One of the recurring, albeit underlying, themes in my plays is the examination of human behavior: Can people change? Because we are animals, must we at root behave like animals? Are we to some degree naturally moralistic, or are these  morals constructs created by us to civilize behavior? I don’t usually set out to write about these things. Usually I set out to write about people in conflict in some way, or sometimes (rarely) I have a beginning notion or perhaps some latest outrage in the news gets my juices flowing, but often this central question of “what does it mean at core to be human” comes up.

I was reminded of this again the other day when I got an email from a friend who had seen my play “Next Time” in Fullerton on an evening I happened to be there. (And, if she’s reading this, I apologize for not responding yet to the email. But I will.) Among other things, she said she was glad to see another one of my plays that deals with ethics. I hadn’t realized this was another of my plays that deals with ethics, so to speak, but upon reflection I’ve realized she’s right; at one point the protagonist’s inner self (and, therefore, himself) questions all the behavioral systems he’s set up, pointing out that there’s no proof that anyone or anything else exists. (That point of view, it occurs to me as I’m writing this, is the perspective of a sociopath; I’ve written a few of them, too.) In my play “Animals,” a character named Social Realist gives us a tour of mankind’s base brutality through the prism of four interconnected lives (a man, a woman, a “Bad Friend” who may have had an affair with the man, and a contract killer), as well as his own experience when young of seeing a dog eat all her own pups.

Given my subconscious interest in this topic, this news story jumped off the web at me. In essence, according to this research as reported in the current issue of Science, humankind is more ethical and less self-interested than its closest cousin, the chimpanzee.

Key finding #1:

Economists used to say that people are self-interested and rational, maximizing whatever payday is within reach. But recent studies have blown that idea to smithereens. When people are given the choice of accepting or rejecting the split of some spoils that a partner offers—say, how to divide the $10 that researchers have given them in an experiment—they reject offers perceived as unfair. So if you offer me $2 and propose to keep $8 for yourself, I’ll walk away and leave us each with nothing—stupid, considering that I’m rejecting $2 in free money, but consistent with the emerging idea that humans have a strong, evolved sense of fairness that trumps immediate self-interest. Something like this probably underlies people’s tendency to punish cheaters, free-riders and noncooperators. The game has been played uncounted times in labs, and the basic finding is that proposers typically offer 40 to 50 percent of the pot, and responders walk away from any offer less than 20 percent.

I find this true in my own life, as I’m sure you do. Today we had some work done at our office by a professional firm and, before leaving, their workers subtly shared with my business partner that if we ever needed more work of the same sort done these guys would gladly come without telling their employers and charge us less. When I heard this, I was outraged. Not only are they moonlighting as direct competitors to the people who employ them, they’re doing it within their employers’ customer base. That’s doubly, or triply, cheating. Is it in my self-interest to be outraged? No, because the value proposition they offered would save us money. Nevertheless, I would never call these guys privately to come work for me, and I’m thinking about how to anonymously alert their employers.

Evidently, chimps see this sort of thing differently:

In a study being reported today in Science, researchers had 11 chimpanzees at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Germany play this “ultimatum” game. One chimp, the “proposer,” sat beside the “responder.” The proposer pulled out a tray as far as he could. The tray held two dishes with raisins, separated by a see-through divider: one for the proposer and the other for the responder. The proposers first chose which tray to pull out; if the responder liked what he saw—and he could see how many raisins he and the proposer would each get, by seeing how many raisins were on each side of the divider—he accepted the offer by pulling the tray the rest of the way out. Both chimps would then chow down. If the responder did not like the offer, he refused to pull the tray the rest of the way out, and neither chimp got a snack.

If the dishes held the same number of raisins, the responder chimp almost always accepted a 50-50 offer and rejected a 100-0 offer. Unlike people, though, they rarely rejected 80-20 offers—only 5 to 14 percent of the time. And unlike people, who fume when confronted with unfair offers, the chimps almost never took umbrage, throwing a tantrum at an unfair offer a mere 2 percent of the time.

There has long been a debate over whether chimps are able to sense fairness, much less tolerate unfairness. These results suggest that chimps behave “according to traditional economic models of self-interest, unlike humans, and that this species does not share the human sensitivity to fairness,” the scientists write. As scientists find fewer and fewer fundamental human traits to be unique (see the previous post on tool-using animals), at least we can keep hold of this one.

There are two lessons for me in all this:

1. I guess there’s more hope for humankind after all, because chimp wars are truly vicious and the issue of fairness never intrudes.
2. Economists think people act like chimps (but we don’t). Now I better understand the origin of Reaganomics and its present-day ilk.

A profile of an American falsely accused of terrorism who has been fighting the system and the Patriot Act the past three years — and winning.

Maybe our Constitution is retrievable after all.

If you haven’t had a barking exchange with a ticket agent and can get to Minneapolis airport, it’s safe to use the men’s room again. Authorities are putting in full-length dividers. But now that even Larry Craig knows not to go there for anonymous sex, isn’t that like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped?

According to this story, you’d better bow and scrape if you don’t want to get screwed by an airline ticket agent and sent to Siberia while your luggage heads to a lost-and-found auction. Some of us thought just buying a ticket entitled you to decent service. Guess not.

You may recall my failed attempts last week at convincing my kids to see “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.” Sixteen-year-old Lex was always up for it, but his two younger siblings were adamantly opposed because, quote, “Mr. Bean is stupid.” (This led me to a theory that Mr. Bean is uncool, and my kids want to be cool, at least until they become teenagers when, evidently, it’s okay to self-identify as a nerd even when one has actually become cool.) Over the course of the week my nine-year-old daughter weakened and this morning for some reason my five-year-old son relented, and we were off to see “Mr. Bean’s Holiday.”

It was terrific fun.

Surely no one reading this needs any further discourse on Rowan Atkinson’s comedic skills. But what became evident throughout the movie was the joy in it — the simple, childlike pleasure in being foolish. One of the subplots concerns a boy of 10 or 12 whom Mr. Bean is trying to reunite with his parents in Cannes. Later, Bean and the boy wind up separated as well, and when we discover what the boy was up to sans Bean it turns out he was adopted by an Afro Cuban jazz band traveling between gigs, where the kid had the time of his life. And isn’t that really what so much of 10- or 12-year-old boyhood is about — adventure? Hijinx? I’m sure other movies, especially the American comedies, would have shown him in increasing peril; here, he’s off on a lark. Every bit of “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” was like that: silly, upbeat, and sunny. When the movie ended the audience applauded, and when we stepped out all three kids proclaimed their love for “Mr. Bean.” Outside, the world seemed brighter.

Not for most Americans, though, as The New York Times reports here. Perhaps there’s something wrong with you if like Mr. Bean or, well, goofy fun. Last week in one of my classes I shared my appreciation for Mr. Bean and one or two students snorted. “There goes your credibility,” one said. But I’m not seeking credibility from anyone else; I know what I like and I know why I like it and I’m capable of expressing it — and that makes me cool.

In the 1970’s, comics artist Neal Adams did a heroic thing: He personally committed himself to a campaign to cajole and embarrass DC Comics into doing something to help Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of “Superman.” While DC had made untold hundreds of millions of dollars with this character — in publishing, in lunch boxes and Halloween costumes and action figures, on TV and radio and seemingly everywhere else all around the globe — Siegel was eking out a living as a typist at $7,000 a year and Shuster was going blind and unable to work. While the “work for hire” agreement the two had signed in the 1940’s may have been the letter of the law, it sure didn’t feel like Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Adams’ very public campaign culminated shortly before the release of the first Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie, and thus succeeded in embarrassing DC into giving the two creators an annual “salary” of $35,000, and amount that has grown over the years and is now paid to their heirs.

Most of us probably thought that was the end of it.

But now, according to Portfolio magazine, Siegel’s widow (who was the inspiration for Lois Lane) has contracted Hollywood’s most hated lawyer to represent her in a battle to recover all rights to Superman — and evidently he’s had success with similar cases.

Here’s the story.

“Facts” are not always straightforward, as Talking Heads acknowledged in “Crosseyed and Painless”:

Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don’t do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of things
Facts don’t stain the furniture
Facts go out and slam the door
Facts are written all over your face
Facts continue to change their shape

Anyone who follows the news can sympathize, where most of us I’m sure would prefer “the facts” served straight, but where those of those who have been news practitioners know that inclusion of some facts and exclusion of others — whether for point of view or for story length — results in very different perspectives on the same story. (A phenomenon I blogged about here.)

If this subject interests you, you should consider joining us for a panel we’re putting together at USC entitled “Truth, Lies or Scam — Can you believe anything you read?” More information below. Hope to see you there.

Here’s a story I found delicious because the misuse of language is only slightly less entertaining than Yogi Berra. The story is headlined “Giuliani faces tough NRA crowd.”

To begin with, reading the story reveals that the “tough crowd” didn’t exactly pepper spray the candidate, or even ask difficult questions; rather, they were reduced to tepid applause and wondering if perhaps they might be able to some day bring themselves to support him even though he’s from New York and “hard” on guns. If Giuliani ever becomes president, he’d better be prepared to face far tougher crowds than this.

Here’s my favorite quote from the story:

“I think he is sincere; I just don’t know if he truly believes it down deep inside,” said Thomas Crum, a retired trucking executive from Scottsdale, Ariz. “I have a little difference with him just beginning to realize what his position really is.”

Mr. Crum, here is what “sincere” means: “free of deceit, hypocrisy, or falseness; earnest.” So if you think he is sincere, then you should know he truly believes it down deep inside. If somehow you think he is sincere but don’t know if he truly believes it, then you are having thoughts that are disconnected from knowledge — not surprising given the environment you found yourself in during Giuliani’s speech. This may be a medical condition called psychosis, one you should have checked out.

Someone else at the NRA event struggled with sincerity’s close kin, truthfulness:

Sitting next to Bell at lunch Friday, Joe Rogers was keeping a scorecard for each of the presidential candidates on the conference’s brochure. While some speakers had check marks, Giuliani was the only one with a zero next to his name. The Wilmington, N.C. salesman said even Democratic presidential candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson scored better during his taped remarks.

“I don’t think there’s anything he could have said and been truthful about to win over the crowd,” Rogers said of Giuliani. “To his credit, he spoke the truth.”

From this, I take it that Mr. Rogers is saying Giuliani could have won some of the crowd over had he chosen to lie, something some of the crowd would have welcomed (although not Rogers himself); most of the crowd awards no credit for truth. Given the track record of the GOP from Reagan to present, I believe the crowd is going to be delighted with what it’s getting. And that Giuliani would be better off drinking that particular flavor of Kool-Aid now so he can get used to it for the long months to come.

Just tried again and failed to elicit any enthusiasm in my kids for seeing “Mr. Bean’s Holiday” today.

My 5-year-old remained defiant: “I’m not seeing Mr. Bean,” he said, adding this time for my clarification, “It’s stupid.” My daughter sank deeper into the couch in a pronounced cringe, a response very much like the family dog’s when I raise my voice.

Here I thought Mr. Bean was funny. Evidently he’s deeply disturbing.

While I’m on the topic of the cartoons of Ruben Bolling, which I usually enjoy, here’s one where he misses by a mile. For the Village Voice he recently did this strip, which purports to be “Toy Story 3,” but written by Cormac McCarthy. While Bolling does get McCarthy right a couple of times, as with Woody’s line “I aim to,” for the most part he’s clueless about what distinguishes McCarthy. The abundant presence of commas is an immediate tipoff. McCarthy largely ellides them. Because he doesn’t use them he must find other ways to write sentences for clarity and it is this which gives him his rhythm. (Which I’ve just attempted to emulate, with limited success.) It is the spareness of the writing, the lack of reflection in narration, the surgical skill in selecting precisely the right word, the narrative drive unblocked by commas, and the wide-open spaces he uses for setting that make McCarthy’s writing seem existentialist. It’s not directly about God. Either Bolling doesn’t know anything about McCarthy (perhaps because he hasn’t read him), or in this case he’s got poor judgment.

(If you can’t see the strip below, click here.)