In Praise of Feminists

It’s depressing reading guys like Dawkins or Pinker. If these nabobs of negativity are to be believed, I (the average human male) was born a lying philanderer, a remorseless deadbeat, an incessant brag, a violent, megalomaniacal brute, a perpetually horny ape and a rather crass specimen for an “evolved creature”, all in all.

If you believed that shit, the policy implication would be to write draconian and sexist (anti-male) laws, with respect to marriage, divorce, alimony, child custody, sexual harassment, violent crime, workplace discrimination and a host of other things. Not only should we be sent to boot camp to prepare us for civilized society (hoping there is enough in the prefrontal cortex to eventually override the utter junk elsewhere), there should also be the perpetual threat of the whip to keep us in line. No salvation, only discipline and toil.

That’s being optimistic. Depending on how strong the evolutionary tug is supposed to be, solutions could be more drastic. I won’t be too surprised if Dr. Pinker recommended a complete quarantine, with all bearers of the Y chromosome breaking stone on some island in the south Pacific, while nubile women cavorted in lesbian bliss on the continents, raising test tube babies created from sperm shipments that arrive from time to time in the harbors of our brave, new world.

It made me turn to religion for a while. At least Eve gets some of the blame, if not a major share. But being paraded around everywhere, with a sign saying “Original Sin” around the neck, is not much fun.

Then I discovered feminists. Apparently, boys won’t be boys as soon as they change those grade school textbooks, and replace the plastic guns on the shelves with Barbies. At any rate, it’s not a character deficiency, just a curricular glitch. Don’t blame us, blame the school board.

Clearly, women just can’t stop loving men, be they attired in corsets or burning bras.

I have cancelled my Penthouse subscription. Who needs it as long as there is Ms magazine?

It's A Tipsy Turvy World

1. Anyone heard the one about the Hodja? Hodja goes to a posh Soho restaurant in his tattered clothes and gets very shabby treatment. He leaves a massive tip. Next week, same restaurant, the wait staff all fawn over him. Hodja leaves a quarter. “Wtf, Hodja?” cry the waiters. “This one is for last week’s service,” says Hodja, “Last week’s tip was for today.”

2. The funny thing about tipping is that it turns the categorical imperative on its head. If you leave a higher than average tip for the charming and flirtatious waitress, she gets a windfall. If there is across the board tip inflation, the market response will be an offsetting reduction in the salaries of wait staff. Act in a way that you wish wouldn’t become universal law.

3. Performance pay works best when it is paid by the party best placed to evaluate performance, which is why tips are paid by customers and sales commissions are paid by the employer. The problem is that tipping tries to solve one kind of moral hazard (bad service) by introducing another (under-tipping). To the extent the latter is solved by moral pressure on customers, it is also likely to reduce the sensitivity of the tip to the quality of service (a low tip could be as much an indictment of your stinginess as the waiter’s rudeness), creating a see-saw effect. Incidentally, if there is significant tip inflation, my conjecture would be that eating out in large groups (stuff like business lunches) is also on the up, as a proportion.

4. Product boycott is an especially dumb and counter-productive way of protesting slave wages, because the reduction in demand will depress those wages even further. In fact, the opposite would be helpful – buy lots of sweatshop manufactured T-shirts and make a bonfire out of them (pouring expensive Burgundies down the sink surely made the surrender monkeys laugh all the way to the bank, but then the freedom fries crowd isn’t particularly known for business acumen). Why exactly is it immoral to wear a shirt made out of $1 an hour labor rather than shun cheap goodies and let thoughtless pricks go around wearing outfits made of $0.90 an hour labor?

5. A presidential tip jar may not be a bad idea. Not as financial incentive, but as real time barometer of public approval. “Dick Cheney’s Starbucks fund has hit rock bottom this week,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “with barely enough money left to buy two cappuccinos and a chocolate chip cookie. The spin from the VP’s office is that it reflects public concern about his heart condition. Democrats on the Hill are buying none of that.”

The Old Man and the Sea

1. Backward Induction:

A while back, I developed a habit of getting depressed on Fridays. Sunday evenings are depressing for the obvious reason (demise of the weekend and impending work week). Saturdays started getting bleak on anticipation of those Sunday evening blues, and soon, thanks to acute foresight regarding what lay in wait for Saturday, a pall of gloom descended on my Fridays too. At a time when most people joyously rushed out of their offices to hit the pubs, the restaurants and the theaters (to say nothing of wild orgies and raves), I made excuses to go home and lie wrapped in a blanket lest I slash my wrists in despair. What kind of deluded idiot celebrates a fleeting freedom when the fate of being dragged back to the harness is merely two days away?

A key determinant of the quality of life is how we relate to the future. That seems obvious enough; what is less clear is how exactly it works (or can be made to work). For example, placing a high weight on the future may elicit much good behavior in us (e.g., avoid adultery, stick to a diet, stop being an asshole), but may also unravel all commitments (love, loyalty, friendship) by throwing a harsh light on the impermanence of everything. There is also the argument that what we tend to hold intrinsically precious is what is fleeing. I wonder if I should prefer a one night stand with Angelina Jolie or a lifetime. Maybe I’ll settle for a week.

Eventually, I found a way of conquering my weekend blues. On Monday morning, I tell myself that glorious Friday is only five days away, so that I am essentially a free man biding my time to throw off my shackles. This has imparted such an insufferable aura of cheerfulness to my demeanor throughout the week that most friends and colleagues shun me till Thursday night at the very least. I wonder if I should return to the previous perspective.

2. Virtual Dotage:

Once one has spent a good length of time on a discussion board, a sensation sets in that can only be described as simulated dotage. I don’t mean it in the trivial sense of having “aged” in terms of years spent, but in the psychological one of garbled memory, attention deficit and an increasingly blurry sense of what is happening around on the board. Here is my best understanding of Wikifray/nopunuq/whatever’s architecture:

There are a bunch of individual blogs. When people post comments there, they show up here, so that others can reply here, discussing what they read there. The blog entries elsewhere also show up here as feeds, but comments must be posted there to be registered here as such. Some posts made here may be published in Wordflare, which has its own forum where readers may comment on what they read there about thoughts originally posted here (or, for that matter, there) in response to blog entries which appeared there (not Wordflare, the other “there”, wherever that is). All this digs up the old philosophical squabble about whether there really is any there there, but that is neither here nor there. I think.

Was I even close?

3. Religion:

As a self proclaimed atheist, I am often alarmed at the prospect of being clubbed together with polytheistic nutcases practicing ritual sacrifice and other weird shit. Let me explain.

There is little difference, really, between an atheist and a deist. The atheist believes there is no God, while the deist believes that He exists, but resolutely stays away from the universe (i.e., He is always there, never here). Thus, which framing I choose ought to make not an iota of difference as to how I expect the universe to behave, or what my fate in it will be. I might just as well call myself a deist.

The difference between a deist and an orthodox monotheist is similarly infinitesimal. Suppose I believe that saints can fly. Rather than calling this a supernatural phenomenon, I can always rewrite Newton’s law so that the gravitational force between bodies is a function not only of their mass and the distance between them, but also of their virtue, thereby fitting my belief into a deistic framework where natural law rules supreme. Alternatively, were I of the opinion that Newton’s inverse square law operates without exception, I could still think that God is working furiously every nano second to keep it from breaking down.

Finally, the distinction between monotheism and polytheism is just plain absurd. Is the Federal government a single entity, or a conglomeration of interacting entities like the Defense department, the Treasury and the CIA? I could frame my beliefs as if all godliness were emanating from a single source, or (without any alteration to their essential substance) as if they were multi-sourced: like the dept. of miracles, the dept. of fire and brimstone, the divine hurricane dispatch service, and so on.

This has led me to the disturbing conclusion that I may be a worshipper of the flying spaghetti monster and the giant tea-pot, after all. In which case, who am I to call the Scientology kettle black?

Epistemological Indigestion: Stanley Fish and Godly Chips

Stanley Fish is an academic heavyweight with very little intellectual mass. Unlike most pomo intellectuals, he can write clearly, which, unfortunately in his case, works out to be a handicap. It throws his misunderstandings, ignorance and confusion into sharp relief, proving that the impenetrable and obfuscatory prose typical of his school of thought was adopted for a good reason by his peers – it is probably a tactical ploy, not a deficiency. For his part, Fish frequently mistakes vocabulary for thought, and sophomoric nihilism for sophisticated skepticism.

Fish’s review of the “New Atheist” literature is too riddled with absurdities to bother writing a point-by-point rebuttal, but I will comment on two key points.

Darwinian explanations of morality: Fish repeats the old canard that Darwinism is unable to account for altruism or morality, a claim that should crumble upon reading even one of the numerous popular expositions of the subject that are around. Theoretical rationale for the evolution of altruism were famously laid out by biologists like Hamilton and Trivers, and its manifestations in social insects and suchlike plotted in great empirical detail by people like E. O. Wilson. The general idea is that the gene’s long term interests are often compromised by maxing out on short term opportunities, which is why natural selection found it useful to instill internal commitments (e.g., parental or romantic love, loyalty and tribalism, status seeking, etc.) that override the narrower kind of selfishness and materialism. Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology has pushed the boundaries of these ideas in trying to understand the greater complexities of the human mind, though with more speculative and contested results so far.

Fish breezily invokes scientific authority (geneticist Francis Collins), dutifully trotted out for the occasion as useful idiots usually are, to claim that “physical processes cannot account for the universal presence of moral impulses like altruism.” No argument, no demonstration of any awareness whatsoever of the ideas of Hamilton, Trivers or Wilson, just sweeping claim nailed into place by the typical argument from incredulity: “How can there be a naturalistic explanation of [altruism]?” Well, Dr. Fish, if you spent all semester next to the beer keg in the frat house (or the champagne bottle in the faculty club, for that matter) instead of reading the textbook, none of the questions would make any sense, would they?

Instead of tackling existing Darwinian theories of morality, Fish quotes at length (very selectively, I suspect) from Sam Harris’ ruminations about the course of future research in the area, proceeding to surmise that it “sounds an awfully lot like faith.” Of course it does, but I am yet to come across any commentary on any discipline’s future prospects that sounds “an awfully lot like established truth.” I haven’t read Harris’ book, but I have read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, where he takes care to explicate (for the umpteenth time), at some length, the Darwinian reasons for “irrational” behavior like altruism or suicide. Indeed, it forms the very basis of his attempts to explain religion. Fish summarizes Dawkins thus:

One can speculate, as Dawkins does, that members of a species are generous to one another out of a desire (not consciously held) to preserve the gene pool, or that unconditioned giving is an advertisement of dominance and superiority.

The first assertion is flat out wrong, and one of the commonest misunderstandings of evolution, while the second constitutes a very minor mechanism. Fish either didn’t understand Dawkins at all (and likely doesn’t care if he does), or has resorted to subterfuge.

In any case, how does religion explain human morality, pray tell? As the learned professor helpfully guides us through subtle theology, we learn that morality may be understood by attributing it to God! And then, as the problem of theodicy inevitably raises its ugly head, by attributing cheating, theft, murder, rape, war, genocide (presumably earthquakes and tsunamis too) and every manner of evil twittery to that other exquisite divine gift – free will. We are good because of God, and bad in spite of Him. Our goodness is not our choice but God’s gift, yet God didn’t stop us from going bad because He was determined to give us choice. The fact that this assessment is preposterously rigged in the Creator’s favor from the beginning is almost beside the point. If Fish had bothered to do to Dawkins’ book what he doubtlessly hectors his students to do all the time, namely read it, he would have found copious discussion on the tired point regarding God of the gaps. The religious “explanation” of moral and immoral behavior is no explanation at all, at least of the kind that requires painstaking enquiry. It is simply giving a name to unknown causes – God as a shorthand for “whatever causes us to be good.” Maybe GOD is an acronym – Goofy Omnipresent Do-gooder?


[I’ll end my rant for now. If the mood still persists, there will be a second part later, on Stanley’s idiotic, relativistic meanderings about incompatible paradigms and epistemology in general. In case the link doesn't work, the Fish article can be found at: iraqwarit.]