There’s a thought that keeps echoing in my mind. You are welcome to judge for yourself whether it carries any water.

We need to start being decent people. Maybe “again” or maybe “for the first time” but I’ll come to all that. I mean that in a strange way, an unusual way — No, I’m not going to plead impotently that you be nice to Nazis or Tucker Carlson, sorry. I’m going to say something very different, maybe even a little surprising.

Decency is the most powerful idea human beings ever came up with.

Let me explain.

Imagine, for a moment, a village. Just a little prehistoric village. Something at the beginning of time. Do you think that they were more — or less — civilized than us? (Don’t worry — this isn’t a naive call for primitivism, for everyone to give up modern conveniences, and live a rustic life. The point I wish to make isn’t about technology, and it isn’t a condemnation. I only want to examine something like what I can only call a shattering moral deficit in us, a hole in our souls.)

So imagine my village. More or less civilized than us? How would we judge?

I think that one way to judge is with the simple truth that decent people, civilized people, make sure that everyone in their societies has the basics. What are the basics? I suppose they change from age to age. Or do they? Would we have said, even in prehistory, that everyone deserved education, healthcare, and retirement? I think so. Even villages had medicine men, doctors, wise men, songs of wisdom, and cared for their elderly.

It’s true that in my little village, the quality, the form, of “healthcare”, “education”, “retirement”, and “safety nets” would be very different. Healthcare would be probably plant remedies and roots and potions and chants (which, before you condemn them, are recommended all over again by modern psychology). “Retirement” would probably be the village elders being able to sit around the fire, while the youngers hunted. Education would probably be songs of wisdom, passed down from generation to generation, sung at the campfire, commemorated in ritual. Childcare and elderly care would probably be had by everyone, because it would be a shared task by all.

Now — let me clarify what I am saying. I am emphatically not saying any of the following things. “They had a higher quality of life than us!” “We should all live in prehistoric villages!” “Technology is the original sin!” “Look at those noble savages!” None of these are my intent and meaning.

I am simply observing that even in a prehistoric village, people would probably make sure, so far as I can deduce from everything I have read and understood, that everyone had the basics. But what does that make us, and what does that make them?

It’s true — very true, indisputable — that their “basics” were far less effective and powerful than ours. But that doesn’t absolve us as innocent — it only implicates us as guilty. Because if our basics are even more life-giving — then shouldn’t everyone have them even more so?

I want you to see my first point. Perhaps it’s a foolish point. Perhaps it’s a subtle point, a good point. I don’t know — that’s for you to judge.

Our distant ancestors were better people than us, in my estimation. They cared about one another, respected one another, in ways we do not — and simply do not seem to even think about anymore. They cared about a very great deal: each other, their young, their old, their environment, their past, their future, their little societies. And it strikes me these days — just how different we have become.

We don’t give one another healthcare. We take it away from one another. We are at the point where we don’t give each other the most basic kinds of medicine — insulin, antibiotics, and so on. Our medicine men are only for the rich.

Imagine my village operating that way — medicine men only for the kings. How long would it last, before everyone deserted it? Imagine that one day, the most cruel and abusive in my village proclaimed — they would make access to the medicine man “cost” an average person’s resources: their monthly hunt, the food and belongings they had saved up. How long do you think my village would endure? Wouldn’t everyone leave and desert it — leaving it to collapse? Or even if they stuck around, as inequality grew and spiralled — wouldn’t things soon enough reach the point of ruin, as poverty grew? Yet don’t you think that actual villagers in history probably never did this precisely because they understood just that? So why don’t we?

We don’t take care of our elders, either. We make our elders work 80 hour shifts at Walmart while living in their cars. We turn them out on the street. Heaven forbid they are not “productive” — but wait: isn’t the point of “productivity” a better life? So what’s the point of it then if all you do is work in more and more insulting, demeaning ways to your dying day — because you are a “burden” or “liability” if you don’t?

Imagine if that village worked that way — if, when it’s elders could no longer hunt, their wisdom and knowledge wasn’t considered enough of an “asset”, or a “resource”, to use our fairly gross modern terms — and so they were put to work, clearing out the night soil, or doing other hard, low, labour. How long would that village last? Why would anyone want to be a part of it, if that was going to be their end, their lot? Don’t you think people throughout history understood just that — which is why, mostly, they took care of their elderly?

Nor do we educate our children. We say: the rich can have education at storied colleges. But even those storied colleges don’t really educate much, do they? Ivy Leaguers go on to work at Wall Street, raiding pension funds, which is to say in plain English, stealing money. Do educated people devote their lives to stealing money? I exaggerate a little — but only a little, so that you see my point. Even our best education doesn’t educate — it merely indoctrinates our kids into our failed culture of selfishness, greed, abuse, and gain, at any price.

It’s true that “education” in the village would probably consist of learning how to make a bow and arrow — and then hear songs of wisdom by firelight. Sure, they didn’t learn chemistry, biology, and physics. So what?

Imagine if education in my village consisted of what we teach our kids. Use that bow and arrow to steal food and belongings from the village’s old and sick and frail! Those songs of wisdom? Bah, the only thing that matters is whether you have more than everyone else. If you don’t — you’re nobody at all. You’re not a being with inherent worth, on a great journey from death to life to death again, something mysterious, vast, beautiful, strange. You are just here to be selfish, abusive, and cruel.

How long would my village last? Everyone would turn on everyone else, trying to take what they had. And because they never thought about the meaning of it all — they’d told each other the meaning of it all was just gain, gain, gain — they’d never even understand why their little village was collapsing, as violence overtook it. And don’t you think, too, people through history understood all that — which is why they educated their children?

Nor do we have what are today called “safety nets” — a sterile term, which disguises a simple cutting truth: simply taking care of each other. When people in our societies run out of resources — due to bad luck, folly, circumstance, or just plain human frailty — what do we do? Mostly, we leave them to die. No matter if they’ve fought wars for us, or worked long and hard. Out of money? Sorry — go live on the street. Nobody cares. You should have looked out for number one, loser.

Imagine my village doing any of that. When someone ran out of food — they were just left to starve. When someone’s arm broke, and they couldn’t hunt — their whole family was left to die of hunger. When someone’s little farm was washed away — everyone else laughed and watched as they died of thirst. And so on.

Can you imagine my village doing that? I can’t. In fact, everything that we know about actual history suggests that people did nothing of the kind. They helped each other when they fell on hard times. When one’s harvest failed, another fed him. When one’s hunt or forage yielded no meat or fruit, still, they were fed. They looked out for one another. In sharply, stunningly different ways to us.

What would have happened if they didn’t care for one another, after all? If you didn’t look after your neighbour — well, why would he look after you? Your kids? Your wife? When your arm broke, or your hunt failed? It was insurance, in other words. People throughout history insured one another against disaster, ruin, catastrophe, failure.

They understood, intuitively, that if they didn’t insure one another — then their little societies would soon enough fragment and collapse into tidal waves of negligence, violence, vendetta. Not insuring each other against disaster would only create another disaster — the disaster of stupdiity, greed, selfishness, and cruelty. They understood yet another thing we don’t.

(You’d be right to say that I’m romanticizing our distant ancestors a little. But I do it to make a point. Didn’t they make wars, too? Didn’t they kill and rape, too? Build fruitless temples? Didn’t they have their own forms of oppression? Sure, sure, sure. But we do all that — and we also fail to care for anything at all. See what I’m getting at? I’m not saying they were perfect, pure, immaculate, the best, that we should all go live in the Stone Age. I’m saying something a little subtler.)

Do you see my point a little bit yet? Let me make it plainer.

We have become indecent people, my friends. Maybe not you. Maybe not even “the people you know.” But enough of us. Many of us. Masses of us. So much so as to destabilize our societies, and send them plunging off the abyss of extremism, nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism. People who only care about ourselves — and in increasingly violent, stupid, and unthinking ways, in which we will happily destroy ourselves for a little temporary gain, a rush of power or a thrill of dominance.

But more than this is true.

We have become, I think, a great deal more indecent than we know. Throughout history, people provided to one another the very things that we try to take away from one another. We are special, exceptional, unique — but in a bad way. In our indecency, which is alone in history. Nobody in history, really, so far as I can see, has been as indecent as us. As obscene, selfish, abusive, cruel. Our indecency is unmatched. Can you think of anyone — anyone at all — else who didn’t take care of their young, old, neighbours, selves, or environments? Who didn’t give each other education, healthcare, retirement, childcare, and so on — in the ways that they could afford, in the forms they could achieve?

I can’t. What does that say about us? That we’re the only people in history, really, who are so self-absorbed and stupid that we only care for our little atomic individualized selves (or even worse, the plastic fantasies we want those selves to be)?

But even more than this is true.

But we haven’t just become indecent people. We have also become foolish, stupid, imbecilic people. Our ancestors were wiser than us — for millennia. They understood that caring for each other, for the young, for the elderly, for their environments — these weren’t “random acts of kindness”, as we say today. They were acts of great wisdom. They were what our ancestors did for their villages and societies to endure.

We are singular, my friends. Exceptional. But not in the way we think. We think of ourselves as champions of history. But we are not. We are history’s idiots. We are exceptional, that much is true — but only in our indecency and in our ignorance. We have forgotten the very things our ancestors knew, and knew forever — the deep wisdom of decency, the first and still the greatest idea human beings ever had.

The reason we see ourselves as champions of history, rather than its fools, is that we see history as an upwards line. But it is not. It’s true that we’ve made technological progress. But it seems to me that we have made profound, ruinous moral regress, too, along the way.

Without decency, none of the things we think of as great accomplishments — science, art, literature, the written word — could have happened to begin with. Human beings would have simply been dumb, warring tribes, at each others’ throats, forever.

So, sure technology, discovery, science, endeavour, has made life easy, convenient. Medicine has raised life expectancy, and so forth. There’s no disputing the fact that “life has gotten better” — if by that all you mean by that is an unexamined, unthinking proclamation. But all these things began with the Big Bang of decency — which we have forgotten entirely, which we despise as a value, which we scorn and jeer as a truth.

Hence, it’s truer to say we have made stunning, ruinous moral regress, when you actually stop and think about it — by forgetting that decency itself was the Big Bang of human progress, and why that matters, what it means. We don’t care about anything but ourselves — and even then, we only care for ourselves in increasingly stupid, backwards, narrow-minded, evanscent ways — and our refusal to invest in anything or anyone else is vivid, stark evidence. We don’t believe it’s important to share what we have made and accomplished in fair, equitable, and reasonable ways. We believe that all the gains should go to the rich, to the powerful, to the cruel, to the abusive. Maybe not you — but certainly enough of us. We don’t remotely the same quality, nuance, insight, standard, power of morality, ethics, truth, that even our distant ancestors had.

(They believed in equality, in freedom, in justice, in much truer ways than us. The ancients might have had pre-democratic societies, with chieftains and so forth. But the axis of their social organizations was decency, which you can call whatever you like, whether humanity, equity, or fairness — and decency ensured stability. They cared for one another, in deep and lasting ways, or else they would have died out in a flash — because they understood the deep wisdom of decency — yet we don’t care for anything at all, except more, faster, bigger pleasure, money, and power for ourselves.

Now, you might say that our moral decline as human beings began with the age of kings, with people discovering agriculture — etcetera. I won’t answer that question for now. I only want you to see the simple point.

We consider ourselves enlightened and civilized people — especially us Anglos. It is our founding myth — we are the most rational and sensible people of all, the “innovators” and the “explorers.” It’s a comforting myth. We are not enlightened and civilized people. I don’t mean to say that to judge or shame or condemn. Just to observe. If our distant ancestors were more decent than we are — then who is the civilized, enlightened one — and who is the indecent, uncivilized one? We are the ones who don’t know the deep wisdom of decency, my friends. Not them.)

It’s true — they didn’t have antibiotics and insulin and money. Wait — do “we” have all that? It’s truer to say that we are only allowed to “have” basics in profoundly unfair and indecent ways. And it’s even truer that while they didn’t have insulin, antibiotics, and money — the basics we take for granted — that they were kinder, better, gentler to each other, sharing what basics they did have have in fairer, truer, and smarter ways, because they had something we lack: the deep wisdom of decency.

Our story of ourselves as champions of progress is all wrong, my friends. We have made progress of a simple kind. But when it comes to the harder kind, wisdom, which you might call morality, ethics, truth — we have made only regress. We appear to think wisdom is foolishness: cruelty, abusiveness, selfishness, greed. The ancients would have laughed at us. They knew that would only lead to collapse? When did we forget what they knew? When did we become ignorant and indecent people — the ones who forgot the deep, primal wisdom of decency?

That is what history says to me. We are people who are unique in our indecency and our ignorance — truly unique, singular amongst the millennia. We are the only people I can think of who take care of nothing at all — not their young, not their old, not their land, not each other — only caring for themselves.

We are not paragons of progress, enlightenment, reason, civilization. We are the degeneracy of all those things, too. Our ancestors were better people, morally, ethically, socially, culturally, than we are today, by a very long way. They cared. We don’t. We have had our hearts ripped out and our eyes blinded by ideas they didn’t have: the follies of supremacy, of capitalism, of domination. We are alone in history. Perhaps that is why, deep down, we feel so lonely, so empty, so helpless — so ruined.

Umair

March 2019