The Humbaba

When a child scores a goal in hockey or something, people ought to cheer, because sports are all about healthy competition building higher self-esteem, right? Or, in adult arenas, people cheer when their team succeeds and gloat when the opposing team fails, but in a playful and sportsmanlike manner, because sports are all about bringing citizens together in enthusiasm and good fun, giving them something to talk about when they would otherwise talk about nothing, right? Sports may be marinated in a bunch of useless math and sensational journalism, but it's really all about an excuse to have a big powwow, right?

Anyway, I know next to nothing about sports, but I do know that science and art used to have similar, grand purposes, but there's always someone out there who forgets what it's like to be alive and concludes that the purpose of science and art is to "prove" that one group of people is better than another.

But maybe it's wrong to continue pursuing things like sports, things that are designed to help humans pretend that they like each other and are glad that other people exist, even if they have different opinions or habits. In science, are we lying to ourselves and inhibiting progress by accepting an axiom of racial or mental/spiritual equality?

Even now, when all the Pokemon have told our kids to follow their happy dreams and all the Blackberries have helped roboticized organisms refrain from draining their blood for a second of free time, I see advertisements and scientific opinions regarding animistic and hunter-gatherer cultures as if they were unevolved humans.

For example, a commercial for a travel-planning Web site recently showed a family getting ready for a vacation. The father told his kids, "We're going to go see the land of our ancestors." The kids said, "You mean Ireland?" And the father said, "No, our more distant ancestors." The family ended up going to a village populated by a hunter-gatherer tribe of what looked like South American natives, speaking a language that was treated as comical gibberish (and it probably was).

Now, I'm not a combative guy at heart. In fact, I think a culture that is unable to laugh at its own foibles is an insecure culture. But this wasn't a comedy of foibles (I really hate that word "foible"), this was just plain insensitive.

The genius of "primitive" cultures and their own breeds of science and art is in many ways just as grand as the supposed genius of the non-culture of affluent America. Evolution happens, but not on the wavelength that a white stock broker in New York can be considered "better" than a Huli warrior from New Guinea.

But I'm probably overreacting and seeing something that isn't there. It's just a commercial -- maybe I should pretend it's all in good fun and go back to thinking about all the white people I see every day and all the white things they do. My brother-in-law is a scientist and in no way an elitist. On the other hand, he's a physicist and not a biologist, and the science of biology has been so corrupted by the daft ideals of humanism through the years -- daft because, even though humanity will apparently save itself some day, elitist scientists and sci-politicos absolutely hate individual persons, especially persons who differ in opinion or habit from them.

We're all in this together, baby, but according to Mengele's progeny, if you're primitive, genetically diseased, imbalanced, religious, short, black, or just plain ugly, then you might as well have not been born.

Look around and you'll see a world of pure evisceration.