The genetic code inside all humans is older than government, commerce, corporations, law, treaty, religion, or social convention.
These are modern social constructs, and none are more than 10,000 years old.
Inside every human, and underneath this relatively modern gloss of civilization, is the ancient genetic code of a social pack predator not so very different from a wolf.
The evidence is written on our face. Predators have eyes that face forward in order to judge the striking distance to the prey. Prey animals, however, have eyes located on the sides of their head in order to see backwards as well as forward.
The very shape of our face informs us of what we are: a predator.
Humans, of course, no longer hunt as they once did. Across the globe, forest has fallen to field, and field has fallen to factory in a dizzying explosion of roads, technology, and population growth. And yet, the code inside us remains the same – the code of the opportunistic social pack predator.
About five thousand years ago, as man increasingly turned to farming, trade, and living in cities, people began to cast about for a new external code to help govern the internal, drives always bubbling just beneath the surface.
The Ten Commandments were not the first attempt at an external code or “law” to govern internal drives, but they are an early example of a code that has endured and shaped a great deal of western law.
Without a doubt, inscribing and teaching the Ten Commandments to generation after generation of people has helped prevent a lot of lying, stealing, and cheating. That said, admonitions to “do the right thing” have never been the sum of all law, and substantive real-world penalties have always been attached to breaking laws, ranging from the very mild (such as shaming or small civil fines) to the extreme (death by stoning).
I bring this up because the terrorist group ISIS, which has been trolling the world for years looking for “un-Islamic” things to ban has decided that pigeon breeding should be made illegal because they are afraid that looking at pigeon genitalia as they fly overhead might corrupt he mind and the soul.
No, I am not making this up.
The missive from ISIS says that the new rule is in place “to put a stop to the greater criminal act of harming one’s Muslim and Muslim women neighbors, by revealing the pigeon’s genitals.”
Anyone caught breaking the law will be punished via public flogging.
Lest anyone think radical Muslim clerics are particularly nuts, let's remember fundamentalist Christian Churches and Orthodox Jewish sects are similarly obsessed with covering every scrap of skin. Yes, God made it, but the radical religious who believe in flying faeries and voices from the sky shrink from it as if it were boiling acid.
And what it is the fear?
The fear is that men and women will become unbridled and run wild.
No comments:
Post a Comment