Ants Without a Queen

Go to the ant, you sluggard!
Consider her ways and be wise,
Which, having no captain,
Overseer or ruler,
Provides her supplies in the summer,
And gathers her food in the harvest.

--Proverbs 6:6-8

I have always been morbidly fascinated by ants. I had a number of Ant Farms when I was a child. My second eldest son recently acquired one for his birthday, and it probably brings more joy to his father than it does to him. They slave away above the refrigerator, day by day, digging tunnels, constantly on the move, always diligent, and rarely resting. Of course, in the wild, the ant's sole purpose is to ensure the survival and expansion of the colony. The life of the collective is the end and the means to the end. Though the purpose is self-contained, cyclical, and temporal, there is a certain charm to it. Moreover, their greater purpose is to glorify God's incomprehensible attention to detail and the intricacies of His profound wisdom. Now, the captured ant in the Ant Farm is something else entirely. There is no queen, no propagation of the species, no means of continued survival. These ants will dig their tunnels and die. There is no purpose, it is all utterly futile, yet, as we all know, ants are too stupid to realize this. You never see one of these little gals throw up their antennae, say "What is the point...the horror, the HORROR!" and remove their head from their thorax with their sharp mandibles. After all, if I were one of them, that is what I would do. In my rather warped mind, with my tongue in my cheek, I could not help but draw an analogy between these poor creatures and the modern nihilist. Within their philosophical framework, the nihilist is like a captured ant with no queen, no objective ideal. They slave away through life in their artificial, self-created, unnatural prison, they dig their tunnels, as it were, yet there is no point, no meaning, no purpose. Of course, with an ant, it is humorous and charming. With a human, it is sad and tragic, for we are creatures who are painfully able to comprehend futility and the horror of the absence of meaning. Thus, though I may wonder why the ant does not just end it all, I wonder more about the nihilist. Thank God for intellectual inconsistency, I suppose, for it is a most merciful gift to the unbeliever.

Honor, Liberty, Truth!