The Dog and the Hitchhiker: A Ghost Story

Last night I went to see a horror movie called the Conjuring. It wasn't the best I've ever seen, but it gave me a couple of literal shivers, so I guess it got the job done. It's one of those "Based on True Events" horror movies, in the tradition of The Amityville Horror. In fact, two of the main characters are Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life "demonologists" who also worked the case that The Amityville Horror was based on (rather loosely, it seems). In The Conjuring, the Warrens are nice, normal-seeming people, whose work just happens to require them to battle unclean spirits. Ed is a strapping, God-fearing, all-American kind of guy with a bit of a swagger, while Lorraine is unassuming and fearless. They're the heroes of the movie, which makes it clear they've fought their good fight in spite of all those skeptics who scoffed at them

Now, as anyone who reads the blog knows, I'm one of those skeptics. I figure there's no such thing as the supernatural, in either the religious or the New Age sense. Angels, demons, fairies, auras, and psychic phenomena all seem equally unreal to me. But I'm an open-minded skeptic, and I honestly don't think that's an oxymoron. If someone can give me hard evidence that I'm wrong, then I'll change my mind. Besides, I hate seeming like the wet blanket skeptic from some horror movie (especially since those guys usually get killed off rather horribly). Besides, I like a good ghost story as much as anyone else, and I've had a few odd experiences in my life too.

Have you ever felt like you had a premonition, or thought a coincidence was too unlikely to have happened by chance? I have. In my 41 years, I've had exactly three such experiences. The first was just silly. I was about 16, and my dad had me clearing brush on a lot he owned. I decided to walk to the motel in the next lot and get a Coke out of the machine, so I pulled the change out of my pocket--three quarters. I glanced at them there in my palm, and something possessed me to throw them all on the ground. They all came up heads, and they were all from 1967...pretty old quarters, even then. That's a pretty weird coincidence, for all kinds of reasons. What are the chances they would all be from the same year and come up heads? And what made me want to throw them on the ground? I never do that. Anyway, I looked at them, thought, "Wow, that's freaky", and went and spent them on my Coke. If they were lucky magic quarters, somebody else has them now. Maybe I should have waited for the beanstalk to sprout.

The second freaky coincidence happened on April 11, 2007. I was at my parents' house in Arkansas, and I woke up thinking about Kurt Vonnegut. That was odd, because I hadn't thought about him in years. He had been my absolute favorite author when I was in my late teens, but I was 35 in 2007. I was lying there thinking, "He's getting really old now. He surely won't live much longer." Then I got up and went downstairs, and my mom said, "Well I just heard on the radio that Kurt Vonnegut died." Later that day my sister, who was also visiting, looked at me and said, "So, Mom told me how you killed Kurt Vonnegut this morning."

That's two freaky, pseudo-psychic experiences in 40 years. They were pretty strange coincidences, but I honestly think they were just that--coincidences. Forty years is long enough for a few coincidences to happen just by chance. People do draw royal flushes every now and then, and that's explainable by statistics. Magic isn't necessary.

But let me tell you my ghost story. Or maybe it was just another dream, even though I was half-awake at the time. Whatever it was, for years afterward, my scalp would prickle every time I told the story. It was March 25, 1989, and I had turned 17 a few days before. That was the heyday of hair metal bands, and Cinderella was coming to Little Rock, which is 90 minutes south of my hometown. I wasn't a Cinderella fan myself, but my friend Dave was, and he made me a deal--if I drove, he would buy the tickets for both of us. That sounded good to me. Going to the big city without grownups was a big deal then, and David and I had a grand time.

We must have gone to eat after the concert, because it was around 2:00 AM when we finally headed home. By the time we got back to the foothills of the Ozarks, where the road gets curvy, Dave was asleep, and I was fighting to keep my eyes open. That's when saw a big, beautiful collie walking down the side of the road. We were nowhere near a town, or even a visible house. I wondered vaguely what it was doing out there, but I was too sleepy to think straight. So I kept on driving.

Then, after a couple more miles, I saw another, identical collie on the side of the road...just trotting along like the last one. That struck me as very odd, but once again, I was too sleepy to think about it much. So I kept on driving, curving down into a steep little valley toward the old Cadron Creek bridge.

Just as I started descending, I saw that collie again. There it was, on the side of the road, dead and decomposing.

That's when a little jolt of fear finally broke through the sleepiness. But I kept driving. Then, just as I hit that layer of cold air you find in those little valleys at night, I saw a hitchhiker. He was a couple hundred yards in front of me, and he just stepped out into the road like he didn't see my headlights. But he didn't seem to be getting closer to me, even though I was going pretty fast. As soon as I realized how strange that was--just before I crossed the bridge--the laws of physics kicked in again, and he was right in front of me. Looking across the hood of my car, right at me. And then he was gone.

I hit the gas and roared out of the valley, pulled over, and shook Dave until he woke up. "You've got to help me stay awake, man, I'm seeing things!" We drove a few more miles and stopped at an all-night convenience store. I got out and did jumping jacks to try to wake up, and then we headed on home.

The strange thing is, the whole thing startled me, but it didn't seem truly scary until the first time I told the story, and felt the hair on the back of my head stand up. But that stopped happening after a few years, and it just became a good spooky tale to tell. I still think I was just falling asleep at the wheel, and dreaming while I was half-awake. That's a much simpler explanation than ghostly hitchhikers, to say nothing of ghostly collie dogs.

But it's not like I know everything, and it's a weird old world, whether there's a supernatural or not. I hadn't thought much about that story for years, until today, when I was thinking about that movie last night. I was trying to find the real story it was supposedly based on, and ended up finding some creepy, sad articles about "exorcisms" performed by real clergymen. I was thinking about how different my naturalistic view is from someone who truly believes in demon possession. So much less scary. So I started thinking about my "paranormal" experiences, and decided it was finally time to write about them.

But then, as soon as I got home from work, I got a message on Facebook from my old friend Dave. He had attached a picture of his ticket from that concert, 24 years ago. "Remember this?" he said, "I kept the ticket stubs to every concert I ever went to....man, what a crazy night!"

So, my third freaky "psychic" experience in 41 years was earlier today, just as I was getting ready to write this story for the first time. I don't know if it makes me or Dave seem like the psychic one, but it's pretty strange either way. In the three years or so that we've been friends on Facebook, how did he happen to send me a picture of that ticket today? If it's been roughly 1,000 days, that means the odds are 1/1,000. I know a few long shots like that are almost certain to happen in 41 years, statistically speaking. But who knows? It's still a weird old world.

Philosophy is Not Optional

Last night I picked up a book on philosophy written for undergrads. It's a good book, but certainly no late night page-turner. Nevertheless, one of the first lines jumped off the page and slapped me. It said:

Philosophy is not an optional experience in your life.

"Wow," I thought, "That's true." But what struck me about that statement isn't that it's not optional for me. I've never been able to resist pondering the big mysteries in life. What's striking is that it's not optional for anybody. Nobody can go through life without facing some of life's big questions and deciding how they're going to answer them. Consider the idea of economic justice: the question of who deserves what in society. How you vote depends on how you answer that philosophical question. Is it right to tax wealthier people to give poorer people a bigger slice of the pie? Why or why not? To what extent do the wealthy deserve their wealth? Does it matter whether they inherited it or earned it by being smart and hardworking? If it does, to what extent do people deserve credit for being smart? If some people are simply born smarter, do they deserve to be wealthier based on an accident of birth? Why or why not?

These are all tough questions, which is why people still argue about them. And they're just some of the philosophical questions we can't avoid, either individually or as a society. On the individual level, suppose a friend asks what you think about his new, expensive car. You think it might be the ugliest thing on four wheels. Should you be honest, or should you tread lightly on his ego and say it's great, since he can't return it anyway? That's a philosophical issue, but a fairly trivial one. Most of us will have to face far bigger ones someday. For example, we may have to decide whether a dying family member should be taken off life support. That's not idle dorm room philosophy. How you decide that particular philosophical issue is literally a matter of life and death. Even if you believe the right answer is provided by religion, and can be looked up in the Bible, you still have to weigh philosophical issues. How do you decide which interpretation of the Bible is correct, or example? If different Christian denominations have different answers, how do you decide which one is right? If a non-Christian asks you why he should accept what the Bible says, how do you respond? It won't do any good to say, "Because the Bible says so." You need to provide independent reasons. In other words, you're back to philosophy.

Actually, though, maybe it's not philosophy that's not optional. What's really not optional is facing big philosophical questions and making decisions about them. Actually engaging in philosophy--in hard thinking about those questions--might be optional, because some people make decisions without thinking. They may never question their intuitions, or just automatically apply rules from the ideology, culture, or religion they grew up with. We can't avoid facing life's big questions, but we can avoid really thinking about them, if that's what we really want to do. But most people, I hope, don't really want to do that. Most people like to think they can back up their opinions with solid reasons for believing them.

But oftentimes, they can't. They think what they think because they grew up thinking it, or because their friends or family think that way, or because they just feel in their guts that one answer is right. Those clearly aren't adequate reasons, because they can all lead to false beliefs. Some people "just know in their guts" that men are superior to women. Their guts are wrong. Young Vikings grew up believing that Thor caused thunderstorms. They grew up mistaken. Their dear old Viking mamas and daddies were wrong.

This means that if we want to be able to back up our opinions with real reasoning, not just appeals to authority, tradition, or gut feelings, that's when philosophy isn't optional. That's why people need to learn a little about philosophy, because philosophers really have clarified some of these questions. To take a currently contentious example, many people who oppose gay marriage do so based on two arguments 1. God says it's wrong, as shown in certain Bible verses 2. It's not natural (it goes against the laws of nature or God's plan). The first is the Divine Command theory of ethics, and the second is a Natural Law theory. But here's the thing--philosophers have discovered serious logical problems with both of those theories, which have caused most to abandon them. The Divine Command theory runs into the Euthyphro Dilemma, and Natural Law arguments run into many objections, one of which is: Who says what's natural is good? Many male mammals kill babies of their species who aren't theirs. Does that mean infanticide is right?

The fact that philosophers have mostly rejected Divine Command and Natural Law theories of ethics doesn't mean those theories are wrong, but it does mean it's worth taking a critical look at both of them. If you want to defend either one adequately, you need to know what the objections are. They may not be convincing to you, but they certainly aren't trivial. Some of those philosophers were pretty smart people, after all, and some of the big questions they've wrestled with are questions we can't avoid. It might be possible to avoid thinking about those questions--to avoid doing philosophy, in other words--but it certainly isn't wise. If we want to be able to say our beliefs about some of life's most crucial questions are based on solid reasoning, then philosophy just isn't optional.

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The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy / William Lawhead

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.