Things Are Looking Up

When I was a student, many ages ago, I learned that the modern world was still under the sway of three dead white men whose views held sway from the second half of the 19th century well into the 20th: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Their theories had a good run, I suppose, especially in the academy. But by the end of the last century we had seen both psychoanalysis and Marxism discredited, and now it seems that Darwin's theory of evolution will soon be no more than just another abandoned theory from an earlier century.

It turns out that the proletariat doesn't want to overturn capitalism, they want to be investors too. What's good for General Motors is good for our 401(k) plans. And no one really believes all that silliness about childhood sex fantasies. Oedipus didn't even know who his parents were, much less want to kill his father or marry his mother. That was the whole point of the story and why he poked out his eyes when he found out what he'd done. But the best news is that we're not really descended from apes. Some new theory has come along, Intelligent Design, to argue that this world we live in is much too complicated to be the result of mere chance or random mutations.

Of course to the untrained eye, this complicated, ordered existence of ours may look like utter chaos, but thankfully this new theory will explain that what some may see as a world balanced on a precipice is in actuality a very intricate and intentionally designed creation. It turns out that this is exactly the way it was always supposed to be. So we can stop worrying about terrorism, the war in Iraq, the price of gasoline, melting polar ice caps and all that scientific mumbo jumbo about global warming. Things are looking up. We're not a bunch of apes. And although it may not appear that way to the untrained eye, or to those schooled, as I was, in the old discredited theories of the past, we know what we're doing here. Everything is proceeding according to plan.