Random observations....

1. Mail that says "IMPORTANT ACCOUNT INFORMATION ENCLOSED" has no importance, other than that it must be shredded as soon as possible to prevent identity theft. Truly important account information--such as a replacement card, a pin number,* or an account statement--is usually discreetly labeled because misuse of such contents represents a more direct liability to the company that sent the envelope.
2. A "courtesy call" from a telemarketer is not particularly courteous to the one receiving the call.
3. In Chicago, cars don't slow down at the red octagonal stop-suggestion signs, but they're more likely to slow down to avoid splashing a pedestrian who walks by a flooded gutter. This increased likelihood is in direct proportion to driver's wish not to splash his or her own car and thus not have to clean it again.

*Yes, I know "pin" stands for "personal identification number" so that saying "pin number" is redundant. Deal with it.

The "equally valid viewpoints" straw man

I am working my way through a book about the (political) life and times of Ronald Reagan. In the introduction, the author--whose name I won't disclose but whose last name rhymes roughly with the capitalized part of the sentence "WHY LEND Scott the money?"--states

I reject, however, the now fashionable claim that objectivity involves reporting all views or interpretations as equally valid.

This type of statement is common in my experience in academia, and I submit that it is a straw man. I know of very few people, even at the level of the "popular" trade-book audience to which Mr. Wilentz's this author's book is directed, who really believe that "all views or interpretations are equally valid." At least, I have not encountered any personally, and I have not read any who make such an extreme claim.

Who's so vain?

A recent blurb that I found via Yahoo! news (click here to see it, but do it quick, as these blurbs time out rather soon) says that Carly Simon has rebuffed speculation about who is the referent for her famous song, "You're so vain."

The song, for the uninitiated, has the following catchy refrain:

You're so vain
You probably think this song is about you

The rest of the song lyrics go on to talk about the narrator's experience with someone who (presumably) jilted her somehow. For example:

You had me several years ago
When I was quite naive
You said we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
Well, you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me

And people obsess over who the song was "about."

Doesn't it occur to anyone that the song is actually about the narrator (or perhaps about Simon, assuming she's the narrator)? My take is, the person the song is addressed to is "so vain" that he thinks the song is about him when in fact it's really about her and her experiences with him.

And yet people still obsess about it.

UPDATE 3-21-10: I've updated the title of this post. It was originally "whose so vain." Ack! grumble, grumble.

Is it really important to prove that humans are different from animals?

A book I'm currently reading about anger, by Carol Tavris,* goes to some pains to distinguish anger as a human emotion from the anger or rage that animals feel when threatened. Tavris says (p. 33)

But in the case of anger, the differences [between animals and humans] are essential. The human symbolic capacity for learning give us a far greater range of choices than lower animals have. Human anger is not a biological reflex like the sneeze, nor simply a reactive display designed to ward off enemies.....

The author then follows with some specific ways in which humans are different from animals.

Tavris is trying to make this distinction between humans and animals in order to qualify some assertions that Charles Darwin made about the congruity between animal and human behavior. This is an introductory chapter in which the author sets up some of the antecedents of current psychological and pop-psychological views of anger that have developed in the last 200 years. (Short answer, as always: the original formulators of modern views about anger, for example Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, never intended their views to be taken as far as they have. In other news, that food you thought was bad for you is actually good for you, "if it's used in moderation.")

As far as I'm concerned, I'm convinced that humans express and probably experience anger differently from the way other animals do. I'm not conversant with all the evidence, but the evidence and argument that are offered are convincing.

But in a wider sense, is it even important? The chapter I took this example from discusses the evolution of thought on the psychology of anger, and I suppose the perception of differences between humans and animals are an important element in that evolution. But the book as a whole is meant as a thought-piece on anger--how to deal with it and whether society's assumptions about how to deal with it are healthy--and simply knowing that humans are different from animals does not really answer these questions. (I'm reminded of the "Simpsons" episode where Mr. Burns is suspected by the IRS of having stolen a trillion dollar bill, and the IRS agent says "we tried to use satellite technology. But all that tells us is that it [the bill] isn't on his roof.")

I don't write this as a crusade against Tavris's book. I've read only the first couple of chapters and it seems quite interesting and capable of offering a challenging and insightful experience. (In short, it will do wonders in yet again delaying my progress toward completing my dissertation.) But I do write this to give one example of something I've noticed in a lot of fields: the seeming necessity of proving that humans are, indeed, different from animals.

Two other examples of where else I've seen this:

• The debate over an assertion that Noam Chomsky allegedly made (which I allegedly read about in a book that was allegedly written by an author who I've allegedly and conveniently forgot the name of) that language is unique to humans. This assertion has sparked an effort by some linguists to either prove or disprove the contention that animals do not have language as humans understand it.
• C. S. Lewis (and others, I presume) has asserted somewhere (again, I don't have a citation....it's nice not to have to be tethered by "evidence" or "facts") that the distinction between animals and humans is that the latter, as far as he can tell, have souls while animals do not. (Come to think of it, maybe it's in Lewis's tract on the problem of pain, and in the chapter on animal pain.)
  

Why do people feel the need to differentiate humans for animals? I don't know. I suppose it has something to do with our spiritual nature or our vanity or whatever.

But for me, the important question is, how useful is it to make the distinction?

I suppose there are theological implications for asserting that humans are endowed with souls while all the rest of creation are not. Still, does Christian theology really depend on whether humans are specially created. Perhaps for some, this is a case, but I doubt that if a Christian who, having died and gone to heaven, finds out that Koko the ape had a soul and got to go to heaven too, would suddenly decline the invitation and go off to the other place. (For what it's worth, C. S. Lewis makes room, at least in theory, for the possibility that there might be other creatures, besides humans, who have souls....I'm thinking primarily of his science fiction trilogy and, if memory serves, of something he wrote in one of his Christian apologetics.)

I suppose also that if it can be shown that animals have language abilities in any meaningful sense (whatever "meaningful sense" means), maybe we can learn to speak to them; and even if animals do not, then maybe the quest to find out if they do tells us something about our own language or helps us define more precisely what we mean by language (because and as an aside, there seems to me to be a bit of circularity in the assertion that animals lack human-like language abilities (and for what it's worth, even if animals can speak, I don't think they'd make too-long, convoluted sentences like the one I am writing right now)). But does knowing that animal communication is different (or not) from that of humans really help us answer the pressing questions of linguists?

I suppose that if one is looking at the history of such things and expects to represent them accurately, one needs to take account of the debate over the differences between humans and animals. But at the end of the day, I think we should be more explicit about why the question matters at all.

*Carol Tavris. Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

George Bailey didn't sit on the draft board

I've been thinking about the classic film, It's a Wonderful Life. You will recall that the movie was about an honest man, George Bailey, who gave up his dreams of world travel and wealth and fame to run his late father's honest "Bailey's Building and Loans" business and to save that business from the clutches of the richest man in that small town, Mr. Potter.

The movie chronicles George's life, from his youth in the 1920s, to his marriage and his takeover of the building and loans business during the Great Depression, and through World War II. During World War II, George does good, helping, if memory serves, to ensure proper preservation of materials important for the war effort. (It's been a while since I've seen the movie, so I stand to be corrected on the specifics.)

Meanwhile, the evil Mr. Potter is head of the town's draft board. Of course he is. He's a bad man, and making people go to war involuntarily is an unsavory thing to do.

My question, though, is, isn't this a bit too convenient? It doesn't seem to me that George Bailey's character objects to the idea of drafting people, and the film's audience, probably, does not so object either, or is not expected to object. Yet, drafting people is unsavory, something that smells bad even if it's necessary, and why not let bad people do it?

Capra was obviously making use of a common literary trope--bad people do the necessary but unsavory things while good people do the necessary and savory things.

We see this a lot. For example, in the movie Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, there is a scene where the protagonist--glamorous bank robbers who scrupulously attack only bankers and avoid stealing from honest, hardworking farmers--take a man (played by Gene Wilder) out drinking and carousing. They eventually find out that his occupation is that of an undertaker, and when they do, they abandon him on the road, far from his home. The moral, as I take it, is that the man who profits off other people's deaths is to be loathed. (Still, his services are necessary.)

I suppose such tropes are okay when it comes to entertainment. Maybe they're are even necessary. But is there not some room to acknowledge moral ambiguity?