Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 519glimmering of the brute economic fact that often adversaries can bothcome out ahead by dividing up the surplus created by their laying downtheir arms. Even some of the Yanomamo see the futility of their waysand long for a means to break the cycle of vengeance. People throughouthistory have invented ingenious technologies that turn one part ofthe mind against another and eke increments of civility from a humannature that was not selected for niceness: rhetoric, exposes, mediation,face-saving measures, contracts, deterrence, equal opportunity, mediation,courts, enforceable laws, monogamy, limits on economic inequality,abjuring vengeance, and many others. Utopian theoreticians ought to behumble in the face of this practical wisdom. It is likely to remain moreeffective than "cultural" proposals to make over childrearing, language,and the media, and "biological" proposals to scan the brains and genes ofgang members for aggression markers and to hand out antiviolence pillsin the ghettos.Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama of Tibet, was identified at the age oftwo as the fourteenth reincarnation of the Buddha of Compassion, HolyLord, Gentle Glory, Eloquent, Compassionate, Learned Defender of theFaith, Ocean of Wisdom. He was taken to Lhasa and brought up by dotingmonks, who tutored him in philosophy, medicine, and metaphysics.In 1950 he became the spiritual and secular leader in exile of theTibetan people. Despite not having a power base, he is recognized as aworld statesman on the sheer force of his moral authority, and in 1989was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No human being could be morepredisposed by his upbringing and by the role he has been thrust into tohave pure and noble thoughts.In 1993 an interviewer for the New York Times asked him about himself.He said that as a boy he loved war toys, especially his air rifle. As anadult, he relaxes by looking at battlefield photographs and had justordered a thirty-volume Time-Life illustrated history of World War II.Like guys everywhere, he enjoys studying pictures of military hardware,like tanks, airplanes, warships, U-boats, submarines, and especially aircraftcarriers. He has erotic dreams and finds himself attracted to beautifulwomen, often having to remind himself, "I'm a monk!" None of thishas stood in the way of his being one of history's great pacifists. Anddespite the oppression of his people, he remains an optimist and predictsthat the twenty-first century will be more peaceful than the twentieth.Why? asked the interviewer. "Because I believe," he said, "that in the20th century, humanity has learned something from many, many experi-