I get more than a little uneasy when I hear people talk about the "good old days" and even more so when I hear Donald Trump saying he will "make America great again". Why does his rhetoric depress me? Because I am less than four years younger than him. I knew the times he is referring to. In many, many ways they weren't so great.



   


Above is a 2005 picture of the 16th Street Baptist in Birmingham, Alabama. Back in 1963, it saw a time in which it looked very different. In September of that year, four Ku Klux Klan members planted a bomb under the steps going into the church and when it exploded, it caused the deaths of four little black girls. It took ten years and more before the case against these men was put together and even then one of them never did any time, though the other three were eventually given life sentences. The event probably was the one that led to the shift in public opinion among white Americans and thus to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Even many white people in the South began to turn against the Klan. It had gone too far; the event was just too horrible.

The whole struggle to improve the lot of African-Americans grew the most heated in the 60's that it probably ever became, though present times are threatening to reach similar levels of hate and violence if the trends continue. 

And let us not forget the war in Vietnam, which nearly tore the US in half. It pitted generation against generation and got young people who protested the clandestine, criminal actions of their government killed at Kent State University and then ten days later at Jackson State University in Mississippi. 

And there were ugly things going on in other parts of the world as well. Canada, my country, had its residential schools for native kids. The kids were taken from their parents and placed, almost always against the will of both themselves and their parents, into government or church run schools where they lived in residences and were given their white overlords' idea of a "good education". They learned nothing of their own cultures and were whipped in many cases for even speaking their own languages. The kids who emerged from these schools were scarred for lifetimes and were often all but useless as parents to their own kids a few years later as they had seen so little of what loving parenting looks like. 








More generally,  kids were whipped or strapped routinely in the public and private schools all over the West and even more so at home. It's horrifying when seen from our perspective today. We know physical abuse makes everything worse - for kids, parents, and society over the long haul. The evidence is unequivocal. But in those times, corporal punishment was just life. 

Millions of women were beaten by drunken husbands. Some in and out of emergency wards every few weeks.  

If I was walking through my neighborhood in the middle of the day, I sometimes heard these kids being whipped or women being beaten. But no one in the neighborhood said a thing. It was always generally seen as that family's business and others stayed out of it. 

In addition, let us not forget what lay beneath these rivers of abuse. Every neighborhood had men and plenty of them who had gone off to World War Two a few years before - as teenagers, in many cases - seen and done terrible things, and come home to supposedly return to normal, civilian life. They were carrying deep psychological traumas. Many became alcoholics. They were emotional cripples and basically a mess.  









I lived and grew up in a working class neighborhood in Edmonton, Canada in the 1950's and 60's. I do not speak of those days with longing. We had all of the above circumstances hanging over us. We also lived in hourly fear, especially in Edmonton (which we were told was number 4 on the Russians list of targets) of nuclear holocaust. We did drills at school. At thirteen, I went through a time during which I lay awake and listened to sirens, trying to decide whether they were air raid ones, so scared my teeth would chatter.   








The good old days were not good. 

The past really only has one thing going for it that the future does not: we survived the past. The future ...who knows? And while this has always been true, it's also true that the future is looking scarier and scarier again these days. Ecosystem failure on a planetary scale is staring us in the face. 

People's looking back longingly to their past in such times is a well-known phenomenon to social scientists. But nostalgia is all poppycock and always has been. The rosy past these people long for never existed anywhere except in their imaginations.  

I'll say it again to close: the good old days were not so good. Take it from one who lived them. 

So quit sighing over the past and instead have a nice evening right now. Love the ones you love and let them know it. While you can. 

   




   




   




   



   


Once in a while I offer one of my poems to ease the droning on about Philosophy that I know I do. I grew up working class. My dad was a coal miner, a plasterer, and then a steam engineer in a number of different factories around Edmonton. My mom was a nurse. They both had little room or time for pretentions or nonsense. Kids' stuff. 

I grew up already knowing as an axiom that there is no respect for people who will not work. Of course, in some circles of society, the idle welfare and the idle rich, work is seen as a chump's way of life. But I think it is worthwhile to say once on this blog that I grew up working class, and I knew almost nothing but work in a whole bunch of different fields, as I tried to build a better life for myself and my family, for about forty years.  

Anyway, one of my earlier jobs as I saved to go to university in the late '60's and early '70's was at a fiberglass insulation plant. I couldn't find a photo in the "labeled for reuse" category of a fiberglass insulation plant, but I found a lot of others that depict accurately enough what it was to have lived working class over the last 150 years or so. 

Here's my poem on a day of work in the fiberglass insulation plant. 

Insulation Education

Up in the rafters of the Fiberglas of Canada plant

I clean from every crevice, fine, pink, snowdrifted particles of

the product

Below ... figures in green coveralls and lemon hard hats

Stagger through shallow swirls of this snow

The line is in trouble

The green robots serve the line in this, their temple.

Frenetically.

Batten-waste scattered everywhere.

Always hot. Always itching, an unnatural itch like no other ever felt.

What God drives foremen's supervisors' managers' board's shareholders ... 

or ...

What am I doing here?

What are humans doing here,

under multiple blue fluorescent suns,

shuffling through the fine drifts of fine preter-dust 

... silica boiled, jetted, and spun?

Humans forbidden to touch any skin but their rashitching own.

One hour and forty seven minutes 

... will I head for beer?

Is the pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the forest?

Was beer invented for working men?

Shimon Peres died last night. He is shown above with Yasser Arafat (to his left) and Yithzak Rabin (to his right) just after they received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for their work on the Oslo Accords. These accords have not realized their promises, but they made a real difference, I believe, because they were one more step on the path toward a real peace. They showed that there is a willingness on both sides to talk through their differences. 

As a side note, I think it is worth saying that the signing of the Oslo Accords probably got Rabin assassinated by one of his own people in 1995 in a way closely analogous to the way in which the Camp David Agreement got Anwar Sadat assassinated by his own people in 1981. Both were hated for trying to make peace with the "sworn enemy". No nation has a monopoly on political extremism/insanity.  


   

      Egyptian President Sadat, US President Jimmy Carter, Israeli Prime Minister Begin (1978) 



Peres' was Israel's last link to it founding generation. Him, Rabin, a few others. Gone now. His death has made me think, sadly, one more time of how blindly cultural differences have driven political turmoil in our species. It does not have to be this way. If we could come to understand, in large majority, what cultural differences are really about, the scientific basis, we could teach that truth to the kids. We could get past the militaristic madness.  

I believe absolutely that peace is doable in every conflict. And it does not have to be bought with blood - with war casualties, in other words. It just needs balanced, visionary, dedicated leaders, who are both realistic and compassionate. And majorities in the nations involved who really do try their best just to be decent. Then, the rest, in spite of the warmongers, will come.  

Sometimes, the array of forces opposing a peaceful settlement can be very strong, and humans, being the weak and myopic creatures that they are, can slip so easily into the violent, delusional option. But honest people know, in their hearts, on both sides, that it didn't have to come to so much hurting. They could have worked it out if both sides had been ready to use reason and compromise. There are really very few "non-negotiables" in any dispute, and even these can be resolved by compromise. Jerusalem, for example, one day will be an open city, administered by a UN council, then later a local council, and it will be better off on its own than as part of either Israel or Palestine. Workable compromise can be done.  

Shimon Peres was a man who gradually realized this hard truth over the course of his life. I believe it is correct to say no Israeli ever loved Israel more, loved his people more, or knew the real world for what it is better than he did. But he came to believe, after years of suffering on both sides, that the Palestinians were people with legitimate aspirations as a people just as much as the Jews were. And to believe that debate, negotiation, and compromise could work to find a resolution to the endless woes of the two peoples. 

Was he mistaken? I can hear both Jews and Muslims all over the world arguing right now that he was, each side absolutely certain of its case, each case, of course, being utterly incompatible with that of its "adversary". "We must use force. They understand nothing else." Nonsense. 

When enough of their kids have died and nothing is getting any better for anyone, the grieving and the burning desires for vengeance gradually evolve into a real willingness to just talk. And listen. They have in the past and they will again. 

The festering core of the so-called "war of civilizations" between Islam and the West has been Israel/Palestine since before I was born (1949), and the war of civilizations will keep stumbling drunkenly and pointlessly on until the two sides really have had enough. 

I, meanwhile, will keep insisting that we could arrive, via Science, at a set of values that really could work for a family of human beings. 

Living with another culture is a lot like living with another family in your home. It will always be a strain to some degree, but it is still completely doable. We could do this. We could be a family. We just have to accept a low but constant degree of anxiety as ...life. A way of life that is infinitely preferable to the alternative. In short, it is time humanity grew up. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a good day. 


   


   

No post yesterday and a short one today. I can barely walk. Picking grapes for two days and several days more ahead of me ...if I can stand it. Well, you know. They need help. Most people don't want to work that hard anymore so farm workers are very hard to find. Anyway, I hurt everywhere. Maybe I really am getting old.

But working in the vineyards and orchards around my hometown is good for driving home in my own mind one of my main theses. We humans are all family deep inside.

I have heard several languages and met up with even more cultures working in the orchard. Sikhs, Mexicans, Pakistanis, Australians, all sorts of Canadians, English-speaking and French-speaking, and some others. They all value hard work and courtesy and humor. It's as simple as that. And you praise the really good workers and thank the people who share a bit of their lunch or a cup of coffee and you know when a man is standing with his back to you and both hands in front of him why he has stepped over into the bush. And you rush to help if someone gets hurt. And you can tell when a husband and wife are mad at each other and you don't interfere.

We are all so much alike just below the surface that it is depressing for some people. Boring.

But not for me.

I see so much reason to hope when I work in the circle of love in the common people. Elitists can sneer at my sentimentality till they crack their faces for all I care.

I see humanity, human nature, the simple story of every life. And but for a few sociopaths, who are so easy to spot when you're working in the orchard, these people - all of them - are beautiful.

Enjoy your evening, folks.







  

                             

                                                                 "The Scream" (Edvard Munch) 



In the struggle that I am waging with postmodernism, I am definitely David and it is Goliath. For now, anyway. I am one of a very few voices that cry out against the whole postmodernist way of thinking. As I have said here many times, I think postmodernism is flawed in its core. 

Languages are made of cultural conventions, sets of sounds then written characters, that a group of people set up among themselves so that humans of the same language group can get along and work together as a community. Cultural conventions they are, but completely arbitrary and particular to a particular culture in each case they are not. 

There is implicit in any communication that connects one mind to another, and passes information across the gap between minds, some common referent that the words and sentences refer to and that both parties to the communication at least roughly understand. Otherwise, communication could not take place. To posit otherwise, is simply incoherent. The assumption that postmodernism is based on - namely, that everything humans do is irretrievably locked inside of the doers' implicit set of cultural assumptions - contradicts the deeper axiom that makes human social living possible in the first place. That axiom, if articulated, would say something like: "You have these needs that are grounded in the material world, and I have something to tell you about them via these bits of language that we both understand. The bits of language get the meaning that they have for us both, and can then be passed back and forth between us, because of the material world that we both experience." The culturally neutral material world is assumed to exist and assumed to be at least somewhat describable with our words. Otherwise, our babel would be made up of 7.4 billion mutually untranslatable tongues and our lives would be poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short. 

Translation, as a human activity that we do as we re-word a message from one language into another language, shows this truth up even more dramatically. Translation would not be possible if there were no outside, material world to which people from two different language groups can refer, as their translators attempt to make one tribe's meaning clear to another tribe.

The whole postmodernist project has kind intentions ("Don't belittle another culture by comparing it to your own! Don't even let your mind go there!"), but it is so glaringly self-contradictory that I have to wonder what could have led thinking people to such a muddle in the first place.

And yes, I have a theory that explains why postmodernism ever gained the force it did.  

I think the originators intentions were basically very kind, even though the system of thought that they proposed is incoherent. But I also think there were deeper things going on in the minds of the originators of this philosophy, things that drove this rationalizing. 

I don't need to mention the names of the most prominent postmodernist thinkers. Suffice it to say that most of them are gone. But I will try to find in their life histories, some experiences that I believe profoundly shaped their thinking, along with the thinking of millions they influenced.  

To explain my thoughts on why postmodernism ever got the momentum that it did, I need to briefly describe the work of Leon Feistinger and his student, Elliot Aronson. These two men were social psychologists whose most important research and writing was  centered around cognitive dissonance theory. Wikipedia gives Feistinger's definition of cognitive dissonance: 


cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time; performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas, or values; or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.


In short, cognitive dissonance is the mental clashing we feel when we see ourselves as hypocrites. We don't much care for that feeling so, to reduce it, we adjust our beliefs or our actions to bring the two into consonance, or at least a more tolerable level of dissonance. We need to like ourselves. 

Probably, if you're a sharp reader, you can tell where this train of thought is going. 


   

                                                                  "Guernica" (Pablo Picasso) 




The postmoderns, it seems clear to me, were decent people who found the chaos of nineteenth century philosophy - Kierkegaard and Nietzsche - distressing enough. But then came the horrors of two world wars, and for the Americans, Vietnam. Some of the postmoderns even played roles that we now think of as collaborating with the tyrants. These were tyrants whose henchmen did murder and torture on an industrialized, assembly line scale, though in fairness to some of the philosophers and social scientists who cooperated with the tyrants, most of the atrocities were not revealed until after the various wars were well under way or over with.

In their secret hearts, these men then asked themselves ruthlessly: 

"How could I have stood by and let this happen?" Or even, "How could I have believed the monstrous lies these people told?"

Cognitive dissonance. 

It's interesting, in a side note, to see how the tone and attitude of Americans as shown in their movies changed as a result of the Vietnam War. "Judgement At Nuremberg", a huge production released in 1961, unequivocally condemns the educated, professional people of Germany for what happened under the Nazis. Educated people, the film says bluntly, should have known better. But by one decade later, the film "Cabaret" leaves audiences with the clear conclusion that Germany was like much of the world in those Depression times. Ordinary people trying their best to live ordinary lives - loving, bickering, working, and so on. The forces that led to the rise of the Nazis were too huge and complex for any one person or even group of people to do much about. Or so "Cabaret" seems to say. 

Such were the experiences of the postmoderns. Read their life stories. In France, Germany, Britain, the US and all of the countries thereto attached, they knew horrors, sometimes ones that at the time were kept out of the public eye, but also sometimes ones they witnessed and even participated in. Some of them even backed the tyrants.  

The postmoderns then, to reduce cognitive dissonance, made up a philosophy under which no one is responsible for anything in order to be able to live with what they saw their countrymen do, and in some cases, with mistakes they made themselves. 

Unfortunately, these kindhearted forgiving motives have, in my view, gone too far. 

Yes, guys, you made some bad mistakes. I see that and I see that to do otherwise would have required an almost super-human insight and prescience. And I can forgive you. All you need to do is allocute and then ask for forgiveness. We all screw up sometimes. 

But no, that does not mean that these acts weren't mistakes. Nor does it mean we can disavow responsibility for our actions and our lives now. Most of all, what we cannot do is settle into a kind of disillusioned resignation. What we must do is find a better model of human culture and of what makes wars happen so that we can keep from doing it all again. 

So before I close, let me make one thing clear. I have not developed and offered a philosophy that connects our mental lives, and especially our moral values, to empirical reality mainly because I want to help my fellow human beings get out of this postmodernist muddle. That would be a gratifying consequence if it ever came about. But I did the thinking and writing I did first and foremost because I really do believe that the model of human social evolution that I have developed explains what has been going on with our species all along. I seek first to explain reality. 

In reality, I claim, values foster patterns of behavior and behavior patterns either help us or hinder us in our struggle to survive. 

The postmodernists' kindhearted intentions are not enough. Not for me, nor for my species. We must above all else, deal first with what is. Know the truth and it will set us free. Then maybe, we can give it to the world, and then maybe, together, we can build a better version of that world. One in which there really is a life of decency and sense for all. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a good day.    

    
 

   



A lot of my posts are merely review and further explanation of the things I say in my book, which I began re-posting on this site last April, a bit over five months ago. It might take a bit of time for you to read it, but if my thoughts on human history, culture, and moral values intrigue you at all, then reading my whole book might be enjoyable for you. And you certainly do not have to conclude at the end of the journey that God is real because I am exhorting you to. The whole point of my book is that I think I can make, and now have made, a case for the conclusion that belief in God, in a way that suits this twenty-first century, is just rational.

                       




God is there alright. She is just one stern mama sometimes. The hawk has babies to feed too, and her talons are not meant for grasping melons out of your garden. Some songbirds must die. The wolf keeps the caribou herd strong. She just looks a bit scary when she is dragging strands of intestine out of her kill and her jaws are dripping blood. But the caribou calf she killed would have weakened the herd. It wasn't deformed or diseased or even slow of foot. It was just dancing at the fringe of her mate's sprint zone while she hid in the rocks a few feet further on. When she got a good opportunity to lunge out and bring it down, she took that opportunity. Nature has no place for weak or sick, but she also has no place for stupid. Harsh. Real. The wolf has cubs that she must feed too, and her teeth are not meant for grazing. 

Yes, God is pretty harsh, but the harshness is kinder in the end. All things die. The fit deserve the chance to breed and pass on their genes and their ways. The rest don't. The herd must stay strong. 

Humans, on the other hand, have modified nature's code somewhat. We protect the lives of the weak even when they are not our young or the young of anyone else in our tribe. Most animals protect their young, but we also protect nearly every herd/pack member. Why? Nearly all human tribes have adopted this value because our way of life is so dependent on passing detailed, complex knowledge and skills down the generations. Humans learned long ago that people who might not make it if left to fend for themselves in a raw environment, often become excellent spear makers or healers of diseases and injuries or tellers of the tales that hold the myth-embedded wisdom of our ancestors. 

Loving your neighbor turns out to be a good practice over the long haul for humans. Even loving neighbors you hardly know or ones from another town that you don't know at all or ...you see where this train of thought is going. Love your neighbor because your neighbor with his somewhat peculiar ways may one day use those very ways to save your life and the lives of your children. You nursed him through the epidemic time. He remembers that time. Years later, he shows you how to stop the blight that is withering your crops. 

My larger point for today then is this: all human values/beliefs, and the mores and customs that come attached to those beliefs, have a survival index associated with them. Loving your neighbor, when you really do and you really practice it, is just smart for you and your tribe over the long haul. 

Quantum uncertainty, which is built into reality remember, guarantees that the future is going to hit you, me, and everyone with some shocks. Events we have made little or no provision for. If we have a lot of different kinds of people in town, the odds that someone will see a way to fight or block or dodge the coming catastrophe are just higher than they would be if we were a more homogeneous population. Freedom is one of our values because it means that lots of kinds of people can live lots of kinds of ways in our nation. Love so that our nation does not fall into factions and mutual suspicion and then violence and fissioning. We have freedom and love as prime values for a reason. Together, they are our response to an absolutely universal, inescapable trait of all of empirical reality. 

Values connect to reality. They are not mere conventions. The core ones are not particular to any one tribe. They are found everywhere because over the long haul, they work.  

Ah, well. If you follow my blog, you know I have repeated this claim many times. 

It will be enough for today if I simply leave you with a picture in your head of millions of humans living out their lives, day by day, in tribes and nations all over the world, over millennia of time, encountering uncertainty - that is due, at its deepest level, to quantum uncertainty - over and over everywhere. Now run the film forward, but slowly. Watch what happens.  

Enough for today. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a good day. 



   







 

What I dream is that the people of the world will come to comprehend and then to handle the aggressive drives that exist at the tribal level in all humans. The mode of behaving called "tribalism" that made war such a universal phenomenon for our species right back to the Australopithicines is a way of life that we can no longer afford to practice. We can't stop our most primitive drives, but we may be able to learn to redirect them. 

To stop the madness, we must first cut off the head of the tribalism monster and graft on a new one. This metaphor sounds pretty nasty, but in the realm of human memes and the cultures that are built on them, our species actually operating under a new master operating system would not be painful at all. Probably, we would operate, or rather the kids in a couple of generations would operate, in a society in which creativity, imagination, work, and change were all just life. We learned to drive cars and to put a set of rules in place for all drivers in a generation. The hard part for our species is going to be letting go of the past. Seeing our kids make a new world and leave us and most of our ways behind.  

How many humans might we be aiming to re-educate? Here is a link to one version of the world population clock: 

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/  


I think this project is still doable. How? Via the internet. We need to offer an explanation of where our troubles all ultimately come from, and it needs to be an explanation that is readily understood by all reasonably intelligent adults on this planet and is also readily teachable to the kids. 

There is much reason for hope when a man like Barack Obama can get elected in a country that had legal slavery of members of his race four or so generations ago. The last African-American who had been born into slavery died in the 1970's, well after Pres. Obama was born. 

The climate deal signed in Paris is looking like it will come into effect before the end of 2016. 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-climate-change-60-signed-1.3772285

Slavery - which still exists in many parts of the world - is being tackled, as articles all over the internet attest. 

https://blogs.state.gov/stories/2013/02/01/ten-ways-you-can-help-fight-modern-slavery

I could go on, but the point has been made, I think. We can do a lot of things. There is hope. What we can't do is just do nothing. 

What I try to do to get  more sanity, decency, and sense into the way the whole world runs is to offer a model of what our largest operating memes, our moral values, are and why they are as they are. A model that fits the facts. A model that can be seen as scientific, in other words. Such a model, I believe, will make our activities to build a better world rational and efficient. 

The project of putting a new understanding of why we talk the way we talk and do the things we do into the minds of the big majority of the world's people may yet work. 

So I say again: courage and wisdom, in a taoist, dynamic equilibrium, are our response to entropy. Freedom and love, in a similar balance, are our response to quantum uncertainty. Over millions of humans and thousands of generations, they became core values all over the world because they work. They get results. They enable human tribes who believe in them and live by them to survive. These values must inform all that we believe at the tribal level, and one day, the species level. 

Core values are not particular to any one culture. If we have a bewildering variety of cultures and their values and mores out there in the real world, this does not prove cultures are incommensurable. It only proves just how free we really are. And for over a million years, at least, we have been testing different cultural meme sets, mores, and values against one another by war. Hitler was correct in saying it made our species vigorous. What he didn't see is that its day is up. As Kennedy said, either we end it or it will end us. 

Let the past go. 

So? Whether you're feeling confident or you're floundering, remember: values are real. Yes, we have invented words to label patterns in human civilization, but the patterns are ones that exist in empirical reality. The words for those patterns work just as well as the word "gravity" works to describe patterns of movement of bodies in space and the word "magnetism" works to describe what iron filings do around a magnet. "Courage", "wisdom", "freedom", and "love" are as real as any words can be. They name observables.   

In practice? In real terms, what is good? 

Whatever is increasing the health of our planet is good. Whatever isn't is bad. That is what wisdom tells us. 






Pluralism is good. That is what love tells us. A complex human social ecosystem containing a wide varied of human lifestyles in complex interactive relationships is nimble. It flexes with shocks. It can adjust and adapt. It is much more resilient than any monolithic, near-heterogeneous society ever can be. Diversity is a good thing for non-human ecosystems. It is good for human ones as well. In the long haul, even if pluralism goes underground for a while, it always returns. The trick, the challenge, for humans is to learn to do more than just accept pluralism and live with it. We must learn to exalt it and revel in it.  

I could go on, but enough for today. 

Right and wrong are real. That is my message. How values work over whole populations and over many generations, I am barely beginning to comprehend. I still hope to see farther into how values and cultures work. A model that fits the past and may even enable us to make predictions about what is coming for our species if we go one way, and what would come if we went any of several others. A model that finally becomes scientific, one with explicative and predictive value. 

But I'm running out of time. My fondest wish is that moral realist thinking and model-building will take root in a few young minds, ones that get the math, which I am sure is there. They will build, test, and promulgate models that will give us greater guidance in running our world. Competing models sometimes. And the struggles will take place in our minds, our research, and our debates, which is where they must be quarantined and studied if we are to survive. 

But I will keep on in my backwater too, of course. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a good day. 




 

My apologies again for the mistake that I made with yesterday's post. The gist of the post was accurate, but the facts were more complex than I had at first portrayed. I think I've fixed it now. Very embarrassing. Facts matter to me. 


However, let's get on with today's post. 


   

                                                                                        cichlids 


   

                                                 convict cichlids (female on left, male on right) 





Below is a a quote from Konrad Lorenz, in his book "On Aggression". Yes, the book is a bit old (1963). But it seems to me to be totally relevant to any discussion of human behavior. 

Here he is talking about his studies involving cichlids, a kind of small fish. 



 "If the male has even the slightest fear of his partner his sexuality is completely extinguished. In the female there is the same relation between aggression and sexuality: if she is so little in awe of her partner that her aggression is not entirely suppressed, she does not react to him sexually at all. She becomes a Brunhilde and attacks him the more ferociously the more potentially ready she is for sexual reactions, that is, the nearer she is to spawning, in respect of her ovarian and hormonal state." 

"Conversely, aggression and sexuality are quite compatible in the male; he can treat his partner roughly, chase her all round the tank, and between whiles perform sexual movements and all possible mixed forms of motor patterns. The female may fear the male considerably without suppression of sexually motivated behaviour patterns. The bride-to-be may flee before the male and at the same time make use of every breathing-space to perform sexually motivated courtship movements." 


"Thus the behaviour mechanism just described guarantees the pairing of two individuals of opposite sexes. In many variations, and modified by different ritualizations, this process of sex recognition and pair formation play an important part in very many vertebrates right up to man." 

(Lorenz, Konrad; On Aggression; 1963; p. 100 - 101) 



Here is a link to the complete text: 

 https://monoskop.org/images/d/d0/Lorenz_Konrad_On_Aggression_2002.pdf


Why do I bring up this theory of aggression and especially aggression between the sexes? The answer is that I see this same atavistic tendency in humans even though their behavior patterns are far more the result of cultural programming than is the case with small fish. 

Many men and women all over the world tend to find members of the opposite sex who play this game more attractive. It is also true, it seems to me, that the numbers of males still playing at the dominant role is considerably higher than the numbers of females playing the submissive one, but the big point is that the game is still among us. 

It should be obsolete. We are not fish. We're supposed to be smarter than that. 

The male dominant/female submissive game should be obsolete among humans for more primal reasons also. If we program females to be reluctant to compete with men seriously, then we rob our society of a major part of its talent pool, and we simply don't need them to act submissive and make a lot of babies in order to improve their tribe's survival odds anymore. They are far more of an asset to their nations today if they have way fewer babies, but instead become major producers of wealth.  

A nation can have more babies than it needs fairly readily these days. Smallpox is gone. Polio almost so. And so on. Babies survive fairly reliably in this century, and in the areas in which the infant mortality rates are high, even there, the numbers are dropping every year.  

We don't need more babies; we need to properly educate the ones we have, including the girls. 

Am I envisioning a globe full of intimidated, largely impotent men? Am I shrugging such a scenario off? Not at all. I think we really can get past thinking like fish or birds or any of the other vertebrates that Lorenz studied. 

Smart women are sexy. They seek a greater degree of involvement and motivation in both their partners and themselves in their sexual liaisons these days. And good on 'em for doing so. 

To be blunt, women who just lie there are not much fun. 

I think I speak on behalf of most men in the modern world when I say: 

"Oh, yes. Take the active role sometimes. Half the time. More if it suits my temperament and yours, and we talk about it openly. Let's be peers. Partners. When we are, you are sexy to me." 


In the shadow of the big tree outside your bedroom, have a lovely day. 




                                    


   


   


                     

Sorry, friends. That's what comes of not sleeping. This is Obama's speech at the UN in September of 2015. The main gist of my post yesterday is correct. He is speaking of values and they are coming from a worldview that I agree with fully. But this speech is not his final speech at the UN. That speech was delivered yesterday. Sorry. I have amended my post so that it makes more sense and is consistent with the facts. But it is worth noting that Obama's values in the intervening year have not changed.  








Below are some clips from President Obama's speech at the UN General Assembly last September 28. I really don't have much to add. 




"The strength of nations depends on the success of their people -- their knowledge, their innovation, their imagination, their creativity, their drive, their opportunity -- and that, in turn, depends upon individual rights and good governance and personal security.  Internal repression and foreign aggression are both symptoms of the failure to provide this foundation."  


"A politics and solidarity that depend on demonizing others, that draws on religious sectarianism or narrow tribalism or jingoism may at times look like strength in the moment, but over time its weakness will be exposed.  And history tells us that the dark forces unleashed by this type of politics surely makes all of us less secure.  Our world has been there before.  We gain nothing from going back." 


"I say this, recognizing that diplomacy is hard; that the outcomes are sometimes unsatisfying; that it's rarely politically popular.  But I believe that leaders of large nations, in particular, have an obligation to take these risks -- precisely because we are strong enough to protect our interests if, and when, diplomacy fails."  


"The commitments we’ve made to the Sustainable Development Goals speak to this truth.  I believe that capitalism has been the greatest creator of wealth and opportunity that the world has ever known.  But from big cities to rural villages around the world, we also know that prosperity is still cruelly out of reach for too many.  As His Holiness Pope Francis reminds us, we are stronger when we value the least among these, and see them as equal in dignity to ourselves and our sons and our daughters." 


"Together, we can eradicate extreme poverty and erase barriers to opportunity.  But this requires a sustained commitment to our people -- so farmers can feed more people; so entrepreneurs can start a business without paying a bribe; so young people have the skills they need to succeed in this modern, knowledge-based economy." 

"We can promote growth through trade that meets a higher standard.  And that’s what we’re doing through the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a trade agreement that encompasses nearly 40 percent of the global economy; an agreement that will open markets, while protecting the rights of workers and protecting the environment that enables development to be sustained." 

"We can roll back the pollution that we put in our skies, and help economies lift people out of poverty without condemning our children to the ravages of an ever-warming climate.  The same ingenuity that produced the Industrial Age and the Computer Age allows us to harness the potential of clean energy.  No country can escape the ravages of climate change.  And there is no stronger sign of leadership than putting future generations first.  The United States will work with every nation that is willing to do its part so that we can come together in Paris to decisively confront this challenge." 

"That is what I believe is America’s greatest strength.  Not everybody in America agrees with me.  That's part of democracy.  I believe that the fact that you can walk the streets of this city right now and pass churches and synagogues and temples and mosques, where people worship freely; the fact that our nation of immigrants mirrors the diversity of the world -- you can find everybody from everywhere here in New York City -- (applause) -- the fact that, in this country, everybody can contribute, everybody can participate no matter who they are, or what they look like, or who they love -- that's what makes us strong."  

"The people of our United Nations are not as different as they are told.  They can be made to fear; they can be taught to hate -- but they can also respond to hope.  History is littered with the failure of false prophets and fallen empires who believed that might always makes right, and that will continue to be the case.  You can count on that.  But we are called upon to offer a different type of leadership -- leadership strong enough to recognize that nations share common interests and people share a common humanity, and, yes, there are certain ideas and principles that are universal."

Some principles are universal, he says. If you have read much of my blog at all, you know I literally could not agree more. America is going to sorely miss him. He will look to thinking people early, and all others later, like the genius of our times, and these times will seem like the good old days if America takes the wrong turn this November. Our species is at stake, and yes, that is how much America, today, for all her flaws, matters. 

Here is a link to the full text of the speech: 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/28/remarks-president-obama-united-nations-general-assembly

There really is hope. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless friends, have a good day.

Here is a link to the video of this year's speech: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIw9B_7QkGA

Here is the link to the text of this year's speech: 

 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/20/address-president-obama-71st-session-united-nations-general-assembly

                         

                                                                famous poster, WWII era, Betty Grable




                           
                                   





                                   
                        







   




   
   



                     



          



                              


                                      



                                      

I was talking yesterday about the universality of combat sports all over the world. Today, I thought it might be appropriate to talk about another universal way of communicating between humans. 

Men, especially fit, muscular men, sometimes, sometimes constantly, project an image of themselves as fit and muscular when they are in public places, almost as unconsciously and naturally as they breathe. It becomes a way of life. They do not have to be constantly flexing pectorals or quads or whatever muscle group is most likely to be noticed at the moment. They may just be used to standing and walking with energy as a way, probably a primitive way, of signalling to other men that they are a force to be reckoned with. The primitive signal was probably something like: "...and so, if you know what's good for you, keep your hands off of my women." Looking tough raised one's odds of breeding successfully. Over generations, fit and assertive men had more kids, in particular, more sons who watched their dads' examples, and passed their genes and their mores on more successfully down the generations. 

Women have other routes to power. I have never heard anyone say it out loud or in print, but it needs to be said. For women, beauty is a route to power. Beauty enables a woman to get men, a bigger selection from which to choose a mate. Beauty may also get other women who have been duly intimidated, to do what the beauties want. Beauties, over the millennia, have had more kids, especially more daughters who were imprinted with their moms' mores, and thus have had more success, over generations, in passing their genes and mores on. 

Men get weak and worn. Women get the same. Both get wrinkled. Beauties and muscles fade. But for a while at least, during their children's most impressionable years, they retain their signals and signalling power. 

The women in the images above are signalling that they are sexually confident. Note the tilts of the head and shoulders. These are pieces of a motif that is a universal human signal. 

"Yes, I know I'm cute. Yes, I might be interested in a liason with you."

The tilt of the head and the incline of the shoulders is a pose each of these women probably saw in the sexually powerful women around her when she was a little girl. The signal is universal. It is found in all cultures. But the fact that a woman is putting out such signals does not - repeat, does not - mean she actually wants some sexual interaction with the man she is looking at - or anyone else in the room, for that matter. It is a look that got imprinted into her little girl brain long ago. In many women, it can be a look that they are unaware of projecting at the time. 

An awareness of this fact is especially important when we travel from one culture to another. Women everywhere do this pose, but it indicates varying degrees of sexual interest or readiness.
There is universality here, but also there are particularities that vary from tribe to tribe.  In some countries, where women are kept out of the gaze of men, this look might very well mean an almost overwhelming level of desire and readiness is being signalled.

On the other hand, in the West, where sexual mores are more open, it may only be a pose, memorized and performed so many times that the performer is unaware of any signalling coming from her at all. Perhaps, she didn't even see the look in her own mom. It could be that she only saw it in a movie or a magazine, and she is doing nothing more now than testing the equipment. 

The women pictured below, for example, from everything we know of them now, were actually not very skilful as sexual athletes. It was all an act. 

Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe. Sex goddesses. And it was all an act, one which, in both of their cases, may have contributed to the array of forces that got them killed. May they rest in peace now.  




   

                           

                                          

                                              Minoan youths boxing (fresco dated to 1600 yrs. B.C.) 


   

                                   modern boxing (World Series of Boxing bout, Los Angeles, 2011) 


   

                                   French savate championship bout, 2013 


   

                                             students training in modern karate dojo 



   

                                                             Muay Thai boxer delivering a kick 



   

                                                            women's mixed martial arts event 



For those who doubt that humans have values, beliefs, needs, etc. that are quite translatable from culture to culture, I offer a short comment today on the universality of combat sports. Every nation has a form of self-defense that it sees as its own and in every one of them there are rules, off-limits areas of the body, referees, and so on. There is a deep need in us humans to test ourselves physically against each other, and it seems to be pretty much universal. But we also all recognize the need for balance and control and the safety of the athletes who compete in combative sports. 

Balance. Courage. Wisdom. And everyone recognizes when one combatant has had enough. Universal. Translatable from culture to culture. Not incommensurable at all. Raw aggression, like raw energy, tamed, harnessed, and directed into useful channels. A safe outlet for anger. A great motivator to inspire young people to train and condition their bodies and their minds. 

There is something very deep here, something about what it means to be human. Balance. 








   

                                        young Thai boxer and his trainer pray before a match 



                                  



































                            boxers Ted Kid Lewis and Jack Britten shake hands before their bout, 1921




   

                            Manny Pacquaio and Floyd Mayweather embrace after their fight in 2015