Many of the pieces of furniture that find their way into my path have stories about war attached to them. The main events are typically World War one and two. And yet equally, there are also stories about tragic times at other times, like stolen generations and times of severe economic depression. Many of the stories that are handed down by families talk of times that are difficult to imagine and perhaps even harder to comprehend. I wonder some days how lessons of the past can seem, in many respects, completely forgotten today and yet the behaviours and actions of many today have incredible similarities with the events leading up to these catastrophic events of the past. How could this be?
One day, if human civilisation ever wipes itself out, aliens or one of our successors will cast an eye on our ruined planet and ask themselves what ever happened to homo sapiens. Their answer might look a little like this. Homo sapiens tackled three grave problems:
Firstly, tribalism. Humans were always on the verge of developing violent hatreds of foreigners and manifested strong ongoing tendencies to slaughter strangers in vast numbers. They could never reliably see the humanity in all members of their own kind.
Secondly, homo sapiens were fatefully prone to short-term thinking. Even when confronted by data, it could only imagine the near-term future, a few years at best, viewing the long-term as a chimerical and unreal state. Its immediate impulses were left un-contained and worked to destroy its individual and collective future.
Lastly, homo sapiens had an especially keen fondness for wishful thinking. Though capable of immense intellectual achievement, its mind hated to reflect on itself, it couldn’t bear to submit its ideas to rational scrutiny, it preferred to act rather than think and daydream rather than plan. Having invented the scientific method, it preferred – in most cases – not to use it. It had a narcotic desire for distraction and fantasy. It didn’t want to know itself.
For many generations, these three flaws were more or less endured. Certain institutions were invented to attenuate them: the law, sound government, education, science. It worked, sort of. Humans kept wiping out swathes of their fellows, but they didn’t scupper the species as a whole. What caused the ultimate destruction was the increasing yet untrammelled power to seek to control. The control started out as managing to capture fire, contain the elements, and (seemingly) give homo sapiens a godlike power over the planet. There was (and is) a blindness to seeing our true being. As scientists have shown us, everything is relative.
If I look at a chair, its ‘being’ depends on where I look from. At a distance of 8 to 10 feet, it definitely looks and feels like a chair. At a distance of one eighth of an inch though, it looks much more like timber, varnish and glue components. It is still a chair, yet the perspective is very different. Similarly, from a distance of a mile or ten miles, the chair will take on the form of a house or even a neighbourhood. From a distance of ten thousand miles, it will take on the form of a country or even a planet. But yet, it is still a chair. It is all relative to where we observe the chair.
There was one thing that might have saved humanity: love, and three varieties of it in particular:
Firstly, the love of the stranger; the capacity to see the other as like oneself and worthy of the same mercy and charity.
Secondly, the love of the unborn: the concern for those who do not yet exist and whom one will never know but whose lives one is shaping in the selfish present.
Thirdly, the love of the truth: the strength to resist illusion and lies and square up to uncomfortable facts of all kinds. And the facts, can seem to evolve depending on our vantage point or perspective.
We don’t need to be aliens or from the future to understand all this. We can see the disaster scenario only too well right now. The fate of civilisation lies ultimately not in the law courts, at the ballot box or in the corridors of governments. It lies in our ability to master the most short-term, selfish and violent of our impulses active in the dense folds of organic matter between our ears; it lies in learning how fiercely to compensate for the flawed architecture of our minds. It means taking a few minutes to walk around a little chair and see it from many different perspectives… all of a sudden, the world will look completely different...
