What Would It Take?

by
Galaxy Collision Switches on Black Hole (NASA, Chandra, 12/10/09)

NASA’s Mar­shall Space Flight Cen­ter via Compfight

I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about Mass Effect… again.  It sort of has me think­ing and I wanted to share some dif­fi­cult per­sonal insights.  My way of work­ing out the issues that some­times bother me about the world and human­ity as a whole.  And yes, believe it or not, I’m going to use a video game as my jump­ing off point.

Mass Effect is set about 170 years into the future.  You, the main char­ac­ter, Shep­ard, are charged with the task of unit­ing alien races into a most uncom­mon alliance in order to fight a force that wants to destroy you all.  There is a sig­nif­i­cant degree of racism.  A mem­ber of one race may refer to a team­mate of another species not by their name but by their racial designation.

“Get out of my way, asari.”  or “What do you want, human?”

Stereo­types abound and have been assigned to each race with­out prej­u­dice.  The friend­ships that Shep­ard is able to cul­ti­vated dur­ing the course of the game go a long way towards decon­struct­ing those stereo­types and reveal­ing the inher­ent “human­ity” (for lack of a bet­ter word) they all pos­sess.  Hear­ing the racist ref­er­ences some­times makes me cringe a lit­tle bit, but I def­i­nitely get the point.  I think it is hon­est and that it would be that way.  What I also notice is that among the humans, there is absolutely never an issue with regards to racial, reli­gious, or cul­tural dif­fer­ences, like there are today.  In a time when humankind rubs shoul­ders with peo­ple from far off worlds we humans are united by virtue of our human­ity.  Noth­ing else seems to matter.

So, that sort of got me think­ing.  What would it take for mankind today to dis­miss the triv­ial dif­fer­ences between us, or even bet­ter, embrace them as being part of a lovely human mosaic?  What would it take for us to be kind and accept­ing of one another by virtue of our shared human­ity and noth­ing else?

Would it take an indomitable force to threaten our col­lec­tive lives for us to rec­og­nize that we are all so much more alike than we are dif­fer­ent and that our dif­fer­ences are awe­some points of con­ver­gence and not rea­sons for divergence?

  • http://www.facebook.com/houseofwilliams Matt Williams

    Good ques­tion, and its def­i­nitely one sci­ence fic­tion has tried to answer over the some time. And yes, i think it would require a cer­tain “them” to make us feel like an “us”. I wish it weren’t so, and I do think that sev­eral more gen­er­a­tions of a glob­al­ized econ­omy (along more human­i­tar­ian and fair trade lines) as well as an open dia­logue through com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy will make us feel and act more inter­twined. But I think the thing that will make us think as a united front is know­ing that we aren’t alone in the uni­verse. My thoughts at any rate.

    • khaal­i­dah

      Thanks for stop­ping by. I talked about this with my son this morn­ing and the only solu­tion we could come up with was time or an outer space alien inva­sion. Ha. Well, we (as in human­ity) have plenty of time, I hope, but an alien inva­sion? Highly unlikely. That said, and all jokes aside out envi­ron­men­tal health is one cause we could all get behind on a global scale. But how bad does it have to get?