Returning To Our Roots

SUPPOSE you are a member of an advanced species, and your assignment is to keep an eye on planet earth, and monitor the progress of its most promising species, homo sapien sapiens. You return every, oh, say, ten thousand years, just to have a quick look see. Each time you see essentially the same thing. Small groups of perpetually migrating semi-hairy primates, chasing and fighting over food. Dozens of times, at ten thousand year intervals, you see this. Then, on, say, your one hundreth visit, you are intercepted by a squadron of jet fighters, which, though still primitive, approach your spacecraft, cautiously. Suddenly, a considerable change has occurred. A precipitous lurch forward has taken place since your last visit. We human beings are not at all well suited to the world we have created. We are programmed to live in small, roving, hunter gatherer groups, paleolithic its called, using spears and knives hewn of stone. We are not hard wired to live in immobile cities, with thousands, or millions of others living nearby. Nor are we made to establish large nation states, and such accoutrements as cars, capitalism, and global economic systems. You notice how we Americans, for instance, feel an urge to roam, to move around. We are essentially primitive primates living far beyond our means, way above our heads. Thus, our current discontent. All that we have now, all that we are now, is entirely new, a product of a few hundred years of high speed cultural evolution. The sixteenth century had more in common with human culture as it was ten thousand years ago than with the twenty first century. And it would appear that we are longing to return to our origins, replacing globalism with a new nationalistic fervor, replacing national loyalty with identity politics, returning to our tribal origins, trying to recapture lost contentment. And if we do not find a way to alter or transcend fundamental human nature, the world as we know it will cease to exist. and we might not even miss it.