LABOR
Look at the picture first and think about what has gone on – all through the night.
All this labor was for the purpose of possibly catching a fly or two – or some other flying insect – for a meal – or to feed the “kids.”
With our much superior capabilities, any one of us could have provided several flies, and it would have required very little labor to do it. The spider would never understand the gift, however – and would continue the next night to do the same labor. We could do a little less – and wait for the web – and then provide the flies – insuring the spider’s success. This way, we have required the spider to have moral health before we give.
It’s not likely that our political motivation will ever include such help for the unappreciative and unimportant. It’s unlikely that religion will ever develop the obligation to do such a labor. There are good reasons for all of this, based on assumptions we have made about our own importance.
Once hungry enough and many enough times, the spider will lie over and discontinue the great labor – and of course, die. The spider’s entire life will have been almost nothing more than to accomplish this one end – a little food and continuance of the same life. It also has no regard for the needs of the insects, whose lives are unintentionally sacrificed for the good of the spider. Some of them also were looking for some other being to kill and eat.
We tend to complain about such a thing as a tax on our labors, yet none of us would ever have achieved more than the cave man achieved without the society and all its developed language and varied shared talents. The spider has no such advantage, but at least it does not pay taxes.
We see on TV that a few dollars could save a life in a poor country. That’s much like helping the spider – but so much more to us than the spider. Any of us could do such as this without the organization vying for our support.
Because species have no moral incentive to help one another, evolution has developed a trillion relationships that cause help from one species to another – and often something in direct return. Even that fly is a service from his society to the society of the spiders. (No fly hath greater love than this – that he lay down his life for a complete stranger.)
We think that rewards in heaven are reserved for higher intelligences. “We” are what “It’s” all about. That’s what we have come to believe. At a much lower level of consciousness, the spider also believes the same. With a much lower IQ – he’s actually just as dumb as we are – not a whit dumber.
In the scheme of the entire universe, we are no more important than that spider. When we divide anything by the infinite, we always come up with zero.
Chuck Borough