Dinosaurs Didn't Use Spoons

The year is 2024. There are a great many challenges we face as a people. The environment, equality, war. Humanity has problems. Stacking problems. Problems mounting on top of each other, year after year, like a Jenga tower of terrible truths. The weight we can hardly bear, it seems, causes the tower to tremble. Many fear it will inevitably come down.

The year is 2024. Say the number out loud. Two thousand and twenty-four. Four whole digits. It was that many years ago (roughly) that people bothered starting to keep track of time by the way of a calendar. Let us for the sake of argument suppose that society, organised/enlightened/ human community, began back then and that it has now been going on for around 2000 years. On the cosmic scale that makes society rather young. Infantile in fact.

For anyone fretting about the state of the world we live in, the injustice of it, the cruelty throughout it, how difficult it will be to correct it, remember this - we are young. Homo sapiens are believed to have thus far occupied this planet for just shy of 200,000 years. If that sounds like a lot, know that the dinosaurs enjoyed 140 million of them without even coming up with the idea for a spoon. It is a fact, we are young, and a child is not capable of solving complex, inter-communal problems. A child is barely capable of tying a shoe or telling the time. That’s where we are right now - the year is only 2024.

Society is like a human. That is no mere simile, it is a fact. It was a thing created by humans, is a thing maintained by humans and will continue to be shaped by humans in the future. We even made a word for it. And if society is like a human, and human society is only very juvenile, then society is, right this very moment, a screaming, crying baby desperate for its nappy to be changed. It is a soothing thought, because the baby will undoubtedly grow. The baby will learn, mature and become stronger, more resilient.

Of course, the problems faced by a child are nothing compared to the problems a teenager has. Think back to your teens – the heartbreaks, the embarrassment, the cringeworthy terror of it all. But a teenager is better equipped to deal with its issues than a child would be. That is the way society will go as it blossoms into adulthood. Remember how put together the grown-ups looked from the eyes of your childhood? There is a beautiful balance to the whole act. The older we grow, the more battles there are to fight, but the older we grow, too the more powerful we become.

With this comfort however, comes a new conundrum. If society is itself its own person, what does it think about? Is it more concerned about rising temperatures or rising tensions? What does it look like? Does it look like you? Does it look like me? The truth is, Society is an amalgam of us all. Your parent’s warmth, your lover’s smile, your neighbour’s noises, your friends’ multiple vibrancies, your enemy’s sharpness. It is a being composed in equal 8 billionths, each of us contributing the most minute fraction, yet each of us fully represented nonetheless. Would you recognise this person, if you passed them in the street? What about you might stand out the most?

It is an incredible thought, that there is someone out there, the living personification of the human race, all of its quirks, quarrels and beauties. A person completely unaware of their prominence. It could be me. It could be you. As for what they might think about, consider the following:

On a flight once, I had the privilege to sit by the window. Two hours with just me and the sky. I watched the outside world silently for almost 80 minutes before the passenger beside me asked what I was looking at. She’d found it strange that I had angled my head low, to look upwards and not down. I explained to her that I was looking for the point where the deep blue turns black, and that in moments where the plane had tilted on its wing, I had seen it. She told me that she tended to look down at the people below, never up.

Speaking with an attendant later, she described to me how it was a fact of life, that when presented with an incredible vantage point, there is an even split in behaviour. Some people look up and some people look down. It was just one of those things. Cake or ice cream? Tea or coffee? Dark chocolate or milk? But I contest that it is something bigger than that. Space is hard for the human mind to grasp. From our limited perspectives, space is impossibly large, impossibly constructed and utterly incomprehensible. The miracle of our being here separates us into two groups; those who look up and those who look down.

Some react to our place in the cosmos with delight – that we are one special, bright spark in an abyss of darkness, a triumph of nature. Others react with nihilism – that we are insignificant in comparison to what surrounds us, an accident of nature. When I look up into space, I recall the purported beginnings of this place. That at the start there was nothing, or very little, or immense hotness and blackness. Our espials of galaxies, nebulae, stars and planets make me ecstatic that in the war against the dark, the light is winning, gaining more and more ground as we wisen. I am one who looks up into the atmosphere with hope and wonder.

Of course, there are those too who look down at the planet, parroting the same line that hasn’t changed since our species first took flight. They look like ants down there. Insects in comparison to what reigns above. With roughly 50% of people pulling one way and the other half pulling the other, is it any wonder Society can seem so uncompromising, closed and inhibiting? And with your entire life’s history being reduced to a mere 1 in 8 billion blocks with which Society is constructed, is it any wonder that we sometimes feel left out, overshadowed and unrepresented?

This leaves us with one devastating binary to deal with – this one person, the walking-talking epitome of contemporary humanity – are they a person who looks up, or do they look down?

Basically, Society it is what we put into it, make it to be. Use your fraction well and remember - dinosaurs didn’t use spoons.