Happy birthday, Plato!

As near as I can figure it, today is Plato’s birthday.  The traditional date was the 7th day of the month of Thargelion.  The Athenian calendar was a lunar one, so this means the seventh day after the second-last new moon before the summer solstice.  And I think that’s today.

Next year, it looks like it will be on Cinco de Mayo.

So do something Platonic today: contemplate the nature of reality, appreciate the beauty of simple colors and geometric shapes and soothing music, argue passionately about the education of the young … or open a large jug of wine with a dozen good friends and sit around until dawn talking about love.  Your pick which!

Answer to technical difficulties

Back here I posted about some trouble I was having getting the blog to display right.  The troubles seem to have gone away, and they seem to have had something to do with one of my posts having a whole lot of DIV flags in there that I didn't understand and didn't know where they came from.  Anyway, it seems to be better now.

When people think you're a creep

My father has a bit of a problem in social groups, because he makes out-of-line suggestive comments to women and pats them when he shouldn't.  He doesn't do this all the time, of course, but it's a behavior that people notice, especially when (like his in-laws, my mother's family) they see him over and over.  And I think it has cost him some friends over the years.

I'm always a little cautious about bringing the subject up, because ... well, hell, he's still my father and I love him in spite of his faults.  But sometimes he brings it up himself, usually when one of my aunts or cousins has finally had enough and tells him off; then afterwards he asks me about it because he genuinely doesn't understand that he did anything wrong.  "Hosea, what on earth was she so upset about? She couldn't possibly have minded anything I said, could she?"  And I try to find some tactful way of saying, "Well yes, in fact, you're lucky she just yelled at you instead of slapping your face or suing you."

Often I try to talk about how times have changed from when he was a young man in the late 1950's and early 1960's.  I tell him that back then, you could say those sorts of things and get away with them.  (I don't really know if that's true, but "Mad Men" has convinced me that the bar for what you could say in public was a lot lower back then.)  He listens and nods appreciatively while I talk about the huge social changes since then, but he doesn't change his behavior.  (In the back of my head I have thought to characterize it another way -- viz., that he acts like his social cues were frozen at about the age of fifteen. But I don't say that out loud, for reasons I have already mentioned above.)

But a few months ago, while I was looking for something else on the Web, I stumbled across a link that seemed just perfect.  It was to an advice column where two different people had written independently asking how to handle guys in their respective social circles who behaved a lot like my dad.  I should add that most of what they describe is more extreme than the things my dad has done when I've been around to witness him personally.  But there is a close "family resemblance" between the behaviors that I thought might help him understand what people were getting at.  So I forwarded him the link, which is this here:

http://captainawkward.com/2012/08/07/322-323-my-friend-group-has-a-case-of-the-creepy-dude-how-do-we-clear-that-up/

I framed my e-mail in terms of social change, but the point was to get him to follow the link.  Well he did, and his reply was uncharacteristically brief:

Was I that bad?

I wasn't quite sure how to answer that.  What I strongly suspected, though, is that he would try to steer the conversation in the direction of arguing, "The accusations are false: I never did any of those bad things."  And I wanted to get him to see that in interpersonal relationships, that question isn't particularly useful.  So I wrote:

I have no idea.  I wasn’t there.  All I know is that often things look very different from one person’s point of view than they do from another.  So you should really be asking two different questions: …

Was I really that bad?Answer: I don’t know, because I wasn’t there.
Did I really look that bad to these other people?Answer: I don’t know because I didn’t ask them.
But what is absolutely, fundamentally critical is to see that these are totally different questions, which means that it is entirely possible for the answer to the first one to be No and the second one to be Yes (or vice versa, of course) … and that this mis-match between the answers does not necessarily involve any bad faith or lying or hypocrisy or dishonesty on anybody’s part.  It really, truly is possible for appearances to be genuinely, honestly that different, depending on whose eyes you are looking through.

It’s weird but true.

For that reason I am always very reluctant to speak for somebody else or to tell you what somebody else’s opinion probably was.

On the other hand – for exactly the same reason – if someone complains to me about my doing something bad that I know for a fact I didn’t do, I work very hard not to get mad but to remind myself, “Somehow he misunderstood something that I did so that it looked that way to him. So even though I know I didn’t do what he says I did, it is up to me to figure out what I can do to correct his misapprehension. Why is it up to me, when he’s the one that is wrong? Just because if I don’t do it, there’s damned sure nobody else on the planet that’s gonna do it for me. So it really doesn’t matter if it’s fair or unfair … it’s still up to me to take his report as accurately representing what he thinks he saw and therefore to do what I can to help him see the truth next time.”  It’s not easy and it’s not fair, but personally I have never found any other option that works.

Just for what it’s worth.  Your mileage may vary.

His next answer was almost as short as his last one.  For my father, this is really saying something.  If he's not going on at length (kind of the way I do), you can guess he is uncomfortable.

So either I:

a) join a twelve-step program so I can "make amends" to all who say I've wronged them;

b) move to a new town and start over;

c) become a stand-up comic and get paid for saying outrageous shit;

d) [fill in suggestion here].

Sorry, Dad, but that's a bullshit answer and you knew it was when you wrote it.  You're not taking the discussion seriously; you're just trying to look oppressed.  No, of course I didn't say that.  What I wrote instead was:

Or none of the above.  It’s a free country.

(b) is too much trouble.  (c) is appealling, but a lot of work and even then the odds against striking fame and fortune are huge.  And (a) is an exaggeration designed to make the whole conversation look absurd.  But heck, even that is more work than you need to go to.  Just delete this e-mail and don’t answer it, and look at all the trouble you’ve saved yourself.  As I say, it’s a free country.

All that I am suggesting here is that it is better to understand what is going on than it is to be shoved around by events that make no sense to you.  It’s better to understand the people you are with so that you can interact with them on purpose and get the reactions you are looking for, rather than acting at random and having them react in ways that baffle you.  It’s better to see what is coming than to be blindsided.  That’s all.

Also, understanding someone else means understanding him (or her) on his own terms, from his own point of view.  Saying, “Well yeah, I understand that Fred is a malicious asshole who has been conspiring against me for no reason since Day One,” is not really understanding Fred; it is, rather, a refusal to understand him.  You can do that if you want, of course, but personally I don’t find it very satisfying.

If you do get to the point of understanding the other fellow on his own terms, then after that you can do pretty much whatever you feel like.  Maybe this means changing nothing at all … but in that case it will be with full knowledge of what it looks like to the other guy, so you have to decide if you are comfortable with looking like that.  Or maybe it means handling it the way you’d handle it if you accidentally trod on someone’s toe … call him up informally and say “Ooops, I had no idea I was stepping on your toe. Ouch, I bet that hurts. Hope you’re all right and all that.”  Or maybe … gosh, I dunno.  You’re a creative guy; use your imagination.  But when you ask somebody else (like me) to tell you what to do about it – even in a joking form by listing choices (a), (b), (c), and (d) – that implicitly means playing a role and asking which script you should use.  Don’t do that.  Don’t play a part.  Don’t act.  Rather, if you get to the point where you really can see things from the other guy’s point of view, then do what you really, honestly – in real life, not by putting on a character – feel the most comfortable (or least uncomfortable) doing.  If you forget about all the couldas-wouldas-shouldas, if you stop thinking about what other people want you to pretend to be, if you silence all the noise in your mind that distracts you on a daily basis and keeps you from focussing … you might surprise yourself with what you come up with.

In any event, do what you want.  My only advice is that sometimes you might have to think about it a while to be able to see what it is you really want.

I truly meant the part about "Do what you want."  I do think -- and this may be the only line in the whole post that has any obvious resonance with classical thought -- that there is something universal about our knowledge of what is good.  If my dad -- if any of us -- can just cut the crap for a minute, the odds are very good that what he (or we) really wants to do will actually line up with what is right.

Of course, "cutting the crap" is a lot harder than it sounds.  But it really is the main thing.

Technical difficulties

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?  All of a sudden the layout of this blog seems to have changed, and I'm not aware of having done anything to change it.

The problem is with my gadgets: the "About Me", the archive list, the labels, the lists of other sites to read ... all that stuff.  That used to be off on the right-hand sidebar.  And in fact my blogger.com "Layout" screen tells me it still is.

Only when I look at my blog itself, those things all show up in the main column where my posts are, except all the way down at the bottom after the posts.  And that's crazy!  Nobody is going to look for them there!

Does anybody have any familiarity with the blogger.com layout tools, such that you might be able to give me some pointers?  I'd really appreciate any help.

Thanks!

Don't explain -- just apologize!

Oh, I'm sorry I interrupted you. I just didn't want us to get involved in some long pointless discussion that went nowhere."

"I'm sorry if that joke offended you. I didn't think you were one of those hyper-sensitive people that have no sense of humor."

"Oh no, I'm so sorry about spilling all that soup on your brand-new dress, but I had no idea how hot the bowl was and when Fred handed it to me he just thrust it at me like, 'Here, take your soup!' and so I grabbed it to get out of the way but it just scalded my hand, and besides my wrist has never been the same since I fell on it three weeks ago because you know I have these dizzy spells ...."

"Sorry you didn't appreciate that pat on the ass. I didn't realize you were a lesbian."

Translation (in all four cases): I'm not sorry.

Apologizing is a painful thing to do, especially when we know we are in the wrong. But that's why it is so important. That's why it works.  If I've hurt somebody and I want him to get over being mad at me, I apologize precisely because it is a little humiliating. It's my way of telling him, "Look, I feel so bad about what I did that I hurt too. And I'll gladly abase myself (at least a little bit), and put up with the suffering that it causes, if it can reconcile us." The way he knows that I mean it when I say I'm sorry -- the way he knows that I'm not just parrotting the words -- is that if I do it right it costs me something. It makes me hurt. And I wouldn't make myself hurt unless I meant it.

But of course I don't want to hurt. Nobody does. And so at the same time that my better self is admitting to fault and apologizing for it, there's another little voice in my head that will do anything possible to deflect the blame. Part of me will gladly admit to having been a shit if that will reconcile me to my friend; another part of me compulsively wants to prevent anybody from getting the idea that I was being a shit. So while one part of me magnanimously apologizes, this other little voice quickly slips in an explanation or excuse that somehow it really wasn't my fault.

It's almost overpowering, this desire to deflect blame. It takes all my conscious awareness and deliberate self-control to make myself shut up after saying the words "I'm sorry," ... to make myself stand silent rather than launch into a dozen different explanations of what I was really trying to do and who really jostled my arm at just the wrong moment and how it really wasn't my fault after all. Because that's what I want to say.

But saying it voids the apology. If it wasn't really my fault, then my apology is just hot air. And if -- as it usually turns out -- my friend can see damned well that it really was my fault all along, the explanation does nothing at all except to let him know, "I'm not willing to feel bad over what I did to you. Too bad for you and all that, but it's not my problem. Take a hike."

And a lot of the time that's worse than the original hurt.

The bottom line is easy to spell out, but oh so hard to do. If you screw up and hurt somebody, don't make it worse than it already is. Don't rub salt in the wound. Don't explain. Just apologize. And then shut up.

Remember, I never said it was easy.

Brief thoughts about intelligent design

A little while ago, I saw some remarks posted online about "Intelligent Design" (or "ID").  You may have heard of this: it is an attempt to make the traditional Argument from Design (an argument for the existence of God) into a respectable scientific theory.  One of my friends is strongly in favor of ID as an idea, and he tells me he spends a lot of time on pro-ID websites (presumably talking with people who agree with him).  Anyway, he pointed me to this piece somebody had written which linked ID to some of its intellectual antecedents, and asked me what I thought of it.

The essay was OK, I guess, as far as it went.  There was only one lone commenter who had posted anything in reply, and that was a short note saying nothing one way or the other about ID but simply pointing out a couple of elementary flaws in the essay's argument.  But there was something I really wanted to ask (although I didn't):

Who cares?  What difference can it possibly make?

Here's the thing: according to the little blurb after the article, the author is not a professional biologist.  He is not a paleontologist.  He has no practical reason for caring one way or the other how life on Earth got started.  So why does he work himself into such a lather over it?  Maybe he's like my friend, who always complains about the arguments made by the pro-Darwinian, anti-ID camp: they are wrong on the facts (so he tells me), they are smug, they are condescending ... and so he just has to spend all his free time lambasting them across the Internet to prove to everybody how wrong they are.  Excuse me?  Like this is going to change anybody's opinion about anything?  Like this is going to generate even the smallest amount of light to go along with all that heat and noise?  I don't know about you, but when I meet someone who is smug and condescending and wrong my preference is to spend as much time away from him as possible -- not to hang around him obsessively cataloguing his faults.  It's just a happier and pleasanter way to live.

Somewhere along the line I think my friend -- and the author of this article -- have lost a sense of perspective; and among other things, I think that loss is related to a misunderstanding of what this kind of knowledge is for.  It's not for its own sake: knowledge is not some kind of ultimate good that needs no justification.  If it were, then the most knowledgeable people would be the happiest; and if I think about my friends and family as examples (choosing them as a small but easy sample) I'm pretty sure that's not the case.  But if knowledge is for the sake of something else (and not itself), then in some sense the justification behind learning anything is what we can do with it.

This doesn't always mean building a better mousetrap.  The justification for learning Greek, for example, is that then you can read Greek and there's a lot of good stuff written in Greek.  The justification for certain particularly recondite branches of mathematics -- stuff that could never find its way into mechanical of industrial application -- is that it is beautiful; and contemplating a beautiful thing, be it a sculpture, a sonnet, a sonata, or a theorem, brings joy.

But neither classic Darwinism nor ID is a particularly beautiful theory, so that justification is not available.  Remember too that in talking about natural science we are not talking about The Truth, whatever that is.  Natural science is always provisional.  There is always the possibility that a new discovery tomorrow will overturn some allegedly established fact of today.  This is why the focus, in science, must be resolutely on usefulness.  If a theory can prove itself useful, that's good enough; it's all that a theory has to do.  And therefore the only point at issue between two scientific theories is which one does a better job of explaining and predicting the world around us.  If either contestant could prove itself to be more practical in developing new antibiotics, say, or in mapping the spread of diseases across a population as they develop immunities to known cures -- well in that case the palm goes to whichever one does a better job, and the argument is over.  And if, on the other hand, the argument has nothing useful about it -- if neither contestant makes the slightest difference to the life of the working biologist, epidemiologist, or doctor -- then the whole thing is a waste of time.

Plato cautions us somewhere that we should never expect perfect knowledge about the natural world ... that we may have to content ourselves with a "likely story".  It's a practical approach -- and a kind of humility about knowledge that would forestall a lot of pointless bickering.  Too bad nobody quotes it in the middle of these kinds of arguments.