“We are as gods and might as well get used to it,” Stewart Brand said back in 1968. I remember reading that in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the day.
The concept appealed to me, as did the catalog and its successor, the Coevolution Quarterly. I recall thumbing through the issues, finding gems of ideas amidst a lot of odd ones. In those pre-Internet times, it was a way – along with alternative comics, music, and the underground press, not to mention the Civil Rights and antiwar movements and second-wave feminism – to find something new to chew on.
We were definitely looking for something new to chew on.
I don’t remember exactly what I thought when I first saw those words, but l suspect that part of what I thought was that they were an admonition to human beings who were starting to unlock knowledge beyond that needed for basic survival. I heard “Be careful. We’ve got more power than we understand.”
After all, I grew up in the shadow of the Bomb. We were playing with things that could blow up the whole world, and far too many of the men – and it was mostly men – in positions of power were not the sort of person who was good at taking care or planning for the long term.
But these days as I look at some of what Brand has to say, I’m not sure at all that I was correct about what he meant. I’m starting to wonder if he was thinking more along the lines of the broligarchs who are out to spread humanity throughout the universe and even think they’re going to live forever.
After reading Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, I think those people believe they are gods, or that they’re becoming gods.
My morning book these days is Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, which is about the fact that there’s never going to be enough time for everything no matter how many time management schemes you try to follow. Four thousand weeks is about the average lifetime (around 77 years).
In Monday morning’s reading, he observed:
The notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing rather than denying our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to wholeheartedly human instead.
Now I don’t happen to believe in any gods – not Greek ones nor Hindu ones nor the one whose commandment says “Thou shalt have no other gods but me” that I learned about in Sunday school. And I certainly don’t believe that a bunch of guys who understand a lot about computers (or at least put money behind those who understand a lot about computers) and very little else are likely to become actual gods to replace the ones humans have made up over the millennia.
I don’t think humans are completely powerless, either. We have created a lot of things that have major effects on our planet and each other, some of them wonderful, some horrific.
But we’re not unlimited and we’re not going to live forever or, in all likelihood, take over the universe. (Taking over the universe sounds like colonization on steroids and it should be obvious by now that colonization was a terrible plan on this planet.)
We could, however, do even more damage to the planet we evolved on, and while the planet would eventually survive, we humans and lot of the other life here might not.
What we have now are the kind of god-like powers seen in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment in Disney’s Fantasia – we can turn things on but all too often we don’t know how to control or regulate them.
Like that apprentice, we need to learn a great deal more about what we’re doing instead of jumping on the latest cool tech idea and using it to move fast and break a lot more things.
My take on “we are as gods” was probably influenced by Fantasia, now that I think about it. I would have thought Brand’s was as well, at least back in the day.
I still remember the day I tested for my black belt in Aikido. I recall the friends who jumped up to partner me. I recall breathing hard. I’m pretty sure my randori – defense against multiple attackers — was pretty weak.
And I remember thinking, after I learned I had passed, that now I was really ready to start learning something. I had shown I had a grounding in the basics, which gave me enough to take everything to a deeper level.
That was 35 years ago. I’m still learning. I’m definitely not a god, but I do have some power and knowledge.
I try to use it judiciously.
I wish I could say the same about the broligarchs.