Archive for April, 2007

but that would require me to finish sewing up the poncho I’ve been working on for 3 years. Is this fabulous or what?

Check this out: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html
Moyers’ show starts broadcasting tonight. The report on the war in Iraq was compelling enough to keep me watching.

So I learned this on Oprah today. I know the O word is usually the kiss of death in conversations but I don’t care. Her show can be great, and I’m home sick with a nasty cold.

African-Americans are predisposed to have high blood pressure because those who survived the passage over on slave ships were the ones who could hold more salt in their bodies. Fascinating. It’s also hard to get my brain around treating people that way as being acceptable. The conditions of the ships and the treatment was all economic-based. They accepted a certain amount of “loss.”

I’m sure this isn’t news to you American studies folk out there, but I am a Science person. My experience of history has been the boring PG variety.

Related question: What is your favorite readable and gripping nonfiction book?

Nothing stirs the dissent in my heart like hearing mutinous lyrics from slightly tarnished 24-caret-gold vocal chords. And by that I mean I love Eddie Vedder. I want to have a million of his babies. Eddie covers an acoustic version of Phil Ochs’ song, “Here’s to the State of Mississippi.” Now if I only had 82,000 leaflets encouraging the impeachment of the President to distribute throughout Lawrence. . .

But, hey, if you can’t impeach the President, maybe we can impeach  VP DICK Cheney. You go Dennis Kucinich.

As being green is the new in thing, I am wondering how green our group is?

Here is a little check list of ways to be green. Which do you do?

• Drive less than 10 miles a day
• Turn off computer, lights, tv, stereo when not needed
• Eat locally grown food
• Shop locally
• Recycle more than two types of materials at home
• Set your thermostat to a comfortable, yet reasonable temperature
• Buy carbon offset credits
• Have adequate windows and insulation in your house
• Consume less
• Pick up stray trash
• Buy green energy
• Install compact florescent light bulbs
• Use low flow shower heads and toilets

I am sure there are more ways to be green. If you do a green thing that is not on this list, please share. I encourage you to pick one of these ways to be green that you are not already doing and start doing it. Yay Earth.

Here is a video of Richard Dawkins on the Bill O’Reilly’s show. There is some banter back and forth. Towards the end Dawkins is explaining that Stalin did the atrocious things that he did not because he was an atheist, but because he was a morally corrupt person. O’Reilly dismissed Dawkins (of course) and basically chalked up Stalin’s bad deeds to atheism.

Is atheism forever doomed to hell for being perceived as morally corrupt? Can the concept of moral universalism become mainstream? Where do your morals come from? Is morality and moral guidance the domain of religion?

I grew up Catholic so I can’t claim that my morality is self derived or derived from my parents and schooling. My social norms are definitely influenced from my 7 years in Catholic school. I like to think that my current moral fiber is more of a reflection of my own comfort with the world and the moral completeness of the people around me, ie you people. How do you view your own morality? How do you view society’s morality?

This will probably spark a discussion, I expect input from Trevor. David Brooks from the NYT:

Over the next few days, we’ll ponder the sources of Cho Seung-Hui’s rage. There’ll be no shortage of analysts picking apart his hatreds, his feelings of oppression and his dark war against the rich, Christianity and the world at large.

Some will point to the pruning of the brain synapses that may be related to adolescent schizophrenia. Others may point to the possibility that an inability to process serotonin could have led to depression and hyperaggression. Or we could learn that he had been born with a brain injury that made him psychopathic. Or perhaps he was suffering from the ravages of isolation.

It could be, for example, that he grew up with some form of behavioral illness that would have made it hard for him to interact with and respond appropriately to other people. This would have caused others to withdraw from him, leading to a spiral of loneliness that detached him from the world and then caused him to loathe it.

Over the next weeks, we could learn these or other things about Cho Seung-Hui. And as we learn the facts of his life, we’ll be able to fit them into ever more sophisticated models of human behavior. For over the past few decades, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and social scientists have made huge strides in understanding why people — even murderers — do the things they do.

It’s important knowledge, but it’s had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self. “Man is the measure of all things,” the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared millenniums ago. But in the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing. Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within.

At the extreme, many scientists now doubt that there is such a thing as free will. As Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told Dennis Overbye of The Times earlier this year, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have a sense they are free.” But, he added, “the more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.”

But even in the more mainstream level of the mass media, the scope for individual choice has been reduced, and with it so has the scope for morality. Once, Cho Seung-Hui would have been simply condemned as evil, but now the language of morality is often replaced with the language of determinism. The press this week has been filled with articles like “What Made Him Do It” (Newsweek) or “Why They Kill” (The L.A. Times), which run down the background factors that lead people to become mass murderers.

Responsibility shifts outward from the individual to wider forces. People interviewed on TV tend to direct their anger at the gun, the university administration, society and so on. If they talk about the young killer at all, the socially acceptable word seems to be “troubled.” He’s more acted upon than acting.

In short, the killings at Virginia Tech happen at a moment when we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice — and individual responsibility — begins. The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground.

And it’s true. We’re never going back. We’re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons.

But it should be possible to acknowledge the scientists’ insights without allowing them to become monopolists. It should be possible to reconstruct some self-confident explanation for what happened at Virginia Tech that puts individual choice and moral responsibility closer to the center.

After all, according to research by David Buss, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had a vivid homicidal fantasy. But they didn’t act upon it. They don’t turn other people into objects for their own fulfillment.

There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It’s just that these selves can’t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

Seeing how this community was founded out of the ashes of a book club, I thought I would invite you all to read a book with me. A sort of impromptu book club. The book I am reading, while not necessarily inspired by Mark’s post about the generalization of male emotion, is related to Mark’s post. The book I am reading is “Emotional Intelligence” by Danial Goleman (ISBN-13: 978-0553383713). Lawrencians, I think there is another copy at the library.

The title of this post is “linear non-linear book club,” because I don’t expect us all to read it at the same time or pace. If you decide to read it and find something noteworthy, please share. It doesn’t matter if the discussion follows the order of the book. Nor does it matter if you comments are timely and “in order” of the commenting. It only matters that we are communicating. (Does this make sense? Sometimes I think I am too geeky for my own good. Sheesh.)

Let the LNL Book Club begin. Woo (can I get a “hoo?”)

1) Supreme court says greenhouse gases bad.

2) Pelosi says Bush not only US voice.