Yes, those are made-up words. But the issues are genuine.
Technology and sociology define humans and the path we’ve taken since we separated from the rest of the simian world. We have distanced ourselves from our chimpanzee and baboon brothers and sisters.
Technologically, in the last 500 years, we’ve leaped forward light years in terms of transportation, electronics, medicine, science, and everything that falls under the heading of technology. We have left our simian relatives in the dust, literally.
We have moved from oxen and horse-drawn buggies to high-powered cars. We are actively exploring the solar system and beyond. Computing advances are made daily, and some, like AI, are mind-boggling. The frontiers of technology seem endless.
Meanwhile, our simian cousins have yet to make much technological progress beyond breaking open coconuts with rocks and fishing termites from a mound with a stick.
However, sociologically, we’re still back in the Stone Age, along with our hairy cousins. There was a time when, like the chimps and baboons, we romped across the plains, mounting anyone nearby. The strongest and meanest males and females dominated the others through threats and actual violence. We did form troops and a degree of social structure, but violence is still the norm. Battles for the top spot are still violent politically and sometimes bloody.
It’s almost like having a split personality. On the one hand, we have conferences to explore the next great technological frontiers. Countries from all over the world come together to try to plan the next great technological leap.
Sociologically, we are hampered. We are angry at the drop of a hat. We strike out at each other, both on a personal level and as nations. We discriminate and oppress others we think are inferior. We have endless wars that we justify as needed to establish our hierarchy in the world.
We are insular, dictatorial, unforgiving, and, well, we are still baboons in many ways. And, the most frightening thing of all is that, unlike the baboons and chimps who still use Stone Age methods for solving disputes, we now have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, and weapons of war, unlike anything history has ever seen. It’s like giving a troop of chimpanzees a nuclear missile.
We have indeed tinkered with social evolution. Not with the same passion we’ve applied to technology, but we’ve tinkered. We went from wandering across the earth to coming together in communities and cities. We’ve written rules and laws to contain those who won’t submit to civil society.
We even invented religions and philosophies like Buddhism to try to tame our wildest impulses. We wrote religious laws intended to reign in our most simian instincts. Many of those texts reflect how backward and misinformed the authors were.
We determined that marriage was needed to stop the endless humping of everyone nearby. In some cases, we approved of multiple wives to appease the more aggressive males who couldn’t be tamed with just one spouse. For the most part, though, our social evolution is millennia behind our technical evolution.
Can we survive this? It’s anyone’s guess. We have turned over the asylum (our planet and all it contains) to the inmates who seem incapable of meeting the challenges of a world with almost 9 billion people functioning with the mentality of apes who are holding weapons of mass destruction in their hands.
Perhaps we need more conferences dedicated to solving social ills instead of technology and war. We need to find a way to make quantum leaps in social behavior with the same light speed we applied to technology. Can that happen? Will it happen before we destroy ourselves? Time will tell.
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