Rational Philosophy

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

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?

ÂÂ