I persist in my heresy that we are living out the birth of a new species, and that many, maybe most, of our current troubles arise from this unprecedented. conflict-filled situation.

Here’s the argument (which I have made before in these pages). It’s quite simple, really and comes down to a matter of reproductive choice.

Humans with each passing year are dividing themselves more and more clearly into two major groups. Both groups have fairly strong herd needs (that’s been part of humanity for a long time). Both also want security and stability. But the two groups also have certain increasingly divergent needs.

1.
One group wants membership in a herd with a strong leader who in clear terms explains what’s what. Generally those terms are rooted in the statements, documents, and persons of past strong leaders—the Bible with its assorted characters, Adam Smith, Hobbes, etc. Daddy by any other name.

Externally members of this group thrive on conformity—in dress, speech, beliefs. Membership in the Right Organizations—church, country club, political party—is of central, sustaining importance.

Obedience and obeisance are essential behaviors. Success is defined in terms of wealth, fame, and power. Hypocrisy, generally not recognized for what it is, smoothes the very rough edges of this difficult behavior. Do as I say, not as I do.

Internally, members of this group are believers, quite ready and easily willing to accept revered (mostly ancient) texts and ideas, especially where promulgated by revered strong leaders. There is one God; his son is Jesus; or his prophet is Mohammed, etc.

Children are expected above all to be unquestioningly obedient. Like adults, they are to learn not to think for themselves. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Every culture has many members of this group. Politically, they are called conservative, or right-wing. Philosophically, religiously, economically, they tend to be close-minded. Either they have the answers, or their leaders do, or their old texts do. Doubt, despair, irony are not part of their make-up.

2.
Members of the other group also usually want herd membership, along with security and stability. But, in contrast to the first group, they tend to be open to the new: new ideas, new ways of dealing with the problems of the world.

They display a respect for the past and its ideas, but their respect is much wider than is that of the first group and driven by an insatiable curiosity.. All possibilities are to be considered and then explored. Leaders, while sometimes helpful, are to be questioned vigorously, closely. and continuously, and when necessary challenged outright.

These humans are open to experimentation—social, political, religious, artistic, scientific. If the experiment works, fine, they’ve learned something useful. If it doesn’t, also fine, move on. Failure itself has its own valuable lessons.

Early cultures apparently had few of these humans. Often the few who raised their voices got into serious trouble for suggesting alternate ways (Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Lenin, etc.).

If you think carefully about the large-scale behavior of human societies in recent centuries, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the numbers of these free-thinking trouble-makers is increasing. Rapidly.

Racial equality, women’s rights, gay acceptance—all those behaviors are massive steps toward a kind of personal freedom and responsibility that, not so long ago, would have gotten people burned at the stake. Or forced to swallow hemlock.

3.
In American terms, we’re talking about red states vs. blue states. In religious terms, orthodoxy vs. heresy. In economic terms, jungle capitalism vs. humane socialism. In artistic terms, art as commodity vs. art as the battering ram of future heterodoxy.

Burgeoning creativity has learned that irony is the feather by which to tickle, satire the cudgel by which to smite the rich, the famous, and the powerful, and only as the last, most dangerous stance, resort to truth. Arab saying: If you’re going to speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.

Speculative aside: What are the characteristics that distinguish each group? Strangely, intelligence is not a definer, at least not intelligence in the quantifiable IQ sense. It’s easy to mistake what are in fact secondary qualities for primary ones (as I may have done above): closed vs. open mindedness, social conservatism vs. social liberalism, etc.

I suspect there’s a more deep-seated, less visible, less easily indentifiable change going on, something inside the mind, an alteration of or addendum to older human consciousness. Call it maybe "a newly pervasive awareness of awareness."

Example: In a "Will and Grace" episode the obstreperous Gang of Four (Will, Grace, Karen, and Jack) attend the "commitment ceremony" of friends Joe and Larry. Someone runs up and tells Joe it’s time for the ritual to begin. Without missing a beat, not even a second’s pause, he looks into the middle-distance and says, "So that’s what nervous feels like."

In the new consciousness there is a constant second-guessing of the self and the immediate situation which may show itself as intrigued running commentary (Joe’s remark), ironic self-analysis (Holden Caulfield), or profound self-criticism (Hamlet).

This new self, constantly present, stands always to one side, with its own agenda, monitoring what’s going on, ever ready to jump in either with an apter remark or a telling gesture or a bold, seemingly tangential behavior—or all three at once.

Once, as we moved across the Serengeti and much further, immediate surface reality was all that matter: what threat is here, now? Then we learned, based on difficult experience, to expand that old awareness: what possible threat may lie over the next hill, or the next day? Such deep-seated but superficial cautiousness served us well for a long time. Now it’s become a paralyzing habit, trapping us in a one-eyed view of a world whose rich dimensionality increases by the hour.

As binocular vision gave creatures a tremendously powerful tool for moving successfully through the physical world, so the binocular mind not only widens all horizons but makes them both more comprehensible and (bye-bye, old jungle) fun.

4.
Where, you ask, is the evidence for a new species?

And I have to give you a very personal answer concerning your own reproductive behavior and the probable reproductive behavior of your children.

Ask yourself this: whichever group you belong to, would you marry and have children with a member of the other group?

Whichever group your children belong to, do you think they will marry and have children with a member of the other group?

A very high percentage—leave it to the sociologists to determine the number—of each group will say no.

In the larger animal and plant world, members of a species are roughly defined as those who cannot reproduce with any but their own kind. No choice here. A dog cannot reproduce with a cat.

The evidence I’m offering here is highly suggestive that among humans we have got—or are getting—ourselves to a place where, when profound behavioral and belief changes become apparent, reproduction with one’s own kind becomes a matter of more or less conscious choice.

In this new human world, members of a species are defined as those who WILL NOT reproduce with any but their own kind.

Put concisely: consensual evolution.

If you are a member of one group, yes, your daughter can marry and have children with a member of the other group. As with animals, it’s physically still possible. But will she? Or will she instead look carefully for a mate from her own group?

5.
Obviously we’re talking about a very large gray area here and so have to speak in terms of a long-term tendency. Right now it’s often hard to tell which group a given person belongs to. The person himself may not be sure.

But in so-called advanced countries where most of the old economic battles are behind us, where there is a high degree of security and stability, the division into these two groups has in the last two centuries become clearer and clearer, culminating most recently in the news channels’ red-blue maps of the United States.

In 2008, one of the strongest and most startling bits of evidence for this species-emergent situation is the fact that the blue party had only two leading candidates for president. Earlier humans and present-day red group members would be alarmed by the idea of either a woman or a black man as president. But suddenly for a lot of humans, what was important was neither gender nor race but… consciousness, a certain way of looking and living in the world which, I’m suggesting, trumps all other values. Including—especially—sex.

Heresy? Viewed from the biases of the currently rich and powerful, yes. In terms of already widespread, and spreading, human behavior, no.

Not heresy, only hope. For some.

6. The Dying Screams of Dinosaurs
The Great Divide and the Coming of Terranova

After the meteor fell on the Yucatan peninsula 50 million years ago, the world changed to one in which dinosaurs could not survive. They died fast and by the million.

Did they go easily? Silently? Probably not. It’s easy to imagine that primitive world echoing with the angry, futile screams of the doomed.

For us, the world is about to change in ways fatal to the greed and grasping for power that got us to this tipping point. The adaptable know this and will—though perhaps not without difficulty—adapt. The unadaptable don’t know this and, victims of incomprehension, will scream mightily as they fail and fall.

A nightmare president stands in Israel and spews invective at those who will come after he and his ilk are done laying waste to the world.

Preachers and priests and rabbis and mullahs galore squeal and squeak out their displeasure and disapproval at the least sign of the tolerance and hope that will get us through the present difficulties and into a braver, fairer new world.

Pseudo-scientists wear blinders, ignore the evidence before them, and yelp about the creation of the world in 4004 B.C. and, beholden to their corporate or religious daddies, yap incessantly about the impossibility of human-caused climate change.

The gated rich heap wealth on their corporate and media minions who to the last will milk profits and bend news to maximum dying effect.

So much for dinosaurs.

Sure, they have done much damage and until they’re gone they will continue their damaging ways: it’s all they know really. But their screams fall on increasing numbers of deaf ears and their maneuvers and manipulations weaken as their once-faithful, unquestioning armies desert in ever greater numbers.

What to do?

Suppose you come from a distant elsewhere and in your intergalactic travels one day you stumble upon Earth. You pause a few million miles way and observe. The direness of the situation is quickly apparent, the survival of the sentient beings obviously as threatened as that of the planet itself.

With the powers available to you, you could easily wipe out the carriers of the deadly DNA of violence and greed and accelerate change toward a better, safer, happier Earth. Do you?

Of course not. For you too are an inhabitant of a greater reality that has its own wisdom (however inscrutable). The greater wisdom in which you move is simple: the drama must be allowed to play out on its own terms. If loving cleverness is not to carry the day, so be it. Sometimes, you know with your larger perspective, on this or that remote speck it does and sometimes in doesn’t.

The most you can do is to drop a few hints whose obviousness is exceeded only by their extreme subtlety.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the grasping, the conniving, the plotting continue unabated. The original dinosaurs, not being self-aware, didn’t know they were doomed. These human dinosaurs have added to their violent paranoia the fearful awareness of the possibility of their extinction. Against which they can do nothing except scream.

Darkness, of a kind and durance that humans have not experienced, falls. The planet groans in the agony of illness we have imposed on it. Healing begins, and humanity be damned.

Billions die. The earth, reshaped, slowly renews itself: Terranova.

The time between the onset of sickness and placable recovery forms a great hiatus in human history, a great divide. What came before is appraised, and re-appraised. Old canons, along with old consciousness itself, fall by the way.

New maps are drawn internally and externally. Time itself is remeasured, recalibrated, and finally renamed.

The best of what came before the Great Divide is treasured. The worst is entombed, for study and reminding.

Darkness slowly lifts and another human day begins.

7. Planet of the Man-apes

There’s another way to look at this long, bloody process of apparent interspecific conflict.

Maybe there’s nothing new going on. Maybe the divisive, internecine social, political, and military battles we’re seeing are just a continuation of the oldest world war, the one that’s been underway ever since homo sapiens appeared and began struggling to secure its place in the world order of creatures.

Many details of human DNA remain obscure, some of unknown purpose, some still altogether unidentified. Who knows what remnants and recombinants of older bipedal life forms we all carry about with us. Who knows what effects these unknown DNA contents have on us, our consciousness, and our behavior.

The conflict which above I wanted to label as between-species, arguing for the emergence of a new kind of human being, may in fact be not between-species but within-one-species.

Whoever came before us may still be very much with us, given their love of and belief in the superiority of simple strength and power, and their love of good old fashioned mano a mano conflict.

Against a slowly emergent background of more pacific creativity on the part of homo sapiens, Old Whatevers (Cro-Magnon? Neanderthal?) fights on. And on. Prevailing more often than their lesser intelligence should allow them to.

But prevail they have. And do. Still. Today.

They sit in offices of great wealth and power, their clumsy mitts on levers of frightening control and destructiveness. We call them "leaders," we elect them, we applaud their victories, and now and then even call them "great". Yet they die with the blood of millions on their hands, and by example inspire others of their mentally deficient ilk to strive—and fight—for a continued hegemony of the brutally strong.

Meanwhile, perhaps the real battle is invisible, occurring not in the social or political background but on a microscopic scale in the DNA helix where over decades, indeed over centuries, tiny unseen sieges of miniature Leningrads and nano-Maginot Lines take place across generations. And we macro-beings skate eerily and uncertainly along on the surface which is slowly reshaped by those invisible wee battles.

Looked at this way, none of us can preen ourselves as a brave new species, harbingers of a brighter world to come, because, in ways and to degrees we don’t understand, we all share the difficult, conflict-inducing genetic heritage that is humanity.