I'll post a slightly unusual Sunday Sermonette this week. Bertrand Russell is always perfect for this feature, and I suppose one can derive at least one moral lesson from this quoted material. But really, I just find it hilarious. If you haven't read Heinlein, you need to. From Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where Valentine Michael Smith learns why humans laugh:
But today even the misanthropy of camels could not shake Mike's moodiness. Nor did monkeys and apes cheer him up. They stood in front of a cage containing a family of capuchins, watching them eat, sleep, court, nurse, groom, and swarm aimlessly around, while Jill tossed them peanuts.
She tossed one to a monk; before he coult eat it a larger male not only stole his peanut but gave him a beating. The little fellow made no attempt to pursue his tormentor; he pounded his knuckles against the floor and chattered helpless rage. Mike watched solemnly.
Suddenly the mistreated monkey rushed across the cage, picked a monkey still smaller, bowled it over and gave it a dubbing worse than the one he had suffered. The third monk crawled away, whimpering. The other monks paid no attention.
Mike threw back his head and laughed - and went on laughing, uncontrollably. He gasped for breath, started to tremble and stink to the floor, still laughing.
Bertrand Russell, twenty-nine years earlier:
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ’The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race. -Education and the Social Order
Heinlein's final thought:
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more effective ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all other ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself. The very bedrock of humor was --
"Man is the animal who laughs," Jubal answered.
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