World Ethos 2
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 08.2
The planetary era
Schematically, we could distinguish three main phases in human evolution: the fourth being the one we have just entered.
The first was the biological phase, approximately 20 million years long, which saw the divergence of the hominid branch from the other primates and paved the ground for the advent of homo habilis, the first hominin to master stone technology. A number of physiological and developmental adaptations followed. Bipedalism and lengthened ontogeny being the most significant. Also, during the last million years a process of encephalization began, which eventually resulted in the doubled cranial capacity of homo erectus.
Encephalization has been tied to an increasing emphasis on meat in the diet, with the development of fire cooking and increased social interaction. Homo erectus was the first hominin involved in big game hunting, which requires advanced coordination skills. Homo erectus was also the first of the hominina to leave Africa, spreading through Asia and Europe between 1.8 and 1.3 million years ago.
The second phase is the cultural phase, that starts with the rise of homo sapiens, around 200.000 years ago. Their dispersal out of Africa around 70.000 years BP coincides with the progressive replacement of earlier hominids, either through competition or hybridization. By the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period (50,000 BP), full behavioral modernity, including language, music and other cultural universals have developed.
The third ‘historical’ phase starts with the neolithic revolution, when agriculture-prompted food surplus leads to the formation of permanent human settlements, domestication of animals and metallurgy:
Civilization is born. Trade leads to the development of written language and culture becomes the main evolutionary drive.
In the first two phases the underlying condition is the natural struggle for survival, which indirectly selections the fittest and eliminates the inapt. But the third and last phase is somewhat different. Food surpluses allowed most of the neolithic communities to expand simultaneously, and to inevitably confront each other for land and resources.
Military forces were formed for protection, and government bureaucracies for administration: the state reorganized hierarchically in order to face the constant threat of war.
The struggle for survival became a struggle for power.
The ‘historical’ human, prisoner of its tribalistic cultural horizon, was not able to conceive a peaceful distribution of the extra wealth made possible by technology outside the walls of the city. Each culture would be centered on itself, assuming its particular forms to be universal. No difference, in this matter, between the Persians of Xerxes and the modern Europeans. Recounts Herodotus that the Persians “honor the most themselves and their nearest neighbors; they honor in the second degree those who live at medium distance; and so forth, they progressively measure their esteem in proportion to the distance. The reason is that they look upon themselves as greatly superior in all respects to the rest of mankind, so that those who are the farthest off must be the most degraded”. After three thousand years, the panopticon of the West isn’t much different.
The past teaches us that a mutual recognition between two different cultures in the name of the common ‘humanity’ can happen only when a major change of the circumstances challenges the survival instinct of both and reveals a common destiny.
Today, this conditions have realized themselves, bringing about a new evolutionary phase, that of planetarization.
For the first time, Humanity is both free from material necessity (if technology and knowledge would be made available to all) and unable to settle its scores by waging war, since a WW3 would result in a mass suicide with no winners. Our, as stated in State of the World,1988 report by the Worldwatch Institute, is the first generation that has to choose if Earth is to remain a habitable planet.
Just as millions of years ago our primate psyche was able to evolve a tribal conscience, a moral code of behavior to overcome the tragedy of the commons (me vs. us) and enhance individuals’ cooperation within a given community,
today we are called to develop a planetary conscience able to transcend the particular cultural forms that competed against each other (us vs. them) and result in a common world ethos for the entire Humanity.
This world ethics has to be pluralistic and involve every ethnic group on Earth in a joint effort to save the planet we all share.
This is not an utopistic vision: this is a necessity consequent to the new human condition, foreseen by Darwin himself, that requires the extension of those sympathetic feelings we traditionally held towards the members of our own local community to the whole world.
The barriers between races, cultures and states are relics of the past phase,
when destructive aggressiveness was functional to the preservation of ethnic diversity. We could say that our duty as a species, today, is to adapt our perceptive and moral apparatus to the current condition.
The epochal threshold we have stepped upon marks the entrance to a new, unavoidable phase of homination: planetarization. As C.S. Coon puts it: “We now stand on the threshold of phase four of history, faced with a triple choice. Either the world will be destroyed, or nature will regain its balance at man’s expense, or man will restore nature without loss of his cultural heritage when he learns to unify the cultures of the world, just as his ancestor made man a single species. As he unified the human species at the highest biological level then in existence, so must we unify man at the highest cultural level existing today, or evolution will come to an end”.
The conventional ethical and moral traditions we inherited are therefore incompatible with the challenges we are facing.
Evolving with the new world ethos will maybe feel to some as a betrayal of certain ideals they grew up with, and yet that’s an honest price to pay if we want to share a common set of values we can all live by.
Human auto-genesis
One of the main issues regards the emerging field of biotechnology.
Since the discovery of DNA in 1953, we know life to be programmed by a code made up of a combination of genes, each carrying some specific hereditary trait. By modifying the genes’ combination, it’s possible to alter the organism’s generative process.
That’s how was born the most upsetting of all nature-taming technologies ever conceived by humans: bio-engineering, the biological analogue to atomic engineering.
The anthropological sense of this breakthrough is the demolition of a boundary for long considered to be inviolable: that between liberty and necessity, between human free will and natural determinism.
Humanity broke into the seminal sanctuary of life itself, and started to refashion it according to its own creative flair.
Traditional morality reacted in bewilderment, hindered by an obsolete concept of natural law based upon the assumed conformity between order of nature and ethical precept.
What do we really mean for natural law? Wasn’t human nature free from every preconceived determinism?
Human nature is indeed freedom, intended both as ability of self-determination and as transcendence of the causal chain of events:
humanity is an end in itself,
and for this reason it should never be intended simply as a means.
Hence the painful ambivalence of bio-engineering:
- on one side, it could be used to relieve the future generations from potential hereditary defects, or help with the growth in vitro of customized transplant organs, thus being an asset to enhance human freedom;
- on the other, it could be used to alter the human genome in the perspective of the old strategy of world-domination, with its racist and utilitarian paradigms, thus opening a new terrifying scenario in the history of violence and discrimination.
On this fragile line between nature and human being will be decided the future of our species. The present world order is too corrupt and profit-oriented to take an effective ethical stand.
It’s up to us, humans of the earth, to stand up and collaborate at the drafting of a world ethical charter, consisting not only of prohibitions, but mainly of functional orientations apt to guide humanity in the forthcoming planetary era of common responsible awareness.
