In his recent post on religion (or his lack thereof), John Derbyshire provides his answer to the prerequisites for a civilized society and I wanted to see what the response would be from the most intelligent comments section in all of the inter-tubes...
Derbyshire stated:
The trick, if you want a reasonably happy and stable society, is to corral human nature into useful, non-socially-destructive styles of expression: sexuality into marriage, or at least some kind of formal and constrained bonding; aggression into sport or military training; the power urge into consensual politics; cheating into conjuring, drama, and games like poker. (I don't mean you should cheat at poker, only that you need some powers of deception to play poker well.) Any aspect of human nature can get out of hand...That doesn't mean the aspect is bad, just that some society has done a bad job of corraling [sic] it. What do you have to say in response?
