Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

Toxoplasma gondii is in the news again. I've spoken of this a couple of times before: There's a microorganism that lives in a complex coevolutionary ballet between cats and rats, and once it gets into the rats' brains, it unplugs an ancient adaptive caution against being anywhere you can smell cat urine. In fact, T. gondii actually makes rats seek out cat urine, suggesting that here is a single-celled creature working under contract to genus Felis to keep the protein coming. T. gondii infects humans as well as cats and rats (and many other mammals) and there's some indication that infected people live less-controlled lives, are prone to rages and psychopathic jealousy, get in fights and accidents more often, and do other things we would generally categorize as stupid.

There's a new weirdness connected with toxoplasmosis that I didn't know before today: People who test positive for the disease are very likely to test positive for low levels of LSD. This is intriguing, since LSD is a well-known changer of brain chemistry, and it can remain in the body for many years after being ingested. (Some of my ex-hippie contemporaries have gone on unexpected trips decades after their last deliberate encounters with LSD.) I don't see anything crisp on what's cause and what's effect and what's merely coincidence, but it provides some rich avenues for further research. LSD is the by-product of ergot, a mold that grows naturally on grains, so I see no reason why it could not be an accidental by-product of a parasite. And whereas we've studied what happens when an individual ingests a significant dose of LSD at one time, I don't know that we've ever studied what might happen if something in the body were to release miniscule quantities of LSD over a longer period of time, like months or years. There's not enough hard data to say any more, so I won't.

I've been puzzled by the explosion of various kinds of public rage in the last 20-odd years, culminating in the sort of frothing pathology I see constantly from self-described progressives. There's an intriguing difference between the sorts of extremism that comes from the left and those that come from the right. The recent passing of Betty Friedan on February 4 recalls the debate she had with Phyllis Schlafly over the Equal Rights Admendment, back in 1973. Friedan shouted, "I'd like to burn you at the stake!" at Schlafly, who then cooly replied, "I'm glad you said that, because it just shows the intemperate nature of proponents of the ERA." Friedan was no fool, and not nearly the extremist that her demonizers paint her to be, but she lost her cool in a truly stupid way, a way that gave her opponents yet another weapon with which to bludgeon the ERA to death. Extremists on the left often seem much brighter to me in an intellectual sense than extremists on the right, but they can't control their anger, and sabotage their causes by ceaselessly flaming their opponents when they ought to be quietly working to persuade the unconvinced of their positions. (The Left will live to regret Ted Rall's unspeakable cartoon labelling our Secretary of State a "house niggah.") Extremists on the right are often dimmer (Schlafly was no equal to Friedan intellectually) but they understand what the game is, and they plug away at their agendas with a lot less noise. (This is one reason I worry about right-wing whackos more than left-wing whackos: You can always hear the lefties coming.)

So let me put forth a Jeff Duntemann Crazy-Ass Hypothesis: The characteristic (and often self-defeating) fury of the left may be due to higher rates of cat-carried toxoplasmosis infection among left-leaning intellectuals. Virtually all my far-left friends have cats; the handful of far-right folks I know are either petless or have dogs. Cats, of course, are present throughout the political spectrum, but statistically they seem to lean left.

Note well before you froth at me that this is not a criticism of cats, which I actually learned to like late in my life. (My sister's cats sit in my lap regularly when I visit, and seem to have forgiven me for my cat skepticism as a young man.) It's really part of my ongoing criticism of inarticulate rage, and an SF writer's hope that we may eventually be able to make the world a more civil place just by getting our shots.