Human beings are meaning-seekers. We have this inbuilt desire to keep moving forward, to progress toward....um, that thing that gives us purpose and a reason to get out of bed in the morning. That new car, that person we want to be, that money / job / promotion / degree / new kitchen - you name it, we want it. We suspend contentment, thinking we'll be happy - finally - when we arrive at that future destination. We forget the joy is in the journey, and that the destination actually doesn't exist (unless you're talking about the final destination, and I'm not sure we should really be hurrying towards that!). We treat life as if it is linear - marching roughshod over what is good in the here and now. And it's not just in our individual lives' that we do this. History - the story of society's march of progress toward civilisation. Cough.
As humans, our understanding of the march of civilisation is, exactly, that of a march - of a steady progression that started somewhere ( in a cave, with awful amenities and heaven forbid, no facebook) and is currently somewhere a lot better than that (with all sorts of flushing, beeping and flashing technologies that we like to think we control). In western industrialised society, we teach our children how we've progressed in our humanity from barbarism to the democratic society of today, citing periods of time where women were burned for being witches, of world wars where millions left home to die in trenches elsewhere, or where one mad man could dream up and execute a bureaucratic plan of mass murder under the noses, seemingly, of all of Europe. As if the blight is gone. The blood has somehow left our hands. We forget our own histories in our bid for a good nights sleep. We pretend poverty in our own cities isn't structural violence. The use of drones to kill in far off places is as strange as it is invisible to us.
We teach our children how we've progressed in our technology and economies, with our competitive free markets and trade capable of delivering flat screen televisions to every room in every house...well not every, you have to be a good, actively engaged working citizen. Anybody can be part of the Dream if they really want to.
And then we look outwards to the 'developing countries' and 'new emerging markets' (what we used to call the third world) and we put them on the linear bar...they aren't here yet, at some stage in the march of civilisation we decided to catch a train and get ahead. They'll be along presently when they figure things out I guess. (Although, if they get too big their boots we might have to step in, in the name of global peace of course...)
Meanwhile, we set about consuming our planet like locusts (but remember, you can get a flat screen television for every room in your house so there's always a silver lining), and we are growing steadily immune to the plight of those who cling on to existence with their fingertips. Planet earth is not the same for everybody, one day you're in - the next you're out, she's a competitive world out there. Soz to the species on the verge of extinction and the people consigned to subsistence living in slums, you weren't competitive enough. But we can offer you some two minute ads on television pleading your cause for money, prod our consciences and we might share some scraps. You'll need to be entertaining. One click of the remote and these problems can remain...well...remote.
March toward civilisation? Or we are lurching around in the dark making the same mistakes over and over?
