Is there progress? According to "Arthur Koestler, for whom the human brain consisted of a little shop counter, ethical and rational (still very small), and a huge cerebral backroom, bestial, animal, territorial, charged with fears, irrationalities and murderous instincts. Millions of years would be needed, he said, for moral evolution to clear this brutal backroom."
http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/05/05/inenglish/1367755108_874316.html?rel=rosEP
The Enlightenment took humanity a giant step forward. But it's over eager optimism seems sad today. Both its glory and its naive failure. The nineteenth century was relatively peaceful in the west. But then the twentieth came, with its world wars. And the twenty-first started with Bush's absurd wars....... Let's hope it's not a "million years."
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"Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up."
ReplyDelete:-D
ReplyDeleteIt's a line from Surviving Progress.
The documentary presents its viewers with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
The clock is ticking: Homo sapiens sapiens, along with most of the species remaining on Earth (those that the Naked Ape has not quite yet driven to extinction, as well as those, theoretically, whose genome was preserved before they went extinct, and who, hypothetically, still may have a future), do not have "a million years."
Some, like primatologists Jane Goodall, are placing their hope in humankind ingenuity and moral evolution.
:~X
Goodall does make one good point, though: "when it comes to problem-solving, humans do well when their backs are up against the wall."
So, presumably, there might be hope, still.