humannature
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You are viewing stuff tagged with humannature.
My thinking, years ago, went like this: people, groups of people, compete for limited resources. Even if one side is consistently committed to negotiation, to peaceful compromise (even if BOTH are), physical aggression from a few rogues on one side will inevitably cause armed conflict. How could even the most egalitarian, humanistic leader do anything else, upon witnessing killing of their own?
“What Old Age Is Really Like” by Ceridwen Dovey in The New Yorker:
As Helen Small writes in ”The Long Life,” her study of the literature and philosophy of old age, “declining to describe our lives as unified stories … is the only way we can hope to live out our time other than as tragedy.” Lively describes the frustrations of autobiographical memory in old age. “The novelist in me—the reader, too—wants shape and structure, development, a theme, insights,” she writes. “Instead of which, there is this assortment of slides, some of them welcome, others not at all, defying chronology, refusing structure.”
I read a poem called “Pushing the Dead Chevy” in this week’s issue of the New Yorker and I realize that, more and more, I believe in an intensely bright, pinpoint core inside of us, unsullied by the difficulties, failures, and harm from the outside world. It’s a nice thought, enchanting even, but I don’t know how much about people it actually explains.
If your goal is to impress, you’ll never stay motivated.
Philosophy says you can not have good without evil. Which is to say you have no frame of reference, no true way to define “good” if you don’t have it’s opposite. Now, I haven’t the philosophical experience to discuss good’s definition in terms of evil, but I believe it is related to another universal facet of the human experience: joy’s definition in terms of pain.
I was not aware that Ken Burns could write this well: “A Conflict’s Acoustic Shadows”:
In our smug insistence that race is no longer a factor in our society, we are continually brought up short by the old code words and disguised prejudice of a tribalism beneath the thin surface of our “civilized” selves.
“The Someone You’re Not” in Esquire magazine is about a man wrongfully imprisoned for almost 30 years.
He loves work. He got out May 5 and started working June 21. Hell, I’ve been vacationing for thirty years. He wears a smock and pushes a mail cart. He stops at all the cubicles, greets everyone with his friendly smile. Ray even loves commuting to work, especially now, in his new car, a black Ford Focus. He’s like a sixteen-year-old who can finally drive himself to school. It costs almost the same to park as it does to take the train.
“You have a right to your own opinion, not your own facts.”
This is part of a extremely popular, insightful MetaFilter comment by a wise fellow about two different kinds of people:
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
Is it infinitely cruel or impossibly beautiful that we can conceive perfection, but can not attain it?
Roger Ebert reviews the movie “The Girlfriend Experience”:
What draws a powerful man to pay for a women outside of marriage? It’s not the sex. In fact, sex is the beard, if you know what I mean. By paying money for the excuse of sex, they don’t have to say: I am lonely. I am fearful. I am growing older. I am not loved. My wife is bored with me. I can’t talk to my children. I’m worried about my job, which means nothing to me. Above all, they are saying: Pretend you like me.
The film was written by Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Believe it or not, the same two wrote the screenplay for Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s Thirteen.” I imagine the three of them sitting around on the “Ocean’s” set and asking, “What could we be doing instead of this?”
Chelsea is played by Sasha Grey. She is 21. Since 2006, according to IMDb, she’s made 161 porn films, of which only the first title can be quoted here: “Sasha Grey Superslut.” No, here’s another, which makes me smile: “My First Porn #7.” I haven’t seen any of them, but now I would like to see one, watching very carefully, to see if she suggests more than one level.
I’ve an image file on my computer that says “Life is beautiful.” I was going to print it out and hang it up until I realized this: I don’t think the word “beauty” is enough to capture this life. (“Life is many things, including beautiful” probably wouldn’t read well on the wall.) The shortcomings of this adjective make me think there’s one problem with intense, focused training: it reveals the world to the participant in one dimension, from one angle, in one color, from one perspective. Yet the glory of living pushes out from the uncountable, myriad aspects of reality.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
— Stephen Hawking
While waiting for my ear appointment today … wait a second, I’ll digress for a minute. Dr. Wilson has been treating my ears since I was two years old. He has, over the years, pulled my tonsils, adenoids, put in ear tubes (none of which I remember), fixed the hole that would’t heal from the ear tubes, and monitored my ears since that hole opened back up. I hear the phrase “could you write down a 1-2% TPM perforation” at regular sixth month intervals. There has always been hope of this healing, and right now it looks like my left ear, holy for all this time, just may be on the mend. Fantastic news for someone (me) who has always wanted to pursue things like water skiing and diving, but has always been hindered by the requisite ear protection. Maybe I’m just making excuses for myself. Regardless. While I was waiting for this appointment, I read the Newsweek cover story on anorexia from the December 5th issue. The article itself was nothing earth-shattering: a lot of personal stories and a point to a paradigm shift in the diagnosis; parents are no longer being blamed as “causing” the illness.