We Seem to Disagree on Everything

Extremism, Gender Warfare, Moral Humility, Pluralism, Social Issues, Woke

 

The divisions in America keep growing in number and in the depth of those divides. As usual, Canada is the same just a little more gently. Polls have shown that many Americans think those divisions are so deep that the country will not be able to survive its problems.  In other words, because of polarization we are doomed.  But are things that bad?

 

Mark Edmundson writing for the New York Times pointed out that evolutionary biologists have determined that,

 

“binary behavior is an evolutionary adaptation. It inheres in the reptile brain. There was a time when it was incumbent on us to decide and decide quickly who was friend and who was foe. Will it eat me? Am I safe around it? Err, if you must, on the side of enmity. You don’t want to equivocate about a sabre-toothed tiger.”

 

But, he also said, he did not agree things were that bad. Edmundson suggested the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida had some important things to say on the topic.  Derrida hated the compulsion so many of us have to divide the world into binaries or polarities.  Life just was not that simple he said.  That is why according to Edmundson, Derrida was an “an enemy of simple, dualistic thinking.” That is not a bad thing. Such thinking deserves critics. Added to that, he said “Derrida worried that compulsive binary thinking, in which one seeks opposition everywhere, could readily lead to violence…”  Edmundson agreed with Derrida. So do I.

 

Edmundson preferred the position of that modern philosopher Ted Lasso, who said instead, we should “Be curious, not judgmental.” That is often good advice. As a result Derrida called for thinking that did not require polar opposites but instead “resembled a form of thinking that was not based on the tension of opposites but resembled an ever-expanding web of rich associations.” Derrida’s curiosity led him to affirm the free play of the interpreting mind.

 

I agree with both of them but put it just a little differently.  My take is that we should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour. But that is not what we do.

 

Instead of that we think in black and white. We think the world is either A or B. 2 choices no more.  Pick a side and stick with it. As Edmundson said,

 

“Our culture is amok with binaries. We have two major parties, just two, and they are forever opposed. When a group tries to start a third party, it can be summarily disabled by the existing powers. We love sports, generally the most binary of activities. One side wins; one side loses. Root hard for your squad and the devil take the opposition. We savor debates where one side wins and one side loses.”

 

In the larger world, we find allies and we find enemies. We are, as I say, Democrats or Republicans, realists or idealists, people of much faith or people of none. We wear our team jerseys with pride and scoff at the opposition’s colors.

 

 Such binary thinking is just plain impoverished and so are we if confine ourselves to black and white.  Yet it is everywhere.

 

There is one clear modern example of this deficiency which is pretty plain if you look. That is thinking about  sex and gender.  More and more people are saying there are only 2 sexes and 2 genders.  A person is a male or female. Oner or the other. The pendulum is swinging. There are no other choices. In fact this is an issue in the municipal elections in Steinbach this year, as odd as that seems.

 

But life is not that simple, even if we would like it to be.  It is an uncomfortable fact that some people are born with ambiguous sexual organs. It is just not clear whether the person is male or female. Such a person could be one or the other or some combination of both. Such people are called intersex.

 

The differences between the genders is even less clear. There seem to be a lot of choices when you look. As Edmundson said, “Insisting on purity — you must be one thing or another — will inevitably create confusion and resentment.” That really is the point.  Insisting on simple answers will just bring about a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and pain.  There is no need to insist upon a clear distinction. There is nothing to be gained by such simplified thinking. Its none of our business. Let others live and let live.

 

Edmundson had a better approach, which he found in eastern religions. This is what he said,

 

“A person influenced by the great Eastern texts, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, would be likely to see it differently. The best state of mind is one in which you can look out on all creation, other people in particular, and say to yourself: That, too, I am.

 

We are all part of one being; we all possess the same soul. This way of seeing does not cultivate opposition or conflict. It accepts what comes its way without picking sides and initiating strife.”

 

This does not just apply to issues of sex or gender. We should look at the other and keep our opinions to ourself.  If the other person is suffering from confusion let him or her or they choose. Be happy.

 

I am not sure the Bible actually says, as some suggest, “we are all God’s children,” but it could still be true. If you believe in God surely you would say we are all God’s creation. Is that not enough to give us all dignity? Sometimes, we should give up judging in favour of accepting. As the Beatles said, “Whispser words of wisdom. Let it be.”

 

Is that not enough?

Even Hitler was Loved by his Mother

Extremism, Hate, Polarization

 

Mark Edmonson pointed out in a New York Times articles something that is actually quite obvious. He said, “Our culture is amok with binaries.” I have called it ‘My way or the highway’ thinking. This is particularly true in politics but this attitude has seeped into many aspects of modern life. For example, in can still be seen among some religious communities where each thinks they have a monopoly on truth and the “other religions” wallow in ignorance.  Sadly, many Mennonites think that way, though not as many as before.  There is some improvement. For example, my teacher Will Braun, did not think that way. He always worked hard to avoid such binary thinking. He was a Christian but admitted that there is truth to be found in other religions.

 

Sports is one field where binaries still rule and the glaring ugliness of it can be seen there.  At hockey games or football games as soon as the referee makes a call adverse to “our side”, we tend to leap up in with venomous disgust. We can’t stand it.  I have even seen parents jumping and screaming at very young refs of games in which their children are participating. It is ugly enough to tarnish the sport.

 

And really, we must admit that these games and these perceived injustices are really pretty insignificant. Why do I love the North Carolina Tar Heels and hate the Duke Blue Devils? They are both great basketball teams and live about 7 miles apart in North Carolina. But there is a lot of hatred between those teams, and sadly, not all of it is good natured. Some of it is vile and really the differences between the two sides are puny.

 

This is what Freud called the “the narcissism of minor differences.”  And their sole purpose is to keep insignificant binaries alive. Yet, even though I know this is true, when I watch the next basketball game between Duke and North Carolina is will be dying every time Duke makes an unlikely basket or North Carolina misses an easy shot. These small differences to me are very important. My bad.

 

We should not think and see in black and white, nor even gray. We should think and see in colour. Glorious colour.

 

Will Braun’s attitude which he got from his interpretation of the Bible was that we are all God’s children.  My wife Christiane says something similar, also wisely, “Even Hitler was loved by his mother.”

 

 

Why do we hate so much?

Polarization

 

Will Braun who taught the course that Christiane and I took at Canadian Mennonite University 2 years ago said that “we are all God’s Children.”  He is a Christian and to him that is a fundamental principle. God loves all of us. Not just the Christians who go to church. Not just Christians. He also loves Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and people who don’t love him back or even believe he exists. I suspect a lot of modern Christians don’t agree with Braun. I find it easier to believe that many of them hate Muslims for example. At least that is what their actions suggest. They don’t even treat Muslims with respect let alone love. Some claim to love them but I just don’t believe them because their words and actions suggest otherwise.

 

In fact, it seems to me many Americans hate Muslims. Many hate Jews or blacks or indigenous people. Again, they might claim to love them, but to me it seems more likely that they hate them. Perhaps even more obviously, many Americans hate Democrats. And Many Americans hate Republicans.  They hate them because they are on the “other side”.  And they can’t stand the other side in many cultural disputes. They hate gays or lesbians, or heterosexuals. They hate whites or blacks. They hate, often with surprising viciousness, those on the other side of their important cultural and political debates.

 

About a year ago or so, Charlie Kirk was murdered. He was loved on the right, but not so much on the left.  In fact, it seemed if the right loved him the left would have to hate him. He was immediately attacked on the left and defended on the right. People took sides. And those sides were sacred. No one gives up on what they think is sacred.  At least it is very difficult, if it is not impossible.

 

Some have called this “binary thinking.”  Mark Edmundson said this in an article in the New York Times: “Look around: Binary thinking (often informing binary rage) is everywhere in our country.”

 

One person who resisted binary thinking was Van Jones an occasional commentator on CNN. This is what he said about Kirk: “I was very frustrated with people in my party throwing rocks at the corpse before he could even be buried.” According to Edmundson, “Mr. Kirk was on the other team, and in binary-thinking America, that meant he was a foe.”

 

I think he was right. Not all teams work that way, but increasingly political teams do. You are almost required to hate the other team to stay on your team. You risk shunning if you don’t hate enough. Religious groups used to work that way too, but thankfully, many of them are moving in the other direction.

 

At Charlie Kirk’s funeral service his widow said, demonstrating Christian principles in action, that she did not hate the man who killed her husband. She said she forgave him. That is uncommon. Donald Trump was very different. This is what Trump said,

 

“Mr. Kirk did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”

 

Kirk and his wife were followers of Trump, but they did not follow him down this path. When leaders do the wrong thing we should not follow them. That is unusual in modern politics, particularly politics that are as polarized as American politics, and increasingly, Canadian politics which is going down the same path as Trump, not Kirk.

 

I recently attended a conference that was attended by many religious people of various religions and they all got along  respectfully. It was great to see. Pluralism in action. This is a big improvement over the “good old days”, that were really not always so good. I hope we don’t start back-sliding. Extremism is really not often attractive. Often its ugly. Just watch Trump. Or the extremists on the left for that matter.

There is a better way.

Lawful Little Migrants

Hummingbirds

In South America the Andes mountains provide great habitat for numerous hummingbirds. In fact, as David Attenborough remarked, “half of all humming birds live in these mountains along with their plant partners.”

 

The Ruby-throated Hummingbird, which is the only one to live in Manitoba, needs to make sure that it leaves the north before its plants stop producing nectar for the winter. If it fails to do that right it will starve.  When the time comes, they begin their incredible migration to the south. When they arrive in places like Rockport Texas they load up with food where they can get it. Many people place feeders for them on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Each of the humming birds must convert sugar from its source such as nectar, into fat for the long migration over the gulf which has very few islands for resting on the flight.  Most fly non-stop across the Great Bay that some idiots call the Gulf of America.

According to David Attenborough, “in just 3 days the average hummingbird will nearly double its weight. This is the equivalent of a human of average weight putting on over 50 kg of fat in 3 days.” As Attenborough said, “During the peak of migration Rockport is home to tens of thousands of hummers. This spectacle of so many hummers can be found nowhere else on earth.” Needless to say, it attracts bird enthusiasts from around North America. Those are the real bird brains.

 

The crossing of the Gulf of Mexico is the greatest test of the flying skill of the hummingbirds. They make their journey at night and fly at least 800 km non-stop. That is an enormous task for such a little bird. No one really knows how they can do it. But they do it.

I love this photo because it shows the long tongue of these birds which are used to suck out nectar from flowers with long nectar chambers.

 

David Attenborough summed up hummingbirds like this:

 

“There is much we do not know about humming birds and their secret high-speed lives, but what we do know is that they are the most remarkable, colourful, energetic and acrobatic of all creatures. They live at the limits of what is possible. Nature’s miniature masterpieces and all because they are the messengers of plants.”

 

 

We are fortunate to be blessed with hummingbirds. Life would be so much duller without them.

 

At the Edge of what is possible

Hummingbirds

 

 

 

It is abundantly clear that hummingbirds have an abundance of skills, some of them spectacular. As a result of all of exercising these skills they require a lot of energy. Their flights are often like aerial pilots with their dogfights.

As  David Attenborough in his film explained this:

 

“When flying, hummingbirds have the highest oxygen demands of all vertebrates. Their wings beat as fast as 80 times a second. The problems is getting all that oxygen to the proper place. When the bird is perched its heart beats at around 400 times per minute. In flight it rises to an astonishing 1,200 beats per minute [20 times per second] as the heart pumps oxygen rich blood to the wing muscles. Even this is not enough for hovering, so the heart expands in size so it can pump more blood with each beat. When this happens, the blood circulates around the whole body. Heart to lung, heart to muscles, and back to the heart in under 1 second! They are living at the edge of what is possible. Extreme aerial athletes with extreme needs. It’s no surprise that when they are not flying and feeding, they rest and conserve energy.”

That really is astounding. As a result of all of this, hummingbirds spend 80% of their day perched. That is why I sometimes have such a hard time finding them, as they perch often inside tree branches where it is so dark and difficult to photograph them. During this time, they stretch muscles and groom their very important feathers. They also take advantage of rains to clean their feathers. Unlike insects they really seem to flourish in the rain. I noticed this from inside my cottage this summer when I was watching hummingbirds in the rain.

 

The hummingbirds also as a result need to protect their sources of nectar. In the forests of South American for example, they must protect their flowers from nectar thieves. That is why they have evolved to drive out competitors. Like all good capitalists they are habituated to destroy the competition. It is in their nature.

 

As a result of all of these high energy needs, hummingbirds must feed every 15 minutes or more. “Starvation and even death is always only hours away,” Attenborough reported. As a result, they don’t have time to visit flowers that have no nectar. They don’t really have time to chase competitors to away either, but I can report they do. This begs the question, what do they do in the dark?

 

Staying alive until morning is a challenge for every hummingbird. They do that by going into torpor every night of their lives. This is similar to hibernation. It is like going into hibernation every night! Their heart rate drops precipitously and their heart rate goes down from 400 to 40 beats per minute. That is 1% of the energy they use when flying!  This is a radical solution, because while they are in torpor they can’t move and are easy prey for predators that are out and about where they are. They can’t escape from nocturnal predators that find them. If a predator finds them at night, they are dead meat. When day breaks, they shiver and in about half a hour can fly again. It is a remarkable transformation for these truly remarkable birds.

 

To feed themselves sufficiently hummingbirds must be smart, except when it comes for rivals at least.  Then they can be stupid. Competing when it is not necessary to compete. Reminds me of humans.

 

They must learn to avoid flowers that don’t produce nectar or not enough or are temporarily drained. As a result, they learn to avoid flowers they have already drained of nectar until they are replenished. They must have mental timers in their brains and be able to remember flowers already visited recently in trees or flower patches among enormous numbers of virtually identically coloured flowers. So Hummingbirds are indeed smart. That is why Attenborough said it was “a great feat for a bird brain.”

Hummingbirds can’t live on nectar alone. That is why they have learned to catch prey such as flying insects as well, which of course requires incredible aerial dexterity. They particularly need protein to replace feathers and build muscles.

 

Hummingbird Plant Partnership

Hummingbirds, Nature

 

It is interesting that hummingbirds are not found outside the western hemisphere except with the assistance of humans who help them to visit there. Some have been carried to Africa by humans. Most of them live in South America, but we found many in Arizona the years we lived there in winters, before the United States declared economic war on us here in Canada.

Manitoba only has one native humming bird, the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), but it is gorgeous. The males are particularly gorgeous of course.

 

That is also why so many hummingbirds have such flamboyant displays of colourful feathers that are designed to scare their foes. Some of their feathers are what Attenborough called “extravagantly iridescent.” Those extravagant colours are not produced by pigments, but rather by layers of  air bubbles in the feathers. Attenborough described this as follows: “Those air bubbles refract, reflect, and recombine sunlight to produce dazzling colours. The colours depend on the angle of the sunlight, so hummingbirds can turn on and off their brilliant signal, flashing a warning to an intruder, or hide from an enemy.” That is why one can never be sure that a dull hummingbird is nonetheless a male with its gorget feather not reflecting well because of the angle to the sun

 

Hummingbirds are not unusual in the sense that like so many other birds, they look to flowers for their food in return for agreeing (or not) to carry the flowers pollen from one flower to another. It is an example of a free trade agreement. As a result, as Attenborough said, “nectar fuels their frenetic movement.”

 

Nowadays a lot of flowers use birds as carriers, but this was not the original inters-species agreement. When flowers first evolved, over 60 million years ago there were no hummingbirds. The first flowering plants depended on insects to carry their valuable cargo, but in South America the mornings are often cool and damp, and insects are cold-blooded so are often lethargic at such times. Flowers could use better, more reliable, messengers, so they looked to birds. The original bargain was one between plants and animals such as butterflies. Butterflies carry the pollen from one flower to another and hence fertilized flowers they encountered. Insects are then fed with nectar. A fair deal. Some flowers cheated however. For example, some orchids deliver no food to the insects, but only sweet smells. They promise nectar to the birds but don’t actually give it up.

 

Hummingbirds in South America, and now Manitoba, are able to fly in all weather conditions, at least in summer. Thus, they can carry pollen more reliably than butterflies.

 

As David Attenborough said in his film, The Secret Life of Birds, “the plant and insect have been in a long and successful arrangement, but at some point, some plants dropped their insect messengers.” Birds like hummingbirds provided a safer pair of wings as far as the flowers were concerned. This first new deal probably happened about 50 million years ago according to Attenborough. Hummingbirds were ideal partners.

 

Birds at first probably were attracted to the insects on birds as a source of tasty food. But some hummingbirds could also drink the nectar inside the flowers. The first hummingbirds were larger and clumsier than the modern hummingbirds. They learned better in millions of years they related. Evolution in time—long time—provided smaller birds that were better flyers. As Attenborough said, “the bird evolved to better suit their new way of life.”  That’s how evolution works. “Over millions of years birds’ bills to be evolved thinner and lighter all the  better to scour for nectar,” as Attenborough said. The birds also became more agile than their ancestors. They had to learn to hover in order to insert their bills into the flowers. They also evolved long tongues to probe the flowers and sip the nectar.  These tongues are visible on some of my photos.

 

The hummingbirds also had to reduce their weight and did not have any Ozempic pills to help them. So their legs got lighter, thinner, and smaller. As a result they could no longer hop. As Attenborough said, “Hummingbirds live on an energy life edge”.

 

 

Today over 8,000 different plants depend on birds for pollination. Of course, there was a problem.  Insects are cold-blooded unlike birds. As a result, birds require a lot more energy than the insects. In fact, often they need 10 times as much energy than the insects they replaced. According to Attenborough, “a hummingbird eats more than its weight in nectar each day.”  So flowers have to produce a lot of nectar to keep those birds coming. No nectar; no birds.

A lot of flowers that are attractive to hummingbirds are red or orange.  Bees are red-green color blind. To make their flowers less attractive to insects, some of the flowers evolved to have long thin flowers which the birds could find and insert their long slim bills into. Hummingbirds can hover, which is needed to get inside those flowers, but that costs the birds a lot of energy. They are the only birds that can hover well enough to hold their bills in place to extract nectar. Hummingbirds are formed to give them lift and power on the downstroke as well as the upstroke, unlike other birds.

 

Hummingbirds are unique among birds because they are able to fly backwards. They can also rotate on the spot. They can even fly upside down. As Attenborough said, “Plants with their hard to reach flowers have produced the ultimate aerial acrobats.” It really is the plant that creates the animal, and the animal creates the plant. It’s called coevolution. The entire world is connected that way. And it’s all amazing.

 

 

 

 

Celebrities of the Bird World

Birds, Hummingbirds

 

 

 

 

David Attenborough in his film about the Hummingbirds, The Secret Lives of Hummingbirds said, “They are the celebrities, the stars of the bird world.” I agree with this. Who can outshine hummingbirds?

This summer Christiane and I have been spending a lot of time on our deck at the lake watching hummingbirds. We put out feeders filled with sugar water—1 part sugar for every part water—and wait for the birds to come to us. We pull out binoculars on the little table between us and are entertained for hours. We can sit there reading and watching. The entertainment is astounding. Every few minutes another hummer comes by or is chased by one of his cantankerous colleagues.

 

Humming birds do not play well with others.  They cannot abide a competitor no matter how much abundance in feed.  They will spend enormous energy flying after foes to make it clear to the others that this is their territory and no one else’s.

It is strange that they are so territorial. In the forests of south America that is necessary. They must fend off competitors for food. In the front yard of our cabin at the lake they waste their time and energy chasing rivals away from their food source—my feeders. Perhaps in millions of years they will adapt and change if some people continue to support them with supplies of sugary nectar substitution

This was one of the rare males I saw this year. Are the males dying out? Teh gorget was more orange than red.

I have been trying to catch them in flight with my camera and my big lens, and that is an incredible challenge.  They rarely stay long in one place.  But again, the fun is in the chase. They are so fast they fly by in a blur.  But modern high-speed cameras can slow them down when 1 second becomes 15 seconds.  When you slow them down you can look into their secret world.

The Secret Life of Hummingbirds

Birds, Hummingbirds

Lately I have been spending a crazy amount of time following and luring hummingbirds.  I want to capture them. Not literally, but virtually, with my camera.  It is great sport. It would be much easier to shoot them with a rifle. But this is more fun. Great fun in fact.  People often say the fun is in the chase. And I agree with that.

 

I recently watched a video narrated by David Attenborough, one of the finest nature narrators and interpreters.  The video is called The Secret Lives of Hummingbirds. He said that “hummingbirds are amongst the most spectacular of animals on earth.”  I agree with this as well.

Hummingbirds are very small birds. Among the smallest warm-blooded animals on earth, according to Attenborough.

 

He also “their glittering colours and prowess in the air are unmatched.”   Many birds have gorgeous colours, including hummingbirds, but their flying skills are astonishing.