Red-Teaming & Rhetoric (and Arguments Like that on Abortion)

Apropos of little — for a long time it was and apparently remains conventional for US forces in war-games, at least of the table-top varieties, to be the Blue Team and the opponents the Red Team. So there's the handy expression and concept, "red-teaming it": for working out strategies from the point of view of one's opponent(s). Sort of "walk a mile in his shoes," but maybe while heavily armed. 

We asked students to do something similar when writing argument papers in Rhet 101, when they got to the "Refutation" part of the argument and needed to respond to "obvious objections." Well, "obvious to whom?" and "how obvious?" (you don't want to raise objections that are just silly — or are pretty powerful, but easily overlooked).

More Americans need more experience "red-teaming" (also reading more literature and "mindful" game-playing) and working through the logic of situations, including logic using premises we don't share, even premises we abhor.

For one thing, we'd get fewer references to "senseless violence" when the mayhem is probably evil but is, if anything, too logical. The leadership of your rebel army wants peace talks with the Imperial government, and your subgroup doesn't? Some "naked infants spitted upon pikes" from a nursery for the kids of government officials will stop those talks. Fast. And invite reprisals that will keep the war going strong for months to come. You believe that human beings are essentially a human soul, that each soul is of infinite value, and that your job as an agent of the Inquisition of Holy Mother Church is to save souls by any means necessary? Then effective means up to an including the destruction of the world — mere  finite matter — can be justified, and the torture of a heretic arguably an act of love. 

We'd also get "logical" being used less as a kind of Vulcan compliment word and get it back to a neutral meaning. «All men are green; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was green» — is logical but you can safely bet untrue. 

Being able to "red-team" an argument is even more important when we're not talking about enemies but just opponents on some political issues who might be our allies on others. It's a way to learn (to use another old expression) "where they're coming from" and understand the logic of their arguments — even when they might not understand the logic because, like most of us, most of the time, they haven't worked through "where they're coming from" and how the hell they got to where they are, taking positions that look obvious to them and — in bad cases — just "senseless" to you.

So let's get to an argument where we need such thinking 'cause currently it keeps going around in circles, when it doesn't "spiral out of control." Abortion.

Consider some descendants of an Inquisitor and of a rebel willing to make good on a government terror threat — the line on spitted infants is from that " mirror of all Christian kings" (II.Cho.6), Shakespeare's Henry V — and how they might be arguing.

One, and it might be either, sees humans as essentially a soul, with a human soul entering matter at the moment a human child is conceived. So a human zygote — a fertilized human egg — is essentially a soul to be saved or damned, a soul of infinite value, and as yet unbaptized and unborn the first time, let alone "born again." (I'm conflating some belief systems here, but "'good enough' is good enough.") To kill intentionally that zygote, embryo, fetus, and, eventually, soon-to-be-born child is murder to start with plus, far worse, damning an innocent soul perhaps to limbo or, perhaps, "the easiest room in hell," as the estimable Rev. Mr. Michael Wigglesworth puts it in his "Day of Doom" (see lines 345-60, or don't; even if you agree with the theology, it's a really, really, really awful poem). 

The other can cite the doctrine of the sovereignty of free people over their bodies and the right of women not to have to go through a pregnancy they don't want. And go on to cite how enforced pregnancy has fit into the history of men keeping women unfree. 

Now the pro-choice person here can say s/he doesn't believe in souls, and the anti-abortion person can argue s/he accepts the history but that the emphatically finite Earthly rights of pregnant women are outweighed by the right to life — not just physical life, but a chance at "life eternal." 

And the figurative "game" — the argument — doesn't really even get started. In a minimum of two games, there are two winners in their own terms, and nothing has gotten settled.

"Red-teaming" the abortion argument is important to show both logical, hence "extreme," sides how serious and seriously dangerous the abortion argument is. 

Many pro-choice people might just say, and will say if pressed, "Well, we don't believe in souls and ensoulment and all that." Now red-team it. If humans are just meat, what then? If there's no problem killing a zygote or embryo or even a fetus, when does the problem enter in? It's a leap into the absurd to believe in a God and a God moreover who cares — in the midst of a massive universe — cares about human beings, period; but in that objective view of things it's just an assertion contrary to fact (as in, probably, "a lie") that the human species, as meat, has any significant value, let alone any individual human being. 

To which the pro-choice person can say, "Well, I believe in human value; I feel the value of the child in my arms; I sense it when I talk to people" and, with that confession of faith — that absurd leap of faith if you know humans and our history — there may be a reduction of contempt for one's opponent who starts with another leap of faith; and reductions of contempt are frequently useful.

And for the anti-abortion person to be "pro human life," with human value and dignity — that person must think through the situations of individual women forced to have babies they don't want, and the history of women kept in subjugation. 

And where do we go from there?

And then, I suggest, from there we think through what happens if that damn Red Team and our fine and pure Blue Team press our points to a philosophically pure, radically, essentially, totally-pure pure conclusion. What should be done with people who'd continue the millennia-long persecution of women — who'd enslave women to the making of babies? What should be done with murderers of infants and souls? 

Shall we, say, fight to the death? Or exhaustion of resources? 

There is precedent.

Let he who is without sin, she who is most rigorous, cast the first molotov cocktail.

There are lots of precedents.

My own suggestion is for backing off: agree that maybe literal fighting has never been such a great idea, and a really bad one given the current range and availability of weapons. My own suggestion is for pragmatic, messy, political thinking: sometimes in the manner of Machiavelli, sometimes in the manner of the compassionate, practical saint or holy fool. 

Eventually, we can get a "technological quick fix" for the abortion issue. Our fairly near descendants can declare a human embryo a person under the law from implantation on — and remove the embryo to storage and, in another "eventually," the womb of a woman who wants a baby. Or, eventually, an artificial womb. Such actions would be too expensive to be done frequently, so we should do what we should be doing anyway — the Church gets the nature part of "Natural Law" wrong here — and coming up with really effective contraception: i.e., implants or whatever so that women and girls, men and boys are sterile until they desire children. Until then: working full-tilt on a male contraceptive, on making contraception readily available, and, starting, say, ten years ago, inventive and shameless "Wrap that Willy!" campaigns to encourage condom use.

The logically and morally rigorous probably can't go along, but the rest of us can do fairly well seeing things from the points of view of others. And since we probably can't exterminate our opponents and damn well shouldn't try; since even as we wouldn't like to be silenced, we shouldn't even try to silence others ... Well, we can muddle through on our disagreements, and agree and cooperate where we can. 

As I said, it's messy, but necessary for that social life, civilization experiment thing.  

America Needs More A**holes Like Me (3 March 2013)

      I shall assert, with all due modesty, that America, perhaps the world, needs more assholes like me.

     I will now clarify that assertion.

     First, I cast no aspersions upon the anus, neither that of humans nor more generally. The anus in itself is an innocent orifice, of great importance in evolutionary history and to be appreciated by all of us organisms organized around a digestive tube.

     Second, America and the planet do not need assholes not like me, for example and especially macho assholes. Nor does the world need more assholes like me in my curmudgeon aspect (with curmudgeons as aged or, to be generous, vintage assholes). As Boomers move into the twilight years, America will undoubtedly have more than enough curmudgeons — at least until younger people realize how much their elders have messed them over with resource depletion, debt, environmental degradation, and transferring money from them to us, and we get a crash in the curmudgeon population when we're recycled as Soylent Grey.™

     No, what we need more of is me as an inner-directed person strong on integrity, and willing to be obnoxious in the process. We need more people like me in my mode of (arguably) a narcissistic, insensitive asshole.

     Actually, I care a lot about what people think of me; but at 5'2" tall (157.48 cm), the initial reaction I'm going to get from most Americans is what I experience as a mild, casual contempt: disregard. They won't actively dislike me — probably — before I open my mouth, but they will kind of ignore me. (I have, after all, needed to call out "Hey, I exist!" on more than one occasion.)

     After I open my mouth, then people can dislike me on more solid grounds.

     Anyway, I overcompensate a lot and tend to be inner-directed, which is a very complimentary way of talking about someone who does what he (usually he) thinks is right without caring a whole lot what other people think or will react.

     Let's start with a harmless example from a simulation game, a variation on "The Prisoners' Dilemma."

     In the variation I played, the prisoners got to talk to each other, and the simulation situation was this: Pairs of prisoners have been arrested; the charges were not revealed to us and would not be revealed — I asked; if both prisoners remained silent, there was a chance we'd both be freed, eventually; but there was a better chance that we'd go to jail for a year. If one simulated prisoner ratted out the other, saying the other was guilty … of something — the accused prisoner would go to jail for at least X years (with X significantly greater than 1), and the betraying prisoner would go free. If each ratted out the other, we'd both go to jail for Y years.

     I didn't pay much attention to those "X" and "Y" details because I, of course, remained true to my fellow prisoner.

     My fellow prisoner — a professor in the Business School if I recall correctly — ratted me out consistently. He betrayed me even after I pointed out to him the Kafkaesque situation we were in — not even told the charges! —and how all we had to depend on was loyalty and integrity.

     Every time, I remained loyal, and he betrayed me.

     Now, if I had my brain in higher gear, on the third or fourth repetition I'd have interrupted the script by telling the game-runners that my fellow prisoner couldn't talk to them because he'd died mysteriously overnight from blood loss and trauma when someone pushed a shiv several times into his ratfink guts.

     Actually, I think that a lot of simulation games and psychology experiments should have their scripts disrupted. E.g., if you know the great Stanley Milgram "shock" experiments on obedience to authority — someone should have snuck a shill into the pool of test subjects, and have the shill blithely deliver all the electric shocks to the supposed victim in the next room, finally saying to the "Experimenter," something like, "Why, why, I've killed him; and you're the only witness …."

     But that's going off on a tangent, though an instructive one for my point.

     At least in a game, a simulation like "The Prisoner's Dilemma," I'm going to stick to my integrity and not allow the actions or probable actions and reactions of another player to determine my behavior.

     It's a control thing.

     I'm not a cynical asshole — although I was introduced to my adviser at Cornell as "a cynical little bastard from Chicago" — I'm not lower-case cynical but try to be something of an upper-case Cynic, with some of the Stoic and the "Job-ic" (as in the Biblical Book of Job) thrown in.
     "What do I have control over?" such people asked; and the answer is "my behavior": even when told, possibly correctly, "Agree with God and be at peace," Job insists "till I die I will not put away my integrity […]. / I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go […]" (22.21, 27.5-6).

     Capital "C" Cynics say, "Virtue is its own reward" 'cause virtue is not likely to get any other reward — as Job learns, certainly not inevitably get rewarded; but all we have is our integrity and should hold onto it up to, if not including, being told off by God, personally, face-to-face (Job 31, 37 f.).

     So, okay, I'm a wannabe capital "C" Cynical little bastard from Chicago who can be damnably self-righteous.

     And we need more people like me; not a lot more, but more.

     When people sneer at my recycling, they can say, correctly, that I may feel good about recycling but it doesn't do much for the environment.

     And I can say back, "Screw you! I'm following Kant's 'Categorical Imperative' and acting so the principle of my action — here, preserving the environment, responsible citizenship — can be a law for all people. And if nobody else goes along, that's too bad for the environment and for the younger among that 'nobody else,' but screw them, too."

     In other modes and moods, I care a lot about influencing others and about consequences, but in inner-directed, Cynical asshole mode, I don't.

     I write letters to the editor that I know few people will read — and I can look up hard numbers on how few people have read my blogs. I continue to write, but in part in the manner of the Hebrew Prophets or satirists. I.e., I write such things mostly because I have to vent the words and partly because of an archaic belief that if the Word "goes forth" (as a mashal) it will do some work in the world. Similarly, as a teacher I strongly encouraged my students to read my comments and revise their papers, but I suspected from the beginning and was damn sure after a few years that many, perhaps most, of my comments were ignored. I continued to write comments: critique is part of teaching, teaching was my job, "teacher" was in large part who I was and remains a significant part of who I am.

     Push varieties of such "inner-direction" too far, and one gets to sociopath, but the mode is useful for avoiding "group think," at least when "group think" is more like "group feel."
     Feelings are important; empathy is central to responsible morality. Still, sentimentality is not — emphatically not — compassion, and sentimentality can get in the way of ethics; too much squishy feeling for others can stop you from doing the right thing.

     Obviously with squeamishness if, for example, we're hiking together and you get bit by a rattlesnake and I'm too sensitive to cut into the wound and way to fastidious to try to suck out the poison. Not so obviously, consider a scenario where you're an emergency-room nurse in the midst of a major and wide-spread disaster. If that's your assignment, you had better be willing to perform triage on incoming wounded. And as an effective and ethical triage nurse you have to be willing to condemn a probably mortally wounded cute little girl to certain death, if limited resources could be directed to probably saving a severely-wounded, ugly, adult male.

     Indeed, there's a story about emergency food-aid workers in a village who acquiesced to the demands of the village's armed men that they and their starving wives and girlfriends should be given the very limited amount of food available rather than giving it to the young children and infants. "We'll make more babies," the adults said. The doctrine of "Save the Children" and "Women and Children First" might have the aid worker fight to the death against the armed men. The insensitive asshole view might defend the workers from a charge of mere cowardice by noting that the best of a bad situation might be acting to save the village, not individuals, and allowing as legitimate here the adults' argument that, indeed, the younger the children the more quickly they can be replaced, and the weaker the young victims the more likely they would be to die even if fed.

     (For a quick aside I'll supply an infallible law of ethics: Thou shalt strive with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might to minimize the instances in the world where the dilemmas are brutal and triage becomes an ethical imperative.)

     Quite unobviously but more relevantly for most of us, we need more cold-blooded, cold-eyed assholes like me as citizens and politicians: as decision-makers who ask to see the numbers before getting carried away by pathetic images and stories about victims of Disease of the Month or the Disaster of the Week.

     Breast cancer and prostate cancer are horrible diseases and have afflicted family and friends of mine, prostate cancer killing a favorite uncle, and a close friend; but breast and prostate cancer are primarily diseases of the old, and we should refrain from unnecessarily scaring young people about such cancers and putting more resources into combatting obesity, diabetes, and asthma, plus putting more money into foreign aid to combat malaria and enteric diseases, and finally stamp out polio. (And if you seriously want to decrease "excess mortality," a few bucks more invested in anti-smoking campaigns would be money well spent.)

     Kids' getting murdered at school is horrific, but rare. Concern and sensible precautions are appropriate, but we need more assholes (like me) to stress that schools are very safe places for kids and should be made less, not more, like prisons. If SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about school shootings — and this is an imperative regardless of the numbers — it should be SOMETHING involving minor Second Amendment sacrifices by adults, not placing more restrictions on kids. A Sarah-Connor style pump-action shotgun (and a heavy door) should be all even the most nervous grownups need for home defense, and really serious shooters really ought to stick to bolt-action rifles for the personal touch appropriate for civilian weapons.

     Beyond that, as with terrorists on airplanes, we need more non-macho but also non-neutered, nasty folk to say that groups of grownups should have the adrenals and gonads to rush a shooter and bring him down, even if that means some of us will die.

     We're all supposed to do the right thing, and kids shouldn't have to take classes in an armed camp because American adults have timidity issues.

     (For another solid rule to follow no matter what others are doing: Don't allow kids to die unless it's really, really, clearly the least bad alternative.)

     I've grown impatient — feeling kind of disgusted — with an American culture where feelings get in the way of moral judgment, starting with the emotion of fear. Americans are afraid of crime and afraid for their kids and occasionally terrified by rare horrors from obscure diseases to shark attacks. And fearful people do bad things, as is clear from America's overcrowded, budget-busting prisons to dangerous arguments for encouraging fire-fights in schools to more dangerous campaigns against vaccinations.

     Come on people, feel less, think more. Follow the crowd only if they're going some place sensible. Hold fast to your integrity.


     A lot of people you know may think you're acting like an asshole, but odds are you'll be a useful asshole.

Poetry and Push-pin, Satire and Sailing (14 March 2014)

[Q]uantities of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.
—Attributed by John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham 

                                                                                                                               Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with […] 

                                                                                                                            music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, 

                                                                                                                                it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin; 

                                                                                                                                                                 poetry and music are relished only by a few. — 

                                                                                                                                       Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (1825) [III.i]  

            
            Push-pin is apparently some sort of kids' game noted for being particularly mindless, perhaps comparable to "Marco Polo" as played by Stewie Griffin on Family Guy; or, to keep John Stuart Mill's brevity and alliteration — although losing his gender-neutrality — we might say, "poetry is no better than pud-pulling."

            "Different strokes / For different folks" ….

            I've been thinking of such matters since retiring from having taught for forty years the largely poetic scripts of William Shakespeare, and such other works as Shakespeare film, the original Buck Rogers stories, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

            And, having a retirement income to live on — younger readers should study up on the concept of "pensions," out of which you have been screwed — having a retirement income to live on, I have entered the film biz and have, among other things, provided fairly extensive Notes to improve a brief scene of a nice young Canadian having his stomach punctured repeatedly by a pick axe. Not coming soon to your local theaters but available on Amazon.com: PSYCHOTICA! (2010), and if the bit about a pick axe would be a spoiler for you for the movie, you really don't watch many slicer-dicers and probably shouldn't watch this one.

            Since retiring I've also had to put up with my annoying best friend Dan's habit of periodically asking me why anyone nowadays should study Shakespeare. Dan, of course, is a serious reader of serious fiction, and, as Captain Dan, teaches the problematically practical art of sailing. If the south-central coast of California is ever attacked by poorly-equipped 17^th-century pirates, Dan can be out there leading the naval attack on them; or, in a somewhat more likely scenario, after a secular Apocalypse, Dan could be running supplies out to the wretched survivors on the Channel Islands, depending only on the winds for power, and the aversion to water of both robots and zombies.

            "Quantities of pleasure being equal," poetry is indeed no better than push-pin or Marco Polo or masturbation or sailing — if, but only if, all we're concerned about is quantity of pleasure.

            That's one standard response to Jeremy Bentham's bit of philistinism, but note that the formulation is "if all one is concerned about" is pleasure. Pleasure counts. Utile et dulce and all that: good art is supposed "to please and instruct," to have some utility — a good word for a Utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham — and give pleasure. If pleasure didn't count, people would do better to just read history or philosophy or self-help books or instruction manuals or, God help us, theology or law books.

            But why give university course credit for studying Shakespeare or Blazing Saddles, usually even more credit than for studying sailing?

            The answer I gave Dan: 'cause it kept me working and getting paid, (schmuck!). The more interesting question, that one out of the way — it costs money to sail with Captain Dan, and he wasn't about to push me on that argument — the more interesting question is what literature and drama and film might be good for, period. Granting that harmless fun needs no excuse, what's useful about plays or movies, or — for most of what I taught — non-technical reading?

            In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker has recycled an old and unfashionable argument defending literature, but, if it holds up, a very powerful argument. A major part of Pinker's analysis concerns "The Rise of Empathy and the Regard for Human Rights" from the 18^th century on in the West, a crucial phenomenon for what he calls "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4). And Pinker holds that this phenomenon didn't just follow substantial increases in literacy and the reading of fiction, but to a significant degree was caused by that reading — and, I will add to Pinker's list, by watching and listening to some drama and later film.

            "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head" — especially when reading a novel — "you are observing the world from that person's point of view. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions" (Penguin pb, 2011: 175). That is, while reading many novels, you are automatically engaging in a kind of empathy; and Pinker argues cogently that a rise of empathy was significant for the elimination or radical reduction — usually and so far! — of most of the casual brutality woven into the fabric of everyday life for almost all of recorded human history.

            And there's more involved than just empathy.

            As an admirer of satirists like Jonathan Swift, Pinker also recognizes that "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now'). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done in some other way" (175).

            As a student of satire and science fiction, I'll add that such "S&SF" works, when they're earning their keep, can be highly effective in an audience's world expansion. As Pinker says, most of us, most of the time accept the world we live in as the world, the only possible world. A study of history or anthropology would disabuse us of that delusion quickly: our ways are far from the only way. History however, often comes with quizzes where the proper little "bubble" to fill in gives "1492" for the Fall of Granada or Christopher Columbus's sailing off and doesn't get you picturing life in a besieged city or what was going through the head of a complex world-changer, and major criminal like Admiral-Governor Columbus. And you may remember from your anthro courses mostly factoids on kinship relations among the clans, phratries, moieties, demes, and what-all of the Tlingit peoples of wherever.

            Good satires and science fictions are fun, and they sucker us into seeing our world from alien points of view and seeing the weirdness of everyday life — or seeing worlds radically different from our own. How would Early Modern European history look to a humane, civilized giant of high intelligence, or to a horse-like creature who was truly a rational animal, a rational animal who had never seen an ill-natured quarrel, much less a war? How would we view human relations after several chapters inside the mind of a highly intelligent creature whose species has always come in three sexes?

            Admittedly, a bad teacher can make Swift's Gulliver's Travel's or Isaac Asimov's The God's Themselves every bit as boring, tedious, and unpleasant as bad teachers can make history or anthropology; but for their original audiences, Gulliver and Asimov were somewhat guilty pleasures, and still can be discovered with delight by curious young readers. Or some young nerds can discover to another kind of delight that there are adults willing to take Asimov and Swift and Animal House and South Park seriously.

            Pinker may be more wrong than right, of course, and the esthetes' and puritans' doctrine may be correct that poetry — and art more generally — accomplishes nothing and/or wastes time better devoted to useful things.

            I don't think so.

            Robert Browning's disreputable monk and great painter Fra Lippo Lippi gives us a look into his world in a dramatic monolog justifying himself and his painting to the Italian Renaissance equivalent of a cop on a late-night beat.

                                  we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. (lines 300-06)

Art, when it's working, "defamiliarizes" our world and opens up other worlds: "making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar" to paraphrase several lines in S. T. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817: ch. 14). If Pinker and an old tradition are right; if Browning's Lippo is right, and Browning as well, as an author of dramatic monologs — then some forms of art can get us to see the world through other's eyes. That's empathy by definition, which can lead to sympathy; and it offers visions of alternatives.

            So it might be useful to watch and listen to Shakespeare, and perhaps study his scripts, and study and enjoy satire and SF and other arts.

            And, if you're into it, go sailing: quantities of pleasure being equal, sailing is as good as satire reading, plus it's a good way to learn some math and meteorology and the somewhat foreign language of utterly pedantic ways to talk about parts of a boat.

PlayStation 4: "Perfect Day" — and Empathy (22 March 2014)

            Let us contemplate for a moment the opening scene of the "Perfect Day" TV commercial for PlayStation 4 (2013-14).

            The second and third scenes are also good — present-day on-road mayhem and post-disaster, high-tech, ultraviolent warfare — but the opening gets us back to basics: two heavily armored knights, battling to the death of one while serenading each other with Lou Reed's sweetly sentimental "Perfect Day," with the key lyric here "Oh it's such a perfect day; / I'm glad I spend it with you."

            The ad is effective in part because it's funny, and I am going to ask the class, okay, why is it funny?

            The first part of the answer is, of course, "Incongruity": if two things don't go together in a really quirky way, there's a good chance our response will be laughter. There's the sentimental song on the sound track, and there's the visual combat and implied gore.

            Additionally, though, there's the comedy of a complex, resolved paradox, where the incongruity turns out to be not so incongruous and — as you know or by now have guessed — helpful for pushing the PlayStation product.

            The two guys trying to kill one another in increasingly high-tech ways really are having a good time together, unseen, off-screen, managing their great-looking, if murderous, avatars, who are also having a good time, until, in the virtual world, both or one or the other is dead.

            The implied relationship between the real-world guys is what a fraternity brother of mine called "bundling-board buddies": two friends not necessarily screwing (that was "butt-hole buddies") but still, metaphorically, "sleeping together." Or, in this case, we have two guys enjoying "a perfect day" with one another playing PlayStation: probably two dorks, but in the virtual world they are beautiful, macho, and baaaad-ass muthafuckas; and it is comically weird to think of them sensitively feeling the perfectness of the day spent in close relationship.

            Which gets us back to incongruity and why the ad is funny, and, in a really indirect kind of way, why the ad is intellectually useful.

            For all the fairly-late medieval and renaissance bullshit of the chivalric Romance — Camelot and all that — knights were central to an exploitive military aristocracy, and Lancelot of Monty Python and the Holy Grail got it about right: knights were generally thugs, and sensitivity to the feelings of others would get in the way of business.

            Knights were also, and to a large extent have remained, high-ranking role models; and it was significant that the literary chivalric bullshit moved them to be lovers as well as fighters and, eventually, even poets. (The Japanese Samurai were way ahead of Europe on that last bit.) This idea was pushed to a kind of absurdity in some European Renaissance presentations of Hercules — the archetypal violent dumb jock — as an epitome of civilization and a great orator, but the thought was nice.

            And, again, significant: In my sort of book of the month, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), Steven Pinker stresses that part of "the civilizing process" for humans, and the later "humanitarian revolution" came when knightly thugs who'd moved up in the world became courtiers. At the same time, as Pinker notes elsewhere and you probably learned in some history class or other — at the same time, as the medieval world moved into the modern, it became almost respectable to go into "trade" and make money in commerce.

            And we can throw in that warfare became increasingly sophisticated, and that success in warfare was determined less by possessing the personal brute force to smash in an enemy's head and more by abilities such as the talent of seeing into an enemy's mind and outwit him.

            Neither Beowulf fighting a monster nor a video-game knight delivering a death-thrust to a downed opponent needs to get in touch with his own feelings beyond murderous rage, much less understand the feelings and thoughts of others. Courtiers, merchants, orators, and successful generals do need to.

            Now quite possibly the most reproductively successful human being of all time was Genghis Khan, who left parts of his DNA over large swaths of the Eurasian population, and The Great Khan doesn't seem to have been much into empathy beyond figuring out that massacring the inhabitants of City N along the route of the horde was effective in encouraging the inhabitants of Cities N+1, 2, 3, and so forth to flee or surrender. It's hard to picture him pronouncing a Bill-Clintonesque, "I feel your terror."

            It's funny that the two knights in the PlayStation commercial are feeling each other's joy — but comprehensible. It's unlikely Genghis Khan or real knights would get it. They were not, but we are, products of cultures who came to respect courtiers more than brawlers or even most conquerors, cultures that came at least to accept merchants, and even politicians and sales reps: people whose jobs require them — whose jobs require many of us — to read the moods and feelings of others, and, to some extent, be able to figure out what others are thinking and, as we say "see things from their points of view."

            That young Americans, Japanese, Europeans, and others — even Mongols — mostly crush the skulls of one another in game worlds is progress, as is the fact that as I write the standoff between major world powers over Crimea and Ukraine remains a standoff, not yet anyway slipping into another Crimean War or moving toward the horrific "glorious" slaughter of The-Guns-of-August/World War I variety. It's progress for which we should thank, in small part, the phenomena that shrank the ranks of noble knights and put their chivalry into our fantasy lives. We should be grateful that so many of us in our real-worlds are ignoble and nonchivalric and went into "trade" and business and sales and politics and nursing and teaching and other work that requires us to take really seriously — to do our jobs — the thoughts and feelings and attitudes and desires of others.

            So, gameboys, let's laugh at that touchy-feely stuff, but let's all of us show some gratitude toward increases in empathy.