China Learn

Image of the Monkey

So then, instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey, and that we are as far removed from the perfect God, as, let us say, the ants are removed from ourselves. We are very clever, we are quite sure of that; we are often a little cocky about our cleverness, because we have a mind. But the biologist comes in to tell us that the mind after all is a very late development, as far as articulate thinking is concerned, and that among the things which go into the make-up of our moral fiber, we have besides the mind a set of animal or savage instincts, which are much more powerful and are in fact the explanation why we misbehave individually and in our group life. We are the better able to understand the nature of that human mind of which we are so proud. We see in the first place that, besides being a comparatively clever mind, it is also an inadequate mind. The evolution of the-human skull shows us that it is nothing but an enlargement of one of the spinal vertebrae and that therefore its function, like that of the spinal cord, is essentially that of sensing danger, meeting the external environment and preserving life-not thinking. Thinking is generally very poorly done. Lord Balfour ought to go down to posterity on the strength of his one saying that “the human brain is as much an organ for seeking food as the pig’s snout.” I do not call this real cynicism, I call it merely a generous understanding of ourselves.

We begin to understand genetically our human imperfections.

Imperfect? Lord, yes, but the Lord never made us otherwise. But that is not the point. The whole point is, our remote ancestors swam and crawled and swung from one branch to another in the primeval forest in Tarzan fashion, or hung suspended from a tree like a spider monkey by an arm or a tail.’ At each stage, considered by itself, it was rather marvelously perfect, to my way of thinking. But now we are called upon to do an infinitely more difficult job of readjustment.

When man creates a civilization of his own, he embarks upon a course of development that biologically might terrify the Creator Himself. So far as adaptation to nature is concerned, all nature’s creatures are marvelously perfect, for those that are not perfectly adapted she kills off. But now we are no longer called upon to adapt ourselves to nature; we are called upon to adapt ourselves to ourselves, to this thing called civilization. All instincts were good, were healthy in nature; in society, however, we call all instincts savage. Every mouse steals-and he is not the less moral or more immoral for stealing-every dog barks, every cat doesn’t come home at night and tears everything it can lay its paws upon, every lion kills, every horse runs away from the sight of danger, every tortoise sleeps the best hours of the day away, and every insect, reptile, bird and beast reproduces its kind in public. Now in terms of civilization, every mouse is a thief, every dog makes too much noise, every cat is an unfaithful husband, when he is not a savage little vandal, every lion or tiger is a murderer, every horse a coward, every tortoise a lazy louse, and finally, every insect, reptile, bird and beast is obscene when he performs his natural vital functions. What a wholesale transformation of values! And that is the reason why we sit back and wonder how the Lord made us so imperfect.