time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like a banana)
Holy crap, it is August already?! This year is flying by.
Christopher left for a 3-week business trip today. He'll be in Malta for a week and then Ireland for 2 weeks, so he won't be back until the end of the month. Unless, ,you know, they change the dates again. We found out about this trip last week. It started as 4 days, then a week, then two, now three... and now we find out that some of the equipment they shipped there is damaged, so who knows what he'll actually find when he gets there. Hmph. Stupid work, stealing my boyfriend. People at my work seem to think that this will free me up to do "what I want to do," but secretly I spend most of my non-work hours hanging out with Christopher and thoroughly enjoying it, so that theory is shot. (Does that make me codependent, or just in a good relationship? Maybe it just makes me an introvert, happy enough with one boy and two cats.)
I've been thinking academic thoughts lately. Thinking about how as humans evolved, the way we see the world must have become adaptive, and this makes me wonder how much of our social system is based on "truth", and how much is based on this niche that we've evolved to fit into. I've also been thinking about how we do so much of our thinking in narrative form, and how if those narratives are threatened, we get very defensive and illogical. It doesn't matter whether you question someone's religion or their vegetarianism or their politics or their stance on abortion... it's very hard to have a level-headed discussion about this. It's very easy to get emotions running high and to take these disagreements personally, and that's very interesting to me. It seems like our capacity to discuss these issues calmly and without offense is, well, kind of broken. But if it's similarly broken across the species... maybe it's an adaptive trait with some negative consequences.
Of course, I haven't a clue who else is writing or researching about this, so I'm not sure who to read. Seems like sociology or psychology at first glance, but you would think that a good theory of brain would cover this.
Labels: christopher, evolution, narrative
posted by Heather Ann @ 9:45 PM
2 Comments:
Interesting thing to think about. I think that humans needed to be defensive in order to survive all along the way and this "verbal" or "intellectual" defensiveness is probably a remnant. We certainly can be irrational when we become passionate about something can't we?
Yeah, it seems that the amount of discomfort caused by someone questioning our opinions is proportional to how central the opinion is to our worldview. So if I say that Hemingway was born in 1902 and someone says, "No, it was 1899," I probably wouldn't be quite as angry as I would if they were disagreeing with me about, say, politics.
It's true about narratives. We all make up a story about the world we live in, and it's extremely disconcerting when someone casts doubt upon it.
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