It had been Nashibitti who had taught Leaphorn the words and legends of the Blessing Way, taught him what the Holy People had told the Earth Surface People about how to live, taught him the lessons of the Changing Woman—that the only goal for man was beauty, and that beauty was found only in harmony, and that this harmony of nature was a matter of dazzling complexity.

‘When the dung beetle moves,’ Hosteen Nashibitti had told him, ‘know that something has moved it. And know that its movement affects the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle’s stiff wing bends the will of the Wind People, and know that all of this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cottonwood.’ That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature. Every cause has its effect. Every action its reaction. A reason for everything. In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony. Thus one learned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause. And thus one learned, gradually and methodically, if one was lucky, to always ‘go in beauty,’ to always look for the pattern, and to find it.

Chapter 7, Dance Hall of the Dead,

by Tony Hillerman (Harpertorch, 1973)

We are told that God is perfect. Imagining himself as God, Fu-Manchu would create a universe that is perfect and self-regulating, requiring no further intervention. Today, science is telling us the same thing overall¹ that older civilisations living close to Nature knew intuitively, namely that all life is interconnected in myriad ways that are of dazzling complexity.

Unless humanity wakes up to this fact and gets a grip on itself in short order, we will go the way of the dinosaur to become extinct as Nature readjusts itself to compensate for an excess of human life. Life will endure, but it will endure either without human beings or with humanity in much reduced circumstances.

We will fall prey to a self-regulating system and only have ourselves to blame.