Guilty Reading Pleasures

My boyfriend suggested yesterday that we watch the miniseries of Stephen King's "The Stand," because he liked the book. Since we've only been dating for a year, I was shocked by his casual confession of such a deep and personal flaw.

It reminded me of an NPR story from last summer, where legitimate writers, supposedly people of taste, revealed their guilty summer reading pleasures. Writer Joshua Braff admitted that he enjoys John Irving, and Karen Abbott confessed to drawing insight from "Destiny Times Six: An Astrologer's Casebook."

At the time, my reaction was to applaud the courage of these writers. We are all flawed humans, weak to resist the temptation of mysteries where cats help find clues. Why not admit the weird stuff we're into and try to live openly, relating to each other on a more honest and authentic level?

I'll tell you why not. Pretensions and affectations, elitism and snobbery allow us to create an image of what we want to be, and when we aspire to be the sort of people who read Tolstoy and Jose Saramago, with an occasional McSweeney's thrown in for comic relief, we affirm the value of good literature over bestsellers.

None of us is perfect, but when we publicly air our flaws to make them seem normal and acceptable, we as a culture, sink deeper into the abyss of "pop". If an NPR reviewer tells you it's okay to read romance novels, you no longer have to feel guilty about it, so what will your new guilty pleasure be? Reader's Digest condensed classics? Reading "Playboy" actually for the articles?

Go on reading your Anne Rice, my dears, but please keep it to yourselves.

Common "Knowledge"

I am always a little bit disturbed when I find out that a piece of common knowledge is actually false. Everyone knows that it's good to drink six cups of water a day and that Neil Armstrong said "One small step for a man, one giant leap for man kind," even though neither is true, and it's upsetting to have your strongly held beliefs shaken, no matter how trivial they may be.

We've all heard about the study where scientists poked electrodes into the pleasure centers of rats' brains so that they would be pleasantly stimulated every time they pulled a lever. We also "know" that the rats pulled the lever at the expense of every other activity until they eventually starved to death.

Not so. It turns out that the scientists, while they did conclude that the rats would have starved themselves to death, did not actually let the rats die. In a rare instance of psychologists not being as creepy to animals as they could be, they removed the electrodes before the rats starved to death. It's actually kind of sweet. But the important thing is that now you know, and your set of beliefs is a little bit closer to the truth.

Sorry, Jim Emerson

It seems that I was wrong about Jim Emerson. He's actually a pretty neat guy. He was responsible for the concept of today's panel, Argument Clinic: Why Discussion Fails, in which Jim Emerson, William Nack, and Tina Packer tried to explain the phenomenon of people whose beliefs cannot be altered by logical argumentation.

Scientists who don't believe in global warming, birthers, Fox News "journalists," millennial cultists, and a man who goes by Second Amendment Joe seem to become more entrenched in their ridiculous opinions the more they are confronted with logical opposition. This can be quite upsetting, and if nothing else, the panel made us feel a tad less alone in the belief that a "fair and balanced" interpretation of reality needn't necessarily account for the opinions of crazy people.

Tip: Quote Hitler at People

I have a new favorite technique for arguing, dear readers. It goes like this: An obnoxious person offers an opinion, and you quote Hitler agreeing with them.

For example...

Guy "When the government uses our tax dollars to pay for welfare, poor people have no incentive to find jobs instead of mooching off the system forever."

Me "As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice."

Guy "Who said that?"

Me "Hitler."

I am looking forward to using this technique on my anarchist friend, who likes to criticize the democratic process by saying that if people are not fit to rule themselves, we have no reason to believe they are fit to choose rulers. My response to this is "Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be discovered by an election."

I do not suggest doing this to people whose company you enjoy. I am fully willing to admit that the technique is fallacious and irritating, but as Hitler would say, "I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few."

CWA 63

For as long as I can remember, Roger Ebert has attended CU's Conference on World Affairs every spring to host the Cinema Interruptus event, where he would screen great movies, pausing every few minutes to comment, discuss interesting points, and take questions from the audience.

No longer capable of speech, Ebert will not be attending this year's conference (happening next Monday through Friday). He will be succeeded as Interruptus host by a fellow called Jim Emerson, who has chosen A Serious Man as his debut film.

Now I like the Coen brothers as much as the next person, but I fear that, if Mr. Emerson takes A Serious Man as his starting point, it will only be a few years until we are debating cinematographic tropes in Eclipse.

It is only fair to note that Jim Emerson has hosted the Cinema Interruptus twice in the past. I did not attend but have been told that it was not entirely uninformative. Still, Ebert will be missed, and I can only hope that the pain of his absence will be mitigated by Friday's colloquium on Everything Sounds Smarter and Sexier with a British Accent.

Noncognitivism May be a Downer

It occurred to me just now that being a noncognitivist is perhaps not as much fun as I had hoped.

A noncognitivist believes that moral statements have no truth value; 'killing people is bad,' means something along the lines of 'don't kill people, it makes me sad.' This is appealing for many reasons. Noncognitivism allows us to avoid the messy question of what kind of fact a moral fact is while explaining why we generally want things to happen when we judge them to be morally good. It wraps up the entirety of ethics into a convenient little package as delectable as a tiny blue box from Tiffany.

However, I am also a determinist, and those who still believe in free will sometimes ask me "Don't you find it depressing to believe that everything you think and do was predetermined from the beginning of time?" I usually respond by saying "I think and do certain things because I'm a smart, educated person with the same basic preferences as any decent person. There's nothing depressing about that. What's scary is the notion that my beliefs and actions are not caused by something, that everything I do is random and meaningless and unrelated in any but a coincidental manner to everything ever. How can you free willers live with yourselves?"

You can see my dilemma. I do certain things because I have certain preferences, and I have certain preferences, because... I can't say "Because I'm a rational person;" for the most part, preferences can't be characterized as rational or irrational. Nor can I say "Because I'm a good person," since the word 'good' already refers to my preferences.

There is a physical cause of my preferences, but noncognitivism can offer no reason for them. This is a little bit sad. If you ask a moral realist "Why do you want me to jump in that pond and rescue you from drowning?" he will say "Because it's the right thing to do." If you ask a noncognitivist, all he can say is "DO IT."

Putting aside for a moment the relative persuasiveness of these arguments, it makes me sad to not have reasons.

Of course, there are many things which are both sad and true, and my preference for being correct still overrides my preference for being happy. I therefore remain a noncognitivist. But I sincerely wish, dear readers, that I could tell you why.

Return of the Toads

Something important has happened, dear readers. Something so important as to drag me out of blog hibernation after over a year and a half of ignoring you, which makes this very awkward and so should assure you of the extreme urgency of this announcement.

I'm sure you all remember the 80s cult classic documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which educated us about the plague of toads that began taking over Australia when they were artificially introduced to an environment with no natural predators. It introduced us to the dangers of messing about in ecology as well as cool stuff to do with cane toads, e.g. feeding them cat food, swerving to hit them in your truck, and smoking them.

So you will be as excited as I to discover that there is now a sequel. Cane Toads: The Conquest is almost certainly an epic adventure punctuated by trenchant insights into human (and toad) nature. I have not yet seen the film, but rest assured that you will be alerted the moment it hits Netflix. And if you are friends with a high school biology teacher, ask him or her if you can borrow it.