So meanies are not the “fittest”? Dacher Keltner says no, they’re not.
If you want to excel in the biggest game of all — life itself — your best chance is to be kind, according to UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. And he should know, as one of his primary research areas is a focus on the biological and evolutionary origins of human goodness.
In a recent essay “From Darwin and Confucius: More Jen in the New Year” for Powell’s Books, Keltner wrote about his wish for the new year:
Jen is the central idea in the teachings of Confucius. Jen refers to a complex mixture of kindness, humanity, and respect that transpires between people.
In his own research, Keltner says he has discovered that the belief that many have that human beings are inherently greedy, competitive and violent is wrong. He goes on to explain how the ancient writings of Confucius about jen are supported by the research of Charles Darwin:
The deep story to the science of jen traces back to two of Charles Darwin’s less well-known assertions about human nature. The first is that our capacities for sympathy, play, appreciation, and fellow feeling are in fact the strongest of our species — survival of the kindest is a more apt description of our evolution than survival of the fittest. Insights from studies of our close primate relatives, the chimps and the bonobos, from archeological studies of hearths and hunting remains, and from hunter-gatherer cultures are corroborating Darwin’s early intuitions. We are learning that:
* We are a care-taking species. The profound vulnerability of our offspring rearranged our social organization as well as branches of our nervous system.
* We are a face-to-face species. We are remarkable in our capacity to empathize, to mimic, to mirror.
* Our power hierarchies differ from those of other species; power goes to the most emotionally intelligent.
* We reconcile our conflicts rather fleeing or killing; we have evolved powerful capacities to forgive.The science of jen is founded on a second assertion of Darwin’s, unusual in western thought, that happier individuals and healthier communities — that is, those with high jen ratios — cultivate emotions like compassion, gratitude, awe, love, embarrassment, and mirth.
Keltner has written a newly-published book, “Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life,” in which he explores his findings on goodness. He talks briefly about the book in the video below:
Jovanotti: a singer, a poet
Jovanotti — Mi Fido Di Te (I trust you), 2005
Today’s opinion pick: “Why We Need Stronger Unions, and How to Get Them”
Why is this recession so deep, and how can we fix it? Writing on his personal blog, earlier this week former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains why this recession is deep, and how to fix it.
Excerpt: (Robert Reich’s Blog, Jan 27, 2009)
In 1955, more than a third of working Americans belonged to one. Unions gave them the bargaining leverage they needed to get the paychecks that kept the economy going. So many Americans were unionized that wage agreements spilled over to nonunionized workplaces as well. Employers knew they had to match union wages to compete for workers and to recruit the best ones. Fast forward to a new century. Now, fewer than 8% of private-sector workers are unionized. Corporate opponents argue that Americans no longer want unions. But public opinion surveys, such as a comprehensive poll that Peter D. Hart Research Associates conducted in 2006, suggest that a majority of workers would like to have a union to bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
I found this link at Talking Points Memo.
Chasing cyberspace — and losing
Even though the Internet and all the evergrowing, new technology related to it fascinate me endlessly, I’m also left feeling intellectually and emotionally flabbergasted much of the time. While brooding about this a few days ago, a comic image of my besieged state of mind spontaneously popped up — it was of a tiny, wildly excited, yapping Chihuahua chasing cars zooming by on the street. The poor thing doesn’t stand a chance.
But after reading Mathew Honan’s Wired article last week about some of the new, Location-Aware software, I realized in a flash of hyperventilating, cognitive collapse that my racing Chihuahua self-image is simply wrong — in fact that Chihuahua has been flat out run over. Squashed!
An excerpt from Honan’s piece: (“I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle” Wired, Jan 19, 2009)
I wanted to know more about this new frontier, so I became a geo-guinea pig. My plan: Load every cool and interesting location-aware program I could find onto my iPhone and use them as often as possible. For a few weeks, whenever I arrived at a new place, I would announce it through multiple social geoapps. When going for a run, bike ride, or drive, I would record my trajectory and publish it online. I would let digital applications help me decide where to work, play, and eat. And I would seek out new people based on nothing but their proximity to me at any given moment. I would be totally open, exposing my location to the world just to see where it took me. I even added an Eye-Fi Wi-Fi card to my PowerShot digital camera so that all my photos could be geotagged and uploaded to the Web. I would become the most location-aware person on the Internets!
When professional journalism meets citizen journalism
The CNN news video below offers a terrific example of professional journalism integrating citizen journalism reporting into a news feature.
As described in a post Thursday from The Washington Note: (“CNN’s Photosynth Another Leap in Moving Content with New Technology” Jan 22, 2009)
CNN‘s John King shows how pictures that regular folks took at the Inauguration can be synthesized into a photographic wall much larger than any single person had themselves. This is called CNN‘s “Photosynth.”
a thing: Dan Cruickshank’s Adventures in Architecture: Beauty
From Ovation TV and Dan Cruickshank
Today’s opinion pick: “Barack Obama’s Prose Style”
When President Obama stepped to the podium at his inauguration on Tuesday and began to speak, I felt the same curiosity (and slight apprehension) that many, I think, have come to feel every time he makes a major speech. My nervous jitters worried the question – can he rise once again to the occasion? The curiosity encircled my question – how will he rise to the occasion?
For me, our shiny new President didn’t disappoint, but some disagree (or think they do). New York Time‘s columnist Stanley Fish discusses an intriguing type of reaction to the speech in his “Think Again” column today.
An excerpt:
Commentators on radio and television have been doing a two-step. First they say that the speech lacked the eloquence of his speech on race or of his remarks on the night he won the presidency; and then they spend lots of time talking about the implications of a sentence (“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”), a clause (“programs will end”), a phrase (“dust ourselves off”) or even a single word (“Muslim,” “non-believers.”)
