We must, with the Pope, endevour to rediscover our Garden of Eden

Though I am not a Catholic and have written critically on European Christianity’s history, I live in a world where the faithful are the overwhelming majority.

Because I don’t know any other world, I must seek to live in symbiosis with that majority without necessarily succumbing to its shortcomings.

The Greek word symbiosis is the key.

For it invokes us to “live together” and calls upon people of all ethnicities, races, cultures, genders and religious beliefs to respect one another and even, whenever necessary, come to one another’s assistance readily and selflessly.

Probably the most wonderful attribute of our species is its nature-given diversity.

No other species can live in so many drastically different habitats.

As a direct consequence, humanity manifests itself in many cultural, ideological, national, racial, theological and tribal forms. Marvellous!

In other words, in a planet with so many different existential possibilities, our racial differences can only be a blessing.

Thus, whenever Pope Francis extols “Catholicism”, I hear him.

For it rekindles even in a non-Christian mind like mine the original significance of the word Catholic (from the Greek Kata Holos by which the first Christians expressed the universality – the “all-one-ness” – of their hopes and their mission).

A SINGLE SPECIES

Yet, taking place long after evolution had already produced what Stephen Oppenheimer, the historian of science, calls “Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH)”, it means that – notwithstanding our myriads of races, nations, tribes, cultures and beliefs – human beings remain just a single species. The lesson is thus clear to see.

It is that – by their own nature-given manual, mental, oral and social efforts – human beings can survive and even thrive both inside the most frigid polar tundra as well as inside the most torrid equatorial selva.

In a word, humanity’s unique survival secret lies in its natural ability to put its eggs in very many differing survival baskets.

In that way, if some environmental happenstance – like El Niño – destroys one basket, other baskets may remain to carry on humanity’s evolutionary journey.

Most other species are not endowed with such genetic versatility and have to perish in the sudden appearance of any environmental holocaust.

That is the answer to clannism, racism, sectarianism, sexism, tribalism and other forms of bigotry in which our world remains steeped.

To annihilate such chauvinism, so that humanity could tackle together in harmony all the environmental challenges that faced it, was among the objective purposes for which civilised mankind invented government and organised religion.

OBJECTIVE FOLLY

The modern biologist minces no words about it.

Any species which puts all its eggs in a single environmental basket necessarily condemns itself to the verge of extinction.

Thus the number one attribute of the human species is its ability to put its survival eggs in a myriad of environmental baskets through racial and other kinds of differentiation.

That – if you ask me – is the objective folly of racism and tribalism.

Existing among all races, these are expressions of human individuals who have failed to outgrow humanity’s primitive mentality to learn the objective oneness of the species and the need – through science and technology – to fortify that oneness and tackle the environment with ever greater skill.

In his reading of history, Pope Francis knows the extremely negative role that both his race and his Church have played against humanity in general and, in particular, against the black and the female human being, including in his Latin America.

But we, the scions of the victims, cannot go on moping for ever about these injustices of history.

Positive action is what is now called for. It is time the scions of both the perpetrators and the victims merged their efforts to return humanity to its original family home.

And, in the Vatican, Pope Francis – a Caucasian and yet a Third Worlder – is excellently placed to lead humanity in the fight to rediscover its Garden of Eden.