I opened up the NY Times website this morning and read a fascinating article on Bonobos. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/science/bonobos-apes-matriarchy.html

I like science pieces and enjoy learning about primates but the fascination goes beyond this. Is this just a science piece? Why the timing?

A few months ago I read a piece about primate females banding together to keep males under control and that piece spoke directly about Trump v. Clinton. To me this gets into the “natural law” conversation we were having.

As a culture we are of two minds with respect to “natural”. On one hand we look to the “natural” whether they be Bonobos or non GMO foods or “organic” produce to orient ourselves for “health” and even morality. We think that somehow aligning ourselves with our origins segregated from non-natural which we interestingly separate ourselves from will somehow get us in touch with a moral foundation or an evolutionary enduring or secure platform unlike the industrial or synthetic world we have derived from these natural sources.

The deep assumption beneath it is of course that we, humanity are somehow by virtue of our decisions, our technology and our politics “un-natural”. Is this vestigial residue of Christendom where we are suspicious of our exercise of “dominion”? Is our harnessing of fixed nitrogen for synthetic fertilizer https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Air-Jewish-Scientific-Discovery/dp/0307351793/ or fossil fueled greenhouse gasses “unnatural” because we have touched it? Or are these miracles of science that we perform, somewhat like Jesus’ miracles, miracles of speed though which we are destroying the “nature” upon which we depend for “natural” life?

There is beneath our anxieties a “natural law” faith that holds that if we somehow use dung rather than chemicals to grow our crops we are safe, even if the dung based agricultural regime would likely leave half of the world’s population with nothing to eat.

So on one side we have a very urbane, fashionable “natural law” moral regime at work, while within the same population a far more docetic spiritual anthropology at work that resides in the same subculture with relatively little dissonance. Elizabeth Gilbert is my poster-person for that side.

She evolved past a confining marriage (with a book advance) to write probably the first white middle class housewife manifesto of the new century Eat Pray Love. Where she left her husband, left the country, found her true self, her inner voice, and a new lover all while making a boatload of money in a bestselling book and movie. Some say that in the process she wrecked Bali. http://jezebel.com/5601522/how-elizabeth-gilbert-ruined-bali Can you really put a pricetag on finding your true self, your true path or your soul mate?

When her new love needed a visa she made her peace with marriage. Supposedly a newly evolved peace. http://www.salon.com/2010/01/09/elizabeth_gilbert_committed/

Along the way she joined the pantheon of spiritual lights in Oprah’s stable becoming a headliner in Oprah’s 2014 Super Soul Sunday http://www.oprah.com/own-super-soul-sunday/elizabeth-gilbert

A bit later she resurfaced in the NYT with a confessional piece about being a serial seducer. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/confessions-of-a-seduction-addict.html?_r=0 I suppose we’re done with the priest and there is no CRC elder to hear her confession in her parlor the NYTs will do.

Now she’s continued to evolve into her truest self announcing (on Facebook of course) the end to her second marriage and her lover and best friend who is a woman. The evolution is that she has transcended gender (along with this generation of high school graduates if my children’s cohort is any indication) The key line is that “she is my PERSON” She provided the all caps in case we might miss the evolutionary moment. Authentic gender is found within or discarded as a vestigial organ of primitive societies. (Psst., don’t say ‘natural’).

This leave me to ask whether we should look to the Bonobos or not for revelation.

Now that the summer is ending and kids are off to college I’ve just started watching the show “Mad Men” on Netflix. If there was ever a group of people that illustrated total depravity this bunch would be it, from the men in the office to the women to the wives at home. Last night watching Don Draper (formerly Whitman) try to continue to stay dead to his half-brother I thought of a piece I saw this week about Pilgrims and tourists. https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/tourist/Baumann-pilgrim-tourist.pdf I thought this very insightful into our cultural transition. Don says to his half brother “people change their names all the time…” Yes they do, but that’s not the interesting question, the question is why?

We’re caught halfway between thinking ourselves as developed Bonobos (we choose them because we think them more moral than chimps) and “spiritual beings have a physical experience”.

It doesn’t seem that we are completely free of questions of “natural law”. Is it the providential deism Charles Taylor sees as a vital stage in the making of the secular age? Is our rush to the Kurzweil singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near haunted by moral and romantic attachment to evolutionary ancestors or are other things in play?

pvk