Micawber and Jeremiah on the Human Condition

I subscribe to Gratefulness.org, a not-for-profit group that “provides education and support for the practice of grateful living” and sends daily inspirational quotes for us to ponder. Some of these are way too quixotic and Zen-like for my literal-minded tendencies, but occasionally there’s one that I understand and which gets me to reflecting.

Such was the following quote that appeared in my inbox one morning recently—

The world is evolving from imperfection to perfection. It needs all love and sympathy; great tenderness and watchfulness are required from each one of us.  - Hazrat Inayat Khan, A Bowl of Saki

I compared those thoughts with a passage my erudite cousin Carol quoted from Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker's The Journey of the Universe. The passage reads:

Our human role is to deepen our consciousness in resonance with the dynamics of the fourteen-billion-year creative event in which we find ourselves. Our challenge now is to construct livable cities and to cultivate healthy foods in ways congruent with Earth's patterns.  Our role is to provide the hands and hearts that will enable the universe's energies to come forth in a new order of well-being.  Our destiny is to bring forth a planetary civilization that is both culturally diverse and locally vibrant, a multiform civilization that will enable life and humanity to flourish.

Seeing the quotes in juxtaposition, I didn't know whether to be uplifted or depressed. On one hand, it's nice to think that the world is evolving toward perfection. On the other, evolution is a slow process. As Swimme and Tucker point out, the universe is about 14 billion years old. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Human-like animals have been around for a hundred thousand years or so, but human civilization, as such, for merely twelve thousand (plus or minus).

I posit the following analogy: if humanity today were a single individual, he* would be about 12 or 13 years old, one year for each thousand years of civilization. I will call him Typical Human (T.H.).

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*I use the male pronoun only for the sake of convenience, but the characteristics I describe below appear more pronounced in males, so saying he/him seems apt. 

In other words, Typical Human is a tween or teenager—callow, self-centered, and defiant; rebellious, boastful, and bereft of much insight; pleasure-seeking, annoying, and short-tempered. Like a tween or teenager, T.H. is engaged in a struggle to create a stable and permanent sense of self and to achieve a degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance. He is ready for abstract thinking, but he's still pretty concrete.

T.H.'s friendships are with those who play the games he likes and, to a lesser degree, with people who have similar personal qualities. He is suspicious of "the other"—geeks, nerds, people who look odd and think differently. He believes that what interests him should interest everyone else, and he is shocked to find that most people are indifferent to what he's ready to die for. In fact, of course, the issues that are important to T.H.'s peers are those which are of greatest concern to them. They are just as interested in themselves as T.H. is in himself.

When T.H. speculates about what his world could be he gets lost in dreams, becomes overly idealistic, and forgets the practical limitations. He fails to consider the needs and dreams of his peers because he is unaware those are not congruent with his own. He becomes frustrated. This leads to anger and, often, to acting out (i.e., war). Like real tweens and teenagers, T.H. is trying to integrate past, present and future in such a way as to establish a stable and consistent sense of self.  In short, he's having a crisis of identity.

But a stable identity takes a long while to develop. In real people the process lasts at least through adolescence and into one's twenties or beyond. Given my analogy of T.H.'s age to human civilization (1 year = 1,000), it will be ten or fifteen millennia before humanity matures, if it ever does.

I shared these thoughts with Carol and, ever the optimist, she wrote back—

I would have to say that I would give both teenagers and your Typical Human a more balanced persona. In addition to the characteristics that you've listed, I would add that both teenagers and the human species in our time also exhibit emerging noble, collaborative, and compassionate qualities-- the capacity for hypothetical and reflective thought, great creativity, a growing capacity for empathy of other humans and life forms, including those who are different from ourselves, a capacity for awe and wonder, and a rising sense of justice and interdependence with the rest of the world.

Something deep within me believes that while we are surely still evolving, our goodness has an edge over our selfish side or we probably would have destroyed ourselves long ago.

Carol is such an optimist: a Micawber to my Jeremiah. I’m glad she, Khan, and Swimme/Tucker think we're evolving. I'd like to come back in 15,000 years or so to see whether we've made much progress.  (But I remain skeptical that we will have. LOL)

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