Hello Robert, I don't know what makes liberals or conservatives, Democrats and Republicans? All I know is that I spent my life involved in studying both politics and social science. In my opinion the liberals have done a much better job of making the world a better place for the human species. E.g. even right now we see the Republicans openly trying to suppress the vote. And it was the conservatives that tried to hold on to segregation, and engage in racism, not the liberals. What makes one person one way and another person another way I have no idea.
But here is what I think about the human species in general. This was a response to a liberal friend who is very down on the human species for all the destruction of the environment and the suffering we cause and has always caused throughout human history. He felt it was a flaw in our DNA. The following is my response. | Humans are capable of being very great and humanistic. We are not flawed at the DNA level we are programmed over millions of years of evolution to adapt to the environment we lived in. That is not a flaw, that is just nature at work. Now our environment has changed, but luckily we seem to be able to build a new mind that is capable of understanding the importance of humanity, and saving the planet. Both of my children and all of their friends for instance are radical environmentalists.
I like to tell the story of when I went to the store with my younger daughter and we bought some tomatoes and she had forgotten her green bag, she refused to take another bag and made me carry out the tomatoes in my arms. Both of my kids and all of their friends are hard-core recyclers and do everything in their power to make the world a better place to live. And they know why they're doing it. When I told my daughters I went to the Bernie Caucus, in all sincerity she texted me back and said;" thank you for doing that".
Now we live in a new environment and we have to build a new mind to deal with that. But the one positive thing that is easy to see and easily confirmed by statistics is that as people get more educated they become more humane. Our entire species has become more humane very quickly as we learn and it is very easy to see.
We have no idea how far our humanity can go, but one can speculate that at the highest levels of intellectual development we will see much greater levels of humanity. What civilized person today even considers slavery, or sexism, or homophobia, or segregation? In just 150 years all of those issues have become settled ethics. Settled ethics the entire world officially agrees on. Those are great strides considering we only really started metamorphosing from operating with an animal brain, to operating with a modern existential brain since Darwin. More or less.
There's no telling how good we can be if we can just survive for a little longer. The human species is capable of being a very great animal, if it sheds its animal mind and replaces it with a modern capable existential mind.
I think, in fact it is our manifest destiny to try and get through this terrible time to a more enlightened species. I think it is how the universe works. I think every biological system in the universe that survives long enough to come to this point has the same difficulty getting through to the other side as we are facing. So it is a matter whether we can make it through to the other side where kindness and empathy replaced death and destruction. |
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