The Unity of Life

"The science of ecology teaches us that everything in the universe is connected. We cannot separate ourselves from the consequences of even the least of our actions: whatever we do here comes back there. This is the law of the unity of life. Like gravity or any other law of nature, you cannot break it; you can only break yourself against it."

-- Eknath Easwaran

The Best Deterrent

I read an interesting article in today’s Christian Science Monitor. It was written by Joanna Shepherd, an assistant professor of law at Emory Law School. It addresses the issue of whether capital punishment deters murder. Shepherd claims that well-designed studies establish that capital punishment has both a “brutalizing effect” and a deterrent effect. But, she says, states, like Texas, that execute a high percentage of those they sentence to death deter murder, whereas states, like California, that execute a low percentage of those they sentence to death may increase the murder rate. In other words, in states with high execution percentages, the deterrent effect of many executions outweighs the brutalizing effect of capital punishment, whereas in states with low execution percentages, the brutalizing effect outweighs the deterrent effect. The author goes on to suggest that states like California should execute more people so that “future empirical analysis” can tell us if her hypothesis is true. If it is, we will know that we can deter murder by executing more of those we convict of committing it.

I would like to make a very different suggestion. I would like to suggest that we declare human life sacred and truly begin treating it as such. One way we can do this is by declaring an official and permanent end to killing, in the most cold-blooded way imaginable, those we believe have committed murder. And then let’s see what “future empirical analysis” tells us about the cumulative “deterrent effect” over time of according every human life inviolable respect and compassion.

An Unbridgeable Gulf?

I watched Larry King last night. The topic of discussion was the upcoming execution of Stanley Williams. The guests included famous defense attorney Mark Geragos, motivation guru Tony Robbins, the prosecutor in Williams’ murder trial, conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, actor and anti-death penalty activist Mike Farrell, and Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in “Dead Man Walking.”

The guests made many interesting points, but Dennis Prager raised two of the most interesting ones. First, he said that he supported the death penalty, believed that Williams should die, and that all who support the death penalty should be willing to carry it out themselves in a legal fashion, as he would be if called upon to do so. I wonder what kind of executions he’d be willing to commit if they were sanctioned methods. Would he be willing to boil someone in oil? Would he be willing to strangle, stone, beat, stab, or otherwise torture someone to death? Would he really be willing to pull switches administering drugs of a “lethal cocktail” if he knew that dying this way may often be accompanied by torturous pain and suffering? The second point Prager made was that anyone who believed that an Adolf Eichmann should die but that Williams should not was being morally inconsistent. But I wonder if there’s a true moral equivalence between what Eichmann did and what Williams was found guilty of doing, or if people should always be enthusiastically willing to do the unpleasant things that they believe someone needs to do.

Last night’s discussion heated up for a moment when Mike Farrell exclaimed that he found Prager disgusting for licking his lips with glee over the impending execution. Prager retorted that he was disgusted with Farrell for always taking the side of convicted murderers and ignoring the suffering of their victims and the victims’ families. Farrell replied that he was trying to help lift humankind out of the destructive caveman mentality of an eye-for-and-eye. Prager concluded that there was a “moral gulf” between Farrell and himself.

I agree that the there is a very wide gulf of opinion between Mr. Farrell and Mr. Prager. It may, in fact, be an unbridgeable one. But I wonder if a gulf needs to separate them as human beings who both presumably want to love and be loved, to give and receive goodness, to be happy, and to have the best for themselves and the world. I wonder if there’s any way of softening the increasingly adversarial stance that we see in the media, in politics, and in interpersonal relations, and of learning how to dialogue with one another in a spirit of mutual respect and empathy. Is it necessary to give up one’s opinions to do this, or is it only necessary to open one’s mind and heart to understanding where the other person is coming from, to acknowledge what truth may lie in opposing views, and to respect and value the other person as a human being?

I believe that capital punishment is wrong in most or all cases and that it’s doubly wrong to take pleasure in seeing someone die this way. But I don’t want to allow myself to succumb to the kind of devaluation, dehumanization, and hatred for those who disagree with me on this or anything else that may well underlie the murderous acts that landed people such as Williams on death row and ultimately in the death chamber and grave.

Stanley “Tookie” Williams died at 12:35 AM PST this morning. As his supporters left the witness area after he died, they shouted, “The state of California just killed an innocent man!"

A Fifth Senseless Death

Stanley “Tookie” Williams is going to die at midnight tonight unless a miracle happens. It would take a miracle now that Governor Schwazenegger has refused to grant him clemency. Schwarzenegger’s decision doesn’t surprise me. Neither does his justification: Williams was convicted of four wanton murders and has never admitted guilt much less apologized. Yes, he has done good things in prison since then, but they don’t overcome the magnitude of his savage crimes or the fact that he won’t own up to them. There is no true redemption without a remorseful admission of guilt.

For his part, Williams continues to deny that he committed the murders and claims to have too much integrity to lie even if it could save his life. This sounds very noble, if it’s true. But I frankly don’t believe that it’s true. I believe that Williams committed those murders and has lied about it ever since.

Yet, I still believe that Williams should not be executed. I believe this not only because I categorically believe that the death penalty is wrong, but also because I believe that Williams can do more good for society by living the rest of his natural life in prison than by dying tonight of homicide committed by my state. For years Williams has written and spoken with moving eloquence to adults and children against violent crime. He has modeled redemption to the masses. And countless adults and children have listened to his words and watched his example and quite possibly been steered away from or out of a life of crime by what they’ve heard and seen. What will Williams’ death steer them away from? From not committing wanton murder? Did capital punishment stop anyone from coldly murdering those four innocent people Williams was found guilty of murdering? Will coldly killing people for coldly killing other people stop anyone from murdering in the future?

Many have argued that Williams’ words against violent crime are a ruse aimed at sparing his life or even getting him released from prison someday. Yet, it looks to me as though he never had a real chance of being released even if he’d been allowed to live. And even if his speeches and books against crime were mere ploys to save his hide, the fact is, he made those speeches and wrote those books and surely helped a lot of people and made all but the most hardened cynics among us believe just a little bit more in the possibility of redemption. What would be so terrible about Governor Schwarzenneger granting clemency to Williams and thereby encouraging others sentenced to die or spend the rest of their lives in prison to at least go through the motions of having reformed by trying to help other people in the compelling ways that Williams has?

I don’t condemn Scharwezenneger for his decision. But I wish he would have granted Williams clemency and done what he could at this pivotal moment to further society’s idealism instead of its cynicism. I wish he would not have allowed a fifth precious and productive human life to be destroyed by crimes committed long ago.

Narnia: Faith, Heresy, or Just a Movie?

Many Christians are excited about “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and are taking their children to see it in droves. The film is based on the first book in a series of Narnia stories by C.S. Lewis, a famous Christian apologist and good friend of “Lord of the Rings” author J. R.R. Tolkien. Those associated with the film are surely hoping it does as well at the box office as the “Rings” movies, and it is has been praised by many reviewers who compare it favorably to the “Rings.”

I presume that few Christians have read or heard of John Goldthwaite’s criticisms of the book of which the film is said to be a rather faithful adaptation. Goldthwaite is a Christian and scholar of children’s literature who, in his “A Natural History of Make-Believe,” accuses the book of being not only misogynistic in its depiction of women but also un-Christian if not anti-Christian in its portrait of the Narnia world and its inhabitants. In Goldthwaite’s words:

“…whenever a professed Christian feels he must create some wholly other world to explore the meaning of his religion, he is flirting with bad faith. When he fills that world with the make-believes of other religions, he is playing at polytheism. When he further sets sorceresses to rule over it, and werewolves, incubuses and wraiths, he is dabbling in Manichaean dualism, the idea that standing opposed to God's good creation is another, separate and equal, or nearly equal, creation given over to evil.”

In other words, it is wrong for a Christian to invent an imaginary world to teach anyone, including a child, about Christian principles in this one, and to populate that world with characters and objects that seem to symbolize important things and figures from conflicting religions. Worst of all, it borders on heresy for the evil characters in a supposedly Christian parable to be almost if not as powerful as the good ones. This implies that Satan and his minions are almost if not as powerful as God, and this is a huge no-no so far as Christian teachings are concerned.

I was never one to read books or watch movies about fantasy worlds filled with wizards and gnomes and talking animals. I always liked my fiction injected with a heavy dose of plausibility, be it sci-fi, Westerns, war stories, martial arts, or what have you. I never liked my fantasy to be too fantastic. So I have never read any of the Narnia or Rings books, and I will probably never see the movie and be able to address Goldthwaite’s criticisms in depth.

I will only say in passing that it seems to me that the Bible itself, in its numerous references to God and his followers being at war with the forces of evil, does the very thing Goldthwaite accuses Lewis of doing—making the agents and power of evil virtually equal to the agents and power of good. Just take a look at the Book of Revelation. Whether it’s seen as symbolic like the Narnia story or literally true, it depicts a horrendous battle between the armies of good and evil. Even though the army of good ultimately prevails, it’s an apocalyptic fight to the finish. I have always been puzzled over why an omnipotent God needs to wage bloody war with evil, and Lewis seems no guiltier of this dubious teaching than official Christianity has historically been.

In any case, I wish adults would just let kids see and enjoy the movie on whatever level or terms they want to see it, and leave religiously based proselytizing or criticism out of the picture.

Tom Fox is a Hero

Tom Fox will probably die within the next few days. He was abducted by the “Swords of Truth Brigade” in Iraq on November 26 and threatened with death unless certain demands are met that will almost certainly not be met. He went to Iraq more than two years ago as a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a pacifist group dedicated to helping the Iraqi people in the wake and midst of the terrible violence and suffering ravaging that godforsaken country. One of the ways this group has helped is to reconnect and reunite Iraqis detained by US and Iraqi forces with their families. In fact, many reporters responsible for exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other such hellholes credit CPT as one of the primary sources documenting and calling this story to their attention in the first place. In fact, Tom and other members of the CPT have done so much selfless good for the people of Iraq that key Iraqi Muslim organizations have appealed to Tom’s abductors to let him and the others go. But they have received no response, and, in all likelihood, they won’t. At least not the kind of response any compassionate and reasonable person would hope for.

Not that all seem compassionate and reasonable. Rush Limbaugh has characteristically said: “Well, here's why I like it. I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality,” and a lot of his listeners and others no doubt share his sentiments to some degree. Beyond feeling disdain toward those whose politics or religious convictions we don’t agree with or whose idealism strikes us as so stupidly naïve that it deserves the consequences it reaps for its holder, it is distressingly easy to get so caught up in vindictive hatred and anger toward the abductors and suicide bombers and their grotesque distortions of religion that we lose sight of the elemental fact that Tom suffers gravely, his family and friends suffer gravely, thousands if not millions of people inside and outside Iraq suffer gravely without the rhyme or reason of anything approaching justification. Human beings who are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, idealists and cynics are suffering and dying needlessly because too many of us dismiss their humanity and worth out of contempt and hatred, and too many of the rest of us do nothing about it.

Tom Fox tried to do something about it. He knew he was walking into a hornet’s nest, but he did it because he believed that God wanted him to, and he found the courage to follow his convictions through the Valley of Death even when fiery rage and hatred threatened to consume him or icy indifference threatened to defensively numb his soul to the overwhelming carnage and misery around him. As he wrote in his blog:

“It seems easier somehow to confront anger within my heart than it is to confront fear. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right then I am not to give in to either. I am to stand firm against the kidnapper as I am to stand firm against the soldier. Does that mean I walk into a raging battle to confront the soldiers? Does that mean I walk the streets of Baghdad with a sign saying 'American for the Taking'? No to both counts. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life and if I lose it to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan. I struggle to stand firm but I'm willing to keep working at it.”

I could not do what Tom has done and risk my life in a place like Iraq. But neither will I join the chorus of those who say, “He should have known better.” He DID know better, and yet he placed selfless principle over self-interest, unconditional love over apathy or hatred. How much more like heaven and less like hell might this world be if more of us were willing and able to do as Tom Fox and others like him have done and are doing in Iraq and countless other places where humans suffer and cry out for help? Even those of us who remain ensconced within the comforts of family and relatively safe surroundings can still refuse to join the legions of naysayers such as Limbaugh or the vindictive haters of “Islamic fanatics.” We can applaud Tom Fox as a genuine hero and labor to hold empathy, love, and compassion in our hearts for EVERY human being and eschew the use of dehumanizing labels for anyone. In Tom’s inspiring and divinely eloquent words:

“It seems as if the first step down the road to violence is taken when I dehumanize a person. That violence might stay within my thoughts or find its way into the outer world and become expressed verbally, psychologically, structurally or physically. As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

"Why are we here?" We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.”

The Triangle and Transcendence

Last night I watched the first installment of the new Sci-Fi Channel miniseries “The Triangle.” It was about what I expected—not too plausible, but plausible enough that I could enjoy it to a modest degree. I really want to enjoy programs like this. I want to be drawn into a familiar world that begins to act in unfamiliar ways. As complex, challenging, and even threatening as the world is already, I want to find it even more so, at least for a few hours in my stimulated imagination, and see humankind forced to abandon its petty squabbles and wars and channel its collective intelligence and effort into solving really big problems that threaten the whole human race if not the world with annihilation unless we can prevail. 9/11, the tsunami, and Katrina were horrible, horrible events. But they DID bring people together and elicit their grandest feelings and behaviors, sometimes only momentarily and sometimes for much longer periods, in ways that we seldom see outside such overwhelming disasters.

The gist of the “The Triangle” story, so far, is that an ultra-rich shipping magnate is losing an alarming number of his ships in the infamous Bermuda Triangle, and he is unshakably determined to find out what’s going on. So he hires a disparate group of experts in their respective disciplines to investigate. If they find out why the ships are disappearing, they each get $5 million. If they fail, they earn nothing. The experts—a cynical reporter well versed on Triangle lore, a disaster-at-sea prevention specialist, an oceanographer, and a psychic get to work and immediately begin confronting some very strange phenomena including the crashing of an airliner that shows up hours later under water looking like it’s been there for decades alongside World War II fighter planes that appear to be brand new. Stranger still is the fact that there are no bodies on the airliner except for one survivor trapped in the bathroom who claims to be a six-year-old girl but looks more like sixty-six. Other strange phenomena also occur, some of it outside the Triangle itself, suggesting that whatever mysterious forces plague the Triangle may be expanding into a broader area and posing a grave threat to the world at large. The series continues tonight and Wednesday night, and I will probably watch all of it, despite the presence of an unconscionable number of blocks of commercials spaced approximately ten minutes apart.

Eknath Easwaran says that we all hunger to confront great challenges by rising above our limited selves to act as our true and infinite Self. It’s a pity that it takes real and imaginary threats and disasters of terrible proportions to inspire such real and fictional transcendence.

Seeing Jesus in Everybody

Mother Teresa once said:

“I believe in person to person. Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment.”

I know that I’ve said many disparaging things about Christians and Christianity over the years. But if every Christian saw Jesus Christ in every person and acted accordingly, nary an unpleasant word would you hear me utter about the Christian faith or about those who embrace it. Indeed, I would almost certainly be Christian myself and using my vanishingly small talents to draw others to the faith. But even if most Christians don’t see and love people the way Mother Teresa did, this doesn’t mean that I can’t, even if I never call myself Christian, and even if I continue to harbor grave misgivings about institutionalized versions of the faith.

Gone, but not forgotten

I recently posted an entry mentioning the movie “Normal Life.” I said that I didn’t have the same favorable impression of it after seeing it again the previous night that I had eight years ago when I saw it the first time. I surmised that this was because losing the affections of someone I loved back then with nearly the same crazy intensity that the male character loved the female one in the movie had hardened my heart to such feelings over time, and that I could no longer empathize with anyone feeling that way about someone.

Well, a friend of mine wrote today to tell me that he saw this woman Wednesday in a place where she and I first met and subsequently spent a great deal of happy time together, and that he talked with her, telling her that I was married and living in Sacramento, and she asked him to say Hi to me. I can’t describe the torrent of feelings that swept through my heart and soul after reading this…the joyful memories and regrets and other things too intimate to share even in a blog titled “Naked Reflections.” The only thing more I WILL say is that, for a brief, overwhelming moment, my heart was laid bare and raw before the protective armor quickly fell back into place, and I once again thought “Normal Life” was one of the greatest movies ever made.

I’m glad I moved to Sacramento and am far away from her.

Studying the Studies

A recent study warns that up to a third of all medical research is wrong, often because it doesn’t employ randomized samples, and that doctors and laypeople alike should be wary of embracing too enthusiastically the results of any one piece of research. The study goes on to recommend that a system be put in place that would grade the quality of all published medical research by evaluating such factors as “the rigor of its experimental design, sample size and amount of supporting research.”

Aside from the irony of one medical study criticizing other medical studies and my skepticism over the reliability of the people and methods used to evaluate the reliability of research results, I like the idea of rating medical studies for quality. Most of us aren’t qualified to evaluate the quality of this research ourselves, and even most clinicians who, we can only hope, are qualified are often just too plain busy treating patients to spend the requisite time and energy to scrutinize studies carefully enough to evaluate them well. Having experts or panels of experts, who presumably have the time to do their jobs effectively, might make it easier for all of us to give each medical study that captures our attention the credence it merits and empower us to become better consumers and practitioners of the healing arts.

A Disappointing War of the Worlds

When I first heard that Steven Spielberg was directing a new movie version of War of the Worlds, I was quite excited, even though a small voice within cautioned me not to get too worked up over what could turn out to be a crushing disappointment. Sure enough, when the movie came out, many reviewers criticized it. Still, I waited eagerly for it to come to DVD so that I could see it for myself and make up my own mind about its quality.

When I finally saw it the other day, I was forced to agree with the critical critics. Yes, it was a masterpiece of visual and auditory special effects, rendered all the more impressive by my big screen TV and thundering surround sound system. But it lacked just about everything else that makes a movie good. Tom Cruise seemed to sleepwalk through his role, even at his most histrionic moments. His children were so obnoxious that I wanted the death rays to incinerate them and get them the hell out of the way. There was an extended scene in the basement of a building with a survivalist character played by Tim Robbins that seemed pointless if not “creepy,” as one reviewer called it, in its gratuitously pedophilic overtones. The movie, even with its stunningly graphic portrayal of extraterrestrial dominance and destructiveness, seemed too narrowly focused upon a family I cared nothing about and too little on broader scientific, social, philosophical, religious, or just plain human themes. And its ending seemed like little more than an afterthought.

This is in stark contrast to some of my favorite sci-fi films such as “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Forbidden Planet,” or even Spielberg’s own masterful “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” all of which managed to engagingly blend personal stories of human interest with compelling treatments of broader issues. I’d like to see the 1953 version of “War of the Worlds” again. It seems to me that even it was superior in some respects to Spielberg’s mindless, soulless extravaganza, and I understand that there’s another fairly new movie version of the story that may also be better than Spielberg’s, even if a great deal less flashy.

I wonder if anyone will ever make another truly great sci-fi film that engages the heart and mind as readily as it does the senses, or whether we are doomed to either cheesy Sci-Fi Channel potboilers or prodigal clones of the “Clones.”

Physics and Mysticism

A number of popular works, including Fritjof Capra’s “The Tao of Physics,” have argued that modern physicists have come to understand things about the universe that corroborate what great mystics the world over have been telling us for millennia about Reality. But Ken Wilber doesn’t buy it. He argues that when physicists tell us that subatomic particles depend on one another for their existence and behavior to such a degree that they comprise a unified whole, this is not the same as the mystic telling us that all the parts of all the various levels and sublevels of Reality are so interdependent that they comprise a unified whole. In other words, the physicist is addressing only one level of Reality—the physical level--and then only at the submicroscopic sublevel, whereas the mystic is addressing every sublevel and part of the physical, biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and spiritual levels of Reality. Thus, argues Wilber, it is only coincidence that physicists now see interdependence or “interpenetration” between some subatomic phenomena, particles, or quanta while, at the same time, mystics see the unity of all phenomena, and it is a coincidence that the physics of the future could conceivably abolish with a different understanding that no longer sees the subatomic phenomena in question as interdependent and interpenetrating. But if we don’t hitch the insights of mysticism to the current understanding of physicists, it doesn’t matter how future physicists understand the sublevel of subatomic reality.

I guess I understand Wilber’s point, but I don’t know if I agree with it. For it seems to me that if Reality is a unified whole of interdependent parts, why shouldn’t this be true for the parts on one level or sublevel as it is between levels and sublevels and between the parts of the various levels and sublevels? That is, for example, if the thoughts in my mind are interdependent with, among innumerable other things, the electrical impulses in my nervous system, the sights and sounds of my socio-cultural environment, and with the promptings of my spirit, why shouldn’t it also be the case that the spin of one subatomic particle should be interdependent with the spin of a “twin” subatomic particle far away from it? Why shouldn’t the interdependence or interpenetration that physicists see on the quantum level mirror what mystics see on and between all levels? And if physicists someday don’t see this interdependence on the quantum level, is this because it doesn’t exist, or because they have temporarily lost sight of it through flawed theory? I’m inclined to believe that it would be a case of the latter and that there is not necessarily anything wrong with using quantum physics to support mysticism right now.

Is It True?

"Myth, my friend, not alcohol, not marijuana, not meth- Myth has always been the most popular drug (hallucinogenic) in the history of humankind. Humankind loves nothing more than to hypnotize itself into a stupor by watching the distorted refracted bits of its own mind projected out onto a Universe that is actually wholly unconcerned with man's silly stories."

--Stuart Davis' Inner Voice of the Skeptic

Blessed Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving Day. Arising in North America as a celebration of the harvest, it has evolved into a holiday occasion when families in America and Canada gather to feast and give thanks for all that they have. I am exceedingly grateful for all that I have—my wonderful wife, family, friends, home, health, and countless other blessings, and I am very mindful of the fact that most people in this world have far less than me. I know how fortunate I am and wish that I could find effective ways of giving back more to a world that has given me so much over the course of my life. But one area where I feel so lacking is in talent and skill that I can share with others in an uplifting way, and it is my profound wish that I can gain realistic confidence in my abilities to give something valuable of myself to others beyond what I’ve ever done.

But today I will visit and feast here at home with family and friends and give silent but constant thanks for the incredible abundance with which I’ve been undeservedly graced.

Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

Goodbye, Ted

Ted Koppel said goodbye last night to ABC News, with which he’s been for the past 42 years, and to “Nightline,” with which he’s been for the past 25 years. I will miss him. He was my favorite of the news heavyweights who used to grace us with their impressive combinations of intelligence, eloquence, hard-won journalistic experience, broad knowledge, and calm, dignified news reporting and interviews. I’m not much impressed with the way TV news is going or with those who are taking over the jobs once held by the likes of Jennings, Rather, Brokaw, and now Koppel. Perhaps they will grow into their roles, but I doubt that they’ll given the chance to by news organizations that seem to be increasingly focused on youth, glitter, and, of course, dollars over substance, on “emotional reporting,” as one leading news organization boasts of its new hotshot anchorman, over graceful and dependable sobriety and reason. I guess I sound like an old fuddy-duddy pining for the “good old days.” But, in some ways, the old days WERE better than today.

Coincidence or Causal Connection?

The other day I mentioned a guy I knew in high school who ended his life as a disgraced ex-police officer who fatally shot himself after robbing a bank and being cornered by police. The next day, I read about a CHP officer being shot to death in a nearby community by someone in a car he had pulled over for a traffic violation. The next day I discovered that the suspect, who police say is definitely the man who murdered the CHP officer, is the son of that guy I used to know in high school. An interesting coincidence. But how coincidental is it that this young man, if he did what he’s accused of, is the son of a guy whose life came to such a tragic end, or is there a strong causal connection between his father’s behavior and his own? If so, might this connection have a genetic as well as psychological component? That is, might the son have learned bad lessons from his father’s conduct and subsequent departure from his life, and might he also have inherited bad genes from his father that contributed to his and his father’s destructive behavior? Every time I encounter stories like this, I am more skeptical than ever that we humans truly have “free will.”

What Turns Men On

In looking at the photo of the young woman I wrote about recently, I’m reminded of the fact that I’ve long wondered why most men seem to feel the most physically attracted to the same kinds of women—women with bigger eyes, smoother skin, fuller lips, and other so-called “feminine” features. What is it about these features that are so universally attractive to men? Well, this article reports that Scottish researchers have linked the phenomenon to estrogen and fertility. That is, men are attracted to women with these physical features because these women generally have the highest estrogen levels and are therefore the most fertile.

I’ve read about other studies that link our perceptions of physical beauty with symmetricality—i.e., both sides of the face and body being equally proportioned—but the Scottish study is not addressing beauty per se but female sexual attractiveness. I suppose it’s possible to rate high on the beauty—symmetrical—scale but not so high in sexual attractiveness. In fact, I seldom feel particularly attracted to “beautiful” women. I tend to go for the cutely sexy ones.

Of course, many women do not have high estrogen and fertility levels and don’t naturally look as though they do, but they can often get around this by judiciously applying make-up that fools males into thinking they’re more fertile than they are. Furthermore, there is more to overall attraction than physical attractiveness, especially in terms of long term relationships. There are psychological dimensions, as the online dating service eHarmony emphasizes. But speaking strictly of sexual attractiveness, the physical indicatiors of high estrogen and fertility are very compelling. Women are acting naturally when they do their best to highlight these features, and men, of all ages, are acting naturally when they respond positively to them.

However, I wonder what it is in males that is most sexually attractive to females, in females that is most sexually attractive to other females, and in males that is most sexually attractive to other males. Are more complex variables involved in these attractions? Studies have shown that females are not necessarily physically drawn to the most overtly virile looking males. The explanation is that females are programmed by their biology to seek men who can not only impregnate them with good genes but who will also be good providers and protectors for them and their offspring, whereas men are biologically programmed to be more narrowly focused on propagating their genes via as many fertile women as possible.

It’s fascinating to contemplate the connections between biological drives and other factors in our sexual and romantic attractions and behaviors, and also the relative degrees to which these various factors should govern our sexual and romantic behaviors. I feel frequent tension between what I think I, as a married man, should feel and do and what I actually feel and want to do. I want to copulate with every pretty woman, especially if she’s Asian, in sight, but I love my wife and feel committed to her. But what would I REALLY do if the Asian equivalent of Jessica Alba came on to me? Would it be as easy as I’d like to think it would be to say “No” to her? Fortunately, this seems as academic a question as the one of what I’d do if I could go back in time knowing what I do now. Unless I ever end up taking an unsupervised trip to Asia, that is.

Teresita

I don’t usually think much about the past. But I’ve been doing quite a lot of it the last couple of days, as my latest entries show. In perusing websites aimed at my high school graduating class, I encountered pictures and names of classmates who are, as they say, “no longer with us.” Some of them I knew fairly well, some I hardly knew at all. But there was one young woman named Teresita I have no recollection of whom I wish I had gotten to know. If I could go back to high school then knowing what I do now, I would try to get to know this extremely pretty young woman and see if her character and personality matched her physical beauty. She’d probably have nothing to do with me, but I’d like to think that I’d have more courage than I had then and would at least give things a chance. No, I’m not talking about a sexual relationship. I’d like to think that having experienced plenty of that in my alternate timeline and remembering it all vividly would tame my physical desires to controllable levels and I would not be, in essence, a 50+ year-old man (albeit in a horny teenager’s body) taking unfair advantage of teenaged girls. But if this young woman were as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside, I’d sure like for us to be friends while we were classmates and, perhaps, even until she left this earth. Or maybe our relationship would somehow, for better or worse, change things so much that she wouldn’t leave prematurely. I don’t know how she died, but maybe it wasn’t disease. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she was in the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe our friendship would somehow lead to a different outcome. I’m not sure why I’m thinking these strange thoughts. I guess I’m only now beginning to get a real sense of what I missed during those precious, irreplaceable years.

What am I missing now?

Changing the Past

I graduated from high school in 1971. In my entry yesterday, I mentioned that I posted a message in a public forum dedicated to my graduating class. In my message, I addressed the question of whether I would do anything differently if I could go back to my high school days knowing what I do now. This is the message I posted:

I'm delighted that you would change little or nothing if you had high school to do all over again, knowing what you do now. However, my answer is profoundly different. If I knew back then what I do now, I think, or would like to think, that I would do virtually EVERYTHING differently. For I was a painfully shy and geeky young man in high school who largely stayed to himself and graduated in the class of '71 not with a bang or even a whimper but so nondescriptly that I doubt that anyone even noticed. I regret that. For I believe that there was so much more I could have experienced and given of myself during my time at LAHS if only I'd had the confidence and self-discipline to do
it.

There's a great episode of the series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in which Capt. Picard is propelled back in time with his knowledge and character of the future, and he does many things differently and ends up far worse off than he was before. He concludes from this that life is a "tapestry" composed of innumerable interdependent threads and
that to remove any of these threads is to risk having the whole tapestry come disastrously apart. However, if I had the opportunity to do what Capt. Picard did, I would enthusiastically take the chance of changing almost everything and seeing what happened.

But since such opportunities are the stuff of fantastic fiction rather than reality, I will simply say that, despite my misgivings about the past, I am truly grateful that I was privileged enough to attend LAHS
and meet so many nice people and enjoy a good many wonderful times.

Blessings to one and all, now and forever.

Reminiscences

Last night I watched a movie called “Normal Life.” It was about a police officer (Luke Perry) who meets a very troubled young woman (Ashley Judd), falls hopelessly in love with her, and plunges with her into a bleak hell of crime and death.

This movie came out in 1996, and I saw it for the first time a year or so later on cable. When I saw it again last night, I shook my head in disbelief that the straight-laced Luke Perry character could lose his heart so quickly and completely to such an obviously disturbed woman and later resort to such extreme measures to keep her in his life. But when I saw the movie nine or so years ago, my reaction was very different. The movie resonated with me profoundly back then because I knew all-too-well what it felt like to love someone with such obsessive and desperate focus that one would do almost anything to have and keep her in his life. I didn’t rob or even contemplate robbing banks for the woman I loved at that time. But if she had wanted me to and I had felt capable of pulling it off, I have little doubt that I would have done it if I thought it meant keeping her with me. Nor do I doubt that I would have acted much the way the Luke Perry character did at the very end of the film were I to face similar circumstances.

I would like to think that it’s a measure of how much I’ve matured over the intervening years that I no longer empathize with this character or think the movie is particularly good. But have I REALLY matured all that much emotionally, or is it more a matter of having suffered a figurative hardening of my heart to the slings and arrows of unrequited love that I experienced with the woman in question. After her, I think I permanently lost the ability to love anyone with that kind of overwhelming passion and depth and to empathize with anyone else who could. That’s probably a good thing overall, but it’s not completely good. I think I lost a vital piece of myself when I lost that young woman’s affections. I’ve spent the last nine or so years feeling too little emotional connection to other people and to the emotional aspects of my past. I’ve sheltered myself from the pain and sadness that can come from getting too close to others and to a less than fulfilling past, and, in so doing, have sacrificed some of my humanity to the insipid God of comfort.

But the film reminded me of a somewhat similar story of a guy I used to know in high school who ended up being a cop who lost his job over his illicit involvement with a woman, eventually took to robbing banks, and killed himself when he finally faced capture. So I went online to refresh my memory of the precise details of his case and stumbled across a couple of websites for fellow class of 1971 graduates of my high school. There I found brief messages from people I hadn’t seen or heard anything from in almost 35 years, and I felt the sadness as well of pleasure of connecting a little with that long ago time and place in my life.

I was an impossibly shy geek in high school with no close friends. I didn’t attend school dances or other functions, I was terrified of women, and I earned decent grades but never really challenged or applied myself in school. After I quit the varsity basketball team as a sophomore because my learning disability rendered me incapable of learning the plays or even executing simple practice drills and because I had a recently diagnosed heart arrhythmia that would have made effective play on that level difficult under the best of circumstances, my passions were playing playground basketball on weekdays after school and then retreating into my bedroom at night to lose myself in books and television, and bowling on the weekends. To say I was outside the mainstream at my high school would be an understatement, and I hung out with my out-of-the-mainstream casual male friends and was so isolated from the overall scheme of things that I didn’t even know enough about what I was missing to really miss it all that much.

But when I saw a brief message from one of the guys I knew in elementary and junior high school and spent quite a lot of time with in high school, I felt the happy warmth of nostalgia and sent him a message telling him how much I admired and liked him all those years ago and that I hoped things were going well for him.

I also posted a public message to another forum for my graduating class in which I addressed a poster’s question of whether she would do anything differently if she had a chance to go back to high school knowing what she does now. She said she would do almost everything the same the second time around. I said I would do almost everything differently. And so I would, or would like to think I would. But that’s perhaps a subject for another journal entry someday.