About PMF
The Pink Monkey Farm is a vain, but well-meant, attempt to discuss the urgent need of humanity to find out what it is, to what it pledges allegiance, and how we might re-imagine ourselves. Some of the reasons for its existence are sketched out in a sister website, pworldrworld.com, where I follow one line of thought that suggests that our picture of ourselves is outdated. There are others, however.
In the first post, I outlined my purpose thus:
As our scientific abilities have progressed at an ever increasing rate, our ability to employ those abilities ethically, or in the service of humanity, has stagnated. We well remember when scientists worried about their role in the development of the atomic bomb. Many who worked on the project initially later distanced themselves from it in disgust.
New challenges are upon us. They are in no way smaller than those who had the new ability to build a weapon of unimaginable destructive power. In material science, and even more in the biological sciences, we have developed remarkable facility. We can tinker with genetic information, and are just short of being able to design life-forms from scratch. We can envisage, and in some cases already manufacture, physical strata with active abilities. These are grown-up abilities, and a grown-up sense of responsibility is required, urgently.
In tandem with this development, we humans are seeing one another as never before. People are aware of others in distant places and from radically different cultures. The scale at which humanity now sees humanity is entirely unprecedented. This is altering our social affiliations. People are beginning to recognize that they belong to a species, and not a nation, church or football team. But we need to know what that means.
The Pink Monkey Farm adopts a stance towards our understanding of ourselves which may help. It does not equate humans with their pink monkeys (bodies). By recognizing that we are not mere bodies, although we have bodies, we can fumble our way towards a more realistic understanding of ourselves. “We” have both a collective and an individual nature, and regulating the relation between the two is the single greatest task we face. Different cultures do this differently, and we must be loathe to assume that the relative balance each of us is familiar with is in any sense the only, or best, way of regulating this relationship.
The PMF sees humanity as a grand thing, which is manifested in a stock of pink monkeys. We need to ensure that conditions are optimal for those monkeys, so that humanity can be the best damn humanity it is capable of. What kind of aspirations should we hold for any human being born in the future? Can we replace the charter of human rights with an agreed guide as to what constitutes a minimally satisfactory environment for a person to live in? How can we safeguard the personal while promoting the collective good? These issues will be teased out here. Feel free to contribute.
This is cobbled together by Fred Cummins, who can be emailed at fred.cummins at gmail.com.