One way to think of our time is as a race between these conflicting tendencies: one to bind up the planet, preserving, it may be, some of its ethnic and cultural diversity, and the contrary trend to destroy the planet, not in the geophysical sense but the planet in the sense of the world that we know. It is by no means clear which of these two conflicting tendencies will win out, in the lifetime of you who are among the first to be hearing these words.
Now, another way of looking at this is as a conflict within the human heart, as a conflict between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others who may superficially not look or talk or act or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is focused and concentrated in our cerebral cortex. Our survival is (how could we have imagined it to be anything else?) a reflection of our own nature and how we manage these contending tendencies within the human heart and mind.
Since the times are so extraordinary, since they are unprecedented, it is in no way clear that ancient prescriptions retain perfect validity today. That means that we must have a willingness to consider a wide variety of new alternatives, some of which have never been thought of before, others of which have, but have been summarily rejected by one culture or another. We run the danger of fighting to the death on ideological pretexts.
We kill each other, or threaten to kill each other, in part, I think, because we are afraid we might not ourselves know the truth, that someone else with a different doctrine might have a closer approximation to the truth. Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can't convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview that I have dedicated my life to is inadequate. I'm putting this in personal terms so that I don't say "you," so that I'm not accusing anyone of an attitude, but you understand that this is not a mea culpa; I'm trying to describe a psychological dynamic that I think exists, and it's important and worrisome.
Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another's belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? There is a worldwide closed-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren't as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available.
We have Ten Commandments in the West. Why is there no commandment exhorting us to learn? "Thou shalt understand the world. Figure things out." There's nothing like that. And very few religions urge us to enhance our understanding of the natural world. I think it is striking how poorly religions, by and large, have accommodated to the astonishing truths that have emerged in the last few centuries.
Let's think together for a moment about the prevailing scientific wisdom on where we come from. The idea that nearly 15,000 million years ago the universe, or at least its present incarnation, was formed in the big bang; that for some 5,000 million years thereafter even the Milky Way Galaxy was not formed; that for some 5,000 million years after that, the Sun and the planets and the Earth were not formed; that 5,000 million years ago, on an Earth not identical by any means to the one we know today, a large-scale production of complex organic molecules occurred that led to a molecular system capable of self-replication, and therefore began the long, tortuous, and exquisitely beautiful evolutionary sequence that led from those first organisms, barely able to make vague copies of themselves, to the magnificent diversity and subtlety of life that graces our small planet today.
And we have grown up on this planet, trapped, in a certain sense, on it, not knowing of the existence of anything else beyond our immediate surroundings, having to figure the world out for ourselves. What a courageous and difficult enterprise, building, generation after generation, on what has been learned in the past; questioning the conventional wisdom; being willing, sometimes at great personal risk, to challenge the prevailing wisdom and gradually, slowly emerging from this torment, a well-based, in many senses predictive, quantitative understanding of the nature of the world around us. Not, by any means, understanding every aspect of that world but gradually, through successive approximations, understanding more and more. We face a difficult and uncertain future, and it seems to me it requires all of those talents that have been honed by our evolution and our history, if we are to survive.
One thing that seems especially striking in contemporary culture is how few benign visions of the immediate future are offered up. The mass media show all sorts of apocalyptic scenarios, ghastly futures. And there tends to be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy to these prognostications. How rarely is it that we see a projection twenty or fifty or a hundred years into the future into a world in which we have come to our senses, in which we have figured things out? We can do that. There's nothing that says that we will inevitably fail to meet these challenges. We have solved more difficult problems, and many times. For example, there was once a doctrine called the divine right of kings. It held that God gave kings and queens the right to rule their people. And at that time it really meant rule. "Rule" was not so very different from "own." And eminent clergymen argued that this was clearly written in the Bible. It was the will of God. Eminent secular theologians, Thomas Hobbes, for example, argued just the same thing. And yet there was a stirring sequence of worldwide revolutions-the American, the French, the Russian, and a number of others-that have now produced a planet in which no one, except an occasional atavistic emperor of a short-lived, small country, no one believes in the divine right of kings. It's now a kind of embarrassment. It's something that our ancestors believed but we in this more enlightened time do not.
Or consider chattel slavery, which Aristotle argued was intended, it was in the natural order of things, the gods required it, that any movement to free the slaves was against divine intention. And slaveholders throughout history have pointed to passages in the Bible to justify the holding of slaves. Yet today, in another stirring sequence of events worldwide, legal chattel slavery has been essentially eliminated. And again it is something from our past that we are embarrassed about, that we surely should still think of as an important insight into a dark side of human nature that should be resisted. Surely the depredations visited on peoples who were once enslaved have not been balanced, but we have made remarkable progress.
Or look at the status of women, about which finally the planet is coming to its senses in our own time. Or even things like smallpox and other disfiguring and fatal diseases, diseases of children, that were once thought to be an inevitable, God-given part of life. The clergy argued, and some still do, that those diseases were sent by God as a scourge for mankind. Now there are no more cases of smallpox on the planet. For a few tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of physicians from a hundred countries, coordinated by the World Health Organization, smallpox has been removed from the planet Earth.