Rational Philosophy

Dick Cavett’s folly, guns in parks.

The NY Times grants Dick Cavett considerable space to reflect in an entry called “À la Recherche de Youthful Folly.” Proust would roll in his grave. I’m not sure whose folly bears more of the responsibility for the piece making its way into the paper. Cavett wrote it, but the NY Times published it. Cavett reveals himself to be an unapologetic jerk. He talks about stringing newspapers across the road at night so that car drivers would get spooked and brake suddenly. He talks about deliberately tripping a fat guy who was chasing him after such a prank. He talks about ruthlessly picking on one of his peers. “Distasteful but [...] funny, which to me is always the important thing,” Cavett says.

Sure, these were things he did as a kid, but I think we all knew kids like that, and we knew then that they would always be jerks.

What’s the point of Cavett’s piece? Beyond self-indulgence, it’s hard to tell. But it does give us an example of immorality. Apart from a couple of throw away comments, Cavett displays a singular lack compassion for those who suffered at his hands. Yet his actions caused them unnecessary distress and put them in danger.

“Compassion,” Schopenhauer opined, “is the basis of all morality.”

Schopenhauer himself suffered greatly through the lack of compassion others showed him. When he submitted his essay “On The Basis of Morality” in response to a contest offered by Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies, his was the only entry, but the society refused to award it the prize because they said he’d misunderstood the question.

The Royal Danish Society asked: “Are the source and foundation of morals to be looked for in an idea of morality lying immediately in consciousness (or conscience) and in the analysis of other fundamental moral concepts springing from that idea, or are they to be looked for in a different ground of knowledge?”

Schopenhauer answered that morality arises out of our awareness that:

1. Living things strive to exist.

2. If we oppose the striving to exist of another living thing (i.e., cause it deliberate harm) we are acting immorally.

Compassion, in Schopenhauer’s moral system, is the awareness that another’s suffering is no different from our own.

Maybe the Royal Danish Society just didn’t like his answer…

The marvelous thing about Schopenhauer’s explanation for moral feeling is that it strips away all of the layers of artificial moral concepts that arise out of systems of thought (religious and social) and examines morality in a very raw and immediate form.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has proposed a rule change that would allow people to carry concealed weapons in some national parks (the ones where state laws permit carrying concealed weapons). What intrigued me most about this story was the way in which the proposed rule change had come about: Kempthorne “proposed the rule in response to letters from 51 United States senators — 42 Republicans and 9 Democrats — who asked that the current rule be changed.”

So either 51 senators up and decided that despite the absence of any alarming crime statistics this was an issue that warranted a letter to Dirk, or the NRA lobbied the senators to press the Interior Secretary on the matter.

Those who run the parks oppose the proposal, saying that the guns would create more problems than they would resolve.

Which brings me back to thinking that our society suffers from a lack of philosophical instruction and education. Shouldn’t our children learn about such things? Shouldn’t those who administer our government be able to see past and hold firm against transparent political manipulation?

Dick Cavett and others like him can perhaps convince themselves that because something is socially acceptable it is not immoral. Schopenhauer’s piercing injunction reveals how ill-founded is such thinking.
Schopenhauer also said: “Rascals are always sociable — more’s the pity!”

(For those interested in the origin of moral and other feelings, my own book begins with the fundamental principles of space and time, arriving at some of the same general conclusions as Schopenhauer.)

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

On the value of skepticism in philosophy and life.

Philosophy requires skepticism. Without the urge to doubt or question our immediate experience we cannot understand it. To Socrates, the ultimate knowing was knowing that he knew nothing. This idea, so central to the process of finding firm conceptual ground, has been taken up again and again by philosophers. A good philosopher has to be scrupulously skeptical, particularly of his own ideas. Bad philosophers tend to be bad because they have lousy ideas or because they’re not skeptical enough –

Schopenhauer, in his World As Will And Representation, spectacularly criticizes his contemporary, Hegel, for instance, because he saw Hegel as a self-aggrandizing mystic rather than a real philosopher. Here’s a sample of Schopenhauer’s delightful vitriol: “What was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make use of this privilege; Schelling at best equaled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.”

In one of those curious NY Times pieces that hovers between information and advice, like a girl enjoying the attentions of two suitors while delicately avoiding a commitment to either, the NY Times reports on the desirability of skepticism as an asset for business leaders. The article points out that executives tend not to be as skeptical as they should be, causing them to fall on their noses more often than they should. The piece checks off a few reasons why this might be so:

1. If an executive doesn’t know the facts, he or she can’t make good decisions.

2. Hearing about the facts means being accessible and open to bad news.

3. Sometimes it’s not enough to be approachable and you need to go looking for bad news.

In everyday life, so long as we’re careful to understand the basis of our skepticism, skepticism can provide us with a helpful perspective on things. Socrates founded his skepticism on the sound philosophical ground that he knew only that he knew nothing. Such a fundamental skepticism would quickly prove impractical as we’re trying to get through the day. “Do I exist?” may be an eminently reasonable question when we first wake up, but it won’t get us into the bathroom to brush our teeth. Instead, there will be some things that it makes sense to be very skeptical about and others that we can pretty much accept at face value.

It makes sense to be skeptical of the e-mail from a complete stranger promising us a share of a vast fortune. And less sense to be skeptical about whether our schools should be teaching intelligent design.

But back to the reasons an executive may not always be as skeptical as he should be: I would add a fourth imperative to the Times’ ad hoc list — an executive may not want to admit that he is wrong. After all, he’s been making the decisions and setting the strategy, a change in direction often demonstrates that some of those prior decisions or plans were flawed. Letting go of the idea of one’s infallibility can be tough for the person in charge.

Clear thinking absolutely requires an acceptance of one’s fallibility. In my own life I’ve learned from my wife that I’m nearly always wrong. This sense of supreme fallibility has helped me immensely in my marriage. As a manager in the business world, I learned over the course of several years that my own ideas could always be improved upon; another valuable lesson.

As we wade on through this election year, I fear that we’re being too hard on the candidates as they make mistakes. The hypercritical election process, during which every statement is parsed and critiqued, only serves to drive the poor hopefuls toward the alluring but false embrace of purported infallibility. Don’t we want a president who, as the most important executive in the country, can feel comfortable with his or her fallibility?

In Iraq, two bomb attacks today killed 19. President Bush, the current national executive, had this to say yesterday about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: “By helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity, we’ll lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

Monkeys controlling robotics make the headlines (again) and the new, old practice of meditation gets some focus.

Back in January I wrote about monkeys who had used their minds to make robots walk on a treadmill. The article pointed out that the scientists involved had had monkeys control robotic limbs with their minds back in 2003. Along the same lines, in what The NY Times calls “the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology” Nature has published results of experiments in which monkeys controlled prosthetic limbs to feed themselves. (Their own arms were gently restrained.) The results hold great promise for a new generation of advanced prosthetics. (Unfortunately, I can imagine that the Pentagon will be interested, too.)

And in the world of mind over melancholy the Times reports on the growing trend in using mindfulness meditation to help people combat such things as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Generally an optimistic report, citing considerable enthusiasm and some degree of success, it also points out, a little ruefully, that some in the field don’t share this enthusiasm and question the success, even warning that for some the mindfulness meditation seems to make things worse. The concept: In a calm, peaceful, centered state, the subject allows himself to experience the emotions that underlie his symptoms, learning to explore them and diffusing their power.

He didn’t call it mindfulness meditation (he didn’t call it anything) but this sounds a lot like much of the work I did with my life coach / therapist over the course of the last few years. So, from personal experience, I’d add that the skills of the therapist would be critical to determining success. Anyone can play the piano, but only a pianist can make the instrument produce reliably pleasant sounds. Or, perhaps a more apt analogy, you wouldn’t trust a podiatrist with your by-pass surgery.

Serge, in my experience, was an incredibly skilled and sophisticated practitioner, and with him I achieved regular breakthroughs that have stayed with me and changed my life. But I can easily imagine that the same techniques applied without supreme care, patience and respect could well make matters worse. The therapy subject places his or her most delicate feelings in the hands of the therapist, and the interaction between them is critical. (As a case in point, the article talks about therapies that last eight weeks, clearly not enough time for the therapist to win the trust of his or her patient.)

All of which brings me to thinking, curiously, about Scott McClellan, the ousted Bush press secretary, who casts various aspersions on the current administration’s delusions, deceptions and duplicity in his new book. Not surprisingly, the White House “responds negatively” as the Times puts it. And Bush, true to form, says he won’t read it — he’s too busy deciding what to meddle in next.

In the book, McClellan describes Bush as a president who could convince himself of anything (hmmm), claims that both he and Bush were duped about the Plame leak, and describes Bush in tears as he sympathizes with his old friend just after he’s given him the boot. As I think about this it summons up a mental image of Rove and Cheney controlling Bush as deftly as a pair of monkeys reaching for grapes with prosthetic limbs, simultaneous with an image of Bush engaging in some kind of distorted mindfulness therapy with his old buddy McClellan, wallowing in memories of the good old days as the tears roll down his cheeks. Well the therapy clearly didn’t leave McClellan feeling warm and fuzzy, I wonder what it did for Bush…

On a stroke victim’s experience of nirvana, Supreme Court justices’ rendering surprising decisions, and a father’s $45K investment in his son’s self-motivation.

I watched The Simpsons movie over the weekend, which uses the twin drays of pollution and global warming to help drive its plot. I thought it must have been during the Simpsons movie that I heard a witticism about an endangered species being one simply less able to survive, but my daughter corrected me; David Letterman cracked the joke about the great blue heron when he hosted the Piedmont bird impersonators on a recent show.

Which is a long way around (what do you expect?) to introducing the subject of my curiosity today — exceptions. An endangered species might be considered an exception in that it is one of a minority of the species on the planet doomed to imminent extinction, but maybe another way of looking at this is that every species is endangered, we’re just each on our own time-lines.

Other exceptions:

A stroke victim experienced an informed nirvana after her stroke disabled the egotism and analytical dominance of her left brain. Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor, now recovered but having learned a new skill, can still tap into the peaceful, euphoric oneness that her stroke foisted upon her. Unusual in her pragmatic perspective on the sensation, Dr. Taylor describes her experience as a sudden understanding the relative and all-connected reality of her existence. But since we’d need a stroke, and a lucky stroke, to get to the same euphoric sensation, what use is Dr. Taylor’s unique affliction?

The Supreme Court rendered two surprisingly non-conservative decisions today in favor of workers versus employers. The particular details are less pertinent to this post than their out-of-wackness.

And lastly, I’ve written variously before on the value of education as an end in itself. I was just talking about this yesterday to my wife’s aunt’s mother (such are family gatherings) who made the pertinent point that the value of an education is to teach one how to learn. But today I read the compelling story of a man who bribed his son to apply himself in school by promising him a Shelby 427 Cobra. (Those kids who’ve been duped into performing for $50, read no further…)

Alright, so what gives? We like evolution, survival of the fittest, but we love the endangered species. We pride ourselves on our mastery of language, on our analytical heft, but our jaws drop as we think about freedom from ego and stress. We hate the conservatism of the court with such vehemence that we try to read conservative subplots into its more liberal decisions. And we don’t believe in the value of financial incentives in encouraging our children to learn, but we wonder how we’re going to pay for the Shelby Cobra…

Exceptions.

Does an exception tell us that the rule is wrong?

Not necessarily. I think they perhaps give us a new overarching rule that we should be careful of absolutism. We love to categorize. Categorizing has been such useful skill for the conscious mind that it has become a ready defense against uncertainty. In some cases perhaps too ready.

Dr. Taylor’s experience tells us that we may have a very different perception of reality if we could find ways to counter the less helpful strategies of the left brain.

The Supreme Court justices remind us that we can’t necessarily judge people by their past actions and ideas.

And the father who bought his son a Shelby Cobra for making the honor role thumbs his nose at those of us who hove to the higher ground of learning for the sake of learning…

On Hillary Clinton’s unerring sense of footinmouthity.

Capitalizing on the tragedy of her inability to be sensitive, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated her supreme political aptitude for footinmouthity. Stricken with a malignant brain tumor she is not, but Hillary needs no excuse to usurp Teddy Kennedy’s tragedy and achieve her outrageous best. Is it her fault that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June of the year of his foreshortened primary bid? Of course it isn’t. Then why are people so bent out of shape that she would attempt to make political capital out of it…?

Jeez. Anyone would think you’d never seen a man shot before.

And now, with rumors that her fellow liability, Bill, is agitating for her to be Obama’s VP, one wonders how she’ll outdo Dick Cheney (remember him?) who managed to shoot his old friend in the head with a shotgun…

Exploring the idea of rightness and wrongness in intent and deed.

NY Times Op-Ed contributers Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins serve up an interesting history of President JFK’s face-off with Nikita Khrushchev. If we accept their account, JFK fared poorly in the exchange because Khrushchev went on the offensive and handily routed the ill-prepared young president in their one-on-one meetings. Thrall and Wilkins indicate that it was during these meetings that Khrushchev formed a critical impression of JFK as an immature and weak leader, an impression that in part lead to his subsequent decisions to build the Berlin wall and establish a missile base in Cuba.

We’re being drawn to review this period of history because Obama has often quoted Kennedy’s view on negotiating with hostile powers, as expressed in his inaugural address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” The question being asked — if Obama, also young and arguably less tested than Kennedy, is so taken with Kennedy’s philosophy, would he make the same mistake?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will testify in court during the hearing of the city’s lawsuit against a Georgia gun-shop. The city claims that guns sold in the south too easily make their way into the hands of bad actors (no pun intended) who then use them to inflict harm in New York City. It’s clear from the story that this particular gun shop owner — Jay Wallace — isn’t prepared to give up without a fight and has fashioned his case quite cleverly to present himself as David against Bloomberg’s Goliath.

And in the high stakes world of Internet search engines and on-line advertising (ten years ago, who would have thunk it?) Google is set to defend a proposed deal that would have Yahoo! license and use Google’s superior ad technology. (The backdrop being that Yahoo! has resisted Microsoft’s attempts to buy it — this deal with Google would add about $1 billion a year to Yahoo!’s coffers.) There are rumblings that Google’s deal with Yahoo! would be anti-competitive and fall foul of anti-trust legislation. Google claims to have found a way to fashion the deal so that it won’t. (Coincidentally, or perhaps not at all coincidentally, as a Google Ad Sense and Ad Words participant I just received an e-mail from Google telling me that they now place ads from qualified third-parties. Effectively, they’ve started to do for others what they propose that Yahoo! will do for them… Smart strategy for avoiding anti-trust accusations.)

These three stories present internal conflicts for me, and perhaps some intrinsic philosophical conflicts between ideals and reality.

I want to believe that John F. Kennedy was the better man, the better person, I believe he had more good intent that Khrushchev. But in the wiles and wills of international political maneuvering, Khrushchev had him beat hands down. I want to believe that Obama wouldn’t make the same mistake if he sat down with Kim Yung Il or Assad, but I realize that part of Obama’s charm is that he’s not cunning. (I do hope he’s smart enough and strong enough not to sit down until he’s sure that the right ground has been prepared.) I believe that Obama is a better person than Clinton or McCain; hence, my desire to believe he’s better able to run the country.
I want to believe that Bloomberg is fighting the right fight against those who sell guns. I like Bloomberg. He seems to have all around good intentions. But in this situation, maybe he’s misjudged. Maybe Jay Wallace isn’t the right guy to go after, or maybe Jay Wallace is just better at crafting a sympathetic image.

And even though Google has become such an all-dominant behemoth, I can’t help having a soft spot for a company that has the motto — “Do no evil…” I’m rooting for them against the anti-trust watchdogs.

Sadly, life isn’t fair. Bad people do win.

His fellow Greeks trumped up charges against Socrates and he went on his way with a draught of hemlock. His dying words? “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” Now, show me a better man.

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

Bill Clinton and dumb ideas, memory loss and wisdom, and enhancing mental sharpness.

“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
Plato

Brain researchers should be studying Bill Clinton; Bill is a smart man, by all accounts. Why then does he sometimes say stupid things? As Hillary battles on against the odds, Bill, speaking off the cuff outside Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville Kentucky, said that not counting the votes in Michigan and Florida would be dumb, even though the states were disenfranchised prior to their primaries, and despite the fact that Obama didn’t campaign in either state and took himself off the ballot in one.

Brain researchers have in fact been finding that, Bill Clinton’s apparent example to the contrary, older minds may well be wiser minds. Aging brains pay more attention to what may seem to be extraneous information, mulling over it and absorbing it much better than younger minds. This seems to indicate that younger minds tend to power through information happily dispensing with seemingly spurious data, sticking to the highways. Whereas older minds have learned that the journey itself can be as informative and valuable as the destination.

(I’m quite prepared to believe that Bill Clinton has as much fun with his illogical statements as he does with his logical ones. He doesn’t really expect anyone other than those blindly partisan to his wife’s cause to agree with him, but he doesn’t really care. Why he doesn’t really care is a much more interesting question, and I can only hazard guesses.)

Other scientific evidence points to the benefits of activities that improve brain function. Exercise, diet, mental stimulation, engaged and engaging social and family contacts — all can contribute to our ability to stay sharp. As the article points out, and as I’ve written about here before, the idea that the brain inevitably declines and can’t grow new cells or forge new pathways has been debunked and cast aside. A very exciting turn, and one that can give us some optimism in these times of dumbness in high places.
As Socrates said and as Plato reported, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” This seems in keeping with the concept that as the brain gets older it is less likely to discard seemingly irrelevant information. It understands better that wisdom comes through accepting fallibility, rejecting absolute knowledge.

Socrates was also saying that we can never know anything. We can only perceive and infer. To claim absolute knowledge is to posture, to attempt to overpower someone with the assertion of knowing.

Bill Clinton cannot know what the voters in Florida and Michigan would have done if the delegates from those primaries were to be seated and the candidates campaigned accordingly. He can only posture and infer. While it’s understandably frustrating for Hillary to have perhaps missed out on a couple of wins and some delegates from those states, it is far from fair for her to convert this frustration into a claim of victory.

Related posts from around the Internet:

Alzheimer's Plaques And Tangles

 Why Brain Fitness Training Works to Combat Cognitive Decline

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

On broken escalators and varying sperm counts.

The New York Times, after “months examining the system,” has concluded that New York City Transit does a lousy job of installing, maintaining and repairing its elevators and escalators. I think that about 5 million people could have saved the poor Times reporters several months of trawling through financial records, trouble reports, maintenance chits, interviewing experts and the like. Any member of the regular subway ridership knows that the New York City Transit performance in this area sucks. (That’s the official technical term.)

Until recently I would make the round trip every weekday from my home in Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan. The escalators at the stations I traveled through regularly broke down, with sometimes just a few days between repairs. With a glance over the transom at the smudged and harried faces of the maintenance crew it was clear that their level of confidence in the repairs was no higher than anyone else’s.

Unlike the New York City Transit Authority, the New York Times, despite the redundancy of its efforts, does a bang up job of itemizing the extent of the problems and the underlying causes. To net it out, the system is mismanaged. Again, no great revelation. I myself once worked for the Transit Authority and witnessed first hand and unwittingly became a part of the hypertrophied organization that runs the city’s subway system. The level of unnecessary and wasteful bureaucracy is staggering, and inevitably leads to crappy services. (Another official technical term.)

On a less depressing note, the ravishing Olivia Judson reports on findings that animals vary their sperm output according to the circumstances of the intercourse — more chance of rival sperm, more jizz (I apologize for using so much technical jargon in this post). Judson holds out the tantalizing hope that these findings may have practical application for couples who are undergoing IVF. If the man watches the appropriate explicit videos while he’s providing his sperm, he’s more likely to produce more active sperm. (The appropriate videos would depict a woman with more than one man — competition!)

New York City Transit Authority take note. In the absence of competition, we fall back on regulation, bureaucracy, checks and balances. But as anyone knows who has worked in such an organization, or read any Kafka, the regulation and bureaucracy rarely achieves what it’s supposed to achieve — transparency, fairness and efficiency, and instead creates a culture of indifference, ass-watching, megalomania, and ineptitude.

From a philosophical perspective, competition derives from the concepts of aims and pursuers. The aim or object exists or is perceived, and the pursuers go after it. Why do pursuers pursue, and out of what circumstances does competition arise or not arise?

Living things have an urge to persist and to pursue the persistence of their genes. Given time and causality, competition between living things is inevitable. But in circumstances when cooperation promises greater success, competition can take a back seat. This is why we have IVF and novel ideas about how to produce a higher sperm count. It’s also why we live in societies with division of labor and, for the most part, respect one another’s right to live.

But in circumstances where competition is thwarted without sufficient incentive for success — i.e., New York City Transit’s monopoly on the subway system — we end up with incompetence and failure.

And here is the great challenge: When society wants to have services like subways that may not be profitable if privately operated how do we make them work well? How do we inculcate a sense of competitiveness, of aiming for an objective, into the organizations that operate those services?

I have an idea: Run them like a company — reduce the bureaucracy, operate them with targets and incentives, weed out the freeloaders and crappy managers, hire bright, motivated employees, challenge them to succeed or face the consequences. Bloomberg, put your thinking cap on!

(When I worked at the Transit Authority, you could have fired half the workforce and it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference; well, it actually might have meant that more got done.)

If this seems impossible, just think about how efficiently and effectively the city runs the parking violations unit. One minute after your meter expires, the transit cop is there writing the ticket…

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

On the importance and unimportance of naming things.

A new kind of ant has descended on the coastal belt outside Houston. The ant beats out other pests for food, is a prodigious reproducer, and has no known enemies (except the homeowners and exterminators who live on the coastal belt outside Houston). But there’s one thing this new ant lacks that other ants have — a bone fide name. (Locals call them running ants, but there’s as yet no official scientific name.)

But, when it comes down to it, whether those hordes of tiny insects have a name or not must seem irrelevant when they’re infesting your yard.

David Brooks picked up on the idea that Obama, obliquely criticized by Bush’s speech in Israel to the Knesset, may not have intended to espouse a philosophy of appeasing terrorists. To his credit, Brooks contacted Obama and asked him to explain more about his foreign policy ideas, and, in particular, his ideas about handling the likes of Hezbollah.

That’s where the credit ends. Brooks sounds a little like Bush in his instinctive response to Obama’s remarks. And just as ill informed and naive about the history of diplomacy. As I wrote yesterday, when it comes to achieving peace, there’s no progress without communication of some sort or another.

“Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy?” Brooks asks. “Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform?” (I’ve inverted the sequence of these two quotes.)

Through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, when the Provisional IRA (the IRA) carried out apparently endless campaigns of violence against other Irish citizens, the British army, and British citizens, there seemed to be no way to reach a peaceable conclusion. For a very long time, the British trotted out the line that they wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorists. And what happened in the end? In 2005, after much discussion and compromise on both sides, the IRA renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA has been integrated into Irish politics.

Is Obama naive, or are those who refuse to talk naive?

And although the courts in California have decided that gays can wed, anti-gay wedders society (epitomized by Randy Thomasson, head of Campaign for Children and Families) now seek an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

What do these three stories have in common? you may be wondering. Well, it strikes me that from a philosophical perspective these three stories pivot on the naming of something.

• The new ants have no name. This somehow makes them seem more threatening.
• Bush and others, having slapped a terrorist sticker on an organization, want to use this label to rule out anything that might be seen as legitimizing that group’s concerns.
• And the brouhaha over gay marriage seems to be more about nomenclature than practicalities. Not that there aren’t practicalities to be debated, there are, of course, but the emotion seems to derive from whether the label “marriage” can be applied to a same sex union.

But here we have the really difficult question, do names matter, philosophically speaking. Psychologically, they clearly do. But if we can narrow a concept and label it have we achieved anything more or less than narrowing a concept and labeling it?

There are two answers: Without names or labels for concepts we can’t discuss anything, we can’t communicate. But without qualifications to those names and labels, and careful use, we risk encamping behind words that evoke emotion but not reason.