The Daily Grind

I've got to wonder what alien creatures would make of human existence. The question becomes particularly vexing to me as I sit on the 10 East breathing carbon monoxide in bumper to bumper traffic creeping through downtown L.A., where thousands of people are crammed into tiny cubicles cheek by jowl in high rise office buildings. Less than ten thousand years separate us from the hunter gatherers. It's an infinitesimal blip in time to today's mad mad world from the development of agriculture, which led to property ownership, which led to inequality, fences, boundaries, war, and the 10 Freeway. If one is to believe in intelligent design, then the human being has to look like a noble experiment gone terribly awry in a very short time. On the other hand, if we accept the premises of Darwinism, homo sapiens seems like a suddenly unsurvivable deadend from which not even the fittest among us can escape. Either way, whether it was God or the chance peregrinations of nature, built in to us are mechanisms for joy, and hope, that seem to render it all worthwhile.