Our Place in Time (Is Tiny)

A quick review of humanity’s social genealogy exposes the absurdity in dividing ourselves. Jeremy Rifkin observes that human consciousness has made enormous leaps over the course of our evolution. During our hunter-gatherer days we valued blood ties exclusively, regarding those outside our local tribe as potentially hostile foreigners. The advents of centralized irrigation technology and written communication gave rise to hydraulic agricultural production and larger economies, and the civilizations that emerged from these developments eventually came to formalize their existing cultural mythologies into religious doctrines. Organized religion was useful for promoting social cohesion, leading us to recognize theological ties as an acceptable level of trust, and expanding our consciousness to accommodate those with congruent spiritual beliefs into our social circle.

As long-distance trading became normal during the following millennia of exploration and innovation, ideas were shared and became entangled, eventually calcifying into robust ideological camps. Guided by these theories and ideals, the technology and ambition of the Industrial Age both allowed for and demanded greater political organization, precipitating formal nation-states to manage a complex economic paradigm. The predominant echelon of human consciousness is now based on national/ideological ties. But it’s still just a grander form of tribalism.

There’s a clear teleological trend at work here, with each socially-constructed fiction gradually yielding to a relatively more enlightened stage of awareness. And now that humanity has progressed to the national/ideological level of consciousness, Rifkin poses the deceptively obvious question: Why would we stop there?

It’s normal to feel overwhelmed by these things. The human mind isn’t equipped to make sense of gigantic numbers. We’re vulnerable to believing stereotypes because we rely on heuristics and slogans when attempting to understand complex concepts. When it comes to social dynamics, our empathy is emotional, not rational; people are less likely to be charitable when confronted by urgent statistics of, say, millions of starving people in Yemen, and more likely to donate when provided with a personal story of one child in need. In fact, our mental bandwidth even caps the size of our social groups to about 150 people — something known as Dunbar’s Number. That’s right: everything from ancient villages, to Hutterite and Amish communities, to military company units, to the average wedding guest list all top out at around that magic number.

That cognitive limit goes some way to explaining why tribalism still exists: we can only know so many people intimately, and it’s hard to truly trust people you don’t know. Still, as Rifkin showed, we’ve managed to work around this principle several times already during the course of the human story, so we’re clearly capable of transcending some of our primitive instincts. It just takes an open mind to get there.

Our Place in Space (Is Also Tiny)

You might vaguely get how big the universe is. But do you really? Outer space is unfathomably gargantuan…

…and we are utterly microscopic.

I’m guessing that, like me, you don’t care about the rivalry between two ant colonies. The ants in the park could fight the bloodiest, genocidal war in ant history, and the only human who might consider paying attention for even thirty seconds is little Jimmy trying out his new magnifying glass. And yet, that conflict is clearly important to those ants. Their species and our species have almost entirely different priorities because we occupy different tiers on nature’s hierarchy.

Significance is a relative concept, you see, and that should give us pause. We take for granted that our business is important simply because it takes place at our level, and we only have less-intelligent life forms against which to measure ourselves. This self-serving bias isn’t surprising because it’s a survival strategy that all creatures appear to possess. It also limits our potential, though, because it prevents us from understanding nature in its fullest. If someday we encounter an alien race much more intelligent than us, we will suddenly become the humble ants in the comparison. Then again, if that day ever comes, our blushes might be the least of our concerns.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. — Stephen Hawking

Turn to whatever spiritual or philosophical refuge you need to find comfort. But whatever you do, rest assured that no matter what cosmic force or divine creator or random phenomenon put us here, it doesn’t give a two-penny fuck about the ‘differences’ between us, to which we so naively assign so much importance.

To Survive Despite Ourselves

Let’s return to the Fermi Paradox once more to hammer this point home. Notice that whenever we speculate about the existence of aliens, we always imagine them as being monolithic. But what if those aliens have internal ethnic and cultural divisions that they take as seriously as we do ours? We haven’t bothered to consider that possibility.

We haven’t bothered to consider it because the mere discovery of life external to Earth would be a shock to us, and we’re not about to put the cart ahead of the donkey. If said aliens paid us a visit, we would perceive them as Aliens, full stop, rather than as a complex political coalition of Vulcans, Klingons, and Ferengis built painstakingly over the course of eons. Meanwhile, in contrast, our erstwhile human divisions would suddenly look next to meaningless. Our consciousness would graduate to the next level where we would instead be challenged to unite all life forms — humans and aliens — in common cause.

Even without a close encounter of the third kind, the Fermi Paradox still presents us with an enormous challenge. There have been many theories proposed to try and explain it, but one proposition stands out above the rest because of the urgency it implies. It’s known as the Great Filter, and it posits that along the countless rungs on the ladder of evolution, there’s probably at least one hurdle that’s nearly impossible to overcome. Most civilizations go extinct at that stage, explaining why intelligent life in the universe is so incredibly rare.

Supposing this theory is correct, we’re struck by an essential question: Where is the Filter in relation to humanity’s position on the ladder? Perhaps it’s behind us, at the very beginning. Maybe planet Earth is the only place in the whole universe where starlight interacted with carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen to produce carbohydrates — a process known as photosynthesis — in a way that allowed the molecules to replicate themselves. Or maybe the transition from simple prokaryotic cells to complex eukaryotic cells is the difficult step. Let’s hope so.

For if the Filter is still in our future, we’re in for a rough ride. It would mean that we’ll be faced with, at best, a monumental challenge the likes of which we’ve never encountered before, and at worst, certain annihilation. There are several candidates for the form this threat could take: an asteroid collision, an unstoppable virus, a hostile super-intelligence, global nuclear war, and catastrophic climate change, to name just a few.

Obviously, the threats listed here could only possibly be survived through a concerted, global effort. To retain nationalist priorities in the face of such danger would be like if the village people, rather than banding together in communal defence of an enemy army, each fled to their private huts and waited to be slaughtered one by one. Divide and conquer; unite and survive.

There are almost certainly multiple steps at which life can fail. Even if it defies the odds to get off the ground in the first place, it might still be wiped out later. The story of life is like this game with the metal ball and rods. It usually takes several attempts to get the ball all the way to the end, because one little mistake erases all your progress.

I don’t know what it’s called, but I bet you recognize it, too.

We should view our existence as a cosmic game in which each challenge is a test to determine whether or not we deserve to continue playing. If we vaporize ourselves in a nuclear holocaust, or we starve because we allowed runaway climate change to destroy the planet’s biodiversity, or we invent a super-intelligence that turns us all into paper clips, the verdict will be clear. The fact that you’re even reading this right now means we’ve progressed further in the game than any other life form that we know of. That’s encouraging. It also may not be saying much. One of the theories proposed to explain the Fermi Paradox, after all, suggests we might be animals kept in a galactic zoo for someone else’s entertainment. It’s hard to feel cool from inside a cage.

We’re All in This Together

As ideal as human unity would be, it won’t be easy to achieve because humanity’s strength is also its weakness. Our capacity for social organization and technological innovation has made us the planet’s apex predator. The cost of that large ideational range, however, is that our disparate ideas are often incompatible with one another and trigger conflict. Worse still, the more technologically sophisticated we become, the higher the stakes. Although the psychologist Steven Pinker makes a compelling case that the world is steadily improving, that progress is somewhat beside the point: in nuclear weapons, climate change, or artificial intelligence, we may be looking at the means by which, if we’re not careful, we will go extinct. Enrico Fermi wrote that the

[h]istory of science and technology has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life. . . . What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.

The speed of our technological advancement has always outpaced our moral progress, so we’re constantly experimenting with forces and concepts that we don’t fully understand. It’s vital that we be vigilant and compassionate. The human family can “grow adult” as a species by uniting through shared values that keep us focused on the big picture. The principles of liberalism — pluralism, basic individual freedom, and equality under the rule of law — provide a framework for common cause.

If there’s any room for ‘soft’ nationalism, it’s only insofar as liberal-democratic countries currently foster these values better than others. A free and multicultural country like Canada, for instance, is a better model for promoting a cosmopolitan vision than, say, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or Hungary (yes, really).

Nationalism is tribalism, and tribalism is outdated. It served a purpose when human civilizations needed it to focus their people on an immediate and local goal. But now that the human race circumnavigates the globe with ease and regularity, and has its eye on venturing beyond Earth, cosmopolitanism is the only defensible worldview.

Our ancestors believed they were literally at the centre of the universe. Their hubris limited their understanding of the world; if you think you know everything, you’ll never learn anything. Today, shorn of (most of) the delusions that afflicted them, we’re at a moment in our evolution when we can finally combine humility with innovative prowess to make more giant leaps forward.

A species whose members compete with and kill one another is self-defeating. A species that exterminates those beneath it, deliberately or not, is hypocritical — intelligence is relative, and there’s almost always a bigger fish. Given the global-level tasks at hand, therefore, compassion ought to be understood as a form of intelligence in its own right.

The Human Condition is as simple as it is awesome: We homo sapiens are just a bunch of frightened apes huddled together in the darkness, desperately clinging to a tiny blue marble that’s hurtling through the epically vast unknown. We’re all in this together.

So the next time someone chants “America First!”, or tells you to be concerned about the colour of someone’s skin or the manner in which they pray, don’t just roll your eyes. Roll on the floor laughing. Then make them read this essay.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, styling himself a pantheist, was skeptical of conventional religious doctrines. One would suspect that he’d feel the same way about secular religions like nationalism, giving new meaning to his view on the matter: