Ought from Is?
Humans who get to view the Earth from space typically experience the so-called “Overview effect”, which gifts them a profound sense of the precarity and preciousness of the planet and all life supported by it. Currently, this is not an experience available to all given the prohibitively expensive nature of spaceflight.
Sages of various spiritual and mystical traditions worldwide have bequeathed upon us ample accounts of a perhaps similar appreciation for all existence, born of voyages internal. Given the diversity of traditions and the inherent vagueness of things subjective, such accounts typically come with trees that often obscure the forest.
Setting aside space exploration and spiritual escapades, for both are otherworldly in their own ways and involve steep costs, there is a simple, secular, path to such profound appreciation for life and existence, shorn of all the existential provincialism that otherwise informs being human. The contemplation of all that we have figured out about the world, thanks to science.
For a species most charitably describable as “mostly clueless” (“Sapient” as a descriptor is more aspirational than not, when it comes to humans), we have accomplished something truly remarkable. We engage in the active pursuit of a deeper, truer understanding of the universe that has spawned us. As increasing knowledge paints our ignorance in starker relief, we get better at probing the origins of life, the universe and existence itself.
Science has long informed us that humans are a single species, interconnected in a tangled web of that wondrous phenomenon known as Life. Regardless of one’s preferred approach to unpacking the fundamental nature of existence, one can surely abide securely in the knowledge that in every possible interpretation, life is a phenomenon of interdependence and interconnection. Carl Sagan’s musings on our “pale blue dot” springs to mind.
To be human in our present world is to partake of an interconnected system where flourishing cannot be the privilege of a select few but needs to be a collective goal. A goal that can only be adequately realised in the form of societies that cherish the individual and afford each one of us liberties and opportunities, in turn supported by the diligent observance of duties human and civic by each individual.
What is the point of all this? Well, humans as a species are still painfully immature. In a world where we appear to be en route to true Artificial Intelligence and an even deeper understanding of the cosmos, our societies and politics are informed, if not driven by ideas and patterns of thought that are dangerously antiquated. All wars are fundamentally internecine as we are one species. The cost of entrenched existential provincialism in some human minds/power structures cannot and must not be paid by posterity.
Peace is not merely an option, it is a necessary precondition to the fashioning of a better, more just and truly free world. How do we get there? By recognising that some of the ideas mentioned above have practical value in how we construct our characters, conduct ourselves and cooperate as a society, if not as a species. Richard Feynman once opined that truth is often if not always clothed in uncertainty, in physics and moreso in human affairs. To this we might wish to add a prescriptive corollary; such a considered approach to truth has a necessary and wonderful consequence that also doubles as wise policy; compassion.
