How come mindless killing does not move humanity to tears?

Some of the weapons recovered by police who foiled a major terrorist attack in Isiolo after fighting off gunmen, killing one and arresting two others. PHOTO | FRED MUKINDA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Love of young ones is among humanity’s most intense gifts from nature.
  • The very sight of a human baby seems to touch the very heart of every normal human being into tenderness, into wishing to hold and feed that very baby and eventually to enfold it as one’s very own.

Human beings, I hardly need to tell any one of you, are mammals. Love of young ones is, therefore, among humanity’s most intense gifts from nature.

Yet, quite clearly, love of young ones is also a spectacular human failing. Among human beings, among the most remarkable mammals, it is even a spectacular failing.

The most remarkable question that it poses is: For what good evolutionary purpose does nature play certain extremely cruel tricks on human beings? One of those tricks is that mammalian love of young ones is so intense in human beings that it may drive a childless woman into stealing a new-born baby from another woman, causing that other woman the most extreme mental anguish.

Why does natural selection play such a painful evolutionary trick on its own most intelligent creation?

For although, after a certain age, practically every human female pines for a baby of her own, not every woman can produce one from her own womb on her own.

CREATING BABIES

Quite another person – a male individual – must be involved in the entire process of creating babies, and this to the extent that, if she fails to get a baby from her own womb, the anguish might overcome her into robbing another woman of her own.

In Kenya, that happens almost every day that the sun sets in the west.

The problem is that, although intense love of offspring is a mammalian heritage, it may lead to a crime as soon as the mammal species involved develops a brain as large as that of human beings.

That is among the most spectacular evolutionary self-contradictions of Homo sapiens sapiens (mankind self-declared “the knowing” – nay, even “the wise”)

However, a truly wise animal species would never be urged by what are merely stomach needs to accumulate a stockpile of the deadliest weapons aimed directly against members of its own species elsewhere on our planet. Nevertheless, having done so, a section of a sapient animal might even offer to disarm itself, thus probably shaming its alleged enemies also into self-disarmament. 

TRAGEDIES

I say self-declared because – given the spectacular tragedies that befall human beings as a result of their own cultural tiny-mindedness – human beings do everything (including theft, murder, racial and ethnic arrogance and mistreatment and robbery of someone else’s child).

Clearly, this last crime is a direct result of our own naturally evolved mental conditioning towards child protection.

The very sight of a human baby seems to touch the very heart of every normal human being into tenderness, into wishing to hold and feed that very baby and eventually to enfold it as one’s very own.

For no normal human being will stand by unmoved whenever a human child is weeping unattended nearby.

But how many of us really do appreciate the fact that, in evolutionary terms, that is excellent?

WEAPONS

Quite clearly, however, the human being’s brain is also a self-contradiction. How is it that one political state, manned by  individuals who are manifestly human beings, will pour the most perilous bombs onto another set of human beings, killing even the loveliest and most innocent children and their mothers and ayahs in that state?

How does a species qualify to call itself Sapient (“the wise”) when it is so manifestly unwise, particularly when its greatest thinkers – especially those who man the state  and the educational instruments all over the world  – think it is an excellently human thing to rain such weapons onto children and their mothers all over the place?

Exactly where was the Sapience of those who rained the deadliest weapons onto the most innocent human children and their mothers at what a European film maker later lamented as Hiroshima mon amour (emotive French words which we might translate as “Hiroshima Darling”)?