STRANGE IS THE HUMAN BEING

How many of us were shocked by the Moslem madman in Holland who killed film maker van Gogh because he objected to van Gogh’s ideas about the oppression of Islamic women? I was shocked and enraged. I suddenly could side with George Bush in his effort to kill as many terrorists as possible. What angered me most was the threat to freedom of speech that the Moslem killer represented. Or so I thought.

Yet, here in America, in Taylor, Michigan, a 49 year old former Eagle Scout shot an acquaintance because the acquaintance identified himself as an “atheist”. The Eagle Scout/killer shot his atheist acquaintance because, “... he [was] evil; he was not a believer.” Another blind, senseless murder by a fundamentalist of another sort against one of my own, an atheist like me.

So why am I not as outraged by this Christian murderer as by the Moslem murderer? Evolution tells me why. The Moslem is a double outsider to me whereas the Christian is a part of my country. Evolution tells me that I will have stronger feelings about protecting my national group above the other’s national group. Thus, I’m not as outraged by the one murder as by the other. The interesting thing to me is that even someone, like me, who understands the evolutionary pressures on my decisions can do nothing about the intensity of feelings that my evolutionary body creates in me.


NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE AFTER ALL

According to E. O. Wilson, George Scialabba wrote perceptively of Michael Foucault when Scialabba observed, “Foucault was grappling with the deepest, most intractable dilemmas of modern identity.... For those who believe that neither God nor natural law nor transcendent Reason exist, and who recognize the varied and subtle ways in which material interest—power—has corrupted, even constituted , every previous morality, how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?”

As answer, Wilson writes, “To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it’s not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.”
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"The reason grandparents and children get along so well is that they have a common enemy." —Sam Levenson (comedian)