au does speak to a characteristic of human behavior, but Tartarin's response is the only one possible. Rape too is natural - is part of the natural world, found in most primates and in most or all human communities - but this is where the 'ought' comes in.
snood...I didn't mean to suggest racism was of the past. I think gender prejudice will be with us for a long time too, but both been fought back with no small vigor and with real results.
On my use of 'barbaric'... I'll talk about that later, but it seems pretty sadly transparent to me that if one took a visigoth farmer, dumped his smelly hide into a pressed military uniform, and gave him a cell phone and a shiny M16, you'd have one more rousing chorus member for war in Iraq, one more justifier for the national museum, and one more Bush voter to counter. Technological advance is a good thing, but it's not the measure of all things.
Here is a lovely piece on Havel...note not only that his drug experimentations are NOT a matter of embarrassment, but note also how he thinks about the sixties (comparison to Bush and the American right is invited)
http://www.reason.com/0305/fe.mw.velvet.shtml