Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

498 | HOW THE MIND WORKSmales whose prospects teeter between zero and nonzero. Men attractwomen by their wealth and status, so if a man doesn't have them and hasno way of getting them he is on a one-way road to genetic nothingness. Aswith birds that venture into dangerous territories when they are near starvation,and hockey coaches that pull the goalie for an extra skater whenthey are a goal down with a minute to play, an unmarried man without afuture should be willing to take any risk. As Bob Dylan pointed out,"When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."Youth makes matters even worse. The population geneticist AlanRogers has calculated from actuarial data that young men should discountthe future steeply, and so they do. Young men commit crimes,drive too fast, ignore illnesses, and pick dangerous hobbies like drugs,extreme sports, and surfing on the roofs of tram cars and elevators.The combination of maleness, youth, penury, hopelessness, and anarchymakes young men indefinitely reckless in defending their reputation.And it's not so clear that professors (or people in any competitive profession)don't duel over pool tables, figuratively speaking. Academics areknown by their fellows as "the sort who can be pushed around" and "thesort who won't take any shit," as people whose word means action or peoplewho are full of hot air, as guys whose work you can criticize withimpunity or guys you don't want to mess with. Brandishing a switchbladeat a scholarly conference would somehow strike the wrong note, butthere is always the stinging question, the devastating riposte, the moralisticoutrage, the withering invective, the indignant rebuttal, and meansof enforcement in manuscript reviews and grant panels. Scholarly institutions,of course, try to minimize this rutting, but it is hard to eradicate.The goal of argumentation is to make a case so forceful (note themetaphor) that skeptics are coerced into believing it—they are powerlessto deny it while still claiming to be rational. In principle, it is the ideasthemselves that are, as we say, compelling, but their champions are notalways averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance,among them intimidation ("Clearly . . ."), threat ("It would beunscientific to . . ."), authority ("As Popper showed . . ."), insult ("Thiswork lacks the necessary rigor for . . ."), and belittling ("Few people todayseriously believe that . . ."). Perhaps this is why H. L. Mencken wrotethat "college football would be more interesting if the faculty playedinstead of the students."