ANIMAL MENTALITY AMONG US

Author David von Drehle asks and speculates about the answer to a most provocative question in his book Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year. What if the South had won and succeeded from the Union? Although I have not yet read his book, the question intrigued me. Such searching and in depth question deserve deep consideration. “What if questions” are vital steps we must use if we are to learn from history. That question paralleled in importance and is intimately related to the questions of what would have happened had we as a Nation decided that “separate but equal” rather than “integration” was the answer to racial strife? Looking back, there is no question in my mind that in both cases, the majority of the people decided what was best for everyone. There would not have been just a North and South, two nations standing separately. The states would have fragmented to a European style existence, perhaps eventually uniting to form a troubled union with a common currency and permeable borders. Separate but equal would certainly degenerated in to a broken and apartheid society similar to an uneasy South African peace or the persistent Israeli and Palestine conflict.

Now, we face an equally deep social question; one to which we already have an answer. A small group of radical politicians has adapted the Ayn Rand divisive philosophy; the makers verses takers; the 47% verses the 2%. She derived her philosophy from biology but didn’t know it. A political philosophy that  reminds me of a story told by a biologist observing an audience watching a film of orphaned baby seal lions begging other mother sea lions to nurse. The mothers had their own pups. They rejected the babies to certain death by starvation. The people in the audience gasp in horror at the cruelty of the scene. It was a classic example of a human reaction to “survival of the fittest”. “Survival of the fittest” does not recognize cruelty.  The audience members gasped as they did because they are humans, they have empathy and compassion; they are us. Can we condone letting people starve while others have so much? Have we gotten to the point where we have no empathy? Are we still animals or do we have those with animal mentalities among us? Our government is a way of learning to share: to do what we cannot do for ourselves. We do that through a complex system of taxes and wages only manageable by government. Paul Ryan, for example, is one of a group of prominent politician who want to destroy the government. They do not want the government to help anyone—they are sea lions—greed dominates their thinking.  Why do we have to go through all the pain and torment to learn the lessons of over 2 million years of natural history, to learn what we should already know?