Flaws in Newton’s Laws
A guy emailed me earlier this week in response to a recent blog post of mine. After a few tangents and segues, we got on the topic of self-inflicted melodrama and how our evolutionary mechanics have developed this socially pertinent, yet seemingly trivial, behavior of ours.
This was via the South’s contribution to culture through the pains of racism and poverty and whether there can be great art without suffering. It did not come from what you may presume… which is that I tend to be ridiculously dramatic and/or incite incidents of melodrama to self-amuse (See, if we know each other—I know what you’re thinking).
I figure that drama spawns from boredom or an internally wired craving for something to upset us due to our living-being design to fight for sustenance—we simply EXPECT conflict from deep down in our fibers, thusly may create it when it’s not there. Agriculture and industrialization circumvented our hunting and gathering activities; then in turn gave way to population growth. Our picky mating rituals relaxed as the gene pool expanded.
This was all tied into whether we could ever achieve justice for all, no matter how allegedly advanced we became as a species. My questions often revolve around whether these behaviors are inherent human patterns that show up in cultural dictates, whether they are actually biologically coded in us, and will that ever change. Can we actually advance beyond our instincts—unlike this superficial breech we’ve done thus far with “will power” and what not.
Maybe what makes us humans unique is our ability to sense injustice, feel compassion, and keep the weak animals around (and attempt to heal them) despite the resources we’d rack up when surviving the species without them.
Any politically correct, humane world citizen would declare that there’s no justification for treating masses of human beings as anything but human beings. There’s never an excuse to be one race/class/power and shit on the socially defined lesser humans. It could be a built-in population control for resource reservation (studies have found that primates only engage in “war” when resources are scarce). Or there’s the purposeful social dynamics of the pecking order… (but I’ll save that discussion for another day).
Then I found that the Skeptic’s article in Scientific American this month (Oct. ’05) is relevant to said topics. First he quoted Thomas Jefferson (1814):
… Nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses.
Then after he went on about science being compatible with aesthetics, resulting in a jab at Keats and a nod to Hubble… He said that “science now reveals that love is addictive, trust is gratifying, and cooperation feels good. Evolution produced this reward system because it increased the survival of members of our social primate species.”
Perhaps Nature’s intent with these particular traits is for our own good and we just need to make a conscience effort to embrace them instead of being so damn imperialistic. The drama we create is an adaptive approach to goad our impulse to care. So in the end, self-induced melodrama is great as long as it’s contributing to society and not detracting from it.