Absolute versus relative well-being

Let's consider a key dimension that people differ on: wealth.

At any given level of wealth, people can compare themselves to richer people and feel dissatisfaction, or to poorer people and feel thankful.

People compare themselves to those who live nearby in the present much more than those who live far away or who lived long ago. Do American middle class people today appreciate that they are better off than the ordinary folks in the Third World? I doubt it's salient to them. The classic line for children of my generation encouraging them to clean their plates was, "Think of the starving children in India." But I do not believe it was notably successful at getting children to clean their plates or to feel fortunate, and it has been mentioned since then mainly as a joke. Americans mostly compare themselves to other Americans. I speculate that the relatively well off of the Third World are more thankful comparing themselves to those around them than dissatisfied that they are not so well off as those in the American middle class.

I suspect most people attend more to those richer than them rather than poorer. The advertising industry feeds off this and also reinforces it. Advertising is trying to get us to buy things, people who are richer buy more things, so buying more things will give us the appearance of being richer. Earning more money to buy those things would be making us in fact richer.

Evaluation relative to others living nearby is in line with what evolution might predict. We are geared to aspire to plausibly attainable improvement and to avoid dangers that have hurt people like us. If the band next door is catching more game than you are, it's well worth your while to study how they do it and try to duplicate it. They have less interest in studying you, unless you did something different that did not turn out well. Sacrifices to the gods that are too lavish might in fact leave your people hungry. In the environment we evolved in, there would have been limited awareness of those living long ago or far away, and limited relevance if they lived in a very different natural or social environment.

But if we step back and think things through, is relative comparison really a good idea? Is it perhaps more important to focus on what you have in absolute terms rather than how you compare to others?

One way of looking at our relative perspective is as the result of <cognitive biases>. The "framing effect" and "anchoring effect" come to mind. The basic idea is that people will evaluate a situation relative to the frame they perceive it in. A retailer sets a high list price for something, and then announces it is on sale. If the buyer accepts the retailer's list price as the frame, he will think he's getting a good deal compared to a retailer who simply sets the first one's sale price as their list price and doesn't have a sale. A discount for paying a bill in cash is acceptable, while a surcharge for paying by credit card is unpopular. Psychologists can confirm this in experiments by setting different frames for different people and comparing the results. People will feel better about paying a higher price if framed appropriately. Applying this to wealth, if due to some change in policies you get 10% richer but your neighbor gets 30% richer and you feel worse, we could call that the result of an irrational cognitive bias.

One simple way to get happier is to adopt as your frame of reference people who lived 200 years ago. You live longer, infant mortality is more like 1% than 40%, you have much better health, you have hot water and flush toilets, plenty of food and a wide variety year-round, clean streets and air, and a world of information and entertainment at your fingertips. By those absolute measures, today's working poor have it better than the nobility of two hundred years ago. But from a comparative viewpoint, the nobility of times gone by were content and today's working poor are not.

The absolute perspective can be used appropriately as a defense of capitalism -- even if the system creates vast wealth inequality, it is justified as the poor are so much better off too in absolute terms. Taken over the sweep of 200 years, I think this is accurate. Even Karl Marx recognized that capitalism created wealth and was an improvement on what came before. Still today, the prospect of getting very rich motivates people to create wealth. Without such incentives those creative people would not bother to work extremely hard and take the risks and create the wealth. However, it is also entirely compatible with 70% marginal income tax rates, 50% inheritance taxes, and 1% wealth taxes. Motivation of entrepreneurs doesn't require the prospect of keeping everything they earn, just a large portion of it. That (combined with consistent regulation to control externalities) is the best economic system we know of.

An absolute perspective suggests that there is no inherent benefit to making the rich poorer. Instead, it should emphasize what benefits we can get for ordinary people. Such benefits may require money. The only people with the money are the rich. But we should sympathize with them, as none of us likes to pay taxes -- the only justification is that we need the money to help out ordinary people.

Studies suggest that people's happiness depends on how they compare to others around them. It is unlikely we are going to change that in any major way. But I suggest it is due to cognitive biases, and a sensible and even preferable alternative when considering two futures is to prefer the one with better well-being in absolute rather than relative terms.

People might disagree. Even with cognitive biases controlled for, they might feel that relative wealth is what's important. You could ask them whether they would prefer the status quo to a future in which ordinary folks are 5% richer and the rich are 100% richer. Or one in which they are 5% poorer and the rich are 50% poorer. The answer would probably depend on exactly how the question is framed, requiring refinement over multiple experiments.

I am not at all suggesting that those choices (+5/+100 or -5/-50) are the actual alternatives available. I believe we can and should reduce wealth inequality and income inequality substantially, and the obvious mechanism is redistributive taxation and spending. Redistribution does not require a relative perspective. If you ask ordinary folks if they favor being 2% richer and the (far less numerous) rich being 20% poorer, they might well agree with that. The large majority of people are getting richer in absolute terms.

We might find that relative well-being is simply what we inherently value more than absolute well-being, not just the result of cognitive biases. Or we might find that different people have different values. Some people might find they prefer to adopt the absolute perspective.

Evolution and science

Note: This is the 7th and last post in a series. Start at the beginning and read "up":
http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2019/06/how-to-make-sense-of-it-all-theory-of.html

Daniel Kahneman, in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" describes two modes of thinking -- the fast, automatic, effortless kind, and the slow, halting kind that takes concentration and makes people tired.

It is the fast thinking that we share with other intelligent animals. The slow kind seems to be primarily if not exclusively a human invention. When we study in school, it is all about educating the slow-thinking side. One example is language. The spoken form is natural to all humans and learned by children without special instruction. It is part of fast thinking. Written language is an invention of the past few thousand years, and it does require special instruction and practice. Though to complicate matters, reading can become effortless and something we cannot turn off -- slow thinking turned to fast.

Starting in the 17th century, the slow-thinking sides of some gifted humans formed a community and launched the scientific worldview. It is all about answering "How?" instead of "Why?" Isaac Newton was a key figure. Some people scoffed at universal gravitation, thinking it ludicrous that things could affect each other without touching. His answer was that he had data and measurements on very different phenomena, and gravitation explained them all, and that trumped intuitive disbelief. He didn't know why gravity worked, but he knew how it worked. We still really have no idea why it exists.

That community of gifted humans in time grew to be today's impressive scientific establishment. Only a tiny fraction of humanity understands the intricacies of any particular point on the frontier of science, and perhaps it is only a small fraction that is gifted enough to understand it even if they decided to make it their life's goal. But the rest of us benefit from the discoveries and efforts of those tiny minorities. So we have jet planes, computers, and gene therapy.

Powerful telescopes tell us earth is a tiny speck in a sea of 250 billion other stars in our galaxy, and our galaxy is just one of 200 billion that we know of. At the other extreme, the microscopic scale, the world is just very strange, with particles popping in and out of existence and much happening based only on probabilities. Certain atomic-scale things cannot be measured without changing them.

At the intermediate scale, with regard to life, Darwin discovered and elaborated the theory of evolution by natural selection, and we know a great deal about how organisms work. Biochemistry has had a major role too.

Psychology is a case where slow thinking has come full circle to study the mind itself. It has discovered a great deal about how it works, including the instinctive, automatic fast thinking that is such a big part of who we are. A first approximation of how it differs from the clearer thinking of our slow thought processes is contained in a <list of cognitive biases>. And slow-thinking psychology has studied slow thinking itself.

However, our slow-thinking sides also have the ability to choose things that most people don't. We could choose to torture children, though thankfully hardly anyone does. We could choose to do things that are painful instead of pleasurable.

Someone could make it their life's goal to collect as many defunct microwave ovens as possible. They could make it their goal to chisel the letter "W" into as many rocks as their strength and longevity allowed. The range of what a few people will do in pursuit of their own private version of "art" is truly astonishing.

On the more positive side, we can choose to help strangers to the detriment of ourselves. We can value all humans equally without giving special preference to our nation, or our family. We can choose not to knowingly harm any animal.

Our slow-thinking side gives us the ability to defy generalizations science has made about how we will behave. But there is no objective reason anyone can give as to why those choices are preferable to the ones most people make. The closest we can come to making sense of life is to realize we are creatures shaped by evolution by natural selection.

This ends the series of posts on "the meaning of life".

(I wrote a blog post over ten years ago on how evolution explains why <happiness is transient>, which fits with this series of posts.)

Evolution and the arts

Evolution is on shaky ground in trying to say anything profound about music, dance, literature, theater, painting, sculpture and the like.

Most "primitive" cultures dance and sing and tell stories. One function of this may be to impress members of the opposite sex. Many other species have elaborate courtship displays. The exact form is essentially arbitrary, though they likely require physical attributes like strength, endurance, and fine motor control. By excelling at such a display, a potential mate shows good health and good genes. Dancing, singing and story-telling may serve that function among humans.

But why do we find some things beautiful and profound, others ugly or dull? Evolution shaped our cognitive machinery for adaptive purposes -- leaving more descendants. Scientists' best guess is that our sense of the beautiful and profound is a side effect of that cognitive machinery. It's a good guess that things most humans agree are beautiful or profound have those properties only through a human lens. Intelligent aliens arriving from another planet would be unlikely to find our arts very appealing since they would have evolved different nervous systems and cognitive abilities. One exception might be mathematical truths, as they are independent of the particulars of a given organism or environment. Prime numbers, golden ratios, and Fibonacci sequences might appeal to all intelligent beings.

Of course human culture is extraordinarily complex. Evolution can't come close to explaining anything but a tiny fraction of that complexity. But then -- neither can anything else. A belief in God certainly can't. It remains a mystery.

Evolution and religion

Humans have a strong tendency to believe in the supernatural. Some of what is "natural" is plain -- things that everyone can see, hear, or otherwise sense in essentially the same way. But beyond that, the distinction between natural and supernatural is very much a product of the accumulated wisdom of science. Universal gravitation is something we consider natural and real. But it is a form of spooky action at a distance, and not obviously more sensible than the idea that spirits live in trees and rocks.

We humans owe a lot of our success as a species to noticing relationships and regularities in the world and taking advantage of them. For instance, our band knows that root vegetables are a good source of food. Suppose we move to a new environment and find that the predominant root vegetable makes us sick. It is good if we suspect it too can be a good source of food if we can get past obstacles, and we experiment with different ways of cooking it or pounding it or treating it to see if any of them make the food edible. If certain prey animals show up in a certain place due to a particular combination of (say) season, recent rainfall, and the distribution of other predators, it is adaptive if we can detect that relationship. We are selected to try different things and keep doing the ones that work. However, this effort to find regularities is not highly developed -- we are not born with any refined intuitive sense of statistical significance, for instance. So we are also prone to finding false generalizations as well as true ones. The evolutionary approach would suggest that however imperfect we are at finding generalizations, the benefit of the true ones outweighs the downsides of the false ones.

"Primitive" humans trying to make sense out of the events of the world are dealing with not just other people but plants, animals, rocks, earth and sky. It is no surprise that they decide there are spirits in those things to try to explain what they otherwise cannot explain.

As for belief in one all-powerful God, this idea is appealing as a natural extension of childhood. As children we trust our parents to have everything figured out. If we explore the world as children and find confusion or danger, we can return to our parents and they will protect us. To a young child, parents seem all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. As adults our intellect may make us wonder about why we're alive and why we should follow society's rules. We may find ourselves overwhelmed trying to think everything through. A God who is very much as we viewed our parents is a comforting salve for a mind thinking things through too much. The idea of a reward for being good little boys and girls also fits in nicely with adults being good and doing what they think God wants them to do.

Along with religion comes the hope for an afterlife. This makes our mortality more bearable and is adaptive for that reason -- in some cases it may be a deterrent to suicide. As it happens, in successful religions a good afterlife is dependent on doing certain things -- almost always ones that in fact improve our fitness. It is a very unusual religion that discourages everyone from having any children, and we know what the fate of the Shakers was. No religion suggests cheating members of our own social group or neglecting children. Our brains may be wired to support belief in supernatural entities which enjoin us to do things which in fact increase our fitness in the natural world where we leave more or fewer descendants.

Evolution and morality

Objective morality may not exist, but morality does exist as a feature of human cultures and the human minds that underlie them. Scientists have documented reciprocity as a human universal that benefits everyone. Let's scratch each other's backs, but if you don't scratch mine after I've scratched yours, I'll notice and punish you for it. We humans aren't generally so good at solving logical puzzles, but if you find one that can be framed as a "cheating detection" problem, we're very good at it. Mutual aid helps us survive and reproduce, and refusing to aid others if they don't aid us keeps them from taking unfair advantage of us.

Humans are wired to identify with a group, belong to the group, and care passionately for its success independent of their own individual success. This started out as adaptive for the hunter-gatherer band, but has extended to larger units of organization as well. The ease and passion with which we modern humans can care deeply for the success of the local sports franchises shows how strong a tendency this is in us. It's not that people are willing to sacrifice all their personal interests for the group (think of the failure of collective agriculture most places it has been tried), but they will invest something in the group.

A popular position of moral philosophers is consequentialism or utilitarianism, whereby we should seek the greatest good for the greatest number. This would suggest that people in rich countries should give almost all of their resources to improving the lot of people in poor countries. But in fact, this very rarely happens. Humans tend not to share with people who are "other". Not many people give money to people far away. The nation-state is a very important unit of organization in today's world, and indeed Americans will often give to charities specific to America. But we're even more likely to give to our own community -- and most likely of all to save the bulk of what we have for our families. This suggests that morality as practiced by real people is more in line with evolution than abstract philosophical considerations.

Another prominent moral philosopher was Kant. His key insight was the categorical imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." I think one implication of that would be that in (say) 1980, when you could predict that the sum total of carbon emissions had a significant chance of making the earth a much worse place, each citizen of the earth would be obligated to reduce our carbon emissions to a level whereby we would have avoided this scenario. Obviously this didn't happen. It's hard to think of any cases where large numbers of people have followed this rule when it was counter to their own selfish interest. Once again, morality as actually practiced was shaped by evolution and is mostly impervious to philosophical argument.

Evolution, survival, and suicide

We humans are aware of certain things that other animals don't seem to be aware of. We know we will die. When we focus intently on that fact, we find it very unpleasant. Existential angst may not be adaptive, but thinking creatively about ways to postpone death has a clear adaptive purpose -- living for another day is another chance to reproduce or help your offspring to thrive. And while humans do sometimes commit suicide, it is rare. Existential angst is sufficiently controlled that most of us live as long as we can, even when suffering pain and despair. Why? There's no objective, logical reason, but it surely looks like an adaptive aspect of our minds molded by evolution. Genes that predisposed a significant portion of people to kill themselves would be selected against by evolution.

This is as good a time as any to counter objections along the lines of, "If we are molded by evolution, why do some people commit suicide? Why is there homosexuality? Why do some people kill their children?" Fundamental to evolution is the idea of variability -- different genes result in different consequences. This variability is a necessary condition for evolution to take place. If all members of a species were perfectly adapted to some environment and their genes were identical, then when the environment changes there would be no basis for adapting to the new one. The animal lineages that have survived have some variability, much of it not helpful for the current environment. As a result, at any given time there are traits that are not adaptive -- but they are present only in a very small part of the population. All the human genetic diseases fall in this category of variability. What they all have in common is that they are rare. Natural selection keeps trimming them back and keeping the frequency of the causal genes low. But if the environment changes, one of these genes that is now not adaptive may suddenly become adaptive, may dramatically increase in the gene pool, and help humanity adapt to this new environment. Suicide, homosexuality, and killing of children are all very rare, and as such are not arguments against evolution.

So we mostly work very hard to postpone death as long as possible. And yet there are exceptions to this -- ones that prove the rule. Women and men will both sometimes risk death in defense of their children. We all die and our genes survive only through our children, so sometimes it is more adaptive to die ourselves if we can save the lives of our children.

Men also have a willingness to band together into military units to fight other bands of men, with a significant risk of death. But in our environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA), defeating a neighboring band was often accompanied by stealing or raping their women, providing more opportunities to leave descendants, and this may have offset the risk of death. Even today, with men organized into armies instead of bands, the rape of conquered women is all too common.

One classic dystopian future involves the computers achieving sentience and then taking over the world and exterminating humanity. To me this seems incredibly unlikely, because there is no inherent reason why an artificial mind should want to preserve itself or replicate itself. From the very beginning, evolution has selected above all for survival and reproduction in organisms. As consciousness developed, those same pressures made the overriding goal of that consciousness to survive and leave descendants. Thinking that a sentient intelligence would naturally have those same goals seems to me like projection. Our minds care deeply about those things based on evolution, but no evolutionary process has operated on computer programs. We would have to program it to want to survive and replicate itself. We have to program it to "want" anything.

Evolution, care of the young, and sex versus reproduction

It's no surprise that we seek out sex and enjoy it. It's no surprise that women as female mammals are strongly motivated to care for their offspring. Unlike most mammals, humans have evolved so that adult males provide resources (originally this was mostly food) for the children they have fathered, so they also care about the welfare of those children and invest a great deal in them. That is exactly what evolution by natural selection would predict.

Our desire for our children to thrive, and our willingness to invest heavily in them is so commonplace that we may lose track of how it's not obvious. Even selfish people who treat those outside their families very poorly most often leave all their assets to their children. We don't say, "Oh, he wasn't selfish -- he left money to his children!" In our minds, leaving money to our children *is* a form of selfishness. Given that we are all mortal, this is exactly what evolution would predict. Even selfish people with considerable money rarely spend all they have on hedonistic pursuits in their later years, but instead think it is right to leave something to their kids. They will typically do this even when their children are estranged, or hate them, or have adopted values very different from the parents' own.

At the heart of evolution by natural selection is leaving many descendants, and where this starts is being the father or mother to many children. The advent of reliable contraception in the past 70-odd years has created a major divergence between current selection pressure and that operating at any time in the past. Evolution did not require us to actively want to have children. All it required was the desire to have sex. Sex naturally caused pregnancy and in turn babies were born. Evolution has shaped us so that once they are born, it is a very high priority to care for them. But evolution never made us say, "I would like to have children." I think all human societies understand that sex causes pregnancies, and people in earlier times may have had the idea that they had enough children already. But this competed with the immediate urgent desire to have sex, and also a male's insistence on having sex with his mate even if she didn't want to. These factors are still in play in the large parts of the world that do not have access to reliable contraception.

But where contraception (and as a fallback, abortion) is freely available, birth rates have plummeted. We can fulfill our urges to have sex without having children. Of course many people do want children, but they typically want just one or two. Evolution's goal is to have many children. While medical advances have cut child mortality dramatically, three is still a minimum for a population to replace itself where a significant number of people choose to have no children at all. Why do people not want lots of children? For those of us who are fairly well off, there are opportunity costs -- lots of fun things we could do with our time instead of raising children. Also, we care about the welfare of our children, and realize that our existing one or two children will thrive better if they do not have to share our limited resources with further children.

The resulting dynamic seems to be that people in rich countries do not replace their numbers, but their place is taken by immigrants from regions where reliable contraception is not available. When those immigrants take on the values of the rich societies and have access to contraception, then they do not replace themselves either. But there are always more immigrants to come in, creating perhaps a dynamic equilibrium.

If this state of affairs persisted for thousands of years, evolution would strongly favor genes that tend to make people want to have a lot of children, not just a lot of sex.

Evolution would favor genes predisposing men and women to be willing to pay large sums to be sperm donors and egg donors. The fact that no such donors today pay for the privilege, and that egg donors in particular need to be paid for their services shows that evolution has made us want sex, but did not make us want to have offspring.

How to make sense of it all? The theory of evolution

I've joked sometimes that if I needed to come up with an epitaph for my gravestone, it might be, "I don't know." Yet of course, "not knowing" isn't a very satisfying answer. I'm reminded of the line from Paul Simon's song, disapproving of a person constantly saying "I have no opinion about that" by reframing it as, "I have no opinion about me."

There's a great deal that we don't know.  "How did wings develop on animals?" or "Why are there so many galaxies and stars?" Science is working on those, but most of us don't lose sleep over them. The questions that we all seem to care about a lot more are, "Why are we here? What gives life meaning? What should I do with my life?"

I've argued that there is <no objective morality>.  I've argued that <there is no God>. I'm not sure I need to argue that there is no objective "meaning of life" in the absence of objective morality or God, as I can't see what candidates there would be.

The best answer to, "What should I do with my life?" is to pick something, decide that it's what's important, make it your own, and work for it. In the absence of objective morality, there is no argument to be made as to why any choice you make would be fundamentally, profoundly right or wrong.

Yet when we look at what humans pick and what guides their choices, there is a great deal they have in common. So I offer answers to questions that are slightly less profound than "What is the meaning of life?", namely: "Why are our minds the way they are? Why do we want some things and want to avoid others? Why do we think some things are important or moral or 'right living' and others are not?"

This will take a while. I've divided it up into seven separate posts.

The best framework I know of for making sense of our lives and the world is evolution by natural selection. This is the foundation of all of modern biology, and one of the best-supported scientific theories there is.

You can look up <Evolution> so I won't go over the basics. But one critical concept I want to raise is the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA). We humans (and our hominid ancestors) evolved over the course of millions of years in hunter-gatherer bands. Only in the past few thousand years have we lived in larger units of political and economic organization, initially triggered by agriculture. That is not very much time for natural selection to change our minds. We may sometimes have traits that were adaptive in the EEA but are not adaptive today.

Our bodies evolved countless unconscious processes -- regulating temperature, water content, eliminating waste through kidneys, healing wounds with scabs, on and on. All the "lower" life forms have their own versions of solutions to such problems, and often our solution is the same as organisms quite different from us. These are the focus of the field of biology, but I focus below on our conscious experiences, since those are what concern us.

We are mammals, and we share with other mammals a great many things. We mammals feel pain when our bodies are damaged, and this unpleasant sensation motivates us to avoid such situations. We avoid being too hot or too cold. We enjoy food, and it's no surprise that we are motivated to find enough. Even people who have been hungry for a long time never really adapt to that circumstance -- they always want enough to eat. That is of course entirely consistent with surviving.

The exact relationship between conscious experience and the physical world is an unanswered puzzle and one which many thinkers (and I) see absolutely no prospect of answering. But whatever the relationship, it makes sense that our conscious experience shares the same goals of survival with our physical bodies. We know conscious experience depends on a physical body, and if your consciousness is in control of your actions and has no interest in eating, the body will die and with it the consciousness.

Given climate change catastrophe, build monuments?

I made an <earlier post on climate change>. It centered on an essay by Jonathan Franzen. The main message was that climate change is already here, and we need to think about how to live with it as best we can rather than pretending that if we all band together we can keep it from happening.

Not long after, I received the <latest issue>  of MIT's "Technology Review", with the cover title "Welcome to Climate Change". A mainstream publication was taking the same view Franzen had.

Some of the articles looked at details rather than the big picture, such as a push in areas of Australia where wildfires are becoming increasingly common to build fireproof houses (mostly underground).

We learn that while India is investing in solar power, it's still going to use more and more coal. Nuclear power, one possible source of energy without a carbon cost, is on the wane in Korea and China.

But the most interesting, big-picture article was by Roy Scranton, titled "Learning to live in an apocalypse". He notes that all previous crises we have faced or imagined begin with an event -- pandemic, earthquake, meteor strike, nuclear war -- and then they end. But there is no event marking the beginning of the climate crisis. It's already here and getting worse. There's also no end in sight. This is not a crisis you get over and resolve and recover from. It goes on for hundreds of years at least. The best guess is a 12-degree-Celsius rise in temperature in less than 100 years. Scranton suggests it's entirely possible that this is inconsistent with large numbers of human beings surviving. I'm afraid that sounds entirely plausible. Yet my intuition is there will be at the very least little corners of the earth that will still be habitable. A thousand-fold decrease in the population would still leave 7 million people, enough to be the seed of a new more vibrant civilization in hundreds of years as the climate improves or we find ways to adapt. Perhaps that will come across as emphasizing that the glass is 1% full instead of 99% empty, but human extinction feels far more serious than an enormous population decline followed by a resurgence.

So, if you can get your mind around the reality of climate change, how should you think about the future?

Scranton writes, "Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing -- to live with radical hope." Even if it came to look like there was a 90% chance we would go extinct, that 10% chance of a future flourishing should be enough to motivate us to go on.

And to emphasize the continuing great uncertainty, in this same Tech Review issue a real climate scientist, Tapio Schneider, writes, "The single biggest contributor [to uncertainty in climate predictions] is uncertainty about clouds, and specifically about low clouds in the tropics. Low clouds over tropical oceans reflect sunlight because they are white, and this cools the earth. We don't know if we'll get more or fewer of them as it warms."

Then we can ask what political actions we can take. In my previous post, I relayed Franzen's belief that if climate change is already here, it's much harder to motivate reducing carbon emissions. When you could say, "If we all pull together we can keep the temperature rise below 2 degrees and avoid catastrophe", that had a certain appeal. If you say, "If we all pull together, we can take one degree off the expected rise in temperature, though we don't know if that means 6 degrees instead of 7 or 10 degrees instead of 11, but it will probably help make things not quite so bad as they would otherwise be." The old message was not motivating any sort of major change, and it seems likely the new one will motivate far less. It's great to limit carbon emissions when opportunities arise, but it's time to give up on that as a central political strategy.

I hope scientists think hard about novel approaches to head off the worst calamities or minimize their destructive effects. Having abandoned the push to reduce carbon emissions, climate activists' new focus should be on massive funding for research and pilot projects of mitigation. Tech Review describes scientists working on genetically engineering new strains of food crops that can thrive in hotter and more extreme conditions -- the mitigation potential is obvious.

As sea levels rise, there will be enormous political pressure to find a way to save coastal cities. We should oppose large expenditures to protect against a 5-foot rise in sea levels if we can look just a little further into the future and see a 20-foot rise. We should oppose shortsighted, short-term solutions.

But the fundamental problem is that it looks like our civilization is in for a major decline no matter what we do, when taking account of the enormity of the problem and the political realities. Mitigation is an attempt to slow our decline, but it seems likely that it cannot prevent a decline that could better be termed a collapse.

If we take this view seriously, it suggests a major change of perspective -- perhaps a shocking change.

I suggest we look back to the Roman empire -- more than a thousand years ago. Today we figure the empire was going to fall no matter what they did. But when ordinary people think of the Romans, we don't condemn them for not doing everything in their power to keep the empire from falling, and we don't condemn them for extreme income equality and the many practices we now consider barbaric. We get joy and inspiration thinking about their luxuries and achievements at the height of their power.

If the future turns out to be as bleak as it appears, posterity may view us all as living in a golden age, the pinnacle of human achievement and comfort that will be followed by a thousand years of hard times. This suggests two different things we might do.

First, the people a thousand years from now will be far more interested in how far we expand the horizon of progress than what we did (and mostly did not do) to stave off catastrophe, so let's keep on pushing those limits, just as we have been. Let's keep extending the human lifespan and curing rare diseases. For us liberals, goals include reducing income inequality and working to improve the lot of oppressed minorities. Let's keep those scientific discoveries coming so we know more and more about the nature of the universe.

At a personal level, we can choose to enjoy what our forebears created for us, even if we can see that it will likely end before long. There's no need to stay at home, eating locally grown potatoes, freezing in winter and baking in summer -- though few of us do that anyway.  Let's go right on using air conditioning, driving wherever and whenever we want, eating produce flown in from far away, and flying on jets to vacation or visit distant friends. Heck, we can do more of it.

This doesn't require much effort, since that is what ordinary people are doing right now. But it suggests that climate activists could relax and feel less guilty about mostly living a life of ease and going right on as if nothing is going to change.

The second thing we might do would be to put more effort today into pushing the limits of what we can accomplish. Build a pyramid to make Cheops look like an anthill. I've mostly thought the idea of a manned mission to Mars was a ridiculously expensive boondoggle. But if we think of our legacy as the far limits of human achievement in this golden age, why not?

A <Star Trek episode> explores what a civilization does when it realizes all life on its planet is going to end. They created a probe to go off into the stars and transmit to someone (Captain Pickard, naturally) the experience of one lifetime on their planet -- for some remnant of their civilization to survive. That technology is pure science fiction, but if our audience is humans on Earth emerging from primitive circumstances, it is more feasible: Let's engrave a summary of human knowledge and history in rock.

In search of analogies, a strong sports team vying for a championship may trade away future prospects for proven stars who can help them win right now. Someone in hospice can eat whatever they want, or use whatever addictive drugs they want, knowing their own time is almost finished. The future rests not with them but with their children.

It's premature to fully adopt this perspective. We can still all hope for more low clouds in the tropics rather than fewer. But it's time to realize that developments of the next 20 years might make this an approach to seriously consider. In 40 years it might clearly be the right thing to do. It's time to start thinking about it now.

The vast majority of people today will not accept the idea of coming catastrophe, perhaps by consciously denying it or more often by just figuring that the world won't change much and there are always doomsayers. Perhaps their attitudes will change if we do have to abandon coastal cities and significant portions of the world population start dying. Perhaps they will then be receptive to this plan of expensive space missions and monumental achievements if circumstances become dire enough.

Yet even an ordinary billionaire could finance inscriptions in rock.

I eat meat, but my choice makes me uncomfortable

There are many arguments against eating meat that don't move me. The possible downsides for my physical health don't concern me much, as I don't put much effort into my health. The increased carbon footprint involved in animal products is real, but it coexists with many other lifestyle choices that would have greater carbon impact.

So then it comes to the animals themselves. What's the baseline for a good animal life? I suggest that the relevant baseline for animal suffering is not humans, but wild animals. Animals in the wild routinely starve to death and suffer parasites and injuries. Just because we are responsible for farm animals coming into the world, that does not mean we have to choose our modern goal of minimal human suffering as the relevant comparison.

"Don't kill the poor animals" doesn't move me. All animals die, and the dying is often unpleasant. Animals do not fear death as people do (eternity of nothingness, etc.).

"They're meant to live free" doesn't move me. "Life of Pi" was a work of fiction, but I thought one point was correct in reality as well. Pi's family owned a zoo. His belief was that animals in a zoo that have enough to eat and are safe from harm are happy. (Sufficient living space is probably also required.) They wouldn't choose to be wild, doing the hard work of getting meals and avoiding becoming someone else's meal. The desire for them to live free and wild comes from us, not them.

So I would have no problem with eating meat from animals who lived reasonably happy lives. But almost all of our meat comes from factory farms, and arguably all of the animals in factory farms live a life of misery, even measured against the yardstick of wild animals. Confinement that distresses the animal is worrisome and seems to apply to many types of factory animal. There are allegations that chickens are bred to grow fast at the expense of their structural integrity, and so their short lives are spent in pain.

With the concern being the misery of animal lives, being a vegetarian who eats dairy and eggs doesn't get you off the hook. Dairy and egg production also involve animals in stressful, miserable circumstances.

So why am I not a vegan? Why do I not even seek out rare and expensive meat from happy animals? First, I cannot look you straight in the eye and give an answer that makes me feel confident. It is an uneasy choice for me. But below are some rationalizations and reasons.

I read a book several years ago which concerned food and human culture, but sadly I cannot remember the author or title. It started with the observation that all human societies have a "meat hunger", likely due to the concentrated calories and protein in animal-derived food. The author asserted that only half a percent of world population is vegan by choice, though many more are due to poverty. But numbers don't determine right and wrong. I could of course join that half a percent.

So, what would veganism accomplish? If I don't eat animal products, then I am not supporting the meat industry. With lower sales volume, meat producers will produce less meat. Fairly often a chicken that would have been raised in miserable conditions will not be born, and far less often a cow, steer or pig.

The fact that the scale of the industry is so large makes it easier to avoid thinking about consequences. If I was getting my meat from a local butcher, the relationship would be clearer -- if I don't buy this chicken, then a chicken that would be killed tomorrow in the back of the shop will not be. And the butcher will order one less chicken.

A reason for my refusing veganism that I am more comfortable with is that factory farming is integral to our entire society. The best way to fight against something integral to a society is political activism. A person could organize to end factory farming and not eat a vegan diet, and of course not all vegans are activists. If a ballot initiative improving the lot of animals in factory farms showed up, I'd vote for it (and I think there was one in Massachusetts in recent years).

But as a political issue, it is going nowhere. Nothing much has changed in recent decades in terms of the suffering of animals or people's attitude towards it. It seems that a large majority of my fellow humans know that animals suffer so they can eat meat, but they are not inspired to support even mandatory incremental improvements in animal living conditions that would raise the price of meat slightly.

I live in a society where meat and dairy are everywhere. They taste awfully good. They do have concentrated calories and protein. I could set myself apart from my fellows and become vegan, and ignore the tempting aromas and sight of tasty meat and cheese all around me But I don't.

Why does the average person not care about the suffering of animals in factory farming?

I wonder if the problem lies in expanding circles of "we". Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thought it was just fine to kill all the people in a neighboring band if they could get away with it. In the ancient world (say including 2000 BCE to 500 CE), slaughtering the entire population of a conquered city was routine. Surely they knew that the others were humans just like them and suffered just as much, but the golden rule didn't affect behavior. Up through World War II nations routinely cast the enemy as subhuman and troubled themselves little about slaughtering enemy civilians. Since then we have seen fair numbers of people considering themselves as citizens of the world as their first allegiance. Europeans stopped fighting and made a union. It sort of looks like rich countries don't wage all-out war on each other any more (though I am far from confident that this will continue indefinitely). The right-wing positions that horrify us liberals so much have to do not with killing disfavored minorities but with limiting immigration, which shows how far we've come since 1945.

But still, at least through 1945, lots of people knew that enemy civilians suffered just like they would suffer, but made it a low priority to avoid enemy civilian casualties. The US and Britain might have committed fewer "hands-on" atrocities in World War II than Japan or Germany, but the strategic bombing campaigns slaughtered a great many innocent civilians, and we knew it.

So now we are perhaps in sight of the point where we might follow the golden rule as it applies to all other humans, even those from very different societies and races -- at least the innocent ones.

But not animals. We know animals suffer, but somehow they're not part of "we". And of course even though they suffer, animals are dramatically different from humans, who are all exactly like us in the ways that count. Pet animals are part of "we" because we invite them into our lives with affection, and humans will put great effort into their health care.

Maybe in a hundred years our descendants will look back at us meat-eaters with the same disbelief we might have for a society of the ancient world that captured a city and slaughtered every last man, woman and child. I'm not taking the lead in bringing about that society, but I'm not proud of it.

I like most kinds of meat and dairy. Perhaps some animal foods involve less animal suffering. For instance, if veal calves are confined but ordinary beef cattle are not, that would be a reason to eat beef instead of veal. Perhaps with some research I could find reasons to choose among, say, chicken, pork, beef or dairy.

As someone who often just doesn't want to think about meals, I have become a fan of Soylent -- a mildly sweet liquid meal in a plastic bottle that goes down easy. Three bucks for a healthy meal. And Soylent is vegan. Maybe I'll start having more of it.

God does not exist

At this point in my life the nonexistence of God feels so obvious that I'm not inclined to give a detailed argument.

The paradigmatic "God" is an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being, though polytheistic religions have believed in a much wider variety of gods. Humans have a powerful urge to make sense of things, which has been adaptive for us in finding generalizations, outfoxing foes and prey, and ultimately leading to our impressive store of scientific knowledge. However, on many big questions there's not enough data to really make sense of things, so we make things up. That includes belief in spirits, gods, and ultimately, God. But science has explained a great many things that were before explainable only by God. Evolution by natural selection was an especially profound discovery. Our need to make sense of the big questions and long historical tradition leave many people still believing in God. But if we take the scientific perspective of hypotheses, predictions, and repeatable observations, no hint of an actual God is to be found.

I don't claim science understands everything. The most profound thing we know of that it does not understand is conscious experience -- why things have a "seemingness". There is no limit to what else might exist that we have no knowledge of. The Christian God might conceivably exist, but we have no evidence for it. Pascal's wager is useless, and here's why: for any imaginable God who will reward you for doing X and punish you for doing Y, there is an anti-God with the exact opposite preferences -- he will punish you for doing X and reward you for doing Y. If there is some God, we know absolutely nothing about him, which for practical purposes means he does not exist.

In a world with no inherent, objective meaning, we choose our framework for how to live a good life (often simply accepting what our family, friends and society believe). Choosing to believe in God is no worse a choice than any other. Studies suggest people who believe in God are happier and have improved measures of well-being. I suppose such a choice could be called faith. But the scientific method has given us tools for discovering a great many regularities in the world and dismissing ideas that are not supported by fact. Those who believe in God, if they are honest, should realize it is an arbitrary choice without support from the extremely impressive edifice of science.

And while believers may not want to focus on the arbitrariness of their choice, they should at least have humility, recognizing others have chosen different frameworks with no less support than theirs. In a pluralistic society, we have rules about tolerance for a wide variety of personal choices as long as they don't encroach on others' freedom. So what I ask of believers is that when they do affect the lives of others with different beliefs, via laws or their private behavior, they should have a secular justification. This obviously prohibits burning heretics or chopping off the heads of infidels, but it also argues against a state religion or discrimination against any group based on their private beliefs.

God does not actually exist. Choose to believe in him if you wish, just also have humility to understand that other good and reasonable people have made other choices, whether believing in some other conception of God or no God at all, which need to be respected.

Inner experience is a poor reason to believe in God

I have no doubt that in cultures with strong religious traditions, many people believe in God without the benefit of any inner mystical experience. They believe what people close to them who they trust believe.

Another reason to believe is an inner experience. Suddenly a person feels God's presence. Or they feel a connection to the entire universe. It seems to be a very common feature of the stories of saints. These people are moved by the inner experience to go beyond what those around them believe.

Today, in more liberal circles, many people are atheists and if we follow the lead of trusted people it is definitely a live option. Among UUs, I sense that very few people believe because they have read the Bible (or the holy book of some other religion) and agreed with it intellectually. The more common reason to believe in God is some inner experience. This could occur while daydreaming or on the margins of sleep. It could occur during meditation. It could occur while reading a holy book.

In a sense, everything we experience or think we know is a perception. But some perceptions are more reliable than others. One criterion of clear perceptions is that everyone in the same situation perceives the same thing. This is the foundation of science. This liquid is a certain color. Looking at a life form, a given person sees the same body shape and characteristics. People can sketch it or photograph it, and everyone else who looks at it sees the same thing. You look at the gauge of an instrument and if it reads 97.3, everyone else who looks also sees 97.3. In more recent times, what you observe is often the output of a computer program. Other people can independently write a program designed to do the same thing, give it the same input, and see the same output.

Mystical experiences do not have this uniformity. People experience different things. Some have vivid experiences of being abducted by aliens. Society recognizes an entire class of such inner experiences under the heading of hallucinations, most often associated with schizophrenia or dementia.

There are also perceptions where almost everyone experiences the same thing but independent measurements of the scientific sort reveal them to be incorrect. Optical illusions are a classic case. In the 1970s I knew of the Necker cube illusion, the Muller-Lyer illusion, and a few others. Searching today, I found this large collection on the web, composed mostly of illusions I had never seen before.

Beyond perceptions, there are also inferences and beliefs. If I have a bible, it is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. In it he lays out in detail the various ways that most people will think things that simply aren't true, with everyone tending to make the same mistakes. Mathematics, logic, and other observations of the repeatable, scientific kind give us in contrast the right answer. Wikipedia has an impressive (or depressing, perhaps) list of cognitive biases.

So even if everyone had the same mystical experiences, it would not be good evidence of the existence of God.

Inner experiences are very interesting in their own right. We live our lives in our own heads, and the part that reads scientific gauges, changes diapers, buys low and sells high, and generally gets things done is only one part. Various schools of meditation do achieve interesting inner experience that those who have not trained in their technique don't have. It's just that it all goes on within a single head. Or when information travels between heads it does so by through the mundane modalities of speech and writing.

An omnipotent God surely could give us experiences of the sort that scientific observation is based on. He could inscribe some particular message on prominent surfaces throughout the world. He could make us all hear the same message in our heads. We would independently write it down and discover that we all heard the same thing at the same time. We are so used to the fact that God never does this that we can lose track of how he surely could. One explanation for why he doesn't do this is that it doesn't suit his purposes. The simpler explanation is that he doesn't exist.

Some theists have argued that there is a God-shaped hole in each of us. To the extent this is true, the simpler explanation is that it is a "belief-in-God shaped hole". It could join the list of cognitive biases.

Mystical experiences are far from universal. They have a great deal of variability. It is hard to draw any clear distinction between them and hallucinations or alien-abduction experiences. Our inner experience is unreliable in a great many ways documented by science, typically in ways that are the same across people. Inner mystical experience is a poor reason to believe in God.

There is no objective morality

This post was never posted to the FUUSN list. Unless otherwise specified, from now on all posts to this blog are appearing here for the first time.

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That's right, there is no objective morality. People have strong feelings and convictions that some things are moral and some are immoral. Such feelings tend to run in the same direction within a given society. Some such feelings may be universal to members of the human species. Scientists and philosophers can study such beliefs and find patterns. But to be objective, a morality isn't just a description of people's moral beliefs. It is a firm belief on a firm foundation that certain actions really are right and some are wrong, independent of social customs and human nature.

In March of 2007, I wrote in my blog, "But I do have a faith, and a hope. My faith is that a basic belief like "killing is wrong" is true and that killing really is wrong and not just some convention or fluke of my human nature. Like many who have a more ambitious faith, mine sometimes wavers." But by 2012 my faith had vanished. When I read this article by Joel Marks, it felt exactly right to me:

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/confessions-of-an-ex-moralist

This was someone else who had reached the same conclusions I had but could express them far more eloquently. He was also arguably a master of the field he was rejecting -- a professor of moral philosophy. I have no such credentials.

In the debate between theists and atheists, theists will commonly argue that without God there can be no morality -- no right or wrong, and anything is permissible. Atheists disagree strongly, and Joel Marks refers us to the book Louise Antony edited, "Philosophers Without Gods" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/970578.Philosophers_Without_Gods). She asserts that "Every writer in this volume adamantly affirms the objectivity of right and wrong." I read the book but their arguments in favor of objective morality aren't there and must be somewhere else.

Perhaps one factor is that in an attempt to convince theists that morality can exist without religion, atheists can quietly maintain faith in "ought", since theists' belief in God is also based on faith. In arguing with the amoralist, atheists who believe in objective morality need to defend their faith in something different from everything else that exists. I have heard this described as the "argument from queerness". Objective morality would be a queer thing.

I agree with Marks that there really is no need to panic:

"One interesting discovery has been that there are fewer practical differences between moralism and amoralism than might have been expected. It seems to me that what could broadly be called desire has been the moving force of humanity, no matter how we might have window-dressed it with moral talk. By desire I do not mean sexual craving, or even only selfish wanting. I use the term generally to refer to whatever motivates us, which ranges from selfishness to altruism and everything in between and at right angles. Mother Theresa was acting as much from desire as was the Marquis de Sade. But the sort of desire that now concerns me most is what we would want if we were absolutely convinced that there is no such thing as moral right and wrong. I think the most likely answer is: pretty much the same as what we want now. "

We can go on teaching our children about right and wrong. We can continue to refer to morality in talking with other people. It's just that it's not an objective morality.

Marks also refers to Richard Garner's book "Beyond Morality", where he sets forth the amoralist position in detail. Garner notes that philosophers have been earnestly debating moral questions for millenia, but nothing is ever resolved. On practical questions such as abortion, capital punishment, or animal suffering, it really looks as if people already have their conclusion in mind and marshal moral arguments to support it, rather than the other way around. Garner suggests we would do better if we simply describe what we like and don't like about the different options, appealing to others who we hope will be persuaded to the extent they like and dislike the same things we do.

If you dig deep, seeking to find the ultimate truth of right and wrong -- as I think some intelligent young people commonly do -- you will find nothing. You will find no objective basis of morality. But if you give up that search, life goes on as before. We all have our goals, desires, and sense of right and wrong, and we will keep arguing with each other about them, striving to do what is right as we see it because that is what we desire.

Review of "White Fragility", part 2

I sent part 1 of this review to the FUUSN list, but I did not send this second part. It appears here for the first time.

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In an earlier post I gave my initial reactions to Dr. Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” focusing on my strong objections to that two-word phrase if the goal is to actually improve the position of people of color in society in large.

This leaves another question. How should people run a racial sensitivity workshop?

DiAngelo puts at the center of her workshops a strong version of how whites are part of a profoundly unfair racist system and have an obligation to change that system. I think this is unwise. There will be a few people who are ready to join the vanguard, and all they need to tip them over the edge is the understanding of their place in an unfair system and how much is at stake. The vanguard might think this is a good strategy, since quite possibly it’s exactly that strategy that made them join the cause. But the vast majority of people will not easily accept that they have unearned advantages. Compare, “It is very hard to get someone to understanding something when their salary depends on their not understanding it.” Roughly half of white people think it is they who are discriminated against today, not minorities. It’s an erroneous belief, but if DiAngelo insists on challenging it directly, they will likely not listen to anything else she has to say – this is what Jonathan Haidt would predict. Even those who don’t think they are discriminated against are likely to resist the idea that they have unearned advantages.

How would I run a racial sensitivity workshop in a work setting? Here’s an initial idea: make a video of a number of workplace interactions, followed by a smiling person of color for each gently explaining why that wasn’t so great from their point of view. Or show whites taking polite feedback gracefully, perhaps describing some minor shame and embarrassment but how they worked through it. Specific problems, specific solutions. No need to dump “You are a racist” on people like a ton of bricks. Don’t goad the elephant (the one Haidt argues is inside each of us). Whites are more likely to be receptive to seeing how a specific sort of behavior is problematic without confronting their beliefs about overall racism in society.

The subtitle of DiAngelo’s book is “Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”. She never answers that question – I feel like I’ve made a better start than she does just by referring to Haidt’s work. But she does have a vision for how anti-racism work might proceed in general. I might summarize the overall vision as, “I as a white person have the original sin of racism, and only with the help of the wisdom of people of color will I be able to learn of the full extent of my sin and begin, ever so slowly, if my devotion is constant and my heart is pure, to start reducing that sin.” Those religious overtones are not stated explicitly, but the gist is clear. This may work well for the anti-racist vanguard, but it is a very poor fit for average whites.

On pages 139-140, DiAngelo relays her own experience of anti-racism work, with the understanding that she has already worked on this quite a bit and we are seeing an advanced perspective. If we agree that the goal is to try to get ordinary white people to work to reduce racism, I find it alarming. Here is a lengthy verbatim quote:

“The equity team has been invited to a meeting with the company's new web developer. The team consists of two women, both of whom are black, and me. The new web developer, who is also black, wants to interview us so that she can build our page. She starts the meeting by giving us a survey to fill out. Many questions on the survey inquire about our intended audience, methods, goals, and objectives. I find the questions tedious and feel irritated by them. Pushing the survey aside, I try to explain verbally. I tell the web developer that we go out into the satellite offices to facilitate antiracism training. I add that the training is not always well received; in fact, one member of our team was told not to come back. I make a joke: "The white people were scared by Deborah's hair" (Deborah is black and has long locked braids). The meeting ends and we move on.

A few days later, one of my team members lets me know that the web developer -- who I will call Angela -- was offended by my hair comment. While I wasn't paying attention at the time, once I was informed, I quickly realize why that comment was off. I seek out a friend who is white and has a solid understanding of cross-racial dynamics. We discuss my feelings (embarrassment, shame, guilt) and then she helps me identify the various ways my racism was revealed in that interaction. After this processing, I feel ready to repair the relationship. I ask Angela to meet with me, and she accepts.

I open by asking Angela, "Would you be willing to grant me the opportunity to repair the racism I perpetrated towards you in that meeting?" When she agrees, I continue. "I realize that my comment about Deborah's hair was inappropriate."

Angela nods and explains that she did not know me and did not want to be joking about black women's hair (a sensitive issue for many black women) with a white woman whom she did not have a trusting relationship with, much less in a professional work meeting.

I apologize and ask her if I have missed anything else problematic in the meeting.

"Yes," she replies. "That survey? I wrote that survey. And I have spent my life justifying my intelligence to white people."

My chest constricts as I immediately realize the impact of my glib dismissal of the survey. I acknowledge this impact and apologize.

She accepts my apology. I ask Angela if there is anything else that needs to be said or heard so that we may move forward.

She replies that yes, there is. "The next time you do something like this, would you like feedback publicly or privately?" she asks.

I answer that given my role as an educator, I would appreciate receiving the feedback publicly as it is important for white people to see that I am also engaged in a lifelong process of learning and growth. And I could model for other white people how to receive feedback openly and without defensiveness.

She tells me that although these dynamics occur daily between white people and people of color, my willingness to repair doesn't, and that she appreciates this. We move on.”

That ends the long quote from DiAngelo.

One extraordinary aspect of this exposition is that she accepts Angela’s accusation of racism regarding the survey without question – and even with ample time to select her example for her book, she doesn’t question it or see that what she presents as racism is, as best I can tell, not. I’m open to hearing arguments as to why I’m wrong about this.

DiAngelo is presented with a survey that she assumes was written by some white person. She reacts dismissively to it. That is not ideal collegial behavior, but it is not racism. When Angela later tells her that she wrote that survey and has spent her career justifying her intelligence to white people, DiAngelo’s chest constricts -- and her critical thinking stops. It is fine to sympathize with Angela’s past history of people doubting her intelligence – but how does this connect to present-day racism by DiAngelo? What we have is DiAngelo’s race-blind negative reaction to a survey which as it turns out was written by Angela. Angela’s job as a professional is to find out why DiAngelo had a negative reaction to the survey and see if it can be improved. She’s under no obligation to take her suggestions, but Angela doesn’t even want to hear about it -- she wants implicit permission to be a second-rate web developer. She wants explicit permission to publicly criticize DiAngelo for allegedly racist behavior, with the assumption she must naturally be right, and in a spirit of religious contrition, DiAngelo agrees.

I am happy to accept Angela’s original complaint about DiAngelo’s making a joke about some black woman’s hair. But here’s my idea for how the conversation might go, without the religious overtones:

"Hey, Angela, you know I try to do better on racism stuff, and I think maybe I screwed up the other day. You got time to talk about it? Up to you..."

"Oh, yeah... OK, I got time."

"When I talked about Deborah's hair... my team member said you weren't so happy about that, and I can kind of see why. Did I get that right from her?"

"Yeah, I didn't like it because I don't know you, and we didn’t have a relationship of trust."

"OK. You do realize I was most definitely disapproving of that white woman's reaction to Deborah's hair?"

"Yeah... yeah, I do. But even so..."

"OK, I understand that didn’t make it OK... I'll try to do better. I apologize."

That involves checking assumptions that DiAngelo’s version does not. It doesn’t assume Angela is right about everything just because she’s black. While it’s reasonable to assume the person of color is more likely to be right when racism is being discussed, why not approach it as two people of good will finding what works for them? Does it really serve a useful purpose for DiAngelo and her similarly advanced-in-antiracism colleague to decide what is (reverent hush here...) Racism and then set out to “repair” it? Crucially, I doubt very much the average white person is willing to take that approach.

One lesson a white person in DiAngelo’s position might learn from the Deborah’s hair issue is to never make jokes in the presence of people of color. Don’t say anything spontaneous... monitor your every word. That’s not ultimately good either. Maybe people of color differ in how sensitive they are on various issues, and what trade-off they would like to make between a more spontaneous atmosphere with some slights as background noise and a more tense and militant atmosphere where everything is held up to scrutiny. Maybe in different work groups the people of color would converge on different preferences.

Review of "White Fragility", part 1

I sent this to the FUUSN list on March 16, 2019

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I was told that “White Fragility” was FUUSN’s book of the season. I read it. These are some of my reactions.

My conclusion is that the program suggested by this book, while well-intentioned, will serve if anything to worsen the situation of people of color in US society at large. Average white people will not take on the original sin of racism as their own and work hard to reduce it. It goes against everything we know about human psychology.

 And yet lots of people have thought “White Fragility” was a good book. Why? My best guess is that they are already convinced of the deep injustice of racism and the need for white people to humbly repent, learn, and atone. They can take pleasure in condemning the whites who have not instantly accepted this message and conclusion. “White Fragility” – both the concept and the book – may fuel an exhilarating righteous indignation in those who are already convinced, but progress depends not on how zealous the minority is, but on convincing more people. The fact that so many people accept the book uncritically is due to taking too narrow a view – staying within a liberal/left bubble. But to be clear, my assumption is that everyone at FUUSN approaches this with the very best of intentions.

I know I have some subtle racism, and suspect there is more I am not aware of. I do believe that our society has many ingrained patterns that serve to make the lives of people of color more difficult. Dismantling those patterns would be a good thing. Give me a proposal on reducing police brutality, mandatory minimums, differential sentencing, voter suppression, or affirmative action, and I’m instantly on the anti-racist side. But I don’t choose to put much more effort into it than that.

Many liberal whites, notably UU whites, are deeply concerned about racism. They feel personally complicit in racial injustice, and seek to reduce their own racism as much as possible. This is noble. Perhaps it has inherent value regardless of how it fits into the bigger picture. And the idea makes sense – start with what you can control, set an example for others, and be in the front row of a vanguard against racism. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But in this case it is a misleading analogy. This model does not scale up.

The strategy of the book (and the anti-racism activism movement of which it is a part) is to point out how painful racial injustice is for people of color, to show how very unfair the system is, and to trust that will motivate white people to dig deep and do some rather painful things – after all, it’s nothing compared to the pain of the people of color. It won’t work, because only a minority of any group will readily admit to self-interest and unearned privilege and set out to get less for themselves, and whites are no exception.

Jonathan Haidt, starting with “The Righteous Mind”, observed that the US is full of people of good will who disagree fundamentally on politics but rarely change their beliefs. He began looking at what it actually takes to get people to change. He describes two ways of thinking – the automatic, instant, judgmental kind he calls the elephant, and the slow, halting, tiring kind that tries to use facts and logic the way a scientist would – the rider. But the rider is not actually in charge – the elephant is. The elephant has no inherent use for facts, figures and logical arguments – in fact it will often instruct the rider to select whatever facts support pre-existing beliefs. (Daniel Kahneman’s lifetime of work is the firm scientific foundation for Haidt’s views on the rider and elephant.)

Dr. DiAngelo has a career that includes running anti-racism workshops, often sponsored by corporations that want to hire and retain more people of color. It sounds like she starts these workshops by presenting the facts of racism, arguing that all of us whites are complicit in a racist system, and if we have any moral decency we must do hard and painful work to dismantle that system.

She observes that quite often in her workshops, a few white people will object, arguing that they are not personally racist. She corrects them -- they are part of a racist system. They will sometimes get emotional or storm out of the meeting. DiAngelo derisively refers to their reaction as White Fragility. The term itself is an insult. If you doubt this, imagine comparable titles that someone who disagrees might use for their book.

This participant reaction is an instance of exactly what Haidt and others would predict any time you challenge someone’s central beliefs. Imagine that your boss has his own issue he is passionate about and mandates that you attend a workshop. Global warming? You must never fly, use air conditioning, or eat meat, or else you are an earth-destroyer. Wealth inequality? You must give 3/4 of your (ultimately) ill-gotten assets to those in the Third World who need it so much more, or you are unspeakably selfish. Would anyone be surprised if some employees reacted with tears or hostility? Even advocates on those issues would understand it was unwise to call the reaction “fragility” if they actually want to change minds.

I will make some guesses at the range of reactions of other people in DiAngelo’s workshops. Surely a few people will have the desired reaction, accepting the facts and getting with the program. A great many others will realize they are sitting with their co-workers and will do what they think the boss expects them to do. Perhaps some people in those groups will learn to be more sensitive in their day-to-day interactions with people of color they work with. And yet – DiAngelo has told them they are racists because they are part of a racist system, getting good things they do not deserve, and their elephants will silently resent that. You can guess it might fortify underlying conscious racist tendencies, or erode sympathy for policy issues like reducing sentencing disparities. Those who display visible fragility might well just be the relatively harmless, somewhat naïve tip of the iceberg that DiAngelo’s approach reinforces.

Dr. DiAngelo is also in a quagmire of her own making by overloading the term “racism”. She concedes that this term can be used to refer to conscious and explicit acts and beliefs of racial superiority -- this is the most obvious and natural interpretation. However, she wants to use the term to refer to the whole set of unconscious relationships and attitudes that serve to make life difficult for people of color. She then looks on with disgust at the poor, fragile whites who resist being called racists. She could use a different term -- on a few moments’ thought I’ll coin “deck-stacking”. But overloading “racist” isn’t an accident. That same emotionally charged word “racism” is used intentionally, to emphasize how unjust it is. She doesn’t want to let whites off the hook by using another term – she wants them to feel an obligation to change. There is to be no wiggle room here. She tells us that whiteness can’t be innocent, that its existence is intricately tied up with opposition to blackness. Race is THE biggest issue. She tells us that if we don’t reach out and seek to have black friends, we are racist. There really is no escaping the conclusion that in her view, once you have been informed about racial oppression, if you do not actively work to combat it, then you are a bad person. You have been given not just facts, but values and priorities as well. It’s a bit as if she wants to climb right into your brain. Most people don’t like that. They like to choose their own values and priorities.

I know I do, and DiAngelo’s formulation angers me. How could she present her case in a way I would receive more calmly? People of color suffer from oppression, and much of what keeps it in place is deck-stacking against them. We whites are all part of this deck-stacking, through no fault of our own. If you have some energy to go beyond your own life to make the world a better place, you might consider looking at some of your assumptions, listening to some people of color, finding out how the world seems to them, maybe finding ways to object when racist assumptions are voiced. That’s better. But Dr. DiAngelo also has to be prepared to react gracefully if I say, “No, thanks.” Maybe other causes move me more. Maybe I’m just struggling to get by in life from one day to the next.

There is a whole spectrum of white attitudes towards people of color. In one survey I read about, white liberals felt race was more of an obstacle to having a successful life than black people did. Some will engage earnestly in personal anti-racism work. They are enthusiastic about DiAngelo’s book. On the same end of the spectrum but somewhat towards the center are people like me who think of it as one cause among many but are in favor of all of the progressive legislative priorities. In the middle are those with a mix of feelings but featuring elephants that do not accept the idea that they live life with undeserved advantages.

But then there is the other end of the spectrum. Along with all the micro-aggressions against people of color are some macro-aggressions, such as police brutality and harsher sentences in the criminal justice system. Somehow when I imagine the policemen, judges, and legislators who are behind those injustices finding out what slight offenses their fellow whites committed to earn the diagnosis “White Fragility”, I don’t imagine them behaving better.

I have no objection to DiAngelo and her co-facilitators meeting alone after a session and letting off steam -- how damned fragile those whites were! People let off steam privately all the time. But to write a book about it – to put it in the title of the book no less, is very different. Maybe it sells books. Maybe it energizes a small band of anti-racist zealots. But it doesn’t help the cause.

To me the more interesting frame of reference is ... What does it take to make progress on this issue? Since I don’t believe the anti-racist zealots hope to seize power and impose their views on the majority through force, I assume they share my assumption that it involves winning the hearts and minds of a lot of people in the center.

So exactly who is DiAngelo taking aim at with “White Fragility”? Not White Supremacists. Not those with more moderate but still consciously held racist views. Not even those who keep their feelings to themselves while they try to figure out what their employer wants them to do. She’s taking aim at those who sincerely believe that they are not personally racists, and some who deny that systemic racism exists. They are engaging seriously with the arguments they have been given – far more than most people. Given time to reflect, some of these people could be won over to at least favor the legislative priorities. DiAngelo slams them.

Haidt’s work suggests it would be quite extraordinary if significant numbers of such people changed their views at all, no matter what facts you present them with. But DiAngelo thinks her facts are so obviously true, the associated value judgments so indisputable, that anything short of immediately accepting those facts is to be scorned and labeled “White Fragility”. The generous view is that she is simply ignorant of the relevant psychological findings of Haidt, Kahneman and others.

DiAngelo is attacking moderates – some of the very first people along the spectrum of opinion she needs to convince. Is there a countervailing advantage here to the use of “White Fragility”? Do we have testimonials of converts that go, “I was struggling to take in the facts on racism I was being presented with, but then when I heard that I had “White Fragility” it all made sense – I was being racist to even question it -- of course the facts were true and I needed to just believe them and accept that race was the most important issue society faces.” It doesn’t seem likely.

Some people further along the continuum of race relations will notice this use of White Fragility. It will harden their beliefs that the anti-racist elite liberals are out of touch and view them as not just opponents but people worthy of contempt. To the elephant, Donald Trump will continue to sound pretty good, whatever his other drawbacks.

It would be great if people responded without ego or narrow self-interest to new facts, evaluated them, and changed their ways based on a commitment to equal justice for all. But very few people do. If you want to actually change people’s beliefs, you have to meet them where they are, establish shared values, and take it one step at a time. It’s a long, slow road. One shared value might be a better deal for working people regardless of race. Cooperate on an improved social safety net, a modest guaranteed income, a greatly expanded earned income credit, infrastructure spending, and tax the wealthy to pay for it. Working side-by-side to improve each other’s economic position in absolute terms would build trust. It might be the start of a lasting coalition modeled on the New Deal consensus that started in the 1930s.

“Unstacking the deck” against people of color is very hard work. I have sympathy for the activists feeling exasperation and lashing out with “White Fragility”, but it is terrible politics.