The Binary Circumstance

I totally enjoyed this article by Professor Russell Jacoby about the fashion of complicating everything in academia. But here’s the point:

To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing — for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be “complicated”?

[…]

…Perhaps it is time to return to Ockham’s principle of parsimony, his so-called razor: “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity.” Instead we have gone in the opposite direction. The cult of complication has led — to alter a phrase of Hegel’s — to a fog in which all cows are gray.

And it all comes down to existence, which is binary. Either that $3.75 exists in your pocket or it doesn’t. And either you–who wants that latte–exists or you don’t. Either the coffee shop exists or it doesn’t. Either the latte can be made or it can’t.

Will Rogers, whose birthday is today, had this to say about government:

• Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.
• On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.
• Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.
• Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.
• There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.

More quotes here.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Advertising guru Neil French (I’ve never heard of him) resigned from his job after making remarks that many considered derogatory to women.

LONDON - One of the world’s most flamboyant advertising gurus has left his job after reportedly telling an audience that women made poor executives because motherhood made them “wimp out.”

Marketing giant WPP Group PLC said Friday it had accepted the resignation of Neil French — a one-time debt collector, trainee matador and rock-band agent who served as the group’s worldwide creative director.
[…]
French made the contentious remarks during an industry discussion in Toronto on Oct. 6. According to a report in the city’s Globe and Mail newspaper, French said women did not make it to the top because “they’re crap.”

Nancy Vonk, a Toronto-based creative director at WPP subsidiary Ogilvy & Mather who attended the event, said French described women as “a group that will inevitably wimp out and go ’suckle something.’”

The comments sparked outrage among many women in the advertising industry.

Those are pretty outrageous, not to mention collectivist, remarks but I would like to point out that screen giant Katherine Hepburn said that she thought it was impossible to have children and her very successful career at the same time. I can’t find a direct quote but I remember her saying it in a couple of interviews.

In searching for a quote about having children by Hepburn, I came across this site, Childfreebychoice.com which lists hundreds of famous people who did not have children.

Many of the names surprised me, as did their comments about children:

“I don’t dislike children; I just don’t particularly want to be around them a lot. The problem is, neither do their parents. And I’m tired of being constantly, involuntarily deputized into the fight to keep your kids away from adult pleasures. “It takes a village.” That’s just a saying. Us other villagers are busy, okay? I have other things to do in the village.” –Bill Maher - former host of Politically Incorrect (who also had to leave his job because he spoke his mind)

“The world might, perhaps, be considerably poorer if the great writers had exchanged their books for children of flesh and blood.”–Virginia Woolf

“I cannot regret not having children of my own because I am so work-focused; I always knew that it would be a major achievement to integrate and do right by my career and my marriage, and that children would spread me too thin and I did not want to be the father who wasn’t there.” –Nathaniel Brandon, author, psychologist, and one-time confidant of Ayn Rand

I did find this quote by Katherine Hepburn on the Childfreebychoice.com quotes page, but it is not the one I was thinking of:

“If motherhood doesn’t interest you, don’t do it. It didn’t interest me, so I didn’t do it. Anyway, I would have made a terrible parent. The first time my child didn’t do what I wanted, I’d kill him.”