It probably was a mistake, but I just finished reading
“The World Set Free” by H. G. Wells. It is about the nuclear war in the mid
1950’s and the aftermath of the war. The book was written a hundred years ago,
before anyone actually knew what a runaway nuclear reaction would be like. He
got that wrong, thinking that the chain reaction would continue for years,
rather than creating a real explosion of large size. The novel was about the results,
rather than the action. He pointed out a few things that we usually forget but
that are still important.
Humans are designed to be hunters and gathers. Our social
systems and institutions are designed for people who survive by hunting and
gathering. While some economic activities are like hunting, there are
differences. But the economic system is predicated on human life as it was
hundreds or thousands of years ago, and things have changed a little. Social institutions
are for a species that numbers in the millions, not the billions. Humans aren’t
meant to see other humans in great numbers. The millions of years of evolution
led to a species that lived in groups of fewer than three hundred, people who
wandered much of the time, animals who perpetuated the works, words, and superstitions
of their forebears, people who didn’t change much from millennium to
millennium. Until recently things didn’t change much over the millennia, but in
the last few thousand years the surroundings in which people found themselves
started becoming more and more different over time, and the social situations
also changed. As population increased there became more opportunities for
exogamy. Until recently the overwhelming majority of people married first or
second cousins, and there were people who didn’t look like each other, and some
of those strange people were in the habit of doing things that were different
from what other people were accustomed. Most social institutions, including
governmental institutions are based on the assumption that most people will be
similar. It is fairly easy for humans to get along with other humans who seem
like them, but humans who are different are potential targets.
As society became different in its constitution, the
prior institutions were retained, even though they might not have been ideal.
The question is: Do we need a new order? If we do, then what should it be?
People have suggested various alterations to social institutions, but those are
mostly still based on the same assumptions. I don’t think that the human spirit
has changed for thousands of years, and I base that on literature that was
written in the past and recently. But that spirit is not appropriate to the
situations in which most people live now.
I can see two possibilities. Either humans will change
their social institutions, or the human population will decrease dramatically. Both
of those possibilities have been explored in non-fiction and in fiction, but I
don’t think that anyone has figured out what will actually happen, and I think
that the highest probability is for something other than what has been
predicted to be the actual result.
I happen to like humans pretty much as they are (at least
I am accustomed to them as they are, whether I like them is an individual matter).
That doesn’t mean that I am not a misanthrope, but as an observer I think that
the human species is interesting, and it is adaptable. Unfortunately, there are
a great many humans who are not well suited for humanity as it operates now,
and that may include me. I think that the greatest hope for humanity is for its
numbers to greatly decrease. In the last one hundred years many people have
lived and reproduced who could not have survived without intervention, and
humanity has not developed the intellectual strength that is required for a
change in the society. Business is still carried on in ways that are largely
unchanged. Running a society with the degree of specialization that is required
now is different from what was needed just fifty years ago, and the nature of
the population has not changed to fill those needs. As technology changes there
is more and more need for people with greater intellectual capacity, but humans
are still born with an average IQ of 100, which means that half of the
population is not even that intelligent. That level of intelligence was fine
when most people farmed, fished, mined, or worked in manufacturing plants, but
tie often takes more than training for someone to move from physical labor into
intellectual labor.
The idea of a population crash has been brought up, and
it would be likely, if humans weren’t as aware of their surroundings as they
are. It is not unusual for excess population to cause a crash in deer
population, squirrel population, and so on, and such a crash in human
population is possible, and it would eliminate a great many problems.
Things often work out in ways that were not foreseen. As
with the works of H.G. Wells, prediction s become out dated quickly. Looking at
history we can see that there usually is one part from one side of the
argument, another part from the other side, and yet another part that is
different. With that I will make my suggestion.
Regardless of what we might like, there will be a new
order of things, but that isn’t on the immediate horizon, and the nature of the
changes can’t be determined, but the population of humans will decrease
significantly during the next few decades. Lastly, something else will happen, but
I don’t know what that will be; although the list is topped with an unexpected
scientific breakthrough and contact with intelligent life from another star
system.
There are several possibilities of what will cause a
decrease in population, but the old standbys top that list: disease and
catastrophe. For a catastrophe to be big enough to be effective it would have
to be an asteroid strike or something similar. As far as diseases go, Plagues,
especially if a new strain evolves, is at the top of the list, but there are
many other diseases that could also change only slightly and become world
killers.
There are plenty of people who think that society should
be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and
urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the
ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could
not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few
creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers
are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other
change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of
people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what
couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require
seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.
Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for
becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to
Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or
Summer), or something else along those lines.
So reader, what do you think? Must it begin here and now, or can we put
things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as
we have for these past millions of years?
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