The parts and the whole...

We have believed - and we do believe now - that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible. - Indira Gandhi, 1917 - 1984

What a brilliant quote! It's so pivotal. Why isn't that as famous as it should be? Why doesn't everyone quote that on a daily basis?

Breakfast...

I like to put food in the slow cooker before I go to bed, because then I don't have to worry about cooking things in the morning. Frying or scrambling an egg is okay, and so is oatmeal, but one likes a change. I seldom eat cold cereal, and don't like it. So the slow cooker is a wonderful thing.

Last night I put leftover pork and some veggies and sauce in the crockpot and had it for breakfast and it came out weirdly tasteless. Disappointing.

I wonder why.

The Way...

Went to see the movie The Way with Lisa and Lynne this afternoon. We are all fascinated by the Camino de Santiago.

That was a lot of the fun: seeing the beautiful scenery of the Pyrenees and northern Spain.

The story is of an American eye doctor, Thomas Avery, a crochety old guy who is set in his ways and has little good to say to anyone, least of all his son Daniel. He's angry that Daniel decided to drop out of his PhD program to see the world. Then Thomas gets a phone call from France. Daniel has died in an accident in the Pyrenees on his first day of the pilgrimmage to Santiago.

Daniel goes to France to pick up his son's ashes, and decides, on something of a whim to walk the Camino - to take the pilgrimmage his son was embarking on, to do it for Daniel's sake, leaving his ashes along the way. "The Camino is always for yourself, not for someone else," the police Captain tells him.

Along the way, even though he wants to be alone in his anger and grief, Thomas is befriended by a hearty Netherlander, an angry Canadian (counter-stereotype, there!) and a crazy Irish writer. And of course, as it is supposed to do, walking the Camino changed Thomas' life. I don't know if it changed him at all - in fact, all the characters seem pretty much the same in the end. But it was worth the journey.

Good movie. It might have been better if Thomas Avery was a little more likeable, or if it asked deeper quesitons; but good all the same.

What a wonderful evening...

It isn't every day I get to hear, see, and meet one of my heroes.

The Writer's Festival today sponsored a talk by Steven Pinker about his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

It was terrific. He speaks as well as he writers, making his points clear and lucid. I wish I could be a student in one of his classes.

He said it all started with a Christmas blog in which people were asked what they felt optimistic about. (I'd like to see it - presumably its URL is included in the book.) Pinker noticed a trend in what experts had to say in their own fields, so he then researched it. People tend to say that times are violent, that there's more war and violence in the world than ever - and he thought, "that isn't right", and set out to prove it wasn't. And he did. He said that in prehistorical times, 15% of all deaths were by violence - and he talked about how this figure was calculated. In the past ten years, .001% of deaths are by violence. He gave the statistics on wars - war between nations, civil wars, and wars between superpowers - and even with the spikes for Word War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and Iran/Iraq, death by violence is in steady decline.



Why? He broke down the analysis very systematically, but the bottom line is education and a society that is steeped in what he calls modernity:the trend to cosmopolitanism, reason, and science. From the invention of the printing press to the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment, it's a process that has been accelerating. People do not need to burn witches when they have rational explanations for crop failure or disease; they don't need to plunder when they learn that trade is more profitable and less risky; with mass communications, people's circle of empathy expands to include more than their own family, tribe, race or nation. He quoted Voltaire: "Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

And the duration of wars is less: "We used to have the Hundred Years War. Now we have the Six Day War."

Has human nature actually changed? He doesn't think so. The average two-year old boy is still a violent creature. People still fantasize about murdering those who humiliate them. People play violent video-games, and enjoy violent movies. He cites government control as a large part of the psychological mechanism: we don't need to exact revenge for wrongs done to it, as the law does it for us. "A third party steps in and ends an endless round of vendetta." People are more aware of each other, and more aware of consequences - more aware of violence, too, and more sensitized to it. "Human nature is a complex thing. Motives push us every which way."

He talked Ray Balmeister's "Myth of Pure Evil" - regardless of the nature of the atrocity, the person who initiates it believes himself to be pushed to it, to be doing the reasonable thing, to be responding correctly - people don't believe themselves to be evil. While the victims of the atrocity see themselves as having provoked nothing, and being justified in retaliation. He cited the Joker in Batman as being the archetype of self-conscious evil - the colourful myth.

He said much else, all of it fascinating. I must read the book.

And I got his autograph.

For amusement value...

You can't take the sky from me... or do I mean: Out there, thataway?