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.