Author: Ophelia Benson

There are a couple of discussions of Evolutionary Psychology at Twisty Sticks: one here and the other here. They’re interesting because of what appears to be a fairly unshakable assumption that all evolutionary psychologists have a right-wing agenda and that the agenda determines their conclusions. That’s probably true of some evolutionary psychologists – I think I’ve read one or two of those – but it’s not true of all of them. It’s a bit puzzling. It’s not easy to figure out why people are convinced that thinking natural selection might have played a part in making human nature what it is requires being a free marketeer. I’m not a free marketeer, and I think natural selection played a part in making human nature what it is. I don’t quite see how it could be otherwise, really. How could natural selection not have played such a part? How could we have evolved over millions of years in complete independence of selective pressures? How exactly would we go about doing that? With a little help from the God of the Gaps? Is that it? If not, then what? It would be a pretty good trick.

But, then again, maybe I just don’t understand the points that are being made. But I can’t help thinking I detect a good deal of rhetoric in play, a certain amount of deck-stacking. Though maybe I’m wrong. There’s a very interesting archived discussion of related issues among Steven Pinker, Janet Radcliffe Richards and John Gray on In Our Time in November 2002. Anticipating this discussion at Twisty Sticks, I happen to have re-listened to it a few days ago. And the email interview B&W did with Steven Pinker about a month before that is also relevant and worth a read.

Update. Our old friend the Anonymous One has made one of his classic comments, where the retort is so obvious it would be too cruel to make it. Too like aiming projectiles at a piscid in a water-containment device, as Chris said (using other words) of the sweet bit of Lacanian profundity I gave you the other day. So I’ll make it here, instead, where it’s not quite so cruel. He does have (Anonymous, not Chris) such a way of saying things that apply to himself better than they do to the people he’s saying them of. It’s quite hilarious really. A few weeks ago – this is really funny – he called Scott McLemee a talentless ankle-biter! I nearly fell onto the floor laughing at that one. Yo, dude, if you’re going to pee, don’t do it upwind because – oh too bad, too late. I’d run home and take a shower if I were you.

You should check out the wonderful passage from Higher Superstition where they argue that—just hypothetically, mind you—the science faculty at MIT could do a better job at teaching the humanities classes than vice versa, if it came down to that somehow…I certainly would feel better about the future with an English professor teaching differential equations than with Pinker teaching literature or philosophy. At the least the former would be humble enough to try to learn something about what they were doing beforehand, which Pinker rather plainly would not.

Right. Uh huh. And if the English professor is someone like, oh, say, you, which I’m afraid it all too probably is – well, I know which of the two I would rather be taught by. But I won’t say which one that is; it would be too cruel.

Not too bad, thanks. The agony is somewhat abated, as Macaulay said. (Was it Macaulay? I think so. At the age of two, or a week, or something, when a kind evangelical woman spilled some coffee on him.) I’m tottering around, pale and trembling, but recovering. A little weak, a tad mentally unstable, but on the mend. Kind of you to ask. The flowers are lovely. I don’t suppose you brought any chocolates – ? No no, of course not, silly question.

I wrote the Comment yesterday in such a way that it sounds as if I think I wrote the dictionary all by myself. I noticed that after I’d done it, but having done it, didn’t want to correct it. It sort of had the right number of syllables already and I didn’t want to rearrange them. But of course I didn’t write it all by myself, and I don’t even think I did. I’m delusional but not that delusional. No, my colleague wrote it too. But I’ve left him out of this story because he has nothing to do with it, he’s ecstatically happy that it’s finished, he wouldn’t know a postpartum depression if it bit him on the ankle, or calf. It’s all zip zip zip with him, none of this girly lingering and brooding and whining, thanks. Got a book to do? Wham! Write that sucker in a couple of days and be done with it, that’s the ticket. Plenty of time left for a game of squash, and no backward looks. Whereas I…well I sort of wanted to ease into it, as one might ease into a very hot hot tub, or a very cold ocean, or a tank of piranhas. Ease into it, slowly, gently, thoughtfully, and then once in, just sit there for awhile, a week or three, smiling peacefully and thinking things over. That’s what I wanted to do. And then just very slowly, deliberately, calmly, no rushing, no rapid breathing, no flurry, think up entries, one at a time, and write them down in careful calligraphy and then in the fullness of time type them into the database. That was my plan. But it wasn’t the Zipper’s, so it’s not what we did. No. What we did was more like carefully positioning a bob sled at the top of a cliff, climbing aboard, and then shoving off.

Well it was good fun, in a tumultuous sort of way, and I’m sure all the people whose emails I forgot to answer will forgive me eventually. Maybe.

You’re sure about the chocolates? Okay, sorry, no, you’re right, never mind. Forget I said anything. Would you like a little gin in that?

Oh, man, I have the most terrible case of post-partum depression. Or perhaps that’s not the right word, perhaps I mean empty-nest syndrome. Or separation anxiety. One of those, anyway, or possibly all of them. The book is gone! It’s finished! It’s over! It’s history. It’s on its way out into the world, to sink or swim, to make it on its own or to crash in flames, to become something or to flop down on the nearest bench and vegetate for the rest of its pathetic aimless life.

I wasn’t ready. I had plans. I was going to teach it to make toffee, and drive a car, and read Braille. I was going to teach it principles, and wash all its clothes, and make sure it had enough cash for the trip. And then wallop! In a matter of about five minutes it was gone. There was I standing stupidly on the doorstep waving and gulping and calling advice after it, and it was just rocketing up the street without looking back as if it couldn’t wait to get away from me. Which it probably couldn’t. Stupid thing. After all that, and that’s the thanks I get. Wham, bam, bye I’ll phone in a year or two. Well thank you very much.

But I can’t help wondering if I did all I could. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine the other evening. Maybe I should have given up coffee. (Yeah, right, like that’s really going to happen.) Maybe I should have spent more time with it, instead of always leaving it with that heroin addict down the street.

Oh who knows! It’s too late now. It’s over, it’s finished, it’s time to move on. Maybe somewhere out there, over the rainbow or behind a cloud or in the garbage can behind the taco place, there’s another book waiting to be hatched and taken home and cherished and nourished so that a few months later it can run away and embark on a life of crime. Who the hell knows. Not the Wizard, that’s for dang sure.

As you may have surmised, I’ve been busy. Very busy. Working flat-out on this dictionary. It’s nearly done now, and then I’ll have more time to write long windy inconsequential N&Cs again.

But one good thing about this dictionary caper is that I find a lot of stark staring nonsense while googling for just that purpose. We’re going to have a Nonsense File in a few months, when my colleague has a spare moment to program one. For now I’ll just present you with some links here.

This one for example is a really good (good in a special sense) bit of Lacanian literary criticism. I don’t see how you can fail to enjoy it. I’ll just give you a taste, shall I?

For Lacan, the gaze is always an act of desired appropriation…Seeing becomes desire — part of the scopic drive in which the eye functions as a phallus. The person who does the looking is the person with power, but there is power also in the ability to provoke a gaze. For Bishop, occupying a position of spectator in the phallic mode would not explain her recognition of the inability to grasp, understand or resolve the death portrayed in “First Death in Nova Scotia.” Larysa Mykyta’s discussion of the position of the feminine in Lacan’s analysis of the gaze finds woman in her position as other to be destructive to the illusion of reciprocity and one-ness that the process of seeing usually supports: “The female object does not look, nor does it have its own point of view; rather it is erected as an image of the phallus sustaining male desires”. If we accept this argument then Bishop’s gaze questions the possibility of successfully imagining, at least visually, the phallic drive to apprehend and conquer.

Got that? Splendid. Next there’s this, which will tell you what to think of Eurocentrism. Will you be surprised if I tell you the answer is, not much? No.

…the “Eurocentrism” of social science has been under attack, severe attack. The attack is of course fundamentally justified, and there is no question that, if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage which has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world. If, however, we are to do this, we must take a careful look at what constitutes Eurocentrism, for, as we shall see, it is a hydra-headed monster and has many avatars. It will not be easy to slaughter the dragon swiftly. Indeed, if we are not careful, in the guise of trying to fight it, we may in fact criticize Eurocentrism using Eurocentric premises and thereby reinforce its hold on the community of scholars.

Oh no, not that. That would be terrible. Then there’s this, which will tell you the same thing, and also tell you how to disapprove of science. Ambition is a good thing. All that in a few hundred words; it’s very impressive.

Eurocentrism in science is based on the assumption that because modern science arose and developed in Europe understanding the history of science…does not require us to take into account the philosophical and natural knowledge ideas that are to be found in cultures outside Europe. For example the views of Schrodinger were influenced by Hindu philosophy (as he himself notes), and both Bohr and Heisenberg considered that Taoist, Buddhist and Zen ideas had an affinity to the philosophical implications of the quantum theory (as they have been recorded to affirm), but these reflections are treated as aberrations on their part…This orientation, coupled with the easy facility with which ancient Greek philosophical ideas are connected to modern science, lends credibility to the charge that the philosophical interpretations of contemporary science are also Eurocentric in orientation.

And that must not be allowed so everyone had better cut it out right now or else.

Happy April Fool’s Day; enjoy some foolery.