HU
Featured Archive Post: Kailyn Kent on Lyonel Feininger’s retrospective at the Whitney.
Anne Lorimer expresses skepticism about the Gay Utopia project.
Is there any good literary fiction?
Ng Suat Tong on myth and the Encyclopedia of Early Earth.
Sean Michael Robinson on the one thing that’s not awful about Grease 2.
Chris Gavaler on the French Batman.
Michael A. Johnson on Guido Crepax and the erotics of page layout.
Me on Morales and Kirby’s Truth and the bitterness of the black Captain America.
Utilitarians Everywhere
My son helped me out with the Black Girl Dangerous bucket challenge to support queer and trans people of color in the media. No bucket, but I do get bashed in the head.
At the Pacific Standard I wrote about
—Patricia McGinley’s great book Staging the Blues and why Beyoncé isn’t a terrorist.
—Curtis Johnson’s book on Darwin and chance and why life is all about uncertainty.
At the Center for Digital Ethics I wrote about why Facebook is like Stanley Milgram.
At Splice Today I wrote about the Manara Spider-Woman and the difference between sexy superheroines and sexy superheroes.
Other Links
Conor Friedersdorf on yet another case of police racism and incompetence.
G. Anne Bassett on interviews for the long-term unemployed.
Dani Paradis on the problems with anti-rape nail polish.
Avital Andrews on the virtues of being a couch potato.
Monika Bartyzel on why the Big Chill still matters.
That Johnson book sounds interesting. But from what you describe in that review, it sounds like you’re misstating its relevance to (a) elite smugness about their merits, and (b) evolutionary psychology. The randomness/chance in Darwinism occurs at the stage of variation, not selection. That is to say, what’s random are the variations that emerge — random, not in the sense that they’re uncaused, but with respect to fitness (i.e. it’s no more likely that mutations will help the organism than that they will harm its fitness…in fact, when you’ve got a group well adapted to their environment, it’s more likely that major mutations will be harmful — when you’re at the top, the only place to go is down). This is arguably the chief difference between Darwin’s theory and Lamarck’s — that, for Darwin, variation is undirected.
Now, how is this relevant to the view that capital and success (of various kinds) are strongly based on individual merit? It isn’t. Once variation has arisen “by chance”, it’s then available for natural selection to act on; and, once John Galt has been given his temperament, and environment, “by chance”, his merits will bring to the top (supposedly).
“But,” you say, “it’s just Galt’s good luck that has given him the traits that lead to success; and contrariwise for those who fail. So maybe his merits do bring him success, but he’s not personally responsible for those merits; that’s just the cards fate dealt him.”
Indeed, but that’s just the old, prima facie conflict between determinism and some of our intuitive ideas about merit — which is a serious conflict, but you don’t need Darwin to get there.
Well, you don’t *need* Darwin to get much of anywhere in terms of social theories; you use him because the patina of science he offers is metaphorically strong. John Galt doesn’t *need* Darwin to tell him that he’s awesome; rich people have long thought they were awesome. Darwin is just what we look to these days as validation, rather than God.
I get the difference between selection and variation (I talk about it in the essay.) I guess I have two points, more or less. First, as I mention in passing in the piece, not all variations are necessarily things that contribute to survival; variation really is random, but it’s *not* necessarily in individual cases determinative, so anyone saying, “I deserve this because my random variation is awesome,” is pretty clearly bastardizing Darwin, and seeing necessity and teleology where there doesn’t have to be any. Second, as you say, each person is formed randomly, and there’s no particular virtue that goes along with that; you could just as easily be somebody else. How you’re formed and who you are is mysterious, which means that rather than preening you might really want to thank your stars. A John Galt focusing on how grateful he should be is a good bit different than John Galt telling everyone he deserves what he’s got. Neither are John Galts who need Darwin to form their ideology, but to the extent that the second John Galt thinks he’s smart because he’s got Darwin on his side, it’s worth explaining to him that he really doesn’t.
Oh, okay
Wait…did I win that argument? I didn’t just win that argument, did I?
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Noah…