“Do you think humanity is doomed?” – Kate, Singapore
“Yes.” – Nick Cave, Melbourne[i]
There are days I agree with Mr. Cave. He’s an astute observer of the human species, whose closest primate relatives are the sociopaths known as chimpanzees. According to ethnobiologist Melvin Konner, if chimpanzees had invented hand grenades there wouldn’t be any more chimps. Unfortunately, being the whiz kids among planetary lifeforms, humans did invent bombs you can throw, and nuclear weapons shot out of cannons, and city annihilators perched atop missiles. Since human and chimp DNA is 96% identical, Mr. Cave doesn’t have much faith in that all-important 4%.
Freud believed every human was neurotic, and their neuroses were expressed in the cultures they formed. Nothing better explains America. Since neuroses were rooted in an unresolvable conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, Freud wasn’t hopeful. He questioned whether our psychological maturation would keep pace with technological innovation, meaning technology becomes an extension of our neuroses (think hand grenades and city annihilators.) Our need to find final peace leads to oblivion.
The Book of Revelation envisions doom, too. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will bring war, famine, and death. The fourth horseman represents Christ, who is returning to kick ass and take names. No more Mister Nice Guy; God has had enough. Many Christians believe they will be miraculously removed before the global devastation event, in a concept called “the rapture,” which is why they tend not to care if the world blows up. It’s all part of God’s plan and they’ll get to watch.
Obviously, Mr. Cave isn’t alone in his pessimism.
We are all certainly doomed individually, meaning that we all will die. Those same whiz-kids are trying to fix the problem of death, while simultaneously inventing methods to cause lots of it, but, at this point, death still occurs to everyone. However, an individual death doesn’t threaten the existence of humanity, which is what the prophets of doom envision. Nick Cave, Freud, and the Book of Revelation believe the species is doomed and we’ll go the way of passenger pigeons.
To believe otherwise takes a great deal of faith these days. It’s not hard to imagine an unstable ruler setting off a WMD conflagration that takes down the Homo genus.
On the other hand, there are places where we find more optimistic outlooks. Taoism believes that creation possesses a flow or current that reflects the attributes of simplicity, unobtrusiveness, humility, and compassion. Over time, nothing can resist the flow and anything not of Tao is swept away; humility and compassion are destined to rule the day. Admittedly, this is a long view, but that tends to be a common trait among optimists.
Martin Luther King was an optimist. “The arc of the moral universe is a long one,” he said, “but it bends toward justice.” To his credit, King admits taking the long view up front. But that is necessary when you view love as a kind of gravity at work in the cosmos. In the short term, it may not be of immediate help; King was assassinated. But someday the love train will arrive.
The Rev. King, of course, was greatly influenced by Jesus, who was another optimist. He claimed to inaugurate the Kingdom of God on earth, found wherever people loved each other just as he loved them. In his eyes, he planted the seed and the plant would grow, until it sheltered everyone in its branches. He made no promises about how long this growth would take, but evidence suggests that two thousand years later the tree is still a sapling competing for light.
There’s a mystical element to optimism or hope, in the same way that dark matter exerts gravitational force upon the universe, even though we don’t know what it is, and deduce its effects from its absence. Basically, to be an optimist, to believe that humanity is not doomed, requires faith in evidence of things unseen. But believing in unseen things is not a popular choice in modern cultures like our own. Being good Americans, we demand cash on the barrelhead.
As a person who attempts to follow Jesus, I equally attempt to be an optimist, with a significant failure rate at both attempts. But I do believe the energy of the universe is love, which is why it is life-giving. We may well engage in future mass slaughter, but it won’t be our demise. New branches will sprout on the sapling Jesus envisioned, having gained much more sunlight.
i]The Red Hand Files, Issue #282 https://www.theredhandfiles.com/
Image of fire by Ria Sopala from Pixabay
Image of Freud by Welcome to All ! ツ from Pixabay
Image of skull and bones by Marcelo Russo de Oliveira – Coffee Tips Welcome from Pixabay
Image of tree branch by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay
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