Space Alien confronts Human over Earth’s Roiling Turmoil.
Alien: Hrumpf. You humans. Can’t live without one another; can’t live with one another.
Human: Don’t judge us by the present turmoil. We have had and still have our moments. We have peace talks and reconciliations, and we even implement preventative strategies to address potential conflict. Sure, conflict exists, has always existed, but we’re also always making concerted efforts to thwart it. And maybe you haven’t noticed: We have our commonality. We can be empathetic, sympathetic, and compassionate, and not just individually, but rather and also as groups both small and large, the latter sometimes encompassing an entire nation. You’re just a passing visitor here, so you have only this snapshot of human interactions. Maybe you haven’t seen the times when we humans have “pulled together,” so to speak, what we call the “brotherhood of Man.”
Alien: Really? I read through your local library collection before I made my presence known. What I read doesn’t support your claim of a brotherhood, or sisterhood, or peoplehood. Your species really doesn’t have any worldwide positive “moments.” Even when billions of you focus on a single event, like the moon landing or a tsunami that kills 250,000 of you, there are others who are unconcerned or negative. I don’t see those moments of peaceful and encompassing unity. I don’t see a universal “spiritual togetherness” and brotherhood. Is there a positive connection among your disparate minds? I don’t think you can prove there is a pervasive “good.” There seems to be just the opposite, a pervasive bad. At best evidence for your “good moments” is anecdotal. Any attempt to demonstrate a worldwide spiritual connection in humanity fails the Popper test. Maybe you just want to think your species exhibits moments of good, but you have short lives and even shorter attention spans. You easily forget the turmoil and focus on any ostensibly shared happiness. Those “moments,” as you call them are, however, just snippets of connection that are highly transitory. Saying “We have our moments” means little to an outsider who has studied your history.
Human: I meant good moments lke people helping people in a crisis.
Alien: I get it, but what does that mean for your species as a whole. If an earthquake devastates a region, you gather up goods to give to the stricken, but you also loot the area, and the danger of the latter is such that your policing authorities have to issue warnings, cordon off areas, and police for looters, in some locales, even ascribing to shooting looters on sight. So, yes, some of you for a limited time can join in a “good moment” that you say represents humanity’s best, but that moment is offset by the actions of looters and the thinking of rivals. Someone dies, and some say, “He was a gem; we will miss him.” Others say, “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope he suffered.”
Human: That’s true, but it still doesn’t negate the many good deeds we do for one another, the charitable acts, the expressions of sympathy, and the empathy.
Alien: Well, look at your current turmoil. It doesn’t appear to have an end in the Middle East or in any other place on the planet. That turmoil between the Israelis and Hamas is merely a spike among historical spikes in violence. This spike in violence will drop to a background hum, but like micro tremors beneath an active volcano, the hum will simply mark a period of quiescent but persistent buildup of tensions. Dormant volcanoes always pose a threat. The magma of your “bad moments” is dormant for a period, but the eruption is inevitable as long as the magma chamber is filled with hot, though repressed or contained, emotion.
Human: Certainly you have read about stellar good people, Mother Teresa comes to mind. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?
Alien: A tiny spike in the hum of repressed violent emotion. Afib, to use a heart reference. And like that arrhythmia, it’s unpredictable; it’s irregular.
Human: Well, what’s it like elsewhere in the universe? You’ve traveled. What have you seen?
Alien: Pretty much the same. The hum is always in the background, and since you mention universe, I’ll give you another analogy. The hum of discord is much like the Cosmic Microwave Radiation. It’s everywhere. It fills the Cosmos.
Human: Are you saying the universe is inherently evil, ineluctably bad?
Alien: it definitely has more spikes of “bad” on the graph of Time than spikes of good, and the bad spikes do more damage than the good spikes can undo or prevent. Maybe they all work toward entropy. Someone will drop an egg while you successfully cook one. Humpty Dumpty can’t sit without the potential to fall and break. Your “good moments” emerge only briefly and have no lasting effects because the generations that follow stumble over the spikes of bad that emerge from the background hum. It’s a dissonant hum, by the way, just like the static on an AM radio, the static caused by the Microwave Background Radiation, the static you hear when your AM radio dial is just off the precise channel frequency of a radio station. The static is all around; the magma lies beneath. Both reveal themselves. And they work in conjunction to make no place on your planet free from bad moments. You can flee a volcano, but you can’t flee the static. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson demonstrated its ubiquity back in the fifties.
Human: So, what you’re saying is that we humans are destined to encounter bad moments more often and to a greater degree than we encounter good moments.
Alien: Pretty much. That’s my observation. Look at the current hum which has erupted into the surface of relations between Muslims and Jews. October seventh’s massacres are now praised by marchers in Washington, D.C. and other countries’ capitals. The praise has run through the young on college campuses, the next generation to hum the tune of background violence and hate. They are testimony to the ubiquity of the hum, the dissonant hum, the madding hum.
Human: That’s a pessimistic view of humanity.
Alien: Hey, I’m not the one humming dissonant sounds. I’m not the one breaking out in a combo of heavy metal, punk, and reverberating dissonance. Maybe that music is an analog of the background hum’s emergence or the volcano’s eruption. For generations, your species endeavored to make harmonious, melodic music, but you ended in gravel-throated screaming at a mosh pit of true violence.
Human: But…
Alien: I’m waiting. Prove me wrong. Go settle the differences between Israelis and Hamas; go tell the Russians to seek peace with their neighbor Ukraine; go tell all the Sri Lankans, the Kiriwinans, the Houthi and the Saudis, the Hutu and Tutsi, and the…I just realized how long the list would be, and I haven’t gone through your history’s complete list. But I have found evidence of it in your literature, even your ancient and sacred literature. Take the…
Human: But we’ve tried. We have religions.
Alien: I was just about to mention that. And look how many religious wars you’ve fought. Look at the current underlying areas of contention: Sunni vs. Shia, Catholic vs. Protestant, for example, and Muslim against just about everyone not Muslim. Hindus against Muslims, too. Animists in Africa and Australia. Micronesians of differing religions. Where are these “good moments” you spoke of? And your sacred texts record the contention. Look, here’s a passage from Chapter 2 in the Book of Malachi, or Malachias: “Why then does every one of us despise his brother?” And the author even addresses the contention in marriages. Marriages! Aren’t they supposed to result from those “good moments”? Look at your current breakup and divorce rates. Look at the animosity between two who once swore everlasting love. Malachi writes that men divorce the women of their youth, even despise them. If two humans who began in love can’t get along for long, then what does that say about all the rest of you other than you’re destined to quarrel and break any covenant you had. Your allegiances shift over time: Friends become enemies; enemies become friends only to dissolve that friendship in the ensuing generations: Napoleon fighting other Europeans followed by Europeans making covenants of peace that later generations will dissolve. French against English; Germans against French and English; Germans, French, and English against Russians. Americans and Chinese against Japanese, and now Japanese and Americans against Chinese. Moments? As you might dismissively say, “Give me a break!”
Human: But there’s always hope.
Alien: That might be all you humans have in common. Well, that and the underlying hum of a magma only temporarily contained.
Alien: Hrumpf. You humans. Can’t live without one another; can’t live with one another.
Human: Don’t judge us by the present turmoil. We have had and still have our moments. We have peace talks and reconciliations, and we even implement preventative strategies to address potential conflict. Sure, conflict exists, has always existed, but we’re also always making concerted efforts to thwart it. And maybe you haven’t noticed: We have our commonality. We can be empathetic, sympathetic, and compassionate, and not just individually, but rather and also as groups both small and large, the latter sometimes encompassing an entire nation. You’re just a passing visitor here, so you have only this snapshot of human interactions. Maybe you haven’t seen the times when we humans have “pulled together,” so to speak, what we call the “brotherhood of Man.”
Alien: Really? I read through your local library collection before I made my presence known. What I read doesn’t support your claim of a brotherhood, or sisterhood, or peoplehood. Your species really doesn’t have any worldwide positive “moments.” Even when billions of you focus on a single event, like the moon landing or a tsunami that kills 250,000 of you, there are others who are unconcerned or negative. I don’t see those moments of peaceful and encompassing unity. I don’t see a universal “spiritual togetherness” and brotherhood. Is there a positive connection among your disparate minds? I don’t think you can prove there is a pervasive “good.” There seems to be just the opposite, a pervasive bad. At best evidence for your “good moments” is anecdotal. Any attempt to demonstrate a worldwide spiritual connection in humanity fails the Popper test. Maybe you just want to think your species exhibits moments of good, but you have short lives and even shorter attention spans. You easily forget the turmoil and focus on any ostensibly shared happiness. Those “moments,” as you call them are, however, just snippets of connection that are highly transitory. Saying “We have our moments” means little to an outsider who has studied your history.
Human: I meant good moments lke people helping people in a crisis.
Alien: I get it, but what does that mean for your species as a whole. If an earthquake devastates a region, you gather up goods to give to the stricken, but you also loot the area, and the danger of the latter is such that your policing authorities have to issue warnings, cordon off areas, and police for looters, in some locales, even ascribing to shooting looters on sight. So, yes, some of you for a limited time can join in a “good moment” that you say represents humanity’s best, but that moment is offset by the actions of looters and the thinking of rivals. Someone dies, and some say, “He was a gem; we will miss him.” Others say, “I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope he suffered.”
Human: That’s true, but it still doesn’t negate the many good deeds we do for one another, the charitable acts, the expressions of sympathy, and the empathy.
Alien: Well, look at your current turmoil. It doesn’t appear to have an end in the Middle East or in any other place on the planet. That turmoil between the Israelis and Hamas is merely a spike among historical spikes in violence. This spike in violence will drop to a background hum, but like micro tremors beneath an active volcano, the hum will simply mark a period of quiescent but persistent buildup of tensions. Dormant volcanoes always pose a threat. The magma of your “bad moments” is dormant for a period, but the eruption is inevitable as long as the magma chamber is filled with hot, though repressed or contained, emotion.
Human: Certainly you have read about stellar good people, Mother Teresa comes to mind. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?
Alien: A tiny spike in the hum of repressed violent emotion. Afib, to use a heart reference. And like that arrhythmia, it’s unpredictable; it’s irregular.
Human: Well, what’s it like elsewhere in the universe? You’ve traveled. What have you seen?
Alien: Pretty much the same. The hum is always in the background, and since you mention universe, I’ll give you another analogy. The hum of discord is much like the Cosmic Microwave Radiation. It’s everywhere. It fills the Cosmos.
Human: Are you saying the universe is inherently evil, ineluctably bad?
Alien: it definitely has more spikes of “bad” on the graph of Time than spikes of good, and the bad spikes do more damage than the good spikes can undo or prevent. Maybe they all work toward entropy. Someone will drop an egg while you successfully cook one. Humpty Dumpty can’t sit without the potential to fall and break. Your “good moments” emerge only briefly and have no lasting effects because the generations that follow stumble over the spikes of bad that emerge from the background hum. It’s a dissonant hum, by the way, just like the static on an AM radio, the static caused by the Microwave Background Radiation, the static you hear when your AM radio dial is just off the precise channel frequency of a radio station. The static is all around; the magma lies beneath. Both reveal themselves. And they work in conjunction to make no place on your planet free from bad moments. You can flee a volcano, but you can’t flee the static. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson demonstrated its ubiquity back in the fifties.
Human: So, what you’re saying is that we humans are destined to encounter bad moments more often and to a greater degree than we encounter good moments.
Alien: Pretty much. That’s my observation. Look at the current hum which has erupted into the surface of relations between Muslims and Jews. October seventh’s massacres are now praised by marchers in Washington, D.C. and other countries’ capitals. The praise has run through the young on college campuses, the next generation to hum the tune of background violence and hate. They are testimony to the ubiquity of the hum, the dissonant hum, the madding hum.
Human: That’s a pessimistic view of humanity.
Alien: Hey, I’m not the one humming dissonant sounds. I’m not the one breaking out in a combo of heavy metal, punk, and reverberating dissonance. Maybe that music is an analog of the background hum’s emergence or the volcano’s eruption. For generations, your species endeavored to make harmonious, melodic music, but you ended in gravel-throated screaming at a mosh pit of true violence.
Human: But…
Alien: I’m waiting. Prove me wrong. Go settle the differences between Israelis and Hamas; go tell the Russians to seek peace with their neighbor Ukraine; go tell all the Sri Lankans, the Kiriwinans, the Houthi and the Saudis, the Hutu and Tutsi, and the…I just realized how long the list would be, and I haven’t gone through your history’s complete list. But I have found evidence of it in your literature, even your ancient and sacred literature. Take the…
Human: But we’ve tried. We have religions.
Alien: I was just about to mention that. And look how many religious wars you’ve fought. Look at the current underlying areas of contention: Sunni vs. Shia, Catholic vs. Protestant, for example, and Muslim against just about everyone not Muslim. Hindus against Muslims, too. Animists in Africa and Australia. Micronesians of differing religions. Where are these “good moments” you spoke of? And your sacred texts record the contention. Look, here’s a passage from Chapter 2 in the Book of Malachi, or Malachias: “Why then does every one of us despise his brother?” And the author even addresses the contention in marriages. Marriages! Aren’t they supposed to result from those “good moments”? Look at your current breakup and divorce rates. Look at the animosity between two who once swore everlasting love. Malachi writes that men divorce the women of their youth, even despise them. If two humans who began in love can’t get along for long, then what does that say about all the rest of you other than you’re destined to quarrel and break any covenant you had. Your allegiances shift over time: Friends become enemies; enemies become friends only to dissolve that friendship in the ensuing generations: Napoleon fighting other Europeans followed by Europeans making covenants of peace that later generations will dissolve. French against English; Germans against French and English; Germans, French, and English against Russians. Americans and Chinese against Japanese, and now Japanese and Americans against Chinese. Moments? As you might dismissively say, “Give me a break!”
Human: But there’s always hope.
Alien: That might be all you humans have in common. Well, that and the underlying hum of a magma only temporarily contained.
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