Posted on August 30th, 2023.

Some years ago, there was much ado about a woman in North Dakota, who called a radio station to comment about deer crossing signs. She complained that they were misplaced. In her view, they were installed at the most inopportune locations, and seemed to result in more rather than fewer deer collisions.

Her position was that the deer crossings should be moved to areas where the deer could cross more safely, thus resulting, in her mind, in fewer deer strikes, and a corresponding reduction in injuries and property damage. The audio of this call-in went viral on the internet, making this woman an object of national ridicule.

Listening to her speak, one gets the impression that this woman is of sound mind and at least average intelligence. Yet her stance on this particular issue evokes profound disbelief. How could a seemingly rational human being possibly embrace the false concept that your average woodland creature pays attention to road signs, much less has the intellectual capacity to discern their messages?

At the risk of sounding patently cliché, I believe that society is to blame.

My argument is that this woman has been conditioned by society to become disconnected from logic and analytical thought. This is the result of the increasingly popular notion of applying governmental solutions to all of life’s problems. I’m reminded of a line from an old television commercial from the 70’s, in which an imposing ersatz-authority figure intones, “It’s not NICE to fool Mother Nature”. In truth, it isn’t really possible. Man acts, and nature reacts. Man’s attempts to “fool” Mother Nature are really only stimuli to which nature reacts. Nature is what it is.

So, in between guffaws, we uneasily affirm to ourselves that deer really cannot read signs, even if the message is pictorial rather than in text. Moreover, we reassure ourselves that we understand that the signs were intended to warn drivers, rather than to direct animals to an area where it’s safe to cross. Nevertheless, how many times do we less obviously fall prey to the same flawed conceptual thinking?

The failing usually occurs when we try to separate ourselves from nature. Human conceit has a large portion of our society believing that somehow we are immune from the concept of natural tendencies, merely because we are human. Our elevated sense of our power and ourselves frequently leads us to foolhardiness of thought. The Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana is most often quoted thusly:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Rarely have so few words carried so much meaning; rarely have such profound words been so often repeated in vain. The sin of human pride, conceit, is the vehicle by which we allow ourselves to believe that we have superiority over nature and its laws.

Try to imagine a youthful generation that reveres the wisdom of its elder generations. While such a paradigm no doubt exists in the world, it is outside the sphere of dominant culture. Youth, by its nature, is rebellious. Woe to the parent who is not prepared for this eventuality.

Indeed, woe to the culture that imbues its youth with unprecedented credibility, as our own culture surely has. Lack of life experience endows young people with an inordinate sense of their own wisdom, for in their own limited universe, many of their “enlightened” notions have never previously existed, and are therefore “new”.

Few would dispute the claim that hindsight has 20/20 vision. Fewer still seem to connect that idea with the aforementioned Santayana quote. It is easy to look back on events in the past and pass judgment, since the outcome of those events is undeniable.

When we look back at the darker moments in our history, such as the Spanish Inquisition, or the Holocaust, our hindsight immediately grasps the concept of the abject horror of these events. It fails to apply the inherent lessons of history, because people have a tendency to rush to the judgment that “we are more enlightened now.” That’s easier to accept than it is to realize that tyrants do not market themselves as such. Some mask their insidious intent behind noble intentions in order to gain power, and others become corrupted by the power that they later acquire. The answer lays not so much in choosing leaders wisely, as it does in denying them the power to control us.

The truth is that to be truly enlightened, one has to embrace the concept that we are not. Human nature is what it is, and despite our fantasies to the contrary, it will always be what it is. Tragically, one component of human nature is the notion that we as individuals, or in our own select groups, are clearly superior to other individuals and groups. This manifests itself in our view of preceding generations. We cluck our tongues and chide our forbears for their human weaknesses, as if somehow, we are immune to them ourselves.

Yet, despite our self-aggrandizing spiritual evolution, we all need to be “brought up”, or “raised”. New babies are born every day, and they develop all of the normal human traits over time. Not all of these traits are good and noble; else, there would be no need for parenting. New parents who fancy themselves better equipped to raise a child than those who have spent years refining the process often amuse me. They shun the advice of their parents and grandparents, who somehow managed to raise them in spite of overwhelming ignorance.

This is not to say that parents of adults are perfect; it is just to point out that their progeny tend to believe it of themselves. Therefore, the new parents approach their job with an inflated sense of their own enlightenment, and the inherent goodness of their own child. Eventually, they get a huge dose of reality.

The sad truth is that we are all composites of both good and bad thoughts, feelings, and intentions. We deny this at our own peril. Good people (with the exception of the Virgin Mary and Jesus himself) are not born that way. Their character is the result of their own conscious decision to choose to be good, assisted by many environmental influences. Even at that, they all are subject to the temptation to act badly. To err is human.

In fairy tales, the monster is pure evil and ugly in appearance. In the real world, there are beautiful monsters everywhere. They have a tendency to flourish in environments where some people believe that their leaders can effectively use road signs to tell wild animals where to cross a highway

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