thoughtful"The ultimate sense of security will be when we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race. Our primary allegiance is to the human race and not to one particular color or border."
-Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (b. 1942)
I would qualify this, depending on how you define "security"... if you mean "safety from depredations by other humans", I think that if we act from this recognition- to me, the primary truth behind true compassion- we can achieve this.
But we also must recognize that humanity is an inseparable part of the ecosystem; we are part of it, not better or worse than Nature. Our security as a species- our long-term survival and welfare- is tied to our ecosystem, and we will not achieve that security unless we act from that recognition.
And the two forms of security are inextricably linked. Ecological troubles create unrest, humanitarian and economic disasters, and other factors that drive conflict.
I tend to think of humans as once being a part of nature but due to some quirk of evolution we ended up apart from it much in the same way a mutated cell that reproduces out of control to the detriment of the body at large, by draining resources and causing damage to healthy tissue eventually causing the death of the body. I see humans as a cancerous infection of the living planet. Once we were just another type of cell in the "body" that comprises the ecosystem. Now due to a mutation that caused us to develop the ability to alter our environment to suit our selves we spread with out plan or reason consuming all in our sight killing and destroying all in our path. Just like a cancer humanity has infected the world spreading across it's surface disrupting and destroying ecosystems, causing countless extinctions of plants and animals as we crush them out to make more room for our eternally growing population. All the while we are stripping the planet of its inherent resources and dumping the toxic waste byproducts of our expansion back into the environment we stole them from originally spreading poison in our wake killing the every environment we need to live. Just like cancer. And just like cancer we will continue to use up the resources of the planet until it dies and takes us with it. Unless of course the universe has the misfortune of the human race developing the ability to spread to other planets to exhaust them and move on.
I know this is a bitter, cynical, misanthropic view of the situation but having seen how we bring disfigurement and death to everything touch it's hard to see us in any other terms. Humans are greedy, selfish, shortsighted beings and it will be our undoing eventually. I think the best scenario for the planet at this point is that we somehow manage to wipe each other out before we can totally destroy the environment beyond it's ability to recover.
Re: Please forgive my rampant misanthropy
Re: Please forgive my rampant misanthropy
I think, like many explanations of what is essentially the "problem of evil", that this view of humanity is oddly comforting- because it absolves us of the responsibility to try to make things, to become better and to behave better.
ETA: To quote Shriekback, I choose "the clean difficult way over the dubious easy option". I choose hope over despair, and may I always do so.
Edited at 2010-05-06 05:52 pm (UTC)