About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Is There A Dog? Across the room from me is a device. Although versions of this device are made daily, cheaply, and in enormous numbers, my favorite is the old one across the room from me that was manufactured in the middle to late eighteen hundreds. It weighs nearly forty pounds. I carry a much lighter, much more modern version in a pocket, although I don't refer to it nearly as often.
Versions of this device have been around for many thousands of years, actually. Some types have even been known to occur naturally, although typically those function poorly.
They are quite useful. They largely give us information. Mostly they tell us no more than someone else could tell us, although they usually get things exactly backwards. But they do so reliably, and reliability is the only thing we require in divinatory devices. To the human eye reliability is much more desirable than accuracy. If we know in an exact way how something will lie to us, then we imagine we know the truth.
Today I am talking about intelligent design.
But first, a Shakespeare break. Hamlet, Act II, scene ii:
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
My favorite delivery of this speech is in Tom Stoppard's dance remix of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. This is the scene where Hamlet completely blows the pair of them away at the questions game.
(As a complete aside, I am forced to recall when I was describing this play to a college roommate and dear friend of mine. I was describing the opening scene, idly flipping a penny over and over while I went on. Mick smacked the penny clean out of my hands the eighteenth time in a row that it turned up heads. So it goes. True fuckin' story.)
Back to the point. In this speech, Ham is going on—somewhat ironically, in my interpretation—about Mankind being the pinnacle of God's creation. To which he appends, "As if."
Here's an exercise for you, reader: Hit Google for a while and see how many sites quote this passage from the Bard. Note how many of them are religious sites, or failing that, what proportion of those sites simply miss Ham's sarcastic tone. Hint: How many of them stop the quote before the "And yet, to me...."
I expect the proportions are pretty similar to Shakespeare's time. It seems obvious to me that Hamlet was quoting some popular viewpoint he didn't quite agree with. Not much has changed in five hundred years.
See, then, science was on the upswing, basically having just been born. The Plagues were largely over, the Renaissance was beginning (for the wealthy and literate, anyway), and hardly anyone was being hanged or burned as a witch. Good times for all. Scarcely a hundred years later, Hobbes was saying that without the man-made advances of law, science, literature, and the arts, man's life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The device leaning against the opposite wall was quite popular in Shakespeare's day. I expect Hamlet, had he not had the handicap of being a fictional character, would have had at least one of these oracular devices and consulted it daily. Those of his station would have been expected to have several and to put them to good use. Even playwrights would have had access to them in Shakespeare's day, though they might be expected to have to share with everyone in the household. Like the early days of radios and telephones and televisions.
Intelligent design is a theory predicated on the theory that the universe is wonderful and marvelous and somehow simultaneously precisely too simple and too complex to have been achieved by accident. Mostly this view is held by those who, if they were God, would have put things together exactly so so that the miracle of humanity, the pinnacle of the Intelligence's mighty achievements, would have occurred exactly in the manner that it already has, there being exactly no room for improvement.
I turn my head from the device and look out the window instead, and I wonder how people can have this opinion. I look at the window itself, and Nature, and Man's place in it—which is indoors, cowering. The remains of Hurricane Dennis is overhead where Cindy squatted but just a few days ago. Without the struggle that we perfect creations put up against the perfection of God's destructive engines of sunlight and wind and water and ice and fire, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" is quite the understatement. Or maybe it's an overstatement, as the only relevant word there is "short."
And then there's what Man does to one another. Two words: mass graves. Although there are some very beautiful examples of compassion, there are plenty who remain in power who seem to prefer that that other guy's life, regardless of the modernities of civilization, be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Well, "man delights not me." For the most part. Certainly not so much that I'd ever consider him perfect. Or give God a passing grade for demonstrating the wondrous and miraculous Intelligence for designing the universe to be just so, just so that Man could exist in the state he's in now.
In fact, I'd give this Intelligence exactly the same grade that I'd give his so-called Paragon of Animals. Exactly the same grade. And for good reason.
The device across the room from me? It's a mirror. Just a mirror.
When I was young, I had a dog that would bark every time it came near one.
There's a wonderful, nearly perfect thing about mirrors. A magical thing. They can reflect anything. Light comes at it from one way and leaves in a different direction according to strict mathematical rules. With adjustments in curvatures and alignments we can use mirrors to show us anything in the universe, gigantic or microscopic. Science uses mirrors and is itself a mirror we use to reflect to our eyes the parts we could not ordinarily see.
And what do we, the vast, vast majority of mankind see in our mirrors, given the choice of where to point them?
We look for ourselves. We see ourselves. And not much else.
Now that's vanity.
We are so happy we exist, so relieved we exist, that we see reflected in all of our reflections our own intelligence, that sure as hell we would have seen to it, given the choice and the power, to make ourselves exist exactly as we are now. We look in the mirror, we see ourselves shrunk down or writ large, and we recognize that otherness that moves just like we do. We pray to it, we plead for it to make us even larger, we thank it for giving us what we have, we beg for more and more and more, which, if anything, is argument against the perfection of how things are.
Or maybe we just bark.
Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy. |
