I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed.
— Woody Guthrie, “Hard Traveling”

I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too.
— Bob Dylan, “Song for Woody Guthrie”

In the summer of 1978, after planning and saving for years, my whole family packed into an Itasca motorhome and spent six weeks driving a loop around the country, heading south from the Boston area on I-95, then west on I-40 (or was it I-70?), out to California, then back on the northerly I-90. I was ten years old, and the trip was more than a touristic venture to me. It was discovery on multiple levels. It was, in some sense, “the quest,” a term that I would later find helpful when I watched The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers’ series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, on PBS. It was history and myth come alive as we drove, walked, and slept in places we’d heard and read about, inhabiting stories in a material way. It was the sense of freedom of movement, and freedom from abstract responsibilities beyond the practical needs of the day. It was a process of self-discovery in every encounter with people, things, sounds, smells, sights, ideas, and stories that had not otherwise figured directly in my daily life at home.

For years after that summer the highway figured strongly in my imagination. I dreamed of living in a motorhome or a van, something mobile with a sense of self-sufficiency. By the time I was in college the American highways’ promises of adventure and freedom took another tangible shape in the form of Grateful Dead concert tours. Here, thousands of relatively like-minded Deadheads pictured America as a network of roads connecting nodes of familiar gathering sites that were the regular seasonal stops of the band that gave them an identity that was simultaneously deeply American (and tied to an American mythos) and yet an alternative to the American mainstream. Dead shows were places of experimentation, expression, and learning with a particular emphasis on the relationship between individuality and community. The unusual form of Deadhead community—only coming together physically periodically and temporarily, and never the same in each case, while simultaneously imagined as stable and lasting over great distances—was, it seemed to me, much like the sense of America that I had formed in my earlier highway travels. Shared roads, shared landscapes, shared experiences, and the shared stories brought the disparate together into some form of unity—or perhaps what Victor Turner meant by “communitas.”

When I graduated from college, by then a veteran of Dead tours, I had one thing on my mind. I packed up my Volkswagen bus and headed out on the highway with no particular destination in mind. I lived in that bus for months, driving wherever my whims took me. I was discovering America, and in the process discovering myself. Or, more accurately, the America that I came to know and study and the self that I became were co-constituted by the highway.

Female Road Worker Directs Traffic During Repairs on the Overseas Highway Leading to Key West by Flip Schulke

On the road again –
Just can’t wait to get on the road again.
— Willie Nelson, “On the Road Again” (1980)

The highway, for me and for my fellow Deadheads, as well as for countless other individuals and communities, has been a quintessentially American spiritual technology of the twentieth century. As both symbol and concrete (or asphalt) reality, as metaphor and metonym, the highway has figured deeply as a space of freedom, transformation, discovery, individualism, danger, hope, and new beginnings. Though a twentieth-century development, the highway’s spiritual roots lie further back in the seafaring trajectories of the European pilgrims and entrepreneurs who saw in their westward movements and explorations the possibilities of fulfillment of purpose and discovery. Ever since, the frontier and pioneers have defined at least one vector of the American Dream. From Mormons to missionaries, speculators to homesteaders, natives to immigrants, movement across the American continent has been an essential element of the American soul.

A thorough study of highway spirituality would also have to include formative roots in Transcendentalism and the Romantic painters of the Hudson River School, among other American imaginaries that identified God in nature and, especially, in the abundant American landscape. The nation’s traditional tension between wilderness and technology, described aptly by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden, finds a dialectic still point (or is it a monstrous energy?) in ribbons of asphalt upon which people drive to connect to the American land. In what amounts to a material form of Zen koan, highways are the connecting arteries between National Parks, which are sites of deep spiritual resonance for many who travel great distances for the chance to walk and drive through protected nature. As I understand it, the “spirituality” evoked, provoked, or invoked by the highway is tied to the particular cultural and social history of the United States that provides the stories, characters, events, metaphors, and resonances making up a spiritual idiom that merges with (and emerges from) the languages and experiences of physical mobility.

Looking Northeast Across Route C1 Elevated Highway by Michael Philip Manheim

Life is a highway
I want to ride it all night long
— Tom Cochrane, “Life is a Highway” (1991)

Although “spiritual” is so often cast as the antonym to “material,” any consideration of the venues, forms, and technologies of spirituality in America quickly must concede matter’s inescapability. In the case of the highway, the material produces the spiritual by laying down the grooves of physical space to be traversed, again and again, adding layers of experience, legend, myth, and memory over time. To travel the highway for any substantial distance is to move through space that is occupied by a century of ghosts, each moving through that space similarly, along the same trajectories, passing through the same landscapes and towns and crossing the same rivers and mountains. Moreover, those ghosts have stories—stories that have shaped and been shaped by a particularly American sense of authenticity and liberty. Spirituality here means a sense of getting to the real by stripping away the conventional, staying on the move to slip out of the confines of being pinned down by the stasis of habit. The authenticity and spirituality of the road is premised on the idea that the real is elsewhere, or can be reached by leaving the familiar behind. The highway is the space of potential, not here nor there: it is liminal. A “temporary autonomous zone.”

When travel writer William Least Heat Moon decided to drive the nation’s “backroads” highways that meandered through small towns and “real” America detailed in his classic Blue Highways, he thought that “Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one.” Maybe it could. At the very least, it might set things in motion and materialize the spirit of American dreams. More than simply a means of convenient transportation, the highway has held out this promise as a significant spiritual technology throughout its American history.

Looking Down From the Old Highway on Rowena Hills by David Falconer

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
— Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

Highway 61. U.S. Highway System (1924). The Interstate Highway System (1956). Route 66. Highway 1. The 101. 95. The names and the routes, the movement through changing landscapes as the roads wind through the mountains and prairies, call to mind other movements and peoples who found hope and purpose, who sought adventure or rebirth on the highway. For me, those connections are visceral: the highway conjures Jack Kerouac’s Beats and Ken Kesey’s Pranksters, who in turn recited Woody Guthrie’s Okies and Utah Phillips’s Wobblies and hobos. Here is a history of an other America that nevertheless has been a defining American experience. These (and many more) mythic figures of American history took to the roads and rails in pursuit of American dreams of freedom and autonomy—ambivalently defined in material, social, psychological, political, or transcendent terms. The common thread was movement across the landscape, typically at one’s own pace and whims. And that movement produced encounters with self and with others in ways that spun out of the everyday into the extraordinary. Kerouac’s novels, for instance, documented continuous religious and spiritual learning from the strangers he met on the road. Kesey’s boundless utopianism and the Pranksters’ experiments with reinventing reality were fueled not just by LSD, but by the mobility of their psychedelic bus traveling the American highways.

But as with most mythic histories, the road’s realities have been far more complicated than the romanticized images conveyed by literature, film, and folklore. The highway’s movement is dynamic and polysemous, transformative in specific relation to the motivations and imaginations of those who travel it. For some, therefore, it is a space of leisure and adventure, a remove from the tediums and conformities of everyday life in the social/consumer/workplace rat-race. For others, it is a space of labor, whether driving a truck or itinerantly looking for a next paycheck, a way to get ahead or at least to keep afloat. For some it is an escape from a life best left behind, perhaps a chance for a practical rebirth, a new beginning in a new place. For others, it may be an extension of a life, or a temporary voyage of discovery with the promise of a safe and comforting return. In any case, the road journey is a passage through time and space that produces potent potential encounters with newness that might challenge the status quo and the everyday. The highway holds potential.

View West Toward Worthington Glacier and Thompson Pass by Dennis Cowals

These two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real,
To trade in these wings on some wheels.
Climb in back
Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.
Oh oh come take my hand,
Riding out tonight to case the promised land,
Oh oh Thunder Road
— Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road” (1975)

A glance at the abundance of stories set on the highway in various genres of American popular culture illuminates the desires encapsulated, but also the tensions inherent, in this space of discovery and becoming. Bruce Springsteen knew the spiritual measure of the road and made it a staple of his songwriting toolbox. The highway, for Springsteen, was the Exodus path. The car was the vehicle to the Promised Land. As Kate McCarthy has explained, though, the highway to the Promised Land, while remaining a central metaphor, has changed texture and mood over the course of Springsteen’s career, from an early vision of escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of small-town, working-class New Jersey to a later criticism of America’s failure to live up to its promises.

The transformation from hope to tragedy is as familiar a theme in American popular culture’s depictions of the highway as its converse. From Easy Rider to Thelma and Louise, the quest for freedom through movement has often ended in death and despair. Or is it a radical form of freedom that these texts teach? Thelma and Louise certainly leaves the ambivalence open. So do, in their own way, Bonnie and Clyde, another American archetype of the highway that influenced these and other films such as Natural Born Killers. Such films and characters are a reminder that the highway is also the space of the outlaw, the bandit, represented by motorcycle gangs who take the liberty to live according to their own rules of honor and community outside of the laws of the nation-state (for instance, see The Wild One, Hell’s Angels on Wheels, and Smokey and the Bandit.) They are twentieth-century pirates, portrayed as dangerous but radically free and fundamentally fair within their own world. They serve, then, in pop culture, as a critique of the material and social inequalities and the structures of domination and oppression that belie the American Dream. For all of their danger, violence, and refusal of the legal and social norms that guide mainstream American life, these outlaws and their stories figure prominently in the nation’s folklore. Like the sacred itself, according to theorists of religion, they are both appealing and terrifying, attractive and repulsive. And this, too, is part of the mystique of the highway as a spiritual technology that has the ability to take travelers to the edges of experience.

I cannot help but think that much of the spiritual power of the highway stems from the multiple tensions and contradictions that it embodies: the highway is a space of desire and danger, of freedom and violence, of individual autonomy and communal connection, of promise and pitfall, of industry and nature, of self and other, of stability and transience, of potential and limitation, of dreams and dirt. The structure of contradiction itself embodies a particularly American, and particularly modern, antagonism. It should not go unnoticed, for instance, that this particular spiritual technology is also destructive of the American Dream, inherently taking part in the industrial production and sales of automobiles and the overuse of fossil fuels. As so often happens, the pursuit of freedom and the real comes with great costs and unforeseen consequences.

But out on the highway old stories are inhabited, new stories emerge, and they blend together like the blur of the passing landscape as it mixes with the music on the radio. Throwing off the everyday, entering into the space of discovery and adventure, opening up to whatever possibilities and experiences come into play, the highway traveler is born anew.

I run in Nike Free, divinely inspired running shoes. In them I am, I am able to be, spiritual.

Nike (Νικη) names an ancient Greek goddess or spirit, a divine courier who delivers Zeus victoriously via his chariot. She is a winged intermediary, moving and transporting through the air between here and there, between mortal and divine. The daughter of a titan and a river, she is a force of nature, a numinous being, a kind of angel, who bears deep bonds to Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Nike, wisdom is related to movement, transit, and to air.

Nike moves unencumbered—which is to say, freely. In many ways, then, Nike Free is redundant, particularly when Free suggests not, or not only, an enlightened free agent who is “free to” but a bareness that is “free from” unnecessary embellishment. In running shoes, such freedom often translates into a modern fetishization of technology, of progress (new = better) and excess (more = better). Nike Free running shoes, however, resist this fetish, opting for a different equation: new = less, and that less = better. These shoes promise freedom by using technology to strip away as much encumbering technics as possible. Introduced in 2005, Nike Free got back to basics and hence to the elements, coming two steps away from being barefoot (thanks to their extremely thin and flexible sole). Running in them, unlike running in almost any other kind of running shoes, my feet feel the ground’s contours, its textures and striae.

Running in them, I become more bodily, more aware of my bodily movements, since I can feel those kinetic effects in my feet as they contact a solid surface and then lift themselves into air: contact, release, contact, release; earth, air, earth, air. Unlike nearly all other running shoes, Nike Free do not overcushion and overcorrect. They do not permit bad technique or incorrect form. Instead, they insist on corporeal sensitivity, reconnecting my bodily parts to one another by reminding me of action-reaction relations. They silently suggest kinesthetic corrections, modifications in motion. They, like other spiritual exercises, are praxial rather than simply practical: they are transformative, perhaps even transfiguring.

Running in them, I am my most bodily, hyperaware of my bending knees and elbows, of my foot stride and impact, of the angles of my head and chest, of my heart and lungs as they invigoratingly move air, resuscitating—almost resurrecting—my sense of my corporeality. Running in them, I move and move through air. Thus I am, in a seeming paradox, simultaneously my most spiritual and my most bodily, most spiritual because most bodily. This seeming paradox exposes itself as illusory as I re-member spirit: a matter of breath, of air. Spirit—as ruach, as psuchē or pneuma, as anima or spiritus—names breath, wind, air with movement. It is elemental, sensible, mobile, dynamic, animating, vital and vitalizing. It is divine, as Nike’s domain or as ruach elohim (a Hebrew name of god), as well as human, even fundamentally so in tripartite anthropologies, including Stoic and Pauline, that conceive of humanity as body, soul, and spirit. Spirit, as a matter of breath—as the (literal or figurative, biological or religious) breath of life—is humanly necessary, and that necessity ties spirituality to corporeality, bound together by air. My body cannot live for long without air, without respiring.

Running makes me acutely aware of that need; it makes me intensely sensitive to my breathing—that is, my relationship with air. Running is all about breath, air, spirit, since it involves respiration, perspiration, and, for me, inspiration. When I run, and my body is continually in motion, moving and moving me from here to there like Nike in transit, I am most receptive to inspiration, to thoughts and perceptions that I take in like air. I am, body and soul (however those words signify), my most porous, and I do my best thinking and my best contemplating while running. I, like my stripped-down shoes, feel less encumbered, more flexible, most free. Respiration and inspiration meld as body and spirit mingle.

I breathe in air rhythmically, and with it comes…well, that depends. Sometimes while running I work through intellectual puzzles. Sometimes I ponder personal predicaments. Occasionally I stumble upon wisdom (recalling Nike’s relation to Athena). Sometimes I experience an airy stream of conscious perception. Sometimes I am simply free, free from distracting concerns or laborious thoughts or conscious monologue—free, that is, from a certain reflexive self, in an experiential zone (sometimes dubbed simply “the zone”) to which many spiritual or religious praxes aspire. Running can inspire or even be what others label meditation, moksha, prayer, contemplation, communion, ecstasy, enlightenment.

My Nike Free are akin to an athletic sajjāda or tallith or prayer beads (whether japamala or rosary or otherwise): they become the medium, the apparatus, the tool or supplement, that enable my running, which engenders what I experience as and am calling spirituality. If I am spiritual, I am so while running, sensitively breathing in the world.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
– Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)

Struggling with a deep and abiding sense of loss, Cotton Mather invented America. As he lamented in his epic Magnalia Christi Americana, “I shall count my country lost, in the loss of the primitive principles, and the primitive practices, upon which it was at first established: but certainly one good way to save that loss, would be to do something that the memory of the great things done for us by our God, may not be lost.” In the wake of later generations’ inability to live up to their forefathers’ vision, Mather memorialized what he could not emulate. But there was a paradox in this. Mather’s grandfathers hoped to transform a howling wilderness into a gift for their grandchildren: “None the least concerns that lay upon the spirits of these reformers, was the condition of their posterity: for which cause, in the first constitution of their churches, they did more generally with more or less expressiveness take in their children, as under the churchwatch with themselves.” Giving up on the depredations of Europe, the Puritans sought to create New Israel from scratch. But there was far too much work to be done for their Godly society to be realized in one lifetime. Like later generations of immigrants, they would work hard so that their kids and grandkids could live the American dream. But something had gone terribly wrong.

Left with only the memory of the “great things done for us by our God,” Mather celebrated the errand into the wilderness even as he knew it was doomed. The founders’ graves were an ongoing rebuke to their posterity: “I’ll shew them the graves of their dead fathers; and if any of them do retreat unto a contempt or neglect of learning, or unto the errors of another gospel, or unto the superstitions of will-worship, or unto a worldly, a selfish, a little conversation, they shall undergo the irresistible rebukes of their progenitors, here fetched from the dead, for their admonition.” Mather was dwarfed by his grandfathers’ accomplishments. Next to monumental aspirations to create a city on the hill, the quotidian concerns of ordinary people were worldly, selfish, and small. Because the first Americans’ social vision proved too difficult to fulfill, they left to their grandkids a sense of spiritual failure. Caught in a temporal loop that retrospectively anticipated its own impossibility, Mather’s America was trapped in an imaginary space that mourned the memory of this lost future.

After my father died, I leafed through a Bible given to him as a child from the First Presbyterian Church of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On its back page, he had written 1 Pete 23. I do not know when or why he did this or what significance he saw in this passage, but referring to a Biblical book by a diminutive nickname was the kind of thing he would do. The passage reads: “You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God,” and then continues “for ‘All flesh is like grass and its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides for ever.’”

First Peter is a vexing book. Addressed to the exiles, it proclaims freedom to the captives. Peter promises spiritual rewards for present suffering. Our mortal bodies, we are told, are passing ephemera like grass withering and flowers falling. Peter tells us this because he wants us to endure. Later readers have drawn diverse conclusions from his instructions. At best, those born of imperishable seed find the hope and strength to resist the world’s many injustices. At worst, the promise of spiritual freedom diverts our attention from the sources of this worldly suffering, such as in Peter’s injunction to servants: “Servants, be submissive to your master with all respect, not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing. For one is approved if, mindful of God, he endures pain while suffering unjustly.” A Marxist would see here the opiate of the masses. Promising illusory happiness in place of real happiness, the spiritual strength to endure injustice could help such injustice to persist. So is this why we tell the suffering that they are free?

My father died at the age of 52. The cancer which took his life is not uncommon in people who can vividly recall the smell of napalm and who resided temporarily in a forest possibly sprayed by Agent Orange. The specter of Vietnam seemed to reappear after his death, with his obituary noting his Purple Hearts and Bronze Star for valor. During his life, my dad spoke little about these medals. Most of his war stories highlighted some absurdity, such as the time he weathered a field training exercise by jettisoning all of his survival equipment in favor of a case of beer. Or, he told of being rudely awoken from a nap for the trivial reason that the compound was shelled in a mortar attack. “Do you know what the odds are that a shell is going to hit you? Basically zero,” he told me. “They told me to take cover. I told them I was going to sleep.” Or, one time in a village, he was approached by soldiers from another unit who wanted his translators to tell the people: “We’re up there! Up there! Tell them! Tell them we’re up there!” The “up there” was the moon visible in the early evening sky. As my father would later learn, the source of the excitement was the Apollo lunar landing. It was unclear how the Vietnamese took the news, but implicit in the soldiers’ excited proclamations of triumph was that any nation capable of breaking free of terrestrial bonds promised great things. The success of the errand to place the American flag on the barren moonscape stood in stark contrast to the failing mission to the win the hearts and minds of villagers in French Indochina.

As an herbicide, Agent Orange’s job was to wither plant life. But this was no mere landscaping exercise. It promised freedom. Chemical spraying cleared the territory American soldiers sought to liberate from communist tyranny. The memory of fighting in forests informed my father’s reductionist theory of the first Iraq War, which he claimed was promoted by an officer corps of Vietnam vets relishing the chance to redo their lost conflict in a place with no damn trees. While the explanatory power of this theory might be limited, I do remember thinking that the glee we had over that victorious war might for some soldiers compensate for the memory of a failed one.

While Agent Orange and smart bombs are distinctly modern methods of clearing space, the same herbicidal logic that ties freedom to the destruction of life can be found in Mather’s celebration of the providential work that cleared New England of its Native American inhabitants. “The Indians in these parts had newly, even about a year or two before, been visited with such a prodigious pestilence, as carried away not a tenth, but nine parts of ten, (yea, ‘tis said, nineteen of twenty) among them; so that the woods were almost cleared of those pernicious creatures, to make room for better growth.” Mather offered no commentary on these graves.

The ideal of better growth, the sense that a free society depends upon a spiritual vitality best cultivated in places cleared of history, nature, and people, promises a curious kind of liberation. Drawn to wide-open spaces, Americans seek freedom from the messy complexity of history, institutions, and the clutter and inconsistency of life. Variants of this can be found in the errand into the wilderness, or the frontier thesis that mourned the loss of seemingly limitless westward expansion, or in attempts to tell the American story as a series of revivals in which new spiritual energies revitalized decaying societies. In these portrayals, Americans are a people perpetually searching for a fresh start. These born-again narratives continue to persuade in spite of the diligent efforts of historians who insist these stories are nostalgic misrepresentation of events. More restrained historical analysts have told us, for example, that no errand existed among the first generation of American Puritans. This sense of mission and purpose was rather the projection of later descendents intent on aggrandizing the more modest ambitions of their forebears. If this is so, it means that America imagines its origins as a monumental project of spiritual freedom that exists as a standing rebuke to the quotidian reality of social life. Mather’s lament for lost “primitive principles” and “primitive practices” ties the American dream to an elusive origin existing in empty, imaginary utopian space perpetually undone by the real life failings of human beings.

The American answer to failure is to tell a story about success. Rather than mourning loss as loss, we are encouraged to pick ourselves up, start again, work hard, and succeed. We are reminded of the great things done for us by God and the obstacles faced and conquered by people whose suffering was far greater than ours. Above all, we are reminded of our freedom. For this reason, even the most modest attempts to ameliorate human suffering through collective projects to heal the sick, feed the hungry, or educate the young are seen by many today as signs of an encroaching tyranny. As it stands right now, freedom is the ubiquitous slogan of a selfish, petty, vicious, low-down politics that would be abhorrent to Peter and Peter’s God.

Freedom often finds itself in tough spots like this. It’s the kind of word that people want to do things it might not be able to do. Freedom’s remarkable elasticity seems to endow it with an uncommon ability to resist and to justify injustice, to call for something better and to say that things are fine the way they are. But one point of consistency is that freedom has a hard time reckoning honestly with the losses, failures, and violence that lie in its wake.

Like many of his generation, my father was inspired by On the Road. Ironically, he was drafted after he quit school in the spirit of Sal Paradise to wander America on a motorcycle. Kerouac also yearns for open space, but sees no need to clear it of people. He dreams of freedom instead by immersing himself in America to grow deeply within a mad tramping chaos of people, nature, and sin. On the Road ends with a kind of mourning, but one that lacks Mather’s monumental aspirations. Kerouac tells us instead of his friend Dean Moriarty, who has been the source of no small suffering in the lives of himself and others, wandering pathetically around the corner of Seventh Avenue toward an uncertain future. I remember discussing this chapter with my father. I do not recall the particulars of our conversation, but I know we both agreed its final sentence was really good. Here it is:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Deathbed Conversion

I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late in the night and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

⁂

Flawed Design

The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life experience that natural selection could not have produced such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation, since ascribing design to the state of humanity is almost unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist that the Theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl, neck and neck, mano a mano, with Mr. Darwin’s speculations.

The Theory of Flawed Design postulates a creator who is mentally impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as they call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the result of malevolent will but incompetence or incapacity.

⁂

Observant Jew

I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.