If anyone is looking for a Good Book that endorses and promotes human slavery, Ebonmuse has a recommendation for you. No cheating by skipping around, now. Just read the passages he presents and then heed the conclusions of Ebonmuse.
As human animals, we are condemned to live with great ignorance in an unpredictably violent world. To compensate, most of us work hard to develop an extraordinary expertise to protect ourselves from considering our precarious existence. We work hard to pre-screen toxic thoughts. We rarely contemplate our own inevitable deaths, for example. We are often successful at protecting ourselves from real-life things that would terrify us if we dared to squarely consider them.
Once in a while, though, we get a terrifying glimpse of unvarnished reality. For instance, we sometimes suddenly realize that we are affixed to that Conveyor Belt of Life, a “belt” that inexorably moves us toward a time when we will be old if we’re lucky, then lifeless. Whenever this terrible thought brings shivers, we quickly change channels to consider something less macabre. Yet we are all strapped onto that Conveyor Belt, even our precious young children. In 150 years, everyone currently living on Earth will be dead. It is difficult to conjure up more disturbing thoughts.
What other toxic thoughts occur when our mental guard is down? How about the thought that we are not meaningfully different from each other. Or that the world is full of mobile intestinal tracts–walking talking intestinal tracts. Or that our bodies are rife with parasites. And that we are animals. Or that we are breathing, thinking meat, a point directly yet elegantly made by a touring entourage of corpses known as BodyWorlds. And here’s another toxic truth most of …
Bill Clinton’s Commencement Speech at Harvard – June 6, 2007
The former President explained much societal dysfunction when he asked a simple question: Should we focus on what human beings have in common or should we obsess about their minor differences?
The outcome of this simple choice determines innumerable personal and political agendas. To the extent that we choose incorrectly, the resulting contentious rhetoric has the capacity to mushroom into oppression and violence that can displace, maim and kill millions of people. It has done so repeatedly.
Many of our political and moral disputes stem from this basic low-level perceptual choice: whether to focus on differences or commonalities. Here is how Clinton captured the issue:
So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent?
For at least six years, the air has been thick with violence, bigotry and oppression because too many people are making the wrong choice up front. The current Administration excels at choosing badly. The result? A de facto national policy that anyone who is different is suspicious.
As eloquently …
OK, bear with me here. I’m still processing the adventure a friend and I had earlier this week as we attempted to elicit information, of the public record kind, from our country’s federal bureaucracy. I accompanied my friend on a quest for information about a long-deceased relative. Wow. After only a small glimpse into the inefficiencies of, well, everything, we could only wonder how our entire system has not yet imploded upon itself. First, some background:
This relative in question died in the mid-1930s, and my friend’s family knows that he never became naturalized as a citizen of the US. He was still a citizen of his native Italy as of the 1930 census, the only government document my friend has found thus far (found, by the way, via the genealogical website, http://www.ancestry.com). The relative died only a few short years later. My friend’s search this week is for proof of this lack of naturalization. In order to acquire some documents from Italy, he must show that a search has been conducted for naturalization papers and that they have never been found. Dates are sketchy, as the only living relative with information was just a child when this man died, so the family is working from approximations.
My friend, a very organized fellow, had all the paperwork he’d been able to gather thus far carefully compiled in a folder. He’d scoured the websites of the USCIS (that would be the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, formerly known as the …
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 …