Project Noah has launched the

Society for Humane Intellectual Progress (SHIP)

Interpretation

A lot can be said in a name, and a lot misconstrued. It is helpful, therefore, to be specific about where the SHIP is going at the outset.

SHIP is more working title and catchy acronym than a final position. Here follows the general drift of our terminology, for Progress towards an Intellectually consistent and Humane Society.

In short, contemporary society is not progressing and is inhumane, largely because backward ideas go unchallanged and retard human development. Together, we must turn this around.

Progress

On the vast majority of fronts - economic, humanitarian, social interaction and values, geopolitical and individual security etc. - world society is stagnating. Spectacular advances are now only made in technological fields - in armaments, telecommunications, medicine, and space exploration, for example. But these 'gains' are actually rare exceptions in the global pool of increasingly squalid events. They simply are played up by the techno-dependent newsmedia, maintaining the psychological chimera of market confidence, as sheer energy costs drive the inter-capitalist system under. What had been developed by public institutions as science - a "public good" expanding the modern era - has at end-of-era become the cash cow of mineral barons and corporate patenters. Knowledge itself is being privatised and digitised, entwining the human genome. The previous dynamism of world society is waning. Its very environment - its food, water and air - is dying. Profit is the antithesis of gain.

Our dynamism remains latent, in all the cumulated achievements and learnt methodologies of the past, waiting to be realised again as a way out of the compounding global crisis. And progress we must, even by beginning to grasp our current dilemma.

The solutions to today's problems must leapfrog us forward historically, going by previous performances of our collective innovation. However, the very concept of 'progress' - problematic as it has been in environmental and transnational terms - must necessarily be revolutionised, concurrent with its social context.

Intellectual

Technology - that supreme expression of human achievement - is a double-edged sword. At the same time that 'smart machines' displace human operators in diverse fields of employment, so too is the increasing dependence on technology undermining overall standards of education and thought.

Independent thought has become practically a crime in a homogenised 'brave new world', post-'1984'. 'Smart machines' are making most of us dumb, until we exert conscious control over their direction. The value of broad education is likewise in decline, as unemployment's structured positioning enforces conformity and reinforces prejudice. The ascendancy of abstract monetary values and Hollywood heroes has detached referenced judgement as the instinctive human preserver of life.

Reality remains, to be comprehended or not, as becoming very, very grim for most of humankind. The fundamental tool for comprehending reality - if we are not to hand the task over to a super-computer - is human intelligence. It can be argued that the human brain, through its resident adaptive mind, is the crowning achievement of millions of years evolving life on Earth. It is certainly the most complex organ known, and that is what has made us so influential upon the planet of our birth, taking us out into the solar system.

But we have yet to master our own ego. Just as men created God in their own image to justify gaining dominion over Earth and women, so too does human attachment to material reward prevent us from seeing the ultimate result upon our fellow creatures and ourselves. Responsibility (causation) has been placed elsewhere, until now. Coming to complete consciousness of our place in the universe is the essential next step in our biological development. Only our imagination limits the potential gains of liberating humanity from present want and wastage, greed and neglect, delusion and ignorance.

The SHIP is built through InfoHelp

Humane

Primacy of creationist myth restricts human growth. God-causation theory in religions has been an evolving key in social and intellectual development. It universally traces a shift from the many gods of pagan tribal times, to the one god of slave-based, larger class societies, with Christianity and Islam providing perfect examples. Religious history's logical conclusion is to arrive at no god and full human realisation.

God-creation myths were an ideological trick for maintaining class rule in agrarian societies, transmitted through religious bureaucracies. It is often said that wars of religion have killed more people than any other cause, but underlying these was competition for earthly spoils. Creation myths justified mobilisation of religious adherents to expropriate resources in the name of their god, but on behalf of their temporal and spiritual ruling classes. Science liberates humanity from class rule, and the obfuscatory superstition that hides it.

Liberation from creationism is needed to end its anthropocentric spawn. This has placed human interests above those of all other life forms, in an unnatural hierarchy of rights reinforcing class rule. Wanton wastage of 'lower' species is counter-productive, and unsupportable. Consciousness grows from conscience, and our treatment of other life. A gentle manner rests internally, awaiting propitious conditions to emerge as our behavioural norm. En route, harsh competitive struggle predominates. This must be understood, and kept in context.

Nature produced living species for varietal competition. Innumerable plants have a monopoly fixing solar energy into food at present, as far as we know. Further up the food chain, however, change is more rapidly afoot.

As Earth is more completely transformed into industrialised human habitat, the extinction of non-domesticated lifeforms accelerates. The loss of genetic variation is tragic and clouded in sentimentality, but a natural progression nonetheless, demonstrated through human mastery in the field. The hydrogen-carbon-oxygen-nitrogen based chemical process called life constantly restabilises itself in more and more complex, webbed arrangements of its atomic force, against the prevalence of entropy. The burgeoning mass of humankind is essentially the physical expression of nature's course. As we slowly develop awareness of our function in nature, and let this guide our behaviour, nature achieves consciousness. That is, natural life can at last harmonise with its physical environment, through realised human society. It just remains for us to shed our inhumane economic system of selfishness (abstracted monopolised value, known a "money"), which drives all ills.

Society

One small, voluntary step now, towards a striving, unitary and healthy, inter-planetary social organism in the very near future, of necessity. Together, we can build it.

Other meanings for SHIP

Dialectical materialist dualism shows The Way:
The Scientific Humanist Introspective Path
The Simple Humble Inspirational Path
The Spiritually Healing Individual Path
The Supreme Hidden Intelligent Path
. . .

SHIP pages:
1. SHIP home - current page
2. Peace and Compassion
3. Middle East notes, 3a 'Nile-to-Euphrates' sources, 3b Deuteronomy,
3c Recognition of 'Israel', 3d Hamas, 3e Gulf region, 3f Jerusalem Post colonial extracts
4. Mission of Peace
5. Philosophy for Change
6. Green Future - 10 parts
7. Two Futures
8. 2050 C.E. - humanity's deadline