Not one of them will fall to the ground

Driver's seat philosophy

Last week I was driving to work with my airpods in and my Spotify on shuffle, thinking about how absurd it is that we have the will to live or to perpetuate life. Evolutionary psychologists say that our prosocial behavior is not evidence of objective morality, just evidence of our own desire to keep on living. That is to say - you aren’t nice to your neighbor because being nice is good, but because being nice to your neighbor ensures that you don’t get thrown out of the cave and into the dark to be eaten by wolves¹. We have learned to call that “good,” and we have learned to mold it into a toothless thing, to tell ourselves that selflessness is not transactional and that righteousness is its own reward. But in the end, that too is a prosocial adaptation. “Good” only means that we go on to live another day.

I was driving to work and I was thinking about how even if you’re nice to your neighbor so you don’t get eaten by wolves and even if you only want to make a baby because making a baby perpetuates life and perpetuating life is what all living beings do - even if all those things are true and they’re true all the way down to the most base level (you only want to have sex because having sex feels good) - why should any of it be directional at all? Why is sex supposed to feel good? Why should life want to perpetuate or replicate itself? Why should we want to be prosocial or survive or feel good or do any of the things that can be reduced to an evolutionary advantage? Why do we want?

I was thinking all this as I stopped at a stoplight. I was thinking about how it’s insane. That there is something and not nothing and that it’s all going in one specific direction is insane. There’s no reason for it to do that. I thought of how the existence of even a little bit of direction or form or structure - even if it’s reduced and attributed to blind instrumentalism - is still enough to subvert chaos and confusion in a thousand forms, and I thanked God for His order. I thought of this as the stoplight turned green and as Amazing Grace came on Spotify shuffle, and as my eyes filled with tears and I turned the corner and praised God in my heart, a wounded bird fell from a tree in front of my car, one wing maimed and the other thrashing about on the road, and I swerved and looked back and it was still there and two other birds had flown down immediately after it, fighting it or tending to it I do not know.

The image of the two birds hopping around the wounded bird moved me greatly, since at least in appearance it seemed as if they were distressed at the fall of their friend. I parked and cried for a long time and then got out of my car and walked to the spot of road where the bird had fallen, half preparing in my heart to meet an angel. When I got there, I saw nothing. All three birds had disappeared.

What lies underneath our distress and our suffering and our desire? Why do we want? Why do we feel? Why should a bird fall on my path? Why should two birds follow after it? I think I know why, and it fills me with extreme joy. Our world is not accidental, and even the relentless, obliterating numb that would tell us that there is no Good, that nothing matters, that there is no meaning, that all is self-constructed and that we form our own truth, cannot keep that Truth from us.

1. It’s why some men say women have limited moral agency — women are especially vulnerable to wolves and other dangers of the outer world, and so they’ve developed an extra strong social acumen in order to maintain good standing and keep their place in the tribe. That’s why if a woman berates you for a moral failure (tracking mud in the house; leaving the toilet seat up; a racist joke) you can feel free to take it with a heavy grain of salt. She’s only doing it because she evolved that way. Men - able to leave the cave freely - see everything more clearly.