Short and brilliant commencement speech at the University of North Carolina by E.O. Wilson - a must watch. I am yet to read his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth
We will have to evolve a better world order than the one we have now, which I like to call our Star Wars Civilization. I mean we have stone-age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. In the case of emotions they evolved in pre-history over millions of years. In the case of our institutions, especially within religions and ideology, we are in constant conflict. And in the case of our technology, we are seeing things going almost beyond the control of our imagination. These three stanchions of current civilization explain why we are constantly in trouble. They are dangerous. They are very serious problems for the rest of life and, ultimately, with that, ourselves. And today we are still (far) from even at the margin of solutions.
At the base of the problem, I would like to suggest, are the three still mostly unanswered fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science. They are Where do we come from?, What are we?, and Where are we going? You graduates have dealt with aspects of these questions, the great riddle, here at this university, in parts and pieces, but everywhere our best thinkers are confounded by them. It is still the case, as the French writer Jean Bruller put it during the dark days of the 1930s. He said, for then as well as for today, “All of mankind’s problems are due to the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we wish to become.”
We will have to evolve a better world order than the one we have now, which I like to call our Star Wars Civilization. I mean we have stone-age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. In the case of emotions they evolved in pre-history over millions of years. In the case of our institutions, especially within religions and ideology, we are in constant conflict. And in the case of our technology, we are seeing things going almost beyond the control of our imagination. These three stanchions of current civilization explain why we are constantly in trouble. They are dangerous. They are very serious problems for the rest of life and, ultimately, with that, ourselves. And today we are still (far) from even at the margin of solutions.
At the base of the problem, I would like to suggest, are the three still mostly unanswered fundamental questions of religion, philosophy, and science. They are Where do we come from?, What are we?, and Where are we going? You graduates have dealt with aspects of these questions, the great riddle, here at this university, in parts and pieces, but everywhere our best thinkers are confounded by them. It is still the case, as the French writer Jean Bruller put it during the dark days of the 1930s. He said, for then as well as for today, “All of mankind’s problems are due to the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we wish to become.”
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