Our culture has become so smart, so over educated that we're the dumbest people ever to walk the planet.
Sure., we can Google the answer to any question we can ask in a matter of seconds but we're too damn stupid to know the things that have been common sense in civilizations for tens of thousands of years.
It's headline news to us that men and women are actually wired differently. Really. Gloria Steinem was wrong, and we're shocked SHOCKED.
Now there's
this.
Turns out it's a big bleeping surprise that kids are healthier when they know who their parents are. Even their fathers!!
We've told ourselves for over forty years that women didn't need husbands to have babies and babies didn't need fathers. As insulting as that is to fathers, it turns out it's not so good for the kids either and that makes news.
As far as I know, throughout human history there have been many civilizations and cultures that allowed and even encouraged polygamy but in none of those cultures did that polygamous set up include one woman and multiple men. Think maybe there's a common sense reason for that? Think maybe it was biology and not socio-economic constructs that set the dynamic up? Think maybe it makes a difference that the King of Siam, with his harem, still knew all his kids and each and every one of his offspring knew who their mother and their father was? Think it matters that the children of a woman with multiple partners don't know who their fathers are?
Many of the rules of civilization that our enlightened culture seems so willing to toss aside only came into being through the experience of generations that went before. Human nature doesn't change and technology only makes it easier for some of us to escape the messier ramifications of that behavior; it doesn't change the affect that behavior has on us.
As Bill Cosby says, a home without a father is a challenge but a neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.
The myth of Prometheus is alive and well and it's lesson should still be heeded.
Technology, whether it's fire or cloning, can have extremely deleterious affects on mankind and there are things we shouldn't do, even though we can.
Michael Crichton and Mary Shelley both understood this when they wrote their respective classics Jurassic Park and Frankenstein, which are pretty much the same story,
For Heaven's sake (literally) the very first book in the Bible tells us the same thing. Why did Adam and Eve get pitched out of Eden? Was it because they disobeyed the one rule God gave them? Because they ate from the tree of knowledge and became self aware? Or was it because the reason they disobeyed and ate was because they wanted
to make themselves like God?
It's what we Christians call "original sin" and we as a species just keep finding new ways to commit it over and over and over.
And we're always surprised when the outcome is bad.
Wisdom is the ability to learn from the mistakes of others and as a culture, we have disgarded wisdom as old fashioned. We shouldn't be surprised at what we get for our efforts.
