The “Lemming suicide story” is largely myth…No, they don’t rush off cliffs in Norway, throwing themselves into the sea in order to kill themselves. Reason? Lemmings can swim. And once in the water, instinct tells them to swim like mad to get to a new piece of land. Only sometimes, they can’t.
Natural science’s best guess (with Science it’s always a guess, folks, so don’t confuse it with Mathematics), since they can’t interview the little buggers, is that when their populations get too large, portions of that population are compelled to make that big leap, mass starvation being a greater risk. Humans are the same way, which is why American settlers pressed westward for over 200 years before they finally ran out of new land. (And government planning had very little to do with this exploring, blazing trails, or organizing wagon trains. Not a single clerk was involved.) Then Frederick Jackson Turners wrote in 1893 that the “frontier” had ended, and from there on people rolled back over old ground, and start sub-dividing it. And populations got denser. Or something like that. But it was all instinctive. And Jackson believed it signaled a change in the America character, for there were no new territories to explore, or no new ground to break. It had all been done before.
Unlike lemmings, Man is more adjustable, and Americans are (or were) more adjustable than most of the rest of the world.
Just as social psychologists argue and debate why men did things back in those days, today animal behaviorists still haven’t figured how the lemming population sorts out who will go and who will stay. Just best guesses. But as we’ve learned from our own human experience, age may have something to do with the lemmings’ selections. Indeed, Arctic tribal people (Eskimos), humans who can and do make cognitive choices, it wasn’t uncommon for the sick and elderly who could no longer contribute to the survival of the group, to simply go and sit on an ice floe (and sing death songs) waiting for a polar bear to come out of the water and snatch them. For the clan to have to continue to feed them without any reciprocal contribution would have been, in their circumstances, “survival endangering”. There were no committees that came to the igloo and told them. They just did.
My dad explained this to me about the Eskimos when I was still a teenager. He believed that if a person can no longer contribute, and became a net drain on the community it was his duty to remove himself from the community. Americans generally no longer believe this and haven’t for a few generations, nor do they have to. But my mother lost all of her mind by 89, only her body stayed healthy until she was 94, and was fed like a vegetable, wiped and nursed, until, coincidentally, her insurance ran out, and the care facility called to say she’d passed away.
When Dad was 71, after several strokes, and knowing what lay in store for him in coming months, he decided not to go Mom’s way, and took the Eskimo’s route to Valhala.
The point I’m driving at is that, even in human communities, natural law plays a major, even determining role in humans determining their own fate; not only at the individual level, as so many young people are now taught to believe, but at the community level, working its way up thru family, to tribe…and these days to nation.
The American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the 9/11 wars, all offer proof as to how widely and deeply that instinct of belonging, surviving and human worth can be felt among the multitudes. It can’t just be “Me, me, me” or the entire identity and reality of nation, community, even family, falls apart.
And you have to admit we’re witnessing this process all over America. And likely the world.
Now, this set is about how societies arranged from the bottom-up deal with homosexuality as opposed to top-down societies, and the role natural law plays in both. I’ll deal with homosexuality in Part II.
Several natural law understandings about human societies apply, and have been studied since the Enlightenment, (17th & 18th centuries), first as philosophy then, as natural science, and later as soft science such as sociology, psychology and political science.
But I don’t want to turn this into a dry, dreary treatise, like Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) or Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). I tried reading both in college. God knows I tried, but I just couldn’t do it; with every paragraph I had to pull down a dictionary and look a word up, even verbs. But I had read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (1839) in high school and it was an easy read, understandable, even entertaining. So he’d changed in those 20 years. “Got full of himself” as Dad (an engineer) used to say. As a college senior what I recognized was that neither of those books were written for me, but for another batch of people altogether.
Hold that last thought and compare: Our Bible has been read through-and-through by thousands of times more people than have worked their way through either of these scientific and philosophical stem-winders.
It would take me years to make this connection, but what is remarkable is that even though most who have actually read the Bible front-to-back only did it once. Then they selected books and verses and connected them to real life situations, a practice which carried over to real life situations, such as found in a book, Common Sense by Thomas Paine, the “Declaration of Independence” by Thomas Jefferson, and the Constitution and the authors of the “Federalist Papers.” Like Bible studies, men and women simply returned to their notes and made judgments about everyday ideas and events.
No such concordances are found about Darwin or Marx, except in large tomes the size, and unreadability of the master blueprints established by Darwin and Marx, so available to very small groups of readers.
This is a survival enhancing practice to single persons, his/her family, and passed on in the same way mammals pass on skills to their young. So just keep this notion in mind, for at the heart of this phenomenon is the simple Natural Law truth that, just like people tending to the daily bread they can lay on their table every day as opposed to that fine menu available at Maxim’s in New York they only see on TV, there are pertinent matters found in the Bible having to do with the survival of their families and individual selves, even their community, including a “folk history” of how it all came about, that for close to 2000 years has contributed to more individual survival choices that has kept human society at least with its head above water than all the science and technology teachings combined.
Simply put, the Bible is a thousand times more survival-enhancing than Darwin or Marx, for it is something ordinary people can consult in the comfort of their own home, when needed, and without it, life becomes a thousand times more survival-endangering.
A few pertinent General Theories you can chew on:
Between the two, I give Darwin more points than Marx. You should acquaint yourselves with the general principles of “Natural Selection” and “Survival of the Fittest”, both of which are Darwinist terms and largely true. Certain natural laws guide your lives and decisions whether you want to admit it or not and if we dismiss them, we do so at our risks.
Things such as “Territory”, and “Property”, and ultimately “Freedom” and “Liberty”, have strong roots in Natural Selection, and if you actually run the numbers, you can easily see that nations that are governed, truly governed, by the majority of the herd, fare much better, and are much less likely from being destroyed from within or without, than those that are governed only by (more often) self-anointed members of the “fittest” groups…what we commonly refer to as “Alphas and Betas”. Both Darwin and Marx appeared to be reaching out to those exclusively, Darwin finding some really fine scientific minds, but also exciting some very political minds who had scores to settle, especially with the Church of England, the likes of HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was also a Fabian socialist, and they believed they could soften Marxism up to make it more palatable to English tastes.
Fabian socialism was a cornerstone to the Labour Party that replaced the Liberals of G K Chesterton’s era in the early 20th Century. After World War II, it became the model for the “social democracies” that defined Europe after Hitler had been dispatched. The Russian version of kick-ass Marxism, (with the Bomb) was not the sort of image Europeans wanted to convey. They wanted three-pieced suits, and champagne socials, Marxism-Lite social democracy, to define the United Nations as well as urbane Europe, while the United States and our quaint little ideas about human liberty, still clutching our largely Protestant Bibles, and that nuclear button, would protect their lazy, entitled arses for over 70 years, while hoping they could ease America’s wealthier and more Euro-envious into their camp.
They want nothing to do with a nation of high school grads and professing Christians…although “Professional Christians” will do. (Mark Twain).
What America is dealing with today has been several successive (and growing) generations of “self-appointed” Alphas and Betas, both males and females, since the 1960s. This is not by accident. This notion that “smarter-people” should rule the “lesser-smart” began with the so-called Revolution on 1848 in Europe, a series of (some historians argue) politically unrelated, but most certainly Darwin-related revolts by faculty members of European universities who were teaching for a pittance of what they believed they were worth. Free-market capitalism had nothing to do with this, meaning the college professors’ Revolution of 1848 got off on the wrong foot from the outset, but Karl Marx, a loner among this group, came up with own theory, which alas, outlived the others, and because he captured the zeitgeist, is still in high demand today among that group, in large part because it pushed all the right buttons about the personal vanities and appetites of the Alphas; Pride, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth and Wrath, and blocked God out…as a profession of faith. And Karl Marx, on a very personal basis, personified all seven, throwing in a nasty, down-the-nose mocking attitude to boot. So he touched all the emotional, and pretend-intellectual bases, which is why his arrogance is almost universally admired by that same group 180 years later.
Next, in Part II, in this context, I’ll try to provide a short natural history of homosexuality in America compared to the rest of the world, including the “Pride World” of today, using natural selection and a general overview of the “Nature vs Nurture” debate that goes on ad naseum in the psychology realm, where specialists today are paid $200/hr to try help Bobby deal with his affinity for dressing up in Mother’s lipstick and gowns.
