Out on a Limb

Looking out the window of my stairway landing onto the backyard, I notice a dust of snow dislodged from the tall elm’s branch. A squirrel is inching its cautious way to the twig-like end of a branch of a limb, arriving finally at the gap of space separating it from the equally twig-like end of a branch of a limb across from it. The squirrel eyes that gap, regards it. Its tail undulates. The limb’s end bends under its 2 pound weight. No doubt its four-chambered heart has accelerated considerably beyond its normal 280 beats per minute. And then it leaps, hurls itself into space, across the emptiness, to land sure-pawedly, pausing momentarily as its new perch sags and recovers before scurrying on.

That safe landing is no slam dunk. Squirrels do sometimes slip, stumble at their mark, and plummet to the ground; and while their tail can function as a parachute to cushion a short fall, a fall from the height of that elm’s branch could break bones and spine. The Rodentia condition, like the human one, is filled with quotidian microdramas. Seeing that squirrel poised on a verge, meagerly supported, I’d like to think its racing little heart took on a percussive beat, a rapid and rhythmic contraction that fueled its courage to venture out on a limb.

I have been told at various times by various people to avoid going out on a limb. “Out on a limb” is an idiomatic phrase; its meaning is connotative and figurative rather than literal. Like all idiomatic phrases, it is not used innocently. It suggests a way of thinking and feeling; it gestures toward a normative boundary. Being “out on a limb” means being at risk, vulnerable, and it is almost always functions as a social warning or proscription, as a location to avoid placing oneself at, for social support there is dangerously weak, may snap, and one may fall to the lonely, unforgiving, injurious ground. Better to stay near the trunk, the solid trunk, where the branches thicken and are more compactly congregated and better able to bear one’s weight, where even the stoutest breeze barely registers on their unswayable density.

I was never cautioned against going out on an intellectual or athletic limb. “Truth is conformity of the mind with reality,” the Christian Brothers at my high school told me, quoting Aquinas; so, “sapere aude,” dare to know. They gave me Latin, and I had the key to English grammar and all the Romance languages. They gave me Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and I had the yin and yang of Christianity. They gave me Freud and Jung, and I understood myself and others better. Subsequent teachers at higher levels gave me theology and philosophy and history and literature, told me to think long and hard and critically, with and against the grain of what I read, to add my voice to the great conversation—a wealth of knowledge that I could spend lavishly, like a plutocrat, without fear of bankruptcy. On the athletic field I was told to be a winner, not at all costs, but at the cost of all my effort and energy; to play through pain, to practice and train, to play smart and intuitively. In school and sports I was encouraged and exhorted and pushed to tread out on a limb, to accumulate and expend intellectual and physical capital, to enter the ranks of the elite.

But such was not the counsel I received regarding the social sphere. I was admonished to conserve social capital, to maintain connections, to not be a stranger in the social landscape, to not separate myself from social networks—indeed, the denser the network, the better one’s expectation of reciprocity and trust. A strange paradox seems to be at work here. In the classroom and on the playing fields, the display of individual excellence was expected. In the public square, however, in the everyday moving among and interacting with others, such behavior was experienced as arrogant or narcissistic or an idiosyncratic weirdness or difference, fit only for the margin, for the periphery where social displeasure lies, for a distant suburb to the metropolitan center of social acceptability. On the one hand, we are urged to develop a personal style, an original voice, an individualized legibility, a unique, signatory perspective to inscribe on things and events. On the other hand, we are urged to avoid those very qualities for fear of ostracism or ridicule, for fear of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.” We are urged to practice little more than a faceless gaze.

I think that, in the social sphere, this unwillingness to exhibit difference can be dangerous, inviting what media theorist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman calls “the spiral of silence.” According to Noelle-Neuman, the social voices that are the loudest and most constantly amplified through various media garner the most attention, even if they express perspectives unshared by the majority of listeners. But hearing those perspectives expressed so often in so many venues convinces the majority that it is, in fact, a minority, a conviction that tends to render it less and less likely to speak out, less and less likely to go out on the limb of public discourse. The majority, in effect, gradually spirals into silence, and minority perspectives become dominant. The marketplace of public discourse becomes a monopoly; the dynamic churn of competing ideas is thwarted, and the truth-seeking goal of argument is stifled.

I believe that out on a limb is where we sometimes need to be. We need the risk, the sway, the feel of our own weight so we do not find ourselves conscripted and uniformed and crisply saluting ways of thinking and acting adopted at the bidding of others. We need to declare the separation point between our selves and the social self, if we feel a point of separation. We need to listen, and then we need to reflect, to hold an inner conversation between our convictions and the convictions of others. It is “irresistibly tempting,” David Foster Wallace observes, “to fall in with some established dogmatic camp.” If it calls, when it calls, we need the courage, and the intellectual integrity, not to heed the lure of the limb’s end.

Why Benjamin Franklin Is Cool

The founding fathers were mostly cool. George Washington possessed discipline, discernment, and integrity, but seems aloof and was a bit too fond of fitted uniforms that displayed his muscular physique. Thomas Jefferson had a brilliant mind, wrote the Declaration of Independence, advocated a “wall” between religion and the state, and sent Lewis and Clark on their exploratory way, remained a slaveowner despite an emancipator sensibility. James Madison wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, defended religious freedom, successfully prosecuted the War of 1812, and married the sprightly, party-loving Dolly, but he too owned slaves. John Adams ferociously advocated independence, but presided as president over the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts, which nullified free speech. Patrick Henry gave an inspiring “give me liberty or give me death” speech, but advocated state taxes to support Christian religion and opposed the Constitution because it abrogated states’ rights.

But for me, the founding father who is totally, florescently cool, is Benjamin Franklin. Why? Not because his unremitting industry enabled him to retire wealthy enough at 42 to pursue public projects; not because he invented bifocals, established a library, and discovered electricity; and not because he is on the hundred dollar bill. Benjamin Franklin is cool because he possessed a rare gift: the ability to laugh at himself.

Here’s one small example in an autobiography filled with such examples. At 16, Franklin adopted vegetarianism. Not long after, however, he was tempted by Cod. While on a voyage from Boston to New York, he is stranded due to lack of wind on a small island. Some of the others in his group begin fishing, catch some cod, and cook them over an open flame. Now Franklin considered eating fish “a kind of unprovok’d Murder, since none of them had or ever could do us any injury that might justify the Slaughter.” However, he had always been “a great Lover of Fish,” and when the delicious smell of cod “came hot out of the Frying Pan,” he “balanc’d some time between Principle and Inclination,” until remembering “that when the Fish were opened,” he “saw smaller Fish taken out of their stomachs.” So, Franklin reasons, if the fish eat one another, he sees no reason why he “mayn’t eat” them. “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature,” Franklin concludes, “since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

And right there, in that slippery watermelon seed of a rationalization and the deadpan conclusion he draws from it, we see Franklin’s coolness. Franklin is a man of the Enlightenment, an age that viewed reason as the means of human perfectability, yet he knows that reason can justify inclination over principle, appetite over precept. He knows that self-indulgence often suborns the best of intentions, that we are often bridled by our desires and led away from our moral resolutions, that the embodied senses can be smithy furnaces that render our ethics pliant. Long before Bohr and Heisenberg appeared on the scene, Franklin saw an uncertainty principle at work, in human nature itself. We are complex, sometimes self-deceiving, unfitted for moral absolutism. We are, as Alexander Pope says, “darkly wise, and rudely great”—The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.” Yet, Franklin can live with such irreconcilable aspects of human being, unshivved by the kind of guilt Augustine felt at stealing some pears from a neighbor’s tree, perfectly OK with the fact that we sometimes shadowbox with reason and experience a small fall from grace. And Franklin gives us this picture of human contradiction in a “the joke’s on me” spirit. It is a mini-sermon delivered not in the thunderous, apocalyptic tone of a jeremiad, but in an avuncular, good-natured tone of self-mockery. That’s cool.

But self-mockery, I think, is actually more than cool. It is necessary. People who can mock themselves understand that all assumptions about the world and our place and action in it are contingent and mutable. They will not be immobilized in rigid systems of belief, systems that induce anxiety when threatened, violence when violated. They will not resist the challenge to look honestly at themselves, will not resist the sallies of doubt about why they do what they do, think what they think, believe what they believe. They know that reason is flawed, that it rationalizes, that it succumbs to confirmation bias, and that it elevates and ennobles us only in proportion to the constancy of our willingness to place it under critique. This is what Franklin teaches. It is cool. It is important. Our capacity to live together and deliberate together, to find reciprocal trust in each other, to understand that human pursuits and perspectives are never reducible to one idea of what is absolutely, irrevocably, comprehensively good or true, depends on it.

Language, Thought, and Politics

Many of the attempts to explain what motivated Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords have centered on language, specifically on the pernicious effect of the intemperately hostile rhetoric that has recently characterized the political scene. Implicit in these explanations is an old debate in the field of linguistics: to what extent, if any, language influences thought.

Loughner himself has claimed that the government engages in “mind control” and brainwashing “by controlling grammar.” The belief that language determines the way we think, known as linguistic determinism, was advanced some 70 years ago by Benjamin Lee Whorf. The world’s “flux of impressions,” Whorf maintained, is “organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.” Phenomena, in effect, are “codified in the patterns” of language.

Whorf’s strong causal ligaturing of language and thought has few adherents now, but a weaker version of it is generally accepted. According to Guy Deutscher, language influences our minds “not because of what it allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.” These habits of speech, Deutscher says, “can settle into habits of mind” and affect our “experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.” They force us “to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience.” A language in which nouns are assigned gender, for example, can influence the kinds of adjectives used to describe them. In “Metaphors We Live By,” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson assert that metaphors structure the way we perceive and understand the world, and the way we relate to others. It makes an attitudinal difference if a politician is described as a “clueless” or a “gangster,” if an audience is exhorted to “take our country back” or be “armed and dangerous,” or if the crosshairs mapped on congressional districts are described as a “gun sites” or “surveyors’ symbols.”

We may use language mindlessly, but it is seldom received that way. As Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of “language games” suggests, language is meaningful because its use is catalyzed by a variety of rule-governed social practices, practices that are largely unspoken aspects of our social reality. Over the last two years, political language has too often operated according to rules that permit excessively heated and immoderate militancy. It is time to remember that words are deeds, not simply the intangible exhalations of breath that generate them. It is time to think, to think hard, about the words we use to describe others. It is time to remember that in the political language game, abrasive discourse, denunciatory discourse, discourse barbed with skepticism and sarcasm, is well within the rules. Discourse that advocates armed rampancy and violence, overtly or covertly, is not.

Do We Reason? Do We Have Free Will? Does It Matter?

I’ve been reading lately a good bit of the social psychology and neuroscience literature devoted to human decision-making, especially as it applies to making moral judgments. It has been a humbling experience but not, I think, a necessarily disheartening one.

By and large, these studies in the science of morality conclude that we are not the rational creatures we think ourselves to be. We are not thoughtful in making moral judgments; our thought processes are not especially subtle or penetrating; our consciousness is not especially discerning or sophisticated. We do not carefully analyze a situation and, on the basis of that analysis, decide whether or not an action is wrong or right. Rather, it seems, our judgments occur beneath or behind or outside of conscious awareness, and are galvanized by emotions, intuitions, and physical sensations. Reason simply justifies decisions always already made by processes external to it. Perhaps Emerson is right: our “primary wisdom” is “Spontaneity or Instinct,”—an “Intuition, whilst all later teaching are tuitions.” And perhaps David Hume was right: reason is “the slave of passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Here is a quick summary of some representative studies:
• What we consider moral or immoral behavior is influenced by the cleanliness or dirtiness of the environment in which the decision is made. Simone Schnall, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, reports that people sitting at a dirty table in a room pervaded by a foul odor consider doctoring a resume to improve their employment prospects wrong; at a clean table in a pleasant-smelling room, they consider it acceptable. Evidently, the emotions aroused by the ambient surroundings transfer to moral judgments.
• Sitting in a comfortable or uncomfortable chair, holding a hold or cold beverage, or filling out a questionnaire with or without a clipboard influence assessments of other people. Holding a hot beverage, sitting in a comfortable chair, and filling out a questionnaire without a clipboard result in friendlier assessments of others.
• Seeing others perform a good deed for someone inspires the observers to feel morally elevated, and motivates them to lend assistance to others themselves, often going out of their way to do so. Thus, the secret of Oprah’s success. As Blaise Pacal noted, “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.”
• Behavior can be “primed” by language. Given a task description containing some words referring to old age, test subjects performed the task more slowly than a control group whose task description did not include those words. Words that refer to higher education led to improved scores in games of Trivial Pursuits.
• On sunny days, people tend to be more satisfied with their lives than on rainy days.
• People who are politically conservative have a larger amygdale—an area in the center of the brain associated with anxiety—and a smaller anterior angulate—a front-brain area associated with optimism and fortitude. Though it is unknown whether these areas are shaped by experience or are inherent in brain structure, the finding suggests political outlooks are not reasoned choices. A “liberal gene”—DRD4—has been identified; its possessor tends to respond positively to unconventional perspectives.
• People seek a “moral equilibrium,” a self-satisfaction that they wish to maintain. Those who experience moral equilibrium are less likely, due to a “moral licensing effect” to help others, feeling that they are already good persons. Those who feel a moral disequilibrium are more likely to help others, thereby restoring a sense of moral balance.
• In his book “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values,” neuroscientist Sam Harris asserts that free will is an illusion. He cites experiments in which the brains of subjects in an MRI machine display activity up to io seconds before consciously deciding to do something. Such findings, Harris says, “are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one’s actions.”

It is difficult not to read this research as yet the latest instance of a 400 year history of human displacement from pride of place. First, Copernicus and Galileo removed earth, and its human inhabitants, from the center of the universe; then, Darwin stiffarmed the belief that we were created imago dei, in the image of God, by theorizing that we were produced from earlier forms of life; then, Freud informed us that we were quite unaware of the motivations for our actions, sequestered as they were in unlit cavern of the flamboyantly irrational id; then, linguists began a mugging of the distinguishing features of human language, finding the so-called “language gene,” Fox 2P, in birds and discovering grammatical complexity in the calls of certain nonhuman creatures; now, the “science of morality” suggests that moral decisions are either automatic mental subroutines or impulse-imbued intensities of feeling that masquerade as deliberative judgment. “It don’t seem natural,” as Huck Finn would say, but the research reckons “it’s so,” and it is tempting to see these findings as assaults on free will and human dignity, as grist for the mill of a despondent determinism or moral irresponsibility.

I think that would be a mistake.

I do not see the revelations of morality science as especially pernicious. If they indeed uncurtain fundamental conditions, then let’s accept them as such. If we know they are true, if we understand that we process our experience of the world through affect and hidden emotion, then we are in a fair way of exerting a governing control over it. Even if our actions spring largely from involuntary factors, taking responsibility for them decreases the lure of infatuated impulsivity. We may not have free will, but we can at least exert that neuroscientist Benjamin Libet calls “free won’t.” We can, like Odysseus, lash ourselves to the mast of restraint.

That reason is not the pure source of our action in the world changes nothing about what we are or what we do. We have always sought to be self-intelligible so we could assume responsibility for ourselves and the world we inhabit. We have always felt moral tugs and urgings. Where our sense of moral value comes from is less important than the fact that we have such a sense. Its origin in no way diminishes its significance, or the value we attach to our goals and intentions. We will still perform charitable acts, still feel compassion, still exhibit loyalty, still meet obligations, still practice self-denial, still entune ourselves with the melody of all the outward-reaching virtues that mark our humanity. We always have. We will still make things, things with design and function, things that incarnate our purposeful striving. We always have. We will still be remarkably, endlessly creative. We always have. Despite being an irreducibly messy bundle of qualities, we will still be adventurous, still feel a transcendent spirit, still be taken by wildly extravagant flashes of imagination. We always have. We have always been taken by courage and love and virtue and faith and wonder and beauty and justice, and we have always written the narrative of that captivity. We always have been, and will continue to be, subjects encountering other subjects, one moving among many, experiencing risk and conflict, and held accountable for what we are and what we do

I am not naive. I have not been Pollyannaed and Panglossed into believing that we live in the best of all possible worlds. I know that the history of human beings on this planet displays lavish cruelty, cruelty that too often bears compound interest. I know that people blink when staring down moral challenges, that hearts and minds have been adamantine, that in taking a long, backward glance, “one sees more devils than vast hell can hold.” Still, I do believe we need not fall into a kind of secular Calvinism, skeptical of the value or efficacy of human actions, simply because we may do things for no good reason. We still do good, in small ways and large. We too easily forget that. It is worth remembering that in the last 150 years we have abolished slavery, that labor unionized to guarantee workers’ rights, that consumers upended “buyer beware” in favor of “seller beware,” that we established civil and voting rights, addressed concerns about gender equality, proscribed environmental degradation, outlawed gay bashing, and asserted non-human animal rights.

Problems, highly vexing, perhaps indurate, problems, assuredly remain. But I choose to take heart from this: while Galileo’s book Sideries Nuncius, Starry Messenger, may have demoted humanity from its exalted perch in the order of things, it ironically promoted humanity as well, for it unveiled truths hidden behind dogma and superstition and unquestioned tradition and enshrined opinion, truths that set knowledge afoot in the world, truths that, finally, in the balance of things, made us, and our world, not the best we and it can be, but better.

The Art of the Insult

It’s a new year, and, at some point during it, inevitably, you’ll want to insult someone. Hurling an insult feels so good; it’s such an explosion of catharsis, such a rapturous rupture of annoyingly ossified social discourse, such a tuft of crabgrass in the Zen garden of civility, such a tasering stimulation of the brain’s reward pathways—and, besides, the recipients just deserve it. This year, though, let’s resolve to elevate our insults, give them some class and sophistication, for classy, sophisticated insults double the cortical arousal: they leave the insultee nonplussedly silent as well as listeringly binsulted. So, to that end, I offer the following selection of insults from that capo di capi of insultitude, William Shakespeare.
• Is his head worth a hat?
• A knot you are of damned bloodsuckers
• A fusty nut with no kernel
• A man who is the abstract of all faults that all men follow
• I desire that we be better strangers
• A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog
• Go thou and fill another room in hell
• Thine face is not worth sunburning
• Priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you
• God grant we never have need of you
• Thy mother’s name is ominous to all children
• He has not so much brain as ear-wax
• He speaks nothing but madman
• Foul indigested lump
• Let vultures gripe they guts
• If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt
• Leave they vain bibble-babble
• Idol of idiot-worshippers
• I’ll carbonade your shanks
• I throw thy name against the bruising rocks
• Thou full dish of fool
• I think thou art an ass
• Were I like thee, I would throw away myself.
• Owner of no one good quality
• You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!
• Methink’st thou art a general offense and every man should beat thee
• That bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies
• There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune
• Thou art unfit for any place but hell
• Thou are pigeon-livered and lack gall
• A most pathetical nit
• You are as a candle, the better burnt out

It’s fun to make up your own using Shakespeare as a model. Here’s a few I’ve created and intend to use this year, in meetings most likely:
• That vial of bubonic mediocrity
• Cease thou thy wince-inducing quantum of ego-addled prattle
• Thy wit is as a chassis onto which nonsense is welded
• Take hence thy puckering astringent ineptitude
• Conscience-deprived credit default swapper
• Oh arrant blunderer, thou speak’st solecistic ignorance
• I find thy thinking of like clarity with the stochastic gradient decline
• Oh unlanced boil; oh zettabyte of intractability, oh sneering dunderheadery
• Has’t not yet recovered from thy intellectual narcolepsy?
• Get thee to the remainder bin, thou tumescent plaything of conformity
• There is no more substance in thee than in a bucket of Karmelkorn
• Save me from thy towering bushwa; feed me not thy intellectual gruel

Weaponed with a Shakespearean insult, you will, in any verbal cage match, send your opponent to an ignominious smackdown. However, full disclosure requires that I include a word of warning. Recall Montressor’s opening sentence in Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado:” “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” And what a revenge! Montressor bricked and mortared up the unfortunate Fortunato, alive, in a small catacomb recess. Perhaps Fortunato failed to make his insult sufficiently Shakespearean. In any event, exercise some caution: make sure that your insultee is not, like Montressor, “a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart,” that he is not “deep, hollow, treacherous and full of guile,” and that he is not “a huge translation of hypocrisy, vilely compiled.”