This should be fun. Blogs are for splattering your deepest, darkest opinions all over, so let's paste in a rant I wrote a while ago. There is no structure and no paragraphs, only indignation. Let's see what happens.
It's all been asked before. But there is still no satisfactory answer. Why? Why is their war? Famine, death and disease are different. They are natural. War is not--although it can be said that some animals, such as ants, have war. True, war is a manifestation of natural impulses. But, especially on the scale it exists today, there is not much natural about it. The solution is simple: we all have to get along. Why is it so difficult to produce this simple solution? Maybe the same reason it's so difficult for me to put down in words the stories that are so clearly etched in my imagination. Theorizing is easy, implementation difficult. It's like an unseen force. It's like that thing that happens when you try to press two magnets together at the wrong ends. Something that can't be defined. Maybe when we ask "why," we are really asking: "what is this thing that stands in the way of us doing what we know to be right and good?" Again, as happens so often when I get philosophical, I see why religion exists. Religion provides the unseen force with identity. Satan or some other demon holds us all back from attaining what we know we need. I would like to believe that, but I can't. I know (or I think, rather) that it is human limitation. It is my own mind keeping me from writing, and our collective minds keeping us from getting along. Why can so few other people grant any time to seeing things from others' points of view? Or to feeling what other people feel? When you think of another person as yourself, it becomes easy, even essential, not to hate them. Could this be the instinct for self-preservation? If that was all we were running on, why would empathy be an admirable trait? It would be an annoyance, preventing you from doing things that must be done for your own survival. I understand conservatives, or at least I think I do. I can also see why they feel the way they feel. But I know they are wrong. History shows that they have always been wrong. They can't see it. How could they? To realize, consciously, that your viewpoint, philosophy on life, and everything you believe in is wrong (or rather, too simple) would be destructive, devastating, to one's psyche. Why should we expect them to admit that? It would be death. How can we change them? Many, we can't. They'll die, their children will feel differently, and things will change despite their best efforts. But conservativism will never go away. Some things will simply be replaced with new things to feel conservative about. The old "earth is flat" argument and all that. Flat-earthers would never have dreamed about conflict over evolution, but it is their spiritual successors that carry on that debate. In their own way, conservatives are very modern. I also have no doubt that they are eternal. To be conservative is to be someone resisting change. They are frightened people. The rest of us are frightened too, of course, but unlike us they have found a symbolic solution to that fear: the familiar past. Let us not forget that we are all, in some ways, conservative. Most of us would think it unethical, or at the very least creepy, to remove the brain of a newborn and replace it with a computer that programmed in its designated societal role. But in a few centuries, perhaps people that believe that would be the conservatives, and the ones advocating it the progressives. Is there no limit to human morality and immorality? It seems to me like a continuum, with the progressives striving forward and the conservatives backward, onwards and onwards through time, with the old progressive opinion being the new conservative opinion. Where, in this, is real morality? Does such a thing exist? In the universe, or at least on Earth, is there a real "right" or "wrong?" And if morality does not exist, what does that mean? If it doesn't than everything almost everyone believes is wrong, because most of us possess a sense of morality. If there is no morality, it is money and power that are right. The capitalist, the individualist, the selfish one. If there is no morality, the only people who are right are the ones whose only function in life is to look out for themselves. Yet I feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with this way of thinking. I don't know, I feel. To look out for themselves is something animals do. Are humans actually greater than animals? I don't know about greater, but I think that humans are more than animals. The way we strive for knowledge, spirituality, fulfillment beyond our material needs is distinctly beyond the animal. But is it better? Who knows? We could use all our knowledge to destroy the planet. Yet we are also a fundamentally optimistic race. All of our science fiction depicts this. Even our post-apocalyptic scenarios assume that we as a race somehow survive the apocalypse. We believe we will always be present. But as C. S. Lewis has pointed out in Out of the Silent Planet, we have no way of knowing that our future selves will be "us." In fact, with the advent of genetic modification, it is likely that they won't be. Even with natural evolution, they wouldn't be. Our descendants will no more be "us" than we are the dinosaurs. We will not survive. What is left? I understand religion.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
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12 comments:
But I want my brain replaced with a computer! Seriously, though, I completely agree that today's radicalism eventually morphs into tomorrow's knee-jerk, backwards, anti-intellectual tripe. I suppose it's all a matter of what you grew up with; after all, our parents are all perfectly comfortable using TVs, assorted motor vehicles, and complicated kitchen electronics, but most of them haven't yet figured out DVD players and couldn't competently use a computer to save their lives.
Ah, but morality and technology, though they be closely linked at times, are not the same thing. And I agree that what you grow up with usually forms your ideas of morality. But this still doesn't answer the question, what is morality in the first place? Does it even have an independent existence beyond what humans place on it? This unanswerable question is, I believe, a strong reason that religion is such a powerful force in people's lives.
Morality is a human construction. It doesn't "exist" the same way a tree does, there is no right or wrong model of morality (ironically enough). But this doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, just that none of the different versions we have currently invented is The One, or ever will be. And this doesn't mean that morality is useless and should be ignored. The reason morality exists, and the reason we have war, is because we are neither animal or non-animal. We're in between, and that makes things bizarre.
Animals have no morality. Animal morality is about as useful as a parachute made out of a net. Animals simply know what to do and what not to do, to survive. Since they don't possess self-awareness or the capacity for abstract thought, self-preservation is the only goal they care about because in their world-view, such as it is, it's the only truth. Humans, for better and for worse, do possess this capacity to ask "Why?" and to try to find out or make up answers to questions. Thus, morality: without fully-fledged instinct, how do we figure out how we're suppposed to live? We really have no idea, so we just improvise.
But neither are we totally devoid of instinct. Competitiveness is an animal instinct, and even when it stops making sense in a human context, we still do it anyway. And because we possess that peculiar intellect, we are non-animal enough to come up with neat new ways of killing and destroying that go beyond our body's abilities, but we're too animal to stop fighting. We have the impulse to fight, but the intellect to enhance fighting and to try to logically justify or rationalize it (like I'm doing now). Most of our undying social conflicts, I think, stem from this internal struggle of being in the middle of evolving out of an animal consciousness and into something different. It has a crapton of growing pains, and we might not make it through this growing phase at all.
Leastaways, that's what I think.
One more thought: We aren't "more" than animal, because that implies we are animal plus something else. The way I see it, we're slowly shedding our animalness and replacing it with that "something else." So we are less than animal and more of something else, at the same time.
A lot of what you said makes sense, but I don't agree that human conflict arises out of our state of being in between animal and something else. In fact, most of it is fairly easy to understand--here's a very simplistic model. Each group or individual believes themselves to be right and anyone who disagrees with them to be wrong, as a matter of psychological self-preservation. Look at Bush. America, and himself, are good. The Middle East opposes America. Good cannot oppose good: therefore, the Middle East is evil. Fighting against evil is never bad. Therefore, they must be fought against. Bush vs. the Middle East is a heavy-handed example because he is a man who thinks especially simplistically, but all people, no matter how open-minded, fall into this cycle in one way or another. We all sequester ourselves into groups. I don't believe this behavior is unique to humans; in fact, you can see it quite clearly in any other type of social animal. Not us=bad. Again, far too simplistic to be the whole truth, but it's the basic structure. The big question is, since humans can realize this sort of thing, why are we unable to overcome it?
You just said what I said, but with concrete examples. People need "reasons" for going to war, animals don't. Animals fight because they have to survive, be it fighting for food or for mates or for living space. They don't need to make up bullshit reasons to fight because their reasons are real. But humans always make up excuses, and the reason we do this is because that new, developing part of our brain pretty much makes us do it. We don't want to admit that we're being animals when we fight, so we have to make up "human" reasons. After all, rational beings are not supposed to act irrationally like animals, right? So if we go to war, it must be for something greater, something else. Thing is, we're not fully rational beings yet.
We've always liked to think of ourselves as better than animals, above the rest of nature. So we don't like admitting that when we fight, we're fighting because its our instinct to fight. We have the irrepressible urge to fight; we do it all the time! We fight over cleaning the apartment! We have to fight until we lose that instinct. The thing is, in our continual evolution away from animals, we have lost most of the animalistic reasons to fight before we've gotten rid of the will to fight. And because we can't just hit each other for no reason, because our new rationally-based minds can't allow that, we fabricate new ones. Thus, "He's the bad guy! Roar!"
Now, the fact that these reasons we've come up with are often incredibly stupid just goes to show you how young and immature our rational minds still are, as a species. They are still preoccupied with justifying animal actions as human actions instead of embracing pure rational action, which I would guess would be something along the lines of mutual cooperation for all. But there's no way to be sure because none of us are there yet. Not even you, kiddo; you bicker with Nate often enough, or with people who ate your slices of pizza without asking ;) . War is merely that on a much bigger and more violent scale; the instinct is the same.
We aren't going to overcome it until we all start to think much differently. And that's going to take a lot of evolution.
Also, who the hell did eat that pizza? The fucking pizza gremlins?!
Far more nefarious than mere gremlins. Nothing short of pizza demons would have done such a thing. Clearly it is also they who followed me to SLOW11 this summer and stole my pizza, ice cream, cookies, milk, bowls, glasses, and cutlery. Then trashed them all and left them for me to clean up. Again and again and again...
What!? I have not heard of this!! Do tell!!
Basically, we've been living in a house that has people in it capable of stealing and lying to our faces about it. Repeatedly. And there was no way of telling who to blame--essentially one or two perpetrators hiding among innocents. We had our suspicions, which I'll tell you about in person, but nothing could be proven. We dealt with it--bought a mini-fridge and hid our more valuable items in our rooms--but we're glad to have the house to ourselves now.
It was really frikkin annoying. Nobody would own up to it, and it kept happening until we took all our stuff out of the common area and stashed it in Emily's room. They probably ate $50-100 of our food, the cocktarded ass-sticks. They're no better than vermin, really.
Wow. Looks like I'll have to fuck someone's shit up when I get back. Indulge in my animal instinct to go intercontinentally ballistic on some good ol' fashioned scum.
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