It's easy to decide we are a horrible species if you listen to our complaints about ourselves. Most of us dismiss the rest of the population as being a bunch of idiots or nasty, and while this is possibly true, it is also a matter of perspective.
So I asked google, the font of all wisdom, what men are. It suggested search terms of (among other silly things) waffles and lonely. When I asked it what women are, it suggested, more curiously, are talking, werewolves, blind to male advances, from Venus, hypergamous (I'd not heard the word before) and finally I found this, women are wonderful effect. I've not heard of this effect before, but compared to men... yeh. Women don't start wars, women don't do most of the violence. I am not saying there aren't women out there who aren't awful people but I don't know how many centuries ago a woman started a war, as opposed to defending her country in a war. And yes some women might be violent in that she slaps a kid or a man but is he genuinely afraid for his life when she slaps him? How many women go on these shooting sprees without a man? Yes I know a very few have but men do most of the killing sprees.
I found the google suggestions curious. Women as seen from a male perspective and men as individuals. It became even more so when I searched on 'older women'.
Anyway I digress.
I guess our introspection is proof we are trying to be better, trying to understand ourselves. And we have improved. It wasn't many centuries ago the government would hold public executions (the last public execution in the US was 1936! not even a century ago) are the people brought picnics to watch people die, although this was the 1600s. Also there were 'witch' killings. Pinker's book 'the better angels of our nature' puts forth this idea, but in my opinion society has gotten better because women have gotten more power. Even children have gotten more power. And society will be at it's best when everyone and their time is treated as equally important.
Men have a habit of basically saying, men aren't bad but humans are not good, which is away of putting the blame on everyone in our society rather than taking any blame for their own behavior. And men like to narrow themselves down to a uniform block. Uniform blocks exclude so much of who we are. But humanity is anything but a uniform block. We are extremely diverse. We are not all bad and we are not all good either, and no one is exclusively either. There are probably many more good men than there are bad, and similarly we shouldn't Disney-fy all children as being pure innocents. There is no doubt there are probably many very awful women too. But I think we need to see the spectrum of who we are rather than seeing a pigeon hole, or a generalization, because that is a lazy thinkers primary method of dismissing the differences - and to some extent I think we need to call ourselves humans rather than 'men' because we are a multitude (not just humans but our environment) and we have a multitude of responses.
At the same time some people like to magnify differences so we can dismiss whole portions of society as not being worthwhile. This is also lazy thinking.
We have distanced ourselves from our violent past, but we should never forget it. We need to marvel at how far we've come as a species. We do amazing things to help each other and other species all the time.
So I asked google, the font of all wisdom, what men are. It suggested search terms of (among other silly things) waffles and lonely. When I asked it what women are, it suggested, more curiously, are talking, werewolves, blind to male advances, from Venus, hypergamous (I'd not heard the word before) and finally I found this, women are wonderful effect. I've not heard of this effect before, but compared to men... yeh. Women don't start wars, women don't do most of the violence. I am not saying there aren't women out there who aren't awful people but I don't know how many centuries ago a woman started a war, as opposed to defending her country in a war. And yes some women might be violent in that she slaps a kid or a man but is he genuinely afraid for his life when she slaps him? How many women go on these shooting sprees without a man? Yes I know a very few have but men do most of the killing sprees.
I found the google suggestions curious. Women as seen from a male perspective and men as individuals. It became even more so when I searched on 'older women'.
Anyway I digress.
I guess our introspection is proof we are trying to be better, trying to understand ourselves. And we have improved. It wasn't many centuries ago the government would hold public executions (the last public execution in the US was 1936! not even a century ago) are the people brought picnics to watch people die, although this was the 1600s. Also there were 'witch' killings. Pinker's book 'the better angels of our nature' puts forth this idea, but in my opinion society has gotten better because women have gotten more power. Even children have gotten more power. And society will be at it's best when everyone and their time is treated as equally important.
Men have a habit of basically saying, men aren't bad but humans are not good, which is away of putting the blame on everyone in our society rather than taking any blame for their own behavior. And men like to narrow themselves down to a uniform block. Uniform blocks exclude so much of who we are. But humanity is anything but a uniform block. We are extremely diverse. We are not all bad and we are not all good either, and no one is exclusively either. There are probably many more good men than there are bad, and similarly we shouldn't Disney-fy all children as being pure innocents. There is no doubt there are probably many very awful women too. But I think we need to see the spectrum of who we are rather than seeing a pigeon hole, or a generalization, because that is a lazy thinkers primary method of dismissing the differences - and to some extent I think we need to call ourselves humans rather than 'men' because we are a multitude (not just humans but our environment) and we have a multitude of responses.
At the same time some people like to magnify differences so we can dismiss whole portions of society as not being worthwhile. This is also lazy thinking.
We have distanced ourselves from our violent past, but we should never forget it. We need to marvel at how far we've come as a species. We do amazing things to help each other and other species all the time.
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