Panglossing it Over

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, and Joshua S. Goldstein,  a professor emeritus of international relations at the American University, wrote an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s Times entitled “War Really Is Going out of Style,” NYT, 12/17/11). For Pinker, the Op-Ed  piece seems to be an extension of the argument that he makes in his recently published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The three reasons that Pinker and Goldstein give for the decline of war are 1) political 2) economic and 3)social. In terms of political boundaries, no one is really the winner. “Since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force,” Pinker and Goldstein argue.  Further, economic hegemony has been more effective than geographic invasion. “Today, wealth comes from trade, and war only hurts,” they continue. Lastly on the social front mankind has evolved. “Brutal customs that were commonplace for millennia have been largely abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic-burning chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions.”  The natural extension of Pinker and Goldstein’s argument is that benevolence has become naturally selective and that mankind has found a better way of dealing with its aggressive impulses, by making love not war to re-invoke the 60’s. The explosion of pornography might evidence the latter, if the majority of sites weren’t so involved with conquest and submission on an ontogenic basis. Not to be judgmental about playful sex, but the sex on Kink.com makes water boarding seem like a sport. The question is, are Pinker and Goldstein talking about the two new planets discovered orbiting the star Kepler 20 reported by Dennis Overbye in the Times (“Two Earth-Sized Planets Are Discovered, “ NYT, 12/20/11)?  Do we occupy the same planet as these two eggheads ? They sound like  Voltaire's Pangloss, whose reaction to a succession of brutalities, “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds," takes aim at another egghead named Leibnitz.  What about the brutalities perpetrated by the Janjaweed militia in thee Sudan, the brutal dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, whose fortunes are again on the rise due to a windfall from the country's diamond industry? OK Qaddafi was toppled in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, but even the reports of Qaddafi’s brutal capture create suspicion about the prospects for peace in that troubled land and the recent accounts of the Egyptian military’s sexual humiliations of women protestors seem to show throw doubt on the old  adage that “every cloud has a silver lining.” Make no mistake the lining of Mubarak regime was a military that controlled the economy of the country. We need turn no further than troubled Afghanistan if we want evidence of the fact that age old customs die slowly. Let the women with severed noses and burned faces testify to the progress of the human race. As for our so-called more advanced Western societies, who walked off with the shekels at MF Global and what made such a sterling institution as Goldman Sachs bet against the collateralized debt obligations it was offering its customers? And what about hazing at FAMU where the drum majors now must bang the drum slowly in mourning for a hard working 26 year old who was beaten to death? Go up to the South Bronx and watch the promoters of cock fights placing razors in the beaks of their contenders and then tell us about mankind tempering its aggressive instincts as two hapless birds run around with heads cut off. Happy Holidays!

Gene Therapy

The Times reported yesterday, “Berlusconi denies wrongdoing and has said he has no intention of stepping down” (“Trial Is Set for Berlusconi in Prostitution Case,” NYT, 2/15/11). While Berlusconi and his heartthrob, the now 18-year-old Karima el-Mahroug, aka Ruby the Heart-Stealer, may not have had sex, the prime minister, according to the Times, “gave her 7,000 euros, about $9,450, the first time she visited his villa for a party last spring.” This tops the $4,300 Eliot Spitzer paid for his first tryst with Ashley Dupré, which included, according to the Wikipedia entry on the subject, a $1,100 down payment to the agency for future work. Maybe Berlusconi should have used the moniker George Fox, as Spitzer did when he checked into room 871 at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. Even worse was Berlusconi’s apparent attempt to get RHS (Ruby Heart-Stealer) off the hook for a theft charge. The Times article explains that “Mr. Berlusconi has said he called the police to avoid ‘an international diplomatic incident’ because he had been told that the Moroccan-born Ms. Mahroug was the niece of Hosni Mubarak, then the president of Egypt.” Perhaps Berlusconi was not being entirely disingenuous. After all, Hosni Mubarak was also someone who had “no intention of stepping down.” Is it possible that Hosni and Silvio are in fact related and share similar genes? DNA analysis is routinely used in rape cases, but this might be the first time it could be used to explain the stubborn and despotic behavior of international leaders. If there is such a gene pool, then Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is probably also swimming in it.

Starless, Starless Night

Even the lowliest, most disreputable scumbag thinks he or she is the center of the universe. At least they hold on to that hope. Even the dying patient lives for some tomorrow in which magically, within their shrinking finitude, they will arise like a genie from the miasma of their toxicity. This is the curious thing about the human species. The heresy perpetrated by Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler by using science to show that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe was all the more galling because of the insult to “dark matter,” or whatever it is that’s the building block of the thing called ego. We have tyrants and authoritarian personalities that hold onto power with an almost admirable tenacity and ability to obfuscate. Such is the case of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the recent machinations by which Hosni Mubarak refused to relinquish his increasingly tenuous hold on power. But these despots are only the tip of the iceberg. They are only exaggerated examples of the anthropocentric demon that lies within the soul of all creatures that are blessed or cursed with the human attribute we call consciousness. There is anecdotal material about great men and women of compassion, like Gandhi and Mother Theresa, to support the notion that they were no more freed from the bonds of the self than the destitute and homeless they championed. These unfortunates occupy an ever-shrinking universe in which their own bodily needs or addictions (watching methadone addicts staggering away from a local clinic and hollering to each other with little regard for the pedestrians around them is a good primer in a perverse brand of egocentricity) form the center. And what about the recent revelations about the expansion of the universe that predict that man will one day awaken in a starless sky, the light from distant stars no longer able to reach him?