Funnies

Subtitle: In which I ruin jokes by commenting on them.

When I was young we were so poor that if I hadn’t been a boy, I’d have had nothing to play with.

Yes! Oh, to be easily amused again…

I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn sound louder.

—Steven Wright

A rare beauty. In only 12 words, it indirectly tells a hilarious story. We don’t usually think of horns as being a substitute for brakes, but it makes sense in a ridiculous way.

Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.

Better than most wordplay because it makes you consider the possibility of photons having consciousness, and what the eff that might mean.

Last night I made a Freudian slip. I was having dinner with my mother, and I wanted to say, “Please pass the butter,” but it came out as, “You bitch, you ruined my life!”

I hate it when that happens.

Theater sign typo: Usher will eat latecomers.

Took me a second to figure out where the typo was, which is maybe part of its amusement, giving me a little bit of the jollies for solving the puzzle.

Okay, so what’s the speed of dark?

This did not make me laugh, or even really come close, but I still consider it funny. It gave me a smile, if only on the inside, because it made me look at something obvious in a new way.

Texan: “Where you from?”
Harvard grad: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Texan: “Okay—where you from, jackass?”

Down with elitist grammar snobs! Classic superiority humor, just in this case down with people who think themselves superior.

You know “that look” women get when they want sex? Me neither.

—Steve Martin

It’s lines like this that make me suspect that Steve Martin is crazy smart. This is really freaking complex humor, but in a way that is simple to understand.

I don’t have to tell you that it goes without saying there are some things better left unsaid. I think that speaks for itself. The less said about it the better.

—George Carlin

It’s okay, but it feels pretty weak after just reading the Steve Martin one.

There are two rednecks in a field:

Bobby Joe: “Hey, you wanna play twenty questions?”
Billy Bob: “Sure. Lemme thinka somethin’.”
Bobby Joe: “Got it?”
Billy Bob: “Yeah, got it. Ask me.”
Bobby Joe: “Is it a thing?”
Billy Bob: “Yeah.”
Bobby Joe: “Can you fuck it?”
Billy Bob: “Yeah.”
Bobby Joe: “Is it a goat?”
Billy Bob: “Yeah.”

This seems like typical superiority humor, but I don’t think the primary reason why it’s funny is because it makes us feel better than rednecks, but because we noticed the incongruity in our assumptions. (Plus, fucking goats is funny, in a weird way, or because it’s weird.)

We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.

—Lilly Tomlin

Gives new thought to the motivators for evolution.

I’ve read that the brain is the most amazing thing in the universe (but look what’s telling us that).

—Emo Philips

Ooo, brain burn.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

—Scott Adams

There is pleasure/amusement to be had in drawing lines between disparate parts of the brain. Lotteries, dating, and religion are not things we typically store in the same neural neighborhoods, so seeing this connection gave me a small high.

***

These funnies come from Matthew Hurley’s book Inside Jokes, which is an academic-y look at humor, offering the most compelling theory I’ve heard for why humor exists.

Fucking charming people

Lately I’ve been on a streak of calling people (internet friends) out—flaws not just in their intellectual logic, but in much more personal matters, in their behavior, in their character, in personal qualities they don’t seem to be admitting to themselves. This is fairly new for me, and I feel more than a little weird about it, so I want to explore why I’m doing it and why I didn’t do it (much) before.

It seems that something[s] have fundamentally changed in my philosophy. Example:

I have known Bob pretty closely for a while. I feel intimately familiar with his opinions and his perspective. I have noticed lots of [what I perceive to be] flaws in Bob, but except for a couple of occasions where I called his words condescending, I have not even hinted at calling him out. Why might that be?

Possibility 1: I see Bob as a mentor figure, and so calling him out seemed against the unwritten rules of authority, or something.

Possibility 2: There is a woman on my private blog whom it would be an understatement to call brutal. I had never seen someone quite like her in action before. I’ve seen brutal people, but not brutal people who were simultaneously sensitive, unstubborn, and likeable. That was a combination I didn’t realize was possible.

Possibility 3: Philosophically, I had been a typical unreligious, liberal-y type, believing that ethical standards and vague concepts like “character” were cultural constructs that had no inherent backing by any objective standard. Now my philosophy is that there *is* something that gives us an objective-ish standard of beauty and goodness, it just isn’t a god (because it doesn’t need to be). It’s evolution. This new philosophy makes me feel less uncomfortable evaluating the goodness of people’s actions.

Possibility 4: Like any good child of the self-esteem generation, I believed that you shouldn’t hurt people’s feelings. Things like guilt, shame, embarrassment, and insecurity are nuisances to be expunged from our otherwise pristinely confident and secure core, I thought. But my new philosophy is that those nuisances, if listened to, can be both informative and motivational.

I think there is truth to all of these, but I suspect the biggest reason is this one:

Possibility 5: I didn’t realize until recently that I had been more concerned with being liked than being caring. A quote from the last post:

Caring about people is very, very different from caring about relationships. If you care about relationships, then you probably care about being charming, about being likeable, about avoiding conflict. But then you just care about acquiring resources or feelings for yourself. I.e., you care about yourself.

That, I would say, was a good description of me. I went out of my way to avoid conflict, but I didn’t realize until recently that that was because I valued relationships more than I valued people.

I feel a stomach-sinking shame and disgust with myself. I feel humiliated. But paradoxically, I feel good, because the shame/disgust/humiliation is motivation to change, and I want it to keep motivating me.

+++

I am going to make some clarifications on this new philosophy of mine because I think it can be easily misinterpreted:

--My version of calling people out is substantially different from the philosophy of radical honesty, which basically says that you should say whatever comes to your mind. I despise that philosophy, and I think it’s every bit as selfish as trying to be friendly and likeable. If you care about people (more than yourself), then you will measure your words to try to have a positive effect.

--By “measure your words,” I don’t mean being gentle. The balance I try to find is being gentle enough that they won’t put their psychological barriers up but not so gentle that it won’t hurt, because if it doesn’t hurt then it’s unlikely to do anything for them.

--This doesn’t have to be just negative stuff, though. Sometimes people don’t realize positive things about themselves, and you ought to be helping them see those, too. Well-placed feedback will likely feel either hurtful or exhilarating to the communicatee, and that’s because we tend to feel either hurt or exhilarated when we get unexpected and (crucially) reasonable-seeming information about ourselves.

--I am not going to call out just anyone. If I don’t know you well, if I don’t think you can handle it, if I don’t *care* about you (and yes, I’ll freely admit that there are plenty of people I don’t care about), then I’m not going to call you out.

--There is a real risk of getting arrogant with this philosophy, of thinking that you know the answers and it’s up to you to inject them into naïve people’s skulls. The goal is not to convince people of your opinions but to challenge them to think about things differently, to raise difficult questions rather than giving easy answers.

I feel like I’m becoming adult-y.

(Either that or a mega dick. Hard to tell.)

Caring outside yourself

I’m worried about this sounding preachy and dogmatic, but eff it, it’s my blog and I’ll be preachy and dogmatic if I want to.

I feel like I’m coming around to David Hayes’s opinion. The debate with him on the topic of “betterness” continues on, unragingly. Just like I believe there is an objective-ish standard of beauty (one that is based in gene propagation and so is still arbitrary and incidental), I am now starting to believe that there is an objective-ish standard of Meaning, and I feel like I made some non-trivial strides this week in understanding what that might be. (That’s right: The Meaning of Life, revealed exclusively, right here on Wehr in the World. [I hate myself.])

David’s opinion is that it’s compassion. That, for him, is the word that comes closest to describing it. I think that’s close, but I’m going to word it differently and add some clarifications:

We each as individuals have to figure out what we care about / why we care about living. This is going to be different for different people. So different, in fact, that people can care about polar opposite things.

But it seems that what all meanings need to have in common is caring about things outside yourself. That’s not terribly informative because it doesn’t tell you in what direction to care; it only tells you that the care needs to be elevated to something beyond your goofy self.

So far I’ve mostly just been re-stating the definition of Meaning. It gets more interesting, though, when I add some speculative clarifications:

--You don’t need one thing that you care about. It can be many things. And in fact, the things can conflict. Brains are incoherent. Live with it.

--The caring does not have to be limited to humans, but it probably needs to at least be limited [if only indirectly] to forms of life. For example, you might care about noise pollution or light pollution (as I do), but you probably care about these things because of how they affect living things.

--An interesting question to me is, how much of what we care about is under our control? It might not be under our control any more than is our perception of beauty. There are things that we are prone to care about more than others, just by virtue of our genes trying to survive. You can maybe talk yourself into finding some additional beauty or meaning in something, but it seems for the most part objective-ish.

--Except maybe in some weirdo cases, ideas are probably not very care-about-able. If you are in love with ideas, you might be in love with assembling some mental state or personal image. In other words, you’re probably not really caring about things outside yourself.

--Similarly, there is a big difference between caring about people and caring about the idea of people. You might be interested in other people’s ideas, and you might be interested in their style or how they present themselves, but that’s qualitatively different from caring about them, their fears, their confusions, their petty annoyances, their cares.

--Caring about people is very, very different from caring about relationships. If you care about relationships, then you probably care about being charming, about being likeable, about avoiding conflict. But then you just care about acquiring resources or feelings for yourself. I.e., you care about yourself.

--The important kind of caring is done through action. I don't (ahem) care how much you *feel* like you care about someone/something. I'll know it when I see it.

--But at the same time it's important that you *feel* care, and that you (I hate this word) "cultivate" that, because if you don't feel it then it's going to be very, very hard to do it.

--The caring does not have to be this Buddhistical "love everything" crap. In fact, that's probably impossible. You probably *need* to discriminate with who/what you care about. You have to notice things in people/ things that seem special to you. Caring without discrimination seems not just lame, but definitionally impossible.

--The logic of caring outside yourself can be easily misinterpreted as stop caring about yourself. No, caring about yourself is a good thing; in fact, it is probably a necessary thing to being able to care outside yourself. This, to me, is the trickiest and most confusing part of this whole thing, because certain breeds of self-care seem much better than others, but I do not yet know how to succinctly identify the differences.

***

Although I said that philosophical ideas are un-care-about-able, and although this post is mostly just a bunch of philosophical ideas, some of these are crude articulations of ideas from William Deresiewicz’s book A Jane Austen Education that happened to move me very deeply, and I’ll post the more eloquent articulations in next few days. It is exceedingly rare that an idea can move me to the point of eye wetness, but the ideas in this book have been doing it with regularity. Never have my intellectual cherries been so intensely rung. I am not the type who typically makes noises as he reads, but multiple times I have found myself impulsively saying out loud, “oh my God, this book is fucking killing me”—in a good way!

A theory of hurtfulness

On my private blog I (narcissistically) asked for some candid feedback about how these people – my internet friends – perceive me or how they suspect I am perceived by Wehr in the World readers whom I am less friend-y with.

I was nervous about reading their comments because I thought it was going to hurt (some of these people take pride in their honesty and directness, which I love about them). But when I read the comments, even though some of them were of the negative feedback variety, I felt nothing – no pain or ego bruise – just a little bit of confusion about what exactly they meant. And that led me to theorize about what kind of feedback hurts. And the answer seems exceedingly simple:

What hurts is what seems reasonable but we haven’t yet accepted as true.

For example, you can call me reclusive, stubborn, narcissistic, socially anxious, and immature all day long, but it won’t hurt a bit (unless maybe you’re really mean about it) because I’ve already accepted these things as true.

When I say “accepted” I don’t mean that I’m content with them and I’m glad they’re there; I’m just saying I’ve acknowledged their existence. I’m not hiding from their reality. And so when my internet friends offer this feedback, rather than feeling hurt by it, I feel slightly positive about it because it’s like, yep, good observation, we’re seeing the same thing. Perceptions are not completely out of whack.

Which leads me to a second, related, but significantly more questionable theory: The reason why some stuff hurts is because it’s motivation to change, or at least to acknowledge it as true so that you can start changing.

Similarly, I suspect we feel exhilarated by positive feedback when it seems reasonable but we haven’t yet accepted it as true. And maybe the reason why we feel exhilarated is so that we can absorb it as part of “the happy bucket” of our identities so that we can get down to the business of doing something with it.

The implication is that if you feel hurt or exhilarated by a piece of feedback, you probably ought to be paying attention to it and asking what it means (as opposed to trying to downplay your irrational emotions [although sometimes you should do that, too]), because it might be trying to tell you something important (that you didn’t already know).

Beauty is objective-ish

The last post was about how I think/feel that aesthetic “goodness” is in some sense objective, and capable of being skillfully evaluated. Now I am going to attempt to defend that supposition by getting philosophical on your ass.

Instead of starting with logic, let me start with feelings. The aesthetic difference between a cathedral and a parking garage is pretty immense, right? And the aesthetic difference between Denali and Fayetteville, NC is also pretty immense, right? These are not things we need to make intellectual evaluations about; just being in those settings has a noticeable effect on how we feel.

The same goes for music and any of the more “fine” arts. When I go from listening to Van Morrison or Bob Dylan or Ray LaMontagne to listening to hit radio (LMFAO/Adam Levine/Pitbull), it feels just like stepping out of a cathedral and into a parking garage. The difference is so immense that it seems somewhat absurd that these things share the same planet (let alone the same city block). It’s almost like, okay, to the left we have our sacred stuff, and to the right we have, well, the other stuff.

We can pretty easily drop the sacredness quotient by theorizing about why we silly primates care about aesthetics. The only reasonable way to answer such ‘why’ questions is through invoking evolution. You can make a natural selection argument that our ancestors were more likely to survive when they preferred landscapes that looked “lush” and “verdant,” and that their offspring were more likely to survive when they preferred mates who looked “symmetric” and “proportioned.”¹ And you can make a sexual selection argument that ladies were more likely to choose dudes who could display “complex” and “harmonious” qualities-that-are-hard-to-fake-that-signal-important-things through their music/painting/other creations. These arguments seem to me not only plausible but really the only reasonable way to think about it.

You can hear a more eloquent articulation of this view in Denis Dutton’s TED talk.²

The point is that, like everything else, our sense of aesthetics is just another mechanism to increase our genes’ probability of surviving for a couple more generations. In that sense, you can kind of see how there would be an “objective” “standard” of beauty—it’s whatever things are most likely to help genes survive. It’s an arbitrary and incidental standard, sure, but it’s still there.⁶

+++

I’m guessing that some religious readers might find this notion of mine terribly sad. Where’s the sacredness? Love⁵ and compassion and (depending on your particular religious flavor; I’m looking disapprovingly at you, protestants) beauty—this is what it’s all about. This is God’s stuff.

My response would be sorry, but I think you’re stretching it, because I can pretty easily explain all of those things through the lens of evolution. It’s comforting to put some extra padding and narrative around our proclivities toward these things, but if you ask me, it’s kind of (ahem) sad that we seek that kind of comfort.

There is just no escaping this biological reality of ours. There are no islands where beauty reigns free of biology. Even cathedrals have places for people to poop.

I’ll say, though, that I probably seek my own comfort through the lens of evolution. It’s a process (which is probably better conceptualized as a “Law of Biology”) that results in things that are so unfathomably complex but also so strangely coherent that it seems to me, in a way, sacred-ish. Totally unintentional, and totally arbitrary, but sacred-ish. Somewhat paradoxically, the process/law that created our perception of beauty is now seen by us (or at least by this creature; Me) as “beautiful.”

###

¹If you buy this theory, then one prediction is that other animals possess a sense of aesthetics. This may surprise you, but that seems to me almost certainly true. Aesthetics are not limited to appreciating music or paintings—these are the complex/hard-to-fake brand of aesthetics that we creatures who rely heavily on our brains use to signal our intelligence and sensitivity and such things to mates, but other animals have less-brainy ways of addressing this information problem. I certainly think that most animals and probably all mammals make comparisons on beauty in landscapes and in mates. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should try looking at what the birds are up to in Spring.

²This might be the third or fourth time that I’ve linked to that TED talk on this blog. That video probably increased my intellectual³ confidence in my unreligiousness more than any other idea/argument. It told me that, oh, you can pretty easily explain that sacred-seeming stuff in very non-sacred ways. Instead of finding this notion sad, I actually found it a bit… freeing?

⁴The word “intellectual” here may seem unnecessary and wordy, but what I mean to say is that I don’t necessarily feel emotionally confident in my unreligiousness. Life, of which Death is one part, scares the shit out of me.

⁵“Love,” by the way, seems definable in large part as an appreciation of beauty/goodness. So what we’re talking about in this post is no trivial visual design-y topic. We are indirectly talking about Love.

⁶This also explains how aesthetics, while being kind of objective, also has a subjective component. What matters is the probability of our genes surviving, but which aesthetic judgments are going to most increase that probability will depend on context. It’s going to be partially geographic and partially cultural, and even within cultures there is going to be personal variation, both across individuals and within individuals across time. Even the emphasis on the importance of aesthetics probably varies based on context. This might sound like a horribly un-P.C. thing to say⁷, but some cultures probably value braininess less than others, and I’d predict that those cultures are going to have less emphasis on the excellence (complexity, harmony, etc.) of their music and other fine arts.

⁷I love how evolution/logic excuses me from saying such things.

I like your taste, girl

I’m having a philosophical problem. What the eff does it mean to say, “I like your taste”? Even more perplexing is, “You have better taste than me.”

Me being unreligious and liberal-y, it’s easy for me to advance opinions such as, “it’s, like, just your opinion, man, no better or worse than anyone else’s.” But then at the same time, I regularly find myself saying/thinking that other people have better taste than me.

A cynic might say that complimenting others’ taste is really just the same as complimenting your own. But I am cynical of those cynics. It might be partially true, but it’s certainly not 100% true. My friend Bob, for example, has excellent taste in music, but I don’t share much of it. I can respect his taste in Muddy Waters and Chambao, for example, but I don’t share it.

I think that when I compliment someone’s taste, what I’m really doing is saying that they are good at noticing/appreciating beautiful things. And I happen to take this stuff seriously, so this is no small remark.

Basically, I seem to think/feel that aesthetic “goodness” is in some sense objective, and capable of being skillfully evaluated. I’m okay with thinking/feeling that.

+++

What’s interesting to me is how I go about making judgments of other people’s taste. I’ll use some examples from music again:

If you tell me you like Bob Dylan, even though I love him, it will mean very little to me. I sense that a lot of people who like Bob Dylan like the idea of liking Bob Dylan more than they like the music itself. But if you add that you also like John Mayer, now we’re talking.

John Mayer is, to me, a very interesting example, because your like of him could either be a huge indictment or a huge [what’s the opposite of indictment?]. He’s a pretty boy and cliché-y. That was my perception of him for the first 5 or so years of his musical career. Then I learned that a friend of mine whose taste I really respect was in love with John Mayer, and that made me take a second, more careful listen, and now I will say unembarrassedly that John Mayer has some really, really good stuff (and also some songs that you’d be kind to call duds). So if you say that you like both Dylan and Mayer, then I feel like you are canceling out some of my prejudices, and are indicating to me that you find genuine goodness in their stuff.

Van Morrison is another interesting example. If you tell me that you *love* Van, that he is up there among the greats, then I’m sold on your taste. You don’t need to tell me anything else. This is because Van doesn’t seem to have the Bob Dylan problem where people like the idea of liking him, and also because I feel like I have seen in full glory the greatness of Van’s stuff, as if it has been empirically validated that his music is amazing.

You are also allowed to tell me that you hate Van Morrison. I can empathize with that. And you are allowed to tell me that you don’t really know / haven’t heard enough of his stuff. But if you tell me that he’s just meh, or that the song “Moon Dance” is pretty cool, then we’ve got problems.

+++

There seem to be what I am going to call aesthetic generalists and aesthetic specialists. Some people seem really, really good at picking out good music or good writing or good film or good comedy or whatever. These are the specialists, and I will admire their specialized ability, but a far greater compliment to me is calling you an aesthetic generalist—people who seem capable of recognizing goodness or beauty across pretty much all domains (albeit maybe to a lesser degree than specialists). That tells me that you are constantly on the lookout, rather than limiting your aesthetic appreciation to certain contexts or hours of the day.

If you are looking for examples of aesthetic generalists, then the two clearest cases to me (and I’ve said this before) are Mark Larson and Colin Marshall. I aspire to their aesthetically-general greatness, but I’m not even close.

lowercase-m meaning

There are a lot of people who work at my company. We all have different reasons for working there. Some of us want to provide for our families, some of us want to feel like we are contributing, some of us want pride, some of us just want enough financial freedom to afford nights and weekends, etc. These different goals do not prevent us from looking across all workers’ reasons and trying to come up with some Ultimate Reason for working there, but you could only do it in the vaguest and most half-formed way. For example, I could say the Ultimate Reason for working at my company is because it pays us. That’s true-ish, but it’s not very useful or meaningful, because the more important question is why do we care about getting paid? Why do we care about working? We’re all doing it, but why? And why look for a shared reason? What’s wrong with having our own? And what’s wrong with having many reasons?

It should be clear that reasons vary across individuals – some people are more interested in pride or contribution or families or weekends than others, etc. etc. – but it may be less clear that they also vary within individuals. Is anyone working at my company for the exclusive reason that they want pride, or for the exclusive reason that they want to provide for their family? Probably they are weighing a whole bunch of reasons, and probably a whole bunch of them conflict, and in all likelihood their satisfaction with working at the company will depend on the day or even minute you ask them. You can look for coherence, but I don’t understand why you would, because I don’t see how that’s useful when brains are inherently incoherent.

Hopefully you saw where I was going with that. If not, I’ve replaced the key words below:

There are a lot of people who live at my universe. We all have different reasons for living there. Some of us want to provide for our families, some of us want to feel like we are contributing, some of us want pride, some of us just want enough financial freedom to afford nights and weekends, etc. These different goals do not prevent us from looking across all livers’ reasons and trying to come up with some Ultimate Reason for living there, but you could only do it in the vaguest and most half-formed way. For example, I could say the Ultimate Reason for living at my universe is because it pays us. That’s true-ish, but it’s not very useful or meaningful, because the more important question is why do we care about getting paid? Why do we care about living? We’re all doing it, but why? And why look for a shared reason? What’s wrong with having our own? And what’s wrong with having many reasons?

It should be clear that reasons vary across individuals – some people are more interested in pride or contribution or families or weekends than others, etc. etc. – but it may be less clear that they also vary within individuals. Is anyone living at my universe for the exclusive reason that they want pride, or for the exclusive reason that they want to provide for their family? Probably they are weighing a whole bunch of reasons, and probably a whole bunch of them conflict, and in all likelihood their satisfaction with living at the universe will depend on the day or even minute you ask them. You can look for coherence, but I don’t understand why you would, because I don’t see how that’s useful when brains are inherently incoherent.

I think this analogy can be used to illustrate why “satisfaction” or “happiness” are awkward as goals. They’re just that Ultimate Reason we are looking for. They’re tautological, which is another way of saying meaningless.

Learning about learning

(The two types of desirable info I proposed in the last post? What I’m about to write about falls [for me] in the second category.)

In A Jane Austen Education¹, William Deresiewicz writes about what he learned from Jane about learning. The lessons were manifested through a professor he had in graduate school, whose style he described as stupid questions and playing dumb. Here are various descriptions I pieced together:

He came across as eccentric, to say the least, if not actually soft in the head, and the impression was not dispelled by the questions he proceeded to ask. They seemed absurdly simple—silly, really, almost stupid, too basic and obvious to ask a class of freshmen, let alone a graduate seminar.

But when we tried to answer them, we discovered that they were not simple in the least. They were profound, because they were about all the things we had come to take for granted.

He was stripping the paint off our brains. He was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew. He was teaching us to approach the world with curiosity and humility rather than the professional certainty we were all trying so hard to cultivate. In order to answer his questions, we had to forget everything and start over again from the beginning. “Answers are easy,” he would later say. “You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions.”

We were graduate students, stepping uncertainly into a new phase of life. No, that actually gives us too much credit. We were coping with feelings of insecurity in an intimidating new world by pretending to know more than we really did, and being rather competitive about it, to boot. My professor was the opposite. He pretended to know less than he did, refused to play the role of wise man or sage. Or rather, he knew that he knew less than he did, because he recognized that everything he knew—all his own assumptions and conceptions—was subject to constant reappraisal.

He taught by provoking, taking us by surprise, making us laugh, throwing us off balance, forcing us to figure out what was going on and what it meant—getting us to think, not telling us how.

If you said something vague or half-formed, he’d pretend to misunderstand you, as if he were slightly dense, so that by fighting your way back to what you really meant, you’d have to figure out what you’d been trying to say in the first place.

I’d catch myself walking out of his office backwards, as if I’d been in the presence of royalty.

So learning is synonymous with questioning. Well, a certain type of questioning, because not all questions are created equal:

He taught by asking questions, and so did I, but only now did I see how utterly different our questions were. Mine were really answers in disguise, as if I were hosting some sadistic from of Jeopardy! I wasn’t a teacher, I was a bully. I wasn’t helping them; I was manipulating them—and doing so, to a far greater extent than I wanted to admit, in order to gratify my own ego. I was telling them what to think, even if, by trying to get them to say it first—that is, by putting words in their mouths—I was pretending not to. I was trying to turn them into little versions of me, instead of better versions of themselves.

When my professor asked a question, it wasn’t because he wanted us to get or guess “the” answer; it was because he hadn’t figured out the answer yet himself, and genuinely wanted to hear what we had to say.

Instead of thinking of a session as a kind of engineering problem—how to transfer a certain quantity of material from my head to my students’—I started to see it as an opportunity to incite them to discover the powers that were waiting, unborn, within them, and in doing so take both themselves and me by surprise. I went from feeling that a good class was one in which I had “gotten my points across” to regarding it as one in which I had learned something myself—not because my learning was the goal, but because if I had found out something new, it meant that I had given my students the freedom to think their way beyond me.

Students don’t come to school with open minds, they come with all the concepts they’ve already acquired, and they can’t wait to project them onto everything they read. If you’re in college, you go hunting for “symbolism” or “foreshadowing” or “Christ figures.” If you’re in graduate school, it’s “constructions of otherness” or “discourses of sexuality” or “the circulation of power.” Either way, you end up with a very elaborate theory that bears no relationship to what’s actually going on in front of you. The job of a teacher, I now understood, is neither to affirm your students’ notions nor to fill them with your own. The job is to free them from both.

Crude summary: Teaching means freeing people from their naïve notions, and it is best done by arousing, by letting them think their own damn thoughts, by asking questions you don’t know the answers to, rather than by trying to inject knowledge into skulls by discipline pump.

What it comes down to is teaching through feeling:

One of the most shocking things about his courses is what they didn’t involve. The rituals of the graduate seminar, all of them devised to turn us into professional scholars, were entirely absent. No lists of secondary sources or packets of supplemental reading, no theoretical frameworks or critical jargon. No seminar papers, even though they were supposed to be the principal means by which we received our training: twenty-page essays, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, our first baby steps in writing for professional publication. Instead, he simply wanted us to write a one-page paper every week. One page, with no citations and no outside reading. Just you and the book and one of the fiendishly simple questions he liked to ask.

Literary study, he was trying to tell us, was not about learning a secret language or mastering a bag of theoretical tricks. It was not about inventing a new, professional personality, either. It was about getting back in touch with the ways we used to read—the ways people read when they’re reading for fun—but also about intensifying them, making them more thoughtful and deeply informed. “Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.” It was about trusting our responses, but examining them, too.

Feelings are the primary way we know about novels—which, after all, are training grounds for responding to the world, imaginative sanctuaries in which to hone and test our ethical judgments and choices. Our feelings are what novelists work with, the colors on their palette. Curiosity, perplexity, exhilaration; the buzz in the brain, the tumult in the soul—that, my professor was telling me, was what I had to work with; that was where my scholarship should start. With the love of reading that had gotten me into graduate school in the first place.

In Pride and Prejudice, I had learned to put thinking above feeling. Now I learned a more complex idea about the relationship between the two. It is good to be in touch with your feelings, but it is even better if you also think about them. Feelings, Austen was saying, are the primary way we know about the world—the human world, anyway, the social world, the people around us. They are what we start with, when it comes to making our ethical judgments and choices.

Learning to read means learning to live. Keeping your eyes open when you’re looking at a book is just a way of teaching yourself to keep them open all the time.

Learning to learn means keeping yourself mentally young:

Now I understood how my professor had managed to stay so young. He never settled into certainty, never stopped challenging himself—and getting us to challenge him—as hard as he challenged us. There was a paradox, I realized, at the heart of Austen’s work. She showed us how to grow up, but she also wanted us to remain young.

The passage that hit me the hardest was when Deresiewicz said that learning these lessons freed him to grow up:

Austen’s work contained a paradox, yet it didn’t have to be a tragedy. You can get older but still remain young. That, I started to realize, was part of what had been keeping me from growing up for all those years, the fear of foreclosing possibilities, of turning into another boring adult with a spouse and a house.

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¹This is now my third (1,2) long post about the book, and I have only read three chapters. There are three more to go, and I might do a long post on each of them, because it has been that good.

I take this book to be strong evidence for my theory that I should choose books based on the writer, not the subject. I would’ve never picked this book up just looking at the cover, but reading Deresiewicz’s commencement inspired me to seek more of his words, and hoo boy I’m glad I did.

Teaching by arousing

It seems that there are two and only two types of information that I crave from writers/philosophers/scientists/anyone trying to teach me something:

1. Stuff that surprises me, throws me off guard, makes me question my unquestioned beliefs.

2. Stuff that I know is true and useful, but just needed to hear clearly articulated in order to have it absorbed into my fleshy software.

Anything in between, all the dry facts and theoretical frameworks and reasonable-sounding ideas, I could do without. That’s actually too gentle. I would pay to do without that stuff.¹ I would make sacrifices to get only the above two types of information and have the rest systematically eradicated like diseased vermin.

Although the two types of information seem to be at opposite ends of the continuum, I think they actually have something important in common: They are both arousing. They both get me riled up, and it is that arousal that leads (necessary? sufficient?) to learning.

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¹Business opportunity, anyone? What if there was a site like Reddit or Digg that filtered information based on these two criteria?

Travelling Solo

I learned today that my company will very likely be sending me back to Alaska in a couple of months. Commence existential vacation planning.

I was last there in August 2009 and, while the whole trip was good, Denali. I so want to go back to Denali. I remember certain moments there as being the most awe-filled moments of my life.

I phrase it that way – “remember as being” rather than “was” – because while I was actually experiencing it I probably would’ve described it as “pretty cool” or something else short of intense awe. But the memories, those faulty bundle of neurons, suggest that this was a profoundly transcendental experience. And so to say that I’ve been itching to go back would be an understatement.

I’ll be going to Alaska with some co-workers whom I really like, and I imagine we’ll probably end up doing some ice fishing or snow shoeing or something equally as awesome. But I’m thinking I’m going to need to extend my stay for a few days or a week, and go it alone.

I’ve only done one other solo-trip, and it was in Miami / the Everglades. It was pretty great, but it was, um, Miami / the Everglades.

Solo-trips are greatly underappreciated, I’d say. Never going on a trip alone seems to me every bit as Missing Out as never having a meal alone. And I don’t mean eating-your-burrito-in-front-of-your-computer alone, I mean truly just you and the food. No other stimulus. When it’s truly just you and the food, the experience is wildly different. Without the pollution of conversation or ideas or social conventions (not that they are “pollution,” but I couldn’t come up with a better term), the food tastes different, or more accurately, it just tastes.

Being alone outside of my house is uncomfortable. I sometimes entertain the idea of dinner at a restaurant alone, not because I can’t find anyone to go with me (okay, I can’t) but because I like the idea of being alone with food. But I have yet to do it (in Durham) because the awkwardness and discomfort dissuade me.

Solo-trips, though, I can do that. For whatever reason, I’m more willing to be adventurous if I am outside of my home city, probably because the relative anonymity ≈ privacy ≈ comfort. (Which is probably a lot of what appeals to me about NYC, the combination of stimuli and, weirdly, “privacy.”)

So I’m probably going to take an existential trip to Denali, which I realize probably sounds horribly cliché to anyone who has seen/read Into the Wild, but I am only vaguely aware of the story, so I am immune to that cliché. I think it might be a good time to try that thing I mentioned wanting to try, which is no interactions with any people at all, written or spoken, email or books, verbal or non-verbal, nothing. 2 days? 3 days? 7 days? I don’t know, but I’ve got to give it at least a day.

I’ll probably try some other stuff, too, like, I dunno, meditating on mountaintops or tackling meese (which I’m convinced should be the plural of moose). Last time I was there the bus driver dude referred to the little prairie dog-looking rodent thingies as “snickers bars for the bears.” That made me want to try one. I wonder if they have a delicious peanut-y core. So many things to explore.

Basically, I’m excited. Brace yourself, Denali. Here I come.

Praise your husbands

The last post relates to something else that has been nagging me the past couple of days. In a (apparently rare) post of marital advice, Auntie Seraphic advises women to perpetually praise their husbands. Here’s the reason she gives:

Not only does this make your husband feel good, it cements in your mind your absolute good fortune in having married such a splendid chap, instead of the sort of chap who might have made you absolutely miserable. This creates a beautiful mental walled city that can withstand the force of any puny annoyances you might have with your husband when you or he is in a temporary bad mood.

She uses fancy language like “beautiful mental walled city,” but what she’s really doing is making delusion sound romantic(!).

This is to me in the same category as “fake it until you make it” advice, which has likewise bothered me since the first day I heard it. I don’t deny that acting as if something is true will make me more likely to believe/feel it is true, but I am very, very uncomfortable with the implicit philosophy of the approach, which suggests that we should be working to assemble a fuzzy and likeable set of beliefs and feelings, without any regard for their validity.

The best argument I’ve heard for such a FIUYMI / delude-yourself philosophy came from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in the behavioral economics-y book Nudge. I’m going from memory here, but their argument was something like delusion/bias is unavoidable, so we might as well nudge ourselves in the direction of the delusions/biases that benefit us the most.

So, for example, if we’re asking people whether they want to be organ donors, we might as well make the default option “yes,” because which option is default makes an enormous difference in which option people end up choosing. Similarly, if we’re deciding whether to praise our husbands, we might as well make the default behavior “yes,” because which behavior is default makes an enormous difference in how you end up perceiving and feeling about that person.

The logic passes my filters, but it still doesn’t sit well with me. Then again, not much in this mess of a universe does.

The implication for the previous post, about whether it’s possible to non-deludedly know the person you are in a relationship with, is that no, it’s probably not possible, so you might as well nudge yourself in the direction of the delusion that benefits you.

I love my perception of you

I recently heard an intensely emotional story of a young guy falling in dumb love and later learning that the person was not at all who he thought she was. Like really, not at all. The experience, he said, left him feeling jaded with the whole concept of love.

Because of this experience, I would argue that people who are in relationships are actually in love with their own perception of that person. Therefore, most problems in relationships originate from one person's expectations and the degree in which the significant other's actual behavior deviates from those expectations.

Expectations. If you catalogued all the reasons why people break-up, I’d bet you’d find that one of the most common reasons would be something like “violated expectations,” often stated along the lines of “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.” Some new action or behavior has been witnessed that didn’t fit with mental models of who that person was, and so the whole system of love – built on knowing and understanding the object of your love – was thrown into doubt, leaving the model-holder feeling very, very uncomfortable and wanting more than anything to escape like a child to their mother, to something/someone they know and can trust. The model-holder got an unasked-for peek at reality, which was experienced as unreality, and it scared the living shit out of them.

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic in that description, but I don’t think so. I’ve been referring to the problem as one of violated “expectations,” a very cold and rational term that you might hear an economist use as he speaks of abstract topics in front of his chalkboard, but you’d have the same story if you substituted in the word “trust.” And anyone who has had their trust violated in a serious and seriously unexpected way knows just how emotionally terrorizing it can be.

Trust/expectations are at the foundation of relationships. I don’t think I’d find many people who disagree with that statement, so let’s assume it’s true. Let’s assume it’s true that a relationship without trust is as good as rubble.

Here, then, becomes the question: Can you ever know someone, and not just your mental model of them? Put another way, can you ever legitimately trust your trust in someone? Can a relationship ever be more than a shared illusion?

I wrote a whole bunch after this, but I wasn’t too satisfied with it, so I think it’s best to end with those questions.

Adolescents seeking fulfillment

Finally, my friends (and acquaintances and trolls), we have The Answer. We have been fruitlessly attempting to achieve capital-M Meaning or capital-F Fulfillment without knowing where to find it or how to latch onto its nipple. But finally, mercifully, Anthony Storr identified the capital-A Answer on page 21 of his book (capital-S) Solitude:

Many people have, for one reason or another, learned as children to be over-compliant; that is, to live in ways which were expected of them, or which pleased others, or which were designed not to offend others. These are people who build up what Winnicott called a ‘false self’; that is, a self which is based upon compliance with the wishes of others, rather than being based upon the individual’s own true feelings and instinctive needs. Such an individual ultimately comes to feel that life is pointless and futile, because he is merely adapting to the world rather than experiencing it as a place in which his subjective needs can find fulfillment.

The clincher:

The capacity to be alone thus becomes linked with self-discovery and self-realization; with becoming aware of one’s deepest needs, feelings, and impulses.

The Point: Find some alone time so that you can introspect and get to know your true, non-false, non-others-influenced self – i.e., identify your personal, subjective wants and needs – so that you can get down to the business of going out and individually fulfilling them.

In case you couldn’t tell, I was being sarcastic. I don’t actually think that Storr has identified The Answer. But I think he has done a nice job of pretty naïvely describing the liberal individualist worldview.

I wonder what Storr would have to say about conservative collectivist cultures in Asia and really all over the damn place—would he say that people in China are hopelessly unfulfilled until they find a quiet, lonely place to figure out independently of their families what they want for themselves? If so, would he be right? I suppose it’s possible that he would, but it seems more likely that Storr would be identifying his own (selfish) priorities and wording it in a way that makes it sound like His Answer ought to apply to everyone.

I’m glad I recently read William Deresiewicz’s chapter on adultiness, because otherwise I might’ve been quite sympathetic to Storr’s argument. I’m all about finding some alone time and introspecting and identifying my “true” passions. I am, after all, an individualist. I grew up in Ohio, which I would call the breadbasket of individualism. For me, like for Storr, doing what I personally care about is what I suspect will make me happy and fulfilled. In other words, fuck authority. Fuck “shoulds.” Give me what I want.

But Deresiewicz helped me realize that this worldview is, if not childish, then adolescent-y. To assign that kind of reverence to your feelings and passions is to do what popular music does:

The most important word in popular music today is not “love,” it’s “I.” And the second most important word is “wanna.” Popular music is one giant shout of desire, one great rallying cry for freedom and pleasure. Pop psychology sends us the same signals, and so does advertising. “Trust your feelings,” we are told. “Listen to your heart.” “If it feels good, do it.”

This is not to say that the correct or true Answer lies instead in conservative collectivism. I’m resigned to the fact that I’m hopelessly individualist, and I’m okay with that. But individualism does not have to mean viewing your passions and feelings and desires as sacred objects in need of fulfillment. I can still use my prefrontal cortex (to some extent) to overrule my passions and feelings and desires when they are being dumb, and in fact, if I hope to be adult-y, I probably (ahem) *should.*

Irony like fire

As you’ve probably deduced, I love irony. I employ it freely and generously, often even when inappropriate.

What I want to understand is when/how/why it is and isn’t “appropriate.”

In an essay called E Unibus Pluram, Dave Wallace (ahem, DFW) said this:

Irony is not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in soundbites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

When I saw the term “ground-clearing,” my mind went immediately to wildfires, and it occurs to me that that’s a pretty informative analogy. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, as I see it, is a pretty potent lens through which to clear some of the flimsy or inferior mental brush by examining it with a skewed, almost angry distance and magnifying (and thereby destroying) it as ridiculous or sad.

That’s what irony/mockery/sarcasm is good for. But three cautions:

1. Like wildfires, irony/mockery/sarcasm has a tendency to clear not just the flimsy, inferior stuff but also some of the sturdy, good stuff.

2. While irony, like wildfire, may provide a more fertile ground for things to grow, the irony/fire itself cannot grow anything. That requires a much slower and more delicate process.

3. Irony/mockery/sarcasm, like wildfire, can sometimes spread, well, wildly, changing directions suddenly and jumping over roads, rivers, and firebreaks into residential neighborhoods and into your own precious intellectual backyard.

My conclusion, then, is that trying to suppress irony/mockery/sarcasm in some attempt at Perfect Sincerity is every bit as unwise as trying to suppress wildfires, but be very, very cautious of overuse because it is singularly destructive (incapable of being constructive) and risks spreading into precious, personal territory.

A fourth caution: While it’s okay – good, even – to let these intellectual wildfires happen inside your own skull, you should probably be wary of letting them penetrate too deeply your interactions with other people. Here’s DFW again:

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.”

So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”

Adultiness

What does it mean to be adult-y? Is it something I should (or do) care about?

These are the questions that nag my brain whenever I find myself laughing at scatological humor.

Let’s start by making a list of what adultiness is not:

• going to school and getting a job
• passing tests, gaining admissions, accumulating credentials
• marriages, babies, home ownerships
• naps, grape nuts, oatmeal, prostate exams

The Point: Adultiness is not the same as doing things that adults do.

So then what is it? A feeling? Maybe does it mean feeling confident and secure in your independence and responsibilities or some such?

Mmm, probably not. In A Jane Austen Education, William Deresiewicz describes the lessons he learned about adultiness through reading Pride and Prejudice. Adultiness is absolutely not a feeling of confidence, he says. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.

If anything, self-confidence and self-esteem are the great enemies, because they make you forget that you’re still just a bundle of impulse and ignorance.

The problem of so many young people is that they have too great a belief in their own feelings. They achieved the relative autonomy of adolescence—learning to trust yourself—but now they have to take the next step, into the full autonomy of adulthood. They need to learn to doubt themselves.

“Life is a comedy for those who think,” said Horace Walpole, “and a tragedy for those who feel.” Everyone thinks, and everyone feels, but Jane Austen’s question was, which are you going to put first?

Being adult-y, he/Jane says, means putting thinking before feeling. That doesn’t mean giving up your feelings, but it means giving up your belief in your feelings, your conviction that they are always right.

This was not easy to swallow. We tend to believe that our emotions are reliable indicators of the way things are in the world. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have a good feeling about this”—a college application, a lottery ticket, a new relationship—only to discover that things don’t necessary work out just because we have a good feeling about them? Older relatives are particularly fond of these kinds of pronouncements. “I know you’ll do well.” “I can’t imagine they won’t hire you.” “I’m sure everything will work out fine.” Really? You’re sure? What makes you so sure? Just because you happen to like me?

It’s important to doubt ourselves – our feelings – because by default we tend to see ourselves as glorious, flawless protagonists of the world’s story. Growing up, he says, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited (stupid, smelly) creature.

The first part of being adult-y, then, means honestly acknowledging your flaws.

Errors are not accidents that could have been avoided; they are expressions of character. You don’t “fix” your mistakes, Austen was telling us, as if they somehow existed outside you, and you can’t prevent them from happening, either. You aren’t born perfect and only need to develop the self-confidence and self-esteem with which to express your wondrous perfection. You are born with a whole novel’s worth of errors ahead of you. You can’t save yourself from your mistakes, but maybe your mistakes can save you from yourself.

The next part is feeling ashamed, disgraced, and humiliated by them.

Shame, humiliation, disgrace: hard feelings to accept if you’ve been brought up to believe that you should never have to experience any pain.

Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. “Humiliation,” after all, comes from “humility.” It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it’s okay to make mistakes, it also told me that it’s okay to feel bad about them. Austen understood that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won’t happen.

The final step of adultiness, after noticing your flaws and feeling them, is remembering them.

It takes courage to admit your mistakes, and even more courage to remember them. How tempting it is to rewrite our personal history in a more flattering way, and how familiar we all are with the person who experiences a moment of self-knowledge—after a breakup or a failure or a sin—only to go right back to being the same person they always were. For Austen, maturation means refusing to forget. Humiliation is a gift that keeps on giving.

If you do growing up right, it never stops. Not only weren’t you born perfect, you are never going to be perfect, either. Becoming an adult is not going to give you the right to become complacent.

This is kind of a downer, isn’t it? To view adulthood as perpetual humiliation? As a downplaying of your passions and feelings?

Not so, says Deresiewicz:

Learning this lesson was oddly liberating. Just because I thought that another person had done something to me, I was now forced to acknowledge, didn’t mean that I was right. I might be offended by something they had said, but maybe I’d misunderstood them. I might be mad because they were getting ugly with me, but maybe I had started it. Feelings are always about something, and that “something” is not itself a feeling. It’s an idea, a perception of a situation. And because ideas can be wrong, the emotions that are based on them can also be wrong. So now I had a way to let go of my feelings when they weren’t legitimate—when they weren’t correct. I could acknowledge my emotions, but I didn’t have to be controlled by them.

Personally, I really like this definition of adultiness, but I might be biased. It excuses my tendency to put thinking ahead of feeling, my proclivity toward humiliation and insecurity, and, perhaps best of all, it permits me to keep laughing at scatological humor.