Rational Philosophy

In The Darjeeling Limited, Jason Schwartzman plays a writer who uses moments from his real life as the basis for his short stories, then insists to his brothers that the highly recognizable characters are fictional. The Darjeeling Limited is a gem-like movie, and this aspect of the story left me with a new insight, or the beginning of an insight into the relationship between art and life.

The actions of Schwartzman’s character create a text within the text. Schwartzman co-wrote the screenplay with Wes Anderson, the film’s director. So, we have the screen-writer playing the role of a writer who fictionalizes real moments in his life. The movie isn’t about art, Schwartzman’s fiction plays a minor role in the plot, but the film is about artificiality in life. The characters keep the world at arm’s length, rarely entering into events fully, yet believing that they do.

We use and appreciate art as a construct and technique to distance ourselves from reality. When it works, this distance provides a perspective that permits us to apprehend reality more fully, or to access a part of our perspective that would otherwise be hidden from us.

The artist takes a feeling or perspective, conscious or subconscious, and transfers it to some external medium (canvas, music, sculpture, text, etc.). After watching The Darjeeling Limited I was left with a new sense of life as unconscious art, or if not art then something akin to it.

Today is Halloween. Never in my recollection have I wanted to wear a Halloween costume nor enter into the spirit of the holiday, much to the disappointment of my wife and children. As I walked to the train this morning and reflected on this and on the premise of The Darjeeling Limited I felt a strong correlation between the two and the overlay of art in life.

If we think about distancing and abstraction as a critical construct of the artistic process, all of a sudden much of what we do in life starts to seem if not artistic then representational. Two days ago I got my hair cut, for instance, and felt disquieted by the relative neatness and attractiveness of my hair afterward. I now think that I was put out by the artificial construct of a haircut. We clothe ourselves partly for warmth, but the way we clothe ourselves is to a greater or lesser degree a representation of the image we seek to project to those around us. We are wearing an abstract perspective of ourselves.

The way we speak, the way we behave, the way we move, everything but the most automatic, innate impulse bears the impression of conceptual intervention. Focus on your breathing for a moment and all of a sudden you become conscious of how fast, how deep, how measured and the pattern of your breathing changes even if it doesn’t in fact become faster, deeper, more or less measured. The observation of your breathing makes it somehow different.

But whereas good art uses distance to bring us closer to something real, affectation in life distances us without achieving this ultimate closeness. Good art lets us feel or apprehend something more directly, more pertinently. A good haircut does nothing to bring us closer to reality. In fact, it takes us more deeply into the concept of ourselves as a person with attractive hair.

I’m not suggesting that we go about wearing sacks and with long, lank locks. But I am suggesting that being aware of the artificiality we invest in a good part of our waking life may actually be a step toward living more fully in the moment rather than in our minds.

I buy coffee and a carrot muffin every day for breakfast from a “Pret” cafe in midtown Manhattan. As I do wherever I go, I strive to be pleasant when I get my breakfast. I see people being unpleasant sometimes and it makes me cringe. (Isn’t it less stressful to be polite and helpful and sympathetic to those with whom we come into contact? And, I should point out, Pret does a great job of attracting and training its staff to be polite and courteous, too.) In any case, this morning there were no carrot muffins out on the rack so I took a blueberry muffin instead. When I stepped up to pay, the person serving me recognized me, remembered what I typically purchase, and rang up a carrot muffin. When she realized that I’d settled for blueberry she went out of her way to hunt down a carrot muffin for me. (It was delicious.)

Republican Representative Deborah Pryce in announcing her retirement today had this to say about America’s increasingly media-driven campaigns of dirty politics: “I don’t think anything will change until Americans revolt and get it into their heads that they need to be informed voters instead of just listening to the paid political ads.” But she also freely admitted that she’d resorted to attack ads in order to hold onto her seat in last election, to the tune of $4.5 million. Which makes one wonder whether politicians don’t also need to do a little revolting of their own. The message though is that being nice, in politics at least, doesn’t pay off. That’s the prevailing wisdom. I’m not sure whether any politician has yet dared to be nice in the face of his or her rival’s nastiness.

Various religions have long taught the virtues of being nice, of not retaliating. The texts of Christianity (the religion with which I’m most familiar) stress the importance of being kind and peaceful even in the face of unkindness. Although, if I remember rightly from my attendance at church, long ago, as a boy, the religion seemed to attract a high proportion of petty, judgmental and holier-than-thou people. But I guess you can’t necessarily blame the teachings for the people they attract!

The 2001 movie Evolution, in amongst slapstick humor and great special-effects, teases up an interesting philosophical question. The movie’s premise: A meteor carrying the necessary genetic material for a very different form of life crashes into the earth. The new form of life has two characteristics that set it apart from the kinds of life forms with which we’re typically familiar: 1. Life evolves exponentially faster. 2. The species are uncompromisingly unpleasant and aggressive. I was fascinated by this second characteristic (made easier to observe by the first).

In the context of the movie, life can evolve even if the members of its various species behave with uncompromising aggression. But could this be true out in the universe? Does any principle indicate that we will get further by being nice?

Here’s a theory (one that I explore in greater detail in my book): Being nasty can help an individual survive in certain situations. It can help us get our coffee ahead of the next guy, or it can even make a difference between life and death — the killer instinct. But when we think about survival more broadly, in a family or social group, being nice starts to pay off. Being nice creates social bonds and payback. It leads to cooperation and sacrifice. I would argue that being nice is a much more enlightened practice than being nasty and one that pays great dividends over time.

If only politics could evolve to be more enlightened, too.

Judging by a report on the California wildfires, some residents seem intent on refusing to see things logically. They want the world to be other than it is. Angry that wildfires again have put their homes in danger they don’t accept any responsibility for continuing to live in what is a well-known and, for the forseeable future at least, incurably hazardous danger zone.

Another story got me wondering whether, as Merrill Lynch’s CEO, E. Stanley O’Neal steps down, those who have fostered ire at the company’s recently slumping stock price have stopped to consider what part O’Neal played in lifting that stock price in the first place. Under O’Neal’s more aggressive leadership, for instance, the company made $7 billion in 2006 using capital to trade for itself and clients, compared with $2.2 billion in 2002. The stock that recently slumped, slumped from a dramatic peak. Was O’Neal responsible for the slump but not the peak? Or was he the victim of those now in denial about whether they were getting what they asked for — a more agressive and therefore more volatile company. These are finance types, they surely know that it cuts both ways.

And President Bush, still in denial about his administration’s culpability for the lousy federal preparation for and response to hurricane Katrina, this week siezed the opportunity of California’s tremendous response to its wildfires to again shift Katrina blame from himself to the Louisiana governor. “It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead,” Mr. Bush said. (The same could be said of the White House, Mr. Bush.)

The concept of being in denial presents us with a curious psychological and philosophical circumstance. To be in denial one must be aware of the logic or reason of a situation, or at least aware that one could find such logic or reason, and suspend that awareness in order to act contrary to it. It is a willful refusal to accept reality.

As an evolutionary function, being in denial may be a technique that has helped us survive. When facing the reality of a situation means that we must admit that life isn’t worth living, it must have helped us as a species to be able to ignore the unhappy truth and carry on. In the course of human history countless millions of people’s lives haven’t been worth living and still aren’t today. People have put up with hopeless situations of drudge, oppression, hunger, war, drought, poverty, you name it, living wretched lives that ultimately end… well, wretchedly. If we had seen this for what it was and given up, we wouldn’t have survived long as a species.

Denying one’s perception of reality must mean that one creates and holds a conceptual framework of the world in one’s mind. This seems like a lot of work when you don’t have to do it. I’m an advocate for less denial and more reality in the cases cited above. It doesn’t help the California homeowner to deny that he or she has picked a lousy spot to live. Nor does it help the investor, employee or director of Merrill Lynch to ignore the fact that the leader they’re kicking out has been doing quite well by them up until recently. And although Bush can’t hope to salvage any political legitimacy at this point in his tenure, as a person he would do well to start admitting that, yes, even he can make mistakes.

Is it ‘what we don’t know can’t hurt us,’ or ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you?’ I’m not sure. Let me look it up…  Hmmm, still not sure. I found both versions out there, and no origin. I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

But David Brooks’ Op-Ed today “The Outsourced Brain“ got me wondering about the harm of not knowing. Brooks recently installed a GPS system in his car and now can’t live without it. He lets iTunes select his music, and he finds himself wedded to his Blackberry. Brooks, tongue in cheek, professes oneness with the idea of an outsourced brain, but clearly remains ambivalent on the matter.

He makes an interesting point: “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.”

Last night, my wife and I went to our son’s pre-school to hear a little from his classroom teachers about the learning environment. It’s a Montessori school, and we both marvelled at the teachers’ efforts to make the learning process organic, tactile and structured. Each activity aims to add a specific strut or pillar to the incremental development of the child’s understanding of the world.

Listening to the teachers at my son’s school it seemed incontrovertibly right that children should learn from first principles how the world works, including the world of abstract concepts. If we don’t understand the foundations of abstract thought as they relate to the world around us, we can never have a solid rational understanding of life and existence. Going through life without that understanding seems a bit like tying one arm behind your back for a game of tennis. (The arm you would usually hold the racket with!)

Unlearning things in later life or dispensing with the regular exercising of pieces of knowing or know-how for the sake of efficiency perhaps isn’t such a big deal. Outsourcing navigational worries to a GPS system (which will navigate a whole lot better than most of us,) for instance, doesn’t seem problematic.

But as the old adage about art goes: You have to know the rules before you can break them. When technology allows or encourages us to avoid knowledge or understanding that seems like not such a good thing. Using a calculator is fine, then, as long as you understand the computations it’s performing for you. But if your only interface with the art of navigation is a GPS system, that seems to be a problem.

(Incidentally, I just learned for the first time that GPS systems use relativistic calculations to account for time dilation. When I found this out (I was helping my daughter research her Physics homework on Doppler effects) I reeled at the depths of specialized knowledge embedded into a device that will soon seem like an everyday driver’s tool.)

But what about some of the common and seemingly innocuous holes in our collective understanding? How many of us know where our electricty is generated, and by what means? How many of us know the source of our local water supply and potential risks posed to it? And what happens when technology becomes unavailable or breaks down? Do we wait for someone to fix it, or do we have the wherewithall to get on without it?

You’ll be relieved to hear that all of this leads me somewhere. It’s to this: We can’t outsource to our school-teachers the importance of understanding the world from first principles. This is perhaps the most important reason for adults and parents to remain in touch with a direct and comprehensive understanding of the world, rather than divesting this understanding to gadgets and gizmos.

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The concept of motive has many facets. Understanding a person’s motive often proves to be critical in knowing how to respond to what they do or say. I was left perplexed by Lou Dobb’s comment today, because although he makes it clear that he thinks the Bush administration misstates (or lies about) the reasons why the US should sign onto the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, he doesn’t provide a motive for them to do so. I’m left uncertain whether they just don’t understand (in which case, how do they know to twist the truth?) or whether Bush has some nefarious reason he wants the US to sign the treaty.

(I went looking for some sound hypothesis that explains the administration’s true motives, but although everyone agrees that Bush’s support for the treaty seems odd, theories of motive lie thin on the ground. Some claim that as a lame duck Bush is pursuing a global socialist agenda. This, I thought, had to be meant as a joke. And another proposes that Bush seeks to mollify global critics of his detention policies. Again, not a convincing theory. I have to believe that there must be an economic motive, and a very immediate one. Cheney apparently signed on as a supporter of the treaty before Bush did. If that’s not a clue to there being an economic motive, then I’ll eat my hat…!)

Earlier today, I set off to school with my son as my wife ran down the street to move our car before the 8:30 street-cleaning curfew. Alas, despite her shouted pleas, when she arrived the traffic cop insisted on issuing the ticket. The traffic cop (or ticket vendor) explained that she couldn’t stop once she’d started otherwise she’d “get into trouble.” I see the exterior motive for writing tickets on street cleaning days — so that the street cleaning truck can rumble unencumbered down the curb, sweeping up all of the dirt and detritus that has accummulated in the preceding few days. But since I passed a second traffic cop also writing tickets at a shade after 8:30am, I wondered afresh whether the city might not have an ulterior motive — to collect from as many sleepy Brooklynites as possible.

And in another political story, the Bush administration denounces Iran and its Republican Guard, issuing details of automatic economic sanctions unless they shape up. The story concludes by mentioning that since Iran has done very little business with the US in the past twenty years, the effect of the sanctions would be more “political and psychological.” Again, doesn’t this either seem incredibly naive or duplicitous? Does the administration really think that sanctions without spine will deter Iran? Rice perhaps believes this — she seems quite naive — but surely for the leaders of the administration this is another step along the path toward conflict.

We are adept at letting our true motives guide us, and we are adept at concealing our true motives when we think they won’t be viewed favorably. But what is a motive, what is the mental process concealed within that word?

Motive rests on the concepts of desired outcome and action (or inaction). For a motive to exist, we must conceive of a desired outcome. Bush wants the LOST treaty signed to achieve a particular outcome. The actions he takes to achieve that outcome consist of promoting the treaty and, we posit, concealing his true motive. The traffic copy issuing the ticket is motivated by her desire not to be sanctioned, and the city, one presumes, has as its motive for setting her and her colleagues forth at 8:30am precisely the desire to collect as much ticket income as possible.

A particular problem with concealed motives seems to be lack of imagination. When we conceal our motives we don’t expose them to critique and challenge. I can hear you saying that that’s the whole point. But by this I mean that the more openly we share our motives the more likely we’ll end up reaching a better conclusion on the strategy to achieve them. Bush can’t imagine that the LOST treaty will be a bad thing for the US once he’s concealed his motive for why he thinks it’s a good thing. The City of New York can’t be open to the idea that it’s ultimately better for the City (and probably more profitable) not to be so hard-ass about parking tickets when it must conceal its motive to recoup as much ticket revenue as possible. Issue tickets with more discrimination and a little heart, and you’ll create good will, make people happier, more motivated to stay and contribute income to the city’s coffers by their commerce.

And since the concealed motives that led us to attack Iraq still haven’t been disclosed, here we are heading toward a similar disastrous outcome with Iran.

A concealed motive locks us so tightly in to a narrow perspective that it can be almost impossible to adjust.

In the third installment of Erroll Morris’s fascinating essay on the history and historical veracity of two photographs taken during the Crimean war, we find this wonderful quote from one of Morris’s interlocutors — “Certainly the more information we get, the higher the level of ignorance seems to be.” I couldn’t agree more. Beyond a certain point, the amount of information available to us becomes overwhelming. We cease to be able to discern what’s imporant.

It’s for this reason that I have a certain nostalgia for the idea of Cuba. I’ve never been there, but it seems that along with his willful limitation of personal and political freedoms Fidel has kept Cuba constrained in a bubble of simplicity. People have less to process. Life takes on an easier pace. People appreciate what they have all the more for what they don’t have. Now that Castro’s rein seems close to an end, and his brother Raul seems set to pick up where Fidel left off, but not exactly, we look on and wonder whether the bubble will burst.

My daughter has been writing a High School paper on whether and how the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in Cuba over the past thirty years. It’s been fairly straightforward for her to research and list the various freedoms that have been withheld from the Cuban people. But it got me wondering about freedom. I asked her if the history teacher had assigned anyone the task of writing the same essay about the United States. He hadn’t.

Which of the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in this country over the past thirty years? United States citizens and permanent residents (such as myself) do have certain important rights and freedoms (some of them that squeaked in quite close to that 30 year boundary!!) but in certain important and insidious ways I believe our freedoms are restricted.

If we sit back and think about how the forces of government and economics shape and constrain our lives, we start to feel somewhat less free. We elect a government, but the political parties are increasingly constrained by the forces of economics and political exigency… which are in turn constrained by economics. And we get to choose what we do with our lives, but unless those choices fall into some pretty neat buckets we’re going to have a hard time of it.

I’m not defending Castro’s abuses. But I’m just trying to get to the heart of the idea of freedom. Isn’t a large part of freedom the feeling of ease that one gets when one doesn’t feel beseiged? And in America today aren’t we beseiged by information, by images and expectations, by fears and constraints?

(And I’m not even touching on the encroachments on the right to privacy and right to liberty and right to fair treatment meted out by the Bush administration. Ironic for Bush to lecture Cuba on freedoms. But that’s another story.)

I watched The Age of Innocence last weekend — Martin Scorcese’s rendering of Edith Wharton’s novel of the constraining customs of New York society. As one character points out, she had thought that people came to New York to escape the restrictions of European society, and is surprised to find out that the restrictions, if anything, are subtler but more pronounced.

To sum it up, perhaps, the kind of freedom I’m talking about is that enjoyed at its fullest by the young child who knows nothing of expectations or correctness or obligation. It’s the freedom to take off all your clothes and play with your toy trains while the world around you teeters on in fear and uncertainty.

My fourteen year-old daughter (who’s studying High School Physics) asked me the other day to explain a vacuum to her. I told her it was the absence of any substance. “Like air?” she asked. I wafted my hand in front of her face to demonstrate that air is something. On another occasion she asked me what we think about when we’re not thinking about anything. A tough question. Can we think about nothing? When meditating, it seems to be possible for brief stints, but I’m never sure that I’m not fooling myself.

‘Sopranos’ creator, David Chase, reportedly aimed for an absence of explicit meaning in the closing scene of the Sopranos series when he cut to black. Chase lambasts those who felt cheated of a more definitive ending, defending the uncertainty as more appropriate.

And a woman who salvaged a discarded painting headed for the dump, not knowing why she’d done so, felt driven to learn more about it and found out years later that the painting was a masterpiece worth perhaps a million dollars. (‘One Person’s Trash Is Another Person’s Lost Masterpiece‘.)

In each of these situations, it seems, there is a common set of concepts: It is difficult for us to conceive of an absence (of matter, thought, meaning, history or value) and when we encounter an absence it tends to be quickly filled.

People have been concerning themselves with the concept of a void or vacuum for thousands of years. From c.485bc to 350bc, for instance, Parmenides, Leucippus and Aristotle take turns denying, affirming and denying again the possibility of a vacuum. We now know that what seems solid actually consists of smeared-out energy states that only have solidity in as much as they resist sharing space with other similar energy states.

But the difficult concept of a void interests me. As a premise, we could assert that people find a void or vacuum difficult to conceive of because it is the opposite of our nature. Baruch Spinoza expressed this difficulty in absolute terms: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” He also said: “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”

So, we can’t conceive of an absence because from a naturalistic perspective we cannot comprehend what we cannot encounter directly, and from a spiritual perspective because we cannot accept the possibility of nothingness, since in comparison our “somethingness” would dwindle into insignificance. A similar and overlapping problem exists with the concept of infinity. Infinity is in some respects the inverse of the void. (Mathematically, a division by zero.)

Where does all of this leave us? Well, I think it leaves me with a newfound respect for the concept of a vacuum. Perhaps meditation as a practice if it brings us even only glancingly into contact with an appreciation for the concept of nothingness teaches us exactly what its proponents say it teaches us, eternal humility.

The NY Times reported yesterday that tighter controls for returning Americans at the Mexican border have been causing long delays, with wait times up to a couple of hours or more. I guess I’d never thought about how long it takes, nor how long it should take, to cross the Mexican border. I wonder now whether two hours is, in real terms, a long time. I also wonder how we deal with such numbers — the processing of numbers and the comparison of these abstract quantifiers affects so much of our lives.

Two other reports on numbers caught my eye:

“How many site hits? Depends who’s counting” discusses the fight between Internet businesses, ratings organizations, and advertizers, on how to count and account for website traffic. The businesses count more visitors than the ratings organizations. But which numbers are correct, and why do the advertizers care?

And in his piece on military contracting corruption (I won’t say scandal, because, unfortunately, it’s not that much of a scandal) Frank Rich points out that the suicide of the second highest ranking USAF procurement officer, seems to have been due to a sum of money that wouldn’t have even made a bulge in Erik Prince’s pants pocket (Erik is the Blackwater guy…)

Are such numbers real or abstract, relative or absolute? When we place stock in numbers, run our lives and our deaths by them, are we working with the stuff of tangible experience or throwing psychological dice?

Numbers start out real, I think, but quickly become signifiers. We seem to be very good at translating numbers into abstract concepts that we can use as points of data in processing everyday life, making decisions, discussing our opinions for and against, etc.

In the case of the Mexican border crossing: The numbers have a reality for someone who last year crossed the border several times without any wait time, and now has to sit in his car for two hours. The delay is real, tangible, perhaps it causes him to be late for an important event, or to lose income, or to become frustrated or tired or angry. But by the time the NY Times reports that average delays are up to a couple of hours, the number has become a signifier of stricter controls. If the delay time had gone up to two hours because of reductions in staffing it would have become a different signifier. If raccoon migrations had caused the delays, still another.

Similarly, website traffic numbers have a tangible basis in the collective urge of Internet users to visit pages on a particular site. I may feel an urge to go back to a site, to tell a friend about it, to click through from another page. These are tangible connections I have with my visits. Likewise other visitors have their tangible connections, too. If I were in a room with a group of people and half of us had visited a particular site and began to discuss it, this would be a tangible reflection of the aggregated numbers. But by the time the business and the ratings agencies are arguing about hundreds of thousands of clicks, the numbers have taken on a different meaning. They are now signifiers for reliability of data, viability of business models, money.

And lastly, in the matter of the poor man who killed himself over $26,788, this number was tangible to him, this was money that tided him over until he got his first Pentagon check. Maybe it meant that he and his family could avoid a few weeks of belt-tightening while he was between jobs. And then it became a signifier for him of a personal lapse in judgment. A signifier that he couldn’t downplay or get past. And now it has become another signifier for the sad schism between his devastated reaction to the publicity, and the administration’s generally flagrant waste and squandering and lining of the pockets of the likes of Erik Prince, Halliburton, and countless others.

In the modern world, a lot of counting goes on. We count things all the time. Everywhere, there are people counting things, arriving at statistics and conclusions, tranferring numbers into signifiers. The danger is that we begin to replace reality with signifiers. That the signifiers become more real to us than the reality that they attempt to signify. Life is in the here and now. If it’s not tangible, how much time should we spend consorting with it?

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In the wake of a hazing death, a fibbing (and possibly fight-fixing) grand master, and a what seems to have been an attempted assault on the all-male sanctity of the sumo ring (Japan Wrings Its Hands Over Sumos Latest Woes) change threatens Japan’s sumo tradition. As the NY Times piece points out, though, a little digging reveals that sumo doesn’t quite have a stronghold on tradition. Much newer than people believe, and with much more of a history of reinvention than the current purists want to acknowledge, sumo is no stranger to change.

On the global stage, the threat of climate change has caused many people to react by simply denying its possibility. It’s been interesting to see that as time has passed, more people have become prepared to accept the prospect that the world’s climate is changing. In the US this has happened more slowly than in other parts of the world.

Philosophically, the psychology of change has two primary components: Acceptance — coming to terms with the idea that change is possible, desirable, inevitable, real. And resistance — the idea that the status quo is possible, desirable, inevitable, real.

When change looms it tends to create a tension between acceptance and resistance. This tension can exist in one person, or between people. And it strikes me that such a tension is not just inevitable, but desirable. Acceptance of change not balanced by some resistance will lead to unproductive or harmful change as well as productive and beneficial change.

In society, however, people tend to polarize around positions of acceptance or resistance to particular changes. I’d go further and say that forces in society encourage people to polarize. The “you’re either for it or against it” demand.

Where did this come from? Why do certain aspects of the structure of some societies tend to divide on issues rather than encouraging reasoned debate?

A group, philosophically and logically speaking, requires that the members of the group have some common characteristic. I always remember my math friends at college discussing the question of whether the group that contains all groups contains itself. (A question I could never quite see the importance of.) In this I’m speaking of any group, not just groups in society. A group of marbles may be called a group because they’re all green, or because they’ve been put into the same bag, or because they’re all less than an inch in diameter…

For groups of people in a society, the common characteristic can be quite strong — all of the members of the group are blood relatives, for instance. Or it may be quite weak — they are all taking the same bus.

But people are extremely good at grouping themselves, at establishing groups and reinforcing those groups. It is a critical social function.

Take the example of the bus stop: All of you are waiting for the same bus. There is no particular allegiance, no great bonding force. But now if the bus is late, all of a sudden the members of this ad hoc group have something in common. They can rally around the disagreeability of the bus being late.

To take the example one step further, we can imagine what happens if, after an hour of waiting, a bus comes around the corner just as a newcomer shows up at the bus stop and sidles up to the front of the line. The “group” will be inclined to turn on the newcomer and tell him what’s what.

While philosophically speaking a group is not emotional, psychologically speaking the stronger the urge to form groups, the more likely the groups will be to defend the parameters of their existence.

This tendency to easily form strong groups has doubtless helped human beings survive and prosper. It causes us to work well together when we can establish a common goal. But it also causes us to take sides on issues, and to defend against a change to the group, just for the sake, sometimes, of defending against change.

In Japan, the people who feel most strongly about the parameters of sumo most actively resist any change to those parameters. They have associated themselves with the group that likes sumo to be traditional. Even though they don’t personally know many or perhaps any other members of this group, they wish to keep the group strong. Contrarily, those who feel that sumo should change have joined another group. They will fight just as vehemently for the idea that a change is good.

Acceptance of change and resistance to change confuse us then in part because they are the same thing behind a different mask.

President Bush warned yesterday of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. He spoke of his pressure tactics, including economic sanctions, by which he intends to encourage the people of Iran to find new leadership. I’m not the only one to experience deja vue and to read into this that if the sanctions and pressure fail, Bush would consider that we should do with Iran what we have done with Iraq, use force.

In a different story, but with a similar underlying theme, the head of the Federal Communications Commission has a plan to relax decades-old restrictions and again allow media companies to own a newspaper as well as a radio or television company in the same city.

Whether it’s apochryphal or not seems unlcear (although likely,) that the determination of a web-spinning spider inspired Robert I of Scotland to come out of hiding and return North to inflict a series of defeats on the English, thus originating the sentiment that if at first one doesn’t succeed, one should try, try again. (Perhaps Bush has heard of that legend.)

My connecting thought today has landed vaguely on the principle of determination, of trying again. Why do we try again? What conceptual basis causes us to respond to failure with another attempt at the same thing?

It occurs to me that there may be several reasons why one would try again: Because one believes that the circumstances have changed in one’s favor. Because one feels that one can try harder. Because one feels that the only choice one has is to keep trying, that it is the right thing to do. Or because one lacks the imagination or insight to do anything else.

In the legend of the spider, Robert I of Scotland took from the spider’s efforts a sense that defeat should not be accepted. That the right thing to do was to go back and try again. The current head of the FCC seems to feel that circumstances have changed that the communcations landscape no longer calls for the same restrictions on media ownership.

But what of Bush and Iran?

Of course, I realize now that I am following a completely erroneous path of reasoning. Bush believes that he has not failed in Iraq. He acknowledges that there have been problems. But he believes still that the approach he took was not just right, but also effective. With Iran, in his mind, he is not reapplying a failed strategy, but a winning strategy.

At which point the question becomes one of why the president doesn’t perceive his Iraq policy and his foreign policy generally as a failed policy. Why, in the face of contrary evidence, does Bush cling to the idea that he is right, that he has made good choices not poor ones?

Self-insight requires courage. We all make mistakes. We all fail. Every day I do things I shouldn’t do, say things I regret, avoid doing things that I know I should be doing. Occasionally I manage to overcome my failures, to make good on something, to follow through when I’ve procrastinated, to apologize when I’ve insulted. It’s in those moments that I feel a glimmer of courage. That I realize how much I lack by way of courage. That glimmer however slight permits me some self insight.

Bush then must lack courage. Thinking back over this administration’s failures, Bush’s lack of courage has perhaps been the single biggest impediment to his success as a leader. His lack of sharpness hasn’t helped. One wants a leader who can understand the complexities of the challenges at hand. His laziness has been a problem from time to time. But without courage he has been doomed to fail and to continue to fail, to never be able to recognize his failure for what it is, and to address his mistakes.

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