Science Vs aesthetics. Researchers Vs travelers.

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I see plots.
I think there is a more or less unconscious lobby with the aim to turn all of us into terrible people. They just give us, every day, new justifications to our meanness in opposition to our own worst judges, ourselves.
They are slowly trying to widespread the idea that it’s no longer worthwhile to smile, to be courteous, to be honest, to pretend to be in a good mood just not to spoil the day for others. They frequently start their new attack with the words: ‘a research of a famous American university’.

From ‘Who drinks beer is more intelligent’ established by the University of Illinois, after a thorough study on 40 men that, after the second beer, became more creative (I wonder if the U.S. universities cost so much to finance it all…);
To the Harvard University, which established that those who have a bad character, have a more developped personality. Certain that the research has more details and explanation than what was reported by journalists, and leaving out the years of study by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer about emotional intelligence, I remain convinced that it is not necessary to be assholes and irritable to have a critical sense.
I close with a brief overview of Keele University (UK), that recently stated that swearing makes people more confident and improve their mental condition. Not hard to believe, since the bad words are taboos, and challenging such a little taboo make us forget for a while that we are not victims of our overwhelming superstructures.

My personal researches, with much more than 40 samples collected say:
– If you drink a lot of beer you’re often drunk. And you’ll have much less taboos. But only for a little while. It seems that it also causes bloating but on this I have my strong doubts. I will conduct further studies on the subject.
– If you have a bad temper … you’re insufferable. That’s it. And people will break their own taboo covering you with bad words. Even at your back.
– If you say bad words, Mama scolds you.
Why just my research should go beyond the obvious?

Let’s go back to travels: I have conducted further studies, as a traveler and a linguist. My research, gloriously conducted at the University of  Duckburg and Mousetown, through a transdisciplinary study, found some aspects about language learning:

– After the first beer you start to speak a foreign language much better. I always make my students drink before the lessons of conversation. Communication is like happiness, and it depends too much on alcohol to be taken seriously.

– Many have observed that, when talking in another language, people use more bad words than what they generally do in their own language. It is certainly not a sign of greater intelligence only in speaking the foreign language. This is the so-called ‘de-empowerment’. Our language are tied to our values ​​and therefore also our cultural structures, which are often a constraint during the interaction. When speaking another language, we get rid of some of them, entering a new cultural universe … and feeling freer to express ourselves.

However, as we get rid of some cultural taboos just speaking in another language, we also get free of some of our small neurosis that we believe we have to show up to deserve living.  And so, suddenly, in another country, people always seem pleasant, sociable, cheerful, polite.
The ‘scientific’ explanation is simple: when we go for a stroll in another place, we are, without realizing it, tbetter people: sociable, curious, solar, even polite. And the environment responds in the same way.

– I conclude the list of good scientific reasons to be better persons with a beautiful phrase from a friend, an anthropologist, currently in Cambridge (Massachusetts). Phrase which I believe should be taken much more seriously than science, at least because of the fact that Giovanna is beautiful, the science … only sometimes and up to a certain point.
‘I hardly ever get angry. But not so much for an ethical matter, but for aesthetic reasons’.

Beauty, not science, will save us.