Beastly Behaviors

Beastly Behaviors

How am I to account for the beastly behaviors of young men old enough to vote and procreate but who live with the awareness of an earth worm blindly boring their way through dirt oblivious to the effects they are creating on others or worse feeling they are entitled somehow to an unwarranted position of superiority.  As an instructor in a program that teaches about diversity, I have to feel that perhaps US society has not become as enlightened about the potentiality of each human being regardless of gender.

I am reminded of werewolf—man wolf-- stories and the full moon theory. The gravitational pull of the moon on animals and tides is well documented. So part of what separates humans from animals is that people have the ability not to be affected by the full moon The medieval belief was that a real man controlled those beastly urges: That is what made him a man. However, the resentment and absurd justifications I recently heard spewing from the mouths of two young men who had behaved badly toward two young women makes me yearn for times when there were codes of courtesy that were expected in terms of behaviors between men and women. Today those codes have been replaced by laws and punishments that do little to raise the consciousness of individuals because the punishments reinforce beastliness: People who are treated like animals tend to behave like animals, fighting and clawing their way to survival without regard to the ill effects they create.

 The well-known French tale of Beauty and the Beast--La Belle et la Bête—plays on a similar theme of overcoming beastly urges.  In this story, it is the love of a beautiful young maiden who transforms the beast. This parable is intended to show that only the spiritual aspects of aesthetics, in this case called love, can overcome those baser instincts. It is interesting to note that the beast is represented by a male and the spiritual aspect of love is represented by a female. This portrayal contrasts sharply with the portrayal of woman as temptress as seen in Eve and Jezebel and may represent an older European idea of women.

Certainly in Native American cultures of most of North America, women were associated with life with the men openly acknowledging their dependence on women for sustenance. The Choctaw story of corn illustrates the importance and reverence accorded women. In this story, two young men who have gone out hunting are unsuccessful in finding game. As a consequence, they are on the verge of starvation when a beautiful young woman appears to them. She provides them food that sustains them but also all future generations. Tanchi represents the Choctaw idea of femininity. And it isn’t by accident that Rabbit, the trickster of Southeastern tales, and Coyote, the trickster of Southwestern tales, is male or that male rain is the one that comes crashing down with thunder and lightening, sweeping everything in its path while female rain falls gently and consistently to water crops.

While “modern” psychology likes to pretend it has some understanding of human behavior, it appears that ancient people already had it figured out and were teaching the lessons they learned to their children as they grew up. I am going to guess that the two young men who behaved badly did not grow up with these lessons as they were totally unable to see the beauty they were destroying.