Of Two Minds

Clouds and chill do not dampen a dog's view of the world.

The grass is bright green, almost an unnatural-appearing green, so lush after recent heavy rain, but trees in the orchard, prematurely (from my perspective) shedding their leaves, had an almost wintry look recently against lowering grey skies. Not quite a contradiction, it was a scene to illustrate lack of demarcation between what we humans think of as one season and another – in this case, summer and fall. Seasons, like human emotions and states of mind, blend and interpenetrate more than they conform to any kind of calendar.

 

Which leads me – or, at least, I want to use it to try to lead you to think about fact and imagination, reasons and dreams, and the different ways our brains go at the work of knowing ourselves and the world. For Henri Bergson, my "main man" in philosophy (as the Artist liked to refer to him), two different ways of knowing came out as intellect/intuition. Gaston Bachelard's distinction was reason/imagination. It was psychobiologist Roger Sperry at Cal Tech whose experiments in the 1960s led to the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain specialized in different tasks, the left devoted to language, the naming of objects, and the right to visual construction of what we receive as “the world.” 

The left brain/right brain idea was grabbed up in simplistic dress by the general public, only to be rejected by science as myth and now resurrected in more nuanced form. There is more than one book on this fascinating subject, but the one I’ve been reading is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist.

Reading is a good activity on a chilly day.

McGilchrist’s is as far as possible from a simplistic view. He stresses, for example, that mathematics (and by that we don’t mean simple bookkeeping) is creative as well as logical and that the “indirect, connotative language of poetry,” dependent on the brain’s right hemisphere, 

 

...underlies all forms of understanding whatsoever, science and philosophy no less than poetry and art.

-      McGilchrist (p. 71)

 

It is the working together of the two hemispheres, he underlines, that allows us to put a world together at all. 

The sun returned!

Most brain scientists these days would have no quarrel with McGilchrist thus far. Where some dig in their heels and think he goes off the deep end is with his thesis that Western culture (going back to the 5^th century BCE and Socrates/Plato) has lost left/right balance (except for a few brief periods) and become overly dependent on – and dominated by – the left hemisphere’s narrowly focused rationality, its impatience and inability to deal with ambiguity and to make “big picture” connections. Although both parts of the brain deal both with units and with aggregates, he writes, the right hemisphere sees individuals and unique instances in holistic, always changing context, while the left categorizes and therefore can deal only with generic objects, types, and a fixed, static world.

Doggie nose prints on the inside of the windshield I just cleaned!

McGilchrist asked himself a question previous brain scientists seem not to have asked: why would mammalian brains, even brains of birds, divide their work in the first place? His answer is that life demands of us two different kinds of attention: first, a broad, flexible, sustained vigilance to everything around us; second, a focused attention on a task at hand (e.g., capturing prey). A machine model of animal behavior is a left-brain re-presentation. All left-brain re-presentations are based on what is already known. They are good at routine. They run as if on computer programs. They are, however, bad at revising in the face of the unexpected: what doesn’t fit is rejected. If McGilchrist hadn’t wanted to make as much reference as he does to Nietzsche, he might have called his book The Sorcerer and the Apprentice. (Don't miss Mickey Mouse in that link!)

 

The Master and His Emissary takes its title from Nietzsche, however, McGilchrist identifying the left brain as the “emissary” that has taken over the role of the “master” right brain, and it is a dense read at almost 600 pages, 54 of them notes and a hefty 67 pages of bibliography. The index, I must say, is disappointing and could have included much more than it does. This book is fascinating reading, though, for anyone interested in how we humans perceive and think.

 

That’s my nonfiction reading for sunlight hours. In the dark of the morning or evening dusk, I turn to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie and am amazed and delighted again and again. In fact, even my use of different times of day for these two books conforms to Bachelard’s idea that even words can have different psychic “weight” 

…depending on whether they belong to the language of reverie or the language of daylight life (la vie claire) – to rested language or language under surveillance – to the language of poetry or to the language hammered out by authoritarian prosodies.

I don’t think I am stretching a point at all to seeing Bachelard in this passage agreeing with McGilchrist as to how the different brain hemispheres construct a world. And when he, Bachelard, uses Jung’s animus and anima language, again McGilchrist’s brain hemisphere distinctions, rather than any gendered differences, make sense of the distinction. Projects and worries, Bachelard says, belong to the animus, while “tranquil images” from the anima … “meld together in an intimate warmth.” And thus there are also two different kinds of reading, one in animus, the other in anima.

…I am not the same man when I am reading a book of ideas where the animus is obliged to be vigilant, quite ready to criticize, quite ready to retort, as when I am reading a poet’s book where images must be received in a sort of transcendental acceptance of gifts. Ah! to return the absolute gift which is a poet’s image, our anima would have to be able to write a hymn of thanksgiving. 

 

The animus reads little; the anima reads a great deal.

 

Sometimes my animus scolds me for having read too much. 

 

Reading, ever reading, the sweet passion of the anima. But when, after having read everything, one sets before himself the task of making a book out of reveries, it is the animus which is in the harness. Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limiting himself to dreaming it. 

 

-      Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

And yet, I think to myself now, reflecting on these two books, on the work of the different hemispheres of the brain (my brain!), and on the expressions and statements of these two writers, I seem to sense the right and left brains, the anima and animus, in dialogue. Or is that the right brain, synthesizing facts handed to it by the left? At any rate, as I read, I take notes (left brain) and smile happily (right brain).

View without doggie nose prints --

And view without the road --

--

Today’s images have nothing to do with today’s text and are only included for relief from what might otherwise seem like overthinking. 

Did You Just Come Here to Argue, or What?

Morning sun and last ice, Lake Leelanau

When President Obama announced on March 16 his nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, he noted that the nominee, Judge Garland, is well known and widely respected for (and I’ll have to paraphrase here, not having written down the exact words) “understanding before disagreeing” and “disagreeing without being disagreeable.” If you missed what amounted to a fully prepared speech from the president on the occasion of his announcement, it’s worth taking time to catch the whole thing. 

I must admit I’ve been rationing my news listening of late. So little is “new” from one day to the next, and very little encouraging, let alone inspiring. Listening to the president on Wednesday, however, I did feel encouraged. I also felt proud to be an American and to have such a president in office, a man who has had one of the most difficult jobs in the world and has endured acrimonious hostility and partisan opposition at every turn, yet one who continues to believe, despite its shortcomings, in our country and its form of government and to be a model of civility to the nation and the world. I had been happy to read [in Rolling Stone, Oct. 2015] that he understands the “failures” of his administration are not exclusively presidential failures. He could and would have accomplished more with Congressional cooperation. The Congress wouldn’t have had to cave to his every demand, either -- just have been willing to engage constructively and compromise creatively. But “compromise” has become a dirty word to ideologues, both those in political life and all too many of those who elect them, Americans who have convinced themselves (or pretend they have) that political compromise is nothing less surrender to evil.

Really? Angels vs. Devils? Jehovah vs. Satan? Really?

In his essay on “The Future of Tragedy,” Camus wrote that tragedy differs from drama or melodrama in that, “the forces confronting each other in tragedy are equally legitimate, equally justified.” This is what makes tragedy difficult, if not impossible, to grasp in adolescence. In high school I could only see Creon as a tyrant, Antigone as a heroine. And yet, for the playwright and his Greek audience, the entire situation was ambiguous. There was reason, as well as blinding passion, on both sides. Thus,

Antigone is right, but Creon is not wrong. Similarly, Prometheus is both just and unjust, and Zeus, who pitilessly oppresses him, also has right on his side.

Camus gives the formula for tragedy as follows: “All can be justified, [but] no one is just.”

Ah, we keep our little minds so busy, we humans, justifying our lives!

And this is beside my point, too, but as Camus understands tragedy, the present American political scene may well be tragic, although Congress and the American public in general lack the basic insight of the Greek playwrights and audience. In all too many minds, we do not have tragic conflict but a morality play. If you see where I’m coming from. But that was an aside....

Slowly, in roundabout fashion, I am coming to my topic for the day, which is not tragedy but rhetoric. How the two may be related (if they are) will perhaps emerge before the end of this exploratory foray.

What is Rhetoric?

Before agreeing or disagreeing with any social practice it’s important to get clear on just what the practice is, so before I ask if rhetoric is good or bad, I need to be clear on what I take the term to mean. It helps to look at the origin of the practice. Then, does the term carry nonstandard but legitimate meanings, or are there nonstandard but legitimate ways of understanding the practice? Finally, has rhetoric changed (improved or degraded) over the course of history?

So tedious! I know! But what is the point of speaking or writing at all, if not to understand and be understood?

Well, the term is Greek, and so, like tragedy, rhetoric has Western European origins. More important in the context of present-day American politics is the fact that rhetoric grew up alongside Greek democracy. In the fifth century BCE, when ordinary citizens first had the opportunity to argue legal claims against other citizens, teachers of oratory offered their services for hire. They were not lawyers but speech coaches for citizens acting as their own lawyers. These teachers then devised theories about what made for successful speech. Finally philosophers got into the act, with concerns for truth and morality that went beyond having a winning argument. Perhaps we should note that all this was taking place in the early days of the decline of “the glory that was Greece.” 

Roman rhetoric (Romans copying everything Greek for their own purposes) broke down the process of rhetoric into five components: analysis and research (the marshalling of facts); arranging of the material; putting the argument into effective language; delivering the speech (the performance); and committing its ideas to memory (for, one presumes, future use).

Having flowered in the Greek polis and law courts, it is hardly surprising that rhetoric became nearly synonymous with debate. The idea that truth emerges from adversarial verbal combat continues in our American courts and political campaigns today.

As Americans with differing perspectives, some of us may believe strongly in justice and politics as competition while others hold a modified or even entirely different view. For now, my point is simply that rhetoric and debate, like it or not, are

1)  adversarial in nature;

2)  closely allied historically, if not almost identical; and

3)  serve a function in American society much like the function they served in ancient Greece.

One course required of all first-year undergraduates back when I was a freshman at the University of Illinois was Rhetoric. In that class we learned to take and argue for controversial positions, although, as I recall, our arguments were handed in as written papers rather than delivered to the class as speeches, so there was never an opposition ready to jump up with objections. The instructor, however, assigned positions to each of us, often not the positions we would have chosen for ourselves, and so to do the job we necessarily had not only to give support for our assigned position but also to imagine, anticipate, and respond to potential serious objections. That was rhetoric as it was taught to me – not debate, as such, but the clear statement of a position and solid supporting argument for holding the position.

This, in fact, is how I continue to understand the term “argument” -- as a reasoned exchange. Shouting, name-calling, high-horse refusals to explain with a patronizing “Trust me!” – none of that is argument, as I see it. Argument demands accepting one’s opponent as a moral equal, deserving of respect.

But is “rhetoric,” my stalking horse, something else? Is it something more – or (gulp!) less?

I can’t get the question out of my head because voices on the radio keep using the term “rhetoric” in a way to suggest that the practice is less than desirable in the political arena – ironically, the very arena that gave it birth. Rhetoric, they imply, is obfuscation at best, and inflammatory bombast at its present-day worst.

Suspicions of rhetoric are as old as rhetoric itself. John Ralston Saul, in The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, presents under his heading “Sophists” the following description (his own opinions apparent in the other bold-faced terms he defines elsewhere in his book):

SOPHISTS       The original model for the twentieth-century TECHNOCRAT; more precisely for the BUSINESS SCHOOL graduate and the ACADEMIC CONSULTANT.  

       These fifth-century BC teachers wandered around Greece selling their talents to whomever would hire them. Their primary talent was rhetoric. They were not concerned by ethics or the search for truth. Long-term consequences, indeed reality in most forms, did not interest them. What mattered was their ability to create illusions of reality which would permit people to get what they wanted.

Clearly, reservations about rhetoric today are nothing new. Back at the root of reasoning’s public practice, rhetoric was used by the Sophists for gain, their own as well as that of their clients, and victory was the sole relevant measure of rhetorical quality. Serious examples of debate today (in my opinion, American political campaign matches hardly merit the term, although they certainly employ rhetoric), e.g., the “Oxford-style” debates we hear on public radio, while neither monetary award nor political office is at stake, are still concluded with winners and losers, as decided by audience vote.

Sample question: Has religion contributed, over the course of history, more good or evil to human society? Two teams argue, each taking a side of the question. In the end, the audience votes for one team or the other. Truth decided by vote: a strange Western notion.

And there’s the sorry truth of it: outside a classroom led by a instructor with high standards of argument, rhetoric as persuasive reasoning can include just as many straw men, bandwagon appeals, camels’ noses, and other informal logical fallacies as can be put over on an audience. And that’s not all. Innuendo, empty claims, and outright falsehoods, if said with sufficient conviction and repeated often enough, can be – and here we must sigh over having to use a perfectly inoffensive word in such a ghastly context – effective.

Where Does That Leave Us?

Because argument presupposes an attempt to influence, if not an outright conflict of opinion, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whether or not there’s yelling involved. But can we imagine a human society that made no attempt to influence the thinking of its members? Fear and force are one way to urge social conformity. Reason, which presupposes freedom and works through argument, is another.

But suppose you are not comfortable with conflict, perhaps also fearful of “losing” – what are your options if you decline to engage in debate?

Here’s one possibility: Refuse to listen. Walk away. Get on your high horse and take what you see as the high road. Follow the example of Senate Republicans, who say to the president, “We don’t care who you nominate for the Supreme Court. We will not meet with your nominee, and we will not hold hearings.”

Am I the only one reminded by this strategy of fifth-grade girls? “Come on, let’s walk away. We’ll just ignore her!” Did we really elect people to Congress to play this game instead of doing their job? Well, perhaps we can be thankful Senate Republicans are not acting like fifth-grade boys, slugging it out (wordlessly, of course) on the playground after school!

Other options?

Sometimes people are yelling because they think no one is listening. Listening could be a course of action taken in place of debate. I say “in place of” deliberately, because although in a true debate only one person can speak at a time, we have all seen the others making notes and preparing their rebuttal during the other side’s speeches. Understanding is not the goal in debate, much less working together – only “winning.”

I’ve said that reason -- that is, argument -- demands and presupposes freedom and equality. I’m thinking now about listening and wondering what, if anything, it presupposes. There is, unfortunately, a frequent perception, shared by speaker and listener, that the speaker is in a superior, one-up position (see Tannen reference at the bottom of this post). Can a listener take a different perspective on the relationship? If so, might the speaker’s perception also shift? Not necessarily. But possibly?

I haven’t found a wide, clear path yet but am searching through the forest.

Judge Garland’s way, as President Obama characterized it, of “understanding before disagreeing” tells me that the judge must be a good listener. I can psychologize and/or demonize an opponent, based on his or her positions, but I can’t understand the reasoning that led to those positions unless (1) the other person is willing to explain his or her reasoning, and (2) I am willing to listen. Possibilities that follow listening are multiple rather than binary:

o    I may find I agree with the speaker, after all. Perhaps we were simply using different language and not realizing we were aiming in the same direction.

o    I may agree with some of the speaker’s reasons but don’t see that they entail the conclusion the speaker has drawn. Maybe we can talk this through together.

o    Our positions may be incompatible but not marked by enormous pragmatic distance. Perhaps we can each move a little closer.

o    I disagree more strongly than ever and now understand more clearly where our disagreement lies. Understanding allows me to aim my own explanation to the heart of the matter, in hopes of changing the speaker’s mind or modifying her or his position.

o    I might change my mind!

These are possibilities that immediately occur to me, not a list I see as exhaustive. Do you see other possible outcomes?

Maybe, as Bergson says of the future, the path to bring us together isn’t lying somewhere in the woods, waiting for us to stumble upon it. Maybe we have to clear that path ourselves. 

As for the Senate blocking the President’s nominee for the Supreme Court, the following idea comes from my friend Michael Roth:

"Recent history suggests there are no adverse consequences for this style of political maneuvering. So perhaps an alternate form of questioning might be to investigate what the opposition's options are.

"Suppose the president could get a federal court somewhere to find that the submitting the name is sufficient for fulfilling his constitutional duty and since the Senate has chosen not to weigh in, he can go ahead an seat his nominee.

"The senate might then chose to appeal this to the supreme court. Assuming the appeal results in a 4-4 tie, the lower court's ruling would hold and the Justice would be seated.

"Is that possible. What are the next steps for getting it done?"

That Michael! He was definitely one of the smartest of our graduate school philosophy cohort!

Suggested reading: The Argument Culture: Working from Debate to Dialogue, by Deborah Tannen; The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, by John Ralston Saul

Book Review: THE UP SIDE OF DOWN

THE UP SIDE OF DOWN: WHY FAILING WELL IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS, by Megan McArdle

NY: Viking, 2014

(On sale February 11, 2014)

Hardcover $27.95

When teaching philosophy, I used to tell my students that getting a concept wrong, being confused, misunderstanding or misstating an idea or position were all positive signs. “It means you’re thinking, not just memorizing and regurgitating.” This is a lot of the message of Megan McArdle’s new book: failure can lead to learning, which can lead to growth and success.

One thing you should know, however, is that this is not a self-help book. You and your problems and issues (or me and mine) are not McArdle’s focus. Her canvas is much broader. And that broader vision is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The big picture approach helps to situate personal experience and individual concerns in a broadly psychological and social context that allows the author to commend or criticize government and corporate policies and programs, as well as the aims and strategies of individuals. On the other hand, it is a weakness when examples drawn from disparate realms are tossed in with insufficient discussion (“punish” puppies to house-train them? How? “spank ... immediately” to discipline children? For what range of offenses, one instantly wonders with some alarm) or when huge global issues such as poverty are brought in for a brief paragraph, acknowledged with a nod, and then left by the side of the road.

Those are my caveats. Having issued them, I want to assure my readers that this book is well worth their attention, for as many reasons as the topics it addresses.

McArdle presents fascinating information from diverse disciplines and draws from it her own conclusions. She writes engagingly not only when recounting very personal experiences (the kind that don't usually make it into books on economics) but also because she brings an open mind to national debates, debates often rigidly polarized in American society at large and treated superficially in familiar sound bytes. The publisher identifies her as “an outspoken Libertarian,” yet time and time again McArdle acknowledges an active role for government, and never does she seem to be hewing to a party line –conservative, liberal, or libertarian. More than once her even-handed discussion reminded me of Aristotle: no one person or group is wrong (or right!) about everything, and she gives every position its due issuing her critique. Then, too, her criticism is based on empirical evidence, not personal opinion or blind ideology. Very refreshing!

What we need, this book implies, is more information, more experiments, and even more gadflies and whistle-blowers. Will that eliminate or even reduce failure?

In your dreams! 

Despite the most thorough market research, scientific research, psychological research -- at the end of the day the market is still made up of human beings, and human beings are and always will be unpredictable.

So why bother? 

Because we can do better. Because we can prevent failure from turning into disaster.

To manage failure and learn fast enough to stay clear of disaster, we must be aware of common errors in the way we process information. Because of the normalcy bias, it’s hard for us to see a crisis if everyone around us is acting as if things are all hunky-dory. (I think of this as the “Emperor’s New Clothes” bias, but really, someone does need to blow the whistle there, wouldn’t you agree?) Then, once we’re all convinced we’re going down the right road, the confirmation bias kicks in to reassure us and will even “bend the map” in order to discount information that would otherwise clue us in to the fact that we are lost. The lesson here, as we used to say to each other in grad school philosophy classes, reading one philosopher after another who started out with what he considered self-evident propositions, “It isn’t always obvious what’s obvious.” Too often we just see what we look for. And then there’s risk aversion, or what I always think of as the why-we-are-in-Vietnam syndrome: We’ve put too much into this! We can’t get out now! Throwing good money after bad makes for disastrous gambling, with ever-mounting losses. Excuse all my Memory Lane quotations today, but it’s true that “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

To anyone familiar with the work of Tversky and Kahnemann or Dan Ariely, news of the ways in which our reason is contaminated by irrationality is no news at all. The thing is, “knowing” as in “being able to choose the correct answer on a test asking about risk aversion facts or statistics" is not at all the same thing as knowing how to avoid the pitfalls, so any book that reminds us to double-check our thinking is probably a book we need to read. In one book I recently read but did not review, Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, the author, who never believed in fortune-telling in the first place visits a fortune-teller, focuses on how she’s doing what she’s doing, sees clearly what’s going on – and yet

Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said – that is, until I remembered the source and pushed these thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness....  

One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable.  

- Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini (2012)

How scary is that?

Okay, I said that The Up Side of Down isn’t a self-help book, but McArdle does have a few words of advice for unemployed job-seekers, most of them good. Her take on why the long-term unemployed slack off on the searching is that the longer they have to look, the more anxiety and unhappiness they experience and that discussions on unemployment benefits should take this into account, to reduce job-seekers’ anxiety and keep them moving – presumably to wherever there are jobs. This was basically a good discussion, as far as it went, but the number of jobs that have gone overseas is left unaddressed, and the advice to spend time with others in the same boat, other unemployed people, for “support” didn’t convince me. After all, you won’t get job leads hanging out with other people who are out of work, and you might just get more depressed and feel more hopeless. I wonder if McArdle has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch. I’d love to see Ehrenreich and McArdle onstage together, not debating, per se, but conversing these important issues at a deep and meaningful level.

There’s much more in this book than what I’ve covered here. For instance, Chapter 8, “Blame,” begins with the way human brains work, brains looking for patterns, causes, and agency – brains jumping, therefore, from accident to intent, positing intention and design to what may be random events, assigning blame where there may not even be responsibility. Just as having control reduces stress, so believing we have control reduces stress. -- But if we’re all in control, designing events to conform to our intentions, isn’t someone always guilty? -- Not so fast!!! We may have only imagined the intention....

The following chapter, “Punishment,” may surprise many readers (and I know from teaching undergraduates that there will be strong resistance here), because in it the author lays out the well-supported claim that visiting vengeance on criminals (‘vengeance’ usually called in this context by the milder term ‘retribution’) is usually counterproductive. She does not argue against punishment in general but says that the consequences, to be both effective and cost-effective, must be immediate and inevitable. No letting small violations slide and then, unpredictably, crashing down with harsh verdicts. Actually, the harsher the verdicts, the more 3-strikes-you’re-out, “the higher the incarceration rate, the less it discourages....” The probation program she introduces to us mainlanders is from Hawaii, called HOPE, and the judge’s message to his probationers, people who have failed usually several times in many different ways, is that everyone wants them to succeed, that the focus from here on in will on the future, not the past.

Closely monitoring probationers costs less than keeping criminals in prison. Likewise, providing free housing to homeless people, even if they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts, is cheaper than the myriad costs to society of homelessness.

With bankruptcy, as with criminals and homelessness, this libertarian author takes a surprising position, namely that choosing bankruptcy can make much more sense than remaining under the crippling burden of debt year after year. Bankruptcy lets people start over. And since so many entrepreneurial endeavors fail, it’s important that people willing to take the risks of starting new businesses should have the opportunity to try again after failing.

In so many ways, in so many realms, forgiveness costs much less than punishment. This should be a wake-up call to individuals, voters, and government officials.

Realizing that McArdle's book originated as essentially ten separate magazine features (the author is a long-time blogger and a writer for Bloomberg View, The Atlantic, The Economist, and Newsweek) helped me make sense of the variety of topics brought together in a single book under one umbrella title. It isn’t the book I expected, but it brought together many intriguing issues, and I look forward to future books from Megan McArdle.

To Worry or Not to Worry, and If Not, How Not

Today’s topic: WORRY! Why do we do it, and how can we stop? I will be very interested in responses on today’s post (if anyone has the patience to wade through the whole thing), not just agreement or disagreement, but additions, clarifications, problems, alternate hypotheses, or whatever else comes to minds.

Thesis: Worry Is Superstition

I have done more than my share of worrying, starting in childhood, but have cut back considerably in recent years. Lately, instead of worrying so much, I’ve been thinking about worrying and its role in our lives, trying to figure out what function it could possibly play — other than the very important function of getting us to take preventive and remedial measures when a problem presents itself -- and what I’ve come to believe is that we worry so much because we are superstitious.

Positive changes that worry can spark, such as changing one’s diet or wearing a seatbelt or getting enough exercise or paying bills on time, are excellent reasons for initial unease. What I’m talking about is the needless fretting we continue to engage in when we’ve done everything we can possibly do — or, worse, instead of taking positive steps to eliminate the cause for concern. Do this thought experiment: Separate worry from the action it prompts. Imagine yourself taking the logical course of action but still worrying. Why? How can worry possibly add anything to the elimination of the outcome you dread?

“I can’t help it!”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a slave to worry any more than I want to be a slave to anger or fear or alcohol or caffeine or credit card debt. Saying “No, thank you” to worry, though, isn’t as simple as turning down a beer. This is part of what prompted my thinking about the problem. (Think, think, think, think.... Maybe I should start again?)

Again, the working hypothesis I’ve come up with is that the base of worry is superstition. If you are skeptical, please play along with me a little further.

Superstitions are interesting in themselves, persisting in the most educated of countries and individuals. Why do so many tall buildings lack a designated thirteenth floor? There is no reason other than superstition about the number 13. Note that numbering the floors of tall buildings only occurs in  cultures usually considered, in other ways, “advanced” – no buildings that tall in so-called “primitive” communities – and yet the superstition persists in a very powerful way. 

Here’s how The Encarta World English Dictionary associated with my Word program defines ‘superstition’:

1.    an irrational but usually deep-seated belief in the magical effects of a particular action or ritual, especially in the likelihood that good or bad luck will result from performing it  2.   irrational and often quasi-religious belief in and reverence for the magical effects of certain actions and rituals of the magical power of certain objects

So worry, as I’m seeing it, is a mental ritual. When we worry, we vividly imagine exactly the outcome we fervently wish will not come about. But why would we do that?

Let’s look at an example. A common response to a medical diagnosis is “How much should I worry?” or “How worried should I be?” The question is asked in all seriousness – and let’s think about that for a moment. The patient is not asking how many ounces of water he should be drinking every day or how much time she should put into an exercise program or what medications are indicated or any number of questions that would make perfect sense, but what portion of mental energy should be devoted to worrying. The more you think about it, the stranger the question becomes. The patient is seeking to proportion worry to the seriousness of his or her condition, as if the mental activity of worrying will have some beneficial effect on the physical condition. The issue here is not what the patient should do, faced with the diagnosis. That is a separate and perfectly rational question.

As I try to tease apart this mystery, it seems to me that we hold a vague, unconscious, and unreflective belief that by worrying we feel we are making time payments to ward off future disaster. Pay now, play later! The focus of a worry, remember, is an undesirable outcome (or, all too often, multiple undesirable outcomes on a variety of fronts); thus worrying is suffering in advance that we feel should be subtracted from the outcome. If my hypothesis is correct, this same unconscious belief explains our worry over loved ones, as well. If, for example, I worry myself sick over my son’s late return home, I am paying the price that might otherwise have to be paid by a terrible accident befalling him. Or so says my superstitious belief.

Here is how we might articulate the underlying, unreflective, usually unconscious line of reasoning in the case of the patient in the doctor’s office:

1. A condition or situation calls for my attention.2. Worry is a form of attention.3. The correct amount of mental energy devoted to worrying, therefore, will help to bring about a positive resolution of the condition or situation.

How many of us, if asked to defend pointless, distracted fretting, would make such an argument consciously? And yet, how else to explain the dysfunctional distraction and the pointless, narrow focus that goes way beyond constructive action and can very well get in the way of constructive action?

Is It Possible to Stop Worrying?

“Don’t worry about it!” Easier said than done! There must be something in the evolution of our brains that pulls us toward the narrow focus when we feel threatened. Focus on a problem, after all, can show us possible courses of action. So there is the old evolutionary answer to the Why? question. Worry, however, can just as easily get in the way of productive thinking, or persist beyond productive thinking and constructive action, and in that way it works against us rather than for us.

So yes, I do believe worry is natural -- and yes, I also believe it is a waste of energy. What’s the answer then? Are we just stuck in a bad evolutionary design? Is there no way out of this dilemma. Help!!!

Awareness is the first step to changing any habit. Since focus is the problem, then, it seems clear that the next step will be to shift focus. How to make the shift will vary from one individual to another. Chop firewood? Meditate? Visit an elderly neighbor? Walk the dog? Dive into a remodeling project? The possibilities are endless. Sometimes just sharing concerns with a trusted friend weakens worry’s grip on imagination. Reality check!

When are you most vulnerable to worry? For me, it strikes hardest and worst in hours of darkness, in the middle of the night. I can lie still and keep my eyes closed and try to get back to sleep, but when worry is too strong I might just as well get up and out of bed. Sometimes a cup of cocoa and a book will relax me. Spending the time I wouldn’t otherwise have had on a writing project can turn sleeplessness to good use. Anything productive, even sorting laundry, is better than being paralyzed – because worry does tend to be paralyzing – and I’ll feel better just getting up on my feet.

When morning comes, a new course of action often reveals itself. Physical movement plus daylight jogs my brain, and I see a path hidden to me in darker hours. Then, if there’s something I can see to do, I do it, and if I can’t see any course of action to take in the worrisome area, I turn my attention to something else. Sometimes, after all, the worrisome aspect of life cannot be removed, but at the very least, if worry continues to sit like a cold stone in my heart as the day progresses, I can still get a few things done and feel better for having been productive, getting back my sense of agency – because it is the powerlessness of worry that is most distressing to me.

Looking to friends or family members from worry’s paralysis, we can all too easily perceive absence of worry on their part as absence of caring, seeing the distraught parent or friend in hysterics as more loving than the calm provider of mundane necessities and comforts, but “You should have been more worried about me!” is an accusation born of superstition.

Are you pleased when others worry about you? Do you feel that worrying about others shows you care? What about that vague feeling we almost never quite see clearly, that by worrying for a loved one we are doing something to bring about a positive outcome for that person? 

Non-Worry

Here’s where I have recently come to a radical shift in my own point of view. Just as worrying about myself can imprison me negatively and get in the way of constructive action or healing or simple enjoyment of each day, I have come to believe that worrying about those I love is also a mistake and not good for them. Now, instead of showing and expressing worry, I seek to convey non-worry.

Does that sound heartless? Non-worry is not indifference. It is not telling a sufferer to “buck up and take it like a man” or “Stop whining—everyone has problems!” It is not—and I want to be very clear about this-- giving advice at all. It may accompany advice, if sufferer and comforter have that kind of relationship and wisdom, but non-worry may also be completely wordless.

Here’s an example: I was visiting a friend in the hospital and was present when she had to endure a painful blood draw. My old self, empathizing with her pain, would have clenched muscles in sympathy. I would have held my breath, my face showing nothing but worried concern. Would that have helped my friend? Would it have lessened her pain? Instead I tried something different, an idea came to me on the spot, and this is the first time I’ve told anyone about my what I did. Instead of tensing, I focused on relaxing my own body – hands, arms, breathing. What I wanted to do was to send calm to my friend. Moods can be contagious, I reasoned, and rather than add to her tension and fear, my aim was to reduce it.

Did it work? I have absolutely no idea. But could it possibly have made her pain worse? I don’t see how.

Not a Permanent Cure

What about falling back into old superstitious mental patterns? Well, of course! Over and over! Eating and sleeping and housework, mowing the grass and weeding the garden, all have to be done over and over – why should it be different with habits we want to conquer? Falling down isn’t the end of the world.

I will never be immune to worry. These days, though, acute episodes of short-lived panic (!!!) are a far more common feature of my mental life than endless days and nights of fretting. An unpleasant surprise or loss of control or difficult decision can throw me completely (if briefly) off-balance. But at least I will not be chewing it over endlessly and sinking into a bottomless pit. Anyway, if worry were a savings account, I would have millions in the bank by now!

Is that superstitious? To think I have a huge worry savings account? I said IF it were! If I’d had this insight at age 25, I don’t think I would be the poorer now for it.

But what do you think? Does my hypothesis of worry as superstition make sense to anyone else out there? Someone near and dear to me, a champion worrier, remains unconvinced, so I’m interested in what others think.

P.S. Can you tell by the length of this post how much worry I had to ward off???

“Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”

Writers, story-tellers, song-writers, and artists are among those who are asked this question, and often they have no more clue than anyone else. “What made me think of that?” one might muse. Is the creative mind simply more open, more receptive, to its own emerging phantasms? Where do our dreams come from—and where they go when we wake?

How about more practical ideas—an idea for a new business or even an idea about what would be good or bad legislation for Michigan or the United States?

The deeply held ideas we call our “beliefs”? Where do they come from? From our parents, our education, television, friends, the Internet, newspapers, politicians, “spokespeople,” the air we breathe, our own independent philosophical investigations? What think you?

The best public relations is invisible. While it’s easy to spot advertising—the stuff that blatantly urges you to go buy something—PR subtly convinces you to change the way you think. Advertising urges you to do something now; PR is patient. Advertisers pay for the time and space devoted to their messages. Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information.
 - Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans (Bloomsbury Press, 2010)

Read that last sentence again, please. Here, I’ll repeat it: “Good PR usually gets free media space because it is presented as unbiased information” [emphasis added]. So what our politicians tell us, what we hear and read in news media, what we pass along to each other, and even our own belief-forming thought—all that is constantly being shaped by well-bankrolled, behind-the-scenes forces. Now please look again at the subtitle: This is more than a book about the health care so-called “debate,” and the author is more than just another pundit urging his opinion on you. Wendell Potter worked for 25 years in public relations.

This book is also a lot more than just another exposé. The author tells of a very personal journey, beginning with his parents’ and his own origin in a poor rural Appalachian mountain community. He also traces from its origins the development of public relations in this country—who first came up with it, where the first college class was taught, what kind of ethics restrained early practitioners, and where PR has come in less than a hundred years. For example, “crisis management” was first developed by Ivy Lee, cofounder of the Parker & Lee agency in New York, who counteracted bad publicity about industrial massacres and strike-breaking with carefully written and distributed press releases. Press releases, he discovered, did reporters’ jobs for them, and reporters were happy to hand in a release rather than investigating a story for themselves.

A contemporary of Lee, Edward Bernays, enterprising son of Jewish parents, Potter tells us, is “generally credited with coining the term ‘public relations counselor.’” It was Bernays who came up with a wildly successful campaign to attract more women to smoking cigarettes, equating smoking with equality and calling cigarettes “torches of freedom.” Why do I mention his Jewish heritage? Because according to a citation Potter’s to Bernays’s autobiography, in 1933 the noted public relations counselor was disturbed to be told by a guest in his home, a guest who had recently been a guest in the home of Joseph Goebbels, that Goebbels had “at least one of Bernays’s books” on his shelves. Hitler’s use of slogans and manipulation to move crowds was well know, also, and Potter says that Bernays “fretted publicly about ethics later in his life.”

Looking back, he said that had he known the dangers of tobacco, he would not have accepted the American Tobacco account. “No reputable public relations organization would today accept a cigarette account since their cancer-causing effects have been proven,” he wrote in 1986. Also late in life, Bernays appealed to the PRSA [Public Relations Society of America] to police its ranks, arguing that circumstances allowed unethical behavior without any sanctions, legal or otherwise. “There are no standards,” he said.

“No standards.” What does that mean? Anything goes. There are, you may object, legal limits, but let’s look closer at that idea, too.

As Americans, we treasure our freedom of speech. At the same time, we hold onto the idea that “what’s good for General Motors,” i.e., more generally, Big Business, is good for us all. Enter a new American entity, the front group. A front group is created by PR people but not identified with an affiliation to any particular corporation or political party. PR people begin with focus groups, private citizen volunteers, and they test phrases with these groups to see what responses are evoked by certain words and phrases. Say that you find, as PR folks did, that the phrase “government takeover” generates a high fear response. A front group is then organized under some intentionally vague name, chosen because the words have positive focus group response. A website is set up, and the “group” begins to issue statements warning about, say, “a government takeover” of health care. The phony group also buys advertising but never in the name of the industry or any particular business or corporation: the point of PR is to make it look like some group of public- and like-minded citizens just got together in a grassroots kind of way.

Here’s a personal backtrack: I remember in the 1970s when my employer, Western Michigan University, announced that we were going to be given a choice between our old, traditional insurance and a new health maintenance organization (HMO). What surprised me was the high correlation of features shared by the HMO alternative and “socialized medicine” as the fear-mongers had presented it. Why, I wondered, were these features (e.g., limited list of approved health care providers) nightmare outrages if part of a government program but reasonable and desirable if offered by a for-profit private company? I have never had a satisfactory answer to the question. Only slogans come back: “government takeover” and “socialized medicine” vs. “the American way.”

The best example of the industry’s secrecy is the medical-loss ratio, which, as I mentioned previously, is the measurement of the share of premium spent on actual health care. The trend since Clinton’s plan failed has been unmistakable. In 1993, the leading insurers used about 95 percent of premium dollars on medical benefits, according to the consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. The merger wave and the new philosophy about health insurance pushed MLRs down sharply, so that by 2007 the number was 81 percent. By contrast, Medicare has consistently had a ratio greater than 97 percent since 1993.

What Americans pay in and what they get back: that’s what the MLR measures, and there are the numbers. What about increasing health care costs and inflation in general?

If the [insurance] industry had chosen to raise premiums at the exact pace that it increased spending on health care from 2000 to 2008, insurers would still have made substantial profits without pushing millions of people to go without health benefits. But during those years, insurers raised family premiums 2.5 times faster than the rate of medical inflation, 3.3 times faster than that of wages, and 4.6 times faster than that of general inflation.

Insurance was costing more at the same time that those buying it were getting less, and many could not afford to buy it at all.

The picture that emerges in this book is the clear subversion of the democratic process, but Potter’s examination of the insurance industry (“Industry”? What do they make? Why is every business these days called an “industry” and every income-generating plan called a “product”?) is one case study in a much larger economic development. We all recognize that politics is rife with public relations specialists, doing all they can to shape candidates to our fears and desires. The greater truth is that every important issue that comes before those politicians, once they are in office, has also been manipulated in similar ways. What do “the people” really want? Which voices are theirs? Have we all been hoodwinked before we even open our mouths?

For example, one justly deep fear of the American people has always been the invasion of personal privacy by government. Is the parallel to socialized medicine and HMO’s obvious to you? The greatest threats to the privacy of Americans here at the beginning of the 21st century, as far as I can see, come not from our government but from private interests against which the government is able to offer little protection. Again, please look up your own sources on privacy and data mining. Do you view your concerns for privacy and for freedom as contradictory?

In 1963, in his justly famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. warned of “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” in the struggle for human rights, insisting that the present was a time of “fierce urgency.” For Wendell Potter, the present is a time of fierce urgency in the war of independent thinking against public relations. The problem is that the enemy is invisible. We have already been infiltrated. We may even be unknowingly complicit, unpaid soldiers on a side we never chose.

Potter does not tar all PR with the same brush. Like any tool, PR can be and is often used in the service of good. He does, however, end his introduction with these words:

...I believe that unless we do fight back—and with urgency—the twenty-first century will be dominated by the retrenchment of democracy and the unbridled growth of corporate power, enabled by increasingly unchallenged propaganda.

Who were “Citizens United”? Did you unite with them? Isn’t it ironic that putting the government of the United States up for sale was accomplished without any need for a bloody coup, that it was put on the auction block by our own Supreme Court (three dissenting), reasoning on principle?