Poem: Icy Evolution (triggering)

 

Icy Evolution

 

icy evolution.

humans enslaved their kind

and said it was okay

for thousands of years;

 

and scholars defend them still,

our species so young, after all,

barely cutting its teeth on

an epoch or two;

 

how could the slavers know?

and the scholars go on

 

to blame the fool of phylogeny,

and tut-tut ‘mother nature,’

if only ‘she’ weren’t so fond of ants and wolves

and their cruel ways;

 

it’s in our mitochondria,

and splitting hairs about means and ends

is something that should be left

for bad hairdresser days.

 

i look into the eyes of said scholars

and watch daylight

disappear down their pupils,

as if to follow tentacles of biology,

 

back to some irrefutable kraken.

 

but really there's nothing there,

only the fake surface up top,

that altar of ignorance,

vanity unwilling to thaw.

 

 

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3/22 ... smoothing edits everywhere... 

3/21 ...

This poem concerns a debate in ethics:  are people in the past blameworthy for, say, committing slavery, or were they just products of their culture?  Today, more and more, we are assigning blame to some historical figures, like Thomas Jefferson.  But how far back should we go? What about Christopher Columbus?  Columbus seems to be losing his holiday.  What about the Roman empire?  Are they to blame for enslaving others?  

This poem, actually, was originally about rape. You can see that version below.  But I thought that the poem in this version, with rape as the specificed evil, might be received very differently by whatever puny audience I have for this blog.  My reasoning on this is as follows:  we are still today more likely, as a civilization, to countenance rape than we are slavery.  Despite rape being considered a horrific crime, like slavery, sexual harrassment and assault of over half the human population goes on everywhere at epidemic levels, and relatively few perpetrators are brought to justice.   

Maybe future humans will look back at us and say we are not to blame for our toleration of so much abuse of over half the human population.  Why?  Because our culture is primitive.  It is similar to how today some scholars say that the Roman Empire's culture was primitive, and so they are not to blame for committing slavery.

But I think the opposite.  If humans do exist in the future, it will be because our ethics technology has evolved to a much higher level, enough to overcome the threat of tyrants and war.  Future humans will see us as people who are deservedly labeled as blameworthy for our wicked, cruel acts such a rape.  

I agree with this line of thinking.  We are not innocent because our culture is primitive.  We deserve condemnation.  We know sexism is wrong, as we know racism is wrong, and oppression, in general .   But we continue to oppress.  

Another issue is the torture of animals, such as pigs, in factory farms.  We do this casually and continuously in our culture.  Again, future generations will say we are blameworthy, even though it is built into our culture so completely that most of us don't even think about it, the torture of these animals, and when we do, it is quicky overridden by habit.

In general, humans conform far too much to evil standards when they have the ability to see in their heart that what they are doing is wrong by a simple, ancient measure, the Golden Rule:  Do to others as you would them to you.

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Icy Evolution

 

icy evolution.

men raped women

and said it was okay

for thousands of years;

 

and scholars defend them still,

our species so young, after all,

barely cutting its teeth on

an epoch or two;

 

how could the rapists know?

and the scholars go on

 

to blame the fool of phylogeny,

and tut-tut ‘mother nature,’

if only ‘she’ weren’t so fond of ants and wolves

and their cruel ways;

 

it’s in our mitochondria,

and splitting hairs about means and ends

is something that should be left

for bad hairdresser days.

 

i look into the eyes of said scholars

and watch daylight

disappear down their pupils,

as if to follow tentacles of biology,

 

back to some irrefutable kraken,

 

but really there's nothing there,

only the fake surface up top,

that altar of ignorance,

vanity unwilling to thaw.

==========

Until 1975, every state in the nation considered a husband’s rape of his wife an exception to its rape laws. Legal codes of the time either defined rape as a man having non-consensual sexual intercourse with a “woman not his wife” or defined the victim of the offense to exclude the wife of the actor

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-sense-chaos/202005/the-bizarre-legal-loopholes-surrounding-spousal-rape

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