Lily and I celebrated this Valentine’s Day weekend in Monteverde. Among other things, we took a guided tour into the Cloud Forest Reserve. Our guide was extremely knowledgeable and displayed a passion and love for nature that was inspiring. While discussing the peculiar sexual habits of colibris (or hummingbirds) he made a statement that really got the wheels of thought grinding. He said, to paraphrase and translate, “in the jungle there is no right, nor wrong, but just the natural order of things.” His quip made me ask myself why is it that there exists this great separation between us (humans, that is) and nature that only extends to our side the often perplexing dilemma of moral judgement. To make matters worse we have religious codes popping up all over the place that claim to have the definite answer to these issues…while the colibris are busy enjoying their rampant sexual promiscuity without the slightest whim of regret or guilt. What is really going on here? I am not at all suggesting that humans throw off all moral limitations and go around copulating like hummingbirds. But I am questioning the whole issue of morality…where it originates and why it is only relevant when it comes to us. Is it merely a coincidence of a more highly evolved brain and capacity for thought? A capacity that actually enables us to be cruel and therefore gives rise to the need for some moral standard that acts as a governor against our own self-destructiveness? Could be? Of course, if you believe in a created world, as opposed to one that just happened by accident, then you would probably think there is a reason for this curious line of demarcation that separates human beings from the vast balance of the created world. We are just a tiny part of it, yet a very special part. A part that is endowed with attributes that maybe our creator possesses and therefore decided, possibly for his (her or its) own amusement, to grant to us. One thing is for sure, this capacity to do either “good” or “bad” carries with it a great responsibility. We have the capacity to interfere with the natural order of things…the way things were meant to be, the way they were created to be. Maybe the truest concept of morality is in judging our actions in this light…rather than according to some contrived religious code. These religious codes often have more to do with the “after” life than the current one and therefore really don’t place much, if any, relevance to sustaining what they claim to be a fallen and sinful world. Maybe a better way of judging morality is in questioning whether or not what we do is destructive of the natural order of things…destructive of life, our own as well as all the living things that make up the environment in which we have the privilege to live. In that sense, morality and sustainability (as I defined for myself in a previous post) begin to take on strikingly similar qualities.
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