The babies

You ever think about the life that someone born around now will have?
It isn't going to end with us. We have to leave them something. It should be something good.

It isn't that complicated. In the past all species have developed until they became extinct. Because they couldn't survive. Some of these we killed. Others died because of ecological changes. One of the things that distinguishes humans from other animals is the impact we have on the environment. A wolf might eat a deer, but damn thing isn't dumping poison into the oceans.

We do this. Because we have to have stuff. Because we are selfish and live for our own pleasure, ignoring the impact it has on anyone else.

A lot of people have talked about how to make the world a better place, but beyond sin, beyond oppression, beyond racism, beyond sexism, beyond whatever you want to call the bad in the world is the selfishness of evolution. That's what capitalism is: evolution. We compete to see who gets to reproduce. Or whose ideas get to reproduce themselves. Humans, see, can think about shit and figure it out. So we come up with ideas and those reproduce themselves in culture so we can become selves who fight to survive. So our DNA can get from here to there.

It is culture that keeps us from being condemned to the fate of all previous species who have had their day and died. We can talk all we want about the fallen civilizations of the past, but truth is the Roman Empire lives on in the U.S. and it will live on in China or whomever survives us. As a species we've only been around a little while, but we've managed to transgress our temporality because of our ability to communicate. A dinosaur could only warn his immediate contemporaries of dangers, could only pass on her acquired knowledge to immediate contacts. We can learn from those who have been dead for thousands of years.

People die. Culture doesn't. It just mutates.

We need to make sure there are hosts for it in the future. Because it is all we can leave of the past.

mm