By Emily Spence, Countercurrents
There are moment in life when one, seriously, wonders whether our species, overall, is mentally ill in some underlying ways. Then again, any definitive determination is likely relativistic since it largely depends on the standards that a given society and culture use to define mental illness, it would seem.
In any case, there, certainly, seems to exist some sort of major intrinsic flaws that humans harbor in general. How could there not be when we, continually, have, along with many constructive ones, the same sorts of ugly dysfunctional behaviors happening again and again through the centuries?
In an offhand way, this being the case reminds me of a particular shark species that renders live births before which the biggest babies developed teeth and ate their smaller siblings while in the womb. Imagine! (One can craft all sorts of analogies off of this pattern.)
Yet, this animal type has endured for an incredibly long period of time since the action in no way wipes out the sharks in entirety. Indeed, this little quirk, actually, seems to ensure that the ones that do manage to survive to be born are stronger, bigger and more capable after birth than they would have been had they not consumed their kin.
So, any human sense of moral correctness is, appropriately, swept aside in terms of the actual results as nature, itself, is amoral, and it is anthropocentric and Disneylandish to consider otherwise. (Alternately put, such actions as the sharks’ seem favored from an evolutionary standpoint or else they would not exist or would have no effect whatsoever — just like the Hapsburg earlobe or any other number of neutral conditions.)
So regardless that some activity might be considered distasteful or shockingly unconscionable, it is merely functionally viable in the larger scheme when it aids furtherance of life. As such, the most adept victors in life’s struggles to move forward, whether brutal or not, wind up having a better chance at surviving and living to breeding age to sometimes pass forward the very traits, whether deemed repulsive or not, that gave them the advantage in the first place.
How tragic, though, this actuality is when the unwary victims aren’t the smaller unborn sharks but are people who face ethical turpitude. How especially this is so when involving noncombatant civilians, as well as other life forms largely viewed as being benign. As such, one wonders about the perverse, although possibly functionally beneficial, foundations that impel acts of violence for the sheer pleasure of it or the twisted thrill that could arise from having domination over life and death of others. (Do members of any other species besides ours kill for the pure joy of it?)
Further, the same sort of warped thinking that could apply to the act of bombing cities from jets in the clouds or seeding farm fields and waterways with mines, while there is awareness about whom will be impacted in the process, assuredly could apply in some manner to certain climate change victims. In other words, they are all simply seen as collateral damage and are of little consideration, if any whatsoever at all, by many of the worst offenders.
So despite being outrageous, Barack Obama’s continual refusal to sign the international cluster bomb treaty is understandable even as the U.S. military has a stockpile of nearly one billion cluster bomblets that kill and maim citizens of other countries. Concurrently, the U.S. stockpiles 10.4 million antipersonnel mines and 7.5 million anti-vehicle mines while he, likewise, snubs ratifying the anti-landmine treaty.
In addition, the Pentagon has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to complete research and development on ever new, more lethal designs for mines, which sets an alarming precedence to legitimize global resumption of landmine proliferation. After all, who knows when they might come in handy during a preemptive invasion.
At the same time, it is tragic that the United Nation’s worldwide anti-mine programs face a budget shortfall of $565m in 2010. As such, there is little hope of clearing away the estimated 119 million to 20 million mines buried across the world or providing a timely education about them to populations at risk to be slaughtered or mangled on their account.
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