Letters: Theocracy and Its Discontents

NEWSWEEK

Published Jun 27, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Jul 13, 2009

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Thirty years after the shah was deposed, Iranians are once again divided and polarized. Can their leadership handle the currents of democracy?
Victor Lopez, Seville, Spain

When religion has to be enforced, -policed, or dictated, it has failed and becomes destructive in a way that it was not meant to be. Leaders, like religion, must be a personal choice to truly have meaning.
Tim Devlin, Toronto, Canada

I realize why the events in Iran have been particularly moving for me: they remind me of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which I also followed closely from afar. But the differences stand out in stark relief as well: there is no conquering (Soviet) army behind the theocracy, and now the Iranian population is so tech-savvy.
Tamas Pick, Budapest, Hungary

People who cannot make their point without resorting to violence and unlawful behavior are not fit for election and are certainly unfit for government. If Mir Hossein Mousavi cannot control his followers, he is not fit for office.
George Blahusiak, Bentley, Australia

Don't Blame the Caveman
I would like to thank science writer Sharon Begley for yet another article that is thoroughly researched, clear, well-argued, and marginally sarcastic. With regard to the evolutionary psychology controversy, I must confess immense relief at seeing science finally confirm what common sense and observation told me long ago: in most modern Western societies and in some non-Western ones, too, it is maladaptive for men to be violent and promiscuous. Which is why fewer and fewer are. Which means that we, as a species, are capable of change and adaptation. Which is, indeed, a great reason to rejoice!
Ana Minasyan, Paris, France

One Nation Under Medicare
Jonathan Alter's reference to Medicare as "the fabulously popular free health insurance" is patently incorrect. All Medicare recipients have $94.60 deducted from their monthly Social Security checks. A couple, therefore, pays $2,270.40 per year for their combined coverage. I will agree it is a "fabulous" bargain, but it is not free.
Cyrus P. Schoen, Sarasota, Fla.

Reagan Was Wrong
Ronald Reagan's crowning glory was to double the size of the federal government and to triple our nation's debt? Not quite the brightest of platforms for our current Republican Party. And yet most Republicans want to be even more Reaganesque. I'll vote for the first candidate who vows to be more Clintonesque, a president who reduced the size of the federal government and who began paying off the legacy to our children, a $10 trillion to $14 trillion Republican debt.
David Dumin, Clemson, S.C.

Jeremy McCarter's essay on Henry Fairlie's criticism of Reagan's conservatism indeed shows that it was dangerously shallow, but NEWSWEEK suffers from being unaware of the equally dangerous shallowness of the kind of widespread liberalism epitomized by Obama. American civilization has been skewered on the intersection of these two patterns of intellectual shallowness and hysteria.
Thomas A. Metzger, Senior Fellow Emeritus, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Calif.

Member Comments

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Posted By: Tan Boon Tee @ 07/05/2009 11:14:14 PM

If religion is to be used as a tool for political expediency in order to achieve the supremacy of theocracy, it can never last.

After all, history has already provided numerous evidences. So, please let the situation in Iran take its own course.
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Posted By: skeptic2 @ 07/03/2009 7:24:20 PM

In regards to the study of sexual selection and the male attraction to woman???s waist-to-hip ratios. Shouldn???t the limited sample age range raise some skepticism? Of course the study failed to prove the sexual preference was innate. College aged men are generally between the ages of 18 and 24 whereas male sexuality begins at 12 or 13 and continues till death. The study may have yielded different results if men of all ages and all countries instead of the razor thin slice of the world???s male population called ???American College students???. Perhaps the studies that found that men in Peru and Tanzania were ignored because they statistically insignificant. What percentage of the world population of men did they represent? The men, and women, of the religious movement in 19th century America called the ???Shakers??? attracted thousands of participants and practiced celibacy, but it is not reasonable, based on the fact of their celibacy, to assume that sexual reproduction is not innate in human beings. Where would the data on Tanzanian and Peruvian men reside on a bell chart that also contains male preferences from the rest of the world? This data may not only be a statistical anomaly but also the result of confirmation bias.
One big problem with these studies is that the concept of availability appears to be left out. Availability is likely to have always been a big impact on the male selection of preferred body types. For example, although an old single male may want women like a Barbie doll for a mate, he might realize that the young Barbie dolls have their own ken dolls preference, so that the old single male might realize that despite his own desire, that Barbie dolls are unavailable to him, but the older and less physically desirable are available and the path of least resistance is followed. In the study of evolution there are thousands of examples of biological objectives are solved by economically expending the least amount of time and energy possible to satisfy those goals. If a middle aged man marries a woman that he is half heartedly attracted to, and over the years becomes accustomed and more attracted to his mate, will he remember this initial dissatisfaction twenty years later during a study of male sexual selection? If he did remember his initial dissatisfaction, would he admit to this if he feared damaging his relationship? This same availability/ selection probably applies to women as well as men.
The sexual body type preferences are effected by economics, but this too, is influenced by availability. Human history is full of stories of men marrying women that they are not that attracted to in order to gain money or power. Women have done this too. Would it be a surprise if these same conniving men also found ways of cheating on their wives in order to have both power and sex of their preference? Genes will try to satisfy their goals, in many ways, irregardless of religious, philosophical or political ideology.
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Posted By: skeptic2 @ 07/02/2009 10:24:19 PM

Dear Editor
In regards to the ???Don???t blame the Caveman??? by Sharon Begley. Ms Begley???s column is my favorite, but sadly, this is the worst article by her that I???ve ever read. Where was her skepticism on the day she wrote this column?
Kim Hill???s study on rape seemed highly flawed. It highlighted that there are heavy group sanctions of rapists in some tribes, but there is no mention of the rape of women outside of the tribe, in village raids. Do the wives care about these unknown victims, or would they even know about them? What evidence is there that the Ache tribe, or any tribe of cave people over 7,000 years ago, had any comprehension of the connection between a single intercourse (rape) and a birth nine months later and please explain how this could be calculated by people had no known conception numbers or counting. If a prehistoric woman had consensual sex on a Monday, was raped on a Tuesday, and then had consensual sex on Wednesday, how would she know nine months later, if the baby was the result of rape or consensual sex? It was suggested that the genes of rapists would not benefit from raping old women or under age girls as sometimes happens in modern society, but if cave men had no knowledge of this concept, then wouldn???t the rapist with no age discrimination towards his victims statistically succeed in having children. If the oldest cave women only had life spans of 25 ??? 30 years, wouldn???t they usually be capable of reproduction? There were also suggestions that women will easily abandon their babies after birth, because of a rape, but where is the statistical proof of this? If cave people couldn???t make the cause and effect link between sex and birth, why would a cave woman abandon her baby? According to Jane Goodall, male Chimpanzees of Gombe have been observed in the act of rape, and if their genes benefit from the crime, then why wouldn???t Homo sapiens derive the same results? At the very least, Jane Goodall???s observations indicate that rape as an animal behavior is far older, by millions of years, than the social sanctions for rape, of which likely requires a cognitive level advanced enough for language in order to be viable.
Sincerely
Gary McDermott