Pandora's Box

The Truth of Pandora's Box

Russell E. Vance, III PhD

with Pamela S. Smith, MS (i)

Most people - scholars to the "average joe" - view Pandora's Box as a myth. Rightly so. The scary thing is that I believe that there is some truth to the myth, which is not infrequent, and I think I know what happened.

Myths - gods, creation stories, etc. - are created and told in an attempt to explain what we do not understand. In this case, I believe that I have discovered the source of our own destruction and our attempt to destroy the world in which we live. It all happened in one of the frequent philosophical or scientific conversations that Pamela and I so enjoy.

Assuming that you agree that homo sapiens are destroying themselves and the world that supports them, what one word would you use to describe the cause? Greed? We do not seem to be happy with a most magnificent planet and the means to live and be happy. We want more wealth. We want to indulge ourselves with what we call luxury. We want more power. We want it all at the expense of our planet and other equally deserving species.

To have some idea of the extent of our lives in relationship to the world today, it would be less than a blink of an eye. Yet we believe that that infinitesimally small amount of time is more important than the existence of the world. Why?

This is the result of Pandora's Box. I believe that the content of Pandora's Box was the ability to abstract.

Pamela's input and argument is very helpful in such situations. My original idea was that Pandora's Box contained both greed and the ability to abstract. Pamela challenged that and after some lengthy discussion we came to the conclusion that the real cause of greed, among other things some of which are good, is the ability to abstract. Abstract thought can be used to consider complex phenomena in the universe and it can be used to justify an evil deed.

Let's use a standard definition of abstract - "existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence." (ii) Now we can consider that, through the complexity of abstract thought, how the homo sapien conceives of a deity who makes the human the most important animal on the planet. We have no physical or concrete evidence. We have only the complexity of abstract thought that concludes that we are the most important species on the earth because some homo sapiens created a deity to justify such a belief. We completely ignore the evidence that, if we were to suddenly disappear from the earth, the world would not miss us. To the contrary, the world would heal and prosper. Therefore we are not the most important species on the planet. As Pamela said, "cynano bacteria would be," because that is the most basic and oldest source of oxygen on the planet.

Hold your arms out to the side. Now consider that the finger tip of your right arm is the beginning of our planet and the finger tip of your left hand is current time. All of human existence would be in the last cell on your left finger-tip. We, as individuals, are on a microscopic part of that. How can we argue that we are more important than the whole or the future?

Analytical thinking might well be our salvation. Analytical thinking is what enables us to realize that the abstraction we use to justify our superiority complex and greed is full of shit.

Greed goes far beyond wanting whatever it is to survive and prosper. We don't find greed among other animal species. For example, they kill to eat, procreate and survive not for fun or a trophy.

I believe that we can make a convincing argument that greed is dependent upon the ability to abstract. As far as we can tell, no other animal species abstracts. Other species may manifest what we call selfishness, but we soon realize that their selfishness is different than ours. Their selfishness is dependent upon survival and the survival of the species. They put their survival above that of others because that is a natural part of survival of the species. Greed is very different. Greed does not care whether it promotes the survival of the species. When humans are greedy they do not care about the survival of homo sapiens. It is all about the comfort and pleasure of the individual for their insignificantly small existence on earth.

Whatever in the world could be the up-side to this? I ask this question so that this entire monogram isn't just one big downer. We are a part of nature. Everything is a part of nature. It just happens that, at this moment, we are a destructive part of nature. We do have the ability to be a productive part of nature. We can use both our abstract and analytic skills to find ways repair the damage we have done. We can use those skills to figure out how we can be a positive, not negative, part of the world - not believing that we are superior but accepting our place and living in concert and union with the rest of the natural world.

FOOT NOTES:

(i) for those of you who do not know Pamela, she is a biology professor who has a passionate love of nature and natural sciences - a true naturalist. She will climb a mountain to see stromatolites that billions of years ago were at the bottom of a shallow sea. She takes pictures of plants and searches the forest for specific plants such as an orchid that grows in the northern Rocky Mountains. She will stand toe-to-toe with a young black bear if it means his survival. We are the only couple I have ever know to take 5 hours to drive 40 miles of the Going-to-the-Sun Road because we stopped everywhere we were allowed and got out our topographic maps along with our natural history and geology books to study what we were seeing. Whether we are talking philosophy, quantum physics or natural science, our discussions are priceless.

(ii) New Oxford American Dictionary, third edition, 2005, Oxford University Press, Inc. eBook copyright @ 2008.