There’s been a hiatus in my postings. I had a mastectomy and have been slow to get my energy, and perhaps more importantly, my focus back after a summer of being sick, but I’m plodding through. In all honestly, the times have been depressing, and in response, I am depressed.
I’m writing this at the point in the COVID-19 pandemic when we’ve just realized that Omicron variant has escaped the confines of the southern African continent and is at a minimum in Europe, SE Asia, the Middle East and Australia. A good 40% of the US (60% in my area) are mask-less anti-vaxx flag-waving zealots.
Since the great wars, Americans have been indoctrinated that in tough times, human beings have the capacity to rally together for solvency and support. This is foundational to progressive optimism, it’s akin to Humanism, to the spirit of the Enlightenment because that it trusts that human individuals have the capacity to share in a greater pragmatic realism, and to leverage their intelligence and ideas to solve problems for the community, or greater society.
This sensibility makes a few assumptions that have led to its inglorious collapse. It’s sad to let go of these assumptions, as someone who has held them dear, for whom these assumptions have been agents of hope and confidence.
Problematic Assumption 1: Human beings will consider the welfare of their largest tribe rather than their most immediate.
Problematic Assumption 2: Human beings accept responsibility for their ideas, words, and actions.
Problematic Assumption 3: Human beings will interact conscientiously with other tribes.
Problematic Assumption 4: Human beings are the measure against which living things must be compared and valued.
Problematic Assumption 5: Human beings are capable of incorporating facts that are at odds with tribal ideology.
Postmodernism indulgently wallows in the the failure of these assumptions. At its core, it honors selfish, solipsistic, tribal and personal relativism. This approach seems to reflect with naked honesty the worst of Humanity, and extends it to the whole. It’s destructive. It’s terminal. If we as a civilization are to survive and triumph, we need to recognize that this paradigm is not serving us. We must accept the truths that it offers and move forward with these caveats in mind and not wholly succumb to their persistent erosions.
What if we adjusted Humanism in such a way that it encompassed the reality of these faults: if it built in a recognition that we are of the same life-mechanism as crows, and shrubs, and algae; if it beaconed us to strive beyond the reflexive impulses that emerged through our evolution (please, reference some of the ideas in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins, even if you’re not a fan of the whole work) to a more expansive moral structure (See Non Zero by R. Wright), we might just might be able to use many of our unique Human capacities to steer the globe into more secure and sustainable direction.