stiff, cold hardness. This thing
stabbing into the ground so unfeelingly and slicing what refuses to yield is
fundamentally otherworldly, and almost miraculous.
Our species, Homo sapiens,
arose about half a million years ago. The Bronze Age arising from the Stone
Age, in that context, occurred just recently, only about 4000 years ago. Since
humans have been making and using metal only for less than 1% of our existence,
you can say that for nearly humanity's entire existence we had no metal, had to
skin animals with flaked flint, and grub roots with sticks and sharp rocks.
Then someone discovered how to alloy copper and tin to make bronze, and in a
relative wink of an eye this technological leap evolved into the world we have
today.
As I work, it occurs to me that in
the context of recent cogitations, this knife is contributing its own thought.
It is reminding me that technology evolves at one rate, while biological and
human social evolution proceed at much, much slower rates. We can see what a
profoundly dangerous dynamic this is when we remember that today too often
high-technology destructive power resides in the hands of people whose minds
are grounded in belief systems thousands of years old.
Specifically and most troublingly,
a two-thousand-year-old religion may go into great detail about matters such as
sexual politics and the rites to be celebrated on this or that occasion, but it
won't say a word about what to do when the Earth becomes overpopulated with
people, is faced with global warming and the oceans have become polluted and
overfished.
Exodus 35:2 very clearly and
without qualification informs fundamentalist Christians that a person who works
on the Sabbath must be murdered. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing you'd
expect from a tribal elder in the Middle East 2000 years ago? But is it an
appropriate message for today, right now?
I have heard people who distrust
religions say that they put up with them because without them there'd be
nothing to believe in, no guide for ordering society, and no compass for
establishing goals in one's life.
My steel knife blade shining in
sunlight as it works the moist, crumbly soil suggests that it is a beautiful
and powerful thing if you can pass through the fire of becoming something new,
of evolving, evolving, evolving...
To anyone needing something to
believe in, I suggest that it is enough to believe in universal paradigms
easily discernible in Nature -- such as the desirability of diversity, the
necessity of frugal living and recycling of resources, and the beauty of
simplicity.
Anyone wondering
how to order society might consider the notion that it be ordered according to
rational decisions made by well-informed, public-spirited