The Narrative Fallacy Revisited

February 19th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

I started the last post with this quote:

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
~ Albert Bartlett

Nassim Taleb has identified a similar but more general shortcoming in the human race:

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract. Everything good (aesthetics, ethics) and wrong (Fooled by Randomness) with us seems to flow from it.

Historically, we have tried to use things such as narratives to explain abstract ideas. Arguments have been made that religious stories should be understood metaphorically and not literally, for example. Such arguments have not always been convincing to the larger audience.

I’ve had many students that were not turned on by math. It can be a real struggle to get them interested. Some of the first advice I ever got as a teacher was something like, “Keep it visual, keep it hands-on, and try to connect it to something in your student’s world.” In other words, serve the shortcoming.

At this time in our growth, however, I think there is something emerging that seems to directly fight the shortcomings that Bartlett and Taleb identify. There is a group of people that  favor the abstract and scorn the narrated. I don’t know what this group thinks of the myth of growth, but they might have new and interesting solutions to the problems growth can bring, and the problems of religion too.

Lawrence Krauss, in a discussion panel on a radio show, said that some research suggests, “the only way to really change people’s minds is to confront them directly with their wrong misconceptions, and lead them to an internal contradiction so that they discover that for themselves.”  (I don’t remember whose link I followed, but thank you!)

This is a tough choice, to perpetually face up to what’s wrong, internally and socially, but people are making this choice. People are trying to lead their lives by willingly facing up to contradiction, inconsistency and personal inability. I think people are consciously choosing to fight the narrative fallacy, and deliberately choosing the hard, slow road of rational thought as an “aesthetic” (guiding principles for the appreciation of things like beauty and ethics).

In an earlier post, I tried to make a fun, rough, short list of possible tenets for this supposed “new worldview”. This time I think I want to put them in the form of questions. Do you try to live by any of these “new aesthetics”? *

Do you like to measure things? Do you trust numerical data over anecdotal data, and even try to consciously maintain skepticism over anecdotal evidence for things?

Do you think having multiple sources of information is better than having one source of information? Are you skeptical of authoritative sources unless they have been rigorously tested?

Do you scorn supernatural explanations and even have an emotional reaction against them (They’re not even wrong)? Do you favor rational processes and have an emotional appreciation for them? (I think Taleb once said of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene that it read like mathematics. He was complimenting Dawkins on the elegance of the writing.)

Have you ever changed your mind on something because of logical conclusions? Do you value rationalism, even at the high cost of letting go of some personal motivations?

Do you believe competence should be the measure of vocational positions and social positions?

Not everyone does hold to these kinds of views, or at least cannot consistently. Some are trying to, though.

What do you think?

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* I don’t really think this is ‘new’ but I think it can be thought of as an aesthetic. I’m trying to suggest a significant number of people do share these values now, making them a shared, collective commitment to act in a certain way.

Link to the radio program: Can Science shape Human Values? And Should it? with Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Simon Blackburn

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Eat, Pray, Love – Empathy’s Dirty Little Secrets

October 12th, 2011   by   Andrew

Liz, Naomi and Lyra – Three Daughters, Three Stories

Chapter 16 of the series Myths and Dragons

Part 1 – Liz and Empathy’s Dirty Little Secrets
Part 2 – Naomi and the Hard Decisions Between What is and What Should Be
Part 3 – Lyra and Changing the Metaphors (or Making a New Map over the Old)

Setup:

In the first part of this series I looked at three mythic male heroes that make up a significant part of our ancient cultural heritage. In the second part of this series I looked at three new myths from science fiction that I think will shape how the future generations will frame their personal experiences. In this last part of the series, I want to look at the stories of three women. What do they say about our maps for behaviour – how the individual navigates between the known world and the unknown world?

I’m terribly late when it comes to the whole Eat, Pray, Love thing. I saw Julia Roberts’ version before getting to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book. For both the movie and the book, most of the reviews and commentaries I noticed seemed to be of two camps. This person was delightfully envious of Liz’s fun and admittedly self-indulgent journey to some of the world’s “I” countries. That person was eye-rollingly underwhelmed with Liz’s navel-gazing and supposedly spiritual journey only to catch the eye of a charming, cosmopolitan, older man in the end.

I hope I’m not just rehashing old criticisms or adorations, but I saw a side of empathy that confirmed a few of my theories on spirituality and a few of my worries about people.

1.
Liz talks to her God frequently, and she makes no bones about just how personal the relationship is with her God.

What I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this – I used to have a this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God.” (14)

Her God, like many of us, is a plural concoction. We like to believe we have taken the best features of our experiences to make the finest self, or many selves, we could. And we like to think that of our Gods, too. And since we are living more and more internationally now, we are motivated now to see how we fit ourselves and our Gods into such plural roles.

All the more telling, in those conversations her God talks to her in Liz’s own voice. Early in the book Liz talks about a night she spent in the bathroom. Her husband was sleeping, blissfully unaware Liz was going through a crisis of identity just a closed door away. Ultimately, Liz did not get down on her bathroom floor and ask her God, through tears, “What is real?” or “What is true?” She didn’t even ask, “Are you real, God?” At the heart of her crisis, she was not in the least concerned with reality. She asked her God for something much more useful, and much more important:

Please tell me what to do. (15)

In the moments that shape our lives and construct our character, our own identities, we want to know how to act, what we should do, more than anything else.

She then explains how she heard the voice, her own voice, say to her, “Go back to bed, Liz.”(16) After that, she is willing to abandon all bonds of material possessions and commitments in order to take up the journey. She is able to act. It’s amazing what a good night’s sleep can do for a person when that person is finally comfortable with herself (or with what she is doing).

2.
Liz never once thinks of going to a Christian community or leader for part of her spiritual journey. She talks about her Protestant upbringing but certainly doesn’t identify with that culture. Instead, she seems to find hope in the foreign, the different. In particular, she is drawn to traditions that seem to offer personal experiences with whatever divine natures that might be out there, ready for relationship. This is a predictable course of events when it comes to the Hero’s Journey, or even the Heroine’s Journey. She sees something wrong with the known world around her, and so seeks the unknown, and she seeks a different concept of self. As a result, she brought back an experience that a lot of readers identified with, or at least could see themselves in.

Christianity has a long history of mysticism within its spirituality. But it has been outsourced over the last hundred years or so to self-help authors, new wave gurus and other cultural injections. And the typical, traditional trappings of the Sunday services, committee meetings or community outreach projects all downplay the personal experience for the sake of the social event or the social group. As a result, prayer has a distorted reputation. It is something to study in terms of efficacy, or to scorn, or more plainly to feed to the reductionist knife. It certainly isn’t a meet-n-greet-n-get-cozy between a person’s self and a person’s God.

It’s a statement of the times in the Western world, when even Western people looking for personal identity and personal spiritual communion don’t consider the resources of the culture around them. Liz goes to Rome to have a spiritual experience with pasta and pizza and never cares to catch a glimpse of the pope.

She doesn’t see herself in the pope. And she certainly doesn’t seem to see her God in the pope either.

3.
While in Bali, Liz becomes fast friends with a woman named Wayan. Wayan is about Liz’s age. She is divorced, like Liz. She is a professional – Bali’s equivalent to a naturopathic doctor or healer. She has dreams of owning her own home someday to take care of her daughter and two adopted girls. Liz finds the girls adorable and charming, and wants to do something remarkable for Wayan. Liz has a lot of wonderful, professional friends back home and asks them all to help so that Wayan can purchase a home and have a permanent place of business.

It’s a delightful success story for empathy. Liz sees a part of herself in Wayan. She sees the the struggles a professional, caring, divorced woman like Wayan must deal with because of Bali culture. And Liz wants to make things right. And I’m sure many of the readers empathized with the situation too. It’s well written.

The event made me look back on all of Liz’s relationships and friendships in the story. Liz has a great time in Italy. Several friends and family members came to visit her. They see the sights and remember past experiences together. In the Ashram in India Liz spends a lot of time with fellow Americans. Divorce and middle-class professionalism are common denominators with most of them. In Bali she starts a friendship with a guitar player that once lived in New York. He was deported due to the stricter immigrant regulations after September of 2001. They both reminisce of the places they know and love  and used to frequent in New York.

Would Liz have helped Wayan if she had not seen so much of herself in Wayan? I can’t help but wonder if underneath the gracious act Liz was only really helping herself, in a way. In all her travels, she seemed to only strike up relationships with other versions of herself. She went into the unknown to find her personal identity, and she found others like her to share the journey.

And would Liz’s audience have found so much in the story if they did not see so much of themselves in Liz?

Empathy seems to need something common or shared in order to initiate a relationship or spark a positive social change. However, I fear this isn’t really starting a relationship with “the other”. Being so very comfortable with your God doesn’t bridge the differences that still remain between people, especially when you don’t see anything in common between yourself and “the other”.

Liz’s story turns out to be important, not just for the success it found or the empathy it sparked in its readers. It shows us just how much farther we still have to go. Liz took up the quest, made some material sacrifices and found an identity she could literally share with some others in the world. But in many ways, she only found herself, which means there is a much larger, unknown world still out there waiting.

Maybe the same thing can be said about us?

What do you think?

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Star Trek: Healthy Attitudes, and Some Sex Too

September 19th, 2011   by   Andrew

Part of chapter 14 of the series Myths and Dragons

The first interracial kiss on television occurred in November of 1968 between Lieutenant Uhura and Captain James T. Kirk. In the episode,“Plato’s Stepchildren”, the Enterprise crew make contact with an ageless people that have organized their society on ancient Greek ideals.

Gene Roddenberry was determined to have the kiss in the episode despite the fears of the NBC executives. What the television executives didn’t know was that the public was ready and curious and prepared to go into that unknown. The feedback and fan mail generated by the kiss proved it.

Television was a great medium for science fiction. Each week the Enterprise crew had a meaningful adventure into some part of the unknown. But Star Trek did more than just entertain the audience. It offered a complete and inspiring attitude for how we could reach a future worth striving for. And that is the greatest gift a myth could give to a culture.

Kirk’s attitude towards women is legendary. But when the research is collected, Kirk’s reputation should not be about conquering women. He wasn’t a notch-collector.  In fact, enough women initiated relationships themselves with Kirk to dispel that theory. He was looking to have some fun adventures and take some risks, but it was never a contest of numbers. It was about romance, curiosity, and when a situation gets tight, completing his mission.

Some followers of Star Trek believe Kirk’s true love can be found somewhere between his ship and his first mate, and even Roddenberry himself made some open-minded comments about the chemistry between Kirk and Spock. But as far as television goes, they haven’t boldly gone there. Maybe Star Trek doesn’t have the future all figured out. (Much like us now – we don’t have human sexuality or alien sexuality all figured out,  and we shouldn’t be making too many bold claims about anyone or anything.)

Whatever you might think of Spock and Kirk, one thing they did share was a committed love of exploring the unknown as a team. And in all the different incarnations of Star Trek, that has been the one thing that defined the relationships between the characters the most. Each crew, as a team, was excited to face and explore the unknown, prepared and ready to learn from it. They weren’t satisfied with whatever they already knew or assumed to be true.

Starfleet, in the Star Trek world, has an intriguing mandate – scientific exploration, diplomatic relations, military protection and civil peace-keeping. It is structured on a command hierarchy but social co-operativity. Orders might be top-down but ideas are discussed horizontally and initiative comes from every individual. Google and today’s tech businesses would be envious of the teamwork and commitment this inspires in its members. Even if it’s just a fictional organization, and therefore “not real”, it gives us a glimpse into what might be possible, and how we can work towards it.

I often wondered how all of it was possible. How can they make all the problems of the world simply disappear? Part of the answer seemed to come from technology. Another part came from attitude and policy. In Star Trek, our planet was always portrayed as a place that had shrugged off the violent and brutal past. National borders were abandoned and people were all considered citizens of Earth. A weather modification net was in place to avert or manage most natural tragedies. Institutional religious strife was a rarity . Universal Healthcare and Medical research solved almost all physical problems or impairments. Almost everyone was well-adjusted, accepted for who they were, competent, and given the education or tools or practice to become self-fulfilled individuals.

Come on! Human beings don’t work that way, do they? Could they? Where’s the usual human ignorance?

One of my favourite part-time characters from The Next Generation was Lieutenant Reginald Barclay – a socially uncomfortable introvert with a stutter, a hypochondriac dealing with transporter phobia, and a lonely guy suffering from holodeck addiction (something we might have to address in our near future). Barclay had a long career with Starfleet, but he always had personality issues, social issues, addiction issues. I swear, if the episode’s plot needed a guy with issues, the writers called in Barclay.

Barclay wasn’t all that good at dealing with his issues. He wanted to ignore his problems mostly, or create a fantasy world in the holodeck where he could ‘play’ the hero, rather than make real relationships with the people around him. But with the help of his superior officers, and the guidance of friends and therapists, Barclay faced and came to terms with his problems. He never seemed to fully conquer them, but he learned how to live with them while still contributing to the work and lives of those around him. He even got a chance at a romantic adventure or two. Maybe even Kirk would be proud…

I guess that might be the final lesson of Star Trek for me. The future isn’t going to be perfect. And people won’t be either. To think so is ignorant and unfair to anyone that will have to live there.

People will still struggle with themselves and with others. They will find or make threats and conflicts. There will be problems of iniquity and under-representation. But the right attitude does not try to stop problems from coming up ever again. That is a denial of the very nature of existence. Instead, the right attitude prepares the individual to be strong enough and wise enough to face the challenges existence has to offer. This is possible when you have the support of a good team with you, a commitment to shared exploration, and a healthy curiosity for the adventure you can have together.

And so, even if that world isn’t real, it has to be asked: isn’t it worth striving for?

What do you think?

Do you have a favourite Star Trek character or episode?

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Star Wars: Past, Present, Future

September 16th, 2011   by   Andrew

Chapter 14 in the series Myths and Dragons

Recently, NASA has found a planet in orbit around two suns. The planet was quickly compared to Tatooine, the childhood home of Luke and Anakin Skywalker.

I still have a VHS box set of the three original Star Wars movies. Not even the touched up “special editions”. I mean old special effects from models and pyrotechnics – engineers playing around with toys in a big industrial playroom.

And yes, I still watch them. The original movies were made of awesome, and so they remain awesome today. The limits of 30 or 40 year old technology don’t limit my imagination.

I’m not much of a traditionalist or anything. I can sort of empathize with George Lucas’s desire to constantly innovate. He isn’t one to abandon a great work as “good enough”, and that says something about how important storytelling is to him. But at the same time, I can enjoy the brilliance of the original series without feeling slighted by the updated and reincarnated “even more special editions”.

Apparently, for the Blu-Ray set, he’s made a small change to the end of Return of the Jedi. In the original, when Emperor Palpatine is about to finish off Luke for good with the blue lightning, Darth Vader says nothing but stoically decides to protect his son and throw the emperor into the abyss. In the newer version, Vader has something to say about it.

Now, why would Lucas want to make this change?

Almost immediately, fans had something to say about it.

Youtube is now filled with little parodies like this. And maybe that’s how it should be. The audience is part of the story now, and it should be able to say, “This is our story too!”

Star Wars is sacred. It’s a big part of our contemporary mythology. And that means some people’s very identities are wrapped up in the story, and what the story says.

There are websites devoted to the story of Star Wars that thoroughly examine each and every scene, every layer of meaning, and every goof-up. Every line is scripture for those of us that love the story. Even the characters and scenes we don’t like, we still accept, as long as we get to play with it or make fun of it or fast-forward to the scenes we do like.

The scene in the throne room where Emperor Palpatine tempts Luke says a lot about how we look at our relationships even today. The story, in the end, is about a father and a son and the over-controlling social order governing their relationship.

It’s quite Abrahamic, really. Vader is to sacrifice his son. Luke is to sacrifice his father. The victor would ‘complete’ their service and commitment to the Empire.

But that’s not how it turns out. Neither Luke nor Vader are 100% committed to the Empire. Nothing is as complete as the emperor would like to think. And what’s more, it is the son that redeems the father, and not the other way around.

Luke finally does surrender, but he does so as a true hero. He does not surrender to his father, the villain, the mechanized man, the tool of the Empire, the unchanging, unforgiving, all too certain and ever-lurking Sith, or simply put, the past. He doesn’t submit to the emperor either, the one in power, the ruthless tyrant, the will to dominate, the controlling overlord of social order, or in other words, the present. Luke is not committing, ultimately, to what was. And he is not committed to or daunted by what is, either. Instead, Luke commits himself to what should be. He has an idealized vision of himself and his father, regardless of how well either stand up to that ideal. He’s willing to face the consequences of this commitment unarmed, completely vulnerable. By finally stopping and refusing to play the Emperor’s game of wills, he offers a moment of conscious reflection and a possibility for change in attitude.

Whether Darth Vader says, “No!” or not, his decision is that his son is more important than any ideas he may have about the authority of the emperor or the certainty that comes from his own anger. He makes a choice to sacrifice himself for his son, and in doing so becomes Anakin once again, even if it means his own death.

The lesson is one repeated again and again in mythology. The past can hold no authority unless it serves its children. And the present is just a temporary emperor.

What do you think?

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Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology

September 15th, 2011   by   Andrew

One summer when I was in school, my girlfriend at the time had a placement in Ottawa. If I visited her during the week, I would have to entertain myself during the day while she was at work. One of my favourite things to do was explore the downtown Byward Market.

Imagine a few city blocks in a North American capital outfitted like a modest international bazaar. Established franchise restaurants competing with street-meat vendors and old family-owned diners. Posh stores selling flower-pots from Provence beside clothing shops hawking t-shirts with all their collar tags cut out. Pedestrians crowding out the vehicles while still sharing some gracious-but-busy right of way on the paved lanes.

But the best spot for me was The Book Market. The basement was filled with music – sheet music, old records and retired instruments. It was still quiet like a bookstore, but there was a song in each shopper’s head as they went from one old cardboard box to another in search of something rare and precious. One time I found a book of piano music with the themes from the Rocky movies underneath George Gershwin’s I’ve Got Rhythm. ( I ended up buying both…)

The main level was more routine — cook books and war books and the recently released novels from Stephen King or Michael Crichton or Margaret Atwood or whatever.

The top floor was my paradise. Sci-fi and Fantasy-Lit paperbacks stuffed together and arranged alphabetically by author. In the pulpy recesses of that upper-room I found a book that changed my life. In fact, it changes my life each and every time I pick it up.

It was used when I got it, and I’ve beaten it up a little myself. I tried to give it some protective edging (masking tape) to slow down the process of deterioration.  I found it in the 90s, but it was published in 1978 as a kind of textbook. Each chapter opens up with an introduction explaining a mythic pattern in science fiction, written cooperatively by a sci-fi writer and a sci-fi critic. Good ol’ teamwork.

I want to use this book and my experience as an introduction to the next part of this series – “The Contemporary Myth”. Three science fiction stories stand out, for me, as examples of this modern story. And curiously enough, all three stories are told through a screen:

1. The Star Wars story

2. The Star Trek story

3. The Matrix story

These three stories reflect a contemporary “ethos”, a way of being, that is now embedded into how the contemporary generations structure their relationships to the world, to other people, and to their selves. These three stories have tapped into the identities of their audiences so deeply that new religions have been born out of each of them (one example here).

Why? They are not real, obviously.

What do these new stories offer that old myths and present sciences do not?

I’d love to hear your ideas on this. I think it has to do with the direction in which science fiction looks. It’s not literally about the past, or the present, and maybe not even about eternity. It tends to be about what might be next.

I’ve added a quote below from Patricia Warrick’s introduction to Chapter 1 (note: gender-exclusive language left unedited. Please remember this was written more than 30 years ago):

Science fiction describes a future time that will be different from the present in at least one significant way. In contrast, traditional myths typically are unchanging in the universe; they propose that the order of the world and man’s destiny are immutable. Contemporary man is sharply aware that time’s arrow moves irreversibly into the future – a future that promises him only one certainty: it will be different from the present and past. Time is no longer cyclic and repetitive.

The unknown tends always to be threatening to man. He needs to find a way to cope with the novel. The science fiction imagination comes to terms with the uncertainty of the future by making up stories about what it might be like when it arrives. In the same vein, the imagination comes to terms with the vast cosmic spaces that dwarf man to a particle by making up stores about man successfully adventuring through those endless spaces sprinkled with stars and galaxies.

It seems safe to assume that in previous myths both the teller and the listener believed the story was true. In contrast, the participants in a science fiction myth are very conscious that the story is not true; however, they do believe that in the future it just might be true – for the good science fiction story always has an aura of plausibility about it. It does not violate known scientific concepts. The working of the science fiction imagination is not dissimilar to that of the modern scientist, who knows he can never transcend the human reference point in studying the universe, and so he will never really know truth, whatever that may be. He can only say that our experience up to the present is best represented by a particular model. Tomorrow’s experience may require a new model. Scientists deal with models describing reality and not with ultimate truths. The scientist is willing to discard one model for another if he finds the new model works better. The science fiction imagination designs all the possible models it can conceive that describe how the future might be. And because this imagination has always been very inventive and fertile, a rich abundance of futures has been created.

Earlier myths tend to be very clear in their meanings and their concepts of good and evil. The devil my try to disguise himself, but down underneath, his qualities are known to all. The myth defines with authority what is good and evil in the universe. But science fiction myths have a quality of ambiguity about them. They are much less certain of what man’s relationship to the natural world around him and to the cosmos is. Good and evil can no longer be easily labeled. This uncertainty may be a reflection of the fact that contemporary man is in transition from one cultural mode to another – from a pastoral society to an industrial and then postindustrial or information society. With this shift in cultural patterns, his values are also being transformed. But the quality of ambiguity may also reflect the awareness of science that certainty is not possible in describing the matter that comprises the material world.

We are coming to understand that nature is not a machine at which we peek, but a network of interconnected happenings that extend through the whole universe. Man is enmeshed in that network, and his act of observation is an event that effects a change. It alters the matter he observes from the way it would have behaved without his act or observation. Further, we begin to realize that because we are among the parts of the universal network, we cannot with certainty understand the whole. Uncertainty and a resultant ambiguity in any statement reflect the reality of man’s position in a mysterious universe forever in process. The rich array of shifting science fiction images of the future catch and model that uncertainty.

What do you think?

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