In fairness to chimps...

In yesterday's post, I said some unflattering things about our cousins the chimpanzees (not that I don't say worse things about humans most days). Here's the other side of the coin. If we inherited our capacity for intra-species violence from our chimplike common ancestor, it looks like we also got a sense of fairness from them too. It's always a mixed bag.

SCISSORBILL was a term used by the Industrial Workers of the World back in the day to describe workers who just didn't get it. The term refers to the bill of a duck, as in cutting off your nose to spite your face. As in low income workers who finally get health care from the Affordable Care Act but support politicians who want to repeal it. Earlier this week, I linked a NY Times article about that. Here's another take on the subject.

CHILD POVERTY. Despite some progress, it got worse in WV in 2013, according to the latest Census data..

War before people

For a long time, there has been a prejudice in the social sciences which tended to view early humans as peaceful noble savages and blame human violence on more recent social structures like capitalism, imperialism and all that. Short version: we used to be cool but now we're crap.

I'm no cheerleader for predatory capitalism or imperialism, but that view turned out to be pretty much perfectly wrong. More and more evidence indicates that the rate of violence as it affects a portion of the human population has actually decreased throughout human history. By a lot. In other words, we may be crappy now, but we were a whole lot more crappy and violent in hunter gatherer societies.

It is also now pretty well established that something like war has long existed in chimpanzee societies and that this is unrelated to human intervention.

You could view that as a downer, but I don't. It shows that we really can make progress and control our historical end evolutionary baggage to some degree. Of course, we're not there yet!

Through the roof

It's no secret these days that the ratio of income between corporate CEOs and workers is growing by leaps and bounds. Here is an op-ed from the NY Times about it and a pretty slick graphic feature on the same from the AFLCIO.

URGENT DARWIN FISH UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The glorious imaginary library of *******

One of the weirdest writers I've ever read is the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges. His work is very surrealistic. One frequent quote about it is that it embraces "the character of unreality in all literature." The words supernatural realism come to mind, minus the realism.

For example, in a one-paragraph short story, he tells of an empire where the art of map-making was so precise that one map of the empire was the exact same size as the empire itself and "coincided point for point with it."

Anyway, out of the blue I was struck by a story idea right up his alley, one that wouldn't be much longer than a paragraph itself. It would be about an imaginary library so fantastic that people come from all over the world to admire it. I must have been channeling Borges' ghost. Alas, I don't think I have what it takes to write it.

Maybe I'll read it someday. In that imaginary library.

THE POLITICS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM. This could be interesting to watch.

OF APES AND ANGELS. Here's the latest from primatologist Frans De Waal about evolution, apes, ethics and religion.

ANIMALS THAT OUGHT TO BE. Here's a whimsical look at composite critters we wish really existed. There are probably books about all of them in that glorious imaginary library.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I keep, and pass, and turn again

Say what you want about the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he gave me an easy topic to blog about during a busy couple of months. For that I'm grateful, anyway.

For the last month or two I've been looking at some of his most influential essays or lectures, but it turns out that what Waldo really wanted was to be a great poet. I'm not sure he hit the mark, but it wasn't for lack of trying. One line from an 1837 Fourth of July poem about his town of Concord during the American Revolution became quite famous, as in "the shot heard round the world."

I can't claim that I've read all his poems but I did find two that I really liked. Today's feature is the poem Brahma, which was published in 1857. It reflects his interest in the spiritual literature of India and was heavily influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. The poem also captures some of the monistic (as in all is One) and pantheistic (as in all is God) themes of Transcendentalism.

Here goes:

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

IGNORANCE is alive and well, according to this writer.

MONKEY TALK. Did human speech develop from this kind of primate communication?

ARE WE ALONE? Here's an interesting item on the search for extraterrestrial life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A newborn bard of the Holy Ghost

The theme at Goat Rope these days is the life and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose impact on 19th century American culture was pretty huge. I have a love/hate relationship with old Ralph. Some of his writings are really inspiring, others are totally unintelligible to me, while still others seem kind of idiotic.

At the moment, the focus is on his 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, which was pretty controversial in its time (and much of which seems to lean to the loopy side to me).

One reason for this was his advice to would-be clergy to disregard the dogmas and rituals of the past and trust only in their own direct experience.

Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for these good men, but say, `I also am a man.' Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, — cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity.
 

 I suppose prattle like this sounds inspiring to people with an overly exalted conception of their own internal hiccups, but the asylums and alleys of the world are full of sad and misguided souls who consider themselves to be the newborn bards of the Holy Ghost. It's one thing to oppose unthinking dogmatism but it's another to disregard tradition altogether and to mistake our internal chatter as the voice of God. The capacity for self doubt is a virtue, but the tendency to self-deification is a delusion.

WRONG TURN. Here's a good Gazette editorial on the tragic waste of the Iraq war.

MORAL ANIMALS? Maybe.

TALE OF THE WHALE. Here's a great feature on Melville's Leviathan and its evolution.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Fair warning

My mind has been taking a stroll backwards lately to the spring of a year right before the millennial odometer rolled over. Most of us might not have been aware of it, but these were kind of the good old days in America. Maybe the last of them.

The country was at peace, mostly. The economy was booming, although it was kind of hard to tell in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. In a word, things hadn't quite gone to hell yet as they would in the early years of the next decade.

It had been a good year for me as far as work was concerned. We won some major fights defending the safety need for poor families and people with disabilities, both in courts and in the legislature.

I was also working my way through graduate school in sociology, a class or two at a time. I had just completed another class in theory and was enjoying the fact that my reading time was again my own.

To clear my mental palate, I listened to an 84(!) part lecture series by Arnold Weinstein on the classics of American literature, courtesy of The Teaching Company and my local library. And I resolved to read or listen to as many of the works discussed as I could.

This is probably a sad commentary on my life but that whole thing was one of the more pleasant experiences I've had. I read or listened to Irving; renewed my cursory acquaintance with Emerson; learned new things about Poe; hit some of Twain's and Melville's work that I had missed; dove into Fitzgerald and Faulkner; read the great plays by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; discovered "new" writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, etc.

Say what you want about the USA, but this country has produced some kickass writers.

Over the next few weeks, as things heat up in WV and I'm going to be spread kind of thin, this blog is going to focus on an early and hugely influential current in American literature, with a special focus on the work of one writer who is difficult to classify.

More on that to come.

I'M GETTING TIRED OF THIS DRAMA-OF-THE-WEEK GARBAGE from Washington, and from the leadership of the US House in particular. Here's a look at what the latest mess (the sequester thingie) would look like.

THE UBER MAMA OF MODERN MAMMALS, including us, was a bit of a rat.

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I SOOO thought I was done with zombies for a while

...but a friend sent me this link.

Here's a thought. What if zombies, due to bad oral health,which is endemic in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, didn't have teeth? Would they just gum people? That would be a disgusting nuisance but something short of an apocalypse.

Just saying.

IN CASE YOU MISSED KRUGMAN, click here.

SIGN OF THE TIMES. Obesity is the new malnutrition.

ARE YOU GLAD THERE AREN'T MANY GIANT BUGS? Thank a bird.

NOTE: El Cabrero has to be everywhere all the time this week so posts may be irregular.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Command performance

El Cabrero has been an irregular blogger this week due to running around a lot. Here are a few items that have caught my eye lately.

THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE IT. This Gazette story from a couple of days ago provides great insight into the politics of coal in WV. This week the industry is having a series of taxpayer funded pep rallies in which the Obama administration and the EPA will be ritually denounced. Coal is a jealous god and everybody who is anybody has to show up and burn some incense and join in the maledictions.

MORALITY AND TAXES. Here's a look at the moral sentiments that often lie behind opposition to taxes.


WHO'D A THUNK IT? Birds and turtles are cousins.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Diversity of bad ideas

Overwhelmingly but with some exceptions, participants in the Occupy movement have adopted, often explicitly, nonviolence as a method of action. However, in some places there are those who argue for "a diversity of tactics," which basically seems to consist of throwing things at cops.

Presumably such people believe that this is the best way to win over the hearts and minds of the 99 percent they claim to represent.

Sorry, but the most charitable thing I can say about that approach is that it is, in one of the Spousal Unit's favorite phrases, "dumber than dog ****." I say that not only as someone who works for a Quaker organization that promotes nonviolence, but also as a gun owning Gandhi-allergic Scotch Irish hillbilly with a black belt.

This has nothing to do with any belief on my part regarding the moral arc of the universe, the evidence for which is underwhelming to me most days. It comes down to this: as much as some seem to like throwing stuff as a method of change, the rulers generally have way more stuff to throw. And they can throw it harder. Second, most people are not all that turned on by the sight of people throwing stuff.

It seems to me but simple prudence to avoid giving one's opponent the excuse and/or ability to crush and/or totally discredit and isolate you unless there is a compelling reason to do so and I don't imagine that happens very often.

As a friend of mine once said about ultra "left" groups that engage in provocative action, "If they're not getting paid by the other side, they're getting ripped off."

IT'S MONDAY so it's gotta be Krugman bashing austerity.

HISTORY IS MESSY, so the Tennessee Tea Party wants to clean it up--by keeping slavery and such unsavory matters of American history out of the textbooks.

WHAT IS 24 MILLION GENERATIONS? If we were playing Jeopardy, that would be the number required for mouse sized mammals to evolve to elephant proportions assuming natural selection was favorable.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

What he said

Hats off to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for kicking up dust on the deficit reduction debate. Here's an extract from a recent letter of his to President Obama:

This is a pivotal moment in the history of our country. Decisions are being made about the national budget that will impact the lives of virtually every American for decades to come. As we address the issue of deficit reduction we must not ignore the painful economic reality of today – which is that the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well while the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing. In fact, the United States today has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth.

Everyone understands that over the long-term we have got to reduce the deficit – a deficit that was caused mainly by Wall Street greed, tax breaks for the rich, two wars, and a prescription drug program written by the drug and insurance companies. It is absolutely imperative, however, that as we go forward with deficit reduction we completely reject the Republican approach that demands savage cuts in desperately-needed programs for working families, the elderly, the sick, our children and the poor, while not asking the wealthiest among us to contribute one penny.

Mr. President, please listen to the overwhelming majority of the American people who believe that deficit reduction must be about shared sacrifice. The wealthiest Americans and the most profitable corporations in this country must pay their fair share. At least 50 percent of any deficit reduction package must come from revenue raised by ending tax breaks for the wealthy and eliminating tax loopholes that benefit large, profitable corporations and Wall Street financial institutions. A sensible deficit reduction package must also include significant cuts to unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending.

Please do not yield to outrageous Republican demands that would greatly increase suffering for the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. Now is the time to stand with the tens of millions of Americans who are struggling to survive economically, not with the millionaires and billionaires who have never had it so good.

WHAT THEY SAID. Key WV legislators warn Senator Manchin about the dire consequences to the state if Medicaid is cut. Manchin has never been much of a fan of that program. Or of poor people.

ON THAT NOTE, proposed cuts to Medicare could also hurt seniors.

DARWIN. The rap version.

COOL SCIENCE ITEM here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hwaet!

The theme at Goat Rope these days is Beowulf, although you'll also find links and comments about current events below. The title of this post comes from the first word of the poem in old Anglo-Saxon (although the a and e were joined together in the original). The word means something like Listen, or Behold, or Hear this! Seamus Heaney's translation renders it as So.

It's a way of saying, "The show is about to start." And it is quite a show. Heaney calls the poem "a work of the greatest imaginative vitality, a masterpiece where the structuring of the tale is as elaborate as the beautiful contrivances of its language."

If I had to say what it was about, aside from the whole monster and dragon killing thing, I'd have to say it was about aging and how those glory days that Bruce Springsteen sang about pass you by. In the beginning of the poem, Beowulf is a young man eager to gain fame and a name for himself by killing the monster that haunts the hall of the Spear Dane king Hrothgar. He goes home to Geatland and eventually becomes king, ruling justly for 50 years.

In his old age, when a dragon threatens his realm, he determines to fight it alone, as if it see if he's still got it in him:

"I risked my life
often when I was young. Now I am old,
but as king of the people I shall pursue this fight
for the glory of winning, if the evil one will only
abandon his earth-fort and face me in the open."

He reminds me a bit of Tennyson's Ulysses, who decides in old age to hit the whale road again:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

He does pretty good, but it doesn't turn out too well for the king, the kingdom or the dragon.

BIG NEWS. It looks like Alpha Natural Resources is about to buy Massey Energy, which continues to dispute MSHA's version of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster. For more, click here. It will be interesting to see what changes--and what doesn't.

SEVEN SOCIAL SINS. Here's an op-ed from the Gazette by Perry Mann on some problems as identified by Gandhi.

DODGING THE ISSUE. Most high school science teachers avoid taking a strong stand on teaching evolution in biology classes.

MEDITATION ON THE BRAIN here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Causes and reasons

I've frequently heard people say "everything happens for a reason." Often when people say this, they seem to imply that there is a greater purpose behind apparently unrelated events.

It would be more accurate to say that everything happens due to causes, although we are not always able to ferret out what the causes are. Still, we seem hard-wired to attribute our experiences to conscious, purposeful agents or beings that are acting in some way.

(This might explain why I attribute deliberate evil intentions to a machine when it doesn't act the way I want it to. Or why some winters--like this one so far--seem to have nasty personalities.)

Evolutionary psychologists believe that this is an adaptation that has helped us survive. Among early humans and our non-human ancestors, thinking that a predator might be behind an unexpected sound would prompt defensive actions that could save a life. This tendency is referred to as agency detection.

Often we're wrong in attributing agency to things that just happen, but in evolutionary terms the consequences of a false positive are not as bad as that of a false negative. Being mistaken in trying to escape an imagined tiger isn't as costly as not trying to escape from a real one.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that agency detection is behind belief in supernatural beings when things go bump in the night or when we have good or bad experiences. Overly active agency detection can manifest itself in paranoia or seeing conspiracies behind every that that happens.

It seems that humans are pattern seeking animals. And if we look for a pattern, we'll probably find one, whether it makes sense or not. The universe probably isn't personally out to get us and probably won't go out of its way to do us special favors either, but sometimes we see things that way.

TAXING AND SPENDING. Here is a look at the biggest right wing untruths about this perennially favorite political topic.

NOT TERRIBLY STIMULATING. Here's a pessimistic assessment of President Obama's deal with congressional Republicans on tax cuts and unemployment.

ENDING HOMELESSNESS. Here's an interesting approach that seems to be working.

OH GOOD. Forty percent of Americans believe that humans were created 10,000 or so years ago. To tell the truth, I thought it would be more.

COLD CASE. Scientists have found the remains of a 50,000 year old Neanderthal family in Spain that appears to have been the victims of cannibalism.

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One would have thought

Random animal picture.

One would have thought that market fundamentalism, the worship of "unleashed" unregulated capitalism, would have taken a mortal blow after 30 years of deregulation finally resulted in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. The Gentle Reader may have noticed that this has not come to pass.

One dogma of the cult of the market god you still hear a lot today is that government action cannot do anything to promote economic vitality (other than cutting taxes for the rich).

Lately I've been reading Felix Rohatyn's Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America and Whit It Must Rebuild Now. In that book he points out numerous examples of how government action helped spur economic growth throughout our history. Examples include the Louisiana Purchase, the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, land grant universities, the interstate highway system, the GI Bill and more.

Not all of those were pretty at the time and some we might now wish we did differently but all show that public investments and policies have always had a major role in moving the economy.

On a different but related subject, he also includes a great anecdote in the book about what it was like to go to college with veterans who had just returned from WWII and were taking advantage of the GI Bill. Rohatyn's family were Jewish refugees from Nazi occupied Europe before the war. While he attended college after the war was over, a representative from his national fraternity visited and warned that their charter could be expelled because they had "unsuitable" members, one black and one Jewish.

As he tells it,

Then the two veterans intervened. Politely yet forcefully, they explained to the visitor that they had not fought a war against the Nazis in Europe to see racial laws enacted in the United States. With the shocked national representative wedged stiffly between them, the two veterans escorted the man out of the house and to the railroad station.

They wound up losing the charter but keeping the house. And their dignity.

THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS was bad enough. The bogus foreclosure crisis is a real mess.

CUT THE CUTS. Yet another poll shows overwhelming support for allowing Bush era tax cuts to expire.

I'M STILL NOT SHOPPING THERE, but in the spirit of budo and fair play, let it be noted that Wal-Mart is going to start buying more local produce.

THE NOT SO SELFISH GENE. Some research suggests an evolutionary basis for altruistic behavior (short version: it's a turn on).

DOUBLE SHOT OF LOVE. A new study suggests that intense, passionate love can be an effective pain reliever. Another study found that couples that had been together for a long time--say 40 years--knew less about their partner's preferences than couples who had been together for a much shorter periond, although they expressed more contentment with the relationship than did younger couples. Maybe Dylan was right when he said, "True love tends to forget."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Darwin on the left

I've been meandering lately though some musings on the relationship between human evolution and social life. Some recent posts have looked at how Darwin's ideas were received and celebrated on the political right. A look at how Darwin was received on the left seems to be in order now.

One lefty contemporary of Darwin's who eagerly received his ideas was none other than Karl Marx, who saw some similarities between the former's ideas his own materialist theory of history. He wrote in a letter to another radical leader that

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a natural-scientific basis for the class struggle in history.

Marx was also amused to find that Darwin projected the workings of capitalism onto nature:

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening-up of new markets, 'inventions,' and the Malthusian 'struggle for existence.'

(Marx had snarky things to say about everybody.)

It seems, though, that Marx believed that once people became human, social relations of labor and interaction (including especially economic relations) were the decisive factor. In the "Theses on Feuerbach," he wrote that

the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

His sidekick Friedrich Engels followed suit in viewing humans as uniquely developing through conscious production, which he believed "makes impossible any immediate transference of the laws of life in animal societies to human ones."

This basic denial of human nature was to become a dogma of the communist movement, with disastrous consequences.

RIGHT WING BACKLASH? This writer doesn't think so.

"THE WAR ON ARITHMETIC." Paul Krugman was not impressed with the "Pledge to America."

SIX MONTHS DOWN. Here's a look at what health care reform means, with a special focus on primary care. And here's is coverage of a press conference on the same from the Gazette and WV Public Radio.

A NOD TO THE BOSS. This book excerpt celebrates Bruce Springsteen.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Survival of the what-est?

Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." He doesn't look all that fit to me.

It is a great irony of contemporary politics that social Darwinism is alive and well amongst political conservatives who believe in a literal six day creation.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Darwin's ideas--or what people thought were Darwin's ideas--were first seized upon by people on the political right. Such people were quick to draw public policy conclusions from the "survival of the fittest."

As the idea was popularly conceived, evolution worked for the good of all--or at least all the survivors--by weeding out the weak. Therefore, any aid to people who were poor or otherwise disadvantaged was counter-evolutionary.

What is missing from this picture is the fact that one thing that has enabled humans to survive and thrive is our tendency to care for the sick and weak. After all, every human is born pretty helpless and stays that way for several years. Women in or near childbirth are pretty much out of the game and anyone at any time may become sick or injured and require the help of others.

There is even some interesting archaeological evidence along this line from our human ancestors. A severely deformed skull of someone at least five years of age was found dating back to around 530,000 years ago. This finding suggests that early humans at least some of the time cared for the disabled members of their group despite deformities.

This suggests that at least some early or pre-humans knew some things that some modern humans have forgotten.

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION AGAIN, one researcher thinks our Neanderthal cousins were smarter than generally thought.

MILESTONE. Today marks six months since the passage of health care reform. Some key changes kick in today.

UNEMPLOYMENT. West Virginia's unemployment insurance system could avoid going broke by making key reforms.

TALKING REDNECK. Here's an excerpt from Joe Bageant's new book about the white underclass.

REALLY NOT WANTING TO TALK. Massey Energy officials have filed suit to keep from being interviewed in the Upper Big Branch disaster investigation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A law of nature

Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by means of natural selection were first taken up (with many misunderstandings) by those on the political right. Part of the reason for this was that early expositions of Darwinism emphasized competition. It would take a while for evolutionary biologists to look at the other side of the equation by investigating cooperation and altruism.

More to the point, in the Gilded Age, robber barons and financial aristocrats found in them a great rationalization for their own wealth and power.

Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie wrote that while capitalist competition may harm some individuals, "it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department."

(That phrase "survival of the fittest," by the way, has its origin in the writings of British philosopher Herbert Spencer rather than Darwin himself.)

In a similar vein, John D. Rockefeller Jr. wrote that

The growth of large business is merely a survival of the fittest...This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working our of a law of nature and a law of God.

As the Church Lady would say on the old Saturday Night Live, "Isn't that convenient?"

SPEAKING OF EVOLUTION, this article suggests that our relationships with animals helped make us human.

FORECLOSURES. Here's Dean Baker and what the government could do about the foreclosure crisis but isn't (so far).

FUN LIST. From The Nation, here's a list of the 50 most influential progressive leaders of the 20th century.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB ON STEROIDS. A spider in Madagascar weaves the world's biggest webs with the toughest natural material yet discovered.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

"This is mine"

I've been blogging off and on lately about the connections between evolution and our social and political life. It seems that recent research has pretty much busted the bubble of those who thought that people are blank slates on which society writes whatever it will.

If that idea was true, then it might follow that all our nasty traits are due to the corrupting influence of society and could be removed given a different environment. If, on the other hand, we carry a lot of evolutionary baggage from our pre-human ancestors, this might not be so easily done.

In a classic passage, the 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau finds the source of human corruption in the primal sin of private property:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'

Rousseau and others in this tradition believed that with a reorganized society, we might be free of this corruption and spare ourselves any number or crimes, wars and murders.

It can't be denied that greed for private wealth has caused all kinds of carnage. And it shouldn't be forgotten that people like Rousseau played an important role in opposing arbitrary tyranny and absolutism and making real social gains. But the utopian vision has run aground these days, and part of the problem might be the raw materials with which the reformer has to work.

DEATH OF A THOUSAND CUTS. Republicans plan to kill or weaken health care reform bit by bit if victorious in November.

HAIR OF THE DOG. This sampling from a new book looks at how right wing "philanthropy" helped pave the way for the Great Recession.

COLD COMFORT. Speaking of the Great Recession, the National Bureau of Economic Research said it officially ended in June 2009. Just not so's anyone could tell.

STEPPING UP. In this op-ed, a wealthy entrepreneur argues for ending Bush era tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

INDULGE ME. Longtime readers of Goat Rope will remember El Cabrero's fondness for the martial arts. Here's an interesting item from the Washington Post about how China's newly wealthy are hiring martial arts experts as bodyguards.

SOME BIRD. Imagine one with teeth and a 17 foot wingspan.

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Facts and values

Shortly after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, he wrote to a scientific friend that

I have received in a Manchester newspaper rather a good squib, showing that I have proved might is right and therefore that Napoleon is right, and every cheating tradesman is right.

That unknown Manchester journalist may have been one of the first--but far from the last--to make some kind of leap from the fact of evolution to the idea that this makes something right. From then on partisans of the privileged and powerful seized on evolution to "prove" that cutthroat capitalism was a law of human nature.

This kind of leap from an "is" to an "ought" is a fallacy pointed out as early as 1739 by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. One way this shows up in popular culture is the conflation of the idea of "nature" or things that are natural with that of "goodness." One doesn't have to turn over too many rocks, however, to find quite a few things in nature that seem downright nasty to most people. At the ancient sage Lao Tzu put it, "Heaven and earth are not humane."

Evolution by means of natural selection, then, isn't good or right. It just is. People have to decide questions of value form themselves.

THE CLOCK IS TICKING on a program credited with creating 240,000 jobs in the recession. The Emergency TANF program, part of the Recovery Act, will expire at the end of the month unless it is reauthorized. This item highlights efforts in the Senate to keep it going. If you haven't done your good deed for the day, getting in touch with your senators' offices on this would fit the bill.

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Tabula rasa?

John Locke, an influential British philosopher of the 17th century, believed that all knowledge comes from experience and that the human mind was a "tabula rasa" or blank slate.

Every so often, I've been blogging about the possible connections between human evolution and social life, an area often fraught with controversy and misconceptions. For years, I was biased towards the view that social conditioning and environmental factors were the decisive force shaping what is frequently called human nature.

Plus, when I was young, I was attracted to the philosophy of existentialism, which in some forms emphasized human freedom to choose. As Jean Paul Sartre put it, we were (supposedly) "condemned to be free." I still have a soft spot for those views and don't think they are entirely wrong, but the tide of science has been pulling the other way.

I'd like to give a shout out to two books, one big and one little, that deal with this subject in interesting ways. The big one is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and the little on is Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation.

Pinker takes aim at three cherished myths: the idea that humans are silly putty totally moulded by social influences; the idea of the "ghost in the machine," i.e. that the mind is somehow independent of the brain; and the idea of the Noble Savage, which idealizes people in an imaginary "state of nature."

Singer argues that while we do carry evolutionary baggage that makes a peaceful egalitarian utopia a bit problematic, this doesn't mean we can't successfully work for a more just and fair society.

More on that to come.

DYING TO WORK. Jim Hightower takes aim at death on the job.

TAX THIS. House minority leader John Boehner made headlines this weekend when he said he might accept letting Bush era tax cuts for the wealthy expire as a compromise if cuts for the middle class were preserved, something no one else in his party seems prepared to do. A recent Gallup poll found strong support for ending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE for the coal industry to deny. A new study of the health effects of coal-fired power plants found West Virginia to be the hardest hit state in the country, as the WV News Service reports. Here's another article on the topic and here's a link to the full report.

IDENTIFIABLE VICTIM BIAS. A study of jury verdicts found that penalties for damages go down when the number of victims go up. It seems that people are more likely to impose severe penalties when the injured party is someone concrete rather than a bunch of unknown people. This reminds me of a characteristically evil remark attributed to Stalin that when one person dies it's a tragedy but when a million die it's a statistic.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED