The Questions This Pause Raises

Questions For These Times

Peter Shea

April 16, 2020

I wanted to name the questions that have become urgent for me in the last while. This is the most promising moment for learning that I have experienced. It seems important to hold on to the variety of new impulses.

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.  W. K. Clifford, writing in 1877.

I have never met an habitual and casual liar, that I know of, and so, seeing such people in public life, and counting up the damage they do, day to day, has made me worry with new force about faith and the teaching of faith. Having faith counter to the evidence, hope against hope, has been represented for so long as an admirable stance -- in churches, and elsewhere. In these times, is this just a way of inculcating a bad habit destructive for both the individual mind and for our civic life? If not, if faith is something different from ‘believing what you want to be true,’ how do parents and religious educators teach faith without implicitly repudiating fact-based research, science, and intellectual modesty?

Sometimes I feel sorry for judgmental people and their boring lives. From Someecards.

Is high-horseism a problem, or does it just depend on the horse? Trapped at home with liberal media, I read hundreds of similar condemnations of things I already think are bad. People love to know better, and they love to print that they know, “What he’s doing is bad, it’s really bad, it’s even worse than you thought!” I understand the motive of not normalizing intolerable actions, of keeping pressure on, but I can’t think that this drumbeat is good for public discourse or for public discoursers. For one thing, even when someone is right, revisiting the same points takes energy away from finding something new and useful to say. For a long time, people have been making the sensible point that ventilators are in too short supply and are being distributed in unreasonable and unfair ways. Surely, that was and is a problem. But it took quite a while for pieces to emerge pointing out that ventilator therapy has serious limits, that it is a treatment of last resort in many cases, and that there are urgent reasons to find alternatives to such therapies where-ever possible. Narrowing the scope of the problem to “getting enough ventilators” was not helpful to the discussion. So, where else have discussions gotten stuck in backwaters, and what is being missed, because of smart people’s obsession to repeat the obvious? Could they instead probe around for new approaches, new angles, new relevant facts and cases? It seems better when everybody is part of the research team, not just part of the righteous chorus, however righteous that chorus may be.

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;         
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;     
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! we ourselves must Pilgrims be,           
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea, 
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

James Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis, 1845

Can our moral stories and examples be updated to serve us now? For a long time, examples of hands-on care, of sacrificial love, of close community gathered for meals – with an open table for strangers -have been the spine of Christian teaching. We hear about St. Francis and the lepers, about Mary Magdalene, about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, about the early communities that held all things in common. But now, for many people raised on such stories, isolation and distancing have become the moral norm. There are still good things to do. But can this particular tradition, one of many ideas about how to do good, maintain itself in a culture that shifts away from personal contact? Someone said that the only way to bring back druids is to plant trees. Can the Christian inspiration be transformed to apply to a world that is unfriendly to gatherings, to open borders, to interactions with strangers?

April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring. Dull roots with spring rain. T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 1922

What do we make of the recent tangible proof that everything can change within weeks? This is a basic experience. We have known about it from history, but to have people all over the world encounter this fact at once is a huge thing. No one will be able to read science fiction or utopian novels or dystopian novels in the old way again. One knows now: this, or something just as radical, can happen. The entire interlocking economic engine can shut down. Standards of behavior can be reversed. Common sense assumptions can be simply abandoned. One thought that presents itself: if this is possible, what else is possible? Have we been living in imaginative poverty? But also, how bad must this society be, to undertake such sacrifices now, against an indiscriminate killer of fairly small numbers, when it has not even considered such radical moves to address the destruction of ecosystems, the threat of sea level rise, the exhaustion of resources? Can we be better about those things, also, or will we normalize and forget that this happened? There are many roads diverging from the point, “everything that seemed firm can change very fast”. We have not yet even begun to follow those out.

The question is what does it take for you to get infected? And that I think is the trillion-dollar question we have. -  Mike Osterholm, after months of trying out various theories, with the whole apparatus of virology and epidemiology at his disposal.

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial… Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

Can common sense sneak up on expertise? People have causal intuitions. They know, from experience, how fast things happen, what sort of thing can cause another thing of a certain size, which explanations make the most sense. These intuitions work pretty well for rocks and divorces and hunting deer, but they limp for viruses, and anything that, like viruses, expands exponentially. We are used to changes that can be graphed with sloping lines. Many can; these can’t.

Another case: we have an idea of when we have nailed something down, what kind of evidence is enough. Again, that common sense theory of knowledge works pretty well for most of what we run into. ‘There are three reasonable theories anybody can think of. We eliminate two, pretty much, and go with the third one.’ That’s how juries work, and car mechanics, and kids trying to blame somebody for eating the last cookie. Scientists think differently. They don’t like small whole numbers of theories, and they don’t like eliminating ‘pretty much’, so they are maddeningly slow and uneconomical – but, occasionally, they get something absolutely right. If this country is going to administer a vaccine to 200 million people, one hopes that the researchers thought like scientists and not like my uncle Joe, who’s good at fixing things. 

The political question is: can our education give people enough sense of the limits of usual thinking and common sense to enable them to be participants in decision making about common and uncommon matters, or are we destined, in the best case, for benevolent authoritarian rule by those who have the necessary sophistication, or in the worst case, for destruction by somebody’s inappropriate hunches. 

Individually, the question this all raises is just: how much can I trust myself, my own good sense, my own intuition – on this matter, but, by extension, on any matter?

If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. Billy Preston.

The economist Daniel Kahneman has done wonderful work on the long-term effects of good and bad fortune on average happiness (measured in some sophisticated ways). His results suggest that both of these work the same way: if you win the lottery, you get happier for a while, and then your average happiness goes back to about where it was. Something similar happens with disabling accidents: you become miserable, and then go back to roughly where you were. So, in general, humans are very good at establishing a new normal – not always, but lots of the time. This experience of interruption has given many people the chance to test Kahneman’s thesis: what can I live without? What can I make do with? What new burdens can I take on?

This fact, like the fact that change can happen, opens questions. If I can be ok with a way of life that would have horrified me in prospect, a month ago, what else is possible for me? Do I have to go back, when going back becomes possible? Can I worry less about making myself miserable and try some new things?

Leisure: the Basis of Culture -- title of a 1948 book by Joseph Pieper

How do we make sense of the experience of leisure? I know leisure is not universal now; many people are working harder than they have ever worked before – parents trying to work from home, medical personnel, those in essential jobs, teachers. Still, many other people have been subjected to uninterrupted expanses of time that’s not spoken for, have been given the equivalent of a European-style vacation – 6 weeks off. What are we all going to make of that? It may take a few weeks just to relax. But then, can we rise to the challenge of taking over our own time, or do we need demands and structures and deadlines? That’s an individual question, but also a social question: what level of constraint will people want, when they have tried out this obligatory freedom? 

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What questions would you add to this list?

Museums From Now On

This crisis of forced isolation has emphasized questions about the meaning of museums. The questions have been around for a long time.

Once upon a time, one could only get a good art education by traveling (that is, by being rich enough to travel extensively). One needed access to the museums of the world – enough access to generate lively mental representations. Morse, before he invented the telegraph, was trying to democratize this a bit, by painting a replica of a Louvre gallery for the edification of North Americans who could not afford passage to Paris.

Then reproduction took off, and reproduction got better and better, and cheaper and cheaper. A late stage of that has been reached recently; museums that have closed have put large parts of their collections online, sometimes in astonishingly detailed reproductions. (See the app Art Authority for a kind of summary of what is possible.)

I saw into the bizarre state of things-museum on a visit to the State Egyptian Museum in Munich. They give visitors an Ipad with really good gps; it knows exactly where one is in the museum, so that it is presenting an image of the item one is looking at, as one is standing in front of that item. One also has information and links and all that annotation-in-depth that the Germans are good at. As, one walks around, the question just won’t quit: what do these objects add? The Ipad image is generally clearer, and shows more sides. One sees details one could never see through the museum glass. So, at the exit questionnaire, I am inclined to write: “Sell the objects. Keep the Ipads. No one will ever know the difference.” I don’t think that response would endear me to the staff.

I like museums. I visit my local art gallery, affectionately renamed MIA, about once a week. But the staples of my artistic nourishment are the thousands of images in my pictures file, set up to appear on my screen at random, every 5 seconds. I can’t visit a museum every day, but I can see 500 images every day, and that is important to my comfort and peace of mind. 

I have struggled to find a particular use for MIA, one not well served by good photos of MIA-things. One idea I had was to try to remember rooms, and to treat the rooms or sections as works, as attempts to teach something. I am maybe a third of the way through learning the third floor galleries; rehearsing them is comforting when I can’t sleep or need dental work. And the pieces do start to converse with each other, and to raise questions about the mind (and in some cases, the sanity) of the curator. (One consequence: I get really upset when they move something I like and won’t tell me where they put it. It is like losing a pet. This is worse when they replace a favorite with something I hate.)

I am sure that, for people with very good eyes (physically sound eyes and the training to use them well), these questions will seem just crazy. For them, the original painting has nuances that reproductions don’t capture – perhaps nuances that only appear when the object is seen at different times of day, with different light. I respect that expertise, but not enough to let go of my question. It isn’t clear to me that no reproduction could ever capture the putative nuances, and, more important, I can’t see them, and most of the people I run into in the museum can’t see them – don’t have the eyes or don’t have the training. So, once again, for most visitors, what is the museum for? How exactly does it help?

Decades ago, I annoyed my art history friends by suggesting that every small town in Minnesota should have a small museum with a rotating collection of first-rate reproductions. This suggestion was met with two kinds of scorn: it wouldn’t be good enough, and small museums, when they exist, should buy and show contemporary work. I think the technology has superseded my original suggestion: now, anybody with a decent LED screen can have a very good museum, to taste.

What is the way forward for museums? I truly don’t know. Partly, I think, they can explore their potential as meeting spaces. People cluster around an image and let that image work on them, and communicate through their responses. This can be done online, but it is most natural and pleasant in a physical museum. Also, the idea of curation should come out more from the background. If the individual images are widely available, the value that a museum adds is in the intelligent juxtaposition of those images, and that value is seldom emphasized. For the curator, I am sure, the objects in a room are in dialogue. They add up to something. The visitor needs an introduction to that kind of thinking, room by room. 

When the museums re-open, visitors will have had a rest from their usual habits. Will they continue to visit museums in the same way, for the same reasons? If not, then museum staff will have to re-imagine what they are doing. Now would be a really good time to start that.

The Moral Argument for Limiting Social Contact

The citizens of many countries in the world are engaged in a large-scale project of self-isolation, putting up with individual hardships to promote the common good. I don’t put this project in the same family as other participatory efforts to improve things, and it seems important to make some distinctions – conceptually important, because this crisis helps us to see something about different kinds of large scale moral projects, and practically important, because different projects have properly different motives, different sources of energy, and, therefore, different kinds of resilience.

I missed the memo on participation. When someone encourages me to join with other people to work in some good direction, I always ask, “If I don’t, what difference will it make?” And, when the answer is, “By itself, your action won’t change anything,” I put that request in a “non-urgent” folder. It isn’t my highest priority, though it might be worth doing.

I see this reflex as partly a personal quirk. I grew up in a situation in which I had little opportunity to participate in movements or group actions. The example through which participation was introduced to me was the war effort in World War II. My father had enlisted in the army. My mother had interrupted college to work in defense industries. Both were proud of doing their part to beat the Germans and the Japanese. Even before the Vietnam conflict raised questions about the wisdom of U.S. choices to go to war, I balked at the idea of being a small contributor to a vast killing machine. I might be happy to take a shot at someone like Hitler, but this other thing, this slaughter of draftees by draftees, seemed kinky to me.  This made a difference with my parents that persisted for decades. They were eccentrics and rebels, but I was an outsider.

When I came to study moral philosophy, and met some passionate participants in unions and political movements and boycotts, I tried to understand more about my peculiarity (as Hannibal Lecter might try to understand his idiosyncratic food choices). I admired vegetarians for being vegetarians. I admired people who took trouble to go vote. I admired people who marched. Those actions and commitments seemed to me part of beautiful ways of going at the world. So was my mother’s gardening, my father’s reading binges, my sister’s engagement with raising prize hogs. A life, I decided, is composed of lots of projects and decisions, not all of which immediately change anything. Having a life of a certain richness and intensity and coherence allows one to work in the world in good ways, to make good differences sometimes. Participation is part of some people’s character. 

I held on to one idea from my ‘outsider’ past: participation is a moral option. The right thing to say to non-participants is, “You may be missing out on a dimension of life that matters” but not “You are doing something wrong.” I think it is good for people to have gardens. I would encourage people to have gardens. I would never criticize someone for not having a garden.

Partly, I was drawn to this view by the thought that there are many possible movements, and that the most participatory people only engage with a few of them. United States citizens, contemporary people in 2020, are downstream from an incredible mass of cruelty, exploitation, pure evil. The economy rests on exploitative relations, and its foundations were dug in the time of slavery. The land many people live on is stolen land. Animals have been degraded into meat machines. Resource allocation decisions have privileged the current generation over all future generations. If one is to opt out of all that - doing, in every instance, that which, if everyone did it, would make things better, one will have a life that is pure participation. The most ardent participators I know stop well short of this.

Here is an example. The Black Hills were stolen from native peoples, and the descendents of the victims have never consented to the theft. The ‘compensation’ money remains unclaimed. Suppose someone decided not to travel through that country, not to support any enterprise based there – to treat the Black Hills as private property, its inhabitants as criminal intruders. Clearly, the only immediate external effect of that would be that the person would lose a wonderful vacation option. But it would not take all that many such decisions to make white economy in the Black Hills unviable. It is surely no more of a stretch to support such a movement than it is to support ‘going vegan’ as a way to transform the livestock industries. 

If someone were to decide to skip the Black Hills, to take the boring route west instead, I’d respect that: that is, I’d see it as part of an interesting and beautiful way of going at the world. I would consider it as an option for myself, but only as an option, one way of living an upright life.

The proposal for social distancing and self-isolation provoked by the coronavirus is a different case. Most of the rules are not readily enforceable, so, in one sense, compliance is a matter of choice.

However, this choice is in a different category from voting or enlisting or recycling, because any individual might be a super-spreader and any gathering might be a super-spreading event. One cannot know whether one will, by oneself, cause great harm, or whether an encounter will cause great harm. Most important, so far as I can tell from reading the stories of the major “superspreader events” (the Westport soiree, the Biogen conference, the Skagit Chorale rehearsal, the Mitchell funeral), there is no clear common element, and so no way of estimating the risk that one will spread the disease. There are two aspects to risk here: (1) my own actions may spread the disease; and (2) my obvious carelessness may encourage others to be similarly careless, and their actions may spread the disease. Since nobody knows how widespread the virus is, these risks have to count decisively, where-ever the virus has established a foothold.

This is a situation in which participation is not morally optional, because it is wrong to risk causing great harm (in a way that it is not wrong to opt out of good practices). The central moral argument is not: “If everyone does this, we will all be safer and the vulnerable will be protected.” The central argument is: “If you do not adopt these practices, you risk causing great harm.” It is an individual and particular causal argument.

How great is the risk? We can’t tell, without testing. And we can’t test.

Duolingo for Difficult Times

I learned what German I know in the best way. In high school, a teacher who cared about my mind used a German tutorial as a way of introducing me to literature, art, philosophy, politics, music. The German language became a doorway to a new life, and I more or less inhaled it. Later, I tried other languages: I got a little way in, but never found the magic.

A couple years ago, in January, I was sitting in Keefer Court, my favorite Chinese bakery and restaurant, listening to Chinese being spoken all around me and wanting to understand some of it. I decided to try a language again, but maybe French first, to warm up. For a few of months, I dabbled in the French Duolingo course. It was easy and mindless, and a few bits stuck. Then, I had to spend a long time away from home, visiting family, and I began to get compulsive about the thing. Normal progress is maybe 80 points a day. I got up to 1000 points a day.

After that, predictably, I lost interest, did other things, forgot about it. When I returned a few months ago, Duolingo French had introduced little stories, not just exercises, as before, stories good enough to keep my attention. I quickly ran through all of them (hundreds), then went back to actually learn them and to get them located in my memory. I became conscious that I now had a lot of available vocabulary, and that my pronunciation was improving. Now, I try to ration myself to 150 points a day; during a recent illness, I didn’t miss a day.

A few lessons from this, for the current lockdowns:

1.     I like their modest educational goal: just do some, every day. Don’t worry about it being systematic. It will come together. I think that might be the best we can hope for, for lots of online learning in the next while.

2.     It comforts me to have a useful and simple activity available in endless quantities, when I have seemingly endless time.

3.     It is very helpful when my mind wants to do painful or stupid things to be able to ‘go to French’ and rehearse vocabulary, try to remember the story about the grandmother and the police officer. 

4.     The sense of a structure building in the background, of a language coming together through dream processing and familiarization and practice, encourages me. It is different from going out and attacking a subject, mastering it.

I have extended my practice a little, turning on French captioning for things I want to watch anyway, beginning to read children’s books. I don’t know whether I will ever be proficient enough to teach in French or to have the conversations I want to have, but the exercise shows me things about good teaching and about how I take up new things that are useful in their own way.

I’d recommend Duolingo as one resource for these times. It’s still free, works best on a computer. 

Teaching Ethics Online

 

As schools of different kinds require their faculty to move instruction online, I remember my early encounters with this request, back when it was just a request. I was hostile, at first, because my whole way of teaching depended on the spontaneous interactions of a class. There was no meaningful content to my courses, apart from that. Anything they read or watched was intended as a provocation to build something together, to take their own responsibility for a question or concept or project. So, online teaching betrayed all my commitments.

When a class-dependent course worked well, it was splendid. But I found that many students were not willing to participate. They insisted on “the delivery of material in digestible pieces” (think ‘feeding a baby owl’) and waited me out, when I tried to make different rules. Also, many students had so many higher priority commitments, like football practice from 6 to 11 am, that being alert in a classroom at the same time each day was just too much to ask. 

When I was finally forced to teach online, I found some surprising advantages. For those with limited time, the mechanics of going to class eats up a substantial part of their time-budget. In an online class, it is possible to make the reading and writing the whole story, and have more hope that the reading is completed and the writing is worried over.  Also, I had more time to revise assignments, to make lectures clear and short, to give the course a simple structure.  

I was never able to replicate online the interaction I valued in the classroom. That would have required much more attention to guidelines for online discussion boards and to technologies for virtual meeting. I was just beginning to experiment with those tools when I stopped teaching. 

I came away with a few ideas, from my early experiments:

1.     The online format requires short, tight, high-energy lectures – at 20 minutes maximum. One cannot do such things without a lot of work, polishing and editing a script, practicing delivery. Each semester, I would try to add a couple more good pieces to the mix. It was not possible to do it right the first time, at least for me. Here is one piece I did, to give you an idea of the cope and limits of my ambitions. (The context is a review of one central argument in Plato's Republic.)

2.     I came to think that lectures made sense mostly as set-up for writing assignments. I designed the assignments to build directly off of ideas in the lecture, so that people would see the point of watching the lectures carefully.

3.     I decided that almost every paper I read should begin with a personal story, and that the assignment should encourage students to think about that story. This was partly because I think that ethics is primarily about being thoughtful about one’s own life, a project not well honored in other college classes. But, likely more important, it was almost always possible for me to like a paper that began with a story. I looked forward to hearing about unjust principals, bad coaches, acts of true friendship, saints, mistakes, perplexities and dilemmas. Even when the analysis had problems and the writing was shaky, I loved the stories. This was important because my main teaching mode was to assist with the revision of papers, which meant I had to spend a lot of time with each one. If I couldn’t like a paper, couldn’t see it as a project with room for improvement, I was stopped dead. The stories kept me reading the assignments and thinking about them.

4.     Online quizzes are magic. The classroom management programs do quizzes so much better than one can do other ways, taking over the record-keeping and grading. Making quizzes helps teachers figure out what is important in the readings or in the lectures, and what distinctions they want students to make – how closely they want them to read or listen. Taking quizzes stirs up students’ memory in useful ways; there’s research on that. Also, taking quizzes gives people comfort in a philosophy course where they are sometimes puzzled. They can secure some kind of a reasonable grade by being conscientious and careful, and they can evaluate their progress by their quiz scores. (This matters especially if a course has few other checkpoints, or if those checkpoints happen toward the end of the course.)

I never had a chance to fully explore this teaching medium. I know that colleagues can make magic happen in online discussions and that meeting tools are good enough to allow a lot of small group work. I was never very satisfied with my own experiments in that direction. In that way, my teaching became much more ‘teacher-student’ than it had been in the classroom, where my hope was always that people would take each other seriously and begin conversations independent of me. I hope this new wave of experiment, this massive shift in how education is done, prompts many new discoveries about how to invite students to take their own responsibility for questions and issues.

Limited Outreach

In 2014, I started a short-term blog, thinking about what it was like to revisit Vienna, Austria after 40 years away. I like this form: a bounded blog, responding to something specific, from different angles. This is first page of that early effort.

I'd like to try this again, with this "hunkering down" exercise imposed upon us by the novel coronavirus. As the state and the society impose or suggest new limits on how we all can move, to keep the herd safe, I notice new things and have new thoughts. I am guessing that there might be an audience for these impressions. I have been teaching ethics and trying to establish video as a medium of education most of my adult life, and this new era reminds me of old questions and gives me new things to think about. Also, I am so curious about how other people are responding. Perhaps my postings will provoke similar efforts at outreach.