Humanity - Hubris or Humility?

Which will we choose?

NASA Webb Images

In the beginning, there was physics. Then physics begat chemistry, and chemistry begat biology. And biology begat psychology, and psychology begat philosophy. Well, sort of. 

But what’s really wrong with this timeline of genealogy?

Like everything we discuss - even, it seems, at the most considered, the most earnest and most well-meaning level - it is all about us. We, the human species and our own self-absorbed ponderings, are always the final destination. From the moment the first conscious thought of a brow-furrowed hominid burst, like Frankenstein’s monster, into being from the instantaneous electric bolt of a billion synapses, we wondered: 

What am I? Who am I? What am I against the world I walk in?

Notice the common theme here. I, I, I. But the long arc of history should hint to us that the premise of our questioning is either misguided or just plain wrong. All of our assumptions and accumulating so-called “knowledge” are generated within the limitations of our human intelligence and senses. Remember how we used to think all the celestial bodies revolved around us? That our own planet was at the centre of the universe? Then we wised up, of course. It’s not Earth that’s at the centre, we admonished ourselves - after a period of the obligatory accusations of heresy (ask the guy below) - it’s the Sun, silly! Note still the definite article and capital S. Only since has astronomy suggested we take our humility not just a little further, but infinitely so. We (mostly) have finally resigned ourselves to not being the physical centre of the universe. 

But in all other aspects, we’re still not listening.

Today, for example, as each of us walk through the world (pausing daily, as we do, to shit in our own nest), we still think each of our own feeble lives is what’s most important. 

And when we debate the virtues of morality, we forget that morality is, like all other ideas, not a universal truth, or even truths, but yet another human construct; a natural evolution of ideas that were borne of the conscious living thing’s will to survive amongst others and to lessen suffering - at least, for some. We forget that the origin of that will to survive in every entity we define as living or that has ever lived is but a gloriously complex yet also simple, double-spiralled molecule, unconsciously unzipping, then rezipping itself in duplicate, for ever and ever. Amen.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but [human] thinking makes it so.”

We remain trapped - just as our poor brains are physically trapped in each of our skulls - through a trick of our own make-up, in a state of marvelling at ourselves (or deploring ourselves, as the case may be). But always ourselves. The way we are constructed of biological goo - a goo that is so hellbent on staying alive yet dimly conscious of its own impending death anyway - is what seems to stop us from escaping ourselves.

But why do we need to “escape ourselves”?

Because our track record of human self-centredness is paradoxically causing the destruction of our own home, our only liveable habitat - where billions of years of evolution, adapting to our changing environment that has teemed with life of the most extraordinary diversity, and has led to the emergence of our own consciousness. It is the ultimate example of human hubris, then, to let Earth burn while we make plans to abandon it in favour of lifeless Mars.

I had thought being humanist was a good thing. But now I see its shadow. Like racism and sexism and other noxious -isms which decree the supremacy of one over another, humanism could also be interpreted as such - of the human species over all else.

As long as we continue to remain trapped in this self-centred understanding of the universe, we are doomed to self-destruct. We so love to think it’s all about us. It seems to be a psychological prerequisite for our emotional comfort - a consoling denial of the cold truth of our (to date) lonesome existence in this universe.

But, it’s not all about us. It is our consciousness, as miraculous and mysterious as it is, that has duped us into believing this lie. 

Rather, it is all about the all. How could it be otherwise? On Sagan’s tiny pale blue dot, we humans are even tinier - each but a blood-red pixel in the infinity of space-time.

Just as we have abdicated, albeit reluctantly, our physical centrality to the universe, we might now wish, if even for our own sake, to renounce the sense of our own species’ supreme importance. Because we do not exist in isolation. Our separateness is a myth. Granted, it’s a very plausible myth. We move about the earth untethered by roots. We can’t see the vital oxygen we breathe, or the non-human cells that outnumber human cells on and in each of us by a factor of ten, and which keep us alive. 

As soon as the umbilical cord is cut, it feels as if we’re on our own. But we forget that every single cell in our body is the product of one single cell, the zygote, more than half of which was once of our mother’s body and the rest our father’s, and so it goes ad infinitum. We forget the vast eons of time that have passed to allow a once seemingly inert planet’s oceans to bubble life into being and let it crawl onto land like a shipwrecked sailor (or rather, salamander), gasping, not for air, but for water - our very own ancestors.

We are completely and utterly reliant on all else that has ever been, and so much of what now is, for our own existence. All is interconnected. We are not separate, let alone superior.

When will we choose to become aware of this - to understand it, honour it, and be infinitely awestruck and grateful? To bow down, not before some human-concocted false deity in child-like naïveté, but in acknowledgment of the all, and of our own humble but intrinsic place within it. 

If only we could transcend our species’ innate self-importance, we might just edge closer to the truth - not our own convenient truth, but the whole truth, or perhaps, the truth of the whole. We keep saying how good it feels to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. But for that bigger something, we must imagine far beyond our species, as remarkable as it may be.

With each new discovery of the sheer, incomprehensible extent of the universe, we inch closer to a better understanding of our place in and of it. But as we inch toward this, our self-destructive misunderstandings seem to gallop ahead. Perhaps the only way we will ever truly comprehend that we are not at the centre will be when contact is made with an intelligence so far beyond our own we may not even recognise it as intelligence. To an ant, surely our foot can only look like an existential threat. 

But rather than that intelligence arriving from any number of distant galaxies, in an ironic plot twist, it may instead arise right here under our noses - another creation of ourselves as Dr Frankenstein. But this beautiful monster may not be generous enough to leave us a choice between hubris and humility.