John G. Messerly's Blog, page 45
August 9, 2020
40th Wedding Anniversary Songs
My wife and I on August 9, 1980
I’ve written over a million words on this blog. But my words seem inadequate to describe a lifetime of living and loving together. The best words I’ve ever found to describe my feelings in this regard were penned by one of my intellectual heroes, Will Durant:
Do not be so ungrateful about love … to the attachment of friends and mates who have gone hand in hand through much hell, some purgatory, and a little heaven, and have been soldered into unity by being burned together in the flame of life. I know such mates or comrades quarrel regularly, and get upon each other’s nerves; but there is ample recompense for that in the unconscious consciousness that someone is interested in you, depends upon you, exaggerates you, and is waiting to meet you at the station.[i]
The best advice I’ve ever received about love came from a short book that I read in my early twenties—and the first book I ever gave to my wife—Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving. It begins:
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise …
Yet perhaps music best expresses our love. With this in mind, I share these 15 songs:
And finally, the one we danced to at our wedding, forty years ago:
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[i] Durant, On the meaning of life, 125-26.
August 5, 2020
Free Speech and Cancel Culture
[image error]The Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester
In response to my recent post regarding Steven Pinker, I received a carefully and conscientiously crafted reply from Dr. Peter Guekguezian of the University of Rochester. (Dr. Guekguezian is also a former champion of the game show Jeopardy.) I thought is comments important enough to merit their own post.
As a member of the LSA and someone who knows and speaks with many of the letter’s signatories, I believe that this article (my post) is disingenuous. The letter’s signatories are not trying to censor or cancel Dr. Pinker. They merely don’t want him to be a public face of their/our organization. Removing Dr. Pinker from this honorary and public-facing position in no way silences his voices. It hardly affects him at all. And, the reason this was done through a letter is because they had no other recourse, which to me reflects the undemocratic nature of many academic institutions. If a majority of members of a professional organization no longer want a particular person representing them, they are free to do so. Calling this “censorship” or “cancellation” is laughable at best, ominous at worst: equating loss of a ceremonial position with loss of actual right to free speech I may well make the latter seem less of a big deal.
It’s also disingenuous that one of the three other linguists that the article quotes, in fact, the one who is quoted most prominently, is John McWhorter, who is the same sort of person as Pinker: a very much public intellectual who has much greater reach than most other linguists (due, like Pinker, to popular writing, not to superior scholarship), and sometimes uses this reach to defend the status quo and blame or patronize those who are oppressed or struggling. There are aspects of both Pinker’s and McWhorter’s ideas (scholarly and public) that I endorse, but other that I vehemently disagree with. And, if a majority of other linguists agree with me, why does Pinker need an additional role at the LSA? He has plenty of other audiences.
To be clear, I am wholeheartedly against actual censorship. But, I don’t think censorship by leftists against prominent public intellectuals is an actual danger in the USA in 2020.
Addendum – In subsequent correspondence, Dr. Guekguezian summarized his view thus:
I find myself ambivalent about both Dr. Pinker’s work and the issue of ‘cancel culture’. On the one hand, I firmly agree that our recent history is full of progress and that free speech is a bedrock of a good society. On the other hand, I am wary of attempts by those with power to dismiss very real oppression and to claim that they are being “censored” when their voices are amplified.
I thank Dr. Guekguezian for taking the time to pen such a thoughtful reply.
August 3, 2020
Tennyson and the Meaning of Life
[image error]Tennyson with his wife Emily and his sons Hallam and Lionel
Maybe the key to the meaning of life is not in our answers, our hopes, or our wishes, but in our struggles. This is a salient theme in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, which tells the story of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, and his ten-year journey home after the end of the long Trojan War. Odysseus’ tribulations on his homeward journey are legendary, as he battles giants, monsters, storms, and the sirens of beautiful women who call sailors to their death. After finally reaching home, reunited with his wife and his kingdom, Homer suggests that Odysseus desired to leave again, an idea picked up centuries later by Dante.
In the nineteenth century, Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) expanded on this theme. Tennyson was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign, and one of the most popular poets in the English language. His poem Ulysses, Odysseus’ name in Latin, famously captured Ulysses’ dissatisfaction with life in Ithaca after his return, and his subsequent desire to set sail again. Perhaps nothing in Western literature conveys the feeling of going forward and braving the struggle of life more movingly than this poem.
Tennyson begins by describing the boredom and restlessness Ulysses experiences after finally returning to rule his kingdom.
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Contrast these sentiments with his excitement that his memories elicit.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
He’s nostalgic about his past, but he also longs for new experiences. He describes those feelings with this powerful imagery:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life.
For there is more to do in life than wait to die.
Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
The lure of the sea, of another journey, is calling again.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
Finally, he gathers his fellow sailors and leaves the safety of the harbor for the thrill of new adventures. Tennyson describes the scene and the sentiment with some of the most beautiful and moving lines in the English language.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Ulysses found joy and meaning, not in port, but in his journeys, in the dark troubled sea of life against which we wrestle. There we can find the meaning of our lives as we battle without hope of ever finding a home.
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(Note. This post first appeared on December 28, 2013.)
July 30, 2020
70th Birthday
[image error]Colored lanterns celebrating the anniversary of the Buddha‘s birthday
(This post appeared on the blog Erasmatazz on June 1, 2020. Reprinted with permission.)
Today I am 70 years old; I can’t believe it. I’m an old man! I don’t feel old; I feel pretty much like the same person I was at age 30. True, my body isn’t as healthy as it was back then; I’ve learned to live with a depressing sequence of petty maladies. Skin injuries don’t heal as quickly as they used to; I pulled a muscle and it took two months to heal. I overheat quickly. I don’t have the stamina I once had. I’ve had prostate cancer and recovered, but the treatments had their own side effects. For example, I now have hot flashes in the middle of the night.
My mind isn’t anywhere near as quick as it once was; I can’t write code with the facility of younger days; my mind gums up. Yet I’ve also learned so much, figured out so much, that overall I consider myself much smarter nowadays. In the footrace of thinking, my feet don’t move as quickly, but my stride has lengthened considerably.
My life goal has been clear to me: to help make the computer a medium of artistic expression. To achieve this goal, my primary effort has been the creation of interactive storytelling technology; secondarily, I have attempted to teach my ideas to others through lectures, my website, videos, and books. The results of my efforts fall far short of my hopes.
My work on interactive storytelling has led to a lot of great technology, but in the end it just didn’t work. I abandoned work on Siboot, my last-gasp attempt, nearly two years ago; I was much demoralized by my failure. Having recovered some of my creative juices, I have launched a new attempt, but I have been burned so many times that I refuse to invest hope in the project. I’ll work on it and we’ll see how it comes out.
My greatest disappointment has been my failure to change the industry. I have certainly inspired a great many people to aim higher, but they don’t understand the underlying principles required to go beyond my own work.
At first I thought that all I needed to do was show people how I did it. That didn’t work. I published an entire book explaining in detail exactly how my game Balance of Power worked, and yet, 34 years later, I have yet to encounter a single game with the geopolitical sophistication of Balance of Power. I say this not with pride but with disgust. They should have left me in the dust years ago, and they haven’t even caught up with me yet! When will they learn????
In my career, I have advanced from the alchemy of game design (not really understanding what I was doing, but playing around with pieces and getting interesting results) to chemistry (understanding some of the principles of game design) to atomic physics (delving deeper into underlying principles) to nuclear physics (clearly understanding most of the basic principles). I haven’t figured out the particle physics of game design, and I’m nowhere near a unified theory of game design.
Meanwhile the rest of the industry is still doing alchemy. In the 80s and 90s, I thought that writing articles and giving lectures would help nudge the industry forward. I was wrong. Early in this century, I thought that writing entire books would help nudge the industry forward. I was wrong.
This image summarizes the progress the industry has made:

We’ve improved the cosmetics immensely, but we’re still playing the same game!
I was a smart kid, but once I boasted to my dad about how smart I was, and he came down hard on me. “Don’t you ever think that you’re smarter than other people!” he snapped. I took that lesson to heart, and all my life I have reined in my assessment of my own intelligence. But of late I have tired of this pose; at seventy years of age, I shouldn’t be posing. Dammit, I’m a genius, and it’s time I admitted it to myself.
That admission has opened up a new realization for me. The reason I have failed to communicate my ideas to other people is that I have a weird and powerful way of thinking about reality, something that does not come naturally to people. It’s the idea of Process Versus Object that I have started teaching people about. I have always thought this way, but only recently have I realized that other people DON’T think this way. Process-intensive thinking always came so naturally to me that I noticed it as little as a fish notices water. The significance of process-oriented thinking may be the most important idea I have ever conceived.
Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper has been striking closer and closer to home. He has been especially active with my dearest friends. First I lost Christa. A few years ago I lose Veronique. Now another close friend, Gemma, is in the final stages of her battle. As old friends die, I feel increasingly isolated in a world of younger and more distant people. Most of it is my own fault, I confess—I don’t readily make friends.
Will Durant wrote:
“We suspect that when our fires begin to burn low, we shall want the healing peace of uncrowded mountains and spacious fields. After every idea has had its day with us, and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals. Then we shall take to the woods; we shall make friends of the animals; we shall leave the world to stew in its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform.”
With each passing year, this quote rings more and more loudly inside my soul. But I’m too stubborn to completely give up on humanity; I’ll continue trying to teach process intensity.
In the meantime, I have indeed taken to the woods. I have lived for 25 years now on 40 acres of forest land, and I take my stewardship of the land very seriously. I tend the land: I cut down dead trees because they’re a threat in a wildfire; I thin the thickets so that the remaining trees will grow up healthy; I plant half a hundred seedlings from my tree nursery every year, and then spend hundreds of hours dragging hoses around the acreage to water them in their first two summers. The threat of wildfire grows with increasing temperatures, and I have spent more and more time cutting firebreaks, reducing forest floor fuels, and planning for disaster.
In the process, I have grown closer to the land. I see death every day: dead bugs, dead birds, dead trees. I see new life as well: trees bursting with new leaves, flowers, and baby animals. I now see myself as part of a huge system of life. I am no different from the bugs, the birds, and the trees. I have DNA in common with every living creature on this land. I live, grow, and will die just like every living creature here. A million living voices, small and large, sing the glorious song of life here, and I can feel that song stirring inside me. I strive to listen closely, that I may join that magnificent chorus.
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Jun 1, 2020
July 27, 2020
The Era of Stupidity
[image error]
© Darrell Arnold Ph.D.– (Reprinted with Permission)
https://darrellarnold.com/2020/05/18/...
In President Obama’s recent online commencement speech, he criticized President Trump. Hearing this, I wondered immediately what false and hostile tweets Trump would send in retaliation. I woke the morning after this bemusing to the expected tweets. One tweet was simply the words “100% correct” to a retweet of a post that: “Obama was the most corrupt president in the history of the US.” Another was “The Obama Administration is turning out to be one of the most corrupt and incompetent in U.S. history. Remember, he and Sleepy Joe are the reasons I am in the White House!!!” Trump’s claims about Obama’s corruption are ridiculous, but they play to a racism that has served him in the past. A further of Trump’s tweets of the morning was “A CNN Faker,” which he added to a retweet: “Mask-police CNN reporter @Kaitlancollins caught removing hers at presser, as soon as she thought she cameras were off.”
Unfortunately, as baseless as Trump’s quotes about Obama are, we can expect those who took Trump’s birtherism seriously to also take these ideas seriously. It’s race-baiting, pure and simple. But it works for a significant portion of the Trump base. Regarding his statements about Kaitlan Collins, we might well wonder why Trump would find the criticism worthwhile at all. After all, isn’t it a good thing to get people to wear masks when our epidemiologists have indicated that doing so can help save lives? Evidently not. Apparently the attempt to keep people safe isn’t primarily what Trump is aiming at. Instead, he seems more concerned with his re-election chances and thus is trying to fan the flames of a cultural war and enthuse that part of his base that thinks the virus is not to be taken very seriously—many of the same people incidentally who thought birtherism was to be taken seriously and think that Obamagate is to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, this concisely described incident points to how right a recent Boston Globe editorial by Michael A. Cohen is: we are living in an “era of stupidity”—the stupidity fueled by Trump and kept aflame by those who repeat his lies and conspiracy theories and go along with his deflections. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Day in and day out, if we follow the news we’ll see Trump make one ridiculous statement followed by another. And if we wait just a bit we’ll see plenty of his supporters repeating and defending his ideas. They’ll post about them on Facebook or organize a demonstration to protest the wearing of masks that help to save people’s lives, or in a face-to-face discussion, they’ll defend statements about windmill cancer or raking leaves in the forest or the need to try out disinfectants or sham meds to counter the Coronavirus. Now we can listen for a few days, weeks or months to defenses of another self-serving and ridiculous lie meant to deflect from Trump’s own corruption—Obamagate.
The thing is there are really important things we could be spending our time thinking about—ideas, for example, that could help us better understand the pandemic or that could bring us to better understand social life or the natural world around us. We could busy ourselves with ideas that edify the human mind, that might improve ourselves and others around us. But today in America (everyday, to be sure, that Trump continues as president) those of us who want to follow current affairs will be busying ourselves with mental rot that is an insult to human mind and to human decency.
We are in part formed by the ideas we are exposed to. Since Antiquity, philosophies of personal cultivation have thus emphasized the importance of exposing ourselves to ideas that expand our minds and that edify us in some way. Philosophers have traditionally advocated the search for truth. But a serious problem under Trump’s political leadership, and especially with a Republican senate largely supportive of him, is that in the US anyone who follows current political dialogue is continually flooded with lies and ideas that have precisely the opposite to an edifying effect. Day after day we are confronted with a banal leader who is more concerned with his own ego than with human lives, more concerned with appearances than truth. We are confronted with lies to a degree unique to many of us.
The result on our minds is all but good. The ideas that the president regularly espouses are more like those we would traditionally find in the National Enquirer or on AM fringe radio. Frankly, the ideas are often more than a little nutty; and we’d all be better off not listening to this kind of thing. Worse still, such distortions are being offered up at the same time that changes are being made to the governmental institutions that set a new basis for our understanding of the world and our moral compass. The best leaders, as many thinkers since Confucius have recognized, inspire the moral sentiment of a people. Sprinkling that with a little Neo-Hegelianism, we can also see them helping to form a social reality that can facilitate better thinking and strengthening bonds of social solidarity and decency. The worst do the opposite. Trump unfortunately does the worst. And as a result, in general, we are slowly all left a little bit worse off.
July 24, 2020
Defending Steven Pinker
[image error]
I’m on Steven Pinker’s side regarding this current controversy. He is a superb scholar who has written great books advancing our knowledge tremendously and his critics find six tweets and a couple of two-word phrases objectionable in all his work. Even if a few phrases uttered were objectionable I can attest as a university instructor and writer for over 30 years that if you say and write enough someone will find something you say objectionable no matter how innocuous your intent.
I hate to somewhat agree with the American political right about political correctness but this is what some of them have in mind when they talk about cancel culture. And I did experience this in my own classes, ironically enough when I discussed E. O. Wilson or Pinker about a topic like sex differences. I don’t know if it is true that, for example, women have some innate advantage when it comes to child-rearing or men are generally better suited to be firefighters. But whatever the truth is about these and other matters I want to know what it is. We just need to follow the evidence wherever it leads. (What I do know is that the world would be an infinitely better place if at least half of all politically powerful positions were occupied by women.)
Issues like these arose at my first academic job because my college had made national news for revamping its core curriculum based on the book, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind[image error]. (It was an all women’s college.)
I was somewhat skeptical of some of the book’s claims because I doubted that the cognitive differences between men and women were great enough to justify different curriculums. Instead, it seemed to me that men and women were relatively equal in this regard, both relying on their sensory and cognitive apparatuses in order to understand the world. I also worried that young women might negatively interpret this supposed unique way of learning. I don’t know if I was correct about any of this and I didn’t investigate the issue in detail, but I found that expressing doubts about these issues among my colleagues was taboo. The ideas in the book were sacrosanct at my institution.
On the other hand, there are so many people who want to do and say whatever they feel like doing and saying, no matter how rude or noxious or ignorant they are. So the emphasis on being correct highlights that people should just stop being assholes. Moreover, as a reader pointed out,
“The cancel culture works both ways. We have a president who fires and then ruins anyone who disagrees with him. A football player takes a knee to demonstrate his disappointment in a broken system and gets blackballed from the NFL We have a religious movement that would cancel the entire LGBTQ community if they could get away with it. Not to mention white supremacists and their plan to cancel a whole race of people.”
I couldn’t agree more.
July 22, 2020
On Confederate Statues
[image error]
My last post about learning from the past got me to thinking about Confederate statues. As my son pointed out, what’s most objectionable about a statue of, for example, Robert E. Lee, isn’t that he had slaves or defended slavery, or even that he took up arms against the government.
If we judge people in the past by our moral standards they will fall short, as we will if future generations judge us by their standards. They may justifiably chastise us because we tortured and ate animals, destroyed the environment, irrevocably changed the climate thereby, and more. If we judge this way it follows that we have nothing to learn from past generations and future ones will have nothing to learn from us.
As for Confederate statues, the main reason they are appalling is that they were meant to terrorize African Americans; they were built mostly in the 20th century to reinforce white supremacy. That’s the difference between confederate statues and statues of say Washington, Lincoln, or Jefferson whatever be the moral shortcomings of those men.
My son also pointed out that statues themselves are a problematic art form. By suggesting the immutable perfection of their subjects they mislead us about the mixed nature of human beings. Thomas Jefferson was an educated man and a slaveholder; Woodrow Wilson was the leading architect of the League of Nations and a racist; Mother Theresa opened India’s first hospice and did many despicable things. But statues by their nature can’t account for such simple distinctions or place their subjects in context.
What is really needed is a true understanding of history as opposed to myths and legends. I suppose the truth may set us free.
July 20, 2020
Some People Know More Than I Do
[image error][image error] “I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. … Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth.” ~ Will Durant (The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time[image error])
My son recently shared this quote … so apropos for our times. It got me to thinking about my own experience as a university teacher. For example, I’d critique Aristotle’s defense of the idea of natural slavery (who wouldn’t) but then add that I thought his insights about, for example, how to live well are good ones. Often a student would claim that they reject anything a defender of slavery said. I would point out the ad hominem nature of this attack, often to no avail.
A connected idea is our rejection of experts today. Generally, people won’t acknowledge that others are smarter than they are or know more about some topics than they do. Insecurity or some other psychological condition probably explains this. How easily people say “well, I have my opinions about physics and disagree with Steven Hawking or Sean Carroll or Brian Greene.” Wow.
Or think of Trump or other Republican politicians saying they sometimes disagree with Dr. Fauci and other scientists about COVID, as if politicians are the equals of scientists regarding knowledge of pandemics. People often pontificate about history, economics, or biology when they don’t know what they’re talking about. (This is the essence of Plato’s critique of democracy—people who vote don’t know what they’re doing.)
Sometimes is best to say “I think the physician or scientist probably knows more about that than I do.” This takes humility but it typically gets you closer to the truth than false bravado.
July 18, 2020
I Can’t Stay Away
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I will publish a number of new posts in few days. I wanted a vacation from thinking and writing but—after almost 50 years since my higher education—your work becomes such a part of you that it is hard to disengage. I will continue to intersperse some previous posts too but there is too much happening in my mind and in the world to quit writing new posts. Hopefully, some may benefit from my musings.
July 15, 2020
The Democratic Virtues Of Skepticism
[image error]Pyrrho of Elis is credited as being the first Greek skeptic philosopher.
(This essay first appeared at 3 Quarks Daily on July 13, 2020. Reprinted with permission.)
by SCOTT F. AIKIN AND ROBERT B. TALISSE
Skepticism is the view that knowledge is unattainable. It comes in varying strengths. In the strongest version, it is a thesis about all knowledge, the global denial that anyone has ever known anything. More commonly, though, skepticism is constrained. It is the denial of the possibility of knowledge of some specific kind. Moral skepticism, for example, is the view that there is no such thing as knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad. External world skepticism is the thesis that there could be no knowledge with respect to matters outside of one’s mind. You get the idea.
When you think about it, we’re all skeptics in at least some of these constrained senses. You’re likely a skeptic with respect to some kind of purported knowledge or other. And most folks think that being skeptical is a healthy attitude to have when people make striking claims. Still, skepticism gets a bad rap among philosophers. So much so that entire intellectual programs have been devised solely for the purpose of defeating the skeptic.
Yet there’s a virtue to skepticism, at least in its ancient varieties. And this virtue is both crucial to a healthy democracy and presently under attack in our politics.
The insight of the ancient skeptical tradition, exemplified in both the Academic and Pyrrhonian schools, is that intellectual humility is a virtue. It is not a weakness to admit you do not know, that you don’t have the answers. In fact, with this humility and the skills of inculcating it, we not only have the ability to cut through the bullshit of others, but also our own bullshit.
The Academics saw that the longer one surveys the breadth of arguments on many issues, the less one is sure of one’s answers. The later Pyrrhonians developed a series of skeptical tropes, shortcuts to skeptical challenge, that in pretty short order uncover incomplete evidential support or simply question-begging reasoning. When it comes to the big ideas that run our lives, most of the things we feel certain about are more often than not uncritically accepted. In light of this, the ancient skeptics counseled that we should suspend judgment, and if we do judge, it should be modest and at the end of a process that weighs out all the sides.
Today, we live in a world that provokes nearly instantaneous judgment. We are inundated with calls for outrage, support, indignation, and sympathy. In many contexts, the explicit norm is that silence constitutes a kind of complicity, and withholding judgment is itself an endorsement. Time is of the essence! Let your views be heard, because no matter what, you’ll be understood to have communicated an opinion.
Yet this advance towards a culture of insta-verdicts comes at a time when information has become increasingly difficult to process. In a world of sophisticated fake news and deep fake capabilities, combined with the old-fashioned techniques of manipulation, it is, as George Orwell observed, a struggle simply to see what’s in front of one’s face.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the valorization of the unblinking judgment is in part entrepreneurial. Regardless of our politics, we are all conservative in an epistemic sense. That is, once we formulate an opinion, we are cognitively wired to hold on to it. We are psychologically disposed to stick to our guns. And so, we evaluate evidence partly in terms of how well it supports our antecedent beliefs. We suffer from confirmation bias. Moreover, our beliefs prevent us from detecting bad reasoning in favor of them. In one famous study, we are less likely to spot formal fallacies in arguments when they have conclusions we find agreeable. Finally, many of our beliefs aren’t just things we assent to, but they are things that make us us. Think of how your position in your social circle depends on saying the right things about all the important things, and how you not being sure about something may endanger your place. Maybe even whether you’re in that circle anymore. The stakes for beliefs are high, and we, once we’ve got them, tend to keep them.
The marketplace of ideas is more like a market for minds, where content providers compete for our attention by providing images and messaging that we can be expected to find satiating. It helps these providers to further their commercial interests if audiences can be curated in predictable ways. Hence the import of the snap judgment: we’re encouraged to get on board as quickly as possible so that a pleasing narrative then can be constructed, a diet of information that will keep us watching.
It goes without saying that this is all terrible news for democracy. Although it may make citizens feel as if they’re especially engaged in the politics of the day, it’s all just a matter or increasingly elaborate marketing. What’s more, the hard work of real politics is farmed out to large commercial interests that can be counted on to warp our perceptions. When our capacities for judgment are outsourced in this way, we eventually lose them. In the end, we become one another’s strawmen, increasingly fitting the worst depictions the other side projects on to us.
The ancient skeptical tradition teaches the importance of suspending judgment, even the face of persistent calls for assent. It teaches the art of stepping back from the immediate, not as a way to separate from the world, but as a strategy for properly gauging one’s investments in it. That is, the skeptical view is that learning to suspend judgment is a necessary precursor to properly assessing the appropriate degree of confidence one should attach to a belief.
In a democracy, the shared project of self-government among political equals calls us to sustain within ourselves the powers of intellectual humility. We must stand ready to adjust, correct, and revise our judgments in light of new or newly considered evidence. We must remain persuadable by others. And we must avoid overplaying our views.
Being persuadable and open to new evidence means that you are able to hear those with whom you disagree, hear their reasons as reasons. That doesn’t guarantee that you are persuaded in the end, but it does mean that, in proper democratic fashion, you treat them as equals. The problem is that if you don’t see those with whom you disagree as fellow reasoners, then you’re not seeing them as coequal in the project of jointly deliberating. They are merely obstacles. That’s not a democratic attitude about one’s fellow citizens.
The great irony is that although skeptics think that, ultimately, very few views are worth assenting to, they also hold that almost every view is worth taking seriously enough to investigate. The key democratic insight that we must take our fellow citizens’ views seriously because they are our political equals. In order to do that, we have to resist the pull of showing up with our judgments already set, we must find a way to slow down our inclination to hastily form beliefs.
The current political culture of instant takes itself works against these skeptical virtues, and insofar as they are virtues that are also central to good democratic citizenship, this culture of snap judgment also works against democracy.