There Goes the Neighborhood

I remember reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land what is now decades ago and while I’m not completely clear on the plot anymore, the Earth was being studied by a sort of accidental emissary from the planet Mars, home to an ancient and advanced civilization, with the aim of determining the relative merit of the human race. The Martians had previously studied the inhabitants of the rocky fifth planet in our solar system and, having found them somewhat wanting, turned their home into the asteroid belt. I can’t remember how Heinlein explained away planetary genocide as characteristic of an advanced and enlightened race or why all the other less sentient occupants of Planet Five had to perish as well, but I suppose it was all a sort of religious allegory and shouldn’t be too overly analyzed. Religion tends to make the most sense when you don’t think too hard.

Dr. Carl Sagan was not fond of these flights of objectification fancy because he felt that by imagining that flying saucer from Ceti Alpha Six flying by and its occupants shaking their head(s) in dismay at the foolishness of Earth’s residents we were in denial about the very real possibility that the human race constituted the only sentient beings in the almost infinite vastness of space. He felt that we had an obligation to preserve ourselves as a unique, singular and special representation of the universe’s self-expression. That is not to say that being special translates to essential goodness, but I believe that perhaps Dr. Sagan felt that we were a link in an evolutionary chain that might ultimately result in some fundamental realization of purpose or meaning and that our self-destructive idiocy threatened to cheat all creation of a chance at some ultimate completion, an almost theological idea.

Part of our human problem is that we all tend to think of humanity as an end result rather than a point on a continuum. Since God made us on the last day, we are the final product, the pinnacle of divine achievement. Our penchant for monotheistic constructs reinforces our natural predilection to arrogance by making practically the whole moral structure of creation revolve around us, and what we do with our genitalia. Since we generally see ourselves as distinct and apart from nature, we don’t consider the possibility of evolutionary change as a fundamental aspect of humanity, The implications of this include, among many other failures, the resulting denial that the degradation of the natural environment that supports our existence is a suicidally irrational course of action and the fallacy that we can always count on being around no matter how irresponsible, selfish and short-sighted our behavior is.

But what then would our hypothetical alien tourists make of the eclectic, contradictory and convoluted mess of human civilization? Perhaps, if they lacked a talent for religious allegory, they would forego the concept of angels and demons fighting for control of the human soul and speculate that a relatively intellectually unsophisticated species which had spent all of its evolutionary history simply meeting the demands of survival had, by chance, experienced a rapid change in brain capacity and function and begun to exert adequate control over its environment to meet the requirements for survival in well less than the waking time available. The consequences of this, they might speculate, will have been the misapplication of previously essential survival skills such as intuition and inference, aggression, reproductive urge, fear, greed and gluttony to other, non-essential pursuits, creating a myriad new potential psychological states and intellectual failures to plague the hairless, big-brained apes as they infested their planet in ever increasing numbers.

The curious aliens might further note that this seems to pretty much be the evolutionary pattern that all sentient species followed, and that it was really the only way that a transition from a survival based existence to a meaning based existence could occur. They might also remind one another that their species had also travelled this path and speak analytically about the other species known to have attempted and failed to navigate this transition. Their judgment on the human race would, at this particular juncture, probably be reserved. Of course, Relativity pretty much precludes such recreational visits by possible stellar neighbors, and we can say nearly for sure that there aren’t any competing technological civilizations in our neck of the woods, so for the time being we will just have to judge ourselves, perhaps the harshest judgment of all. Maybe the curious aliens and the angry and jealous God are after all just two different manifestations of our own severe self-judgment and perhaps the fact that we are able to conceive judgment of ourselves at all is a new and unbreakable pier in that evolutionary bridge spanning the void of uncertainty to our shining future.

Perhaps, but though I love my children as much as my genetically-coded urge to self-preservation will allow, I know that they are bequeathed the same birthright as every stranger in this strange land since the advent of primordial ooze, the freedom and responsibility to change or die. What we leave to them will be a legacy equal parts fear and ignorance and progress and hope, but they can no longer depend on past judgment and evolution by natural selection to correct the course; they must now evolve by self-direction, and soon, because the grim countenance of Mars hangs low in the west and waxes angry red, and the ominous rumblings of inevitability accompany the dying embers of some other world’s fractured dreams as they burn incandescent streaks across our darkening sky.