OF HUMAN ADVANCEMENT

Is there anything that you and I can do to help devise and promote a viable future on Earth for all creatures, great and small?  Then, beyond that primary exigency, can we also make salutary advances into new understanding and invention that realizes more of our intellect’s potential to create beyond the capacity of mindless nature?

Somehow, out of unconsciousness, consciousness has emerged on Earth, and then self-consciousness in us, Homo sapiens sapiens.  If there are yet higher, finer, keener levels of mentality to be realized, it seems likely that we are the agents of such advancement, at least here on Earth—for who knows what the evolutionary process has manifested elsewhere in the cosmos, beyond our present ken?

To that end of advancing human mentality, our first imperative is that of the physician: Do no harm; yet that commandment we have blatantly flouted.  Obviously, our burgeoning, reckless species, like a plague of locusts, is ravaging our planet’s resources and despoiling its habitat.  That behavior we must cease or any hope of advancement is null.  Our population must be limited rationally and humanely.

Yet, every human being born must be regarded as precious—a pearl of great price.  Children’s caregivers must assume the responsibility of doing all possible to help the child’s positive potentials manifest and flourish, not merely its aptitudes and talents, but its whole humanity as a loving, caring, generous person.

Whence does malice, evil, atrocity arise?  “I’m depraved on accounta I’m deprived,” says a lyric from West Side Story.  Just so.  We need what we need, and without proper provision we fail to flourish.  Without loving-kindness we rot.

Humankind is most assured of advancement to the extent that it is both human and kind.

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