Kesey's Letter: Thoughts on Truth and Empathy

Note: This is a repost of something I wrote over a year ago. I'm posting it again now because my last post was about symbolic logic, of all things, and it doesn't get much more dry and analytical than that. I feel like I should restore some balance by posting something a little less cold and mechanical. In fact, I wrote this in part to remind myself not to be too cold and mechanical. But it didn't work. I slipped back into a bit of emotional tone-deafness. It's a failing I have--I get so caught up in thinking that I forget to feel. That's really quite stupid, for reasons I explore below. So I'm going to remind myself again--hanging on to past insights is one of the major purposes of this blog, after all. I thought about tackling this topic all over again, and then I realized I probably won't be able to say it better than I said it here. Or maybe I'm just feeling lazy. Anyway, here it is again:

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I just read a letter by Ken Kesey, the '60's wildman famous for writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and for leading a band of pioneer hippies known as the Merry Pranksters on a cross-country trip in a psychedelic school bus--a trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Kesey's life was, oddly, defined by school buses.  In 1984, after Kesey had long since settled down, his son Jed was on another school bus, on his way to a wrestling meet.  The bus started sliding, and went over a cliff.  Jed was comatose when he was pulled from the bus, and died a few days later. Kesey wrote the letter afterward to some of his closest friends, describing his son's last minutes in the hospital, and his touching funeral. It's a heartbreaking, honest, beautiful letter, written by a man bent with grief but still overwhelmed by his love for his friends and family, and for the relentless beauty of a world where birds keep right on singing, no matter who was just buried.

But don't rely on my second-hand account.  By all means, read it yourself (unless now is not a convenient time to shed a tear). I'm going to wait, though, and put the link at the bottom of this post. If you read the letter now, you're not going to want to come back to my anemic, overly-analytical scribblings which it inspired.  At least, I wouldn't if I were you.

My friend who recommended the letter to me said it made her “cry noisily.” It didn't quite do that to me, and that's probably my loss. But it did make me think. Well, that's not quite right. It made me feel, and then think. I'm usually more of a thinker than a feeler.  I'm one of those withdrawn ponderers who is as attracted to ideas as to people (unless they're people who have a lot of interesting things to say).  For years, I've imagined that I prefer facts to feelings, not realizing until today just how silly that statement is. Why it is so silly will take some explaining.

On Kant and Kindness: What's the Point of Ethics, Anyway?

Immanuel Kant

Every so often I encounter an idea that stops me cold and makes me think, “Woah, if that's true I'm going to have to rethink all kinds of things.” These ideas aren't necessarily true, but they do demand to be considered. One that I've encountered recently is the way Kant thought about what makes an action moral or ethical (I use the two words as synonyms). To see how Kant thought about ethics, imagine a doctor who loves her work. What makes her happy is to help other people, and the more she helps them, the happier she is. That's an extremely moral person, right?

Not so fast, says Kant. Kant thought the only actions that can truly be considered moral are those based on a reasoned sense of duty, not on compassion or benevolence. To illustrate this, let's imagine another doctor. This one isn't especially compassionate, and it doesn't make her all that happy to help others. But she's not in it for the money, either. This doctor does her work out of a sense of duty. She believes that helping people is the right thing to do and the best way to spend her life, but she would much rather be a professional surfer. Kant would say it's she's who's acting morally. It's not that the first is being immoral. But she's simply doing what makes her happy, and it's a nice coincidence that what makes her happy helps others. It's the second doctor who's putting her desires aside to act in a way that she thinks is right.

That's an arresting thought. We tend to think of the best people as the ones who are the most selfless and kind, but we also admire people who put aside their desires to do what's right. Are people who do good out of a sense of duty really more ethical than people who do good because it makes them feel good? I don't know. I tend to think that while the doctor who helps people out of a sense of duty is very ethical and admirable, it would be even better if she could somehow cultivate compassion for people, and align her happiness with theirs. It would make her life easier, and probably make her a better doctor.

But the idea of acting according to principle, regardless of how it makes you feel, is pretty important, too. A whole lot of the time, what's obviously right doesn't align with what we want to do. Imagine you've recently been fired from your job, and you're wondering how you're going to pay next month's rent. Then you find a wallet with $2000 in it. Some people would never want to do anything but get the wallet to its owner. But not many, I suspect. Others would take the money and ditch the wallet without a second thought. Alas, there are plenty of those. But in between those two extremes are those who would really, really want to take the money, but don't because they think it would violate an ethical rule. They feel it's their duty is to find the owner of the wallet and give it back to them.

It's good that they feel that way, because their innate kindness toward strangers wouldn't have been enough to make them give the wallet back. Kindness and compassion are great, but they're probably too unreliable to use as the sole bases for ethics in a society. A sense of duty can be a very good thing, even if it isn't accompanied by any particular kindness.

But duty without kindness has serious pitfalls. What if the rules people feel duty bound to follow are bad ones? In Peter Singer's book, How Are We To Live, he mentions that Adolph Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, claimed that he had been acting according to a Kantian sense of duty. Apparently Eichmann thought—based in part on his interpretation of Kant--that he shouldn't let sympathy interfere with his duty, which was, he thought, to be faithful to his country by carrying out its horrific Nazi policies. He even talked about how he had occasionally felt sympathy for Jews he saw being killed, but suppressed it on Kantian grounds. At least, that's the story Eichmann told his captors, and maybe himself. But it does seem to be true that many rank and file Nazis who committed atrocities weren't sadistic, just heartlessly dutiful.

Of course, we can't blame Kant for how people misguidedly acted on his philosophy. Still, Kant does seem to have believed that we should never let our sympathy for others get in the way of our ethical duty to act according to universalizable standards. And this did lead him to some chilling conclusions. For example, imagine that a friend comes to your house and says someone is trying to kill them, and asks you to hide them. You do. Then the killer comes to your door and asks if your friend is inside. Should you lie to protect your friend? Kant thought not, because he thought lying was universally wrong, and that our duty to obey this universal law outweighs our feelings for our friend.

And that is clearly crazy. This a case where reason has gone too far, and should have brought compassion along with it. I admit that's not much of a refutation, logically speaking, but I bet you agree, so I'll move on to my main point. That's what the conundrum about the two doctors is really all about, which is: what should ethics be based on? Some people think ethics should be based on consequences—we act ethically because it leads to desirable outcomes. Thinking we should act ethically because it makes life better for conscious beings is an example of such a consequentialist position. Others, like Kant, think ethics should be based on reasoning about what laws should be universal, and then acting with a sense of duty to uphold those laws. This is the deontological (duty-based) theory of ethics. Then there are people, like Aristotle, who believe that ethics is all about having or cultivating certain virtues, or desirable personal traits. Most people would consider the kindness of the first doctor to be that sort of virtue. Of course, probably the majority of people in this country think about ethics in terms of religion. They may think ethics should be based on God's will or God's plan for us. I've talked quite a bit about religion and ethics in other posts, so for now I'm just going to focus on secular ethics.

Whenever you're pondering these questions it seems to me that you have to ask, “What's the ultimate point of acting ethically?” When I ask that, the consequentialist view is the only one that makes any sense to me. What could possibly be the point of either duty or virtue if they don't do any actual good in the world? In a world of robots who don't care what happens to them or anything else, what would be the point of kindness? What would be the point of following ethical laws? Are ethics even conceivable in a world without preferences; without pleasure and pain, or hopes and dreams? Don't get me wrong. Cultivating virtues, and making good ethical rules and following them even when we don't want to, are both good ideas. But at bottom the only reason I can imagine for doing those things is that they make life better for people or other sentient creatures who are capable of being happy and fulfilled in one set of circumstances and miserable in another. In the absence of consciousness and preference, ethics makes very little sense. If someone walked up to you and said, “The problem with Mars is that there are no ethics there,” you would think they were crazy. First, because a person saying such a thing out to a stranger out of the blue probably ain't quite right, and second, because Mars is a planet of rock and wind, with no life or consciousness. What need is there for ethics in a place like that?

In this era, when traditional religious ideas about morality have lost a great deal of their grip, people worry that people without religion will see no reason to act ethically. As the common paraphrase of Tolstoy goes, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.” It's a legitimate worry, because some people will conclude just that. But it's not a rational conclusion for them to make. First of all, if the only thing that is keeping you from murdering and thieving your way through life is the idea that God would disapprove or it, or that he will punish you with hellfire if you do it, then you aren't actually very moral. Second, whether there's a God or not, the world is full of thinking, feeling beings with preferences about what kind of life they want. As soon as you recognize that there are other beings in the world whose desires and dreams are every bit as real to them as yours are to you, you've recognized the need to consider ethics.

So what about the two doctors? Which one is more ethical? Heck, I don't know! The comparison is useful for isolating a philosophical point, but it's not clear that there's an answer. I'd say they're both quite ethical, because they're both doing things would good consequences. Perhaps the second one is explicitly basing her actions on ethical considerations more than the first one, but perhaps the first was just born with a better sense of what is ethical? The first is acting according to the virtue of kindness, and the second is acting according to duty (though dutifulness is a virtue, too, as long as it doesn't run away from compassion). Surely it doesn't make sense to belittle sympathy or similar emotions as engines of good behavior? Would it really make sense to have a world where people ignored their sympathies and acted solely based on duty, because that is somehow a truer display of ethics? If the emotionally indifferent doctor is more ethical than the compassionate one, then would a downright misanthropic doctor (who still does good work) be the most ethical of all? If so, do we want a world full of people like that? Surely not. Why not simply cultivate kindness and make being decent easier for everyone? No easy task, or course, but still.

One thing is clear--if you had to choose which doctor you wanted to be, you would pick the first one, who's simply happy when she is doing good. It would be a better world if we could find a way of cultivating that kind of effortless goodness, both for the people benefiting from the do-gooders, and the do-gooders themselves (and surely their happiness counts, too?) A sense of duty is still necessary too, for times when temptation makes people forget the interests of others. But the idea of rules or duty for their own sake makes no sense, at least not to me. Those are means to other ends, not ends in themselves. In fact, kindness and other virtues, as well as rules and duties, are all just means of making the world a better place to live in. That's the real point, the ultimate end, and whatever gets us closer to it is surely a good thing. Both doctors are good people, taking different paths toward the same goal. I imagine Kant would disagree, and I'm quite sure he was smarter than I am. But, then, I wouldn't hesitate to lie to a murderer to save a life. And I bet Kant wouldn't have, either.

Can You Say "Shibboleth"?

I've had the good fortune lately to go to a couple of fancy dinners. I call it good fortune because the company was good, not because the event was fancy. The food was not especially tasty, but it was presented with great style and pomp: it looked pretty. And then there was the silverware. My plate was surrounded by a garrison of forks, spoons, and knives. I had no idea which spoon to use for the soup, or which fork to use for the salad. Worse, there were glasses placed, with perfect symmetry, on each side of my plate. Which glass was mine? I chose the wrong one, of course, thus stealing my neighbor's glass. This breach of etiquette sent shock waves around the table, as each of my dinner companions had to use their neighbor's glass instead of their own. I apologized in my politest Arkansas accent, but if any of my dinner companions had decided I was a yokel, that probably didn't help.

All this would have bothered me if I were a more formal person. But I laughed it off, because I figure things like that shouldn't be taken too seriously. Knowing which fork to use--and speaking in a certain accent, for that matter--are nothing more than shibboleths. They don't have any particular purpose except to identify who belongs to a particular group...and who doesn't. Using the wrong fork immediately identifies me as someone who hasn't mastered the rules of etiquette. My accent identifies me as being from the hilly part of the south--not a region associated with sophistication in the average American mind. Linguists know that pronunciation is arbitrary, and has no intrinsic association with intelligence, but I can attest that people will judge you for having an accent like mine. The shibboleth is still in effect, no matter what the linguists say. But when I think about the origins of the term "shibboleth", I realize it could be a lot worse.

The word "shibboleth" comes from the Old Testament. In the late second millennium BC, the Israelites were still a set of quarrelsome tribes who hadn't yet united into the Kingdom of Israel. The Book of Judges tells how two Israelite tribes, the Ephraimites and Gileadites, went to war. The Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites, leaving many Ephraimites stuck in Gileadite country, east of the Jordan river. As they tried to cross back into their own country, the Gileadites stopped them at the river. The two tribes spoke the same language, but unfortunately for the Ephraimites, they had different accents. Judges 12:5-6 tells what happened next.

Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, "Let me go over," the men of Gilead would say to him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" When he said, "No," they said to him "Then say Shibboleth," and he said "Sibboleth" for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand of the Ephraimites fell at that time.

A fateful word, shibboleth, but not because of its meaning. Depending on who you ask, it meant either "ear of grain" or "torrent". The point was that Ephraimites said it differently than Gileadites, and that allowed the Gileadites to identify their enemies. Shibboleths have been used in warfare more recently, too. In World War II, Allied soldiers would distinguish Japanese soldiers from other Asians by asking them to say, "lollapalooza." Since the Japanese language doesn't distinguish the "L" and "R" sounds, the Japanese would say "rorraparooza"--a dead giveaway, often in the literal sense. A fictional shibboleth appears in the movie "Inglourious Basterds", where an Englishman posing as a German soldier is caught making a hand-gesture a German would never use.

Not all shibboleths are so deadly, or even particularly nasty. Accents, in-jokes, fashions, slang, musical preferences--all these things can function as shibboleths. Many of them are pretty harmless, and just used to distinguish some subculture, often distinct only in its sense of fashion or music. There are all kinds of pop culture shibboleths I haven't mastered, but no one is particularly mean to me because of that (there's the occasional snotty hipster, but life is too short to concern oneself with the opinions of snotty hipsters).

However, the shibboleths of formal etiquette can get nasty (though not usually downright murderous). Knowing your table settings is a shibboleth indicating whether you know the rules of etiquette, and that is historically a way of indicating whether someone is from the upper or aristocratic classes, because only people from those classes had the means to learn such things. That's why etiquette is full of rules that don't really serve any purpose except to differentiate people who know the rules from those who don't. The word "etiquette" actually means "tag" or "label" in French. Having etiquette labels you as being from the refined classes. It's a behavioral badge, but a badge nonetheless.

Of course, etiquette can be more than just a set of shibboleths. It can also give people guidelines for being polite and thoughtful. But that purpose can be lost in the minutia of social rules. The shibboleth function of etiquette, when you think about it, is not very polite and thoughtful at all, at least to the people it excludes. Arbitrary social rules are also a burden for the people who know them, because life would be simpler (and often less expensive) if they didn't have to bother with them. People will work very hard to appear better than others.

It's odd how notions of good behavior are still bound up with old notions of class, or even old-world aristocracy. Think about the word "classy", as in, "That was a classy thing to do." "Classy" didn't originally mean "thoughtful and admirable", but "what a person from the higher classes would do". Today we think of a "gentleman" as a man who has good manners, but once it simply meant somebody who didn't have to work with his hands, or even work at all, regardless of how polite he was. The word "courtesy" originally meant "the proper way of acting at court." Americans still say certain behaviors are "noble" even though we have never had a class of noble men and women here. The aristocracy often weren't very noble, anyway, if by "noble" you mean "well-behaved and honorable". In fact, the oldest noble families in Europe first became nobles by fighting brutal wars.

The problem with confusing good, thoughtful behavior with class-based shibboleths is that class divisions don't necessarily reflect good behavior. In fact, most people today would say that a rigid, hereditary class system is a form of societal injustice. People aren't members of the upper classes because they have good manners, but because they were born in certain families, or made a lot of money and bought their way in. As the old saying goes, "Make money and the world will conspire to make you a gentleman." Making your money in a gentlemanly way is optional, and often counter-productive.

I don't mean to bash the upper classes here. I've known people from the upper classes who were truly noble, but I've also known some who used social niceties as a weapon to shame others.  I don't care how "well-bred" they are, those people can be as mean as scorpions in a skillet.

The point of all this is that we need to disentangle true courtesy from arbitrary shibboleths, and politeness from class and wealth. If some rule of etiquette makes life more pleasant, or shows thoughtfulness and respect toward other people, then let's keep it. If it's merely a shibboleth, good for nothing but distinguishing one group of people from another, then toss it in the garbage, where it belongs. I'm all for refinement and politeness when it serves a real purpose. After all, people can be pretty nasty creatures when they aren't taught manners, and the current parenting style ignoring rudeness strikes me as a horrible idea. But what's also a horrible idea is continuing to use arbitrary rules to distinguish people based on social class. If we could root out shibboleths masquerading as manners, and focus on actually being nice, thoughtful, and honorable, the world would be a simpler and kinder place. As Emily Post herself said: "Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."