The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  In 1807 the slave trade in British dominions was legally ended, followed by abolitions in other slaveholding nations, most of whom, however (including the United States), took more than another half century actually to stop the persistent, illicit traffic in human lives. Nevertheless, as Anton Chekhov wrote for mankind, "We are squeezing the slave out of ourselves drop by drop," even though it took the American Civil War and a century of pogroms, gas chambers, jihads, race riots, lynchings, court decisions and bitter confrontations to arrive at our present relatively liberal stage of interracial, interclass tolerance.

  At the same time enslaved women were removing their veils and demanding the right to own property rather than be property. So, not much longer would it be possible to buy a wife for $4.00, as was still being done in the Gold Coast Colony of West Africa when I was there flying cargoes in 1943. In fact that summer I met an African who had bought a wife at a bargain sale for $2.50 during the great depression and was just contemplating paying a witch doctor $12.00 to cure her of a mysterious chronic fever when a friend pointed out the folly of squandering $12.00 on this "old" wife when he could have his pick of forty "new" ones for a mere $4.00.

  Things were very different within a quarter century, however, even in the Gold Coast, which had become an independent nation called Ghana. Women had long since been granted "equal rights" with men in all "civilized" countries, including the right to vote. And during this same germinal period the United Nations had adopted an antigenocide pact and a bill of human rights for mankind; the majority of Earth's remaining colonies had become independent, self-governing nations in Asia, Africa and South America; and the 15 million refugees uprooted by wars and revolutions from China and Vietnam to Bangladesh, the Arab states and central Africa were being steadily absorbed and resettled everywhere from Hong Kong to America. In fact the whole world, despite lingering oppression in totalitarian labor camps, prisons and particular pockets of prejudice, had at last taken the road that leads to liberty and justice.

  10.THE UNIVERSALIZATION OF EDUCATION

  The compulsory schooling of children is suddenly and for the first time spreading all over our planet. As a result, more than 60 percent of humanity can now read and write and the proportions of that majority are increasing about one percent a year as illiterate old people die off.

  This is having a profound effect on evolution, particularly the mental or cultural evolution it is part of. And it is accompanied by no little struggle. For literacy is not yet, in any obvious sense, everyman's dish. When an Arab in Algeria was approached recently about letting his wife join a reading and writing class, he asked in astonishment, "You mean my wife should write letters? To whom?" And in many primitive countries the radio finesses the need for reading by reaching illiterates wherever they are, even to regimenting their thoughts in every field from birth control to politics.

  Culture in animals is a kind of lower-level literacy which, as in the higher kind, is transmitted not by genes but by learning. Thus the young rat is not born wary of bait but must be taught every facet of the culture of caution by his elders. And in the mixed culture of the famed Spanish Riding School in Vienna the old men teach the young horses and the old horses the young men. It has also been found that dogs raised in cages, deprived of normal stimulation and adventure, learn poorly all their lives. Likewise with the orphaned ghetto kid, who learns nothing in school until given a mirror so he can discover he exists.

  What's true of the individual can be presumed, in general, to be true of the world. As every baby starts life a "savage": dirty, ignorant, amoral, selfish, awkward, a potential thief, liar, rapist and killer, so must Earth herself. Yet now at last we are encouraged by the knowledge that the planet symbolically has found her mirror and is growing up and germinating. And that she is assured of soon knowing she has a mind and soul.

  11. THE SPREAD OF STANDARDIZATION

  Standardization is rapidly uniting Earth by permeating all science and all nations. For not only does mankind as a whole already use the twenty-four-hour day, the seven-day week, decimals in mathematics, standard scientific criteria from market scales to atomic energy and common traffic rules in shipping and flying, but soon the metric system will undoubtedly become universal, highway signs similar everywhere and, sooner or later, all countries driving on the right.

  Besides that, worldwide radio and TV broadcasts (not to mention magazines, books, movies and travelers) have achieved standardization of most fashions, art, architecture and other aspects of culture.

  Since it is the first time this ever happened on Earth, people are apt to be disillusioned by the tedium of uniformity that sometimes results, but, as the world matures, they will surely learn that it is possible to keep flowers of every shape, color and smell growing in one harmonious and beautiful garden.

  12.THE APPROACH OF A GLOBAL LANGUAGE

  A universal language that all educated humans can speak and understand also seems on its way to becoming a reality on Earth. Although about fifty artificial languages, such as Esperanto, have been devised, which offer the advantages of phonetic regularity, simplicity and universality, no one of them has yet been officially adopted as the world language, because they all bear the heavy initial disadvantage that there is no considerable population speaking them, no government or large institution promoting them and no literature to give them a tradition. So the natural, evolutionary process of the filtering and amalgamation of the 4000-odd known ancient tongues toward fewer and more universal modern languages inevitably favors such literary, widespread and large-vocabularied languages as English, Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, German, Japanese, French, Bengali and Arabic. And, of these, English now seems the one with the best chance of becoming a truly universal tongue, especially if it can be made more phonetic and regular. Already more than 70 percent of all scientific papers are published in English, work on simplifying it is being done, it is the standard language of airports all over Earth, and even communist nations like the Soviet Union and mainland China, who regard English as alien and capitalistic, cannot avoid teaching it on a large scale.

  13.THE COMING OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT

  World government has become such an obviously essential step in Earth's present development that it must be considered one of the factors in planetary germination even though it hasn't yet happened. Indeed, should man's narrow nationalism or heedlessness continue to block the establishment of any sort of world political federation in the coming decades, humanity's very survival will be increasingly threatened!

  An evolution of many thousand years is involved here, starting with families, then small clans that gradually yielded to larger, stronger tribes led by chiefs or priests. Next appeared village and town governments that grew into city-states that eventually amalgamated into nations, federations, empires, grand alliances and superpowers - with only the final step of a true world federation still lacking.

  The history of war has unfolded at the same time in a parallel, feedback interrelation, there being no evidence that man invented war (or had reason to) until agriculture made it possible for him to settle in permanent villages with territories that required organized defense. Moreover, of the 14,550 wars on Earth since history began to be recorded in 3600 B.C., a new one appearing every 140 days on the average for some six millenniums, wars have been relatively local until this century, indeed generally conducted like sporting events with traditional rules and led by individual heroes, the participants being limited to armies of professional soldiers rather than spreading to vast amateur populations. The only ones that involved whole populations, so far as I know, were the terrible ravages of major invaders like Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan and the occasional wars of extermination that killed off small tribes.

  But now suddenly in our own time something entirely new has evolved with the advent of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, which have made all-out war so impersonal and instantaneously lethal on such a scale that the "victor" must almost s
urely be destroyed along with the "vanquished," not to mention all large cities and possibly half of mankind vaporized in a day.

  The absurdity of continuing the present international anarchy provoked Einstein into calling nationalism "an infantile disease, the measles of mankind." And the folly of it is now so obvious that probably the majority of all educated people already favor world federation, including the sacrifice of national sovereignty that is essential to enable it to disarm and police the planet. Yet it is very hard, for prime ministers, presidents and heads of state, charged with responsibility to uphold and defend national sovereignty, to feel the need to limit that sovereignty, which would seem to mean limiting their own power and importance. It is hard for them to see the analogy of the peaceful justice that prevails in almost any court of law, which of course depends on the ultimate judicial power (armed bailiffs and police) being controlled by the law (judges and magistrates) rather than by the litigants (prosecutors and defendants). For how different it is at present in the "court" of nations on Earth where the ultimate power (missiles and bombs) is controlled not by the law but by the litigants (competing nations), which results in the perpetual danger of catastrophic war. Clearly a change is due and overdue, a shift of power from the litigants to the law, from the competing nations to a world government constitutionally authorized to make and execute world law - thus to preserve world peace!

  Whether this will come through the relatively peaceful evolution of international trading cartels, political treaties, charter reform in the United Nations, Olympic games, world citizenship declarations (like that by Minnesota which, in 1971, became the first state of the U.S. to declare the allegiance of its citizens to the world community), intercultural conventions (perhaps involving UNESCO), ecumenical or world religion or (God forbid) through catastrophic famine, worldwide disease, poverty, war, or some unforeseen natural upset, mutation, cosmic interference or a combination of them - no one can foresee nor Prophet foretell. Yet somehow world government is coming, as surely as any human future is coming. And that alone (with all it implies in mind and spirit) should ensure that world germination will lead directly to the flowering of the planet!

  14. SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION

  Man's spirit is likewise swiftly evolving. By spirit I mean the part of humanity that is beyond the body, beyond all material things and technology, even beyond mind. It is the inscrutable part of us that inspires and is inspired. In essence spirit is not only mysterious but so far beyond understanding in this finite phase of life that it can often be called exalted and is sometimes indisputably divine!

  But the specific point I want to make here is that, aside from man's obvious material and mental progress, his spirit is the key factor that must soon unite all people in a common bond of empathy that will bring such harmony and peace as was never before known on Earth. If this sounds strange or unbelievable, it may be because the spiritual aspect of the future is what is generally missing in prophecies. Indeed, contrary to a popular saying, it is almost certainly earlier than you think! For man, as a spiritual kingdom, has hardly reached the dawn of his own history. Actually he is still in a state of confused anarchy, having barely yet even learned to consult himself, let alone how to integrate, organize or rule his world. And his spirit as a whole has nowhere to go but up!

  This of course is not a scientific statement, nor is it provable nor (I presume) even credible to most people. Yet it is at the heart of the germination of the planet and must be, in some sense, measurable. I mean that spirit in the sense of divine essence has to do with a profound question that seems to disturb many serious thinkers: is our world getting better or worse? Are we passengers on Earth evolving as we should? Or are corruption and pollution (with its 3 Bs) overtaking us as we slide hopelessly down the drain?

  The answer is not easy. At the very least, it calls for spiritual comparison between life on Earth today and life as it was on Earth a hundred or a hundred thousand years ago - and it is a comparison bound to be controversial, both because no one lives long enough to gain firsthand perspective over such spans of time and because spiritual things are so utterly intangible and elusive.

  Nevertheless, one can look at stone age life on Earth today which may well be comparable to the pre-Eden days when man was a hunter and knew nothing of farming, his morality presumably on the level of the increasingly clever beast he had found himself to be and whose sense of right and wrong, if it could be called that, depended, as with other animals, on his instinctive urges to hunt, kill, eat, mate and defend the territory he regarded as his. Then as man settled into tribal and village life with all it involved in common defense measures, laws of property, adaptability to authority (including gods, devils and chiefs), inevitably disputes became louder and more frequent, leading to more laws that resulted in more violations as crimes became sins - and the evolution of virtue slowly advanced, significantly changing the killing of a rival from a noble deed to a shameful murder.

  Thus although man seemed to be slipping morally as he evolved through his symbolic Garden of Eden phase into what we call civilization, in reality he was only increasing his potential for both good and evil, those two opposite but complementary qualities which, as the Polarity Principle suggests, are inherent in each other. And, ironically, it was the organized tradition of religion itself that seems to have perpetrated what are widely considered the most horrible tortures and massacres in human history, a fair sample being the sacrifices of the Aztecs of Mexico, who ritualistically killed an estimated 25,000 men, women and children every year for two centuries, burning some to honor Huehueteoti, the fire god, with the glory of his own flames, torturing children to appease Tialoc, the rain god, literally with showers of tears, and actually cutting beating hearts out of living bodies with the pious acquiescence of most of the deeply indoctrinated victims.

  Possibly worse, because of the divisiveness and hatred it engendered, was the medieval Inquisition instituted by the Christian Church in the name of sanctity and for the avowed purpose of "saving souls"! And the lengths to which so-called divine justice was stretched may be suggested by the record of Bishop Peter Arbuez who was credited with having burned 40,000 heretics at the stake, a deed of such rare "piety" that, eventually he was canonized as a saint!

  Of this period, Erasmus sadly wrote: "We were forever slaughtering each other for opinions that were mere guesswork - yet caused half of humanity to send the other half to the gallows or the stake - and for what?" Science was virtually standing still because any man bold enough to do any scientific research or to admit any scientific discovery was taking a fearful risk. Michael Servetus knew it - he who discovered the circulation of blood and was burned at the stake at the request of Calvin. Giordano Bruno knew it, and was burned for agreeing with Copernicus that the earth moves around the sun. And Galileo, who discovered the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, barely escaped a similar fate by recanting on his knees.

  It isn't easy to measure spiritual qualities, but there always seem to be witnesses to straws in the wind. In 1730 Montesquieu wrote that the Church's influence was disappearing from intellectual England and being replaced by an unprecedented reverence for nature. Indeed for the first time in history significant numbers of people began to admire landscape and artists to paint it. Men started climbing mountains just for fun and the exaltation of a sweeping view. And Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote philosophically about the beauty of nature even while being persecuted by the establishment, who saw blasphemy in statements like "I feel, therefore I am."

  Life in cities, however, continued much as it always had, and in 1750 Horace Walpole saw a poor old man fall down in the street outside White's coffee house in London and recorded that the customers inside placed bets on whether the fellow were dead or not. And, when a passerby suggested he should be bled (standard first-aid treatment of the day), they loudly protested that this would interfere with the fairness of the betting.

  At the same time in America and western Europe there was a gro
wing impression that the world was changing and perhaps going somewhere. This feeling was supported by such signal events as the founding of the Royal Humane Society in England in 1774 followed by the French Revolution and a rising flood of humanitarianism that had never existed before as a conscious goal of man. Although in England there remained 223 offenses punishable by death in the year 1819, and I've read that a nine-year-old boy was hanged for taking twopence worth of paint from a printer's shop through a broken window in 1833, reforms followed swiftly. By 1838 there were but 14 capital crimes left in England, with both the pillory and public hangings abolished, and the fresh breeze of humaneness advanced inexorably through the nineteenth century. One of its most significant steps, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had been founded in England in 1824, being, so far as is known, the first consciously organized action taken by any species of life on Earth solely for the benefit of other species. The first board of health was created in 1848. Then Florence Nightingale appeared to institute the merciful profession of nursing, dramatically lowering the death rate among Crimean War wounded from 42 percent to 2 percent, slavery was outlawed from civilization, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army founded, the germ theory "proven" and anesthetics adopted to remove the ancient horror of the surgeon's knife.

  But if evolution of the human spirit showed signs of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it fairly erupted in the twentieth. Not only was there the series of almost unimaginable miracles brought to technological practicality, but there was the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by its General Assembly in 1948 and an unprecedented series of world treaties, demilitarizing Antarctica in 1959, four more limiting nuclear weapons in the 1960s, the dismantling of the colonial system mostly between 1955 and 1970 and motion toward serious superpower disarmament later in the 1970s.