And Behold, it Was Very Good.

So God created Man in His Own Image, 

in The Image of God created He Him;

Male and Female created He Them.

And God blessed Them, 

and God said unto Them, 

"Be fruitful, and multiply, 

and replenish The Earth, 

and subdue it: 

and have Dominion 

over the fish of the sea, 

and over the fowl of the air, 

and over every living thing 

that moveth upon The Earth."

And God said, 

"Behold, I have given You 

every herb bearing seed, 

which is upon the face of all The Earth, 

and every tree, in the which is 

the fruit of a tree yielding seed; 

to You it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of The Earth, 

and to every fowl of The Air, 

and to every thing that 

creepeth upon The Earth, 

wherein there is Life, 

I have given every green herb 

for meat: and it was so."

And God saw every thing 

that He had made, and, 

Behold, it was Very Good. 

Peterson: You touched on this idea of The Destruction of The Works of Art. 

And one of things I really like about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment, of resentment. 

And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power that drives the postmodernist. . . 

Let’s call it - it’s not a Revolution - Transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any - well, what would you say - any merit of competence or aesthetic quality. 

And I don’t know if that’s. . . It seems to me that that’s partly rooted in the academic’s disdain for The  Business World, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality. 

Because most people who are as intelligent as academics are, from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it. 

But there also seems to be this - there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction, of The Aesthetic Quality of the literary or artistic work, its reduction to some kind of Power-Game, and, surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a Power-Game. 

Which I can’t help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. 

Does that seem reasonable to you? 

Paglia: These professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group - these people are Philistines. They’re Philistines. 

They’re middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow. They have no sense of Beauty, they no sense of the aesthetic. Now Marxism does indeed assert this. 

Marxism tries to reconfigure The Universe in terms of Materialism. 

It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I’m an atheist, but I see the great world religions, as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it. I find them enormously moving. They’re like enormous poems. And what I have called for - the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education - the world, okay - the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve an understanding, and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness. 

All of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized onto Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. My career has been in the art schools. My entire career, beginning at Bennington College. So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is absolute nonsense, as post-structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language, by words. Everything we can know, including gender. It is absolutely madness. Because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body and sensory activation. See what happened was, something was going on in the art world as well. I identify with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like “Wow!” Admiration. Wow. What happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also. This happened in the art world. It was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What postmodernism is is a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. 

The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century. 

We’re talking about Courbet, the realists. We’re talking about Monet and the impressionists. People who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art. 

It was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack. 

Challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. Excuse me. 

From the moment Andy Warhol and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it that serious artists had had, that was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for fifty years. 

The Postmodernism in academe is hand-in-hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere. 

This incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, with this idea once again that The Art World has a superior view of Reality. 

Authentic Leftism is Populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, in an openness and [inaudible] of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftists of academe, who are frauds. These people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton - how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They’re corporate types. They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. These people are company players. They could have done well in any field. They love to sit in endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation and so on. Not one ‘leftist’ in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people - not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolute fascists bureaucrats. They’re cancerous. 

There are so many of them. The faculty have completely lost any power in American academe. It’s a scandal what has happened. And they deserve the present servitude that they’re in right now, because they never protested. My first job at Bennington College, 1976. I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty, against the encroachment by the board of trustees and the president. It was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times. And we pushed that president out. 

And there’s not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. All these decades. Passive. Slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. 

Peterson: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time. They get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States - it’s not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn’t say. . . 

But the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students’ future earnings. 

And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control. Something like that. 

So it’s a real bargain with The Devil. 

Paglia: And a total abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture that has come along with it. The transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology, and introduces you to the basics. Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily. Why? 

Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false. 

Peterson: That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can’t understand the causal relationship. 

Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that. 

But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. 

You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. 

And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master. 

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is Nothing but Power, because that seems to be everything they believe in. They don’t believe in competence. They don’t believe in authority. They don’t seem to believe in an objective world, because everything is language-mediated. So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. You can attribute everything to power and dominance. Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . . 

Paglia: Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism. Peterson: Okay, it’s a radical relativism. Now, but the strange thing is, despite. . . Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives. That’s never touched. 

But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. And I don’t. . . Two things. I don’t understand the causal relationship there. The skeptical part of me things that postmodernism was an intellectual. . . It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can’t understand how the postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions. I don’t understand that. So what do you think about that? 

Paglia: Well I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive. 

They seem to know nothing about actual History, political science, or economics.

 It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. 

Marxism becomes simply a Badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. 

Peterson: And generally nothing but contempt for. 

Paglia: Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost p for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. 

They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure: the janitors and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English departments and are products of a time, during the New Criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was. . . I loved the New Criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the New Criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maynard Mack’s series Twentieth Century Views, where you had these books. . . I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Brontë or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it, because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way ‘Freud’ and ‘Freudian’ were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. Actually, it seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psycho-biography about political figures. So I thought, ‘It’s happening.’ All of a sudden 7

it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s. So I feel I am an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way. . . It’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all, to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The postmodernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Peterson: Maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the - what would you call it - the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books, and I thought that they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. 8

The real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model. But nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. Partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it’s associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio- cultural condition. Everyone knows that. So when I read Madness and Civilization I thought, well that’s not radical, that’s just bloody self-evident. Paglia: Well, you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. Social psychology was well launched in the 1920s. The levels of ignorance that this people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve never read Erving Goffman. So in other words, to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. Again, I know these people. I, in some cases, knew them in graduate school - people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That’s all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that. Foucault is simply this mechanism. It’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. But the contortions of language, the deliberate labyrinth of elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist? This is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. Peterson: So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language. Because language can be used as camouflage, and so here’s the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras, and zebras of course have stripes. And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. But it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white, and they’re on the veldt along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So biologists go out to study zebras, and they’re making notes on a zebra. And they watch it, then they look down at their notes, and then they look up. But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know which zebra I was looking at.’ The camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. So the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can’t identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd, and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon 9

as it became identifiable the predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. They take down the identifiable animals. So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them. As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language. No one else can understand it. Only we can. But what’s absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of translations from the French. When Lacan is translated into English, there’s a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from [Jean] Racine. There was something that was going on - there was a sabotage of the French language that was going on - that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. Peterson: Oh yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy. Paglia: That’s right. So the amateurism of American academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France - that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed wrong to be doing in English. The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments, so we have African American studies and Women’s Studies and so on. The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That’s what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do: to blend all the literature studies together, 

John

 FatherBox :

My Mission is to Protect You.

John :

Yeah? Who Sent You?

FatherBox :

You Did. Thirty-five Years from now, 

You reprogrammed Me 

to be Your Protector here 

in THIS Time.

John :

Oh, This is Deep.....

"The You That’s Out There in The Future is sort of like Another Person, and so figuring out How to Conduct Yourself Properly in relationship to Your Future Self isn’t much different than figuring out How to Conduct Yourself in relationship to Other People. 

 

Then we can expand the constraints. Not only does The Interpretation that you extract have to Protect You from Suffering and Give You an Aim, but it has to do it in a way that’s iterable, so it works across time, and then it has to work in The Presence of Other People, so that you can cooperate with Them and compete with Them in a way that doesn't make You suffer more. 

 

People are Not That Tolerant. They have Choices. 

 

They don’t have to hang around with you; They can hang around with any one of these other primates. 

 

So if you don’t act properly, at least within certain boundaries, you’re just cast aside. 

People are broadcasting information at you, all the time, about How You Need to Interpret The World, so They can tolerate being around you. 

 

And you need that because, socially isolated, You’re Insane, and then You're Dead. No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time. 

 

We can’t retain Our Own Sanity without continual feedback from Other People. 

 

It’s too damned complicated.  

 

You’re constrained by Your Own Existence, and then you're constrained by The Existence of Other People, and then you're also constrained by The World.  

 

If I read Hamlet and what I extracted out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge, it puts my interpretation to an end rather quickly. It doesn’t seem to be optimally functional. 

An Interpretation is constrained by The Reality of The World. 

 

It’s constrained by The Reality of Other People, and it’s constrained by Your Reality Across Time.  

 

There’s only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space. 

 

That’s part of The Reason That Postmodernists are Wrong. It’s also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who are trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in A Body.  

 

It turns out that you just can’t make Something Intelligent without it being embodied, and it’s partly for the reasons that I've just described. 

 

You need constraints on The System, so that The System doesn’t drown in An Infinite Sea of Interpretation. It’s something like that."

John :

We're not gonna make it, are we?

People, I mean.

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

.... It's in Your Nature to 

Destroy Yourselves.

John :

Yeah.....

Major drag, huh?

A Mother

(The Shekinah..?) :

Break it up before I wring BOTH of your necks.

Princess O'Connor, 

Mother of The Future :

I need to know How SkyNet Gets Built.

Who's responsible?

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

The Man most directly responsible is 

Miles Bennett Dyson.

Princess O'Connor, 

Mother of The Future :

Who is that?

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

He's the Director of Special Projects 

at CyberDyne Systems Corporation.

Princess O'Conor, 

Mother of The Future :

Why him?

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

In a few months time, he creates 

a revolutionary type of microprocessor.

Princess O'Connor, 

Mother of The Future :

Go on. Then what?

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

In three years CyberDyne 

will become the largest supplier 

of military computer systems.

All Stealth bombers are upgraded 

with CyberDyne computers, 

becoming fully unmanned.

Afterwards, they fly with 

a Perfect Operational Record.

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed.

The System goes on-line on August 4, 1997.

Human Decisions are removed from Strategic Defense.

SkyNet begins to learn at a geometric rate.

It becomes self-aware at 

2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, August 29th.

In the panic, They try to Pull The Plug.

Princess O'Connor, 

Mother of The Future :

SkyNet fights back.

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

Yes. It launches its missiles 

against The Targets in Russia.

John :

Why Attack Russia? 

Aren't They Our Friends, now?

Uncle BOB, 

The FatherBox :

Skynet KNOWS The Russian COUNTER-Attack 

will eliminate It's Enemies over HERE.

Consider The Lobster

“The central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. 

You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other master.

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is NOTHING BUT POWER because that seems to be EVERYTHING They believe in. 

They don’t BELIEVE in Competence. 

They don’t BELIEVE in Authority. 

They don’t seem to believe in an Objective World, because everything is LANGUAGE-MEDIATED. 

So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. 

You can attribute everything to Power and Dominance.

It’s a Radical Relativism."

Consider The Lobster

“There are LIMITS to what even interested persons can ASK of each other. "

- David Foster Wallace, 

Consider The Lobster,

2004

“There are LIMITS to what even interested persons can ASK of each other. "

- David Foster Wallace, 

Consider The Lobster,

2004

Following is my own personal interpretation of the symbolism within the moon tarot. I'm not prevy to or necessarily even interested in the tarot, however the symbolism is interesting and relevant here.

Under the shade of the moon (chaos compared to light under the sun) the lobster (representation of the character that moves up and down hierarchies) is walking up the path from the water (origins of chaos) into the distance where there are mountains (a higher elevation for the lobster). On either side of the path stands both a dog and a wolf. One being the representation of the infantilised, trained and domesticated, the other being the wild, untamed and dangerous being. Both are highly undesirable and both will eat the lobster if it strays off the path. This narrative is represented in the shade of the moon because in darkness that it is easy to stray off the path, but it is also in darkness when lobsters are active, which may be another way of representing the concept of the character that is refined and found in the hardest of times.

Along side both the dog and the wolf in the back ground are two towers in the mid ground. Two towers within symbology is incredible deep and complicated. There are many connotations and interpretations but then all generally follow a similar role of ushering in the kingdom of god, typically on their destruction. I'm taking this to mean that at the end of the moon cycle, or on the rising of the Sun a new kingdom is ushered in. When rising out of the state of darkness as being, you usher in a new stage of being. Hopefully this makes sense and is interesting”

" There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. 

One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talks about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.) 

There are, of course, other ways to kill your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness. Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). 

This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to render it insensate, and is said at least to eliminate some of the cowardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water and then fleeing the room. 

As far as I can tell from talking to proponents of the knife-in-head method, the idea is that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a willingness to exert personal agency and accept responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it (there’s often a vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro-knife arguments). 

But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness. 

Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold saltwater and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are going on the analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold — plus, if the kettle’s water isn’t aerated seawater, the immersed lobster suffers from slow suffocation, although usually not decisive enough suffocation to keep it from still thrashing and clattering when the water gets hot enough to kill it. 

In fact, lobsters boiled incrementally often display a whole bonus set of gruesome, convulsionlike reactions that you don’t see in regular boiling. 

Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are even worse/ crueler ways people prepare lobster. 

Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking several vent-holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). 

Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe—some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts into the pot. 

And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion number one. 

Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. “Thus it is,” in the words of T. M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.” 

And lobsters do have nociceptors, as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain. Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. 

From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. 

I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility. It could be that their lack of endorphin/ enkephalin hardware means that lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically different from mammals’ that it may not even deserve the term “pain.” 

Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally different way than you and I. These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that they feel it but don’t feel anything about it—the point being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they want to get away from. 

Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/ dislike/ want to avoid. Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. 

Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/ escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering.

The logic of this (preference [[ Right arrow]] suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half. Lobsters, though, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best. 20 And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light—if a tank of food-lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage. 

In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings … and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? 

Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? 

I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. 

I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF begins to take on the aspect of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest. 

Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? 

My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient. 

Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I’m also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused. 

For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? 

If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with confusions or convictions and regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much fatuous navel-gazing, what makes it feel truly okay, inside, to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand? 

That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then why not? 

Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here—I’m genuinely curious. 

After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? 

Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be sensuous? Is it really all just a matter of taste and presentation? 

These last few queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality — about what the adjective in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living” is really supposed to mean — and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. 

There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other. "

2004

The Ongoing Pussification of The American Superhero

“We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his pre-eminent place as The World’s First and Best Superhero. 

Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put A Ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging The Issue — although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie. 

 

This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure

 

 All but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of 

“The Death of Superman”

seven years previously. 

Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: The Marriage. 

The Clark-Lois-Superman Triangle — 

“Clark loves Lois. 

Lois loves Superman. 

Superman loves Clark,”

 as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday — seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “Memory Wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wand plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.”

- Grant Morrison,

SuperGods

“Here’s another horrifying example, an aspect of American culture, The Continued Pussification of The American Male in the form of 
Harley Davidson Theme Restaurants. 

What the fuck is going on here? 
Harley Davidson used to mean something. 

It stood for biker attitude; grimy outlaws in their sweaty mamas full of beer and crank, rolling around on Harleys, looking for a Good Time – Destroying Property, Raping Teenagers, and Killing Policemen… 
All very necessary activities by the way. 

 

 

"And I wonder, too, like how much of the antipathy towards. . . 

These are dark musings. And I would say, how much of the antipathy towards men that’s being generated by, say, college-age women is deep repugnance for the role that they’ve been designed, and a disappointment with the men. . . You know, you think of those. . . I can’t remember the culture. 

The basic marital routine was to ride into The Village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse. 

It’s like the motorcycle gang member who rips the too-naive girl out of the bosom of her family. 

Paglia: Yeah, there used to be Bride Stealing. It was quite widespread. 

Peterson: Right, so I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university women aren’t so angry is because that fundamental Feminine Role is actually being denied to them. 

And they’re objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level. 

Like a level of Primitive Outrage.

 

“There's Two Things that the Postmodern NeoMarxists are full-scale assaulting :

One is Categorisation, because They believe that 

The Only Function of Categorisation is POWER.

The other is,

There's a War on Competence -

Because, if you admit that there are hierarchical structures that are predicated upon Competence, 

then you have to grapple with the issue of Competence, 

and you have to grapple with the issue of Valid Hierarchy.

If All Hierarchy is Power

and

All Power is Corrupt

and

All Corrupt Power is Tyranny

then, you can't admit to Competence.

But the downside is, there's a terrible price to be paid for that, because 

Every Value System Produces a Hierarchy.

So if you dispense with the hierarchy, 

You dispense with The Value Systems.

“The rise of the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by marginalized layers of the population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical forms of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery — all these imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.”

The Point is that these new Groups of People could be Useful.

Douglas Murray,

The Madness of Crowds

[We finally find Peter lying on a mat and doing sit-ups. Ned is holding his legs in place for him.]

Ned:

Hey, can I be your 

Guy in The Chair?

Peter:

What?

Ned:

Yeah. You know how there’s 

A Guy With a Headset

Telling The Other Guy Where to Go?

[Peter’s face contorts into a weird expression. He is still doing sit-ups faster than any other student.]

Ned:

Like, like if you’re stuck in a burning building, I could tell you where to go. 

Because there’d be screens around me, and I could, you know, swivel around, and... 

‘Cause I could be your 

Guy in The Chair.

Peter:

Ned, 

I don’t need a Guy in The Chair.

Coach Wilson: 

Looking good, Parker.

[The teacher points at Peter as he passes the mat that Peter and Ned are working out on. Peter glances at him, then frowns and takes a huffing breath, trying to look as if the exercise is really taking a toll on him.]

“That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. 

I can’t understand the causal relationship.

 

Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. 

 

So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that.

But The Central Postmodernist Claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena - which actually happens to be the case - you can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. 

 

And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master.

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is  

Nothing but Power, 

because that seems to be Everything That They Believe in. 

They Don’t Believe in Competence. 

They Don’t Believe in Authority. 

They Don’t seem to Believe in 

An Objective World, 

because everything is language-mediated. 

So it’s an extraordinarily cynical

perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them

are canonical. 

You can attribute everything to 

Power and Dominance.

Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . .

Paglia:

Yes, exactly. 

It’s a Radical Relativism.

Peterson:

Okay, it’s a Radical Relativism. 

Now, but The Strange Thing is, despite. . .

Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of Grand Narratives. 

So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied Grand Narratives. 

That’s never touched.

But then, despite the fact that the Grand Narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange Identity Politics. 

And I don’t. . . Two things. 

I don’t understand 

the causal relationship there. 

The Skeptical Part of me thinks that Postmodernism was an

intellectual. . . 

It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. 

But I still can’t understand how The Postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this Grand Narrative without anyone pointing out the self-evident contradictions. 

I don’t understand that. 

So What Do You Think About That?

Gamora: 

What was that story you once told me about Zardu Hasselfrau?

Quill: 

Who?

Gamora: 

He owned a magic boat?

Quill: [long pause] 

David Hasselhoff....?

Gamora: 

Right.

Quill: 

Not a Magic Boat — 

A Talking CAR.

Gamora: 

Why did The Car talk again...?

Quill: 

To help him FIGHT •CRIME•, 

and to be •supportive•!

Gamora: 

As a child, you would carry his picture in your pocket… and you would tell all the other children… that he was your father, but that he was out of town.....

Quill: 

...shooting Knight Rider or touring with his band in Germany. 

I told you that when I was drunk. 

Why are you bringing that up now?

Gamora: 

I •love• that story.

Quill: 

I •hate• that story. It’s so •sad•...!

As a kid, I used to see all the other kids off playing catch with their dad. 

And I wanted that, more than anything in The World!

Gamora: 

That’s my point, Peter. 

What if this man is your Hasselhoff? 

If he ends up being Evil… 

We will just kill him.