Birds and the Human Condition

My wife, who is an inveterate worrier, remarked to me this morning how the life of birds is so simple. I think she may have been comparing her worries to that of the birds feasting at my bird feeders. Anyway, I responded that, yes, all they had to worry about was food and procreation. It seems like an ideal life but I remind you that if anyone you knew did the same you might not have flattering things to say about them. So, I took the opportunity to philosophize a bit and set off on a discourse on how we, humans, were once as the birds, seeking only food, shelter and procreation. Then as we began to find ways to feed ourselves more than abundantly our brains became free to engage in more far reaching concepts such as tool making which made our lives even easier freeing up more brain space for more esoteric endeavors such as art.

Now, I told her, we were at a critical juncture because we had a choice. Either keep life simple or move on into the brave new world. Sometimes I'm not sure we made the right decision and maybe should have taken the road the chimpanzees did but we didn't know then what we know now and so off to the adventure we went. What happened was that we found that by living in communities we could share the work load and live life large. What could go wrong? Right?

But now we had a small group of people with pretty basic needs but someone decides that it is way easier to allow someone else to do the work and just take his stuff away from him. He decides that about procreation also creating ill feelings among the people in the group who really didn't like that person taking their stuff and sneaking around when they were out hunting and foraging.

That is when a more advanced person came up with the idea that we should have a set of rules that told us what we could and could not do and if anyone broke the rules then the rest of the people would make him wish he hadn't. Pretty simple, right? What could go wrong?

Then they had to decide who would decide when the rules were broken and what was to be done about it. So, they had a choice to make. Now, remember, this is way before democracy so the strongest guy and some buddies decided they would be the right ones to do this. The rest of the people were kind of OK with that until some of the strongest guy's buddies decided they should get a larger share of the booty and, by the way, a larger share of the booty, also.

This is about where we find ourselves today. Oh, we've accumulated more stuff and ways to get stuff. We have lifted this ancient compulsion to a fine art. We've created more and more cultural groups etc. that have their own sets of rules and we are still searching for the one ring to rule them all. I mean, one set of rules that everyone can agree on so we'll stop trying to take away the other group's stuff.

So, I told my wife, here we are with our big brains and lots of rules that philosophers figured out by starting with the natural man (who was like the birds) who just took what he needed to survive and working their way up to our complex societies and all kinds of art, some of which most people even understood. Along the way the different philosophers thought about the different ways people could try to make rules and decide who is obeying and who is not. We now call this governing but I think that may be a charitable assessment.

Some of the philosophers called themselves libertarians since they thought that people should be free to gain whatever they could and not have to share it with others. This is probably the closest to pure humanism of any of the prevalent philosophies today.

Others called themselves socialists and thought that the very best of humanity could be only achieved by appealing to our higher calling and sharing all things equally. Well, sort of, because a lot of the time the strong guy and his buddies still thought they deserved more and the lazy people really couldn't see much point in working hard.

Some were capitalists who thought sort of like the libertarians but they could see how it didn't look good to have people begging for bread and dying in the streets so they felt like they could kick in a little to keep themselves from feeling too guilty.

So, then the rule makers (we can call them governors or some such thing) thought maybe we could take some ideas from one group and some from another and create something that didn't seem so stark and brutal. The philosophers thought long and hard on that one and came up with all sorts of ideas. Kingdoms, Religious Orders, Oligarchy and so on but for some the idea called democracy seemed like a good idea. This way the people could decide who would make the rules and who would enforce them and everyone would be happy.

I looked over and my wife's eyes had glazed over and she had this look on her face like WILL HE EVER SHUT UP? I agreed with her that the birds that we feed at our feeders do indeed have it made.

My Take is that sometimes you have to gauge your audience when choosing to pontificate.