Logical Castles in the Sky

Earlier this week, I listened to a back-catalog interview with Phil Hendrie on Rick Overton's podcast. Somewhere in the second part, Overton starts spilling gobbledy-gook. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, he said, men did the killing. As Rick imagined it, killing another creature would be traumatizing--the hunters would naturally sympathize with the death throes of their dinner. To prevent them from being too distraught to feed their clan, men developed capacity for compartmentalization. This, of course, explains why men are able to commit heinous acts and then go on about their business.

Several years ago, I had a customer at my bar educate me, "You know, man is made to crave sugar and fat," because of energy needs out in the wild. He gestured down his overweight, slack body. "You see where these cravings get you."

Likewise, the article I discuss here had a detour tracing the origins of jealousy back to "caveman" times.

Theories based in evolutionary psychology--as least as practiced by the chattering class--are simply science fan-fiction. They take whatever trait they'd like to endorse and trace it back to an imaginary situation in which that trait would be an advantage. Thus, we are hard-wired to have that trait. Thus, we must accept that trait unconditionally.

Overton himself is a great example of this attitude writ large. He's a funny person and his discussions of comedy, improv and performance are always interesting. There's no doubting his expertise and passion for these subjects but he insists on inserting his smart-guy-liberal opinions into everything.

One subject he returns to is his theory that education has been intentionally dumbed-down by the powers-that-be to prevent another uprising of intelligent youth as they had experienced in the 60s. Because clearly those in charge are descendants of Barry Goldwater, only more nefarious. And because clearly our educational system is tightly controlled by a handful of people and not a sloppy mess of bureaucrats, loan officers and those-who-can'ts.

We see this again and again among smart-guy-liberals. They may be decent thinkers but they never, ever examine their first principles. Was the youth activity of the 60s really the result of a bunch of kids using the full capacity of their minds? Did they really, as Overton insists, "stop the war?"

When one starts making arguments from incorrect premises, one might as well start discussing the rules of order for the Hogwart's teachers' union. It has just as much relation to reality.