A while ago I registered a web domain - homohumilis.com.

I was thrilled to discover it was available.  The idea behind it is simple. How do we find an aspiration that is strong enough to counter everything that is summed up, morally, spiritually, and physically by an approach to the world and to each other that can be summed up in  “Build a Wall”?

How do we find another story that is not about retreating from the beautiful complexity and wonder of which we are a part, by building walls and blaming other people?

Back in the 1990’s, I was privileged to have started a company with and become a good friend of the late great Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Digital Village, a wonderful group of co-founders, artists, programmers and writers, was launched in the dial up days of the Internet. 

Douglas used to tell a little parable - the ‘Parable of the Puddle’, though he would probably not approve of my using the word parable, militant atheist as he was!

“ A puddle wakes up one morning, looks around at the hole that it is in and thinks to itself ‘ this hole fits me very neatly, in fact it fits me so neatly that this hole must have been made especially for me.’ The puddle continues to believe the hole it is in was made especially for it as the sun comes up and the puddle evaporates.” 

I have always taken this to be Douglas’ plea for a little more humility on behalf of Sapiens in believing that we are the apogee of cognition, perception, intelligence and feeling, maybe even consciousness.

The parable is also a beautiful koan- like expression of an intellectual and creative theme that, I think, runs through all of Douglas’ work, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, through the Dirk Gently books, Last Chance to See about endangered species, which he always described as his favourite book, and through much of his ‘secular’ writing and many of his talks (he was a sensational public speaker). 

I think that theme is a willingness, indeed the joy to be found in thinking about different perspectives, in asking “I wonder what the Universe might look like from this angle?”

Covid has revealed to Sapiens what it really means to be a part of a web of interconnected complex adaptive systems. No virus has ever read Adam Smith and believes in the “hidden hand” of the market..

Covid reveals us in our capacity to act as a species, when push comes to shove, in the face of a species level event. As when a very low tide reveals many things on the water swept sand that have previously been hidden or against which we have been banging our shins. 

It reveals our fragility but also our immense creativity and it reveals the constructive aspects of human nature and as always the destructive too, a perpetual struggle inside each one of us and in the societies and institutions we create.

So here is my hope. 

IF this generation and the seven generations to come, act with a new found humility about our place in the Galaxy, if we unleash our extraordinary creativity and curiousity to become better stewards of each other and all the systems we share the plant with, if we bend our backs to inclusive problem solving, then we can usher in an age of renewal. 

And one day some future paleontologist will bestow on us the species name “Homo Humilis”, because we nudged the dial away from the destructive in us towards the constructive. 

It will always be a struggle because we are messy, contradictory people but nudging that dial is worth getting out of bed for in the morning.

Homo Humilis, a name, we should be so lucky to earn, given to the generations post Covid, that saw more clearly what it meant to be good stewards, a name for the generations who found a way to hold  the paradox of celebrating all that is special about us and also found a way to “get over ourselves”. We certainly do no deserve it today.

Homo Humilis, not Deus for sure. We are not Gods. Let us indeed hope that we are not one day dubbed Homo Hubris, the generation excoriated by the future for sitting and watching the degradation of self, other and planet.

Strive one day to be called Homo Humilis and start by being a good ancestor. We have no excuse now for not seeing and perceiving differently.

Knowing what mattered to Douglas, I hope he would have approved of the idea too.