The wisdom of the internet

 Robert Cottrell  shares with us four lessons he has learnt in five years’ drinking from the fire hose which is the internet.

His first contention: this is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media. Not everything online is great writing. Perhaps only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader but another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights. 

Where the internet excels is in serving up plentiful writing that sits one level down: at the level of very good daily journalism, whether on subjects of immediate interest for a general audience or more esoteric subjects for a specialised audience. Where is it coming from? Some of it comes from professional journalists, writing for the websites of established publications or on their own blogs. But much of it – the great new addition to our writing and reading culture – comes from professionals in other fields who find the time, the motivation and the opportunity to write for anyone who cares to read. As a gross generalisation, academics make excellent bloggers, within and beyond their specialist fields. So, too, do aid workers, lawyers, musicians, doctors, economists, poets, financiers, engineers, publishers and computer scientists. They blog for pleasure; they blog for visibility within their field; they blog to raise their value and build their markets as authors and public speakers; they blog because their peers do. Businessmen and politicians make the worst bloggers because they do not like to tell what they know, and telling what you know is the essence of blogging well. They also fear to be wrong; and, as Felix Salmon, Reuters’ finance blogger, insists and sometimes demonstrates: “If you are never wrong, you are never interesting”. To read the blog of a political scientist, or an anthropologist, or a lawyer, or an information technologist, is the next best thing to reading their mind; better, in some ways, since what they have to say emerges in considered form. These are the experts who, a couple of decades ago, would have functioned as sources for newspaper journalists. Their opinions would emerge often mangled and simplified, always truncated, in articles over which they had no final control. Now we can read them directly, and discover what they actually think and say. We can know, for example, what lawyers are saying about a new appointment to the Supreme Court; what political scientists expect from an election; how computer scientists evaluate Apple’s updated operating system; what economists expect from a new government policy. The general reader now has access to expertise through the internet that was easily available, a decade ago, only to the insider or the specialist.

His second contention as a professional reader is one that may seem self-evident in the world of blogging but also holds good across the whole universe of online writing and publishing: the writer is everything. The corollary of this also holds good: the publisher  is nothing. Good writers write good pieces, regardless of subject and regardless of publication. Mediocre writers write mediocre pieces. And nothing at all can rescue a bad writer. A simple assertion, but put it in context and it becomes more complex and interesting. Think back to the days when print media ruled. Your basic unit of consumption was not the article, nor the writer, but the publication. You bought the publication in the hope or expectation that it would contain good writing. The publisher was the guarantor of quality. Professional writers still see value in having publishers online, not so much as guarantors of quality, but because publishers pay for writing – or, increasingly, if they do not pay for it, they do at least publish it in a place where it will get read. Readers, on the other hand, have less of a need for publishers. One striking trend is that in the past five years  individual articles uncouple themselves from the places where they are first published, to lead their own lives across the internet, passed from hand to hand between readers.

This is due, in large part, to the rise of social media – primarily Facebook and Twitter. Five years ago, you needed to visit a publisher’s website to see what was new there. Now, you hear about a particular article through Twitter or Facebook; a friend will share the link; you may visit the page directly but more probably you will save the link to your Instapaper or your Readability account, or mark it for reading later in your Flipboard feed, or on your Kindle or other reading device, and you will enjoy the piece later, probably offline. The article is what matters to the reader; the place of original publication may not even be noticed. Indeed, from a reader’s point of view, many online publishers subtract value. Let us say you have a writer who wants a reader; and a reader who wants a writer. Perfect. But if there is a publisher involved, his instincts will probably be to fill the space between reader and writer with banner advertisements, the object of which is to distract the reader from reading. It seems almost inevitable that a new business model for reading and writing online will prevail in the future, which consists of readers rewarding directly the writers they admire. Almost inevitable, because this is by far the most efficient economic arrangement for both parties, and there are no longer any significant technological obstacles to its general adoption.

And so to his third contention: we overvalue new writing, almost absurdly so, and we undervalue older writing. You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year,” or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month.” Why are we so much less interested in journalism that’s a month or a year old? The answer is that we have been on the receiving end of decades of salesmanship from the newspaper industry, telling us that today’s newspaper is essential but yesterday’s newspaper is worthless. That distinction has been increasingly bogus since newspapers lost their news-breaking role to faster media 50 years ago, and began filling their pages with more and more timeless writing. While consumers had to rely on print media, the distinction between old and new could be sustained by availability: today’s newspaper was everywhere, yesterday’s newspaper was nowhere, except perhaps in the cat litter. Online, that distinction disappears – or it should. You can call up a year-old piece as easily as you can call up a day-old piece. And yet we hardly ever do so, because we are so hardly ever prompted to do so. Which condemns tens if not hundreds of thousands of perfectly serviceable articles to sleep in writers’ and publishers’ archives, written off, never to be seen again.

Why do even big publishing groups with the resources to do so make so little attempt to organise, prioritise and monetise their archives? Think of a newspaper or magazine as a mountain of data to which a thin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week. Everybody sees the new soil. But what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten. Even the people who own the mountain don’t know what’s in the lower layers. They might try to find out but that demands a whole new set of tools. And, besides, they are too busy adding the new layer of topsoil each day. Actually the wisest new hire for any long-established newspaper or magazine would be a smart, disruptive archive editor. Why just sit on a mountain of classic content, when you could be digging into it and finding buried treasure?

His fourth contention is that the internet is a force for brevity. You may think of it as a place where people witter on for ever. But when you’re writing online, you don’t have to fill an expected space or length, as you do when you write for a print publication. When you have a fixed space to fill, the temptation is to provide the minimal decent amount of original work needed, wrapped up in the maximum tolerable amount of verbiage. When you have no particular space to fill, there’s no marginal utility to be derived from going on any longer than you need to. It helps, too, that when you’re writing online, there’s no need to introduce and source every person, place and fact you mention, and no need to fill in the backstory for those new to the subject. You can link out to the source document or the related story – or just assume your reader knows how to use Google and Wikipedia.

This trend towards brevity is even more marked when it comes to books. Online publishing has spawned a new category of short books, 10,000 to 30,000 words long – Kindle Singles, Penguin Shorts, Atavist Originals and others – that give writers the space in which to turn round a big idea or a big story quickly and nimbly. Very often, 10,000 to 30,000 words is all a big idea needs, when you don’t need to bulk it out with anecdotes to justify the price of a hardback book or to make sure it still has some value when it finally gets printed in a year. You can keep your thesis lean and topical. 

Finally, the big complaint of the paper newspaper and magazine readers is that you often stumble across  articles and ideas inadvertently that you dont do when reading an ebook. That too has now been corrected by the internet by collapsing a whole range of books and magazines in one spot. You can place a software like flipchart on your ipad and get instant access to the latest in almost any area of expertise - from the latest trends in science to those in art. What the internet has now done is to multiply your capacity to acccess and absorb information from around the world and in diverse areas besides providing you links to the sources of this information as well. You can almost now drink from the hose.

To be happy or to be creative that is the question

The tortured artist who produces a masterpiece of art or literature has been with us for as long as I can remember, Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear to produce his masterpiece, other lived in poverty and gleaned lessons of life from their misery that found echoes in their writing. But is it true that you have to be truly miserable to produce great art or literature?

From Lord Byron to Vincent Van Gogh, society has long believed that creativity is the product of a tortured soul. 

Recent studies however, have shown that in fact, the opposite is true, and that everyday creativity is more closely linked with happiness than depression. In 2006, researchers at the University of Toronto found that sadness creates a kind of tunnel vision that closes people off from the world, but happiness makes people more open to information of all kinds. Not only are happy people more creative, but this creativity allows them to come up with new ways to solve problems or simply achieve their goals. This ability can lead to greater success or happiness, which spurs further creativity, feeding a self-perpetuating cycle in which these two qualities reinforce one another.

Mut most of these studies about happiness and creativity focus on everyday creativity, or an ability to think outside of the box, and not necessarily on great artistic creativity. Although little evidence exists to link artistic creativity and happiness, it turnes out that the myth of the depressed artist has some scientific basis. Researchers have found a slight connection between mental illness and high levels of artistic creativity. A happy person is better equipped to apply creativity to everyday problems, but a person with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder might instead be more capable of creating great art. Scientists are unsure of the exact cause, but some believe that manic periods give the artist an amplified version of the creativity experienced by happy, healthy people. Illnesses such as schizophrenia allow people to make connections or experience emotions that would not occur to people without these diseases.

Creativity is nothing peculiar to genius. Nor is suffering a precondition for it. All happy persons can be positively creative. It is not the hope of achieving fame or amassing wealth that drives the creatives, rather it is the opportunity to do the things they enjoy most. According to a Yale University computer scientist, David Gelerntner, all human beings "slide along a spectrum of thought processes" on an average day and this could begin with "high-focus" thinking where "we can sandwich many memories and pieces of knowledge and quickly extract the thing they all have in common". It is not so much creative ability as assimilative expertise aiding swift decisions and quick action. Slide along the spectrum to "low focus" and we become less good at homing in on details but our memories are more vivid, concrete and detailed". The linking of memories and knowledge is more by emotion than by reason. When we are at the work place we are in "high-focus"; when we are in love, in "low-focus". It is when people are in "middle-focus" that they are at their most creative. This is because the mind is free from both obligatory, occupational concerns and mind-numbing, un-reasoning emotions. In "middle-focus", people make unusual connections—Newton and the apple, Archimedes and the bath tub, Kekule and the two snakes, Gandhi and the railway booking in South Africa—and they acquire insights which change the course of science, art and history. Gelerntner calls this mode "unconcentration", which provides a person the right insight into things that already are in high-focus.

Creativity, however, involves more than moments of "unconcentration", relaxation and free association of unconnected thoughts. Human imagination, indeed all imagination, follows rules and thrives on constraints to provide clear-cut definitions to problems for which one seeks creative solutions. Creativity itself is undefinable. It is not originality. One of the easiest things in life is to be original and foolish. For long, creativity remained a mystery better left to poets, artists and the like. It always conjured up the messy, unverifiable world of muses, inspiration and intuition.

French mathematician Poincare identified four stages of creativity: preparation (you try to solve a problem by available, normal means), incubation (when these don't work and in frustration you move to other matters), illumination (the answer comes in a flash, when you are not looking for it), and verification (your reasoning powers re-assert and you are on the way to finding a solution). Most of us give up at the stage of incubation and miss the illumination and, consequently, the experience of creative joy. Mark Twain put it nicely: Happiness, he said, "is like the Swedish sunset. It's always there. Only, people look the other way and miss it".

There's thus a correlation between creativity and happiness. All creative persons are not happy, but all happy persons can be positively creative. They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or amassing wealth that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the things they enjoy most. They feel an inner glow and they exude it. Many people do the work they do, and many do it better, but most of them either do not enjoy it or do it as a painful duty expected of them. Or, the spur is fame, power, money, publicity, awards and honors.

I looked at my own experience in the past few months. During my very painful bout with shingles, I continued to write my blogs and columns at the usual pace. But when my son turned up to visit me last week, I have barely looked at the computer choosing instead to spend time with him. So maybe there is some truth in the saying that pain leads to creativity while happiness leads to contentment with life and no great urge to seek noble meanings in life around you. Of course, given the choice how many would choose pain?

Alternative medicine- what is the truth?

Alternative medicine has always created controversy whether it is homeopathy, aryuveda or accupuncture. Tomes have been written and lots of research carried out to demonstrate the efficacy, or lack of, of these treatments. Medical professionals trained in the western methods routinely deride alternative medicine as placebos and mumbo jumbo pills. But what it the real truth?

The fact is that anecdotal envidence goes heavily against the medical professionals. Take my own case. 

I was always a sceptic of alternative medicine till my two year old son got "bleeding eczema", a particularly painful skin disease. We tried all the western remedies without any avail till one day our pediatrist advised us to go to a homeopath for a perment cure. So we went to the preeminent practioner of homeopathy in India at that time, Dr Jugal Kishore. He took a long hard look at the skin blisters and prescribed a range of pills to be taken at very specific times. How heavily diluted pills taken at very specific times could lead to a cure is beyond my ability to decipher, but the fact was that the skin was cured and eczema has never come back.

So what is homeopathy? Homeopathy is a system of alternative medicine originated in 1796 by Samuel Hahnemann, based on his doctrine of similia similibus curentur ("like cures like"), according to which a substance that causes the symptoms of a disease in healthy people will cure similar symptoms in sick people. Hahnemann believed that the underlying cause of disease were phenomena that he termed miasms, and that homeopathic remedies addressed these. The remedies are prepared by repeatedly diluting a chosen substance in alcohol or distilled water, followed by forceful striking on an elastic body, called succussion. Each dilution followed by succussion is said to increase the remedy's potency. Dilution sometimes continues well past the point where none of the original substance remains. Homeopaths select remedies by consulting reference books known as repertories, considering the totality of the patient's symptoms as well as the patient's personal traits, physical and psychological state, and life history. The low concentration of homeopathic remedies, which often lack even a single molecule of the diluted substance, has been the basis of questions about the effects of the remedies since the 19th century. Modern advocates of homeopathy have suggested that "water has a memory" – that during mixing and succussion, the substance leaves an enduring effect on the water, perhaps a "vibration", and this produces an effect on the patient. This notion has no scientific support. Pharmacological research has found instead that stronger effects of an active ingredient come from higher, not lower doses. Homeopathic remedies are derived from substances that come from plants, minerals, or animals, such as red onion, arnica (mountain herb), crushed whole bees, white arsenic, poison ivy, belladonna (deadly nightshade), and stinging nettle. Homeopathic remedies are often formulated as sugar pellets to be placed under the tongue; they may also be in other forms, such as ointments, gels, drops, creams, and tablets. Treatments are “individualized” or tailored to each person—it is not uncommon for different people with the same condition to receive different treatments.

But scientific research has found homeopathic remedies ineffective and their postulated mechanisms of action implausible. A large portion of the scientific community regards homeopathy as a sham; the American Medical Association considers homeopathy to be quackery, and homeopathic remedies have been criticized as unethical.

Despite this scepticism, according to recent surveys in France, an astounding 40% of the French public have used homeopathic medicines, and 39% of French physicians have prescribed them. At least six French medical schools offer courses leading to a degree in homeopathy, and homeopathy is taught in all pharmacy schools and in four veterinary schools. 42% of British physicians surveyed refer patients to homeopathic physicians. Another survey of British physicians discovered that 80% of recent graduates wanted training in either homeopathy, acupuncture, or hypnosis. One respected author estimated that 20% of German physicians use homeopathic medicines occasionally. At present, the most popular hay fever remedy in Germany is a homeopathic medicine, and other homeopathic medicines for the common cold, sore throats, and circulatory problems are in the top ten of their respective categories. According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey in the US, an estimated 3.9 million adults and 910,000 children used homeopathy in the previous year. These estimates include use of over-the-counter products labeled as “homeopathic,” as well as visits with a homeopathic practitioner. Out-of-pocket costs for adults were $2.9 billion for homeopathic medicines and $170 million for visits to homeopathic practitioners. 

So what is one to believe?

Many years later I was stricken with shingles a particularly painful disease. While the disease itself was cured in a few months , really with little help from western medicine, it left painful aftereffects due to nerve damage. We tried a range of western medicines to try and cure the nerve damage with little effect - actually some of these medicines had side effects which were often worse than the pain.After much prodding by my wife and daughter I reluctantly agreed to go an accupuncturist. She was a chinese doctor trained in Beijing and declared that accupuncture could certainly cure this nerve pain through a two or three month regime. So we started the cure and sure enough after three weeks there was perceptile improvement. 

As we know acupuncture is an alternative medicine methodology originating in ancient China that treats patients by manipulating thin, solid needles that have been inserted into acupuncture points in the skin. According to traditional Chinese medicine, stimulating these points can correct imbalances in the flow of qi through channels known as meridians. The general theory of acupuncture is based on the premise that bodily functions are regulated by an energy called qi which flows through the body; disruptions of this flow are believed to be responsible for disease. Acupuncture describes a family of procedures aiming to correct imbalances in the flow of qi by stimulation of anatomical locations on or under the skin (usually called acupuncture points or acupoints), by a variety of techniques.The most common mechanism of stimulation of acupuncture points employs penetration of the skin by thin metal needles, which are manipulated manually or by electrical stimulation. 

But current scientific research has not found any histological or physiological correlates for qi, meridians and acupuncture points. Other reviews have concluded that positive results reported for acupuncture are too small to be of clinical relevance and may be the result of inadequate experimental blinding, or can be explained by placebo effects and publication bias. The fact is that the invasiveness of acupuncture makes it difficult to design an experiment that adequately controls for placebo effects.

So faced with this welter of facts and counter claims what is one to do? Here is where I come out after my limited experience with alternate medicine:

• Despite massive research, the verdict on alternate medicine is at best mixed

• Always remember that your affliction is yours alone and unique and only you can decide how to proceed to handle and conquer it.

• If conventional medicine has not provided you with a cure, be willing to experiment with alternative medicine. But in doing so, always seek out the most prominent and reliable practitioner you can find and be aware of its negative side effects.

On mothers

A dear friend of mine recently lost his mother and wrote a powerful, emotional eulogy for her that I wrote about in my earlier blog. 

The loss of a mother is the most profound event in one's lifetime and leaves wounds that take a long time in healing. For many even the thought of thinking about the departed becomes too painful and they go through life nursing the loss. Having gone through this experience twice in my lifetime, I can confirm that one does not ever get over it and the loss hits you at times when you least expect it and with an emotional force that leaves you drained and dry.

l lost my mother when I was not even thirty and had not enough time to spend with her in her last years having been abroad or away from home. She was a kind and generous soul with a delightful smile and a kind word for everybody. It has been one of my eternal regrets that my children never knew their grandmother and that she never got to see her daughter in law or her two grandchildren and now her great grandchild. She would have been so proud of them but that was not to be. As years pass by, memories fade but I will always remember her sweet disposition with nary a harsh word for anyone and a willingness to listen to everybody's problems and lend a helping hand. She was graceful and even when we kids teased her about her lack of English skills ( she learned the language after she got married and was not familiar with our jargon of the day) she took it all with good humor. Now all I have left are but sweet memories of her:

“a traveller between life and death:

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright

With something of an angel light." My mother and I in 1945

It was a few years later that her younger sister took over the mantle. For the next four decades she was to be our surrogate mother guiding us through some of the most turbulent times of my life. I had married out of the family norms and was ostracized for almost decade and through it all she comforted and guided me through the emotional turmoil. She was there when my children were born and became an adoring and loving grandmother to them. To my children, she was "bari Aunty" and they rejoiced in her company even as she upbraided them and chided them into discipline. Actually my own memory of her growing up was of a strict disciplinarian who kept all of us children in line in our grandfather’s house in Lahore. She may have been a “phantom of delight” to her college mates, but to us children she was the "dragon lady", both feared and loved. Of course, all this changed when she got married. She then became our favorite aunt, generous of her time and love. We would spent summers with her in Iklehra, Parasia and Burhar, all coal towns where her husband worked and these were summers we all eagerly looked forward to filled as they were with affection and laughter (and don’t forget the lovely cakes). Later when I returned from the U.S in the early seventies, she was the bedrock of our family and the refuge that both Ena and I repaired to. And even when we left Delhi, on our return she was always the first person we saw and the last person we had dinner with on our way to the airport. She was our confidante, and adviser and our biggest defender and our warmest refuge.  She died a few years ago having lost her will to live after erbs palsy took away her hearing and faltering eyesight. And we miss her.


I only wish that my children and grandchild will remember and cherish their memories of their grandmothers- one whom they did not meet and the one they did. And that their  wisdom, generosity and compassion will live on through them.

"Badi Aunty" in 2009

The right age

Women in their 20s are often told they're too young to settle down. Then, seemingly overnight, as they move into their 30's, they start hearing that they're spinsters. What gives? 

Women today, in certain milieus, find themselves placed into one of two categories: too young to settle down, or too old to find a man. It seems in this view that there is a window of opportunity to get married, but it is ephemeral almost to the point of non-existence. It falls at a different age according to region, or the idiosyncratic biases of one's circle, but hovers around 27. 

Here's how it works: A young woman hears from friends and family that she needs to focus on her career or education, not some guy. She is warned of certain dangers: unsolicited male attention; unintended pregnancy, as if intended pregnancy were also a thing; and the desire hardwired into all straight men to turn their girlfriends into 1950s housewives. To entertain the possibility of it being difficult to find a husband, to even utter the expression "find a husband," is to regress to another era. And this advice is incredibly appealing, a rejection of the quaint notion that female heterosexuality is the desire not for men, but for a white picket fence.

And then, suddenly, the message shifts. A not-quite-as-young woman will learn that rather than having all the time in the world to start a family, her biological clock is about to strike midnight. That even if she doesn't want children, she is now on the cusp of being too old to find a husband. Hasn't she heard of the man shortage, which only gets worse with age? 40-year-old men can date any 23-year-old they want but not women. And what about those degrees, that burgeoning career that she has so assiduously built ? Should they all be forgotten just so that society may realize its dreams of all women being married before they turn into spinsters.

As it stands, women in happy relationships are under pressure to exit those so as not to be 20s-something child brides, while ever-so-slightly older ones are asked to settle, chastised for having given up Mr. Almost-Right back before they got haggard. And even if they have, by some miracle, remained attractive, it's all a mirage, because you can't fool nature


Of course the window of opportunity emerges from certain facts: reproductive technologies have extended female fertility, but the age at which one may feel too young to settle down is increasing at least as rapidly, and with no end point. Men and women are in school for longer, and often financially insecure. What is socially constructed is the sense of urgency. The world does not end when a woman marries too early (within reason; note the use of "woman"), too late, or not at all.

The urgency comes from expectations younger women internalize. Reflecting on her college years, Kate Bolick (then 39 and single) wrote, "We took for granted that we'd spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we'd finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

The problem, which Bolick grappled with, is that if one is to be single throughout one's 20s, yet married for all of one's 30s, this leaves rather little time for meeting a boyfriend, marrying him, and having children before 35, or "advanced maternal age."

Straight men, meanwhile, do not face these pressures. A man who marries young may be thought more responsible. No one will assume he gave up on his career for some girl. And a man who's 35 and is still single is not assumed, by virtue of his age, unmarriageable. One not interested in marrying is generally assumed to be living the life he chose, not to have failed to find a woman in his thicker-haired, pre-paunch days.

While women had long been warned of becoming 'spinsters,' what's new is that the message arrives with a thud. Women are now asked to live by second-wave feminist principles, until, boom, they're informed that they need a man no less than women ever did. The same friends and relatives who once gave advice informed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show have now let The Dick Van Dyke Show be their guide. 

The answer is not to radically revamp expectations. As a rule, it makes sense to encourage the young to see what's out there before committing. The stability of marriage in upper-middle-class circles likely owes something to premarital trips around the block. French politician Léon Blum's 1907 argument in favor of both sexes experimenting prior to settling down, as a way of improving marriages once they occur, has been largely vindicated. Meanwhile, there's no point denying that if one wants to start a family, there's an age past which this becomes more difficult, especially for women. 

But individual cases are, well, individual. A 22-year-old may already have had all the dates or relationships she wanted, and be prepared to commit. While the woman of a certain age who regrets dumping a long-ago boyfriend has become something of a cliché, there probably are women who regret ending things simply because those whose advice they value urged them to move on. And while romantic options tend to decrease with age, there is no official end date to when a woman can find a husband.

It is time for all of us to become more accepting both of women settling down younger than the "right" age, and of women remaining unattached past that point. In the mean time, women should do as they please, and care less what those around them think. 

For the fact is that there is no right time to marry. The only right time is when the mate is right!

Should we kill granny?

In Paraguay's Ache tribe, aging women used to listen with terror for the footsteps of the young men whose job it was to sneak up on them with an ax and brain them. 

Now most societies don't actually murder their grannies but the fact is that how women manage to attain old age is an evolutionary mystery. In nature, from the point of view of the selfish gene, creatures are supposed to drop dead as soon as they lose the power to reproduce. So why should women survive when they can no longer reproduce?

A man can make babies his whole life, even if the sperm of his old age lacks vigor and genetic fidelity. But a woman outlives her eggs by about 20 years, which almost no other female mammals do. (Only female killer and pilot whales and orcas are known to last as long after the end of their menstrual cycles). Besides being classed among the oddities of the animal kingdom, post-menopausal women lack obvious utility. They tend to be weak. They don't have much sex appeal. They eat food working people might make better use of. 

In the 1980's Hawkes and her colleagues developed the "grandmother hypothesis," which holds that women past childbearing age helped not just their children, but their children's children, and lengthened the human lifespan in the process. Without babies of their own to lug around, grandmothers had both time and a very good reason to be useful. When they eked out food for their daughters' children, they reduced the chance that those children would die. That gave the grandmothers a better chance of passing on their own predisposition to longevity. 

This grandmother hypothesis also explains another conundrum: Why do humans have shorter birth intervals than other primates? Chimp mothers, for instance, wait five or six years to give birth to another neonate. But women can pop out infants as soon as they've weaned previous ones. It turns out that, once humans learned the art of collaborative child-rearing, old women started spending more time with their daughters' toddlers. That freed up the young women to have more. As the grandmother effect spread throughout the population over thousands of generations, this theory goes, it changed humans in another way. It made their brains bigger. As life lengthened, so did each stage of it. Children stayed children longer, which let their brains develop a more complex neural architecture.

Not everyone accepts this triumphantly feminist account of our evolutionary history. When anthropologists first heard it, most of them dismissed it as ridiculous. For one thing, it cuts man-the-hunter out of the picture. What about all the calories needed to grow our oversized brains? Didn't those have to come from the meat brought back from the hunt? Moreover, throughout recorded history, young women left their villages to move in with their men. So how would mothers have had access to their daughters' children?

Two decades later, the grandmother hypothesis has gone from oddball conjecture to one of the dominant theories of why we live so long, breed so fast, and are so smart. The extra calories and care supplied by women in their long post-fertile period subsidized the long pre-fertile period that is childhood. And that's what made us fully smart and human.

In a happy coincidence, the grandmother hypothesis comes along just as Americans enter what might be called the Age of Old Age. America's biggest generation, the baby-boomers, began retiring in 2011. This gerontocracy is expected to drain our wealth. By 2060, more than 20 percent of all Americans will be 65 or older, up from 13 percent in 2010. More than 92 million oldsters will roam the land, if roaming is within their power. People who fret about the federal budget point out that, by 2011, Social Security and Medicare were already eating up a third of it. Looming in the near future is the prospect that both programs' trust funds will vanish as the number of workers paying into the system goes down.

But are senior citizens really "greedy geezers" (a term made popular by Science magazine in 1988) about to bankrupt us? The grandmother hypothesis suggests not. It suggests that we should see the coming abundance of over-65-year-olds as an opportunity, not a disaster. As gerontologist Linda Fried, dean of Columbia University's school of public health, points out, "Older adults constitute the only increasing natural resource in the entire world."

A growing body of research shows how much grandmothers help their grandchildren, even when they aren't giving them hands-on care or food. Often enough, though, they do provide those things, especially in poor families or ones with dysfunctional parents. Unsurprisingly, grandmothers often do more for their grandchildren than grandfathers do. "Older women are the neighborhood watch and the neighborhood glue," says Fried. "They're the community purveyor of norms." 

Not that all grandparents can or want to be useful. As more people in industrialized countries postpone childbearing, parents become grandparents later and have less energy. The divorced ones may have started second or third families of their own. Global mobility puts distance between the generations. Assisted-living facilities segregate the old. Some retirement communities bar children altogether. But children still need the nurture they once got from their mothers' mothers.

So it's worth thinking about institutions that would give parents and children that grandparental boost and of programs that would take advantage of the deepening wellspring of senior talent, which would cut costs, make old people happier, and sew up the threadbare bonds among the generations. If we want to keep enjoying the grandmother effect, we'll just have to broaden our idea of what a grandmother can be. 

Fortunately there is now ample research to buttress the argument that we should revere our grannies and not kill them!

Ten virtues for the modern age

In the modern world, the idea of trying to be a ‘good person’ conjures up all sorts of negative associations: of piety, solemnity, bloodlessness and sexual renunciation, as if goodness were something one would try to embrace only when other more difficult but more fulfilling avenues had been exhausted.

From times immemorial, all cultures have tried to define the virtues that one must try and attain in their lifetime. The Greeks and the Buddhists have always had a set of virtues they lived by. But now Alain de Bottom proposes a new set of virtues for the modern age.

"Throughout history, societies have been interested in fostering virtues, in training us to be more virtuous," he says, " but we're one of the first generations to have zero public interest in this. You're allowed to work on your body (going to the gym has very high status as an activity), but announce that you're going to work on being more virtuous, and people will be guaranteed to look at you as if you're insane."

There's no scientific answer to being virtuous, but the key thing is to have some kind of list on which to flex our ethical muscles. It reminds us that we all need to work at being good, just as we work at anything else that really matters.

 Ten Virtues for the Modern Age according to Bottom: 

1. Resilience. Keeping going even when things are looking dark; accepting that reversals are normal; remembering that human nature is, in the end, tough. Not frightening others with your fears.

2. Empathy. The capacity to connect imaginatively with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person. The courage to become someone else and look back at yourself with honesty.

3. Patience. We lose our temper because we believe that things should be perfect. We've grown so good in some areas (putting men on the moon etc.), we're ever less able to deal with things that still insist on going wrong; like traffic, government, other people... We should grow calmer and more forgiving by getting more realistic about how things actually tend to go.

4. Sacrifice. We’re hardwired to seek our own advantage but also have a miraculous ability, very occasionally, to forego our own satisfactions in the name of someone or something else. We won't ever manage to raise a family, love someone else or save the planet if we don't keep up with the art of sacrifice. 

5. Politeness. Politeness has a bad name. We often assume it's about being 'fake' (which is meant to be bad) as opposed to 'really ourselves' (which is meant to be good). However, given what we're really like deep down, we should spare others too much exposure to our deeper selves. We need to learn manners, which aren’t evil - they are the necessary internal rules of civilisation. Politeness is very linked to tolerance, the capacity to live alongside people whom one will never agree with, but at the same time, can’t avoid.

6. Humour. Seeing the funny sides of situations and of oneself doesn't sound very serious, but it is integral to wisdom, because it's a sign that one is able to put a benevolent finger on the gap between what we want to happen and what life can actually provide; what we dream of being and what we actually are, what we hope other people will be like and what they are actually like. Like anger, humour springs from disappointment, but it's disappointment optimally channelled. It's one of the best things we can do with our sadness.

7. Self-awareness. To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one's troubles and moods; to have a sense of what's going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs to the world.

8. Forgiveness. Forgiveness means a long memory of all the times when we wouldn't have got through life without someone cutting us some slack. It's recognising that living with others isn't possible without excusing errors.

9. Hope. The way the world is now is only a pale shadow of what it could one day be. We're still only at the beginning of history. As you get older, despair becomes far easier, almost reflex (whereas in adolescence, it was still cool and adventurous). Pessimism isn't necessarily deep, nor optimism shallow.

10. Confidence. The greatest projects and schemes die for no grander reasons than that we don't dare. Confidence isn't arrogance, it's based on a constant awareness of how short life is and how little we ultimately lose from risking everything. 

Let us go back and look at what the ancients have to say on this as well.

The ancient Greeks considered wisdom to be the master virtue, the one that directs all the 
others.  Wisdom is good judgment.  It enables us to make reasoned decisions that are both good for us 
and good for others.  Wisdom tells us how to put the other virtues into practice—when to act, how to 
act, and how to balance different virtues when they conflict (as they do, for example, when telling the 
honest truth might hurt someone’s feelings).  Wisdom enables us to discern correctly, to see what is 
truly important in life, and to set priorities.  As the ethicist Richard Gula points out, “We cannot do right 
unless we first see correctly.” 

The second virtue named by the Greeks is justice.  Justice means respecting the rights of all 
persons.   Since we are persons ourselves, justice also includes self-respect, a proper regard for our 
own rights and dignity.  Schools, in their character education efforts, often center on justice because it 
includes so many of the interpersonal virtues—civility, honesty, respect, responsibility, and tolerance 
(correctly understood not as approval of other people’s beliefs or behaviors but as respect for their 
freedom of conscience as long as they do not violate the rights of others).  A concern for justice—and 
the capacity for moral indignation in the face of injustice—inspires us to work as citizens to build a more 
just society and world.

A third, much-neglected virtue is fortitude.   Fortitude enables us to do what is right in the face 
of difficulty.  The right decision in life is often the hard one.  One high school captures that truth in its 
motto: “Do the hard right instead of the easy wrong.”   A familiar maxim says, “When the going gets 
tough, the tough get going.”   Fortitude, as the educator James Stenson points out, is the inner 
toughness that enables us to overcome or withstand hardship, defeats, inconvenience, and pain.  
Courage, resilience, patience, perseverance, endurance, and a healthy self-confidence are all aspects 
of fortitude.  

The fourth virtue named by the Greeks is self-control (which they called “temperance”).  Selfcontrol is the ability to govern ourselves.  It enables us to control our temper, regulate our sensual 
appetites and passions, and pursue even legitimate pleasures in moderation.  It’s the power to resist 
temptation.  It enables us to wait—and to delay gratification in the service of higher and distant goals. 
An old saying recognizes the importance of self-control in the moral life: “Either we rule our desires, or 
our desires rule us.”   Reckless, self-destructive, and criminal behaviors flourish in the absence of selfcontrol.

A fifth essential virtue is love.  Love goes beyond justice; it gives more than fairness requires.  Love is the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of another.  A whole cluster of important human virtues—empathy, compassion, kindness, generosity, service, loyalty, patriotism (love of what is noble in one’s country), and 
forgiveness—make up the virtue of love.  In his book With Love and Prayers, F. Washington Jarvis 
writes: “Love—selfless love that expects nothing back—is the most powerful force in the universe.  Its 
impact on both the giver and the receiver is incalculable.”  Love is a demanding virtue.  If we really took 
seriously the familiar injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself,” says an essay on this virtue, would 
we not make every effort to avoid gossiping about others and calling attention to their faults, given how 
sensitive we are to such things said about us?  


A positive attitude is a sixth essential virtue.  If you have a negative attitude in life, you’re a 
burden to yourself and others.  If you have a positive attitude, you’re an asset to yourself and others.  
The character strengths of hope, enthusiasm, flexibility, and a sense of humor are all part of a positive 
attitude.   All of us, young and old, need to be reminded that our attitude is something we choose.  
“Most people,” Abraham Lincoln said, “are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”   Said 
Martha Washington: “I have learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery 
depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.  We carry the seeds of the one or the other 
with us in our minds wherever we go.”

Old-fashioned hard work is a seventh indispensable virtue.  There is no substitute in life for 
work.  “I challenge you,” says the great basketball coach John Wooden, “to show me one single solitary 
individual who achieved his or her own personal greatness without lots of hard work.”   Hard work 
includes initiative, diligence, goal-setting, and resourcefulness.

An eighth essential virtue is integrity.  Integrity is adhering to moral principle, being faithful to 
moral conscience, keeping our word, and standing up for what we believe.   To have integrity is to be 
“whole,” so that what we say and do in different situations is consistent rather than contradictory.   
Integrity is different from honesty, which tells the truth to others.  Integrity is telling the truth to oneself.  
“The most dangerous form of deception,” says author Josh Billings, “is self-deception.”   Self-deception 
enables us to do whatever we wish and find a reason to justify our actions.

Gratitude is a ninth essential virtue.  “Gratitude, like love, is not a feeling but an act of the will,” 
observes writer Anne Husted Burleigh. “We choose to be thankful, just as we choose to love.”  
Gratitude has been described as the secret of a happy life.  It reminds us that we all drink from wells 
we did not dig.  It moves us to count our everyday blessings.  Asked what was the biggest lesson he 
learned from drifting 21 days in a life raft lost in the Pacific, the war hero Eddie Rickenbacker 
answered: “That if you have all the fresh water you want to drink and all the food you want to eat, you 
ought never to complain about anything.”  

And above all Humility, the final essential virtue, can be considered the foundation of the whole moral life.  Humility is necessary for the acquisition of the other virtues because it makes us aware of our 
imperfections and leads us to try to become a better person.  “Humility,” writes the educator David 
Isaacs, “is recognizing both our inadequacies and abilities and pressing our abilities into service without 
attracting attention or expecting applause.”  “Half the harm that is done in the world,” said T. S. Eliot, “is 
due to people who want to feel important.”   Humility enables us to take responsibility for our faults and 
failings (rather than blaming someone else), apologize for them, and seek to make amends.  

According to the Dalai the ten virtuous acts spoken of in Buddhism are:

Three concern the body: one must not kill, steal, or engage in sexual misconduct.

Four others are verbal: do not lie, defame others, speak offensive words, or engage in frivolous conversation, which relates to everything that might be said under the influence of afflicting emotions.

Finally, the last three virtuous acts are of a mental nature: do not develop covetousness or malice and, finally, do not hold false or perverted views, such as the extreme view, close to nihilism, which totally denies spiritual perfection.

A eulogy to remember

 The mother of dear friends of ours died recently at the age of ninety five. His son gave a eulogy at her funeral which worth reading.

“My dear brothers and sisters, family and relatives, companions and friends, 

We have gathered here because we remember Irene, my mother, who touched so many of our lives in so many different ways. We all share a common bond with her and we feel her loss in the measure in which she touched our lives. For me it seems like an unending ocean of sadness, and yet I cannot but celebrate her life her nine-five years here. There are the memories we bring to this final farewell, and there will be many more we take away from here. They should all help to lift our sorrow, to pick up the pieces of our lives and heal our hearts. Otherwise our loss might draw in the horizons of our lives, like enclosing walls of sorrow, dark, desperate, crushing. 

Every goodbye is a little death and now the final good bye, when one who touched our lives as she did, leaves us with an emptiness that only resurrection hope can fill, already now, but not fully yet. 

This is a mass of the resurrection and I ask you to bring to this mass memories to celebrate the life she lived and the new life she now enjoys. We all want to be remembered by those we leave behind. The haunting lines from Rabindranath Tagore, she included in her memoir, express it so beautifully:

Remember me, still remember me (Tobu mone rekho)......

if I go far away,
still remember me …
If tears come to your eyelids
If play ceases one day, one spring night,
still remember me
If work is stopped one day, one autumn dawn,
remember me
If I come to your mind,
yet heavy tears no longer brim
in the corners of your eyes
still remember me
Remember me, still remember me
(Tobu mone rekho)

How do we want to remember the way Irene, my mother, was? How would she like to be remembered and how would we like to be remembered by her from where she is now? 

No human life is perfect. But of those who have gone before us we want to tresure the happy, soothing memories to heal our sometimes unhappy, disturbed hearts. In the liturgy we ask God to forgive our dearly departed Irene, remembering that we all need God’s mercy and unless we forgive others we ourselves cannot receive God’s pardon. For it is in forgiving we are forgiven, in giving we receive, in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life. So as we remember Irene, my mother, what images of her will we treasure and what hopes will we dare? 

An image I treasure is of Mum, sitting in our large living room alone in the dark, when the whole house was silent in sleep. I had once crept up on her to find her crying as she prayed her fifteen decade rosary. Go to sleep now, she said to me as her told her beads for her many, many intentions. I could only guess at rupture my father’s death must have meant for her. Everything seemed “like ashes in the mouth”, she had said to me then. 

....After her ninetieth birthday she told me she was loath to leave this planet earth, she liked it here. But then her gradually failing sight and hearing enclosed her space, while her undaunted spirit struggled with the dissonance between her clear, incisive mind and her frail, failing body. ...

Even now I hear her echoing the words of Rabindranath Tagore to us: 

"Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence." (Stray Birds). In the afterglow of her sunset now this is my dedication to my mother for I know the sun is rising on her in another better place to which we all are called. 

A Dedication to Em

For Em, the gem
whose gentle sparkle
of flickering light
reflects, refracts,
enhances, nuances,
brightens, enlightens
as she polishes to perfection
opaque resistant stones like me.

With filial reverence, loving respect,
boundless admiration, unbounded appreciation,
and irrepressible hope that
the glorious burst of colours 
at the sunset
will only presage an ever more
beautiful, wondrous dawn.

With Dad now she's home at last, 
the memories are ours 
to share and care and carry on.

Your (sometimes ungenteel) son
Rudi.