MIND READERS DICTIONARY : Mind Readers Dictionary

About a year ago I wrote an article seeking a non-subjective definition for butthead, an alternative to the subjective definition as anyone with whom I butt heads. This is a central research question for me, which translates to lofty yet practical conundrums about the alternative to buttheadedness: What is wisdom? What is rationality? And the great existential question: Now that we are forced to admit that there are inescapable differences of opinion about what God or the universe expect of us, how do we figure out who's right in any argument? If you've followed my articles, you'll know that I have particular people with whom I butt heads--Sarah Palin or the latest reincarnation of the right wing (I've called them the "Always Right" wing) for example. Readers who don't have my reaction to these targets challenge me to be more specific about what makes them buttheads. It's a great question, consistent with my quest for an objective definition of butthead, and I'll attempt to answer their question here broadly and in my next article to give some examples. I have a new definition of wisdom and rationality I'm trying out: The ability to actively embody alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation, to conscientiously select the perspective to operate from, and to maintain the capacity to actively embody the alternative perspectives even after having selected. Let me unpack this: Actively embody: In practice this translates as the capacity to mirror alternative perspectives. Mirroring is the act of giving full, convincing voice to a perspective independent of whether you subscribe to it. It's like the lawyer's skill for making a case for any argument. A skillful lawyer could, on a dime switch to her opponent's argument, making a strong and compelling case against herself. Mirroring is the best test of empathy I know, the capacity to put yourself in another person's shoes, or to take on another person's perspective, not just giving it lip service, but actively embodying it. Perspective: A "take" on a situation. It could be some particular person's take (for example your opponent's in an argument) but it could also just be any alternative interpretation, story, explanation, or description of what's going on, and as a consequence, what to do about it. Select the perspective to operate from: This is the focus of most definitions of rationality and wisdom: The ability to choose the best alternative perspective. It's skillful "shopping" among perspectives, skillful "bet placing" on how to read a situation. My new definition of wisdom and rationality includes this central issue but shifts to include a focus on how to keep the alternatives in mind, as implied in the oft-quoted (at least by me) from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Still retaining the ability to function means that you chose a perspective from which to operate even as you keep alternatives in mind. Alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation: One can't see all possible alternative perspectives, and one can't always tell what's a controversial or ambiguous situation. Therefore, there will always be errors about which perspectives to keep in mind and which situations call for wise attention. Still, research into groupthink shows that decisions improve when even just one alternative perspective is given voice. Alternative perspectives generate doubt, so what I'm suggesting here all boils down to a question about doubt-management. To act with focus and productivity, we need to get doubt out of the way, but to act appropriately, producing what will prove to have been the right thing to produce and not the wrong thing

Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist called my electric bass a toy. Earlier he had me play bassoon which had eight keys for the right thumb alone and required making your own reeds with a micrometer-very fussy. He was right. Comparatively speaking, the bass was a toy. Musical equipment just gets easier and easier. Now you don't even have to know any simple riffs to sound like a virtuoso. With electronic keyboards you can rest a finger on any key and a whole band pumps out a steady glorious sound. DJ's claim to be musicians. In the old days people who said, "Yeah, I play music; I play the record player," were kidding. Compared to an electric bass, these new instruments are toys.* Musicians debate what easy access to easier instruments will do to musicianship. We hope these easy instruments won't set a new low standard for musical achievement. We hope instead they'll be like gateway drugs. That's what the flatteringly loud bass equipment did for me. It affirmed me early on, whispering, "You're a pro, you're really doing this," in my ear while I closed my eyes, kicked back my head and wailed away for hours on those same simple riffs. But like a gateway drug it eventually lead me to the harder stuff like bebop and altered dominant scales. Of course for some, the flattering new equipment doesn't have the gateway effect. They're easily impressed by their prowess. They get complacent and don't bother to learn anything more sophisticated, not that there's any reason they should have to. After all, life is short. We should all be so lucky as to experience the pinnacles of human achievement, even if only by simulation. Fake musical instruments, virtual reality games, movies, fiction, even pornography--are we going to begrudge the talentless a chance to pretend to have talent, the timid a vicarious experience of fictional heroism, the homely a chance to experience sex with attractive people? Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India around four hundred years after Buddha lived. The word Mahayana means "great vehicle" in several senses, but the key sense comes from the allegory that justified the pivotal Mahayana update on Buddhas' teachings: A father's house is burning down and his two children are in it. He wants them to run out of the house but they don't see why they should. He entices them out with the promise of little toy wagons, a different one for each child. Excited, the children rush out to their father and the presents but when they arrive their father admits that he didn't have the two little wagons really. He has something better instead, one large wagon, a great vehicle that would carry them both. The traditional interpretation is that the little wagons the father promised were the earlier schools of Buddhist thought to be replaced by Mahayana Buddhism, the great vehicle that would carry all people. Though these earlier schools couldn't take you to nirvana they are to be appreciated for motivating people to take the first step toward Buddhism. They did not deliver as promised but they demonstrated the earlier teacher's "skillful means," which from what I've read sounds like a euphemism for the seductive skill of leading people toward virtue, in effect, selling good gateway drugs, drugs that will eventually lead people into addictions to truly worthy commitments. As with the easier musical instruments that led me eventually to dig deeper into music, the fabled

Many subscribers didn't get the animation I created as last week's article: Here it is. I'm a practicing jazz musician--practicing because I'm nowhere near as good as I want to be. I didn't start out interested in jazz and getting good, I was interested in rock and getting girls. Rock didn't necessarily take a lot of practice. During my teens I was satisfied playing the same simple riffs over and over through my flatteringly loud bass equipment. My father, a classical oboist and pianist called my electric bass a toy. Earlier he had me play bassoon which had eight keys for the right thumb alone and required making your own reeds with a micrometer-very fussy. He was right. Comparatively speaking, the bass was a toy. Musical equipment just gets easier and easier. Now you don't even have to know any simple riffs to sound like a virtuoso. With electronic keyboards you can rest a finger on any key and a whole band pumps out a steady glorious sound. DJ's claim to be musicians. In the old days people who said, "Yeah, I play music; I play the record player," were kidding. Compared to an electric bass, these new instruments are toys.* Musicians debate what easy access to easier instruments will do to musicianship. We hope these easy instruments won't set a new low standard for musical achievement. We hope instead they'll be like gateway drugs. That's what the flatteringly loud bass equipment did for me. It affirmed me early on, whispering, "You're a pro, you're really doing this," in my ear while I closed my eyes, kicked back my head and wailed away for hours on those same simple riffs. But like a gateway drug it eventually lead me to the harder stuff like bebop and altered dominant scales. Of course for some, the flattering new equipment doesn't have the gateway effect. They're easily impressed by their prowess. They get complacent and don't bother to learn anything more sophisticated, not that there's any reason they should have to. After all, life is short. We should all be so lucky as to experience the pinnacles of human achievement, even if only by simulation. Fake musical instruments, virtual reality games, movies, fiction, even pornography--are we going to begrudge the talentless a chance to pretend to have talent, the timid a vicarious experience of fictional heroism, the homely a chance to experience sex with attractive people? Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India around four hundred years after Buddha lived. The word Mahayana means "great vehicle" in several senses, but the key sense comes from the allegory that justified the pivotal Mahayana update on Buddhas' teachings: A father's house is burning down and his two children are in it. He wants them to run out of the house but they don't see why they should. He entices them out with the promise of little toy wagons, a different one for each child. Excited, the children rush out to their father and the presents but when they arrive their father admits that he didn't have the two little wagons really. He has something better instead, one large wagon, a great vehicle that would carry them both. The traditional interpretation is that the little wagons the father promised were the earlier schools of Buddhist thought to be replaced by Mahayana Buddhism, the great vehicle that would carry all people. Though these earlier schools couldn't take you to nirvana they are to be appreciated for motivating people to take the first step toward Buddhism. They did not deliver as promised but they demonstrated the earlier teacher's "skillful means," which from what I've read sounds like a euphemism for the seductive skill of leading people toward virtue, in effect, selling good gateway drugs, drugs that will eventually lead people into addictions to truly worthy commitments. As with the easier musical instruments that led me eventually to dig deeper into music, the fabled

Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can make us passive, oblivious, docile and dangerously myopic. Read it for a fascinating history of how the U.S., which started so dour and puritanical, became the positive thinking capital of the world. The pivot point was Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. From Christian Science to The Secret, both with their preposterous idea that you can change anything—cure cancer or make multi-millions--if you just put your positive mind to it. Ehrenreich counsels that to bring about real change we have to analyze and identify what’s really wrong. Then there was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, a book after my own progressivist heart. It argues in favor of positive thinking as a way to compensate for our naturally curmudgeonly hearts. Negativity hinders. You can’t bring about change by analyzing and identifying what’s wrong. Instead, you must identify and build on successes and set passion-fueled positive yet concrete goals. Both books are quite convincing. They tease out my ambivalence about positivity and negativity—carrots and sticks--in producing change, a dilemma after my own inconsistency-probing heart. In between, I’ve been reading a 34-year-old book called Double Bind: The Foundation of the communicational approach to the family. This book is a retrospective on 20 years of research into a 1956 concept developed by Gregory Bateson, one of my mentors. Bateson hypothesized that schizophrenia might develop in children who are repeatedly subjected to inconsistent parental messages of a particular kind he called the double bind. A double bind is a double message and a bind that keeps you from saying it is a double message. It’s a three-way, no-win situation that amounts to you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t, and you’re damned also if notice that you’re damned either way. In other words, “By jerking you around, I’ll make you feel powerless and if you try to escape my jerking, I’ll make you feel even more powerless.” Bateson came to his hypothesis through case-study evidence and through an abiding fascination with the logic of paradoxes (a fascination I share). The case studies included situations like this: A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more? He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. Bateson identified the double bind’s three necessary and sufficient conditions: 1. The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately. 2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and each of these denies the other. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order

Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can make us passive, oblivious, docile and dangerously myopic. Read it for a fascinating history of how the U.S., which started so dour and puritanical, became the positive thinking capital of the world. The pivot point was Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. From Christian Science to The Secret, both with their preposterous idea that you can change anything—cure cancer or make multi-millions--if you just put your positive mind to it. Ehrenreich counsels that to bring about real change we have to analyze and identify what’s really wrong. Then there was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, a book after my own progressivist heart. It argues in favor of positive thinking as a way to compensate for our naturally curmudgeonly hearts. Negativity hinders. You can’t bring about change by analyzing and identifying what’s wrong. Instead, you must identify and build on successes and set passion-fueled positive yet concrete goals. Both books are quite convincing. They tease out my ambivalence about positivity and negativity—carrots and sticks--in producing change, a dilemma after my own inconsistency-probing heart. In between, I’ve been reading a 34-year-old book called Double Bind: The Foundation of the communicational approach to the family. This book is a retrospective on 20 years of research into a 1956 concept developed by Gregory Bateson, one of my mentors. Bateson hypothesized that schizophrenia might develop in children who are repeatedly subjected to inconsistent parental messages of a particular kind he called the double bind. A double bind is a double message and a bind that keeps you from saying it is a double message. It’s a three-way, no-win situation that amounts to you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t, and you’re damned also if notice that you’re damned either way. In other words, “By jerking you around, I’ll make you feel powerless and if you try to escape my jerking, I’ll make you feel even more powerless.” Bateson came to his hypothesis through case-study evidence and through an abiding fascination with the logic of paradoxes (a fascination I share). The case studies included situations like this: A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more? He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. Bateson identified the double bind’s three necessary and sufficient conditions: 1. The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately. 2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and each of these denies the other. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order

An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission. Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management. In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner. I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is. But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest: We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences. There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear. We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings. The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power. Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste

An enthusiastic reader wrote to ask me questions about what makes me tick, "Are you trying to make people think? To make them think a certain way? Do you just enjoy the writing?" All of the above, but on the second question, yes I am a man with a mission. I am a missionary. I'm trying to put a leash on those Godawful narrow-minded right wing, Sarah Palin, Tea Partying, manipulative tricks we all use, me included. Before my current missionary work, I was your basic idealistic left wing activist moving from issue to issue looking for leverage. I lived for six years on The Farm, the world’s largest hippie commune whose mission statement was “We’re out to save the world.” I ran water development projects for villages in Guatemala. I researched and wrote for Food First and Ashoka Foundation, Fecundity Fund and GBS Foundation. I co-founded 20/20 Vision, a D.C. based peace/environmental organization that lasted for 28 years. I ran the public affairs department for The Body Shop International, invited by its legendary environmentalist founder, Anita Roddick to help “radicalize the company.” I designed political campaigns for Ben and Jerry’s. I was on a mission. Throughout my 20-year first career as an activist, I had a sense that progressivism would just keep on progressing. Sure there would be bumps in the road, but the overwhelming trend would be toward less dogma and more pragmatism, less fear-mongering and more freedom, less waste and more efficient resource management. In my naiveté, I thought the US was free and clear from the lure of fascism, and I didn’t foresee the Republican Party becoming the sneering, ranting know-it-all crazy uncle who won’t stop bullying folks into submission at the family dinner. I didn’t foresee that while he ranted, rallying the nation’s natural-born ranters to his side, the family’s goose would be cooked. In the 80’s there were a few big causes. Now there are so many it is hard to know where to the leverage is. But I know where. I’m a man with a mission at home and abroad, a mission that pertains as much to our daily personal interactions as our global negotiations, a mission to curb a tendency not just in Republicans, but in all of us. Of all the problems we face, here’s the biggest: We humans tend to translate "ouch" into "you're bad," "I want" into "you owe me," "I'm uncomfortable" into "It's all your fault,” “I’m disappointed” into “You’re evil.” In hundreds of ways, specific and vague, forceful and gentle we instantly, automatically, sanctimoniously, self-servingly, and selectively summon moral principles to support our personal preferences. There’s no reason to expect us to be any different. We’re all born as babies and babies have to whine to get attention. For newborns, crying is survival. And there’s no reason to assume that, just by growing up into our meager human power of reason, whining would disappear. We are what you’d get when you cross strong feelings with modest powers of abstract reasoning. You’d get abstract reasoning tripping all over itself in a desperate lurch to support our strong feelings. The Republican Party didn’t start out as the “Always Right” Wing. Buried in the party’s history are a few laudably well-reasoned and substantive principles. Chief among them was a strong commitment to the rational design of a well functioning Republic, a hierarchical hybrid form of government in which individuals, states and the country as a whole share power. Ironically, Edmund Burke, the father of conservativism was on a mission like mine. In reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution he argued that abstract ideas and political theories are dangerously likely to be ill-conceived and self-serving and therefore rarely better guides to the design of governments than the weather-tested syste

The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you too?" she asked. "Yes," said her Grandpa. She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?" A fundamental principle: In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived in your community the harder it is to leave.  The longer a creature has been domesticated the harder it is to be released into the wild, the longer you’ve had a cell phone, the harder it is to do without it, the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to break, and the longer you have been married the more complex your divorce settlement is likely to be. The challenge to long term relationships is not finding the raison d’etre (the function, the reason to be or stay) but the raison d’entre (the reason to enter in the first place). A new parable: God was experimenting.  She had made many fine creatures. Her first were fully programmed at birth.  They were like robots.  She made large numbers of them because, being preprogrammed, they couldn’t adapt.  If they wandered into an environment where their programmed behavior didn’t work, they would die. As long as there were lots of them though, that wasn’t a problem. Her next creatures could learn by trial and error. If they had a close call with something deadly they could learn to avoid that danger in the future.  They could only learn from close calls--near death, not real death experiences--but that made them a lot more adaptable to changes in their environments.   These did well. God was getting better, and more daring too. God decided to see what would happen if he made one with hindsight, foresight and sidesight, the ability to imagine back into the past, forward into the future and really anything on any side, and from any side. It wasn’t just that they could imagine anything. They could sew all of their imaginings together into one big overview of God’s works, really a glimpse of what God herself saw.  This overview would make the creature highly adaptive, able to anticipate danger not just from near death experiences but from weaving all sorts of twos and twos together. For the second time ever--God being the first time--there was a creature that could ask and answer the question “what’s this all about?” The trouble was that there was plenty of danger, behind, in front and on all sides. Being able to see so much at once is not for the faint of heart. God could handle it but that’s because she was above it.  She was the one who set up the game of life this way originally, with things falling apart, and life resisting falling apart but only for a while, a competition in which each creature is both an individual trying to survive in a dangerous environment and the dangerous environment to other creatures. These new ones were creatures who could remember terrible things that had happened to them.  They could foresee their own deaths. They could see threats on every side of them.  It made them anxious, clingy, quirky and even a little more dangerous than the other creatures. It’s true, God’s new breed were better at adapting. They were good at figuring out what was dangerous and steering clear. Indeed, so clear, that they weren’t very good at mating. Their foresight enabled them to anticipate trouble with their fellow anxious quirky creatures. Their hindsight made them remember dating troubles past.  Instinctively they were drawn to each other, but then their imaginings made them shy away. So God started playing around with the variables.  She invented some painkilling, bliss-wakening drugs that would fi

The older we get the harder it is to start new lasting romantic relationships. I can explain it by way of an old joke, a fundamental principle, and a new parable. An old joke: A little girl, sitting on her grandpa's lap asked "Did God make me?" "Yes," said her grandpa. "And did God make you too?" she asked. "Yes," said her Grandpa. She reflected and said, "He's getting better isn't he?" A fundamental principle: In living systems, attachments and dependencies grow. The longer you’ve lived in your community the harder it is to leave.  The longer a creature has been domesticated the harder it is to be released into the wild, the longer you’ve had a cell phone, the harder it is to do without it, the longer you've had a habit, the harder it is to break, and the longer you have been married the more complex your divorce settlement is likely to be. The challenge to long term relationships is not finding the raison d’etre (the function, the reason to be or stay) but the raison d’entre (the reason to enter in the first place). A new parable: God was experimenting.  She had made many fine creatures. Her first were fully programmed at birth.  They were like robots.  She made large numbers of them because, being preprogrammed, they couldn’t adapt.  If they wandered into an environment where their programmed behavior didn’t work, they would die. As long as there were lots of them though, that wasn’t a problem. Her next creatures could learn by trial and error. If they had a close call with something deadly they could learn to avoid that danger in the future.  They could only learn from close calls--near death, not real death experiences--but that made them a lot more adaptable to changes in their environments.   These did well. God was getting better, and more daring too. God decided to see what would happen if he made one with hindsight, foresight and sidesight, the ability to imagine back into the past, forward into the future and really anything on any side, and from any side. It wasn’t just that they could imagine anything. They could sew all of their imaginings together into one big overview of God’s works, really a glimpse of what God herself saw.  This overview would make the creature highly adaptive, able to anticipate danger not just from near death experiences but from weaving all sorts of twos and twos together. For the second time ever--God being the first time--there was a creature that could ask and answer the question “what’s this all about?” The trouble was that there was plenty of danger, behind, in front and on all sides. Being able to see so much at once is not for the faint of heart. God could handle it but that’s because she was above it.  She was the one who set up the game of life this way originally, with things falling apart, and life resisting falling apart but only for a while, a competition in which each creature is both an individual trying to survive in a dangerous environment and the dangerous environment to other creatures. These new ones were creatures who could remember terrible things that had happened to them.  They could foresee their own deaths. They could see threats on every side of them.  It made them anxious, clingy, quirky and even a little more dangerous than the other creatures. It’s true, God’s new breed were better at adapting. They were good at figuring out what was dangerous and steering clear. Indeed, so clear, that they weren’t very good at mating. Their foresight enabled them to anticipate trouble with their fellow anxious quirky creatures. Their hindsight made them remember dating troubles past.  Instinctively they were drawn to each other, but then their imaginings made them shy away. So God started playing around with the variables.  She invented some painkilling, bliss-wakening drugs that would fi

My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. People with stressful lives would tend to find the beginning more painful and the ending more compelling. When grieving the end of my marriage, I suddenly lost my appetite for bravely honest movies about divorce. I was getting enough of a reality check from reality, thank you. For some folks the grief and stress never ends. I am also keenly interested in the scientific pursuit of ever more accurate stories about how things work. I don’t think I would have nearly the appetite for accuracy if I needed to counter a more miserable existence with more comforting, reassuring, affirming stories. The lure of wishful thinking is, in part a function of what you’re up against. The more pain you’re in, the more wishful thinking you’ll naturally want and need. For those of us with relatively cushy lives then, it’s no good telling those with difficult lives that they ought to face reality. In this often cruel and always unfair world everyone deserves to tell whatever stories give them comfort enough to get by. We could call it The Right to Believe. It’s also no good to have wishful thinking imposed on the scientific pursuit of accurate stories. We could call it The Need to Know. People should be free to believe whatever wishful stories get them through the night, but science should be free to pursue whatever accurate stories will get us through the crises. Climate change, extinctions, epidemics, cancer—the conflict between the right to believe and the need to know isn’t some intellectual debate, it’s a hot war, so let me word it more directly: From science to belief: We honor your right to believe whatever comforts you, but get it the hell out of the way of science, because even unimpeded, science can hardly keep up, and only if it keeps up will it save our children, even your children, oh wishful thinker. From belief to science: You scientists caused most of those crises in the first place and how dare you say your method gets at truth better than other methods? Why are you qualified to make that claim? Because you’ve decided you’re right? Do you know how many wishful thinkers say exactly the same thing? What makes you think science is so special that we all have to get out of your way? As pretentious as it sounds, science can make special claims. The universe either complies with or defies our beliefs. Reality pushes back. As Aldous Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” The universe simply complies more with scientific accounts. Imagine parallel annual reports from two human ventures, one for science and one for, say, religion. Or imagine centennial or millennial reports. No matter what period you measure, science’s report would be vastly thicker. No matter what opinions we might hold on the subject, our intuitions recognize that science is winning the accuracy game. So no, it’s not just like any other way of believing. Even the people who claim that science and wishful thinking are indistinguishable intuit this. Their argument undermines itself and reveals deference to science. They are trying to make a compelling objective case that there is no way to make a compelling objective case. This backhanded, reluctant deference to science is understandable. We may grumble about sciences’ pretentiousness, especially when science disappoints our wishful thinking, but at least tacit deference to science is all-pervasive and not arbitrary. When religious fundamentalists need results, they rely on doctors and engineers rather than faith healers or prayers.

My life is so completely cushy that I can afford to visit distressing thoughts and scenarios. I can watch a movie like Slumdog Millionaire and feel empathy from my safe vantage point. I can even find the ending a little hokey. I'm betting that it wouldn't be so easy if I were suffering more. People with stressful lives would tend to find the beginning more painful and the ending more compelling. When grieving the end of my marriage, I suddenly lost my appetite for bravely honest movies about divorce. I was getting enough of a reality check from reality, thank you. For some folks the grief and stress never ends. I am also keenly interested in the scientific pursuit of ever more accurate stories about how things work. I don’t think I would have nearly the appetite for accuracy if I needed to counter a more miserable existence with more comforting, reassuring, affirming stories. The lure of wishful thinking is, in part a function of what you’re up against. The more pain you’re in, the more wishful thinking you’ll naturally want and need. For those of us with relatively cushy lives then, it’s no good telling those with difficult lives that they ought to face reality. In this often cruel and always unfair world everyone deserves to tell whatever stories give them comfort enough to get by. We could call it The Right to Believe. It’s also no good to have wishful thinking imposed on the scientific pursuit of accurate stories. We could call it The Need to Know. People should be free to believe whatever wishful stories get them through the night, but science should be free to pursue whatever accurate stories will get us through the crises. Climate change, extinctions, epidemics, cancer—the conflict between the right to believe and the need to know isn’t some intellectual debate, it’s a hot war, so let me word it more directly: From science to belief: We honor your right to believe whatever comforts you, but get it the hell out of the way of science, because even unimpeded, science can hardly keep up, and only if it keeps up will it save our children, even your children, oh wishful thinker. From belief to science: You scientists caused most of those crises in the first place and how dare you say your method gets at truth better than other methods? Why are you qualified to make that claim? Because you’ve decided you’re right? Do you know how many wishful thinkers say exactly the same thing? What makes you think science is so special that we all have to get out of your way? As pretentious as it sounds, science can make special claims. The universe either complies with or defies our beliefs. Reality pushes back. As Aldous Huxley said, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” The universe simply complies more with scientific accounts. Imagine parallel annual reports from two human ventures, one for science and one for, say, religion. Or imagine centennial or millennial reports. No matter what period you measure, science’s report would be vastly thicker. No matter what opinions we might hold on the subject, our intuitions recognize that science is winning the accuracy game. So no, it’s not just like any other way of believing. Even the people who claim that science and wishful thinking are indistinguishable intuit this. Their argument undermines itself and reveals deference to science. They are trying to make a compelling objective case that there is no way to make a compelling objective case. This backhanded, reluctant deference to science is understandable. We may grumble about sciences’ pretentiousness, especially when science disappoints our wishful thinking, but at least tacit deference to science is all-pervasive and not arbitrary. When religious fundamentalists need results, they rely on doctors and engineers rather than faith healers or prayers.

"Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too." Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety." To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe." This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years. Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe. Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence. The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug

"Every life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first -- the story of our quest for sexual love -- is well known and well charted. Its vagaries form the staple of music and literature; it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second -- the story of our quest for love from the world -- is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important, or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here, too." Alain de Botton "Status Anxiety." To be loved by the world--what could that mean? I think it's a sense of inner and outer harmony, relief from dissonance within yourself and dissonance between yourself and the outside world. It's a sense that you can both be yourself and be successful by the world's standards. Being loved by the world doesn't have to mean being adored by the world, but still somehow affirmed, or as the biologist Stuart Kauffman put it, a feeling that you are "at home in the universe." This affirmation is not just the thought or realization, "Hey, I'm at home." It's a feeling. I'd go so far as to say it's the feeling of being well adapted--surmisal of the fittest--a sense, even a false one, that you fit your circumstances. In that respect it's a direct extension of what organisms have been evolving toward for over 3.5 billion years. Still, surmisal of the fittest is not just about biological fitness despite what evolutionary psychologists tend to imply. No, it's surmisal of the fittest by whatever standards of fitness have emotional resonance for us these days, not all of which are directly or indirectly in the service of biological reproductive success. Think of how much human behavior is driven by a desire to feel like you're a good person on the side of righteousness, a person with integrity fighting for greater integrity in the world around. That feeling may have nothing to do with having children who survive and reproduce. It can be uncorrelated to the biological urge and can even work at cross-purposes to it, for example in a suicide bomber who dies childless feeling that he has acted with supreme integrity in perfect service of what is truest in the universe. Feeling fitted has both the inner and outer quality--integrated within and integrated with your outside circumstances. The inner feeling is relief from dissonance or doubt, a sense that who you are--your preferences, intentions, and values hold together with simple clarity. This internal consistency is what in the world of the intellect is called coherence. But with feelings it's not necessarily a drive to have a coherent intellect. The coherence that makes us feel loved by the world is just the gut's satisfied feeling of relief when ambivalence, confusion and inner conflict has lifted. Indeed, emotional coherence might be achieved at the expense of intellectual coherence. For example George Bush who many of us found intellectually incoherent felt that he was a man of exceptional integrity. And indeed for most of us, most of the time the feeling of being right takes priority over actually being right. Emotional coherence often trumps intellectual coherence. The feeling of freedom from conflict with your outer circumstances is like what in the world of the intellect we call correspondence. Correspondence is having your theories match sense data and experiential evidence. If I said "eggs don't break when you drop them from second story windows," you would say that lacks correspondence to the audiovisual sense data that comes with the splatting crunching sight and sound of eggs dropped from windows. Again thoug

Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view. The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution. So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship. The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice. Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar. Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership. In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti

Life is sweet; life is dangerous. You have to be positive; you have to be careful. Love makes the world go round; people are scary. I'm an ambigamist not just about embracing a partner but every aspect of life. I watch myself and everyone I know wrestle with the tension between open and closed, romance and skepticism, faith and reason, confidence and doubt, tenderness and protectiveness, hope and fear, transcendence and realism, generosity and caution, friendship and business. I don't see any way out of it. I think this kind of tension is the truest fundamental, a fundamental that, alas, isn't a groove you can slide and cozy your way into, but a groove that's a rickety rope bridge we weave as we walk it. How can it not be? Ours is to enjoy life with death in full view. The tension plays out in every arena and at every scale or scope, from how we cope with keeping a spring in our step as we stumble over the day's little obstacles to how we enjoy the world we've created even as it becomes clear that it is creating terrifying climate change. How do you enjoy life when you know the risks? Through a mixture of liberating pleasure and compromising caution. So no, my column isn't just about romantic partnership. But still, that kind of love is a great and practical place to explore this tension. "To love that well, that thou must leave ere long" as Shakespeare put it. Courtship is a microcosm in which we experience a particularly vivid version of the open/closed question that all of life addresses. To survive, organisms' bodies have to answer correctly such questions as Should I join this? Should I stay with this? Should I be open to this? Can I trust this? Am I safe here? And these too, on a different scale are the questions we deal with in courtship. The paradox of life is that it consists of independent individuals that, to survive have to be open, sacrificing some of their individuality. From the simplest single cell organism to the most complex society, sustainability depends on having the right semi-permeable membrane, one that lets in what is good and keeps out what is bad, joins the right partnerships and not the wrong ones. That's what all of life seeks, through some combination of trial and error, biological mechanism, instinct, responsiveness, emotion and in us--the very rarest of cases--through conscious cognitive choice. Lately I've noticed that there are really two types of ambigamists and that I much prefer the company of one of them--the ironic ambigamist--so much so that I'll describe the other as bipolar. Both ironic and bipolar ambigamists oscillate between open and closed, romance and skepticism. But ironic ambigamists never forget that the tension between those two is the truest fundamental. No matter how open or closed they feel in any moment they know and embrace the opposite condition. They own both their openness and closed-ness, even while they're feeling more one way than the other. For ironic ambigamists, the dream partner is someone with whom they can merge their ambivalence. Their partnership is one in which each partner winkingly recognizes that the other is an appropriately skeptical individual, even while both parties do what they can to keep the romance, or at minimum the appearance of safe, certain, romance strong and alive. They joke about life on that edge between being one thing and two, a couple and individuals. They give each other room to breath and forgive each other the disconnects when one is closed and the other is open. In other words they respect the inescapable give and take of partnership. In contrast, bipolar ambigamists, when feeling open can't remember feeling closed, and when feeling closed, can't remember feeling open. So yes they oscillate like any ambigamist, but no, they don't take responsibility for it. If you're feeling romanti