Mennonite Preacher Anslo and Wife - Rembrandt van Rijn
Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of
a cow lying placidly in a pasture, and apparently contentedly chewing the cud
balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in the pasture you
drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting
horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely
absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we
imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.
I’m
intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily
because it’s an attempt to visualize
what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the
knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a
choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of
it, you shall surely die.”
Scribes
gathering and composing the text of Genesis 1-4 could see the fruit of this choice
all around them; it was written during a time of bloody wars of conquest and
revenge. Later, Charles Darwin would discover that it wasn’t choice, but
natural selection and survival of the fittest that resulted in one
species of life developing this knowledge of good and evil, this
wonderful, yet dangerous, consciousness that gave humans a god-likeness when
compared to all else that lives.
Consciousness
makes boredom not only possible but probable, I think. Because conscious minds
can imagine, predict, analyze and plan, humans can visualise unlimited
possibilities, a visualization which in turn incites a hunger for variety, for
change, for unending newness.
A knowledge
of good and evil implies a moral consciousness, or conscience, a
sensitivity about what’s right and what’s wrong to do. Unfortunately, our
hunger for newness tends to override our moral judgment. Take killing devices:
stick to sword to crossbow to rifles to explosives to nuclear weapons. Were we
guided by a morality prohibiting the taking of life, laying down the stick
would have ended the sequence in its infancy. If you eat of it, you shall
surely die begins to feel like a prediction with merit when we consider the
wickedness by which so many relieve their boredom.
I’m a
Christian because even the flawed and sometimes perverted gospel of Jesus’
teaching answers the problem predicted in Genesis; namely that the core of
righteousness will in the end be found NOT to have been the unflinching
preoccupation with self-preservation, but the striving for the health of the
species. Love your neighbour as yourself; greater love hath no man than that
he should lay down his life for his friend; how can one love God whom he has
not seen, if he cannot love his brother whom he can.
The
great gift of consciousness will either kill us or set us free.
Andrew Moore wrote that “Bio-optimists, then and now, see a bright future if we can use technology to enhance our “moral sense and our capacity for social responsibility.” The “if” in Moore’s assessment parallels the debate between God and the Serpent in Genesis about whether eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will mean mankind’s demise or a glowing, heavenly future.
Surely the gospel also seeks to
“enhance moral sense and [the] capacity for social responsibility.” [1]
It doesn’t, of course, propose technology as the medium to get us there.
Although the placid cow and the tripod horse may never feel the frustration of
boredom, I’m pretty sure I will never want to change places with either
(although even three legs might allow me to chuck my cane). Were the
three-legged horse to be suddenly endowed with human consciousness, he might
well declare, “I’m so bored,” then jump the fence, break into the nearest bar,
drink a pail of beer, go out and harass every pretty filly in town… ‘nough
said.
