The Work of Humans

Posted on May 26, 2026 by hessd

I’m going to skip over all the practical impediments to this.  If it has to get done, it will get done.  We turned the entire economy over the the war effort in the early 40s and did things no one had even imagined could be done.  Why?  Because we felt we had no choice.

So I am thinking AI thoughts on one side of my mind and on the other, I am thinking carboni thoughts from The Ministry for the Future. [1] The carboni is a currency that was awarded to people who reclaimed carbon dioxide  from the atmosphere or who prevented it from escaping into the atmosphere.  There is no natural economic system that would reward that job, so they invented a currency that would and changed a lot of economic behavior that would otherwise not have occurred.

In the meantime, the AI side of my brain is trying to grapple with the fact that we keep defining jobs so that they can be done better by AI.  There is no reason we could not define some jobs that can only be done by humans (and leaving others to whichever life form does it best) so that there is a balance between economic efficiency and human flourishing.

The way I have heard the problem posed took for granted that the most efficient (productive) way to provide various good and services is the best way.  When that argument fails on the merits, the argument is that firms that refuse to work that way will be put out of business by firms that excel in it.

You could even define “human support jobs” in a way that would allow AI machines to outperform humans.  What you cannot do is to say that jobs that are defined by human to human contact can be better done by AI.  Some jobs could be made to come under the productivity metric; other jobs come under the human support of humans metric.

If that sounds like Affirmative Action to you, I am willing to let you be reminded.  If the alternative were to turn out to be Affirmative Inaction or Affirmation Rather than Action, it wouldn’t sound as bad.

I, myself, think that we can be more discerning about what only another human can do for a person.  I think we have not paid much attention to that form of the problem yet.  But I also have a nightmare scenario that pushes me in the direction of the human care of human beings.  It is that if we settle for the simulated care of human beings of which AI is already quite competent, we will begin to define what we value and what we need in terms of what it can produce for us.

Perhaps a silly example would help.  Imagine that the speech programs with which they fit up AI systems are unable to pronounce the Sh- as in shibboleth.  Like the Ephraimites, they could not pronounce the Sh-.  Fine; use it as a test.  But this was a battlefield situation.  They can either pronounce it or they can’t.  But if you were living with them, as many people so far have lived with robots, you would have the chance to decide that your really preferred a word that sounded like “Sibboleth” rather than the old way.

Some years ago, Sherry Turkle wrote a book with the title, Alone Together.  It is a spectacularly good book, but along the lines of this essay, it is good to remember that the subtitle is: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.  The short answer is that we develop emotional attachments to these AI devices and want to prefer what they offer us to what could be available from any other source: human or machine, natural or artificial.

The reason the system I am trying to imagine would require humans providing services to other humans is that if we do not, humans will be vulnerable to choosing the AI performance over the human one.  And that is only the provision of services.  There are also special skills required to receive those services in an affirming way. [2]

It seems sensible, I am sure, to lob the ball up as if it were a jump ball and allow the better performer to control the play thereafter.  You could even say that we will simply let people choose which source of their “personal services” to use, the natural ones or the artificial ones.

But it is not sensible.  AI systems can be tweaked to provide better service in the same way that viruses tweak their performance to stay ahead of anti-viral  treatments.  AI systems can perform in the way that is coolest or hottest, depending on the era; squarest or weirdest depending on the culture.  The authentic response of one human being to another is not going to meet the preferences of people who allow their preferences to be messed with like that.

As nearly as I can see it, nothing short of defining personal services as services provided by one human and received by another human.  That should take care of the competition between the two.  It may very well, as in the carboni example, require a lot of rules and a new currency, but it seems to me that it is a step in the direction of thinking it through together.

[1]  Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderful sci-fi novel about the rescue of the planet.

[2]  Giving and receiving are discrete sets of skills, neither of which can substitute for the other.

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Being Old: Part III

Posted on May 24, 2026 by hessd

One event after another has chased me back into my extensive electronic library.  Let me illustrate.  Where I live, there is a debate being formulated based on the Tragedy of the Commons.  In fact, there is a much more relevant literature based on Elinor Ostrom’s study of Common Pool Resources, which I have in my “library.”  The prospect of the debate reminded me that I have it.  It shouldn’t have taken that much.

In one of the Bible courses I teach, a theologian is criticized for being too general in his prescriptions, but I have a much earlier book that he wrote which is aimed precisely at the individual application of the same teaching and I have that, too, in my electronic library.

You get the idea. 

But I go to that vast and curated collection only to look something I have forgotten.  I do not treat it as the very individually chosen treasure that it is.  What I do instead is scout out new books, many of them on those same themes.  Mostly, I do that because someone has just discovered the issue and has found a book and wants to talk about it.  But I am old now (see title) and it has come to seem to me scandalous that I leave my library alone or check on it only episodically.

What I should be doing in my old age is lovingly reviewing them; reminding myself why I scanned

them and saved them.  They are my “old books” and I should be luxuriating in them.  I am looking forward.  I think that is mostly a good thing.  But I am looking forward instead of looking backward and I think that is a shame.

All the materials that formed my Political Psychology course are there.  All the materials I wrote for my Political Psychology course are there including some very pertinent examples.  I have there the best study of the framing of issues I have ever read and I have not read it in maybe twenty years.  If it is as good as I remember, I should read it again very soon.

I have three sets of such libraries.  The first is largely academic and it is material I collected for three reasons.  The first is that I really needed a PhD and to do that I had to persuade a committee that I had done some original work.  The second is that I taught courses in Public Policy over the next forty years and I added to my electronic library every time I taught the course.  Some of it I wrote myself.  Most of it, I found in journals and textbooks.  The third is that I spent that same forty years also teaching courses in Political Psychology, and I kept reading the founders of the subdiscipline and their modern critics.

The second set has more to do with theology and biblical exegesis.  I have studied those topics since the 1960s and began adding them to my electronic library as soon as I had a computer and a scanner.  I have some tomes and I have articles that tickled my funny bone.  I found them to be humerus.

The third set more or less defies classification so I just built a library under my own name.  All kinds of stuff is there, but if it intrigued me and if it is not political science or biblical studies, that is probably where it is.

I have built the case for not reading new books on my old topics.  As usual, I have overbuilt.  What I would really like to do is to allow the new issues to chase me back to the old materials.  The illustration of the Tragedy of the Commons and the institutional contours of Common Pool Resources is a good example of that.  The issue came up here where I live.  That discussion would be much enriched if it were broadened to studies that are contemporary and empirical.  I actually have some of that material in my library that will show me how to get more if I need more.

I really need to spend more time there.  It could very well be that is one of the great compensations of being old.

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The Days of our Life

Posted on May 8, 2026 by hessd

Donald Trump is a disaster as President, but he is probably the best pitch man we have ever seen in the Oval Office.  He has found a way to attract and hold the attention of an electoral majority.  He has made American government the favorite soap opera of many voters, who turn on their TVs to find out “what he has done next.”  The quality of attention that is paid to the DT Show is like the quality earlier generations paid to a soap opera, hoping to find out of Dustin will FINALLY pop the question to Jennifer.

The Framers were not, as everyone surely knows, fans of “democracy.”  In fact the principal connotation of that word in their time was “mob rule.” They dealt with that worry by restricting who could vote (white male property owners) and who they could vote for.  The people elected one part of one branch of the legislature.  Period.  And even so, the argument had to be made in the Federalist Papers that if trouble arose, regional dissatisfactions would not flourish (the country is too big) and that, in any case wiser heads would prevail (the Senate).  They also made no place for political parties, which were not invented until some time later (1800).

It is easy, from our present standpoint, to look back and call the Framers’ presuppositions naive, but our own ideas are beginning to look naive as well.  We have thought, until recently, that voters will vote for and sustain in office, parties that solve their problems and meet their needs.  Until recently, nearly all of that took place “off camera.”  Heads of departments and bureaus were budgeted for projects and given authority to complete them and then left alone. [1]

The clear demonstration of the Trump administration is that “off camera” is no longer adequate.  It does not sustain the attention of voters for whom “what is he going to do next” is the question of the day—day after day after day.  Among some segments of the electorate, there is the sense the “he is doing all this for us” but even for people who have not been carrying that grievance, the “on camera” form of government has attracted their attention.

It would be easy go slide off into a rant at this point.  I say that to help me control the tendency.  What I want to say, really, is that DT has changed the form of government by changing the appearance of government.  He has successfully “personalized” government.  When he says of an action by some foreign power “They have disrespected us,” millions of people see themselves as part of the “us.”

I felt sly when I titled this post, “the Days of our Life,” using the collective singular instead of the plural.  It is in fact, “our life.”  Citizens who are appalled at what the President is doing are saying in vain, “He does not represent me.”  Yes, in fact, he does.  However much liberal Democrats may hate the actions and the posturing, this President does, in fact, represent “us” and will until he is replaced.

This is “our life” and these drama-ridden days are the days that define that life.

I tried to include here a picture from Trump’s early acting career  [2] in order to make the point that it was so successful that he is still using it.  What “the U. S.” used to do, he does now, and he casts it in language everyone will understand and some will cherish.

[1]  Not quite “alone.”  They always had the rapt attention of representatives from important interests watching them, but those representatives often came in pairs, one pro and one anti, depending on the proposed legislation.

[2]  He is playing his final role at the moment and we are all paying for it.

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Polostan

Posted on April 12, 2026 by hessd

Very soon, the second of Neal Stepehson’s Bomb Light trilogy (D: Heavy Water) is going to be published.  The review that Amazon has posted says that Owen Crisp-Upjohn is going to find himself pulled into the orbit of “Aurora, a curiously compelling woman with a shadowy past rooted in Soviet intelligence.”  That really is the least that can be said about Aurora, who dominates the first of the Bomb Light trilogy, which is called Polostan. [1]

Polostan is a spectacular book.  It introduces a fearsome variety of people, half American, half Soviet and weaves their stories together. He does it not only by interspersing chapters–this one in Chicago, that one in Magnitogorsk–but also by playing one personality type off against another.

In any case, the first thing Aurora says to Crisp-Upjohn in her own voice, is “The OGPU [2] wants me to sleep with you.”  She has been playing the part of “Katya,” speaking Russian-accented English.  But this she says in her own Montana plains voice.  The only thing she had previously said in her own voice was the line just before that one,  which was, “Owen.  This whole thing was a setup.”

That is a lightening fast re-introduction to a person he thought he knew, but he is up to it.  He says, “How may I be of assistance, young lady?”  Aurora replies, “Fall in love with me.”  He responds, “Done. Will there be anything else.”

Given that, I am not surprised to learn that she is with him in the second book.  I knew she wanted to get out of the Soviet Union.  She had spent a long time, several chapters earlier, strapped naked to a bed frame and dipped by ropes on a pulley into a hole in a frozen lake.  After a while, Shpak, her interrogator, began to hold a knife to the rope, cutting a strand or two and suggesting much more.

I will come back to that experience later, but here, I want it to introduce this reflection of Aurora’s.  “She knew that as long as she lived in this country, she’d be dangling above that hole in the ice, the knife on the rope.” Dangling in that way was not just interrogation. It was a way of life.

That is why I am not surprised to learn that in the second book, she is in England, conspiring with Crisp-Upjohn.

It was Lavrentiy Beria himself, head of the secret police under Stalin, who ordered that she be cut down from the bed frame.  “I’ll have them cut you down,” he said.  “We’re going to be late for dinner.” We. Are going to be later for dinner. OK.

When you read this book, you have to get used to very large and very fast changes in tone.  From the bed frame to “late for dinner” was one.  The next one comes when she is in the hotel where they put her, and they call her for that dinner.  She could have just, the text says, 

“sat in bed enjoying the solitude, but the man with the glasses (Beria) had been insistent that she show up for dinner and she got the clear sense that she belonged to him now.”

Got that one?  Next:

“So she did what she could with her hair, put on a skirt and blouse, and went down to the hotel’s restaurant.”

Stephenson can make the narrative turn on a dime and he has done it in Polostan more than any of his other books I have read.  What she says to Crisp-Upjohn, abandoning her role as “Katya,” sets the stage for the next book.  On the last page of Polostan, Crisp-Upjohn says he will be leaving soon.  She says, “Write me letters.”

He says “…which will be read by the OGPU.”   She says, in her real persona, Aurora, “Of course.  Go around the world and do what you do.  Eventually they’ll send me out after you.

And apparently they have.

[1]. Which is a pretty good joke in the context.  They have just invented a Red Army Women’s polo team and the field they provide for them is so big that Crisp-Upjohn names it the first time he sees it, just by slapping the -stan suffix onto the polo field.

[2]. Soviet era secret police

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Being Old: Part 2

Posted on April 6, 2026 by hessd

People who write about the changes in perspective that come with aging talk about the new “temporal horizon.”  I get what that means, but when I ask the question of myself as a newly “old person,” it takes the form of “How much longer can I keep doing this?”

And if that seems like a natural question to ask, I would have to say that it is a new question for me.  I have asked other questions, all of which seemed natural at the time.  For example, I have asked whether some public contribution is being made by my participation in this activity.  That may seem to be an odd question, but I put it first because otherwise, the first question would be “Am I enjoying this?” which does not seem to me to be a proper first question. It is a good later question.

I have also asked whether I am good enough at the skill the group requires to continue, in good conscience, to be a part of it.  If it is a discussion group or a class with a teacher, those are often harder questions to answer.  In music groups, on the other hand, it is easy to answer.  In my church choir, I am called on to sing the pitches that are called for.  The higher pitches are really not available to me anymore unless they allow the right volume (forte or better) and require the right vowel.  Getting to my seat on the third level of the rehearsal room (and back down) is getting more challenging.  It is not “challenging” enough for me to conclude that I can no longer do it, but it is challenging enough to make me wonder how much longer I will be able to do it. Enough about choir.

There are several elements involved here as I see it.  First, this is not a failure of ability.  Foreseeing a time when I will no longer be able to do something is not at the moment, a failure of ability.  After all, I can still do it.  It is more like an awareness; a part of my mental background on those occasions when it occurs.  As a “mental background,” it is something we do not have good words for.  It is more like a flavor or a scent or a barely audible hum.  It influences how I attribute things.  Young and able, I am surprised when I stumble over things.  Old and less able, I predict it, try to allow for it and take it for granted when it occurs.  Those reactions are effects of what I am calling “mental background.”

Or, let me take a stereotyped scene from fifty or so dramas.  Two women are sitting at a bar.  One takes for granted that she is attractive; the other takes for granted that she is unattractive.  They look identical, but they give off different “vibes.”  That puts it in the flavor or scent or hum category.  It is there and it is important, but you can’t see it.  Actually, you probably did see something, but you don’t know just what it was you saw.

The third thing is that it is about me.  There are things that meet the other two criteria (failure of ability, awareness) but that are about settings or other people or programs.  This is an awareness about me—about who I am now—that has considerable implications for what I notice, what I attempt, and how I file it in my “how did it go” file.

That makes it centrally important, however hard it might be to nail down specifically.  That is why it is important to call these essays “being” old, rather than “getting” old.  To me, “being old” is something I have noticed as if it were an objective condition.  I know it is not.  It is just a subjective condition I had never noticed before, and, having noticed it, I find myself struggling for terms to describe it.

As you see.

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A Bulwark of Democracy

Posted on April 1, 2026 by hessd

I don’t often see “existential” in a political column, so the paragraph below caught my eye.

The precariousness of the Democrats’ position in the coming decade hit home for me after reading “The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential,” a March 24 essay that Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist based in Florida, posted on The Bulwark.

The provision of a link made going to the article a simple matter, so I did.  Schale’s article was in the Bulwark, a site I had heard referred to several times before but I had never paid much attention to it.

This article made me wonder what kind of a site it was, so I googled it.  This is what came up immediately.

This is the answer to my Google question: What is the Bulwark?  The page they directed me to contained 352 words.  Here are some of them.  Their words are italicized.

The Bulwark is an American news and opinion website dedicated to defending liberal democracy and providing center-right political analysis.

I don’t often see “liberal democracy” and “center-right” analysis paired, so I was interested.  I suspect that they will have a carefully guarded, but defensible, definition of “liberal.”  I am sure I will find out; on the basis of this first page, I signed up.

The next paragraph says that the site—here called a “platform”—was founded in 2018 “to provide a home for rational, principled, fact-based center-right voices who [I would have said “which” on the grounds that “voices” are not “persons”] oppose tribalism and polarization in politics.

I, myself, am a little wary of the claim of “fact-based” because it is the collection of relevant facts, organized according to some relevant value, that are important.  On the other hand, there are people now in office who deny or ignore “facts” so just believing in them in general isa good thing.

I have never thought of myself as “center-right” but I reacted very well to it this time.  I will be getting a lot of opinion pieces from The Bulwark, so I am sure I will have a chance to make up my mind.  “Rational” and “principled” can be put to various uses, but I am willing to accept them at first pass.

That brings us to opposing “tribalism” and “polarization.”  I don’t oppose either of those absolutely, but I know that they are negative words connoting tight social bonds, on the one hand, and the alienation of those outside those bonds on the other.  Sometimes it might turn out to be worth it, but I like the idea of opposing them in general.

In the next section, they say that the publication “emphasizes honesty, good faith, and putting country over party, aiming to create a community for the politically ‘homeless” who reject extreme partisanship.

I confess that I begin to get wary here.  Who is against “honesty” as a principle?  Even people who confuse emotional authenticity with “honesty” would say they are in favor of honesty.  The same for good faith; there is no way to be against it, so it is not of much value as a distinctive value.

“Country over party” is harder.  If you step back just a little, you come to an understanding of democratic governance in which the free contest of parties, each of which has committed adherents, is thought to be the best way to determine and to enact the public interest.  It is the lingering attractiveness of that model that makes me wary of “country over party.”  Party, in the model I described, is a way of determining what supporting the country would involve.  In the absence of some way—not necessarily that way—of determining what supporting the country means, it doesn’t mean very much.

This way of putting it is aimed at people who will look at the disastrous effects of a policy on the country and the very good effects of that same policy on their party, and approve of it on that basis.  I am happy to censure such people, but it is hard to describe in general terms.

On the other hand, the last description—a place for the politically homeless— hits me right where I live.  When they talk about the politically homeless, they are talking about me.  I will vote for Democrats every time I get a chance, but I have not had strong feelings for the Democratic party since early Obama.  The logic of partisanship pushes my party in directions I am not comfortable with.  It isn’t the logic of partisanship that is pushing me, so I move more easily in other directions.  So the party, for its reasons, and I for my reasons, have chosen diverging paths.

Maybe I have become “center right.”  Maybe they have moved the center.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  In any case, I will be reading the people who write for the Bulwark for a while and maybe I will find out.

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Being “Old:” Part 1

Posted on March 26, 2026 by hessd

I was surprised at how fast it happened.  There is a series of experiences that I have mentally labelled “getting old.” But, as you see, the difference between getting old and being old is as clear as the difference between being on a journey and arriving at a destination.  I am now at the destination.

By “old,” I am going to mean the way I experience it.  It isn’t another way to say decrepit.  “Decrepit” is just Latin for “broken down.”  I did not suddenly become broken down.  On the other hand, just what is broken on any given day is more salient than it once was.

I used to say that I began a day by “calling a play.”  I am the quarterback of my team, in this metaphor.  Then I adapt the play based on the abilities and the conditions of the members of the team.  I have vertigo, for example, and for the purposes of brevity, let’s say it is a problem of the inner ear.  Sometimes it is active; other times it lurks at the periphery of awareness.  I call a play and the middle ear says “I can’t provide any guarantee of your standing up for that long at one time.”  The left calf (intermittent cramping) says, “That play runs twice as long as I can go.”  And so on.  And I modify the play to utilize the present condition of the available players.  That’s not what I am calling “old.”

“Old” is when I gather my resources in the team huddle and see who is there.  Until I know whose help I can count on, I don’t even make notes in my date book.  When a new resource shows up—no dizziness at all so far today!—I call a play I had hesitated to call before.

But “being old” is more than that.  It is a mental construct, for one thing, not a physical condition.  And it is a place where my mind starts, not a condition to which it adapts.  I would not, for example, decide to start a project or enhance a relationship and then think, “Oh wait.  I’m too old for that.”  Rather, I would start with “OK, I’m old.  Given that, can I start a project like this or work on a relationship like that?”

“Starting with old” is what I mean by “being old.”  I started doing that only recently.  Who would have thought it?  And it has required the reconsideration of some patterns of thought I have really enjoyed.  

When I moved into a Senior Center ten years ago, I was really intrigued by the number of people who excused their actions—more often, their inactions—with the tag line, “I’m Old, You Know.”  It sounded so routine and so practiced that I made a game out of it.  This is a “game” in the Games People Play sense.  It joins, NIGYYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch), which is one of the best known of Eric Berne’ s“games.”  I called it IOYK (I’m Old You Know).

And I still think most of those IOYK namings were correct.  But now I realize that there is an alternative.  It is not “old” as an excuse; it is the naming of the initial mental condition of the which the person was aware.  Maybe preemptively aware. It is, in other words, “starting with old.”  It is, at those times, beginning with the mental awareness of age—not of decrepitude—and saying or doing things that require that initial premise.  That’s not really IOYK.  It’s just being old.

Like me.

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“The range of respectable opinion is strikingly narrow.”

Posted on March 13, 2026 by hessd

When I first read those words, they seemed to me clearly true.  Now I have thought about them a little, and I am not so sure.

When I think about the range of respectable opinions, my mind reverts to my first conscious experience of it.  I was in elementary school, standing in the lunch line.  I could see what was being served and I said I was looking forward to eating it.  Those were not the words I used, but they convey the meaning.  I was immediately set upon by members of my class for saying such a thing.  It turned out that complaining about the food in the school lunchroom was what we did and that saying other—especially opposite—things would lead to exclusion.

I solved that problem instantly.  I never again said that I liked the food they were serving in the school lunchroom.

Yasha Mounk says that today’s range of acceptable opinion is narrower than that of any historical epoch since Victorian times.  In Victorian times, he says, the range of opinion was kept narrow because of the unavailability of other views.  You repeated and sometimes debated the views you heard in your stratum of society because those are the only ones you heard.  Today, Mounk says, strong arguments against nearly any view you can imagine are available to “any human with an internet connection.”

“John Stuart Mill famously argued,” says Mounk, “that it is crucial to hold our beliefs as living truths rather than dead dogmas, something that would only be possible if we were exposed to a genuine diversity of views.”  That sounds right to me.  There is, without question, a genuine diversity of views, but we are not exposed to them.  We have grouped ourselves into very agreeable groups and the truths we share are in danger of becoming, as Mill says, “dead dogmas.”

The settings I, myself have chosen, are running this risk. So when I speculate about what can be done about this issue—which I acknowledge is a serious one—get personal quickly.  What to do?

First, establish yourself as a serious participant in the conversation.  It is easy and pointless to throw stones at the reigning consensus.  It is a good deal more valuable to grant that the position now held by the group is based on real values; if you do that, you can raise the question of whether those values are being achieved.  If all goes well, you have now achieved a “Yes, but…” conversation.

This won’t help the hangers on who are, as in my example above, complaining about the cafeteria food because it is “what one does.”  They are dead coals, once a part of the fire, but exhausted.  But others, who might look as lifeless, might be brought back into flame by blowing on them a little.  These “not quite dead” coals still care about the values that underlie the current consensus and they are open to the idea that those values are not being achieved by doing and saying what the group does and says.

Having achieved the “Yes, but…” conversation, you need to have something to propose.  Value A is still the underlying value of this group, but the conversation we are having (A.1) does not move it into serious consideration or to action, if action is appropriate.  I propose that we move on to another conversation (A.2) which is based on the same values but that offers more promise of achieving results.

Several good things might happen if you follow this strategy.  One is that the group is persuaded that A.2 is better and begins to move in that direction.  Another is that the old conversation, which I have described as tethered to A.1, is subjected to the opposition of group members.  People who once nodded along, assenting to the ruling consensus, can now see that they have a choice. 

They always had the choice of throwing stones at the group and its values.  Provided that these are only little stones, this choice will be tolerated and ignored.  If they are stones that attack the group consensus but offer no alternative, the stone thrower will be invited to move elsewhere.  But now they have the choice of engaging in real conversation; conversation that affirms the underlying value, but that raises new ways of understanding it or offers new ways of making it contemporary.

This is what “Yes, but…” does to the conversation if it can be achieved.  I don’t want to be misunderstood; this is not an easy transition.  As Mill says, “living truths” are the goal to be sought.  He neglected to say that “dead dogmas,” the alternative he offered, can be a source of great consolation and it might be that consolation is what the group is really after.

But I think it is worth considering.

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Small Injuries

Posted on March 11, 2026 by hessd

Listen to the careful language here. This is Baya Voce [1] on Jonathan Haidt’s substack, After Babel, March 10, 2026


Here is what she says. One of the partners is in bed, their body “angled in that small wordless way that signals come here.” Then the other partner comes to bed and there is “a last email check.” Then finally, as Voce puts it, “Nothing dramatic happens….but the body registers it anyway.” [2]

How does the body register it? Here, it is “a faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs.” Then there is a mental grasp of the “event”—Voce calls it a “recalibration.”


I want to stop at “register.” I don’t want the body knowing something I don’t know or could not have known had I been better attuned. If Voce wants to say that the body knows something “I” do not know, I want to be sure that it is something I did not notice, not something I could not have noticed.


Everything the body “knows” came from me. I thought it or smelled it or felt it or heard it. I might not have noticed. If I didn’t notice, I don’t know about it. I pass it along nevertheless because I and my body have connections where information passes back and forth and I don’t even know about most of them.
So now the body “has” it. There is, as Voce says, “a faint drop in the chest, a tightening behind the ribs.” I can respond to these events, having no awareness of what I am responding to (the tightness) or the event that caused it (the lack of response to my signal) and this response can occur without my having any knowledge of what caused it.


In Voce’s imaginary scenario, I ask a logistical question—did you check in on the kids, did you remember to close the garage door, have you noticed a lack of reception in the bedroom? [3]—the goal of which is to say something but not to say what I am feeling. Voce says the “emotional request stays hidden inside something respectable.”


So there has been a “conversation” of sorts. I signaled a desire for emotional focus. My partner signaled a prior engagement. I adapted by asking a question, but not the question I wanted to ask. That is “the pattern.”


Voce calls the pattern “tiny departures that are too frequent to ignore.” These departures create “thousands of small injuries that accumulate over time, eroding trust and collapsing erotic potential and emotional safety.”


OK, That’s what Voce says. I would like to place this in context. First of all, since many of my friends read this, this blog is not about Bette and me. Second, I am not concerned about “the cellphone problem.” Bette and I both live in webs of relationships—the more so since we have separate sets of children—in which she and I are the principal subjects, but there are other people who deserve not to be ignored. I think we have devised a way to attend to each other, but to recognize that other claims on our attention need also to be acknowledged.


Those are two things this blog is not about. What it is about is the pattern of sending and receiving and responding to signals—none of which “I” might know about. Voce is writing about the “thousands of small injuries” that accumulate and that cause serious damage.


I have raised the question of what I know and what I can know and of what my body knows and can know and the relationship between the two. For me to continue thinking about things as I have done ever since grad school (in the 1970s) there are things I can not notice that are nevertheless mental events and these can be passed on to my body. Because I did not notice them, I do not know them. Because I passed them on, my body can “know them”—be affected by them—when I do not. And the effect can be more pronounced with recurrences of the event and I still will not know.


There are two kinds of solution for this problem. One is to make myself aware of them so I can talk about them. There are ways to do that. The other is to change my life so that I do not cause these small injuries and so that I notice them when I am injured in that way. Those are the two kinds. Both are possible but both are difficult.


What most people do, as I see it, is to live with them and “get over them.” Voce might say that you really never get over those toxic patterns, but maybe you do. Maybe they get folded into some general schema about the partner. Maybe I adjust my expectations. Maybe I change the silent requests into spoken requests. Maybe they get better at registering unspoken requests. There are lots of ways.
I am not, myself, a “relationship repairer,” which is what Voce called herself. I am just someone with a sustained and active interest in how we receive, fabricate, and store the data that matter most to us. It’s an old grad school habit.


[1]. Baya Voce says she is a “relationship repair expert.”

[2]. I am trying not to make the signaler “she” and the nonrespondant “he.” It requires vigilance and the prose suffers, but I think it is worth it.

[3]. There is a small parallel meaning there. We keep them separate by calling it “reception” in the technology sense and “receptivity” in the interpersonal sense, but here they overlap.

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What to Say on Valentine’s Day

Posted on February 23, 2026 by hessd

Mitzi Sampson was quoted in an article on Valentine’s Days past as saying that today’s receiver doesn’t want “frills or grand proclamations, but an intimate knowledge of the receiver, and the simple recognition that says I know you, I see you, I choose you.”

That was the end of the article; the last part of the last paragraph. But I was left with the sense that I needed to get to know Ms. Sampson better.  I felt real power in those words and, as I thought about them, it seemed to me that not only were the words right (know/see/choose), but also that the order was right.

Today, I would like to consider what they might mean if they were considered in order, so that the first prepares the way for the second and the second for the third.  All three of these, Sampson says, are aimed at “an intimate knowledge of the receiver,” but the first is know: I know you.

Bette and I make a real thing out of Valentine’s Day.  We met shortly before Valentine’s Day twenty years ago and my first attempt to honor the Day with her was a memorable success.  In that case, I took some risks with her (more later), since I had just met her and she took some risks with me in the way she responded.  And that is what we have done since.  I present her with several days of cards, leading up to Valentine’s Day and it turns out that she is one of the best receivers of cards I have ever seen.  She seems to see the meaning I am trying for and to respond graciously to that even if the card itself and/or the message within the card are flawed.

That may be why it made such sense to me that the first meaning of a card is, “I know you.”  The card ought to elicit the unique connection between us, not just say nice things.  This year I led off with a very unspecial card where the message was “I’m a lucky duck to know you.”  Not much, surely.  But I went to the University of Oregon and am therefore a Duck and Bette’s family is strongly oriented to Oregon State University and therefore not Ducks. [1]  I pasted a U of O logo on the back of the “lucky duck” in the picture, just to say, “I know who you are.”

I take “see you” as a matter of attention.  It means that I pay attention because what you say and what you mean are important to me.  When I walk into a room, I find out where you are because it is something I want to know.  I may or may not come to be with you–particularly if it is a large crowded room–but I want to know.  Sometimes a knowing glance across that room, entirely unseen by others, does that job.  It is silent and powerful connection.

That is how I understand “I see you;” if that is what it means to me, then it clearly presumes “I know you.”  One of the cards was supposed to be a sort of Happy Retirement card, but the picture on the face of the card was a clock showing 6:00 a.m. with the alarm setting on OFF.  Bette didn’t follow the retirement idea because she ordinarily gets up at 6:00.  That is when her alarm goes off.  And by then, the coffee is ready and her cup is warmed, ready for her.  

The idea of the 6:00 picture was to celebrate those very early morning times when she knows her coffee is ready because her husband knows who he is married to.  “See you” refers, in this card to the morning dance, where Bette finds the coffee and then finds me and raises the cup as a brief toast as she mouths, “Thank you.”  She knows that she has been seen.

Finally, although choosing her is very nearly implicit in knowing and seeing, you really want it to be explicit on Valentine’s Day and if you have been married for awhile, you know that “choosing” is not something you once did.  It is something you do over and over.  And again the other half of the gesture is crucial.  Bette needs to be willing to be chosen over and over and she shows that with all the class she showed at that first Valentines day when I gave her four flours (spelt, rye, wheat, and white) [2]. When I left, she said, “Thank you for the flowers” and she said it with the manner and in the voice of a woman who had just been given a dozen perfect roses.

So choosing and being chosen have great power when they are done in order. For the last card of the series, I gave her a very mild-looking card that said “I love you more than books.”  It instantly melted the heart of my librarian wife because she knew what it meant.

The guy who introduced me to Bette said that she was a librarian and that she was a really cute redhead and that I ought to check her out.  I don’t think he heard the metaphor but the idea of checking out a librarian was pure gold to me and I put some of that gold into the final card because I wanted her to know that I continue to choose her.

I am not sure that I have made the case that knowing and seeing and choosing are a time-ordered series, but that is still how they feel to me and I will remember them with pleasure on the next Valentine’s Day.

[1]. They are Beavers, but they are decisively NOT Ducks.

[2]. I’m a baker.  I told her I didn’t know what her favorite flours were so I brought them all.

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