Seventy-Five
If enlightenment were a scale from zero to one hundred—zero being pure evil and one hundred being a truly enlightened civilization—I think we're somewhere around 58.
That's probably better than it sounds.
For most of human history, life was brutally tribal. Violence was ordinary. Conquest was honorable. Slavery was economically normal. Children worked. Women were property. Public executions were entertainment. Your religion, birthplace, skin color, or family name could determine nearly everything about your life.
We've come a long way.
But 58 feels about right.
Because we've developed something strange:
Near-godlike tools running on Stone Age emotional hardware.
We can split atoms.
Edit genes.
Speak instantly to someone on the other side of the planet.
Put the accumulated knowledge of humanity into everyone's pocket.
Build machines that can reason alongside us.
And then we use some of those machines to argue with strangers about politics.
Our capabilities might be 90 out of 100.
Our wisdom might be 58.
Maybe that gap is one of the most important measurements of civilization.
So I've been wondering:
What would 75 look like?
Not 100.
Not heaven.
Not some utopian world where everyone meditates at sunrise and spends the afternoon planting community gardens.
Seventy-five.
The Shopping Cart Theory
I've never liked the shopping cart theory.
You know the one.
The internet says the ultimate test of whether someone is a good person is whether they return their shopping cart. There's no law requiring it. No reward for doing it. No punishment for leaving it. Therefore, the theory goes, returning the cart is the purest measure of character.
The first time I heard it, I was honestly taken aback.
Not because I leave shopping carts all over the parking lot. I don't.
I'll never leave one in the middle of a parking space. I'll never leave one where it can roll into someone's car. If the parking lot is sloped, I'll even put the front wheels up on the curb so it can't move.
But I don't always return it to the cart corral.