How Not to Worry

I think we can all agree that worrying makes very little rational sense. Helpfulness-wise. Rarely is worrying helpful. And I full-heartedly agree with what my friend called the best career advice he read this year: put your headphones in, stare at your computer, and assume that everyone loves you until you are fired, or retire. (The Book of Mormon put it another way.)

But the truth is that demanding of yourself a stiff upper lip, when it comes to unhelpful emotions like worrying, doesn't really work. It is pretty clear to me that merely being made aware of something sensible and a verifiable fact does very little in the way of changing my behaviour. Only a crude understanding of human thought could posit that a life strategy's helpfulness as I see it carries much weight with the complex and mysterious brain-machine that is responsible for what I eventually say and do.

So if a stiff upper lip doesn't work, what does? The boring answer is analysis: many sad and lonely days slowly debugging the black box intricacies of your mysterious brain-machine.

The reason why analysis is more likely to work is because worrying is not necessarily irrational. The brain-machine has its logic, if one that gives more weight to survival than to your minute-by-minute psychological comfort. To change the outcome (worry), one must begin by assuming that the logic of worrying is valid, and then ask why.

Suppose the machine works thus. You worry about not being good enough (most common secret worry of everyone I've ever worked with). The internal structure of this worry, implicitly or explicitly, probably goes something like this: if I underperform, then I am worthless; if I am worthless, then I have no claim to other people's love and tender care which are absolutely necessary to my continual & thriving existence (because in my model of how the world works, people don't hand over their regard unless under duress from the awe instilled in them by evidence of my measurably superior intellect; and in this model I also identify entirely with my intellect, because evidently what else is there to human beings). So if I have no claim to TLC, then I am left to contemplate a combination loneliness and self-loathing in the dreary company of Netflix and nothing else. Sneer all you want at the plainly untrue, or certainly very questionable, claims in that sequence: if that is your model of how the world works, then the worry is entirely valid.

And faulty models of how the world works are no joke. Because these are not explicit, coherent, logical constructs. They are implicit, embodied, wordless intuitions built upon instinct and tradition, and half-forgotten childhood experiences, and the infinite stream of subversive media messages beamed at your subcortical systems every moment of your waking life. So, for the most part, you are not privy to the mechanics of how these world models come about. You are only privy to the result (the worry) and the dim but inescapable conviction that this worry is in fact plausible.

And not only plausible, but urgent. If fear of failure is connected by rigid conviction to a fear of rejection, then no amount of stiff-upper-lipping is going to suppress worrying. Rejection is no joke. It's not absurd to think that there might be some evolutionary logic for the emotion of rejection to be wired together with the prospect of actual, imminent and probably unpleasant death. Remember that scene in Gravity with the Hubble Space Telescope when Sandra Bullock's character is out on a spacewalk and there is a sudden wave of high-speed debris from a nearby satellite explosion and the space shuttle is destroyed and her attachment gear is wrenched off and she is catapulted into space? I submit that that's not entirely unlike what rejection can feel like: like being sent adrift into the deadly darkness of interstellar space, alone.

So rather than taking the tough-guy attitude that worrying is for women and weaklings, as a popular folk story from back home used to say, it might be more effective to engage with the worry (or - insert unhelpful emotion of your choosing) and debug it properly.

The skill of analysis and self-awareness is pretty much indispensable for an undespairing adult existence. And yet I'm sure it sounds trite and boring on paper, even if in practice I've seen it elude many a clever and educated people. It still eludes me, in the trenches of day-to-day existence, all the time.

Unconditional Positive Regard

In the real world people worry about status. They polish their highlight reels. They secret away their Impostor Syndrome. They try to play it cool. They judge and expect to be judged. They cleave the world into good and bad and winners and losers. In the real world, people understandably stick with being tough and tough-minded.

But there is another world, call it Neverland. That world which your tough-minded striver dismisses as naive, childish, impractical, and a festering ground for hippies and anarchists (you know, people without ambition, quote-unquote). I venture to submit that perhaps this other world might have some insights to offer.

You can read about it lots of places. I was reading On Becoming a Person ("a therapist's view of psychotherapy"), by the famous twentieth century American psychoanalyst Carl Rogers and I was very glad for it. Like Impro by Keith Johnstone before it, or Men, Women and Worthiness by Brene Brown; like Book of Life by Alain de Botton; like Great Thinkers by School of Life; like War and Peace by Tolstoy and The Notebook by Agota Kristof; like Steppenwolf and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; like Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut; and like one of my favourite books of all time, L'Etranger by Camus. Like all these books and others, and this lady speaking at Google, On Becoming a Person filled me with this joy. A joy simple and steady and tranquil, like a warm summer's day in feeling format. This was Neverland.

What was this joy, this sense of something meaningful and important, this tranquility of mind, so unlike the tough-mindedness of the real world? I kept going back and forth.

In the real world, I worry about everything all the time. Have I done a good enough job? Have I upheld my values? Have I successfully avoided disappointing the people I care about? etc.

But back in Neverland, those worries lapse. Here, Dr Rogers speaks to me with soothing reassurance thus: In my relationships with persons, I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that I am not; I find I am more effective when I can listen acceptantly to myself, and can be myself [because] the curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I change. His approach to relationships is humbling. It's a reminder of how much more empathy I could bring to my own, of how I could be judging less, accepting more, and trying harder to understand rather than dictate, to help rather than demand.

Dr Rogers reminds me of the virtue of giving (provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth) and acceptance (a warm regard for [the other] as a person of unconditional self-worth - of value no matter what his condition, his behaviour, or his feelings; (...) a respect and liking for him as a separate person, a willingness for him to posses his own feelings in his own way; (...) an acceptance of and regard for his attitudes of the moment, no matter how negative or positive, no matter how much they may contradict other attitudes he has held in the past; and acceptance of each fluctuating aspect of this other person; (...) a continuing desire to understand).

Why these virtues? Because, he continues, it is only as I understand the feelings and thoughts which seem so horrible to you, or so weak, or so sentimental, or so bizarre - it is only as I see them as you seem; and accept them and you, that you feel really free to explore all the hidden nooks and frightening crannies of your inner and often buried experience. And as with you, so with myself.

This unconditional positive regards is what Neverland has that the real world doesn't.

I have a Virginia-Woolf-type archetypal memory that helps me return to this feeling of unconditional positive regard. It is December, a few days before Christmas. It is cold. The day is almost over. I am walking through Covent Garden and everywhere there are people: people doing their Christmas shopping, people drinking in the pub, people talking, people walking, people everywhere doing their myriad people things. And I reach the plaza at Seven Dials, whence seven roads stretch outwards like the seven spokes of a cart wheel. And still more people can be seen sauntering underneath the Christmas lights, underneath the decorations, sauntering underneath the crests and mountains of the darkening winter clouds. The seven roads are sprawling like wide riverbeds through the tall canyon of buildings. And soundtrack to all this is Girl from the North Country, in a version by Bob Dylan, and it's a melancholy song. But melancholy and uplifting, and light with the sort of calm composure that one feels when one has accepted one's yearning as definitely unending and as the normal condition of one's life. It is just the right soundtrack. And right there is that joy, that melancholy and uplifting joy akin to reverence, expansive and suffused with awe, at life's tremendous capacity for suffering and still more tremendous capacity for growth. It's a joy as if of standing before the Project of Being, so much bigger than oneself, or one's mission, bigger even than the ambitions of one's species as a whole. For a moment, I feel free from the tragedy of unyielding tradeoffs, finite resources and finite lives of intolerable vulnerability. And from that perspective, Neverland's unconditional positive regard truly does feel like the only sensible attitude to existence.

Why I Read (Even the News) & How to Tell a Good from a Bad Story

Order makes me happy. I can spend a day organising papers. I organise drawers, too, and my calendar and the nuggets of wisdom from books I read. Order is my peace of mind. Order soothes me with the promise that the world makes sense. At least, once you think hard enough.

Order makes you happy, too. Hence this craze for material design and meditation and minimalism. And white space. Because without order there is chaos. And confusion and, worse of all, chance. All scary stuff. If I may grow lyrical for a moment, if you squint, life in all its forms is one long struggle for order, against a melancholy universe of noise and entropy and chance. We are sense-seeking machines. We seek to build a world of order, where things are clear, coherent, predictable - and therefore fair and safe. Order is safe.

Hence why I read. Intelligent thought is an organising principle. Comprehension turns this disheveled reality into a well-structured story inside of which the world makes sense. Smart people are like focusing lenses. They can take the bewilderment of Brexit, with its multitudes of strangers thinking things stranger still, and turn it into the neat thesis of the "left behind". So panic over. Here, we feel certain, confident and calm. Out there, anguish.

This is not to say, with postmodernism, that everything is a deception. Some of these stories are objectively truer than others. This is to say that intelligent thought makes me happy. Even in small doses. Here are just 313 words of dim unease sublimated into a block of rhythmic prose that you can share on Facebook. A good story makes the world intelligible. And bearable.

Hence why I read, even the news.

The news is annoying because it is essentially a slot machine. It even looks like a slot machine, all flashing headlines and that. It's a gamble. You hit refresh and maybe win a bit of better understanding. Or something funny about a cat. Mostly, you win nothing, he-said she-said blather from pundits and analysts who sound more and more like they might fail a Turing test.

To be fair to the news, its job got harder. Here is some history. News used to be about concrete if weird things happening to people nearby. Stuff you could understand. These days, concrete events have been replaced by patterns, analysis, underlying issues, explanation, charts and everything else needed to make sense of a complex world. The time of stories has expanded to include past (context), change over time (trend) and future (forecasting). Individuals have been replaced by representatives, experts, commentators and spokespeople. In the 1890s, you might have read a story about Miss Emilia Taylor from 224 Evelyn Gardens. Now, she will just be an English teacher in London (i.e. nationality, profession, region). Also, back then, the farther it was from where you lived, the less it was news. Now, you have to keep up with everything everywhere. Well, you don't. People who buy and sell stock across continents have to. It was for these people that news agencies like Reuters were set up, rather than the likes of you, with your boring individual existence and lack of a portfolio. All that came later, when someone invented rubrics, meaning a way of sorting readers into consumer groups. Still, self-ascribed members of the elite have always liked to have opinions about everything. I am thinking of Stepan Arkadyevitch from Anna Karenina: "for him, living in a certain society - owing to the need.. for some mental activity - to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat".

But having views is indispensable not just because I move in a "certain society". Views are indispensable because they keep me sane. A good story is an ordered interpretation of reality. It is desk tidy for the brain. I would run out of room to breathe, for all the facts and data, without stories to assemble them into stable, comprehensive wholes. Great stories turn a pile of information into a single thought. One you can remember and hold in working memory and reason about without feeling faint. The thesis of the "left behind". Nationalism vs Globalism. The gig economy. And the better the story, the bigger the bucket. Good stories, like good explanations, have reach.

There is science to back this up. Cognitive science calls this assembling of information into coherent wholes chunking. To handle large quantities of information, we pack them into higher-order abstractions. Turning the key to start the engine, checking incoming traffic, putting the car into drive, steering and changing gear becomes "driving". Millions of people, with their sense of selves and habits and love affairs and daily struggle to make it to 50 without shooting themselves, become "Germans" or "generation X" or "digital natives" or whatever. Chunking is the hallmark of expertise. Chess grandmasters have chunked individual chess pieces into valid configurations, the way we all chunk letters into words (the chess "vocabulary" is much bigger). So we need chunking. We need these stories to make sense of the world.

The trick, of course, is finding the good ones. This is why I like brands. Daniel Kahneman says this: the basic test of skill is persistent achievement. What a brand does is advertise skill. And because its achievement is persistent, a brand helps you find important repositories of skill reliably. Great brands are great. I love The Economist, Book of Life and Steven Pinker. People can be brands, too, and great writers always are. It is hard to brand the news, because news is essentially random, but you can brand the quality of reporting and the skill of the people who do it. That is why I read The Economist. You can't brand a local grocery shop either, but Tesco and Waitrose have managed to brand the experience around one. I have a Twitter list called "great". Here I collect outstanding brands, the way a photographer might collect lenses. There is also "British politics", with a set of lenses, and "psychology and cognitive science", with its own.

Hunting for these brands, these people, these lenses, is like foraging. Except you are after good explanations rather than mushrooms. In theory, you have a choice between exploration (going from fertile patch to fertile patch) and exploitation (selecting a patch and sticking with it until it is no longer fertile). Darwin, for example, seemed to prefer serial exploitation, that is mastering one topic at a time (or, at least, this was the pattern he displayed in the 665 books in the diary he began when he was 28, they think he might have explored more in earlier years). In practice, it is all a bit random. Then again, collecting stuff always is. You just have to keep at it.

Which stories you collect is important. "No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant", says William Clifford in The Ethics of Beliefs; "it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resemble it before and weakens others". You can't get tricked by a piece of fake news by accident. Most people are rational. Rational just means that your views are consistent with each other. But you can be rational and wrong. Years of consistent deception will make you believe anything. A guy in a white coat will make you do most things. Again, quoting Daniel Kahneman: "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs". So the brands you follow matter.

Luckily, truth has a nagging habit of turning up evidence. After a while and with sufficient intellectual rigour, you learn to tell the good story from the bad. As someone said recently, there is no post-truth way to fly an airplane (I think it was Brian Cox, but I could not find the quote). A foundation of good stories will keep you safe from lies, like a good immune system. The lies will try to fit in with them and fail. 

That said, some lies masquerade as truth quite successfully. This is because, given a choice, our brains will choose coherence over truth. The list of cognitive illusions is staggering. Here are just two from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, fast and slow. If I say that Alain is "intelligent - industrious - impulsive - critical - stubborn - envious" and that Ben is "envious - stubborn - critical - impulsive - industrious - intelligent", you will like Alain better than Ben. Because order of information matters. Because we prefer to feel either one way or another about a person and ambivalence is hard. And if I repeat the phrase "the body temperature of a chicken" enough times and then ask you to rate true or false the statement "the body temperature of a chicken is 144°", you will rate it true more often than random. Because familiarity matters. As Dr Kahneman concludes: "The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen... Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance".

Still, I remain hopeful. We need stories, because we need order, because we need to feel safe. Our stories are like houses, they protect us from a reality that is far weirder, more random and more uncanny than we like to think. The trick is not to get rid of stories, but to continue to hunt for better ones.

Bad Luck

I realised something the other day. I realised that identities are contiguous parts of our bodies. And that we prefer guilt over bad luck.

This week, in acting class, we were discussing an exercise called the Assumptions Game. In this game, you pair with someone and give them a good looking over and observe the sort of thoughts that cross your mind. Perhaps, "this person is a musician" or "this person is kind" or "this person likes to wake up early" (often the person you are paired with is a complete stranger). Then you take turns to share these assumptions - you look straight at your partner and say "you like to wake up early". Your partner's job is to accept the statement, with a "yes I do" or "yes I am", after which you swap roles. As you can imagine, this exercise can quickly push people out of their comfort zone. In regular life, we self-censor for a reason. The first few things that occur to you are always more psychotic, obscene and offensive than you feel comfortable admitting, even to yourself.

Anyway, in this discussion, I kept referring to the Assumptions Game as the Prejudice Game, named so by my paranoia. While playing, I had felt this constant anxiety, like what if I am really a bigot only masquerading as a decent person. Bigotry is a sure path to ostracism, where I'm from. So I called it the Prejudice Game. For some reason, this seemed to annoy the teacher and eventually he cut me off, if gently, by insisting that I please call it a game of assumption not prejudice. 'Prejudice', he explained, 'would be if I were to say to you something like - if you can afford to live in London without working, then your father must be a dentist'.

That is when it happened. Had I been anywhere else, my brain would have happily just parsed the message and moved on ("prejudice is an offensive assumption, here is an example, you should call the thing by its proper name lest you put others off it" etc). But because I was in acting class, where we are conditioned to pay special attention to our breathing and posture and other physical sensations, I immediately realised I felt, for a moment, genuinely upset. First, I think I must have blushed. Certainly, I tensed, my pulse quickened, I felt an unpleasant lightness in my head and I mumbled in reply something I cannot now remember, which is a classic fight-or-flight response. Next, a cold shiver ran me over and my energy sapped. I had to fight the impulse to slide off the chair and curl up on the floor. For a few moments, I was speechless. Finally, I felt this wave wash over me, a wave of overwhelming sadness, in which were mingled a raw and silent rage and a vague sense of anguish and vexation. All this, in what must have been thirty seconds, if not less. I was astonished. You understand that I was fully aware this was all just conversation and that I was being a bit of a fool and that no harm had been intended. Yet a certain part of my brain had reacted to this simple, off-the-cuff remark the same way you might expect a two-year-old to react if you slapped it. I was so intrigued that I spent the next hour analysing this. And here is what I realised.

First, that I had reacted to having my identity threatened the same way I might have reacted to an actual physical threat. That is, what had in fact been upsetting had not been the put-down (which I fully deserved), but the notion, the illustrative example notion you understand, that I was living off my parents. I cannot emphasise enough how crazy this is. Turns out that being a strong independent woman is a core feature of my identity and that to have someone question it, even in jest, is wired to send an atavic part of my psyche into anguish. The fight-or-flight reflex proves it. What is more, under normal circumstances, I would have had no awareness of any of this. None at all. The higher faculties of my brain would have censored the initial reaction, on account of being completely crazy, and would have put in its place something more appropriate. But, returning to my metaphor that being human is like trying to get a full pint through a bustling crowd, at some level, splash splash. Identities are contiguous parts of our bodies!

Second, that it hurts to be misconstrued. It would have bothered me less, or not at all, had the thing been true. The real injury was being misjudged. Is that not fascinating? I mean, why? I searched my memories and concluded that this is always the case, I am always more upset at being rejected or put down because of a misunderstanding than an actual character flaw. Partly, because a misconstrual is to an identity what an injury is to a physical body. But partly, because I can forgive myself for being an idiot, whereas a misunderstanding is bad luck. And how do you forgive bad luck?!

There is something about bad luck that is utterly intolerable. I don't know what it is, but humans seem to be hysterically antagonistic to the idea of bad luck. We would rather feel guilty than unlucky and certainly we would rather feel guilty than unfree. The illusion of free will might be causing us to be angry all the time - at others as well as ourselves - but better that than to feel like a powerless "moist robot". I think this must be, at least in part, why even unsuccessful people seem to prefer to imagine that successful people deserve to be where they are. I find that fascinating.

Don't Use Maybe to Mean No

Ever tried to get a full pint through a crowd without spilling? That's what being human feels like to me, sometimes. The liquid in the pint in this metaphor is your overall sense of wellbeing. Every time you yield to circumstances and do something you did not quite want to do, you splash a drop of it away. Maybe you give in and agree to that second starter or stay for another pint or give your boss an unrealistic deadline. Splash, splash, splash.

I yield to the impulse to please people like a puppet yields to its master's strings. Two things conspire to make me do this: the genuine pleasure of seeing people happy and the fear, verging on phobia, of disappointing them. This is not a virtue.

Every time you offer something which you did not quite mean to give away, be it your time or anything else, you allow your boundaries to be trodden. This hurts. Weak boundaries can make you resentful and aggressive and not even aware of it. They can also make you avoid people, certainly those people disinclined to notice when your enthusiasm is less than unreserved. Poignantly, this is often your fault more than it is theirs. Mindreading is a tricky business.

Sometimes it is a matter of culture. Here is a story my grandfather loved to tell. It is the custom in Moldova for hosts to offer their guests a dinner invitation by asking more than once; at the same time, guests are expected to start by turning them down. In this way, poor hosts can save face by still issuing a dinner invitation and poor guests can avoid appearing desperate (or so the legend goes). In Transylvania, such fussing about is not the norm, presumably on the assumption that guests know best and that foisting attention on them might be irksome. (Though it is also the case that Transylvania has always been the richer province.) And there is a popular trope about a Moldovan who travels to Transylvania and turns down the dinner invitation, by his own lights. Queue cartoon comedy as the hungry guest looks on, with disbelieving dismay, at the food stuffs being duly withdrawn and packed away to the kitchen. Proud Moldovans like myself are socialised to feel delight in their customary sort of undue generosity. 

Still, weak boundaries are not a virtue. They are a symptom of chronic insecurity. You become compulsive about pleasing (and performing and perfecting) when you imagine that relationships are transactional and that you must make it profitable for others to offer you their time, attention and regard. Individuals assured of their own worth have nothing to fuss about. They offer what they mean to offer and no more.

You might think that boundaries make you rigid. Not so. If you walk along the edge of a sheer drop and there is no railing, you will walk well away from it. Where there is a railing, you can go right up to the edge. Good boundaries can mean more freedom, not less.

In acting class, we play this game sometimes. You pair with someone. Your partner's job is to shout boundaries as soon as they feel the slightest distress. Your job is to try to unsettle them. You test a string of gestures, maybe you start by touching their shoulder and then touch their hand. Before long, something will set them off. (I find trying to stick a finger in their left ear works quite well.) Different people have different boundaries and your job, and their job, is to learn to notice them. Also, to notice them before you trample them over. It is a social talent in painfully short supply.

Here is why you should get good at this game. When you are dealing with people who stand well outside of your boundaries, you can be calm and reasonable and examine your disagreements with academic detachment. You can debate, without losing your temper, the pros and cons of digital proximity to the tympanic cavity. Not so after the rubicon has been crossed. Then the situation is more like get your f**king finger out of my f**king ear. Trying to be calm after someone has stepped over your boundaries is like trying to negotiate a peace settlement while the invading army is marching through the city, door to door, killing all the babies. You will not want to be tactical; hysterical is what you will want to be. As George Orwell once put it, you "cannot take a purely aesthetic interest in a disease you are dying from". 

Playing boundaries in your head is a fun way to go about your day as well as useful. It helps with the people-hating. Oh come on, don't be boring, tequila shots? BOUNDARIES! Would you like double fries with that? BOUNDARIES! etc. Don't use maybe to mean no.

<< Prev: Person vs People      Next: Bad Luck >>

Person vs People

There is as yet no measuring unit for unconditional positive regard, so let me invent one: the kilocuddle (kCu). A kilocuddle is the amount of vitality required to get out of bed on a damp January morning, at 6:45 am, under low barometric pressure. It is equal to a thousand gram cuddles. At rest in an emotionally neutral environment, the average adult will exhibit a basal cuddle metabolic rate (BCMR) of around 60 kCu per hour (kCu/hr), with children under 5 going as high as 110. At present, most people get by on a daily intake of roughly 1750 kCu (just over 72 kCu/hr). In what follows, I will try to argue that this is in fact woefully inadequate and that the vast majority of people are severely and routinely malcuddled.


I found myself strolling down that thought path a number of times over the past few months. Here is why.

The first thing you will discover, if you happen to become unemployed, is that it becomes extremely difficult to introduce yourself. Unless you speak with a foreign accent, the first question anyone asks you is "what do you do". At an alumni event last month, I challenged a group of people to introduce themselves without giving their job title. Everyone struggled. One guy gave up: "Gosh, I don't know, all I do is work".

Why are job titles so important? One theory is that they replace conspicuous consumption. They signal to hurried strangers, in shorthand, key bits of information about ourselves: education, money, status, likeliness to enjoy sushi, opinion re:what constitutes a valid Sunday morning and cetera. Lawyer and musician are loaded terms. In different situations, from different people, they purchase different amounts of social capital. (Social capital is measured in kilocuddles.)

This is not a joke.

Here is one scenario. I have just met my future husband, Barry. He is intelligent, successful, handsome and kind. He is compassionate and strong. He loves me. Moreover, he likes me. (Which is no small feat because, while I am not a Yahoo, I'm quite a lot Yahoo-like, quite a lot of the time.) Meanwhile, Zanny Minton Beddoes offers to hire me to run a new blog for The Economist called "The Economist Explains Why Sausage Manufacturing is Difficult" (it is a series of explainers that debunk "why don't we just" political initiatives - like "why don't we just bring back the gold standard"). It's a roaring success. Life at 120 kCu/hr is great. When I receive optimal levels of affection, I am an infinitely better version of myself. I am patient, calm, balanced and compassionate. I am resilient and calm. I play. I welcome criticism. I am eloquent and witty. I exude empathy, talk with more enthusiasm and listen with fewer interruptions. All people, not just the smart and attractive ones, become fascinating. I exercise. I eat well. I take initiative and risks. I feel warm and expansive and open to experience. I laugh. I learn with renewed vim and explore with fresh curiosity. I can sit with interest through 90-minute of slides on pelicans. It is that general joy of living that is peculiar to new and reciprocated love (or to the renewed possibility thereof), and which reminds me of Pierre Bezuhov at the end of War and Peace:

"A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life - not for him alone but for the whole world - seemed to him centered in his love (...) Often in afterlife, Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct. 'I may have appeared strange and queer then,' he thought, 'but I was not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary, I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because... because I was happy.' Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed 'good qualities' in people, before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause, he discovered indubitable causes for loving them."

Consider now what happens at the other end of the spectrum. Barry, turns out, is a cheat. He married me for my EU passport. The Economist gig falls through because the government has banned immigrants from holding public opinion. Meanwhile, Joan from the party never approves my friend request and Lilly the writer from that networking event cancels our meeting. I sulk so often that my friends begin to keep me out of the loop. My pet turtle dies. Trump bans Hamilton. My marketable skills become outdated and I become poor and unemployable. Soon I am denied the baseline level of esteem in society otherwise known as dignity. Life below 50 kCu/hr is not fun. In fact, it turns into one long (unrelenting) love withdrawal symptom. No matter how enthusiastically the Harvard Business Review likes to claim otherwise, shrugging off rejection and failure is hard. Resilience is a tricky talent. Practice might help somewhat (compassion certainly does), but normal people don't operate reliably at such levels of self-assurance. I for one don't. Without Barry and Hamilton, I become quiet and tetchy. I am consumed by shame¹. I succumb to a slow smouldering rage and fantasies of omnipotence. I am vengeful. I lose interest. I find everything boring and everyone ugly. My intrinsic motivation weakens and I space out during conversation. I am always anxious. I feel tired and distracted. I don't return phone calls. I eat too much. I hate anyone who disagrees with me and pelicans.

In unemployment you can worry a lot about those scenarios. In those particular emotional terms.

This is very interesting because when your life is closer to scenario one, the attractiveness of the two outlines is exactly reversed. In the first scenario, the fabulous job and the loving relationship are burdens. They are incredibly tiring. Your time is forever occupied. You spend every hour executing the commitments accrued by your past self and have very little actual agency. You are weighed down by ridiculous expectations. You live off meal replacement shakes. You worry permanently about falling behind. You never feel good enough. Ever.

Conversely, the second scenario sounds blissful. You are master of your own time. You can, as Henry David Thoreau once put it, "go confidently in the direction of your dreams" and "live the life you have imagined". Freedom. Happiness.

At this point you might think that all I've done is proven that it is possible to find fault with any situation. Standing outside the rat race looking in was fun for a while, but then it got lonely. Maybe I just learned, the long way, one obvious truth: that competition is not really for money and status, but for the social capital they purchase. We compete for stuff we actually need: esteem, validation, respect, affection, recognition, regard, the interest of others, their attention, curiosity and time - their "love". That is the real scarcity in the system². You are free from the weight of expectation, but the result is not happiness³. The result is a sort of dreary limbo, like living outside of time. Sure - "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" is a great quote, but even Henry David Thoreau wrote a book. What higher bid for social capital is there?

Actually that is not the conclusion.

The conclusion is that the compromise is always between authenticity and belonging. Between individual and society. Between being free and being loved. This is not to say you cannot have your cake and eat it. It is to say you can only have however much of the cake you didn't eat. Life is about choices.

The conclusion is also that Love⁴ is a very accurate predictor of behaviour, mood, personality, character flaws (or virtues), vitality, performance and, in general, sanity and well being. We all have within ourselves the capacity both for great good and great evil, both for fun and staggering dullness. The world can feed one or another of our impulses.

For me, life is optimal at or above 100 kilocuddle per hour. I get by on 90. Below 60, things get tricky. Below 20, I die. You have to work out these numbers for yourself.

There are ways to lower your basal cuddle metabolic rate. Meditation, for instance. Culture. Philosophy. Art. Accepting the idea that you are alone, actually alone, irredeemably alone and that the promise of "love" is for the most part an illusion. Breathing. Reading Proust. Good quality marijuana⁵.

Until then, I only mean to point out this permanent tension: person vs people. Authenticity vs belonging. Doing what you want vs doing what is expected of you. Freedom vs love.

We are like cells in a body - only saints and psychopaths can live without others. Love is highly addictive⁶. You notice this in the language: "self-worth" is distinctly transactional⁷. The result is that everything is extremely interlocked. You cannot talk about self-worth without talking about money, status anxiety, the culture of meritocracy, politics, advertising and capitalism. Normal people cannot exist in a vacuum. Only saints and psychopaths.

Unemployment, even the wealthy "gap year in Thailand" sort that I am fortunate enough to enjoy, teaches the value of belonging. Work is hard, often boring and always a limit on your individual freedom. It is also a way of participating in the human project.

----------------------------

¹ I warmly recommend studying Brene Brown. This audiobook is short and excellent. And for a quicker start there are her two TED talks (they are funnier in chronological order).
² If I had to guess. Economics seems to have a hard time reasoning about surplus. It never ceases to baffle me how, on the one hand, journalists complain that they must produce more copy than ever , while, on the other, there is too much news and everyone feels like they are drowning in pointless garbage. You would think the solution is obvious. But how do you stop an arms race? A discussion for another time, perhaps.
³ Unless you are an accomplished Buddhist.
⁴ Dignity, respect, regard, esteem, validation etc etc etc
⁵ Joke!
⁶ It may actually be an opiate. I will include the first reasonable link returned by Google because I am too lazy to look up the many source whence I derived this belief.
⁷ Self-worth, to nobody's surprise, is also measured in kilocuddles.

Intrinsic Motivation

There is one way to make yourself unhappy, and that is to hold unrealistic expectations. When I left my job in June last year, I left because I felt cheated. Work, certainly the sort of work that I was doing, relatively challenging and well paid, was meant to the rewarding. Turns out no and that they call it compensation for a reason. Maybe it works for some. I was certainly naive for taking the corporate propaganda at face value, with their patter about meaning and creativity and impact, rather than anything so base as money, but surely this notion that work can be both gainful and fulfilling is not all a lie?

To a depressive, motivation exudes a certain fetishistic allure, like luscious long hair to a bold head. Andrew Solomon calls the opposite of depression "not happiness, but vitality". It's about that energy required to bother about the business of living. Most people most mornings don't need a good reason to get out of bed. It just sort of happens. But imagine one day waking to discover that the impulse is missing. Darkness. Anguish does not even begin to convey it. That "why" is like waking up from the Matrix inside a windowless coffin with tubes coming out of your chest. Motivation is the blue pill. You want it because you miss the illusion of agency, the smell of freshly baked pastry and your friends.

Motivation can be mined from the world or generated in the mind. External motivation is the stick-and-carrot kind most of us discover in childhood. If you are human and not psychopathic, you probably prefer praise, validation, respect and curiosity to being abandoned by the canapés after giving your job title or just saying something naff. Money, status, power and fame (or the social capital they purchase) are powerful motivators. They also, like all drugs, build tolerance. Intrinsic motivation is necessary at least some of the time. I define this as anything you can generate independent of other humans and on top of the default instinct of survival.

I decided to go back to the basics. I believe work is a real human impulse. We might be naturally given to laziness, but I am not convinced that left to our own devices and free from want, we would spend all our time napping, nuzzling each other, frolicking and eating ice-cream (though there would be a lot more of that). We like making things and figuring stuff out. So in my seven months of gainful unemployment, I made a list: what keeps me engaged and motivated when there are no external incentives (money, praise etc). There are five things, so far. Progress, order, the intuition of coherence, mastery and art.

One - progress. If I am palpably changing the/my world for the better, whether by reading a book or doing the washing up, if the goal is drawing decidedly nearer, I usually persist. I like to finish things, complete tasks, tick things off lists and in general have a sense that things are moving forward. I also like walking, driving, hiking and running, so perhaps there is something in that universal notion of motion or travel that I find particularly satisfying. Or the pleasure of agency - it's fun and gratifying to cause change in the world.

Two - order. Alain de Botton clarified this for me: that people have an impulse to "cultivate the garden". It is certainly very satisfying to be able to impose order in an otherwise crazy world. It has a very calming effect; even if it just means tidying your desktop or making a list. Writing is that sort of activity for me. I find being alive, even on a fairly average day, pretty confusing. At any moment there are goals, impressions, projects, wants, questions, ideas, longings, needs, hopes and general apprehension lying around my mind in a confused messy heap. Writing is building a lattice - neat with the shelves, drawers, folders, pots, cabinets and boxes of better understanding.

Three - the intuition of coherence. I used to call this understanding, but I'm reading about "the intuition of coherence" in Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman and I like it better. Without going into details, cognitive ease makes us happy. Spotting a pattern which connects otherwise disparate elements makes us happy. Making the world intelligible makes us happy. Learning is just that: a guided tour around interesting places in which someone shows you how things stand. Sometimes the tour is self-guided. No matter. Making sense is autotelic.

Four - mastery. This is where people like Dan Dannette talk about flow. Activities that are autotelic (which I'm going to use again because it is a great word). I think the underlying mechanic is skill. It is very satisfying to do something you can do very well, and the more sophisticated the task, the more satisfying. Though I wouldn't shy away from listing touch typing in this category. Or riding a bike. Muscle memory is immensely pleasurable. To use Daniel Kahneman's terminology, if it can be done mostly by System 1, then it needs no justification.

Five - art. Also here I include beauty and self-expression. Making pretty things, cool things, clever things, things that represent some key aspect of ourselves made solid. So we can sit back and point to it and say: that's a little like me.

Also, as I explain in the next post in this series, work is a way of participating in the human project.

<< Prev: Why We Need To Talk About Kevin      Next: Person vs People >>

Why We Need To Talk About Kevin

When Lionel Shriver's novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, appeared in 2003, it was greeted as a taboo-breaking success. Yet with hindsight and despite the gory plot, I remember Kevin not for the story or the drama, but the subtle afterthought - that living is worth it, even if it makes no sense.

After Kevin Khatchadourian, not yet sixteen, decides to kill nine of his fellow high school students, a teacher and a cafeteria worker, how should blame be split between the boy and the grieving mother? Could things have gone differently? This, Eva Khatchadourian ponders at length and with indelible insight, in letters to her estranged husband Franklin.

The mental atmosphere is that of slow smouldering rage. The apparent cause is that Franklin wants a child - Eva does not and the cake cannot be had and eaten. In binary relationships, zero-sum happiness is really just unhappiness by a different name. To remain barren is for Eva to wound the man she loves, deeply and sincerely. To have a child is to become "hopelessly trapped in someone else's story", a mere body "designed to expel its own replacement". There is no winning third option. There is only that archetypal human conundrum: to be sincere or not lonely?

Ostensibly, Eva aims this rage at every stock argument in favour of reproduction. Meaning? She pulls no punches and there are notes of raw bitterness in her reproof for those who "foist their own aimlessness onto their offsprings". Love? Try cowardice, Franklin, she taunts: having children because "you can never become their ex-father, as I might become your ex-wife". And in any case, "if there is no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation".

Yet what is the rage really about? Some clues in the remarks that "you can locate most people on a spectrum of the crudest sort and.. it may be their position on this scale with which their every other attribute correlates: exactly how much they like being here, just being alive".

At one end, there is Franklin, who "disparaged people (people like [Eva]) for their cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions, because to fail to embrace the simple fitness of being alive betrayed a weakness of character". Here too are Franklin's parents, a pair unique in their living "so exclusively in three dimensions". These are people who do not struggle, like Eva, "against convention as a constraint", but who are "grateful for the rules". (There is the side remark that childhood and maturity are both, in their extremes, "all about following the rules"). They are "still and present" and Eva, at length, concedes: "the capacity is existential, that ability to just be, with a profundity that I have seen elude some very well educated people".

At the other end, of course, is Kevin: beset by an indifference "so absolute that it's like a whole you might fall in". It is not rage that ultimately moves Kevin to massacre, as much as an unbearable apathy. Because in his experience, there is no joy or simple fitness of living: reality is lame, if only because "it is real and therefore finite and fixed". Why was life "foisted" on him? he seethes. The promise of life is that it's worth living - but "expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed". As Eva puts it: nothing is interesting if you are not interested. This is existence through the joyless eye of the depressed, who suffers not from unbridled melancholy, but a deadly lack of vitality, sheer and true. Poignantly, Kevin feels cheated. Moreover, he rightly feels unloved ("what does it mean that Dad loves you and hasn't a bleeping clue who you are?"). Eva alone understands why. For if Franklin's parents (and most people) manage to forget the uncanniness of existence through their "forever puttering, greasing the machinery of daily life", Kevin refuses "to deceive himself that by merely filling it, he was putting his time to productive use". The line lies between those who have the character to face the void and those who don't. There is no real point to life and no good reason to do anything. "The difference", she concludes mournfully, "is that your father would wittingly install the water softener for no good reason and Kevin would not".

Eva knows this because she is caught in the middle. Franklin's parents might be silly, "well-meaning but unimaginative" and blind to "why anyone would seek out a film with an unhappy ending or buy a painting that wasn't pretty", but they are happy. And unlike Kevin, she does not seem to begrudge their capacity for immersion or their enthusiasm for doing the living thing. (Or if she does, it's only to the extent of passive aggression.) Their wholesome unselfconsciousness is not "the string and arrows of other people's outrageous fortune" (no accident that Kevin's weapon is a crossbow). She recognises that "it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone's life has always gone well with minimal impedance". If anything, that might be the aspiration: to be "too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvellous marriage to bother about what it all amounts to". Yet she never quite gets there. Mingled with her "cussedly nonspecific dissatisfactions" and despite the permanent goings to and fro, her own struggle with meaning festers unacknowledged. That Kevin should come to embody this secret void of vitality is more than a parent's nightmare of a child she cannot love. It is our communal horror of genuine self-knowledge. For after all, "who could live day after day with the deficiencies of their own imagination made solid as brick"?

Under the circumstances, the question of blame has particular significance. This is a quintessentially human obsession, for we are staunch believers in free will. Eva's acerbic dismissal of people who spurn accountability through lawsuits, is telling - as is Kevin's derision of "amateurs" who try to justify their atrocities with paltry excuses ("I was bullied", "I was misunderstood"). For his own, he insists to take responsibility. Yet there is subversive ambivalence on both sides. Kevin's defence makes use of his Prozac prescription, at Kevin's own suggestion. And Eva herself asks with revealing poignancy: why so much guilt and shame, attached so vehemently, to events regarding which one feels at once "responsible and helpless"? Is mental illness, lacking the simple vitality of living - a curse or a character flaw?

Nevertheless, both Eva and Kevin cling to blame as to a life boat. Why, when "there's a freedom in apathy, a wild dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk [and] do anything [like] Kevin"? As Eva herself observes: "you can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good". Like Roman Romanovich Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, Eva and Kevin accept blame because it is the necessary payment for something neither is ultimately prepared to abandon: membership in the human race.

And there is another reason: because it does not matter. When one victim's mother sues her for negligence, Eva writes: "The problem was not who was punished for what. The problems was that her daughter was dead". Likewise, the problem is not whether society ever deigns to forgive Eva and Kevin - the problem is that life has no meaning.

Ultimately, the high-minded reasons for living, like the reasons for having children, are just dirigibles: "immense, floating, and few; optimistic large-hearted, even profound, but ominously ungrounded". Happiness perhaps is possible only in the negative, as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky once remarked: we feel it briefly in the the lack of suffering, the lack of deprivation. This reminded me of a passage in George Orwell, from the review of Mein Kampf (1940): "[Hitler] grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. (...) because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, [he] knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. (...) Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time", Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death" and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet"¹. As Eva reflects bitterly to Franklin: "when your life was wholly in your lap you didn't know what to do with it". Struggle, hardship and self-sacrifice are an easy way out.

Thus we are come, full circle, back to the "simple fitness of being" - and our communal perplexity before it. For in the end, Kevin's rejection of just being is no more baffling to us than it is to Eva. We've all peeked at the void. If not exactly struggle, certainly work is a vital distraction from the vast meaninglessness of it all.

And if it's true of individuals, it's true of collectives. Every so often, societies are driven to despair by their own success - unsure how to find meaning in a life largely void of real hardship. In Eva's world, the hate-mail is "meet-red", whereas the kindness of condolences is "pastel and processed" and nobody uses "nice" to mean anything other than "boring". In the midst of progress, there is an atavic yearning for violence, "raw and unleashed", to tear away the veil of civilisation which "comes between us as much as it makes life possible". Is it rash to put progress on a pyre and light it? Yes. Then again, "desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses".

Despite this, I don't think Kevin's conclusion is pessimistic. On the contrary. The book ends with a certain softness. Needing kindness herself, Eva is kinder now. In the end, there is something of Franklin's attitude in her remark that maybe "you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile". More importantly, she finally discovers how to love Kevin and through him - the nihilistic impulse in her own heart. In the end, she does love life, in full awareness of its ultimate meaninglessness.

And unlike Franklin's - who hasn't a bleeping clue, who loves not his real country or his real son or life as it really is, but delusive shadows of those things built with squinting eyes in his own heart, Eva's love is real.

<< Prev: The Beginning of Infinity Review Part 2      Next: Intrinsic Motivation >>

The Beginning of Infinity: Optimism, Societies, Ethics

Good books have reach. You know them because they stick around in your mind for weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. I reckon The Beginning of Infinity (2011) may just be such a book. I recommend it. Meanwhile, here are a few more highlights¹.

All Evils Are Caused by Insufficient Knowledge

Why would anyone want to change a bad leader? At first glance, this might sound rather absurd: why would anyone not want that? Yet the question does conceal a certain assumption: hope. We hope that the next leader will be better - or, at any rate, less bad. However - why? Change is both risky and expensive, forecasts are often unreliable and the leadership selection process far from guaranteed to deliver the best outcome. Surely, better the devil you know?

This is an open question. People can, and often do, argue in favour of keeping bad leaders (if less often in their own countries). For Thomas Hobbes, to take a classic example, merely stifling opposition and crippling the economy were not reasons enough to depose an absolute ruler ("humane affairs cannot be without some inconvenience", he wrote). Constant change can be chaotic. And life in a power vacuum - "nasty, brutish and short". No sober advocate of change would seriously dispute that. Indeed, Karl Popper pointed out that democracy is not about electing the best possible leaders, but about changing leadership without bloodshed. There is no guarantee of improvement, only the promise of change. For Mr Deutsch, how a society settles the question of bad leadership is a special case of how it settles the question of progress in general. Both questions turn on a certain attitude: optimism.

For Mr Deutsch, optimism follows from the reality of living in a "computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation friendly" universe. If the only requirements for knowledge creation are conjectures and criticism, then the only requirements are human intelligence, mass, energy and evidence (for the purpose of testability). These are all things we have, so "problems are soluble". In other words, "if something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing [preventing] it from being technologically possible is not knowing how".

Whether or not you agree with Mr Deutsch that optimism is self-evident, it is certainly worth considering his notion that there can be no progress (and no democracy) without it. Change is not an unalloyed good. We may try to improve things and fail. Misunderstandings are ubiquitous and neither intelligence nor the intention to be accurate can guard against them. Knowledge is fallible. Bad leaders emerge, mistakes happen and it takes optimism to push through when they do. Optimism is the hope that future choices will be better than present ones. Optimism is the willingness to accept the gamble of change. It is "a way of explaining failure, not of prophesying success". It is a stance towards the future: the belief (perhaps the hope) that "all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge". At their core, progress and democracy are both expressions of optimism. Perhaps a better leader can be found, perhaps new ideas will prove better than existing ones, and perhaps problems are, in principle, soluble.

Progress / knowledge creation = creative conjectures + rational criticism. Democracy is a special case of progress, in politics. Both are expressions of optimism: they express the hope that change is likely to prove beneficial.  

So whether a society is open or closed rests largely on how it settles the question of its optimism. "A pessimistic civilisation considers it immoral to behave in ways that have not been tried and tested many times before, because it is blind to the possibility that the benefits of doing so might offset the risks", writes with declared partisanship Mr Deutsch. An optimistic one, on the other hand, will be "open to suggestion, tolerant of dissent, and critical of both dissent and received opinion". Closed societies are static: they follow tradition. Open societies are dynamic: they embrace change. Closed societies discourage creativity and criticism, open societies encourage them2.

Moreover, both tendencies are self-perpetuating. Open societies expect change to bring about improvement. Consequently, they encourage creativity and criticism, which does (eventually) bring about improvement, and this confirms their original assumption. Closed societies, on the other hand, fear that change leads to decline. Consequently, they discourage creativity and ban criticism, which in turn makes the emergence of bad ideas more likely, and this confirms their original assumption. Bad ideas are more likely to emerge in closed societies because without a tradition of critical thinking, they are left vulnerable to false and harmful conjectures. Besides, "almost no one is creative in fields in which they are pessimistic". So in a closed society, change is more likely to lead to decline because "in the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage".

Progress relies on creativity and criticism. Creativity is important, but criticism is more important still, for it is our best mechanism for detecting and eliminating errors. In the absence of criticism, true ideas no longer have the advantage.

Side note on "I told you so". I rather enjoyed Mr Deutsch's deconstruction of why the answer "I told you so" is bad. It is bad because it could be used to "explain" anything (see point about good explanation needing to be precise, in part one). It is bad because it answers the form of the question rather than its substance: it focuses on who asked it, rather than what was asked. It is bad because it reinterprets a request for true explanation as a request for justification. It is bad because it confuses epistemological authority (which does not exist3) with human authority, meaning power. And, finally, it is quite dangerous because it implies that through such power, it stands outside the jurisdiction of normal criticism. So yeah - fuck you, Mr Adult.

Side note on emotional triggers. A short comment on his observations around the mechanisms static societies (or static subcultures within societies) employ in order to suppress change. They are the usual mechanisms employed to prevent deviation from the norm: triggers of uneasiness, embarrassment and shame, together with positive triggers (such as pride and endorsement) which can be used to reward conformity. Moreover, there is the mechanism of socialising children to derive their sense of selves from enacting that society's memes. From then on, such people "not only enact those memes, they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them". Psychology has shown that a strong sense of self (identity) is correlated with feelings of high self-esteem, purposefulness, connection and love; so bundling a person's identity with the need to conform to certain norms can be pretty effective. I sometimes wonder - is doing so infringing on a child's right to freedom or is it a requisite part of creating a new person? A bite for thought.

Side note on communication. Finally, I enjoyed his argument that communication is an act of creativity. It goes like this. Memes cannot be downloaded from one mind to another like software or inherited like genes. Memes spread by being enacted. Person A enacts a meme, Person B observes Person A's behaviour and tries to guess what the meme might be from this observation. It's a process of reverse engineering. Person B is building an entirely new instance of the meme in their own mind. How? You've guessed it: conjecture and criticism. Person B makes an intelligent guess with regards to the meme in Person A's head (using evidence, logic, experience, creativity), then subjects this to criticism and testing before tentatively adopting it. We call this conversation. "The puzzle of how one can possibly translate [a meme from one mind to another] is therefore the same puzzle as where scientific theories come from". Creativity, argues Mr Deutsch, must have evolved as a solution to the problem of perpetuating culture, by making meme-copying as accurate as possible. The trouble with generic solutions, however, is that they can be repurposed :)

Only progress is sustainable

What if you disagree that optimism is self-evidently the better choice and that it follows from the laws of physics? Is there another argument in favour of adopting it? Yes, says Mr Deutsch.

The answer is subsumed by the rather amusing anecdote of the prisoner who escapes a death sentence, by promising to make the king's favourite horse talk within a year (as a child I heard this story starring Nasreddin Hodja, a famous character in Middle Eastern folklore). Fellow prisoners are appalled on hearing of Nasreddin's bold proposal: what if he failed?! Well, says Nasreddin, a lot can happen in a year. The horse might die. The king might die. I might die. Or the hose might talk! If Nasreddin "is going to escape by creating a new idea, he cannot possibly know that idea today, and therefore he cannot let the assumption that it will never exist condition his planning". However, the story's moral is not just that "progress cannot take place at all unless someone is open to, and prepares for, those inconceivable possibilities". The moral is also that the alternative to progress is not stasis, but death.

If we are inclined to believing 1) that problems are not soluble (and that to think otherwise is sheer hubris) and 2) that stasis is sustainable, we are inclined to do so because of bad philosophy. In particular, Mr Deutsch embarks on an arduous debunking of two popular ideas: the Principle of Mediocrity (physics laws are majestically indifferent to humans affairs, there is nothing special about our species) and the Spaceship Earth metaphor (this planet is highly adapted to sustaining human life, humans are but its stewards, they should never aspire to more than keeping it as it currently is). Nonsense, says Mr Deutsch. Humans are special, they are "universal constructors" of knowledge. And their habitat is only hospitable inasmuch as they possess the knowledge of how to make it so. On a time scale long enough, "Mother Earth" is guaranteed to kill us.

In reality there is no sustainable lifestyle, only progress is sustainable. Antibiotics have saved many lives, but may soon become obsolete. Industrialisation lifted millions out of famine and poverty, but the resulting climate change means new discoveries will soon be needed. Sooner or later, an asteroid will lay waste to the whole planet. All triumphs of progress are temporary. Rather than hankering after an irretrievable past that was never sustainable in the first place and rather than aspiring to reproduce, endlessly, our current lifestyles, with their misconceptions and mistakes - better to look to the future and "embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next". Survival requires progress.

Moral imperative: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors

In conclusion, if progress requires optimism and survival requires progress, then this moral imperative naturally follows: do not destroy the means of detecting and eliminating errors. In others words, do not suppress criticism. Doing so is a "rare and deadly sort of error: it prevents itself from being undone".

Enlightened people accept that all knowledge is fallible. Indeed, the mechanism of conjecture-criticism relies precisely on allowing ourselves to be wrong. Not just sometimes and not just incidentally, but always and inherently. This should be fine. Progress, as Mr Popper put it, is precisely about allowing our theories "to die in our place". It is the mature pledge to criticising our ideas without staking our lives on them. And it is about discriminating between ideas, not between people. Such a process is self-correcting. We may temporarily be deceived by bad explanations. But in the long run, what other path is there to Truth?

-------------------

Notes:

1 The better to grasp/remember/index a worldview (Weltanschauung, to use the fancy term), I look out for these two features: call them Pursuit and Attitude. Between them they cover the two questions all Weltanschauungen must address: What sort of employment gives Life meaning? and What sort of outlook makes Life bearable? The first is about what to do, the second is about how to feel. Here are some examples. In the worldview of Herman Hesse, the Pursuit is wisdom, the Attitude is reverence. Marcel Proust proposes art and curiosity, Tolstoy - love and piety, Alain de Botton - reflection and ambivalence, Kurt Vonnegut - creativity and forbearance. Certainly, worldviews that have taken great minds lifetimes to create should not in earnest be folded neatly into pairs of words, but I find Pursuit/Attitude nevertheless a useful mnemonic. In David Deutsch, I reckon the Pursuit is progress. The attitude is optimism. (Note: George Orwell in Why I Write, "but before [the writer] beings to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape")

2 Of course, no society is either always closed or always open (Mr Deutsch's didactic examples are Sparta and Athens); instead, all societies nurture both impulses: open and closed, liberal and conservative, relativist and absolutist. Most of us possess both tendencies. It is clear which of the two Mr Deutsch prefers. However, just for the sake of championing the middle ground, I would like here to mention Jonathan Haidt's TED talk, in which he argues that thriving societies honour both liberal and conservative values.

3 Karl Popper in Knowledge without Authority (1960): "I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of knowledge by the entirely different question: how can we hope to detect and eliminate errors?"

The Beginning of Infinity: Good Explanations

What good were five weeks reading the cult classic by David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity (Allen Lane, 2011)? Other than being seen reading it on the Tube, here are a few ideas.

Knowing

Mr Deutsch takes issue with the idea that testability is the only requirement of a good theory.

Some background. The scientific method is understood to mean that a theory must be both "falsifiable" and "testable". Falsifiability means its predictions ought to be such that certain outcomes can be imagined which could in principle prove the theory wrong. Testability means that those outcomes can be sought in practice. Religious doctrines are unfalsifiable because they do not, even in principle, admit outcomes which could prove them wrong: they predict the world being exactly the way it is, so that any observation cannot but confirm them. By contrast, String Theory is said to be falsifiable but untestable, because its predictions can only be evaluated in scenarios where both quantum and gravitational effects are simultaneously observable - meaning inside either a black hole or a big bang or a large hadron collider the size of a galaxy. By these definitions, testability subsumes falsifiability.

Mr Deutsch's argument is that making predictions (even accurate ones) does not amount to having a theory. In a conjuring trick, predicting that the person sawn in half would later appear on stage unharmed may prove accurate. And one could even acquire a bundle of such predictions and call them "A Theory for the Outcomes of Conjuring Tricks". However, while being testable, such a theory would not address, let alone solve, the question of how conjuring tricks actually work. What is missing is "an explanation: a statement of the reality that accounts for the appearance". In other words, we need a story. Not everyone agrees: instrumentalists prefer to "shut up and calculate", rather than aspire to make any grand claims about the nature of reality. They, says Mr Deutsch, are wrong.

However, not any story will do. Plenty of theories, while both testable and explanatory, are nevertheless wrong. Ancient Greeks, for instance, ascribed the bleakness of winter to Demeter's sorrow, each time her daughter Persephone had to go on an annual trip to Hades (god of the underworld), which was stipulated in their marriage contract and enforced by a magic seed. Such a theory is testable (seasons can be observed) and provides an explanation. However, the explanation is bad. It is bad because "nothing in the problem of why winter happens is addressed by postulating specifically a marriage contract or a magic seed". The details are completely arbitrary and "whenever it is easy to vary an explanation without changing its predictions, one could just as easily vary it to make different predictions if they were needed". So if the Greeks had travelled to the southern hemisphere and had encountered Summer in winter time, instead of abandoning their myth, they could have simply altered it to match this new observation: Demeter only "banishes warmth from her vicinity", say. Think - Problem of Evil and how flexibly religions bend their explanations to take it into account, without however changing their conclusion (that God is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent). By contrast, consider the good explanation for why seasons happen: Earth's rotational axis is tilted relative to the plane of its orbit and this varies the angle at which sun rays encounter Earth's surface; this changes - throughout the year - the amount of energy bestowed on any given area of land. This explanation cannot have any of its details changed arbitrarily and still make sense. In other words, along with being testable and explanatory, it is also precise. There is no superfluity. Moreover, it obeys the laws of logic and finally, it fits in neatly with all other good explanations: those concerning gravity, geometry, thermodynamics and so on.

Finally, good explanations have reach. The axis-tilt explanation was proposed to explain variations in the sun's angle of elevation throughout the year, but combined with some knowledge about heat and spinning bodies it also explains seasons and, without further modifications, the differences in seasons between hemispheres, the lack of seasons in tropical regions and the months-long days around the poles. Good explanations have reach because they elucidate underlying laws of reality, which themselves have reach. This is a consequence from the nature of reality: "the reach of explanations cannot be limited by fiat". It is good fortune that we live in a "computation-friendly, prediction-friendly and explanation friendly" universe (the fine-tuning problem is discussed at length).

Knowledge is the accumulation of "good explanations": stories that are testable, explanatory, hard to vary while still fulfilling their function, consistent with logic and consistent with each other. Good explanations have reach.

*** 

How do these good explanations come about? Not through observation, argues Mr Deutsch, against the grain of empiricism. "[No] amount of observing will correct [a] misconception until after one has thought of a better idea". Instead, the seeds of progress are creative conjectures, that is - imaginative educated guesses. These are candidates which, to become good explanations, must survive the arena of critical thinking, where their explanatory prowess, consistency with logic and consistency with existing good explanations are challenged and settled. Testability, then, is just one of the many tools employed by the tradition of criticism in its pursuit to turn the best candidates into new good explanations. "We do not test every testable theory", remarks Mr Deutsch, only the plausible ones.

Moreover, testability actually relies on existing good explanations: all observation is laden with theory. The book recounts the anecdote of Karl Popper starting his lectures with the single instruction "Observe!", followed by a long silence; eventually, someone would ask "What?", proving his point that knowledge is required in advance of any observation. To observe a distant galaxy, astrophysicists interpose a lot more technology between it and their eyes than those ancient astronomers staring at the night sky: a telescope, a camera, software for aiming and tuning its lenses, software for sifting through the large piles of raw data, another camera, a photographic lab and a microscope. Yet, they "see" the galaxy much clearer, for all that.

In other words, "theories aren't testable in isolation". Since observation is laden with theory, any experiment ends up testing a whole bundle of hypotheses, not just the one under investigation. Consequently, a negative result can be ambiguous: maybe your hypothesis was false, but maybe the machine was miscalibrated or the protocol forgone, or indeed perhaps an altogether unknown phenomenon interfered.

Finally, theory cannot be derived from observation because: there is no shortage of data points. We are drowning in evidence of real phenomena. However, as any company now sitting atop a mountain of raw information can attest, such evidence is useless unless someone knows what to do with it. Creative conjectures must come first. I was once told that programming is the future of journalism, but I reckon programming merely helps with testing a conjecture, that is - once and only once one has been creatively imagined. If programming was the only skill required of a data scientist, I would be typing this from Mars.

Good explanations are formed through the alternating process of creatively generating new conjectures and pitting them against one another in the arena of rational criticism (where testability is but one of the tools).

*** 

From this epistemic outlook, it follows that there is such a thing as objective reality. That is, Mr Deutsch opposes postmodernism with its claim that "because all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially arbitrary". Nonsense, he replies: conjectures can be evaluated in the arena of critical thinking. And rejecting all criticism as mere "narrative", as postmodernism would have it, is deadly - for it removes the means of identifying and correcting errors.

In other words, while on a timescale long enough all explanations are wrong, right now some are objectively less wrong than others.

The aim of knowledge creation is not certainty, however pleasant an emotion that might be. The aim of knowledge creation is progress - from being wrong, to being less wrong and from these problems to other, ever better problems. (He reckons science would be better served if its theories were known as 'misconceptions': thus, "Einstein's Misconception of Gravity was an improvement on Newton's Misconception, which was an improvement on Kepler's".) Such thinking might prevent people from needing to be reminded "that science claims neither infallibility nor finality". Or, as Karl Popper put it: "It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal".

Hence his rejection of instrumentalism, with its coyness in making statements about reality. He notes the split within the scientific community. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics prefers to "shut up and calculate", while paleontology speaks of dinosaurs' existence as an "explanation of fossils" (rather than "an interpretation of our best theory of fossils").

Objective knowledge therefore is attainable because competition in the arena of critical thinking is a real possiblity. There are real criteria by which competing conjectures may be assessed: reasonableness, testability, usefulness, consistency with logic, consistency with our current best explanations and so on. In the end, all good explanations are pieces of the same puzzle: the puzzle of reality.

In conclusion, people who converge on truth, converge with each other. And progress is the best defense against irrationality, postmodernism, pessimism and relativism.

Footnote. Elsewhere in the book: "And then we hone our guesses, and then fashion the best ones into a sort of waking dream of reality.. A waking dream that corresponds to reality. But there is more. It is a dream of which you then gain control".

This got me thinking: his epistemology works even if you accept the postmodernist view that all theories are mere "narratives". After all, existence is just energy and mass, a spasmodic stream of sensations, chaos. It lends itself to various interpretations. It doesn't really matter if the explanations represent "what is really there": they just have to be precise, compelling, consistent with observation (meaning physics), with logic and with each other. Who cares if they are not what the universe intended? More power to us. The universe has no intentions.

However, "reality" exists in the sense that it is the name by which we call the external, shareable story we are all weaving together. It is made "real" and "objective" through our communal participation. No single human can alter it substantially, but as a species there is nothing really preventing us from changing the story any way we want (subject to physics, logic etc). Individually, we are restricted. Together, we are free. (I feel compelled to appreciate the irony.)

The reality of abstractions

Next, Mr Deutsch attempts to show that, in addition to accepting good explanations as being statements about reality, it is important also to accept that the higher-level abstractions which these explanations often reference are realities too. This is his anti-reductionist stance.

To this end, he uses a thought experiment created by Douglas Hofstadter in I am a Strange Loop (2007). Imagine a computer built out of dominoes. The pieces are spring-loaded (they both fall and rise), there are loops. bifurcations, junctions and logical gates. A stretch of fallen dominoes represents 1; left standing - 0. One domino represents the 'on' switch. The input is a number (say 641). The output is binary: a particular domino left standing if the number is prime and knocked over otherwise. Now the calculation begins. There is a flurry of motion, dominoes falls and rise in waves and loops and complicated patterns. It all goes on for some time (a computer made out of dominoes is not very efficient). Now imagine that an external observer notices the particular domino which, despite the general commotion, remains standing. Why, she asks, is that domino never knocked over? To this sort of question, there are two types of answer.

The first type of answer, the reductionist answer, will try to give an account in terms of basic principles, meaning dominoes: the domino in question never falls because none of its neighbours ever fall, which is to say none of the patterns of motion initiated by knocking over the 'on'- switch domino ever included it. This is correct. But we knew that already. The reductionist answer feels unsatisfying because it attempts an explanation at the wrong level of emergence.

The second type of answer will simply say: because 641 is prime. This answer certainly seems to make a lot more sense. However, it makes no reference to the dominoes at all. Instead, it explains why the domino is left standing by referencing a pure abstraction: primality. And that is the point: Hofstadter's argument is that primality must be part of any explanation attempting to elucidate why the domino did not fall. In fact, the notion of causation itself is emergent and abstract. We cannot perceive causation, remarked David Hume, only a succession of events.

As another example, take trying to explain why "one particular copper atom at the top of the nose of the statue of Sir Winston Churchill stands in Parliament Square in London". An explanation in terms of atoms alone may well exist, perhaps a law that describes the trajectory of that atom from the mine via the smelter to the sculpting studio, given a known earlier state of the universe. But a more satisfying and potentially more useful explanation, would be one which referenced war and politics and the culture of celebrating influential people by moulding their shapes in copper and mounting them onto the pedestals of public squares.

"There is no inconsistency in having multiple explanations of the same phenomenon, at different levels of emergence".

Consequently, he rejects the notion, supported by Dan Dennett and eventually even Hofstadter, that consciousness, or indeed Artificial Intelligence, is just a bag of tricks. He would like an explanation at a higher level of emergence.

And in Ethics, he rejects the claim that, just because "you can't derive an ought from an is", there can be no morality justified by reason. "Certainly you can't derive an ought from an is, but you can't derive a factual theory from an is either. That is not what science does". Reductionism in philosophy, he continues, therefore fails in just the same way. Rather than deriving an ought from an is, better to attempt an explanation at a higher-level of emergence (using concepts such as tolerance or virtue). And in any case, what is (pleasure, pain, preference) may very well be shaped by the high-level abstraction of what constitutes a good life.

Read on: David Deutsch on optimism, societies and Ethics