Is Brian Williams being punished just for being human?

Robert Wright thinks so:

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus put false memory on the map decades ago by showing how easy it is to permanently insert new narrative elements when someone is recalling an event. This kind of research has since moved to the neurological level. Kenneth Norman, a psychologist at Princeton, studies how memories get distorted via “interactions between medial temporal structures and [the] prefrontal cortex.”

On a more anecdotal level: Norman likes to tell students about the time he was recounting to a friend something that had happened to him when he realized that it actually hadn’t happened to him. How did he know? Because it had happened to the friend he was talking to, who had once recounted the experience to Norman—and who now helpfully reminded him of this fact. Norman, somewhat like Williams, had conflated his experience with someone else’s.

The parallels go beyond that. The memory Norman had appropriated was of seeing a famous actor in a particular restaurant. It was a restaurant he had actually been in, and the actor was someone he had seen—just not in person. So the key visual elements for the false memory were in place, ready for a little dramatic tweaking.

So too with Williams: He had been in the kind of helicopter that was hit and damaged, he had made an unplanned landing after experiencing a violent jolt (from the release of heavy equipment the helicopter was carrying), and he had then seen the damaged helicopter on the ground—not to mention subsequently seeing images of it juxtaposed with images of himself. So a minor reshuffling of his mind’s archival imagery was all that was necessary.

Most of us have no way of knowing how far our memories depart from reality, since we rarely find ourselves in the situation Norman found himself in—recounting a “memory” to its actual owner. Nor do we do what Williams did—retell the same stories on videotape over many years and then suddenly have that whole database subjected to crowdsourced fact-checking.

Of course, Williams knew these retellings were being videotaped. And in the case of many of the retellings that are now being scrutinized, he knew there were other witnesses to the original story. And, since he’s not stupid, that probably means his fabrications weren’t conscious and intentional, but, rather, were an illustration of human memory working as human memory often works.

Why would human brains be so fallible? The best guess is that, from the point of view of the brain’s creator, natural selection, unreliable memory is a feature, not a bug.

It makes sense when you think about it: In both Williams’s and Norman’s cases, the false memory put them closer to something important—to a famous actor, to a brush with death. So too with the helicopter pilot who on CNN at first vouched for Williams’s story. He said—and apparently believed—that he had been Williams’s pilot, but it turned out this was just his memory’s way of placing him closer to something important: a star anchorman. He later realized he had actually been flying a helicopter near the one Williams was in.

The foundational premise of evolutionary psychology is that the human brain was designed, first and foremost, to get our ancestors’ genes into subsequent generations. During our evolutionary past, high social status could help do that. Believably telling stories that connect you to important people or underscore your daring can elevate your social status. And the best way to believably tell those stories is to believe them yourself. So genes for this kind of self-deception could in theory flourish via natural selection.

If this was the only kind of natural self-deception—all of us retelling our fishing stories until trout turn into a barracuda—the world would probably be a better place, and journalism would be a more consistently honest enterprise. But unconscious dishonesty runs deeper than that.

Before elaborating, I should say that I know Williams slightly. I haven’t spoken to him, or otherwise communicated with him, in more than three years, and (if memory serves!) I communicated with him on about half a dozen occasions in all the preceding years. But my encounters were always friendly, and I’m sure that makes me look at his plight sympathetically. So judge the above paragraphs in that light.

This source of bias—when a journalist is acquainted with someone who figures in a story—is well known, and the standard remedy is to either do full disclosure or recuse yourself from writing about the story. Which is fine, but what about when the subject of our journalism is someone we may not know yet we still have strong feelings about?

Suppose, for example, that you hated Saddam Hussein. I doubt it’s a coincidence that the journalist who most doggedly and credulously circulated accounts of Hussein’s aiding and abetting Al Qaeda had already advocated war partly on the grounds of how horrible Hussein was.

But I also doubt that, in peddling this story, he was being consciously dishonest. He was just subject—as all of us are—to “confirmation bias.” We’re especially attentive to evidence that supports our predispositions—including the predisposition to believe our enemies are up to no good or that our friends are up to no bad.

In fact, it’s even subtler than that. When our friends do good things, or our enemies do bad things, we tend to attribute these deeds to “dispositional” factors. In other words: that’s just the kind of people they are. But when our friends do bad things, or our enemies do good things, we tend to chalk that up to transient situational factors—peer pressure, etc.

The social scientist Herbert Kelman has spelled out the implications: “Hostile actions by the enemy are attributed dispositionally and thus provide further evidence of the enemy’s inherently aggressive, implacable character. Conciliatory actions are explained away as reactions to situational forces—as tactical maneuvers, responses to external pressure, or temporary adjustments to a position of weakness—and therefore require no revision of the original image.”

Translation: Saddam Hussein may comply with our demands by letting weapons inspectors into his country, but that’s a temporary expedient and won’t change his long-term plans to conquer America. So we must invade. Or, to take a contemporary example: if the Iranian regime does agree to a deal that limits its nuclear program, that’s just a trick—don’t fall for it.

All of this suggests that one of the most important things journalists can do is try to report accurately and soberly about foreign governments that many of their fellow citizens consider enemies. If ever there was a case where they should try to be fair and balanced, this is it.

And if ever there was a case where that’s hard, this is it. The reason isn’t just that journalists naturally form opinions of foreign governments, and these opinions then shape their view of the facts. It’s also because our brains seem to be designed to keep us in good standing with our peers; following the crowd is natural, and fervently nationalistic crowds are especially hard to resist. This alone probably accounts for much of the media’s credulity about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. . . .

[I]f . . . someone famous is “lying,” that makes for a better story than if he’s just being human. It is, as we say in journalism, a story that’s too good to check.

"When it's Obama vs. anybody, Obama loses."

Says Robert Wright:

Why are powerful men so likely to cheat on their wives?

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, on Huffington Post, argues:

The biggest mistake we make in determining why powerful men cheat is to believe they're looking for sex. If it's sex they're after they have wives who can cater to their needs. No, these men are looking for something else entirely: validation. Men cheat not out of a sense of entitlement but out of a sense of insecurity. . . .

What makes men slowly climb the ladder of success is a desire to prove they're a somebody. They want to be and feel important. . . . It is not the promise of their potential that drives them, but the fear of being a nonentity. . . .

And that's why these men turn to women to make them feel good about themselves. They want to feel desirable. They seek to silence the inner voices that taunt them as to their own insignificance. Because of its power, sex has a unique capacity to make insecure men feel -- however fleetingly -- like they're special. Having women desire them makes them feel desirable.

Amy Alkon (the "Advice Goddess") says: "Oh, please." Rabbi Boteach "doesn't get it":

They take sex because it's there, in variety, because they can. Because it would be fun to have a little strange, and the little strange is right there bending over sweeping up a broken glass, and seems willing, and Maria is nowhere to be seen. . . .

Regarding the evolved male preference for sexual variety, as the late Margo Wilson and her husband and partner Martin Daly pointed out: Sperm are cheap; eggs are expensive.

I don't see why there needs to be a polarized debate about whether men commit adultery because they want sex. Of course they want sex. But even if Alkon's evolutionary-psychology explanation is right, that alone isn't a reason to dismiss other explanations like Rabbi Boteach's.

Robert Wright explained why in his book The Moral Animal. First, here's his explanation of why men (more than women) become increasingly likely to cheat as they get older and more successful:

As a marriage progresses, the temptation to desert should—in the average case—shift toward the man. The reason isn't, as people sometimes assume, that the Darwinian costs of marital breakup are greater for the woman. True, if she has a young child and her marriage dissolves, that child may suffer—whether because she can't find a husband willing to commit to a woman with another man's child, or because she finds one who neglects or mistreats the child. But, in Darwinian terms, this cost is borne equally by the deserting husband; the child who thus suffers is his child too, after all.

The big difference between men and women comes, rather, on the benefits side of the desertion ledger. What can each partner gain from a breakup in the way of future reproductive payoff? The husband can, in principle, find an eighteen-year-old woman with twenty-five years of reproduction ahead. The wife . . . cannot possibly find a mate who will give her twenty-five years worth of reproductive potential. This difference in outside opportunity is negligible at first, when both husband and wife are young. But as they age, it grows. . . .

A poor, low-status husband may not have a chance to desert and may, indeed, provide his wife with reason to desert, especially if she has no children and can thus find another mate readily. A husband who rises in status and wealth, on the other hand, will thus strengthen his incentive to desert while weakening his wife's. (87)

Now, here's Wright on why the ev-psych explanation isn't mutually exclusive with other psychological explanations:

Objections to this sort of analysis are predictable: "But people leave marriages for emotional reasons. They don't add up the number of their children and pull out their calculators. Men are driven away by dull, nagging wives, or by the profound soul-searching of a mid-life crisis. Women are driven out by abusive or indifferent husbands, or lured away by a sensitive, caring man."

All true. But . . . emotions are just evolution's executioners. Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes—cold, hard equations composed of simple variables: social status, age of spouse, number of children, their ages, outside opportunities, and so on. Is the wife really duller and more nagging than she was twenty years ago? Possibly, but it's also possible that the husband's tolerance for nagging has dropped now that she's forty-five and has no reproductive future. And the promotion he just got which has already drawn some admiring glances from a young woman at work, hasn't helped. (88)

"Isn't it a little alarming ... that fundamental constitutional principles can just fall by the wayside, and just nobody does anything about it ...?"

Robert Wright, who strongly opposed President Bush's invasion of Iraq, starts out by giving a hedged defense of President Obama's invasion of Libya (he sees it as "dicey" but justified and likely to succeed soon). However, he becomes disturbed once my mom, Ann Althouse, explains how constitutionally suspect Obama's actions have been. That's when he makes the statement I've put in the heading of this post:



The constitutional part of their discussion starts at 11:45.

(The Libyan city Wright at first can't remember the name of is Benghazi.)

Has affirmative action hurt Barack Obama?

Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright debate the question:



They agree that affirmative action has probably hurt Obama. They seem to agree about how it affected him early in life, while disagreeing about how his experience as president is problematically different. Wright thinks the problem is that Obama wasn't prepared for all the racism he faces now. Kaus thinks Obama wasn't prepared for the lack of racial bias affecting his presidency. (Actually, it's not clear how much they really disagree; Kaus aptly notes that Wright "snatched disagreement from agreement.")

Jonah Goldberg explains how the Tea Party will help more than hurt the Republican party, bamboozling Robert Wright with his choice of metaphor.

The 12 books that have influenced me the most

Tyler Cowen started this meme, in response to "a loyal reader" who told him:

I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.

Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias, and many others have given their lists. There's no required number of books, but most people seem to be giving around 10.

Some of the recurring authors are Plato, Nietszche, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Thomas Kuhn, Derek Parfit, Paul Johnson, and Thomas Sowell. This is all slanted by the fact that the meme was started by a libertarian economist, so the people who pick up his meme are going to be disproportionately libertarian.

Here's my list:

1. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. (Previously blogged by me and also my dad.) He looks at many of the classic philosophical problems (knowledge, free will, the meaning of life, etc.) in order to illuminate the frustrating interplay between the objective and the subjective, both of which are inescapably real. 

2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Kant's book is famously badly written, while Hume's book is pretty clearly written for the 18th century. Both of them have to be confronted by anyone trying to understand the limits of understanding. They didn't create enduring theoretical frameworks, but they still made progress by waking us up from our "dogmatic slumbers" (as Kant said Hume had done to him).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. Emotions aren't the opposite of reason — they contain intelligent thoughts and allow us to rationally interact with the outside world.

5. What's It All About? by Julian Baggini. An argument that the standard solutions to the meaning of life don't work.

6. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Blogged.) How to structure all the activities in your life to maximize happiness.

7. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. (Blogged.) You could file this under philosophy or self-help.

8. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. (Blogged.) I'm sure there are more recent books on evolutionary psychology that are better supported (at least because more research has been done since 1994), and Wright himself admits that the theory has its shortcomings. But this book offers a compelling explanation of human behavior.

9. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. He applies his dryly, lucidly analytical style to the kinds of questions that continental philosophy more often approaches with overwrought extravagance and obscurantism. The famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of many highlights; others include "Death" (blogged), "The Absurd" (blogged), "Sexual Perversion," and "The Fragmentation of Value."

10. The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn. Why we haven't, and aren't going to, solve the mind-body problem.

11. Rationality in Action by John Searle. A refreshing look at the problem of free will. (His shorter follow-up, Freedom & Neurobiology, deals with similar themes but also extends his analysis into political philosophy.)

12. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. As the back cover says, he makes the case for a revolution in our concern for animals by reasoning from beliefs most people already hold. This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.

Looking over the list, I seem to have been most interested in thinking about thought and its place in our lives, with more emphasis on the inadequacy than the power of rational thought. This emphasis is rather awkward since any such analysis is itself an attempt to think rationally. The View from Nowhere captures this awkwardness explicitly.

Feel free to post a comment either listing the books that have influenced you the most, linking to your blog post with your list, or linking to other people's lists that you've found especially interesting.

Should kids have heroes?

In a long conversation about Tiger Woods, Robert Wright subscribes to Tiger's spin that one of his great failings was to let down kids who had viewed him as their hero. But my mom, Ann Althouse, sees this as a good thing. Here's the clip, with my partial transcript below:

Wright: Do you agree that this kind of really matters, in the sense that there's all these kids who are at an impressionable age, he was God . . . Do you agree that this kind of matters in terms of affecting the future behavior patterns of these kids who are worshiping him?

Althouse: . . . Maybe a good lesson is: don't have heroes. Don't look at these people — these are just men; they're not gods. Maybe it's a little humility . . .

Wright: So you think it's good? . . .

Althouse: Yeah, yeah.

Wright: This is good for America's kids, to see that their heroes have feet of clay, so that they don't make the mistake of deifying other heroes?

Althouse: Hey, life is not a bed of roses — learn it now, kids! No, I think kids should have values. And maybe they should be taught religious values or secular ethical values. But the idea that, oh, here is an icon, you should worship him — I don't think that is good. I don't think those are good values. I think this idea of having heroes is not a good value.

Wright goes on to argue that it's futile to criticize "this idea of having heroes," because the idea is hard-wired into human beings, especially children. But I agree with my mom. I can't remember ever having a "hero" when I was a kid, or at any other time. And if I did, it was a ridiculous idea, not a concept that I'd insist remain untarnished for the kids of the present and future.

The clip below is their whole conversation on Tiger Woods. I don't generally follow sports, golf, Tiger Woods, etc., but Tiger Woods has turned out to be a very rich topic: in addition to heroism, they talk about race, Buddhism, addiction therapy, sex . . .



UPDATE: The same section I excerpted is now featured in the New York Times.

Mickey Kaus gives a trenchant critique of Obama's handling of health-care reform to an exasperated Robert Wright.

(Previously -- also Kaus-inspired: "Is the talk of 'death panels' so crazy?")

Robert Wright's self-contradictory attack on the "new atheists"

Robert Wright, who has a new best-selling book out called The Evolution of God, explains his problem with the "new atheists" -- an unfortunate term that presumably includes Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris (see below for the video version):

I think now it is more acceptable for intellectuals to openly ridicule religion than it was 15 years ago. But anyway, whatever the case . . . this bothers me, and it is part of the motivation for my writing th[e] afterword [in The Evolution of God]. And here's one reason it bothers me. In a way, at the root of that afterword is the belief that . . . being human is hard. . . . I think even harder is trying seriously to lead a moral life and be human.... If somebody is really making an earnest effort to lead a moral life, in the face of all the obstacles ... and really moral by our lights: they're decent, gentle people. They're trying to help. They're not going on jihads and killing people. It makes me just almost nauseous when someone walks up to them and say: "Don't you understand, the basis for this noble struggle is just not as intellectually sophisticated as I am?" OK? That just makes me sick. . . . But John, you do that! [He's talking to John Horgan. -- JAC] You're anti-religion! You want to wipe religion out!

I think that "nauseous" statement is wrong on a few levels.

First, I don't see how Wright could reconcile it with his comments in a diavlog between him and Joel Achenbach (again, scroll down for the video):

Achenbach: Is it not a fact that I asked you a straightforward question, I said -- these are the exact words -- "Bob, is there a God?" And you came up with this sort of Clintonesque answer ... "Depends on what the meaning of 'God' is," or something like that.

Wright: Well, don't you think it kind of does, Joel? I mean, for example, if you defined God as a laptop computer we could both just look around us and go, "Yeah, God exists." So it does depend on the definition.

Achenbach: First of all, it's the entity that's accountable for everything. OK? Has created everything and, ideally, cares about us.

Wright: No, wait, let me read exactly what you said on your little blog -- I mean your blog. You said: "We all know what we mean by God, which is someone who cares about us and has unlimited power." Now, I can tell you right away, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: How do you...

Wright: Because if God cared about us and was omnipotent, could do anything, we wouldn't suffer as much as we do, Joel! So that one's easy: no, that kind of God doesn't exist.

Achenbach: OK, I'm glad we cleared that up.

Wright: For crying out loud! But you know, most gods that people have believed in for most of history have not been those kind. They have not been omnipotent. That's, like, this Judeo-Christian, this Abrahamic hang-up.

(Previously blogged here.)


Note that he doesn't just deny the Christian/Jewish/Islamic God's existence, but he also takes a distinctly pugnacious tone (it's "obvious"; the Abrahamic religions have a "hang-up," etc.).

He makes a similar statement in the same diavlog where he makes the above "nauseous" statement:

Horgan: Bob, let me just ask you, right to your virtual face: do you believe in a loving god?

Wright: Do I believe in the sense of having confidence that one exists?

Horgan: Just answer the question, Bob!

Wright: Well, the answer to that is no.*

* I've left in more discussion in the video below. If you watch the video, do you think he accurately characterizes what atheists necessarily believe about morality?





Now, Wright has publicly stated that he was raised devoutly Southern Baptist and rejected the religion. He's said he doesn't strictly follow any religion but is, at most, a "bad Buddhist." If he really believed that Abrahamic religion were essential to being good, presumably he'd still believe in it. But actually, he says that his sense of right and wrong comes from thinking about concrete facts in the world within a utilitarian framework.

Wright doesn't seem that different from Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" he excoriates. (I don't think Harris is very concerned with disproving the existence of God, hence the scare quotes -- but that's how Wright and others refer to him.)

Both Sam Harris and Bob Wright reject Christianity/Judaism/Islam and prefer a vague Eastern mystical alternative. They both view the world through a modern/secular framework in which science tells a lot about the physical world but doesn't provide everything you need to live a meaningful life. They both recognize that a lot of evil has been done in the name of religion, and that Christian/Jewish/Islamic sacred texts include a contradictory mix of good principles (don't kill, don't steal, give to charity, etc.) and bad ones (advocating or at least condoning violence, slavery, prejudice, etc.).

The main difference I see is that Harris tends to see religion as the cause of things like the Crusades and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Wright thinks that's ridiculous because those conflicts were actually motivated by land disputes. Both of them are being far too confident that they know what would have happened in a world without religion. We'll never know what that counterfactual would have looked like. So I think it's futile to try to point to human behavior -- whether it's war or donating to charity or anything -- and say: "Aha, this was caused by religion! Gee, isn't religion good/bad/___?" Harris and Wright have each decided to adopt a posture -- Harris's being more anti-religion, Wright's being more pro-religion -- and they'll relentlessly interpret the facts to fit this stance.

I also take issue with Wright's language (in the first clip in this post) about how the "new atheists" hold themselves out as being on such a lofty intellectual level that the commoners should defer to their superior intellects. Maybe this is a fair critique of Dawkins's The God Delusion. But I don't think Harris (in The End of Faith) or Hitchens (in God Is Not Great) say anything of the sort. You don't even get that sense from reading between the lines of their books. Those books actually aren't written on an especially high intellectual level. They're easy, fast reads. (I say this as a very slow reader.) The M.O. of both authors is to collect a bunch of facts -- many of which are readily accessible and will be familiar to the average reader -- and make common-sense observations about them.

Another undertone to Wright's "nauseous" comment -- with its vivid language about the new atheists "walking up to" religious people and so on -- is that Harris and Hitchens are simply rude to write their books. (I'm picking on Wright, but many others have made this argument.) Well, the content of most nonfiction books that make persuasive arguments would be rude if you repeated it in the wrong company. If you've noticed that your co-worker has a lot of anti-war bumper stickers on their car, you probably won't tell them about all the great arguments made in the book you just read by Robert Kagan -- but Kagan still writes smart books about foreign policy that are worth reading.

I think it's quite common for people to have blunt discussions about what they like and don't like about this or that religion (or about those who don't subscribe to any religion). You might not choose to talk about it, say, at work, or even with certain close friends or family members, but maybe you'll have the conversations with other close friends or family members. I don't see what's wrong with writing books about these issues that people are going to think about and talk about anyway.

It's also too easy to forget the fact that criticizing religions -- even in a harsh or over-the-top way -- isn't unique to the "new atheists." It's done all the time by people of all religious stripes. The adherents of one religion will regularly criticize those of other religions. People within a religion will even criticize other followers of the same religion. And when there are criticisms being made out there in the world, they're probably going to be reflected in books if they're on enough people's minds. Whether you like it or not, Christians (for instance) are going to write books supporting their Christian views, secular humanists are going to write books supporting their secular humanist views, and so on.

Now, the fact that secular humanists enjoy this kind of freedom of expression along with religious people hasn't been true for most of human history. But we're not in most of human history; we're in 2009. It's inevitable now.

And I'm not too worried about the possibility that Hitchens/Harris/Dawkins might hurt religious people's feelings. People who are easily offended by criticisms of religion aren't likely to read those books anyway. But to many people -- including people who are kept up at night wondering if they're evil for disagreeing with the faith of their family, and including gay people who wonder if they're going to go to Hell, and even including devout believers who simply enjoy reading an honest polemic from the other side -- the books might be quite welcome.

So, go ahead and criticize the "new atheists" for making specific points you disagree with. But don't criticize them just for harshly criticizing religion -- unless you're also going to criticize everyone else who does so. That includes a whole lot of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And it certainly includes Bob Wright.

My favorite quotes from a year of blogging

The following are my favorite quotes by other people that I've blogged in my first year of blogging (April 12, 2008 to April 11, 2009).

For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the attribution link and look for it in the original post.


LIFE

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton


WORK

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk


ENVIRONMENT

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"If you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian." -- Mark Bittman

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


RELIGION

-- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
-- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust." -- Colin McGinn

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- President Obama's budget director Peter Orszag, as quoted by David Leonhardt

"The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes." -- Richard Posner

"And that was an unedited interview with the secretary of state taped earlier this morning from Jordan. We appreciate Secretary Powell's willingness to overrule his press aide's attempt to abruptly cut off our discussion as I began to ask my final question." -- Tim Russert


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong -- I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." -- Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


GENDER

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful." -- Pashe Keqi, as reported by Dan Bilefsky

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- "Sofa King"

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling, as reported by Gene Weingarten

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

Hope-based administration

In the midst of an overwritten, over-metaphored piece called "Is Obama skidding or crashing," Penn Jillette sums up exactly how I'm feeling about the Obama administration right now, except for the part about being twice Obama's weight:

President Obama is so damn smart. He just drips smart. He clearly understands stuff that we could never understand. He's trustworthy. ... If I weren't twice his weight, I'd fall back with my eyes closed into his caring arms in one of those cheesy '70s church trust exercises. He could talk me into anything.

Obama tells us that we can spend our way out of debt. He tells us that even though the government had control over the banks and did nothing to stop the bad that's going on, if we give them more control over more other bank-like things, then they can make sure bad stuff doesn't happen ever again. He says we can get out of all those big wars President Bush caused by sending more troops into Afghanistan. And I don't know. I really don't know.

RELATED: This blog post by my mom from right after the financial crisis exploded:

Democrazy.

A typo I just made while trying to IM the line "this shows we don't really have a democracy." The topic was how impossible it is for almost anyone to understand the current financial crisis, how disembodied it is from the presidential candidates we've been so focused on, and how we are forced by the complexity of the system to rely on experts whose reliability we cannot judge.

That was about an IM conversation she and I had in September 2008. I don't think the situation has gotten significantly better since then.

I feel like giving up on reading the news, then checking back in a year or two to see how things went. In the meantime, trying to figure out what's going on seems hopeless.

What Katha Pollitt doesn't get about Ross Douthat's sexual conservatism

Katha Pollitt has an article in The Nation that begins:

Liberal blogger men are thrilled with the New York Times's appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page.

Why "liberal blogger men"? Because Pollitt thinks that these "men" wouldn't be so "thrilled" about Douthat if they were women. Why? Because Douthat says things like this (quoted by Pollitt — I couldn't find the original source):

[I]t . . . makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they're more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along.

If you Google this quote, you'll see it's been frequently ridiculed on the internet. But I haven't seen anyone, including Katha Pollitt (who sarcastically calls it "thoughtful commentary"), actually explain what's wrong with it.

That passage is an attempt to give an evolutionary explanation for a human trait. I don't know if Douthat is right or wrong, but you don't show that he's wrong unless you give some kind of specific argument beyond sarcastic sneering.

But are the liberal blogger men somehow slanted against women in praising Douthat? I'd say no. A few points:

1. By observing a fact about the world and then providing an evolutionary explanation of it, you're not approving of that state of affairs.

For instance, I can observe that a lot of men commit rape, and I can give an obvious evolutionary explanation for it: men, unlike women, have the physical potential to reproduce as many times as they can have sex. Since women tend to resist consenting to sex, men will have an easier time reproducing if they're willing to violate women's lack of consent. But does giving this explanation mean that I in any way approve of rape? Of course not.

I've previously blogged Robert Wright's broader point in his book The Moral Animal:

[W]e're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. . . . Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow it's peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

2. I doubt many "liberal men" are "thrilled" about this observation by Douthat, from his highly publicized article entitled "Is Pornography Adultery?":

As we try to make sense of the brave new world that VHS and streaming video have built, we might start by asking a radical question: Is pornography use a form of adultery? . . .

[A]dultery is inevitable, but it’s never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become—at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by “real” prostitutes and “real” affairs, we’re ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in.

Now, I'm a liberal blogger man, as Pollitt might put it. And I disagree with Douthat's take on pornography. Yet, reading the pornography article makes me glad the NYT chose him as their new columnist. It's possible to learn from people you disagree with, or at least admire their willingness to take unpopular positions.

3. As Matthew Yglesias (one of the liberal blogger men Pollitt criticizes) points out, he can endorse Douthat as the columnist without endorsing everything Douthat has written:

I think that conservatives such as Ross Douthat are regularly wrong about a wide variety of important topics. Thus, instances of them being wrong can be easily produced. . . . That said, . . . I don’t think it makes one a traitor to progressive politics . . . to think it’s a good thing when conservatives-who-offer-more replace conservatives-who-offer-less.

Pollitt openly disagrees with Yglesias on that point: she wishes Bill Kristol had stayed at the NYT because he's "a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory." The problem is, it's hard to have a useful debate when one side doesn't make the best possible case for itself. If you're a liberal and you really believe in the merit of your liberal views, you should want them to be pitted against the most thoughtful conservatives, even if (especially if) they sometimes take positions that make you uncomfortable.

Bertrand Russell on the impulses that drive our actions

Continuing the series of insights from Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness (see this tag for all the posts)...

In these passages from 1930, he seems to hint at evolutionary psychology, which would have put him ahead of his time:

9. "Loss of zest in civilized society is very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential to our way of life. The savage hunts when he is hungry, and in so doing is obeying a direct impulse. The man who goes to his work every morning at a certain hour is actuated fundamentally by the same impulse, namely the need to secure a living, but in his case the impulse does not operate directly and at the moment when it is felt; it operates indirectly through abstractions, beliefs and volitions." (133)

That reminds me of something Robert Wright says in The Moral Animal: "We aren't designed to stand on crowded subway platforms, or to live in suburbs next door to people we never talk to, or to get hired or fired, or to watch the evening news. This disjunction between the contexts of our [evolutionary] design and of our lives is probably responsible for much psychopathology, as well as much suffering of a less dramatic sort." (38-9)

10. "Very few men or women will have children from a sense of public duty, even if it were far clearer than it is that any such public duty exists. When men and women have children, they do so either because they believe that children will add to their happiness, or because they do not know how to prevent them. ...

"To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future. As a conscious sentiment, expressed in set terms, this involves no doubt a hypercivilized and intellectual outlook upon the world, but as a vague instinctive emotion it is primitive and natural, and it is its absence that is hypercivilized. A man who is capable of some great and remarkable achievement which sets its stamp upon future ages may gratify this feeling through his work, but for men and women who have no exceptional gifts, the only way to do so is through children." (152-4)

COUNTERPOINT: "Would having children make me happier?"

Robert Wright asks himself: how did we get here?

And what do we need to do to continue the world's upward moral trajectory instead of plunging into the slightly less preferable "death spiral of negativity"?

Here's an 18-minute answer by Bob Wright (the author / journalist / diavlogger known for popularizing evolutionary psychology):



You know, Bob Wright -- whom I've blogged numerous times -- reminds me of another comically dead-serious man.

He's already been compared to Buster Keaton. But no, there's someone else.

It's not just the deadpan humor.

It's also the "everyman" who's simultaneously delighted and disconcerted by that role.

And it's the wry, self-conscious astonishment at the modern world.

If you still haven't guessed: one of them founded a website called Bloggingheads, the other founded a band called...

"Is there a God?" And what's wrong with punching a robot? And can an atheist truly enjoy Thanksgiving?

I agree with just about everything Robert Wright says in this excellent discussion of whether God exists:



That's Robert Wright -- whom I've blogged repeatedly -- and Joel Achenbach, who writes the Achenblog.

Here's a transcript of the whole conversation, via Bloggingheads.

How Obama lost me, part 3

Click here for the premise of this list and #1-5.

Click here for #6-8.

At the risk of making this Obama supporter even more mad at me, here's the rest of my list of "How Obama lost me":


9. Rigidly opposing the surge

Obama's two main responses to being asked whether he was wrong on the surge (which you can see starting around 4:00 of this clip) are, to paraphrase:

• It didn't do what it was supposed to do.
  
• No one, not even Bush or McCain, expected it to achieve the positive results that it did.
  

So his position is: the surge wasn't successful enough ... and by the way, it was successful beyond our wildest dreams?!

If he wants to present himself as such a nuanced observer of the surge now, he should have taken a nuanced position back then. Instead, he seems to have opposed it without considering the possibility that it would work out.

I have very little understanding of the situation in Iraq, but I can understand this: if he got the surge right, he should explain why. He hasn't done so. If he got it wrong, he should be as blunt as John Edwards was in admitting he was wrong about whether to invade Iraq. 


10. "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." (#87 in my campaign moments list)

This line -- from a speech Obama gave to the pro-Israel AIPAC in June -- was a worse foreign-policy gaffe than anything I've heard Sarah Palin say.

Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus -- both of whom, like me, are still supporting Obama despite lots of reservations about him -- give a very thorough explanation of why it was so awful:




11. Rev. Jeremiah Wright

I don't agree with all the attention and criticism Obama's pastor got, but that's water under the bridge. It was reckless of Obama to run for president, knowing he had something as explosive as this with the potential to tilt the election to the Republicans, and apparently do nothing to prepare for it. 

He could have had a Sister Souljah moment by proactively distancing himself from Rev. Wright early on. He could have even done this out of the blue, before anything hit YouTube. And once the clips started circulating, he should have acted immediately and decisively. By dragging things out for weeks and weeks, he just delayed the inevitable reject-and-denounce, while making it look like a reluctant political calculation.   


And lastly, of course...

12. Inexperience

I hate to say it, but he shouldn't have decided to run for president with just 2 years of qualifying experience.

I think I understand his calculation: he had the growing excitement around the beginning of the primaries, whereas if he'd waited around for years being a boring ol' senator, that might have eroded his luster. But he just should taken that gamble and run in 4, 8, or 12 years -- when he would have been in his 50s or just turning 60. It would have been worth it to be able to run as someone who's more fluent in policy, has more specific accomplishments to point to, and doesn't compel people to doubt whether he's "ready."

--

So, that's my list. To be clear, none of this is reason enough for me not to vote for Obama. Every candidate has a slew of flaws, and I think McCain's are worse. There are the staggering self-reinvention and flip-flops, which dwarf anything I've seen from Obama. There's his refusal to admit that invading Iraq turned out to be a bad idea. There's his painfully shallow understanding of economics. There's his "How dare you question my integrity or righteousness -- I was a POW!" attitude, which makes Bush look humble by comparison. 

And yes, there's his age. Of course I think people in their 70s can handle serious jobs. I have no problem with, say, an 80- or 90-year-old judge, as long as they're able. But being president is a uniquely stressful and demanding job, so I do have a problem with an 80-year-old president (which is what McCain will be if he has a full, successful presidency). The idea that this is somehow offensive or taboo is ludicrous. The stakes are just too high to worry about offending people. 

--

I haven't gotten to read all the comments on this list yet, but I might have an update once I do. Thanks for all the civil discussion. 

And thanks to the many bloggers (and one Twitterer) who linked to this list and made it almost certainly my most-read content yet -- I've gotten about 20,000 visits since I started the list on Monday, compared with about 60,000 total visits to this blog. Thanks especially to Instapundit and my mom.

How Obama lost me, part 2

As I explained in this post, I've become disillusioned with Barack Obama as a candidate (read the intro to that post for the details). Here are some more points in the continuing list of reasons why:


6. Does Obama have a problem with "policy specifics"? Yes and no...

This critique has always bothered me. The fact is, most voters are moved by speeches about broad themes and values, not policy wonkery. And I find it highly suspicious that everyone makes this complaint about Obama, while no one says it about McCain, even though McCain is even more vague than Obama on policy. But...

a) Hearing Bill Clinton's convention speech, where he mentioned actual statistics and explained how they matter to ordinary people's lives, made me think: it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Obama is just not operating at the Bill Clinton level when it comes to communicating policy. Of course, very few people are at Bill Clinton's level -- but Obama has been billed as the next Clinton. And given the Democrats' history with presidential elections over the past few decades, Bill Clinton would be a pretty good person to emulate.

b) While saying "His policies are on his website!" is appropriate as a response to anyone who suggests that he truly hasn't offered specific proposals ... it's not very satisfying. If he really cares about those policies, he should be devoting real effort and political capital to trying to convince people of their merit instead of just passively hosting them on the web.

Also, he obviously didn't sit down and write that stuff from scratch and hit the "post" button; he found some smart, knowledgeable person to do it for him. Nothing wrong with that! That's true of every candidate. But it would be more useful if we could see him actually explain and defend these policies in an extemporaneous setting (or as close as you can get, given the scripted nature of campaigns).

Many Democrats are (rightly) skeptical of whether Bush, McCain, or Palin genuinely understands and believes in their own official economic policies. Voters are entitled to be equally skeptical of Obama.

c) Campaigns aren't fair -- that's life. Even if you don't agree with the narrative that "Obama is inspiring but too vague," as long as that idea is out there, it's Obama's burden to proactively convince voters otherwise.

He actually tried to do that in February while campaigning in Wisconsin ... but the result just wasn't very interesting! I watched one of his "specific policy" speeches, and the only thing I remember from it is that he wants to give college students a few-thousand-dollar tuition credit in exchange for community service. If I'm understanding it correctly, he's basically saying he'll offer a bunch of low-level government jobs specific to college students. That may be a perfectly fine thing to do, but it's not the kind of idea that's likely to sway anyone's vote. Yet it was the climactic moment of his whole policy speech.

d) A couple of his most distinctive policies -- that is, ideas specific to him rather than simply reflecting the consensus of mainstream Washington Democrats -- are notably bad ideas:

• Requiring 50 hours a year of public service from middle and high school students as a condition of federal funding for schools. I think my mom had the right call on this:
  

[C]hildren are already forced to work when they are sent to school. School is work. Respect that work. Let them know that it is work, and it's their job. And when they are done, let them play. Let them have their free time. Don't appropriate any more of their time. How dare you!

• The faith-based initiative. Why put so much emphasis on a reheated leftover from Bush's 2000 campaign? Admittedly, this is an example of actually backing up his bipartisan rhetoric with policy specifics ... but if that's what Obama's bipartisan approach is really like, then I can do without Obama's bipartisan approach! (To be clear: I admire religious organizations for doing good works, but I don't want my tax dollars favoring the religious over the secular.) He claims the program will fund only "secular programs" and not "proselytizing" ... but money is fungible: give a church more money for their charitable works, and you're indirectly giving them more money for everything else they do.
  

7. As much as I hate to admit it, there's a lot of truth to the "He's all about speeches, not ideas" critique.

This is similar to #6, but broader. In other words, even beyond policy, what has he ever said about anything that's so exciting or original?

This is another point I've been resisting for months and months, but I couldn't deny the basic truth that Robert Wright -- another skeptical Obama supporter -- hit on here (transcript of key point followed by video clip):

If you are a great orator ... and you don't use your skills to surprise people or stake out a position that's a little risky and really do the work of convincing people that that's the right position -- if you take your great oratorical skills and just keep repeating "I'm a uniter, not a divider," plus several boilerplate predictions that are totally poll-driven -- you look like an empty suit!

(end of quote -- back to me...) It's getting clearer and clearer that what has gotten him so much attention and adoration despite his inexperience is not his ideas or policies or even his life story. It's two things: he's black, and he can give a great speech. If you took those two things away, it'd be inconceivable that he'd be chosen over Biden, Richardson, or Dodd, let alone Hillary Clinton. I'm not complaining about the focus on his race -- I think it's really important to have the first black president. And I'm glad he gives a great speech. But look, fellow Obama supporters: that's not really enough, is it, considering the crisis America is in right now?

Many commenters on my previous post complained that if I'm going to make all these anti-Obama points, I shouldn't turn around and vote for him. Well, there's a difference between whether to vote for him, and whether the excitement surrounding him has been justified. None of the points I'm making in this list convince me to vote for McCain instead of Obama. But at the same time, I think it's worth pointing out that it's really hard to see the justification for the unprecedented level of excitement around the guy -- which I myself participated in.


8. His take on race has been disappointing.

I largely agreed with the praise showered on his race speech. But it was pointlessly overshadowed by the famous passage in which he criticized his own grandmother for fearing black men on the street -- the implication being: even basically decent people have some racism in their hearts.

The problem is: whether or not you think Jesse Jackson and others are racist to feel relieved if the person towards them down a dark street turns out to be white, the fact is that many Americans do feel this way and don't consider themselves racist, anymore than they'd consider it sexist to feel relieved upon seeing that the person walking towards them turns out to be a woman. It's fine with me if Obama privately thinks otherwise, but that doesn't make it a productive thing for him to say when he's running for president.

Of course, the fact that he later tried to clarify that part of the speech by explaining that his grandmother was being a "typical white person" only compounded the problem.

Another example: when he was asked at a debate whether he, as the son of a Kenyan immigrant, has had to deal with the problems facing most black Americans, he jocosely mentioned "trying to catch a cab," then pointedly cut himself off as if to say to the audience: Now, doesn't that just about say it all? Of course, this got enormous applause. First of all, if that's one of the worst problems facing blacks in America, given our racial history, then we should all be overjoyed. Second, this image conjures up an affluent man standing around in NYC, waiting for a driver who -- let's face it -- is quite likely a minority and/or an immigrant trying to make ends meet. That's not exactly a crystal-clear symbol of everyday black people being thwarted by The Man.

UPDATE: Concluded here.

The paternalistic-liberal gender double standard

I'm still in the middle of blogging Robert Wright's book The Moral Animal, but meanwhile, I have something to say about something he said in his latest diavlog with Mickey Kaus.

You can watch it here, or scroll down for the transcript:

Wright: There's any number of sentences you can begin with, "The trouble with men is...," and it's a little dicier, at least certainly in liberal circles, to begin with, "The trouble with women is..." And that's fine, I mean —

Kaus: You mean that in your PC, academic world, it's OK to do that. I'm saying: do you endorse this double standard?

Wright: Actually, I think it has a certain logic: that historically aggrieved and disempowered groups get a little more protection on the taboo front than historically empowered and privileged groups. Yeah, I actually kind of see that. Yeah.

Wright has illustrated this principle in the past by talking about "male answer syndrome" — "the tendency of men to assert things with great conviction when they have no idea what they're talking about." (The reference is about 1 minute into this clip; I've excerpted the rest just for context and because it happens to be an interesting discussion about suspected-terrorist detainees that has nothing to do with this blog post.)

I agree that men do this ... but so do women. Last year I was in a restaurant in Ithaca, NY, and a waitress was talking with a male customer who asked about another restaurant across the street with a sign that said "WINE AND TAPAS BAR." He wanted to know what "tapas" meant. She confidently replied, "Oh, that means they have wine and also beer on tap."

But unfortunately, you can often get more traction for your ideas by framing them as "I hate when men do this," rather than, "I hate when people do this." At least in the liberal enclaves of America in which I've spent most of my life, there's this unwritten rule that you can score social points by broadly ridiculing men, but you'd better not make any negative generalizations about women or you'll be ostracized. Few things are more disingenuous than men who do this men-are-terrible routine. (I remember Michael Moore doing this vehemently on Bill Maher's old show Politically Incorrect, for instance. If I recall correctly, Maher didn't let him get away with it.)

Back to Wright's rationale that we need to be extra cautious in judging women but we're allowed to freely criticize men. This baffles me. First of all, the fact that he would go out of his way to state this principle implies that he actually does have a bunch of not-so-flattering generalizations of women in his head -- he's just not going to say them out loud. Now, what exactly is the point of this? To protect people's feelings? Or, more precisely, to protect women's feelings? Why is that? Because they're, what, "the weaker sex"? And that's supposed to be the enlightened, feminist view?

To be clear, I'm not saying we should have carte blanche to throw around blatant stereotypes. But if we need to be hyper-cautious when doing it about women, then we should be equally cautious with men. The "Which gender has been the most disadvantaged?" standard is just irrelevant. The fact that your group has been disadvantaged or advantaged doesn't automatically make generalizations about that group any more or less valid.

And another thing — I've been presupposing that Wright is right that women are the ones who are disadvantaged while men are the ones who are advantaged. But it's not obvious to me that that's true. Both genders face huge and distinct disadvantages. I'd be hard-pressed to say whether it's more unfortunate to be a man or a woman. [UPDATE: See this later post for much more on this question.]

As a thought-experiment, you could imagine -- apologies to John Rawls and his veil of ignorance -- that you haven't been born yet and you get to choose which gender you want to live your life as. You get to be fully informed about what the world is like, but all you know about your future life is that you'll be a human being growing up in the United States. (Significantly, you don't know your race or sexual orientation.) Which gender would you choose to be? I think some people would choose to be a man, and others would choose to be a woman, and it's far from obvious what the wiser choice would be.

One last problem with Wright's double standard is that he wrote an influential book arguing that you can take your intuitive, common-sense gender stereotypes and use those as a starting point for genuine insights about human nature based on evolutionary psychology.* He published this book in 1994 to great acclaim and is only now, in 2008, announcing that he favors a policy of deliberately skewing gender generalizations in one specific direction (pro-woman, anti-man). Now, normally I wouldn't particularly care that some author has a bias against stating generalizations about women -- everyone has their biases, and most people have a bunch of sexist views. But Wright decided to build up an extended argument for a scientific theory on these generalizations! Of all people, I would have thought he would be willing to sacrifice political correctness for the sake of empirical accuracy.


* I don't know if he says this quite so explicitly in the book. He certainly backs up the generalizations with empirical research. But there's no denying, based on his examples, that he thinks it's legitimate to go from (a) off-hand observations of men vs. women in everyday life to (b) scientific claims that are, as he might put it, asserted with great conviction.

Commonplace blog: rebellious puppets

Before I got into the journaling that led to this blog, I thought about doing a blog-as-commonplace-book. Like the idea of a typed-up diary, though, I realized that a blog version of the underlining and marginalia in my books would be too cramped and fussy. But I still want the blog to have some of the marginalia concept. So…

I've been reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal — about how evolution shapes human behavior. As with many books, I set it aside when I was midway through it, but I plan to finish it eventually.

And, well, it's changed how I think about people! One thought that especially made an impression on me: Explaining human behavior as the result of natural selection doesn't mean justifying the behavior. This seems so obvious to me now that it almost doesn't even seem worth pointing out, but I don't know if I had realized it before reading this book. And this is what really got me:

we're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer.

He goes further:

Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

People tend to assume that if want to effect social change, you need to somehow show that nature is on your side. Thus, if you're for gay rights, you need to argue that homosexuality is inborn, not a choice.

But the problem is that we don't know that. To my knowledge, we haven't solved the mystery of homosexuality. It doesn't seem to fit very well with natural selection: why haven't gays died out as a result of their distaste for procreation? Wright (a liberal and a supporter of gay rights) raises that question and admits the answer is unclear.*

The reason we respect gays isn't that they have a well-defined place in the natural order of things. We simply respect them because they're not doing anything wrong.

I wish everyone could agree to stop equating "nature" with good, and instead adopt the view that, "Look, of course the world is a terrible place. There are huge problems intrinsic to the world itself. Some of them might be fundamental defects in human nature" — in this case, aversion to homosexuality, distrust of outside-the-mainstream behavior, etc. — "and we should try to solve them using human ingenuity. Those solutions might just as well come from rebelling against nature or tradition rather than returning to nature or tradition."

But it's hard to make this kind of argument and win over many people. One problem is religion: if you believe that God is good and is the creator of the natural order, then the natural order must be good. Maybe that's why we're going to keep getting sidetracked by "issues" that shouldn't be issues, like "Is homosexuality a choice?"

Speaking of human tendencies that are natural but evil, I also want to highlight what Wright says about rape on pages 52-53 — and, relatedly, what he says about tall men — but that will have to wait till later.

There is one point I don't see Wright addressing. He notes that male animals typically have bright colors or other features designed to attract women. This is because females are "choosier" than males when it comes to sex,*** so their preferences are more influential than males' on which traits get passed down to future generations.

But this is the opposite of what we observe in humans. Women are the ones who wear visible makeup, not men. Women have much more leeway to wear clothes with bright colors and ornate patterns. [UPDATE: This might have been too simplistic if we're talking about human beings in general rather than merely our own culture and era. See the comments. Also, this intro to one of Wright's diavlogs suggests that he himself may be an exception to the rule.] Throughout the book he explains how human traits and behavior parallel those observed in animals, but then there's this one discrepancy that seems to contradict how you'd expect the sexes to behave based on natural selection.

If men are the ones who want to have as much sex as possible (because that will maximize how many of their genes get passed on), then what's the point in women getting all dolled up?

If anyone knows the explanation for this, or has a guess, please let me know in the comments. I can't be the first person to notice this. (I tried Googling for it, but that didn't work.) Maybe it's just one of those "I'm not going to point this out because it would contradict the whole theory of this book" things. That's a big problem with books.

So, apparently this is going to be a blog with footnotes. I didn't plan that — it just happened. I'll try to cut down on them in the future.

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* He wrote the book in 1994, so it's possible that more recent research provides the answer. But something like this 2007 study offering various highly speculative theories suggests that not a lot of progress has been made since then. For example, one theory -- mentioned by both Wright and the linked study -- is that gays contribute to the survival of their own genes by caring for their family members. As Wright points out, it follows from this theory that we should be able to observe gay people being extraordinarily devoted to their nephews and nieces, far more so than heterosexuals. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that that's the case. (384-6)

** This is a huge theme of the book, and he certainly thinks it applies to humans as well as other animals.