Irreconcilable Differences

You may be acquainted with Matrix I -- the movie that brilliantly concretized an abstraction which, until then, philosophy professors had had for centuries to explain with mere words: the genuine possibility, a metaphysical inevitability for each of us (though some deny it), that the world we perceive is wholly illusory.

In Matrix I, the real world is a desolate, ravaged place. The sun is history -- it's been extinguished. Apart from a motley band of rebels, most people spend their entire lives in "pods," immobile. The evil aliens who control the world sustain them only to draw nourishment from the kind of battery charge that the human life current provides.

The aliens understand that the human animal cannot subsist without some sense of society and purpose. So they provide it -- the sense, that is -- via a plug physically inserted into the brain of each pod's inhabitant. Through these plugs, the humans' brains are all connected to a central computer.

From that point, of course, the mechanism of illusion is straightforward. You're no doubt aware that all brain activity is electrical, including the signals from the five physical senses on which all our perceptions of the material world are based. The aliens simply do essentially the same thing you do in your morning shower when you pull the thingie to switch the water from the bath faucet to the shower head. They divert the brain's connections from the five senses to the false sensory signals generated by the computer. Thus is wrought a completely synthetic reality.

The humans have no way to know it, but the truth, as one character informs another, is that "you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind." (Script here.)

How this works as an allegory for our actual condition in this "information age" of ours hardly bears mentioning. You know it already. Funny man Jon Stewart is suddenly everyone's darling because he merely alluded to our condition on CNN's Crossfire last month. There was no need to spell it out:

JON STEWART: I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad.

(LAUGHTER)

PAUL BEGALA: We have noticed.

STEWART: And I wanted to -- I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't -- it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America.

(LAUGHTER)

TUCKER CARLSON: But in its defense...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: So I wanted to come here today and say...

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys.

CARLSON: Yes.

STEWART: Stop.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

BEGALA: OK. Now

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: And come work for us, because we, as the people...

CARLSON: How do you pay?

STEWART: The people -- not well.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: Better than CNN, I'm sure.

STEWART: But you can sleep at night.

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns.

[Excerpted from transcript of Oct. 15 Crossfire.]

I've been constructing my very important and logically airtight arguments for urielw.com about the failures of public debate, about delusion, about cultural pollution and the imminent end of everything.

This guy Stewart just has to say "Stop hurting America." Everyone knew.

The phrase itself has swept America and is now part of our lexicon. (Google it and see for yourself.)

But the problem is deeper and darker than the news media's false portrayal of the world. The reality is bleaker even than the sunless Matrix world. It's something that renders polemics pointless, something that should shut us all up.

The Matrix's slaves, after all, enjoy an unhampered ability to communicate with each other, just like in the (apparent) world outside the movie theatre. How this works is that the Matrix computer not only generates the inputs to each person's brain, but also receives the brain's outputs -- for example, a person's neural commands to his legs, arms and vocal chords. And the computer then generates everyone's subsequent brain inputs accordingly.

So when a person "says" something, he "hears" himself say it. And everyone around him also hears it. Everyone hears the same thing.

The point is, there is a single and unique simulated world for everybody.

That's why the Matrix allegory is really too cheerful. There are no "separate realities"! Even Bush and Kerry supporters hear the same thing.

In our real world, by contrast, we are divided into innumerable reality blocs. We might call them opinion blocs. And the information boundaries between these blocs are impregnable.

Allow me to expose myself here, for the public interest. Taking myself as an example, it's practically inconceivable that anything would lead me to change my mind about an opinion I've already developed.

And I assure you I'm exceptionally open-minded.

You, dear reader, are the same way. If you got an opinion, it ain't gonna change.

So. This certainly raises uncomfortable questions about what we're doing here. And about communication in general.

Besides the opinions I already hold, my general opinions are often applicable to a brand new issue I've never heard of before. So I'm quite capable of having an inflexible opinion instantly when an issue arises for the first time.

My own particular opinion bloc, since we're on the subject, has an estimated size which I confess is not especially large. As I've become more realistic about the world's separate realities, it's begun to dawn on me that its population may not significantly exceed one.

Which, certainly, does not make overturning my views any less unthinkable.

I'm not talking about an inability to recognize error. Everyone makes mistakes, and virtually any ass knows he's no exception. I am talking about the inflexibility of developed opinions -- the same inflexibility you yourself share (though most people enjoy the validation of a more populous bloc).

I sometimes look back on things I wrote some time ago -- for example, my September 1, 2002 letter to my diplomacy school students, or the one from the year before (just before 9/11) to my Tsinghua students -- and I think, this is just so right. It's wondrous how the passage of time has left my conviction totally undiminished.

That 2002 letter, for example, says that "the most potent threat to freedom, democracy and other fundamental American values" is

unbridled corporate power and the way it corrupts politics, news reporting, and (via the entertainment media) the culture at large. This worsening problem is probably best appreciated and most often criticized by commentators within the U.S. itself, but it seems only radical solutions could address the problem, and none is under serious consideration.

Isn't that just too true? No radical reform is on the agenda. No reform under discussion could credibly address our polity's core problems. Our news is manipulated. Our democracy is on its way to being extinguished, like the Matrix's sun. And nothing is being done. ("Stop hurting America," though touching, won't work.)

But I understand these feelings of mine cannot breach the confines of my private opinion bloc.

This disconnectedness between people's opinions is of course a national obsession right now, as millions ponder how their fellow citizens could have re-elected a president they perceive as plainly dishonest and dangerous.

Communication, as we know, is fundamental to society. We must establish the wiring, we must link up our pods. And some blocs are talking about it. But has news of the issue surfaced within the dominant blocs?

The potentially interesting topic of whistle-blowing drew me for a second visit last night to the Toronto Debating Society. Whistle-blowing, fundamentally, is about exposing truth -- but some personal exchanges I had with participants after the debate illustrate our culture's delusion problem.

One person, a mother in her 40's, told me how she'd been a "whistle-blower" herself. She'd become aware of some kind of fraud taking place in a corporation she'd begun working for shortly before. She'd been pressured to sign some documents and felt personally implicated. And, she told me with evident emotion, she'd spoken up -- presented the facts to senior officers of the corporation -- and had subsequently been threatened and intimidated. She'd then decided not to be involved any longer, and had tendered her resignation.

"Was the crime stopped?" I asked her.

"Uhhhh .... I really can't say for sure."

That, dear readers, is not whistle-blowing. It is self-delusion. The lady has transformed what appears to be one of the significant experiences of her lifetime -- from the truth, that she caved in, into a memory of an act of courage.

Remarkably, a second participant whom I spoke with at the same event exhibited exactly the same kind of self-delusion. In his case the "whistle-blower" was his father. That man had become outraged upon discovering that a major American corporation's prospective business operations in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), operations he'd supported in his capacity as a lawyer, were grossly exploitative. His "whistle-blowing" consisted of getting drunk and loudly denouncing the lot of them at an executive meeting -- an act which got him fired on the spot.

The person telling me the story was proud of his father for what he'd done. He wanted to tell me, however, that his father himself considered the act questionable because he'd violated the ethical obligation of client confidentiality. So, his point was, the rightness of whistle-blowing was sometimes difficult to assess.

That case isn't difficult at all, I said. It's easy.

"Well, I don't want to discuss it," he said. The point, he maintained, is that whistle-blowing is not a "panacea."

This same person was later kindly urging me to join the society, and I confided what it is that limits my enjoyment of the club's activity. His response there too is telling.

My problem with "debating" is that typically you're arguing a position that does not reflect your own beliefs. It's just a game. That's fine if you like that sort of thing, but personally I don't get much of a kick out of promoting some arbitrary position that I don't believe in. My sincere beliefs already meet with enough disagreement. I hardly need to pursue additional, artificial arguments.

But the man was against the idea of debates in which participants would debate their actual beliefs. Why? He said the problem would be that people would get carried away by their emotions, and that in consequence their arguments would be irrational.

Well. Doesn't that just say it all?

How could our differences be anything but irreconcilable when we can't discuss them rationally?

The man's spontaneous remark contains a great truth.

How widespread is this phenomenon? How many of us can't or won't frankly face the truth? 50%? 80%? How does the incidence of this disease vary across cultures? Is it more or less pronounced in ours?

And ... how about yourself?

Our disconnectedness turns out not to be absolute.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was going to vote, April 19, on President Bush's nomination of John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. The panel's 10 Republicans were expected to unanimously support the nomination, a move that would have sent the nomination to the Senate floor.

But then communication happened.

In the course of a two-hour meeting of committee members in which two Democratic senators spoke against Bolton, one of the Republican senators listened ... and heard. He then "stunned" his colleagues, according to the New York Times, by changing his mind about supporting Bolton without further review.

The Times reports the reaction to this singular event by another Republican on the panel who had also had misgivings about Bolton:

The second Republican ... did not make his views known at the hearing, but told reporters later that he was glad that the vote had been postponed.

"I don't know if I've ever seen, in a setting like this, a senator changing his mind as a result of what other senators said," [he] said. "The process worked. It's kind of refreshing."

["Senate Panel Postpones Vote on U.N. Nominee," New York Times, April 20, 2005.]

Guest New York Times columnist Matt Miller offers some thoughts today which strike me as thoroughly persuasive:

Speaking just between us - between one who writes columns and those who read them - I've had this nagging question about the whole enterprise we're engaged in.

Is persuasion dead? Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?

Marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.

[Edited excerpt from Is Persuasion Dead?, New York Times, June 4, 2005.]

I wrote in a quite similar vein last November (though I proferred "blocs" rather than "cocoons"):

Our reality is bleaker even than the one portrayed in the movie, The Matrix. It's something that renders polemics pointless, something that should shut us all up.

The characters in Matrix, after all, enjoy an unhampered ability to communicate with each other. There is a single and unique simulated world for everybody.

That's why the Matrix allegory is really too cheerful. There are no "separate realities"! Even Bush and Kerry supporters hear the same thing.

In our real world, by contrast, we are divided into innumerable reality blocs. We might call them opinion blocs. And the information boundaries between these blocs are impregnable.

Allow me to expose myself here, for the public interest. Taking myself as an example, it's practically inconceivable that anything would lead me to change my mind about an opinion I've already developed.

And I assure you I'm exceptionally open-minded.

You, dear reader, are the same way. If you got an opinion, it ain't gonna change.

So. This certainly raises uncomfortable questions about what we're doing here. And about communication in general.

[Edited excerpt from Irreconcilable Differences.]

The only point on which I'm obliged to regretfully part ways from Mr. Miller is when he supplements his observation that there is no communication with the suggestion that it makes no difference anyways. Just as I did (in making a different point), he offers himself as an example:

The embarrassing truth is that we earnest chin-strokers often get it wrong anyway. Take me. I hadn't thought much about Iraq before I read Ken Pollack's book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," a platonic ideal of careful analysis meant to persuade. It worked. I was persuaded! So what should we conclude when a talent like Pollack can convince us - and then the whole thing turns out to be based on a premise (W.M.D.) that is false?

If serious efforts to get it right can lead to tragic errors, why care about a culture of persuasion at all? On one level, everyone needs a good rationalization at the core of his professional life; mine holds that the struggle to think things through, even when we fail, is redeeming.

Miller poses the questions -- "what should we conclude," "why care about a culture of persuasion at all?" -- but, strangely, offers no better reason for working towards communication than this meagre, "even when we fail, [it's] redeeming."

Miller then conjures the conclusion: "if you believe that meeting our collective challenges requires greater collective understanding, we've got to persuade [politicians and mass media outlets] to try."

Let me fill in the answers Miller seems to have in mind, though he leaves them implicit: Of course communication and public debate are beneficial. Not just because the struggle is "redeeming" (whatever that means). And notwithstanding the fact that they sometimes lead to wrong conclusions. Generally speaking, rational public debate -- could we only achieve such a thing -- would improve our level of insight, the quality of our decisions, and thus our ability to achieve shared goals. Can any of this be doubted? The alternative would be to abandon the idea of self-government and consign ourselves to whatever fate brings us.

Miller offers no prescriptions for improving communication and insight. I offer two:

• University programs should be instituted with sufficient government financing to attract bright students in large numbers to public policy analysis as a viable professional career. It would be desirable to have 1% of the workforce engaged full-time. A rational electorate is an investment that would pay for itself. (Elaboration at my Easy Answers to World Priorities.)

• Recognize that improving communication requires not only incentives for insight, but deterrents against the widespread practice of distorting public debate through lies. (Mistaken War also discusses the Iraqi WMD issue and proposes that some people should be charged with treason for using false premises to promote war.)

Today's New York Times delivers a one-two punch to thoughts of communication amongst humans:

Scientists Bow to Irreconcilability

When the Kansas State Board of Education decided to hold hearings this spring on what the state's schoolchildren should be taught about evolution, Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and an ardent advocate of the teaching of evolution, was invited to testify. But he declined. And he was not alone. Mainstream scientists, even those who have long urged researchers to speak with a louder voice in public debates, stayed away from Kansas.

In general, they offered two reasons for the decision: that the outcome of the hearings was a foregone conclusion, and that participating in them would only strengthen the idea in some minds that there was a serious debate in science about the power of the theory of evolution.

"We on the science side of things strong-armed the Kansas hearings because we realized this was not a scientific exchange, it was a political show trial," said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, which promotes the teaching of evolution. "We are never going to solve it by throwing science at it."

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large organization of researchers and teachers, and the publisher of the journal Science, also declined to participate.

"If the evidence for modern Darwinian theory is so overwhelming, they should have called the bluff on the other side and come and made their arguments," said John West, a political scientist and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a research organization that supports work challenging the theory of evolution. "They should have put up or shut up."

"The majority of biologists obviously support Darwinian evolution in its full-fledged view," he said. "The question is, are there legitimate, peer-reviewed criticisms? If there are, students should know about them."

In theory, this position - "teach the controversy" - is one any scientist should support. But mainstream scientists say alternatives to evolution have repeatedly failed the tests of science, and the criticisms have been answered again and again. For scientists, there is no controversy.

Scientists who stayed away say they did the right thing. Declining to testify "can be made to look as if you do not want to defend science in public, or you are too afraid to face the intelligent design people in public," Dr. Miller said.

But, he said, taking part in this kind of argument only contributes to the idea that there is something worth arguing about, and "I wasn't interested in playing a role in that."

Dr. Scott said that until recently she believed scientists should seize opportunities to debate the opponents of evolution. "I was one of the holdouts, saying yes, appear with these guys, yes, tell them what is wrong with their ideas, go to their conferences, treat them like scholars," she said.

Like other scientists, she said that if someone identified a flaw in evolutionary theory that could not be dealt with, science would have to modify the theory or even scrap it. But the criticisms raised have fallen in the face of scientific scrutiny, she and others say, yet opponents of evolution raise them again and again.

So a few years ago, she said, "even I threw in the towel."

[Edited excerpt from "Opting Out in the Debate on Evolution," New York Times, June 21, 2005.]

The Genetic Dike

On the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

The report appears in the current issue of The American Political Science Review, the profession's premier journal.

The idea that certain social issues produce immediate unthinking reactions comes through in other political research as well. In several recent studies, Dr. Milton Lodge of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has shown that certain names and political concepts - "taxes" or "Clinton," for example - produce almost instantaneous positive or negative reactions.

These intensely charged political reflexes are shaped partly by inheritance, Dr. Lodge said.

It may be the clash of visceral, genetically primed social orientations that gives political debate its current malice and fire, the study suggests.

Although the two broad genetic types, more conservative and more progressive, may find some common ground on specific issues, they represent fundamental differences that go deeper than many people assume, the new research suggests.

"When people talk about the political debate becoming increasingly ugly, they often blame talk radio or the people doing the debating, but they've got it backward," said Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University, one of the three political scientists who authored the new report. "These genetically predisposed ideologies are polarized, and that's what makes the debate so nasty.

"You see it in people's eyes when they talk politics. You can hear it their voices. After about the third response, we all start sounding like talk radio on some issues."

The researchers are not optimistic about the future of bipartisan cooperation or national unity. Because men and women tend to seek mates with a similar ideology, they say, the two gene pools are becoming, if anything, more concentrated, not less.

[Edited excerpt from "Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes," New York Times, June 21, 2005.]

Related:

• Delusion Carries Bush (Nov. 3, 2004)

• Karl Rove's America, by Paul Krugman (July 15, 2005)

• Some comments from readers when Irreconcilable Differences appeared at blogcritics.org led me (on May 2, 2005) to add an addendum there.