Morality without religion

In his new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, de Waal challenges this theory, arguing that human morality is older than religion, and indeed an innate quality. In other words, religion did not give us morality. Religion built onto a pre-existing moral system that governed how our species behaved. 

de Waal's argument, which he has been making for years, is strengthened by the fact that recent research is starting to paint a better picture of the kind of cognitive processing that empathy requires. It turns out that empathy is not as complex as we had imagined, and that is why other animals are capable of it as well as humans. 

So if being moral is so easy, can we dispatch with religion altogether?

From Big Think.

But then anyone who has seen the great The Tree of Life​ already knew that empathy predated humans. Remember the dinosaur that spared the other dinosaur? Malick knew it before you did.

Trouble Will Find Me

​Pitchfork likes the new album by The National.

I haven't heard it yet, but for a few musical groups, I'll buy their albums sound unheard. Matt Berninger's vocalization is just so satisfyingly heart, like a hot beef stew on a chilly winter day.

The great stagnation of parenting

We’ve come a long way, as a species. And we’re better at many things than we ever were before – not just slightly better, but unimaginably, ridiculously better. We’re better at transporting people and objects, we’re better a killing, we’re better at preventing infectious diseases, we’re better at industrial production, agricultural and economic output, we’re better at communications and sharing of information.

But in some areas, we haven’t made such dramatic improvements. And one of those areas is parenting. We’re certainly better parents than our own great-great-grandparents, if we measure by outcomes, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Why is that?

The post includes a couple theories as to why the labor productivity of parenting has not increased.​

If you accept the premise that parenting is difficult to do well no matter how hard you try, it's worth reading the arguments put forth by Bryan Caplan in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, namely that you should chill out a bit and burn yourself out less trying to be a super-parent. You'll be happier and more stress-free, and your child will probably turn out the same.

(h/t to Tyler Cowen)​

Kobe vs MJ

"One of the biggest differences between the two stars from my perspective was Michael's superior skills as a leader," Jackson writes. "Though at times he could be hard on his teammates, Michael was masterful at controlling the emotional climate of the team with the power of his presence.  Kobe had a long way to go before he could make that claim. He talked a good game, but he'd yet to experience the cold truth of leadership in his bones, as Michael had in his bones."

“One of the biggest differences between the two stars from my perspective was Michael's superior skills as a leader. Though at times he could be hard on his teammates, Michael was masterful at controlling the emotional climate of the team with the power of his presence. Kobe had a long way to go before he could make that claim. He talked a good game, but he'd yet to experience the cold truth of leadership in his bones, as Michael had in his bones.”

"No question, Michael was a tougher, more intimidating defender," Jackson writes. "He could break through virtually any screen and shut down almost any player with his intense, laser-focused style of defense."

Those are excerpts from Phil Jackson's new book Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, coming out Tuesday, ​in which he compares Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan.

​This bit was especially revealing.

Jackson also revealed that the sexual assault charges levied against Bryant in 2003 temporarily clouded his outlook of the Lakers star. The situation "cracked open an old wound" because Jackson's daughter Brooke had been sexually assaulted by an athlete in college.

"The Kobe incident triggered all my unprocessed anger and tainted my perception of him. ... It distorted my view of Kobe throughout the 2003-04 season," Jackson writes. "No matter what I did to extinguish it, the anger kept smoldering in the background."

I am definitely going to pick up that book. Too bad Phil Jackson hasn't coached more of our generation's leading players. I'd love his insight into, say, Lebron James or Tim Duncan.

The Americans

My favorite new TV show this season was The Americans. It took me a bit of time to fully embrace the show, though.​

Halfway through the season, I was hung up on how Philip and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth, didn't really seem credible in their loyalty to mother Russia. This was Keri Russell, for god's sake, how could she turn against the U.S.​? She doesn't even look the slightest bit Russian.

[Yes, they're supposed to be able to blend into the U.S., that is the point of being a spy, but All-American Keri Russell is not a species native to Russian soil, especially as compared to the much more Russian faces seen at the Soviet embassy in the show.]​

​But the best TV shows, the ones that rise above being high end soap operas, are ones that have a larger point to make, and the longer the season ran, the more the show's casting works in its favor. What are national loyalties, after all, than arbitrary "us versus them" distinctions implanted in us by chance and circumstance?

What better way to illustrate that by having an American sweetheart playing a Russian mole? In one life, born in the United States, Keri Russell would be Felicity Porter. In another life, born in Russia, she became Nadezhda, a KGB agent. How unaware we all are of the group affiliations we subscribe to purely because they were the ones most available to us in formative years of our lives.

That Elizabeth and Philip are playing the role of husband and wife extends this theme out beyond spy games to the very household institution of marriage.​ When Elizabeth attends the marriage of Philip to Martha Hanson, one of his informants, she asks Philip, after the wedding, if their marriage might have been different had they actually had a real wedding. In asking that, she cuts to the heart of the power of ritual.

That their fake marriage initially seems stronger than ​the actual marriage of Stan (Noah Emmerich) and Sandra Beeman, their neighbors (one of which happens to be an FBI agent hot on their trail), is a wry comment on the entire institution. Elizabeth and Philip had no choice in their marriage early on, it was their cover, and they had to make it work, despite both of them having been attracted to other people earlier in their lives.

Stan and Sandra went into ​their marriage with different expectations, romantic ones, and the show is rather harsh about the sustainability of a relationship centered around such notions. When Elizabeth and Philip start to see their relationship strained, what seems to draw them back towards each other is not any abstract ideal of romance but instead a pragmatic life and death dependence. It's easy to love someone when they're literally saving your life on a regular basis.

As with Mad Men, the audience knows how the plot at large turns out since The Americans is set during a Cold War that ended long ago. But what we're curious about is not that larger context but the smaller scale drama of Elizabeth and Philip's relationship. Of all the backdrops for a show about marriage, the Cold War must rank among the most unlikely.