Maggie's Farm

Executive decision-making is a skill. Good executive decision-making seems to be a talent. These are neither skills nor talents that I was blessed with, but that's probably just as well. I've never been much of a leader, and never a good follower either. My major life decisions have always made me nauseous. Medicine has been the right field for me. Independent work, endlessly interesting, and cautious, careful, conservative decision-making comes easily to me.

From Harvard Biz School, "While elevated narcissism and self-promotion has been shown to result in quicker promotion early in one's career, its negative impacts are revealed in positions of higher authority."

As in the sports world, in the biz world, if you cannot produce winning decisions consistently and with integrity, you will eventually go down. It's rough out there. I hear all of the stories and all of the excuses, but the most talented and honest do pretty well and never make excuses for their disappointments. Competition is a big part of life, and an exciting part of it.

There is no "should". This foolish and, I think, exhibitionistic piece in the WSJ, How Often Should Married Couples Have Sex?, has been getting attention all over. I don't think it is very illuminating. Sexual frustration, however, does make both guys and gals cranky, and tends to make them want to look elsewhere for their instinctual romantic and sensual drives (which normal people do anyway, but even more so).

In my professional opinion, younger guys seem to be OK and relatively calm with sex twice daily. They are monkeys. Older fellows seem to get by with anywhere from daily to 3-4 times/week, depending on how hard and long they work at their jobs. Women are an entirely different topic, but my general advice to women is to remove the TV from the bedroom. Not to worry ladies - they will put it back in our bedrooms 24 hrs/day when we're demented widows in the nursing home. We can catch up with our shows and movies then. Carpe diem.

Apropos of the topic, I saw that Glenn Reynolds linked this book: Lube Jobs: A Woman's Guide to Great Maintenance Sex. Library journal commented about it, "Most people spend the largest part of their adulthood slogging through committed relationships, and they need books like this." 

Good cozy marital snuggles can make up for a lot of troubles. But "slogging"? If you're slogging, it's your own darn fault. I have patients deep into their 70s and 80s with quite satisfying and jolly sex lives even when they know far more than they want to know about their spouses, and when their equipment is not what it once was. We are, in part, biological beings.

Have Americans lost the sense of evil? I don't really think so. Some say that, nowadays, the cognoscenti can only use the word ironically, but I don't agree with that entirely either. After all, I have read too much vitriol from the Left directed towards people like me, labeling us (non-ironically) as evil.

In other words, I think "evil" has been secularized or politicized. At the same time, attempts are made to psycho-babbleize it away.

Without writing an opus on the topic, I'll make just a few points about evil (from a non-religious standpoint). Evil thoughts and impulses exist in everyone, to varying degrees, whether consciously or unconsciously. It never appears in pure form. 

A normal human conscience, along with social pressures, fear, a desire not to be destructive, etc. permit most of us to live without enacting very many evil deeds. Some people, in denial of their own dark sides, project evil into others. Some people attempt to deny the existence of evil anywhere. Some people try to erase the presence of evil by what we call "identification with the aggressor", of which the Stockholm Syndrome is an extreme example.

To look upon evil, wherever it is and however banal it may appear on the surface, is frightening. In the movies it can be exciting, but in real life it is deeply scary. Thus thoughts like this: St. Louis U. student asks, “Why don’t we talk about evil anymore?” and this: Why Does Evil Make Liberals Stupid? A quote from that:

This piece in The Atlantic is a good exemplar of the mushy liberal commentary that has proliferated in recent days. Authored by one Megan Garber, it is titled: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” Before taking a close look at Ms. Garber’s article, let’s advise The Atlantic not to put away that headline. It could come in handy so often. “The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

And this one:  Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away - But willful blindness remains the order of the day.

I am sorry to say that Mukasey has it right:  Make No Mistake, It Was Jihad - Let's hope the administration gets over its reluctance to recognize attacks on the U.S. for what they are.

All sorts of things can help unleash the cruelty and destructiveness in people, but I won't get into all of that now because I only want to mention one of the things: communal support of evil. If only 7% of Muslims are inclined to active Jihad, that's 100 million people. That's no mob - that's a large nation of killers and would-be killers of infidels and they are all on the same page.

Jihadists believe the West is evil. "Submit or die." They are convinced of their virtuousness, but they are as wrong as can be because all that we in the West want is to be left alone and to truly "coexist" peacefully.

Here's an interesting 1996 book by Columbia Prof Andrew Delblanco: The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil

I have been saving two links about Tallis' 2011 book, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, until I found time to say something interesting about the ideas. I could not add anything, as it turned out, because Mark Signorelli says it so well in his review.

Tallis, a neurologist (and amateur and impressive philosopher) wrote the book as a critique of biological and evolutionary reductionism. 

Here's a brief review from the WSJ.One quote:

 In his vigorously argued "Aping Mankind," Raymond Tallis takes on what he calls "neuromania" (the belief that we are our physical brains and nothing more) and "Darwinitis" (the insistence that our consciousness can be reduced to evolutionary terms) in a robust defense of the unique nature of human consciousness. Mr. Tallis, a doctor and researcher in clinical neuroscience, believes that most contemporary accounts of human consciousness fail to understand the lived experience of individual minds. Reducing man to simply another animal in a real sense de-humanizes us, with disastrous effects in areas from social policy to the interpretation of art and literature, which the author touches on in engaging asides.

Aping Mankind is negative research. While most popular-science writers attempt to weave compelling stories from the latest neuroscience experiments to explain 'why we are the way we are', Tallis attempts to show why these stories simply cannot be true. If you are skeptical of media--and scientific journal--headlines such as "Researchers discover the location of love in the brain", then you may enjoy Aping Mankind. In this work Tallis exposes the odd proclivity of scholars, from biologists to literary critics, to anthropomorphize pieces of matter while simultaneously dehumanizing human beings. In effect we are systematically transferring our humanity to matter, and this may not be good for our health--just like vitamins.

Returning to Signorelli's impressive review which opens like this:

I can recall very clearly the moment at which the spread of Darwinian ideology became a matter of concern for me. Previously, I had been acquainted with such ideology, and recognized it as but one more strain of fashionable cant, promoted by a set of persons quite obviously unfamiliar with elementary philosophical reasoning. Having attended college in the late twentieth century, I, like many of my generation, simply became accustomed to dwelling in an intellectual atmosphere poisoned by noxious dogmas, whether deconstructionist, multi-cultural, or what have you; Darwinism was evidently just such another doctrine, and so I took no great alarm at its prevalence. That changed one evening when, surfing idly across the internet, I came across the late Denis Dutton’s article on “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology” in the Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, an article which proposed the advantages of applying evolutionary theory to our inquiries regarding the arts and literature. This was the first time I had encountered Darwinism in such a context, and when I looked into the matter subsequently, I found that Dutton was by no means alone in his project; quite a body of literature had amassed by that point, purporting to offer evolutionary accounts of poetry, dance, and painting, among other things. Now I became alarmed, and greatly so. Literature (understood in the broad sense of learning, or letters) has been everything to me, the source of all my consolation, and all my self-understanding. To see it threatened by this dirty little creed, with its invariable tendency to degrade whatever comes under its purview, was deeply worrying to me. So I began writing against it, with that same defensive urgency that motivates a man to fight for kin and country.