I’ll Show You The Life of the Mind

Books and Literature, Media, The Life of the Mind

One of my fonder memories of Oberlin College was taking a really tough neuroscience class in my junior year. It was an intermediate level course that I had no business taking without organic chemistry and research methods and suchlike; I’m not even sure how I managed to get in. Despite its reputation as a place where the disaffected queer stoner second sons of not-that-rich Upper West Side professionals did independent majors in environmental gender veganism, Oberlin had a formidable undergraduate neuroscience program, and the courses were very hard. And interesting!

While not an intro course, it was technically open to non-majors (cf. me), and the usual lunatic sociologists and anthro kids in need of hard science creds gravitated to it. Although I was an English major, I’d been a big science nerd in high school, and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know shit about shit, so I sat halfway back and kept my mouth shut. Budding sociologists have no such sense or compunction, and they were forever interrupting the lecture on cell receptors or whatever in order to make wild extrapolations about human behavior and what one—I wish I could remember his name; I remember that he was shorter than me, and we may have made out one time at a Soccer House party—invariably referred to as “Society At Large.”

This was more than ten years ago, and perhaps in the intervening years the state of the art has advanced and propounded a psychohistorical theory of the mind, but I rather doubt it. The giddy extrapolations of popsci writers from Brooks to Gladwell are so deliriously just-so, and the idea that the evolved architecture of the human mind has something to say about whether a human becomes a Democrat or a Republican so completely bonkers . . . Well. A dog evolved to be a remarkable omnivore, but it eats shit because she’s hungry and the shit is there, if you know what I mean. When a writer comes bearing a PET scan and a bill of particulars, you have the right to remain skeptical. It is probably a con.

I don’t know that I ever read any of Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker pieces, but I did read Proust Was a Neuroscientist. You will not be shocked to learn that Proust was not, in fact, a neuroscientist. Proust was an astute observer of human behavior and a meticulous reporter of human sentiment. Somewhat later, some scientists described some natural, physical phenomena which may partially give rise to certain behaviors and sentiments. Lehrer, like a good popscicle, proposes that Proust’s observations somehow pre-post-retroactively anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience. You see the logical fallacy. It’s like claiming that Hebrews 11:12 anticipated the Hubble Deep Field.

What does neuroscience have to say about the fact that it was fake Bob Dylan quotations and a habit of cribbing from his own work that got Lehrer marked as a fraud rather than the fact that his writing was total bullshit? His books and their theses were fabricated, and through them he became a public intellectual. Then he lazily rehashed some blog posts and misattributed some guidance-counselor pabulum about creativity to Bob Dylan, and for that you’re upset about his still commanding $20K speaker fees? Listen, for $20K, I would be happy to tell you that “our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation.” Hush, girl. You don’t say.

I am in danger of violating my own best dictum here: never begrudge another man his successful scam. Lehrer and I are nearly exact contemporaries. While he was constructing this elaborate and profitable ruse, I was being a Cool Kid and going to openings and hanging out late and putting off finishing my novel. Now, even disgraced, he commands a single speaker fee that’s bigger than my whole advance! (Dear WW Norton et al., I am not complaining. Love, Jacob.) This is because America prefers a fiction that purports to be true rather than truth expressed via fiction; it is why Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more palatable than Proust. And Lehrer is certainly very smart, smart enough to understand the profit potential in a well-coordinated campaign of public semi-abasement. Y’all are just jealous that he got there first.

Journalism—the neologism-profession that Leherer stands accused of mispracticing—is one of those items of modern life that’s always more sinned against than sinning, and that oughta tell you something. Its arcane professional conventions have the malleable orthodoxy of a child’s game, both infinitely changeable and totally inviolable, lest someone or other throw himself into the wood chips and start bawling. Lehrer was a lousy writer, and that merited success and accolades, but when it was discovered that he was unprofessional, the collective moral conniption commenced. What does that tell you?

Jacob Bacharach’s next book, entitled Physician, Heal Thyself, examines how the words of Jesus Christ anticipated some of today’s most challenging medical and public policy problems.

Financeketeers

Economy

How could professional analysts have gotten it so wrong?

Apple’s stock that is. The Times is on it! They have interviewed experts. They found a professor or two. It’s a lotta things! It’s complicated! Some say one thing, and some say a modification of this one thing. Get your tootsie-frootsie ice-ah cream!

Fortunately, I am here to uh-splain it all for you. Here is what happened. Gather round. There was once a young man named Fredrich Maynard Krugman. He got an undergraduate degree in history with a minor in sociology, and then he got into Wharton or some shit. In pursuit of his MBA, he took a couple of finance courses. The first one taught him how to value bonds and equities, and the second one taught him how to figure out firm valuations based on the partial capital structure information in the word problems at the end of the chapter. Also, he took a statistics class; it didn’t really stick, but he does vaguely recall what an adjusted R-squared means, and Professor N. Viswanathan was nice enough to show everyone that you could just use the Slope function in Excel when you didn’t want all that ANOVA bullshit that you don’t understand anyway.

So he graduates. Now, he doesn’t have a background in applied math or anything, so he gets a job as what the New York Times calls “a professional analyst.” And after a couple of weeks on the job, his boss comes over, and he’s like, “What the fuck is this?” It’s Fred’s analysis of Apple’s stock, and it says, with charming earnestness, that the stock is overvalued at one gatrizillion kroner per share.

Fred explains that he just took Apple’s recent Earnings Per Share divided by a growth rate derived from the firm’s capital structure model and both its own historic stock beta as well as the historic betas of similar firms and competitors, and then he added the Net Present Value of Future Growth Opportunities, which he carefully figured after diligently calling some industry insiders plus an old frat bro of his who actually works in product development at Apple—nothing untoward, just to get a feel for what might be in the pipeline . . . and at this point, his boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Fred says that Apple has followed the classic tech company trajectory; it’s still a big valuable firm, but it’s getting awfully blue-chippy, producing popular products for a pretty mature market, unlikely at this point to get much bigger or grow much faster . . . I mean, how much bigger could it possibly get?

Fred’s boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He then explains that the job of analysts is to predict that popular firms are worth tons of money until such time as that analysis proves wrong. So you can put away your little NPVGO model, you fucking nerd. No one can predict the market anyway. Don’t you know anything? Just follow the momentum. What’s the trend? Who cares what the company is doing? Just mention something about the earnings report. What are you doing playing with all that SAS shit, anyway? What are you, some kind of engineer? Pick better fonts. Get invited on Bloomberg. And for fuck’s sake, is that Jos. A. Bank? Christ.

Sapience Is the Result of Dreaming

Poetry

Does it imagine? Does it dream, or feel?
It dreamed it was a falcon; it did not
return to its perch. It snapped the tethering line.
Its once-bound eczemantic ankle healed.
Unhooded, it could not remember what
it had been when waking. Banking now, it climbs
the upward-drafting, dessicated air.
The falconer grows smaller, disappears.
The late sun is huge. The Hindu Kush
grow a long beard of shadow. A dark pair
of murine eyes gauges its passing. Here
and there small bands of village farmers push
their lowing beasts and plows without a word,
and do not fear, nor note, the spiraling bird.

Drone Go Changing Just to Please Me

Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

I never really believed in democracy. Oh, I believe it exists all right, just as I believe that Catholicism exists, but you won’t find me kneeling and waiting for the wafer. It’s the metaphysical claims that I doubt. Sometimes I suppose an electoral process delivers something fair or just or of human value. Sometimes praying coincides with the remission of your cancer. Let’s just say that I wonder how the statistical package would handle the troubling multicollinearity of chemo and intercessionary prayer.

Anyway, democracy and its advocates make a very specific and very weird claim. They claim that through an electoral process, it’s possible to distill the general will of huge human populations into a series of practical applications. Let’s call them policies. You might note that the whole thing has lot in common with magic. Or homeopathy.

Well, another memo “leaked.” It says that the President can kill you. This in and of itself is nothing new. It might be fairer to say that it’s now easier than ever for the President to kill you. It’s the same old Tide, but now it lifts 55% more stains per volume. The timing of this little press release suggests that the main concern was alienating the President’s more fickle lefty followers, if such exist, during an election season.

In reality, of course, those votes are inalienable. What are you gonna do, vote Ron Paul? He said something racist this one time! And that Mitt Romney, why, he’d have strapped a 16-year-old to the roof of his station wagon!

Democracy proposes itself as a choice model, but it doesn’t deliver any choices. Ah, but the choice couldn’t have been clearer between Obama and Romney on domestic matters, you cynic! For all the evils of the American empire abroad, at least we got the ACA. But that’s precisely the point. In the guise of narrow distinctions on strictly circumscribed and wholly “domestic” issues, you get no choice at all. You can have assassination and endless war with federalized dental coverage, or you can have assassination and endless war with lower marginal tax rates and maybe a slightly bigger take-home paycheck. Either way, some poor Yemeni gets incinerated on his way to the wedding.

Expanding the Definition of Imminence

Justice, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

I imagine that when Mary felt the first
small twinge of morning sickness, what she thought
was stomach flu or last night’s shrimp and not
that some bizarre vindictive god had cursed
her womb. Or all the Greeks those gods coerced
to bear their muscle-headed young! (There ought
to be a law, some liberal said.) We’ve got
ourselves an age of prophets. They’re the worst.
Injustice is the utter end of some
aggregated culmination of
an entrail-excised, data-modeled flock
of captive birds. The emperor is dumb
enough to buy it retail. The priests love
their mark-up. They bill each sparrow like a hawk.

Heloise and Abelard

Justice, Media, The Life of the Mind, War and Politics

Partly because he was a good sport in the comments, but mostly because I can’t turn down an opportunity to take potshots at psychology, I want to say a few things about Joseph Isenberg’s comment on my recent Bradley Manning post. Post here. Comment here.

1. Trans. Ishun?

I never did drag, but one year I went to the Oberlin College Drag Ball as Hegemonica Preshun. Get it? Anyway, what? Oh. I’m going to use the masculine pronoun to refer to Manning. That’s probably wrong, but I want this to be easy to read. Apologies in advance.

It does indeed seem clear enough that Manning was troubled when he began to believe that he was transgender. A lot of his interlocutors, both supporters and oppressors, read into this some sort of grievous psychic trauma and mental break. “Troubled” is the euphemism either way.

But if we’re honest with ourselves in our own personal recollections, we recall that we experienced all sorts of developments in our persons and personalities as agonizing and troubling and traumatic, especially in our adolescence, which Manning was barely out of, if out of at all. Adolescence and young adulthood are a ceaseless, battering storm of psychic catastrophe . . . to adolescencents and young adults.

In fact, what’s remarkable about Manning is how swiftly he moved from the sense of world-ending dread in his realization to mature acceptance, from gloom to planning the surgeries and picking a new name. This occurred over a period of months while deployed in a war zone, while engaging, allegedly, in a massive act of heroic disobedience. What this suggests is not a “troubled,” depressed, immature, confused, ravaged young man, but rather a young man of extraordinary poise and self-possession–a person who over the course of just a few months in the most trying of conditions could come to a reasoned conclusion about altering one of the two or three characteristics that the broader society considers the most fundamental and unchangeable of your character and your being.

None of this is to say that Manning didn’t experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. He did, and he says so candidly. But we all experience doubt, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, and dread. We experience them all in much less trying circumstances. We’re just worried that the boss might check up on our progress on that sales report, or whatever, or that our boyfriends are spending a little too much time on grindr “just to laugh at the profiles.”

What distinguishes Manning is not his self-doubt, but his self-possession.

2. ASL? Into?; or, The Anonymizing Influence of the Barcelona Chair

Because I grew up in the great flowering era of the chatroom and cut my fag teeth on mIRC back when AOL M4M was as distant as Skynet, I can’t understand the astonished commentary that springs up around the fact that Manning made a “tortured confession” to some dude on AIM, or whatever. I am sure I made many tortured confessions to any number of fat weirdos and priests and pic collectors posing as cuteboi81. If Manning had made his confession to some shrink he’d never met before, would that be so weird? Why? What about the transactional nature of that relationship makes the act of confession less absurd? They’re based on the same principle: it’s often easier to talk to a stranger, to confess through the lattice to the robed and hooded man.

And anyway, Lamo wasn’t a stranger. You’re buying into a pretense! You’re falling for the same con that ultimately snagged Bradley Manning. Forget your anachronistic feelings that These Kids Today and Their Instragrams do not have real friendships. Online relationships are real. They’re just epistolary. Manning considered Lamo a friend. Forget all that “I can’t believe I’m telling this to a stranger” shit. You just don’t understand how young gay dudes flirt and interact online. They’d chatted, flirted, got acquainted, talked about all sorts of things. It wasn’t anonymous at all.

Except that Lamo was a liar and a con man. If Manning were just some dude and a talented con man had insinuated himself into his life in order to rip him off, would you blame Manning for trusting someone anonymous? Of course you wouldn’t. You might suggest that he’d have to learn some hard lessons about trust, but you’d blame Lamo, the perpetrator of the deception, and you certainly wouldn’t read some kind of psychopathology into the nice, trusting young kid who got taken in by the scammer.

3. Yeah, But His History of Depression, Dude

When I hear the word depression, I reach for the nearest beverage in order to do a spit take. Was Manning depressed? Probably. But the DSM is next to the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the US Code in its titanic indifference to that which is actually human.

If every human behavior is the end outcome of some diagnosable disorder, then we are automatons. Do depressed people lack moral agency? Does “gender dysporhia” attack conscience along with cock and cunt?

As soon as some supposed mental illness enters the picture, sentience gives way to subroutine, and suddenly the great mystery of the human mind becomes a flawed decision tree diagram. People’s straightforward actions are imbued with a weird moral laxness; their convictions are suddenly “complicated”; their simple story suddenly not the “whole story,” and their motives suddenly in question.

Sabotage

Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

I’ve always been suspicious of arguments about institutional equality, that is to say, the idea that if gays can get married and women can kill foreigners, we will have achieved some sort of a just and equitable society. Expanding access to the institutions of inequality doesn’t engender equality. Approbation isn’t equity. Belonging isn’t justice.

Now, the human intellect is a remarkable and supple thing. Although I happen to believe that most of our anthrocentrism is pride and vanity, that the capacities for thought and sentiment, happiness and sadness, memory and culture are shared by our animal sisters, I do think we exceed them all in one way: we are unique in our capacity to construct realities at utter odds with reality. Dogs dream and dolphins imagine, but only humans are deluded.

So, a human thought the thought that produced this sentence:

Hopefully the greater inclusion of women into the military will help us all see that violence and war is learned behavior—it’s not inevitable.

Professionalized equality has escaped from the lab and threatens to overthrow its creators. The military is a machine for killing; its purpose is to wage war. Inevitability and inherency are not paired concepts. Nature vs. nurture isn’t germane here.

What’s really sad is that this argument actually recapitulates almost exactly the most inane conservative case against the inclusion of women in so-called combat roles: that it will “feminize” the military and make it less inclined to the psycho violence so necessary to, well, whatever it’s necessary for. The only difference is that Amanda Marcotte believes this is a good thing. The presumption is identical: women will decrease the army’s efficacy as a dealer of death.

Believing, as I do, that women are pound-for-pound, neuron-for-neuron just as capable physically and intellectually as men, this argument seems to me to be completely crackpot. Just as women are very good at flying helicopters, they will be very good at shooting guns. Their presence in the ranks will have not the slightest disincentive effect on the use of force as a first resort of American statecraft.

The Meaning of the Word, Reform, in the Political Discourse of a An Early Post-Late-Capital Society

Economy, Poetry

It is, I think, the unborn sense that through
some demiurgic Will-to-Being all
our right intents can just meet up and do
an imitation of a shopping mall.
Is it convenient? Does it have enough
free parking for giant cars we bought to fill
with self-entitled kids and useless stuff
that we forget until the VISA bill
arrives? Well, we don’t mind; at least we get
the miles, our purchase transubstantiated—
unaffordable? Yes. And yet
we think it might be renegotiated,
our debts forgiven, household assets free
by act of god or luck at lottery.

Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon

Media, War and Politics

Some shitty blogger once said:

Whenever and wherever a human does something of which the Times is not certain it approves, the grey lady turns to psychology, like an eleventh-grader with a collection of Capote stories and a looming term paper deadline . . . Gay computer-nerd loser is the pathology, and revealed government secrets is how it presents clinically.

It was unfair of him to single out the Grey Lady. The old girl isn’t the only one. All media must now report that Manning suffered from crippling gender dysmorphia and GAY SEX CONFUSION, the two leading causes of Opposing US Military Action Abroad, a confusing syndrome for which there is currently no known cure nor effective prophylaxis.

So you find documentary filmmaker (I submit to you, BTW, this is the single most insufferable noun phrase modifier in the Queen’s tongue) Alex Gibney, in the course of discussing his new Wikileaks documentary, proposing:

The initial presentation of the story was that Bradley Manning was a pure political figure, like a Daniel Ellsberg. I don’t think that’s a sufficient explanation of why he did what he did. I think he was alienated; he was in agony personally over a number of issues. He was lonely and very needy. And I think he had an identity crisis. He had this idea that he was in the wrong body and wanted to become a woman, and these issues are not just prurient. I think it raises big issues about who whistleblowers are, because they are alienated people who don’t get along with people around them, which motivates them to do what they do. To understand Bradley and all his humanity seemed terribly important in this film.

“To understand Bradley and all his humanity,” you need to grok that he was a fucking weirdo who wanted to cut off his own johnson.

It’s only lately occurred to me that straights must experience their own sexuality as an absolutely crippling psychic nightmare, a torturous, imprisoning dream from which the dreamer cannot awake. Nothing else explains their readiness, their eagerness, to discover in gays or trans people or whomever a dark well of self-hatred and disgust which can only be overcome by the eventual transformation-via-habituation of their families into models of tolerance and understanding and the cheerful evolution of the President Himself into an oratorical Stonewall namechecker.

In the Manning/Lamo chat logs, Manning says matter-of-factly that it was “easy” to figure out that he was gay, although he took a lot of shit for it in school and from his family. And though he agonizes about gender transition, his agony is practical. “I wish it were as simple as ‘hey, go transition’,” he says. His problem, such as it is, is that he revealed that he was trans to his military employers, and he is stranded in “limbo,” awaiting “outprocessing.”

Manning’s own self-accounting of his dissent, what we know of it, is “pure[ly] political . . . like Daniel Ellsberg,” and unrelated to his desire to transition. Conflating his sex and gender with his dissenting acts is pure projection on the part of a condescending hetero who can’t imagine a queer person as anything other than a protean, inchoate shitpile of doubt and contradiction whose only outlet is adolescent acting-out.

Gibney’s “terribly important” desire to “understand Bradley and all his humanity” reduces Manning to the crudest gay caricature: young, confused, weak-willed, emotional . . . my god, practically a woman.

Ridicule

Media, War and Politics

Well, I may have called Jill Kelly et al. “a bunch of self-inflated, over-leveraged, Floridian yoga-and-pedicure arrivistes,” but at least they never killed nobody. If she and her husband and their little circle of Gulf Coast socialite lites were running a series of nested social scams, as they patently were, appending themselves to the native déclassé aristocracy of West Florida, namely, The Military, like a collection of slightly natty minor nobles pissing in the stairwells at Versailles while waiting for a chance encounter with a Bourbon, then at least they were harmless. They weren’t off in Afghanistan, sending folks to their doom. The fact that everyone in Washington seemed—and seem—to find them so offensive for having brought low several once-great men suggests that there may yet have been some redeeming social value in their grift. Oh, I am sure they’re self-entitled assholes, but at least they’re not generals . . . or senators. And remember, Petraeus himself was just a useful Press Release, an avatar of some sort of martial success to be dumped on each open-mouthed Tina Brown each time the grim facts of our “Decade at War” threatened to boil over into something like public disaffection. A stooge of a bunch of stooges brought down by the machinations of some more stooges—is anything more American than that? The Kellys can’t understand why they’d face opprobrium for what they know anyone else in their circumstances would’ve done. They wanted notoriety, not to be notorious! Sister, don’t we all.