Cobb

Faith vs Reason: Will Atheists Eat a Christian Meal?

 

Q: Despite being a sinner, could a Christian still be honest and objective enough to examine the moral attitudes of atheist progressives and leftists, and form conclusions accordingly?

A: It’s almost impossible.

Look up my questions to atheists. You’ll find that I get opprobrium because ‘small a’ atheists tend to suggest that there is nothing more to their atheism than a denial of God and that for someone who practices faith essentially has insufficient moral standing to investigate their morality. This implies, basically, the Hitchens argument which is as follows. The presumption that the faithful can be forgiven their sins (by a non-existent entity) undermines every moral system the faithful can have. Because assertion of a falsehood as true implies anything is true. So anything clerics dream up as ‘the will of God’ can be justified regardless of its inherent good or evil.

The Hitchens argument is reasonable and absolutely nails hypocrites. But it doesn’t address the moral or psychological origins of the disciplines of faith. There are a lot of other implications here as well that it’s difficult to get atheists to discuss, but we can in the comments.

Progressives and Leftists. Well let’s start with Leftists.

‘The Left’ is essentially the Marxists or the Frankfort School devotees. I think they are overly materialist and tend to be authoritarian. Even ‘authoritarian’ in the way that German intellectuals can be, which is in that way of mastering a technical scrum and expecting that the less capable will fall in line. There is a certain lack of libertarian sentiment in that line of thinking as I see it. That is the difference between a Leftist and a ‘classic liberal’. So I tend to think of such people as incompatible with religious freedom in that they are not likely to accept more than one moral master, nor would they borrow or share. Again, this is a kind of totalizing sentiment.

Of course Enlightenment liberalism (and natural philosophy) are under a broadside attack from the Progressives. I see them as unilaterally shallow and completely dismissive of any idea that true freedom has ever existed prior to the years of their births. This would be ok if they had a decent track record of institutional reform. But I perceive that Progressives are more likely to be ahistorical in their attacks against Christianity and more than a little susceptible to anti-Semitic tropes.

What I would like to discuss with atheists is the usefulness of art which is wholly created out of someone’s mind as a symbol of moral teaching. Consider the moral universe of Star Trek. Can any science fiction be morally instructive even if it asserts the falsehood of faster than light travel? Can any fiction be morally instructive if its characters never existed in actual history? Doesn’t that make authors of fiction atheist prophets? I think some atheists fail to distinguish between facts and truth in that the search for truth doesn’t begin and end with findings of fact. To do so is to be shallow, moreover it is an admission to the trust of human instinct in all decisions that are unproveable. What is that other than faith? I try to draw the equivalence between cosmology and/or the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and the search for God. I set these equivalent. The will of God = the laws of nature = the inherent structure of the universe.

Given that equivalence there is no core principle of the existence or non-existence of ‘god’ that is relevant. What is relevant is the ethical and moral discipline of the schools and adherents. And I think a careful study of history will show the syncretism between Christian ethics and natural philosophy in the development of the West. To me, a proper vision into this shows no conflict between faith and reason. Just as there are fallacies of logic, there are heresies of faith. The existence of these don’t negate the ability of these systems to reveal truth.

I am interested in evolutionary psychology. I’m getting a clearer picture of what we don’t know about the ways in which we think. And I am convinced that a refreshing study of the history of philosophy and the history of religion can clear things up as we advance our understanding of what thinking actually is, what believing actually is, what conviction actually is. This being the core idea in pressing back the unknown, I tend to be dismissive of Progressives and Leftists who seem to have no positive use for any history before the 20th century or respect for the development of the humanism they claim.

I have been instructed in many forms of Christianity and I respect the historical idea of Christendom as well as the aims of Catholicism which means ‘universalism’ as well as the general idea of monotheism over polytheism. I am particularly fond of the fact that the Catholic church is not fundamentally evangelical, and the same holds true for Judaism. I am a student of the Tao, and I have essentially made peace with the universally understood mystery “Thou art that.” My contention is simple. Moral truth is like an excellent complex meal. It takes much skill to prepare it and generosity to serve it, but everyone will enjoy it and be nourished by it. We have all evolved in the same way, if we are not defective, it’s impossible for us not to.

I say it's almost impossible. What I really ask is will atheists eat a Christian meal?

The Modesty Point

If you interview someone. If you talk to someone about themselves. You will get one of two variations of confidence. The modest confidence and the bold confidence. It's difficult to know which one to trust.

What strikes me at the moment is that the person who is modest is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or quite aware of people who are superior to them in the context of the subject being discussed. The person who is bold is probably either, unclear of where they might stand or completely unaware of people who are superior to them. Which to trust? There is also the matter of the interlocutor. The modest person may consider that the interviewer is smart and is asking questions they already know the answer to. The bold person may consider that the interviewer needs instruction and context. On the other hand, the modest person may assume that the interviewer may know nothing and be embarrassed by a frank discussion of facts. The bold person may assume an interactive Socratic confirmation or disconfirmation.

I tend to be bold and make no assumptions about the interlocutor. I expect both theoretical and experiential disconfirmation. My interest is 'Chinese'. What can the two of us do with what we have?

You Missed The Sausage Party

Apropos the following:

1. https://letter.wiki/conversation/127
2. https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/24/a-wrong-against-boys-an-impossible-conversation-about-circumcision/

I wonder, given the depth and breath of this essay if some broadly implemented surgical reform is capable of establishing the issue in the forefront of thoughtful parents and all other interested parties. To be blunt, if our common cultural morals consider it taboo to subject anyone to involuntary touching of genitals are we likely to be more rational about our undoing of the custom, behind our backs as it were in a decision by the medical community?

I think we'd be much better off surfacing the information in the context of our social norms and expectations, and that admittedly is a great deal more difficult to do, than to get consensus among practitioners, researchers and ethicists. Who then will have the ultimate responsibility? Well, it must be the individual. That means from my point of view that the most important boat to be lifted is that of a specific male rite of passage. Consequently the same seriousness has to be taken in consideration of why we don't have one.

But where I'm afraid my logic really goes, given that I don't consider my own circumcision to be such an imposition, is to all manner of birth customs. In my family, all us children were assisted out with the use of forceps whose marks on our faces had to be explained. But even more horrid to my sensibilities is the rise in cesarean section for no apparent reason. I don't mean to throw dead cats on the table, but how are we ever to get a men's movement to reconcile this ethical gap given our social environment?

If we are missing, as men, a specific, even if physically minimal transition from the boy's penis to the man's penis because we have been deprived a piece of it, then the social implications go much further than an ethical loathing of heretofore primitive ideas about sexual acts themselves. The greater tragedy is the social lacuna of a male rite of passage similar to a woman's first menses, even as clumsily as that might be handled.

Men's Constructive Hazing

So I'm recently thinking about men and violence, and yes I just finished Jim Mattis' book on leadership. I shake my head in guessing the number of people who still think 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron. I don't recall where I read an excellent passage on how men in dangerous professions tend to haze newbs, but I immediately recognized the sense of it. It reminded me of my own fraternity initiation which included a significant amount of a black cultural angle. Which in as few words as possible can be summarized "If you can survive our terror, then you can survive what the white man has in store for you." We leave that for another day. Today I am answering the question:

Q: What are things men have to go through that women either do not understand or have empathy for?

A: I think women don’t generally understand violent hazing and competition in a non-abstract way. They are generally quick to assert that all violence is stupid and accept that they will not have to make use of it for any reason. They don’t have to live and compete in masculine hierarchies that establish rational violence that controls irrational violence, and generally expect to be protected from such environments.

It is my experience that there are particular ways that men fight and there are particular ways that women fight. I don’t want to get overly deep into that, but I think the following illustration is apt.

Boys playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved immediately face off and blows are exchanged. After some period, other boys will break up the fight. Every one of them will know who won the fight. They are both ejected from the game. In the next game, the boys play fair and the incident is forgotten.

Girls playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved face off but no blows are exchanged. Only the original offender is ejected from the game according to those rules. But the sting of the encounter remains. In the next game, the offended girl or one of her friends will foul the original offender for what happened in the prior game.

So what I’m saying is that in all conflict there is a direct application of social game rules and a higher meta application of unwritten rules. The higher meta application of unwritten rules includes unregulated violence and that is considered fair and the ultimate adjudication. It is male.

It’s not fair to say that women don’t understand or have empathy for this because they are very aware of its operation. They simply don’t participate in it in anywhere near the proportion that men do. But they expect men to and they will seek to reward heroes over bullies in the same way men do. I am saying they don’t necessarily understand how those lines of combat are drawn and evaluated the way that men do, from experience.

I think this comes to play in contemporary society often over questions of respect and conflict resolution or ‘anger management’. The simplest way for me to describe it is in terms of the lack of patience men will tend to have over endless negotiation and bickering back and forth in futile attempts to have nobody hurt or making everyone safe from conflict even when it is clear that there are irreconcilable differences in play.

In my personal experience I have observed how my daughters will debate questions endlessly and sometimes bring up old questions that should have been settled years ago. That ‘mean girls’ vibe of pulling back old scabs. I tell them, “Why don’t you just slap box?” They never do of course. It’s just the way they argue. Fathers and sons will resolve this at some point with a credible threat or actual use of violence. Women will argue and non-violently fight with their mothers for their entire lives.

I don’t have a theory as to why this is other than to say that it is evolutionary and that such behaviors are observable and recognizable in other mammals as well. Females nest and arrange for the conflict free home, and will pick over the details endlessly. Males hunt and having won a conflict to the death will plop down the meal anywhere, end of story.

In that context of nature vs nurture, I say it’s both, but evolution has a much deeper influence - millions of years vs a few years of graduate studies and social conditioning.

We could debate this endlessly, or you and I can take it outside.

Leadership: The Hybrid Model

I am becoming more convinced that what is miraculous about AI should not seem miraculous to us any more than the miracle of the Triceratops. AI is a creation of the evolution of human thought pursuant to particular ends. If it reaches those ends, that doesn't make it generally useful or sustainable. As soon as people get bored with AI and the margins for AI development decreases, the industry and its products will suffer like flat screen TV repair. 

I read an excellent introduction to a new product called LF this morning and it has got my mind spinning and connecting a large number of dots. I will archive that original post here. In summary, it offers an interesting insight into sustainability by making the convincing observation that system developers fall in love with elegant models and tend to shy away from hybrids. I mean you teach theory, right? You cannot teach leadership. Leadership that works (as you see I'm skipping ahead to the lede) does so because it is agile. It keeps the goal in mind and it uses a variety of delivery methods for carrots and sticks contingent on its ability to see and sense. The operant phrase is in the quote:.

"Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works."  

The next thing that happened was that I watch videos of Ronald Reagan and noticed how he stumbled over his answer about what leadership is. That's ok. A dictionary definition would not suffice. Reagan became clear when he reflected on his own values and his own stories. That's a very good way for a certain type of leader to operate - on the confidence with the methods that have personally worked before, yet with an understanding that whatever you do know or don't know, responsibility ends with you. If you are decided to not let theoretical impurity discourage you, ie if you are not afraid to be heretical for the purposes of a specific solution, then along with sharing the credit for success, there is nothing you can't accomplish. 

I like the idea of abandoning a slavish dedication to systemic elegance. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

Stop Crying

So about a year ago I witnessed something that stuck with me. Over in Sunnyglen Park where I did my morning runs, I saw parents out with their young kids. One of the kids was riding on a scooter. He must have been about 3 1/2 or 4. I can't remember if he was wearing a helmet but he did an Arte Johnson. Fall down go boom. As he recognized that he was in pain, he started yelping and the parents rushed over. Of course they were young parents and so they didn't know how to deal with the situation, not as well as I do of course. They were reacting to the pain he was feeling, not the wreck. And when you're crying and people are reacting to your cries, you cry until they guess right or promise you ice cream. 

The proper thing to do when your kid is bawling his eyes out is to get him to start talking about what happened. You want to encourage him to talk and then he'll realize this and then he'll have to pipe down to explain the situation. So the first logical question is What happened? (sob sob, I fell down), Where? (sob. over there) Over here? (no) Show me where. (right here). OK. Where does it hurt? (sob. on my arm) Let me see. (see?) Oh. Yeah I see. 

If you are more perceptive than a 4 year old, then you'll see how the misdirection gets him to focus on the series of events that lead to the boom. Not the present pain. By the time you get through this exercise, the kid will have put together some cause and effect stuff in his head. You can even elaborate with some forensics. OH. Look at this bump. I bet you hit that bump and it made your scooter fall. (yeah. stupid bump!) Well you know to watch out for that bump. Now the kid is oriented to be smarter about his scooter riding and the consequences of bumps, rather than the quickness with which he can procure ice cream by crying loudly at all the mommies and daddies in Sunnyglen Park. 

Thus endeth today's non-fableized fable.

Obligatory Seriousness on Abortion in Alabama

The problem with being a Leftist is that you're supposed to be highly consistent on a wide variety of subjects you actually know nothing about. The consequence of this is that you tend to have contempt for people who don't make similar efforts to stay current with the state of the social art. It creates a class of intellectual consumers who pride themselves on their first class, continuing luxury educations. Lifelong learning for political effect is probably some kind of borderline personality disorder. I was lucky to grok that vibe in 1992 when I was in the throes of my public rants disguised as performance poetry. Yes, there was a moment at the Nuyorican when I dreamed of being published in the New Yorker. That moment was dashed within a few minutes after I learned that my worst poetry (It was a reverse poetry slam) was greeted with genuine appreciation for being pretty good, and make sure you come for a real poetry slam. There is nothing like the experience of being an engineer watching people fawn over and kiss up to assistant editors. Then again, you know Cobb goes there. 

When I decided to go there and the destination was the American Right, back in 2003, I was quite surprised by the actual diversity of the Right and the narrow way in which I, as a former Leftist, perceived them. Particularly as a 'black Republican' I so much expected to find that a majority of them were somewhere between Warren Buffett and Gordon Gecko, private enterprise, free market, supply siders of the sort that fixed the inflation problems of the late 70s with the election of Ronald Reagan. I had no idea. In particular, I certainly never expect to be confronted with black women who were fundamentalist Christians singly focused on the abomination of abortion. Yike. This is real? Yes it was, and it was something I learned within an hour of going to the Republican Club somewhere in Culver City that fateful evening. I expected people more like the late Joe Hicks, and although I never listened to his show, Larry Elder. No, this was not the black Right I was encountering. They were generally single issue folks. Small Government! Military Spending! Anti-Commie! But more than anything, what California conservatives wanted was money and votes. They had the walking dead's hunger for winning in one of the bluest of blue states - and lived in the shadow of winning ways of Mayor Richard Riordan and the strident domination of Governor Pete Wilson. Days long gone. They were, as I think of it now, destined to fragment into the unconsolidated Balkanized panoply of single-issue voters resentful of the Democrat's easy pickings.

Nothing quite tastes like the victory of Trump who might as easily decided he would be a Democrat as run at all. It has a greasy taste, like water out of a jerry can in an electoral desert. You swallow it, wondering which kind of death you'd rather have, that by dehydration or poisoning. As of today I see no oasis in sight for the Right. I only see the disjoint fanaticism of single-issue voters who are only partially satisfied by their party's victories. We live in the post-political-philosophy world of populist politics, in which hatred of the enemy far outstrips organization of the friendlies. But of all the friendlies, none are quite as motivated in such an energetic manner as the anti-abortionists. Say what you will about Republican claims to be unapologetic. This is obvious to the point of never necessary to mention when it comes to those opposed to abortion. And now it seems that in Alabama, the first domino has fallen.

I have only one philosophically consistent dog in that fight, which is my insistence that individuals have the right to make life and death decisions. It happens to align with my support of the death penalty and the use of deadly force in defense of one's life and property. But in all cases, none of these are decisions to be taken lightly either by an arbitrary individual or an arbitrary punt of that decision to the state by proxy. These are the most serious matters. Nothing speaks to me quite the way Eric S. Raymond's essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun on the use of firearms brings the weight of such moral considerations and individual responsibility and virtue into focus.  Consequently, for me, there is no sense of partisan alignment. As a mature individual who tends to overthink all matters, I remain curious to the logic and motivations of positions taken by all parties. It is the dynamic of the decision and the domain of evidence and aegis of thought that is the most interesting thing to me, and I have all but abandoned all hope that American political debate in the mainstream is capable of making such considered decisions. In other words, what is aggregated is compromise. I am brought to mind of the study that proved that a seven game series at the end of a season of baseball is actually statistically inconclusive. Yet we accept the winner as the champion. At least baseball coaches tend to be honorable in defeat. 

So what I see as the philosophical aegis of thought around abortion must take into consideration what has been described as 'reproductive rights'. My thinking about the matter began somewhere in the mid 80s when in vitro fertilization was meeting with success on a larger scale. Were test tube babies real babies? Was it the fact of sex between married men and women that made  babies real humans, or was it just the matter of DNA? Would an artificially inseminated ovum brought to term in an artificial womb be an artificial human being? What if the government collected the appropriate genetic material and raised these parentless humans to be soldiers? Would they have the same rights as the rest of us? Can the state be a parent? Can a university be a parent? Is love always attendant to 'authentic' human children? Is love therefore necessary? These are the kind of questions that arise in my mind after just a moment's reflection. As well, I imagine what defenders of either side of the abortion debate might say in response. But I only have the luxury of this blog to engage such matters, and I am long past the days when it is reasonable for me to expect more than 10 responses from a variety of people. The blogosphere is moribund, or at least arcane. But more interesting that these, perhaps practically unanswerable questions, are those questions surrounding legal matters of parental rights.

They say that women want equality everywhere but family court, where they want and expect greater standing and superiority. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, and of history, this makes perfect sense. And in the short history between the time of first wave feminism and today, this hasn't been challenged. So too, question of child support and welfare benefits in principle are not controversial. Men and women have different stakes and therefore different interests in the raising of children. Or put more basically, men do not squirt milk from their teats and therefore the pairing of mother and child in those first most crucial months of infant development are the responsibility and duty of the mother. The father must provide so that women are not dragging infants out to the farming fields, hunting grounds, factory floors, nurses stations or cubicle farms as the case may be. Or the attending wet nurses in the case of certain royal families. I'm sure those who support an artificial army would have them supplied, in addition to artificial wombs, artificial teats and artificial milk from the Playtex / Nestle military contractors.  Then the actual education could begin. Most of us, simply have mothers, fathers and love. Sisters and brothers too, if we're lucky. It is what we have evolved to be. But what if men were guaranteed equal say in matters of abortion? It seems to me that those in support of abortion rights would have a very difficult time in allowing any man who impregnates a woman to force abortion on demand. So the argument that avoids such a matter is that men's right in this matter extends only to the life of motile sperm, and once the ovum is inseminated, it becomes the woman's property to dispose as she sees fit. Which is not to imply disposal, but responsibility for its disposition.

All that said I can understand that by and large it is woman's choice to baby or not to baby the world, as by and large it has always been no matter what the particular instrumentality of men's defense of that decision. Clearly rape is illegal in all cultures and that matter has been consistent throughout history without any requirement for the effort of politicization. It is simply reasonable that women have that choice and obviously that men have agreed. I also understand that women spend a great deal of time in pursuit of the right kind of man, overlooking many others. We are not like chimps, dominated by seasons of heat, in which females don't care which male it is, so long as he bludgeons the competition. This mutual sexual attraction makes us different - we negotiate first and then let our basic instincts run. Despite our current proclivity to call all human choosing and negotiating 'politics' or 'markets' I think it should be obvious that the rules for one domain, particularly sexual selection, do not apply across all of them. Who would dare question the 'inequality' of Warren Beatty as compared to Harvey Weinstein. Hollywood does understand a few things among which is the art of sexual attractions and they can be masters. After all, Rock Hudson got millions of women to part with their entertainment dollars. Those were not shills screaming for the Beatles, and I find it difficult to believe that Mick Jagger had to pay for female attention and favor. The point is that millions of men who were not such stars got little benefit of doubt, and it is not reasonable to expect every man to be a good husband, father or provider of family. Despite the fact that women choose, it is not reasonable to expect that they will make good wives, mothers or makers of homes. 

One can make jokes about Alabama being a backwards place and I am not above that despite my respect for what engineering goes down in Huntsville and what shipping goes through Mobile. However when I think of the place, I think of it as a place from which thousands of African Americans voted with their feet. The Great Migration of the 20th Century is one of those massive historical events, like the Eastern Front of WW2, that Americans don't bother to keep top of mind, significant as they are. As well, Alabama being a Southern state, I am for Constitutional reasons reminded that despite interpretations to the contrary, States Rights are real. Our states are sovereign and as such cannot declare bankruptcy despite the fact that they very well may be in more ways than one. The empirical data on Alabama speaks for itself, socio-economically speaking. How long ago was it that their age of consent was 14 years old for females? It is 16 now, which compares to 20 in South Korea and 11 in Nigeria. Your mileage may vary. That being the case, I don't actually expect every jurisdiction to snap immediately into conformity with the latest findings of evolutionary psychology, as I don't necessarily agree, for example, that the Dodgers weren't the best baseball team last season. But in the long arc of history we do understand the dynamics of sexual attraction and selection, and so the laws have conformed to human behavior and desire. Rape is still rape, highly punished and also rare, online porn fantasies notwithstanding. But here is Alabama putting that Republican mantra into real legislation. Abortion is murder. They are deadly serious about it, and now making the 'abuse' of the human reproductive system as important as the abuse of guns. Obviously I disagree with the legislation, but on the other hand, you cannot deny that the intent is life and death serious. Alabama has radically ramped up the cost of the ethics of sex.

Is Alabama's new legal negotiation the first in a chain of dominos? Will women there find themselves in situations similar to those portrayed in The Color Purple? Will such a social shift be contagious? I don't think so. The viral talk about tipping points on the matters of rape and incest are not particularly persuasive to me. It's difficult for me to see how such women would not vote with their feet and find sanctuary in other states. Then again, if women have a right to choose, they are presumably wise enough, at the age of 16. Would any advocate for such choice deny an abortion to such a woman? Would they advocate for a higher age of consent? If the statutory age for rape were changed, who would complain? A woman who decides to baby or not to baby has that right to choose which man. That is natural because we are not like dogs or chimps. Alabama is going to be Alabama. I don't get to vote there. Alabama's body politic has the right to choose. I can only say that I wish they chose a wiser commensurate age of consent. One more consistent with the age of 19 at which one can legally buy and carry a firearm. And, by the way, I think it is much more reasonable to have all of those ages right about 20. Voting, military service, drinking, smoking, abortion, consent, marriage, CCW. Im comfortable with exceptions and I am comfortable with bumping it up a year to 21 in all those cases. Quite frankly Millennials are proving me right. Different subject.   

I expect that there are some people of all persuasions, coming from the jurisdictions from which they are comfortable, are going to be uncomfortable with the new regime of Alabama. It's a bigger deal than New Coke. It is a life and death decision, which I fervently believe is the right of every human being. It is not something to be taken lightly. It's 250 miles across Alabama from Columbus GA to Meridian MS. From Mobile, it's only 58 miles to Pensacola, FL. Now it might seem contradictory to some, but it is also true that in Alabama, you can carry a gun without a license. You have the right, with said gun, to defend your life and property.  So as rare as rape and incest may be, an abortion law with a 99 year penalty will chill the hell out of the medical practice, and predictably draw objections from the non-monolithic American Right. But as I see it, it all boils down to the individuals most affected and most responsible. They can walk, they can kill. No matter how many subjects we overthink to establish and maintain philosophical consistency, all we can do is watch. 

 

Thou Art That

So imagine you put a couple phrases together. Bear with me on this because it is so deep that it's almost obvious. I hope you actually see it, and once seen cannot be unseen.

"Thou art that". Take the history of physics and the history of religion and consider the heresies and tangents, because only one familiar with the heresies and tangents truly understands what might evolve. We're just in a desert now where intellectuals stumble over weak misinterpretations, like rebels hate business thinking it's all evil.

"Thou art that" means god is in the prayer. God is self and the prayer of prayer is both prayer and prayee. Thus prayer is both meditation and public declaration.

Which kids get math in school? The few. The dedicated. Those blessed with a talent. And they start seeing numbers everywhere. Then what of the spiritual talent? They see god in self and in others and try to use what has been passed down to get others involved in self-improvement, which is just clarification of the ultimate truth that the ultimate human soul has its own perfection we try to reach.

The song says 'rise and shine and give god the glory'. Testimony is just teaching. You find your keys you say 'praise god' but it is nothing more than an acknowledgement that your conscience is always looking out for yourself and your keys. So you tag it publicly with #God. So you just discovered it, and you overuse it a bit and people with no vision beat you up about it. You don't have to say #self. It's just as reasonable to assume god as assume self. Was Descartes *really* philosophically consistent, considering what we still don't know about how the brain makes a self? Maybe a shortcut is acceptable after all. Call it god. Billions have. Billions have lived without physics. Was their world any different? Billions have lived without god. Was their world any different? Why search for god? Why search for more? Why search for understanding? Indeed why curse the sojourner?

What if i could give you a pill that shortcuts your mental processes and delivers you to a state of increased perception? What if god were at the end of that tunnel? But it's actually just the self? What if the overwhelming compulsion to discover ultimate meaning in god is nothing more than the mind finally appreciating and recognizing it's own instinct for self-preservation, self-discovery and self-regard? What if worship of god were nothing other than the ultimate expression of self-esteem. What if that comes with the implicit understanding that 'Thou art that'? You just didn't know you were god's creature. And now you know. And it's yourself. And it's myself. And it's ourselves.

We are not alone in the universe. We regard it and it changes the mind of god.

Hmm. I'm just reminded of the puzzle that was finally solved in Iain Banks' The Algebraist. So simple.

What is the greatest discovery of physics? Some might say The Bomb. It has got to be up there. Was religion the reason that the bomb was invented, or did this just come with the territory of the universe? Minds come with the territory of the universe, don’t they? Everything can be reduced to atomic transactions, right? Yeah until you get to the quantum level, then it goes all haywire. So maybe there’s that limit to mind, and understanding and god. And yet at the abstract level above the quantum level, it can be explained simply. Minds get it. But how many get the quantum level. What if there is a true explanation of god that exists, but minds can only grasp it above a quantum level. That would kind of prove Goedel right, right? A mind cannot consistently and completely describe itself. We need an abstract cheat. Therefore god is perpetually mysterious. It’s the name of the gap, not the falsity that implies everything. It’s the inside of the black hole, but its existence doesn’t defy the universe. We just don’t get to see it.

If a human mind is capable of describing an ethical universe, or a Platonic perfection of the human value, then there is a theoretical framework for achieving that. Let’s get asymptotic to that. ‘Thou art that’ is the convergence at infinity.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that I think I will be referencing back to for the rest of my life. If you basically want to understand the entire perspective of a Western thinker on the commonalities of Eastern religion and mysticism as well as Christian mystic thought, this is the book. Think of it as the complete tutorial on what people *think* they're saying when they utter the cliche "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual." Now if a person were truly that, and very intelligent as well, then this book explains how they might think about God, self, universe, time, idolatry, salvation, truth, good, evil, immortality, mortification, charity, prayer... yeah, you name it everything you've stuffed in a closet in the back of your mind and called it 'religion' is presented here from the mystic point of view and collected wisdom of multiple 'religions'.

This might properly be called, at least I will, the set of ultimate goals for the self, or perhaps the self-less perfection of the realization of the divine in the individual and the purpose of all human consciousness. I'm not used to speaking this way, it will take me some time to get through all of the material in this course of study, but I can feel it working on me.

Several years ago I wrote that all I care about is wisdom. This is true. But one tends to think of wisdom as an attribute of the self. The Perennial Philosophy extends that challenge beyond the self (and yet within the self) towards the human infinite. So instead of the pursuit and capture of wisdom like a trophy to put on your mantle and show off, the Perennial Philosophy explains that this is an attainment of psychic, spiritual as well as intellectual dimensions.

There's some speculation in this which is especially clunky in the dated volume which contemporaries more well versed in psychology will easily spot. Also Huxley had been taken in by claims of faith healing and ESP that should not be taken seriously, but he seems to understand this. Also the book gets a bit murky in dealing with the concepts of time vis a vis Time and Eternity. And yet the book becomes quite persuasive in describing how nations and religions and philosophies that deal with reality in progressive time rather than in eternal timelessness, inevitably make bloody violent sacrifices to time (God the destroyer of all things, in time).

Huxley presents a convincing case for the unification of purposeful thought in this volume by taking contextualized quotes from a variety of wise ancients and mystics. It puts, for me, God back where God should belong in all thought, and the discipline of finding God central in human moral purpose.

I am convinced that this is the kind of material that is central to the human experience. It clears up a lot of things.



View all my reviews

Conservation of Threat

So profoundly true. H/T Schneier

 

Here's some interesting research about how we perceive threats. Basically, as the environment becomes safer we basically manufacture new threats. From an essay about the research:

To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task ­-- to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem "threatening." The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless.

As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of "threatening" to include a wider range of faces. In other words, when they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered "threats" depended on how many threats they had seen lately.

This has a lot of implications in security systems where humans have to make judgments about threat and risk: TSA agents, police noticing "suspicious" activities, "see something say something" campaigns, and so on.

The academic paper.

The Psychology of WEIRDos

This particularly struck me today:

This is one of the most important topics, right?  Well, here is a new and quite thorough paper by Jonathan Schulz, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Jonathan Beauchamp, and Joseph Henrich.  Here is the abstract:

Recent research not only confirms the existence of substantial psychological variation around the globe but also highlights the peculiarity of populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). We propose that much of this variation arose as people psychologically adapted to differing kin-based institutions—the set of social norms governing descent, marriage, residence and related domains. We further propose that part of the variation in these institutions arose historically from the Catholic Church’s marriage and family policies, which contributed to the dissolution of Europe’s traditional kin-based institutions, leading eventually to the predominance of nuclear families and impersonal institutions. By combining data on 20 psychological outcomes with historical measures of both kinship and Church exposure, we find support for these ideas in a comprehensive array of analyses across countries, among European regions and between individuals with different cultural backgrounds.

So I was talking to my daughter about, now that I think about it, the 8th End of My Blackness. In this telling, she was relating, her sense of friction she gets for speaking proper English and a host of other upper-middle-class markers that, to her critics, mark her has 'white'. I repeated my normal 'haters gonna hate', but also added that all she needs to do is actually visit Africa in order to shut most of them up. It's an expensive trip for a stupid reasons, but is one that ultimately such haters must acknowledge. The reason I have observed has primarily to do with what those poor souls lack in cranking up the significance of 'their culture', which is an actually researched family tree. The less coherent family you have the more likely you are to adhere to cultural institutions, ethnic myths and racial unity. That's what I see.

When I was talking to Richard Peete the other night - there's no way we could catch up on 7 years in one evening - we did brush across the same subject. I told him about the time when some Hoteps at City College, back in my school days, reduced some freshman girls to tears. They were some of the first in their families to attend college and were informed in no uncertain terms that they had no idea what their real roots were, and would not be complete or authentic black women unless and until they went back to visit the slave castles and the pyramids. Guess who was organizing such trips, for a not so small fee?

While I am ready to accept the premise of WEIRD psychology, and it certainly makes sense to me, I wonder if the gap between the rule of law and of honor codes, viz Pinker, is so deeply broad. What I mean to ask is how long into a Catholic marriage does it take for kinship circles to fade into obscurity? How many generations out of the 'hood with all your play cousins does it take for one to psychologically adapt to Corporate America's bowling leagues and pizza overtime? I'll be keeping this in mind, as it relates directly to Peasant Theory and the applicability of personality to political narratives.

Oh. Have I not talked about that? Probably not. Here's the gist. If and when America comes apart and delivers government of the quality of Ferguson, MO, then people will abandon democratic institutions and adopt tribal and kinship associations. This is likely in most rank and file cases, to result in honor culture lawlessness and radical autonomy of the sort we love to watch in zombie and other post-apocalyptic dramas. Only in this village scenario with the individual start to matter again, as the individual is being squeezed by a bipolar political conformity that grows more shrill by the year. Hard to say what will correct it. But I am very curious as to how personality works when it comes to the fundamentals of civilized community outside of kinship and tribe.

The thing is, ironically, that most American tribes are voluntary 'civic organizations'. Like the skateboarders, the volunteer firemen, the book of the month club, and the stoners at the liquor store.

My Remarks on Peterson

I'm a big fan of Peterson for a lot of reasons, and I think most people are predisposed to dislike or distrust him because he is not political, but is in fact scientific. The person he is most like is the Berkeley physics prof Richard A Muller who became famous by talking about the physical science that any American President should know. I also find his independence very much like that of Dick Feynman. He is, as he says, surfing the 100 foot wave, and I expect that in the short term he will remain unsponsored and thus gangbanged by big media. I find his sense of integrity absolutely extraordinary.

What Petersen cannot do is stop all sorts of partisans from excerpting 10 minute sections of his lectures and headlining them like the NY Post. What very few people have done is read his books or find actual flaws in his methodology.

I find it interesting, most of all, that he is the kind of intellectual who talks about great literature, and seeks to connect dots within the tradition of Western culture.

And I also admire that he takes a long view - as such he is perfectly willing to say 'we don't know'. I found that particularly interesting when he talks about women in the white collar workplace and what is actually acceptable. It was really hilarious when he matter of factly said that women wearing makeup is sexually provocative, from a dispassionate scientific point of view. So where should a business draw the line when it comes to fraternization given such facts? He doesn't know, so he doesn't say.

He has harsh words for Progressives that mirror my own and he absolutely destroys the methodology of Peggy McIntosh, the inventor of 'white privilege' without calling her out by name. He deals very frankly with personality and gives a breath of fresh air for people who are like me, sick and tired of hearing about race, gender and sexual preference as if all discrimination on the planet were determined by these attributes.

There's no question in my mind that he is genuine and not cynical. He is emotionally authentic and it shows. It makes him so very different from all of the talking heads, because in the end, he wants to be helpful more than he wants to show off his intellect. But he really throws the hammer down when it comes to being serious about what is good peer-reviewed academic work with rigorous methodology and what is not. This is, I think, more than anything what gets under the skin of university types. And I think he is genuniely impressed about his ability to reach hundreds of thousands more people through social media than he did as a university lecturer and thesis advisor.

I first encountered Peterson on Joe Rogan's video podcast over the Evergreen State College fiasco. Liked him immediately and found him more interesting than the guy it happened to.

I've seen that Christian apologists have a tough time with him because he is not devout although he takes very seriously the evolution of thought from religious and classic knowledge. IE Peterson recognizes how one invents religion in the self-discovery of pre-literate and pre-scientific societies. But ti's going to be a slog to get through that book - I understand the gist.

The thing that I appreciate most about Peterson.. well I don't know quite yet. He's surprisingly good all over the place. But the most novel idea that he has armed me with is the context of evolution on human behavior with an understanding that it is millions of years old. Human beings are not so presciently self-conscious and capable of maintaining abstract thought as they are in actually experiencing being. Or to put it my way, our intellectual muscle memory is much stronger than our conceptual capacity. There are things we have evolved to understand that are out of touch with things we expect to be conventional wisdom, and a lot of that has to do with the power of sexual selection among other things. In a funny way, he also reminds me of Penn Gilette. He's giving away secrets of the science of psychology by plain speaking it all. The dude is super transparent.

So of course this evolutionary weight puts him at odds with cultural Marxist who wish to go all materialist and erase history and religious tradition, and in this he's perfectly aligned with Stephen Pinker on that whole blank slate controversy. But since Peterson, unlike Pinker, is not satisfied with a statistical accounting of history, Peterson gives a lot more consideration to great authors, especially Neitszche, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. So in his attacks on Progressives and social Marxists, he illustrates the totalitarian component from the psychological perspective. IE, what kind of personality defect gives rise to the compulsion to change other people's behavior rather than to fix oneself? So of course he comes down hard on political correctness, the Socialist Left and SJWs.

 

When I Say So

Q: How will we know when racism is over? What does the United States look like without racism? Who determines that racism no longer exists?

A: Nothing racist has happened to me in 12 years. There are things that people have told me are racist and should stagger me to my knees, like the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. I have been told that because of this it should affect me because of my race, and that I should be shocked and angry and humiliated and determined take a stand. I was not shocked, or angry, humiliated or determined.

So what’s wrong with me? How come this racism hasn’t changed my life? How come the organization Black Lives Matter doesn’t matter to me? How come I want to make jokes, like a picture of a GrumpyCat who says ‘9 Lives Matter’? How come Donald Trump doesn’t make me panic with fright? Every day people ask questions like “Is it racist if I’m not Mexican and I eat at taco?” and then the next day say “Am I racist against Mexicans if I hate tacos?”. I just roll my eyes.

Could it be that racism is over? No, I don’t believe that. Maybe racism is over just for me. Maybe the kind of racism that most people actually encounter, not just what they speculate about, just doesn’t happen to me. That starts to make more sense.

Somebody once said “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

  

“Your ambitions blind you to the nature of reality.”

What if racist acts of all sorts are going on and they only affect certain people but the race of the person doesn’t affect the perception of racist acts. Think about that for a minute. One of the ideas going around is that there is this thing called ‘white privilege’. It is a bogus racial theory designed to make you feel guilty for being white. How? It does it by identifying things nobody really pays any attention to unless they have a racial theory in mind. In other words, it racializes your perception. It forces you to look for the gorilla.

That is to say that if you look at the world determined by your ambition to see racism, then you will see it a lot more racism. If you look at the world determined by your ambition to always see the operation of evil, then maybe you will not see the operation of love, or charity, or courage.

Did you ever have a friend get a new car you never heard of, and suddenly you see that car everywhere? Did you ever start eating a new kind of food that you never tried before, and now you see restaurants of that type all the time?

What is racism? It’s a false ideology. It is enough to know that it is bad. It is a sin. It is evil. So when do we rid the world of evil? When does nobody sin? Racism is just a particular sin. It doesn't kill people. Murder kills people.

Racial identity is just a lie. Fools believe lies. Liars lie as much as they can get away with. What you need to do is tell the truth and move on. Don't internalize the lies. Don’t racialize your mind, don’t racialize your identity. If your aim is to see the good in people, then do so.

People will tell you all the time. Racism is real, it still operates, we’ve got a long way to go. And then they’ll say it has been around for centuries. Well, so has murder. So has rape. Everybody is against murder and rape. Everybody is against evil. It’s not a new idea. Why are you in such a panic? You’re not going to end it. It’s not going to end in another hundred years.

What is the crime of racism? How does it hurt? It simply the crime itself done for racist reasons. Then what is the crime? Is it an insult? Is it misrepresentation? Perjury? Is it theft? Assault? Assault with a deadly insult? Murder? Rape? Human beings have been dealing with crime since the beginning of time. It’s nothing new.

How will we know when crime is over? What does the USA look like with no crime? It looks like Heaven. Paradise. Nirvana. The Elysian Fields. It looks like everyone is perfectly equal. Hey, that’s all the same thing. It requires you to be dead.

 

Twelve Simple Words to Destroy White Privilege

The term ‘white privilege’ is so powerful and consequently so pathetically useless and subversively dangerous, because it is so stupefyingly broad.

It would be much more useful and accurate to say, ‘trustworthy, experienced, educated, attractive, overachieving, affluent, confident, intelligent, social, conscientious, tall, healthy privilege’ and then everybody would say, duh that’s obvious. Instead, you just use a racial stereotype and say well all that is what ‘white’ means, (and 'black' means the opposite). Then it would be completely and totally clear that the use of the term ‘white privilege’ is based on a theory of race. That’s the racial profile.

Those listed are some of the virtues of our society. They are what we want to be. Of course people who demonstrate such virtues are privileged in our society. That’s the whole point of having a society. Society gives human experience value and meaning. And of course racists want race to have value and meaning, which is why they want you to say ‘white’ and ‘black’ instead of talking about virtue and vice.

If you believe in individualism, then you must judge individual character and you must discriminate based on the virtues and vices individuals demonstrate. The more you use racial concepts and stereotypes, the more you empower racists to define value and meaning in our society towards race and away from individual character.

 

Human Memory is not Computer Storage

Steven Pinker is my go to authority in this. He explains something I now understand about how memory is ‘retrieved’. Part of intelligence is the way you organize information in your mind. The better you organize it, the easier it is for you to remember.

In fact, ‘memory’ is not memory, it is the active re-creation of ideas and events based on the way they were organized in the first place.

This has a great advantage so that you can abstract ideas and events and then deal with them as somewhat different versions of a basic concept. So if you become, say, a baseball play by play announcer, you don’t have to remember the path of every ball from the mound to the plate (which might take a ‘gigabyte’ of visual storage), you just say the pitch was a ball or a strike. I can say ‘baseball game’ and immediately (if you understand baseball) you have the context for a class of events. When you’re watching baseball and you don’t understand the game, you have to store a lot more information. When you understand baseball, it’s easy.

Another example is you are talking to a stranger vs you are talking to a friend. With a friend you have context, therefore less storage required. This is why two people who were at the exact same party will remember the same conversation differently. They hear the same words and sentences, but they make different assumptions about what the person speaking was trying to say. So you could have a third person describe motivations and then suddenly have an aha moment, “Oh that’s why they said that, I thought they meant..” People remember differently because interpret and organize context differently, and thus they re-create events differently.

The more associations you give a particular event or idea, the more ways it is accessed in your mind. If you associate songs, or smells or how your body was feeling, you remember better. If you have an experience with a framework of theories, you remember better. If somebody keeps telling you the same story and you can hear their voice telling you, you remember better.This is (simplistically) the way that the mind works with the brain being the apparatus. If an old person has a healthy brain, then nothing changes. But if they have a disorganized way of creating memories, it won’t make sense coming out.

So it’s really not about how much storage, but how efficiently ideas and events can be re-created based on their intelligent way of contextualizing such ideas and events. This is why intelligent people seem to have better memories or *more* memory even though their brains are the same size. Their context for performance of certain things is better, they can get ‘in the zone’ quicker. And scatterbrained people remember crazy stuff all the time. Same ‘memory’ different organization, different re-creation.

 

12 Steps from Chaos

About 10 years ago, I purchased Meg Meeker's 'Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters'. It was one of the few times in my life I found a sense of purpose from an expert writer that I could immediately use in my life. It was, quite frankly the best self-help book of the decade. I'm sure my daughters are better for me having read it and followed its expert advice. Prior to that, only Sowell's Ethnic America and Bly's Iron John come to mind. I was inches from but never did take Campbell's ride into ancient mythologies. At the time I was into all things Japanese and found the Tao instead. This time with Jordan Peterson's latest book '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos', Western Civilization is square in the frame. My brother Doc is reading it. I bought a copy for my son. I have a Kindle edition and I'll probably get another hard copy to put prominently on my shelf. 

For all the years since 9/11 I have been trying to find a way to understand and defend this Western Civilization, and I find it slightly ironic that it is being best done by a man from a small town in Western Canada. Just listening to him speak is like hearing something both intimately familiar yet markedly unusual yet uncannily consistent. He quotes the Bible. He quotes Dostoyevsky. He puts Neitzsche in perspective. He understands the past. He understands people. He is fierce and calm at the same time. He is the transparent opposite of Woody Allen, and he's not trying to be funny. He is, as he says, surfing a 100 foot wave. 

I immediately put Peterson on my T50 list, and am opening myself up to Jung and his heirs because of him. When I talked with Doc over the weekend, he mentioned alexander Solzhenitsyn asking himself, as told by Peterson, what he had done to deserve this Gulag? And he replies with the understanding of himself, he was once a fervent communist agitator. He owned this part of himself. His prior self jailed his current body. So, if I am cursed with memory, I will have plenty to consider for the rest of my life.  So I have even opened a new category here in the blog. 

What is remarkable about Peterson's book is that the 'self-help' angle goes all the way to the top. It's not just about getting over your particular bad vibe, it is a categorical and canonical framework for taking one from the bottom to the top. That's not the point however, it's not a makeover or shift that gets you into overdrive. It's more like a complete set of tools from which you can, over time, carve out the most perfect sculpture possible. Nothing drives this point home more clearly than his coda at the end of the book, without which I think we might all just be happily informed. No. We are challenged to be our best selves cast as we are in Western society. That makes Peterson more than clever, but wise, and willing to show how a wise man questions himself. Oh but it's difficult. 

Peterson understands suffering. Life is full of it, for all of us. And we must ultimately face it. We fail when we do not face it and challenge it. Peterson does not allow us to cower and say that we are weak or undermined or victimized. He steadfastly refuses to allow us to lie to ourselves, and that means there is so much to unwind. Our conventional wisdom has allowed us to assume it to be our nature to be weak. No. There are so many times, having listened to the audiobook where I hear Peterson's voice saying. "That's wrong!" He doesn't elide to the conventional wisdom by making sly references or jokes. Instead he tells us that there are many things that we don't know and that we don't understand, and that we must push ourselves to have faith in Being and in Truth, and in the absence of facts we must engage the eternal. We must deal with our archetypal models of self. We must understand the mythical which shapes our emotions, because facts don't help, or as Eric Raymond says, 'The universe doesn't care about motive'.  What makes us suffer? We don't understand cancer. We understand the pain that cancer brings. Facts will not help us face the pain. So what does? Character. Our character informed by the accumulation of wisdom over the ages, and it is ever the job of men like Peterson to show us. 

I say men like Peterson to show us rather than scholars like Peterson to teach us because this is the business of living. And I think that's the best compliment I can give. These are rules for life which are both obvious and profound. They are to be applied to keep chaos at bay, because it is always with us. So we must look to our friends, to people we can confide in, to help us on our journeys. This is what Peterson does for a living, to assist others in living. What a responsibility.

 

 

 

 

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The Center of Gravity of the Self

So I'm beginning to get a vague picture of evolutionary psychology and the first thing that struck me as totally new was the idea that all of evolution happens on this planet at once. Sex is not just what humans do, it's what large sections of the animal kingdom do. Sex evolved in all manner of creatures and so what sex is is not for humans to suggest only involves Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We big headed primates may like to live in the Matrix and believe what we want to believe about sex, but we're ultimately wrong. Sex is what it evolved to become, across all creatures that do it. It is not for us to redefine. We're not responsible.

So as I came in sideways to a discussion about abortion and .. well this:

A reminder: The conservative anti-choice crowd's rhetoric makes a lot more sense if you see it less as "saving a child's life" and more as "pregnancy is the punishment for having sex".

To which I said: Pregnancy is the inevitable consequence of having sex. It is what sex is, the result of the way of the universe, ie evolution. If conservatism were genetic, would you give eugenics a second thought?

Of course there's the obvious homosexual angle. But is homosexuality eugenic by design? I doubt it. I think most people simply get their rocks off in different directions, some of which will be rewarded by evolution and some which will not. My concern here in using the term inevitable is me weighing in against the amount of chemistry devoted to stopping pregnancy in order to enable a sporting amount of sexual profligacy some of which is just as greedily obtuse as obesity. I could belabor the point, but suffice it to say that if the Rubenesque were all that in yesteryear, and skinny bitches with green hair are all that today, then our taste in sex is unmoored from any particular path. Which is to say what's sexy in the Matrix is random. There is no reason nor rhyme behind it. It's just what you wanna do. Therefore you should have no moral pretense about it. I shit on your sex life. So what? Again, the universe doesn't care about motives. It simply rewards what it does and you have no say.

But what if we are actually capable of being smartly in tune with our nature? In other words what if we build houses with door frames that are the right size for the overwhelming majority of humans. Then we're doing something right. That's all I'm going to say that we do right, for now.

How about a man with no legs? Say he has lost them in combat. Has he lost some element of his humanity if he will never walk again?  Is he as human as the man who has run all his life? Is walking and running a fundamental part of being human? I say it is. I say we recognize that loss no matter how much wheelchair basketball he plays. No matter how he fulfills himself playing piano, he is still handicapped. That doesn't change his rights under government. That doesn't change his status in society. But he is handicapped. If he wasn't, then nobody would have ever invented the wheelchair. Everyone would be just as happy crawling as walking. Walking is fundamentally human, those who cannot or do not are handicapped and have lost some element of their humanity.

So too is childbirth fundamentally human. 

Oh. You're scared now, aren't you? You see where I'm going with this don't you? How could I not go there? I'm just building the door the right size for the overwhelming majority of humans. That's doing something right. You see I don't want to live in the Matrix. I want to live in harmony with nature, with an eye for understanding what humans have evolved from to be what we are. Isn't it strange that when we talk about sex with kids for the first time, we mention the 'birds and the bees'? How we do it is much more like the dogs and the horses, or quite frankly the monkeys and the chimps. Sex evolved without our thinking about it.

Pregnancy is not a punishment for having sex. Children are a reward for having sex. Psychologically I understand this as a parent who has raised three of those dirty blighters. And I love them. Illogically. I don't understand exactly why. It goes against my logic to put up with them as long as I have, and yet I do. And I'm also happy, illogically, to please my old ass parents. I know this is an experience central to humanity, and I don't really understand why. But some of that understanding is unnecessary. When I'm happy, I'm just happy. I don't need to explain how or why. I just enjoy that thing. When I'm suffering, I don't need people to explain it. I don't want to hear explanations of why and how. I just want it to stop.

This is me talking psychology. Get used to it. It's my new category.