here we are, saddled with 4 1/2 billion years of biological legacy, essentially designed to live short, aggressive and violent lives on the plains of the serengeti, but yet forced to be good, contemporary citizens. life is hard for everybody. we're all trying to eke out an existence in unbelievably confusing circumstances.
given our biological inheritance i think that we need to be more tolerant of ourselves and more tolerant and compassionate in our dealings with others. the standards that we have for human behaviour are at times noble, but at times quite absurd. we're genetically designed to be lustful, aggressive, gregarious, productive creatures, and it can be a good thing to hold ourselves to high community standards of behaviour, but we need to deal with ourselves as who and what we are, not just what we think we're supposed to be. the last thing in the world that we need to do is judge and condemn each other. i can understand locking someone up if they're violent, but i can't understand judging that person without compassion and tolerance. if you have a five year old child that likes to kick cats you don't abuse him and lock him in the basement and tell him what a horrible person he is. obviously you talk to the child and try to get him to figure out why kicking cats is not such a great thing to do. and you recognise that he's kicking cats not because he hates cats, but because he's expressing something that he feels and can't otherwise express. abuse begets abuse, compassion begets compassion. i'm not advocating a soft approach to criminal, violent, or anti-social behaviour, rather i'm advocating an enlightened and realistic approach to our human-ness. locking a criminal up in a horrible place and making them feel like shit is neither a compassionate nor a culturally expedient way to deal with the situation. it's also not taking into account the fact that we're all essentially guilty of the same things. if i had been brought up in a different environment that was abusive and only reinforced violence and aggression i'm sure that i would have turned out differently. so how can i condemn someone and judge someone who was raised differently from me? i can, with justification, prevent someone from hurting someone else, but i can't comprehensively condemn them for it. we're all saddled with a violent biological and cultural legacy, it's just that some of us have the skills and upbringing to deal with it.
in most cases people just aren't aware of the effects of their actions. you can't take a creature who has spent the last couple of million years reproducing and fighting and living a short and difficult life and then plop them in a suburb and ask them to enter data into a cpu and expect them to be well adjusted and fine. we're supposed to be out chasing and being chased, eating and being eaten. nothing in our genetic lineage has prepared us for most of what we deal with on a day to day basis. if you took a penguin from antarctica and put him in a corn field in mexico would you be surprised if he got sick and died? same thing with us humans. for the last million years we've, for the most part, lived in tight communities and led urgent and vital lives. we're not designed to be slothful and indolent suburbanites.
i'm not advocating a rejection of modern conveniences, but i am advocating an acceptance of what we've inherited and what we are as biological humans. christ took pity on us and had compassion for us, so why can't we try to have understanding & compassion for each other? moby