Chimpanzees aren’t the only spectacularly intelligent animal species. Sometimes human beings act intelligently! Yes, humans are animals, as difficult as this is to believe for many people.
In this TED video, Joshua Klein reminds us about the intelligence of yet another species: crows. Using their intelligence, crows continue to flourish among human populations.
This post was written by Erich Vieth
Many people still bristle at the idea that chimpanzees can have “cultures.” The evidence is accumulating, however, as documented in “Almost Human,” an article found in the April, 2008 edition of National Geographic. The article was written by Mary Roach, with incredible photos by Franz Lanting.
In 2007, an Iowa State University anthropologist named Jill Pruetz reported that while studying chimpanzees in the field (two years earlier) she noticed a female chimp:
Sharpening a branch with her teeth and wielding it like a spear. She used it to stab at a bush baby–a pocket-sized, tree dwelling nocturnal primate that springs from branch to branch like a grasshopper. Until that report, the regular makings of tools for hunting and killing mammals had been considered uniquely human behavior. Over a span of 17 days at the start of the 2006 rainy season, Pruetz saw the chimps hunting bush babies 13 times. There were 18 sightings in 2007. It would appear the chimps are getting creative.
Pruetz has spent more than four years studying the Fongoli chimpanzees (they are savanna-woodland chimps from eastern Senegal, across the border from western Mali). Pruetz has been habituating the Fongoli chimps (allowing them to get used to her) for the past three summers. She has done this hot, filthy and exhausting work six days a week, from dawn to dusk. She has gotten sick with malaria seven times. In the course of watching the Fongoli champs, she has also noticed them engaging in other behaviors unique to these Fongoli chimps: “soaking in a water hole and passing the afternoon in caves.”
Spearing bush babies is only the most recent of the many cultural behaviors documented regarding chimpanzees. Jane Goodall was the first to report seeing chimps making tools (for termite fishing). The world-famous bonobo named Kanzi has learned hundreds of symbols to communicate. This National Geographic article reports numerous other behaviors unique to various communities of chimpanzees have been documented. Some communities of chimpanzees use rocks to smash open nuts much like we would use hammers and anvils. Other champs chew leaves into a spongy wad to soak up water for drinking. Several communities of chimps cool down by a wading into pools of water. Numerous communities of chimpanzees throw rocks, sometimes as weapons and other times as part of displays.
The article notes that chimpanzees and humans share between 95 and 98% of their genomes. The article cautions, however, that this is “less meaningful than it sounds. Humans share more than 80% of their gene sequence with mice, and maybe 40% with lettuce.”
The author of this article, Mary Roach, was surprised to learn that chimpanzees’ yawns are contagious, “both among each other and to humans.” In the course of writing this article, she also learned that chimps laugh, and even get upset if someone laughs at them. They sometimes spit in disgust. Some chimps have been known to adopt other species of animals (one chimp named Tia adopted a small kitten).
Chimps get up to get snacks in the middle of the night. They lie on their backs and do “the airplane” with their children. They kiss. Shake hands. Pick their scabs before they’re ready.
The observations reported in this article certainly blur the cultural boundary between humans and chimpanzees. These sorts of observations will make many people upset, however. They want to believe that humans are sui generis among animals, of their own kind and that there is no real comparison, certainly no cultural comparison between humans and animals of any other species. In fact, there are hordes of people who resist thinking of humans as animals at all (and see here) (and here and here).
Perhaps it won’t soothe the critics to view the situation in the way suggested by a famous evolutionary biologist:
It is perhaps less problematic to view the situation as does The Third Chimpanzee author Jared Diamond: Not that chimps are a kind of human, but that humans are a kind of chimp.
This is an article that truly transported me around the world. It made me feel that I was almost there, observing these magnificent animals. As I’ve commented before, this type of writing and photography is nothing out of the ordinary for the National Geographic.
This post was written by Erich Vieth
The disturbing part of this story is the reactions of so-called medical professionals to this couple’s situation and decision.
Now there are two ways to look at this. The one that might make more sense (though certainly no more palatable) is that these physicians et al are concerned with Insurance issues. What’s covered here? How does malpractice potentially enter into it? And while these folks are relatively well off and can carry their own expenses, what kind of precedent might be set here that will spread to the uninsured or Medicaid?
Unpleasant, but it would give a dimension to it that we could wrap our disgust around.
The other way to see it is as an example that, much as we might as a society wish to see ourselves as maturing, getting beyond such primordial reactions (namely—”Ugh! You different! You die!”), it turns out not to be true. That what we have is a facade and as long as no one really tests it, we can be what we think we are, at least to ourselves.
My reaction to what this couple is doing was initially (and continues to be) “Wow, cool!”
But I may well be in the minority.
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
We do many inefficient things. Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way? Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.
The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change. We don’t do this, however. It would take too much initial effort.
Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories. This is another tendency toward path dependence. For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars. Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.
It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language. We don’t do this, however. It would take too much time and effort in the short run, even though it would be well worth our while in the long run. And shouldn’t we all switch over to a universal language, so everyone could understand everyone else? Esperanto, anyone?
We don’t have the determination to make many long-term improvements due to the time and energy it would take to make the short-term change.
I thought of path dependence yesterday when I drove past the campus of St. Louis University, a large Jesuit college in St. Louis, Missouri. I attended the St. Louis University school of Law. I know many people who have received fine educations from St. Louis University. I know that many of the people associated with University are good-hearted people who do wonderful things for the community. On the other hand, St. Louis University is a school based upon an unsubstantiated belief that a bloody crucifixion occurring 2000 years ago “saved” humankind. What does my well-reputed school of law have to do with claims that a man/God visited Earth to save his wretchedly undeserving children? Many people would say nothing at all. The Law School is attend by many students who don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. It could be argued that the education provided by the St. Louis University School of Law could equally be provided by a university that didn’t make any claim that a man named Jesus rose from the dead. After all, I attended law school for three years and never once heard Jesus discussed in any law school class. So, why is it that a law school that teaches nothing about Jesus is considered to be a Jesuit law school? Good question. I consider it to be another manifestation of path dependence. The buildings and administration of an existing Jesuit college simply made for a good foundation for the Law School. The Jesuits would argue that the SLU School of Law is as good as it is because it is Catholic. They would hear some good arguments that this is not the reason from some of the many fine law schools that are not Catholic, however.
Speaking of law, the legal principle of stare decisis holds that an ongoing legal dispute should be decided a particular way solely because a previous and similar case was handled that way. (more…)
This post was written by Erich Vieth
Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time. I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since. Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.
What did I think of the movie? It was entertaining. It moved well. One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones. The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction. Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.
I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through. The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation. It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least. I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.
No, it is beyond that. It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women. Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.
It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for. Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.
(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy. If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)
The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness. Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.
The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus. I seriously doubt it was. I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic. He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals. Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!
Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device. The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests. If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.
Did they do this consciously? Some probably knew very well what they were doing. Most just followed orders. They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust. After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating. It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it. Nonsense. Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.
But was it based on Jesus’s teachings? Likely not. He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal. The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.
The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it. All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving. To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences. All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.
I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others. It’s a lengthy topic. Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.
What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church. People are gullible, but stubborn. It would do no such thing. People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes. I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise. Never happens. Never will.
At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.
Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other. The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point. They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir. But more importantly, they would have lost their icon. Their center. They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.
I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper. Absurd in many ways, though. While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture. The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. It did not fare well. Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’ It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci. The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting. The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork. It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive). If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time. But who can say? It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.
I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue. The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people. The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness. Capable of wholeness. Capable, finally, of love.
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
As reported by Scientific American, Researchers have concluded that only 10,000 years ago, the human transition from living off the land to actively raising crops and domesticated animals was accompanied by an accelerated rate of evolutionary change. The pressure for this change occcurred because populations became highly concentrated compared to hunter/gatherer societies. This concentration raised many new biological challenges, such as staving off serious diseases that were common in crowded living spaces. How much did human biological changes accelerate?
Comparing the amount of genetic differentiation between humans and our closest relatives, chimpanzees, suggests that the pace of change has accelerated to 10 to 100 times the average long-term rate, the researchers write in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
What kind of biological changes occurred in our species in these recent times? One quite visible recent change was skin color, but there were many other recent changes:
“Their bodies and teeth shrank. Their brains shrank, too,” he adds. “But they started to get new alleles [alternative gene forms] that helped them digest the food more efficiently. New protective alleles allowed a fraction of people to survive the dread illnesses better.”
By looking for wide swaths of genetic material that vary little from individual to individual within these sections of great variation, the researchers identified regions that both originated recently and conferred some kind of advantage (because they became common rapidly). For example, the gene known as LCT gave adults the ability to digest milk and G6PD offered some protection against the malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum parasite.
“Ten thousand years ago, no one on planet Earth had blue eyes,” Hawks notes, because that gene—OCA2—had not yet developed. “We are different from people who lived only 400 generations ago in ways that are very obvious; that you can see with your eyes.”
According to the researchers, not all human populations changed equally.
For example, Africans show a slightly lower mutation rate. “Africans haven’t had to adapt to a fundamentally new climate,” because modern humanity evolved where they live, [anthropologist Gregory] Cochran says. “Europeans and East Asians, living in environments very different from those of their African ancestors and early adopters of agriculture, were more maladapted, less fitted to their environments.”
This post was written by Erich Vieth
Why are the West Memphis Three Still in Prison?
by Brooks CaruthersFourteen years ago Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, the notorious West Memphis Three, were convicted of murdering three eight year old boys: Michael Moore, Steve Branch, and Christopher Byers.
Almost immediately, the case against Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley was exposed as a hollow sham, a travesty of justice. But after numerous appeals, careful examinations of evidence old and new, and international attention brought about by hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, two documentary films, and at least one very well-researched book, the West Memphis Three are still in prison. Why?
I’ve only heard vague answers. Third hand rumors. (My friend says there’s stuff that wasn’t reported, stuff that wasn’t in the trial…My friend knows someone who has seen things…My brother knows someone who heard things…my sister knows someone who was there, who knows things, who is positive Echols and them are guilty.)
What “things”? I have yet to hear one. So far the only tangible “thing” I’ve heard was, “I know a lawyer who says the bite marks on the body matched their teeth.”
Which is interesting because the exact opposite is true. The teeth marks found on the bodies DO NOT match the teeth of Miskelley, Echols, or Baldwin. That’s been known since 1998.
Now, in 2007, as announced in a press conference given by Damien Echols’s defense team, it has been shown that the teeth marks found on the bodies were not even human. This is the opinion of more than a half dozen forensic pathologists and forensic odontologists. In their opinion, almost all of the horrible wounds found on the three victims, including the genital mutilations, were the result of post-mortem animal predation, i.e., animals trying to eat the dead bodies. Furthermore, it is the opinion of the experts that none of the wounds on the bodies was caused by a knife. This is important, because in the original case the prosecution tried very hard to convince the jury that the body wounds were made by a serrated knife…a knife just like one found in the watery area behind Jason Baldwin’s house.
Three of the forensic consultants were at the November 2nd press conference. The odontologist, Dr. Richard Souviron and the pathologist, Dr. Werner Spitz, stated clearly that none of the marks on the bodies were made by a serrated knife and that none of the wounds were consistent with any kind of knife. (There was also no evidence of sodomy or forced oral sex, another part of the prosecution’s narrative that has been disproven for some time.)
New DNA evidence was also revealed at the press conference. Forensic serologist Thomas Fedor stated that none of the DNA found at the crime scene matches the DNA of Baldwin, Echols or Misskelley. However, the DNA of a hair found in one of the ligatures that bound Michael Moore roughly matches DNA of Steven Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs. Another hair found on the crime scene matches a friend that had been hanging around with Hobbs on the day of the murder.
It may not be Hobbs’s hair. And even if it is, that doesn’t mean he’s the murderer. But even back in 1993, without the DNA evidence, Hobbs, a family member, would have been a far more likely suspect than three teenage strangers.
But almost from very start of the investigation, the Crittenden county authorities were convinced they were looking at some sort of ritual Satanic human sacrifice. All the evidence they found was viewed through that filter. If any promising lead or piece of evidence didn’t fit the narrative of Satanists doing evil in our midst, it was ignored.
The local media fueled this frenzy, reporting damn near any crazed, unsubstantiated rumor. Then the coerced and contradictory “confession” of Jessie Misskelley was made public, and newspapers fell all over each other to report all the lurid details of Satanic ritual sodomy and murder.
Misskelley was a borderline retarded teenager who had been a casual friend of Echols and Baldwin. His confession was the result of hours upon hours of abusive interrogation by Crittenden County’s finest. The full text of his two “confessions” is riddled with contradictions and factual errors that reveal his story to be a complete fabrication. But the media didn’t report any of that. They only reported the “good” parts. (For an in depth look at how the “Satanic Ritual” theory was developed and how the Misskelley “confession” was created, see Mara Leveritt’s book THE DEVIL’S KNOT.)
This brings us to another revelation of the November 2nd press conference: the discovery of private notes by jury members indicating that Misskelley’s “confession” was a major consideration in their guilty verdict. That’s a problem because the confession was never officially entered as evidence. Jurors never got to see the whole thing in all its absurd contradictory glory. Instead, they were considering only the lurid confession highlights presented in the media.
Sound like a fair trial to you?
The focus of all this attention was the alarmingly named Damien Echols. He looked and acted like everyone’s ultimate nightmare of a teenager. He was the perfect villain for a “satanic panic”. It was easy to sentence him to death and lock him away where the sun doesn’t shine.
I mean that quite literally. Since 2004, when Echols was moved to Varner SuperMax, he has not seen the sun.
I’ve never met Echols. I’ve met his wife, Lorri Davis, and I know people who have corresponded with him and and even visited him in person. If you knew the things I knew, if you’d heard the things I’ve heard…you might decide he’s a pretty nice guy. Smart. Quiet. Buddhist.
Still, I was a bit reluctant when my wife handed me a book called ALMOST HOME: MY LIFE STORY, VOL. 1 by Damien Echols and told me I should read it. I mean, I still had the mental image of the teenage heavy metal villain in my head. And the book was printed by iUniverse…which means that it’s self published.
To my surprise, I read the whole thing in one day. Dude can write! His style is clean and matter-of-fact, with a nice undercurrent of ironic humor and occasional poetic turns of phrase that lightly ornament his prose but never become overbearing. Echols has lived a life of dirt-poor poverty with long periods of dead end despair, but he never wallows in it. Instead he gives us a series of vivid, emotional snapshots: some dark, some light, some funny, some strangely ecstatic.
Now here you might argue that the fact that Echols can write doesn’t mean that he’s innocent. And you’d be right.
And you might argue just because celebrities like Margaret Cho and Henry Rollins and Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines think that the West Memphis Three are innocent, that doesn’t make it so.
And you’d be right.
And you might mention that the out-of-town producers of the PARADISE LOST documentaries had an agenda, and part of that agenda was making us look like a bunch of redneck idiots.
And I’d say, “Point well taken.”
But none of this changes the fact that the West Memphis Three were convicted on little more than an arbitrarily concocted story about a Satanic sacrifice, and that now we have evidence that directly contradicts this story, exposing it as a lie.
The official reason for the November 2nd press conference was to announce that on October 29th Damien Echols’s defense team filed a Second Amended Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus. In plain English, the team is asking, in light of all the new evidence, for a federal court to either overturn Echols’s conviction or give him a new trial.
The presentation made by the lawyers was very powerful. You can watch it online at the Free the West Memphis Three website: wm3.org. (A site well worth exploring.) Or, if you read this in time, you can watch the press conference on a big screen at Market Street Cinema, along with 20 minutes of highlights from from the first PARADISE LOST movie. This event will take place on December 11th, at 7:00 PM. It is presented by the WM3 support group Arkansas Take Action!, which will also host a live Q & A.
And if you want to demonstrate that freeing the West Memphis Three is something that native Arkansans believe in, as opposed to all them crazy out-of-town Hollywood types, write letters to Governor Beebe and Attorney General Dustin McDaniel asking them to overturn the conviction of Damien Echols and expedite the exonerations of Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley. If you write the letters before December 15th and send them to Arkansas Take Action!, P.O. Box 17788, Little Rock, AR 72222-7788, they will be presented en masse to the Governor and the Attorney General on December 18th.
So far McDaniel’s response to the writ has been: “…we can say with confidence that these three men are, in fact, guilty…”
Good. Let us hear why, openly, in court if necessary.
Open up everything. Let Damien Echols see the sun again.
Can you guess the issue to which I allude?
Person in the back row, there, with both hands raised, yes? Modern witch hunts! Right on the first try.
Since the Salem Affair, we’ve wrestled with an uneasy accommodation with religious perceptions in our public life, specifically in regard to law and jurisprudence. Not that we need the presence of Satan in order to make boneheaded mistakes—sometimes all you need is a media frenzy. Combine the two, though, and we have cause number one for keeping religion out of our politics, our law, our government.
Once someone makes the claim that Satanism is involved and the general public accepts it, reason goes out the window. The explanation? Well, how can anyone rely on rules of evidence when the devil is involved, with his supernatural (or, as Ann Druyan is currently insisting, subnatural) ability to deceive? What? The maze of tunnels supposed to exist beneath the pre-school couldn’t be found when authorities dug it up? What can you expect when Satan probably filled them all in! What? The perpetrators can prove they were nowhere near the scene of the crime when it occurred? What can you expect when Satan can instantly transport them from point A to point B and erase memories? Once Satan gets involved, all our highly-regarded investigatory capacities mean nothing!
This is foolishness of a high order. But we fall for it from time to time, in various places. No one is immune, it seems, and those who insist that law enforcement is somehow violating its own rules and denying its own abilities are cast as witting or unwitting collaborators with the Master of Lies. How dare anyone suggest the police would deceive us? That district attorneys would hide evidence or misrepresent a case? Surely that never happens!
Unless Satan is involved.
Curious that no one ever seems to suggest that Satan might be working his wiles from the other end, by duping law enforcement and corrupting our own system so that we end up sending innocent people to prison. That the deception has to do with manipulating our own fears rather than causing someone to commit a crime. Better, isn’t it, that we be made to attack ourselves from a misplaced sense of righteousness, born out of terror at the boogie man we have not quite managed to deny? Why is it that no one steps forward to suggest that Satan may be working through children (who, in these instances, we are told NEVER lie) to cast a pall over the perfectly innocent adults around them, setting us at each others’ throats using the tools of our own legal system to do damage to our sense of security, our faith in reason, and disrupt the equitable flow of justice? How come Satan only ever can be seen present in the form of the accused?
We’ve been going though another one of those absurd “They’re trying to destroy Christmas!” things, with that issue in Fort Collins. We just can’t bring ourselves to draw a hard and fast line. And it does seem ridiculous when it comes to a holiday. What’s wrong with a little nod to an informing cultural myth? What harm can it do to make a small accommodation to a traditional belief?
We ask this question legitimately, and perhaps some people do go too far in their quest to be rid of the religious in our public lives. These zealots seem like crackpots to most people. Grinches.
But then something like this happens. This is the flip side of that same coin.
It’s not the subject of the belief that’s the problem—it’s that we don’t seem able to defend ourselves from the insanity of our own embrace of that belief.
Admitting to this, though, means that maybe there’s a very good reason to separate out the religious from the civic. And if there’s a very good reason for that, maybe there’s a very good reason to rethink the whole thing.
Being rid of Christmas decorations in state buildings and so forth may mean a little less holiday cheer for a lot of people, and that’s curmudgeonly.
On the other hand, it might also mean we never let Satan be a cause for wrongly imprisoning innocent people. Hmm. I’m having a hard time seeing that as a bad thing.
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
Listening to a talk show at work yesterday, I heard some fall-out from the recent suicide of the young girl who had been “duped” on MySpace. When I first learned of this tragedy, I ran through a series of thoughts about the dangers posed by the interfaces we use these days, which put us often too early and unprepared into contact with things in another era we would simply have had no opportunity to encounter. This girl was a casualty of the wavefront of experience that comes now in new forms and through media that never before existed.
I never once thought it was her fault.
How could you? She’d been deceived. Inexperienced, unwitting, she invested a bit too much, and it put her over the edge to discover that what she thought was “real” was in fact a deception.
History is full of examples of people committing suicide over things with only marginal reality. Especially among adolescents. We’ve learned in the last decade a great deal more about brain development than ever before, and one of those things is that adolescence is the time of some of the most intricate and fragile growth–physically–within the brain. The hormone storm that is unleashed at the onset of puberty, the growth spurts visible in every other part of the body, the physiological changes of emergent sexuality and secondary sexual characteristics, all have their equivalent in cognitive development. It makes perfect sense after the fact, but for a long, long time we blithely assumed that adolescents were more or less just like adults. Instead we find that, because of the rapid and complex changes they are going through, teen-agers who appear out-of-control, impulsive, overly-sensitive, clueless, clumsy–in short, borderline insane–really are all those things and it is the responsibility of the adults around them to set guidelines and provide aid to get them through this period to the other side and (hopefully) “normality” and sanity. (When this fails, we have all manner of screwed up adult.)
Which is why holding a teenager responsible for not behaving like an adult is absurd on its face.
And consequences of this journey can run the gamut from perpetual clumsiness to neuroses to schizophrenia to manic-depression to suicide.
It is one of the challenges of our new awareness of these things to take actions to mitigate the worst effects and to do what we can to ensure a healthy mind in the emergent adult.
Something like this tragic suicide occurs, though, and when we listen to what comes after we discover how unlikely that is for some people. Many people emailed this talk show to express their opinion that the dead girl “got what was coming to her.” It was somehow her fault.
When we tease through this senseless reaction, we come to the bottom line opinion that what she was doing on MySpace was something she shouldn’t have been doing, something that is to some people Bad. In fact immoral. Evil. That she reaped the rewards of an inappropriate indulgence.
This is pathetic. But rather than condemn it outright, maybe we ought to take a look at this and see where it comes from. This echoes similar responses to other events, like rape. “She shouldn’t have been out that late, she shouldn’t have been with Those People, she shouldn’t have been dressed Like That.” We’ve heard all this. After enough of it, you’d think the poor rapist had absolutely no choice but to attack That Female. It was all her fault, she brought it on herself.
Blaming the victim.
This happens to men, too, but in less obvious ways. (more…)
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, is a runaway bestseller. Dawkins is a relentless one-man religion wrecking-crew. He carries a sharp knife for the many arguments that religions are somehow useful or worthy.
But isn’t religion sometimes good? Doesn’t religion sometimes heal the sick and feed the poor? When it comes time to complement religion, Dawkins tends to give only backhanded complements. When people are good, they are not really good because of religion. To the argument that religion makes people happy, Dawkins cites George Bernard Shaw’s words: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.” (Page 167). Indeed, Dawkins really doubts whether religion is worthwhile at all:
It is hard to believe, for example, that health is improved by the semi-permanent state of morbid guilt suffered by a Roman Catholic possessed of normal human frailty and less than normal intelligence. . . . . the American comedian Kathy Ladman observes that “All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”
When it comes time to applying evolutionary theory to religion, Dawkins doubts that religion is an evolutionary adaptation. He suspects religion is only a wretched byproduct of evolution.
Moths fly into the candle flame, and it doesn’t look like an accident. They go out of their way to make a burnt offering of themselves. We could label it “self immolation behavior” and, under the protective name, wonder how on earth natural selection could favor it. … the insect nervous system is adept at setting up a temporary rule of thumb of this kind: “steer a course such that the light rays hit your eye at an angle of 30°.” Though fatal in this particular circumstance, the moth’s rule of thumb is still, on average, a good one because, for a moth, sightings of candles are rare compared to sightings of the moon. We don’t notice the hundreds of moths that are silently and effectively steering by the moon or a bright star, or even the glow from a distant city. We see only moths wheeling into our candle, and we asked the wrong question: why are all these moths committing suicide?
Applying this byproduct theory to religious behavior, Dawkins observes that most people hold beliefs that “flatly contradict demonstrable scientific facts.” They hold these beliefs “with passionate certitude.” Why? Perhaps, writes Dawkins, natural selection has built child brains for us. Brains “with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is viable for survival: the analog of steering by the moon for a moth.” (Page 176).
Unfortunately, this sometimes helpful tendency can be infected by “mind viruses.” Religious leaders pick up on this vulnerability and take advantage of it. Religion even seems to be a byproduct of several normal psychological dispositions. Citing Pascal Boyer, Dawkins argues that religion can also be seen as a byproduct for the mis-firing of various mental modules, “for example, the modules for forming theories of others’ minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favor of in group members and against strangers.”
At bottom, it is clear that, for Dawkins, religion is not an adaptation. For this reason, Dawkins argues that we should not expect that practicing a religion will make us better off as an individual or a society. Hence, his unrelenting attacks on religion.
But is it really so clear that religion is a harmful byproduct of evolution? In “Beyond the Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins Is Wrong about Religion,” David Sloan Wilson argues that Richard Dawkins’ critique, “however well-intentioned, is . . . deeply misinformed.” D.S. Wilson further argues that Dawkins’ book fails to actually apply evolutionary theory to religion. Yes, Dawkins is an expert in evolution. On the other hand, in The God Delusion, Dawkins is writing as “just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for religion to vent his personal opinions about religion.” D.S. Wilson argues it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work to see whether religion might, indeed, be an adaptation. (more…)
This post was written by Erich Vieth
A Hindu chaplain was invited to say the opening prayer in the Senate and some christians slipped in to protest, disrupting the prayer, and generally making fools of themselves and presenting the face of their faith which causes those who feel religious belief is something everyone ought to get over and soon to feel more justified in that opinion. The CNN article, with a video, is at this link:
I stumbled across a very old post I made to a philosophy BBS on the subject, and I thought I’d revise it and repost it here. This present a good opportunity. Upon reading it, though, I admit to having a few second thoughts, but one of the joys of having a mind one is unafraid to use is that second, third, and tenth thoughts are part of the fun.
What is Tolerance? Broad question. It might well be the wrong question. The trouble is, like other things people discuss endlessly without resolution, it has as many exceptions as definitions. Tolerance and its parameters goes to the root of our civilization. Not for the reasons we might immediately assume—which is that we have a pluralistic society and the requirement of such is a broader degree of tolerance than what has ordinarily been found in most history—but for more individualized reasons. Because we all are intolerant of something and someone at one time or another, and it is not always wrong of us to be so. When you look at this so-called “pluralistic society” one feature bobs to the surface that doesn’t seem to fit: we’ve never been particularly tolerant. Wave after wave of newcomer has had to go through the same round of bigotry from those of us who consider ourselves “born Americans.” Not everyone, of course, but look at the record. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hispanics (who were first tossed out of their home and in the subsequent decades came back as if they’d never been here before and had to prove they deserved to live here), and on and on. Today it’s Bosnians, Vietnamese, more Chinese, Africans of various nationalities… Those of us with birth certificates claiming we are, right from the get-go, Americans…well, look at the news. What we have entered is a period of enforced public tolerance, in which it is simply uncouth and, in some instances, illegal to express displeasure at the presence of someone Not Us.
Religion may be the last bastion of intolerance, as indicated by the fracas in the Senate. It is arguable that we should tolerate all religious views. If one believes that one’s religion demands that he or she kill those who do not believe the same way, should we tolerate the religion? Traditionally in this country, it is more what someone does than what they believe that causes legal action, but we’ve always questioned that. Look at the lives ruined in the 50s because of a flirtation by some with communism. In most instances, the affair ended, nothing lasting resulted, but because “you attended these meetings” you faced the opprobrium of the community. It’s like a politician having sex with the “wrong person”—years go by, it’s never done again, life goes one, but if someone finds out…
Tolerance follows trends. Sad but true. I know devoutly religious people who now accept gay people on their own merits, but would throw a divorcee out of one of their parties. Consistency there isn’t. That’s trendiness, not genuine, thoughtful tolerance. So let’s try for a definition.
Tolerance means: not making a person suffer for being an individual.
Sounds easy enough on the faced of it, but it has some wrinkles that feed into our current, present-day problems. Legally, we place more importance on actions than intent. Intent becomes important when the severity of an action is in question, but there still must be An Action before—legally—we start in on someone. But as we all know, a single action successfully prosecuted leads often to a label that goes directly to an assumption of future intent. A criminal who has been caught, tried, convicted, and serves his or her sentence finds that full citizenship is never restored. The system expects recidivism and so the balance of that person’s life is constrained by assumptions of possible behavior. (Never mind for the moment the statistics on recidivism—we’re talking about ideals here, and who’s to say that our treatment of these folks isn’t part and parcel of the motivating force behind that recidivism?) Basically, such folks have shown themselves capable of certain behaviors of which the community is intolerant and so become part of a population designated as untrustworthy. On that basis, we do not tolerate them. In some instances, our intolerance goes so far as to bar residency to them in certain areas and to post their names in public, making them pariahs. In some instances, no crime has been committed to engender similar, non-legal actions.
But this has, ultimately, nothing to do with the individual so treated. It has to do with our idea of that individual. It’s a box, wherein we place people to make it easy to deal with the complexities of our so-called pluralistic society. Some people get very, very tired of going through this daily coping with Strange People, and demand that “We Do Something About Them!” Hence protests at prayer meetings. Simpler if such people, who think differently, dress differently, talk differently, pray to a different god, were just Not Here. The Nazis had that idea. The problem is, of course, that we are all Strange People if you dig deep enough. But the urge to Belong causes such denial of self that our individuality turns on itself, like an autoimmune disease, like cancer.
Look at Senator Vitter. One of the loudest advocates of so-called Family Values, and look at this, his name is on the client list of a bordello. To reduce him to the simplest explanation, he so abhors his own inability to be someone else that he seeks to eliminate all possibility that he could ever stray, which means vociferously advocating against lifestyles other than the one to which he wishes to adhere. Take away all the temptation and he won’t “stray” again. It never occurs to someone like that that maybe his own self-abnegation is more a problem than the behaviors he seeks to legislate out of existence. (A less kind explanation is that he belongs to a clique of long tradition which seeks to establish conditions in which the behavior for which he’s been pilloried is available only to a self-selected group of elite, and denied to all those “unwashed” and undeserving. This is not at all uncommon, and seems to follow those who are loudest in their condemnations of the very things they secretly indulge. Besides, to be perfectly open and honest about it would mean their spouses ought to be allowed the same privileges and—dare we say it?–rights. Can’t have that. It would be nice to be done with goose-and-gander crap. Alas.)
So how do we tell if we’re being intolerant of someone just for being an individual? How do we know that our intolerance isn’t justified? Well, try this: if you find that you’re condemning someone based solely on a community standard and only that community rule tells you it’s wrong, then more than likely that standard is wrong.
Pretty broad. But consider. Murder is self-evidently wrong. The violent denial of another individual of the freedoms, liberties, options, and potentials that the murderer then retains and that all people who condemn the murderer retain is obvious self-sustaining in the moral sense. You don’t really need a community standard to tell you this, the standard arises from a clearly recognizable maxim. Likewise, theft, lying, rape, battery….the irony being that sometimes community standards are set up to protect certain kinds of theft, lying, rape, and assault.
But conversely, alternate philosophies are not self-evidently wrong in the same way. The value of them must be weighed through examination, comparison, debate, study….a dialogue must occur.
Alternative economic practices are not self-evidently wrong.
Alternative sexual choices are not self-evidently wrong.
Alternative rituals are not self-evidently wrong.
And yet, community standards are established all the time, depending on where you live, to permit and promote the condemnation of people who embrace one or more of the aforementioned, even if only as ideas.
Why? Is such intolerance justified? It depends on how much you value community standards over individuals. People who adhere to a set of community standards not because they believe in them, but because it is easier, because they cannot or will not think for themselves, or out of fear of being expelled from that community are hypocrites and often moral cowards. Lazy at best. But if Joe Bloe and Jane Plane just want to get along, who is anyone to condemn them for not challenging the status quo in the name of personal conviction? Isn’t life hard enough without throwing ideological self-consistency into the mix? Who can blame a person for not wanting to rock the boat in the cause of philosophical freedom?
The problem here is one of long term moral judgment. If you do not understand the nature of what you believe and merely accept what the community tells you, then when something legitimately dangerous or threatening comes along, how do you tell the difference between it and all the noise that is only your neighbor being intolerant of fashion choices? How do you know how to make choices and judgments about new ideas or protect yourself from con jobs and nonsense posing as Ultimate Truth? If you do not know what it means to Be Tolerant, how will you know when Being Tolerant according to community prescription won’t just lose you your rights to be different? And how will you know the difference between self-defense and bigotry?
It is human nature to fear what is different. It is our responsibility to overcome fear. That axiom, if I may call it such, is, I believe, the seed of true tolerance.
Now here’s the catch—and the reason this is so difficult to manage—Tolerance isn’t a prize you win and then take home like a present. It’s a chore. It’s a challenge. You work at it every day, just as you have to work at being free every day. You die working at it and the job is never done. I think a lot of people sense that and shun it. But there it is. And we have to be willing to turn our backs on the comfort of community if we wish to be tolerant and free. By willing I don’t mean we have to—but if forced to a choice between conscience and community, to opt for community is the first cut in the death of tolerance.
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
I was reading about Gallium metal, and got sidetracked by a debate about math software. The point that got my attention is the contention that civilization is based on an institutionalized principle that we all are incompetent in many important fields. The item being debated was the necessity of children developing skill at long division and such procedures.
The process of civilization arguably began as early man began to specialize. A man who could not hunt to support his family because of a game foot becomes an expert flint knapper, and trades his specialized skill for the products of the more common skill of hunting. He passes this skill on to his sons, who never become competent hunters. A grandchild might become a more specialized expert at finding fine-grained stones. And so on.
How many people do you know who can pass a wilderness survival test? How do they survive in spite of their total incompetence to make it on their own? Civilization. Before we developed specializations, everyone had a total wilderness survival skill set. Now, most people wouldn’t recognize an edible plant if it was planted in rows. Can you tell hemlock from parsley or carrots?
We are all massively incompetent, and things have never been better.
Except that we now accept incompetence from those who are supposed to be the experts. A politician is not elected because he is the best at managing his constituency; he is elected because his handlers are the best at getting him elected. Products are hot because of clever promotion, not product quality.
The real question becomes one of orders of ignorance. How important is it for people to be aware of what it is that they are not aware of? Should people at least learn what subjects there are that they would need to know about if we were subjected to a lower level of civilization?
Religion and politics (each arguably a force to be reckoned with) both depend on the majority being sufficiently ignorant about those fields. Other than that, there is no excuse for people to not have at least a rough idea of how much they don’t know. But then, I know that I am incompetent in the fields of education and social anthropology. So take all this with a grain of gestalt.
This post was written by Dan Klarmann
Erich just uploaded a short post noting that Americans feel sourly about nearly everything. With no sign of optimism, and marked lack of trust in virtually all institutions, does it come as a surprise that people often sigh hopelessly over the “good old days”? Many people cling to an image of past glory and happiness, even when their fantasy “good old days” never existed. Several writers on the blog, Jason Rayl and me among them, have pointed out the inaccuracies of such perfect, imagined pasts.
So when we look back to a “good old day”, hold it up to the light of present times and see a glaring gap, has the world changed, or have our perceptions simply matured, become more jaded with time?
Some psychological research has delved into this tendency of human cognition to misperceive the past, and of our additional tendency to ignore the role that perception plays in how the world looks. A recent Cornell University study entitled “When Change in Self is Mistaken for Change in the World” (Eibach, Libby & Gilovich, 2003) finds that:
“Personal changes in respondents (e.g., parenthood, financial change) were positively correlated with their assessments of various social changes (e.g., crime rates, freedom).”
Thus, if your world has improved in recent years, you may think that crime rates have lowered, drug abuse and dependency has shrunk, and that the country’s economy has brightened and bettered recently as well. But if things have gotten worse for you, perhaps you clamor for the “good old days” of yore.
And as it turns out, many generations before us have lamented about the worsening condition of the future. Eibach, Libby and Gilovich write:
“The belief that society is changing for the worse is not unique to this era. It has been evident in every generation of the United States since the late 18th century… Evidence of similar attitudes have been found among the ancient Greeks, and in myths of cultures as diverse as the Aztecs and Zoroastians.”
Eibach et al say that a huge flaw in human cognition fuels this frequent mistake. We have trouble noticing a change in ourselves, which leads us to look at the world with what these researchers call “a naïve realism”. Years of psychological research have revealed that we attempt to see our past and current selves as a cohesive whole, in spite of evidence that suggests the opposite. Historic research, for instance, reveals that we misremember our old attitudes and beliefs as in line with our current attitudes and beliefs, even if they have actually changed dramatically.
(more…)
This post was written by Erika Price
When are we likely to share resources? At first glance, some of us might say that we share when we have more of something than other people around us. It’s not that simple, however.
In “Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics in the Law,” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby discuss moral heuristics and the evolution of the legal system. It is a well-written article throughout, though I’d like to focus on one aspect of the article that I found especially interesting. I’d like to focus on their discussion the circumstances under which people are willing to share and when they are not.
Cosmides and Tooby note that the “hunter-gatherer life is not an orgy of indiscriminate sharing, nor is all labor accomplished through collective action.” On the other hand, the hunting of large animals often is a social activity and the meat, whether caught by a few or by a large cooperating group, is often shared throughout the social group. These transfers of meat are “not characterized by direct reciprocation in any obvious way.” Cosmides and Tooby go so far as to suggest that the sharing of meat may be closest to that predicted by Marx’s belief that hunter-gatherers “lived in a state of primitive communism, where all labor was accomplished through collective action and sharing was governed by the decision rule,’ from each according to his ability to each according to his need.’”
The widespread sharing of meat appears to challenge the evolutionary model, which would hold that “selection would not favor indiscriminate sharing.” Cosmides and Tooby argue that different kinds of rules regulate sharing in different kinds of situations. Each of these subprograms embedded in us “produce different moral intuitions about when to provide help and to whom, and each is activated by different situational cues.” We have different programs, they argue, for sharing meat versus sharing gathered goods. Why would it be that meat and gathered food would be shared in different ways? It boils down to the perception of luck, according to Cosmides and Tooby.
Success in hunting is relatively unpredictable. Even great hunters often return empty-handed. Therefore, success in hunting (whether for meat or honey) often depends upon factors outside of the hunters’ control. The Ache hunters of Paraguay, for example, return empty-handed 40% of the time. In this situation, “an individual is better off redistributing food from periods of feast to periods of famine.” This can be done in two ways: through food storage or by pooling resources with others, although the former is often not feasible when it comes to spoil-prone meat in hot climates. Cosmides and Tooby suggest that meat “can be stored in the form of social obligations.” In fact, the same sharing rule will evolve wherever the social group faces “frequent and random reversals of fortune.” This rule is triggered “by the perception that the suffering is caused by bad luck, rather than lack of effort.
Contrast hunting with the lack of variance of success that one encounters regarding gathered goods. Luck plays a relatively small role in gathering. Harder work tends to reward the worker proportionately. Similarly, gatherers who are more skilled tend to gather more. Because of this,
band-wide food sharing would simply redistribute food from those who expend more effort or are more skilled to those who expend less effort or are less skilled . . . there is little reason to expect that the future will be different from the present and, therefore, little reason to expect that those with less food now will be in a better position to reciprocate in the future. Under these circumstances, selection will favor adaptations that cause potential recipients to welcome sharing, but potential donors to be reluctant to share.
Cosmides and Tooby cite studies supporting these differences in their willingness to share. They suggest that these deep biological programs take the form of the following propositions:
1. If he is the victim of an unlucky tragedy, then we should pitch in to help him out.
2. If he spends his time loafing and living off of others, then he does not deserve our help.
The authors correctly point out that these expressions seem self-evident, that “there seems to be nothing to explain.” On the other hand, see what happens when these expressions are reversed:
3. If he is the victim of an unlucky tragedy, then he does not deserve our help.
4. If he spends his time loafing and living off of others, then we should pitch in to help him out.
Cosmides and Tooby point out that although 3 and 4 sound eccentric, they present “no logical contradictions.” (more…)
This post was written by Erich Vieth
Have you ever noticed that certain people who drive Very Large Vehicles tend to drive slower than everyone else? I followed a 4X4 pick-up truck of epic proportions this morning and the driver crawled along at just under 25 miles an hour on a 35 mph street. He–there’s only one word for it–”sauntered” along, impressed by his own steel garb. It was attention-getting and annoying.
The thing is, I’d wager that if you put him in a Toyota Celica, he’d bomb along at 40-plus.
People wear attitudes. Ever noticed the personality change that takes place in an otherwise pleasant, excellently-mannered fellow who puts on his leathers and climbs onto his Harley? This is not illusion. There is a shift in attitude that comes with the whole aesthetic, and an aesthetic is what it is.
In a deep way, we wear our attitudes and our ideologies. The “traditional dress” of certain cultures come with changes in body language, posture, speech patterns, and attitudes toward others. This is not all bad and I’m not suggesting it is, but…
I took you through the path of mild chuckles to bring you to my main point, which is a bit harder, but no less valid.
We hide within and behind our furnishings, by which I mean clothes, cars, houses, symbols. From within them we face the world and deal with it accordingly. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, until we get to things like–
Terrorist suicide bombers.
I won’t drag this out. Simply put, they couldn’t do that but for the baggy clothes, cloaks, djebbalyhs, and so forth that hide not only who they are but what they carry. Want to end suicide bombings in Baghdad tomorrow? No one is allowed on the street clothed. Okay, maybe some briefs, bikini tops for the ladies. You want to eliminate bombers on airlines? Everyone flies naked. Very difficult to smuggle something on board that way.
No uniforms would lead to a lack of ideological signs. Who do you shoot? Who do you hate?\
Furthermore, this could potentially lead to better health. I mean, really. There’s been discussion on Dangerous Intersection for a while now about health, fitness, losing weight, high heels, etc. There are people with sound medical reasons for not getting “in shape” but for the rest, the best reason is that they can hide behind their clothes. If there are going to be instances of socially mandated public nudity, I’d bet more of them would get serious about how their bodies look.
(This is insensitive, but I can’t help it. One of the things that just blows my mind is seeing someone patently obese who obsesses over a chic hairstyle, as if that little bit of protein on the scalp when coifed can detract from the fact that the wearer would do much better to lose about a hundred pounds. It is self-deceptive. I’m being curmudgeonly, I know, but…)
Now, everyone has a right to be Who They Are. This should not be compromised. Cultural symbolism is very important in this respect. Clothing and custom of different people’s should be respected.
But I think it would help the world if we stopped believing that we have to go with this all the time. An hour or two a day when everyone has to drop all that and be just like everyone else would, I think, go a long way toward smothering the self-annointed who put such cultural standards ahead of everything else–including everyone else’s life.
We can now return to our regularly scheduled mundanity.
This post was written by Mark Tiedemann
There may be little original in this post, but then, there seems to be little original in its subject. It’s just that, well, no one, or not many, manage to say the obvious.
I was sitting before my tv the other day watching Dune. The SciFi Channel version, not that monstrosity from David Lynch–of the two, the former is far superior, because you can actually follow the story without wincing at the acting. Now, for those not familiar with it, Dune by Frank Herbert is a groundbreaking science fiction novel about a desert planet that contains in its substance “the greatest treasure of the universe”, the fictional Spice, a quasi-hallucinogenic morphogenetic substance without which travel in this universe is impossible and the Empire, such as it is, will cease to be. Hmm. Sounds metaphorical to me, how about you? In any event, the planet, Dune, is peopled by a nomadic desert folk known as the Fremen, who, when roused, become the fanatical warriors for the messianic personality known as Muad’Dib.
As I’m watching, I listen to the second or third speech about how the Fremen have a prophecy about an off-world leader–the Mahdi–who will come to lead them against their enemies. In the meantime, they collect water (a precious commodity) keep to themselves, and settle their differences among themselves with ritual combat and other related practices. When questioned about this, the standard reply is “It’s our way.”
And it occurred to me that the function of the Mahdi–and all other Messiahs–is to serve as a catalyst for change, to do the things unthnkable within a society, to lever a people out of their traditions and set them to change.
Something they could–and should–do for themselves.
Because none of these figures have ever done anything particularly special, other than to say what everyone–or at least many–are thinking but are too cowed by custom to say.
So they have prophecies about, essentially, some hapless goof who has the wisdom–or stupidity–to point out the exit from the temple and then have the audacity to tell everyone that they can leave. For their moment of inspiration and trouble, they are usually killed–or coopted by the war faction to lead a jihad or something and do some killing, by which time a new order has taken root and customs are reestablished and immutable and the change brought by the messiah safely neutralized by all the bloodshed In The Name Of…
Custom can be a fine thing in its place, but when it chains people to misery and oppression because everyone is too afraid to point out the obvious, it becomes an abomination. I’m watching Dune and thinking, “What the hell do you need a Mahdi for? You have a pretty good idea already what needs to be done, why don’t you just go do it?”
In the case of Jesus, the Hebrews needed a Messiah to free them. From what? They could travel throughout the Rom