On a Saturday night before finals week, I did what any college student would do to relieve some stress: watch 2001: A Space Odyssey, alone in my dorm.
2001: A Space Odyssey is a polarizing film, in large part thanks to its ambition. As the YouTuber exurb1a observed (along with many others), the film aspires to be a modern myth. When I say “myth”, I don't mean a belief that's not true. The myths I'm talking about are stories, often with supernatural elements, that attempt to answer certain foundational questions for a culture. Among other things, 2001: A Space Odyssey engages with the themes of human progress and evolution, offering a narrative spanning from prehistory to the future.
I'll spare you my literary analysis. I bring up the film because it made me appreciate—in a way only art can—just how remarkable and fragile humanity truly is.
As far as we know, humanity is the most complex thing that the universe has ever created. But our familiar way of life (with agriculture, language, technology, and so on) is an abnormality in the big picture. Civilization has only been around for a little over 10,000 years—that might sound like a lot, but compared to the ~4,000,000,000 years of life on Earth or the ~13,800,000,000 years of the universe, we are a blip. Not only is our situation abnormal, but it's also rapidly changing. Although it might be an obvious observation, it's worth a reminder that we have never been in our current situation before—and as far as we know, no one else has either.
We are a cosmic experiment. We do not know how the future will turn out. Like Natasha Bedingfield famously said, the rest is still unwritten. I think we tend to forget that.
Many of us just assume that progress will continue; I figure that's for a few reasons. One is just extrapolation from the past. Yes, there has been a general positive trend line of progress over time, but it hasn't exactly been smooth. Humanity has experienced many periods of decline. To name a few in Europe alone: the Late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the crisis of the late Middle Ages.
Another reason is that capitalism as a socioeconomic order is constituted atop of the promise of eternal economic growth (ignoring the perennial recession every ten years or so). There is a sort of technological-utopian presupposition in capitalism that creating more advanced technology will lead to a higher standard of life. Of course, we know that this isn't necessarily true. The same technology that brought us nuclear energy brought us nuclear bombs. Technology is simply the use of knowledge to achieve goals—these goals can be good or bad. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman compared science, the discipline that brings us technology, to keys: everything we discover or invent is a key to the gates of heaven, but also to the gates of hell.[1]
A third reason is the lingering persistence of the idea that we are in the “end of history”—that, following the Cold War, democratic capitalism has prevailed. The “end of history” meme has been making a spiritual resurgence with the “nothing ever happens” crowd, albeit with less of an optimistic angle. But I think that crowd is wrong. It is true that we are in a period of relative stability, but I would predict that it's just the calm before the storm. People in countries around the world are ousting their governments, in no clear pattern other than anti-incumbency.[2] It's becoming clear that people are generally unhappy, and that the new world order created by neoliberalism at the turn of the century is not stable.
But above all else, we don't often contemplate whether human society is in decline because it's just plain uncomfortable. Our collective fate is something we as individuals have very little control over. It's comforting to imagine that democratic capitalism is like autopilot, that it will naturally and autonomously deliver us progress towards salvation. There comes a point, though, when reality makes this thesis untenable. There are serious existential threats to humanity that we have not yet properly addressed: artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, fascism, etc. For all the bad that will come from Trump's second term, it will hopefully make Americans realize that progress is not assured.
There is a deeper question underlying all of this: what is progress? Or in other words, what do we want to advance towards? Myths like 2001: A Space Odyssey depict a teleology of humanity that we need to discover and actualize. But absent an alien monolith, our species needs to figure this out ourselves.
Humanity is in adolescence, and it's time for us to ask what we want to be.
Our society hasn't really grappled with this question in any substantive fashion. Under our current configuration of neoliberalism, there is no shared mission, other than increasing shareholder profit for its own sake. Like stated earlier, I don't think this is stable. I can't help but wonder if the current rise of Christian nationalism is in part due to its promise of an answer. If we want to ensure that these ideologies are only phases in humanity's adolescence, we need to get lucid, center this question, and come up with a better answer.
What seems to be common among nearly every ideology is a desire to achieve some sort of higher standard of living. But of course, this is too unspecific. What does a higher standard of living entail? What exactly should we prioritize?
Not to be overly presumptuous, but I'd like to take a crack at figuring this out. Well, someone has to do it! Besides, if we want everyone to be on board, we should come up with goals that are simple and agreeable. We don't need to be experts to identify common values.
I think the first thing we should try to get done as a species is to ensure that all of our basic needs are met. By basic, I mean physiological and safety needs: the bottom layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This includes air, food, water, shelter, sleep, sanitation, healthcare, and security (both physical and emotional). We have the technology and abundance to acquire these things for everyone; it is only a matter of distribution at this point.
It's shameful that we haven't done this already. I hate to play the capitalism card again, but there's only one system to blame. We have relegated essential goods that should be public utilities to the profit motive. I don't believe that the profit motive is all bad; it is effective for some kinds of progression. But profit is inherently exclusionary, as to make profit is to set prices. The price that brings a corporation the most profit is almost always greater than the price that everyone can afford, and if a consumer can't afford something, they don't get it. This inherent tension makes the profit motive particularly bad at providing goods or services that we believe should be accessible to all.
I don't necessarily believe that we should settle at the specific needs I listed, but they're places to start. Providing these needs would give our species a foundation on which to develop. Our society can meet more needs as we expand our infrastructure and create more abundance.
Secondly and simultaneously, we need to ensure our longevity as a species. Achieving such a goal requires of us both reactivity and proactivity. For example, protecting ourselves from future pandemics not only entails quick and effective responses, but developing the health infrastructure necessary to monitor risks and carry out such responses. Tackling climate change not only entails stopping the active destruction of our planet, but going on to redesign all of our past practices (and continuing to design our future practices) to be sustainable.
If you're anything like me, you are fatigued by all the hullabaloo about artificial intelligence. But I think we're too hyper-focused on the short-term economic threats to see the long-term existential threat. The Human Era has been characterized by humans being the apex predator of the world—but this will soon change. We are creating entities that will soon surpass our collective intelligence, the characteristic that elevated us above the other great apes. Whether it will take 10 or 1000 years for such intelligence to emerge is unclear, but if we stay on this path, it will happen. Unlike some other folks on the left, I don't believe that we realistically can (or should) stop this wave of AI advancement, but that's a topic for another essay. All I want to say here is that we need to prepare to live aside another intelligent species.
In the long-term, we should attempt to become a multi-planetary species. I know that there's a lot of antagonism against space exploration because our situation on Earth is still less than ideal. But we shouldn't venture into outer space just to have fun, we should be building an insurance plan. If Earth goes kapoot, spreading our society across multiple planets may be the thing that ensures the continuation of humanity (and perhaps even life). Also, I think this is a false dichotomy; we can both improve our situation here on Earth and secure our future among the stars.
Beyond fulfilling our individual basic needs and ensuring our collective survival, I'm unsure what humanity ought to aim for. Should we conquer the galaxy? Should we upload our consciousnesses to a state of pure bliss? Should we work towards some colossal art project? This seems like a question for philosophy, and it doesn't seem like the philosophers have reached a consensus quite yet. I think for the moment, that's ok; we have enough on our plate right now. However, keep in mind that, assuming everything goes well, humanity will have to answer this question eventually.
How do we achieve these goals? Big species projects like these require us a build a stronger concept of a collective humanity. Such a concept, a collective humanity, is necessarily built upon a shared appreciation of the intrinsic value of all humans, and it is actualized through the establishment of democratic global institutions.
Whether we like it or not, we are all interconnected—our fates are linked. Never before in history has humanity held the tools to destroy itself so quickly. Before 1945, the worst that intraspecies conflict could realistically bring was the total supremacy of one group of humans over another (which, to be clear, is still very bad). Since 1945, the worst is total human extinction. We've gotten remarkably lucky so far, but we need to take this risk seriously and begin to work together, even if it is difficult. (Can you tell that I watched Oppenheimer?)
I doubt we will be able to overcome all of our divisions or prejudices any time soon—tribalism seems to be ingrained in us. But at the very least, can we think of humanity as one big tribe? If that means we need an enemy, might I propose something akin to suffering itself? I know such a paradigm is perhaps more difficult than “blame [insert group of people here] for everything”, but it might be necessary.
God is dead. Jesus is not taking the wheel. We don't have to take the wheel, but personally, I'd like to stop this clown car that we call life from crashing. Just imagine: after that, we can think about where we want to drive.
[1] Quoted by Michael Stevens, Vsauce, in his video “Cruel Bombs”.
[2] Robert Ford, “Kamala Harris is just the latest victim of global trend to oust incumbents”, The Guardian, November 10, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/global/2024/nov/10/kamala-harris-is-just-the-latest-victim-of-global-trend-to-oust-incumbents.