Rational Philosophy

More Valentine’s day ice-water; on the philosophy of charm and its opposite: Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin and British men.

In recent history, Bill Clinton, as president, stood out for many as man of great personal charm. Bill Clinton in his supporting role as Hillary’s pit-bull has been less widely admired for his charm. Vladimir Putin charmed George Bush early in Bush’s presidency, and he seems to have charmed a Russian populace eager to swoon again for strong, dynamic leadership. But, as an outsider, Putin’s charm seems about as thin as the ice on the Dead Sea.

I wonder what role charm plays in life, how it works, and when it breaks down?

Charm is a form of deception in which the deceived is complicit. The charmer uses strategems to make the charmee feel special. The strategems work to falsify or exaggerate the degree to which the charmer really believes in the charmee being special. The charmee on some level recognizes that he or she is being charmed but appreciates the effort being exerted. The apparent exchange then: “I like you; thank you for liking me,” masks a more subtle exchange “I am willing to exert myself for your benefit; thank you for exerting yourself for my benefit.”

Looked at this way, we can see that charm doesn’t really work unless the person being charmed feels on some level or in some way inferior to the person doing the charming. That’s why Vladimir Putin can charm the Russian people who have felt somewhat rudderless in the post-cold war era, or George Bush who doesn’t hold a candle to Putin in terms of ruthlessness and political savvy, but not the average westerner who reads the news and sees right through Putin’s waxy smile.

The person doing the charming also has to have something to gain from exerting the effort. This can sometimes be directly related to the process of charming — getting something out of the charmee. But it can also be indirectly related. Bill Clinton, I hazzard to propose, charmed people as president in order to develop and sustain a cult of charm. He positively glowed with charm and understood that this glow would extend to far greater reaches than the person toward whom he was directing his attention at any moment in time.

Bill Clinton the dutiful husband has nothing personally to gain from being charming. He’s not running for president. One can’t imagine that he’d be happy back in the White House playing, at best, second fiddle to Hillary. Consciously, I’m sure he believes he’s supporting Hillary, but subconsciously he’s undermining her through his charmless tactics.

The British men surveyed by a manufacturer of large screen TVs probably did so anonymously. And yet, there’s still something charmless about the statistic that 50% of them would trade in six months of sex for a 50 inch screen. (I imagine you can hear the French men laughing all the way from Dover as they purchase their ferry tickets for a quick trip to woo the not-so-merry maids of England.)

Charm or lack of charm can be a characteristic of nations as well as individuals. I can say this because I’m British, but the British (with the exception of the shrinking upper class) are charmless because they feel inferior to everyone. The charmer has to feel superior to someone. The French feel superior to everyone, which makes them the people most capable of charm, but their arrogance is their achilles heel — most of the time they can’t be bothered to be charming because they feel they have nothing to gain from it.

And since I’m generalizing offensively, I’ll say that men tend to be less charming than women unless they’re trying to seduce a woman… or get her to buy them a large screen TV. 

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In writing yesterday’s post as I waxed on about Bush as a puppet I made a mistake. I realized this last night in the lucid wakefulness that comes between dreams. I allowed my reason to be swept away by my infatuation with the argument I was making. I made unsubstantiated and in some respects improbable claims about the degree to which Bush has been manipulated in his presidency.

I both gave Bush less credit than I truly believe he deserves (for being his own person) and correspondingly more credit than he deserves (for not being responsible for his administration’s blunders). Doubtless the truth lies somewhere between my accusations that Bush is no more than a stooge, and the opposite possibility that he’s largely steered the political and ideological course of his presidency.

I feel better now I have that off my chest.

The title of a New York Times piece on Obama’s Illinois State voting record misleads the reader: “Obama’s Vote in Illinois Was Often Just ‘Present.’” By using the word ‘Just,’ the Times implies that the vote of ‘Present’ must be some kind of lesser vote than ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Indeed, the piece investigates Hillary Clinton’s campaign claim that Obama’s voting record was softer than he’d like people to think. But instead the piece provides a compelling body of evidence and perfectly good rationale supporting the concept that Obama’s voting record, far from being weak, gives evidence of leadership and careful deliberation. The ‘present’ vote can imply leadership, register dissatisfaction, display a tactical approach. Statistics give the dots, joining them up requires context and detail.

So why did the New York Times choose that headline? It’s beyond me…

What do you know! I go back to the same story and the headline has been changed. “It’s Not Just ‘Ayes’ and ‘Nays’: Obama’s Votes in Illinois Echo,” it now reads. No doubt, after the story was posted, an editor spied the discrepant title and changed it.

In another story South Africa seems likely to elect Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma as its next president. As the article points out, Zuma, like most people and many great leaders, is far from perfect. Facing corruption charges and having been acquitted of raping an HIV positive woman, but admitting to having sex with her, saying she seduced him by wearing a short skirt and posing provocatively, and having also said he showered after having sex with her to reduce his likelihood of catching HIV, Zuma nevertheless seems to be popular because of his admission of human frailty rather than in spite of it.

Failure is a fact of life. Further, failure is a natural and inevitable part of existence. The path of the evolving universe, particles popping in and out of existence, gas clouds swirling, stars imploding, has been one of many unproductive paths and just a few fruitful ones. Life is the same way. The DNA of a living organism mutates blindly. Each mutation knows not what it might bring to the organism, something useful, something harmful, or something of no particular use or harm. Successful mutations we call adaptation. They are successful because they get passed on by natural selection; they hold no special quality other than the fortune of being favorably transmitted.

As human beings, however, we have the ability to conceive of success and failure, to foresee, or recognize and regret our error. It is an interesting parallel to reflect that if we recognize and face up to our errors and try to address them, we are performing our own task of natural selection and adaptation, we are mimicking life by choosing to improve ourselves.

Without our awareness of our frailty we would have no ability to effect positive change. This is why, I suspect, I feel relieved for having admitted yesterday’s failing, why my faith in the NY Times editorial process is reinforced by the change of a headline, despite the original blunder, and why South Africans recognize in Zuma, a flawed man, a leader who may have the power to effect positive change.

What is reason?

I’ve probably written about fifty posts already on this blog, but it occurred to me just yesterday that I have yet to write about “reason.” Since the name of the blog is rationalphilosophy.net and since it’s my stated goal to analyze subjects of interest from a rational perspective, I think I should correct the omission.

We can encapsulate the realm of reason as follows: Reason involves the logical manipulation of abstract concepts.

To unpack this: “Reason” itself is an abstract concept that describes a mental process. This mental process is what happens when we use logic to explore and analyze other abstract concepts. “Logic” is the consistent application of definitive rules (it’s also an abstract concept).

So, when we take any set of defined rules and apply them consistently to analyze ideas, we are using reason.

Notice, we’ve said nothing about whether the rules reflect reality. Neither have we said anything about whether the ideas being analyzed reflect reality. Reason doesn’t require real objects. But as we evolved the rational faculty we first apprehended reason through our interaction with the real world, because that’s our primary and immediate point of reference. The real world also provides us with myriad situations that can be abstracted and anaylzed through reason. Reason is what we do to some extent and with varying degress of success day in day out just to stay alive.

When I was a boy I used to enjoy logic puzzles. Many of them conjured up odd worlds populated by fanciful tribes (one springs to mind about three different groups that sometimes, always or never told the truth). After setting out the rules of the imaginary world and posing a problem, the puzzles left the puzzler to figure out a rational solution. The unspoken dictat being that if the puzzler applied logic, he would find a definite solution.

In real life, we often find ourselves presented with problems or challenges for which no definite solution exists. Either the set of concepts is incomplete or the rule set to be applied isn’t definitive.

Here are some examples from current news stories:

Credit available to US business apparently shrank by an unprecedented 9% since August, perhaps pressaging a recession. The story and the information set reveal that it is impossible to deduce rationally whether the credit shrink indicates that a recession is nigh. The history that connects previous credit shrinks to recessions hasn’t established a definitive causal link, the circumstances surrounding the current credit shrink are unique, and the actions that people and institutions will take in response to the credit shrink are undetermined. But rationally we can say that we have cause to be concerned about a recession given the news about a credit shrink.

After the latest round of middle-east peace talks ended with a commitment from both sides to work toward peace in ‘08 and a two state status quo, Ehud Olmert is quoted as saying: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” Olmert asserts this as rational fact, but he is inferring a future event by comparison to a similar set of circumstances. He is probably correct to draw the comparison, and he may be making a reasonable guess about the outcome, but the categorical tenor of his statement leans on emotion rather than logic.

Bill Clinton this week said that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. Records of his statements at the time indicate that he spoke in favor of completing WMD inspections rather than rushing to war. Clinton recalls that he didn’t speak out more plainly because it would have been inappropriate for a former president to question the military decisions of an acting president. Clinton could be recalling correctly and his statement may be true. Or he may be deliberately mistating his former position on the war in which case his statement would be false. But he may also be mistaken in his recollection, in which case his statement would be false in fact, but true in its own internal logic (derived from his faulty recollection). We cannot know which is the case unless Clinton kept some kind of definitive record of his true position on the war at the time.

The elusiveness of definitive information and fully understood conditions means that when it comes to real life we’re often working with approximations and likelihoods. We don’t know that something will happen (like a recession) but we try to deduce the likelihood and weigh the risks or benefits of certain actions in the face of this likelihood. This, I believe, leads to a very common mistake. When we’re faced with incomplete information, we often replace questions of “what is likely” with “what is possible.”

A striking example of this is religious belief. Religious belief is a matter of faith. We don’t have enough information to draw a rational conclusion about whether a god or supreme being exists or doesn’t exist. When many people argue about religion, they invert this logic to say that we don’t have enough information to draw the rational conclusion that a god or supreme being doesn’t exist. That’s true, but just because the two statements are true doesn’t mean that they infer the same likelihood of god’s existence.

Let’s put it this way: If I claim that a large frog lives on the far side of the moon, you cannot prove that I am wrong, but you can demonstrate with a very high degree of likelihood that I am wrong. I can also say that can’t prove that the frog doesn’t exist, and while this is true, I can’t demonstrate it with the same high degree of likelihood.

After a simple review of the world’s greatest conflicts we quickly determine that they are not caused by insolubly complex problems but by the refusal of people to engage in thoughtful, rational debate and problem-solving.

“Expediters” exist as a wonderfully bizarre byproduct of the inefficiency of the NY City Buildings Department. For a mere few thousand dollars the expediter can help your application jump the queue, furnishing you with a work permit in a few days rather than a few months. Raking in money from the relatively wealthy for doing something that wouldn’t be necessary if the city’s bureaucracy worked better has a tragi-comic element to it. Add to that the down-to-earth nature of your average expediter (how else can he successfully negotiate the underbelly of the buildings department?) and you can readily imagine that a vulgar sense of irony might pervade the expediter’s workplace… You’d be right. My wife, being a venturesome soul, didn’t flinch at being the one to engage an expediter on our behalf earlier this week (I think she quite relished the prospect). And our expectation of scoring some low comedy along with our work permit didn’t go unrewarded. Here’s an example: “I’d be gay,” said the expediter to my wife at one point, “if it wasn’t for the gross sex.”

Which is a long preamble to my point of inquiry. I’ve been thinking about the inevitable infusion of levity into everyday life, the capacity and craving we seem to have for all things fluffy, amusing, and distracting.

CNN’s list of most popular stories today features “Diet Tricks of The Stars,” “Guess Who Bought a Huge Diamond?” and “Celine Dion Tries Some New Things” at numbers 6, 7 and 8 respectively (ahead of stories about quake aftershocks in Chile and torture and murder allegations in Columbia). Our capacity for meaningless distraction is seemingly insatiable.

The fashion designer Marc Jacobs has been broadly pilloried in the last couple of years for not being serious enough (in the fashion industry?) A lovely quote from Mr. Jacobs in an interview with the NY Times amplifies both the silliness he strives to represent and the silliness of the outcry against that silliness. “People don’t really want reality,” the NY Times quotes Marc Jacobs as saying. “They want surgically enhanced, scripted reality. The perversity of life today is so thrilling to me. It’s like a circus out there. It’s cartoon land.” It’s hard to imagine that those who have been lambasting poor Marc Jacobs don’t otherwise relish the very unreality he’s been reflecting in his work.

From the other direction, a profile on Mit Romney reveals the coexistence of Mit’s burgeoning passion for serious issues at an early age with his penchant for quoting cartoon characters in his letters home from a Mormon mission in France.

From a philosophical and psychological perspective such things as getting wrapped up in how the stars lose weight, or finding humor in the minor tragedy of our everyday lives, or wanting reality to be surgically enhanced and scripted as Mr. Jacobs so eloquently puts it, seems to stem from the same urge that we have to engage in play. We play because we want a safe place to experience activities that wouldn’t be safe if not wrapped in the distancing of acting out. Animals and children wrestle and play-flight as a low-risk mechanism for learning how to wrestle and fight. Such things as humor, gossip, and fantasy serve a similar purpose for adults. When we’re not wrapped up in our own angst, we can reflect on the serious matters of everyday life with a more balanced perspective.

(If there were ever any doubt that playfulness extends to animals, it would be eradicated, I think, by a look at this NPR slideshow of a wild polar bear playing with huskies.)

Of course, when we take things too lightly we risk avoiding the appropriate weight of difficult experiences. If we go through life evading hardship and pain, physical or emotional, we will live a stunted and “unreal” life. Likewise, if we suppress the urge to play, we will go through life without enjoying the fulfillment that we can find through an objective, playful perspective.

In summing up the inverse of this sentiment, Mel Brooks perhaps said it best: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

In The Darjeeling Limited, Jason Schwartzman plays a writer who uses moments from his real life as the basis for his short stories, then insists to his brothers that the highly recognizable characters are fictional. The Darjeeling Limited is a gem-like movie, and this aspect of the story left me with a new insight, or the beginning of an insight into the relationship between art and life.

The actions of Schwartzman’s character create a text within the text. Schwartzman co-wrote the screenplay with Wes Anderson, the film’s director. So, we have the screen-writer playing the role of a writer who fictionalizes real moments in his life. The movie isn’t about art, Schwartzman’s fiction plays a minor role in the plot, but the film is about artificiality in life. The characters keep the world at arm’s length, rarely entering into events fully, yet believing that they do.

We use and appreciate art as a construct and technique to distance ourselves from reality. When it works, this distance provides a perspective that permits us to apprehend reality more fully, or to access a part of our perspective that would otherwise be hidden from us.

The artist takes a feeling or perspective, conscious or subconscious, and transfers it to some external medium (canvas, music, sculpture, text, etc.). After watching The Darjeeling Limited I was left with a new sense of life as unconscious art, or if not art then something akin to it.

Today is Halloween. Never in my recollection have I wanted to wear a Halloween costume nor enter into the spirit of the holiday, much to the disappointment of my wife and children. As I walked to the train this morning and reflected on this and on the premise of The Darjeeling Limited I felt a strong correlation between the two and the overlay of art in life.

If we think about distancing and abstraction as a critical construct of the artistic process, all of a sudden much of what we do in life starts to seem if not artistic then representational. Two days ago I got my hair cut, for instance, and felt disquieted by the relative neatness and attractiveness of my hair afterward. I now think that I was put out by the artificial construct of a haircut. We clothe ourselves partly for warmth, but the way we clothe ourselves is to a greater or lesser degree a representation of the image we seek to project to those around us. We are wearing an abstract perspective of ourselves.

The way we speak, the way we behave, the way we move, everything but the most automatic, innate impulse bears the impression of conceptual intervention. Focus on your breathing for a moment and all of a sudden you become conscious of how fast, how deep, how measured and the pattern of your breathing changes even if it doesn’t in fact become faster, deeper, more or less measured. The observation of your breathing makes it somehow different.

But whereas good art uses distance to bring us closer to something real, affectation in life distances us without achieving this ultimate closeness. Good art lets us feel or apprehend something more directly, more pertinently. A good haircut does nothing to bring us closer to reality. In fact, it takes us more deeply into the concept of ourselves as a person with attractive hair.

I’m not suggesting that we go about wearing sacks and with long, lank locks. But I am suggesting that being aware of the artificiality we invest in a good part of our waking life may actually be a step toward living more fully in the moment rather than in our minds.

I buy coffee and a carrot muffin every day for breakfast from a “Pret” cafe in midtown Manhattan. As I do wherever I go, I strive to be pleasant when I get my breakfast. I see people being unpleasant sometimes and it makes me cringe. (Isn’t it less stressful to be polite and helpful and sympathetic to those with whom we come into contact? And, I should point out, Pret does a great job of attracting and training its staff to be polite and courteous, too.) In any case, this morning there were no carrot muffins out on the rack so I took a blueberry muffin instead. When I stepped up to pay, the person serving me recognized me, remembered what I typically purchase, and rang up a carrot muffin. When she realized that I’d settled for blueberry she went out of her way to hunt down a carrot muffin for me. (It was delicious.)

Republican Representative Deborah Pryce in announcing her retirement today had this to say about America’s increasingly media-driven campaigns of dirty politics: “I don’t think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads.” But she also freely admitted that she’d resorted to attack ads in order to hold onto her seat in last election, to the tune of $4.5 million. Which makes one wonder whether politicians don’t also need to do a little revolting of their own. The message though is that being nice, in politics at least, doesn’t pay off. That’s the prevailing wisdom. I’m not sure whether any politician has yet dared to be nice in the face of his or her rival’s nastiness.

Various religions have long taught the virtues of being nice, of not retaliating. The texts of Christianity (the religion with which I’m most familiar) stress the importance of being kind and peaceful even in the face of unkindness. Although, if I remember rightly from my attendance at church, long ago, as a boy, the religion seemed to attract a high proportion of petty, judgmental and holier-than-thou people. But I guess you can’t necessarily blame the teachings for the people they attract!

The 2001 movie Evolution, in amongst slapstick humor and great special-effects, teases up an interesting philosophical question. The movie’s premise: A meteor carrying the necessary genetic material for a very different form of life crashes into the earth. The new form of life has two characteristics that set it apart from the kinds of life forms with which we’re typically familiar: 1. Life evolves exponentially faster. 2. The species are uncompromisingly unpleasant and aggressive. I was fascinated by this second characteristic (made easier to observe by the first).

In the context of the movie, life can evolve even if the members of its various species behave with uncompromising aggression. But could this be true out in the universe? Does any principle indicate that we will get further by being nice?

Here’s a theory (one that I explore in greater detail in my book): Being nasty can help an individual survive in certain situations. It can help us get our coffee ahead of the next guy, or it can even make a difference between life and death — the killer instinct. But when we think about survival more broadly, in a family or social group, being nice starts to pay off. Being nice creates social bonds and payback. It leads to cooperation and sacrifice. I would argue that being nice is a much more enlightened practice than being nasty and one that pays great dividends over time.

If only politics could evolve to be more enlightened, too.

Reports from a team of Cambridge scientists last week presented a theory explaining how an asexual organism (a tiny invertebrate pond-dweller, the bdelloid rotifer) has been able to survive 80 million years without sexual reproduction.

In a related article scientists from the University of Sussex show that the rate of mutation in a range of sexual organisms is lower than it would need to be if sexual reproduction occurs to guard against the harmful effects of mutation.

All of which seems quite new and interesting to those of us who haven’t been keeping up with the theories of evolutionary biology. But apparently the elusive evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction have been much hunted and seldom in clear view for quite some time.

I also read the first two parts of a fascinating essay by Errol Morris “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg.” Although it’s about photographs from the Crimean war, the Morris piece reminded me, as did the two science reports, that evidence and hypothesis make a far less solid foundation for our understanding of the world than it sometimes seems. Morris’s article also makes a powerful case for the importance of careful, methodical, skeptical inquiry. It may be a long time before we know as much about the wending path of evolution as we once thought we did. And for this reason what we think we know can’t tell us as much as we might hope.

But if we look through the other end of the telescope things become a little less dizzying. We can ask the question: Do we need to know the details of each stage and step of evolution to know that organisms evolve? If organisms evolve, what can this tell us about the purpose of evolution?

For the past few mornings when I’ve walked into my office and pressed the light switch, the lights have flickered on and then off. Only after repeatedly pressing the switch off and on again have they remained “on.” Through my experience I know enough about electrical circuits to deduce that there is a loose connection somewhere.

I don’t know very much about electricity. As far as I understand it, there’s a flow of electrical current (electrons). I couldn’t design a generator. I would be able to replace a light switch, but that’s about it. My point is that I don’t need to know about electricity to turn on a light. When I press the light switch, the lights generally come on.

The concept of evolution says that living organisms tend to improve their ability to survive by becoming better adapted for survival over time. Using the parallel of the light bulb, understanding that this happens doesn’t require us to know exactly how it happens.

I’m immediately struck by the thought of extinction. (Yesterday I was reading Mo Willems story about Edwina — the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct — to my son; highly recommended.) Species that become extinct at first seem to be counter-examples of evolution. But when we think again, we realize that they instead provide evidence that a species won’t survive if it is not well adapted to its environment.

Another possible counter-example: Genetic weaknesses. Genetic weakness that can be produced by in-breeding (either by cultural or social practice or by design). But this again supports the general concept that evolution works more effectively when such circumstances don’t interfere.

Generally then, we can say that as time passes organisms tend to become incrementally better adapted to their environment. This is actually a much narrower conceptual risk than to accept the specific details of the evolutionary process itself.

But I believe we can even take another step away from the whole question and ask whether the principles of space and time provide a philosophical basis for the concept of evolution. (An approach I pursue in my book LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.)

The principles of space and time show us that things will continue to exist in space if their form remains stable over time. If we think about fundamental particles and the way the stuff of the universe has persisted we can understand that stable particles and stable conglomerations of matter predominate. The same is true of living organisms. The more stable and persistent organisms, the ones that evolve, survive, and adapt, tend to predominate over time. Extreme circumstances can produce counter-examples, but then statistics will take over again and evolution will tend to win out over time.

While it’s helpful to be skeptical, methodical, and careful, and remember that we know a lot less than we’d like to think we do; we also perhaps know a lot more than we sometimes care to imagine.

Whenever emotion overpowers my reason, I realize anew just how deep and powerful our emotional selves can be. Last night I blew up at my mother-in-law, convinced that I had reason on my side, completely unapologetic. And this morning when I woke up I felt the shame of hurting her feelings, and bewilderment at my irrational overreaction to what had upset me.

Emotion like reason, has its roots in our evolution as a species. Emotion came prior to reason. It developed out of the key, immediate survival responses of the human organism. Fear (and the fight or flight response), anger, sadness, happiness, disgust. As we have evolved reason we have naturally retained these valuable emotional responses, although we often use reason to suppress or override our emotional impulses.

Psychotherapy and similar therapeutic methods aim to help us smooth out the bumps in our emotional responses. It’s still OK to be angry or afraid, of course, but when our responses follow a particular pattern, or seem systematically extreme, we can try to figure out why and work on the underlying cause of these overreactions.

Emotion and reason sit side by side. We can reconcile them (sometimes) and we can better understand our emotions resulting in a happier cohabitation. But since emotion is an automatic response to a stimulus (like the reflex jerk when the doctor taps our knee with his mallet) the emotional response, however valuable in the moment, should never be used as the basis for a conceptual framework.

What do I mean by this?

To take first the example of my disagreement with my mother-in-law, I used my emotional response, my anger, as the foundation of my side of the disagreement. I slathered my rationale on top like icing on a dry cup-cake.

To take a more important example, the furore around abortion laws is an emotional furore. Reason rarely enters into the equation. People’s perspectives on abortion tend to polarize around their emotional response to the matter. The same is true of capital punishment. There are many other examples.

Likewise racists create a false rational framework founded on emotions of fear and hatred. There are countless other examples.
We can’t eradicate or expunge our emotions. But as individuals and as a society we would be well served to beware of using emotion as a starting point for reason.

The bra, apparently, turns 100 years old today. Apart from a few dicey years when the poor things were getting burned left and right, the bra has enjoyed a pretty robust first century. That most women now wear a bra on a day-to-day basis seems unremarkable; but that easy conclusion struck me differently when I saw the news today of its relative youthfulness as a piece of clothing. It caused me to wonder about the philosophy of our societal relationship with the bra.

I’ve been told that women wear bras for two reasons: To present their breasts in a way that enhances or optimizes their appearance, and to support their breasts so that they will not sag as much or as early in later life.

Like so many of our practices in a society, wearing bras modifies our concept of what is normal or natural by revising or reassociating our concept of what is normal or natural.

The process is something like this: People draw an association between perky breasts and youthfulness and beauty. This is a reflection of an innate conceptual process that has evolved over the development of the species: sexual desirability during the period of prime fertility. Some person devises a mechanism (the bra) to enhance, both short term and long term, the perkiness and shapeliness of a woman’s breasts. Society extends the innate concept of perky breasts being associated with desirability during peak fertility. Now perky breasts become associated with desirability, regardless of peak fertility. We have coopted the innate concept and transformed it into an explicit abstract concept.

Does this kind of transformation serve society or the species?

That’s a much more difficult philosophical question to answer. One could say that it serves neither society nor the species because the conceptual link we’ve to some extent manufactured or extended between perkiness of breast and sexual desirability clouds and inhibits the functioning of the innate concept. Crudely put, it messes with the hardwiring of sexual desirability with fertility.

I don’t want to pick on the bra. It’s the same with so many other aspects of society and in so many areas. Us men shave our beards, clip our nose hair, or wear toupes. Men and women dye their hair. We often engage in physical exercise to enhance our physical appearance. The list is practically endless.

What’s interesting is that consciousness, almost like a disease, creates a rampant, chaotic and overwhelming system of concepts that control our lives and our responses to a degree that often shrouds or obliviates our innante reactions and responses.

As an adaptive mechanism, consciousness has certainly been an enormously powerful mental function; one that has permitted humans to further the ends of the human species with incredibly effective results. We live in naturally inhospitable areas in comfort. We have removed innumerable threats from natural predators, sickness and disease. We have systems for harnessing natural resources. We organize our societies in ways that permit the vast majority to benefit from the highly specialized work of the few, each of us contributing work in our specialty.

But all of this produces layer upon layer of insulation from the innate and non-conscious operation of the species. It also allows us to wreak harm and havoc without fully understanding or while ignoring the consequences (deforestation, global warming, warfare).

In contrast, the bra perhaps seems like a relatively harmless affectation of modern society, and one which many of us, on balance, would choose to continue to live with, notwithstanding its unnatural function.

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I saw a news clip today about a New York City stockbroker assaulting a fellow spinner in a spin class (he pushed him and his bike against the wall). The reason: he was enraged by the man’s grunting.

And yesterday I was introduced to the term “Dumbfounding.” As reported in the science section of the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, has proposed that human beings have an innate and pre-rational sense of judgment about right and wrong that evolved as useful to our survival, but leaves us “dumbfounded” when our rational mind can’t explain why we feel that something is abhorrent or wrong.

I would guess that the NYC stockbroker’s ire derived from a pre-rational response; when he wakes up tomorrow he’ll wonder how he could have been so enraged as to assault another person for grunting, and get himself into so much hot water in the process.

Haidt’s hypothesis concurs with my own thinking on the origin and evolution of our moral sense. In LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I propose that our sense of morality has been baked into our genes through evolution, and came about for the very simple reason that if we are to persist as an organsim we need to react in certain ways that will help us survive (all of which I tie to the very concrete principles that shape the universe). This also gives us a very concrete basis by which to understand and discuss our sense of morality.

But upon reading about the poor stockbroker and his unfortunate victim I was struck again by something that occurs to me regularly. We live in a world, in a society, that has evolved very rapidly, and evolves ever more rapidly. We are evolved but we’re less evolved than sometimes we’d like to think. We step out into the world feeling that we are equal to its challenges, but it’s like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk. Whether it’s the grunting of a fellow spin class member, or a jittery stockmarket, or a pair of dirty socks left lying on the bedroom floor, we’re not always as psychologically well-equipped as the world demands. Our rational minds have created a mental world that has a dizzying range of customs, procedures, laws, etiquette, social and workplace demands, and underneath the surface our innate urges and responses sometimes can’t keep up.