WIESEL

“I write as much to understand as to be understood.” This quote is a favorite, going there to weigh ideas. It’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle; you can’t perceive the whole of Denali or Grand Canyon in little pieces. It requires a construct that has been debugged, one that has continuity. What I take from Elie Wiesel’s observation is; sometimes I have to discover what it is that I’m about and writing is an humble means of exploring the animal. 

All I can bring to a conversation is what I draw from inherited DNA and from what I have acquired. That’s it; that’s all there is. Since we are all unique in both heredity and experience, it’s no wonder we have different views on so many issues. Then, our culture has a way of pounding square pegs into round holes so that we conform without thinking at all. There is a lot of that going on with a 24/7 media barage of polarized politics and fundamentalist religion. 

When I was in graduate school I had to take a no-brain education class that lost its way and became a very good philosophy class. We took on the idea of ‘Thought’.  What does it require to think? The professor made the distinction between thinking and remembering. He suggested; thought requires we consider old meanings in new or different context to come up with modified or new meaning or, use new information to formulate new understanding. In either case, if you’re not after something new or different, it’s just remembering. If all we do is reinforce old correlations and old meanings we ignore the possibility for change and that’s not thinking. Neil deGrasse Tyson suggests five simple rules for getting at the truth.

1. Question Authority; great start, straight from Buddha. For certain, question the good judgment of your leaders and of long established tradition.
2. Think For Yourself; Question yourself (think vs. remember) The fact that you want to believe something should send up a red flag. Believing doesn’t make it so and we are vulnerable to what makes us comfortable.
3. Observe, Experiment and Analyze Evidence; It’s not an ideology; it's a process.
4. Follow The Evidence; when the evidence conflicts with what you want to believe, stay with the evidence; the other option is blind leading blind. Popular opinion is a leaky boat without a rudder.
5. Remember - You Could Be Wrong; quest for truth doesn’t end with the last fact.  When you learn more or better, you change accordingly. Truth is a moving target, as much in the way you get there as it is an answer.

I have friends on both sides of popular issues who believe they are thinkers but are in fact culturally programmed rememberers. They take comfort in sound bites that were crafted by lackeys, in closed meetings, paid for by leaders, who see leadership as a mandate to do as they please. When you are out of sync with both sides in a mainstream debate you feel lonely. I am stuck on an issue nobody else considers an issue. It is so fundamentally ingrained into western culture that it never, ever comes into question. The sanctity of human life is both a moral conviction and a cultural premiss that elevates human beings to something slightly less than God.  In that rarefied air, the value of any and all human life is intrinsically sacred, precious, requiring a high degree of dignity. From experience I understand how cultural pressure would have us believe it. Along with sentient, self awareness comes a self obsessed ego, vanity, conceit and selfishness. The sanctity clause goes a long way to soften the guilt of human hubris. It plays straight into Deist religion, appealing to the same self absorbed mentality. We are so special because of who we are and our sophisticated attributes that everything else in creation can be subordinated. Whatever we want to do with or to anything, we are so near God-like that we are justified. That stretch is too much right now for me to get my head around. 

The minute you step back, and you do have to step back,  to consider the alternative, it scares you to death. We are animals. We are animals with uniquely evolved features, skills and mind. We have been able to fashion for ourselves in just a few thousand years a world that not only favors human sovereignty but discriminates systematically against anything that appears to be an inconvenience. In the short span of our species line we are at the two year-old stage, just learned how exercise our own selfish whims. We have developed a pecking order among ourselves that waxes righteous principles on one hand and practices genocide on the other. Buried somewhere in the human, collective conscience is a need to feel justified in what we do. At the root of all religion is the principle of, ‘Do unto others . . .’ But jealous, angry Gods conveniently leave wiggle room to do whatever you must to satisfy your appetite. We are animals and we value human life only as long as it suits our immediate need. The idea of sanctity, if rescinded, would not diminish humanity. It would elevate all life, from whales and elephants who demonstrate human behaviors too complex to be dismissed, to algae, even bacteria. Life is shaped by a magical, natural process. Energy and matter combine in systems that not only metabolize raw materials but use them to replicate themselves. The Bible gets the ‘Begat’ part correctly. 

So, what does this mean to me? I am human and I can’t change that, even if I wanted to. I see too many flaws and inconsistencies in the ‘Sanctity of Life’ model to believe in the ‘God-Religion’ construct but I understand why everybody else does. I’ll keep questioning myself, keep looking for new, better information. But this life is way-too short and I’m way-too far along on its journey to expect much. So I’ll go with the wind that blows ‘Do unto others . . .’  and I’ll hold onto the collective conscience that favors cooperation to competition. This life is the only one I’ll ever know and most of it is spent. What I have left I want to feel good about after all, I am human.