In the year 2525: Beyond trivial divisions
One of the less tangible changes over time may be in the ways we categorize each other.
It seemed natural, making a big deal out of trivial distinctions between people. And in a strictly biological way, maybe it was.
Which doesn't mean it ever made much sense.
Back in the 21st century, it was common to discriminate by age. It went both ways, toward young and old. Even people a few years apart were ageist. An eight-year-old could disdain a six-year-old, a 14-year-old could look with scorn on a 12-year-old, and an 80-year-old might call a 95-year-old a lumbering fool.
Four hundred years ago, in the 21st century, people were trained in this pattern of thinking from their early years. Each grade of school was separated from the one before and after it by a single year of life. It was a big deal to be a year apart in school. First graders feared and revered third graders, not to mention everyone above them. Finally, their ‘class’ was all those who graduated school together as 18-year-olds.
It seems ridiculous now that we've talked ourselves out of it. It just took some perspective.
So much perspective is accomplished by zooming out. Leave your home, leave your town, leave your planet, and the distinctions that had seemed critical become not just meaningless but invisible. With practice, we can commit to the same outward zoom in our minds, taking in a universe both of space and time, to see what genuinely connects us.
The likelihood of the simultaneity of existence in a 13-billion-year-old universe, and the likelihood of the simultaneity of existence on a five-billion-year old planet, is odds beyond arithmetic. The sheer improbability of living-thing X existing at the same time as living-things Y and Z and A and B makes everything that is alive of a piece, and rare. Our real ‘class’ is anyone who is alive when we are alive, from age nanosecond to age 150 years (as some of our Okinawa and Inuit fellows now achieve).
If there were a reunion of all humans at the end of time where all people who have ever existed were to meet, and all people wore tags displaying the era that they had lived, we’d greet each other like this: “You lived in the twenty-sixth century? I lived in the twentieth-sixth century too! Imagine that! How rare!” It's even more probable that at such a reunion we would marvel at having shared the first 10,000 years of human history together: "You lived between the ice ages? I lived between the ice ages too!"
This sensibility that we have of the improbability of sharing life was our solution to ageism in all directions—toward the young and toward the old. And this sensibility has been the impetus for cultivating real fellow feeling in the world. Who are my people? Answer: Everyone who is alive right now. There is no ‘generation gap,’ as spoken of 500 years ago, because there is only one generation—the generation that is currently alive.
And in year 2525, we have gone further still. An awareness of other living creatures sharing some part of our lifespan was not just a remedy for ageism. It was a cure for speciesism too.
We are back to the unlikelihood of the simultaneity of existence, the rareness of it all. Anything that is alive when you are alive is highly improbable and therefore in your ‘class.’ This includes animals, insects, and plants.
That orb spider in your garden is at the furthest edge of evolution’s march, just like you. The same goes for the sharded beetle and the gnat and the coddling moth and the ruddy duck. You are alive when the oyster is alive, and the gazelle, and the barbirusa, and the barrel-eye fish, and the fox, the ox, giraffe, shrew, echidna, caribou. These are all in your ‘class.’ Ditto for the ivy on the garden wall and the nearby tulip and lily, and that field of pampas grass. You are living when the ball cactus is living and the date palm and the needle palm and the natal plum.
Again, imagine a fantastical reunion of earthly creatures at the end of time. At such a gathering, phantasmagoric beasts of all stripes would greet each other with recognition because they shared half a hundred years of oxygenated existence a million years prior, or a billion years before. If plants were to arrive at such a reunion and could speak, they would chatter away to help the mirth.
In the year 2525, to the world’s great benefit, we have realized that our generation, our group, our gang, our ensemble, our outfit, our collective, our cohort, our clutch, our cluster, our class—is every living thing that exists when we do.
And perhaps next month, or next year, or next century, others will extend this fellowship further to include inanimate objects. The rocks are indeed as old as the hills, but the rocks that are now apparent to our senses were buried a billion years before they peeped out upon this sunlit and spinning orb. From our perspective, rocks too are rare.
