At least since Aristotle and probably long before him, people have wondered what the meaning of life might be.

Meaning is defined in various ways, but basically it refers to the end, purpose or significance of something, in this case a human life. 

For Aristotle, life has a purpose or function, which is earthly happiness, which can be achieved only through reason and virtue. The aim of life, he seems to be saying is to be a good person, a moral person, and that in being such a person we will find happiness.

Yesterday, I read through the Myth of Sisyphus to find the answer to that question that Camus proposed:  

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."

For evolutionary biologists the aim of life is to reproduce. For humans, reproduction is not a simple thing. Our offspring, perhaps unfortunately, are altricial. They don't hatch out of eggs and race down the beach to the ocean where they, in turn, hopefully survive long enough to reproduce. If our offspring are, in turn, to be successful reproducers, we must make a huge investment of resources, including vast amounts of our time, into such things as teaching, nurturing, and protecting. Further, our offspring, particularly when they are young, are fragile or vulnerable. They have no teeth or claws. Their very survival depends on parents, and grandparents, either being there to protect them, or having invested enough in them to try to ensure that they have the wits (mental skills, but also physical skills to) to survive when facing a large predator looking for a meal. Another one of the important skills parents need to impart to their children is in the realm of social skills We are a highly social species, but strangers throughout  human history, have presented clear and present danger. Today, with systems of law, we have attempted to minimize the danger, but have not been totally successful. 

So, to cut to the chase, as I have other things that I need to be working on, it would seem that Aristotle has an important point, although only a partial answer. The aim of life is to reproduce and towards that end, we must be good kin. We are a link in a chain, a link that connects our ancestors to their future descendants. If we successfully reproduce, that line of ancestors who successfully managed to raise costly human offspring, does not end with us. Happiness lies in loving unselfishly and being loved. That love is the result of sacrifice, the hugh investment we must make. 

In sum, biologically speaking, Camus was not only full of hot air but he was wrong. 

Let me put this clearly

My main argument is that the original function of art perhaps was to identify kinship. However, my main point is that it’s function is to drawn attention to a body, object or message. So, while it still may advertise or communicate kinship, as kinship systems break down it is less often so used. Now it clearly is used to in many ways , whether the artist intentionally wanted a specific result. It can advertise wealth, advertise ones sophistication,  promote cooperation or animosity, etc.

Caravans and Caring 

We all have heard that a caravan made up of peasants and, among other people, thugs, drug dealers, terrorists and MS13 members, is headed north to our border with Mexico. These people are, we are often cautioned, armed to the teeth, just like the soldiers in Pancho Villa’s or Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s armies once were. Again, we hear, an invasion is approaching. Fear reigned then and again fear reigns in our country.  

We are told that we now can relax — a large army of our solders has been sent to protect our borders, to protect us, our children, our way of life and even our honor. I am not writing, however, to defend the decision to send the army to the border nor am I writing to oppose it. Nor do I want to belabor the point of why people are fleeing from Central America. I am not going to point my finger at any role we might - or might not - have played. My sole point is to explain a bit more who is in the “caravan” of people — who actually is coming north. 

It might be important to begin by pointing out that thugs, MS13 members and terrorists would never be found among this group of poor, hungry, thirsty and desperate people who are making their way north. These people not only are walking but many are carrying babies and many are leading small children by the hand. They are walking slowly. Many, if not most, came from small and often remote villages. They didn’t  receive daily newspapers. They didn’t hear the latest news about our decisions regarding asylum.  Many lived in huts with dirt floors and no electricity. They had no computers 0r television. They were poor, often living on the food they could grow or raise on small plots of land. They headed north because they had heard of the golden city on the hill - the modern day Seven Cities of Cibola - and they headed there in desperation and with hope. 

Why didn’t these people have just applied for a visa? This is the question we regularly hear people ask. For the poor, however, obtaining a visa has always been a virtually impossible task. It is difficult to travel by bus and find your way through a big, bustling, and bewildering city where our embassies are located. It is even more difficult, being dressed in the humble clothes of a peasant, speaking a dialect of one of the Native languages, to get into the lines and through the door of an embassy. There was no money to pay for a visa even if they had been able to get through the door of an embassy. 

These people descended from proud ancestors who built magnificent cities, cities that put to shame most European cities of the time. Their ancestors built tall pyramids, designed highway systems, created craft guilds and magnificent art, and they developed amazingly accurate calendar systems. They are, like their ancestors once were, a creative and intelligent people. They, like many of our ancestors, just need a chance to develop that creativity and intelligence. If given that chance, they, like our ancestors, could contribute to the development of this country and, if we are willing to listen to their voices and stories, contribute to its healing.

We all know that we did not always have an honorable history even though we all know that this country was built on the labor, creativity and intelligence - the blood, sweat and tears - of immigrants. The Irish, fleeing the potato famine in which an estimated million people died, were greeted by taunts and were said to be dirty, poor and disease ridden. Newspapers claimed that the Irish would rape our women, commit crimes and take jobs away from Americans. This did not prove to be true and the thousands of descendants of these early Irish are now proud to claim Irish ancestry. We locked the Japanese in internment camps. During World War II, we turned away the ship St Louis with its 900 Jewish passengers. Of those we rejected, some (26 people) found refuge in Cuba, some found refuge in England and South America, and 254 died in the Holocaust. When it was proposed in congress that the US take in 20,000 Jewish Children a cousin of President Roosevelt, also the wife of the US immigration commissioner, testified that these 20,000 charming children would all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults. These people were also desperate, fleeing a life that had become dangerous and intolerable. 

We again are being asked if we would take in the tired and the poor, the tempest tossed yearning to be free? Again we have said no. No one needs to ask me to cry for all these people. I do cry for them. And I cry for us as we seem to have again lost our heart and our way. If we wish to heal the chasm that now divides our country perhaps each one of us needs to listen again to the music written by Rodgers and Hammerstein that tells us: “You've got to be taught to hate and fear...you’ve got to be taught to be afraid... of people whose skin is a different shade.” We each need to ask ourselves who we hate or fear and who taught us to do so. 

           

When women marched in Phoenix, the one woman we heard about had gained her 15 minutes of fame because she marched bare breasted. Some observers referred to her as lewd and immoral, suggesting she was asking to be assaulted. Others said we should focus on her heart and soul and not whether her top was plunging. She wasn’t, this group insisted, “asking for it”.

While we can’t know what she was thinking when she walked out her door and joined the march, we can be pretty sure that she was not thinking she wanted to be assaulted. Women don’t want to be assaulted. We can assume, however, that her aim was to attract attention and at that she was successful. That does not mean she was asking to be raped.

Trying to look at this objectively, the first step of influence, of getting attention and eliciting a response, negative or positive, is attracting attention. Animals know, perhaps instinctively, that attracting attention makes them vulnerable, that attracting attention can lead to death or rape. That is why so many have protective coloration. Humans, of course, are more complex. We have bigger brains and more complex behavior and culture. The function of breasts, for humans and other female animals, is to nourish an infant. Here, in the U.S., however, breasts are seen as sexual objects. Bare breasted women inhabit the pages of men’s magazines presumably because men find them enticing. While breasts are not ignored in other, very different types of cultures, the males see breasts in terms of their function – feeding an infant. When I lived with a tribe in a remote part of the Ecuadorian jungle, the women, traditionally, had gone bare breasted. At that time, shortly after outsiders began to enter the area, only older women continued that tradition. Younger women, when asked why they covered themselves, said that they felt uncomfortable -- outsiders stared at their breasts. The local men, as far as I could determine through observation and conversation, did not refer to breasts as sexually tempting. They referred to them as milks. Culture, in other words, seems to have a strong influence on what women do publically and how males interpret what they do and, given opportunity and depending on character, subsequently respond.

A great many women, including fully clad ones like Catholic sisters in habits and women in burkas have been assaulted. What this suggests is that women themselves, not just their breasts attract the attention of males. Women are vulnerable to assault when they are in a powerless position and in the presence of a male who does not exercise self-control. Clearly we are not talking about most men, only some men.

Going bare breasted in public does attract attraction. Doing so may have positive effects -- commentary in the local news and possibly a starring role in a Hollywood film. It is equally likely, however, that showing your breasts -- when they are seen as sexual objects -- can make you vulnerable, attracting the attention of someone you never would want to meet.  Simpler animals can teach us important lessons if we open our minds to learning; attracting attention can be dangerous.                                                                                                                                      

                         

Burning the library

I read this morning, actually I read this a few days ago, but was reminded this morning that:

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden terms at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden terms are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

What a reminder this is of the perceived power of words. I don’t think trump wrote these rules as his life seems to have been a pilgrimage involving a search for the three Ps — power, prosperity and
p——.  It also is a reminderer of how politicians play by some of the rules set by their base — perhaps one should say seem to play by those rules. Tell them they got a tax cut — while behind the scenes cracking up and saying but don’t tell them not to spent all $50 of it in one place.

Vulnerable refers to the fact humans are susceptible to being hurt or wounded. We are vulnerable. Every one of us, though we all pretend to be otherwise at certain times in our lives. We are vulnerable to senescence, death, disease, injury, pain, depression, sadness, poverty, hunger, cold. The list could go on forever. How strange it is to try to erase that particular word from our language. The powers that be (short lived one has to hope), of course, don’t want the CDC and one can assume the NIH, and the INS, etc. to refer to vulnerable populations, to the disparities in health and social justice. They want to erase the entire population of refugees who have suffered from depravities created by men who are even more cruel (perhaps) than the ones in power in the US. They want us to forget the poor, sad, depressed, wounded and even those who have been shot and killed by the very guns the NRA pays our politicians to protect.

Entitlement can be read several ways — we are (or once were) entitled to equal protection under the law. We are entitled to equality, which we have never even witnessed. We are (or were) entitled to life (although the NRA, apparently, has more rights to our lives than our most vulnerable have.  Liberty? Well, we are free to suffer, be sad, be hungry, but each day there are more restrictions on our ability to try to criticize — or speak truth to — power. It can mean that people like the trumpettes — trumps kids — are entitled to things we cannot ever even dream of having. I am sure the powers that be like that form of entitlement. What they don’t like are the  entitlements we were promised by our forefather. Those entitlements apparently are now not to be discussed.

Diversity, transgender — those words refer to members of our own world who once were given certain inalienable rights. Rights that now are being taken away from our sisters and brothers — from people we love.

Fetus, of course, is an appeal to the anti abortion crowd. That group of rich Americans who never have known what it is like to struggle to feed, clothe and shelter a child. Who lived in safe neighborhoods and never were terrified if their child wanted to go out to play because of the violence that surrounds their  home. Who never worked three and four jobs to try to make ends meet and still tried to raise a child. Who have never faced a pregnancy when they knew they  did not have the power or strength or resources for another child — and would lose their  jobs if they got pregnant even if they were married.

The last two are attacks on science — attacks aimed at protecting lies they want to protect — lies that claim we can put anything into our water and air and birdies without facing consequences. Lies that claim guns don’t kill and that we are not selling assault weapons to those we should be caring for because of their mental health problems. Lie after lie, now protected because the library at Alexandria was again burned.

Enough is enough. we need honorable and intelligent people in congress. We need to weed out the fools, knaves, liars, cheats, philanders, and greedy — those who are willing to punish the “vulnerable” merely because they are vulnerable. Enough is enough.