51吃瓜

Whenever I talk about the kinds of changes human civilization is going to have to make if we want our species to survive into the future, I always get people saying that no such civilization has ever existed in all of human history. They tell me that at no time has there ever been a large industrialized civilization wherein human behavior was driven by collaboration rather than competition. Never before in history have humans eliminated the profit motive as a driver of civilization or worked in cooperation with the ecosystem for the good of all beings. It is unprecedented, they say, for peace and harmony to prevail and everyone to have enough.

And of course, they are correct. At no time has any civilization like that ever existed. But at no time has humanity ever been in the situation it鈥檚 in currently, either.

At no other time in history have humans been so close to destroying the biosphere with their profit-driven behavior. At no time have there ever been this many humans on this planet. At no time have there ever been billions of human brains networked with each other in real time the way ours are now, via the internet. 

That last one鈥檚 kind of a big deal, by the way. The fact that billions of human beings now have access to (a) all the information known to man and (b) instantaneous communication with each other is far and away the most significant thing ever to happen to our species since the evolution of the human brain. It will get even more significant as improved translation services network us even further. Although, from the outside, we might look more or less the same way we looked three decades ago, in reality there have probably been more significant changes in our species in the last three decades than in the previous three millennia. Humans are functionally a very, very different kind of organism than they were before I, and probably you, were born.

We have literally never been here before. We鈥檝e never seen anything remotely like this. Not even close. We are in completely uncharted territory.

These are wildly unprecedented times, and unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. Because our situation is so dramatically unlike anything we鈥檝e ever seen before, the same must also necessarily be true of the solutions to the problems we now face. If there鈥檚 a way out of this mess, it鈥檚 going to look unlike anything we鈥檝e ever seen before. 

Our species is at an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at this point in spacetime. We鈥檙e staring down the barrel of total extinction via nuclear armageddon or environmental collapse. Everything that got us to this point is the result of the behavior patterns we鈥檝e been moving in for the centuries leading up to it. 

What this means is that any deviation away from our trajectory toward annihilation will necessarily entail a drastic unpatterning, since you cannot separate our circumstances from the patterns that gave rise to it. Even if you could wave a magic wand and have our biosphere perfectly healthy again and all nuclear weapons reduced to atoms, our behavior patterns would just cause us to destroy the biosphere again and rebuild the nukes in a matter of years.

So if we are to survive into the future, we鈥檙e going to have to drastically change our patterns. We鈥檙e going to have to begin acting in ways we have never acted before so that we can begin organizing civilization in a way that it has never before existed.

So, sure, maybe I am being unrealistic in describing the radically divergent kind of civilization we鈥檙e going to have to create 鈥� but it鈥檚 also the only kind of future civilization that can possibly exist. If it鈥檚 impossible to create a wildly different kind of civilization than the kind we鈥檝e been living in, then it鈥檚 also impossible for humans to exist in future centuries, because we will necessarily wipe ourselves out with our self-destructive patterns otherwise.

So, while I am talking about a future civilization that sounds utopian, I am also talking about the only kind of future civilization that can possibly exist. If there are future generations, they will necessarily be living in a society that functions in a completely different way from our current one.

And I personally believe it鈥檚 possible. I really think we can make the adaptation-or-extinction jump if we want to. In wildly unprecedented times, no possibility is off the table.

[ first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author鈥檚 own and do not necessarily reflect 51吃瓜鈥檚 editorial policy.