Yale Mafia Update

1. Helen on my SOCIETY piece:

What happens when having an identity starts to feel like (ugh!) management? For one thing, it makes selfhood a matter of technical expertise. For another, it locates all inspiration—which, even after we toss Romanticism out a tenth floor window, is still something that only an individual can have—in the managing meta-self, essentially killing it.

Also: any manager who thinks the road of teamwork leads to the palace of creativity needs to sit down and read the Phaedrus; I'm not sure what a communal "flash of inspiration" would look like, but it sounds unlikely.

Yet for every Phaedrus there's a Symposium. At any rate, the managerial attempt to turn bureaucratic hierarchies and networks into social entertainment and self-realization opportunities strikes me as less a creativity-unleashing gambit than a ploy to make people feel more like they do when they're not working when they are in fact working. And as everyone knows, happy hour is hardly a surefire setting for flashes of mutual inspiration. Creativity is a means to a different end -- even 'creativity for creativity's sake' has its primary use in bureaucracy as a catalyst for the sense of shared creativity, which is what presumably motivates a human cog in a human machine to feel like working -- which in turn ends up seeming more important than actually working.

Also see Helen read Rieff and Sennett. Read, woman, read! If anyone knows where I can find Sennett's mythical book on conservatism, do let me know.

2. Nicola's put up part of a chart from the '30s that purports to offer a scientific methodology for appraising your wife. Demerits 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 are bad, but 11 is the only true sin. Merit 9 is surprisingly contemporary.

Also read Dara's ruminations on the 'neediness' factor in hookup culture --

which recognizes sex as a separable biological urge and therefore permits hookups under the logic that they’re “filling a need” — but won’t allow the student to hook up with anyone he might develop a lasting interest in, because that would constitute distraction. I know it’s perverse, but it’s also equally reliant on the divisions hookup culture imposes and on disdaining the side of that division it reveres.

How perverse, indeed, to try to prove we're not emotionally needy by throwing ourselves into the arms of merely physical 'needs'.

3. I was going to write a big screed, maybe even an article, on this so-smart-it's-stupid 'nudge' idea of Cass Sunstein's. But I may wind up only with this post to show for it. Will makes the right point:

libertarians will freak out about "soft-paternalism" for psychological reasons; while cool, cool reactionaries such as myself will be disgruntled for cultural reasons.

Of course, since culture is really the lived-out memory of a ruling psychology, it's complicated, and I'm not as concerned as Will is that

The trouble with soft-paternalism is not so much that it's a bad idea or that it's anti-freedom (it isn't), but rather that it leads us to value the wrong things in our leaders.

I'd say the big problem is that it leads our leaders to value the wrong things in us. Drawing a fly on our urinals reduces spillage by 35%! Efficient, sure, but why are aggregate statistics the proper way of looking at citizens? The aim isn't to reduce my spillage by 35%, but to reduce total spillage, regardless of whether some people freak out at the sight of the fly and pee all over the wall. The individual as such is meaningless, is not the unit of analysis. Individualism, as such, is not only inefficient but quantitatively irrelevant. Mass outcomes are what matter. The problem is less soft paternalism than it is soft despotism. The psychology of scientific rationalism understands progress as possible only when human beings are treated as holistically analyzed data points, not as unique individuals. Applied social science on this model is only possible by leveraging large-n 'trends' and 'samples'. This may be interesting at the level of pure science, but as an education for politics it stinks. Public policy should not be set by leaders who do not care what individuals do, or who they are, as long as the big picture produces the 'right' size and rate of change.

See also Will's creepily sharp eye for the creepy side of that lovey-dovey oceanic feeling I keep trying to ruin for everybody:

Giles Foden argues cogently that al-Qaeda and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo may both have been inspired by Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

Thankfully, the essay moves beyond etymological quibbling (al-Qaeda means "the foundation" in Arabic), and tosses out a few gems like this:

"More generally, the space opera sub-genre of science fiction offers the possibility of a massive expansion of self-mythologising will-to-power. In a 1999 New Yorker article on galactic empires, Oliver Morton beamed up French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, author of The Poetics of Space, to explain all this: "Immensity is a philosophical category of daydream. Daydream undoubtedly feeds on all kinds of sights, but through a sort of natural inclination, it contemplates grandeur. And this contemplation produces an attitude that is so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity." [My bold - JGP.] A world, one might add, in which knocking down the twin towers with passenger jets seems a possibility that can be realised...

In retrospect, I can recognize that a somewhat masturbatory desire for encounter with the infinite was one of the things that most attracted me to science fiction -- and to science.

Asexual onanism? The aphysical orgasm is the wettest dream of science, and also its most unnatural and dangerous.