This description was intended as a joke. Allow me to explain myself here: I’m a high school senior who’s trying to write about politics and culture, what was I supposed to do, post my transcript? More importantly, Faludi has many other arguments, so why does she need to quote me in an attempt to degrade my qualifications.

You don't have to defend yourself against people who simply don't get the joke. It was funny...perhaps you need to think like a blogger to get it, though. Either way, it was an unfair and silly attack on you.

Though Faludi surely wouldn’t put it this way, The Terror Dream is a scientific hypothesis.

This, I think, is wrong. It's a pretty far stretch to call Faludi's, or any cultural theory, "scientific." While it's true that cultural studies and sociology have scientific branches (audience studies, opinion polling, etc), there are plenty that don't work in this field.

There's nothing scientific about theories about art. There's nothing scientific about Habermas, or Baudrillard, or McLuhan, or any other thinker who's tried to examine our culture, and to try and apply some kind of scientific "falsifiability" standard to this type of work is as silly as attacking a blogger for being snarky.

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

Okay, you're being simple-minded. Your contention that the gender anxiety zeitgeist had nothing to do with the war relies on willfully ignoring the propaganda crunch to get people to support it. You get the impression from your post that Bush administration didn't do *shit* to try to get people behind the war. Remember the lies about the WMDs? Why would they tell lies if they weren't trying to exploit the public's anxieties to get their support?

Your entire argument is based on the notion that public support was *irrelevant* in the lead-up to the war, and I'm not buying that. The Bush administration dropped the words "9/11" as much as possible to dredge up anxieties (which Faludi proves had a gendered angle to them) and garner support. Right now Giuliani is practically waving his cock around and screaming "9/11" all day, and the strategy is working. Because anxious masculinity has a lot of power over a lot of people.

As for the word "falsifible" that you introduced to create the false standard that every book of cultural or political criticism should be a book of empirical science---a high standard I suspect you don't hold against books that have a thesis that doesn't make you anxious for whatever reason---well, you kind of stumbled into a landmine if you wanted to hand wave feminist theorizing away with assumption that feminist theories are a tad to femmey to exist in the world of empirical science.

In that you're wrong. Faludi and Ducat's theories actually have a lot of genuine, falsifiable scientific research behind them, namely in the study of terror management theory. The Faludi/Ducat cultural theory is that people retreat to reactionary (and sexist) tropes when threatened with death. TMT research demonstrates, though gen-yoo-wine studies, that if you make people think about their deaths, they have a whole slew of conservative tendencies, from being knee-jerk anti-abstract art, to being more likely to vote Republican to....being more misogynist. Yes, women's bodies are considered vulnerable (!), soft (!), penetrable (!), and by othering women in this way, men can deal with their fear of death by positioning themselves as the stalwart (!), stoic (!), impenetrable (!!) protectors who "save" women and save their own selves from confronting their mortality.

Point is that even your initial assumption that these ideas couldn't be applied in a scientific manner and developed into genuine, falsifiable theories was wrong. Plus, there's the ignoring of the propaganda effort behind the war, that did and does rely heavily on the tendencies Faludi describes. Maybe you could quit flailing and admit you jumped the gun?

Amanda, with all due respect, no one is claiming that the "gender zeitgeist" had nothing to do with the war, the question is whether it is dominant enough to be explanatory or causal. In order for Faludi's argument to be important, it needs to access something on that level, otherwise it's sort of a nice aside, an ancillary reason the US populace drank the kool-aid so to speak.

There were lots of cultural reasons that the populace reacted the way it did, all of them are tangential to this conversation, but what Matt seems to be pointing out is that if hyper-masculinity were so dominant a theme it would pervade any single person holding the presidency. That doesn't seem to be the case, which mitigates the importance of Faludi's claim a great deal.

Falsifiability is not just a claim in science, it is a claim in logic. Without it, people can develop non-testable super-hypotheses and pounce when others don't have an answer. It seems to be a pretty fair standard to me. I'm sort of baffled that so many supporters of Faludi take offense to such an obvious argument.

I can't access your terror management theory link, but my cursory google search brought up this, which seems ridiculously on point:

Terror management theory was criticized for a variety of reasons. Experimental findings, such as increased intolerance toward out-groupers following reminders of death, can be explained using alternative theories.

Link

It seems this type of theorizing lends itself not to falsifiability, but to findings that ignore alternate causalities...which would seem to help Matt's argument, not hurt it.

Additionally, I don't think falsifiability was the end point of the argument, it was a reason to be skeptical. The crux is the question of whether or not conceptions of gender are such a driving force in politics that they can dictate extreme policies such as war. There is an example on the table (Gore) that this is incorrect. So far, no one has refuted that argument.

That is ridiculously not fair. Matt is articulating arguments that are far more sophisticated than many adults, he deserves a fair hearing based on the merits of his claims, not his age.

I agree that the rebuttals were inadequate and indeed off the point. Not all our guests will have read the book to join in a discussion, and you were only being honest and clear in acknowledging your limitations owing to that. The lack of qualifications frankly baffles me altogether. We all gather here to talk about politics because in a democracy we all have a stake in it and all very much should be talking. Besides, as the saying goes, this isn't rocket science.

The use of falsifiability also seemed perfectly fine. We all require evidence, even if we don't require the kind of case made in the sciences or even if we've read Kuhn and Feyeraband and think Popper's claim about science is misleading. Faludi phrases it as a need to consider soft things like the emotions, but while emotions aren't necessarily public and logical, how we discuss them can still be. Besides, if we should have discussed things like emotions in the run up to war, we should also have discussed evidentiary things like the need for war to knock out WMD or the point of fighting bin Laden by invading Iraq.

Indeed, the bulk of Faludi's reply, a list of things she didn't really mean, does make the thesis sound slippery enough to accommodate an awful lot of qualifiers. And at that point, it's not unreasonable for someone to ask what would count against the thesis. In effect, her reply seems to make Matt's objection that much more plausible to me. I of course shall read the book to decide for myself, and of course I have no qualifications to judge it, so don't expect me then to say I like it. That's be presumptuous.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

Falsifiability doesn't demand scientific evidence, merely a premise that can be proven wrong. I think it's fair to critique an argument that cannot be proven false as non-falsifiable, particularly when the answer to the argument against it is that it isn't meant to be so explanatory.

Ad hominem.

Jerk.

The crux is the question of whether or not conceptions of gender are such a driving force in politics that they can dictate extreme policies such as war. There is an example on the table (Gore) that this is incorrect. So far, no one has refuted that argument.

Yet I somehow feel this is a little off-target too. This is a book of cultural critique; I don't think it's making testable predictions. It's important that it make arguments which could in some way be wrong, but I don't think the way in which cultural-critique arguments are proven wrong is that they fail to be predictive. It's that they don't fit the array of signs, or don't make a distinction between these signs and any other ones in the category.

And I don't think that Faludi is saying that the US was doomed to invade Iraq because of our Puritan heritage. I think that to say that in the US's invasion of Iraq, one sees the marks of our Puritan heritage, and to go into that, is an interesting and useful exercise.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

That's pretty nitpicky. Forgive the wikipedia link, but they have a good definition of falsifiability a la Popper (which I'm guessing is what Matt meant):

Falsifiability (or refutability or testability) is the logical possibility that an assertion can be shown false by an observation or a physical experiment. That something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false; rather, it means that it is capable of being disproved under hypothetical circumstances

Data can do it, but it's more about their being a mechanism to prove it is false than anything else.

After much consideration, she’s right, I hate messiness and am just too scared to ponder the mucky national id. Of course, if I were to deny her suspicion, it would merely be a defense mechanism, and around we go again.

I thought this was a generally good response up until this point, Matt. But this statement is actually quite weird, and tends to undermine the rest of your argument. It's one thing to say that one rejects a certain line of explanation because the explanation has not been adequately justified or empirically confirmed. It is another to say that one rejects a certain line of explanation because one finds it just too unpleasant to examine, and therefore one is disinclined even to inquire about whether and to what extent the explanation is true.

One might wish, to take an analogous example, that the human body were a perfect marvel of interacting "systems" and its behavior and conditions could be explained according to idealized models of the proper functioning of those systems. But in fact, the human body is filled with parasites, toxins, infections agents, congenital defects and other things that make it far from the well-functioning machine we might like it to be. What would we think of someone who rejected an explanation of some person's physical pathologies on the grounds that they just don't like to contemplate all that chaotic, yucky stuff?

Throughout this extended discussion, there have been a number of rather confused assertions about "rationalism". It's a fluid term, but we can and should distinguish at least two clearly distinguishable uses for the term.

On the one hand, "rationalism" is sometimes used to refer to certain normative epistemic claims about method and justification, that is, about the "right way of conducting our reason". Rationalism in this sense is an outlook characterized by views about how we ought to think and seek the truth; about what constitutes the most reliable method in a given science; about how deliberation and evidence ought to influence our behavior; about the appropriateness of certain decision procedures, etc.

On the other hand, "rationalism" is sometimes used to refer to descriptive claims about human behavior, and about what actually motivates people. A rationalist in this second sense might be one who claims some particular rational choice model of rational decision making under imperfect information, or some model of reasoning, methodology and rational inquiry in the exercise of theoretical reason, is an empirically adequate descriptive model of actual human behavior.

Now it should be quite clear that these are logically distinct doctrines. One can easily be a normative rationalist without being a descriptive rationalist. One can easily endorse certain rationalist ideals about how people ought to think and behave, about what forms of inquiry, deliberation and decision-making would be optimal, while at the same time accepting that people are on the whole not terribly rational, and are driven by all sources of irrational or non-rational motivations, drives, impulses, etc. One might even strive to employ scientific method, in its most sophisticated and well-developed forms, to study the non-rational dimensions of human behavior.

My own view is that human beings are full of all sorts of motivations and that are non-rational. Their thinking is fraught with dreamy images, fantasies, gross metaphors, impulsive habits, crude dualistic distinctions, chaotically undisciplined association, magical thinking, superstitious obsessions and primitive drives, and is compromised by weak attention spans, limited cognitive capacity, faulty memory, inferential simplemindedness and other forms of relative stupidity.

I think Ducat is right when he says that modern liberalism has suffered from excessive rationalism. I took him to be talking about rationalism in the descriptive sense. His point, as I understood him, is that some liberals - particularly of the wonky technocratic variety - have tended to substitute simpleminded and empirically inadequate rational choice models of human behavior, of the sort popular in the social sciences, for a more sophisticated, mature and supple understanding of the complex reality of human behavior. They are thus consistently surprised by non-rational responses. They fail to predict them, and are unprepared to deal with them as they arise.

Your methodological views here, Matt, strike me as a bit too doctrinairre and inflexible. There are important aspects of the real world, particularly in the world of human behavior, that are vital for us to understand, but challenging to study. Understanding them requires the application of different, complementary methods from different fields. It's unfortunately quite a mess, but we have no choice but to do it since we live and interact in a world of human beings, and bring our beliefs about them to bear in everything we do.

There are different reactions one can have to this mess. One is to withdraw from it, and to restrict our inquiries to the least messy, most tidy and methodically tractable corners of human life. The benefit of this approach is that one ends up with well-confirmed views. The drawback is that those views concern such a narrow realm of human behavior and experience - only the tidy stuff - that their applicability is limited. The practitioner of this approach probably ends up with a crippled, crabbed and unsophisticated understanding of human nature - even one's own nature.

An alternative is to let oneself go a bit, and consider and investigate a broad variety of areas, even those areas that are quite messy and confusing, and for which it is hard to devise controllable experiments or make quantifiable observations. One does the best one can with the looser causal explanations that are proposed, and one tries to confirm or disconfirm these explanations by bringing in other, admittedly sporadic and imprecise, observations about human behavior in concrete circumstances, and subjecting the input to some sort of rational argument and disputation, to the extent possible.

Presumably, there is some sort of Aristotelian mean to be struck between the extremes of exclusive attention to the experimentally tractable and wild undisciplined exploration of every facet of human craziness.

Rationality is not, primarily, a set of innate competencies that require only normal biological nurturing in order to flower. Rationality is an evolving individual and cultural achievement, and and body of skills and habits that have been discovered, developed and acquired by our ancestors, and passed on through culture. Rationality has been fashioned and perfected from the rough and messy raw materials of human cognitive and behavioral nature, like a dwelling built from the raw materials of the woods in the middle of a wilderness, and hopefully over time advances in method and choice skills, and in the ways of teaching and disseminating them, has made us somewhat less stupid. But don't make the mistake of thinking the wild stuff isn't still there, or that its impact on human behavior is negligible and can safely be ignored.

My apologies, I ,meant to post this as a response to Marcotte.

Noone would have guessed that Matt is in high shcool if he had not anounced it. Why not judge his contribution based on its content? His commentary is certainly supperior to anything I have read of yours and I suspect you are beyond high school.

I don't think you understand the context of Matt's quote. As I understand it, this is Matt's summation of what Susan wants Matt to "realize." If Matt doesn't conform to this belief, then Susan would say he's in denial. It reinforces his argument that her theory is unfalsifiable.

On further reflection, you might be right. I couldn't tell whether Matt was partially agreeing with the diagnosis, or was just being sarcastic.

What!!!? How DARE you suggest that Freudian and Marxist explanations are quaint and deluded!!!

I'm just kidding. I agree with your point 100%. But if my mother-in-law were here right now, she'd be dead serious.

Ah, but here I disagree with you. Faludi is not attacking arguments about going to war--she's explaining decisions about going to war. And she's consistent: I imagine she would offer the same explanatory analysis whether she agrees with the ultimate decision or not.

This is not an appropriate use of the genetic fallacy. Whether or not her explanations bear the test of time (a good question in itself), they at the least are a possible explanation (or partial explanation) of the phenomena she seeks to explain. To this degree, so were Freudian and Marxist analyses.

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."

Yeah, Wittgenstein!

Be that as it may, in the end we can't simply dismiss all logical arguments as deriving fundamentally from unacknowledged impulses. In the end, everybody needs to grant that some arguements must simply be dealt with on their own logical merits, otherwise thinking and debate are pointless -- including, of course, the arguments of the likes of Faludi and the Freudians and the Marxists as well.

The deep problem with Faludi and crew is that they use their "explanation" in terms of patriarchy to dismiss all manner of arguments opposed to their own position. When they do so -- and the case of the liberal hawks would be a good example -- they are employing the genetic fallacy. They are basically abandoning logic.

How many times do feminists "argue" against a position merely by pointing out that the arguer is a male, represents the male point of view, and therefore can't be taken seriously, because he reflects the "patriarchy"?

Very nearly always, in my experience.

I don't agree that Faludi, or most fair-minded Marxists or Freud followers, "dismiss all manner of arguments opposed to their own position". As Ducat mentions today, they are focused on one particular strand of a multi-faceted discussion. They acknowledge the economic and political dimensions to complex human events, but their purpose is to point out other components of the explanation as well. Perhaps there are some ill-informed feminists, or Marxists, etc., who actually believe that THEIR perspective is the only one that truly "explains" events in the world, but mostly it is a straw man that your are exposing. The Faludis of the world are merely calling our attention to one neglected and important aspect of the overall phenomenon.

I wholeheartedly embrace TPMCafe's populist openness to hear the unstuffy views of intellectuals young and old and especially those not related to some kind of legacy.

Well done TPMCafe and well done Matt. Keep on.

Okay, you're being simple-minded. Your contention that the gender anxiety zeitgeist had nothing to do with the war ... Your entire argument is based on the notion that public support was *irrelevant*...

Geeze, talk about simplistic. Kicking off with multiple straw men based on infinitives... And the punctuation (!)

Where do you see the argument it had zero influence? The argument I've seen has been Faludi and Ducat, and by extension you if you're supporting them, have vastly overstated it, and the theory doesn't hold up factually or logically in many of the examples give by Faludi or Ducat, and fares even worse in examples given by other contributors. Basically, that it's wildly exaggerated and doesn't hold up.

Furthermore, it been argued they, and probably you, come from an ideology, school of thought, and movement prone to such exaggeration and gender polemic.

though gen-yoo-wine studies ... Yes, women's bodies are considered vulnerable (!), soft (!), penetrable (!)

wow, somebody has "gen-yoo-wine" (!) issues (!)

Excellent link to the Judis piece, btw. cheers.

Very impressive, especially for a 17yo. You rock! Keep up the good work. (Oh, and don't get a big head or blow it. lol. )

It is great to see that Matt is enthusiastic about Popper who in many ways did seminal work in post positivist philosophy of science.

The position is Popperian "falsificationism".

First, it is necessary to point out that Popper's whole theory demarcates scientific from non-scientific theories on the basis that the former is falsifiable and the latter is not. So Newton's law of universal gravitational attraction was/is scientific (according to this view) because it was falsified by Einstein's relativity theory.

However, no such falsification ever took place. Historically speaking what did take place is that Newtonian physics was abandoned and Relativity Theory was adopted as the official theory for other than falsificanionist reasons. There was neither a single recalcitrant observation nor a set of data that falsified Newtonian physics.

So not only is Marxism and Psychoanalysis not falsifiable in the Popperian sense (Popper actually uses Marxism and psychoanalysis as examples of the un-scientific) neither is anything else we call science.

Critics of Popperian philosophy of science make the case in many ways, which I cannot go into here since it gets technical. But suffice it to say that given Popper's own assumptions, scientific theories are simply not falsifiable (let alone anything in the social sciences).

See for example the work of Miller and Tichý (1974) on the issue of verisimilitude. Also look at Lakatos, I. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. Hilary Putnam has some valid criticism too. Then there is Paul Feyerabend's criticism and finally there is Thomas Kuhn's work

Fair enough, sorry, I jumped the gun. :P

As for the word "falsifible" that you introduced to create the false standard that every book of cultural or political criticism should be a book of empirical science---a high standard I suspect you don't hold against books that have a thesis that doesn't make you anxious for whatever reason---well, you kind of stumbled into a landmine if you wanted to hand wave feminist theorizing away with assumption that feminist theories are a tad to femmey to exist in the world of empirical science.

Amanda, where in anything that Matt has written does he give the indication that he's criticizing Faludi's theory because it's feminist?

In that you're wrong. Faludi and Ducat's theories actually have a lot of genuine, falsifiable scientific research behind them, namely in the study of terror management theory.

This is even more bizzare, since Matt himself mentions it as an example of a falsifiable theory:

John Judis had a great piece back in The New Republic about psychological and experimental research on how fear of one’s own death can trigger “worldview defense” whereby one will feel more nationalistic, heteronormative and hawkish by merely being reminded of their own mortality. We can talk about our “mucky id,” but it’s just not clear if Faludi's chosen method is the best way to do so.

Why do you feel the need to create straw anti-feminists, when real ones abound?