Our Challenge Today
The new sciences of our human past form an intricate and wholly original narrative, not just of our history but of our own time as well. This fuller accounting of ourselves spans the more than five million years of natural human life leading up to the Agrarian Revolution, and the roughly ten thousand years since this nearly contemporaneous and radical change in human life.
Our story as a species includes waves of natural human development on the savannahs of Africa, each selected for increasing intelligence and creativity, over millions of years. It then moves to the sudden rise and precipitous fall of early regional civilizations in the evolutionary moments that are centuries. In the comparatively short history of settled human life, there have been times of wisdom and peace already, and recurring and nagging descents into primitive belligerence and conflict.
Each of these lessons of early settled life is enormously important and instructive to us today. They give us hope for more beneficial conditions and equally suggest the need for specific changes and science-based improvements to our hereto unconsciously-evolved global civilization. As we will discuss in more detail, these changes involve better managing fixed life to create conditions that ensure fairness and provide essential security to all people, nurture talent and creativity for individual and collective benefit, and make progressive, health-seeking, and adaptive life the essential mission of society.
To conclude this brief but foundational summary of our past, we must add that our human history now includes the Industrial Revolution and the development of advanced technology. It includes the rise of modern democracy and civil society. And it of course includes the enabling and accompanying rise and increasing preeminence of science and science-based human worldviews. Together, these new modern developments almost certainly mark yet another new chapter in the remarkable history of our human ascent from pre-human life, and our long natural development and increasing power as a social cooperative species.
After many centuries of fixed civilization, but just a few brief decades of industrialization, new technologies and social changes now proceed on an extraordinary scale and at an incredible pace. In our time, they are creating and helping to influence an emerging new global culture, one that steadily dominates in our world and is distinct from the pre-industrial cultures that came before it. This new world culture is more educated and affluent than the regional societies that today contribute to it, and are gradually replaced and eroded by it. This growing global culture is increasingly aware that it is enabled by and must actively manage new technological development, and that our decisions and actions greatly influence our quality of life today and human possibilities for the future.
In this time of rapid change, human life and health are now seemingly even further from their natural state, as advancing technology and new social conditions inexorably work to further isolate us from natural life and the original sources of our health. For many, lasting well-being and natural harmony are ever more difficult phenomena to envision, let alone achieve, in the often frantic and pressured condition of modern life – and with the increasing breakdown of our earlier agrarian order and its conceptual tetherings.
At the same time, there are clear signs of emerging positive trends in our world society. In particular, there is a growing modern awareness of our new species capacity for greater self-mastery and more optimal conditions, owing to the new tools and transparency of science and the rise of industrial-age affluence and knowledge. In this new awareness, many of us sense the waiting opportunity and feel the natural challenge to achieve fundamentally new levels of health and quality of life than people of earlier epochs. This new state takes the general form of a progressive new harmony with one another and the natural world around us. In our time, many of us search for the formulas and components that will enable this new human condition
As evidence of this growing trend, rising numbers of us place unprecedented new emphasis on our health and quality of life, including environmental health and social sustainability, even if these developments are still disjointed and not yet well-linked to the science and practices that will be needed to create true breakthrough conditions in life today. This new health orientation, like our overall society, is often still too-rooted in our pre-scientific past and insufficiently appreciative of the full opportunity and capacities of our new present. At times, these pre-modern biases allow untested, ill-considered, and erroneous ideas to thrive. While these developments may perhaps work to raise expectations and will lead to advancement, they also likely inhibit our full potential for cooperative and progressive action today.
Even with this cautionary note, our new modern openness to change and many alternative ideas about human flourishing are an auspicious sign and a gateway to new personal learning and more beneficial social conditions. Already, our new outlook has led to important environmental and social justice initiatives, improving the health and lives of many. These trends underscore our earlier discussion of our still elusive and yet waiting and increasingly palpable potential for progressive new awareness and realized modern states of health and quality of life. They highlight a critical new imperative and opportunity for professional scientists to foster greater health awareness and new health-impacting applications of science in society. Equally, these trends challenge non-scientists to support these efforts and insist that our public leaders better translate rapidly-advancing health science into progressive quality of life improvements and social sustainability.
Against this remarkable new natural health potential, we must also contend with our still formidable pre-scientific legacy and its many evolved and less than optimal norms and traditions. These include the modern facts of unchecked inequality and unhealthy and irrational materialism, acculturated norms and systems that are contrary to our general requirements for well-being and vitality, and subcultures indifferent to or opposing science and new human self-understanding. Like the progressive trends of our times, these traditional and legacy forces define our times and frame the needed work of healthier and higher quality life today.
Our dawning global society is thus a place of remarkable new opportunities for new health and one of potent limits, new and old, on our capacity for change. In our time, the modern world is quickly assimilating our remaining agrarian populations into a dominant urban condition and consumerist pattern of life. As a species, we are rapidly gravitating to a few hundred large metropolitan areas around the world – in the most sudden and massive movement of people in our history – even as people in the previously-industrialized and urbanized areas of the world increasingly question the wisdom, sustainability, and optimality of these changes.
Crossing into the future
Along with its unhealthy legacy and many new personal entrapments, modern civilization has been enabled by, and thus has brought with it, modern science and more advanced and secure times for many of us.
These new developments – even amidst conditions of reduced social health and the many undesirable aspects of our times – afford us the potential for far more informed, considered, and optimally-created lives and communities than ever before. They present the unprecedented opportunity and real prospect today of very different lives for ourselves, compared with our parents, and for entirely new futures for our children and future generations of people.
The evolution of human society over the last ten thousand years, that initially led us away from nature and natural life, and from our natural health and essential sources of well-being, has also finally brought us back again to the facts and lessons of our long life and health in nature. Our evolving society and technology now provide us with a new modern capacity and freedom to explore our human origins, to uncover our necessary connections to the natural world, and to see ourselves in much richer and fuller terms.
To cross this modern human threshold into the future – into new, more scientifically-oriented, and health-affirming forms of life – and to take our own first steps into the more informed and vital personal choices waiting there for us, we can begin humbly and work pragmatically. We can start by using the science of our past to restore our personal diet and daily activity patterns, better meeting essential requirements for our natural health and well-being. In this way, we can explore and validate for ourselves the new science and power our ancient natural health, and better appreciate its potential to generally renew and then transform our life and larger environment.
When we find that our health, well-being, and quality of life are improved from these early and foundational efforts, we can press on to seek new and higher dimensions of healthier life. We can use science to pursue new vitality and harmony in other areas of our lives, and then enlarge our efforts with others around us. As we pursue, creatively use, and confirm each new lesson from the science of our natural past, as well as other new truths of healthy human life that science affords, we can increasingly, practically, and progressively improved the quality of our lives and society.
Our challenge, as modern people living amidst the revolution in human understanding and technological power that is our time in history, is to move forward in essential new ways. It is to act from our transformed knowledge of our past, from our reawakened connection to our ancient natural origins and health, and from our prospect of new attentiveness to the many opportunities for improved life in advanced society today. As individuals and as a global civilization, it is to seek our progressive health and vitality against the ultimate fact of our life in nature, and our life long-based on increasing cooperation, intelligence, and adaptability.
With our most compelling needs and possibilities as people in mind, we can forge a new synthesis of our ancient past and the modern world around us, taking what is best in each and creating conditions for sustaining well-being and more vital life for the future. In the least, as a modest first step on this larger path of progressively healthier life, each of us can commit individually to investigate and re-discover, and then build upon, our own personal potential for natural health and well-being – in the weeks and months ahead, in small and perhaps not so small steps.