Loyalty is not a virtue

What is it to be loyal? According to Merriam Webster, to be "loyal" is to be

1 : unswerving in allegiance: as a: faithful in allegiance to one's lawful sovereign or government b: faithful to a private person to whom fidelity is due c: faithful to a cause, ideal, custom, institution, or product.
I don't have a problem with this definition. I do object, however, that "loyalty" has been given a free pass in modern American culture, as though loyalty is always a good thing. In particular, the mass media has bought into this linguistic sleight-of-hand: according to the mainstream media, it is always a good thing to be "loyal." Loyalty is undoubtedly a virtue when we are dealing with pet dogs. We like our dogs to be loyal. We like our dogs to do what we tell them to do. The loyalty of a human being is not necessarily a good thing, however. Loyalty is a matter of committing oneself to a person, to a group of people or to a cause. But people and causes can be either praiseworthy or despicable (or something in between). If a social cause to which I am loyal is that all babies should have basic medical care, loyalty to such a cause would be a good thing. If my idea is that we should all give homage to Hitler, loyalty to this cause would be a horrible idea. Therefore, how can it be said that loyalty is per se a good thing unless one first examines the merit of the person(s) or clause(s) to which a person is being loyal? [More . . . ]

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Defining Achievement . . . or not

Uh-oh, I’m annoyed again. Nothing new, just a recycled annoyance that popped into my craw today and won’t leave, I suppose, because this particular instance, while merely a minor irritation on the surface, indicates a raging cultural infection coursing underneath.

I’m easily annoyed by words used incorrectly in the hopes of making either the subject matter or the speaker sound more important or intelligent or valuable or necessary than it probably is. This happens regularly; verbal faux pas have been catalogued, column-ized and syndicated. Corporatespeak has created a behemoth of misuses and our own president plays with English as if it were a Nerf football to be tossed about, squished, stepped on, soaked in mud then caught in the dog’s teeth, and hey, don’t worry if a few chunks of actual meaning are missing.

This day, however, the word wasn’t grammatically trounced, but it assaulted my senses nevertheless, leaving an irksome sensation of unpleasantness, a bad taste on my cultural tongue. I was listening to news in the car, as most of my city lay without power after treacherous storms roared through the region. I mention this only because I normally listen to CDs in my car, music to soothe rather than news to agitate. I need calming when I drive so as to avoid my propensity toward early-onset road rage. Anyway, in the midst of the news, a commercial ran for a plastic surgeon who promises to make us all beautiful. He can create perfection. Upgrade us from our …

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Did Adam have a belly-button?

Until yesterday I didn’t realize that there was a serious debate about whether Adam had a navel.  But, alas, the debate has been a serious one in the minds of some people.

According to both versions of creation in Genesis (there are two substantially conflicting versions in the Bible), neither Adam nor Eve was ever in a woman’s uterus.  So neither Adam nor Eve needed a navel.  This doesn’t answer the question of whether they had navels, though.

We don’t have the remains of Adam and Eve.  We don’t have their photos.  How would one resolve this debate, then?  Many believers are undeterred.   Here is one analysis that Adam and Eve had no navels.  Raptureready.com also weighs in with a “no.”  Ditto for Christiananswers.net.  It’s not always seen as a serious debate.  Here is a tongue in cheek account by posted by a Baptist Church.  The terminology can get a bit daunting.  For instance, there is mention of the “Post-Umbilisists,” those “learned theologians and scholars believe that Adam’s navel was formed after the Fall.”

This issue occurred to me only because a friend (thanks, Deb!) recently mentioned to me that her friend was a “Navelite.”  I’d never heard of this religion.  Well, turns out that there is a small offshoot of Christianity that distinguishes itself by its belief that Adam did not have a navel.  It was a big enough issue at one point to cause a schism.  I have this one word of mouth only; Deb’s friend was …

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FCC patrolling our airwaves to protect us from dirty words

MSNBC has just reported that the FCC is working long hours to protect us from harmful language, i.e., language that “depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities or organs in a patently offensive manner.”

In its continuing crackdown on on-air profanity, the FCC has requested numerous tapes from broadcasters that might include vulgar remarks from unruly spectators, coaches and athletes at live sporting events, industry sources said.

Tapes requested by the commission include live broadcasts of football games and NASCAR races where the participants or the crowds let loose with an expletive. While commission officials refused to talk about its requests, one broadcast company executive said the commission had asked for 30 tapes of live sports and news programs.

As explained by MSNBC, the Commission is cracking down on variations of the words “f***” and “s***” even if the words are uttered accidentally.

I’m really glad that our government is keeping TV safe.   This sort of detail work is likely quite expensive, but I’m sure they’ve thought this all though to make sure that there is nothing better to do with all of that money.  There’s no telling what harm could happen if one is exposed to a dangerous word.  I didn’t see Janet Jackson’s nipple, but had I seen it, I might have missed several days of work trying to recover. 

Or so I thought.  Because this is such an important matter, I decided to subject myself to an experiment.I turned off the phone, went to a quiet room …

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How many friends/acquaintances can I have?

In a book called Evolutionary Psychology: A Beginner’s Guide (2005), Robin Dunbar, Louise Barrett and John Lycett addressed this issue.  The book drew on additional research that can be found in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, by Robin Dunbar (1997).

We don’t have limited numbers of friends and acquaintances merely because we choose to have such limited numbers.  Rather, as explained in these two works, physiological limitations constrain human social choices. We are limited in the number of acquaintances we can have because we are physiologically limited.  This is another example that those who claim to explain human animals without the benefit of careful science do so at their own risk.

Human societies are complex social environments.  Archaeologists have determined that pre-modern humans lived in small-scale hunter gatherer societies “characterized by very small, relatively unstable groups, often dispersed across a very large area.”  Only after agriculture was developed (10,000 years ago) did large permanent settlements become possible Living in groups gives members huge advantages such as reduced predation risk (we benefit from the “many eyes” advantage and large groups of individuals deter most predators).

Group living comes with costs, too.  We have conflicts over limited resources, such as food and mates.  Group living stresses immune systems too.  The menstrual cycles of female primates are disrupted.  In order to obtain necessary food, humans need to travel further each day. Associating with large groups of people also has a huge mental cost.  In order to live safely within large groups, …

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