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October 28, 2006 - October 21, 2006

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

BEAGLING. A prelude to today's topic. The sound file and the painting above are the work of Arnold Schoenberg, who has been called "the most able composer of the twentieth century." If you haven't listened to the sound file, I urge you to do so. I can fearlessly predict that the overwhelming majority of you won't like it. Not just because I don't like it, which I don't, but because of a structural faultline that exists between Schoenberg's perspective on music and that of most music afficianados. He has intellectualized music to such an extent that he has virtually eliminated the emotional core of an art form to which most people respond emotionally (and physically) rather than intellectually.

It's possible, of course, that some percentage of people could come to embrace Schoenberg by studying his musical philosophy and learning to translate the sensory experience he provides into an esthetically satisfying intellectual experience, but this kind of experience is likely to be so different from their intuitive response to traditional music as to represent not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. It will seem, even to them, that they like music, and they like Schoenberg. And it will seem to many of those who can't accomplish this feat that they don't like Schoenberg because they like music.

There's nothing wrong with any of this. It's just the way it is. The Roman poet Vergil summed it up nicely with the aphorism "degustibus non disputandum est," meaning tastes shouldn't be disputed. We all have them. We like spinach or we don't. Trouble only enters the picture when someone insists that we really should like spinach even if we don't, or the music of Schoenberg, or -- to get to the point at last -- gay sex.

The Kaus-Wright Debate

These kinds of thoughts occurred to me after reviewing the blog discussion about Brokeback Mountain between Mickey Kaus and Robert Wright at bloggingheads.tv. I had the sense that they were trying oh-so-hard to be scrupulously reasonable about a subject which is inherently anything but, and the odd conversation that resulted seemed to touch on numerous relevant issues without ever getting much below the surface of any of them. (I'm going to reprise a fair amount of their discussion below, and since I have no intention of putting words in their mouths, I encourage everyone who doubts my motives to watch the exchange between Wright and Kaus at the site linked above.)

This is a good place for me to apologize for the snide title of this entry, because both these gentlemen are intelligent and thoughtful. They are liberal in the classical definition of the term -- seeking tolerance out of deep-seated principle, prepared to consider and yield to superior argument, however counter-intuitive. In fact, where they both consistently err, at least in this context, is by preferring the counter-intuitive discipline of their educations to their native intuition, which makes its presence felt only in awkward pauses and the overly meticulous search for the right words. They are having a rigorously intellectual discussion about a subject which touches on every aspect of being, from the nerve ends of the skin all the way to the deep unconscious of the mind. It is not surprising that they come off looking like over-educated castrati. What is surprising is the extent to which their conversation succeeds in becoming a microcosm of our whole cultural approach to homosexuality.

I am expressly not accusing them of dishonesty. Kaus, in particular, laid the groundwork for the webcam discussion by writing a candid little assessment of Brokeback Mountain's box office appeal to heterosexual men. He suggested that people are only interested in romances involving at least one character they're attracted to. Thus, heterosexual men  are likely to pass on a love story between two men, especially if fairly explicit sex is involved.

Hardly a controversial opinion. Yet when the subject came up for web discussion with Robert Wright, Kaus seemed defensive from the start, almost embarrassed to confess a certain revulsion at seeing men touch each other sexually. His discomfort about his own response led him to suggest that the revulsion lay in his genes, a product of Darwinian selection rather than environmental factors, such as bourgeois morality, which his education should have enabled him to overcome.

Now Robert Wright happens to be something of an expert on Darwinian theory, and he is so poker-faced as a webcam performer that it is impossible to tell how ingenuous or disengenuous his subsequent hijacking of the discussion was. Either way, he immediately grabbed Kaus by the head and towed him into the deep end of the pool; he saw no Darwinian basis, he said, for a heterosexual male experiencing an "active revulsion" to male homosexual behavior. Kaus immediately began flailing in the water, denying that his revulsion was active and characterizing it as "superficial" instead. From this point onward he was in retreat.

Wright argued that in Darwinian terms heterosexual men should respond positively to the presence of homosexual men because it reduces competition for females and therefore increases the likelihood of passing on one's genes. Along the way, Wright conceded that he, too, felt some discomfort about watching homosexual acts between men but declared that he believed the assertions of homosexual men that their preference was genetic even if he couldn't quite understand how this made any sense in evolutionary terms. While Kaus spluttered about Wright's simultaneous acceptance of genetic homosexuality and seeming unwillingness to grant the possibility of a genetic basis for his (Kaus's) aversion to homosexuality, Wright dwelt on the possibility that genetically based sexual preferences could exist without having any Darwinian cause, which would make them in some sense meaningless. On this foundation, he proposed that heterosexual revulsion to the witnessing of homosexual acts could be "desensitized" by prolonged exposure, as opposed to evolutionarily necessary Darwinian responses such as the revulsion we feel for decomposing flesh. Kaus responded by hesitantly and somewhat apologetically bringing up the threat to survival represented by anal sex. Both of them tap-danced around this issue for a bit.

At the end of the conversation, when Wright graciously confessed that he didn't have a definitive answer about the source or meaning of heterosexual aversion to homosexuality, Kaus expressed his relief and his gratitude for having been allowed to escape being "pinned" in the debate by Wright.

Afterthoughts

Two intelligent, well educated men produced a discussion that was in almost every respect ludicrous. How and why was it ludicrous? When Kaus introduced the issue of anal sex he referred to it as "the moose," a term those of us who do not hang on the sayings of Pinch Sulzberger might understand more easily as "the elephant in the room." But the elephant in the room is not anal sex; it's the political and social agenda of the gay movement, whose purpose is to overturn a moral consensus which has underlain western civilization for at least 2,000 years. In this context, the entirety of the Darwinian discussion was off-target and irrelevant.

Let's return to Schoenberg. For purposes of argument, I'll posit that one to two-and-a-half percent of the population has an inherent attraction to the twelve-tone music Schoenberg composed. I'll also posit that the devotees of twelve-tone music may have been oppressed or mistreated in the past by adherents of traditional music. (Maybe, in this scenario, heavy metal bands used to mock twelve-tone compositions on their stratocasters, and their groupies used to beat up twelve-toners, steal their Ipods, and call them 'tonesies'.) In response to this kind of abuse, a twelve-tone liberation movement is born. They want the oppression to stop. A majority of traditional music lovers agree that it should. But as they achieve this initial objective, the twelve-toners start to insist that everyone must now listen to twelve-tone music and like it. If they persist in not liking it, they are to be branded as bigots, compelled to undergo musical reeducation, and everywhere treated with derision and disgust.

With respect to this secondary initiative, it just doesn't matter whether the traditional music lovers love traditional music because it is embedded in their cultural tradition or in the genetic programming of their senses and brains. All that matters is their distaste for it, which relieves them of any obligation beyond toleration. Note, significantly, that we have left morality out of the scenario as it relates to the predispositions of traditional music lovers. This omission is key because it does not at all change the fact that it's nonsensical to try making the internal esthetic responses of this overwhelming majority of music listeners into a basis for moral condemnation or a diagnosis of pathology. (What price the additional irony that psychology, one of the keystones of secularism, has invested so much resource in convincing us that genes and the environment make morality impossible and pointless? Except when it comes to brute egalitarianism, of course.) The most that can be required of the traditionalists is that they refrain from harming twelve-toners or preventing them from exercising the formerly taboo preference. Their own physical and emotional responses to music, per se, cannot and should not be regulated by statute or any other form of compulsion.

Kaus is defending what does not have to be defended. He owes no one a change in, or rational explanation of, his interior esthetic, emotional, and physical responses. And Wright is implicitly demanding a deep explanation that is only relevant in the opposite case -- that of a tiny minority which demands that the social structure of the entire community be rebuilt for the purpose of making that minority loved, admired, and celebrated rather than merely tolerated. For example, Wright's exegesis on Darwin entirely omits the fact that the structure of society and its behavioral customs are also part of the evolutionary process he believes in. As a primate, man is a social animal and his survival depends upon a consensus about behaviors which minimize loss of life and property by enabling -- no matter how -- members of the community to live and work together. Acceptable behaviors also conform to Darwinian principles; that is, their identity as advantageous attributes cannot be defined in absolute terms but only through their utility in promoting survival. There is thus risk in dispensing with embedded behavioral attributes without knowing the nature of the traditional advantage they provided in the past.

Wright puts the shoe on the wrong foot. It's not the heterosexual's responsibility to prove that his physical and emotional aversion to homosexuality is a Darwinian survival attribute. It's the responsibility of the homosexual to prove that his own previously taboo behaviors do not represent a risk to survival for others. And even if the homosexual can do this, he still has no right -- Darwinian or otherwise -- to tyrannize the majority by demanding an emotionally positive interior response by heterosexuals to an experience they feel loathing about.

Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus are, of course, free to learn how to turn off their own instinctive revulsion if their liberal guilt so dictates. And in these terms, their discussion was not irrelevant to them. It was irrelevant to most everybody else, however, as Kaus tacitly admitted in a postscript he wrote in his blog:


He doesn't state that his own resistance and revulsion may arise in part from the determination of people like David Leavitt to rub our noses in acts we find deeply offensive. That's the very real barrier they are erecting now to their further acceptance in society. Kaus might not admit as much in print or on camera. But I'll bet he'd admit it over a beer. That's the price we're all paying for political correctness and fraudulent over-intellectualization of sex. It explains why we're all submitting so passively to the brand new phenomenon of the gay rights bully.

I'll say what few seem able to anymore. Have your rights. Enjoy them. But don't ask me to watch or imagine your sexual exploits. I find them disgusting.

P.S. I still don't like Schoenberg, either.

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Monday, December 19, 2005

ADAM.45.1-16. We're coming up on another new year, and as I have done for half a decade now, I find myself thinking about the Y2K computer bug and the end of technological civilization that didn't happen on January 1, 2000. It seems especially relevant this time around, which I'll explain later even if I can't infer a helpful lesson.

I was one of those who was definitely concerned but not panicked. I didn't build an underground shelter stocked with canned goods and shotguns, but unlike the blissfully ignorant ones who didn't know or care how the ones and zeros did their magic inside PCs, I had worked in the computer industry deeply enough to believe that disaster really was possible. Anyone who has had to write a computer program knows what insensate and literal machines processors are. The very simplicity of the problem -- two-digit representations of the year would be read as 1900 rather than 2000 if not reprogrammed -- meant that impacts could be incredibly numerous and far-reaching. Some of the most expert computer jocks I'd heard of were the most concerned about the prospects for calamity. And vast numbers of computer illiterate businessmen who had come to believe they could order problems out of existence were famously reluctant to take the Y2K bug seriously or allocate real resources to fix it.

Then the dread day came and... nothing. TV news anchors turned it into an instant joke. The world was suddenly divided into those who had never known enough to worry and those who were too embarrassed to admit they had ever worried. The cataclysm that didn't happen disappeared from the radar as completely as if there had never been a Y2K scare in the first place. All's well that ends well?

The thing is, there was a Y2K scare. You can verify that to yourself by doing a Google search. You'll get pages and pages of links. What you won't find are more than a handful of entries dated after January 1, 2000. Either an enormous and expensive hoax was perpetrated on the world, or we all dodged a huge bullet. Yet in all the years since, who among us has cared enough to figure out which it was?

We should care, though. Here's why. There is precedent for significant events that disappear from cultural consciousness. The 1918 influenza epidemic was an outstanding example. Within weeks of the height of the death toll, Americans ceased writing or talking about it. This singular event, which killed five times as many Americans as World War I, wasn't even mentioned in the history books I learned from in elementary school. My grandparents spoke plenty about both world wars, but they never said a word about the Spanish flu.

Today, of course, various experts are trying to warn us about a possible (some say inevitable) pandemic of avian flu, although most of us are far more concerned about the NFL playoffs than mass death due to a virus. In another part of the cultural spectrum, our lawmakers are whistling past the graveyard of future terror attacks by dismantling the Patriot Act and forcing U.S. interrogators to treat al Qaeda captives more respectfully than the cops in your town treat petty criminal suspects. Our national memory is already fading exponentially about the potentially huge loss of life that might very well have occurred -- and was, in fact, erroneously reported -- in New Orleans. Nevertheless, many highly esteemed scientists are beating the drum louder and louder about global warming, which may represent the closest analogy we have to the Y2K scare, while other experts insist that warming is merely a cyclical phenomenon that tracks more closely with sunspots than human behavior. So many bad things that could happen, and here we are trimming our Christmas trees with silly smiles on our faces.

So is it truly the case that the really bad thing can never happen here? That our spectacular ignorance does in some way protect us?  The nuclear holocaust that was supposed to be the outcome of the Cold War never happened. All the yearly predictions of Armageddon by seers and psychics never happen. Maybe we're just generally safe from everything.

But 9/11 happened. And whether anyone remembers it or not, the influenza epidemic happened. That they're both absent from our public consciousness these days keeps leading me back to the Y2K bug. Were we standing on some kind of brink? If not, why not? If so, how did we escape? And either way, why do so few people care?

I found a lengthy webpage by somebody who does care. Ben Best was involved in Y2K reprogramming projects. And he continued to study the event long after it didn't happen. Except that it did happen, as he documents, just not on the horrific scale many of us feared:


These incidents demonstrate that there was a Y2K bug. It's also true that hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to prevent it from doing great harm. And there are some technological reasons why problems proved not to be as bad as feared in hardware categories like embedded microprocessors. Yet despite his methodical analysis of the facts -- and of his own psychological reaction to the Y2K crisis -- Mr. Best arrives at some final observations that tend to defy logic.


Mr. Best was there. He's looked into it since. He doesn't know what happened or why, and he can't find any easy answers. So it appears that Y2K doesn't offer us much of an object lesson in anticipating or assessing future dangers. Even in an almost purely technological arena, outcomes can still be so unpredictable as to seem irrational or even anti-rational. All we can do about such situations is the best we can, as they come up

Which suggests that maybe there is a lesson after all. When Mr. Best concedes that he can't figure out the truth of Y2K even after the fact, he is saying that the nature of reality is incurably messy. The scoffers would have it, probably, that all the money spent preparing for Y2k was a waste. They might be right. They might not. I'm reminded of the antiwar crowd who are so certain that the messy reality of Iraq proves that it was wrong to depose Saddam. That is not a logical inference if life is as messy as the Y2K story indicates. Rather, not deposing Saddam would have resulted in a different mess we'll never get to experience.

Now what should we do about avian flu, and global warming, and the Patriot Act, and prisoner treatment, and planning for natural disasters, and the war in Iraq? We've already seen the right answer, which seems both simple and hard -- the best we can, given that we just don't know what's going to happen and may never understand what did happen after the fact. The best we can do probably involves steering a course that avoids the Scylla of ignorant wishful thinking and the Charybdis of imagining doom lurking at every bend in the road ahead. It probably also involves fewer recriminations in hindsight and more focus on the future than on the road not taken.

Friday, December 16, 2005

PSAYINGS.5A.11. I'm not going to beat up on her or even fisk her. I'm simply going to show you the first paragraphs of her column in today's Texas Bleat (or whatever rag is so lout-brained as to pay for her words) and a link to the rest.

 
Read the whole thing. It's her standard fare, but here's the amazing part. On this day of all days, her assessment of Iraq contains no mention of the elections. Not one. And she presumes to speak on behalf of sanity.

There's nothing more that needs to be said about this, uh, woman.

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