"units of cultural transmission".......

 

-from this Gaping Void post

Ideas that spread..............................

 ........................................win.

gratitude and obligation................

 There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.  We take the future of our community into account not by fictitious cost-benefit calculations, but more concretely, by seeing ourselves as inheriting benefits and passing them on.  Concern for future generations is a non-specific outgrowth of gratitude.

-Roger Scruton, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Grand Tradition

Worth repeating..............................

 "As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit.  One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible:  avoiding occasions of expence by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it;  avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expence, but by vigorous exertions in time of Peace to discharge the Debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen which we ourselves ought to bear."

-George Washington, as excerpted from his Farewell Address

As the new year dawns.................

.......it wouldn't hurt to remind ourselves that the veneer of civilization is very thin:

     The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome. A female honeybee larva can, for example, grow up to be either a queen or a worker, depending on what food it is fed.  Its DNA programmes the necessary behaviours for whatever role it will fulfil in life.  Hives can be very complex social structures, containing many different kids of workers, such as harvesters, nurses and cleaners.  But so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees.  Bees don't need lawyers, because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive constitution.  The queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food, and they never go on strike demanding higher wages.
     But humans do such things all the time.  Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny.  A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind

Parenting matters...............

.............................Six lessons taught by his depression-era parents.

"They didn't tell me their stories to nag me or to exalt themselves. They just wanted to teach me valuable lessons that books could never tell."

thanks

Yep.........................................

thanks jess

So smile already..................................

Inheritance.........................

"We are born animals; we become human.  We have humanity thrust upon us through hundreds of channels whereby the past pours down into the present that mental and cultural inheritance whose preservation, accumulation and transmission place mankind today, with all its defectives and illiterates, on a higher plane than any generation has reached before."
-Will Durant, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

From the not-so-Simple Village Undertaker...........

................comes this beauty.   Visit Ray's blog here

The latest in management fads...............