Full House (27 page)

And yet I think that the Full House model does teach us to treasure variety for its own sake—for tough reasons of evolutionary theory and nature’s ontology, and not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot. Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative—and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations. In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellences—where McDonald’s drives out the local diner, and the mega-Stop & Shop eliminates the corner Mom and Pop—an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to stem the tide and preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation itself.

We turn, with fascination and respect, to the lines that Darwin carefully chose to end his revolutionary book, the Origin of Species. He did not celebrate evolution by lauding the development of human intelligence or any upward march to preordained and preferable complexity. Rather, he chose to honor life’s bursting and bustling variety in contrast with the dull repetition of earthly revolution about the sun in all its Newtonian majesty (he also acknowledged life’s beginning at the left wall):

Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

He began these final lines with the best epitome of all: "There is grandeur in this view of life."

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