Welcome to this new blog.

This is the beginning of my first blog, so you are likely to see "learning" mistakes.  Hang with me and it will get better.

Some of you may have read my Lumens as part of  

Pointless and Random Short Essays (PARSE)

PARSE was distributed through Facebook and to an e-mail list of friends and relatives.  Now, in an attempt to reach a larger audience, PARSE is gone and "Birds and Other Nonsense" is born.  Lumens 1-11 were distributed through PARSE and will be repeated in Birds and Other Nonsense, so those of you who read PARSE will see slightly modified versions of what you have already read.  Entirely new stuff will begin with Lumen 12.

 

Lumen 21-1, 4.0

Distinctive Features of Humanity

Posted July 26, 2021

Irrelevant tid bit – Elvis is dead, and I’m not feeling too good myself.

 

What characteristics do all humans share?  What do all human cultures/tribes have in common?  These are not original questions and my answers are also not original, but for some reason this topic has jumped into my head lately, so here is my list of distinctive features that permeate humans and our cultures.

Cave Horses

ART – I do not know how to define art but cave paintings and markings on practical/useful items, such as pots, seem to qualify as art.  Our way-back ancestors painted on cave walls including way back in the cave where it is dark, making it difficult to paint and appreciate the work.  A cave art show must have been a carefully managed event to prevent the patrons from becoming permanently part of the cave, as in getting lost.  This art clearly was important to them and all human cultures since then have some version of art.  Why?  Does art contribute to or enhance our intelligence?  If we explore the world in representative or abstract ways, do we come up with better new ideas, inventions, and operational plans (early humans came up with better hunting plans?)?

Chuck Berry

MUSIC – As with art, everywhere we find people, we find music: different instruments, different musical scales, different tempos, but always some kind of music.  We all have experienced the power of music: we do not have to be told to dance we just start moving, anthems and theme songs have great motivational power and help to cement groups together, and many people devote their entire lives to creating and performing this sound that has no practical application.  No things  (buildings, food, etc.) are created by music, yet we consider it an essential part of our lives.

(Art and Music could be the same thing expressed in different ways.)

Road Train

 TRANSPORTATION – We (humans) want to go somewhere else – The Silk Road, all roads lead to Rome, On the Road Again a la Willie Nelson.  This may seem ridiculously obvious and necessary, but plants do not move and still they prosper, and it is not too far a stretch to think that plants could have intelligence at the human level; they do not have that level of intelligence but they could without moving.

In recent years archeologists discovered that the Maya culture of Central America had roads that connected their towns.  With no vehicles (no wheels) and no horses, the roads are designed for walking humans, but they wanted to travel from one town to the next, and this is found in all human cultures.  Early humans survived by hunting and gathering – you might be able to hunt without moving if you can catch enough prey by waiting is one spot, but gathering requires moving across the countryside.  This could easily be the origin of our transportation desire which we satisfy by building animal-drawn carts, cars, planes, boats and ships, trains, etc.  We power our vehicles with animals, steam, gasoline, electricity, gravity, wood, anything we can find: just get me there.  We are always on the move, either as individuals or as populations.

 GREGARIOUSNESS/TEAMWORK - We want to be near each other so much that we live clumped up in cities when we could be spread out over the countryside.  The worst punishments are banishment, shunning, excommunication, solitary confinement, the silent treatment, exile.  Hermits are considered weird and loneliness is a major phycological problem.

A refined aspect of our gregarious nature is that if we form groups dedicated to a single or a set of purposes, we accomplish much more that if we work alone. This goes beyond each person sharing their special knowledge and skills.  Somehow it is like a magic power/ability is created/released and/or activated when we form teams that work together which results in the power/ability of the team being greater than the sum of the parts.

How does this work? 

For early man the value of teamwork in hunting is easy to see, and it is used by a wide range of predatory animals, but mankind has elevated and polished teamwork far beyond the obvious.  We thrive working together and languish alone.

Not surprisingly teamwork can easily be side tracked and made ineffective by disagreements/uncooperativeness among the participants.  “Dissension in the ranks” is an old cliché that is accurate in predicting trouble.  If everyone is not “on the same page”, “going the same direction” the benefits of teamwork quickly diminish or entirely disappear.  This great ability that we have to work together is very valuable and at the same time very fragile.

Om - Hindu Symbol

HIGHER POWER – The world is complicated and works in mysterious and frightening ways.  The seasons change and early astronomers, very early astronomers who were likely also considered as community leaders/priests, were able to track and accurately predict the change of the seasons while not knowing why or how the change happened.  This is serious survival stuff: if the seasons stopped changing or changed their schedule, crops will fail and famine will follow.  When we do not know how important things work, we search for answers and one convenient answer is that some god(s) or other higher power is responsible for the things we don’t understand.

Most (all?) human cultures have adopted this god answer to reduce their discomfort about not understanding how critical things work.  In fact, the god answer is so powerful that it dominates many cultures and not accepting the local god can lead to being kicked out of society and even killed.  (While not really relevant, it is interesting to observe that the bible was written by people who did not know where the sun goes at night.)

PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS - I’m not sure if all human cultures use psychedelic drugs, but it is something to think about.

  

We struggle to understand why these human characteristics govern us.  I think the reason(s) is obvious, but we can’t see it because we are in the middle of our own behavior which prevents us from getting the necessary perspective.  Someday aliens (intelligent species from another planet, not illegal border crossers) will visit us and see why we are how we are in five minutes.  When they tell us, we will all immediately go, “Of course, why didn’t I see that before.”