Of monkeys, people and religion

Hanuman, the Indian monkey god.

El Cabrero spent a good part of the week careening around West Virginia. For entertainment and edification, I listened to a recording of primatologist Frans De Waal's book The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

In it, he made an interesting point that never had occurred to me, i.e. that religions that developed in places where people lived in proximity to monkeys and/or apes didn't separate humans from the rest of the natural world. Presumably it would be harder to do so when there were little furry human look alikes running around.

Dude has a point. Compare and contrast Hinduism and Buddhism with Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

FRACK PICTURES to come next week.

POLITICS, GENES AND BRAINS discussed here. Comment: as interesting as books on that topic are, they don't explain why things are so polarized today.

GET OUT THERE AND JOG if you want to live longer.

MORE TO DENY here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A day late and...

I knew it was coming but somehow it slipped my mind. Yesterday, May 24, was the 70th birthday of a certain Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan. I have never met Bob, although I've seen him in concert several times. But I can say that it feels like I have a deep karmic connection to his music.

Many times, before I even knew who he was, I was stopped dead in my tracks by his songs, whether performed by him or by someone else.

I am a bit younger than those who first fell under his spell. But I recall as a kid a time my late brother came home from college and plucked out "Blowin' in the Wind" and being stunned by the words.

(As I grew up, I must confess a greater affinity for the older, more cynical, Bob than for the younger idealistic one. But still, there it was.)

I recall other moments growing up when certain Dylan songs, like Knocking on Heaven's Door or Tangled Up in Blue just froze me up where I was standing. Eventually, I figured out who this guy was and started listening to his music.

There's one question that I'd really like to know at some point. Does he really know what he's writing when he writes the lyrics or is he just a vessel of the Muses? I remember being at an Arlo Guthrie concert one time when he speculated that Bob fished upstream from other songwriters and just caught more than they did.

However it happened, he has the power of the Word. And I even like the voice that delivers it. The raspier the better.

SPEAKING OF WHOM, some birthday tributes can be found here
and here.

RAKING IT IN. Massey Energy executives stand to profit big time in a sale to Alpha Natural Resources if the deal goes through, in spite of playing games with the lives of coal miners. My best advice is that the Gentle Reader make Ken Ward's uber-blog Coal Tattoo a regular site to visit.

STRANGE AS THIS WEATHER HAS BEEN. Bill McKibben suggest a connection between climate change and extreme weather events here. I think he's right.

BECAUSE I NEED TO SLEEP AT SOME POINT, this post has been scheduled for publication in advance. Well may the world go and I'm against anything bad that happened between then and now.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

TWO BIRDS

Metaphors are an important and inevitable way of looking at the world. Some cognitive scientists think we're basically wired for metaphor. I even remember reading a book about the American Civil War that suggested one reason why the Union prevailed was that Lincoln made better use of metaphors than Jefferson Davis.

(The author had a point, but I tend to be of the same mind as the ill-fated Confederate General George Pickett, who mused that "the Union army had something to do with it" as well.)

We need good metaphors if we're going to start thinking and moving in the direction of a just and sustainable economy. I stumbled across a pretty good one in the introduction to Bill McKibben's book Deep Economy:

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why centuries since Adam Smith have been devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. The idea that individuals, pursuing their own individual interests in a market society, make one another richer and the idea that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth that has indisputably produced More. It has built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading this book. It is now wonder and no accident that they dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. That changes everything. Now, if you've got the stone of your own life, or your own society, gripped in your hand, you have to choose between them. It's More or Better.

STICKING WITH THE THEME, perhaps the "age of heroic consumption" is at an end.

GROW IT. Local food banks are urging gardeners to donate fresh food to help feed the hungry. Beware the flood of zucchinis!

SPEAKING OF FOOD, this article argues that sustainable farming is the way to go and that globally we can expect women to take a leading role.

REST, REST, PERTURBED SPIRIT! Insomnia and poor sleep quality has been linked to suicidal symptoms in college students. I think it's nap time.

SPACED OUT. Here are a couple posts from Wired Science about how the location of extraterrestrial life, if it happens, might affect religion.

MEDICAID. This Gazette story discusses the current state of Medicaid in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PUBLIC DREAMS?

Heracles, courtesy of wikipedia.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) is probably the most popular interpreter of myths today. Campbell was the author of The Masks of God, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and many other works. His works also inspired Star Wars creator George Lucas.

Campbell's public following grew by leaps and bounds with PBS's broadcast of The Power of Myth, a series of interviews between Campbell and Bill Moyers. Strongly influenced by Jung, he believed that all myths worldwide shared similar themes and spiritual insights. He sometimes spoke of a "monomyth," such as that of the quest of a hero, as if all humanity was basically watching the same psychic movie.

One problem with that approach is that it selectively picks from many diverse myths and imposes a general interpretation on widely diverse traditions with widely different systems of meaning.

He had a knack for catchy phrases such as this one:

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Sounds good but doesn't hold up too well. Myths are enduring stories repeated over time, whereas dreams are physiological events, most of which are not remembered or retold. Myths provide a world of meaning for those who accept them, whereas most dreams are mental static that have little influence on daily life (although we arguably should pay more attention to them than we do).

The problem with overgeneralizing about myths is that in doing so one creates a more or less artificial construct that loses a lot of particularity. As one of El Cabrero's teachers used to say, you can't unscramble an egg. Instead of lumping all myths together into some gigantic stew, it might be more interesting to look at different traditions in their own terms.

THE SURGE IS WORKING? You decide.

THE TREE ARMY. Here's Bill McKibben on the relevance of New Deal era programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps today.

COAL AND/OR HEALTH. A new study by a WVU researcher finds that residents of the state's coalfields are more likely than other West Virginians to suffer from chronic heart, lung and kidney disease.

SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR... Here's Dean Baker on the credit crisis and corporate bailouts.

THE WIRE. Here's a critical view of El Cabrero's favorite TV show that talks about all the positive things in Baltimore and other cities that the show ignores.
Point well taken, but can somebody tell the folks at HBO to get that season 5 DVD out soon?

SPIDERS AND SNAKES. New research is studying the question of whether the common fear of snakes and spiders is an evolutionary inheritance or something learned.

LOOK TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD! They invented farming 50 million years ago when we were just a twinkle in a primate's eye.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED