Golden Ages

"How can we realistically call it a "Golden Age" of humanity?? World Peace is not all it is cracked up to be, you know."

"Whatever do you mean, oh doubtful one? Aren't Golden Ages good things? And why do you say it as though the words are accompanied by sardonic speech marks?"

"I'm asking a question which pierces to the heart of the human condition here. Think about it. What possible good is something like world peace? It's like the opposite of that song... what was that song... back in the 70s...?"

"'War, What Is It Good For?'?"

"YES! That's the one! "War, huh! What Is It Good For?" -- it's like the opposite of that. More like "PEACE! - What is it good for?"

"I'm not quite following. Do realise that this conversation started somewhere out of the blue, and I have yet to pinpoint the place you are coming from."

"Oh yeah! ha ha.... I hear all these stories, these fictional visions, hopes for the future. They all involve a human race which has entered some sort of Golden Age and left it behind, some kind of Golden Age or Ages where the technology of Today has magically transformed into something fantastic. Spaceships, lasers, robots, all that."

"You have a problem with that? It's just fiction, you know. How can anybody in their right mind have a problem with fiction. Do you want to burn some books?"

"Not exactly. I'm asking how someone in their right mind could honestly take any of this stuff and believe it to be some sort of preordaning of a future path of humanity. Most of them all agree on it somehow, that we will have certain things at some certain point in the future."

"So?"

"So, wouldn't you agree that there is some sense of agreement in the fiction - and there is so much of it! - an agreement that this is the goal we will aim for in the real world?"

"I can see what you mean there. Like stories of using a big gun to launch is to the moon. You could think of the Saturn rockets of the Apollo program as ginormous bullets, but with no gun, instead powering themselves along."

"Right! Right! That's what I'm getting at! So many people think that Science Fiction is a blueprint of sorts for our future development. Which brings me back to my original point. They all require a Golden Age. And I don't think it is realistic to expect such a massive Golden Age."

"Uh huh. And you don't like Golden Ages?"

"No, I'm all for them. But I don't think the 'Big One' will ever come."

"Well, why not? What's stopping it?"

"Not what's stopping it, but what's stopping us!!"

"Do tell."

"The last Golden Age could be said to be in the Industrial Revolution. But look how that turned out: complete upheaval of the pre-industrial social order, enslavement of the lower classes into factory-labour and a general overlay of disease and pollution. We started raping our planet, and now our social problems are bigger than ever!"

"Wow! You might be right about the conditions back then, but that's a seriously negative perspective to take. What about the bright side?"

"What bright side?"

"Are YOU working in a factory now?"

"No. I work in a service-based industry."

"Uh huh. As do I. Most of us here in the industrialised world work in a service-based industry. Whether it's private advisors like doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers, or food providers like supermarkets and restaurants, or just the public services like politicians, police and teachers. Where did all that industrial dirt and flth go?"

"Oh it's still here. I mean, not here here, not in the industrialised world. We shipped it back off to the unindustrialised world. The people there don't want so much money for the same work, and they also don't care for things like safety, welfare, compensation -- you know, all those pesky things which seek to guarantee high living standards, but at the expense of raw business profits."

"Well, why not in the industrialised world? Can't an unemployed person with able-body pick up a hammer?"

"He can, but he wants to be guaranteed ironclad that if he drops that hammer on his toe, he gets some kind of payout for the injury it causes him."

"Well, he could just not drop the hammer."

"No, no, he will drop the hammer. Eventually. He might even drop it on purpose. Either way, he also wants to have things like benefits - you know, so if he decides to knock up another worker and they get married, she gets time off the have the kid, and she gets to come back to her job when it's all done and born. It would be so much easier if her employer could just fire her and pick up a new employee off the street corner."

"That sorta makes them all sound like pieces of meat, to tell the truth."

"Well, maybe it does, but it's the most economically efficient way of looking at it."

"Indeed it is, but where is the heart? Where is the humanity??"

"Who needs heart and humanity when you got shitloads of money? You can hire someone to act hearty and humany in your spare time."

"'Spare time'?"

"I know, I know. In certain parts of the industrialised world "spare time" is somewhat of a mystery. But hey, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinnin'!"

"But what does any of this have to do with World Peace? I recall you mentioned that in the beginning."

"Oh, yes. 'World Peace'. Well, like you just said, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinning. For the kind of Golden Age we'd need to push off and start colonising planets and developing cures to our diseases and building spaceships and all that, we'd have to do some pretty impossible things."

"Go on."

"Well, for one, we'd have to end wars in our world."

"Hence World Peace?"

"Of course. It can be said that many wars have turned the tide of history and pushed us along. I'd agree for most examples. Even the two biggies - World War I and World War II, gave us the wrist watch and nuclear bomb respectively, among many other things; many other things which are taken for granted now, but were simply lived without a hundred years ago."

"But you're saying that wars have driven human development. You are contradictin..."

"So it may seem. They HAVE driven human development. A lot changed with those last two biggies. Before WWI, there was a certain order to the world. Between the wars we got carried away with the exhilaration of going back to that order, then took it all way too far in the Great Depression. World War II put the nail in the coffin of the pre-WWI style world, and now we have the modern Real World."

"Can you give me some kind of example?"

"Yes I can! The bet example is that of conquest and colonialism. Before World War One, every coutnry and its sovereign ruler, be it democratically elected or autocratic or whatever in between, had basically a god-given right to call other countries evil and invade for the good of the motherland - or fatherland. But when the United Nations was born, a strict element of its charter was to outlaw conquest and annexation by force - it tried to push democracy as a global governing force."

"But I love democracy. It may not be perfect, but it is the best we have. When I don't like someone, and enough people agree with me, I kick him out of relevance."

"Well, your first problem there is that YOU may like democracy, but a LOT of other people in this world do NOT!"

"Like whom??"

"Pick any country still ruled by a king in the Middle East or Africa. Pick almost any damn country inside OPEC. Hell, even the United States - the crowning jewel of democracy, has a whacky voting system that defies any believable semblance of democratic process."

"You mean that election back at the turn of the century?"

"Indeed I do! So, your first step here, and hence the first stage of a Golden Age, would require convincing all the people who hate democracy to like it - this means convincing the hardcore fundamentalists that secularism is not lethally heretic. It means asking politely that people who have the will and the way to subvert democratic processes for sake of their own monetary gain to please stop trying to make huge wads of money."

"What do you mean 'ask politely'? Can't we make them do it?"

"What do you mean 'we'? Who is 'we'? You and me?"

"Well, I suppose the correct armed force would have to do it - you know, like the trained and organised military of a democratic superpower."

"Oh, like the US Armed Forces? Would it make any difference if you sat back to see who gives the orders? The President. And what if the President is in fact one of these money-porking blood-suckers? Because he was once! And I guarantee you that it will happen again!"

"You have very little faith in the human race, my friend."

"Give me something to have faith in, and I'll have faith in it. Faith, Blind Faith, is something for child molesters and neurotics who can't survive their corporeal existence without asking questions that may be worthy to something that simply does not exist."

"Are you an atheist or something?"

"No. Not at all. I have many many better things to do thatn sit around all day trying to prove god doesn't exist. I already know that, and anyone who doesn't is only deliding themselves."

"I suppose so."

"Anyway, the Golden Age they all require, all those future worlds of hi-tech and gadgetry, they all need humanity to let go of religion for starters. If God wanted us to walk among the stars with him, he wouldn't have held us back for a cumulative millennium during the Dark and Middle Ages."

"I thought you just said God didn't exist."

"I did. There was no actual being named 'God' holding us back. It was US, us HUMANS, all along! How pathetic is that! How can the same race that held itself back for fear of a thing that does not exist be expected to launch itself into a Golden Age of such epic proportions like the one we need???"

"Well, we can hardly say that God is holding us back anymore, not in the 21st century. Or at least, not in the developed, industrialised world."

"Well, yes and no. No, in that the world changed after all that was before it. No more tithe and not so much bible-bashing as in the good ol' Inquisition days. But YES in that we have two problems now: ONE: with the extreme population parameters (in relative terms to all aof human history) there is an alarming number of middle class humans who have time, money, and no purpose in their lives. These people become weak and soft at the heart and the core, and when in tough times they automatically turn back to more modern incarnations of that aeons-old thumb-sucking ritual of organised religion. There are also, for that matter, many mroe fundamentalists who are grasping for those good ol' days of long, long ago, and whether inadvertantly or not they are blanding the modern with the ancient and coming up with theologies and doctrines that are paradoxical to say the least, calling for religion that was relevant back in the stone age to govern a modern society.
TWO (the other problem), is the NEW God - MONEY!"

"The Almighty Dollar?"

"The Almighty Dollar! But I'll go into more detail on that later. For now, I want to clarify myself and say this: With all the security blankets and surrogate deities humans have constructed over their time on this Earth, I find it very hard to fathom that the world will enter any sort of colossal golden age. Hell, even the lowly middle- and lower class people still watch reality TV and listen to opinionated media pundits to the letter. How else could thousands of people protest the development of universal healthcare in the USA? How else could those thousands of people be tricked into wanting to pay through the nose for every damn thing they buy? Tow reasons: They are stupid, and the people pulling their nose-rings are extremely self-centric and unsympathetic."

"Well, I guess that for the Golden Age to occur, people are just going to have to get over all thse speed bumps."

"Not that easy, my friend. These 'speed-bumps' are mountains of our own creation, they are human constructs, and they exist because we put them there, and we reinforce and renovated them every damn chance we get - whenever there is a setback in science, whenever the weather goes bad, and whenever our lives take ugly turns. The best thing for us would be a form of evolution. Allow Darwin's order to come back to the fore, and allow the stupid and morally weak and worthless to die off, by whatever means the elements of evolution bring to them."

"The next stage of human evolution? A moral and intellectual shoring up of the human population? Is that even possible? Does this mean yet another war - a war of extermination or something??"

"No. That would definitely be the wrong thing. Even cockraches would survive a nuclear holocaust. The dummies would always survive, and doubtless so any form of violence is simply out of the question. Even if we found a way to judge who was worthy, and sealed them in bunkers and nuked the planet to rid the arseholes, there would always be more in the near future. This is because of two things: ONE: the natural movements of mutation (a key factor in Darwin's theory) would eventually produce from the seeds of two intellectuals a complete arsehole - and that arsehole would likely be an evil genius, too, and would find a way to enslave the smart people - it'd be like the situation now, only much harder to realise and much harder to get out of.
TWO: The people who were sealed away would come back out, and, despite their alleged moral and intellectual superiority, the kinds of competitiveness and arguements that come from smart people trying to convince each other of their own versions of reality would eventually produce an army of piss-off smart people who would fight the rest of them and, again, lead us into an even worse situation thatn we are in now.
Plus, whatever method was used to select the people to go into the mineshafts and bunkers would be the product of a human mind - sullied by the vices of self-interest and uncertainty -- so commonly human!"

"So what are we to do?"

"If I knew that, I'd have done it already."

"Did you start this conversation just to make me feel like shit? Because that's what's happening!"

"Oh. Sorry about that. No, I didn't. I started it for one real purpose, a purpose which, to be honest, was not even on my mind originally, but has evolved as we have talked.
To paraphrase what a great man once said, God is no sort of supreme being sitting in the sky and playing dice. What people think as 'God', I think as the sum total and sum prduction of my boundless ability of wonderment. My capability to wonder about things far out of my reach. My imagination, if you want to sum into one word. I want YOU to use your imagination as much as I do. Hey, maybe that is the evolutionary step we are supposed to take. I mean, our human bodies have evolved over millions of years, and with some minor compromises I can't see how it could go further. but our minds have not. We need NOT all become supergeniuses overnight. All we each need do is wonder a little more, and then a lot more. We like to tell ourselves a few times a year that many brave men died in those big wars - and still die today - to afford us the freedoms we have. That may or may not have been an ongoing propaganda ploy by our less noble political leaders, but what our dear leaders don't know (and even if they did, they can't stop it) is that the freedoms we have in the freest countries today are freedoms of the mind, and freedoms of expression. They were born out of struggles for just that, and the original purpose of those struggles is in many ways irrelevant now. So be glad that you are not living in one of those countries where by policy or by culture there are no shackels on your mind. (like Japan, just to single out ONE of MANY.)
I want you to wonder, my friend. It won't hurt you, and even if the almighty dollar is your god, then it is still worth your while. We didn't get the nuke because Oppenheimer was stuck on exploding gas lamps."

"OK. I'll give it a try."

"You do that. Trust me, it feels good. Then, maybe we can get back to that Golden Age. One day."