SIXTY DAYS

The conventions are over.  The Republican convention was bizarre, the Democratic convention pretty much the sort of successful event one would expect from a collection of grown-up professionals.  Now the campaign begins [I feel like the psychiatrist at the end of Portnoy's Complaint.  -- By the way, does everyone understand the witty pun on the word "complaint?"]  I have donated the maximum allowed by law first to the Obama primary campaign and then to the Obama election campaign, so there is nothing for it but to just check Nate Silver's 538.com every day for reassurance.  Several comentators to my earlier blog about probabilities have cleared up my confusion about what Silver's statistical estimates actually are.  If I understand all of this even marginally, each day that passes with no essential change will result in a slight uptick in his estimate of Obama's re-election chances.  Sixty days.  Sixty nights a bit more sleepless that usual.  Romney will not crush Obama in the debates, nor, I imagine, will Obama destroy Romney, but from Obama's perspective, a draw is a win, since he is leading.  My mean-spirited fantasies have turned to speculation about the self-immolating anguish that the Republicans will suffer when they awake on November 7th to discover that their worst nightmare [to quote Sylvester Stallone] has possession of the White House for four more years.

I will now turn my restless energies to Bennett College.

BEHAVIORISM

Back in the '50's, when I was a student and then a young Instructor  at Harvard, Sigmund Freud's theories of human personality, which were enjoying a considerable [and, in my opinion, deserved] reputation, were challenged by the school of Psychological Theory known as Behaviorism, of which the Harvard professor B. F. Skinner was the leading exponent.  It was the contention of Skinnerian behaviorists that they could give a completely adequate explanation of even the most complex behaviors without reference to internal thought processes, conscious or unconscious, restricting themselves solely to observable stimuli and responses.  According to Skinner, human behavior, like animal behavior, could be regulated by schedules of positive and negative reinforcement [rewards and punishments], such as pellets of food for chickens or pigeons.  In the laboratory, Skinner's disciples were able to achieve such wonders as conditioning a chicken to play perfect games of tic-tac-toe.  Skinner himself viewed his theories as beneficent, since they taught that desired results could be achieved by properly constructed schedules of positive reinforcement, without the need for punishment at all.  Some readers of this blog may be familiar with the enormous stir created by Noam Chomsky's scathing review, in 1959, of Skinner's attempt in Verbal Behavior to explain language acquisition by Behavioral Theory.

In those days, an urban legend was making the rounds in Cambridge, Mass. about a malicious game devised by some of Skinner's more reprehensible students.  According to the legend, they would go to a student party and spot a shy, anxious, socially awkward young man [of whom, at Cambridge parties in those days there was sure to be an adequate supply], and they would observe him quietly until they spotted some distinctive bit of socially unacceptable behavior that he exhibited, such as picking his nose.  Then they would position themselves around the room, and as soon as he moved his finger to his nose, they would all smile broadly at him for a moment.  [This was the positive reinforcement.]  By the end of the evening, it was said, they would have him touching his nose again and again, like a pigeon pecking a key that released a pellet of food.   The poor young man would be utterly unaware that he had been "conditioned by a schedule of positive reinforcement."

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I have a rather embarrassingly compulsive need for encouragement from my readers in the form of the comments appended to blog posts.  Periodically, I express my dismay with the enterprise of blogging, exhibiting a pathetic desire to be reassured that my efforts are not falling on deaf ears [or, perhaps more accurately, on blind eyes.]  I think I have developed this tic as a consequence of a lifetime in the classroom, where one is constantly rewarded with reactions from one's students -- laughter at a joke, a groan when an exam is announced, the shy smile from the quiet young woman the back row who never speaks in class but seems to understand one's subtlest points and most obscure references.  None of these "positive reinforcements" are available in the blogosphere, where even the identity of one's readers may be concealed behind bizarre web handles.

I shall soldier on, confident that someone out there is reading me.  When I grow anxious and feel unappreciated, I shall consult Google's statistics, which faithfully record every visit to this page.  How strange we humans are.

I OFFICIALLY RESIGN FROM THE HUMAN RACE

Good God!  Jim is perfectly correct.  In January I wrote a multi-part Appreciation of MIMESIS, a fact that I had totally forgotten.  It is clear that I am not to be allowed out alone without supervision.  My apologies to one and all.  I will now commit myself to an Assisted Living facility where sympathetic attendants will look after my every need and pretend not to notice when I ask three times in five minutes what day it is.  aaaarrrrgggghhhh!!!!

STATISTICS PUZZLE

Nate Silver, as all political junkies know, is the baseball stats guru who has morphed into a politics stats guru, running the blog 538.com, which now appears in the NY TIMES.  [538 is the number of votes in the Electoral College, for overseas readers of this blog.]  Silver achieved a brilliant forecasting record in 2008, successfully predicting the outcome in 49 of the 50 states and all 35 Senate races.  Silver currently gives Obama a 75% chance of victory.  Now, if my rudimentary grasp of statistics is correct, that means that roughly, over a long run, someone with Obama's current chances against his opponent should win three-quarters if the time, and someone with Romney's current chances against his opponent should win roughly one-quarter of the time.  Right?

But in 2008, if my memory is correct, Silver was giving Obama and McCain winning chances in the various states in the range of 70-90%, not in the range 96-99%.  Which means that either his statistical estimates were way off or 2008 was a really, really anomolous roll of the dice.

It is like adventures in white-water rafting or sky diving, which are billed as very dangerous, but in which virtually no one in fact ever dies.

It seems to me that if Silver is so often correct when he predicts presidential or senatorial races, then he should be assigning probabilities close to 1, not in the 75% range.

Am I missing something?

THE MIRACLE OF GOOGLE EARTH

I was feeling rather lonely for Paris today, so I called up Google Earth, typed in "Paris, France", put in the address of our apartment there [17, rue Maitre Albert] and up came a lovely clear picture of the front door of our copropriete, or condominium.  A little clicking and dragging, and I was looking into the restaurant across the street.  I then discovered that by rolling the wheel on my mouse, I could proceed down our street to quai de la tournelle.  I was seeing a succession of pictures taken by the little Google cars that cruise the streets of the world, snapping photos of every building and intersection.  I called Susie in to see, and the two of us followed along the route that she takes each Sunday on her Segway, along the quais past the Institut du Monde Arabe and a branch of the Universite de Paris, to the Jardin des Plantes.  I then reversed course, followed the quais back, stopped to look at the front of one of our favorite restaurants, La Rotisserie du Beaujolais, and ended where we had started, at our front door.

Now, I think I understand exactly how Google manages this, but nevertheless it is simply miraculous.  Sitting at my desk in Chapel Hill, I was there, in our quartier of Paris.  The pictures were wonderfully clear and sharp.  Indeed, while looking at our street, I saw a little local man who walks the quartier in a beret and has taken to greeting me with a handshake when we pass one another [which really makes me feel as though I genuinely live there.]  I am sure that my grandchildren, as they grow up, will take all of this for granted, and find it hard to imagine a time when one could not instantly see any place on earth.  Indeed, by the time they are in high school, they may be able to put on a pair of glasses and see the world as they walk along the street near their home.  But for me, it is a neverending miracle.

OPINIONS

This being Sunday, obsessive browsers in the land of punditocracy like myself are presented with a surfeit of opinions, from the right, from the self-satisfied middle, and from what passes for the left in this benighted land.  The opinions themselves are for the most part toothless, no danger to themselves or others, but the reading of them, I find, can be very dangerous indeed.  They raise my blood pressure alarmingly.  This is, I suppose what it is to be addicted -- consuming something that long experience teaches can be harmful to one's health, and yet unable to stop.  My father was both an alcoholic and a nicotine addict.  If necessary, he could stop drinking, but he was completely unable to stop smoking, and in the end, it was the cigarettes that killed him.

Having an opinion is at once so easy and seemingly so important.  The official purveyors of opinions -- the Thomas Friedmans and Maureen Dowds and the rest -- appear to think that when they have formed an opinion they have done a good day's work, and can knock off.  It is rather like those media stars, the Kardashians, who are said to be famous for being famous.

It all puts me in mind of one of the most poignant and moving passages in all of Philosophy, the Preface to Kierkegaard's short, beautiful work The Philosophic Fragments.  Here he is as he begins the last long paragraph of the Preface:

"But what is my personal opinion of the matter herein being discussed?   ... I could wish that no one would ask me this question;  for next to knowing whether I have an opinion or not, nothing could very well be of less importance to another than the knowledge of what that opinion might be.  To have an opinion is both too much and too little for my uses.  To have an opinion presupposes a sense of ease and security in life, such as is implied in having a wife and children;  it is a privilege not to be enjoyed by one who must keep himself in readiness night and day, or is without assured means of support."

To have an opinion about public affairs implies that one has a secure income insulated from the matters about which one has formed the opinion.  Thomas Friedman will continue to live a comfortable upper-class life regardless of the total disconnect between his opinions and the events of the world.  Maureen Dowd is free to write dismissively of Barack Obama as a "disappointment" because the TIMES will continue to pay her salary regardless of what happens to the auto workers in Detroit or to a gay couple in Mississippi.  And of course, I sit here in a comfortable Chapel Hill condo, confident of receiving my pension and Social Security bank deposits every month, no matter how witty or penetrating or banal and superficial my blog post of the day may be.

At the same time, I am struggling to launch a program at Bennett College that may, if I have some success, help a few students to earn a college degree who otherwise might drop out.  In Kierkegaard's words, when it comes to my involvement with Bennett, "to have an opinion is both too much and too little for my uses."  Each day, I must make decisions with too little information and nothing like adequate resources, hoping that the choices I make will lead to at least a modest success.

The contrast between my efforts at Bennett and my self-indulgence as a blogger makes me wonder whether perhaps I should be engaged in the latter at all.

I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES

Like all the other political junkies, I was mesmerized by Clint Eastwood's bizarre performance at the Republican Convention, a performance so riveting in an appalling way that it has already given rise to a new word, "eastwooding," which has gone viral on YouTube.  But I was also saddened.  I have always liked Clint Eastwood as an actor.  I have admired the way in which he graduated from Serge Leoni's spaghetti westerns to the Dirty Harry police procedurals, and then, as he aged, to his later roles as an over the hill thief or a long in the tooth Secret Service agent.  There was a quality of self-deprecatory humor about his cinema persona that made me think he was someone it would be fun to meet.  But there he was on the stage of the Republican Convention, older even than I am, rambling on in a pointless and scattered monologue to a chair.

It all made me think of an episode of the old Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson, on which Walter Pidgeon appeared as the featured guest.  Walter Pidgeon was a big, handsome Canadian film and stage actor with a magnificent presence and a deep, rich, rumbling, mellifluous voice, best known to film buffs for his performances in such classics as Mrs. Miniver opposite Greer Garson, and in the great sci fi rendering of Shakespeare's The Tempest, Forbidden Planet.

Pidgeon's appearance on the Tonight Show was for the most part a let-down.  Seated opposite Johnny, he seemed simply to be an old, big, classically handsome man with almost no personality.  [This was all about forty years ago, by the way, when I was still capable of staying up late enough to see the Tonight Show, which did not begin until after the evening news, at 11:30 p.m.]  Carson, casting about for something to keep the interview afloat, asked Pidgeon whether he had difficulty remembering his lines, and Pidgeon replied that for many years, as a sort of exercise, he had schooled himself to memorize a poem every day.  "Here is the poem I memorized yesterday," he said, a poem about a donkey, as I recall.

As he started to recite the poem, his voice deepened, his face took on a look of intense thoughtfulness, and magically, before our eyes, he became -- WALTER PIDGEON.  When he finished the little poem, it was as though a spotlight had gone dark, and he became, once again, an unremarkable old man.

Great actors have this capacity, when they recite the lines that have been given to them,  of becoming larger than life, filling the stage or the screen with their presence.  As a recent commentator to this blog observed wryly, they have the ability to fake sincerity.  I once saw Charles Laughton, in the George Bernard Shaw play Major Barbara, dominate a stage and command the attention of every person in the theater simply by walking slowly from downstage to upstage, not saying a word.

Clint Eastwood is a great actor, and he has demonstrated this capacity in countless movies.  He is also a fine director, so he knows something about how the illusions are created.  But, seduced by the moment, he confused his film personae with his real-world self, and made the fatal mistake of thinking that he was Dirty Harry.

I hate it when my film favorites reveal their right-wing politics.  I used to like the Charlton Heston of The Ten Commandments, but after he had morphed into the spokesman for the National Rifle Association, I could no longer enjoy watching reruns of his old movies.  Must I now stop watching A Fistful of Dollars?