Shifting Sands

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!" -H.G. Wells

Indeed, here it is. Brazen, brutal, barbaric and beautiful, it lumbers on down the sordid path. It doesn't seem that any people could have anticipated it a century ago. Most estimates saw us living in some advanced technology driven utopia or falling off the tightrope of progress into the abyss of oblivion. Amusingly, people today seem even more certain of these two disparate futures, with more favoring the latter as time goes on and our inability to get our shit together becomes starkly contrasted to the challenges we face as a species.    

H.G. Wells had a really interesting theory about what was needed to give humanity a chance. His project was to get all humans to acknowledge our collective history, not as a divided chronology of petty identity, but as a sprawling mosaic that unites us all. Living as he did during an era of unprecedented nationalism, he said "our true nationality is mankind".  

This was coming from an Englishman at a time when England owned an absurd amount of the worlds surface and controlled a staggering percentage of its population. For this reason English is still dominating globally, and the heirs to the Anglophone Empire still hold preeminent power globally in the two things that have always mattered on such a scale- the ability to get what you want and vanquish those who oppose. 

These days it seems to me that nationalism is fraying at the edges, and in some places getting torn apart. It was always a questionable concept, this large scale sanctified tribalism. Especially so when we consider were most of the worlds nations came from. There was a chance during the era of decolonization to build a world more focused on commonality than conflict, but that was very cleverly diverted by the cunning of Western businessmen and the ruthlessness of vested power in the recently liberated regions.

Today there is very little indication we have learned anything from history, but somehow there seems to be a growing awareness in some areas that all the things we were so convinced made us different was all a lie. I find a lot of hope in the message Wells tried to get across all those years ago.  

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress."

Our collective inability to surmount the primordial problem of Oligarchy is surely of primary importance. In connection with this is the need to start working towards eliminating borders, not so much on the ground, although this is important as well, but in our minds. The longer we keep thinking of this person as this or that nationality, or that somehow the border between two countries is anything more than a dirty trick, the more we work against ourselves. 

It's a hell of a struggle to forget what we have been taught for ages and to learn that which is currently only an idea. Somehow I get the feeling that people are starting to realize more and more how stupid most accepted things truly are, and this makes me think that perhaps this absurd political map of the world that one sees so on so many walls will someday be relegated to its rightful home, the museum. 

"There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope."

"A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it."