And the Truth Comes Limping After

"A lie will go around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on."

                                                                                                   - Mark Twain

That's always been one of my favorite Mark Twain quotations. It's just so true. Except...it's not. It's a true observation, to be sure, but Mr. Twain never actually said it. A guy named C.H. Spurgeon did, in 1859. And he borrowed it from other sources, which can be traced back to 1710, when Jonathan Swift said, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

Here we have a delectable irony--a quotation about how fast lies can spread is itself a lie; one that has indeed spread around the world. It proves how true it is with its own falsehood. Or...something. 

Anyway, I got an amazing lesson today about how true it really is. As I write, it's day three of the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). In a Facebook discussion today about Obamacare, someone illustrated their objections to it by linking to an essay by a Louisiana attorney named Michael Connelly called "The Truth About the Health Care Bills." Connelly lists several reasons he believes House Bill 3200 is unconstitutional. The only problem is, House Bill 3200 is not the Affordable Care Act. It's a different piece of legislation altogether, and it never passed. I don't know whether Mr. Connelly's analysis is correct, but that's beside the point, since it never passed anyway. It certainly shouldn't be spread as if it were a critique of Obamacare. 

But that's exactly what was happening. When I looked at the Facebook link where Mr. Connelly's essay had been posted, it had been shared over 4,000 times since the day before...by people who thought it was about Obamacare. Many of them shared it with comments like, "Wake up people! Obamacare is taking away all our rights!!!" 

Whether they are right or wrong isn't the issue here. The issue is that they were accidentally spreading misinformation, and spreading it fast--sharing the link every few seconds. 

I watched the number of shares climb to 5,000, and then 6,000. Finally, I asked to join the Facebook group it had appeared on, called Repeal ObamaCare, so I could leave a comment on the post. I was accepted within 20 minutes, and posted a link to the Snopes.com article showing that the essay was not about Obamacare. 

And then, nothing happened. People just kept on sharing it. In the 40 minutes after I posted the Snopes link, nearly 1,000 people shared the essay. Finally, the guy who originally posted the link said he would take it down, and he did, just before it hit 7,000 shares. 

It was a small victory, but I'm not going to lie--it was sweet. Tilt at enough windmills, and you might knock a small one over.

Of course, as he said: "It's out there now." Seven thousand people saw that link and shared it without ever checking to see if it was legitimate. They didn't know enough about Obamacare to realize the essay wasn't about Obamacare, but they were sure they were against it, and that essay explained exactly why! Except it didn't.  But that didn't matter...it kept right on spreading. And for thousands of people, I'm sure it confirmed what they already believed in the first place.

As I said, though, my point here isn't whether Obamacare is good or bad. My point is about people's willingness to spread what they want to hear, without taking just a few seconds to see if it's true. I'm not sure the majority of people even care whether it's true, as long as it supports their point of view. I hope I'm being too cynical on that score. 

One thing is certain, though, and that's how true the old adage about the speed of lies is, whoever said it. These days it's more true than ever. While the truth is pulling its boots on today, a lie can circle the world hundreds of times per minute, multiplying as it goes. The only way to prevent that is to actually care what's true--to prefer a truth we don't like to a lie we do. Lies are swift, tough, and almost impossible to kill.  The truth is fragile, plodding, and utterly precious. It needs all the help it can get. 

School Prayer Again: The Good Old Days and Other Fallacies

This morning I saw that a group called The American Family Association of Kentucky has an online petition to the governor of Kentucky, imploring him to return "God's protection to America" by "putting prayer back in the schools." At the top, it shows a pair of praying hands in front of the American flag, and says, "restore student religious liberty." It goes on to say:

Prayer was in our schools for over 200 years before the anti-God forces took it out in 1962. After prayer was removed from our schools, teen pregnancy went up 500%, STD’s went up 226%, violent crime went up 500% and SAT scores went down for 18 years in a row, opening the door for the AIDS epidemic and the drug culture.

I didn't wake up this morning thinking I would write another post about school prayer, but this survey got me thinking about some of the myths and fallacies I keep seeing that surround the issue, and I'm getting pretty tired of them.

The biggest myth (or lie, if you're more cynical) is that prayer was ever entirely taken out of schools. It wasn't. Official, school-sponsored prayer was taken out of schools (though not always successfully--I remember bowing down with all the other seventh grade football players to say the Lord's Prayer before games). Students are still free to pray as long as they aren't disrupting class or doing so as part of an official school function, like cheerleading or speaking at a graduation. School officials can pray, too, but if they want to stay within the law they need to do it silently and discreetly, so that it isn't a promotion of prayer. You can't outlaw silent prayer, and no sensible person wants to anyway.

I've noticed it's incredibly hard to get some people to acknowledge the distinction between "official school prayer" and "voluntary student prayer". It's an important one: the first is illegal, and the second is not. In fact, it's protected, as long as it's not disruptive. There's an inevitable tension in the 1st Amendment between the Establishment Clause, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and the Free Exercise Clause: "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". In the case of government institutions and employees, free exercise is restricted, to keep from violating the Establishment Clause. That's why public schools and their employees can't officially support one religion over another. What they do on their own time is up to them.

Which brings us to another fallacy: that restricting official school prayer is a violation of "religious liberty", as the Kentucky petition claims. It isn't, or at least it isn't an unreasonable one. School officials and students acting in official school functions can't expect full religious liberty while they are acting on behalf of the school, because that violates the Establishment Clause. We're back to that official/voluntary distinction. In fact, official Christian school prayers would be a violation of religious liberty, because some non-Christian kids would be forced (or would feel intense pressure) to participate in the prayers of a religion they don't share. There's this strange idea on the religious right these days that religious liberty means being allowed to force others to conform to your religion. It doesn't--that's twisting the word "liberty" into something else entirely. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Another one you hear a lot is that "God has been kicked out of schools." There's an idea in religious right circles that many of today's woes can be traced to the removal of official prayers from school in the early sixties. Those woes aren't just the result of kids not receiving religious instruction, according to this view. They also come from the fact that God has removed his protection from America, as the petition claims. The recent school shootings aren't just happening because the students don't know God. They are also happening because God is letting them happen, because we "kicked him out of the schools."

Now, I'm a little out of my theological depth here, I admit, but these sentiments don't seem to be giving God a whole lot of respect. If God is really omnipotent and omnipresent, as most Christians believe (I think), than it's impossible for mere humans to kick him out of anywhere. Of course, you could argue that the "kicking out" part is just a rhetorical flourish, and what's really happening is that God is simply deciding to leave the schools and withdraw his protection. As Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (the same organization sponsoring the petition in Kentucky) put it when discussing why God let the Sandy Hook school shooting happen:

In 1962 we kicked prayer out of the schools. In 1963 we kicked God's word out of ours schools. In 1980 we kicked the Ten Commandments out of our schools. We've kicked God out of our public school system. And I think God would say to us, 'Hey, I'll be glad to protect your children, but you've got to invite me back into your world first. I'm not going to go where I'm not wanted. I am a gentleman."

So...God let a madman gun down little children because...he's a gentleman? Once again, I don't think the word "gentleman" is being used correctly here. This view paints a picture of God as being petty and vindictive, the kind of God who says, "If you don't base your government on one particular religion--conservative Christianity--then I will let terrible things happen to you and your children." Granted, that does resemble the vengeful and jealous God of the Old Testament. But happily, not all Christians see God in those terms anymore (some folks on the religious right seem to have never read the New Testament...except for Revelation, of course). 

But whether this view is true Christian doctrine or not, some of us in this country aren't Christians, and it's our country too. Personally, I think that if God exists at all, he probably doesn't have much to do with human affairs one way or the other, so the whole "God's protection" argument is a moot point. I don't think that's how the world works, and if it is, and God only protects countries with school-sponsored prayer, then he is a petty and callous deity, and certainly no gentleman. Is that a God worthy of worship? I don't think so.

Now, what about the quote from the petition that talks about the ills that have befallen America since "anti-God forces took it out in 1962"? First, that "anti-God forces" part is mostly wrong.  Engel v. Vitale, the court case in 1962 that made official school prayer illegal, was brought by a group of parents including "two Jews, an atheist, a Unitarian, and another Protestant." Only one of those people could possibly be considered "anti-God", though at most an atheist would be anti-religion, because you can't be against something you don't think exists. Maybe they're confusing that case with Murray v. Curtlett, the case that lead to Bible readings being outlawed in 1963. That's the one that involved the famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who was pretty anti-religion, and apparently not a very pleasant person. Many of the court cases that helped remove official religious observances from schools were brought by religious people, many of whom are quite passionate about separating church and state (religious people came up with the idea in the first place, after all). So, it isn't generally "anti-God" forces; it's "anti-official-sponsorship-of-religion" forces, which is a very different thing, and often quite pro-God. 

But what about the claims about teen pregnancy, STD's, and violent crime increasing after 1962? I'm not going to spend a bunch of time tracking the statistics down for Kentucky, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were partly accurate. Those things may have increased in the 60's. Society did see some upheavals then. But that doesn't mean the removal of official prayer from school caused those problems. Jumping to that conclusion is an elementary logical fallacy: the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (it means "after this, therefore because of this"). The fact that an event precedes another event doesn't mean it caused that event. My Dad is a veterinarian, who is always having people tell him that their pets got better because they dewormed them, even when the ailment had nothing to do with worms. He asks, "Did you ever have a flat tire the same day you went to the gas station? Did you decide that going to the gas station causes flats?" (See also "regression to the mean" and "correlation does not imply causation")

There are all kinds of things that might have caused increases in violence, teen pregnancy, etc. in the 60's, and the removal of school prayer is just one (rather remote) possibility. However, I can imagine that both the removal of school prayer and the increasing social ills could have been related to a general societal move away from traditional religious and moral values. That move did really get rolling in the sixties. It's true that belief and morality have grown more diverse in the United States in the last few decades. Some people are moving away from traditional religion, while others are embracing fundamentalism. I do believe it can be a dangerous time when people start questioning their old moral systems, because they may start abandoning rules that are there for very good reasons. That's one reason I write about ethics so much in this blog--people have to have some kind of moral framework that keeps them from doing hurtful things, and I'm trying to figure out what system might make sense, without relying on unproven supernatural claims. 

That's the thing--just because the removal of an old system of morality leads to problems, that doesn't mean the old system was right or good. And that brings me to the good old days. Lots of people, especially those on the religious right, look back wistfully at a glowing golden age when God was in charge and morals were morals. I heard someone recently longing for the time when "God was in the classroom, and there was a paddle in every teacher's desk". People look at "kids today" and shake their heads in despair. But there are some big problems with that view. For one thing, it's been around forever. Back around 700 BC, Hesiod lamented that "When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint." People have said the same things for at least 2700 years, and probably much longer, yet the world has never yet completely gone to hell in a handbasket (it's come close, maybe). Every generation has the rebellious kids and the more obedient kids. Admittedly, things today are a little unusual, because we have seen traditional Christianity lose more of its dominance over western culture. Many Americans, and far more Europeans, are now non-religious (and some of the least religious countries are some of the happiest on Earth). So yes, we are living in an unusually dynamic time, in a moral sense and in pretty much every other sense. 

But that doesn't mean there's no hope for the future, or that we should return to some imagined Golden Age. Things aren't that bad now, and that golden age wasn't so golden. Yes, violent crime started climbing in the 60's, and kept on climbing through the 80's...and then it started declining in the early 90's, and has ever since. We're not down to the levels of the early '60's yet, but we may get there. Most people think violence is increasing, but that's just an illusion based on the way the media plasters the juiciest atrocities across our TV screens day and night. As for teen pregnancy, I don't know about Kentucky, but across the United States, teen pregancy was at its highest in--get this--the fifties. It started declining right around the time prayer was removed from schools (and I won't claim causation) and has mostly declined since then. Sure, we've got some problems these days, but the news isn't all bad, despite what's on the news.

Besides, those good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be. Yesterday I was looking through some microfilms of the local paper (I live in south Louisiana) from 1965. There was an obituary for a black woman who had died at the age of 89. It was tucked at the bottom of the page, in a small section entitled "Negro news". Any article that mentioned a black person would pause to point out their race, as in, "John Doe, negro, was...". In 1965, local schools were separate and distinctly unequal, and the whole region was segregated. Blacks didn't have schools that went past the 8th grade until around 1950, and those schools opened months after the white schools, so that their students could keep working in the sugarcane fields. I read an account of this period by a woman who came home from Xavier University in New Orleans in the 50's and went to the library system (where I now work) to do some research. She didn't see a "Whites Only" sign, so she decided to risk going in. But she was told to go "her people's" library, which was a shelf full of books in the underfunded black high school. 

This doesn't sound like the good old days to me, and I know it doesn't to a black person. Back in the days when "God was in the schools", women and most minorities were treated as second-class citizens, and blacks especially suffered incredible indignities and injustices. But I'm not saying that's because God was in the schools back then. That's just the kind of dodgy reasoning I'm arguing against here. 

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History on Engel v. Vitale

Cartoon Thinking

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes I think the public's intellectual sophistication in the past few decades has been inversely proportional to the sophistication of its video games. Video games have become high-resolution, near-photorealistic affairs, while the thoughts you see expressed online have regressed to the level of Pong--black and white, unsophisticated, and not very impressive. 

I know this is probably an illusion. I doubt people are really less mentally sophisticated than they were 30 years ago, though they might be more polarized and have shorter attention spans. It's mostly just that people's thoughts are now on display, so we can see them in a way we never could before. And it's not a pretty sight. 

The rudeness, the fear and loathing, and the lack of logic can be pretty discouraging. But what I want to focus on here is something a little different: the lack of complexity and nuance. I've started calling it cartoon thinking. People take complex, multidimensional realities and simultaneously simplify and exaggerate them, turning them into a caricature of the real thing. They do this with individuals (Obama wants to destroy America), with groups (Tea Partiers are all racists), with ideologies (If it's not capitalism, it's socialism), and with ethics and loyalty (You're either with us or you're with the terrorists). This kind of low-resolution thinking won't cut it. It's like trying to watch high-definition movies on a 1992 Apple Macintosh. It won't give you a clear enough picture, because reality is complicated.

People, for example, are complicated. Barring a few true psychopaths, pure heroes and pure villains mostly just exist in fiction. Very few people are all one or all the other, and lots of people are both at different times in their lives, or in different areas of their lives. As much as I admire some things about Thomas Jefferson, for example, the man owned slaves, and even fathered children with one of them. Was he a towering historical figure with a phenomenal intellect, or a slave-owning bigot who thought women and blacks were inferior beings? He was all those things. People are multi-faceted, and just won't fit in a nutshell. Walt Whitman's description of himself fits most people, to some extent: "I am large. I contain multitudes." Granted, Joe Sixpack down the street may not be as large and multitudinous as Jefferson or Whitman, but he's still more complex than he seems.

Categories are complex things, too. We talk about groups of things or people as though they were all alike and had hard and fast boundaries, but many of them don't. You hear people say things like, "Men are more prone to violence than women". Well, that's certainly true on average, but a more accurate way of thinking about it is to imagine two bell curves. If we plotted the propensity for violence from left to right, then the curve for women will be to the left of the curve for men. They may not be exactly bell-shaped, but one thing is certain--the two curves overlap. Even if men are more violence-prone on average than women, some women are far more violent than the average man, and some men less violence-prone than the average woman. Most men, thank goodness, are not nearly as violent as Bonnie Parker or Lizzy Borden. This is why it's wrong--both ethically and logically--to judge a single individual in a group by statistical characteristics of that group as a whole.

Categories very often have fuzzy boundaries, too. It's silly to try to decide definitively if the Chevy El Camino was a car or a truck. It was a little of both. For that matter, some people with odd numbers of sex chromosomes are not exactly male or female. They're somewhere in the middle, or possibly even their own category. It's not always either/or.

Ideologies and economic systems also have fuzzy boundaries, though people seem to forget it. In the last few years, it's becoe common to hear people talk as though capitalism and socialism were on opposite sides of a canyon, with nothing but a gaping abyss in between. Any deviation from pure free market capitalism gets called socialism these days, as though if you're farther left than Milton Friedman you must see eye-to-eye with Lenin. But that's ridiculous. There are all kinds of shades of grey between pure capitalism and pure socialism, and no country on earth is all one or all the other. It's not like an on/off switch; it's more like a continuous dial (and the correct setting is somewhere in between, in my opinion). 

To speak accurately about individuals, groups, categories, and ideologies, then, we can't make sweeping generalizations of the sort that fit on bumper stickers (well...generally speaking). Reality is complicated, so our thoughts need to be complicated enough to do it justice. Take patriotism, for example. The other day in an online discussion, I mentioned how I didn't care for the practice of requiring children to say the Pledge of Allegiance. I maintained that people give it too much weight, as though it were a founding document like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights. It isn't. It was written by a Christian socialist in 1892 as part of a campaign by a children's magazine to sell a bunch of flags to schools. "Under God" wasn't added until the height of the red scare in 1954 (though it does come from the Gettysburg Address--Lincoln seems to have inserted it on the fly in his speech). I'm not at all sure that people like James Madison or Thomas Jefferson would have approved of affirming our freedoms by requiring kids to stand up and recite a pledge in unison. That is a little contradictory, after all.

The response to this was, "So we should throw out patriotism too, since it's all a joke!?!?!?" (Don't even get me started on the excessive punctuation.) Apparently her reasoning was, "He has problems with the Pledge of Allegiance, therefore he thinks we should get rid of patriotism". Which is wrong. She was engaging in cartoon thinking, assuming that my views are more extreme and less nuanced than they actually are. The fact is, I couldn't describe my view of patriotism in less than a couple of pages, because it's pretty complex. I might even have to use compound sentences, like, "Yes, we should support our troops and respect their bravery and sacrifice, but we should also question the necessity of something as horrible as war." Of course I love my country and want what's best for it. I have the deepest admiration for most of the principles in our actual founding documents, and would fight to defend my country if it necessary. But I also know patriotism can become a kind of violent, exclusive nationalism, and that sort of thing has caused a lot of terrible things. I also know that questioning people's patriotism is a popular method of enforcing conformity and suppressing dissent. Patriotism has often been, as Samuel Johnson said, "The last refuge of a scoundrel". 

I could go on describing all the nuances of my idea of patriotism, but I'll spare you. The point is that it's very complicated, because the realities surrounding patriotism are very complicated. Lots of people will disagree with me, thinking patriotism ought to be simple. "I'm a patriot, no ifs, ands or buts about it". Well, sorry, but those ifs ands and buts are necessary. Of course, I understand why people shy away from more subtle, less decisive thinking. They think that if we get too caught up describing every nuance, or weighing every pro and con, we'll get bogged down and lose our clear vision of right and wrong, or our ability to stop thinking and take action. That is a legitimate concern. It happens, and sometimes you do have to stop thinking and say, "No, I have to draw my line here". But the flip side of that (you knew there would be a flip side in an essay like this, right?) is that people draw those lines too quickly, thinking that the task of understanding what's true and right is easier than it really is. We shouldn't fall into an endless cycle of hand-wringing, but at the same time, we also shouldn't succumb to mindless knee-jerking and cartoon thinking. Life is too complicated for that.

More Things in Heaven and Earth: Thoughts on Openmindedness and Skepticism

Like most people, I like a good quotation, and I have several favorites. A good, pithy observation can stick in my head for years. Some stick because they make me say, "Yes! Exactly! That's just how I would have said it if I were clever enough." Others stick because they bother me.  That happens when I can't quite decide what I think about them, but I'm pretty sure the answer is important.

One of these bothersome quotations is from Hamlet:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The context here is that Hamlet has been having a chat with his father's ghost. The ghost vanishes, and Hamlet's friends Horatio and Marcellus walk up. Hamlet makes them swear not to reveal his plans to avenge his father's murder. From beneath the grave, the ghost backs him up, saying, "Swear". Horatio, understandably taken aback, says, "O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!" Hamlet replies, "And as a stranger therefore give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy".

I've loved that quote ever since I first heard it. It's a great reminder to be openminded. We live in a great big weird universe, and our little minds have just begun to understand it. There are plenty of things out there that we have no idea about, so we shouldn't get too smug about our theories. Taken that way, Hamlet's statement is similar to Newton's reflections about his discoveries: 

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

But the Hamlet quotation is commonly used in a different way. It comes up in discussions of astrology, miracles, and yes, ghosts, whenever someone says they are skeptical of those things. Then, the quote is used to tell those people, "Stop being so skeptical! You don't know everything, so how do you know it's not true?" 

I don't know Shakespeare's feelings on such things, but I don't care for that use of his quotation. Yes, we should be intellectually humble and open to the possibility that the universe is full of surprises, but that doesn't mean any particular claim about ghosts, miracles, etc. is true. Maybe there are such things as ghosts and maybe not. I doubt it, but if I ever saw enough evidence that they existed--evidence that couldn't be debunked as a hoax by skeptics--then I would have to conclude that they exist. The point is that to say "the world is full of unexpected things, therefore this particular unexpected thing is real" is fallacious reasoning. 

Open-mindedness is a virtue, but only to a degree. Which brings me to another saying that comes up often in these discussions, but not often enough: 

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. 

I say it's a saying, and not a quotation, because no particular person seems to have said this exact thing. It's often attributed to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, longtime publisher of the New York Times, but it may predate him. Like many common "quotations", it's probably evolved into a more streamlined and memorable phrase over time (the Newton quote above often takes a shorter form, for example). 

Wherever it came from, it's a good thing to remember. We live in a big, complex, hard-to-understand world, and there are plenty of hucksters and charlatans in it, trying to get us to do what they want and buy what they are selling. It doesn't do to be open-minded to the point of gullibility. Truth doesn't come easy, and there are a lot more false claims than true ones. As P.T. Barnum, one of the great hucksters in history, said:

There's a sucker born every minute.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be a sucker. What's needed, I think, is a balance between openmindedess and skepticism. As I've said elsewhere in this blog, those things can be seen as two sides of the same coin: an attitude of not clinging too tightly to any idea, whether you currently believe it or not. If you're willing to consider--or abandon--any idea according to its merits, then you are both openminded and skeptical. They aren't mutually exclusive. At their best, they are mutually necessary.

I've been saying this for years, but I've recently remembered where I got the idea: from a book by Carl Sagan called The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Here's an extended quote, where he explains the essential balance we need to strike:

what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You never learn anything new. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, maybe once in a hundred cases, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful as from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then, it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all. Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future. And it is precisely the mix of these two modes of thought that is central to the success of science.

This balance is certainly central to science, but I think (and I think Sagan would have agreed) that it has an even wider reach than that. It also works when trying to think about any idea, to try to determine whether it's true or at least useful. 

There's another balance that has to be struck, though, when it comes to skepticism--the balance between skepticism and cynicism. Contrary to popular belief, the two aren't the same. Skepticism is a probing, realistic view of the world, whereas cynicism is an overly-negative view. A cynic thinks the world is nastier than it really is. Still, it's easy to slip from skepticism into cynicism if you're not careful. Realism, for one thing, can be depressing. There's no guarantee that skepticism will make you feel better about the world. It's easy to come up with all kinds of false, but comforting, ideas about how the things are. In fact, comfort seems to be a more popular criteria for judging ideas than evidence or truth. Studies have shown that depressed people are more realistic about some things (how well other people like them, for example) than happy people. That's a depressing fact in itself, huh? If you stay skeptical all the time, a lot of the things people do can start to seem a little nonsensical--arbitrary at best and farcical at worst. That happens to me sometimes, and it is a little depressing.

The trick, I think, is to remember two things (though I don't always remember them). First, focusing on negativity doesn't do anybody any good (unless you're trying to change something negative, and then it's still more effective to stay as upbeat as possible). Winston Churchill has a good quote here, as he so often does: 

I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else.

Optimism here doesn't mean self-delusion, or turning a blind eye to injustice. It just means remembering the good and the hopeful, while staying mindful of the bad. That's the second thing to remember: to pay attention to the good things. Sure, this world is full of nasty stuff, from dishonest politicians, to wars, to brain-eating amoebas. But it's full of a lot of love and goodness and beauty, too, and remembering that is the way to keep from slipping into cynicism. It's possible to be skeptical while still maintaining a sense of awe and humility, and a respect for beauty and goodness. If that hackneyed word "spirituality" means anything to a skeptic, it means that kind of attitude. Unlike some smaller-minded skeptics, Carl Sagan respected spirituality in that sense. The older I get, the more I'm amazed by Sagan's intellect and elequence, so I think I'll end with another quotation from him. Once again, he's talking about science in particular here, but there's no reason it shouldn't apply to the search for truth in general.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: It's for People, not Beliefs

"Test everything, hold fast to what is good" - 1 Thessalonians 5 21-22

Douglas Adams, hilariously hyperbolic humorist and author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, once attended a conference called Digital Biota 2, where he stood up and gave a impromptu, rambling, and altogether brilliant talk. People still read and quote it today, years after his death.

One of the topics he covers is the way people tiptoe around other people's religious beliefs:

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'.

He goes on to say:

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise - that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think 'Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity', what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so?

This question has been nagging at me lately. I absolutely agree with him that the best way to find the truth is to test and question every idea. Whatever ideas can survive the questioning are the ones most likely to be true or useful. But if questioning is essential, how do we approach religion? Religious people can be very attached to traditional religious answers to big, important questions like, "Where do we come from", or "How should we act?" Those who question those ideas can face a backlash. Once they were burned at the stake, and they still face violent reprisals and arrest in many parts of the world. Such backlash is just one reason people avoid questioning religion, but it's a pretty compelling one.

These days, it's not just Christianity that gets this kind of deference. Lots of secular liberals have a knee-jerk respect for most of the world's religions. That comes from an admirable impulse to avoid ethnocentrism, but it can be problematic, too. A while back, for example, I was reading about how Bob Marley died. He had found a melanoma on his toe, but when doctors advised him to have it amputated, he refused, saying it was contrary to his Rastafarian beliefs. He died of cancer at the age of 36. People praise him for being brave enough to stick to his beliefs in the face of death. I even had the same reaction at first. And then I thought, "Well, yeah, it was brave, but it was also a tragic waste of a brilliant life." If he had stopped to question why it should be taboo to amputate a cancerous toe, he might have stayed alive these last 32 years.

When people react to such stories with approval, rather than sadness, it shows that they're respecting people's beliefs more than their actual lives. And that's perverse. Beliefs have no feelings, no hopes, no family...people do. Beliefs aren't the kind of entities that deserve dignity and respect. People are. Life is precious, not belief.

When so many beliefs in this world are both wrong and harmful, being deferential to them is a luxury we can't afford, and that includes religious beliefs. But that doesn't mean we should start ridiculing religion willy-nilly, the way a lot of people in the secular humanist/atheist/skeptic movement do these days. There's no reason you can't question somebody's religious beliefs politely (unless questioning them at all is considered impolite, and that's what needs to be changed). Questioning is essential for all ideas, not just religious ones. But it can be done considerately: by trying to understand and respect people's feelings...and remembering they have every right to question your beliefs, too. Fair is fair.

But having a frank, respectful discussion of religion can be especially tricky. One thing secular types like Douglas Adams and myself forget is that religious people see the things they believe in as real and deserving of respect--even worship. To a secular person, God is an abstract idea. To a believer, God is the supreme creator and ruler of the universe, who loves them and watches over them. They may see any questioning of God or other sacred things, like sacred texts and rituals, as disrepectful to God; as sacrilege or blasphemy. Secular people have a hard time understanding blasphemy: how can an abstract idea be insulted? But to religious people, that abstract idea is very real. Maybe they're even right. But if the ideas that can survive our questioning are the ones that are true, and God is a real, all-knowing, all-powerful being, then he should have no trouble weathering our puny little human questions.

Ideas have to be questioned. It's the only way to figure out which ones are true. Such questioning might be the chief engine of human progress (a twin engine is compassion). But we can do our questioning with respect--not for the ideas themselves, but for the people who hold them. One reason to be respectful is simply practical: if you want someone to seriously consider what you're saying, the last thing you want to do is offend them. Sometimes you truly can't help offending people, but the less you do, the more likely they are to listen. The other reason to be respectful is that most people--religious and otherwise--really do deserve respect. When I think about the people I admire most in this world, some of them are atheists, and some of them are devoutly religious. I know truly great people in both camps, and at many points in between. I know people on both sides whose compassion and selflessness I find awe-inspiring. When I write this, I hope some of the religious people I admire will read it, too, so I'm trying to show them the respect they deserve.

I don't always succeed, of course. I get mad and scathing. I forget that the point of having a discussion is to get at the truth, not to win the argument or show off my debating skills. I let my ego get in the way of productive debate, and try to back people into embarrassing logical corners. Then I feel bad about it later, unless they're absolute jackasses, and then I really don't. Maybe I should anyway. I'm only human, though, and I still have a lot to learn from wiser people than myself--religious and otherwise.

My point is that we need to change how we conceptualize respect for other people's opinions. Maybe true respect is best shown by having an honest, civil discussion, with no taboo topics. After all, are you really respecting someone's intellect when there are topics you avoid, for fear of giving offense? I don't think so. I think polite honesty can be more more respectful than deferential silence. Besides, as I've been saying, beliefs don't deserve respect. People do, and that's why it's possible to question a person's beliefs while respecting them as a person. In fact, it's not just possible. It's essential. There's not much hope for humanity if we stop questioning old beliefs and looking for better ones. But there's also not much hope if we forget to treat each other with respect.
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http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

Of Nameless Nonsense and Naked Emperors

When I write these posts, I usually spend a couple of days writing down the things I want to talk about (as they pop randomly into my head), and then sit down and arrange them into a rough outline before I start writing. But this time I'm skipping the outline, because I can't seem to arrange my thoughts into a coherent form. Sometimes you don't really know what you think until you sit down and write about it for a while. Which is one of the reasons I have this blog.

Anyway, this post is going to be a little unstructured, because I only have a vague idea of how the things I'm thinking about relate to each other. Worse, there's no word for the category they all fit into. Let me try to explain what those things are, by telling about some recent encounters with them.

I recently went to a conference for librarians. When I got to the hotel, I asked one of guys out front where the parking was. He said, "Oh, it's all valet parking. We'll take your car, sir." I looked at him and thought, "Well, crap." The thing is, I hate valet parking. It's always presented as a helpful, top-shelf service, offered up to make your life easier. But it doesn't. All that happens is some stranger takes your keys from you and whisks your car off to parts unknown. If you leave anything in it, you have to ask a valet to go get it. And then you have to tip him. I hold that valet parking has two purposes, neither of which have anything to do with convenience: 1. Making socially-insecure people feel like they're doing something fancy 2. Making money.

After the valet had careened out of sight in my car, I wrestled my bags back from a bellboy that wanted to carry them, headed up to my room, and sat down in an elegantly excruciating chair to look over the conference program. It was packed with ads from vendors and corporate sponsors, and for some reason, this reminded me of the valet parking. Professional conferences, I thought, can be a lot like valet parking: they don't necessarily serve the purpose they claim to serve. People think of them as a way to meet other professionals and share ideas (or to get drunk, hook up, and go sight-seeing). And they are all these things. But they're also a way for vendors to try to sell you things, and to get your contact information so they can bug you later. Conferences also seem to be big moneymakers for the organizations that sponsor them. In the case of libraries, they charge the librarians (who already pay yearly dues) to go to the conference, and they also charge the vendors big bucks for the best spots to set up their booths. And then they sell ads in the program.

Even the people attending the conference aren't there for the reasons they might claim. They aren't just there to share information and build professional networks. The people giving presentations, for example, aren't just trying to share what they've learned. They're giving a talk at the conference because it looks good on their resume. Sometimes it's based on a paper they wrote. And why did they write it? Because it looks good on their resume. Or they need to get published if they want tenure (academic librarian jobs are often tenure-track). Maybe they also did it because they had something valuable to contribute, but anybody who has read many academic papers, or sat through many conference presentations, will know that's not always the case.

These were my thoughts as I sat there reading that program. But then I remembered why I was there (or did I?) and decided to go to a keynote speech by a mover and shaker in the library world. The talk lasted about 45 minutes, and to be honest, I can't remember just what it was about. But I do know she was a great believer in "going forward" and "reaching out", and that she used the word "conversation" at least 35 times in 45 minutes. She seems to know what she's doing, too, so my money is on "conversation" as the go-to buzzword in the coming year. If you want to get ahead in 2013, don't say "let's talk about that". Say "we need to have a conversation about that". "Conversation" is the new "leverage". It will take you far.

I don't mean to sound too cynical about conferences, much less librarians, most of whom really do want to help people. It's just that librarians--like members of every other subculture--have their fads and bandwagons. One way of showing you are on a particular bandwagon, or that you belong to a particular subculture, is to use its buzzwords. As my friends and coworkers will tell you, I have a bit of a thing about buzzwords. I hate them. Corporate-speak, education-speak, bureaucratese, technobabble and psychobabble; they irritate me to no end. But it's not just a mindless peeve. They grate on me because I'm a passionate believer that people should think for themselves, and think about what they are saying. If people are using faddish buzzwords, that tells me they're doing neither. Instead, they're acting like a talking herd animal, sort of a cross between a parrot and a lemming. They're not thinking. They're imitating.

Some of those buzzwords don't really mean anything at all, but they serve a purpose nonetheless. They show that the person saying them is part of the in-crowd, and up on the latest fads...er, trends. They also seem to inspire a certain kind of impressionable person, so they get plastered all over educational manifestos and corporate websites. And conference programs. Buzzwords have some nastier cousins, too. Things like euphemisms, weasel words, loaded language, and vague or impenetrable language--like buzzwords, they have a purpose other than clear, honest communication. But these can be used to obscure and distort the truth. As George Orwell put it in his important essay Politics and the English Language, this kind of language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

So, how did I get from valet parking to buzzwords? The point I'm trying to make is that people are always saying, doing, and believing things not because they are true or useful, but because they serve some other purpose, which usually has to do with money, in-group identification, or both. That's what ties together valet parking, resume-padding professional activities, buzzwords, catchphrases, and all kinds of other things people do without stopping to think about why they're doing them. There's a disconnect between the assumed purpose of the words, ideas, or activities and their actual purpose. Sometimes they have no purpose at all, except that they have caught on, and people will feel like they're out of touch if they don't do them.

This is a problem, because doing things that are, at best, useless, is a waste of time...at best. Life is just too short for that nonsense. But it's hard to speak clearly about the problem, because that there's no standard term that describes this category of things. There's no widely-known conceptual framework for understanding what they are, and how they relate to each other.

Personally, I tend to relate them to the Hans Christian Anderson story The Emperor's New Clothes--surely as wise a fable as has ever been told. If you haven't read it in a while, here's a refresher. Two swindlers convince an emperor that they can make him a wondrous set of clothes. These clothes will make him invisible to stupid or incompetent people, and in fact, the clothes themselves will be invisible to such people. The swindlers get their looms and go to work, pretending to spin and weave. When the emperor and his ministers come to check on their progress, each of them realizes with horror he can't see the clothes. But of course they all keep their mouths shut, so everyone thinks everyone else can see the clothes. Finally, the emperor strips, dons his new, invisible finery, and parades down the street. None of his subjects says a word, because they've all heard that stupid people can't see the clothes, and besides...it's the emperor! It takes a little boy to point out the obvious: "But he's not wearing any clothes at all!"

I love that story, because it seems to me that a whole lot of the things people take seriously in this world are just different styles of imperial non-clothing. They're just...made up. They don't serve any purpose, or not the purpose people think they serve. But people believe in them, and therefore we all have to spend a lot of energy dealing with them. The naked emperor holds up non-existent hoops, and makes us all jump through them.

As insightful as the story is, though, it doesn't give us a good word for this kind of nonsense--this misplaced importance we give to things that may not even be real or true or valuable. Saying "that sounds like the emperor's new clothes" is just too wordy. Other options--bullshit--for example, aren't precise enough and may not be socially acceptable, despite their clear usefulness. Also insufficient are the various terms for pointless activities (jumping through hoops, going through the motions), and the necessary multitude of terms for pointless or misleading language (cant, bafflegab, blather, drivel, verbiage, twaddle, buzzwords, codswallop, weasel words, euphemisms, loaded language, purr words and snarl words, lip service, etc). There's no term that draws all these things together in one basket and gives us a handle to carry it with.

We need one. We need a word that lets us identify this stuff to each other, so we can try to root it out. We need to be able to point to empty buzzwords and activities done for the sake of appearances, and say "Hold on, that's _______!" I'm not suggesting we use such a word as a thought-terminating cliche, along the lines of the current usage of "class warfare". The word should promote critical thinking, not shush it. We need a good word for describing things that are useless or worse. We need a word that reminds us it's time to look around and see if we're on a bandwagon, and to check whether the driver is wearing any clothes.

Such a word might remind people to spend more time asking questions like: "That word you keep saying: what does it actually mean?", and "How do you know that's true?", and "Does this idea really do anything useful, or is it just fashionable?", and "Is this crap really necessary?" What, in other words, is the actual point of this thing we are talking about? Of course, such a word should itself be watched closely, so it doesn't turn into another meaningless buzzword, emptied of all meaning. That would be ironic, but not unprecedented. After all, "drink the kool-aid" began as a clever, if tasteless, metaphor for the dangers of blind conformity. Now it's become an overworked corporate tic, and the only people who can sincerely say "don't drink the kool-aid" in 2013 have, in fact, drank the kool-aid.

The reason we need this word, and the reason people should ask these questions, is that even though the emperor's new clothes don't actually exist, they still manage to do real harm, because people believe in them. Think about how many people spend big chunks of their lives doing things for the sole purpose of padding their resumes: joining committees they don't have time for (and possibly aren't even needed), writing papers that don't advance knowledge a single step, giving talks nobody really listens to, and so on. Parents push their kids to take on too many extracurricular activities, for the same reason. Some people waste their precious days in other ways, but still for the sake of appearances. Does anybody buy a Cadillac Escalade, for example, to actually take off road? No, because that's not what it's for. An Escalade is for showing people that you drive an Escalade. And then there's the stuff people believe in, that just isn't true. How many people have devoted their lives to forgotten religions that nobody believes in anymore? How many people were murdered for questioning those forgotten, non-existent gods?

The common denominator of all these things is that they involve mistaking appearances for substance or ideas for reality, and that people do them without stopping to ask why. They "give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".

If it's true that nonexistent imperial clothing causes trouble, so do the naked emperors themselves.  Some people make a whole career out of imperial nakedness. In fact, maybe "naked" isn't a strong enough word. As Lewis Grizzard said, "'Naked' means you ain't got no clothes on. 'Nekkid' means you ain't got no clothes on and you're up to something." These people are full-on nekkid. Those who learn to manipulate language and appearances, and make others believe in things that aren't really there, can become extremely powerful, and often quite destructive. They may actually believe their own nonsense--they probably think they're really wearing clothes--but that's beside the point. The point is that they're hawking nonsense and people are wasting their lives buying it. Skilled naked emperors go far, because we take them seriously. For example, the speaker I saw at the conference, who kept saying "conversation", is pretty powerful in her world. She may mean well, and she may even be doing a lot of good, but I can't help thinking that part of the reason she rose to the top of her field is that she's good at keeping up appearances--at joining the right committees and throwing around the right buzzwords. Lots of powerful people--politicians, university presidents, corporate heads--have an intuitive sense of managing perception. Maybe my view is jaundiced, but many of the ones I've met strike me as soulless phonies; "perma-grin zombies", I call them. You can go a long way by being a soulless phony--a nekkid emperor--if people are gullible enough to think they're admiring your clothes, instead of staring at your bare backside.

How do we respond to all this imperial nakedness, and even outright nekkidness? By not putting up with it. By teaching kids to ask tough questions about whether conventional wisdom is true, and whether common practice makes sense. If society has made up various types of nonsense, it will take a society-wide movement to un-make it. When questioning and critical thinking fail, satire is a time-honored method of dealing with nonsense. My whole point here, after all, is that nonsense should not be taken seriously, and nothing deflates a bloated sense of importance like laughter. Naked emperors, in other words, deserve to be mooned. As Orwell says about bloated, insincere language (just one variety of imperial nakedness): "One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase...into the dustbin where it belongs".

So how about it? What are we going to call this stuff, so we can actually talk about how to rid of it?

Taxes, Lies, and the King Kong Effect

 "Figures don't lie, but liars figure" - Some Unknown Sage

This morning I was reading about how you can lie--or at least mislead--with perfectly accurate numbers and graphics.  People commonly present accurate numbers in a way that gives a completely inaccurate impression.  The book I was reading quoted an editorial in 2003 by the Wall Street Journal which lamented the tax burden of wealthy Americans, saying, "taxpayers with incomes over $200,000 could expect on average to pay about $99,000 in taxes."

This is technically true, but entirely deceiving, because it implies that once you hit an income of $200,000, you can expect to make pay nearly half your income in taxes.  That's not true.  The figure of $99,000 is the average tax for everyone with an income of over $200,000--from a doctor who makes exactly $200,000 all the way up to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.  These ultra-rich people pay millions in taxes, and that drives the average way up, even for people with very high incomes.  I had a professor in grad school who called this the King Kong effect.  If you took 14 normal-sized gorillas, and then King Kong, and computed the average weight of all 15 gorillas in your sample, your average would be a whole lot more than the average (normal) gorilla weighs, because King Kong is skewing the average.  In the same way, most people making around $200,000 per year (the gorillas) would pay much less than $99,000 in income taxes, and those with very highest incomes (the King Kongs) would pay far more.  And they will still be very, very rich.

But I don't want to suggest that only anti-tax crusaders play this game.  This afternoon, I saw this rather compelling video: Why Obama Now?  The video shows a figure based on the one below (I should point out that, while the video is based on a speech by President Obama, this graphic was not cited in the speech--I'm calling foul on the makers of the video and the graphic, not the speech the video is based on).

From ReadyThinkVote.com

Here we have people against tax cuts for the rich, using the same tactic used by the Wall Street Journal when arguing for those cuts.  But what is exaggerated here are tax cuts, not taxes.  A more honest chart would continue showing higher and higher incomes, instead of lumping vastly different incomes together on the right.  A chart like that would show a gradual rise in tax cuts with income, not a sudden jump at the top 1%.  Of course, if that chart were drawn to the same scale as this one, and included the highest-paid CEOs, it would be around 75 feet across.  Those folks get paid a lot.

But that's a whole other issue, and I want to be clear that this post isn't about taxes or income distribution.  It's about deception.  Statements like the Wall Street Journal's, and charts like the one above, are deceiving--whether deliberate or not, I don't know.  But whatever side of the tax issue you're on, I hope you'll agree that deception is wrong.  Truth is what matters, not ideology.  As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of having an ideology is that it reflects what I think is true and right.  If I have to resort to deception to serve my ideology, then I've lost sight of the truth.  And then I've missed the point entirely.

The Impostors of Reason

With its seven-inch wingspan, the owl butterfly is an impressive bug by any standard.  But what is really striking are its fake eyes.  It has eyespots on the underside of its wings, which mimic the eyes of an owl. Since owls prey on the birds that eat butterflies, the sight of those fake eyes is likely to give any would-be predator pause.  The butterfly is able to survive because the bird doesn't take the time to discover the deception. If the bird stopped and watched the butterfly for a while, it would realize how harmless it actually is. 

As for the owls it imitates, they have been symbols of wisdom and reason in western culture ever since the ancient Greeks associated them with Athena.  Owls actually aren't particularly wise or reasonable birds, but owls and reasoning do have one thing in common: they both have impostors.  The imposters of reason are things like anger, hard-heartedness, rudeness, and smugness.  People commonly mistake these things for rationality, when they're really nothing of the sort. They are impostors.  Like owl butterflies, they draw their power from shock and credulity. The more they're mistaken for the real thing, the more powerful they become.

Critical Thinking: What it is, and Why it's Not Just a Catchphrase

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. 

- Thomas Jefferson

Once I had a bumper sticker that said, “Think for yourself, or you're not thinking at all.”  I admired this sentiment a great deal, which is not surprising, since I had come up with it myself. Yes, I'm a little embarrassed to say it now, but I made my own bumper sticker.  I even bought some special paper to print it on. But the ink wasn't made for life in the elements, so it faded pretty quickly, and I didn't replace it. It's not that I didn't still believe it; it's just that I thought it was incomplete. After all, what good does it do to tell people to think for themselves, when so many people are terrible at thinking? I briefl considered making a twin bumper sticker that said, “...but think carefully.”  And then I thought, “That's ridiculous!”, and peeled the first one off.

As silly as my twin bumper stickers would have been, I do think both ideas are important. We live in a country where people are allowed, and even expected (in theory), to think for themselves. That being the case, you would think we would put more effort into teaching people how to think; not what to think, but how think, and how to think clearly and effectively. This sounds like a good idea, but it's pretty vague.  What exactly would we teach?  One of the first step in clear thinking is to define terms, so let me start by doing that.  The word “thinking" covers a huge range of mental processes, including concept formation, memory, decision-making, visual thinking, creative thinking, and so on.  I'm talking about something more specific. I'm talking about the kind of careful thinking that's aimed at deciding what to believe. This kind of thinking proceeds by carefully and honestly weighing the evidence for beliefs before accepting them. I'm tempted to call this “rationality” but that term, like "thinking" is also a little ambiguous. In economics, rationality is used to mean something like “optimal decision-making or action.”   Economists imagine ideal worlds in which there is an optimum way for “rational agents” to proceed in order to “maximize their utility”. This optimal strategy could easily include lying, and need not have much to do with what's true or morally right. That's not the kind of rationality I'm talking about here. What I'm interested in is honest, deliberate thinking aimed at finding what is really true, or what is really right...or at least getting as close to those things as possible.

Critical Thinking

This kind of deliberate thinking is already taught in school, though not nearly enough. It was once known as informal logic or reasoning, but these days it's usually called critical thinking. Most people have heard that term, because it's become an educational buzzword.  That's unfortunate, because it means it's in danger of being emptied of meaning by people who repeat it--parrotlike--because they like the sound of it.  But critical thinking isn't just some new educational fad that will soon go the way of New Math. It has roots going back as far at least as far as Socrates, and still has some very important lessons to offer. 

Rumble on Sesame Street

It was ugly. And it all started with Big Bird. As everybody knows by now, in the first debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, Romney declared that, if elected, he was going to stop the federal subsidy to PBS...even though he loves Big Bird. This was a tiny part of a long debate, but it got folks pretty heated up. A lot of people love PBS, and apparently a lot of people really hate it, or at least hate the fact that any of their taxes help support it. As I write, this debate is causing big arguments and bulging blood vessels. If you happen to read this years from now, that may seem strange, but it's true. I know, because Big Bird got me into the biggest, nastiest online fight I've ever been in. I don't mean a heated debate. I'm talking about a scathing, name-calling rumble. If it had happened face to face, I think punches might have been thrown.

This bothered me, because I don't normally get into arguments that nasty. Before it was all over, I had been called unpatriotic, a weakling, and a budding Nazi. But it what really got my dander up was being called irrational. I may not always be rational, but I try hard to be, and spend a downright unhealthy amount of time thinking about what rationality is...and what it isn't. That's what the argument made me think about, and what I want to think about in my next few posts. But first, a little more about the Rumble on Sesame Street. I won't get too detailed, because there's nothing more boring than hearing someone tell you, “So then I just said to him, I said....blah, blah, blah...” But I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about civility and rationality, and this argument was a spectacular breakdown of both, so it's worth looking at what went wrong. (Just to be clear, I'm not saying everyone who doesn't support government subsidies for PBS is like the guy I'm describing here.  Some of them are very smart and nice, and I can disagree with them without getting into a fight). 

Here's how it started. I'm one of the PBS lovers, so as soon as the debate was over, I started thinking up ways to show people that federal spending on PBS is actually quite minuscule compared to the entire federal budget. I had soon worked out that if you imagined federal spending this year in terms of height—the height of the Empire State Building, which is 1445 feet tall—then federal spending on PBS would amount to a little more than a tenth of an inch. I was rather proud of this image, so, when I saw a comment thread about PBS, I threw it in there.

Memo: Keep Up the Good Work

To: Ministry of Communication

Dear Colleagues:

The Director has been following your recent work, and is very pleased with the quality of public debate you've helped promote in the United States. Social networking sites have been a godsend to us (if you'll pardon the expression). However, we've become aware of a small but troubling movement calling for “civil public debate.” As this yawn-inducing phrase indicates, the movement isn't exactly capturing the public imagination. Indeed, its commitment to restraint, modesty, and rationality should insure its failure. It doesn't appeal to the more primal emotions, and should therefore be no match for our more robust methods.

Still, the Director feels that if the civility advocates learn to spread their message effectively, they could be a thorn in our side. As a countermeasure, we have prepared a message to be funneled to our contacts in both American political parties.

Dear friends,

With all the progress we've made against our opponents, we have good reasons to congratulate ourselves. Our courage and zeal have paid off--just look how mad the other guys are! They're really starting to hate out guts.

But there are people questioning our success.  They claim the rhetoric is getting too heated, and they're calling for “civility." Folks, we can't let this kind of thinking slow us down. Our progress so far has been based on untempered passion and self-assurance. Now these civility advocates are bleating about how “complex” reality is, and how we need to be more “reasonable.” Well, when have our opponents ever been reasonable with us? This talk of moderation will only let them get the upper hand. Our country is like a house on fire, and we have to fight fire with fire.

So forget this stuff about reality being complex. What we need are simple, catchy slogans. We need punchy one-liners. We need talking points we can repeat until we don't even need to think about them anymore. Logic and science are fine when they tell us what we want to hear, but they just don't light a fire under people. We also need good, solid denunciations. We need boogiemen. That's why we have to get out there on Facebook and Twitter and keep the fear and loathing hot. If you're going to snipe at someone, don't just say it; say it with feeling. Use multiple exclamation marks; and don't be afraid of the caps lock button. A SENTENCE LIKE THIS SHOWS HOW PASSIONATE YOU ARE, AND IF YOU'RE PASSIONATE, YOU MUST BE RIGHT!!!!!

Try to make converts if you can. As soon as someone changes their mind and joins us, they become one of the Good Guys.  So get out there and argue. Everybody knows there's no better way to convince someone than saying what an idiot they are in front of as many people as possible. If it didn't work, why would so many people try it? If your opponent hasn't seen the light, a few more good insults will usually bring them around.

Of course, some people are hard-headed, and won't believe you no matter how stupid you say they are. If they absolutely won't listen, just ask yourself this: were you really trying to convince them anyway? Of course not. You were trying to make US look smart, and THEM look bad. And that's OK, because we are smart and they are bad. Otherwise they would agree with us!

Most people aren't going to change their minds about anything, regardless of the evidence. Do we? Absolutely not! Still, we can't let our friends be lured to the dark side. That's why we need more preaching to the choir. We need more bandwagons; more strength in numbers. It takes real courage to stand up for something when all your friends do, too.

Some will claim we should be fair-minded and truthful, but how can we, if the other side won't? This is like a nuclear arms race, and some things you have to see through to the bitter end. We have to embrace vital rhetorical tools like hyperbole, rumor, and wild accusation. It's amazing what people will believe. They'll even spread the message if you phrase the email correctly. Don't worry...most people have never even heard of Snopes.com.

If you run into one of those irritating people who make calm, thoughtful points, just throw up a straw-man caricature of their argument and kick the stuffing out of it. And never underestimate the power of simpler forms of ridicule. A good horse laugh has stopped many an argument in its tracks. Finally, never attack someone's argument if you can just attack them. Do they look funny? Point it out. Some say ad hominem attacks like that are fallacies. Maybe, but a good fallacy can get you a long way in today's world.

Finally, don't worry about making people so mad they'll get violent. It's not like you're looking them in the eye. This is the age of the internet--just insult the ones that live far away from you; that's the safest thing. They probably won't take it out on anyone else. The bottom line is, there may be risks associated with the kind of robust public debate we're advocating, but they're worth it. Our side has everything to gain, and our opponents have everything to lose. People who say we should find common ground have their heads in the clouds. Besides, it's not like Americans would ever actually go to war against each other.

Feel free to modify this message as you see fit.  However, this may not be necessary, as it was written by the Director himself.  He has thousands of years of experience at this sort of thing, and his track record speaks for itself.

From:  Office of the Director
One Ninth Circle
Hell

Insults and Arguments: Why We Need to Do Better

"There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good." -Burton Hillis

"We're not enemies, we just disagree."  - The Strokes, Is This It

I'm going to try to make this post entertaining, but the cards are stacked against me. Here's the problem:  I want to be as thoughtful, logical and accurate as possible.  Those things, sadly, don't have much entertainment value. It's a shame, but there you are.  Humor, satire, clever metaphors, hyperbole--those things are entertaining, and they may even lend themselves to deep insights, but they aren't particularly logical or precise. Maybe that's why people like them--logic and precision are dry things. Necessary, but dry.

That's a bitter pill, for those of us who try (try I said) to see the world clearly and rationally, while avoiding being boring or pedantic.  The more we try to be thoughtful and clearheaded, the less entertaining we're likely to be.  Even worse, if we get in a public debate with someone, we may be completely in the right, but if they're more entertaining, they are probably going to be judged the winner.  And it's easier to be entertaining when you're not worried about being accurate.  Never debate a good comedian. You won't win, even if you're right.  At least, not in the eyes of most crowds. 

I learned this lesson years ago, back when I was trying to be a writer and was correspondingly underemployed.  I had signed up with a temp agency, and one day I found myself working for a Sikh trader in oriental rugs, whose first name, I recall, was Surender.  Surender was rearranging the rugs in his warehouse, and he had a whole team of temp workers rolling them up and moving them around (this was amazingly demanding--you don't realize how heavy rugs are until you move them around all day long).  Four of the other temp workers were dodgy sorts, with jailhouse tattoos and jailhouse attitudes.  From their conversation, they seem to have known each other in jail.  Anyway, one of them was an accomplished loudmouth, swearing like a stevedore and bossing everybody else around (in hindsight, I realize he was probably on a roaring meth buzz).  I think he had worked there a couple of days already, so he considered himself an expert at the rug-shifting game.  When he gave me one order too many, I said, "Hold on. Why are bossing everybody around?  How long have you been here?"  Everyone else stopped and looked at us.  He eyed me and said, "How long have I been where? On Earth?!"  The rest of the ex-cons laughed like that was the funniest thing ever said.  "Burn!!"  "Good one, dude! Tell him!".  Everybody else laughed along nervously, and kept folding rugs and taking orders.

I lost that argument.  Not because I didn't have a point.  I did, and some of the other guys agreed with me. I lost because my opponent had been judged the wittiest, by a jury of his peers.* It was embarrassing, but I had learned a good lesson.  The person who makes the most entertaining remarks, or seems sympathetic to the most observers, generally wins a public debate--at least in the eyes of the public.  Their opponent may be more reasonable, and may even be right, but that doesn't matter.  If you come off looking tongue-tied, or stiff, or pretentious, you lose.

Obviously, this is a problem, because wrong is still wrong, even if it makes the crowd go wild.  If someone give the most eloquent, memorable speech ever, extolling the benefits of drinking strychnine, that doesn't make strychnine good for you. If the people in the crowd rush home and make strychnine tea, most of them will die, no matter how convincing the speech was.  If this weren't true--if facts and truth didn't matter--then it would be fine that glibness convinces more people than reason.  But they do matter, so it isn't fine.

But what can be done?  The only solution, I think, is to educate as many people as possible about what makes a statement truly convincing, and what just makes it seem convincing.  In other words, people need to know what constitutes a valid argument, and what constitutes a fallacious or invalid one.  I'm using the word "argument" in a particular way here.  I don't mean it in the sense of "verbal conflict".  Logically speaking, an argument is a claim that is supported with other claims.  The main claim is called a conclusion, and the supporting claims are called premises.  When you give an argument, you don't just state your conclusion.  You state your premises, too:  the reasons, or evidence, that supports your conclusion.  If I say, "Bernie Madoff is a swindler", that is true, but it isn't an argument.  To make it an argument, I would have to offer facts about the Ponzi schemes he was running, and how many people they ruined.  A naked claim, with no evidence to back it up, doesn't give you any reason to believe it.  If a stranger walked up to you and said "Bernie Madoff is a swindler", and you had never heard of Bernie Madoff, you would have no particular reason to believe him.

Once you explain what arguments are, it's easy to see why they're essential in a debate.  Strangely, though, most of the statements in a debate aren't arguments. Think about the debates you've seen break out in online comment threads.  You've almost certainly seen insults (You liberals are a bunch of idiots), jokes (If Obama came out for oxygen, Republicans would stop breathing), ridicule (Nobody with any sense believes that), demonization (Republicans love it when homeless people die in the gutter), cheerleading for your side (I'm a conservative and proud of it!), and old-fashioned, meaningless verbal abuse (Screw you!).  Actual arguments, where someone makes a claim and then backs it up with reasons or statistics, are the exceptions to the rule in most debates (just look at an online debate and see how many you can find).  Even when people do offer actual arguments, many of them are invalid, because they commit one fallacy or another.  Their premises are wrong, or irrelevant, or their conclusions don't follow from their premises.  Most debates online are like a Three Stooges fight, all eye-poking and ear-pulling.  They're noisy, and they entertain some people, but they don't prove a thing, except possibly who can gouge eyes with the most flair.

If most of the statements people make in a debate have no bearing on whether the idea being debated is true or false, because they offer no evidence for or against it...why do people make them?  I think it's because finding the truth isn't peoples' main goal in a debate. The real (if unconscious) goals for most of us are things like showing people how smart we are, convincing our opponents we're right (and how often does that happen?), making our opponents look bad, displaying support for our side, and so on. 

Of course, most people don't admit these things to themselves. They think they already have the truth, and that they're defending it when they debate.  This means they don't see a debate as an interaction that might bring all parties closer to the truth.  They think they're already there.  Maybe that's why many people don't put a lot of thought into whether the things they are saying are valid arguments. That rarely occurs to them, because they take it for granted that they know what's really true.  Why worry about giving valid reasons for your claims when you know you're right?  Why not spend your time trying to sound smart, and making the other side look bad? Especially when many of the people watching the debate think that insults, ridicule, and fallacies are just as compelling as valid arguments, if not more so. They're more likely to be vivid and memorable, after all.

Why are people so...unreasonable? I think it's because most of us have far too much faith in our ability to see the world as it really is. Human senses are weak, and the human mind is amazingly error-prone. Think about basic sensory perception, and how limited it really is. We can see only a thin slice of a vast spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.  Our eyes can detect red, green, and blue light, but not infrared or ultraviolet, to say nothing of radio waves and x-rays.  Similarly, we can only hear a thin slice of the spectrum of sound waves out there.  Elephants communicate in deep rumbles that carry for miles, but we can't hear them, because they are too low-pitched for our ears.  Not only are our perceptions limited, but we make sense of what we do perceive by bending it to fit with what we already know or believe.  People fall prey to all sorts of perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, and fallacies of reasoning.  If you start looking up these mental pitfalls, you'll find there are hundreds of them. Can you really be that sure you're right, when there are so many ways to be wrong?

Not only is it easy to misinterpret the evidence of our senses, but for many of us, evidence isn't even what's important. People quite often hold beliefs for reasons that have very little to do with how much evidence they have for them.  People may accept a belief because:

• They grew up believing it.
• Their friends and the people they identify with believe it.
• It makes them feel good.

What would make the most sense, when deciding what to believe, is to first look at the evidence, and then decide what you think is true.  That's not what people do most of the time. They get their beliefs from others, and then they look for arguments that support them, and ignore arguments that don't. They associate with people who share their beliefs, and tend to avoid or even demonize those who question them. Liberals read liberal magazines and nod along, and conservatives do the same thing with conservative magazines. It's more comfortable that way.

We all do these things, to some extent.  We do them because, even though we're prolific in our errors, we're passionate in our beliefs. We get upset when our beliefs are questioned.  We'll defend some of them to our last breath, even though we are fairly likely to be wrong.  In fact, some of the ideas with the least evidence to support them are the ones people kill each other for the most. It's one of the great absurdities of humankind, but there it is.

So, how do we get out of this mess? How do we stop being so silly?

I think we should start by taking hard look at ourselves, and admitting just how silly we've been. We should admit how error-prone we are, and that we might be wrong. We should take another look at the way we argue with others. If we could just admit that we might be wrong--that the "truths" we are defending might not be unassailable--then maybe we could admit that we are going about debate in the wrong way.  Maybe, for example, we actually need to give reasons for our claims, instead of squawking and jeering and saying that whoever doesn't believe us is a fool or a villain. If we decide that the purpose of debate isn't to prove we are right, but to discuss things until we all get closer to what is true, then maybe we should listen more to our opponents. Lots of them are smarter than we think. Perhaps we should interpret their arguments charitably, instead of caricaturing them. When they make a good point, we should acknowledge it. When they point out a flaw in our own reasoning, maybe we should actually admit it, and even (gasp) thank them for pointing out our mistake.  Maybe we should de-escalate the discussion when it gets heated, so that everyone keeps listening and learning from each other. 

I think these are all worthy ideas, but the main point I want to make in this essay is that we need to learn the difference between a real argument and its imitators. We need to spot fallacious reasoning in others, but we also need to spot it in ourselves (this is harder, because of our self-serving biases, which means it really is easier for other people to point them out). One way to start is by reading about cognitive biases and logical fallacies, and learning to watch for them (and not just in other people). I've listed some good places to start in the links below.

Of course, it's no easy thing to recognize the flaws in our own thinking.  And it may even be thankless. You may think, "What's the point of improving my reasoning--trading insults and fallacies for good arguments--if so many people out there are convinced by bad reasons, and wouldn't know valid reasoning if it mugged them in the street? If I debate someone funnier than me, and everyone decides the funny guy won, then what's the use?"

All I can offer is that the truth matters. Honesty matters. Striving for reasonable debate--and against unnecessary, childish squabbling--matters. That's why it's not enough just to improve our own reasoning. We have to convince others to recognize good reasoning, so that it gains more widespread respect, and bad reasoning loses it. We need more people to be able to recognize the difference between an unfounded assertion and a well-supported one. We need people to know the difference between a satirical jab, hilarious as it may be, and a plain, honest, valid point. Of course we're never going to show everyone how to think and debate intelligently. But the more people learn how, the better off we'll all be.

________________________________________________________

A Rulebook for Arguments. Anthony Weston.  A good, concise guide to arguments and critical thinking.

Fallacy Files

List of Cognitive Biases (Wikipedia)

  

Rhetological Fallacies:  An infographic from Information is Beautiful

Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies:  Has a nice, printable poster about fallacies.

 * I did get the last laugh.  Later that day, I noticed the bossy comedian was gone.  I asked Surender where he was, and he raised an eyebrow and said, "He had a foul mouth.  He had to go".