Is our time past?
Given current conditions on our planet, it may be only natural to wonder about past apex predators that may have doomed themselves by the extent of their own success.
Any predator species that’s too good at hunting and reproducing seems likely to eventually exhaust its own food supply, and vanish along with its prey. The ongoing cycle of life thus appears to require a certain balance. It would be vain and foolish for us humans to imagine ourselves exempt from a natural law of this type.
Our species has also done something that may well be unprecedented: we’ve used our advanced brains to invent technologies and communications media that are beyond the capacities of those same brains to adequately handle.
We’re able to create audiovisual experiences that feel so much like actual reality to us that even when our rational faculties tell us they’re only manufactured artifacts, our hardwired subsurface mental processes seem to have no alternative but to store them in the same brainspace as encounters with the real world—where, in the ultra-fast sifting-through of remembered experiences that feeds conscious thought, the two are inherently prone to being treated as the same thing.
We also now have the means to derive major social support from collections of outliers scattered across the map for ideas that are far too bizarre to be countenanced by any significant number of the people we actually come in contact with. Moreover, we immerse ourselves at every possible opportunity in these alternative realities, via the same devices we use to get news and other information about the real world, choosing only stories that please us—and ending up catastrophically divorced from objective reality.
There’s something profoundly ironic—and sad—in the contrast between our godlike ability to imagine and create such wondrous objects and systems, and our abject cluelessness about how to use them without hurting ourselves.
No less ironic (or sad) is our ability to radically transform our natural environment almost however we like—yet fail to do so in a way that actually increases our satisfaction with our lived experience.
Most of us in the developed world are now able to consume a plenitude of goods that would have been unimaginable in the rest of world history. But consuming is at root far less satisfying than producing, and our modern world tends to limit our personal participation in the production process to roles of ant-like insignificance.
We’re also offered an abundance of gripping experiences that in times past would have been the envy of kings and emperors, but now we’re mostly relegated to the role of spectators. We’ve lost the deeper satisfaction that comes with being participants.
Most damaging of all, we’ve created a gigantism of scale that leaves everyone outside of the infinitesimally narrow sliver of humanity who constitute our new global celebritocracy feeling like nobodies.
In doing so, we’ve shown wanton disregard for the degree to which mattering is hard-wired into our genes. Henry Kissinger wasn’t just joking when he observed that power is an aphrodisiac. As mammals, we humans are, no less than deer or wolves, beings for whom status is a key factor in our ability to procreate and pass on our genes—an evolutionary drive as fundamental and deeply embedded in living things as it’s possible to be.
The flip side of this is that around the world and throughout history, belittling someone is one of the most common ways of starting a fight. Should we really be surprised, then, that so many of us are at one another’s throats these days, when we’ve given most people so few reasons to believe they’re considered significant?
The human need to matter is a lot like gasoline. Intelligently harnessed, it enables us to travel at previously impossible speeds on the ground, or fly higher than any bird. Similarly, our gasoline-like drive to matter can impel us to write soaring poetry, or vanquish monstrous diseases. But if it’s not handled with proper care and respect, gasoline fuels devastating fires and explosions. Likewise, if our need to matter is mishandled, the result can be world-consuming fascism, jihadism, mass shootings, and meltdowns into political and civil chaos.
Unlike gasoline, our quest for significance is not something we can simply do away with, if it begins to give us more trouble than we feel it’s worth. It’s just part of us. And if its inherent combustibility results in excessive damage, we literally have no choice but to devise and adopt better ways of handling it.
We’re long overdue in beginning that process.
