Page 29 - Ruminations

27. Seven odd resemblances

Obsession and auto-immune disease. A random stimulus provokes
a chronic inappropriate response. May be treatable (habituation,
isolation) or become fatal (hypersensitivity, shock).

Insurance and socialism. A pool of resources estimated actuarially
to cover need within a population. Optimized when beneficiaries are
also the contributors. Privatizing risks becoming privateering.

Edible and moral fiber. The educated, understanding history, culture
and science, tend to be morally relative (soluble). The uneducated,
committed to an absolute worldview based on rigid ideology, tend to
be morally inflexible (insoluble).

The scientific method and religious ritual. Both depend upon the
principle of repeatability; empiricism demands identical experimental
results as confirmation of validity, while superstitious practices require
rigid duplication of ritual to obtain predetermined results.

Dictionaries and audiovisual media. The same unresolved dispute,
under different names. Should dictionaries be descriptive or
prescriptive? Should imagery and music project or reflect social
values). The issue itself is quaint: the idea that anything presented in
our culture outside a Sunday school or writing class should have an
uplifting or corrective message is just about dead.

Ontogeny and phylogeny. Haeckel’s strict mapping of embryonic
development on its evolutionary history may have been discredited,
but a curious parallel remains between the life of the individual and
that of his progenitors. One begins life because his ancestors, back to
the first self-replicating molecule, were lucky or adapted enough to
survive. One ends life because he is no longer lucky or adapted
enough to survive.

Truth and fiction. If stranger than fiction, truth must be thinly
spread compared to fiction, and the standard for strangeness must be
lower for fiction than truth. Truth would be more comprehensible
than fiction, and therefore less strange, were education more widely
spread; that would also enable fiction to find its strangeness within
plausibility.