Posted on 10/25/2007 5:31:26 AM PDT by Ouderkirk
Liberals are tremendously attached to the idea that we are apes, but are unwilling to face the fact that we humans still retain an awful lot of our ape programming. This is what led to the Christian concept of Original Sin and the Jewish concept that we are all born with both the urge to good and the urge to evil. And this programming is not identical for men and women, because behavior that enables a male chimp to pass his genes on might get a female chimp a new home in a saber-toothed tiger's stomach.
Sometimes when I read about the manifestations of this ape programming I'm pretty disgusted. Here's one, and this one reflects badly on both sexes: stepfathers (or "mother's boyfriend") are significantly more likely to abuse and even kill children than anyone else. This behavior is seen in plenty of other mammals as well: when new males come in and take over a territory, they kill or drive off the adult males, kill all the children, and mate with the females. The females seldom attempt to protect their young; instead they start producing new young with the new males. This behavior is seen in lions, monkeys, and humans. Appalling, yes, but if our ancestors hadn't had this programming, they wouldn't be our ancestors. A female who objected to this arrangement, unless she was a human female living in the very recent past, would have been killed or driven out of the tribe to fend for herself. A male who refrained from this behavior would not have reproduced. This was a matter of survival for our ancestors, both human and primate, so we really shouldn't condemn them for it. Condemning modern humans for it, of course, is entirely appropriate.
But, you rightly protest, we're not mere apes. Can't we expect better from civilized humans? Of course we can, and should. The point is that the programming is still there. When I see something shiny I might have the same impulse as a gorilla to bop the guy who has it on the head and snatch it away, but unlike that gorilla, I will restrain myself. It isn't my sterling moral character alone that makes it possible for me to let my neighbor keep his shiny things, though. Nor is the threat of going to prison the chief deterrent. The real deterrents are my conviction that taking someone else's shiny things by force is wrong, the belief that God wouldn't approve, and the knowledge that everyone who knows me would give me dirty looks. That is to say, philosophy, religion, and manners.
The whole point of civilization - of philosophy, religion, and manners - is to bolster us against our instinctive behavior. I'm sure I don't have to explain how giving in to our instincts to grab, hurt others, be lazy, etc. will destroy all the benefits of civilization.
Notice that liberals are the avowed enemies of all three of these bulwarks against instinct. According to liberals, philosophy is just a conceited attempt for us humans to convince ourselves that we're special, religion is a device for oppressing the masses, and manners are hypocrisy to keep the lower classes down. Liberals work hard to liberate themselves from everything that helps humans behave better than apes, and consequently they have no defense from their own instincts. I have joked that they are so enamoured of the theory of evolution that they are determined to demonstrate by their behavior that they are nothing more than apes.
This is why, for example, schoolteachers, almost all of whom are female and liberal, make no effort to discourage violence in the classroom. Ever since our distant ancestors grew fur, female survival has depended upon placating and currying favor with rampaging males, and that programming is still with us. A conservative woman understands in some way that seeing a violent male triggers that impulse in her, even if the violent male is six years old and can't really hurt her; for most of human and primate history, violent males have travelled in packs, so the fact that one in particular isn't a real threat doesn't prevent them from triggering this instinct. Because the conservative woman understands this impulse, though she might describe it differently from the way I have, and because she has the support of philosophy, religion and manners to act against this impulse, she can stand up to that dangerous creature, a male intent on violence, and tell him to go stand in the corner until he can behave.
Almost all teachers have renounced the supports that would have made this possible, so they are left with the instinctive response of a female chimpanzee to a bunch of male chimpanzees who are running around throwing things, hooting loudly, and assaulting other chimps: to yield to them and curry favor with them. Even the companion behavior, also nearly universal in schoolteachers, of punishing girls or smaller boys foolish enough to protest to being battered by the little alpha males, also makes sense in an evolutionary context: when new men came into the village and killed all the men of the tribe, if some females objected to providing food and sex to the men who had murdered their fathers and brothers, the wrath of the conquering males could well mean several dead females. These teachers are punishing the girls who complain about being bullied by boys while letting the boys wreak havoc unchecked in an effort to defend the tribe from annihilation.
There are other examples as well. Female jurors are significantly more likely to acquit violent criminals. Only a few decades ago, most states sensibly did not permit women to serve on murder juries. Since this has changed, the degree of violent crime in America and Europe has gone from "almost none" to "off the charts".
There are dozens of books and hundreds of articles speculating on why Japanese schools are so much better and less dangerous than ours, but all of them carefully avoid mentioning the true reason: 80% of Japanese schoolteachers are men. As long as we leave education in the control of women, schools will remain hotbeds of violence where little if any learning takes place.
What makes humans different from apes is that we are capable of rising above our instincts. What makes civilization different from barbarism is the systems that help us to do so in large numbers. But the instincts will never go away. Communism was based on the premise that humans don't have instincts and that all those impulses can be programmed away. It doesn't work. The instincts have to be channelled. My desire for a shiny bauble like my neighbor's can't be wiped out, but it can be channelled into me working hard enough to make enough money to have a bauble of my own.
Pretty much all males have an urge to bonk each other over the head and steal each other's women and shiny things, but I presume most of you has never clobbered another guy for an iPod, though you might have thought about it. The urges aren't going to go away. But if you're not a liberal, you don't have to act on them.
Pretty good piece.
This certainly explains the behavior of my junior high principal (never mind the teachers).
Pretty much Poppycock.
Hello, Mary Winkler jury.
“Liberals are tremendously attached to the idea that we are apes, but are unwilling to face the fact that we humans still retain an awful lot of our ape programming. This is what led to the Christian concept of Original Sin and the Jewish concept that we are all born with both the urge to good and the urge to evil.”
So our ape programming is what led to the biblical concept of original sin? I stopped reading this poorly written article right there.
There was also the woman from the Michael Jackson jury who proclaimed that she didn’t like the boy’s mother’s attitude so she wasn’t going to convict Jackson.
Stopped reading at sentence 2 . . . where the writer says that our “ape programming” explains the “concept of original sin” . . . 1) Stupid idea even on its own terms (what of cultures without the concept of original sin?) 2) Rejects God and the Bible out of hand.
Stopped reading at sentence 2 . . . where the writer says that our “ape programming” explains the “concept of original sin” . . . 1) Stupid idea even on its own terms (what of non-Christian cultures without the concept of original sin?) 2) Rejects God and the Bible out of hand.
The rot started with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
How do the Nuns that terrorized the bullies at the Catholic run orphanages and schools of my youth fit into this theory?
To this very day, when I see an angry nun, I sit or stand up straighter, nervously check my zipper to make sure it’s up, and hope my hair is neatly combed.
And sneak away as quietly as possible.
It’s rhetorically ham-handed, but not entirely stupid. The Fathers of the Church, some of whom were very literalist in their approach to Scripture, some of whom weren’t, but all of whom very much believed in God and the Scriptures, nonethless taught that the Fall made us more like brute beasts.
Chalk the article’s rhetoric up as an attempt to explain to liberals (who unaccountably insist on neo-Darwinism as their creation myth, and fancy human beings are reprogammable computers rather than animals as their creation account would suggest) the concepts inherent in “male and female he created them” and in the doctrine of the Fall by appealing to their own creation myth, and their consequences and read the article.
Like any column that is opinion there are some ideas which are at odds with reality. I think the purpose of the two sentences was to point out that if one believes Darwin, then this is the next extension of that theory.
You need to get past such simpleton thought patterns as to stop reading after a couple of lines with which you disagree.
It was an interesting piece and there are several nuggets of truth later in the column. I’m not suggesting that the writer is 100% correct in all her assertions. However, the suggestions are as valid as any other when dealing with group dynamics.
Either teachers are waging war against conservative values by attempting to eradicate natural masulinity, and that's why our schools are no good, or we are caving to brute masculinity, and that's why our schools are no good. But I do not see how it can be both.
I don’t agree with the “ape stuff”, but it does explain a lot of what I’ve seen in the classroom. Females absolutely DO behave this way in a classroom setting. I have seen it over and over.
You need to get past such simpleton thought patterns as to stop reading after a couple of lines with which you disagree.
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Time is fleeting . . . time is valuable . . .
No kidding. I think the government school system is an abject failure and that most school teachers are incompetent liberal morons (obviously, convervative teachers are excepted). But this article hardly explains anything.
I thought female school teachers were supposed to hate boys and hold them back to spite them? Pretty sure I’ve read that one. Or get them put on ritalin. Not reward bullies.
The logic here is just nonexistent.
Um, in the old days, nuns in the West undertook serious ascetic discipline to help overcome the effects of the Fall. Not so clear since Vatican II that applies any more, though now in the liberal orders that have dispensed with the habit, a distressingly high percentage look like absent the vow of celibaby they’d have been bull dyke lesbians.
I can see how it can be both.
Little kids playing kiss-chase or (as in one famous case) flicking each other on the butt as part of a game: - this kind of behaviour has been unnaturally oppressed by PC authority figures in schools for being some kind of “sexual harassment”. The hysterical over-reaction has included the turning of six-year olds into registered sex offenders.
Whereas one kid punching another kid is the kind of behaviour which should be always prohibited and controlled in a properly run school environment, not enabled or appeased.
Agree totally.
The article is great in it’s recognition of the problem regardless of the evolutionary/creationistic cause of it.
Societal training has created this “placating response” by the teachers... and this feminization has spread to the whole of the institution (male and female instructors). This is exacerbated by the lack of parental discipline.
Our PC system has eliminated any connection between cause and effect. There is no follow-through because the student knows that even if the teacher actually finds the testicular capacity to send them to the principal’s office, and even if the principal takes some kind of action, that there will be no follow through in the community or at home.
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