First Question
NOTE - Thank you for indulging me as I write through my process and thinking on how to produce a meaningful book. You have all been immensely helpful! Many of you ask questions, send comments and/or encouragement, and all of that has been extremely helpful and appreciated. Forgive any errors in grammar and flow because my goal is to keep my process going, and writing the post takes less than half the time of editing so I have decided to skip most of my editing.
What I want my reader to get should be the easiest question to answer, but not for me. This question has been the most important and difficult question, not only for what book I want to write but also for the meaning of my life. Initially, I wanted to help my reader feel better, or have a more peaceful life (or death), or to find greater connection to spirituality and God, or many other things like that. But none of these things felt right. Maybe they were part of what I wanted to say but not the main point. I had to explore myself more deeply, what was it that kept wanting me to write?
What I truly wanted, way down deep inside, was the continuation of my species. From what I knew about our history, and had observed during my life, it seemed our continuation was not guaranteed. We needed to put more attention on the very real possibility of becoming extinct, seriously. We humans must evolve if we want to survive, and I want to help that evolution occur. Yes, that is what I want, for my reader to get an understanding of the importance of human evolution and how each of us can and must participate.
During my process of discovery I realized that my feelings complicated my understanding of this deeper issue. Why? Well, for one thing I reacted to what I saw in present time, and this kept me from looking for the deeper desire to help my species evolve. Let me give you an example using current events. As you must know, we are currently in the midst of tremendous social division, maybe we always are. This has been both challenging and fascinating to me because I have been able to watch how we humans are able to quickly adopt new beliefs and form ‘sides.’ My desire to love all people, all things, all thoughts and preferences, kept me from joining any side and instead I chose to put myself in each side’s shoes and understand it well enough to be empathetic. This simple and personal desire became difficult, which was very unsettling.
For the second time in my life, I experienced extreme coercion to join a side. People I had known for decades adopted whole sets of preferences solely based on these newly created sides, and despite knowing me for years insisted that I join their side. People seemingly would choose news outlets, thought leaders, social and political philosophies, and other important ideas based solely on whether or not these things were approved by the leaders or spokespeople for their side. This bothered me greatly, and for the only time in my life that I can remember I needed to stay quiet about personal opinions because they were accepted or scorned based on the listeners chosen side. More disturbing to me, was that by virtue of any thought I might have that was not in accordance with current thinking on a particular side, I became an outcast even to close friends and family. There were very few people during these past years that accepted me as a person who did not choose a side, and would allow me to pick and choose pieces and parts from either side without feeling obligated to everything else that particular side espoused. This all distracted me toward thinking I wanted to write about human behavior, which is part of what I want to write about, but only in the context of encouraging my species to evolve. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and every other way in order to survive the very difficult times ahead.
Being human is a bit more complicated than being a lesser animal, no offense to lesser animals. Partly because your lesser animals do not have a concept of right and wrong nor do they worry about the morality of killing a baby animal and eating it. They simply kill and eat each other freely, as nature guides them to do. Humans do have concepts about right and wrong and do question, and have the ability to override, instincts and the rules of nature. Not only when it comes to killing but also how to treat each other in general. Since the beginning of human evolution one group of people believe one thing and a different group of people believe another thing, and both sides are right. That is hard to reconcile. In fact, the idea that more than one belief can be right is so difficult to reconcile that humans have mostly decided there is just one right thing. The problem with believing there is only one right thing is that we box ourselves into a corner. It is difficult to change what has previously been determined as the right belief, which makes it nearly impossible to change everything else that has been determined as wrong. Ultimately, when we view humanity from a thousand year or more perspective, many things may work just as well as another and the good news is that we are making progress.
War is an extreme example of how humans solve disagreements. One difficult part of warring between large populations is that only a few people at the top think through complex information and make decisions, and all the rest of the people in these groups must be supportive of those decisions. Oftentimes the victor of war will create new rules for behavior or new beliefs, for example the United States created a new form of democracy and new beliefs about human rights. One challenge of large populations having beliefs is that it is quite difficult to change those beliefs. Often times a person that questions these beliefs will be coaxed back into believing or ostracized. But a determined person will seek agreement from more and more people until a large enough group forms and can revolt. But revolutions are dangerous, and most people prefer to keep new thinking to themselves. The very nature of human behavior and these dynamics creates stagnation in the evolution of beliefs, which in turn makes changes in morality a slow process. This is probably good, it would not be in humanities best interest to change morality too quickly.
One key to the adoption of a belief is getting more and more people to accept that belief. To do this, ‘sides’ are created and each human is encouraged to choose a side. How these sides interact is complicated, and studied by sociologists, philosophers, and theologians. But who creates these sides is also an important question to ponder. Many times these sides get created by those seeking power or control over large groups of people, and their motives for wanting the population to change or adopt beliefs is uncertain because their main goal is control and power. This means the statements getting made may or may not be authentic, the desire for change in order to create better human relations may or may not be the real agenda. This too is a complex subject, but the most important take away is that ‘sides’ do get created and are taken up by individuals. Each side has its own thinking and beliefs, and often times create protocols and rules.
How rules and beliefs get created is important to our evolution. Just a few thousand years ago many people believed murder was ok, and some evolved humans felt this should change. People do not change their behavior easily, even for such an obvious rule as humans should not murder other humans without just cause. The best way to get people to follow a new rule is to show them that it is in their best interest, and usually to adopt a belief about what is right and wrong. But this is not easy, and generally some form of enforcement is required during the initial adoption of a new rule until it becomes a belief. To properly enforce new rules it is critical that the current leadership embrace the new rule, and if that does not happen a greater authority must get invoked. Imagine you are one of those people that believed murder was unacceptable and the leadership throughout the world was unwilling to adopt rules against murder, what would you do?
Let us assume for a moment that whether or not there is a god, and whether or not that god would step in and do something about the issue at hand, that it would be your choice to make people aware of this authority greater than the existing leadership, make people aware of God. This would be an authority greater than any human leadership and you could use that authority to enforce the new rule. But lets not go too deeply down that path in this post, suffice it to say that when current human leadership will not adopt new beliefs, new rules, or new morality, that god and religion are valuable tools whether they truly exist or get created.
The process of creating new rules and beliefs takes a great deal of time, usually happening across multiple generations, and close up it all looks quite messy. But when we zoom out in time it is a fairly efficient process, and using the example above, mostly we do not murder one another any more.
For me, it is important and urgent for more of my fellow humans to get interested in, and participate in, human evolution. For the first time in our species existence, we have developed mentally and technologically to the point that a handful of people can wipe out the human race. The survival of our entire species truly rests in the hands of very few other humans. Those humans could have goals that are noble or not, those humans might simply be mentally ill, or a whole range of other possibilities, and that is a bit dangerous.
The fact humans have developed mentally beyond their moral development is likely the most serious threat our species faces, and needs far more attention. Not only from scholars and leaders, but from each human individually. While the safeguards for this new reality might come from technological advancements that stay ahead of what a small group of people can carry out, I believe the best safeguard will come from enough evolution in humans that something that could wipe out all the other humans would never become desirable or a goal. Therefore, I consider our human evolution to be of paramount importance.