Sunday 19 May 2024

We Are All Just Human's Trying To Live

There are a few times in my life when i have read something which has stayed with me forever and one of them is the Carl Sagan monologue used to describe the famous picture of Earth taken by Voyager 1 as it turned its camera around as it passed Saturn and photographed our Planet 4 billion miles away which become known as the Pale Blue Dot.  
Sagan's words were perfect and start with: 'That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives' and these words came back to me when my writing partner and I were cranking out the Famous Dead Bloggers series of posts, all these people, the famous, the infamous and kings and queens, murderers, Saints, dictators and doctors have all come and gone and left enough of an imprint for a couple of bloggers to write about them hundreds or thousands of year later.
Globally, average life expectancy is 73.16 years so it is fairly safe to surmise that in 100 years from now, almost everyone on Earth, all 8 billion of us will be different, there will be hardly anyone alive today who will be alive in 2124 as almost the entire population in 1824 was different in 1924 and the same in 1024 to 1124 or 124bc to 24bc, pick any era from the tens of thousands of years that us humans have been on the Earth.
This blog is called Falling On A Bruise which is a Evelyn Waugh quote which means doing something painful again and again in exactly the same way and i thought it summed up perfectly what we have been doing since time immemorial, falling on the exact same bruise again and again with our wars and persecutions of anyone of a different ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, nation, political beliefs or any other reason our nefarious minds have dreamt up to forcibly remove anyone who we deemed 'different'.
It is amazing to think that a whole new group of people have come along and acted and thought in exactly the same way as the previous ones which must say something about either nature or nurture, the Psychological debate over how much a person's characteristics are formed by either biological factors such as genetics or their upbringing or life experiences but that argument has been going on since the Ancient Greeks thousands of years ago so i'm not about to make a declaration on it, if great minds like Plato or Aristotle couldn't work it out then i'm not about to.  
Sadly, if it is Nature and it is a genetic trait to want to kill, subjugate and persecute each other then there is no hope for us and it will continue for as long as humans survive on this ball of rock but if it is nurture and all these horrific things are shaped by our upbringing and experiences, then we have a chance to reverse what we have been doing to each other since we evolved.
I come down on the Nurture side but not because i have any particular insight or evidence for it, to me it means we have a chance to escape the depressingly long chain of events which have blighted mankind and all it takes is for us all to deal more kindly with one another regardless of how hard some people try to tell persuade us some of us are 'different', because we are not and have never been, we are all just human beings trying to get through our allotted 73.16 years as best we can.

4 comments:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

first, my father was a lawyer. lawyers fix problems for people that can't fix their own problems: relationships (divorce, child custody), financial (contract issues, tax issues), criminal, etc. having dealt with these problems for others, he often said, "people are doing the best they can even if it is no damn good."

second, you got it wrong here: "...to want to kill, subjugate and persecute each other..." It is not "want" that is in human nature. it is "willing". few people "want" to harm others for the sake of harm, but potentially all people are "willing" to harm and take from others for their own survival.

third, i think nurture is the solution. that is why we have civilizations which shape societies which shape nations. but we are a long way from there being one civilization, one society, and one nation with shared views about what is: fair/unfair, equitable/inequitable, right/wrong, smart/dumb.

fourth, even if we had one shared view about what makes life right, when it is time to take action every individual has different views about WHY we should act (priorities), about WHAT to do (options) and HOW to do it (action). eventually these unique individual views, for each and every human, cause conflict. it will never go away.

fifth, even if we had one shared view about life, there are still people that are superb at finding the differences between people and using those differences to gain influence (Maslow level 5, self-actualization ==> shape the world to fit your "ideal"). envy and jealousy lead to frustration, anger, hate, and fear. humans are dangerous when they feel frustration, fear, hate, or anger...

nuture is the solution, but it is not a problem that is solved, it is a problem that is managed...





Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

nurture, nurture is the solution, not nuture...

Anonymous said...

If nurture is the answer than as I said, we can change and improve and we are moving in the right direction with each generation, just painfully slowly

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

yes, that is what you said, but it doesn't make what you said correct. you can use force, ala ussr, russia, cuba, china, n korea to repress human nature, but you can't change human nature and still have humans... you should watch more of the old star trek shows...