I've seen more than I'd like of misanthropic attitudes on all sides of politics - people who see humanity not as a beautiful thing whose best qualities have to be nurtured, but as a vicious beast that needs to be brutally controlled and punished for its sins. Aside from being simply false, ugly, and personally repugnant to me, such puritanical beliefs benefit no one but the people who would appoint themselves the censors of civilization. Religion and authoritarianism are the only beneficiaries of obsession with Humanity The Sinful, and I've had enough of it. There is too much beauty in us, too much vision and love to be dismissed, and the failure to see that is the root of all atrocity and squandered opportunity. Unless you love humanity, you are not and cannot be a progressive.
In every peaceful and honest mind is the deep knowledge of humanity's ultimate connection to nature - that we are not, as lazy and bigoted minds would like to believe, some kind of pestilence or vermin, but the world reaching out to know itself and the cosmos; the life of this planet accelerating toward unity and expansion into the unknown. For all the suffering beyond suffering before our species even existed, and the endless subconscious dream of terror and want that was and is life without self-awareness, we are the answer and the vanguard - we are the inheritors of past sacrifices, and owe it to every single microbe and rat that has ever been to admit our significance and potential.
If you could go back in time and negate the suffering of ancestors at the price that people would never learn anything new, would you? If you personally could live forever, never changing or facing pain, would you? If you could magically produce a pain-free existence for all living things, but know clearly what it is you are sacrificing in the balance, would you? Conversely, what suffering could you not endure, if you could see an infinite future of life and consciousness springing from it? If you could see the generations receding into an unbounded horizon, branching outward in awesome profusion, all sprung from a simple act of imagination or altruism? We are evolution gone exponential - the fulcrum that moves the world, and the mind that chooses where to move it.
So, I present this list and photo diary of the top 10 reasons I personally love humanity. They are not the only laudable qualities or products of our species, and some of them can have terrible consequences when taken in perverse directions by diseased minds, but evolution (like justice) occurs both in long arcs and punctuated equilibria.
- Memory
Without memory, there is no awareness - only stimulus and response. All joys and discoveries are abortions limited to a single moment, and can benefit the future only insofar as it allows an individual to procreate. The advent of symbolic language and writing allowed humanity to remember more robustly, reliably, and over longer time periods than mere individual memory and oral tradition could permit. Even lies were beneficial, because people would repeat mistakes until someone chose to try something else and succeeded beyond their contemporaries, and that success could be recorded for posterity.
To know the past of our species is to truly unite it across time, because we can not only make the sacrifices of our ancestors meaningful by not repeating their mistakes, but honor their successes by not sociologically or politically reinventing the wheel and paying twice for the same progress. This is why all cognizant, responsible individuals and societies learn and respect history, while remaining unsentimental. In most cases, the past was neither Golden Age nor Dark Age - these are rare conditions indeed, and regionally localized. But all times carry their dreams and nightmares, lessons and possibilities, and the memory of their existence allows not only a very long-term education, but a personal connection with people and civilizations long dead. At very least, one can say, and be heard by distant generations, "I was here."
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- Art & Sculpture
In the artist's hand and sculptor's chisel, we can get a glimpse of the soul of an ancient people, a period in the life of an existing one, or the mind of a profound individual. It can show in language deeper than words what was seen and how it was seen, what it meant to the artists and the civilizations that gave them birth, and provide a kind of soundless music to ages and societies that have long since gone silent. True art is an act of both discovery and creation, and cannot occur without love and openness, whatever the character of the artist in their daily life.
A given work will not speak to all who view it, but everyone has their art, and all true art has its audience. There may be a lot of sad nonsense out there pretending to be art for social or financial reasons, but ultimately art criticism is not the point - what speaks to you is art, and whatever doesn't is simply immaterial to the subject.
Every civilization that has ever been has contributed something beautiful and unique to art, although sadly most of it has not survived the ages. But there is a lesson in the incredible diversity of the art we inherit and see all around us - that there is no limit to the diversity of beauty, and that we should await the future with anticipation for what new additions it will contribute.
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- Music
Life is change, and so is music - that which lies between the notes rather than the notes themselves. Soaring, wheeling, bursting, diverging and reconverging: An ecosystem of sound and experience that both reflects and alters a more fundamental symphony than mere vibrations in air. The best and most gifted composers and musicians tap into something profound that speaks to the essence of humanity, if not something even deeper. To hear them is to know things that do not belong in words or static images, but exist in the flow from one moment to the next, as if they represented all the glory and epiphany of time itself.
There is more of God, if you believe in any (I don't), in thirty seconds of the Ode to Joy than in the entire compiled Holy books of every religion that has ever been or ever will be - more than all the sermons, prayers, and pious contemplation across all the ages of history put together. All such chicanery, navel-gazing, and irrelevant wordplay is silent beside the sonic revelation of a deaf German.
And yet even in smashing past the vault of heaven, humanity kept moving, experimenting and evolving, striking new chords in ourselves and our musical instruments as we changed the world around us. We can no more imagine where we will go next than Herr Beethoven could have imagined where we have already been since his death.
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- Architecture & Engineering
It takes a certain temperament to fully appreciate great feats of architecture and engineering - a sort of animist outlook that is every bit as capable of relating to inanimate objects and static forms as things that move and breathe. In truth, everything is alive after a fashion: Everything moves, whether quickly or slowly, and reflects things greater than itself, so if there is nothing artificial you find inspiring, then you are not fully aware of yourself or your environment. Humanity builds great things in the shapes of ideas it has difficulty articulating in words, and these things speak to generations long after their builders and originating motives are little more than fiction piled on fiction.
You can always find excuses to hate anything that challenges you to dream and aspire, if that's your inclination - the creator was a bad person with evil motives; it was put to destructive ends at some point; it was funded or built through immoral means; the resources used in its making might have gone to more immediate humanitarian needs, etc. etc. But I say that a society that doesn't aspire does not serve its people, and that desolate puritanism and pious resentment of creativity are poor substitutes for compassion.
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- Women
Yep.