Words among friends

Calling someone an asshole, morally corrupt or incompetent will probably not help them to see your point of view......

Reason: an afterthought

From an article I read the other day:

"I generally try not to get involved on slacktivist, because a lot of people who discuss there tend to disagree with me pretty rigorously. Some of them are pretty incisive when it comes to ripping apart bad logic, and it takes me a while to figure out why I still disagree with them (if, in fact, I do). Maybe I just think slower, but I need to really weigh things out carefully before I jump in, or I end up overextending myself into an untenable position."

"This lack of communication is often exacerbated by the psychos, and the people who foolishly endorse them. The media knows a good story has controversy and an ability to produce knee-jerk, gut reactions, so they ramp up the broo-haw-haw and watch as escalating tensions diminish the chance of communication and meaningful dialog."

This is a quite common experience for me and the author summarizes my own thoughts quite well. I tend to have all of these instinctive responses and only later, through careful thought, am I able to formulate some very clear justifications for my beliefs. Unfortunately  I think that's a sign we are going about everything backwards. It's also a sign I am dogmatically clinging to ideas and not really keeping an open mind. This probably has a lot to do with how combative we are with each other. These things tend to be battles. Not even-handed, thoughtful, caring, reflective conversations in pursuit of a better world. When I reflect on my own experiences, it is usually when I discuss things calmly and rationally with a close friend that I am able to change my mind. I need the gentle prodding of someone I trust to help me reframe my views.

I am still slowly wading through the Righteous Mind by Haidt and have really been thinking reflecting and focusing on the analogy the author presents of an elephant (our unconcious mind) and the rider (reason).   The author called his book a decoder ring for understanding the other side. He lays out quite a few psychological studies that suggest that we are led by our impressions/instinct/emotion/intuition much more than reason/logic.

I think watching the recent gun debate unfold has brought this into focus for me. No one (well few people) is looking at public health data. No is looking at where we might actually reduce gun violence the most. It's a debate over how we feel about guns. To some, guns are bad things: they represent violence, murder, accidental injuries and are associated with crime. To others they represent security from wild animals or protection when police might be half an hour away. We all have post-hoc reasons why they are bad, but this isn't what drives our decisions. The fact that super-rare mass shootings are driving people to call for reform is further evidence of this. As heinous are the acts are they aren't a real threat to public safety. Cigarettes kill as many people in a day or two as have died from mass shootings in the last thirty years. This is about what makes people fearful - what sends shivers down their spine - what generates righteous indignation and higher blood pressure.

The author also suggests that our values can be generally divided into six buckets: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Liberals tend to value care and fairness above all else. Conservatives tend to value all five evenly. Through this lens it is easy to see how the gun debate is really just a debate over care vs. liberty.

When we weigh these moral values so differently it is easy to see how we will have no trouble disagreeing. To some, the right to carry a gun will never outweigh a few stories about domestic violence victims. To others, the thought of an innocent woman being sexually assaulted in some dark alley because she was completely defenselessly brings the same moral outrage. It's not that the other side is immoral, we just have different moral systems.

It doesn't make the solution any easier, but it does help us to see why we disagree. Hopefully it might help us stop demonizing each other.

Hermits vs. Herds

P.96 "WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature."

P.102 (non-Western cultures) "I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family are intensely interdependent."

Simply, the Western mind focuses on the individual. Other cultures focus on the group. We are hyper-individualistic. 

Though even within our society this concept also tends to divide "liberals" and "conservatives." The former focusing on groups of disenfranchised (women, the poor, minorities) while the latter tend to focus on individuals (and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps). It also brings into conflict the balance things like public health vs. liberty (seatbelt laws and affirmative action are good examples of this). 

What the hell are you talking about?

Love is just a word, for when the fun begins... 
a word we use to cover up, a multitude of sins

-Dory Langdon, "Goodbye Again"
performed by Diahann Carroll

Words, Words Words.... Language is all we have, to get the idea in my head, into yours. 

Yes, I can wave my hands, raise my eyebrows, and feign a frown or smile, but language is primary. The fact that I am able to peck out some symbols on a screen and (presumably) concomitantly have ideas arise in your mind, almost like sunshine on a cloudy day, is quite remarkable. 

I bring this up because I think our most sacred words are largely undefined and ambiguous. The amorphous concepts we hold closest to our hearts have no shared meaning. I remember two years ago when I looked through the Bible to sort out how it defined God, I repeatedly came across the word "holy." In the original hebrew, it just means "special." How is that for ineffable?

I think this happens all the time when we discuss the world, politics and religion. What is meant by fairness, justice, care, respect? Too often we have very precise interpretations which often vary dramatically from the person we are speaking with. I need to remind myself to spend more time on the obvious. These are our real values, not the conclusions we reach.

More time on the axioms and less on the theorems. 

Here is an interesting passage I came across on Wikipedia that highlights this very problem:


Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts:

• It can be defined as encompassing two related views about the existence of God:The view that a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless. In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; theterm "God" is considered meaningless.
• The second view is synonymous with theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking "What is meant by 'God'?" before proclaiming the original question "Does God exist?" as meaningless.

Animal Spirits

"No more of those 'dreadful but necessary disturbances,' those 'foolish counselors' leading the rational mind astray. Yet the result of the separation was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of passion. It was the shocking revelation that reason requires passions...... The head can't even do stuff without the heart"
-Jonathan Haidt

Positing that without the "seething passions" that burn within us we have little to live for. What use is rationality without desire? You can't calculate the value of an action if you have no internal worth assigned to it.

Earlier in the text he compares the difficulty in making highly non-emotional decisions (such as buying a washing machine) and how difficult it would be if all decisions in life were this difficult. He highlights the need in identifying and speaking to the raw emotion within each human soul. Without this connection people simply will not become engaged. When speaking to it, you must be careful to understand the underlying emotional intuition which drives decision making. 


Some good commentary I found:

"First of all, Haidt is right that rationality alone cannot be a complete guide to moral behavior, so liberals shouldn't idolize rationality. From early training in mathematics I learned the distinction between axioms, which are statements of first principles, and theorems, which are logical conclusions from the axioms. Reason can provide theorems but it cannot provide axioms. Reason alone cannot tell us which is more important: caring or loyalty, fairness or sanctity, liberty or authority. So what we value needs to be emotionally based. We can try to think through what actions will promote our values in the long run - and even there, as Haidt points out, we are all imperfect.

Second, Haidt is right that loyalty, authority, and sanctity are important moral values for many people. So rather than attacking conservatives for believing in those values, liberals should try to co-opt them. For example, if a corporation closes a working factory in an American town and lays off unionized workers in favor of cheaper labor overseas, liberals can rightly claim that the corporation is being disloyal to its community. If a tar sands oil pipeline threatens to accelerate climate change, liberals can claim that building it disrespects the authority of scientists who have carefully studied its effects. If the same pipeline is likely to spill, liberals can claim that it violates the sanctity of our clean water supply and our natural wonders."

-Amazon Review

Decision making

What is real?
What is possible?
What do I choose to believe?

Pause

"At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all — to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow — the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento. Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not so hurriedly ‘get things done.’ It teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes. My patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Anomie and solipsism

“But the young educated adults of the 90s -- who were, of course, the children of the same impassioned infidelities and divorces Mr. Updike wrote about so
beautifully -- got to watch all this brave new individualism and self-expression and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation. Today's sub-40s have different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”

-David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays