Forever coalescing

Where to today, down the dusty corridors of my mind, weaving our way through the nooks and crannies and settling upon one of the many, albeit mostly pointless, topics for me to project forth my view. Which, for the record, would only be my view at any given moment in time and is just as likely to be not my view in a week or a month or a year of asked again. Not that anybody is asking, but if they did, then that would be the case. Is it not the case for everyone? Perhaps some are so dogged and immovable in a particular view that they never change and stick with that view no matter what, no matter what evidence is placed before them, no matter how the rest of the world might move on. Well, that is there prerogative I think. So long as they do not seek to harm or unduly influence others, then they can keep their dogmas all to themselves.

I thought about war the other day and why people, predominantly men, go to war, to kill others with a disproportionate number of women and children being caught up in the collateral damage. War is, I suspect, as natural as most other things we do. Even when we were mere hunter gatherers we probably fought other tribes to protect the areas we were living in. No different to the way apes or lions would do today. But since the days of moving from roaming nomadic small groups of individuals simply eating to live and living for the sake of living into a more agricultural being, we have become ever more bound to a plot of land and to others around us. And in amongst these ever enlarging groups of individuals there always has to be a leader. Typically male, typically the alpha male. And typically at some point in some way the leader or elders or counsel or whatever will determine on behalf of the group that they must take up arms to defend or conquer another group or take some more land, whatever it takes and then blood will be spilt.

No matter what the cause or the reason. The Great War had no great reasoning other than bickering relations looking for glory, power and respect upon the backs of the working classes. The war that followed was a necessary war in so far as the evil that was unleashed in both Germany and Japan had to be quelled else it would have likely destroyed everyone but a select number of people with germanic heritage, in Europe, and similarly the Japanese would have decimated every other culture in Asia. At some point these large blocs would have either traded with one another or would have fought each other with even greater numbers of dead on all sides. It might have been that there were four super blocs with USA, unified German Europe, Unified Japanese Asia and the USSR. And as the Germans were the ones making the greatest strides in technological innovations towards nuclear weapons and rocketry... then who knows what might have happened. But that didn't happen, fortunately.

Yet one thing is worth considering, if you take a huge step back, or maybe up. In fact up, might be the way to go. If you took a trip to the space station or even sat on the moon and looked down and you had a remote control that allowed you to rewind history and replay it at high speed and you could see the growth or the human population and its interactions. I think what you would notice over the millenia is, that small groups have continually coalesced into ever larger groups. You cannot take too much notice of 'today' because today is simply a blink of the eye to history. You have to play with the remote control and watch as small tribes become bigger tribes, become huge tribes and then massive tribes. Sure, along the way there will be lots of fighting and death but the fighting almost never results in the annihilation of another group, it results in the fighting ceasing and a the losing group being coalesced into the winning group.

Sure, if you take a snapshot at a given point of time you will find huge empires breaking apart into smaller groups but you almost never see a return to the original size of the groups. Sometimes it is because the larger imploding group has been in control for so long that there are no longer any memories of what the smaller group was. This isn't strictly true because there will always be stories passed down by generations but where would that stop. At it's apogee, societies would all return to the small family hunter gatherer packs of tens of people. But that has never happened that I am aware of, instead, the trend is always towards greater numbers of people living in communities or countries and the thing that really makes this happen is trade between these groups.

So when you are sitting on the moon with your remote control rewinding, playing back, freeze framing etc maybe you also get the chance to fast forward into the future. No doubt you will see more wars, more disasters, more change. But I suspect that at some point you will see a coalescing of all society throughout the world. Maybe this will come about due to a war that forces everyone together or maybe it will be due to natural forces that mean we all *have to* live together and work together as one simply to survive. Whichever it is, it will be many years, decades, millenia in the future. So it matters very little at this moment in time. For now, we are stuck with what we have which means that we have leaders that occasionally rattle sabres and, hopefully even less often, draw them.