Tag: love

Caroline Furlong on Fights vs. Fluff in Men’s Fiction

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I came across another very interesting post by Caroline Furlong which can probably best be described as explaining to women why men’s fiction has so much action and so little emotional talk, but there’s quite a lot more in it—including some interesting discussion of people being trustworthy vs. people who abuse trust, for example—and I recommend reading it in full:

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 17: Too Much Action, Not Enough…Fluff?

Something I think worth mentioning is that people (I do not mean Ms. Furlong) often confuse what takes up most of the words of a story with what the story is about. I think that there’s a very useful analogy to be had, here, from a physical lens: a lens is a large piece of glass whose purpose is to focus a large quantity of light down to a small point. Similarly, a story is very often a large quantity of words whose focus is a scene or two. But the whole point of all of those words is to earn that scene.

This can easily be shown by taking any truly great scene and showing it to someone who doesn’t know the story. It will, invariably, mean nothing to them. Or you can even see this in jokes: if you tell someone the punchline of a joke without its setup, it’s not funny.

The emotional scenes in men’s fiction are much like this: the extremely rare times when manly men talk about their feelings with each other are incredibly important, but only if you earn them by properly setting up the extremely rare circumstances where this is natural and healthy and manly. A really great example of this is the ending of Casablanca. The speech that Rick gives Victor Laszlo is an example of it; in it he tells him how he feels about Ilsa. It’s also subtle but you can see Victor Laszlo tell Rick how he feels; his almost-smile as he accepts what Rick tells him without believing it, and the way he welcomes Rick back to the fight. Much of the ensuing dialog between Rick and Captain Renault conveys how they feel, even if you have to read between the lines see it. But then you get the magnificent final line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” It is magnificent precisely because it is earned by the entirety of the movie that led up to it.

You can also see this in well-written male characters which are written by women, by the way. Consider Mr. Darcy from Pride & Prejudice. It is precisely his reserve that makes it so striking that he says to Elizabeth, “I must tell you how ardently I admire and love you.” It is this reserve that makes the letter he wrote to Elizabeth so meaningful. It’s what makes this line so powerful:

“If you will thank me,” he replied, “let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you, might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe, I thought only of you.”

More properly, it’s his reserve combined with all the rest of what he’s done and what happened, that all of these things are earned and we learn of his feelings in conditions that make it reasonable and manly of him to communicate them in those very unusual moments.

All of this stands in contrast to that women’s fiction which is mostly “fluff.” That’s Ms. Furlong’s term for it, but I think it’s well chosen, because the emotions are mostly very transient—like the lilies of the field, they are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire. This reflects the feminine orientation toward maintaining a household, which involves keeping track of many people and their current relationships to each other. Speaking as someone who does a lot of this himself because he has three children, you need to keep track of how everyone’s doing because the day-to-day changes in people are significant. When someone is suddenly quieter, there’s a good chance that they’re sick—or have some other problem that they need help with. If they’re suddenly louder, they might have a problem they need help with or they might be getting more caffeine than they realize. If they feel lousy and are lethargic about things that they want to do, they’re probably sick, whereas when they just feel lousy they might be having a stress reaction to something they don’t want to do. Similarly, some problems between kids they need to work out on their own, but some you need to step in and guide them to work out because they’re not doing it on their own and you don’t want to let problems fester. Letting problems fester leads to less well-developed social skills than when you step in and fix the problems they can’t, because people will mal-adapt to bad circumstances. Those women who have a facility for this—and it’s probably most of them—find the application of this facility to fiction satisfying, in a very analogous way to how many men find carving, or woodworking, or beating a video game very satisfying to their facility for problem solving. Thus the fluff—tons of transient emotions on display—gives lots of scope for refining one’s reading of people based on their trivial actions and comparing to the feelings that they express. (This is, of course, an oversimplification of what’s appealing about it to the people to whom it appeals.)

Caroline Furlong on Men Expressing Emotions

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I came across this very interesting post by Caroline Furlong when I noticed that she had linked to my post Women Want Men To Show Emotion. I recommend reading her post in full, it’s very interesting:

Writerly Sound Bites, Number 18: A Look at the Male Psyche as Presented in Fiction

The one thing I would note about her description of how men deal with anger is that—for very understandable reasons, given that her primary focus is writing fiction—she is mostly describing how young men deal with anger. (Oversimplifying: finding a legitimate target for aggression like a punching bad or wood that needs to be chopped.)

Turning into an adult greatly amplifies the intensity of the feelings one experiences (this is one reason why it’s so hard to be a teenager) and young men aren’t used to this yet. Also, if they’ve been raised at all well they’ve been taught self control, but it’s still a relatively new skill. So finding a legitimate target for aggression serves a purpose they mostly don’t realize it does: physical exhaustion. When an angry man hits a legitimate target over and over until he’s exhausted, this doesn’t directly help him to process the emotions. What it does is physically exhaust him. This counteracts the physical arousal that comes with anger, giving him the ability to think clearly—at least until he recovers his energy. Which is why it’s so important for him to actually do some thinking once he’s tired. This is also why this is where you usually see the older man come talk to him and he’s somewhat receptive. Once he’s tired, he can think, and the older man gets him to do it. Then he leaves and gives the young man time to think about what was just said. But very frequently the scene ends with the young man, who is now somewhat physically recovered, hitting things again. That’s because the physical arousal that returns as his exhaustion dissipates is clouding his ability to think again.

As men get older and more experienced, the physical arousal diminishes slightly but more importantly it’s familiar. In the same way that older men tolerate pain better than younger men do because it doesn’t scare them, older men deal with anger better because it doesn’t distract them so much. This allows them to get to the part that actually helps with the feelings more directly: thinking about the problem. Thinking it through, thinking about whether it was perceived correctly, thinking about how to handle it, thinking about how to handle all of the possible outcomes, etc. This is what actually helps a man deal with the emotion of anger: understanding what caused it and how to deal with it; having a plan for dealing with it.

It is possible that there’s too much to think through for a short time, of course, in which case one needs to think about it in the back of one’s mind while doing other things. When this is the case, thinking about it in the foreground of one’s thoughts is helpful occasionally—almost to check in on one’s progress in figuring it out—but it’s unhelpful or even counter-productive most of the time. In these cases a man will need to distract himself, and will usually do so with some kind of problem solving. Preferably, by doing something useful, but things like video games can also work. The critical thing to understand about this is that it’s not the man refusing to deal with his problems. It is, in fact, the man dealing with this problems. It’s just him dealing with the problems slowly, because that’s the only way that will work. It’s a bit like sleeping on a big decision like buying a house or a car. It’s not that your internal monologue is all about the purchase, but you are none the less doing something useful; if no objections occur to you in that time period it is much more likely to be a good decision. In like manner, when there’s some really big problem making a man angry, shoving it to the back of his consciousness and focusing on other things helps his mind to sort it out. Sometimes what you need are to make connections to things you don’t remember, but over time will think of and then see the connection. But the critical thing to realize is that this is actually quite constructive. If you force to him only think in the foreground of his mind about the thing making him angry, he won’t be able to pull together the various threads of his knowledge and thoughts necessary to really understand his problem and formulate a plan to deal with it. And he will feel awful until he does that. This is why a man talking about his feelings is often not just unhelpful but outright counter-productive. It’s getting in the way of doing the thing that will make him feel better, and emphasizing all of the stuff that makes him feel bad.

Anyway, that’s just an addendum to what Ms. Furlong said. Go read the post, it’s very much worth the time.

Women Want Men To Show Emotion

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

A few days ago a tweet went viral about men showing emotion:

wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

A great many people objected to this because, if a man follows this simply as described, the results are pretty much always a disaster. That’s because there’s a communication gap going on. What she wants is not, in fact, men “openly showing their emotions.” Men have very big emotions and many of them women would find terrifying if exposed to the full force of them. Also, if you’re speaking in the context of people who are merely dating, a man blubbering, out of control, will probably kill any attraction that the woman felt to him.

What she’s actually talking about but not saying clearly is that she wants communication. There’s an old saying in writing fiction that when people give feedback about your story, they’re usually right in what the problem is and wrong about what the solution is. This is a good example of that. If you ignore the suggested solution and focus on the problem, you can see that it’s a real problem.

instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall

If you focus on this part, you can see that this is a legitimate problem. If a man does not communicate anything about his emotional state, at any time, to any degree, his wife will have no idea what’s going on, where he stands, where they stand, whether she can support him, whether it’s a good time to ask for things that eventually need to be done, etc. etc. etc.

And bear in mind that when I talk about her supporting him, I’m not primarily talking about giving him a shoulder to cry on so he can “get it out.” Men mostly don’t work that way. We don’t “get it out.” Talking about feelings does not exhaust them, or reduce them, or put them in perspective. If anything, it amplifies them and makes them harder to deal with. But within a marriage, there are many things each spouse does to support the other. This can range from things like getting the other one a food they particularly like to spending time with them in a way that’s relaxing or fun to letting them know that you’re fine with any outcome. (“Even if it doesn’t work out, we’ll be fine” can take a lot of stress out of many situations.)

For this and other reasons, reliable communication about how the man is doing, emotionally, is extremely helpful to his wife. (I’m talking about wives; all of this is merely prospective when it’s about a girlfriend because she is subconsciously evaluating what life will be like as a wife.) But the key things about this communication is that it is reliable and intelligible. None of this requires it to be performative. You do not need to cry to tell a woman that you’re feeling sad. You do not need to shout to tell her that you’re angry or laugh giddily to tell her that you’re happy. There is substantial individual variation, of course, but it is, in general, quite sufficient to simply describe your feelings in kind and magnitude. Things such as, “I’m not looking forward to work today. Nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired and I haven’t had a break in a while,” and “This problem at work is really stressing me. We’re going to be fine, but the customer is losing $1000 a day and calls us like every hour to see how it’s going” are usually quite sufficient, so long as they’re said with an intonation consonant with the meaning. (All bets are off if you sound like an android when you speak.)

This communicates what she needs to know in order to be a loving wife who works with you to try to make a happy household in which you are raising happy children. However much you deal with your own problems, doing so will inevitably use some of the resources you have for dealing with other problems such as family members making mistakes and being annoying or hurtful or whatever; when they know that you’re dealing with something big they can take extra trouble to not bother you and be extra tolerant if you snap. This is exactly the same as how you treat a person who has a headache or a cold with extra care and are more tolerant—which is why it’s important to tell people when you have a headache or a cold.

But that’s the thing—you want to tell them. The goal is not to simply give up all control and show people exactly how you’re feeling. You want to communicate like a rational human being who trusts the people to whom he is communicating.

And, indeed, this is attractive to women. If you communicate in a controlled way, she will feel that she is able to actually bond with you and form a relationship with you but will not feel that you are weak. Indeed; by letting her know how you feel, she is better able to gauge your strength. Weak people need to conceal their weakness for fear that it will be exploited, just as injured animals like to curl up in a place where no one can get at them and snarl viciously at anything that comes near so it doesn’t get closer. If you do not communicate at all, that can come across as being afraid of her getting close to you, which is weakness. Which is fair, because it often is. It is only strong people who are willing to be vulnerable. The key to the whole thing is: vulnerable in a rational, self-controlled way. What women want is communication, not emotional incontinence.

The Kind of Confidence That is Attractive in Men

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Women commonly say that confidence is very attractive in a man and young men frequently misunderstand this because they think by “confidence” the women mean “believing that there is a high probability of success at what one is currently attempting.” Starting from this mistaken premise, they go on to notice that the people who most believe that their current endeavors are certain to succeed are swaggering fools. From this they they either conclude that women are self-destructive idiots, or are just completely confused. The problem, of course, is that this is not at all what the women mean. (There’s also a secondary problem that damaged women who were raised very badly tend to be attracted to men who were raised badly, and these cases supply evidence that this mistaken interpretation is correct. I’m not going to address that further, though.)

What women actually mean when they say that confidence is attractive in a man is that it is attractive when a man is rationally pursuing good goals, and both halves of that are intelligible to the woman. That requires some explanation, though, because the word “rationally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That’s for a good reason—wisdom and virtue are not easy in this fallen world. But it is, none the less, in need of elaboration.

The first and easiest thing to distinguish the rational pursuit of good goals from something that is obviously not confidence—desperation. Or, as Adam Lane Smith likes to put it, trying to get adopted like a puppy at the pound. There are different ways at arriving at this error, but they broadly fall into not having a good goal—usually, merely wanting someone to like you—or having a good goal but not rationally pursuing it: wanting a wife with whom to raise a family but snatching at any opportunity without regard to whether the woman would be a good wife, and not giving her any opportunity to find out if one would be a good father. I don’t think it needs much explanation why desperation does not come off as confident, but it will be helpful to look at the reverse: why does rationally pursuing the goal of finding a wife come off as confident?

Consider what the rational pursuit of that goal entails: the man needs to get to know the woman and to assess things like her wisdom, prudence, temperance, fortitude, patience, etc. At the same time, she will need to evaluate the same of him, and so he should be helping her to do that accurately. This will necessarily entail holding off from prematurely forming emotional bonds—it would be imprudent to become attached to a woman he may want to separate himself from, and it would be uncharitable to encourage her to become attached to him when he may wish to separate himself. Actually doing this requires willpower, but even more importantly, it requires conviction that the world is organized in such a way that the rational pursuit of these goals can actually lead to success. If the man is a Nihilist and believes that the world is merely chaotic randomness, it would not make sense to follow such a plan. But neither would it make sense to follow any other plan; if the world is unintelligible to human beings, if we are merely the playthings of evil gods, then following through on such a plan of action, with the restraint it entails, makes no sense. But here’s the thing: whether we are merely the playthings of evil gods in an unintelligible world or whether God is in his heaven and though his mills grind slowly yet they grind exceeding small, the only people who ever have long-term success are the people who follow rational plans. The people who treat the world like an unintelligible chaos always flame out after a while and usually flame out immediately. So if you want a life-partner and co-ancestor for your descendants to raise them with you, you really want someone who acts according to the conviction that rational plans are worth following. This is confidence.

Of course, confidence is evaluated according to many more pursuits of many more goals than just the pursuit of the woman herself, but especially in the beginning, that is probably the most obvious one to the woman. However, she will pretty quickly discover what other goals the man she’s evaluating as a potential husband is pursuing, and in what manner he’s pursuing them.

For example, how does he earn his living? While it is possible to approach that question in a mercenary way, it is a highly relevant question even to an ascetic who owns only two saris, as the nuns in Mother Theresa’s order do (two so that she can be clothed while she washes the other). Feeding and clothing oneself is not the highest good, but it is an important good and a noble and dignified pursuit, and one very much worth doing well. Even if a man is just a subsistence farmer, does he care for his fields or does he let them go to ruin? The answer to that question tells you quite a bit about the man and his convictions.

Does the man find anything in the world interesting in a manner worthy of an adult? To find something interesting takes work. This is related to an aphorism by G.K. Chesterton:

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

If a man finds nothing interesting besides games—which were made to interest him without effort on his part—it means that he has not taken the trouble to find interesting anything which was made for a reason other than to please him. Such a man will be a very dull conversationalist, and even more important, what kind of father can he be? If he has taken no trouble to learn about anything which exists for its own sake, how can he possibly know anything worth teaching to his children? How much will he even take the trouble to learn about his children?

I would not have the space to explain all of the possible things to learn about a man even if I were writing a book and not a blog post, but I hope that this has at least sketched out what is meant when (healthy) women say that confidence is appealing in a man.

An Interesting Lesson From A Woman Who Complains About Her Husband

On By Christopher LansdownIn Interesting Finds, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I ran across an interesting TikTok on Twitter which I think is a useful jumping-off point to some practical aspects of how to interpret low-context things on the internet:

@sheisapaigeturner

I am not alone in this experience. Many women have been in this exact same position. The work required to manage a home and a family is not something that one person should ever have to carry alone. It is possible to change these dynamics. It is hard but with the right tools and support it’s possible and it’s so much better on the other side. #marriageadvice #mentalload #mentalloadofmotherhood #divorced #divorcedmom #parentingadvice #default

♬ original sound – Paige

The first question you need to ask about anyone making almost any kind of argument is who are they and why are they making this argument. In theory this shouldn’t be necessary because arguments are supposed to stand on their own. And some in fact do. It doesn’t matter who is making the argument for God from contingency and necessity because that argument actually does stand on its own. You can simply examine its premises and the logical links in it and that’s sufficient. But for most arguments that people make, when you examine the argument, you will see that people use themselves as an authority in their argument. In technical language, their argument uses premises whose truth value can only be known by themselves, so you can only know it by trusting them when they vouch for it. The TikTok above is exactly such a thing; the premises in her argument are very much things no viewer can evaluate apart from her trustworthiness.

So the first question is: who is this woman? Of course, I’ve no idea who this particular woman is, but we do know a few things about her just from the video. First, we know that she is publicly complaining about her spouse, so we know that she has bad judgement. Second, if you’re familiar with human beings, you don’t even need the sound on to see that she is neurotic, but if you do turn the sound on, you can tell with near-certainty that she is highly neurotic. (You can also tell from how she’s dressed and the house that she filmed this in that she’s upper middle class and very concerned with status.) All of which means that she is not to be trusted on any premises she offers which require good judgement, stability, courage, or humility to be correct about.

She begins by talking about how she does all of the household work, and while I don’t necessarily doubt that she does almost all of the work that she notices, what I don’t trust her in the slightest about is that most of this work needs to be done.

Don’t get me wrong, kids are a lot of work. I’ve got three so I’m quite familiar with this. What I’m also quite familiar with is that it’s easy to multiply the work that needs to be done if you set up rules for yourself that don’t match reality. And this is where her bad judgement and neuroticism come in. It is not even a little plausible that her workflow is streamlined and matches reality. Indeed, her evident desire for status and suspiciously immaculate kitchen very strongly suggest that much of her workload in the morning is about conforming to rules that, in her mind, gives her the status she craves.

A very strong indication that what she wants is not, in fact, help with the labor is the that she complains that, when she told her husband she was overwhelmed, that he asked her what she wanted him to do (i.e. how he could help). If her actual problem was more work than she can do, the last thing in the world she would want would be someone just starting to do things without coordinating with her. No rational person wants someone to take over randomly selected jobs from them without coordinating first. Equally, no rational person thinks that another person magically knows, without communication, everything he does and how he does it and how all of the details fit into each other. Moreover, any even slightly competent adult who is overwhelmed by work and who wants help will identify which tasks they can offload with less work than doing them themselves and directly ask for help with those. The woman in this video may be unpleasant, but she’s clearly an adult and not a complete idiot, so the obvious conclusion is that what she wants is not, in fact, help with some of the household work.

(Some additional evidence of this is the particular example she cites of when she considered divorcing her husband: a particular time he didn’t take out the trash in the morning because he was running late and so she took it out and ended up being late to work as a result. Now, the odds that she was late to work because she took out the trash are, in themselves, tiny, unless their garbage cans are a quarter mile hike over difficult terrain away. But even more to the point is that she can’t possibly have needed to take out the trash in order to do anything necessary in the morning. In a reasonable worst-case scenario if she needed to throw something out that couldn’t just be left on a counter she could have just pulled out another garbage bag and left it on the floor. If they didn’t have a spare garbage bag, she could have put it in a spare plastic grocery bag. Or in a ziplock bag. Nothing irreparable or unsanitary will happen to garbage left in a bag on the floor of an empty house for eight hours. She can only have been forced to take out the trash and therefore be late to work by some unnecessary rule she has imposed on herself.)

Given that she’s got bad judgement and is almost certainly neurotic and status-seeking, what she almost certainly actually wants is someone to force her to calm down. That is, she wants someone to override her worrying so she doesn’t worry so much.

In theory this could be her husband, if he’s sufficiently manly and confident and she’s willing to trust him. Far more likely to be successful, though, is another woman that she respects. A good friend might work, but an older female relative that she respects would probably be the most effective at it. She needs to feel like she has permission from the society whose status she craves to not do these things, such that she won’t lose status for doing them. So it needs to be someone who, in her mind, can grant her that permission.

There are, of course, almost certainly some other things going on too. She’s going to want to feel valued and appreciated, but she probably can’t feel those things as long as her life and her interactions with others are dominated by status-seeking unnecessary work because very few people are any good at thanking somebody for them wasting their time, in theory on your behalf but in reality for their own sake. But this is only probable based on how human beings behave; it is less in evidence from the video.

But, to bring it back to the general: when you’re not dealing with someone wise, the problem is almost never the stated problem. As a Lindy Hop instructor of mine once put it: when you see something go wrong, the problem is usually two steps earlier.

A Modern Retelling of The Parable of The Good Samaritan

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

The parable of the Good Samaritan is well known, but I think that it is common, these days, to miss a large fraction of what it’s about. The most common interpretation, in my experience, focuses entirely on the aspect of seeing people outside of one’s group as human. In particular, that the “good guy” in the story is a Samaritan, which is the last person a Jew in Jesus time would expect to be the “good guy.” This is certainly true, and no true interpretation of scripture is invalid because every true interpretation of scripture was intended, since God, in His eternity, as he inspires it sees every moment of everyone interpreting scripture simultaneously with the moment of its writing. But there’s a great deal more to it than just that (now trite) truth, and I want to present a more modern retelling which I think will help us to notice some of these other truths in it.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with the original (including the context of why it was told).

And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”

The key word, neighbor, in the original Greek.

The first problem most of us encounter is: what on earth is a Samaritan? Most of the time we’re only told that they are people that the Jews looked down on, but we’re never told why. The thing is, it was for a good reason: the Samaritans were descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who intermarried with pagans and took up the worship of pagan gods alongside the God of Israel. They weren’t just a different ethnicity—in fact, they weren’t really a different ethnicity. They were idolaters who flagrantly broke God’s commandment to have no other gods before him and taught their children to do so. And the pagans of the time had some pretty awful practices—this was not all theoretical.

Also important to know is that the Samaritans were not an oppressed minority. Samaria was, for many hundreds of years, a separate kingdom from Judea and the two often warred with each other. By the time of Jesus the two had only recently been both brought under a unified rule, but (oversimplifying) this was only because of Roman domination, not because of any unity between the two. They were still separate places, with Jews rarely going to Samaria and Samaritans rarely going to Judea. Yes, the Jews didn’t like the Samaritans, but equally importantly, the Samaritans didn’t like the Jews.

In not mentioning that last part, we miss a great deal of what this parable is about.

So I’d like to offer a modern retelling, which captures the relationships as first centuries Jews would have understood them when listening to this parable:

Back in the 1960s, in Michigan, a black man was walking in a bad part of Detroit when some robbers caught him, beat him, and took everything he had, leaving him half dead in the street. By chance, a civil rights leader walked by and, seeing the man, moved to the other side of the road and walked by. Similarly, a baptist minister happened to be there and saw the man, switched to the other side of the road and walked past. But a KKK member who was driving by saw the man and was deeply moved. He pulled his car over, treated the man as best he could with the first aid kit he had, gently moved him into his car and drove him to the hospital. At the hospital he told them that if the man didn’t have insurance he himself would pay the bill.

Who, of the three, was the neighbor of the beaten man? If you answer, the one who took him to the hospital and paid his bills, go and do likewise.

The way Jesus’ question is often translated, “who proved neighbor” or “who was neighbor” doesn’t, it seems to me, capture all of the meaning of the Greek verb which is used. It’s more literally “who came to be neighbor”—the verb is the same verb used in the prologue of the Gospel of John where it says “all things came to be through him and not one thing came to be except through him.”

This also seems related to how the context is often forgotten about. The context is the lawyer saying that the way to eternal life is (secondarily) to love his neighbor as himself, and asking the clarificational question, “who is my neighbor?” That is, he’s asking who it is that he should love in the same manner that he loves himself. And I think it’s important to take note of the fact that Jesus never (directly) answers this question.

If you examine the parable with an eye towards the question of who had the obligation to love another in the manner he loved himself, the most direct answer that you get is that the man who was beaten by the robbers—the Samaritan became his neighbor. But that’s not what Jesus says; he does not say who anyone owes anything to. He only says to go and do like the Samaritan did.

There’s an interesting aspect to this if you look at the original Greek. The word always translated as “neighbor” is “plesion” which is actually an adverb being used as a noun. As an adverb, it means “near” or “close.” In the parable, the priest and the Levite both stayed away from the man who was beaten. Upon seeing him, they walked on the other side of the road. Only the Samaritan, upon seeing him, came close enough to touch him.

And a final thing about the parable worth considering when this happened: why was the Samaritan there? It’s actually quite strange, since Jerusalem, Jericho, and the path between them are all in Judea and not close to Samaria. The Samaritans worshiped on their own mountain, they didn’t go to Jerusalem. So it’s really rather strange that he was there. All we are told was that he was journeying—he was on his way to somewhere. That is, he was going about his own business. He was not a do-gooder who scoured the countryside looking for Jews who had been beaten up. He also wasn’t at home with a sign up that any beaten Jews should stop by. And, furthermore, he also kept going about his own business, whatever that was. He didn’t give up his journey, he only gave the innkeeper money and told him that he would repay him any further expenses on his return.

A final thought about the passage worth considering is Jesus’ final instruction: go and do likewise. He didn’t say that the Samaritan was righteous, or that the Samaritan’s idolatry was less important than his good works, or even that the Samaritan did a single other decent thing in his entire life. All Jesus said was that the lawyer should do as the Samaritan did in this particular case.

That is, he told him: show mercy to someone in your path who needs it.

The Science of Test Driving a Potential Spouse

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Science, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I recently saw someone try to support the idea of “test driving” a potential marriage partner prior to getting married in order to ensure that they are “sexually compatible”, and then in the ensuing discussion I was told to look up the research on “the wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”. My understanding is that what research in this “field” exists doesn’t support the importance of “test driving” a potential marriage partner, but that’s irrelevant because there simply can’t be any good science on this subject. We can tell that by the simple expedient of asking what kinds of experiments could get us the data we want, and discovering that it’s not possible to do them.

So, what kind of experiment would show us that “there’s a wide variability in female sexual responsiveness due to both psychological and anatomical reasons”? Clearly, we’ll need to have a large number of females copulate with a wide variety of partners and measure their responsiveness during each copulation, then compare the things to which each female maximally responded to in order to see how big the range is. You can’t leave off any of these things; if you only study a few women, you won’t have the statistical power to conclude anything. If you leave off the wide variety of partners, then you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to versus there simply being a wide variety in the degree to which women respond at all. If you leave off measuring, instead relying on surveys, you can’t differentiate between there being a wide variety in what women respond to and there being a wide variety in how women describe their response.

This experiment is both impractical and impossible; let’s discuss the impracticality of it first. One obvious problem is recruitment: there are very few people willing to copulate with a large number of strangers in a laboratory, covered in probes to measure responsiveness, and observed by experts, on command. Also, since you will have to pay the participants and this amounts to prostitution, there are relatively few places you can legally conduct this experiment, especially since bringing in the variety of women you want may well count as sex trafficking, doubly so because of the use of blindfolds to eliminate attractiveness as a confounding factor when measuring the effect of physical variations of anatomy. Moreover, getting this approved by an IRB (ethics committee) is pretty dicey. Never say never, of course.

But supposing one were to manage to work all of these practicalities out and conduct the experiment, it would not produce any data relevant to real life because people’s enjoyment and satisfaction in copulation is largely determined by their relationship to the person with whom they are copulating. Married people frequently report greater enjoyment of sex after five or ten years of marriage than right at the beginning, and it is impossible to have your experimental subjects form real relationships for years to each of the many subjects with whom they will be paired. If nothing else human beings don’t live that long, but repeated pair bonding is also well known to weaken subsequent bonds, especially without time between them. Plus people don’t form real bonds on command.

It is thus impossible, even in theory, to scientifically study the kinds of things which might support the idiotic idea of “test driving” a potential spouse. And bad science is worse than no science.

I should probably mention that the idea of test driving a spouse, in addition to being immoral, is also idiotic because it’s predicated on two premises, both of which are false:

  1. people can’t learn
  2. people don’t change

Young people are told to not pay too much attention to the looks of a potential husband or wife because looks are only skin deep and virtue, character, and personality matter far more. This is all quite true, but it’s also the case that selecting a husband or wife based on their looks is futile anyway because their looks will change as they age. You can find this with any celebrity who is in their sixties—just look at pictures of them from the various decades and while they are recognizable, they will be quite different. And celebrities tend to be selected for being people who change the least as they age.

In the same way, people’s tastes and preferences change. Women’s bodies change after pregnancy and childbirth. Quite apart from the immorality of the thing, the idea that finding who people who happen to match each other in their sexual enjoyments will be conducive to lasting happiness is simply unrelated to reality. Everyone must learn and adapt. There are no exceptions to that in this world.

Secular People Still Need to Explain Religious Truths

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There are a lot of stupid secular theories abounding today, such as red pill dating advice or mimetic-rivalry-hoe-phase-theory, which receive a lot of criticism from people who are sane. But this criticism usually has no effect because, to believers in these theories, it amounts to nitpicking. This is because they are secular people trying to explain religious truths. Their theories are (necessarily) secular and when you try to explain religious truths with secular theories, the theories have to be idiotic, for the same reason that if you jam a square peg into a round hole, it will end up as a very funny looking square.

The religious truths that people are trying to explain are the necessity of having ideals and the impossibility of achieving the ideals, or to give them their proper names, everything has a nature and it is a fallen world. God created the world to be perfect, but the world chose sin over perfection, but God has not abandoned the world and is working to save it. Within this religious framing, it’s easy to explain why it is that we must strive to achieve perfection and also why we must accept quite a bit of imperfection. You do not need to throw out the ideal for one which seems achievable, and you do not need to worry (overmuch) about not achieving it.

This framework is not available to secular people. Secular people can, of course, have lofty ideals and, in pure pragmatism, accept that no one achieves it and keep going anyway. Most people want some kind of rational relationship between their thoughts and actions, even if they are completely incapable of expressing that rational relationship in words. So for the vast majority who can’t just hold incompatible beliefs with no explanation, they either come up with an explanation (which doesn’t make sense if you look at it too closely) or alter the beliefs.

Red pill dating and hoe-phase-theory are the same basic philosophical move of throwing out the ideal and substituting one that they think is achievable. The benefit to this is that trying to achieve the ideal is actually a rational activity since the ideal is achievable. The downside, of course, is that it’s an evil ideal.

Modern ideas about marriage are the opposite, though with a bit of a twist. Modern ideas of marriage demand the perfect realization of the ideal, which is no small part of why so many people aren’t marrying (though by no means the only cause). The twist is that the ideal is modified to one which makes sense within the secular worldview, so we get marriage not as a covenental relationship or as the mutual self-sacrifice of the parents for the sake of their children, but as a thing which is supposed to be mutually fulfilling. That is, marriage is supposed to fill both parties up so that they are happy. And this happiness is increasingly demanded; where it is lacking this is taken as a sign that the marriage isn’t real and so divorce is just recognizing the reality of the failure to form a real marriage. This is not particularly more sane than the red pill dating ideas, though its insanity is less spectacular.

I am reminded of a wonderful section of G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, about being happy in marriage:

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–“

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”

(It must be born in mind that Michael Moon is his own character and not a mouthpiece for Chesterton; Michael does have some good points among his mad ramblings, even if he doesn’t have the fullness of appreciation of the committed single vocation.)

But his fundamental point is quite sound: it is a mistake to try, as one’s primary goal, to be happy in that earthly sense of the word happiness. There will always be pain and sorrow and trials, and worst of all we will let ourselves and each other down. The big thing is whether we always pick ourselves up again. But happiness is a terrible goal in marriage, because marriage exists to accomplish wonderful things—making new people and teaching them how to be human—and trying to be happy gets in the way of accomplishing things. There’s so much more to aim for in this life than happiness.

Happiness in the sense of smiling and having a good time and enjoying yourself, that is. Happiness in the sense of the Greek makarios, which can also be translated as “blessed”—that’s quite a different thing. But in that sense, it’s important to remember that this is a painting of the happiest man alive:

I’m sure that Chesterton has said it before me, but the problem with reasonable goals is that they always end up being completely unreasonable. And that’s because this world is about God, and so doesn’t make sense on its own. And every attempt to make sense of it in itself, without reference to God, will fail in one of only a few ways.

Conservative vs. Progressive Artistic Talent

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, TV & Movies, Uncategorized2 Comments

A debate which comes up from time to time is about why are most artists “progressives” and is this because conservatives don’t have artistic talent. There is, perhaps, something to be said for the idea that the kind of extreme creativity involved in artistic work tends to be unbalancing to a person’s sense of how the real world works, so a wildly creative person is more apt to believe absurd things (like socialism) will work in the real world, but I doubt that this explains the majority of what causes the tremendous skew towards progressivism in the arts. For that, we need to look at selective pressures, envy, and the defense against envy.

First, let’s consider selective pressures. Most of what is called conservatism is about producing the best environments possible for the raising of children. This puts all sorts of restraints on parents and communities for the sake of children. Included in these is needing to earn one’s living in a reliable way, because children (and sometimes a spouse) are relying on one to provide their living for them. The arts, in general, are an extremely unreliable way to earn a living. There’s an excellent reason that the words “starving” and “artist” go so well together. Thus there is a massive selective pressure against people who value family and the raising of children. And the talents that underlie art can, generally, be put to more practical uses, and practical uses pay better. This is especially true if the person with artistic talent has other talents, too.

From this we can see that it’s no accident that a large fraction of artists come from broken homes. Not only does coming from a broken home make a person less likely to understand the value of raising children well (though it can have the opposite effect), it also makes them more likely to seek attention. Putting the talents which underlie art to practical use tends to get you a paycheck but not nearly so often praise. (Don’t get me wrong, people can make art out of love. But it takes a lot of love. It takes a lot less love if you also have a deep-seated psychological need for approval.)

There is a secondary selective pressure on art to appeal to buyers or (in the case of advertising-subsidized art) viewers. This can be done through quality, but it is easier to do it through adding pornography. There is an absurdly large market for pornography that comes with social sanction or plausible deniability. Just check out the short film It’s Not Porn, It’s HBO. The success that this kind of pseudo-pornography brings allows for bigger budgets which makes for higher quality in the output (largely by being able to pay more people to work on it).

The other major thing to consider is envy. If you study history for even a few minutes, one of the most dominant themes you will find is that if somebody put in the work to make something worth having, someone else wants to take it from him rather than make it himself. This gets modified slightly when it comes to competition, where envy wants to win by dragging down others. “He did not deserve first place, I did.” You see this kind of envy constantly in third-rate artists. And progressivism is practical just codified envy; the progressive ideal is that all men are equal by dragging down any who are ahead, justified by fairy tales about how they only got ahead by cheating. This explains why third rates artists are so often progressives. But what of first-rate artists?

Here we come to the universal need of the successful to defend against envy. On an international scale, the primary defense against envy is a powerful army. On an international scale, if you want to steal what others have built, you must take it with an army, and their army being large enough to defeat your army protects them. This does not work within a nation, though, where the state retains to itself most of the use of violence. There are still defenses against envy using direct violence, such as front doors with locks and the police. But within a nation the envious can work within the legal system to enact laws to use this machinery of the state to take what belongs to others and give it to themselves. This is the reason why the rich are usually politically connected; as long as the laws are crafted in a way to allow loopholes, it doesn’t matter what the law is meant to achieve. And this is why, wherever you have a progressive party with enough power, the rich are always members of the progressive party. But it’s not the only reason. It also defends them against excessive envy being directed at them, personally. And this is why we see successful artists being progressives—it (partially) defends them against the envy of third rate artists.

(It should be noted that the individual political views of the artists making it don’t matter very much on collaborative projects, because most artists, and especially most progressive artists, will do whatever they are paid to do. The people who made movies were not wonderfully better people during the days of the Hayes Code, they just did what the men with the money told them to do, and that happened to be to make morally decent movies. So they did. It’s very easy to find the documentation that they didn’t want to.)

You Can Tell Whether an (Older) Actor Has Died By His Profile Picture

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Something I’ve noticed, when looking up the biographies of actors who are in movies or TV shows I’m researching, is that you can instantly tell whether an older actor has died by their profile picture. If their profile picture is often them looking old, they’re still alive. If they look young, they’ve died. This can be really fast, too. I confirmed that Angela Lansbury had died on the day I heard the news by going to her Wikipedia page and seeing that her profile pictures was of her when she was twenty five.

This makes a certain amount of sense, I think. So long as a person is alive, what they look like right now (for which what they looked like within the last few years will suffice) is what’s most important. But once they die, it makes sense that what was most characteristically them is what’s most important. But that does raise a question as to what is most characteristically that person. In Angela Lansbury’s case, her picture at twenty five certainly is more beautiful, in the sense of having smoother skin and looking far more fertile, than her at fifty nine (the age she was when Murder, She Wrote first aired). I’m not sure that she looked better (if sex appeal is not the sole criteria of beauty) at twenty five, and I think she was far more recognizable at fifty nine.

There are broader philosophical questions that this raises, of course, which the sort of people who choose profile pictures are probably not interested in, but it is curious to ask what picture is most representative of a person’s whole life. Naively one might answer them at the end of it, however old or young that was, because that is the summation of it. That’s not really true, though. Life has phases, and as we age we leave behind phases. If we lived well, we leave them behind completed, but if we survive long enough we will inevitably leave them behind. And then at some point we’re done with all of our phases and leave this life behind entirely. This is the point of memento mori: to remember that we’re in the prologue to life, not in the real story. It is not a tragedy that we leave phases of our life behind because we were only ever getting them ready for eternity. It would be a tragedy to prepare without end and never truly live with what has been prepared. (What this consummation in eternity of what is merely prepared in time will look like we cannot imagine, of course, since all we can imagine comes from our experience and this is unlike our experience.) But to return to the main subject: perhaps, then, the picture which most represents a person is a picture of them at the height of their powers.

It’s not a very practical question for people who do not select profile pictures for the dead, but it is none the less an interesting question.