Believe It or Not

Sacchi Green

Over a long life I’ve come to believe that belief doesn’t matter as much as acting according to certain beliefs. I’m not thinking of the just-in-case sort of thing, behaving according to a religion’s rules on the off chance that the teachings may be true and affect your chances of an afterlife, or what kind of afterlife you’d qualify for. I’m thinking in practical, everyday terms.

I’ll get back to the religious connection soon, but I have another example in mind. Every now and then I see something to the effect that scientists (I don’t believe I’ve seen details as to which scientists) are more and more convinced that we’re living in computer simulation being run (or set in motion far in the past) by hyper-intelligent entities to whom our entire cosmos is just a game setting. Do I believe this? Of course not. I’m not capable of understanding their reasoning well enough to believe or disbelieve. My reaction is, interesting, but so what? What difference does it make to how we need to go about our lives? There have been other theories of life being an illusion, but illusion or not, we’ve learned how we have to deal with it. We feel hunger, pain, joy, or loss, and generally know what causes these feelings. A broken bone will hurt, whether it’s an illusion or not. Gravity affects us in predictable ways, even though it’s not completely understood and there are theories that it doesn’t actually exist. We still have to accept gravity’s perceived effects, from the way things drop if we let go of them to the way planets revolve around suns and suns around the central masses of galaxies. We have to act on our perceptions of what works, and revise those perceptions when we see evidence to the contrary. And whether we believe in something like global climate change or not, we’ll feel its effects.

Getting back to religion: that computer simulation idea has a certain similarity to some of the traditional religious creation stories. Hyper-intelligent entities creating our cosmos sound pretty close to some notions of deities. But when it comes to our ideas of good, evil, morality, immorality, all those sorts of things, I think—not necessary believe, but think—that they've evolved along with our physical attributes. Maybe those extra-terrestrial (and extra-galactic) entities have imbued us with those values as part of their game (somewhat like the Sim City computer game my granddaughter plays, although I don’t know whether that includes value systems), but it seems more likely that they’ve developed as survival tools just as opposable thumbs and big brains have. Being able to live together in communities is a survival tool. Being suspicious of other communities may have at times been a survival tool, even though these days it may be more of a danger to survival.

But it doesn’t matter whether you believe in a particular deity as much as whether you behave as though certain teachings of that deity are important to making life work. Most religions have something resembling the Golden Rule of Christianity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We recognize the value of this idea, and have a vague sense that life would be better if everyone did this, even though very few people actually manage it.

Christianity is the religion I was brought up in and know the most about, and the teachings of Jesus as reported in the Bible seem right and good to me, but that doesn’t depend on belief in Jesus as a deity, or even as a historical figure. I know that presumed followers of Christianity have caused great harm, and continue to do so, probably outweighing all the good that others of those followers have managed to do. I know that the magnificent works of architecture and art and music inspired by Christianity do not outweigh the persecution and warfare waged in this religion’s name.

Still, there may be something I do believe, as far as there can be any belief based on human perception. I read something today that made me think of this. My Senator, Elizabeth Warren, is known as a fighter for justice, but not for her religious beliefs. It turns out, though, that her political activism is based on a deep faith. She doesn’t flaunt this, but sometimes quotes passages from the Bible to explain her views, including one from the Book of Matthew 25:40. When Jesus’s disciples ask when they have seen him hungry and fed him, or sick, or imprisoned, etc., he tells them, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Warren quoted this, and then shared her interpretation: “He’s saying to us, first, there’s God in every one of us, there’s Jesus in every one of us — however you see it in your religion, that inside there’s something holy in every single person.”

My belief is not that there’s something holy in every person. I don’t even have a clear sense of anything being holy, or even what holy means. But I do believe that whether or not Jesus ever existed, someone, more or less two thousand years ago, wrote those words, and related ones on the subject of caring for each other and helping those who need help. And I believe that the fact that those words were considered important enough to be written and passed down through the centuries—as were similar ones in other religions—is reason to hope that we humans do have a sense of what is good, what works in life, however often we may fail to follow those words. Does it make any difference whether that sense was imbued in us by extra-galactic computer gamers, or deities, or our own evolutionary development? Probably not. But I confess to preferring to think—maybe even believe—that we did it on our own.

Weakness Is the Mother of Invention

Sacchi Green

What do you do when you have to come down out of the trees because the climate has changed and the trees become scarce and now you’re living in a savannah environment where the grasses are tall and most other creatures, both those that want to catch and eat you and those you want to catch and eat, can run faster than you can?

Right away I’ll back off my choice of title and admit that evolving to stand erect so that you can see farther across the savannah is a form of survival of the fittest that has nothing to do with invention. But consider what happens when you can see the prey or the predator from far away, but the predator is stronger and has bigger teeth and claws than you do, and the prey is still too fast to catch easily. How do you compensate for your weaknesses?

You invent weapons for protection, and for hunting. You figure out how to use fire to scare the sabre-tooth tiger away from your cave, and incidentally to cook your food and keep warm, and you invent snares to catch small prey and throwing devices to kill prey at a distance. If you had been the biggest strongest species around, there would have been no need to invent weapons, or tools, or much in the way of strategy and tactics.

This is not to deny that necessity is also the mother of invention. Invention has two mothers. Probably more. Necessity is also the mother of evolution; when we lived in trees, it was necessary to be able to hold on to the branches, so those who survived were those who evolved to have opposable thumbs, and without opposable thumbs we would have had a much harder time inventing weapons, or much of anything else. Once supplied with an erect posture and opposable thumbs, we were able to invent work-arounds to compensate for our many weaknesses.

Farther along the human timeline, when population pressures or changing climate or just the curiosity that goes along with inventive minds drove us from the warm regions of our origin to colder, harsher environments, we figured out how to compensate for the weakness of our bodies when it came to keeping warm by wrapping ourselves in the skins of animals we’d killed, and later with woven fibers from plants. If we hadn’t compensated like this evolution might have eventually restored our ability to grow enough warm fur of our own, but then again it might not.

Of course the more we compensated for our weaknesses the stronger we became, in terms of survival. We learned to grow and breed our food, to irrigate our crops, to produce and save enough food and other resources to be able to diversify our work, so that some people didn’t have to produce their own food but could trade their crafted goods or various skills for what they needed. Some people needed physical strength for farming, hunting, protecting the resources their communities had amassed, but other people could make their living in ways that depended more on mental strength than on physical. Eventually some people could be weak in every way, but survive due to the resources of their families. Survival of the fittest wasn’t what it used to be, but neither was the environment one needed to survive in.

These days strength of one sort or another is still valued, and weakness despised, but oddly valued at the same time if it makes the despiser feel more powerful. Let’s not get into the labyrinth of gender relationships in this regard, except to note that men who seem to appear weak get the most disrespect. Women who seem to appear stronger than culturally approved get disrespect, too, and resentment, but at least in recent times they’ve been able to get away with wearing clothing similar to men’s in ways that men can’t manage the other way around.

The more complex our society gets, though, and the more important technology becomes, the more valuable inventiveness becomes, and the less necessary physical strength turns out to be. That ninety pound weakling on the beach might get sand kicked in his face by the muscular brute eyeing his girlfriend, but he may well own a tech start-up that pays him enough to buy lawyers who can flatten the muscle man. (Sorry, youngsters, for using a metaphor from old magazine ads that was already passé before you were born.) And that rich techie may well have his youthful nerdiness to thank for motivating him to study and create and compensate for his own perceived weakness. Strength gets redefined, and so does the fitness to survive.

Am I grasping at straws to handle this time’s theme of “weakness?” You bet. Just be glad you avoided my real thoughts on the subject, all of which have been focused lately on the weaknesses that come with aging. Not my own, except by unavoidable extrapolation, but those of my once strong, handsome, intelligent, and compassionate father, who, at ninety-five, is still compassionate, but needing more and more help, and feeling guilty to be needing it, however much my brothers and I assure him, truthfully, that he’s earned every bit as much help as we (mostly me, for valid reasons) can give him.

So you can see why I chose to take the long, long view of weakness as a benefit in the development of our species, rather than get up close and personal. Also, social media addiction and general procrastination have already been covered pretty well, so there’s no need for me to go there. Thank goodness.