2% Off Chimps
On a grand tour of SE Asia like we are currently on, there is always more down time than one expects. Sometimes it has to do with sleeplessness due to lingering jet lag, and sometimes its just the group dynamics of letting everyone have their space to carry on with their daily needs. In addition, travel delays in places that are unfamiliar are also to be expected. Yesterday we arrived in Bangkok after a relatively long and delayed flight. I had been unable to win a bid for an upgrade and since Mike won and I lost, I couldn’t figure out why. Then I realized I had put in a Dollar bid when I should have bid in Ringgit on Malaysian Airlines. That made for a bid that was reduced 4.76X based on the Dollar/Ringgit exchange rate. I was therefore resigned to traveling in economy with Faraj and Yasuko despite them fitting better in the seats than me…by a long shot. When we boarded with Group 6 (right before an entire kids soccer team), Melisa surprised me by insisting that I sit in her upgraded seat next to Mike and she would sit back with Kim and talk about things that Garden Club co-presidents talk about. What an unexpected and kind treat. It made a long travel day more tolerable no matter how resolved I was to just grin and bear it.
These sorts of travel delays are also where the internet and all of one’s favorite news feeds become so valuable…even if you are trying to deescalate your daily news cycle consumption. One of my favorite magazines and news feeds is an old favorite, The National Geographic. So, while reading my regular NG feed about a wide range of issues including antiquities, nature, climate change, history, superstition and much more, I ran across an interesting factoid that caught my eye. In an article about the world’s largest snake, the Anaconda, and while explaining how difficult it is to tell several varieties of Anaconda apart, the writer dropped an interesting genetic reality. Snakes that vary by as much as 5-6% of DNA coding may be very hard to identify as different with the human eye. To highlight the strangeness of this point, the author mentioned that human genetic codes are only 2% off chimps and their genetic markers. That may be a fact that geneticists and anthropologists have known for years, but as a person who considers himself well-educated and well-read, that is an eye-opening new fact. It makes me think of many things about our modern society that are otherwise mysteries to me.
People have been denigrating others not like them with simian references for many years. The idea that some people get called monkeys or apes can be a fun reference, such as “he’s such a little monkey” said about a rambunctious kid on a jungle gym. But it is most often used to imply stupidity and boorish behavior. Sometimes it is not even based on any observed behaviors, but rather just an ethnic or racial slur that is used to suggest that some races and ethnicities simply look darker or more corse in their features. It is right up there in horrific and uncouth manner to make such references, but it is also never far from the surface with some people that are perhaps most self-conscious and most insecure about their own status in the world. It is pure hate speech and has no place in any human dialogue. Now that I know that there but for the grace of God or the Universe of Nature go any of us given as little as a 2% genetic difference, it seems both more understandable that it happens and yet more disappointing as an indicator of civility and civilization in general.
What brings this to mind as we arrive in Bangkok is mere coincidence. In the immigration lines at the Bangkok Airport we got placed among a group of vacationing Russians, flying in from their presumably cold climes in the skimpiest of their beachwear and yukking it up like any other Spring Break participants. While there was no reason for me to be bothered by their joviality, it did cause me to wonder about these normal looking young families going on vacation just after Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian dissident and activist, died mysteriously and far too young in a Siberian prison camp north of the Arctic Circle. There may be no reason for questioning a Russian’s vacation schedule, but I did wonder whether these people were pro-Navalny or pro-Putin. Their prosperity that allowed them a Thai beach vacation implied the latter, but I’m not sure that was a fair conclusion. I travel and yet I am appalled by behavior similar to Putin’s that I see in the U.S. I am on vacation even while Tucker Carlson is in Moscow filming in local supermarkets and suggesting that things are better there than in the U.S. … specifically playing up on the U.S. population displeasure with the cost of groceries. Carlson’s implications are so distorted and misleading as to be disgusting and decidedly un-American at a moment when the Putin regime is killing its detractors in such dramatic and evil ways. It ranks right up there with the most crude and boorish of racism and name calling and I cannot help but think it is more simian behavior than not.
Speaking of simian behavior, I forgot to mention that the other day when we went to the Batu Caves there were monkeys all overt the place running up and down the stairs up to the temple. Since I was holding on to the handrail for dear life on this smaller-than-normal stair treads, I had monkeys running across my hands one after another, not seeming to be concerned in the least with my presence. These monkeys were smart enough to know the tourist program at Batu Caves and quick enough to make a living out of the food scraps left behind by the barefoot Hindu worshipers who make a day of a visit to this, the most important Hindu site outside of India. While that was Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country that is officially Muslim (no separation of church and state there), there are still enough practicing Hindus to make Batu Caves a popular destination. As I mentioned previously, the invading Muslims of old allowed other religions, but with a tithe, that I’m sure was a pinch to the pocketbook for most of the faithful. Here in Thailand, a country that is officially Buddhist, specifically of the Theravada variety, I am led to believe that Thais are hesitant to declare themselves anything other than Buddhist when asked their religious preference. While there is no longer a fee to declare otherwise, it seems that the intermittent flirtation with military totalitarianism (alternating with periods of democracy), makes people cautious about declaring other than that they are followers of the King’s religion of Buddhism. That undermines the 94% share of Buddhism that is recorded and seems rather un-Buddhist in nature.
Man continues to amaze the universe with his ability to not use the gift of grace that has been bestowed upon him by virtue of his cognitive capabilities and what we call his soul where things like empathy reside. Buddhism is generally seen as somewhat higher in its enlightenment with its Four Noble Truths that were handed down by the Buddha himself. They are:
1. All of human existence is suffering or dukkha.
2. The cause of dukkha is craving.
3. The end of dukkha comes with putting an end to craving.
4. There is a path we can follow to put an end to dukkha.
And I guess now I have to add a fifth…be sure you stuff the ballot box so that you can say everyone’s a Buddhist whether or not they actually are. I guess that means man will have a hard time moving off his position of being 2% off chimps.