Café Philos: an internet café

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 suppose the short answer is: Evolution. That is, the short answer to the question, "Why is understanding human sexuality so important to understanding human nature?"

From the theory of evolution, we know that reproductive success determines which species will hang around. Then when you combine that with the simple fact we reproduce sexually, you get the short answer. It's not sexual desire that makes understanding our sexuality so important to understanding human nature. It's evolution.

That understanding human sexuality is crucial to understanding human nature is so obvious even some of our politicians know it. That's why they seldom speak of the future in abstract terms -- instead, they speak of "the world we will leave to our children". The distant future is just a fantasy to most people -- until you link it to their reproductive success. Then, of a sudden, it becomes something to be taken seriously.

Sex, of course, is not everything. Human nature is not synonymous with human sexuality, and all efforts to reduce human nature to human sexuality have failed. Yet, our sexuality so pervades us that it is impossible in many ways to understand people without understanding their sexuality. The affair Bill Clinton had with Monica Lewinsky told us at least as much about Bill Clinton the man as his decision to bomb Serbia.

I have always wondered why Clinton chose Lewinsky. A president can pick from a host of women. Why didn't he pick an extraordinarily gifted, talented, sophisticated, and intelligent woman? Put differently, why didn't he pick someone who challenged him, inspired him, made him want to be the best he could be?

Until last Thursday, Steve Bitterman was an instructor in Western Civilization at the Red Oak campus of Southwestern Community College in Iowa. It was on Thursday, according to Bitterman, that Linda Wild, the College's vice president of instruction, called him on the phone to fire him.

His offense?

He told his students the story of Adam and Eve was not to be taken literally.

From Inside Higher Education:

This fall, [Bitterman was] teaching Western civilization at Southwestern’s Red Oak campus, and his lectures [were] broadcast to students at the Osceola campus, with a live hook-up so he [could] see students. Much of early Western civilization focuses on the myths and beliefs of ancient peoples. Gilgamesh was no problem for students, Bitterman said. But when he got to the Bible on Tuesday, a student walked out of the Osceola section when, Bitterman said, when he wouldn’t agree with her that the story of the Garden of Eden was historically true. Several other students appeared disturbed by the incident, he said. From their questions and statements, he believes that they are evangelical Christians.

Furthermore, according to the DesMoines Register, in a conversation with a student after Tuesday's class, Bitterman called the myth of Adam and Eve a "fairy tale". He was then told some of "the students had threatened to see an attorney."

Bitterman says that, when Wild called him to fire him Thursday, she told him, "several of the students and the parents had threatened an unspecified lawsuit", and that "the parents said that I was there to teach history and not religion and that she agreed."

Meanwhile the Community College is being vague about why it fired Bitterman:

Sarah Smith, director of the school’s Red Oak campus, declined to comment Friday on Bitterman’s employment status. The school’s president, Barbara Crittenden, said Bitterman taught one course at Southwest. She would not comment, however, on his claim that he was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.
“I can assure you that college understands our employees’ free speech rights,” she said. “There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment.”

And Linda Wild is responding neither to emails nor phone calls.

Bitterman himself is unrepentant:

“A few of the students thought I was knocking their religion by not promoting it,” he said. “They were upset that I didn’t say that the Bible was literally true.” Bitterman said that he treats the Bible as a historically significant, important work, but that he does not accord it status beyond that. “That really seemed to come as a shock to some of them,” he said.

And:

“I’m just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college and have a master’s degree, a couple actually, have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,” Bitterman said.

So who to believe? At this point, it's just a "he said, she said" situation, but the College seems somewhat cagey in how it's responding, which gives a bit more creditability to Bitterman's side of the story.

At any rate, there can be no doubt evangelical and fundamentalist Christians these days often act aggressively to quash views that contradict their cherished belief in the literal truth of the Bible. If Bitterman's story is true, it wouldn't be too far out compared to other things we've been hearing about the extreme Religious Right. Consider this quote from Gary North, the Dominionist son-in-law of R.J. Rushdoony:

"We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."


References:

Prof Says He Was Fired Over Bible Reference

Adjuncts and Gods

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?

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.

A very large number of Americans believe we should stop acting the role of world ruler. Those Americans represent the majority opinion of the American people: They believe we should have a major role to play in the world's affairs, but not a predominant role.

Yet, the will of the majority of Americans is simply not represented by anyone in the American Foreign Policy Community. Neither the Liberals, nor the Conservatives, nor the Neocons of the Foreign Policy Establishment give a damn about what the majority of Americans want. Instead, there is an entrenched and dangerous consensus in the Foreign Policy Community that America should be the predominant power in the world. As Glenn Greenwald writes:

The Number One Rule of the bi-partisan Foreign Policy Community is that America has the right to invade and attack other countries at will because American power is inherently good and our role in the world is to rule it though the use of superior military force. Paying homage to that imperialistic orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining Good Standing and Seriousness Credentials within the Foreign Policy Community.

Conversely, one who denies that premise reveals oneself to be deeply unserious and unworthy of meaningful discourse. While differences on the "when" and "how" are permitted, there is virtually no debate within the foreign policy establishment about whether the U.S. has the right to continue to intervene and attack and invade and occupy other countries in the absence of those countries attacking us.

What the hell? Just how many Americans do you suppose would support the Foreign Policy Community if they knew how it thinks?

Make no mistake: This is the very same Foreign Policy Community that supported -- and still supports -- Bush and Cheney's tragic invasion of Iraq. It's the same Foreign Policy Community that even today calls for invading Iran while our forces are tied up in Iraq. And it's the same Foreign Policy Community that dropped the ball on North Korea, allowing them to develop nuclear weapons.

Those are our elite foreign policy scholars, folks -- and they bear an uncanny resemblance to our village idiots.

The only things that seem to progress are science, technology, and wealth. On the whole, humans don't get smarter, they don't get wiser, they don't get kinder, and they don't get more compassionate than they've ever been. But neither do they get worse than they've ever been. So, while science, technology, and wealth progress, human nature remains the same from one generation to the next.

Among other things, the apparent fact human nature remains more or less constant seems to argue for the notion that something -- most likely our genes -- limits and stabilizes our range of behaviors.

Wondering what the human prospect is these days? You might get some factual insights on that by visiting Trinifar this week.

Trinifar has put together some beautiful graphs showing major ecological, demographic and economic trends in a post on "visualizing sustainability". He then briefly explains each graph in clear, non-technical terms.

Especially worth noting I think are the estimates that the world population of humans will reach 9 billion by 2050, while the maximum sustainable population is estimated between one and three billion. If anything even remotely like that occurs (and something remotely like that seems very likely) some environmental resources will be exhausted by the excess population, perhaps leading to a reduction in the number of people who can live on the earth in a sustainable fashion. That's just about the mildest effect such a disaster will have on the human prospect.

The effect of too many people and too few resources that concerns me most is political and spiritual. Huge numbers of people competing for diminishing resources is quite likely to lead to repressive societies. Then what happens? Will humanities' potential for authentic happiness ever be realized? Will most of us be able to appreciably develop our talents and skills, or stay true to ourselves? Or will only the tiny elite that controls the world's resources have decent lives?

I am reasonably confident that in the long run, the human spirit will rebound. But the long run could take centuries to be realized.

A few weeks ago, my friend Faisal told me that, when he was growing up in rural Saudi Arabia, a common expression was, "Do you think you're in America?"

People typically asked, "Do you think you're in America?", when a person did or said something improbably, wildly optimistic, such as suggesting they could change society for the better, or even travel to the moon.

Sadly, Faisal tells me the expression has fallen into disuse since Bush invaded Iraq. People in his hometown no longer believe in America, it's dream and it's promise.

Many Americans are no more concerned with what America represents to the rest of the world than they are concerned that American forces did nothing to stop looters from destroying the museums and hospitals of Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq. For those Americans, all that matters is the world fears us, fears our power, fears our military; just like the ancient world feared the Roman legions and the will of the emperors.

Yet, it's really quite petty -- even insanely petty -- to think that all America might legitimately represent to people in the rest of the world is a threat.

America has in its short history represented many things to many peoples. It has at times shown the world that a government of the people is practical and not merely a dream of idealists. It has at times shown the world that people can live freer than their princes, dictators, and tyrants tell them people can live. Indeed, it has at times been a savior of other nations, a light unto the world, and a beacon of decency, optimism, and hope.

How strange it is that some Americans think it should only be a force to be feared by the world's peoples.

Last night, May at Religious Forums revived a thread that I started some time ago. The thread asks, "Is Abstinence From Sex Before Marriage Really Best?". May, who is a pleasant person and a Jehovah's Witness, posted a link to a JW article, "What's Wrong With Premarital Sex?". Of course, the JW article takes the view that a great many things are wrong with premarital sex.

It seems if you go back far enough in this country, you will arrive at a time when very few couples had sex with each other before marriage. That's a finding reported in The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices In the United States. The generation that married in the 1920's and 30's very infrequently had sex before marriage. That is, they very infrequently had sex with their future spouses before marriage. Bordello's absolutely flourished back then, and it's a reasonable guess for that and numerous other reasons that many of the men who married in the 1920's and 30's were not virgins on their wedding nights. Yet, that generation actually did practice abstaining from premarital sex with their future spouses.

The scene changes during the 1950's. There are still plenty of whorehouses in the country, but they are on the wane, and premarital sex with your future spouse is on the rise. The rule of the day was that if a boy got a girl pregnant, they married. Because that was the rule, rather than the exception, the 50's saw more underage brides, and more pregnant brides, than any decade since. Contra the Religious Right, it was the 1950's, not the 60's and 70's, that firmly established premarital sex as the custom in America.

Today, a whole slew of surveys agree that nine out of every ten married American couples engaged in premarital sex. Thus the custom shows no real sign of waning. In my opinion, premarital sex between loving, committed couples -- couples planning to marry -- is also openly accepted as a good thing by most people now. "Testing the waters" is thought prudent as a way to prevent marrying someone you are sexually incompatible with.

So, the Jehovah's Witnesses -- as well as many other Christian denominations -- are a bit out of step with the American consensus on premarital sex.

Cynics will point out that to be out of step with the overwhelming majority of Americans is usually a sign of sanity, but the cynics might not be right this time. It could be the overwhelming majority of Americans are evolving a sane sexual morality -- without much help from Christianity.

When my former neighbor Hannah was 17, she decided to, as she phrased it, "terminate her virginity with extreme prejudice." Although she was raised Southern Baptist, it never occurred to Hannah to ask her preacher for advice. Instead, she called up an older female friend and asked her for help.

Hannah's friend took a day off work, took Hannah to Planned Parenthood for birth control, then to Victoria's Secrets for lingerie. The two later went to lunch for a long girl chat that answered the sort of questions Hannah needed honest answers to but couldn't expect to get such answers from a Southern Baptist preacher.

The church later lost Hannah from its flock, and part of the reason she told me she quit attending was simply because the church had become irrelevant to her on sexual matters. "If they lie about sex, what else are they lying about?", she said.

In so many ways, traditional Christianity is having a hard time adapting to the world today. Even many believers are finding their religion is largely irrelevant to them in crucial areas of their life. To be sure, most are not dropping out of Christianity like Hannah. Instead, they are remaining nominal Christians while increasingly reinterpreting the Christian message to suit them. Americans are not going to give up Christianity any time soon, but they will almost certainly continue to quietly evolve their own values and views despite it.

Legend has it that before Ted Turner opened the doors of CNN some many years ago, he first did something that was unprecedented for a news organization: market research. That is, until Turner came along, no news organization in history had thought to ask people what kind of news they wanted to see.

Instead, the traditional news organizations had relied on the judgment of their professional news staff to determine what was newsworthy and what was not. But Turner changed all that with the success of CNN. We largely owe to him the fact that a major news organization nowadays will break away from a White House press briefing to report a car chase. It’s the market these days, and not the news staff, that for the most part decides what is newsworthy.

That’s the legend. No doubt the truth is more complex, more nuanced. There are probably several factors that play a role in what becomes news. Yet, no one living in the 21st Century can any longer doubt the news is heavily influenced by what the market wants to hear. And in an ideal world, that would be a good thing.

Consider what has happened to most consumer products over the years largely due to the attention that corporations now pay to market demand. Products overall have improved in quality and features, while coming down in price. Anyone could give examples of that. In a competitive market driven economy, the consumer is king and queen. The corporation doesn’t decide what’s good enough for you. Not if it wants a successful brand. You have choices. If one corporation won’t produce a higher quality brand with more features at a lower price, another one will. That’s the case in most industries nowadays, but is it the case in the news industry?

In an ideal world, a competitive consumer driven news industry would translate into more news, higher quality news, and all of that at a lower price to the consumer. In some ways, that’s exactly what has happened.

News is far more available today than it was thirty years ago when most people had their choices limited to three TV networks, one or two local newspapers, a handful of national newspapers, and several magazines. Today, we are flooded with news outlets. The price of most newspapers and magazines has dropped too, at least in terms of percent of income. That leaves us with quality. Has it gone up?

Of course, that depends on what you mean by quality. The news industry is no different than any other industry: Quality is what the consumers think of as quality. Quality has indeed gone up – in the minds of most consumers. And therein lies the problem.

What the market thinks of as quality news is problematic for anyone concerned with truth, for truth is not what the market thinks of as quality. If that’s the case, then what does the market think of as quality?

So far as I know, no one has yet come up with an exact term for what the market thinks of as quality when it comes to the news. The best I can do is a phrase: “comfortably entertaining”. That phrase covers the two things people most demand these days when it comes to what they will consider quality news. The word “entertaining” is self-explanatory. So, let’s deal with “comfort”.

People want their news to be comfortable in the sense they want it to confirm their existing view of the world. They certainly don’t want it to throw them to the wolves of doubt, uncertainty, and confusion. Unfortunately, the truth can do that at times. And when that happens, the truth – increasingly – gets thrown overboard to make room for what the market really wants, and what it really considers high quality news: comfortable entertainment.

None of this is going to change. On the contrary, it will almost certainly accelerate. As the news industry becomes increasingly more sophisticated in gathering data on what the market wants, we will see the most popular news brands become increasingly divorced from truth. To be sure, they will retain the semblance of truth in their reports, but the substance will be largely purged. In the end, it will only be news outlets that cater to limited niche markets that accurately and honestly report the news. Those “high-end” outlets will have nowhere near the demand for them as the mainstream outlets. At best, those high-end outlets will be just as respected for quality – and just as unpopular with the majority of consumers – as is Mercedes Benz in automobiles.

"The Bible contains no reference to earth in terms of the conservation ethic. Wild life and wilderness are apart from man and inferior. The Christian, and Jew, had no relation to the earth, the air, the waters, or the wild life. He could without fear poison the waters, pollute the air, level the forests, and despoil the land. The Bible and Christianity conditioned men to be vandals, converting everything from alligator skins to mountain ranges to blue waters into dollars. Men took the wealth and left only the ashes."

Former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas





For more on this subject go here.

Before he died recently, Arthur Schlesinger defended the Western values of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, democracy, human rights, and liberty. He wrote:

These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle-Eastern ideas, except by adoption. There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism.

One wonders, however, why these are almost uniquely Western values? That is, why didn't they crop up everywhere? For it might be argued that these values resonate with us. Indeed, the Dalai Lama has said, "No system of government is perfect, but democracy is closest to our essential human nature." The same could be said for the other Western values besides democracy. Yet, if that is true, why are all these values not ubiquitous?

Nowadays, there is some confusion in America about where Western values come from. Propagandists for the Religious Right put out the falsehood that we in the West owe our core values to the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition. But in order to believe that one must not have read the Bible, nor paid much attention to the history of those religions in Europe.

In reality, Western values have at least three main sources, all of them European. First, they are based on the remarkable cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Second, they are based on the humanism inspired by those cultures that arose during the Renaissance. And last, they are based on the values nurtured in England (and later in Scotland) beginning around 1100 or 1200 A.D. Schlesinger was right: Western values were certainly not imported from the Middle East via the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition, but are instead truly Western.

Yet, why is it that they did not develop outside the West? Especially when they are arguably the values that most resonate with human nature?