Short Term Animals In A World Of Longer-Term Consequences
Why we humans find it so difficult to act in our own best interests
Civilization.
What a lovely word. For some Europeans it conjures up not merely cities and commerce but literature, theatre, music, and all the other arts. It implies a wider span of knowledge and, hopefully, a more humane approach to the business of surviving each day until sunset.
Alas, civilization is in many ways built upon inventions arising from the exigencies of war. A great many of our shiny modern technologies either arose during WWII (radar, jet engines, enriched nuclear materials that today are used to provide electricity but whose origins lie in bombs) or were made in preparation for the next war (the Internet, space flight, GPS navigation). We humans, it is clear from history, simply adore slaughtering each other in as many novel ways as we can conjure into existence.
Although the world has never had a day in which a war was not being waged somewhere on Earth, we naturally tend to focus only on our own personal experiences. The USA has restricted itself to cultivating a constant stream of around 35,000 gun deaths per year and to invading distant nations since its civil war ended in 1865 CE. Western Europeans since 1945 have experienced the longest…
