There's documentary on C4 tomorrow night entitled something like Endtime Thinking presented by Tony Robinson. Seeing the trailer I was immediately interested and not just because Tony Robinson is presenting it.(1)

I'm not entirely sure what the actual ideas being investigated will be but the very phrase tied together a few things I've been thinking of for a while so here's your three:

First off there's the difference between race and culture (including but far from limited to religion,) and I guess I should start here by explaining my stance on race:

I don't believe in skin colour.

Now I could be a pedant here and justify this seemingly rash statement by stating the fact the everyone's SKIN actually is the same colour, (it's the amount of natural sunblock underneath that produces an apparent difference in shade,) but thankfully my beliefs are based on a stronger argument than this.

Let me describe to you the thought experiment required to get on board here. Imagine if you will that all six billion human beings on earth stand side by side in a single line.

At one end is the person with darkest skin in all the world and at the other stands the very palest of us whiteys. The entire race is then ordered between the two by the shade of their skin.

Now if skin colour were a valid criteria by which to classify human beings we would be able to walk along this line and mark boundaries between categories. It is my belief that no such boundaries could be drawn as the transition from dark to light skin would be perfectly smooth.

There are, of course, people who would maintain their accusations of pedantry towards me here and say that we could in fact draw these boundaries, the edges would just be a little fuzzy with a few people straddling each line.

I would dispute this however by imaging the line another way. If we now ordered our species by height would we be able to draw such lines? No, the transition in heights would again be perfectly smooth and all would surely agree that any boundaries drawn now would be entirely arbitrary. Skin colour is exactly the same.

From where then does this idea come, and I admit it carries a powerful air of instinctive truth, that skin colour is somehow more significant than height? The answer, which carries us neatly back towards the almost forgotten point of all this, is geography.

The only reason humans have different skin colours is that we developed different amounts of natural sunblock under our skins depending on where we lived. As our numbers increased and we began to travel and mingle further and more we began to make our way along a very special road.

Basically this road along which everybody fucks everybody else until we're all the same colour. (bare in mind the evolutionary timescales that determined skin colour is millions of years while that of the spread of the human race is thousands.)

Now all cultures, (and yes, religions, yawn,) have also been defined by geography but are fundamentally different from skin colour partly because they are much more recent and also because they can remain relatively constant despite our intermingling.

Going back to our thought experiment, you could indeed categorise humanity by culture, albeit with fuzzy lines. The reason we confuse skin colour with culture is that we simply haven't yet had time to mix it up enough for the difference to become to obvious.

And here we come to the whole endtime thinking issue. This is basically the attitude that the present is in fact the end of time, that we have reached some kind of plateau along which we will now cost at a constant speed for all eternity.

This dangerously weird delusion stops us from seeing things like skin colour as the temporal phenomena they are and tempts us to make sweeping statements that may appear to hold true for a few millennia but quickly fall down when taking a longer view.

So there you have it, there is no such thing as skin colour. You may as well decide that one size of pebble is superior to any other when, actually, they're all going to end up as grains of sand in the end.

The second angle on this endtime concept is more specific and considers not people but the organisation, and acronyms, they create. The UN and the NHS are the two groups of people and letters I was thinking of in particular.

The process of creating both was that of making of making a grand and impossible dream a reality with the aim of permanently solving some of the greatest problems people faced.

The concept that health care was something above and beyond power and politics, that access to the best medical care possible was an inalienable right to all regardless of status is, when you think about it, a pretty amazing thing.

So too is the idea that no nation should ever be at war with another and the subsequent creation of an arena within which preventative dialogue could always be held.

The problem we face today is that we have, again, slipped, fallen in to the trap of believing that we have arrived. The very existence of the NHS and the UN is seen as the end of the process when , in fact , they are both just the first step along the road.

Rather than carrying these noble intentions forward and reaching even higher, we are apparently content to allow our elected representatives, (pardon me while I spit,) to just maintain the appearance of standing still when, in reality, our loss of momentum now means we're actually sliding backwards.

The fight is not over, it has barely even begun and it's not a question of maintaining what we have but perfecting it so as build even further.

The third and final point here is to consider why this may be happening.

There's an argument to be made that the power to change the world lies in the global north west and that in this region we are so, relatively, affluent and comfortable that we have lost the desire to push forward. There are no doubt plenty of other contributing factors as well, suggestions please.

The factor that occurs most clearly to me however is, as you might expect, a little darker than this.

The people making the decisions in our society today are partly the politicians, (ting goes my spittoon,) but mainly large corporations. The careers and lifestyles these people enjoy are fundamentally based on the existence of problems in society.

Both groups are afforded power and riches by us the people in order to enable them to solve our problems. What happens to them however when those problems are solved? Get to the back of the dole queue messieurs Blair and Gates.

The fact is it is not in the interests of a company or a government to actually solve problems. If companies produced products that lasted forever for example, they'd go out of business. If governments delivered a decent and sustainable standard of living to the whole population what would we need them for?

The vertical structures within which we all choose to live have as their foundations the assumption that today is forever. While they are very good at producing the illusion of progress, what is actually changing for the better in our world?

A recent poll showed that happiness levels among americans have stayed almost perfectly constant for the last half century, yet how much technological 'progress' has there been to your mind over that time?

It's easy to be angry at the world but anger can be a powerful engine when kept in perspective. One of the greatest sources of frustration I experience on an almost daily basis(2) is the feeling of treading water.

You look around you at all the people maing cricles in the dirt and just want to scream: "for fuck's sake come on! can we stop dicking about and just get on with it please?"

Generations passing without any actually development of the species? That's what animals do, that's why sharks and crocodiles today are almost identical to their ancestors of millions of years ago.

We are not however, at some point we set off along a road of radical change. Our heads swelled and our backs straightened; then we started planting seeds and putting one rock on top of another; then we started getting high and expressing ourselves by marking wood and rocks.

It was all going so well until, at some point we decided we couldn't be arsed any more. As mind blowingly, unimaginably wonderful as the golden city on the horizon may be we decided to stop by the side of the road and sit with our thumbs up our arses.

How much longer people, how much longer? We are most definitely NOT nearly there yet but that's no reason to stop altogether.

footnote

(1) is there anyone out there who doesn't like Tony Robinson? I've always had the impression that he's genuinely sound bloke and enjoyed watching him on TV, and yes, that's even before found out he's a stoner!

(2) while this is certainly partly due to working for the council it's also a result of the world at large as well,