From The Past Into The Future

 The past is a different country. I guess so is the future. Humanity has stayed essentially caught between the best and the worst of our natures. We have sought freedom from the universe, and we have sought security from the world. I will always think that conflict is what makes us creative. That our creativity is not always for the good is memorialized in Auschwitz.

Thus, we need to know our history. This is why I enjoyed reading David Wengrow's Beyond kingdoms and empires. 

Investigating the human past in this way is not a matter of searching for utopia, but of freeing us to think about the true possibilities of human existence. Unhampered by outdated theoretical assumptions and dogmatic interpretations of obsolete data, could we look with fresh eyes at the very meaning of terms like ‘civilisation’? Our species has existed for something like 300,000 years. Today, we stand on a precipice, confronting a future defined by environmental collapse, the erosion of democracy, and wars of unprecedented destructiveness: a new age of empire, perhaps the last in a cycle of such ages that, for all we really know, may represent only a modest fraction of the human experience.

We are at our worst when we limit our vision, our imagination, of what can be the good life. Reading history shows us the whole expanse of humanity. Read the whole essay. Think about it. Let us listen to our better angels. Let us live boldly, liberally.

 sch 7/6