With too many useful toys,
Playing with each one that comes along,
And discarding it when something
Newer appears in its midst.
We have been dilettantes and amateurs
With some of our greatest notions
For human betterment.
We have been like spoilt children:
We have been like tyrannical children;
We have been impatient and imperious
Demanding proof when listening is required,
Tearing things down when they don't do
What we want them to do
(How much simpler to let things do only
What they can do)
Being uncreative about what seems dark
And terrifying;
Preferring only what seems easy
And effortless;
Asking about the numbers of a philosophy's
Followers rather than examining
The efficacy of its ideas;
Wandering down blind alleys of populism
That lead to concentration camps;
Refusing to admit our vast crimes and mistakes
Denying the horrors of the slave trade
Minimising the reality of the gas chambers
Tearing our hair out in futile attempts
To reconcile civilisation with genocide,
When civilisation (as we have come to accept it)
Never did mean true universal goodness
Of heart, but rather the self mythology
Of a people, a race.
No, neither the good in us
Nor our capacity for evil are exhausted.
And time will show just how young
We are in our abilities,
Our genius for good and evil.
For all these strains, unexamined, unredeemed,
Will find their higher fruition
In the unlit centuries to come.
We carry with us, across the silver river
Of the new age, many ambiguous
And deadly seeds,
And many seeds of illumination too.
We are the sum total of the history
That we have not truly examined.
We are the carriers of history's
Future diseases and cures.
The sooner we face the spawn
We carry within us in silence
The better it will be.
The sooner we admit our crimes to others,
To other peoples, creeds, genders, species,
The better and lighter the human
Future will be.
The more we deny, the greater will be the horrors
And vengeances of time
That wait in the wings
Of the bloody drama of our future.
Many beautiful thoughts have not yet sprouted
In our deepest hearts and minds,
Though they have lain there, within us,
Lain waiting for thousands of years.
The heart of humanity can
Sometimes be a stony ground indeed.
We speak the good words,
But we do not live them.
We perform the beautiful rituals,
But don't embody them.
We praise our capacity for reason,
But are unreasonably intolerant
Of other people's validity, and reasons.
We deploy the finest attributes
Of the mind and spirit
To make ourselves the elect
And to cast our fellow travellers
On this earth into outer darkness.
What a wonder is humanity:
How marvellous its astonishing gift
For hypocrisy.
(Ben Okri)
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