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Nation Down To Last Hundred Grown-Ups
Staff, The Onion
‘Mature Adults Could Be Gone Within 50 Years,’ Experts Say
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According to alarming new figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation’s population of mature adults has been pushed to the brink of extinction, with only 104 grown-ups remaining in the country today.
The endangered demographic, which is projected to die out completely by 2060, is reportedly distinguished from other groups by numerous unique traits, including foresight, rationality, understanding of how to obtain and pay for a mortgage, personal responsibility, and the ability to enter a store without immediately purchasing whatever items they see and desire.
“Our grown-ups are disappearing at a much faster rate than we previously believed,” said Census Bureau chief Robert M. Groves, who believes the decline in responsible adults may now be irreversible. “Unfortunately, we’ve only recently noticed this terrible trend, perhaps because of this group’s unusual capacity to endure hardships with quiet dignity instead of whining loudly to draw attention to themselves.”
“If nothing is done, these wondrous individuals, with their special ability to consider the long-term consequences of their own behavior and act accordingly, will be wiped-out completely,” Groves added.
According to recent data, the grown-up population has plummeted dramatically since 1950, when a Census count found that more than 24 million Americans could both admit when they were wrong and respect a viewpoint other than their own. Today, only one in three million citizens can provide thoughtful advice to a fellow human being instead of immediately shifting the topic to their own personal issues or what they had for lunch.
(19 May 2011)
The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram
Scott London
David Abram is an unusual combination of anthropologist, philosopher and sleight-of-hand magician. Though he worked as a magician in the United States and Europe for a number of years, he attributes most of what he knows about magic to the time he spent in Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka learning from indigenous medicine people.
Performing magic is not simply about entertaining, he points out in this interview. “The task of the magician is to startle our senses and free us from outmoded ways of thinking.” The magician also plays an important ecological function, he says, by mediating between the human world and the “more-than-human” world that we inhabit.
When Abram published his book The Spell of the Sensuous in 1996, the reviewers practically exhausted their superlatives in praise of it.
… London: How did that lead to your subsequent interests in ecology and anthropology?
Abram: When I decided to return to college to finish my degree, I became very interested in the uses of magic in medicine. It struck me that this was a very old connection — that in traditional societies the healers were often magicians. So I traveled as an itinerant magician into various indigenous, traditional cultures in Southeast Asia — Sri Lanka, various parts of Indonesia, and Nepal — in the hopes of using my own skills as a sleight-of-hand magician to meet and come to know some of the traditional magicians, or medicine people, who apply their craft in those cultures.
… Abram: I discovered that very few of the medicine people that I met considered their work as healers to be their primary role or function for their communities. So even though they were the healers, or the medicine people, for their villages, they saw their ability to heal as a by-product of their more primary work. This more primary work had to do with the fact that these magicians rarely live at the middle of their communities or in the heart of the village. They always live out at the edge or just outside of the village — out among the rice paddies or in a cluster of wild boulders — because their skills are not encompassed within the human modality. They are, as it were, the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community — the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings.
… Abram: As I said, the shamans and sorcerers whom I encountered in my travels always said that their ability to heal people was a by-product of a different kind of healing. Their primary work is to heal the relation the village and the land, to balance the equilibrium between the human gang and the more-than-human field of forces. If the magician was not simultaneously doing this work of offering prayers and praises and ritual gestures to the other animals and to the powers of the earth and the sky, then he might heal someone in the community and someone else would fall sick, and then he would heal that other person, and someone else would fall sick. The source of the illness is often perceived as an imbalance within the person, but it is actually in the relation between the human village and the land that supports it, the land that yields up its food, its animals for skins for clothing, and its plants for food and medicine. Humans take so much from the land, and the magician’s task is to make sure that we humans always return something to the land so that there is a two-way flow, that the boundary between us — the human culture and the rest of nature — stays a porous boundary. The magician ensures that that boundary is a membrane through which there is this two-way flow, and that the boundary never becomes a barrier shutting out the other-than-human powers from our awareness.
(May 2011)
It’s hard for us moderns to understand shamanism – perhaps because we need it more than ever before. David Abram does a good job of explaining it in terms we can understand. -BA
Children growing weaker as computers replace outdoor activity
Denis Campbell, Guardian
Modern life is ‘producing a generation of weaklings’, claims research as physical strength declines in 10-year-olds
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Children are becoming weaker, less muscular and unable to do physical tasks that previous generations found simple, research has revealed.
As a generation dedicated to online pursuits grows up, 10-year-olds can do fewer sit-ups and are less able to hang from wall bars in a gym. Arm strength has declined in that age group, as has their ability to grip an object firmly.
The findings, published in the child health journal Acta Paediatrica, have led to fresh concern about the impact on children’s health caused by the shift away from outdoor activities.
Academics led by Dr Gavin Sandercock, a children’s fitness expert at Essex University, studied how strong a group of 315 Essex 10-year-olds in 2008 were compared with 309 children the same age in 1998.
(21 May 2011)
How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person
Sander van der Linden, Scientific American
Even a poster with eyes on it changes how people behave
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… A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior. Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals. In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with a corresponding verbal text, without any text, male versus female faces, posters of something unrelated like flowers, etc). The posters were hung at eye-level and every day the location of each poster was randomly determined. The researchers found that during periods when the posters of eyes, instead of flowers, overlooked the diners, twice as many people cleaned up after themselves
In fact, this research builds on a long tradition of psychologists being interested in explaining and stimulating human cooperation in matters of the collective. In technical terms, we often speak of a “social dilemma,” that is, a situation where personal interests are at odds with that of the collective. (For example, it would be easier for me to throw my trash on the ground, but if everyone thought that way, we would all be stuck with a huge pile of waste.) Robyn Dawes and colleagues showed in the 70’s that the presence of other people in the room tends to have a positive effect on people’s decision-making when faced with a social dilemma. Yet, it wasn’t until a few years ago that Terence Burnham and Brian Hare published an article in Human Nature that showed people make more cooperative choices in economic computer games when they are “watched” on the screen by a robot with human-like eyes. Somewhat baffled, a number of researchers subsequently conducted a set of experiments that confirmed these initial findings.
(3 May 2011)
