Deep Thoughts

Evolutionary Stability is Real.

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From time to time, Cold Spring Shops calls attention to the effects of the sexual revolution and hook-up culture on human unhappiness.  Two observations from a 2011 post structure that argument.  First, “contemporary mating practices and admissions policies might not be evolutionarily stable.”  Second, “younger people have different time horizons, and different rates of time preferences.”  Those observations tended to rely on opinion columns.  The mini-dissertation below the jump will engage recent Serious Scholarship on those themes.

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Where Went the Wind?

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Honestly, I’ve always been considerably conflicted about Gone With the Wind both the book and the movie. Yes, best-seller, and loved extravagantly by more readers and movie-goers than partisans of the antebellum South, a gripping tale of a time, a place and a people, in a war that stripped away every shred of that noble and deluded gentility and Southern cavalier-worshipping delusion… shades of Vanity Fair, with a spineless, guileless and gentle supposed-heroine whom we are supposed to sympathize with in the main, contrasted with a conniving, spiteful and yet … entrancing stubborn, gutsy and conniving anti-heroine. I was reminded of all this once again, on reading this recent essay by another woman and writer, similarly conflicted.

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Cursive and Other Archaic Skills

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My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.

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Fever

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A fever, so the doctors and medical experts tell us, is a symptom of a deeper issue; an illness which most often is a mild and fleeting thing. And then, there is the serious and life-threatening fever in either case, a fever is a way of telling us that something is wrong, and we’d best pay attention.

Just such an indication in the body politic is the occurrence of vigilante groups a kind of civic fever, an indication that civic adjudication the administration of justice in the case of offenses against law and order to the satisfaction of those offended by crime has become seriously out of whack. It is a purely human drive; if one has been harmed by the unlawful actions of another, one would prefer to be assured that justice has been served and if not made whole again, at the very least satisfied that the offender has been properly chastised for their offense.

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