The Perfect Planet
There are so many programmes on these days where the quality of photography is so good, showing all manner of nature's creatures living out their lives in breathtaking surroundings. Which all adds up to the impression that the planet really would be perfect, if only those pesky human beings didn't exist. Are we really a dysfunctional anomaly (not the biblical view, but then maybe we had to make that up to justify our existence), too clever for our own good and only here to mess things up? Perhaps Covid, or some other pandemic, is really supposed to get rid of us, in order for the world to right itself?

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And asking if COVID is supposed to get rid of us presupposes a god figure doing the intending. I agree with that--the existence of God, I mean, not that he intends to wipe us out--but just saying. No, I think COVID is just another sucky thing in a world history full of them. And there are any number of horrible aspects to how animals etc. live their lives, which rarely make it to camera.
That said, I love the documentaries you describe!
I have sometimes wondered if Earth has had enough of us, and is doing the equivalent of a whale hitting the water hard enough to shake off barnacles.
At least in the insect world, what happens is not the result of pride, avarice or malice. You need to be human to be so depraved as to have pride, avarice and malice.
And I say that despite the fact that some of my best friends are human.
Please note that the 'view on the left' I imagine above is mostly based on me drawing inferences from the books of my dear Doris being a disillusioned former communist, just like the wonderfully witty Philip Adams on Australian radio. They are the good former communists.
I see you emphasize the word "family"—as opposed to some of your—what? neighborhood? Elks lodge?
But that is okay. The Ship is very understanding and we all have secrets we can disclose here. Even something so horrible as having humans as part of your family. We understand.
(NOTE: this is meant as a compliment to the non-human Elks under discussion, and is not meant to reflect badly on them, or on human Elk lodges, or on the humans in them.)
Heheh. The shame! (and my keyboard has suddenly decided to give me endless sssssssssssssssss. I fear we may include some snakesssssssssssss amooong ussssssss)
Certainly the production values of these programmes are fantastic. But it is still a curated view of nature which provides thrills and spectacle at a safe distance. Victorians used taxidermy and zoological gardens to keep hazardous nature safely in boxes. We have David Attenborough (peace be upon him) to keep it safe in electronic boxes.
I don’t think we need to read greater or lesser significance into the emergence of Covid; if you dropped me into the middle of Africa anytime, I wouldn’t last the night. The natural world is always like this. We don’t have to deal with it first hand, so we forget.
Obviously men and women of faith can be tempted to indulge in armchair prophecy: disease as punishment. We saw this with AIDS. Where Jesus steps up to help and to heal, sadly His Church often recoils for fear of contamination.
You could say that this has become ingrained, not simply due to the Hellenistic hierarchy of spiritual above physical, but reinforced by a fear of “the other”; foreign food, foreign people, foreign creatures.
Is there any sort of message here? Is this one of the washing-up bowls from Revelation 16? Only if you want a cheap frisson for the fanatically faithful.
There’s that word again; faithful.
The world continues to be what it is; beautiful, chaotic, unruly, broken, incomplete. We build our Banks and our Churches with surprisingly similar architecture, to keep the things we treasure and ourselves as far from the world as possible. Just another series of boxes. Only this time, we are the ones inside. Stuffed with victorian values, startled looks on our faces and just as frozen.
It’s way past time to just open the doors and walk out into the jungle. Okay, so it’s urban rather than tropical, and like Paul, we’ll probably get shipwrecked more than once and yes that does sound chaotic. But it is faithful.
I gave up on that novel, and we gave our collection of her works to Lifeline some years ago. Someone probably bought them.
I'm not sure that matters too much to the caterpillar being eaten alive from the inside out by a brood of wasps.
The "perfect planet" of nature is one where life is nasty, brutish and frequently very very short. It's all well and good watching cute arctic fox cubs frolicking in their den, but we need to remember that they're being fed primarily on baby geese. Not very perfect for the geese, is it?
Dolphins are horrible creatures. Groups of males will regularly chase, harass, kidnap, and rape females. If the females have a baby (that isn't related to the males) the males will kill it so that the mother will come back into heat. They have even been observed bullying/brutally murdering baby sharks and porpoises, apparently just for fun.
If humans have no part in the "perfect planet", then there's a strong case for saying dolphins don't either.
To lifeline? You gave a book that imagines a horror of wrongness to LIFELINE?
I did wonder about Dolphins, who are also reportedly very intelligent.
Or words to that effect.
I think the question reflects Hardy's own puzzlement (and mine, too, FWIW).
The body of another animal represents a much more concentrated source of energy than plant life.
If you can develop a taste for it you don’t have to spend as much time foraging as you would with lower energy alternatives.
You can then devote more time developing various pack interactions: grooming, territorial disputes, mating rituals, playing football etc.
But WHY did God/god/gods make it this way?
No comment.
Humans have a lot more choices and I, for one, am rather proud of the fact that, in the current crisis, we have chosen to protect the more vulnerable, rather than just adopt 'survival of the fittest' mode.
Does your statement, Chorister, not require a lot of unpacking? I would have thought that what Covid-19 has exposed is the significance of structural inequalities, both domestic and international, to place alongside the sacrificial examples of individual acts of faith and love.
Because He/She/They does/do not have a problem with animal instincts.
Yet crucially there has to be a “call” to see the animalistic world differently, to be responsible stewards not just top predator: to be in the world, yes - as part of the web - but not of it. And not via some socially constructed prudishness or squeamishness but because we recognise that we are answerable for it.
Not that we place cute animals above people, but because helping people always has to include their environment. No one is helped if we uproot them.
The Dasgupta Review is long overdue.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nature-is-a-blind-spot-in-economics-that-we-ignore-at-our-peril-says-dasgupta-review
Maybe we are already too late and the uprooting of entire populations is inevitable. 😔
Maybe we can get a reprieve.
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that there was no other way life could be created. Even drumming up the primordial soup is miraculous. If there was another way surely all animals (including us) would be vegan, and unicorns would be thriving.
Yes, we do. They have converted an old house in a nearby suburb (where we happen to do our grocery shopping) - you drive into the back and put your donations of books, clothing, unwanted cutlery and dinnerware, or something you've just bought at the nearby supermarket. Someone will buy the donation and that way Lifeline will get some needed cash. New clothing etc will go straight to a beneficiary.
I reckon those structural inequalities have been in plain sight for my entire life.
It was a response to your phrasing "Perhaps Covid, or some other pandemic, is really supposed to get rid of us." The words "supposed to" presuppose somebody doing the supposing, if you see what I mean.
Basically, the world isn't as it should be, however an individual decides to diagram that. People aren't what we should be. Growing as a person helps; but it's a slow process, and we're in the meantime.
Plus there are horrors in nature that only a sadist would purposely design...or a sociopath with no empathy whatsoever...or someone well-meaning who wanted everything to run efficiently, but had no real clue as to what that would cost.
So whether these are long-term, evolutionary growing pains; or there was no design/designer; or things somehow got broken...the world isn't the way it should be.
Someone--maybe CS Lewis--said (approx.) that the fact that we know that is a sign that we want God to be there, and good, and loving, and involved.
I'm not sure where that leaves us, other than to mend ourselves and the world. (Tikkun, in Judaism.)
And hope that God exists, and meets our standards.
Ok, that's all I've got. Someone else talk.
We are making the planet less inhabitable for ourselves and extinguishing species we would like to remain (and the ones we do not care much about) though not at the expense of "progress".
The distinctive feature of humanity is that we are able to change, and have changed, the environment itself, which makes those ecosystems unstable or causes them to fail altogether. An Antlion can set a trap in a single location for a few unfortunate insects; we can lay a strip of tarmac to flatten thousands of migrating frogs. And lay them here, and there, and everywhere. And that's just roads and frogs.
Or, to paraphrase Grace Jones: the world’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for us.
In our Judeo/Christian tradition we have been “given dominion” so naturally, because we are broken and incomplete, we want to turn that into “opportunity to judge”.
We cannot stop ourselves: big cats are graceful, noble; foxes are cunning; monkeys mischievous. Animal behaviour must be anthropomorphised. Same with collective nouns: pride, swarm, murder (really? Crows?).
And if it is anthropomorphised, then it can be judged: we see “sin” in animal behaviour where none exists.
This isn’t dominion, it’s projection:
“Well if you think I’m bad, what about that wasp over there? Laying its eggs in that poor defenceless caterpillar! That’s disgusting! Kill it, kill it, kill it; kill all the wasps! Kill them now! Oooo but not the bees, because they are jolly, cheerful and industrious workers and their honey goes well with milk and property rights.”
TV natural history is just more of the same in 4K. You can tell by the music. One minute penguins are cast as victims and seals are the villains; the next, seals are victims, orca the villain.
We can try to blame kings for encouraging this sort of thing: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise” but even without a Bible, there we are, right from the start, making our cave paintings and telling stories about the natural world. Whoever tells the story or paints the picture, gets to invent the cast and the narrative; usually “tribe good; everything else either useful or bad”
The natural world is there to be interpreted, just like any parable. What you see in any story reflects what is in you already.
Bad break-up? Look at that <insert preferred gender here> of the species, flying away! Abandoning its responsibilities! Bastard!/Bitch!
Oh and squirrels are just rats with good PR. Trust me.
Humanity isn't one block of all of us doing bad, and I don't see how we get to have any effect on the ones who do. They don't listen, they don't care, they, for instance, charter planes to steal what is intended to help others.
I'm sure there are things I do which don't help. I'm can't be innocent. And I mustn't do that prayer thanking God that I am not like that billionaire over there, or that covidiot in the Capitol.
But what, in heaven's name, do we do with them?
*Tiny problem occurred to me - if the planting of acacias to limit the growth of the Sahara works really well, the supply of nutrients to the Amazon rain forest drops.
Oh, those poor plants! Couldn't God have just set it up so that animals photosynthesise, then no living thing would ever have to be eaten!
Horrifyingly, some people take this sort of thing far too seriously:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia
While others simply refuse to take other options seriously enough:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insects_as_food
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=edible+insects+for+humans&sprefix=edible+insects+&ref=nb_sb_noss
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=edible+insects&ref=nb_sb_noss
Kinda disappointing tbh. Maybe I was expecting too much. It’s fine, their edible, it’s an option. But they are great with kids (as guests, not side order)
They’re not their!
Honestly, compound eyes really play havoc with my typing sometimes!
For sure, in a world of magic, animals that could animals photosynthesise would be a great idea
It’s the temptation to disappear into any non-present world. You don’t have to have a god to go with it: Golden ages, happier times, alternative presents, post-apocalyptic nightmares, utopian/dystopian fantasies.
Whatever your faith or non-faith it is really hard to let go of both past and future and embrace the harsh reality that everything that physically exists, exists only on the knife-edge of “now” which all moves forward at sixty minutes per hour (relative velocity and spacetime curvature allowing).
The past is as equally non-existent as the future. So Matthew 6:34 applies equally to yesterday as it does to tomorrow.
Yet it is difficult to be here now. To be fully present.
Absolutely. I used to do a lot of meditation (Zen), and the number of avoidances of the present is amazing. We used to call it mind fucking. Time is very odd in this respect.
I suppose theism systematizes it, by speculating on a past and a future, that are appealing/appalling. It's too tiring for me now to think about.