Name | St. Paul |
Life | 74 - 76 |
Country | Rome |
Category | Idealism |
Wikipedia | >> |
Are we God-like creatures as Genesis suggests, or are we only inflated bacteria made of water in a global drop of water?
Our horrible experience with 10,000 years of holocausts and with the 20th century as its epitome, gives us reason to believe Thales was right.
Conclusion? May I suggest: The more we believe in the "water-hypothesis", the harder we should strive to make the "creator-hypothesis" come true.
So far our creative gifts have been concentrated to the instruments. There is no reason, not an iota, for believing that human nature has changed and become better since the Troyan War or the Jewish Exodus. Now, if we want to survive, the creation of atomic bombs must be accompanied by the creation of new behavior.
Note the word "behavior"! To demand, as many have done, a "New Man", is useless in the face of our new genetic knowledge. We are left with the old one. But can we not hope for a new "behavior" of the old man, for fear of possible death of his species?
Paul's saying is one of the most emotionally appealing statements mankind has ever heard.
We must have faith in miracles. They have happened before. All of us now live thanks to no less than three miracles: the miralce of life (p.00), the miracle of evolution (00), and the miracle of culture.
To that faith we should now add our hope that we will be able to continue the miracle of culture by producing food for another 300 rabbits. (see p. 00!). Because our best predictions tell us that in the year 2050 mankind will have grown by another three billion human individuals, or 300 new rabbits out of nature's high hat. Leading experts believe we will be able to keep mankind's population growth below twelve billions. That is yet another 300 rabbits after 2050.
Considering the extreme capacity of the inflated bacteria to construct new instruments, we are certainly justified in hoping that we can give not only food and water, but an even better material living to all the twelve billions in the year 2100.
The precondition for such success is, however, the third element in Paul's wise saying: love!
What can we demand here?
Considering the human condition at the beginning of the third millennium after Christ and the fact that we still, after so many years, are not able to love our enemies, what could a wise philosopher king do? He must maintain superior force because the struggle between good and evil will never cease.
That force, however, is today suicidal. It must be there to threaten, but never to be used. If so, how can he keep the world together? How can he avoid acknowledging that the contagious, disintegrative disorder of the Roman, the British or the Soviet empires, or of Nigeria, Caucasus or Balkan, also affects NATO and, again, Europe, with potentially disastrous effects?
Lordly love will not perform the trick.
Economic growth through integration will feed more people. But at the same time, it will also increase the level of frustration between the innate Number Ones who are forced to become Number Twos.
Perfect planning for human happiness has been tried, and bitterly failed.
Looking into the abyss, it is hard to avoid a suspicion that mankind, collectively, is caught in something of Holbein's famous Dances of Death, the suite of 46 wood cuts from the 1540's. The text of the last picture, on The Fool, says: "Death is leading him away gaily, making him dance to the sounds of a bagpipe. The Fool, ignorant without doubt of the catastrophe that awaits him, seems to be meditating some piece of mischief, which will probably be his last."
What to do to avoid that end?
If we cannot plan for human happiness, we might at least follow the rule of "inverted utilitarianism" and try to avoid the worst disaster, death by
atomic proliferation. A good observer of mankind has written that "my sense of ...life, a sad one, is that latent mistrust between different cultures is immortal". The judgement refers to the people of the Black Sea, but might be true all around the globe.
Education might have been a vain panacea since the beginning of well-intentioned philosophers. Nevertheless, that is what must be joined to force. Education - with what content? A few ideas may be gleaned from my meditations.
One is that we will never become perfect. Human problems are founded in an unchangeable human nature, making some strong, others weak. With that pre-determined injustice we are forced to live.
In living with that injustice, created not by other men but by genetic evolution, two warnings must be heeded. The strong should listen to the wise Greeks, telling them that arrogant hubris always will be punished. And the natural envy of the weak must be prevented from ruining the world with revolutions and warfare, which can only increase misery, including for themselves.
One way to do this is to develop the insight, even a new ideology, telling us all that it is Mandeville and not Amos who is telling the truth of our human condition.
The rich do not live as well as they do because they rob the poor of their just desserts. They do so because nature has given them force, curiosity, inventiveness, courage and intelligence enough to create ever better weapons and instruments in the struggle for existence.
The poor live not in spite of, but thanks to the "trickling down"-effects of the competition between the adrenalinomaniacs, just as Heraclitus suggested.
These are four of the truths that today's philosopher kings must explain to their global citizens, possibly through the panem et circensis of modern media:
1. The ruling Superbrain cannot renounce force. Only deadly dangerous chaos would result.
2. Not evil men, but natural evolution has created the "injustices".
3. Both arrogance and envy, so innately part of the strong and the weak, should be moderated.
4. In sum, we need a new global ideology based upon the realistic insights of Heraclitus, Malthus, Darwin, Mandeville and the modern genetic HUGO-studies.
However good the intentions, mankind has not learned to master "the law of unintended consequences". However understandable, the violence-promoting lamentations of Amos and Marx must go. Our inability to create a "New Man" has been much tested, with disastrous results.
The essential message of our new biologically based wisdom is that all men to 99.9 percent are DNA-equal and thus worthy of equal human rights.
If we do not learn that lesson, the collective Fool of Holbein's Death Dance
will take us all into an abyss, like the one those who stand at my inscription from Paul have right behind them.
If we learn it, our future may be as beautiful as the view form the "philosophical park" at Belvedere di Migliara in Anacapri, created for all global friends of wisdom and, especially, for Marianne.