If the bloody, murderous and soul-destroying effort to create classless societies was proven, in less than a century, to be an impossible dream become a living nightmare, why would anyone think that societies which overlook race or gender (or age, or beauty or skill, etc) and treat everyone equally are possible?
My least favorite character in that Brit scifi program, Outcasts, was a utopian moralist*. When she learns that the head of the colony --a deliberate, sage, righteously secular and consensus-seeking former professor-- secretly ordered a mass murder for, in his mind, the survival of the group, she explodes and implodes simultaneously. "But I thought we were making a new start, that it would be different here, that we had learned from the mistakes we made back on earth..."
LOL. Silly wabbit.
When pacifist types (or San Francisco police chiefs) go on about "an end to violence", I shake my head. My typical internal question is, "What planet do you think you're living on?" Does anyone really expect that somehow human beings will no longer lust or be gripped by anger or envy or greed or sloth or arrogance?
And even if, after many decades of life, making your own messes and learning a bit from them, you find, as you age, a modicum of wisdom...that's just you. Each human has to go through their own history of mistake, error, sin and perhaps wisdom. Each one. There is no Lamarckian shortcut. That fact alone ought to give pause to the Disciples of The Light.
In my unreconstructedly Christian days, I understood these things to be sins, the capital sins, painful effects of the primal Fall from Grace. And they are sins, much of the time, in that they wreak havoc. But I eventually realized that they are also inescapeable elements in the human condition, the human predicament, or as my friend Rosamonde says "the nature of this planet of which we are a part." Each of them is a kind of excess of what is inborn in us for our very survival. No sense moaning about their existence; the issue is how you handle these things, realistically. (I do moan, of course, about stupidity. I grant myself a dispensation in that regard...I am, after all, Ex Cathedra.)
I have often joked that Original Sin is the one Christian doctrine which requires no faith to accept, all you have to do is look around. And that's not far off. But what sticks in my craw still is the notion that it could ever have been different, that the trainwreck of history could have gone down a different track but for some kind of human choice. That it was contingent, avoidable, merely voluntary. That seems vastly more unlikely to me than Transubstantiation or the Trinity.
Like most people in my culture, I basically buy the theory of evolution. Some day it may be proven to be as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. But no other cosmology is remotely believable to me. Given that limit, if our species did evolve from primates --in a world fundamentally and ab initio structured on scarcity of resources and armies of hungry predators, competition for space and food and mates and status, full of contingencies, etc. then what other possible outcome for Homo sapiens could there be? This is not a Fallen World that we created. It is the only world in which we find ourselves, fully, independently and bloodily in operation long before the first self-conscious humans blinked themselves awake.
As my favorite apocryphal line of St Thomas says, "It would be a sign of credulity to imagine that, prior to the Fall of Adam, lions ate grass."
Utopia means no-place. So you may as well get used to where you are.
*Utopian moralists are pretty much my least favorite characters wherever they appear.
My least favorite character in that Brit scifi program, Outcasts, was a utopian moralist*. When she learns that the head of the colony --a deliberate, sage, righteously secular and consensus-seeking former professor-- secretly ordered a mass murder for, in his mind, the survival of the group, she explodes and implodes simultaneously. "But I thought we were making a new start, that it would be different here, that we had learned from the mistakes we made back on earth..."
LOL. Silly wabbit.
When pacifist types (or San Francisco police chiefs) go on about "an end to violence", I shake my head. My typical internal question is, "What planet do you think you're living on?" Does anyone really expect that somehow human beings will no longer lust or be gripped by anger or envy or greed or sloth or arrogance?
And even if, after many decades of life, making your own messes and learning a bit from them, you find, as you age, a modicum of wisdom...that's just you. Each human has to go through their own history of mistake, error, sin and perhaps wisdom. Each one. There is no Lamarckian shortcut. That fact alone ought to give pause to the Disciples of The Light.
In my unreconstructedly Christian days, I understood these things to be sins, the capital sins, painful effects of the primal Fall from Grace. And they are sins, much of the time, in that they wreak havoc. But I eventually realized that they are also inescapeable elements in the human condition, the human predicament, or as my friend Rosamonde says "the nature of this planet of which we are a part." Each of them is a kind of excess of what is inborn in us for our very survival. No sense moaning about their existence; the issue is how you handle these things, realistically. (I do moan, of course, about stupidity. I grant myself a dispensation in that regard...I am, after all, Ex Cathedra.)
I have often joked that Original Sin is the one Christian doctrine which requires no faith to accept, all you have to do is look around. And that's not far off. But what sticks in my craw still is the notion that it could ever have been different, that the trainwreck of history could have gone down a different track but for some kind of human choice. That it was contingent, avoidable, merely voluntary. That seems vastly more unlikely to me than Transubstantiation or the Trinity.
Like most people in my culture, I basically buy the theory of evolution. Some day it may be proven to be as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. But no other cosmology is remotely believable to me. Given that limit, if our species did evolve from primates --in a world fundamentally and ab initio structured on scarcity of resources and armies of hungry predators, competition for space and food and mates and status, full of contingencies, etc. then what other possible outcome for Homo sapiens could there be? This is not a Fallen World that we created. It is the only world in which we find ourselves, fully, independently and bloodily in operation long before the first self-conscious humans blinked themselves awake.
As my favorite apocryphal line of St Thomas says, "It would be a sign of credulity to imagine that, prior to the Fall of Adam, lions ate grass."
Update 2016. It is not apocryphal but is found in Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Question 96, Article 1, reply to Objection 2.
Utopia means no-place. So you may as well get used to where you are.
*Utopian moralists are pretty much my least favorite characters wherever they appear.
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