The habit-path, A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 288

288
The habit-path: The difference between our species and a water shrew is that we can “classify” experience and apply an old lesson to a completely new environment.  The water shrew, as the ultimate realist, is too perfect ... too “honest” to continue an old presumption into the new circumstance ... not for very long anyway.  When something new is brought into its environment, it does not play false to the immediate world — but only because it is true to its history.  It nonetheless very quickly comes upon the difference and begins its correction.  It tries out new paths through the new environment over and over again in order to perfect the new, highly efficient habit-path.  In short, the water shrew is the perfect scientist; its presumptions are soon encountered, and immediate sense perception takes over and corrects all previously learned lessons.

Our great advantage, on the other hand, is our “dishonesty” to the immediate world ... our unrealism ... our ability to say, “This is like that” or “This is not like that” — and as the ultimate tribute to our species, “I am, and therefore this and that are relative.”  We take two contrasting experiences and, through a greater capacity for recognizing repetition, find them summed up into a third cerebral experience and call what would be immediately false the “Truth” ... and it is the truth.  The sun does not revolve around the earth.

But Truth recognition is also our great disadvantage.  Our environment changes, but we do not.  A rock withdrawn and the water shrew still leaps, stops, goes back, leaps again! … but then relearns.  Darwin presents a book and withdraws a God and the human still leaps, stops ... and leaps again, and again, for two hundred years and counting.



A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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