Are We Evolving?

From the Age of Enlightenment, secular humanism arrived basically rejecting the belief that a relationship with the divine is necessary to bring out the best in human beings. Once we achieve a certain level of prosperity -- education, adequate supply of material goods to meet our needs, good health etc. -- the more our humanity will emerge and cruelty and oppression, something that will always exist, will fade into the background. However, if the last century is an example of how far we've come, as the 20th Century manifested an unprecedented scale of evil juxtaposing what could be referred to as the height of civilization, it appears the secular humanists could be wrong and that we have not evolved.

Currently, we have the technical and material capability to see that everyone's most basic needs are met, yet two billion people live on a diet of rice alone. Destruction and violence are widespread all across the globe, and the more technologically proficient and prosperous we become, the more our humanity seems to hibernate.

Intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified un-freedom. Throughout the world of industrial civilization, the domination of man by man is growing in scope and efficiency. Nor does this trend appear as an incidental, transitory regression on the road to progress. Concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs are no “relapse into barbarism,” but the unrepressed implementation of the achievements of modern science, technology, and domination. And the most effective subjugation and destruction of man by man takes place at the height of civilization, when the material and intellectual attainments of mankind seem to allow the creation of a truly free world. -- Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 1955

Could it be that with prosperity comes complacency? The better off we are the more smugly conventional we get. We assume a morality that doesn't exist and that our own existence is proof of that "morality". Presuming we are moral just because we are is one of the reasons so much evil exists in a world of plenty, imho.

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Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality.

Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality is an excellent documentary introducing the work of cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, author of Pulitzer winning book, Denial of Death.

"The essence of normalcy is the refusal of reality." -- Ernest Becker

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Gift of Uncertainity

I would never characterize incertitude as a gift as I like to know the when, why, and how of everything. The past couple of years have felt as if I'm adrift on a sea of uncertainty and everything I've "known" and depended on to be true is in question. The handrails - tradition, custom, ways of behaving, religion - which have served to define who I am and which I've clung to my whole life are gone, leaving me nothing to base my decisions on, nothing to develop a course of action with and worst of all leaving me with no way to predict an outcome, in other words, completely disempowered...hardly what I would call a gift.

I feel like someone who has been let out of prison, squinting in the bright sunlight, after spending decades behind bars, overwhelmed at the challenges before me, to create a new life for myself, only given a lump of clay, without any tools to mold this blob.

Then it occurred to me, I'm free. Those handrails I clung too were nothing more than prison bars, preventing me from living life the way I was meant to live it, as myself.

Human beings are the only living organisms able to break free from instinct and chart their own course, yet most of us choose to be anchored in one spot, restrained from exploring life. It's safe, secure, dependable and most of all, it make us feel like we are in "control" when clearly we are not as it's impossible. Our surroundings can reign over us at anytime and show us who is really in charge in a split second. In fact, anchored in one place, clinging to a guardrail makes one ten times more vulnerable to the arbitrary forces of our environment; we've sacrificed our freedom to become a sitting duck, unable to move when the shit hits the fan.

America has become too complacent. We've lost the innovative, inventive, creative risk-taking spirit that defined this country at one time. Progress and creativity demand we take risks and confront uncertainty head on.

As scary as it is and it can be terrifying, uncertainty is a gift as it presents an opportunity to break free from our cultural straight jacket or "character armor" as Ernest Becker calls it whether it be as an individual or a nation.

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