Jacques Barzun said that most people are willing to acknowledge that there are people who are smarter than them, but not in the same way that they acknowledge that others are stronger than them; "most of us believe that we are smart enough for all honest purposes." This is true of most men but not of most women.

More deeply, women are quite willing to believe that they will never understand some people, and that some people will never understand them, whereas men tend to believe that they understand and condemn that with which they disagree and to do all they can to force others to see it their way. A man who doesn't understand what it is that consultants do assumes they're crooks, while a woman is quite willing to say that she just hasn't a head for numbers.

This makes women more tolerant than men. As a direct corollary, it makes them less open to new ideas. (Tolerance has various sources, but it always reflects some form of skepticism on the importance of ideas.) If there is no drive to reconcile opposed ideas-- if the ideas of one's friends seem not so much contradictory as concerned with separate worlds-- then argument becomes a sort of willful invasion, creating conflict where none need exist.

I have had a few good friends, mostly women but one man, who thought this way, but I find myself absolutely unable to do anything but hate or patronize it. My first reaction is anger: if someone believes something absolutely contradictory to my worldview, I can't help but think she must think I'm wrong, and so I try to argue with her, but she sees this as a largely hopeless and ridiculous enterprise and so argues the way I would with someone so hopelessly confused that no argument could be worthwhile. Gradually, though, I realize that she doesn't think my worldview is wrong, exactly, although she certainly believes the contrary: she simply withholds judgment, patronizing it or arguing with it only when I force her to do so by rubbing it in her face. But then I'm left with the view that my friend does not think it problematic that two people disagree about the same world, which leads me to think that her ideas are somehow not in fact about "the world"; I think of her as having a subjective worldview, some thoughts she has picked up and enjoys, rather than an actual effort at truth. I learn to "tolerate" her views in turn, but only by translating apparent truth-claims into descriptions of an aesthetic worldview or interesting psychological indicators.

The frustrating thing about all this is that I think women are in some ways right in their evaluation of the role and importance of ideas; at the very least one should see the political and philosophical beliefs of non-intellectuals in this way. But I certainly can't start thinking this way myself. Advice?

Zeitgeist I

There's a book in the bathroom of my new apartment which is very smug. It is called Predictably Irrational, and it points out a bunch of ways in which people are Basically Stupid, but predictably so. There are lots of Terms for the ways in which people are Basically Stupid in this book, as you can imagine. Terms are an important way of converting Observation into Explanation without the mediation of Thought.

I think this is part of a way of doing things which is zeitgeist. Other things in this category: evolutionary psychology, articles about how pheremone perfume makes customers more likely to buy things, cognitive science experiments running statistics on various biases, MRI studies about how the same part of your brain lights up when you smell fresh-baked bread as when you meet your wife's sister, everything about Gary Becker (1), most sociology, much of Malcolm Gladwell...

Obviously like everything this is overdetermined. The imperialism of scientificity and the pleasure of "discovering" that your own culture's arbitrary preferences are actually determined by nature or reason are big ones. But of course those phenomena are as old as the hills, and I want to point to something new. What's interesting here is that unlike previous incarnations of the "science explains everything, science proves our intuitions" trope, this one is cynical rather than idealistic. More than that: its driving force is cynicism. The people who produce these things may claim that they hope to help society escape determination by such things, but their lies are damned lies. People who believe so much is determined by such petty things and believe it with such pleasure cannot really believe in anything much better than the state of things as they find it.

I think the form of cynicism at work here is deeper than that cynicism which protests, accusing mankind of self-involvement, selfishness, and a deep and abiding stupidity. Mankind envisioned in this way behaves but does not act and so cannot sin.

1) "Becker argued that such decisions are made in a marginal-cost and marginal-benefit framework. For example, he concluded that wealthier couples have higher cost to divorce and thus a lower divorce rate." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker )

Love Possession Aggression

A friend of mine was describing to me the plot of Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. In Pamela, the male lead, Lovelace, a rake, was spurned by a woman he loved many years ago and has vowed Eternal Vengeance on the fairer sex. He seduces virtuous women, destroys them, and abandons them, wreaking his wrath on the supposedly innocent sex and thus proving himself impervious to their wickedly capricious charms. Then he sets his sights on Pamela, the Most Virtuous Woman of All Time. As his epistolary seduction proceeds, he finds himself beginning to fall in love with her-- yet this does not quell but intensifies his desire to destroy her and all womankind. Apparently in the end she resists Temptation and he is Redeemed by the love of a good woman in a most eighteenth-century manner, but for a long while he's in love with her and wishes to destroy her, to seduce her into desiring him more than virtue and then abandon her. My friend found this strange, but I think I understand.

Love involves some kind of possessiveness-- the desire to be the center of someone's life, to be their sole orientation in the world. It's easy to miss the fundamental aggressiveness of this desire-- the will to make the other nothing but an extension of you that represents its limit case. (Are the insanely jealous more aggressive and possessive than the more relaxed, or are they only more psychologically acute and fastidious?) It's also easy to miss the fact that there is no comfortable endpoint here: a fully possessed person is no longer a person, and so no longer worth possessing. Of course giving it up to your man will make him lose interest in you. It's not that we always want what we don't have, in this case, so much as that once we have it it's no longer what we want.

So this raises some questions. First, Nietzsche thinks the desires of the genders are conveniently complementary here: men want to possess, women to be possessed. Is this so? I'm not sure I grasp the desire to be possessed-- my closest approximation is that it provides relief from ambivalence and decision (see earlier posts). Am I wrong? Am I missing something?

Second, given that for the most part we don't abandon women once we've seduced them, what happens here? One possibility (which Nietzsche suggests) is that we are "fastidious" in our desire for possession: we want something more than mere sex, more even than desire, we want to possess more deeply and absolutely. Another possibility is that the transition between a love affair and a marriage is a kind of gradual acceptance of the distance separating us from any kind of absolute possession, a quelling of the unconditionality of the desire.

Third, what stops this desire from being terrifying in its effects? It seems obvious that the limiting case here is something like that Weezer song, "I want a girl who laughs for no one else"-- the beloved should have no friends and no commitments, should see no one else but you in a crowded room, and anything else will be irritating. Of course there are moderating circumstances outside the will to possession-- relationships are a mix of all kinds of desires, this one is probably not frequently primary-- but is there a way in which the will to possession might be internally moderating? The good will to a challenge, perhaps?

Nietzsche on Willing, Part Two

This psychology of willing also clears up a bit the pleasure in obeying-- those who need to obey need to end the civil war in their mind by calling on the King of France to intervene. (Because a long civil war benefits neither side, remember.) It's among the sources of a very common perspective error: the belief that people who are not you are much more certain in their decisions and have better reasons for them than you do, which is a way of believing that the King of France has an enormous army and you should surrender immediately. (When you realize this giving advice becomes a much dicier proposition: suddenly it becomes clear that often what the person really wants is an end to indecision, and that anything you say will be misinterpreted toward that end.)

Infinite Jest predicts that in the future there will be ever more bizarre cults demanding ever more ridiculous and unpleasant things-- the reaction to a bourgeois society demanding only that the individual pursue his self-interest is a set of sub-societies demanding that the individual sacrifice absolutely everything to a higher cause or will. Why is a total, self-sacrificing commitment so much more appealing in this situation than the local, conditional commitments which serve most of us? Is it that the only way you can destroy the other wills using this one is to disobey them so violently that going back becomes unimaginable?

(Fastidious note: the noble in Nietzsche are better at obeying as well as commanding. The herd is capable of spasmodic worship but not of lasting commitment, whereas it is perfectly possible for the noble to obey an equal absolutely as a way of honoring himself.)

Nietzsche on Willing

I'm starting to really buy into one aspect of Nietzsche's psychology: the idea that the individual requires a single, strong, dominating will to be happy. He says (in Beyond Good and Evil somewhere) that a big part of the reason we modern Europeans suffer from ourselves is that we are the products of a mixing of value systems, hence we always will in every direction and cannot escape the war that we are. (The upside, according to him, is that the individuals who turn out well from such a starting point turn out very well, because they have overcome so much.)

It seems to me like this might be a reasonable way to think about certain kinds of "neurotic" activity. Neurosis is often the product of a sort of indecision. There's an obvious case of this-- I'm trying to spend less, but I'm lazy (weak-willed), so instead of just deciding to spend less and doing it I end up thinking over and arguing back and forth on every little spending decision, and being more dissatisfied whatever I decide than I would be if I just made a firm decision. I think it's also true, though, of what I think of as the most common form of neurosis: overthinking social interaction. Often this "overthinking" takes the form of an inability to come to a conclusion of some sort: you wander back and forth, thinking "Maybe she's pissed at me! Should I apologize? Would that make it worse? She didn't seem pissed..." and then maybe if you're subjecting your friend to this kind of thing for long enough he tells you "Look, man, if she's pissed she's pissed and there's nothing you can do. There's no sense in chewing yourself up over it." A "strong will"-- the ability to come to a decision, push everything else aside, and stick to it-- cures this problem, clears up the dirt in your mind by declaring it irrelevant. (Nietzsche says elsewhere that a strong will requires a kind of willed stupidity: once you've made a decision you can't even entertain counterarguments.)

This seems to me to integrate two qualities of Nietzsche's ideal which seem incompatible: the man who has turned out well has the ability to forget (small injuries and sufferings) but also the ability to make promises. Of course making promises requires the ability to remember, but in a very specific way: one decides which elements of the past are relevant and cleaves to them absolutely; in so doing one is able to allow the rest to drop away. The act of promising subjectivizes memory in a way-- it requires separating the past as what happened to you from the past as what still belongs to you. Someone who can't decide firmly for the future (make a promise) won't be able to let any of the past go either-- for such a person no decision is final so everything that has ever happened to him is still a live issue, which is an awful place to be.

(Somewhat related: In Anna Karenina, Kitty apologizes to Levin for making a foolish marriage decision by saying that because women are not allowed to take the active role in deciding who to marry, it's very hard for them to tell what they want. I think not being allowed to make decisions has the same effect as being too weak-willed to make decisions in this situation: without the ability to end uncertainty, to go one way or the other, the very "you" trying to make the decision gets eroded and unclear. Maybe it's only in decision that a self rises out of the whirl of considerations, events and emotions constituting experience.)

More on this later.