How Magnificent is Man, and How Flawed!
This essay is my attempt to explain how I have come to see the world, humans, and the challenges we face. I have put a lot of effort into it. That does not mean it is good or interesting, but simply that it is the best I am able to make it.
Life is imperfection and flaws. They are the motor of evolution and fuel the daily drive to overcome. Perfection is stagnation. It is an unwanted Paradise. It is despair for having forgotten what we are. What are we without pain and travail, without defiance in the face of injustice, be it natural or manmade? What are we if we do not want more? Perfection does not exist, not even in our imaginations. Thank God!
We forget or fear that there can be no magnificence without flaws. Ever. Not on this world. What creates the beauty of a tropical forest or a coral reef? It is the manifestation of millions of battles won and lost if only we could see and understand them. We perceive balance because we can only see a moment in time, and only the barest surface of that moment. Competition is not cruel nor dark nor unfair – nor is it only about the victors. It is simply life. It is remorseless and tireless. It does not forgive nor pardon. It does not stop, ever, except in death.
What is the beauty of a city skyline? It is a testament to our survival and the endless push to overcome the limits placed on us by Nature and by our own natures. Cities are living things. They breath and they talk to you, if you let them, with a collection of voices that cannot be reduced to another origin. They are embodied by packed subways and buildings, empty cafes and abandoned parks, and the inhuman processions regulated by the clock. We made them but we don't own them, not really. Are they as complex as a tropical forest, as interconnected and over-determined? Of course not, and yet, they are more complex than we made them to be, and they become more so all the time, whether we like it or not. Although cities no longer sing to me – I prefer the wild mountain – I cannot deny the defiance, creativity and drive they embody.
It is utter folly to imagine that we can understand ourselves well enough to make ourselves universally virtuous, and more folly still to imagine that we know what Virtue is for everyone, everywhere and everywhen. We can try to root out our weeds, our bad ideas and practices. We can emasculate ourselves so that we are harmless rather than fierce. But Nature teaches us that each limit we place on ourselves is merely another opportunity and goad to overcome, innovate and dominate. That’s what we are. That's what you are. We have to ask ourselves seriously if the kind of mechanized, computerized, rationalized and dehumanized societies we are constructing to harness our fierce creativity are not merely incentivizing the emergence of people who have adapted to the extreme conditions of loneliness, isolation, lack of purpose and despair in order to try to flourish -- who must strip away the intolerable constraints of faceless, superficial conformity in order to fulfill their destinies, perhaps making an ally of cruelty in the process. Like Nature, we will not stop except in death. That is why we are beautiful and terrible. Like lions and leafcutters. Like every creature that has ever lived.
We will only become more powerful, both as nations and individuals. Up until now the ability to kill large numbers of people and undermine entire cities or societies has been limited to Nation States with ample resources. World-destroying weapons like thermonuclear ICBMs have been restricted to advanced countries with high economic and technological development. The fact that we have refrained from using these weapons is largely because the only nations that had them were highly disincentivized from ever using them. This will inevitably change.
As technology advances and becomes more accessible, the ability to kill tens of thousands, or even millions of people at a time will be within the reach of small groups, or even individuals, relatively cheaply and easily. Biotechnology is the most obvious danger, but information technology in a world dependent on a digital infrastructure also presents significant mortal risks, and, of course, there are always the unknown unknowns. The incentives and checks and balances that have constrained Nation States will have no power over small, fanatical groups or individuals, many of whom will be motivated by vengeance or eschatology and will wish to wipe away this world along with all who live upon it. Once such technology becomes readily available it will almost certainly be used by someone somewhere. When tens of thousands, or more, are killed in one go, either quickly through catastrophe or slowly through disease and panic, in one of the great cities of the East, West or South the world as we know it will have changed.
I am not writing this out of despair nor as some reluctant, or joyful, harbinger of doom. Quite the opposite. If we are to overcome the challenges that are most likely right around the corner, we have to look them squarely in the face and get to work. If we allow ourselves to be controlled by fear, anger and the desire for vengeance when the inevitable happens, we will enter the path to hell on earth, be it the war of all against all or an omnipresent surveillance state. There will be powerful incentives to attempt to control every aspect of our lives for “safety’s sake” as these dangers become apparent. This will serve the interests of the powerful. By nurturing fear in the governed, perhaps justifiably, they will assume more control to “save” them, but I fear they will only create the conditions for more destruction. All such attempts to control and guide human society from above have eventually resorted to slaughter and have failed disastrously. I believe we are better than that, but we have yet to prove it. Proving it must be our common project.
We are fierce and terrible, but we are also incredibly kind, generous and brave in ways that are hard to account for through a purely evolutionary lens. If we can’t eradicate our unsociable behaviors neither can we eradicate our capacity for love, solidarity, or our need for Society in order to flourish. They run very deep. They fill our lives. We are the only species that cares about the well-being of other species and that worries it is taking "too much". We have created governments and laws designed to ensure opportunity and liberty for everyone have failed of course, and continue to try. We have fought and died to protect the liberty of total strangers and those whom we have cruelly used in the past. We have changed, haltingly and painfully, and have flourished in the process. However, there are many who do not share these values and would like to eliminate both them and us. They believe that Man must be domesticated and guided, be it by a God embodied in the State and its leaders, by the State as the embodiment of Destiny or the Will of the People, or simply by Orwell’s eternal boot stomping on each person’s face until they submit to the will of the Wise.
We have always found it so easy to account for our evil. There are endless stories of "The Fall" of Man, most of which focus on some fundamental flaw in our nature, be it greed, envy, lust, the remorseless drive for power, hubris, stupidity or credulousness. Oddly, though, we find it very hard to imagine how we ever could have been good. Goodness is often depicted as fragile and fleeting, requiring constant attention and nourishment, or perhaps even seen as coming from outside us as a kind of spiritual invasion, a virtuous disease or some odd, second-order characteristic of evolutionary fitness forever subordinate to the imperative of kill or be killed. No matter what we do, we think and fear that evil is there waiting to be released, always threatening and plotting because it is our “true” nature. The irony is that each tale of The Fall and the darkness of Human Nature is only possible to tell if we already imagine and know how we have been and can be good. Every lament over our ugliness is also an elegy for our beauty, even if only in the might have been. We cannot mourn our Fall without having first celebrated our goodness. No matter how we try we cannot eradicate it from our natures.
Of course, in the real world none of these stories are actually true, no matter how appealing it is to spin tales both lovely and terrible about the nature of Man and his cosmic battle for his own soul. In this world we shake our heads wisely as we hear yet another example of corruption or disaster that merely repeats an age-old pattern. "Why don't we ever learn?" we mutter sagely to ourselves as we go about our days, "Why can't we change?" Like throwing salt over our shoulders or touching wood, such mantras are repeated to protect us from all of "that". Whatever dark, stalking forces move in the human heart shall have no place in ours -- we pray. If we do not look at them perhaps they will pass us by (as if they enter through our eyes rather than our hearts, stomachs and spleens). In extreme need we will call upon those “dark” abilities to save us, as we should – violence in the face of the enemy to protect our families and neighbors, deception of those who wish to use us, cruelty to save those whom we love, stealing from the dead, or nearly so, to provide for the living, etc. What we are really asking with our mantras is that we be spared from such a test. Beyond the physical danger, we are fearful of how it will change us should we survive. We don't want to look there lest what we find sings to us. However, not looking, feeling and acknowledging what we have always carried inside us for both good and ill is cowardice, and cowardice is a luxury that, as potential World-Destroyers, we can no longer afford. We never could afford it, really. Whatever cosmic battle there may be is only ever fought within us, one person at a time, together in the here and now for reasons that appear that appear right to us, or at least necessary. That is where we must focus our attention, love and courage – and our violence, too, if we must. Terrifyingly, we are free to choose even if it costs us everything.
The real world is the moment of choice. It is what we do every day and how we treat others. It is also the stories we tell ourselves about what we do and why because these stories shape what we imagine to be possible and reveal how we understand, or not, our failures. Our aspirations reveal the kind of societies we wish to build and the kind of people we wish to be. Not all of us wish the same things, obviously, and not all visions are compatible. The freedoms that we have gained at great cost are not guaranteed to prevail. Our societies, which have until recently been expanding those freedoms to more and more people, will not continue on this most difficult project without the hard work and courage of all of us, and an unapologetic dedication to the values and institutions that have brought us this far even though they are imperfect.
I would like to believe that the liberal idea of inherent individual freedom, and the agency and personal responsibility it entails, arose hand-in-hand with Science and Industry because it is one of the few ways we may be able to survive the great powers we have and shall have. Liberty is the only soil in which we may flourish sufficiently so as not to destroy ourselves, or so I believe. If life is to find a way and we are to fulfill our common project, we need the best from each of us and only through freedom may we find it.
Throughout all of human history this has never been possible. Until a handful of years ago liberty was limited to the vanishingly few. We were nearly all subjects – of the King, God, Empire, whatever. We served Them or we died. Thousands of millions of us still live that way, but even in the farthest reaches of the Afghan desert or the deepest North Korean dungeon they know that more is possible – even in the silence of purdah, even in the heat of jihad. However, instead of renewing our commitment to our common project, we call each other Fascists and Communists, Nazis, White Supremacists, Haters and Phobes of all types while real Fascists, and worse, are at our gates. They literally want to subjugate and kill those who do not submit to their view of Justice. In order to create the illusion of our Virtue we have tried to erase the truth of what we were, are and may be – Magnificent and Flawed. Always. But striving. Always.
I don’t know about you, but I still remember the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the machetes of Rwanda chopping neighbors to death. When I was a child I learned about the Gulags, the Stalinist purges and the Cultural Revolution where wearing glasses was a sign of impurity. The memories of the Second World War and of the Camps were still fresh when I was growing up. They haunted me because they revealed to a young boy that the cruelty he had lived and witnessed was universal. I could not attend seder at my friend Laura Herzog’s house because my German blue eyes and aspect would have been too much for her grandmother to bear -- understandably so. I knew what my Blood could represent. I almost believed it was true. There was nothing I could do about it then. Laura’s grandmother and I would never see each other as mere people. We would never meet. That, too, was cowardice. It was safer to remain on the surface of History – blue eyes – than it was to face the millions of choices made by people “just like us” who collectively, one act at a time and together condemned millions to death, destroyed a nation and changed the world. By looking away we gave up on the chance for transformation – for a 15 year old boy and an 80 year old woman in the New World to mourn together the sins of the Old and free themselves from its shadow.
Even now, young boys are kidnapped and groomed for war. Their sisters are raped, enslaved and mutilated. All over the Muslim world young women grow up in effective, institutionalized slavery, their very lives depending on their husbands and male relatives. In authoritarian countries on every continent children grow up seeing their parents lie and hide what they know to be true out of fear of reprisal, prison or death. They learn suspicion and resentment from the cradle. Everything they have ever worked for can be taken from them in a moment by a Tyrant. That is Hate. That is Evil.
We must celebrate how far we have come together and not denigrate each other for flaws we all share but have still managed, somehow, to prune together. Ours is the more difficult and uncertain path forward. Ideological authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism are much more understandable and easier to explain and implement. Their recipe for “success” is relatively simple – relentless coercive Power. The only thing standing in their way is our fierce, independent and creative nature which they despise, and which me must treasure and nurture if our children and their children are to have any chance at the freedom we have enjoyed.
So, for the next few essays I am going to write about the qualities we need to nurture, especially in young people, if we are to become stronger and more resilient, as well as some of the current practices and ideas that make us weaker and more fragile. I am just a small person so I don't know much, really. I will make my best effort to avoid the trap of building worlds of make-believe that would only serve to enshrine my own, imagined brilliance. I will focus on the hard lessons I have learned and the experiences and insights of others whom I respect. I am going to try to make them very practical, focused and, hopefully, short.
What I am sure of is that Man is a unique and emergent species whose destiny is far from certain. I do not believe we can tolerate living, or thrive, within a walled garden, no matter how virtuous and kind the gardeners. They are never virtuous and kind for long unless they are continuously constrained by the needs, aspirations, and will of those they govern. For the Powerful and the Righteous the incentives to control as much as possible will always be nearly irresistible. When pursued, will inevitably lead to disaster – on this world at least.
I want to leave you with a simple observation:
Life is not safe. It never was and never will be. If we are to survive and flourish, we cannot put safety first…or second…or third. We live and always shall live on the edge of disaster like every creature that has ever existed. Pretending otherwise denies us what we need most in order to flourish.