Part of the reason I don’t begrudge people their religions is that the desire to fill up the gap between the Known and the Unknown is one of the defining characteristics of humans. We, as a species, don’t have ANY of the traditional “natural weapons”; we don’t have claws, or fangs… we have shitty senses, low physical strength, relatively poor balance… hell, we can’t even climb trees like we used to. What I wouldn’t give for a prehensile tail nowadays. No, the only things humans have going for them number three: upright bipedal locomotion, opposable thumbs and a complex frontal lobe. While the first two enable us to use tools, only the last is unique to humans; it is our intelligence that is our primary survival trait. Accordingly, our intelligence should be the facet of ourselves about which we feel the most insecurity… this insecurity should be a driving force towards learning survival lessons from the world around us. And anything that increases our chances of survival should increase our chances of reproducing, which in turn will reinforce the driving behavior in accordance with evolutionary statistics.
SO: humans, being exclusively dependent upon our intellect for survival (at least in hunter-gatherer times), should be accordingly paranoid about anything of which we perceive we are ignorant. To quote super-shady ex-SecDef Donald Rumsfeld:
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
Beautiful, eh? Inspired. Eloquent. Mother fuckin’ poetic, even. Honestly, Rumsfeld looks like the kind of person who cheats at strip chess and thinks date rape is cool if you can forge the victim’s signature on a Love Contract… but if we could choose anyone to be the Secretary of Defense, I really, really don’t mind if we pick the guy who’s willing to break the rules to ensure victory. Just don’t play chess with him, you’ll be fine.
With any luck AT ALL I’ll be moving to somewhere in the Southern California region around mid-2010.