Rational Philosophy

On lying, fibbing, tricking and kidding.

My four year-old son is learning the nuances of deceit. When he’s caught claiming that he didn’t eat that piece of candy you said he couldn’t have he says he was “just joking.” His deceptions have a straightforward purpose — to get something that he wants which would otherwise be denied him, or to avoid responsibility for something that would incur his parents’ displeasure. Transparent and predictable, his lies seem to come with the territory of being human. He’s learning about the commodity of untruth, and its cost.

One would think that by the time a person has grown to adulthood he or she has learned that obvious, easily uncovered untruths have little value and come at a high cost, especially when you live in the public eye.

Hillary Clinton, one can presume, must understand, abstractly at least, the high cost of silly lies. And yet she trots them out as if she were a four year-old. (I’m not exculpating Barack Obama, but his lies at least seem to be in keeping with his general philosophy and purpose, whereas Clinton’s sometimes confound us with their preposterous posturing.) Claiming to George Stephanopolous, for instance, that her support for summer gas tax relief was something other than just political pandering insults the intelligence of those who would vote for her.

Recent research into the psychology of lying suggests that people lie to deceive others or to deceive themselves. This research also suggests that lying to deceive oneself has an aspirational quality — the student who inflates his grade point average aspires to that grade point average, and, more often than not, will get closer to it over time.

Very often politicians lie because they aspire to be right. They lie to defend a position because they believe in their ability to hold correct positions. Hillary Clinton desperately wants to believe that her aspiration to the presidency is legitimate. Beyond anything else, a victory would validate her sense of her right to be center stage — politically and personally. When someone fights so desperately to win, it gives us a window into what they feel they have to lose.

Philosophically, deceit is a simple concept — the presentation of untruth in place of truth. We can quibble about what we mean by truth, about whether anything can be completely objective, but this is hairsplitting. When a student says his grade point average is 3.7 when it is really 3.1 this is deceit.

And deceit isn’t confined to humans. The natural world abounds with deceit. Animals camouflage, impersonate, dissemble, trick… all with the aim of staying alive or furthering their genes.

Early philosophers such as Socrates and Plato focused a great deal of attention on the mechanics of deception and the antidote of reason. They did this because they felt that too often people were deceived by illogic. Clear, unfettered truth was the primary battleground of their philosophy.

Amazingly, many hundreds of years later, despite great advances in so many fields, we still don’t teach our children the fundamentals of logic and reason as a matter of course. Until today, until right now, I’ve thought that this was simply an oversight. But I wonder now whether the battle that Socrates started isn’t still underway. Perhaps it’s a battle of humanity for humanity.

Here we have highly educated people fibbing like four year-olds. In Socrates’ day, the sophists were aware of their deceptions, and they succeeded because people wanted to believe them. Just so today, the Clintons of the world know that they’re dissembling, but people want to believe them. We like rhetoric. We like to think that the world might be something other than what it is. Reality is hard. The truth is unsavory. Let’s go for a drive…

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On truth and lies: and their effect on society and how we live.

My wife and I are selling our house. One man made a good offer, insinuated his keenness to move quickly, and then promptly became impossible to pin down. After a roller-coaster of promised inspections and contract signings, reneged upon for reasons of his workload or ill health, we have been forced to conclude that he’s either completely full of it, or extremely busy and unfortunate. We don’t know which. Nor does it seem likely that we will ever know. While I’m curious for curiosity’s sake to know the real story, my overriding concern has a practical base — is he a legitimate buyer?

I’d been wanting to write about fake memoirs (the latest being Peggy Seltzer’s Love and Consequence, her (fictitious) account of her young life in the LA drug wars) and Daniel Mendelsohn helped me find a way in. Mendelsohn has been gathering life histories of family members who survived the holocaust for a book he’s working on. Mendelsohn has a very personal take on those who lie about their experiences in order to tell an amazing story. He thinks it is repellent. He goes further and questions whether it is a good thing to go through the process of trying to imagine the pain of others, to put ourselves in their shoes. Our presumption to be able to imagine what others go through “debases the anguish” that they suffer, he claims.

Mendelsohn spares no one in his assault on induced empathy. A holocaust museum that recreates the experience of riding in a cattle car “encourage[s] not true sympathy or understanding, but a slick “identification” that devalues the real suffering of the real people who had to endure that particular horror.” (Mendelsohn goes on to implicate the Internet, “which has already made problematic the line between truth and falsehood, expert and amateur opinion, authentic and inauthentic.”)

Apart from his skepticism about manufactured, the real crime, according to Mendelsohn, is that when people lie about their experiences, they make us less trustful of such accounts generally. “How tragic if, because of the false ones, those amazing tales are never read — or believed.”

All of which made me wonder — is he right?

I concluded that Mendelsohn takes an essentially irrational position. That his response is mostly emotion wrapped in rationale.

Rationally, Mendelsohn’s empathy hypothesis would lead us to suspect any form of empathy. But if we read, watch or listen to a true story of oppression or suffering, the story has impact and affects us only if we can feel some sort of empathy. If we were to be able to tell ourselves that we had no place imagining ourselves in a similar set of circumstances, the story would be emotionally meaningless to us.

Mendelsohn’s actions also don’t concur with his rhetoric. He is compiling a list of true stories because he believes they should be heard. Does he want them heard but not to affect people?

Sure, some empathy ploys are cheap, ineffective, devaluing and insulting. But to damn empathy generally is short-sighted.

Mendelsohn’s other target is trickier to unravel. I share his desire for less fabrication, for greater honesty and candor. But wanting won’t make it happen. And I don’t immediately come to the same conclusion that modern society has become a catchall for lies and misstatements, with the Internet as its most effective web.

I wrote recently that we each have an obligation of skepticism. That we can’t simply accept everything we read or see at face value. Mendelsohn seems to hanker for a world where everything is believed because it is all truth. But truth is an elusive quality. Even in the true stories that Mendelsohn gathers for his book there will be elements that become highlighted, brought to greater intensity by the use of a particular word or phrase or literary technique, as well as aspects that get excluded or diminished in the telling. That’s the whole point of the telling — to get it told, to bring out the essence.

For as long as there has been language there have been lies and liars. As human beings we process the stories we hear, some we know to be truth, some we know to be lies, and some we either must take at face value or not. Ultimately, we each reach our own level of skepticism. Without a certain level of honesty and truthfulness, society begins to crumble, because society relies on contracts of reliability in human relationships. Society rightly places a great value on honesty. I therefore feel less pessimistic than Mendelsohn seems to feel about the future of truth.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

(OK, that’s one of my four lies for today.)

On lying and its uses: Rudy, McCain, Bush, and your average guy.

After Giuliani’s thankfully dismal showing in Florida, the rush to spout fibs found Giuliani and McCain vying for who could tell the biggest whopper. First Giuliani suggested that he had failed in Florida because his opponents had built up too much momentum in earlier primaries, whereas, in fact, Giuliani spent a lot of money and time in New Hampshire before retreating from that state. McCain countered with the gracious and fallacious compliment that Giuliani had “invested his heart and soul” in the race, which of course was exactly what Giuliani hadn’t done, otherwise he would have performed much better. McCain followed this up swiftly with an upper-cut of an untruth declaring that Giuliani had “conducted himself with all the qualities of the exceptional American leader he truly is.” Giuliani tried to recover with a transparent falsehood of his own; that he had run “a campaign of ideas.” But McCain, again, clearly had him beat.

On a less happy and more serious note, the editorial board of the NY Times brings our attention to the latest lies from George W. Bush. If you’re going to tell lies, I suppose that delivering them in a state of the union address endows them with a deep and lasting sense of moment and history. The Bush legacy will be in large part one of mass deception – about weapons of mass destruction, the illegal activities of the government and its agencies, and the intent and actions of Bush himself. As The Times points out, Bush’s reconciliatory rhetoric conflicts with his deeds, yet again, as he refuses to respect certain new legal provisions that would increase oversight of military contractors, their actions, and the acts of government agencies by asserting in his signing statement that these provisions step on his constitutional powers.

Bush is an inveterate and habitual liar. One can presume, by studying his behavior and his words, that he feels no remorse about his lies and that he believes the ends justify the means.

Which brings me to a recent study that finds that people admit to telling about four untruths per day and that two-thirds of those polled don’t feel guilty about lying. Now, statistics can be misleading, but in this case, as one commentor wryly observed, asking people to admit to how many lies they tell will probably result in under-reporting rather than over-reporting. (Another study lends support to this theory by finding that people underreport the number of their sexual partners unless they’re told that they’re hooked up to a lie-detector.)

The actual numbers concern me less than the philosophy of lying.

We lie, it seems, to avoid unwanted repercussions, to sway the course of events by untruth. This applies to the fib “no, you don’t sound bitter” as well as to the deception of a nation so that you can fill your cronies’ coffers. 

Essayist Harold Nicolson defined a person who tells the truth as ’someone who, when they tell a lie, is careful not to forget they have done so, and who takes infinite precautions to prevent being found out.’ This is humorous, of course, but hints at the “humanness” of lying. Surely very few people habitually tell the truth, and those that do would be considered odd and unnecessarily blunt. One generally likes to be lied to if one looks lousy or has made a fool of onesself, for instance.

Is this a distinction that helps us? Lies are OK if the person wants to be lied to.

And what about lies that avoid unreasonable conflict? If we know that someone will react unreasonably to the truth, does that justify a lie?

It seems that we get much more worked up about the lies people tell to get away with something, to avoid being held accountable for their actions, unless the accountability is unreasonable or irrational. (We like the idea of Robin Hood. And we support the concept of the resistance fighter who lies to the oppressing power.)

The intent of the lie and the legitimacy of the repercussions of the truth then seems to be far more important, rationally speaking, than the act of lying itself.

Which brings us to the concept of honesty. When we speak of honesty as a virtue, we are really speaking of the bravery that comes with telling a difficult truth, of risking the consequences. What seems to be lacking in politics today is the bravery to tell difficult truths. One by one the candidates shift positions in order to sound more appealing to the voters, or to cast shadow on an opponent. McCain has done it, Romney has done it, Clinton has done it, Obama has been accused of doing it (did he snub Hillary Clinton deliberately or unintentionally before the state of the union address?)

And I wonder if we were to be served up an honest politician, would we elect them, truth and all, or would we prefer to be lied to?

�

On the purpose and principles of education, and the perils of ignoring them.

Living in New York, it’s hard to avoid the whirlpool of anxiety around schools and education. What’s the right school, what’s the best school, how are we going to get our kid in there? Even before a child turns three parents are fretting and fussing over plans for his or her education. And while the particular circumstances may vary from place to place, concern over educational standards seems global.

In Japan, parents have begun to worry about the slip in educational standards relative to India and China. Once leading the world in math skills, Japan has fallen to 10th place. In the NY Times report, Japanese parents concerned over test scores and competitive educational achievements, and envious of India’s surge, sound just like New York City parents. Another current report focuses on concerted efforts to improve the organizational skills of schoolboys, thereby improving their grades.

When we have a child in school, the emphasis on testing and grades can overwhelm us. We forget the true purpose of education. If we’ve grown up through a competitive system ourselves we may never even pause to consider whether there may be anything wrong with it. But since we submit our children typically to more than a dozen years of school with the stated goal of giving them a good start in life, it seems to make sense for us to actively question whether and why those years should be spent chasing grades.

Education should serve the fundamental purpose of teaching a body of knowledge and thinking skills; it should only secondarily serve the subordinate purpose of furnishing qualifications. In modern times these primary and secondary purposes have been flipped. But why?

Ironically perhaps, one reason may be the relative democratization of education in developed countries. When all children have access to school, the focus for many shifts from acquiring knowledge and skills to getting or giving our children the upper hand. We start to want our children to succeed in school by achieving quantifiable, bankable grades, rather than by absorbing useful, valuable brain food.

When I think about my own time in the educational system, I tend to be impressed by how much I’ve forgotten rather than by how much I learned. The process of learning remains with me, even when the product of learning fades. Put another way, I doubt I’d score very well now on high school tests, but I have a clearer sense these days of how to approach a set of educational material in order to appreciate and learn from it (I watch myself doing just that with my high school age daughter). The boy in the NY Times story improved his grade with some intense focus and help from a tutor. But did he learn more, do his improved grades equate with a person who thinks better?

This nation faces a critical time in its history. It is no coincidence that these eight years of democratic dismantling have been presided over by a man who is so famously lax in speech and thought, who brazenly values faith over reason, victory over right, ends over means. Bush and his entourage have taken us down a perilous and irrational path. Yet though the current administration has eroded the principles of freedom and democracy in insidious and worrying ways, the country as a whole hangs back and takes it on the chin. Where is the outcry? Where are the howls of protest? They are few and faint.

When we teach our children not how to think but how to achieve social and economic success we bankrupt the foundation of a democratic society. If we cannot think for ourselves, if we cannot question and criticize, we cannot participate effectively in our democracy. As parents and citizens I believe we have an obligation to encourage our children to pursue knowledge, reason, and truth, not grades.

�

What is reason?

I’ve probably written about fifty posts already on this blog, but it occurred to me just yesterday that I have yet to write about “reason.” Since the name of the blog is rationalphilosophy.net and since it’s my stated goal to analyze subjects of interest from a rational perspective, I think I should correct the omission.

We can encapsulate the realm of reason as follows: Reason involves the logical manipulation of abstract concepts.

To unpack this: “Reason” itself is an abstract concept that describes a mental process. This mental process is what happens when we use logic to explore and analyze other abstract concepts. “Logic” is the consistent application of definitive rules (it’s also an abstract concept).

So, when we take any set of defined rules and apply them consistently to analyze ideas, we are using reason.

Notice, we’ve said nothing about whether the rules reflect reality. Neither have we said anything about whether the ideas being analyzed reflect reality. Reason doesn’t require real objects. But as we evolved the rational faculty we first apprehended reason through our interaction with the real world, because that’s our primary and immediate point of reference. The real world also provides us with myriad situations that can be abstracted and anaylzed through reason. Reason is what we do to some extent and with varying degress of success day in day out just to stay alive.

When I was a boy I used to enjoy logic puzzles. Many of them conjured up odd worlds populated by fanciful tribes (one springs to mind about three different groups that sometimes, always or never told the truth). After setting out the rules of the imaginary world and posing a problem, the puzzles left the puzzler to figure out a rational solution. The unspoken dictat being that if the puzzler applied logic, he would find a definite solution.

In real life, we often find ourselves presented with problems or challenges for which no definite solution exists. Either the set of concepts is incomplete or the rule set to be applied isn’t definitive.

Here are some examples from current news stories:

Credit available to US business apparently shrank by an unprecedented 9% since August, perhaps pressaging a recession. The story and the information set reveal that it is impossible to deduce rationally whether the credit shrink indicates that a recession is nigh. The history that connects previous credit shrinks to recessions hasn’t established a definitive causal link, the circumstances surrounding the current credit shrink are unique, and the actions that people and institutions will take in response to the credit shrink are undetermined. But rationally we can say that we have cause to be concerned about a recession given the news about a credit shrink.

After the latest round of middle-east peace talks ended with a commitment from both sides to work toward peace in ‘08 and a two state status quo, Ehud Olmert is quoted as saying: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.” Olmert asserts this as rational fact, but he is inferring a future event by comparison to a similar set of circumstances. He is probably correct to draw the comparison, and he may be making a reasonable guess about the outcome, but the categorical tenor of his statement leans on emotion rather than logic.

Bill Clinton this week said that he opposed the Iraq war from the start. Records of his statements at the time indicate that he spoke in favor of completing WMD inspections rather than rushing to war. Clinton recalls that he didn’t speak out more plainly because it would have been inappropriate for a former president to question the military decisions of an acting president. Clinton could be recalling correctly and his statement may be true. Or he may be deliberately mistating his former position on the war in which case his statement would be false. But he may also be mistaken in his recollection, in which case his statement would be false in fact, but true in its own internal logic (derived from his faulty recollection). We cannot know which is the case unless Clinton kept some kind of definitive record of his true position on the war at the time.

The elusiveness of definitive information and fully understood conditions means that when it comes to real life we’re often working with approximations and likelihoods. We don’t know that something will happen (like a recession) but we try to deduce the likelihood and weigh the risks or benefits of certain actions in the face of this likelihood. This, I believe, leads to a very common mistake. When we’re faced with incomplete information, we often replace questions of “what is likely” with “what is possible.”

A striking example of this is religious belief. Religious belief is a matter of faith. We don’t have enough information to draw a rational conclusion about whether a god or supreme being exists or doesn’t exist. When many people argue about religion, they invert this logic to say that we don’t have enough information to draw the rational conclusion that a god or supreme being doesn’t exist. That’s true, but just because the two statements are true doesn’t mean that they infer the same likelihood of god’s existence.

Let’s put it this way: If I claim that a large frog lives on the far side of the moon, you cannot prove that I am wrong, but you can demonstrate with a very high degree of likelihood that I am wrong. I can also say that can’t prove that the frog doesn’t exist, and while this is true, I can’t demonstrate it with the same high degree of likelihood.

After a simple review of the world’s greatest conflicts we quickly determine that they are not caused by insolubly complex problems but by the refusal of people to engage in thoughtful, rational debate and problem-solving.

Last night I performed a show with no audience. Apart from myself and the bass player, the only people in the room for much of the gig were the sound engineer and the wait person. (Toward the end a few people showed up early for the next act.) And yet, I was aware of creating a performance, an event. This event lacked an object, and so could be said to be not a true performance. After all, what is a performance without an audience?

The reverse of this experience, I suppose, would be an object without an event.

Just now I read the New York Times piece about a woman called Tania Head who has claimed to be a 9/11 survivor, a claim which now seems unverifiable and possibly false. Her story of survival has moved people. She has acted as a survivor and engaged with others as a survivor. If she is not a survivor, if her stories have been fabricated, then what does that say about the truth of the responses she has evoked in others?

From reading the Times piece it seems that Ms. Head has not been trying to make anyone feel anything inappropriate about the events of 9/11 or its aftermath. She has not been attempting to misrepresent the tragedy, only her own part in it. And yet, if I put myself in the shoes of someone who has spoken to Ms. Head and responded to her story, I would feel that something had been taken away from me, that I had been cheated.

This reaction seems at once rational and irrational.

In communication and in representation, the truth is illusive. Any encoding of a story or feeling into words or signs must fail to perfectly convey the truth. Communication is at best an approximation of the truth. Likewise, the study of fundamental physics tells us that nothing can be exactly known about a physical measurement. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle indicates this with great force: The more accurately we measure the location of a thing (a particle) the less sure we can be about its momentum. We can never approach exactness in either one or the other, since the inexactness of the other will approach infinity.

In Ms. Head’s case, if we presume for the sake of argument that she is not a survivor, then her story is a fabrication. Then again, it is a fabrication in which many of the aspects of the story are approximately accurate, they just didn’t happen to her. Ms. Head didn’t survive, but some did. Ms. Head didn’t experience the emotion of that trauma, but some did. She has drawn on her fiction, one presumes, from reports of the actual experiences of others.

Rationally then, again presuming that Ms. Head’s tale is fabrication, what she has done is to label something as her experience when it is not her experience. To label it a best approximation of her truth, when it is not. We only have our lives, and in our lives the closer we can come to an honest and true awareness of the world around us, the more we can derive value and add value. This, I think, is why a report such as this, of possibly deliberate fabrication, so makes us recoil and wish it were other.

 

�