How to Think Page 10
WHO WHOM?
Lenin—whom Orwell satirizes in Animal Farm and condemns elsewhere—got one important thing right when he asked a question: Kto kovo? “Who whom?” The question has general relevance: Who, we might ask in any given situation, controls whom? Who is sovereign over whom? Who benefits from adopting these categories—and who is victimized by them?
In this light we can see that the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.
Of course, some people govern their whole lives by such taxonomies. And we need to formulate a particular kind of response to them. Consider the example of John C. Calhoun and the college at Yale University named for him. Why, when Edward Harkness gave Yale a pile of money to build residential colleges, did the university decide to name one of them after John C. Calhoun, a passionate defender of slavery? Possibly the thinking went no further than this: that Calhoun was a Yale graduate who went on to become a famously powerful and influential senator and a vice president of the United States. There could have been few better-known graduates of the university.
And Calhoun, when Calhoun College opened in 1933 and for decades afterward, was widely believed to be a great American. Indeed, in 1957 a committee overseen by a young senator named John F. Kennedy named Calhoun one of the five greatest senators in American history. So even after Brown v. Board of Education and at the outset of the civil rights era, few people of influence in American government thought Calhoun’s pro-slavery commitments were sufficiently troublesome to prevent him from being honored as one of the greatest of senators. Perhaps they thought, Ah well, people didn’t really know better in those days.
But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view. The general forgiveness of society has been extended to millions of members of the Soviet Communist Party, and the Nazi Party, but the places once named for Adolf Hitler have had their names changed, as have Stalingrad and Leningrad.
Similarly, to those who would excuse Margaret Sanger’s support of eugenics as merely a product of her time and place, I say: Sanger did not just “hold eugenicist ideas,” as some have claimed; she was one of our nation’s most passionate and widely respected advocates for those ideas. It is this ceaseless, tireless, and very successful advocacy for some very nasty beliefs and practices that sets Sanger apart from others who happened to “hold eugenicist ideas.”
If we were to apply this same logic to John C. Calhoun, he wouldn’t come off very well. Calhoun did not merely accept slavery, he was the single most passionate and influential advocate for slavery in his era. He believed that slavery is a “positive good,” railed against “the fell spirit of abolition,” and called those who believe that slavery is sinful “this fanatical portion of society” who wish to perform their insidious “operations” on “the ignorant, the weak, the young, and the thoughtless.”
In brief: Calhoun devoted his life to arguing for and politically implementing a taxonomy that radically separated free and superior white people from enslaved and inferior black people; Margaret Sanger did the same for the binary opposition between those worthy to reproduce and those unworthy. Calhoun and Sanger did not just hold the views of their time that most of us now find deplorable; they made those views. They centered their public lives on the enforcement of taxonomies, and the pernicious myths that underlay them.
In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent. Such people are immensely dangerous, and for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.
THE VALUE OF SPLITTING
So let me conclude this chapter with a celebration of splitting—of the disciplined, principled preference for rejecting categories whenever we discern them at work. Again, this is not to say that we can live without them, but rather that we need to cultivate skepticism as a first response. Though group solidarity matters to almost all of us in one way or another—it is the stuff of which both Inner Rings and genuine membership are made—on some fundamental level, as Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.” The key word there is always: to be “reckoned . . . as a member of a class” is sometimes useful, often necessary, but intolerably offensive as a universal practice.
Those words come from a brilliant and delightful essay called “Are Women Human?” and in that essay Sayers writes,
When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: “Why should women want to know about Aristotle?” The answer is not that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle . . . but simply: “What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him—but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.”*
There is a kind of blessed selfishness to this cry—a celebration of the “eccentric individual” who doesn’t give a fig about what other supposed members of her class do. But there is also a blessed universalism, a blessed humanism, if I may dare so beaten-up a word. The Roman poet Terence wrote a line that was once famous: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—and I think this strikes precisely the right note. Terence doesn’t say that everything human is fully accessible to him, that there are no relevant divides of race or class or sexual orientation or religion; he doesn’t say that everyone else is instantly or fully comprehensible to him. He says, rather, than nothing human is alien to him: nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.
Many years ago I spent a summer teaching rhetoric to pastors in Nigeria. The seminary was in a village in the heart of Yorubaland, and many of the pastors were Yoruba, but a significant minority were Hausa, from the north of the country, and Igbo, from the southeast. For me the experience of living and working among them, and thinking alongside them, was exhilarating but also disorienting. Sometimes I felt that we understood one another perfectly, other times that we didn’t understand one another at all. The latter feeling was especially strong the day that one of my students, whom I will call Timothy, spoke passionately and at great length about the challenge he had recently faced when a woman in his congregation gave birth to a demon baby. Clearly Timothy wanted me to assess his handling of the situation, but I was speechless. The proper pastoral response to the birth of demon babies did not lie within my sphere of competence or knowledge.
I walked away from class that day reflecting that I simply did not know how to bridge the sometimes enormous gap between American and African Christianity. I was troubled, and after dinner, when evening came on and the air began to cool, I took a walk through the seminary compound and the village. On my return I saw two of my students, walking along hand in hand, as Nigerian friends often do. As I passed, one of them, apparently having read my face, said, “Professor, plea
se do not worry too much about Timothy. He is very excitable.” And then he said, as an afterthought, “He is Igbo, you know.” To which his friend replied, with a smile, “Timothy is not like that because he is Igbo. He is like that because he is Timothy.” And at that moment I realized how utterly my habits of lumping—“American” versus “African”—had misled me.
Terence’s great line is a motto worthy of any thinking person. Our social taxonomies are useful, but if we think of them as something more than that, if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another, if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible, they serve us poorly. Our age is so dedicated to its various lumpings that it has, I think, lost sight of these dangers, and of the possibilities that may be found in judicious contemplation of Terence’s wise statement. Let a billion eccentric individuals bloom. Even Timothy.
* * *
* Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? new ed. (Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 26– 27.
six
OPEN AND SHUT
Why you can’t have an open mind, and why it wouldn’t be good if you could
There’s a famous and often-told story about the great economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?” The story appears not to be true, alas: no one has ever been able to track down its source. But it’s too good a story not to use, and it’s always used in the same ways and for the same reasons: to denounce ideologues and to commend open-mindedness.
To be open-minded!—a condition to aspire to. To be closed-minded!—a condition to fear and shun. The contrasting terms are so deeply embedded in everyday usage that they’re almost impossible to avoid, but they really should be avoided. They’re nonsensical and misleading.
The primary problem is that, of course, we really don’t want to be or want anyone else to be permanently and universally open-minded. No one wants to hear anyone say that, while there is certainly general social disapproval of kidnapping, we should keep an open mind on the subject. No one wants an advocate for the poor to pause in her work and spend some months reflecting on whether the alleviation of poverty is really a good idea. About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.
Chesterton said of H. G. Wells—with whom he disagreed about almost everything but remained in cordial relations—that “he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind.” Chesterton, however, was by contrast “incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”* I like Chesterton’s gustatory metaphor: it suggests that when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished.
The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled. To understand this problem and begin addressing it, we need to think in terms of the old Aristotelian language of virtue and vice, in which a virtue lies midway between two opposing vices. We don’t want to be, and we don’t want others to be, intractably stubborn; but we don’t want them to be pusillanimous and vacillating either. Tommy Lasorda, the onetime Los Angeles Dodgers manager, used to say that managing players was like holding a bird in your hands: grip it too firmly and you crush it, too loosely and it escapes and flies away. In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.*
All that is difficult enough to manage, but there are further complications: we need to be able to make reliable assessments about the state of our knowledge, in such a way that when necessary we can hold back from taking any position until we learn more; and we need to accept that while knowledge may be analog, decision making is often digital, that is, binary. I may believe with some but not absolute confidence that one political candidate will do a better job than her rival, but when I go into the voting booth I’m not allowed to vote 70 percent for Candidate A and 30 percent for Candidate B. (Though it would be interesting to see what happened to elections if such a thing were possible.) Just from these two points we can see what’s so naïve about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s imagined Evidentiary Republic of Ratio-nalia: it’s perfectly fine to say that “all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence,” but sometimes the evidence is insufficient or contradictory, especially when we’re trying to predict the future consequences of today’s actions, and yet policy must be made all the same. In the laboratory you can and should wait to announce your findings until the evidence is all in and has been carefully assessed, following the best protocols of double-blind testing; but in many arenas of human life, including the political, it’s not possible to do any of those things. We must muddle along as best we can, and we must always be honest with ourselves about the muddling, and not pretend that the evidence is more conclusive than it really is. As I’ve said before: Thinking is hard.
VIRTUES, VICES, AND SUNK COSTS
If we all need, in good Aristotelian golden mean fashion, to steer virtuously between the vicious extremes of rigidity and flaccidity, we should engage in the preparatory exercise of discerning which of those extremes we’re more prone to. For most of us, I expect, the temptations of rigidity will be greater, largely because of the informational fire hose we have so often had to consider in these pages. When you are dealing with contents under pressure blasting their way toward you, your natural impulse is probably to brace yourself. You don’t want to be moved. You want, precisely, to hold your position. It’s too disorienting and stressful to be, as St. Paul so vividly put it in a gaseous rather than a liquid metaphor, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”
Establishing and holding a position in that way is natural, probably inevitable, but it can lead to errors. You become resistant to acknowledging that the facts have changed; you become entrenched. You’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to establishing your ground, protecting it from assault. To change now would be, it seems to you, to admit that all that work was for nothing.
I’ve carried this fortificational metaphor about as far as it can go; to take the argument further I need a new one. Economists speak of sunk costs as investments in a particular project that cannot be recovered, and some of them have pointed out that sunk costs have a disproportionate influence on decision making. The more people have invested in a particular project, the more reluctant they are to abandon it, no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause. Poker players who have bet heavily on a hand don’t want to fold and lose it—even though sticking with it is mathematically likely, even very likely, to result in further losses. Stock market speculators can’t bear to face the fact that their prized stock is going down the tubes, and won’t sell at a loss—even when the value of their investment is declining precipitously. Such people are fixated on their sunk costs, on what is irretrievably past, rather than on the best available decision right now; this fixation leads to the all-too-common reaction to an awareness of sunk costs, what the scholars call “escalation of commitment.”
But here’s the salient point: poker players and stock investors who don’t learn to control their instinctive deference to sunk costs go broke. They lose all their money and can’t play poker or invest in stocks anymore. By contrast, the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostly, sustained by habits and social structures that prevent him from paying the full price for his error. There’s no r
eason why a flat-earther, with his commitment to flat-earthery escalated to the max, can’t also be a good insurance adjuster. (You just wouldn’t want him designing navigation systems for spacecraft.)
In 1954 three social psychologists, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, read in the newspaper about a religious cult whose leader, a woman they called Marian Keech—her real name was Dorothy Martin—was prophesying the end of the world. Keech claimed that she had received messages from the inhabitants of a distant planet named Clarion, and from them she had learned that the world would be destroyed by a great flood on the twenty-first of December 1954. (She received these messages through automatic writing: she felt a tingling in her arm and a compulsion to write, but when she wrote, the words that emerged were not her own, nor in her handwriting. This was the method of communication the beings from Clarion chose to use to warn the world of its imminent destruction.) Those who heeded this warning and joined Keech’s group would be rescued by the arrival of a flying saucer from Clarion.
Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter pretended to be true believers in Keech’s message so that they might infiltrate and study the group. They had formulated a twofold hypothesis: first, that Keech was a charlatan; and second, and more interesting, that when the falsehood of her prediction was revealed her followers would not abandon her but rather escalate their commitment to the cause.
Whether she consciously understood the relevant psychological conditions or not, Keech manipulated her group in ways that ensured such loyalty to her and her message. She kept the group as secret as possible, and denied access to anyone who could not plausibly demonstrate belief in her messages. As the Day of Destruction grew closer, she made more and more demands on her followers: for instance, in anticipation of the alien rescue squad, they were told to discard all metal items, and some of the women even got rid of the aluminum clips that adjusted their brassieres.