from: GR613@gmail.com

date: Feb. 26 2008 6:13 a.m.

subject: re: re: the argument from Lucinda

Good morning.

III.

The Argument from Dappled Things.

When Lucinda Mandelbaum entered the crowded auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center at Frankfurter University for the inaugural Friday-afternoon Psychology Outside Speaker lecture of the new semester and rejected an aisle seat, instead clambering lithely over the legs, laps, and laptops of the assorted faculty members and graduate students, all of whom had been impatiently awaiting her maiden entrance, even though it was not she but, rather, Harold Lipkin of Rutgers University who was the invited speaker; and when she then slipped into the empty seat next to Cass Seltzer, bestowing on him a sweet little shrug of coy chagrin at coming in late and making a bit of a commotion in getting to him; and when she then proceeded, all through Lipkin's lecture, entitled "The Myth of Moral Reason," to address her running commentary on Lipkin's efforts exclusively to Cass, so that Cass, who had in fact been looking forward to Lipkin's lecture, seeing how the psychology of morality dovetailed with his own research on the psychology of religion, ended up missing a good part of it, instead chuckling appreciatively at Lucinda's zingers and even managing to launch one himself that had made Lucinda snigger so enthusiastically that his good friend and colleague Mona Ganz, sitting several rows in front of them, her well-groomed girth just able to settle itself into the seat she always claimed for herself, front and center, swiveled her head around and then, determining the identity of the sniggerer, reversed the motion just as sharply-"like that kid in The Exorcist," Lucinda observed, making Cass give vent to a chortle so disloyal that it certainly ought to have been swiftly followed by a stab of guilt, considering Mona's devoted mindfulness toward him, especially during the ravaged weeks and months that had followed the post-aphasic Pascale's first words to him from her hospital bed, which, in their percussive rhythm and impeccable precision, "I must of necessity break your heart," were as reflective of the poet that Pascale was (La Sauvagerie et la certitude, Prix Femina, 1987) as they were effective in dampening the desire of her husband to live out any and all possible forms of his future-it had been entirely by mistake.

Lucinda had thought that Cass Seltzer was someone else entirely. To be precise, she had thought that Cass Seltzer was their mutual colleague Sebastian Held, to whom she had been introduced last week at the welcome party that she thought the university had thrown for her. (Actually, she had been wrong. The party had been in honor of all the newly arrived faculty.) Lipkin, a small man with a booming, pedantic, overenunciating style, was an excitable lecturer, who rose onto his well-shod tiny tiptoes as he hammered home his points. He was already launched at full steam in his oratorical trajectory, irrigating the first row with his spittle, speed-clicking his way through the PowerPoint presentation that swerved abruptly from brain scans of sophomores, neuroimaged in the throes of moral deliberation over whether they should, in theory, toss a hapless fat man onto the tracks in order to use his bulk to save five other men from an oncoming trolley, to sweeping conclusions that claimed to deliver final justice to John Rawls, not to speak of categorically laying to rest the imperative-rattling ghost of Immanuel Kant.

"He Kant possibly mean that" had been the quip of Cass's that had been anointed by Lucinda's titter.

Cass had never been good at this sort of thing, making fun and making light, but Lucinda's proximity, or, more to the point, her having so deliberately chosen proximity to him, had revved up his wit. The Katzenbaum auditorium was subterranean and windowless, but it seemed to have become ungloomed ever since Lucinda claimed her seat, as if some of the dazzle from outdoors had been tracked in on the bottom of her shoes.

It was one of those September days, the sky looking like an inverted swimming pool, and the white-gold liquor of afternoon light drizzling through the leaf-heavy trees and pooling on lawns and walkways and the gleaming crowns of Frankfurter's youth. Cass had quoted the line "Glory be to God for dappled things" to himself, which was from a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as he made his way across the stippled campus. "Glory be to God for dappled things- / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings." And then that stunning second stanza, beginning, "All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) ..."

How was Cass to know that Lucinda Mandelbaum was slightly prosopagnosic, "prosopagnosia" being the technical term for an inability to recognize faces? Arguably, Lucinda's prosopagnosia had nothing to do with any malfunctioning in her fusiform gyrus. Arguably, prosopagnosia, in the case of Lucinda, was more a matter of mental efficiency than deficiency. Lucinda tended, largely unconsciously, to group faces into kinds, and then was likely to exchange one of a kind for another of the same kind. She could often, when her mistake was discovered, reconstruct the logic of her unconscious taxonomy. Her confusions sometimes led to awkwardnesses, but Lucinda generally knew how to cover herself, and her errors more often amused than alarmed her.

"Did he say brain scans or brain scams?" Lucinda whispered now into Cass's tingling pinna.

"Do Lipkins recognize the difference?" Cass had returned with breathtaking celerity.

Cass had never been quick on the verbal draw, and the years he had lived with Pascale had buried him deeper beneath his reticence. Pascale went after statements with ferocity, ripping them into phonetic shreds. It was her poetic technique. At least several of her poems had been the result of her free-verse attack on some phrase he had uttered, including the prize-winning "Je ne peux pas te nier ca": "I can't deny you that."

There had been something lupine about Pascale Puissant, and, as much as he had loved her, it had turned him cautious. Her beauty-her pointed features, hollowed cheeks, burning black eyes-had always reminded him of a starved wolf. Even the gash across her mouth of her deep-red lipstick, often a bit smeared, suggested bloodstains from a wild meal of still-quivering flesh that had left her just as starved.

Narrow as a boy of twelve, her tiny derriere able to fit into Cass's large palm, her voice, heavily accented, dissolving like smoke into thin air, Pascale was nonetheless a force with which to be reckoned. Her father, a mathematician at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, in BuressurYvette, twenty kilometers outside of Paris, had chosen her name in honor of Blaise Pascal, who had founded mathematical probability theory when a gambler asked him for some rules to govern rational game-tabling.

After her parents divorced, when she was nine, Pascale had chosen to live with her father. It was pleasant for her at Bures-sur-Yvette, all the distracted mathematicians living together in housing owned by the Institut on parklike grounds, a playground in the middle with a jungle gym from which she had liked to hang upside down, "for the images and the vertigo." All the children she played with were the offspring of mathematicians, which made them less annoying, in general, than typical children. Also, her father left her alone far more than her mother would have. So she chose to live with her father, therefore not with her mother, and therefore refused to see her mother anymore.

"Refused to see her? That seems extreme. Had she mistreated you?"

"No, not at all. What do you mean? I just told you that I had to make the decision. I had to fabricate it out of my will. If she had been a bad mother, then I wouldn't have had to make the decision. The situation"- she pronounced it as a French word-"would have decided."

"But why wouldn't you see her anymore, just to visit, now and then?"

"Now and then." She paused for a few moments, and Cass wondered whether she was going to go to work on that expression, but she let it go. "No, there could be no now and then. If I had chosen to live with Marie-France, then it would have been exactly the same, then I would have refused to see Papa."

"Marie-France? That's your mother?"

"But of course! Who else?"

She glared. He wasn't paying attention. She often glared, thinking that he was lacking in attention. She was wrong. When it came to Pascale, whatever it was Cass was lacking, it wasn't attention.

"So it was more or less random, whether to live with your mother or father. It was more or less symmetrical. But then, once you decided, it was completely asymmetrical. He got all of you, and she got none."

"It was still symmetrical, absolutely, but in the abstract. The symmetry was preserved, absolument, but in the abstract."

She was annoyed with him. Her infinite eyes were darkening with impatience. Her scowl brought her brows together in one continuous line over her delicate but imperious nose. He was being slow, deliberately obtuse. He was very sweet, her Cass, and tried very hard to make her life easier. He believed that in doing all the household chores, the paying of the bills and the shopping and the cooking, and the dealing with the computer, and even doing her research in the Edna and Edgar Lipschitz Library at the Frankfurter University, where he taught, he could put himself, in his own small way, in sacred service to her muses. But occasionally, for reasons that eluded her, he was determined not to understand the simplest of things. It was a mystery to her. Also extremely annoying.

Sometimes, in order to show her that he really was following her, or to test his own comprehension, he would try to finish her sentences as she groped for the right English words, and if she smiled her red-toothed smile and said "Exactement!" his day was made. But there were times, too, when he chose the coward's way and only pretended to know what she was going on about.

For example, her views on probability. Though she was named after the founder of probability theory, she thought the entire concept a perversion of reason. An event that happens happens. Its non-occurrence, therefore, cannot happen. Never, when something happens, can its not happening also happen. It is happening 100 percent, and it is 0 percent that it is not happening. And since a thing either happens or not, there is only 100 percent or 0 percent of the probability. C'est logique! Therefore, what is the probable but the confused? And what is the confused but the cowardly? And what is the cowardly but the immoral? And what is the immoral but the probable? It is full circle! Therefore-she always said this word with a special emphasis, equal accent on both syllables, and blowing a bit of air into the f, so that the aspirated phoneme seemed to ascend on the smoky fragrance of her voice-there is only the absolutely impossible, what they rightly call the thing with 0 probability, and the absolutely necessary, which they say has probability 1, Papa had informed her, but she had vehemently countered that, no, it must be measured as 100, or, better yet, as infinite, since certitude is infinite. Therefore-maybe she had inherited the love of the adverb of consequence from mathematical Papa, or maybe, as Cass enjoyed picturing, all the children of Bures-sur-Yvette, hanging upside down on the jungle gym, solemnly sprinkled their sentences with donc-there is only, in the calculus of probability, the numbers zero and infinity.

"And do you know, Cass-Papa, he did not argue with me."

Cass could well believe that Papa, he did not argue with her. What Pascale believed, she knew, and what she knew, she knew with savage certitude. La Sauvagerie et la certitude.

"Basically, she's full of shit" was the way that Mona had put it, which Cass thought hardly did the situation justice. Mona, with her high-school-level French, couldn't even read Pascale's poetry in the original. Cass had translated as best he could, but clearly it wasn't good enough.

"Her poetry is a crock, too. That relentless keening. It hurts my ears just reading it. She's the Yoko Fucking Ono of poetry. She's anti-art."

"How is she anti-art, Mona?" Cass felt compelled to ask, even as he acknowledged to himself that Mona's Yoko Ono comparison had something to it. "Say what you will about her, Pascale is a brilliant poet. How can her poetry be anti-art?"

"I'll tell you exactly how. Art is supposed to increase our mindfulness. Pascale wouldn't know mindfulness if it bit her on her skinny French ass."

This last phrase, which might easily be perceived as not only anti-Gallic but, even more egregiously, intolerant of a woman's right to choose the shape of her own body, was a testament to just how angry Mona felt, on Cass's behalf, or how hard she was trying to get Cass to feel some anger on his own behalf. (She never succeeded.) But her assertion about the mindfulness function of art was straight out of her textbook. Mona had done her doctoral work with Arlene Unger, who makes the concept of mindfulness central to her existentialist psychology. The concept was central to Mona as well. She worked it in whenever she reasonably- or even unreasonably-could. Mona, who was quick to ask the first question at lectures, always began her query with the phrase "As an Ungerian, I'm wondering." You could tease Mona about almost everything-her bisexually frustrating love life, her Omaha, Nebraska, upbringing, even her weight-but mindfulness was off limits. Mindfulness was Mona's religion.

And Mona had indeed been mindfully present to Cass during the long ordeal with, and without, Pascale; mindfully eager for every blood-smeared detail, which she had picked clean with raptor-zeal; mindfully condemnatory of the mindlessness that had left Cass so battle-of-the-sexes-scarred-"I hate to say it, Cass, but you've been pussy-whipped. So have I, if it's any consolation"-that she, Mona, repeatedly wondered whether he'd ever be able to love a woman again.

Mona was facing stoically forward now, but Cass knew her well enough to read the silent reproach in her back. He knew what it must be costing Mona not to give way to temptation and swivel around backward to see what was going on now, and he felt remorse in a highly theoretical sort of way, which is to say that he supposed that somewhere, in whatever part of the brain was supposed to be involved in moral reactions-did Lipkin say it was the right orbitofrontal cortex or the left?-his neurons must be making desultory guilty gestures, and perhaps eventually he would register the muted activity.

Lipkin was now affirming the unthinkability of the unsayable, which prompted Lucinda to tickle Cass's ear with a whispered "Ah, the all-too-common Wittgenstein Fallacy."

It was as if she were prescient. The next words out of Lipkin's mouth were "as we have learned from Wittgenstein."

"Ah, the all-too-common As-We-Have-Learned-from-Wittgenstein Fallacy," Cass shot back, winning from Lucinda a smile of such splendor, along with a playful elbow dig in his side, that he might have died happy at that moment, asking nothing more out of life than this.

When the unthinkable had happened, when everything had become unsayable for Pascale, she had clutched at Cass, her beautiful and terrible eyes gone even more terrible. One moment she was complaining that her right arm felt like "a little sharp-teeths bete, bite, bite," and the next she was staring at him wildly, unable to utter a word, a soundless howling in her eyes.

The doctors had argued back and forth over whether the clot should be removed. Poor Pascale, with her repudiation of probability, was now caught in a deadly matrix of risks. Dr. Micah McSweeney, the neurologist with a love of literature-whose scruples about mixed metaphors had caused him to allow the loss of his right leg in a kite-surfing accident to determine his entire piratical presentation, had alone stood firm against surgery. McSweeney stood on a peg leg and wore a kerchief knotted over the top part of his head. Was the neurologist bald underneath? Was the jaunty kerchief another prosthetic? Cass would never know. The important point was that McSweeney had read Pascale's poetry, and he knew that to operate was impossible. He, too, knew what he knew with savage certainty.

During the long days of sitting beside Pascale, her wild poetry silenced within her and her convulsively tragic eyes trying so hard to communicate some essential message to him, her icy child-sized hands clutching and unclutching his large warm palm, Cass had felt himself achieving a new and revelatory penetration into the nature of love. His adoration of the afflicted darling of his life, his own tormented wife, sank so deeply into his being that he felt it must be transforming him on the cellular level.

He had first laid eyes on her on a cold December evening at a reading she had given at the crowded Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. The Grolier had been crowded with books, not with people. He had been one of only three attending the reading of her newly translated book, and he was pretty certain that the other two, a man and a woman, had come in to get out of the cold. The man kept loudly blowing his nose into what looked like a torn scrap of a brown paper bag, and the woman noisily unpacked a sandwich, the aluminum foil making a racket. Cass had wished that he could reach out his enormous hands to ward off these insults from the eyes and ears of the poet, her smoky voice struggling beneath the foreign tongue and barbarities.

But though he had fallen in love with Pascale because of her words, it was only now, in her writhing wordlessness, that he knew how entwined their two souls were. They inhabited this silence with an intimacy so complete it all but matched a person's own intimacy with himself. The two of them were alone together inside this silence, with all the world outside. Her brilliant words, counter, original, spare, and strange, had entranced him, but also distracted him, distanced him even as they pulled him in. Perhaps words always do. We depend on them to read each other's souls-what else do we normally have?-but it's only in cases like this, when the other is simply given to one, soul to soul laid out before one like a scene before the eyes, that one really knows who the other is.

He had spoken of all this and more to his stricken wife, sometimes in words, but more often in the soundless communion to which they had been both reduced and elevated.

And then, one evening, after the supper tray-loaded with the home-cooked food he brought her-had been removed, she had spoken, vindicating McSweeney, who alone had known what Pascale's own passionate desire was in regard to the question of whether to operate or not, while Cass had wandered lost in the matrix of risks.

"I must of necessity break your heart."

Meaning: I have lain here in my silence and I have fallen in love, as you, too, have fallen in love in my silence. It is symmetrical, absolument, in the abstract.

Meaning: Therefore, it is necessary to love Micah McSweeney.

Meaning: Therefore, it is impossible to love you. A tout a l'heure, devoted Cass. You have served the muses well, in your time.

For all these years, it had been impossible for Cass to think of Pascale, her starved-wolf eyes and the long coarse black hair that always held an intoxicating fragrance that he had thought of as the scent of ethereality itself, without a gasping contraction round the ventricles of his heart.

Lipkin must have miscalculated the length of his talk. It was nearing the end of the hour, and he obviously still had a lot more material to get through. He was powering through his PowerPoint at a maniacal clip.

"Oh dear, don't tell me he's going to throw in the Milgram experiment now, too? Lipkin, Lipkin, where will this end?" Lucinda was laughing deliciously in Cass's ear.

Lipkin had clicked up onto the screen the famous picture of Adolf Eichmann in his bulletproof glass booth, the three Israeli judges, in their heavy black robes, sitting above him like buzzards. The top of the screen was labeled "Only following orders."

And, sure enough, remarkable Lucinda had been right that Lipkin was using Eichmann as a segue into the famous Milgram experiment about following orders that had been conducted at Yale in 1961, a few weeks after the Nazi SS-man, who had been hiding out for ten years in balmy Argentina, was kidnapped by the agents of the Mossad and smuggled back to Jerusalem to go on trial for his enthusiasm and efficiency in loading Europe's Jews into trains.

"I think," Cass whispered back to Lucinda, "that Lipkin's performing his own psychological torture on us."

Cass was perhaps getting just a bit punch-drunk. This gibe fell a little flat and, if you thought about it, didn't really make that much sense.

"It's amazing, the sputum that passes for science in these parts," Lucinda responded. This witticism was all the wittier given that Lipkin was a spitter, but it had made Cass's grin go a little shaky around the corners, since it touched a sore spot. Did Lucinda know what his own specialty was? Was she aiming a gibe at him as well? Given her camaraderie, it was hard to believe, but his experience had been that those occupying the more technical reaches of the field could be pretty dismissive of people like him. Sebastian Held, for example, who was a Mandelbaum wannabe, was downright rude. Did the enchantress beside him have similar tendencies? There was nobody who went further in the direction of the technical than Lucinda Mandelbaum.

Her first book, Mathematical Foundations of Game Theory with Applications to the Behavioral Sciences, based on her doctoral dissertation, had formulated the famous Mandelbaum Equilibrium, and she had been trailblazing ever since. After receiving her Ph.D. from Stanford, she had spent the next three years at Harvard's dauntingly elite Society of Fellows, had garnered the Distinguished Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association, and the Troland Award in cognitive psychology from the National Academy of Sciences, awarded to an under-forty scientist.

By the time Lucinda went on the job market, post-Society, she received offers from every top department in the world that had an opening, which had been her goal. She had accepted Princeton's offer. All the other job candidates in the field that year who got hired elsewhere were aware that they were employed only because Lucinda Mandelbaum hadn't wanted their jobs. That was three years ago, and her productivity had not suffered since. Only last year, Newsweek had included her in their cover story of "Thirty-Five Scientists Under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields." She had stared out of the pages, one of only six women, and the single representative of the "soft sciences" among the cosmologists, molecular biologists, and computer scientists. Of the thirty-five who had been featured, it had been, unsurprisingly, Lucinda's striking face that had been reserved for the blowup photo on the first page of the article, her pale-gray eyes staring straight at the reader as if daring him to be the one to look away first, her measured mouth only hinting at her victory smile.

Game theory is the attempt to use mathematics to capture the relative rationality of different strategies in various situations, where how well a person fares isn't just a matter of his own decisions but of the decisions of the other players. It's a theory that analyzes behavior in terms of rational agency, meaning the theory assumes that each agent wants the biggest payoff, or utility, for himself. Each agent wants to balance a minimum of expected loss with a maximum of expected gain. Lucinda Mandelbaum is famous for having found applications for game theory everywhere, not just in economics and statesmanship and warfare, which are the most obvious places to look, but in areas that don't seem to involve rational agency at all. All living things, down to the level of the so-called selfish gene, are following strategies that people like Lucinda are elucidating.

Given Lucinda's area of expertise, it was ironic that she should be sitting here in the auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center, chatting up Cass Seltzer under the illusion that he was someone else entirely. Even Lucinda could-wincingly-admit that she was here only because she, of all people, had let her enemies outplay her.

Of course, Lucinda had her share of enemies. Everybody does, since life, as she can demonstrate, is often a zero-sum game, where one person's win is another person's loss. But a person like Lucinda attracted not only more enemies, but enemies of a different kind, namely griefers: people who wished her grief for no other reason than to wish her grief. Lucinda was unabashedly ambitious, she was unapologetically successful, she had always played hard, and ... she was a woman. A beautiful woman. The imbalanced distribution of natural gifts seems unfair because it is; and people will always try to make things fairer by giving grief to the gifted. Griefers present one of the complications in the rational-agency model.

The trouble for Lucinda had begun when Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter, wanting to restore the university to those refulgent days when it had been able to boast on its faculty such international figures as Jonas Elijah Klapper, had used that article in Newsweek as a strategic plan. He made fabulous offers to each and every one of those Thirty-Five Scientists under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields, from Aashi Alswaan, computer scientist, to Simon Zee, cosmologist.

Lucinda had only intended to use the generous terms-not only a whopping salary but a minimal teaching load-to improve her situation at Princeton, playing one institution off against another. This was standard academic strategy. Instead, it was Lucinda who had been played, and she couldn't believe that her being a woman wasn't relevant.

David Prentiss Cuthbert, who was the chairman of the Princeton Psychology Department, had frankly had enough of Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose aggressive intellectual style had always been off-putting to him, and most especially after the Newsweek article had appeared. Lucinda hadn't even tried to pretend to be embarrassed by the hype. If she could have had that damn article shrunk down and laminated to wear around her tyrannical throat, then she would have. So, while Cuthbert had encouraged her to press her demands and to threaten to leave if Princeton failed to match Frankfurter's offer, he had also gone to the dean and told him that, "between the two of us, Bill, I wouldn't be sorry to see her go. Her demands are infinite. I spend more time trying to keep her happy than I do the rest of my department put together. If I'm going to run this department, I have to assume that no one is indispensable."

The Goddess of Game Theory had been knocked off her game, and it had been a chastening experience. She had spent the summer doing what someone like Cass might have called searching her soul. The depth of the animosity against her-she had learned of Cuthbert's treachery- astounded and wounded her. He apparently resented her so much that he was willing to act against the interests of his department just to damage her, for surely it couldn't be good for Princeton to lose her to Frankfurter.

She had only tried to game the system, and now here she was, within retching distance of the stink of failure, packing up her office in Green Hall and nobody stopping by to help her or offer her even a token word of insincere regret. She didn't doubt for a moment why this punishment was being inflicted on her. It was the combination of her mother's beauty with her father's brains, which he had used to become an extremely successful doctor-lawyer specializing in malpractice. Caught in the summer's swampy misery, she almost felt aggrieved with her parents for bequeathing her the singular genetic sum.

Perhaps the nagging sense that her parents had somehow done her wrong explained why she ended up sticking out the summer in Princeton instead of returning to the home in the Philadelphia Main Line that the Mandelbaums had bought from the estate of the late Eugene Ormandy the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. That summer made her hate New Jersey so much that she wondered how she could have lasted in Princeton for the three years she'd been there. Nevertheless, she stayed the summer, though there was no place she would rather have placed herself than supine on a chaise lounge, Tanqueray and tonic in hand, in the middle of the rose garden that lay just outside the french doors of the room that the Mandelbaums called "the conservatory." Philippa, her mother, had planted the rose garden herself and did much of the tending with her own delicate hands, although Hy Hua, their Vietnamese gardener of twenty years (he'd been a boat person), did the heavy lifting.

Philippa had once used the beloved rose garden as the setting to try to draw her little daughter into a fantasy of the sort that Philippa herself had loved when she was a child of seven. Standing under a folly smothered with Rambling Rector, Paprika, and a few other climbers, she had smiled at her little towheaded daughter in her corduroy Oshkosh and said: "Someday, you're going to stand here in your flowing white dress and your white tulle veil, with some strong, good, handsome man beside you, and he'll be thinking that, of all the beautiful roses in this garden, he has picked the loveliest one of all."

"Which one did he pick? The Alchymist?"

This was their favorite rose, not only because of its beauty-it changes shade day by day, deepening from cream into orange-but also because Philippa had been able to grow it herself from division, a fascinating process which little Lucinda had avidly followed.

"No, you silly! You! You'll be the rose he picks."

"I'm not a flower. And, anyway, picking flowers only makes them wilt, even if you put sugar in the water to give them energy. Don't let that man pick me, Mommy."

But here was a complication: If her father adored her mother so much, as he self-evidently did, then why had he wanted Lucinda to be so different from Philippa? Why had he so extravagantly cultivated Lucinda's intellectual pride and derived such pleasure from his little baby's taking on everyone and whupping them upside the head? Why did he continue to tell that punch line, "Don't let that man pick me, Mommy," with undiminished relish?

It was the first time she had asked herself such questions, and it made her unsteady. She didn't know how to describe the feeling, and she didn't know how to explain it away.

It was a setback, of course, for Lucinda, to take up the post, lucrative as it was, at Frankfurter. The department was a bit of a joke, stocked with all sorts of flakes. Sebastian Held seemed the only one who did what Lucinda considered real science. But, still, the very laid-backness of the place was a welcoming change for the time being. She could regroup and come back stronger than ever.

Lucinda took a rather implacable attitude toward the softer and more addled areas of psychology. She had to. Psychology, like Lucinda herself, couldn't afford to indulge in softness. In some sense, she and psychology were similar, their fortunes joined, both of them with a lot to prove, with a presumption of softness to overcome. In the case of Lucinda, the presumption was the result simply of her being a woman, especially a woman who looked the way she did. She had had to put up with a lot to get where she was, and the putting up never really stopped. Look how precipitously she had been toppled from her perch at Princeton. A woman who thinks for her living always has to be on her guard, always has to cultivate her implacability.

Deep down, she still thought of herself as shy. She had been pathetically shy as a girl. But at a certain point, while still an undergraduate, she had realized that shyness was a luxury she could ill afford, and had found that the best way of overcoming it was, whenever possible, to go on the attack. She herself had coined the verb "to fang" when she was an undergraduate at Harvard, where she had begun to hone her aggressive style of questioning. To fang is to pose a question from which the questioned can't recover. You could see the stun, the realizaton of helplessness setting in.

Lipkin was already quite a bit past the one-hour time limit and was foaming like a mad dog. For all his bombast throughout the talk, he ended rather limply, hurriedly restating his claim that moral reason is a myth. Perhaps his mouth had run dry.

Lucinda's running patter all through Lipkin's talk had seemed to indicate that she was listening to Lipkin as superficially as Cass himself had been. But when the call for questions came, hers was the first hand to shoot up-or maybe it was tied with Mona's-but in any case, Lucinda Mandelbaum was the one who was recognized. Just about everybody in the auditorium had been waiting for this moment. Would they be witness to the first fanging at Frankfurter? She stood up. The gesture itself was uncommon in these parts, and it seemed to raise the proceedings to a new level.

"Thank you, Harold, for that provocative talk. I think I speak for everyone here in saying how much we admire both your erudition and your ability to speak so quickly."

The laughter was good-natured. Lipkin's smile was grim.

"You've packed so much in that it's hard to know where to begin. I'm going to restrict myself to the last point you made. I want to challenge your claim that the Milgram experiment shows that there's no moral reasoning going on. And my objection to your interpretation of the Mil-gram experiment is an objection to your entire thesis that reasoning isn't functioning in our moral calculations, that it's all just gut reactions.

"Milgram's results are astonishing, but no more astonishing than the result we get in game theory in what we call escalation games. What I'd like to suggest is that Milgram's experiment is an escalation game, and the playing of an escalation game certainly involves reasoning.

"Take the simplest escalation game, the dollar auction. Two or more people can bid on a dollar. Each bid has to be higher than the last, and the highest bid gets the dollar-just like in a regular auction-but, crucially, the lower bidders have to pay whatever their last bid was, even though they get nothing. Given these rules, the bidding will quickly go up to a dollar, with the last bidder having bid ninety-nine cents. Will it stop there? No, because then the ninety-nine-cent bidder will have to pay ninety-nine cents and get nothing for it. So he rationally bids a dollar and a cent, so he'll lose only a cent rather than a dollar, which is outbid by a dollar and two cents, and so on. What happens in the dollar auction is that people will bid five dollars, ten, fifteen dollars, just to get a dollar in return. In fact, once you get a dollar auction started, there's no rational way for it to end, since the cost to either player of bowing out will be high, and the marginal cost of raising his bid is just a penny. So it's rational to keep bidding, a penny at a time, even though this leads to an irrational result.

"Anyway, the Milgram experiment is an escalation game. Once a participant takes the first step, he's already paid a certain price-he's inflicted discomfort, and he's feeling bad about it-but if he stops he'll get nothing for his pain. He won't have successfully completed a psychological experiment and contributed something to science, and that authority figure running the experiment is going to be displeased with him. So, once he's made his first bid, and the experimenter escalates by telling him he has to give an even stronger shock at the next mistake or he will not have completed the experiment like a good subject, he's more than likely to escalate by complying. Just like the dollar auction, once you start there's no natural place to end until the experimenter calls a halt to it. It's all perfectly rational, step by step, even if it leads to a bizarre result. In fact, given that the experiment is, in fact, an escalation game, the outcome is completely predictable.

"And here's how to empirically test what I'm proposing. Run the experiment with the participants instructed, with no matter how much authority, to administer a deadly voltage on the first trial, without any incremental escalation, and see what happens. I predict that not a single subject will do it."