opinion

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Bernal, Cronies Day
Sirias, Trapped in a changing Cuba
Gutman, Inflexible beliefs
Stimson, Finding the easy
Greenpeace, G8 countries shirk climate change duties
Wheeler, The protests during Bush's Latin America trip
Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida, Bush in Brazil
Denis, The joy of living in the Caribbean

N. Jackson, The wheel of karma catches up with Scooter Libby

E. Jackson, Obama, Walter Reed and the antiwar movement

Inflexible beliefs make good men bad, bad men worse

by W. E. Gutman

A friend, who has fewer reasons than I to reach the same conclusion, recently said that “humans are just not nice.” His was a generic deduction, a one-size-fits-all verdict reached in the sanitized vacuum of upper-crust suburban Connecticut --- not in response to some specific affront.

My friend is right, of course, but his decree is fragmentary. Yes, we are not nice but we possess seeds of genius and creativity. We are prone to sudden bursts of unkindness, but we are also capable of astonishing acts of magnanimity and self-sacrifice.

We are ... human ... and not far on the evolutionary scale from ancestors whose primordial challenge, for millennia, was to survive in a harsh, hostile environment. We have since left our footsteps on the Moon, landed robotic craft on Mars ... and pulverized Nagasaki and Hiroshima. We have produced Aristotle and Shakespeare and Leonardo and Beethoven and Einstein … and spawned Attila and Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam. I see no contradiction in these incongruities, however jarring the contrast between them. Genetics, upbringing, and life’s travails --- after years of self-exploration --- have since led me to accept, with equal dispassion, both the wretchedness and the sublime transcendence of the human spirit. 

What I have seen and experienced --- the good and the bad --- may have helped alter my perceptions, but they have done nothing to change my inner core. I flew on the Concorde, scaled Mayan tabernacles in Mesoamerica, probed the Kabbalah’s murky realm, combed the ruins of the Essene community in Qumran --- and written about these experiences on a state-of-the-art computer. But I have no illusion that my reptilian brain, far from atrophied, is still capable of sending antediluvian stimuli of odium and belligerence. I live the life of modern Homo sapiens but deep down inside, Neanderthal creeps back into consciousness, reminding me that I dwell in a spiritual cave age shared by other troglodytes.

As I wrote not long ago, “I am never more certain of my origins than when I look into the soulful eyes of a great ape. I find comfort and a sense of innocence -- long since lost -- in this genesis. It is when I look at myself and examine my fellow humans that I ponder the future of our race. This is one faulty product that can never be recalled...." 

Predictably, the epigram gave some readers apoplexy, lending further evidence that blind faith in absurd beliefs will cause otherwise rational people to act like chimpanzees run amok.... It is a theory of mine (reached independently but postulated much earlier by wiser men than I --- Dostoevsky, Einstein, Hugo, Huxley, Jefferson, Nietzsche, Orwell, O'Casey, Paine, Pascal, Vidal, Voltaire, among others) that inflexible convictions can make good men bad and bad men worse --- a congenital propensity for aberrant reasoning and evil notwithstanding.

Witness a recent case involving a New Jersey high school student who objected when his history teacher warned the class that those who don’t believe Jesus died for their sins belong in hell. Instead of reprimanding the teacher, the school district penalized the student for secretly taping the teacher’s harangue. The teacher can be clearly heard asserting that evolution is bunk whereas the Bible is fact, that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, that the Big Bang theory of creation is unscientific, and that the Bible has been proven to be literally true.

The growing popularity of faith-mandated literalism demonstrates that while it has not been fully Talibanized, America is as close to an embryonic hard-line theocracy as one can get in an ostensibly democratic enclave.

My friend, who has an eye for truisms, also observed that animals possess greater virtues than man. This is a sentiment shared by many but rarely articulated for fear that it may betray an antisocial streak. I agree with my friend. Animals are neither mean nor cruel. Meanness and cruelty are to a large extent premeditated and premeditation is the province of man. A shark is not unkind; it’s a shark. A lamb is not compassionate; it’s a lamb. Man, after learning to dominate his environment, still possesses a capacity and a taste for untold brutality, something animals lack. Man is the only creature that kills for pleasure, especially to retaliate against ideas that do not conform to his concept of reality. In addition to a vestigial but intoxicating reflex for aggression, man is further compromised and degraded by what the great Maimonides (1135-1204) called "senseless beliefs and degenerate customs." He was referring, very cagily, in an era of furious religiosity, to ... religion.

I do not have to go back to the Crusades, the St. Bartholomew massacre, the Inquisition, the 30-Years War, the centuries-old sectarian strife in Ireland, the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, the Hutu-Tutsi reciprocal slaughter, the Hindu-Moslem conflict in India and Kashmir, the bloodbath in Sudan and the current Shia-Sunni carnage. All I have to do is look at modern America, at the proliferating dynasties of Elmer Gantries who are hijacking its psyche (while rifling through its pockets), in short at a maniacal, snarling phalanx of soul-robbers, to find all the raw materials that coalesce into intolerance, intransigence, cruelty and, ultimately, lunacy.   

As for animals, man’s nobility (or bestiality) is never more in evidence than in his relationship with animals, who can teach us how to live, love and, more importantly, how to die with dignity.

Bernal, Cronyies Day
Sirias, Trapped in a changing Cuba
Gutman, Inflexible beliefs
Stimson, Finding the easy
Greenpeace, G8 countries shirk climate change duties
Wheeler, The protests during Bush's Latin America trip
Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida, Bush in Brazil
Denis, The joy of living in the Caribbean

N. Jackson, The wheel of karma catches up with Scooter Libby

E. Jackson, Obama, Walter Reed and the antiwar movement