Photo by Kevin Gill | CC BY 2.0
The hubris of the Neolithic mind has been much in evidence recently; witness the sexual predation of the economically, culturally or politically powerful on the weak; the many refusals to acknowledge our complicity in global warming and the bone-headed military, economic and social aggressions of our statutory leaders (see also sexual predation, global warming, above).
The ability of humankind to control events has never been more tenuous. Like it or not, we have ceded much of that control to the realm of those non-human actors that we have long ignored or, more recently, actively aggravated: now, we are collectively suffering real-life home invasions by the dark powers that we had thought safely relegated to the past, buried deep in our subconscious, or rendered impotent by our technological prowess. Is it possible that the overt expression of our atavistic aggressions is stirred by new realizations of our impotence?
Or, can we trace our bad behaviors to the first scratchings on rock of anthropomorphic gods – of the fetishization of the female form and the celebration of the virility of the bull? Have we distanced ourselves from each other and the environment and, in celebrating our otherness (our alienation) are licensed to predate with impunity, like the gods of old?
As the kids say, karma is a bitch: but it is also, more simply, less sexistly, a mirror. I was caught up in some of its pay-back earlier in the week, my temerity…