Almost anything we say about a better behaved world sounds like an old Sunday sermon – incontrovertible and not achievable. Humanity has largely abandoned aspirations of good behaviour for its own sake in exchange for competitive challenges to be the Most Superior. Wealth, health, longevity, power to boss others about, now all demonstrate ‘Success’.
We seldom admit it but what we really seek is immortality. We want this so much that we will often vehemently deny it in a perverse attempt to prove our cleverness. We secretly imagine that to live forever in a world in which we are successful would be paradise. Only those who exercise their minds philosophically reach the conclusion that paradise might also be hell. It’s the irritations that make life worthwhile. Sailors don’t sail only for the good weather.
The consequence is that our aspirational aims become rejected as pie-in-the-sky, old hat, passé pieties. Those who speak them now are derided for impracticality. Those who try to live them are eased into Sunday or One day worship events in search of self-consolation for lack of material achievement. Good is considered ‘innocent’; wicked, ‘clever’.
After some seventy years of reasonable peacefulness we were heading into a strategy called globalisation. It was the recognition that communication and action were at a new level of speed, permitting us to understand and trade faster than ever before. Not only would physical and intellectual exchange be speeded up, so would education, conflict resolution and justice. A golden age of cooperation seemed on the horizon. The great powers were, if not exactly in harmony, reconciled to a policy of live and let live with certain agreed boundaries for all.
Globalisation had a deeper meaning than peaceful coexistence. It presaged a state of understanding that would enable humanity to explore the universe and become capable of creating in a way not previously dreamt of. Rather than a threat to any divinity it was an espousal of something nearer to divinity than had ever been conceived before.
Aggressive exploitation of one country’s resources to acquire another’s – for purposes as much concerned with ego as with material benefit – trashed the globalisation movement and unleashed a level of emotional greed for which humanity was not – and is not yet – prepared. Wars and conflict have always been part of human history. Two new factors make them different today from previously.
Speed of communications has already been mentioned but as a potential benefit. It is a real hazard, too. Human brains are not thinking much faster but technological speed and increasing intelligence are working at a greater pace than any personal ability to say ‘stop and think’. And, secondly, the might of armament, with both nuclear weapon and drone, is greater than human judgment has ever had to deal with.
Combine speed and might and the risk of error loosed uncontrollably is hazardous at a level never before conceived. An accident of triggering force is just as likely as an accident of misplacing a highly secret message on social media.
The human race has the wealth, equipment, intelligence and capability of educating itself to understand the risks it runs with its newfound freedoms. If it reflects briefly it can also realise the incredible benefits its heirs and successors can reap from an order of rational and decent behaviour. If it acts swiftly it can achieve the possibilities it now sees so clearly.
If it doesn’t it will self-destruct.
That would be very sad.
Good morning
John Bittleston
Thank you for your several views on the Vance comment.
One of my readers is quite right – he does need a life coach!
Please tell us more at [email protected].
31 Mar 2025
