a bonobo humanity?

Okay so it’s hard to try and focus on a bonoboesque humanity when the current global political situation, dominated by extremely rich and brutal white men, hits me in the face every day. Is it just a phase we’re going through? Will it have to get worse before it gets better? Something nuclear, to wake us up to what we’ve become?

It’s hard to propose humanism, when humans have become the planet’s greatest problem. But it’s worth bearing in mind that those problematic humans are a small minority, with way too much power, because of the breakdown of checks and balances, the very much widened rich-poor gap, and the lack of any means to remedy the situation. About two years ago I read Rutger Bregman’s hopeful book Humankind, and now I can’t help feeling sorry and sick about how far we are from that vision. The USA might partially get there if it stopped being the USA, if the more enlightened and humane states on the east and west coasts managed to gain independence, but unfortunately they’re not making plans… They should, though. Desperate times require desperate measures, and at such times those measures become rational.

However, I’m having some difficulty with talking up a bonobo humanity in today’s global environment. We’re so very far away from that ideal. Is anybody listening? (Well, they’re not listening to me but that’s not their fault. Virtually nobody reads blogs these days, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to promote my views in any other way..)

So I watch and listen helplessly to the horrors surrounding me, or I switch off and switch on to interesting scientific developments, new discoveries (for me) in music, or cute animal behaviour, hoping it’s not AI-generated. Or I take a walk by the Torrens River, or around my new and leafy neighbourhood, amazed  at all that energetic green regeneration after the skeletal bareness of autumn and winter.

A few conversations recently have been quietly pushing me away from global politics, to focus on the local scene, but that’s no more heartening. We are, as my most recent post noted, experiencing something of a move toward reactionary politics, a politics of selfishness, it seems to me, a product of the empowerment of the super-rich, now more super in their richness than has ever been seen before, and it’s likely happening as much in Australia as anywhere else. I dare not look into it for fear of being stamped on.

I enjoy listening to physicists, palaeontologists and other specialists bubbling on about the discoveries and challenges in their fields, seeming to leave the politico-economic world far behind. I wish I had the talent, the focus, the energy and the funds to do that, but I’ve always been too ‘all over the place’, and now too old, to specialise, so I just tend to try and deal with what the world throws at me, a world of tech giantism, AI confusion and financial corruption on a scale more massive than has ever been known in human history. It wears me out. I think I’ll stop here.