How Humanity Evolves

There are so many ways this story could go. This is only one.

By MIKE ROBERTSON

1. Take as a starting point the obvious fact that we humans are a fractious lot with what seems to be an indefatigable appetite for friction and selfishness and arrogance and greed. But we’re not all the same all the time: our natures as individuals range from angelic to demonic with a wide spread between. Most of us freely sway back and forth between extremes depending on our circumstances. If hungry, we fight for food; if freezing, we kill for warmth. We do, however, have a similarly strong instinct for species survival. Thus we, females at least, feed our children before we feed ourselves; we will, again females, give the warmth of our bodies to our offspring. We men, on the other hand, can be counted on to become aggressive and single-mindedly selfish in the face of scarcity. We men justify and rationalize our aggressions. Our aggressions are for our women and children.
2. But we’re not just individuals, or even just families. We are, despite ourselves, social creatures in a wider sense, which sometimes tempers or at least defers our crueler natures. We pride ourselves in inventing technologies to solve, or merely defer, problems that threaten our survival. Technologies like agriculture, tools, religion. Yes, religion. Such institutions serve to encourage cohesiveness and groupthink, which tempers our selfish natures and thus defuse some of our crueler impulses. Thus, instead of killing each other, we give ourselves the option to restrict killing to those we perceive as outside our group.
3. Yet every advance we achieve by inventiveness eventually seems not to be enough. Pressures of overpopulation cripple our efforts to feed and house ourselves; the accumulation of power around individuals dominated by selfishness results in institutions dedicated to bleeding the many to satisfy the greed and lust of the few. We have not solved these problems, and can hardly imagine a future in which we have overcome the limitations of our nature.
4. Despite all of this, pockets of cooperation and intelligent, mostly selfless collaborations continue to grow. We call ourselves Progressives and work to preserve the rights and dignity of all individuals, even those outside of our group. How is this possible, and to what end?
5. Suppose we think of our intractable problems of selfishness and greed as artifacts of limited intelligence and imagination. In other words, consider the possibility that, as our population grows and becomes denser, and as we continue to develop and evolve our technology, we begin to take seriously the idea of a groupmind, a species intelligence. And that, as that species-mind evolves, its sense of self-preservation and welfare begins to take hold and even to dominate our cultural identity.
6. Suppose more and more individual minds begin to express that higher mind, that intelligence that represents the welfare of the entire species. This is not to suggest that self-interest evaporates; quite the opposite. “Self” begins to refer both to individuals and to the whole of humanity, at the same time. What is good for the whole is what is good for me. Until the whole of humanity is released from its chains, I remain chained.
7. As this evolves, as individual minds begin to merge identity with species mind, “intelligence” becomes something much larger and more comprehensive. Whatever we call it, it begins to take precedence over the much smaller, selfish minds of individuals. In other words, we, as individuals, begin to make much smarter choices. As well as feeding ourselves and, more importantly, feeding our children, our highest priority is to feed the highest part of ourselves — the human race.
8. One technology making this transformation possible is broader, deeper and faster communications between individuals. The Internet, and whatever its next evolution might be, is perhaps the key technology feeding and encouraging this evolution to a higher level of consciousness among humans.
9. We can already feel the effects of this evolutionary movement, at least in primitive forms, as we scan thoughts and opinions of the many on every topic imaginable, daily. We complain about the effects of this massive groupthink, about how topics pop up and spread instantly via media like Twitter and Facebook, for example, and how silly and trivial the chatter seems to be. Yet we also see how people find each other, identify their shared concerns and yearnings, and talk about them endlessly. And sometimes all this noise coalesces into something like a movement, into a group choice and group action like the Occupy Movement and the sudden appearance of thousands in the squares of major cities chanting their needs as loudly and physically as possible. And a regime collapses and is replaced; an administration is toppled; the greed and selfishness of corporations are exposed and corporate-owned media is trumped as the real needs of the many are expressed by citizen journalism.
10. Communication and mass consensus. Group mind. Gradually the intelligence of humanity grows; gradually options and choices are identified and discussed and tested and acted upon. Gradually the species begins to adopt solutions to problems that threaten it, that hold it back, that diminish the quality of life of its fundamental components: individuals.

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