Reading Subtly

In Honor of Charles Dickens on the 200th Anniversary of His Birth

2012-02-07T07:17:00.000-08:00

Dickens' writing desk. Image Courtesy of dickenslit.com

DISTRACTION

He wakes up every day and reads

most days only for a few minutes

before he has to work the fields.

He always plans to read more

before he goes to sleep but

the candlelight and exhaustion

put the plan neatly away.

He hates the reading,

wonders if he should find

something other than

Great Expectations.

But he doesn’t have

any other books,

and he thinks of reading

like he thinks of church.

And one Sunday after sleeping

through the sermon,

he comes home and picks up

his one book.

He finds his place

planning to read just

those few minutes

but goes on and on.

The line that gets him

is about how “our worst

weaknesses and meanness”

are “for the sake of” those

“we most despise.”

He reads it over and over

and then goes on intent

on making sense of the words

and finding that they make their own.

After a while he stops to consider

beginning the entire book again

feeling he’s missed too much

but he goes back to where he left off.

The next day in the field he puts

everything he sees into silent words

and that night he reads for the first time

before falling asleep.

The next day in the field he describes

to himself his feelings about his work

and later holds things in their places

with words as he moves around in time.

The words are the only constant,

as even their objects can shift

through his life, childhood,

senility, and through the life of the land.

He wants to write down his days on paper

because he believes if he does then he can

go anywhere, do anything, and yet still

there he’ll be.

It’s not that Dickens was right that got him,

but that he was wrong—

even Pip must’ve known his worst

wasn’t for anyone but Estella,

nor his best.

One day could stretch to a whole

book of bound pages like the one

in his hands, or it could start and finish

on just one.

He imagines writing right over

the grand typeset words of Dickens'

on page one, “Hard to believe,

I woke up, excited to read.

I wished I could keep reading all day.”

Sunday,June 22, 2008, 11:43 am.

Gracie - Invisible Fences

2012-02-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Invisible Fences

I hated Tony’s parents even more than I had before when Iheard about the “invisible

fence” for Gracie.

They were altogether too strict, overly vigilant, intrusivein their son’s, my friend’s, life,

and sounjustifiedly.

He and I were the shy ones, the bookish, artistic, sensitiveones—really both of us were

conscientiousto a fault.

What we needed was encouragement, always some sort ofbolstering, but what Tony got

wasquestioned and stifled.

And here was Gracie, a German shorthair, damn good dog, spirited,set to be broken by

similarlyunjustified treatment.

As dumb kids we of course had to sample the “mild shock”Gracie would receive should

she venturetoo near the property line.

It seemed not so mild to me, a teenager, with big dreams,held back, I felt, by myriad

unnecessary qualities of myself—

qualities I must master, vanquish—and yet here were Tony’sparents, putting up still

morearbitrary boundaries.

I could barely stand to hear about Gracie’s march ofshameful submission, conditioning

to ahigh-pitched warning.

She started whimpering and shaking, and looking up withplangent eyes at her merciless

or misguided master—

this by the second lap along the border of the yard, so she’dlearn never to get shocked—

it was all “for her own good.”

The line infuriated me more than any lie I’d ever heard, asthere was no question whose

conveniencewas really being served.

That first day after Gracie had been trained as directed,Tony and I were walking away

from hishouse,

and I looked back, stopping, to see her longingly looking,desperately watching us leave

her, leaving me sighing.

I shook my head, frowned, subtly slumped, which maybe shesaw, because just then a

change came over her.

She fell silent, her ears fell flat to her brown, bullet-shapedhead, her body tensed as she

lifted herself from her haunches.

And then she shot forth her willowy, maculated body in long,determined strides, but

keeping low all the while,

as if somehow intuiting that the impending pain was simply amanifestation of her

master’s hand to be ducked under.

My mouth fell open in thrilled astonishment, and as sheneared the buried line, I shouted,

“YeahGracie! Come on!”

Tony likewise thrilled to the feat his old friend was aboutto perform, shouting alongside

me, “Come on girl! You can makeit!”

About the time Gracie would have been heedlessly hearing thewarning beep, my

excitement turned darker.

Simultaneous with the shock I barked, “Go Gracie! Fuck ‘em!”with a maniacal,

demoniacal, spitting abandon.

Without the slightest whimper Gracie broke through theboundary, ducked under the

blow, defying her master’sdictates.

“Yeah! Fuck ‘em!” I enjoined again, my head jolting,thrashing out the words, erupting

with allthe force of self-loathing.

If Tony had any apprehensions about hearing his parents socursed he never voiced them

—was I really cursing them?

Gracie approached atremble, all frenzy from her joltingaccomplishment and now met

by our wild acclaim and eagerpraise,

or not praise so much as gratitude, as she anxiously dartedbetween and around us as if

disoriented, reeling, overwhelmed.

But Tony and I knew exactly what we had just witnessed, thetoppling of guilt’s tyranny,

a spirit’swillful, gasping escape.

Our deliverance lasted hours, while we idly ambled about andbetween neighborhoods,

casting spiteful glances

along the endless demarcations of land, owned, separated,displayed, individual

kingdoms, badges of well-lived,

well-governed lives—I wanted to tromp through all thosemanicured front lawns, my

every stepspreading pestilence

to the too-green grass we weren’t supposed to walk on lestit wear a trail, ruining the

pristine quality of ownership.

Our march of euphoric defiance inspired by Gracie’s coup degrace could only go on for

so long,though—

we were newly free, but free to do what?—before we’d have toreturn home for a meal,

shelter,electronic entertainment.

As the sun sank, I began to have the sense of squanderedopportunity, dreading the end

of myreprieve from invisible impediments.

Back toward Tony’s house we hesitantly made our way, but allthe while I kept the image

of Gracie’sescape fresh in mind.

My friend and I took up conversing as we neared the stretchof road by his house, ranging

widely andirreverently—

our discourses having served as our sole escape up tothen—in the tone and spirit of

seeing right through everything.

We were both halfway up Tony’s driveway before we noticedthat Gracie was no longer

keepingpace with us.

…She was turning tight circles in the street, whimpering,anxious, and seeing her, Tony

and I exchanged a look I’ll neverforget.

Even after removing the device from Gracie’s neck, we stillhad to lift her, squirming

desperately, over the line to gether home.

Secret Dancers

2012-01-28T07:22:00.000-08:00

For about 3 years, I was a bit obsessed with C.K. Williams's poems. They usually tell stories, and rather than worrying over whether his words impose some burden of meaning on his subjects, Williams uses words to discover the meanings that exist independent of them. The result is a stripping away of tired, habituated ways of seeing to make way for new revelation.
This poem was also inspired by Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which focuses on a day in the life of a neurosurgeon. Anyway, I really love how this poem turned out, but it's so derivative I feel I have to cite my inspirations.

Secret Dancers

The woman on the right side of the booth as I approach—“CanI get you something to

drink?”—I noticed had somethingwrong with her,

the way she walked, the way she moved, when I led her withher friend, much older,

her mother perhaps, from thedoor—“Hello, will it be

just the two of you today?”—to where they sit, in mysection, scanning the menu for that

one item.

“I’d just like water with lemon,” the one on the left says,the older one, the mother.

I nod, repeating, “water withlemon,” as I turn to the other,

like I always turn from one to the next, but this time withan added eagerness, with a

curiosity I know may offend, and Isee my diagnosis was correct,

for the woman cannot, does not, sit still, cannot be still, but jerks and sways, as ifunable

to establish equilibrium, find abalanced middle.

I’m glad, hurrying to the fountains, as I always do, thewoman said, in essence,

“For me too,” because I’ve alreadylost her words in the deluge

of the disturbance, the rarity, the tragedy of the sight ofher involuntary dance—chorea—

which is, aside from the movement,nothing at all like a dance,

more an antidance, signaling things opposite to what realdancers do with their

performances.

I watch my hands do by habit the filling of plastic cupswith ice and water, reach for

straws and lemons, still seeingher, slipping though sitting,

and doing my own semantic antidance in my mind: “How couldanyone go on

believing… after seeing… dopamine…substantia nigra…

choreographed by nucleotides—no one ever said the vestibularstructure, the loop

under the ear with the tinyfloating bone that gives us, that is

our sense of balance, was implicated… so important to see.”

In the kitchen, sorting dishes by shape on the stainlesssteal table on their way to being

washed, I call to the pretty youngcook I sort of love,

who sort of loves but sort of hates me for the sorts ofthings I say (noticing and

questioning), and say, “There’s awoman with Parkinson’s

at table three—you should come look,” and feel chastised byan invisible authority

(somewhere in my frontal lobe Isuspect) before the suggestion

can even be acknowledged. Look? Are we to examine her, makeher a specimen, or

gawk, like at a freak? But it—she is so important to see,

I set to formulating a new category of looking.

I begin with the varieties of suffering so proudly andannoyingly on display: abuse, or

“abuse”, survived, poverty escaped, gangsta rappers shot or imprisoned

to earn their street cred, chains of slights andabandonments by ex-lovers, all heard so

frequently, boasted of as markersof authenticity. Is there a way,

I wonder, to look that would serve as tribute to the woman’smuch more literal, much

more real perseverance and courage,a registering and appreciation

of identity, that precious plumage that renders each of usfindable in the endless welter

and noise of faces and the dubiousstories of heroism attached to them?

Returning to the booth to take the women’s orders, soawkward, so wrong, the looking,

I discover, cannot be condonedunder my new rubric because

the sufferer’s antidance is leading her in the wrongdirection. Those stories of abuse,

penury, assaults or arrests, andrecurrent dealings with

unfaithful lovers all go from bad, the worse the better, tobetter but never too good. This

story, like nearly all real andauthentic stories, is about deterioration.

So I type their orders on the touch screen computer,defeated, chastened, as if curiosity—

noticing and questioning—leadsirredeemably to taboo

(but how lucky to be born with this affliction instead ofone more incapacitating!)

I’m left sulking a little, and thinking about dancing andmovement that goes by the name

but isn’t. “Dance Champ!” theyexhorted Ali from ringside in Zaire,

when he’d decided, strategically, and it turned out successfully,not to. Ali, The Greatest,

the star and subject of movies, Kingof Classic Sports on ESPN,

his not quite dancing featured so prominently, soinescapably—look all you want, look

and be awed—but all in the past.You forget the man is still alive.

The secrecy makes me wonder: is it economic, is itpolitical?

The visibility, the stark advertisement of achievers of theformerly impossible, the

heroically, the monstrously successful,coupled with the tabooed

hiding away of the vastly more numerous unfortunate, fallen,and afflicted—the

lifeblood, the dangling AmericanDream, insufficient,

the market for better lives necessitates the beating heartof belief, “You can do

anything...,” be your heroes, beheroes for others, by working,

spending, studying, being industrious, acquisitive, butnever, never questioning and only

curious to a degree, “…anything youput your” (antidancing) “mind to.”

As I carry the plates, one in the crook between palm andthumb in my left hand, the other

balanced over it on my wrist so Ihave a free hand to grab the ketchup

on my way to the booth, I recall uneasily watching Ali, hisarm outstretched, antidancing

as he lit the Olympic Torch.

CK Williams translates Ovid

2012-01-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

Image Courtesy of wikimedia.org

Hercules, Deianira, Nessus

FromOvid, Metamorphoses, Book IX

There was absolutely noreason after the centaur had pawed her and

tried to mount her,

after Hercules waiting acrossthe raging river for the creature to carry her

to him

heard her cry out andlaunched an arrow soaked in the hydra’s incurable

venom into the monster,

that Deianira should havebelieved him, Nessus, horrible thing, as he

died but she did.
-

We see the end of the story:Deianira anguished, aghast, suicide-sword

in her hand;

Hercules’ blood hissing andseething like water in which molten rods are

plunged to anneal,

but how could a just-marriedgirl hardly out of her father’s house have

envisioned all that,

and even conjecturing thatNessus was lying, plotting revenge, how

could she have been sure?
-

We see the centaur ascunning, malignant, a hybrid from the savage time

before ours

when emotion always waspassion and passion was always unchecked by

commandment or conscience;

she sees only a man-horse,mortally hurt, suddenly harmless, eyes sud-

denly soft as a foal’s,

telling her, “Don’t beafraid, come closer, listen”: offering homage,

friendship, a favor.
-

In our age or scrutiny anddissection we know Deianira’s mind better

than she does herself:

we know the fortune of womenas chattel and quarry, objects to be won

then shunted aside;

we understand the cost ofrepression, the repercussions of unsatisfied

rage and resentment,

but consciousness then wasstill new, Deianira inhabited hers like the

light from a fire.
-

Or might she have glimpsedwith that mantic prescience the gods hadn’t

yet taken away

her hero a lifetime later onthe way home with another king’s daughter,

callow, but lovely,

lovely enough to erase fromHercules’ scruples not only his vows but the

simple convention

that tells you you don’tbring a rival into your aging wife’s weary, sorrow-

ful bed?
-

…No, more likely the centaur’spromise intrigued in itself: an infalli-

ble potion of love.

“Just gather the clots ofblood from my wound: here, use my shirt, then

hide it away.

Though so exalted, so regal awoman as you never would need it, it

might still be of use:

whoever’s shoulders ittouches, no matter when, will helplessly, hope-

lessly love you forever.”
-

See Hercules now in the shirtDeianira has sent him approaching the

fire of an altar,

the garment suddenlyclinging, the hydra, his long-vanquished foe, alive

in its threads,

each thread a tentacleclutching at him, each chemical tentacle acid,

adhering, consuming,

charring before his horrifiedeyes skin from muscle, muscle from tendon,

tendon from bone.
-

Now Deianira, back then, theviscous gouts of Nessus’ blood dyeing her

diffident hands:

if she could imagine uswatching her there in her myth, how would she

want us to see her?

Surely as symbol, a petal ofsympathy caught in the perilous rift between

culture and chaos,

not as the nightmare she’dbe, a corpse with a slash of tardy self-

knowledge deep in its side.
-

What Hercules sees as hepounds up the bank isn’t himself cremated

alive on his pyre,

shrieking as Jove hisOlympian father extracts his immortal essence from

its agonized sheathing¾

he sees what’s before him:the woman, his bride, kneeling to the dark,

rushing river,

obsessively scrubbing away,he must think, the nocuous, mingled reek

of horse, hydra, human.

¾C.K. Williams

TheVigil, 1997

Also available in Collected Works

The Upper Hand in Relationships

2012-01-22T14:05:00.000-08:00

Peopleperform some astoundingly clever maneuvers in pursuit of the upper hand intheir romantic relationships, and some really stupid ones too. They try to make their partners jealous. Theyfeign lack of interest. They pretend to have enjoyed wild success in the realmof dating throughout their personal histories, right up until the point atwhich they met their current partners. The edge in cleverness, however, isusually enjoyed by women—though you may be inclined to call it subtlety, oreven deviousness.

Some of the most basicdominance strategies used in romantic relationships are based either on onepartner wanting something more than the other, or on one partner being made tofeel more insecure than the other. We all know couples whose routine revolvesaround the running joke that the man is constantly desperate for sex, which allowsthe woman to set the terms he must meet in order to get some. His greaterdesire for sex gives her the leverage to control him in other domains. I’llnever forget being nineteen and hearing a friend a few years older say of herhusband, “Why would I want to have sex with him when he can’t even remember totake out the garbage?” Traditionally, men held the family purse strings, sothey—assuming they or their families had money—could hold out the promise ofthings women wanted more. Of course, some men still do this, giving their wiveslittle reminders of how hard they work to provide financial stability, ordropping hints of their extravagant lifestyles to attract prospective dates.

You canalso get the upper hand on someone by taking advantage of his or her insecurities. (If that fails, you can try producing some.) Women tend to be the most vulnerable to such tactics at themoment of choice, wanting their features and graces and wiles to make them moredesirable than any other woman prospective partners are likely to see. Thewoman who gets passed up in favor of another goes home devastated, likelylamenting the crass superficiality of our culture.

Most of usprobably know a man or two who, deliberately or not, manages to keep his girlfriend orwife in constant doubt when it comes to her ability to keep his attention.These are the guys who can’t control their wandering eyes, or who let slipoffhand innuendos about incremental weight gain. Perversely, many women respondby expending greater effort to win his attention and his approval.

Men tend tobe the most vulnerable just after sex, in the Was-it-good-for-you moments. Ifyou found yourself seething at some remembrance of masculine insensitivityreading the last paragraph, I recommend a casual survey of your male friends inwhich you ask them how many of their past partners at some point compared themnegatively to some other man, or men, they had been with prior to therelationship. The idea that the woman is settling for a man who fails to satisfyher as others have plays into the narrative that he wants sex more—and that hemust strive to please her outside the bedroom.

If you canput your finger on your partner’s insecurities, you can control him or her bytossing out reassurances like food pellets to a trained animal. The alternativewould be for a man to be openly bowled over by a woman’s looks, or for a womanto express in earnest her enthusiasm for a man’s sexual performances. Theseoptions, since they disarm, can be even more seductive; they can be tactics intheir own right—but we’re talking next-level expertise here so it’s not somethingyou’ll see very often.

I give theedge to women when it comes to subtly attaining the upper hand in relationshipsbecause I routinely see them using a third strategy they seem to have exclusiverights to. Being the less interested party, or the most secure and reassuringparty, can work wonders, but for turning proud people into sycophants nothingseems to work quite as well as a good old-fashioned guilt-trip.

Tounderstand how guilt-trips work, just consider the biggest example in history:Jesus died on the cross for your sins, and therefore you owe your life toJesus. The illogic of this idea is manifold, but I don’t need to stress howmany people it has seduced into a lifetime of obedience to the church. Thebasic dynamic is one of reciprocation: because one partner in a relationshiphas harmed the other, the harmer owes the harmed some commensurate sacrifice.

I’mprobably not the only one who’s witnessed a woman catching on to her man’sinfidelity and responding almost gleefully—now she has him. In the firstinstance of this I watched play out, the woman, in my opinion, bore someresponsibility for her husband’s turning elsewhere for love. She was brutal tohim. And she believed his guilt would only cement her ascendancy. Fortunately,they both realized about that time she must not really love him and theydivorced.

But theguilt need not be tied to anything as substantive as cheating. Our puritanicalChristian tradition has joined forces in America with radical feminism to birtha bastard lovechild we encounter in the form of a groundless conviction thatsex is somehow inherently harmful—especially to females. Women are encouragedto carry with them stories of the traumas they’ve suffered at the hands of monstrousmen. And, since men are of a tribe, a pseudo-logic similar to the Christianidea of collective guilt comes into play. Whenever a man courts a woman steepedin this tradition, he is put on early notice—you’re suspect; I’m a traumasurvivor; you need to be extra nice, i.e. submissive.

It’s thisidea of trauma, which can be attributed mostly to Freud, that can really make arelationship, and life, fraught and intolerably treacherous. Behaviors that wouldotherwise be thought inconsiderate or rude—a hurtful word, a wandering eye—areinstead taken as malicious attempts to cause lasting harm. But the mosttroubling thing about psychological trauma is that belief in it is its ownproof, even as it implicates a guilty party who therefore has no way toestablish his innocence.

Over thecourse of several paragraphs, we’ve gone from amusing but nonetheless real strugglesmany couples get caught up in to some that are just downright scary. The goodnews is that there is a subset of people who don’t see relationships aszero-sum games. (Zero-sum is a game theory term for interactions in which everygain for one party is a loss for the other. Non zero-sum games are those inwhich cooperation can lead to mutual benefits.) The bad news is that they canbe hard to find.

There are a couple of things you can do now though that willhelp you avoid chess match relationships—or minimize the machinations in yourcurrent romance. First, ask yourself what dominance tactics you tend to rely on. Be honestwith yourself. Recognizing your bad habits is the first step toward breakingthem. And remember, the question isn’t whether you use tactics to try to getthe upper hand; it’s which ones you use how often?

The second thing you can do iscultivate the habit and the mutual attitude of what’s good for one is good forthe other. Relationship researcher Arthur Aron says that celebrating yourpartner’s successes is one the most important things you can do in arelationship. “That’s even more important,” he says, “than supporting him orher when things go bad.” Watch out for zero-sum responses, in yourself and inyour partner. And beware of zero-summers in the realm of dating. Ladies, youknow the guys who seem vaguely resentful of the power you have over them bydint of your good looks and social graces. And, guys, you know the women whomake you feel vaguely guilty and set-upon every time you talk to them. The best thing to do is stay away.

But you may be tempted, once you realizea dominance tactic is being used on you, to perform some kind of countermove.It’s one of my personal failings to be too easily provoked into these types ofexchanges. It is a dangerous indulgence.

Artificial Beauty - Is There a Better Way to Advertise?

2012-01-17T09:53:00.000-08:00

While the idea of objectification is as nonsensical as it is offensive, it is nevertheless undeniable that fashion and cosmetic industry marketers deliberately aggravate the insecurities of young, and not so young, women by setting unrealistic standards of fitness and beauty. A recent viral video (see below) underscores just how easy it is to create convincing dynamic images of women with impossibly exaggerated features, and the video’s popularity testifies to the pressure women feel to live up to these preposterous ideals. (Men are also subjected to similarly exploitative advertising, but that’s for a future post.) Still, I would wager most women would balk at any plan to do away with models and beauty product advertising altogether. It’s the deceit and the artificiality that they find infuriating.

So what would more truthful, more ethical, more realistic, but just as useful and effective advertising look like? If images really are as easy to doctor as the critics suggest, then it should be just as easy to transform ordinary pictures of everyday women into ads for clothes, accessories, and makeup. And we already have immense caches of digital images featuring exactly the types of women we encounter on a regular basis in real life. As TV commercials tend more and more toward obsolescence, and marketers cast about for newer and better ways to reach their audiences, it seems to me they ought to avail themselves of the opportunity to rise above their saprophytic, bottom-dwelling, insecurity-inducing industry practices. Why not use our friends, why not use us, as models—assuming we give them permission to do so?

Imagine registering at a website for a line of clothing or products we tend to find appealing, giving the operators access to our friends list on Facebook or some other social media site (with whatever necessary restrictions we wish to impose), and then receiving adds featuring our friends as they would appear decked out in the new fashions, done up in the new shades. These ads would probably be even more effective than the old-fashioned TV spots—and they would allow us to pass along the images to the very friends featured in them. “Check out how good you’d look in these boots!”

As long as there were some mechanism in place to ensure the doctored images resulted in faithful renderings of how the products would affect our appearance (and that could be tricky because the marketers would have a huge incentive to make the pics look too good), the problem of impossible standards and artificial ideals would be solved.

I'd be amazed if something like this isn’t already happening.

Is Patriarchy Even a Real Thing?

2012-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

One of the definitions of patriarchy is male control offamilies and government. But what many are referring to when they use the termis a culture and socialization process that privileges men and boys whileoppressing, disadvantaging, and subjugating women and girls. In practice,patriarchy often means the simple assumption that males have it better thanfemales and that they work, often deviously, often with the complicity ofblinkered females, to maintain their advantage.

I'm skeptical that there even is such a thing as patriarchy,at least in that latter sense of the term. I can imagine my feminist friendsreading that line and getting set to unload a barrage of anecdotes and snippetsof history lessons. Before you begin your attempts at setting me straight, letme be clear about what exactly I'm suggesting. It's undeniable that thetreatment of women in third-world countries is often abysmal. It's undeniablethat some cultures—usually the religious sectors in particular—explicitlypreach that women are to be submissive to men. Those explicit teachings arerightly called patriarchy.

There is an important distinction to be made, however,between a system of family hierarchy and social governance on the one hand, andthe suggestion on the other hand that an entire culture is biased in favor ofmen. Keeping score on both sides of the gender divide by adding up all themiseries and subtracting all the privileges to see who has it worst is exactlythe type of tribal behavior that makes this sort of politics so divisive and incendiary.So let me just point out that there are a lot more people monitoring thetravails of women and not bothering to consider for a second that men might begoing through things that are just as bad or worse. Often small groups of menprey on women and other men alike. And women often enjoy certain advantagesover men, especially if they're intelligent or attractive or both, even inthird-world countries. (The case of third-world countries, incidentally, oughtto give feminists pause before they spout off about the evils of civilization.)

I'm not a Pollyanna. There really are groups who suffer fromsevere societal and generational disadvantages, even in this first-worldcountry. In fact, their plight offers a helpful template for how we should expectoppression to appear in various measures. Here, for instance, is a graph of howAfrican Americans and whites have responded to surveys investigating theirsubjective well-being since the early 1970s.

Source: "Subjective and Objective Indicators of Racial Progress," by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

Two things stand out in this graph. One is that whites havea significant advantage in terms of subjective well-being, just as we mightexpect. The other is that the gap between the races has been narrowing, albeitat a disconcertingly sluggish pace, over the past forty years. This is probablydue in large part to the victories of the civil rights movement, and otherdeliberate social efforts to right injustices.

Based on the conventional wisdom regarding the plight ofwomen, we might expect the happiness divide between the sexes to demonstratepretty much the same trend. But it turns out the two graphs look nothing alike.

Source: "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfters

First, men didn't start out with a clear advantage. Second,it seems women have actually gotten slightly less happy over the past fortyyears.

Yes, men continue to make more money, men continue to hold morepositions of power. So, you could argue that men are still privileged and womenare just disappointed that they haven't made much progress. And I bet at leasta few of you reading this are wondering how girls might be socialized to claim to be as happyas men even when they're not. But neither of these special pleads reallyaccounts for the pattern anyway.

We need an alternative hypothesis. Maybe it is human natureto develop different roles for women and men. These roles may even be influencedby regular developmental differences, like the production of hormones, and thenover time become somewhat exaggerated through a process of observationallearning and norm generation. Insofar as this is the case, it’s simply wrong topoint to the different roles and claim their existence is proof of one side’s privilege.

With each role comes a set of privileges and burdens, andmaybe, just maybe the two cancel out pretty well. Many men probably feel theneed to make money is a burden. Many women probably feel the greater burden ofchild-rearing placed on them is a privilege.

None of this necessarily works as evidence for the superiorityof traditional sex roles—and I certainly don’t advocate any enforcement ofthem. Indeed, we need to do our best to support people who for whatever reasonwant to step outside the bounds of our common expectations. But we also have tobe prepared to accept the conclusion—should it be arrived at with a thresholddegree of certainty—that people are happier when they embrace theirdifferences, whether those differences are the product of biology, culture, or both.

And, if you are wont to insist on the existence of maleprivilege, how will you demonstrate it? How can you be sure it isn’t limited tocircumscribed domains? How would you convince a reasonable and informed skepticthat patriarchy is a real problem?

Seduced by Satan

2012-01-08T09:04:00.000-08:00

Why do welike the guys who seem not to care whether or not what they’re doing is right,but who often manage to do what’s right anyway? In the Star Wars series, Han Solo is introduced as a mercenary, concernedonly with monetary reward. In the first episode of Mad Men, audiences see Don Draper saying to a woman that theyshould get married, and then in the final scene he arrives home to his actualwife. Tony Soprano, Jack Sparrow, Tom Sawyer, the list of male characters whoflout rules and conventions, who lie, cheat and steal, but who nevertheless compelthe attention, the favor, even the love of readers and moviegoers would bedifficult to exhaust.

John Miltonhas been accused of both betraying his own and inspiring others' sympathy and admiration forwhat should be the most detestable character imaginable. When he has Satan, in Paradise Lost, say, “Better to reign inhell than serve in heaven,” many believed he was signaling his support of theking of England’s overthrow. Regicidal politics are well and good—at least fromthe remove of many generations—but voicing your opinions through such adisreputable mouthpiece? That’s difficult to defend. Imagine using a fictionalHitler to convey your stance on the current president.

StanleyFish theorizes that Milton’s game was a much subtler one: he didn’t intend forSatan to be sympathetic so much as seductive, so that in being persuaded andwon over to him readers would be falling prey to the same temptation thatbrought about the fall. As humans, all our hearts are marked with original sin.So if many readers of Milton’s magnum opus come away thinking Satan may havebeen in the right all along, the failure wasn’t the author’s unconstrainedadmiration for the rebel angel so much as it was his inability to adequately “justifythe ways of God to men.” God’s ways may follow a certain logic, but the appealof Satan’s ways is deeper, more primal.

In the “Argument,”or summary, prefacing Book Three, Milton relays some of God’s logic: “Man hathoffended the majesty of God by aspiring to godhead and therefore, with all hisprogeny devoted to death, must die unless someone can be found sufficient toanswer for his offence and undergo his punishment.” The Son volunteers. This reasoninghas been justly characterized as “barking mad” by Richard Dawkins. But thelines give us an important insight into what Milton saw as the principlefailing of the human race, their ambition to be godlike. It is this ambitionwhich allows us to sympathize with Satan, who incited his fellow angels torebellion against the rule of God.

In BookFive, we learn that what provoked Satan to rebellion was God’s arbitrarypromotion of his own Son to a status higher than the angels: “by Decree/Another now hath to himself ingross’t/ All Power, and us eclipst under thename/ Of King anointed.” Citing these lines, William Flesch explains, “Satan’s grandeur,even if it is the grandeur of archangel ruined, comes from his iconoclasm, fromhis desire for liberty.” At the same time, however, Flesch insists that, “Satan’srevolt is not against tyranny. It is against a tyrant whose place he wishes tousurp.” So, it’s not so much freedom from domination he wants, according toFlesch, as the power to dominate.

AnthropologistChristopher Boehm describes the political dynamics of nomadic peoples in hisbook Hierarchy in the Forest: TheEvolution of Egalitarian Behavior, and his descriptions suggest thatparsing a motive of domination from one of preserving autonomy is much morecomplicated than Flesch’s analysis assumes. “In my opinion,” Boehm writes, “nomadicforagers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free fromthe authority of others” (68). As long as the group they belong to is smallenough for each group member to monitor the actions of the others, people canmaintain strict egalitarianism, giving up whatever dominance they may desirefor the assurance of not being dominated themselves.

Satan verylikely speaks to this natural ambivalence in humans. Benevolent leaders win ourlove and admiration through their selflessness and charisma. But no one wantsto be a slave. Does Satan’s admirable resistance and defiance shade intonarcissistic self-aggrandizement and an unchecked will to power? If so, is his tyrannyany more savage than that of God? And might there even be something not altogether off-putting about a certain degree self-indulgent badness?

What Would Make Me a Feminist: Response to Comments and Criticisms

2011-12-31T07:05:00.000-08:00

My argumentis that there is an important distinction between women’s rights as a goal andfeminism as an ideology. I support women’s rights, though I prefer to advocatefor universal human rights without exclusion or demarcation. The feministideology, however, is far too problematic for me to identify with. I write thisfully aware that feminism has various strains.

Feminism,in my experience, relies on an insultingly crude dialectic: men, women, andpatriarchy. This formula leads to some facile and incendiary assumptions andclaims. In my first post, I argued that too many feminists fly into rages overthe income gap, even though differences in wages are the result of many complexfactors and the role of discrimination may be vanishingly small. There is a report of a study that found 6.9 % of the income gap in 2004 was unaccounted for byother factors stemming from different preferences. But eight months after thepaper was covered, it has yet to be published, suggesting it failed to make itthrough peer review. (It may still appear, but we should reserve judgment.)

If the 7%figure holds up, I admit I’ll be surprised. But I doubt there will be many feministswho look at the twenty percent income gap and rush to remind everyone that overninety percent of the difference is attributable to divergent preferencesregarding fields, working conditions, and family management. (For a more sober discussion of the pay gap from a staunch conservative--strange bedfellow--go here.) I have to emphasize that my argument is not based on a complete absence of any pay gap; it focuses rather on the assumptions feminists make about it. Again, the vast majority of it can be attributed to choices freely made.

My secondpost took on the feminist tendency to conflate male attraction with oppression.Many complained that the idea of “objectification,” though perhaps untrue, wasnevertheless useful. Men who engage in harassment or sexual violence, theymaintain, are not recognizing their victims’ humanity. These commenters aremistaking familiarity with usefulness. If objectification theory actually dididentify factors that make violence more likely, then we could conclude it wasuseful. But it simply doesn’t. The theory points to media portrayals of womenthat emphasize body parts (objects) over emotions or intelligence and suggestssuch portrayals encourage men to dehumanize women, which might lead toviolence. Psychological experiments find this not to be the case at all.Further, as the availability and consumption of pornography have exploded overthe past decade, sexual violence has actually decreased. Objectification is aninvalid theory with offensive implications about men. And there are betterfactors to target—like economic inequality—to address the issue of violence.

My third post took on theridiculously facile assumption that all gender differences stem fromstereotypes and socialization. Many feminists charge anyone who suggestsnatural differences in behavior or career preference with essentialism. This isnonsense stemming from scientific ignorance. None of the commenters brought upany challenges that require addressing.

While myproblem with feminism begins with the term itself—because it comes freightedwith tribal implications—I accept that unconditional opposition would be prettymuch meaningless. So here are some things that would make me more accepting offeminism:

- Evidence that people learning about feminism aresystematically warned of the dangers of demonizing or vilifying men.

- Evidence that feminism, as an ideology and notas an extension of Enlightenment ideals regarding human rights, has contributedvalid or useful insights that have advanced science or benefited society.

- Evidence that being a feminist has beneficialeffects for individuals.

On this last point, a study thatwas published with much fanfare in 2007 reported that feminism had no illeffects on romantic relationships and that men in a relationship with afeminist were more likely to say their sex lives were satisfactory. The study,published in the journal Sex Roles,is titled, “TheInterpersonal Power of Feminism: Is Feminism Good for Romantic Relationships?”The authors, Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, leave little doubt regarding thepurpose of their study:

What isparticularly disturbing is that, by eschewing feminism, women themselves may

be participating in backlash. Thus,it is important to understand the reasons why women

today tend not to embrace feminism.

It’s amazing to me that something this blatantly ideologicalgot published in a scientific journal. What the media coverage failed tomention is the study actually discovered that the female participants who labeledthemselves as feminists actually reported higher levels of conflict withintheir relationships. Rudman and Phelan felt this was a statistical artifact,though, and dismissed it. I don’t understand their reasoning, and I have toassume if it wasn’t valid the reviewers would’ve picked it up. But it doessuggest the methods they used might not have been sufficiently sensitive.

The biggestissue I have with the study, however, is that it willfully conflates supportfor career women with feminism; in this study, I would have been counted as astrong feminist. The authors justify the move by pointing to a strongcorrelation between the actual label and attitudes toward women in high-poweredpositions. But the self-reports didn’t match up in many cases—as they wouldn’thave in mine. Using attitudes toward working women as a stand-in for feminismalso opens the door to confounds like higher education and the benefits to ahousehold of having two incomes.

With regardto my concerns about ideological feminism, the Rudman and Phelan study is completelymeaningless. Some studies I’d like to see: a comparison between academicdepartments measuring relationship satisfaction and stability; some objectivemeasure of women’s support for feminist ideology, like knowledge of prominentauthors, compared with attitudes toward men as measured by self-report andresults from Implicit Association Tests; an objective measure of men’s exposureto feminism, like a test of their knowledge of feminist authors, and both theirattitudes toward women and the satisfaction and stability of theirrelationships. I would also like to know more about how ideological feminismimpacts young girls and boys.

Weshouldn’t keep giving this tribal ideology a free pass because we assume it’sin the service of a good cause. We shouldn’t celebrate studies designed toproduce congenial results. Feminism, like any other idea, needs to passempirical muster if it is to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, policiesinspired by it continue to be implemented in the absence of any tests orchallenges.

Why I Am Not a Feminist—and You Shouldn’t Be Either part 3: Engendering Gender Madness

2011-12-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

"As a professional debunker I feel like Iknow bunk when I see it, and Wertheim has well captured the genre: 'In alllikelihood there will be an abundant use of CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamationpoints!!! Important sections will be underlined or bolded,or circled, for emphasis.'"

This is from Skeptic editorMichael Shermer's review of a book on the demarcationproblem, the thorny question of how to recognize whether ideas are revolutionaryor just, well, bunk. Obviously, if someone's writing begs for attention in waythat seems meretricious or unhinged, you're likely dealing with a bunk peddler.What to make, then, of these lines, to which I have not added any formatting?

"Honestly, Ican’t think of a better way to make a girl in grade school question whethershe’ll have any interest in or aptitude for science than to present her with a'science for girls' kit."

"And, sciencekits that police these gender stereotypes run the risk of alienating boys fromscience, too."

"I reallydon’t think that science kits should be segregated by gender, but if you aregoing to segregate them at least make the experiments for girls NOT SOLAME."

"If girlsare at all interested in science, then it must be in a pretty, feminine waythat reinforces notions of beauty. It’s mystical. The chemistry of perfumery ishidden behind 'perfection.' But boys get actual physics and chemistry—just likethat, with no fancy modifiers. This division is NOT okay..."

To the first, I’dsay, really? You must have a very limited imagination. To the second, I’d say,really? Isn’t “police” a strong term for science kits sold at a toy store? Iagree with the third, but I think the author needs to settle down. And to thefourth, I’d say, well, if the kids really want kits of this nature—and if theydon’t want them the manufacturer won’t be offering them for long—you’d have todemonstrate that they actually cause some harm before you can say, in capitalsor otherwise, they’re not okay.

Were thesebreathless fulminations posted on the pages of some poststructuralist site forfeminist rants? The first and second are from philosopher JanetStemwedel’s blog at Scientific American. The third is from a blog hosted by the AmericanGeophysical Union and was written by geologist Evelyn Mervine. And the fourth is from anthropologist KrystalD’Costa’s blog, also at Scientific American.

You’d hope these blog posts, as emphatic as they are, would provide linksto some pretty compelling research on the dangers of pandering to kids’ andparents’ gender stereotypes. One of the posts has a link to a podcast about research on how vaginas aresupposed to smell. Another of Stemwedel’s posts on the issue links to yet another post, by ChristieWilcox, in which she not-so-gently takes the journal Nature totask for publishing what was supposed to be a humorous piece ongender differences. It’s only through this indirect route that you can find anyactual evidence—in any of these posts—that stereotyping is harmful. “Reinforcingnegative gender stereotypes is anything but harmless,” Wilcox declares. Butdoes humor based on stereotypes in fact reinforce them, or does it make themseem ridiculous? How far are we really willing to go to put a stop to this typeof humor? It seems to me that gender and racial and religious stereotypes arethe bread-and-butter of just about every comedian in the business.

The science Wilcox refers to has nothing to do with humor but insteaddemonstrates a phenomenon psychologists call stereotypethreat. It’s a fascinating topic—really one of the most fascinatingin psychology in my opinion. It may even be an important factor in theunderrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Still, the connection betweenresearch on stereotypes and performance—stereotype boost has also beendocumented—and humor is tenuous. And the connection with pink and prettymicroscopes is even more nebulous.

Helping women in STEM fields feel more welcome is a worthy cause. Genderstereotypes probably play some role in their current underrepresentation. Itake these authors at their word that they routinely experience the ill effectsof common misconceptions about women’s cognitive abilities, so I sympathize withtheir frustration to a degree. I even have to admit that it’s a testament tothe success of past feminists that the societal injustices their moderncounterparts rail against are so much less overt—so subtle. But they mayactually be getting too subtle; decrying them sort of resembles the righteous,evangelical declaiming of conspiracy theorists. If you can imagine a way thatsomebody may be guilty of reinforcing stereotypes, you no longer even have toshoulder the burden of proving they’re guilty.

Thetakeaway from all this righteously indignant finger-pointing is that you shouldnever touch anything with even a remote resemblance to a stereotype. Allow mesome ironic capitals of my own: STEREOTYPES BAD!!! This message, notsurprisingly, even reaches into realms where a casual dismissal of science isfashionable, and skepticism about the value of empirical research, expressed intortured prose, is an ascendant virtue—or maybe I have the direction of theinfluence backward.
On two separateoccasions now, one of my colleagues in the English department has posted thestory of a baby named Storm on Facebook. Storm’s parents opted againstrevealing the newborn’s sex to friends and any but immediate family to protecther or him from those nasty stereotypes. In the comments under these links werevarious commendations and expressions of solidarity. Storm’s parents, mostagreed, are heroes. Parents bragged about all their own children’s androgynousbehavior, expressing their desire to rub it in the faces of “gendernazis.”

From the Toronto Star

            From what I can tell, Storm’s parents had no idea the story of their unorthodoxparenting would go viral, so we probably shouldn’t condemn them for using theirchild to get media attention. And I don’t think the “experiment,” as some havecalled it, poses any direct threat to Storm’s psychological well-being. ButStorm’s parents are jousting with windmills. They’re assuming that gender issomething imposed on children by society—those chimerical gender nazis—througha process called socialization. The really disheartening thing is that even thebloggers at Scientific American makethis mistake; they assume that sparkly pink science kits that help girlsexplore the chemistry of lipstick and perfume send direct messages about whoand what girls should be, and that the girls will receive and embrace thesemessages without resistance, as if the little tykes were noble savages withpristine spirits forever vulnerable to the tragic overvaluing of outwardbeauty.
            When they’rethinking clearly, all parents know a simple truth that gets completelydiscounted in discussions of gender—it’s really hard to get through to yourkids even with messages you’re sending deliberately and explicitly. The notionthat you can accidentally send some subtle cue that’s going to profoundly shapea child’s identity deserves a lot more skepticism than it gets (ask myconservative parents, especially my Catholic mom). This is because identity issomething children actively create for themselves, not the sum total of all thecultural assumptions foisted on them as they grow up. Children’s minds are notreceptacles for all our ideological garbage. They rummage around for their ownideological garbage, and they don’t just pick up whatever they find lyingaround.
            PsychologistJohn Money was a prominent advocate of the theory that gender is determinedcompletely through socialization. So he advised the parents of a six-month-oldboy whose penis had been destroyed in a botched circumcision to have thetesticles removed as well and to raise the boy as a girl. The boy, DavidReimer, never thought of himself as a girl, despite his parents’ andMoney’s efforts to socialize him as one. Money nevertheless kept declaringsuccess, claiming Reimer (who was called Brenda at the time) proved his theoryof gender development. By age 13, however, the poor kid was suicidal. At 14, hedeclared himself a boy, and later went on to get further surgeries to reconstructhis genitals. In his account, written with John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, Reimer saysthat Money’s ministrations were in no way therapeutic—they were traumatic.Having read about Reimer in Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, I thought ofJohn Money every time I came across the term gender nazi in the Facebookcomments about Storm (though I haven’t read Colapinto’s book in its entiretyand don’t claim to know the case in enough detail to support such a severecharge).
            Reimer’scase is by no means the only evidence that gender identity and gender-typicalbehavior are heavily influenced by hormones. Psychiatrist William Reiner and urologistJohn Gearhart report that raising boys (who’ve beenexposed in utero to more testosterone) as girls after surgery to removeunderdeveloped sex organs tends not to result in feminine behaviors—or evenfeminine identity. Of the 16 boys in their study, 2 were raised as boys, while14 were raised as girls. Five of the fourteen remained female throughout thestudy, but 4 spontaneously declared themselves to be male, and 4 others decidedthey were male after being informed of the surgery they’d undergone. All 16 ofthe children displayed “moderate to marked” degrees of male-typical behavior.The authors write, “At the initial assessment, the parents of only foursubjects assigned to female sex reported that their child had never stated awish to be a boy.”
            An earlier study of so-called pseudo-hermaphrodites,boys with a hormone disorder who are born looking like girls but who becomemore virile in adolescence, revealed that of 18 participants who were raised asgirls, all but one changed their gender identity to male. There is also acondition some girls are born with called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH),which is characterized by an increased amount of male hormones in their bodies.It often leads to abnormal testes and the need for surgery. But Sheri Berenbaumand J. Michael Bailey found that in the group of girls with CAH theystudied, increased levels of male-typical behavior could not beexplained by the development of male genitalia or the age of surgery. Thehormones themselves are the likely cause of the differences.

From Psychology Today and Satoshi Kanazawa

           One particularly fascinating finding about kids’ preferences for toys comesfrom the realm of ethology. It turns out that rhesus monkeys show preferences for certaintypes of toys depending on their gender—and they’re the same preferences youwould expect. Girls will play with plush dolls or with wheeled vehicles, butboys are much more likely to go for the cars and trucks. And the difference iseven more pronounced in vervet monkeys, with both females and malesspending significantly more time with toys we might in other contexts call“stereotypical.” There’s even some good preliminary evidence that chimpanzees playwith sticks differently depending on their gender, with males using them astools or weapons and females cradling them like babies.
            Are genderroles based solely on stereotypes and cultural contingencies? In The Blank Slate, Pinker excerpts largesections of anthropologist Donald Brown’s inventory of behaviors that have beenobserved by ethnographers in all cultures that have been surveyed. Brown’s bookis called Human Universals, and itcasts serious doubt on theories that rule out every factor influencingdevelopment except socialization. Included in the inventory: “classification ofsex,” “females do more direct child care,” “male and female and adult and childseen as having different natures,” “males more aggressive,” and “sex (gender)terminology is fundamentally binary” (435-8). These observations are based onsocieties, not individuals, who vary much more dramatically one to the next.The point isn’t that genes or biology determine behavioral outcomes; therelationship between biology and behavior isn’t mechanistic—it’s probabilistic.But the probabilities tend to be much higher than anyone in English departmentsassumes—higher even than the bloggers at ScientificAmerican assume.
            Interestingly,even though there are resilient differences in math test scores between boysand girls—with boys’ scores showing the same average but stretching farther ateach tail of the bell curve—researchers exploring women’s underrepresentationin STEM fields have ruled out the higher aptitude of a small subset of men asthe most important factor. They’ve also ruled out socialization. Reviewing multiple sources of evidence,Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams find that
the omnipresentclaim that sex differences in mathematics result from early

socialization (i.e.,parents and teachers inculcating a ‘‘math is for boys’’ attitude) fails

empiricalscrutiny. One cannot assert that socialization causes girls to opt out of mathand

science whengirls take as many math and science courses as boys in grades K–12,

achieve highergrades in them, and major in college math in roughly equal numbers to

males. Moreover,survey evidence of parental attitudes and behaviors undermines the

socializationargument, at least for recent cohorts. (3)
If it’s not ability, and it’s not socialization, then how do we explain thegreater desire on the part of men to pursue careers in math-intensive fields?Ceci and Williams believe it’s a combination of divergent preferences and thebiological constraints of childbearing. Women tend to be more interested in socialfields; while men like fields with a focus on objects and abstractions.However, girls with CAH show preferences closer tothose of boys. (Cool, huh?)
            Ceci andWilliams also point out that women who excel at math tend to score highly intests of verbal reasoning as well, giving them more fields to choose from. Thisis interesting to me because if women are more likely to pursue careersdealing with people and words, they’re also more likely to be exposed to thestrain of feminism that views science as just another male conspiracy tojustify and perpetuate the patriarchal status quo. Poststructuralism and NewHistoricism are all the rage in the English department I study in, anddeconstructing scientific texts is de rigueur. Might Derrida, Lacan, Foucault,and all their feminist successors be at fault for women’s underrepresentationin STEM fields at least as much as toys and stereotypes?
            I havelittle doubt that if society were arranged to optimize women’s interest in STEMfields they would be much better represented in them. But society isn’t a veryeasy thing to manipulate. We have to consider the possibility that the victory wouldbe Pyrrhic. In any case, we should avoid treating children like ideological chesspieces. There’s good evidence that we couldn’t keep littlekids from seeking gender cues even if we tried, and trying strikes me as cruel.None of this is to say that biology determines everything, or that gender roledevelopment is simple. In fact, my problem with the feminist view of gender isthat it’s far too crude to account for such a complex phenomenon. The feminists arearm chair pontificators at best and conspiracy theorists at worst. They believestereotypes can only be harmful. That’s akin to saying that the rules ofgrammar serve solely to curtail our ability to freely express ourselves. Whilegrammar need not be as rigid as many once believed, doing away with italtogether would reduce language to meaningless babble. Humans need stereotypesand roles. We cannot live in a cultural vacuum.
            At the sametime, in keeping with the general trend toward tribalism, the feminists’complaints about pink microscopes are unfair to boys and young men. Imaginebeing a science-obsessed teenage boy who comes across a bunch of rants on thewebsite for your favorite magazine. They all say, in capital and bolded letters,that suggesting to girls that trying to be pretty is a worthwhile endeavorrepresents some outrageous offense, that it will cause catastrophicpsychological and economic harm to them. It doesn’t take a male or femalegenius to figure out that the main source of teenage girls’ desire to be prettyis the realization that pretty girls get more attention from hot guys. If a toycan arouse so much ire for suggesting a girl might like to be pretty, thenyoung guys had better control their responses to hot girls—think of the messageit sends. So we’re back to the idea that male attraction is inherentlyoppressive. Since most men can’t help being attracted to women, well, shame onthem, right?

(Full disclosure:probably as a result of a phenomenon called assortive pairing, I find ignoranceof science to be a huge turn-off.)
Check out part 2 on "The Objectionable Concept of Objectification."
And part 1 on earnings.
These posts have generated pretty lengthy comment threads on Facebook, so stay tuned as well for updates based on my concession of points and links to further evidence.
And, as always, tell me what you think and share this with anyone you think would rip it apart (or anyone who might just enjoy it).
Update: Just a few minutes after posting this, I came across Evolutionary Psychologist Jesse Bering's Facebook update saying he was being unfairly attacked by feminists for his own Scientific American blog. If you'd like to show your solidarity, go to http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/.
Go here to read my response to commenters.

Why I Am Not a Feminist - and You Shouldn't Be Either part 2: The Objectionable Concept of Objectification

2011-12-11T15:05:00.001-08:00

From eatingdisordersfacts.org

Feminists theorize that one of the ways men subjugate women is by objectifying them. The idea is that a man, as part of the wider male conspiracy, makes a point of letting girls and young women know they’re constantly being ogled by people who are evaluating them and comparing them to other women—based solely on their physical features. Even compliments can contribute to this heightened awareness and concern for appearance, since they let women know what aspects of their persons are attention-worthy. The most heinous example of objectification is the casual dismissal of a woman’s ideas in the workplace and the substitution of some remark about her appearance in place of the serious consideration her idea deserves.

Or maybe the most heinous example of objectification is the parading of impossibly attractive actresses and dangerously thin models all over the media landscape, setting the standards of beauty so high young women can never even hope to compete. In Hollywood, directors are fond of lovingly sweeping their cameras over their favorite parts of a female’s anatomy to let every young woman viewing the films know precisely what men find most appealing. The lustful male gaze is thus a powerful tool of oppression because it causes women to feel self-conscious and insecure—or so the feminist theory suggests (or, rather, one of the feminist theories).

Looking through the ever-looming feminist lens at statistics about how much more common self-esteem issues and eating disorders are among girls has a predictable impact on how we view boys. “Inevitably, boys are resented,” writes Christina Hoff Sommers in her book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, setting them up to be

seen both as the unfairly privileged gender and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls. There is an understandable dialectic: the more girls are portrayed as diminished, the more boys are regarded as needing to be taken down a notch and reduced in importance. (23-4) (excerpt)

The effect on young boys of being taught this theory of oppression by objectification must be akin to the effect of Catholic preachings about the fallen state of man and the danger to their souls of succumbing to the temptations of carnal desire. At some point, they’re going to start experiencing that desire, they’re not going to be able to do anything about it, and it’s going to make them feel pretty guilty. It’s a bit similar as well to what young homosexuals must experience growing up with families who believe attraction toward members of the same sex is sinful and unnatural.

Men look at women and assess their attractiveness. They even get aroused merely from the sight of women who have certain features. Movie-makers and marketers know all about men’s fondness for checking out women. I’m not going to cite any of the research from the field of evolutionary psychology that explores whether or not men’s passion for beautiful women is something that occurs reliably in diverse cultures, or whether or not there are certain features that are considered beautiful by men all over the world. I’m not going to recite the logic of natural selection as it pertains to mate selection and the relative cost of reproduction. You can find that stuff anywhere, and you’ve probably already got some response to it worked out.

I’m going to do my best to explain why objectification can’t be a valid theory and doesn’t in any way establish the need for any social and political movement pitting the genders against each other at as purely practical a level as I can manage.

Objectification goes wrong before even getting beyond the term itself. Men aren’t—humans aren’t—with a few rare exceptions, attracted to or sexually aroused by objects. By being attracted to or sexually aroused by a woman, a man is in fact acknowledging her humanity. We humans are physical beings, and sex is a physical act. It stands to reason that in assessing a potential sexual partner’s compatibility, we focus a great deal on physical attributes. We have to distinguish humans from objects obviously, and we have to have some other criteria on which to base our decisions about who to couple with. For one thing, we need a way to figure out whether the prospective partner is mature enough for sex—so features signaling sexual maturity tend to be seen as attractive. And, since most people prefer to couple with members of one sex over the other, features signaling that membership will also tend to be seen as attractive.

Individualist feminist (there’s got to be a better term) Wendy McElroy, in a defense of pornography, points out the flaw in thinking of objectification as automatically and invariably degrading, using logic very similar to mine:

The assumed degradation is often linked to the 'objectification' of women: that is, porn

converts them into sexual objects. What does this mean? If taken literally, it means

nothing because objects don't have sexuality; only beings do. But to say that porn

portrays women as 'sexual beings' makes for poor rhetoric. Usually, the term 'sex objects'

means showing women as 'body parts', reducing them to physical objects. What is wrong

with this? Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls. No one gets

upset if you present women as 'brains' or as 'spiritual beings'. If I concentrated on a

woman's sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, is this degrading?

Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality?

Few women, as far as I know, complain about being treated as sexual beings by men they happen to be attracted to. The trouble arises when they’re treated that way when it’s inappropriate, as in the work situation I’ve described. The problem in such situations—and of course I agree it’s a problem—isn’t that the woman is seen as an object; it’s not even that she’s being recognized as attractive; it’s that someone is refusing to see her as more than merely a sexual being.

But why do men have to be so obsessed with sex? And why does it seem like a woman’s role as a sexual being takes precedence over her other roles so frequently? Practically speaking, if two people who don’t know each other are going to begin a physical relationship, at least one of them must be motivated to pursue and get to know the other. Since the pursuer doesn’t yet know anything about the pursued, all there is to go on is physical appearance. Think about this for a second or two and you’ll come to a realization most women take for granted and, as long as it’s not in the context of a discussion about gender oppression, freely admit: Being the one who is the most motivated to pursue a relationship puts you at a disadvantage. An attractive woman has the power to accept or reject overtures from any of her suitors—and the more attractive she is the more of them she’ll have to choose from.

From CDC

It’s just as legitimate to look at the numbers of women who suffer from eating disorders or undergo risky surgeries to improve their looks as evidence of an intense desire on the part of females to have the upper hand over men. The problem young girls face is the same problem young boys face—competition for attractive partners is unavoidable. Judging from suicide statistics, the consequences of this competition are even direr for the boys. The explanation for girls’ increasing self-consciousness and their more readily resorting to more extreme measures is probably the simple fact that media technology has opened the world up to everyone like never before, so that now the standards of beauty are determined by a contest with a much larger pool of contestants—not to mention the technological wonders of digital alteration.

All the panic notwithstanding, this wider field of competition may actually be a societal boon. Some people of both genders harm themselves trying to be thin or athletic. At the same time, though, the obesity epidemic is doing even more harm. It’s easy to find stats and figures on anorexia, but how many people, after seeing a Victoria’s Secret model or that Twilight kid with his shredded abs, simply forgo that extra helping they were tempted to devour? And the competition extends beyond the realm of physical appearance. We don’t usually complain about how the work of geniuses makes it difficult for us to say anything interesting—even though we have to assume many first dates end in disappointment owing to lackluster conversation. What’s so special about attractiveness that it calls for protection from high standards? (This is not to say that there aren't plenty of other good reasons not to watch crap TV and read glitzy crap magazines.)

Even if women admit that they like sex and that male attention is flattering, most of them will still attest to having experienced unwanted or inappropriate sexual attention or commentary at some point. While a lot of the time their complaints about this issue are probably bragging in disguise, that at least sometimes male attention can be downright scary or just outrageously inappropriate is undeniable. Still, women have to keep in mind that men like to tease their friends, often aggressively, and the point at which intimate liberty-taking shades into something more malicious is often ambiguous.

And if you think a workplace dominated by females would be some kind of peaceful utopia, you probably haven’t spent much time around groups of women. If a man has a problem with you, he’s much more likely to tell you directly. Women, on the other hand, are much more likely to smile to your face and then attack your reputation when your back is turned. This is one of those patterns that emerge reliably across cultures; psychologists call it indirect aggression. I’m citing it because it’s not about beauty standards or male desire—and because it underscores the point that when a man makes some comment about a woman’s "proper role" it’s an act of aggression perpetrated by an individual, not an act of political or economic oppression for which the entire gender is guilty.

From shortsupport.org 1

Those perpetrators are also much more likely to be at the bottom of the workplace hierarchy than they are at the top. Studies of natural hierarchy formation find that self-sacrifice and altruism are key determiners of status. There is also strong evidence that people resort to aggression primarily to compensate for low status. Although unwanted sexual advances aren’t acts of aggression, a rejected man’s effort to save face can certainly be frightening. The important thing to keep in mind, though, is that even these face-saving measures aren’t politically motivated. The guy’s not belittling the woman from a position of power; his position is in fact pitiable. (I'll even make a prediction: the guy who's bugging you--he's short isn't he?)

What do neuroscientists and psychologists say about the nature of men’s lustful gazes? A small preliminary imaging study presented at an AAAS meeting in Chicago by Susan Fiske seemed to offer some support for the idea of objectification. When men were put in scanners and allowed to look at pictures of women, the region of the brain that motivates and manages male conspiracies lit up like a Christmas tree--sorry, couldn't help myself. Here is the claim Fiske actually made:

I’m not saying that they literally think these photographs of women are photographs of

tools per se, or photographs of non-humans, but what the brain imaging data allow us to do is to look at it as scientific metaphor. That is, they are reacting to these photographs as people react to objects. (Quoted here)

However, Fiske goes on to say that when she matched the scans with surveys of attitudes she discovered that “the hostile sexists were likely to deactivate the part of the brain that thinks about other people’s intentions.” So along with the part of the brain associated with using tools, people who aren’t “hostile sexists” actually do think about naked people’s intentions. This finding has actually been replicated.

The most comprehensive study to date on how people’s attitudes are affected by viewing pictures of scantily clad women and men concludes that while seeing skin does in fact lead to a diminishment in assessments of agency, it leads to an increase in assessments of a capacity to experience either pleasure or pain. The authors write:

To the extent that this modified framework concerning perceptions of the mind and body

turns out to be correct, it is inaccurate to describe the body focus as inducing “objectification.” People who seem especially embodied are not treated as mere physical objects but, instead, like nonhuman animals, as beings who are less capable of thinking or reasoning but who may be even more capable of desires, sensations, emotions, and passions. (12)

Looking at other humans like they’re animals isn’t much better than looking at them like objects—but the study was of people looking at pictures of individuals they’d never met. Assuming a capacity for desires, sensations, emotions, and passions is, at least in my opinion, a really good start considering the pictures are of naked people in sexually suggestive poses; people with more clothes were perceived to be more like robots. (So show more skin to hide your agendas, as if you didn't already know.) The authors not only take issue with the term objectification; they also failed to discover any justification for thinking the changes that occur in attitudes toward strangers based on how much skin they’re showing are only experienced by men:

Objectification is often discussed in terms of men objectifying women …, but we found that both men and women strip agency and confer experience to both men and women when a bodily focus is induced. (11)

This study’s findings dovetail almost perfectly with those of a study that found men who watch a moderate amount of pornography demonstrate less sexist attitudes in general, but when sexism does emerge in relation to porn it tends toward so-called "benevolent sexism," the supposedly paternalistic, protective, and worshipful variety (the measures for which are shot through with dubious feminist assumptions).
Benevolent or not, men's feelings toward women in porn are probably the starkest proof that objectification is a nonsensical idea: if men were aroused by objects or instruments, the women in x-rated videos would be passive and inert as often as they are active and enthusiastic. I don't have any numbers to cite on this but I'd say most men, by far, cringe at the thought of taking pleasure without reciprocating. Advocates of objectification theory seem to worry that someone will sneak up behind a man and slap him on the back while he's looking at a woman as a sexual being, causing his mind to get stuck that way. I can't be the only man who on more than one occasion has had sex with one woman only to drive to work a short time afterward and speak to other women in a purely professional capacity. Guys looking at porn and then going to work--got to be happening millions of times a day. People shift modes all the time.

The study that questions the term objectification is titled “More Than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification.” Tellingly, when Peircarlo Valdesolo reported on it for Scientific American, the headline read “How Our Brains Turn Women Into Objects.” In my future post on the hysteria (yes, I’m using this term with a sexist etymology ironically) over the “gendering” of children, I’m going to point out how this flagship publication for popular science seems to be bowing to pressure to be more feminist-friendly. Valdesolo, to be fair, did include a subheading: “There is, it turns out, more than one kind of ‘objectification’.” Those quotation marks notwithstanding, I still have to object—no, in fact, there aren’t any kinds of objectification. (A later “60-Second Mind” podcast has a much more accurate title and subheading: “How We View Half-Naked Men and Women: Research finds that scantily-clad women and men are judged in similar ways.”)

Make no mistake, those hostile sexists are out there. But not all of them are men. Some people, women and men, are hell-bent on plunging this country back into the dark ages and on dispelling all the evolution craziness that gets taught in schools, all the global warming crap, all the godlessness. These people are sure to belittle and disparage anyone, woman or man, with more liberal or libertarian leanings (and we them). Make no mistake on the point too that while mixing up objectification and attraction is wrong and offensive, there are acts that really do deny the humanity and sovereignty of women and men. In America, we can be glad that it's overwhelmingly more likely for the most disadvantaged people to be either the perpetrators or the victims of such acts. I believe, nonetheless, that by targeting the forces behind their disadvantage we can and should be doing more to prevent such acts.

The stats on part 1 of Why I Am Not a Feminist: Earnings are still blowing up. But the comments have stopped coming in. Please let me know what you think. Feel free as well to share this post with anyone you think can tear it apart.
Read part 3: Engendering Gender Madness
Read my response to commenters.

Why I Am Not a Feminist—and You Shouldn’t Be Either part 1: Earnings

2011-12-09T05:37:00.001-08:00

From a Georgetown University study called "Education, Occupation, and Lifetime Earnings"

In order to establish beyond all doubt the continuing criticality of the battle for women’s equality, feminists rely heavily on data demonstrating an earnings discrepancy between genders. Women make less money in America, and therefore women are not yet equal. If women aren’t making as much as men who work in the same industry, if women aren’t making as much as men with the same education level, isn’t that an injustice? So how can I claim something is wrong with feminism, a movement seeking equal rights and equal treatment and equal pay for half the population of the country?

There’s a point at which dwelling on the crimes committed against a group of people becomes a subtle form of bigotry toward other groups. Jews like to rehearse their long history of persecution for a reason. Focusing on anti-Semitism can bolster solidarity among Jews—if for no other reason than that it fosters suspicion of gentiles. This is not to minimize the true horrors and hatreds faced by God’s chosen people, but rather to point out that no matter how horrible their past is it doesn’t justify atrocities against other groups of people.

I’m not writing merely to bemoan male-bashing, and I'm not suggesting feminists are guilty of atrocities (though a case could be made that they are). I’m writing because the good cause of equal rights and equal pay shades with distressing frequency into sloppy thinking and unscientific, perfervid preaching. Feminism has become a free-floating ideology, a cause inspiring blind frenzies and impassioned pronouncements about mysterious evils unlikely to exist in the world of living, breathing humans. And, yes, it is unfair to men, mean to boys, and counterproductive to women.

I am an advocate of universal human rights, and many of my positions overlap with those of feminists. A pregnant woman has the right to choose whether or not to carry her baby to term. Any type of legal or educational enforcement of gender roles is a violation of the right of individuals to choose their own lifestyles, educational trajectories, careers, and the nature of their relationships. But this freedom in regard to gender roles also means that girls and boys, women and men, have just as much of a right to choose to be traditional or stereotypical in any of these domains. Any law or educational policy that goes after any aspect of gender freely chosen or naturally occurring is just as much of an injustice as one that forces individuals to take on roles that don’t fit them.

From a 2011 Gallup Report

If it were true that the figures showing earnings discrepancies in fact represented compelling evidence of hiring or promoting biases favoring men, I would support the cause of reform—not in the name of women’s rights, but in the name of human rights, in the name of fairness. As stark an image as they paint, however, the results of the studies these figures come from are no more proof of bias than a study showing boys win more often in school sports would be proof of cheating. Just as you would have to address the question of how many girls are even playing sports, you have to ask how many women are applying for top-paying positions. Fortunately, several studies have looked at the application and hiring process directly—at least in academic fields.

From a CDC 2011 Report

Before discussing those results, though, I’d like to point out (only somewhat flippantly) that earnings aren’t the only area in which reliable gender differences occur. Men have more heart attacks than women. And men tend to die at an earlier age than women, heart disease being the single most common cause of death. One of the main concerns of feminists is the so-called objectification of women and, more specifically, the theory that media portrayals of underweight actresses and models instill in young girls the conviction that they must be dangerously skinny to be attractive. Might it also be the case that media portrayals of extremely wealthy men instill in boys the notion that in order to be attractive they must make extremely large incomes, incomes they go to dangerous lengths to secure, say, by working long hours, spending little time with family and friends, ignoring their health, stressing themselves out, and working themselves into early graves.

A 2010 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton begins its discussion of results thus:

More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with

emotional pain. Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income

no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-

being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and

enjoying leisure. According to the ACS, mean (median) US household income was

$71,500 ($52,000) in 2008, and about a third of households were above the $75,000

threshold. It also is likely that when income rises beyond this value, the increased ability

to purchase positive experiences is balanced, on average, by some negative effects. A

recent psychological study using priming methods provided suggestive evidence of a

possible association between high income and a reduced ability to savor small pleasures.

(4)

Perhaps a monomaniacal lusting after money is a pathology, one that men suffer from in much greater numbers than women. But my point isn’t that I think we should try to do something to protect these men from harm; it’s rather that income is not necessarily an absolute good. So why should it be a benchmark for women’s rights that they make dollar for dollar what men make? We have to at least consider the possibility that women have it as good or better than men already today.

Still, if a woman wants to go toe-to-toe with her male counterparts to see who can earn more, there should be no institutional barriers hampering her ability to compete. Before we look at those earnings charts and imagine sinister cabals of Scotch-swigging conspirators, however, we must determine whether or not the numbers result from choices freely made by women. “Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Math, and Engineering Faculty” is the 2010 report of a task force established to investigate this very question. The main finding:

For the most part, male and female faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities within the university, and gender does not appear to have been a factor in a number of important career transitions and outcomes. (153)

How does the study account for the underrepresentation of women in these fields? “Women accounted for about 17 percent of applications for both tenure-track and tenured positions in the departments surveyed” (154). So the plain fact is that women apply for these positions less frequently. Could it be because they despair of their chances for getting an interview? It turns out that “The percentage of women who were interviewed for tenure-track or tenured positions was higher than the percentage of women who applied” (157), which does sound a bit like discrimination—against men. And it gets better (or worse): “For all disciplines the percentage of tenure-track women who received the first job offer was greater than the percentage in the interview pool” (157). Fewer women applying to positions in these fields, not discriminatory hiring or promoting, explains their underrepresentation.

Reviewing this and several other research programs, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, in a report likewise published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled "Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science", explain that

Despite frequent assertions that women’s current underrepresentation in math-intensive

fields is caused by sex discrimination by grant agencies, journal reviewers, and search

committees, the evidence shows women fare as well as men in hiring, funding, and

publishing (given comparable resources). That women tend to occupy positions offering

fewer resources is not due to women being bypassed in interviewing and hiring or being

denied grants and journal publications because of their sex. It is due primarily to factors

surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices,

and career preferences—some originating before or during adolescence—and secondarily

to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as

gateways to graduate school admission. As noted, women in math-intensive fields are

interviewed and hired slightly in excess of their representation among PhDs applying for

tenure-track positions. The primary factors in women’s underrepresentation are

preferences and choices—both freely made and constrained: “Women choose at a young

age not to pursue math-intensive careers, with few adolescent girls expressing desires to

be engineers or physicists, preferring instead to be medical doctors, veterinarians,

biologists, psychologists, and lawyers. Females make this choice despite earning higher

math and science grades than males throughout schooling”. (5)

These "math-intensive" fields (Wallstreet?) are central to our economy and accordingly tend to mean higher pay for those who chose them. Since the study that compared incomes by gender and education level failed to account for what field the education or the career was in, the differences in fields chosen probably explains the difference in pay. The PNAS study authors cite a Government Accountability Office report whose findings accorded well with this explanation. Ceci and Williams write that

the GAO report mentions studies of pay differentials, demonstrating that nearly all current

salary differences can be accounted for by factors other than discrimination, such as women

being disproportionately employed at teaching-intensive institutions paying less and providing

less time for research. (4)

Conservatives are fond of the principle that equality of opportunity doesn’t mean equality of outcome. Though they are demonstrably wrong when it comes to economic inequality in general (since inequality and mobility are negatively correlated), the principle is completely sound. I have no doubt that some men are barring the doors of employment to some women in America today. There are probably places where the reverse is true as well. But feminism is a body of facile assumptions that leads to ready conclusions of questionable validity. The assumption of discrimination when faced with earnings discrepancies is just one example.

Feminism is the political and social effort to attain equality between the sexes. While this sounds perfectly innocuous, even admirable, it frames relations between women and men as fundamentally antagonistic; it’s us versus them. Even a whiff of tribalism tends to make otherwise admirable efforts take tragic turns. How many relationships have been undermined by the idea that difference means inequality means oppression, by the notion that within every man lurks the impulse to dehumanize and dominate women.

In future posts, I’m going to look at the faulty assumptions inspired by feminism in the realms of sex and attraction—i.e. the bizarre notion of objectification—and in the upbringing of children, where so much pointless hand-wringing takes place over whether gender stereotypes are being subtly imposed. For now, I’m going to close with some questions from a graduate level textbook, Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism by Ann Dobie. They’re from a section devoted to helping burgeoning scholars learn to write feminist essays about literature. The idea is to pose these questions to yourself as you’re reading. See if you can spot the assumptions. See if you think they’re valid or fair.

-What stereotypes of women do you find? Are they oversimplified, demeaning, untrue? For example, are all blondes understood to be dumb?

-Examine the roles women play in a work. Are they minor, supportive, powerless, obsequious? Or are they independent and influential?

-How do the male characters talk about the female characters?

-How do the male characters treat the female characters?

-How do the female characters act toward the male characters?

-Who are the socially and politically powerful characters?

-What attitudes toward women are suggested by the answers to these questions?

-Do the answers to these questions indicate that the work lends itself more naturally to a study of differences between the male and female characters, a study of power imbalances between the sexes, or a study of unique female experience? (121-2)

In case you missed it, let me quote from the first page of the chapter: "The premise that unites those who call themselves feminist critics is the assumption that Western culture is fundamentally patriarchal, creating an imbalance of power which marginalizes women and their work" (104). While I acknowledge the assumption was historically justified, I have a feeling people will keep making it long after its promise of a better tomorrow is exhausted.
Read part 2: The Objectionable Concept of Objectification
and part 3: Engendering Gender Madness
Read my response to commenters.

T.J. Eckleburg Sees Everything: The Great God-Gap in Gatsby part 2 of 2

2011-12-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

Read part 1
Though The Great Gatsby does indeed tell a story of punishment, readers are left with severe doubts as to whether those who receive punishment actually deserve it. Gatsby is involved in criminal activities, and he has an affair with a married woman. Myrtle likewise is guilty of adultery. But does either deserve to die? What about George Wilson? His is the only attempt in the novel at altruistic punishment. So natural is his impulse toward revenge, however, and so given are readers to take that impulse for granted, that its function in preserving a broader norm of cooperation requires explanation. Flesch describes a series of experiments in the field of game theory centering on an exchange called the ultimatum game. One participant is given a sum of money and told he or she must propose a split with a second participant, with the proviso that if the second person rejects the cut neither will get to keep anything. Flesch points out, however, that

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the

proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And

yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means

they are paying to punish. They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the

selfishness of the proposer. (31)

To understand why George’s attempt at revenge is altruistic, consider that he had nothing to gain, from a purely selfish and rational perspective, and much to lose by killing the man he believed killed his wife. He was risking physical harm if a fight ensued. He was risking arrest for murder. Yet if he failed to seek revenge readers would likely see him as somehow less than human. His quest for justice, as futile and misguided as it is, would likely endear him to readers—if the discovery of how futile and misguided it was didn’t precede their knowledge of it taking place. Readers, in fact, would probably respond more favorably toward George than any other character in the story, including the narrator. But the author deliberately prevents this outcome from occurring.

The simple explanation for Fitzgerald’s decision not to gratify his readers but rather to disappoint and disturb them is that he wanted his novel to serve as an indictment of the types of behavior that are encouraged by the social conditions he describes in the story, conditions which would have been easily recognizable to many readers of his day and which persist into the Twenty-First Century. Though the narrator plays the role of second-order free-rider, the author clearly signals his own readiness to punish by publishing his narrative about such bad behavior perpetrated by characters belonging to a particular group of people, a group corresponding to one readers might encounter outside the realm of fiction.

Fitzgerald makes it obvious in the novel that beyond Tom’s simple contempt for George there exist several more severe impediments to what biologists would call group cohesion but that most readers would simply refer to as a sense of community. The idea of a community as a unified entity whose interests supersede those of the individuals who make it up is something biological anthropologists theorize religion evolved to encourage. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, in which he attempts to explain religion in terms of group selection theory, David Sloan Wilson writes:

A group of people who abandon self-will and work tirelessly for a greater good will

fare very well as a group, much better than if they all pursue their private utilities, as long

as the greater good corresponds to the welfare of the group. And religions almost

invariably do link the greater good to the welfare of the community of believers, whether

an organized modern church or an ethnic group for whom religion is thoroughly

intermixed with the rest of their culture. Since religion is such an ancient feature of our

species, I have no problem whatsoever imagining the capacity for selflessness and

longing to be part of something larger than ourselves as part of our genetic and cultural

heritage. (175)

One of the main tasks religious beliefs evolved to handle would have been addressing the same “free-rider problem” William Flesch discovers at the heart of narrative. What religion offers beyond the social monitoring of group members is the presence of invisible beings whose concerns are tied to the collective concerns of the group.

Obviously, Tom Buchanan’s sense of community has clear demarcations. “Civilization is going to pieces,” he warns Nick as prelude to his recommendation of a book titled “The Rise of the Coloured Empires.” “The idea,” Tom explains, “is that if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged” (17). “We’ve got to beat them down,” Daisy helpfully, mockingly chimes in (18). While this animosity toward members of other races seems immoral at first glance, in the social context the Buchanans inhabit it actually represents a concern for the broader group, “the white race.” But Tom’s animosity isn’t limited to other races. What prompts Catherine to tell Nick how her sister “can’t stand” her husband during the gathering in Tom and Myrtle’s apartment is in fact Tom’s ridiculing of George. In response to another character’s suggestion that he’d like to take some photographs of people in Long Island “if I could get the entry,” Tom jokingly insists to Myrtle that she should introduce the man to her husband. Laughing at his own joke, Tom imagines a title for one of the photographs: “‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like that” (37). Disturbingly, Tom’s contempt for George based on his lowly social status has contaminated Myrtle as well. Asked by her sister why she married George in the first place, she responds, “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman…I thought he knew something about breeding but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe” (39). Her sense of superiority, however, is based on the artificial plan for her and Tom to get married.

That Tom’s idea of who belongs to his own superior community is determined more by “breeding” than by economic success—i.e. by birth and not accomplishment—is evidenced by his attitude toward Gatsby. In a scene that has Tom stopping with two friends, a husband and wife, at Gatsby’s mansion while riding horses, he is shocked when Gatsby shows an inclination to accept an invitation to supper extended by the woman, who is quite drunk. Both the husband and Tom show their disapproval. “My God,” Tom says to Nick, “I believe the man’s coming…Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?” (109). When Nick points out that woman just said she did want him, Tom answers, “he won’t know a soul there.” Gatsby’s statement in the same scene that he knows Tom’s wife provokes him, as soon as Gatsby has left the room, to say, “By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish” (110). In a later scene that has Tom accompanying Daisy, with Nick in tow, to one of Gatsby’s parties, he asks, “Who is this Gatsby anyhow?... Some big bootlegger?” When Nick says he’s not, Tom says, “Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together” (114). Even when Tom discovers that Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair, he still doesn’t take Gatsby seriously. He calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (137), and says, “I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door” (138). Once he’s succeeded in scaring Daisy with suggestions of Gatsby’s criminal endeavors, Tom insists the two drive home together, saying, “I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over” (142).

When George Wilson looks to the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg in supplication after that very car ride leads to Myrtle’s death, the fact that this “God” is an advertisement, a supplication in its own right to viewers on behalf of the optometrist to boost his business, symbolically implicates the substitution of markets for religion—or a sense of common interest—as the main factor behind Tom’s superciliously careless sense of privilege. The eyes seem such a natural stand-in for an absent God that it’s easy to take the symbolic logic for granted without wondering why George might mistake them as belonging to some sentient agent. Evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering takes on that very question in The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life, where he cites research suggesting that “attributing moral responsibility to God is a sort of residual spillover from our everyday social psychology dealing with other people” (138). Bering theorizes that humans’ tendency to assume agency behind even random physical events evolved as a by-product of our profound need to understand the motives and intentions of our fellow humans: “When the emotional climate is just right, there’s hardly a shape or form that ‘evidence’ cannot assume. Our minds make meaning by disambiguating the meaningless” (99). In place of meaningless events, humans see intentional signs.

According to Bering’s theory, George Wilson’s intense suffering would have made him desperate for some type of answer to the question of why such tragedy has befallen him. After discussing research showing that suffering, as defined by societal ills like infant mortality and violent crime, and “belief in God were highly correlated,” Bering suggests that thinking of hardship as purposeful, rather than random, helps people cope because it allows them to place what they’re going through in the context of some larger design (139). What he calls “the universal common denominator” to all the permutations of religious signs, omens, and symbols, is the same cognitive mechanism, “theory of mind,” that allows humans to understand each other and communicate so effectively as groups. “In analyzing things this way,” Bering writes,

we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed

supernatural agent we have on offer… This is to say, just like other people’s surface

behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about

something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped

with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about

underlying psychological causes. (79)

So George, in his bereaved and enraged state, looks at a billboard of a pair of eyes and can’t help imagining a mind operating behind them, one whose identity he’s learned to associate with a figure whose main preoccupation is the judgment of individual humans’ moral standings. According to both David Sloan Wilson and Jesse Bering, though, the deity’s obsession with moral behavior is no coincidence.

Covering some of the same game theory territory as Flesch, Bering points out that the most immediate purpose to which we put our theory of mind capabilities is to figure out how altruistic or selfish the people around us are. He explains that

in general, morality is a matter of putting the group’s needs ahead of one’s own selfish

interests. So when we hear about someone who has done the opposite, especially when

it comes at another person’s obvious expense, this individual becomes marred by our

social judgment and grist for the gossip mills. (183)

Having arisen as a by-product of our need to monitor and understand the motives of other humans, religion would have been quickly co-opted in the service of solving the same free-rider problem Flesch finds at the heart of narratives. Alongside our concern for the reputations of others is a close guarding of our own reputations. Since humans are given to assuming agency is involved even in random events like shifts in weather, group cohesion could easily have been optimized with the subtlest suggestion that hidden agents engage in the same type of monitoring as other, fully human members of the group. Bering writes:

For many, God represents that ineradicable sense of being watched that so often

flares up in moments of temptation—He who knows what’s in our hearts, that private

audience that wants us to act in certain ways at critical decision-making points and that

will be disappointed in us otherwise. (191)

Bering describes some of his own research that demonstrates this point. Coincident with the average age at which children begin to develop a theory of mind (around 4), they began responding to suggestions that they’re being watched by an invisible agent—named Princess Alice in honor of Bering’s mother—by more frequently resisting the temptation to avail themselves of opportunities to cheat that were built into the experimental design of a game they were asked to play (Piazza et al. 311-20). An experiment with adult participants, this time told that the ghost of a dead graduate student had been seen in the lab, showed the same results; when competing in a game for fifty dollars, they were much less likely to cheat than others who weren’t told the ghost story (Bering 193).

Bering also cites a study that has even more immediate relevance to George Wilson’s odd behavior vis-à-vis Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes. In “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” the authors describe an experiment in which they tested the effects of various pictures placed near an “honesty box,” where people were supposed to be contributing money in exchange for milk and tea. What they found is that when the pictures featured human eyes more people contributed more money than when they featured abstract patterns of flowers. They theorize that

images of eyes motivate cooperative behavior because they induce a perception in

participants of being watched. Although participants were not actually observed in either

of our experimental conditions, the human perceptual system contains neurons that

respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes…, and it is therefore possible that

the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants’ perception

that they were being watched. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that

reputational concerns may be extremely powerful in motivating cooperative behavior. (2)

This study also suggests that, while Fitzgerald may have meant the Dr. Eckleburg sign as a nod toward religion being supplanted by commerce, there is an alternate reading of the scene that focuses on the sign’s more direct impact on George Wilson. In several scenes throughout the novel, Wilson shows his willingness to acquiesce in the face of Tom’s bullying. Nick describes him as “spiritless” and “anemic” (29). It could be that when he says “God sees everything” he’s in fact addressing himself because he is tempted not to pursue justice—to let the crime go unpunished and thus be guilty himself of being a second-order free-rider. He doesn’t, after all, exert any great effort to find and kill Gatsby, and he kills himself immediately thereafter anyway.

Religion in Gatsby does, of course, go beyond some suggestive references to an empty placeholder. Nick ends the story with a reflection on how “Gatsby believed in the green light,” the light across the bay which he knew signaled Daisy’s presence in the mansion she lived in there. But for Gatsby it was also “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—” (189). Earlier Nick had explained how Gatsby “talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” What that idea was becomes apparent in the scene describing Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss, which occurred years prior to the events of the plot. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God… At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (117). In place of some mind in the sky, the design Americans are encouraged to live by is one they have created for themselves. Unfortunately, just as there is no mind behind the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, the designs many people come up with for themselves are based on tragically faulty premises.

The replacement of religiously inspired moral principles with selfish economic and hierarchical calculations, which Dr. Eckleburg so perfectly represents, is what ultimately leads to all the disgraceful behavior Nick describes. He writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and people and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess” (188). Game theorist and behavioral economist Robert Frank, whose earlier work greatly influenced William Flesch’s theories of narrative, has recently written about how the same social dynamics Fitzgerald lamented are in place again today. In The Darwin Economy, he describes what he calls an “expenditure cascade”:

The explosive growth of CEO pay in recent decades, for example, has led many

executives to build larger and larger mansions. But those mansions have long since

passed the point at which greater absolute size yields additional utility… Top earners

build bigger mansions simply because they have more money. The middle class shows

little evidence of being offended by that. On the contrary, many seem drawn to photo

essays and TV programs about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But the larger

mansions of the rich shift the frame of reference that defines acceptable housing for

the near-rich, who travel in many of the same social circles… So the near-rich build

bigger, too, and that shifts the relevant framework for others just below them, and so

on, all the way down the income scale. By 2007, the median new single-family house

built in the United States had an area of more than 2,300 square feet, some 50 percent

more than its counterpart from 1970. (61-2)

How exactly people are straining themselves to afford these houses would be a fascinating topic for Fitzgerald’s successors. But one thing is already abundantly clear: it’s not the CEOs who are cleaning up the mess.

T.J. Eckleburg Sees Everything: The Great God-Gap in Gatsby part 1 of 2

2011-12-03T09:01:00.000-08:00

When George Wilson, in one of the most disturbing scenes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, tells his neighbor that “God sees everything” while staring disconsolately at the weathered advertisement of some long-ago optometrist named T.J. Eckleburg, his longing for a transcendent authority who will mete out justice on his behalf pulls at the hearts of readers who realize his plea will go unheard. Anthropologists and psychologists studying the human capacity for cooperation and altruism are coming to view religion as an important factor in our evolution. Since the cooperative are always at risk of being exploited by the selfish, mechanisms to enforce altruism had to be in place for any tendency to behave for the benefit of others to evolve. The most basic of these mechanisms is a constant awareness of our own and our neighbors’ reputations. Humans, research has shown, are far more tempted to behave selfishly when they believe it won’t harm their reputations—i.e. when they believe no witnesses are present.

So profound is humans’ concern for their reputations that they can even be nudged toward altruistic behaviors by the mere suggestion of invisible witnesses or the simplest representation of watching eyes. The billboard featuring Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes, however, holds no sway over George’s wife Myrtle, or the man she has an affair with. That this man, Tom Buchanan, has such little concern for his reputation—or that he simply feels entitled to exploit Myrtle—serves as an indictment of the social and economic inequality in the America of Fitzgerald’s day, which carved society into hierarchically arranged echelons and exposed the have-nots to the careless depredations of the haves.

Nick Carraway, the narrator, begins the story by recounting a lesson he learned from his father as part of his Midwestern upbringing. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” Nick’s father had told him, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had”(5). This piece of wisdom serves at least two purposes: it explains Nick’s self-proclaimed inclination to “reserve all judgments,” highlighting the severity of the wrongdoings which have prompted him to write the story; and it provides an ironic moral lens through which readers view the events of the plot. What is to be made, in light of Nick’s father’s reminder about unevenly parceled out advantages, of the crimes committed by wealthy characters like Tom and Daisy Buchanan?

The focus on morality notwithstanding, religion plays a scant, but surprising, role in The Great Gatsby. It first appears in a conversation between Nick and Catherine, the sister of Myrtle Wilson. Catherine explains to Nick that neither Tom nor Myrtle “can stand the person they’re married to” (37). To the obvious question of why they don’t simply leave their spouses, Catherine responds that it’s Daisy, Tom’s wife, who represents the sole obstacle to the lovers’ happiness. “She’s a Catholic,” Catherine says, “and they don’t believe in divorce” (38). However, Nick explains that “Daisy was not a Catholic,” and he goes on to admit, “I was a little shocked by the elaborateness of the lie.” The conversation takes place at a small gathering hosted by Tom and Myrtle in an apartment rented, it seems, for the sole purpose of giving the two a place to meet. Before Nick leaves the party, he witnesses an argument between the hosts over whether Myrtle has any right to utter Daisy’s name which culminates in Tom striking her and breaking her nose. Obviously, Tom doesn’t despise his wife as much as Myrtle does her husband. And the lie about Daisy’s religious compunctions serves simply to justify Tom’s refusal to leave her and facilitate his continued exploitation of Myrtle.

The only other scene in which a religious belief is asserted explicitly is the one featuring the conversation between George and his neighbor. It comes after Myrtle, whose dalliance had finally aroused her husband’s suspicion, has been struck by a car and killed. George, upon discovering that something had been going on behind his back, locked Myrtle in his garage, and it was when she escaped and ran out into the road to stop the car she thought Tom was driving that she got hit. As the dust from the accident settles—literally, since the garage and the stretch of road are situated in a “valley of ashes” created by the remnants of the coal powering the nearby city being dumped alongside the adjacent rail tracks—George is left alone with a fellow inhabitant of the valley, a man named Michaelis, who asks if he belongs to a church where there might a be a priest he can call to come comfort him. “Don’t belong to one,” George answers (165). He does, however, describe a religious belief of sorts to Michaelis. Having explained why he’d begun to suspect Myrtle was having an affair, George goes on to say, “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window.” He walks to the window again as he’s telling the story to his neighbor. “I said, ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’” (167). Michaelis, who is by now fearing for George’s sanity, notices something disturbing as he stands listening to this rant: “Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night” (167). When George speaks again, repeating, “God sees everything,” Michaelis feels compelled to assure him, “That’s an advertisement” (167). Though when George first expresses the sentiment, part declaration, part plea, he was clearly thinking of Myrtle’s crime against him, when he repeats it he seems to be thinking of the driver’s crime against Myrtle. God may have seen it, but George takes it upon himself to deliver the punishment.

George Wilson’s turning to God for some moral accounting, despite his general lack of religious devotion, mirrors Nick Carraway’s efforts to settle the question of culpability, despite his own professed reluctance to judge, through the telling of this tragic story. Nick learns from Gatsby that it was in fact Daisy, with whom Gatsby has been carrying on an affair, who was behind the wheel of the car that killed Myrtle. But Gatsby, who was in the passenger seat, assures him it was an accident, not revenge for the affair Myrtle was carrying on with Daisy’s husband. Yet when George finally leaves his garage and turns to Tom to find out who owns the car that killed his wife, assuming it is the same man his wife was cheating on him with, Tom informs him the car belongs to Gatsby, leaving out the crucial fact that Gatsby never met Myrtle. George goes to Gatsby’s mansion, finds him in his pool, shoots and kills him, and then turns the gun on himself. Three people end up dead, Myrtle, George, and Gatsby. Despite their clear complicity, though, Tom and Daisy experience nary a repercussion beyond the natural grief of losing their lovers. Insofar as Nick believes the Buchanans’ perfect getaway is an intolerable injustice, he must realize he holds the power to implicate them, to damage their reputations, by writing and publishing his account of the incidents leading up to the deaths.

Evolutionary critic William Flesch sees our human passion for narrative as a manifestation of our obsession with our own and our fellow humans’ reputations, which evolved at least in part to keep track of each other’s propensities for moral behavior. In Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Flesch lays out his attempt at solving what he calls “the puzzle of narrative interest,” by which he means the question of why people feel “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). He finds the key to solving this puzzle in a concept called “strong reciprocity,” whereby “the strong reciprocator punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22). An example of this phenomenon takes place in the novel when the guests at Gatsby’s parties gossip and ardently debate about which of the rumors circling their host are true—particularly of interest is the one saying that “he killed a man” (48). Flesch cites reports from experiments demonstrating that in uneven exchanges, participants with no stake in the outcome are actually willing to incur some cost to themselves in an effort to enforce fairness (31-5). He then goes on to give a compelling account of how this tendency goes a long way toward an explanation of our human fascination with storytelling.

Flesch’s theory of narrative interest begins with models of the evolution of cooperation. For the first groups of human ancestors to evolve cooperative or altruistic traits, they would have had to solve what biologists and game theorists call “the free-rider problem.” Flesch explains:

Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through a mechanism of

group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it

was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or

invaded by nonaltruists—that is, that group boundaries were too porous—to make

group selection strong enough to overcome competition at the level of the individual

or the gene. (5)

Strong, or indirect reciprocity, coupled with a selfish concern for one’s own reputation, may have evolved as mechanisms to address this threat of exploitative non-cooperators. For instance, in order for Tom Buchanan to behave selfishly by sleeping with George Wilson’s wife, he had to calculate his chances of being discovered in the act and punished. Interestingly, after “exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg” while speaking to Nick in an early scene in Wilson’s garage, Tom suggests his motives for stealing away with Myrtle are at least somewhat noble. “Terrible place,” he says of the garage and the valley of ashes. “It does her good to get away” (30). Nick, clearly uncomfortable with the position Tom has put him in, where he has to choose whether to object to Tom’s behavior or play the role of second-order free-rider himself, poses the obvious question: “Doesn’t her husband object?” To which Tom replies, “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive” (30). Nick, inclined to reserve judgment, keeps Tom and Myrtle’s secret. Later in the novel, though, he keeps the same secret for Daisy and Gatsby.

What makes Flesch’s theory so compelling is that it sheds light on the roles played by everyone from the author, in this case Fitzgerald, to the readers, to the characters, whose nonexistence beyond the pages of the novel is little obstacle to their ability to arouse sympathy or ire. Just as humans are keen to ascertain the relative altruism of their neighbors, so too are they given to broadcasting signals of their own altruism. Flesch explains, “we track not only the original actor whose actions we wish to see reciprocated, whether through reward or more likely punishment; we track as well those who are in a position to track that actor, and we track as well those in a position to track those tracking the actor” (50). What this means is that even if the original “actor” is fictional, readers can signal their own altruism by becoming emotionally engaged in the outcome of the story, specifically by wanting to see altruistic characters rewarded and selfish characters punished.

Nick Carraway is tracking Tom Buchanan’s actions, for instance. Reading the novel, we have little doubt what Nick’s attitude toward Tom is, especially as the story progresses. Though we may favor Nick over Tom, Nick’s failure to sufficiently punish Tom when the degree of his selfishness first becomes apparent tempers any positive feelings we may have toward him. As Flesch points out, “altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a population of purely benevolent altruists” (66). On the other hand, through the very act of telling the story, the narrator may be attempting to rectify his earlier moral complacence. According to Flesch’s model of the dynamics of fiction, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). However, many readers of Gatsby probably find Nick’s belated punishment insufficient, and if they fail to see the novel as a comment on the real injustice Fitzgerald saw going on around him they would be both confused and disappointed by the way the story ends.

Read part 2

Tax Demagoguery

2011-11-25T10:21:00.000-08:00

Image Courtesy of historiann.com

Robert Frank, in The Darwin Economy, begins with the premise that having a government is both desirable and unavoidable, and that to have a government we must raise revenue somehow. He then goes on to argue that since taxes act as disincentives to whatever behavior is being taxed we should tax behaviors that harm citizens. The U.S. government currently taxes behaviors we as citizens ought to encourage, like hiring workers and making lots of money through productive employment. Frank’s central proposal is to impose a progressive consumption tax. He believes this is the best way to discourage “positional arms races,” those situations in which trying to keep up with the Joneses leads to harmful waste with no net benefit as everyone's efforts cancel each other out. One of his examples is house size:

“The explosive growth of CEO pay in recent decades, for example, has led many executives to build larger and larger mansions. But those mansions have long since passed the point at which greater absolute size yields additional utility. Most executives need or want larger mansions simply because the standards that define large have changed” (61).

The crucial point here is that this type of wasteful spending doesn’t just harm the CEOs. Runaway spending at the top of the income ladder affects those on the lower rungs through a phenomenon Frank calls “expenditure cascades”:

“Top earners build bigger mansions simply because they have more money. The middle class shows little evidence of being offended by that. On the contrary, many seem drawn to photo essays and TV programs about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But the larger mansions of the rich shift the frame of reference that defines acceptable housing for the near-rich, who travel in many of the same social circles… So the near-rich build bigger, too, and that shifts the relevant framework for others just below them, and so on, all the way down the income scale. By 2007, the median new single-family house built in the United States had an area of more than 2,300 square feet, some 50 percent more than its counterpart from 1970” (61-2).

This growth in house size has occurred despite the stagnation of incomes for median earners. In the wake of the collapse of the housing market, it’s easy to see how serious this type of damage can be to society.

Frank closes a chapter titled “Taxing Harmful Activities” with a section whose heading poses the question, “A Slippery Slope?” You can imagine a tax system that socially engineers your choices down to the sugar content of your beverages. “It’s a legitimate concern,” he acknowledges (193). But taxing harmful activities is still a better idea than taxing saving and job creation. Like any new approach, it risks going off track or going too far, but for each proposed tax a cost-benefit analysis can be done. As I’ve tried over the past few days to arrive at a list of harmful activities that are in immediate need of having a tax imposed on them, one occurred to me that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else before: demagoguery.

Wouldn't want to appear partisan.
Image courtesy of tvguide.com

           Even bringing up the topic makes me uncomfortable. Free speech is one of the central pillars of our democracy. So the task becomes defining demagoguery in a way that doesn’t stifle the ready exchange of ideas. But first let me answer the question of why this particular behavior made my shortlist. A quick internet search will make it glaringly apparent that large numbers of Tea Party supporters believe things that are simply not true. And, having attended my local Occupy Wall Street protest, I can attest there were some whacky ideas being broadcast there as well. The current state of political discourse in America is chaotic at best and tribal at worst. Policies are being enacted every day based on ideas with no validity whatsoever. The promulgation of such ideas is doing serious harm to our society—and, worse, it’s making rational, substantive debate and collectively beneficial problem-solving impossible.

           So, assuming we can kill a couple of birds with a tax stone, how would we go about actually implementing the program? I propose forming a group of researchers and journalists whose task is to investigate complaints by citizens. Organizations like Factcheck.org and Politifact.com have already gone a long way toward establishing the feasibility of such a group. Membership will be determined by nominations from recognized research institutions like the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and the Pew Research Center, to whom appeals can be made in the event of intensely contended rulings by the group itself. Anyone who's accepted payment for any type of political activism will be ineligible for membership. The money to pay for the group and provide it with the necessary resources can come from the tax itself (though that might cause a perverse incentive if members' pay isn't independent of their findings) or revenues raised by taxes on other harmful activities.

         The first step will be the complaint, which can be made by any citizen. If the number of complaints reaches some critical mass or if the complaints are brought by recognized experts in the relevant field, then the research group will investigate. Once the group has established with a sufficient degree of certainty that a claim is false, anyone who broadcasts the claim will be taxed an amount determined by the size of the audience. The complaints, reports of the investigations, and the findings can all be handled through a website. We may even want to give the individual who made the claim a chance to correct her- or himself before leveling the tax. Legitimate news organizations already do this, so they’d have nothing to worry about.

           Talk show hosts who repeatedly make false claims will be classified as demagogues and have to pay a fixed rate to obviate any need for the research group to watch every show and investigate every claim. But anyone who is designated a demagogue must advertise the designation on the screen or at regular intervals on the air—along with a link or address to the research groups’ site, where the audience can view a list of the false claims that earned him or her the designation.
Individuals speaking to each other won’t be affected. And bloggers with small audiences, if they are taxed at all, won’t be taxed much—or they can simply correct their mistakes. Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore will still be free to spew nonsense; but they’ll have to consider the costs—because the harm they cause by being sloppy or mendacious doesn’t seem to bother them.

Image Courtesy of crooksandliars.com

Now, a demagogue isn't defined as someone who makes false claims; it's someone who uses personal charisma and tactics for whipping people into emotional frenzies to win support for a cause. I believe the chief strategy of demagogues is to incite tribalism, a sense of us-vs-them. But making demagogues pay for their false claims would, I believe, go a long way toward undermining their corrosive influence on public discourse.

Finally, I refer you, dear reader, to a video that highlights the problem. It's from a liberal - whose show I don't watch, so I can't say how much of a demagogue she is - but I'm sure she'd find some whoppers on her own side of the divide were she inclined to look.

What the Northern Lights Look Like From Space

2011-11-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

From video taken by Ron Garan. I found it over at Scientific American.

What's Wrong with The Darwin Economy?

2011-11-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

I can easily imagine a conservative catching a glimpse of the cover of Robert Frank’s new book and having his interest piqued. The title, The Darwin Economy, evokes that famous formulation, “survival of the fittest,” but in the context of markets, which suggests a perspective well in keeping with the anti-government principles republicans and libertarians hold dear. The subtitle, Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, further facilitates the judgment of the book by its cover as another in the long tradition of paeans to the glorious workings of unregulated markets.

The Darwin Economy puts forth an argument that most readers, even those who keep apace of the news and have a smidgen of background in economics, have probably never heard, namely that the divergence between individual and collective interests, which Adam Smith famously suggested gets subsumed into market forces which inevitably redound to the common good, in fact leads predictably to outcomes that are detrimental to everyone involved. His chief example is a hypothetical business that can either pay to have guards installed to make its power saws safer for workers to operate or leave the saws as they are and pay the workers more for taking on the added risk.

This is exactly the type of scenario libertarians love. What right does government have to force businesses in this industry to install the guards? Governmental controls end up curtailing the freedom of workers to choose whether to work for a company with better safety mechanisms or one that offers better pay. It robs citizens of the right to steer their own lives and puts decisions in the hands of those dreaded Washington bureaucrats. “The implication,” Frank writes, “is that, for well-informed workers at least, Adam Smith’s invisible hand would provide the best combinations of wages and safety even without regulation” (41).

Frank challenges the invisible hand doctrine by demonstrating that it fails to consider the full range of the ramifications of market competition, most notably the importance of relative position. But The Darwin Economy offers no support for the popular liberal narrative about exploitative CEOs. Frank writes: “many of the explanations offered by those who have denounced market outcomes from the left fail the no-cash-on-the-table test. These critics, for example, often claim that we must regulate workplace safety because workers would otherwise be exploited by powerful economic elites” (36). But owners and managers are motivated by profits, not by some perverse desire to see their workers harmed.

"Mobility isn’t perfect, but people change jobs far more frequently than in the past. And even when firms know that most of their employees are unlikely to move, some do move and others eventually retire or die. So employers must maintain their ability to attract a steady flow of new applicants, which means they must nurture their reputations. There are few secrets in the information age. A firm that exploits its workers will eventually experience serious hiring difficulties" (38).

This is what Frank means by the no-cash-on-the-table test: companies who maintain a reputation for being good to their people attract more talented applicants, thus increasing productivity, thus increasing profits. There’s no incentive to exploit workers just for the sake of exploiting them, as many liberals seem to suggest.

What makes Frank convincing, and what makes him something other than another liberal in the established line-up, is that he’s perfectly aware of the beneficial workings of the free market, as far as they go. He bases his policy analyses on a combination of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle—whereby the government only has the right to regulate the actions of a citizen if those actions are harmful to other citizens—and Ronald Coase’s insight that government solutions to harmful actions should mimic the arrangements that the key players would arrive at in the absence of any barriers to negotiation. “Before Coase,” Frank writes,

"it was common for policy discussions of activities that cause harm to others to be couched in terms of perpetrators and victims. A factory that created noise was a perpetrator, and an adjacent physician whose practice suffered as a result was a victim. Coase’s insight was that externalities like noise or smoke are purely reciprocal phenomena. The factory’s noise harms the doctor, yes; but to invoke the doctor’s injury as grounds for prohibiting the noise would harm the factory owner" (87).

This is a far cry from the naïve thinking of some liberal do-gooder. Frank, following Coase, goes on to suggest that what would formerly have been referred to as the victim should foot the bill for a remedy to the sound pollution if it’s cheaper for him than for the factory. At one point, Frank even gets some digs in on Ralph Nader for his misguided attempts to protect the poor from the option of accepting payments for seats when their flights are overbooked.

Though he may be using the same market logic as libertarian economists, he nevertheless arrives at very different conclusions vis-à-vis the role and advisability of government intervention. Whether you accept his conclusions or not hinges on how convincing you find his thinking about the role of relative position. Getting back to the workplace safety issue, we might follow conventional economic theory and apply absolute values to the guards protecting workers from getting injured by saws. If the value of the added safety to an individual worker exceeds the dollar amount increase he or she can expect to get at a company without the guards, that worker should of course work at the safer company. Unfortunately, considerations of safety are abstract, and they force us to think in ways we tend not to be good at. And there are other, more immediate and concrete considerations that take precedence over most people’s desire for safety.

If working at the company without the guards on the saws increases your income enough for you to move to a house in a better school district, thus affording your children a better education, then the calculations of the absolute worth of the guards’ added safety go treacherously awry. Frank explains

"the invisible-hand narrative assumes that extra income is valued only for the additional absolute consumption it supports. A higher wage, however, also confers a second benefit for certain (and right away) that safety only provides in the rare cases when the guard is what keeps the careless hand from the blade—the ability to consume more relative to others. That fact is nowhere more important than in the case of parents’ desires to send their children to the best possible schools…. And because school quality is an inherently relative concept, when others also trade safety for higher wages, no one will move forward in relative terms. They’d succeed only in bidding up the prices of houses in better school districts" (40).

Housing prices go up. Kids end up with no educational advantage. And workers are less safe. But any individual who opted to work at the safer company for less pay would still have to settle for an inferior school district. This is a collective action problem, so individuals are trapped, which of course is something libertarians are especially eager to avoid.

Frank draws an analogy with many of the bizarre products of what Darwin called sexual selection, most notably those bull elk battling it out on the cover of the book. Antler size places each male elk in a relative position; in their competition for mates, absolute size means nothing. So natural selection—here operating in place of Smith’s invisible hand—ensures that the bull with the largest antlers reproduces and that antler size accordingly undergoes runaway growth. But what’s good for mate competition is bad for a poor elk trying to escape from a pack of hungry wolves. If there were some way for a collective agreement to be negotiated that forced every last bull elk to reduce the size of his antlers by half, none would object, because they would all benefit. This is the case as well with the workers' decision to regulate safety guards on saws. And Frank gives several other examples, both in the animal kingdom and in the realms of human interactions.

I’m simply not qualified to assess Frank’s proposals under the Coase principle to tax behaviors that have harmful externalities, like the production of CO2, including a progressive tax on consumption. But I can’t see any way around imposing something that achieves the same goals at some point in the near future.

My main criticism of The Darwin Economy is that the first chapter casual conservative readers will find once they’ve cracked the alluring cover is the least interesting of the book because it lists the standard litany of liberal complaints. A book as cogent and lucid as this one, a book which manages to take on abstract principles and complex scenarios while still being riveting, a book which contributes something truly refreshing and original to the exhausted and exhausting debates between liberals and conservatives, should do everything humanly possible to avoid being labeled into oblivion. Alas, the publishers and book-sellers would never allow a difficult-to-place book to grace their shelves or online inventories.

Anti-Charm - Its Powers and Perils

2011-11-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Pink - Image courtesy of pimpmyspace.org

It’s the most natural thing: you like someone, you want that person to like you, so you give him or her a compliment. You may point to some quality you genuinely admire. You may comment more generically. The basic idea, though, is to make this person feel good because you want them to associate feeling good with you—you say nice things because you want to be liked.

If you’re someone who tends to make people you talk to feel good about themselves, or just good in general, you’ve likely been accused of being charming—and rightly so. And charm is considered a good quality to have. But there are a few ways it can go wrong. Attempts at charm can be construed as manipulative, in which case you’ve got more smarm than charm. You may try to charm someone who has already been subjected to numerous, nearly identical charm offensives, in which case your compliments will sound like clichés.

Charm can also fail in a way that’s more subtle than coming across as insincere or unoriginal. The desire for another person to like you suggests that you have lower status than that person. By approaching him or her with offers of gifts—“Can I buy you a drink?”—or compliments—“You have the prettiest eyes.”—you’re effectively saying, “You’re more important than I am, so I’m going out of my way to curry favor with you.”

If you send out this signal of lower status, your attempt at charm will probably backfire. By and large, people want to associate with others who are of equal or higher status than themselves. And there are all kinds of negative emotions that get triggered when we’re in the presence of someone who doesn’t measure up. We also have all kinds of nasty labels for people like this.

The plain fact, however, is that status can be faked. It’s difficult to behave in way incongruent with our feelings, but once you understand what types of behavior signal higher status you can deliberately perform them. And the signals of status are easily—even automatically—mistaken for the real thing. The signals are so powerful in fact that they won’t just work on other people; by behaving as if you have higher status, you’ll begin to feel like you have higher status.

The sense that you’re raising your relative value and authority is inherently rewarding. So every behavior that has this result is seductive. This is especially the case with anti-charm. Charm entails making people feel good so they’ll like you; anti-charm, then, is making people feel bad so they’ll recognize you as someone who doesn’t give a damn whether they like you or not. In the same way charm often backfires by making the charmer seem unworthy, anti-charm often has the counter-intuitive effect of signaling high status and so making the anti-charmer seem eminently worth winning over.

I first began to understand this dynamic as a restaurant server. At wits end some nights, I’d get gruff or sarcastic or even a little mean with my customers. Not only did I not get stiffed, as I often anticipated I would, I actually developed some mutually respectful relationships with regulars. It was as if by letting them know I wouldn’t be pushed around I was showing them I was worth knowing. (I like to think my natural wit had something to do with it too.) (Click here for some interesting science that backs up the idea that rudeness or even bad service can lead to bigger tips.)

Sometime later, the point was reinforced for me when I read Neil Strauss’s book on pickup artists, The Game. A useful strategy for arousing an attractive woman’s interest, it turns out, is to upset expectations and say something that, while not overtly insulting, isn’t at all complimentary. “Nice nails—are they real?” Or “That wig is amazing.” As the interaction proceeds, you continue giving her signs that you’re not interested in her, prompting her to put increasing effort into getting your attention. She’s a beautiful woman after all; she’s not used to being neglected or dismissed or teased.

The danger is that, once you get that first taste of the fruits of anti-charm, you respond to the seemingly miraculous reversal in hierarchical roles by overdoing it. Apparently, using too many “negs” or “indicators of disinterest” is a common mistake for beginning pickup guys. And the problem extends far beyond the realm of men attracting women in bars.

What pickup artists and salespeople call qualifying is an even more powerful way of controlling status dynamics. If done a certain way, it can make people feel good about themselves—it can be charming. How it works is you make a case for some quality you look for in friends or lovers. “I try to surround myself with creative people because they’re always finding new ways to look at things, and they’re always finding new things to look at.” Now it’s your interlocutor’s turn to speak. Most people, if they like you at all, will explain at this point why they believe they meet your criterion. They’ll qualify themselves.

Anti-charmers can also use this tactic. There are some qualities almost everyone likes to think they possess: intelligence, kindness, good looks, sexual prowess, professional competence. So even if someone doesn’t know you, he or she can make you feel bad by suggesting you lack one or more of these qualities. Why would anyone want to do that? Because many people will respond by trying to redeem themselves in the eyes of the person who has just insulted them. They bend over backward qualifying themselves. And the anti-charmer enjoys the attendant boost in status.

Qualification gets even more sinister when the anti-charmer focuses on qualities central to her target’s identity. Say you know someone prides himself on his fashion sense. In an offhand way, you can suggest you don’t like the way he dresses. (This will probably work better, for obvious reasons, if you’re a woman.) Or, if you know someone who prides herself on her intuition about people, you can make subtle comments about how dense she is when it comes to understanding social interactions. They’ll hate you. But they’ll make a special effort to convince you you’re wrong about them. Their intense feelings about you may even turn to obsessive lust.

A lot of people who like to think of themselves as especially authentic and genuine, more substance than flash and gimmick, find anti-charm to be an appealing social strategy. And they definitely come across as more honest, courageous enough to be who they are no matter who they offend and no matter who they may have to confront. It can even work if the fault you find in a person is moral, which is precisely why so many people fall prey to self-righteousness.

Image courtesy of hubpages.com

The scary thing, though, is that we may feel certain that we are merely representing our true selves, telling the honest truth, or legitimately indignant over some moral outrage, when in reality all we’re doing is power-tripping. Anytime we find fault, we’re placing ourselves above the person we’re finding fault with. Sometimes calling people out is appropriate—sometimes not calling them out would make you complicit. But we simply cannot rely on our natural intuitions to discern legitimate from trumped-up charges; we need some set of guiding principles. We also need, more often than we like to admit, to reference the perspectives of disinterested parties.

When it comes to game, there’s a point when you either become much more subtle in your indicators of disinterest or you quit using them altogether. Pickup guys call this moving from the attraction phase to the comfort phase. The recognition that anti-charm has its place, but that it can be taken too far, clung to long after its usefulness is exhausted, is an important insight. Hierarchical relationships are inherently stressful. Spending too much time with an anti-charmer is a good way to make yourself miserable.

Gravitating Toward Tribal: The Danger of Free-Floating Ideologies

2011-11-05T06:07:00.000-07:00

Image from the movie Zardoz. Courtesy of Thersic.com

Ideologies are usually conceived through a coupling of comfortable tradition with a calculation of self-interest. But they can also be borne of good faith efforts at understanding. More important than their origin and development is the degree to which they are grounded. If you work out a comprehensive and adequately complex ideology that serves to explain an otherwise incomprehensible phenomenon and possibly even offers some guidance for dealing with an otherwise chaotic and frightening dynamic, you’ve created a theory that will appeal to human minds desperate for understanding and a sense, no matter how meager, of control. But does the ideology match up with reality? That’s an entirely different question.

Free-floating ideologies, those that persist solely owing to the comforts they provide and the conveniences they secure, survive confrontations with reality and subsist despite vast lacuna in empirical support because human perception operates through a process of cross-referencing sensory inputs with prior knowledge. What we see is largely determined by what we’re looking for, and how we see it by what we believe about it. Patterns arising in what ought to be random incidents often sustain beliefs—even though in most contexts humans are terrible at calculating probabilities. A natural confirmation bias has us perceiving and remembering all the times predictions arising from our theories come to fruition while missing or forgetting all the times they fail. We tend to enjoy the company of like-minded others, and rather idiotically have our convictions bolstered by their common acceptance by those with whom we’ve chosen to associate.

Unmoored ideologies gravitate toward certain predictable tracks in human cognition. We like to think there’s some sort of agency behind everything, an intelligence governing the universe. To think that no one’s in charge of all the swirling and colliding galaxies is variously unsettling and terrifying to us. So we take in the sublime beauty of quiet sunsets and wonder at the beneficence of the creator. Or we note coincidences in our lives, the way they fall together in a meaningful, beneficial way, and we feel a need to express gratitude to the guiding divinity. This is mostly innocent. Though it can lead to complacence and willful ignorance of entire regions where this supposedly beneficent guide has deigned never to set foot, and it can add an extra layer of grief in response to catastrophe, the comfort of believing in an invisible protector and guide has little immediate cost.

Much more worrying is the gravitation of free-floating ideologies toward tribalism. The pseudo-scientific cult that has arisen around certain varieties of psychotherapy has bequeathed to our culture the horrifying belief that an unknown portion of the population, predominantly male, can induce the modern equivalent of demonic possession, severe psychological trauma, through an inverted laying-on of hands. The ideology has made monsters of men. The fetishizing of free markets likewise entails a belief in a loathsome variety of sub-humans. The economy, true believers assert, is a battle between the makers and the moochers, the producers and the parasites. As a conservative friend put in, in a discussion of healthcare reform, “Giving insurance to the slugs will just make them bigger slugs.”

If you challenge someone’s beliefs by suggesting theirs is an ideology divorced from reality, as everyone does who advocates for one set of beliefs in opposition to another, the proper response is to insist that the ideology emerged from an awareness of facts through inductive reasoning. But sunsets, no matter how sublime, don’t really provide any evidence for the existence of an intelligent agency behind the curtain of the cosmos. Troubled young women with histories of abuse don’t prove that sexual experiences in childhood cause a wild assortment of psychological maladjustments. And the higher incarceration rate for impoverished groups doesn’t in any way establish some fundamental divide between good and bad types of people.

Once ideologies reach a certain stage of development, they become all but immune to contradictory evidence. When the facts cooperate, they are trumpeted. When they don’t, the devout have recourse to principles. I’ve referred advocates of particular varieties of psychotherapy to evidence that they’re ineffective. In response, I didn’t get references to other bodies of evidence supporting the beliefs and practices in question; rather, I got an explanation of how the therapeutic techniques were supposed to work. Present a free market purist with evidence that market competition doesn’t led to innovation, or leads to detrimental innovations, and you’ll likely get a lecture explaining the principles behind how it’s supposed to work, according to the free market ideology, rather than evidence that it does, in fact, work in the theorized way. This convenient toggling back and forth between inductive and deductive reasoning literally allows us to explain away disconnects between our ideologies and the world.

It is the tendency of free-floating ideologies toward tribalism that leads me to advocate a strict adherence to science in matters of public concern. It wasn’t merely coincidence that the enlightenment represented the inception of both the traditions of science and universal human rights, which have suffered through a traumatic childhood of their own, and are now living out a tumultuous adolescence. The tendency toward tribalism is also why I’m wary of commercial fiction which almost invariably makes characters represent ideas and personal qualities, only to pit the good guys against the bad. J.K. Rowling can claim all she wants that the Harry Potter books teach kids the evils of bigotry, but any work with goodies and baddies taps into tribal instincts. Literary fiction, on the other hand, at its best, is an exercise in empathy.

The Ghost Haunting 710 Crowder Court

2011-10-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

Long before I was an atheist and scientific skeptic, I was fascinated with and scared shitless by ghosts. I remember watching a show called “Sightings” with my best friends down the street. Their Filipino mom was superstitious and had told them all kinds of stories, like one about a baby born in the Philippines with horns and a tail, and because of the distinctive cuisine the house always had a strange smell. But it was their dad, who had met their mom while in the navy, who really scared me. Those guys were my best friends for years, but I don’t think I ever heard their dad speak once. I had met the two boys at school years earlier and become fast friends with the younger one because he appreciated my ability to make up ghost stories on the fly. He was the one who first introduced me to Alvin Schwartz, whose “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” would be one of the delights of my childhood.

After watching “Sightings,” the three of us would tell about our own experiences with ghosts. It would have been around the same time that I started hanging out with another aficionado of the horror story who went to the same school but lived the next neighborhood over. This guy had HBO and it was at his house that I first saw “Tales from the Crypt.” I can’t think about this period without picturing the strip of woods separating the two backyards forming the border between our neighborhoods. Too often I made Ichabod Crane’s mistake—though I wouldn’t read that story till years later—indulging in all the stories I loved so much only to have to walk home in the dark, along a poorly kept trail through those woods, scared half to death.

As a kid I was imaginative, suggestible, and prone to vivid dreams—hell, I kind of still am. But I only ever had one ghostly experience that I didn’t quickly attribute to being less than fully awake and still dreaming. I remember recounting it to my best friends after watching an episode of “Sightings” in their strange-smelling, uncomfortably silent house. The oldest boy had just told us about how he’d been doing homework and heard someone enter the room. Thinking it was his brother, he made some snide remark only to turn around and see that he was alone in the room. But the dangling cord from the telephone was swinging back and forth. As he sat there frozen, trying to figure out what had just happened, the light hanging from the middle of the ceiling began to flicker, sending him out of the room shouting for his brother. It was the same room we were sitting in now. I looked over at the telephone. Then I looked up at the light. I was glad there were no woods between our houses.

Now that it was my turn I began to tell the story of my first night at 710 Crowder Court, the house my brother still lives in to this day—but not for much longer (he's moving). I had learned from the younger of my two friends down the street that some years earlier the family who lived there before us had experienced a tragedy. Their little boy had slipped while running near a pool, hit his head, and fallen into the water. He had drowned. I actually remembered hearing about this, and at the time I recognized the boy’s name. I want to say Eric now, but that was another little boy I knew from a much earlier time. Eric had died of leukemia; his funeral is one of my earliest memories.

The boy who’d died in that pool had an older sister, who apparently moved into what had been his room in our new house because the walls and the carpet were pink. I’m the youngest in our family, so I got the last pick of the bedrooms. My friend assured me the pink room had in fact been the boy’s bedroom when he died, giving me two reasons to dread moving into it. But move in I did, and I’ll never forget my first night sleeping there.

I woke up terrified, as if from a nightmare. It was still dark but I sensed there was someone in the room with me. The reason I couldn’t dismiss what happened next as the remnants of a dream was that I lay there wide awake for what seemed like hours. My eyes were peeled open and my heart was pounding. I was completely frozen with fear. Next to my bed was a digital clock, but it took me some time to work up the courage even to turn my head. Like I said, it was completely dark when I first woke up, but what finally prompted me to check the clock was the graying light of morning coming in through the window. It was before six. I began to calm down, hoping I might still get some more sleep before my alarm went off.

But that’s when I heard it. I immediately tried to ascribe the sound to the expansion of pipes. My stepdad must be up already, I thought, getting ready for work. He’s running hot water. Then I heard the sound again. If it was a pipe, then it had to have been running directly over my bed. I’d spent enough time in houses still under construction to know how unlikely that was. I lay there frozen in my bed as the rising sun gradually lit the pink walls of the room. The third time I heard the sound there was no mistaking what it was—the pathetic moan of little boy. I didn’t budge again until over an hour later, when the room was fully lit by the morning. I never heard anything like that sound again as long as I lived there.

But there was another sound I heard that would keep me up several nights. Whenever the wind came up at night, I heard what I at first took to be tree branches scratching against the vinyl siding outside my room. I took this explanation for granted for quite a long time. I still recall the first time it dawned on me, while I was pushing the lawnmower around after a night of particularly intense scratching, that there weren’t any trees or bushes remotely close to the siding. I turned the lawnmower off and began pushing and pulling at the vinyl slats, trying to reproduce the sound—not even close. After that, whenever I heard the scratching, it heralded a long, sleepless night.

Years later, long after I’d moved to my dad’s house on Union Chapel Road, long after I had largely outgrown my fascination with ghosts and such things (sort of), I got in a conversation with my mom about my stepsister. Mom was mad at her because she was starting to skip her weekend visits to her dad’s house. As a teenager now myself, I tried to explain that it was perfectly natural for her to prefer spending weekends with her friends, that nothing sinister should be read into it. “No,” my mom said, “she says she can’t sleep here because she thinks there’s something scratching on the wall outside the bedroom.” She was talking about the pink bedroom--even though by then the walls had been painted.

How To Be A Man

2011-10-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

Women are attending and graduating from college at higher rates than men. The recession of the past few years has hit men harder. And skills like communication and nurturing that women traditionally excel at seem much better suited to the way the job market is sure to develop in the future than qualities like risk-taking, aggression, and physical strength, the ken of men. All this has lead Hanna Rosin to declare “The End of Men” in a fascinating article for The Atlantic Monthly. The same magazine declared, or rather asked about, "The End of White America?" a couple years ago, but it really does seem like something strange is afoot with manhood at this juncture in history. Penny Nance, on a Fox News blog asks, "Why Does America Have So Many 'Peter Pan' Men?". Nance's biggest concern, the statistic (which I haven't tracked down) that boys ages 12-17 actually spend less time playing video games than 18-34 year-old men.

But what else is a man-child to do? They don't want to go to school or try to get hired at some job where they'll probably be outshone by their female counterparts. And who do men have to look up to? Linda Holmes, in her blog on the NPR page, "Congratulations, Television! You Are Even Worse At Masculinity Than Femininity," complains about a new season of sitcoms, foremost among them How To Be A Gentleman, for positing "a dichotomy in which men can be either delicate, ineffectual, sexless weaklings or ill-mannered but physically powerful meatheads," and that "there are gentlemen, and there are real men, and each might need to be a little more like the other."

This dichotomy is even represented in literature. Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom, for instance, features two college buddies plying their respective virtues in parallel attempts to seduce and hold on to a mutual love interest. Walter Berglund is an environmental activist and the quintessential nice guy. Richard Katz is the devil-may-care rock star. And Patty Berglund's dilemma seems to be shared by a growing number of women.

Kate Bolik, in another Atlantic article, "All the Single Ladies," relates how she and her friends, along with a growing cohort of the female population, are broadening the scope of their attraction. "Now that we can pursue our own status and security," she writes, "and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it?"

Bolik continues:
"American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the 'marriage market' in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever."

This strange longing for what she calls "traditional" men, and her and her friends failure to locate them, belies one of her central points--that what women want is somehow changing in a fundamental way. In a discussion of the Guttentag-Secord theory, Bolik relates her own experiences with a certain type of male: "My spotty anecdotal findings have revealed that, yes, in many cases, the more successful a man is (or thinks he is), the less interested he is in commitment."

She later asserts that, at least in the "hookup culture" of college campuses, something called the "Pareto principle" is at play. It's "the idea that for many events, roughly 20 percent of the causes create 80 percent of the effects," and so "only 20 percent of the men (those considered to have the highest status) are having 80 percent of the sex, with only 20 percent of the women (those with the greatest sexual willingness); the remaining 80 percent, male and female, sit out the hookup dance altogether."

It may merely stem from my own scientific leanings, but I think Bolik is trying too hard in her article to fit her evidence into a scheme of extremely variable human mating behavior--even as she presents findings to the contrary. Bolik decries "singlism," discrimination against single women, because she's ridden her biological clock all the way to "marriage o'clock" and beyond but is perfectly happy and successful. It's a great article, and as a single, soon-to-be 34 year-old man, I sympathized quite a bit.

But what does any of this leave us with beyond status, self-perceived or otherwise, as the mark of an attractive man--or as a man as distinguished from a videogame-obsessed teen-aged boy? Let's go back to Richard Katz from Freedom. He's a bad long-term mate, maybe even a bit of a man-child, but he's such a good musician he gets away with it. This is a common theme on TV too. Dr. House gets away with being a sociopath, within narratively convenient limits, because he's such an awesome diagnostician. Then there's Don Draper, who gets to be bad because he's so good at advertising. I've recently begun to watch Californifation, which features the novelist Hank Moody, whose gift actually isn't his writing--which gets mixed reviews throughout the series--but his ability to charm women.

It could be that what makes these men attractive (they attract audiences of course, not just fictional women) is their passion for what they do more than their childish inability to delay gratification. But then of course women can be passionate about what they do as well. They can even be so good at whatever it is they do well that they get forgiven for bad behavior. And here we run into the problem that's been plaguing everyone who's been trying to figure out what roles men and women should play in society for the past few decades: as soon as you light on a possible answer, you can count on someone accusing you of sexism.

Men like objects and abstract concepts. Women like social interactions. But not all men and not all women fit the trend. And how dare you suggest that male nurses aren't manly! Or that female engineers aren't feminine! There's even a poststructuralist brand of feminism that views "gendering" as a high crime.

All accusations aside, and without going into cross cultural analysis, I think there's something to be said for a definition of manhood having something to do with a willingness to risk physical harm and give up material comforts for the sake of altruistic punishment. This is a point on which Chuck Palahniuk's Tyler Durden is eloquent.

There's something to be said about being careful with your compromises and accommodations, knowing who you are and valuing what you do without reference to the opinions or lame assurances of women. Yes, women can be this way too, assured, independent, cocksure. But it seems to me there ought to be a way to recognize positive roles and hold up positive role models without encouraging negative reactions to men or women who don't fit those roles.

Maybe the way to be a man is simply to know what being a man means to you. Whether you base it on evolutionary psychology or on your own father or on some other model, you choose your ideal self and you do your best to be him.

There's even something to be said for being able to smash some shit when necessary--rhetorically and otherwise.

Occupy Fort Wayne

2011-10-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

What is one to do when the purpose of events like this is to rouse passion for a cause, only he believes there's already too much passion, too little knowledge, too little thinking, too little reason?

Heather Bureau from WOWO put a camera in my face at one point. "Can you tell me why you're here today?"

I had no idea who she was. "Are you going to put it on TV?"

"No, on the radio--or on the website." She pulled her hair aside to show me the WOWO logo on her shirt.

"I wanted to check it out. We're here because of income inequality. And the sway of the rich in politics. Plus, I guess we're all liberals." I really wanted her to go away.

The first speaker filled us in on "Occupation Etiquette." You hold up your arm and wave your hand when you agree with what's been said.

And the speakers use short sentences the crowd repeats to make sure everyone can hear.

The call and response reminded me of church.

Rallies like this are to gather crowds, so when talking heads say their views are the views of the people they can point to the throngs of people who came to their gatherings.

But what is one to do about the guy carrying the sign complaining about illegal immigrants?

What about all the people saying we need to shut down the Fed?

What about the guy who says, "There's two kinds of people: the kind who work for money, and the kind who work for people"?

Why was I there? Well, I really do think inequality is a problem. But I support the Fed. And I'm first and foremost against tribalism. As soon as someone says, "There's two types of people..." then I know I'm somewhere I don't belong.

We shouldn't need political rallies to whip us up into a frenzy. We're obligated as citizens to pay attention to what's going on--and to vote.

Maybe the Occupy Protests will get some issues into the news cycle that weren't there before. If so, I'm glad I went.

But politics is a battle of marketing strategies. Holding up signs and shouting to be heard--well, let's not pretend our voices are independent.

Some fool laughingly shouts about revolution. But I'm not willing to kill anyone over how much bankers make.

Why was I there today? It seemed like the first time someone was talking about the right issue. Sort of.

Tyler Durden and Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-13T18:40:00.000-07:00

"Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing."
Dear Occupy Wall Street,

It's true that wealth inequality in America is a disgrace.

It's true that we've allowed PR and marketing to become monsters.

We've given up our minds for the sake of convenience and entertainment.

It's true that far too many of us have bought into the bullshit narrative that markets have magical powers, that allowing businesses to poison the earth redounds to the collective benefit, that the existence of multibillionaires is somehow good for everyone.

I agree with you completely on these points. And I agree that the rich have far to much political sway.

But messages mean nothing unless they cost something.

Occupy Wall Street--good work so far, but way too few people really care what you have to say.

Being heard is not a matter coming together and shouting. There's something pathetic about how much your protests resemble parties and festivals.

In Vietnam, monks protested by lighting themselves on fire. Gandhi went on hunger strikes.

It's not what you believe or what you're willing to shout or Sharpie on signs.

How seriously people take your message is a matter of how much you're willing to give up.

Sincerely,
Some boring writer

Celebrities Reading Books: Marilyn Monroe

2011-10-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

Ulysses!

Literature and Rock n Roll

2011-10-11T08:18:00.000-07:00

I ended my Intro Rhet Comp class early on Thursday. I’d scheduled fifteen minutes of the class for discussing the chapter of the textbook assigned for the day, and fifteen minutes after that to a group project based on the reading. After calling on two students randomly and getting a bewildered look from both, I asked for a show of hands to see how many of the eighteen present had read the chapter. One hand went up. Suddenly, the class’s performance on the last paper began to make more sense. Bewildered now myself as to how so many students could be so cavalier about their grades, how they could be content with doing the bare minimum and constantly testing to see if they could get by with even less, I floated the idea of daily quizzes by a few of my fellow TA’s who share an office with me during our pointless office hours.

“I don’t see my job as making sure students do the reading,” Darlene said. She’s a returning adult, one of the women who frequently derail classes by straining to apply their personal and family experiences to the questions raised by professors. “I look at the textbook as just a guide they can use if they need it.” It’s her first semester teaching.

A visceral antipathy toward reading is pervasive on our campus. I read it in my students’ faces every time I discuss an upcoming assigned chapter, this look of “Why are you doing this to us?” But I also encounter it in advanced Lit courses. Last week, after having been arranged into groups of five by the professor, I was excited to see what my classmates had to say about Gatsby, an old favorite of mine. Before getting started, though, we did what had become an obligatory round of disclosing how far into the reading each of us had made it. I was the only one in the group who’d actually finished it.

Undeterred, I kept an eye on my classmates’ Blackboard postings over the following days. The few comments that appeared that were actually about the novel were resoundingly, astonishingly, negative. “The characters are superficial and the plot is confusing.” But mostly people wrote about their difficulties making sense of the “tricky” narration—as if Fitzgerald had let them down instead of the other way around. And these are people who profess to enjoy reading.

Seeing those responses was shocking, uncanny, and oddly encouraging. This past summer I finished a draft of a novel and, after asking on Facebook who all was interested in reading it, sent out fifteen copies. My goal was to get as many responses as I could from educated people who weren’t necessarily English or Literature majors. I got three detailed responses. One was from a fellow English grad student. The other two I would see echoed almost word for word two months later in my classmates’ postings on Gatsby. They complained about not getting the characters, but they’d also missed key elements of the plot which would’ve brought the characters into better focus. I could’ve responded to the poor reception—the twelve copies that went unanswered were somehow worse—by blaming the readers. Instead, I became pretty demoralized. Seeing how many people had the same response to Fitzgerald didn’t exactly reassure me of my bright future as a novelist, but it did hang a question mark over what had for those two months been a period.

Still, I have to wonder if literature has become one of those geeky pursuits, like video games, Dungeons and Dragons, or magic, that so many people--males in particular--obsess over, only to experience more and more isolation because of it. At the opposite end of the spectrum lie passions for sports and music, the crowd-pleasing passions, which are really just as pointless except for their wider followings and the social sanction of popularity.

Monks: a Short Riff on Hemingway and Porter

2011-10-02T11:06:00.001-07:00

We always talk about work, whether we each can tolerate our individual job or if we should try something new. Since we don’t know anyone who has what sounds from the outside like a dream job, we opt for tolerance. I spent a lot of time talking about lost opportunities. I always seemed to be in love with one woman when I could have been having fun with several.

He told me the story of a third member of our tribe trying to get him to participate in a threesome. I pretended like I’d never heard it happened. In truth, some new details emerged. As he spoke, I looked over his shoulder to watch the cook through the service window. She was cute, rangy but in a graceful way. She looks really young. They all do.

We were talking about the woman, the mistress, the third, about whether we should feel sorry for her. I feel sorry, I said, for anyone on the decline. Women have it especially bad. Just imagine part of what makes you special, a large part, a majority, is your youth and your beauty. Only you never fully realize how major a part youth and beauty are playing until yours are on the wane.

“It would be like coming up with a program for success, having it work really well for years, only to realize that the program you’ve been following is actually useless because your success actually stems from the fact that you happen to be a genius—and the way you discover this is that you start becoming less and less successful because for whatever reason your genius is fading.”

“That’s a really depressing thought. That’s depressing me. Why would you be thinking about that? Are you depressed?”

“No—well, I’d say I’m lonely. A little frustrated that nothing seems to be happening in my life. But, no, I’m not really depressed.”

I’d brought up a woman I work with and how much of a turnoff it was to hear her talk about how much she wanted to get married—how it always seems like women who talk like that put their preplanned schedule ahead of finding the right guy, and how that doesn’t seem as tragic as it used to because we both have come to the conclusion that even the idea of there being such a thing as the right guy or girl is pretty suspect.

As much as it still doesn’t sit right with me, I explained, I could see the logic in having your life scheduled out. Women have a briefer window in which to establish their family lives, and their general success tends to begin with healthy family ties. Although, in the context, I was putting two and two together and getting a sum of being a man ain’t no different.

Walking home we talked about “making it” and about how we don’t care much for big houses and cars. They’re not worth the work. I guess there was a pretty overt strain of asceticism being expressed. Still, when he said, “We’re monks,” it surprised me a bit. It surprised me because I’d actually anticipated our conversation after inviting him over and thought about saying I was living like a monk to sum up my situation. So, when he said it, I had to wonder if I’d said it in an earlier conversation, or whether he might have said it and I picked it up from him.

Back at my apartment we got high and talked about how excited we got as kids about skee ball and the prizes you could get with the tickets. He’d been to Cedar Pointe and was talking about the abandoned arcade he’d wandered into when his neck was too sore for any more rides. We laughed at how foolish we’d been.

“It’s really stupid, but really when’s the last time you got that excited about anything?”

We talked about Christmas and Star Wars toys and pellet guns—about how all briefly thrilled before all briefly disappointed before all permanently faded into oblivion. Prizes no longer compel us forward. If we move at all, the impetus comes from discipline. I want to lose a little weight. I want to get a better job. I want to meet more people. I want a woman I can love.

I was drunk, and then I was high. So, naturally I talked too much about the woman I haven’t been with for close to a year and a half. The cook through the service window at the restaurant reminded me of her.

We talked briefly about politics, about how the free market solution for deadly chemicals and toxic customer service was supposed to be the consumers’ initiative to vote with their feet. But you can’t vote for an option that doesn’t exist, or against one that’s an industry-wide standard. We talked about getting badgered every time we try to buy something. Everyone’s trying to squeeze just a little more out of you. In the short term, they may make a few extra pennies—but, big picture, they’re probably depressing the economy by gently punishing consumers. People in China and India are starting to want more. The seeds of a middle class may have been planted.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This was me riffing on a theme from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for anything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
And from Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft”:

In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with; bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships and the dark inexplicable death of love—all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

From the Novel "The Impostor"

2011-09-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

My last post reminded of something I wrote a long time ago.

George remembers a poster on the wall in a stairwell of his high school that read, “Who you are is a matter of how you spend your time.” Was there a picture with it? It was just a generic sentiment, of a type he would encounter again and again in the capacity of elevator serviceman for public schools. His school, though, was a private, Catholic one. And now the idea of one’s identity as a function of spent time strikes him as bourgeois, predicated as it is on one’s freedom to choose how to spend that time. At the time, insofar as he paid the poster any attention, he considered it a truism, too obvious to need pointed out. So, he wonders now, is identity itself a luxury, what biologists would call costly signaling? Perhaps the blue collars are closer to the mark when they implicitly take as the more crucial matter that of worth rather than identity. They play their worst life game, at once complaining and bragging about all the responsibilities they have to shoulder, because they’re desperate to establish beyond dispute their indispensability. A man can spend all his time doing things that are interesting, and he himself might even be interesting as a result—an intricate and profound personage—but what’s he ultimately worth? Or a man can devote his days to toil, providing for his dependent and spendthrift wife and his ingrate children, never complaining (except when he does), and he’s worth the world to the company he works for and the family he supports.

Is Your World Small and Nasty, Stupid?

2011-09-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

Ron and Marty Hale-Evans have a new book out called Mindhacker. As much use as I got out of their previous book Mind Performance Hacks, the decision to get this one wasn't too difficult. It just came in the mail, so I haven't read it all yet, but the first hack I stopped to read as I was flipping through it, from the back, is so important I can't wait to share.

The hack is called "Take the One-Question IQ Test," and I'll get to the question after some preliminaries. For one thing, conventional wisdom must be dispensed with regarding a couple of matters. The first is that IQ is a fixed feature. In fact, there's pretty solid evidence that people's IQ's can change. It can even change depending on such daily factors as how much sleep you've had. The second common misconception is that the more intelligent you are the more likely you are to be the brooding and moody type.

The authors cite a study called "Is Ignorance Bliss? A Reconsideration of the Folk Wisdom," by Lee Sigelman. The main finding is that high intelligence tends to coincide with low anomia, which in Mindhackers is defined as "a feeling that life sucks and other people are to blame for it, so you're better off without them" (333). And other research has shown the ability to appreciate humor tends to be correlated with several important elements of intelligence.

Now the question, which the authors found in Robert Anton Wilson's essay "Stupidynamics":

Does the world seem to be getting bigger and funnier all the time? If it does, then you're intelligence is steadily increasing.

Or

Does the world seem to be getting smaller and nastier all the time? If so, your stupidity is steadily increasing.

The hack is to use this question (questions) as a "mental thermometer" to guide what you're doing. If you're busy doing something and your answer to the question is smaller and nastier, then you need to do something else--change your behavior. They give lots of advice on what else to do, referring to other hacks. They're fans, for instance, of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But the test alone speaks volumes to me--maybe because I so often laugh at something only to have other people look at me like I'm crazy.

Disgraceful Business

2011-09-18T09:42:00.001-07:00

I get spam emails asking me if I’d be willing to campaign for this or that political candidate. They always make me think for a minute: I have strong political views; I believe electing officials with certain beliefs is bad for the country; so maybe I should campaign.

But the fact is campaigns are a disgraceful business. Citizens shouldn’t need to be chased down and bombarded with marketing and PR gimmicks. It’s their duty as citizens to research the candidates and the issues on their own and to vote for the one they decide will best represent them.

This is naïve, I know. We have been trained by the media our whole lives. We want first to be entertained, second to be uplifted, and third to be told how great we are. When it comes to making decisions, we don’t want to have to take any active part in discovering the best course of action. We want to sit back and be allowed to play as passive a role as possible. We’re not looking to be convinced or persuaded—we’re looking to be sold.

In the past two weeks, I’ve gotten around fifty calls from some company whose purpose is to get donations on behalf of charities who hire them. It turns out Doctors without Borders hired them. And since I’ve donated to this cause in the past they see me as a good target for their campaign. But all the other times I donated I simply went online and entered an amount, without getting a single call. Since I’ve been getting calls, I haven’t made a donation.

I go to Sears and buy socks. Not a single brand offers any guarantee that they weren’t manufactured in sweat shops. Then I get to the register and I’m bombarded with more marketing. This is called POS, or point of sale marketing. “Would you like to save 15 percent by signing up for…?” No, I just want to buy some fucking socks.

So many companies are vying for our attention and trying to squeeze money out of us that civic and economic life in this country can no longer deal with actual ideas or values. Every encounter is based on strategies and every strategy is contingent on some number it generates.

As we’re fatted on entertainment and passivity, businesses and political parties continue running their focus groups and assessing campaigns, figuring out better and better ways to parasitize us. And we sit cheering on our favorite football team.

Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: a More Modest Thesis Prospectus

2011-09-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Question:

Do the sciences of human behavior as practiced and understood in the Twenty-First Century have anything of value to contribute to the study of literature? Will the application of theories arising from the fields of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology to literary works yield anything beyond one more perspective in the seemingly endless succession of momentarily fashionable approaches to literary scholarship? Or is the scientific exploration of human behavior itself hopelessly incapable of transcending the culture in which it is undertaken? And, assuming any ultimate verdict on the value of evolutionary theories of literature is at present impossible to render, might they nonetheless shed some light on issues posing difficulties for other theoretical approaches? For instance, what accounts for centuries of readers’ sympathy toward characters who are on the surface meant to serve as villains? Milton’s Satan is a classic example of this phenomenon, while Palahniuk’s Tyler Durden is a more contemporary one. Are reader’s strong feelings on behalf of these antagonists understandable in terms of evolutionary theories of human behavior? And, if so, what does that suggest about the nature of human interest in fictional narratives like Paradise Lost and Fight Club?

Implications:

William Flesch, in his book Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, theorizes that humans’ passion for fictional narratives emerges from a predilection for monitoring one another for signals of their capacity for cooperative relationships. Humans naturally favor conspecifics who prove themselves capable of setting aside their own rational self-interests to act on behalf of others or on behalf of the larger group to which they belong. And they demonstrate their own altruistic tendencies by favoring other altruists and punishing those who would take advantage of them. Does the character Satan in Milton’s epic poem somehow signal to readers that he is altruistic? And is there some type of underlying message about cooperation in the seemingly senseless violence in Palahniuk’s novel?

Flesch, however, leaves another dimension of evolutionary psychology unexplored, one which could provide much insight into the appeal of both Milton’s and Palahniuk’s stories. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm explores the human propensity toward forming hierarchies in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. It turns out that, contrary to conventional wisdom, humans in foraging bands similar to those they have lived in for the vast majority of their time on earth are strictly egalitarian. Indeed, most contemporary hunter-gatherers would, with little prompting, express support for Satan’s famous line about it being better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. And they would likely recognize many of the group dynamics Tyler Durden manipulates to gain ascendancy among the members of the fight clubs—as well as the ultimate necessity of having someone end his reign.

The theoretical foundation established by Flesch can likely support considerations of male competition for status, since one of the conditions thought necessary for the evolution of cooperation among humans is a relative absence of hierarchical behavior. One common form of selfishness humans are vigilant of in their neighbors is a strong motivation to dominate others. When a person, or a fictional representation of one, acquires influence incommensurate with others in the group, those other group members can be counted on to pay close attention to the way that person yields his (or less often her) power. If it turns out to be for the benefit of the group, the higher status individual will continue to have the support of the group. If it is to further selfish gains, the lower-ranking group members will usually act collectively to bring an end to his dominance. And this dynamic plays out in stories told by hunter-gatherers and writers in more complex societies alike.

Methods:

This project will explore the central characters of Paradise Lost and Fight Club in an attempt to illuminate readers’ feelings toward them. In particular, it will focus on Milton’s Satan and Palahniuk’s Tyler Durder, and will examine the way in which they are portrayed in search of recognizable signals of either selfishness or altruism. Such an exploration might also yield insights into how Boehm’s theories of human hierarchical or egalitarian proclivities can be integrated into the approach to literature set out by Flesch.

1st and Overly Ambitious Prospectus for a Master's Thesis

2011-08-31T04:49:00.000-07:00

I'll be paring this down a bit. My advisors felt that the project spelled out here is more appropriate for doctoral disseration or some such longer work.

Grandeur in This View of Literature?

Question:

What, if anything, can evolutionary theory contribute to the study of literature? Is it possible to study literature scientifically, and if so what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so? The trend among literary theorists is to regard science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular as deeply suspect since they have historically functioned as ideological justifications for various types of violence and oppression. Yet, by unmooring literary scholarship from sound epistemology, critics almost inevitably fall victim to what Frederick Crews calls “the fast-talking superstars who have prostituted it to crank theory, political conformism, and cliquishness” (xv). Will E.O. Wilson’s idea of consilience between science and the humanities be just another trendy fashion among literary scholars—if it ever takes hold at all? Will science ever serve any role in the humanities other than that of ideological bastion of European male hegemony? Does an evolutionary approach to literature hold promise in the quest for insights based on sound reasoning that go beyond mere justification for the political status quo?

Implications:
The primary function of a literary theory is to offer insight into works of literature, what they mean, why they appeal or fail to appeal to readers, how they are influenced by and how they in turn influence the cultures in which they emerge and in which they are appreciated. But the insights borne of the application of a theory to a text cannot be taken as evidence of that theory’s validity. Many literary works have been interpreted psychoanalytically, for instance, and the application of Freud’s theory has yielded insights into those works. But, as evidence against psychoanalytic theories mounts, those insights must be called into question. Theories must be validated independently of their application to texts. And the validity of insights produced through the application of theories is contingent on the validity of those theories.

Interpreting a literary work from the perspective of one or another ideology is usually an easy task, regardless of whether that ideology is scientifically grounded. The question then becomes are there empirically validated theories that might be of interest to literary scholars? If so, do they yield insights into literary works beyond simple distillations of the prevailing culture? Once the difficulty of arriving at scientifically sound theories and the threat that such theories somehow encourage the oppression of women and minorities are dealt with, a third potential stumbling block remains. If a scientific theory of narrative is possible, might it reduce literature to a set of mechanistic principles, and thus rob it of some of its mysterious capacity to enchant audiences? Or might such a theory somehow enrich the experience of literature?

Methods:
This project will begin with an exploration of some current approaches to bringing literature into the realm of human biological and cultural evolution. The most promising of these approaches to date sees storytelling as emerging from evolved dispositions toward monitoring other people for signals of their propensity for either selfishness or altruism, and toward signaling one’s own altruism by emotionally favoring altruistic characters. This approach is described by William Flesch in his book, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction. Is Flesch’s theory valid? Does it offer any insight into actual literary works?

The second part of the project will explore possible methods whereby theories of narrative may be tested to establish their validity. Of course, these tests must go beyond seeing whether or not applying the theory generates insights into a literary work, because it’s possible for invalid theories to generate invalid insights. The tests must involve predictions emerging from the theories that can either fail or succeed. One possible way to test Flesch’s social monitoring and volunteered affect theory, for instance, would be to sample a large body of works to see if a strong trend exists for stories to focus on conflicts between selfish characters and altruistic ones. If such conflicts only show up in a minority of literary works, or if they take place only at the periphery of most stories, then the prediction, and the theory along with it, fail.

Since gathering such a large sample would be a daunting endeavor, bringing with it a large risk of confirmation bias, previous attempts by scholars to come up with exhaustive catalogues of plot and character types may be of use. Ronald Tobias’s 20 Master Plots and Georges Polti’s The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations suggests themselves as good sources for data.

The third and final part of this project will consist of an application of evolutionary theories of literature to diverse works so that an (unavoidably subjective) assessment of the value of the insights can be made. Works from different historical eras and spanning a wide breadth of geographical space may serve to highlight the complementary roles of universal cognitive mechanisms and cultural traditions. What counts as altruism, for instance, might vary across cultures. Likewise, each culture tends to sanction certain selfish acts more than others. So the basic framework of selfless protagonist and selfish antagonist can take on countless forms and carry with it important information about a culture and what’s expected of individuals living in it. Possible candidates for this type of analysis are Milton’s Paradise Lost—an interesting case because many readers sympathize strongly with Satan, the antagonist—and Palahniuk’s Fight Club, a modern cult classic in which one character teaches the other the importance of self-destruction.

One Foot in the Real World: Some Thoughts on the New Job

2011-08-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

When people asked me about my restaurant job, I'd say, “I like to keep one foot in the real world.” It’s a response to my family’s heckling, itself a response to their inability to convince me they know what they’re talking about on a range of topics. School, where I spend the rest of my time, when I’m not reading or cranking out calories on the elliptical, isn’t real. At best, it’s a pseudo-reality built up of vain attempts by vain professors to capture something from an impossible distance. The only reason to take the charge of unreality seriously is that they pin their entire case on it, their entire violent dismissal of all I have to say. So I work in a regular, salt-of-the-earth type of place too. You want to see real? Listen to the problems my fellow servers go through—excluding the ones who just graduated from Homestead High School and are working to keep their rich parents off their backs.

I sat taking notes about an email marketing project I’ll be working on at the new job and I was slightly shocked, mostly delighted, by the way it operated. I needed to be brought up to speed. They needed to coordinate their ideas for where we’d be going with the project. Me, two guys, one a Battle-of-the-Bands veteran younger than me, the other a management type with a kind face and a polo shirt with the company logo, and one woman, pretty, assertive in a way that suggests she never had to deal with severe dismissal, the four of us sitting around a table in an office throwing out ideas with only the whisper of top-down control. What would it be like to work at a place where you hardly ever, if ever, eat shit? I don’t know about this real world everyone likes to talk about, and I’m pretty sure the people who talk about it, to a one, don’t know about it either, but I do know that a hell of a lot of people’s jobs consist of eating shit all day, every day. I’m left wondering what I can say about my feet now that I have this new gig.

Twenty hours a week, and most of that time will be devoted to writing copy. At that rate, it won’t take long before my copywriting has overtaken any other writing I’ve done. Are there measures I can take to avoid getting trapped in that style, at once condescending and wheedling, straining to be colloquial and simple while working secret magic on the minds of hapless, bored, or desperate readers with fancy titles and impressive investment portfolios. “Connect with their pain” is the first step in the sales technique I’ll be learning. People are motivated not by promises of gains but by threats of losses. So find out what people are afraid of losing or how they’ve already experienced loss and dangle a way to avoid or restore it in front of them. I have no qualms about selling to “C-Level” people. But what will it do to my writing? My outlook?

Twenty hours at work, then there’s my thesis with its high academic, acid-free prose. Between school and work then I’ll be writing in a voice far removed from what anyone might recognize as genuine or authentic. Of course, I have my suspicions about the use of those terms, but you can’t explode what you haven’t mastered, at least when it comes to conventions of communication. The work you do becomes a part of you, and so you can’t just say this place has a great atmosphere, decent pay, no dealing with moronic disrespectful customers. You also have to ask, who will this job turn me into? Who will I become after I’ve adapted to this place, begun the inevitable social jostling and taken on a role, climbing or otherwise?

I console myself that I’ve spent lots of time eating shit, that people who eat too much shit eventually lose the capacity to arrive at perspective, and I’ll never acclimate as fully as my coworkers in their early twenties. Plus, white collar work is what most of the oblivious conservatives actually mean when they talk about the real world. So maybe I’ll discover some key to the lock of their oblivion. It’s something new. It’s an opportunity. And I’m not the type to forget where I came from.

New Scene for Ch.3 of "The Music Box Routine"

2011-08-20T10:04:00.001-07:00

“It seems like every guy in the game has something they’re really good at, something they’re really passionate about besides game. They’re actors or musicians or comedians—or you, you’re a writer and you’re into science and you can go on about it for hours on end.”

Will was talking and at the same time lifting tuna from a can to his mouth with a fork. I’d dropped by his apartment to discuss the arrangements for our trip the coming weekend, but the habit of talking game was ingrained. Since Will is so extraverted, not particularly given to self-reflection, it took me a minute to switch gears and realize he wasn’t just talking about the mechanics of his seduction process; he’d broached the topic by complaining about how lame his grounding sequence was. He’d never even bothered to go into it with Stacy. She must’ve been okay with him not having a career picked out.

“I get into stuff,” he said, chewing, “like football when we were in high school, but it never leads anywhere. I thought maybe I could go into sports psychology or something. But I just can’t sit in a room with a book like you can. My mind starts to drift as soon as I start reading.”

“That sounds like a lot of business people I know. Maybe you should be trying to get into sales.”

“Why? So I can make a bunch of money and turn into a total schmuck? Money’s cool and all, but look around—you see plenty of people selling out and they end up at least as depressed as anyone else. You were the one who told me that once you have enough to meet your basic needs more money doesn’t make you any happier. So what would be the point of getting on the phone or going to meetings, putting on a fake smile and making deals with a bunch of total douches?”

“It might not have to be like that. It might be more like game.”

“Man, I don’t think about game like that. When I’m in the field, I’m not selling a damn thing. I’m being me. Because going out and having a good time and meeting people, meeting beautiful women, showing everyone a good time—that’s what I want to do. That’s what I love most about life. That and the way you and I coordinate so well sometimes that it’s like the two of us can run the whole world, like no one can imagine we know each other’s game so well, so we can bounce routines off each other and they think it would be totally impossible to do on purpose. It’s like we’re taking it to some new level—almost like some out-of-body experience.”

I know the feeling he was talking about. I’ve read similar accounts by dancers and guys describing their marches in military formation. It might be similar to what some people get from religious ceremonies, a sense that you’ve transcended your individual existence and become part of something greater. But those experiences are all choreographed. Will and I rely on routines, but we also improvise—and we play off each other, like jazz musicians. It really is kind of glorious.

“But what am I going to say?” Will went on, setting the empty tuna can on the coffee table with the fork balancing on the rim. “‘I knew from a young age I wanted to be a pick-up artist’? That’s never going to play well. I actually envy you—even though you have all these issues with pick-up. The truth is you probably wouldn’t be talking to these people if you weren’t running game. And I know you don’t feel like you’re genuinely expressing yourself when you are. But you’ve got something else going on and I don’t. I get home from work and I’m jumping out of my skin I’m so bored. But you—I’ve seen you—you pick up a book or a magazine and you just get lost. I wish I could be that fascinated by something, even if it did sort of alienate me.”

“You shouldn’t envy me. I look at people and all I see is rot. I see people brutalizing their own sense of reality so they can convince themselves they’re the shit, that they and theirs are the only ones truly deserving to inherit the world. I see us-and-them and to hell with them, no one giving a damn about anything that goes on unless it’s going on right in front of their faces. I see people either so completely fucking oblivious or so thoroughly deluded that they wear clothes manufactured by people in some far-off country under conditions they’d literally kill to keep their own kids safe from—and it gets chalked up to the wonders of the modern world. I see the promise of the Enlightenment squandered for a bunch of bullshit fairytales and fistfuls of French fries.”

I was losing him. He sat in his recliner looking at me over the coffee table, feeling sorry for me. And what had I wanted him to feel for me? I pushed out a laugh and shook my head, determined to get the conversation back on topic, back on to what Will might do with his life, and on to how he could make a grounding sequence out of it. “Grownups are a bunch of goddam phonies,” I joked, even as I realized he probably wouldn’t catch the allusion. “You know, my grounding sequence has me being a science writer, starting from when we were in second grade and Mrs. Gulius had us reading about dinosaurs and going out to look for Haley’s comet. So from the time I’m 23 I’m writing a blog about science and how it relates to things like politics and world hunger. And you can track your traffic on those blogs. Most of my pages after a while got like ten hits. After two years, my site totaled like two hundred and fifty visitors. I bet half of those were just searching for pictures or something. Then I start talking to Anton and getting into game. I read and post on the forums. Then I start a new blog of my own, all about seduction. It had two hundred and fifty hits after the first month. Every time I post something now I can wait about a week and check the stats—most of them will already have like a hundred hits. The game blog gets as many hits every week as the science one got in two years.”

Will was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands folded. He looked at me, furrowed his brown, half-frowned, at a loss, wondering what he could do about his friend, the tortured soul. I hate that look of his, that bafflement as to why I’d insist on doing anything but enjoying myself as much as possible. And he’s right. There is no reason. You can’t take life that seriously because you’ll only make yourself miserable and because you have so little influence on the world anyway. But once in a while I slip.

“Well, that’s not the catastrophe you’re making out,” he said. “People search blogs for pick-up routines—I bet three quarters of your traffic is for either the Alpha Test of the In-Love Test. I wish I could pull stuff half that good out of my ass. And you weren’t even running game when you first did the In-Love Test; you were getting revenge or something.”

“What? I wasn’t getting revenge. I was…” What was I doing?

“It doesn’t matter. My point is that blogs are where you go for game stuff. But if you want science stuff I’d guess that’s the last place you’d look. You’d want a site with more authority that not just any jackhole can post on. So, you can’t let that discourage you. And if you’re not thinking about making a career out of game you should probably stop letting it be such a huge distraction. Seriously, if you’re going to be a science writer, what’s the next step?”

“Okay, you’re right. Don’t start running that self-help crap on me. Besides, we’re talking about what you want to do—aside from game.”

He stood up with a sigh and I leaned back into the couch, draped my arm over the top and watched him take up his pacing track, marveling all the while that he hadn’t yet worn a discernable pattern in the carpet.

“I hate to say it, but every time I try to think about it I feel old. It’s too late to start directing movies, or writing screenplays, or—hell, I don’t even know what I’d start doing. I hate this feeling. It makes me avoid thinking about it and that makes it impossible to come up with any good solutions for it.”

“Will, I can’t believe this. I’ve never seen you struggle with anything like this before. Breathe. Now, freaking out’s going to make it harder to think flexibly. So think about something that makes you laugh. –Seriously, think about a good time you’ve had that makes you laugh. That’s how you get a good baseline for your mood, so you can be creative under stress. Now, there are at least ten different angles we can look at this from. For instance, instead of trying to come up with things you’re interested in other than game, try thinking about what you love so much about game and then see if there’s anything else that’s similar. Or—”

“That’s really how you do it? You think of something funny and then you start coming up with different ways of looking at it. I think you should write a book on that. I’d fucking read it. What do I love about the game? Well, people automatically assume it’s just so sinister but how many people—male and female—struggle with meeting people and struggle with relationships? We’re just supposed to leave it to chance, or leave it in God’s hands. Fuck that. People don’t leave their careers to chance—actually, way too many people probably do just leave their careers to chance. But it’s not considered immoral to think strategically about what kind of job you want to spend the rest of your life doing.

“This may sound cheesy, but I want to teach game and help guys perfect their routines because I actually believe it’ll make everyone involved happier. I think of the guys in high school, the ones who look at the quarterback and the cheerleader, and resent the shit out of him just because he has what they want. I want to take those kids aside and be like, ‘You don’t have to be the quarterback, and you don’t have to have rich parents and drive an expensive car.’ They say it’s dishonest or some bullshit. But what’s really dishonest is that poor kid sitting there pining for his high school sweetheart and being fucking paralyzed because he has no idea what to do about it. He’s not being pure and honest. He’s hurting. That’s not innocent. It’s fucking sad. And as kids, boys especially, spend more time playing videogames and looking at porn it’s only going to get worse.

“I know wires get crossed sometimes and people’s feelings get hurt. But maybe we can come up with strategies to avoid that too. I mean, it’s so fun—when it’s going right, it’s so fun. It breaks my heart to see guys walking into the bar with a scowl on their face trying to look tough because they think that’s what women want and because they’re pissed off everybody seems to be getting laid but them.”

“Did you just use the expression, ‘It breaks my heart’? I don’t know how seriously to take you when you’re talking like this.”

“I’m completely serious. Do you ever see me getting into those super alpha matches some pick-up guys are obsessed with? I’m not about proving I can snatch your girl away from you. It’s not necessary. I believe there’s a way to do this stuff and have everyone enjoying themselves. And I don’t look at Mr. Scowl Face and think, you know, ‘What a tool.’ I think, ‘Damn dude, you’re doing it wrong.’ I want to go over and help him.”

“I have to admit, I remember a couple of times when you basically bailed on a set to coach young guys with no self-esteem.”

“I’d do it more often if I thought it would help. Scowly faces won’t let you coach them because they’re afraid you’re trying to tool them out. But I got more joy out of watching that one dude—Sam was his name—open a two-set after I talked to him for like twenty minutes than I got out of closing with that woman later the same night. I actually wonder what Sam’s doing now. Anyway, imagine how great it would be to run a bootcamp for guys and watch them use the stuff you teach—just a little bit of game and your confidence soars. You’re changing their lives, making their lives better.”

“Now, I envy you. Only you could make pick-up into a public service.”

“Hey, that’s how I look at it. And we both know stories about women who ended up freaking out and crying, but those are by far the minority. I know for a fact the girls we game end up having a good time. That’s my point: you can do it right and it’s fun for everyone. The women are going out hoping that—desperate that some guy runs good game on them. They love it. They get hurt when you fuck it up. And one of the things I learned from you is that you can even hurt them a bit and that can just mean even more pleasure later.”

Will broke off, leaving me to turn over what he said about hurting women, while he looked at his phone. “Stacy’s been sending me messages. I have to call her back. Hold on a sec.” It’s true, I thought, he really is going to be an instructor. And he’s going to be fucking good at it. And he’s exactly the type of guy you’d want helping clueless kids figure out how to talk to women they like—unless of course he keeps learning from me.

New Scene for Ch 1 of "The Music Box Routine"

2011-08-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t the first time Will and I had wandered off the bike trails on foot to the edge of the nature preserve, passed the trees with faded yellow signs nailed to them warning of trespass on private property, to check out the derelict house with the collapsed roof and the washed-out barn nestled against the opposite side of a tree-strewn hummock. Both buildings were wrapped in thick vegetation, branches snarled and naked from the winter. The house took some determination to break through to, and the reward was nothing but the shambles of a neglected structure left to rot. No sign of the lives that had lighted the walls remained. After our first exploration, Will and I steered clear of it, since we figured not many women would find picking through the brush worthwhile. The barn provided much easier access.

Beyond the long, low, still impressively straight peak of the pitched roof was nothing but fallow land for a half-mile and then more trees and then the main road alive with the sounds of distant vehicles straining to keep pace with the busy modern world. Power lines that once brought electricity and phone service to the caved-in house ran along the edge of the woods back toward the unforgotten stretch of inhabited homes running as far in each direction as you cared to drive. What used to be the barn’s double doors sliding open and shut on rollers now stands as a dark gape in the dull gray stacked layers of weathered plank, like the mouth of a cave on the barren surface of the moon, but with none of that enchanted silver glow. These places give me a shocking sense of impermanence, not because they’re old and abandoned, but because you know their desuetude won’t be tolerated for long. Kids and teenagers make up stories about scary things that happen in them, and then approach them day or night with a thrill, unaware that what makes their persistence ghostly is the brevity of their future rather than their surplus of memories.

Appropriately, one of these story-addled kids has spray-painted the word “DEATH” beside the mouth of the cave, just beneath the sagging eaves. As Will, Stacy, and I approached, we were those kids too, a grown woman and two fully adult men pricking their ears and casting wary glances about for evidence of somebody who might get them in trouble with parents they hardly ever see anymore. This return to childhood is a remarkably effective tool for seduction. “What in the hell is that?” I heard Will say as I filed in the barn behind him and Stacy. She said something under her breath as they both tip-toed around some object on the wooden floor.

“Holy shit!” I said, “It’s foot track magic.”

“No,” Stacy said. “Foot track spells are hoodoo. This is a Goetia seal.”

Will and I turned simultaneously to look at her, and then each other, before turning our gaze back to the floor. For a long minute we all stood on the edge of the chalk circle staring at the design in the middle of it—three even-sided crosses, perched on the rim of a bowl shape. Concentric with the outer circle was another, and between them were several letters I had to lean over and move around to read as we all instinctively avoided stepping inside the perimeter, which was about eight feet in diameter. “R-I-S-I-T,” I said. “Is Risit an incantation or the name of a spirit or what?”

“Don’t say his name,” Stacy said. “And you start at the top, stupid—with the S. He’s a demon. See where they burned the candles? Someone did a ritual out here to invoke him.”

“Sitri?” Will said.

“I said don’t say his name. And don’t step in the circle.” She barked these interdictions at him like a frustrated parent as she moved around the design, as if checking to see if it was drawn correctly. “It was probably some idiot teenage girl trying to get some poor guy to fall in love with her,” she said, shaking her head in exasperation. “She probably found this on the damn internet and has no idea what kind of trouble she’s getting them both in.”

I had moved away from the seal onto a dais to get a better view of it in its totality. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Will come upon a bunch of boards that had been pushed up against the wall to clear space for drawing the design. After leaping over the clutter, he stood for a second and then turned excitedly to say something to me. There was a crunching sound that interrupted him and made both Stacy me turn our eyes in his direction. He stood looking down at something with both arms raised out to his sides. “Oh, fuck.”

He took three backward steps right into the middle of the circle. From her vantage, Stacy was able to see what had happened before I did. My first hint was the look of horror on her face. Trying to follow their gaze, I saw that something was wrong with Will’s leg—there was a dark streak that as I approached resolved into a gouge. He had run his shin against a large piece of glass jutting out invisibly from between two boards leaning against the wall. Stacy was at his side as quickly as I was. “Jesus! Don’t let any of your blood get in the circle!”

She pushed the two of us to the side. This should have infuriated me. But when I looked at her I was able to read a story in her expression. It actually reminded me of two experiences I’d had with Will, the first of which occurred in the days before we were experienced drinkers. We were at a club at closing time and the staff was trying to corral everyone out. A bouncer who had been gently shoving me toward the door actually followed me into the men’s room as I rushed into one of the stalls to puke. What I remember is that after retching and falling back away from the toilet, I felt the guy trying to lift me by my shirt. That’s when Will pushed through the door of the bathroom. His eyes went first to mine, allowing him to assess just how sorry a state I was in, and then to the bouncer’s. I’ll never forget his immediate flash of rage on my behalf. “Don’t fucking touch him!” It impressed even the bouncer himself, who all but leapt away from me. As Will was helping me to my feet, the bouncer, no lightweight himself, said, “Just get him out of here,” with a tremble that made me think he was on the verge of tears.

The second incident was years later. It was also after a night at a bar, but we’d been concentrating too much on picking up the two women who’d come back to Will’s apartment with us to have gotten all that drunk. Still, a wave of nausea struck me, and I crawled out of the recliner to lie down on the floor. I looked up to see Will sitting up on the couch beside his girl but with his eyes closed. Something was wrong with him too. My girl seemed to think I was playing some sort of game—ha!—and knelt beside me. When she started petting my head, it was almost too much take. I opened my eyes just a moment before Will opened his. He looked at me, knew instantly I was in distress, and shouted at the poor girl, “Quit fucking crowding him!” before closing his eyes again and leaning his head back. The girls left in a huff—to my relief. It turned out both Will and I had the flu.

Stacy, though she wasn’t angry, had a similar look of urgent concern on her face. Will was hurt, and of course it was time to dispense with all the silly nonsense about seals and spells. But she was genuinely worried for him, and she went into action without hesitation, taking off the shirt she was wearing over a tank top and squatting to inspect the maceration before wrapping it. Will, on the other hand, didn’t seem concerned so much as amused. “Damn,” he said, “it looks like—eh, a certain part of the female anatomy.”

The wound was a good four inches running up and down at a slight angle to his shin bone. And it was indeed both wide and deep enough to be suggestive of a bodily orifice. Amazingly, it wasn’t gushing blood. In fact, it seemed to take a minute before it even started bleeding. “Um, anybody know how to sew? I don’t have insurance.”

“You’re probably in the clear,” Stacy said, dabbing at the blood trickling down toward his sock. “If you’d hit anything vital, it would be bleeding a lot more. We can take care of this with some butterfly bandages and Neosporin. Trust me: I have a lot of experience with cuts. You’re going to have a hell of a scar though.”

“Cool.”

After tying her shirt around his leg, Stacy turned back toward the chalk circle. She took a few steps toward the wall, leant down to look at something, and then stood up with her eyes closed, shaking her head. “You got your blood in the circle.”

Will laughed. “Does that mean I’m going to fall in love with some idiot teenage girl?”

“Believe me, Will, it’s not fucking funny.”

Stacy started looking around the barn with a look of concentration on her face, trying to decide on a course of action. Then, decision made, she abruptly turned around and squatted by the boards piled against the wall. When she turned back toward us, she was squeezing her left hand into a fist. “What are doing?” I asked. “We kind of need to get Will out of here—like right now.”

“Just a second.” She held her fist over the spot where she’d found drops of Will’s blood scattered on the wood. And just as I suspected her own blood began to drop from her hand onto the same spot.

“Nice,” I said, the delayed annoyance arriving.

Stacy followed in her car as I drove Will’s truck to Walgreen’s. By the time we’d biked back to the parking lot, Stacy’s shirt was soaked through. But Will carried on a conversation in the truck as if nothing had happened. Back at his apartment, after he and Stacy had disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes to clean the wound and shave the surrounding area, I watched in amazement as she tended to the wound with deft expertise, applying the butterflies perfectly, dabbing the blood with gauze, and looking up to his face at intervals with tender concern to monitor his response. As far as I could tell, he was never in any pain. He talked and joked the whole time. But maybe she saw something I missed.

I am Jack’s Raging Insomnia: The Tragically Overlooked Moral Dilemma at the Heart of Fight Club

2011-07-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

If you were to ask one of the millions of guys who love the movie Fight Club what the story is about, his answer would most likely emphasize the violence. He might say something like, “It’s about men returning to their primal nature and getting carried away when they find out how good it feels.” Actually, this is an answer I would expect from a guy with exceptional insight. A majority would probably just say it’s about a bunch of guys who get together to beat the crap out of each other and pull a bunch pranks. Some might remember all the talk about IKEA and other consumerist products. Our insightful guy may even connect the dots and explain that consumerism somehow made the characters in the movie feel emasculated, and so they had to resort to fighting and vandalism to reassert their manhood. But, aside from ensuring they would know what a duvet is—“It’s a fucking blanket”—what is it exactly about shopping for household décor and modern conveniences that makes men less manly?

Maybe Fight Club is just supposed to be fun, with all the violence and the weird sex scene with Marla and all the crazy mischief the guys get in, but also with a few interesting monologues and voiceovers to hint at deeper meanings. And of course there’s Tyler Durden—fearless, clever, charismatic, and did you see those shredded abs? Not only does he not take shit from anyone, he gets a whole army to follow his lead, loyal to the death. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of characters like this in movies, and if that’s all men liked about Fight Club they wouldn’t sit through all the plane flights, support groups, and soap-making. It just may be that, despite the rarity of fans who can articulate what they are, the movie actually does have profound and important resonances.

And guys who can’t put their finger on what’s so good about the movie shouldn’t feel too bad. I recommend anyone interested in film or literary criticism go to the Wikipedia site devoted to academic interpretations of Fight Club because it’s a good indication of just how far critics have gotten up the asses of the handful of ascendant naked emperors in the field. This pseudo-scholarship is so stupid and yet so common in humanities departments that it’s past the time when we should’ve started holding these so-called theorists accountable. It takes a certain kind of person, though, to confront people who are behaving improperly or acting to the detriment of others, in this case of trusting undergraduates in departments under the sway of poststructuralism or new historicism. It’s safer and more comfortable just to accept what your teachers say. And why should we care what other people are being taught? It’s none of our business, right? If we think it sounds like hogswoggle then we can simply look the other way.

If you recall, the Edward Norton character, whom I’ll call Jack (following the convention of the script), decides that his story should begin with the advent of his insomnia. He goes to the doctor but is told nothing is wrong with him. His first night’s sleep comes only after he goes to a support group and meets Bob, he of the “bitch tits,” and cries a smiley face onto his t-shirt. But along comes Marla who like Jack is visiting support groups but is not in fact recovering, sick, or dying. She is another tourist. As long as she's around, he can’t cry and so can’t sleep. Soon after Jack and Marla make a deal to divide the group meetings and avoid each other, Tyler Durden shows up and we’re on our way to Fight Clubs and Project Mayhem. Now, why the hell would we accept these bizarre premises and continue watching the movie unless at some level Jack’s difficulties, as well as their solutions, make sense to us?

So why exactly was it that Jack couldn’t sleep at night? The simple answer, the one that Tyler gives later in the movie, is that he’s unhappy with his life. He hates his job. Something about his “filing cabinet” apartment rankles him. And he’s alone. Jack’s job is to fly all over the country to investigate accidents involving his company’s vehicles and to apply “the formula.” I’m going to quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s book so I don’t have to dick around with the DVD player:
“You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).
"A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.
“If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.
“If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall” (30).
Palahniuk's inspiration for Jack's job was an actual case involving the Ford Pinto.
What this means is that Jack goes around trying to protect his company's bottom line to the detriment of people who drive his company's cars. You can imagine the husband or wife or child or parent of one of these accident victims hearing about this job and asking Jack, "How do you sleep at night?"

Going to support groups makes life seem pointless, short, and horrible. Ultimately, we all have little control over our fates, so there's no good reason to take responsibility for anything. When Jack burst into tears as Bob pulls his face into his enlarged breasts, he's relinquishing all accountability; he's, in a sense, becoming a child again. Accordingly, he's able to sleep like a baby. When Marla shows up, not only is he forced to confront the fact that he's healthy and perfectly able to behave responsibly, but he is also provided with an incentive to grow up because, as his fatuous grin informs us, he likes her. And, even though the support groups eventually fail to assuage his guilt, they do inspire him with the idea of hitting bottom, losing all control, losing all hope.

If Jack didn't have to worry about losing his apartment, or losing all his IKEA products, or losing his job, or falling out of favor with his boss, well, then he would be free to confront that same boss and tell him what he really thinks of the operation that has supported and enriched them both. Enter Tyler Durden, who systematically turns all these conditionals into realities. In game theory terms, Jack is both a 1st order and a 2nd order free rider because he both gains at the expense of others and knowingly allows others to gain in the same way. He carries on like this because he's more motivated by comfort and safety than he is by any assurance that he's doing right by other people.

This is where Jack being of "a generation of men raised by women" becomes important (50). Fathers and mothers tend to treat children differently. (It should go without saying--but feminist critics tend to be agenda- as opposed to truth-driven--this research is descriptive and not prescriptive; no one is interested in enforcing these statistical differences.) A study that functions well symbolically in this context examined the ways moms and dads tend to hold their babies in pools. Moms hold them facing themselves. Dads hold them facing away. Think of the way Bob's embrace of Jack changes between the support group and the fight club. When picked up by moms, babies breathing and heart-rates slow. Just the opposite happens when dads pick them up--they get excited. And if you inventory the types of interactions that go on between the two parents it's easy to see why.

Not only do dads engage children in more rough-and-tumble play; they are also far more likely to encourage children to take risks. In one study, fathers told they'd have to observe their child climbing a slope from a distance making any kind of rescue impossible in the event of a fall set the slopes at a much steeper angle than mothers in the same setup. Contrary to theory-addled critics, Fight Club isn't about dominance or triumphalism or white males' reaction to losing control; it's about men learning that they can't really live if they're always playing it safe. Jack actually says at one point that winning or losing doesn't much matter. Indeed, one of homework assignments Tyler gives everyone is to start a fight and lose. The point is to be willing to risk a fight when it's necessary--i.e. when someone attempts to exploit or seduce you based on the assumption that you'll always act according to your rational self-interest.

And the disturbing truth is that we are all lulled into hypocrisy and moral complacency by the allures of consumerism. We may not be "recall campaign coordinators" like Jack. But do we know or care where our food comes from? Do we know or care how our soap is made? Do we bother to ask why Disney movies are so devoid of the gross mechanics of life? We would do just about anything for comfort and safety. And that is precisely how material goods and material security have emasculated us. It's easy to imagine Jack's mother soothing him to sleep some night, saying, "Now, the best thing to do, dear, is to sit down and talk this out with your boss."

There are two scenes in Fight Club that I can't think of any other word to describe but sublime. The first is when Jack finally confronts his boss, threatening to expose the company's practices if he is not allowed to leave with full salary. At first, his boss reasons that Jack's threat is not credible, because bringing his crimes to light would hurt Jack just as much. But the key element to altruistic punishment is that the punisher is willing to incur risks or costs to mete it out. Jack, having been well-fathered, as it were, by Tyler, proceeds to engage in costly signaling of his willingness to harm himself by beating himself up, literally. In game theory terms, he's being rationally irrational, making his threat credible by demonstrating he can't be counted on to pursue his own rational self-interest. The money he gets through this maneuver goes, of course, not into anything for Jack, but into Fight Club and Project Mayhem.

The second sublime scene, and for me the best in the movie, is the one in which Jack is himself punished for his complicity in the crimes of his company. How can a guy with stitches in his face and broken teeth, a guy with a chemical burn on his hand, be punished? Fittingly, he lets Tyler get them both in a car accident. At this point, Jack is in control of his life, he's no longer emasculated. And Tyler flees.

One of the confusing things about the movie is that it has two overlapping plots. The first, which I've been exploring up to this point, centers on Jack's struggle to man up and become an altruistic punisher. The second is about the danger of violent reactions to the murder machine of consumerism. The male ethic of justice through violence can all too easily morph into fascism. And so once Jack has created this father figure and been initiated into manhood by him he then has to reign him in--specifically, he has to keep him from killing Marla. This second plot entails what anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls a "domination episode," in which an otherwise egalitarian group gets taken over by a despot who must then be defeated. Interestingly, only Jack knows for sure how much authority Tyler has, because Tyler seemingly undermines that authority by giving contradictory orders. But by now Jack is well schooled on how to beat Tyler--pretty much the same way he beat his boss.

It's interesting to think about possible parallels between the way Fight Club ends and what happened a couple years later on 9/11. The violent reaction to the criminal excesses of consumerism and capitalism wasn't, as it actually occurred, homegrown. And it wasn't inspired by any primal notion of manhood but by religious fanaticism. Still, in the minds of the terrorists, the attacks were certainly a punishment, and there's no denying the cost to the punishers.

Beliefs that Make You Feel Good Make You Look Good Too—But You’re a Total Asshole if You Let That Influence You

2011-07-27T11:14:00.001-07:00

Imagine you are among a group of around thirty people on an island and over the past few weeks you’ve learned of the presence of another group living on the same island, one which has been showing signs of hostility toward your own group. Because of your wisdom, your group has appointed you the task of convening a selective gathering to devise a strategy for dealing with the looming threat. Among your group there happen to be several people with military training as well as some with experience in diplomacy. There are also individuals claiming psychic powers and religious authority. You understand that the composition of the gathering will be among the most important factors determining the consensus strategy it will arrive at. Who do you invite to participate? Who do you exclude?

(Full disclosure: the first strategy that occurs to me is to find a way to get the rival group’s attention and then execute the psychics and religious authorities for them to witness, letting them know afterward this treatment is what they can expect from us should they decide to continue their hostility.)

Beliefs have consequences. A psychic in our hypothetical group may be convinced that he’s seen the future and in it the home group stands victorious, having suffered no casualties, over the rival group. This vision allows an otherwise outvoted military aggressor to persuade everyone else a violent raid is the best course of action. A religious leader may feel it incumbent on her to serve as a missionary to the savages. This may lead to an attempt at diplomacy which backfires by offending the rival group’s own religious sensibilities. The fate of the home group is at stake. Whose opinions do you seek?

This imaginary scenario is meant to illustrate the point that an individual’s beliefs inevitably contribute to the culture and ultimately influence the fate of societies. While it is true that the larger the society the smaller the impact of any one person’s ideas, it is likewise the case that through a mechanism called social proof the stated ideas of individuals have multiplier effects far beyond what any one person believes. Social norms are a major determiner of what people accept as true. And many people may not question pieces of conventional wisdom simply because it has never occurred to them to do so—at least not until they encounter someone who espouses wisdom of an unconventional strain.

This point may seem obvious enough, and yet it represents a major departure from the dominant approach to considering beliefs in American culture. When confronted with a new idea Americans automatically and unconsciously apply a rigid formula to assessing its merits: they ask, first, how would believing this idea make me feel, and, second, how would believing this idea make me look to others? The order of these questions may be reversed, but no other questions ever enter the equation. The foundation of our culture is an ethic of consumerism, and so people decide what to believe exactly the same way they decide what music they want to claim as their favorite, and the same way they decide what type of t-shirt they’ll wear to advertise their personal style.

Savvy marketers, public relations experts, and profiteering charlatan shitbags are well aware of the extent to which consumerism determines our beliefs and behaviors. There’s no shortage of people in this country who will have nothing to do with politics because the topic is just not sexy at all; they know politicians are considered dishonest, petty, and even corrupt. Who would want to associate themselves with that? This general distaste for government and its policy disputes derives much of its fuel from each party’s attempts to brand the other in as off-putting a way as possible. I haven’t seen a survey that establishes the link, but I’d wager where people fall on the political spectrum is largely determined by whether they'd find it less acceptable to be thought of as naïve and effete or to be thought of as callous and lacking in compassion.

I try, as much as possible, to adhere to the Enlightenment values of devotion to science and championing of universal human rights. When people of the consumerist mindset discuss their beliefs with me, they are often baffled as to why I would insist on scientific skepticism with regard to supernatural ideas and pop culture myths. Science is so dry and mechanical. So, when I tell people what I believe, I usually get one of three responses: the first is to assume that my knowledge about research on some issue must be completely independent of my beliefs, because beliefs are personal and science is not. “Okay, you’ve told me what you know about the results of some experiments. But what do you really believe?”

The second response, equally in keeping with the consumerist ethic, is to assume that anyone so devoted to science must be a dry and mechanical person, the type who is incapable of tapping into his intuition, who insists on cold hard facts and bloodless statistics. After all, the reasoning goes, this guy chose his beliefs based on how he wanted to represent himself, so if he’s spouting off stats and experimental results he must have a pretty limited and robotic personality. It should go without saying—but unfortunately it doesn’t—that this reasoning is based on a gross misunderstanding of science and statistics alike. But the other mistake implicit in this response is that people can only decide what to believe according to how they want to represent themselves to others.

And yet it’s the third response that’s the most troubling. When you listen to someone’s beliefs about, say, supply-side economics, or religion, or alternative medicine and then start going into detail about why those beliefs are almost certainly wrong, many people will immediately conclude that there’s an ulterior motive behind your scientific skepticism. Because you have such a strong tendency to reject other people’s beliefs, they reason, you must simply be the type of person who enjoys making other people feel and look stupid. It’s not enough to wear your own favorite brand of t-shirt; you have to ridicule other people’s fashion sense. People who respond this way—you know who you are—can be counted on to violently assert themselves when you challenge them. They take your arguments very personally.

The true reason I’m devoted to science, though, is that I take responsibility for the consequences of my beliefs. What you believe has a direct impact on the culture around you, and an indirect impact on the course of society at large. If you like the fit of supply-economics, if you explain to anyone who’ll listen how wealth at the top trickles down, and if you vote for conservative politicians, then you’re responsible for the results, positive or negative, of the implementation of those policies. In point of fact, the most reliable outcome of these policies is greater income inequality, which is associated with a host of societal ills from increased violent crime to higher infant mortality. I would argue that those signing on to the conservative agenda after these facts were established are complicit in the perpetuation of these social problems.

The position you take on any issue with broader social implications inevitably becomes more than a personal choice. And it’s more difficult than you may assume to come up with issues that don’t have broader social implications. Where, for instance, was your t-shirt made? What were the conditions the people who made it were working under? What effects did its manufacture have on the surrounding ecosystems? The plain fact is that any pure application of the consumerist ethic, whether to your choice of clothing or to what religion or political party you support, is profoundly irresponsible.

In my first novel, which I just recently completed, the characters address issues concerning recovered memories of child abuse. This is a topic I began researching as an undergrad studying psychology. It turns out the best research rules out the theory of repressed trauma with a high degree of certainty. Now, it shouldn’t require any great deal of trust on your part to believe I have no desire to associate myself in any way with the issue of child abuse, especially in any way that entails a risk of being perceived as wanting to defend or advocate it. But there are men in prison today convicted solely on the basis of evidence from recovered memories. If I simply towed the conventional line and neglected to thoroughly research the issue, or worse, if I ignored the products of that research, I would be complicit in the imprisonment of innocent men. This complicity extends to the seemingly innocent act of remaining silent when others around me are expressing views I know to be in error.

The tendency to rely on pure consumerism to assess ideas and to fail to take responsibility for their consequences is a trap all too easy to fall into. I can almost guarantee the shirt on your back right now was made in a third world country under conditions you’d literally kill to keep your own children safe from. But most Americans are blithely ignorant of this. And I can attest it is exceedingly difficult and prohibitively expensive to limit your purchases to products made under more humane conditions. Manufacturers depend on American consumers being ignorant and irresponsible. And yet, under some circumstances, people’s reasoning becomes eminently more practical. When your child gets sick, the sexiness of holistic medicine doesn’t lure you away from doctors trained in scientific medicine—though you may backslide if that first visit fails to cure them.

But how, you may ask, do you express your individuality if you are so committed to science? Alternatively, how can others assess your personality through your beliefs if they’re all based on some scientist’s research? Well, even if research were to prove somehow that it’s better to be extroverted than introverted, people have little control over such things. So it is with most personality traits. Science may also offer some hints about characteristics I ought to look for in a romantic partner, but ultimately which woman I pair up with will be determined by factors beyond the scope of any research project. Not every personal decision you make has wider societal consequences. Anyway, there’s plenty of room for individuality even for those of us thoroughly committed to taking responsibility for our actions and beliefs.

True Love with a Bloody Twist: the Uses and Abuses of the Sympathetic Vampire

2011-07-22T12:09:00.001-07:00

Two strangers lock eyes from across a crowded bar. She is a small-town waitress, living with her grandmother, he a veteran returning home. They look at each other and experience a mutual frisson of seeming recognition. First they’re intrigued with each other, then, within moments, they’re enthralled. With their long, guileless stares, involuntary shifting of their bodies to bring themselves helplessly forward, leaning toward one another then back in an unconscious conscious dance—as if it didn’t matter that they’ve been aware of each other’s existence for only a few minutes—their eyes begin to dart away from that requited gaze toward each other's lips; she tilts back her head, actually closes her eyes until she remembers where she is; any second he will heed the cues and pull her to him for the first kiss. But then they’re interrupted by rowdy patrons in the next booth over.

There’s something not right about the following scene, which has our war-weary lover lying supine as those rowdy restaurant patrons rob him outside in the parking lot. And there’s something not right about how the waitress manages to fight them off, rescuing the helpless veteran. By the end of the first episode of True Blood, though, we see the waitress, Sookie Stackhouse, playing the more familiar role of damsel in distress—just in time for the credits to role, as if the cliffhanger left any doubt about whether the veteran, Bill Compton, would play the role of knight. And yet the familiarity of the romantic plot at the heart of the series is well subsumed within the supernatural subject matter and countless other plotlines. Bill, it turns out, is a veteran not of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, but of the Civil War. He is a 170-plus-year-old vampire. Those patrons were robbing him not of his wallet but of his blood, which can be sold to humans as a potent aphrodisiac, having subdued him with silver chains and inserted needles into his veins.

In terms of pure entertainment, True Blood is the best show I’ve seen in a long time. It aspires to seriousness by allegorizing the plight of homosexuals (LGBT) in modern America, while featuring a cast of characters transparently designed to explode stereotypes. Tara, an angry young black woman, is constantly reading, knows legal and medical jargon, and just wants to be loved. Lafayette, Tara’s cousin, a black flamboyantly gay cook who moonlights as a drug dealer and prostitute, is a Machiavellian mastermind who can whoop some ass. Jason, Sookie’s brother, a narcissistic horn-dog jock, has a heart of gold, and can’t bear to see anyone hurt who doesn’t deserve it. Sookie herself, at first blush an innocent and dizzy blonde, all smiles, quick nervous laughs, and friendly manners, is telepathic, strong-willed, and possesses boundless courage, as she displays in her rescue of Bill. But most of the show’s appeal comes from traditional—you might even say conservative—storytelling.

Bill is played by Stephen Moyers, who was forty when the first season of True Blood was filmed, and Sookie by Anna Paquin, who was 27. (The actors, who began dating the first season, are now married.) Sookie likes her men older, as one of the central plotlines in season one is the love triangle she and Bill make up with Sam Merlotte, the owner of the bar where she works, who has neat tufts of gray hair and is played by Sam Trammell, 39 at the time. In season two, despite herself, Sookie takes a shine to Eric Northman, a thousand-year-old vampire played by Alexander Skarsgard, then 31.

If the May December pairings seem insignificant, there’s also the throwback that Sookie, a woman in her mid-twenties, is a virgin when she meets Bill. Her telepathy supposedly explains her sexual reticence, as hearing the raunchy thoughts of men her own age inevitably precludes the budding of any intimacy—neat little plot device that. But there’s no doubt what the writers are really up to in the episode that has Sookie donning a billowy white dress and running bare-foot just after sunset to offer herself to Bill for the first time. The encounter takes place on a velvet blanket before a fireplace with candles on the mantle. Lest we get bored with this old-fashioned scene—or embarrassed by how much we’re enjoying it—Bill’s fangs emerge. “Do it. I want you to,” Sookie says. Sure enough, he plunges them into her neck, and lovingly licks up the gusher he’s caused. But the blood drinking is merely an interlude—in fact, it’s used as another cliffhanger—and the scene ends with Sookie’s orgasm. The sixteen-year-old boy in me exulted.

What happens next is emblematic of the show’s worst vices. Sitting in the bathtub with Bill, Sookie reveals that she was once inappropriately touched by her great uncle when she was a young girl. What actually happened is obscured by her recollection of the man’s thoughts. The only offense actually depicted is him having her sit on his lap as he helps with her math homework. “It was just touching,” she says. “It wasn’t nearly as bad as what happens to some girls.” This storyline is superfluous, even gratuitous, meant simply to signal that Sookie is deep and complex. When Bill confronts the man, wheelchair-bound and in his eighties, the encounter is disturbing for all the wrong reasons. Bill is supposed to be struggling with his vampiric urge to kill, and the writers saw this subplot as an opportunity to let him backslide in a way that would, if anything, make him more sympathetic. But in a show so proud of its own sexual openness the unceremonious execution of a helpless old man for an unvoiced and opaquely acted out attraction he had no control over is unsettlingly hypocritical and unenlightened. (For punishment to qualify as altruistic, it needs to entail a cost or a risk to the punisher.)

True Blood relies far too heavily on the trope of the haunted past for characterization. Watching the show, I keep imagining a Family Guy-style cutaway to Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers saying in a mock-tragic tone, “We lost a lot of good men out there.” This is bad psychology and lazy storytelling. The idea that personality is reducible to background lends itself to the very urge toward stereotyping the show delights in frustrating. And yet the show has the redeeming quality of being snarkily aware of its own reliance on pulp fiction conventions. In a scene from season one that has Sam and Tara somewhat begrudgingly allowing themselves to fall into a courtship of sorts, he asks her why she likes Sookie’s brother Jason and why she doesn’t do anything about it. She responds in her endearing-annoying rhotic twang, “It’s part of my whole fucked-up thing: low self-esteem, childhood trauma, blah, blah, snore.”

In season two of Mad Men, Don Draper responds to an idea for a TV show, “It’s derivative with a twist, which is what they’re looking for.” Shows like True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, and Twilight certainly fall into the derivative-with-a-twist category. They’re all traditional romances jazzed up with supposed monsters who turn out to be nice guys with tragic pasts. And they all center on prototypes Anne Rice deserves credit for, even though her stories weren’t romances at all. Bill, Stefan, and Edward are really all Louis. Eric, Damon, and—sorry, Twilight is just too awful to watch—are Lestat. What makes the HBO version so much better is certainly not that it has anything like the substance of Rice’s early installments of The Vampire Chronicles, which owe much of their profundity to her abandonment—unfortunately short-lived—of Catholicism and her wrestling with existentialism; True Blood is fun because unlike the other shows in the paranormal romance genre it doesn’t take itself so damn seriously.

Not all of the comedy comes from the characters’ snarky remarks about the ridiculous plots they find themselves in. The hectic pacing does wonders to keep the tone light, an effect that harks back to a much earlier HBO series dealing in supernatural fare, Tales from the Crypt. Watching the episodes, I almost want to pull out a stopwatch and see if the editors are allotting each subplot its portion of the show according to some preset pattern. Indeed, the intricate workings of the multiple plots suggest nothing so much as the inner mechanics of a watch. And the writers are savvy enough never to answer a question without replacing it with three others.

Ultimately, True Blood fails to be anywhere near as progressive as it seems to want to be. For all the collective wincing among the audience every time someone speaks of favoring his or her own kind, any show that pits good guys against bad guys both panders to and promotes tribalism, however it’s defined in the narrative context. Some of the characters who appear bad at first show signs of redeemability. In fact, the writers, in making Eric so much worse than Bill before having him break down in tears at the death of the vampire who made him and becoming inexplicably protective of Sookie, are at risk of letting him steal the show. But there are plenty of other characters—that uncle, Maryanne, Loraine—who are simply beyond sympathy.

The show does, however, have moments when it transcends its mere functionality as pure entertainment. There’s a scene in season one, for instance, in which Bill is sitting at a table in the kitchen of a church, his hand on a bottle of synthetic blood—ironically called true blood—awaiting the arrival of all the townspeople so he can give a speech about his memories of the Civil War, and all the while listening in, with his keen vampire hearing, as everyone remarks on the potential dangers in hosting a blood-thirsty monster. Just as you find yourself desperate for him to prove them all wrong and win them over, Sookie arrives on the arm of Sam Merlotte. Meanwhile, the gears of the watch are turning: Jason is tripping on vampire blood; his friend Hoyt is tempted to taste some true blood; the cops are keeping their ears open for clues about some murders, for which both Bill and Jason are suspects; and a group of miscreants is gearing up to ruin to the lecture. For all its busy distractibility, the scene is masterful. As Bill walks out, takes the American flag from where it’s been draped over a cross for his benefit, hangs it on its pole, and continues winning over the crowd, just as you'd hoped, you know that’s character, in both senses of the term.

Bad Men

2011-07-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

Though I had mixed feelings about the first season of Mad Men, which I picked up at Half Price Books for a steal, I still found enormous appeal in the more drawn out experience of the series unfolding. Movies lately have been leaving me tragically unmoved, with those in the action category being far too noisy and preposterous and those in the drama one too brief to establish any significant emotional investment in the characters. In a series, though, especially those in the new style pioneered by The Sopranos which eschew efforts to wrap up their plots by the end of each episode, viewers get a chance to follow characters as they develop, and the resultant investment in them makes even the most underplayed and realistic violence among them excruciatingly riveting. So, even though I found Pete Campbell, an account executive at the ad agency Sterling Cooper, the main setting for Mad Men, annoying instead of despicable, and the treatment of what we would today call sexual harassment in the office crude, self-congratulatory, and overdone, by the time I had finished watching the first season I was eager to get my hands on the second. I’ve now seen the first four seasons.

Reading up on the show on Wikipedia, I came across a few quotes from Daniel Mendelsohn’s screed against the series, “The Mad Men Account” in the New York Review of Books, and since Mendelsohn is always fascinating even when you disagree with him I made a point of reading his review after I’d finished the fourth season. His response was similar to mine in that he found himself engrossed in the show despite himself. There’s so much hoopla. But there’s so much wrong with the show. Allow me a longish quote:

“The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.
Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical ‘issues’—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.”

I have to say Mendelsohn is right on the mark here—though I will take issue with his categorical claims about the acting—leaving us with the question of why so many of us, me and Mendelsohn included, find the show so fascinating. Reading the review I found myself wanting to applaud at several points as it captures so precisely, and even artistically, the show’s failings. And yet these failings seem to me mild annoyances marring the otherwise profound gratification I get from watching. Mendelsohn lights on an answer for how it can be good while being so bad, one that squares the circle by turning the shortcomings into strengths.

If the characters are bland, stereotypical sixties people instead of individuals, if the issues are advertised rather than dramatized, if everyone depicted is hopelessly venal while evincing a smug, smiling commitment to decorum, well it’s because the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, was born in 1965, and he’s trying to recreate the world of his parents. Mendelsohn quotes Weiner:

“part of the show is trying to figure out—this sounds really ineloquent—trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are…. The truth is it’s such a trope to sit around and bash your parents. I don’t want it to be like that. They are my inspiration, let’s not pretend.”

Mendelsohn’s clever solution to the Mad Men puzzle is that its appeal derives from its child’s-eye view of the period during which its enthusiasts’ parents were in their ascendancy. The characters aren’t deep because children wouldn’t have the wherewithal to appreciate their depth. The issues aren’t explored in all their complexity because children are only ever vaguely aware of them. For Mendelsohn, the most important characters are the Drapers’ daughter, Sally, and the neighbor kid, Glen, who first has a crush on Don’s wife, Betty, and then falls for Sally herself. And it turns out Glen is played by Weiner’s own son.

I admit the episodes that portrayed the Draper’s divorce struck me as poignant to the point of being slightly painful, resonating as they did with my memories of my own parents’ divorce. But that was in the ‘80’s not the 60’s. And Glen is, at least for me, one of the show’s annoyances, not by any means its main appeal. His long, unblinking stares at Betty, which Mendelsohn sees as so fraught with meaning, I can’t help finding creepy. The kid makes my skin crawl, much the way Pete Campbell does. I’m forced to consider that Mendelsohn, as astute as he is about a lot of the scenes and characters, is missing something, or getting something really wrong.

In trying to account for the show’s overwhelming appeal, I think Mendelsohn is a bit too clever. I haven’t done a survey but I’d wager the results would be pretty simple: it’s Don Draper stupid. While I agree that much of the characterization and background of the central character is overwrought and unsubtle (“meretricious,” “literally,” the reviewer jokes, assuming we all know the etymology of the word), I would suggest this only makes the question of his overwhelming attractiveness all the more fascinating. Mendelsohn finds him flat. But, at least in his review, he overlooks all the crucial scenes and instead, understandably, focuses on the lame flashbacks that supposedly explain his bad behavior.

All the characters are racist, Mendelsohn charges. But in the first scene of the first episode Don notices that the black busser clearing his table is smoking a rival brand of cigarettes—that he’s a potential new customer for his clients—and casually asks him what it would take for him to switch brands. When the manager arrives at the table to chide the busser for being so talkative, Don is as shocked as we are. I can’t recall a single scene in which Don is overtly racist.

Then there’s the relationship between Don and Peggy, which, as difficult as it is to believe for all the other characters, is never sexual. Everyone is sexist, yet in the first scene bringing together Don, Peggy, and Pete, our protagonist ends up chiding the younger man, who has been giving Peggy a fashion lesson, for being disrespectful. In season two, we see Don in an elevator with two men, one of whom is giving the raunchy details of his previous night’s conquest and doesn’t bother to pause the recounting when a woman enters. Her face registers something like terror, Don’s unmistakable disgust. “Take your hat off,” he says to the offender, and for a brief moment you wonder if the two men are going to tear into him. Then Don reaches over, unchecked, removes the man’s hat, and shoves it into his chest, rendering both men silent for the duration of the elevator ride. I hate to be one of those critics who reflexively resort to their pet theory, but my enjoyment of the scene long preceded my realization that it entailed an act of altruistic punishment.

The opening credits say it all, as we see a silhouetted man, obviously Don, walking into an office which begins to collapse, and cuts to him falling through the sky against the backdrop of skyscrapers with billboards and snappy slogans. How far will Don fall? For that matter, how far will Peggy? Their experiences oddly mirror each other, and it becomes clear that while Don barks denunciations at the other members of his creative team, he often goes out of his way to mentor Peggy. He’s the one, in fact, who recognizes her potential and promotes her from a secretary to a copywriter, a move which so confounds all the other men that they conclude he must have knocked her up.

Mendelsohn is especially disappointed in Mad Men’s portrayal, or rather its failure to portray, the plight of closeted gays. He complains that when Don witnesses Sal Romano kissing a male bellhop in a hotel on a business trip, the revelation “weirdly” “has no repercussions.” But it’s not weird at all because we experience some of Sal’s anxiety about how Don will react. On the plain home, Sal is terrified, but Don rather subtly lets him know he has nothing to worry about. Don can sympathize about having secrets. We can just imagine if one of the characters other than Don had been the one to discover Sal’s homosexuality—actually we don’t have to imagine it because it happens later.

Unlike the other characters, Don’s vices, chief among them his philandering, are timeless (except his chain-smoking) and universal. And though we can’t forgive him for what he does to Betty (another annoying character, who, like some women I’ve dated, uses the strategy of being constantly aggrieved to trick you into being nice to her, which backfires because the suggestion that your proclivities aren’t nice actually provokes you), we can’t help hoping that he’ll find a way to redeem himself. As cheesy as they are, the scenes that have Don furrowing his brow and extemporizing on what people want and how he can turn it into a marketing strategy, along with the similar ones in which he feels the weight of his crimes against others, are my favorites. His voice has the amazing quality of being authoritative and yet at the same time signaling vulnerability. This guy should be able to get it. But he’s surrounded by vipers. His job is to lie. His identity is a lie he can’t escape. How will he preserve his humanity, his soul? Or will he? These questions, and similar ones about Peggy, are what keep me watching.

Don Draper, then, is a character from a long tradition of bad boys who give contradictory signals of their moral worth. Milton inadvertently discovered how powerful these characters are when Satan turned out to be by far the most compelling character in Paradise Lost. (Byron understood why immediately.) George Lucas made a similar discovery when Han Solo stole the show from Luke Skywalker. From Tom Sawyer to Jack Sparrow and Tony Soprano (Weiner was also a writer on that show), the fascination with these guys savvy enough to get away with being bad but sensitive and compassionate enough to feel bad about it has been taking a firm grip on audiences sympathies since long before Don Draper put on his hat.

A couple final notes on the show's personal appeal for me: given my interests and education, marketing and advertising would be a natural fit for me, absent my moral compunctions about deceiving people to their detriment to enrich myself. Still, it's nice to see a show focusing on the processes behind creativity. Then there's the scene in season four in which Don realizes he's in love with his secretary because she doesn't freak out when his daughter spills her milkshake. Having spent too much of my adult life around women with short fuses, and so much of my time watching Mad Men being annoyed with Betty, I laughed until I teared up.

Review of "Building Great Sentences," a "Great Courses" Lecture Series by Brooks Landon

2011-07-05T10:02:00.001-07:00

You’ve probably received catalogues in the mail advertising “Great Courses.” I’ve been flipping through them for years thinking I should try a couple but always being turned off by the price. Recently, I saw that they were on sale and one in particular struck me as potentially worthwhile. “Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft” is taught by Brooks Landon, who is listed as part of the faculty at the University of Iowa. It turns out, however, he’s not in any way affiliated with the august Creative Writing Workshop, and though he uses several example sentences from literature I’d say his primary audience is people interested in Rhetoric and Composition—and that makes the following criticisms a bit unfair. So let me first say that I enjoyed the lectures and think it well worth the money (about thirty bucks) and time (twenty-four half-hour-long lectures).

Brooks is obviously reading from a teleprompter, and he’s standing behind a lectern in what looks like Mr. Roger’s living room decked out to look scholarly. But he manages nonetheless to be animated, enthusiastic, and engaging. He gives plenty of examples of the principles he discusses, all of which appear in text form and are easy to follow—though they do at times veer toward the eye-glazingly excessive.

The star of the show is what Landon calls “cumulative sentences,” those long developments from initial capitalized word through a series of phrases serving as free modifiers, each building on its predecessor, focusing in, panning out, or taking it as a point of departure as the writer moves forward into unexplored territory. After watching several lectures, I went to the novel I’m working on and indeed discovered more than a few instances where I’d seen fit to let my phrases accumulate into a stylistic flourish. The catch is that these instances were distantly placed from one another. Moving from my own work to some stories in the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker, I found the same trend. The vast majority of sentences follow Strunk and White’s dictum to be simple and direct, a point Landon acknowledges. Still, for style and rhetorical impact, the long sentences Landon describes are certainly effective.

Landon and I part ways, though, when it comes “acrobatic” sentences which “draw attention to themselves.” Giving William Gass a high seat in his pantheon of literary luminaries, Landon explains that “Gass always sees language as a subject every bit as interesting and important as is the referential world his language points to, invokes, or stands for.” While this poststructuralist sentiment seems hard to object to, it misses the point of what language does and how it works. Sentences can call attention to themselves for performing their functions well, but calling attention to themselves should never be one of their functions.

Writers like Gass and Pynchon and Wallace fail in their quixotic undertakings because they perform too many acrobatics. While it is true that many readers, particularly those who appreciate literary as opposed to popular fiction—yes, there is a difference—are attuned to the pleasures of language, luxuriating in precise and lyrical writing, there’s something perverse about fixating on sentences to the exclusion of things like character. Great words in great sentences incorporating great images and suggestive comparisons can make the world in which a story takes place come alive—so much so that the life of the story escapes the page and transforms the way readers see the world beyond it. But the prompt for us to keep reading is not the promise of more transformative language; it’s the anticipation of transforming characters. Great sentences in literature owe their greatness to the moments of inspiration, from tiny observation to earth-shattering epiphany, experienced by the people at the heart of the story. Their transformations become our transformations. And literary language may seem to derive whatever greatness it achieves from precision and lyricism, but at a more fundamental level of analysis it must be recognized that writing must be precise and lyrical in its detailing of the thoughts and observations of the characters readers seek to connect with. This takes us to a set of considerations that transcend the workings of any given sentence.

Landon devotes an entire lecture to the rhythm of prose, acknowledging it must be thought of differently from meter in poetry, but failing to arrive at an adequate, objective, definition. I wondered all the while why we speak about rhythm at all when we’re discussing passages that don’t follow one. Maybe the rhythm is variable. Maybe it’s somehow progressive and evolving. Or maybe we should simply find a better word to describe this inscrutable quality of impactful and engaging sentences. I propose grace. Indeed, a singer demonstrates grace by adhering to a precisely measured series of vocal steps. Noting a similar type of grace in writing, we’re tempted to hear it as rhythmical, even though its steps are in no way measured. Grace is that quality of action that leaves audiences with an overwhelming sense of its having been well-planned and deftly executed, well-planned because its deft execution appeared so effortless—but with an element of surprise just salient enough to suggest spontaneity. Grace is a delicate balance between the choreographed and the extemporized.

Grace in writing is achieved insofar as the sequential parts—words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters—meet the demands of their surroundings, following one another seamlessly and coherently, performing the function of conveying meaning, in this case of connecting the narrator’s thoughts, and experiences to the reader. A passage will strike us as particularly graceful when it conveys a great deal of meaning in a seemingly short chain of words, a feat frequently accomplished with analogies (a point on which Landon is eloquent), or when it conveys a complex idea or set of impressions in a way that’s easily comprehended. I suspect Landon would agree with my definition of grace. But his focus on lyrical or graceful sentences, as opposed to sympathetic or engaging characters—or any of the other aspects of literary writing—precludes him from lighting on the idea that grace can be strategically lain aside for the sake of more immediate connections with the people and events of the story, connections functioning in real-time as the reader’s eyes take in the page.

Sentences in literature like to function mimetically, though this observation goes unmentioned in the lectures. Landon cites the beautifully graceful line from Gatsby,

“Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind” (16).

The multiple L’s roll out at a slow pace, mimicking the women and the scene being described. This is indeed a great sentence. But so too is the later sentence in which Nick Carraway recalls being chagrined upon discovering the man he’s been talking to about Gatsby is in fact Gatsby himself. Nick describes how Gatsby tried to reassure him:

“He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly.” The first notable thing about this sentence is that it stutters. Even though Nick is remembering the scene at a more comfortable future time, he re-experiences his embarrassment, and readers can’t help but sympathize. The second thing to note is that this one sentence, despite serving as a crucial step in the development of Nick’s response to meeting Gatsby and forming an impression of him, is just that, a step. The rest of the remarkable passage comes in the following sentences:

“It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care” (52-3).

Beginning with a solecism (“reassurance in it, that…”) that suggests Nick’s struggle to settle on the right description, moving onto another stutter (or seemed to face) which indicates his skepticism creeping in beside his appreciation of the regard, the passage then moves into one of those cumulative passages Landon so appreciates. But then there’s the jarring incongruity of the smile’s vanishing. This is, as far as I can remember, the line that sold me the book when I first read it. You can really feel Nick’s confusion and astonishment. And the effect is brought about by sentences that are markedly ungraceful. (Dashes are wonderful for those break-ins so suggestive of spontaneity and advance in real-time.)