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Commentary
  By John J. Jalsevac

The final and strangely beautiful song from the most recent album of the popular rock group Nine Inch Nails asks an interesting question. “See the animal in his cage that you built,” it begins, “are you sure what side you’re on?… / Are you sure what side of the glass you are?”

On a certain level this is actually a question worth pondering in some depth. For instance, in our highly regulated, leisureless modern lives, how much like caged beasts have we allowed ourselves to become? Or perhaps, in our search for fulfillment in pleasure have we denied our human nature and become instinct-enslaved brutes? This is thought provoking stuff, at least much more so than song-writer Trent Reznor’s typically crude and profanity laden lyrics.

But strangely enough, even if the question were asked in its most strictly literal sense, there are a select few who would have a very different answer than most of us. For in one enclosure of the London England zoo, as was widely reported in the news last week, there is a new collection of sumptuous specimens of what the curators have called a “plague species”. This is a harsh label for any species, but in this case especially so because the species on display is Man.

In this very embarrassing zoological charade three brawny men and five shapely women have volunteered to strut around for a few days in their underwear and strategically placed fig leaves in an enclosure that was once the home of one or another species of bears. In the immortal words of the Zoo spokeswoman, the purpose of the exercise is that “Seeing people in a different environment, among other animals … teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate.”

Evolution Controversy and Abortion, Euthanasia, Etc

Anyway, it is a curious feature of LifeSiteNews that every so often we weigh in on the debate over Darwinian evolution in what is probably mistakenly thought to be motivated by an opposition to any explanation of life but strict fundamentalist creationism. Some have expressed puzzlement about our interest in evolution and wondered what on earth it has to do with the much more central and vital cultural issues of abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, etc.

The answer, it is as good a time as any to point out, is everything. It has everything to do with it.

In fact, all the many, many articles we print about the science of the unborn child, of whether it cries or doesn’t cry in the womb, or the gruesome details of embryonic stem cell research, etc., are comparatively mere quibbles. Vital quibbles mind you, quibbles that can sometimes save and often have saved valuable lives, but quibbles nonetheless.

The truth is that while we give our energy to these skirmishes over abortion and euthanasia and everything else, what is actually being waged is a cosmic war over a fundamental question of metaphysics and anthropology. It is a war over the question: “What is Man?”

Until this question is answered and answered well, men like Princeton professor Peter Singer will continue to insist on such apparently heinous propositions as the right of a mother or father to kill their child up until the arbitrary number of thirty days after birth. And no matter how much we insist that Terri Schiavo ought to have been allowed to live, if she is just another primate, a monkey whose only distinction is an affinity for clothing, then what’s to stop us “putting her out of her misery?”

Well, nothing really, just as there isn’t anything to stop anybody putting Peter Singer out of his misery if he too were “just another primate”. As the intellectual and agnostic Ivan Karamazov rightly points out in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “without God, all things are permitted.” The same very much holds true if evolution alone—as its proponents obviously believe—explains existence.

In fact, under the monstrous gaze of what Darwinian evolutionary anthropology has become it is difficult to explain why Peter Singer has so far held himself to a mere thirty days after birth. Really, if parents ever don’t want their child, they should be able to drop the hatchet at will. And the same, of course, goes for the child. It’s called survival of the fittest silly.

G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man

But the unfortunate fact is that “evolution really is mistaken for explanation”, which G.K. Chesterton points in Everlasting Man, which is by far one of the best books on the question of Man, and which everybody ought to read immediately if they haven’t already. “It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read Origin of Species.”

Much like the Big Bang theory, the theory of Darwinian evolution creates the dangerous aura of The Answer, when it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s exactly the same monstrous fallacy so many made of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, making the ludicrous leap from the relativity of space and time to the relativity of morality, all to the absolute horror of Einstein.

However, contrary to mainstream reporting, being a “close-minded creationist”is not seen by many honest thinkers and believers as the only credible option to Darwinism. That Man may, in some mysterious, miraculous fashion, have resulted from a physical evolution of primates over a period of many, many thousands or millions of years, that led him to the point of coming into the full possession of his sublime and spiritual humanity is by all accounts possible. Remote, but possible, and all the more miraculous for its remoteness.

It seems quite reasonable that no matter how slow a miracle may happen, it still remains a miracle. Says Chesterton: “The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.”

Mindless Responses From Viewers of London Exhibit

The New Zealand Herald reports the response of one particularly vapid visitor to the London zoo’s human exhibit. “It’s actually quite a powerful message,” she said. And if only she had stopped right there. But apparently she felt the urge to open her trap again, saying, “What if we are so successful in destroying our environment that one day the only place you could see human beings is in a zoo?”

Ha-ha! Knee-slapping fun. Well then—the question literally cries out to heaven—who…or what, on this blessed earth, other than another human being, is going to be putting humans on display in a zoo as an endangered species? After this “plague species”, Man, destroys his natural habitat, is it possible that the dolphins and other sea-creatures are going to construct subaqueous, ventilated cages and capture and display the endangered terrestrial species to the pitying aquatic world? Is this what this curious example of the environmentalist species was saying? It seems to be, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she really believed it. So many strange things are believed today.

Chesterton was fond of pointing out that we currently live, not in the age of common sense, but the age of “uncommon nonsense”. The man of uncommon nonsense—only too often a scholar of great acclaim—puts men and women into a cage and believes that he has proved something sublime. While the man of common sense visiting the zoo in the hope of glimpsing an exotic animal blushes on seeing an exotic dancer instead and promptly goes home to soothe away the distressing feeling that the world has gone completely loony with a drink and a Sinatra record.

“A lot of people think humans are above other animals. When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we’re not that special,” said another visitor to the zoo, who was evidently suffering from temporary amnesia that caused him to forget the pyramids, the Panama canal, and the complete poetical works of Pope.

One opponent of mine, in response to a previous LifeSite article on DDT, concurred. “The problem isn’t with Nature, but with the human ego,” he said in what was unfortunately dead seriousness, “either that of individuals who claim that Nature can be managed and ultimately subordianted [sic] to man’s will through advances in technology, or that of Fundamentalist [expletive] like you who suggest that man is ultimately superior, stands alone outside of the rest of Nature and has some bizarre right of dominion over other living things.”

This is strangely discordant with Chesterton’s (and every man of common sense’s) belief that man is something truly extraordinary, that he is some mysterious way, “the measure of all things.”

Oh, but where to begin…where to begin.

I know. Go, right now, and buy, borrow or otherwise obtain a copy of Everlasting Man. And then read it. I guarantee you will be much the better for it.