Let me refresh your memory. About two years ago, longtime liberal Mamet wrote an article for the Village Voice excoriating his erstwhile “brain-dead” political positions, and explaining that his core views are better reflected in the distrust of big government and faith in the free market that he takes to be the centerpiece of libertarian-conservative thought.

Mamet:

Tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

The extremism of this statement ensures its failure. Government built the National Parks system, landed men on the moon, and made it a lot easier for disabled Americans to take the bus to church like everybody else. These things make David Mamet cry? That’s a rational response.

Here’s some more:

I found not only that I didn’t trust the [Bush-era] government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

I almost wonder if Mamet is writing a parody. What’s disturbing about this article is that it cavalierly uses the most simplistic elaboration of the liberal-conservative divide — virtuous founders vs. decrepit modern politics; the market vs. government; Bush vs. Kennedy. Mamet rests lazily on on arguments that I’ve heard a thousand times from writers without a scintilla of his talent. You’d think he’d have some fancy trick, some new and compelling point. But he doesn’t. He just says the same damn thing everybody does, and he doesn’t even say it very well. That’s embarrassing.

Perhaps my objection is essentially aesthetic. A good conversion story should be like a good Aristotelian drama in that it does not just contain a reversal, but also an element of revelation, of sudden insight. That element is lacking here. Ironically, the problem with the conversion of this major American dramatist is that it is completely lacking in any drama whatever. Mamet comes across like a guy who is used to ordering corned beef and realizes he prefers turkey, and then writes an extended essay on this thrilling transformation.

Back to Terry Teachout, who explains that the conversion should come as no surprise.

The only unexpected thing about this conclusion is that it took the author of American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988) so long to reach it. In these hard-headed plays, which established him as a major voice in American theater, Mamet respectively portrays small-time crooks, unethical real-estate agents, and ambitious Hollywood executives as engaged in identically savage battles for power over one another. His foul-mouthed characters behave like scorpions in a bottle, determined to sting or be stung. They have no past or future, only the unremittingly bleak present, though they somehow manage to entertain us—if that is the word—because of the manic energy with which they do their frenzied dances of death.

The battles in which Mamet’s characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: “It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different.”

Is this right? I thought that the point of these plays is that the characters stuck in these scenarios are full of pettiness, confusion and blunder. I mean, the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross are salesmen ready to claw each other’s eyes out over a brand new set of steak knives. Calling that a “frenzied dance of death” misses the joke of it. These titanic struggles are only interesting because they are so small-minded, giving these plays a signature mood of human self-delusion. To rationalize Mamet’s early work into his current politics we have to take away all of its edge, and that would be a shame.

And why do we need to fit old Mamet into new Mamet, anyway? The attempt to impose total coherence over a lifetime body of work usually comes across as intellectually desperate. Poet John Dryden admitted that although Shakespeare had the “largest and most comprehensive soul,” sometimes his plays could also be “flat” and “insipid.” Writers, like people, are inconsistent, and that’s okay. Actually, when you think about it, by arguing that the old Mamet “prefigures” the new Mamet, Teachout diminishes the profundity of the conversion itself.

So what’s “conservative” or “libertarian” about Mamet’s plays? Teachout writes,

[Mamet's plays] present human behavior rather than trying to explain it. None of the characters is obviously sympathetic, nor do any of them step forward at evening’s end to reassure uneasy audiences that they are seeing man at his worst and that a well-regulated society has the power to lead him in the paths of righteousness. Instead, Mamet portrays human life as a Hobbesian war of all against all, leaving it to the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the ultimate meaning of the struggles for dominance that he witnesses on stage. The only difference between Mamet then and Mamet now is that he has decided that government intervention can do little or nothing to ameliorate the effects of these struggles, and that men do better to work out their differences through the operation of free markets.

Teachout has elected to pursue this line of reasoning for obvious reasons. By arguing that the anti-liberal Mamet “presents” rather than “explains,” the essay aligns these plays with a whole set of attributes that conservatives often associate with their point of view — hard-headedness, practicality, a more accurate reflection of the actual world, the provision of a choice to a consumer. These are essential components of libertarian rhetoric. The only trouble is that we could apply this very model of “showing without explaining” to plenty of works by people all over the political and aesthetic map, including Chekhov, Pinter, O’Neill, even Ionesco.

My sense is that Teachout’s argument gets snarled on an unfortunate misidentification. In fact, he is not describing “conservative theater” or “libertarian theater,” but something else — “drama.” Mamet himself has recently written that all theater is about a conflict between good and evil: in comedy and tragedy, good wins; in drama it’s a tie; evil only gets to win in film noir. If Mamet is right, then Teachout’s philosophy seems to be that there is something inherently market-based and anti-government about “drama” because it is about ties between good and evil. Does that sound right to you? Part of me is delighted to concede the point (personally, I prefer comedy, tragedy and noir, in that order) but there remains something wrongheaded about it, since in the real world most “dramas” tend to be written, performed and watched by liberals, and in the past the lack of cozy resolution in these plays has been the very hallmark of soft, liberal equivocation.

Besides, it seems peculiar for Teachout to define Mamet’s libertarian-conservatism through the unremitting nihilism of plays that contain struggles without any hope of reconciliation. The drama that Teachout describes doesn’t so much make a case for market-based solutions as a case against the very existence of solutions of any kind — in that sense, these are not plays against “the government,” but plays against the premise of politics itself.

Perhaps the chilling prospect of that abyss is just what has made Mamet so compelling to liberal and conservative alike over the years. Mamet’s plays don’t just have political ideologies, they eat them.

Jealous?

During one of these visits, I heard about – but never saw – the famous “bug room.” See, whenever an exotic animal dies at the zoo or wherever, the museum is supposed to preserve its bones for study. Staff carefully dismember the carcass. Then they put the bits and pieces into a pitch-dark room full of thousands of skin beetles and other carnivorous bugs and wait a few days until the pieces were picked clean. Despite all our technology, it seems, nobody has ever come up with a gentler or more efficient way to free a gibbon from its ligaments or liberate a tiger from its meat.

Of course, that’s the kind of story that eleven year-old kids go bonkers over. So maybe it was a lie. I never saw the room. Still: it’s the of kind idea that haunts you.

Anyway, one time I went to visit the museum with my dad and my aunt. She had a job as an archivist at a huge bank. I went to work with her once or twice and she showed me photographs of remote prairie villages in the 1930′s. I also got to see the vault, which is dug right into the bedrock underneath Bay Street. My aunt had a Master’s degree in art. Her apartment was all hardcover books and color-blocked canvases. She and my dad hated each other’s guts, but while I was a kid I still got to go and stay with her from time to time. She’d take me to the big city mall, to book fairs, to jazz clubs. She took me on my first ride on a subway.

At the museum, we saw the collection of Chinese artifacts. The museum has a world-class collection from the Yuan dynasty. Rumor has it that a lot of it was illegally smuggled out of China in the 1930’s by an Anglican bishop who stuffed artifacts into the baggage of traveling missionaries. My dad’s friends told stories of their predecessors lifting whole trainloads of priceless ancient relics from warlords with no immediate use for their own national patrimony. It’s a great collection, see it some time.

Anyway, after our visit, we met up with my dad and were confronted by a group of homeless people asking for money. It was one after the other down the block, asking for change, for food, anything. All kinds of people – men, women, old and young. Panhandlers hang out around the Museum because the tourists flock there in the summer; Toronto didn’t really have a whole lot of attractions back then.

My dad grew up in India, so he knew a thing or two about panhandlers. He’s a gently guy, but he still called them “beggars,” muttering something about how they’re all lazy sons-of-bitches and just trying to get drunk. This bothered me. He enjoyed saying it too much. That made him seem weak. It’s not fitting to demean other people like that, to delight in judging them.

My aunt gave a look and stopped, deciding to exploit this teachable moment, perhaps because she never had any children of her own. She pointed to the oldest of the homeless people as if he were suddenly under glass. She explained that what made us different from that guy was exactly nothing. There but for the grace of God. The guy looked at me with a little bit of pity. Or maybe he had a severe untreated mental illness, like many homeless people. Or maybe this happened to him a hundred times a day. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to turn the situation to his advantage. That’s what I’d do.

We walked on, giving nothing, taking nothing. There was no harm done, apparently. Both my aunt and my dad thought they’d triumphed, but the truth is they were both just being cheap, in different ways.

Everybody’s a plunderer.

Years later, I learned that my Aunt was an anti-Semite. She believed that Jews, homosexuals and the French were working together to take over the world. What a compendium of paranoia! I felt ripped-off.

The New York Times has discontinued it’s humor blog, “a function of the reality of limited resources in a medium where any number of worthy experiments are possible, but all can’t be sustained.” Check out this sign-off, with an old bit from Laurel & Hardy — a little light humor for ongoing tough times.

Evgeny Morozov can really unpack the rhetoric of Internet enthusiasm. His review of Clay Shirky’s new Cognitive Surplus: “Shirky’s digital populism not only blinds him, McLuhan-style, to inconvenient facts, it blinds him to the immense complexities and competing values inherent in democratic societies. He says he is writing about Western democracies, but they are unrecognizable in his book, for they appear to have been sterilized completely of social conflict …”

Ever wonder which dystopian novel is expresses who you are as a person — Player Piano, Snow Crash, The Handmaid’s Tale? There’s a quiz for everything.

Have you read Gene Weingarten’s piece on the lost art of the headline? It’s terrific: “Early this year, the print edition of The Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: ‘Better never than late.’ Online, it was changed to ‘Conan O’Brien won’t give up “Tonight Show” time slot to make room for Jay Leno.’”

“In a house with two young boys, two young cats, and two aging dogs, odd repetitive noises can only mean trouble:”  Writer Oronte Churm has been disturbing old dust and is now beset by coincidences involving boy scout merit badges and pink dolphins.

Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind is causing a stir. Read D.G. Myers’ review: “With gentle logic and a zinging prose, Robinson shows that the modern enemies of mind, those who engage in ‘a hermeneutics of condescension,’ claim the authority of science without practicing ‘the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.’ In the end, thought without mind is self-refuting.”

“What would you do with a souvenir threat? Carry it in your wallet like a talisman and brandish it at surly cashiers?” At TNR Ruth Franklin attends a reading of threats by Amelia Gray, and wonders why it is that women poets nowadays are so reticent to express red-blooded anger.

I’ve been doing some reading about the life of Pythagoras. According to one legend, the ancient philosopher once miraculously overcame the bite of a poisonous snake. Know how? He bit it right back. I love that story.

You probably know that Gibson starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet back in 1990. To promote the film Gibson also made a video entitled Mel Gibson Goes Back to School, in which he toured high schools doing play readings with students. In the video, Gibson says that his favorite passage from Hamlet is a soliloquy from Act 1, Scene 2. The monologue starts like this:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

What a tantrum! In this unweeded garden of verbiage there are eight exclamation points and just one full stop. T.S. Eliot famously argued that Hamlet’s problem is that he seems to lack an “objective correlative” for his emotions. Sure, Hamlet is furious about his mother’s decision to marry his uncle just a month after his father’s death, but nothing has actually happened on stage yet to turn that brooding into a wish for the canonization of oblivion. In other words, it’s the hissiness that’s baffling. Eliot:

The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse.

Does Gibson? Let’s compare diatribes. His tirade against girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva starts out as a complaint about whether or not she lied to him about having breast implants, which strikes me as an infinitely trivial objective correlative for what ensues.

Gibson: So you’re not lying to me about fake tits?

Grigorieva: I never have.

Gibson: Yes yes you did. You said they weren’t, you fucking lied to me.

Grigorieva: I didn’t. I never said anything of the kind. You never asked me I never told you. Or maybe you asked me but I never lied about this.

Gibson: [Sighs] I’m a liar, who cares. They look ridiculous, get rid of them why don’t you. Anyway …

Grigorieva: That’s none of your fucking business.
Gibson: It is, it is I’m just telling you, it’s just an appraisal. Keep em if you want. Look stupid. See if I give a fuck. But they’re too big and they look stupid.

“Appraisal?” Yuck. What is it with Mel Gibson and breasts — remember when he called that LAPD officer “sugar tits?” Onward:

Gibson:  They look like a Vegas bitch, like a Vegas whore. And you go around sashaying in your tight clothes and stuff. I won’t stand for that anymore …

Grigorieva: I don’t walk around in tight clothes, I stay at home for most of the time.

Gibson: … You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat. And if you get raped by a pack of ni**ers it will be your fault. Alright? You are provocatively dressed all the time with your fake boobs that you feel you have to show off in tight outfits and tight pants and you see your pussy from behind and that GREEN thing today was enough. THAT’s provocative, okay?  I’m telling you, I’m just telling you the truth. I don’t like it. I don’t want that woman. I don’t want you. I don’t BELIEVE you anymore. I don’t TRUST you. I don’t LOVE you. I don’t WANT you.

The racial slur is just one reason why Gibson comes across as such a jackwagon. Also, like Hamlet, his intensity is out of all proportion to the situation. In fact, his rage is so excessive that it even undermines his stated position. Gibson clearly does want her, hence the fireworks.

But what is it about her that he wants? That’s hard to ascertain. Gibson starts out like a parent chastising a teenage daughter for wearing a short skirt to church, but by the end of the rant his tone sounds more like a teenager himself, bitching about being grounded, stomping around his room until his hormones subside. I’m surprised he doesn’t threaten to run away from home. Maybe Mel didn’t quite make it back to school, but he seems to have made it back to the schoolyard.

Which brings me back to the soliloquy, and it’s second obvious feature — Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s sex life, which is just as involved as Gibson’s. Here is the second half of the monologue, in which Hamlet describes the suspicious brevity of Gertrude’s mourning before she up and married Claudius:

Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she–
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer–married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

Whatever else he intends to express with all the galled eyes, dexterous events and incestuous sheets, it’s pretty clear that Hamlet gets self-righteous satisfaction from judging the sexuality of women, particularly his mother. Sure, he’s  tormented by his mother’s degradation, but the fine detail in his imagination suggests that he also gets a kind of enjoyment out of the torment. So does Gibson. That’s part of what’s so revealing about the rape comment. My theory is that Gibson relishes imagining this scenario with the provocative dress — you can picture him sitting around thinking about it, turning it over in his mind, coming back to it when he gets distracted by something else. That’s the kind of guy that he is, and it fits in with his racism and paranoid anti-semitism. His misogyny and bigotry are but manifestations of a deeper poverty of character that is the propensity for seething, childish, obsessive fixation.

That’s what makes him scary. He’s the kind of person that you don’t want to think about you in moments when he is all alone with his thoughts.

For me, Hamlet‘s ultimately about just this spiritual illness. Sure, there are plenty of problems with the play, but what isn’t a problem is the way that Shakespeare gradually unravels his hero’s weary, stale, flat and unprofitable propensity for morbid fixation, orchestrating accidents that tease from Hamlet the appropriate level of action needed to bring equilibrium to the world of the play. No other character is really like that in Shakespeare’s fiction. That’s why Hamlet’s rants — as gross, misogynistic and immoderate as they are — always come across as more reflective than rude.

So while Mel Gibson’s career may be finished, I’m surprised to discover that I still hold out hope for his immortal soul. At least he’s got an appreciation for the very literary parable that is best able to draw him out of his infantile egomania.

In romance, do opposites really attract? Nah. Journalist David McRaney has been reading the research.

Not only are you more likely to be attracted to and marry people of the same culture, religion and status, but you’ll probably stick by them in the long run. Why? Well,

People who are more like you are more fun to be around, easier to talk to and more likely to like the same movies and TV shows you do. They’ve read the same books and loved them as much as you did. If they have yet to read those books, you can look forward to introducing them to your favorites.

When you discover new things, you respond to them in a similar way. You say, “That’s awesome!” They say, “Yeah, that’s really cool.”

When you find someone who matches up with your personality, they validate your beliefs and world-view, they confirm your outlook.

McRaney’s overall reading of the research rings true, but the reasoning in his post could be spruced up.

First, “likeness” is not clearly defined. One study focuses on religion, another focuses on sense of humor, another on appearance, while yet more compare several criteria. McRaney’s argument conceptualizes all of these forms of “similarity” as relatively interchangeable. To me, sharing religion is one thing, having the same favorite episode of Lost is something else, and genetic homology is a different thing. Lumping them all together seems counterintuitive.

Defining terms is important for any argument, but the problem is especially acute here because the nature of similarity is part of the mythology of romance. When I teach Pride and Prejudice, I ask my students to consider how Austen encourages us to assess the characters relative to one another at various junctures in the novel. Students instinctively grade characters according to class status. Using that criterion, it’s easy to see how unlikely the pairing of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy really is. But what if we consider the characters based on who comes off as the “coolest?” Whatever separates them, Elizabeth and Darcy seem far cooler than virtually anyone else in the novel, and if the capacity to intrigue us and invite speculative admiration is the basis for assessment, then the marriage seems inevitable. Which of these two criteria should we follow – class, cool, neither? McRaney’s conclusions ought to give us some equipment to know when to discard one criterion or another.

My point is that when it comes to romance, some similarities and oppositions are invariably more prominent than others. Good novelists manipulate that discrepancy, but good social researchers should control for it.

My second criticism has to do with the nature of the argument. I wish that McRaney did not merely expose the falsehood of the “opposites attract” idea, but also asked what that falsehood itself might mean. Dispelling myths is super, but I want to know where those myths come from, what values underlie them, and what forces perpetuate them. In many instances, a myth is less interesting than its stubborn persistence.

McRaney does point us in exactly the right direction. Here are some of the conclusions he draws from the literature:

Most people want a partner with whom they share a lot in common, not who challenges their every notion of how the world works.So, what about choosing someone who looks like you. Does it go that far? Are you really that much like Narcissus pining away at his reflection?

Maybe.

[...]

It seems as though you are looking for someone with a great outlook on life and a wonderful sense of humor, and the rubric, the standard by which you judge potential mates, is you.

The allusion to Narcissus is smart, but not in the way that McRaney thinks. A mirrored reflection is not a likeness of the self. Instead, a mirror shows us the reverse of ourselves, so Narcissus was attracted to his precise opposite. Perhaps a similar effect obtains in real life: the more similar our lover is, the less similar he or she appears to be. While we love people who reaffirm our world-view, we love them best when they appear not to. And so there is a relationship between the delusion of our preferences and our actual preferences. Deep down, we may want somebody just like ourselves, but in order to find that person in the mirror of the outer world, we have no choice but to seek that which our senses will identify as our reverse.

This lines right up with the Narcissus fable. According to Ovid, Narcissus eventually did realize that it was only his own reflection before his eyes. Only after attaining this awareness and continuing to abide in the illusion did Narcissus pine away. Here’s what Narcissus says in the moment of realization:

Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not decieve me. I am on fire with love for my own self. It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure. What should I do? Woo or be wooed? But what then shall I seek by my wooing? What I desire I have. My very plenty makes me poor. How I wish I could separate myself from my body!

Dang. Nobody needs that kind of metaphysical anxiety. Moral of the story? Sure, the belief that opposites attract is a deception, but perhaps it’s one better left undisturbed.

There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes.

Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 minutes in a submerged steel coffin. How did he do it? “It’s a matter of using some common sense to start with. You don’t want to use up a lot of oxygen …”

Here’s a mischievous new initiative: in the U.K. poets are eavesdropping on strangers and turning the phrases they overhear into poetry. The idea is to “bring writers out of their sweaty garrets and into the streets and coffee houses.” Who will be most embarrassed by this, I wonder.

Screw the new iPhone. If you want to really bring the action to life, check out these vintage VCR advertisements.

What is a museum? “A place for a secular ritual,” says Tino Sehgal, “where categories that constitute the basis of our society are enacted and exercised.” After what he pulled at the Guggenheim, he should know.

Stephen Burt surmises that social networking isn’t an addiction, but … “Anyone who regrets time spent online, anyone who spends hours clicking on photos and links and then asks where his morning has gone, has experienced at least a bit of the feeling that addicts know: the sense that our brains’ pleasure centres, our immediate impulses, have led us astray.” Want to read more? Go ahead, click the link. You know you want to. No one’s watching.

And, finally: ever wonder what makes the red pen the mightiest of all? An expert reflects.

This blog is shutting down for a few weeks. It’s about time that I took a hike.

Schulz focuses in part on the curious phenomenon that many of the truths we adhere to most passionately — the Big Bang Theory, tide patterns in the ocean, global warming — are things we have never really bothered to study directly. Schulz:

But this is actually, I think, a really wonderful thing about human beings. We’re able to take advantage of one another’s minds and of one another’s expertise. And that’s important.

We wouldn’t be able to understand or enjoy, you know, most of the world around us if other people weren’t experts in things that we’re not. But it does mean that we’re inevitably relying on someone else, and quite often, when we say that we’re right, what we really mean is, well, I believe that this other person is right.

I don’t mean to be curmudgeonly, but I worry about this. Is it fitting to invest one’s passion in a belief when you haven’t done the homework? One of the maddening things about public discourse nowadays is that there is no real relation between the fervor we have for beliefs and the time we took to bone up on the evidence behind them. So a pundit can express limitless disgust over a bill without having read it, or accuse someone of failing to do something that they have done, and even a subsequent admission of ignorance does not undermine the disgust. Beliefs immunize themselves from the ignominy of error not through abundant proof, but abundant zeal.

It’s as if a student who didn’t do any of the reading has every right to dispute the textual interpretations of the kid who memorized every syllable. That’s pretty crummy.

I’m not arguing that the public sphere sucks any worse than it ever did. Actually, I’m worried that the truth is more insidious: perhaps this situation is an effect of knowledge itself — maybe it’s inherently easier to believe in the expertise of another person because they’re someone else. When the onus is actually on you to do the digging, all of a sudden you appreciate levels of ambiguity in the field of knowledge at hand, and that appreciation can diminish your ability to utter unqualified support. In other words, the less you know the truth the more you can believe the truth.

Another interesting exchange in the interview occurs here, when a health care worker calls in:

DAVID (Caller): Hello, great show, great topic. I used to work in the intensive care units, and often with patients on life support. And there was a lot of pressure to always have the answer. You know, why is this patient’s – his health is declining. We’ve got to keep him alive. What’s going on? There was a lot of pressure to be right all the time and especially the physicians that I worked with.

And now that I’m in a – I find that I’m in a clerical support – or a clinical support role, where I’m more computer-based, and (technical difficulties) it’s just liberating to be able to say, you know what? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. So I don’t have this pressure to be right all the time, and it’s absolutely liberating to be able to say, you know what? I don’t know.

CONAN: Another phrase a lot of people, you write, Kathryn, have difficulty saying.

Ms. SCHULZ: Absolutely. A lot of us are really uncomfortable with not knowing, with that state of doubt or uncertainty. But David, I think you’re exactly right. I think the capacity to say I don’t know really can be very liberating, and it can open us up to learning and to hearing other people’s opinions and ideas and resolving a situation collaboratively.

I also think the point you make that – you know, you were in a situation of really critical stakes. These are people who are very, very sick, and, of course, everyone wants to know the answer and they want to be able to solve the situation.

And I think that really speaks to the heart of why we hate being wrong, which is that we don’t – we’re terrified of feeling out of control. We’re terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don’t know.

This makes me think that the emotions that Schulz describes have less to do with being “right” or “wrong,” and more to do with being certain. As a matter of fact, rightness and wrongness are usually out of our hands. In theory, any belief is liable to debunking. But how much time can we spend in a state of anxiety over that liability? Perhaps our belief in our own correctness is not a fault, but a sophisticated defense mechanism against the more profound anxiety of uncertainty. Thus, the categories of “truth” and “falsehood” are a calculus intended to impose control over a range of levels of certainty that are much more unstable, shifting and relativistic.

According to this view, we declare ourselves convinced less because we are convinced and more because we need to be convinced of something, anything. The truths that we hold to be self-evident are mere bulwarks against the sneaking suspicion that there are no self-evident truths. Being right or wrong is always better than being unsure, and that only comes to light as beliefs pass the diaphanous boundary from truth into error.

Small wonder why we we react childishly when it turns out we’re dead wrong about a model of the universe, a diagnosis or a seemingly clear memory. Our declarations of certainty were pretty childish to begin with.

At The Chronicle of Higher Ed, blogger Laurie Fendrich responds to this phenomenon. Sure, we invent snazzy laptops and great shampoos, she concedes, “but where’s the evidence that we like and know how to fix things?”

Where indeed. Fendrich takes us back a generation or two ago, to a simpler time …

Most of the women fixed things by sewing and darning. Men, however, often spent hours tinkering away in basements and garages, spending their spare time fiddling around with old vacuum cleaners, broken lamps, toasters, and television sets, or trying to fix a toy train that wouldn’t stop derailing. They’d casually fix the noisy potty by deftly cleaning out the fill valve. Or they’d  climb up on the roof to adjust the antenna until the reception finally stopped crackling. Fix-it types frequently started out working with their fathers, in construction or plumbing or electrical work. A lot of them started out as scrawny high-school kids who’d get hold of, say, a clunker Chevy with a leaky carburetor which they then would patiently take apart, carefully laying out the pieces on an old blanket on the garage floor.

I wonder what it was like to grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure, the sentimentality is disarming, but I’m not sure that Fendrich’s rose-colored glasses are more trustworthy than the set she is currently critiquing. The antidote for worship of a utopian future is probably not worship the mythical past. At any rate, this is not the kind of “evidence” mentioned in her initial question, so the beguiling passage above is not contributing to the well-being of this argument.

Fendrich proceeds, contrasting the past with the present,

Nowadays, handy men—and handymen—are an increasingly rare breed. When a toaster or a vacuum cleaner dies, forget it. Who knows a handyman? Without a second thought, we ship our broken stuff off to the dump. As for cars, mechanics are as likely as not to run a computer analysis to figure out what’s wrong, and then order a new (computer) part accordingly. The husbands and teenage boys who used to tinker? They’ve taken to hanging out on the computer.

What’s wrong with hanging out on the computer? Those handy with HTML are the successors of those handy with a torque wrench, which makes sense since we spend more time interacting with computers than any other piece of technology. If the industrial age necessitated a little acquaintance with a grease-gun, it’s only natural that the information age requires a grasp of code, and it’s a little fussy to draw a bright line between those tinkering with hardware and those tinkering with software.

Still, one or two factors do separate the guy who can explain bit torrents from the guy who maintains the building. And Fendrich has her finger on one of them:

The only remaining people with real, practical, tinkering knowledge—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, and yes, oil riggers—are a separate “class.” Yet they’re often the ones who really know the most about how something works, but are listened to the least. The power is “upstairs,” with the people on the computers.

White middle-class men and women may undertake repairs as a hobby — we live, after all, in the heyday of “do-it-yourself” — but practical knowledge as Fendrich conceives it belongs largely to working-class immigrants. In my neighborhood handymen have last names in Vietnamese, Polish or Spanish. I’m convinced that this is a good thing. Knowledge of rudimentary electronics, car repair or plumbing can give displaced peoples an advantage in labor markets where their educational credentials are not readily recognized and language skills may be imperfect. The importance of valuing this labor is a moral point on which I scrupulously agree with Fendrich, and you should too.

The post concludes this way:

While we may still shout, “Fix it!” when things go wrong, what we really mean is, “Make the problem go away.” We show little evidence in our society that we value practical knowlege—the hunch-filled, hands-on, tinkering approach necessary to fix things. Too bad for us we can’t just walk away from the leaking Gulf well, or better yet, toss it onto a landfill.

I’d actually extend this point: perhaps our relative lack of experience in tinkering is the source of our great faith in technological fixes. During the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger disaster, physicist Richard Feynman discovered that NASA engineers expected a failure rate of about one in 100 for Shuttle missions, while NASA managers expected a failure rate of one in 100,000. Many people cite this discrepancy to show that engineering advice is foolishly ignored, but the mismatch of expectations also captures something else — the capacity for utopian projection that can only be generated at a distant remove from the machinery that it describes. Technical problems tend to seem more complex the more you think about them, and since we don’t do that thinking, we erroneously consider them to be readily resolved by somebody else.

Ironically, tossing vacuum cleaners into landfills make us suspect that they are easier to fix, not harder.

Anyway, it’s not our naive faith in technology that worries me, or even our diminishing value for practical knowledge. It’s the erroneous belief that big problems can vanish, rather than linger, transform and fester, which is what usually happens. Even if we could toss the Gulf well into a landfill it wouldn’t really go away, because when you get down to it there is no “away.” You can reshape big problems and manage them, but you can’t “fix” them in the same way you can repair a busted Chevy.

Fendrich believes that we misconceive our solutions, but I suspect that it’s the problems that we fail to grasp maturely. Technology can mitigate some things and aggravate others, but the most intractable naivete of all is the belief that good permanent resolutions even exist in the first place.

In my profession, it is a commonplace to posit that the visual field is extraordinarily malleable, a plenum that is always being shaped by technological developments, aesthetic agendas and other forces of history — especially crises. Thanks to the media, adjustments are always being made to the list of things we imagine ourselves able to see, just as there are always new protocols to help us attach meaning to objects that appear. In the spirit of this hypothesis, here are a few notions that I’ve been kicking around about the BP video feed.

For one thing, not only is this leak something that can be seen, it is also something that must be seen. We watch it to “hold them accountable,” which is a screwy way of thinking about watching a webstream circulated by a congressional subcommittee. Actually, if I worked for BP, I would have made the feed available from the getgo. Why? Because to see the spill is to participate in the belief that we have power over it. Sure, the first time I saw the feed it was scary. But the longer I watch, the less alarm I feel, thanks in part to the calm of the aqueous environment and the sheer abstractness of digital moving imagery. A robotic arm enters the shot, grasping a stray hose; data points are superimposed across the screen; hulking green machinery looms heavily in the distance; clouds of material ripple hypnotically. Such imagery is exactly the opposite of the clips of oil-soaked waterfowl topside. In the anesthetic world of the digital seabed, the victims of the plume are invisible, and the whole situation feels like an exciting hypothetical problem. Considering what’s at stake, that’s pretty evil.

But there is something boring about the image, too. I keep wishing that the shot would pan or drift to explore more of the seabed, the plume, the bottom-life. I keep expecting a stupendous accidental discovery — a colony of fluorescent crabs, a shipwreck, a sea-witch mugging for the camera. According to Siegfried Kracauer, many early photographers emphasized the ability of photography to “stress the fortuitous” — to capture unplanned subject matter. That was part of the thrill, the sense that the world before the lens is partly out of control and that the camera was astute, perceptive, curious. The BP camera lacks this charisma. The camera seems unaware that that it is in the midst of a great adventure in an uncharted world, and there is something disappointing about that disrespect for serendipity.

Finally, while I’m sure that there have been deep water feeds before, this one is noteworthy for its promiscuity — you can watch it on thousands of websites, mobile platforms, on your television. Millions are. The feed gushes out in all directions with the same riotous abandon as the oil that it depicts, and that aggressiveness of presence amplifies the nature of what we see. If the oil is a monster rising from the unconscious depths to punish us for our crappy husbandry of the earth, the images of that process reiterate and extend the attack. Thanks to visual aggrandizement, disaster becomes allegory. That’s one reason that the image is so compelling. Oil rushes up to the Gulf coast wetlands while oleaginous images simultaneously splash on iPads and splitscreens in New York, Norway and Nepal, which makes the event seem less like an engineering accident and more like the fulfillment of some ancient geological vendetta.

So the live feed has effortlessly turned mere leaking oil into a sea monster with a grudge, ascending from the abyss to kill us. What else can it do? Whose side are these pictures on, anyway? Traitors.

“Our affinities with ancestors may be unconscious but are less attenuated than we imagine:” Patrick Kurp on cutting hay, the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, and the origin of the word “henge.”

Marina Abramovic’s current performance at MoMA is causing a stir — the artist sits in a chair and you sit across from her. Philosopher Arthur C. Danto took his turn: “The question was how long to sit. On the one hand, I thought I could sit there interminably. For a wild moment I thought my physical ailments would fade away, as if I were at Lourdes. I don’t really believe in miracles, but I do believe in courtesy …”

Sure, political compromises get things done. But can the middle course become a fetish? Consider Henry Clay’s 1850 Compromise, which both ended and protected slavery …

Does free will exist? Nah. But according to recent neuroscience, there might be such a thing as a free won’t – “The time gap between observing an internal urge and then taking action on that urge, is long enough to be able to thwart the original urge.” We might not shape our own choices, but we can resist them.

Finally, at the south pole there is a brand-new research station, where the “polies” have a basketball court, a greenhouse, and the chef serves grilled salmon in spicy-sweet chili sauce. “Though the chef is mainly into his cooking, he and everybody else at the Pole are actually part of a giant geopolitical chess game …”