Reflections on Hotel Rwanda

I haven’t seen Hotel Rwanda.  I actually rented the movie, and my husband and I started to watch it, but we had to stop.  We knew what was going to happen, and we didn’t want to see it:  we would have known what was going to happen even if we hadn’t had advance knowledge of the story.  He and I know all about Africa.  Personally, I am too broken-hearted about what is happening there to watch it played out on a 42-inch plasma TV screen.

It’s not just happening in Rwanda.  We only hear about Ruanda more often now because this particular story has given that region a voice. 

The stories are endless, one more chilling than the next.  In South Africa, gangs of black youths who suspect an individual of not being “one of them” inflict horrible death.  And they do not reserve the torture for adults.  Children are not immune.  One favorite form of execution involves soaking a tire in gasoline, placing the tire around the neck of the bound victim, and setting it alight.  I repeat, this is done to children as well as adults.  It is done to blacks by blacks, and the rationale behind the brutality is obscure.  Sometimes it is tribal – amaZulu against any black not Zulu – sometimes there is a loosely formulated political agenda.  Sometimes it is simply a case of bloodlust.

This is no urban myth.  We have witnessed something like it personally.  On our last trip to South Africa …

Share

Continue ReadingReflections on Hotel Rwanda

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, …

Share

Continue ReadingHow many friends/acquaintances can I have?

A new age of immaturity

Once regarded as a Generation-X anomaly, social scientists and news publications around the world now observe a frightening trend in young adults: a marked failure to leave home, find a career, attain what most regard as “adulthood”. The reported lack of maturity manifests itself not just in observation, but in real-world statistics: the percentage of 26-year-olds that live with their parents has nearly doubled since 1970, from 11% to 20% according to a University of Michigan study. The average college experience now takes five years, not four. This new agegroup of immature adults has a variety of names around the world- boomerang kids(Canada), nest-squatter(Germany), adultescents (a few US social scientists), and so on. Japan’s parliament even staged a debate on the disturbing reliance of today’s 20-somethings on their parents. But in some ways, this trend follows historical example.

Before the Renaissance, children did not exist. Of course, the age group did not fail to appear, but pre-Renaissance peoples thought of children as miniature adults more than their own stage in human development. Accordingly, children of the pre-Renaissance had to undertake much higher responsibilities, and enjoyed less education and emotional feedback than their modern equivalents.

Then, some time around the Renaissance, childhood came into existence. Society began to see its younger members as less than fully molded, emotionally delicate and needy. At the same time they receive more coddling, longer educational lives, and more parental patience with less physical punishment. In time it became psychologically clear that children did not posses …

Share

Continue ReadingA new age of immaturity

The elephant in the (Hollywood) living room

In the days of the Hollywood studio system, films were classified as “A” or “B” pictures: the former were the studio’s prestige projects, the latter generally shorter and produced cheaply and quickly. Ironically, sometimes “B” pictures are more interesting today because they were less subject to studio control (due to…

Continue ReadingThe elephant in the (Hollywood) living room

Gay Rights “Not a Civil Rights Issue”?

The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) supplies high school LGBT rights groups around the United States with a wealth of useful information, tools, and event and activity guides. For the last few years, I’ve appreciated the planning guides GLSEN provides as a source of brainstorming and public-relations hints. But looking through a GLSEN binder of open forum topics and public speaking tips recently, I came across an unusual and off-putting suggestion:

“Do NOT compare the LGBT Rights movement to the Civil Rights movement.”

Wait, what? The battle for LGBT rights mirrors the Civil Rights movement in a variety of ways. The reactionary backlash and lack of logic behind opponents’ arguments read exactly the same, complete with desperate biblical references. Take for example this judge’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia, a pre-Civil-Rights case on interracial marriage:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indeed, and Almighty God also created Adam and Eve, not, as the social conservatives say, Adam and Steve. The slow social acceptance and increase in violent hate crimes look much the same, too. So what differentiates Gay Rights from Civil Rights, again?

Well, nothing really. It just ruffles a lot of (black, evangelical) feathers to make the comparison. Apparently GLSEN doesn’t …

Share

Continue ReadingGay Rights “Not a Civil Rights Issue”?