I have done nothing interesting since I last blogged. Not quite true as I had poutine for dinner and poutine is always interesting. I wasn’t planning on it, but the chicken hadn’t defrosted, and I don’t have defrost a potato. Can you eat a potato after it’s been frozen? I think the protagonist of The Martian Did and he’s a botanist, so I believe him. Reminds me how much I love a story where the hero’s superpowers are botany and fixing stuff. As much as I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I was disappointed that they forgot about Daisy/Skye’s original superpower, computer hacking. Intelligence is not given its due in fiction. The titular character and protagonist of the Hogwarts books should have been Hermione Granger. That’s one of the many reasons that the Tiffany Aching books are so much better.
That last paragraph is so me, talking about poutine led to discussing how intelligent characters are portrayed in fiction. I have a host of flaws, but I like myself, I’m weird in the good way. Don’t take my word for it, Maura Kennedy told me I was. Her exact words were “You’re weird in the way we like.”
I had one of the mystery bagels I bought on Monday for breakfast. It’s still a mystery. It was dark like cinnamon raison but there were no raisons. Thought maybe whole wheat but that wasn’t it. It had a subtle flavor that I couldn’t identify. I wasn’t fond of it so I’m glad it was subtle. It was drowned out by the hameggandcheese. Something else I like about myself. I taught word to accept hameggandcheese as a properly spelled word. Maybe I was born to be a German, they like mashing words together like that.
Time to dive into the deep end of the pool; I can’t find the ladder to enter slowly. One of the most powerful forces in human psychology is Everybody Knows. People evolved to prefer to be in harmony with those around us. We so often reach a consensus, so much so that what we notice is the dissention. As a kid I was amazed that a jury’s decision had to be unanimous. How can 12 people ever agree on anything? Yet it happens every single day. You keep 12 people locked in the same room long enough most of the time they can come to a unanimous decision. My father was once on a jury that started 10-2 to convict. My father was one of the two. Many hours later they voted 12-0 to acquit. It was after midnight. I had to drive to the courthouse to pick him up. There was added pressure; it was right before Christmas and they would have been sequestered if they didn’t come to a decision, but still they did it. I’m sure those who changed their minds convinced themselves that they came to the right decision. Some did so because they were convinced but in the end they did it because everyone else did.
Look at how many Republicans who said they would never support Trump are now firmly in his camp. Among Republicans the social norm is to support Trump, so people convince themselves that they do. This happens in every field where people have opinions. Hell, I didn’t want to read the Hermione Granger Harry Potter books but when someone gave me the first three as a gift I read them, and eventually read the rest. Peer pressure is real. Reading it allowed me to take part in the shared culture, and I’m an iconoclast. One friend thought I wouldn’t like anything that was popular.
The pressure is not always Everybody knows but My people know. How strong is this? In 2016 primary season there was a secret Facebook group for Hillary Clinton supporters who felt the social pressure from Bernie supporters to conform. I left the group after the election because without the common cause the group think turned in directions that I didn’t like. The danger of the echo chamber.
When I spent a summer at Western Michigan University studying behavioral psychology one of the things we learned is that what behavior is sane is culture dependent. All we can observe is behavior and but understanding it requires context. I was young and impressionable and loved the empirical nature of behaviorism, now I think it’s true but far from a complete theory of the mind. That one lesson is in some way the genesis of this entry. It’s just taking mean 47 years to write it. What we consider normal, moral, and natural, is a cultural consensus arrived at by the same vague means that a book series become cultural touchstone. Why are there so many taboos about nudity and sex? They aren’t universal, go to a European beach and you’ll see plenty of nude people. A German friend told the story of going to beach in the US with her parents and her father with no thought changed out of his clothes in the parking lot while people looked on. It didn’t even strike him as unusual. These things may not be harmful, but they feel wrong to most Americans. Homosexuality is taboo in most of the world. It’s considered immoral. To some sexual behavior is the central pillar of morality.
People “know” these things are wrong the same way they “know” that murder is wrong. It’s what everybody knows, at least everyone they know. That’s why these attitudes are so hard to change. You have to pick off people on the edges and that leaves those on the new edges prone to change. The more people that accept gays you are around, the easier it is for you to accept gays. The same goes with most prejudices. People in the South accepted slavery and then Jim Crow because everyone knew that was the way things are. Part of the great genius of Huck Finn is how Twain portrayed Huck as feeling guilty, for stealing Mrs. Watson’s property, Jim, her slave. Huck was the natural child, existing on the fringe of society, so he could break away from society’s view of moral behavior and do the right thing, but he was not free enough to do so without guilt. In real life I read the story of a woman in Afghanistan who ran away to marry the man she loved and not the man her family arranged for her to marry. Her family sent a relative to kill her, an honor killing. Wherever she went people thought that she was wrong. Most amazingly she felt that she was wrong. Everyone believed what she did was immoral, so it was difficult for her to not feel that.
Thinking about these things has led me to take the Golden Rule as the source of morality. If it doesn’t hurt someone, it’s not immoral. I can’t always follow that. There are still times that my gut says it’s wrong, the gut that has been influenced by what everybody knows. I can’t always overrule it. I’m sure the same is true for most people, but it helps if you recognize it. Think of why something is wrong before you condemn a person.
I’m only halfway through with what I wanted to write about but this is 1218 words so I will leave the rest for tomorrow. Then I’ll talk about the things that are actionable, not just intellectual.
Wise Madness 