Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“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.”

Lucinda Mandelbaum had, on the spot, not only devised an alternative explanation that undermined the claims of the presenter, but, in the best scientific tradition, had also conceived a way of testing the two alternative hypotheses. And it had all come out so smooth and polished- frankly, a lot more coherent than the delivered lecture itself. Cass thought there might have been a scattering of applause following her rejoinder, although he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t projected his own silent ovation onto the external world.

Cass, ravished, followed the ensuing dialogue between the astonishing Lucinda and the atomizing Lipkin. There was no doubt in Cass’s mind, as he was sure that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind, including Lipkin’s, that Lucinda got the better of the man, whom Cass now actively disliked for keeping up his increasingly whining refusal to accept Lucinda’s brilliant counter-explanation.

Pavel Yarnau, the smarmy chair of the Psychology Department, finally called a halt to the heated Q & A, thanking “our speaker for providing us all with such a lively time and much food for thought. And now let’s continue the discussion over more mundane fare, not to speak of drink. I ask you all to join me upstairs in the Leah and Marty Feingold Room for the reception in honor of Professor Lipkin.”