This is a very different question to the similarly phrased one here, but the answer is roughly (and perhaps oddly) the same.
The nature of humanity, like the nature of the universe, and like the nature of any individual, is change. That’s fundamental. As above, so below.
Time is a process that allows change. It’s what makes it time. It’s irreversible, and it tends towards disorder, or entropy.
I mean, that last bit seems conuterintuitive at times, as there are clearly forces in the world that tend to add complexity and order. We mostly think of them as life. Life is creativity is reverse-entropy.
But you still can’t unboil an egg, you can only watch it go rotten. Or eat it.
I think I’m getting distracted.
I’m never happy with the word nature. It strikes me as an excuse for something. Nature is everything, or it is meaningless. The idea that humanity has somehow plucked itself from the purity of nature through its sheer ingenuity is absurd. If anyone is ingenious around here its the cosmos. It’s the nature itself, which has built us, and pandas, and horses, and anenomes, and concrete, and diamonds, and nuclear reactors and space.
We are part of that whole. We are part of this constantly evolving planet. We are part of the universe. We are not an important part of any of it. The whole is the only important thing. Everything appears to grow and swell around us, but that’s the illusion of perspective. We are reacting to the world as much as it is reacting to us. There is an odd sort of harmony.
Eventually, the system will be pressurised enough that we’ll be forced to change. As we push the system out of balance it will become harder and harder to go against the grain, and we’ll recoil back to some other balance for a while. We being the planet. We being the universe (which has barely noticed humanity, of course, but only seems distant when we’re narrow minded).
That will change the course of history some. But so will everything else.
Don’t ever believe someone who tells you this is the end of history. History is just the story we try to tie together the multitude of life with. It is a number of perspectives on a swirling mass of past. It is an attempt to tie together all the ceaseless changes of the world.
Ceaseless. It doesn’t stop changing. In my life time, the world has changed endlessly. On average, maybe people are still selfish and greedy, but not in the same way. The circumstances change, and so do the people.
Time will change the nature of humanity. The world will change the nature of humanity.
Change will always come, and the only way to deal with it is to change. You can’t resist the universe. You can’t resist being part of the whole.
We are drops in the ocean. We may form currents, but we are not the tides.
Be fluid.
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Illustration by Emma (Heavily inspired by the work of Peter Jellitsch)
