There was a train accident last night in a town called Buehl. A train derailed and actually crashed into a house. When they showed the accident site on the news, you could see throngs of neighborhood people standing around trying to get a look at the clean-up work. And these neighborhood rubberneckers had cameras with them. Cameras! To do what - take pictures of the corpses the firemen were pulling out of the wreckage?

It made me wonder why humans have such a fascination with tragedy, disaster, and blood. The Romans threw Christians to the lions, the medieval Christians publicly burned heretics at the stake, and crowds flocked to the guillotines of the French Revolution. Today we have “reality t.v.”, and people still can’t keep themselves from hovering around the site of an accident, desperate to see a glimpse of gore and terrified of it at the same time.

Maybe it’s some primal instinct that stems from the carnivorous side of our omnivorous existence. Maybe our desire to see blood is actually the sublimated desire to taste blood. Freud said that humans are miserable because civilization prevents us from copulating with or killing all the people we would like to either copulate with or kill. Though I’m no Freudian, I think he does kind of have a point. I also think that the barriers between civilization and chaos are very thin barriers indeed.

Tonight, in reference to humans and civilization and rubbernecking, Jeremy said, “We are not fallen angels, we are risen apes.” (The quote’s not from him - from Desmond Morris perhaps?) My first instinct (ha ha) is to agree with this idea. I would, however, cynically add that I don’t think we’ve risen very far.