🚀 go-pugleaf

 Firstly, a brief summary of the history of mankind... 

Primates roamed around forests curiously staring at dead animals and
occasionally taking up objects as tools in an instinctive bid to stay
alive. They also talked to each other, but this was limited to the
expression of basic emotions and implied commands. Over the
generations, the more articulate and comprehending of the hairy
grunters found they had better chances of survival. They could attain
a better understanding about how to find food and compete against
rivals. These, the most intellectual creatures on earth of the time,
thus found they could get more sex and with more appealing partners. 

It's not quite known whether they had enough wisdom to realise the
most basic fact of life. Perhaps even less sophisticated animals
worked it out. There's nothing really to say that any animal with a
decent memory couldn't develop the whole theory of evolution in his
head. 


But the relevance of this is limited. The effect is the same. The more
sex you have and the more partners you have, the greater the chance
you'll have offspring. The smarter apes had more children and could
take better care of them. This was at the cost of the more
intellectually challenged ones. 

At some point in the flow of life, after millions of years of
competition, we came to be humans - still animals, but set apart from
every other animal in the world in the ability to communicate complex
ideas and manipulate our environment collectively as a result. It has
made us a successful species in terms of population for our body size
and we get a fair rating in terms of how long we've been around. But
there's little cause for complacency there - we are unique in our
absolutely huge impact on the world. Singularly, with the right
tool, we can overpower any animal. Collectively, we can destroy and,
less impressively, reshape any ecosystem. With the destructive
technology we have today, one could almost say mankind is more
powerful than life itself. 

This is why this essay focuses on mankind in my view of the world.
It's not just that I'm biased towards a human perspective, being one
myself. But to be honest, I think we're a pretty interesting species
because the motives for our actions are very complicated. While
our complex thoughts have lead to many innovations that have helped us
dominate our environment, they've also made us quite confused. We're
driven by reasoning derived from personal knowledge and experience,
and less by the instinct that gets our pets through the day. These
leaves us with very distinctive and varying perceptions of the world.
Adolf Hitler saw life as a quest for power to cleanse the world of
types of people he came to view as inferior. Michael Jackson would see
his existence more as a quest for affection, insodoing reaching out
for humanist qualities in young people through the capitalist system.
The Pope sees his role as closest man in the world to his god, and
thus a moral authority on the people of the church he leads. If you
could ask their dogs what their life is about, they'd suggest little
more than eating, sleeping and finding a bitch. 

The history of mankind differs from the history of animals, because
we've transcended their basic survival purpose to seek meaning and
follow those they perceive represent their interests. It's a catalogue
of culture - a perpetual conflict and complement of ideas, reinforced
by symbols, shaped by technology, influenced by the strong and
privileged. 

Culture is relative. In the days of the tribe, it was defined by the
small group you were born into. With the dawn of agriculture and
civilisation, it became geographically dependant. People tended to
stay put - the places of worship, local authority and people
prescribed your view of the world. With the era of travel and
discovery of other civilisations, it was the religion that you carried
with you that set you apart from your neighbours. Big whirrey
machines got people on the move again, only that time they were
setting themselves up for a national economy. 

The most important cultural influence today, however, is the rise of
the media. For the first time, individual humans can talk directly to
millions. No more Chinese Whispers from authority. And fiction too -
stories relying on oral traditions or a literate elite were taken and
published, censored, stylised and broadcasted to the whole world.
Humans, set apart from the differences forged by their individually
informed interpretations of reality, were given the same
entertainment, news and views. And there was a single, common truth.
If you took a picture of something, it must have happened. People who
used the media to cultivate respect among millions who have never even
met them, could be unquestioningly believed. 

People started to all think along the same lines. We were not becoming
animals again as such, but rather, entire populations collectively
started to a resemble a single animal. Minds, once individual entities
with a local group of like thinkers, were now linked to every other,
as are neurons in our own brain. Where previously there were vastly
different interpretations of the past, the standardisation of culture
and enforcement of a common truth gave countries a common consistent
memory, essential for the function of the single brain. 

Where you lived and what your parents believed in was no longer as
important as what decade you were living in. Just like a single brain,
the collective brain of the 20th century had phases - fashionable
points of view and things to wear. Our ancestors weren't as fussed
as our parents are about naming decades to account for their sheepish
behaviour. 

The Earth may have come to be inhabited by a single super-organism - a
united network of the prevailing intelligent life form - with every
single other animal no more important than a bacterium in the stomach.
There would be no more conflict between people who make up the parts
of the system, just alternative neural routes to solve problems. Every
brain, representing a single cell in the collective brain, would have
a small productive role for the good of the survival of the greater
organism. 

There was going to be a global government embodying the ideology of
the prevailing side of the cold war. A golden era for mankind -
stability, uniformity, technocracy. But this didn't happen. On the
contrary. And I for one am quite grateful for this. Ask my
brain collectively if it's happy and it will probably give a cautious
yes. Ask one of the cells in the brain if it's having a good time and
it'll manage at best "I'm satisfied that I do my job". 

The media didn't just arise and everyone hooked up. It continued to
grow, such that more and more of it could be made for smaller groups
of people. Soon enough, if we didn't like the way Bert Newton combed
his hair, we could press a knob and he'd turn into James Dibble. If we
didn't like his teeth, there was always Uncle Fester. If he looked a
little unhuman, press a button and on came the host of Mulligrubs. 

And up in those evil places of marching civilians and way too much
vodka, the more blindingly obvious brand of propaganda seemed
inconsistant with the perfect images beamed from across the sea - a
tin of gel for every man, an oven for every woman. 

But we can't manage such crystal images anymore. The 90's will not be
remembered for its decisive fashions or collective aspirations. In
fact, in the naughties, or whatever we decide to call the next decade,
I don't think we'll see much substance in that sort of thing anymore.
We're going back to the days where greatly varying perspectives on the
world live side by side. This quite odd era of certainty is coming to
an end. You won't be able to take a picture anymore and have it
represent the truth - you could have got in with Paintbrush and
grafted that Hitler moustache onto Sheryl Kernot. There are no great
respected authority figures anymore, now that for every crafted media
image, there's an opposing one that brings them down with the rest of
us. 

In this new era, the main determinant of culture will not be where you
live, what your parents believed in or what the fashion is, you get to
actually choose your culture. Fashion gurus will still jump up and
down and announce flares, miniskirts, knicker bockers, undercuts,
overalls and flanelette shirts are back. They're missing the point.
Everything's back. The minds of the world are getting so much ability
to share ideas with whoever and so much choice of entertainment and
information, that global culture will have an unlimited appetite. Keep
in mind here, that with the encroachment of computers and robots
into more and more of what we humans used to do, there won't be much
left to do except entertain and inform each other. 

Everyone will have something like the Internet in the future. It has
enormous potential for finding people like yourself. Why hang around
your next door neighbour who's a pig farming Star Trek goth, when you
can talk to a bloke in Penrith who's a communist astrological raver,
just like yourself? More than ever before, individuals will be
responsible for finding their own source of meaning and satisfaction
in life. 


(c) Luke Metcalfe

http://www.zip.com.au/~metcalfe