| Many of us believe that we're the greatest species that have ever existed. How can we not be? Look at the amazing qualities we have - the use of language, the fashioning of tools, an exceptionally large brain, the capacity of love and friendship, and most impressive of all, the ability to think, reason, and imagine. We are the only species that possesses all these wonderful abilities. Of course we're the greatest. Displayed by this kind of thinking is a breathtaking self-importance, stemming from narrow-mindedness and fueled by a complete ignorance of Nature, of which we're only a part. The only reason we appreciate all the amazing qualities in humans is that we are humans. Most of these qualities, when looked at from the point of view of other species, are useless at best. For instance, our natural tendency to appreciate friendship and to behave altruistically towards others would prove dangerous or even fatal to a solitary animal; similarly, our ability to think and reason would mean nothing to a single-celled organism, whose livelihood involves nothing more than a series of chemical reactions at the microscopic level. If a fly were to have a mental capacity comparable to ours, he would probably consider his compound eyesight the greatest ability in the living world - thousands of tiny eyes are packed in one, arranged in a way so that things could be seen from virtually all angles, allowing their owners to spot food and escape from swatters. Not many species have eyes this impressive, the fly would say. And the transformation of corpse-eating maggots into flying adults, needless to say, must be the greatest wonder in the natural world. He would think further that since his own species is so great, the world must have been created by an omnipotent god-fly, who made every fly in its own image. He would imagine that this god-fly has the body of a fly, though perfected in all respects. And if there is an otherworldly paradise in this fly's theology, we know it is not going to be the kind of place we humans would find amiable: there wouldn't be eternal love and happiness as we understand it; nor would you find 72 pretty virgins lining up to have sex with you. Instead it would be a land of stinking shit and rotten bodies, which, needless to say, flies would be ecstatic about. What are we going to say to him, if we ever have the opportunity to meet this theologically-minded fly and engage him in a philosophical discussion? We'll probably say something like this. What you show in your dipterocentric worldview is sheer ignorance and a lack of sense of proportion. You believe in all that simply because you look at the world only from a fly's perspective. The fact is, the world does not revolve around you. What you should do is stop the smugness, open your eyes, and see the world as it is. Well, perhaps so should we. PS: pardon my drunken ranting. |
