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Philosophy

Self-Deception and Denial (2)

Today’s images were made by a young photographer from New York City. Ben Zank was on a meteoric rise as an artist until the beginning of the pandemic. After a stretch of five years without exhibitions, as far as I know, he is now reentering the world of photography with a book of his photographs of staged compositions, performances that are enigmatic and technically exquisite. I thought the string of self-portraits in Nothing to See Here would be the perfect complement for the topic before us: an essay on self-deception by philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty.

We can probably all list numerous self-deceptions that we detect in ourselves or others. They can be as trivial as thinking that the expenditure of frequent visits to a hair dresser is worth it because we now look more desirable (hah!) or as consequential as turning our eyes away from behavior that signals abuse by someone we love. They can be harmless, when we tell ourselves we are really interested in some boring activity, in order to keep someone’s affections, or they can be deadly, if we wishfully look away from physical signs that would require prompt medical attention before becoming lethal. Given that self-deceptions are not just quirks, I wanted to learn more about them.

User-friendly Self Deception, published in 1994 is a fascinating foray into a corner of moral philosophy about questions that heavily overlap with cognitive psychology, my own neck of the woods, and of course older varieties of psychoanalytic thought. I found Rorty’s essay wonderfully informative about what we need to think through when concerning ourselves with the issue of self-deception. And her writing is delicious – just look at sentences like these:

“We draw the lines between self-deception and its cousins and clones—compartmentalization, adaptive denials, repressed conflicts and submerged aggressions, false conscious- ness, sublimation, wishful thinking, suspiciously systematic errors in self-reflection….The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots? Are there forms of user-friendly self-deception that do not run the dangers that falsity, irrationality and manipulation are usually presumed to bring?”

One of Rorty’s fundamental claim is the fact that we cannot avoid self-deceptions and that they can have positive results, until a certain line is crossed. Rather than condemning them – something that I habitually do, thinking that any kind of lying, even lying to oneself, is morally objectionable and functionally disabling in the long run – she urges us to be ambivalent. We should acknowledge the value self-deception can bring to both self and communal life, but also know where to draw the life when it becomes self-harming.

The essay is structured around a discussion what self-deception is and what it is not, and what strategies we use to perfect it – a helpful tool when we try to understand how the process of deceiving ourselves unfolds. She then turns to the benefits of this psychological manipulation, both globally and locally, and eventually wonders how we can prevent self-serving strategies to become a folly with serious consequences. I will report on the key points, and leave out the philosophical frameworks which I would surely screw up, given my layperson’s extent of knowledge. Or lack thereof. You might have better luck reading the essay yourself.

Rorty defines self-deception as a species of rhetorical persuasion driving us away from rationality and transparency. Like for all forms of persuasion, the processes involved are complex, dynamic and necessitate co-operation – among the different parts of our own selves, as well as between us and our social surround. They imply various mechanisms, including perceptual, cognitive, affective and behavioral dispositions. Concretely, what we (don’t)see, where we (don’t) direct out attention, what feelings we decide (not)to allow and which actions we (don’t) take all interact to sustain the desired state of belief.

I’lI try to translate this into an example of parenting – assume you suspect your teenager to have turned to shoplifting designer clothes (or taking drugs, or stealing cars – you name it.) You don’t want to face the reality. In order to maintain your self-deception of “my daughter would never do this,” you can ignore that the kid sneaks stuff into the house, believe her lies that items are borrowed from friends, avoid inspecting the closet for new merchandise, tell yourself she has gotten a lot of tips at her summer waitressing job, and never ever join her at trips to the mall, or open her mail from the court system. Note that self-deception is not necessarily about yourself, then. It can be about the honesty of other people or some such, as well.

More often than not, this self-deception is sustained by social support. Your friends tell you, should you dare to mention your suspicion, that it can’t be, your daughter is such a good kid, or that it was a momentary lapse on her part, or a quick phase that teenagers go through, not evidence of a larger underlying problem.

Many kinds of self-deception occur within social interactions, and Rorty argues that without them “our dedications, our friendships, our work, our causes would collapse.”

“It is virtually impossible to imagine any society that does not systematically and actively promote the self-deception of its members, particularly when the requirements of social continuity and cohesion are subtly at odds with one another and with the standard issue psychology of their members. Socially induced self-deception is an instrument in the preservation of social co-operation and cohesion.“

Self-deceptions can protect us from an overload of despair, or the burden of constant skepticism, or the stress that comes with acknowledging a true rupture in personal relations, or having to give up self-harming behavior that we are addicted to.

A further benefit from deceiving ourselves can come when we pretend to have confidence or skills in order to acquire them. When the world reacts positively to our mimicry, we might find ourselves very well in position where it becomes reality. On the other hand, deceiving ourselves about the value of our roles in society, or the amount of respect we deserve, or that hierarchical systems are justified, are, of course, contributing to societal peace as well. One might ask who is paying the price, though…. (I am thinking here of the resurgence of the tradwife (traditional wife) movement and its horrifying consequences of women insisting that (economic) dependency on their partner is the best choice in life, smartly explained here.)

Rorty ends her considerations by noting that “Self-deception does not monitor its own use: it doesn’t know when or where to stop. It is specifically constructed to ignore and resist correction. The danger of self-deception lies not so much in the irrationality of the occasion, but in the ramified consequences of the habits it develops, its obduracy and its tendency to generalize.”

For each instance we have to ask the question of who eventually benefits from the manipulation and when will it be self-defeating. We have to inspect the details of our psychological contortions and be willing to ask within every context and occasion who is trying to persuade whom to what benefit within the circle of our various parts of self.

Honestly, I find that a bit unsatisfying, just as her suggestion to be mindful of the company we keep, company that might collude with and incite self-deception. For one, it seems an elitist approach – how many people have the analytic wherewithal required by such introspection? And when does a commitment to constant analyzing one’s states and motives switch over to a kind of hyper vigilance that detects fault everywhere? Feeds into narcissistic tendencies towards continual preoccupation with self? And, most importantly, If it were as easy as asking ourselves questions and following a moral and pragmatic compass, why are the habits so damn entrenched? Any suggestions?

Music today is about the self-deceptions around departed loved ones….

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Self Deception and Denial (1)

When I talk with my friends we often circle back to the question of finding the right balance: When is it ok to stick our head in the sand against world news in order to cope, and when does that reaction become self defeating in the long run? We are obviously not alone with that worry: just last week two eminent researchers, a sociologist and a psychologist, raised a warning flag in the Scientific American about “peak denial,” and the ways it manipulates our take on reality. Newspapers of record also start voicing concerns about the consequences of societal denial.

Independently, dictionary in hand, I stumbled my way through a brilliant essay on self-deception by a philosopher. I thought maybe you might be interested in a condensed version of these assessments of public and personal approaches to psychological (self)control. I hope that I caught some, if not all, of the complexities. We start with public denial. The next blog will focus on self-deception. And for balancing out the heavy topics, today’s photographs will tackle Big Foot denial, since I can provide proof of existence from my hikes in the Cascades….

Marianne Cooper, a senior research scholar at Stanford University and Maxim Voronof, a professor of sustainability and organization at the Schulich School of Business at York University, are interested in what happens when overlooking and tolerating greater levels of harm becomes a shared cultural habit.

“Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we acclimate to ignoring more and caring less at our own peril. In the short term, living in a state of peak denial helps us cope. In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization: that we meet this unprecedented litany of “wicked problems,” from climate change to the rise of fascism, with passive acceptance rather than urgent collective action.”

How did we get here? What do we know about denial and the processes that lead to our “reality-adjacent” lives where serious problems are made to seem normal? The researchers focus on how threatening information is neutralized or evaded (Bonus: they link to two accessible books that look at these techniques in detail: Living in Denial – Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life by Kari Marie Norgaard, and Never Saw It Coming – Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst by Karen A. Cerulo.)

Using COVID as an example, the authors explain how these strategies work. (Given that I am convinced that we will be thrown into another pandemic, variants of the even more deadly avian flu, sooner rather than later, I find this case study particularly worthwhile to think about. But we could also look at climate change, nuclear warfare, or the rise of authoritarian regimes across the world.)

One way of neutralizing a problem is by making it hard to hear or learn about it. You can restrict efforts to look into it, keeping information inaccessible or not collecting it in the first place. The CDC scaled back Covid tracking for example, requiring increasingly less reporting from hospitals or other institution, until they stopped all together. The government also refuses to alert the public about danger levels (the second highest surge happened only 6 months ago, last winter, knowledge not distributed by the White House.) Tracking and warning are replaced by no monitoring or mentioning – allowing things to seem back to normal.

Minimizing the problem is a successful strategy as well, when you want a public ensconced in denial. This can be done by neutralizing language: “endemic,” or “during COVID,” “lower hospitalization rates than last year,” all suggest the main danger is behind us. Establishing laws that prohibit mask wearing make it seem like the danger of getting infected is tiny compared to the cost of having purported criminals be unidentifiable. I wrote about my disgust with the North Carolina bill to ban masks, now adding my disbelief that New York’s Governor Hochul wants to ban masks in the Subway.

One particular consequence of COVID infections was met with early institutional silence: long Covid. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced the definition for long COVID only now June 11,2024. Early on, sufferers of this disabling condition were accused to be hysteric or generally anxiety-driven, making it hard for them to access care. Never mind that long Covid can be acquired by even the mildest Covid infection, is associated with autoimmune diseases, triggering Type 1 diabetes, cardiovascular risk as well as cognitive dysfunction for the individuals, and a societal economic cost that rivals the Great Recession, and has no easy treatment options. People’s behavior would surely be affected if they knew about this threat in all of its complexity. Both neutralization and minimizing are obviously at work here.

Cooper and Voronof point out that in addition to revising the present, we also tend to rewrite the past when that helps with public denial of a problem. The cultural amnesia about the extent of the pandemic is striking. “In burying the past, we sidestep accountability for what went wrong and preserve the status quo by failing to implement lessons learned from our own history.“

And woe to the voice that pipes up, calling us to acknowledge or remember the actual facts. Threats against truth tellers loom large, as do actual retaliations against whistleblowers. We are so used to conspiracies of silence, and so in need of positive illusions, that we don’t want to break the patterns that sustain them on all levels of society, ranging from small groups to large corporations, from personal friendships to politics.

How do we escape this cycle? How do we prepare ourselves for what’s on the horizon by breaking through our patterns of denial? The authors summarize:

“We need to stop enabling it. This starts by being more attuned to our “everyday ignoring” and “everyday bystanding”—like that pinch we feel when we know we should click through a concerning headline, but instead scroll past it.

We need to work harder to catch ourselves in the act of staying silent or avoiding uncomfortable information and do more real-time course correcting.

We need to guard against lowering our standards for normalcy. When we mentally and emotionally recalibrate to the new normal, we also disassociate from our own humanity.

We need to demand that our leaders give the full truth and hold them to account. We must stand up for the silenced and stand with the silence-breakers.”

This seems easier said than done, but Stanley Cohen’s 2001 seminal book, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering, delivers the goods. Cohen was a sociologist and criminologist, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. His research focussed on “emotional management”, including the mismanagement of emotions in the form of sentimentality, overreaction, and emotional denial, spelling out in great detail what we have to do to be effective witnesses. Strongly recommended.

I know I am coming back to that term, over and over. It probably allows me to combat the general feeling of helplessness in the face of world affairs, as if witnessing is a significant contribution. But I think if there are enough of us who continue to look rather than look away, perhaps it will make a difference.

Denial, however, does provide some serious succor, when it comes to politics and economics – science denial is for many an expression of identity, used to shore up polarization within the electorate. And a humming economy needs workers as well as consumers. If either stay home for fear of infection, the system will crash. Self-deception provides similarly important protections for individuals. More on that next time.

Music today echoes foreboding and rebirth, both possibilities when thinking about denial, which can, after all, be abandoned. Beautifully captured by Shostakovich after verses by Pushkin.

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(Re)Birth

There have been rich moments during my stay at the Californian Zorthian Ranch, in the course of daily wanderings, or, for that matter, having my coffee on the patio.

Pigs come by and want to be scratched, or, alternatively, bite your ankles (luckily I was warned and the single culprit is easily identifiable.)

Scout the cat visits regularly, and a small dog named Chicken pretends to be fearless.

I have mentioned the owls before, and have come to realize that the entire soundscape is a reenactment of my childhood, on another continent, in an equally rural surround: Goats, cows, roosters and chickens, peacocks, the occasional horse, crows and multiple songbirds – old traces of “home” reappear from some deep place in memory. Except my village did not have Los Angeles or the likes, one of the largest cities ever, attached, but was a truly isolated. I listen to warblers, finches, mourning doves, and am stunned by the arc that my life has taken, from the sugar beet fields of Western post-war Germany, to the San Gabriel mountains in Southern California, with multiple land mark locations in between. So many new beginnings, so many adventures.

How best avoid being eaten: mayflies hiding on lizard’s head….

Next to the rich moments there are magical moments. If you stand still enough for long enough, you can actually watch a pair of tiny wrens build a nest inside some of the discarded machinery. Every time they deliver a twig they serenade, “Look, world, I did it! One more stick to make it a home! Eggs next!”

Gathering twigs

Oops, dropped one

A triumphant trilling after twig deposit in that wheelhouse.

Most moving was the birth of two little goats, literally a stone’s throw away from my porch. I met them not even 24 hours after their birth. Aptly named Chocolate Milk and Brownie by the resident five-year-old, they are exploring their world, trying to persuade their mother to nurse them, for which she has little patience. They romp, they sleep, they are so cute that it brings tears to my eyes, when really, I am not the most sentimental.

Birth: we – I – tend to overlook the enormity of creation, the possibilities of new beginnings, when the world events draw attention so much more frequently to its opposite: death. I have been thinking way too much through the trauma of real wars and our participation in it through acts of commission and omission; the suffering of women condemned to death through new abortion legislation (it is estimated, that over 1000 women each year will dye of ectopic pregnancies alone in Arizona after the lates court rulings that sets the state back to 1864) or reviewing art so completely focussed on the imagination of war action and outcome, as I did earlier this week.

Hannah Arendt ‘s words come to mind, as ever a reminder that we need to fight off a sense of defeat or resignation.

“With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we responded by beginning something new on our own initiative” (The Human Condition 176-7).

The concept, as she devised it, is called natality. It does not simply describe the fact of being born. It embraces the potential that is inherent in birth, a potential that needs to be converted into action to make a difference or some impression on the world. (There are lots of other concepts attached as well, including the way we can and must connect with others, for political action that is part of shaping the world, but that would lead us to far away from my main point.)

We have the choice to act, in whatever minimal ways, as creatives, or educators, or supporters, or by providing mutual aid. We can run for something, or we can donate, we can plant trees, or hold others in their grief. We can decide what we focus on – Death? Birth? – to allow us to preserve a semblance of sanity, or to generate sufficient rage so that we refuse to give up.

I have not yet read a recent book by Jennifer Banks, Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth which came highly recommended from the L.A. Review of Books. Banks’s case studies include Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Sojourner Truth, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison and Hannah Arendt as well, looking at the centrality of the topic of (re)birth in the authors’ work. It’s on the list! When I have time to read again, that is, away from the temptation to hang out with the baby goats and photograph the wrens.

Books have always been my source to screw up the courage for new beginnings. They modeled the worlds that a bored or lonely child would consider open, just a step needed to enter a new universe. Who cared that I probably understood only half of what I read, way too early, from the classics of Russian and French literature to the German canon of the Greats, from Heine to Mann. I know exactly what triggered my Wanderlust, though, at age 9 or thereabouts: a book about chasing white Rhinos in Africa, on a land rover trip from Algiers to Cape Town. I never made it to South Africa. The Zorthian farm is enough.

Music today is a 1902 symphony called Rebirth.

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Muddy Considerations.

I’m not asking you to walk with me today. Rather, sit back and let me regale you with a tale of failure: the failure to hike to a seemingly easy destination, Cape Falcon at the Pacific coast.

The sign should have been a warning, the generously left behind walking sticks not been ignored. The path seemed perfectly fine, until it wasn’t. Landslides that had felled trees could be ignored, climbing over the trunks was not a major effort.

But then the mud set in, in depth and fluidity that you really could not walk on it without sinking in to the ankles. So you had to find stepping stones, utilize the root systems of the old growth trees or make side detours, only to find your way back to a path that was now covered with mall rivulets of running water.

Jumping puddles….

I gave up halfway in, saying good bye to the dream of seeing the Pacific ocean from high up, off cliffs that I had never visited before.

Let me hasten to add that of course it was not a failure. It was an adventure in a damp, dripping, moist, muddy universe that provide innumerable shades of intensely saturated greens, gentle rain that was barely felt, squishy noises that echoed delightful childhood memories of stomping around in your ladybug rubber boots.

The forest verdant. Wet. Full of new growth, pretending spring was already here.

It was also a reminder of how privileged we are to live at the threshold of so many different micro climates, the dry, steep cliffs of the Gorge on Wednesday, the temperate rainforest at the coast on Friday, all easily reached with a short drive.

Failure, as a concept, was on my mind because of two things I read recently. Both told stories about the consequences of failure, with both acknowledging that our society is particularly, grossly even, success oriented, with success structurally reserved for a few. Failure, then, can lead to compensating mechanisms that prove to be intensely destructive. At least that was the upshot of a thoughtful, well argued article by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men. The essay discusses the misfits who become killers, sometimes mass murderers,

“show(ing) them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies…. But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.”

Highly recommended reading, which, in my case, was paired with an essay by Costica Bradatan, a Romanian immigrant and Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University discussing his new book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.”

In a tongue in cheek assessment of his own predilections he writes:

“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.”

The book is devoted to four major historical figures actively courting failure in their pursuit of meaning and transformation (or religious transcendence.) I have only read the chapter on Simone Weil which is available here, and was much taken by Bradatan’s narrative approach (and skill) and not at all by his conclusions. There is something about the proscription to be humble, to let failure lead you inwards on some self discovery journey that rubs me as too convenient in a society that is set to clamp down on anger and resistance provoked by injustice. (I must also admit that I will never be able to be a neutral reader on the saintliness of Ghandi, one of the four figures discussed in this book. Remember, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime—and to give up their own lives as sacrifices. He told the Jews to pray for Adolf Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus,’ he wrote, ‘he would salve his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.”(Ref.)

Yes, excessive anger leading to mass shootings is catastrophic. But humble cowing in front of oppressive forces that promise enlightenment and salvation if you keep your voice down and obey, is not desirable either. There are too many requests for being humble in the air right now and I always wonder about the underlying societal frictions. I do believe it is important to experience failure (and not shelter kids from that experience, in particular) and learn from it, perhaps grow through it, but let’s not tie it to humility beyond curbing our narcissistic streaks. There’s a slippery slope from humility to servility to conformity and consent, in my not so humble opinion.

One last glimpse of Friday’s wondrous views: neither humble nor proud, the elks were taking it easy, some as mud-caked as their photographer by the end of the day. Pretty amazing.

Music today is America by Jewish (immigrant) composer Ernest Bloch who lived at the Oregon Coast.

PS: This WOULD have been the view, photograph from internet:

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Seclused in Light

by Thomas Lux

It’s dusk. My sons are tall. And one of them became a father this week, starting a new cycle of life. I feel like my heart is encapsulated in light, radiating awe and joy in view of natality, the miracle of birth and new beginnings.

I can’t help but think of how I have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s writings in What is Freedom on the centrality of beginnings to human beings. In reference to Augustine’s City of God she conveys it is not just the beginning of that new life, but also the ability for each life to initiate something new.

“Man is free because he is a beginning. . . . ‘Initium ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nemo fuit.’ [So that beginnings would be, humans were created, before whom there was no one] In the birth of each man this initial beginning is reaffirmed, because in each instance something new comes into an already existing world. . . . Because he is a beginning, man can begin; to be human and to be free are one and the same. God created man in order to introduce into the world the faculty of beginning: freedom.“

In The Human Condition” she writes: “when we speak of birth, we speak not of the beginning of something, but of somebody, who is a beginner himself.” She later describes the possibility of action in this context, and the impact on community derived from plurality. But that has to wait for another day. Right now I can only marvel at birth itself and the existence of someone who has not been in this world but five days earlier. Let’s give that new human being some time to grow before she decides if she wants to participate in the lineage of activism.

I was listening to Arun Ghosh’s new album Seclused in Light when the news of the arrival of this child reached me. (Composed during lockdown, he invented the word as a mix between recluse and secluded.) So much in this music that I wish to be true for her life to come: a clear, melodious voice (his brilliant clarinet), often playful and surprising, sometimes insisting, never shrill. A steady, measured rhythm, never frenetic. An integration of traditions, both across continents and across time, making for a truly international fusion. A mix of spirituality, humor and joy, with an explicit embrace of nature and communal action, and an occasional stoic trait. And, importantly, all written in major keys, sad minor keys making but split second appearances. (Full album – hopefully – here. Two favorite tunes below.)

A life full of light.

A life filled with beauty, variability and resilience like the hellebores that bloom in my granddaughter’s month of birth (snow, cold, rain and all!)

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A Dream within a Dream.

Last blog of 2022.

Comprehensive retrospective? Nope.

Prognoses for 2023? Nah.

Capturing once more the beauty that surrounds us and respond with loosely (if at all) related musings? Let’s try.

If you are lucky enough to be present when a flock of snow geese gets spooked and you look at them through the very circumscribed lens of your camera, you sometimes experience something strange. Some of the geese are still ascending while others are descending already. If you loose track of who is who – easy to do from far away in the chaos – you perceive a strange undulation – as if the same thing is obliquely going up and down simultaneously, the laws of physics abandoned. For a split second you question the reality that surrounds you, fooled by a perceptual illusion.

A related question has been debated since times immemorial: what is reality and how can we be certain we perceive it correctly? It is on my mind because of the current glut of suggestions in both the cultural scene and computer science, that maybe we are mistaken about the reality we experience. Maybe, just maybe, we all live in a simulation, a computer game if you will, in which we are just puppets playing within the structures set by code, installed by some advanced beings somewhere in the universe. Frown all you want (as I do) but there are some serious, smart philosophers out there thinking through this possibility.

Honestly, watch Netflix, and there is the simulation hypothesis, if you click on 1899, a German series that is even darker and less comprehensible than its predecessor, Dark. (Actually, don’t, not worth it.) Or turn to the bestseller lists. The NYT raved about “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel, the simulation hypothesis was the basis of the plot. (Again, don’t, I thought it infuriatingly superficial, never getting to the interesting question, much less providing answers about the concept of living in a simulation. An alternative would be a book on the same topic, The Anomaly, that I found more clever by far earlier this year.)

More seriously you find even respectable thinkers and philosophers captivated by the idea, frequently debated in academia and tech/computer science circles. (Link below gives a graspable overview.)

Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

So why this sudden preoccupation with it, decades after The Matrix offered the proposal that we are all dreaming our existence while stuffed into electronic boxes, our bodies mined for whatever the advanced evil civilization that is holding all of humanity captive, needs for their purposes? Why this emergence of Longtermism, whose prominent adherents often subscribe to the simulation hypothesis?

Why seriously engage with a hypothesis when it cannot be tested and so far there has been zero evidence to support it? If we live in a perfect simulation there is no way to get outside of the game (that is one of the problems that all these movies and books simply ignore.) Only from the outside could you judge if something is real or not. This is already the trap Descartes, wondering about our perception of reality, was caught in. His way out was to postulate that innate feelings and thoughts are pre-determined by God, and as a result, an individual’s perception of reality is in fact defined by God. Therefore, it cannot be the wrong one.

Instead of (a) God/ess who preordained everything, now we have some advanced civilization taking that place? Calvinism 2.0? Why would such a civilization waste computational superpowers on creating a simulation? What would the simulation be for? Why does it simulate consciousness, why stay within certain parameters, like the laws of evolution? Why create a place of misery and harm? And how do you deal with the problem of infinite regression, where every simulated world has potentially one above it, equally simulated into perpetuity – where is the endpoint? Back to a God/ess?

What does it buy us to engage with such a concept? Escapist fantasy? The hope that future life-forms are interested in us, some form of ancestor worship? Release from moral imperatives – if I have no free will, just like a character in Grand Theft Auto the umpteenth or Minecraft, why not engage in immoral, unethical or violent behavior without pangs of conscience? Giving in to ennui and lack of initiative because nothing can be changed, unless the puppeteers permit? Being so bored with your life that you do everything to find a glitch in the matrix as evidence that your life is not “real”? Having lost or given up on one religion, turning to the next one in disguise?

Let me know if you have the answers. Clearly the question of reality perception has been around for a long time.

Wishing you all a healthy 2023 with a grip on reality and dreams that are not turning into nightmares.

Music a favorite by Fauré, after the dream.

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Present or future need – which should be served?

Looks like I always come back to dragonflies at this time of the year, an unending fascination with their beauty and evolutionary prowess – look at the size of those eyes alone. Dragonflies don’t sting, bite, pollinate – they simply eat bugs that might otherwise do harm, an all important evolutionary role!

I had written about the biological facts of the species here some years ago and provided somewhat sarcastic musings when looking at them last year.

This time around they reminded me of aliens, no surprise given that my mind was preoccupied with thoughts about potential scenarios for humanity’s future, the colonization of space included. Looks like I always come back to politics as well. At this time of year, or any other time, come to think of it. Missed it? “No,” mumble the honest among you, “but did miss the photography.” Oh well.

As is often the case when I learn something new, it all of a sudden pops up everywhere, after decades of (my) ignorance. So it was when I encountered the concepts of Effective Altruism (EA) – a morally inspired way of doing good in the most rational, effective and ambitious way – and its adjoined movement of Longtermism – affecting our species’ survival by economic, scientific and political action that reduces existential risk to humanity, protecting future generations. The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vox, Salon, are suddenly all reporting (and referenced below.)

Let us assume we all agree that doing good is desirable, the morally right thing to do. Why not do it in a fashion that is most effective, literally yielding the most bang for the buck? How would we know how to do that? Rational analysis of the evidence: what amount does it take to save a life or relieve suffering, by what means is that reliably accomplished? It became clear very quickly, that helping people in developing nations, particularly Africa, saved more lives per dollar, and engaging in projects there that use donations cost-effectively saved more lives overall. Sounds good, right? Particularly when we know that empathy is often reserved to those who most resemble us ( I STILL can’t get over how Ukrainian refugees are treated by European nations, compared to their Black or Middle-Eastern Counterparts this year, for example, with my full solidarity to all) instead of redistributing our wealth to those most in need, far away and unfamiliar.

The Effective Altruism movement was started by Toby Ord and philosopher Will MacAskill in 2009, with a group called Giving What We Can promoting a pledge whose takers commit to donating 10 percent of their income to effective charities every year. Not only that – people were encouraged to choose high-paying professions or jobs instead of hands-on occupations, so that they could donate more. (Be a bit-coin speculator, not a country doctor!) Multiple smaller organizations worked towards the same goals, soon to be joined by multi-billionaires donating to the causes: estimates are that the movement has roughly $46 billion at its disposal, an amount that had grown by 37 percent a year since 2015. (A detailed, sympathetic overview of the evolution of the movement can be found here.)

Fighting global poverty and evaluating the charities that commit to that fight have been to some extent superseded by a recent focus on protecting lives that do not yet exist, concentrating on the long term. The alleviation of present suffering is eclipsed by worries that we, as a species, might not have a future at all. At least that is the perspective held by the many extremely wealthy donors, tech bros included, and MacAskill himself, all of whom have led Longtermism from obscurity to relative power. (Elon Musk linked to MacAskill’s new book, “What We Owe the Future,” with the comment, “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.”) Longtermists are eager to invest in projects that reduce the risk for humanity to become extinct and increase the possibility for trillions of future humans to be born and colonize other stars. Indeed, they are also committed to transhumanism, believing with its prominent proponent, Nick Bostrom, that we can create digital people living in vast computer simulations millions or billions of years in the future. Yes, no kidding.

The main threats to our future are assumed to be global pandemics, potentially created by our very own, bad-actor scientists, nuclear extinction (note: not climate change) and first and foremost Artificial Intelligence (AI). These threats cannot be faced with simple evaluations where to best spend limited resources. They require political solutions across the board, and they entail unknown or unknowable risks. We don’t really know if our interventions will make things better or worse. ( I know not enough about how dangerous AI might indeed be – I do acknowledge that scores of people unfamiliar with nuclear power ended up with radiation poisoning – just one example that lack of technological knowledge can have horrid consequences. (Here is a warning from a thoughtful perspective just last week.)

We might quibble, then, whether it’s better to save millions of people now or devote our resources to saving unimaginably large numbers later – or we might take a deeper look at what EA and Longtermism actually entail.

Private compassion – even when it provides organized distribution of billions of dollars – is a band-aid for wounds caused by a system that lacks societal and political solidarity. If we do not change the modes in which resources generally are distributed, we are forever looking for remedies that simply patch up the most grievous harm. If wealth is generated socially but appropriated privately, no amount of empathy will suffice to protect most of humanity. And the more conspicuously we demonstrate our compassion the more we will feel we have done our part, rather than tackling the more complicated efforts to change a structurally unjust system. Compassion IS important, but it is no replacement for political advocacy.

Longtermism is a whole different kettle of fish, something we need to be aware of given its increasing influence of businesses and even governments. (Ref.) Proponents, as mentioned above, often adopt transhumanist ideals, the hope to reengineer humanity with brain implants and life extension technologies, making post-humans that are “far superior.” And speaking of superiority: one of the existential risks that longtermists fear are “dysgenic pressures” as an existential risk, whereby less “intellectually talented” people (those with “lower IQs”) outbreed people with superior intellects. (Ref.) Straight out of classical Eugenics teachings. The next logical step then is to save not the poor in developing countries (as EA proposed) but to transfer wealth to already rich nations since they more likely provide innovations that could help with technological advances and space travel. And these advantaged nations should also fight underpopulation by focussing on increasing birthrates (of the “right people,” mind you) because more minds imply more potential innovations.

It gets worse. Robin Hanson, for example, an economics professor on board with the Future of Humanity Institute where many of these ideas are hatched, believes, like many longtermists, that in the event of a civilizational collapse humanity will have to re-enact the stages of our historical development. In order to facilitate that evolution, he suggests we should create refuges — e.g., underground bunkers — that are continually stocked with humans. But not just any humans will do:

“if we end up in a pre-industrial phase again,it might make sense to stock a refuge [or bunker] with real hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, together with the tools they find useful. Of course such people would need to be disciplined enough to wait peacefully in the refuge until the time to emerge was right. Perhaps such people could be rotated periodically from a well-protected region where they practiced simple lifestyles, so they could keep their skills fresh.”

Possessive colonial mind-set, anyone?

I guess what I am trying to say today can be summarized such: whenever you think, hey, smart altruistic giving is a good thing or protecting humanity from risks of extinction is desirable, think further. Are the ways these things are advertised based on something much darker? Are they effective agents of change or actually tools to leave the status quo of distributions of power and wealth mostly untouched? Are they making us feel good, and thus complacent? Are they expressions of grandiosity to curate future lives?Food for thought. Provided by time to read on vacation!

And here is The Dragonfly by Josef Strauss.

See, you got your photos!

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Elective Blindness.

“Magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” – Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (1979)

There I was, making my way through throngs of revelers who had just disembarked the Santa Express, with another queue waiting to get on. Almost none of them wore masks, so I can be forgiven for thinking I had entered a wormhole – the very same thing had happened to me some years back. I was off to walk quietly at Oaks Bottom on a late Friday afternoon, not expecting anyone, and there was the spectacle of the steam engine, the Santas and reindeers climbing on board, the anticipatory joy in children’s faces.

Well, an occasion to photograph something other than herons and eagles and deer, although they did appear later in the afternoon in my field of view as well, with a howling pack of coyotes (heard, not seen) answering the locomotive’s whistle as a bonus.

My sense of duplicate experience was doubtlessly triggered by the book I’d been reading. Notice the past tense – the novel was so gripping that I finished it within a couple of days. The Anomaly by Hervé Le Téllier, translated by Adriana Hunter, winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, is a novel of dizzying complexity. It is a romp through various genres, sci-fi, mystery thriller, human comedy, romance, philosophical tractate, you name it.

The book also brims with literary allusions, thoughts about religion and politics, skewering with equal measure American and French politicians, the French and American media circus, evangelical crazies, the relentless hunger for fame and riches, the obscene black holes of capitalism, the emptiness of scientific prediction and discourse, the malleability of religious proscriptions, shall I go on?

Importantly, it asks us to think through how we construe reality and what would happen if we find out that we were completely wrong.

The author offers reflections on human psychology in considerable depth, and the possibilities of getting a second chance to do stuff over. None of it, amazingly, overpowers or interferes with the other – you can read this book simply as an amusing exercise in science fiction, or you can see it on par with serious philosophical texts that explore the notion of free will and the origins of consciousness. That in itself is a hard thing to pull off.

It looks like, and I would not be able to judge, that there is also linguistic slight-of-hand embedded in the pages. Le Téllier is part of a group called OULIPO, (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle founded in 1960,) which explores the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Founded by mathematicians, they ride on funny mathematics formulas, like “N+7,” in which the writer takes a poem already in existence and substitutes each of the poem’s substantive nouns with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary.” Lots of smoke and whistles. (Professional NYT review here. )

So what’s the set-up of The Anomaly? (Caution, some spoilers inevitable…)

The book introduces us to a cast of characters seemingly unrelated, ranging from young children to aging Romeos, professional assassins to Ivy League lawyers, some famous, some not, some struggling, some successful, some sympathetic when first encountered, others not. Their various fates converge, in slow rhythm, with a shared airplane ride that turns out to have a true Doppelgänger – an Air France machine lands after experiencing some turbulence in the U.S. twice, about 3 months apart. The very same people, doubles of the earlier arrivals, with just a quarter year-span of life events between them that are not shared, are crammed into a military air base in New Jersey, and later released back into society.

The novel proceeds on two basic levels. One is the overall reaction of governments, countries, the superstructure of science and religion, clambering to make sense of it all and contain the potential revelations or consequences of this inexplicable event (which turns out to be less singular than first assumed.) It is on this level that much sardonic humor occurs, originally overshadowing the more serious question what one would do when encountering possibilities that shatter everything we believed to be true. The number of answers offered, from religious elders to scientists of all kinds, mathematicians, astro-physicist, molecular biologists, computer scientists etc. are mind boggling. The author’s background as a mathematician and science journalists makes it all sound plausible but also graspable for a layperson like me. The work of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom concerning the dangers of unconstrained Artificial Intelligence and the possibility of virtual reality, living in a simulation, is also making an appearance in moving the plot forward.

The other level is the human interest aspect, in itself enough for a book of its own – how do you react when your double appears? Do you share, do you fight, do you integrate or destroy, do you want to continue as the same or take on a different persona (helpfully offered by authorities who seem to have the endless resources to double pensions, bank accounts, housing, job opportunities etc.)? What if there is one husband and two wives, one child and two mothers, one secret now shared by two with different motivations to reveal it? What if one of you got pregnant in the 3 months interval and the other didn’t? Additionally, how does the public in general react when confronted with the possibility that their entire world view is based on false assumptions? Will humans be violent, will they reform, will they reconnect with others in more humane ways when they are confronted with the explanations for this event?

The Doppelgänger theme is, of course, not entirely new to literature. Think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Dostoevsky’s The Double, Poe’s William Wilson or Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. They all, though, had a way out, because it was really a different person that impersonated or was created to impersonate one’s own existence, if not an illusion to begin with. Le Guin’s protagonist in Earthsea is able to get rid of his evil double by finding out his name (sort of like Rumpelstiltskin, I thought.) None of this is applies to those who were created in the apparent anomaly during the transatlantic flight of the novel. They are exact copies of each other to the infinitesimal specs of DNA and experience, and here to stay. Moreover, it is not a scenario implicating two people, but one that affects the entire world.

How doubled individuals solve the dilemma is one question, answered by observing them. WHAT or WHO created this dilemma, and WHY, is the larger question and I will refrain from providing clues (assuming I came to the correct conclusion in the first place, which I would LOVE to discuss with anyone who is going to read this book.)

Let me just say that my brain had to digest some amount of moral philosophy and its role in a digital age that worships technology as well as military violence. A brain that was still humming from the shifts in perception when you get closer to the individuals faced with changing fates, a brain that was tickled by a lot of truly funny literary and cultural allusions to science fiction movies that made me laugh along the way.

One of the key figures in The Anomaly, a writer named Victor Miesel, answers the question about what he believes the true explanation of this doubling might be and what will change if an incredible revelation should turn out to be true: “Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love, just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we are fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”

The true naming of a thing, the magic of this book. Le Guin had it right. Again.

Music about our earth (Herbie Hancock) and a parallel universe (Bikram Ghosh.)

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Imagined Past and Future

These days I have a hard time remembering all the stuff I read during the course of a week. By all I mean not necessarily the storylines of the current novels on the bedside table – I can still keep those in my memory, if barely. But the rest, the various articles, essays, commentaries, headlines, art reviews or tweets, you name it, seem to leave fleeting impressions. Except when they don’t.

The current duo that stuck its tentacles into my brain comes from very different corners of my intellectual universe: one an artistic project of the most visual kind creating a glimpse of a potential past, the other a philosophical essay of the more cerebral kind envisioning a scenario of a possible future.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Avion Pearce is a NYC-based photographer who has a knack for telling stories through series of photographs that are staged. She manages to produce work that accomplishes both, strong stand-alone images and an unfolding of a story across the series – not an easy feat to pull off. Location, props, costuming, mask and staging are all her doing, as is lighting. She has a large technical repertoire when it comes to the latter, with an unfailing eye for what lighting tells the story best.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her latest project, Shadows, tells the story of two Black female lovers in Louisiana of years gone by, hidden in a cottage at the banks of the Mississippi, going about their daily routines. The artist and a friend portrayed the women. It is remarkable how the mundane and the erotic, how pride and furtiveness all come across in photographs that are neither particularly dramatic nor particularly subtle. They are not shy of being pretty either, and if I had to translate them into speech, I would think we’d listened to a tenderly told tale, with lowered voices in a private setting, relating joy. Something we don’t come by easily these days, and likely not in those earlier ones either. (Images are all from the link to Pearce’s work.)

Photo: Avion Pearce

Joy is not the thing that comes to mind when thinking through the topic of Agnes Callard‘s essay: our willingness to acknowledge and prepare for a future without humans. Callard teaches Ancient Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Chicago and writes a monthly essay in The Point – a magazine for the examined life, which is one of the more interesting publications out there. Like Pearce, she tells stories or snippets of stories. Her’s embody philosophical or ethical insights in a way that the rest of us laypeople can actually grasp, in a language that is easily understood.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Her essay The End is Coming points out that there will be a future without humans on this planet (whether in about 700 years as many scientist argue or at some later point, relocation to Mars non-withstanding….) because the extant climate conditions will make it impossible to sustain human life. Callard wonders what will happen to humans when they know they are the last ones. Much of the meaning of life for us and those who came before us, if not all of it, rested on the assumption that there will be further generations in whom we live on, for whom it mattered what we created, in all areas of life from art to science. Will the knowledge that there will be no further generations lead to ethical and political collapse?

How do you care about self and others, be passionate about things, find meaning in something when you face extinction, whether as an individual or as a species? How do you overcome our resistance, one likely lasting close to (or beyond) the point of disaster’s arrival, to face the facts? Callard does not pretend to have the answer, but argues that we have the obligation, or humanists have the obligation, to face the scenario and help equip that last generation with courage.

Photo: Avion Pearce

“The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, …, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy. “

Here’s my optimistic (?) alternative. By the time extinction comes around, there will be very, very few of us, with heat, cold, famine, and flourishing pandemics having wiped out most of humanity already. Maybe we’ll regress during these remaining 700 years to a point where we are not aware of the finiteness of existence, where we move through our short lives more like the mammals we originated from. Spared that conscious knowledge, the very last generations will feed, mate, die in due natural cause, with an experiential horizon that barely extends the Now and prevents anticipatory anxiety. And then it’s curtains for a species that was driven by greed and hubris to speed up its very own extinction.

Photo: Avion Pearce

Not what you needed to think about on a Monday morning? Here is cheerful distraction: Gottschalk was born in New Orleans in the 1800s and lived for some years in Cuba. The music goes well with Pearce’s Shadows.

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Nothing is Lost

I learned a new word yesterday, psychogeography, in the context of thinking and reading about travel writing. The travel ain’t happening, but the writing, of course, goes on. So what am I to do?

When I looked it up, as this English-as-a-second-language speaker is want to do, Wikipedia told me it is “an exploration of urban environments that emphasizes playfulness and “drifting”. Hm.

A bit more digging revealed the fact that the term was coined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore how environments make us feel and behave. “Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces…. It is also linked to dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination” (Ref.)

First thought: Isn’t it weird that the word came up in a review of a book by one of the most deeply influential, brilliant travel- and nature writers, Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways. If there ever was something written that makes you feel you’re IN a landscape that you’ve never seen, a natural environment you’ve never visited, it is this. No urban frolicking, but nature captured in its essence. The kind of writing that has me yellow with envy (sticking to the German color scheme for emotions, I know you’ll tell me it is green.)

Second Thought: I had encountered Debord as a young student, maybe early 70s, when his Society of Spectacle was en vogue in leftist circles, but not yet translated into German. The book was an indictment of consumer culture crazy for spectacle, or image, as provided by advertisement, television, celebrity culture and so on. People slogged through finding the correct translations from the French, trying to understand the link between consumer culture as distraction or pacification of mass movements and the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Heady days. I wonder what Debord would say now in our times of internet image barrage, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Instagram! He sure was prescient in linking the spectacle with the economy.

Third Thought: Debord stated that everything that used to be directly lived has now moved into representation (sort of fake life instead of fake facts…). Macfarlane believes that too often we only think of landscapes as affecting us when we are in them. “But,” he writes, “there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”(Ref.)

Ho do we square the circle from the fleeting pleasure offered by externalized representations to the comfort provided by those we have internalized?

Nothing is lost, we might rejoice, memory representations carry the day through isolation! All is lost, we might despair, when our travel longings are but satisfied by pretty pictures, inside or outside of our not so pretty heads.

Perhaps it’s possible to switch from spectacle to life by redefining travel, and figure out authentic ways of capturing the essence of our current place. Must try.

In the meantime here are the views captured by Flâneuse Heuer ambling along the streets of Vienna 2 years ago….

And what better music for this unfinished travel business than Schubert’s Unfinished, performed in Vienna under Kleiber in the 70s, one of the best renditions ever.

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