A voice and moment of reason.

It looks like we are moving toward the passage of historic healthcare legislation. What this means for us now and for our future remains to be seen, but the fact that this is getting done after so many decades of trying should be celebrated if and when it happens. The arguments against this bill have in large part keep us stuck in place in terms of providing affordable healthcare to as many citizens as possible. In effect, our inability to make big and important changes and govern ourselves is tied up in how we aren’t able to rationally address this central life and death issue. Read more…

Another great lesson from Dan Ariely.

We can’t just rule out any attempts to find value in pornography based on a moral resistance to it. Porn is with us for a reason and can serve a purpose. The need for sexual images, outlets, and stimulation are an important part of forming identity and experiencing pleasure. However, we can and should make distinctions about the types of pornography that causes real harm, projecting degrading images of women and most disturbingly exploiting children and adolescents. There are the unrealistic and ridiculous portrayals of human sexuality and how the porn industry uses its workers that must be challenged as well. Read more…

The Huffingtonpost has a post worth noting titled “The 15 Most Controversial Video Games.” We have been trying to describe the benefits and dangers associated with playing video games. Our concerns are primarily focused on how precious time and energy are taken away from other important activities and responsibilities and not as much on the impact of violent content. Of course violent content must be taken seriously, but also put in the context of the gamer wanting to play and master the game itself and what is in fact age appropriate material based on the ratings system provided by the video game industry. Lawrence Kutner, PhD and Cheryl K. Olson, ScD in their book Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do reiterate what we have been saying on this blog and through our work with children and families:

Probably the most important thing you can do as a parent to protect your children from the consequences of violence is to shift your focus to those issues that are much more likely to result in making children behave violently or having them be the victims of someone else’s violence. Despite the urban legends and political grandstanding, violent video games are pretty low on that list.

Violent children and victimized children tend to come from violent and abusive environments. We hear this again and agin from child development researchers. (228)

What sustains a committed relationship? It can’t only be passion or solely compassionate love that keeps us together, but a combination of both woven together over time. We start out with one another ecstatic. As the passion begins to wane some disillusionment shows up and we look for things that are wrong with our partner and/or ourselves, which is where compassionate love kicks in. We need the ecstasy at times and to also give each other a break as much as is possible and acceptable, allowing for a partner and ourselves to be human and flawed. Afterall, life is a series of stops and starts, ups and downs, with some passion and so much compassion holding us together. Jonah Lehrer has a post titled “Marriage” that helps illustrate this point. Here is an excerpt:

What’s wrong with seeking passion? Don’t we need to experience that dopaminergic surge of early love, in which the entire universe has been reduced to a single person? (“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”) The only problem with this romantic myth is that passion is temporary. It inevitably decays with time. This is not a knock against passion – this is a basic fact of our nervous system. We adapt to our pleasures; we habituate to delight. In other words, the same thing happens to passionate love that happens to Christmas presents. We’re so impossibly happy and then, within a matter of days or weeks or months, we take it all for granted.

(See mararie’s photostream.)

The Situationist has a post worth checking out titled “The Policy Situation of Obesity.” Charts like the one above that illustrate such a rapid decline of health standards in this country should sound alarm bells about how we are literally living out of proportion and in need of radical interventions. What does it say about us that we are this out of shape and control. The discipline and effort it will take to change our individual and cultural lifestyle habits, specifically when it comes to what we consume, will be one of our greatest and most important endeavors.

The Daily Dish has a post about the work of artist Alexa Meade that fits into our own focus on how artists interpret our world for us, figuratively illuminating who we are within the space we inhabit. This is the excerpt from her about page:

Alexa Meade is an installation artist based in the Washington, DC area. Her background in the world of political communications has fueled her intellectual interest in the tensions between perception and reality.

Alexa Meade’s innovative use of paint on the three dimensional surfaces of found objects, live models, and architectural spaces has been incorporated into a series of installations that create a perceptual shift in how we experience and interpret spatial relationships.

Here is an excellent presentation by Jon Hanson, Director, Project on Law and Mind Sciences, Harvard Law School describing how “one of the most depressing ironies of America’s legal system is that, in a country that values ‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ it clings to a rigid model of human behavior that is blind to the situational forces at play in the choices people make.”

Debates about nature vs nurture create divisions and place limitations on how we can be thinking about ourselves, others and the world around us. A more interesting way of viewing how and why we are here is through a combined and fluid lens of nature and nurture. Questions about how we evolved to this point in time and why some of us survive and others don’t remain, but there are interesting scientific developments that seem to be getting us closer to some answers. In this regard the NYT has an interesting article titled ” Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force.” Here is an excerpt:

Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. People adapt genetically to sustained cultural changes, like new diets. And this interaction works more quickly than other selective forces, “leading some practitioners to argue that gene-culture co-evolution could be the dominant mode of human evolution,” Kevin N. Laland and colleagues wrote in the February issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Dr. Laland is an evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The idea that genes and culture co-evolve has been around for several decades but has started to win converts only recently. Two leading proponents, Robert Boyd of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Peter J. Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have argued for years that genes and culture were intertwined in shaping human evolution. “It wasn’t like we were despised, just kind of ignored,” Dr. Boyd said. But in the last few years, references by other scientists to their writings have “gone up hugely,” he said.

(Find the chart above here.)