The Getter of Wisdom (Homo sapientior)
Developing wisdom at species level. The evolution of a new humanity, which thinks as a species. The shift from male thought to female thought and leadership. How women can save the world. Changing our identity to reflect the new, risky reality. Setting ‘s
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To know yourself is the beginning of all wisdom —Aristotle. He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened —Lao Tzu.
The twenty-first century will present humanity with the supreme test of our wisdom. To attain it, to survive and prosper peaceably, we need to understand ourselves and our situation better. Among the chief attributes of wisdom is the ability to interpret the likely future and to take precautions against adverse outcomes or take advantage of change and emerging opportunities. This ability to foresee events, based on past experience and a careful reading of present indicators, is the distinguishing quality of humans and has been the principal reason for our success so far. Now, however, we inhabit a time when that success has led to our predominating over the planet, in the process profoundly altering the very systems we rely on for survival: atmosphere, soil, water, other living creatures, our good health, our numbers and ability to get along with one another. We live in times when a domino-like succession of changes is occurring with such swiftness and hammer-blow ferocity that many people are dismayed, even paralysed by it. Nevertheless, we must all respond if we value our survival. This chapter explores two developments which will be essential to the continuance of both our civilisation and of humankind. It then offers a pathway forward.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J. Cribb, Surviving the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41270-2_10
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Surviving the 21st Century
Thinking as a Species The existential threats of ecosystem collapse, resource depletion, nuclear war, climate change, global toxification, famine, overpopulation, pandemic disease, universal surveillance and uncontrollable technologies which surround us may find their solution in the most import human achievement of the past million years: the linking of minds, values, information and beliefs at lightspeed and in real time, around the planet. This is a development without precedent, not only in our own history but also among all the species which have ever inhabited the Earth. Almost unawares, we are giving birth to an entirely different kind of human. In the second trimester of a baby’s gestation a marvellous thing happens. The neurons, axons and glia in the embryonic brain begin to connect—and cognition is born. An inanimate mass of cells and microbes becomes a sentient being, capable of thought, imagination, memory, logic, feelings, beliefs and dreams. Today individual humans are connecting globally, at light speed, just like the cells in the embryonic brain. We are in the process of forming, if you like, a universal, Earth-sized mind. What the Jesuit philosopher and prehistorian, Teilhard de Chardin, once termed the ‘noosphere’—the realm of human thought or intelligence that encircles the Earth—is becoming incarnate (de Chardin 1955). A higher understanding, and potentially a higher intellect, is in genesis—capable of interpreting, and maybe solving, our problems at supra-human lev
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