The grand ideas of religion and philosophy never stop changing. All powerful eternal Gods such as Shamash, Enlil, Marduk, Osiris, Odin and Zeus, have risen to dominate entire civilizations and then been swept aside. The God(s) of the Zoroastrians, the Hindus, the Christians, the Moslems, the Sikhs, the Bahai, and numerous others have risen to prominence only in the last few thousand years.. Likewise politics has seen city states, nation states, tribal chieftains, Kings, tyrants, oligopolies, dictators, totalitarians, Marxists, fascists, democrats, aristocrats, theocrats, technocrats, Emperors, Consuls, Chairmen, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and numerous other approaches constantly emerge.
So why think that we will suddenly stop innovating and creating now with more than 99% of our potential lifespan to go? The lesson of our brief existence so far is that we never stop thinking of new things. We are at the beginning not the end of our intellectual history.
3 New policies are imaginable:
Some may still say that we are near the “End of History” as there is nothing left for us to do.
In fact there are still many things for us to improve. Here are some examples:
Poverty and Starvation: The extraordinary wealth of today was unimaginable 200 years ago. Yet many of our fellow humans face death by starvation. We have developed a situation where in some countries obesity is the main health risk and in others it is starvation! This is a situation which we must address as a problem at the dawn of humanity, not as the apex of our development.
Political organization: The world is divided into competing states that cannot agree on important issues; such as trade, environmental protection, and immigration. We can and should build a genuine global political system which overcomes the petty differences dividing us now, one which respects our human as well as our national and religious identities. We can see the foolishness of allowing tribalism to ruin nation states, but it is equally foolish to allow nationalism to ruin the human political system.
Happiness: Many of the world’s advanced economies have now seen more than a century of economic development. The global financial crisis notwithstanding they are wealthier than ever before. Yet most governments in wealthy countries still seem dissatisfied and seek to make their citizens even wealthier while in such countries illnesses such as depression appear to be increasing rather than decreasing. Material wealth is not by itself the source of human fulfillment and running countries as though it is has not worked. We need to continue developing a concept of happiness and well being which is not tied simply to economic growth.
I could go on listing possibilities. There is still much to do. It is not “idealistic” but realistic to note this. We do not live at the end, but the beginning and can be inspired by the creative opportunities before us. It is time to start thinking about the big picture and developing ideas to build a better world. We live at the dawn of humanity and should be inspired by the opportunities still ahead of us.
[1] The range of dates for the earliest anatomically modern Homo sapiens is subject to some debate of course and I am no expert. For some brief references in mainstream publications that come in close to the 200,000 benchmark see Nature online at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/abs/nature03258.html or Science Daily at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223122209.htm both of which argue for about 195,000 years.
[2] The general time frame of Dinosaurs, give or take a few million years is not too controversial, see the wikipedia entry at http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs
[3] The lifespan of the Sun is harder to estimate, for obvious reasons. For an estimate from a widely respected space exploration organisation which gives the Sun 5 billion years see the NASA overview at http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/star_worldbook.html
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