No one’s asking you to give away all your possessions. Viewing humanity as one family does not require you to be a saint. But an increasingly vocal minority are waking up to the understanding that unless “their own” comes to mean humanity as a whole, then there won’t be any of “ us or them” left at all. Others have broadened this circle to include members of their nation as “their own”. I fully understand that some people don’t think this way, that some people only care about “them and their own”. This is the natural trajectory of evolution, something that has been achieved again and again at all stages of life on this planet. As the Ancient Greeks imagined, we must be as cells in the great body of humanity. Then the tragedy of the commons disappears. Humanity’s only way out of the problem is to form a united global co-operative that spans the planet. We have repeatedly failed to stay within the modest targets politicians have set themselves. Make no mistake: our survival is at stake here. Thus as a competing nation the self-interested course of action is always to pollute more. And as Milinski demonstrated with his climate change game, countries aren’t going to do enough purely out of a sense of duty, even when the worst is threatened. The environmental crisis is a tragedy of the commons – all the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels accrue to individual nations, whilst the costs of global warming are shared by all. Today climate change is providing the stimulus for the cycle to repeat itself. It is driven by the logic of game theory: at all stages of evolution the potential is always there for co-operating groups to do better than competing individuals. The tendency for life to co-operate over ever increasing scales is not a fluke. Bands got together to form tribes, tribes got together to form city states, city states got together to form nations, nations got together to form trading blocs and global organisations. Roughly half a billion years further on and groups of these multicellular organisms started to form hives, shoals, and herds. Another billion years and groups of these cells got together to form multicellular life. After another 2 billion years, two of these cells combined to form more complex eukaryotic cells, such stuff as you and I are made of. As is the human body, so is the cosmic bodyĪs is the human mind, so is the cosmic mindĤ.1 billion years ago the first single celled life appeared on earth.
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