Personality Typing I: Electrons with West's Disease

Did I mention I'm addicted to Deadwood? Okay, maybe addicted is a strong word, but I'm really enjoying it, and as it happens, I'm in kind of a weird place, temporally speaking. I've absorbed the whole first season because I rented the DVDs. Now I'm ready to jump into the second season, but it's already underway, four or five (or is it six?) episides worth. What to do? Rather than lose the impact of seeing them all in order, I settled on the the methadone option - the "Special Features" DVD that came with the last two episodes of Season 1. DND (hereafter invoking a new acronym meaning, does not disappoint).

The guy who writes Deadwood is named David Milch. He's one of those "established" TV writers, the guys who have the jobs that are the heart's desire of countless inevitably unsuccessful writers. He's there for a good reason, irrespective of the lock-out to new talent that typifies much of the industry. Milch started as a writer on Hill Street Blues (won an Emmy) and gained momentum up to co-creating NYPD Blue (won a couple of Emmys), which he rode all the way through the 90's. Now, he's doing Deadwood... unorthodox, like.

It turns out that the folks at HBO (geniuses, if you ask me) have given this guy a wide berth - a lot of what he writes is improvised on the set after he watches some aspect of an actor's performance. The whole crew, according to the interviews on the "Special Features" disk, are like addicts waiting for new pages. (I can relate, but I'm okay.) Anyhow, the last segment on the disk is an interview between Milch and one of the stars of the first season, Kieth Carradine, who plays Wild Bill Hickok. I was impressed and intrigued by this gregarious but admitted self-hater before seeing this interview (he was on Jon Favreaux's Dinner for Five not too long ago). Nevertheless, I was caught off guard by how insightful and esoterically erudite Milch was when, toward the end of the interview, Carradine asked him about a particular scene from Season 1 - a guy who was praising (and irritating) Wild Bill, after being asked to go away, changed his tune abruptly, and wished him dead. I'll quote him so you can follow his train of thought as it comes around the bend.

"Nathaniel West wrote, I thought, beautifully about that syndrome, and W.H. Auden, the poet, wrote an essay about West's analysis of that syndrome, which he called, 'West's Disease.' It's about people who, for whatever reason, are unable to turn wishes into passions in their life, and lacking that capacity, sit passively in mute outrage, anticipating disasters. They go to fires. Any sort of natural disaster attracts them. And in the absence of a natural disaster, they sometimes try and create disasters. And they hate the people whose lives, whether successful or not, are pursued with passion. And first they idolize them, then they want to destroy them. They want to appropriate the vitality of those people..."

Whoa. I talk to lots of people and I'd be mesmerized to be in a conversation of this sort. Maybe it just hits home with me because I'm so obsessed with understanding and generalizing about human behavior (which more than a couple of people have told me is futile). Nevertheless, to me, this was fantastic. It rang so true that I just had to investigate this West fellow. Here's a good bio link. It seems that his most famous work was the novel, Day of the Locust (1939, never heard of it), and it also seems that his most distinguishing characteristic was his tendency to exagerrate to absurdity. This review that followed the release of a compilation of his works in 1997 makes the point.

"In West's cosmology, exaggeration rules: a moment of self-doubt becomes profound self-loathing; fleeting hostility becomes a blow to the head; and the merest gesture of compassion becomes an act of martyrdom. Prose is not always easy to read at this volume -- West's crazy normality has, in the 57 years since his death, often perplexed both the tourists and the folks back home -- but this edition, which demonstrates the range of West's craziness as well as his normality, is convincing evidence that his work is worth looking at again."

I like this idea of exagerration to absurdity. Clearly, "West's Disease" isn't pervasive in society, in literal terms, but it's recognizable. Better said - you can't miss it! We all know people like this, people who hate those who achieve or succeed or just plain live life with a smile on their face. Most of these electrons (as I call them - negatively charged and all) do so under the radar, though I find that they're easy to spot, for the most part. Very few will actually translate their contempt into actions - recall that their problem to begin with is that they can't do this - but some will.

Some folks will go out of their way to screw someone whose very existence, and only that, irks them to no end. These people, even the impotent ones, are cancer. They must be avoided at all costs, and I'll go so far as to say that they should be shunned the moment their nefarious predilections reveal themselves sufficiently. To me, knowing that this personality type exists has significant value. It's just part of knowing what we're up against in our march through life, and knowing what to do about it is often the difference between realizing our dreams and going in circles. Electrons with West's Syndrome. I fucking love it. Cross another nuisance off the Christmas Card list.

(DISCLAIMER: Never, in the course of identifying personality types, do I intend to suggest that any given personality type cannot be substantially altered via sustained diligence, and maybe some drugs. Therefore, no person who bears resemblance to this should assume that they are a loser and are in danger of being shunned. That is, of course, unless they don't get their shit together, like soon.)

I suppose the reason I like Deadwood so much (besides the profanity, of course) is the fact that the characters have so much depth and so much complexity. What's even more interesting is that to be able to write characters like that, you have to have in your mind an understanding of humanity that is the exact opposite of complex. David Milch, being the kind of guy who quotes Socrates as he thinks outloud about the plight of his characters, obviously has a strong grasp of this ostensible paradox. He's good because he gets mankind, which he owes in some small part to Nathaniel West. Because West could generalize, and then make it so absurd as to paint it plainly in our minds (and maybe even put a face on it), we can watch a Western that isn't full of cartoon characters. Now that is cool.

You Gotta Have Faith

In response to yesterday's post, Freedomslave came back with an interesting comment, and I think it warrants a post of its own.

Now I hate bible thumpers as much as the next guy, and I don’t go to church (except on Christmas). But the one thing I know for sure is that you have to have faith. Your faith might be that when a species hits a point in its evolution that the DNA mutates and evolves into a higher form of life. Just like the bible thumper you need a certain amount of faith to believe that, epically with all the inconclusive DNA evidence that now exists and the lack of fossil evidence to verify it.

You have to have faith. With this, I wholeheartedly agree. This wasn't always the case. I used to believe that faith is a crutch, kind of a get out of jail free card for when reality doesn't go your way. In a lot of ways, I still believe this. I don't subscribe to the notion that just because many big questions are still unanswered we have to use faith to believe in something. It's like we're saying we can't get by without embracing some worldview, and our only options are all debatable as to their merit. This is simply false. We can do very well in life without buying into big-picture concepts that don't add up logically. But it requires us to put aside our inherent need to explain our surroundings.

I've talked before about the evolution of hope and despair. The gist of the concept is that our minds have a built-in ability to assess our environment in terms of whether or not it bodes well for our plans, which in caveman days were simple - survive long enough to reproduce. Situations that bode well generate hope, which keeps us clocked in and active. Situations that look bad generate despair, which prompts us to explore our options and do something different. But before hope and despair can do their jobs, our minds have to make that assessment. Thinking about the hostile environment of ancient times, it's clear that decisions had to be made - if you stood too long weighing every little option, bad things could (and often did) happen. Statistically speaking, then as now, it is almost always better to do something than nothing when your life is on the line. Thus emerges our need to explain our world.

But our modern world, as this blog routinely espouses, is nothing like that of our cave-dwelling ancestors. Indecision isn't the perilous circumstance it once was. We have the benefit of nearly assured safety, and we have easy access to food and shelter. Nevertheless, the genes that make our minds are still cranking out models that insist upon satisfied curiosity. This, I am convinced, is why people buy into all manner of odd ideas. Anything to feel certain. And the concept of faith has been so sancitified that it offers the perfect excuse to settle on whatever floats your boat. I would argue, however, that faith isn't all it's cracked up to be, at least not most of the time.

For the most part, faith is exactly as I have always seen it - an excuse to believe whatever makes you feel best. In that case, it's a fast path to intellectual laziness. If something requires faith to believe in it, isn't it worth asking why having faith suddenly makes it believable? What's the old Churchill saying: "If you say a dog's tail is a leg, how many legs does he have? Most people answer five, but it's four. Just saying a tail is a leg doesn't make it so." Or something like that. Anyhow, reality is what it is. In my book, there's never anything to be gained by denying it. But...but...but.

As I said, I am actually now on board with the whole faith thing. I have been for two or three years now, but the only thing I have faith in is reason. As it happens, there's really no other way. You see, reason will only get you so far. You can be the master of all masters at logical deduction and still reason will fail you. It will fail you when you get to the land of quarks and leptons. At the subatomic level, there's no way to really measure what's going on, and this makes all the difference when you're trying to use reason to prove the world is as we think it is.

Think about how many physics equations use time as a variable. But what is time? Or, better yet, what is a second? We just assume that our standard units of measurement make sense, but do they? By definition, a second is the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations. Fair enough. But how can we tell a cesium-133 atom from a cesium-132 atom? We certainly can't pick the former out of a subatomic lineup. We use statistics and probabilities to tell them apart. Aye, there's the rub. We're guessing. Our guesses are good, mind you, but we're guessing nonetheless. So here we are faithless, relying upon reason to guide us in our estimation of everything, and we can't even get the most basic things right. This is where faith earns its stripes.

If I must have faith, and it appears that I must, it has to be solely in the notion that reason will not fail me, in the notion that even though logic holds up under the most dire of circumstances, I can't expect too much of it. In the end, it was Karl Popper who helped me with this (me and David Hume, although Hume was long dead when Popper came along.)

David Hume worried so much about his problem of induction that he ended up rejecting rationalism altogether. His hang-up was founded in the idea that even though something (like the sun rising) has happened for 1000 days, it is illogical to suppose that it will happen on the 1001st. Since we're only privy to part of truth of this world, we could have been wrong lo those 1000 days. Tomorrow, things could change, so it doesn't make sense to make predictions. Ergo, rationalism doesn't work. (Given Hume's popularity in the old days, it's no surprise that there was a decidedly anti-rational movement that succeeded his death and the Enlightenment. I believe they call it Romanticism. Yes, critics, the French Revolution might have also had something to do with it.) Popper, however, having seen the mental cancer that was irrationalism, took a different approach.

Popper conceded from the outset that making predictions based upon some supposed certainty that was obtained by way of reason was illogical. He acknowledged that certainty, in itself, is unattainable, but he also acknowledged that we have to do something in life. So we use reason to evaluate our alternatives and we choose the best one. In that way, we don't ask too much of it, and we keep ourselves as tuned into reality as possible. The only thing required is a healthy faith in reason. That's where I am these days.

I rejoice in the mystery of our world. I'm thrilled to know that there will always be things to be curious about. I'm thrilled to know that there's always a chance that something big and heretofore established will come crumbling down in the face of new evidence. I also watch car chases - maybe it's me. In any case, my explanation for this world is simple - it's all explainable (not explained, but explainable). It's up to us to chip away at it so that we can keep handing what we learn down through the generations. I really don't need anything more than that, and I firmly believe that most people, if they'd take a deep breath and give it a try, wouldn't either.