Chernyshevsky011
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On The Past
From Arkady Chernyshevsky's In Our Likeness: Essays on Humankind Reaching Adulthood:
With alarming frequency, our mythological narratives conceptualize our separation from Nature as a fall: a punishment for sinning, a loss of innocence, a decline from a golden age. We believe that a better state of humanity is possible, but insist that this state must be in the past. And yet our historical experience has been the exact opposite.
For all the horrors of modern war (and they are considerable), relatively few people today have to suffer the unspeakable agonies that our ancestors went through on a daily basis. It is doubly ironic that we place our golden ages in the past, but very rarely ever consider what life was actually like for the people whose genes we carry. How cold they were, how hungry, how frightened of the cruelty of Nature; what unspeakable pains they must have experienced when they were sick or injured. How many of their children they had to lose, unable to help, begging the heavens for mercy and never receiving an answer.
The past is a slowly receding tidal wave of grief. 5358
The battle for human emancipation is not yet won, and the path has been far from straightforward - and yet in but a few thousand years we have eliminated a great deal of suffering that before must have seemed unavoidable and eternal. Some still suffer, their lives held ransom by politics and economics, but at least now we know that a better world is truly possible - and it lies in the future.