Ideology and Evolution
Ideology and Evolution
I speak here as an ultracrepidarian, aware that my grasp of most subjects is thin but still willing to offer an opinion or two about our species and its prospects. If this apology is not sufficient for the three people likely to read these lines, they are welcome to deny any relation to me. What I know comes from ordinary books, not scientific journals, which would have left me even more bewildered than I already am.
We are told that roughly 900,000 years ago the human population may have been close to 1,200 souls. From that slender beginning we have multiplied into nearly nine billion, illuminating the planet like a vast grid of Christmas lights. We are not yet the desperate Manhattan of Soylent Green, though when I visited in 2024 the crowding suggested that the screenwriters were not entirely wrong, simply early and overly dramatic, much like anyone who learned their science the way I did.
Still, I continue my little dystopian meditation, not because I enjoy it, but because age has relieved me of the need to pretend that the future will be gentle.
Shel Silverstein once reminded us that we are “still gonna die,” a truth that every other creature on Earth accepts without ceremony. What fascinates me is how many ideologies we humans have spun, religious, philosophical, political, each offering some escape from time, some reassurance that our story continues elsewhere. I do not recall these promises the way scholars do, but I know enough to say that our confidence in them has grown even as our instincts have not.
For nearly a million years, our survival depended on simple capacities: cooperation, caution, recognition of danger, and the humility to know when nature had the upper hand. Then, in a mere 200 years, technology arrived like a trickster god and disordered all of that. It lifted many burdens, yes, but it also contradicted the instincts that kept us alive. The conflict between ancient wiring and modern machinery now resembles a conveyor belt carrying living bodies toward the radiant fire of the sun. Laugh or cry, either would be appropriate. Once we were buried and became soil; now we are burned and become ash. The mythologies warned us, and technology seems determined to fulfill the prophecies.
Perhaps, after all of this, the species will collapse back to something like its original size. A few scattered communities, twelve hundred souls again, might relearn the old instincts: how to share, how to protect one another, what love is when it is enacted rather than theorized. Maybe they will listen to whales conversing across oceans or watch ducks flying in formation and remember what cooperation once meant.
It is a small hope, but not a foolish one. It may be the only hope that belongs to our species rather than to our ideologies.
Review of Ideology and Evolution
The essay is a reflective, ironic meditation on the human species, its explosive population growth, its conflicted instincts, and its search for meaning through ideology. The narrator adopts a disarming, self-deprecating voice, framing the essay as the musings of an “ultracrepidarian” who nonetheless has earned the right, through age and reflection, to speak plainly about humanity’s trajectory.
The central argument unfolds in three movements:
From Small Beginnings to an Overcrowded World
The essay contrasts humanity’s humble ancestral population with its current billions, using vivid imagery (earth lit like Christmas lights) and cultural touchstones (Soylent Green) to illustrate how far we’ve stretched the planet’s capacity. This sets the stage for a gentle, dystopian outlook, not alarmist, but simply honest.Ideology as a Response to Mortality and Fear
Drawing on Shel Silverstein’s blunt reminder of human mortality, the essay observes that religious and philosophical ideologies function as comfort mechanisms, attempts to deny or soften the inevitability of death. The writer suggests that these systems have expanded even as the biological instincts that shaped our evolution have not changed.The Collision of Ancient Instincts and Modern Technology
The essay’s most powerful theme is the evolutionary mismatch: for nearly a million years humans relied on cooperation and humility to survive, but in the last two centuries technology has disrupted these instincts. The metaphor of a conveyor belt of bodies moving toward “the radiant fire of the sun” captures this transformation with poetic force.
The essay concludes not in despair but in scaled hope, the possibility that after collapse, humanity might return to smaller, cooperative communities that rediscover genuine mutual care, much like the natural cooperation seen in whales or migrating ducks.
Overall Assessment
The piece is:
Philosophically insightful without being academic
Poetic and imagistic, especially in its treatment of technology and mortality
Humorous but earnest, using self-mockery to open space for truth
Elegantly structured, moving from personal voice to planetary vision
Its ultimate message is a quiet, evolutionary hope: that love and cooperation may outlive ideology, even if humanity must shrink back to remember them.