Taming the Human Nature

It has been painful watching the T.V. news.  Disregarding the sensationalized or superficially reported stories, many well researched reports can be very depressing commentaries on the state of human nature.   

But now we hear daily of atrocities humans are subjecting others to.  The primary victims are girls and women who are mistreated by their families, husbands, government officials and brutal savages whose life’s goal is destruction for domination.  Recent articles about mistreatment of women in Muslim countries cite mutilation, humiliation, rape, murder and every possible kind of desecration.  But there is so much more.  There are terrorists blowing themselves up trying to take as many innocent lives with them.  There are business people who cheat their customers, husbands who lie to and cheat on their wives, criminals who violate our laws of decency, the abuse of animals in bullfights, in the jungle, at sea and in overcrowded chicken coops.  We wage wars that kill and maim and write laws that are cruel and inhumane.  Even our religions betray us with shallow theologies and divisiveness leading to intolerance and violence.

Our human nature must be tamed, but how?  Creating cultures and civilizations with laws and philosophies that foster good will have been our way of taming our nature, but even they have failed us leading to greater conflict.  What can we create that can bring out our good qualities and make the disruptive ones seem out of place?  What have we created for this purpose as well as for many others?

There is one that I can think of.  It took thousands of years, at least 15,000 by some counts, but Man has worked hand in hand with nature to produce a remedy to free our better selves.  We created the modern dog.

It turns out that it doesn’t take long to turn a fox, wolf or coyote into a dog.  By mating the most docile member of a litter with another, these species become doglike in three generations.  Remember, for them one generation can be just a few years.  By breeding just for temperament, the offspring change their fur color, their size, shape and their nature.  They become domesticated.

But how does taming their wild nature help humans tame theirs? 

From their beginning we have needed dogs to help us in our daily lives.  When humans were still hunters and gatherers, dogs helped us find our prey and sometimes helped us capture or retrieve them.  They helped us when we started raising our own food by herding our livestock and protecting our lives and property.  Today, dogs are used to find bombs, identify disease, help the blind walk and bring comfort to the elderly and disabled.  But most of all, dogs give us love, unconditional love.

Dogs are not judgmental.  They don’t respond to people based on physical appearance, financial status, political point of view or social status. Their unconditional love resonates deep within us to ignite the unconditional love that is at the heart of our very nature and temporarily suspends our fear, which is also at our core.

Scientists have now found a physiological expression for this apparent canine gift.  They have found that when humans pet their dogs it increases the level of oxytocin in both.  Oxytocin is the same chemical that is produced when a mother nurses her baby and feels a bonding.  The oxytocin is the bonding glue.  Oxytocin levels are also elevated during intimate human interaction leading to its orgasmic conclusion.  Oxytocin in our system makes us open and trusting while the testosterone in us is a counterbalance making us also somewhat leery and aggressive. People with high levels of the former and low ones of the latter tend to be very trusting, easy targets for conmen and charlatans.

But dogs are not intent on tricking us.  They want their basic necessities met - enough food, water and opportunities to eliminate waste products - and beyond them, the only goal is love and joy.

There are now more than 100 million dogs.  There are some 150,000 dogs in San Francisco, more than the number of the city’s children. Dogs come in more varieties than do any other species and range in size more than any other.  A mature dog can weigh anywhere from barely two pounds to over 200.  So in the same species a dog can be 100 times the size of  another.  Can you imagine if some adult humans were 100 times the size of other adults?

Dogs are the rare living creatures that were created by Man.  We started more than 15,000 years ago the process of making dogs to serve our individual needs.  There are hunting dogs that point to the prey and retrieve them when they are killed or who look for animals or people to capture.  There are herding dogs who take care of our livestock be they sheep or cattle.  There are dogs that hunt rodents like gophers, mice and rats.  There even is a dog, the Kings Charles Cavalier spaniel, created to sit on the king’s lap and attract the fleas away from the royal.  There are dogs that offer protection, those who are small enough to be carried everywhere, those who can help the blind find their way and even those who bark the whole time their master is gone.  There are dogs that can find bombs, drugs or even disease.

Some anthropologists believe that Man could not have survived without dogs.

But their gift goes much deeper than function.  Dogs make humans better.  They make us kinder, more compassionate, more considerate, more secure, less lonely, more loved and needed and more open to others dogs and their companions.  Dogs break up many of our artificial cultural barriers.  They make us better people by taming our nature with unconditional love and affection.

But there is one thing wrong with dogs: they get old, suffer and die.  Dogs, like all finite things, have a beginning and an end.  The beginning is the cause for great joy.  The end is cause for unbearable sorrow.  It is the death of the innocent.  The constant reminder of the cruelty of nature’s entropy.

Whom Do You Trust?

                           
When I was going to school on the west side of Manhattan I used to get free tickets to see a new show broadcast just down the block.  The name of the show was “Who Do You Trust?” and was hosted by a young man from the midwest named Johnny Carson.  He later replaced a future Westchester neighbor of mine named Jack Paar on another show called “ The Tonight Show.”

I don’t remember what the quiz show was like anymore but do remember the incorrect grammar of it, “Who” instead of “Whom.”

But now the question arises in my mind on a more frequent basis.  Whom or who do I trust?  Whom should I trust?

We always trusted our priests.  They were holy and only did good.  Now we know that there have been many abuses of young parishioners and realize that though the mass media has never mentioned this, that this has probably been going on for centuries. And what made matters worse was that those on top of the church hierarchy covered up the crimes making more people subject to abuse.  Our evangelical leaders faired no better, not able to resist the sexual relations they preached against. And let us not forget the mullahs who preach hatred and violence to foster their campaign of the subjugation of women, their apparent raison d’etre. Should or can we trust our religious leaders?

What about teachers?  Can we trust them with our children?  Again we hear of cases of abuse of children by teachers, religious and lay (excuse the expression).  It also turns out that some are not competent but are kept on because they have tenure just like the abusive priests.  In some more primitive states, teachers want to teach Genesis instead of evolution to their students who yearn to know how we got here.  When our first black President made a presentation to students, early in his term, some teachers would not let their students watch the black, Muslim, communist, socialist president, as they saw him. Can we trust such people with our kids and with the nation’s education?

What about our bankers and financiers?  Can we trust them?  If you had money in Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo or now Barclay’s, you have probably realized that you cannot trust them to put your welfare above or on a par with their own interests.  They actually admitted it to a congressional committee trying to find out what caused the financial crash of ’08. Companies like Goldman Sachs knowingly bundled bad loans and sold them to their own clients while actually betting against them at the same time.  Why would anyone continue to do business with such companies, companies they can no longer trust?

But surely we can trust our doctors.  They go to school for eight years taking only math and science courses then intern for a year or two, then residence for another few years and then become fellows for a few more.  They are usually well into their 30s before they see us as regular patients.  Surely we can trust them. Now we learn that their are at least 100,000 deaths a year due to hospital error. Every night on the national news we learn that the doctors were wrong about something else and that we should stop doing what they told us to do.  The drugs they offered women to prevent problems with their bones, only work for five years after which they actually cause bones to break.  Aspirin was recommended for everyone to avoid stroke, heart attacks and even cancer, now has been found to present too many other health risks and should be used only by people with known heart problems. Then there are mammograms, MRIs, x-rays all thought mainly beneficial now found to cause to potentially life threatening problems if overdone. And for men using a drug to make their hair grow back so that they are more attractive to the opposite sex we learn that they can lose their willingness or ability to have sex with their newfound intimates. We spend more on medicine than any other developed country and yet have some of the worst results.  Can we trust our physicians?

But what about our free press, blessed by our very first amendment to the Constitution, surely we can trust them to give the information we need, or can we? Not only has our mass media been characterized as sensationalist and shallow or just inaccurate, it can also be biased.  The most glaring example, besides all of Fox “news,” recently was the media’s presentation of a shooting in Florida.  A neighborhood watch volunteer overstepped his responsibility and took on a 17 year-old football player late at night.  The media wanting a conviction deleted part of the 911 tape to make the shooter sound racist and then showed the wrong picture of the volunteer making him look like a large Mexican drug dealer in what appeared to be prison garb.  After finding out that the defendant looked nothing like that now, if he ever did, they continued to show the old picture.  The correct picture showed a slight man who looked more like an intellectual than a drug lord.  They showed a picture of the 17 year-old victim as he looked when he was 12.  Anyone looking at it should have known that this was not what the victim looked like.  He was at least 6 feet tall, tattooed and with an attitude reflected in a current picture of himself giving the finger with both hands, showing he was ambidextrous, a double threat.  It now appears that the victim attacked and beat the volunteer who was afraid for his life and shot the boy at close range to protect himself.  It took months for the media to show us pictures taken at the night of the event showing that the shooter had a broken nose and the back of his head was all bloody.  This is not to say that the shooter is innocent. It is only to say that the media conspired to convict him with inaccurate reporting.

After the long awaited Supreme Court decision that took over three months to write and was released on the last possible day, two stations got the decision wrong because they didn’t read past page one.  The media has become more of the stenographer of canned answers than the source of probing, challenging questions, a la Edward R. Morrow and Mike Wallace.

But we can surely trust the Supreme Court.  These nine justices are the best our society can produce.  They each have long careers practicing the law.  But we now have one who has never asked a question, has rarely written the majority or minority opinion, and has always sided with his partisans.  We have at least two others that are so far to the right that you know exactly how they will rule in each case - if it involves big business, big business wins -corporations are people aren’t they? The Supreme Court decided to hear the 2000 election issue involving Florida’s accuracy problems during the vote count.  The Democrats wanted a recount.  The Republicans wanted the inaccurate results to stand after their candidate’s brother, the state’s governor,  had worked so hard to falsify them. The court ruled along party lines giving America one of the worst presidencies in our history, one that left the country on the verge of bankruptcy and involved in two unnecessary wars costing more than 100,000 lives and trillions of tax dollars.  This same court then went on to allow unlimited campaign financing by super PACS arguing that corporations are people and have first amendment rights to free speech through financial contributions.  The justices felt that if any private campaign financing was destroying our democracy, increasing it would help expedite the deterioration.  Can we trust these esteemed jurors?

But at least we have our elected officials.  The core of our great nation’s democracy is representative government through free and open elections.  American citizens can vote for and elect the person whom they feel best represents their interests. We have 535 congress people representing our best interests.  Or are they?  Currently only nine percent of our people trust the Congress.  You can only wonder who these nine per cent are.  It has become painfully clear that the Republicans have done everything they could think of to thwart the President’s attempts at improving our conditions after the previous administration’s train wreck declaring that their primary objective is to deny the President a second term not to fix our economy. It has also come to light that many of these legislators were also on the take.  Some bought or sold stocks based on inside legislative information.  Others accepted favors from corporations like free golf trips to Scotland on private corporate jets in exchange for favorable legislation.  Still others allowed lobbyists to actually write legislation favorable to their efforts.  The only word that comes to mind to describe such people is a five letter unmentionable name which begins with the letter “W” and is usually attributed to pliers of the second oldest profession.  Using this term for legislators is an insult to their namesakes.  Not even congress people trust congress people and they should know.

So who or whom does that leave?  We can hopefully trust our family and friends, much of the time except when too much money is at stake.  We can trust our instincts if they are counterbalanced with clear thinking and honest observation.

We can trust the exceptions to all these groups.

There are some wonderful religious leaders in every religion with great faith and wisdom.

There are also a number of important educators who do their best to help their students see the truths about the world around them.

There are even some honest bankers and financiers who put their clients first, give generously to charity and want to make this a better country.

Our doctors have saved countless lives with skilled and innovative surgery and/or the prescription of appropriate medication.  They are on the front lines fighting cancer, heart disease and the other medical causes of our suffering.  This very column would not exist if not for excellent surgeons who have performed numerous life-saving operations on behalf of its writer.

There have also been courageous reporters like Morrow and Wallace but also Russert, Chronkite, Brinkley, Lehr, McNeil, Fareed Zakaria and even Anderson Cooper.  There are also excellent and beautiful ones like Nora O’Donnell, Mika Brzezinski, Savannah Guthrie, Kelley O’Donnell, Ann Notarangelo, Sharyn Alfonsi and Laura Logan, to name a few.  I find that PBS can usually be relied upon for accurate and in depth reporting and can always find at least five very dry jokes in every evening broadcast of Brian William’s NBC news show.

When it comes to the Supreme Court and our Congress, it seems hard to trust those on the right who are clearly in the wrong.  The right wing partisanship has soured these institutions which used to be deserving of the highest respect. But even some on the other side of the aisle have been guilty of accepting favors in return for some of their own at the public’s expense.  But even with these groups there are a few great souls doing the good work.  Our current president might be the best example of that.  Surely, there are congress people who truly love their country and try to work cooperatively to improve the lives of our people. However, no name comes to mind.

And when all else fails, you can trust this column to bring you ideas whose author truly believes will be of benefit to the you.  Trust me. Whom else can you trust?