Dear Joe,
Regarding your essay "The Ants of Gaia", allow me to begin by concurring with you that human beings are in a pail of shit largely of our own making. And your metaphor of the ants wasn't bad. They worked away, anting and digging and shitting until they suddenly realized that there was nothing left, and promptly died. Whether that's a deserved destiny for humanity or not is debatable, and not really germane here, so I pass on to a quote from your essay:
"Accept the truth and act upon it."
What you have stated in seven words has to be darn close to the very definition of rationality. But at the end of that same paragraph you slam rationality, and revert to some sort of spiritualism:
"Too much thinking, too much cleverness on the monkey's part leads it to believe it can come up with rational solutions for what ration itself hath wrought."
So thinking about it does harm? Is it better to just ignore the evidence, fail to think about anything, just take it on your belief that whatever you're doing is fine because it feels spiritual? What does failing to think about it do for you? What does taking on blind faith help, where does taking on blind faith that 'fucking feels good, let's fuck more' do without thinking about the consequences? Thinking is not the problem. The problem is people believing without thinking, or moreover, without thinking enough. Think More!
I'd ask that people always think more! Don't take it on faith that the water is always going to come out of your shower when you turn on the knob, think about it! And solder up some pipes just to get a very small glimpse of at least the transport issues! When you fill up the car, think about where the gas came from. When you plug in the waterbed heater, think about the power, and where it came from. Et cetera.
Think about it! It's not God that provides the water. It's not mysticism that runs the treatment plants, it's people that think, people that do chemistry, people that try to nip infestations of disease at the bud that provide. It wasn't spirituality that removed the pump handle, that was someone thinking!
I begin to get a vague idea of a fundamental difference that I'll try to put this way; You seem to believe our world as it is today was created through unrestrained rationality and thinking, and that spirituality could fix it. I believe our world was created through unrestrained spirituality and blind faith, and that rationality could fix it. We're probably both wrong.
But given the predominance of astrologers over astronomers offering their services along the boulevard, I think I've the stronger position.
S.
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Dear S.,
Rationality is only the most useful brain tool of the upright hominid. Without the fiery spirit of the flesh, life is cold beans indeed. Put simply, getting laid or going to sleep with a peaceful mind is a more significant human experience than the highest physics equation.
In art and labor,
Joe
