The Only Winning Move

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is a tough nut to crack precisely because it’s so transparent. It’s one of those books that I feel like I should hate, and so am surprised to find I really loved! What gives?

Its probably the best exemplar of what I’d like to call the “new high-brow.” I don’t know if I made up that term, or if I’m stealing it from someone who uses it quite differently, or if someone else has alredy come up with a better bit of compact snark for what I mean. “What I mean” is this. Once upon a time it was easy to keep genre lit separate from “real” lit. Faulkner went on the shelf in the living room, Doc Smith by your bedside table, and your spouse could be trusted to keep your secret. But then people like Heinlein and Sturgeon came along, and if they didn’t exactly count as university-worthy “literature,” what they did succeed in doing was demonstrating that genre lit - well, science fiction, anyway - had a lot more potential beyond fun pulp serials. Couple that with an economic expansion that meant that university education was available to all, and you got a generation of writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin who were raised on the bad stuff but had the training to appreciate the good stuff. And so we entered a second phase - a kind of golden age, to my mind, where science fiction was interesting and enjoyable, and informed enough about literary conventions that you didn’t have to cut it too much slack. Unfortunately, things went a bit sour from there. The inevitable attention that some of these writers got from high-browed types went to their heads - and, more importantly, to the heads of the next generation - and we got saddled with a kind of in-between genre of really pretentious people. There has been a controversy ever since - between the camp of those like Jonathan Lethem, who think that science fiction was a training camp that should graduate to real lit now that it’s gotten the New Yorker’s attention, and that of those like Lester Del Rey, who think that science fiction is its own thing and wish lit professors would “get out of my ghetto!” The Jonathan Lethems of the world - they are the third phase, in which doing genre send-ups - science fiction and fantasy send-ups in particular - is a kind of automatic writing algorithm. Basically the exchange is this: the New Yorker readers need an insider to tell them how horrible science fiction is so that they can continue to believe that buying a single magazine which is bland but at least never disappoints constitutes being “informed” about literature, and said insider needs the New Yorker to console him that he is not a talentless hack passing off meta-literary conceits as studied observation. And that’s, roughly speaking, where we are now. But like all conceited shortcuts, this one only works so long as it’s not too obvious. And so out of the ashes is rising - well, not a phoenix, exactly, more like a pallid canary - of a fourth phase of genre-meets-university-lit writers that I would like to call “the new high-brow.”

“The new high-brow” is the camp of people who would be Jonathan Lethem and M. John Harrison if these people hadn’t already cornered the market. Or - more likely - they’re people who were in danger of becoming Lethem and Harrison until they got a foretaste, via the works of Lethem and Harrison, of just how pretentious they would sound. And so they lightened up a bit and weren’t afraid to admit that actually enjoying genre lit for the sake of a good adventure story, or for the sake of a mind-blowing concept, didn’t automatically brand you with a scarlet L on your forehead. And of course it helped that what they were doing - writing real adventure stories - could be taken as meta-commentary on the Lethems and Harrisons by any New Yorker types so inclined! If the original gambit was to prove your high-browed mettle by demonstrating that you had tried science fiction and found it lacking, the new sexy would obviously be to try science ficton and find it satisfying - without, of course, compromising your literary principles. Or, put differently, once the average New Yorker reader had been soothed about his anxieties that science fiction might be good, he now needs to be soothed about his anxieties that he himself might be stiff and repressed.

This is Lev Grossman and Michael Chabon. Where Jonathan Lethem was clever by condescending to genre lit while pretending to love it - only one step above camp, really - Grossman and Chabon are clever by self-consciously NOT condescending to it, while at the same time declining to really write it.

So I should probably hate Grossman, and I should probably hate Chabon - because the trick hasn’t really changed. These are still literature professors gentrifying my ghetto, which I liked a lot better when Silverberg and Ellison and Niven were my neighbors. And they’re still writers who have a despicable craving for mainstream attention, such that they feel the need to subtly distance themselves from the genre lit I love. But I don’t hate them. I enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union quite a bit, even if I did think it was overrated, and I enjoyed The Magicians even more, almost without reservation.

Make no mistake - The Magicians is a genre send-up of the kind Lethem wishes he could write. It doesn’t hate fantasy, but I wouldn’t say it endorses it either. It’s a realistic retelling of Harry Potter that takes the Narnia stories as its real object of analysis. The characters are ordinary teenagers who first find that they can do magic, and then end up at a Hogwarts analogue, and then at a Narnia analogue, each of which is more disappointing than the last. The point is about as transparent as it’s possible to be: magic here is a standin for landed wealth, these are the kids of the privileged who have everything they want and therefore nothing they want. It’s the old suburbia conundrum - where comfort is comfortable, and therefore preferable to the alternative, but also boring and meaningless.

So on a superficial reading this book should be offensive to me. Isn’t it making the same cheap and easy point that has driven the publication of The New Yorker for the last 90 years? You know, how there’s real, authentic life, and then there’s fantasy, and growing up, which is unequivocally a Very Good Thing (and women are better at it than men), is about rejecting fantasy in favor of Authentic Real Life? And yes, I suppose it is making that point. But the difference here - for me anyway - is that this book isn’t sneering. It isn’t recycling the same, tired false dichotomy so much as it is seriously asking questions about why we like fantasy. The trouble with the sneering at genre lit was always that it protested too much. If science fiction and fantasy are unalloyed garbage, then why pay attention to them at all? University lit professors who prescribed a healthy dose of Cheever to cure the Stephen King blues always came across a bit like the closeted gay jock. If there’s something appealing about this stuff, then wouldn’t we like to know what it is?

It’s on this level that The Magicians really works for me. We didn’t exactly get answers to our questions, but at least this time they felt like questions. Like, for example, when Quentin and company take the horn from the naiad, there’s just something about the atmosphere of this book that tells us it’s probably not a good idea. And yet, in the fantasy books that this one is half-satirizing, it’s just sort of taken for granted that when a beautiful woman of the water hands you something, it’s not only Deeply Important but also Helpful. In this case, it turns out to summon the villain. Not only that, but in the scene in which Quentin blows it, he has explicitly decided to do so because it seems like the kind of thing that a character in a fantasy novel would do. All this in combination could be sneering but for the fact that we’re pretty clearly meant to identify with Quentin (albeit probably reluctantly). If we know enough to question taking, let alone using, the horn in this book, what explains our willingness to suspend disbelief for similar scenes in others? And the same is true when Quentin’s coveted quest turns out to have made him a catspaw in a dubious fight in which he had no personal stake. Again, once Quentin finds this out we the readers are not terribly surprised. But if we’re not surprised in this book, what explains the fact that we WOULD be completely stunned to find, say, Garion misled by the voices in his head, or Shea Ohmsford getting bad advice from Allanon? Why, indeed, would anyone without prior interest in combat training want to go on an adventure quest - and why would any self-respecting prophecy FAIL to choose a commando badass for this kind of thing? For once, I felt like these questions were actually being asked, rather than presented as excuses for not reading any further. And if it isn’t exactly the kind of loving fan satire that Peasant’s Quest is for early PC games, neither is it the kind of sneering condescenscion that marked the later seasons of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. This isn’t turning fantasy on its head for the purpose of showing off (though there’s plenty of that to go around, mind you), it’s actually sort of trying to figure out how and why it works, what explains its appeal.

That said, there were two conceits that I did feel went a bit too far. The first was having every minor character in the story turn out to be important in some way. I don’t mind the infamous final scene of the novel - so despised by others - but I DID mind the gratuitous appearance of a minor character from the begining, and only becuase there had been too much of this already. The only spin I can put on the relentless devotion to resolving minor plot details that makes it work is as a kind of literary double-bluff - pointing out to We Readers that for all our griping about plot holes, we’d like the other extreme even less. But the worse of the two conceits was having the Fillory books be books in the first place. Which is an odd thing to say, given that I enjoyed the book and given that this “conceit” is indispensible to how it works. Nevertheless, having Fillory appear as an honest-to-God work of fiction in an honest-to-God work of fiction makes the preferred New Yorker interpretation - that fantasy is something that by definition can’t be real, and that any attempt to reify it would result in the kind of broken an imperfect world that “real”-world Fillory turns out to be, and that there are people who don’t know this - hard to shake off. As I’ve always said, I think the most frustrating parts about Lit Prof trashing of genre lit is that they don’t understand what it’s for or on what level we enjoy it. None of us are confused about its reality. Most of us are as self-aware where it is concerned as Alice is in Grossman’s book, in fact. It isn’t that it’s a strawman to imply that we read these books to escape reality - because that is exactly what we do. It’s that it’s a lie to suggest that New Yorker readers are not similarly motivated to read their own favorite authors. The point of genre literature isn’t so much that we dream as how we dream, and the definitive critique of the New Yorker genre from a science fiction critic, if it ever gets written, will no doubt take the tack that the only salient difference between we Scifi fans and They HighLit fans is that they are deluded about what they are fantasizing about, and we are not, and that is why their fantasies are so perverse. By making the Fillory novels real as novels in his own universe, Grossman just misses being this critic, I think. The infamous ending could be read as his attempt to adopt this mantle (SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ONWARD). Quentin’s decision to give up magic-denialism could be read as a clever slight to those who criticize escapism: Quentin has, after all, taken on his real-world job as a way of avoiding the “escapist” world of Fillory! The implication being that escapism and embrace of reality aren’t functions of the world you’re in or the content of your imagination such that minor details can tip you off to when you’re doing it so much as your willingness to confront and take responsibility for what happens to you. And on that level, it really does drive a dagger at the heart of the vanity that is The New Yorker - in the sense that it isn’t enough to pick out keywords to know when you’re reading “the wrong kind of thing,” you have to actually pay attention to its plot and character motivations too. But it doesn’t quite work, and that’s because we’ve already been to Fillory and know it isn’t what Quentin’s looking for. It just isn’t possible to believe that Quentin has come to terms with anything, and the gratuitous appearance of his friends there at the end will likely be no different than his hasty decision to round everyone up and go to Fillory much earlier in the novel - the kind of ill-thought meta-avoidance tactic (”meta” in the sense that you’re avoiding by charging in) that caused so much trouble in the first place.

I think if there’s a point to the supposedly-horrible ending it’s that it could have been anything. I can’t imagine a twist that Grossman could’ve used (save breaking the Fourth Wall, of course, which would have been annoying enough to cause me to hurl the book across the room!) that would’ve been any better or worse than the one he did use. By the end of the book, nothing surprises you anymore, because it’s abundantly clear that Quentin’s case is hopeless. He hasn’t found satisfaction at his “real”-world job, he hasn’t found satisfaction in magical studies, he hasn’t found satisfaction in the fantasy world, and just about everything that could’ve jarred him out of his complacency has already happened. So I think the point about the ending is that it doesn’t matter what the ending is. I can reinterpret Quentin’s flying off with his friends at the end as him jumping to his death in a delusion and not alter the meaning of the story a whit. And I have to say, I find that - strangely - Very Cool.

I don’t think this should be mistaken for genre lit. It’s post-modern lit that happens to be written in a particular genre. I do not think it is aimed at genre lit fans. It is pretty clearly addressing the New Yorker’s straw man conception of what the fantasy genre is. It’s aware of Narnia primarily, Harry Potter in close second, and yes there’s a throwaway reference to Tolkein here and there. Which is to say, it’s primarily aware of a fantasy series that New Yorker readers have actually read, one that they may or may not have read but have certainly read a lot about, and a third one that they have friends who have read (and may have seen film versions of), but are otherwise uninterested in aside from a passing familiarity with the terms and setting and minor interest in invented languages. So to answer Abigail Nussbaum’s implied question - the reason there is no reference to China Mielville or Susanna Clarke is because Grossman isn’t talking to fantasy readers at all. I think this is meant to be a kind of trojan horse for those New Yorker readers who dismiss fantasy out of hat. It doesn’t work on that level (they can get out of it by simply telling themselves that Grossman goofed the ending), but that is nevertheless how I think it is intended to read. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself whether Quentin really reminds you more of your average genre fan, or of your average university literature professor and you’ll see what I mean. None of this means genre fans can’t read and get a lot out of it, though. And actually, the fact that I don’t think it’s aimed at us primarily is what makes it possible for me to enjoy it. If I thought I was the butt of the same flat joke I have been the butt of so many other times, a joke based on misunderstanding about what I get out of reading science fiction and fantasy to begin with, this would be but one drop in the sea of ink already devoted to rehashing that theme.

In summary, it isn’t the best book you’ll ever read, nor is it exactly the hillarious sendup of Harry Potter the reviews might have led you to expect. It isn’t going to teach you anything you didn’t already know, and it certainly isn’t going to change your life. But it is well-written, it does have a nice eye for detail, it throws you a couple of nice “sucker punches” (to borrow an observation from Rob Bedford) that keep you on your toes, and it doesn’t hate you. Enjoyable all-round!

It’s interesting to look at the history of ideas as an evolutionary process, by which parent ideas adapt defenses to survive their circumstances which they then pass on to their descendendants. Presumably, we’re all aiming at The Truth, whatever that is, and we try out solutions until one seems to fit. And once one seems to fit, people become invested in it, often beyond the merits of the idea. Which is not unlike natural selection, really - since an individual creature doesn’t usually opt out of the gene pool once he realizes his geneset is less than ideal. Rather, he resorts to various kinds of gaming the system. Rape is presumably one of these, and it’s an interesting question whether this kind of thing is an adaptive advantage (in that strong-willed, physically capable, aggressive genes get passed on), or a polluting of the selection process (no reason it can’t be both, I suppose).

An analogy in the history of ideas would be things like Faith, or False Consciousness. Marx must have realized early on that his system was not viable because it had the huge problem of explaining why workers went to great lengths to obtain the very factory jobs that it was claimed were oppressing them. Typically, one does not leave his home, move somewhere else at great expense and then stand in line begging to be oppressed! So it was necessary to invent “False Consciousness,” by which workers were confused about their circumstances. The Revolution was delayed because people weren’t educated enough … or something.

Maybe it started out as a mutation, but now it’s in the geneset of the Left, and it won’t let go! The reason why it’s helpful to think of it as a kind of genetic inheritance, actually, is because I see False Consciousness being employed even when it can’t POSSBLY be the right analysis (Marx, at least, really was dealing with largely uneducated contemporaries), almost as if by reflex.

Take, for example, the constant references to “raising awareness” about the dangers of smoking in campaigns to ban same. Does anyone HONESTLY think there’s anyone alive who doesn’t know not only that smoking is dangerous but also in exactly what way it’s dangerous? Can anyone POSSIBLY believe that people are still confused on this score? Back in the “Mad Men” 60’s, of course, it was not only possible but likely that a good chunk of the population was confused. I’m guessing no one who truly paid attention ever thought that inhaling chemically-treated smoke would be good for them (certainly not when it’s the kind of chemicals that go into cigarettes!), mind you, but advertisements of the day definitely promoted the idea that smoking might be healthy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that a lot of the not-so-conscientious actually bought it. But now? Everyone in my generation saw pictures of blackened lungs when they were 6 and can quote the cancer statistics in their sleep. We’ve all seen the video about the guy who talks though a hole in his neck. We’ve all had our heartstrings tugged with weepy stories about people watching their loved ones slowly die, and we’ve all been shocked with the horror of something SO ADDICTIVE that someone would actually smuggle a cigarette into an oxygen tent and inadvertently blow himself up. Awareness is raised as high as it’s going to go, and so any talk of “raising awareness” at this point is just transparent: the person advocating it is just asking the government to foot the bill for his political campaign. The thing is, False Consciousness is so ingrained in the Left at this point that I don’t think the people looking to “raise awareness” of that of which everyone is already very much aware actually notice the contradiction. If they sat down and thought about what they were doing, they’d spot it in an instant, of course, but politics, as we all well know, isn’t always about rational thought so much as herd mentality. You don’t like smoking, and your friends don’t like smoking, and you and your friends are all left-wingers, and someone floats the idea that smokers might not know what they’re doing, and because everyone in the group is steeped in leftist political training that idea seems as natural as the sun rising, and no one does it the courtesy of a second though. Kind of the way that religious types, if they really stopped to think about it, would know that God didn’t make the subway late to punish them for eating too much jam, and yet the idea that God pulls even such minute strings as these is so ingrained in their thinking that they don’t think twice about it. At least, that’s the only way I can explain it to myself.

Another more personal example. I am the TA (”AI” in IUSpeak) for a Topics course called “Language and Politics” in which we analyze the speeches of political actors as linguistic devices. In essence, looking at language as a kind of technology that political actors use to get what they want. Well, the other AI is a big feminist and recently voiced a concern that we weren’t doing enough analysis of speeches by women (never mind that Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have featured prominently so far). I fired back that we were choosing speeches that well illustrated the concepts we were covering in class, and that I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that me and the main instructor had been ignoring speeches by women for sexist motives. And so of course the leftist fell back on her training: he wasn’t doing this on purpose, but Society-capital-S has trained him so well in the language of male superiority that he doesn’t even know he’s excluding women anymore. (!!!) Not only that, but when asked why she felt it was important that we have x number of speeches by women - where x is an integer that can only be accessed internally by her by polling her own private feelings, as far as I can tell - she honestly said, and I can’t stress enough that this is a real quote:

I believe that it is worthwhile to do, to make women more visible in our class presentations, and to demonstrate that politics, for good and for bad, is not just about what men have to say.

And I’m left scratching my head trying my damndest to imagine a person who thinks that politics is “just about what men have to say.” Honestly? No, she simply can’t actually believe this. This is like “raising awareness” of the dangers of smoking. Everyone is already well aware that politics is “not just about what men have to say.” Because just like with smoking, everyone in my generation and afterward has heard countless times already just how much politics USED to be just about men, but how women are making headway now and how wonderful a thing that is, and how someday there will be a female president, etc. And of course you look around you and you know this is true. The Speaker of the House is female. The Secretary of State is female. That same female Secretary of State came within inches of the presidency herself a year and a half ago. There are two women on the Supreme Court. The previous Congress (110) had a record number of women - 90, which is just under 20%. It’s true enough that women are underrepresented (as a proportion of the actual population) in politics - certainly in US politics. But it’s safe to say that there are enough of them that no one is confused about politics being an exclusively male domain. I mean honestly, what does my co-worker think, that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton just sit there at meetings and nod their heads while the men are talking? That Margaret Thatcher did this? The Sonia Sotomayor does this? That all those countless majority opinions that Sandra Day O’Connor authored were ghostwritten? Again, I think it’s just reflex - kinda the way you instinctively hit rather than grabbing a gun when threatened, just because that’s what’s in your geneset. False Consciousness is so deeply embedded within the ideological geneset of the Left that it’s what they resort to in a pinch, even if they can’t possibly really mean it.

I wonder if Libertarians have something like this? In our caricatured version I suppose answering “the market will fix it” to any social challenge is one such thing. But that’s a caricature - I think those of us (and I’m definitely one) who count as market fundamentalist Libertarians don’t reach for the market explanation as so much a reflex as out of a real belief in it. The difference, in other words, is that I’m aware that I’m a market fundamentalist, and that usually when I offer “the market will fix it” solutions it’s not because I’m parrying with something that I learned from waxing on and waxing off, it’s because I’ve actually thought about how market mechanisms will respond to the problem and sincerely believe that they will work.

But then, we’re none of us ever as self-critical as we should be, so maybe I do put too many eggs in the “market” basket out of sheer reflex from time to time. Or maybe I and libertarians like me have other tics that I’m just not consciously aware of. Maybe. But my genuine guess is that we don’t, and that’s because Libertarianism isn’t in the spotlight enough to put Libertarians on the spot often enough (har) to develop these kinds of kneejerk defenses. That may be changing, though. One can hope!

I’m not a big sports fan. I enjoy watching soccer, badminton, tennis, UFC, and can get myself worked up about college basketball under the right circumstances. NFL and baseball put me to sleep, and I think that pretty much exhausts the list of sports I even really know about. For the most part, it’s that I just don’t care. The old nerd’s curse of given that time in life is limited, I can usually think of better things to be doing when there’s a ballgame on TV.

But the Olympics I actively hate.

And here’s one of the reasons. This is one of the most childish articles I’ve read that makes a good point. And it’s a classic: if you take out the judged sports, national team X drops dramatically in the medal count and so aren’t the “real” winners.

First of all, shit like this puts the lie to the idea that the Olympics are about sports and not national pride. In theory, the issue should be which individuals and individual teams are doing well at which individual sports. There’s no sense in which the US has “a team” that I can tell, unless we’re griping about who has more funding for training. And yet, author Chris Chase seems worried that someone might not know that the US has a high count in judged sports, and apparently because a lot of people actually are interested in national medal counts.

Second, I’m not seeing a blazing white line between what does and doesn’t count as a “judged” sport anyway. For example, under Chase’s “real” medal count, South Korea moves up a number of places “because of its dominance in speed skating.” SPEED SKATING ladies and gentlemen. A sport notorious for its labrythine rules, in which all sorts of things like “cross tracking” - i.e. cutting in front of someone attempting to pass - that are ultimately up to the gut feelings of the refs can get you dq’d or penalized. So sure, unlike figure skating, there is actually a finish line in speed skating, but there are so many conditions placed on how you get there that I would hesitate to call it a sport where “medals are determined solely by the athletes and not by faceless men and women in garish blazers.” And that goes for lots of other Olympic sports as well.

Third, there’s something a little snarky about lines like this:

In a perfect world, judges would be impartial and fair and every event would be decided by the same set of criteria, but they’re not. Judges are humans who are influenced by outside factors like reputations, nationalities and fan support. This often manifests itself in judging, which makes the results of these sports controversial.

and this:

When throwing out the results of all events tainted by the influence of judges, the U.S. loses its commanding lead in the only medal tally that means anything: golds.

The pragmatic implication of belaboring this point in an article about the “real” national medal count seems to be that most of the American golds this year in such sports are bogus. But if that’s what you think, then you need to make the charge of bias in the open. Anything else is unfair to the athletes who did, in fact, work hard to win these medals. Because included in the realm of possibilities here, after all, is the idea that all nine of those golds that Chase wants to discount the US in the “real” medal count were actually deserved and would have been decided in the same way by an idealized panel of judges under ideal circumstances.

Bottom line - if you think there’s a problem, present your evidence and suggest alternatives. Don’t leave your reader drawing a vague conclusion for himself that you lack the guts to make openly.

Fourth, I’m pretty sure the “judged” events that Chase is griping about are the founding events of the Winter Olympics anyway. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Winter Olympics were founded largely on a push to have figure skating - THE prototypical “judged event” - included in the regular Olympics. So there’s a real sense in which judged events are what the Winter Olympics are all about, and getting rid of them, or otherwise not factoring them into your perception of who “won” - is a serious break with Olympic tradition.

But the fifth and main point is just that sports commentary tends toward childish points of convenience, and this article is a case in point. To repeat:

When throwing out the results of all events tainted by the influence of judges, the U.S. loses its commanding lead in the only medal tally that means anything: golds.

WHY are golds the “only medals that count?” Well, presumably because that’s what most athletes are really shooting for. Fair enough for individuals - but what about for national teams? To say that golds are the only medals that count in determining which country is “winning” the Olympics (which I already think is a bogus category - see point 1) is a bit like discounting round robins in qualification - only single-elimination tournaments count. And yet no one is suggesting, for example, that the Canadian hockey team should now pack up and go home because they lost to the USA! Advancement to the semi-finals is contingent on your overall performance, and you’re allowed to lose a few and still advance. Completing the analogy for medals, a case could be made that bronze and silver medals should count as well, provided they’re discounted against golds. Say - we count three points for golds, 2 for silver, one for bronze?

Note the precision of the wording above: “a case could be made.” I’m not saying it has to be, because I can see it Chase’s way too. And even if we decide to weight medals, there will be arguments about how much more a gold should be worth than a bronze, etc. 10 for a gold, 5 for silver, 1 for bronze? What’s the ideal ratio? I just don’t know, and neither does anyone else, and the point is just that whatever you decide you need to decide it BEFORE you go writing articles like Chase’s. The Olympics shouldn’t be a national competition, but if it’s going to be, then there need to be some groundrules established beforehand as to how these things are determined, and commentators need to state before the competition even starts what their opinions about the groundrules are so that the competitors know what to shoot for.

Sports commentary in general is wearying because there’s nothing REAL at stake, and this frees statistics snarks to constantly raise and lower the bar in clever and arcane ways so that things come out the way they want, even when they didn’t.

Using my weighting scheme, for example, the US and Norway are tied for second, and Germany is first. Using the second scheme I suggested, the US drops to a clear third. And using Chase’s scheme, Norway is first. And all this assumes that the sports Chase favors for “real” medals exhaust the set, which is an argument in itself.

So - sports commentary in general can fuck off, and especially when it has to do with the Olympics. Speaking as a patriotic US citizen, I really don’t care how Team USA is doing in the Olympics, because there is no such thing. But even if I did care, I think I would accept the rules as written in determining who was winning. Fantasizing about who should have won at some alternate-reality version of the Olymics? Even more pointless than the real thing.

Interesting (though in retrospect probably obvious) thought gelled out of a discussion with Alexis about animal rights: there are both raising and lowering solutions to inequality problems, and a lot of times people get pigeonholed into saying things they don’t really mean by failing to consider the raising solution if they’ve already thought of the lowering solution, or vice versa.

I’m not just borrowing terminology from Syntax. “Raising” and “Lowering” for meta-politics is this: when you’re confronted by a percieved inequality, such that one group is, from where you stand, getting an unfair share of the attention surrounding something, there are two broad ways of evening things out. You can “raise” the other groups to the status of the privileged, or you can “lower” the privileged to the status of the excluded. And of course two corollaries probably go without saying here: (1) that of course one can both raise and lower at the same time in the same problem space and (2) that raising and lowering will in many situations be empirically indistinguishable anyway, as they are relative terms.

I wonder whether there isn’t a correlation between awareness of the existence of “lowering” solutions and predilection for libertarian political tendencies.

Consider gay marriage. The fundamental injustice is that heterosexuals have de facto property rights that homosexuals do not. And here is an issue where I think that the “raising” solution is inappropriate. Typically this issue gets framed in terms of what gays are being denied, and so the obvious solution that occurs to everyone is to extend the marriage franchise to include them. We have hetero marriage, so it seems unproblematic to extend this to include homo marriage. But to me this isn’t the REAL issue, and assuming that it is is a mistake that leads to all sorts of nasty side effects. For example - it leads people to make the frankly ludicrous suggestion that love between the members of a homosexual couple is somehow less real until the government puts a stamp of approval on it. The idea that anyone’s feelings need legitimizing by the state is laughable in any other context, and yet on this issue people buy into it because they cannot think how else to articulate their frustrations. Another nasty side effect is that the problem of government sanction of lifestyle is not eliminated, merely transformed. Other kinds of a priori legitimate relationships are left out in the cold, such as polygamy, polyandry, group unions, temporary unions, and good ol’ fashioned living in sin. By continuing to exclude these groups, people who argue that the government should stay out of people’s bedrooms ironically end up legitimizing its role there.

None of these problems come with the “lowering” solution, however. The lowering solution is to take official sanction away from heterosexual couples. It just says “fine, we agree, this privilege is no longer justified (if it ever was), so now you have to live like everyone else.” Under the lowering solution, the government really does get out of everyone’s bedrooms, and everyone is on a level playing field. To the extent that there are legal marital unions, it’s up to the people involved and their lawyers to hammer out a contract.

I think lowering type solutions appeal to libertarians because they are minimalist. We don’t say it out loud often, but one of our motivations for wanting to shrink the government - in addition to just wanting to leave people free - is wanting to make the law clear and accessible. And lowering solutions typically do that. They ELIMINATE special exceptions in favor of laws that apply to everyone equally. To the extent that laws can be made simple and universal, the system itself becomes simple, universal, and easier to maintain.

My question is whether this is a general category of thinking that extends to other domains as well, such that people with libertarian sensibilities could be identified by their positions on other issues. And I think it’s possible it can. The discussion with Alexis was about animal rights, but including animal cognition. She’s a vegetarian, and her reasoning there is that animals are sentient, and so we owe them moral consideration - what is typically called an “ethical vegetarian.” And I really agree - that animals are sentient and that we owe them moral consideration. I will not use products that I believe are unnecessarily tested on animals, and I prefer to eat meat (such as beef) that I know has been killed humanely. I don’t have any ethical problem with eating animals - since this seems to be the natural order, and humans are certainly evolved to be ominvores - but I can certainly understand the case from the other side. I have a problem with any moral system that extends full rights to animals - but only because of the communication barrier. Animals don’t seem to extend rights to me, and since rights are reciprocal, I can’t really do it unilaterally, etc.

In any case, the relevance to raising and lowering is that I hear a lot of goofy opinions about animal cognition that I think are the result of applying a raising solution when a lowering one is more appropriate. A lot of vegetarians (though not Alexis, I should hastily add!) - wanting to persuade people to give up meateating - are led to make exaggerated claims about the mental abilities of animals. It is a raising solution in that it attempts to raise animals to the status of humans, and it doesn’t work because it’s self-evident that animals do not have the same range of reasoning abilities nor the same mental capacity that humans do. The lowering solution avoids this problem though - and the lowering solution here is to give up on the idea that human mental abilities are different in kind, in favor of saying they are just different in magnitude. In other words, give up on the idea that humans have souls - at least for political and ethical purposes, which is independently appropriate in a secular society anyway.

And this extends, much more interestingly, to the question of whether machines can think. As far as I’m concerned, they can, and this is not an interesting question. Edsger Dijkstra puts it nicely:

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

In other words, computers only don’t think if you’re willing to ascribe some sort of unjustified mystical status to human thinking. If you’re not - and I’m not - they do. They recieve inputs, process them internally, and produce outputs. It’s thinking - just as humans do. It may not be done according to exactly the same methods - and certainly it’s not done in the same medium - as human thinking, but if we ever replicated a human brain in silicon it would be essentially the same. This falls under the rubric of “to the rational mind, nothing is inexplicable, merely unexplained.” Human thought - especially consciousness - is largely unexplained, but I reject the idea that it is inexplicable! And this is, it seems to me, a lowering solution rather than a raising solution. The raising solution would be to say that there IS something inherently mysterious about thought, but that computers (bzw. animals) can do it - whatever it may be - too, and so they’re in the privileged group. Mine and Dijkstra’s opinion is a lowering solution because it asserts that there’s nothing special about human thinking - it is just thinking, and if there’s a difference between human and computer thinking then it’s a difference in complexity and wiring, not in fundamentals. I am a meat machine.

Applying raising solutions when lowering ones are more appropriate also accounts for the ease with which people are confused by the charge that Atheism is a religion. This is a raising solution - but to an insidious end. In using it, Chrisians seek to afford Atheism the same categorical status that their religion has in hopes of avoiding their burden of proof (this, at least, is already a named fallacy). So they say things like “Atheism is a faith, because it’s asserting that which can never be satisfactorily proven: the existence of a negative.” But of course Atheism is making no such claim. What believers fail to understand is that atheists aren’t as concerned with them as they are with atheists. Not believing in God has the same status as my not believing in all those other things that I don’t believe in because I have not been supplied with adequate evidence: unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness Monster, magic, telekinesis and so on. It’s not that these things are a priori impossible, it’s just that (a) believing in them would require some revisions to the model of the way the world works that I’ve built up on the basis of my experiences, and (b) although I might be willing to do that if I had seen convincing evidence of their existence, there isn’t any such convincing evidence. The burden of proof is on the people who believe in unicorns, leprechauns, the Loch Ness monster, magic, telekinesis … and God. *I* am the one who is owed an explanation - and everyone knows this, and they further know that the burden of proof has never satisfactorily been met, and so one sneaky way around this problem is shifting it to me by “generously” “raising” Atheism to the status of a religion. My point here is that I think so many people fall victim to it because there is a general tendency to err on the side of raising solutions. But the lowering solution is the appropriate one: religion is a hypothesis about reality that has to meet the same burden of proof as any other. It may well be that individual believers have access to information that they cannot share with the rest of us (because it is available only by mystical and personal revelation), and that obviously suffices to ground their own beliefs, but it is inadequate for anyone else. I am an Atheist until someone can show me either that there is a God (in which case I will become a believer), or that it is likely that there is a God (in which case I will become an Agnostic). I call myself an Atheist because I do not overlook lowering solutions to the same extent that most people do. (Most people - recently including Noah, to my mild chagrin - implicitly accept the validity of the raising options and call themselves “Agnostics” out of a misguided sense of fairness).

So this sort of error is pervasive. Now, I’m not making any claim that it’s always an error to prefer the raising solution to the lowering one. But I guess I am making the claim that people are more likely to err on that side than the other - if only because they are more existentially comfortable with “building things up” than “tearing things down.” One of the reasons why Libertarianism is a hard sell is because it tears things down, and if we’re going to sell it at all we face the problematic task of selling a system of negative liberties as a progressive step forward. People are inherently unsatisfied with answers that are “none of the above,” and too frequently that’s what our answer is. But of course I assume in general that there are also cases where the raising solution is appropriate in an environment where the lowering solution has been applied instead.

An interesting question is which Socialism is? I can see the case both ways. On the one hand, it’s a lowering solution because it focuses on bringing down the rich and powerful to the level of everyone else. On the other hand, it’s a raising solution, because it focuses on extending the status of the privileged to all citizens. But I think what asking this question at all really serves to illustrate is that we can’t always extend neat models of categorizing things to all domains. Socialism is neither a raising nor a lowering solution - it is simply a category error, based on false assumptions about the purpose of government and the ends of human society.

An asinine comment seen on Facebook:

Thinks that Evan Bayh needs to stand up more and not sit it out, if he is dissatisfied with Capital Hill. We need strong leaders. I think he’s worried that the conflict of interest will shine through.

Referring, of course, to the fact that Evan Bayh is taking his toys and going home.

OK, so here’s my question. How do we know if a leader is “strong?” One interpretation would be that the leader gets his way more often than not. But on that interpretation it’s synonymous with having a bunch of docile followers, and what this guy is arguing for is empirically indistinguishable from saying that people need to follow their leaders more. And yet, somehow that’s not what I think he means. Anyway, I posted something to that effect, and get this - even more asinine - in response:

Actually I meant leaders synonymously with elected representation. What we need is representation that is confident enough to weather the slings and arrows of the voices of the far Left and far Right, honorable enough to reject the lobbyists and corruption, and strong enough to stand in the middle of Congress to help bring it together for the good of the country.

Christ, where to begin?

Well, for one thing, this is a named fallacy. It’s called the “Middle Ground Fallacy,” and it’s the assumption that if you have the one camp that supports the one option, and the other camp that supports the other option, then some compromise between those two options must be the right one. So it’s of the same pedigree as the more commonly cited False Dilemma - bucept in this case we’re ruling out the two given options without proof (whereas in False Dilemma one typically accepts that one of the two must be true without proof). Point being - one of the two options of “Far Left” or “Far Right” might turn out to be just what’s “for the good of the country” for all I know. Just saying they’re both bad options doesn’t make it so.

More to the point, presumably the people who represent the “Far Left” and “Far Right” are also members of the electorate with the same constitutional voting rights that I have, and with the same level of sincerity about their beliefs that I have, and their input is therefore a valid part of the democratic process. I may not really respect their idiotic views personally, but democratic legitimacy requires that they be allowed to participate in the political process just like everyone else. And that means, ultimately, that whatever strong leader this Facebook friend is arguing for is also responsible for representing the interests of his Far Left and Far Right constituents. Of course, almost by definition they will not represent the main swathe of the constituency the representative is supposed to represent, but they are still part of the electorate and thus have the same right to form pressure groups to bring their concerns to the attention of their duly elected representative that everyone has.

But the real point comes when I try to figure out what “Far Left” and “Far Right” even are in America. Do we have these categories? What the hell is this guy actually talking about? I mean, to the extent that there is a CPUSA, it has about 50 members, none of whom live in Indiana. And to the extent that there is Storm Front, it has about 50 members, some of whom probably do live in Indiana, but I doubt whether they vote. And so I think the single most asinine thing of all the asinine things this guy is saying is right here in this idea that somehow the American political spectrum is this broad, all-encompassing thing that’s besieged on the one side by left wing crazies and on the other by fascists. Reality is - the Republicans and the Democrats are just not all that different. Or, rather, they represent quite different underlying political philosophies (the Democrats Socialism, the Republicans any one of the mutually incompatible Fascism/Traditionalism, Theocracy, and Classical Liberalism), but rather mild versions of these philosophies in all cases. There is no one on the Democrat side who advocates or even reads about Marxism, and there is no one on the Republican side who is seriously calling for a police state or a real lasseiz faire market economy. These are tendencies rather than ideologies, as far as I can tell, and they’re so compromised with each other by this point that even though the tendencies are different there is broad agreement on all sides about the scope, purpose, and even the actual policies of government. What partisan bickering goes on in Washington is not driven by ideology so much as power jockeying, and this is actually by design - because it keeps us on a pretty even keel from year to year. There are never radical policy shifts, and I believe that this kind of stability, more than anything else, makes up the lion’s share of government’s contribution to the economic success of the US. Note that this is NOT a claim that things could not be better! Obviously (to me, anyway), a radically Classical Liberal (American translation: Libertarian) government would bring us much more stability and prosperity than we currently have. But that’s a pipe dream, not in line with what the electorate wants. What we do have is second-best - a broadly market-oriented economy that’s not all that politically capricious. And I think if you look around the world you’ll see the same ingredient present in a lot of the other well-known success stories. Japan - the world’s number two - is not a market economy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nothing if not completely politically stable. Sweden is also not a market economy, but again, it’s highly stable. Pretty much any country that has done well over the long term will be marked by a broad popular political consensus - which isn’t to say there isn’t internal bickering over policy, just that everyone is basically on board with what the political culture values and where it’s headed.

There are no extremes in this country, so what’s he whining about? Imaginary problems caused by imaginary foes. There is no Far Right in America, there is no Far Left. It’s pretty much just a well-stocked kitchen filled with a bunch of mediocre chefs who spend all day debating how much saccharine to put in. None at all for me, thanks - I like the REAL stuff. And the good news is, as long as they sit there scratching their heads about it, we don’t get too much actual saccharine. It’s not the BEST solution, but it’s one that seems to work well enough, and so I’m not too keen to rock the boat. Because I’m telling you, if THIS bunch manages to elect a head chef, it’s splenda jello casserole with marshmellows forever. Maybe with Rice Krispies and whipped cream on top.

And how, to asked the begged question, are we to characterize this mythical “middle” that he seems to think exists anyway? There’s some coherent broad agreement about what that is, is there? Such that some “strong leader” could reasonably represent “its interests?” Yeah, I don’t really think so. I think it’s more like this: there’s broad consensus about what America is and what its government does, and within that framework there’s a rag-tag fleet of more-or-less one-issue special interests that spend time trying to push policicy an inch or two toward their quadrant on the grid. So to the extent that there’s a “center” such that most people are in it, it isn’t a coherent thing that can be faithfully represented in any way. No, it’s a bunch of largely unrelated things that all get their input, and there isn’t anywhere in the world a “Joe (the plumber) Normal” who is all of these concerns at once. The only way there would ever be a coherent “middle” position would be if some leader came along and defined it - at which point of course he’s the antithesis of “elected representation,” as he’s setting the agenda rather than channeling it.

No thanks - no leaders, please. In fact, let’s just turn the volume down and forget they’re even arguing. They’re grandstanders, and paying too much attention to them only encourages them. Stop looking to the government to solve your problems, because it never will - not adequately. Stop dreaming about leaders, grow up, make your own decisions, live your own life. Thank you.

So, if you order two beers, you pay for two. And if you want to walk out of the grocery store with two bags of chips, they customarily want you to pay for both of them. Of course, if you pick up a pair of shoes, then you get a left one and a right one for one simple price, but that’s just ’cause the typical case is that people want both at once. Well, airline tickets seem more like beer and chips than shoes. You use one seat, you pay for one seat. And yet - somehow - it manages to be controversial that if someone takes up two, he has to pay for both of them. Which is what Kevin Smith does full time now that he’s a millionaire, apparently - complain about having to pay for two seats if he needs two.

Well, OK. It started because he got charged for two seats but booked on a flight with only one and then kicked off of that flight. That is indeed on Southwest. But Tweeting to hoardes of like-minded fat people that the policy of charging people who take up two seats for (what else?) two seats - that’s just whiny. You use two, you pay for two. Why is this difficult? If I want a bag-and-a-half of chips, I can’t go to the store, rip open the second bag, weigh out the quantity I want, divide by the weight of the bag and multiply by the price to find the “proper” markup. There’s just no markup option! Chips come in bags. You buy a bag, or you don’t. If you want some fraction of a bag, you gotta buy the whole bag. To absolutely NO ONE is it controversial that the chips company gets to decide how many chips to put in the bag and what to charge for it. Likewise, the airline company gets to decide how many pounds go in a seat and what to charge for that. You can’t buy fractions of seats, so if you’re over the weight limit, you gotta buy two. Simple, fair, and indisputable, right? So WHY IS THIS CONTROVERSIAL? Are there no gyms? Are there no bike lanes?