Chapter 21: Friday, Nov. 17

He shortly turned serious, and a hush fell over the standing-room only audience -- many of them students, I was pleased to note. Father O'Gould declared that unless we recognize and accept our position at what he called "the transcendent apex of the chain of being," i.e., our superiority relative to other species, then we undercut what little moral authority we have left: "In an age when the God of our fathers has retreated into myth and history ... To say that we are no better than bacteria or turnips or rabbits is to give ourselves license, like them, to submit blindly to natural processes, to overrun the planet, to indulge in mass exterminations, indeed, to act any way we so choose."

The good priest went on to point out that the denial of any rank in creation was pushing the rationality of the laboratory to absurd lengths. "Is it not a philistine notion that truth is only to be found in a test tube? Simply because the position of mankind at the top of creation is not a verifiable hypothesis in those terms does not render it invalid. Because neither can you prove that the music of Beethoven is beautiful. Those who declare that all species are equal are assuming a stance that, in its apparently disinterested objectivity, is fraught with more pernicious hubris than to simply admit that we are, as human beings, on top, and with all that implies in terms of responsibility.

"I do not mean superior in any aesthetic sense. At least as depicted by Freud -- Lucien, that is, not Sigmund -- we suffer in comparison to the beauty of the hyacinth macaw or to that of Panthera tigris altaica. We certainly are not morally superior, though there is the potential for that. But we are clearly superior in intellect and technology, and that translates into power. With that power comes awesome responsibility.

"Indeed, it is this position at the top of creation which ought to provoke in each of us the moral anxiety to proceed with scrupulous care in our stewardship. Make no mistake about it. We are the wardens and we must attend to our duties in a manner befitting superior beings. Otherwise, we will answer to history as surely as the despots and dictators that have gone before us."

Father O'Gould concluded that real humility was nothing less than the acceptance of reality. "The incumbent responsibility that comes with our place in the universe is the gift of natural selection, and the basis on which we must become our own necessary gods."

It was, in all, a moving and provocative occasion. Father O'Gould's inspiring talk, along with some help from the dinner wine, restored a good measure of my faith in humankind. But not entirely. Images of Corny's cruel demise haunt my inner vision. I recoil, of course. I deplore what has happened. Yet something atavistic in me assents to the sacrifice. There is, nearly, a kind of comfort in it, a comfort I resist. I keep asking myself: Is human sacrifice, in its myriad forms, even in the interest of science, an attempt, however grotesque, to give meaning to death?

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