I had a very brief conversation with a friend the other day about the state of humanity. He told me he thinks we’re getting worse. I disagreed, but we didn’t have time to go into the whole table thumping debate this discussion deserves. He’s a thoughtful, well-informed man and I’m sure he has very good reasons for thinking as he does, but he’s unequivocally wrong.

The history of the human race, from the most primitive groups at the dawn of humanity, through the beginning of civilization, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans, Western Europe and the various empires in India, China and Japan, right up to the modern day, is history of self interested individuals accumulating resources and protecting those resources from others.

By “self”, I do not mean the individual self, I mean the “us”, the community around the individual that has to accumulate resources in order for the individual to prosper. The survival instinct of any species is to define an “us” and a “them” and then ensure that the “us” accumulates more stuff than the “them”.

It’s a simple principle and it underpins almost every human activity in the history of human activities. While its outward expression has taken many forms, the underlying construct hasn’t changed since we first crawled out of the oceans.

What has changed over the last few hundred years, however, is the number and proportion of humans who have had enough resources that they can extend their concern beyond their immediate “us” to consider the welfare of the “them”. The “them” outside our own time and space; future generations, beyond the ones we will know personally, people outside our own culture whose lives we cannot comprehend are now of concern; and this is present in both thought and deed more that it ever has been before.

By no means is it perfect. The pessimists will point to Darfur, the Congo, the BP oil spill, the GFC, Enron, the Pakistani flood victims and the plight of indigenous populations everywhere and say these horrors disprove my argument, but they don’t. Tragedies and atrocities have always happened, in one iteration or another; what has never happened before is the World Health Organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières, UNICEF, World Vision and the internet. Never before have we had organised, large scale movement of resources from the very rich to the very poor; never before have we had united international efforts towards peace, never before has peace been something to aspire to as it is in many cultures of the modern world. Never before have we had the sort of mass communication that make oppression and isolation much harder to impose on even the most deprived of communities.

Never before have we had wealth spread across such a large proportion of the wealth nations of the world. Wealth enables more than just the acquisition of iThings, it give us the time, space, education and opportunity to share it with “them” and this is exactly what we are doing. Welfare in our own communities and overseas aid for other communities has never existed as it does today.

None of these things are perfect, sometimes they only make the smallest dent in the problems they are trying to address, but the fact that they are not perfect does not mean they are not good; and it does not detract from the underlying intent, which is, for the first time, to share resources with all the “them”.

It’s taken 5000 years to get humanity to this point, it may take us another 5000 years to get to Good, and it will probably take longer than that for us get to Perfect (if we ever do) but the trajectory, in the long view, is upwards, not downwards, and the pace of change is accelerating exponentially. Cynicism is lazy and the long view always gives better perspective. We’re getting better, and we’ll keep doing so for a long time to come.

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