Historical Perspective (a Foundation)
To help us understand our world and its problems better, we need to understand ourselves better. To understand ourselves better, we need to understand how our mind and our society evolved. To understand how our mind and our society evolved we need to know where we came from and how we progressed to where we are today, which we can do by looking back at how our earliest ancestors lived, developed and progressed. From this historical perspective, we can see why we are the way we are and what we did right and what we did wrong so that it will be easier for us to come up with better solutions to our problems.
Our human ancestors (Homio Sapiens) evolved from earlier forms of Hominids. They evolved a unique combination of physical, phycological and sociological traits that allowed them to outcompete or at least to outlast the other forms of Hominids. These first humans lived as hunters and gatherers in small tribal groups where their survival depended on how well they all worked together and cooperated for their mutual benefit.
As with any plant or other animal, the various environmental pressures that our ancestors faced over millions of years resulted in numerous evolutionary tradeoffs which made them what they and we became. Basically, they needed to have a physique and mentality that had the ability to protect themselves and to obtain enough food to support themselves in their environment. If a certain trait had allowed them to protect themselves better or to obtain more than enough additional food to support that trait, then it would have been beneficial and would have increased their chances of survival. Otherwise, the trait may have made it harder for them to survive.
Given the prevailing weather and environment and given the plants and other animals that lived in competition and in support of them, our ancestors evolved to fill a unique ecological niche where they could protect themselves, obtain enough food to survive and reproduce. As they evolved, they needed to compete with many predators who were already faster and stronger than they were, so they needed some other advantage. In this case, they evolved bigger brains which helped them to learn to make and to use simple tools, to outthink and to subdue their prey and to outthink and to outcompete their competition.
However, having bigger brains requires a lot more energy. This meant they needed to obtain more food or to get more calories and nutrients from their food. Luckily, their bigger brains allowed them to do both. First, their bigger brains helped them find and obtain more food. Then, their bigger brains helped them to tame fire with which they were able to cook their food to unlock more of the food’s calories and nutrients. With fire, they were also able to keep warm, which helped them to save some of their energy.
Even with their bigger brains, there was still a limit on how much food they could obtain, which meant there was also a limit on how much energy and nutrients they could get to support a bigger brain. This meant there was a limit on how big their brains could get. Therefore, there were numerous tradeoffs that were needed when it came to how their brains evolved and how they ended up working.
Since their brains were limited in how big they could grow, their brains were never able to develop the capacity to handle all the incoming sensory information that they were exposed to. Therefore, there were times when they simply could not pay attention to nor to process all that was going on around them without being subjected to cognitive overload. Therefore, they ended up evolving brains that were more efficient and effective at recognizing and processing the more important sensory information.
For instance, our brains developed short cuts and strategies to handle what was more important, to ignore what wasn’t as important and to cooperate with others for our mutual benefit. These short cuts and strategies included some cognitive biases to help with our survival and decision making and some moral values and emotions to help with our bonding and cooperating with others.
It is important to note that all animals have limitations as to what they can pay attention to without being subjected to cognitive overload. The difference is that our brains are bigger, so we can pay attention to more things. However, our more complex social interactions require us to pay attention to many more things. Therefore, although we may have more capacity to pay attention, we also have more to pay attention to, so we may not be any better at paying attention to some things than other animals are.
With their bigger brains, our earliest human ancestors (homo sapiens) were able to make a few simple tools that they could use to help with hunting and gathering food, making clothes, building shelter and protecting themselves from the dangers that were all around them. However, even with all this they were not capable of easily surviving on their own. Therefore, they lived in small tribal groups. In these tribal groups, they all could work together and cooperate with one another for their mutual survival and benefit. In turn, they could then share in the fruits of their shared labor.
In these close-knit groups, our ancestors’ bigger brains and their cognitive biases, moral values and emotions helped them all to work together and to cooperate for their mutual benefit and survival. They would share the work of making tools, clothes and shelter, hunting and gathering food and protecting the group, and then shared in the fruits of their labor. Although our lives are much different than those of our earliest ancestors, our brains are still best adapted to work in one of these close-knit cooperative tribal groups.
In addition, our early human ancestors had little time to waste if they were to make tools, clothing and shelter, to hunt and to gather food, to protect themselves and their group, to raise their children, and to take care of the sick. The work that each of them did was essential to the survival of the group and essentially just as important as the work done by everyone else. This means that if any of this work did not get done, then it would endanger the survival of the whole group. Therefore, each member of the group was entitled to a similar share of the fruits of their shared labor.
In these tribal groups, there was no concept of being unemployed. There was always work to be done and everyone needed to do their fair share. Anyone who did not do a fair share of the work could endanger the survival of the whole group. Therefore, any freeloaders would have needed to shape up and do their fair share of the work or risk being expelled from the group and their chances of survival being greatly diminished.
Over time, our ancestors learned to make better tools, to grow crops and to domesticate animals for food. With a more reliable food supply, the tribal groups were able to grow into larger communities. With more to learn in these larger communities, one individual could no longer easily learn how to do everything. This led to the need for members of the community to specialize in the type of work they did. At first, each type of work was still essentially just as important to the community as any other type of work. However, the perceived value of different types of work soon changed.
As communities got larger, it also became harder to share the fruits of their labor, so communities developed the concept of commerce. Members of the community started to barter the fruits of their labor with those of others. However, some goods came to be valued more than other goods. That led to those who produced more valued goods becoming better off than those who produced less valued goods. That is, some people become wealthier and other people become poorer.
With the development of new tools, communities were able to continue to make improvements in agriculture and transportation and to grow larger and were then able to trade with other communities. With trade came new goods, more places from which to get some goods and an increased discrepancy in the value of those goods. Some people become even wealthier, and some people become even poorer.
In addition, some individuals could no longer get enough for what they produced to live on. This led to many of those individuals needing to switch to doing some other type of work or not being able to survive. Some of those individuals who became unemployed may have starved or may have switched to a life of crime. This led to the need for additional laws, taxes, police, courts, jails and more, and led to the need for larger governments to oversee all of this.
Our advancements in agriculture, medicine, construction, transportation, technology and many other areas have made life better for many of us, have solved some of the problems that our ancestors faced and have led to the creation of our modern civilization. Most of us now have a better and more abundant selection of food, longer and healthier lives, better homes, and far more choices of employment, entertainment and lifestyle choices than our ancestors ever dreamed of.
Unfortunately, our advances have often come with a high price tag. We only need to study human history to see that our modern civilization is far more complex than any past civilization, has more human suffering due to our wealth and resource disparities, and has far more difficult problems than our ancestors may have been able to imagine. In addition, due to our overpopulation and our dependence on nonrenewable energy, our better lifestyles are not sustainable.
To help support our modern technological lifestyles, we now have more complex laws, rules, regulations, licensing requirements, and tax codes than at any other time in human history. In addition, there are more choices that need to be made about where and how to live, and more things that need to be learned to prosper or even to survive in our modern society.
Technology is becoming prevalent in almost every aspect of our lives. In some cases, it has taken over mundane tasks to make our lives easier, but in other cases we have been overwhelmed with the complexity of so many new requirements and choices that we cannot possibly learn nor understand them all. In addition, we are consuming our natural resources and destroying our environment at a rate that is unprecedented, and which could lead to the collapse of the world’s biodiversity and our civilization.
As time goes by, we seem to be solving some of our problems and to be reducing the impact of others, but many other problems are persisting and even getting worse, and we are creating new problems for ourselves all the time. In fact, some of the actions that we are currently taking to try to solve our problems are in turn adding more complexity to our lives and are causing or will cause even more problems.
For instance, with longer lives, more individuals are experiencing more illnesses related to old age and more overcrowding. With more technology, there is more demand for our limited energy supplies and other natural resources, more pollution and destruction of our environment, and increased ways in which we can become victims of crime. With better transportation and communication, and larger populations, there has been more globalization, which has led to more demand for and destruction of our resources, more conflict, war and terror, easier spread of diseases, and a larger gap between the rich and the poor.
Our world’s history has many examples of the rise and fall of great civilizations. During their rise, the leaders and citizens of each of these great civilizations were able to overcome many problems to create a better life for many of their citizens. Unfortunately, their rise often stretched their resources to the breaking point and resulted in the creation of new problems. In most cases, they were unable to solve these problems fast enough to prevent the fall of their civilization.
In some cases, a civilization’s fall was the result of external forces like floods, draughts, or invasion by foreign armies. In other cases, the fall was a result of some internal strife that tore their civilization apart. Nevertheless, in all cases, the citizens of these civilizations were unable to solve the problems that eventually led to their fall. In most of these cases, they simply had not anticipated nor had planned well enough for the things that happened.
Will our modern civilization be able to continue, or will it fall like all the great civilizations of the past? By looking at our current problems and comparing the history of our civilization with those of the past, it looks to me like we could be headed towards a similar fall. A big difference is the fact that we have risen so far and used up so much of our world’s resources that our fall could be much worse. In fact, we have used up so much of the world’s nonrenewable resources that it would be very difficult for any future new civilization to rise from scratch to the level that ours has.
On the other hand, we have an advantage over those past civilizations in that we now know and understand more about our world and our past than at any other time in history. We just need to decide whether we will use that knowledge to find a path that will take us into a future where we can solve our problems and create a new civilization that is both great and sustainable or not. The first step may be as simple as admitting that our civilization is in trouble and that we must recreate it to save it.
Before we can truly decide on what we want our future civilization to look like, we first need to understand ourselves a little better. To do this, we need to look a little deeper into the latest and best evidence and theories about where we have come from and who we were and compare this with where we are today and who we are today.
It took millions of years for humans to develop into our current form. During most of that time we lived in small tribal groups as hunters and gatherers. Our short lives were mostly devoted to finding enough food, avoiding being eaten by predators, and reproducing. Our anatomy, metabolism, and temperament evolved to become adapted to our hunter/gatherer lifestyles.
It has only been in the last few thousand years that most of us have switched to a more settled agricultural lifestyle and settled into larger communities. It has only been in the last few hundred years that many of us have turned more towards craft, trade, industrial, information and service jobs, and settled into large cities and into suburbs. Our new industrial and technological age is not even a hundred years old yet and the rate of change is only increasing.
Of course, our large and innovative brains have allowed us to handle a lot of these changes and to adjust our lifestyles enough to survive in most new environments. Unfortunately, adjusting is not the same thing as evolving and adapting, which leaves many of us living lives that are far from being optimal for us physiologically or psychologically.
Many of our first customs and traditions came about as ways to help us get along, cooperate and bond with our family and our tribe, which helped us to compete with animals that were faster or stronger than we were and with other tribes that may have wanted our resources. Change was usually slow, and the same customs and traditions may have served many new generations just as well as they had served their ancestors.
As we developed agriculture, moved into more urban settings and invented new tools, life became better for most people, but society became more complex. We had to develop new and updated customs and traditions to surmount the new challenges. Interestingly, different groups often came up with quite different customs and traditions that helped each to surmount similar challenges with similar amounts of success.
In our recent past, the rate of change has sometimes been staggering, and each generation has faced many new challenges. Therefore, the customs and traditions of even our most recent ancestors do not always serve us as well as they did them, so we have constantly needed to develop some new and updated customs and traditions or to do away with some of them entirely.
On the other hand, some individuals have wanted to keep their customs and traditions just as they were and have therefore resisted change. To effectively handle the realities of our modern life and its constant change, we must update or develop some customs and traditions that are flexible enough to serve us better today and in the future.
As we proceed with looking at our present and future paths, we will need to keep looking back at our past to shed light on how we got where we are today and why we now do the things we do. This will help us in developing the philosophy, guidelines, principles and ideas that will help us in mapping out a plan for a better, brighter and more sustainable future.
Few of us now live as our ancestors did. Today, most of us will live longer lives without as much fear of going hungry or being eaten by a predator. On the other hand, we have created a whole new set of challenges that we need to deal with. Of course, our brains have allowed us to adjust somewhat to our new way of life, but, unfortunately, physiologically and psychologically we have not had enough time to evolve and to adapt sufficiently.
For instance, many of us now live a more sedentary life with an abundance of food, which has led to a growing problem with obesity. It may take many generations before our metabolisms and appetites have the chance to evolve and to adapt to our new lifestyles and food supply. That is, if we do not short-circuit our evolution by coming up with a diet drug that will mask the problem. (Note: There are now some new diet drugs that may be doing just that.)
Another major change in our lifestyles has been the transition from tribal and extended families to individuals and nuclear families. The major drive behind this change has been the development of cheap energy. At first, this drew individuals and families away from their small towns and extended families into the cities in search of better paying factory and office jobs. Then, with better cars and roads, many of us headed towards the suburbs in search of a place to live in safer neighborhoods with cleaner air and more green space.
With this shift in lifestyles, our lives are now more dependent on strangers, the state and machines. Physiologically and psychologically, we are still best adapted to a life in a small tribal group with our extended family close by. As a result, more individuals today suffer from more stress, loneliness and mental illness than most of our ancestors ever did, which may be because we are now surrounded by far more strangers than friends or family and further removed from nature.
Even if we could completely evolve and adapt physiologically and psychologically to our current lifestyles, we would still have a major problem. Our current lifestyles are using up our resources at a faster rate than they can be replaced and are causing the destruction of natural habitats and the extinction of numerous species of plants and animals. Today, the greatest threat facing us, and all life on our planet, is humanity itself.
One possible analogy to our current lifestyle may be to think of it as sky diving. Sky diving can be fun and exciting, but at some point, before it is too late, one must open the parachute, or everything will come to an abrupt and destructive end. Of course, opening the parachute just delays and softens the end.
Instead of sky diving, we may need to think more about our lifestyles in terms of gliding or parasailing. It may not give everyone the same rush as sky diving, but the fun can be sustained for a longer time so that future generations can continue to enjoy the ride. Of course, even gliding and parasailing will eventually come to an end, so we may need to find more down-to-earth ways to enjoy the ride. Maybe rollercoasters are the way to go.
Planning our future is like planning a trip. Before we can start any trip, it is a very good idea to decide where we want to go. Of course, we all may have very different ideas about what we want to do on our trips and how much we are willing to spend. This is why a wide variety of travel destinations has evolved to cater to a wide variety of interests and budgets.
Of course, if we did not have to worry about the cost, most of us might want to take a trip to a lush paradise. Even so, when we talk about going to paradise, many of us may have very different ideas about where that would be.
Even though many different destinations may seem like paradise to many of us, not one of these destinations is likely to be considered a paradise by all of us. I would even bet that there are some of us who would not like an often talked about paradise like Fiji, and might prefer Hawaii, Bali, or some other tropical island, or might prefer something totally different, like Los Vegas, New York City, Paris, Rome, a quaint small town, or even a cabin on a mountain lake or a horse ranch.
For our future, we need to describe what that future would be like. For instance, we might like it to be utopia, but just like as with paradise, we may have very different ideas about what we would consider utopia. However, we all probably do have some basic things that we would all want.
For instance, all of us would probably want clean air and water, healthy and nutritious food, good clothing and shelter, safe places to go and a job that pays us a living wage or better. Beyond these basics, most of us also may want friends, liberty, freedom and some purpose in our life. The importance of each of these and many other things may vary from person to person, and each of us may have very different ideas about what we want. Therefore, any possible utopia would need to be flexible enough to meet a wide variety of wants and desires.
In any large enough sampling, you will have individuals who like city living, individuals who love the suburbs, individuals who want to live in a small town and individuals who want to live on a farm or ranch. You will have individuals who like working in an office, individuals that want to work outdoors, individuals who love working from their homes, individuals who love working with their hands, and individuals who enjoy business travel. You also will have individuals who like the convenience of living in an apartment or condo, individuals who want a home with a backyard, individuals who love living on a farm, etc.
As we can see, one of the most desirable features of any utopian future would need to be that we all would have some choice as to where and how we could live our lives. So, when we talk about a utopian future, we must keep in mind that it must allow for very different ideas of where and how each one of us wants to live our lives.
This may be easier said than done, since we must also remember that we need to create this utopia within the constraints of our world’s limited resources and the way each one of us lives our life can impact the way others can live their lives. Nevertheless, we must be able to provide everyone with an equal opportunity to live their lives the way they desire. In addition, more of us would then be able to live a better life than we are able to do today.
Psychology and Sociology -
Psychology and Sociology help us understand who we are.
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