From Chaos to Maturity

Ma and Pa Robin built a nest in our front walkway. No doubt weighing the odds, they decided we were less dangerous than the crows surveying the area from the rooftops and the racoons and skunks patrolling the lower levels. 

We paused to look into the nest each time we walked by, at first counting the aqua blue eggs, then the chicks as they hatched.

It didn't last long. The little guys went from downy fuzz to pinfeathers in a little more than a week and flew away in three weeks. Sure, they were clumsy at first, hitting branches and tree trunks, but it was clear that Mother Nature equipped them for survival as young birds.

How different from human children. We are totally dependent on our parents far longer than the infants of any other species. Most other mammals and birds have grown into independent adulthood by about the time that we master the ability to totter along in a bipedal posture and begin to communicate verbally. It takes much longer to make a human being.

We are born equipped only with a set of genetics carrying an array of basic bodily functions, inherited predispositions, and infinite potential. It takes some time before the human child's mind begins to recognize the differences between places and faces, names and numbers. All that is achieved through interaction with others and educational programming beginning at home and evolving through a system of schools.

Some of us emerge from the chaos of childhood at a faster rate than others, but overall, the conversion from a chaotic to an organized mind set is slow and takes all of our lives, and while the distance we evolve may be compared, it is never complete.  

Our rate of learning is most rapid in early childhood. That is because we have such a great distance to go to be brought up to speed in the prevailing state of social consciousness. There is such a concentration of new experiences that the passage of time seems to take forever. A human being has the potential to never stop learning, but as the number of new experiences diminishes, the perceived passage of time accelerates in direct ratio.

It is painful for many people to look back over the times of their lives because of the things they did or did not do because of the things they did not know. On the other hand, there are those people who say, wistfully, "Oh, if only I could go back to being 18 again ."

Difference between these two groups is that the first have fully functional memory that allows them to view the prospect of being 18 again as a return to a chaotic period full of new experiences, both memorable and scary, situations they did not know how to handle, foolish pursuits and mental excursions up dead-end streets. 

My parents, like good parents everywhere, did their best to guide my way to avoid the pitfalls they had experienced on their own routes to maturity. Typically, like children everywhere, I was about as receptive to their advice as the little characters in the late Charles Schultz's excellent Peanuts animations where the adult voices come through as a sort of background nasal drone, completely devoid of any actual message.

It is not accidental. It is a natural adaptation that favors evolutionary development. There would be no generation of new ideas if all of the old ideas were accepted immediately without question. 

It is the same principle as the natural occurrence of mutations and wide genetic variations to weight the odds in favor of survival of some organisms in times of widespread microbial, physical or any other kind of attack. It is the biological binary code at work. It is Mother Nature's personal insurance policy for the survival of the species. 

Of the thousands of great new ideas conceived by each up-and-coming generation, 99 percent will vaporize in the cold light of reality, but the few ideas that do survive will be integrated into the development of the social consciousness to be built upon as conditions change. 

Some ideas will survive a few years. These are the ones that happen to be particularly relevant to the state of consciousness that happens to be in existence at the time. Few will survive a full generation or the emergence of the next distinct level of social consciousness. Fewer still will be permanently embedded into the set of social parameters that define our species.

That is how our level of social perceptions evolves as each new generation tries out new modes of behavior, new technology, new ways of thinking--anything just to do things differently from the way their stodgy old parents did it. 

In the past, this has produced mods, beatniks, hippies, flower children, nazis, communists, and every other kind of youthful sub-culture. Currently, we have to cope with Goths, rappers, hip hoppers, skinheads, vegetarians, vegans, human environmental degradation alarmists, construction boot feminists, rainbow coalitionists, animal rights activists, and other curiosities emerging out of the most convoluted corners of juvenile minds.

This includes the youths who wear the crotch of their pants down between their knees, display posterior cleavage and remind us of sloppily dressed penguins as they waddle by.

But let us not forget the chaos of youth also produced Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the rest of the bright minds behind the electronic revolution. These men were just kids when they emerged upon the electronic scene. 

And what about Andrew Lloyd Webber, a musical genius unparalleled in the modern world and Andre Rieu, musical entertainment that does not grate mercilessly upon our auditory senses? Apparently, Rieu just couldn't see himself as being just another violinist in yet another symphony orchestra.

There is an upside to chaotic thinking. It is not all downside. It produces creativity. Creativity can be described as a ball taking an unusual bounce; a new way to do something; charting an unexpected course; viewing something from yet another angle. Trouble with creativity is that it quite often skirts the boundaries of reality and is not always adaptable to current conditions. 

Not all creativity has a realistic purpose. Some of it, unfortunately, is just too far out to have any useful application. The only way such creativity can survive is when it is supported by some government agency being overly generous with money they extract from the taxpaying public. It's when politicians vote financial support for "the arts" in trolling for votes among the clutching, fumbling and bumbling masses.

When the politicians do that, are they really leveraging the money they extort out of the working taxpayers to support the arts, or are they simply perpetuating mediocrity?

How about those robins? As I walk around the corner to the convenience store in Upper Oakville Mall for the paper each morning, there are robins keeping pace, hopping along the sidewalk almost within reach. These birds do not display the cautious behavior of ordinary birds. Are they the little guys who hatched in the mailbox in our entrance way? I like to think so.

The God Issue

The God issue:

There's a lot of discussion out there in the media on whether or not there's a God. It's the usual sparring match between the high priests of religion and the high priests of science. Everybody has an opinion and nobody has a satisfactory answer.

Problem with this debate is that there are strong indications that many of the debaters still see God as an old guy with flowing white beard and a halo or nimbus surrounding the bald spot. It's an old picture, but it's one that will have to do until a better one is posted.

Long ago, when tribal elders first undertook to introduce a little predictability into the affairs of their communities, the old guy with flowing white hair and whiskers was a good image. He might have been one of the elders, a source of wisdom and full of experience, a benefit to the more chaotic end of the community spectrum, whose members were too busy with the pursuit of sex and success to take the time to think things through.

This is no longer the case today. Science has made great strides. Charles Darwin has re-defined the story of Creation, altering it from a week-long event to an ongoing process. We now see creation as the process of Natural Selection that keeps unfolding even as we speak. 

Isaac Newton gave us insights into gravity. Albert Einstein gave us insights into temporal relationships and Steven Hawking is exploring the cosmos for us. All of these are worthy undertakings.

Einstein thought he could gather the celestial clockwork into one simple mathematical equation. He was going to call it the Theory of Everything. Hawking, today's High Priest of Science, is trying to do the same with cosmology.

Another scientist, Polish-born Benoit Mandelbrot, comes closer to mathematically outlining an all-encompassing reality with his work with fractals. Other learned types talk about strings, a marginally-comprehensible theory about the nature of matter on a sub-atomic scale. It would appear that so far,  life's physical realities resist being gathered into a neat mathematical equation.

Nuclear physicists working on the Cern project in Switzerland are looking for the God particle by studying the debris from particle collisions in their giant accelerator.

Astronomers, working with incredibly refined optics, are looking deeper and deeper into space and farther and farther back in time. Each time they encounter another mystery, they postulate another hypothesis to try to explain what they are seeing. There's all kinds of speculation, but so far, they cannot explain effects they labelled dark matter and dark energy.

Isn't that what the biblical scribes were doing when they put together the scriptures? Encountering gaps in their knowledge, they used their imaginations every time they ran into another problem that defied explanation.

Neither the people looking for God nor the ones looking for the God particle have anything more than theories to offer us at the moment, but neither can define God because God is a concept. He's a concept we all need in order to make our everyday lives easier to navigate. 

Many people will keep God around because they need someone to thank when things go right, someone to blame when things go wrong and someone to appeal to for help when all other avenues of appeal have been exhausted.

It is also fair to expect that the more science delves into the mysteries of the universe, the closer we come to a better understanding of God. Like personal maturity, the search is open-ended. It can be compared, but it is never complete.