INTO THE ABYSS

By: David Edwards


What lies at the heart of man? Anything? Nothing? Nothing much? Many of us believe that the human heart is a wasteland, a kind of abyss into which we might fall. In his book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote:

"The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes. We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

If we direct our focus to the heart of our “robot vehicles”, what will we find? Well what +could+ we possibly find? Just transistors, microchips, hydraulics. When we look into the eyes of our loved one and she smiles, we feel a warmth in our heart, but it is only the surge of some reproductive control centre. If we look behind her eyes, we won’t find ‘love’ in any meaningful sense of the word - we will find optical sensors, USB cables linking to central processing units. If Dawkins is to be believed, there is no beloved to be found, not really, just a patterned mass of wires that by some weird accident of nature is given to reproducing itself.

And when we consider evolution, when we consider our closest biological cousins - other mammals, primates - we can hardly bear to imagine what might lie within. Surely at the heart of man is a bloodthirsty beast, a will to power, domination and conquest. Perhaps a repressed reptilian lust for mayhem. This, after all, is the theme of innumerable novels and films - the thinnest veneer of civilisation separates us lords and ladies of the flies from our ugly underneath.

There must be horror inside rooted in a meaningless parade of lifeforms randomly reproducing and killing throughout eternity - who could bear to look deeply into such a heart? Better to put on The Simpsons.

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