System/Emotion

I’m sympathetically disposed towards the author of this article because of the endless hours of amusement Borat has given me over the last few months. But who could have thought up an experiment that involved having infant children look at a mechanical mobile? How can you reasonably draw conclusions about a male preference for systematicity at such an early developmental age? How about if it’s just shiny? I’m tempted to write a “just-so” about aliens to really explain this effect.

And what narrow cultural preference leads us to devise personality inventories with system/emotion polarities? I can see no reason for thinking these things exclusive. There’s a deep emotional content in all systematic description. I watched Brent Scowcroft on CSPAN last night talk about depleted uranium shells, the inert type of uranium vs. the other kind, and how it’s the heaviest metal and thus has the most tank-busting momentum and so forth. It might have sounded dispassionate, but not to he with ears to hear.

Similarly, any one who’s listened to popular music, which is completely encaged by a generic system, knows how deep emotional resonances, gusty wet roads on autumn nights, can be formed from the most soulless synthesizers?