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.