Artist – n.
A person who calls himself, or herself, an artist.
Bright – n.
An atheist in search of a congregation.
Community – n.
Any grouping of people, proximate or otherwise, sharing some common characteristic and therefore assumed to have a meaningful social bond (e.g. the double amputee caregivers community.)
Coward – n.
A bad guy. A general purpose insult with no particular meaning. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks the perpetrators, who died voluntarily for their cause, were branded “cowards”. Since that time, this usage has persisted. (see: “Hero”)
Denier – n.
Originally, a holocaust denier (i.e. a person who denies that the extraordinarily well documented extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany ever occurred.) Now, simply a term of derision for anyone who is skeptical about something the speaker has come to believe.
Facebook – n.
A playground in cyberspace constructed to meet the rather dissimilar needs of teenagers, grandmothers, and pedophiles. A place where millions of people who are appalled by slavery can attempt to sell themselves to the rest of the world.
Judgmental – adj.
Having standards.
National Conversation – n.
US Politics: A fictitious backyard chat between 300 million amiable neighbors. The call for such an exchange is popular among the political elites precisely because it is an impossibility with an appealing democratic smell.
Racist – n.
A white non-flagellant.
Small Talk – n.
A species of speech act equivalent in intent to the tail wagging of the domestic dog.
Twitter – n.
A communication forum based on the assumption that a paragraph is unnecessary and verbose. An assault on language, and ultimately on thought. In nature, tweeting songbirds are actually engaging in mating rituals and territorial disputes. The difference between Twitter and nature, then, is largely one of musical tastes.
(see: Addenda to the devil's dictionary - no1. )
September 22, 2014
September 18, 2014
A Weakness of Civilization
“If
a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make
the laws of a nation.” - Andrew Fletcher
Before I
launch into my exposition, let me sketch out a couple of assumptions. First, I assume that, all else being equal, a
polity informed by facts is usually in a better position to make successful
decisions than one informed by non-facts.
I am not implying, as some have, that political decision-making should
be chiefly informed by academics or scientists.1 I am simply taking as a given that facts are
usually a better basis for decision making than feelings, speculations or
ideological dogmas. Second, I assume
that one of the characteristics of a good system of social organization (e.g. a
government) is that it advances the general happiness of its participants. By this I am by no means advocating for the
superiority of socialism, but simply making the assumption that a government
that creates a general state of misery by either intention or incompetence isn’t
a good government. If a government
creates a living hell for the majority of its citizens, it doesn’t really
matter, for our purposes, how large or beautiful its monuments are.
In an idealized democracy, or any form of government with
consequential democratic institutions, an individual voter is assumed to be
capable of acquiring at least enough factual understanding of the world to vote
for laws or candidates that will promote his or her own interests. Being able to vote for ballot initiative or
candidate “X” over ballot initiative or candidate “Y” is obviously meaningless
if one knows nothing relevant about either “X” or “Y”. An uniformed voter undermines the concept of
democracy at its root. How, we must then
ask, do people understand the parts of the world beyond their direct
experience? Broadly speaking,
there are two ways one can conceptualize circumstances one cannot directly
experience. The first way is
narratively. The second is by some
combination of logical inferences and statistics. We will begin with the second.
We all know what statistics are, so I won’t bother with a
definition. When I say we can know
something logically, I am not talking about a rigorously nomothetic
standard, but rather the very mundane sort of induction any more-or-less lucid
human being is capable of making. For
example, if one knows that a magnitude 8 earthquake has just occurred under San
Francisco, one does not need any further information to reasonably assume that
there has also been extensive property damage and probably at least a few
deaths. Likewise, if you know that group
“A” has been protesting policy “B”, it is fair to assume group “A” at least
feels strongly that policy “B” is objectionable. This is all I mean by logic in this context –
merely the predictable correlation between certain events or circumstances with
others.
Statistics can be misleading, incorrect, or deliberately falsified, but
if they are collected and presented in good faith they are often the closest
approach to truth that we have, particularly about the kind of subjects that
are the most likely to arise in a political context. The magnitude of a problem, and therefore the
amount of attention that should be devoted to it, is usually best revealed by
statistical analysis. Despite this
strength, statistical analysis has its limitations as a way of communicating
information with the general public. For
many people, statistics are indecipherable and boring. I am old enough to remember Ross Perot’s
abortive 1992 presidential campaign.
Perot, a businessman, made a series of half-hour television broadcasts
that were essentially business presentations centered around a series of
printed graphs. Informative though these
presentations may have been, the public not only yawned, but snickered. Though Perot dropped his candidacy for other
reasons, the public’s lack of interest in statistical explanations was
striking. I had never seen a candidate
for anything hold up a chart before, and I don’t believe I have seen one since.
Logical induction, too, has limitations. One can say that a magnitude 8 earthquake can
be expected to cause property damage, but one cannot say with equal certainty
that it will cause looting. The behavior
of human beings, a matter of paramount political concern, is much too complex
to lend itself to simple causal assumptions.
Worse, the transition from the inductions one can reasonably make to
those one can’t is not abrupt, but a smooth continuum. It isn’t always possible to tell what one
actually knows from what one just assumes from the “common knowledge” of long
standing prejudice. Thus, when making
predictions about the future behavior of political candidates or the future
consequences of policies, logical induction is easily adulterated with all
manner of extraneous noise. The nature
of logic is likely to preserve a kind of internal coherence, in which a faulty
conclusion follows faithfully from a faulty premise, but coherence is merely
the preservation of the form of reason, rather than being any guarantor
of truth. Finally, even when inductions
are reasonable and appropriate, the iterative process of basing one induction
on another must eventually lead to conclusions which are not, themselves,
particularly sound.
Most people, including most intelligent ones, think narratively most
of the time. A narrative explanation is
one expressed in the form of a story.
Narrative explanations can also be misleading, of course, and they need
not be deliberate fabrications or malicious to be misleading. Consider the case of the first space shuttle
disaster, the explosion of the Challenger in 1986. All seven astronauts were killed, including,
notably, Christa McAuliffe, who was to be America’s first Teacher in Space. Why was Christa McAuliffe’s death especially
notable? Quite simply because it made a
good story. Children and parents across
the nation were heartbroken, or at least they were told to be. Six other astronauts died practically
unnoticed. Beyond the death of the
astronauts, on an average day in 1986, 126 people died in auto crashes. Were these other people somehow less dead? Did their families grieve less? Did their deaths have less real, tangible
impact on the lives of most viewers of the news? In every case, the answer is “no”. Nevertheless, the TV networks played the
video of McAuliffe’s parents watching the explosion, its significance dawning
on them with agonizing slowness, and they played it over, and over, and over
again. They milked the story for ratings
for a week. They created, from the
tragedy of an individual human being, a tragedy of national proportions. What I am trying to illustrate here is not so
much the well-known cynicism of the press, but the native psychology of our
species that such cynicism capitalizes on.
Let us delve a little deeper.
Imagine, if you can, that you were alive 8000 years ago – a neolithic
farmer living anywhere in the world.
Your perception of that world would have been completely different than
your perception of the world today.
Your world would have consisted almost entirely of the people and the
environment that you happen to experience first hand. You might have had some acquaintance with a
few nearby villages, and maybe some dim idea of the distant lands from which
peddlers or occasional raiders came, but most of the world you would have known
would have been the world you would have seen.
In such a world, a narrative explanation would be fairly likely to be
both accurate and relevant. The story of
your cousin’s death might well have had real consequences for you. A flood that removed a neighboring village
could be both a real tragedy and a possible concern. Critically, most of what you learned from
others narratively could have been verified by your own first hand
experience. Such was the world in
which almost all of our evolutionary history was spent. It is true that pre-civilized societies used
the narrative form to brew up deities and mythological histories for
themselves, but, in a small community, in most instances narratives would have
been testable. The narrative form of
understanding was both appropriate and sufficient for the context. It is, in fact, hard to imagine what a neolithic
farmer would have done with a modern notion like statistics – with the
knowledge, say, that 57.8% of the neolithic farmers on his or her continent
happened to suffer with tooth decay. It
mattered if the farmer himself had bad teeth, or if anyone in his family or
maybe his small village did. The fact
that we no longer live in neolithic villages is the problem.
When a TV reporter shoves a camera into the face of some weeping
person on another continent, the audience they are appealing to is our prehistoric
inner selves. They are, in effect,
making that person part of our mental community. That, of course, sounds very nice and decent
and humane – until you realize how incredibly deceptive it is. Consider a harmless, non-controversial
example. There are on average, about 50
fatal lightning strikes in the US every year.
Imagine that, for whatever reason, the news media suddenly decided to
cover all of them, and not merely cover them in passing but in depth and intensity
– breaking in on regular programming, showing pictures of the victims and their
stunned and saddened relatives. Imagine
further that the legislature mandated lightning safety training in all schools
and businesses, to be carried out at regular intervals. Without any knowledge of statistics regarding
the actual frequency of fatal lightning strikes, you would begin to imagine
Zeus had run amok. You would inevitably
see lightning strikes as a significant cause of death, and perhaps as a
national or global crisis demanding governmental action. You would, like it or not, see lightning
killing a member of your mental community on weekly basis. While no one has a particular interest in
magnifying the importance of lightning, the phenomena I have proposed is
entirely real. There is, frankly, no
such thing as fair and balanced news.
When you accept someone else as a reliable source of information,
whether that someone is a TV network, a web site, a magazine, an educator, or a
government – you are giving them the power to rank the importance of events
beyond your visual horizon. You are
accepting that, for the most part, the things they choose to emphasize will be
relevant and the things they choose to ignore will not. This is not merely a characteristic of those
with particular political axes to grind, but a feature of mass communication
itself, no matter how well-intended its purveyors might be. The reality is that, while each of us has a
certain set of impressions about the parts of the world that are beyond our
individual perceptual horizons, those impressions are features of our minds and
not necessarily the world. In short,
most of what we think we know about the world is merely a set of distortions
others have created for us.
The natural human tendency when confronted with this idea is to think
to oneself – “sure, there are plenty of naive people in the world who are
gullible enough to believe whatever hype comes their way – but I am
different.” My contention is that no
one is different. We all get second-hand
knowledge in the same limited number of ways.
People who like to see themselves as sophisticated tend to be drawn in
by more elaborate and nuanced narratives than the rest of humanity, but an
elaborate and nuanced story is nevertheless still a story, no more necessarily
true than the crudest bumper-sticker slogan.
“Yes, but my story is supported by the data,” one might protest. Data is a wonderful thing in principle, but
we have only the data that someone else has chosen to collect, interpret, and
present to us. In other words, even the
statistical perspectives we get are like pictures from a carefully chosen
angle, emphasizing those parts of reality someone wants us to see, and concealing
those elements that don’t advance their story.
I am pretty confident that the lightning fatality figure I cited earlier
is approximately accurate – but only because I am also pretty confident that no
one has much interest in distorting it.
Again, at least with regard to political knowledge, this is not a kind
of error to which our remote ancestors were really subject. The family, the village, and the clan are
knowable entities. The nation of a
million or a billion is not. The nation
is a fiction of the mind, a creature made of sweeping ideas anchored loosely to
a few well chosen facts. When an
official of the state makes a statement in the form “the nation grieves with
the Smith family for the loss of their son,” he is making a normative statement,
telling the public how to feel, not a descriptive statement, derived
from the results of some sort of comprehensive national poll. The power apparatus of the state is sometimes
small and coherent enough to know itself, but the hearts and minds of millions
are inevitably heterogeneous and largely unknowable.
The most obvious and painful consequence of this phenomenon is that it
renders democratic processes farcical.
Even assuming the mechanisms of voting and district apportionment are
left untampered with, the democratic process is ultimately reducible to a dual
between competing advertising agencies – or, to use the more quaint term,
between opposing balladeers. It is a
contest between two or more worldviews, each of which is an expedient mixture
of carefully selected facts, promises that cannot be guaranteed, and poetic
visions that mean little or nothing.
It should be noted that while democracy suffers greatly from this
barrier to human knowledge, other forms of government do not fare any
better. Whether a society is governed by
elected officials, communist committees, or an individual autocrat, it is still
a problem that no one can grasp the totality of the populations’ desires,
capacities, or needs all at once. The
cold blooded tyrant has the curious advantage of not caring much about the
public interest – but this conflicts with my second assumption: successful
oppression does not constitute good government.
While it is theoretically simpler for a small elite of leaders to have a
decent grasp of reality than it is for some enormous national polity, it is
also easier for them to pursue the most preposterous and dangerous
delusions. This is because elite
minorities are naturally more insulated from the immediate consequences of
their own bad decisions than democratic polities are – as well as more clever
in the sophisticated task of repairing their own narratives. An aristocrat can be persuaded that a
starving peasant is actually well-fed, but the balladeer has reached his limit
when he tries to convince the peasant himself with the same story.
It is ironic that contemporary humans tend to think of mythology as a
feature of ancient times, while we are arguably now more deeply embedded in
mythology than we have ever been. In
part this is simply because the mythology of the past usually appears childish
and naive, whereas contemporary mythology seems pertinent by definition.2
That which a culture ascribes value to acquires its own aura of importance and
reality. In absolute terms, though, it
is hard to say our remote ancestors were childish because they didn’t use
corporate buzzwords or immerse themselves in celebrity news. We are more technologically advanced,
certainly, but much of our most soaring technological ability is used for
little more than the care and feeding of various illusions – video games and
fashion being only two of innumerable possible examples. As a species, we have never really liked
reality very much, and we are happy to depart from it at the first opportunity
that presents itself.
While I will not deny a certain schadenfreude in criticizing humanity’s
epistemic limitations, I am not an utter defeatist on this matter. It is not the case that all suspect ideas are
equally near the truth – it is just the case that we are usually
neck-deep in uncertainty regarding which ideas are actually nearer to it. To take a popular example from history, we
know in some meaningful sense that the First World War really occurred. We can induce that there are just too many
photographs, written accounts, and otherwise inexplicable dead for the whole
thing to have been a hoax. We have logic
and statistics on our side. We know
about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and the lamentable cascade of
treaty obligations that set the armies of the European powers in motion. We know innumerable facts about the
subsequent fighting. What we do not know
are the answers to the overarching “why” questions. We cannot justify claims like Lenin’s, that
the First World War was an inevitable consequence of the imperialist stage of
capitalism, in which the lower classes had no honest stake. Neither can we meaningfully claim, like the
historian Barbara Tuchman did, that the French national lust for revenge was a
contributing factor. These are narrative
explanations, intended to bestow a sense of coherence on events that the events
themselves do not record. It is probably
fair to say, however, that both Lenin’s and Tuchman’s narratives are nearer the
causal mark than those the explanations for the war that have been provided by
astrologers. There are explanations we
can reasonably exclude, but beyond that we are lost in a sea of more-or-less
coherent but untestable theories. We
should not confuse “what is true” with “what makes sense.”
_____________________________________________________________________________
1 I think Sam Harris at least implies this in The Moral Landscape.
2 There are
exceptions. The 7th century
mythology of Islam has clearly become quite pertinent to some.
Posted by
E.M. Cadwaladr
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