“I Don’t Know. Maybe If……….”
“I don’t know. Maybe if I had been the man I am today, it could have turned out different. But I had a different mind set back then.”
The above seems a simple, but interesting comment that signals something unique about life. Namely, that we are never the same person today as we were yesterday. To the extent this statement is simple—but profound—it alters the way we judge others and ourselves. It also alters the way in which we understand life and it’s consequences. One of the major flaws of most religious scripture is the absoluteness of many ethical statements. And this rigidity runs head onto ethical fairness. Ethical fairness, it seems, is seeped in flexibility dependent on time and circumstances. On the other hand, ethical flexibility opens the door to ‘anything goes’ dependent on circumstances. Since circumstances can be varied depending on culture, historical period, custom, tragedy, luck (bad or good), economic resources, health, age, and perhaps many other factors—— fair or ethical judgment is extremely tricky in many situations.
When we sometimes say that “God will punish those who do wrong” we do this in the same way we say “God will help those in need”. But in both cases this lacks logic. After all, the laws created by God to control the evolutionary process depend on diversity for advancement. So does this mean God will punish Himself? Let’s take an extreme example or two—if some guy cuts off his mother’s head and carries it around in public this is obviously both wrong and crazy. Who is to blame? God for allowing such mental states to exist? What is the proper punishment? We don’t say “Well, God will punish him so let’s just stay out of it. The truth is we collectively are to blame because most everyone knew the son was mentally ill and yet the mother got left to do the best she could to feed and house him, at a substantial financial and emotional cost to her and any others in the family dealing with the situation. It only makes sense to accept that diversity is necessary for evolutionary progress, and that fortunately for humans, we have the mental capacity and ethical nature to understand that we collectively, have to help ‘care for, isolate, or punish those who are a danger to others.
When some ghetto gang member murders a different young gang member or kills/rapes/terrorizes innocent people, who is to blame? By the same logic we collectively know that children raised in such environments are often not mentally normal or emotionally normal. We also know, but rarely admit, that our society via our government is responsible for what kind of communities exist as part of our society. The trouble is we punish but fail to eliminate such ghetto environments from existance. Science now understands when people, especially children in their formative years, are left in situations which generate chronically high levels of stress hormones, many of them will be mentally and emotionally damaged individuals by the end of their formative years.
In short, our entire society, collectively, is responsible to do the preventing and the punishing. For self serving reasons the human species is not ‘advanced’ enough to be very good at this. We invent ‘family values’, individual responsibility, economic greed, and resent certain aspects of diversity. So the easiest way to cop out of our collective responsibilities is to ward these people off, gate them away from our own lives, and jail as many of these ‘misfits’ as we can. The trouble here is that obviously these kind of communities grow and spread to suburbs and rural areas until a greater and greater percentage of our population are ‘developmental’ misfits.
Sometimes we make bad decisions when young because we are still in our formative years and have limited experiences. While individuals can grow ethically at any age, the ability to be flexible enough to grow seems to shrink with age. Many diverse minority groups achieve more justice or rights only when the generation which created the injustices dies out and a more flexible, younger generation is able to accept the ’new’ justice or rights. At any rate social interactions are complicated precisely because of such wide diversity in human social attitudes. Other species have social behaviors driven much more by hormones and genetics, while human social behavior is far more learned and adaptable. Doe (deer) do not have to decide when to send their fawns off to be on their own. The right hormones kick in and just like that she drives last year’s fawn off to be independent. Humans on the other hand have to think about whether to send their offspring off to be on their own to fend for themselves with holidays created for family reunions. Some families never cut the ‘apron string’ and ‘family values’ becomes a permanent primary social entity. Is this wrong or right? Hard to conclude since with individuality of human reason comes a lot of diversity.
That our current social milieu is more advanced, in general, than during the Stone Age, the Dark Ages, or even our social milieu a hundred years ago, is evident enough. Because of global issues like human overpopulation, distribution of human wealth, climate change, global economics, and multiple access to varied modes of mass human destruction—aided by the internet and multiple gadgets which enable all sorts of human cabals, centered around self serving interests, to organize effectively without ever any having to be near each other physically—all this access to terroristic methods creates a human species sitting on a modern day tinderbox capable of genocidal acts of major impact. We need remember the more complex a society, the faster it can often crumble since so many factors which enable a complex society to function well, are dependent on each other. Cut off electricity, fuel, clean air, unpolluted water sources, functioning financial institutions, fair elections, intact infrastructures, and so on—and Humpty Dumpty falls and “all the kings men and all the kings horses cannot put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” Gone are the days of the Wild West or less crowded and isolated communities when a family could simply pack up their belongings and move to another area and start over. There are currently 75 million refugees who can attest to that.
Putting all this global stuff aside, the best way for an individual to grow to be a more ethical, economically independent, physically healthier, more accomplished and a more contented product of personal growth is to continually make the effort to be a better person today than we were yesterday. Without this positive growth and adaptation to change, we become frustrated, angry, emotionally unstable, cantankerous fools who lash out against everybody and everything, sometimes tweeting endless nasty personal insults 24 hrs/day about anyone not a mirror image of ourselves and our own particular circumstances. Rapid changes in technology can generate less interaction between diverse populations, while 24 hour endless babble between personal cabals of some sort create toxic feelings about human diversity. All this while still another large group uses technological advances and gadgets to expand their social interactions with diverse groups. If we read the comments following many internet political, religious, or lifestyle articles, the hateful toxic mindset of so many people is clearly evident. Reason and good will as a means to coexist is a train which has long left the station. Which is not to conclude that the same train will not come back, at some distant time, again to the station.
While we all can still become better persons today than we were yesterday, the times are making it far more difficult to impact positively on others to the degree we could in the past. Our social environment today is far less about our diverse neighbors or community, and more about an internet cabal of like-minded people having their own mindset or genetic base, or inherited religious beliefs, or current political beliefs, or sports interests, etc. who can end up far more isolated from real diverse people than say 60 years ago. Community used to be important socially to everybody, but this is a thing of the past. The world as we may have known it or grown up in, is gone. No surprise here since this has been happening as part of evolution for a long time. But the pace has picked up exponentially the past 100 years and just what this all means for the evolutionary process is not clear. The evolutionary process is heavily dependent on change and chance and diversity. We cannot logically predict chance and change so we cannot therefore predict the future—not our own nor the future of the human species. The greatest illusion our own species has at the present time is the belief that we now control the environment, the natural resources, the fate of other species, and so on. Mostly we have, as in the past human cultures, created a God which thinks like us, likes us best, interacts with us on a personal basis, and will, if we play our cards right, suspend some laws of nature so we can be exempt from their consequences. We have put the cart before the horse and while this in no way impacts on the laws which govern the evolutionary process, it makes it ever more clearer that our species has vulnerabilities which are very self destructive. How this all plays out is beyond human predictability. No, the universe and it’s amazing evolutionary process are not in trouble. The evolutionary process has never been about us, in fact we are one of the newest specie participants. The process is obviously amazing, long standing and Time does not pass away. Time stays and we go, every one of us goes, and the process continues on evolutionary Time, according to the laws God created to run the process. All is well with the process—- how well it is for any of us, or our offspring—today or tomorrow or the distant future, is another question.
Could any us of have lived our lives better? “We can’t know. Maybe had we been the person we are today, it could have. But we had different mind sets back then.” (Paraphrased quote of the original quote at the start of this musing. Author: Terrell Owens” (smile)
