Let's be incoherent. It's still 2016.

By incoherent I mean trying to bung everything I can remember having thought in the last twelve hours into one post, to save time. One day I will actually do this properly, you know, plan what I'm going to say, put the coloured clothes in one basket and Tirant Lo Blanc in another, and all of that.

First, my treacherous pulse rate and shaky hands: damn and tarnation. Today a Shoveaceous Cult member in a natty suit and a rather dog-eared Cassandra-type woman with a Puritan face came visiting. Apparently they wanted to flog us a "reading program" for a special low, low reduced price of one and a half thousand bucks. For that you get one or two hours a week of "training" for a year, at the end of which they guarantee (money back!) that you will read 2,000 words per minute with a hundred per cent testable recall rate. Since they themselves administer said "test" I don't see how they could fail, really: I mean, if I gave one of my students the word "a" printed two thousand times in succession, let them look at it for one minute and then asked them which was the thirty-second word printed on the first page, I expect they would also do rather well. Anyway, the point is that when the moment came for me to explain to them that I wasn't interested in enrolling my son in this course, much as I recognize his reading deficiencies, and that the reason was that I was loth to fork out large sums of cash to an organization that made impossible claims, and that if you wanted 100% recall (not just skimming) no serious reading program in the world would aim above three hundred wpm, and that the "we then develop your Photographic Memory" stage advertised in their literature was complete bunk since leaving aside the odd Kim Peek there is no evidence for any such thing ever having existed in a human adult - instead of making these points calmly and politely as was my intention, I found myself shouting, with hands raised in ham theatrical gesticulation and pulse racing (and the poor salespersons had done nothing to provoke this, other than come out with the aforementioned pitch). Which is almost exactly the physical response I produce when I have to tell one of my students that I have caught them cheating and that I am going to do my level best to ensure they fail the course. That physical response. It really pisses me off.

I don't know why that happens. There was a time, years ago, when it was always a surprise when it happened: now it is expected, and I emphatically don't want it, but it happens anyway. One answer would be to say: well, tough, you have some crap psychosomatic wiring aka rogue adrenaline, it's incurable, you can't handle potential conflict calmly, deal with it, i.e. avoid situations that trigger it, pretend you don't know your students are cheating, and agree with everyone all of the time even when you know they're wrong. Another answer might be: this is an indirect manifestation of chronic self-esteem problems. Having spent your life mistrusting your own perceptions (on the basis that they are the perceptions of an Unsavoury Individual), on the rare occasion that you feel absolutely certain the other person is the one who is wrong, and not (as you habitually suspect) you, you are possessed by an emotion of righteous self-vindication that is as exaggerated as your more habitual self-mistrust invisibly is. Maybe there's something of that. Or maybe it's just that as a Social Phobic you missed out on the teen socialization phase where you learn the decorous way not to be lacking in the thinking and then being triumphant area. Point is, if I have this then some other people must have it too: how many I don't know, and perhaps in the majority of those cases it's less of a bother, but it's there.

You find something akin to it in this absurd phenomenon of militant atheism. Unless you live in a confessional regime, there's no more reason to go around saying "I don't believe in God" than there is to go around telling everyone "I don't have an appendix". People don't want to know. It's emphatically something a well brought up person should keep to him or herself (blogs is different, innit). But I get the impression a lot of the online atheists are like myself, people so awash with self-doubt that they cling to the certainty that X doesn't exist as a sign of identity. It allows them to feel part of a select minority of what Dawkins famously and repulsively termed "Brights". It allows them to look down on a whole group of people. And the passion with which they tout their unbelief is directly proportional, perchance, to the invisible self-doubt that assails them on, well, most other intellectual and relational fronts. (I'll come back to this one day when I'm not groggy and incoherent.) Unfortunately, and as an aside, such passion is emphatically not directly proportional to actual objective certainty. You can be right about something and not be too sure you are right: you can be less right about something else and feel the passion of absolute certainty regarding it. The emotions aren't too picky about evidence. That's your job, not theirs.

Tribalism. It's everywhere. So. Why do I say this. Well, age. Age is, I think, what exposes the wiring. Here's the image I came up with this morning. We have all these wires in our brain that are all insulated in the sense that they are coated with a substance that makes them invisible to consciousness. We think and act without knowing why we think and act that way, because we don't see the circuitry. When you get old, the insulation rots and the wires are exposed (some). Sometimes they also touch and small explosions take place. But mostly they just bug you, like an exposed nerve in a tooth. Sometimes they bug you so much that you find yourself trying to figure out where they lead and what they do.

So it is that I look around, I look in the paper, and I see tribalism everywhere. It seems to me even blindingly obvious: people seem to need to be part of a group, of a sort which can conceptually be distinguished from, say, a family or a species or a people by certain depressing signs, e.g. there has to be a shibboleth, a ritual or credo or totem or special haircut signifying Inclusion, which logically means there has to be an out-group, i.e. for you to feel Included it must also be possible to be Excluded, and the more excluded you see those others being the more included you yourself will feel, and hinc illae lacrymae, in saecula saeculorum. In this light, watching an Internet skirmish between, say, an SJW and an anti-SJW is like watching an elaborate territorial display between two robins in the back garden. Ten minutes of complicated tweeting and circling around and menacing, after which both parties flit away, back to their stately Zuckerberg-decreed echo-chambers, feeling smug and vindicated in their respective territorial claims. Each feels the happiness of a good deed of the day well done: today I have excluded someone.

In this country it's correistas versus anti. In the USA it's red versus blue. In the UK it's Brexiteers versus anti. In Venezuela it's the barking mad versus the grieving and bereaved. Perhaps it was always thus, but there were safeguards. In ye Goode Olde Days, people were given a tribe to belong to, but also certain Principles that overrode tribal membership, the Golden Rule being one. Now, by contrast, we have things like Postmodernism and Standpoint Theory to tell us that no Principle can operate beyond the group it was intended to serve. The brakes are off, there are no safeguards, there is no wider group of common humanity to which we can claim membership by default, because everyone now has their own definition of what a human is, and it ain't you. (It's something considerably simpler and more Zuckerberg-friendly, for a kickoff.)

I stick by my original definition of Hate, as a single emotion behind which lies a Trinity of cognitive manifestations, viz, offence, vengefulness, dehumanization. But it's this last especially, its stalking long-shanked across the world landscape, that is so troubling today. There seems to be no allowance for the fact that, though you be a Trumpista and I an Immuralist, there is craic to be had anywhere outside the narrow circle of political affiliation, provided we are rounded humans with something in our heads and hearts other than political dogma and prejudice. Trouble is, for there to be craic there has to also be a culture. Once it was "culture", now it's "a culture". Globalization my arse. We are all of us in one or another cultural ghetto, maybe peering over the parapet, if that. The whole point of culture used to be the realization that there was a great garden of common humanity, outside of which the comets sped and the weevils weeved, and you could stake out your modest allotment therein and mere politics and nation be damned. Without that garden, it's just fancy French literature. It's Honore de Bleedin Ballsache.

Enough of that. I'm more interested in the exposed wires that crowd into our notions of sex and gender. Here's what I have discovered so far:

We (by which I mean people with the same OS as me) are reproductively programmed to respond to certain sensual stimuli provided by the presence of a person of the Appropriate Sex (you can tinker with the config a bit there, but after a certain point it's pretty much baked in). This response is not (by default) the same as we are programmed to have in the presence of a Rich Chocolate Cake. We don't just think "oh, I'll eat that". I could go into the differences (which will be familiar to anyone who has ever lived with a female cat on heat: since the poor things can't wank themselves back into sanity, or at least not very efficiently, the matter is clearer) but let's not get sidetracked. The point is that evolutionarily, in a pseudo-monogamous (a necessary term) species, sexual attraction is quite a high stakes thing. There's a lot of quite chilling, quite long-term investment involved, an evolutionary truth which cheap birth control and porn tend to mask. So it's no surprise that the stimulus produces not just a response in the various pleasure centres and will centres of the brain, but one that reaches off-set, interfering with the camera and lights setup, affecting our actual perception of what we are seeing, and the as I say glowing nimbus that surrounds perception, for the sake of inducing and stabilising a longer-term commitment. And this altered perception can, I think often does (I use myself as an example) rope in quite a lot of precognitive stuff, by which I mean to refer to channels of association, what linguists call connotation. We can see someone attractive and choose to mute this dangerous attraction by deliberately summoning negative mental associations (much as if you entertained yourself, while looking at the Rich Chocolate Cake, with a perceived similarity between the cake and the colour and texture of raw sewage), and sometimes find it convenient to do this, but it's generally easier and less effort to conjure positive associations, and I think we're configured to do this. For example, those people who value intelligence (there are a few) will tend to over-estimate the intelligence of someone perceived as beautiful; those who value sweetness and charm and innocence will perceptually inject these qualities into the object of desire.

As to how programmed we are to do this, well, anecdote time: yesterday some idle linguistic research into the etymology of "harem" (turns out yes, the same Arabic triconsonant as in Boko Haram, h-r-m signifying "forbidden", as I suspected) led me to a wikiarticle on an early C19 pornographic novel called The Lustful Turk. Read it - it's an easy and entertaining two-hour stroll through the immutability of male erotic fantasy, plus the various mistransliterations that a dodgy OCR introduces into the online text can be quite hilarious (various "me" for "the", inter alia), and the ending is a belly-laugh-and-a-half. Point is, the protagonists of this delightful tale are a stupendously large oriental dick (with some uninteresting shmuck temporarily attached to it) and various preternaturally innocent and naïve wenches, and there you have it. This manufactured feminine naivety and ignorance about sex wants to be a pornographic trope, has maybe always been one, and is only partially impeded from being one in the early C21 by overarching considerations of plausibility. Some part of us wants our women dumber (and hornier) than they can realistically be, at least at the key moments - perhaps to match ourselves. So there is a whole mythos of Associative Ingenue that congregates in the sky over the head of the desired one, like griffins over an unsuspecting Arimaspian, chortling over the slightest flash of gold, by which I mean unseered flesh, unconscious sensual gestuality, that sort of thing.  And of course, it kind of gets in the way of seeing what's there, to a small but significant degree.

All of which is not the same as "objectification", which is at bottom a silly concept, pace Martha Nussbaum who did her best with some very dubious semantic demarcation. I mean, if we were truly an objectifying species, or gender, the fresh cadaver sans entry wound would the summum of phwoar. Pull the other one - oops, it's come off.

Anyway, point is that this web of glowing numinous associations (some of them perchance memories) we build around a succession of desire-objects can, after a certain point, begin to look like a person in and of herself, and hey presto, we have a Jungian archetype, an anima of sorts or part of one: at any rate, we have La Mujer, someone larger than life or certainly dumber, eternally nubile, short on agency and long on neoteny, not a fantasy but a pre-fantasy, and hence far more... dangerous? Dangerous but necessary? And pretty much culturally shared, with variations, across genders and all. She's why we don't have and perhaps never will have a gender studies program anywhere in the world which is not a stereotype soup, a more or less artful rearrangement of unchallenged prejudices.

To get outside those prejudices you need data, and for that you need to know what you are measuring, which means you need a robust model, which in turn means you need a level of sophistication in neuroscience we are still decades away from. We are still in the Dark Ages of figuring people out. All we can do meanwhile is pull apart premature conclusions and rationalizations of prejudice.

Ach, I could say more, but I've overshot and it turns out it's now 2017 and I made a resolution to try to make sense at least sometimes. So thus far and no further for now.