Don’t let anyone tell you that there is nothing more to humanity than aggression and destruction.
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Human Family (We Are More Alike, My Friends, Than We Are Unalike)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL_ofpwicsc
Human Family, by Maya Angelou
I note the obvious differences
in the human family.
Some of us are serious,
some thrive on comedy.
Some declare their lives are lived
as true profundity,
and others claim they really live
the real reality.
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U.S. Attitudes Toward Refugees
Generally speaking, U.S. attitudes toward the idea of accepting refugees have not been very generous over time.
From Drew DeSilver at the Pew Research Center:
And from Jeffrey Jones at Gallup:
Alcohol, Coffee & Sex: Keeping the Revolution at Bay
“To alcohol… the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” – Homer J. Simpson
I read this essay by Adam Cole on NPR yesterday, titled: “Drink Coffee? Off With Your Head!” Cole explained that in the past some societies viewed the widespread acceptance of coffee drinking as a threat to social order. This was true of England and the Ottoman Empire during the 17th century, as well as in 18th century Prussia.
The threats came in different forms – in terms of health, spirituality, and political upheaval. Cole reiterated that sometimes coffee was blamed for draining a person’s vigor, at other times painted as “poison for the bodies and souls.” And it was also seen as a sort of lubricant for revolution, since it was consumed in coffee houses where people could discuss a range of subjects, including possibly getting rid of the current social and political status quo.
Compassion at the Crossroads
Robert Kennedy, on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination:
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
I know posting this won’t matter much. A few people will watch the video below (thank you). Fewer will care. It’s not very anthropological, or analytical. I have little to add to it. Some, in the Jonathan Haidt school of thought, could take umbrage that citing RFK and MLK is just more evidence of the liberalism of academics.
It just feels like a time when social divisions continue to grow. Injecting a little bit of compassion into the blogosphere simply feels right.
Trump-ed Up Genes
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
I try to keep my ears open to how public figures speak about science and anthropology. It’s always interesting to learn how different people, particularly influential people, perceive these subjects. For example, in his 2009 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize Barack Obama said that “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” That’s an empirical claim, but I don’t think the archaeological evidence is on his side.
However, Obama’s statement offered a tantalizing window into the way he might see war – that it is simply an unavoidable outcome of human nature, implying that we may be stuck with it indefinitely. I don’t know for a fact that he actually thought that way; that’s me trying to read between the lines. And I’m not saying that such a view is wrong; I don’t think war will be eradicated anytime soon either. But I don’t think we should reduce something as complex as the large-scale arming and mobilization of military forces simply to some fuzzy notion of an aggressive human nature.
This brings me to Donald Trump. More than once, I’ve noticed that he likes to say that he’s a “big believer” in the “gene thing” as an explanation for whatever success he has had in life (see here and here). A quick Google search shows that he’s done this for years, and that he has credited several of his ‘superior’ traits to his genes or some generic notion of heredity, a pattern I find interesting. Some examples:
Your Life is a Logical Absurdity
“Think of it: zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another: ‘My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death.’ And you are one of these organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.”
— Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
“An Extraordinary Miasma of Untruth”
“There’s no them. There’s only us.”
I first read Dervla Murphy’s book “A Place Apart: Northern Ireland in the 1970s” over twenty years ago for a class on the anthropology of Ireland. In it, she described her conversations with people from various perspectives in Northern Ireland (Catholic and Protestant, etc.).
To be honest, so much time has gone by that I’ve forgotten much of it, but every once in a while certain segments come back to me. The part that returns to me the most, particularly of late, is this:
In Spite of Everything
This seems relevant.
“It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.
It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the sufferings of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return once more.”
Anne Frank
Related Posts
On Finding Optimism (July 2013)
Nature, Not Always Red in Tooth and Claw (January 2013)
On Optimism and Human Nature (April 2011)
Patrick F. Clarkin, Ph.D. 