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By Betsy Hille
Special to the Rappahannock News
Carleton Coon of Washington will talk about his new book, “One Planet, One People— Beyond Us vs. Them” on Friday, Feb,. 11 at 8 p.m. at the Rappahannock Library. The talk is sponsored by The Rappahannock Association for the Arts and the Community (RAAC), as part of the Second Friday at the Library Series.
Coon’s latest book is his most definitive statement about how his progressive humanist world view can illuminate contemporary world issues, as well as the age old questions of who we are, where we came from, and why.
A central theme of Coon’s book is that societies have evolved over the last 50,000 years not only by adapting to environmental change, but by competing with each other.
Throughout this evolutionary period, the “us versus them” syndrome has enabled successful societies to survive. But even our most successful societies have reached a breaking point.
Global problems have emerged that require global solutions. In Coon’s view, in recent years we have witnessed a disastrous case of leadership moving the world’s most powerful country in exactly the wrong direction.
“I draw on my experience as a diplomat to propose the broad outlines of a solution,” said Coon. “A coalition of countries that have achieved stable democratic systems of governance will have to cooperate closely among themselves and with a strengthened UN while they reach out to zones of instability and gradually deal with the roots of that instability
“Eventually, our descendants will enjoy a world order that still contains and even rejoices in diversity, but human rights will be respected everywhere, the worst inequalities between rich and poor will be removed, and everyone will cooperate in meeting environmental concerns.”
“Is this utopian and impractical?” continues Coon. “Not in the least, unless we lose our quintessentially human capacity to imagine things that have not happened yet — but could happen — if we cooperate to achieve them.
“It is this capacity to imagine that hit our ancestors like a Promethean lightning bolt 50,000 years ago, and propelled us out of caves into megacities. We imagine, we set our goals, we achieve. That’s the progressive part. The humanist part is, we do it for all of us.”
“One Planet, One People” is based on modern science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular. Societies evolve, as well as species, but the rules governing their evolution are somewhat different.
To lay a foundation for this examination of how societies evolve, Coon describes the complex world of the human mind, which exists not just in separate minds alone, but in a continuum that represents the collective thinking of all people, past and present.
Coon analyzes how creatures of the mind
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