Genesis
A friend told me once about his friend the meteorologist. My friend asked his friend if meteorologists could predict weather better than is commonly thought, and the guy said, “Well, yeah, we could, if we could find a starting point.”
The planet is engulfed in a swirling game of tug of war, and there’s a sense of a pattern, but there’s so much of it and it’s changing constantly, it’s hard to get wrapped around it. So I guess they just pick an arbitrary starting point, the meteorologists, plug in some observations, and hope they’re close. Not right, not prescient, but close.
I’m a little skeptical of the claim, or of my recollection; but there is something to weather, a spirit of order that hints of elegant chaos. Its inscrutibility is almost tantalizing, in the way that dark forests and closed doors beckon our curiosity.
That’s how our days go. Our mornings, middays, and evenings find us collecting ideas and observations, and sorting them as well as we can into patterns. Which health insurance plan is my best choice? What should I fix for dinner? Am I stuck in a dead-end job, or are all jobs equally pointless?
The accessibility of patterns we find, and the models we make for them, vary inversely to their power to make sense of things. So while deciding what to make for dinner is relatively easy and provides immediate results, it’s not terribly extensible. Eventually, there are bigger things to understand, larger datasets to model. Is abortion really harmless, or is that an irrelevant facet of its debate? Should the debate over rights of abortion focus less on what’s good for the child or mother, and more on what’s good for the population? Does whatever value we at least want to place on human life logically decrease as the world’s population increases?
Just like with weather, if we had but a stable point of entry into the foray, we might be better able to negotiate the issues. Maybe we could get close to any truth that might exist. Not right, not prescient, but close. The trouble is that the number of intersections between the variety of salient issues can be overwhelming. Abortion as a topic of debate is as much about a society’s perceived value of human life directly as it is about religious doctrine and political opportunism and socioeconomics and aesthetics. It’s difficult, though not necessarily untenable, to maintain outrage at abortion concurrent with support for war, at least logically. It’s similarly difficult to contemplate abortion as the means of providing for the needs of an unborn child known to have health problems at the same time as investing into the human spirit a vigilant optimism.
All indications suggest that our continued investigation of existence will simply illuminate how much there is yet to know. The means the human species has to store and coordinate knowledge are mercurial relative to the time scale on which existence operates. Just as it’s only after longitudinal studies of usage and effects of pharmaceuticals that we can understand their more subtle natures, it would seem that any reasonably approximate understanding of Existence requires a longer view than any one of us will have.
But I’m not concerned quite yet with reasonable approximations. I’m not concerned with accuracy or prescience. I’m finding it hard enough to triangulate a good starting point. Where is your square one, your origin, the place you know, the place with those few hardwon scraps of insight hanging framed on the wall?
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