The War For Human Survival
Humanity is at an existential crossroad
Humanity is at an existential crossroad. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are each being manipulated in a war of ideas. The ultimate resolution of this conflict within each of us, when integrated across all humans, will determine the ultimate fate of our species. Yes, we will first have to overcome our current viral plague, but we will persevere through COVID-19 as a species relatively intact. What I reference here is more profound, more insidious, more ingrained in the fundamental order of modernity. Unfortunately, we have limited time — perhaps less than a decade — to collectively make some crucial decisions. Even if humanity determines to change course after this critical time period, it will likely be too late to make dramatic differences in the outcomes for billions of people, not just for the remainder of this century, but likely for thousands of years beyond, leaving us only with the task of bracing ourselves for the oncoming onslaught.
Many who have considerable pertinent expertise have certainly spoken or written quite eloquently about the various simultaneous crises humanity is now facing, and what I am writing here will come as no surprise to them. However, most lay people, even those who are highly educated, are ignorant of the disruptive changes that are currently underway. These processes, if left to their own momenta, will critically test the foundations of human civilization; indeed, so great will these stressors be that if we leave them unchecked we must then anticipate the wholesale collapse of human civilization as we now know of it in many places of the globe, if not entirely.
Many perils threaten the survival of the human species: global climate change and all of its associated repercussions, including adverse impacts on human health via food and water insecurity; economic damages and loss of life from droughts, floods, wildfires, and more intense storms; fewer habitable zones on Earth due to heat stress, with resultant unfathomable mass migrations; plagues to make the 2019–2020 coronavirus seem like a mild summer cold unleashed on humanity, some of which have never been seen by human beings in over ten thousand years; development of artificial intelligence with a high chance for the emergence of intelligent, but fundamentally unconscious and unaware machines that may jeopardize our very existence as they carry out their programmed goals; worsening socioeconomic disparities leading to powder keg political scenarios rife for revolutions; the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology; the rise of authoritarian regimes concomitant with the erosion of representative democracies; continuing human population growth with simultaneous per capita increase in energy and resource requirements that inevitably must occur with modernization.
Many forces are currently at play that dramatically increase the odds of our species’ failure, but most corrosive is the rampant spread of disinformation via social media. Even if we are somehow able to rally the forces of reason and through brute political force successfully navigate past the existential storms we are about to confront, future unforeseen challenges undoubtedly await humanity for which we are not ready. What will be necessary for the perseverance of our species is more fundamental than simply winning these immediate battles. To win the war for human survival we will need to first win the war raging within each of our minds. For the first time in our species’ history, failure to do this will have repercussions that will leave us seriously wounded, perhaps mortally so.
Fortunately, we have the means to win this war. For more than two millennia humanity has known how to do this. It is only now that modern neuroscience and psychology is catching up to this ancient insight. Simply put, our modern cultures and societies are the amalgamation of each of our respective haphazard and ricocheting mental states. Our minds wander aimlessly, prodded by primeval instincts designed by evolution to maximize our reproductive success in conditions that were radically different than the ones we encounter today. Through our own scientific and engineering brilliance, we have inadvertently turned the tables on evolution and we have destabilized our own existence. Daily we feed our minds’ insatiable desires without conscious awareness. In this way, most of us fall victim to our externalities. We rage in traffic, succumb to and consume ubiquitous nutritionally vacuous foods, constantly compare our gains with those of others, sexually meander through our human interactions while failing to make deep and meaningful interpersonal connections, and hastily blame others for our internal mental states of affair. Very few of us recognize that this mental cauldron leads to deep dissatisfaction, and yet we wonder why we are overweight, stressed, depressed, anxious, lacking money, not pretty or handsome enough, or any number of other concerns. Many of us respond to this personal disaster by seeking refuge in addictive substances or experiences to alter our mental states, if only to temporarily escape our deep angst. Paradoxically, and worse, we even question the very scientific enterprises that have created our modern success in health and longevity. As we each lose our way, so too do our societies.
We of course readily recognize the contributions of Copernicus and Galileo, DaVinci and Newton, Darwin and Mendel, Lister and Pasteur, Salk and Taussig, Curie and Franklin, Einstein and Hawking. But in truth, the overwhelming majority of us owe our existence to not only these giants, but also to the countless unrecognized efforts of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of intellectuals, scientists, social and naturalist experimenters, writers, philosophers, tinkerers, and investigators who dared and continue to dare to challenge our all-too-human superstitions, tribalism, ignorance, and penchant for seeking solace from suffering through faith in wholly manufactured falsehoods and bloodthirsty creation myths. These heroes of humanity have created our modern material wealth, health, and longevity, but in so doing unwittingly created conditions that have actually increased our mental suffering, for their efforts have also led to the creation of the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle. Recoiling from this, and thinking that materialism has failed us, we search for solace elsewhere, questioning the very discoveries of our most important empirical enterprise, modern science. Instead, we seek a supposedly simpler life that we apparently lost, but in reality never actually possessed, and we unwisely ask impractical metaphysical questions that have given rise only to confabulation, dogmatism, and false reassurance.
Our collective memories are short, and our individual memories even shorter. The “simpler” life of our past involved tremendous brutality, and humanity was a victim of a pantheon of circumstances that most of us would simply not be able to bear today. Were measles, smallpox, polio, rubella and other scourges to rampage through our modern societies just as they had in the past we would immediately clamor for our political and scientific powers to devise effective solutions. Were we in modern times suddenly confined to geographic areas of only a hundred square miles at most, we would immediately seek means of more efficient and expedited travel, if only to explore farther. Were we suddenly returned to a state of majority illiteracy where only a privileged few went to school while the rest of us toiled daily in the agricultural fields or in dirty and dangerous factories without protections, we would immediately recoil and rebel against the powers that be. So in our forgetfulness of these conditions of centuries past we now let our minds rot, compromising the very tools that we will need sharpest if we are to effectively slice through our morass and confront our rapidly approaching existential zero hour.
In the midst of this mental decay we discover that we have been manipulated by special interests, including industry, foreign governments, our political parties, and even a wealthy minority, each seeking its own interests. In so doing, we have relinquished control of our minds, and thereby lost our ability to properly scrutinize what has been transpiring all around us. Ultimately, we have lost influence over our own destinies. When well-meaning individuals propose evidence-based interventions, instead of appropriately asking for an explanation of the scientific evidence, many of us subversively question the science itself, stripping ourselves of the very tools and methods that millions before us created, and more importantly, that we will need to ensure that lifesaving and enriching policies are actually enacted.
As far as any of us knows, we alone in the vastness of the universe are aware of our own physical limitations in space and our mortal limitations in time. Despite these constraints, somehow we possess a remarkably unmatched capacity for insight that can allow us to transcend these very spatial and temporal boundaries. If only for this reason, the persistence in our universe of our individual and collective human consciousness has the utmost meaning and importance. Indeed, this not only provides a more than sufficient foundation for morality, it also endows a profound purpose to live. Compassion for our fellow human beings, who are in the same ultimate lot as each of us, flows from this wisdom that propels us to nourish and protect our collective existence. These two principles, wisdom and compassion, are all that we need to find our way through darkness. Alas, in our modern ways we have strayed from this wisdom and we have lost compassion for our fellow human beings. Even more shocking is that we have lost compassion for ourselves.
Fortunately we have a solution that dates back at least twenty-five hundred years, when a diagnostic insight occurred to humanity to cure its affliction. This remedy of personal responsibility in the guise of empirical introspection — what we now call “mindfulness”— is ever more critical for our survival today. From this mindfulness, we can rediscover wisdom and re-kindle compassion. Yes, we are indeed a sick species, but only inasmuch as each of us is a sick individual, as each of us is struggling to come to terms with our innate and all-too-fallible human condition. While climate change and wealth disparity and many other issues should worry us all deeply, even more so should we be disquieted about the ongoing erosion of what makes us special and fundamentally important as human beings. Let us take care of ourselves first, and let us do so quickly. And then let us collectively get to work fixing the problems that plague our global human civilization. Our time is limited and precious, and this is a war we cannot afford to lose.
(The author reserves all rights to photographs published in this article.)
