Bozo Sapiens

Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human

Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (2009, Bloomsbury Press)

What a rich world of possibilities is embedded in that subtitle! Ellen Kaplan and her son, Michael, deploy a wide range of explanatory tools in their exploration of our human minds and cultures, from studies of non-human primates in the wild, through economics, engineering, and evolution, to high-tech laboratory studies of the workings of the brain. Better still, they write really well, presenting a mountain range of research as an afternoon’s hike over a well-marked trail.
The Kaplans open with a tour of the history of our awareness of error, from the Garden of Eden, by way of the Han Dynasty, to Aristotle, one of whose great gifts to the world was formalized logic, a system of spotting some kinds of errors of reason. But formal logic can’t save us from error. Not only is it too unwieldy for everyday use, it’s a little too abstract. Aristotle knew this; he also produced On Sophistical Refutations, which covers, the Kaplans say, “question-begging, weak analogies, false generalizations, ad hominem arguments, appeals to force–all the slippery faults that, in logical terms, are not even wrong.” It’s a comprehensive inventory, with modern examples available at every turn.
Humanity’s next step in error-proofing came in the seventeenth century, with the work of Sir Francis Bacon, who invented the scientific method to bring rigor to our knowledge of the world, enabling great strides in discovery and invention; yet science remains a resolutely human endeavor. “Although we publish and review the way Bacon said we should, we simply don’t discover the way Bacon assumed we would. Our inspirations remain intuitive–rigor only makes its appearance at the write-up stage.”
So what’s the nature of that intuition? As these examples show, our brains are not machines for logic. They are tools for the lives we live, based on the lives our early human ancestors lived. In computer terms, our brains are very powerful, and very slow. They achieve quickness by operating in parallel, processing the same information for several uses; and the interactions of chemistry and electricity are non-linear, and irreproducible. On top of that, the brain structures we share with lizards and those we share with other mammals have not ceased their contributions; we do not think by rationality alone, but by autonomic systems, instincts, and emotions long written in the genome.
The result is that our brains reach for conclusive certainty on which to base decisions, as opposed to abiding ambiguous information that leaves us up in the air: “to save on expensive resources, the brain puts things in categories and assigns likely explanations to sense-experience long before it reaches the conscious decision-making mind. The world we think we see is actually an executive summary, helpfully condensed and annotated by unseen cerebral assistants.” If, as we stroll through the jungle, one possible meaning of a twig-snapping noise is the footfall of a tiger, the other possibilities don’t matter much.
It’s intuitive that one way to make mistakes is to meddle in things we’re not good at yet; think of the first hundred or thousand miles driven by a rookie behind the wheel. It’s less obvious that expertise itself conveys new and more catastrophic powers for messing things up. Pilots and surgeons are the archetypes of people who may be so confident of their knowledge and skill that they fail to take heed of new circumstances; such assumption errors can also happen within teams of experts; no matter what our level of expertise, we absorb new safety devices and procedures into our treatment of risk.
Experts are also as subject as anyone to the bias of their preferences, known as motivated reasoning. Whether they know it or not, people see what they expect to see, and what they prefer to see, “...whether it’s a case of researchers ‘finding’ that the data fits the curve or taxpayers discovering that they magically owe the government less than they’d thought. These aren’t necessarily lies–just accurate reports from a parallel, more desirable universe, which suggests why people caught out in them are so often sincere in their protestations of innocence.”
Bozo Sapiens probes some ways of looking at the ways we are like early-human ancestors, even as our culture changes rapidly around us. We face many instances of the tragedy of the commons, such as the rapid decimation of popular kinds of fish, because it’s in no one party’s interest to stop hauling them in. “We inevitably overexploit our world because our character, our set of instinctive assumptions, is far too local for our current circumstances.” But it’s also in our nature to strive for solutions, and to do so in company with others: “We are not condemned to live as our physical mechanisms dictate; in the history of a people as in the lifetime of an individual, we welcome the chance to reshape our circumstances and our expectations–that is what culture is for.”
These are lofty thoughts; this book abounds in them, but they are well grounded, too. For just 250 pages of text, the authors needed nearly 400 end notes (several of which are worth the trip.) It’s good to be reminded of how long all this has been going on: the getting and spending, the eating and dieting, the living and dying. What’s different about the current moment is this: “Life doesn’t separate neatly: local and global are intermingled, and each is compounded of elements both deterministic (like technology, taxes, and the law) and essentially random (like politics, finance, sickness, and love). We are asked to respond to the world at every scale, and have to be as interested and informed about the widest matters as we are about our most personal expertise.”
Will we have the courage to be flexible, and live with the likelihood of error? Will we have the vision to create meaning and value, even without certainty? Storytellers like Michael and Ellen Kaplan give me hope.


Carolyn
email edition for June, 2011

The Music Instinct

The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It.
Philip Ball (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Oddly enough, I can tell you exactly how long I’ve been waiting for this book: in 1997, when Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works came out, I was struck by his dismissal of music as “auditory cheesecake,” and his suggestion that “music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged.” This seemed a deliberate slur, or at best, an error, but I’d have been hard put to prove it in Pinker’s terms.

Philip Ball’s The Music Instinct is a beautifully thorough response, (beginning with the title, presumably a reference to Pinker’s 1994 The Language Instinct). Music is part of our culture, he says, because it is part of our brains: “It might be genetically hard-wired, or it might not. Either way we can’t suppress it, let alone meaningfully talk of taking it away.” Music, like art and language, is an area where culture takes off from instinct, both making use of our intellectual capacity and irrevocably shaping that capacity. Moreover, Ball does not neglect to note, it enriches our social and emotional lives beyond measure.

He begins with a wide-ranging survey of the social uses of music, examining some hypotheses from ethnomusicology and related fields, gently skewering various just-so stories about the origins of music, (“Again, contemporary parallels offer themselves with treacherous alacrity:...”) while appreciating what grains of truth they may contain. Apparently, there’s nothing you could say about what music is, and how people use it, that you couldn’t also find exceptions to; but that simply points out how significant and universal the subject is.

Ball proceeds to the fascinating business of how “nature and culture interact to produce the diverse palettes of notes that most traditions draw on in creating their sonic art.” The biology of the ear and brain; the physics of the octave and the fifth; and the difference between Pythagorean tunings and the harmonic series are presented clearly but in enough detail to make sense of what follows, as Ball moves on to the musical implications of these matters.

Implications, of course, are what it’s all about. Whether we think of ourselves as musically sophisticated or not, music works on us by setting up expectations in our minds. There seems to be a sweet spot between predictability and chaos within which music is maximally interesting; it tickles our taste for ambiguity and suspense, but generally also offers resolution. As Ball says, “Experiencing music is an active affair, no matter how idly we are listening. If it wasn’t, we would not be hearing music at all.”

The Music Instinct covers a lot of ground. Ball delves into MRI studies of the brain as well as anthropological evidence; his musical examples include African drumming and the Rolling Stones as well as Mahler and Mozart. But he does not neglect the meat of music theory in the European tradition, exploring the inventive journeys through harmonic space made by composers like Chopin, much of whose art lies in inventive modulations. The cognitive psychologists are hard at work figuring out just how our brains map such matters, but it’s certain that they do, or try to.

The vagaries of rhythm receive in-depth study as well. Ball endears himself to me particularly with this note, about the famous syncopated note in the theme of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: “The emotional effect of this rhythmic hiccup, with its early entry of the theme, is very clear: many people say it induces a thrill. (There must be something wrong with me -- I just find it irritating.)” I was sure I wasn’t the only one to feel that way.

The book would be incomplete without consideration of emotional content and meaning in music, elusive as these turn out to be. At least, certainty about them is elusive; yet the various ambiguities and uncertainties Ball encounters are not faults or errors; they are part and parcel of the entire enterprise, in all its untranslatable, irreducible glory. “In the end we need to allow music to be music, with its own set of emotions and sensations that we have yet to name and perhaps do not need to.”

No doubt there is more research left to do, especially on the cognitive science front, but The Music Instinct delivers what it promises. It is full of questions worth asking, and answers worth hearing.



May 1, 2011

Essays

Essays
Wallace Shawn (2009, Haymarket Books)

Wallace Shawn describes himself as divided; the table of contents of his volume of essays seems to confirm it. Under “Part One: Reality,” we find such titles as “After the Destruction of the World Trade Center,” “The Invasion of Iraq is Moments Away,” and “Up to Our Necks in War, ” a not-quite-unrelievedly grim portrait of the blindness of American exceptionalism. “Part Two, Dream World” takes up Shawn’s career as a playwright, and his experiences of theater and poetry.

On the face of it, the political essays from the Reality side have more bite, but they turn out to be deeply and usefully informed by Shawn’s theatrical experience. His awareness of how many other people he could be, given the right lines to say, and how many characters and characteristics his subconscious can disgorge, has led him, he says, “to a certain skepticism, a certain detachment, when people in my vicinity are reviling the evil and alien Other, because I feel that very easily I could become that Other, and so could the reviler.”

So you rather have to pity Shawn his awareness, in 2003, of the inexorable preparations for making war on Iraq, on both the military and propaganda fronts. He knows well that “the boys are going to be fighting this war with money from my taxes, and they’re going to bring me back the prize--my own life. Yes, I’m involved, to put it mildly.” When he calls out “the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war,” he’s not saying that those men are uniquely blood-thirsty by nature: any of us is capable of violence and cruelty, if conditions are right. But he can’t help seeing that those who brought that war about were possessed by an alarming sense of purpose and righteousness, which made it seem downright impolite to talk about all the lives that would be wrecked by war.

Shawn is compelled to talk about the people in the world whose lives are made harder by our lives being made easier, though as he says, he went through the first forty years of his comfortable, liberal life without that awareness. “When one hasn’t noticed that it’s one’s own boot that’s standing on the suffering person’s neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them.”

The path he hews for himself out of this ambivalent position is the hope that, through art, some forces besides power and aggression are at work in the world. “Beauty really is more enjoyable than power. A poem really is more enjoyable than an empire, because a poem doesn’t hate you. The defense of privilege, the center of our lives for such a long time, is grim, exhausting. We’re exhausted from holding on to things, exhausted from trying not to see those unobtrusive people we’re kicking away, whose suffering is actually unbearable to us.”

Shawn presents, as essays, interviews with the poet Mark Strand and the political philosopher Noam Chomsky. In a way, this marks the extreme of his divided nature, but it may also be the way that nature comes together. “Somehow poetry and the search for a more just order on earth are not contradictory, and rational thought and dreams are not contradictory, and there may be something necessary, as well as ridiculous, in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.”

Serious thinking, good writing. Recommended.

April 2011 email edition

Reading Jesus

Reading Jesus: A Writer’s Encounter with the Gospels
Mary Gordon (2009, Anchor Books)

It would hardly seem that we needed another book about the Bible: hundreds, of one sort or another, must be published every year. Mary Gordon’s Reading Jesus is relatively modest in scope and ambition, but Gordon’s voice is lucid, and her point of view strikes me as trustworthy. She is marking out a path between the cut-and-paste Enlightenment gospel of Thomas Jefferson, who excised all that was miraculous in search of a perfect system of ethics, and the hellfire-and-brimstone certainties of contemporary Evangelical preachers.

She shows a fitting respect for the impulses that drive those preachers and their followers. “I am striving for a tone and diction that neither shouts nor threatens, a diction that neither promises falsely, nor underestimates the power of fear, or supposes that, with right thinking, it can be brought under control. Above all, I have no interest in making a doctrinal point, no desire to convert.” If her readers are interested in reading, that will be sufficient.

She confines her attention to the Gospels because, as a writer, she is more interested in narrative than the theological contentions of the Epistles; and because, as a Christian, she takes the life of Jesus to be the most compelling narrative. Calling the figure of Jesus elusive, ungraspable, yet irresistible, she selects stories that show just how inexplicable he is.

She is not weighing in as a scholar of religious or scriptural matters, but as a student and teacher of literature. She uses five English translations, discriminating among them by their power in English, rather than by any consideration of other translation issues. I think she’s justified in focusing instead on the experience that readers and listeners are having as they encounter these stories, “if only because most of the people in the world who have read the Bible have not had access to this scholarship.”

And what do you have, if you have only the texts? Stories of a strangeness that invites wrestling, at least. Contradictions, paradoxes, outrageous claims. Considering that these narratives were composed a generation or more after the events they describe, and were not solidly canonized for another three centuries, how did some of these details persist? Gordon inquires about details like the fig tree Jesus withers in a fit of pique (Matthew and Mark), or the young man who runs away without his clothes in the fourteenth chapter of Mark.

Inquiry at this level, of course, leaves us with more questions than answers. Gordon’s questions are passionate and honest, and, as I see it, they get to the heart of the difficulties, contradictions, and stumbling blocks we find all through the Gospels. Facing these, wrestling with them, she arrives at a place not of Truth, but of possibility.

I’m glad to go there with her. Thanks be to God.

CTR
March 2011

Not Even Wrong:

Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism
Paul Collins (2004, Bloomsbury)

In Paul Collins's latest book, Paul and Jennifer move back to Oregon (from Wales, where they were living in his Sixpence House) and take two-year-old Morgan for a check-up. He's a normal, healthy, toddler, they think, with a few unusual abilities--he can start up a computer and make it play games, and he can read books, the fatter and more abstruse the better. But, as the doctor notes, he never says, "Mommy" or "Can I have some popcorn?"; he doesn't make eye contact. To Collins, it's a bafflement: "How can it be that we left our house an hour ago with a healthy toddler, and returned with a disabled one?"

By trade a historian, Collins has a parallel story to tell. He has been nursing a fascination with Peter the Wild Boy, brought to England from the forests of Hanover by order of George I. Peter was smart enough to survive on wild foods, but had little use for language, or the ways of men. He was famous in his time, attracting the attention of Swift, Defoe, and Linnaeus; he was a prism for emerging ideas of what it was to be human.

If, as seems likely, Peter was what we would now term autistic, he represents a case study in how the disabilities of autism are, at the same time, hyperabilities. Collins investigates other strange but creative characters, including Alan Turing and the nerds of Microsoft. "Other animals are social, but only humans are capable of abstract logic. The autistic outhuman the humans, and we can scarcely recognize the result." Which still leaves the problem of communicating, of getting along in the social world. Imagine your whole life as a sort of Turing test, in which you have to use reason to process social information that most people can grasp without a second thought.

Paul and Jennifer, with some expert help, make overtures to Morgan using written language. There's a lovely Helen Keller moment when Morgan first answers a binary question from Paul, as he'd been doing with his computer games. It's a huge step in the right direction, as is the class Morgan is finally old enough for, at three and a half, with other kids like him. "There is no awkwardness among them: they are equals. It's as if we have brought a seal to the ocean and watched him shuffle awkwardly off the land to glide effortlessly through the waves, finally within the world he was made for all along."

Morgan's parents still have their work cut out figuring out what he needs, and how to keep him safe; they have to plan to have him living with them for the rest of their lives; but they know what they need to know about not pounding their square peg into a round hole, and it's going to be all right. Thanks be to God.

CTR