We raised horses when I was a kid, Appaloosas who preferred the outdoors and went semi-wild every winter, their coats as thick and layered as a Russian Cossack’s. The bulk of my family’s property was called The Cedars because the second-growth Eastern red cedar had taken over what was once rough pasture land, and on this property towards the bottom were old apple trees once tended by crusty Yankee farmers. In the fall, the apples would drop and these wild Indian ponies would gobble them down until their multiple-stomach digestive systems fermented the apples. We would watch in amusement every year as the horses foamed at the mouth, staggered around like human drunks, then plopped down in comfortable dust wallows that they had formed over the years. I have no idea if they had hangovers, but like many a human, they did not seem to learn from them if they did. It became something of an annual rite, enjoyed, I presume, by all.
It was probably a terrible thing for the horses. I don’t know, and, what the heck, those days are long-gone now, so long-gone that I had not thought of those ponies and their apples for ages until I noticed a young tom turkey staggering about in our over-grown garden just last morning. The weather of late has been humid, and the shortened days are now causing the nights to cool considerably, bringing a light mist to the garden at dawn that made this stumbling tom seem like an emerging zombie turkey, lurching in the gloaming for a taste of unpicked corn or, who knows?, some flesh from living turkeys. Turkeys being turkeys, it could be, even though the flock to which it belonged was nearby, a large group of sixteen parading around the edge of the road. No running in terror for them; and, coincidentally, no running to save their former comrade, either.
My first thought was that the turkey, like the horses, was drunk on too many garden produce. But no: many feathers were broken and it seemed he always lurched to one side, indicating a definite wound or break in a leg. My wheels began to slowly turn: by the road + hurt turkey must = car. So it was hurt and dying, falling among the over-abundant tomato plants as the dog took a definite and not very neutral interest. I called the dog off first before thinking that perhaps the dog would be doing it a favor by ending its life quickly. Still, I restrained her. I felt sorry for a turkey who had been helping to wreck the garden and who I would have gladly shot and eaten a month or two later, in-season of course. Meanwhile, the flock continued on its way, its brother or uncle or cousin left to the tender mercies of humans or dogs or of nature in general.
So as I stood barefoot in the cool, wet morning grass, the wheels began to turn more quickly. How is it that I could feel sorry for a turkey? And how is it that its nearby flock couldn’t, literally, give a flying flatulence about their very kith and kin?
It came to me that the foundational questions to ask are: does our empathy make us stand out alone in nature?; and: how did we among all creatures get it?
Certainly, before we answer these questions, we must hang our heads in shame, all of us, regardless of race, creed, etc. As if I needed more proof of the evil of our species, I am just finishing a new non-fiction, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, by Matthew Frank, about the history and ongoing horrors along the West South African diamond coast, where DeBeers Enterprises continues to corner the market on the world’s diamond supplies, keeping a fairly abundant commodity outrageously expensive. The company itself follows the law for the most part, which is still, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, ridiculously loose concerning their near-totalitarian powers over the workforce on this otherwise deserted coast. They employ child labor, as children are the preferred size for those being lowering hundreds of feet into the ground into tiny drill holes. They get lung disease before puberty, and die at the average age of 37. Everyone is searched just about everywhere, small tortures are given to those trying to smuggle, and it is said that many simply disappear forever in the everlasting sands of the vast Namibian desert.
Worse, though, are the illegal operators from many nations, from China to the US to India, who use slave labor, particularly children, for hellish mining operations that often kill them in months or a few hideous years. All for a hard and shiny rock that supposedly says, as the commercials tell us, “I love you forever.” Could Satan be more fiendishly perverse?
And yet…what of our local turkeys? They are still roaming the yard and garden, oblivious to their fallen comrade who is now dead and quickly rotting in the adjacent field. Peering out the window, I can see that our dog is doing her best to dislodge the feathers now that the corpse is getting soft. I can clearly see that she has already gotten the head. I must stop her soon, before she starts on the more dangerous bones. To do this, I must lift the rotting corpse up into the crotch of a tree and hope that the raccoons take care of it before knocking it to the ground again. We’ve been here before.
At this point, I no longer feel sorry for the turkey, but for myself. If this were a human corpse, this attitude would be seen by most as a sign of depravity or of moral tragedy forced by brutal circumstances. That, along with our shock and disgust with the treatment of diamond miners, among many other things, is what we might see as our salvation.
And it is. Still, we might wonder how we got compassion and how we maintain it. The new “head” chaplain at Harvard is known as an atheist, someone who is part of the “Good without God” movement. This is not unusual for our elite groups these days, this pairing of non-sequiturs with moral self-righteousness, but is the philosophy correct? Certainly, we can be a good person without believing in a god or gods, but can we be a good people for several generations? Without a North Star, where might the moral compass point? Consider: if we reverted to nature, we would become overridingly selfish and unconcerned about the well-being of anyone other than ourselves and our dependent children. We would also most likely become much worse with time: unlike the turkey and other beings of nature, our ability for abstract thinking enables us to vault above the casual cruelties and momentary greed of nature- in- the- raw. Isn’t that how it happens in real life? Isn’t every society constantly pulled towards the elevation of those in power at the expense of the rest? Without a transcendent good, then, wouldn’t morality be used to drag any society toward the tyranny of one small group over all others?
In fact, Karl Marx had it right when he saw religion as the “opiate of the masses,” as it was often construed and abused by the ruling classes. However, he ultimately had it wrong, for even as religion was being used, it was still curtailing the worst impulses of the greater society. In the Christendom of the West, it was not religion that was abusing people, but rather the distortion of religion. Even so, against every desire in a tyrant’s twisted psyche, he and everyone else were always eventually called to bow before the greater moral principles of love, charity and forgiveness, or be despised and, often enough, eventually deposed. So it was, and is, that the moral compass provided by religion (if it has not become too corrupted) ultimately holds against the selfish compulsion of nature.
The other question, however, has not been answered: where did the universal impulse towards spiritual authority come from in the first place?
We might say that it is God or the gods or a genetic predisposition for social order, but I think the answer can be distilled into a more universally accepted word: beauty. A dying thing is wrong, is off, is distorted, is ugly, and we want to make it right again. Right is what beauty is; a diamond is beautiful but ugly when mined and treated with greed. We want to set that moral failing right again, so that the shine of the gem might be made beautiful again; a beaten and wounded Samaritan is wrong, is malformed and malfunctioning. We want to set him right again. Even drunk horses are wrong, and still I worry, just a little, that we did not do the right thing. Things and beings that look and work the way they are supposed are what make beauty and happiness. We rejoice in our world when things work well and all is as it should be, frozen in time and space in perfection.
We have a sense of perfection, then, that thrills us as beauty. We were given this, of course. It is a gift, not a side-order of social evolution. We must be shepherded towards this set again and again or else become lost in nature as it is moves us through time, but we know what is ultimately the most beautiful and in that, the most perfect and the most good. That is where we find God; or, in other words, that is where we find the Good. It is inside us, as the atheist minister thinks, but it cannot exist without a separate creator, and it cannot continue without guidance through the collective efforts of Man as directed by this creator.
Which makes me wonder: did our Harvard minister ever wonder why he might feel sorry for a dying turkey? Who, if not this transcendent good, put that in him? Was it a sense of goodness passed on from his ancestors that somehow appeared out of nowhere? Or was it, rather, the spirit of too much fermented fruit that made him fall into the sand and, blinking into the dust, think that we who are filled so often with froth and foam determine all things bright and beautiful?
We raised horses when I was a kid, Appaloosas who preferred the outdoors and went semi-wild every winter, their coats as thick and layered as a Russian Cossack’s. The bulk of my family’s property was called The Cedars because the second-growth Eastern red cedar had taken over what was once rough pasture land, and on this property towards the bottom were old apple trees once tended by crusty Yankee farmers. In the fall, the apples would drop and these wild Indian ponies would gobble them down until their multiple-stomach digestive systems fermented the apples. We would watch in amusement every year as the horses foamed at the mouth, staggered around like human drunks, then plopped down in comfortable dust wallows that they had formed over the years. I have no idea if they had hangovers, but like many a human, they did not seem to learn from them if they did. It became something of an annual rite, enjoyed, I presume, by all.
It was probably a terrible thing for the horses. I don’t know, and, what the heck, those days are long-gone now, so long-gone that I had not thought of those ponies and their apples for ages until I noticed a young tom turkey staggering about in our over-grown garden just last morning. The weather of late has been humid, and the shortened days are now causing the nights to cool considerably, bringing a light mist to the garden at dawn that made this stumbling tom seem like an emerging zombie turkey, lurching in the gloaming for a taste of unpicked corn or, who knows?, some flesh from living turkeys. Turkeys being turkeys, it could be, even though the flock to which it belonged was nearby, a large group of sixteen parading around the edge of the road. No running in terror for them; and, coincidentally, no running to save their former comrade, either.
My first thought was that the turkey, like the horses, was drunk on too many garden produce. But no: many feathers were broken and it seemed he always lurched to one side, indicating a definite wound or break in a leg. My wheels began to slowly turn: by the road + hurt turkey must = car. So it was hurt and dying, falling among the over-abundant tomato plants as the dog took a definite and not very neutral interest. I called the dog off first before thinking that perhaps the dog would be doing it a favor by ending its life quickly. Still, I restrained her. I felt sorry for a turkey who had been helping to wreck the garden and who I would have gladly shot and eaten a month or two later, in-season of course. Meanwhile, the flock continued on its way, its brother or uncle or cousin left to the tender mercies of humans or dogs or of nature in general.
So as I stood barefoot in the cool, wet morning grass, the wheels began to turn more quickly. How is it that I could feel sorry for a turkey? And how is it that its nearby flock couldn’t, literally, give a flying flatulence about their very kith and kin?
It came to me that the foundational questions to ask are: does our empathy make us stand out alone in nature?; and: how did we among all creatures get it?
Certainly, before we answer these questions, we must hang our heads in shame, all of us, regardless of race, creed, etc. As if I needed more proof of the evil of our species, I am just finishing a new non-fiction, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, by Matthew Frank, about the history and ongoing horrors along the West South African diamond coast, where DeBeers Enterprises continues to corner the market on the world’s diamond supplies, keeping a fairly abundant commodity outrageously expensive. The company itself follows the law for the most part, which is still, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, ridiculously loose concerning their near-totalitarian powers over the workforce on this otherwise deserted coast. They employ child labor, as children are the preferred size for those being lowering hundreds of feet into the ground into tiny drill holes. They get lung disease before puberty, and die at the average age of 37. Everyone is searched just about everywhere, small tortures are given to those trying to smuggle, and it is said that many simply disappear forever in the everlasting sands of the vast Namibian desert.
Worse, though, are the illegal operators from many nations, from China to the US to India, who use slave labor, particularly children, for hellish mining operations that often kill them in months or a few hideous years. All for a hard and shiny rock that supposedly says, as the commercials tell us, “I love you forever.” Could Satan be more fiendishly perverse?
And yet…what of our local turkeys? They are still roaming the yard and garden, oblivious to their fallen comrade who is now dead and quickly rotting in the adjacent field. Peering out the window, I can see that our dog is doing her best to dislodge the feathers now that the corpse is getting soft. I can clearly see that she has already gotten the head. I must stop her soon, before she starts on the more dangerous bones. To do this, I must lift the rotting corpse up into the crotch of a tree and hope that the raccoons take care of it before knocking it to the ground again. We’ve been here before.
At this point, I no longer feel sorry for the turkey, but for myself. If this were a human corpse, this attitude would be seen by most as a sign of depravity or of moral tragedy forced by brutal circumstances. That, along with our shock and disgust with the treatment of diamond miners, among many other things, is what we might see as our salvation.
And it is. Still, we might wonder how we got compassion and how we maintain it. The new “head” chaplain at Harvard is known as an atheist, someone who is part of the “Good without God” movement. This is not unusual for our elite groups these days, this pairing of non-sequiturs with moral self-righteousness, but is the philosophy correct? Certainly, we can be a good person without believing in a god or gods, but can we be a good people for several generations? Without a North Star, where might the moral compass point? Consider: if we reverted to nature, we would become overridingly selfish and unconcerned about the well-being of anyone other than ourselves and our dependent children. We would also most likely become much worse with time: unlike the turkey and other beings of nature, our ability for abstract thinking enables us to vault above the casual cruelties and momentary greed of nature- in- the- raw. Isn’t that how it happens in real life? Isn’t every society constantly pulled towards the elevation of those in power at the expense of the rest? Without a transcendent good, then, wouldn’t morality be used to drag any society toward the tyranny of one small group over all others?
In fact, Karl Marx had it right when he saw religion as the “opiate of the masses,” as it was often construed and abused by the ruling classes. However, he ultimately had it wrong, for even as religion was being used, it was still curtailing the worst impulses of the greater society. In the Christendom of the West, it was not religion that was abusing people, but rather the distortion of religion. Even so, against every desire in a tyrant’s twisted psyche, he and everyone else were always eventually called to bow before the greater moral principles of love, charity and forgiveness, or be despised and, often enough, eventually deposed. So it was, and is, that the moral compass provided by religion (if it has not become too corrupted) ultimately holds against the selfish compulsion of nature.
The other question, however, has not been answered: where did the universal impulse towards spiritual authority come from in the first place?
We might say that it is God or the gods or a genetic predisposition for social order, but I think the answer can be distilled into a more universally accepted word: beauty. A dying thing is wrong, is off, is distorted, is ugly, and we want to make it right again. Right is what beauty is; a diamond is beautiful but ugly when mined and treated with greed. We want to set that moral failing right again, so that the shine of the gem might be made beautiful again; a beaten and wounded Samaritan is wrong, is malformed and malfunctioning. We want to set him right again. Even drunk horses are wrong, and still I worry, just a little, that we did not do the right thing. Things and beings that look and work the way they are supposed are what make beauty and happiness. We rejoice in our world when things work well and all is as it should be, frozen in time and space in perfection.
We have a sense of perfection, then, that thrills us as beauty. We were given this, of course. It is a gift, not a side-order of social evolution. We must be shepherded towards this set again and again or else become lost in nature as it is moves us through time, but we know what is ultimately the most beautiful and in that, the most perfect and the most good. That is where we find God; or, in other words, that is where we find the Good. It is inside us, as the atheist minister thinks, but it cannot exist without a separate creator, and it cannot continue without guidance through the collective efforts of Man as directed by this creator.
Which makes me wonder: did our Harvard minister ever wonder why he might feel sorry for a dying turkey? Who, if not this transcendent good, put that in him? Was it a sense of goodness passed on from his ancestors that somehow appeared out of nowhere? Or was it, rather, the spirit of too much fermented fruit that made him fall into the sand and, blinking into the dust, think that we who are filled so often with froth and foam determine all things bright and beautiful?
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