The Determinist Explanation

Because of the autonomic responses of the chicken's internal nervous system in response to visual, auditory, and other sensory stimuli, moving through a complex neural network to stimulate the chicken's behavior. Likely, the neural programming within the chicken's brain was influenced by both pleasure and pain induction, perhaps modeled after previous experience such as when the chicken had previously crossed other roads and located a source of food, or an instinctual response left over from hundreds of thousands of generations of successfully-breeding ancestors which "hard-wires" into the unconscious motive imperatives of the chicken the notion that across the road, a place of apparent safety from foxes or other threatening predators is likely to be found, e.g., a coop. While our understanding of the natural phenomena which are the inputs leading to the particular behavior under examination is admittedly limited, a complete and comprehensive understanding of those phenomena and how they are internally processed by the subject is ultimately unnecessary to come to the realization that in no event can the chicken be understood to have "chosen" to have done this.

Three Classes

This post is about what exists in reality and how I've seen it, not what I think that reality ought to be or my moral approval or disapproval of it. On balance, I'm not particularly happy with seeing the world this way but I believe it to be a useful and accurate lens with which to understand things.

Class And Personal Experience

Perhaps the most consistent thing about the many phases of my own law practice has been the very wide spectrum of people that I have met, people from all sorts of walks of life in so many different phases of their lives. It's hard to say whether one's own experience is truly representative of the world under the best of circumstances, and my experiences have comes from people who are facing legal troubles. And you get a good sense of what people really are made of when you see them grappling with their troubles. So a substantial part of what I have to say here is based on the least reliable sort of evidence, which is anecdotal. I've little else other than media to rely on for observations about broad social classes, however – media both popular and academic, to be sure, but really, what other sources of information does anyone have about the way one's own society is structured?

Also having substantial weight on my observations here is a book which has been influential among my peer group, Paul Fussell's Class. Prof. Fussell wrote this slim and trenchant observation on American society in 1983, in an attempt to explode the myth that the United States enjoys a classless society. Fussell identified nine primary socio-economic classes in the modern United States – five of which he described as "proletarian" or less – and asserted that upward mobility between the classes was extraordinarily difficult even if one overcame the odds and acquired sufficient money to afford the kinds of things that members of the next rank up might acquire with minimal difficulty.

For instance, Fussell posited that a "high proletarian" would simply never be comfortable or fit in as part of a world of "middle class" people, because the high prole's recreational preferences, aesthetic tastes, educational experiences, and socialization habits would not match those of her neighbors. She would leave Christmas lights on the eaves of her house all year, change her own oil in the driveway of her house rather than take it to a mechanic, buy cheap beer to serve at a party when her guests would be expecting imports and white wine, prefer televised stock car racing to the Super Bowl, and so on. But more to the point would be that the high proletarian would in all probability never even get to the point that she would be in a position to make such a series of faux pas to her new neighbors because the kind of jobs she would need to get in order to make that kind of money would never open up to her – there would be formal qualifications for education and work experience that she could not meet, and social hurdles during job-selection processes which she could not overcome because of her lack of a peer group in the class to which she aspired.

The highest and lowest economic classes were, according to Fussell, at such economic extremes as to be functionally invisible to the rest of society – the very poor living under bridges, committing petty theft and scrounging garbage cans for their very survival and keeping out of sight of others so as to avoid detection by a world that hates them for their poverty; the very wealthy living in rarefied and isolated enclaves having isolated dinners served to them by their servants, in which the only subject able to generate any emotion was the pressing imperative for the preservation of capital.

The basic observation that the United States is a classified society, and that class boundaries are by this phase of our history significantly ossified and impermeable, seems so true as to be beyond reasonable dispute.

Real-Life Experience

In later editions of the book, Fussell added a new chapter, alleging the instance of a "Class X" which transcended the nine-tier system originally posited. "Class X'ers" engaged in the arts for their existence, could come from nearly any of the classes, and 'enjoyed' social mobility. Wealth to them would be irrelevant and if they exhibited skill at their craft, they could gain both fame and fortune and in that sense find easy acceptance in nearly every level of society. I have always been of the opinion that Fussell was induced to add this by his editors, who found the overall thesis of the original book too depressing despite Fussell's interjection of acidly humorous observations about the behaviors of specimens from all nine classes. The existence of such a class is in too great of contrast, too blandly optimistic, and too obviously calculated to please editors of large New York publishing houses, to enjoy substantial credibility.

Real-life experience shows that there are artists and then there are artists. There is an economic spectrum within the arts and the great, great majority of those who make their career in the arts do so in exchange for shockingly low amounts of money and live in tremendous obscurity. Those who seek entrée into the elite levels of the arts world need the right kind of education (not necessarily found in a university, mind you) before undertaking their careers and the right kind of peer network so as to be noticed by the right kinds of people. In other words, they already need to at least be in the proximity of other elites in order to become elite themselves – which is, ultimately, the definition of a class.

Real-life experience contrasts with Fussell's nearly thirty-year-old observations in many other ways. I look at myself – as a lawyer enjoying a good income and a superior education, I should fit in to what Fussell described as the "upper middle class," the third-highest tier in Fussell's taxonomy – a collection of people who have significant economic comforts, who actually want for nothing, but do not consider themselves wealthy and aspire to greater wealth than they have. But my neighbors are an aircraft engineer, a postal worker, an assistant human resources manager at a community college, a termite exterminator, a drywall applicator, and a retired plumber. Some have been to college, one (other than I) has completed graduate school. These people span the sorts of professions from "middle prole" to "upper middle"; but unlike the "upper middle" Fussell described, I actually know and socialize with my neighbors periodically. We all enjoy professional football, wear similar kinds of clothing when off work, we all sporadically enjoy nights out at various performing arts venues, and we all drink high-end beer and mid-range wines when we get together. The traits and backgrounds of these people (myself included) are all blended together.

This is not to disparage Fussell, who provides a useful framework upon which to build. But it is to say that economically, it's not necessarily any great shakes to be a lawyer anymore and it's entirely possible to have a very comfortable existence without the kind of educational and professional background that Fussell associated with the middle or upper middle class. Fussell's regime is not fundamentally incorrect – but it is too compartmentalized. It describes a continuum, not a stratification.

Capital And Class

At the same time, Fussell observed that there are people of fantastic wealth, people for whom money is so plentiful as to never be an issue. These people, he says, behave differently than those who have to work for a living. Real-life experience bears that observation out and it is enduring. They have to do something with their money and they typically put it in things like real estate and securities. Thus, I encounter such people as clients. For them, money is like air – there is always a lot of it around and even if they don't have it themselves at a particular moment, there will always be more around. There are differences in behavior and world view that come from that background.

Such people sometimes seem to lack anything one could identify as a "job." They own stuff, they do things, but there seems to be little by way of structure or pattern to it. Some day-trade online for a few hours a day, some scour real estate opportunities in something like an orderly way, but for the most part they don't pay a lot of attention to what other people do to support their activities. Like their lawyers – they hire me to do certain things and leave me alone to do them. This is pleasant enough for my practice, but in dealing with them they seem to lack a realistic understanding of what is happening on the ground with their own assets. Indeed, they are often unaware of the value of their own assets or the (highly variable for both better and worse) extent of their own creditworthiness.

More importantly, they don't always have, or at least have access to, the money which so permeates their existence. And they don't always live particularly well. I'm not talking about Mitt Romney flying coach to the winter Olympics because coach seats were the only ones available for the flight he wanted. I'm talking about trust fund babies who continually mooch money from their accountant friends while smoking a lot of pot and buying new guitars to ornament their beach houses. I'm talking about people on the make who try to put together eight-figure business deals based on half-baked ideas, and who have temper tantrums when their lawyers present them with bills for a few thousand dollars.

Those tantrums seemed inexplicable to me when I first encountered them, before I realized that my clients simply didn't have the money and were using their emotions as a substitute for the money I had requested. All the shell games with future money and investors' money they promised me at the end of the tantrums were proof that for them, the money was like the air – it was simply there, somewhere, and its presence was sufficient. Beyond that, they had never given thought about money at all.

The takeaway is that proximity to capital is the key to this class. Most of the people I'm referring to here earned their money the old-fashioned way – they got it from their parents, who got it from their parents, and so on and so on. Consequently, ready access to liquid money is not always a defining trait of this class, but money permeates their existence in a way that it does not for those who make their living like me and most likely like you, my Reader, by exchanging some kind of useful work – whether that is manual labor, intellectual work, or professional services – for money and thus survive.

Entitlement And Class

On the other end of the spectrum, I get to see people – middle-aged, sometimes even elderly – who seem to have little experience at all working. Their entire economic lives revolve around various kinds of entitlement payments from a variety of governmental agencies. Perhaps there is relatively more of this here in relatively generous California than in other parts of the country. But my experience living in Tennessee tells me that such people are found there in appreciable numbers as well. These are the apparently able-bodied people who always pay their rent late because they're waiting for their Social Security and state disability payments, which despite being electronically wired to bank accounts, always seem to arrive late.

What amazes me about dealing with this collection of people is not so much that they can survive on this kind of existence. The governmental entitlement programs are designed to achieve that goal and while the shoe doesn't always fit well, it does seem to fit most of the time. There are two things that stand out for me. First, a significant number of those who live in this way seem to do so with little real understanding of, and sometimes even apparent contempt for, people who exchange labor for money.

I say "contempt" rather than "resentment" because when I encounter them (either when they solicit my services or when I am evicting them from the homes they have failed to pay rent on) they do not evidence any real jealousy for either my station in life or my clients'. As best I can perceive, for them working is for suckers; why work when you can get the same money for doing the stuff you would rather be doing anyway? These are people in the entitlement system who grew up within it, who never really leave it for very long, and who seem to consider the ability to navigate it a fundamental life skill. They view others who lack those skills the same way I view people who do not understand the importance of having a driver's license or a checking account. This is why I refer to this group of people as a class – they are born into it, socialized into its values, and consequently face significant difficulties migrating out of it.

The second observation is that for some of these people, there seems to be a pretty substantial skill set, a collection of experiences and shared knowledge passed from person to person – a curriculum, if you will – that leads to a lifestyle that seems almost enviable.

An unemployed person lacking formal educational credentials can live in section 8 housing, in a bigger house and a nicer neighborhood than I do, paying double-digit monthly rent out of pocket, which may or may not be paid at all. AFDC provides enough money for the entire family to eat on – and indeed in many cases to eat out at restaurants with some frequency. General relief provides money. State disability and social security disability payments provide more money. Periodic low-end employment results in continuing eligibility for unemployment benefits, as well as opportunities to make workers' compensation and wrongful termination claims, from which both money and disability eligibility is extracted. The end result is that for one who is able to navigate the paperwork, one can achieve a comfortable lifestyle not involving work but including material comforts such as new cars, new clothing, state-of-the-art cell phones in near-constant use text messaging friends, and cable television. Should the rent go unpaid, they can frequently stall out the eviction for six months or more, and there is little lasting consequence for them as a result. When they get sick, their medical care and medications are paid for by a panoply of public assistance programs.

This may seem a lot when taken at first glance, but it really isn't all that improbable. In terms of absolute dollars, cable TV, cell phones, clothing, and even auto leases are not terribly expensive anymore. One suspects that the cars lack insurance, that cash is not always readily available, and credit is on a downward spiral. Still, it's hard to feel sorry for such folks because their lifestyles – the actual consuming they do – appears to exceed that of a large number of people who exchange their labor for money; they are able to engage in such consumption in exchange for conforming the patterns of their lives (how many children they have, where they live, etc.) to incentives created by the government and filling out the appropriate paperwork.

Abuse, Not Cheating

I hesitate to call such people "welfare cheats," however, because it's clear that they aren't cheating the system – they are working within it, conforming to its rules, exercising their rights. They comply with the law. That's not cheating. It might be something else we don't like (call it "abuse"), it might be a cynical manipulation of the system beyond its intent, but particularly if your ethic is that the system permits something and therefore you can do it, it is more than possible to work the system into a life that features things that many people who actually work for a living cannot afford to enjoy – not the least of which is substantial amounts of free time.

This is not to say that everyone who is enrolled in government entitlement programs behaves in such a way, which when cumulated in that fashion looks very dishonest. Not everyone possesses either the skill set or the – how to put this politely? – disposition towards the government's role in society necessarily to manipulate the system in this fashion. I'm telling myself that this sort of thing is exceeding rare. But I can't say it's nonexistent, having seen it with my own eyes. What I tell myself is that my own view of things is skewed; my own personal sampling of what's out there in the world comes from being in the courthouse more days than not, and the population of a courthouse is, by definition, selective to include people who have legal problems and therefore not representative of the population as a whole.

The Tennessee Taxonomy

What all of this demonstrates to me is that wealth and affluence are different things. There are those who do not need to work, those who do need to work, those who lack the ability to work. But one's degree of poverty or affluence is a variable independent of one's ability or need to work for a living. My observation is that there are three classes of people – those who do not need to work for a living because of their association with (although not necessarily personal possession of) capital; those who exchange their labor for money in order to survive; and those who get what they need to live by way of governmental entitlements. This is a continuum, not a stratification. One might have access to capital but still either need or want to work for a living in order to secure cash flow. One might have a background of life "in the welfare system" but genuinely seek real employment.

What's more, within each of these three broad bands of ways of life, there are degrees of affluence and poverty. Some "capital-class" people live very affluent lives, some have kind of sketchy existences. As common experience for most of us shows, some people make better money at their jobs than others. And some people are very good at working the system and some are not so good at it.

So it's not right to say we have an "upper class," a "middle class," and a "lower class." Fussell's term "proletarian" was intended to reach people who do manual labor, construction trades, and the like, and do not enjoy wealth. But it is possible to make a reasonably handsome living turning a wrench, if you do it the right way and in the right place. It is possible to engage in a traditionally high-status profession like law, and only reap a meager income.

One's class is determined not by one's social status, education, or even income, but rather in how one's subsistence is derived. This is a function of heredity.

One's affluence is not determined by one's income, but rather by one's consumption. This is much more widely variable than might appear at first glance and Fussell's taxonomy is either outmoded or was never actually right. This is why I've put together a new chart, a two-dimensional taxonomy that examines consumption separately from the means by which consumption is made possible.

The result is something that to my mind looks a little bit like a map of the state of Tennessee. I have it that way because it seems to me that those within the capital class will only be allowed to fall so low by their fellow class members – wealthy family, well-off associates, and so on – and will probably not wind up in abject, grinding poverty no matter what. And I want to reflect that while it is possible for those who live mainly on entitlements to live affluent lives, this is actually a pretty rare phenomenon.

Both axes of this taxonomy are not intended to be broken down into discrete units. If I had more skill at graphics, I'd show the colors fading smoothly in to one another. The curves of the left and right sides, representing the extremes of affluence and poverty, are not ones I'm married to, particularly, although the general shape is, I think, correct. So I'll ask your indulgence, Reader, in imagining it drawn more proficiently than I have done here.

Government entitlements and subsidies may also be perceived in certain kinds of tax incentives – home ownership, for instance, is subsidized by the home mortgage interest deduction. I include those who are employed by the government in the "Labor Class" because they do, in fact, exchange their labor for money, and therefore have the same intellectual system of what skills and activities are valuable as those who pursue employment in the private sector. They have simply chosen to exchange their labor for the government's money rather than a private employer's money.

I've struggled as to how to classify Social Security in this taxonomy; people say, "But I earned Social Security," and the benefits are derived, in part, on how much of the SSI tax one has paid throughout one's lifetime. But Social Security is also used for disability regardless of what one has (putatively) paid in to the system and the system exists to ensure at least minimal survival-level income for everyone no matter what they've paid in. One's retirement income also comes from savings and investments. The right way to treat it, as I see it, is to place it somewhere in between "Labor Class" and "Entitlement Class"; on my crudely-drawn chart, those who live mainly on Social Security would be right about the line between those two. One would move up or down based on what kind of other income was coming in.

Finally, should note that capital-class people will only be allowed to fall to a certain depth on the affluence-poverty scale, while entitlement-class people do eventually face an upper limit on how far they can rise on that scale. That is why my chart looks, roughly, like a map of the state of Tennessee. That is designed to represent the fact that there are floors and ceilings that apply based on how one's sustenance is derived.

The big point of all this is to define wealth not as either net capital or the size of one's income stream, but rather in terms of consumption – and to separate that level of consumption from the manner in which that consumption is obtained.

The Death Of A Nation: A Case Study Of Anxiety Projection

Paging Doctor Freud!

It would seem that institutionalized prejudice against homosexuals is more important to some people than patriotism and love of country. When men who have devoted enough of their lives and professional careers to achieve the very respectable rank of Colonel publish remarks such as this, one has to ask whether the very idea of a common national identity has suffered some sort of awful erosion:

I ask you, fellow citizen, after Saturday’s vote, would you give your life for our Senate? Would you give your life for our president? Or, would you go home to your family? Sadly, you know the answers already. If you never made a phone call or never entered the debate on this issue, it’s too late to care now.

Hat tip to Jim Burroway for this astonishingly sour grapes quote.

Now, I'm reminded of a few other things, both historical and demographic, which cause me to react to this sentiment with something other than despair. Unlike other advocacy groups, I tend to think that the young people who are doing the real, on-the-ground work of our military, are much more concerned with whether their brothers and sisters in arms can shoot straight than whether they are straight. There is little reason to think that recruitment will suffer so badly that this will happen:

This looks beyond conservative to me; it looks reactionary -- resistance to change for the sake of resisting change. When National Review offered as a slogan and image the idea of conservatism as a force which "stands athwart history, yelling Stop", the idea was "Hey, let's think this through before we do it."

But we have thought about allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. We've studied it. We've looked at other nations' experiences in their military. We've determined that the great majority of servicemembers and the great majority of citizens whom they serve are unconcerned with the sexual orientation of soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Resisting change for the sake of resisting change is not really aimed at improving anything. And the military is a uniquely adaptable institution within our society, precisely because it is so hierarchical, so driven by orders from above. A conservative (in the mold of a William F. Buckley, at least) can eventually be persuaded to try something new -- they're cautious about it, but sufficient data and study and relation of the new idea to timeless principles that work to make society stronger can overcome that caution and be embraced as welcome developments.

Contrary to the claims of some that laws reflecting evolving social realities irresponsible render the military into a political football, the truth of the matter is that while there is resistance to change, change happens and the military needs to adapt to that change and is possessed of a sufficiently supple internal social fabric to do so:

Now, I'll grant you that the last clip is fiction, but like most good fiction it makes an important point about reality: the military has been socially engineered before, and it came out stronger for it.

That there is lingering paranoia over homosexuals serving in the military is entirely understandable -- paranoia is founded, in many cases, upon fear of homosexual tendencies within oneself. Some refer to this as "repression of homosexuality," but it looks to me like it is more exact to say it is unresolved anxiety about the possibility that one might be homosexual, rather than anxiety about actual homosexual feelings in one who identifies as heterosexual. Regardless, paranoia is the result of not resolving that anxiety in a healthy way. What we're seeing is not really the erosion of our national identity, it's people being forced to confront their unresolved, or ill-resolved, internal anxieties, and projecting them out onto the larger world. In this projection, what starts out looking like a logical syllogism progresses into something at once darker and more irrational.

1. I'm afraid that I might be gay. Being gay is bad.
2. I identify with, or at least I like, the military.
3. If the military accepts gay people, that means being gay isn't bad.
4. But being gay is bad, so if the military accepts gay people, that means the military is bad.
5. If the military is bad, the military must be gay.
6. If I identify with, or at least like, the military which I now know to be gay, that must mean I am gay myself.
7. Therefore now I'm gay and I don't want to be gay because that's bad!

That such a line of thinking is obviously irrational and fraught with all manner of structural errors is beside the point. When you peel back the thought process of those who see some sort of fundamental, existential threat in the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, you're going to see something that looks a lot like that.

Nationalism isn't dying and the military will adapt to including openly homosexual members within its ranks. We shouldn't let the irrational psychological anxieties of some get in the way of moving our nation, and its essential institutions like the military, into the twenty-first century. The military has had gay people within its ranks for generations, of course, and somehow it functions well, as it always had. There are lots of old, old jokes about how back in the day when only men served in the military and especially in the Navy, sailors passed the time out at sea by coupling up, but somehow none of those jokes ever related what happens in the minuscule sleeping quarters of a ship with the ability of that ship to function in combat. There has always been recognition that even if those sailors turned gay when the ship lost sight of the horizon, they were still tough, capable fighting men serving America.

The only thing that's different now than what was in those old jokes is that soon, those soldiers and sailors won't have to pretend their straight if they aren't -- they won't have to lie in order to serve honorably. This will results in less cognitive dissonance, less anxiety, less lying to oneself and others. In the long run, our military will be stronger for it.

The Nineteenth Retirement

ESPN ought to thank Brett Favre for providing fodder for a round-the-clock, non-stop coverage item.  You can be sure that coverage of this, Brett Favre's most recent announcement of his retirement from professional football, will be the only thing discussed in any sports media today.  When the Vikings offer to raise his salary to squeeze just one more year" out of the 40-year-old 19-year veteran, Favre's fourth unretirement will receive the same level of coverage, as will his post-unretirement re-retirement announcement.  This will all happen before the regular NFL season begins.

Come to think of it, most of Favre's previous retirement, un-retirement, re-retirement, re-un-retirement, re-re-retirement, re-re-un-retirement, re-re-re-retirment, and re-re-re-un-retirement announcements, just like today's re-re-re-re-retirement announcement, all seemed to happen during pre-season training camps or otherwise in the few weeks leading to the beginning of the formal NFL season.  Cynics might suggest that it is all to jockey for additional money, but I would not agree.  Favre makes way more in endorsements than in salary, so salary isn't the big issue for him so much as ability to play and maintain visibility and thus make his endorsements valuable. 

No, my thinking is it's good old-fashioned narcissism, which ill-suits someone whose record speaks for itself and places him indisputably and forever in the pantheon of "greatest ever" contenders -- and may there never be a clear winner.

Authadeia

The Wife said to me the other day that she admires my skills at diplomacy and ability to navigate social situations.  This absolutely blew my mind.  When I look in the mirror, I see a man who prefers the company of a few close friends to anything involving new people, and whose self-consciousness over his inability to engage in small talk nearly parallels that of his inability to whistle.*

All too frequently, I feel very awkward and uncomfortable in social situations, particularly ones involving a large number of people whom I have never met.  A large party of strangers is a deeply intimidating environment for me, not one into which I eagerly dive in the hopes of emerging with dozens of new friends. Small talk and light jokes have always been a tremendous effort of imagination for me, which have much more often than not left me drained by the end of the evening.  Talking about nothing is difficult.

That's not to say I can't, don't, or won't engage in that sort of social activity.  I do have the skills and abilities necessary to meet new people and make myself agreeable to them.  But I don't enjoy or seek out such situations and nearly all of the time, I find myself uninterested in pursuing a friendship with the people I thus meet.  Not that I feel superior to them or that becoming friends with new people is some kind of condescension.  In truth, what restrains me is quite probably my own lack of self-confidence because I wonder why people would want to be friends with me.

So mingling at parties, mixers, and bars has always been tough for me to do.  I have always found being placed in an environment with a lot of new people to be mentally and emotionally exhausting, and I likely always will.  In order to really feel comfortable at a larger social gathering that includes new people, I need to have known about half the people there before I got there.  That's probably why I never flourished in politics; I always preferred policy to politics anyway. 

I express these things as regrets for a personal shortcoming because I think they are a personal shortcoming. I envy the people who truly enjoy meeting new people and therefore become very good at doing it.  I have never seen myself that way or felt like such a person and such people seem to be happier and better off in the world than I.  That doesn't mean I want a social angel to come along and introduce me to a dazzling galaxy of interesting new friends; it doesn't mean I crave sympathy or pity for my inadequate social life.  I have a more than adequate social life and a healthy stable of friends.  Making new friends is not easy or enjoyable, but I am capable of completing this task.  I do wish I didn't think of it as a "task."

After all, the professional life I have chosen for myself requires that I do this sort of thing from time to time, whether it be with new clients or prospects, new adversaries or judges, or at professional networking functions like bar association meetings or mixers.  When in such a situation, I make the effort to meet people and try as hard as I can to think up new kinds of nothing to talk about with people who I do not know.  I do go through lots of business cards because that's part of what it is to be a practicing lawyer; you need to get your name out there and meet lots and lots of people.  But I also have to be reminded from time to time by one of the partners in my firm to schmooze up my eviction clients the same way a child has to be reminded by his parents to make his bed or put away his dishes and for the same reason:  it's a chore, something one does perhaps to earn a reward but which is very different from the reward itself.

But it's one of the facets about my profession and some dimensions of my social life which are somewhat unpleasant, the same way that I find picking up after my dogs every couple of days to be a disagreeable part of the otherwise-enjoyable companionship which I enjoy with my pets. 

What's amazing is that apparently, I've been able to subsume my real feelings about this so convincingly that more than six years after we married, my wife had no idea about it.  It's very odd to come across such a stark contrast between my own self-image and that of someone so close to me.  I can't imagine how that came to be.  I wonder what other kinds of disconnects between my self-image and others' perceptions of me might be out there.

I suspect that I might be happier should I remain ignorant of other answers to that.  Learning that my wife perceives me to be more socially adept than I think I am has not made me any more or less happy than I was before.  It has, however, left me somewhat unsettled.


* That's right, I can't whistle; when I pucker up my lips air soundlessly blows out.  I've never been able to whistle despite dozens if not hundreds of people throughout forty years of my life offering the profoundly unhelpful advice, "Aw, come on, it's easy!"  Please resist the impulse to whistle should you encounter me in person and remember this bit of trivia; it only amplifies my sense of personal inadequacy and sadness at my inability to whistle.  After all, if you met a paraplegic, you hopefully would not tell her that it was easy for you to do jumping jacks and then demonstrate how you can just do them whenever you feel like it.  If you possessed more empathy than that of a cobra contemplating a nearby wounded mouse, you would anticipate that such behavior would hurt the paraplegic's feelings.  The emotional parallel for a non-whistler is closer than you might imagine.

Blame It On The Soviets For Going Away

A random thought from a psychologist:  If it seems that our country's political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, intractable, and hostile, blame the Soviet Union for it. 

Specifically, blame the Soviets for collapsing and depriving us of a meaningful enemy.  If we have a common enemy, a common repository for our instinctual aggression and hostility, then whatever differences we have amongst ourselves will pale in comparison and be kept within the realm of manageable political disagreements. 

But each of us has 'X' amount of hostility, aggression, and need for dominance within ourselves, and that holds true for our elected officials, opinion leaders, and everyone else who is making decisions or even simply involved in politics through self-selection.  Since they don't have the Soviets to rally against, their aggression has to find an outlet elsewhere in the form of conflict. 

Thus the viciousness with which we aim rhetoric at people little more threatening than common criminals (now re-named "terrorists") and the venomous state of internal political discourse.  There must be conflict, there must be aggression, there must be a struggle for dominance -- that is built in to being human.  Freud calls it the "id" and Jung calls it the need for the "Other."  So since we have no external enemies against whom we may direct these aggressive impulses, we find new enemies and the only sources of conflict visible are internal disagreements.  Thus, liberals and conservatives scarcely even recognize one another as being loyal to America anymore.

I'm not entirely sure I buy it.  Europe has nasty politics, but Europeans for the most part recognize it as "just politics" and maintain national identity and cohesiveness.  Europeans are just as human as the rest of us, and there isn't a lot of political expression of aggression within Europe, either external or internal, that compares to what can be seen in the U.S.  Consider the leaders of Europe's largest national economies -- Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, Dmitriy Medvedev, Nicholas Sarkozy, and Silvio Berlusconi.  Of them, only Berlusconi has any discernibly aggressive qualities in his public personality, which in his case manifest not in fiery rhetoric but rather in a mercurial pattern of sexual excess and casual corruption.  The others are dull technocrats.  And before you protest that it's Putin, not Medvedev, running the show in Russia, recall that Putin has his technocratic side as well (although I'll concede he demonstrates more aggression than Medvedev in his public persona).

Still, it's an interesting idea to chew on for a while.

Aristotle's Hedonic Salad

A longstanding philosophical disagreement I have with some is that there is a difference between happiness and pleasure.  Today, I got a good wrinkle on that debate.

I was asked whether I get more pleasure from my writing, from reading, or from watching football on television.  The context was mainly my interlocutor's observation that when he watches a football game, he generally finds it only moderately entertaining, and he observes that I seem to get a lot of pleasure out of it.  He was curious as to why he and I responded differently to the same thing, and even more curious about how he could find some way of measuring the degree to which our responses differed.

My answer was a bit off-the-cuff and called back on a concept I originally learned way back in high school when I took a philosophy class through the local junior college.  In the context of discussing utilitarianism, the professor had suggested that one way of looking at "the good" which utilitarian ethics are supposed to maximize would be to say that pleasure is good and pain is bad.  So, how then to measure pleasure and pain and thus evaluate whether a particular action was moral or not?  This isn't something you can quantify, right?

Well, let us posit that pleasure can be quantified.  My old philosophy professor suggested that the appropriate name for a unit of pleasure would be a "hedon."  So my response to the question about how pleasurable I found watching football to be was that if reading a regular book would generate ten hedons per hour, watching a football game would generate fifteen hedons per hour, and reading a really good book would generate thirty hedons per hour.

From there, we played with this intellectual vanity a little bit and suggested that there are quite a few activities that generate diminishing rates of hedonic production.  My friend observed that I seemed to like watching about one football game a day, but that I grew somewhat impatient and pensive during a second game; my response to a second game in a row was similar to his response to the first game.  Thus, diminishing returns -- the first game generates a lot of hedons, the second game, not as many.  This was eventually reduced to the idea of "saturation," meaning that we had varying appetites for the activity in question.

Now, yet another participant in the conversation pointed out that things he liked to do were not things that he considered pleasurable at all.  For instance, some of his hobbies cause him to endure some degree of physical pain.  Thus, the concept of the "anti-hedon" was worked into the conversation, as was teasing out the implication that a pleasurable activity, when its benefits and burdens are weighed, is really something that has a "net hedon production."  Presumably, the pleasure that this fellow gets from his activities outweighs the pains, so by doing them, he achieves a net gain of hedons.

And of course, the generation of hedons may create as a byproduct a certain number of anti-hedons, such as the pain endured by a mountain climber over the course of climbing the mountain, which the climber calculates as less than the pleasure that will be gained by reaching the summit.  Certain activities involve very little effort or cost to generate hedons, such as the initial example of watching a football game on TV -- the main cost of that activity is an opportunity cost because you could be doing something else with those three hours instead of watching sports on TV.

We briefly amused ourselves with the idea that this could create an entire hedonic calculus, by which the hedons and anti-hedons of a particular activity could be weighed and the curves of diminishing returns would lead to an economically-computed action plan resulting in the achievement of an Epicurean ideal state.  I think there is something to this, as I explore below.

So, after dealing with a sidebar about whether Epicureanism is about maximizing pleasure or whether it's really about minimizing pain, we returned to the question of mixed activities and evaluating net pleasure or net pain.  Our friend whose hobbies require him to endure pain resisted the idea of a hedonic calculus to his decision to do these things, intimating that his hobby generated very little pleasure at all and suggesting that indeed, his hobbies produced a net hedonic loss.

Why, then, would he do them?  These are hobbies we're talking about here, not work or government-compelled duties or any other sort of obligation.  He suggested that reducing a decision to do something to a question of whether it generates more pleasure than it does pain is to look through a lens that conceals more than it reveals.  But that doesn't take us away from the question that maybe my friend is a masochist?

While that's possible, I think what's really going on is that it is insufficient to quantify pleasure and pain.  Pleasures and pains are also qualitatively different from one another.  The pleasure of sex is qualitatively different from the pleasure of achieving a difficult task, and both of these are qualitatively different than the pleasure of receiving praise.  The physical pleasure-pain spectrum for my friend's activity is negative, but if the analysis is made along the achievement spectrum, my friend is able to defer seeking a reward for long enough that he will endure both physical pain and short-term frustration of learning how to do something, in exchange for the long-term satisfaction of achieving the difficult goal of succeeding and learning.

Now, perhaps for the masochist, pain is simply another qualitatively distinguishable form of pleasure.  If that is the case, then the masochist seems to be dysfunctional because pursuit of the qualitative "pleasure" generated by enduring suffering must necessarily negate and even outweigh a different sort of pleasure.  This eventually descends into a paradox in which negating hedons generates new hedons -- or perhaps not, if one "flavor" of hedon is converted into a different "flavor" through the psychological process of masochism.

Now, none of this really answered the initial question of why it is that my friend doesn't like football as much as I do.  But I think the larger point is that this provides an objective, or nearly-objective, platform from which happiness can be defined as a function of pleasure, without descending into the sort of sybaritic vision of life that seems unsatisfying when considered in the abstract -- after all, if pleasure could be generated by direct electric stimulation of the brain, why wouldn't we all become wireheads?  But it seems obvious that most people would reject such an existence if given a choice.

All this talk of quantifying and qualitatively classifying pleasure led me to think that happiness might be defined as a hedonistic salad.  There are many different kinds of pleasures in life, as well as different kinds of burdens and pains. They have to be balanced against one another. A well-lived life is one that has a range of different kinds of pleasures, likely ones which are generated by qualitatively different activities, each of which is quantitatively done to the point where the subject activity begins to produce diminishing returns.  Each person's individual happiness is a function of her ability to measure her net generation of multiple varieties of hedons through a variety of activities.

The result of this looks more Aristotelean than Epicurean to me.  If happiness is a hedonic salad, with just enough, but not too much and not too little of one kind of pleasure (eating) and a similar "just right" kind of another kind of pleasure (education) and the right balance of still a third kind of pleasure (sex), then aren't we really looking at life lived according to what Aristotle called "the golden means"?

The question of why different people take different levels of pleasure out of different activities is not one that I can answer with this bit of intellectual gyration.  But I can better define now what happiness means in terms of distinguishing it from and defining it in relation to pleasure.

Depressing Reality

The cover story from this month's Atlantic is deeply depressing.  And, I can tell you from my (comparatively) brief experience with unemployment, based on a very real psychological phenomenon.

Back after The Wife and I moved to Tennessee and discovered that what we'd thought was the promise of a good job was actually nothing but hospitality, it took a long time for me to find new work.  Not having productive work and not contributing much to the household led me to sink into a pretty deep funk, from which I had difficulty summoning the energy and hope to go out and take the necessary pro-active steps to get out from underneath our problems. 

And it took a toll on my marriage; The Wife and I had many more conflicts, and much more serious conflicts, than we had at any other point in our relationship either before or since.  We managed to stay together and get through our tough time, and now hopefully we have the roughest waters behind us.  At least, now I can have the optimism to seriously think such a thing even if the realist within me knows that there are no guarantees about anything important in this life other than that it will eventually end.  After many years together, I've never felt closer or more in love with my wife than I am now and I'm certain that both of us having productive careers and a sufficient level of material comfort is a factor in that.  But I remember what it was like when things went unexpectedly bad and how frustrating it was to feel like we were powerless to change them, so when I read in the Atlantic that prolonged unemployment can cause significant and lasting effects on family dynamics, it doesn't take much convincing at all to tell me that this is something real.

I'm also reminded of an old discussion from a few years ago at the firm.  One of the attorneys had read that there is a seventy to eighty year "long cycle" in economics, which the author of the book thought was approaching its end.  The end of the previous long cycle was the Great Depression beginning in 1929, and before it, the Crash of 1873, which led to a six-year depression and a wobbly economy for a twenty-five years after that, and the long cycle that at the time was thought to be coming to an end would have started a few years afterwards.  I sure hope we aren't re-creating 1873.  Re-creating 1929 would be bad enough.

Now, the bit in the Atlantic about how unemployment depresses one's future earning arc may be true for most but unless you're on a Biglaw career track, attorney incomes often rise and fall according to a set of rhythms within which simple employment longevity is often not a significant factor.  But that's more important in terms of setting long-term fiscal policy for the government than anything else; the marketplace will take care of consumers getting things like food and insurance even if incomes do not rise as much as they have for the previous generation.

What I'm saying is that it's right to take a close look at the social effects of extended periods of unemployment.  They're real and they will change our society whether we like it or not.

Taking Avatar Way Too Seriously

Apparently, there are people who have become genuinely depressed that the real world is not more like the world depicted in the movie Avatar. They want to live in a world of pristine beauty with a simple way of life and to experience harmony with nature.

And then there's this:

I would like to think that the behavior in the video above is fiction, a scripted bit for some sketch comedy show on TV or the net. But like a Poe, it is actually somewhat difficult to tell whether I'm seeing a glimpse of reality or satire.

Nor do I think that a reminder that "It's only a movie" will do any good. What these folks are doing is projecting their desires and hopes, and those are real enough. Longing for a simple life and wishing to be surrounded by beauty are perfectly understandable things. What disturbs me is not that people would want that or even that they might engage in fantasy role-play based on it. It's off-putting, though, for people to describe suicidal ideation and insist that what is depicted in the movie is real.

For the record, the image of the noble savage who lived in harmony with nature is an idealized fiction. The reality of Native American life was that Native Americans deforested most of the Rocky Mountains and surrounding plateaus in what is today the southwestern United States, with ecological effects that last to this day; early Native Americans hunted their best available food and clothing source, the wooly mammoth, to extinction; and left to their own devices, native peoples like the Aztecs, Incas, and Anasazi urbanized and formed stratified, monetized, slave-based economies that included ritualized human sacrifice as a significant part of their social fabric. Which is not to say that they were worse than the Europeans who supplanted them, only to point out that what you are looking at in the movie is a fictional analogue to a vision of history that has intentionally had all of the unpleasant bits edited out from it in the name of "dramatic license." The real-life Native Americans were people just like us, no more and no less than human beings, with all of the same moral falliability and short-sightedness that goes along with being a human that people experience today and that they have always experienced for as long as there have been people.

And there is no way to connect oneself neurologically with a "tree of life" and acheive communion with an actual, physical, living god-who-is-also-the-entire-planet. Like it or not, you are human beings and you lack those nerve endings at the end of a tail that the entirely fictional Na'vi characters in Avatar had -- and which, by the way, they completely ignored when they had sex.  A signfiicant error in storytelling, if you ask me -- if such a thing existed, wouldn't that be the ultimate form of intimacy, the ultimate expression of love and interpersonal union?  But it's not what happened; instead, we got about fifteen seconds of PG-13 level heavy petting.  So let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the Na'vi represent an ideal society because they really dropped the ball there.

If you're among the number of people who have seen Avatar and think it depicts and idealized, better world, great.  I think that rather than sighing into your webcam about how you wish you could fly one of those pterodactyl-looking dealies while shooting arrows (note that the Na'vi practice chemical warfare in total violation of the Geneva conventions) you'd be better off finding some way to work to make the world that you actually live in become a better place in some way.

Oh, sure, go have fun painting yourself blue and practicing archery for some escapist recreation, if that's your idea of a good time.  But adults ought not to mistake fantasy for reality -- that's one of the very definitions of being an adult.

Hat tip to Stephen Green for the video.

Leave Tiger Woods Be And Brit Hume Too

Brit Hume, a former anchor and host and still part-time commentator on Fox News, suggested over the weekend that Tiger Woods should become a Christian.  He [Hume] is under criticism for saying he does not think that Buddhism offers the same sort of redeption and forgiveness as Christianity.  Some have called it already one of the most dumb things said in 2010, while social conservatives are quick to hold up this incident as an example of the liberal media mocking faithful Christians.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:  While I think Hume's comment was not particularly helpful and moderately ignorant, it was also mostly harmless and well-intentioned, so it's silly to criticize Hume.  The real issues confronting Tiger Woods are ones which confront everyone going through a tough time like a divorce. Woods has to work these issues out for himself and for the benefit of his children and there is no one-size-fits-all resolution to them.  While some churches offer positive and beneficial resources to their members, others sometimes do more harm than good.  So the best environment in which Tiger Woods (or any divorcing parent) can deal with the issues he inevitably must confront is one in which he gets help from appropriate professionals and is free from potentially-harmful religious teachings.

Full essay below the jump.

More After The Jump -->

Sports Psychology

Speaking of sports, though, I had a great insight today from a colleague:  people who like sports are distinguished from people who don't like sports based on their relative comfort level with ambiguous rules. 

See, as we grow and develop, we come to understand that there are rules in the world, and we also perceive that sometimes those rules are applied flexibly or selectively.  Most of us find this unjust and unfair in some way, usually when we are on the bad end of the disparity -- or when someone else is on the good end and gets a reward or benefit that we are denied.  We all internalize and accept the notion that the world just isn't fair, in our own ways and at our own paces.  But maybe some of us long for a really fair world to a degree that others do not.

Those who have that strong desire for fairness, that strong desire for certainty, that need to know who wins and who loses, find themselves more attracted to sports than their opposite numbers.  In sports, there are rules, damnit.  In baseball, if the ball goes outside the base line, it's foul, whether you're Milt Pappas or Frank Robinson.  In (American) football, if you goe outside the line with the ball, the clock stops whether you're Randy Moss or Joe Shit the Ragman.  If you drive the ball into the water, that's a one-stroke penalty.  Doesn't matter if you're Tiger Woods.  Maybe the rule isn't fair, maybe it isn't the best possible rule, but the rule is the rule.  You have certainty.  And almost all the time, you wind up with a winner and a loser.

Even if the refs make a bad call, you know where you stand. And for the most part, the rules are at least aimed at creating a system where there is a pretense of fair play and evenhandedness in dispensing and administering the rules.  Something in the sports fan hungers for that kind of regimentation, that kind of structure, in contrast to the  way that the non-sports fan is comfortable with ambiguity in the structure and administration of rules.

In real life, if you have a disagreement with someone else and you walk away, you may tell yourself you got the better of the exchange, but your counterpart is probably telling herself the same thing and there is no third party to pronounce one side or the other the winner.  In sports, though, the rules discourage and in most cases prohibit disputes resulting in a draw. Particularly here in hyper-competitive America,  the prevalence of tie scores in soccer (European/global football) is probably the biggest reason why that sport has not ever really taken off in a big way here.  The NHL stopped having tie games, going to a shootout format if games are still tied after overtime.  Major League Soccer would be well-advised to do something similar.  Whether your team wins or loses, there is a result.  Once again, you know where you stand and that is something of a consolation no matter what that standing might be. 

My response to this concept was that in the world of music, there are a lot of different genres and ways to perform -- and listen -- to music.  Some people find themselves gravitating to musical forms like jazz and free-form hip-hop.  These are the same people who find themselves indifferent to sports and for the same reason -- they are comfortable with the unstructured, improvised structures of that genre of music.  But others find themselves enjoying, whether consciously or not, the structure of forms of music like rock and roll, old-school rap, or classical music.  My colleague got the concept right away; it is the same mental dynamic.

All of this is a bunch of tendencies and gross generalizations, of course.  But I think there's some meat on those bones.

The fact that rock and classical music tend to have larger audiences than jazz, and the fact that there seem to be more sports fans than non-sports fans, suggests that more people desire certainty and structure in the rules that govern the world around them than there are people who are willing to navigate the world with improvised and unstructured rules.

It's natural to read something like this and react that, "Well, I'm not really like that, so there must be a flaw with this."  And maybe there is -- but I think everyone's reflexive response to that sort of generalization is to resist it and that's probably a mistake.  Be willing to at least consider the possibility that one or the other kind of personality trait may actually be subsumed within your psyche and that your preference for (or apathy towards) sports or certain kinds of music may be a reflection of your comfort or discomfort with ambiguously-administered rules.

It's a good launching point for introspection about your subconscious attitudes towards authority, even if you ultimately conclude that my colleague and I are quite full of it.  (You wouldn't be the first to think that about either of us and I promise, we're not offended.)

Paging Dr. Freud

There's good dreams and then there's bad dreams and then there's dreams that wake you up in fear. My dreams are experienced in the first person, as I suspect most peoples' are -- I am an actor within my dream; I see and experience things in the dream world as though I were living them in the waking (that is, real) world.

Sometimes I am able to exercise a small degree of conscious control over my dreams and "steer" them like Neo in The Matrix. Most of the time I cannot or at least do not do this; I go along for the ride and deal with the weird shifting realities that make up dreams.  Generally, dreaming is a pleasant or at least merely surreal experience, and almost always, dreams are evanescent, vanishing into nothingness within mere seconds of waking up.

I react poorly, though, to dreams in which there is an element of violence. They usually wake me up and I have trouble falling back asleep. It does not seem to matter whether I am the victim of the violence or not -- I have a recurring dream of witnessing an act of violence that I am unable to prevent. It elicits a sense of dread and horror that lasts well after I wake up suddenly, sometimes crying out and scaring my wife. Worst of all are the dreams in which I engage in violence. Not only does the act of violence terrify me, it also leaves me riddled with feelings of remorse, self-doubt, and panic no matter how justified my own violence might have been while I was in Dream World. And since these dreams produce strong emotional responses, they are the ones which tend to remain vivid for a long time after waking up.

This happened to me last night. Now, I had a very good reason in my Dream World to engage in violence (self-defense) but I'm not going to record the details here despite a vivid recollection of them. What I'm writing about is the fact that I'm still creeped out about it eighteen hours later. 

Maybe other people have dreams of violence, too.  For someone who has experienced real, intense violence like military combat or being assaulted by a criminal, that makes a fair amount of sense.  But I have been blessed to have had a life largely free of any encounters with violence more intense than some pushing and shoving and a couple of unpleasant episodes with bullies as a young teenager. So why would I have dreams of violence at all, much less dreams in which I engage in the violence myself?

Gratefully, for me such dreams are infrequent.  I lack the psychological scars a trauma victim would have.  I'm quite confident I'm not the only person who occasionally has violent or disturbing dreams and that it's very easy to read too much into one's dreams.  But I wonder what they mean, what kind of junk my subconscious mind is trying to sort out.

A Test Of Resilience

Many of you Readers will have already come across the sensational story of a woman escaping from an eighteen-year captivity in an East Bay Area exurb. She was kidnapped by a stranger near her home in South Lake Tahoe in 1991 when she was only eleven years old, and held by a married couple. Her male captor appears to have raped her at least twice shortly after she reached puberty, fathering two children by her. The kidnap victim, and maybe her two daughters, were forced to live in tents in the back yard, as over the years the captors seem to have descended into a cycle of madness reinforced by warped religious views. The dude finally got arrested taking these victims with him to circulate religious literature on campus at UC Berkeley, and now the story breaks.

I've got a few thoughts in reaction to reading about this.

First, I say the criminal here has "warped" religious views despite knowing that that determining the exact point of warping as opposed to theological disputes is somewhat subjective. I might think that someone who sincerely believes the Holy Spirit protects him from the venom in a rattlesnake's bite has gone over-the-line crazy while you might defend that person as as factually erroneous in that particular belief but otherwise functional in society and therefore not insane.

But we can all agree that when you think God speaks to you out of a cardboard box and tells you to kidnap and rape an eleven-year-old girl, and you also believe you've been gifted with the ability to control sound using only your own mind, it's been quite some time since you crossed the line from "unusual religious beliefs" to "schizophrenia." The male captor, at least, has a rap sheet for violent sexual crimes going back a quarter century.

So while in other entries of this blog I'm critical of religion, this incident isn't something for which religion, at least in the form I usually address it, is a significant factor. The issue here is the crazy, not the religion.

Second, the kidnapping of children by strangers who are sexual predators is actually extraordinarily rare, but it does happen, but when it happens, unfortunately, the usual and horrific result is that the child victim is raped and then killed shortly afterwards. (Regarding the frequency of stranger kidnappings, see also this contrary study, suggesting that 24% of all juvenile kidnappings are by strangers.)

What makes this situation extraordinary is that the kidnapper did not murder the kidnap victim but instead kept her. Perhaps that was an outgrowth of his particular kind of mental derangement. I think it would make more sense for us as a society to respond to the story rationally, by recognizing that it is an exceptional circumstance. I suspect, though, that it will be digested into our culture as an example of what usually happens in a kidnapping situation.

Third, at least here in California we have a culture in which it's not unusual to not know your neighbors very well, rarely if ever visit their houses, and generally leave them alone. I'm a big one to espouse the virtues of people minding their own business, and I think that giving other people a reasonable sphere of personal privacy is one of the obligations of decent behavior. Now, the Wife and I are friends with our next-door neighbors and we're very fortunate that they're perfectly normal folks. But the fact of the matter is that being friends with one's neighbors is something of the exception rather than the rule in California.

But what if our neighbors were not perfectly normal folks but instead were kind of weird, hyper-religious, seemed to prefer to keep to themselves, and had tents and outhouses up in their back yard all the time? At what point do we stop respecting their desire for privacy, and start to be justifiably suspicious that something criminal is going on over there? And once we form that suspicion, what do we do about it? No easy answers here.

Fourth and finally, how will the now-freed victims adapt to their new circumstances? The 29-year-old woman who was abducted was eleven when she was taken. That would mean she was in, I think, sixth grade. She's had no education at all since then but probably a lot of bizarre religious ranting. She is 29 years old and has spent 18 of those 29 years as a captive and probably as a sex slave of a couple of lunatics.

Her two daughters have had no education of any kind, and are now 11 and 15 years old. Whether the pubescent girl got treated like her mother is a disquieting question but one that there seems to be no choice but to confront when contemplating the situation. Either way, though, living in that bizarre environment is the only thing they have ever known.

How does a human being adapt to that sort of circumstance? How will these women re-integrate into normal society? What kinds of bizarre notions about the world will they have acquired? Will they be able to learn the kinds of skills that they will need to get jobs and support themselves? Will they be able to fall in love, and have families of their own? They were no doubt subjected to huge amounts of bizarre religion -- will they become religious themselves, now that they will have the freedom to choose for themselves how to live their own lives?

Gratefully, most of the public will never learn the answers to these questions. They will be a long time coming, and the media spotlight will move off of them very soon. Which is good -- these women should be allowed privacy and personal space in which to do what they have to do to heal and integrate into society. I would hope, though, that mental health professionals stay on top of the situation and there is at least some professional literature that comes out of the singular and exceptional case study that this situation represents.

There are elements of hope for a good outcome here; the abductee's mother appears anxious to reunite with her daughter after so many years; her stepfather also seems supportive and willing to help. (The trauma of having their daughter taken from them seems to have led to the breakup of that marriage, an illustration of how crime affects not just the victim but like a crack in a windshield spreads harm and pain to many members of society.) But I think that whatever happens to them will have to look a lot like the way people are deprogrammed from cult membership, and that seems to be a decidedly unpleasant process.

The proverb is that people are amazingly resilient and adaptable. But the reality is that they are not infinitely so. These three young women are going to be a test of exactly how resilient and adaptable people can really be.

Who Watches Watchmen? Shouldn't Be Little Kids!

As intended, over the weekend The Wife and I went to see Watchmen. I'm not going to review it in detail because I was going to like it no matter what, although after having really enjoyed the depth and complexity of the book. Perhaps The Wife will review it herself, in which case you might get a more objective view of the film.

A few notes, though. Technically, it was marvelous; its effects were fantastic and the set-piece images were precisely as the graphic novel visualized them.

Some of the acting was quite good; Jackie Earle Haley (as Rorschach) and Patrick Wilson (as Nite Owl II) delivered complex, emotionally-convincing performances. Other actors like Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan and Malin Ackerman as Silk Spectre II, looked luscious but were not satisfying with their deliveries. (Crudup had a tough job, playing such an emotionally distant figure.)

The makeup on the actor playing President Nixon was a little bit silly. Nixon had a pointy nose, but it wasn't that pointy.

I was midly disappointed at seeing a lot of the deeper layers of the story removed from the movie. But then again, I knew going into it that the movie could not get into that stuff -- the pirate comic mirroring the action of the real story, and getting a better sense for what the older generation of costumed heroes had done any why they had done it -- in any depth if at all. It's a movie, for crying out loud, and even though the producers gave themselves two and a half hours, there was still a lot of story to tell, so some stuff had to be cut. Effectively losing the insight into the older generation of superheroes really did take some of richness out of the story; such portions of the 1940's heroes that survived in the movie were so brief and oblique as to leave viewers like The Wife more confused than interested.

I did approve of some of the other changes they made; for instance, the mechanism of the villian's dastardly end-of-the-world plot changed from the novel in a way that I thought made a good deal more sense, without all that squiddy ickiness.

The script left very little doubt about the ultimate plot. The Wife figured out the whole thing after less than half an hour. There was a bit more mystery in the graphic novel. But the overall plot is actually not the interesting thing about the movie -- the psychological profiles of the characters in action is.

By all means, go see this movie. It's good fun and there is still enough there intellectually to make you think a bit. But unlike some people who were there this weekend, for crying out loud, leave your little kids at home!

The movie is violent. Much of the violence is unglamorized, morally questionable, and brutal, even when it is perpetrated by the heroes of the film. You are aware, pretty much all the time, that the costumed heroes of the film are mentally right on the razor's edge of being outright insane on the one hand and no better than the criminals they are attacking on the other. There is violence against the police. There is violence agianst women. There is a scene of one of the heroes attempting to rape another. There is literal mayhem.

This is not "comic book violence." Particularly when the movie explores the transformation of Rorshach into his "mature" self, it's quite disturbing. While this is entirely true to the spirit of the comic book, I would not want a small child to see this stuff. A teenager, okay. But to the woman who brought her four-year-old son, who started crying during that particular scene, I have to ask, "What did you think was going to be in this movie? The 'R' rating was there for a reason."

Now, in my poll for this week, I asked what people thought should be the appropriate way to handle very violent movies with little kids. There is a significant diversity of opinion here, with many of you thinking that a movie theater should card the parent or guardian of a small kid going in to a violent movie, and many others thinking that this is just plain not the movie theater's job at all. I can see both points of view. But what I can't see is how this sort of thing is appropriate for a little kid at all.

If scenes of a man getting his hands chopped off with a circular saw, a woman getting raped, and people being set on fire isn't enough for you to keep your kids away, then maybe the sex will. The movie will treat you to a scene of a women being pleasured by multiple partners (well, sort of) and a later scene with naked pelvises thrusting together with gasps and moans of pleasure, complete to climax. And of course, since we're talking about people who dress up like superheroes, this is sexualized cosplay, which you'll have to explain to the kid later. And then there's a rather critical element of the story involving the would-be rapist and his victim. Again, it didn't take long for The Wife, who had not read the comic, to quickly penetrate this plot twist, but it would still be a tough pill for an immature child to handle.

Watchmen is a movie for grownups. Its themes are very, very dark; it explores areas of the human soul that are uncomfortable to consider. Its content intrinsically involves the relationship between sexual dysfunction and graphic violence, things that are not appropriate things to be exposing little kids to.

Inevitable Information Imbalance

So many times when I have a disagreement with someone, I am struck by how my counterpart seems to be responding to a world that is simply different than the one in which I live. Discussion of the issue becomes strained when it seems we cannot agree on facts in common. An interesting insight on this point is offered from Tom Maguire at Justoneminute (riffing off of Ezra Klein at American Prospect and Matt Yglesias): We all have opinions on issues. Our opinions are based on facts and information that are known to us. But here's the rub -- we gather facts and information selectively, so as to support opinions that already existed.

The linked articles all apply to politics, which is perhaps the easiest way to identify this phenomenon. For instance, Freddie from L'Hôte looks at the same internet articles I do about the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. I conclude that Hamas are a bunch of thugs using human shields, human scum who deserve to be eradicated and the civilians who get killed in the conflict are their victims. Freddie sees the exact opposite -- he sees the Israelis as cruel oppressors who are as responsible for the death and suffering of the people in Gaza as the Hamas rocketeers are for the death and suffering of Israeli civilians. Same data, opposite conclusions. Is Freddie dumb? Is he a moral simpleton? No, far from it. Am I those things? No, I don't think so. But still -- same information in, different result out.

I see it in law, too -- eyewitnesses to the same incident describe seemingly very different things happening and reach very different conclusions about who was at fault and even what happened at all. Witness A: "The blue car was driving all crazy. That guy was a drunken fool. He swerved around this other car, sped up, ran through the red light, and hit the red car. It's totally the blue car's fault." Witness B: "The red car sped up to beat a yellow light and he should have stopped instead. So then he got himself trapped when the light changed and had to come to a screeching halt. He just made himself a target out there in that intersection, and he caused that accident. What's that about the red light? No, the blue car had the green light."

Creationists appear to me to be astonishingly blind -- selectively and seemingly willfully so -- to the evidence supporting evolution by way of natural selection. They also accuse "evolutionists" like myself of being willfully blind to the purportedly overwhelming evidence of God's hand in the creation of life. And there's apparently no using facts and evidence to change someone's mind on this; whatever evidence is offered by one side will be viewed through a lens so jaundiced by the other that it effectively does not exist. I'd like to say that I would be able to consider evidence that they would offer objectvely, but in all honesty, after learning what I have about the issue, I doubt that's true because the first thing that leaps out to me from every example is the fallacy underlying it -- typically it's the argument from incredulity or a straw man, but that's getting more specific than I need to be here because this is not a post about evolution.

And most prosaically but perhaps most clearly, consider the question of children in restaraunts. Kids get bored in restaraunts when they're not eating, and they demand a high amount of attention.* On that, a lot of people will agree. But the degree to which childrens' loud play or vocalizations will be tolerated in a particular instance varies highly. Some people are apparently completely indifferent to kids acting out in restaraunts; I'm much more sensitive to it and it takes an exercise of patience and focus to make myself ignore it. It would be one thing for the parent of a child acting out in a restaraunt to say, "My kid wasn't behaving inappropriately," because that might involve a difference of opinion about what is appropriate in the first place. But the parent would more typically say something like, "My kid wasn't doing anything at all." I gather information about the kid's behavior like, "She's been shrieking in apparent terror for ten solid minutes." The parent gathers information like, "Aww, she's happy." The result is that I am irritated and tense, while the parent is happy and relaxed -- I have gathered information about the child's vocalizations that the parent has no ability to perceive; the parent, similarly, has gathered information about the child that I cannot perceive.

How this state of affairs came to be may well be something of a chicken-and-egg question. Once the cycle starts, the phenomenon is clear. Once I have formed a bias, I will then view the world through the lens of that bias and gather information which supports my opinion, and eschew information which discounts it. But where did the bias come from? I had to have had information to react to in the first place, right? I think the answer may be "no."

The reason I say that is, in all of these cases, it's not just a case of interpreting the same facts differently. It's a case of gathering facts that support the conclusion and excluding facts that discount from it. The information never gets stored in your brain in the first place. It's simply not there to interpret one way or another. It's not viewing the world through a lens, it's viewing the world through blinders. That's why one person seems to be living in a different version of reality than someone else -- despite being exposed to the same things, different memories result.

This is a difficult thing to recognize in yourself and a more difficult thing to combat within yourself. I am not immune from this, and neither are you. Good science depends on being objective about evidence and not pre-determining a result. But it's almost impossible to divorce yourself from your own opinions and preferences, things that happen irrationally, subconsciously, and in all probability, nearly instantaneously.

Where do the different reactions come from? I don't know that we can say, ultimately. But that's worthy of more reflection. For now, my insight, offered for your contemplation, is this: we don't just interpret the same events differently. Instead, we learn about events differently in order to support our pre-judged conclusions, biases which may well have nothing whatsoever to do with the facts at hand.


* I have dinner periodically with friends who bring along their two-year old son. I'm not referring to him here, at least not in particular. My friends are good about appreciating when the kid has had enough and it's time to take him home or otherwise get his behavior toned down.

Plagiarism And Memory

It's my considered opinion that people remember things that generate intense emotions; things that generate only mild emotions tend to slip away into the fog of one's generalized recollection of the past. Examples:

• I can remember, with great clarity, how great I felt getting married. I remember my best man telling me early that day that it was important to eat. I remember what my wife looked like during the ceremony intensely. I don't remember everything the officiant said other than that he defied my instruction for a civil ceremony and invoked Jesus at the end, and that I decided that was OK because it would be pleasing to most of our families.
• I also remember, with no small amount of clarity, what it felt like to travel to Tennessee and realize that the job I thought I'd had lined up for myself was not ever going to happen. I can remember the terror I felt there scrambling around to financially provide for my family. A terrible feeling, and I remember it and the times I experienced it quite well. And there are other bad things I can recall happening to me about which I am more reticent to write in detail -- confrontations with enemies (indeed, even coming to the realization that I had somehow acquired an enemy) were tough times. Learning of the deaths of family members was tough.
  
• I do not remember with any particular clarity, whether the traffic lights on my way to work yesterday were in my favor or not. I can't really remember whether the coffee I got from McDonald's the last time I drove up to Stinking Bakersfield worked out or not. I think the last time I bought a shirt it was a little bit too small, but I'm not real sure about that. None of those things inspired intense emotions.

When I hear of people saying that they've repressed memories of particularly traumatic things, I am skeptical. It seems to me that if I went through a really bad experience, it would not only be difficult to repress, it would be difficult to stop thinking about it. I remember my grandfather, a combat veteran from WWII, seemed to have no trouble remembering what he'd been through -- he didn't care to talk about it much, but he clearly remembered everything that had happened.

So that's a little bit of my thinking of how the human mind works. With that background, I have little trouble at all reacting with some sympathy to this story -- Neale Donald Walcsh wrote a book called Conversations With God in which he claimed to have, through episodes of what can be called "automatic typing," communicated with Jehovah.

Well, Walcsh also writes for the religious website beliefnet.com. In his recent essay,* he related a heartwarming story, about a schoolgirl in a Christmas play was supposed to hold the letter "M" in a display reading "Christmas Love." But she held it upside down, so the text the audience say read "Christ was Love." (Now is the time for all Christians in the audience to go "Awww....".)

The book caught on and he sold millions of copies. Problem is the upside-down "M" story was not original to Walsch; another Christian author, Candy Chand, wrote the same story in a Christian magazine back in 1999. So when she saw Walsch's posting on beliefnet, she got mad, and now she's suing him for copyright infringement. And we're talking about a fairly extensive and serious bit of plagiarism here:

Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim, Ms. Chand’s previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “the morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”

What does Walsch have to say for himself?

In a statement posted Tuesday afternoon on his blog on Beliefnet, which is owned by the News Corporation, Mr. Walsch said he had made a “serious error,” and apologized to Ms. Chand and his readers.

“All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so ago,” Mr. Walsch wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ’stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

Now, this is in no way a legal defense to the claim of copyright violation. Chand wrote the story, and Walsch copied it -- apparently nearly verbatim. But frankly, I have little difficulty believing Walsch's explanation. I've seen this process in action in my work a lot. I see people who act as though they are convinced of things that aren’t true all the time. Common protest from an unlawful detainer defendant: “No, I paid the rent!” They act like they really think they did. My client, however, never got the money. But I have to entertain the possibility that not only do the tenants act like they really think they paid it, but that indeed, they really, really do think that they paid it.

So it’s easy for me to see how Walsch might have put this story away for a long time and, to use his words, “internalized” it and ultimately convincing himself that it was his own. That’s not objectively true, but over time he could have forgotten where he learned of the story without forgetting the story itself.

The reason I think this is possible is that the story does not elicit a particularly strong emotional response. Oh, sure, it's cute, especially if you are a Christian. But it's forgettable, based on cheap wordplay. You can build up a story like this with some fluff and background, maybe help the punch out a little bit, but at the end of the day, it's not much of a story and it likely doesn't even inspire a huge sense of awe even in a true believer. Far be it from me to question the authenticity of his Christianity, but Walsch is a guy who is both willing to indulge himself in the vanity that God literally types through his own hands, and then to sell the putative product of such a extraordinary conversation for profit. There is a possibility that in the course of making his living -- which is gathering, packaging, and then selling stories to a religious market -- he lost track of where he picked up particular stories that he sells.

Chand is clearly in the right here, both legally and morally. She wrote the story, she deserves to profit from it. I'm not going to say Walsch was a horrible thief, but he did take and exploit something that was not his and he needs to make that right. I suspect that he will and that his contrition is genuine. But the big insight out of this story is not that authors sometimes plagiarize, it's the insight into how the human mind works.


* Beliefnet.com has taken the original essay down since the story erupted. The link should take you to a mirror site maintained by Google.

The Banality Of Obsessive Palin Disorder

For some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the bizarre and pointless campaign claim that Trig Palin was somehow Sarah Palin's grandson and not her son and there is some sort of massive conspiracy to conceal this fact has survived not only the initial flush of publicity surrounding the campaign, and indeed survived the campaign itself. And it's growing.

Just as a sample -- Tripp Johnston, who is (purportedly) Governor Palin's grandson and (purportedly) the son of her daughter Bristol Palin and boyfriend/fiance Levi Johnston, was born a few days ago. But the announcement did not hit the presses until three days after the birth and Half Sigma smells a rat. Megablogger Andrew Sullivan does, too. And on the horrendously overvalued Huffington Post, you can follow a breathless headline to a report about Johnston's mother's legal troubles.

Here's a bit of unpleasant truth for both Palin fans and the Palin-obsessed: The Palins are deeply banal people. Economically well-off, religious, embroiled in family and community disputes of various degrees of pettiness, politically and socially conservative, they are very much like the busybodies who inject themselves into suburban local politics -- yes, Sarah Palin is exceptionally good at that sort of game, which is how she got to Juneau. But it's the same insipid game you can see anywhere, including in your own town, church, or social circle.

Sarah Palin could be interesting if she had a political future or if she were a source of interesting ideas or if she were some sort of mythic figure. By "mythic" I don't mean she's the modern-day equivalent of Hercules; I mean someone whose story gives us something that the rest of us could use to pattern our lives around (or in opposition to, as the case might be). For instance, a lawyer at my firm tells a story of a woman who was giving a presentation to the board of directors of a major defense contractor. After she was introduced, she stood up and walked over to the podium to begin her talk, and the skirt of her suit fell down around her ankles. She stopped in her tracks, picked up the garment and put it back on, and said, "Now that I have your complete attention, let's begin." That's a mythic figure -- she provides an example of something that you might do in a tense, horribly embarrassing situation.

Sarah Palin has not, as far as I can tell, done or even been purported to have done, something with that sort of emotional resonance. If she will be remembered for anything, it will be for the absurdity of her claims to be qualified to lead the country. Palin did not actually say she could see Russia from her house (that was Tina Fey impersonating her), but she did say that her foreign policy credentials included Alaska's proximity to Russia -- and no one says that Rick Perry or Arnold Schwarzenegger are experts on foreign policy or immigration because their states border Mexico.

So if Palin is a mythic figure, she is one of opposition rather than emulation -- she is an example of what not to do.

Personally, I find it unlikely that Sarah Palin will ever rise above the level of Governor of Alaska -- yes, being the Governor of a state is no small achievement, even with a relatively small population to whom one must appeal. But she got brought up from the AAA league into the majors before she was ready, and she amply demonstrated that in the Presidential campaign -- even to this observer, who tried to keep an open mind about her for a long time. She will need to re-make her image as some kind of a wonky policy wizard in order to overcome this problem; and in so doing, she will abandon the "Average Jane," small-town folksy persona that was the foundation of her charisma in the first place. So I think she's out.

And her family's tawdry affairs are, whether rightfully private or not, really kind of uninteresting. Those people who seem unable to let go of finding deeply personal ways to attack or malign her are something of a mystery to me. Dudes: SHE LOST! She's done. Out of the picture. Whatever it was about her that you hated so intensely, you've managed to purge it from the body politic. And the people who so intensely liked her back in the campaign and still do, take care to understand why you like her. Are you sure that it isn't just to piss off the people who continue to be negatively obsessed with her?

Point is, continuing to obsess about Sarah Palin and her family is really, really pointless and weird.