A Reed Trembling in the Wilderness

Francis Crick, the biologist who established DNA as the chemical
building-block of life, once delivered his assessment on man's worth.

"The Astonishing Hypothesis, is that 'You,' your joys and your sorrows,
your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free
will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased
it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"

Mark Steyn drily noted in his obituary
the irony that Francis Crick could "only unmask the mystery of humanity by
denying our humanity", as if intelligibility had the quality of diminishing
what we love by depriving it of mystery and hence, majesty. Samuel
Johnson believed that some men preferred the unattainable over the actual.
"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness
which this world affords". Elsewhere he enlarges on the point. "The
natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from
hope to hope". We've all heard the refrain:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

(John Keats)

None of which explains the interest in the debate between President George W.
Bush and Senator John F. Kerry. Glenn
Reynolds felt the last was the most boring of the series. "So far this
is the weakest debate of the three. That in part accounts for the glassy look in
my eyes, though I've had that kind of a day anyway ..." No policy
bombshells were dropped, so attention was chiefly focused on how the men spoke
and moved. Ann
Althouse had time to observe a drop of spittle forming in the President's
mouth. "Bush is smiling a lot, and the left side of his mouth nevertheless
turns down oddly. A glob of foam forms on the right side of his mouth! Yikes!
That's really going to lose the women's vote." Nothing Kerry said all night
provoked as much interest as his mention of Vice President Cheney's daughter's
homosexuality. Her mother, Lynne Cheney,  was livid. The Washington
Post reports:

Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice President Cheney, accused John F. Kerry on
Wednesday night of "a cheap and tawdry political trick" and said he
"is not a good man" after he brought up their daughter's
homosexuality at the final presidential debate.

Roger
Simon wondered why Kerry, when asked about his wife, brought up his mother.

Why did Kerry's mother feel she had to remind him "Intergity!
Integrity! Integrity!" from her hospital bed when he told her he was
thinking of running for President? What did she know? My mother would have
assumed I would have integrity in the same situation.

The focus on small beer stood in opposition to what Crick, Johnson and Keats
would have led us to expect: that people prefer their Presidential candidates to
be more Olympian. Yet the impulse to closely inspect the candidates, to see the
fleck of spittle, to catch them in an unguarded moment is rooted deep in our
evolutionary makeup. It is almost as if, in an inversion of Crickian logic, we
can only love and understand what we diminish. And for that reason people had to see the candidates up close. The National
Academy of Sciences notes the evolutionary advantage conferred upon species
that were able to recognize a predator's face in the background of foliage. In a
long article on pattern recognition, they try to answer why living things have
devoted so much neural processing power to recognizing patterns, such that the
humblest animals can outperform the best supercomputers of the early 21st
century.

Contour fragments in an image are linked together if they exhibit "good
continuation," i.e., can be linked to form a smoothly curving extended
contour. These are sound probabilistic inferences in a world where objects
tend to have parts with coherent color and texture and are bounded by smooth
contours. A survival advantage would accrue to those animals that had
incorporated such factors in their visual processing.

Which in plain words meant that animals who could see a tiger amid the
dappling of leaves stood more chance of surviving than one which could not. That
instinctive compulsion is too important to ignore. Even today many of our most
important decisions --  who we will trust as a prison cellmate, combat
buddy or wife -- are based on an indefinable pattern recognition. We may choose
a lawyer on his resume, but we will choose our allies in barroom brawl on
personal assessment. Polls show that half the American public has found what it
wants in John Kerry and an equal number have found it in George Bush. But what
each has sought may be strikingly different.  Although the general populace
was split evenly between Bush and Kerry, a Military
Times survey showed soldiers preferred President Bush by a 73:18 ratio to
Senator Kerry. That suggests those seeking allies in maintaining Roe vs Wade may
see a welcoming visage in Senator Kerry; while those looking for someone to
trust in a foxhole will take one look -- and fly. Which is no condemnation of
Senator Kerry: elections are only secondarily about candidates, they are
primarily referendums on ourselves.

What did you go out into the wilderness to see?

A reed shaken by the wind?

But what did you go out to see?

A man clothed in soft garments?

Indeed, those who wear soft [clothing] are in kings' houses.

But what did you go out to see?

A prophet?

Who knows what we have come for but ourselves.