Promethean Wildfire

While once referred to as the “Language Gene”, it is now thought that FOXP2 became ubiqutous in our species because it allowed us to carry out sequential motor functions. This would have included knapping stone tools or creating composite technologies would require sequential actions or processing of materials, such as capturing and later creating fire. Only later was the same ability applied to the manipulation of sounds, and while likely used tactically at first to arrange hunts or share gossip it was quickly adapted to the construction of myths. These sophisticated conceptual tools were not true in-and-of-themselves, rather they allowed us to navigate and manipulate a constellation of truths - the behaviour of animals, the location of springs or the justification of social taboos around foods - in a way which enabled our survival. Over the millennia they allowed better means of describing the world, leading to better tools and technologies and in turn new ways of thinking about and adapting our environment. However this feedback loop has now spiralled out of control and our Promethean gift has set the world ablaze. At the same time as we fast become an urban species whose impact on the world has reached a geological level, so too have our myths detached us from natural processes. In the comfort of mechanical habitats we flee to the mytholgical comfort of the postmodern, liberated from the burden of having to identify and track meaningful truths. Indeed, we have convinced ourselves truths are simply interchangeable fictions. One symptom of this is that once sacred nature of truth is degraded to spear rattling assertions of warring tribes who seal themselves off in polarised intellectual enclaves, increasingly unable to understand themselves or the world around them. As the Information Age magnifies the world in microscopic and astronomical detail, we are overwhelmed by the true complexity of the cosmos and flee from its terrifying vistas. The challenge to our species is whether we can devise new myths capable of adapting to today’s information ecology in a way that meaningfully describes our environment and our place within it in a way that enables our long-term survival.