Almost nothing to which you're responding is anything I've actually said.
Too, you contradict yourself. You decry the sense of superiority you imagine my words to express, while two paragraphs later favoring one of your own - and, more crucially, you fail to recognize the inherent contradiction between your apparent desire that we act in ways which make us "morally and spiritually superior" (to whom? by whose measure?), and your dissatisfaction with my point that we're in a position to act at all, and might do well to value even the less apparently savory of the traits which got us here.
Your arguments revolve around a preference for a particular sort of destiny which we might choose to make for ourselves. I'm talking about how we've put ourselves in a position to make any such choice to begin with. They're not at all the same thing. And, in general, I'm less concerned with the particular sort of future we choose - I don't even think that's something we're within millennia of being able to do, on the level of our species as a whole - than that we choose our more immediate actions with an eye toward the more immediate goal of maximizing the chance that we reach a point where we're able effectively even to contemplate such lofty purpose.
Too, you contradict yourself. You decry the sense of superiority you imagine my words to express, while two paragraphs later favoring one of your own - and, more crucially, you fail to recognize the inherent contradiction between your apparent desire that we act in ways which make us "morally and spiritually superior" (to whom? by whose measure?), and your dissatisfaction with my point that we're in a position to act at all, and might do well to value even the less apparently savory of the traits which got us here.
Your arguments revolve around a preference for a particular sort of destiny which we might choose to make for ourselves. I'm talking about how we've put ourselves in a position to make any such choice to begin with. They're not at all the same thing. And, in general, I'm less concerned with the particular sort of future we choose - I don't even think that's something we're within millennia of being able to do, on the level of our species as a whole - than that we choose our more immediate actions with an eye toward the more immediate goal of maximizing the chance that we reach a point where we're able effectively even to contemplate such lofty purpose.