Non-issues, and Other Dangers

crusades2.jpgThis is a bit of a discussion I’m having with another blog commenter over at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, a nice Christian who seems sometimes open-minded, sometimes not, but always quite a bit not, if you get my meaning. I’m posting it here because the discussion that my reply evolves into is something I want to have heard in more than that one place.

He says:

The whole thing of Darwinian evolution, to me now it is a non-issue. The development of the physical world, whether through the eons of cosmology or a magical “Poof!” make no difference.

And I answer:

And there’s yet another way in which we differ.

Rich, in this and some of your other comments, I’ve noticed that you have that typical religious “doorstop” in your head. You’re willing to have the door swing so far – say in accepting “microevolution” – but no farther.

Yet I begin to wonder if the underlying real reason you’re here is that you, too, realize it, and you’re searching for some reason to let it go, and accept that some of the stuff in your head is useless and counterproductive … and FALSE.

You used to be a creationist, you say. If you recovered from that, you’re obviously able to think about things at some level of independence.

You probably see me as an antagonist, and a bit of a snarky one, and I’ll admit that as far as you’re concerned, I haven’t been a very sympathetic presence. But I always do really hope that people will become realer and more open. I think the world depends on an “evolution” of thought in each of us, away from the static, frozen patterns of religion and toward something more reality-based.

And when I say “the world depends on,” I literally mean I think it’s life-or-death. I think we’re seriously screwed if the majority of us remain on the irrational side of the line. The price of irrationality was tolerable in all those past years when we were beasts among the beasts, but 100 years or so ago, it started being intolerable.

We now have vast power to change things. The power itself is value-neutral, but …

I’ve often said “If you have a faulty mental model of a problem, you get right answers only by accident.”

Because the power is directed by irrationality, it can only be the power to destroy .. except by rare happy accidents. We’re already seeing it. The slow-motion-so-far process of destruction is speeding up. All these little news stories of certain types of fish vanishing from the ocean, of certain species of dolphin dying out, of mountain gorillas expected to vanish, of glaciers melting, of polar ice withdrawing, of unpredictable weather patterns … it’s HERE.

And it’s here because we haven’t been reasonable. We haven’t used foresight. We haven’t thought about our decisions and actions. We’ve made them based on silly “ancient wisdom” that NO LONGER APPLIES, frozen-in-time ideas that are now an immense danger to us and to our planet.

I’ve said elsewhere that I had a recent scary epiphany: Humans under pressure become less intelligent.

And oh boy, do we have some pressury times coming. I’m not sure whether the election of President Bush was a symptom of the panic that I imagine coming – in other words, the “less intelligent” is already here – or just some historical aberration due to other factors. But there’s no denying that his reign in American politics made the world much less safe, much less livable, much less reasonable, must less intelligent.

But whether he was a symptom or not, the process will continue to speed up. Unless people, a lot of us, can be dragged back into rationality. Into moment-by-moment careful reasoning of solutions to the problems that we already have and careful prophylactic planning to prevent some of the worse ones to come – ones we can already see.

I hope if you’re in the midst of your own mental revolution, that you’ll go faster. I hope you’ll get there. I hope a lot of us will.

I flatter myself that I can sometimes see some of the broad general patterns of the world. There’s a current to history, and it happens back behind all the things people say. It’s what they actually DO, and all the side effects that happen because of it – and the way those things play out on the gaming table of the living world itself.

The broad general pattern I see now is that if we go on with people like you, and all those even less open and imaginative, we’re dead. And we’ll drag a lot of the things I love about the planet – lions and polar bears and ravens and red foxes and such – into the pit with us.

I repeat, I think this is already happening: Watching it is like watching a parked car with the brake off start to roll down a hill. Nothing will save it from a crash … except intelligent action.

I imagine moments in history when war came to this place or that, and how the residents of those places were willing to give up something of their own personal autonomy – up to and including their own lives – to place it in the hands of the war effort, aiming at the larger goal of regaining peace.

As an individualist, I appreciate that process with great reluctance. Giving up something of your Self should always be the last resort.

But the necessity of personal sacrifice is again upon us. Fortunately, this time, it isn’t individuality that has to be sacrificed for the war effort. This time, the war is against human ignorance, against mental laziness, against the sullen beastly part of us that wants to not think, but only react, and then find reasons and justifications later.

For the greater good, once again we have to give up something of our own sovereign selves. This time, what we have to give up is our own ignorance, our own desire not to see, not to know. Our desire to take it easy on ourselves, to tell ourselves none of it really matters, to lounge around in comfortable old patterns of thought forever, like today is a pajama-clad Saturday morning of a weekend that will never end.

But it isn’t. It’s not even Monday morning. It’s more like Friday afternoon, and there are only a few hours left to us to get the vital work done before the 5 o’clock deadline.

We have to give up our own irrationality, and our tolerance for it. Now.

It’s time you started thinking about why you’re really here. If you’re here only to be a Christian dog-in-the-manger – “Well, you atheists don’t know EVERYTHING.” – fine, stay as long as you like and do that.

If it’s this other thing I suspect, SPEED IT UP. We need you over here in the clear air, so we can all concentrate on what needs to be done.