The Dilettante's Dilemma

Trump: Not So Much a Candidate as a Tantrum

Posted on August 7, 2015 by hessd

I have ranted in one setting or another recently about the movie Inside Out, which nearly everyone has found to be delightful and which no one, myself excepted, has found to be dangerously subversive. Today, I would like to make another pitch that the premise of the movie subverts what we care about most in our fragile American democracy and I would like to look at the Donald Trump Phenomenon as the example.

We call our kind of government “representative democracy.” [1] By that, we mean that the people elect people to represent their interests and that these people operate the government with the interests of their constituents in mind. [2] This presupposes both a) that the constituents will know what their interests are and b) that they will choose representatives (now including both the Senate and the President) who will enact public policy with those interests in mind.

We are nowhere near that at the moment and I would like to point to the Pixar film, Inside Out, as an illustration. The movie is about how five emotions collectively construct the life of a little girl named Riley. These emotions do not have “interests,” of course, because they don’t have intentions. As a result, Riley does not have interests based on intentions. Riley’s behavior represents the dominant emotion at the time. Here, for instance, is Anger. A few paragraphs down, I will offer Trump himself. See if you can see the similarity.

OK, that brings us to tonight’s “debate” among the candidates for the Republican nomination and particularly to Donald Trump. Does the Donald represent Republican voters?

Well…yes and no. He represents the way they feel. He probably will not represent their hopes for public policy. He may not even represent the kind of party they want the Republican party to be. But in Inside Out, how you feel is the only thing that matters and if that holds for Republican voters, I think the best short answer is “Yes. The Donald represents Republicans better than anyone else.”

I got to thinking in this direction based on a piece Jonathan Chait wrote for New York Magazine. Here’s a piece. You can see the whole article here.

The current moment of enthusiasm for Donald Trump is instructive because it pulls the [ideological and emotional] strands apart. Trump’s appeal reflects, in nearly singular form, the nonideological component of Republican rage. He is the candidate of affect.

This is galling, Chait writes, for Republican officeholders who have acquiesced to every demand for “ideological purity” from the Republican base.

Republicans have dutifully complied with every policy demand. They have refused to increase taxes, even at the cost of programs they support, like infrastructure and defense. They quickly withdrew cooperation from all of President Obama’s legislative initiatives, opposed virtually all of his nominees, and joined self-destructive demonstrations of anger they knew would fail.

They have done all this, and now a candidate who has refused to do any of it has surged into the lead. The Republican primary electorate has demanded that candidates be good little boys and they have given their hearts to the baddest little boy around.

And here is Chait’s very best line. See what you think.

His affect supplies his appeal — he is strong, mad, and, above all, unapologetic in a world that demands he apologize. Trump is not the spokesman for an idea at all, but the representation of undifferentiated resentment.

“Undifferentiated resentment” is Howard Beal’s “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take

this any more,” from the movie Network. (You can find it and 99 other beauties on the American Film Institute’s 100 best movie quotes.) This is a newscaster urging people to open their windows and yell his line out into the dark. It’s great catharsis. It’s no way to choose a president.

It’s easy to say bad things about Donald Trump, but if he really represents us, then we are the ones about whom bad things should be said. Trump is betting that that will be enough. The horrible possibility is that he might be right.

[1] Another way to say that is “republican government.”
[2] Not to get picky, but the Framers had overlapping constituencies in mind. The House of Representatives would represent the people, the Senate would represent the states, and the President would represent the judgment of unrepresentative “wise” elites, who would choose him or her by means of an “Electoral College.”

Posted in Politics | Tagged Donald Trump, Fox News, representative democracy, Republican candidates | Leave a comment

Getting Over It

Posted on August 6, 2015 by hessd

Day 1

My version of the truth is that I came to “causal attribution” as a tool for doctoral study for perfectly good academic reasons. [1] Bette thinks I turned to that kind of research because I was a natural worrier anyway. What I would have liked to say to her in response is that she has not adequately distinguished “rumination from reflective processing,” as in “she is accusing me of the former when actually, I am utilizing the latter.”

I have not said that to her because it is a phrasing I just discovered yesterday. In 2005 [2] the journal Psychological Science published an article with a very catchy title. It is, “When Asking ‘Why’ Does Not Hurt” In fact, causal attribution is the study of asking why—usually we ask it of other people, but it is remarkably revealing to ask it of oneself.

The subtitle of this article is “Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing on Negative Emotions.” I am eager to confront Bette with this article. I am pausing only to give myself a chance to read it first, just in case it doesn’t support the conclusions I am already committed to. I am a fan of science, of course, but satisfactory outcomes have their place as well. This is not a problem Vulcans worry about much.

Day 2

OK. I’ve read it now. There are two distinctions that will make it possible to look at these options the way Walter Mischel and his colleagues look at it.[3] It turns out that I will be able to deal only with the first one today. The second one distinguishes asking “what questions” about a past event from asking “why questions.” Maybe I can get to that soon.

In the first dichotomy, we need to distinguish “self-immersed” from “self-distanced.” The orientation they call “self-immersed” is part of “the hot system.” It is concrete, it causes a first-person reliving of the event, and it intensified the bad feelings you are having at the time. The other orientation, “self-distanced” is part of “the cool system.” It is abstract, rather than concrete; it supports a “third person” or “bystander” way of remembering of the event; it reduces the bad feelings that come from recalling it.

Since we seem to live in groups, it is always important to look at how my way of doing something looks to you and particularly what vocabulary is available to each of us to describe it. If you reflect on negative experiences in a “self-immersed” first person style, you will be all prepared to misunderstand people who use the other style.

If you use the style of remembering that goes with the hot system, you look at me handling my remembering in the cool system and you say, “That’s not remembering. That’s denying.” You mean, by saying that, that I am avoiding emotional contact with that memory. With the rise to prominence of psychological jargon, you would be able to say just that I am “avoiding.”

Or you might say that I am “intellectualizing.” For the direct wrestling with vivid images of the event, you say, I have substituted abstract names that fall into even more abstract categories. I am keeping the event at a distance by dealing with what actually was a very emotional event, as if it were merely a difference of opinion among friends.

As I consider the charges—you call them observations, but they feel like charges to me—I have to admit that you might be right. The real question is whether I am getting the job done or not. I want to deal with those awful past events in a way that reduces or eliminates the physical symptoms I once had when I remembered them and also in a way the reduces or eliminates the mental and emotional stress I once had. If what I am doing actually accomplishes that, then I should reject the charges.

On the other hand, you might be right. What if I am overusing the “cool system,” turning it into a “cold system?” If I am simply distracting myself from remembering those events by some other strategy—drug addiction, alcohol addiction, hypersexuality, workoholism—then the events are still “there” and I still have not learned to live with them. If I am avoiding those memories, I am not processing them and they are still there. If I am “over-intellectualizing” them, then I am not dealing with them and they are still there.

So when you import the bad words you have available, I need to pay attention to them. You may have come to them by a flawed method. You may have picked up the pejorative words simply because what I am doing is different from what has worked for you and you don’t understand. Regardless of how you came to your judgment, I need to consider it. And the heart of the consideration is this: is what I am doing, working?

Let’s think about “working,” for just a moment. I learned about this from Josh Lyman and Stanley Keyworth. The episode appears early in Season 2: it is called “Noël.” At the end of Season 1 of The West Wing, Josh Lyman, assistant to the Chief of Staff of the President of the United States, is shot. He tries to go back to work when his body has recovered sufficiently, but it turns out that his mind has not recovered sufficiently.

Early in the second season, Stanley Keyworth (Adam Arkin) is called in to help Josh get through those events and this is the distinction he makes. It is the first time I ever heard it.

Keyworth: What we need to be able to get you to do is to remember the shooting without reliving it. And you have been reliving it.

Working a dark and difficult memory successfully brings us out on the “remembering” side; not the “reliving” side. And what I need to do is to listen respectfully to the words you use to characterize my way of working with these memories and match them against the results. If I’m not getting the results, maybe the reason is, just as you said, that I am avoiding the memories or “intellectualizing: them. But if I have been successful in reducing their effect on me, in largely avoiding the tax they levy on my energy and my ability to focus, then I need to say, again respectfully, “I know the cool system I am using looks odd to you, but really I am not avoiding or intellectualizing. I am doing what works best for me.

I like it that there are words that point to misuse of the hot or cold system or overuse. They need to be used by people who know what system you are using and what actually works for you. “Works” means that you are actually engaging the emotions, not denying them or hiding from them. And “works” means that you are able to come into contact with the experience that carries these emotions without reactivating their toxic effects.

The authors that this analysis is based on are, for all these reasons, big fans of the cool system. You can read the experiments yourself if you like and see if they are persuasive. For me, what matters most is that a system that is working is respected even by people who have found relief in another system and that we apply pejorative words only to practices that don’t actually work.

[1] I needed a tool by which individuals (especially the students I hoped to work with) could explore their own “life-worlds” by means of a system of notation that could be found in the phenomenological tradition. A study of “causal attribution” using “causal attribution journals” turned out to be just right.
[2] Apparently this particular point has mattered a lot to me lately. I keep referring to John Gray’s Mars and Venus distinctions because he takes the trouble to talk about what men’s processing looks like to women and vice versa. It turns out that each has a supply of good affirming words for their own way of interacting and a supply of bad pejorative words for the other style. I applied that same distinction recently at it bears on aggregating interests and making a group choice. I invented followers of Thomas Hobbes (Hobbesians) and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseaueans) and found that each has a supply of good words for their own way of adding up preferences and a supply of bad words for “the other style.” Martin and Doka, in their book on gender and grief (Men Don’t Cry…Women Do) show the same division between those, like me, who grieve in “the instrumental style” and those who grieve in the intuitive style.
[3] Ethan Kross, Ozlem Ayduk, and Walter Mischel, “When Asking ‘Why’ Does Not Hurt: Distinguishing Rumination from Reflective Processing of Negative Emotions. Psychological Science, Vol 16, Num. 9, (2005), pp. 709—715

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, ways of knowing | Tagged avoidance, cool systems, denial, depression, hot systems, intellectualizing, rumination, Walter Mischel | Leave a comment

Women Who Love Too Much

Posted on August 3, 2015 by hessd

In 1985, Robin Norwood wrote a book called Women Who Love Too Much. My immediate response was, “Oh dear. She’s redefining what love means.” I haven’t read the book, but I still dislike the title. Is it really possible to “love too much?”

I don’t think so.

To make a judgment like that, it would be very helpful if various actions could be assigned to love and love alone. Not, for instance, to combinations like love and cowardice or love and ignorance. But let’s talk about love as if it were a single unmixed motive.

My notion of love is organized around other dimensions. It doesn’t make any sense to me that anyone could “love too much.” You might, of course, do the wrong things. There is nothing about love as a motive that cleans up all the actions it drives. The actions may still be ineffective or even perverse in their effects. The outcome may be disastrous for all parties. That does’t reflect on love as a motive and particularly it does not argue that love might be successfully viewed as an amount, as if there were too little, too much, and just right.

Let’s look at a few settings where this notion might be usefully examined. Ms. Norwood seems to be thinking about—again, I haven’t read the book, I am working off the subtitle of the book, which is: when you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change. The man in the subtitle, a significant other of some sort, is not behaving the way you wish but you stay with him anyway. You say, it seems to me that you are doing that because “you love him too much.” If you loved him only as much as you should—the “amount notion” of love again—you would have dumped him long ago. Apologies to fans of the book if the argument makes is actually more subtle than that.

Let me offer a counter example. The word love doesn’t show up in this text at all but I do think that if there were a subtitle, it could well be: “when you keep wishing and hoping she’ll change.” This is a children’s book, one of my very favorite books of any kind, called A Bargain for Frances. [1] In the first scene, Frances announced to her mother [2] that she is going to play with Thelma. Mother’s response is, “Be careful.”

Frances wonders why she should be careful. Mother ticks off a few instances of Frances’s previous times with Thelma—we get the distinct impression that these are taken from a much larger list.

Remember the last time? said Mother

Which time was that? said Frances

That was the time you played catch with Thelma’s new boomerang, said Mother. Thelma did all the throwing and you came home with lumps on your head.

I remember that time now, said Frances.

And do you remember the other time last winter? said Mother

I remember that time too, said Frances.

That was the first time there was ice on the pond. Thelma wanted to go skating and she told me to try the ice first.

Who came home wet? said Mother, “You or Thelma.”

I came home wet, said Frances.

But even the two instances we see are enough to establish that over and over, Thelma acts as a predator, counting on Frances to be her prey. If Frances wants a friendship relationship with Thelma, she is going to have to offer it from a different place; a different status. Sheep do not make friends with wolves. It doesn’t work that way.

And there is nothing Frances can do to make Thelma want to be a sheep. She could choose to put up with Thelma’s abuse—apparently, that is what she has been doing—or she could decide that if she continues to be gentle and tolerant, that Thelma might be shamed into changing her behavior. That’s why I like the wolf and sheep analogy so much. Wolves are not ashamed of killing and eating sheep.

We can imagine Frances’s mother anguishing over the kinds of behavior Frances tolerates from Thelma. Mother might conclude that Frances “loves too much” and that “loving less” is the right thing to do. My argument is that loving smarter is the right thing to do.

Since there is nothing Frances can do to turn Thelma into a sheep, it might be the smart thing for Frances to become a wolf. And that is what she does. In this story, Thelma lies to Frances and cheats her out of her toy tea set. In response, Frances lies to Thelma and gets the tea set back. Thelma understands immediately that a shift in relationship has taken place and that it might not be good for her. “I can see,” says Thelma the wolf, “that I am going to have to be careful when I play with you.” To which Frances the wolf replies, “Do you want to be careful or do you want to be friends?”

As a wolf, Frances now occupies the same status as Thelma. Neither is now predator; neither is now prey. Wolves are a very social species. [3]There is nothing, now, stopping them from being friends.

This achievement of Frances’s love is surprising and encouraging. Nothing about it suggests either that “love considered as an amount” is a useful notion or that “love” requires acquiescing to abuse. I think it stretches the story beyond the author’s notion of it to say that Frances cheats Thelma for the purpose of establishing the basis for friendship. I think Russell Hoban’s notion is that Frances, confronted with Thelma’s new wariness, is moved by an instant generosity to offer Thelma friendship. But as an illustration that the love that works best is the love that is both smart and courageous, the first interpretation actually works better.

Based on the Frances analogy, a useful response to the subtitle of Robin Norwood’s book (when you keep wishing and hoping he’ll change) is that wishing and hoping are not going to get the job done. Deciding what you, yourself, are going to do is the form that love can take that shows the most promise. Just what that is will depend, of course, on the relationship. Hoping he will change, would apply equally to a husband who abuses the children, who spends all his time at work, or who treats his wife as if she were the maid.

What would a wife have to do to bring herself to the place where she could offer friendship? Certainly, she will have to be taken seriously. Whatever she has to say can’t be simply waved away at the time or violated without consequence later on. I would want to apply my notion of loving enough to ask, “Do you love him enough to do that?” To say what you want to say will require that your husband be married to an actual person. Loving him enough to establish yourself as a person is a preface to having the kind of marriage in which two persons can thrive and grow.

Applying my notion of “loving enough” to this situation requires that you say what you are willing to do to achieve it. That could be onerous. It could be scary. It absolutely must be generous and non-vindictive. Asking for a new relationship means making it a choice he will want to make. It means that the new actions he might contemplate that will support the relationship should be recognized and rewarded. Actions he might take that fall short of that or that exacerbate the situation need to be either ignored or opposed, depending on what works best for him.

It’s hard to know what to do. And knowing what it will take might establish that it takes too much. But neither of those brings the motive—loving enough to do the right thing—into question and neither of them imagines that “loving more” is going to do the trick.

So let’s have no more of “loving too much.” It’s not a useful notion. Let’s talk instead about doing what a knowledgeable and courageous love might require.

[1] I haven’t written anything about this book since the accession of Pope Francis and the question of who Francis’s friends will be, when the tumultuous politics of his first years in the Vatican are sorted out.
[2] If you don’t know the Frances books, you wouldn’t know that all the characters are badgers. It doesn’t really matter except to the illustrator, Lillian Hoban.

[3] A good general introduction to the question is Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals.

Posted in Love and Marriage, Words | Tagged Bargain for Frances, loving too much, personhood in marriage, the gift of friendship | Leave a comment

Inside Out (and Upside Down)

Posted on July 29, 2015 by hessd

“It’s a charming movie. It is also distinctly American.”

That’s the assessment of Tanya Luhrmann in the New York Times recently. (See her column here.) I like that way of putting it, because all the things I disliked about the movie, when Bette and I went to see it, were things I took to the theater with me.

I have, for example, a model of “how selves work.” Every model that has any aspirations to adequacy will need to deal with what we intend, what we think, how we feel, and what we do. You can subdivide those further if you like. The principal variations among the models of selfhood are formed by putting one or the other of those elements in first place or by rearranging the means by which they might be related to each other. [1]

For my own system, I put intention first. I am more interested, for instance, in the effects that our intentions have on our thinking than I am in how our thinking affects our intentions. Or, for a jargony summary, conation drives cognition more than cognition drives conation. [2]

So Bette and I go to a movie—it’s a well done and really cute movie—that eliminates three of our elements. It won’t spoil anything, I am sure, to tell you that the five principal characters are a pre-adolescent girl’s five emotions: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy. Although you would think it sometimes when you are seeing it, the movie is not about Riley, the young girl. It is about those five emotions. The girl herself is just an artifact, a product, of the interactions of those emotions.

If you go to the movie understanding that the movie is about the emotions—the personifications of the emotions—themselves and not about the humans, you will be OK. There is a lot of very acute, research-based understanding of our emotions built into the movie, thanks in part to the professional consultants. [3] You can see their New York Times article here.

So I’m not quibbling about the emotions part. But where is everything else? It would be fair, I suppose, (misleading, but fair) to say that Riley has no emotions. The emotions, rather, have her. Or they ARE her.

But Riley has no intentions—the part that is most important to me; the part that very largely defines what we think and feel and do. You could almost say she doesn’t “have” those other elements either, although the pictures they show you of Riley’s life do show her acting and thinking. But check the cast of characters: all of the emotions are “voiced,” as we say about animated characters. None of the other elements of selfhood are voiced.

Of course, you say. That’s because it’s a movie about emotions. But that means that it is not a movie about persons and it looks like a movie about persons. Riley and her parents, for instance, have the classic spat at the dinner table that ends with “Go to your room!” What was the father intending, you might ask, by saying such a thing to a daughter overwhelmed with sadness and then, momentarily, with anger. Ask it of another movie. The father doesn’t “intend” in this movie, no does any other person. The emotions do, of course. Anger was dominating the father’s console at the time. (Joy is controlling it in the picture of the console above.)

So there’s my own private struggle with the movie. “Charming,” as Luhrmann says, but “distinctly American.” This is the way Americans have come to view the self. According to Luhrmann, “…there is something deeply cultural about the way this mind is imagined,.” We think of minds this way, and that it has consequences for the way we experience thoughts and feelings. She gives examples from China and from southern India that show other people “imagining their minds” in different ways. But Europeans also “imagine the mind” in ways that are different from the way Americans do it. That’s one of the reasons that the Netherlands winds up year after year and one of the happiest nations in the world.

One result, Luhrmann thinks, is that Americans are notably anxious. A 2002 survey by the World Mental Health Survey found that “Americans were the most anxious people in the 14 countries studied, with more clinically significant levels of anxiety than people in Nigeria, Lebanon and Ukraine.” Nigeria? Lebanon? Ukraine? Don’t they read the newspapers? Surely they should be more anxious than we are! But, apparently they are not. At least, they weren’t in 2002. If you think things have gotten better since 2002, you haven’t been reading the same reports I have.

Luhrmann reports that “Americans are a pretty anxious people. Nearly one in five of us — 18 percent — has an anxiety disorder.We spend over $2 billion a year on anti-anxiety medications.” She thinks it has something to do with how we imagine the mind.

“Our high anxiety,” she concludes, “whatever the challenges we face, is probably one of the consequences” of this way of understanding ourselves.

Speaking only for myself, I want to say that I don’t like those consequences. If thinking of ourselves—how we actually operate as selves—in this “emotions-first” way helps to drive unprecedented numbers of us to antidepressants, then I think we should be looking around for another way to think about how we work.

I have one in mind, of course, but we are w-a-a-a-y too deep in this essay to start on it. I’ll just say this. If you make it a practice to pay attention to what you are trying to do and to pay particular attention (not exclusive attention) to the times you are unable to do it successfully, you will learn a great many useful things about yourself. If you are willing to think about just why, in each of those instances, you were unable to achieve what you were intending, you will learn even more about yourself. It’s amazing. Trust me on that. [4]

.[1] I suspect that what looks to me, at this stage, like a disagreement between Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) and Walter Mischel (The Marshmallow Test) is a disagreement how the various elements work as a system. So Haidt’s metaphor, the rider and the elephant, and Mischel’s “hot systems and cool systems” might be different ways of saying the same thing. So far, it looks to me like a disagreement.
[2] Conation, the faculty of willing to do something, is either an archaic word or a word that was in a brief eclipse when I was in grad school. That was when I really needed it and it took me a long time to find it. Maybe it will get popular again. It comes into English directly from the Latin conari, “to attempt.”
[3]Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul Ekman is a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

[4] I just made a collection of my former students smile. They spent an entire term on that paragraph and when the recognize it here, they will turn to their current colleagues and say, “You’re not going to believe this.”

Posted in Movies, Political Psychology | Tagged emotions are everything, how selves work, Inside Out, why are we so depressed? | Leave a comment

What to Do if the World Burns Up

Posted on July 28, 2015 by hessd

I didn’t start out to think about the topic of suicide. [1] Actually, I started with the destruction of the entire surface of the earth, courtesy of Neal Stephenson’s recent SevenEves. [2] The death of all the humans on the planet is easily foreseen after the destruction of the moon on page one. Here’s the way Stephenson starts the book: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” The question for those remaining on Earth is mostly how to die, and, to a limited extent, when. It is in that context that I have started thinking about it.

Some of the people, as Stephenson tells it, despair at the end of their race [3]. Some, for instance, do “all the things they always wanted to do,:” some legal, some not. And then they commit suicide. Others do what they have always been doing for as long as they can. I think that’s what I would do. If I had a job, I would go to work and do what needed to be done. I like doing what needs to be done. It has been a while since I have done any work anyone wanted to pay me for, so I would follow my present routine, as follows.

I would meet with the Northwest Corner Caucus at Starbucks in Multnomah Village. Then I would go home and write a little more of whatever I was writing. Then a run up in Forest Park or a workout at 24 Hour Fitness downtown. Then a nap. Then something—often another round at Starbucks with a friend on a particular topic. Then checking on what is in the refrigerator for dinner and, if necessary, a trip to the grocery. (I like shopping, but I don’t like planning.) Then dinner and then Bette and I do something or other together and then bed. That’s pretty normal for me.

If I knew that the surface of the earth was going to get hotter and hotter until it would no longer support human life, I would keep on doing my routine, or as much of it as was still available, until it got really uncomfortably hot. At that point, Bette and I would consult about how to end ourselves with as much meaning (reflections on lives lived) and as little inconvenience to anyone else as we could manage.

I’ve thought a good deal about suicide, as you would imagine, knowing that I live in Oregon. Our famed Death with Dignity Act provides for a physician’s help for anyone who is near the end of life and (usually) in substantial pain, and who still has the dexterity to convey a pill to his own mouth by his own hand.

As I imagine myself in that situation, I find myself drawing back from it a little. It’s a residual conservatism (I don’t mean that in any pejorative sense) that I might honor at the end or, as I have done with so much of my conservatism, just overrule it. But I don’t think I feel that way about holocaust. The complete consumption of the surface of the earth by fire is “holocaust” in the most literal sense of the term. [5] If it is going to be hot on Monday and blisteringly hot on Tuesday and “hide in the basement” hot on Wednesday and “hurts to breathe air that hot” on Thursday, and “collapse and die from the heat on Friday,” why would I wait until Friday? Is it “suicide” to give up on Thursday? On Wednesday? My guess is that somewhere between Monday and Tuesday, I would want to call it quits. I think I’d want to find a good reason not to.

There is the question of “others,” of course, and Bette is my principal “other,” so we would do what we do with most complicated questions. We sit down, pour a couple glasses of wine, and talk it out. I’m just skipping over that part for the purposes of this exercise because I don’t know what I would propose to Bette until I have it clear in my own mind.
In SevenEves, there were “end of the world” parties, as I recall; some quite formal. That sounds pretty good. Would there be a ceremony like a memorial service, except for all of us. Would we celebrate what makes each of us unique and also what joins us all, other than, you know, imminent death?

I think I’d like that. On the principle that one’s death should be in keeping with one’s life, living an everyday sort of life as long as possible and then joining with others to celebrate the end of it sounds just right. I’m imagining something like the party that attends a play that has had a good long run on Broadway. “Wasn’t that just amazing?!,” we would say. “Do you remember the night we were supposed to have a duel with swords and we couldn’t get them apart in time for the scene? This party is for Young Frankenstein.

I’ve lived a religious life, so according to this principle, I ought to die a religious death, but I’m not really sure what that would be like. I have full confidence that if there is a life after this one, that God will manage it and my part in it as He chooses. According to my very forgiving orthodoxy, that makes sense. On the other hand, I am not at all confident that there actually is a life after this one, so I am prepared to lie down, like Abraham, “being old and full of years.”

[1] Please note the careful phrasing. All of my brothers and some of my kids read this and I don’t want to allow the interpretation that I am thinking of –ciding myself. I am not.
[2] The title means what you think it means, which is unusual for Stephenson. There are seven women who regenerate the whole known human population after a cataclysmic event and they are, collectively, what the Eve of the Garden of Eden is to our present human race or what the primate dubbed Eve is to a substantial part of it.
[3] Not what the Apostle Paul imagined for the end of his race and the difference is directly pertinent to what I imagine the theme of this essay is going to be.
[4] About twice as many Oregonians go to the trouble of acquiring the pill than actually use it. People report taking some comfort from the prospect that if the pain gets THAT BAD, there is something they can do. That makes complete sense to me.
[5] Joshua 6:21 says “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” The “every living thing” is the holo- of holocaust.

Posted in Books, Living My Life | Tagged choosing an end, keep calm and carry on, Seveneves, the world on fire | Leave a comment

Believing and Believing IN

Posted on July 25, 2015 by hessd

I love it when this happens. I have watched Secondhand Lions maybe half a dozen times. Some parts, probably well over a dozen times. And always there is the sense that some part of my mind is receiving some really meaningful signals. It is not, I regret to say, the part of my mind that recognizes and names patterns.

Until last week.

Last week, I said, “Oh. That’s what has been jumping up and down and waving its hand. I see it now.” The element of the movie that caused all that discomfort and this belated recognition is the difference between “believing” and “believing in.”

I’m going to give you the crucial line the way I have heard it all these years. It’s wrong. I finally heard it correctly. Uncle Hub says, as I heard him, “Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe it.”

Hub is such an appealing character and the scene is genuinely transformative for Walter, the confused little boy. And those things, among others, made me want to hear Hub differently than the way I was hearing him.

This movie isn’t about religion. It certainly isn’t about Christianity. Hub has a “confession of faith,” of sorts that I have appended and you will see that there is not the slightest whiff of Christian doctrine in it. On the other hand, I am a member of a religious faith that has never made any bones about the historical foundation on which it relies. Christianity is a historical religion in all the important senses. Christians say, “This happened and as a result, I am a different person than I would have been had it not happened.”

So the “true” and the “real” are mixed together as the cement that holds the major boulders of Christian doctrine together. And that’s the reason I was very surprised and also very happy to finally have heard what Hub actually said. What he said was, “Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe IN it.”

In fact one of the major plot elements in the story is whether “all that Africa crap” really happened or not and that is the story I am telling today. I’ll start with an introduction to the movie. Then I’ll show you the scenes that make up this subplot. Finally, I’ll reflect little on what all that means.

Plot and Characters

Walter,(Haley Joel Osment) a hapless pre-adolescent is dropped off by his irresponsible mother, Mae,(Krya Sedgwick) to spend the summer with his uncles, Garth (Michael Caine) and Hub (Robert Duval), neither of whom Walter knows. Garth and Hub are old men who live boldly in present day rural Indiana, but the stories they tell about their adventurous pasts are scarcely credible. Hub is the principal hero of the stories; Garth is the principal teller.

Walter is drawn into the world of the stories because they are wonderful stories. First he rejects the whole idea that they happened at all. Then small fragments of the story come to seem plausible. Finally, Walter is living in the stories in the same way that Garth and Hub are.

Late in the summer, Mae returns with a boyfriend, Stan. Stan is a bully and he is in debt to people who do extreme things to recover their money. Stan tries to get Walter to say where Garth and Hub’s legendary supply of money is. When Walter refuses, Stan punches him and promises a lot more punches if Walter doesn’t give in. That’s the origin of the “friends or enemies” remark.

Scene I

Walter and Uncle Garth are sitting on the porch watching Hub give his “what every boy needs to know about being a man” speech to a bunch of tough guys that Hub has just defeated in combat. Walter asks for more Africa stories.

Uncle Garth:You don’t believe all this Africa stuff.

Walter:It’s a good story.

Scene II

Walter goes to stand with Uncle Hub in the middle of the night, looking over the lake. Garth has said that only Hub will tell Walter whatever happened to the legendary love of Hub’s life, the Princess Jasmine. Walter has come down to the lake to ask him.

Walter:These stories about Africa…about you. They’re true, aren’t they?

Uncle Hub:Doesn’t matter.

Walter:It does too. Around my mom, all I hear is lies. I don’t know what to believe in.

Uncle Hub:If you want to believe in somethin’, then believe in it. Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it.

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most.

Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.

Scene III

Mae and her thug boyfriend have returned, saying that Hub and Garth have all that money because they stole it from a bank back in the 1930s. Walter replies that they couldn’t have done that because they were in Africa in the 1930s.

Walter:Hub and Garth didn’t rob any banks. They were in Africa.

Mae:Africa! Oh Walter, be serious.

Walter:They were shanghaied to the French Foreign Legion and had adventures for forty years. They couldn’t have robbed any banks.

Stan: Oh come on pal, you don’t believe all that, do you?

Walter:Sure I do.

Mae:You? Mr. Doubting Thomas? Here Stan’s got actual evidence and you believe that Africa crap?

Walter:Yes. Yes I do.

Scene IV

Stan has taken Walter out to the barn, where he believes Garth and Hub’s money has been hidden. He is determined to scare the boy into telling him where it is. He punches Walter in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Then he lays out this proposition.

Stan:So what’s it gonna be, pal. Friends? Or enemies?

Walter: Defend yourself.

Movie Note: A full 11 seconds elapses between the question and the answer. During that 11 seconds, Walter’s face turns from passive fear to active joy and we hear, very faintly, the theme music of Garth and Hub’s Africa adventures.

Reflections

The struggle that these passages point to revolves around the nature of the stories. The first question we come across is whether they are historically valid. Walter is a skeptical kid by nature—as Mae’s comment in Scene III shows—and it seems completely beyond belief that the events that make up the stories actually occurred. That way of assessing the Africa stories returns late in the narrative when Walter tries to use the Africa stories as a way of showing that Hub and Garth are not bank robbers. It is the historical accuracy of the stories that Mae has in mind when she uses the word “believe”

But in Uncle Hub’s fullest account of the value of the stories (Scene II), he says “believe in,” rather than “believe.” When Walter says he needs to know about the Africa stories, he says he has lived a life of being lied to and he doesn’t know what to believe—he doesn’t know, he means, “what is verifiably true.” That’s important to Walter because his mother, Mae, lies to him a lot. But Uncle Hub’s response has nothing at all to do with verifiability. “If you want to believe in something,” he says, “then believe in it.” Hub is talking about asserting the supreme value of what makes life good, things like honor, courage, and virtue.

This has always been the tension of Christianity as a historical religion. We maintain that an event actually occurred. We maintain that the event is the basis of our commitment to the values that the event displays. The charm of Secondhand Lions is that Walter moves from asking the “what is true” question to committing himself to the “what is right” question over the course of the film.

So Walter’s response in Scene I indicates only that he finds Uncle Garth’s stories interesting in a time when he has nothing else to do. By Scene II, he wants to know whether Uncle Hub’s adventures actually happened—whether they are historically verifiable in principle.

Uncle Hub’s response sweeps past the question of “believing that an event really occurred” and doesn’t stop until it gets to “values that are worth our commitment.” These things are worth “believing in.” These are things Walter can choose to believe in, regardless of how unreliable his mother is; regardless of how much he has come to clutch empirical certainty as a solution. Certainty is not a solution; commitment to ultimate values is the solution and we are free to commit ourselves to them just be choosing to. In fact, as Stan will find out in Scene IV, no one can stop us.

And Hub snuffs the latent confusion in Walter’s mind by stating clearly that “actual occurrence” is not a condition of such a commitment to values. In fact, Hub lays the contradiction out in three successive statements of relationship

Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason you can’t believe in it;
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most; and
Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.

So, in order: you can believe in it even if it is not true at the level of historical occurrence. Then, this is particularly true of the most important things. It is the most important things about which we must say that “they may or may not be true.” And finally, it is the values themselves that contain worth. Our obligation to believe in them is only a recognition that they are worth believing in.

This matter of believing and believing in comes to a remarkably clear focus in Scene IV. His mother challenges Walter, “You don’t believe in all that Africa crap, do you?” It is interesting that she uses the “believe in” form, but she means “believe as a matter of historical fact.”

Notice how far Walter has come from his conversation in Scene I with Uncle Garth. Walter asks for more of the Africa story. Uncle Garth says, “You don’t believe all this Africa stuff.” This is the “believe” form; it means, you don’t believe these events actually occurred. It means, oddly, the same thing Mae means by “believe in.” Walter doesn’t answer the question. He asks for the stories on the ground that they are good stories, engaging stories. When Mae challenges him directly—You don’t believe in all this Africa crap…” —he answers directly, “Yes. I do.” And that answer is only moments away from his being punched by Stan and he is, in that way, asked the question much more directly. His answer to Stan, “Defend yourself!” is the same answer he gave his mother. Yes. I do.

This solution—the transition from “good stories” to “Yes, I do believe them” looks so good on the screen that we are tempted, as Christians, to follow that same path. We would say, as Hub did, that values like honor, courage, and virtue or their Christian equivalents, are so True that they are worth believing in whether all that stuff about Jesus of Nazareth happened or not. I think that would be a mistake.

It has never been the position of the church that the values Jesus exemplified are so
ultimately worthy that they are worth “believing in” whether there ever was a Jesus or not. It has (almost) always been the position of the church that “when the time was right, God sent his Son.” The Son lived out obedience to God and exemplified the values that characterize God’s reign, but he came in history. The church “believes” that he came and we “believe in” the values—God’s values—which he showed and for which he was willing to die.

The values by themselves are “nice.” They are good values. But if they are not God’s values, then we honor them at the cost of honoring God. We value them as if they were of ultimate worth, but it is God who is of ultimate worth and our salvation has come to us by the means God has provided. In Jesus’ appearances after his death, we see the disciples saying with wonder, “So…it was all true.”

Also…in Secondhand Lions, there is what amounts to a post-resurrection scene. The director showed good judgment in removing it from the theater version of the film. It is too long and complicated. Thank God he left it on the DVD. It relies on Josh Lucas—a face we scarcely see in the movie—as the adult Walter to bring off the final confirmatory scene. And it really doesn’t work as narrative.

But it works great as theology. Walter is making a few remarks at Hub and Garth’s funeral when a van of the French Foreign Legion shows up, their horses leaping out of the vans and assuming a formation of respect for one of their own. The old sheik shows up, scars on both cheeks, just as the story has it, and breathing through an oxygen mask. “So…” says one of Walter’s sons, “it’s all true.” And the adult Walter, just a little slower than his son, agrees in wonderment, “It’s all true.”

Uncle Hub’s Confession of Faith

That people are basically good. Honor, courage and virtue? mean everything. That power and money, money and power, mean nothin’;. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this. Love, true love, never dies.

Posted in Movies, Theology, ways of knowing | Tagged believing in what is good, believing what is true, history and faith, Secondhand Lions | Leave a comment

Did the Media Go Too Far?

Posted on July 23, 2015 by hessd

This is mostly a rant about how television “news” operates. If you’ve never watched news programs on television or if you do watch and like what you are seeing, this is probably not the essay you want to read. On the other hand, it is really easy for me to write, because nearly all the writing has been done by Jill Ciment in her novel Heroic Measures, which has recently been made into a movie, Five Flights Up. The role of the media—the way they work a story without actually providing any information about it—is prominent in the book. In the movie, not so much.

When I started watching the news on television, I watched “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” featuring Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. It was fifteen minutes long. NBC announced plan to extend it to thirty minutes and someone asked Brinkley what he thought about that. He didn’t oppose it directly, but he did remark that some days, there are really not thirty minutes of news. Jill Ciment’s story is, in large part, a story of how they have solved Brinkley’s dilemma.

Let’s start with the last of the clips I have taken from the novel and which I have used as the title.

“Stay tuned,” says the newscaster, “next up, the results of tonight’s poll Did the Media Go too Far? and an exclusive interview with Pamir’s girlfriend from rehab, Debbie Twitchell.”

My answer to that question is a resounding Yes! The media did go too far. Further, they went too far down a road where they should never have gone at all if “news” is their business. If generating viewership and thereby advertising dollars is their business, then we’d have to say that they handled it pretty well.

Here is the event that starts the media journey down “the road.”

“The tanker jackknifed; it’s blocking all in-bound lanes,” Ruth continues. “Police don’t know if it was an accident or if the driver swerved on purpose. The mayor is asking everyone to remain calm and to not drive into Manhattan tonight.
Last night’s graphic—the truck’s headlamps as seen by the night-vision robot with Danger in the Tunnel splashed across it—appears on the screen. The morning newscaster, the blond in Washington, D.C., promises that after the station break she’ll be right back with an exclusive interview with the truck driver’s family and friends.

So “Danger” is the first issue. Certainly there is no denying that. It’s a truck full of flammable liquid. Of course it is dangerous. Now we go to “interviewing the family.”

The truck driver’s uncle and mother have faces like walnuts, shiny tacks for eyes. They’re standing on a snowy sidewalk before a row house in Queens. Behind them, neighbors jockey for a position on the television screen. The mother wears a massive black garment under an overcoat and a headscarf, though Alex and Ruth can’t tell if the scarf is worn for warmth or for religious conviction. It looks like something their grandmothers might have worn. The uncle, a stout man with a black mustache as big as a pocket comb, reads a statement in a stiff guttural accent that goes slack with emotion: “Abdul Pamir is a devout, gentle, and caring son, husband, father, uncle, brother, and nephew. He was born in Uzbekistan, and became a proud American two years ago. We want him to come home safely.”

Danger, Will Robinson! The truck driver is a foreigner. He is an Uzbek, which means, among other things, that he was recently part of the USSR. His parents are “foreign-looking.” That’s why the “massive black garment” on the mother and the “black mustache as big as a pocket comb” on the father are included. A “headscarf for religious reasons” suggests Islam, as does the name Abdul. We have gone well past the flammability of the truck’s cargo now and are approaching the flammability of American xenophobia.

Alex turns on the television: Live Press Conference pulses in the screen’s upper corner. Camera lights, as bright as competing suns, irradiate a makeshift stage in the lobby at city hall. A burly man, captioned FBI Spokesman, the short mayor, and the buzz-cut police chief in full regalia approach a lectern crowned by microphones. The burly spokesman reads a statement: “At eight twenty-two, the aqua-bomb detector finished its sweep of the tank. As of this hour, we believe there is no bomb.” Barrages of questions are hailed at him, but he ignores them. “We’re asking New Yorkers to stay on high alert until the driver’s in custody.” The mayor leans into the microphones. “Keep your eyes and ears open, but go about your lives. Soon as the city engineers give the go-ahead, mine will be the first car through the tunnel. We will not take questions at this time.”

Visually, we have the mayor, a burly man identified as an FBI spokesman and the police chief in full regalia. As to “information,” we learn that they have sent a bomb detector to determine whether there is a bomb attached to this “jack-knifed” semi, whose driver has fled the scene. Everyone is asked to stay on high alert. For what exactly is not specified.

And that was the good part. That was “news.” Now we get “reaction to the news.”

The screen bisects into halves—the basset-eyed newscaster in New York and the blonde in Washington. “What they’re not saying,” the blonde says, “is that Pamir might be wearing the bomb and that’s why they didn’t find one in the truck.”
“You’re right, Kat, the device could be on him and he could be anywhere at this point.”

I think that the “they” in “what they are not saying” is scary, although she might have meant just the FBI, the police, and the mayor. Also, “not saying” is scary. Why are they not saying something that we need to know? The line between “not saying” and “withholding” is a very fine line. And then there is the question of a bomb. Why would he be wearing a bomb? I think it is because his name is Abdul Pamir and his family is from Uzbekistan.

“GOOD MORNING, EVERYBODY,” SAYS THE basset—eyed newscaster. “Before I bring on my first guest, a forensic psychologist and consultant for Homeland Security, to help answer the question—Is Pamir a suicide bomber or not?—lct’s see what the American people think. Here’s how our viewers responded to this morning’s polling question. Seventy-seven percent say yes, Pamir is a suicide bomber, twelve percent say no, and eleven percent isn’t sure. We’ll be right back to see if the experts agree.”

Of course, it doesn’t matter very much what the answer to the question is. It’s the question that matters. It pairs “Pamir” and “suicide bomber.” We might ask why it matters what people think, remembering that all they know is what the media have told them, but, of course, it matters a great deal to the station that people feel they have been asked and also that they keep on watching this particular station to see whether others agree with them. And if it weren’t a fact—a hard clear fact—then why would they have experts there to talk about it? A forensic psychologist? Homeland Security? Please.

The basset-eyed newscaster’s face is as large as the moon. He wears the expression of an oracle about to make a prediction. Across his brow is written Breaking News—Target: New York City.

New York City is now a target. OK.

“The FBI has Pamir cornered nearby in a Bed Bath and Beyond,” Alex tells her. “They have one on the Upper East Side?”
“It’s just around the corner,” the moon-faced guard pipes in.
“Does he have a bomb?” Ruth asks.
“He has hostages,” Alex says.
The garment fades and the basset-eyed newscaster takes over the screen. “Only fifty-two percent of our viewers say they’d come out if their mother called. ‘What do the experts think?”
He’s turns to the double-chinned forensic psychologist from this morning. Six hours under the hot lights and her lipstick looks as if it’s melting. “The suicide bomber believes he’s doing this for his mother,” she says.

The cast is still the same. There are telephoto shots from circling helicopters. Pamir has taken hostages in the kitchenware section of Bed, Bath and Beyond. His mother is standing outside, so there is something to see, even if it is the same loop they have been showing for half an hour. The forensic psychologist is still in the studio. The public is still being queried about questions for which they have no knowledge at all.

A bullhorn blasts, but before Ruth can make out what’s being said the words break into echoes against the buildings. Pamir lowers his hands and begins struggling to open his coat, a puffy, hooded gray parka that almost reaches his knees. He tugs at the zipper, but he can’t seem to undo it. The teeth appear to be caught on something. In his panic to get the coat open, he pulls on the zipper as if it is a rip- cord and he is in freefall. Ruth can’t tell if the camera is running in slow motion, or her mind is, but Pamir seems to be fighting with his zipper for an eternity.
Suddenly, white feathers appear to hang in the air all around him. Only when the feathers settle does Ruth realize Pamir’s ripped his parka in two to get it off. He pulls what remains of it over his head. Ruth can see he isn’t strapped with explosives.
The bullhorn barks again, and Pamir tosses his coat into the street. He peels off his sweater, unbuttons his shirt, and throws them on top. Clad only in a T-shirt, he slowly rises to his feet and removes hi sneakers and socks, flings them into the pile, too. “The pants,” the bullhorn barks. He undoes his belt, zipper, and steps out of his pants. Shivering, he kicks them away with his bare foot.
He pulls his T-shirt over his head, and leaves his hands up in the air, but the bullhorn’s not satisfied. It barks and barks until he takes 0ff his underwear and lies down on the ground, spread-eagle. The station discreetly covers his derriere with what looks like a smear of Vaseline.

This is great TV. The “terrorist” is now forced to strip naked and lie on the cold pavement. I can’t think why they would bother with a trial.

“WITNESSES SWEAR THEY SAW A BOMB UNDER Pamir’s coat,” says the evening newscaster, a prematurely white-haired man with a ferret-like face. “Dozens of people described the exact same explosive device down to the number of dynamite sticks and the detonator button’s color. Now the mayor tells us Pamir never had a bomb. Was it a mass hallucination? What did these witnesses really see?” he asks his guest, an intense, thin woman with flyaway hair captioned, “Author of Mass Hysteria.”

One of my favorites. Witnesses agree that they saw something they could not have seen and which the mayor says was never there at all. What shall we do? I know. Let’s bring in a woman who has written about mass hysteria. The “story” has gone away. The experts that can opine about the story have gone away. All that is left, is an expert who can comment on the fantasy the media have devised and explain it as a mass glitch. Still there is no one to talk about market share and the cost of advertising. Dear me. And now we arrive where we began.

“Stay tuned,” says the newscaster, “next up, the results of tonight’s poll Did the Media Go too Far?

You could say that. The only consistent element is the “stay tuned” part. Is there a Video-Industrial Complex. Is it too soon to start worrying about it? Don’t forget to cast your vote and tune in at 11:00 to see how many of your fellow Americans agree with you. We’ll step aside now for some messages.

Posted in Politics, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged "no news" news, expert witnesses, Heroic Measures, media creation of public opinion, news helicopter | Leave a comment

Men learn from Hobbes and Women from Rousseau

Posted on July 20, 2015 by hessd

OK, so it’s never going to replace Mars and Venus. Also, it’s not precisely true. But it is mostly true—more often than not—and it has the same principal virtue that John Gray’s Mars/Venus books have. It teaches that there are two complete orders of reality and that standing in one and judging the other is an exercise in futility.

You need to know that there are two and you need to understand the acts of each in the

Women trying to solve conflict between men

context of the life-world of each. Gray teaches—over-teaches, really—that men make certain presuppositions about what women are like. They use “what men are like” thinking that they are using “what everyone is like” as the template. Men think, in other words, that they are using a gender neutral standard. When women act differently, the men think they cheated somehow. Then men read the Mars and Venus books and learn several important things.

They learn that the women didn’t cheat (or deceive or misrepresent, etc.).
They learn that there is a way women act and if you learn to judge them by the standard they use, you can find a way to make it all make sense.
They learn that the way they act is, in fact, not the way “persons” act, but the way men act.
They learn that acting this way is going to be received in a very predictable and not a very positive way by women.
They learn, however, that there is a way of understanding how they see things and that by honoring that way of seeing—not by adopting it yourself, but by knowing it is there— you can work out a very satisfying way of being together.

Brief Digression: When I said that Gray “over-teaches,” I meant that his system works because he lumps all women into the same model and all men into the other model. His approach is not friendly to individual differences. It is also not friendly to men and women who, for whatever reason, have adopted the way of thinking more typical of the other. So I’m not arguing for the validity of Gray’s typing. What I am saying is that he teaches more successfully than anyone I have run across that there are two ways, and identifying the way you yourself do things as “the normal way” is only a self-inflicted wound.

End of Digression (told you it was brief): I want to use the same essential gimmick Gray uses, but I want to use it about something else. I want to talk about interest aggregation.

So the first thing to do is the grossly oversimplify the teachings of Thomas Hobbes
(1588—1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1788). Rousseau taught (and his followers, the Rousseaueans believe) that there is a general will. If I were writing about societies as a whole, I would probably capitalize, e.g., General Will, but I’m going to be talking about deciding what movie to see, so I don’t think I will capitalize this use. When we express our “interest”—when we “vote,” for instance—what we are doing is expressing our best guess about what the general will is. We are saying, “This is what I think will be best for us.” You can see that Hobbes, at the left, looks bemused.

Hobbes had no idea a any transcendent “general will” at all. On our menu are: a) the war of each against all and b) domination by a large and competent central government (Leviathan). Hobbes (and his followers, the Hobbesians) taught that humans arrange things as best they can. We do know, after all, what we want. We strive to achieve what we want even at the cost of what you want. Most times, it doesn’t work out well and in the long run, it never works out well. Life without Leviathan is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Enough political philosophy. A group of men and women are trying to decide what movie to see. The men prefer violent action movies so they vote for violent action movies. The women prefer social comedies, but the women, following Rousseau, don’t vote their preferences. They vote for the kind movie that they believe will be best for the group as a whole. Possibly a historical drama, accurately and colorfully told, of which there are several.

The women propose the historical drama and are very surprised to see that the men all believe that the group’s welfare will be best served by seeing the violent action movie. Who would have thought it? Why would they believe that such a movie would be best for all? The women, seeing that they must have guessed wrongly about the general will, express their preference for the violent action movie. So it’s unanimous. Or at least it looks unanimous to the guys. Here is Rousseau, thinking of the General Will or possibly about Happy Hour.

This same decision process operates week after week. Finally one of the women owns up to not really enjoying the violent action movies. The other women chime in; they don’t either. The men are surprised. Really? You keep choosing these movies, and now we learn that you don’t like them. What’s going on?

“Surprised” is the happiest phase of this process for quite a while, so let’s linger. Here’s what the guys know. They are incredibly lucky to be in the company of women who like violent action movies, one after another. Now, after many such movies, they learn that the women actually don’t like that kind of movie although “they said they did.” (We know that is not what they said. We know that they expressed their guess about what would be best for all.) Now the men are wondering, “If you can’t find out what they want by asking them, how can you find out?”

Now let’s go beyond the “surprise” phase. Let’s say that the women blame the men for choosing only the films they like and never choosing the films the women like. The men don’t like to be blamed for something everyone agreed they all should do. The women discover at that point that the men are not “voting” for their sense of the general will, they are only voting their own preferences. Who could be as selfish as that? Really.

The men, it turns out, are selfish. When they say, “Let’s see Mad Max III: The Revenge,” all they mean is, “I want to see Mad Max III.” No other person’s interests are taken into account. The interests of the group as a whole are not taken into account. These men are all I, me, mine.

The women, it turns out, are devious. They say they want to see Mad Max III: The Revenge, but they didn’t. The problem of aggregating the interests of the group and making a choice that fits those interests pretty well is a knotty problem. It can be managed—the guys have been managing it this way for years—but it requires a base level of honesty by the participants. What is this thing about I said I wanted this, but all along, I really wanted that. What is all that about?

The men are exasperated. Their lament has been immortalized by Henry Higgins in the line, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”

The next time the question of movies comes up, it will be dealt with by some wounded and wary men and women. The men will ask for nominations, knowing that they can’t trust the women to tell the truth. The women will know that when the men nominate a movie, they have only their own interest in mind. They don’t care about the preferences of the women. They don’t care about the long-term viability of the group.

Things get worse and worse. The men are punished for “being honest about their preferences.” The women are castigated for being dishonest in the information collection phase and then vindictive in the assessment phase. The Hobbesians know that the Rousseaueans can’t be trusted. The Rousseauseans know the Hobbesians are heartless bastards.

There is, of course, a solution. The men need to understand that the women are not expressing their preferences, although they seem to be. Just understanding that is a major achievement. Beyond that, they will need either to try to imagine what a “general will” could possibly be or they will need to get the women to express their own “selfish choices” as if that were something to be proud of.

The women need to understand that the men are not refusing to recognize choices other than their own. The men believe—where to they get these ideas?—that if everyone expresses a selfish choice, the group will be better able to take all the choices into account and make a good decision. Just understanding that much is a major achievement. Beyond that, the women will have to imagine a way of piling up selfish choices in such a way that the group is benefitted or they will need to get the men to take the welfare of all into account as they make their choices. [1]

This brings us back to the wisdom that John Gray popularized. There really are two distinct ways of addressing the world. Each one makes sense when everyone is using it. But if you know there are two—and there are, in fact, more than two and they aren’t all based on gender—then you can allow for the possibility that arriving at the common good might be harder than you thought.

But if you know this much, you have a chance.

[1] It’s harder than it looks. The men believe that “the general will” cannot be known directly. That’s why you start with honest preferences and bargain your way toward optimal choices. The women believe that it’s a moral matter, a the very foundation. You don’t just say what you want; you take into account the needs and wishes of others before you open your mouth.

Posted in Politics, Sustainability, Words | Tagged devious women, getting along, interest aggregation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, selfish men, Thomas Hobbes | Leave a comment

They Could At Least Have Warned Us

Posted on July 17, 2015 by hessd

I do like democracy. I don’t like how very limited our democracy has become. I would like for us to be better. I’m a fan, a booster; but I think our team has lost a lot over the last few seasons—since, to pick a date, 1948.

The kind of democracy we are now can be represented by diners who get to choose from the menu, but have almost no control of what is on the menu or of how any particular menu item will be prepared. That’s really not good enough. We really need for the people running the restaurant to put the right things on the menu. In many cases, “the right things” are the things people want to eat. Sometimes, though, they are the things the people really need to eat.

Here are several views of what I am calling, in this metaphor, “restaurant management.”

Here’s how Edmund Burke and I feel about the restaurant management. Burke said it best:

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

This expresses my point that sometimes the managers need to exercise their knowledge and their judgment and put “the right things” on the menu.

In the next quote, Herman Göring makes the point that you can get the people to order whatever you want them to order if you know the tricks.

Gilbert: In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. [1]

I like to look at this dilemma in the restaurant setting because it is so small in scale and so unthreatening. It’s going to get a good deal more threatening in just a moment, but let me stay at the restaurant for just a bit more. If you were serving your customers french fries and a substantial group of the regulars wanted tater tots, you would just smile and shift over to tater tots. Same thing if they wanted sweet potato fries rather than regular potato fries.

But what would happen if you tripled the price of everything on the menu? That extra money would enable you to add something to the food so that their great grandchildren would be protected from a plague that might or might not strike the area in 2069? I’m going to guess that there would be an uprising and in short order, the cook would be instructed to put the old menu and the old prices back in place. So far, so good.
In 2069, a devastating plague hits the town and the great grandchildren of those early diners drop dead almost immediately. An inquiry is held and the people who were running the restaurant at the time of the aborted attempt to “strengthen the menu” are tried and convicted as mass murderers.

I am, as I said, a fan of democracy. I like to order from the menu as much as the next guy. I am also a fan of far-sighted leadership, when it is necessary.

We can have it either of two ways. We can demand that the state provide for us only the services we want, rather than the ones we need and particularly rather than the ones our great grandchildren will need. On the other side of that coin, we can refuse the judgments of our leaders that some services we need but don’t want or, more likely, don’t want to pay for, should be put in place.

I’m OK with that. We demand control and we accept responsibility.

The other way is for us to take the counsel of our leaders and do the things that have to be done. Then when the distant danger has been prepared for and many lives are saved when it actually occurs, then we praise the leaders for their vision and their willingness to oppose our short term preferences.

I’m OK with that too. We give our consent to the judgment of our leaders about matters we don’t know how to understand or how to appreciate properly. Then we praise them for having done well or condemn them for having done badly.

But today, I’m thinking of a school superintendent on the Oregon coast.
The last person I met with in the Pacific Northwest was Doug Dougherty, the superintendent of schools for Seaside, which lies almost entirely within the tsunami-inundation zone. Of the four schools that Dougherty oversees, with a total student population of sixteen hundred, one is relatively safe. The others sit five to fifteen feet above sea level. When the tsunami comes, they will be as much as forty-five feet below it.

In 2009, Dougherty told me, he found some land for sale outside the inundation zone, and proposed building a new K-12 campus there. Four years later, to foot the hundred-and-twenty-eight-million-dollar bill, the district put up a bond measure. The tax increase for residents amounted to two dollars and sixteen cents per thousand dollars of property value. The measure failed by sixty-two per cent. Dougherty tried seeking help from Oregon’s congressional delegation but came up empty. The state makes money available for seismic upgrades, but buildings within the inundation zone cannot apply. At present, all Dougherty can do is make sure that his students know how to evacuate. [2]

When we have, in the Pacific Northwest, the enormous earthquake and tsunami that are overdue, we will lose a lot of lives. That’s inevitable. If we prepare for that event, we will lose many fewer lives. Saving all those lives is what we call a “public policy outcome.” It’s an outcome that benefits many of us and that is achieved by the establishment and the funding of a new policy—a policy that, in this case, prepares for an increasingly likely natural disaster.

Here are some quick estimates from the current New Yorker.

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.

Just a personal note. Bette and I live about half a mile west of I-5. Also:

FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

Facing losses of that magnitude, Oregonians are going to be really angry. My interest, as a political psychologist, is what people will do with their anger. Our political leaders are supposed to prepare us for things like this. We know they did not do their job because we were, after all, not prepared. Why should they escape the penalty for their failure? They ran the state during all those years as if preparation were unimportant and now we know that it was crucially important and someone has to get the blame.

accountability road sign illustration design over a white background

It won’t be us, I’m guessing. There was never an election that gave us the chance to choose between “Prepare for the Inevitable” candidates and “What, Me Worry?” candidates. Those are also the high tax and low tax candidates, just so we are keeping the policy proposals lined up with the fiscal implications. Had there been an election like that, we in Oregon would have overwhelmingly chosen the “What, Me Worry” candidates and used in our own private ways the money that would otherwise have been required for public programs. Of course, the parties know that, which is why they never ran for office under those two designations.

We warned them not to offer us that choice and they obeyed and did not offer us that choice. So it couldn’t possibly be our fault. It must be their fault.

[1] Gustave Gilbert, a German-speaking intelligence officer and psychologist. This interview was conducted in Goering’s cell in 1946.

[2] Kathryn Schultz, “The Really Big One”, The New Yorker, July 20, 2015.

Posted in Living My Life, Political Psychology, Politics | Tagged Edmund Burke, Great Cascadia Earthquake, hard political choices, Herman Goering, political accountability | Leave a comment

Reading Strategically

Posted on July 14, 2015 by hessd

I am a strategic reader. It is the scandal of my book group. Last month, my grandson, who is headed off to college, drew back from me when I described what I meant by that term and said something on the order of, “Oh…that’s just wrong.” Sorry if I misquoted you, Karl.

I began as a strategic reader for the very best of reasons. I didn’t have any choice. The reading schedule in grad school was brutal during my summer at Miami (Ohio) and I survived it by adopting a very simple plan. I begin with the question, “How well do I need to read this?” I defined “well” as “what will I need to know to stay out of trouble?” Then I would divide the number of pages required by the number of minutes available and get to work.

I use a version of that same process even now. One of the ways I manage my life these days is to trade book recommendations with friends and then, later on, sit down to talk with them about the book. The motives are entirely different from grad school, but the process is pretty much the same. I have a friend who said last week, “Oh…you’ve got to read this.” When I started the book, I realized very soon that, as much as I valued the friend, I wasn’t going to value the book all that much.

So here’s what I did. I read the first chapter. Then I scanned quickly through the rest of the book to get a sense of what it had to offer to a “strategic reader.” Then I went back and read everything that bore on that particular theme. It was enjoyable. It was efficient. And now I am looking forward to sitting down with my friend and listening to what he liked about it and telling him what I liked.[1]

One of the good things about being in a book group is that you read books you would not have chosen yourself. But sometimes there is very little relationship between what the book wants to do and what you want to do. (That brings up the author’s intention question, to which we will return.) I don’t feel I owe the author anything, but I do owe the book group. All of us read things that matter a lot more to someone else and the only respectable thing to do is to give yourself to that book as a way of honoring the group and all the friendships it holds in place.

I have an example in mind. We are currently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time, a study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the era of World War II. I started into the book with high hopes because I like Goodwin and immediately got bogged down. TMI. Way too much! I know she has a researcher—many, probably, but one of them appears on the dust jacket with the author—but there are lots of things about Eleanor’s relationship with her father or Franklin’s with his mother, that I really don’t want to know. Yet.

On the other hand, I do know a little about World War II, particularly about the diplomatic debates and the military preparations, and it is amazing how satisfying it is to learn a little more about something you already know something about.

So I am not “reading,” No Ordinary Time; I am “reading for.” I am reading No Ordinary Time for the diplomatic debates and the military preparations. That interest gives me a focus and I read all that material and some additional material on each side of it. I learned some interesting things about how Winston Churchill saw the war and how Eleanor Roosevelt saw the war. When I go back to this book again, probably in a year or so, that relationship will be part of the focus and I will read “some additional material,” perhaps about Franklin’s relationship with the collection of very attentive and competent women with whom he surrounded himself.

Assuming I read this book several times over the next ten years, which is more likely than not, I will take as the focus of my reading more and more of what Goodwin has to offer. I will not go very far from my own interest, but as my interest expands, I don’t have to go very far to be in new territory. And this “new territory” is the very place I looked at originally and said, “TMI. Way too much!”

One more example, then I’ll try to give a serious answer to my critics, prominent among whom is my librarian wife, Bette. I recently read a novel called Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside, by Martin Walker.[2] I read the first part: I got the feel of the town, I met Bruno, I found the event that sets the plot in motion. Then I read the last part to see how everything turned out. Then I went back to the place where I had stopped my page by page reading—this is where the murder is reported—and started reading.

I am a Step B reader. It’s what I like best. A is the setup; C is the culmination—or, since it’s a French story, the dénouement. Then comes the B part. I watch new characters arise, new events slide into the necessary path of the narrative. I see much more than I would otherwise, since I know where the narrative is going, and I enjoy it much more because I am not reading for C. I know C. I am enjoying the whole range of B, every part. It’s wonderful.

Now about the author’s intention. This is Harper Lee, by the way, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird and recently, of Go Set a Watchman. Modern literary theory holds that we can’t really know what it is and furthermore, that there is no reason to prefer the author’s intentions to our own. But modern literary theory baffles me. My reasons are much easier to hate. I like to read books in a way that lowers the cost to me and that raises the enjoyment I receive from reading them.[3]

That seems so sensible to me. I think I would continue to do it even if it did not scandalize my friends.

[1] And I am not resenting him for dragging me through this long and boring book.
[2] Bette and I are going on a bike and barge tour of France in September and reading murder mysteries is my favorite way of learning about the place we are going.
[3] I read technical scientific articles according to the same principle, but using different markers. I don’t look for the murder, in other words. I go to the statistical device I can understand best and to the discussion that I can apply most broadly. Then I quit.

Posted in Books | Tagged a library of friends, a style for each purpose, author's intention, Harper Lee | Leave a comment