Intuition vs. Science: What's Wrong with Your Thinking, Fast and Slow

From Completely Useless to Moderately Useful

            In 1955, a twenty-one-year-old Daniel Kahneman was assigned the formidable task of creating an interview procedure to assess the fitness of recruits for the Israeli army. Kahneman’s only qualification was his bachelor’s degree in psychology, but the state of Israel had only been around for seven years at the time so the Defense Forces were forced to satisfice. In the course of his undergraduate studies, Kahneman had discovered the writings of a psychoanalyst named Paul Meehl, whose essays he would go on to “almost memorize” as a graduate student. Meehl’s work gave Kahneman a clear sense of how he should go about developing his interview technique.

If you polled psychologists today to get their predictions for how successful a young lieutenant inspired by a book written by a psychoanalyst would be in designing a personality assessment protocol—assuming you left out the names—you would probably get some dire forecasts. But Paul Meehl wasn’t just any psychoanalyst, and Daniel Kahneman has gone on to become one of the most influential psychologists in the world. The book whose findings Kahneman applied to his interview procedure was Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence, which Meehl lovingly referred to as “my disturbing little book.” Kahneman explains,

Meehl reviewed the results of 20 studies that had analyzed whether clinical predictions based on the subjective impressions of trained professionals were more accurate than statistical predictions made by combining a few scores or ratings according to a rule. In a typical study, trained counselors predicted the grades of freshmen at the end of the school year. The counselors interviewed each student for forty-five minutes. They also had access to high school grades, several aptitude tests, and a four-page personal statement. The statistical algorithm used only a fraction of this information: high school grades and one aptitude test. (222)

The findings for this prototypical study are consistent with those arrived at by researchers over the decades since Meehl released his book:

The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented. (223)       

            Kahneman designed the interview process by coming up with six traits he thought would have direct bearing on a soldier’s success or failure, and he instructed the interviewers to assess the recruits on each dimension in sequence. His goal was to make the process as systematic as possible, thus reducing the role of intuition. The response of the recruitment team will come as no surprise to anyone: “The interviewers came close to mutiny” (231). They complained that their knowledge and experience were being given short shrift, that they were being turned into robots. Eventually, Kahneman was forced to compromise, creating a final dimension that was holistic and subjective. The scores on this additional scale, however, seemed to be highly influenced by scores on the previous scales.

When commanding officers evaluated the new recruits a few months later, the team compared the evaluations with their predictions based on Kahneman’s six scales. “As Meehl’s book had suggested,” he writes, “the new interview procedure was a substantial improvement over the old one… We had progressed from ‘completely useless’ to ‘moderately useful’” (231).   

            Kahneman recalls this story at about the midpoint of his magnificent, encyclopedic book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is just one in a long series of run-ins with people who don’t understand or can’t accept the research findings he presents to them, and it is neatly woven into his discussions of those findings. Each topic and each chapter feature a short test that allows you to see where you fall in relation to the experimental subjects. The remaining thread in the tapestry is the one most readers familiar with Kahneman’s work most anxiously anticipated—his friendship with AmosTversky, with whom he shared the Nobel prize in economics in 2002.

Most of the ideas that led to experiments that led to theories which made the two famous and contributed to the founding of an entire new field, behavioral economics, were borne of casual but thrilling conversations both found intrinsically rewarding in their own right. Reading this book, as intimidating as it appears at a glance, you get glimmers of Kahneman’s wonder at the bizarre intricacies of his own and others’ minds, flashes of frustration at how obstinately or casually people avoid the implications of psychology and statistics, and intimations of the deep fondness and admiration he felt toward Tversky, who died in 1996 at the age of 59.

Pointless Punishments and Invisible Statistics

            When Kahneman begins a chapter by saying, “I had one of the most satisfying eureka experiences of my career while teaching flight instructors in the Israeli Air Force about the psychology of effective training” (175), it’s hard to avoid imagining how he might have relayed the incident to Amos years later. It’s also hard to avoid speculating about what the book might’ve looked like, or if it ever would have been written, if he were still alive. The eureka experience Kahneman had in this chapter came about, as many of them apparently did, when one of the instructors objected to his assertion, in this case that “rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.” The instructor insisted that over the long course of his career he’d routinely witnessed pilots perform worse after praise and better after being screamed at. “So please,” the instructor said with evident contempt, “don’t tell us that reward works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.” Kahneman, characteristically charming and disarming, calls this “a joyous moment of insight” (175).

            The epiphany came from connecting a familiar statistical observation with the perceptions of an observer, in this case the flight instructor. The problem is that we all have a tendency to discount the role of chance in success or failure. Kahneman explains that the instructor’s observations were correct, but his interpretation couldn’t have been more wrong.

What he observed is known as regression to the mean, which in that case was due to random fluctuations in the quality of performance. Naturally, he only praised a cadet whose performance was far better than average. But the cadet was probably just lucky on that particular attempt and therefore likely to deteriorate regardless of whether or not he was praised. Similarly, the instructor would shout into the cadet’s earphones only when the cadet’s performance was unusually bad and therefore likely to improve regardless of what the instructor did. The instructor had attached a causal interpretation to the inevitable fluctuations of a random process. (175-6)

The roster of domains in which we fail to account for regression to the mean is disturbingly deep. Even after you’ve learned about the phenomenon it’s still difficult to recognize the situations you should apply your understanding of it to. Kahneman quotes statistician David Freedman to the effect that whenever regression becomes pertinent in a civil or criminal trial the side that has to explain it will pretty much always lose the case. Not understanding regression, however, and not appreciating how it distorts our impressions has implications for even the minutest details of our daily experiences. “Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us,” Kahneman writes, “and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty” (176). Probability is a bitch.

The Illusion of Skill in Stock-Picking

            Probability can be expensive too. Kahneman recalls being invited to give a lecture to advisers at an investment firm. To prepare for the lecture, he asked for some data on the advisers’ performances and was given a spreadsheet for investment outcomes over eight years. When he compared the numbers statistically, he found that none of the investors was consistently more successful than the others. The correlation between the outcomes from year to year was nil. When he attended a dinner the night before the lecture “with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses,” he knew from experience how tough a time he was going to have convincing them that “at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were a skill.” Still, he was amazed by the execs’ lack of shock:

We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I have no doubt that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on just as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the industry. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed. (216)

The scene that follows echoes the first chapter of Carl Sagan’s classic paean to skepticism Demon-Haunted World, where Sagan recounts being bombarded with questions about science by a driver who was taking him from the airport to an auditorium where he was giving a lecture. He found himself explaining to the driver again and again that what he thought was science—Atlantis, aliens, crystals—was, in fact, not. "As we drove through the rain," Sagan writes, "I could see him getting glummer and glummer. I was dismissing not just some errant doctrine, but a precious facet of his inner life" (4). In Kahneman’s recollection of his drive back to the airport after his lecture, he writes of a conversation he had with his own driver, one of the execs he’d dined with the night before. 

He told me, with a trace of defensiveness, “I have done very well for the firm and no one can take that away from me.” I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, “Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it? (216)

Blinking at the Power of Intuitive Thinking

            It wouldn’t surprise Kahneman at all to discover how much stories like these resonate. Indeed, he must’ve considered it a daunting challenge to conceive of a sensible, cognitively easy way to get all of his vast knowledge of biases and heuristics and unconscious, automatic thinking into a book worthy of the science—and worthy too of his own reputation—while at the same time tying it all together with some intuitive overarching theme, something that would make it read more like a novel than an encyclopedia.

Malcolm Gladwell faced a similar challenge in writing Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking, but he had the advantages of a less scholarly readership, no obligation to be comprehensive, and the freedom afforded to someone writing about a field he isn’t one of the acknowledged leaders and creators of. Ultimately, Gladwell’s book painted a pleasing if somewhat incoherent picture of intuitive thinking. The power he refers to in the title is over the thoughts and actions of the thinker, not, as many must have presumed, to arrive at accurate conclusions.

It’s entirely possible that Gladwell’s misleading title came about deliberately, since there’s a considerable market for the message that intuition reigns supreme over science and critical thinking. But there are points in his book where it seems like Gladwell himself is confused. Robert Cialdini, Steve Marin, and Noah Goldstein cover some of the same research Kahneman and Gladwell do, but their book Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive is arranged in a list format, with each chapter serving as its own independent mini-essay.

Early in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman introduces us to two characters, System 1 and System 2, who pass the controls of our minds back and forth between themselves according the expertise and competency demanded by current exigency or enterprise. System 1 is the more intuitive, easygoing guy, the one who does what Gladwell refers to as “thin-slicing,” the fast thinking of the title. System 2 works deliberately and takes effort on the part of the thinker. Most people find having to engage their System 2—multiply 17 by 24—unpleasant to one degree or another.

The middle part of the book introduces readers to two other characters, ones whose very names serve as a challenge to the field of economics. Econs are the beings market models and forecasts are based on. They are rational, selfish, and difficult to trick. Humans, the other category, show inconsistent preferences, changing their minds depending on how choices are worded or presented, are much more sensitive to the threat of loss than the promise of gain, are sometimes selfless, and not only can be tricked with ease but routinely trick themselves. Finally, Kahneman introduces us to our “Two Selves,” the two ways we have of thinking about our lives, either moment-to-moment—experiences he, along with Mihaly Csikzentmihhalyi (author of Flow) pioneered the study of—or in abstract hindsight. It’s not surprising at this point that there are important ways in which the two selves tend to disagree.

Intuition and Cerebration

  The Econs versus Humans distinction, with its rhetorical purpose embedded in the terms, is plenty intuitive. The two selves idea, despite being a little too redolent of psychoanalysis, also works well. But the discussions about System 1 and System 2 are never anything but ethereal and abstruse. Kahneman’s stated goal was to discuss each of the systems as if they were characters in a plot, but he’s far too concerned with scientifically precise definitions to run with the metaphor. The term system is too bloodless and too suggestive of computer components; it’s too much of the realm of System 2 to be at all satisfying to System 1. The collection of characteristics Thinking links to the first system (see a list below) is lengthy and fascinating and not easily summed up or captured in any neat metaphor. But we all know what Kahneman is talking about. We could use mythological figures, perhaps Achilles or Orpheus for System 1 and Odysseus or Hephaestus for System 2, but each of those characters comes with his own narrative baggage. Not everyone’s System 1 is full of rage like Achilles, or musical like Orpheus. Maybe we could assign our System 1s idiosyncratic totem animals.

But I think the most familiar and the most versatile term we have for System 1 is intuition. It is a hairy and unpredictable beast, but we all recognize it. System 2 is actually the harder to name because people so often mistake their intuitions for logical thought. Kahneman explains why this is the case—because our cognitive resources are limited our intuition often offers up simple questions as substitutes from more complicated ones—but we must still have a term that doesn’t suggest complete independence from intuition and that doesn’t imply deliberate thinking operates flawlessly, like a calculator. I propose cerebration. The cerebral cortex rests on a substrate of other complex neurological structures. It’s more developed in humans than in any other animal. And the way it rolls trippingly off the tongue is as eminently appropriate as the swish of intuition. Both terms work well as verbs too. You can intuit, or you can cerebrate. And when your intuition is working in integrated harmony with your cerebration you are likely in the state of flow Csikzentmihalyi pioneered the study of.

While Kahneman’s division of thought into two systems never really resolves into an intuitively manageable dynamic, something he does throughout the book, which I initially thought was silly, seems now a quite clever stroke of brilliance. Kahneman has no faith in our ability to clean up our thinking. He’s an expert on all the ways thinking goes awry, and even he catches himself making all the common mistakes time and again. In the introduction, he proposes a way around the impenetrable wall of cognitive illusion and self-justification. If all the people gossiping around the water cooler are well-versed in the language describing biases and heuristics and errors of intuition, we may all benefit because anticipating gossip can have a profound effect on behavior. No one wants to be spoken of as the fool.

Kahneman writes, “it is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own.” It’s not easy to tell from his straightforward prose, but I imagine him writing lines like that with a wry grin on his face. He goes on,

Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others. Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefore matters. The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home. (3)

So we encourage the education of others to trick ourselves into trying to be smarter in their eyes. Toward that end, Kahneman ends each chapter with a list of sentences in quotation marks—lines you might overhear passing that water cooler if everyone where you work read his book.  I think he’s overly ambitious. At some point in the future, you may hear lines like “They’re counting on denominator neglect” (333) in a boardroom—where people are trying to impress colleagues and superiors—but I seriously doubt you’ll hear it in the break room. Really, what he’s hoping is that people will start talking more like behavioral economists. Though some undoubtedly will, Thinking, Fast and Slow probably won’t ever be as widely read as, say, Freud’s lurid pseudoscientific On the Interpretation of Dreams. That’s a tragedy.

Still, it’s pleasant to think about a group of friends and colleagues talking about something other than football and American Idol. Characteristics of System 1 (105): Try to come up with a good metaphor.·

generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions·

operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control·

can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when particular patterns are detected (search) ·

executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training·

creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory·

links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance·

distinguishes the surprising from the normal·

infers and invents causes and intentions·

neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt·

is biased to believe and confirm·

exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)·

focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence (WYSIATI)·

generates a limited set of basic assessments·

represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate·

matches intensities across scales (e.g., size and loudness)·

computes more than intended (mental shotgun)·

sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics) ·

is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)·

overweights low probabilities.

shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)·

responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)·

frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another

Also read:

LAB FLIES: JOSHUA GREENE’S MORAL TRIBES AND THE CONTAMINATION OF WALTER WHITE

“THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY” AND THE GREAT ANTHROPOLOGY DIVIDE: WADE DAVIS’S AND JAMES C. SCOTT’S BIZARRE AND DISHONEST REVIEWS OF JARED DIAMOND’S WORK

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

DISTRACTION

He wakes up every day and reads

most days only for a few minutes

before he has to work the fields.

He always plans to read more

before he goes to sleep but

the candlelight and exhaustion

put the plan neatly away.

He hates the reading,

wonders if he should find

something other than Great Expectations.

But he doesn’t have

any other books,

and he thinks of reading

like he thinks of church.

And one Sunday after sleeping

through the sermon,

he comes home and picks up

his one book.

He finds his place

planning to read just

those few minutes

but goes on and on.

The line that gets him

is about how “our worst

weaknesses and meanness”

are “for the sake of” those

“we most despise.”

He reads it over and over

and then goes on intent

on making sense of the words

and finding that they make their own.

After a while he stops to consider

beginning the entire book again

feeling he’s missed too much

but he goes back to where he left off.

The next day in the field he puts

everything he sees into silent words

and that night he reads for the first time

before falling asleep.

The next day in the field he describes

to himself his feelings about his work

and later holds things in their places

with words as he moves around in time.

The words are the only constant,

as even their objects can shift

through his life, childhood,

senility, and through the life of the land.

He wants to write down his days on paper

because he believes if he does then he can

go anywhere, do anything, and yet still

there he’ll be.

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

but that he was wrong—

even Pip must’ve known his worst

wasn’t for anyone but Estella,

nor his best.

One day could stretch to a whole

book of bound pages like the one

in his hands, or it could start and finish

on just one.

He imagines writing right over

the grand typeset words of Dickens'

on page one, “Hard to believe,

I woke up, excited to read.

I wished I could keep reading all day.”

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

Also read:

Secret Dancers

And:

Gracie - Invisible Fences

Gracie - Invisible Fences

Invisible Fences

I hated Tony’s parents even more than I had before when I heard about the “invisible fence” for Gracie.

They were altogether too strict, overly vigilant, intrusive in their son’s, my friend’s, life, and so unjustifiedly.

He and I were the shy ones, the bookish, artistic, sensitive ones—really both of us were conscientious to a fault.

What we needed was encouragement, always some sort of bolstering, but what Tony got was questioned and stifled.

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

As dumb kids we of course had to sample the “mild shock” Gracie would receive should she venture too near the property line.

It seemed not so mild to me, a teenager, with big dreams, held back, I felt, by myriad unnecessary qualities of myself—

qualities I must master, vanquish—and yet here were Tony’s parents, putting up still more arbitrary boundaries.

I could barely stand to hear about Gracie’s march of shameful submission, conditioning to a high-pitched warning.

She started whimpering and shaking, and looking up with plangent eyes at her merciless or misguided master—

this by the second lap along the border of the yard, so she’d learn never to get shocked—it was all “for her own good.”

The line infuriated me more than any lie I’d ever heard, as there was no question whose convenience was really being served.

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

and I looked back, stopping, to see her longingly looking, desperately watching us leave her, leaving me sighing.

I shook my head, frowned, subtly slumped, which maybe she saw, because just then a change came over her.

She fell silent, her ears fell flat to her brown, bullet-shaped head, her body tensed as she lifted herself from her haunches.

And then she shot forth her willowy, maculated body in long, determined strides, but keeping low all the while,

as if somehow intuiting that the impending pain was simply a manifestation of her master’s hand to be ducked under.

My mouth fell open in thrilled astonishment, and as she neared the buried line, I shouted, “Yeah Gracie! Come on!”

Tony likewise thrilled to the feat his old friend was about to perform, shouting alongside me, “Come on girl! You can make it!”

About the time Gracie would have been heedlessly hearing the warning beep, my excitement turned darker.

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

Without the slightest whimper Gracie broke through the boundary, ducked under the blow, defying her master’s dictates.

“Yeah! Fuck ‘em!” I enjoined again, my head jolting, thrashing out the words, erupting with all the force of self-loathing.

If Tony had any apprehensions about hearing his parents so cursed he never voiced them—was I really cursing them?

Gracie approached atremble, all frenzy from her jolting accomplishment and now met by our wild acclaim and eager praise,

or not praise so much as gratitude, as she anxiously darted between and around us as if disoriented, reeling, overwhelmed.

But Tony and I knew exactly what we had just witnessed, the toppling of guilt’s tyranny, a spirit’s willful, gasping escape.

Our deliverance lasted hours, while we idly ambled about and between neighborhoods, casting spiteful glances

along the endless demarcations of land, owned, separated, displayed, individual kingdoms, badges of well-lived,

well-governed lives—I wanted to tromp through all those manicured front lawns, my every step spreading pestilence

to the too-green grass we weren’t supposed to walk on lest it wear a trail, ruining the pristine quality of ownership.

Our march of euphoric defiance inspired by Gracie’s coup de grace could only go on for so long, though—

we were newly free, but free to do what?—before we’d have to return home for a meal, shelter, electronic entertainment.

As the sun sank, I began to have the sense of squandered opportunity, dreading the end of my reprieve from invisible impediments.

Back toward Tony’s house we hesitantly made our way, but all the while I kept the image of Gracie’s escape fresh in mind.

My friend and I took up conversing as we neared the stretch of road by his house, ranging widely and irreverently—

our discourses having served as our sole escape up to then—in the tone and spirit of seeing right through everything.

We were both halfway up Tony’s driveway before we noticed that Gracie was no longer keeping pace with us.

…She was turning tight circles in the street, whimpering, anxious, and seeing her, Tony and I exchanged a look I’ll never forget.

Even after removing the device from Gracie’s neck, we still had to lift her, squirming desperately, over the line to get her home.

Also read:
IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

And:

Secret Dancers

Secret Dancers

For about 3 years, I was a bit obsessed with C.K. Williams's poems. They usually tell stories, and rather than worrying over whether his words impose some burden of meaning on his subjects, Williams uses words to discover the meanings that exist independent of them. The result is a stripping away of tired, habituated ways of seeing to make way for new revelation.

This poem was also inspired by Ian McEwan's novel Saturday, which focuses on a day in the life of a neurosurgeon. Anyway, I really love how this poem turned out, but it's so derivative I feel I have to cite my inspirations.

Secret Dancers

The woman on the right side of the booth as I approach—“Can I get you something to drink?”—I noticed had something wrong with her,

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

her mother perhaps, from the door—“Hello, will it be just the two of you today?”—to where they sit, in my section, scanning the menu for that one item.

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

I nod, repeating, “water with lemon,” as I turn to the other, like I always turn from one to the next,

but this time with an added eagerness, with a curiosity I know may offend, and I see my diagnosis was correct,

for the woman cannot, does not, sit still, cannot be still, but jerks and sways, as if unable to establish equilibrium, find a balanced middle.

I’m glad, hurrying to the fountains, as I always do, the woman said, in essence, “For me too,”

because I’ve already lost her words in the deluge of the disturbance, the rarity, the tragedy of the sight

of her involuntary dance—chorea—which is, aside from the movement, nothing at all like a dance, more an antidance,

signaling things opposite to what real dancers do with their performances.

I watch my hands do by habit the filling of plastic cups with ice and water, reach for straws and lemons,

still seeing her, slipping though sitting, and doing my own semantic antidance in my mind:

“How could anyone go on believing… after seeing… dopamine… substantia nigra…

choreographed by nucleotides—no one ever said the vestibular structure, the loop under the ear

with the tiny floating bone that gives us, that is our sense of balance, was implicated… so important to see.”

In the kitchen, sorting dishes by shape on the stainless steal table on their way to being washed,

I call to the pretty young cook I sort of love, who sort of loves but sort of hates me

for the sorts of things I say (noticing and questioning), and say, “There’s a woman with Parkinson’s

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

(somewhere in my frontal lobe I suspect) before the suggestion can even be acknowledged.

Look? Are we to examine her, make her a specimen, or gawk, like at a freak? But it—she is so important to see,

I set to formulating a new category of looking.

I begin with the varieties of suffering so proudly and annoyingly on display: abuse, or “abuse”, survived,

poverty escaped, gangsta rappers shot or imprisoned to earn their street cred,

chains of slights and abandonments by ex-lovers, all heard so frequently, boasted of as markers of authenticity.

Is there a way, I wonder, to look that would serve as tribute to the woman’s much more literal,

much more real perseverance and courage, a registering and appreciation of identity,

that precious plumage that renders each of us findable in the endless welter and noise

of faces and the dubious stories of heroism attached to them?

Returning to the booth to take the women’s orders, so awkward, so wrong, the looking, I discover,

cannot be condoned under my new rubric because the sufferer’s antidance is leading her in the wrong direction.

Those stories of abuse, penury, assaults or arrests, and recurrent dealings with unfaithful lovers all go from bad,

the worse the better, to better but never too good. This story, like nearly all real and authentic stories, is about deterioration.

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

noticing and questioning—leads irredeemably to taboo

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

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

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

when he’d decided, strategically,

and it turned out successfully, not to. Ali, The Greatest, the star and subject of movies, King of Classic Sports on ESPN,

his not quite dancing featured so prominently, so inescapably—look all you want, look and be awed—but all in the past.

You forget the man is still alive. The secrecy makes me wonder: is it economic, is it political?

The visibility, the stark advertisement of achievers of the formerly impossible, the heroically,

the monstrously successful, coupled with the tabooed hiding away of the vastly more numerous unfortunate,

fallen, and afflicted—the lifeblood, the dangling American Dream, insufficient,

the market for better lives necessitates the beating heart of

belief, “You can do anything...,” be your heroes, be heroes for others, by working,

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

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

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

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

on my way to the booth, I recall uneasily watching Ali, his arm outstretched,

antidancing as he lit the Olympic Torch.

Also read:
GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

IN HONOR OF CHARLES DICKENS ON THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

The Upper Hand in Relationships

People perform some astoundingly clever maneuvers in pursuit of the upper hand in their romantic relationships, and some really stupid ones too. They try to make their partners jealous. They feign lack of interest. They pretend to have enjoyed wild success in the realm of dating throughout their personal histories, right up until the point at which they met their current partners. The edge in cleverness, however, is usually enjoyed by women—though you may be inclined to call it subtlety, or even deviousness.

Some of the most basic dominance strategies used in romantic relationships are based either on one partner wanting something more than the other, or on one partner being made to feel more insecure than the other. We all know couples whose routine revolves around the running joke that the man is constantly desperate for sex, which allows the woman to set the terms he must meet in order to get some. His greater desire for sex gives her the leverage to control him in other domains. I’ll never forget being nineteen and hearing a friend a few years older say of her husband, “Why would I want to have sex with him when he can’t even remember to take out the garbage?” Traditionally, men held the family purse strings, so they—assuming they or their families had money—could hold out the promise of things women wanted more. Of course, some men still do this, giving their wives little reminders of how hard they work to provide financial stability, or dropping hints of their extravagant lifestyles to attract prospective dates.

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

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

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

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

I give the edge to women when it comes to subtly attaining the upper hand in relationships because I routinely see them using a third strategy they seem to have exclusive rights to. Being the less interested party, or the most secure and reassuring party, can work wonders, but for turning proud people into sycophants nothing seems to work quite as well as a good old-fashioned guilt-trip.

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

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

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

It’s this idea of trauma, which can be attributed mostly to Freud, that can really make a relationship, and life, fraught and intolerably treacherous. Behaviors that would otherwise be thought inconsiderate or rude—a hurtful word, a wandering eye—are instead taken as malicious attempts to cause lasting harm. But the most troubling thing about psychological trauma is that belief in it is its own proof, even as it implicates a guilty party who therefore has no way to establish his innocence.

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

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

           The second thing you can do is cultivate the habit and the mutual attitude of what’s good for one is good for the other. Relationship researcher Arthur Aron says that celebrating your partner’s successes is one of the most important things you can do in a relationship. “That’s even more important,” he says, “than supporting him or her when things go bad.” Watch out for zero-sum responses, in yourself and in your partner. And beware of zero-summers in the realm of dating.

Ladies, you know the guys who seem vaguely resentful of the power you have over them by dint of your good looks and social graces. And, guys, you know the women who make you feel vaguely guilty and set-upon every time you talk to them. The best thing to do is stay away.

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

Also read

Anti-Charm - Its Powers and Perils

Seduced by Satan

[Excerpt from Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: Altruism, Narrative Interest, and the Adaptive Appeal of Bad Boys, my master’s thesis]

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes the political dynamics of nomadic peoples in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: TheEvolution of Egalitarian Behavior, and his descriptions suggest that parsing a motive of domination from one of preserving autonomy is much more complicated than Flesch’s analysis assumes. “In my opinion,” Boehm writes, “nomadic foragers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free from the authority of others” (68). As long as the group they belong to is small enough for each group member to monitor the actions of the others, people can maintain strict egalitarianism, giving up whatever dominance they may desire for the assurance of not being dominated themselves.

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

Also read:

CAMPAIGNING DEITIES: JUSTIFYING THE WAYS OF SATAN

THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

SYMPATHIZING WITH PSYCHOS: WHY WE WANT TO SEE ALEX ESCAPE HIS FATE AS A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

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

Read part 1

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

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means they are paying to punish. They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the selfishness of the proposer. (31)

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

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

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

A group of people who abandon self-will and work tirelessly for a greater good will fare very well as a group, much better than if they all pursue their private utilities, as long as the greater good corresponds to the welfare of the group. And religions almost invariably do link the greater good to the welfare of the community of believers, whether an organized modern church or an ethnic group for whom religion is thoroughly intermixed with the rest of their culture. Since religion is such an ancient feature of our species, I have no problem whatsoever imagining the capacity for selflessness and longing to be part of something larger than ourselves as part of our genetic and cultural heritage. (175)

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

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

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

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

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

we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed supernatural agent we have on offer… This is to say, just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. (79)

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

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

in general, morality is a matter of putting the group’s needs ahead of one’s own selfish interests. So when we hear about someone who has done the opposite, especially when it comes at another person’s obvious expense, this individual becomes marred by our social judgment and grist for the gossip mills. (183)

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

For many, God represents that ineradicable sense of being watched that so often flares up in moments of temptation—He who knows what’s in our hearts, that private audience that wants us to act in certain ways at critical decision-making points and that will be disappointed in us otherwise. (191)

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

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

images of eyes motivate cooperative behavior because they induce a perception in participants of being watched. Although participants were not actually observed in either of our experimental conditions, the human perceptual system contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes…, and it is therefore possible that the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants’ perception that they were being watched. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that reputational concerns may be extremely powerful in motivating cooperative behavior. (2) (But also see Sparks et al. for failed replications)

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:
HOW TO GET KIDS TO READ LITERATURE WITHOUT MAKING THEM HATE IT

WHY THE CRITICS ARE GETTING LUHRMANN'S GREAT GATSBY SO WRONG

WHY SHAKESPEARE NAUSEATED DARWIN: A REVIEW OF KEITH OATLEY'S "SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through a mechanism of group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or invaded by nonaltruists—that is, that group boundaries were too porous—to make group selection strong enough to overcome competition at the level of the individual or the gene. (5)

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

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

Nick Carraway is tracking Tom Buchanan’s actions, for instance. Reading the novel, we have little doubt what Nick’s attitude toward Tom is, especially as the story progresses. Though we may favor Nick over Tom, Nick’s failure to sufficiently punish Tom when the degree of his selfishness first becomes apparent tempers any positive feelings we may have toward him. As Flesch points out, “altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a population of purely benevolent altruists” (66).

On the other hand, through the very act of telling the story, the narrator may be attempting to rectify his earlier moral complacence. According to Flesch’s model of the dynamics of fiction, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). However, many readers of Gatsby probably find Nick’s belated punishment insufficient, and if they fail to see the novel as a comment on the real injustice Fitzgerald saw going on around him they would be both confused and disappointed by the way the story ends.

Read part 2

Tax Demagoguery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           Talk show hosts who repeatedly make false claims will be classified as demagogues and have to pay a fixed rate to obviate any need for the research group to watch every show and investigate every claim. But anyone who is designated a demagogue must advertise the designation on the screen or at regular intervals on the air—along with a link or address to the research groups’ site, where the audience can view a list of the false claims that earned him or her the designation.

Individuals speaking to each other won’t be affected. And bloggers with small audiences, if they are taxed at all, won’t be taxed much—or they can simply correct their mistakes. Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore will still be free to spew nonsense; but they’ll have to consider the costs—because the harm they cause by being sloppy or mendacious doesn’t seem to bother them.

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

Also read:

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE DARWIN ECONOMY?

THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

What's Wrong with The Darwin Economy?

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

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

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

Frank challenges the invisible hand doctrine by demonstrating that it fails to consider the full range of the ramifications of market competition, most notably the importance of relative position. But

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:
THE IMP OF THE UNDERGROUND AND THE LITERATURE OF LOW STATUS

Anti-Charm - Its Powers and Perils

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:
THE UPPER HAND IN RELATIONSHIPS

THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

The Ghost Haunting 710 Crowder Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:

THE SMOKING BUDDHA: ANOTHER GHOST STORY FOR ADULTS (AND YOUNG ADULTS TOO)

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

BEDTIME GHOST STORY FOR ADULTS

NEW YORKER'S TALK OF THE TOWN GOES SCI-FI

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

Occupy Fort Wayne

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

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

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

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

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

The first speaker filled us in on "Occupation Etiquette." You hold up your arm and wave your hand when you agree with what's been said. And the speakers use short sentences the crowd repeats to make sure everyone can hear. The call and response reminded me of church. Rallies like this are to gather crowds, so when talking heads say their views are the views of the people they can point to the throngs of people who came to their gatherings.

But what is one to do about the guy carrying the sign complaining about illegal immigrants? What about all the people saying we need to shut down the Fed? What about the guy who says, "There's two kinds of people: the kind who work for money, and the kind who work for people"?

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

We shouldn't need political rallies to whip us up into a frenzy. We're obligated as citizens to pay attention to what's going on--and to vote. Maybe the Occupy Protests will get some issues into the news cycle that weren't there before. If so, I'm glad I went.

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

Some fool laughingly shouts about revolution. But I'm not willing to kill anyone over how much bankers make. Why was I there today? It seemed like the first time someone was talking about the right issue. Sort of.

Monks: a Short Riff on Hemingway and Porter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was me riffing on a theme from Hemingway’s

The Sun Also Rises:

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

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

        Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

And from Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft”:

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

Also read:

TAKING THE GRE AGAIN AFTER 10 YEARS

KAYAKING ON A WORMHOLE

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

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

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

[This essay is a brief distillation of ideas explored in much greater depth in Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: Altruism, Narrative Interest, and the Adaptive Appeal of Bad Boys, my master’s thesis]

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

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

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

So why exactly was it that Jack couldn’t sleep at night? The simple answer, the one that Tyler gives later in the movie, is that he’s unhappy with his life. He hates his job. Something about his “filing cabinet” apartment rankles him. And he’s alone. Jack’s job is to fly all over the country to investigate accidents involving his company’s vehicles and to apply “the formula.” I’m going to quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s book:

You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).

A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.

If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.

If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall (30).

Palahniuk's inspiration for Jack's job was an actual case involving the Ford Pinto. What this means is that Jack goes around trying to protect his company's bottom line to the detriment of people who drive his company's cars. You can imagine the husband or wife or child or parent of one of these accident victims hearing about this job and asking Jack, "How do you sleep at night?"

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

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

This is where Jack being of "a generation of men raised by women" becomes important (50). Fathers and mothers tend to treat children differently. A study that functions well symbolically in this context examined the ways moms and dads tend to hold their babies in pools. Moms hold them facing themselves. Dads hold them facing away. Think of the way Bob's embrace of Jack changes between the support group and the fight club. When picked up by moms, babies breathing and heart-rates slow. Just the opposite happens when dads pick them up--they get excited. And if you inventory the types of interactions that go on between the two parents it's easy to see why.

Not only do dads engage children in more rough-and-tumble play; they are also far more likely to encourage children to take risks. In one study, fathers told they'd have to observe their child climbing a slope from a distance making any kind of rescue impossible in the event of a fall set the slopes at a much steeper angle than mothers in the same setup.

Fight Club isn't about dominance or triumphalism or white males' reaction to losing control; it's about men learning that they can't really live if they're always playing it safe. Jack actually says at one point that winning or losing doesn't much matter. Indeed, one of the homework assignments Tyler gives everyone is to start a fight and lose. The point is to be willing to risk a fight when it's necessary--i.e. when someone attempts to exploit or seduce you based on the assumption that you'll always act according to your rational self-interest.

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:
WHAT MAKES "WOLF HALL" SO GREAT?

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

Bad Men

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

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

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical ‘issues’—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:
SYMPATHIZING WITH PSYCHOS: WHY WE WANT TO SEE ALEX ESCAPE HIS FATE AS A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

SABBATH SAYS: PHILIP ROTH AND THE DILEMMAS OF IDEOLOGICAL CASTRATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read:

POSTSTRUCTURALISM: BANAL WHEN IT'S NOT BUSY BEING ABSURD

WHAT TO LEAVE OUT: MINIMALISM AND THE HEMINGWAY MYSTIQUE

Kayaking on a Wormhole

We’d been on the water for quite a while, neither of us at all sure just how much longer we’d be on it before reaching the Hursh Road Bridge, cattycorner to which, in a poorly tended gravel parking lot marking the head of a trail through a nature preserve, I’d parked Kevin's work truck before transferring vehicles to ride with him in his wife’s truck, kayaks strapped to the roof, to Cook’s Landing, another park situated in the shadow of a bridge, this one for Coldwater Road just north of Shoaf on the way to Garret. After maybe an hour of paddling and floating, it occurred to me to start attending to our banter and assessing how faithfully some of the dialogue between friends in my stories mimicked it.

            “What the hell kind of bird is that?”

            “Probably an early bird.”

            “Probably a dirty bird.”

            “Oh yeah, it’s filthy.”

            At one point, after posing a series of questions about what I’d rather have fall on me from the trees—a cricket or a spider?; a spider or a centipede?; a spider or a snake?—followed by the question of what I’d do if I saw a giant snake someone had let loose slither into the water after me, he began a story about a herpetologist in Brazil: “Did you hear what happened?” Of course, I hadn’t heard; the story was from a show on cable about anacondas. This hundred and fifty pound woman was walking through the marshes, tracking a snake, which turned out to be about twenty-eight feet long and five hundred pounds, to study it.

            “She’s following the track it left in the tall grass, and then she senses that there’s something watching her. When she turns around, she sees that it’s reared up”—he held up his arm with his fist bent forward—“so it’s just looking at her at eye level.”

            “Did it say, ‘Who da fuck is you?’”

            “Snakes don’t generally creep me out, but I don’t like the idea of it, like, following her and rearing up like that.”

            “Yeah, I’ve never heard of an anaconda doing that. You hear of cobras doing it. Did she say, ‘Dere’s snakes out here dis big!?’”—my impression of Ice Cube in the movie Anaconda.

            When I asked what she did, he said he didn’t remember. The snake had attacked her, lunging at her face, but she must’ve escaped somehow because she was being interviewed for the show. At a couple points in his recounting of the story, I thought how silly it was. For one thing, it’s impossible to sense something watching you. For another, her being a herpetologist doesn’t rule out the possibility that she was embellishing. And yet I couldn’t help picturing the encounter, vividly, as I paddled my kayak.

            The story was oddly appropriate. Every time we put in on Cedar Creek and make it some distance from the roads, we get the sense that we’re closer to the jungle than we are to civilization. Kevin knows snakes are my fear totem. At times, scenes from the Paul Bowles collection A Delicate Prey, or from Heart of Darkness, or even from Huckleberry Finn would drift into my mind. We did briefly discuss some paleoanthropology—recent discoveries in Dmanisi, Georgia suggesting a possible origin of modern humans in Western Asia rather than Africa—but, for the most part, for the duration of our sojourn on the river, we may as well have been two prepubescent boys. Compared to the way we were talking, the dialogue between friends in my stories is far too sophisticated.

            But that’s really not how we normally talk. As our time on the water accrued long past our upper estimates, and as the fallen-tree-strewn stretches got more and more tricky to traverse, that sense of being far from civilization, far from our lives, our adult lives, became ever more profound. The gnats and mosquitoes and splendidly black dragonflies, their wings tipped with blue, swarmed us whenever we lolled in the shade, getting more bold as more of our bug spray got washed away. We talked about all the ways we’d heard of that Native Americans and other indigenous peoples avoided bug bites and poison plants. The shores were lousy with poison ivy. It was easy to lose your identity. We could’ve been any two guys in the world, at any time in history. The phones were locked away in a waterproof box. The kayaks could’ve been made of anything; the plastic was adventitious. Out here, with the old-growth trees and the ghostly shadows of quickly glimpsed fish, it was the big concrete bridges and the exiguous houses and yards backing up to the creek that seemed impermanent, unreal. Even the human trash washing into the leafy and wooden detritus gathering against the smoothed-over bark of collapsed trees was being dulled and stripped of all signs of cleverness.

            “Do you ever have déjà vu?” Kevin asked after we’d passed all the expected landmarks and gotten over our astonishment at how drastically we’d underestimated the length of the journey down the creek. “Because the first time we kayaked here, I was completely sure I’d had a dream about it—but I had the dream before I’d ever been here.”

            “I think it’s something about the river,” I said, recalling several instances that day when I had experienced an emptying of mind, something I’ve often strived for while meditating but seldom even come to close to achieving. You find yourself being carried downstream, lulled, quieted, your gaze focused on the busy motion of countless tiny bugs on a swatch of surface gilt with sunlight. Their coordinated pattern dazzles you. It’s the only thing remotely resembling a thought. “There’s something about the motion of the water and the way it has you slowly moving along. I keep laying back and watching the undersides of the leaves move over me. It puts you in a trance. It’s hypnotic.”

            “You’re right. It is, like, mesmerizing.” He knew what I was talking about, but we kept shuffling through our stock of words because none of them seemed to get it quite right.

            So there we were, a couple of nameless, ageless guys floating down the river, leaning back to watch the trees slide away upstream, soft white clouds in a soft blue sky, riotous distant stars shattering the immense dark of some timeless night.

            “I forgive you river for making me drag my boat through all those nettles.”

            “I’ll reserve my forgiveness until I find out if I have poison ivy.”

Also read:

THE GHOST HAUNTING 710 CROWDER COURT

GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

PERCY FAWCETT’S 2 LOST CITIES

Taking the GRE again after 10 Years

            I had it timed: if I went to the bathroom at 8:25, I’d be finishing up the essay portion of the test about ten minutes after my bladder was full again. Caffeine being essential for me to get into the proper state of mind for writing, I’d woken up to three cans of Diet Mountain Dew and two and half rather large cups of coffee. I knew I might not get called in to take the test precisely at 8:30, but I figured I could handle the pressure, as it were. The clock in the office of the test center read 8:45 when I walked in. Paperwork, signatures, getting a picture taken, turning out all my pockets (where I managed to keep my three talismans concealed)—by the time I was sitting down in the carrel—in a room that might serve as a meeting place for prisoners and their lawyers—it was after 9:00. And there were still more preliminaries to go through.

            Test takers are allotted 45 minutes for an essay on the “Issue Topic” prompted by a short quote. The “Analysis of an Argument” essay takes a half hour. The need to piss got urgent with about ten minutes left on the clock for the issue essay. By the end of the second essay, I was squirming and dancing and pretty desperate. Of course, I had to wait for our warden to let me out of the testing room. And then I had to halt midway through the office to come back and sign myself out. Standing at the urinal—and standing and standing—I had plenty of time to consider how poorly designed my strategy had been. I won’t find out my scores for the essay portion for ten or so days.

**********************************

            I’ve been searching my apartment for the letter with my official scores from the first time I took the GRE about ten years ago. I’d taken it near the end of the summer, at one of those times in life of great intellectual awakening. With bachelor’s degrees in both anthropology and psychology, and with only the most inchoate glimmerings of a few possible plans for the future, I lived in my dad’s enormous house with my oldest brother, who had returned after graduating from Notre Dame and was now taking graduate courses at IPFW, my alma mater, and some roommates. I delivered pizzas in the convertible Mustang I bought as a sort of hand-me-down from that same brother. And I spent hours every day reading.

            I’m curious about the specific date of the test because it would allow me place it in the context of what I was reading. It would also help me ascertain the amount of time I spent preparing. If memory serves, I was doing things like pouring over various books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, trying to decide which one of them knew the real skinny on how evolution works. I think by then I’d read Frank Sulloway’s Born to Rebel, in which he applied complex statistics to data culled from historical samples and concluded that later-born siblings tend to be less conscientious but more open to new ideas and experiences. I was delighted to hear that the former president had read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and thought it tragically unimaginable that the current president would ever read anything like that. At some point, I began circling words I didn’t recognize or couldn’t define so when I was finished with the chapter I could look them up and make a few flashcards.

            I’m not even sure the flashcards were in anticipation of the GRE. Several of my classmates in both the anthropology and psychology departments had spoken to me by then of their dejection upon receiving their scores. I was scared to take it. The trend seemed to be that everyone was getting about a hundred points less on this test than they did on the SAT. I decided I only really cared about the verbal reasoning section, and a 620 on that really wasn’t acceptable. Beyond the flashcards, I got my hands on a Kaplan CD-ROM from a guy at school and started doing all the practice tests on it. The scores it gave me hovered in the mid-600s. It also gave me scads of unfamiliar words (like scad) to put in my stack of flashcards, which grew, ridiculously, to the height of about a foot.

            I don’t remember much about the test itself. It was at a Sylvan Learning Center that closed a while back. One of the reading comprehension excerpts was on chimpanzees, which I saw as a good sign. When I was done, there was a screen giving me a chance to admit I cheated. It struck me as odd. Then came the screen with my scores—800 verbal reasoning. I looked around the room and saw nothing but the backs of silent test-takers. Could this be right? I never ace anything. It sank in when I was sitting down in the Mustang. Driving home on I-69, I sang along to “The Crush” by Dave Matthews, elated.

            I got accepted into MIT’s program in science writing based on that score and a writing sample in which I defended Frank Sulloway’s birth order theory against Judith Rich Harris, the author of The Nurture Assumption, another great book. But Harris’s arguments struck me as petty and somewhat disgraceful. She was engaging in something akin to a political campaign against a competing theory, rather than making a good faith effort to discover the truth. Anyway, the article I wrote got long and unwieldy. Michael Shermer considered it for publication in Skeptic but ultimately declined because I just didn’t have my chops up when it came to writing about science. By then, I was a writer of fiction.

            That’s why upon discovering how expensive a year in Cambridge would be and how little financial aid I’d be getting I declined MIT's invitation to attend their program. If being a science writer was my dream, I’d have gone. But I decided to hold out for an acceptance to an MFA program in creative writing. I’d already applied two years in row before stretching my net to include science writing. But the year I got accepted at MIT ended up being the third year of summary rejection on the fiction front. I had one more year before that perfect GRE score expired.

**********

            Year four went the same way all the other years had gone. I was in my late twenties now and had the feeling whatever opportunities that were once open to me had slipped away. Next came a crazy job at a restaurant—Lucky’s—and a tumultuous relationship with the kitchen manager. After I had to move out of the apartment I shared with her in the wake of our second breakup (there would be a third), I was in a pretty bad place. But I made the smartest decision I’d made in a while and went back to school to get my master’s in English at IPFW.

            The plan was to improve my qualifications for creative writing programs. And now that I’m nearly finished with the program I put re-taking the GRE at the top of my list for things to do this summer. In the middle of May, I registered to take it on June 22nd. I’d been dreading it ever since my original score expired, but now I was really worried. What would it mean if I didn’t get an 800 again? What if I got significantly lower than that? The MFA programs I’ll be applying to are insanely competitive: between five hundred and a thousand applicants for less than a dozen spaces. At the same time, though, there was a sense that a lower score would serve as this perfect symbol for just how far I’d let my life go off-track.

            Without much conscious awareness of what I was doing, I started playing out a Rocky narrative, or some story like Mohammed Ali making his comeback after losing his boxing license for refusing to serve in Vietnam. I would prove I wasn’t a has-been, that whatever meager accomplishments I had under my belt weren’t flukes. Last semester I wrote a paper on how to practice to be creative, and one of the books I read for it was K. Anders Ericsson’s The Road to Excellence. So, after signing up for the test I created a regimen of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice,” based on anticipation and immediate feedback. I got my hands on as many sample items and sample tests I could find. I made little flashcards with the correct answers on them to make the feedback as close as possible to the hazarded answer. I put hours and hours into it. And I came up with a strategy for each section, and for every possible contingency I could think of. I was going to beat the GRE, again, through sheer force of will.

***********

            The order of the sections is variable. Ideally, the verbal section would have come first after the essay section so I wouldn’t have to budget my stores of concentration. But sitting down again after relieving my bladder I saw the quantitative section appear before me on the screen. Oh well, I planned for this too, I thought. I adhered pretty well to my strategy of working for a certain length of time to see if I could get the answer and then guessing if it didn’t look promising. And I achieved my goal for this section by not embarrassing myself. I got a 650.

            The trouble began almost immediately when the verbal questions starting coming. The strategy for doing analogies, the questions I most often missed in practice, was to work out the connection between the top words, “the bridge,” before considering the five word couples below to see which one has the same bridge. But because the screen was so large, and because I was still jittery from the caffeine, I couldn’t read the first word pair without seeing all the others. I abandoned the strategy with the first question.

            Then disaster struck. I’d anticipated only two sets of reading comprehension questions, but then, with the five minute warning already having passed, another impossibly long blurb appeared. I resign myself at that point to having to give up my perfect score. I said to myself, “Just read it quick and give the best answers you can.” I finished the section with about twenty seconds left. At least all the antonyms had been easy. Next came an experimental section I agreed to take since I didn’t need to worry about flagging concentration anymore. For the entire eighteen minutes it took, I sat there feeling completely defeated. I doubt my answers for that section will be of much use.

            Finally, I was asked if I wanted to abandon my scores—a ploy, I’m sure to get skittish people to pay to take the test twice. I said no, and clicked to see and record my scores. There it was at the top of the screen, my 800. I’d visualized the moment several times. I was to raise one arm in victory—but I couldn’t because the warden would just think I was raising my hand to signal I needed something. I also couldn’t because I didn’t feel victorious. I still felt defeated. I was sure all the preparation I’d done had been completely pointless. I hadn’t boxed. I’d clenched my jaw, bunched up my fist, and brawled.

            I listened to “The Crush” on the way home again, but as I detoured around all the construction downtown I wasn’t in a celebratory mood. I wasn’t elated. I was disturbed. The experience hadn’t been at all like a Rocky movie. It was a lot more like Gattaca. I’d come in, had my finger pricked so they could read my DNA, and had the verdict delivered to me. Any score could have come up on the screen. I had no control over it. That it turned out to be the one I was after was just an accident. A fluke.

**************

            The week before I took the test, I’d met a woman at Columbia Street who used to teach seventh graders. After telling her I taught Intro Comp at IPFW, we discussed how teaching is a process of translation from how you understand something into a language that will allow others who lack your experience and knowledge to understand it. Then you have to add some element of entertainment so you don’t lose their attention. The younger the students, the more patience it takes to teach them. Beginning when I was an undergrad working in the Writing Center, but really picking up pace as I got more and more experience as a TA, the delight I used to feel in regard to my own cleverness was being superseded by the nagging doubt that I could ever pass along the method behind it to anyone.

            When you’re young (or conservative), it’s easy to look at people who don’t do as well as you with disdain, as if it’s a moral failing on their part. You hold the conviction deep in your gut that if they merely did what you’ve done they’d have what you have or know what you know. Teaching disabuses you of this conviction (which might be why so many teachers are liberal). How many times did I sit with a sharp kid in the writing center trying to explain some element of college writing to him or her, trying to think back to how I had figured it out, and realizing either that I’d simply understood it without much effort or arrived at an understanding through a process that had already failed this kid? You might expect such a realization would make someone feel really brilliant. But in fact it’s humbling. You wonder how many things there are, fascinating things, important things, that despite your own best effort you’ll never really get. Someone, for instance, probably “just gets” how to relay complex information to freshman writers—just gets teaching.

            And if, despite your efforts, you’re simply accorded a faculty for perceiving this or understanding that, if you ever lose it your prospects for recreating the same magic are dismal. What can be given can be taken away. Finally, there’s the question of desert. That I can score an 800 on the verbal reasoning section of the GRE is not tied to my effort or to my will. I like to read, always have. It’s not work to me. My proficiency is morally arbitrary. And yet everyone will say about my accomplishments and accolades, “You deserve it.”

            Really, though, this unsettled feeling notwithstanding, this is some stupid shit to complain about. I aced the GRE—again. It’s time to celebrate.

Also read:

GRACIE - INVISIBLE FENCES

SECRET DANCERS

THE GHOST HAUNTING 710 CROWDER COURT

KAYAKING ON A WORMHOLE

The Inverted Pyramid: Our Millennia-Long Project of Keeping Alpha Males in their Place

Imagine this familiar hypothetical scenario: you’re a prehistoric hunter, relying on cleverness, athleticism, and well-honed skills to track and kill a gazelle on the savannah. After carting the meat home, your wife is grateful—or your wives rather. As the top hunter in the small tribe with which your family lives and travels, you are accorded great power over all the other men, just as you enjoy great power over your family. You are the leader, the decision-maker, the final arbiter of disputes and the one everyone looks to for direction in times of distress. The payoff for all this responsibility is that you and your family enjoy larger shares of whatever meat is brought in by your subordinates. And you have sexual access to almost any woman you choose. Someday, though, you know your prowess will be on the wane, and you’ll be subjected to more and more challenges from younger men, until eventually you will be divested of all your authority. This is the harsh reality of man the hunter.

It’s easy to read about “chimpanzee politics” (I’ll never forget reading Frans de Waal’s book by that title) or watch nature shows in which the stentorian, accented narrator assigns names and ranks to chimps or gorillas and then, looking around at the rigid hierarchies of the institutions where we learn or where we work, as well as those in the realm of actual human politics, and conclude that there must have been a pretty linear development from the ancestors we share with the apes to the eras of pharaohs and kings to the Don Draperish ‘60’s till today, at least in terms of our natural tendency to form rank and follow leaders.

What to make, then, of these words spoken to anthropologist Richard Lee by a hunter-gatherer teaching him of the ways of the !Kung San?

“Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all…maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.” (Quoted in Boehm 45)

Even more puzzling from a selfish gene perspective is that the successful hunter gets no more meat for himself or his family than any of the other hunters. They divide it equally. Lee asked his informants why they criticized the hunters who made big kills.

“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this.”

So what determines who gets to be the Alpha, if not hunting prowess? According to Christopher Boehm, the answer is simple. No one gets to be the Alpha. “A distinctly egalitarian political style is highly predictable wherever people live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups” (36). These are exactly the types of groups humans have lived in for the vast majority of their existence on Earth. This means that, uniquely among the great apes, humans evolved mechanisms to ensure egalitarianism alongside those for seeking and submitting to power.

Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior is a miniature course in anthropology, as dominance and submission—as well as coalition building and defiance—are examined not merely in the ethnographic record, but in the ethological descriptions of our closest ape relatives. Building on Bruce Knauft’s observations of the difference between apes and hunter-gatherers, Boehm argues that “with respect to political hierarchy human evolution followed a U-shaped trajectory” (65). But human egalitarianism is not based on a simple of absence of hierarchy; rather, Boehm theorizes that the primary political actors (who with a few notable exceptions tend to be men) decide on an individual basis that, while power may be desirable, the chances of any individual achieving it are small, and the time span during which he would be able to sustain it would be limited. Therefore, they all submit to the collective will that no man should have authority over any other, thus all of them maintain their own personal autonomy. Boehm explains

“In despotic social dominance hierarchies the pyramid of power is pointed upward, with one or a few individuals (usually male) at the top exerting authority over a submissive rank and file. In egalitarian hierarchies the pyramid of power is turned upside down, with a politically united rank and file decisively dominating the alpha-male types” (66).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t individuals who by dint of their prowess and intelligence enjoy more influence over the band than others, but such individuals are thought of as “primus inter pares” (33), a first among equals. “Foragers,” Boehm writes, “are not intent on true and absolute equality, but on a kind of mutual respect that leaves individual autonomy intact” (68). It’s as though the life of the nomadic hunter and forager is especially conducive to thinking in terms of John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.”

The mechanisms whereby egalitarianism is enforced will be familiar to anyone who’s gone to grade school or who works with a group of adult peers. Arrogant and bullying individuals are the butt of jokes, gossip, and ostracism. For a hunter-gatherer these can be deadly. Reputations are of paramount importance. If all else fails and a despot manages to secure some level authority, instigating a “dominance episode,” his reign will be short-lived. Even the biggest and strongest men are vulnerable to sizable coalitions of upstarts—especially in species who excel at making weapons for felling big game.

Boehm address several further questions, like what conditions bring about the reinstitution of pyramidal hierarchies, and how have consensus decision-making and social pressure against domineering affected human evolution? But what I find most interesting are his thoughts about the role of narrative in the promulgation and maintenance of the egalitarian ethos:

“As practical political philosophers, foragers perceive quite correctly that self-aggrandizement and individual authority are threats to personal autonomy. When upstarts try to make inroads against an egalitarian social order, they will be quickly recognized and, in many cases, quickly curbed on a preemptive basis. One reason for this sensitivity is that the oral tradition of a band (which includes knowledge from adjacent bands) will preserve stories about serious domination episodes. There is little doubt that many of the ethnographic reports of executions in my survey were based on such traditions, as opposed to direct ethnographic observation” (87).