March 2012

I Would Prefer Not To

By in santutthi, waiting for the barbarians, work

T & V Buchholz:


We are a nation of movers and shakers. Pilgrims leapt onto leaky boats to get here. The Lost Generation chased Hemingway and Gertrude Stein to Paris. The Greatest Generation signed up to ship out to fight Nazis in Germany or the Japanese imperial forces in the Pacific. The ’60s kids joined the Peace Corps.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother. The Great Recession and the still weak economy make the trend toward risk aversion worse. Children raised during recessions ultimately take fewer risks with their investments and their jobs. Even when the recession passes, they don’t strive as hard to find new jobs, and they hang on to lousy jobs longer. Research by the economist Lisa B. Kahn of the Yale School of Management shows that those who graduated from college during a poor economy experienced a relative wage loss even 15 years after entering the work force.

Perhaps more worrisome, kids who grow up during tough economic times also tend to believe that luck plays a bigger role in their success, which breeds complacency. “Young people raised during recessions end up less entrepreneurial and less willing to leave home because they believe that luck counts more than effort,” said Paola Giuliano, an economist at U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management. A bad economy can boost a person’s weighting of luck by 20 percent, Ms. Giuliano found.

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

Your information economy revolution is over, Buchholz. Condolences. The bums won. Maybe their sense of community outweighs their need for adventure. Maybe they’re content to live with less. Maybe they’re sophisticated enough as consumers to be suspicious when authors of books like Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Race try to sell them the same old Protestant work ethic, now with extra fear of cultural decline. Or maybe they just aren’t listening and don’t care what you think. Good for them.

J’accuse…!

By in conspicuous crusading, free speech, fresh hell, moralizing

Conservatives take offense to admittedly obnoxious language from an entertainer and start talking about boycotts. I’m going to hazard a guess that this is, like, totally different and unfair somehow.


I did like this from John Cook, though:

I am sick of spending all my time talking about how we talk about what we talk about when we talk about policy, instead of talking about actual policy. I am sick of recriminations and demands for retractions and counter-retractions and shocked outrage and line-drawing and line-crossing and apologies and non-apologies and boycotts and petitions. I am tired of watching every national debate inevitably pirouette out of the realm of morality, or merit, and into a rhetorical funhouse where insults bounce from mirror to distorted mirror. It’s our dominant mode of political debate now: We don’t evaluate arguments for their logic or elegance or force (or lack thereof), but for their appropriateness relative to metrics of racism, sexism, patriotism, religious bigotry etc.

Textual Harassment

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, socmed, technology, work, writing

Chad Wellmon:

For Heinzmann, late eighteenth-century German readers suffered under a “reign of books” in which they were the unwitting pawns of ideas that were not their own. Giving this broad cultural anxiety a philosophical frame, and beating Carr to the punch by more than two centuries, Immanuel Kant complained that such an overabundance of books encouraged people to “read a lot” and “superficially.” Extensive reading not only fostered bad reading habits, but also caused a more general pathological condition, Belesenheit [the quality of being well-read], because it exposed readers to the great “waste” [Verderb] of books. It cultivated uncritical thought.

…Carr’s recent and broadly well-received arguments wondering if Google makes us stupid, for example, rely on a historical parallel that he draws with print. He claims that the invention of printing “caused a more intensive” form of reading and, by extrapolation, print caused a more reflective form of thought—words on a page focused the reader.

…Even the form of intensive reading held up today as a dying practice, novel reading, was often derided in the eighteenth century as weakening the memory and leading to “habitual distraction,” as Kant put it. It was thought especially dangerous to women who, according to Kant, were already prone to such lesser forms of thought. In short, print did not cause one particular form of reading; instead, it facilitated a range of ever-newer technologies, methods, and innovations that were deeply interwoven with new forms of human life and new ways of experiencing the world.

Well, huh; I did not know that reading often and widely had ever been seen as anything less than a virtue. Learned something new today!

The widespread anxiety over the Internet age that people like Carr have profitably exploited is understandable. The pace of modern life does seem to be constantly accelerating. The robots and jetpacks we were promised have never materialized, and we work longer and harder for less reward. The basic principles of sustained concentration and deep thought that Carr seems to want to rescue are unobjectionable; I just think he’s being ridiculous in acting as if they are fundamentally incompatible with being online. Perhaps he’s even being a bit too generous in assuming that the majority of people who allow themselves to be easily distracted and overwhelmed while working on the computer were ever going to be sitting around composing sonnets and rondeaus, discussing science and listening to chamber music.

I value that sort of contemplation and reflection myself, of course. But I think I manage to engage in it fairly often despite being online many hours a day. I find plenty of arresting material online that captivates my attention and forces me to concentrate and contemplate, and I still manage to set aside a couple hours before sleep to read dead-tree books. Carr is almost determinist in his insistence that technology inevitably warps anyone who allows themselves to be contaminated by it. Yes, of course it requires time and effort that could be spent playing with our phones and checking our Facebook walls to sit down and write like this, but is it really the gadgets that eat up all of our time or is it the entire matrix of assumptions and purposes that accompany them?

In other words, without checking to see how much more eloquently Ellul and Mumford have already said this, the system that produces social media and smartphones is following a logic of its own, devoted to capital above all else, which has led us to this state where we work longer and harder than ever for less reward and security. If you’re frazzled and stressed and can’t sit still long enough to finish a long article, maybe your life is just too complicated and unbalanced. Maybe you’re like countless other people who work too much to afford a bunch of shit they never have time to enjoy because they work all the time. Are you willing to make the sort of professional and social sacrifices it would take to have enough free time to read great books and write substantial letters to your friends? Are those Epicurean standards of refined, rarefied pleasure worth enough to you to become an underemployed hermit if need be, or are you fine with banal company and frivolous conversations? Yes, I’m afraid it’s true — people often want contradictory things, or they even profess to want one thing for the sake of respectability while secretly wanting another.

I mean, I agree that Twitter is like kudzu, but it’s not like there’s really a shortage of good long-form writing out there; someone’s gotta provide the substantial content for all the twits to link to. I agree that it represents a fetishization of novelty above all else, a sea level of discourse, but in my experience, most people don’t talk about much besides gossip and trivia in everyday life anyway. It’s one of those unquestioned cultural understandings, that we should want to value contemplation and deep conversation while taking time to smell the flowers, but we’re mostly content to just pay occasional lip service to it while continuing to live distractedly and suck the marrow out of a KFC Bucket Meal. But we don’t ever ask ourselves if we really are the kind of people who value such things, and if not, whether that truly is some sort of moral failing. Blaming the nature of the Internet is itself just another way to procrastinate instead of pursuing that line of thought.

What annoys me about Carr’s shtick is that it panders to the sort of educated suburbanites who like to flatter themselves as the sort of people who would write short stories and villanelles for pleasure but never seem to actually get around to doing it, the sort of people who have achieved the professional career, the nice house and family, but still have a nagging sense that they’re missing out on something vital and a sense of guilt for finding themselves drawn to superficial entertainment in their free time. Instead of a more penetrating look at the necessity of our work and what we expect from it, or how far we’re willing to go in sacrificing bourgeois respectability and success for the sake of personal contentment, we get this “Oh noes the Internet is eatin mah brainz” trendy neuropop.

You’d Think by Now I’d be Smiling

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, psychology

Dwight Schrute: I never smile if I can help it. Showing one’s teeth is a submission signal in primates. Whenever someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee – begging for its life.

David Dobbs:


What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile when you’re skydiving. Smile while you’re giving natural childbirth. Offers one smiley devotee, “I smiled through my natural, drug-free labor and fully believe it transformed the whole experience. I recommend smiling to all women going through childbirth.” I would love to have seen this woman recommend that to my wife as she was being wheeled down the hall for a c-section after 40 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing. In fact, to test the astonishing power of this recommendation, I just now read it aloud to my wife. Her reaction makes me long to see this woman offer her this advice even now. She wouldn’t be smiling when she finished.
I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m actually fairly smiley myself. But this book, which as a TED book is supposed to be about “a powerful idea,” is a fatty concoction of neuropop, adventure travel, self-help, California woo, and Palo Alto entrepreneurial gush. It pushes positive thinking across some mathematical warp zone that renders it negative. I suspect it would make even the father of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, just fwow wight up.

Eschew Obfuscation

By in conspicuous crusading, fresh hell, george carlin, language, moralizing

Pat Healy: My real passion is my hobby.
Mary: Really, what’s that?
Pat Healy: I work with retards.
Mary: Isn’t that a little, uhm, politically incorrect?
Pat Healy: Well, heh, to hell with that… no one’s going to tell me who I can and can’t work with, right?


A state legislator introduced a bill to remove the word “retarded” from California’s law books on Wednesday, calling the word outdated and demeaning. State Senator Fran Pavley’s legislation would replace all references of mental retardation with the more accepted term “intellectual disability.”


In an official capacity, that’s fine. You expect bureaucratese to be as bloodless and obtuse as possible. But to believe that changing the name of the condition somehow changes the condition, as George Carlin famously ranted about, you’d have to be an idiot. Or a moron. Or an imbecile, or any of the other words that mean the exact same thing as calling someone a retard.

“Intellectual disability” or “mentally challenged” describe the exact same reality as “retarded”, one in which a human being’s intellectual capacity is damaged, limited or deficient, which any honest person would agree is a condition no one would willingly choose. And I’m sure schoolchildren are busy right this moment using even those terms in a demeaning and pejorative way toward their peers. Words are empty vessels; mean-spirited insults can inhabit any of them.

Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People In Large Groups

By in conspicuous crusading, free speech, moralizing, the madness of crowds, tribalism

Scott Mendelson:

Bill Maher famously lost his television show on ABC after outcry over commentary that one of his guests made (which he agreed with) concerning the 9/11 hijackers not being cowards, given that they were willing to kill themselves in pursuit of their mission. It was this statement that famously led President George W. Bush’s press secretary at the time, Ari Fleischer, to state that “all Americans … need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Never mind that Maher didn’t even utter the offending statement, or that it was technically correct (suicide bombers, come what may, aren’t cowards in the strictest sense of the term), the post-9/11 “sensitivity” caused his comments to create a firestorm of (arguably) manufactured controversy that forced his show off the air even as ratings had gone up after the 9/11 attacks. And let’s not forget any number of “controversies” that were sparked during the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2002 and 2003. Let’s not forget the outcry over Natalie Maines’ comments that she was ashamed that President Bush was from Texas (which led to death threats and mass album-burning), or the politically motivated firing of Phil Donahue from MSNBC because his liberal ideology didn’t fit with the nationalistic fervor (never mind that he had the highest-rated show on the network at the time). And that’s not counting the various “scalps” that the GOP has claimed during Barack Obama’s first term (Shirley Sherrod, Van Jones, etc.). Yes, there is a difference between the above incidents, which allegedly had behind-the-scenes government support, and what appears to be a purely grassroots effort in feminist (and humanist) activism, but it’s still almost scary how fast the fire spread.

I don’t have any profound conclusions to draw from this, nor do I have any “answers.” I guess what I’m saying is that, having lived through 10 years of countless liberal/progressive or just-plain-not-crazy people being targeted and/or persecuted because they said something that was deemed inflammatory, like when Michael Moore was targeted for murder purely for making an anti-war statement at the 2003 Oscars (after winning his Oscar for making an anti-gun-violence documentary), I can only take so much pleasure with the shoe being on the other foot.

I don’t have anything profound to add, myself. I just detest mob mentality by its very nature, regardless of what the inspirational cause is. When the argument becomes about the righteous intensity of our feelings instead of what we can know, the right to free speech is just a hollow formality. Fine, you can have your megaphone. We’ll just take away your soapbox and quarantine you somewhere out of earshot.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

By in books, fresh hell, socmed, waiting for the barbarians

David Haglund:


By and large, though, the whole little game, briefly diverting and occasionally amusing as it was, essentially proved Franzen’s point. While he had attempted to make an argument—albeit an off-the-cuff and ham-fisted one—about the negative aspects of Twitter, the partisans of the micro-blogging platform reduced that argument to a meaningless punchline.


…I have to side with those who believe that emotions are indeed complex enough to merit 600-page novels, and cannot be fully conveyed in an emoticon. I don’t think emoticons and 600-page novels are mutually exclusive; it appears that the universe is capacious enough to include both these phenomena, and I don’t intend to choose sides. But if people start making teams, I know which one I would rather be on.


For Erin Faulk, a 29-year-old legal assistant and voracious reader in Los Angeles, the era of e-readers has had one major effect: she has accumulated many more books that she categorizes as “DNFs” — Did Not Finish. But she is also buying more books, she said, and she thinks that all the interruptions have, in a way, made her a more discerning reader.

“With so many distractions, my taste in books has really leveled up,” Ms. Faulk said. “Recently, I gravitate to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the book’s not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.”

Exactly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, “Y’know, what this book really needs is an RSS feed or some kitten videos.” Authors, attend: if you want to remain relevant, your writing needs to compete with YouTube and Angry Birds.

As for Twitter, well, what do you expect. The kind of people who hate being reminded that the world doesn’t actually revolve around their toy phones are the same ones who think supercilious irony and clever put-downs make one a public intellectual.

Feh. If you need me, I’ll be busy lugging all my books over to the monastery.

…adding, Roxane Gay complains that Franzen simply doesn’t understand what Twitter is for, then proceeds from the apparent assumption that Twitter primarily consists of writers promoting their work, which strikes me as dubious, to put it mildly.

Allow me to me suggest that it is perfectly consistent to acknowledge the utility of a medium that enables fast, convenient communication while disparaging its outsized influence on public dialogue and the limitations it places on nuanced expression. Let me further add that jokes about old geezers and their lawns are about as fresh and witty as jokes about people living in their parents’ basements, and anyone caught using either of them from now on should be forced to take a one-month time-out from the Internet.

If I Could Just Keep My Stupid Mind Together

By in alan watts, foolosophy, language, meditation

Brad Warner:

But there’s another way to take this statement. And I honestly believe it’s the way most people would take it. They’d look at it and say, “Gosh. I’m not mindful enough. I’m not concentrated enough. Because when I look at a sunrise, I just shade my eyes so that I can get through this traffic jam on West Market Street without running over any of the kids from Our Lady of the Elms. Sunrises kind of annoy me. They give me a headache. I better get more concentrated and more mindful so that I can be more like Thich Nhat Hanh and let the beauty of the sunrise be revealed to me.”

In other words, the concept of “mindfulness” gets in the way of the sunrise. It becomes a big obstacle between what we think of as our self and what we think of as the sunrise. And we make our efforts to try to overcome the obstacle we’ve placed in our own way. Most of the time I hear or read the word “mindfulness” it sounds to me like an obstacle.

Pretty much all of our religions and our various self-help practices are based on the idea that what we are right now is not good enough. We then envision what “good enough” must be like and we make efforts to transform what we are right now into this image of ourselves as “good enough.” We invent in our minds an imaginary “mindful me” and then try to make ourselves into that. The problem with this kind of effort is right at its very root. We are setting up a habit of always judging ourselves as being not whatever it is we want to be.

Alan Watts said something similar about excessive self-awareness becoming more like paralyzing self-consciousness:

For feeling blocks action, and blocks itself as a form of action, when it gets caught in this same tendency to observe or feel itself indefinitely—as when, in the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy—so as to be sure not to miss anything.

“Mindfulness” to me only means setting aside time to allow the chattering monkeys of the mind to fade away on their own, but I take Brad’s point. It flatters our culturally inherited work ethic to see mindfulness as a reward to be achieved through devoted effort and delayed gratification. Meditation for those people is still an opportunity to flex the cerebellum, to be active and positive and in control, to keep pursuing the egocentric fantasy of being masters of their fate, captains of their souls.

I Love Only That Which Is Written With Blood

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, technology, writing

Stephen Elliot:

An email felt different, it didn’t feel right. When you write a letter, it’s such an incredibly personal exchange between two people. It’s really intimate, even if you’re writing a letter to 2,000 people, which is what we are doing. The person gets your letter and opens it and reads it and takes time with it. You never do that with an email.

…When you sit down to write a letter, you really think about it. When I used to write letters, I would go to a café, sit there all day. When I receive a letter, I wouldn’t just open it, I’d sit down, get a coffee, get everything ready so I could really experience it. When you’re on the computer, you’re never fully paying attention, you’re jumping around. With a letter, you walk away from everything. You open it and read it. It’s just you and the letter. It’s an entirely different experience.

Dude, you and Nicholas Carr can speak for your goddamn selves. If the world is too much with you, that’s your problem, not the medium’s. I often spend hours per day on posts and emails — writing, rewriting, reading aloud, checking references, supplementing with links, and just generally letting myself get completely absorbed in the joy of crafting sentences. Most importantly, I make time to do it.

Being clairvoyant, I already anticipated and responded at length to this more than two years ago. Here, I’ll just admit that I, too, used to be a devoted letter-writer in my teens. I used to intersperse them with phone calls, saying that one of the advantages of letters was that no one ever came bursting into your room, saying, “Get off the pen! I need to use the pen!” Sadly, maybe my friends just weren’t literary enough, but their responses were few, far between, and left a lot to be desired as far as intimate, personal exchanges go.

Those very same friends are currently terrible about returning emails as well. You know, there’s a common denominator here, and it’s not soulless, impersonal technology. Motivation and conscientiousness do not inhere in ink and stationery like ghostly essences.

Shut Down the Devil Sound

By in augean stables, ohferfucksake, socmed, the madness of crowds

Slate’s Brain Trust:

Did Social Media Take Down Rush Limbaugh?
On Monday, AOL announced in a Facebook post that it was joining the flood of advertisers pulling their spots from the Rush Limbaugh Show… At Slate, we’ve been arguing about the role of social media in the corporate backlash against the conservative host. Are Limbaugh’s advertisers deserting him because he pushed the envelope further than he ever had before, or was he felled by a lethal combination of offensiveness, Twitter, and Facebook?

The link they provide for evidence tells us that the “flood” of advertisers amounts to seven (now eight, I suppose), and adds:

For now, the ad boycott is uncomfortable but not crippling for Mr. Limbaugh, who is estimated to make $50 million a year and whose program is a profit center for Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates it. The program makes money both through ads and through fees paid by local radio stations, and while it often has sparked outrage during more than two decades on the air, efforts at ad boycotts in the past have had no measurable effect. Liberal groups and activists, however, hope that this time is different.

Oh. So… neither taken down nor felled, then. Uh, well, hyperbole in defense of righteousness is no vice, or something. Anyway, Daniel Engber has one of the only intelligent remarks in the discussion:

There’s an attribution bias here. Twitter and Facebook are buzzing about all sorts of things, every day of the week. Whenever one of those things has real consequences, we want to trace it backwards to Twitter and Facebook. But what about the zillions of trending topics that don’t go anywhere?

Seriously. I know it’s an almost-irresistible fantasy, that your cool little consumer products are also lawful good agents that allow you to shape history for the better without even having to leave your comfy seat, but social media sites are simply fulcrums and levers, indifferent to the moral nature of the mass opinion they leverage into action. Blinding speed of communication can just as easily facilitate the spread of rumors and lies. I almost can’t wait for some reactionary group to dramatically utilize Facebook and Twitter for their own ends just to finally put an end to all this inane boosterism.

Pogonophobia

By in beards, gender, jests japes jokes jollies

Fiona Macrae:

It is a finding that Brad Pitt might do best to take on the chin: women don’t find beards attractive. Men were rated more highly when they shaved their beards off, a study found. Being bearded also made them seem older and more aggressive. But there is some good news for gents who are fond of their facial hair – having a beard commands respect, particularly from other males.

Fine with me. Let the naysayers have their irrelevant opinions so long as they fear me. I even prefer wearing sunglasses as much as possible to create extra tension. For God’s sake, dear, avert your eyes! You can’t see what he’s looking at! You don’t know what he’s thinking, his face all swathed in mystery like that! He might snap at any moment!

But let us move away from the realm of idiosyncratic taste to the objective territory of science:

Science gives us various theories as to why men are able to grow beards, from protecting the delicate facial skin from sunlight to buffering blows to the jaw in a fight.

Two questions. One, women’s facial skin isn’t susceptible to the damaging effects of UV light? And two, has any man outside of a Chuck Norris joke ever grown such a magnificent bramble patch upon his face that it could absorb punches? This is something I would surely like to see.

It is even suggested that a beard is a sign of a strong immune system. The theory goes that disease-carrying parasites thrive in body hair and so if a man can sport a beard without getting ill, he must be extra healthy.

This is true; my immune system is so strong that it started beating itself up for want of any viruses or bacteria worthy of posing a true challenge. Still, this slanderous association of hair with disease is, unfortunately, all too typical of the propaganda you’d expect from Big Electrolysis. Those bastards won’t rest until all men look like giant walking thumbs.

I have severe reservations about the methodology here, though: this study defined a “full beard” as six weeks of growth with no trimming. No trimming? I’m sorry, what kind of clinical depressives or barbaric hill folk are we talking about here? Is this really representative of the population? I trim mine every week! I daresay any fellow who lets his beard grow that wild and unruly encounters more wildlife than human females in a given day, or he’s simply given up on life altogether.

I Used to be a Dreamer Just Like You and Then My Pocket Told Me What to Do

By in conspicuous crusading, moralizing

I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors. …One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.

— Ivan Karamazov

Rich Lang:

This, I think, is the difficult terrain Occupy has to now navigate. Although the Movement still carries a wide, sympathetic base of popular support, it is this very depth that becomes its problem. On the one hand, it was originally the young and disenfranchised who carried the flame that reawakened political consciousness in this country. The cry from the encampments was to radically alter the economic and governing structures of a system felt to be monstrous. This cry crept up into the middle class, awakening them to their own insecurity and vulnerability.

But, on the other hand, the middle class doesn’t really want radical alterations. Like it or not, what the middle class wants is reform, a yearning to return to an old way: a way of stable employment even if that employment is wrecking the earth and is dependent upon militaristic imperialism. It is a way of life that gives the shrinking middle more toys, more money, more access to privileges. The beneficiaries of this system don’t want an end to capitalism, nor even an end to global corporations. Basically, they just want the dream of a stable job, home ownership, reliable health care, and the ability to get their kids through school while saving for retirement.

Many who committed to the encampments desired a new way of life; but the well-housed sympathizers mostly just want the old ways to be renewed. The campers desire a world that moves towards holding all things in common, a world of military stand-down, and a world of no more borders. This is not the vision of the majority who admire the courage and passion of the campers, but who do not share the communal values originating there. Most of the 99% still want private property and segregated, hierarchal wealth.

John Lenin

By in augean stables, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions, fresh hell, moralizing


His historical and cultural clumsiness aside, Horgan seems increasingly unclear of his subject as the book goes on. Does war refer only to military conflict between nation-states, or also the actions of paramilitary groups, spats of social antagonism, or all inter-personal violence? What is to be gained by shrinking such a wide and complex field of interactions to a three-letter word? Besides, that is, making it easier for Horgan to answer with the even smaller word no.

“If we all want peace — and every sane person does — surely we’re smart enough to achieve it. Or rather, choose it,” Horgan writes, describing his overall task.

Unfortunately for idealists, violence is frequently a product of cold, rational calculation. A lack of smarts has nothing to do with it. Is this becoming a trend, these procrustean attempts to fit history within a progressive teleology? Oh, what hath Pinker wrought?

Zip It, Grip It and Snip It

By in sex-you-all

Benjamin Percy:

I don’t scream, but I clamp my jaw so tightly it clicks. I arch my back so much I end up looking behind me at the door. The technique differs from doctor to doctor. Some cut diagonally. Some puncture “keyholes” with a hemostat on either side of the scrotum. Mine scalpels a vertical slash right down the middle. The room is cold, but I am sweating. How I regret not accepting the Valium. The doctor explains the procedure as it progresses. Apparently some men don’t have pronounced enough vas deferens, the tubes that carry sperm outward from the testicles, making the vasectomy impossible. But mine look great, he says. I would tell him thank you if I had a voice.

He will now sever the right vas deferens and excise a length of the tube, making recanalization close to impossible. “Now,” he says, his voice lowering, “you may feel a hot nauseating spike of pain that reaches up your right side.” Nobody I have spoken to, nothing I have read, mentioned anything about hot nauseating spikes of pain. Before I can steel myself to the idea, I hear a snip. The noise of garden shears deadheading geraniums.

I am unable to breathe. I cannot see what the doctor is doing, but he very well might have shoved a furnace-baked length of rebar through my groin and into my torso. I am introduced to vast, intricate networks of pain I never knew existed.

…The next day, I walk with a sore-saddle mosey. Picking a magazine off the floor is nearly impossible. My scrotum is so black that I wonder if something is wrong. I remember the doctor warning me about the hot nauseating spike of pain. I’d expected the injury to remain localized. How could cutting something down there hurt my whole body?

It did. It does. It is more than the physical. Emotionally, I am curled into a question mark, as if there is a hook inside me. I remember the story of a friend whose mother, after getting a hysterectomy, cried on the couch for days and said she no longer felt like a woman. My reaction is not so severe, but the weekend is long, and I experience several moments of despair when I feel like less than a man.

My son asks me why I have a hurt penis, and I say the doctor fixed me, and he says, “But you still seem broke.” He is right. I am not better by Monday. I am not better by Wednesday, either. But steadily I improve. Over the course of the week, I go from feeling like somebody stubbed a cigar out in my lap to feeling like somebody kicked me in the balls an hour ago.

I’m not bragging, or maybe I am on behalf of my doctor, because mine was nowhere near such a big deal. There was one brief twinge of pain, very little blood, and no terrible discomfort from that point on (and a needle in the beanbag, while admittedly terrifying to contemplate in the abstract, hurts no worse than getting a shot anywhere else). I even went back to work two days later. I walked a little more gingerly, but that was more out of paranoid protectiveness than anything. Don’t let him scare you, fellows, it’s well worth it.

Must It Be? It Must Be

By in atheism, conspicuous crusading, moralizing, nietzsche, psychology, religion

Alain de Botton is the Coldplay of philosophy. Earnest and sensitive, adequately talented if not stunningly original, yet somehow capable of provoking intense rage in his detractors, seemingly all out of proportion to his unimposing, nondescript gentility.

His latest mission to rescue religion from both the faithful and the faithless don’t make no nevermind to me; I think it’s needless if well-intentioned, but I don’t think it does any harm to the cause of atheism, and for all I know, maybe there are enough people who want the kind of structure he’s trying to offer. Take your coffee with extra spoonfuls of ritual and camaraderie if it makes you happy.

But I will comment on an odd little tic of his I noticed:

I believe it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling – and be curious as to the possibilities of importing certain of their ideas and practices into the secular realm. In a world beset by fundamentalists of believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.

Or from another recent article:

“I once very politely raised the thought that one reason philosophy departments have been cut is the fault of philosophers. The answer always comes back: ‘The point of philosophy is to ask questions, not to give answers.’ I can’t help but think ‘No. It can’t be!’

Oof. I have to say, I feel a bit embarrassed by the irony of his speculation that atheists like Dawkins are the ones who have some sort of psychological trauma at the root of their disbelief. Poor guy’s got his prescriptive all knotted up with his descriptive. Is it possible? Sure, but a lot of things are possible without being actual, so that’s probably going to be cold comfort to you. Must it be possible? Uh, no, and what a weird question. It either is or it isn’t, but more importantly, whom are you making demands on?

How many there are who still conclude: “life could not be endured if there were no God!” (Or, as it is put among the idealists: “life could not be endured if its foundation lacked an ethical significance!”) – therefore there must be a God (or existence must have an ethical significance)! The truth, however, is merely that he who is accustomed to these notions does not desire a life without them: that these notions may therefore be necessary to him and for his preservation – but what presumption it is to decree that whatever is necessary for my preservation must actually exist! As if my preservation were something necessary! How if others felt in the opposite way! If those two articles of faith were precisely the conditions under which they no longer found life worth living! And that is how things are now!

— Nietzsche

You said it, man.

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