Take, and eat

Becky Lynn Black has been fighting cancer for many months now, and recently she learned that the battle is far from over. Her essay is a meditation on how to respond to the news, and I recommend it all to you. I found this part especially helpful.

Today as I got up from a nap, the Lord met me with a new understanding. To choose Him & His way means to live according to the Truth of Scripture. What does this mean, practically-speaking?

It’s like eating a meal. The food is before me on the plate. I can acknowledge the reality of its presence. I can see it. I can discuss it with others. But it does me no good, sitting on the plate. I must first make the decision to eat the food, and then I must act on that decision by lifting it piece by piece into my mouth. Once in my mouth, I chew on it, savoring the taste, considering its texture, interacting personally with it. But it still does me no good. I am more intimately involved with the food, but I can still spit it out.

I have not committed to it until I swallow it. Only after surrendering to it, after allowing it to pass the point of no return, do I gain any benefit from it.

Because with that decision to swallow I set in motion the largely-unconscious absorption of the food into my own body. Blood carries the food to my cells, and my cells now have strength for their work. It is the act of swallowing (not the looking at the plate, not the chewing, but the swallowing) that makes it possible for me to absorb the benefit of the food, so that the food becomes part of me and empowers me.

Truth is like that food. It is real. It is discussed. It is sitting on the plate waiting to see who will “eat”. Truth is the Scriptures, “cooked” by God Himself and placed in front of us. “Come and eat”, He says.

So we gather around the table. We ‘oo’ & ‘ah’, commenting to each other what a wonderful meal. (“Great sermon!”)   In our neat little Bible Studies we discuss the colors, the scents, the layout on the plate . We set up hypothetical situations in which the Truth could be beneficial. A few of us, a very few of us, get brave and put a bite into our mouth. We chew on it. We think & meditate on it. We discuss it with the Lord. We test it against our private thoughts. We wonder if we should trust it and take the swallow.

Only the courageous amongst us go so far as to swallow. Most of us prefer to just slowly starve to death, looking at the plate of Truth, happy to sit around the table with others, from time to time bravely tasting a bit, but never committing to the swallow. Never daring to go beyond the point of no return. Perhaps this is what Jesus referred to when He said “The way is narrow, and few there are who find it.”

Few amongst us are willing to commit to the swallow.

I’ve worked in several corporations, and the response to crisis was almost universally to talk about options for dealing with it—and then to talk some more. I think that the reluctance to commit to some course of action, although foolish, was understandable: deciding what to do was also deciding what not to do, while continuing to talk left all the options open. As long as no choice had been made, nobody was responsible for having made a wrong choice.

Understandable, because human wisdom is at best imperfect and there is never any guarantee that it will choose correctly. But also foolish, because to avoid choosing is as a practical matter the same as rejecting all the options. Fear of failure guarantees that you will fail; paralysis spares you from walking the wrong paths, but also prevents you from walking the right ones.

It’s good to know your Bible. But it’s not good to put off living according to that knowledge with the excuse that further study is called for. The truths of scripture can be pondered endlessly, but they are also straightforward and lie on the very surface of the text. Further study will not overcome your reluctance to obey—in fact, it may increase it as it persuades you that further study is a good unto itself.

Take, and eat. Don’t forget to swallow.

The freedom of self-sufficiency

Sometimes I think I do all my deep thinking in anecdotes, especially favorite anecdotes. For me, they do a much better job of encapsulating wisdom than a saying, even a pithy one. Some I return to again and again, and on occasion I’ll see something new.

One I like comes from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Farmer Boy, which describes a year or so in Almanzo Wilder’s boyhood. At the end Almanzo is offered a chance to apprentice with the carriagemaker in town. Pa Wilder tells Ma about the offer over supper, and Ma is not too enthusiastic about the idea. [Emphasis added]

“Well!” Mother snapped. She was all ruffled, like an angry hen. “A pretty pass the world’s coming to, if any man thinks it’s a step up in the world to leave a good farm and go to town! How does Mr. Paddock make his money, if it isn’t catering to us? I guess if he didn’t make wagons to suit farmers, he wouldn’t last long!”

“That’s true enough,” said Father. “But—”

“There’s no ‘but’ about it!” Mother said. “Oh, it’s bad enough to see Royal come down to be nothing but a storekeeper! Maybe he’ll make money, but he’ll never be the man you are. Truckling to other people for his living, all his days—he’ll hever be able to call his soul his own.”

For a minute Almanzo wondered if Mother was going to cry.

“There, there,” Father said, sadly. “Don’t take it too much to heart. Maybe it’s all for the best, somehow.”

“I won’t have Almanzo going the same way!” Mother cried. “I won’t have it, you hear me?”

“I feel the same way you do,” said Father. “But the boy’ll have to decide. We can keep him here on the farm by law till he’s twenty-one, but it won’t do any good if he’s wanting to go. No. If Almanzo feels the way Royal does, we better apprentice him to Paddock while he’s young enough.”

I love Ma Wilder’s defiant opinion here that the farmer is king because, unlike a merchant or laborer, he does not have to truckle to other people for his living. On my more idealistic days I like to think that this was the prevailing opinion in 1830—but, if so, how far we’ve come!

But I’ve always been uncomfortable with the suggestion of rugged individualism here. Often those who champion agrarianism for its emphasis on self-sufficiency are accused of putting too much value on not needing to depend on others. And sometimes  the accusation is valid. Is self-sufficiency merely the route to personal sovereignty, the blissful state of being able to say to anyone and everyone, “You’re not the boss of me!”?

I was talking this over with Chris on our latest long drive, and suddenly it hit me. The good of self-sufficiency lies not in being free to say no on a whim, but in being free to say no when necessary. Self-sufficiency puts a man in a position where doing the right thing will not cost him his living.

I went back and re-read the passage from Farmer Boy, and was pleased to see that this thought is in there.

Almanzo went on eating. He was listening, but he was tasting the good taste of roast pork and apple sauce in every corner of his mouth. He took a long, cold drink of milk, and then he sighed and tucked his napkin farther in, and he reached for his pumpkin pie.

He cut off the quivering point of golden-brown pumpkin, dark with spices and sugar. It melted on his tongue, and all his mouth and nose were spicy.

“He’s too young to know his own mind,” Mother objected.

Almanzo took another big mouthful of pie. He could not speak till he was spoken to, but he thought to himself that he was old enough to know he’d rather be like Father than like anybody else. He did not want to be like Mr. Paddock, even. Mr Paddock had to please a mean man like Mr. Thompson, or lose the sale of a wagon. Father was free and independent; if he went out of his way to please anybody, it was because he wanted to.

Exhortation, or scolding?

On Doug Wilson’s blog I saw this excerpt from The Pastor as Minor Poet by M. Craig Barnes, which is depressingly accurate.

So the [good preacher] doesn’t stand in the pulpit to scold the congregation by essentially calling them bad dogs. It is striking how much of contemporary preaching reduces to this: ‘You bad, bad dogs! Look at what you did.’ And those in the pews respectfully cower and look like guilty golden retrievers who know they have disappointed the master once again.

It made me think of Dug, the dog in Pixar’s UP, and his “I do not like the Cone of Shame!” Unfortunately, I think there is something in us that dearly loves the Cone of Shame. Otherwise why come back week after week for another swat with the newspaper?

I think it was T. David Gordon, in his book Why Johnny Can’t Preach, who pointed out that there is a common variation on this them, namely “Those bad, bad dogs! Look at what they are doing!” At which the congregation mutters, self-satisfied, “Isn’t it a shame what some folks do in the name of Christ.” And the cleverest preachers phrase these exhortations in such a way that it is easy to take them as a general admonition—yes, yes, a good Christian should never do those bad things, or should try harder to do those good things—but hard to take them personally.

Why Galatians 5:4-5 doesn’t serve as a blanket prohibition of such preaching, I’ll never understand.

But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.

We’ve forgotten how to die

Modern faith in technology critically depends on the assumption that, as new problems result from our use of technology, solutions to those problems will also eventually present themselves. We assume that it is the nature of problems that they should be solvable.

But what if this isn’t true at all? Why couldn’t it be that pursuing some new direction in technology could take us into social territory where there are no solutions to the problems that it creates, where the old solutions no longer work and all attempts at new solutions at best do nothing and often make things worse than the problem they address?

According to Atul Gawande, we used to know how to deal with death, because death used to be a simple thing.

For all but our most recent history, dying was typically a brief process. Whether the cause was childhood infection, difficult childbirth, heart attack, or pneumonia, the interval between recognizing that you had a life-threatening ailment and death was often just a matter of days or weeks. Consider how our Presidents died before the modern era. George Washington developed a throat infection at home on December 13, 1799, that killed him by the next evening. John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and Andrew Johnson all succumbed to strokes, and died within two days. Rutherford Hayes had a heart attack and died three days later.

Some deadly illnesses took a longer course: James Monroe and Andrew Jackson died from the months-long consumptive process of what appears to have been tuberculosis; Ulysses Grant’s oral cancer took a year to kill him; and James Madison was bedridden for two years before dying of “old age.” But, as the end-of-life researcher Joanne Lynn has observed, people usually experienced life-threatening illness the way they experienced bad weather—as something that struck with little warning—and you either got through it or you didn’t. […]

But the wonders of modern medicine have turned the journey towards death into something that is prolonged, excruciating, of dubious worth to the sufferer, and uncertain in nature.

These days, swift catastrophic illness is the exception; for most people, death comes only after long medical struggle with an incurable condition—advanced cancer, progressive organ failure (usually the heart, kidney, or liver), or the multiple debilities of very old age. In all such cases, death is certain, but the timing isn’t. So everyone struggles with this uncertainty—with how, and when, to accept that the battle is lost.  […]

Medicine has made it almost impossible to be sure who the dying even are. Is someone with terminal cancer, dementia, incurable congestive heart failure dying, exactly?

Gawande offers an excellent of how difficult it is to answer this question.

I once cared for a woman in her sixties who had severe chest and abdominal pain from a bowel obstruction that had ruptured her colon, caused her to have a heart attack, and put her into septic shock and renal failure. I performed an emergency operation to remove the damaged length of colon and give her a colostomy. A cardiologist stented her coronary arteries. We put her on dialysis, a ventilator, and intravenous feeding, and stabilized her.

After a couple of weeks, though, it was clear that she was not going to get much better. The septic shock had left her with heart and respiratory failure as well as dry gangrene of her foot, which would have to be amputated. She had a large, open abdominal wound with leaking bowel contents, which would require twice-a-day cleaning and dressing for weeks in order to heal. She would not be able to eat. She would need a tracheotomy. Her kidneys were gone, and she would have to spend three days a week on a dialysis machine for the rest of her life.

She was unmarried and without children. So I sat with her sisters in the I.C.U. family room to talk about whether we should proceed with the amputation and the tracheotomy. “Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

The last sentence above is not quite right. Mankind has always been faced with the difficulty of how to die. But until recently mankind has also been blessed by the fact that dying was almost always a short and uncomplicated process, and as a result socially manageable. The difficulty isn’t a new one, but our technological wizardry has turned it into something that people can no longer handle.

This is a discussion that we all will be engaging in soon, simply because we can only sustain our current state of denial by throwing money at the problem, and the money is fast running out. Unfortunately, the heart of the problem is still well obscured, and I doubt that the discussion will come anywhere close to penetrating it.

The cultural value of reportage

I don’t read much imaginative literature, i.e. fiction, not because I don’t like it, but because a little goes a very long way for me. I first read Joseph Conrad’s short novella Heart of Darkness nearly twenty years ago, and I am still working through the many fundamental lessons it taught me. I don’t see how it is possible to read a good work of fiction in any manageable period of time without out leaving most of its ideas unconsidered, much less explored. But that may be simply because I don’t absorb ideas quickly or easily.

In John Carey’s introduction to Eyewitness to History he claims that reportage is at least as culturally valuable as imaginative literature, possibly superior. That’s an argument I don’t care to engage in, and I leave it to the interested reader to go read for himself how Carey makes his case. Along the way, though, he makes some interesting points about the role that literature plays for the reader.

Imaginative literature habitually depends for its effect on a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in audience or reader, and this necessarily entails an element of game or collusion or self-deception. Reportage, by contrast, lays claim directly to the power of the real, which imaginative literature can approach only through make-believe.

It would be foolish, of course, to belittle imaginative literature on this score. The fact that it is not real—that its griefs, loves, and deaths are all a pretence, is one reason why it can sustain us. It is a dream from which we can awake when we wish, and so it gives us, among the obstinate urgencies of real life, a precious illusion of freedom. It allows us to use for pleasure passions and sympathies (anger, fear, pity, etc.) which in normal circumstances would arise only in situations of pain or distress. In this way it frees and extends our emotional life. [Emphasis added]

My only quibble here is that I think readers look to the passions and sympathies of imaginative literature as much for instruction as for pleasure. We want to know how other people tick, how they respond to extreme situations, not just to be entertained but to be instructed in how to behave, or how not to behave.

Carey points out that for most people these days this need is mostly filled by reportage.

It seems probable that much—or most—reportage is read as if it were fiction by a majority of its readers. Its panics and disasters do not affect them as real, but as belonging to a shadow world distinct from their own concerns, and without their pressing actuality. Because of this, reportage has been able to take the place of imaginative literature in most people. They read newspapers rather than books, and newspapers which might just as well be fictional.

The mixed blessing here is that both imaginative literature and reportage let us approach reality from a distance, with a certain critical detachment—a detachment that can be good, in that it allows us to look deeply into matters that would be intolerable in real life, or bad, in that it encourages us to trivialize and dismiss matters that are in fact weighty and significant. The same distance that spares us the pain of reality also puts us in a position to deny that the pain is there at all. When we read an account, fictional or reported, of a person who is suffering from the consequences of bad choices, it is difficult for us to appreciate the suffering and learn from it without lapsing into pious moralizing about how the suffering could have been avoided if only the right choices had been made—or, worse, smug satisfaction that we would never have chosen so badly.

Carey claims that good reportage avoids this shortcoming by slipping past the reader’s defenses to convey a situation in such a way that there is no denying its reality.

However enjoyable this is, it represents, of course, a flight from the real, as does imaginative literature, and good reportage is designed to make that flight impossible. It exiles us from fiction into the sharp terrain of truth. […]

When we read (to choose the most glaring example) accounts of the Holocaust by survivors and onlookers, some of which I have included in this book, we cannot comfort ourselves (as we can when distressed by accounts of suffering in realistic novels) by reminding ourselves that they are, after all, just stories. The facts presented demand our recognition, and require us to respond, though we do not know how to. We read the details—the Jews by the mass grave waiting to be shot; the father comforting his son and pointing to the sky; the grandmother amusing the baby—and we are possessed by our own inadequacy, by a ridiculous desire to help, by pity which is unappeasable and useless. [Emphasis added]

This I think is the real power of reportage. It takes us out of the realm of pat answers, reminding us that there is far more to the world than is encompassed by our philosophy, no matter how refined. Facts are stubborn things, and when we are confronted with one that we can’t explain—and when we find ourselves unable to deny its reality—then comes the opportunity to understand the world more deeply.

Or not quite useless, perhaps. For at this level (so one would like to hope) reportage may change its readers, may educate their sympathies, may extend—in both directions—their ideas about what it is to be a human being, may limit their capacity for the inhuman. These gains have traditionally been claimed for imaginative literature. But since reportage, unlike literature, lifts the screen from reality, its lessons are—and ought to be—more telling; and since it reaches millions untouched by literature, it has an incalculably greater potential.

I like this final paragraph because I think Carey points to the only sphere in which significant change is possible, namely the human heart. More and more I return to this famous observation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

Another Russian, Leo Tolstoy, once lamented that “everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” And thus the world remains unchanged.

I want to know how people tick, that I might find ways to effectively adjust my own internal mechanisms. And so for awhile now I’ve spent my time studying the line Solzhenitsyn speaks of, sifting through accounts of how that line manifests itself in the lives of different people, treasuring especially the stories of how a select few have managed to shift the boundary within themselves.

The best of imaginative literature can certainly provide such accounts, but in the end those accounts are imagined, used by the writer to convey his own conclusions about the nature of reality. The advantage of solid reportage is that it provides us with the truth; the disadvantage is that, being unprocessed, we may not be able to grasp it.

News as an object of faith

The walls of the Kentucky Coffeetree Cafe are lined with shelves filled with high quality used books. One afternoon while Chris and I took a break between sets, I glanced at one shelf and saw a book called Eyewitness to History. It is a collection of excerpts from first person accounts written over the years, e.g. one fellow’s report of his dinner with Attila the Hun. The British title of the book was much better: The Faber Book of Reportage.

What caught my eye, though, was that the book was edited by John Carey, the fellow who wrote The Intellectuals and the Masses, a book I enjoyed and blogged about. Carey is very much a defender of mass culture against the disdain heaped upon it by the elite. His interest in reportage was partly spurred by this, since the explosion of news in the late nineteenth century was largely a phenomenon of mass culture, and one that was despised by those with more refined tastes. It all sounded promising, but since the Coffeetree copy was priced at $7.95 I cheaped out and ordered it through Better World Books, snagging an unread library hardback for just $4 including shipping.

I wasn’t surprised to find that the eight page introduction was more than worth the price of the book. You can read it at Google Books if you like, for free. In it, Carey points out that the news of the day is a very recent phenomenon, and represents a major change in how man views life.

Arguably the advent of mass communications represents the greatest change in human consciousness that has taken place in recorded history. The development, within a few decades, from a situation where most of the inhabitants of the globe would have no day-to-day knowledge of or curiosity about how most of the others were faring, to a situation where the ordinary person’s mental space is filled (and must be refilled daily or hourly, unless a feeling of disorientation is to ensue) with accurate reports about the doings of complete strangers, represents a revolution in mental activity which is incalculable in its effects.

To early-modern man the current situation would have been incomprehensible. Ben Jonson’s play The Staple of News (acted around 1626) turns on the self-evident absurdity of news-gathering as an activity. History has not supported Jonson’s judgment.

Carey then points out that the news has become such a fundamental part of our modern lives that we can barely imagine what people occupied themselves with before news came along. His answer is surprising.

It is hard for communication-age man to imagine what pre-communication-age man found to think about. But if we ask what took the place of reportage in the ages before it was made available to its millions of consumers, the likeliest answer seems to be religion.

Well, there’s a novel take on things! But Carey is not suggesting that before the news we all wandered around in a pious, godly haze, unconcerned with worldly things. Instead, he means that religion supplied at least three of man’s basic and pervasive needs.

Not, of course, that we should assume pre-communication-age man was deeply religious, in the main. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was not. But religion was the permanent backdrop to his existence, as reportage is for his modern counterpart. Reportage supplies modern man with a constant and reassuring sense of events going on beyond his immediate horizon (reassuring even, or particularly, when the events themselves are terrible, since they then contrast more comfortingly with the reader’s supposed safety). Reportage provides modern man, too, with a release from his trivial routines, and a habitual daily illusion of communication with a reality greater than himself. In all these ways religion suggests itself as the likeliest substitute pre-modern man could have found for reportage, at any rate in the West.

So, man needs to (1) know that reality is bigger than his immediate sphere of operations, (2) find relief from the mundane details of his own life, and (3) participate in matters of greater significance than his daily routine. The bigger, more important sphere of operations used to be heaven; now it is the world at large.

I found this idea helpful in understanding why modern Christianity has become so obsessed with worldly affairs, some to the point where they have decided that worldly affairs are exactly the business of heaven, and the proper work of a Christian is to bring governments and cultures into line with their reading of the Bible. Perhaps so. But this leaves unanswered the question of why God was content to leave his people puttering around aimlessly for so many years, only very recently giving them the go-ahead to get on with reconstructing the world.

Carey makes one other religion-related point, namely that both religion and reportage are profoundly focused on death.

When we view reportage as the natural successor to religion, it helps us to understand why it should be so profoundly taken up with the subject of death. Death, in its various forms of murder, massacre, accident, natural catastrophe, warfare, and so on, is the subject to which reportage naturally gravitates, and one difficulty in compiling an anthology of this kind is to stop it becoming just a string of slaughters. Religion has traditionally been mankind’s answer to death, allowing him to believe in various kinds of permanency which make his own extinction more tolerable, or even banish his fear of it altogether. The Christian belief in personal immortality is an obvious and extreme example of this. Reportage, taking religion’s place, endlessly feeds its reader with accounts of the deaths of other people, and therefore places him continually in the position of a survivor—one who has escaped the violent and terrible ends which, it graphically apprises him, others have come to. In this way reportage, like religion, gives the individual a comforting sense of his own immortality.

I think this is right, but I also think Carey’s reason for it stops too short. Looking at both the news and modern Christian thinking, the commonality is not just focused on mortality but actually covers the whole human condition, a cynical “There but for the grace of God go I …” sort of thinking. A central purpose of reportage is to reinforce our sense that we are better off than others in just about every way—smarter, richer, fatter, happier. And a central purpose of the modern Christian obsession with theological study is to reinforce our sense that we are closer to God than most, not just the heathens but also those who just don’t quite grasp doctrine and practice with the depth and subtlety that we’ve obtained for ourselves.

Carey has one other important thing to say about reportage, which I will cover in a later post.

Man of Constant Sorrow, by Ralph Stanley

Much to my surprise, this is a fine, fine book. Dr. Stanley decided to write it using his own dialect, a risky choice that adds significantly to the depth and warmth of the story. Ralph Stanley has remained a simple man all his life, even after the sudden fame that came to him at age 73 when the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released. He tells his story simply, without flinching at the harder truths he encountered, and the resulting book is the best single account of life as a musician in the early years of bluegrass music.

This book was a gift to me and Chris, from our students at the recent jam camp in Owensboro. As I was chatting with some of them about bluegrass history, I mentioned that it was probably a very important addition to the canon, but we didn’t know yet because we couldn’t afford a copy. One fellow was inspired to go next door to the Bluegrass Museum, buy a copy, and have it signed by the folks who had been in our coaching groups. They presented it to us just before we all went onstage at the festival for the jam campers performance. That obviously meant more to us than the most enthusiastic evaluation form ever could.

We’ve read it since, and it definitely deserves a spot on the shelf next to the Bill Monroe and Carter Family biographies. And being one of the only first person accounts of bluegrass history makes it especially valuable.

Knowing what we don’t know

Courtesy of Alan Jacobs, here is a terrific article by Errol Morris about a fundamental but largely ignored truth: there is a critical difference between knowing that you don’t know something and not knowing that you don’t know something.

Morris came across a paper with a wonderful title, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” It was written by two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger [emphasis added throughout]:

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

Morris contacted Dunning to ask him a few questions:

DAVID DUNNING:  Well, my specialty is decision-making.  How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life?  And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true.  And I became fascinated with that.  Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them.  Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS:  Why not?

DAVID DUNNING:  If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.

ERROL MORRIS: Many other areas?

DAVID DUNNING: If you look at our 1999 article, we measured skills where we had the right answers.  Grammar, logic.  And our test-subjects were all college students doing college student-type things.  Presumably, they also should know whether or not they’re getting the right answers.  And yet, we had these students who were doing badly in grammar, who didn’t know they were doing badly in grammar.  We believed that they should know they were doing badly, and when they didn’t, that really surprised us.

ERROL MORRIS:  The students that were unaware they were doing badly — in what sense?  Were they truly oblivious? Were they self-deceived?  Were they in denial?  How would you describe it?

DAVID DUNNING:  There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it.  But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

ERROL MORRIS:  Knowing what you don’t know?  Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?

DAVID DUNNING:  That’s absolutely right.  It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know.

At the risk of being pedantic, let me point out that at the end of the interview Dunning says two important things which he doesn’t distinguish very well. First, he points out that it is very difficult to know exactly where the gaps lie in your knowledge; put another way, it is difficult for us to keep track of which of our operating assumptions are grounded in knowledge and which are based on sheer guesswork, received wisdom, wishful thinking, and so on.

However, when Morris asks him if such an ability is the hallmark of an intelligent person, in agreeing Dunning actually puts forward a different hallmark: an awareness that there are gaps in your knowledge. It’s not enough to be good at keeping track of what you don’t know. You have to be humble enough to acknowledge that gaps are the default state, that what you actually know is vastly outweighed by what you don’t know. And you have to be vigilant about staying clear on what fits into which category.

I think this is more or less what Socrates meant when he said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing.” The statement by itself is misleading, but the context makes it clear. Since I’ve written about this before, I’ll resort to quoting myself:

Part of the accusation against Socrates was that he purported to be wise, and was misleading the youth of Athens and otherwise raising a ruckus via his wisdom. His response was that in fact he had no wisdom, and that the rumor that he considered himself wise was baseless.

He went on to trace the source of the rumor to a prophecy by the oracle at Delphi, who once proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest of all men. Socrates was astonished, knowing he had no wisdom, and alarmed, not wanting such a reputation. He figured the quickest way to disprove the prophecy was to find someone wiser than he was. The search for such a person didn’t go well, though; each time he found folks who had reputations for being wise—politicians, philosophers, poets, artisans—Socrates’ questioning of him revealed that in fact there was no wisdom there at all. (Which didn’t please the politicians, philosophers, poets, and artisans, turning them into enemies who floated calumnies against him, leading to his false reputation for wisdom.)

The puzzle remained: was the oracle correct? Giving the oracle the benefit of the doubt, Socrates finally understood the prophecy to mean that he was the wisest of men simply because he, unlike the rest, understood that he had no wisdom at all.

In saying that he has no wisdom at all, I think that Socrates is using excessive modesty as a rhetorical device; clearly he thought he had wisdom to share with others. But his wisdom is actual wisdom because he has done the hard work of identifying and junking the baseless assumptions that others pass off as wisdom, thereby making room for the truth.

I will often challenge my children to defend a claim they make, especially an offhanded one, not because the claim is false—it may be true—but because I don’t think they know it to be true. And even so I am not insisting that they speak the truth, but that they speak carefully. I want them to develop the awareness that Dunning speaks of, as well as the humility and consideration needed to keep silent when one has nothing useful to say.

Generalize, dehumanize, marginalize

I’m reading a very good short book by John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses. It touches on a subject that greatly interests me, namely which blessings are available to the average person, and which are not. Literature, for example—clearly not all of what passes as literature is going to be accessible to everyone, or even potentially accessible. Which leaves me wondering, are some joys just beyond the reach of most people, or do we make an important mistake when we assume that such things are joys?

I like a writer who is upfront about his intentions. Carey introduces his book as follows:

This book is about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture. It argues that modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth century educational reforms. The purpose of modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’.

Sometimes changing circumstances can shine a bright light into the dark recesses of our hearts. As long as access to “the best that has ever been thought or said” was limited by practicalities, intellectuals could view their special social status (and the lifestyle it required) as noblesse oblige. But once the public became literate, that status had to suddenly be defended; there’s not much special about a club that just anyone can join.

The end point of this attitude, of course, is the old Groucho Marx quip: “I refuse to join any club that will have me as a member!” Most of us are not so secure in our conviction that we are right and the rest of the world is wrong, so we like to have at least a few others in our club for reassurance (and for purposes of mutual admiration). But there must be a gate, and it must be manned vigilantly.

As an element in the reaction against mass values the intellectuals brought into being the theory of the avant-garde, according to which the mass is, in art and in literature, always wrong. What is truly meritorious in art is seen as the prerogative of a minority, the intellectuals, and the significance of this minority is reckoned to be directly proportionate to its ability to outrage and puzzle the mass. Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform.

What has surprised me in reading Carey’s book is how transparently contemptuous the intellectuals were of the newly educated public, what they referred to as the masses. Writers we all admire (or think we admire) wrote some pretty vile things about these folks. And Carey claims that it was made possible only by conjuring up a notion of “the masses” which had no basis in reality.

The ‘mass’ is, of course, a fiction. Its function, as a linguistic device, is to eliminate the human status of the majority of people—or, at any rate, to deprive them of those distinctive features that make users of the term, in their own esteem, superior.

Intellectuals aside, isn’t this a fairly accurate description of the rhetorical strategy of our age? We are quick to seize on any group characteristic that doesn’t include us, whether it be racism or environmental wackoism or climate change denialism or easy believism or fundamentalism or feminism or capitalism or socialism or partriachalism or egalitarianism or clericalism or individualism. We apply the name to ‘people’ who don’t actually have names or faces or histories, who we have no personal acquaintance with. And then we proceed to point out to those inside the gates how ridiculous these ‘people’ are, how absurd, how irrational, how lacking in character, how … inferior they are to us.

Carey makes a telling observation about the idea of the masses.

Its usage seems to have been originally neither cultural nor political but religious. St Augustine writes of a massa damnata or massa perditionis (condemned mass, mass of perdition), by which he means the whole human race, with the exception of those elect individuals whom God has inexplicably decided to save. Even in modern times, the belief that God is implicated in the condemnation of the mass lingers on among intellectuals […]

Outer darkness comes in many forms, and there is no small pleasure to be had in consigning others to it, since it reinforces the idea that God has very strict standards for choosing those He will love—and it’s sweet to have made the cut.

Lately I’ve been exploring the opposite attitude, namely that if it is something that separates me from a (potential) brother—and who isn’t a potential brother?—then it is adiaphora, neither mandated nor forbidden. I don’t want to deal with the difficult cases by dehumanizing them in order to consign them to outer darkness, I want to confront them in their rich, complex, confusing, mixed-bag humanity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote this:

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

It reminds me of a friend I had once, a very kind and sweet older woman who along with me attended the most liberal Episcopal church in Austin, the most liberal city in Texas. She was a dedicated parishioner, participating fully in the life of the church. At one retreat we both attended, somehow the conversation turned to overpopulation, and she told me that even though it was pretty tough-minded she could see the wisdom in China’s one-child policy. In that moment it was very, very important to me that we were sitting across a picnic table from one another, that I could see the thoughtfulness in her face, that I had a history with her and knew her to be kind and sweet and very serious about her faith—because it forced me to wrestle truthfully with the things in our thinking that separated us, rather than simply write her off as an abstraction.

Why I don’t write much

If you like to think about the acts of reading and writing, you really ought to follow the Text Patterns weblog by Alan Jacobs. He doesn’t write too often or at length, but over the past year I’ve benefited from reading this weblog more than any other; I’ve read several of the books Jacobs recommended, and started looking into things that wouldn’t have otherwise shown up on my radar screen.

Today he points to an excellent short essay on writing by Jed Perl, which considers the question of whether everything which is written ought to be read. First, Perl notes that the value of a piece of writing is not directly correlated with its success in some marketplace:

But the speed with which words, once written, are now being read … has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader. There is too much talk about the literary marketplace, the cultural marketplace, and the marketplace of ideas. We need to remember that a book—or a painting or a piece of music—begins as the product of an individual imagination, and can retain its power even when largely or even entirely ignored.

I can certainly vouch for this as a reader. If I were to list the fifty pieces of writing that have had the greatest impact on my thinking, forty of them would be works that are largely forgotten today, and some were never valued at all in the marketplace of ideas. No matter; the power of those works remains available to the few who are fortunate enough to encounter them.

Perl goes on to observe that when we assume that only what is read is valuable, we run the risk of sacrificing value for eyeballs, giving the reader what titillates rather than what edifies.

But writers who live for their readers—or for what their editors imagine their readers want—may end up with an impoverished relationship with those readers.

And when I can’t stand the thought of my words going unread, I face the even greater danger of inflicting half-baked thoughts on our readers. Why is this a danger? Because it risks reinforcing the assumption that readers read my words because they are my words, that what matters isn’t what I say in those words but just that they emerged from my pen phrased in my own special way, that the reader delights in me as a personality (scamp, curmudgeon, innocent, sage, iconoclast) rather than in the ideas I convey. Soon enough I won’t bother baking those thoughts at all, or even worrying whether they qualify as thoughts; any fodder will be sufficient, since it is the sausage machine of my style that provides the significance.

I’ve always been attracted by the thought of being a writer, but not so much by the thought of being a stylist—it didn’t come naturally to me, and I had other ways of scratching my itch to show off. Once I gave up on style, I discovered that all that remained to interest the reader was content—and valuable content was not only hard for me to come by, it was even harder fore me to put into readable shape. At that point I mostly gave up on being a writer.

But I never gave up on writing. What kept me at it was the growing realization that I couldn’t say with any confidence that I understood something if I was unable to convey it to someone else—essentially, putting an idea into words (or failing to do so) is an important test of its soundness. Moreover, putting an idea into words often requires that it be researched and reshaped, with the final product being different that the vague original—and often much less valuable.

Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. This is obviously true of forms such as the diary, which are inherently solitary. But even those of us who write for publication can conclude, once we have clarified certain thoughts, that these thoughts are not especially valuable, or are not entirely convincing, or perhaps are simply not thoughts we want to share with others, at least not now.

I am not someone who does the bulk of my thinking on paper. Usually by the time I sit down to write, the basic ideas have been turned over at length in my mind. But writing still serves as the final, cruelest test of my thinking. I use a few guidelines that will frequently force me to revise my thinking on a certain point, often encourage me to put a idea back in the oven for further baking, and sometimes lead me to abandon certain assumptions. One of those (which I am employing right here) is to always follow a general claim with at least one concrete example. Frequently I need to modify the claim in order to come up with such an example, and often enough I can’t come up with a convincing example at all; both occasions teach me something, and spare the reader a bit of nonsense.

For many of us who love the act of writing—even when we are writing against a deadline with an editor waiting for the copy—there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other reader. I believe that most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.

When I think about the writers I loved to read when I was in high school and college, I know what mattered most to me was the one-on-one relationship I felt I was developing with the writer’s thoughts. It was fantastic to feel I was alone with a writer, engaged in a splendid intellectual or imaginative conversation. (The wonder of reading Henry James’s late prose was in seeing his magnificent, disorderly thoughts achieve their infinitely complex order.) [Emphasis added]

I love this observation. I’ve spent enough time trying to think clearly about various topics to know that it is a precious and hard-won thing. And so I bond strongly with a writer who not only has done the hard work of thinking things through, but has gone on to the even harder work of putting those thoughts into readable form. Such writing not only reveals important things to me, it teaches me how to think through such things for myself.

I don’t publish here in order to put my thinking to the test. I am confident that I can read my own writing honestly and critically enough to judge its soundness. I publish in the hope that some will benefit from reading about what I’ve concluded, and that some others from seeing how I reached those conclusions.