We humans don’t yet know what we\u2019re going to be when we grow up.<\/p>\n
In my morning senryu, which I call zentao, I often close with the last line \u201cnot civilized yet.\u201d Here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n
We can do better.
\nWe have the tools and knowledge.
\nNot civilized yet.
\n#zentao<\/p><\/blockquote>\nA lot of those senryu are written in anger. If we were civilized, this thing wouldn\u2019t happen. Or we know better than this; we could be civilized.<\/p>\n
This is rooted in an idea I\u2019ve had for many years that every established group of people \u2013 particularly the wealthy ones \u2013 thinks they are civilized. We are civilized, unlike the people from a thousand, a hundred, fifty years ago.<\/p>\n
Or, more dangerously, we are more civilized than those people over there, which often becomes an excuse to kill them.<\/p>\n
This is not a popular theory. Once on a science fiction convention panel I suggested we humans weren\u2019t even close to civilized, and got a lot of pushback from everyone else.<\/p>\n
Of course, it depends on what you mean by civilized. My own conception of that is long and complex, but the gist of it is a world in which we use what we know and can learn to make good lives for all in sustainable ways.<\/p>\n
As we were driving across the country this past week, my sweetheart, having gone down a rabbit hole online based on something we\u2019d noticed, told me that the horse was first domesticated by humans maybe 6,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
(My sweetheart also suggests that teenage girls first domesticated the horse. It\u2019s an interesting theory.)<\/p>\n
And it suddenly dawned on me \u2013 because my mind goes down its own rabbit holes \u2013 that human beings are a very young species.<\/p>\n
Of course we aren\u2019t civilized. We haven\u2019t been around long enough. <\/p>\n
Now we\u2019ve had many glimpses of civilization over the years, many peoples (and individual people) who have showed or suggested how we can live in harmony with our planet and each other.<\/p>\n
We have also come up with the idea that human nature is flawed, even terrible, something I don\u2019t accept. Based on my experience of other people, I think most of us are naturally kind and good. Circumstances cause a lot of the evil we blame on human nature.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m getting a lot of glimpses these days of how we can work toward a real civilization. My view doesn\u2019t look anything like the AI tech bro \u201cwe\u2019re all going to be digital beings\u201d world. It also doesn\u2019t include poverty or destruction of the planet we evolved on.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m also starting to think that, destructive as we humans can be, we need to stop thinking that we\u2019re going to destroy it all. That\u2019s part of the idea that human nature is bad.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a kind of human exceptionalism, if you will. \u201cWe have all the power and are so terrible that we will destroy it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
(It occurs to me that we\u2019ve invented a lot of gods like that. Another place where attitudes should shift.)<\/p>\n
Most people are just trying to get by and deal with the world as they find it. That makes some of us do terrible things, some drink too much and take drugs (both legal and illegal), some just do whatever it takes, some try to fix things. Those trying to fix things keep trying to inspire others, not always successfully.<\/p>\n
Some of us have a vision about what civilized human beings might be.<\/p>\n
But what I want to suggest here is that we give ourselves a break, that we stop beating up on ourselves so much. I don\u2019t mean quit trying to fix things, but I do mean having more love and respect for ourselves as human beings.<\/p>\n
Of course we\u2019re not civilized. We\u2019re a young species.<\/p>\n
We might still make it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We humans don’t yet know what we\u2019re going to be when we grow up. In my morning senryu, which I call zentao, I often close with the last line \u201cnot civilized yet.\u201d Here\u2019s an example: We can do better. We have the tools and knowledge. Not civilized yet. #zentao A lot of those senryu are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[636,17],"tags":[877],"class_list":["post-3343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-rants","tag-not-civilized-yet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3343"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3344,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3343\/revisions\/3344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}