Actually, people would be a lot better off if they were as dumb as turnips, considering turnips can’t be thought of as contributing to their own extinction, let alone the of the extinction of a whole host of other life forms, if not eventually the planet itself.

Posted by: anna missed | Jul 23 2005 7:22 utc | 4

The human species can serve as a great raw material and inspiration, although it does depend on what you are trying to build.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 23 2005 7:44 utc | 6

My basic theory is that man is an intermediary evolutionary stage and is not fully bipedal yet. He is extremely vulnerable, clumsy, and ill adapted. The spine and body have to change a bit more.
Perhaps when homo erectus came on the scene, the standing postion exposed his genitals and created this awkward violent reaction in self protection, not being sure of how to do this effectively.
Another factor is the impossibilty of seeing the full spectrum in the midst of experience… a lack of recognition of the problem and a failure to see a clear solution. A lack of objectivity.
It’s interesting to note that J. Diamond says that the reason the people of Easter Island destroyed the vegetation to build the statues was to appease the gods. I don’t know where that notion originated. Where the orders came from.
And of course… a lot of people ARE dumb. And we are held back by the lowest common denominator. I think there are a few in the species who are really advanced, and while they squirm in frustration at the lack of consciousness in the others, they hold the seed for man’s evolution.
Too bad for us.

Posted by: jm | Jul 23 2005 9:06 utc | 8

As someone with an abiding love for two wonderful people afflicted with spectral disorders, I can say, definitively I think, that as far as desirable human traits, “gentle and kind” has it all over “intelligent” and that the problem with the world is not so much an intelligence deficit as a kindness deficit.
In any event, the problem with our dominant Republican species is not that they can’t think clearly. It’s that the only thing they can think clearly about, is themselves. Lack of intelligence wouldn’t explain a Cheney, whereas selfishness would…

Posted by: bcf | Jul 23 2005 11:18 utc | 10

I’m with bcf … the fundamental failing of the western capitalist societies seems to be an ever greater deficit in such simple survival traits as compassion, empathy and simple humanity … developing some form of congenital detachment to the people, communities, the world around us … the elites seem to be trying to run some sort of eugenics like indoctrination program to breed the traits out … profit, shiny baubeled posessions and status in a ‘dog eat dog’ system are all that is to be valued, and above all else … not exactly encouraging traits for technologically advanced militaristic societies … or am I just exhibiting/projecting mild paranoia ?

Posted by: Outraged | Jul 23 2005 11:45 utc | 12

Over the years I have watched the pitiful series of self congratulatory canards that have passed for argument as to how Man is, in some exceptional way, different from, better than, removed from the animal kingdom.
You know them all: Only we have souls (Try telling that to anyone whose family pet has just died), Man the toolmaker (Until we found animals using tools), Man the speechifier (Until we taught apes to speak), etc., etc., etc.
There seems to be an almost pathological need for Western Man to, in some god-like way, separate himself and place himself above the rest of nature–kind of like the insecure braggart in grade school. This seems to be a reaction to the religions of the peoples whose lands they conquered, that for simplicities sake I will refer to by the term Animism– the belief that all of reality is in some sense animate–and hence, significant, valuable. The term has fallen into disuse as it is not very categorically descriptive and its use has been primarily perjorative. However, for the sake of this discussion, I think we could all agree that if the European colonizers of North America had adapted Native American ways of seeing the world, we might all be sailing on a longer trip in a better boat.
The book that best addresses these concerns is “Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism” by Jack D. Forbes. He refers to the term “Wetiko” as a “highly contagious form of cultural mental illness” characterized by amoral and predatory behavior, what can be called “dominator” or “taker” cultural mass psychology.
It seems to me that if Man can be said to have any single identifying feature that sets him apart from animals it must certainly be his behavioral propensity for subjecting, torturing, and killing other members of his own species. I am not a Biologist, but can anyone tell me of another species which so treats its own members.

Posted by: Malooga | Jul 23 2005 12:39 utc | 14

Malooga: No luck there, either, I’m afraid.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 23 2005 12:53 utc | 16

Funny, I was just thinking about this last night. My conclusion is that humans react to feed-back. Do something harmful; get harmed; learn not to do that again. Like the famous example of little kids touching a hot stove.
The trouble is, in a complex society the feedback becomes faulty because one’s actions do not immediately rebound on oneself. Which is a polite way of saying that the rulers of the U.S. can bomb the hell out of other people, and the feedback they get is that they continue to rule and make lots of money. So why would they stop?
It is this which makes me certain that humanity is doomed; or at least societies as large and with such diffuse feedback as we have now.

Posted by: Ferdzy | Jul 23 2005 13:09 utc | 18

“It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe”. B Dylan, “The Idiot Wind”
You’re right, it’s not just a lack of long term thinking, it’s medium and short term as well. We’ve reached a state of cultural alzheimer’s.
It’s always morning in America. A drooling, infantile tape loop of greed with no memory or plans. This relates to your earlier posts about “limited” nuclear wars on the drawing board at the Pentagon, and concerns about nuclear exchanges between Israel and Iran, etc.
There is some debate about this, but there is one school of thought that says even a limited exchange of nukes, say between Pakistan and India, or two smaller countries who may join the club de nukes in the future, would bring on enough of a nuclear winter to pretty much do us all in. There’s no discussion of this, or any other consequences either, from the “bomb ’em back to the stone age” crowd.
It’s like the CEO who lays off 10,000 workers to boost stock prices next quarter, even if it spells doom for the company later. The difference is, unless there’s some well stocked space ships parked in Cheney’s bunker, no one’s getting out of this one alive.

Posted by: crackpot | Jul 23 2005 14:11 utc | 20

Used many times, but still appropriate:
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
–H.L. Mencken

Posted by: Don F | Jul 23 2005 14:31 utc | 22

Maybe it has nothing to do with intelligence, per se, but with the idea that our brains are built upon previous brains…we still have our “reptile” brain that functions at the stem. While higher brain functions developed later, they didn’t replace all lower brain functions (lower not being intelligence, but less abstract, more primal emotions.)
Maybe populations have grown so large that the cooperative ways that served before are easily subverted by the xenophobic lizard brain suspicions.
Maybe technology makes it possible for us to inflict a level of damage never possible previously, yet our lizard brain still reacts with fight or flight when feeling threatened.
Maybe the stories various groups have told themselves (They all seem to be “the chosen people,”) or like God giving MAN (sic) dominion over the earth justify all sorts of abuses, rather than being seen as a “middle management position” with orders to not fuck it all up.
At its most basic, I think it is fear, not stupidity, that causes the most problems, combined with an ability to reach far beyond our little corner of the veldt to assuage that fear.
…that’s also why it’s important to laugh, even when it’s dark humor, in the face of fear…if you can laugh at something, it makes it less powerful. Just ask the court jester.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 23 2005 15:12 utc | 24

Maybe populations have grown so large that the cooperative ways that served before are easily subverted by the xenophobic lizard brain suspicions.
has anyone ever studied the differences between IQ and common sense? is common sense common because its common? it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that cooperation is at the core of harmony within society, so why are brilliant people opting out on cooperation while trying/lusting to control society? how does this figure into the wearing of other hats? what good is having microscopic vision if you can’t see the forest for the trees?

Posted by: annie | Jul 23 2005 16:22 utc | 26

Lexington comments
I assume you’re aware that this is basically the question Thomas Homer Dixon explored in The Ingenuity Gap ?
From Dixon’s website I see that his suggested ingenious solution for the global warming problem is carbon sequestration.

Posted by: Fannie Farmer (Mrs.) | Jul 23 2005 17:03 utc | 28

razor, google IQ by state. Then you tell me a bunch of red state dumbasses didn’t elect Bushie. He won the moron vote.

Posted by: jdp | Jul 23 2005 17:17 utc | 30

Posted by: behan:
Have you ever seen Jane Goodall’s furry little friends engage in a turf war? Or have you seen the Alpha Male strut about giving the other males a quick one up the rump to let them know who’s boss? Yahhhhhhs! good entertainment.
I am on a one woman mission to note that Goodall’s chimps are NOT our closest behavioral and genetic relatives. Instead, bonobos, hear them here, also called pygmy chimpanzees, are…and they ARE NOT the same as common chimpanzees,
Frans de Waal has done the most to popularize knowledge of bonobos in the west. The great difference seems to have derived from a shift in environment and competition for food with other primates. His work also demonstrates various human strategies (aka peacemaking) that are related to our primate relatives as well.
Bonobo chimpanzees french kiss. Common chimpanzees don’t. Bonobo chimpanzees have sex face to face, common chimpanzees don’t. Common chimpanzees have sex when a female is in estrus and has a swollen genital display. Bonobos have sex, like humans, at many different times….and for reasons other than procreation…as in social cohesion, to “make up” after a fight…and in all sorts of combinations (i.e. female/female, male/male in addition to the catholic version of sex.) Unlike humans, female bonobos still display when they are in estrus.
They walk upright to perform more functions (carrying things) while common chimps walk upright more often for aggressive display.
In addition, human males, like both chimpanzees, have testes that are larger than necessary for procreation. This indicates that females had mulitple partners whose sperm competed, ala nascar, as Dorie Sagan put it.
But human males also have penises that are much larger than necessary to simply wham, bam and thank you ma’am. This indicates that our female predecessors selected for larger penises than necessary because of the pleasure side effects (and, no, this does not mean that human males should be like a porn star…avg male penis size is larger, by species comparison, with all other primates.)
(however, some mosquistos do go for the mosquito equivalent of long dong silver.
These larger penises are one indication that humans predecessors were more like bonobos because primate communities in which males dominate females are also communities with males with small penises…because there is no sperm or selection competition…which means that our ancestral females were definitely NOT monogamous and definitely WERE NOT controlled by one male with a group of females.
(Sorry to bust your fantasies, guys 🙂
Also, related to the issue of when bonobos and common chimps diverged (b/c they were separated by environmental changes) is the idea that bonobos are able to remain together more easily than common chimps because of their food supply. Now, I have to wonder if males were in charge of getting all food and controlling all resources and constantly at war for those resources and all that…why would human males have such large penises?
…and, amazingly, considering the history of male control of resources for thousands of years, evolution works slowly, we can see, and beneficial characteristics created for one reason are not sloughed off (in the “keep it simple” idea of where to put energy, as far as genetic change…i.e. males have non-lactating breasts) since human male penises are not now the size of an almond.
And these larger penises happen to also occur with male investment in raising their offspring in humans, contrary to former androcentric “just so” stories of evolution. But it doesn’t mean that males controlled the females who gave birth to those offspring.
/rant off

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 23 2005 19:00 utc | 32

The Easter Island parable has a certain appeal and maybe it contains a kind of higher truth but I don’t buy the image of an Easter Islander standing in front of the last living tree with an axe in hand.
Having powerlessly watched the pine trees on four acres turn brown and die in less than half a year, my sympathies are with the Islanders. The bark beetles that infested my trees, as their name implies, worked under the bark. By the time there was visible evidence of their damage, it was too late to do anything.
I believe we should respect and care for the planet we live on, that we shouldn’t be creating things physical or chemical that we can’t neutralize or correct if something goes wrong. But we should also remember that nature isn’t always a benign force.
Most of our existence as a species has been a struggle for survival against the forces of nature. The fact that we are here is evidence that our predecessors prevailed. The jury is still out for us. Nature could still do us in. But we are among the first generations to face a new threat. We are capable of wiping ourselves out as a species, intentionally or not. And that is something that badly needs discussing.
I am glad that Jared Diamond’s Collapse has stimulated that discussion. I expect I’ll get around to reading it eventually but given its most popular citation, I also expect to be suspicious of his conclusions because no one really knows what happened to the trees on Easter Island.
So what’s my point…that the Easter Islander wasn’t necessarily bad or stupid, just human.

Posted by: Emma Zahn | Jul 23 2005 19:41 utc | 34

Jassalasca, Markbob,
Thanks for those great links.
Bonobos have sex all the time. It is their form of greeting. I think they all mount one another face to face when they start an interaction. It’s brief and probably doesn’t include orgasm. It’s a fascinating sight to see.
As to the exaggerated size of the human penis, I don’t know. Food for thought, though. Maybe as the male has lost his fur, colors, etc. and other signs of potency, he’s had to reveal his breeding potential in simplistic terms. ME BIG!!
I believe there are two routes in the brain body connection when danger is perceived. One is immediate and lightening fast, the other goes through some reasoning to get to reaction. Maybe we are in an evolutionary switch and we are confused about assessing danger accurately. I agree that fear is a culprit. Stupid people can be nice.
Again, I think it’s evolutionary, as we know that so much of the brain isn’t used…yet. And confusion is the constant. And we still cower under some perception of omnipotent force above us. so we defy our smallness and weakness in the face of greater power by dominating others (frightening them) as a false way of feeling potency and safety.
We have such diversity in the human population… intelligence, personality traits, physical traits. etc. My question is, why do we seem to elevate the most primitive and brutal to leadership positions?

Posted by: jm | Jul 23 2005 20:45 utc | 36

DeA, interesting comment, though I don’t agree w/the “not smart enough” part. If anything the intellect is over-valued relative to our capacity to feel. It’s isolating that which is so dangerous. It’s Patriarchy gone mad. In the West it manifests itself as over-valuation of the intellect, in the Arab world where it’s more obvious, it’s that women are soo despised that they can only have children to gain status, so they’re overloading the planet. Both symptoms of the same problem.
I don’t know about Europe, but in America we seem stuck in a positive feedback loop of testosterone. More is better, even leading to injections to get yet more… . Look at the children – of all the aspects of the universe to explore they’re rutted into endless competition. And now, even girls get their share of the pie, lest they distrurb the Patriarchal Value System – or tunnel their way out. (I saw a bit of a PBS prog. featuring the Beautiful David Suzuki. His grandson was lost in the “kid universe” of video games etc. He took him out for hikes, explaining the natural universe to him, helping him get grounded. It completely transformed him.
To me that’s the core of the problem. We’ve lost our roots. Not lack of intelligence – of course, yr. friend could have merely used that word as shorthand for any number of things, so I’m not specifically criticizing him.

Posted by: jj | Jul 23 2005 22:01 utc | 38

From Razor: the pygmys emphatically demnonstrate one species distinctive approach to sexuality that is emphatically not homo sapien sapiens,
…and neither is the common chimpanzee, though people have used them to say “see, our closest genetic relatives also wage war…but that’s not true, and that’s the important thing, to me. Humans are not “sociobiologically” doomed to war because of their ancestral past, as bonobos have a different strategy.
as any wedding magazine will demonstrate, not to mmention date movies,
–yes, cultural inventions that reinforce cultural conventions…but not all females fit into that stereotyped box in which you’re putting wedding magazines and date moves and females.
and the stress on penis size and paternal involvement in raising the young uns rather undoes the conclusion you want to arrive at
–how does it undo my conclusion?
and forces this unpleastant question on the faithful: after all those genterations selecting for a larger flaccid penis, why did the wimmnefolk then throw in with patriarchy? That ruthlesss stupidity is not a sex specific trait of homo sapien sapine is old news.
no one said anything about selecting for a larger flaccid penis. As a guy, you are surely aware that penises do not necessarily act the way you tell them to.
who said womenfolk threw in with patriarchy? as I understand it, the division of labor between genders gradually became an “our jobs are more important than yours” moment. And, if genders were separated by task and males were not at home, then they would want to make sure they are keeping alive their own genes and not someone elses, as far as survival goes.
And I do not think that every culture evolved in the same way. This is still apparent in the small hunter-gathers vs agricultural communities that still exist.
also, there are “matrilineal” cultures in which the maternal uncle, rather than the father, makes sure a child grows to maturity…in other words, he invests in his genetic offspring via the females in his family and he knows his genes continue through his niece or nephew.
so, please, Lady Macbeth, can you elaborate a bit so that I can understand what you’re saying?
I’m sort of stupid and I don’t deal well with elliptical remarks.
Horror consists in its always remaining the same—the persistence of ‘pre-history’—but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces.—Theodor Adorno 
(I just threw that in for the hell of it, or because I know how much you like that sort of thing. 🙂

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 23 2005 23:20 utc | 40

considering the history of male control of resources for thousands of years, evolution works slowly, we can see, and beneficial characteristics created for one reason are not sloughed off

sexuality itself is a social construct, gendered to the ground. Male dominance here is not an artificial overlay upon an underlying inalterable substratum of uncorrupted essential sexual being. Sexuality free of male dominance will require change, not reconceptualization, transcendence, or excavation.–Catharine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State

As I understand this argument, biological dimorphism is “social construct”?
I’d rather have the women run things. In terms of “are we doomed?”–the women should have a crack at saving “us.”

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 23 2005 23:56 utc | 42

From what I have read of MacKinnon I would say you understand the argument correctly.
In light of this argument the correcting surgery that is performed on newborns with an unclear genderstatus (generally making hermaphrodites into women) is quite quintessential to our present construction of gender.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 0:08 utc | 44

So it was not on the savannah we learned to walk upright? Guess that kills of my bully-ape theory. Ah, well, it had a good name though.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 0:13 utc | 46

thanks skod

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 24 2005 0:24 utc | 48

Since I guess MacKinnon will not stop by here (would be rather cool if she did though), I will for the sake of argument argue her position as I understand it. I am not really a MacKinnon scholar, but I dabble. So if anyone thinks I am stating her position wrong feel free to correct me.
My understanding of MacKinnons arguments:
1. The sexes are social constructs. This argument can be supported with differing construction of sexes in different cultures. For example the Berdache phenomena. This is the founding assumption of Queer Theory.
2. Our construction of sexualities is very dependent of those social constructed sexes.
Ergo: sexuality is a social construct.
On an endnote I would say that a lot hangs on how the concept “social constructions” is constructed.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 0:33 utc | 50

Posted by: ghazzali
Should I be more worried about my penis size than about the fate of the planet? Or are the two connected?
no. the worry…maybe.
From Slothrop: The notion of “social constructiivism” applied to gender is that women are physically dominated because men made woman in the image of a body easily dominated by men.
AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Other than the fact that that sounds like someone pulled something straight out of some patriarchal religious text and called it new…
as far as I can tell, males and females evolved at the same time. as far as I know, humans are not highly dimorphic, and the bones that are known thus far, afaik, do not indicate the sort of dimorphism in, say, robustus, or gorillas, currently.
dimorphism is an indicator of the way a social group is set up.
genetically, we are most closely related to common chimpanzees and bonobos. while common chimps will use aggression (alpha male stuff) for access to females, a female mates with many males at the same time, when she is in heat, or estrus. Not just the alpha male. Diff. males have diff. ways of access, too, not all scream and show off how alpha they are. Compared to other primates, chimps and bonobos are not greatly dimorphic. Their social groupings and their matings go along with this idea.
(some people think this multiple mating in chimps is to confuse paternity so that male apes won’t kill her offspring (like Blaffer-Hrdy’s organs do) –and so that the infant is accepted into the community.)
for bonobos, sex is “hello.” or “oops.” but, both aggression and sex are outlets for tension and both have physiological (biochemical) effects on the animal doing either one.
Again, these are our most closely related primates…the vast differences b/t humans and chimps probably has more to do with the timing of genes…when they are turned off and on, than with the genes themselves (i.e. the “culture” in which the genes live, and the “environment” in which genes operate…which makes total genetic reductionism a little bit too reductionist.)
at the most elemental level of survival, the most pressing problem for an individual or a community is their environment…their access to food, their competition for that food from another species (or not), and the threat that they are something else’s food.
Reproductive success springs from adequate nourishment.
This is what I can say in answer to CM’s statement. I don’t think the evidence is there.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 24 2005 0:53 utc | 52

slothrop- you’re the scholar, not me. I don’t really follow the arguments because, for good or bad, I decided many of them were pure b.s and, yes, I’m a disgusting pragmatic empiracist for the most part, but I don’t think we know everything there is to know, or can even understand everything…so I’m not even purely an empiracist.
But I was not screaming about the style, but, rather, the substance. doesn’t social constructivism seem a bit like tautology in that statement?
Anyway, pardon me being a pest, or for lacking the ability to carry on a conversation at the level of discourse that others find useful.
This is a failing on my part. I also don’t read much science fiction, as other MOAers do…but it doesn’t make me scream for some reason. hm.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 24 2005 1:26 utc | 54

Faux,
the way I read the quoted statement, it is about nurture, not nature. Women are continously made into “the weaker sex” physically by strength both being encouraged in men and not women and strenght being constructed and reconstructed as “what men, in average, is a bit better at”.
Thus there is the creation of “woman in the image of a body easily dominated by men”.
If I am wrong and it is a statement about nature, then I agree it is crap.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 1:43 utc | 56

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say,
A measure of wheat for a penny,
and three measures of barley for a penny;
and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.
-REVELATIoN 6:6

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 24 2005 2:00 utc | 58

@slothrop Strossen always reminds me of Friedman — under the banal rhetoric of Freedom and Choice, just another cheerleader for the commodifiers.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 24 2005 2:18 utc | 60

I am getting tired, not of this discussion, but of more mundane reasons as the bright summer night is starting to get brighter and morning is approaching and I will soon head of to dreamland. One last post though (and I will read any answers tomorrow).
I probably have mixed up genders and sexes in my previous posts. However, what we generally call sexes is genderified. If we had a just reproductively based language there would be the cathegories “fertile and reproducing man” as well as “fertile and reproducing women” but these would not need any direct link to different cathegories of infertiles. The infertiles, especially those that will not be fertile (old people for example), would be rather unhelpful to confuse with the fertile. Therefore there is a criticism towards the split of sex/gender where one is presumably natural and the other cultural.
But that probably does not matter as I guess MacKinnon speaks mostly of genders.
I did not get that about Leviticus.
Now I will sleep. Sorry if I got incoherent.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 2:24 utc | 62

Slothrop,
no need to apologise. Now I get it. Bit tired.
Liked this discussion. Will sleep now.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 24 2005 2:42 utc | 64

razor,
I beg to differ on your comparison. Mississippi has an average IQ of 85. That thug Haley Barbour is the gov and those shits don’t realize how bad he’s f—ing them. Kos used to have the chart of state by state IQ and state by state teen pregnancy. The lowest IQs were Bush states and the highest teen pregnancy rates were Bush states. The twenty five states with the lowest IQ went to Bush, the 16 states with the highest IQ went to Kerry in the 2004 election.
Is this just random acts of dumbness. I don’t believe so.

Posted by: jdp | Jul 24 2005 3:45 utc | 66

Are there no answers to these questions in reference to Macdworkin?
According to their definitions of pornography, no women is considered capable of signing a consent form (oh, yes, I know, because of the dominant paradigm and the reification of consent within such an environment, right?)
I do not understand how the infantalization of women that is the basis of macdworkin’s argument is in any way a feminist statement. It is disempowering and it places responsibility for one’s actions in the hands of others.
what is the difference between macdworkin’s outcome and a similar one arising from the ideology of someone like Dobson?
MacKinnon, in one of seemingly dozens of similar statements, is quoted as saying that “[The] only major distinction between  intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often  that one can’t get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”
…and tell me, where does she come up with the absolutism that she SHOULD be able to get people to see something wrong with “normal” sex?
Yes, freedom and choice are such banal rhetoric…it’s so much easier to take absolute positions that attempt to impose yet another form of totalitarianism on females by denying their ability to choose…political positions as well as social ones.
and, before I leave this thread, here is one final quote:
“There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language,”
— Bergson

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 24 2005 21:13 utc | 68

faux real
we have more in common than not. once having decided that the other apes will tell us what we could not know if there were no other apes.
we are neither bonobos nor commons nor gorillas nor orangutangs nor intermediate homos, and, the choices made by our species that many here ascribe to social construct and that you, above, properly ascribe to the birds and bees, are intimately tied to homo sapien sapien sexuality and how it is tied to pair bonding and long term child rearing and grandmothers and privacy and weddings and so on. To reduce all this to patriarchy or some such thing is just silly and anti human. Lady MacBeth just came to mind on the sterotyping of ruthless stupidity as being a male speciality.
To bring it back to the starting point, homo sapien sapien is in a life and death struggles against its assholic tendencies, but its assholice tendencies are but the small and unsurprising story of the species. Meanwhile, the proven accomplishment of social altruism without which the species could not be, which is bound up in its sexuality, is the big news most in the field stil lack the courage to face.

Posted by: razor | Jul 25 2005 5:32 utc | 70

we’re too immersed in our experience to judge if we are stupid or not or making the right decisions. Time will tell that story.
We are caught in a massive system in flux that is way beyond our understanding and control anyway. As the earth constantly changes and we are creatures of her creation, we are an intinsic part of something we know not. I think we grope in the dark pretty much through trial and error, but I feel that all creatures have an innate survival intelligence. And extinction comes when they know longer fit the changing environment.

Posted by: jm | Jul 25 2005 8:40 utc | 72

Biological change is slow. We have not changed physically, either in our skeletal structure or in the size of our brain, for at least 50,000 years. We evolved as ice-age hunters. The change in our ways of life since then is through the growth of culture, and the ability to pass on the growing complexity of knowledge from generation to generation. You could say that culture is our “software.” So we are running 21st century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago. That’s part of our trouble. We are smart enough to get ourselves into trouble, but not smart enough to get ourselves out of it.
— ronald wright, a short history of progress

Posted by: b real | Jul 25 2005 14:49 utc | 74

@b real:

Actually, another way to look at the problem is that we’re smart enough to get ourselves out of trouble, but we still have our “dinosaur brains” engaged. (The part of the human brain which deals with emotions is essentially unchanged from that of a dinosaur.) There are plenty of solutions available. For example, we could slaughter (or sterilize, if there’s enough time left) every human on the planet with an IQ lower than, say, 90. Result: instant lowering of the population by a vast number (thus relieving some of the strain on the ecology) and much more intelligent behavior from the remaining population. But we find reasons not to do that—nearly all (if not all) of which can be traced back to the dinosaur brain.

The fact of the matter is that evolution is a lazy process. Nothing changes unless there is a reason to change. Human beings have been tremendously successful. There has been no need for human beings to make anything other than slight behavioral changes (we even eat the same basic source foodstuffs our ancestors did!) in recorded history or, as far as we can tell, prehistory. In order to make evolution start working on humanity, we either have to make a deliberate move (i.e. slaughter or sterilize groups which are deemed retrograde) or wait for a crisis which will kill or disable most of us in any case, and which is almost certainly coming in the form of ecological disaster. The difference is that if we ignore our dinosaur brains and choose a deliberate move, we get to pick what survives. If we wait for the disaster, it’s random. If you accept that an ecological disaster which will kill billions is on the way, then there is no argument against directed mass slaughter or sterilization which does not boil down to “I’m squeamish,” since the alternative is to let even larger numbers of people die anyway.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 25 2005 15:56 utc | 76

we could slaughter (or sterilize, if there’s enough time left) every human on the planet with an IQ lower than, say, 90. Result: instant lowering of the population by a vast number (thus relieving some of the strain on the ecology) and much more intelligent behavior from the remaining population
the implication that intellegenct behavior springs from intellegence is stupid.
w/thought such as these no wonder you remain anonymous

Posted by: annie | Jul 25 2005 17:11 utc | 78

no name: you assume that intelligence as measured by knowledge of western civilization is the standard by which to measure survival in the event of an ecological catastrophe. That idea is absurd.
skills that would be most useful depending on different circumstances do not get measured on IQ tests.
let’s see…what might be useful? Hand/eye coordination. Knowledge of past practices in hunting or fishing or growing food or tending animals. Emotional resilience. where you just so happened to be located at any time and place. The ability to negotiate difficult encounters. Keen eyesight or hearing…this is just off the top of my head…but it seems those skills are not generally measured in an IQ test.
but, yes, that lizard brain is working at the highest levels of leadership in the grab for oil, the short term thinking, the refusal to change situations that are profitable for them…and to even convince themselves that there is no problem because it would make their lives less pleasant in the present.
So, by your thinking, it would seem that the eugenics of ecological survival would have to do with those blocking ways to soften the blows and mitigate some problems, it would seem to follow, to me, and then use the money they have hoarded toward solutions…like birth control and small scale farms and energy farms and better mass transit and better forms of fuel, and cities that are for walkers and bikers and so on.
skod- I still do not understand where gays and lesbians fit into the macdworkin world view, vis a vis pornography. And I also do not agree with their valuation of sex. You know, of course, that they share the goals of the religious right in these things…not really an odd alliance based upon their philosophy.
slothrop- when you frame freedom of speech as “the marketplace of ideas” you are already demeaning the concept for someone like you who scorns capitalist anything. I do not think freedom and choice and free speech have anything to do, at their most basic, with the marketplace of ideas. They have to do with an individual’s intellectual and emotional and spiritual autonomy…the opportunity to think for themselves.
Money, and the power it brings in this society, not porn, is the issue. The women execs in Hweird who have made bundles and have big jobs also are known to hire young men for sex work. As women have acquired more money, more pressure has been placed upon men to consider themselves as “sexual objects” as well.
The balance of financial power still rests with men, of course.
Razor- I do not think I was reducing western traditions to patriarcy by noting that peacemaking bonobos are equally if not more like humans. Lady MacBeth was worried that her husband was too kind to kill in that passage, btw.
And your mention of altruism and affliative behaviors again ties into my wish to help to spread another view of proto-humans, that has come about from observation of mostly common chimps. And, although we are not chimps nor bonobos, we do learn things about social structures by looking at theirs and, more importantly, by looking at the physiological characeristics that co-exist with certain behaviors or social groupings, etc… physical anthropology reveals these things as well.
It would be hard not to have some sort of affliative behaviors if you lived in a community of both males and females and cooperation increased success in hunting for food or catching fish or eventually growing grains.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 25 2005 17:40 utc | 80

doh! “efforts widely advanced by the television” -guess i should watch my back now for the iq police…

Posted by: b real | Jul 25 2005 19:20 utc | 82

I agree that intelligence would contribute to a better relationship with cause and effect and maybe a better environment. I think we are caught in an in between state of brain development where the primitive response and action is getting confused and the new pathways being forged have yet to fully become functional.
One theory also professes that the invention of the alphabet and written language caused the over development of the left brain, the rise of patriarchy, and the abandonment of the pictoral advantages of the right. The future blending of the two, feminine and masculine as represented by them, will take us to a more balanced and harmonious life. But perceived necessity so far always dictates. I don’t think we are at the point of true conscious choice…..intelligence… although the germ plasm seems to be there.

Posted by: jm | Jul 26 2005 1:26 utc | 84

No ape has a dinosaur brain anymore than a dinosaur has a mitochonddrial survival instinct. Apes are social beings and that doesn’t come easy. And most apes are to smart to reduce social intelligence to an IQ test, barring, those apes who have internalized the fantasy of Mr. Spock as a description of the human.
FAux real
Aside from my contentiousness over some false orthodoxies of the day, we are on the same side.

Posted by: razor | Jul 26 2005 2:35 utc | 86

I suspect the Talented Mr Ripley would have scored very high on an IQ test. Ditto Hannibal Lecter. ‘Nuff said.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 26 2005 5:01 utc | 88

@annie:
Yes, and what about the times you were wrong? What about the lottery tickets you bought that didn’t win? What about the people you chose to date, who turned out to be real losers? What about all the women who trust their boyfriends—until it turns out they are just waiting to commit date rape? Instinct is a worse guide than intellect; instinct doesn’t learn from its mistakes, Candide.
i don’t buy lottery tickets, i’ve made more money (on instinct) than any one person deserves/needs
i dated a loser, once. thats all it took
i cannot speak for other women
i beg to differ w/ you(and candide) about instinct not learning from mistakes. i will agree to disagree. doesn’t make me wrong.
i have gut feelings/instincts, they rarely lead me astray. i have an ability to cut thru bullshit and get to the heart of the matter.
sure, i think i’m smart. not denying IQ. but it hardly pulls the weight. i RELY on my instinct. in heart, integrity, passion, finance, when in doubt, i look within and i FEEL the answer and trust in myself. when i am lost in the abyss literally and figuratively i take a time out, weigh my options and trust my gut. granted i can’t speak for everyone. but instincts are not valued in our cultures as they are in others. therefore those who trust them are often considered wacko, and for good reason, gamblers etc. but people who practice listening to themselves /others (medicine peoples) begin to trust. it may be a combination but we NEED that combination. we have lost touch w/ this human trait.
this position, where does it get you? you are not your body, you are not your mind, you are not your ideas.
somehow we survived here for centuries, but we are failing now? could it be that we are loosing touch w/ our basic human instincts? are you so willing to trust your intelligence, one that could lead you so astray as to propose such an absurd suggestion as ‘intelligent slaughter’ and enter into a debate that pits intellect vs instinct
and wtf named this ‘dinosaur brain’ bla bla.
could someone please inject a little love into the world about now

Posted by: annie | Jul 26 2005 7:49 utc | 90

You are not in the position to make such a decision. Neither am I.
Well, what if we were king or queens of the world? Well, then surely we could come up with a better solution having a lot of brainiacs working on the problem?
Besides if you or I were the king or queen of the world might not such a plan lead to a foe amassing an army of stupids to conquer the position of king or queen of the world? And would not such a war possibly be worse a disaster?
In short I find the underlaying assumptions for your question preposterous. And if you find this planet overcrowded there is always suicide. Oh, what was that? Are you saying it is your duty to stay alive because you are so smart. How fortunate for you. Funny how that works.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jul 26 2005 11:03 utc | 92

@annie
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY
The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another’s being mingle–
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;–
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?
–Percy Bysshe Shelley
There ye go.

Posted by: argh | Jul 26 2005 11:33 utc | 94

Vicious- the “logic” you discuss effects my personal life. I have a son who has asperger’s syndrome..or high-functioning autism.
If someone hears the word “autism” they would assume he is a non-productive member or society…and, according to your idea, all stupid (i.e. non-productive according to your definition members of society should be killed.)
In fact, he would meet your high IQ definition…but he would be unlikely to survive because his practical skills are very hard work to come by. But those things are not measured on an IQ test.
For this personal reason, as well as abstract ones, I find your position abhorrent.
I was not talking about “emotional intelligence” when I mentioned emotional resilience, btw. I was talking about the ability to recover and maintain hope in devastating circumstances. That’s a survival skill. Baby chimps who lose their mothers and do not attach to another, because of depression over their loss, starve to death.
I do not think “playing god,” or pretending you can know the outcome of a genocidal decision is very rational, frankly.
Nor is your idea of a total ecological catastrophe…different places will, I would imagine, see different effects from climate change or whatever else may come about.
Since the larger “powers that be” will not deal with these issues, the humane solution is to deal with them, as you can, at a local level, and share what you learn with others.
fwiw- look at Cuba and how they handled their loss of fossil fuels and money, etc. etc. after the fall of the Soviet Union. They’re practicing sustainable farming. They’re not getting rich, but they’re not starving, as far as I know.
But playing god, exterminating populations…well, Hitler also had good reasons to advocate gassing and shooting small children too, but that didn’t make it right.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 26 2005 15:37 utc | 96

@A Swedish Kind of Death:

Actually, I had presumed that I would be treated just like anyone else; if I passed my hypothetical test (or tests), I would live, otherwise I would die. Besides, the current champion of intuition, annie, says that it’s a good thing to want to live. So basically you’re assuming that, because instinct tells you to live, intellect should tell you to die? Sorry, but that makes no sense. If instinct and intellect always disagreed, they would in effect amount to the same thing.

As for my hypothetically becoming a world dictator (why bother whitewashing it with a term like “King” or “Queen”—any government where a single person has theoretically unlimited power is a dictatorship in principle): how on earth would I have gotten there in the first place if there was so much opposition? Hiding agendas has always led to no good—I know enough about history to know that—so if I were going to be elevated to a dictator, everyone would already know what I intended to do. (Quite frankly, though, being the dictator of a world full of smart people would be a job I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy. Smart people would see fairly quickly that dictatorship depends on a lack of effective resistance, and would be able to build effective resistance through covert planning the minute I stopped representing their perceived best interests. Thus, as long as we’re entertaining the dubious fantasy anyway, my hypothetical rule would run something like 1. euthenization/sterilization of the foolish, 2. possible euthenization of the remaining guilty—certain people I have named above as clever but unscrupulous would survive step 1; it would be tempting to wipe ’em out 3. set up a representative government and give it all my authority 4. retire and do something less stressful, like alligator dentistry or parachuteless skydiving.)

@fauxreal:

Did I ever represent my plan as a perfect one? No. Are you actually complaining because I don’t want to kill your child?

My plan takes the cry, “give me liberty or give me death,” which many people have now stated in principal, to its logical conclusion—by assumption in the discussion (see above), the extremely stupid cannot be allowed liberty without endangering the world, so they can’t have liberty.

As for navigating by Venus: unless you know how the position of Venus changes over time, and how to do reckoning based on your current position, both of which are feats of intellect, not instinct, that knowledge is useless. And how do you suppose they even figured out to look at the sky to navigate in the first place?

During the period before the Renaissance, mathematics was considered to be dangerously un-Christian (place-based representation, which is basically necessary for sustained mathematical thought, was associated with Arabic numerals, which the Church didn’t like because of their source). So all European ocean voyages relied on instinct, always stayed within sight of the coast (which is dangerous and slow), or had Jewish, Islamic, or atheist navigators. (This was one of the things which contributed towards popular anti-semitism, in fact. The Jews can tell how to get from one place to another when we can’t? Obviously, they have a pact with the devil, who feeds them the information, and they’re using it to get rich at honest Christian merchants’ expense! There’s your instinct at work for you: fear the foreigner.) The instinct approach worked so poorly that after a while it basically died out. Then as now, people who own boats want to recoup the investment before the boat sinks, and slower, less reliable navigation does not make them happy. The period of Euopean exploration basically only started once the average sailors started listening to their intellect and learned to use arabic numerals and geometry for navigation.

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Jul 26 2005 17:41 utc | 98

@fauxreal:

I didn’t realize you were a student of the Cheney school of debate. From my perspective, you raised the objection that I would allow your child to live while others who were more suited to survive would perish. That suggests that you would be more approving of my idea if it destroyed your child (and those like your child) and let others live in their place, because then you would have one less objection to the idea. Correct me if I’m wrong.

You seem to prefer, given my hypothetical situation, letting everyone die over making an attempt to save some subset of the population, apparently because you feel that nobody should make that sort of decision. But we all make that sort of decision all the time—do you invite all the destitute into your house, feed them, and provide them with care? If not, you’re letting them suffer and in many cases die by choosing not to do so. And even if you do, there are more homeless people out there; you have chosen to live where you do and save the specific group that you save, letting the others go. Refusing to choose is, in itself, a choice, and in my scenario, it is actually the nastier of the two.

That is why I am shocked by the reluctance of this group to say anything on the subject. We’re like the Bush administration: we won’t even discuss a contingency which is possible (can you deny that there’s a big environmental catastrophe coming? It is possible we could avoid it by removing the people who are, at the root, responsible for the forces unleashing it) as long as it doesn’t mesh with our philosophy.

I am a leftist for purely intellectual reasons. I now feel like the character in the old G. K. Chesterton story: “His antimilitarism was of a peculiar and Gallic sort. An eminent and very wealthy English Quaker, who had come to see him to arrange for the disarmament of the whole planet, was rather distressed by Armagnac’s proposal that (by way of beginning) the soldiers should shoot their officers.” I definitely agree with the “start locally” idea; I go everywhere on foot, by bike, by bus, or by train, and buy organic (locally-grown) whenever I can; I try not to shop in chain stores when there is a local equivalent; I oppose development (which is practically impossible where I live); I use energy-efficient bulbs and keep everything unplugged when not in use; I follow the issues and I vote, even in the local elections. But I can’t say I particularly agree with this know-nothing attitude towards responsibility—if we refuse to learn and make the best choices we can, we increase our guilt, not lessen it.

And, as an aside, if the ability to see Venus is a sense perception that people generally no longer employ, they no longer employ it because it is far less worthwhile than other means—should we force navigators to develop this perception anyway, even though it is in effect a waste of time, albeit a charming and traditional one?

Posted by: The Truth Gets Vicious When You Corner It | Jul 26 2005 19:24 utc | 100