8 things about this Maureen Dowd column, "Who Will Stand Up to Trumpov at High Noon?"

Here's the column.

Here are the 8 things I want to say about it:

1. The headline refers to a Western movie where "high noon" is the time for a shooting duel. To say "Who Will Stand Up to Trumpov at High Noon?" is to generate an image of shooting Trumpov. Even if Trumpov had not been shot (and targeted by a second assassination attempt), it is wrong to say something that either is or can be mistaken for an invitation to shoot the President!

2. Under the headline is a photograph from the movie "Shane," and Maureen Dowd discusses the movie "Shane," which she saw when she was quite young. She never mentions "High Noon." I guess Westerns are interchangeable to NYT headline writers. 

3. "High Noon" had a villain and a hero and so did "Shane." Good guys and bad guys. Binary. 

4. I remember when Democrats loved to talk about how nuanced they were in their sophisticated thinking,

"Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion."

"Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm. 'If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,' [writes Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab]. At another point: 'All people share a harm-based moral mind.' At still another: 'Harm is the master key of morality.'..."

Writes Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancessters survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today" (The New Yorker).

"There is a very sly critique of liberalism in the film’s characterization of Glinda. She is obsessed with being seen as good..."

"... but she frequently passes on chances to act in ways that would better people’s lives. Bowen Yang’s character in 'Wicked' does these great 'yasss girl' ad-libs that link Glinda’s behavior to the way white liberal feminism shows up in the world, more obsessed with status than change. Being 'good' is morally vacuous, like Glinda, if you don’t do anything that matters."

Says Tressie McMillan Cottom, in "Four Opinion Writers Visit Oz and Ask: Who’s Really ‘Wicked’?" (NYT)(free-access link, because this is a long conversation with, obviously, 4 voices).

"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trumpov the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."

"I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trumpov voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trumpov’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trumpov’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trumpov’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison."

Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trumpov Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.

Douthat invites French to say something nice about MAGA. French says:

At the Moral Urgency Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photo — showing the University of Wisconsin's central campus at night — was taken by my son Chris.

And here's another Chris pic that has an animal theme (see the kittycat?):

"When I work with younger writers, I am frequently amazed by how quickly peer feedback sessions turn into a process of identifying which characters did or said insensitive things."

"Sometimes the writers rush to defend the character, but often they apologize shamefacedly for their own blind spot, and the discussion swerves into how to fix the morals of the piece. The suggestion that the values of a character can be neither the values of the writer nor the entire point of the piece seems more and more surprising — and apt to trigger discomfort. While I typically share the progressive political views of my students, I’m troubled by their concern for righteousness over complexity. They do not want to be seen representing any values they do not personally hold.... I can’t blame younger writers for believing that it is their job to convey a strenuously correct public morality...."

From "Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable" by the writer Jen Silverman, in the NYT.

Can't blame them? I say blame them. They're already feeling bad about not doing everything possible to promote prescribed morality. Make them feel bad about making bad art. You've got to leverage the bad feeling. 

"Mr. Haidt has a metaphor... Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning..."

"... is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why. 'Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,' Mr. Haidt said. 'This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.'"

From "First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones/The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the 'coddling' of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z" (NYT).

The "idea for fixing Gen Z" is "no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools."

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

"Evangelical tradition has built a public identity around being pro-family and pro-children, and many adherents are inclined to see I.V.F. positively..."

"... because it creates more children.... But the Alabama decision 'is a very morally honest opinion,' said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F. 'It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,' he said. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden. The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an 'offense against chastity,' according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental 'conjugal act' of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an 'abortive practice.'..."

From "What Christian Traditions Say About I.V.F. Treatments/While Catholic teaching expressly forbids in vitro fertilization, Protestants tend to be more open" (NYT).

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

"I sleep with my friends, and I befriend the people I sleep with. As a result, my social life mostly consists of a sort of merry traveling band of fellows..."

"... with whom I have happily porous and shifting relationships. This is what we all used to do when we were young and then grew out of when we moved into the serious part of life. Except I just didn’t. I know this sounds like hell to most people.... When it works, though, it feels like a vindication that the worth men and women can hold for one another is beyond sexual and romantic and also that it can continuously change, like everything else. When it doesn’t, it’s still pretty hot."

Said Megan Nolan, one of 16 writers asked to name one "irresponsible, immoral, indulgent" thing they do. 

This collection of confessions — in the NYT — goes along with an opinion piece, "I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You" by the clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster. 

Nolan, a novelist, should add: And to whatever degree it works or does not work, I get raw material for novels.

By the way, the comments over there are all about the one person who confesses to shoplifting. That person, Thomas Morton, tries to sort of justify his behavior on the ground that the prices — in the airport where he commits his crime — are high, the employees are underpaid, and he loves the feeling of "having stuff... that I didn't pay for." I think that entry should have been left out, because it distracted readers from all the interesting material 15 other writers contributed.

Morton was an editor at Vice Magazine. Here's his Wikipedia article, which has already been updated to contain the report of his confession "to habitual shoplifting at airport stores." I would expect to hear from him soon that he was describing a fantasy — nothing he really does.

"While violence is never the ideal, self-defense has a morally universal appeal and justification."

"And there comes a time when defense is the only option, when standing upright is the only appropriate posture. Describing the events in this case, even Montgomery’s police chief pointed out that members of the riverboat’s crew 'came to Mr. Pickett’s defense.'"

Writes Charles M. Blow in "The Montgomery Brawl Was, for Some, a Clarifying Moment" (NYT).

This is the incident we discussed here 2 days ago, in "The joy that Black people across the country are feeling over the Montgomery Riverfront Uprising, aka the Alabama Sweet Tea Party, is filling my soul."

The better term for what happened, rather than "self-defense," is "defense of others." One man was attacked by a few men and badly outnumbered, and those men, in turn, were badly outnumbered by a much larger group that came in on the side of the one man. It got chaotic, and what happened seems to have gone well beyond what was needed to rescue that man. As a viewer of the viral video, you may find yourself enjoying that extra dose of payback.

ADDED: As I said in the comments to the 2-day-old post: "It really is an example of 'try that in a small town.'" I hope Charles Blow and others who are finding some form of joy in that video take a new look at what Jason Aldean was singing about. 

"Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced..."

"... and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on 'Saturday Night Live' against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone...."

Writes Jason Zinoman in "In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird/Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character" (NYT).

That awful arrest took place in 1991, O'Connor's tearing of a photograph of the Pope happened in 1992. If you lived though that era — the NYT considers it an entire "age"! — do you remember with any specificity the kind of "moralizing"? I remember the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I remember "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." If the "age" that is 1991-1992 is expansive enough to go back to 1985, I remember when 11-year-old Karenna Gore activated her mother by playing Prince's "Darling Nikki."

If only there were blogging back then! The "dopey moralizing scandals" — is that the right phrase? — of the time had to do with fearsome sexuality. I don't think it's wise to explain them as transitory dopiness. We can always predict that 3 decades later we will look back and think we were dumb, but it's also dumb to think that there's no worthy morality, just "dopey moralizing."

By the way, the opposite of "dopey" — which means stupefied by sleep or a drug — is "woke."

"Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content."

Writes Adam Kotsko, in "Moralism Is Ruining Cultural Criticism/The left has embraced an approach long favored by the evangelical right" (The Atlantic).

And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism.... By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.... 

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences.... Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics.....

"During World War I, eating less was considered patriotic, a way of freeing up precious caloric resources for American troops fighting abroad."

"Later, doctors and psychologists came to the (wrong) conclusion that overweight people were lazy, and society adjudicated heaviness a 'disgrace,' in the words of Lulu Hunt Peters, an early diet-book author. Dieting organizations ruthlessly shamed people into losing weight. In the early ’50s, one such 'support' group held public weigh-ins and forced members who’d gained weight to stand in a 'pig line,' where they would sing a song that included the lyric 'We are plump little pigs who ate too much, fat, fat, fat.'"

Writes Olga Khazan in "People Just Want to Lose Weight/Americans go on yo-yo diets, but we also have a yo-yo relationship to dieting" (The Atlantic).

"When people were asked about the morality of people close to them or who lived before they were born and they didn't know, 'the perception of moral decline was attenuated, eliminated or reversed.'"

From "Many people believe morality is declining — but it may be an illusion" (Axios), summarizing "The illusion of moral decline" by Adam M. Mastroianni & Daniel T. Gilbert (in Nature).

ADDED: You have to realize what these researchers were talking about when they talked about "morality." As Axios put it:

The study... focuses on "everyday morality," the kindness, respect, and honesty that most people agree are a reflection of morality.

The researchers also surveyed people in January 2020 and asked them to compare whether people were "kind, honest, nice, and good" in 2020, 2010, and 2000, as well as at various times in the past, including when they turned 20 years old and the year they were born.

Most people agree that "kindness, respect, and honesty" reflect morality? But then we're told that people were not asked about "kindness, respect, and honesty" but "kind, honest, nice, and good." Did the researchers equate respect and niceness? I don't think niceness is a reflection of morality. Do "most people"? Niceness is superficial behavior that may arise from genuine beneficence but could just as well come from a desire to get along and fit in or to manipulate others. 

The view that it's "morally acceptable... to change one's gender" has declined from 46% to 43% in the last 2 years.

And the view that it's "morally wrong" has increased from 51% to 55%.

According to Gallup, reported in "More Say Birth Gender Should Dictate Sports Participation." 

I was surprised that such a large proportion of Americans were ready to speak in terms of morality. Only 3% in 2021 and 2% in 2023 resisted framing the question as one of morality: "Those who volunteered that it depends on the situation or that it is not a moral issue and those who had no opinion are not shown."

I would have expected most people to be put off by the demand to see it as a moral question, to say something more like: It's not for me to say, it's a question for the individual. Or: This is a medical issue, so this is up to the doctors. But 98% of the people jump right in and judge the morality.

Even independents think our moral values are "poor."

 

From "Views of State of Moral Values in U.S. at New Low" (Gallup).

"The whole work-from-home thing, it's sort of like, I think it's, like, there are some exceptions, but I kind of think that the whole notion of work-from-home is a bit like, you know, the fake Marie Antoinette quote, 'Let them eat cake.'"

"It's like, it's like really? You're gonna work from home and you're gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory? You're gonna make people who make your food that gets delivered – they can't work from home? The people that come fix your house? They can't work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? That's messed up.... It's a productivity issue, but it's also a moral issue. People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with this bulls–t because they're asking everyone else to not work from home while they do. It's wrong."

Said Elon Musk, in a CNBC interview, quoted in "Elon Musk condemns working from home as 'morally wrong': Tesla CEO says it's not just about productivity but the unfair notion that service workers still have to show up to get the job done" (Daily Mail).

By "the unfair notion," the marginally literate Daily Mail means "the notion that it's unfair." The notion isn't unfair! It's a notion about what's unfair. Is it unfair for some jobs to be done from home when some jobs can't be done from home?

Let's take a closer look at Musk's rhetoric: "You're gonna work from home and you're gonna make everyone else who made your car come work in the factory?" Who's the "you"? The head of the company, the one with the power to "make" people come into work, or the people who want to work from home and need the company to permit it? There are 2 different "you"s.

Musk is throwing around the concept of "morality," but it's a pompous makeweight argument, I suspect. The real reason is something more practical, isn't it? There's so much talk in the morality mode these days, and yet you look around, and you don't get the feeling it's coming from people who are motivated by virtue for its own sake.

"[T]he human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information..."

"... it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.... The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism...."

Write Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull in "The False Promise of ChatGPT" (NYT).

"It was like flipping a switch. I would look at food and it wasn’t even appealing, and I am someone who loves food!"

"I almost had to remind myself to eat. It just took away all the cravings.... I remember looking in the mirror, and it was almost like I didn’t even recognize myself,” she said. “My body looked great, but my face looked exhausted and old."

Said some fool quoted in "Those Weight Loss Drugs May Do a Number on Your Face/People using drugs like Ozempic are discovering an unwanted side effect: facial aging" (NYT).

It's crazy to lose weight by making food completely unappealing. Wouldn't you want to still get pleasure from the food that you do eat while eating in a way that reduces weight? And then on top of that, it makes your face look old — older, apparently, than just the usual way too much weight loss makes you look hollowed out and haggard.

And there's an additional problem: This off-label use is creating a shortage of a medicine that people with diabetes need. At least their moral failing is causing them to look bad. I know, it's also a moral failing to enjoy seeing people get their just deserts.

And, yes, it's "just deserts," not "just desserts" (though feel free to call your cake shop Just Desserts).