Watching A History of Scotland has Ter shaking
her head. “We haven’t evolved,” she laments, referring to the ongoing struggle
of one man, any man, for power over the masses. Be it a king, a clan or a whole
country out to subjugate another, the contrast is ancient and eternal.
Treachery and deceit are required qualifications to build an empire, and if
strengthening oneself means cutting down everyone else, then we are indeed a
failed experiment.
I did some lamenting myself, during one of my morning
tea chats with a friend at work. The topic du jour was online bullying
or hate crimes or something (there are so many to choose from that it’s easy to
forget), and I remarked to my buddy that humans are the only animals in the
kingdom who treat each other so cruelly, so wantonly, and with such perverse
delight in the destruction of others.
“Oh, no,” she countered, “there’s a breed of monkey in
(insert jungle here) that does the same thing. They hold kangaroo courts and
beat the defendant to death.”
I guess that makes it all right, then. After all, why
should we be better than the monkeys? We’re only supposedly more
intelligent—oh, wait. That may be the problem. Intelligence is no indication of
kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy or any sort of emotional evolution. You
can teach a monkey to communicate by pushing buttons—the simian form of
texting—so maybe we aren’t any smarter and shouldn’t tout ourselves to be
superior.
*sigh*
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