By Rand I mean Ayn Rand, and by wrong I don't mean her philosophies. I'm only starting to read into those, so I couldn't give you a distinct argument either way. I'm just reading Anthem by her, about another futuristic society whose morals and ways of thinking have blown so far off course they are now in what can only be described as another stone age. With candles. The premise is that all humans have lost any sense of self and individuality, leaving them with the great "we". It's a world where one can't be alone, think alone or even have preferences... to anything.
I just don't buy it.
There are so many stories about our future being less than our past and everyone in it being extremely ignorant. But how can this happen? So some natural disaster/man made catastrophe/unstoppable epidemic/alien attack leaves humanity with only a few survivors, say 1,000 people. They, in turn, have to create new generations, but knowing what they know then (and assuming these 1,000 people aren't ALL naiive, uneducated kids/toddlers), why would they simply forget it all? Clearly they have to know some basics of life including reproducing to survive, why is it that only supreme ignorance is passed down to their successors?? If these people survived whatever killed the other 5,999,999,000, they would still hold to their learned traits and morals.
The way I see it there is only a cycle. We were monkeys (sorry creationists), now we're humans, if we all die (assuming there are still monkeys), the monkeys will once again evolve or that will just be the end of us. If any of us survive, the monkeys won't have time to evolve before we just return to this state we're at currently. There is no complete 180 in human behavior and knowledge, just this again.
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5 comments:
I’ve never read that book or anything else by that author, so I’ll just respond to what you wrote:
That depends on what you see as "morals", in my opinion there is no true set of morals (sorry religious people), different times value different truth's etc... So to stay that we are in a one way direction is a bit off because who knows what we will value in the future. This is NOT to say that rape and murder is good, but to say that the reason it is bad is because our Western Philosophy shaped our minds that way. To your part about say 1000 survivors, the deciding factor may be who these people are. We will surely not all be college professors, doctors, teachers, and 1000 people is a very small population. In the scheme of things intelligence is only relevant on what time period you live in. Native instincts like that of reproduction and the need to find food and water will surely be passed on no matter how small the population, but it is very conceivable that we lose all sense of our scientific accomplishments because they are not necessary to our survival. Ignorance would definitely be passed down for reasons they were created; fairy tales are used to teach us morals and ideals BUT we are taught from an early age these are metaphorical and to walk away with the themes that can be applied to real life. While this is only one example of how say we could possibly morph our sense of logic, by just believing those tales to be true, in a more scientific area, SUPREME IGNORANCE is what we possess; do we know much of anything about our universe? No, while we have started amassing knowledge we know minimal. Our scope of knowledge is how to live and reproduce, the rest is just trivial.
Second of all I just want to add we were monkeys but we did not jump from monkey ---> human; there are intermediates from a build up of changes. Remember evolution does not have any "goal" it is just a build up of mutations. We can not definitively say we are the most intelligent life forms, because we do not know the extent of dolphin's intelligence and so forth. Monkeys do not get called up if human's falter at all. Ability to survive is by far the most prevalent factor in an organism’s evolution, if it involves a more developed brain then it may go in that direction but to assume that it is the only one is very naive. There is no limit that one intelligent life form may exist, while we are alive (human race) there are favorable chances that monkeys will not equal humans simply because of the millions of years it took for humans to actually “appear”(not in the creationist way). We can definitely digress though, if food became a very scarce commodity our thoughts would not be on the infinite universe or the sheer luck we had in being born, it would be on food. It is not as easy as picking up where we left off also; we would have a significant drop off in our life spans if we lost a large part of our population because like you or I, we know almost nothing about medicine. We take it, we feel better; but do we know where it came from, how it is processed? Of course not. To say that older civilizations had a goal of how they wanted to evolve, is ignorant; they slowly developed, realized technologies and created some (like a catapult or gunpowder) discovered cures like penicillin and other fungi; this was no easy feat and even if we did try to do it all again if would take thousands of years not a few generations.
Hey thanks for the comment, this was the intense philosophical debate I was looking for haha.
About the idea that in 1000 people, there could be zero MDs, zero physicists, zero historians, electricians etc... is conceivable, yes. I mean I'm sure there would be a bunch of educated individuals in that group, but even if there were none. That doesn't give reason for the sudden loss of culture. Yeah the loss of tons of scientific knowledge and history, but that isn't cause for all this. Maybe it's hard to compare when you haven't read the story to know the extent, but my reason says even the most closed off civilizations of late do not share the ideals that this futuristic society does.
Yes, I'm sure a LOT of intelligence will be lost. Say we even lose the knowledge of electricity. That doesn't mean we lose the recognition of it. Sure the future could be hundreds of years behind but the basics of knowledge and their sense of everything is still there. With that, eventually they would expand and rediscover/figure out all that we have today.
The next part, I think, is best said through Ishmael. We really are the end product. We aren't evolving right now, because of what we do to the environment. We're the first species to do that, which is why we're in control. I'm not saying this to sound pompous against dolphins haha it's just that the monkeys will eventually stop at us, or some other version of us. Maybe dolphins will evolve quicker, or whatever, and maybe the next "us" is amphibious. All you can be sure of is that that species will form the environment around them like we do now.
But sure, those species' could then have these morals like the futuristic society, but then they really aren't human. What I'm saying is, give me that extreme disaster that leaves 1000 alive, and I'll give you us again. Just lots of generations later.
Basically I see no way, without the extinction of the human race, that we could be so completely different in the future. Even then, the probability seems doubtful.
So yea I really have no idea what the book is about, but I am responding to just what you write, so I guess I’ve digressed to just the idea of our culture and the idea of where our species stands as well as where we would be if we had only 1000 people. I am talking about our culture not the one that is being faced in the book. The point I am trying to make is that I can see us moving in the direction of idiocracy. Ishmael may be faced with a warped culture through the lens of our society but we can definitely regress. It is very easy to see that in the medieval ages…
What’s so good about our culture? We are definitely (as Americans) not the most advanced and are surely losing our spot atop the greatest nation in the world. We have some fundamental ideals that are great such as free speech, etc. but we are very far behind. I have a very big gripe with the church and religion in general, which is a FUNDAMENTAL part of our culture. As you can see from any videos on youtube of protestors against gay marriage, stem cell research, abortions, and rants about why they would vote for Bush (4 years back) just because he believed in the same imaginary deity we are not enlightened people, only few are. Our morals are all malleable and totally trivial. Back in the 60’s being gay was accepted by the majority was as “wrong”, interracial marriage in the states was “wrong” and it was all considered moral and right. Our culture is constantly changing but the way I see it, as long as religion spills over into politics and is really just evident we can never reach our full potential. To your part about us reaching where we are today, it is true we have the framework down but we will not be able to maintain what we have until the time when we are able to use it again. Think about it, say a medicine to a disease we need is in Australia or some other continent, we would not have the capabilities to go and retrieve it, even if there was a pilot. Oil a rather important commodity would no longer be a viable source to use, for obvious reasons, and the list goes on. Think about cell phones and telephones, would we have the capabilities to keep either of them running? If there was a catastrophe such as nuclear war or something along those lines, any type of reference to how to build wires or connect them. Surely we would not go back to geocentric model and we would still know gravity exists but how would we prove it? After some generations removed from sophisticated civilization, it would become just as believable as the tall tales from the bible (which even though I disagree with the stories of the bible, most intelligent religious people will try to explain it as metaphorical).
It’s a very scary thought if we are done evolving in my opinion. Physically we most likely are not evolving (or at such a low rate that it goes unnoticed as said by Harvard Evolutionary Biologist Steven Pinker), but we are definatley not evolving mentally. By evloving I don’t mean becoming more humanitarian (as the direction we are going now) but we are changing and not static. What I’m trying to say is futuristic society is going to be different (I don’t even want to speculate), such as technologies and advancements, but morals and ideas are totally trivial. The only thing I can hope for is that we care more about humanity as a whole and not about have petty wars over imaginary friends, and people will be smart enough to pour there efforts into bettering our short stay here (that is being alive) instead of trying to stop people from being happy and live fulfilling lives because their religion states that it is wrong.
It sounds like we're agreeing just not seeing it. Yes, I know we would regress. A LOT, and for a while we wouldn't have a lot of the technology we do today. Chances are, we would get some of it back very quickly, as someone of the 1000 would probably know something like "how a light bulb works", thus making the transition from no electricity to electricity much quicker than our ancestors. But technology isn't the subject in question. Morality, in a way, is part of it. Sure, we could end up with those 1000 creating a new morality that says, i don't know, absolutism is the best form of government. But they would not forget there were other forms before it. They would not forget what government WAS. In the book they don't even know the idea of a light bulb.
Technology-wise, if we discovered and invented all these things once, we can do it again. But these inventions would come much quicker because the people know the technology EXISTED. They knew what a computer WAS. Instead of a short answer test, they're given a multiple choice one.
As for evolution, from the beginning there isn't a goal that the origin species can see, as if monkeys were like "one day we shall become humans!", you're right. But there is an invisible goal that cannot be seen until its reached. Why? Because we change our environment. We as humans aren't evolving anymore until we either find a more difficult environment to control or regress back far enough. Now that invisible goal doesn't always have to be humans. Say dolphins evolve to something with our brain equivalents, but walk on four legs. If it could change its environment instead of its environment changing it, it would be the "goal", or rather limit of evolution.
It doesn't HAVE to be the monkeys who evolve to that goal, it just has to be something. Unless of course the world fails to support life or new, other environment-changing species' find our planet and come inhabit it like we are now.
And even today we can't prove gravity. But if only 1000 people were left its plausible that one of them knows the theory. So in some aspects we could have no digression at all.
The rest of that is just opinion, and you know I agree on that. Unfortunately, probability speaking, even with an ultimate 'restart' of human morals, there will eventually be bad apples. Like John Tesh.
Im saying, we could revert back to the technology of today much quicker than our forefathers did because we have the basic building blocks, not necessarily in our hands but in our minds. Not all of them, but some.
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