415
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_46
Chapter 46
Famine in Bangladesh
46.1 Combinatorial Cruelty in Nature
Every act of production and consumption begs several perennial questions revolving
around pain and suffering. These unknown qualia and their magnitudes, in turn,
encompass all of biochemistry, trophic (food chain-level) relations and separations,
reproduction and barriers to such, social order and entropy, consciousness and the
conscience. The silent reveries from atom to molecule, from cell to ethical dispositions, have revealed, by example, a lesson of relative durations, a mere few hundred
million years of (human) time. That is, according to the most open-ended characterization of cosmological coherence and its pathway (at least one of them) toward
nerve endings, axons, sensations, and their implicative orientations, whether in the
guise of a soul, a body, a mentation, or some other construct altogether separate but
aware. The history of philosophy has idly speculated on these forms, motions, and
laws—the perturbations and combinatorial epiphanies we all inhabit.
At the evolutionary level of life-forms and their commingling, we almost immediately come upon birth and death (maternal, child, and infant co-mortalities) and,
with these predicates, a host of sporadic reflections that remain unanswered in the
annals, certainly, of the human brain. Issues pertaining to death: the cruelest way to
die; animal species starving to death, no euthanasia to put themselves out of their
misery; the ecology of starvation—what point does it serve? What mission has famine served? And hence the inevitable conjectures congealing around every consideration of ethics, of a God, or no God; of the value of biology and its multiple
disciplines. If “it” all evolves toward general destruction and suffering, then has it
been worth it? Biodiversity, contemplation, artistic expression, some manner of joy?
Or, is the debilitating epic to stave off pain merely the self-directed odyssey predicated by a terrible guidebook that should never have come into existence? How
many have proffered the terrible conjecture: If all this cumulative experience and
wisdom is simply a prelude to destruction, what is the point?
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_46
Chapter 46
Famine in Bangladesh
46.1 Combinatorial Cruelty in Nature
Every act of production and consumption begs several perennial questions revolving
around pain and suffering. These unknown qualia and their magnitudes, in turn,
encompass all of biochemistry, trophic (food chain-level) relations and separations,
reproduction and barriers to such, social order and entropy, consciousness and the
conscience. The silent reveries from atom to molecule, from cell to ethical dispositions, have revealed, by example, a lesson of relative durations, a mere few hundred
million years of (human) time. That is, according to the most open-ended characterization of cosmological coherence and its pathway (at least one of them) toward
nerve endings, axons, sensations, and their implicative orientations, whether in the
guise of a soul, a body, a mentation, or some other construct altogether separate but
aware. The history of philosophy has idly speculated on these forms, motions, and
laws—the perturbations and combinatorial epiphanies we all inhabit.
At the evolutionary level of life-forms and their commingling, we almost immediately come upon birth and death (maternal, child, and infant co-mortalities) and,
with these predicates, a host of sporadic reflections that remain unanswered in the
annals, certainly, of the human brain. Issues pertaining to death: the cruelest way to
die; animal species starving to death, no euthanasia to put themselves out of their
misery; the ecology of starvation—what point does it serve? What mission has famine served? And hence the inevitable conjectures congealing around every consideration of ethics, of a God, or no God; of the value of biology and its multiple
disciplines. If “it” all evolves toward general destruction and suffering, then has it
been worth it? Biodiversity, contemplation, artistic expression, some manner of joy?
Or, is the debilitating epic to stave off pain merely the self-directed odyssey predicated by a terrible guidebook that should never have come into existence? How
many have proffered the terrible conjecture: If all this cumulative experience and
wisdom is simply a prelude to destruction, what is the point?