Category: Fleming

This Simian World Revenge and marriage, as institutionalized means of expressing love and hate, have much in common: Both are found in a variety of forms, but the forms and tendencies that converge in societies around the globe encourage us to think of them as generically human phenomena.  That is because they are, both of them, based on natural necessities and passions that have probably been instilled into the human species throughout the long course of evolution.  A mouse will fight against an attacker, whether the enemy is a rival mouse or a cat, and I have been charged by...

NOTE:  I had decided to omit the following two chapters on individual violence– as well as a later chapter on blood feuds etc.–from this volume and to put them in a separate book.  As I worked on the later chapters, it became apparent to me that my initial outline was better. Sweet Revenge With base deceit you worked upon our feelings. Revenge is sweet, and flavors all our dealings.”   Revenge is sweet, whether anyone likes to admit it.  But even a hundred years ago, when people were more candid about the reality of aggression, audiences at productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s...

From Kith to Kin to Commonwealth If there is one commonplace that is shared by political theorists who view human societies not as a set of abstractions but as an organism or ecosystem it is that the commonwealth is an outgrowth of the household or family.  Wherever we turn—to Aristotle or Cicero, St. Thomas or Althusius, Sir Robert Filmer or French counter-revolutionaries—we find the family at the foundation of the evolving social order. The steps of this theoretical social evolution usually echo Aristotle’s account that traces the coalescence of households into a village and villages into a city or commonwealth. ...

PARIS I boarded the plane in Pisa and joined the flight full of North Africans going home to Paris.  It is hard to get a waitress–I mean, professional flight attendant on board for the passengers’ safety–because one Moroccan mother seems completely unable to deal with the logistics of traveling with a baby.  It is a nice enough baby, and the mother is sweet, though her French is even less comprehensible than my own.  Not so long ago, a man’s level civilization could be measured, almost literally, by the size of his French vocabulary (never by his accent, since a good...