The Case of the Cheating Girlfriend

This week New York Magazine’s advice columnist, Polly, takes off her fake-therapist hat and speaks to the letter writer clearly and directly. She does not tell the woman to get in touch with her feelings. She does not even tell her to feel her feelings. She shames her for her appalling behavior.

The letter writer, who calls herself a Selfish Romantic, has developed the habit of cheating on her boyfriends. No matter which boyfriend she has, she manages to find another man to cheat with. In ancient times, she would have been called a slut or a tramp. In modern times we are not supposed to be judgmental… we are supposed to feel her pain.

Much to our surprise, Polly does not feel her pain. She refuses to associate herself with a woman who does not respect herself or other people. Polly is clearly correct here. She shows that adult women refuse to associate with woman of ill-repute because they understand that condoning such behavior will cause them to be similarly disrespected. This the rationale for slut shaming, a practice most often engaged by women, not men. When women refuse to shame their slutty sisters they are defining themselves down, declaring that they are worthy of being treated as women of less repute.

Kudos to Polly.

Anyway, here’s the text of the letter:

I started cheating on my boyfriends in college, and it’s a habit that has followed me into adulthood. It started out with onetime hookups and escalated into full-on affairs. I always had the comfort of a loving boyfriend while the “other man” could nourish unfed parts of me — my interest in art, my inner social butterfly, my sense of adventure. It’s weird, I remember fantasizing about infidelity when I was younger but have also always craved monogamy.

I find ways to rationalize this extremely selfish behavior (“What they don’t know won’t hurt them”). I’ve even called it a “feminist act.” In other words, I’m delusional.

I’m currently in one of these situations, but it feels harder than before. My current boyfriend and I get along so well. We have so much fun together, laugh at the same things, and he really loves and cares about me. We’re on the same page about almost everything, but I’ve noticed some parts of him that I don’t love. He’s often negative, sometimes short-tempered, pretty unmotivated, and a bit anti-social. I suppose these are the things that have led me to cheating on him, even though I love him.

The guy I’m cheating on him with is also a great guy, but I don’t feel the same comfort, ease, and love with him as I do with my boyfriend. He checks a lot of my boxes (passionate, social, friendly), but I would hate to leave my loving, supportive, compatible boyfriend for someone who might not be worth it. I don’t know what to do. On the one hand, I love my boyfriend. But on the other, I’m literally cheating on him.

Who do I choose? The answer everyone has been giving is “choose yourself,” but I don’t want to give up both of these great men.

Selfish Romantic

After offering a wee bit of psychobabble, Polly offers the cogent remark, that romance is a contract. I would have preferred that she note that relationships and especially marriage are contracts, but she is using the term that the letter writer uses. In her deluded state the letter writer thinks she is being a romantic.

Polly writes:

Maybe you have to pretend or act cheerful or suspend your disbelief a little bit, but with romance, there’s a contract. Romance means you share at least a loose understanding of what you’re doing together. Romance cannot exist when one person is lying. The lies nullify the romance. The lies mean that your partner is trying to live in reality, but you’re bamboozling him for the sake of living in a fantasy world. Your fantasy depends on a heist.

I especially like the idea that a man who is faithful to his girlfriend is engaged in a real relationship, while the cheating girlfriend is living a lie. That means, is living in a fantasy world.

She continues to argue a point that I often note: namely, that the contract does not require you or anyone to come clean about everything. Other advice columnists have said as much. It is worth repeating:

Coming clean is not always the most generous and kind act that a person can engage in. But those rare and particular situations are nothing like your situation. In your situation, lying is a crime against the two men you’re milking for affection and support.

Polly places responsibility where it belongs, with the cheating girlfriend. Since the letter writer behaves the same way with every man she is involved with, the chances are good that she is the problem. True enough, the problem might be that she chooses men who are inappropriate, who are not marriage material, who are lousy in bed… whatever. None of it justifies chronic cheating.

Polly continues, sympathizing with the men and denouncing the cheater in notably harsh terms:

They’re trapped by your lies while you suck the life force out of them. It’s not romantic and it’s not sexy and it’s not just selfish, it’s deeply unethical and punishing and unfair and wildly abusive.

Polly suggests that the woman has numbed her moral sense to the point that she is oblivious to the harm she is doing to herself. She ought rightly to feel shame for her behavior but has numbed herself to it. Here Polly takes up the shame issue and gets it right.

You already realize that, at some level. Your cells are absorbing the unethical nature of your current experiment. That’s what I think you don’t see. You think you deserve the luxury of dating two men, at some level. You think that you haven’t gotten enough and you, personally, deserve a little more. You’re in more pain and need more than other people. Or you’re less decisive and that’s just how you are! You like cheating! Whatever, that’s you! You’ve always been this way! It’s kind of messed up, sure, but you identify deeply with your dark center. You’re a little bit of a criminal, one who has become attached to the criminal lifestyle. You think it makes you a badass. Even when you say, “I know it’s delusional,” it almost sounds like you’re bragging a tiny bit.

Trust me, you don’t know how delusional it is.

The delusional part goes well beyond the unethical nature of your activities, because the damage to your self-esteem, your daily lived experience, and your worldview at large is so enormous that it’s impossible to map. “He’s often negative, sometimes short-tempered, pretty unmotivated, and a bit anti-social. I suppose these are the things that have led me to cheating on him,” you write. This lies at the heart of your wrongheadedness: to believe that your boyfriend’s flaws are the cause of your cheating is to believe that your own flaws make you worthy of being cheated on, abused, abandoned, you name it. You believe that flaws are moral failures.

Polly continues, speaking from the heart. And being utterly and correctly judgmental. She should do it more often.

I just need for you to INTEND to understand that you’re hurting yourself every single minute you continue to live the way you’re living. Your fantasy world is making you sick in a myriad of ways that aren’t that obvious yet, but they can only get worse. You’re permanently fucking with your balance and your senses. You’re choosing confusion over clarity. You don’t like to reflect on anything because it means letting in all of your self-hatred. This also means you have no room for anyone else. You don’t listen. People are disposable, even when you crave a permanent relationship. You are all alone on a lonely planet. That’s why you always need more. That’s why there’s never enough. That’s why neither man is quite good enough. That’s why you will never be good enough for any man, not without lies, not without the safety of a hedge, not without the reassurance that you know something he may never know, not without bamboozling the living fuck out of him.

Think about that. Love is a theft to you. You aren’t even feeling it. And you can only have enough if you take more than you actually deserve.

It’s time to turn the corner and get some clarity. In order to do that, you have to walk straight into your shame and self-hatred and look around at the world in your mind, a world where flaws are moral failures. You have to acknowledge your fear. You have to acknowledge how ugly and disgusting you feel. You’ve always felt that you had to put on seven veils and dance and charm and cajole just to have friends, or lovers, or support, or patience. You are a real living organism who can’t feel anything, so you’re pretending to be an invincible robot dog.

Wow!!!

New York's Rigged Public Works Market

Now for the bad news. In a city that lives for free market capitalism, subway construction costs are many times more expensive than they are in any other city in the world. The recently completed Second Avenue Subway took decades to build. And it cost more than anyone imagined. 

Why did it cost so much? Apparently, an unholy alliance of government regulators, environmentalists, labor unions and construction magnates saw it as their very own piggy bank. As for the quaint notion that politicians might control the cost... not a chance. apparently it did not happen.

To its credit, the New York Times reports the story. And, not for the first time. For the most part it will be ignored:

The astronomical costs of building the Second Avenue subway and other New York public transit projects are now the subject of a federal inquiry.

The Government Accountability Office said on Wednesday that it was preparing to launch a study of why transit construction is so much more expensive in the United States than in other parts of the world. Special attention is expected to be paid to New York City, where recent projects have cost far more than anticipated.

Auditors plan to examine contracting policies, station design, project routing, regulatory barriers and other elements that drive cost, comparing practices in different cities in the United States and abroad, officials said. A final report with recommendations is to be issued by the end of the year.

The study was part of the spending bill that was approved by Congress last week. And it comes three months after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how city and state public officials had stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms drove up transit construction costs and amassed large profits.

The first phase of the Second Avenue subway on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for instance, cost $2.5 billion for each mile of track. Another project known as East Side Access, which will carry the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal through a 3.5-mile tunnel, is on pace to cost $3.5 billion per track mile.

Elsewhere in the world, a mile of subway track typically costs $500 million or less.

It’s always good to know where our tax dollars are going.

David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez: Not Too Bright

Now we know. Stoneman Douglas High School student leaders of last weekend's anti-gun march are not the brightest of the bright. 

Take David Hogg… he’s the anti-gun zealor who cursed out the world on national television. Apparently, young David was rejected by the colleges of his choice. Among them were UCLA, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at San Diego and the University of California at Irvine.

As a consolation, he was accepted at Cal State San Mateo, Cal Poly and Florida Atlantic.

Hogg is not sure what he will do next year. He thinks he is going to change the world. With that in mind he will probably take a year off.

As for his record, his GPA is 4.2, well above the 3.4 threshold for out-of-state applicants to California universities. Yet, his SAT score was 1270, undoubtedly insufficient for admission. Apparently, there’s some serious grade inflation at Stoneman Douglas High School.

As for Emma Gonzalez, she will attend something called the New College of Florida. You have not heard of it. Neither have I. One thing we can conclude is that it is not Stanford or Williams.

It is ranked high for being gay friendly and for being pot friendly. Wikipedia offers this tidbit:

In 2015 New College of Florida failed to qualify for a share of a $100M pool of state educational funds after scoring third lowest statewide among Florida colleges and junior colleges on a career issue-focused rating metric. One year post-graduation, only 44% of New College graduates were working or pursuing their education full-time, by far the lowest in the Florida college system. Median wages for New College graduates employed full-time in Florida one year post-graduation was $21,200, vs over $30,000 for every other university in the state.^[31] Similarly, a Brookings Institution report rating U.S. Colleges by their incremental impact on earnings 10 years post-graduation ranked New College in the bottom 15% of colleges nationwide.

It looks as though their fifteen minutes of fame will soon be over.

The Sexual Revolution Has Failed

William Voegeli has written a seminal account of what happens when you politicize sex. In part it concerns the sexual revolution that arrived in America during the Vietnam War. In larger part, it concerns the predations of one Bill Clinton, and the way that his enablers, led by his wife, created an environment where it became commonplace for men to harass and exploit women for sex.

For my part I would add that we should not overlook the influence of one John F. Kennedy, liberal icon and serial sexual predator. After all, Bill Clinton was nothing but a poor man's John Kennedy.

Mixing sex and politics was not a good thing. If your moral compass about sex involves whether or not you want to save or to undermine a presidency, you have no moral compass. Pretending that men and women were the same, that women wanted sex as much as men did, contributed to the massive confusion that surrounds the issue. If women no longer want to marry young, they will be induced to fill their college years and young adulthood with a series of meaningless sexual encounter... ones that will protect them from the dread marriage and family.

As we speak, some part of the media has taken its eyes off of what matters in the world in order to drool over an accusation that Donald Trump had a consensual one-night-stand more than a decade ago with a porn star. In the past such women were described as being of ill-repute. Now they are martyrs for the anti-Trump cause. The women (and men) who fought like rabid dogs to protect Bill Clinton from accusations of rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse are now wondering whether Donald Trump used protection.

It ought to be clear that those who defend women selectively do not care a whit for the women or their honor or their dignity. If they cared about women’s dignity they would not be trotting out harassment victims and porn start to make debating points against politicians they do not like. And they would not be encouraging women to expose themselves to the world… attitude that does not elicit respect for women’s minds and professional achievements.

Under the aegis of those who were conducting the sexual revolution, sex became weaponized and politicized. If accusations of sexual impropriety threatened a politician who supported feminism, it needed to be defended. If they threatened a politician who rejected feminism, it needed to be denounced.

Now, with the #MeToo movement, the revolution has set about eating its own children. It has come down hard on Bill Clinton’s children. The media moguls, Hollywood tycoons, commentators, reporters, talk show hosts and television stars have been taken out and sacrificed to the gods of political correctness. It’s supposedly a way to empower women. It’s a way for women to take back something they had been induced to give away for free. So, we understand the impulse. But, we also know that talking about sex all the time and talking about female sexuality all the time... while destroying men’s lives… is not going to achieve the goal. It will make women a threat in the workplace. And it will incite men to punish women for what they have done to men.

Voegeli sums it up well and clearly:

The sexual revolution has followed its logical course to a place that growing numbers of people find sad and ugly. That revolution’s objective was a new moral regime, neither censorious nor hypocritical, in which consensual sex outside marriage was every bit as licit as sex within it. Before the sexual revolution, a man wasn’t supposed to have sex with a woman unless she’d taken his last name. Fifty years after the revolution, it’s increasingly common for a man to have sex with a woman without ever learning her last name. The sexual revolution has yielded the “hook-up” culture or, as Vanity Fair described it, the “dating apocalypse.” Not only are sexual “partners” not required to commit to each other, the hook-up demands that the transitory, transactional partnership must disavow any possibility or hope of commitment. As a result, one writer lamented, “It’s rare for a woman of our generation to meet a man who treats her like a priority instead of an option.”

Criminalizing sexual behavior is not going to help the cause. Clearly, Voegeli is right to say that the sexual revolution has failed. The personal is not political. And unless we depoliticize the personal and the sexual, we are not going to solve the problem.

Mr. Kim Goes to Beijing

As noted on this blog, the Trump administration’s diplomatic breakthrough with North Korea has been orchestrated by Chinese president Xi Jinping. Until now it was happening behind the scenes, but yesterday the relationship became center stage when Kim Jong-un made a visit to Beijing and was prominently photographed with President Xi. The two leaders stated clearly that upcoming negotiations between the United States and North Korea would focus on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

Kim’s initial outreach to South Korea involved negotiations over his nation’s participation in the Winter Olympic Games. North Korea did participate and did send propaganda minister and Kim’s sister to the games. The point was clear: Kim needed to show that he was in charge and that he was not being pushed around by anyone, especially by the Chinese president.

Having established his leadership role, Kim could reach out to President Trump. One recalls that anti-Trump commentators were appalled that Trump seemed to have decided to accept the invitation-- delivered by South Korean diplomats-- without consulting with his foreign policy team. Apparently, more thought went into the decision than we know about. Apparently, it was orchestrated through backchannel communications with President Xi. And of course, the leaders of the Trump foreign policy team, Tillerson and McMaster are on their way out.

Surely, the Trump administration maximum pressure policy mattered, but the meetings and the relationship between Trump and Xi Jinping mattered more. You noticed that when Kim requested a meeting and Trump accepted, our president made clear that he credited Xi with arranging it. After Trump’s visit to Beijing last year, the Chinese government sent envoys to North Korea. We do not know what they said, but we can assume that they made clear that the Chinese government had run out of patience with the obstreperous boy leader. And China also signed on to the United Nations sanctions regime, thus, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, crippling that nation's economy.

One also notes that the Chinese government publicly briefed President Trump about the meeting.

Yesterday, Kim Jong-un was rewarded for his more conciliatory attitude. When Xi Jinping received him formally in Beijing, he was giving Kim face. He was elevating his standing in the world, but was also letting the world know that China was standing behind him. That means, in diplospeak, that Xi has offered Kim protection. He is guaranteeing the continuation of his regime and is assuring Kim that he will not end up like Col. Qaddhafi. The public ceremony means that Xi means what he says.

One suspects that this will make the negotiations with President Trump more constructive. One also suspects that Kim Jong-un will begin to institute economic policies that can raise his country into a more prosperous and functional nation. Perhaps Xi invited him to become North Korea’s Deng Xiaoping.

At a time when bands of hysterical ninnies are running around screaming that, what the with arrival of John Bolton as National Security Adviser, a nuclear holocaust is pending, we ought to ignore these absurd rants and understand that the Trump administration has been advancing its goal of solving the problem of Kim’s nuclear weapons diplomatically.

He Gambled Away His Family

From time to time the Daily Mail finds a story that justifies its status as the world’s greatest tabloid.

This story comes to us from India. A man was gambling and, apparently, in an excess of confidence, put his wife and two children into the pot. He lost the hand, he was forced to forfeit both wife and children. 

When the winner showed up at the loser’s home, to collect his prize, the wife objected. Thus, a local council was called to adjudicate the dispute.

It’s decision was: that the loser only had to forfeit one of his children to the winner.

The wife then divorced her husband and married a “younger man.”

The case has been referred to a district court. Police are now investigating the matter.

Did the Novel Kill Religion?

Thanks to Steven Pinker we are all having a national conversation about the Enlightenment. We are being persuaded that replacing religious dogma with reason was just the thing that Western Civilization needed… to awaken from its slumber and become dynamic and democratic.

I have already offered extensive commentary on Pinker’s errors. I will not repeat it all here. I am not alone in pointing out that Pinker does not understand the Enlightenment and that his efforts to promote atheism defy belief. After all, many nations around the world tried to overthrow religion and to replace it with cultures based on atheism. They called it Communism, and even fascism. They failed miserably. If Pinker et al. wanted to engage their rational faculties on the question of what atheism has done for us, they would show some honesty and consider that the efforts to create atheistic cultures have consistently failed… catastrophically so.

To be fair, Pinker and his fellow atheists will never accept that Stalin and Mao enacted the atheist agenda. And yet, discarding experimental results that do not fulfill the terms of your ideology does not bespeak science or rationality. It exposes the project as a polemical exercise designed to persuade people to believe something that makes no sense.

Of course, the defenders of atheism will quickly retort that Communism failed because it did not affirm the basic Enlightenment value of empathy. You see, to Enlightened thinkers and to most of our therapy culture, empathy is the basis for all human morality. Feeling someone else’s feelings makes you kind and gentle. Better yet, said capacity for empathy is hard-wired in the organism. If you lack it you are a perverted psychopath… and not an embodiment of Enlightenment values.

As it happens, this is all wrong. Serious Enlightenment thinkers knew better than to believe that we could generate moral principles through neuroscience or any form of science.

David Hume, a leading figure in the British Enlightenment, ignored by Pinker, famously asserted that science is about “is” while ethics is about “should.” You cannot get from the one to the other. Naturally, our new atheists ignore Hume… because his inconvenient thought would sink their project.

I offer this background as an introduction to an essay written by one M. M. Owen about famed British novelist and new atheist Ian McEwan. I have not read McEwan, certainly a more-than-capable novelist, for some time, so will refrain from commenting on Owen’s analysis of his fiction. If Owen is correct and McEwan is trying to sell his enlightened atheism in his fiction, this would count against him.

Art ought not to be preaching to us. It ought not to be telling us what to think or what to do. If I may, art dramatizes moral dilemmas. It shows possible outcomes. It shows possible approaches to the problems. It is an adjunct to religious texts, but does not destroy them.

Examine Owen’s opening gambit:

Three hundred years ago, reading novels (as opposed to the classics, or Shakespeare) was widely seen as vulgar, indicative of a deficient mind. So was not believing in a divine creator. Today, at least among the sort of people who tend to read literary magazines, both these thing are more likely to be regarded as signs of intellectual and moral refinement. For the critic James Wood, this is no coincidence: the novel is “the slayer of religions,” a form that swept away Biblical certitudes and replaced them with fictional narratives that move “in the shadow of doubt,” asking readers for a belief that is fundamentally and irreligiously metaphorical.

He continues:

One author who would agree wholeheartedly with Wood is England’s Ian McEwan, who asserted in 2013 that the novel is a product of the Enlightenment that “has always been a secular and skeptical form.” McEwan is a committed nonbeliever, so committed that he qualifies as a junior member of the intellectual movement-cum-publishing-ploy known as New Atheism, which emerged in the wake of 9/11.

Religious texts contain stories. But they propose to set down a series of moral principles and rules for conducting life in community. Religion—the word means, in its Latin root: to bind together—teaches you the rules that will allow yourself to conduct yourself as a functioning member of a social group. To teach those rules, it offers dramatic instances-- call them parables, if you like-- that show the rules in action.

Since you cannot have a community unless everyone is playing by the same rules, religion must present an authority that is beyond that of a mere mortal. It may be communicated through Moses taking dictation from God or through Jesus Christ, as Son of God, but everyday human beings accept and follow the rules that define a culture because they believe that these rules were laid down by a higher authority, that is, that they were not invented to advantage or disadvantage any group of human beings or any individual human being.

Since the new atheists seem to have no use for such rules, they want to replace them all with empathy. And they imagine that novels teach people to feel empathy for other people. One notes, because one is something of a curmudgeon, that novels contain literary characters, even fictional characters, and if the best you can do is to pretend that people learn how to feel for their other humans by imagining that fictional characters are human, you have a problem.

The new atheists notwithstanding, novels create alternative worlds, what the philosophers call possible worlds. They show characters whose actions fulfill the terms of a narrative… according to the narrative’s internal logic. They might resemble human beings, but their actions are governed by the narrative and are shown to produce an inevitable outcome. If people are playing a game, and not pretending to be fictional characters, the outcome of their actions is not predetermined. Whatever moves you make in a game, however you move the pieces on the chessboard, you are not creating a fiction. You are playing a game. YOu are not living a narrative fiction.

Owen explains McEwan’s misguided journey into philosophy:

McEwan aligns strongly with the New Atheism through his celebration and exaltation of capital-R Reason. In the New Atheist framing, post-Enlightenment science embodies the apogee of the human capacity for reason, while religion constitutes a troublesome soup of everything that is unreason. McEwan’s literary vocation coalesces with his scientific rationalism via the moral role he proclaims for the novel—a role he frames in explicitly neuroscientific terms. As he describes it, “we are innately moral beings, at the most basic, wired-in neurological level.” This morality stems from the fact that “our imagination permits us to understand what it is like to be someone else” (psychologists call this Theory of Mind). From this, McEwan says, it follows that fiction is “a deeply moral form, in that it is the perfect medium for entering the mind of another.”

He continues:

Within the history of English letters, McEwan’s vision of the novel as a “deeply moral form” and force for social good recalls George Eliot and Iris Murdoch—with the special quality of its being underpinned and animated by all the things contemporary rationalists and atheists love: evolution, neuroscience and a morality rooted in our selfish genes, rather than in God. To listen to only McEwan’s interviews, it all seems very straightforward: novels make us nicer people. Good novels can ultimately achieve the same thing as antibiotics, vaccines, nitrogen fertilizer or any other other scientific success—they can aid the species.

The issue is going to be: are we naturally moral beings and do we merely need to overthrow religion in order to allow our own neurons to lead us to do the right thing. By this reasoning, the right thing will feel good while the wrong thing will feel bad.

Aside from the fact that David Hume would have laughed as such pretension, the truth is that, to take an obvious example, we are all born with the capacity to learn language. And yet, unless someone teaches us language… by talking to us… we will never speak a word. A capacity is one thing. The rules are something else. We are not born with brains filled with moral rules, any more than our neurons contain words and phrases.

And of course, the new atheists tell us that we just need empathy. One might respond that we really need to learn how to get along with other people, to function within groups, to form social organizations. Empathy might contribute to that function, but, in any of itself, it will not give us the rules and principles that we must all follow if we are to function within a social organization.

Owen continues:

Around this time, he also begins to be explicit about his moral conception of the novel: Homo sapiens are primates that, over millennia, evolved deep-set pro-social features, including the capacity for empathy. Empathy is fundamentally an act of imagination (we imagine our way into the mind of another), and an act of imagination on the scale of a good novel can send a tsunami of it washing through the brain. Novel-reading (and writing) can be a form of moral education.

As it happens, and as we have known since the time of the Enlightenment, empathy is not intrinsically moral. It can promote sadism and psychopathy. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith-- another great Enlightenment thinker-- argued persuasively that if we see someone getting beaten up, and if we put ourselves in his shoes, via imagination, and choose to avenge the mistreatment he has received. And to avenge him against whomever comes along. Yale professor Paul Bloom argued the point in his book, Against Empathy. Empathy can make you a very nasty piece of work.