When you teach history for enough years, it begins to dawn on you that human life has developed in ways that seem to defy any logical analysis. It also occurs to you that humanity’s life on this planet today is so complex and filled with interrelated variables that no one can really foresee in any detail what might happen in the future, despite the tiresome cliché that humans “learn” from history. (From where I stand, it seems that they have learned very, very little from it.) Anyone who sees a plan of some sort in all of this is more perceptive than I, because I can’t, for the life of me, discern one.
If we were to take the most intellectually gifted human being in the world of 10,000 years ago and show him or her something of the nature of human life today, I’m pretty sure that person would have virtually no comprehension of it, and would be completely at a loss to explain how it got that way. If that strikes you as too extreme of a case, let’s take a person from the year 1000 CE and carry out the same exercise. Looking at the aftermath of ten centuries of relentless change would leave that person bewildered and shaken. If the person were European, there would be, of course, some institutions he or she might recognize—the Roman Catholic Church, for example—but even that would be fantastically different from what it was a thousand years ago. The majority of its adherents now live in places the person from 1000 CE didn’t even know existed. If the most intelligent person in the world of 1000 CE were African, he or she would be shocked at the vast upheavals that ten centuries of change inflicted on Africa (as well as the true immensity of the continent’s landmass). If he or she were Chinese or Indian, all of the empires and dynasties that comprised the political reality of their worlds would be gone. If the person were a pre-Columbian Native American, the virtual eradication of the multitudinous native cultures of the Americas would probably seem nothing less than an utter catastrophe. And this genius from a millennium ago would, I am pretty sure, be totally at a loss to explain what had happened to produce the world of the 21st century.
Even the most brilliant individual from the world of 1900 would have difficulty giving a coherent explanation of how the world of today came to be the way that it is. If he or she had not seen it or studied it themselves, it is unlikely that they would grasp the enormity of the political, scientific, technological, and social changes that have swept across this planet since the last year of the nineteenth century. But we shouldn’t feel a sense of superiority over our hypothetical observers from 10,000, 1,000, or a little over 100 years ago—we’re in exactly the same situation in regard to the future as the people of the past would be in relation to us. Despite our confident assertions and computer-based prediction models, we haven’t any more of a clue about what the world will really be like in 100 years than our observer from 1900. And any attempt to predict the nature of the world 1,000 or 10,000 years hence would be laughable, or simply an example of science fiction.
Moreover—and in a more humbling way—we still aren’t sure ourselves of how the past produced the world we have now. In fact, it is my opinion that the world is now so vastly complex that no person, however well educated, keenly informed, and gifted with fluid intelligence, really understands more than a small part of it in detail. There are simply too many things happening on any given day, too many chains of consequence intersecting each other at any given moment, for anyone to have more than a broad framework of knowledge of this bewildering entity called human life.
In a darker sense, additionally, we need to ask ourselves, “has human life been a good experience for most people throughout our journey from 2.5 million years ago to the present?” I think you can guess what my answer would be. Humans have survived on this planet with tremendous difficulty. Most of them have worked or still work like pack animals every day. Most of their lives have been scarred, at least part of the time, by material deprivation, disease, physical suffering, fear, and uncertainty.
I don’t want to exaggerate the hardships humans have experienced in their centuries on this tiny speck of a planet. Most lives have their share of laughter, their times of celebration, their everyday joys and satisfactions. There has been good food, impassioned lovemaking, the joys of music, and the comforts of familiar life. Nonetheless, the lot of humanity has been suffering, to an appalling degree. What is especially discouraging is the knowledge that most people on the earth seemed to have been resigned to it, seeing their burdens and ordeals as simply “the way things are”. Of course, such an attitude may have been necessary in the face of conditions that could not be changed, but it is hardly less depressing for that fact.
And think, for a moment, of the more dramatic evils and ills that have plagued us. I used to teach the history of warfare. It was a sobering exercise. War has been depressingly common in the history of Homo sapiens. Despite human attempts to glamorize it or glorify it, it has always been what it is today—gruesome, horrible, stupid, and destructive of both body and mind. There have been perhaps 200 years in the last 5,000 when there has been no major war raging somewhere on this planet, a damning indictment of human failure. These wars have frequently involved the mass killing of whole civilian populations, and our ability to slaughter non-combatants has risen to the point where we now, as a species, possess the means to exterminate ourselves completely. Mass killing, in fact, is arguably the greatest of all human skills.
Other evils have been shockingly common. Uncounted humans have been swallowed up in the grim world of slavery, a world that still exists today, despite all international efforts aimed at its abolition. Torture, both physical and mental, is still widely practiced, and governments are still good at rationalizing it. (In fact, I strongly recommend that people who are sensitive and easily scarred by what they read avoid the systematic study of the history of torture. I often wish I didn’t know what I do about it; knowing something of these practices effectively destroyed my faith in humanity some time ago.)
The way many our of species’ children have been treated is further cause for a sense of shame and outrage in any decent person. Infanticide has a long and terrible history. Small children have been used for brutally heavy labor throughout human existence. Children have been physically and mentally abused, sexually assaulted, neglected and abandoned so frequently in the story of our species that most of us turn away from thinking about it, lest we fall into utter despair. Just as sadly, abuse does not cease after childhood. Interpersonal violence of all kinds has marked human life, as individuals have shown themselves capable of the most terrible cruelty imaginable. Women have often been treated as property and subjected to the most degrading and humiliating treatment. And there are the thousands of small, petty injuries and insults people heap upon each other. It all adds up to a pretty dark picture.
At this juncture, you are probably tempted to interject that humans have frequently, very frequently, acted in ways the exact opposite of those I have just mentioned. You could argue—and you would be right—that humans have shown each other countless acts of love, kindness, mercy, considerateness, compassion, and empathy. You could point to innumerable examples of self-sacrifice, bravery in the face of unspeakable evil, and a thousand forms of everyday heroism. You could point to the good humor in the face of the world so many have shown. There is the whole vast story of family love and friendship, and the enduring strength of relationships whose rewards cannot be measured. The catalogue of human decency would overflow with examples. And there is the glorious crown of human creativity in the arts to be considered, as well. All of this needs to be remembered. (And perhaps we need to remind ourselves of something we all know--that most of life for most people has been ordinary, uneventful, unremarkable, routine, and undramatic.)
Further, there has been some progress. Children, on the whole, are somewhat better off now than they have ever been, and they are certainly more widely educated than ever. Women have improved their status in many parts of the world and have now reached social equality in some areas. Slavery has been somewhat reduced in scope (but the number of enslaved humans on this planet remains shocking); the more gruesome forms of torture have been made less common; human rights are more widely respected now than at any time in history. Health care has made huge strides, material wealth has spread, and the majority of humanity is reasonably well fed, although terrible numbers still die of malnutrition and diseases related to it. And yet, this progress has been achieved only by the most excruciating and exhausting effort. The effort to make life minimally decent for the people of the world has been filled with starts and stops, setbacks, reversals, and needless complications. We may well ask ourselves: Why did it take so long to improve things? Why was it so hard for us to get to where we are? And why is it possible that all of it may yet be destroyed?
Human life has been characterized by countless instances of bad judgment, faulty reasoning, incompetence, misinterpreted information, misunderstandings, faulty communications, and plain old garden-variety stupidity. Humans have sold themselves to every sort of swindle, grasping at wildly illogical hopes. They have participated in pogroms, massacres, lynchings, and other horrors based solely on factors such as the victim’s appearance or religious affiliation. They have fervently embraced ludicrous superstitions and beliefs so absurd one would have thought no one capable of believing them. They have started terrible fights over simple misunderstandings, broken off personal relationships of great emotional value over trivialities, lost contact with family members over old grudges, and generally quite often acted to ruin every chance at personal happiness that came their way. They have destroyed their own homes, denuded landscapes, fouled bodies of water, made the air stink with choking pollutants, killed off animals on which they relied, and often made their environments disaster areas. They have misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted, misrembered, and wrongly estimated virtually everything imaginable. In some ways, it’s a kind of miracle we’re still here, and if we had possessed nuclear weapons during some of the more savage eras of human history, I doubt that we would be.
Why has it been so hard for us to figure out why we have had so much difficulty in this world?
Well, as you can imagine, I have some ideas on that, but I'll enlarge on those later.