The "Natural Order"

This is something that on the back of my mind that I've been meaning to discuss for some time.

Earlier this year, my wife informed me that our pet birds had recently birthed two new baby birds. Although I was slightly dismayed that there would be new pets to manage, I was more excited to see these new life forms and give them a good home. It wasn't too long after they were born, however, that differences between the two started to surface. One of them was larger and healthier than the other.

On the way to work one day, I went to check on the birds, and noticed that the smaller of the two had been kicked out of the nest, and was lying on the bottom of the cage, unnoticed by the others. A great sadness came over me. I knew what was going to happen regardless, but I still picked up the baby bird, and gently put him (or her - I never did know) back in the "nest" (which was a food dish filled with some cotton). I phoned my wife to tell her what I found, but nonetheless, by early afternoon, the bird had been kicked out again, and had died - naked, ugly, alone, unnamed and unloved on the cage floor. My wife buried the bird by our work. She had given it the name "Mousey", because of it's resemblance to a mouse. I thought that was fair enough, since it was sad to die without a name.

I won't say I was distraught, because I'd formed no real attachment to the bird. Nonetheless, I was filled with that overwhelming despairing sadness - that one that you get when you realize not only that are you going to die one day, you're lucky for being one of the few that gets to enjoy the life you do have. I realise that empathy is one of those traits that differs in intensity depending on the person, and I would say not everyone feels it for largely unintelligent (at least not sapient) animals, but it is not one of those things that you can control.

Which brings me to the rant. There are those who believe in a "natural order" to the world, and that it is perfect, and that human intervention is the cause for all suffering in the world. If only human beings were to be more like animals, we would have world peace and society would be perfect. These people are usually the same ones that have the bumper stickers on their car that explains everything away in saccharine little quips like "You can't hug your child with nuclear arms". I've got something to say to these people that's been brewing up for a while.

Mother Nature isn't perfect. In fact, she's a cold-hearted murderous bitch. She's worse than all of the serial killers, warlords, false prophets, and politicians of the world combined. Every day, human suffering worldwide is staggering, whether it's due to starvation, overpopulation, natural disaster, accidental, or human intervention. If you were to sit and dwell on everything that was happening worldwide, it would drive you mad. And that's just the human world - thankfully, because of our "interference", we've spared ourselves to a significant degree by some of the crueler forms of suffering (at least statistically speaking). In the animal kingdom, death most frequently comes in two forms: the slow death by starvation or dehydration, or the intensly painful death by predator - in many cases where the victim is eaten alive. The notion that evolution has brought about the "perfect" state of being is pathetically naive. Yes, evolution is an efficient process by which life develops and adapts to a hostile and changing environment, but only to one end: reproduction. Everything that has developed as a result of evolution has developed to serve only one of two ends:

1) Survival to the point of reproduction

2) Reproduction, preferrably producing a many offspring as possible to reach #1

That's it.

No quality of life gaurantees, happiness comes as a side effect if and only if it gets you to those two ends. The same nervous system that gives us the ability to react to danger from predators or to hunt prey is the same one that assures us that our final moments will be in most cases, agonizingly painful. There's no evolutionary incentive to a merciful death - because after dying, #1 and #2 aren't possible anymore. The same pangs that give you the drive to find food to survive torment you when there's none to be had. The same biological imperative to find a mate for reproduction or to bond with family or friends to ensure your survival leads to sadness and desolation when you lose the ones close to you, and are isolated.

This is not the perfect design. When the naturalists claim that human attempts at prolonging life, gene manipulation, or even efforts at immortality should not be tried, because it's not what nature intended, it makes me sick. Life, as we were given it, is cruel and arbitrary. As possessors of intellect and reasoning, it is not only our right, but our duty as beings capable of suffering to subjugate nature and wrest our destinies from its grasp. It got us this far, but we can take over from here.

I believe that one day death and suffering can be conquered. After all, what is suffering but impulses that are delivered to the brain designed to trigger a response? Sure, that response was necessary for our survival, but now that we possess reason, can we not control these impulses so that we can decide our reactions based on our intellect rather than our suffering? And death? Is it anything more than the deterioration of our genetic material after so much reproduction? Can't the effiency of the process be improved upon, our even our genetic material preserved for retrieval later? Isn't the key to immortality just a little improvement on the cell reproduction process that we already survive on? The concepts are out there, yes, but they're not beyond comprehension. At every turn, scientific advances are stopped by critics who say that the way things are is just fine. That intervention is going to cross Mother Nature, or God, and there will be some metaphysical backlash.

I don't care who it is. The job didn't get done right. Mother Nature exists to server only one end, and if it's God, then I'll take my chances. If God didn't want humans to work for the betterment of their species, He would have stopped us a long time ago. In case you were wondering, I was once a believer, but it eventually dawned on me that I didn't really believe there was a God - I just wanted so badly to believe that there was some being out that that would give justice to the world - something out there to do something about the fact that the innocent suffer, sometimes too unbearably for us to even concieve of it, that the wicked prosper, and to make sense of all the nameless madness out there - the wars that have been fought, the poeple we've loved that we'll never get back, and all the little unnamed birds that die alone.

But wishing and hoping won't make it happen - like the Green Day song, "wish in one hand, shit in the other and see which one fills up first". And the naturalists' answer is just another way of dodging the sad reality of it; it's an even sadder lie, because it says that everything's hunky-dorey the way it is. I've realised that if we're going to do anything about the suffering in the world, we're going to have to do it ourselves. It's kind of depressing, since we're so far from making things really change, but that's the way it is.