Café Philos: an internet café

D.H. Lawrence somewhere says that youth should not be misled into believing that it must rebel against authority and tradition in order to achieve freedom. Lawrence asserts that those battles have already been fought and won. Youth is largely free to do as it pleases today, and so it is misleading youth to tell them that they should be battling against authority and tradition.

On the other hand, Lawrence points out that the real revolution youth must accomplish is "to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door." That is, to find and exploit the aspects of life that youth does not even as yet suspect are part of life. Doing so will bring about a greater revolution in youth than will battling against authority and tradition.

What do you think of this? Is the real job of youth to find the undiscovered and unsuspected door, or is it to battle against tradition and authority? Which brings greater freedom? Which is more revolutionary?

Two years ago, the Republican mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, was elected on a platform that included opposition to gay marriage. Yet, on Wednesday, he suddenly dropped his opposition and signed a City Council resolution supporting a challenge to California's gay marriage ban. He had previously promised to veto it.

Why the change of heart? It seems the most important reason is Lisa Sanders, the mayor's daughter, who it turns out is a lesbian:

The Republican mayor said he could no longer back the position he took during his election campaign two years ago, when he said he favored civil unions but not full marriage rights for homosexual couples.

He fought back tears as he said he wanted his adult daughter, Lisa, and other gay people he knows to have their relationships protected equally under state laws.

"In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships — their very lives — were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana," Sanders said.

The move most likely carries some political risk for Mayor Sanders since, "in 2000, 62% of San Diego voters endorsed a statewide measure to restrict marriage to a union between a man and woman."

It seems quite understandable to me that through the love one has for one's daughter, one would gain insight and empathy for the plight of homosexuals. Yet, that is not always the case. Dick Cheney's daughter is gay, and Dick Cheney continues to oppose gay marriage. I think in Cheney we have a man willing to put political considerations above what his heart must tell him is the right thing to do. But do you think I'm being too hard on Cheney?


Reference:

San Diego Mayor to Back Same-Sex Marriage

At the Emmy's last night, Sally Field won best actress in a drama series for her work as matriarch Nora Walker on "Brothers & Sisters." She remarked in her acceptance speech:

Surely this [award] belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen, may their work be valued and raised. Especially to the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait. Wait for their children to come home from danger, from harm’s way, and from war. I am proud to be one of those women.

At that point, she began her next sentence, "If mothers ruled the world, there would be no...”. But Fox cut off her sound and pointed the camera away from her, censoring the rest of her sentence, which ended, "...god-damned wars in the first place."

Backstage, Sally Field told reporters: ''I honestly believe that if mothers ruled the world, we wouldn't be sending our children off to be slaughtered.... I probably shouldn't have said the 'God' in front of the 'damn.' I would've liked to have said more bleeped-out words, but that's life.''

Some people on the net are saying Fox censored Field to remove the "god-damned". But Fox is more than passively pro-war -- To say the network leads in beating the drums for the Iraq war is an understatement. It seems reasonable to assume they censored Field at least as much for her anti-war opinion as for her use of "god-damned".

Sadly, Fox has a legal right to censor whatever it wants to censor, so there won't be any lawsuits over this.


References:

Fox Censors Sally Field's Anti-War Speech at Emmy's

Wow! They Censored Sally Field!

Emmy's Backstage: Stars Get Sassy


Related Article:

Kathy Griffin's Emmy Remarks Will Be Censored

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.

"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom."

- John Locke