The city of the dead

No, this is not some crappy horror movie title. What I wanted to express with is this idea: 200 million years ago, an unknown plant or animal died and somehow ended up in a high-pressure underground pocket where, by a torturously slow process, its myriad mass of biosynthesized macromolecules was converted into hydrocarbon chains of varying lenght and saturation, what we have come to call "fossil fuels". This animal is powering the plant that generates the electricity to run my computer. So, in a very real sense, we are all stuck in a city powered by the dead. Ancient death is what keeps the streetlights ruining the view of the night sky; ancient death pushes us along freeways. This morning, I used death to warm up my breakfast. Tomorrow, I will shower to water warmed by death. I could go on, but the point has been made somewhat redundantly.

There is another sense in which this society is powered by death. Guess what I'm going to write about now?

Nothing at all. I'm too tired to explore the ways everything I and others do spins way beyond our control into morally reprehensible activities. But what is morality, anyway? It is not perfection, surely. I suspect it is something much closer to "good enough". Certainly, if not supernatural, it cannot be greater than individual human beings, in all their snivelling fallibility and weakness. Suffice it to say morality is nothing mysterious or otherworldly. We don't know how it evolved, but it most assuredly did evolve. And it was shaped by other people and the brutal choices of survival and competition, not given or imposed by space monoliths or Moloch (I'm going to be returning to this again and again, I feel).

Consider: "I and my brother against my cousin. I and my cousin against the stranger."