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This is Homo Comfortus

We humans are amazing. We can inch our way through existence on this planet despite our paltry brain capacity of perhaps two pints, never really understanding.

Consider a town with two football teams. As is often the case, each team has players who are brought in from other nations, with no association with the town even in language. The fans for each team are of the same basic sorts in wealth, religion, colour, and sex. In essence there is no difference, but the tunics and chants and every other superficial feature are quite different - so they can be different tribes. Each week the tribes are unreasonably lifted or crushed according to the success of their teams. Each week the tribes threaten and rail and bray at one another. At times some are prepared to kill or be killed for the honour of their tribe, the men often spurred by their women.

Yet we call ourselves homo sapiens.

Instead, I suggest that only the best of us may understand even our simplified models, knowing these can never be comprehensive.

A sane mind accepts that we can never understand our planet, let alone our solar system, galaxy, or universe. But others imagine they are greater than God, and suffer madness when they cannot achieve certainty, or control outcomes: certainty, even over whether it will rain the next day, or the traffic light will be red when they reach it, or whether a plan will succeed.

Sane or mad, each of us lives in a complex system of individuals, each free to make local decisions that can link with the decisions of others ... each unaware of the greater system, each like an individual ant sensing few parameters at only short range, but part of a column that feeds the great reproductive female in the nest.

By what rule do we make our human decisions?  I say we make simple decisions, one at a time, the rule for each of us being to eke out our sparse effort in the present to reach our greatest benefit, or comfort, in the future. It’s an exchange of effort between me now and me in the future. Perhaps we follow God’s will, knowing that outcomes are in God’s hand. Or perhaps we seek the comfort of being part of a tribe, or of feeling powerful, or of winning, or of having eased for a moment the grip of fear.

Whatever the comfort we seek for our effort, we are Homo Comfortus.