Vision for Humanity
My namesake Henry Guy flatters me by asking me to write my "vision for humanity in a few pages".
He asks because I make a living writing about astronomy. But I have no astral wisdom. I'm more vitally interested in our microscopic planet and its moment of human life.
When I was thirteen I thought I was a philosopher, but now I just believe in several causes, of which I've been persuaded by the writings of other people. If my convictions (which are held to various degrees of certainty) have any common ground, it is perhaps in aesthetics: the philosophy of beauty. I would find more beautiful, for example, the non-existence of torture than its existence. Aesthetic judgments ultimately are not justified in words.
I would like to see torture become extinct - now. Shockingly, it is not just a problem of the ancient Assyrians and a few dark corners of the contemporary world: it exists massively, and is practised by people of whom we wouldn't have suspected it, such as Americans. (How to start stopping it? Join Amnesty International.)
The death penalty, abolished in all advanced countries except one, should become extinct. If you disagree, the arguments are unfortunately too massive for me to enter into here.
I would like to see the tide turn against the driving of indigenous cultures to extinction. Along with their languages. When a language is lost, a universe is lost.
I would like to see the Israel-Palestine quarrel settled in my lifetime. (If it were, along with it would go the largest single source of terrorism, and of racist violence against Jews and Arabs.) I lived in the Old City of Jerusalem when it was part of Jordan; later lived in Israel; was an almost full-time advocate for the Palestinian grievance back when it was a lonely cause; later reacquired my sense of proportion. I could never answer the question "What should be done about it all?" The question has been answered by the Geneva Accord (www.fmep.org/documents/Geneva_Accord.html), a set of specific solutions and compromises set out in 2003 by Israeli and Palestinian generals, ministers, and the like. Politicians should be made to work for it.
On a wider scale, the United Nations' Millennium Project is a set of practicable goals (with costs and timetables) to which governments have nominally agreed, for reducing poverty, disease, and environmental catastrophe. It is described in a recent (September 2005) special issue of Scientific American magazine devoted to the really important issues facing the world.
I would like to see clean water brought to thirsty people, by large methods mentioned in the Millennium Project or by small ones such as the foot-operated pumps being sold to peasants in Bangladesh for utilizing otherwise unreachable below-ground water (the same magazine, page 67). Right now, a pregnant woman in Ghana or Ethiopia walks for several hours to carry water on her head from a filthy hole, on every day of her pregnancy but the last, when she must be washed with this water, if any.
I would like to see the reform of the trading system that governments have recently had conferences about but have essentially done nothing about. Rich nations subsidize their agribusinesses to produce surpluses of food; poor countries are often required, as a condition of aid or debt reduction, to lower barriers to imports; thus foreign food is dumped on poor nations, underselling their small-scale farmers, whose produce is even kept out of the rich countries by high tariffs. This unfairness is a systematic way of transferring more wealth to the top of the pile while driving traditional farmers to starvation in city slums.
I would like to see a quick end to the military sonar that fills the oceans and drives whales to madness.
I would like to see more of humanity become vegetarian. That would end the driving of oceanfuls of fish toward extinction, the chopping of fins off living sharks, the clearing of Amazon rainforest to grow fodder to be turned inefficiently into hamburgers, the putrefaction of North Carolina rivers by torrents of waste from hog farms, and the invasion of human brains by bovine spongiform encephalitis (mad cow disease).
It's idealism, isn't it? And idealism is generally rejected, unless clothed in mystic language that makes it stranger still.