Month: December 2024

Angela Lansbury’s Exercise Video

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A friend recently told me about Angela Lansbury’s exercise video. It’s really quite fascinating:

I’m not entirely sure that “exercise video” is really the right word to describe it. The actual title is Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves. It’s subtitled, A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being At Any Age. It reminds me of some of the videos I’ve seen of old people doing Tai Chi in public parks in China—mostly slow, deliberate movements through a fairly large range of motion.

Given the popularity, today, of moving quickly and lifting heavy things (or even of lifting heavy things quickly) it’s easy to look at a video like this and scoff. Is it even an exercise video? At the time (1988) it was possible to cover oneself neck to foot in spandex, throw on some leg warmers, and move with a great deal more vigor to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. Or you could sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons. And if you didn’t have the spandex and leg warmers, you could do the same thing to Jack Lalanne’s TV show—and you could even buy one of his “glamour bands,” which was basically a modern resistance band before they were popular. (If you could get reruns; his TV show ended its long run in 1985.)

So why get Angela Lansbury’s tape where, by modern standards, she barely does anything?

The thing is, there’s a lot embedded within those modern standards. It’s not just what we do, such as pumping iron. It’s also what we want. Those of us who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and beyond have different goals for our bodies than people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s did. Even those of us who don’t work out want to be muscular and strong. That was not nearly so much a goal of people who grew up in the 1930s and 40s. Especially by the time they were in their fifties and sixties in the 1980s (by “grew up” I’m referring to when they were old enough to remember cultural influences). Not all of them, of course. Charles Atlas and other strong men had a market back in the 1930s. But for a lot of people, and especially women at the time, they had no great interest in being strong and muscular; mostly what they wanted, if they had aspirations of fitness at all, was to not fall apart. You have to remember that they grew up at a time when medical advice often featured the health-promoting benefits of rest. Women might be prescribed weeks of bed-rest after giving birth; there’s a family story of my grandmother finally being allowed to dangle her legs over the side of the bed several days after giving birth to my mother (or one of her sisters; I can’t remember which).

Angela Lansbury’s exercise video makes a great deal more sense for that kind of goal. Moreover, if that’s a person’s goal, they might already have weakened to the point where Positive Moves is actually challenging. There are various points at which Angela gives alternatives for if the movement she’s doing is too strenuous or the viewer otherwise can’t do it. And thinking back, they were movements it seems possible that both of my grandmothers in the 1980s might have found challenging. It’s something to consider that there are people who haven’t sat down on the ground and gotten up from it in years.

If a movement is too hard to do, and by doing a modification you’re able to work up to it—that is, by definition, building strength. It can be misleading, to us, that the maximum amount of strength that someone wants to build is so far below the maximum that they’re capable of, but I think it’s interesting to try to imaginatively enter into this kind of mindset. The more difficult it is to imagine, the greater the benefit to our ability to see things from another’s perspective in trying. I’m not going to stop squatting with a barbell loaded to hundreds of pounds on my shoulders in favor of doing Angela Lansbury’s positive moves, but I think it is useful as a workout video for one’s imagination.

The Parable of the Dishonest Steward

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized2 Comments

The parable of the dishonest steward appears in the Gospel of Luke, and is very interesting:

Then he also said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

This is a perplexing parable because Jesus is drawing a lesson from a dishonest man, which presents the difficulty of figuring out which parts we’re supposed to copy and which parts we’re not. And other questions like, “why did the master praise the dishonest steward for giving away his property?” To figure this out, we need to look at what actually happened: yes, the dishonest steward gave away some of his master’s property by canceling some of the debt, but he didn’t give it all away. And he could have.

In modern times, when a person is fired, the usual procedure is to lock them out of all of the computer systems of a business before telling them that they’re fired, so they can’t do anything bad on their way out. But the master doesn’t do this with the dishonest Steward. Instead, he leaves him Steward until he has drawn up a full account of his stewardship. Why?

Because the master didn’t know what he had.

In order to know what was his, he needed the dishonest steward to tell him. The dishonest steward was thus in a position to give away everything. If he told his master, “I’m sorry, but you’re broke” the master did not know better.

Further, since he was still steward, he was within his rights to entirely cancel the debts of the people whose debts he partially forgave. It was not honest, but it was his right. So why didn’t he entirely cancel out the debt of those debtors?

We’re not told, of course, but there is a strong hint in the fact that he did not forgive the same amount to both debtors. He forgave one half his debt and the other a fifth of his debt. Since he was praised for being prudent, we must assume that he forgave different amounts because of reasons specific to each, that is, because it was prudent. Perhaps the one could only repay half anyway, and the other could repay four fifths. Perhaps the one who was forgiven half had done something for the master earlier while the one who was forgiven a fifth hadn’t. We don’t know, but we must presume that the actions made sense in context.

And what about this from the master’s perspective, when he hears about it? Had the Steward canceled the entire debt, he would be very angry at the dishonest steward. But he was left with two thirds of what he was owed, which was far better off than he might have been. It’s not optimal, but if the master was realistic—and he seems to have been realistic—he got rid of the steward far more cheaply than he might realistically have and better than many have. (Just look up the history of how many sports figures were left penniless by dishonest business managers.) Moreover, he might even have received some small benefits from the forgiveness of the debt in addition to the money he got back. If the one who was forgiven half of his debt had done something for the master, that debt is now paid. If the debtor was only able to pay half, he might now get the half promptly. If nothing else, in not making a fuss over the canceled portion of the debt, he might at least receive good will from the debtor in case the situation is ever reversed and the master is the one who owes. It’s possible that he got rid of the dishonest steward even more cheaply than we know.

This also shows a great deal of understanding of human nature on the part of the dishonest steward, because consider what happens next: he’s going to ask the people whose debts he reduced for a job. That’s a delicate thing to do when he was just fired for dishonesty. Sure, they have reason to like him, but at the same time a job for many years can easily cost a lot more than twenty kors of wheat, especially if the guy is dishonest. Critically, he shows that while he’s dishonest, he’s not too dishonest. If the debtors are at all reasonable, they know that it’s very hard to find a completely honest man—consider how long Diogenese looked without finding one—so one who is only a bit dishonest is a reasonable choice. And he proved himself to be only somewhat dishonest by his actions when the metaphorical fecal matter had hit the artificial wind generator, i.e. when he was deeply stressed and might have been desperate or resentful.

Putting this all together, we can see what Christ referred to when he said that the children of his world are more prudent in dealing with this generation. The dishonest steward knew how people thought and acted, and acted accordingly. In modern terms, his psychology was good, even if his morals were not. He knew how to effectively manipulate people; he manipulated them with the truth. The great advantage of manipulating people with the truth is that, when they find out, they are not angry with you.

And here we come to the part to imitate: the common name for manipulating a person to his own benefit is “supporting” him. We, each of us, have an influence on the people we meet in this life, and if we will their good, we should support them. To do that, we must be able to understand things from their perspective, and how we and they and the things under our control relate, and then use the truth to manipulate them to their benefit. That is, to effectively support them.

I think that this also sheds some light on what Jesus says after—to use dishonest wealth to make friends so we will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. All wealth—all possessions—always have some dishonesty about them because we never do a perfect job. Everything we make, or deliver, or do for another is always, because of our human weakness, at least slightly less than it should be. But this does not completely invalidate it; there is still good that we can do with it and if we use it well—that is, prudently—it can make people better off and it’s worth doing this. And it’s not easy to do this and it’s worth putting the effort into doing it well.

This stands against the mistake of being “so good that you’re good for nothing,” that is, so fixated on purity that you never accomplish anything good. That’s not to say that one should choose to be dishonest; heaven forbid. But it does mean that there are limits to how much one should allow the fear of what is technically called “remote material cooperation” to prevent one from ever doing anything.

World War 2 And the Religion of the State

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized6 Comments

I was recently reminded of how much of western culture, in the 1970s, was about World War 2. In that period, the second world war was only thirty years before and the people of responsible age (that is, those in their forties through their sixties) had spent many of their formative years in it. And World War 2, which was in many ways only the second great industrial war, had been a total war in a way the world had not really seen before. And I think that this total war had the effect, as few other things besides Communism have had, of turning the state into a religion. And I think that this may have had some strange effects afterwards.

When I say that the second World War turned the state into a religion, I mean that the war, and by extension the state, became the primary purpose of its citizens’ lives. (I’m going to confine my remarks to America, since I know its history best, but from what I’ve read this was largely true of many other countries as well.) This was not absolute, of course, and individuals might have maintained a better set of priorities. Still, the state tried very hard to make itself the purpose of its citizens lives. You can see this in the way that people were encouraged to do everything “for the war effort”. You can find all sorts of examples of magazine ads by companies who aren’t selling products because their factories are now making weapons, but that they will one day resume, so don’t forget them! There was also an enormous amount of propaganda produced, which covered almost everything, since the war touched on almost everything. There were ads which encouraged people to accept rationing of food. There were ads encouraging people to put all their spare money into government bonds rather than buy things for themselves. There were ads that encouraged young women to get a job in the war effort to help bring their sweethearts and husbands home sooner. And from what I recall talking to relatives to had lived through it, much of it worked. As much as people might grumble and there was a thriving black market, people did take up the spirit of the thing and often think about the war effort whose nearest land battles were many thousands of miles away.

And the thing is, while all this can be done as a matter of secondary loyalty, fallen human beings are weak and this kind of total subservience to the state had the effect, I am beginning to suspect, of supplanting God with the state in the hearts of many people. I’ve heard the explanation that many people fell away from Christianity after WW2 because Christian churches were too compliant with the governments that brought us to such an awful war. The horrors of World War 2 broke people. Christianity’s old tired answers were no longer good enough. I’ve heard many such things. And, truth be told, they’ve never sounded very convincing. Christianity made sense under the horrors of the Roman empire and Germanic barbarism but didn’t make sense after the horrors of World War 2? The secular governments of the world plunged people into war and starvation, and Christianity didn’t stand against them enough, so let’s abandon Christianity and become completely secular? These aren’t serious explanations.

The explanation that the people started worshiping an idol—the State—and as idol worship does, this caused the people to turn away from God? That does, at least, explain.

I don’t want to overstate this idea. I’m just beginning to turn it over in my mind. But it does explain a bunch of things which had always not-quite-fit.

Rumpole of the Bailey Seems Almost Good

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Starting in the mid 1970s, there was a British TV series called Rumpole of the Bailey, which was about a barrister named Rumpole. It was a bit of a courtroom drama and a bit of a comedy. Rumpole was a highly skilled barrister who had a tendency to quote the poetry of Wadsworth and to wax occasionally philosophical. My father used to watch it, when I was a child, and I recently had a hankering for it.

Here’s the first episode ever made:

The actor, Leo McKern, did a fantastic job. He really sold the character, and gave him an outsized amount of vivacity. It’s easy to be quite taken with Rumpole.

Until you watch a full episode or two.

Rumpole is not a good man. The writer, John Mortimer, who was a barrister and from his biography on Wikipedia not a good man either, plays a trick that I’ve seen a fair amount in nihilistic works: putting in little tidbits that suggest that Rumpole is a good man in order to keep the audience going.

To give an example: in the third episode, Rumpole has successfully defended a woman on a major drug charge by impugning the evidence against her, but the case adjourns for lunch before the charge can be dismissed and during that adjournment she tells Rumpole that she did in fact buy the drugs. Once she has told him that she is guilty, he can no longer defend her and only advise her to enter a guilty plea. There’s a scene where he explains this to her, but rather than saying that he is morally obligated to be truthful, he says that the book containing the barrister code of ethics is his religion.

I’ve grown to rather despise this kind of trick, of suggesting that the character has principles only to pull the rug out and have him say that he doesn’t, but always in a way that it’s just possible to doubt. Except that there is also the clear evidence that he doesn’t really have principles. In the first episode, there’s the issue of his son who he has raised spectacularly badly. So badly, it’s clear that he never tried—a point his son makes by pointing out that at age seven he was sent away from home to various boarding schools and never really knew his parents after. In the third episode, Rumpole (a married man) more-or-less accepts sexual bribery from his client in order to stay on the case when he wants to leave after she confessed to the crime.

I was strung along for about four seasons of the show House by this same basic trick, until I finally figured out that Dr. House was, in fact, the villain of the show.

It’s a great pity because Rumpole could easily have been a really good show. It did not depend on the poor character of Horace Rumpole for anything that made it good.

Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.

Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.

The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.

The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.

The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.

The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.

OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.

To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.

Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.

If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.

On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”

The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.

Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.

So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.

1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)

2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.

3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.

When Libertines Advocate Self Control

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Several years ago, a British feminist by the name of Louise Perry wrote a book called The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I haven’t read the book, but I’ve read a bunch of things Ms. Perry has written, including her own description of the book. She is careful to explain that she does not want to return to the sexual morality of before the sexual revolution, just to avoid the excesses of the sexual revolution. And I recently read an essay (originally published in 2022) which discusses the book, by libertine writer Bridget Phetasy, titled I Regret Being a Slut. She, too, does not want to return to traditional sexual morality, she just doesn’t like the results of the sexual revolution either. And neither of these women is at all unique.

In both cases, their writing is a bit like a man who talks about how it’s exhilarating to jump off a building, but not to hit the ground, so it’s best to continually fall past the seventh floor. That might be the point in one’s fall which is the most fun, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.

The problem with this kind of thinking—it applies to all libertines who want the benefits of self-control without the downsides of self-control—is that it is, at its core, utilitarianism. There are many problems with utilitarianism (see Why Consequentialism Doesn’t Work), but the relevant problem is that it has no power to motivate people. Forgoing certain short-term benefit for the sake of uncertain long-term gain is very tricky to justify. And even if you can, a justification which is best done in a complicated Excel spreadsheet will, at best, be lifeless and dull, even if it does manage to convince someone in the abstract. And that’s ignoring the problem that, since we can’t know the probabilities with any certainty, you can always doubt the conclusion by quibbling with some of the numbers.

To put it more concretely, forgoing certain short-term benefit for uncertain long-term benefit only makes sense under one of two conditions:

  1. Extreme optimism
  2. A principle which says that you should even if it doesn’t benefit you

Very few people are extremely optimistic, for the simple reason that, in a secular sense, it’s stupid to be that optimistic. Lots of people are unlucky. And there’s a further problem: if you’re this optimistic, you might just as easily be optimistic that you can have both the short-term and long-term benefits.

That only leaves option #2: principle. But principles are exactly the thing that the libertines don’t want.

To take it back to the example from which this started: the libertine feminist advocating for sexual restraint is in the awkward position of saying that people should be free to have as much sex as they want before marriage, if they even want to get married, but they shouldn’t want sex before marriage and should want to get married because that works out better in the long run. The problem is that, if something actually does work out better in the long run, it means that you’re wise to do it and foolish to not do it. And it’s bad to be foolish.

That’s the thing which always sabotages this kind of quasi-libertine in the end: they want people to make good decisions about everything except for who to associate with. Because the only people who willingly associate with fools are other fools1. Deciding who we depend on is very nearly the most important decision we can make; asking people to exercise good judgement except for in their associations is nonsensical. Doubly so when it’s a particular kind of association that you want them to exercise good judgement on.

If a person has been sexually promiscuous, and it is accepted that sexual promiscuity is bad judgement, it means that the person has bad judgement. This is, by the way, as true of men as of women. If you read old literature instead of modern pornography set in older times, you will find that a male being sexually continent was praiseworthy and expected, while being sexually promiscuous was something he was quite desirous of hiding. The only difference was that a male was, typically, not dependent on forming a marriage to pay for his upkeep because there was a great deal of difficult work to be done in the world (soldiering, sailing, and the like) and so even as an outcast from polite society he could at least feed himself on his own. Also, people just didn’t care as much what happened to males. (You can find stories where a male who does need to make a good marriage will go to great lengths to hide his promiscuity, such as the King of Bohemia in the Sherlock Holmes story, A Scandal in Bohemia.)

Anyway, the point is that you can’t have a society in which it is accepted that only fools with poor self control are sexually promiscuous and it’s also considered just fine to be sexually promiscuous if a person wants to be. You can see this exact problem with alcohol. No one wants to associate with a drunkard (except for other drunkards2) and anyone considering marriage with a drunkard will be warned off of it by all of their friends and family. The same is true of gambling addictions, or narcotic addictions. In fact, you will be very hard pressed to find any behavior that is generally regarded as extremely foolish where only low-self-control people engage in it that people would not try to dissuade someone from marrying into.

Which is why a libertine cannot make an effective case for self-control. If they manage to make it, the world will cease to be one in which people can freely do whatever the libertine is trying to discourage.

I don’t have much patience for people who discuss sex and marriage without relation to children and child-rearing, but there is something especially tiresome about people trying to do so in order to promote things which are much better argued in reference to children and child-rearing. Perhaps this is done in order to soothe the reader; to lull her into a false sense of security so she’ll actually hear the authoress out. I have my doubts that any such deception will work, and I gravely doubt that it will work in the long-term, because it will damage the trust placed in the authoress.

Though perhaps, for the intended audience, this is one of those “white lies” like the stereotypical answer to the stereotypical woman asking her stereotypical husband whether a stereotypical hideous dress she is going to wear anyway looks good. Perhaps no one believes it, so no one will be deceived, but the willingness to tell the superficial lie signifies that the person is on the other’s side. “I’m only telling you to exercise a bit of self control. I’m not telling you that you have to believe in God or listen to your grandma or do anything for anyone else.”

Well, there are a lot of very weak and timid people in the world.

1. And saints who are trying to help them. But there aren’t many saints to go around, and they don’t associate in the same way anyway. A saint may well take on the company of a young fool and advise them, but the saint doesn’t marry the young fool or depend on them in any other way.

2. See 1.

Clearing Plates at Family Gatherings

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

In America, Thanksgiving and Christmas tend to be occasions for family gatherings with a large meal. People often talk while they eat, and when people are done eating and only talking, it is extremely common to see the women of the family get up and start clearing the plates away while the males continue to talk. Around this time, a few unpleasant women who don’t understand human beings very well will write articles complaining about this. So for the sake of young people who might be taken in by one of those articles, I will explain what’s going on.

Unless you’re really into cooking, making thanksgiving dinner isn’t actually a lot of work. It takes perhaps fifteen minutes to put the turkey on a tray, season the skin, and put it in the oven at 325F for 3-5 hours (depending on size). Mashed potatoes or if you have better taste mashed sweet potatoes are another fifteen minutes of work. Bread, you can easily just buy at the store. If you’re not making it from scratch, add another fifteen minutes for the stuffing. Putting that all together, it’s an hour of work for a single person. That’s not trivial, but it’s not that much work. I’ve done significantly more work than that for minor dinner parties, and it’s not more work than one might do barbecuing food at a cookout. Cleaning up a dozen plates from a table is, if you’re doing it yourself, perhaps five minutes. If you have a dishwasher (as everyone who writes articles complaining that men talk instead of helping does), add another five minutes for scraping food off of plates and loading them into the dishwasher. If this is a major amount of work for you which might break you unless you get help, as the kids would say, you’re NGMI (not gonna make it).

Of course, that’s not what’s going on. Except for the occasional host with significant health problems—and the family member with significant health problems almost never hosts family gatherings—the host of family gatherings is not overwhelmed by the work involved and doesn’t need help. The reason why all the women help is because this is an expression of female social bonding. Identifying ways to help each other and helping unasked is a way that women reinforce their social bonds. When there’s nothing to do, asking, “what can I do to help” is a next best thing, which is why you will see it asked even when there’s obviously nothing to do to help. The point isn’t the actual work, but the affirmation of the social bond in the offer. This is also why the typical response is, “there’s nothing right now,” followed by a list of what’s going on. The point of this is not the actual inventory, but the affirmation of the bond by sharing concerns and implicitly inviting the other woman to help monitor them. (There’s actually a bit of an art to this because a woman can give offense by usurping some decision-making in her effort to help; young women generally watch their elders navigate this and learn the art by the time they’re old enough to take part as adults.) This is why when one woman gets up and starts to collect plates, the rest of the women jump up and start collecting plates too—they are affirming their social bonds by all working together.

This type of social bonding is markedly different from male social bonding, which can be readily observed at a cookout, where it’s traditionally the males who do most of the work. Males can, without giving offense, make a perfunctory offer of assistance to the male host, but mostly they don’t because assuming that another man can handle everything is a sign of respect. Further letting the male host do whatever grilling and other work is involved in hosting without interference is also an implicit sign of respect. Males will, however, make a point of hanging out with and talking to the host, because conversation about interesting subjects is a primary way adult males affirm social bonds.

So at the big family meal, when the women clean the plates together and the males keep talking, both are engaging in their sex’s typical form of social bonding. The two groups bond with each other by the men showing appreciation for the (in truth, quite small) labor of the women, and the women bond with the males by enabling the conversation which is maintained. The males can be rude by taking the generosity of the women for granted, the women can be rude by interrupting the conversation with work that can easily be left for after people are done talking.

The unpleasant women who write articles complaining about this dynamic at social gatherings are people with poorly developed social skills that don’t know how male social dynamics work and who assume that female social dynamics are the only social dynamics and so regard males as dysfunctional women. So they’re trying to guilt them into being functional women. (They’re also trying to parasocially bond with other women with poor social skills who don’t understand the full range of social dynamics by communal complaining.)

Useful Mistakes, or The Three Principle Virtues of a Perl Programmer

On By Christopher LansdownIn Life Skills, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a great meme that goes around on occasion, which is a motivational poster of some kind with the words:

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy.

If you’re not familiar, it’s a reference to a line from JFK’s famous speech, justifying the moon program:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

There is truth in Kennedy’s approach—it is the basic foundation of how we teach children—but it is extremely rarely done by adults for the simple reason that adults usually have better things to do. The truth is that the moon shot program wasn’t really about human advancement. It was a massive game of capture-the-flag played with the Soviets as a PR stunt, which is why we and they both stopped shortly after the US captured the flag (by which I mean, planted a flag on the moon).

Which gets us back to the original quote: there are a lot of times when somebody does something useful because he thought it was going to be a lot easier than it turned out to be, but by the time he put a lot of time into it he found that the harder version was actually worth doing, especially because he was now in a place to do it with a lot less work than if he was starting from scratch. And this is an example of what I would call a useful mistake. Another example would be what Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language, famously called the three principle virtues of a Perl programmer.

Those virtues were: laziness, impatience, and hubris. These are, of course, rhetorical, since laziness, impatience, and hubris are actually vices. What Larry meant (and explained in his own words) was that there are things that look like these things, but are actually good habits. What he called laziness is really foresight; good design so as to avoid having to do excess work in the future. What he called impatience is really ambition, or the desire to solve problems—to not be willing to sit through endless drudge-work when it was possible to write a program to do the drudge-work instead. And what he called hubris was really faith—the faith that one could see the task through to its conclusion. “I can do this,” in spite of not (yet) being able to point to conclusive evidence that you can.

The ideal would be, of course, to have a perfectly accurate estimation of both the amount and difficulty of the work to be done, and also of one’s ability to get it done. We very rarely achieve perfection, though, and so choosing the kind of failure mode we want is important. Would we prefer to fail at our estimations in a way that makes us start more projects, or start fewer projects? That is, is it better to waste time when we make imperfect estimations of difficulty and our ability, or to leave undone things we could have accomplished? I think that there is much to be said for the former, because we can always give up when it turns out that something was too difficult for us, and this will help to refine our skill at estimating difficulty. If we bias our failures towards leaving things undone, there’s no reason we’d ever decide to start up, and there will be nothing giving us feedback about our accuracy of estimating difficulty.

So I think that there’s a lot to be said for slightly under-estimating how hard things will be; your life will tend to be better off for it. And to counter-balance people saying that you should be humble about your abilities, this is just being humble about your ability to estimate how difficult something is. Ultimately, when it comes to worthwhile things, we never know what we’re getting ourselves into, so we have to live by the faith that something good will come of our efforts. This is really just making the decision to have some faith.