Saturday, April 17, 2010
Nice pair of genes!
When is it amoral to have an affair, no matter whether it be a one night stand or something a little meatier?
The other day I caught a story in which a rather crestfallen man discovered, by chance and DNA testing, that all four of his children had been fathered by other men! His wife, during ovulation, had sought out partners of a particular genetic profile. It was probably not conscious, more a driving need but she gave way to it on four separate occasions. One thing is for sure, something about the make-up of her husband's cells sent her scurrying for something different!
Once, when I did some consultancy work for a hospital management team, I was told by midwives that anecdotal knowledge, accumulated over time, suggested that between one and two in every ten children are not born of their legal fathers. The official figure is one in ten. Women of all walks of life, rich or poor, are fully capable of breaking the bonds of happy matrimony and playing the field.
This is a paradox at the heart of societies. While the majority uphold social conventions regarding the sanctity of families, they can still be susceptible to their loins and then their logic gives way to illicit sex and bastard offspring. The rather poignant point of their behaviour is that their genes override everything conventional in their attitudes and set them on this course towards extra-marital promiscuity, for entirely worthy reasons.
The cause of their philandering is that they ‘sense’ that their partners’ gene pools are not sufficiently different from their own to be certain that their offspring will be healthy. In an experiment to show this, women and men were asked to sniff the tee shirts of members of the opposite sex and rate them according to their attractiveness to them. The pattern of results showed, unequivocally, that they rated the tee shirt which was most dissimilar from their own gene profile as the most attractive.
It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female but you have this sense of which you are consciously unaware. Let’s call it genetic sensitivity. Could it be a defence that might stand up in a court of law? As Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, could we argue that in certain circumstances we are not of sound mind, we are at the behest of our DNA? Should we even allow divorce on the grounds of a woman’s infidelity when she is driven by altruism rather than lust? Seeking an unalike genetic partner must be a biological imperative to ensure that her own genes and those of humanity, as a whole, prosper, thus reducing the opportunity for malfunctioning DNA to weaken the population.
This must be the true meaning of the French maxim, vive la difference!
When is it amoral to have an affair, no matter whether it be a one night stand or something a little meatier?
The other day I caught a story in which a rather crestfallen man discovered, by chance and DNA testing, that all four of his children had been fathered by other men! His wife, during ovulation, had sought out partners of a particular genetic profile. It was probably not conscious, more a driving need but she gave way to it on four separate occasions. One thing is for sure, something about the make-up of her husband's cells sent her scurrying for something different!
Once, when I did some consultancy work for a hospital management team, I was told by midwives that anecdotal knowledge, accumulated over time, suggested that between one and two in every ten children are not born of their legal fathers. The official figure is one in ten. Women of all walks of life, rich or poor, are fully capable of breaking the bonds of happy matrimony and playing the field.
This is a paradox at the heart of societies. While the majority uphold social conventions regarding the sanctity of families, they can still be susceptible to their loins and then their logic gives way to illicit sex and bastard offspring. The rather poignant point of their behaviour is that their genes override everything conventional in their attitudes and set them on this course towards extra-marital promiscuity, for entirely worthy reasons.
The cause of their philandering is that they ‘sense’ that their partners’ gene pools are not sufficiently different from their own to be certain that their offspring will be healthy. In an experiment to show this, women and men were asked to sniff the tee shirts of members of the opposite sex and rate them according to their attractiveness to them. The pattern of results showed, unequivocally, that they rated the tee shirt which was most dissimilar from their own gene profile as the most attractive.
It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female but you have this sense of which you are consciously unaware. Let’s call it genetic sensitivity. Could it be a defence that might stand up in a court of law? As Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene, could we argue that in certain circumstances we are not of sound mind, we are at the behest of our DNA? Should we even allow divorce on the grounds of a woman’s infidelity when she is driven by altruism rather than lust? Seeking an unalike genetic partner must be a biological imperative to ensure that her own genes and those of humanity, as a whole, prosper, thus reducing the opportunity for malfunctioning DNA to weaken the population.
This must be the true meaning of the French maxim, vive la difference!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Politics of Empty Rhetoric
So, the UK election fracas has begun in earnest. Being 3000 miles away gives me a certain dispassionate objectivity these days where once I would have been spitting tacks and feeling that if the Tories get in it would mean the end of life as we know it, Captain. Like all manner of experiences, the mind becomes indifferent when the object of desire loses its immediacy. But I manage to hang on in, some days, and evaluate the rhetoric as I see them doing their TV-glossed thing.
Cameron said today that this would be an end to Big Government. Instead a Big Country would be in charge. The Uk’s social infra-structure would see far more guidance and leadership from ordinary people who have a right to determine what is being done for them. A bit socialist, prithee! Meanwhile he has managed to cajole one hundred and fifty Big Business leaders to sign up saying they support the Tories in not raising national insurance contributions. I suppose I could get a hundred and fifty figures from any walk of life to sign up to a policy which increases their profit margins.
At the heart of this bandying of policies is a curious contradiction. Cameron says that the incumbent Government have no credibility in the face of the combined experience of business leaders. They know nothing. However, the Tories do not suggest that businesses would be run better if Big Business Executives shared their power with a Big Country, or even those lower down the organisation. Here, they are in absolute agreement that the Executive must rule the rest.
Both Labour and Tory rhetoric promotes the increased engagement of the everyday person in all manner of professional services. More public accountability, they both bleat. I’m not so sure. What on earth is the point of training professionals to do medicine, education, social work and whatever else and then hamstring them with a committee of naives, laypersons, novices, obsessives, fanatics....
The law can take care of those who break it in any profession and it is there that a jury of ordinary men and women can have their final say. It is the professions that must take the ultimate responsibility for their development and moral purchase on social life, based upon fairness, respect and equal opportunity for all. Give the public the lever of power to lead these domains and we’d have hanging, flogging, a curriculum of learned facts without the nous to apply them, classified drugs everywhere (except alcohol which kills more than the rest put together) and a dictatorship of the middle classes (because the lack of education of the poor at present prevents them having any say in their Big Country). It’s time we stopped electing MPs (who have shown their propensity for venal, invidious and self-aggrandising behaviours) to further the outdated ideologies of their Parties and, instead, elect them for their independence of thought and their expressed concerns for particular issues. Then Parliament might be fun, intellectually absorbing and in itself an education of the Big Country, instead of a ragbag of ill-educated, emotional trumpeting from all sides.
So, the UK election fracas has begun in earnest. Being 3000 miles away gives me a certain dispassionate objectivity these days where once I would have been spitting tacks and feeling that if the Tories get in it would mean the end of life as we know it, Captain. Like all manner of experiences, the mind becomes indifferent when the object of desire loses its immediacy. But I manage to hang on in, some days, and evaluate the rhetoric as I see them doing their TV-glossed thing.
Cameron said today that this would be an end to Big Government. Instead a Big Country would be in charge. The Uk’s social infra-structure would see far more guidance and leadership from ordinary people who have a right to determine what is being done for them. A bit socialist, prithee! Meanwhile he has managed to cajole one hundred and fifty Big Business leaders to sign up saying they support the Tories in not raising national insurance contributions. I suppose I could get a hundred and fifty figures from any walk of life to sign up to a policy which increases their profit margins.
At the heart of this bandying of policies is a curious contradiction. Cameron says that the incumbent Government have no credibility in the face of the combined experience of business leaders. They know nothing. However, the Tories do not suggest that businesses would be run better if Big Business Executives shared their power with a Big Country, or even those lower down the organisation. Here, they are in absolute agreement that the Executive must rule the rest.
Both Labour and Tory rhetoric promotes the increased engagement of the everyday person in all manner of professional services. More public accountability, they both bleat. I’m not so sure. What on earth is the point of training professionals to do medicine, education, social work and whatever else and then hamstring them with a committee of naives, laypersons, novices, obsessives, fanatics....
The law can take care of those who break it in any profession and it is there that a jury of ordinary men and women can have their final say. It is the professions that must take the ultimate responsibility for their development and moral purchase on social life, based upon fairness, respect and equal opportunity for all. Give the public the lever of power to lead these domains and we’d have hanging, flogging, a curriculum of learned facts without the nous to apply them, classified drugs everywhere (except alcohol which kills more than the rest put together) and a dictatorship of the middle classes (because the lack of education of the poor at present prevents them having any say in their Big Country). It’s time we stopped electing MPs (who have shown their propensity for venal, invidious and self-aggrandising behaviours) to further the outdated ideologies of their Parties and, instead, elect them for their independence of thought and their expressed concerns for particular issues. Then Parliament might be fun, intellectually absorbing and in itself an education of the Big Country, instead of a ragbag of ill-educated, emotional trumpeting from all sides.
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Sadists, Paedophiles and Dissemblers: All the Pope's Men...
Imagine a grand palace where officials wear gold and purple, where the decor is splendid beyond even the capacity of a billionaire to reproduce, where there is a hushed silence everywhere and where the central figure, a man among men, is treated as though the Divine emanates from his every molecule. Meanwhile imagine a grim barracks-like detention centre where there is nothing playful to lighten the day and where children are beaten, sexually abused and have their childhoods systematically robbed from them. The latter may have taken place over hundreds of years, there is no way of knowing. The former has been the staple diet and centre-piece of the Catholic Church’s control over millions of people through time.
My knowledge of the history of religion is somewhat piecemeal, mainly because the doings of the various churches that have Christianity at their core, leave me cold and sometimes furious. In fact a key source is a book called Q by Luther Blissett which traces, fictionally, the Reformation. For those of you who know the name Luther Blissett, he was a footballer who went to one of the Milan clubs and played outrageously primitively but created a cult of adoration. A few fans turned out to be good historians and wrote Q, under the pseudonym of their hero’s name! Anyway, back to my thoughts: maybe it is not the place of an agnostic such as I to be critical of religion but even so I expect someone called The Holy Father to eschew riches, be pure of heart and demonstrate in his every act, the teachings of his purported Son of God.
Instead, the abysmal gap between the Pontiff’s Vatican and the Catholic care homes, schools and seminaries around Europe over the last few decades, seems as wide as is conceivable. Although his lieutenants obligingly apologised to their flocks on Easter Sunday, at the same time another of the Pope’s ‘mouths’ was saying that scurrilous rumours regarding the Pope’s previous role as a bishop and condoner of his priests’ unforgiveable crimes was akin to the treatment of Jews in the holocaust. Hyperbole is not dead. A further senior mouthpiece for the Papal tongue, said that rumours regarding the Pope’s behaviour were trivial gossip. Meanwhile, the Pope said nothing.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that an organisation that purports to uphold Christian values, that believes in one God, his Son and the Holy Spirit, would, as a matter of course, be able to tease out those who do not demonstrate the much needed piety and purity. But there have been no such tests of the quality of these servants of God. Whether they entered the Catholic Church in order to perpetrate crimes against the very young, or whether the culture of the seminaries is such that their desires were fed by their brethren, I have no idea but these men (and some Nuns in Eire and elsewhere) were able to stand in front of their congregations, issuing homilies about how to live a good life and meanwhile make demands on the rich and poor to give generously to the Church. And all the while, their horrific acts were concealed by their superiors, to protect the reputation of the Vatican or to protect their own criminal pasts.
Imagine a grand palace where officials wear gold and purple, where the decor is splendid beyond even the capacity of a billionaire to reproduce, where there is a hushed silence everywhere and where the central figure, a man among men, is treated as though the Divine emanates from his every molecule. Meanwhile imagine a grim barracks-like detention centre where there is nothing playful to lighten the day and where children are beaten, sexually abused and have their childhoods systematically robbed from them. The latter may have taken place over hundreds of years, there is no way of knowing. The former has been the staple diet and centre-piece of the Catholic Church’s control over millions of people through time.
My knowledge of the history of religion is somewhat piecemeal, mainly because the doings of the various churches that have Christianity at their core, leave me cold and sometimes furious. In fact a key source is a book called Q by Luther Blissett which traces, fictionally, the Reformation. For those of you who know the name Luther Blissett, he was a footballer who went to one of the Milan clubs and played outrageously primitively but created a cult of adoration. A few fans turned out to be good historians and wrote Q, under the pseudonym of their hero’s name! Anyway, back to my thoughts: maybe it is not the place of an agnostic such as I to be critical of religion but even so I expect someone called The Holy Father to eschew riches, be pure of heart and demonstrate in his every act, the teachings of his purported Son of God.
Instead, the abysmal gap between the Pontiff’s Vatican and the Catholic care homes, schools and seminaries around Europe over the last few decades, seems as wide as is conceivable. Although his lieutenants obligingly apologised to their flocks on Easter Sunday, at the same time another of the Pope’s ‘mouths’ was saying that scurrilous rumours regarding the Pope’s previous role as a bishop and condoner of his priests’ unforgiveable crimes was akin to the treatment of Jews in the holocaust. Hyperbole is not dead. A further senior mouthpiece for the Papal tongue, said that rumours regarding the Pope’s behaviour were trivial gossip. Meanwhile, the Pope said nothing.
I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that an organisation that purports to uphold Christian values, that believes in one God, his Son and the Holy Spirit, would, as a matter of course, be able to tease out those who do not demonstrate the much needed piety and purity. But there have been no such tests of the quality of these servants of God. Whether they entered the Catholic Church in order to perpetrate crimes against the very young, or whether the culture of the seminaries is such that their desires were fed by their brethren, I have no idea but these men (and some Nuns in Eire and elsewhere) were able to stand in front of their congregations, issuing homilies about how to live a good life and meanwhile make demands on the rich and poor to give generously to the Church. And all the while, their horrific acts were concealed by their superiors, to protect the reputation of the Vatican or to protect their own criminal pasts.
Labels: Pope. Paedophilia. Apologies..
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Advertising Death in the Taxis of Accra
I have reported occasionally on notices in the back windows of taxis and tro-tros because they contain enigmas, ironies or plain challenges to my own imagination. Two that I have seen during the past week are symbolic of key forces that are shaping Ghanaian society. If you have read previous blogs you would know that drivers go off to a cheap store and buy acid coloured sticky-backed letters which they then form into words or messages for following drivers and passengers to read. They are mostly religious, declaring their love of God (or fear of Him) usually via the channel of Christianity. They declare bits of biblical text and warnings if these are not heeded. But, as inferred at the outset, some seem to have been written by inscrutable minds, determined to baffle, amuse or create philosophical discourse.
The first one I saw was, “Heaven gate: no bribe”. Now isn’t this the perfect drawing together of religious and social politics? Ghana, despite Obama’s flattery about it being politically clean, is riven with problems of ‘chopping’, the local word for bribery. It is a great shame for the people here are generally courteous, passive and tolerant and the country would do much better if corruption was eradicated. At every level of business, most individuals who have a direct role in one's life seem to expect backhanders, whether it is customs, Government grants, traffic cops and all the usual Ministries. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that people, merely doing the job they are paid to do, will refuse to do it in good time, unless they are paid bribes. Even sometimes refusing to do it at all! Here, people shrug and say that that is the way of it. Some even suggest that it is no bad thing, since no-one is paid a decent basic salary in the first place. But to get into Heaven requires a purity of purpose and spirit that does not exist in every day realities.
The second sign was, “Ending is the problem”. How do you read its sense? I pondered a long time, after initially laughing out loud at its strange, cryptic truthfulness. For all of us, the ending is the problem. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, a conformed atheist, was seconds away from the final curtain when he realised that his impeccable logic, which proved that there could not be a God, could mean, equally, that there was a God! Deathbed revisionism. It is said that a sizeable proportion of lapsed Catholics enjoy a return to the fold during these dimming times. Anyway, as a writer and a mortal, I have often found endings to be a problem. We humans want the stories of our lives like those of good books, to be satisfying with everything tied up neatly and properly, regardless of whether we hope to spend eternity with a handful of virgins or a pastel Heaven full of angels with harps or being blown through the universe, dissembled into the atoms that originally came together to construct us.
I have reported occasionally on notices in the back windows of taxis and tro-tros because they contain enigmas, ironies or plain challenges to my own imagination. Two that I have seen during the past week are symbolic of key forces that are shaping Ghanaian society. If you have read previous blogs you would know that drivers go off to a cheap store and buy acid coloured sticky-backed letters which they then form into words or messages for following drivers and passengers to read. They are mostly religious, declaring their love of God (or fear of Him) usually via the channel of Christianity. They declare bits of biblical text and warnings if these are not heeded. But, as inferred at the outset, some seem to have been written by inscrutable minds, determined to baffle, amuse or create philosophical discourse.
The first one I saw was, “Heaven gate: no bribe”. Now isn’t this the perfect drawing together of religious and social politics? Ghana, despite Obama’s flattery about it being politically clean, is riven with problems of ‘chopping’, the local word for bribery. It is a great shame for the people here are generally courteous, passive and tolerant and the country would do much better if corruption was eradicated. At every level of business, most individuals who have a direct role in one's life seem to expect backhanders, whether it is customs, Government grants, traffic cops and all the usual Ministries. It is hard to come to terms with the fact that people, merely doing the job they are paid to do, will refuse to do it in good time, unless they are paid bribes. Even sometimes refusing to do it at all! Here, people shrug and say that that is the way of it. Some even suggest that it is no bad thing, since no-one is paid a decent basic salary in the first place. But to get into Heaven requires a purity of purpose and spirit that does not exist in every day realities.
The second sign was, “Ending is the problem”. How do you read its sense? I pondered a long time, after initially laughing out loud at its strange, cryptic truthfulness. For all of us, the ending is the problem. Wittgenstein, the philosopher, a conformed atheist, was seconds away from the final curtain when he realised that his impeccable logic, which proved that there could not be a God, could mean, equally, that there was a God! Deathbed revisionism. It is said that a sizeable proportion of lapsed Catholics enjoy a return to the fold during these dimming times. Anyway, as a writer and a mortal, I have often found endings to be a problem. We humans want the stories of our lives like those of good books, to be satisfying with everything tied up neatly and properly, regardless of whether we hope to spend eternity with a handful of virgins or a pastel Heaven full of angels with harps or being blown through the universe, dissembled into the atoms that originally came together to construct us.