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? 

---

What questions would you add to this list?