Upon first glance, I only could see the dark aqua flowerpot in the center of the pond, but as the sky changed it revealed a line of web between it and each shore as if the container were a rest stop along a vast causeway.
The long-jawed spider lowered herself from a red maple branch extending over the pond and took position two-thirds of the way into the center of the pond. A second long-jawed spider crept from out of the flowerpot to defend her territory while a third crept closer from her secured sidetrack.
If you can imagine what a stretched-out daddy longlegs would look like, you have a picture of the long-jawed spider. Their bizarre shape only made them look more precarious as they skittered along their lines to and from the flowerpot, angling for position.
The pond is backlit at dusk, turning the elongated spiders a dark, translucent amber and heightening their precise, delicate, mechanical movements into something almost too real.
Drawn Into the Web
The entire production proved more gripping than I think I can explain. I watched with detached fascination, caring more about what happened than about the outcome as the invading spider worked to drive the larger of the other two from the web.
As it turns out, long-jawed spiders will pillage any web, not just one from their own species. That’s the kind of creatures they are. They’re builders but also takers.
After what may have been as much as an hour, it was clear the smallest of them was trapped. She wasn’t trying to claim space so much as to cross the battlefield on her way elsewhere.
I sent up a silent cheer as she accomplished the mission and tottered off along the low, waterlogged tree branch I’d installed as an accessory a decade or more before. That was the first inkling I had about intervening.
I wasn’t compelled to select a winner so much as stunned at how easy it would be. I could put an end to the spiders’ bickering. I could smite the invader, dispatch the defender, or even tear the whole web down.
Each had its own merits given how little I cared about the battle or about spider motivations.
Just as quickly, I realized there was nothing productive to be done, nothing a being like me could offer that would make them not seek to acquire and defend territory and resources. All at once, I felt a collegial affinity for the god I don’t believe in.
I made a place that was safe for this species of spider, but not for any individual member of that species. If I made it safer for one spider over another it would be deeply unfair, since they were just spiders being spiders, which is the only solution to the problem of evil I ever found even mildly compelling.
The only way we can make sense of an all-powerful, all-good god would be to say that it is a being so fascinated by how life unfolds it wouldn’t dream of intervening.
Divine Intervention Might Be Made Up
We’re a culture of interveners, though, which is why we want that kind of behavior in our divine beings. We enjoy righting wrongs real and imagined because it gives us clear moral footing. Who doesn’t like an obvious, irredeemable foe?
While I’m used to religious maniacs frothing with divine conviction, I’m more troubled to see otherwise thoughtful people getting caught up in vicious moral certainty.
I had the pleasure recently of speaking with a younger person about what’s currently being called cancel culture but mostly is just weaponized righteous indignation.
I get it. It feels good to be free of moral ambiguity, to lose oneself in the moment of perfect knowledge, to be able to point to a higher, unimpeachable authority and then persecute sins without mercy. In a world that seems to run on inequity, striking a blow to right the scales has a weightless, Zen quality.
What’s difficult to comprehend, though, is when bright people feel as if they can wrangle the world into ultimate rights and wrongs. It feels better to think this awakening is part of some moral evolution, that inequity is an endangered concept now that we understand our sins against the formerly marginalized.
That’s not only a lie, it very well may be the lie that helps so many of us sleep at night.
Embracing moral perfection saves us from moral responsibility. It is so much easier and satisfying to join a mob hunting this week’s bad guy than it is to accept that we’re all culpable. Culture is something we make by participating in it. If we hate the way it looks, we’re part of the problem by definition.
“They” aren’t the problem; “we” are.
I think what I’m trying to get at is that you can be upset with something, disgusted even, without getting mean. “Mean” is breaking our culture because we’re determined to feed it rather than let it burn itself out like the toddler’s tantrum it is. The question isn’t why people believe the things they believe so much as how being mean about their beliefs helps.
Ostracizing, browbeating, and taking punitive measures to avoid having messy, unpleasant conversations is the culture we built together and cling to with all of our might. The fallout is inevitable.
What I keep coming back to (especially when I catch myself being mean) is that blunt or cutting responses give me the illusion of accomplishment, as if I’ve done something useful rather than just bicker with another spider on a tiny piece of web that almost no one cares about.
If I had decided for any of the spiders, it would have been out of caprice. Spider hatred or gratitude is meaningless to me. Being fair when I can gives me much more personal satisfaction than deciding who the winners and losers are.
As an all-powerful being in my own backyard, a massive act of divine intervention seems unfair when nature is just doing her balancing act. Better to remain fascinated by the horrible, brutal beauty, and accept that intervening is meaningless at best and counterproductive at worst.