Contest: Small Taboos
What won’t you do because somewhere
between superstition and reason you’ve got doubt? Write
a 200-to 400-word essay exploring a taboo in your life. We’re not talking sleeping with a sibling here. But the little things that just seem inexplicably
wrong. The winner will get something as cool
as Shirley’s pointy hat and will be included in a future newsletter and
on my website.
Winner: Seduction of a
Seedy Bar
Shirley Rorvik won the last contest with her
Five Aces essay, about five little old church ladies playing dead
serious poker in a hitching-post bar in Montana. She’s
getting an odd, yellow, pointy rain hat, designed by a Bristol Bay fisherman. Read Five Aces.
WWBD
What Would Brandy Do?
Benefit from the
wisdom of a trashy blonde who only exists in a book that hasn’t been
published yet. Just emaila question, preferably of a personal and
embarrassing nature.
Dear Brandy,
I have been emailing my boyfriend for 3 months. I
visited him twice (two states away). I call
him every night. I’m moving to his town to be
with him. He knows I want to get married, but
he won’t commit. What do I do now?
Signed,
Desperate
Dear Desperate,
The answer is in the very word you used to describe yourself —desperate. Nobody wants desperate. This
falls under the prevue of Rule #2: never admit desperation.
Contact
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Taking Offense
When I write, I’m
interested not just in the feel of words or the development of a
character. I’m interested in ideas and how those
ideas play out in a story. And the ideas I
like best are ones that I’m, frankly, not too comfortable with. This column is a series of essays by thinkers
whose ideas shaped this book. I want to share
them with you as a peek behind the words and plot. I
encourage you to get as offended, as provoked, as intrigued as I’ve
been. Enjoy.
Excerpt from Constant Battles: Why We Fight
By Steven LeBlanc
In his book, Constant Battles, LeBlanc, a Harvard archaeologist and
director of collections for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, argues that
we are dead wrong about the past when it comes to warfare. He systematically runs through the archaeological
evidence – from severed skulls, to man-size spear points, to fortified
towns, to the Great Wall and the Acropolis – that humans are not and
have never been peace-loving folks. In fact,
on average most cultures have lost a whopping 25 percent of their
populations to warfare, far more than the ratios in modern wars. The noble savage is a myth we believe against all
reason, he says, because, well, it’s nicer to think that there was a
paradise and we just messed it up. And what
are we fighting for? Resources. We’ve never been able to live within our means. We always over-use the land, procreating pell-mell
until the weather turns against us, and we end up hungry and
brandishing a weapon. The logical conclusions
of his arguments swirl into the very foundation of social morality and
give plenty of thinking fodder when it comes to our current conflicts
around the globe. If you’re intrigued by
LeBlanc’s ideas, read
more about the debate or order
his book.
In this excerpt from Constant Battles, he uses two imaginary, isolated
groups to explain why evolution doesn’t favor peaceful, conservationist
types.
Assume for a moment that by some miracle one of our two groups is full
of farsighted, ecological geniuses. They are
able to keep their population in check and, moreover, keep it far
enough below the carrying capacity that minor changes in the weather,
or even longer-term changes in the climate, do not result in food
stress. If they need to consume only half of
what is available each year, even if there is a terrible year, this
group will probably come through the hardship just fine. More important, when a few good years come along, these
masterfully ecological people will not grow rapidly, because to do so
would mean that they would have trouble when the good times end. Think of them as the ecological equivalent of the
industrious ants.
The second group, on the other hand, is just the opposite – it consists
of ecological dimwits. They have no wonderful
processes available to control their population. They
are forever on the edge of the carrying capacity, they reproduce with
abandon, and they frequently suffer food shortages and the inevitable
consequences. Think of this bunch as the
ecological equivalent of the carefree grasshoppers. When
the good years come, they have more children and grow their population
rapidly. Twenty years later, they have doubled
their numbers and quickly run out of food at the first minor change in
the weather. Of course, had this been a group
of “noble savages,” who eschewed warfare, they would have starved to
death and only a much smaller and more sustainable group survived. This is not a bunch of noble savages; these are
ecological dimwits and they attack their good neighbors in order to
save their own skins. Since they now outnumber
their good neighbors two to one, the dimwits prevail after heavy
attrition on both sides. The “good” ants turn
out to be dead ants, and the “bad” grasshoppers inherit the earth.
The moral of this tale is that if any group can get itself into
ecological balance and stabilize its populations even in the face of
environmental change, it will be tremendously disadvantaged against societies
that do not behave that way. The long-term
successful society, in a world with many different societies, will be
the one that grows when it can and fights when it runs out of resources. It is useless to live an ecologically sustainable
existence in the “Garden of Eden” unless the neighbors do so as well. Only one nonconservationist society in an entire region can begin a process of conflict and
expansion by the “grasshoppers” at the expense of the Eden-dwelling
“ants.”
This smacks of Darwinian competition – survival of the fittest –
between societies. Note that the ”fittest” of
our two groups was not the more ecological, it was the one that grew
faster. The idea of such Darwinian competition
is unpalatable to many, especially when the “bad” folks appear to be
the winners.
So after considering the overall evidence uncovered in my own work and
the work of other anthropologists, we see that life in the past was not
as we thought it was – or wished it to be. Not
only have two popular myths about human history prevailed, but they are
intertwined. The myth of the “noble savage”
living in peaceful harmony with nature is a naïve version of the idea
that traditional societies have been able to live below the carrying
capacity and were able to control their populations so they wouldn’t
exceed the resource supply, but human societies have not been able to
do this. And along with the misconception
comes the myth of a peaceful past, which views warfare as occasional,
minor, and almost gamelike. War in the past was frequent, serious, and deadly.
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