The achievement of imitation – the meta-skill that enables all other skills – may explain the otherwise incomprehensibly rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids, since there would be a sudden take-off in the speed with which we could adapt and change ourselves, and in the range of our abilities. Imitation is how we acquire skills – any skill at all; and the gene for skill acquisition (imitation) would trump the genes for any individual skills. Thus from a gene – the symbol of ruthless competition (the ‘selfish gene'), and of the relatively atomistic and oppositional values of the left hemisphere – could arise a skill that would enable further evolution to occur not only more rapidly but in a direction of our own choosing – through empathy and co-operation, the values of the right hemisphere.
Imitation isn't just the sincerest form of flattery.
There is nothing new about any of this. A chillingly accurate description of spirals of silence was written in 1840 about the United States of America. “I know of no country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, in the second volume of his masterpiece, Democracy in America. He explained: "In America, the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within these limits, the writer is free; but woe to him if he dares to go beyond them. It isn’t that he has to fear an auto-da-fé, but he is exposed to all types of distasteful things and to everyday persecutions. A political career is closed to him; he has offended the only power that has the ability to open it to him. Everything is denied him, even glory. Before publishing his opinions, he believed he had some partisans; it seems to him that he has them no longer, now that he has revealed himself to all; for those who censure him speak openly, and those who think as he does, without having his courage, keep quiet and distance themselves. He gives in; finally, under the daily effort, he yields and returns to silence, as though he felt remorse for having told the truth."
We're not the great individualists that we fantasize we are.
Both constitutions [American & the "constitution of knowledge"] rest, ultimately, on versions of what the American founders thought of as republican virtue: habits and norms like lawfulness, truthfulness, self-restraint, and forbearance. If anything could ruin the American constitutional experiment, they believed, a failure of republican virtue would be the most likely culprit. They understood that the people would be tempted to exercise their constitutional rights without shouldering their constitutional responsibilities. That was why Adams and Franklin and Madison and the other Founders warned that democracy was only fit for a virtuous public.
Query: can we ever enjoy rights without commensurate responsibilities. If our rights come from a social contract (as I'd say best describe the Bill of Rights), then any contractual right--to have a valid contract--must have some "consideration."
[Ansel] Keys had noted associations between heart-disease death rates and fat intake, Yerushalmy and Hilleboe pointed out, but they were just that. Associations do not imply cause and effect or represent (as Stephen Jay Gould later put it) any “magic method for the unambiguous identification of cause.”
In many indigenous societies, the deeper instructive and affective connections skip a generation. Since both grandparents and grandchildren are partly marginalized, the young fantast joins the old eccentric against a common opponent, the adult generation between them.
Intriguing observation.
The anger which I propose now for my subject, is such as makes those who indulge it more troublesome than formidable, and ranks them rather with hornets and wasps, than with basilisks and lions. I have, therefore, prefixed a motto, which characterises this passion, not so much by the mischief that it causes, as by the noise that it utters.
Most outbursts of anger are more smoke than fire and are more nuisance than threat.
Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.
