God Teaches law to kings. Nature teaches biology to God.
Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:43 am
One of my all-time favorite history books is The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's account of how a chauffeur gettting lost in Sarajevo was the beginning of World War I.
One of the sad truths of war preparation is that Generals often plan to win the last war. By 1914, barbed wire, the slit trench and the machine gun had negated the favorite French war tactic, the cavalry offensive. The French calvary wore rouge pantalones, which made easy targets for German machine gun nests:
What was true in 1914 is true in 2020: In less than a year the wrong strategy has led to fatalities that dwarf American fatalities in World War I. And like the French Generals at the begining of what was also optimistically called the 'War to end All Wars', the problem is that our strategy doesn't fit ground truth.
We think of Covid-19 in terms of Political, Public Health and Social structures along with individual rights. This is why we are losing the war. That is not ground truth. Ground truth is that humanity is involved in a world-wide biological war against an enemy that sees every human being on the planet as a safe haven, where they can find the DNA they need to replicate. The hubris of mankind would let us forget: Before political systems, before Athens, before politics, before there were human beings, there was biology. Human beings are products of biology. Everything else is secondary.
Political and social structures that do not incorporate themselves in proper relationship to human biology are being taught a lesson. The Supreme Court just said that religion Trump's Covid. Covid is very happy to meet religious people as they congregate in their houses of worship. Covid likes that a lot more than the cardboard cutouts in the stands at sporting events.
All of humanity has a common, non-human enemy that we can fight together in a war. When we fight humans in war, we sacrifice individuals and individual rights that make wearing facemask seem ridiculously insignificant in comparison. When we have a vaccine distributed to everyone, Covid will be a health problem. But until then we are losing a biological war. You could say it's Darwinian. Human beings think they're so goddam smart, but a large percentage of them are not terribly adaptive.
One of the sad truths of war preparation is that Generals often plan to win the last war. By 1914, barbed wire, the slit trench and the machine gun had negated the favorite French war tactic, the cavalry offensive. The French calvary wore rouge pantalones, which made easy targets for German machine gun nests:
By which God teaches law to kings. I was always struck by that phrase. It is the way the world teaches you when your perception of the world is so askew that confronting the real world produces tragic results. Fighting a war with the wrong strategy quickly results in an impossible-to-ignore pile of bodies.Barbara Tuchman wrote:Although the French did not yet know it, the slaughter at Morhange snuffed out the bright flame of the doctrine of the offensive. It died on a field in Lorraine where at the end of the day nothing was visible but corpses strewn in rows and sprawled in the awkward attitudes of sudden death as if the place had been swept by a malignant hurricane. It was one of those lessons, a survivor realized afterward, “by which God teaches the law to kings.”
What was true in 1914 is true in 2020: In less than a year the wrong strategy has led to fatalities that dwarf American fatalities in World War I. And like the French Generals at the begining of what was also optimistically called the 'War to end All Wars', the problem is that our strategy doesn't fit ground truth.
We think of Covid-19 in terms of Political, Public Health and Social structures along with individual rights. This is why we are losing the war. That is not ground truth. Ground truth is that humanity is involved in a world-wide biological war against an enemy that sees every human being on the planet as a safe haven, where they can find the DNA they need to replicate. The hubris of mankind would let us forget: Before political systems, before Athens, before politics, before there were human beings, there was biology. Human beings are products of biology. Everything else is secondary.
Political and social structures that do not incorporate themselves in proper relationship to human biology are being taught a lesson. The Supreme Court just said that religion Trump's Covid. Covid is very happy to meet religious people as they congregate in their houses of worship. Covid likes that a lot more than the cardboard cutouts in the stands at sporting events.
All of humanity has a common, non-human enemy that we can fight together in a war. When we fight humans in war, we sacrifice individuals and individual rights that make wearing facemask seem ridiculously insignificant in comparison. When we have a vaccine distributed to everyone, Covid will be a health problem. But until then we are losing a biological war. You could say it's Darwinian. Human beings think they're so goddam smart, but a large percentage of them are not terribly adaptive.