A bit of background:

In the economics world, behavioral economics is aimed at looking at how people actually make choices, instead of assuming that everybody has excellent information about the given state of markets and the future consequences of their options, and will choose what’s best for them, given their preferences.

In most experiments (and in anybody’s experience of real life) it turns out that people don’t always act to maximize their interests. We make stupid choices. We discount future gains too heavily. We smoke, drink, do drugs, party, don’t exercise, watch porn, drop out of school, quit our jobs and move to Europe to be writers in dying mediums. Null point pour les neoclassicism.

In this writer’s mind, and in others, the gropings of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are linked to behavioral economics, insofar as they chip away at the traditional foundations of the human spirit. These former two semi-disciplines, or intellectual movements, are aimed at grounding elements of our behavior, personalities, and perhaps cultures in our biology. Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate is an excellent primer on these ideas: In a nutshell, we are built initially from genetic instructions. This includes our brains, and our various neurochemical and hormonal eccentricities. These differences, from the very beginning, have consequences – some of us learn faster or slower in certain areas, some are fatter or skinnier (which has societal (but not deterministic) consequences), some are excellent athletes, some can swim through mathematics as though numbers are the sea and they dolphins. We are different from one another, mentally, physically, in every way that has anything to do with genes — and it makes more sense to understand this rather than pretend we start as identical beings, and grow apart.

So. We’re different. We’re not perfectly rational. Wolfe argues that these ideas are chipping away at the heart of old-style liberalism, the idea that we can and should choose our destinies for ourselves, with the minimum amount of interference from outside (with certain necessary caveats that increase the collective amount of autonomy available, such as: no, you can’t own slaves, asshole).

I think there are a few problems with this. I don’t think he gets evolutionary psychology or behavioral economics all that well. As many critics of these disciplines do, he confuses predispositions and statistical likelihoods with a kind of predetermination

(Christians and sociobiologists) both believe in predestination.  For the one we are stained with sin.  For the other we are products of our genetic makeup.  In neither case can we change our destiny.

This statement is bollocks. Sociobiologists (at least good ones) believe that we have constraints on our personalities and capabilities, just as we have constraints on our physical abilities. This isn’t a popular notion, particularly in America, but it is very, very far from the idea of predestination.  (I have these genes, thus I am more likely than someone who does not to express them by acting more aggressively than the norm; *not*: I have these genes, so I will be a rapist).

What Wolfe is really attacking, however, is the idea of the new “libertarian paternalists” that want to help us overcome our irrationalities by “nudging” our choices. Putting their fingers on the scales. It’s not really a new idea – we’ve tried to influence people’s consumption choices through things like “sin taxes” for years. But it, or this explanation for old behavior, is gaining ground as we see the very wide areas in which we don’t choose rationally.

….people should neither be left completely free to do what they want nor should they be coerced by government.  Instead their choices should be constrained by organizing them according to design principles that will produce the optimum outcome for themselves and their society.  Thaler and Sunstein call such design a form of “choice architecture.”… The goal of the behavioral economists is to give people choices over how much to save for their retirement or to recycle their trash, but to design the choices in ways that will overcome the irrationality and ignorance that shape individual decisions.

So: Sin taxes. Gas taxes, to lower people’s carbon production and push them to public transit (which they like in theory, but don’t do enough on their own). Anti-smoking campaigns. Anti-obesity campaigns. Structuring tax breaks so the benefits come in chunks, rather than all at once, so we are more likely to spend the money instead of save it.

These “choice architects” are undemocratically screwing with the way we as supposedly rational people are choosing, Wolfe argues. He seems to be disputing the idea that we are fundamentally irrational; believing, perhaps, that despite the evidence, it is better that we continue acting (as policymakers and as humans) as if we were perfectly rational, rather than accepting that we are not and working to ameliorate the consequences.

Who nudges, is his ultimate question. Who is elitist enough to decide what’s “best” for us, and structure our alternatives so we are more likely to choose well. Which, fair enough, it is never a pleasant idea to hear from the government that: This is the best for you. Despite your stupid desire to eat fatty foods, smoke, etc., we simply won’t let you. (Or wait, maybe that sounds suspiciously familiar. Something about drugs, alcohol, speed limits, dress codes, hate speech prohibitions…)

We don’t like people trying to affect our supposedly free choices. We want the government out of our heads. So we leave the space wide open for psychologically sophisticated marketers, I suppose…

Wolfe’s argument fundamentally hangs on the idea of transparency. He argues that the construction of “choice architecture” can not be transparent. I see no reason why this should be the case. We have always had policy goals, which amount to ideas about how society should look. These policy goals are developed by the government and its advisors. The government is elected. We have the ability to write about and criticize the government.

So, yes, I think Wolfe is wrong. But I do think this debate about human nature will structure the political debates of the future. Are we rational or are we not? Are we identical in every way or are we not? It will be important to remember that “all men are created equal” is poor science (Men? Created? Equal? Really?); however, as a political statement meaning that every person should be given equal rights, or should be given roughly equal opportunities (two very different ideas), it remains extraordinarily powerful.

In an especially rich essay, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists”—in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988), edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg—Hall wrote: “The first thing to ask about an ‘organic’ ideology that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what is true.” What, in other words, actively makes sense to people whose beliefs you do not share? Hall proposed that leftist intellectuals should not answer that question by assuming that working-class conservatives have succumbed to false consciousness: “It is a highly unstable theory about the world which has to assume that vast numbers of ordinary people, mentally equipped in much the same way as you or I, can simply be thoroughly and systematically duped into misrecognizing entirely where their real interests lie. Even less acceptable is the position that, whereas ‘they’—the masses—are the dupes of history, ‘we’—the privileged—are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively, right through into the truth, the essence, of a situation.”

There is a venerable tradition of being critical of nationalism and its assumptions. Nationalism proposes that a person’s freedom is justly maximized if the obligations limiting that freedom are set by the group with which he has most in common—i.e., his nation. A Frenchwoman’s freedom is best entrusted to a French government. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, proposes that, as an ethical and therefore political matter, a person can belong only in a global community. Therefore a person’s freedom is qualified by obligations to others arising irrespective of the nationality or proximity of the other, or—nodding to the contribution of Emmanuel Levinas—l’autre.

…Writers, in order to produce something truly worthwhile, must be ruled only by their deepest impulses, which can come from anywhere and lead in a million valuable directions. But it does seem that those who internalize the new world have every chance of writing something newly interesting.

Read the whole essay here.

We stopped by today. I shouldn’t have worried. It’s brilliant, shedding light on Giacometti in ways I would likely never have noticed on my own. He was apparently entranced by Egyptian art, spending long periods of time studying and sketching ancient sculpture. The collection shows books that had belonged to him, with his own versions of pieces sketched in next to pictures of the originals.

The exhibition works in much the same way, placing a dozen or so of his sculptures next to pieces of a genre that served as obvious models, or inspiration. Tall, eerie striding man next to a classic Egyptian walking man with one leg outstretched, portrait busts that shared structure (and almost the same foreheads), twisted beautiful figures that display feeling and personality in stylized form.

Well worth the visit, particularly on a free museum day.

I’m only beginning to understand Egyptian sculpture, thanks to a visit to the Met last summer. I’d always loved Greek and the best of the Roman (Romans copied dreadfully, but they also gave real personality to what in Greece was often simply beautiful). But even thousands of years before the Greeks, the Egyptians were creating busts and full statues of stunning, almost frighteningly realistic personality. In the Altes, Nefertiti’s head gets all the press, but a little piece called the Green Head is far better — a stone head of a priest, I think, that expresses force and power and personhood in every expert line.

My coauthor Brad and I began our history of video game culture not with anything digital, but with Gygax and his co-inventor Dave Arneson working out the rules for D&D, because we believed (and still believe) that the kind of collective, face-to-face, immersive-world gaming they created was as or more influential in the history of video game communities than anything Atari ever created. Gygax was generous enough to spend hours on the phone with us. He was just as you’d expect. Kind of grumpy, but eager to talk about the origin and lasting legacy of the game he’d created. Which still surprised him.

He was the protogeek, a tabletop gamer who wanted to tell stories and infuse ordinary reality with a little magic.  He and Arneson succeeded.

Dear Winner, (they write)

This is to inform you that you have been selected for a cash prize of 1,000,000.00GBP (One Million Great British Pounds) and
a brand new BMW 5 Series Car from International programs held on the 22nd of JAN 2008 in London Uk.

Details follow, until it is signed by the aptly named “MRS Pat Swindell.”

This was the original cool Berlin, with its own brand of gloomy, spooky glamour, well before East Berlin’s Mitte and Friedrichshain districts were on the tourist map.

Another Weimar love letter, right? Caberet and modernism, sex tourism and the sparkling, fun side of post-inflationary misery? Well no, this “original cool Berlin” is David Bowie’s West, or actually, the new West of a bunch of very wealthy media types (villas on an unnamed lake in West Berlin, places in Charlottenburg) who think the “New East” is now just too cliched for words.

So, uh, they’re going back to what was cool when they were in their 20s. Or rather, a nostalgic, packaged-and-priced version of it. That’s very original. Yes, indeed, regular cultural trailblazing.

Right, then — throw off that shabby chic of the East, get your late-boomer yuppie on and start glorying in the memory of those Bowie years, whether you were actually there or not. Apparently it helps if you start throwing down for 20 Euro entrees in the West. That’s where the action is now, my friends. I read it in the NYT.

Pah. David Brooks’ column in the NYT today is slightly smarter, but not much. He has interviewed Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist, and together they wistfully remember a time when big bands like the Stones and Springsteen meant something, or meant something to huge masses of people. Not like today, where music consumption is fragmented into micro-genres, bands can’t fill stadiums (remember how great the sound and view in those stadium shows are?), and the kids picking up instruments just can’t play.

He says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.

As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.

He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.

Did I say slightly smarter? Forget it. Music cultures change. Everything is fragmented. But why in hell is that bad?

A musical monoculture is like any monoculture. It stagnates. Innovation happens within a strictly circumscribed sphere. What really happens is that it produces rebels, punk, new wave, and then what happens… it fragments. I’m a deeply music loving music geek, who today has the ability to listen to everything from Johannes Ockeghem to Valerio Cosi’s Italian free-jazz drones (if you haven’t heard him, GO LISTEN NOW), with long detours through the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That perpetually blows my mind.

Kids can do this too. The ability to get in touch with musical roots beyond Zeppelin and the Doors and the Beatles and a bunch of very good 60s blues bands is overwhelming today. Not everyone takes advantage of this, but many, many do. It’s creating vast amounts of new and innovative music even despite the industry’s implosion. It ain’t the Stones, ’cause frankly that sound’s come and gone at least three times.

Music, and music culture, moves with the times. Brooks gets part of this. He finishes with this, which was his real point all along:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

This is the old end-of-shared-culture argument. We listen to different things, think differently, read different Web sites. We don’t all watch the same TV news at 8, don’t listen to the same Rolling Stones albums. Terrible, right?

Pah. Before, “technological and commercial momentum” created the impression of cultural monocultures — although underneath, unlistened to by Brooks and his besuited buddies, were other vibrant scenes. Maybe the culture business wasn’t fragmented back then, but culture was — what were the jazzheads listening to, or the folkies, or the deeply weird Tony Conrad or Eternal Music drone aficionados? They sure weren’t in stadiums.

Diversity of cultural opportunity allows people to stretch their minds and expand their experiences, and breeds creativity. Even if people who want to hear the same thing over and over again don’t want to hear it.

Thanks to Alex Ross for the pointer.

The son of an impossibly stern 19th century artist and critic with Nietzschean ideas of modern education, Witkacy was allowed complete freedom as a child — with the single caveat that he grow up to be a groundbreaking artist. So, you know, no pressure. He turned out as a mischevious, creative, self-doubting wreck, but entirely unique.

His paintings, once he matured, lay somewhere between Chagall and the German Expressionists, a riot of color, and cartoonish, nightmarish absurd compositions. His main love was theater, in which he wrote from what he called a “Theory of Pure Form.” He essentially believed that the best art offers a kind of internal geometry that resonates with the reader/viewer/listener in a non-rational way. The actual content of a work is irrelevant, he believed; only the underlying form itself would trigger this “metaphysical feeling,” a state more important than a simple emotional or intellectual response to the work.

In effect, he saw art as a drug. Rational and emotional responses were traps. He spent his entire life looking for transcendence of one type or another, found it himself in a series of drugs, and saw art as the only path that didn’t bring with it a hangover and self-recrimination. If he could have been religious, he might have been happier.

This metaphysical response was theoretically possible in realistic writing, he thought, and he had nothing but praise for the old Greeks; but modern post-Enlightenment realism in the theater had dulled audiences senses, so that all they knew how to experience was an emotional or intellectual reaction. The only way to let audiences find the Form was to use the grotesque, the perverse, the absurd. And he did; his plays are in a sense similar to the later absurdists, irrational, confusing, sometimes hilarious, full of nonsense philosophy and gunfire and reanimated corpses.

None of this brought him money to live, unfortunately. Depressed, he started a one-man portait-painting firm. Several types were on offer: good, realistic ones for which he charged the highest prices, and then others done under the influence of a variety of drugs, which were brilliantly distorted. He published his “Rules” of the firm, with detailed explanations of the types, and strictures such as “Any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out. … Given the incredible difficulty of the profession, the firm’s nerves must be spared.” But he hated it, and saw his role as an artist diminishing. When the Nazis invaded in 1939 he fled to the east, and then killed himself on hearing that the Soviets were invading from that direction.

Dead, he offered an appropriately Witkacy-esque sequel. Rediscovered by avant-garde directors in the 50s, his plays were re-performed. As Polish national sentiment rose in opposition to Soviet control, the Communist government ultimately hailed him as a national hero. In 1988, the government finally decided to exhume his body and rebury him as a symbol of national pride; they “found” his body and buried it with honors in Zakopane, the mountain town where he’d mostly lived. An expert consulted looked at X-rays of the corpse and realized it couldn’t be Witkacy, who had lost teeth; the government tried to cover this up and went through with the ceremony, but the information leaked out, turning the whole event into a farce worthy of one of the playwrights own works.

Nonetheless, other dangers of masturbation as spelt out by medical experts include psychological guilt. A chance masturbator stands the risk of nervous-depressing permanent insanity, premature death, especially for those with high blood pressure, diabetes, blood diseases, inability to perform sexual act naturally, etc. Other dangers attached to masturbation sexes include inability to pull out of the act. It has even been documented to cause more deaths among boys in Europe than any plaque [ED-- sic, perhaps plague? tho "plaque" is in fact more plausible in context] or war. Masturbation also results in total loss of sexual feelings and desire due to lack of sensation when it is time to actually engage in legitimate sexual intercourse. Quick, early or premature ejaculation is also one of the rewards of regular masturbation.

In girls, the breast development is arrested or retarded and the individual also stands the risk of experiencing spinal irritation resulting from epilepsy as a result of loss of seminal fluid in a male.

Like my intellectual mentor, the good Cap’n Jack D. Ripper, I personally am against anything that supports the international terrorist conspiracy to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.