God of the Machine – Page 13 – Culling my readers to a manageable elite since 2002.
Sep 192003
 

What goes around comes around. Carleton College, which tossed me unceremoniously twenty years ago, now wants to cash in on my international fame by interviewing me about blogging for their alumni magazine. Fine. I can afford to be magnanimous about these things. Here’s the Q&A.

1. I notice that your archives go back to June 2002. When did you begin reading blogs? Whom do you read? When did it occur to you to start your own? Did you model yourself on anyone in particular?

I began reading blogs three or four months before I started mine. It occurred to me immediately that I might be able to do that too; the lag was sheer sloth. At the time I was also making a scant living designing websites, and I thought setting up my own web server would be a useful exercise. I still run the whole enterprise, if that is the word, from a Linux server in my living room.

The people I read are the ones on my blogroll, which is more a convenience than an honor roll. Some are famous bloggers, some not. Bloggers who deserve a wider readership include Evan Kirchhoff of 101-280, Tom of Agenda Bender, JW of Forager23, and Eddie Thomas of One Good Turn. Like all bloggers, I have a particular weakness for people who read me.

2. Has anything about blogging surprised you? For instance, were there certain assumptions you made before you started—about audience, say, or time commitment—that turned out not to be true?

I was pleasantly surprised, and still am, by the number of highly intelligent and knowledgeable people in the world I’d never heard of. Many of the best bloggers are well-known in their fields — Eugene Volokh in law, Chris Bertram in philosophy, Dan Drezner and Jacob Levy in political science — but who, before blogs, knew of Steven Den Beste, Megan McArdle, or Colby Cosh? Of course most of blogging, like most of anything, is white noise. There are several million blogs in the world, of which maybe a couple thousand are worth reading. That’s still about eighteen hundred more than I’m ever likely to get to.

I’ve also been impressed by how far out of their way even famous bloggers go to make themselves accessible. I can personally testify that Eugene Volokh and Andrew Sullivan answer their email, pretty promptly. I wrote a piece recently taking Terry Teachout, a deservedly famous critic, to task, not very politely either, and he replied, in detail, on his blog. Before blogs talking to Teachout in this unmediated way was basically impossible. I’d have had to write a letter to the editor at Commentary or The New Criterion or wherever and hope for the best. If you write something worth reading, it will be read, and by the people you want to read it. That just amazes me.

3. On average, how much time do you devote to blogging? Do you find it rewarding?

I am embarrassed to admit the amount of time I devote to blogging, considering my paltry output. I find writing absurdly difficult.

I probably spend ten or fifteen hours a week actually sitting at the computer and writing, but at least twice that to thinking about what I’m going to say. Once you catch the bug everything becomes grist for the blogmill. At dinner I will often orate about something or other, and my girlfriend will listen for a while and say, “I think I just heard tomorrow’s post.” And so she has. This habit makes me unacceptable in polite company. Fortunately all my friends are impolite.

4. Do you have any thoughts on how blogging, as a form, might come to influence the outside world (i.e. the non-online world)? For instance, some bloggers have given themselves credit for bringing down a) Trent Lott, b) Howell Raines, c) various flawed academics. Jeff Jarvis is busy encouraging the rise of blogs in Iran. Some Congressman once read James Lileks on the House floor to underscore a point he was making. My editors are particularly interested in how the rise of blogs might influence established a) media, b) politics, c) academia, d) digital culture—and so on. What do you hear from others and what are your own opinions?

Whither blogs? I have no idea. What Mickey Kaus calls blogger triumphalism, the orgy of self-congratulation that ensued at the fall of Trent Lott and Howell Raines, sets off my bullshit detector. I know from reefer logs that by far the most loyal audience for blogs is bloggers. Still, other influential people read them too, and Michael Bellisiles, to take a famous example, would have gotten away with very sloppy work if bloggers hadn’t caught him out. In fact he did get away with it, for years. Mainstream journalists are lazy enough to piggyback happily on research that a blogger does for free. They often don’t credit that research, but that’s another story.

Blogs are a sort of Zeitgeist-accelerator. You find out what everyone is thinking, and thinking about, except right now instead of next week or next month. They also radicalize the discourse, partly because having comparatively radical opinions is what inspires many people to blog in the first place, and partly because there’s a lot you can say on a blog that you can’t say on The New York Times op-ed page.

All of this pertains strictly to the polibloggers. Belletristic bloggers like me have no hope of influencing the world. We don’t try, really.

I wish Jeff Jarvis all the luck in the world in his quest to free Iran through blogging, but I suspect the rise of blogging in Iran stems from the mullahs beginning to lose control of the country, not the converse. The Congressional speech that quoted James Lileks had, I am sure, as profound an effect on policy as any other Congressional speech.

More important, some genius will eventually figure out how to make money from blogs. If you happen to run into him, please give him my phone number.

5. Tell me about your life outside of blogging. You live in New York, I see. What do you do for work? For fun? When did you graduate from Carleton, and do you ever correspond with other Carls online?

I was thrown out of Carleton in 1982, my junior year. This was due entirely to my inadequacies as a student and is no reflection on the school, which is perfectly fine as liberal arts colleges go, although so left-wing that it made my teeth hurt. Or maybe that was the weather. Memory blurs.

I maintain no connections from school, virtually or otherwise, because I find the term “Carl” indescribably embarrassing. The last time I spoke to a Carleton alumnus, so far as I know, was about five years ago, when I had dinner with a friend of mine from school. He had become a partner at McKinsey, the management consultants, and grown rich, sleek, and dull.

By trade I write computer software. For fun I play games. It used to be pool — the one activity in which I distinguished myself at Carleton, where I was the straight pool champion two years running — now it is bridge. Recently I captained a team that defeated a world championship team from Poland in an online match, which was a pretty big thrill. That should give you some idea of what a thrilling life I lead. I live in Chelsea with my long-time girlfriend and an old, surly cat with a pronounced overbite.

(Update: Agenda Bender comments.)

Sep 192003
 

Will the Google madness never stop? I can only hope so; in the meantime, welcome, visitors from the exotic lands of

depression quitting pot
Tom Petty neither here nor there
critical tits 2003
I believe Michael Kelly
Ann Coulter mental illness
wheelchair bondage
pitchers of god
how do you kill the undead

and, finally,

libertarian wallpaper

I believe I could die happy if I were #1 on Google for “libertarian wallpaper.”

Sep 162003
 

Trading Spaces, as recent visitors from distant galaxies may not be aware, is the biggest hit show on cable television. Two homeowners, given a decorator, a carpenter’s services, and $1,000 budget, have two days to redo a room in each other’s house. I watch it for the same reason everyone does, because I find before and after pictures impossible to resist. It is also a fine piece of moral instruction.

Along with the glories of the division of labor comes, perhaps necessarily, the worship of the specialist. The deference accorded physicians, scientists, and experts of all sorts never ceases to astonish me. Of all specialists the artist gets the best deal: physicians lose face if their patients die, scientists if they produce bogus results, and artists never, so long as they can continue to intimidate their clients, which, aesthetic criteria being notoriously ineffable, is a relatively simple matter. Nice work if you can get it, and unsurprisingly sub- and sub-sub-artists, like interior decorators, have begun to muscle in on the racket.

As a rule, the worse the artist, the more insistently he drapes himself in artistic trappings. So it is on Trading Spaces. The decorators are “designers.” Talk of “themes” abounds and inevitably precurses disaster. Novels have themes. Does your bedroom? Would you prefer it if it did?

Four of the show’s eight “designers,” as I suppose we must call them, are so out-and-out incompetent that their pretensions are neither here nor there. Kia is helpless in any style. She blows her budget on pointless and overelaborate creations that, fortunately for her clients, tend to fall apart, making them easy to remove. One might feel sorry for her were it not for her complete lack of self-knowledge. Confronted with the evidence of her latest trainwreck, she warbles “no problem,” often before she has been apprised of what the problem is. The hostess hates her, and liking people is her job. Watching a Kia episode is like rubbernecking; you can’t look, and you can’t look away.

Edward and Frank have been put in the wayback machine with the dials set to 1982 and 1992, respectively. No matter what the question, Edward’s answer is a high-gloss, “sophisticated” finish, while Frank puts his trust in hand painting. When all you have is a hammer then everything must look like a nail. Still, I could imagine either of them doing adequate work for a client whose sensibility dovetailed precisely with their own, whereas it is impossible to picture Kia performing competently for anyone, anywhere. The less said of giggly, jiggly Genevieve, the Princess of Distress, the better. Genevieve is to acid washes what Claus von Bülow is to insulin. Distressed baseboards. Distressed furniture. Distressed clients.

These four flail about entertainingly enough, but the meat of the show is the conflict between Good, represented by Vern and Laurie, and Evil, represented by Hildi and Doug. Vern especially, and Laurie to a lesser degree, listen to their clients, decide what the room needs, plan it in detail, and execute. They produce consistently pleasing results. Vern, an architect, appears to be the only one with any technical training, and it shows. The other decorators’ drawings for the carpenters, next to Vern’s, look like Nigel Tufnel’s efforts at scenery design.

At the other end of the spectrum are Hildi and Doug, who design the worst rooms on the show, Kia’s excepted. These two are the theme queens. No room is complete without one, preferably having nothing whatever to do with the interests of the client. Doug designed a “Brazilian” bedroom on one episode because he had just returned from a trip to Brazil. Hildi painted a room baby-blue with random white stripes in another because she liked the Tiffany box. Neither client had any connection to Brazil or Tiffany’s.

At first I believed they were just incompetent. Gradually it dawned on me that they are, in fact, actively hostile to their clients’ interests, lest they interfere with their own precious right to express themselves in other people’s houses. For some viewers the tip-off might have been when Hildi papered the kitchen of a teetotaling couple with wine labels, or when Doug framed an enormous drawing of a foot in the bedroom of a couple who had expressed a particular distaste for feet, saying, “They wouldn’t dare take it down.” (They did.)

For me it was Hildi’s hay and Hildi’s records. Hildi decorated the walls with hay in one episode and old records in another for no reason in particular. The homeowners had shown no interest in farming or music — not as if farmers would want hay in their living room, or musicians random records glued to the wall. These go beyond podiatric art, which you can easily get rid of. These are acts of wanton destruction that require stripping and repainting the whole room to repair. Doug, for his part, reliably paints his client’s furniture, provided they insist that it not be painted. To Doug also belongs the unique distinction of making a homeowner cry on camera.

In last week’s episode one couple specified that they hated pink and mauve, inspiring Hildi to paint their living room — surprise — pink! “Coral,” she insisted, as if to say it made it so.

For the most part the homeowners offer only token resistance to these catastrophes; the designers are artists, artists are experts, and experts know best. So any of you Trading Spaces guinea pigs, if you’re reading this, a few words of advice. Stop rolling over. If you think something will turn out hideous, it probably will. Remember that if you refuse to do the gruntwork it won’t get done. Hildi needs you to glue that hay on the wall. Demand Vern, settle for Laurie, and if you end up with Hildi, Doug, or, God forbid, Kia, hire an attorney to release you from the contract. It’ll be less work than redoing the room and possibly no more expensive.

(Update: Michael Krantz points out in the comments that the biggest hit on cable isn’t Trading Spaces, it’s Spongebob Squarepants. I should have said, the biggest hit on cable that is watched in my house. This blog regrets the error.)

(Further: James Joyner comments. Scott Chaffin comments.)

Sep 112003
 

MDMA, better-known as Ecstasy, has been shown to cause Parkinson’s Disease in monkeys if the monkeys had actually been getting MDMA. As it happens they were getting methamphetamine instead. Derek Lowe, himself a pharmaceutical chemist, eviscerates the authors politely, as a professional courtesy:

I’m sure that some people are going to point the finger at this group for not checking the samples of MDMA and methamphetamine. But I can’t fault them so much on that point. In vivo pharmacologists are not chemists, and aren’t expected to assay the samples that they’re dosing. In every drug research project I’ve been on, the animal folks make it clear that they depend on compounds being what the label says they are. They have no way to confirm it themselves. (In this case, Research Triangle Institute, the source of the samples, says that things were fine on their end, as you’d figure they would. Depends on where the label came from on that remaining methamphetamine sample, doesn’t it?)

But all that said, I have to then turn around and wonder why the original paper was published at all. I was surprised to learn that their results hadn’t been repeated beforehand. You’d think that this would be necessary, given the public health implications of the work and its variance with the results of others in the field. I can’t help but think that the researchers got their original data, thought they had a hot result that would make everyone sit up straight, and got it into publication as fast as they could.

I’m really taken aback to learn that they hadn’t looked at the original monkeys for MDMA levels before. Getting blood samples from monkeys is no easy task, but why wait until there’s a problem to do the post-mortem brain levels? Those numbers really would have helped to shore up the original results – and would have immediately shown that there was a problem, long before the paper was even published. I don’t like to sound this way, but it’s true: in the drug industry, we consider pharmacokinetic data like this to be essential when interpreting an animal study.

New scientific results are usually new because they’re usually wrong. Science approximates truth only because its results can be replicated. Scientists make mistakes and studies are shot through with error, though rarely so egregiously. You think science journalists might remember this tale next time they trumpet some “ground-breaking” result on the front page? Me neither.

There is a still larger lesson for my vast juvenile readership, who are possibly capable of learning something. Kids, this is very important: don’t do meth thinking it’s Ecstasy. For one thing, it means you got beat, which is embarrassing. For another, it’s linked to neurotoxicity and Parkinson’s Disease. In monkeys.

Sep 092003
 

Like all products of high school social studies classes (the day history became “social studies” was a watershed in American public education), I have been lectured on the evil of voting literacy tests and poll taxes. They are now against the law, thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the 24th Amendment, respectively, and invoking the specter of a “voting literacy test” remains a sure way to rouse the troops. Voting literacy tests often served as an excuse to intimidate blacks at the polls, and they are certainly objectionable if discriminatorily applied. Yet I see nothing wrong with such tests in principle. If someone is going to participate, albeit in a humble way, in the great affairs of state, ought he at the very least to be able to read? And how about a math test while we’re at it? Sample question:

If one million people are taxed $1 each, and the money is given to one of them, how much wealth has been created?

A. One million dollars.
B. Zero.
C. Are we counting transfer costs and malinvestment?

B or C, you get to pull the lever. If you answer A — well, thanks for playing.

Poll taxes I find no more noxious than any other tax. Supposedly the trouble with poll taxes is that they force a citizen to pay for exercising his fundamental rights, but the same criticism applies to property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, and most other taxes you could name, none of which were ruled unconstitutional on “equal protection” grounds.

The death of one man, Stalin said, is a tragedy; the death of a million men is a statistic. This observation can be generalized into what I will modestly deem Haspel’s First Law: all crime ceases to be criminal when committed on a large enough scale. A liar is only a liar; a gigantic liar is the Minister of Information. If a man owes $5 million he is a bankrupt; if he owes $500 million he is a real estate developer. Giving a bum booze money in return for his vote is election fraud; giving thousands of people a permanent living at taxpayer expense in return for their votes is democracy in action.

Nine of the 27 Amendments to the Constitution deal with the mechanics and the limitations of the franchise, so there’s surely no harm in one more. Why not deny it to full-time government employees? These are paid voting armies, bribed not with liquor for a day but a sinecure for life, and not individually but by the thousands. They ought to be recused from elections, as judges recuse themselves from cases in which they are personally interested. One could extend the logic to argue, for instance, that we ought to recuse Grandpa as well, who has no business voting himself free prescription drugs out of the public largesse. The difficulty here is that in a welfare state, that fiction by which everyone maintains himself at everyone else’s expense, nearly all of us receive government benefits in some form, and the line becomes difficult to draw. If we restrict ourselves to people whose livelihood derives entirely from tax revenue, however, the matter stays simple enough.

Liberty in this country has declined as the franchise has expanded. In 1869 the 14th and 15th Amendments eliminated racial and property qualifications. Along with them came Reconstruction, a program of occupying the South with federal armies, which failed completely even from the point of view of the ex-slaves whose rights it was designed to protect, and was so resented that almost no Southern states voted Republican in a national presidential election for eighty years thereafter. You need not be from the South to regard the episode as less than a highlight in the history of personal liberty.

The immediate consequence of female suffrage was Prohibition; women had always led the temperance movement. In twenty years, with ardent female assistance — Roosevelt, like all Democrats, polled far better with women than men — the top income tax rate rose from 7% to 78%. Thanks, ladies!

In 1971 the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, adding 11 million potential voters, not quite enough to elect McGovern. I attended a reasonably well-regarded liberal arts college. Out of its 1,000 students there were probably 50, assuredly not including me, who could be trusted with the franchise. “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” was the slogan, which had more force when there was a draft. “Young enough not to drink, young enough not to vote” is less catchy but equally logical. Youth must be served, just not liquor.

Next week: bringing back the property qualification. If I’m in a really bad mood.

(Update: Mg comments. George Junior dissents. Aaron Armitage comments.)

Sep 062003
 

I have at long last become a blogparent, courtesy of Forager23, a promising youth who is already listed in the blogroll. Congratulations are also in order for my co-parents The Blowhards, giving Forager, technically, three mommies. They are incidentally chock-full of excellent reading as usual, especially Michael’s two-part interview with intrepid sonneteer Mike Snider and Friedrich’s ruminations about IQ.

Forager’s proprietor, the mysterious JW, writes from Burlington, Vermont, literately and prolifically, on art high and low, with an emphasis on comic books and a sideline in NASCAR, of all things. His greatest hits include:

  • Letter from a Townie. Mind the fence.
  • Comics and opera, which have more in common than you might imagine. I can’t be the only person in the world who was introduced to Rossini by “Rabbit of Seville.”
  • The Couch Rule, and its political implications.
  • A running series on his 25 favorite comic strips. He’s only done four, which obliges him, I hope, to stick around for a while. Dick Tracy is my favorite of his favorites so far.
Sep 052003
 

The other night the girlfriend and I, as we often do, were eating pastrami at Katz’s on the Lower East Side, the last place in New York to slice its pastrami by hand. Katz’s, like many famous old restaurants, is decorated with photographs of the owner and various celebrities. Politicians flock to the place like moths to flame: Mayors Koch through Bloomberg, Al Gore, Soviet Premier-for-a-Day Konstantin Chernenko, and Bill Clinton, who receives the special commendation of a note saying what he ate. Two hot dogs, a pastrami sandwich, and fries, washed down, in a sudden show of restraint, with a diet ginger ale and a decaf coffee. For lunch. Now Katz’s pastrami sandwiches are not of the Brobdingnagian proportions one finds at Carnegie or Stage, but they are more than ample, and the dogs aren’t exactly anemic either. We watched a little girl wander over to the table, read the list with widening eyes, and return to her mother, gesticulating wildly. (“Mommy! Mommy, look what the President ate!”) I will leave to the polibloggers the question of Clinton’s rank as a policy-maker. His place as the most porcine President in American history remains secure.

Sep 042003
 

Endo, Meso, Ecto To your right are three examples of the infamous Ivy League “posture photos” (the linked story, uncredited, is by Ron Rosenbaum), which don’t offer much in the way of prurient interest from an official purveyor of pornography, but it’s the best I can do. For twenty years, from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, at the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, freshmen were herded into the nurse’s office and snapped nude from three angles. Meryl Streep (Vassar). Hillary Rodham (Wellesley). My mother (Smith), to whom it didn’t occur until ten years later that there might be something untoward about it. That these same photographs were taken at the same time outside the Ivy League apparently bothered no one. It’s fine to take nude photographs of Army recruits and other such riff-raff, but Girls of the Ivy League? Quel horreur!

Behind the posture photos was one William Sheldon, a psychologist whose body-typing theories, highly respectable at the time, provided most of their rationale. He published many of them in his Atlas of Men and intended to publish many more in an Atlas of Women, unfortunately never completed. I happened upon a copy of one of his books, Varieties of Temperament, which shows his talents to lie more in the literary than the visual arts. Varieties of Temperament concludes with capsule summaries of Sheldon’s 200 subjects. Some are savage:

An expansive, popular, garrulous young man who wasted his time as a medical student, but has since become an oculist with quite a lucrative business building up. Has joined the Masons and one or two other fraternal organizations of that sort. He is married to a gluttonous, gleeful little 6-3-1. They set a fine table.

(6-3-1 is a “somatotype,” about which much, much more below.)

A weak, baffled undergraduate to whom college is like a bad dream. He wants to cry on somebody’s shoulder but is instead required to attend gymnasium classes.

Some are shrewd:

Has as unpleasant a disposition as is often met. He suggests a partly tamed native gray rat among a generally well-behaved colony of white ones. He continually bares his teeth, although he rarely bites… Many adopt the tolerant attitude toward him that is often shown toward a noisy terrier.

…he has been accused vaguely of homosexuality, but he is in fact strongly heterosexual, and now that his academic career is securely under way he devotes perhaps a disproportionately great amount of time to the sexual pursuit. He has no etchings but his collection of symphonies has begun to grow a bit notorious.

Occasionally he seems to have been gotten the best of:

A young rabbi studying psychology. Polite, ceremonious, yet watchful and critical. His fine black eyes are disconcertingly observant. He is hyperattentional and overly intent.

All make the best bathroom reading you could hope for. Do any other shrinks write like this when no one is looking? And who was William Sheldon anyway?

Sheldon was born in 1898, grew up rural in Rhode Island, and as boy became an expert enough shot to be able to hit a marble thrown 20 feet in the air, which skill he demonstrated to Annie Oakley. He took an M.D. and Ph.D at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, began his teaching career there and at the University of Wisconsin and moved to Harvard in 1940, where he did his best work, published in The Varieties of Human Physique (1940) and The Varieties of Temperament (1942).

He was divorced twice and was apparently not the easiest of men to get on with. At Harvard he served on a Ph.D. examination committee that passed a student he considered unprepared. Sheldon concluded that the term “Doctor” no longer had meaning, and for some time insisted on addressing everyone on campus, including the elevator man, as “Doctor,” embarrassing his faculty colleagues, and no doubt the elevator man.

Sheldon enjoyed a great vogue for a while. Life magazine devoted a cover story to him in 1951, and his disciples included Aldous Huxley, who credited Sheldon with much of his success. The rise of behaviorism did his reputation in. Skinnerian psychology made his theories glacially unfashionable, and he died, bitter and forgotten, in 1977, having published almost nothing for more than 20 years.

Folk wisdom has it that temperament and physique are related: fat people are reputed jolly, short people “Napoleonic,” tall and thin people “awkward,” and so forth. Sheldon set out to ground this scientifically. He distinguished among three “somatotypes,” as he called them — endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy; the terms are still with us. Each body type has a corresponding temperament: viscerotonic (endomorph), somatotonic (mesomorph), and cerebrotonic (ectomorph). Sheldon ranked his subjects according to their endowment of each body type, and temperament, on a 7-point scale. Although we now tend to think of people as one type or the other, the pure endo (7-1-1), meso (1-7-1), or ecto (1-1-7) turns out, in Sheldon’s system, to be extremely rare. He concluded that temperament usually matches physique nearly exactly, with at most a point difference on each of the three scales.

Like Freud, Sheldon fancied himself a scientist; Varieties of Temperament is full of scales, indices, and standard deviations. As he describes his own procedure:

First a list of 650 alleged traits of temperament was collected… These were sifted, condensed, and described as systematically as possible. A few contributions from our own observation were added, and the list was finally reduced to 50 traits which seemed to embrace all of the ideas [emphasis his] represented in the original 650. The 50 traits were then incorporated into a simple 5-point graphic rating scale (later expanded to a 7-point scale)… Then began the tedious process of analyzing a series of subjects in order to rate them in these 50 traits…

We then proceeded to build up lists of such clusters of traits as showed consistently positive intercorrelations among themselves, much after the manner of building up suits in a game of cards…we soon found that three groups of traits showed positive intercorrelation among themselves, and negative correlation with all or nearly all of the other traits

…we set up two quite arbitrary criteria for determining the qualification of a trait within one of the nuclear groups. First, the trait must show a positive correlation of +.60 with every other trait in its nuclear group. Second, it must show a negative correlation of -.30 with every trait in each of the other two nuclear groups. Employing these criteria rigidly, we found that…22 of the original 50 traits had qualified.

This resembles hard science as numerology resembles mathematics. It has about it a distinct pre-scientific whiff of bacon — Francis Bacon, who believed that one could formulate useful scientific hypotheses by gazing steadily at an object and making lists of what one notices. The blithe way Sheldon throws out the 28 of his 50 traits that don’t meet the correlation tests adds a more modern, Johnnie-Cochran flavor: if the trait don’t fit, get rid of it. Since there are no hard-and-fast rules for classifying types, either physically or by temperament, the scheme groans under confirmation bias.

Still, this is not physics but social science, where there may be something to be said for simply looking around. Dubious methods may also serve a defensible thesis. One suspects that Sheldon has been “discredited” less for his technique than his belief that physique influences temperament, which, knotty cause-effect questions aside, is obvious to any sentient inhabitant of the planet.

Sheldon was a prescient critic of therapy, which he considered useless for most people and counterproductive for some. He was no fan of endocrine, the Prozac of the 1940s: “A long history of experimentation with endocrine therapy seems to have intensified [the subject’s] unhappiness without improving the situation.” He didn’t go in much for talking therapy either: “He has been having a long series of conferences with a psychiatrist whose point of view places great weight on the early intrafamilial relationships. This has turned the youth’s attention more than ever toward his parents and familial entanglements… He has learned to blame his mother and father for every disappointment.” Thus Sheldon casually hands Freud his head without even mentioning his name. Of his 200 cases in Varieties of Temperament Sheldon recommends psychoanalysis for about five. Anyone who has observed its whiny modern products will share his skepticism.

The customary accusations of “eugenicist” and “biological determinist” have been hurled at Sheldon, with the customary accuracy. Sheldon nowhere advocated selective human breeding, and although he sometimes lets his system carry him away (“2-2-6’s do not write novels, they only dream of it”), the general thrust of his work is away from determinism. (It is the extreme environmentalists, on the contrary, who tend toward it.) Sheldon takes pains to point up cases of identical somatotype where one succeeds and one fails. At one point he remarks of two cases, an extreme cerebrotonic and an extreme somatotonic, “it is useless to expect Christopher to become a heavyweight boxing champion, or Boris to learn cuneiform,” which may sound like biological determinism to some but sounds like common sense to me.

Sheldon preaches, insofar as he preaches, that human nature is not indefinitely plastic. “Know thyself” is how the Greeks put it. Today that makes him a quack; the modern psychiatric wisdom is “be what you want to be.” How will that look in fifty years?

(Update: Howard Owens comments.)

Sep 022003
 

A few readers have complained that my site is difficult to access. Specifically, that it loads the header and then the page hangs. If anyone has experienced this please leave a note in the comments; it will help me fix it.

Aug 282003
 

“Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.” Frank Lloyd Wright said this. Wright built houses, and the function of houses, as I understand it, is to be lived in. Roofs, too, have functions, among which is to keep out the rain. One might think that a leaky roof would disturb this “spiritual union,” but AC Douglas dismisses this pedestrian concern:

Wright’s houses, for instance, are notorious for their leaky roofs. As a house is the most elemental and paradigmatic instance of a shelter a leaky roof would seem a most damning and fundamental fault. And so it would be were the house simply a building. With the possible exception of his earliest work, none of Wright’s houses qualifies as simply a building. They’re all, as is all great architecture of any sort whatsoever, first and foremost works of art. That’s to say, considerations of the aesthetic trump all else.

Buildings, no matter whose, are not “first and foremost” works of art because they are not works of art at all. “Art” is not an encomium. It is a technical term, referring to things that are intended solely as objects of contemplation. There is a fine word for edifices of this sort; the word is “sculpture.” Buildings can be beautiful or ugly, just as people can, which doesn’t make them art any more than people are. If aesthetics, in Wright’s buildings, “trump all else,” why do they need roofs at all? Tables and chairs clutter rooms so, why not dispose of them? Walls disrupt the continuity between the house and its surroundings; tear ’em down. Wright would be the first to say that this is silly, and so it is, but it is the reductio of AC’s position.

This is a case of a misapplied metaphor. The modern religion, as Tom Wolfe beat me to pointing out, is art, which has become the highest term of praise for anything at all. A well-played bridge hand, a well-placed insult, a nice-looking ashtray are all “works of art.” Except they aren’t, and neither is architecture. Art is art, and non-art is non-art, and never the twain shall meet.

(Update: AC Douglas replies. Brian Micklethwait comments. Alexandra Seely comments. Rene comments.)