2001: A Space Odyssey is on Turner Classic Movie Channel. Made in 1968 it is director Stanley Kubik’s big screen rendition of author Arthur C. Clarkes’s vision — a tale of human evolution. It begins with prehistoric tribal apes coming into competition over their sustenance. One group is given insight through contact with a “monolith” that appears out of nowhere and they learn to use primitive weapons to dominate the others. The implication is that this was the point where apes evolved into humans.
Fast forward from 1968 — a year marked in America by a useless and terrible war and still largely unexplained public assassinations — to what seemed then to be far off into the future. The nations of the world have come together in peace and cooperation — we now transverse outer space with confidence and ease. The monolith has been discovered buried on the moon. What transpires appears to be the next phase in human evolution, a computer named “Hal” acting as a virtually intelligent enabler.
A real event in 2001 actually did instigate an “evolution” of a sort — this one very earthly. Nineteen men who trained in one of the most primal places on earth, much of which looks strikingly like the land of the opening scenes to our movie. They commandeered four passenger jets (we haven’t yet gotten to where these can easily transport people throughout the solar system) using extremely primitive weapons. Two of these people-packed airliners turned fiery spears struck and ultimately brought to the ground two monolithic skyscrapers that symbolized the American style capitalism while the world watched on live television — most in horror and some in ecstatic joy. At the very moment the men and women who were employed where this destruction took place were setting into motion a worldwide financial scheme that would ultimately lead the developed nations of the world to the brink of a financial black hole that terrified even the most optimistic political and economic pundits and geniuses. If there was a Divine message in these events it was that they needed to stop and turn back from these self-ingratiating designs to something more universally beneficial. They did nothing of the kind.
The changes that the actual earth-changing event of the year 2001 has brought about among the most highly evolved creatures on Earth can hardly be called evolutionary progress.
It appears we have devolved.
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