Overview

What does humanity want?

In this work you will not find the answer to this question, but you should find realise of the beauty and unique time when we can ask it at all.

This work is no different than the old philosophical questions of “where we come form?” where are we going?” “And why are we here?”. These have been asked countless times over generations and you would not find the answer to them here. But I would just put these questions in the context of “humanity” as a new emergent concept that has never existed before in the history of our species.

I also do this questioning from my particular background. I have been raised in a Mediterranean, European cultural context, deeply immersed in Greco-roman philosophy and state building plus the influence of the Book or Aramaic religions.

On top of that my studies shape my information sources and world view. I studied a Bachelor in Physics, a PhD in cosmology, did projects in neuroscience, astrophysics, dynamical systems, perturbations, information theory, causality, human evolution and cultural loss and cultural survival. These lines of research are the framework in which I am basing the texts presented here.

Moreover, in that particular “western” view, I come from València, from a catalan speaking family where both of my grandfathers are from the same town I was born (Sagunt), both being Catalan speaking. Both of my grandmothers emigrated to my town in the 40s (in the psot civil-war period) with their families, coming from the interior of València, from a region that was previously Aragonese speaking and switched to Castilian. As with many other mixed families, my linguistic landscape is mixed. My maternal grandmother did not switch to Catalan in the family environment, while my paternal grandmother did. The main economical sources of my grandparents where linked to the land, as farmers, orange orchards and orange industry, bakery and later on neighbourhood retail shops. In general terms they where from lower to upper middle class range in their society at the time.

Although inside of a mainly Catholic society, I have been raised a free thinker, with agnostic parents. Since childhood I always have felt a natural inclination to skepticism, empiricist and atheism. All these inclinations where allowed or encouraged in my educational and family circles, even by my paternal grandmother, who is the most religious and spiritual person in my connections. Although a christian believer, she is not a devout practitioner and is quite skeptical of the institution of the Catholic Church. One of her sayings being “do what the church says, not what the church does”. I have had little interaction with the Catholic church structure, other than the festivities, and enforced learning program at 6-7 years old that was required to do a first “communion”. Even in these classes I have been able to express my early atheism, at the little price of being put to face the wall for extended periods of time.

My parents move within the left-leaning Catalan/Valencian nationalism, which pursues auto-determination by our people in particular, within the historical boundaries of the pervious Kingdom of València, and by historical cultural groups in general My parents shifted away from the land and businesses, got university education and worked mostly at government jobs (city hall taxes and school- high school counselor and head teacher). The land itself in Valencia is of high significance, is one of the most fertile irrigated grounds in the planet, with extensive irrigation channels dating back centuries and developing a industrial level production of fruits, mostly grapes and then oranges.

To expand a bit on my unique cultural background, Valencian and Catalan cultures are quite special inside the Iberian and Spanish context. There are 3 states in the peninsula (Andorra, Spain, Portugal), plus a small part of the United Kingdom (Gibraltar). As Spaniard passport holder, I have unrestricted access to the colonial lands outside the peninsula: the Canary Islands and Ceuta and Melilla.

There are still 4 main languages in the peninsula (Euskara/Bask, Catalan/Valencian, Castilian/Spanish, Galician/Portuguese) and at least 3 other latin languages that are rapidly disappearing or are quite in the minority (Aragonese, Bable/Asturanu, Occitan/Aranés).

Historically, we have layers of culture that most of us can trace to Iberians, Celtics, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Arabs and Berbers/Amazigh. And in particular catalans are the last colonisers of the Valencian land, which was predominately dominated by Arab culture by the time of the Catalan colonisation in the XIIIc.

For few centuries my land was the home of the three main Abrahamaic religions, Judaism, Christianism, and Islam. But, within the Spanish monarchy in the Iberian context, they outlawed the other two religions and expelled every family that was associated with the practices or ancestry of the Jewish or Islamic religions. The Jewish heritage peoples where expelled in 1492 and the muslim heritage peoples in 1609.

In particular, in the town I was born, it is estimated that jewish population peaked at about 20% of the town population before being expelled, and muslims where about 20-30% before being expelled. So within 3-4 generations almost half of the population of my town was kicked away from their ancestral lands. This could be seen archeologically in empty houses in the old Jewish quarters that where scarcely inhabited until the XX century.

The peoples remaining from these other religious and/or ethnic groups were under strict scrutiny. They were forced to adopt Christian Catholicism and they were heavily punished if they were found to violate the practices. That is where the infamous “Spanish Inquisition” comes from.

Therefore, I am from a land depleted form its historical religious and cultural diversity, from a cultural group who’s main language comes from colonisers to the north, and our language itself has been prosecuted in a more or less stringent way for the last few centuries. Yet, we still widely use it, even if it is in decline.

Valencia is also the home to a staggering number of highly visual and impactful cultural traditions and festivities along the territory, or at specific towns that are involved in a grandeur public display. Among others these are: Falles de Valencia; Fogueres d’Alacant; Tomantina de Bunyol; Moros i Cristians d’Alcoi; Correfocs (shared with Catalunya and Balearic islands); la Cordà de Paterna; Muxarangues d’Algemesí; Bous al carrer i Bous Embolats; Bous a la Mar de Dènia; el Misteri d’Elx; la Foguera de Canals; Gegants (Giants and big heads, also shared in many other places of the Iberian peninsula and Europe, especially France and Belgium); Carnivals, shared with most of the Catholic world; and the Holy Week parades (shared with most of Spain and Latin America), which in the case of Sagunt’s Holy Week, it seems to be among the oldest ones, with its origins placed in 1492 and associated with the converted Jews and textile workers.

This framing is intended to raise conscientiousness that in a different socio-cultural background, with different interests, worldviews, formative years, the topic of this text could take a completely different perspective. Humans are the only animal (that we know of) that can sit at night looking at the stars and start wondering how would be the universe in 100 years, 1000 years, 10.000 years, 100.000 years, 1.000.000 years, 1 billion years, 1 trillion years, and where we will be in that time, even there will be such a thing as “humans” then. Moreover, these thoughts would make these humans act NOW in certain ways. To illustrate this point, there is an exercise that is passed to philology students to communicate to people living tens of thousands years in the future to not enter radioactive waste dumpsters. Under this simple exercise there is the deep thought about caring about the future so far removed from us cultural that current communication would be mostly gone.

But beyond these thinking, star-dreaming, “nuclear waste” worried humans, we created something new, the concept of “humanity”.

Therefore, I encourage the question itself to be shared and explored by many other different people, because, willingly or not, we are “forced” to live in the age of “humanity”.

We are no longer simply humans, that time has passed, we are now “humanity”. “Humanity” understood as a willingness to include every single individual on this planet that we can catalogue as a biological “hominid species” in a kind of tabla rasa where we are all equal and there are universal rules applied to all. These rules emerge, in big part, from the cultural background where I have been raised and nourished. Nevertheless, we will see the limits of this universal view, where they are and why.

This writing is about “humanity”, not humans. How “humanity” came to be, how “humanity” can “think”, and if “humanity” can also look at the stars, realise the beauty of the question, and the unique time “humanity” is living, and see what these thoughts, if they exist at all, would make “humanity” act NOW.

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