Something for Kami to find on the 'net Sunday morning before she heads out shopping ....
Understanding The Future
A paper by Dr. Kim Li, department of philosophy, Freemont University-College.
The world is too small. You can drop pins, and people find out. The world is too small. Elvis can fake his own death and hide for decades, preparing for a comeback tour with Michael Jackson. Both these things are truth (the small, the big). We live in a global world, a connected world, and despite the worries about the next great plague it has many benefits, as with most other paradoxes. It is easy to hide, but hard to not be found if people go looking.
All the old truths and certainties of even the last century are being swept away. Information is power, knowledge our candle in the dark and access is everything. We have it, are learning from it. (See 'San Francisco Crime Watch' (Robinson, Crusoe , 2009) for an example: citizens can chart out where the worst crimes are, since the police files are transparent, and push for action in those area.) We live in a world that is becoming more transparent. Libertarians would have us rejoice in this, believing we're all adult enough to deal sensibly with the data we are given. Conservatives believes only they should have the data and use it as they see fit. Liberals, of course, change their minds daily. (I was told I had to write a Political Essay this year: that paragraph is it. If you want to waste your time being offended, go do so.)
Everyone hears the stories and rumours of strange people with impossible gifts, curses, powers and the like. A lot of the evidence for them is anecdotal at present, but will likely not remain that way. There are deeper questions as to how new these people are, how they were hidden and so forth but it is, generally, rather easy to trick people. (For example, you are reading this essay.) If even a third – if even one – of these stories has basis in fact, it is a paradigm-changing moment for the world. Read that sentence again: if you aren't scared, you didn't understand it. The last one was, arguably, the atom bomb.
Historically, such paradigms don't go down well: the old world discovered the new, and decided the inhabitants weren't human. What we have are humans evolving into other states, possibly even post-human ones, and how we deal with that will determine if we are the old world or the new. If you see a man whose skin is covered in bark, what would you do? What will you do? What won't you do? We have deep troubles dealing with differences in our society, hiding away gimps, cripples, freaks until recently, throwing people into institutions because it was easier than accepting them as human beings.
Do you think we shall ever have pictures in fashion magazines of people in wheelchairs and have it not treated as a kind of game? How, then, do we deal with people who used to be normal and how look like horror-movie monsters, or (worse still?) look entirely normal and do monstrous things that are impossible to our limited understanding of the world? These are not idle questions. They deserve answers and need answers, but each of us will answer them differently, and hope that we can be the best in humanity when it comes times to truly face the questions.
Because there will be monsters, if we treat them like monsters. There will be war, if we think they are not like us. I am not saying it will be easy to accept such things. I am not even saying that we can, but I feel the effort most be made and, if we cannot achieve understanding, we could fake it under the guise of tolerance. If they are to be the future – if we do not fight them in a war to the death – could we at least have them say we tried, as best we could, to accept?
No comments:
Post a Comment