Glenden BrownTrying to understand the philosophies of creationism
The science behind evolution denialism is junk, and in many cases, it’s not just junk science, it anti-science. The textbooks at question in the UC case I talked about the other day were published, in one notable case, by Bob Jones University. The book itself proclaimed that any where that science disagreed with the Bible, the science was wrong. Anti-science, not just junk science.
But, evolution deniers don’t just base their arguments on science - they talk about philosophical issues. Over at Concerned Women for America, they recently published an article that wildly overpraises the film Expelled. Here’s a few choice quotes:
[Ben] Stein boldly shines a light of honest inquiry, revealing time and again that Evolution’s Emperor has no clothes. In his trademark deadpan fashion, he skillfully debunks the dogmatic neo-Darwinist programming we’ve all had relentlessly rammed down our throats ever since “Big Science” went bananas over that cute little Scopes Monkey.
. . . As the movie masterfully illustrates, we live in a cultural climate where secular elitists in academia, the media and the courts chew up and spit out anyone who dares to question the gospel according to Charles Darwin. They’re absolutely terrified to follow the scientific evidence wherever it may lead.
. . .They don’t want to upset the morally relative applecart, which is loosely held together by the notion that we’re all just a bunch of monkeys with an instinctive, biological excuse for all our behavioral choices. To them, life’s a whole lot easier under the theory of evolution. Without a sovereign Creator to answer to, we get to scoot along and party hearty, free from accountability.
. . .So, if you happen to be one of those evolutionary fundamentalists who were “randomly selected” to evolve with a built-in blindfold and earplugs, and you’re comfy with your very limited worldview, be afraid of this film — be very afraid. However, if you’re willing to have your eyes opened and are interested in looking at all the evidence, then suck it up, wipe away that Darwinian Kool-Aid mustache and hang out with Ben Stein for a night. What do you have to lose?
. . .For everyone else, Expelled is a must see. If you’re already a person of faith, prepare to have your faith strengthened. And even if you’re not, you can’t possibly walk away without at least admitting that the debate over who we are and how we got here is far from over.
All the usual evolution denial rhetoric and intellectual dishonesty are here, including absurd claims that people who believe in evolution are really fundamentalists who refuse to look at the evidence. (FWIW, this is interesting - the CWFA folks are fundamentalist Christians, but they know the idea of fundamentalism is distasteful to the general public. That’s provocative.) This is the usual creationist/intelligent design/evolution denier bag of tricks. It is dishonest, lacking in integrity, anti-intellectual and anti-science.
But, one passage really jumped out at me:
They don’t want to upset the morally relative applecart, which is loosely held together by the notion that we’re all just a bunch of monkeys with an instinctive, biological excuse for all our behavioral choices. To them, life’s a whole lot easier under the theory of evolution. Without a sovereign Creator to answer to, we get to scoot along and party hearty, free from accountability.
In some variant, I think I have seen this sentiment is almost every document that I’ve read that was written by people who deny evolution. This seems to me the central, philosophical complaint raised by creationists in defense of creationism. The foundational concern of so many people who reject evolution seems to not be the science, which they reach for after the fact, but the belief that if we accept evolution we have to throw out God, morals, standards and that we won’t be punished for our misdeeds. Everything else they say is just noise, window dressing on that core argument. The argument can be summed as “No God, no morals.”
It’s such a short passage - three sentence - but you can unpack it’s implications for hours. The statement about life being easier suggests a view that God expects life to be hard, to be filled with challenges to overcome. It speaks to a view that being a Christian is and should be really difficult and it is only through lots of work and labor that we can be really good people. And, in light of that hard work, a lot of us are morally lazy and want to be bad and evolution isn’t a scientific theory, it’s really an attempt to escape the moral rules laid down by God.
Attacks on “moral relativism” are so common among evolution deniers, it’s easy to see this one as pro forma, but I don’t believe it is. The conservative Christain view really does propose an absolute morality, articulated by an external God and judged by that external God. This morality is expressed in the Bible which a great many Christians believe is literal and without error. Such a view ignores two hundred plus years of Biblical scholarship as well as the biblical text itself. The theology behind it is rejected by a wide array of Christians who recognize that the bible is a collection of things written over centuries, that it contains myth, poetry, allegory, metaphor and some seeds of actual history. But for fundagelicals, the core theology holds that bible is factual, without error and literal. It is an absolute and unyielding moral standard.
Defending this “absolute morality” also suggests a deep distrust of human beings and our ability to make moral choices. I hear in it a belief that if we have to make our own moral judgements, we will be wrong more often than right. I hear in attacks on “moral relativism” a fear that human beings, left to our own devices, will not only do wrong but will do it again and again. Similiar arguments are often made about matters of sexuality - that people must adhere to an external authority or we will just sink into sin and do whatever makes us feel good no matter the consequences. This absolute “Biblical” morality is offered not because it makes sense or because it is consistent, but because we as humans cannot be trusted without an this external and absolute authority giving us the guidelines.
This passage also reveals the belief that the scientific theory of evolution is the core idea of all that creationists dislike; it seems to say ,”If we undo evolution then all the other stuff we’re against falls apart as well.” It’s often pointed out that the flaw in this argument is huge and painful. If the scientific consensus on evolution were to change, there’s not reason to think it would move to creationism or its variants. For all we know, evolution could be replaced by a scientific theory that is anathema to Biblical creationism. This argument seems to me like Pascal’s wager - but if there is really some deity, who is to say that deity isn’t Baal or some long forgotten tribal god worshipped in Papua New Guinea? Or maybe it’s the Greek Gods or the Celtic Pantheon or Shiva? The core of the idea of “faith” often seems to be the ability to believe without and often against the evidence. In this case, fundagelicals are essentially saying, “If evolution goes away, we’ll win the argument” even though there’s no actual evidence for that.
For a great many fundagelicals, the opposite of Christianity is not islam, it’s not even atheism, it’s secularism. They can’t fathom how a person could be comfortably secular, can lead a life that isn’t wholly informed by religion, can be comfortable in a world where faith is not constantly at the forefront. The idea of a secular world and secular life undermines religious fundamentalism more than atheism because it is a lateral move. In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown wrote, “The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. It is fraternity.” The opposite of fundamentalism is not unbelief, it is pluralism, egalitarianism; a world where fundamentalist Christianity and mainline Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, agnosticism, and atheism are all seen as equals. Evolution threatens conservative faith not because it denies it explicitly but because it opens up the possibilities, it introduces radical uncertainties. It forces us to abandon absolutism and that can be scary.
April 5th, 2008 at 9:07 am
If the people who claim “morality” as their highest value stood up against the Bush administration, they might have some credibility.
April 5th, 2008 at 11:03 am
AMEN!
April 5th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
This should shed some light onto the situation.
April 5th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
The thing that really irritates me is the notion that Jesus died for my sins when I wasn’t even around. All these sanctimonious types always say “We’re All Sinners” but rarely do they get specific. I’ve had religious people admit their wilder youth to me, but it’s never in a contrite mood, it always comes with a slightly prideful smile which sickens me. Not because they had a wild youth, but because they see nothing wrong with trying to control other young peoples life experiences through “get tough” laws.
There are legislators and lawmen out there who believe they can do anything THEY want, but think it’s important for them to pass laws and enforce religious tyranny on others for the good of society. Former drug Czar, and first class hypocrite William (Mr. virtue) Bennett is one of them, but there are many, many others who want to hold everybody accountable, but themselves.
Bush came in as the accountability president. Blow me!
April 5th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Am I contrite for using marijuana. Not even a little bit! I didn’t break any constitutional law and I never hurt anybody by doing it.
Am I contrite for drinking too much and annoying my neighbors. Absolutely!
Which one will get you up on felony charges?
April 5th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Whenever I get approached by somebody proselytizing for the church, I always say that if the church would come out against Bush, I will think about it. It never meets with animosity because deep inside, everybody knows Bush is doing wrong.
I always have this argument with my mother, who is religious but doesn’t like Bush. She says the church can’t get political.
The reason the church can’t get political is because they would lose their tax exempt status. If there were any reason on earth why the church should throw away their tax exempt status, it would be because of these immoral, law destroying men who attack innocent people in our name. The church maintains that it has to follow it’s kings and rulers. America doesn’t have kings, and it’s rulers are called presidents. Bush stole the election.
The church has enough mammon to throw it’s tax exempt status out the window and “Stand For Something” If they did, they might truly become the worlds largest denomination. Sadly, they support torture and the killing of innocents through their well known support of Bush.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I’m still clinging to the fact that Utah’s voting machines have been hackable for many decades now, and our top election official works to keep it that way.
April 5th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
It is weird to hear the “This way there be dragons” argument this late in the game. I mean, we all live in a secular republic. It’s not like we don’t know what that looks like. I know, I know, it looks like Britney Spears shaving her head (sigh).
But seriously, you’d have to be pretty insular in America not to know some perfectly nice Jews or secular humanists or at least half-hearted Christians, who, y’know AREN’T performing human sacrifices in their backyards. So the rhetoric of “holding the line” against horrors unknown is a little much. I mean, the cat is out of that bag.
I’m not saying we’re not witnessing the Fall of Rome. We might be. All I’m saying is that we’re already where we’re going. The New York Times said “God is Dead” a full generation ago. In the words of Yzma, “Well, he ain’t gettin’ any deader.”
So, OK, here we are at rock bottom, and there’s a lot that’s alarming. I mean, not tubetops and rock ‘n roll, but a genuine disintegration of what holds us together, as a people. I’m not saying it’s not there.
Furthermore, I get that if you subscribe to a particularly rigid view of salvation, merely comporting yourself in an inoffensive manner is not getting you into heaven and even the most virtuous of us is a seething Sodom and Gomorrah of moral laxity.
And this is where you get the unfortunate phenomenon of salvation as Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. If you’ve committed to a particularly mysterious and self-denying route to salvation, then naturally you object to someone coming along and making it “easier.” The Monday edition, the Tuesday — yea, even the Friday edition — are not the true test.
April 6th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
So I find myself thining aobut the people among whom I grew up in rural Utah. I can see many of these people accepting the argument about evolution and morality; not because they are stupid (some of them are but not a higher proportion than the rest of the population) but as a matter of context. I’m not sure this leap will make sense but try to follow me.
One of the more prominent families in town had a son go to college in the “big city” of Salt Lake. He came home at some point and came out. His parents having lived in a community where there were NO out people, flipped out. Believing all sorts of wrong things about sexual orientation, his parents figured either they’d done something wrong raising him (which they could not accept) or it was something he came into contact with in the city. It was easier to blame the city or the University he attended than it was to blame themselves. Other alternatives are never discussed. The parents have a choice now of doing actual learning about sexual orientation or of looking for excuses.
If they look for excuses, they’ll start digging down into the world of the wingnuts. He’s not gay because it’s just how it is, he’s gay because he learned about evolution, he’s gay because he went to a big city and was surrounded by immoral people or what not - and they want to believe these things because if something could make him gay something else could unmake him gay (okay that’s a bizarre and probably not grammatical sentence).
Expand that concept. If you remove the stigma about single mothers, then suddenly you start seeing single mothers because in the old days you either sent them off to a home for unwed mothers and they cam back with no baby or they had a shotgun wedding. Premarital sex happened we just did our best to digsuise the outcomes. With drug use or alcohol abuse, rather than dismiss it as a kind of “that’s a bad person for using drugs or alcohol” when you change the frame of reference to the therapeutic model that says these are illnesses, then it changes the way we talk about it - it effectively reduces the stigma so people can openly discuss these issue. In that sense, the stigma used to attach to talking about spousal abuse. Remove that stigma and now discuss it more openly than we used to.
So, these accumulated changes create the sense of society going to hell in a handbasket. It’s not that they’re new problems but now we have to face them. We use to not acknowledge them and so unless they affected us personally we pretended they did not exist. And often if they affected we pretended they did not so we wouldn’t face the shaming. But a new found openness to talking about and acknowledging these things happen can create a situation where you feel as if they are new problems. My grandmother once commented something to the effect that “All this stuff that happens today didn’t use to happen when I was a little girl.” Wouldn’t you rather believe that if we could only undo the Times’ pronouncement that God is dead and that woudl fix the problems than face the reality that we actually have to work on the problems with no guarantees? Wouldn’t you rather believe if we stop teaching evolution then things will go back to the way they were (and the problems would go away?
It almost feels to me as if the analysis saying teaching evolution causes immorality is systems thinking gone wrong. It’s not teaching evolution that causes the problems, but if you have only a superficial knowledge of social history then it can feel that a host of social problems arose after Darwin published. It’s analogous to the parents in my story - if they learn about sexuality and what researchers and doctors and mental health professionals are saying about sexuality, then they reach a different conclusion than if they only listen to the folks from NARTH. They’re trying to do a systems analysis but they’re missing a huge and crucial piece of information.
April 6th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Unfortunately Glendon, that it is your belief that things have always been the way they are, only not so open, is somewhat deflected by the rather serious and obvious truths…that our society is actually falling apart.
Despite perceptions that the problems have always been there, do you think it is the sheer volume of dysfunction as our populations increased that is causing our fragmenting society?
Or should we look to other factors, such as destruction of the nuclear family to describe why things are so polarized? Evolution has no moral bearing on behavior, survival, no matter how ugly, is the proof of evolutionary success.
Look at a croc someday and wonder. To teach evolution as a strict value can make many a person discount the value of any social ethos. One need look only as far as miscreant gangsta rappers and their “lifestyle” of huge success and money, then attach to the “success is beautiful” credo.
What else is the culture showing those that are not part of the social elite?
One way or another, the chaos is manufactured, and on purpose. It serves to better enable control of populations.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:43 am
And yet that “absolute morality” isn’t so absolute. How many of today’s Christians think it’s morally wrong to eat shrimp or wear clothes made of blended fabrics? Did God change His mind on that?
I think it’s not so much a matter of being insular as a matter of deliberately ignoring any evidence to the contrary. The fundies have convinced themselves that there simply are no moral atheists. (Strangely enough, despite my lack of religion, I’m quite sure I’m a better human being than the Christian televangelist/adulterer/swindler Jim Bakker.)
What we have here is a bunch of people who’ve decided on certain principles (Christian morality is absolute, religion is necessary for morality) and will never, ever examine those principles objectively.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Seems to me that problems, like solutions, are simply part of another dualistic equation which inescapably leads the mind to rationalize. Some of these rationalizations are wrapped in religious dogma handed down throught the ages and polished to near absolute perfection - so refined in fact, adherence is practically inescapable. That does not make any of it TRUE.
As people find it comforting to drape bodies in fabric and automobiles, so to do they find it comforting to drape thier minds in Dogma and illusion.
In all of the ‘ways’ there are seeds of truth and plenty to think about, not right, not wrong per se, but when the big black hole in the sky finally gets around to sucking us in, all our mentation will only have been meaningful in so far as it has enabled us to love, and I’m not too sure about that even.
April 7th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Lucidity — While I’m sure there must be fundagelicals who have convinced themselves that there are no morally upright atheists, in my humble experience, they don’t so much deny that non-believers can do the right thing as dismiss good acts without faith as ultimately hollow and beside the point. It’s the “Christians aren’t better; just forgiven,” argument and it’s a very powerful argument because look how it makes you simultaneously too humble and yet too righteous for reproach.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Do you mean to say that you are still listening to them Astrodon?
I am well off to assure them that they don’t know their own intentions or what the outcomes are of their forgiven nature, and they could well be conning themselves as they walk to hell. The devil can’t take you to hell, you have to walk there yourself.
This is so much better. Nisargadatta.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Anon — Your statement is all over the place, but I’ll have a crack at it. You say that we’re on a downward trajectory and who’s to say that we’re not? There’s much to be alarmed about. I wouldn’t have started with divorce and thug life. I would have started with failed states, corporate greed, genocide, climate change. But the point stands.
So then, if I understand you correctly, evolution might very well be true, probably is true. But the teaching of it, or at least the teaching of it in an irresponsible way, a way that glorifies an amoral “Nature red in tooth and claw,” is corrupting. Really corrupting. Like so corrupting that we shouldn’t go there.
Not because it’s not true, but because that’s how dangerous it is.
Well, you have a point.
Science is often taught in a moral vacuum and that is a tremendous loss to us as a society. But I don’t think your quarrel is with evolution, then. Your quarrel is with our lame educational system that sucks the life out of intellectual inquiry and reduces us to counting the stars instead of marveling at them.
Evolution, then, and the teaching of it, is not the problem, but part of the solution.
Here is Darwin, a hopeless dreamer, tinkerer, bug collector, not much good at anything. Hops on a boat, sees the world, sees many things that challenge his world view, publishes a book for non-scientists, a book that says, Jump in any time. I don’t have the answers. But what a time we live in that we get to exchange our discoveries with each other and try to come up with something coherent about the big questions. And he suffered mightily for it from the ignorant and dogmatic. But his generation could never go back to thinking the world was six thousand years old.
Further, animal biology is much more than “killing machine’ crocs. Evolution, responsibly and thoroughly presented, shows us all sorts of empathetic, sharing, cooperating, behaviors.
Anon, your point about the people on top, the people in power, might very well have merit. The elite benefit when we are fighting each other, keeping each other down like scorpions will keep each other from climbing out of an open bottle. Plus, when you are elite you can just be corrupt and debased, can knock down the pillars of society all you want, and not suffer the consequences.
But that is not an argument for ignorance, but against it. Any truth, including and most especially , complicated, and difficult truth, including and most especially, the story of Darwin and the stories in animal biology, can be empowering.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Henceforth I shall have to refer to you as “Killer Croc Anonymous” and “Zen Anonymous” to keep it clear.
Zen Anonymous, No doubt you point the way to inner peace, but I am far too materialist to shut out the other voices and concentrate on the “I am.”
UU’s, given the choice between heaven and a symposium discussing heaven, will choose the symposium. I am no exception.
April 8th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Astro, I make no complaint on the direction of our trajectory, it is only clear that we have one, its navigation is yet a mystery. All things rise and fall, and rise again in new forms, some more dynamic than others. Others very unchanged in their new incarnations.
Reality is all over the place, as it is a subjective state based on our own perceptions, illusions, and what we would like to believe. Little doubt that the “true believers” of religious dogma have a different reality than an agnostic or atheist. Who is to know what the truth is? Same goes for politics, the more a person adopts a particular outlook, the more they have scooped the search out for themselves, and happily filled their vacant minds with a brand of dogma that suits their souls. Ignorance Astro, Rut Ro, is a subjective state. We can claim that with all the modernity and complex social theorizing we know what is up, but to look at our own society and see its dysfunction might lead to those looking in, to claim us ignorant. Hey wait, I think that has happened.
What N describes is that all you see, and all you claim to know from your life is illusion, and to focus completely on what you consider reality is to miss what you may be. In short what you were before you came here, is what you will be after, what you are here now, is not you, but a shape of you and experience of the “I am”. It doesn’t matter what happens here apart from your reaction to it, soon enough, you return to what you are, whatever that is. Tough for any person of faith or a darwinian to accept.
I could argue no one has any individuality, it disappears the moment you enter this world, are cared for, and the “bottle” is stuck into your mouth.
Crocs are competitors of ours, fortunately they live in swamps, we not so much, or we would have made them extinct. Here we look upon a creature that hasn’t seen much evolution of a couple hundred million years, still what it always has been, a meat eating, carrion gulping cunning powerful dimwit. Humans do not correspond to this having changed their habits over and over again, in what is a very short period of time. This appears divine to some, remarkable though natural to others, but no doubt, it is unusual.
Our oldest living relative of 150 million years is MOLE. Carnivore that lived beneath the earth to avoid the dominant species(saurians). Since mole is here, and we are here now, our “evolution” is rather peculiar. At some point mole stayed above ground and learned to see and evolved the branch we come from. Or was there “intervention”? Nobody knows, but the conversation shortens a persons doubt, fills the void, whether they are in church, or in the lecture hall.
April 8th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Really Astro we are currently watching the human element of top order predators, what you describe as “red in tooth and claw”, run our country and eliminate competition. Or they attempting to, I should say.
In this one cannot claim a left, right, dem, rep, progressive, regressive description of “who” is causing it. All are involved as prey or predator, and as nature shows, the main advantage prey has over predation is breed rate. If you don’t breed, you don’t lead in darwins world. Consider that in an intellectual idea dominance projection towards the control of society that some wish, not just with regards to reproduction.
Meanwhile predators are doing to humanity what they have always done, eat it. It is why in the natural world, man has basically hunted all competing predators to extinction. Now that we are alone, if “peace” is to be made then, the predators among us must be purged. Then there will only those left you preyed on…the predators. Now in good stead, the prey, has become top order predator. Then the cycle begins again.
N sees another way to transcendence.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:40 am
I can’t make out if you are two zen anonymouses (anonymi?) or one, and would that I had your serenity, but you are right that it is tough for me to accept that it does not matter what happens here except your reaction to it. I insist that here is all there is. Which means that, not transcendence, but peace, connection, justice here is all there is.
You are right that I am more like the dogmatic believer than is comfortable. We both see things in the world that will agitate us until they are put right. We both believe that there is, not a cycle, but progress. We both desperately want that progress.
Ignorance may be subjective, but it is quantifiable. There is darkness and there is light. There are things I know that I did not previously know. There are things we as a people know that we did not previously know. And learning them is progress.
As for the cycle of predator and prey, I think it’s a cop-out to succumb to the “observation” that the cycle will eventually throw us off the top, that the earth will defend against us. We are the stewards. There are no other. We have the responsibility to clean our oil spills and make our seed banks; to throw off our dictators and reconcile with our victims. Not just to breed children, but to grow them as caretakers and pass it on to them. We and we alone.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am
If this is all there is, then become serene, and enjoy the ride, for as sure as god, or evolution dictates where we are headed…might as well enjoy it until the next comet impacts the planet, and do your best like any creature, to avoid those that would feed upon you.
I think that your concept that “we are the stewards” is laughable. In my own parlance the only the only thing I have ever counted on from a steward is a crappy meal and a drink in plastic cup. We are the stewards of ourselves, if we attempted to save the planet from events we cannot control what form of hubris is that? I equate humanity with same effects as any other naturally based phenomena, we have impact, we have always had impact. Consider human success like the trajectory of an approaching comet. Did the dominant dinos know what was coming? Why do you think we do? What in evidence today shows that mans nature, which is much like moles, has the capacity to alter our path?
The idea that we control such a complex thing as our place in the heavens is again laughable.
If we have evolved to be this rather destructive creature, then our purpose as destroyer is quite clear. We have done what we have done as any animal…by instinct, survival, and propagation. In a rather crazy twist, if what we are doing is “wrong” it falls to faith to describe it so. The idea being that we have by our actions and lust offended our creator by our ongoing destruction of his creation and disobeying “his” “laws”. Whether you are a Gaian or whatever.
Reminds me of shamans shaking baubles, and muttering mumbo jumbo in order to get it to rain, or tossing a virgin in to appease a volcano.
Science has no morality, it just is good science or bullshit. Morality has no matter in it. Humans in terms of science are simply a species much like locusts then, that breed, peak, then destroy, and then sink back into the earths miasma to rise later to redo the job.
As for ignorance, give it some time, and we may well be dead, but consider that what you believe you know, as not necessarily being true, as this is the case with all ages of knowledge and human interface with “reality” since we arrived on the scene.
I have let things go Astro, I am no longer desperate for anything. Desperation leads to bad decision making. Bad decision making leads to bad reality. Let me finish that if that materially bothers you, it is tough to see, one man sows, another reaps, so it is in nature, no creature gets to do much more than carry on…until they find extinction, or evolve. At species and individual level.
Consider now that evidence all over the place shows that human highly ordered civilzation existed 17.5 k years ago, before the huge ice melt off, and that what we have been taught of our own origins may well be bunko.
In short, we as a species have risen and fallen before, and will again. Catastrophe of global proportions not of our own making, and of our own making, guarantee this. The only thing to steward is to ensure that when we fall, we can retain as much as possible to re-establish ourselves when conditions improve.
That or fly away, and get off this rock, and spread the species elsewhere. This is the only way to control our destiny from cataclysm. The primary driver of adaptation in simple terms is picking up…and moving.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:17 am
I hear you, I do. But it’s not for me. It’s not that I’m so all-fired selfless. It’s not, truth be told, that I “feel” the pain of the last tree falling in the rainforest or the child being raped in the war zone.
It’s just that the moment of turning — When the judge lays the smack on opposing counsel, or when Rosa refuses to give up her seat, or the people rise up in Tibet and someone is there to broadcast it over the internet — is a thrill for me. It is my joy, my serenity, my prozac, my soma. And I don’t guess I care whether that means I’m wired funny. I’m going to keep chasing that high.