Just plain blues

While having my afternoon coffee, I caught part of a history show about Nero. Everybody knows what a no-account, worthless, ruthless, most likely crazy ruler he was. Or was he? That was the tenor and thesis of the show. Maybe the poor guy got a bum deal. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn't.

Personally, I don't think it matters all that much. After all, it was 2,000 years ago, and nothing in the interim is going to change if it turned out that it wasn't quite like we all thought it was. In the end, he was just another person in charge who didn't do things quite as he was expected to do, and a whole lot of people managed to find a whole lot of fault with what he was doing. Same song, different verse; same play, different actors. You would think that history consisted solely of the lives of these individuals.

Here's a city of probably around 1,000,000 people, and only a handful matter. What's that all about? Oh, sure, most of us will go through life not leaving any real mark, but does that mean we're lesser persons because of it? Well, if you accept the conventional wisdom, the "values" that we were taught in school, if you accept the usual portrayal of how things have gone down, you end up with only one answer: yes, we are lesser persons. In fact, we're really worth nothing at all. To some, we're simply worthless.

Isn't that a sad state of affairs after, what, 10,000 years of recorded human history? A handful in Nero's Rome, let it be two handfuls. 10 people compared to 1,000,000 ... a mere 0.001%. If you pay any attention to the news, if you have even the slightest familiarity with current debates about taxation and income distribution and wealth inequality, that shouldn't be that unfamiliar a number. A whole two millennia of human striving and what do we have to show for it? Not a thing. Absolutely nothing at all.

That's a pretty sad balance, if you ask me. I suppose we could read a lot into it if we wanted to, but for me, it simply says that for as big as our brains are and as many evolutionary advantages that this mere fact is supposed to bring, either the theory is wrong (which it probably is) or it's really a matter of size not mattering at all.

We do know, however, that because our brains are the size they are and are constructed the way they are, we have potentials that other animals, don't have. Whereas most animals operate purely instinctively most of the time, the exceptions where care, concern, and altruism appear to be in play are still quite rare, though I, for one, am quite happy they are there at all. But, we humans, more than any other species, all have the potential for empathy, for simply caring about others, but in more than 10,000 years, and quite evidently in the past 2,000, we've left that potential as good as undeveloped.

And we're so proud of ourselves. I just don't know why.