"Why this stupid knowledge of the impending hurricane if we cannot do anything to stop it?"
"Doesn't this knowledge show our baseness... doesn't it mock and ridicule us, as we stupidly wait two days in advance as some other part of the world get hit by it?" "To report and move on!"
"Why are the news-channels so worried about the few hundred honeymooners in Cancun?"
"Aren't we better off without this knowledge, we spies-of-nature?"
"Dinosaurs were wiser than us... they lived and got extinguished royally"
"Why tabulate nature if we cannot totally control it?"
"Isn't it obvious that we can never completely subdue it?"
"If we didn't think that we were superior, that the process of nature culminates in us, we would not fight against nature.... we would happily give way to better and higher creatures!"
"This doesn't mean that we happily surrender to any calamity approaching us... Here, it is the question of a quality of existence ... of a certain nobility"
"Why the placid indifference, which makes us neither animals nor Gods?"
"Our arrogance! How badly we need to be slapped!"
-- The frustrated but passionate rants of a friend. Not romanticism. No tree-hugging, love-for-all philosophy. Calling the bluffs.
22 August 2007
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2 comments:
Completely agree that humanity has got ideas far above its station. Our distinguishing feature - our big brain - has given rise to all sorts of extreme.
It could be said that the scientific advances we have made are a good result to have come from these big brains (I would say so) but they also made us think we were special, rather than simply different; that we are so unique as individuals that we couldn't possibly simply cease to exist when we die so our brains created souls and an afterlife.
I might be willing to believe in souls and an afterlife but only if my dog has one too!
:)
Even if your dog had an afterlife, he may not believe that he does!
But don't you think we have made scientific advances BECAUSE we thought we were special? If so, our thinking ourselves as special in itself is not something bad (my humble faith in science :). The issue is whether we can prevent this speciality from obtaining a bad taste about itself. Apparently, we have not...
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