History has shown that virtually anything from everyday life can be used as a source for our image making. Campbellâs Soup is a long way from the caves of Lascaux, but we still are painting what we see. Look at todayâs landscapeâbillboards, freeway systems, electric power plants (most beautiful at night), and so forthâto see how they can become art.
One purpose of art is to alert people to things they might have missed.
Consider a sculptor attacking granite with hand tools. Granite resists such attack violently; it is a hard material, so hard it is difficult to do anything bad in it. It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad. Plastilina, though, is a different matter. In this spineless material it is extraordinarily easy to do something badâone can do any imaginable variety of bad without half trying. The material itself puts up no resistance, and whatever discipline there is the artist must be strong enough to provide.
The artist has so much love to give back to the universe that it spills over, and the fallen drops become âworks of art.â It is love in another form.
The commonplace is not worthless, there is simply lots of it.
The intuitive appeal of a scientific theory has to do with how well its metaphors fit one’s experience.
Each generation of human beings both grows up in and creates a slightly different world than the generation that preceded them. Itâs a mess. But itâs a good mess, a mess that allows human beings to thrive in a staggering array of constantly changing environments.
When we say that preschoolers are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that theyâre bad at not paying attentionâthey have difficulty keeping themselves from being drawn to distractions.
Studies by the neuroscientist B. J. Casey suggest that adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewardsâor, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do.
The new generation, in turn, will consciously alter those earlier practices and invent new ones. They can take the entire past for granted as they move toward the future.
What Yeats called âperfection of the life or of the workââthese values canât simply be weighed in some single objective scale.
Virginia Woolf, who chose not to have children, wisely said, âNever pretend that the things you havenât got are not worth having.â
A good parent creates an adult who can make his own choices, even disastrous choices.
None of my children has replicated my life. Instead, each of them has created a uniquely valuable life of his ownâa life that is a mash-up of my values and traditions, the values and traditions of the other people who have taught and cared for them, the inventions of their generation, and their own inventions.
We parents, and grandparents even more, have to watch our beloved children glide irretrievably into the future we can never reach ourselves.
Every generation or so the idea of guiltless sex reemerges with a hopeful new nameâfree love or open marriage or now polyamoryâand with the same hopeless old problems of insecurity and jealousy.
What makes us love a child isnât something about the childâitâs something about us. We donât care for children because we love them; we love them because we care for them.
The fact that the children were so sensitive to the teacherâs intentions made them stupid, or at least stupider than they would have been otherwise. Or to put it another way, their intelligence about teaching, and their cleverness in figuring out just what the teacher wanted, made them worse at actually learning.
Passing on rituals seems to be as important in cultural evolution as passing on technologies. In fact, you might argue that rituals are technologies.
Parents in these communities slow down and exaggerate their own actions, and act in a way that makes it easy for the children to join in. But they donât design special actions or do special things in order to teach the childrenâthey act in order to get things done, and the children learn at the same time.
It turns out instead that even the youngest children look below the surface to try to understand the deeper essences of the things around them. In fact, when children make mistakes, itâs often because they are looking too hard for essences when there are actually none to be found.
In one of those bitter, teeth-gritting ironies, it turned out that moms used generics even when they were trying to combat sexism. Saying âGirls can drive trucksâ still implies that girls all belong in the same category with the same deep, underlying essence.
There is good reason to think that letting children playâspontaneously, randomly, and by themselvesâhelps allow them to learn. But another part of the evolutionary story is that play is a satisfying good in itselfâa source of joy, laughter, and fun for parents as well as children. If it had no other rationale, the sheer pleasure of play would be justification enough.
The evolutionary theorist Eva Jablonka has suggested that the human mind is more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife. A human hand isnât designed to do any one thing in particular. But it is an exceptionally flexible and effective device for doing many things, including things we might never have imagined.
The regime uses biblical symbols, as any authoritarian regime taking over America doubtless would: they wouldnât be Communists or Muslims.