Learning from the past

Repairing the earth means repairing ourselves as well. The most productive way is by learning to put ourselves out a bit. But we need to learn from our collective past mistakes. Now, since we can’t know what is up ahead (any more than we can reach out to the stars) we have to actively bring the future into present reality by finding significance in past events. At first we see the mistakes, then we see the simplicity of (probable) solutions. Maybe we see one simple sparkling idea that stands out from the rest, which can re-route our synapses, to allow us to think differently. As soon as we change our thought patterns, we change our whole nature, no longer constrained by the tight confines of self interest. Now we want for ourselves what we want for others. This might be the greatest value to come out of a war torn twentieth century. Looking back on what happened it is hardly believable that so many humans could have participated in such barbaric behaviour, how they could have allowed things to turn out the way they did. And yet, albeit in different forms, the same barbaric behaviour exists today. And in the future others will look back and find it all unbelievable, that it happened. And yet at the same time they too won’t see what they are involved with, the new behaviour, the unresolved events, equally barbaric. How do we, in the middle of this particular era of barbarism, stop, take stock and consciously alter course?

By looking at the extraordinary events of the mid 1940s, we see human nature in all its extremes. We see bravery, altruism, waste and cruelty, all the big lessons from which to build a future. When I was just a twinkle in my dad’s eye, three near-simultaneous events took place. First there was a war grinding to a halt, millions of humans dead, millions of humans dying of starvation, and in the middle of it all a man who scared the living daylights out of people (and when he shot himself, it gave my parents and many others the confidence to enlarge their families). Next, some hundred days later, an atom-splitting device exploded over a Japanese city. That showed how we could kill a whole planet by just pressing a button if we desired. These two events marking the close of one war gave rise to another war. A war of fear, a precursor of what could happen one day.
The third significant event around this period didn’t get much publicity at the time, but later it was to become the very symbol of non-altruism. Perhaps it grew naturally out of the first two. Certainly it was a forecaster of what was to come. A new grim reaper had appeared in the form of a mindlessness combined with a clever idea, proclaiming: “the cage man cometh”. So now we are in the cage age, or rather in a time where we are so cost effective that we use cages to entomb and enslave animals.