Man's destiny

Title

Man's destiny

Language

English

Source

Volume XIX (6) June 1967

Year

1967

Subject

Human beings -- Origin

Bible and evolution

Human evolution

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

[A famous biologist and writer, the first head of the UNESCO, gives his idea on man as the sole agent of his own destiny.]

Fulltext

■ A famous biologist and writer, the first head of the UNESCO, gives his idea on man as the sole agent of his own destiny. MAN'S DESTINY Man’s destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evo lution of this planet. He is the highest dominant type to be produced by over two and a half billion years of the slow biological improve ment effected by the blind opportunistic workings of na tural selection; if he does not destroy himself, he has at least an equal stretch of evolutionary time before him to exercise his agency. During the later part of biological evolution, mind — our word- for the mental ac tivities and properties of or ganisms — emerged with greater clarity and intensity, and came to play a more important role in the indi vidual lives of animals. Eventually it broke through to become the foundation and the main source of fur ther evolution, though the essential character of evolu tion now become cultural instead of genetic or biologi cal. It was to this break through, brought about by the automatic mechanism of natural selection and not by any conscious effort on his own part, that man owes his dominant evolutionary posi tion. It is only through possess ing a mind that he has be come the dominant portion of this planet and the agent responsible for its future evolution; and it will be only by the right use of that mind that he will be able to exer cise that responsibility pro perly. He could all too readily be a failure in the job; he will succeed only if he faces it consciously and if he uses all his mental re sources — knowledge and rea son, imagination and sensiti vity, capacities for wonder and love, for comprehension and compassion, for spiritual aspiration and moral effort. And he must face it with out outside help. In the 20 Panorama evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, in cluding our human selves, mind and soul, as well as brain and body. So did religion. Religions are organs of psychosocial man concerned with human destiny and with experiences of sacredness and transcen dence. In their evolution, some (but by no means all) have given birth to the con cept of gods as supernatural beings endowed with mental and spiritual properties and capable of intervening in the affairs of nature, including man,. These theistic reli gions are' early organizations of human thought in its in teraction with the puzzling, complex world with which it has to contend — the outer world of nature and the in ner world of man’s own na ture. In this, they resemble other early organizations of human thought confronted with nature, like the doc trine of the Four Elements, earth, air, fire and water, or the Eastern concept of re birth and reincarnation. Like these, they are destined to disappear in competition with other, truer, and more embracing thought-organiza tions which are handling the same range of raw or pro cessed experience. Evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness by creeping fof shelter into the arms of a divinised father-figure whom he has himself created, nor escape from the responsibi lity of making decisions by sheltering under the um brella of Divine Authority, nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his pre sent problems and planning his future by relying on the will of an omniscient but unfortunately i n s c r u table Providence. On the other hand, his loneliness is only apparent. He is not alone as a type. Thanks to the astronomers, he now knows that he is one among many organisms that bear witness to the trend towards sen tience, mind and richness of being, operating so widely but so sparsely in the cos mos. June 1967 21 iMorc immediately impor tant, thanks to Darwin, he now knows that he is not an isolated phenomenon, cut off from the rest of nature by his uniqueness. Not only is he made of the same mat ter and operated by the same energy as all the rest of the cosmos, but for all his dis tinctiveness he is linked by genetic continuity with all the other living inhabitants of his planet. Animals, plants, and micro-organisms, they are all his cousins or remoter kin, all parts of one single branching and evolv ing flow of metabolizing pro toplasm. . . It is hard to break through the firm framework of an accepted belief-system and build new and complex suc cessors, but it is necessary. It is necessary to organize our ad hoc ideas and scat tered values into a unitive pattern, transcending con flicts and divisions in its uni tary web. Only by such a reconciliation of opposites and disparates can our belief system release us from inner conflicts: only so can we gain that peaceful assurance w'hich will help unlock our energies for development in strenuous practical action. Our new pattern of think ing will be evolution-centred. It will give us assurance by reminding us of our long evolutionary rise; how this was also, strangely and won derfully, the rise of mind; and how that rise culminated in the eruption of mind as the dominant factor in evo lution and led to our own spectacular but precarious evolutionary success. Our new organization of thought — belief-system, framework of values, ideo logy, call it what you will — must grow and be dev eloped in the light of our new evolutionary vision. So, in the first place, it must of course itself be evolutionary: that is to say, it must help us to think in terms of an overriding process of change, development, and possible improvment, to have our eyes on the future rather than on the past, to find support in the growing, spreading, upreaching body of our knowledge, instead of in the rigid frame of fixed dogma or ancient authority. Equal ly, of course, the evolutionary 22 Panorama outlook must be scientific, not in the sense that it re jects or neglects other hu man activities, but in believ ing in the value of the scien tific method for eliciting knowledge from ignorance and truth from error, and in basing itself on the firm ground of scientifically es tablished knowledge. Unlike most theologies, it accepts the inevitability and indeed the desirability of change, and advances by welcoming new discovery even when it conflicts with old ways of thinking. The only way in which the present split between re ligion and science could be mended would be through the acceptance by science of the fact and value of reli gion as aYi organ of evolving man, and the acceptance by religion that religions must evolve if they are not to be come extinct, or at best turn into outdated living fossils struggling to survive in a new and alien environment. Next, the evolutionary out look must be global. Man is strong and successful in so far as he operates in interthinking groups, which are able to pool their knowledge and beliefs. To have any success in fulfilling his des tiny as the controller or agent of future evolution on earth, he must become one single inter-thinking group, with one general framework of ideas: otherwise his men tal energies will be dissipated in ideological conflict. . . But our thinking must also be concerned with the indi vidual. The well-developed, well-patterned individual hu man being is, in a strictly scientific sense, the highest phenomenon of which we have any knowledge; and the variety of individual person alities is the world’s highest richness. In the light of the evolutionary vision the individual need not feel just a meaning less cog in the social ma chine, nor merely the help less prey and sport of vast impersonal forces. He can do something to develop his own personality, to discover his own talents and possibi lities, to interact personally and fruitfully with other in dividuals, to discover some thing of his own signifi cance . . . June 1967 23 Population is people in the mass; and it is in regard to population that the most drastic reversal or reorienta tion of our thinking has be come necessary. The unpre cedented population-e x p 1 osion of the last half-century has strikingly exemplified the Marxist principle of the passage of quantity into qua lity. . . Population-increase is al ready destroying or eroding many of the world’s re sources, both those for ma terial subsistence and those — equally essential but often neglected — for human en joyment and fulfillment. Early in man’s history the injunction to increase and multiply was right. Today it is wrong, and to obey it will be disastrous. The Western world has to achieve the difficult task of reversing the direction of its thought about population. It has to begin thinking that our aim should be not in crease but decrease — certain ly and quickly decrease in the rate of population growth; and in the long run equally, certainly, decrease in the absolute number of peo ple in the world, including our own countries. We must make the same reversal of ideas about our economic system. At the mo ment our Western economic system (which is steadily in vading new region) is based on expanding production for profit; and production for profit is based on expanding consumption. As one Ameri can writer has put it, our economy depends on per suading more people to be lieve that they want to con sume more products. This is leading to gross over-ex ploitation of resources that ought to be conserved, to excessive advertising, to the dissipation of talent and energy into unproductive channels, and to a diversion of the economy as a whole away from its true functions. But, like the population explosion, this consumption explosion cannot continue much longer: it is an inhe rently self-defeating process. Sooner rather than later we shall be forced to get away from a system based on arti ficially increasing the num ber of human wants, and set about constructing one aim 24 Panorama ed at the qualitative satis faction of real human needs, spiritual and mental as well as material and physiological. This means abandoning the pernicious habit of evaluat ing every human project solely in terms of its utility — by which the evaluators mean solely its material uti lity, and especially its utility in making a profit for some body . . . Quantity of material pro duction is, of course, neces sary as the basis for the sa tisfaction of elementary hu man needs — but only up to a certain degree. More than a certain number of calories or cocktails or TV sets or washing machines per person is not merely unne cessary b,ut bad. Quantity of material production can be only a means to a further end, not an end in itself. The important ends of man’s life include the crea tion and enjoyment of beauty, both natural and man-made; increased compre hension and a more assured sense of significance; the pre servation of all sources of pure wonder and delight, like fine scenery, wild ani mals in freedom, or unspoil ed nature; the attainment of inner peace and harmony; the feeling of active parti cipation in embracing and enduring projects, including the cosmic project of evolu tion. It is through such things that individuals attain greater fulfillment. As for nations and societies, they are remembered not for their wealth or comforts or technologies, but for their great buildings and works of art, their achievements in science or law or political philosophy, their success in liberating human life from the shackles of fear and ig norance. Finally, the evolutionary vision is enabling us to dis cern, however incompletely, the lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era. . . The emergent religion of the near future could be a good thing. It will believe in knowledge. It will be able to take advantage of the vast amount of new know ledge produced by the know ledge-explosion of the last few centuries in constructing June 1967 25 what we may call its theology — the framework of facts and ideas which provide it with intellectual support; it should be able, with our increased knowledge of mind, to de fine man’s sense of right and wrong more clearly so as to provide a better moral sup port, and to focus the feeling of sacredness on fitter ob jects. Instead of worship ping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher ma nifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellec tual comprehension and as piring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realiza tion of life’s possibilities as a sacred trust. Thus the evolutionary vi sion, first opened up for us by Charles Darwin a century back, illuminates our human existence in a simple but al most overwhelming way. It exemplifies the truth that truth is great and will pre vail and the greater truth that truth will set us free. Evolutionary truth frees us from subservient fear of the unknown and supernatural, and exhorts us to face this new freedom with courage tempered with wisdom, and hope tempered with know ledge. It shows us our des tiny and our duty. — By Ju lian Huxley, abstract from The Humanist Frame. NEW HUSBAND The dying man gasped pitifully, “Grant me one last request, Martha,” he pleaded. “Of course, Stanley,” she said softly. “Six month after I die I want you to marry Abner Jones,” he said. “Abner Jones! she said in a shocked tone. “But I thought you hated that man.” “Exactly, he said with his final breath. 26 Panorama

pages

20-26

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