Itsy Bitsy Ideas

In the shower yesterday, I reached for my washcloth, hanging from the curtain rail, like usual. On the underside of the yellow terry cloth was a small brown spider, which, startled, I swiped away. The spider landed at the bottom of the tub, clearly wounded by the blow and the fall. He or she squirmed and kicked six remaining operable legs wildly in a panicked tarantella. As an act of second-order mercy, I directed some of the shower stream toward the spider, who was caught in a miniature eddy, struggled, weakly this time, for a few more seconds and then floated dead, like a speck of dirt, down toward the drain.

I’ve killed a lot of bugs this summer. Living in a basement apartment, they come out readily through all the cracks and spaces one finds in an old and sub-ideal house. Watching the spider struggle yesterday, I relived a familiar sentiment: a pinch of pity followed closely by a dusting of guilt. In almost every case this summer, however, I’ve swiped away this feeling with an idea as swift and deadly certain as my hand; namely, that an insect or arachnid, while possessing a “soul” in some Aristotelian sense of the word, is in no part constituted of an immortal, rational soul.

Correct ideas matter. I wield my belief about the nature of bug souls like a flyswatter. Without it, I would be compelled to act differently; I’d be resuscitating spiders and performing capture-and-release operations on pill bugs. Or, I’d ignore my qualms, and over time that dusting of guilt would settle, layer upon layer, obscuring and eventually encrusting my conscience. But between slavery to absurd compulsion and moral autoanesthesia lies the freedom of reason. I’m quite sure that not all of my intuitions are correct—there are simply too many contradictory influences out there, which have molded me, even beyond my knowing, for me to take the “just believe in yourself” message seriously—but I’m also quite sure that in developing the habit of ignoring my scruples, I would be neglecting to exercise one of my most important human faculties—and duties—at the risk of one day discovering that I had no conscience, not even a less-than-true-north conscience, at all.

Incorrect ideas matter, too. It I were wrong about the moral status of my spider victim (I don’t think I am, but if I were) my flyswatter of an idea would actually be more of a bloody knife. Not to belabor the point with obvious historical examples, but plenty of people have been convinced by wrong ideas and put them into practice with horrific consequences.
How to tell the difference? What reason helps us sort through reasons? Well, for one thing, “ye shall know a tree by its fruit.” Ideas whose implications are self-defeating, death-bringing, are not the ideas with which I care to ally myself. I also tend to trust the older ideas before the novel ones, which, given how long we’ve been swatting mosquitoes and kicking anthills, is bad news for the bugs.