The scaffold sways the future

I do a lot of holiday posts, for reasons that aren't clear to me. It’s not like I do a lot of observance in real life, but they provide a nice theme to crystallize thought, and their annual reappearance provides a sort of long rhythm to what is otherwise a pretty formless stream.

So, here’s a couple of past posts on MLK Day. And here is MLK himself:

I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. 

Is there an arc to the universe, and does it bend toward justice? If so, how does that work exactly? Yes I am a crudely materialistic engineer contemplating the spiritual and wanting to hack it, to understand, invade, and improve it. It feels slightly silly. Unlike King, I can’t simply summon faith, I need to know the wiring diagram.

Justice is one of those things (like Truth and Beauty) that act as cosmic attractors, that pull people and reality itself towards them. More than just exerting a passive gravitational pull, it inspires passion in people. The arc bends, but individuals must do the work of bending it. This must be something like what someone from King’s religious world would call doing the Lord’s work, and what we modern Jews call Tikkun Olam.

The concept of justice seems to have deep biological roots, predating humanity (that link goes to a paper on cheating in primates by Marc Hauser, who himself was caught cheating). That may represent the starting point of King’s arc. Humanity is somewhere further along. The endpoint is not really visible to mortal eyes, yet we have these capital-letter names for it, and some like King claim to be able to see through the murk of the present into the far distance and want to lead us there. But as usual humanity is caught somewhere in the uncomfortable middle between ape and angel.

The implementation of justice relies on the ability to consider people on a level playing field, where my rights and freedoms are the same as yours and his. This is exceedingly unnatural, because obviously the human in the mythical state of nature privileges himself, his family, his friends above random strangers on the other side of the world. I never liked Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics, because it is impractical, and because it ignores this basic fact of human psychology. It starts from a place we haven’t gotten to and perhaps can’t get to.

I am more interested in the practical and humble psychology of justice and empathy, how we go about constructing this would-be universal sense of justice, this ability to treat every human being with equal dignity and equal rights. It might be unattainable, it might not even be desirable, but it exerts a pull on the arc of humanity nonetheless.

Disaster Porn

Like everyone else who is not actually in the shit, I am watching the Sandy disaster unfold over cable tv and other media. There is something vaguely shameful about the fascination it exerts, but also hints of something spiritual. The difference is in subtle shades of attitude and both may be active at once. What is it about disaster that draws us so?

The spiritual part is a real-life form of PKD's Mercerism, where we all use our empathy boxes to commune with the suffering of others. We watch the horrors not to be entertained but because we want to be there for these poor people, and in fact are there in some sense. We all want to be there, to help, we would all be doing something for them if we could.

The shameful part is when you find yourself using the massive suffering of others for entertainment, for tittilation and cheap thrills, when you congratulate yourself on your luck and foresight in not being on the East coast. This attitude is born of lack of empathy, lack of imagination, and lack of ability to feel an active and living connection to others. But it is fed by the media, which can't help but turn suffering into spectacle.

The best way to keep one's mind out of the disaster porn gutter is to actively join in by helping. Since most of us are not in a position to do that, it is easy for our better reactions to degenerate from non-expression. We can give some money to the Red Cross. Or, given that we are in the midst of an election, and have the opportunity to cast our small but significant votes, we can some thought to what it is that binds us together and what is the role of government in that.

"A Kind of Kafka Steeped in LSD and Rage"

(title stolen from Roberto Bolaño)

So there is a Philip K. Dick festival this weekend. I think I will be going, although not sure precisely why. I am a fan, but not a fan of fandom. But this has too many interesting speakers to ignore. PKD is more than a pulp SF writer – a visionary, spiritual seeker, philosopher, prophet. I get the sense he would be amused by those labels, and perhaps refuse them.

I was first exposed to PKD in my youth, when I stumbled on a copy of Ubik at the library. At the time it seriously freaked me out, and possibly I never completely recovered from that. Ubik is a story of the usual Dickian mid-level corporate functionaries who get caught up by the machinations of implacable and hostile forces, and end up having reality itself crumble around them.

Back then, science fiction (like computer hacking) was a tiny and reviled subculture. Since then both have not only become mainstream, but culturally dominant. PKD's work of course has been mined for movie scripts ever since his death, with middling results. Some of those movies are good, some are even great in their way, but basically none of them (with one exception) seem to capture any but the most superficial aspects of his vision. There are probably many reasons for that, but one is that PKD's heroes are almost uniformly schlubs, and while it is possible to make a movie with a schlubby hero, it is not possible in the context of a summer-sf-blockbusters. The only movie to really be deeply Dickian, that is, to use the cinematic medium in such a way as to convey the actual themes of Dicks' work, is the neglected A Scanner Darkly.

Dick returned over and over again to certain themes, one of which I also seem to return to: empathy, and its absence. There are at least two great inventions of his in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which formed the basis for Bladerunner) – The Voight-Kampff machine which could distinguish replicants from humans by measuring their empathy and the religion of Mercerism. The former made it into the movie; the latter did not, which is a pity, but maybe it is another one of those things that does not translate to movies. Mercerism was a kind of jacked-in version of Christianity where believers can share in the sufferings of William Mercer by means of an electronic device. This kind of thing – the sharing of actual spiritual presence over the intertubes – is something we are quite a long way from but I can't imagine it not happening eventually.

The idea (but not the actuality) of empathy pervades Dick's world. His characters all seem to be either casualties or agents of its absence. They are trapped in "a maze of death", which is none other than the universe itself, seen as a cruel machine manipulated by sinister false gods. Their make pathetic attempts to cling to one another for support, but find the others either unwilling or unable to provide the needed warmth. Genuine empathy, the shadowy presence of the true god blocked by the constructs of the demiurge, exists but only can be seen in glimpses.

Now that it occurs to me, the parallels between the Dickian and Kafkaesque are too strong to not see, and I feel vaguely embarrassed by not having grasped them before now, given that they are two of my favorite writers. Probably they too obvious to list, but one that strikes me is the combination of metaphysical terror with genuine if mordant humor. In Kafka, the machinery of death is composed of bureaucracy and the stuffy social structures of prewar Europe, while in Dick they are built out of automation, warring corporations, and drugs. Same shit, different eras – we are all trapped in these alien-yet-familiar systems, systems built by humans but in the process of spinning out of human control.

Dick's universe is a little less bleak than Kafka's perhaps, since he allows the occasional emanation into the false universe of magical life-restoring substances from beyond its boundaries. Thus the title substance/product of Ubik reveals its true nature in epigraph of the final chapter:

I am the word and my name is never spoken,
the name which no one knows 
I am called Ubik, but that is not my name.
I am. I shall always be.

[update: well, that was -- different. I thought I was a PKD devotee, but I was a mere tourist amongst these people who in many cases knew the man personally, and have devoted years of study, and have internalized the man's enormous sprawling oeuvre.  Many serious scholars too, which I didn't expect. PKD is about fragmenting and fluid identity (among other things), and reading his works has a subtle deranging effect on one's sense of self (true of all authors in a way, but Dick takes it to a whole other level). So to be in this crowd was somewhat like being on a PKD drug, and his spirit seemed to enter and animate everyone there, like a more benevolent version of Palmer Eldritch.]

No Compassion

The latest TSA regulations seem to have converted large swathes of the normally politically supine into rabid civil libertarians, ready to lay down their life for the principle that their junk should not be touched. Well, great, I sympathize with them, they are right. But where was this outrage when the government was fomenting illegal wars, ordering the assassination of US citizens, putting obviously innocent people to death, torturing teenagers, pouring a trillion dollars a year into the security apparat...well, I could go on. Apparently none of this matters because it didn't happen to normal, white, middle-class people. But mess with air passengers -- people with credit cards and Samsonite bags -- well, that's a different story. Aux barricades!

To me, this indicates that our political culture suffers from a lack of imagination and empathy. The underlying psychology of conservatism involves the deliberate denial of these factors, while liberalism promotes them. That does not mean, of course, that conservatives are sociopaths who lack empathy -- they are for the most part just normal human beings, and perfectly capable of putting themselves into another person's point of view -- and also capable of not doing so. To first approximation, everyone can empathize with their neighbors or co-workers and people who they see every day. It's a bit more of a stretch to take the point of view of people in the next town, or those from a different ethnic group or class, or the gay, or the homeless, or those who dwell in radically different social worlds (Afghan tribesmen, say). The liberal humanist imagination at least strives to see the world through the eyes of others; whereas the conservative mind seems to thrive on shutting out foreignness, or reducing it to something known. Here's an interesting piece which shows several examples of conservative politicians who depart from their usual hard line of no handouts when they actually have personal contact with someone from the needy classes -- ie, Nancy Reagan suddenly is all for Alzheimer's research. So they can have empathy for people like them or people they personally know. That works great for peasants, but doesn't really work in a modern society.

Politics involves the construction of fictional identities that promote collective identities and thus a degree of cross-empathy with ones fellow citizens. I think this is most clearly visible in the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, when the meanings of "Frenchman" and "Italian" were quite deliberately cobbled together, but I think it's a universal principle. The underlying conflict of our resent-day politics is over the American identity -- whether to be an American is to be an urban, cosmopolitan, inclusive, multicultural person, or a member of a white christian tribe. Naturally I favor the former, but I feel like I need to acknowledge that there is at least something vaguely legitimate about the emotions that power the latter group. Being cosmopolitan is hard, it takes work. Empathizing with others is also hard -- and it's not even clear what it should mean. Nobody has the time and resources to empathize with everyone, but the modern world puts us in contact with essentially everyone. The American identity that grew up over the last few centuries (and evolved through many different versions during that history) is being eaten away by globalization and many other factors. What will replace it? Nobody is sure. The elites will do OK, they always do, but those not in the elite don't know what they are going to be in the future, and that produces existential fear, which I think is what is really driving the tea partiers.

On the other side, Obama positioned himself as the One to lead the country into the imagined future of the cosmopolitans -- which was a great marketing campaign, it was what we needed and he had the unique personal story to embody it. But now buyer's remorse has set in, and we realize that the perfectly designed package just had a very normal mainstream centrist politician inside the wrapping.

Sorry, this post was supposed to be about airport screening, wasn't it? Anyway -- I think we have a real failure of social imagination in this country, and in addition to all the factors mentioned above we have a glut of media, and as a result a lack of compelling unifying stories. The national mind pays more attention to balloon boys and Bristol Palin than it does to our foreign wars or departments of torture. And why not? Those are compelling, understandable narratives, as is the overreach of the TSA and the brave citizens resisting it. It doesn't take much work to understand it and take a side. That could be me getting my groin felt up -- but it's hard to see me getting my wedding party hit by predator drones. That only happens to some other sort of person, so it doesn't really happen at all.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Justice?

Obama must be a master of some sort of dark-art political aikido. How else could he get his opponents to come out against empathy? Obama mentioned that he'd want to nominate a justice with the capacity to exhibit this quality:

Now, the process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as President. So I will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives – whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes...

Jeff Sessions (R-Jesusland) responded:

"The danger of that is: what is empathy? Empathy is a totally non-objective standard. It is utterly subjective. In other words, I don't like you so I have no empathy for you, but I have empathy for your opponent therefore I'm going to tilt the playing field in favor of the person who's suing you or you are suing.

Or as SadlyNo shortered it:

You know who had empathy? Hitler, that's who.

So I guess the Republican position is that we need to screen all prospective jurists with the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test and exclude those who pass.



This is sure to be another winning strategy for the GOP. Everyone wants a justice system packed with replicants. What with them already successfully running the Terminator for governor of California I'm beginning to think that the party may already be a front for a robot takeover.

There's been much commentary about this, but I liked this one by Jonah Lehrer points out that the lack of empathy is not impartiality but psychopathy, and also pointed out that Adam Smith laid out how empathy was the basis of morality and justice a couple hundred years ago.

Empathy is one of those concepts that cuts across and connects a whole swathe of things I'm interested in, including personhood, group formation and polarization, artificial intelligence, and politics. My dissertation (which was ostensibly about novice programming environments) was partly taken over by the question of how one attributes agency to things, and how one applies certain cognitive frames to quasi-animate objects that enable projection, identification, attribution of goals and emotions. The question of empathy in politics was how commenter Michael and I started our long and tedious debate – I thought that it was useful to apply empathetic thinking to the activities of criminals, he thought that it was just awful and you shouldn't. And of course, it was a central theme of Phil Dick's work.