Right or Happy? -- In a comment on the "Keeping it Real" post below, Julian glibly defines an intellectual as one who would rather be right than happy. Well, I don't think that can be right. I'd rather be happy than right, no doubt about it. Experience machine, here I come! My problem is that I have a neurotic urge to be right. I just can't help trying to be right. (I should say, not about everything - there're lots of fights in which I've no dog.) It would be wonderful if there was some kind of pre-established harmony here, where the lack of ignorance is bliss. But, no.
Now, I do think that we're all stuck with a disposition to regard the feeling of having truth as integral to happiness. We can't just say out loud, with full awareness, "Sure! The religious stories around which I build my life are nothing but elaborate fictions, and there is a largely unconscious conspiracy to create an environment in which the social and psychological costs of rejecting this tangled skein of falsehood is higher than just going along," and then believe all the same. The point of this kind of tacit conspiracy is to insulate believers from psychological dissonance--to maintain a milieu in which it is possible, even easy, to believe that the stories are literally true, so that one can derive whatever value there is in them, including the satisfying feeling of having posession of the truth, without having to seriously confront the divergence of tale from fact.
It is precisely the need to reduce uncertainty, to feel sure, that makes it hard for certain intellectual types to be satisfied. I can't escape or dismiss the high likelihood of my own self-deception, delusion, and habits of confabulation. So my defining commitments are cast under a shadow of doubt, and my sense of my self becomes indistinct, which is unpleasant. I try to be Zen about it, and convince myself that the self is an illusion anyway, but it doesn't help.
It strikes me the Marie Gryphon is a bit optimistic in her smart post on the happy/right issue. She argues that by deferring to "opinion leaders" who appear to have happy followers, one is pursuing a generally rational policy for getting at the truth. All I see in such opinion leaders is the leader of a succesful conspiracy of belief. The relationship to truth eludes me. Furthermore, I think Marie's undersestimating the role of epistemic deference in the intellectual lives of even very independent minds. Almost everything I believe, somebody else told me. In this, I'm just like everybody else. We all make extensive use of the cognitive division of labor. What makes me different from many other people is that I have different policies for when to believe what people tell me. However, I adopted these policies rather than others in no small part due to my deference to certain people I regarded as experts in good policies. But it never ocurred to me that I should prefer to adopt policies for deciding when to believe what I'm told from experts with happy customers. And, for the sake of truth, it's probably a good thing too.
Marie writes that, "Most everyone is pursuing a rational strategy for finding truth," and I wish she was right, but I can't quite believe it. No doubt, most are pursuing rational strategies for generating the feeling of having the truth, but that's not the issue. Now, there is a trivial way in which Marie's claim is true. Keeping your eyes open is a good strategy, and most everyone does it. And if you want to know which way to take the Red Line to get to Woodley Park, then asking's about as good as revelation, and we're all in the habit. But when it comes to the big questions -- what it means to be a human being, or what a just society is, or what happens to us when we die -- rational strategies seem thin on the ground. If the world were teeming with rational strategies for getting at the truth, wouldn't we see rather less delusion?
Globalization is Grand! -- Check out the Institute for Humane Studies' loverly new website on globalization, A World Connected. Too often, the debate about globalization proceeds in terms of tired, potted arguments. A World Connected gets past that by focusing on stories of real people around the world whose lives have been improved by increasing global interconnectivity. Check it out. And if you've got a blog, help IHS spread the word, and give A World Connected a plug.
Capitalism: For Anything You Want to Be -- I'm sure this point has been emphasized and re-emphasized to the point of excruciating boredom in the pages of Reason, but I just wanted to stress it myself.
I was chatting with my roommate, who is very bright, and very reasonable, and has fairly refined taste. Thus, he tends to disdain fast food, and shopping malls, and big box stores, and so forth. He was complaining about the malign influences of consumer culture, mass marketing, and so forth that lead so many of us to lead small, shallow, blinkered lives.
I felt compelled to point out that all his carefuly chosen classical and indie music CDs and the funky ethnic restaurants he likes are for-profit enterprises. Kramerbooks, where he had just purchased a Camus volume, is not a charity. Nor are the boys' dance clubs he frequents, or the stores here he shops for clothes, or buys his High Art Cinema DVDs. It's all capitalist consumer culture, I insisted, and you've used it very expertly to build a style and identity.
The protesters constantly visiting DC use it to buy hemp necklaces, Chomsky books, Fugazi records, and so forth. National Review readers use it to buy William Bennett's Treasury of Heroic Stories for Warmongering Boys, Brooks Brother's blazers, Ronald Reagan commemorative plates, Veggie Tales videos, or whatever. So what's the problem? The problems were (1) marketing and advertising are coercive, and so people are getting what they're manipulated to want, not what's really good for them; and (2) in any case, people have shitty preferences, and it's a shame to have them catered to.
The short replies are (1) how did you become immune to the evil coercive marketing forces of Big Corporation, and how is it that not everyone likes the same things?; and, (2) don't be a snot.
Keeping it Real -- [Autobiographical, free-associative, overwrought prose alert!] It's hard coming to grips with one's own deviance. No, I've no special interest in pre-owned panties, or spurs, but I have a self-conception that makes a fetish of getting at the truth about ourselves. But surely this is healthy; examined life and all that. Well, no. Most people keep truth in its place, looking for it only when they really need it, generally content with the consolations of self-deception and delusion. I have a hard time with this, and as a consequence, I have a hard time relating at more-than-superficial level with most people. I don't like this. I'm a very affable, and awfully sensitive, and so it stings when I'm more or less accused of inhumanity for claiming to know, for instance, that there is no gemlike flame of divinity flickering within our breasts; or that we are continuous with the lesser beasts; or that the multimedia, technicolor riot of consciousness is what it is because of the principles of electricity and chemistry played out in that blob of firm grey pudding between the ears; or that there is no cosmic plan for us, and no planner.
I went to church today, and not for a wedding. I went to church twice a week from birth to 17 or so. It's a form of life with which I am intimate, and sometimes I miss it very much, as an isolated expatriate might miss his mother tongue. I am not always happy with myself. I often fail to be what I hope, or fail to give people their due. Sometimes I am very lonely. Today, among alien Episcopalians, I choked back tears as we collectively announced our sinfulness, and petitioned for redemption. My voice wavered and broke as together we sang of our salvation, and the comfort of our constant companion. These stories and songs are in my bones, and sometimes I need to hear them. I hope the Episcopalians will not mind if I was so deeply moved by what is to me a metaphor, or that I had no choice, after the fact, to think of my rush of religious feeling in terms of the sudden activation of well-developed, but lately starved, sets of of neural networks. Consolation is consolation. Neurotransmitters are neurotransmitters.
Who knows? Walk into enough bars and you might end up a drunk.
It's a trick to maintain this tension. You should avoid it. Don't listen to me! We are glorious machines of meat, our remembered lives (that first kiss, say) registered as mere chains of proteins, which come and go, come and go, each iteration losing something, adding something, increasing the distance from truth with time. (How warm were her lips, really? What color was the sky?) The experience of choosing is a flattering report of decisions made; the feeling of openness an illusion of our ignorance. We are transient, patterned agglomerations of matter, and my matter and your matter will someday soon lose coherence and commingle dumbly with the huge mute universe. Yet the structured electrochemical tangle that make us us is not prepared to accept this.
We demand a sense of our permanence, a sense that our selves are solid, and that solid is not, as physics tells, mostly empty space. We need to believe in the purpose of the whole, and the transcendent import of the little miracle that is each free choice. And we are being watched, and we must be in good terms with the watchers, from whom all things flow. This we are prepared to accept. And rejecting it is a lot like walking everywhere on your hands: it's unnatural, uncomfortable, and people will look at you funny.
Taking the road less travelled makes all the difference not because it's less travelled but because you went one way rather than the other, and going one way rather than the other always makes all the difference. There's no way to calculate the opportunity costs, and to conclude that, yes, this was a profitable difference, really the best road. But it remains that there may be nothing better than to walk on one's hands the whole way, despite the stupefied stares, and despite all the kisses one is destined to miss when one's head is the wrong way 'round. Or . . .
e-mail: flybottle -at- willwilkinson -dot- net
