Or: On the issue of mankind’s place in the world and Western society’s misogynistic creation myths.
OR: a somewhat disorganized tirade about gender, definitions, and mankind's quest to find a place in the world.
Humans have trouble agreeing on things and, barring myriad series of events right out of various science-fiction novels, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes, our children’s, or their children’s. True, we can find some kind of common ground on some issues, but our species has an alarming tendency to take that and find some way or another to go right back to taking issue with one another. Take religion, for example: even people who find accord on certain notions, such as a certain Galilean prophet being the religious leader with the best idea of how things worked, find other things to quibble over, such as whether the best way to follow his teachings is through the use of elaborate, symbolic ceremonies or through faith alone. Ultimately, the different religions all answer some need or set of needs in their adherents, but different people come to the similar texts or ideas with different backgrounds, needs, and ways of projecting onto what they’re reading (or hearing, or having explained to them via pictograph, etc.), and so matters that some people think have little importance end up being the focus of someone else’s entire theology.
Likewise, the point of religion has been a constant source of trouble for humans attempting to discuss it without resorting to violence, name-calling, or so on. There is an observable need in Homo sapiens that religion caters to — a desire to find some way to place ourselves in the universe, to give ourselves some tangible role in our global (often cosmic) systems. It’s a basic question: why are we here? What does our existence mean, if anything? Not simple questions, but asking them distinguishes us from our simian cousins and, in myriad ways, they’ve been essential to human existence since someone had the bright idea to start writing things down. Even atheists and agnostics rely on finding something else to adhere to, even if this predominantly happens because they meet with resistance from the various theists; the explanation that our world and its inhabitants are most likely a fantastic accident writ large, which exist on the planet lucky enough to be at a comfortable distance from our sun, evolved through a combination of luck and natural selection favoring certain traits over others, and might be alone in the universe (though it’s too soon to tell) but are certainly inconsequential to its larger designs because our lifespans (let’s take the Biblical/Dantean route and assume seventy years) aren’t even blips on the grand timeline of universal history.
In the paraphrased words of nigh on god-like superhuman, Doctor Manhattan1: the entire human race could cease existence, our Earth could become devoid of all life, and the universe wouldn’t notice; everything outside our world would continue on as it always has because Creation — the whole of Creation — has so many galaxies with so many stars, so many processes both large and small occurring regardless of whether or not humanity blows itself into oblivion (or is demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass), certain political forces can’t agree over which “rights” are or are not guaranteed to all human beings by the fact that they exist and what the limits to those rights are, or Johnny takes Suzy to the Valentine’s Day dance. On a cosmic level, all of these events have the same amount of importance and that is none at all.2
If one wanted to get politically correct about it, then one could argue that the founding texts of our various religions, both living and dead, are all distressingly Terracentric. Projecting Western ideas onto other cultures without consideration for their traditions and modes of thinking is ethnocentric, as is assuming that our stories will have some universal truth that carries over into all cultures.3 “An ideological focus on males and men,”4 especially in topics where the male perspective is not the focus of the discussion is androcentric, and the corollary with females and women is gynocentric; related terms include phallocentric (as in Sigmund Freud and his infamous cigar) and anthropocentric (ideologically focusing on human beings, potentially but not necessarily including a belief in human superiority and/or humanity as the most significant aspects of reality).5 In the same vein, then, consider that we’re examining a system of belief (out of many) which posits that some supernatural entity — of varying degrees of power and ability to be comprehended by his/her/its human adherents — chooses to ignore the great, unfathomable expanse of the universe in order to focus on one mid-sized planet, in one star system, in one galaxy out of a potentially infinite number, often focusing on one particular group of people above all others… then isn’t it fair to call these modes of thinking Terracentric, or “ideologically focused on Earth and earthlings, to the potential exclusion of other issues”?
Well, yes. You can read it that way — but doing so really only serves to make my point for me.
Read the rest here.
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1: Of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1987 graphic novel, Watchmen.
2: In all due academic fairness: as all things, these preceding interpretations of scientific observations can be spun however the reader wants to see them spun. For example, if there are so many processes going on, and so much random chance involved in human intercourse and conception, and each human being still exists as an individual, with the chances of someone ever being exactly like them being so infinitesimally small as to be statistically negligible— despite the differences that exist between us because of cultural influences, similar experience, and so on — then is that not potentially evidence for the existence of some design, and thus a designer, whether or not it’s “God,” as zie is commonly understood.
3: I’m specifically referring to anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s account of discussing Hamlet with the Tiv people of West Africa, seen here: http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1966_08-09_pick.html
4: definition from the Wikitionary: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/androcentrism
5: I want to note, for the sake of humor, that I’d first put “homocentric” in place of “anthropocentric.” Considering the Latinate proper name for human beings, Homo sapiens, I’d hoped that the term for “ideologically focused on human beings” would be a simple combination of prefix and suffix. Technically, it was, but it turns out that “homocentric” means “sharing a common center.” I learned something today.
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