Though both of us eat meat these days, Beki and I are always looking for good vegetarian restaurants. Finding them is near impossible. We were excited to try the Chicago Diner last winter and wound up mostly disappointed. The food was tasty enough, but like so much American vegetarian cuisine, it was hung up on trying to find meat substitutes, with most dishes including fake sausage or the like. If restaurants don’t go for meat substitutes, they just serve what amount to a collection of side dishes.

Friday was Beki’s birthday, so I took her to Green Zebra. It is a vegetarian restaurant that avoids the traditional problems first by doing away with the inferiority complex and attempts at being carnivore friendly (they reverse the traditional role by offering exactly one meat dish per night (always fish from what I gathered)) and second by offering a tasty menu. The tasting menu means that you are encouraged to order three or four dishes per person and share. By focusing on smaller dishes, the chef is able to concoct inventive dishes without having to figure out a way to make you eat a pound of broccoli in order to fill up. I ordered the Chef’s Tasting Menu, which came with four dishes and a desert. None of the dishes were on the menu. Beki ordered three dishes from the menu. Between the eight things, a bottle of wine, bread (they give each person one piece, which is really a great idea. A server comes out with a basket and asks you whether you’d like whole wheat or white. You tell him and he gives you one sizable piece of bread. You don’t feel cheated because there isn’t a basket with two measly pieces of bread, and you don’t feel gross for eating three loves of bread before dinner), and free extra desert for Beki’s birthday, we were both just the right kind of full.

The meal started with the bread, which came with butter and a shot of spicy tomato soup. The bread wasn’t anything to write home about, but it had a nice crust. The soup had just enough kick and was a great way to prep the pallet for the meal.

The wine was a pinot gris from Oregon. I don’t have much of a nose for wine, but it was tasty enough.

We then had the first of the Chef’s choice, which was a poached pear on a pumpernickel crisp. It was drizzled with some kind of slightly sweet sauce and mustard seeds. The pears were great. The poaching process took out some of the sweetness. They were fork tender but not mushy.

Then we had a mushroom consume with barley. It wasn’t too oily or too salty, which is what often scares me away from consommes. The flavor was subtle. The barley on the bottome gave the broth a nice bite.
Beki’s chickpea fries came out with the consomme. They were exceptionally light and not at all greasy; a very nice job with the deep-frier. They came with a dipping sauce that had strong South-Indian flavors. Beki remarked that it was an Americanized samosa.

Next was the Cauliflower three ways. It was a chunk of roasted cauliflower that was good but slightly too salty, topped with shaved raw cauliflower, and sitting in purred cauliflower with brown-butter. It was really incredible and convinced me that Beki might be correct in suggesting that we make mashed cauliflower rather than mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving.
Beki’s sweet garlic and parsley agnolotti came out with the cauliflower. It featured Moroccan spiced eggplant and toasted pistachios. I thought the garlic was a little too strong, but pasta was incredible and the eggplant more than made up for it.

The last of the savory dishes were two of the highlights. The Chef’s selection was pappardelle pasta with all the ingredients of Italian sausage, minus the pork. It was a very clever acknowledgment of everything that I dislike about vegetarian restaurants. I love Italian sausage, and this was some of the best Italian sausage I’ve had. The flavors were perfect. In particular, the fennel seeds really popped.
Beki ordered braised artichokes with a warm bread salad. It had maybe the best croutons I’ve ever had, and I had bone marrow croutons last year.

The deserts were as perfect as the rest of the meal. We had shortbread triangles with homemade vanilla ice cream and a toffee crisp. It was all served over a very light caramel sauce.
For Beki’s birthday, we got peanut cookies with mashed concord grape jelly and whole concord grapes. It was the grapiest grape jelly you imagine; not too sweet, very fresh.

I’m delighted to finally find a great vegetarian restaurant. It’s too expensive to frequent, but we’ll surely be back.

The internet is killing storytelling is the headline for this piece on the Times Online. I’ve been blogging intermittently for a few years now and was struck by the statement. I often don’t write narrative in my posts (take this post for instance), but just as often I do. The internet seems a fine place for drafting short narratives on a regular basis. The medium allows me to tell stories any time I want. Before this blog I could narrate to others only when in their company or if I was lucky enough to get someone to read a hard-copy of something I’d committed to paper. Otherwise, I was left to narrating to myself in the shower or surreptitiously delivering monologues on walks. If I was lucky, I’d have the house to myself to offer riveting soliloquies on my future achievements to the cat. But now those narratives are at least accessible to the outside, though I resist looking at hit statistics so I have no idea if there are many readers. I have to admit to not reading many blogs. But I have to imagine that there are thousands of blogs out there producing daily narratives.

What Macintyre isn’t clear about is whether the fear is the death of fiction. That might be a clearer concern, though not one that I have to any great degree. When one takes the time to draft a “true” narrative, the truth of it all becomes quite murky. Facts are omitted and the very act of exclusion creates a kind of fiction. I’m not sure there’s a great distinction between fiction and nonfiction where narrative is the focus.

*Disclaimer*
I throw around “coherence” in this post. I’m not dealing with logical coherence in any formal way. This isn’t a possible worlds kind of thing, but a this world kind of thing. So when I say something isn’t coherent, I mean it isn’t coherent because it doesn’t make sense given the way our world works, not necessarily that you can’t coherently imagine some universe.

“The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing ‘imperfect’ institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice is between alternative real institutional arrangements.”
-Harold Demsetz, Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint, 12 Journal of Law and Economics 1 (1969)

This quotation was forcefully given to me in January by my law and economics professor. It is a powerful point; one that I now see everywhere. It goes far beyond the platitudes that you hear supposedly grizzled “realists” shout at naive “idealists.” It even goes beyond Voltaire’s, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The Nirvana Fallacy is an effort to put policy debates into perspective, and it gets ignored every day by me, you, and those in power. It warns us that comparing two options to a third can get us in a heap of trouble on the level not just of possible outcomes, but on the level of coherence. Taking Demsetz seriously helps us formulate our questions about what the world ought to look like in a way that gets us closer to coherence.

I spend much of my time thinking, writing, reading, and talking about environmental regulations. I do this as someone attempting to enforce law and I do this as someone interested in reforming law. But in order to do these things well, particularly when thinking about reformation, one must be able to formulate coherent questions. It is much harder than you might think, which is why Demsetz is so helpful.

Consider water pollution. The New York Times is doing an incredible job with their water series. In particular the data they’ve put together on enforcement rivals anything that the government or any organization has put together. But what do we really want out of our water regulation? The obvious answer is, “clean water.” But when you take Demsetz seriously, that’s not a coherent answer at all. Even if we could identify what clean water would look and taste and be like, it wouldn’t get us anywhere. All of our water could be clean if we didn’t pollute it. We wouldn’t pollute water if we didn’t have factories. Factories are dirty and gross. So let’s get rid of factories. But now we’ve lost jobs. We’ve lost what the factories produce. We’ve lost a bunch of goods in order to get a different good (perfectly clean water). But was our perfectly clean water worth it? No, perfectly clean water isn’t worth doing away with all of our factories. We can’t coherently reach for a world of perfectly clean water without reaching for a world without factories. And we know from high school economics that there are diminishing returns. Perfectly clean water isn’t worth dark, cold nights. This means that what we really ought to ask might sound like an odd question: “What is the optimal amount of water pollution?” Demsetz’ insight is so important because it shows why this isn’t just the right question, but the only coherent question.

Implicit in Demsetz’ point is the notion that there are feedback loops. We cannot change one variable without changing the others. This is driven home by another NY Times water piece on the deleterious effects that cleaning our air has on our water. The question cannot be: “How do we have perfectly clean water and perfectly clean water?” What we really want to know is: “How we can have clean enough water and clean enough air while still producing the right amount of goods that make water and air dirty?”

We must be careful not to apply Demsetz in the wrong situations. Last night I was pumping iron and listening to the podcast of a panel on gay marriage put together by the University of Chicago. One of the panelists tried to tackle the issue of whether gay marriage ought to be the goal or whether civil unions is the way to go. One of the arguments presented was that civil unions might be suboptimal but more achievable and so ought to be secured as quickly as possible. The argument was that those current couples denied rights cannot be made to wait for marriage, and that this is not a sacrifice we can morally ask couples to make. This is not a case in which the Nirvana Fallacy helps us. Gay marriage is a coherent possibility; it isn’t a Nirvana. The situation is more akin to the grizzled “realist” and the naive “idealist” above. The arguments about whether to advocate for civil unions or to declare “marriage or bust” is a pragmatic question. People can make coherent arguments on both sides. Contrast this with demanding no pollution while maintaining our culture and other goods. This is sort of a nice logically coherent ideal, but it isn’t coherent in our world. It isn’t even a nice idea, it’s nonsense. It is a coherence misstep, not a policy debate.

I’m in the midst of my fourth consecutive Fall.  I don’t count my first twenty-two Falls because they were all in Florida.  I saw the aftermath of a Fall when I drove to Kentucky to see the Dismemberment Plan in March of 2002.  Large groups of leafless trees for the first time.  I got closer in January of 2003 when I spent a couple of weeks in Philadelphia.  That trip also gave me snow for the first time.  But my first real Fall was in China, 2006.  It wasn’t the greatest Fall of all time, but there were bursts of color and plenty of raking to be done.  At the university, first and second-year students were responsible for specific parts of campus landscaping, including an area near the lake behind my first apartment.  Once or twice a week a class got together to rake and bag.  No leaf blowers, no mulchers; just eighteen and nineteen year-olds and loads of sexual tension.  What stood out most that Fall wasn’t the colors, the wind, the rain, the temperature.  It wasn’t the lack of duck pears in the market and the increase in persimmons.  It wasn’t even the burning farmland, smoke that hung over the city for weeks.  It was tangles of twigs in trees.

The following Fall was spent in Atlanta.  This time I was treated to a comparatively spectacular display of colors.  Bursts of fire red and sunlight yellow up and down Atlanta’s residential streets.  And when Silas and I would drive to Whole Foods to pick up our co-op bags we’d take a detour through a preserved area that was like driving through a fairy-tale, though thankfully we were spared the man-eating wolves.  But once again it was clumps of twigs that caught my eye.  The library stairs are glass and on the way to the third floor I was just above eye-level to a spindly little tree.  Full and green when I arrived, by late Fall it was a wet cat.  And then I could see its insides.  It had swallowed something the size of a human head.  At first I thought it was a tangling of its own twigs and leaves; a knot of imperfection revealed only during the tree’s immodest months.  And then I recognized it for what it really was: a curious assemblage of twigs and hair not of the tree’s accidental creation but that of a stowaway’s.  It was a nest and it had likely given life earlier in the year and for all I knew would give life again in the Spring.  I then remembered seeing nests in China.  I suppose I knew they were nests in China, but I hadn’t thought on it too much.  But here on my way to study to torts or contracts or some such it was clear.  For all of my life bird nests were something rare.  To discover a nest was always reverential, fraught with the danger of contamination for both parties.  But in Fall I looked outside and they were everywhere.

The last two Falls have been spent in Evanston, IL.  Fall continues to be brilliant.  The bus along Lakeshore Drive from my home to my school, just off the Magnificent Mile, is a beautiful trip all year, but it is particularly lovely in Fall.  Lincoln Park explodes with all manner of colors.  All of the stereotypes of Fall are fully rendered: the colors are vibrant; the strong winds churn the lake; the gray skies expand forever over the same; likewise the blue skies.  And even from the bus there are the nests.

None of this is a surprise in retrospect. Birds are some of the few largish animals we see with any regularity. Birds build nests and there are lots of birds, so there are lots of nests. But to see suddenly the previously hidden homes in every tree I encounter, to see their homes outside my home, remains something of a shock. Walking down my tree-lined street the birds that I hear all year and watch forage at my feet have their nests revealed by those clever trees. The trees shed their outer layer just as I begin to add to mine, and a world is revealed.

Tree outside my apartment

Tree on my street

Neighbors’ yard

Spending so much of my time writing cover letters and proposals for would-be jobs, I’ve got a hankering to explore some other avenues for prose.  I miss writing about things other than my qualifications and how I’d like to explore reforming the Clean Water Act’s antidegradation requirements.  I’ll not make the mistake of promising regular content, but I’d like to do more blogging.

As some of you might know, I like video games.  Like most males of my generation, I grew up playing them.  And perhaps because, other than the 8-bit NES that my uncle bought me in 1989, I could never get anyone to buy me a gaming system (other than Alex’s donation of his Xbox, which I passed on to Brian), as I’ve entered my adult life I’ve treated myself to video games.  While I missed the last generation of home consoles and I haven’t had a video game worthy computer since I was in high school, this generation I’ve managed to procure all three of the home systems (though the wii belongs to Beki).  It’s rare that one is born at the dawn of a new art form, but I’m convinced that video games will eventually be a medium for artistic expression.  The form has been stumbling forward for only 30 years, so perhaps it will soon get its Lost Horizon (I’ve got a lot riding on Heavy Rain, but we’ll see).

There have been plenty of notable steps forward.  The most recent and surprising is an iPhone game called Canabalt.  When you load the game and tap start, you’re presented with a monochromatic world.  The art is detailed but simple.  There are various backgrounds and foregrounds, but all the action takes place on one plane.  The background is a mass of ruined skyscrapers.  The silhouette of a giant robot passes occasionally through the rubble, shooting lasers into the city.  A low-flying spaceship periodically blasts directly over the foreground.  The world is vivid, a bundle of clichés amounting to a convincing sci-fi apocalypse.  Everything about the environment is meant to be familiar to anyone young enough to have read War of the Worlds or seen a Buck Rogers film (that is to say, everyone).  The game starts without any introduction to the world.  You tap start and there is a man in black pants and a flapping jacket running for his life through a building.  There are some obstacles in his path and it’s your job to tap the screen so that he can jump and avoid them.  When he reaches the other side of the building he crashes through a window, falls a couple of stories, roles on the roof of the adjacent building and keeps on running.  And that’s the game.  You tap to make him jump and he runs for his life, the apocalypse blurring behind him as he picks up speed.  The upper right-hand corner displays the number of meters the man has run since you joined the fray.  The better your reflexes, the further he runs, the longer he lives.  And should you miss a jump and hit the side of a building you get a message such as, “You ran 630m before hitting a wall and tumbling to your death.”  And now the game has put you in this nightmare.  You are the man and there’s no escape.

There is no end to the game other than death.  The world is randomly generated so that you can’t memorize the order of jumps.  Most sprints last only 20 or 30 seconds.  The game is an exercise is utter futility.  The apocalypse has arrived and the rest of your life is measured in meters.  The robots always win.  If you’re lucky you’ll see 4,000 meters.  The furthest I’ve gotten is 6544 meters, without even a glimmer of hope of surviving the holocaust.  You’re best bet for survival is to find the middle distance, let your eyes blur, put on a tune with a good beat, and run.  And when you inevitably crash to your death or get vaporized by a stray bomb, you start the nightmare again.  Why even run?  You know you can’t win.  There is no salvation for the man.  You are like a Greek who slept with Zeus’ mistress, condemned to play out this horror over and over.  But what the game does so well is insert a real sense of urgency; a sense that completing that extra meter is what life is all about.  Even upon being resigned to the knowledge that you can’t “win” you keep going because that’s what we do.  As in the real world, there is no end point.  We are lucky enough to measure our lives in years, but they are finite.  We try and eek out as many as possible.  Canabalt’s holocaust condenses your life to meters rather than years.  You have no choice but to run.  And we have an insatiable desire to get as far as we can.

It’s late and I’m not going to do much with this, but there were two more things that came out of Be Kind Rewind that I thought I don’t want to forget to write about.

1. There’s talk about Gondry stealing the idea from the movie from a Nickelodean show. This is the kind of stuff that we’ve been talking about in property and it’s a subject that I’ve found interesting for a while. There are lots of questions about what the law should be, how morally obligated we are, and what standards ought to apply when inspiration comes from somewhere other than Heaven. Since inspiration rarely, if ever, comes from Heaven, the task is difficult. I personally come out on the less restriction side of things. Even if Gondry did get his idea from the show (although as I noted in my previous post this is an idea every ten year old has), I don’t think it matters one bit. If he’s aware that he got the idea from the show (he was watching Nickelodean and said, “That’s a great idea; I bet I could do something interesting with it.”) then he should probably put a thank you in the credits. No money need exchange hands. If Nabakov can lift Lolita (something I fully condone), Gondry can lift from The Amanda Show.

2. A big chunk of Be Kind Rewind is about rewriting the biography of Fats Waller. The characters eventually make a film about how Fats grew up in Passaic and how his family was killed in a gang battle and how he broke the scale as a child. All of this is untrue and the town knows it, but it doesn’t matter. This brings up big questions about why we put a premium on truth and what the obligations of artists who purport to tell the truth have to their audience. I don’t really know the answer, but here I tend to lean towards not caring so much about the truth in lots of these circumstances. Do I really think that Bob Dylan’s autobiography is really going to be completely truthful with regards to the facts? No. I expect that he’ll tell a great story that is emotionally true, but the facts will often not be right. This is in part unavoidable due to our incredibly imperfect memories(this is the best show on the radio, FYI). But he’ll also embellish, and I think that’s OK. It’s hard for me to know why we demand truth all the time.

These are just two things floating around in my head and my generally view. I’ll try and write more in the future, but in the mean time please feel free to correct me before I go too far down the wrong road.

Last night some of us went to see the new Michel Gondry film, Be Kind Rewind. At its most superficial level the film does what Gondry’s films always do: play out childhood fantasies of making movies with stuff we all have lying around. Here Gondry’s stand-ins, three people in a small city outside New York, literally make the kind of movies ten year-old Justin wanted to make. No one in my neighborhood had a movie camera, but I organized plays based on my favorite movies. My favorite gag came from our remake of Home Alone. I rigged up comic books with string so that they could fall over the eyes of the burglars. There’s lots of fun to be had just watching Gondry make grown-up versions of children versions of grown-up films.

But really Be Kind Rewind is about community. The reviews, which have been positive but nothing to write home about, have largely missed this fact. I guess it’s not a surprise that people whose lives revolve around watching films with flashlight pens in preview screenings would say Gondry’s latest is a ” somewhat precious celebration of DIY filmmaking and cult-film consumption.” The only problem is that there aren’t any cult-films here. The remakes by the three entruepeurs and eventually the entire town, are of Hollywood favorites like Ghost Busters, The Lion King, and Driving Miss Daisy (with Morgan Freeman playing a character playing his role in a remake of the original; meta is betta’). The films are something for the community to come together over. I feel stupid writing this because the theme isn’t exactly subtle.

Gondry made a hilarious feel-good movie that really wants us to get along. He wants people to create as a group. He wants more local theatre. It doesn’t matter if the art is good; it only matters that we made it together. This is powerful, revolutionary stuff.

I’ll also note that this has to be one of the most racially integrated films in recent American cinematic history. The film takes place in Passaic, New Jersey and as far as I can tell it was shot mostly in town with lots of non-professional actors. Wikipedia has this to say about the demographics of Passaic:

“As of the census of 2000, there were 67,861 people, 19,458 households, and 14,457 families residing in the city of Passaic, New Jersey. The population density was 21,804.7 people per square mile (8,424.8/km²). There were 20,194 housing units at an average density of 6,488.6/sq mi (2,507.1/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 35.43% White, 13.83% African American, 0.78% Native American, 5.51% Asian 0.04% Pacific Islander, 39.36% from other races, and 5.04% from two or more races. The cultural groupings for Hispanic or Latino of any race were 62.46% of the population. Passaic is also known for its Ukrainian enclave.”

There’s no talk about this in the film. If it’s a statement it’s not explicit. There aren’t any racial stereotypes (though the villains all appear as white out-of-towners). I can’t think of a film where race is so prevalent and yet so not an issue. Like I said, this is a movie about how important community is, and communities aren’t homogeneous, nor are they always about schisms. They’re most often about living together and, if in a perfect world, being together. The gimmick is what made me want to see the movie, but the spirit of people creating together and finding each other by laughing together made me love the movie. I need to write about how much I dig contemporary fairy tales, but in the mean time, go see this movie, then grab a friend, go here, and do an assignment together.

I’m a little behind on the Iron & Wine scene. I got his first album when it was all the rage and I’ve heard his album with Calexico, but I was never blown away. But I just listened to the first track on last year’s The Shepard’s Dog and my jaw hit the floor. It’s been a long time since a recording blew me away with virtuosity alone. It was produced by Brian Deck, who also produced maybe the best record of 2000, Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antartica (Ben and I spent a long time talking about this record our first year of college and we eventually agreed that, if nothing else, it has one of the best opening/closing line pairings in rock history: It starts with “Everything that keeps us together is falling apart” and ends with “[Human beings] ain’t nothing but water and shit” (which only transcendent in the context of the album)). That was a great sounding record, but the stuff happening on “Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car” is a huge step forward. When you start to track the timbres and rhythms and the way things come in and out of the mix, it seems like it should be chaos. There’s a vibe and cello and then a piano and then a sound I can’t identify; things are backward things; a bass note comes in for one beat. Somehow Beam and Deck and engineer Colin Studebaker have done something truly incredible. The tune is pretty good on its own, Beam sounds more like a contemporary Nick Drake than ever, but you need to hear this recording. Right now. Seriously.

Beki sent me an interesting article about a guy, Dr. Ben Barres, she is trying to get to present at her program.  The short of it is that he’s a transsexual who spent most of his carreer as a leading scientist as a woman.  He got a sex change nine years ago, giving a unique perspective on how gender affects you as a scientist.

Pinker comes off as ridiculous.  It’s hard to know what he’s is looking for.  While it strikes me as absurd to suggest that the disparities amongst men and women’s cognitive abilities accounts for most of the differences in professions, you don’t even need get to that debate to understand why Pinker sounds like a fool.  A cognitive difference doesn’t change the social situation that women are put into in the sciences; it doesn’t help the woman who has whatever aptitude Pinker thinks makes people good at science become accepted as an equal or superior in the field.  Of course, it’s hard to imagine that he, as someone who, based on his sex, is in a field that women are “better” at, had any difficulty getting a job or being taken seriously because of his sex.  Had he been in the situation his ideas on the subject might be a bit more nuanced, which is what makes Barres’ perspective so valuable.

Note Lawrence’s thoughts on pushiness: But even as he played down the role of sexism, Lawrence said the “rat race” in science is skewed in favor of pushy, aggressive people — most of whom, he said, happen to be men.

There is a study that I don’t have the time to track down, but in it they had a male actor and female actor read the exact same script in the setting of asking for a raise.  The language was the same.  The intonation was the same.  Everything was the same except the sex of the speaker.  At an incredibly high rate, male and female viewers afterward said that the man was assertive and knew what he wanted, but the woman was a bitch.   With this in mind, ask your friends and family, supporters or not, what they think of Clinton’s attitude.

*Disclaimer: I don’t care about either of the political figures in the title.  By the time the Florida primary rolled around my horses weren’t even in the race.*

I’ve been surprised to find that most of my peers view all human action as a series of calculations based on “self-interest.” The difficulty with any kind of big topic like this one is that each party needs to use the words the same way, but in order to do that you have to understand where each party is coming from. It’s a chicken or the egg problem that can’t be solved without diving in and fixing confusions as they pop out.

But as I understand the basic argument, it goes something like the following: “Whenever I make a decision I consider what effects it will have on me. These effects might be direct (I get hurt) or indirect (it will make others get hurt and that makes me feel bad). They might be short term or long term. It often comes down to choosing not between things that make me happy or sad, but things that make me more happy or less sad. People make mistakes about this stuff, but their intention is, in the end, about improving their lives; anything thing else is incidental.” There are bunch of words there that need defining to really figure out what’s going on, but I think I can work with any reasonable understanding of the words for the idea I’ll present…

here. There are lots of problems with the above argument (contrary to the facts; makes little sense on a biological or social evolution scale), but what strikes me as most interesting and disturbing is that it requires reductionism that don’t find to be in line with experience. In any hard decision there will be a multitude of considerations: How will this make me feel today? Tomorrow? Ten years from now? On my death bed? (This points to another problem with the idea of “self-interest” because what time of self-interest needs to be asked) How will this effect my environment? My loved one’s environment? What do my abstract beliefs and morals say about this? What are my obligations? (Proponents would likely describe obligations in terms of efficient breach (the punishment for breach isn’t as bad as keeping the obligation), but experience would suggest otherwise)

The self-interest model would have one consideration to rule them all in the form of net benefit (though “net when?” makes even this consideration impossible to pin down). But I want to suggest that this isn’t about a hierarchy. Rather, these considerations often run parallel. I weigh my self-interest (what will make me the least unhappy) along with my social obligations. Daniel Dennett claims that, “The best way to seem altruistic is to be.” Why do we think that our feelings of obligation are based on feeling good about being good? Why can’t we just be good? That seems to be the simpler explanation; the one that matches up best with experience.

I don’t really know what to make of this stuff, but the reductionist model doesn’t make much sense to me.  Explanations are, as always, welcome.