Social science will remain forever in the dark, where it seems to be quite happy to stay, in attempting to explain human behavior unless it recognizes the importance of three simple things. First, mothers are important. Second, mothers are designed to influence or lead their offspring; and third, children are designed to respond to the influence of the parent. These seem like such simple obvious facts, but if we take that same idea back a generation or two worth of parents influencing children who grow up to be parents who influence, then we see that traditions are part of the picture--one generations copies the prior generation, back through time. We are designed this way.
So, the argument will be: why do intellects reject traditions? In my bad moments, I say because they are stupid. However, I would argue that they are influenced by the current focus on individualism, which implies that we allow few if anyone to influence us. To allow the past to influence us would be something they reject with vigor, as it is both old and involves influence.
So, the next argument will be: parents don't influence children; peers do.
So, again, I would point to a novel environment. Somewhere I have a paper I wrote on parental, not peer influence. I will find it and summarize it in my next blog.
12/19/2007
11/27/2007
The woman with 10,000 stories
Today I had breakfast with a woman who has at her finger tips and the tip of her tongue 10,000 stories. She is Yaqui and has published the poetry she has written of her ancestors, the land and its plants and animals, and the traditions. She said she is a renegada, interesting word, no? To re-deny. It must come from people who deny traditions. However, she clearly saw traditions as a blessing. What she must denounce is the absurdity of tribal politics, a topic I will cover with an altar cloth and holy water and leave aside for another day.
She told me that when she was young they would go out into the desert to find willow wood and out of it they would make a simple cross. The cross would be dressed as an old woman and they would hang her at the front of their house and talk to her as a grandmother. She protected the home and the family. The old woman cross hangs there for many years until it becomes very old and is falling apart. It is then replaced.
She said that all of her poetry came from the cadence of speaking that she had learned when her grandmother told stories. The evening would come and they would build a large bonfire on the desert and she would tell them one story after another, some lovely, some sad, some full of fear and dread. I had to sit and wonder if the way we tell stories has not been damaging. In the past, people sat together and the story telling was more ritualized. People faced each other and made eye contract. Today, we read books, our eyes often on the book, not peering into the child's eyes.
She also told me that she had learned that unless you could tell a story simply, in few words, you did not understand its essence. The mark of a good storytelling was that gift of few words.
She told me that when she was young they would go out into the desert to find willow wood and out of it they would make a simple cross. The cross would be dressed as an old woman and they would hang her at the front of their house and talk to her as a grandmother. She protected the home and the family. The old woman cross hangs there for many years until it becomes very old and is falling apart. It is then replaced.
She said that all of her poetry came from the cadence of speaking that she had learned when her grandmother told stories. The evening would come and they would build a large bonfire on the desert and she would tell them one story after another, some lovely, some sad, some full of fear and dread. I had to sit and wonder if the way we tell stories has not been damaging. In the past, people sat together and the story telling was more ritualized. People faced each other and made eye contract. Today, we read books, our eyes often on the book, not peering into the child's eyes.
She also told me that she had learned that unless you could tell a story simply, in few words, you did not understand its essence. The mark of a good storytelling was that gift of few words.
11/25/2007
Part II. Saga of the Disappearing Damsel
I once read that you can never put your foot in the same river twice, as every time you dip your foot in the river, it is a new river. While this is both true (e.g., the water atoms (hydrogen and oxygen) are different and pebbles at the bottom might have been moved along and new fish might have appeared--or old ones disappeared), it is also untrue (e.g., the Mississipi is not now the Nile).
A human life is often described as a river, beginning as a tiny streamlette and rushing down into full strength. I am not sure where old age fits in, but if a river runs long enough and does not end at the sea it may seem to disappear, sinking perhaps into the earth to an underground cave. More likely new streams and rivers will join it, and it will become more and more grand. Eventually, however, all rivers end. However, in this sense--rivers are made up of contributing bodies of water -- rivers are like communities, with its strength measured in the numbers of collaborating partners. I will have to think more about that metaphor.
It is doubtful that the river ever forgets what it is. The Nile, which as far as we know has no conscious mind (it is not sentient) will never wake up and begin to argue that it is actually the Missouri River and that Lewis and Clark are caught up in dugout canoes on the surface of its waters, wrapped in time warp that encircles and enbraces them like Echinodorus latifolius and Hydrocotyle leucocephala (which are actually amazonian fresh water plants)or even Dwarf Sagittaria, which is described as a completely undemanding plant?
It would seem that as we move along through life, the person we were before would be a part of us, perhaps 1/4 of us that is identifiable in the upper arm, thigh, and forehead and certainly in a percentage of the memory. Certainly one would think that the way we thought in the past would make up a quarter or some percentage of our thinking and that there would be a graceful evolution from Time A, to Time B, to Time X... If this were true, then you could take out any thought and look at it, and identify the root thoughts and the evolutionary process. This does not seem to be the case as it is possible to wake up one morning early and think: My god, how could that child (teenager, young adult) have ever been me? This does not mean you do not like the old you, you may even mourn the non-existence of the old you, but that the old you is a stranger.
A human life is often described as a river, beginning as a tiny streamlette and rushing down into full strength. I am not sure where old age fits in, but if a river runs long enough and does not end at the sea it may seem to disappear, sinking perhaps into the earth to an underground cave. More likely new streams and rivers will join it, and it will become more and more grand. Eventually, however, all rivers end. However, in this sense--rivers are made up of contributing bodies of water -- rivers are like communities, with its strength measured in the numbers of collaborating partners. I will have to think more about that metaphor.
It is doubtful that the river ever forgets what it is. The Nile, which as far as we know has no conscious mind (it is not sentient) will never wake up and begin to argue that it is actually the Missouri River and that Lewis and Clark are caught up in dugout canoes on the surface of its waters, wrapped in time warp that encircles and enbraces them like Echinodorus latifolius and Hydrocotyle leucocephala (which are actually amazonian fresh water plants)or even Dwarf Sagittaria, which is described as a completely undemanding plant?
It would seem that as we move along through life, the person we were before would be a part of us, perhaps 1/4 of us that is identifiable in the upper arm, thigh, and forehead and certainly in a percentage of the memory. Certainly one would think that the way we thought in the past would make up a quarter or some percentage of our thinking and that there would be a graceful evolution from Time A, to Time B, to Time X... If this were true, then you could take out any thought and look at it, and identify the root thoughts and the evolutionary process. This does not seem to be the case as it is possible to wake up one morning early and think: My god, how could that child (teenager, young adult) have ever been me? This does not mean you do not like the old you, you may even mourn the non-existence of the old you, but that the old you is a stranger.
11/24/2007
The Saga of the Disappearing Damsel....
The Saga of the Disappearing Damsel....
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a fiefdom far away there lived a young lady of gentle birth and quiet manner. Of her, people said that still waters run deep. The still waters was probably a guess, as silence does not, in truth, predict ability or depth. To do that, one needs a depth sounder, something that should be invented, as grades in school are not accurate depth sounders either. Everything I know about depth sounders comes from Mark Twain.
Well, this young damsel did recognize that there was more than one side to her, but the quiet side was more comfortable and, more important, sustainable, as being the life of any party was a drain on her soul and intellect, requiring a rest afterward.
Gentle and quiet did not mean she was not a risk taker; if anything she was too much of one, riding horses with abandon, traveling alone into the rainforest, walking undaunted into high crime fishing villages, making angry those with power. She did stop short, in her risk taking, of being a total fool.
Anyway, when I think back over my youth, it is hard to remember being her, although tiny splinters of her seem to lie in hidden places.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a fiefdom far away there lived a young lady of gentle birth and quiet manner. Of her, people said that still waters run deep. The still waters was probably a guess, as silence does not, in truth, predict ability or depth. To do that, one needs a depth sounder, something that should be invented, as grades in school are not accurate depth sounders either. Everything I know about depth sounders comes from Mark Twain.
Well, this young damsel did recognize that there was more than one side to her, but the quiet side was more comfortable and, more important, sustainable, as being the life of any party was a drain on her soul and intellect, requiring a rest afterward.
Gentle and quiet did not mean she was not a risk taker; if anything she was too much of one, riding horses with abandon, traveling alone into the rainforest, walking undaunted into high crime fishing villages, making angry those with power. She did stop short, in her risk taking, of being a total fool.
Anyway, when I think back over my youth, it is hard to remember being her, although tiny splinters of her seem to lie in hidden places.
11/23/2007
Given the script writers strike and general malaise
I am going to recycle my thanksgiving message from two years ago:
11/24/2005
From killer apes to happy thanksgiving
Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **
This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low
Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.
Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.
However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.
I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).
So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.
*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.
**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.
11/24/2005
From killer apes to happy thanksgiving
Darwinian theorists, at least those who think beyond accepted dogma and limited set of data that can acceptably be used to test theories (i.e., surveys done with undergraduate psychology students, cross cultural studies of highly westernized people, and limited amounts of descriptive data drawn from the worst ethnographies of all time), realize that they need to account, at some point, not only for altruism (e.g., the bountiful meal that the Indians fed to the starving and largely ignorant British colonists), particularly if that altruism is not returned in kind (did the British ever return that act of altruism, double fold, to those who fed them? What the theory requires is a quick return, probably among people with regular interactions, that is greater than the original gift), but that they need to account for other human behaviors, including rituals. **
This brings us to the topic of rituals involving gifts, or actually we started with rituals, but I have been trying to get from killer apes to ritualized, bountiful, and generous feeding of the stranger, and this requires meandering a bit through the morass that theory has built around human behavior. Modern Darwinian theorists explain altruism (gifts, generosity?) in several ways. The first is group selection, a theory that is wrong and I will not even bother to discuss it, as some very intelligent people have spent a lot of effort doing so (read their stuff, with skepticism of course). This just means that group x, because it has cooperative folk in it, can beat the pants off group y, because group x can, if nothing else, create killer fighting groups).* The second theory is reciprocal altruism, which can explain some behavior, especially that seen in the modern world (this refers to tit for tat--you give to me, I give to you, as discussed in the first paragraph), and the third is kin selection. In the case of the first thanksgiving, I have dismissed explanation one and two (because the colonists did not quickly and adequately reward their saviors and group selection is wrong), but explanation three, kin selection, obviously does not fit either--unless we go back to the early, early common ancestor of all humans (that killer ape?) these people eating together were not close kin, the co-efficient of relatedness was too low
Further, this limited handful of theories, it seems to me, cannot account for the fact that for several hundred years, that first set of thanksgiving behaviors has been ritualized, handed down, from one generation to the next. Thanksgiving, today, is a family ritual of generosity and sharing. I would argue it was a family ritual the first time it was done, with family defined in that case fictively--metaphorical kin. I argue in my book that a fundamental maternal behavior, which is the foundation of kinship, is generosity and care of the vulnerable. Of course this brings us to the topic of "good" mothers, a topic I will discuss on another day when I want to tweak the militant feminists and their easily aroused ire.
Maternal-child interactions, from very early in human prehistory, were ritualized, involving such things as particular feeding interactions, play activities to keep a child quiet if nothing else. I see as stereotyped behavior. A handshake is a ritual, as is a religious service, which involves a large set of stereotyped behaviors. Predictability in a pretty unpredictable world must have been essential for our ancestors and their survival and reproduction.
However, to end this topic, I must return to that act of generosity and the vulnerable position in which such an act places the generous person. Now, at a time when American Indians are vulnerable and in many cases desperate (unemployment being 50% on many reservations), I see no caravans going out to reservations carrying bountiful amounts of food. When a person is generous, that person uses his/her important resources for the benefit of others, in this case relative strangers. These resources go to promote the survival and reproduction of the stranger. They also put those colonists in a position to reward the generous act, but over and over, generation after generation, quite the opposite has been done.
I am not arguing for nobility of past peoples, so much as I am arguing that we need to focus some of our studies on the altruism seen in traditional peoples. Of course, there will be some quick and slick response (at least in my mind, as no one knows this site exists, except my family and this blog is aimed at explaining my book to them in bits and pieces) on the part of theorists. Without having heard any of the arguments, although they will be predictable, probably drawn from something obscure in history that provides another view of the event (something like a statement saying that the Indians only served the worst looking and lowest in nutrient content foods, and kept the good food for themselves--it is way too tempting to rewrite history, as we often do, to fit our theories, and it begs the question of why serve the stranger anything that was at all edible).
So, happy thanksgiving and think about the fact that you may be here because generations ago someone fed a stranger.
*while it may be true that a cooperative set of individuals, meaning they work together towards an aim, can whip a less cooperative set (who can't get an act together), too many genes were being swapped for group selection to explain this.
**my mother would have hated that sentence as she always said that anything important enough to write should not be lessened by putting it in parentheses.
11/19/2007
7 random facts
Hum, my own daughter has requested this of me, so as a dutiful mother, I must reply.
To begin, however, I am pretty much not very weird (isn’t the rule I before e except after c or when sounding like a, such as in neighbor or weigh?).
(1) I went alone into the Ecuadorian rainforest, hitching a ride in a dugout canoe, sailing (do dugout canoes sail?) off into the mists and the meandering river.
(2) I studied horseback riding with the cavalry in Bogota, Colombia, where I quickly realized that I could always have a second career as a trick rider -- as we had to do flips and hops and jumps and all sorts of things. My own horse was an ex race horse and on one of my last rides, she, stubborn mule that she was (actually she was an Anglo Arab) stopped dead right before the jump, so I went sailing over the jump while she stood there with a smile on her face.
(3) I studied sculpture and learned to use the acetylene torch, so I also could be a welder. I also cut off the end of my finger with a chisel. As I dripped blood while walking across campus, I remember thinking that this was the only mark I left on that particular campus. When I got to student health they shoved a form at me and told me to fill it out. I stopped applying pressure to my finger. They ended up filling a new form out for me. It rained the next day and erased my marks. This is quite a story for Arizona.
(4) I love studying prime numbers and when I am bored in meetings I try to identify the prime numbers up to 100,000.
(5) I find pure joy in my children and grandchildren and need nothing more, well maybe food and shelter, to be happy.
(6) I want to write a children’s book about an old rusty car that is abandoned in a vacant lot. A girl, who is much like me, sits in the car and drives into wonderful imaginary journeys. One day a very old man comes around and sits with her. He used to own the car and he tells her stories about where the car traveled.
(7) I want to write another book about the way women civilized the west. I also want to write a lay version of my book.
To begin, however, I am pretty much not very weird (isn’t the rule I before e except after c or when sounding like a, such as in neighbor or weigh?).
(1) I went alone into the Ecuadorian rainforest, hitching a ride in a dugout canoe, sailing (do dugout canoes sail?) off into the mists and the meandering river.
(2) I studied horseback riding with the cavalry in Bogota, Colombia, where I quickly realized that I could always have a second career as a trick rider -- as we had to do flips and hops and jumps and all sorts of things. My own horse was an ex race horse and on one of my last rides, she, stubborn mule that she was (actually she was an Anglo Arab) stopped dead right before the jump, so I went sailing over the jump while she stood there with a smile on her face.
(3) I studied sculpture and learned to use the acetylene torch, so I also could be a welder. I also cut off the end of my finger with a chisel. As I dripped blood while walking across campus, I remember thinking that this was the only mark I left on that particular campus. When I got to student health they shoved a form at me and told me to fill it out. I stopped applying pressure to my finger. They ended up filling a new form out for me. It rained the next day and erased my marks. This is quite a story for Arizona.
(4) I love studying prime numbers and when I am bored in meetings I try to identify the prime numbers up to 100,000.
(5) I find pure joy in my children and grandchildren and need nothing more, well maybe food and shelter, to be happy.
(6) I want to write a children’s book about an old rusty car that is abandoned in a vacant lot. A girl, who is much like me, sits in the car and drives into wonderful imaginary journeys. One day a very old man comes around and sits with her. He used to own the car and he tells her stories about where the car traveled.
(7) I want to write another book about the way women civilized the west. I also want to write a lay version of my book.
10/30/2007
The issue of creativity and the role of art critics
In the 19th Century, art styles, influenced by the rising merchant class and a growing number of art collectors, began to change, to rapidly go in and out of fashion. Collectors were intrigued by novelty. When a particular art style was in fashion, Seligman (1952) wrote, the “works of all artists directly or indirectly connected with it were almost equally sought…It was almost as if no critical sense existed (p. 4). “Even more surprising,” he continued, “is the sweeping manner in which all were discarded overnight’ (p. 4). “Taste,” he wrote, evolves “by a series of fanatical infatuations and complete rejections” (p. vii).
A few decades after David had painted The Crowning of Bonaparte and his Empress, Constable, viewing this painting, wrote: ”As a painting it does not possess anything of the Language of the art, much less of the oratory of Rubens or Paul Veronese; it is below notice as a work of execution” (December 6, 1822, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:268). Almost fifty years after Goya completed his Disastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War, 1810), Edouard Manet dismissed Goya’s work, calling it “inferior” (1865, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:303). Innes (1884), in a letter written to the editor of an unknown paper, referred to impressionism as a “humbug,” a mere “pancake of color” (Goldwater & Treves,1945:344).
Narrative paintings (that depicted a story and emphasized subject matter) and naturalistic representations (realism) began to be disparaged, partially as a reaction to the use of art to promote war and revolution. An emphasis now was placed on color, line, and form. Eugène Delacroix became famous primarily for “using a color palette capable of eliciting specific emotional reactions from his viewers” (Fleming 1974:316).
As art began to change, individuals were no longer certain what distinguished good art from bad. Individuals like John Ruskin and Edward Stieglitz would step in and use their influence to develop contemporary art and taste. In the 1850s, painters had doggedly painted according to Ruskin’s precepts. At the turn of the century, collectors bought art only from artists endorsed by Stieglitz (Maas 1984:14).
The unrelenting search for the new characterized this century, as it would characterize the next. Yet, as early as 1821, Ingres issued a cautionary note:
Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: ‘We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.’ Sophistry—all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer: ‘We must follow our century’: but suppose my century is wrong. (cited in Goldwater & Treves 1945:218)
In the 20th Century, Berenson (1948) wrote that visual art should “tune us like instruments--instruments for ecstasy” by stirring “all of our emotions” (p. 147). Ecstasy was aroused, not by the narrative, but by visual art’s “significant form” --the combination of lines, forms, and colors that characterized visual art (1914/1977:40). Recognizing that we did not know precisely why line, color, form could “make people happy, sad, excited, and so on” (Blocker 1979:101), Langer (1953) proposed that the emotional response actually was to the symbols. "Art,“ she argued, “is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling" (p. 40).
The establishment of the new style of visual art, the avant-garde or modern art, which would come to characterize the early part of the century, was built on the destruction of the visual art that had been done earlier. Men like Edward Stiegliz, Clement Greenberg, and Herman Broch dismissed traditional art, even paintings that prior to that had been considered to be great works. The younger generations of 20th century artists, Seligman (1952) explained, rejected all the work of the prior generations (p. 57).
Artists in the 19th and 20th centuries entered enthusiastically, and with some competitive vigor, into a series of “isms”: Impressionism, Abstract expressionism, Neoprimitivism, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Nonobjectivism. The influence guiding this series of “isms” was competition, wealthy collectors, the words of a few confident men, and disdain for the past (even yesterday’s past An anonymous writer (1918), outraged by artists he felt were compromising their sacred and exalted positions for financial gain, wrote in The Art World:
The field of art is no longer an innocent, Sacred Elysium in which each artist, critic, and aesthetician labors for the greater glory of God and the salvation of mankind…The vast increase in millionaires…[has] opened up to the unscrupulous so many avenues of gain that it has transformed a once sacred field of ideal and poetic aspiration [in]to a sordid mart of financial speculation. The money-changers have invaded and are desecrating the Temple!
Alfred Steiglitz, a leading advocate of modern art and photography, established the experimental art gallery “291” in New York City to create exhibit space for artists who were above commercial considerations (Rodgers 1992:54). Due to the efforts of Steiglitz, both in his gallery and his journal, there was major shift in the role of the artist who now was known more publicly as a seer, a prophet, whose life (if not art) was to be seen as “paradigmatic of the new order they sought for society” (p. 54). The Gallery 291 was “a church consecrated to them who had lost old gods and whose need was sore for new ones” (Steiglitz, 1917). This new “religion” was to lead America away from capitalism towards a utopia.
“The artist,” Seligman (1952) wrote, “far more than the layman is perceptive of his environment and this new potential has allowed to him a new vision of which contemporary art is a materialization” (p. 160). It was this unique knowledge and sensitive, that led artists to be viewed as prophets (Lippman 1929) who could lead us to a brave new world by producing visual art that, Bell explained, “might prove the world’s salvation” (1914/1977:47). What artists did was work to destroy the past. As Hoebel (1949) wrote, visual art…can serve to sustain them [social groups], as Renaissance art served medieval Christianity, or it can strive to destroy them, as does the anarchistic art of the Dadaists who hold modern civilization to be so false and meaningless that the honest artist can only lampoon and destroy it with senseless combinations of line and color. (p. 162)
Narrative paintings continued to be dismissed as lesser forms of art because they were seen as tools used by social and political groups to “rouse us to action” (Berenson 1948:68). From Plato’s day to the latest,” Berenson complained, “states, societies, synagogues, churches, and conventicles have deliberately tried to harness art for their particular advantage and, failing that, suppress it altogether” (p. 147). Berenson did not deny that visual art could influence behavior, he just did not want to see visual art used that way. Narrative paintings, he (1948) explained, “cannot help exercising influence, seeing how prone we are willynilly, to imitate what we see and be affected by what we hear” (p. 22).
While a number of new ideas were introduced during 20th century (e.g., art as expression; ideas of detachment, disinterestness, and psychical distance, and various permutations of postmodernism), artists continued to be seen as talented, sensitive, and as having a unique vision. Art has largely come to be seen as idiosyncratic, creative, costly, symbolic, and insightful, and likely to arouse an aesthetic emotion. Many would agree that artists have a special intelligence. Seligman (1952) wrote,
The ‘genius’ is a rara avis whose meteoric appearance revolutionizes the artistic world and, often unbeknownst to himself, adds a new and brilliant star to the aesthetic constellation. He has a message with which to astound the world and for which the technical means at his command may be too limited…Alone in his ivory tower of thoughts, alone with his torments, unconscious of the outer world’s appreciation or deprecation, he follows his divine mission. (p. 153)
The idea of the artist as a mad man, introduced by Veronese after the Council of Trent, was fine tuned around the time of Freud; mental illness, became linked with the creative process. Some felt that there was a causal connection between the psychic illness of the artist and his artistic power. Saul Rosenzweig (1943) refers to this madness as the “sacrificial roots” of art (cited in Trilling, 1971). Artistic power was gained through mental suffering (Trilling, 1971).
A few decades after David had painted The Crowning of Bonaparte and his Empress, Constable, viewing this painting, wrote: ”As a painting it does not possess anything of the Language of the art, much less of the oratory of Rubens or Paul Veronese; it is below notice as a work of execution” (December 6, 1822, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:268). Almost fifty years after Goya completed his Disastres de la Guerra (Disasters of War, 1810), Edouard Manet dismissed Goya’s work, calling it “inferior” (1865, cited in Goldwater & Treves,1945:303). Innes (1884), in a letter written to the editor of an unknown paper, referred to impressionism as a “humbug,” a mere “pancake of color” (Goldwater & Treves,1945:344).
Narrative paintings (that depicted a story and emphasized subject matter) and naturalistic representations (realism) began to be disparaged, partially as a reaction to the use of art to promote war and revolution. An emphasis now was placed on color, line, and form. Eugène Delacroix became famous primarily for “using a color palette capable of eliciting specific emotional reactions from his viewers” (Fleming 1974:316).
As art began to change, individuals were no longer certain what distinguished good art from bad. Individuals like John Ruskin and Edward Stieglitz would step in and use their influence to develop contemporary art and taste. In the 1850s, painters had doggedly painted according to Ruskin’s precepts. At the turn of the century, collectors bought art only from artists endorsed by Stieglitz (Maas 1984:14).
The unrelenting search for the new characterized this century, as it would characterize the next. Yet, as early as 1821, Ingres issued a cautionary note:
Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: ‘We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.’ Sophistry—all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer: ‘We must follow our century’: but suppose my century is wrong. (cited in Goldwater & Treves 1945:218)
In the 20th Century, Berenson (1948) wrote that visual art should “tune us like instruments--instruments for ecstasy” by stirring “all of our emotions” (p. 147). Ecstasy was aroused, not by the narrative, but by visual art’s “significant form” --the combination of lines, forms, and colors that characterized visual art (1914/1977:40). Recognizing that we did not know precisely why line, color, form could “make people happy, sad, excited, and so on” (Blocker 1979:101), Langer (1953) proposed that the emotional response actually was to the symbols. "Art,“ she argued, “is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling" (p. 40).
The establishment of the new style of visual art, the avant-garde or modern art, which would come to characterize the early part of the century, was built on the destruction of the visual art that had been done earlier. Men like Edward Stiegliz, Clement Greenberg, and Herman Broch dismissed traditional art, even paintings that prior to that had been considered to be great works. The younger generations of 20th century artists, Seligman (1952) explained, rejected all the work of the prior generations (p. 57).
Artists in the 19th and 20th centuries entered enthusiastically, and with some competitive vigor, into a series of “isms”: Impressionism, Abstract expressionism, Neoprimitivism, Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Nonobjectivism. The influence guiding this series of “isms” was competition, wealthy collectors, the words of a few confident men, and disdain for the past (even yesterday’s past An anonymous writer (1918), outraged by artists he felt were compromising their sacred and exalted positions for financial gain, wrote in The Art World:
The field of art is no longer an innocent, Sacred Elysium in which each artist, critic, and aesthetician labors for the greater glory of God and the salvation of mankind…The vast increase in millionaires…[has] opened up to the unscrupulous so many avenues of gain that it has transformed a once sacred field of ideal and poetic aspiration [in]to a sordid mart of financial speculation. The money-changers have invaded and are desecrating the Temple!
Alfred Steiglitz, a leading advocate of modern art and photography, established the experimental art gallery “291” in New York City to create exhibit space for artists who were above commercial considerations (Rodgers 1992:54). Due to the efforts of Steiglitz, both in his gallery and his journal, there was major shift in the role of the artist who now was known more publicly as a seer, a prophet, whose life (if not art) was to be seen as “paradigmatic of the new order they sought for society” (p. 54). The Gallery 291 was “a church consecrated to them who had lost old gods and whose need was sore for new ones” (Steiglitz, 1917). This new “religion” was to lead America away from capitalism towards a utopia.
“The artist,” Seligman (1952) wrote, “far more than the layman is perceptive of his environment and this new potential has allowed to him a new vision of which contemporary art is a materialization” (p. 160). It was this unique knowledge and sensitive, that led artists to be viewed as prophets (Lippman 1929) who could lead us to a brave new world by producing visual art that, Bell explained, “might prove the world’s salvation” (1914/1977:47). What artists did was work to destroy the past. As Hoebel (1949) wrote, visual art…can serve to sustain them [social groups], as Renaissance art served medieval Christianity, or it can strive to destroy them, as does the anarchistic art of the Dadaists who hold modern civilization to be so false and meaningless that the honest artist can only lampoon and destroy it with senseless combinations of line and color. (p. 162)
Narrative paintings continued to be dismissed as lesser forms of art because they were seen as tools used by social and political groups to “rouse us to action” (Berenson 1948:68). From Plato’s day to the latest,” Berenson complained, “states, societies, synagogues, churches, and conventicles have deliberately tried to harness art for their particular advantage and, failing that, suppress it altogether” (p. 147). Berenson did not deny that visual art could influence behavior, he just did not want to see visual art used that way. Narrative paintings, he (1948) explained, “cannot help exercising influence, seeing how prone we are willynilly, to imitate what we see and be affected by what we hear” (p. 22).
While a number of new ideas were introduced during 20th century (e.g., art as expression; ideas of detachment, disinterestness, and psychical distance, and various permutations of postmodernism), artists continued to be seen as talented, sensitive, and as having a unique vision. Art has largely come to be seen as idiosyncratic, creative, costly, symbolic, and insightful, and likely to arouse an aesthetic emotion. Many would agree that artists have a special intelligence. Seligman (1952) wrote,
The ‘genius’ is a rara avis whose meteoric appearance revolutionizes the artistic world and, often unbeknownst to himself, adds a new and brilliant star to the aesthetic constellation. He has a message with which to astound the world and for which the technical means at his command may be too limited…Alone in his ivory tower of thoughts, alone with his torments, unconscious of the outer world’s appreciation or deprecation, he follows his divine mission. (p. 153)
The idea of the artist as a mad man, introduced by Veronese after the Council of Trent, was fine tuned around the time of Freud; mental illness, became linked with the creative process. Some felt that there was a causal connection between the psychic illness of the artist and his artistic power. Saul Rosenzweig (1943) refers to this madness as the “sacrificial roots” of art (cited in Trilling, 1971). Artistic power was gained through mental suffering (Trilling, 1971).
The issue of what creativity is/isn't
Although the ancestors have probably been intentionally discarded thousands of time, there is an association between a breakdown in traditions, kinship, and the flourishing of the arts. By flourishing of the arts, I am not referring to such things as the vast number of art forms used by the traditional people of Bali, or to the process of producing a work of art, I am referring to dramatic changes in style. Most call this rapid and dramatic change using the term: creativity.
10/22/2007
My grandfather's shoes
My grandfather, Francis Jackson, died over 80 years ago, when my mother was eight years old. He is buried, if not in a pauper's grave, as is the rightful place for the poet he was, then with a poor man's marker. That is, from what we know, the way he would have wented things to be.
Not only was he buried with a poor man's grave marker, but he was buried, at his request, without his shoes. He wanted his shoes to be given to someone who could not afford them. In the early 1920s, a good pair of men's shoes cost $4.85.
That is the end of the story we were told. What was his worlkd like as he lay dying.
According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/audio/history/pdf/america_in_ the_1920s_triumph_or_disaster.pdf
For me, the theme of the decade is economic prosperity: technological innovation, especially in the motor industry – by 1925 Ford were producing a car every 10 seconds; a burgeoning synthetics industry … the invention of nylon;. a revolution in communications, and in electrical goods; a doubling of the number of telephones and radios, and a tripling of the number of cars. Causes? To a degree, government policy – isolation and protective tariffs – the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922. But more particularly, the rise of a consumer economy, especially the development of advertising and hire purchase, and the growth of the first share-holding economy in the world. For me, the overriding image of 1920s America is a glossy automobile, rich young men and fashionable young women relaxing by a swimming pool, and the legend ‘The Better Buick’.
VS.
I think – by contrast – I would stress the FRAGILITY of the American economy. Tariffs were ultimately going to harm trade, not help it. Agriculture was in crisis --half a million farmers a year were going bankrupt – and the coal and textiles industries were in decline. Prosperity was an illusory crust on the top of the American pie: the richest 5% of the people earned a third of the income, and in the meantime 42% per cent of the population were living below the poverty line. The 1920s was not about prosperity, it was about over-heating–over-production, over confidence, and of course the completely mad speculation in shares, and bogus companies, and bad banking that led to the 1929 depression. It all ended in tears.
VS.
Flappers! The Roaring Twenties! I’m sure that economy is important, but it’s all dreadfully boring, isn’t it, and if you’re looking for where 1920s America made its mark, surely it’s got to be its social impact? I mean, this was THE age of revolution … of liberation. Jazz … Benny Goodman and Fats Waller. Films – the coming of the talkies … Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. And dances! – the Charleston and the Black Bottom. And most of all, a REVOLUTION in the role of women. The advent of the ‘working girl’, and – after 1920 – the VOTING girl. Coco Channel and the ‘garconne’ look, short skirts, those AWFUL hats, smoking in public, playing tennis – these developments have formed our world as it is today, and they were born in American society in the 1920s. So my icon for the 1920s would be film goddess Clara Bow in the film ‘It’, as the self-confident shopgirl Betty Lou Spence, who has ‘it’ and is ‘it’, as she chases rich businessman Cyrus Waltham.
The reality, for most Americans....
To be a widow with a young child in the 1920s was not a position one would desire, had one a choice. There were almost no funds available for widows with dependent children. Many children were put into orphanages, despite the fact that they had a living parent but that parent could not afford the keep the child. One paper said that people would rather give 100 dollars to support an orphanage than 10 dollars to a poor widow with children. What a curious species we are, touched by the children, not so much the mother. Few jobs were open to women.
Not only was he buried with a poor man's grave marker, but he was buried, at his request, without his shoes. He wanted his shoes to be given to someone who could not afford them. In the early 1920s, a good pair of men's shoes cost $4.85.
That is the end of the story we were told. What was his worlkd like as he lay dying.
According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/audio/history/pdf/america_in_ the_1920s_triumph_or_disaster.pdf
For me, the theme of the decade is economic prosperity: technological innovation, especially in the motor industry – by 1925 Ford were producing a car every 10 seconds; a burgeoning synthetics industry … the invention of nylon;. a revolution in communications, and in electrical goods; a doubling of the number of telephones and radios, and a tripling of the number of cars. Causes? To a degree, government policy – isolation and protective tariffs – the Fordney-McCumber Act of 1922. But more particularly, the rise of a consumer economy, especially the development of advertising and hire purchase, and the growth of the first share-holding economy in the world. For me, the overriding image of 1920s America is a glossy automobile, rich young men and fashionable young women relaxing by a swimming pool, and the legend ‘The Better Buick’.
VS.
I think – by contrast – I would stress the FRAGILITY of the American economy. Tariffs were ultimately going to harm trade, not help it. Agriculture was in crisis --half a million farmers a year were going bankrupt – and the coal and textiles industries were in decline. Prosperity was an illusory crust on the top of the American pie: the richest 5% of the people earned a third of the income, and in the meantime 42% per cent of the population were living below the poverty line. The 1920s was not about prosperity, it was about over-heating–over-production, over confidence, and of course the completely mad speculation in shares, and bogus companies, and bad banking that led to the 1929 depression. It all ended in tears.
VS.
Flappers! The Roaring Twenties! I’m sure that economy is important, but it’s all dreadfully boring, isn’t it, and if you’re looking for where 1920s America made its mark, surely it’s got to be its social impact? I mean, this was THE age of revolution … of liberation. Jazz … Benny Goodman and Fats Waller. Films – the coming of the talkies … Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. And dances! – the Charleston and the Black Bottom. And most of all, a REVOLUTION in the role of women. The advent of the ‘working girl’, and – after 1920 – the VOTING girl. Coco Channel and the ‘garconne’ look, short skirts, those AWFUL hats, smoking in public, playing tennis – these developments have formed our world as it is today, and they were born in American society in the 1920s. So my icon for the 1920s would be film goddess Clara Bow in the film ‘It’, as the self-confident shopgirl Betty Lou Spence, who has ‘it’ and is ‘it’, as she chases rich businessman Cyrus Waltham.
The reality, for most Americans....
To be a widow with a young child in the 1920s was not a position one would desire, had one a choice. There were almost no funds available for widows with dependent children. Many children were put into orphanages, despite the fact that they had a living parent but that parent could not afford the keep the child. One paper said that people would rather give 100 dollars to support an orphanage than 10 dollars to a poor widow with children. What a curious species we are, touched by the children, not so much the mother. Few jobs were open to women.
7/28/2007
Streets of Laredo
While working on my computer this morning, I turned on my itunes and clicked on Marty Robbins' "Streets of Loredo," a song I have listened to numerous times before. It begins with such sad, mournful sounds and goes into a sad song about a young cowboy who is dying and wants a drink of cool water before he dies. The song has always been one that I have liked, as we grew up around cowboys, but this morning it struck me as so very sad that tears started pouring from my eyes. There were the lines of mothers who, throughout history, have tenderly raised their sons and kissed them good bye as they went off -- young greenhorns off to seek their fortune. Sons they would never see again. Sons they knew were likely to be foolish risk takers, sons they knew they probably would never see again. Then, there is the line of sons who died unmourned, far from home. So many lives. So much sadness.
7/25/2007
Argument #3: the importance of culture and traditions across species
I am not sure if I was successful in attempting to upload a connection to a paper entitled "Understanding culture across species". It was written by Richard W. Byrne, Philip J. Barnard, Iaim Davidson, Vincent M. Janik, William C. McGrew, Adam Miklosi, and Polly Wiessner. It was published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(8) and is available through www.sciencedirect.com
To make a long story short,
"The lack of local behavioral variation in most animals is...taken to relect cognitive simplicity and human cultures are attributed to more sophisticated or hier fidelity mechanism: imitatation, creative ideation, theory of mind, teaching dependent upon join attention or even deliberate instruction."
"Culture [however] can be exhibited by any animal with a mind that allows social learning; conversely, finding cultural variation is no guarantee of unusual cognitive capacity....Part of the excitement about culture in animals is based on culture's potential to allow access to information not available otherwise. With useful, socially learnt traditions, a local population can 'punch above its weight', and thus gain a criticasl survival advantage. Elephants can learn of the location of water sources merely by following their elders. Without this social guidance they could not survive in the Namib; with it, individuals gain valuable knowledge for nothing. If each generation adds something to what they laernt, then 'racheting' of cultural knowledge can occur--a sort of cultural comound interest."
The authors provide many additional example. However, if you have trouble with their definition of culture and tradition, please read the paper.
To make a long story short,
"The lack of local behavioral variation in most animals is...taken to relect cognitive simplicity and human cultures are attributed to more sophisticated or hier fidelity mechanism: imitatation, creative ideation, theory of mind, teaching dependent upon join attention or even deliberate instruction."
"Culture [however] can be exhibited by any animal with a mind that allows social learning; conversely, finding cultural variation is no guarantee of unusual cognitive capacity....Part of the excitement about culture in animals is based on culture's potential to allow access to information not available otherwise. With useful, socially learnt traditions, a local population can 'punch above its weight', and thus gain a criticasl survival advantage. Elephants can learn of the location of water sources merely by following their elders. Without this social guidance they could not survive in the Namib; with it, individuals gain valuable knowledge for nothing. If each generation adds something to what they laernt, then 'racheting' of cultural knowledge can occur--a sort of cultural comound interest."
The authors provide many additional example. However, if you have trouble with their definition of culture and tradition, please read the paper.
Argument #2 Traditions and Ancestors
I am not sure what you think traditions are, but if you are like my students you think they are necessarily something boring and bad. I will try to address your overstated points one by one.
POINT ONE WHY do you think that those who did NOT follow the traditions were not also successful, becoming ancestors?
1. For most of human prehistory and history our ancestors were traditional. This is evident in the archaeological and ethnographic records. In archaeology we can see that traditions endured for thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of years. My book if full of examples.
2. These individuals reproduced -- that is why we are here. Not one of our ancestors, to be best of our knowledge ever failed to reproduce--back to the beginning of life on earth, each of us goes in an unbroken line. We cannot say with any certainty that any of our ancestors were smart, creative, or strong -- the only thing we can say with certainty is that they reproduced.
3. Traditions primarily address three things: (1) reproduction. Twere what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time. Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.Traditions were the practices that protected children. (2) building and maintaining kinship relationships. Religion is about kinship, as in God the Father, you are brothers and sisters. Kinship turned conspecific threats (we know from other species that conspecifics are the ones most likely to commit infanticide) into the protectors and educators of children. (3) respect for the elders who are the holders of knowledge and the ones most likely to promote following traditions and to encourage certain social behaviors.
The point here is differential reproduction. While those who had no traditions -- and thus had to create kinship, childbirth, etc. strategies every generation would be at a disadvantage.
POINT 2. Where are your death rolls? Birth rolls? I do not buy it.
There are birth and death rolls. See prior blog. The mormon church has them. We also know that the hutterites, who are highly traditional, have the largest families today. They also care for their children and those children tend to survive, thrive, and reproduce. One has only to picture who is most likely to become an ancestor. It is more likely to be, as one example, a mother who has a number of children, who cares for and nurtures and educates them, and who can do so because she has a husband/family who give her the opportunity to do so -- as compared with a woman who waits until she is 40 and successful in business (because she is creative and intelligent), and is artifically inseminated and sends her one child off immediately to day care. Kids so raised tend to be more aggressive and less successful socially. We are a highly social species, but we LEARN how to be social. Traditions tell us how to be social. We don't hink about where we learned what we learned, but often the behaviors we have were ones practiced by our parents, who learned them from their parents. Those are traditions.
POINT 3. It WAS, I'll grant you, about cooperation in its many guises, and served some purpose, but I would say not so vital as you claim.
What is "it"? If you mean traditions, many traditions encourage cooperation; others encourage emnity. They are not all about cooperation. They are about strategies honed over time, some of those strategies encourage cooperation that probably was essential in the "warre of all against all" of Thomas Hobbes. Doesn't it make sense that if a category of individuals could readily form cooperative units, they would be much safer and better able to address an external threat than were individuals without such strategies, already developed and honed over time?
POINT 4: Yes, cooperation has fallen apart, is falling apart faster and faster, but PLEASE.....creativity hardly seems to be in the equation at all. In fact, I would claim that creativity is only really about competition when you are looking at modern art (or science grants, or the Pulitzer) MARKETS.
Clearly we are a creative species; however, for much of human history strong constraints were put on our ability to be very creative. Creativity, arguably, is about competition -- I can do it better. It also can damage kinship ties to the extent it means rejecting (and it generally does) what your parents taught you. Being very different because you reject traditions also breaks ties with others who were taught the same traditions. It also makes the elders obsolete, yet, the elders are important as those who, at least at one time, held knowledge about ways to avoid conflict, resolve conflict, to be social and maintain enduring social relationships--not the quicky ones we are so good at. We have to ASK WHY CREATIVITY WAS DISCOURAGED. My feeling is that we are so brainwashed about creativity being important that we cannot even address the question with any rigorous thought.
POINT 5: But you could wipe markets out totally, and homo sapiens would still be creative, infinitely so, now that those bounds once imposed by church and academies and whatever other repressive organizations you want to name, or simple blinkered eyesight, are no longer major forces. This is what I was saying a couple weeks ago about Picasso, who does not even rate among my favorite top 100 artists (excepting maybe his La Celestina series), LIBERATING the fine arts. K said that was bullshit. She said, if not him, someone else. But we could argue about the Great Man Theory of history until the cows come home. If not Copernicus, some other, if not Hitler, some other, if not Jesus... BALONEY. Creativity is about expanding possibilities and excitement in creating something new and excitement at seeing things in new ways and MUCH more. It is one of the VERY few things that justify our existence. Let us include love and true altruism, and I guess that's about the whole list.
It was not only the church that discouraged creativity (repressive is a political term I want to avoid). However, the church is made up of indivduals and of those individuals, the parents and grandparents were the ones most likely to discourage children from wandering too far away from traditions. Again, we have to ask WHY THEY MIGHT HAVE DONE THAT. I have to admit that words like "liberating" are a bit vague. Creativity may be about excitement, but it has its costs.
Now, what is your next argument?
However, we should remember that:
Traditions were what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time.
Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.
Traditions were the practices that protected children.
POINT ONE WHY do you think that those who did NOT follow the traditions were not also successful, becoming ancestors?
1. For most of human prehistory and history our ancestors were traditional. This is evident in the archaeological and ethnographic records. In archaeology we can see that traditions endured for thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of years. My book if full of examples.
2. These individuals reproduced -- that is why we are here. Not one of our ancestors, to be best of our knowledge ever failed to reproduce--back to the beginning of life on earth, each of us goes in an unbroken line. We cannot say with any certainty that any of our ancestors were smart, creative, or strong -- the only thing we can say with certainty is that they reproduced.
3. Traditions primarily address three things: (1) reproduction. Twere what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time. Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.Traditions were the practices that protected children. (2) building and maintaining kinship relationships. Religion is about kinship, as in God the Father, you are brothers and sisters. Kinship turned conspecific threats (we know from other species that conspecifics are the ones most likely to commit infanticide) into the protectors and educators of children. (3) respect for the elders who are the holders of knowledge and the ones most likely to promote following traditions and to encourage certain social behaviors.
The point here is differential reproduction. While those who had no traditions -- and thus had to create kinship, childbirth, etc. strategies every generation would be at a disadvantage.
POINT 2. Where are your death rolls? Birth rolls? I do not buy it.
There are birth and death rolls. See prior blog. The mormon church has them. We also know that the hutterites, who are highly traditional, have the largest families today. They also care for their children and those children tend to survive, thrive, and reproduce. One has only to picture who is most likely to become an ancestor. It is more likely to be, as one example, a mother who has a number of children, who cares for and nurtures and educates them, and who can do so because she has a husband/family who give her the opportunity to do so -- as compared with a woman who waits until she is 40 and successful in business (because she is creative and intelligent), and is artifically inseminated and sends her one child off immediately to day care. Kids so raised tend to be more aggressive and less successful socially. We are a highly social species, but we LEARN how to be social. Traditions tell us how to be social. We don't hink about where we learned what we learned, but often the behaviors we have were ones practiced by our parents, who learned them from their parents. Those are traditions.
POINT 3. It WAS, I'll grant you, about cooperation in its many guises, and served some purpose, but I would say not so vital as you claim.
What is "it"? If you mean traditions, many traditions encourage cooperation; others encourage emnity. They are not all about cooperation. They are about strategies honed over time, some of those strategies encourage cooperation that probably was essential in the "warre of all against all" of Thomas Hobbes. Doesn't it make sense that if a category of individuals could readily form cooperative units, they would be much safer and better able to address an external threat than were individuals without such strategies, already developed and honed over time?
POINT 4: Yes, cooperation has fallen apart, is falling apart faster and faster, but PLEASE.....creativity hardly seems to be in the equation at all. In fact, I would claim that creativity is only really about competition when you are looking at modern art (or science grants, or the Pulitzer) MARKETS.
Clearly we are a creative species; however, for much of human history strong constraints were put on our ability to be very creative. Creativity, arguably, is about competition -- I can do it better. It also can damage kinship ties to the extent it means rejecting (and it generally does) what your parents taught you. Being very different because you reject traditions also breaks ties with others who were taught the same traditions. It also makes the elders obsolete, yet, the elders are important as those who, at least at one time, held knowledge about ways to avoid conflict, resolve conflict, to be social and maintain enduring social relationships--not the quicky ones we are so good at. We have to ASK WHY CREATIVITY WAS DISCOURAGED. My feeling is that we are so brainwashed about creativity being important that we cannot even address the question with any rigorous thought.
POINT 5: But you could wipe markets out totally, and homo sapiens would still be creative, infinitely so, now that those bounds once imposed by church and academies and whatever other repressive organizations you want to name, or simple blinkered eyesight, are no longer major forces. This is what I was saying a couple weeks ago about Picasso, who does not even rate among my favorite top 100 artists (excepting maybe his La Celestina series), LIBERATING the fine arts. K said that was bullshit. She said, if not him, someone else. But we could argue about the Great Man Theory of history until the cows come home. If not Copernicus, some other, if not Hitler, some other, if not Jesus... BALONEY. Creativity is about expanding possibilities and excitement in creating something new and excitement at seeing things in new ways and MUCH more. It is one of the VERY few things that justify our existence. Let us include love and true altruism, and I guess that's about the whole list.
It was not only the church that discouraged creativity (repressive is a political term I want to avoid). However, the church is made up of indivduals and of those individuals, the parents and grandparents were the ones most likely to discourage children from wandering too far away from traditions. Again, we have to ask WHY THEY MIGHT HAVE DONE THAT. I have to admit that words like "liberating" are a bit vague. Creativity may be about excitement, but it has its costs.
Now, what is your next argument?
However, we should remember that:
Traditions were what helped females assist others in childbirth--they were the strategies honed over time.
Traditions were the behaviors that encouraged a male to stay around and provide for and protect his family, in the days when such protection was essential.
Traditions were the practices that protected children.
Argument #1: Lines of evidence re. traditions and ancestors.
What Finnish Grandmothers Reveal about Human Evolution
Biologist Virpi Lummaa's work reveals that humans may be the best subject to study for evolutionary effects across generations
By David Biello
No animal compares to humans when it comes to studying populations over time. Easy to track and occasionally living in relative isolation, Homo sapiens is the only species that keeps detailed records. That is why biologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England started in 1998 to comb through Finnish church records from two centuries ago for clues about the influence of evolution on reproduction.
"I always wanted to work on primates," Lummaa says. "But if I wanted to collect a similar data set on wild chimps, I would be struggling. I've decided to study
Research in detailed Finnish birth, marriage and death records is revealing why human women survive past fertility: they help their grandchildren survive.
another primate in the end."
The 33-year-old Finnish biologist, aided by genealogists, has pored through centuries-old tomes (and microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records, which ended up providing glimpses of evolution at work in humanity's recent ancestors. Among them: that male twins disrupt the mating potential of their female siblings by prenatally rendering them more masculine; mothers of sons die sooner than those of daughters, because rearing the former takes a greater toll; and grandmothers are important to the survival of grandchildren. "I'm trying to understand human reproductive behavior from an evolutionary perspective," Lummaa says.
Modern medicine and nutrition tend to obscure these kinds of results as well, hence the need to go back to the preindustrial Finns, before the advent of birth control and the easing of periodic famine and high child mortality rates. "It's almost a shock when you realize that 100 to 150 years ago, 40 percent of babies died before they reached adulthood," even when adulthood was defined as age 15, Lummaa notes.
"In the absence of cultural practices such as contraceptives and assisted reproduction, humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces as are other organisms," says biologist Tobias Uller of the University of Wollongong in Australia. "Given that Virpi's data is extraordinarily detailed compared to what we have available for most other animals, the human data can profitably be used to address key issues in evolutionary theory."
The evolutionary biologist has also used this historical data set to ponder the conundrum of grandmothers. That is, why human women often live long after they are able to reproduce (on average around the age of 50), unlike almost all other animals. "If your ultimate purpose in life was to create as many offspring as possible or pass off as many genes," Lummaa says, "it's kind of strange that human women stop halfway."
One possible explanation is that having a grandmother around somehow improves the reproductive potential of her grandchildren. In fact, that is exactly what the researchers found when they reviewed stats on 537 Finnish women who had a combined total of 6,002 grandchildren. Adding in data from more than 3,000 French Canadians (who had a modest 100,074 grandchildren) confirmed that having grandma around to help enabled younger women to have more children sooner and with improved chances of surviving into adulthood. "That suggests that perhaps one reason why women do carry on living is because they are able to help," Lummaa says. ONLY IF THEY ARE TRADITIONAL AND DO NOT RUN OFF TO SUN CITY TO PLAY GOLF!
Of course, studying humans requires teasing out the confounding cultural effects. For example, the Finnish data indicated that child mortality was much higher in mainland towns than on the islands of Finland's Archipelago Sea. This can be traced back to the fact that mainland women were responsible for farm work, leading to earlier replacement of mother's milk with cow's milk. "That led to infections," Lummaa notes. "In the archipelago this was not the case." Birth rates in both areas also tended to cluster roughly nine months after the period when Finns traditionally married: after the fall harvest.
Studying humans has other pitfalls, most notably that it's very easy to become involved with your subjects, Lummaa says. "We have thousands of people. I can't say I know every one of them but there are some families who pop out," she recalls. "One woman had 18 children and every single one died before adulthood while she lived into her 90s without any of these children." She adds: "If you are studying humans, you can't help feeling more connected to whatever you find out."
Lummaa is learning that first hand these days, having recently given birth to a three-month-old son, Eelis. "It's your own child, you can't have a scientific attitude," she admits, "but you are thinking, 'Well, what in the patterns I see is genetic and is it coming from the mum or dad?' I'm always trying to see my parents' traits in my son." She is thrilled, of course, though her research warns it bodes ill for her life expectancy. Premodern Finnish mothers among the Sami people (famous for their reindeer herding) who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—but also with that dreaded male hormone, testosterone. "Testosterone can compromise your immune system, it can affect your health," Lummaa says. "Boys are a little bit more costly than girls" to raise, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life.
Fortunately for Lummaa, she has the benefit of modern medicine. But "I can certainly see that it's taking a lot of energy and I'm sure it's aging me," she says, chuckling. "How on earth these women managed to give birth every year is truly amazing."
Lummaa has now turned her attention to the effect of grandfathers on grandchildren. If grandmothers improve survival odds, what do elderly males contribute? "If anything there's a negative effect," she says. This could be because of the cultural tradition of catering to men, particularly old men. "Maybe if you had an old grandpa, he was eating your food," she speculates. Or it could be that because men can continue to reproduce, they are less vested in anyone other than their own children. Another possible reason is that women can be sure that a grandchild is their genetic descendant, but it is more difficult for grandfathers. This may also have spurred them to seek second and even third wives rather than focusing on their children. "We are comparing men who married once in their lifetime[s] with men who are married several times," Lummaa says.
Lummaa is not alone in using human history to try to enhance evolutionary understanding. A recent study by ethnologist Dustin Penn of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and population scientist Ken Smith of the University of Utah, using Mormon church records from the 19th century, discovered that having more children upped women's chances of dying prematurely. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, also at Utah, reached the same conclusions as Lummaa about the utility of grandmothers after studying populations of human hunter-gatherers in Africa and South America. "It's most interesting to find out what's causing the differences between human populations," Lummaa says. "How do those general evolutionary theories actually explain the patterns we see in humans? And how much is due to other reasons?" As Lummaa says, "We've got more data than we've got time to analyze." Meaning Lummaa, her colleagues and her scientific descendants will have plenty to study until she is a grandmother herself.
Source: Scientific American
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=C0D3CD91-E7F2-99DF-3D5399013D3691D5&sc=WR_20070724\
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek
__._,_.___
Biologist Virpi Lummaa's work reveals that humans may be the best subject to study for evolutionary effects across generations
By David Biello
No animal compares to humans when it comes to studying populations over time. Easy to track and occasionally living in relative isolation, Homo sapiens is the only species that keeps detailed records. That is why biologist Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England started in 1998 to comb through Finnish church records from two centuries ago for clues about the influence of evolution on reproduction.
"I always wanted to work on primates," Lummaa says. "But if I wanted to collect a similar data set on wild chimps, I would be struggling. I've decided to study
Research in detailed Finnish birth, marriage and death records is revealing why human women survive past fertility: they help their grandchildren survive.
another primate in the end."
The 33-year-old Finnish biologist, aided by genealogists, has pored through centuries-old tomes (and microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records, which ended up providing glimpses of evolution at work in humanity's recent ancestors. Among them: that male twins disrupt the mating potential of their female siblings by prenatally rendering them more masculine; mothers of sons die sooner than those of daughters, because rearing the former takes a greater toll; and grandmothers are important to the survival of grandchildren. "I'm trying to understand human reproductive behavior from an evolutionary perspective," Lummaa says.
Modern medicine and nutrition tend to obscure these kinds of results as well, hence the need to go back to the preindustrial Finns, before the advent of birth control and the easing of periodic famine and high child mortality rates. "It's almost a shock when you realize that 100 to 150 years ago, 40 percent of babies died before they reached adulthood," even when adulthood was defined as age 15, Lummaa notes.
"In the absence of cultural practices such as contraceptives and assisted reproduction, humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces as are other organisms," says biologist Tobias Uller of the University of Wollongong in Australia. "Given that Virpi's data is extraordinarily detailed compared to what we have available for most other animals, the human data can profitably be used to address key issues in evolutionary theory."
The evolutionary biologist has also used this historical data set to ponder the conundrum of grandmothers. That is, why human women often live long after they are able to reproduce (on average around the age of 50), unlike almost all other animals. "If your ultimate purpose in life was to create as many offspring as possible or pass off as many genes," Lummaa says, "it's kind of strange that human women stop halfway."
One possible explanation is that having a grandmother around somehow improves the reproductive potential of her grandchildren. In fact, that is exactly what the researchers found when they reviewed stats on 537 Finnish women who had a combined total of 6,002 grandchildren. Adding in data from more than 3,000 French Canadians (who had a modest 100,074 grandchildren) confirmed that having grandma around to help enabled younger women to have more children sooner and with improved chances of surviving into adulthood. "That suggests that perhaps one reason why women do carry on living is because they are able to help," Lummaa says. ONLY IF THEY ARE TRADITIONAL AND DO NOT RUN OFF TO SUN CITY TO PLAY GOLF!
Of course, studying humans requires teasing out the confounding cultural effects. For example, the Finnish data indicated that child mortality was much higher in mainland towns than on the islands of Finland's Archipelago Sea. This can be traced back to the fact that mainland women were responsible for farm work, leading to earlier replacement of mother's milk with cow's milk. "That led to infections," Lummaa notes. "In the archipelago this was not the case." Birth rates in both areas also tended to cluster roughly nine months after the period when Finns traditionally married: after the fall harvest.
Studying humans has other pitfalls, most notably that it's very easy to become involved with your subjects, Lummaa says. "We have thousands of people. I can't say I know every one of them but there are some families who pop out," she recalls. "One woman had 18 children and every single one died before adulthood while she lived into her 90s without any of these children." She adds: "If you are studying humans, you can't help feeling more connected to whatever you find out."
Lummaa is learning that first hand these days, having recently given birth to a three-month-old son, Eelis. "It's your own child, you can't have a scientific attitude," she admits, "but you are thinking, 'Well, what in the patterns I see is genetic and is it coming from the mum or dad?' I'm always trying to see my parents' traits in my son." She is thrilled, of course, though her research warns it bodes ill for her life expectancy. Premodern Finnish mothers among the Sami people (famous for their reindeer herding) who bore sons had shorter life spans than those who gave birth to daughters. This has to do with birth weight—male babies are typically larger—but also with that dreaded male hormone, testosterone. "Testosterone can compromise your immune system, it can affect your health," Lummaa says. "Boys are a little bit more costly than girls" to raise, because they drain more physical resources from their mothers. Sons also are not as likely as daughters to stick around to help their mothers out later in life.
Fortunately for Lummaa, she has the benefit of modern medicine. But "I can certainly see that it's taking a lot of energy and I'm sure it's aging me," she says, chuckling. "How on earth these women managed to give birth every year is truly amazing."
Lummaa has now turned her attention to the effect of grandfathers on grandchildren. If grandmothers improve survival odds, what do elderly males contribute? "If anything there's a negative effect," she says. This could be because of the cultural tradition of catering to men, particularly old men. "Maybe if you had an old grandpa, he was eating your food," she speculates. Or it could be that because men can continue to reproduce, they are less vested in anyone other than their own children. Another possible reason is that women can be sure that a grandchild is their genetic descendant, but it is more difficult for grandfathers. This may also have spurred them to seek second and even third wives rather than focusing on their children. "We are comparing men who married once in their lifetime[s] with men who are married several times," Lummaa says.
Lummaa is not alone in using human history to try to enhance evolutionary understanding. A recent study by ethnologist Dustin Penn of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and population scientist Ken Smith of the University of Utah, using Mormon church records from the 19th century, discovered that having more children upped women's chances of dying prematurely. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, also at Utah, reached the same conclusions as Lummaa about the utility of grandmothers after studying populations of human hunter-gatherers in Africa and South America. "It's most interesting to find out what's causing the differences between human populations," Lummaa says. "How do those general evolutionary theories actually explain the patterns we see in humans? And how much is due to other reasons?" As Lummaa says, "We've got more data than we've got time to analyze." Meaning Lummaa, her colleagues and her scientific descendants will have plenty to study until she is a grandmother herself.
Source: Scientific American
http://sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=C0D3CD91-E7F2-99DF-3D5399013D3691D5&sc=WR_20070724\
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek
__._,_.___
7/24/2007
Happiness, contentment, joy
Here are some quotes for us to consider before we begin our discussion of happiness, contentment, and joy. They raise a number of questions. Does knowing happiness require knowing its opposite -- sadness? How long can we live with the intensity of any great emotion? Are these emotions "pearls of great price?"
CONTENTMENT:
"Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase." Balguy
"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty." Socrates
HAPPINESS:
Quote: I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive
Author: Henry Miller
Quote: The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for
Author: Allan K. Chalmers
Quote: The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved
Author: Victor Hugo
Quote: There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Author: Carl Jung
JOY:
Quote: In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Author: Henry Ward Beecher 1813-1887, American Preacher, Orator, Writer
Quote: I have no greater joy then to hear that my children walk in truth. [John 4]
Author: Bible Sacred Scriptures of Christians and Judaism
Quote: Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
Author: Christian Nevell Bovee 1820-1904, American Author, Lawyer
CONTENTMENT:
"Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase." Balguy
"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty." Socrates
HAPPINESS:
Quote: I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive
Author: Henry Miller
Quote: The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for
Author: Allan K. Chalmers
Quote: The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved
Author: Victor Hugo
Quote: There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Author: Carl Jung
JOY:
Quote: In this world, full often, our joys are only the tender shadows which our sorrows cast.
Author: Henry Ward Beecher 1813-1887, American Preacher, Orator, Writer
Quote: I have no greater joy then to hear that my children walk in truth. [John 4]
Author: Bible Sacred Scriptures of Christians and Judaism
Quote: Tranquil pleasures last the longest; we are not fitted to bear the burden of great joys.
Author: Christian Nevell Bovee 1820-1904, American Author, Lawyer
6/20/2007
A not so fine whine
Thinking about optimism, fate, destiny, pessimism leads one naturally to the topic of whining. I would argue that while it is not true that we have no control over our fate/destiny, it is also true that we can respond to it in various ways. First, we can try to change things (undue what we did that led to where we are--which is impossible probably), or we can accept things, or we can ignore things, or we can whine.
Women are usually said to be the fine whiners; however, it has been my experience that men can whine when they either make a choice they no longer want to live with or end up somewhere they do not want to be because they did not actually make a choice.
One has to wonder if: Individuals who make noble choices ever regret those choices and begin to whine about them.
or
Individuals who refuse to actually make a choice or who make a foolish one always whine?
What do you think?
Women are usually said to be the fine whiners; however, it has been my experience that men can whine when they either make a choice they no longer want to live with or end up somewhere they do not want to be because they did not actually make a choice.
One has to wonder if: Individuals who make noble choices ever regret those choices and begin to whine about them.
or
Individuals who refuse to actually make a choice or who make a foolish one always whine?
What do you think?
6/19/2007
Optimism
Anne suggested that we talk about something new, as the prior topic has been kicked around enough, now looking like an old shoe (or is it old dog)? She suggested answering the question: Am I an optimist or pessimist?
On the web, we find: "Pessimism, generally, describes a belief that things are bad, and tend to become worse; or that looks to the eventual triumph of evil over good; it contrasts with optimism, the contrary belief in the goodness and betterment of things generally. Philosophical pessimism describes a tendency to believe that the life has a negative value, or that this world is as bad as it could possibly be. In particular, it most famously describes the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer."
An optimist, on the other hand, can be described with fewer words as "a person disposed to take a favorable view of things."
My guess would be that one's position would be tied, not only to what one observes in the world, but to whether or not one sees opportunities ahead, to wit: approximately 1700 years ago a Roman philosopher wrote:
I am a goddess seldom found and known to few. I am ever flying. I am bald behind that none may catch me [by the hair] as I flee. Remorse bears me company. When I have flown away, she is retained by those who did not grasp me as I passed.
The “goddess” was Opportunity (From Cato Unbound, May 1, 2006).
The door is now opent to this topic....Let's start with what MAKES a person an optimist or a pessimist. we can assume that genes are involved, but what prior experiences, etc. might play a role.
On the web, we find: "Pessimism, generally, describes a belief that things are bad, and tend to become worse; or that looks to the eventual triumph of evil over good; it contrasts with optimism, the contrary belief in the goodness and betterment of things generally. Philosophical pessimism describes a tendency to believe that the life has a negative value, or that this world is as bad as it could possibly be. In particular, it most famously describes the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer."
An optimist, on the other hand, can be described with fewer words as "a person disposed to take a favorable view of things."
My guess would be that one's position would be tied, not only to what one observes in the world, but to whether or not one sees opportunities ahead, to wit: approximately 1700 years ago a Roman philosopher wrote:
I am a goddess seldom found and known to few. I am ever flying. I am bald behind that none may catch me [by the hair] as I flee. Remorse bears me company. When I have flown away, she is retained by those who did not grasp me as I passed.
The “goddess” was Opportunity (From Cato Unbound, May 1, 2006).
The door is now opent to this topic....Let's start with what MAKES a person an optimist or a pessimist. we can assume that genes are involved, but what prior experiences, etc. might play a role.
6/16/2007
My sister, Anne, and I....
My sister Anne and I had a long discussion over the telephone this morning on the topic of sexuality. The discussion took several turns, as I think she feels (or argued) that sex is natural and good and I think it can be great, but it can be a very dangerous thing also--everything your mother warned you about and a whole lot more dangerous. She said "well, that might have been your experience." However, this is not experience speaking, but theory and evidence. When the homicide records were examined in Canada, as one example, it was found that many of them were related to sexual relationships, in the sense they were done out of sexual jealousy (killing her or the new "him") or rage or desire to impress, or whatever.
I wish I could remember the twists and turns of the argument, as they were quite interesting, but I do remember both of us agreeing that there are only a few ways that societies have devised to keep these strong emotions in check and that is restrain males, which is difficult and can be costly (requiring a police force, legislative system, judicial system, army, navy, marines, etc--you get the point, no?). Restraining females is much easier and certainly cheaper, probably because, at least at one time, we understood the necessity of such restraint, in that, in the end, it served our purposes and protected our fragile kin (children, elderly parents, grandparents)and kept men around who provided for us and our kin/children. The thinking that inspired the feminist movement was that such restraint of females, particularly of their sexuality, was "AWFUL" and that restraint would no longer be accepted. But, I digress. We did not talk about this.
Anne was telling me about visiting the art collection of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City and how she was a bit surprised to find many paintings of nude women, which she said the curator told her had been commissioned by Joseph Smith, who sent many morman boys/men to France to learn to paint nudes. She thought this was great, but I said he must have been a dirty old man and polygyny was not just an accident. The bottom line issue here is to ask what arouses men sexually. As biologists often argue, human males are hyper-sexual, they are fairly easily aroused. Most of the men we know were taught, as boys, to restrain themselves to some degree, at least in public. They are not aware of this, nor are women, but we as females reap the benefit of their restraint. The problem is that there are many men who were not so taught, or who rejected such teachings. These men are dangerous to us. They may not rape or kill the woman who is scantily clad, but they may well rape or kill the next woman they see (when they also see opportunity to get away with it). I said that an irony for me was the fact that the "restrained" males were the ones who fought for freedom of the press and freedom of expression, as they know that they can see explicitly sexual paintings (for men this may be a nude woman)and probably not rape anyone, although they may be hot to trot when the opportunity arises. They are not the dangers, the other males are.
She said that she bet that Mormon men, who she admires for their love of family, watch (and are not discouraged from watching) pornography (although we both rejected the argument that most horrible crimes are committed by restrained males who burst their bounds--where is the evidence?). This watching pornography argument may be true, but it seems to me that if you want to promote the spirituality of love, and devotion to family, you walk a risky path when you turn to eroticism. It seems dangerous that a male would have sex with his wife and just see her as a sexual object, not as a fragile, complex,precious person he loves. To me he should be conscious of her as a special person and pornography is not about that. This may be one of the dangers of pornography for men and perhaps even women--it is about sensation, not about social relationships that are committed. Yes, I can just hear the arguments fall down upon my head. Well, we watch....and we love each other. Well, I stand by my argument and if you are really honest with yourself you will see that I have a point. The emotions related to sex occur because sex is so important. They are powerful emotions. This does not mean that unrestrained they are necessarily good. At least females in other species have oestrus, limiting the sexual opportunities available to conspecific males.
This to me is the dilemma: restraint or freedom. We have a lot of freedom in this country. Woman and men are not very restrained. We have freedom of speech, sexual freedom, drugs, whatever and we wonder why we have problems. Those problems are probably the price we pay for the freedoms we think are so important. There are always consequences to every decision we make.
Now we should think of the counter argument to my own thinking. Any ideas out there?
I wish I could remember the twists and turns of the argument, as they were quite interesting, but I do remember both of us agreeing that there are only a few ways that societies have devised to keep these strong emotions in check and that is restrain males, which is difficult and can be costly (requiring a police force, legislative system, judicial system, army, navy, marines, etc--you get the point, no?). Restraining females is much easier and certainly cheaper, probably because, at least at one time, we understood the necessity of such restraint, in that, in the end, it served our purposes and protected our fragile kin (children, elderly parents, grandparents)and kept men around who provided for us and our kin/children. The thinking that inspired the feminist movement was that such restraint of females, particularly of their sexuality, was "AWFUL" and that restraint would no longer be accepted. But, I digress. We did not talk about this.
Anne was telling me about visiting the art collection of the Mormon church in Salt Lake City and how she was a bit surprised to find many paintings of nude women, which she said the curator told her had been commissioned by Joseph Smith, who sent many morman boys/men to France to learn to paint nudes. She thought this was great, but I said he must have been a dirty old man and polygyny was not just an accident. The bottom line issue here is to ask what arouses men sexually. As biologists often argue, human males are hyper-sexual, they are fairly easily aroused. Most of the men we know were taught, as boys, to restrain themselves to some degree, at least in public. They are not aware of this, nor are women, but we as females reap the benefit of their restraint. The problem is that there are many men who were not so taught, or who rejected such teachings. These men are dangerous to us. They may not rape or kill the woman who is scantily clad, but they may well rape or kill the next woman they see (when they also see opportunity to get away with it). I said that an irony for me was the fact that the "restrained" males were the ones who fought for freedom of the press and freedom of expression, as they know that they can see explicitly sexual paintings (for men this may be a nude woman)and probably not rape anyone, although they may be hot to trot when the opportunity arises. They are not the dangers, the other males are.
She said that she bet that Mormon men, who she admires for their love of family, watch (and are not discouraged from watching) pornography (although we both rejected the argument that most horrible crimes are committed by restrained males who burst their bounds--where is the evidence?). This watching pornography argument may be true, but it seems to me that if you want to promote the spirituality of love, and devotion to family, you walk a risky path when you turn to eroticism. It seems dangerous that a male would have sex with his wife and just see her as a sexual object, not as a fragile, complex,precious person he loves. To me he should be conscious of her as a special person and pornography is not about that. This may be one of the dangers of pornography for men and perhaps even women--it is about sensation, not about social relationships that are committed. Yes, I can just hear the arguments fall down upon my head. Well, we watch....and we love each other. Well, I stand by my argument and if you are really honest with yourself you will see that I have a point. The emotions related to sex occur because sex is so important. They are powerful emotions. This does not mean that unrestrained they are necessarily good. At least females in other species have oestrus, limiting the sexual opportunities available to conspecific males.
This to me is the dilemma: restraint or freedom. We have a lot of freedom in this country. Woman and men are not very restrained. We have freedom of speech, sexual freedom, drugs, whatever and we wonder why we have problems. Those problems are probably the price we pay for the freedoms we think are so important. There are always consequences to every decision we make.
Now we should think of the counter argument to my own thinking. Any ideas out there?
6/10/2007
Finally, my genius daughter figured out my user name and passwork
Blair is declared a genius of the technological order
I am up, but not running. I will start posting again.
I am up, but not running. I will start posting again.
1/15/2007
Raising a Son
Raising a son is clear an easier endeavor than is raising a daughter. However, given the simplicity of the task, the mission is complex: How does one create raise a son who does not lie, cheat, rape, pillage, murder, rob....etc. One only has to read the newpaper to see that males are committing the majority of the more heinous crimes.
I need to take a moment here, before I continue, to add that I have a lovely son and three lovely grandsons.
However, I was watching a documentary the other day about terrorists and how their wives do not always approve of their husband's terrorist activities and urge them to stop. Despite the earnest plea of an earnest wife, not one of the men would change his path. I called my sister, with whom I love to discuss such topics, and asked her why women were not effective in moving men off the path of mayhem. She replied that women, since Lysistrata, had not been successful. Changing a man would be more difficult than trying to build a dam across Niagara falls while the water was running full blast.
There may be, however, another approach to influencing men, and that is the influence that mothers have over their sons. Bachofen assumed, as did others of his time, that a mate who, with “desperate valour,” defended his home and provided for his children, made it possible for a mother to attend to all her children’s needs. Before males became assets, however, a mother had to curb male selfishness through her authority over her sons; mothers had “to tame man’s primordial strength,to guide it into benign channels” (Bachofen, 1861:144, 151). They had to move adult males into a “voluntary recognition of feminine power” (p. 84). Bachofen wrote: "at times the woman has exerted a great influence on men and on the education and culture of nations. The elevation of women over man arouses our amazement most especially by its contradiction to the relation of physical strength. The law of nature confers the scepter of power on the stronger. If it is torn away from him by feebler hands, other aspects of human nature must have been at work, deeper powers must have made their influence felt"(p. 85).
Bachofen pointed out that males as kinsmen and fathers had to learn to restrain their selfishness and use their strength, intellect, and resources for the benefit of vulnerable others. If it is true, however, that human males initially learned to father by watching and copying (being influenced by) their mothers, then maternal care provided the model for paternal care. Bachofen’s claim that the origin of culture owes a great deal to ancestral mothers, needless to say, did not form the foundation of modern social theory. Although Bachofen’s words may seem like little more than wishful thinking, I will be risking little if I build on the argument he raised, as scholars still are uncertain if, when, and/or how humans learn to parent. Biology indeed plays a role in maternal behaviors, genes are expressed, however, in an environment that is, for many primates, social. Among humans, mothering behaviors are learned, taught, supported and reinforced, by and large, through traditional kinship and moral systems (Edel & Edel 1959). Traditions, ancestral strategies coming from the past, are the key to human parenting. They also may be a key to taming male behavior.
I would write more, but my feet are freezing cold...
I need to take a moment here, before I continue, to add that I have a lovely son and three lovely grandsons.
However, I was watching a documentary the other day about terrorists and how their wives do not always approve of their husband's terrorist activities and urge them to stop. Despite the earnest plea of an earnest wife, not one of the men would change his path. I called my sister, with whom I love to discuss such topics, and asked her why women were not effective in moving men off the path of mayhem. She replied that women, since Lysistrata, had not been successful. Changing a man would be more difficult than trying to build a dam across Niagara falls while the water was running full blast.
There may be, however, another approach to influencing men, and that is the influence that mothers have over their sons. Bachofen assumed, as did others of his time, that a mate who, with “desperate valour,” defended his home and provided for his children, made it possible for a mother to attend to all her children’s needs. Before males became assets, however, a mother had to curb male selfishness through her authority over her sons; mothers had “to tame man’s primordial strength,to guide it into benign channels” (Bachofen, 1861:144, 151). They had to move adult males into a “voluntary recognition of feminine power” (p. 84). Bachofen wrote: "at times the woman has exerted a great influence on men and on the education and culture of nations. The elevation of women over man arouses our amazement most especially by its contradiction to the relation of physical strength. The law of nature confers the scepter of power on the stronger. If it is torn away from him by feebler hands, other aspects of human nature must have been at work, deeper powers must have made their influence felt"(p. 85).
Bachofen pointed out that males as kinsmen and fathers had to learn to restrain their selfishness and use their strength, intellect, and resources for the benefit of vulnerable others. If it is true, however, that human males initially learned to father by watching and copying (being influenced by) their mothers, then maternal care provided the model for paternal care. Bachofen’s claim that the origin of culture owes a great deal to ancestral mothers, needless to say, did not form the foundation of modern social theory. Although Bachofen’s words may seem like little more than wishful thinking, I will be risking little if I build on the argument he raised, as scholars still are uncertain if, when, and/or how humans learn to parent. Biology indeed plays a role in maternal behaviors, genes are expressed, however, in an environment that is, for many primates, social. Among humans, mothering behaviors are learned, taught, supported and reinforced, by and large, through traditional kinship and moral systems (Edel & Edel 1959). Traditions, ancestral strategies coming from the past, are the key to human parenting. They also may be a key to taming male behavior.
I would write more, but my feet are freezing cold...
1/03/2007
Creativity
Creativity: it is our mantra, our saint, our god, our joy, our reason to be. We have a big brain and complex wiring in that brain. Clearly, humans can be creative. Yet, what does it mean to be creative? Well, if we look closely, and try to be careful and empirical in our search for definitions, creativity implies change. Creativity means, if it means anything, doing something differently than that something was done before. To me, creativity implies competition, in the sense that you are sure you can do anything better than others, before you, did. You can make things prettier, nicer, more thoughtful, whatever. Clearly it implies a breakdown of traditions.
Last week my sister, Anne, and I were talking about historical periods with a 14 year old girl. The girl mentioned that she had just finished studying the Middle Ages (and thank god for that, she felt) and was moving on to the Renaissance, which she loved. My sister mentioned that she loved the Middle Ages and I offered that the Middle Ages were, to me, much more fascinating than was the Renaissance. The girl looked at us like stink bugs under a microscope: one could see on her face her mind rolling around the thought: how on earth could an adult be so stupid? We let the topic drop then, but due to her arrogance (one has to balance between honoring the confidence it takes for a 14 year old to be so free to think that a 60 year old is stupid, and wanting to let that 16 year old know that there are things out there, Horatio, that she has not thought about. So, over tea, I mentioned that I had written a book in which I praise the Middle Ages and denigate the Renaissance. She just thought I was stupid, but her mother asked why. I tried to explain that for much of human history the function of art had been to promote kinship (or kinship-like) cooperation. This had been its function in the Middle Ages, when all were brought into a metaphorical kinship system under God the father and Mary the Mother and were encouraged to treat one another as if they were close kin: brothers and sisters, children of a common ancestor, God.
Of course I went on and on, but the 14 year old was unmoved, ending the conversation saying that the art of the Middle Ages was, like Egyptian art (with little change), boring. I bit my tongue, briefly, and then said, "well we are brainwashed in this country to think creativity is important, but creativity to some extent is about competition." Why can't people see that cooperation is important; there are costs to creativity, just as there are costs to traditions? The thing about traditions, however, is that they were honed over time. The people who followed them were successful, in that they survived and became ancestors. Why can't we see that many of our social ills are due to our lack of cooperation. We no longer have "boring art" or bowling leagues. We seem to have forgotten how to cooperate in our zeal for creativity.
Last week my sister, Anne, and I were talking about historical periods with a 14 year old girl. The girl mentioned that she had just finished studying the Middle Ages (and thank god for that, she felt) and was moving on to the Renaissance, which she loved. My sister mentioned that she loved the Middle Ages and I offered that the Middle Ages were, to me, much more fascinating than was the Renaissance. The girl looked at us like stink bugs under a microscope: one could see on her face her mind rolling around the thought: how on earth could an adult be so stupid? We let the topic drop then, but due to her arrogance (one has to balance between honoring the confidence it takes for a 14 year old to be so free to think that a 60 year old is stupid, and wanting to let that 16 year old know that there are things out there, Horatio, that she has not thought about. So, over tea, I mentioned that I had written a book in which I praise the Middle Ages and denigate the Renaissance. She just thought I was stupid, but her mother asked why. I tried to explain that for much of human history the function of art had been to promote kinship (or kinship-like) cooperation. This had been its function in the Middle Ages, when all were brought into a metaphorical kinship system under God the father and Mary the Mother and were encouraged to treat one another as if they were close kin: brothers and sisters, children of a common ancestor, God.
Of course I went on and on, but the 14 year old was unmoved, ending the conversation saying that the art of the Middle Ages was, like Egyptian art (with little change), boring. I bit my tongue, briefly, and then said, "well we are brainwashed in this country to think creativity is important, but creativity to some extent is about competition." Why can't people see that cooperation is important; there are costs to creativity, just as there are costs to traditions? The thing about traditions, however, is that they were honed over time. The people who followed them were successful, in that they survived and became ancestors. Why can't we see that many of our social ills are due to our lack of cooperation. We no longer have "boring art" or bowling leagues. We seem to have forgotten how to cooperate in our zeal for creativity.
1/02/2007
selfish genes and mindless intellectuals
The other night on CSPAN books, Richard Dawkins, with a dramatic flourish, dismissed religion and associated traditions. While he did not use the word "deluded" when he referred to those who are religious, as did Geoffrey Miller, Dawkins surely would not deny that he felt the term was an appropriate one. A number of issues emerged during this program. First, girlish giggles were heard as echoes to all of his most dramatic points. One has to wonder why. Was this response due to "intellectualism," which is now firmly founded on an anti-religious platform? Or, was it an appreciative response to the "art" of his presentation? Females amused and attracted by a famous and influential male? Although I did not watch the entire program, the ones to ask questions were primarily male. The only female I saw, a "fellow" athiest, praised him with enthusiasm for his bravery. Is it brave to be anti-religious in a crowd of fellow intellects? One has to wonder. The males who did ask questions tried to discredit him on some of his religious points. Dawkins, however, is quite quick and well able to deflect criticism, often through artful sarcasm.
While I am a Darwinian, in the sense that I understand and accept the theory and its implications, what bothers me is the mindlessness of many of our intellectuals--this use of great gifts to obscure and build political positions. It has always bothered me over the years that my most "intellectual" students have supported Modern Darwinian theory, without knowing what it said or implied, because, apparently, it was the position that intellectuals, such as they, should take. One has to wonder why they would support the theory without understanding it. It seems more honorable to me to admit you are accepting a position on faith, which is what these students are actually doing, not based on empirical science or logic.
The question I would have asked is this: Given the general intelligence of all modern humans, how can we account for the fact that religion is ancient and widespread? Does this not suggest that religion might have had an important function? Might this function be empirically identifiable IF we bother to define religion (Dawkins never did) in such a way as to make it possible to study it empirically? Isn't the first step of the scientific method "DEFINE AND STATE"? Shouldn't we consider multiple hypotheses? Science should be made of sterner stuff. Do they really teach students to make such gross overstatements, to rely on sarcasm and art to make a point-- and to do such poor science -- at Britain's best universities?
This experience reminded me of the Samuel Wilberforce-Thomas Huxley debate, using wit, but not logic and science, to discredit an opponent.
While I am a Darwinian, in the sense that I understand and accept the theory and its implications, what bothers me is the mindlessness of many of our intellectuals--this use of great gifts to obscure and build political positions. It has always bothered me over the years that my most "intellectual" students have supported Modern Darwinian theory, without knowing what it said or implied, because, apparently, it was the position that intellectuals, such as they, should take. One has to wonder why they would support the theory without understanding it. It seems more honorable to me to admit you are accepting a position on faith, which is what these students are actually doing, not based on empirical science or logic.
The question I would have asked is this: Given the general intelligence of all modern humans, how can we account for the fact that religion is ancient and widespread? Does this not suggest that religion might have had an important function? Might this function be empirically identifiable IF we bother to define religion (Dawkins never did) in such a way as to make it possible to study it empirically? Isn't the first step of the scientific method "DEFINE AND STATE"? Shouldn't we consider multiple hypotheses? Science should be made of sterner stuff. Do they really teach students to make such gross overstatements, to rely on sarcasm and art to make a point-- and to do such poor science -- at Britain's best universities?
This experience reminded me of the Samuel Wilberforce-Thomas Huxley debate, using wit, but not logic and science, to discredit an opponent.
"Then the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock -pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words - words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. (see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/legend.html for more historically-based information).
Truth? What confidence he had. As Wilberforce had pointed out, evidence supporting the theory was, at that time, lacking. Some of his criticism was appropriate: Darwin did not know about genes and it was not until the 1940s that much of this theory was put together. However, the point here is that for such a smart species, we can be pretty dumb and we are particularly dumb when we ignore the scientific method and when we fail to apply skepticism to the ideas we hold most fondly.
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