Can I get a quantitative analysis of this choice, please?

There was a day not too long ago when I saw a crow. Heard a crow would be a more accurate assessment of the situation. I heard an awful, scratchy-voiced cah cah followed by an almost *cough*. I looked up to see the small, black bird flying overhead, stretching its wings to a strain to catch the breeze, and cah cah-ing over and over, despite his hoarse voice. I looked beyond him and saw hawks circling much higher in the atmosphere. They lazily followed the path of an updraft, wings unfurled but not overreaching, primaries setting the arch and the tone of the flight. They were solid. A steady, disturbing presence. They did not make themselves known with a cah and a hack; they simply were unquestioningly there.

All of this happened in a moment, and I looked back at the crow and thought to myself, “Well, at least he won’t sound like that when he grows up.” Half a beat later I realized: he was grown up, and he was stuck sounding that way (minus, perhaps, the scratchy throat) for all of his days. He was, after all, a crow.

The human mind is a curious thing. Connections are made in odd and unfathomable ways. Our cultural backgrounds, past experiences, beliefs, hearts, and spirits blend together to influence what we call our mind. Go ahead, try to define it. What is the human mind? For every culture, there are 10 different answers… at least. Maybe 10 different answers in one family. In the new language I’m studying, the heart and mind are the sìm. I can’t remember a word that conveys its meaning in Chinese.

The human mind is a curious thing.

Recent research shows that your culture affects how your brain processes information. Those raised in Western cultures tend to use different parts of the brain to process information about self and others than those raised in Eastern cultures do. It makes me curious what would be found in 1st, 2nd, or even 3rd or 4th generation dwellers of one culture in another. The 4th-gen Korean-Americans; the Brit born and raised in India; the German who has an A-yi to help raise her in China. It makes me wonder what the polyglots of the world are doing with their brains and their languages. Where are they stored?

Recent research also shows that there may be combinations of genetic and family factors that lead to a greater propensity towards homosexuality in some members of societies. One does not choose how many brothers he has, they say, and that’s true. But can we find a way to do a quantitative analysis that gives us a “yes she will be” or “no she won’t be” answer? As they say in the article, like almost everything biological – these are statistical data and do not apply uniformly.

What is behind the cultural ideal of quantitatively defining everything around us in America (the West?)? We want numbers; cold, hard facts. I remember reading an article in China that I could barely make out the meaning of for all its statistics. When I asked what was with all the numbers, the teacher replied flatly that Americans like statistics, so they are included to make the article seem more factual and believable. Seems logical.

Can we quantify and qualify life? It seems to me that today’s culture is driving us toward being as accurate as possible, perhaps (almost?) to a fault. With this has come a drive for accuracy in communication as well as biological understanding. A flurry of new words is created by anthropologists every day—from ethno-regional identity to religio-political beliefs, from sustainable governance to 民族, which even the Chinese cannot decide on a definition for. So we quantify and we qualify our ways through life, not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with that.

But can we quantify everything? And if we can, is it then an excuse for bad behaviour? Perhaps that is the $64,000 question. When can the quantity of our genes, our background, and our culture combined finally justify us in our bad behaviour? And when can I begin using it as an excuse? Already there are more ‘psychological disorders’ than can be named, and while some of them hold water, many of them seem to be fancy euphemisms for lack of discipline. Or am I wrong?

What do you think? Where, and when, do we draw the line and say enough is enough? Can every human thought, action, choice and decision be quantitatively dissolved, melted down to its most basic contents, and declared inevitable due to genetics and brain formation? And when does this madness stop?