Bear with me here.
Nature documentarians are a hardy lot. They have to be able to trapes anywhere, anytime, in any climate, to watch in absolute secrecy the natural behavior, life and death of animals without interfering with them in any way.
The cardinal rule for the nature documentarian is “do not get involved”. Animals behave as animals do, and quite often that means they kill one another. And the watcher must not get involved, must be distant, and watch for the sake of understanding without interfering. If he interferes then he changes the natural evolution of the situation, and the knowledge gained becomes useless.
Here the observation does not change the outcome, and the animals do what the animals do, and quite often they kill one another…
May 11, 2008 at 12:42 am |
isn’t that just deism?
May 11, 2008 at 11:37 am |
Not necessarily.
I haven’t speculated on the constructive elements of Deism such as the morality of human beings or the existence of the afterlife – try reading the Isaac Asimov short story “The Last Answer” for a radical change in that paradigm. I wont spoil the story by summarising it, but you can read the text here (it isn’t long): http://destructionoverdrive.blogspot.com/2005/06/last-answer-by-isaac-asimov.html
I would also say that one of the critical elements of Deism (the rejection of reports of miracles, prophecies and religious “mysteries” ) is not total (without being too populist, how many times in Star Trek did all of the various crews break the “Prime Directive”?). I watched an episode of the BBC’s “Planet Earth” last year in which I think during the “making of” part, a camera woman in the Antarctic rescued a trapped and dying penguin chick.