(I write this with full gratitude to the U.S. armed forces, who make it possible for me to sit and ponder such things in peace.)
I spent hours of my childhood crouched down and hunched over the backyard bugs — so much so that the adults would joke that one day I would be an entomologist.
Eventually, I chose other professions ending in -ist, but still, the hours I’d spent in a New Jersey suburb, watching the insects, shaped me.
I would pick up an ant from the red colony and march him to another part of our yard and drop him into the black colony. And he would, inevitably, run away quickly. I’d try to stuff him down the hole — the entry to the ant hill. Usually when I did this, the alien ant would run out a few seconds later. Sometimes, he never made it out.
My aim was to see if ants from different colonies would assimilate. They would not.
Many times, I saw rival ant colonies at war. The ants would lock heads with each other and pull back and forth. Eventually, the losing colony soldiers would be outnumbered, fighting one-to-three against the victors. There were dead ants all over the place. A littering of specks amid the grass.
Death and destruction, right there in my backyard. It was ridiculous and pointless and seemed, to me, a waste of time. Those ants had no idea how small and insignificant they were.
Every time I read about the latest warring among our own species, I think of the ants and wonder, “How much wiser are we?”
That is some pretty twisted stuff, putting ants down other ant-holes as an experiment. I know a good doctor you could see. I just happen to know of him–I do not really know him, as in a doctor-patient sort of thing of course.
lol – I need help. 🙂
Actually, while I joked about Andrea’s methodology, she clearly raises an excellent point. We think we are so wise when in fact we are really no different from all other biological entities–taking into account our own human variations of course.
I remember in law school being struck by how impressed so many people seemed to be with their intelligence and, as an extension of that, their belief that human intelligence was a panacea for almost everything, forgetting that even in the field of law, what is looked at as gospel today is overturned precedent tomorrow. In other words, we know little to anything of lasting reality in the big scheme of things. But, oh, as indicated, how impressed we can get with ourselves. In fact, I was thinking the other day that even someone with as much current impact as Bill Gates will, in the eons of time, be nothing but a speck of dust in the annals of galactic evolution–a process clearly that supersedes any living entity.
However, as for going to “war,” and defining the term “war” liberally, it seems in my opinion to be a natural course of all life. The forces of nature appear to have in place a system where, whatever you are, including plant-life, you eventually eat or are eaten or at least become fuel for other life-development. When competing life-forces come into contact apparently something has to give. One hopes that over time the outcome is based upon true natural laws so that those doing the eating are those, over a long period of time, that are most in tune with the proper course and flow of life. I have my doubts, though, that this has been the case for a long time—at least on a majority scale.
Michael: Thank you for commenting. It reminds me of two things.
The first is some of the Biblical wisdom of Solomon, provided in the book of Ecclesiastes.
The second is a bit from the book, “Paris to the Moon,” where the author says that every debate and question of life in France can be answered in three steps: Attribute the problem (or solution) to the individual. Then, attribute it to a question of society. And finally, debate it until it becomes a philosophical point, to which there is no answer, and thus the answer is that the question is not worth asking in the first place!