Hello, Friends! (Notes From Summer, 2008)

My last post was on June 11. It is now September 3. This makes me feel a little bad.

I don't know when the next post will be. I have an ongoing internet problem to be solved, but tonight, when, at random, I turned on my computer, the neighboring internet portal let me in again. And though I had nothing in particular to say, really, there was no way not to take advantage of this opportunity.

It is hot here, and I have my keys, but only a limited supply of clean clothes. And I have not watched any of the various conventions, despite having vague (strong) opinions on all of it. And I miss the internet more than I can possibly say. It is a little funny, because most of the people I email with I also talk to, and I have continued to talk to over the long desert that is my lack of internet. So why should I miss the particular form of communication that has to do with funny emails and blog reading and blog comments? But I do. It made me feel stranded and bereft in a way that was not un-related to not having the key to my apartment.

It was very hot all summer and I kept my windows closed for a good three months and my head down. I ate less ice cream than I had planned and drank more coffee. All the plants died and they are still lying outside dead and something needs to be done about it. And it will be.

You will be hearing from me. In the meantime, I had the pleasure on gorging on all of Noko Marie's posts at once, like someone who has had no internet for months.

Take An Ungrateful Whiner To Work Day

Last week I read this really good novel called "Then We Came to the End" by a young guy, Joshua Ferris, who I'd never heard of. I just picked it up wandering around the bookstore.

I don't know for sure, but I think the "we" in the title may be meant to refer partly to the "we" we all were during the late 90's and early 00s. The best thing about the book, I think, is its feeling of immersion in that post dot-com, "downturn," time. Not an easy mood to capture, but definitely a funny one to contemplate.

The dumber blurbs on the book cover describe it as a book about "work," since it describes a bunch of co-workers at an ad agency. Naturally there are some reflections in the book about the nature of work, and about the strange absurdity of "creative" people who fancy themselves original working in an industry that is basically about getting people to become conformists.

Naturally, too, some of the characters decide to quit and do something else. I'm always interested to read about people quitting their careers to take up new ones because 1) I think about doing this all the time and 2) I have the kind of job people usually quit their careers for.

I mean, it's funny: I'm a philosophy professor. It's just the kind of job people fantasize about when they fantasize about quitting their meaningless jobs: I know, I'll quit this, go back to graduate school, and study philosophy! That'll be meaningful and interesting!

It's hard for me to compare since I've never had any other comparable job -- I just worked at stuff like "waitress" and "camp counselor" before I became an academic. So I don't know. But being a philosopher professor sure can be boring, and it sure can seem pointless.

Enough so that, as I said, I often day dream about changing jobs altogether. I know other philosophy professors who do too. So, what jobs do we daydream about?

Lawyer probably tops my own list. After a day of thinking hard and working on some paper that, like, no people will ever read, I crave the effectiveness of lawyering. I mean, lawyers get things done, actual things. Money moves around; custody assignments get made.

Then, too, restaurant and cafe worker are up there. When I am feeling anxiety about teaching, about being constantly evaluated and criticized, I sometimes gaze longingly behind the Starbucks counter. So, you make coffee! Chat with customers! Fun!! Maybe I could own a cafe?

It's not implausible to think there are lawyers and cafe owners daydreaming about becoming philosophy professors, too. There used to be a show on TV where people got to try out other jobs temporarily: I remember one where some finance guy wanted to become a cheese maker. Shocker! It was hard work!

But wouldn't this kind of show be improved if it were more like an actual swap? They could pair people up. You: make the espresso; and you: grade those papers. Like Wife Swap only better.

I realize switching work would be complicated, but you could have a kind of shadow concept. Sort of like "take your daughter to work" day, except it would be like "take an ungrateful whiner to work" day. Here's Joe: even though he has a nice comfy well-paying job, he fantasizes about doing lawn care! He's an ungrateful whiner. Watch as he learns the finer points of mowing, weed-whacking, and leaf blowing!

Yahoo And Its Discontents

I use Yahoo as my internet "portal." I think I do this only because I've always done it. I remember when "the internet" was, like, just text and I wasn't clear on what was there. This is maybe 1993. I asked a forward-looking friend, What can you see and do on the internet? And he said, start at yahoo and they have some stuff.

I remember I did, and it wasn't very interesting. You could click on "arts and humanities" and that would take you to some databases. Library of Congress, anyone? I remember it was supposed to be some kind of famous and hilarous thing that the kids at MIT had connected a sensor to the soda machine in their building so they could monitor whether there was soda without having to go downstairs, and since it was "on the internet" anyone could monitor it, anywhere. Wow, some kind of excitement!

Somhow I've stuck with Yahoo all these years. About two years ago they changed their format to having that featured story in the middle of the page, and I actually wrote them an email to say 1) the featured story is almost always moronic and 2) the other news links are getting dumber too. Please go back to your previous format. Of course they didn't. Whatever.

I don't really care now or notice much what I'm looking at on the Yahoo page, except for one thing: the format of the feature story these days drives me crazy. There's something about it that it always reads like a parody of what it is. Here's the one that's up there now:

Life beyond Earth?
Find out how scientists are planning to colonize Mars and the moon.

-- Not science fiction anymore
-- Are we alone in the universe?
-- Find astronaut ice cream online

Could this be any dumber?

The headlines are always constructed as teasers: Forbes announces top five livable communities. What are they? Weather plays a role. Check real estate listings. Often even if you do get interested and click, you find some stupid yahoo content, or a video you're not going to watch. Who thinks this is a good idea?

I can't wait for some really big news to come along.

Aliens land in major American City.
Are they in your neighborhood?

-- How carbon-based life forms work
-- Will the economy be affected?
-- Find E. T. costumes online

I've tried to switch to an actual news-oriented homepage, but I missed the particular mix of ads and crap and so on. So I guess it's not that I'm against dumb, so much, I just want it to be the right kind of dumb. Can't I have my Britney headlines next to some car ads next to some actual news? Is that too much to ask?

Georgia, Day 2

I am, frankly, a little disappointed in my extended layover in Georgia. Not just because I have not, as yet, learned lessons about life, love, and the true meaning of Christmas as represented by a single father with a horse farm and brought to you by the ABC Family Channel.

No, the fact of the matter is that in these decadent times, being stuck in a strange city with or without your luggage does not actually affect your life as much as you might imagine. People who need to talk to me can talk to me on my cellphone. I have wireless internet access.

I went to IHOP for lunch, then I strolled through the crisp Georgia air to the Family Dollar Store, where I bought socks and underwear and toothpaste. None of this was very difficult.

I guess I could have made this layover mean something. I could have camped out in the airline terminal, which would have had the added bonus of saving money, and it would have been a story then, although people might have asked me why I didn't just go to a hotel.

The most interesting thing was trying to figure out the relationships of the people across from me at the IHOP. The guy was a pastor, one woman was the mother of the two little girls, and the second woman was either the wife of the pastor or some relative of the first woman.

At one point in the meal the pastor asked the mother what she was doing, working or going to school. She said she was going to school to become a registered nurse, and they chatted a little bit about that, and she said she was going on because she had her 3.5, and the pastor said, "Proverbs 3.5?" and she laughed and said no, that was her G.P.A.

Proverbs 3.5, if I'm reading my Gideon's correctly, is "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

It's Hard, Living With Other People

I don't mean living with other people as in having, say roommates, because I don't and I won't and never again, despite the fact that I was mostly pretty lucky in my roommate choices (although the last roommate I ever had had hair all the way down to her ass and, apparently, no idea that it was a good idea to clear the shower drain -- but see this is why I don't have roommates, because I'm telling that story as if she is a jerk, but, in fact, when I asked her to start taking her hair out of the drain she was super nice and apologetic about it).

I mean existing in the world with other people. Particularly on my mind is the whole apartment building living phenomenon. On my mind in part because Miss Manners once again is taking on the most urgent issues of our time with a column in which she advises someone who doesn't know what the protocol is for opening the locked door to a complex when someone else is standing right behind you. Do you allow them to follow you? Do you attempt to slam the door in their face?

Miss Manners, with her usual common sense, advises not allowing other people to pass through, but instead making the face indicating regret at doing so and the sad necessity of following the rules (the apartment complex in question has a sign that asks residents not to allow strangers in). This is probably sound advice; I am too much of a moral coward to follow it. I would spend the next two hours worrying that the person following me hates me for not letting them in.

Mostly my problem in sharing space with other people is a sense that I don't know what their expectations are. I would be happy (more or less) to do the right thing, I just don't know what that is. Take the communal laundry room, usually with a limited number of washing machines. I come down to do my wash, and discover that all the machines are full, although all of them have already run their course. Do you move somebody else's laundry to the dryer? Do you pile it, damp, atop the washing machine? Do you sneak away, and come back later and hope they've picked it up?

If it were my laundry sitting their in the washing machines, I would hope that other people would feel gleeful and confident in moving it somewhere. I do not want to have to time my laundry to the minute, which I would feel obliged to do if laundry could not be moved out of the way. But I have friends who have expressed discomfort with the idea of strangers pawing through their laundry.

This is a little bit of a made-up dilemma, because the obvious answer is that I support moving the laundry to the dryer -- I am not really so eager to get along with my neighbors that I'll skulk around the laundry room until they voluntarily decide to move their wash. But what's real in it is that I feel a vague sense of unease as I'm doing so, a fear that somebody will come in as I am putting a heaping armful of their underwear into the dryer, and that their wrath will be terrible.

Other things: sometimes I listen to music late at night or early in the morning. I don't think my neighbors can hear, but sometimes I worry that they can, that it's too loud. How friendly to be going through the building. Whether it's bad when I let the front door slam.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we so often think of living with other people as hard because of actual conflicts, straight up differences of opinion and/or bad behavior. But sometimes living with other people is hard because of the constant low level desire to avoid situations where potential conflicts become real.

TV, Cars, and Pharmaceuticals

"Magic Pills" by Flickr user e-magic. Creative Commons licensed.

My early 21st century North American life is atypical in at least two ways. I don't have a car and I don't have a TV.

I do have a driver's license. And for various reasons, lately I've been doing some driving. Also, for other various reasons, I spent a lot of time last weekend watching TV. You put these two together you get a real different feeling about the world you live in.

First, when did TV become a distribution system for mood-altering drugs? If you're not used to them, those ads are too much. Scene one: a serious looking woman tries to look hopeful, but just can't manage it. Scene two: a man wants to play with his children, is just too discouraged. Scene three: someone stares off into space. Conclusion: you, too, need more anti-depressants in your life. Talk to your doctor.

Repeat for sleeplessness, heartburn, allergies, and high cholesterol.

But remember. Side effects may include constipation, liver damage, headaches, nausea. "If you experience muscle pain, tell your doctor immediately. Muscle pain is rare but can indicate a serious and dangerous medical problem."

In between the commercials you get a few glimpses of aspirational america on the actual shows. Skinny girls, buff guys, cute youngsters, and comic hipsters duke it out for your viewing pleasure; all are teflon coated and unscratchable. Everyone feels they Must Win. Everything.

I watched a funny show called Dog Eat Dog that consists of funny challenges and voting and all that crap and it came down to these two guys and they were like, "I'm still in the game. I'm a player. It's not over yet. It's not talking that matters, it's action!" And they were, like, totally for real!

Anyway, a few hours of this, I figured, and you're gonna need some anti-depressants.

Then, of course, driving, my god. It's a madhouse out there.

After my little foray I found myself thinking, if I were driving home in rush hour and then watching a couple of hours of regular programming, on a regular basis, I'd be hitting the smack, never mind a little Prozac/Ambien/Xanax cocktail. Jeez.

Gives me a new appreciation for my fellow citizens. Yo! Y'all are pretty tough out there!

I guess my life is atypical in three ways, since I don't take any of these medications. I did once get yelled at by a doctor for drinking too much wine, but now I figure, hey, if you want to talk side-effects, I think I'm doing OK, thanks.

Misery Is Normal. They Should Write It In The Sky.

I was reading the paper version of The NY Times last Sunday, and they have a new little feature where they put in a couple of reader comments on the editorial page. Some of these comments were about an opinion piece I hadn't read by Judith Warner, "Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly."

Warner's discussing the unbelievable series of events that happened recently when some parents of a former friend of a 13 year-old pretended to be a Cute Guy on Myspace. The "Cute Guy" made like he liked this 13 year-old, then turned on her suddenly, and the 13-year old killed herself. Like everyone else, I was like, "Parents did this? Adults??"

Warner argues that the main thing going on here is "parents too involved in kids' lives." One of the commenters -- one who was quoted in the paper Times -- said something I thought was kind of astute, that parents these days, having been through therapy, and having talked with one another about how painful it is to grow up, simply can't bear to put their kids through the same experiences.

Indeed, the parents in this case were getting revenge on behalf of their own daughter, who they thought was mistreated by the 13 year-old girl -- who had sort of stopped being friends with her or something.

Insane, but you can see how this happens. We've created this crazy optimistic cultural space these days: You can be anything you want! Achieve anything you want! You're special and great! Everything is possible and you are totally free.

If that's the basic idea you're operating with, then watching your kid suffer from failure and loneliness is going to be a killer.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Times story two weeks ago, about how Sesame Street DVDs of old shows are coming with a warning: "These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child."

Yep. Oscar was grouchy; Bert was mildly neurotic and maybe had a little OCD. No one believed Big Bird when he described seeing the Snuffleupagus. Cookie Monster was a one-dimensional addict. And on "Monsterpiece Theater" Alistair Cookie smokes a pipe and then eats it.

But as Virginia Heffernan says in the Times, there was something awesome about all these screwy things.

"People on 'Sesame Street,'" she writes, "had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you 'out' of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, 'Sesame Street' suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids."

Man, reading that makes the 70's seem so far away.

I'm just the right age to have encountered these early episodes as they were rolling off the rack. And it's impossible to really look back, but I remember just this feeling watching Sesame Street. Oh, yeah, everyone has the same problems. They get bored. Antsy. Mad at each other. Sometimes like Ernie and Bert they live in basement apartments.

Two things on Sesame Street upset me a lot when I was little. One was the guy with the cakes falling down the stairs after the counting sequences. I don't really remember it but my mom tells me I used to cry and she had to change the channel. Eventually I understood it was faked.

The other was a long sort of video just showing a single drop of water going down a plant stem while some quiet, slow, guitar music played. That music made me feel so depressed and sorrowful. I can still hear it in my minds' ear, and it still makes me feel that way. When that came on I was a little older and I changed the channel myself. That one I never grew out of.

Anyway, it was all very reassuring. There's a great comic by the artist and author Lynda Barry about feeling shitty about her teenage love life, and only realizing later that everyone's teenage love life feels shitty. She says something like, "They should write it in the sky, so everyone would know, and wouldn't feel so bad."

Look at that great picture of Ernie and Bert! If this isn't two imperfect people enjoying some of the simpler pleasures in life, I don't know what is.

Non-Consensual Giving

For the past few months I've been depositing money into a friend's bank account. She's in Europe, and I'm making use of her apartment, so I'm paying her, but it makes no sense to send a check all the way to Germany, so we looked into it and it turns out this is the easiest way to do it.

The first time, I thought to myself, "Wait. Even if I have the account number, surely they're not going to just let me put money into someone else's account. Are they?"

But they are. And they do. No questions asked. You have someone's account number, you show up with the cash, you can put it in.

Does this strike anyone else as odd? I mean, it's your bank account. Someone can just show up off the street? Any person? Who wants to give you money? And they can just put it in your account without needing any permission?

I know it's your account number to give out, suggesting a kind of permission, but it's not like you can show up with just someone's account number and take money *out of* the account. No.

So there seems to be an assumption that with giving, it doesn't matter. But in ordinary life, I think people take the "acceptance" of a gift pretty seriously. There are times you don't want a gift. Maybe you don't want any favors from person X because your're pissed off at X, or you think X has evil motives, or you think X's money came from ill-gotten gains. Or maybe you already have enough.

In ordinary life you're usually there to fight about it. "Take this." "No!"

My (relatively poor) Italian grandmother used to want to give us money all the time when I was a (middle-class) kid. She knew my parents wouldn't accept it, so she'd try to sneak it to me, figuring I was young enough not to really know what was going on. It was, like, you know, five dollars at a time. Then also she'd try to buy stuff for us. There was always a fight. I can hear her making her Thanksgiving declaration. "I'll pay for the turkey!" and a chorus of "No, no you won't!" Indeed, when we wanted to tease her by mimicking, we'd always start with, "I'll pay!"

So, wait, you mean she could've just shown up at the bank, put the money in, walked away? It's a surprising world out there.

Moral Anti-Minimalism: The Case of Dr. Phil and Dan Savage

Two guys you might think didn't have a lot in common: Dr. Phil and Dan Savage.

Dr. Phil is the Oprah protégé who has that annoying afternoon TV show. He's full of family-values opinions and over-reactions that drive me crazy. "You were smoking pot and having sex? You're a drug addict! You're going to ruin your entire life!"

Dan Savage is the writer of the advice column Savage Love. His main thing is, sex is important; it matters a lot to people. Take it seriously; be open-minded, and be nice to each other, but if you're still not satisfied you may have to break up and find someone new.

OK, so pretty different. But Dr. Phil and Dan Savage have one big thing they share: a belief that the moral minimum is not enough.

Dr. Phil frequently tells people in conflict that it's not enough to think about what's fair: for the relationship to work, or move forward at all, one or both of them is going to have to "be a hero" -- to forgive or forget, or reach out, or something. To do more than would be strictly required.

Dan Savage frequently tells people whose sexual desires are an uneasy fit that they must be "GGG" with one another: Good, Giving, and Game. "Game" here means being open to another person's fantasies, no matter how strange or unsettling they strike you. If your boyfriend is dying for you to dress up in a wetsuit, well, you owe it to him to try it out. Even if, you know, it's not really your thing. Do it anyway.

These both strike me as expressions of the same basic idea: that when you live interconnectedly with other people, sometimes "fair" or "within my rights" just aren't the relevant things to consider. It's not fair that you have to forgive before the other person changes; it's my right not to dress up in a wetsuit if I don't want to. But the moral minimum is not enough: these are still, nonetheless, the things one must do.

One reason I think these guys find they have to give this advice so often that they've got handy phrases for it ("be a hero," "GGG") is that we've sort of become moral minimalists.

We're very good at signing on for moral requirements specific things you must do, rules you must obey, things in which a transgression is obviously blameworthy. You can't kill people, cheat on your taxes, rob a bank. You can't cheat on your spouse.

But a world of moral minimalists is a shitty world. It's a world in which everyone is calculating how little they can do, and what they can get away with. Everyone's a defensive little island. It's no way to live.

In a world of moral minimalists, the least misunderstanding, the least unforeseen bit of trouble, the least disruption in the agreed on order throws everything into chaos.

In a world of moral minimalists, you do things for other people, but always with a silent calculation that changes the very interaction. Maybe you can get your partner to dress up in a wetsuit. But the very elements of exchange ruins the feeling: you can't help but be reminded, "Oh, I know, it's a favor. I know."

It's funny that the actual word for going beyond the moral minimum is "supererogatory," a word that no one even knows.

2 Bizee 2 Rede Teh Classix?

Adam Gopnik has a thing in last week's New Yorker on adding and subtracting stuff from works of art. (It's not online; the "abstract" is here).

The beginning part has to do with literary classics, and it has to do with subtraction. Evidently, some unnamed British company is putting out shortened versions of the classics -- books like Anna Karinina, Vanity Fair, Moby Dick. (Unnamed by me, that is).

Gopnik goes on to say some reasonable things, like part of what makes a masterpiece a masterpiece is its crazier qualities, which just don't come out in a shortened edited version. He gives some examples.

He doesn't mention, though, the total fakery of the premise these guys are offering. The ad copy will make you want to vomit: "The great classics contain passionate romance, thrilling adventure, arresting characters, and unforgettable scenes and situations. But finding time to read them can be a problem."

Uh, hello? Did these guys take a logic class? Obviously if you have time to read a version of Moby Dick that is half as long, you have time to read the whole thing. . . it will just take twice as long.

So obviously there's some shenanigans. And a moment's thought reveals the truth: the target is people who have the time to read but not the patience. I guess it just sounds nicer to say, "I don't have the time." Though I don't know who they're trying not to offend. It's not like Melville's going to be moping around about the comments he gets on his blog or whatever.

But it seems to me they should be more honest and up front about it, because the potential target audience of people who have no patience is truly enormous.

I was at the gym yesterday and I was watching Much Music (which is Canadian MTV; don't get me started). They had a countdown of the greatest videos of all time. I was watching the end. Number three was "Weapon of Choice" with Chistopher Walken. Number two was "Thriller." Number one was Johnny Cash's "Hurt."

The commenters went on and on about Cash's video and how moving and real it was. But they never actually showed it. In fact, they didn't show any videos. They just showed clips, little pieces, interpersed with discussion. I know it's old news that MTV doesn't play any videos, but this was, like, a whole show about videos! With a number one video of all time! And they couldn't show it!

I guess videos, which used to be the symbol of a generation with a short-attention span, are now, you know, "Who has the time? Who has the patience for that?"

You Owe Somebody, Somewhere, Something

You hear it all the time: “That’s Objectifying!” Fashion, pornography, sex, whatever.

Immanuel Kant thought sex was inherently objectifying of both partners: since it involved using a person as a mere means, as an object of pleasure, it was morally wrong. His solution was the unity of marriage.

I’ve always had some doubts about the deployment of this concept of objectification. Even when I was kind of on board with the general feeling that there was something amiss, the appeal to this particular concept didn’t seem right. I mean, if I choose to wear stilettos, or pose nude, or let a guy come on my face, well, aren’t I making a choice? How could that be being used as an object?

You might say, well, your choice wasn’t genuine, wasn’t free, it was made only in response to a fucked-up world. And that might be true in some cases, and it would be important. But that conclusion would be a different one from “that’s objectifying!” and would require a separate, contextually sensitive argument: because of very particular conditions X Y Z W you weren’t choosing freely. In such cases “That’s implicitly coercive!” might be a more accurate thing to say – though, of course, it lacks a certain pizazz.

This cool photo is called "Objectified." By Flickr user Stu Willis, here. (Used here under Creative Commons license).


In this previous post, I discussed the ways in which contextual conditions might make choices less than free, and I argued that we had “cultural obligations” not to create such conditions.

In a nutshell, what I said was, if almost everyone does X, it’s very hard to resist X, so your choice to do X is less free, less yours, less genuine. If you do X, you may help create conditions under which others cannot freely choose X. You have an obligation of sorts to help block the creation of such conditions – maybe by being in touch with your inner weirdo; maybe by consciously resisting.

You can see where I’m going with this with the objectification business. Sure, you’re free to choose to participate, and there’s nothing wrong with your free choice. Your conscience has to kick in only when you start joining some kind of mass parade.

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to wear stilettos, with posing nude, with letting guys come on your face. But if so many people did these things 24-7 that opting out just wasn’t a real possibility, well, that would suck.

One appealing thing about this line of thought is that it explains why sometimes the most extreme, crazy, version of a thing seems less objectionable than the everyday version. I love to look at high-fashion magazines; I love seeing teenagers in micro-miniskirts. I was a miniskirt wearer myself in my day. But like most women, I don’t like feeling like unless I look like a fucking fashion plate, no one is going to pay attention to me, or take me seriously. It’s not the teenager in the micro-mini that’s creating this problem; it’s the cumulative effect of millions of women making tiny conformist choices every day at the mall.

Another appealing thing about this line of thought is that, instead of pitting the Xers and the non-Xers against each other, there’s a sense in which each is guaranteeing the freedoms of the other, by undermining the coercion of conformity.

Feminists have bitter battles over “freedom” – does freedom mean freedom to be "Babe of the Month" for Playboy or freedom not to be treated as a sex object? As I see it, it’s only when one is *generally* not taken as a mere sex object that one is free to choose to be treated as one. The everyday insistence of feminists that women must be regarded with equal respect in fact ensures conditions under which there is any freedom to pose for Playboy at all. This might lead to restrictions on how, and how much, of such a thing is good. So perhaps these two lines of thought are reconcilable.

Anyway, I like feeling that when I go out in (somewhat) sensible shoes and a high-cut shirt to teach my classes, and so on, I’m actually enabling that micro-miniskirt wearer, by making her choice a more free one.

Because they involve the undermining of conformity, cultural obligations involve practices that are common – especially those that are becoming standard – and not practices that are uncommon. So you should worry about your choice to get Botox but not about your choice to post bikini photos of yourself in storm-trooper uniform on Flickr.

One big problem putting this idea into practice is this extreme context-sensitivity. When is something on the verge of creating coercive regimes? Hard question.

Anyway, I tried to put theory into practice yesterday. I’d been planning a long-awaited foray into the world of eyebrow waxing… Til now I had always made do with a few tweezer plucks at home, and the result was iffy.

Thinking of my cultural obligations, I changed my mind. It’s probably a losing battle, but whatever, dude. At least I’m trying.

I Want You To Want Some Other Things Too

On Wednesday I wrote about "distributive justice," describing my confusion over the fact that when we come to figure out the fair way to satisfy preferences, we have to count only the preferences people have for things and for themselves (personal preferences) not the preferences they have regarding the preferences of other people (external preferences).

When I said I was confused, I meant it seriously, not as, you know, a polite way of saying an indignant WTF?

What puzzled me was the fact that in an unequal society, it seemed my preferences for, say, the very poor, to have their preferences satisfied ought to somehow count for something.

In the comments, Daniel asked me a good two-part question, and I thought it was worth writing a follow-up to try to answer it.

First, Daniel wanted to know, can't I help satisfy the preferences of these people whose preferences I care about myself? I can just give away my own money, stuff, etc. And second, aren't external preferences being taken into account in distributive justice in, e. g. welfare?

With respect to the second, it's true that many forms of distributive justice involve moving goods from one set of people to another. But usually this redistribution is not justified by an appeal to external preferences, raising the question, what does justify it?

This takes me back to the first question. Imagine instead of two cake-loving people, there's three of us, there's some bags of corn, and winter is coming. A perfectly implausible, doomsday-scenario philosophy example, but whatever.

Imagine A has lots of corn. B has just enough. C has almost none. Suppose 10 bags become available.

Imagine B has a lot of external preferences -- B is just a naturally empathetic person. Imagine A is not -- A doesn't care much about others at all.

Sure, we could count only external preferences. Everyone wants as much corn as possible. Suppose (for the moment) that everyone gets some of the new corn, but that it's not really enough for C to live get by comfortably.

Then B could share his share of the corn with C. Or B can suffer watching C struggle to get by. A will be happy. Asking B to share his own, and asking him to suffer, both seem somehow less-than-fully fair. B seems to be made worse off by the fact that he has this external preference at all. Which is funny, 'cause like I said, we tend to think caring about others is admirable, or good, or something.

If you think about a world of highly empathetic people and a world of not-very-empathetic people, it seems that if there's no place for external preferences in preference-satisfaction schemes, the empathetic people will generally be worse off for their external preferences: either they have to share more of their own goods than the non-empathetic people, or they have to suffer from having their external preferences unsatisfied.

If that's right, it seems raising your kids to be non-empathetic would be the thing to do. But that seems crazy.

Maybe we'd want to say that the various redistributing schemes would take care of this problem -- that this is why we have, e. g. welfare. Maybe we'd want to say that in most real-life distribution schemes, A does get less of the 10 new bags; C does get most of them. A is usually even forced to give some corn to C.

Maybe. But given that there is such a wide range of beliefs and attitudes about how much A must be shortcut here, or whether he must give some corn to C and how much, you start to wonder, what justifies distribution schemes involving forced sharing? And how much sharing is required?

I'm not sure. And I'm puzzled by the fact that the external preferences of empathetic people aren't part of this story. Because it seems that under any system except under the most extreme egalitarianism, those with empathetic external preferences will be worse off in the ways I've described. And I'm not an extreme egalitarian. So I'm in a quandary.

For some reason, whenever I think about empathetic people, I am always reminded of the great 18th-century philosopher David Hume. Hume thought people were naturally quite empathetic. In his sunnily optimistic way, Hume just assumed everyone had lots of external preferences for the good of every one else. "Would any man, who is walking along," he asked, "tread as willingly on another's gouty toes, whom he has no quarrel with, as on the hard flint and pavement?" (from his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals). No one, he thought, could be so callous, so self-absorbed, so cruel.

The sunnily optimistic, always delightful, David Hume.

Well. Indeed, if everyone has equal external preferences for the good of others -- if everyone wants the good of everyone else (as Hume suggested) -- then my puzzles go away. I would love for this to be true, but I believe that it is not.

I Want You To Want Me

One of the main things about humans is that a lot of the stuff they want has to do with the desires of other people.

I want to be able to eat, but I want everybody else to be able to eat, too. I want my friends to be happy. I want birthday cake, but it's no fun having it alone: I want you to have some too.

Now, when people judge what is right, or fair, or just, or good, with respect to distributing the good things in the world, they often think in terms of satisfying simple desires or preferences.


The distributive justice of cats? (UPDATE: oh yeah, it's probably more like this.) Photo by Flickr user mvplante, here. (Used under Creative Commons license.)

Utilitarians, in their generous, inclusive way, think in terms of totals: the thing to do is the thing that maximizes such satisfaction. Just add it up for everyone. Usually this means a lot of *sharing*.

Contractarians, in their love of individual freedoms and self-direction, think in terms of rational exchanges. We're both better off if we cooperate, so sometimes it will be in my best interest to give up something in exchange for something else. Usually this means a lot of *I get to keep what is mine.*

Rawlsian contractualists, in their moderate way, think in terms of blind justice. Imagine you don't know who in society you will be, and consider how much inquality of preference-satisfaction you would put up with. Usually this means *You share some, you keep some.*

All different systems. But they're all based on different interpretations of the idea that it makes sense, generally, to arrange the world so that people get the things they want; sometimes this means moving things around; the question is how we think about that.

They also usually share one other striking thing. Namely, that when counting preferences, we only count a person's "personal preferences" -- that is, preferences for what one does or gets, and not one's "external preferences" -- that is, preferences about what other people do or get.

I only recently understood the reasoning behind this. The problem is "double-counting" of preferences. As David Gauthier explains, if I prefer that we each have an equal amount of cake, because we both like it, and if you just want as much cake for yourself as possible, then factoring in all preferences seems to lead -- on any of the views above -- to the conclusion that the right, fair distribution for us is for you to get three-quarters of the cake. But that seems wrong.

The solution is to consider only personal preferences: I like cake; you like cake; we each get half. It doesn't matter whether I want you to have some cake too.

This is highly intuitive in the case where we each end up with half the cake.

I start getting confused, though, when I think about cases in which the outcomes support inequality -- especially continued inequality.

I live in a city with homeless people. They don't want to be homeless. I also don't want them to be homeless. I have a strong external preference for them to be able to satisfy their preferences for a place of their own. Their unhappiness makes me unhappy.

It seems strange to me that this preference of mine plays no role when it comes time to figure out the proper distribution of goods, or the just way of organizing society.

It seems extra strange when you think that our general preference for the happiness of others is one of our better qualities, as humans. One of our more admirable, morally sensitive ways of being. What, this counts for nothing?

I want to say, "You know, it would be better all around if you wanted me to have cake, too." You know. Just saying.

Obvs, my preference for you to want me to want to have cake, too, doesn't get counted. That would be, like, double- or triple- or two-and-a-half-counting or something something . . . I was never any good at arithmetic. Wanting, though, I am an *expert* at: personal preferences, external preferences, you name it.

It's Lunch At Lutece Or Nothing, Baby

I don't usually read the sports news. But the great thing about reading The Times online is that you see things you might not see in the print edition.

Right on today's online front page there's a featured story illustrated by a photo of an older, very buff woman. I'm like, "What's up with that"? So I click.

The headline is

At 51, Establishing a New Body of Work

And the story is about Eva Birath, a Swedish woman who got laid off from a good job and decided to change her life. She rediscovered her love of painting. And she became a competitive body-builder.

I'm a sucker for stories like this, probably because of my ongoing fear of growing older. I love knowing that at pretty much any point in time, you can just up and change what you're doing, do something else, start a new series of life projects.

Eva sounds really happy.

In this the story bears a close resemblance to another recent Times feature, "Life Changes, With a Latte to Go." Here, a guy with a good job gets laid off, gets a brain tumor, starts working for Starbucks for the health insurance, downsizes his life, and lives happily ever after.

In both cases, The Times emphasizes the money aspect: isn't it amazing that a person can go from making lots of money to making a little money and actually be happier? I don't blame them for taking this angle: it's probably what Times readers are thinking. I think it too.

But both stories also contained a strange, sad detail: The bodybuilder and Mr. Latte say that when they changed their lives, they changed their circle of friends.

Mr. Latte just says he stopped hanging around with the same people, and now spends a lot of time listening to classical music. The bodybuilder says, "You know how you have those circle of people who are your friends? Suddenly, I wasn't invited to those parties anymore. I think they thought I was strange, but I don't care."

I know people hang out with people they have things in common with and all, but still, it seems sad. It's consistent, though, with recent findings that people are closer with family now and less close with friends. A 2006 study at Duke showed "Americans' circle of confidants has decreased dramatically in the past two decades." I guess a circle of friends is now more like to be a circle of co-workers or co-squash players or something. Once you don't lunch at the same place, you can't really be friends any more.

While you're raising a toast to Ms. Birath and Mr. Gill, don't forget to raise a glass to The Times, for dismantling its paywall. No more Times Select! Archives for everyone! Hooray!

If I'd Wanted A Shallow Misogynistic Culture, I'd Have . . . Oh, Wait, Nevermind

It's, like, one of the core principles of American civilization: people should be allowed to make free choices based on their own self-interest, pleasure, and preference.

So far I'd say this is working out Medium-OK. Not great, but not awful.

I sometimes worry that we're only saved from awful by a kind of lingering shadow of some less freedom-obsessed culture. I hope not, because I love freedom-obsessed culture. I mean, I love it. Nobody loves it more than I do. But sometimes when it gets on a roll, you can get a little worried.

I had a little frisson of worry, as Captain Colossal did, with those crazy Tom Ford ads. OK, I know, sex in advertising, it's a free country, but still. Perfume bottles in naked women's pussies? The Boing-Boing post about this noted the similarity to an ad for Vulva perfume, which no one seems to know for sure whether it's a joke or serious.

In last month's GQ, and in a new book he has out -- The Braindead Megaphone -- George Saunders gets a little worried too. He's worried that "our cultural discourse is being dumbed down by mass-media prose" -- prose that is written quickly, ill-thought out, and, well, stupid.

Ironically, I got that quote from the blog that Saunder has going on Amazon. OK, I'm exaggerating; he's only posted twice. And he's aware, very aware, of the irony.

In the GQ piece, he is bitter and angry about TV news, about how dumb it is. Reading along, I kept waiting for the expected money-shot: a moral imperative, please, readers, please, don't watch TV news, don't read crap, use your minds, for heaven's sake!

It never came. Or, at least, I didn't notice if it did. It almost seemed like the plea to the individual was passe, boring, impossible. The plea could only be expressed as a rant of unhappiness about what we've ended up with.

Is it not even relevant anymore to ask people to reflect and change what they do? Jezebel yesterday had a post summing up all the ways TV critics and other media types have been justifying their deep desire to watch TMZ TV. Jezebel even came up with one of their own: it's better than watching Tucker Carlson on MSNBC!

As it happens, the exchange they quoted from Tucker Carlson's show to prove their point had Tucker railing against state-sponsored health care on grounds that if he wanted to make a free choice based on his own self-interest and pleasure not to have health insurance, by God, that was his fundamental right!

It's going to be a long century.

I Love The 80s, Sort Of

Yesterday I was at the gym and the 80's station was on and I heard "Video Killed the Radio Star" followed right up with "What's the Frequency Kenneth?"

These are some goofy and kind of cute songs. And like countless middle-aged people before me, I thought, "Ah! The time of my youth was such a kinder and gentler era!"

I've had this thought before. The funny thing is, during the 80's, I remember thinking that it was a time of real cynicism and non-playfulness. It was a time when people stopped listening to Sly and The Family Stone and got into Madonna and Michael Jackson. The sexuality seemed contrived and competitive; the mood seemed dark and foreboding.

The feeling seemed to be, OK, enough fun, now we've all got to make some money, start worrying, and start impressing one another. Cocaine and crack instead of pot and LSD. AIDS and condoms instead of free love.

I remember reading in the news in the 80's that some clothing company, like Polo or something, had changed the hairstyles in their men's ads from a little long to corporate-short, and I thought: how 80's can you get.

Weirdly, though, I also remember knowing that, in the nature of things, the past always looks innocent when compared with the future. So I used to try to imagine what the future would be like that would make the 80's seem like a golden era.

I couldn't really do it, but of course with hindsight it all seems so obvious.

The late-80's movie Heathers is about high school students who kill other students then plot to blow up a school. It's a comedy. I love hip-hop, but even the most ardent fan gets weary of pimps and hos all the day long.

A still form the movie Heathers. Check out the fashions! Who knew the 80's were a million years ago?

Mostly, though, I think it's not so much that there's something new, as that the same things that made the 80's seem sad have just gotten more extreme. To play the game you gotta make money, work out, have expensive cars or shoes. There's no time for pointless goofing around.

And that's what the best 80's pop promised. Endless, deep, goofing around. I think it's why interest in 80's pop has stayed strong, even though the songs aren't very sophisticated or interesting. They promise a kind of light-heartedness we're a little short on these days.

Speaking for myself, I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. I like 80's pop as much as anyone, but I hate the feeling of nostalgia. Sometimes hearing these songs makes me feel awful: my own youth, lost forever.

While writing this piece, I googled the songs and found that "What's the Frequency Kenneth" is from 1994 and "Video Killed the Radio Star" is from 1979. That'll teach you: not only can't you predict the future, you can't even really remember the past. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Thank God for Wikipedia.

I Was Raped By A Giant Digital Unicorn

Maybe you saw the headline over on Boing-Boing:

Baby Unicorns in Second-Life -- via Interspecies Sex

Evidently, you go somewhere in SL, and a giant digital unicorn has sex with you. Later you give birth to an adorable baby unicorn that you can hold and pet to your heart's content. I think you have to be female, but I'm not sure.

At the original blog post here, there are some NSFW pictures and an interesting discussion.

Also there are a lot of comments. Commenters mostly feel very strongly in one of three directions: first, this is bestiality and is sick; second, these are pixels so who on earth cares; and third, could you all please shut the f**k up and let us get back to our lives?

Mostly I'm with "two": these are pixels; knock yourselves out! But what do I know? I'm seriously ignorant about Second Life.

In The New York Times today, there's a long, fascinating story about the economics of SL. The upshot is: you know how in "first life" people are greedy consumers trying to keep up with the Joneses? The Times story says that in Second Life, people are greedy consumers trying to keep up with the Joneses.

And they don't just buy up SL ("Linden") dollars on their credit cards, even though the exchange rate is really favorable (about 270 LD to 1 USD). They get jobs. They sell stuff.

They buy houses, keep up the lawn, hang out at the mall. The main differences between RL and SL, according to The Times, seem to be that in SL, lots of women have really big boobs and lots of men have really big muscles.

I guess if you see SL as your community, you might be more likely to be upset about unicorn sex. Some comments on the blog post suggest this line of thought, calling attention to the differences between mere games, such as Grand Theft Auto, and Second Life, where a person lives out an entire existence.

I can see this. At the same time, thinking of the ways SL is so much like RL makes me sympathetic to any project like the unicorn sex project. Real life is so limited; isn't it kind of exciting to imagine things that are really really different?

I suppose you might question, though, whether unicorn sex is different in an interesting way. I see the pictures, and I think, wow, kind of weird and cool. But if it's just a fancy way of narrating the weirdo-knocks-up-girl story, with a girl-has-baby-weirdo ending, I have to admit, that's not really so different from real life after all.

As the creator of the unicorn chaser says, it's only a matter of time before we have the shirts: "i was raped by a giant digital unicorn and all i got was this tiny digital baby unicorn".

Dear X: U R My Favrite Riter.

Some novels make you feel like you absolutely must become friends with the novelist. You start to daydream: I know, I'll write a letter. The letter will be so charming and funny, so insightful and interesting, the novelist will write back. We still strike up a correspondence, and eventually meet. We'll finally have a chance to discuss the really important things in life.

I get this feeling powerfully about some living writers. I never get it about dead ones, which suggests I have absorbed the non-existence of an after-life pretty deeply. Generally, I only have the feeling while I'm in the middle of reading a novel. Let me be clear: I've never actually written a letter to a novelist at all.

The impulse strikes me as benign, even good, except for one thing: if you want to be friends with someone these days, and you don't know them, what's the first thing you do? You google them. Before you know it, you're inundated with information: biographical information, interpretive information, critical studies, information about things the author said in interviews, and, of course, contact information.

Some of this may be stuff you just didn't want to know. But, you know, you can't go back.

The novelist who first gave me a powerful feeling in this direction is Philip Roth. Roth's first-person, highly emotional, ranting narrative style gives me an inescapable feeling that I am getting Roth himself, right there on the page. When I encounter some familiar feeling or thought on the page, as I frequently do, I think, "Oh! Yes! I know what you mean! I'm like that too! Let me tell you all about it."

I had the feeling recently with Alicia Erian, whose book Towelhead has lingered in my mind. I was overwhelmed by the feeling reading Julie Doucet (not exactly novels but close enough; see previous post here). And my recent literary infatuation with Michel Houellebecq has this quality, too.

I had a stranger reaction recently to Bret Easton Ellis: reading Lunar Park last summer, I felt not that I wanted to know him but rather that I already did. Very strange. I can't explain.

The feeling doesn't correlate with my liking for a book, necessarily: there are books by Don DeLillo that I love, but I've never had the impulse to invite the author to cocktails. And I know, rationally, that the self on the pages is not the self of the author. Obviously. This knowledge, though, doesn't make the feeling go away.

Through Herculean self-control, I've managed to google each of these folks only once or twice, ever, and to have read very little of what I've found there. So nothing bad has happened.

"What bad things could happen?" you ask. I've always thought that there was danger in too much curiosity about a novel-writer. Once you get thinking about the author and his life, it's almost impossible not to think about the events in the book as they relate to events in the author's life. And then it becomes impossible to really experience the novel in its proper form: as its own little made-up novel-world.

This mix of the biographical and the fictional detracts from the power of the fictional, by creating false explanations, and making the artwork into a kind of commentary. In the worst case, the biography and the fiction fuse in one's mind, and the fiction can no longer exist there.

So there's reason not to know.

In a purely practical sense, the internet has made such ignorance harder to maintain, since the knowledge is all right there.

In a more complicated sense, the internet has made not-getting-in-touch more difficult, too, and thus more artificial. Everyone has an email address; everyone is reachable; even famous people who live in other countries are often just a click away. This means writing that fantasy letter is not a matter of finding paper and pen, and looking up an obscure address. Instead it may be ten seconds of typing.

So the choice not to know, and the choice not to write, they have to be real choices. You can't rely on laziness and inertia to save you. Not anymore.

Men Are From, Um . . . Where Exactly?

I was the kind of little girl who basically regarded little boys as aliens from another planet. I felt basically the same way about boys I did about dogs: there you'd be, trying to play some civilized game or have a conversation, and these creatures would be jumping around, making noise, scaring the bejeezus out of you for nothing.

Eventually I grew up. And I remember in college, and for a long time after, it was almost the opposite: all my friends were guys. Not because I spent all my time with people I was having sex with, or had had sex with, or wanted to have sex with, but just because I liked guys better. I even felt more at home with them.

At that time, it seemed to me that guys were funny while girls were humorless; guys were lighthearted while girls were brooding; guys were interested in talking about stuff while girls were just interested in talking about each other.

More time passed, and now I am a little older. And I realized recently with surprise that even though my close friends are about evenly divided, the people I am just, you know, friends with, are mostly women. I even have a bit of that old childhood feeling with men: what part of the universe did these people drop in from?

At first, I thought: how weird that I have changed. And then thinking it over, it started to dawn to me that I hadn't changed, that what had changed wasn't me, or men, but just the way people interact as they get older.

When you're 20-something, and maybe for a while after, men and women share a lot of the same interests: music, movies, books, a sort of "what am I going to do with my life" feeling. And there's a harmlessness, too, to cross-gender friendship and casual flirting at that age. The desire to seem attractive to the opposite sex makes people interact. And there's no gender-baggage either: you're just, you know, feeling your way.

But in middle-age, these things seem to change. The harmlessness feeling goes away. If an attached woman goes out for drinks or dinner with a male colleague, it's assumed that something fishy is going on. If she goes out with a female colleague, no one cares.

Since a lot of people this age are parents, they're not as interested in discussing movies, music, books, and so on. And when it comes to other topics, I relate to women much more easily. I'm not into sports; I don't want to argue about politics. I do want to talk about the details of our lives, and about clothes, and I want to gossip about the people we know in common. It doesn't get much more girly than that.

Interestingly, the women I know have gotten more funny and lighthearted as they've grown older, while the men have gotten more serious. I don't know why, but I have a partial theory: women start out wary and become resigned, whereas men start out optimistic and become sad as things fail to work out.

Finally, it seems the experience of life just becomes so gendered as life goes on that it becomes harder and harder to understand the feelings of the other sex. I feel like men spend a lot of time thinking about women in a way they can't share with me, and women spend a lot of time thinking about men in a way they can't share with men.

So while I like men as much as I ever did, they've gone back to being kind of a mystery to me. It makes me sad. I miss them.

Has Britney Spears Lost It?

That's what MSN was asking me this morning as I signed out of my hotmail account.

I think I've already mentioned that it would give me great great joy to see Britney
Spears turn it around.

Not that I want to see Britney Spears buy a lovely Los Feliz estate and marry some non-trashy guy and put the excesses of her youth behind her while not eating white flour. Screw that.

Also, I'm not, like, in love with Britney, although "Toxic" is one of the all-time great pop songs.

I just happen to have gotten tired of this division of our celebrities (and by extension ourselves) into the saved and the damned. And, just like in Calvinism, the one sure way to distinguish the saved from the damned is to see how it ends. Angelina Jolie might have seemed like a troubled youth, but now she's got a family and a beautiful husband, and all that goddamn modern architecture, so we know she was always all right. She was fundamentally sound.

Not that I have anything against Angelina Jolie.

Look. Some of my favorite books fall into a category I think of as chick-lit-but-for-real. I am talking about Heartburn by Nora Ephron, who has made vast sums of money off of movies that invariably end happily. Or Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. Also, The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy.

Now, since Heartburn came out in 1983, and Fear of Flying in 1973, and The Company She Keeps in 1942 (this much I have garnered off the internet), and since I don't have any other examples ready to mind, I have just created a (historically speaking) pseudo-category of book. Also The Company She Keeps is much much better than the other two books, and would do just fine in a more heavyweight literary category. But I think about these books together because they manage to remain light, remain bearable, while depicting a world in which being adult means both betraying and being betrayed, behaving badly and behaving very well, and surviving it all.

A middle ground, you might say, between the Mill on the Floss (where every misdeed is paid for in blood and Pride and Prejudice (where all is forgiven, and wasn't that bad to begin with). Things happen, people behave badly, people behave well, people are funny and adult about it and people are heartbroken and childish about it, and then other things happen.

Other cultural artifacts that give me that feeling: the movie Manhattan, the books of Richard Russo, the essays of Gore Vidal. But I can't help feeling that there's not enough of it going around, not enough light-hearted realism, not enough grace seen in real behavior, to counteract the tidal wave of self-help telling us that perfection is obtainable, and that falling short of it can only mean disaster and the grave.

Britney Spears has obviously fallen short of perfection. I think we can agree on that. And her public behavior at the moment seems designed to give the impression that disaster and the grave await her. So, you know, I'd like to see her turn it around. Not apologize, not dress better. Just not give way to melodrama. Keep going, in whatever teetery fashion. Turn it down a notch. Raise her kids, eat her Cheetos, whatever.