Café Philos: an internet café

For me, one of the most fascinating things about the net is how the net makes it easy to meet and know exceptional people.

I am not talking about famous people here.

Frankly, all but a few of the world's most famous people cause me to despair of humanity. Really, is there anything about a Bush, a Putin, or a Musharraf that makes you want to celebrate humanity? Is there anything about a James Dobson, a Britney Spears, or a Bill O'Reilly that makes you want to cheer? Have you ever praised The Cosmic Weirdness for gifting you with a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? I strongly suspect most of the world's most famous people became famous because they were driven to covet fame, power, or money above all else in their lives. In other words, because they were shallow.

When you turn away from the most famous and instead surf the net for the much less famous, though, you seem to turn away from some of the worse people humanity has to offer and turn towards some of the best it has to offer. That has been the great discovery I've made about the internet -- it allows you to meet and know people who lack fame, but who are genuinely exceptional.

That point tends to pop up in my mind each time I surf blogs. If all I knew of humanity were the world's most famous people, I would become a cynic. I could not believe in humanity. I would despair of it.

Yet, so very many of the people I've met on the net have proven themselves kind, gifted and even wise. That's not to say everyone I've met is those things. Yet, I'd rather take my chances of meeting a very decent person on the net, than take my chances of meeting a very decent person at a White House dinner.

On the net, I have met people who are not famous, but who are world class writers, poets, or photographers. I have met people who are extraordinarily intelligent or exceptionally wise. I have met people who are better informed and more intellectually honest than most of the world's famous pundits. I have met people who I suspect have an unrivaled capacity for kindness. I have even met people who have either the luck or the talent to lead quite interesting lives. In short, I have met dozens of people who should be world famous if that sort of fame was based solely on one's human merit. Largely because of these people, I do not despair of humanity.

So, what effect can meeting so many great, but largely unknown, people have on us? Perhaps I can only speak for myself here, but one effect all of this has on me is to create a longing to become -- not merely a good American, not even merely a good Westerner -- but a good citizen of the world.

This is coming from someone who does not consider himself sentimental about humanity. I know humanity can be ugly. I know we are the least sane of the Great Apes. I am aware we are destroying the only world we have, and I recognize it's a long shot the world will ever come together in a sustainable peace. Yet, I still wish to become a good citizen of the world. It seems to me the sanest course in an insane world. What hope I have for such sanity comes to me in some large part from having met so many wonderful people on the net.

If the world is ever to be a decent place for most of us to live, it won't be because of the Bushes and Cheneys, the Dobsons and Spears, the politicians, pundits and preachers, but because of the common people.

A young couple I know were arguing the other night about love. Specifically, one of them held the position that love ends at divorce, while the other was equally insistent that love didn't need to end at divorce.

The point hardly seems worth arguing for the truth is obvious: It's certain some couples who divorce are not in love, while other couples who divorce are in love yet somehow incompatible (the whole notion that you can be in love yet still not be compatible doesn't seem to occur to most young people -- I think you need a few more years and to have seen it a few times to realize it's quite common). So, why were they arguing it?

I might speculate it's because our society -- actually, our popular culture -- has such a narrow view of love and relationships. From Hollywood we learn that a couple who love each other never divorce unless they are going to remarry by the film's end. We also learn true love overcomes all difficulties, life is meant to be lived for love, and no one is better off single than in a relationship. Popular music and romance novels pretty much tell us the same things. If that's all you've been taught to expect of love and relationships, it is small wonder you might argue over whether love ends at divorce.

Real life is much richer than the cartoons of love and relationships presented to us by popular culture. So, I thought I would list a few scenarios that are not typically portrayed in popular culture:

• You can love someone you're incompatible with, and many people do.
• Most often, there's no reason or explanation for why you love someone: You just do.
• So very often lovers part because they cannot overcome some difficulty having little or nothing to do with love or even with psychological compatibility, such as a difference between them of race, age, lifestyle, or religion.
• People can and do love more than one person.
• There is no guarantee the greatest love of your life will marry you.
• People in love with each other can prefer to live apart.
• Divorced people can still love each other, and yet not wish to remarry.
• Not all love is constant -- many times love comes, goes, and returns like a breeze.
• The most significant thing about love is surely not how long it lasts, and merely how long a relationship lasts proves nothing in itself about the quality of love in that relationship: After all, mere co-dependencies tend to last forever.
• Most people, at one time or another, will confuse love with emotional dependency.
• Some people can be much happier single than married.
• Not everyone who loves, loves well, nor ever learns how to love well.
• The intensity of one's feelings does not necessarily indicate the quality of one's love. Just because you love intensely does not mean you love well.

So, what other scenarios that aren't typically found in popular culture have I forgotten here?

According to some historians, during the thousand year long Middle Ages in Europe there was on average one peasant revolt per year. All of them failed.

There are several reasons for the failure of the peasantry to successfully revolt against the elites of the Middle Ages, but I'll mention only one reason to illustrate the difficulty the peasants faced. Before the advent of the hand-held firearm, it required years of training to produce someone highly competent in the best weapons of the Middle Ages. Most peasants didn't train in those weapons, and as a consequence, were usually over-matched when they revolted. Sickles against lances, hammers against swords.

But why did the peasants so frequently revolt in the first place? The most usual reason seems to have been famine. During most of the middle ages, transportation was so poor that it was almost unheard of to ship food in bulk for any distance. So, if the crops failed in one locality, that locality could experience famine even though there might be a surplus of food a mere 30 miles away. When famine struck a locality, the elites had custom, law and force all on their side -- they got what food there was, despite that the peasants produced the food. That left the peasants starving and prone to revolt.

Broadly speaking, at least three things came together to end the thousand year landscape of the Middle Ages. The first was the rise of capitalism, which can be traced back to very early beginnings around 900 A.D. The second was the British Agricultural Revolution -- a remarkable increase in agricultural productivity -- that can be traced back to around 1500 A.D. And the third was the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1700 A.D.

Those three factors, working together, created Europe's most successful peasant revolt. For, while all the revolts of the Middle Ages failed, capitalism, the British Agricultural Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution eventually brought not only wealth and long lifespans to the peasantry, but arguably contributed to their political liberation.

It seems odd to me that nowadays so many of us have come to resent those three developments. We see the many serious problems they have created and we sometimes imagine it would be a good thing if we were rid of capitalism, industrialization, and even large scale agriculture. Yet, to get rid of those things would surely plunge us back into an age when most people lived a short life of scarcity and want. So, I think the real problem is not to get rid of the very things that have lifted societies out of poverty, but to "update" them. We do not need, for instance, to abolish capitalism so much as we need a newer, more useful version of it with the most pressing bugs worked out.

A final consideration here is my gripe against ideologies. Not just any ideology, but all ideologies suffer from the fact they are either impossible or cumbersome to change. The world moves on, but the world's ideologies merely turn into retarded and retarding dogmas. I have never met an ideology that didn't turn to stone all it touched. If a software company were ever to adopt an ideology of software, you can bet they would go out of business -- because they would never update their product in any meaningful or useful way. Version 2.0 would have the same bugs as version 1.0 -- and only the marketing department would say it was better than 1.0. If we are ever so unwise as to leave the future of capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions entirely to ideologists, we will surely get the disasters we deserve for our folly.

After all, it wasn't Christianity, the ideology of the day, that brought about Europe's most successful peasant revolt. Nor should we expect the ideologies of our day to bring about a successful social and economic future for humanity.

I think it's ironic that at the very moment communication and transportation technologies are creating a "global world", specialization is fragmenting each of our societies into expert little niches that often do not understand one another.

It's no longer much of an exaggeration these days to say the only people who understand the law are lawyers, the only people who understand medicine are doctors, the only people who understand information technologies are IT specialists, the only people who understand plumbing are plumbers, and the only people who understand carpentry are carpenters.

Yet, all of those people are increasingly using each other's products and services. I'm typing this on a computer whose components are made in several countries to be read by people from several countries -- and yet much of what I know about the world is so highly specialized that I avoid discussing it except in general terms. Likewise, I can only follow general discussions of what my friends for whom I'm typing this know about the world.

It's not just that we are becoming one world: We are also at the same time dividing into many worlds. I think that is one of the reasons the internet is so important to the future of humanity. It seems to have the power to bring together people from diverse backgrounds, from diverse skill and information niches, into unified online communities. Without that, the world could unite economically -- and even politically -- but perhaps not in a very humane way.

I pulled up an old article published on the web by Discover Magazine this morning and read, "Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser's new theory says evolution hardwired us to know right from wrong." Yet, that's not quite what Marc Hauser is saying.

Instead, it would be more correct to say, Hauser is asserting something along these lines: Our concept that there is such a thing as right and wrong is hardwired into us by our evolution. We have a sort of universal "moral grammar", but not a universal "moral language". For instance: The notion it is wrong to harm an innocent person is universal, but specific notions of who is innocent and who is not innocent are far from being universal.

Yet, most certainly, Hauser is not saying right and wrong exist independent of us. In Hauser's world, man is the measure of right and wrong -- not some metaphysical standard of right and wrong.

Oddly enough, saying "man is the measure of right and wrong" does not preclude a god having something to do with that measure. For, if I were religious, I could always say something like, "God inscribed a universal moral grammar upon the human heart."

Of course, were I both religious and uncomprehending, I could say something like, "God inscribed morality upon the human heart." But that implies there is only one true morality -- and implying that is just as silly as asserting there is only one true human language.

Another way of illustrating the distinction between moral grammar and moral language would be to say morality is hardwired into us much like tool use is hardwired into us. Humans naturally create and use tools. But the specific kinds of tools humans use can vary from culture to culture. And how tools are used can even vary from person to person. So, too, morality is hardwired into us on one level, yet is determined by our culture on another level, and on yet a third level is individual.

Sometime in the 1920's, a cousin of mine established world records in two sports. My mom, who earlier today told me his story, is 89 and cannot recall offhand which two sports he excelled in. I might ask her someday to look it up in the family genealogy -- she has the records -- but I didn't want to put her to that trouble this morning. At any rate, my cousin's prowess in those two sports earned him an invitation to participate in one of the Olympics.

Unfortunately, after the invitation was extended, it was withdrawn upon discovery that my cousin was not that well rounded. He was indeed a superb athlete for his day, but it seems he lacked in academic accomplishments. That's to say, if his shoelaces had required a working knowledge of algebra or history for him to tie them, he would not have been able to tie his own laces. So, the Olympic Committee took back it's invitation. To understand why, it might be useful here to quote from Wikipedia:

The English public schools of the second half of the 19th century had a major influence on many sports. The schools contributed to the rules and influenced the governing bodies of those sports out of all proportion to their size. They subscribed to the Ancient Greek and Roman belief that sport formed an important part of education, an attitude summed up in the saying: mens sana in corpore sano – a sound mind in a healthy body. In this ethos, taking part has more importance than winning, because society expected gentlemen to become all-rounders and not the best at everything. Class prejudice against "trade" reinforced this attitude. The house of the parents of a typical public schoolboy would have a tradesman's entrance, because tradesmen did not rank as the social equals of gentlemen. Apart from class considerations there was the typically English concept of "fairness," in which practicing or training was considered as tantamount to cheating; it meant that you considered it more important to win than to take part. Those who practiced a sport professionally were considered to have an unfair advantage over those who practiced it merely as a "hobby."

Those were the good old days: When athletes were expected to be gentlemen and gentlemen were expected to be well rounded. My cousin might easily have beaten the other competitors at that Olympics -- his records show that -- but that would have missed the point back then.

Today, most of us could not care less whether an Olympic athlete is a well-rounded gentleman or lady. For us, the Olympics are about athletic excellence, rather than virtue. And that attitude permeates all of society. Most of us admire a self-made millionaire for his business acumen even if he is only half-competent as a human being. We admire the famous for being famous without demanding they be more than marginally decent. We vote for politicians who are shrewd political operators but whose wisdom and understanding in all other matters borders on imbecilic. We are a world in love with the expert and the specialist. But we no longer love the gentleman, the lady, the well rounded amateur.

I do not know if that is a good thing or a bad thing -- overall. I can see strengths and weaknesses to both approaches. So, what do you think?

Unless you are trying to pass a class in metaphysics, whether god ontologically exists or not is trivial at best and more likely irrelevant. It's true that discussing the issue can, if done well, exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking, but so can many other issues exercise the brain and sharpen one's thinking. Overall, wondering whether god exists or not is nearly pointless -- except perhaps as a way of distracting ourselves from dealing with more authentic challenges of living.

Underlying the mistaken notion that god's existence or non-existence is vitally important are the assumptions that god, merely by god's ontological existence, saves us from meaninglessness, makes sense of our suffering, preserves us from eternal death, is with us in times of need, and so on and so forth. Yet, not one of those things can be demonstrated -- not to you, not to me, not to anyone.

The mere ontological existence of god implies almost nothing about the nature of god or god's relationship to us. For instance, suppose that tomorrow someone finally proves the universe must necessarily have a creator, and therefore god must ontologically exist. Fine. But would it necessarily mean anything to us? Would it mean there was salvation from eternal death? Would it mean god in any way cares for us? Would it tell us a thing about whether god has a purpose for us or not? On what grounds could anyone answer "yes" to those questions?

Yet, it is crucial to point out here that some people experience god. To be precise, they have an experience of something they choose to name "god". Other people, having similar experiences, choose to say they experienced the Tao, the Buddha-Nature, the Great Spirit, the Void, the Ultimate Weirdness, or some other placeholder. It doesn't much matter what people call their experiences experiences of. That seems to be more determined by what society, religious tradition, or culture they come from than by anything else. What matters is those experiences are so often transformative.

They are transformative in ways the mere ontological existence of god is not. For instance, someone who has had such experiences might find they no longer fear dying. Not because they now believe in a life after death, nor because they now have a reassuring theology, but simply because they have changed, been transformed, into someone who doesn't fear death. Likewise, someone who has had such experiences might find they are now capable of much greater love. Again, not because they believe god ontologically exists and has commanded them to love, but simply because they have been transformed into someone who is more loving. While the ontological existence of god (or the Tao, or whatever) is at best trivial, the experience of god is often profoundly transformative.

The question of whether god exists or not is insignificant compared to the transformation that can occur when one experiences god. Moreover, that transformative experience does not come about from believing in god. You can believe in god to your heart's content, but all your hours of belief will do nothing to bring about a transformative experience of god. Why is that?

"God" is just a symbol -- no more, no less. To say you believe in god is quite the same -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in the star that represents Paris on a map of France. It is just as insignificant -- and just as trivial -- as saying you believe in your wife's name. Nor does it matter in the least how elaborate, sophisticated and complex your notion of god is. For does it matter whether you say you believe in the star that represents Paris on one map, or you say that you believe in the more detailed street map that represents Paris on a different map? In both cases, your mere belief will not be the same thing as an actual experience of Paris -- regardless of how passionately or fervently you believe.

For those reasons, belief in god is quite often mere escapism. It is like reading a map of Paris rather than visiting Paris. It can be no more than a longed for daydream.

At Andersonville during the American civil war, the Union soldiers who were held prisoner there by the Confederates lacked salt. When you go without salt, you begin to crave it, and the craving of some of those soldiers became so intense that they would cut the world "salt" from their Bibles and chew the word. It did nothing to preserve their lives -- they starved for salt anyway. But it had a psychological effect on some of those who ate the word. It comforted them.

For many people belief in god is just such a comfort. It does nothing to really nourish them spiritually, it is by no means as transformative as experiencing god, but it does give them a morale boost -- just as eating the word "salt" comforted some of the soldiers who did it at Andersonville. Perhaps ironically, I think most of us would prefer the comfort of believing in god to the experience of god. That might be why we place so much emphasis on whether we believe or not.

When I think of dating, I think of courtship. Every few years, one or another of the big magazines is sure to run a cover story asking, "Is Courtship Dead?". The magazine will claim that's a serious question and to prove it's a serious question, they will point to some recent poll in which 67% of the respondents between the ages of 18 and 24 adamantly declare courtship means nothing to them. It's something their grandparents might have done in their day, but today's hip 18 - 24 year old has no use for it, etc. etc. etc.

You might recall from your studies of social history that "radical thinkers" in every generation within the last 150 years have declared courtship dead. Courtship is always being declared dead by people. Yet, every generation courts. Why is that?

"Why is that?" would have been a hard question to answer accurately back in the good old days. In this case, the good old days are the 1970's when everyone in academia seemed to believe that humans were born with a "blank slate". That is, the predominant paradigm in nearly every field back then was that humans were born with no innate behaviors -- nor even any predispositions to behaviors -- and that all significant human behavior could be explained as learned behavior.

On the other hand, today, it's very well known that humans are genetically predisposed to some behaviors. Contra the old 1970's paradigm, not everything humans do is entirely learned (although learning does play a role in most everything). Most likely, courtship has never died out -- despite all its obituaries -- primarily because we humans are genetically predisposed to court.

More specifically, it seems courtships follow a certain general pattern, and that pattern is what we're genetically predisposed to follow. For instance, a graduate student in anthropology discovered that women are more likely than men to initiate successful courtships -- at least in bars. One of his methods was to attend campus town bars where he could record the exchanges between mostly undergraduate men and women. He found that women initiate courtships nonverbally, with their eyes. In other words, they offer "come on looks" to men who interest them. The grad student noticed that courtships initiated by women were more successful than those initiated by men. Success in this case was measured by whether the people engaged in the courtship left the bar in each other's company. What the graduate student discovered was part of the general pattern of human courtship.

A while back, I read of two psychologists who had concluded that dysfunctional courtships -- courtships that do not follow, or that slight, the general pattern of human courting -- almost invariably result in dysfunctional relationships and marriages. If that's true, the importance of courtship in humans is clear.

I have a strong hunch, but based only on anecdotal evidence, that when dysfunctional courtships result in sex, one, the other, or both partners is very apt to feel exploited, abused and even humiliated by the sex. From what I've seen, it seems courtships prepare us emotionally and psychologically for sexual intimacy. Without a good courtship, we are not prepared for that level of intimacy, and our feelings afterwards often show it.

So far as I know, there is nothing in our genes that prescribe we must be married to have a healthy sex life. But if the anthropologists, biologists and psychologists are right, then our genes might indeed prescribe we must have a healthy courtship to have a healthy sex life.

Last, I think courses taught in the public schools on human sexuality should include a section on courtship. If dysfunctional courtships lead to dysfunctional relationships and marriages, it might be wise to teach kids what the value of courting is and something about how to go about it.

Ed Diener is America's foremost psychologist researching human happiness. In a 2003 study, he and Shigehiro Oishi discovered that European and Asian Americans behaved differently when choosing tasks to perform.

The European Americans typically picked tasks they were good at, while the Asian Americans were significantly more likely to ignore whether they were good at something when choosing whether to do it. Diener and Oishi further discovered that over time the European Americans expressed greater happiness with their tasks than the Asian Americans. That is, both groups were given a choice what tasks to perform, but only the European Americans picked tasks that made them happy.

Given a choice, why would anyone not choose to do what makes them happy?

Unfortunately, not everyone in this strange world has the option of fully playing to their strengths. It seems in many cases the reasons for that are economic. I would guess the need to earn a living, combined with a lack of opportunities for doing so, has probably forced more people into jobs and lives that play to their weaknesses than perhaps any other single factor. Just imagine how many immensely talented people in the long course of human history have been street beggars because the society and economy they lived in provided them with little or no opportunity to do anything else! Yet, even in wealthy nations today many people find themselves going into jobs where they cannot make full use of their talents and skills, but must to one great extent or another play to their weaknesses.

Besides economics, many social and cultural factors can pressure people into opting for a job or life that does not play to their strengths and leaves them less happy than they would otherwise be. The classic example of that is the social and cultural oppression of women. Until recently, most societies allowed women very few choices in life. And minorities within a society often face similar restrictions.

A third set of factors are probably psychological. A few years ago, the Surgeon General of the United States released a startling report that concluded one in five Americans was mentally or emotionally ill. A symptom of many disorders is anhedonism -- that is, an aversion to pleasure. People who suffer anhedonism are more likely to seek things that make them unhappy than things that make them happy. Although I don't know what percentage of the population suffers from anhedonism, it seems likely enough that it could be a few million of us.

While playing to our strengths is a significant source of happiness, not all of us do so for many and various reasons -- some of which I've touched on.

"Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc."

- Henry Miller

Although many Americans approach sex in the spirit of moderation, American popular culture does not. In the popular culture, it's all or nothing. Addict or prude. Both extremes are merely obsessive.

"Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact."

- Marlene Dietrich

I think if there is one book in the world which has been overestimated as wisdom literature, that's the bible.

A recent Federal survey reported that men had a median seven sex partners while women had a median four sex partners. Mathematicians quickly responded to the survey, pointing out the gap between men and women was too great for the survey results to be creditable. If there's that much of a gap between men's and women's median partners, then someone is lying. But who? And why?

The Federal survey is by no means alone in reporting an implausible gap between men and women: "In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women." So it's pretty common worldwide for folks to lie on sex surveys when asked how many partners they've had. But exactly who is lying and why are they lying? Are men doing most of the lying? Are women? Or, are both men and women lying about their number of sex partners?

Perhaps the answer to those questions was discovered four years ago. In 2003, Terri Fisher at Ohio State University and Michele Alexander at the University of Maine performed a perfectly ingenious experiment that found when men and women are told they have been hooked up to a lie detector, and are then asked how many sex partners they've had, the women report having had substantially more sex partners than they would otherwise report. On the other hand, the men who have been told they are hooked up to a lie detector pretty much report the same number of sex partners as they reported before. In other words, the women are the ones who are lying on these sex surveys, and they are lying by under-reporting how many sex partners they've had.

But why are the women lying? Well, Fisher and Alexander speculate that women under-report the actual number of sex partners they've had because they do not want to appear to be sexually promiscuous.

I read an extremely disturbing story earlier tonight of a young woman who was raped a few months before her planned wedding. Not only was she sexually violated, but afterwards, most of her community -- rather than rush to her support -- betrayed her. They turned against her as if she were the criminal. And they succeeded in destroying any chance she had of marrying the man she loved and who loved her.

We are the most insane of all the great apes.

As most of us know, rape is an atrocity. It ranks with murder and manslaughter as among he most heinous of crimes. It very often leaves its victims emotionally and mentally scarred for years. And the threat of rape alone is a curse against freedom. It is bad enough in itself, but it is even worse when the victim's community abuses the victim for having been raped. At that point, the community becomes despicable. It becomes immoral. And it becomes worse than the rapist himself.

Precisely the opposite should happen. The community should rally to the support of the rape victim. It should do everything within its power to reassure her that she is loved, valued, and held in esteem. It should make it its mission to help her heal from the trauma of rape, to recover her life, and to move on as best she can. A community that will not or cannot do at least that much for a victim of rape is treacherous. What possible allegiance could anyone owe such a community?

People's attitudes towards the victims of rape can and must change.

"It's important to remember that feminism is no longer a group of organizations or leaders. It's the expectations that parents have for their daughters, and their sons, too. It's the way we talk about and treat one another. It's who makes the money and who makes the compromises and who makes the dinner. It's a state of mind. It's the way we live now."

- Anna Quindlen

Source

Let's assume Howard Gardner is correct in asserting there are eight kinds of human intelligence and that no one person excels in all eight. What would that say about us as social animals?

The old adage, "Two heads are better than one", comes to mind. Or, rather, eight heads are better than one -- provided the eight each represents a different kind of human intelligence. I recall something a graduate student in anthropology said about his experiences living with a Southwestern (US) tribe that might illustrate the point here.

Soon after student had begun living with them, the tribe faced a crisis over who controlled the legal rights to much of the water that fed their reservation. An elder went from family to family and explained to them what the situation was. Then, over the course of six months, he returned to each family to ask for advice, after giving the families time to discuss the crisis among themselves.

Finally, the entire tribe gathered in one village to vote on what to do about the water. The elder was the first to speak. He began by once again laying out what the problem was. He then described his efforts to get everyone's advice. At last, he came to the point of the meeting by describing the only three options the tribe had come up with after discussing the issue for six months. And then he did something that shocked the graduate student.

The elder apologized for being unable to think up more options.

Why did that shock the graduate student? Because he himself came from mainstream American culture where publicly debated decisions are made in precisely the opposite way. In America, the goal of public debate is usually to narrow down the choices until only two choices remain. Then a vote is taken to decide between them. But here was a society of Native Americans who thought even three options too few. Instead of wanting to narrow down their choices, they wanted more choices than they had. Furthermore, after inquiring, the graduate student discovered that the tribal leaders typically strove to present the tribe with six or eight choices -- and sometimes as many as twenty!

That tribe knew how to take advantage of the apparent fact humans have multiple kinds of intelligence. They made an effort to get as many perspectives as possible by drawing everyone into the decision making process. Then they laid out all the options they had come up with as a group, leaving out none. Last, they voted on the available options -- which is another way of insuring that everyone's unique mix of intelligences is heard from and represented in the final decision. In doing things that way, the tribe tapped into the fullest ability of humans to come up with creative solutions to the challenges they faced.

It is commonplace to point out that humans are a social animal. Yet, we are only recently beginning to understand what that means. Millions of years of evolution created an animal who functions best in a society. Even the apparent fact we have eight kinds of intelligence seems to reflect that truth. As the graduate student's story illustrates, we come up with the largest variety of options when we work together as a group. It is mere common sense that the more options you can come up with when meeting a challenge, the more likely you will have at least one that helps you survive that challenge. For doing that, eight kinds of intelligence are better than one.

Last year, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that altruistic actions activate the same pleasure centers in the brain as are associated with food and sex. It therefore appears the brain is hard wired for altruism in the same way it is hard wired for eating and procreation.

Besides the National Institutes of Health study, researchers elsewhere are compiling large bodies of data on human moral behavior -- all of which seems to suggest the day when morality can be exclusively attributed to learned behavior is rapidly ending.

Of course, that doesn't mean human morality is rigid and inflexible. Look at procreation! While sexual desire is hard-wired, the range of human sexual expression is huge. So, too, is the range of human altruistic behaviors. Certainly, morality has an innate component. But it is at the same time learned behavior.

Lately, I've come across a string of blogs written mostly by women in their twenties which focus on the author's sex lives. These authors write very openly about everything from how to give excellent oral sex to whether foursomes are more rewarding than threesomes. Judging from their blogrolls, there are quite a few such blogs, although I've only managed to read a half dozen or so. Still, that's enough blogs to get me wondering how such blogs could change our attitudes towards female sexuality if increasing numbers of women choose to blog honestly and openly about their sex lives.

It wasn't too many decades ago that women were widely assumed to have little or no real interest in sex. The prevailing notion was they participated in sex only to please their spouses. Either that, or they suffered from a psychological illness: nymphomania. Although some of that old view lingers with us, most folks today seem at least willing to admit women have sexual desires and needs.

When you get down to it, that's not much of an admission.

Yes, we admit women have sexual desires and needs, but we still largely think of those desires and needs as rather tame -- at least for "normal" women. Doesn't every woman, for instance, deeply want to convert her every sexual encounter into a long term meaningful relationship? Aren't women more timid and less experimental than men? Isn't there something profoundly wrong with any woman who can -- even at times -- find satisfaction in sex alone?

If more women start blogging about their sex lives, then we might seem some of those notions overturned. For the truth might well be that women have richer, more complex sexualities than men.

Recently, the Economist Intelligence Unit created the Global Peace Index -- a ranking of countries according to their level of peacefulness.

It's hoped the Index will further the study of how the world can achieve peace. But the Index seems to have a major flaw: It does not track violence done to women and children. Hence, countries in which great violence is done towards women and children show up in the Index ranked deceptively high for "peacefulness".

From the Christian Science Monitor:

The first-ever study ranking countries according to their level of peacefulness, the Global Peace Index, was recently published by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Sensibly, its basic premise is that "peace isn't just the absence of war; it's the absence of violence."

The index uses 24 indicators such as how many soldiers are killed, the level of violent crimes, and relations with neighboring countries.

Yet it fails to include the most prevalent form of global violence: violence against women and children, often in their own families. To put it mildly, this blind spot makes the index very inaccurate.

That certainly is "putting it mildly". Overall, violence towards women and children creates a "cycle of violence" in which the children tend to perpetuate violence towards others when they grow up. Two infamous cases where that happened were Hitler and Stalin -- both of whom grew up in violent households. It's hard to believe you can accurately measure the peacefulness of a society without taking into rigorous account the society's treatment of women and children.