The Coral Ship

[In my dialect water and order do, in fact, rhyme.]

Come, ship, lie down with us;
Come, ship, lie down and rust.
The sand is soft, the coral is kind,
The sun is dim, we softly bind.
Do not be lonely, we remember
While we grow, and grow forever.
Your shape, our hollows; your stuff, our spires
Where silent fish gather in choirs.
Silence is music, stillness is motion
Growing cathedrals by grains of devotion.
Too long apart from water,
Too long outside of order:
Come ship, sink fast;
The sea has let you in at last.

Versatility

Why is it surprising for someone to be versatile? When the question is (rarely) asked, the usual answer is to blame capital-s Society. Society wants us to specialize; Society wants labor to be divided. Without Society, we would all be versatile. I do not dispute that the state of nature would be one of versatility. But I think it is really small-s society – common friendship, mere company – that keeps versatility rare.

The downside of versatility is that people who admire, or even share, one of your abilities may be contemptuous of the others. “What have you been up to?” An elaborate series of asymmetrical values must be weighed to obtain the answer. It is safe to say building to a writer, unsafe to say writing to a builder; safe to say music to a mathematician, unsafe to say math to a musician. The worst is when they assume day job, and you have to explain: “No, I care about that too.” Being written off is actually something you can feel. It was not said but you still heard it: “Sorry, I thought you were one of us.” Better to be a little apart and aloof from the beginning than to walk into that wall. Certainly if versatility were not nearly a religion to me I would have found some more presentable way to live.

Then there is the problem of taking sides. Your friend the writer calls in a technician to fix their computer. Your friend thinks the technician is subhuman; the technician thinks your friend is braindead. Anything you say will either abet arrogance or insult ignorance; and so, precisely because you understand both points of view, you cannot say anything. The gap is larger, the problem worse, when, say, a plumber is called in. Your friend thinks it proves their own education that they cannot talk to plumbers; the plumber thinks your friend is hardly fit to live. How do you stand – are you for the Morlocks or the Eloi?

But the worst problem is communication. Having a broader base of analogy, you understand faster, but often cannot explain why you understand. Your friend has some half-formed idea; you recognize the shape of it from some far-off source; you say, “That’s just like…” But whatever you say, your friend hears gibberish. It does not matter that you understand; you have committed an error, you have lowered yourself with a blunder, as if you were the traveler-bore who kills conversations with “When I was in…”

Still I think versatility is natural. I often discover that people are more versatile than they think they are, because they have not allowed themselves to recognize, in themselves, abilities which it would be awkward to have others recognize in them. Society is at fault, but not our society; only the fact of society at all.

Coercive perception

Toward a science of memetics consider the phenomenon I will call coercive perception. “That’s not a vase, that’s an old woman’s profile.” “That’s not a sword, that’s a phallic symbol.” “She’s cheating on you.” “That cloud’s shaped like a rabbit!” “That’s not an idea, that’s the false consciousness of the bourgeois.” Or, of course, “That’s not a belief, that’s a meme.”

A perception is coercive when simply understanding it reorients you. Understanding is sufficient; belief is irrelevant. The coercion is instantaneous, irreversible, and permanent; it is seen and cannot be unseen. You cannot be argued out of it, because you never believed it; but, in the end, you may act as though you believe it, because you cannot forget it.

This sounds terrible in the abstract; but in practice it is something we value and seek out. Reading horror stories will coerce your perception of small quiet backwoods towns, of quiet staring backwoods people, of blackletter books and remote silent wastes, to an atmospheric unity. Being coerced this way is pleasant, despite its unpleasant content.

But then imagine a young girl or boy, and the sort of friend who says cruelly, “Did anyone ever tell you look like ———? Look at this picture – can’t you see it?” And of course they see it, they have been coerced to see it, and they will always see it, no matter how absurd and wrong they know it is. They will see it till they die.

This kind of perception is unique to human beings. It is not the substance of human difference, but it might make a good test for human difference – better than the silly Turing test, which even Eliza has passed. So this thing is supposed to be intelligent – can its perceptions be coerced? Does its intelligence close over its perceptions? Correct perception is no test of intelligence. A mirror perceives correctly; what only perceives correctly is no more than a mirror. What cannot misperceive cannot think; what cannot be coerced in its perceptions cannot communicate.

Sociality

Living among animals, you notice there are people – many people – who can handle themselves well with animals, but not with other people. This is strange, because body language and tone of voice are the only channels of commmunication with animals, but body language and tone of voice are where these unfortunates fail with other people – they are oblivious to other people’s cues, and when they speak they seem cursed with bodies they do not know what to do with.

I classify this as one kind of overthinking. They believe that there is something special about social interaction, some difference that raises human sociality above animal sociality, some special prospect of human connection in what human beings, and only human beings, share. But when they reach for it, they lean too far, and they grasp only dead air.

They are not wrong about the difference; they are just looking in the wrong place. Our difference lies, not in social interaction, but beyond it. The mechanism of sociality is not how we connect, but how we avoid and regulate connection. In all human beings there is something so tender, so piteous, so kind, so sympathetic and so generous that it would sooner have us, like the heraldic pelican, wound ourselves to issue blood and give it, than see another go thirsty – something more than vulnerable, self-vulning. To survive we must armor and bar this something; so we place it in the same protected center of our instincts where the animal keeps its throat and belly. It will not be exposed to you until you have proven trustworthy, well-intentioned, and undemanding. That you are human does not give you the right to expect others to undress for you, even if you undress for them; to expect this deeper unveiling, even if you go about so deeply unveiled, is deeper folly.

Scientific Chewing

I am not going to tell you to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Once you know that Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard is people, you grasp the idea. But at the end of the book, after surviving innumerable horrors and humiliations (the only mercy Sinclair allows him is a stint as a migrant worker), the main character falls in with a group of talkative Socialists. Sinclair is artist enough not to make them saints. He makes them almost silly. He wants us not to agree with their solutions, but to respond to the fact of their caring, to respond to their trying to do anything at all. He wants us not to admire them, but to imagine ourselves as one of them. I forget the rest of the projects, but one, mentioned in passing, stuck in my mind. One man proposes “to double the nutritive value of food through the practice of scientific chewing.”

My mind has an alarm for absurdity in reforms and projects; scientific chewing is the noise it makes. Sometimes I read about a project, and despite its well-designed site, its clever name and cleverer slogan, and the intent, conscientious faces of its young founders – all I hear is scientific chewing.

All useful ideas have three life stages: an infancy when they seem ridiculous; an adolescence when they seem all-important; and a maturity when they are present and useful, but limited, and possibly invisible. Scientific chewing belongs to the adolescence of the idea of the scientific. Those who have only recently learned the benefits of scientific handwashing are susceptible to the idea that chewing might also advance.

The projects that make me think of scientific chewing belong to the same stage, the analogous adolescence, of other ideas. Recent examples are many. Online has finally achieved its maturity. There are no more projects tantamount to online chewing, though their weight once sank the economy. Social is in the throes of adolescence; most days some variant of social chewing shows up in the news, flush with seed funding. Crowdsourced is just settling down; mobile is just hitting puberty.

These examples are worth enumerating because we are very fortunate in them. The worst their excesses have done is make fools of us. We have been spared the upheavals and atrocities that accompanied the adolescence of ideas like the people or the nation, like society or central planning. The motion of ideas is circular, but not static; a cycloid, not an orbit; but though it moves forward, it moves with wheels that are heavy and iron, and able to run you down.

My interest is not critical but analytic. I want to know where I stand; I want to know when to get out of the way. If ideas really move in a circle, born boosters and born skeptics will both be right sometimes, like stopped clocks. Scientific chewing is my cue to stand with the skeptics. I have no equally vivid cue to switch the other way; though I have found that my initial sense that something is pointless and weird reliably predicts its popularity – witness the Internet.

I know this essay is a little miscellaneous; so are the rest of the essays where I try to think about ideas as such. I feel something enormous and terrainous loom in the darkness; when something lights that bulk I observe it as an explorer, and not knowing which features are most important, I cannot omit any.

Amateurs

In the twentieth century, better a professional and wrong than an amateur and right. A lie in the high tower commanded the respect and attention of the world. It shaped the textbooks and the encyclopedias, it directed the cameras and the microphones. A truth in the street had to recruit and organize, had to keep the heat on and blow the lid off.

In the twenty-first century, better an amateur and wrong than a professional and right. A lie in the street finds friends everywhere. It supplies interests and activities, it bonds a community: the less self-supporting, the more room for supporters. A truth in the high tower must patiently plait its proofs until they hang long and thick enough to support the perilous climb down.

The distinction between the amateur and the professional is not necessary or ancient. It is a conclusion of the philosophy of pragmatism, one of pragmatism’s dynamic alternatives to the statics of classical philosophy. Everything used to be much more like cooking, where the difference between professionals and amateurs – the difference between livelihood and pastime – is one of better ingredients, better equipment, and wider experience – a difference not of kind but of degree.

The distinction does not divide one scale of practice into the amateur and the professional; it removes professional practice from amateur judgment. Success in all practice had been judged against something prior to practice. There were judges then because there were standards. But the professional, having some arduous qualification, defines the profession as what professionals do. Professionalism is not a standard; professionalism is an alternative to standards. Now there are standards because there are judges. Who are you to tell someone instructed and trained, tested and proven – to tell a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a scientist – who are you tell them what to be? They are not told; they show. If you must have a system, describe them; but do not expect them to notice. Apes do not care about primatology; scientists do not care about philosophy of science.

We do not recognize this division as pragmatism because it has left pragmatism behind and become, instead of a conclusion, a postulate – no, more than a postulate, it has become its own form of logic. The necessities of professionalism define reality. Professions do not serve purposes; purposes serve professions. Not that professionalism is priestcraft. The professional is not the priest of the god; the professional is the very god, and unanswerable. It is difficult to read Job today except as God the Professional shutting down His critics.

Professionalism won; but professionalism is not self-sustaining. Like nature around technology, amateurism grows up in all the cracks of professionalism, and encloses all of its structures. One of the wonders of the early web was to see, in all its private seriousness, the wider ecosystem of amateurism inside which professionalism lives. Until then professionals, like migrating birds, came from somewhere, somehow, and went somewhere, for something. Now we saw the grave mimicry of the professional manner by which postulants committed themselves; we saw the ingenious criticisms by which they kept themselves involved; we saw how the necropolis of obsolete methods, dead-end theories, and abandoned movements was refurbished and inhabited.

But nature around technology is not just what remains of nature before technology; it is something different. Prey becomes pest; wild becomes weed. Amateurism around professionalism is something different than amateurism before professionalism. Separation from money made it resourceful; separation from recognition made it incorrigible; separation from responsibility made it reckless. These changes cannot be reversed. To let go of professionalism would no more restore Renaissance men, gentleman scientists, scholar-adventurers, or philosopher-legislators to mankind, than to remove mankind would restore to nature the mammoth, the aurochs, or the thylacine. There are lines of descent in human varieties as much as in natural species. With these too, extinction is forever. Sometimes backbreeds and hybridization revive the traits; but without a niche to inhabit the result is only a curiosity. In an ecology, if a niche is extant, something will fill it, and if the niche is gone, some other ecology has displaced it. Effectual amateurism has been re-opened; but what we get from it may as little resemble what we had before, as the kangaroo resembles the deer.

Professionalism is an evident pathology. Its privileges are too tempting for us. All professionalism decays toward the asymptote of the DSM. But for now, there is no alternative. Professionalism and amateurism have coexisted too long; they require one another for correction. One cannot be right unless the other is wrong; for now, to be right at all, we need them both.

Historiography

Historians are the natural predators of history. History, like entropy, always increases in a closed system. Without historians to control it, history would suffocate us. Whole peoples live today enthralled by history, peoples for whom the dishonors of a thousand years ago require the murders of today – and all because they never had historians to set them free.

History always increases. There are always more artifacts and more events, always more memories binding those artifacts and those events. The natural condition of history is not the absence of history, but absolute history – when commemoration and observance fill every every hour and block every path, until any choice is violation or sacrilege, and any novelty is hubris or corruption.

Of course there are other, uglier ways to fight history than the historian’s. But besides its low success rate, fighting history with atrocity is perverse. It is only a way of destroying someone else’s history; the winner is still doomed to have their own history written.

The historian is gentler and more effective. In consolidating and concentrating history, in resolving it with narrative, the historian does to history what the distiller does to grain: reduces so many tons of space-consuming, care-intensive material into something stable, compact, and portable. The historian who puts a name and meaning to a period gives us categories of thought that allow us to sort and assess masses of artifacts and memories that would otherwise lay total claim to our attention and devotion.

History is not over. History is still happening. History is still flowing from the invisible meanwhile to the obvious retrospect. But just because we are in history, because we must learn from it – so we must not submit to it, we must not inherit our place in it; we must be free enough of it that we can range over it, that we can examine all of it and it can examine us. Let us look at the past and let it look at us; let us invite the dead to judge the living as their most impartial judges. But first we must be free to take the judgment of the best wherever they are found, not only among our fathers and forebears.

Polyps make coral; trees make wood; human beings make history. Freedom from history is not freedom without history, but freedom for history: the freedom that makes us equal in history with those who have come before us and those who will come after us: not the wreck of the past, not the redeemers of the past, not the seed of the future, not the betrayers of the future, but what we are: the inescapable present.

Common sense

I respect common sense only because it is inconsistent. Of course consistency is good; certainly inconsistency is bad; but there is a kind of knowledge which is useful, not because it is known to be right, but useful only until it is known to be right.

Beginning with what we cannot deny, consistency brings us to what we cannot support. Surprise is a conserved quantity. We can begin with common-sense principles and end with surprising conclusions; or, if we wish to derive common-sense conclusions, in working backward we will arrive at surprising principles. Consistency always incurs surprise – surprise relative to common sense.

This is why I avoid political systems. They begin with, they have as their attraction, common-sense conclusions I could no more disagree with than fail to think of myself. Of course I see, and seeing condemn, the horrors of exploitation, the grotesqueness of consumption; of course I see, and seeing condemn, the incompetence of government, the farce of bureaucracy. But commitment demands consistency, and what begins in the recognition of common sense ends unrecognizably.

Always use common sense; never trust it. Common sense is not wisdom, it is wisdom made fungible. All of its rings true, but none of it agrees with itself. You can no more think with common sense than you can eat money.

Art vs. Life

Sometimes art frightens me. Sometimes I wonder what art is taking to match what it gives. Surely talk was faster and more excursive before recording; surely clothing was more splendid and plumed before photography; surely gesture and pose were quicker and more lifelike before movies. Maybe worship was more devoted, before idols and icons; maybe love was stronger, memory keener, regret fiercer before the portrait; maybe voices were softer, birdsong sweeter, before music. Art universalizes particular experience, delivers it across space, time, and language. But what we receive as if transmitted, might only be lost; what we receive as if preserved, might only be embalmed; what we receive as if translated, might only be parodied. How are we, art-shrouded, art-addled, to know any better? When every sense bends to its particular art, do we more watch than see, more listen than hear, more savor than taste? At best art stands between us and life; at worst it supplants our lives. What could Arthur Henry Hallam have done with his life to match In Memoriam? – where the use of grief in art prevents us from sharing that grief, we who so value the expression. I fear art and I love it; I fear it as I love it, because love is power given, and power brings abuse of power. So many minds are lost to art, full of images and stories they do not even recognize as art, puppets to old, ingrown art (they call it common sense). I study art, value it, and judge it not to pass life but to save life: because to study, value, and judge art is the only defense against it.

Cognitive psychology 5/5

If all this were true it would have two consequences. First, it would require a strict distinction between what a person reports their perception to be and what that perception actually is. The act of perceiving a perception in order to describe or render it would be understood as a skill, subject to cultivation. What cognitive psychology identifies as a bias of human perception would be no more than an untrained clumsiness. And second, it would regard the ways that cognitive psychology identifies to influence human behavior as weaknesses to be compensated by education, not intrinsic handles to pull in a desirable direction.

All this essaying is futile, I know. Even if I were right, no one would ever call me right, except in retrospect; and I am very likely wrong. In doubting a large field of scientific work I am certain to sound like a crank. I can only note that I am not nailing up theses; and that if I am wrong I am only hurting myself.

Postscript 2014

Since I wrote this essay I have participated, as a subject, in several experiments in cognitive psychology. In consequence, I now regard cognitive psychology as a pseudoscience.

I still think cognitive psychology is interesting. It is philosophically interesting, not because it uses science to cast light on the problems of philosophy, but simply because it is interesting philosophy. Its scientific pretensions are false.

Here is the problem: in order to avoid the appearance of shirking, the subject has no choice but to express preferences in the absence of preference and beliefs in the absence of belief. Even without financial stakes, ordinary social conventions compel the subject, in order to be kind to the experimenter, to deceive them.

It goes like this. The experimenter asks, “Does this make me look fat?” The subject says, “No.” And the experiment concludes: “Human beings are incapable of accurate estimation of one another’s weight.” Soon books are written about “cognitive weight bias.” “For our ancestors,” the press release begins, “underestimating one another’s weight was an important survival strategy.” This is what cognitive psychology is, and it is all cognitive psychology is: the heedless elaboration of a social solecism.

To put it another way: professors should not experiment on students for the same reasons professors should not date students. (Effectively all cognitive psychology is done by professors experimenting on students; where the subjects are not students, they are still acting in the role of students.) Between professors and students there are power differentials that preclude sexual consent. But someone who cannot give an honest answer to a sexual proposition certainly cannot give an honest answer to a personality inventory. If it is a bad idea for professors to date students, it is a far worse idea for professors to experiment on them.