Daily Archives: July 14, 2008

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Literature, World History

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.

The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition.  What are the humanities?  An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?

I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota.  The connection is not obvious, but it is real.  In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees.  A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine.  In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.

Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society.  In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding.  He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”

This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science.  Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:

“So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science.  Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.”      My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5  Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.

I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities?  The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West.  That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution.  Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection.  This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.

What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans.  That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become.   How do we know what we have been?  We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties.  We listen to karnatic music.  The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our  eyes.  Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace.  The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality.  The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.

The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.

Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say:  “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”

Art and Culture

I’m Happy to Report

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Older Americans May Be Happier Than Younger Ones
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By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2008; A04

Many times in science, research studies point in conflicting directions. Part of the challenge — and the fun — of watching science is to try to sort out lines of intersecting evidence hidden amid a welter of confusing data.

In recent months, however, several studies have produced a stream of evidence that mostly points in the same direction, and also happens to overturn one of the most stubborn American stereotypes: the belief that this is a land whose gifts, charms and joys flow mostly to young people.

The studies show that when you check on how happy people are at various ages, the elderly generally come out ahead.

Since 1972, researchers have conducted 50,000 detailed interviews with Americans. The questions of the General Social Survey are repeated year after year to enable researchers to detect trends and to make comparisons among groups and to see how the same people changed over time. One asks whether they are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy.

“One important finding was people who were biologically older are happier than younger adults,” said Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago, who is the director of the General Social Survey.

The study, conducted by researcher Yang Yang at the University of Chicago, used the granular detail of the survey to eliminate the possibility that older people seemed happier because they were raised in a generation that was taught from an early age to be content with its lot. Rather, Yang found, in research published in the American Sociological Review, those older than 65 had not always been happy. It was being older that conferred the contentment that many of them reported.

“It is counter to most people’s expectations,” said Smith, who spoke about Yang’s paper because she was not available. “People would expect it to be in the opposite direction — you start off by saying older people have illnesses, deaths of spouses — they must be less happy.”

Smith said he and other colleagues had also examined the phenomenon from a different perspective, by asking people about their problems — including physical ailments, problems with relationships, losing a beloved family member and becoming the victim of a crime. Smith found that older people reported a larger number of health problems but tended to report far fewer difficulties overall — fewer financial, interpersonal and crime problems.

The younger adults, Smith said, had less trouble with their health but had many more of the other kinds of predicaments, and those, in the long run, tended to trump their better health.

Yet another study, Smith said, looked at job satisfaction among people of different ages and again found that those who kept working past age 65 had the highest level of job satisfaction — going against the stereotype that older people keep working mostly because they can’t do without the money.

“A lot of people think of people working in their 60s and 70s as trapped in their jobs. Most of the people who continue working are people who like their jobs,” Smith said. “Most older workers work because they enjoy their jobs; those who did not were mostly able to retire and pursue other things. In 1960, the old were the poorest segment in America, and they have become less poor over the last half-century.”

The studies present an interesting puzzle, said Catherine Ross, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Yang’s finding that older adults are generally happier than younger ones seems superficially at odds with many studies that have found that older people are at higher risk for depression and other mental health problems.

In research published this year in the journal Social Science & Medicine, Ross and co-author John Mirowsky, also at UT-Austin, used data on 1,450 people who were asked in the General Social Survey how often in the previous seven days they had felt any of a range of emotions: blue, sad, lonely, anxious, tense, excited, embarrassed, ashamed, content or serene. Some of the emotions were positive, and some were negative. Simultaneously, some emotions, such as anger, were active, while others, such as serenity, were passive.

In line with Yang’s findings, Ross and Mirowsky found that advanced age was positively correlated with feeling positive emotions. But the researchers also found that being older was negatively correlated with active emotions. Older people, in other words, had both more positive and more passive emotional states.

“A lot of research in different areas finds the elderly have higher levels of depression, so it looked as though mental health was bad among the elderly,” she said. “What this study does is say, ‘Yeah, it is not that the elderly have negative emotions, but that when they are negative, they are passive.’ ”

Older people reported more loneliness — a negative but passive emotion — but they also reported much more serenity, a positive one.

“The reason we think the elderly have higher levels of depression is not because they have higher levels of negative emotions but that they have higher levels of passivity,” Ross said. “If the problem is having lower levels of energy, maybe the answers lie in increasing levels of energy, like reading a book or taking a walk — mental and physical activity — taking a bike ride or a yoga class. The sadness part may not be a negative emotion but a manifestation of the energy level.

“Young people — the very people we think from the stereotype are best off — in fact have high levels of anger and anxiety and also high levels of depression, compared to middle-aged adults.”

Younger adults were far more likely to have financial worries, troubled emotional relationships and professional stressors, she said.

“The image of youth or young adulthood as the best time of life is probably not an accurate stereotype.”

Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Healthy Garden

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79  bar steady 29.84  2mph E dew-point 57  Summer, sunny and warm

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The garden.  When I refer to the garden in these posts, it is a term of compression.  It would be more accurate to refer to the landscaping, the woods, the perennial gardens in back and those in front and, finally, the vegetable garden in raised beds.  I give a lot of thought and care each year to the plants in all of these places.

While I try to do things in an aesthetically pleasing manner, my various efforts never achieve the shine of the  gardens in the newspapers.  I’m not a perfectionist, so the weeds here and there, the plants that have overgrown their neighbors do not bother me.  There is time to get to them and I if I don’t get it this year, then next year.

I do care, a lot, about the health of the individual plants.  In my gardening world a diseased or dwindling plant gets a lot more concern than the niceties of the border.  As a result, our garden tends toward the lush, the verdant, but not always the well-conceived, artful display of blooming varieties carefully placed for height, leaf texture and color.  I’m impressed with folks who can achieve that and on some days I wish I were one of them.  But I’m not.

Gardens and landscapes and woods work on many different levels.  In my case the chance to think about the plants, to place them and nourish them, to reconfigure the whole when shade has outstripped light or the soil needs amendment satisfies me.

When Kate’s 60th birthday was on the horizon and she warmed to the idea of a purple garden, I had a great time assembling various purple flowering plants, amending the soil in each one of our beds and replanting everything, established plants and the new ones.  It tickles me now that the purple garden is in its fourth year and that it comes into its own in August, the month of her birthday.

Not sure what I’m trying to say here.  I’ve just been outside pruning, spreading some mulch on areas I missed the last time around and I feel a little sheepish about the unplanned, somewhat haphazard look of things.  On the other hand, by my own standards, the garden looks fine.  One of those endless loop deals where the stuff you do is fine with you as long as you don’t compare it to anybody else’s.  Yes, I know.  Comparing is foolish and mentally harmful.  Yet it creeps in from time to time anyhow.