Emotional Attachment

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Last night, I pointed out to my students as I usually do the paradox of the human condition. Humans are the only species of which I am aware that places the survival of other species over its own, and we are the only species of which I am aware that goes to the lengths to which we go to save the weakest among us. In essence, our choices undermine our very existence, and I’m surprised humans are still alive at all. Perhaps that is also because comparatively to other organisms of which we are aware humans have the highest emotional attachment to other members of our species and the things they do that affect us or others.

What we choose to keep and support runs afoul of our beliefs that the strong survive or that those who survive are those who can adapt. This week, while listening to NPR, I heard on “The World” a reporter who seemed almost ecstatic over the prospect of a resurgence of Nubian music in the Sudan. Months ago, I read about efforts in Europe to change utility construction plans so as to preserve fragments of a Roman Road some 20 feet below the current land surface. This prompted me to think about what we conserve and why and what emotional attachment we put on what we choose to keep.

Our fascination with these things seems based on emotion over reason. Vegetarians oppose the slaughter of animals whose sole purpose is as food on the auspices that they have faces while some of their number think nothing of aborting human fetuses who also have faces. Environmentalists will go to great lengths to prevent development of an area to preserve the kit fox because they are cute until of course the time comes to lay high speed rail through California’s central valley. We spend large sums of money preserving something when it makes far more sense to tear it down and rebuild a modern mockup. It is ok to conserve some things but not others. In short, conservation is good, but conservativism is considered to be contrary to progress. We romanticize conservation of music and art while we disdain conservation of politics and moral culture. We preserve what but not why.

If their argument holds water, then the successful and valuable really is what weathers change well. By that argument anything Roman, Greek, or from the British Empire is absolutely worthless because those societies no longer exist as formerly constituted. If that’s true, then nothing we do has any worth either, because none of us will live forever unless some historian can be coerced into chronicling our contributions, concocted or correctly. Yet, the same people who argue for the preservation of the past do so only partially. They continue to prop up dying species, dying art forms, dying technology, etc., at great public expense while they criticize conservatives for their "blind adherence to an obsolete moral code". They subsidize stuff over substance.

I believe they do this on purpose. They do not like history or Roman culture or plants; they like certain episodes of history, certain facets of Roman culture, and certain plant species, and the rest, which do not happen to corroborate their taste, beliefs, habits, or politics, are considered as dross and refuse and refused the same protections and fiduciary allocations they extend to their pet projects. This is a diabolical duplicity designed to dispirit, deject, and dissuade the impressionable from the good parts of the past in favor of the parts that testify of government power or distract minds from its excesses. You need only look at what they choose to promote and who becomes an acolyte thereof to realize that it’s still about “bread and circuses”. Most of what they conserve takes our minds off of what offenses other people, in particular politicians, propose to enforce among us. They would do well to remember not to gouge something out with the beam in their own eye while drawing attention to the mote in mine.

As my students learned, the continuity of the human race however relies on a conservative process. Every cell in our body recreates itself via semi-conservative replication of organic molecules inside the parent cell, using an existing template as measure for a new product. Semi-conservative replication uses an old template to make something that is proven successful and improve upon it. Consequently, aberrations are slow, rare, and small, so that if they are wrong they are easily recoverable. I believe that is why the Founding Fathers established our Constitutional government, to control the rate of mutation so that the body politic could endure for generations.

Contrarily, the conservationists are often in a hurry. Obama for example strikes me as brash, reckless, and systemic in his "fundamental transformation" which is not how any natural process creates lasting and successful changes. He insisted that if we didn't act then it would be the end of the world as we knew it even as he ended the world as we knew it. In biology, that's referred to as a mutant, which carries both negative connotation and denotation. Scientific attempts to understand and improve are stepwise and deliberate so we can measure the effects and retain only the parts that do the useful work that we desire, actual work, not work we hope will happen as a coincidence.

What we choose to keep and maintain tells people a lot about what we value. Every visitor to my house knows from first glance what I value most. However, why we value those things matters at least as much as what we value. Much of my décor is emotionally-linked to something rather than rational. While conservationists deny that, it betrays their emotion, whereas my open admission that I have emotional attachments may make me the most rational of all.