Is Man Headed For Extinction

IS MAN HEADED FOR EXTINCTION?

Social disorder is becoming rife throughout the world. How we cope with it would decide the fate of our species.

Few will deny the proposition that overcrowding also has profound effects on human behaviour effects especially evident in the 19^th century. Until the rise of the city, space sheltered us. We competed, as men will always compete, for the big prices of territory, wealth, position. But as long as space was our vast asset, the territory with a fence around it was an objective all sought with enthusiasm.

Today, however as urban concentration continues to grow and competition shifts from dominance over a piece of space to dominance over fellow men, we encounter a vanishment of prices. Dominant individuals, competing as they must for the dwindling number of dominant slots find their aggressive potentiality becoming increasing uncontainable.

Thus the frustration of urban society are forcing on each citizen knowledge of his own nature: that we never have been and never shall be created equal. There is a lot wisdom when George Orwel in his book Animal Farm observed that some animals are more equal than others, that we get along more because we must than because we want to, that we are an aggressive lot easily given to violence. This we hate.

It has to be noted that the city is not a concentration camp, we freely enter the city - producing overcrowding, which eventually leads to a breakdown in the social structure which in turn calls forth urban disaster.

The paradox of the middle class is best explained by three innate and powerful needs which we as humans share with other higher animal. Arranged here is their order of importance.

1. Identity the opposite of anonymity

2. Stimulation, the opposite of boredom

3. Security, the opposite of anxiety

Increasingly, the achievement of economic security, with the resultant release from anxiety, is producing the bored society. The bored society could not be a total reality; however, were we not also an anonymous society stripped in large part of our opportunity to search for identity.

And hence the frustration of the search for identity from above, just as much as the achievement of security from below, forces us into the unendurable area of boredom – from which we can escape only through stimulation.

Violence, like pornography, is a means of stimulation. It carries with it excitement for both violator and violated, whether through the joyful hatreds of the one or the fearful rages of the other.

An urban riot is worth all the circuses that old-time kings could provide. And just like any other form of sensual shock, to retain its stimulation violence must move on to ever stronger or more novel levels of expression. That adaptable animal, the human being familiarizes himself all too easily to any present situation.

However, in so far as fresh sensory experiences satisfy only our need for stimulation, violent experiences tend to satisfy identity as well. The violent are praised whether the praised be the praise of collaborators or the condemnation of antagonists. The little world of violence is recognized. And within this cancerous world of new fellowship, blooms, a new communication flourishes, anonymity vanishes, and identity again becomes possible.

Nevertheless, however, in seeking identity through violence, we sow the seeds of our own destruction. If you sow to the wind, you reap a whirlwind so to speak. Aggressiveness by definition is the determined pursuit of one’s interests. Violence is the pursuit of such interests through force, or the threat of force. They are not the same.

Without aggression is an inborn force, survival throughout the entire natural world would be impossible. But, likewise, survival dictates aggression's limits. The rules of survival otherwise termed as the social contract dictates the evolvement throughout the many animal species, a body of rules and regulations which while encouraging the aggressive, discourages the violent. The problem of man today is not that we are aggressive but that we are breaking our own rules, in our violence; we are ignoring the social contact.

There are two different expressions of human violence. Namely:

1. The struggles within groups of social partners and the struggles between societies

2. War, which today is either winnable or inclusive.

As neither of these results is satisfactory, human violence, once expressed on the battlefield, is now being transferred to the city streets.

If we are to understand the civil substitute for war which is, riot, sabotage, assassination- then we should first inspect carefully the concept of the stranger.

The howling monkey roars, the spider monkey barks, the lion, without warning, attacks. It’s as though amongst the animal kingdom, invisible curtains hang between the familiar and the strange. The social rejection of strangers is as widespread a characteristic within social species any single characteristic we can study. Members of a limited group of similarities know what to expect of each other, and in such groups sufficient order come easily. But the new comer presents a problem. If his attentions persist he is driven out of a group’s social space and physically attacked.

Thus we have in our genetic make-up the tendency to reject strangers; we also have the propensity for violence. War may be nearly abolished but these tendencies are not. Faced with the question- “How do we get along without war?” We subconsciously transfer energies once directed outwards to the inward expression known as social violence. But such an expression presents an interesting problem. Now we must invent strangers.

The fundamental factor for the invention of strangers has to do with non-communication between those who speak the same language and share the same territory. In today’s society blacks and whites, parents and young, students and faculties, governments and the governed, have shown the workability non-communication, the creation of strangers and the transformation of acceptable aggressiveness into unacceptable civil violence.

A young person with a stone in hand is enjoying themselves. We rush to an accident not to help, we hurry to a fire not to put it out, we crowd around a fight not to stop it. Action and destruction are fun to us.

The concerned on-looker who will not accept this fact indulges in the hypocrisy which we cannot afford. The one who regards a taste of violent action as a human misdemeanor is not likely to make any great contribution to the control of our violent ways.

As one views the causes of violent behaviour rising before modern man, the conclusion that we are finished comes with great ease. Since men can live neither with each other nor without, extinction seems on the cards but any such conclusion is inexhaustible.

The social contact is an arrangement of biological validity. Like the sexual impulse of human diversity, it acts to pressure the species with a power which is far beyond human comprehension, Therefore what is at stake in modern times is not the survival of man, but the survival of the suggestion that man can succeed in social order through voluntary action.

The chances look good, because there is visible through all nature a prejudice in favour of such order. Lions and elephants restrict there numbers so that a habitat will not be exhausted by too many offspring. All such arrangements of animals give simple proof to the preferences for order in natural ways.

Fact: violent sub-groups threaten modern society. But likewise the very complexity of our social interdependence threatens the survival of these groups. The social animal cannot stand alone, least of all contemporary man.

Human foresight, combined with a biological need for order, should take center stage before total social disorder. The question that we cannot answer for now is when shall enough of us see the road to disaster in time?

If we do, then with whatever pain, we shall have to accept various comprises, give up certain rights which we believe sacred. We shall provide honours of identity which we now disapprove control our violent confrontations, within such ritualized aggressions as negotiation, seek to correct those true injustices that lend responsibility to violent arrangements and discourage social applause for the violator.

But what if we do not? What if we lack the will or the vision to see what awaits us?

Several years ago an eminent American journalist and historian Theodore White, wrote a simple comment that ought to be stamped in the minds of every active democracy; ‘If man cannot agree on how to rule themselves, someone else must rule them”.

If we do not have the clairvoyance, if we do not have the will, then we shall find out one day who waits to rule us.

Author: Chris Kihara