Prejudice

Dan Savage has struck again.  Answering a letter from a liberal white guy about his girlfriend's sketchy comments about the attractiveness of black and Asian men --

The position that I’ve always held is that we’re attracted to individuals, not types, and it’s wrong to have expectations of people based on race—especially when it comes to sexualizing/fetishizing people. I think we should date and have sex with whomever we want and not carry prejudiced expectations into our relationships. 

The woman's remarks, as he reported them, were perhaps sketchy but not outrageous: she "has a thing for black guys" and found a Korean-American friend "handsome despite not typically being attracted to Asian guys."  It seems to me that people tend to fall back on cliches in talking about their attractions and sex lives, because that's what we learn from our culture and few people bother to think it through.  If someone is often attracted to people of color, "I have a thing for them" is likely how they'll express it in casual conversation, partly because that's how other white people will phrase it to them.  "You have a thing for black guys, huh?"  And that question expresses all sort of malignant assumptions about whom a white person should be attracted to.  I've never been asked, "You have a thing for white guys, don't you?" even though most of the men I've dated have been white, just because of the law of averages in the American Midwest.  Dating non-white men inspires comment in a racist society.  If I don't feel it's noteworthy myself, plenty of other people will make it their business to enlighten me.

Since the letter-writer has no information about how she actually treats the black men she dates, it's premature at best to say that she's fetishizing / sexualizing (!) in a way that would bother them in face-to-face, pelvis-to-pelvis interaction.  (I threw in the exclamation point because when you're attracted to an individual, you are "sexualizing" them by definition.  Liberal discourse on sex is impoverished in its own way.)  The liberal guy goes on to blurt out, all unawares, some significant "prejudiced expectations" of his own, for which Dan rightly called him out.

But Dan also wrote:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. Declaring one Asian guy an exception allows someone like your girlfriend to have her racist cake (“I don’t find Asian guys hot”) and eat it too (“But this Asian guy is hot”).

I think that saying something stupid like "I don't usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive," is how a person begins to rethink their assumptions about their desires.  (Except for "hot," a label that has always grated on me.)  It may not come up to Dan's or Liberal Guy's standards of enlightened discourse, but then both of them have their own cliches for discussing attractiveness.  I don't see anything racist even in Dan's (and it's his, not her) supposedly stupid way of putting it.

Dan went on:

I have to say, though, I disagree with you on one thing: People do have types, and there’s nothing wrong with having types.

This starts off well.  I agree that people have types, and there's nothing wrong with having types, though this also means that it will inspire comment when people are attracted by someone who isn't their type.  But I also agree with Liberal Guy that we are attracted to individuals.  After a certain amount of experience with attraction, however, one may notice (or others will notice for one) that some of those individuals have some traits in common, so one may speak of having a type.  That can be a box one uses to limit one's reactions and experience, though people have the right to do so; or it may just be a mildly interesting fact one has deduced from one's experience.  There are those who humblebrag that they are only attracted to a vanishingly small number of people, one more of the many ways people find to rationalize and exalt their own tastes.  I learned early on that I was pleased, even delighted, when I was attracted to someone who wasn't one of my types.  I'm also intrigued when I'm not attracted to someone who 'should' be my type.  But in both cases, it's of intellectual not practical interest.  However you react to such a discovery, there is no obligation to follow through on it, and of course (except that many people forget this) there is no guarantee that the person you're attracted to will be attracted back.  Even if you're attracted to types, you will be interacting with an individual -- an individual with his or her own types and desires, who may not be attracted to you.

Since many are fascinated by the origins of desire, it's fair to ask where these types come from.  No one knows, any more than anyone knows where the type that is standard -- sex/gender -- comes from.  Is a type a master category encoded in me, an unconscious filter that determines who I'll desire?  Is it in my genes?  Was I born with it?  I doubt it very much.  I think it's something learned, based partly but not predictably on early experience, but also shaped by later experience.  When I was eighteen, for example, men of forty seemed old and I was almost never attracted to them.  Now I'm sixty-eight, and men of forty seem young, and I'm often attracted to them.  But I'm not attracted to all forty year old males, nor to all white men, nor to all Asian men, nor to all black men.

Which brings me to Dan's peroration:

It’s a good idea to ask ourselves whether our “types” are actually ours and not just assigned to us by conventional standards of beauty (white, slim, young) or a thoughtless/fetishizing reaction to those standards (a desire to transgress with nonwhite, larger, or older folks).

I agree, it's a good idea to ask these questions, and I have the only correct answer: "Yes," to both.  Our types are both ours and assigned to us by conventional standards.  The categories and language ("hot," for example) we use to think or talk about them come from society, but we aren't absolutely bound by them.  Where did those standards come from, anyway?  We know that they change over time and vary from culture to culture.  And not everyone conforms to the assignment; probably no one conforms in every particular, or all the time.  Nonconformity produces cognitive dissonance, and people will try to explain to themselves as well as to others, why they like someone they're not supposed to like, or don't like someone they should.  Most people will do a crappy job of it.  But it's not important to do it much better.  What is important is treating the people we're attracted to with respect, which seems obvious to me (if you want something from someone, shouldn't you ask nicely?) but clearly isn't obvious to everybody.

I think these problems arise partly because erotic desire produces anxiety: it's not under conscious control, and people hate that.  We try to get control by rationalizing our desires, which won't work because they aren't rational.  So you get Liberal Guy's cliches about fetishizing/sexualizing, which he got from society but adopted, or Dan's about conventional standards and whether they're ours or society's.  Yet Dan thinks more about these questions than most people; it's his job.  The wrench in the works is that heterosexuality is both something assigned (to everybody) by society, and yet it feels like one's own.  That's what social construction means: what we have learned feels as if it's "natural." 

Notice that Dan writes as if he assumes that desire for non-whites, older or heavier folks comes from a "desire to transgress" instead of being one's own authentic wish.  (What are non-whites in America supposed to do?  Society tells them that only whites are desirable, but society also tells them they shouldn't desire whites.)  That's certainly an assumption assigned by society - I can't count the times I've been told that I'm gay out of a desire to rebel against society, not from genuine desire for males.  One reason it's absurd is that so many gay people are utterly conformist.  Another is that rebelling is hard work, and if I had sex with men in order to rebel, it would eventually get tiresome, and I'd get less and less pleasure from it.  I wouldn't be surprised if some people try to deal with disapproval of their desires by rationalizing them as rebellion, but who knows?  Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?  And if we're going to talk about assigned desires and types, heterosexuality would be more suspect than any other fetish.  Homosexuality would be a close second, even though it's officially disapproved, but then it falls under Dan's proscription of rebellion.  It's very telling that someone like Dan, who believes that sexual orientation -- fetishizing one sex or the other -- is inborn, also believes that it's so malleable under social pressure.

Underneath Dan Savage's rebellious, foul-mouthed exterior there beats the heart of the Catholic conservative he was raised to be.  The function of his strictures, regardless of his conscious intention, is to keep people corralled within the boundaries of conventional standards.  You're white and attracted to a non-white person?  First make sure you aren't fetishizing them - and you can never really be sure you aren't, so play safe and fetishize only white people.  Apparently you needn't worry about fetishizing them.  Some years ago, Dan was celebrating his own fetish (which he delicately called a "bias") for slim, hairless, athletic young guys in "tighty-whities" (a variety of fetish underwear), to the point of inviting readers to send in photos.  As he pointed out, "Because it's my column, and when you've got a column you can get away with that sort of shit. (If Miss Manners can do it, why can't I?)"  Or maybe it wasn't a fetish, because it was Dan's.  Fetish for thee, bias for me.

"I Do Not Remember It," Said O'Brien

For those who are too young to remember the Reagan/Bush years or those who are old enough but  have mercifully/conveniently forgotten them, an easy, enjoyable way to brush up is to read Molly Ivins's collections of her journalism and commentary from those days.  I recently reread Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (Random House, 1991), and today I'm halfway through You Got to Dance With Them That Brung You (Random House, 1998).  As you can see, I'm out of sequence, but it's okay because of these passages I found.

Describing Berkeley, where she'd taught a journalism class, she wrote:

Diversity is such a political buzzword these days that you can forget what it actually means until you spend time in Berkeley. A stroll across campus or along a Berkeley street is like some PC lesson in multiethnic, multicultural diversity. Black, brown, Japanese, white, Chinese; ashrams, sari shops, Tina Turner Buddhists chanting ram-rom-om, bagel shops run by Pakistanis, croissant shops run by Vietnamese, the Black Muslim Bakery; gay and lesbian knitting classes, Little League teams that look like a junior division of the United Nations, Saint Joseph-the-Worker Elementary School featuring Roman Catholics of every nation, skaters with turquoise hair and rings in their noses; God Hill, where all the theological seminaries are clustered.

This was originally published in 1997, but it should sound familiar today.  I realized after I'd read it that, while it sounds like a pleasant environment to me, conservatives would find it revolting. This passage could almost be used as a diagnostic for what Corey Robin calls "the reactionary mind." To be sure, not all conservatives would be repulsed, and some liberals would feel at least a twinge of repugnance; some others might say delicately that they understand why some people might feel that way.  But it is surely a litmus test for the GOP base.

To be fair, though, those who desire cultural purity would also object to mongrel Berkeley as Ivins described it, and they aren't all white Republicans.  They turn up among American Indians, for example, and I wince whenever my Mexican friends claim to be 100% hecho en Mexico, especially since a 100% Mexican is most likely a mongrel, just like a 100% American. You find it among LGBTQ people, like the gay men's baseball team that wanted to exclude bisexual men.  These are people who might not think of themselves as conservative in the same sense as Donald Trump or William F. Buckley, but they have a very important trait in common with them.

Someone on Twitter asked me if I wanted to see America become "darker."  Yes, I said without hesitation.  He (or someone else -- there was a chorus of them and I didn't bother to try to tell them apart) asked if I didn't agree that a "browner" America was at odds with freedom.  I replied that I didn't think so, but that history seems to show that a whiter America is at odds with freedom.

Next passage from Ivins, following directly on the first:

The right wing, ever behind the cultural curve, is now accusing the left of fostering “identity politics,” which means a pernicious harping on one’s ethnic heritage. Berkeley is well beyond identity politics. For one thing, everyone seems to have more than one affiliation. Japanese Hispanics, gay Lubavitchers, Finnish acupuncturists, Irish-African-Americans (that’s quite a Saint Paddy’s Day party). I am told by administrators at UC-Berkeley that the student body is 60 percent “other.” Mostly you have to guess. Samoan? Goan? Aztec? At faculty parties I brag that I have a student from Nebraska whose mother makes casseroles with Cheez Whiz.

Conservative?  Even more so!  This sort of blurring boundaries bothers the Right a great deal. (Though not, as I noted above, only the hard core GOP base; panic over porous boundaries turns up in groups that would ordinarily be counted as anti-conservative, even Left.)  Race-mixing, confusing genders, the failure to maintain and protect borders or boundaries is according to them the kind of degeneracy that brought down the Roman Empire.  If you want to believe that differences are "natural," whether because a deity laid them down or because they're in our DNA, it's unnerving to find people prancing insouciantly past the boundaries you thought were immutable and impenetrable.  Unnerving, but not any kind of natural law that needs to be respected.

I Don't Want a Pickle

Democrats have been indulging in a lot of chest-thumping since the election, so I've been seeing more stuff like this on Facebook lately.

You know, the self-congratulatory "I'm a liberal so I'm like Jesus and JFK!" stuff.  These people have a rather odd notion of what a liberal is.  Even leaving aside the fact that we have no idea what Jesus looked like, and that there's reason to doubt he had long hair, bleeding-heart, peace-loving, anti-establishment hippie freaks were not liberals.  Liberals didn't like hippies, didn't like peace freaks, and the disdain was returned.  Liberals are not anti-establishment, they're part of the establishment.

As for Jesus, while he may have been peace-loving and anti-establishment (though it's hard to be more establishment than the Son of God), he was also a faith healer and exorcist who preached that The End Is Near, taught his followers to leave their families and normal lives to trek around Galilee and Judea with him, and picked fights with the reasonable, respectable religious leaders of his day.  The Sadducees were roughly comparable to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chaplain of Harvard University; the Pharisees were liberals compared to them, if a bit hard-core -- think modern Congregationalists or Presbyterians.  But if you want to put Jesus into a contemporary box, he was a radical, not a liberal.  Within a few years of his death, his followers were speaking in tongues, like modern Pentecostals.  That's not connected to Jesus in the gospels (except for a stray verse or two of doubtful authenticity), so we don't know where it came from.

Liberals don't like radicals.  Radicals don't usually like liberals.  They mock them for their readiness to sell out their fine principles as soon as the going gets rocky. It's a fair bet that if today's liberals had to deal with someone like the historical Jesus, they wouldn't actually call for his execution, but they'd find reasons not to work very hard to save his life either.  As with Martin Luther King Jr., only after he was safely dead would liberals start squabbling with conservatives over who got to claim him for their side.

Stuck in the Middle With You

You might think of this as an uncompressed VastLeft cartoon, the kind of raw material that he boils down for them.

One of my liberal Facebook friends -- let's call him MC -- posted this today, after we'd sparred back and forth on the same subject a bit:

Funny. I have a very "conservative" friend (in the current American Republican sense) who insists Obama is a socialist. And I have a very "leftish" friend who claims Obama is Reagan reincarnated. To me, Obama seems generally like a moderate centrist. But when I say that, both these fellows wonder what planet I've been living on, that I could be so deluded. (If they spoke to each other, their heads might explode.) Makes me think of the story of the blind men and the elephant.

I recognized myself as the "very 'leftish" person in his post, so I wrote:

Well, I gave a number of reasons why I consider him to be the New Reagan, and I'm hardly alone in thinking so. (I also mentioned Clinton in that regard, and I seem to recall Clinton saying he was a Reagan Democrat, though it was 20 years ago and I could be wrong.) Does your right-wing friend give reasons why he considers Obama a socialist?

That being said, "centrist" is a meaningless word. It has no content. As the political elites move ever Rightward, the "center" moves with them. I also think it's important to distinguish between the political elites, who are not representative of the general populace, and the rest of the nation.

I might have added that MC has not given any reasons why I'm wrong about Obama.  I don't think I've called him "deluded", and I don't think he is; I do think he's intellectually dishonest.  When you can't offer serious arguments in support of your positions, it's fair and reasonable to doubt your bona fides.  Anyway, MC replied:

Your opposite number is a little shell-shocked right now and not really in the mood to discuss politics, and I respect that. I've been looking around elsewhere among reactions on the right for reasons why Obama would be any more socialist than any other somewhat liberal Democrat, and haven't found any. They seem to take it as a given. Maybe just the fact that he's not a total market fundamentalist, and considers that the government has some role to play in the economy? In which case, almost any major politician from the last several decades is a socialist. Or maybe it's "Obamacare" - even though that's a program to aid for-profit insurance companies, so it makes pretty inept socialism. I dunno, it's a puzzle.

I replied:

Yes, the claim that O is a socialist has been going around since he became a viable candidate. My opposite number may be reeling right now, but I imagine he was part of the chorus before the election. As you say, what reasons are given are not convincing: if O is a socialist, so were George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. He's not a total market fundamentalist, but he makes much of his background at the University of Chicago, a hotbed of Friedmanism. As you say, the ACA is pretty weak socialism. But we're talking about the same people who consider Obama a Kenyan, an anti-colonialist, a Muslim. The salt of the earth, the common clay of the new West. You know.

As for "If they spoke to each other, their heads might explode", I am made of sterner stuff than that. I've been debating people on politics (and religion and gay issues) for a long time.

After I wrote that, I realized who he meant by my "opposite number." If I'm right, my opposite number and I have spoken to each other often, both online and face to face, yet both heads are so far intact.  I also know that my opposite number never gave any reasons for calling Obama a socialist, even before he suffered the PTSD of this week's election.

Oddly, MC wrote this in reply to my rebuttal:

Oh, I agree. The "on this hand, on the other hand" that journalists feel obliged to do (thus bringing on e.g. a climate-change denier) - or the "both sides are hating on me, so I must be right" formulation. (No, you might still be wrong!) And Kristol is slimy, and Yoo detestable. Yep.

But there is also "moderate" in terms of what you call "content" - for instance, those of us who think there is definitely a role for government in the economy, but that there also can be dangers or disadvantages that come with overextending government's role - and conversely, that market forces do a lot of things well, but not everything that's important (and that some of their side effects need to be ameliorated). Seems almost obvious - unless you're one of those who reflexively hates "Government" or "Business." The ability to find this kind of commonsense "content" or "substance" comes precisely from the lack of interest in being an ideological purist, and the ability/willingness to listen to ideas and suggestions from a variety of points of view on the "political spectrum."

Here MC was doing exactly the "on this hand, on the other hand" thing he rejected.  As always, the benefit of defining your position as "moderate" is that anyone can look moderate if he's allowed to pick -- or, as here, invent -- the extremes he sits midway between.  Ironically, though, the Right in America comes closer to one of MC's extremes, what with its fantasy of shrinking government until you can drown it in the bathtub.  Most of Obama's left critics, on the other hand, don't want to eliminate the private sphere: certainly not me, Senator Bernie Sanders, Avedon Carol, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky ... the list could go on.  In much the same way, the Obama administration sought to marginalize its left critics on the Affordable Care Act by dismissing them as drug-addled, "fucking retards" (in Rahm Emanuel's delicate, tactful phrase), or 'disappointed' (mark the word) that Obama hadn't turned the US into a Communist country like ... Canada.  As you can see, the commonsense moderates of Obama Nation have reason and fact rather than emotion on their side.

I replied:

By the way, I do not think that Obama is "Reagan reincarnated," though he might like to believe he is. I do point out Obama's own declared affinity and admiration for Reagan, which is a bit different.

Yes, there is also "moderate" in terms of what I call "content." But that's not what you were talking about: you were talking about Obama's style, tone, etc., and his apparent aversion to conflict -- neither of which has to do with content. As for the rest, "commonsense" is vacuous and usually bogus. "Commonsense" tells me that the government should not go into debt, that it should be "run like a business," that women are naturally nurturing and close to nature, that homosexuals are women trapped in men's bodies, that the sun goes around the earth and not vice versa. "Ideological purist" is a diversion, also free of content. You're attacking a straw man here, again.

MC is another of those Obama supporters who follow their leader in casting Ronald Reagan as too moderate to be nominated by today's Republican party.  But this is the reverse of the truth: rather, the Democratic party leadership has swung to what in the 1960s would have been the extreme right.  At the same time, most Americans have continued to favor what now is derogated by Obama and his faithful as crazy radical notions: not only continued but expanded social safety-net programs, cuts in military spending and overseas adventurism, less concern about the deficit and more about jobs, and a progressive tax system.  Even most Republicans believe that corporations have too much power.  No doubt this can be interpreted to mean that most Americans are stuck in the middle of the twentieth century; I would suggest that there are worse places to be.

[P.S.  I meant to point out somewhere in there that someone who is temperamentally averse to conflict, as Obama reportedly is, will surrender incrementally to those who thrive on conflict.  Rather than get into a messy squabble, they'll make concession after concession to appease the other party, and before you know it, they've conceded a great deal, if not everything.  Even if I grant that Obama doesn't really want to go along with much of the Republicans' agenda, his supposed aversion to conflict guarantees that he will do so.  As he has done.  That's not "moderation."  And someone who is temperamentally averse to conflict probably should not be in politics, much less the Oval Office.]

The Time Is Overripe By Now

An old friend of mine posted the image above on Facebook.  (Later she also posted a picture of Obama with Bill Clinton linked to one of those advertisements where if you donate a pittance to the Obama campaign, your name will be entered in a lottery to attend an event where both Great Men will be present.)

At first I was suspicious, as I've learned to be with words of the wise posted on the Internet, but the quotation turned out to be genuine.  Too bad, though, because first of all, not everybody thinks of liberals in those terms.  The Right, obviously, but also some supposed beneficiaries of liberal virtue.  I've quoted before this excerpt from one of Langston Hughes's "Simple" stories, "Liberals Need a Mascot":

"Just what is a liberal?" asked Simple.

"Well, as nearly as I can tell, a liberal is a nice man who acts decently toward people, talks democratically, and often is democratic in his personal life, but does not stand up very well in action when some social issue like Jim Crow comes up."

"Like my boss," said Simple, "who is always telling me he believes in equal rights and I am the most intelligent Negro he ever saw -- and I deserve a better job. I say, 'Why don't you give it to me, then?' And he says, 'Unfortunately, I don't have one for you.'

"'But ever so often you hire new white men that ain't had the experience of me and I have to tell them what to do, though they are over me. How come that?'

"'Well,' he says, 'the time just ain't ripe.' Is that what a liberal is?" asked Simple.

"That's just about what a liberal is," I said ...

That was published in 1949.

Second, Hughes's description of a liberal fits John Kennedy's practice as President.  He escalated US involvement in Vietnam, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over Cuba, and severely disappointed Civil Rights activists who'd put their hope in him as a champion of racial equality in America.  (And doesn't that "looks ahead and not behind" remind you of someone today?)  You can call Kennedy lots of things, but "liberal" isn't one of them unless you're using Langston Hughes's criterion.

I've also quoted Martin Luther King Jr. before (via) on Kennedy as a Civil Rights icon, and I might as well quote him again:

No president has really done very much for the American Negro, though the past two presidents have received much undeserved credit for helping us. This credit has accrued to Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy only because it was during their administrations that Negroes began doing more for themselves. Kennedy didn't voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. I must point out, in all honesty, however, that President Johnson has not been nearly so diligent in implementing the bills he has helped shepherd through Congress.

Of the ten titles of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, probably only the one concerning public accomodations -- the most bitterly contested section -- has been meaningfully enforced and implemented. Most of the other sections have been deliberately ignored.

...

I'm sure that most whites felt that with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, all race problems were automatically solved. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Yet Negroes continue to live with racism every day.

--Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, 1969

I pointed out some of these things to my friend; her reply was "I'm proud to be a liberal!"  I'm not sure I see what there is to be proud of, but to each her own.  But I see this as part of a larger problem.  It's not so much that political labels are meaningless, though it sometimes seems so.  When large numbers of Americans think of politicians like JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama as liberals, something is wrong.  Obama knows better: he's said that in Europe he'd be considered a conservative, and that was early in his term, before he'd shown just how far he was willing to follow and extend Bush-era policies.  Even "centrist" is far too generous for him.  If American liberals are willing to claim such men as one of them, then they should revise their mission statement.

CNN: Like The Onion, Only Subtler

This article at CNN.com, reporting on a study which purports to show that American atheists and liberals have higher IQs than the religious and conservative, was noticed both by Roy Edroso and Avedon Carol. Edroso disliked it, appealing to the authority of PZ Myers to support him, while Avedon apparently liked it, at least "the part where religion is a feature of paranoia."

Myers dissects the study easily:

Show me the error bars on those measurements. Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence. Show me that a 6 point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. And then to claim that these differences are not only heritable, but evolutionarily significant…jebus, people, you can just glance at it and see that it is complete crap.

At least the study is going to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, for what little that is worth. Myers might also have pointed out how easily average differences are absolutized, so that "atheists have higher IQs than believers" becomes "atheists are smart and believers are stupid." Edroso falls afoul of that mistake himself, brandishing "my experience of actual human beings, whom I have found fascinatingly varied in their abilities whatever their respective races, ideologies, etc." One of Avedon's commenters (sorry, no permalink) says the same thing: "In my church, there are many people with advanced degrees, including in the physical sciences. Everyone accepts the validity of evolution, seeing it as the tool by which God shapes things. Scripture is treated as sacred, but not literally inerrant." Well, duh! The trouble with statistics generally seems to lie with people who don't know how to read them. To say, for example, that men are on average taller than women does not mean either that all men are taller than all women, or that all men are the same height and all women are the same height. So a higher average IQ for atheists does not imply that there aren't believers with high IQs and advanced degrees -- or that there aren't plenty of unintelligent atheists out there. Statistics is a collection of methods for trying to find patterns in all that lovely variety; it doesn't eliminate the variation.

If not for the ScienceDaily story Myers linked to, though, I'd find it hard to believe that the CNN story isn't satire. Consider the "highlights" sidebar: "Behaviors may stem from desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ ... None of this means that humans are evolving toward a future where such traits are the default". Or the caption under the included photo: "The IQ differences are statistically significant, but experts say the data shouldn't be used to stereotype or make assumptions." Of course that's exactly how a lot of people are using the data, just as I would expect.

Who are those "experts," I hear you ask? Here's one:

"The adoption of some evolutionarily novel ideas makes some sense in terms of moving the species forward," said George Washington University leadership professor James Bailey, who was not involved in the study. "It also makes perfect sense that more intelligent people -- people with, sort of, more intellectual firepower -- are likely to be the ones to do that."

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.

Why CNN asked a "leadership professor" to comment on the study is hard to say, unless they were deliberately looking for uninformed, trivial, even irrelevant soundbytes. If so, Professor Bailey gave them what they were looking for. Species don't 'move forward' in Darwinian evolution, and as Myers pointed out, there's no reason to believe that either atheism or liberalism has any evolutionary significance. And that "neener neener neener, you atheists think you're so smart!" jeer is not just irrelevant but hilarious.

At least CNN talked to Satoshi Kanazawa, the author of the study.

Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger.

"It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere," Kanazawa said.

Wait a minute. According to Kanazawa, atheists aren't "paranoid" enough, apparently because of our higher IQs, and therefore not sufficiently wary of danger. (Avedon, you'll remember, liked the link to paranoia, but paranoia is not the right word for alertness to danger, especially when the environment really is out to get you.) To add to the weirdness, PZ Myers has some links that indicate that Kanazawa is quite a wack job himself; try this one, which quotes Kanazawa to the effect that "we" (the US) "are losing this war" (World War III, as Thomas Friedman calls it) because "we don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us ... And [in past wars] we didn’t think twice about dropping bombs on them, to kill them and their wives and children. (As many commentators have pointed out, the distinction between combatants and civilians does not make sense in World War III, and the Geneva Convention -- an agreement among nations -- is no longer applicable, because our enemies are not nation states.)" And that's why Kanazawa thinks that "this war" is taking longer to win than World Wars One and Two (though he evidently forgets that the War in Vietnam lasted longer than those two put together, and we didn't win it either).

Oh, not to worry, Tosh, "we" are still killing "their wives and children" with gay abandon. The strangest thing in this very strange rant is Kanazawa's claim that "terrorist" is a "euphemism," though it's not far ahead of his notion that Americans don't refer to their current enemies with racial slurs, as they did in the good wars of the past.

No, no, the CNN article must be satirical, like The Onion but not as far over the top, and the study should have appeared in the April Fools issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Fortunately, In America At Any Rate, Education Produces No Effect Whatsoever

I’ve been trying for a while now to fit this quotation into a posting, so here it is upfront:

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism, as Gellner ought to know, is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

The quotation comes from Paul Feyerabend’s reply to Ernest Gellner’s review of Feyerabend’s Against Method, reprinted in Science in a free society (London: Verso/NLB, 1978), p. 148. I like it because it sums up neatly what I was trying to say in yesterday’s posting, though I confess it feels odd to realize that by this definition, I’m a liberal. But I can live with that: words for political positions are imprecise, and change. I’ve always liked this 1895 exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest:

Lady Bracknell. [interrogating Jack, the would-be fiancé of her daughter] What are your politics?

Jack. Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

In the 1952 film version, “Liberal Unionist” was changed to simply “liberal.”

I wish I knew enough Japanese to understand what the Takarazuka Flower Troupe did with it: