The Ocean or the Tiger?

I went to see Ang Lee's latest film Life of Pi today, because Samuel Delany had made some comments about it on Facebook.  Be warned that spoilers will follow.  If you haven't seen the movie yet and want to see it with a minimum of foreknowledge, stop reading now.  Of course many people who see it will have already read the novel it's based on, which I hadn't.  According to some of the comments on Delany's posts, the film stays pretty close to the book.  (Which means, thankfully, that I shouldn't have to read it myself.)

The movie presents itself as a story that "will make you believe in God." But, given the two stories that the plot hinges on, it seems to do the exact opposite--the story of the boy, the boat, and the tiger forming a precise allegory of the failure of all religions to promote humane behavior in the hidden story we are told, at the end, "actually happened" and that was so monstrously awful it had to be replaced with the hallucination we are given instead. They couldn't have come up with a better script promoting atheism if they had gotten Christopher Hitchens to write it. By the way, as a movie I rather enjoyed it--though I would have liked a film that at least tried to do what it set to, rather than the opposite, atheist that I am. But it seemed to have given up on that before it even got started.

I'd differ with Delany on something trivial but still, I believe, significant: the movie tells a story about a story that "will make you believe in God."  I presume that applies to the novel too.  I'm always skeptical about such stories,  The first such a one I encountered was Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, part of which consists of two characters telling each other how things happened, seemingly making up their reminiscences on the fly, and the reader is supposed to marvel at the instability and unknowability of reality that this represents.  Like Einstein or Heisenberg, or Schroedinger's Cat.

In Life of Pi, a young novelist beset by writer's block is told by the title character's uncle that Pi has a story to tell that will make the listener believe in God.  The novelist visits Pi, who obligingly tells his story, which makes up the bulk of the film: the only survivor of a shipwreck that killed his family (mother, father, older brother) and the entire crew of a Japanese freighter en route from Manila to Canada, the teenaged Pi found himself in a lifeboat with a survival kit and the company of a hyena, a rat, a zebra, an orangutang, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.  After a few days, the survivors are reduced to Pi and the tiger.

Pi's family had run a zoo in Pondicherry, India, and were shipping the animals to Canada for sale. During his childhood Pi had become fascinated by religion.  His family was nominally Hindu, but he came into contact with Roman Catholicism and Islam, and engaged in some simple if precocious questioning.  Convinced that animals had souls, Pi tried to make friends with the tiger; his father intervened before he lost an arm, and gave a young goat to the tiger, which killed it in front of Pi.  This convinced the boy that there was no meaning in the world, and he spent several years studying listlessly, finding meaning only later when his heterosexuality erupted in his late teens, just before the family emigrated.  It's hard for me to take the boy's disillusionment very seriously.  After all, carnivores and their prey are part of the Cycle of Life, God's Will and all that.  If the tiger had taken Pi's arm off, that would be God's will.  I'm always bemused by believers' self-serving selectivity about matters like this.

Trying to survive at sea, Pi reaches a modus vivendi with the tiger.  But he still struggles with the meaning of it all.  Occasionally in extremity he cries "I surrender!" to the god or gods he imagines in charge of his situation.  I found this perplexing, though of course it's a common reaction.  After all, if there's an omnipotent, omniscient being running your life, what does it care if you surrender or not?  What does it care if you issue ultimata or collapse in a crying heap?  If you survive, is this (as Pi seems to conclude) a sign that the gods were taking care of you?  If so, why did so many other people fail to survive?

Some commenters on Delany's post invoked the book of Job, which is not very helpful.  Like Pi, it's a fable: Yahweh and Satan bet on what will happen if the righteous and blessed Job loses the protection Yahweh has so far granted him.  Satan kills off Job's family, destroys his chattels, and afflicts him with boils.  Job denounces Yahweh's injustice in eloquent speeches, and his friends reprove him: You must have done something wrong, they tell him, or God wouldn't have done this to you.  (Notice that no one blames it on Satan, quite properly.)  In the end Yahweh speaks to Job from the whirlwind, challenging him to fisticuffs and asserting his power (but not his justice); Job crumbles and admits that he is a mere worm.  Yahweh growls at Job's friends, who he says have not spoken of him what is right, as Job has, and then restores Job's fortunes, and they all live happily after.  The end.

The difference in the story of Job is that there is no real question why Job suffered.  He didn't do anything wrong; God was just trying a little experiment.  He could as easily have gone on protecting Job.  And if Job, who was fabulously righteous, could be tormented so, there's no reason to blame the suffering of other people on their lesser righteousness.  Many interpreters have tried to get around the book's conclusions, but they've never convinced me; I follow the philosopher Walter Kaufmann, whose interpretation in The Faith of a Heretic (Doubleday, 1961) still makes the most sense to me.

Pi was eventually washed up on a Mexican beach.  In the hospital he was questioned by Japanese insurance investigators who wanted to know why the ship went down; this question is never answered, since Pi couldn't have known why.  The investigators questioned the truth of his tale, so he invented a new one in which his mother, one sailor, and the French cook survived with him, but the cook killed the sailor and Pi's mother and then, guilty for his crime, let Pi kill him in turn.  The impression is given that the investigators accepted this grimmer, grittier version, but their report (which Pi produces and shows to the novelist) concluded that Pi made history by crossing the Pacific in a lifeboat with only a Bengal tiger for company.

Like Delany, I can't understand how anyone could find support for belief in gods in either story.  Life of Pi has a New-Agey, culture-of-therapy smugness about it that nearly drove me from my seat a couple of times.  Quite typically, it doesn't go very far in the edifying explanations it considers.  Again, possible spoiler:  Pi happened to survive the sinking of the ship because he was delighted by the storm and went above to watch it; his family drowned in their cabin.  Maybe his suffering in the lifeboat was God's retribution for his having escaped God's will, which was that he should have died with his family?  Why even suppose that the gods are on the side of human beings?  The humility that the faithful proudly claim to possess and practice tends to fall by the wayside when they consider their place in the universe.  Which is no doubt very comforting, but doesn't strike me as very profound.  I don't object to "spirituality" in films or other art; I just hope for something better than the usual pompous cliches, which is all that Life of Pi offers.  The photography and special effects are pretty, but I have this thing about substance too.

Let's Get Critical

I didn't notice at first, but look at those faces.  Are they supposed to represent critical thinkers?  If so, they don't look empowered to me, they look half-asleep, drugged, out of it.  A great advertisement for the power of critical thinking!  But maybe that's just me.

This image was posted on Facebook with the following quotation:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. Carl Sagan

Now, appealing to authority is a very common failure of critical thinking.  (Sagan said it, I believe it, that settles it!)  But I've noticed that many people who fuss about the lack of critical thinking in our society seem rather ... vague ... about what they're asking for.

A good example of what I'm talking about is a book called Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior by Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown, published a decade ago by Oxford University Press.  It's on a subject that interests me and on which I've read quite a lot over the years, but I got bogged down in the first chapter.

Laland and Brown introduce the sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s, which were sparked by the publication of Edward O. Wilson's textbook Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard, 1975).  Most of the book was solid enough, even according to its critics: it dealt with work on the biology of social behavior among other species, especially insects.  But in the final chapter Wilson tried to apply the same approach to human behavior, which led to problems because while he may have known a lot about the behavior of insects, he was flat wrong in many important respects about the behavior of human beings.  Here's how Laland and Brown tell it, though.

In the final chapter of the book Wilson described how the latest advances in the study of animal behavior, particularly the insights of biologists Robert Trivers and Bill Hamilton, might explain many aspects of human behavior. He provided biological explanations for a broad range of controversial topics, including the differences between the sexes, human aggression, religion, homosexuality, and xenophobia. He also predicted that it would not be long before the social sciences were subsumed within the biological sciences. Wilson’s book provoked an uproar and launched what is now known as the ‘sociobiology debate’, which raged throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Social scientists bitterly disputed Wilson’s claims, found fault with his methods, and dismissed his explanations as speculative stories.  Intriguingly, among the most prominent critics were two members of Wilson’s own department at Harvard, evolutionary biologists Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould, who vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist. Yet most biologists could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity. The debate became polarized and highly political, with the sociobiologists accused of bolstering right-wing conservative values and the critics associated with Marxist ideology [4-5].

There are several problems here.  The "explanations" that Wilson provided for those controversial topics were, as his critics charged, speculative stories.  I'm best acquainted with the "explanation" for homosexuality, which attempted to explain the survival of a non-reproductive form of sexual behavior like homosexuality by postulating that maybe men who didn't have children were more helpful with their heterosexual siblings' children, thus increasing the chances of people who shared their genes.  This is a pretty notion, and neither implausible nor illogical.  It got a lot of attention in the gay press at the time; I remember seeing it touted in an article in Christopher Street.  But it was pure speculation, a Just-So Story invented to show how a certain result came to be.  There was no evidence whatever to support it, and in science the way I learned it at my mama's knee, it isn't a scientific explanation until you have evidence that supports it, preferably to the exclusion of alternative hypotheses.  Wilson's speculations were a tad more sophisticated than those of his Social-Darwinist forebears, but still unfounded.  (The same hypothesis is still with us, but still without sufficient evidence to support it.  Notice that in that 2010 story Wilson's idea is clearly and accurately labeled a speculation, "toyed with" in the field since he "raised it.")

So it was quite proper of social scientists to point out that Wilson got a lot of important things wrong in their field, but Laland and Brown suggest that they were just anti-science or at least anti-biology.  They admit that Wilson's speculations also were criticized by other biologists, but they too were just being bad sports who "vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist."  But this is incorrect.  I read a lot of Gould at the time (didn't get to Lewontin until much later), along with other writers in the debates, and as I remember it Gould (like other scientists) granted that Sociobiology was a valuable and important book when it dealt with insects, but went astray when Wilson addressed human behavior.  (P.S. I recently reread Gould's review of Wilson, and I remembered right.  It's interesting that Laland and Brown got it wrong.) There's nothing wrong per se with calling the book simple-minded and reductionist; perhaps it was; certainly Laland and Brown have mustered no reason to suppose it wasn't, though they promise to address the topic in more depth in a later chapter.  As for "vehement," though, Gould and Lewontin always seemed to me to be quite civil in their criticisms, focusing on evidence rather than personalities.  (Take a look at this 1975 letter to the New York Review of Books for a sample of the criticism Wilson's book received.  I suppose it's vehement, but it's not abusive.  It focuses on the scientific faults of Wilson's argument before it points out its political ramifications.)  It was mostly their opponents who resorted to abuse.  Michael Ruse is a good example; see his attack on Gould I quoted here, and his fussing in an interview that "You don't make progress by sitting on your bum farting on about spandrels" (quoted here). Richard Dawkins, with his idiotic hawker style as Andre Pichot calls it, didn't really join the lists until later, but he did nothing to advance civility in the debates.  Steven Pinker's another late arrival who prefers to attack his opponents for their politics rather than their science.  For that matter, Wilson himself would later rant that "Multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism."  Laland and Brown do the same thing, only more mildly, and with false equivalence between sides (both of them were polarized).

"Yet most biologists," Leland and Brown write, "could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity."  As far as I can tell, the critics of sociobiology didn't deny that the approach had "potential."  They were critical of the results sociobiologists claimed to have produced, but that is not merely normal in science, it's normative: scientists are supposed to try to tear each other's claims to bits.  So why did sociobiologists cry "no fair" when their work received precisely the scrutiny that every scientist officially expects?  My own guess is that it's because they weren't doing good science, for political reasons, and they knew it.

Laland and Brown then cite a corrective to all this polarization and fussin' and fightin'.  (Again, it's significant that they see critical disagreement as a bad thing.) 

In the midst of this controversy, when emotions were raised, and knee-jerk reactions common, the position of John Maynard Smith, one of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists, stands out for its balanced judgment and fairness. In the heat of the debate, Maynard Smith retained a dignified intermediate position, supporting science over politics and being angry at much of the unjust criticism directed at Wilson, while at the same time remaining very conscious of the dangers of an inappropriate use of biology. In an interview in 1981, he stated:

I have a lot of the gut feelings of my age of being horrified and scared of the application of biology to the social sciences – I can see … race theories, Nazism, anti-semitism and all of that. So that my initial gut reaction to Wilson’s Sociobiology was one of considerable annoyance and distress (1981: quoted in Segerstråle, 2000, pp. 240-1).

Maynard Smith confessed to finding some of Wilson’s views on human behavior ‘half-baked’, even ‘silly’. Yet in a balanced review of Sociobiology he described the book as making ‘a major contribution’ to an understanding of animal behavior and was careful to stress its many positive features [5] ...

Here Laland and Brown make a very common and popular error: they confuse moderation of tone with moderation of content, and they confuse both with being correct.  To put it crudely, suppose I say that 2 plus 2 equals 2, and you say that 2 plus 2 equals 4.  We disagree 'vehemently,' voices raised, and are near blows when along comes Maynard Smith to settle the debate by suggesting equably that 2 plus 2 equals 3.  Since he is in the middle of the road, balanced and careful to stress the many positive features of both our positions, we embrace him and his answer, joyously renouncing polarization and all its works.  Two plus two equals three, praise Pythagoras!  Let the lion lie down with the lamb!

In fact, it's Laland and Brown who place politics over science: Can't we all get along? they ask. Can't we be nice to each other? There's no need for anyone to raise their voices.  But while civility and calm are nice to have, they are irrelevant to truth in a debate.  Laland and Brown are also incorrect in ascribing "balance" to Maynard Smith alone.  Stephen Jay Gould was not alone in admitting the value of much of Wilson's book.  This did not, however, in any way, mean that Wilson's chapter on human behavior wasn't mistaken, simple-minded, reductionist, or pernicious.  Tone and content are two separate issues.  The content must be addressed on its merits, not by throwing tantrums about socialist feminists who hate science.

I don't deny that people let their emotions (or politics or wishful thinking) cloud their reasoning and arguments.  That should be a given when you're applying critical thinking.  Among the many things you learn in learning how to think critically is how to peel away the layers of emotion to try to get at the underlying argument -- which may or may not be rational.  It's not that people always try to obfuscate in order to distract attention from the flaws in their reasoning; I don't think Laland and Brown are doing that, for instance.  But they do obscure the issues by laying stress on tone and politics, all the while evidently convinced of their own reasonable rationalism.  Once you have laid bare the bones of your opponent's argument, you can then wax polemical, but only as long as your own argument remains correct.  Personally I like polemic, an admission that should surprise no one who reads this blog; but I demand that my polemics be rational and well-informed.  But I've also observed that any criticism, no matter how calm and mild in tone, will be perceived by its subject as mean and hateful -- and it will feel all the meaner and more hateful the more correct it is.

Finally, bear in mind that Laland and Brown are both scientists themselves, a research fellow and a research scientist respectively at the University of Cambridge.  Supposedly they have been trained in critical thinking and scientific method.  One reason for the stylized form of scientific publication, much like a recipe, is to try to keep emotion and politics out of the product so that fellow scientists can focus on the scientific substance.  Still, this usually works only in what Thomas Kuhn called "normal science," the routine work that doesn't upset any apple carts.  When someone comes along with a radically new theory, no matter how routine the presentation, it will still arouse emotion.  And once a scientist ventures outside the paradigm of the scientific journal article, he or she usually finds it difficult to stay rational and critical, and the scientist's temperament comes to the fore.  For Laland and Brown, the temperament involved prefers to avoid conflict and raised voices, to the extent that they find it difficult to cope with temperaments that delight in dialectic; their training fails them the minute they most enter unfamiliar territory.  But the failure isn't their subjects' rationality, it's their style.  Which has nothing much to do with scientific substance.

At the time of the 1990s Sex Panic, largely targeting gay men in New York, some people pointed out that "unsafe sex" was simply sex. Safe sex, whatever its necessity in certain circumstances, was not the default setting.  It occurred to me the other day that "magical thinking" is ordinary, vernacular, commonsense thinking, not some bizarre marginal (worse yet, "primitive") variety of thought.  Learning to think of the universe as not alive, not purposive, not something like a person, is very difficult, probably impossible.  Some people can manage this trick better than others, but they too fall back into natural language and natural thought when they're off the clock.

Of course I'm not suggesting that "natural" is always better.  What I hope to warn against is the assumption that it's only necessary to brush away a few conceptual cobwebs, obsolete heirlooms of our tribal, Stone Age past, to think clearly and See the World As It Is.  Because here's the thing about Critical Thinking: neither the world (or "Nature" -- at any rate, the impersonal Out There) or other human beings are going to hand you problems neatly on a platter.  (See?  Here's your Major Premise, and here's your Minor Premise, and here's your Conclusion.  And I've trimmed away the fat of emotion, politics, and wishful thinking for you, so all you have to do is look at the bare structure.  I think that because this is how Logic is taught, many people who should know better believe that it's how Logic works.  But once you're out of the playpen of Logic 101, you have to learn to trim away the extraneous matter yourself -- and that's not easy.)  You're going to have to look at them, think them over a while, and then try to figure out what is going on here.  Nature, not being a person, doesn't have likes or dislikes; people often do.  But more often they don't realize how they're obfuscating.  Because they are scientists, they are rational and critical by ascription.  But you only need to watch them a while to see how wrong they are.

Family Values

Sounds like a good idea to me, only I don't have any kids.  Maybe I should adopt.

Keep Your Government Hands Off My Catfood Commission!

Tom Tomorrow's latest cartoon baffles me.  It depicts Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles appearing in the Oval Office to offer a nonplussed-looking Barack Obama their help against the "arbitrary, self-imposed budget deadline" he faces. 

You'd think, looking at the cartoon, that Obama had nothing to do with the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  Of course it was his own bipartisan creation, packed with deficit hawks of his own choosing, including Paul Ryan.  ("Bipartisan" is a keyword in the cartoon, but only to mock Simpson and Bowles.  Obama's own bipartisanship-mongering is not mentioned.)

I looked around the web a little to see if I could find out whose idea the Commision was.  It looks like it was Obama's; he certainly made it his own.  One article I found was from last Monday's New York Times.  The title was a giveaway: "Obama's Unacknowledged Debt to Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Aha!  There was no "Bowles-Simpson Plan."  Another article I stumbled on, from a small newspaper, explained it very well:

“Simpson-Bowles” is shorthand for a bipartisan deficit commission co-chaired by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles. While the commission never formally issued a report because it never reached consensus on a plan, Simpson and Bowles informally presented a memorandum of their ideas to the Congress and President Obama.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?  And it's not exactly obscure.  Yet the notion that the Commission produced a report has gone viral in the corporate media.  (So much so that I bought it for a while myself.)  Even if you like the recommendations in their memo, Bowles and Simpson did not speak for the Commission as a whole.  Which hasn't kept them from touring the country giving speeches pushing their recommendations at $40,000 a pop.

The Times article never mentions this. Instead we get stuff like this:

It came just a few months after the president had opted not to endorse the recommendations of a deficit commission he had created in hopes of brokering a bold, bipartisan deficit deal. That gave rise to a portrayal that has stuck, popularized by Republicans, pundits and some Democrats: that the president, out of political timidity, snubbed his own panel’s plan.

There are also allusions to "the major tenets supported by a majority of the commission’s members", "the commission’s report in December 2010," and so on.

To repeat: the "recommendations" did not come from the commission; "his own panel" produced no "plan."  The memorandum the chairmen produced could probably have been written if the commission had never been appointed nor met in solemn convocation -- which would have saved a lot of money right there.  The writer quietly acknowledges reality further down:

On Dec. 1, 2010, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson unveiled an ambitious package of spending cuts and revenue increases that was supported two days later by 11 of the 18 commissioners — five from each party, including all three conservative Senate Republicans, and an independent business executive. While three votes short of the 14 needed to force a Congressional vote, it raised hopes that the blueprint could lead to compromise between Mr. Obama and Republicans. 

The writer almost admits that the "package" was the work of the two chairmen, not the commission itself, and it didn't get the fourteen-vote supermajority required to force Congressional action.  The commission itself had been packed by Obama with deficit hawks (I mean, Paul Ryan?), without whom I suppose support for the memo would have been even weaker.  But it's an article of faith in the corporate media that Simpson-Bowles could have saved us, even if only by putting forth material for bipartisan compromise that could have ended the gridlock, but President Obama lacked the political will to face down his base.

Read the comments on the Times article if you have the chance and the stomach; they're even more demented, by and large, than the article itself.  Evidently the Times has Hope that President Obama will have the commitment to bring about real Change of the kind wealthy Republicans want: spending cuts of the right kind -- especially Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- while leaving the big moneymakers, high-tech industry and its evil twin the military, untouched.

At their recent lunch, Mr. Obama assured Mr. Bowles he would not give up. Mr. Bowles said the president talked of seeing “a real opportunity” for compromise after the election, when Republicans will be eager to avoid the expiration of Bush tax cuts and automatic cuts in military spending — suggesting another chance for a deal inspired by Bowles-Simpson. 

“To see his commitment,” Mr. Bowles said, “gave me real hope.” 

Grumpy Old Man

Oh dear, was I being grumpy again?  I promise you, I didn't mean to be, I was trying to be upbeat for a change.  The other day, a liberal friend on Facebook (not the law professor; this one's a local commercial artist) remarked that I must be on vacation, because I wasn't in "the grumpy chair" about one of his posts.  But that very same day he approved of my being "grumpy" about a right-wing GOP meme.  So it's only risible grumpiness to criticize right-wing Democrats; got it.

But what I meant to write about was my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One's return to the political fray; apparently he's begun to recover from the devastating trauma of Obama's reelection.

Or maybe not.  He posted a couple of links about the "looming fiscal cliff crisis," one of which claimed that the real danger comes from the "looming debt crisis."  On this one RWA1 remarked "There is the real crisis, and the Democrats pretend it that it's all taken care of."  Of course the Fiscal Cliff is largely manufactured by the corporate media and their allies in Washington, including Obama himself.  I'm ready to blame the Democrats for their role in our economic troubles, but that role mostly consists of collaborating with the Republicans.  I pointed out that as far the debt goes, the Republicans raised the debt ceiling for Bush and Reagan, so their present concern about the debt is as deceitful as their concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare.  RWA1 ignored this, mumbling something about what will happen when "the Chinese stop buying our debt."  But it's all the Democrats' fault, even though the Chinese bought a lot of our debt from the Bush crime family.  That's a benefit of being on the losing side in a major election: you can blame everything on the other guys, though as the past four years show, even when you win you can blame everything on the other guys.  It's no substitute for thought, of course.

The other link, to an op-ed, called for the GOP to "force Obama's hand," with no comment from RWA1.  I remarked that I'm all for the GOP continuing to self-destruct, since it would leave the Democrats no excuse for screwing things up.  RWA1 replied, "I foresee a mess, as there is a paucity of courage on all [!] sides."  That was nice and vacuous, but also willfully irrelevant.  (Though "foresee" also means "I hope I hope I hope."  Apocalypse is a typical right-wing fantasy; it never seems to occur to them that a catastrophe could affect them too.)

As with principles, courage doesn't mean anything in itself if you don't exercise it in a good cause.  It's no recommendation to have the courage to destroy the economy; the deficit hawks of both parties have shown numerous times that they do have that courage.  The weird thing is that like so many people on both major parties, RWA1 overlooks the fundamental agreement between Obama and the Republicans: cut government spending, including on social programs; don't raise taxes on the wealthy too much; lower the deficit at all costs.  The main difference between them is that Obama is more willing to raises taxes on the rich.  He has already lowered spending (a disastrous policy in a troubled economy) more than any recent president; he has put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block; he appointed a bipartisan commission to make recommendations on cutting the deficit, packing with deficit hawks -- and when it failed, even so, to reach conclusions, he accepted the report of the two chairmen.

I don't know what RWA1 thinks would be the courageous thing for "all sides" to do.  But it's clear that Obama is ready to do most of what the Republicans say they want done, and to defy his base in doing so.  It won't matter to him, since he doesn't have to appease voters to be re-elected again.  If the Democrats do badly in 2014 because of Obama's policies, the damage will have been done to the economy and it will be hard, nearly impossible, to repair.  I'd suspect that RWA1 still hasn't recovered from the elections, but he's consistently attacked a fantasy Obama for the past four years, so that can't be the explanation.

I confess, I didn't read either article he linked to; what interested me was what RWA1 was saying.  It's the same old swill.

The same day, my liberal law-professor friend linked to this Paul Krugman column, where he frets and whimpers about rumors that President Obama may already have sold the farm.

So this looks crazy to me; it looks like a deal that makes no sense either substantively or in terms of the actual bargaining strength of the parties. And if it does happen, the disillusionment on the Democratic side would be huge. All that effort to reelect Obama, and the first thing he does is give away two years of Medicare? How’s that going to play in future attempts to get out the vote?

I also hope the rumors turn out to be false, but I'm not betting anything on it; Obama has such a long record of selling out his base to his right-wing allies and donors that the rumors seem entirely too plausible.  And what does Obama care about future attempts to get out the vote?  That is not his problem anymore.  The only question is what can be done to block him, or to punish him afterward if he does it.  "Disillusionment on the Democratic side" and a dollar will get you on the bus, and if Obama does queer the deal, I fully expect all the Obama cultists out there to fall into line behind their guy, as they always have before: If Barack says it, it must be right.

I asked my friend why Krugman was undermining POTUS, though.  Even his timid and reserved criticism of President Obama could hurt the Democrats in 2014.  Nothing less than total devotion will do, or the Republicans will take over, and where will we be then?

When You've Got a Ph.D., Everything Looks Like an Intervention

I'm now well into Heterosexual Africa?: The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS (Ohio, 2008).  The author, Marc Epprecht, also wrote Hungochani, a highly-praised book on homosexuality in Southern Africa which I have on my shelves but haven't read yet.  In Heterosexual Africa? Epprecht takes on the doctrine, spread by Africans and non-Africans alike, that homosexuality is unknown in Africa, with an emphasis on the impact it has had on responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  In many ways it's a valuable book, and I suspect I'll be writing more about the book in the next few days, but one sentence on page 117 brought me up short, and I want to discuss it now.

In his chapter focusing on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Epprecht surveys the quasi-scientific literature on modes of transmission, which he says ignored male-to-male sexuality almost entirely; at best, this literature mentioned the possibility merely to dismiss it.  What research did mention (usually male) homosex was itself ignored, as though it had never been published.

In an article on African AIDS patients in Europe, from 1981 through 1985, for example, Jean Sonnet and H.Taelman ... noted that one out of forty-two patients in their study admitted to not being heterosexual. The WHO study noted above found even more. Out of 117 African African patients in Europe who were tested in the first nine months of 1986, 5 percent were found to have contracted HIV through homosexual or bisexual transmission, and a further 1 percent either that way or though intravenous drug injection ... 

So far, so bad.  Epprecht repeatedly stresses the inadequacy of terminology like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" for traditional cultures in Africa, invoking the authority of queer and post-colonial theory; he even has wit enough to recognize that "sex" is problematic, since most societies, including the "West," tend to recognize only penis-in-vagina penetration as "sex."  Even that doesn't work outside English-speaking parts of the world, and researchers working in other languages with informants whose first language is not a European one, are often unclear about the languages they use to elicit information.  In this case I have the added difficulty that Epprecht is paraphrasing his sources, though since they were in European languages "homosexual" or its cognates were probably used.

Even among white Americans and Europeans, however, there's considerable ambiguity about a phrase like "not being heterosexual."  Does it mean that the subject is exclusively homosexual in his or her desires and behavior, or simply not exclusively heterosexual?  Considering the number of Americans who don't consider themselves homosexual because they've never been penetrated although they have penetrated many other males, or who have been penetrated but it doesn't count because they "avidly" penetrate females, some more care, if not precision, with terms is desirable here.

"Homosexual or bisexual transmission" is even worse.  Bisexual transmission would require a rather exotic sex life, even for the decadent West: it would mean that both a male and a female partner were involved (simultaneously?) in transmitting the virus to the recipient.  If he got it from a male, it doesn't matter whether he or his partner were "bisexual," which I suppose is what was meant by "bisexual transmission."  As Kinsey wrote in 1948, the word bisexual "should, however, be used with the understanding that it is patterned on the words heterosexual and homosexual, and, like them, refers to the sex of the partner, and proves nothing about the constitution of the person who is labeled bisexual [657]."

Which brings me, in more ways than one, to the sentence by Epprecht that made me see red, emboldened below:

These figures are very low compared to the epidemic in Europe and America.  But they can more usefully be compared to what Alfred Kinsey found in American men in the days before gay rights (that is, 4 percent admitting to homosexuality as a predominant orientation).

I had been wondering why Epprecht hadn't mentioned Kinsey before in this book, aside from a passing allusion seven pages earlier.  Kinsey understood the problems of studying human sexuality better than every researcher Epprecht discusses in this book (including, I fear, himself).  Long before AIDS, Kinsey rejected Western notions of sexual essence that ignored the widely differing experiences and practices of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women.  He didn't, as far as I know, ask any of his interviewees whether they were homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. (If he had, most of the heterosexuals would have had no idea what he meant, and would probably have said no.)  He didn't ask them if they'd had homosexual (or heterosexual) experiences.  He asked them what they had done, and with whom.  He was, if I recall correctly what his colleague Wardell Pomeroy wrote, ready to use non-clinical vernacular terms for sexual acts when the interviewee didn't understand clinical terms.  (Asking a farmer or a convict how many times he'd received fellatio, for example, would probably have drawn a blank most of the time.  I kinda wonder if some of the later sex surveys dodged this little problem by not interviewing lower-class or uneducated subjects.)  In short, Kinsey grappled with the very problems that stymied researchers during the AIDS epidemic four decades later, in large part because they'd ignored Kinsey as outdated and irrelevant.  He recognized that many people had a lot of same-sex experience without thinking of themselves as homosexual or bisexual, and he recognized that this counted against the notion of homosexual or bisexual persons, not against their experience, which he rightly considered primary.

But what bothered me about the sentence I quoted above is that Epprecht -- who, you'll recall, has spent over a hundred pages denying the validity of homosexuality as an identity for purposes of studying sexuality in Africa -- is still trying to impose homosexual and bisexual identity on Westerners.  His reference to Kinsey (without a citation in the text or endnote) is incorrect.  It is false that 4 percent of males admitted "to homosexuality as a predominant orientation."  Kinsey didn't use the word "orientation" (to be scrupulous, he used it once in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, in a different sense) in connection with homosexual or heterosexual experience.  What he found was that 4 percent of his male sample had exclusively homosexual outlet throughout their adult lives.  If he asked them how they "identified" (also a word that would have made no sense in that context in the 1930s and 1940s), it wasn't a factor in his numbers or in his homosexual-heterosexual scale.  Additionally, he found that another 6 percent of his male sample had at least as much homosexual as heterosexual outlet for at least three years of their adult lives.  This meant that 10 percent had predominantly homosexual experience for at least three years of their lives; it's the source of the popular claim that Kinsey found that ten percent of the population was gay or lesbian.  Thirty-seven percent of males had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm during their adult lives; I guess they were "not heterosexual." (This includes the 4 percent and the 10 percent, which I mention because I've encountered people who tried to add all the percentages together: 4 percent plus 10 percent plus 37 percent and so on.)

The point I want to make here is that if you're writing about the diversity and fluidity of human sexuality, Kinsey is fundamental.  True, his work was flawed in certain respects, most of which he knew full well (the absence of people of color in the sample, for one).  But he mapped out the understanding and approach that would be vital during the AIDS pandemic, and had to be largely reinvented from scratch because the researchers had ignored him.  Even thirty years into the pandemic, research professionals keep rediscovering that OMFG, there are totally men who have sex with other men and they aren't gay!  Anyone who treats this as a new revelation has just informed you that they don't know what they're talking about, and need to go back to sex-research kindergarten for remedial study of the basics.  Until they do, they are wasting money and time and human lives.

All The Other Rogue States Are Doing It!

As Israel continues to make itself a shame unto the nations, Democracy Now! reported briefly on the Palestinian Authority's protest against a new wave of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  At least five European countries have "summoned their Israeli ambassadors."  The Obama administration has responded with the speed and force of a closing steel trap, calling the new settlements "counterproductive."  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman mounted a revealing defense:

Now I want to remind you that building (settlements) in Jerusalem is with accordance to Israeli law. If anyone wants to investigate further, they can go to the Bush letter and see all those settlements blocks and the changes in the territory which the U.S. president spoke of.

In very much the same way, the mistreatment of German Jewry in the 1930s was "with accordance to" German law.  Slavery and the destruction of the American Indian peoples were "with accordance to" American law.  Lots of terrible state crimes have conformed fully to the laws of their respective nations, because by an amazing coincidence, those nations wrote their laws to enable them to do what they wanted to do.  And citing George W. Bush as authority for your actions is unlikely to persuade anybody.