“If the strong person exercises all his rights to oppress and pillage the weak, he is only doing the most natural thing in the world.” — Friedrich Nietzsche When we observe the imperatives of nature, it might appear that might makes right. With relatively few... Continue

Humanity’s place in nature is terrifying. Fires, floods, landslides, predatory animals, starvation, poisoned water, infection, plague; the list of depredations goes on. Were it not for each other we’d have never survived; alone we are weak and vulnerable. Some animals are solitary, but human beings... Continue

Looking ahead to the future has never been easy. One transformational wave after another has swamped humanity in its wake. The control of fire was perhaps the first such event, followed by flint arrowheads, bows, metallurgy, the wheel, gunpowder and the internal combustion engine. One... Continue

A central Buddhist teaching is that being human means living in the realms of desire, and that desire and what flows from it - attachment, craving, grasping, defending, protecting - produces suffering. Sounds reasonable, and from what I can tell, is largely inescapable. As rock... Continue

Animals are alive; it’s so obvious as to be a tautology. Not all animals, however, are aware of being alive. As far as we can tell, human beings are the only ones. Opinion about awareness, and even more precisely reason, has varied. The designation of... Continue

Our present human condition embodies an antagonism towards nature, one that explains the heights of our creative intelligence, the depths of our self-destructiveness, and how they have become one. Although of nature, humanity relentlessly seeks to master it, and in doing so prompts its own... Continue

People are great storytellers. Whether to make sense of a mysterious world beyond our control, to gain influence or power over others, or simply for the playful purposes of entertainment, the tales we spin have created a human reality quite distinct from that of the... Continue

People are talking about how polarized public opinion is right now, politically and socially. The widespread assumption is that a narrow slice of undecideds sits in the middle and that everyone else is rigidly fixed in their opinions; hence, all arguments fail. Ever since the... Continue

The Homo line of bipedal humans sequenced through a variety of iterations before settling down, albeit uncomfortably, into the one we are today. Among others, there’s been Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and the now popular Homo neanderthalensis. All these primate species share characteristics... Continue