Today in Russia a bomb was detonated in Moscow airport that killed around 30 people and badly injured over 100. Not the typical start to a whimsical blog. It is truly a horrific catastrophe, a tragedy for both the people of Russia and the international community, and not something to be joked about.
Yet it would not be in the spirit of this blog to be sombre and serious throughout, and so we shall respect the dead and wounded of Moscow and poke a little fun at our own reaction to such events. Let’s have a chat about irrationality.
When people debate the existence of a God, using the good old argument of “Intelligent Design”, one of the first things that springs to my mind as an obvious counter argument is that if we’re entirely honest the perfect God that so many people revere really didn’t do a particularly great job.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the human body. Let’s start with the appendix; the ticking time bomb of the lower abdomen. It skulks around like a hoodie on a street corner; doing nothing useful, hanging out with its similarly sullen mates known as ‘the tonsils’ and hurling abuse at passing grannies whilst drinking White Lightning. Unlike the disaffected youth, however, the appendix has the capacity to rear its ugly head and strike us down at any moment, forcing us to remove it for no other reason than it felt like being a pain in the arse. Well, stomach, but anatomy was never my strong point.
Take as another example the male genitalia. Not wishing to lower the tone, but what idiot would take the most sensitive part of a man’s body and place them in a small, hairy sack to swing between their legs as they move? Surely this individual would have realised the design flaw fairly soon after the production process, when the earliest hunter gatherers, beating their way through the forests of southern Europe in their search for elk, mammoth or McDonalds (do they find fossilised McFlurrys?), snagged their poor, exposed manhood on brambles, trees and the odd oblivious goat. They are a constant danger; sitting on one can incapacitate a man for half an hour as he lies on the floor pale as a petrified snowman and clutching onto his appendage as if they were about to tumble from his groin.
Yet perhaps the greatest design flaws of all in the human body can be found in the thing we revere the most; the brain. This bizarre lump of matter (I’ve never touched one but I’ve always imagined it would feel somewhat like a blancmange) is often compared to a super computer, yet if a technician put together a PC in such a fashion he would be quickly sacked from his job and have his library card revoked. Whilst it truly is an amazing piece of kit, how can something capable of fathoming the deepest reaches of space with telescopes developed and crafted by years of research and ingenuity still find “that’s what she said” so highly amusing? Why does this amazing matter, which controlled the hands that wrote symphonies, painted masterpieces and controlled space shuttles launching into the heavens, still cause us periodically to sleep on said body part and thus panic when, come morning, we fear it as dead as any man who’s seen Susan Boyle naked. And why oh why does the very control centre that allows dancers to twist their bodies into beautiful shapes and footballers to curl a ball into the top corner of the net still cause me to misjudge my step and trip up a flight of stairs on a very regular basis?
It is in this same vein that we see the conflict between rationality and irrationality. Appalled and horrified as I was to hear the news of the Moscow bombings this afternoon, my brain quickly became engulfed by the fact that I would be in the same country in a few months time. That the terrorists who attacked the heart of the Russian state would show a similar interest in a provincial town in the frozen north largely famous for its cannon foundries and its proximity to a village built entirely out of wood yet with no nails (did no-one tell them about the wonder of the hammer?) seemed an entirely justified conclusion to me, and it wasn’t until I sat down and analysed the situation that I realised how completely irrational this train of thought was.
Similar irrationality governs our lives through every day. It is this irrationality that makes me hum a tune every time I lock the door so as to remind myself that I did indeed lock it when I worry later (or as some sort of enchantment over the lock, because ‘Mary had a little lamb’ is famed for warding off intruders). This irrationality causes people to put their faith in the words of some daft bat called “Mystic Meg”, who tells them that the alignment of Pluto and Uranus will cause them to become rich on Wednesday but most likely can’t open a tin of beans. The same irrationality causes people to despise black cats, despite the fact that these poor feline friends never wanted the reputation and really only want the love and affection shown to their tabby friends.
Sometimes this irrationality is humorous, and without an element of madness you can’t be truly human (or so I reassure myself), but it’s a shame when it prevents us from doing things. Getting on a plane these days can be a truly traumatic ordeal, despite the fact that the chance of you crashing is 1 in 7000 and that the fact that someone is of different ethnic background to yourself doesn’t guarantee that they are a suicide bomber. It doesn’t help that papers like ‘The Express’ tell us on a seemingly daily basis that someone is ready to kill us round every corner and that, without Dianna around to save the day, we’re all fucked. And there must have been the most terrible form of irrationality in the mind of those who placed the bomb in that Muscovite terminal, thinking that the death of innocent people was the way to a better world.
I never like to offer answers, but perhaps I will venture to suggest that we take life with a pinch of salt. Irrationality can be hilarious, especially on someone else’s part; my friend’s mother changes the length of time she microwaves her weetabix by 10 seconds depending on whether its winter or summer, believing it makes a difference to the nutritional value. But when it comes to the big issues in life, perhaps we’re all too quick to dive headlong into an issue and don’t take the time to step back and ask whether the assumptions we’re making are entirely justified.
When the human brain’s as mad as it is already it can use all the help it can get.
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