Transcending the arbitrary narrowness of our empathy isn’t guaranteed by nature. (Why do you think they call it transcendence?) But nature has given us the tools — not just the empathy, but the brains to figure out how evolution works, and thus to see that the narrowness is arbitrary.
So evolution has led to something outside itself — to the brink of a larger, more widely illuminating love, maybe even to a glimpse of moral truth. What’s not to like?
Robert Wright in New York Times April 20, 2007.
To escape the negative reductionist evaluation of Our Situation, you need only remove the words just, mere, only and other such words as adjectives. Those words are synonyms for crummy. Then you are left with simple truths like we are animals or the brain is a gray gelatinous mass or altruism is a survival function. I would substitute glorious for any of those words, because the simple contains the miracle, although using the word miracle may contaminate the thought.
I did not bike ride around the lake today because this part of Prairie Road has some white water flowing over it. Trucks were going through it slowly. People kindly offered to truck me across, but I was just out there to see it. Near our house Byther Brook is roaring into the lake and because I recently moved this website and unitymaine.org to a new host that offers me 300 gig of stoage for cheap, I can put up a little video of that. And I added some flashing heads on the theater page.
Off to New Orleans on Tuesday where we intend to fais do do with jockamo and andanday til three.
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