This is part 5 of a 7-part series.
Click here for part 1
Though there are still many challenges ahead for us to face, we’ve come a long way from the ill-equipped, near-blind species we once were. For all of our historical and present struggles, not only have we gained a great deal in the way of natural insights, scientific understanding and technological capability, but also endless streams of creative self-expression and cultural variation.
We have gone from mythological explanations of nature to detailed technical insight, from rudimentary stone and wooden tools to automated machinery, from cave paintings to digitally generated art, and from being restricted to word of mouth to the written word which can then be shared across the world in the click of a button.
Obviously, it doesn’t stop here.
This digital age of information is still relatively new, and the new generations now are the first generations to be born into it, never knowing, for example, a world before streaming media or the internet as a whole.
Many aspects of people’s lives have been improved and made a lot more enjoyable thanks to the creative and technological endeavours of others; instant communication at the click of a button, being able to shop online for things we need, or being able to share our creativity and things we find interesting with wide audiences of people, whereas contributions from people of past generations will have often faded into obscurity because this kind of thing wasn’t available.
But with these revolutionary technological changes come a whole new set of challenges for humanity as a whole.
Quite often, people blame certain technologies or services for corrupting humanity in some way, when really it’s the business models that govern those services that are largely at fault. Social media proves its technical value to us every time we send a message to someone we need to communicate with, but it is the corrupted business models of some of the companies operating these platforms that produce undesirable human interference and influence. Everything from censorship to performing secret experiments on large numbers of people, provoking their emotions to see what increases engagement time and then algorithmically pushing that, etc.
With the rate of our technological progress becoming difficult to keep up with, no matter how actively people try, and the potential impact of these technologies affecting larger amounts of people along with the very planet we inhabit, a responsibility to handle these things as wisely as possible must be recognised.
The ancient languages of our modern-day thinking give us a never-ending list of reasons to hate each other, to go to war and wreck the planet in the process, and enables malicious individuals to gatekeep truth and divide humanity for profit and power. Now that we’ve developed the technology to actually do the damage a lot easier than we’d like to find out, it’s the wise approach to actively overcome whatever psychological obsolescence we can in order to discover the self-empowering aspects of technology and creativity rather than using them to feed destructive tendencies.
Whatever our future world might look like, the intent and focus of this philosophical discipline is to influence one which strongly encourages creativity and educational exploration, as not only do these things keep life more enjoyable and interesting, but they also often lead to insights and technological innovation that can benefit everyone’s lives.
This outlook and focus does not require that individuals sacrifice personal beliefs, but it does call for a world that no longer allows personal belief or institutional interference to stifle natural human qualities for their own preservation.
There are many examples out there of everyone, from individuals to crowds and from corporations to governments, making deliberate attempts to censor public discussion, to stifle self-empowerment of individuals through education, to cage in creativity, to water down humour and artistic expression, and so on. And so long as we are not restrained by an ideological agenda, everyone benefits from these things being liberated.
As a central focus here, it is the claim that we want to ensure that no future society can be developed based on any kind of rejection or restriction of these human qualities, and that they should be encouraged and supported at every turn.
“The smarter your kids are, the better my life will be.” — Roxanne Meadows
If it’s true that with great power comes great responsibility, with the kind of technology we have at our disposal today, the claim here is that we have a philosophical responsibility to find ways of avoiding using it to destroy ourselves.
Another part of that philosophical responsibility is to recognise the basic insight that it is not only ourselves that our actions affect, but neighbouring cultures with no dog in the fight, and a planet of plants and animals that was millennia in the making. It would have to be a kind of madness to destroy that because of the oversight of some basic philosophical principles and the misuse of technology that resulted from it.
The goal is that we maximise utilisation of technology, creativity, education, philosophy and the scientific method, as those aspects of our lives produce the real revolutions that impact more people on average, regardless of arbitrary social division. Not only that, but they can make their achievements without bloodshed.
The same can not be said for politics, religion or monetary economics. It has to be recognised that the practise of these institutions being the best places to channel our energies is now an outdated custom, and not only are the institutions themselves not worth the human suffering they cause, but they actually have very little, if anything at all, to offer in the way of real solutions.
Not only do we have to overcome centuries of their self-preserving propaganda and cultural reinforcement in our own minds as individuals, but also on a social level in the institutions. They may have been worth living in divided states for once upon a time when it was a matter of survival, but now humanity requires unity to live practically and in balance with nature, and we have the insight and information necessary to make that a practical, realistic goal to set our sights toward.
Next: Future Thinking and Morality
Previous: The Scientific Method
