My favorite Guardian columnist, Arwa Mahdawi, went on a wonderfully controlled, funny rant about Elon Musk’s latest absurdity – riding the testosterone train, a favorite obsession of the social right. Apparently, loads to testosterone are supposed to make men better than women, and musclebound men brighter than wimpy intellectuals.
Oh, who is Arwa Mahdawi? She’s a British Palestinian lesbian journalist living with her wife and baby in Philadelphia, which should be enough for anybody, even if she wasn’t also one hell of a writer. Wish I knew where in Philly she lived, because I’d love to meet her when I get down there to buy Indian snacks and Lebanese olive oil at the International Store on Walnut St.
But that’s just one of my side obsessions. What got me to writing this piece is that I think she, as well as Musk, have the wrong take on our animalistic nature.
The basic assumption of most social commentary these days is that warfare, misogyny, tribal and racial animosity, and internecine conflict – all the woes of the world – arise from social imbalance.
Unh uh. That’s secondary, at best. They arise from evolution.
We’re mammals, and as such we’re going to behave like mammals, to the good and the bad. As a species, we’re part of a genus (homo) that’s part of a larger family… that’s part of the animal kingdom, that’s part of, so far as it can be defined, “life.” We’re all and each creatures of evolution, trying to establish a concept of morality that will support our particular warped assumptions.
We behave as we do because that’s what the world’s evolutionary program demands. We protect our young, our possessions, and our territory; we allow no one else to intrude without introduction and acceptance. Today, with the world on the edge of oblivion, we behave exactly as should be expected through evolution – we deny, we fight, we wield our weapons, and we cry “foul.” But it doesn’t arise from socially imposed foulness or antagonism. It’s simply who and what we are.
[My standard mea culpa here: I’ve said or suggested much of this section some time back.] Morality is a concept which differs for each individual human being. There’s no way you can define, codify or justify “morality” on a cosmic scale, yet on a lesser scale it becomes just mind games. It’s easy enough to say “the psychopath (or the ex-president) has no morality,” but likely the unhinged obsessions of the psychopath and the ex-president occupy pretty much the same realm of certainty for them as “morality” does for the religious or the secular righteous.
Humans invented the idea of morality and raised it to a higher plane than mere rutting mammalian behavior. It then appears obvious (to humans) that having a higher ideal makes us a higher order of being. But should someone – like me – not accept religious precepts as foreordained, the “moral” outlook can have no solid basis beyond mere acceptance. [In my case, that acceptance is pretty damned high: Wielding “authority” over others to their damage is to me as unforgivable as behavior gets. But how could I prove that my response is the better one or that it is “true”?]
It can’t be determined by any scientific measure, which I think is one reason many people these days don’t trust science – it can’t provide them with “truth” the way they want it delivered. They want “truth” to be beyond human definition, imposed by a higher source on a higher level of reality.
So, to take an honest stance, you have to dispose of “truth” altogether. If you, again like me, see science as providing the proper way of determining “what is,” then the hell with “truth.” Accept “what is,” and do your best to organize it for the greatest benefit of all – as if we’d all agree on what that benefit might be.
But what would it look like if we could change the world through social exhortation and policy, could form ourselves into an anti-belligerent species? The world would not just be a different place, we would be a different “us.” We would no longer be human beings (animal – vertebrate – mammal – descendant of hunter gatherers); we would be a signally different form of life from anything that has ever been known on earth.
Now to take this discussion in a slightly different but dependent direction:
Humanity as it exists will not ultimately survive. Nor should it. We are not worthy, and there’s no way, again, to say what will make us worthy.
What makes “worth”? Whatever we, as humans, collectively define as being “worthy.” But why should we even yearn to take such a wacky tack? Because somewhere in a tumbledown part of our brains, a slithery side-effect of evolution has implanted something to which we’ve given the name “worth.” [Circular logic? You bet! That’s something we’re damned good at as a species.]
It isn’t that I don’t think the world (planet Earth) should survive, but that I see no way to expect it to continue as a place that can support life within the range of what’s possible today. Humanity will destroy the place for every lifeform.
As a living form, we have fucked up because we were evolutionarily programmed to fuck up. 8 billion of us – ignorant, uncontrolled, uncomprehending – have chosen to live from one generation to the next without interest in consequences, because that kind of ignorance is innate to all life.
In itself, I don’t think our planetary destruction matters much. There’s a lot of universe out there that has no concern for Earth’s existence. But if someone should fine a way around what seems to me an inescapable, catastrophic end game… maybe I might be delighted.
Nah, not likely. We’ve collapsed in exactly the way our brains have been programmed throughout evolution to collapse. It isn’t that we’ve failed, but that we’ve succeeded too well in a direction that can only lead to the world’s destruction. We’ve come to the end of the line, the only possible end; it’s not just inevitable but necessary.
* * * *
Come gather round, depressives,
And a story I will tell,
Of Pretty Boy Freud the doctor,
Vienna knew him well…
* * * *
Despite the many years since the name change, I wish Top Ramen was still called Oodles of Noodles
lickhaven 