I recently exchanged e-mails with a new reader "Peter" who sent me the following thoughtful note.
I came across your blog today by accident and just want to express my enjoyment of a well-written and well-researched series of posts that contain a great deal of sensible commentary rather than the too-frequent empty rantings one generally encounters across the 'Net.
I tried to subscribe to your blog via my Facebook profile but unfortunately encountered a fatal TypePad error. I'll try again later and see if I can successfully subscribe.
My own intellectual interests and concerns overlap with yours to a significant degree, but I have a slightly more hopeful (and, probably, more unrealistic...) outlook insofar as I continue to wonder if a more adequate knowledge of our cognitive limitations will ultimately enable us to engineer structures that limit much of the damage we cause ourselves today. By way of analogy, when physiology and aerodynamics were very poorly understood, people killed themselves by strapping large feathered wings to their arms and jumping off tall structures in the hope that they could fly. Once we had a better understanding of our limitations (insufficient pectoral mass, too low a rate of blood flow, etc.) and the challenges involved (a better grasp of aerodynamics) we were able to engineer solutions that gave us what we wanted (flight) while dramatically minimizing potential harm.
So the possible way forward would involve us facing up to our cognitive limitations and behavioral hardwiring (all of which are a consequence of various selection pressures operating throughout primate history) and consciously trying to engineer social structures and processes that are designed to minimize our capacity for self-harm. Provided that we also recognize the need for feedback/adjustment loops so that such engineering can adapt to real-world outcomes, this would in theory offer a way forward. That said, the challenged involved in (a) getting enough people to recognize the need for such an approach, (b) securing majority consensus on implementing at least a trial, and (c) doing the practical engineering, are all non-trivial.
The first step, in any case, is to define our cognitive boundaries, which your blog continues to do in a very readable and informative manner.
Anyhow, just wanted to say "thanks a lot" for your writing.
I always appreciate it when I get notes like this. Here is my reply. I made two small edits for clarity.
Peter,
Thanks for your thoughtful note. Fixing things would be "non-trivial" as you observe. Your physiology/aerodynamics example is well chosen.
Unfortunately, we are dealing with the human unconscious here, so whatever physical thing going on in the brain is completely hidden from view, given that "unconscious" means what it says. Neuroscience and psychology can tell us things, but it's not like jumping off a building in the hope you can fly. The brain remains a black box.
Really, it is interesting. A guy puts on some wings, jumps off a building, gravity kicks in, and he dies. There it is, his dead body on the ground. It's obvious there is a physical problem with jumping off buildings with false hopes and inadequate technology.
On the other hand, a guy goes into a gay nightclub in Orlando and kills 49 people, and injures 53 others. There are lots of dead and injured bodies. But to humans, it's not obvious at all that there's a psychological problem in the mind of the killer. It's not obvious at all that various human biases, instincts, defenses, etc. can reach a critical mass in the human mind which leads to this and many, many other similar atrocities day in and day out all over the world.
My own view, expressed in the first Flatland essay, is that human cognitive limitations also preclude humans from being able to acknowledge their own cognitive limitations. On this view, the situation is entirely hopeless because we humans can't get past first base to go on to try to fix ourselves as you suggest.
A subsequent reply by "Peter" suggests that he is barely clinging to an admittedly forlorn and distant hope. My view remains the same.
I used the latest mass shooting to illustrate human blindness to hidden (unconscious) motivations and biases. These tragic incidents provide a window into Flatland, which I will look at here. Let's start with Was Omar Mateen Mentally Ill? Orlando Shooter’s Employer Psychologically Evaluated Him Once Despite FBI Interviews (International Business Times, June 15, 2016).
Omar Mateen, the 29-year-old man police say killed nearly 50 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday, was only psychologically tested by the security company he worked for one time — nine years ago, the Guardian reported exclusively Tuesday.
Mateen worked for G4S, a global security company with more than 610,000 employees, from 2007 until early Sunday morning, when he was killed in a shootout with law enforcement at Orlando's Pulse nightclub...
G4S records reviewed by the news outlet showed Mateen got an "above average rating" on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test when he was hired. He did not require a clinical follow-up session.
In the wake of the massacre, investigators have been looking into Mateen's history and mental state. David Gilroy, who worked with Mateen at G4S, told Florida Today the gunman used homophobic insults and sent Gilroy dozens of unwanted text messages.
"I quit because everything he said was toxic, and the company wouldn't do anything," Gilroy said. "This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people."
But G4S told Reuters Gilroy didn't file any complaints against Mateen and that it had screened the shooter twice, checking his criminal record and verifying his ID. Mateen was interviewed by the FBI twice, in 2013 and 2014. The Guardian reported G4S did not test Mateen again after learning about his FBI interactions.
Was Matteen mentally ill? Opinions vary.
Other opinions on Mateen's behavior varied.
Eleanora Dorsi, who lived in the neighborhood he guarded, told Florida Today he was a polite gentleman. Meanwhile, Mateen's ex-wife, Sitora Yusifiy, told the Washington Post he was abusive. “He was not a stable person,” she said. “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”
...In any event, the connection between mental illness and gun violence remains under debate. "Mass shootings represent national awakenings and moments when seeming political or social adversaries might come together to find common ground, whether guns are allowed, regulated or banned," researchers from Vanderbilt University wrote in a study published last year.
"Doing so, however, means recognizing that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect."
OK, let's ask the question again—was Omar Mateen mentally ill? Your first impulse might be to say "Are you kidding me? Is the Pope catholic?" But let's take a more nuanced view.
The Flatland model implies that all humans are mentally ill — or none of them are. Take your pick. Every brain has the same inventory of biases, defenses, instincts, etc. Only enviromental factors (circumstances) can vary.
Did Omar Mateen act in a socially unacceptable way? Absolutely! Nobody wants to get shot by a crazy person! In Flatland terms, his big brain went haywire. But then again, in the Flatland model, that kind of behavior could come from anyone in circumstances which trigger the "deviant" behavior in question. At those times, "various human biases, defenses, etc. ... reach a critical mass in the human mind which leads to ... many, many ... similar atrocities" (from my note to "Peter").
Remember, all this happens in the unconscious mind. Nobody, including Omar Matteen, has access to what happens there. There were warning signs as detailed above that Omar's big brain was going haywire. Omar is of course unaware that this was happening. The next thing that happens to Omar is that he finds himself shooting up a gay nightclub in Orlando on Latino Night. He seems to be enjoying himself! He's posting on Facebook!
Kurt Vonnegut described Dwayne Hoover's mind going haywire in very similar terms in his novel Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut ascribed Dwayne's insanity to bad chemicals.
My own mother wrecked her brains with chemicals, which were supposed to make her sleep. When I get depressed, I take a little pill, and I cheer up again. And so on. So it is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.
There are of course real physical brain disorders where the brain doesn't work the way nature intended. I am not making light of those. But those physical illnesses belong to another category altogether. That's not the kind of "mental illness" I'm talking about here.
And how does "Flatland" (the human world) respond when big brains go crazy? They don't know how to respond. They say things like "the connection between mental illness and gun violence remains under debate." They warn us to "recognize that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect." Well, that's for sure! — though not in the Flatland sense intended.
What does "mental illness" mean in this context? It can only mean that Omar's big brain went haywire. But what is the difference in kind between Omar's aberrant behavior and bankers knowingly selling booby-trapped mortgage-backed securities to suckers? And then betting that those securities would blow up? Nobody asks whether those bankers were mentally ill.
And what about those ISIS guys? Or those Thai fishermen who enslave other humans and then force them to work on their boats? Or mainstream economists rationalizing bail-outs for bad actors in finance?
Same thing. Ad nauseum. Everybody is crazy or nobody is. Where do you draw that line?
Finally, do we know what the triggering circumstances were which made Omar's big brain go haywire? We seem to know some things. It appears that Omar was gay! His Muslim father hated gay people! He was mistreated by gay Puerto Ricans at the Pulse nightclub! One of them may have given him AIDS and didn't tell him he had AIDS beforehand! Omar was a lover, not a fighter!
All this was way too much for Omar's big brain to handle. He lost his grip.
But everybody's "grip" is tenuous. Under the right circumstances, our "grip" disappears. On the other hand, where there is nothing much at stake, when humans get a good start in life, when everyone is functioning within the same social group, humans can be friendly and cooperative. There are lots of unconscious rules to consider here. These are the rules which make social harmony possible.
But if any (or many) of these social rules get broken in a serious way, all hell can break loose. We see that time and time again. That's the human condition.
"when humans get a good start in life, when everyone is functioning within the same social group, humans can be friendly and cooperative."
This may be a little off topic but something I found interesting, and weaves into your post a little. In his latest book "Ultrasociety, how 10,000 years of war made us the greatest cooperators on earth," Peter Turchin makes the argument that warfare was the leading factor at selecting for larger and larger states that exhibit greater cooperation between individuals. In a nutshell, societies that cooperate better out-compete others that do not. It is an interesting, if not very well written, book and brings up some pretty good ideas about state formation, but ultimately dives into the idea that all this cooperation will ultimately lead to the elimination of war in society, a very overt myth of progress mentality.
His argument obviously lacks any comment on fundamental human nature, such as inherent biases, defenses, filtering, etc., that is systemic to the human brain on the individual level and also how these traits manifest and perpetuate themselves in social groups. I am sure many would say that the manifestation of war between groups is some sort of breakdown of between-group interaction; cooperation going haywire if you will. I am sure progressives would easily take this view. Or you could take the nuanced view that causal factors of war are not readily understood, and it depends on the groups in question, the state of their societies, their past histories and interactions with other societies, environmental conditions, etc. But as you have stated, using the flatland model, it is actually easy to explain how these things happen. Tragic mass killings on the individual level, or tragic, industrial scale mass killings on the group level. It all boils down to the unconscious brain directing human behavior.
Posted by: Dan | 06/23/2016 at 02:43 PM