Waking Up Podcast Interview: Sam Harris and Caitlin Flanagan

Today I listened to yet another engaging episode of "Making Sense," the podcast of Sam Harris. Sam's guest was Caitlin Flanagan, who often writes for The Atlantic. I enjoy listening to energized conversations like this, involving thoughtful people whose thought processes are not severely warped by political party tribal forces. I'm getting worn out from all of the conversations (in so many other places) involving people who are consciously and enthusiastically reverse-engineering their comments to fit the prevailing dictates of political parties. We would all be so much better off if only we would (as Jonathan Haidt suggests) unplug from the Matrix so that we could each be more consciously self-critical. 

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Irresolvable Negotiable Differences of our Culture Wars

Marriage/relationship researcher John Gottman has provided us with a stunning statistic:

"69% of relationship conflict is about perpetual problems. All couples have them — these problems are grounded in the fundamental differences that any two people face. They are either fundamental differences in your personalities that repeatedly create conflict, or fundamental differences in your lifestyle needs.In our research, we concluded that instead of solving their perpetual problems, what seems to be important is whether or not a couple can establish a dialogue about them."

Gottman's research reminds me of the our nation's cultural divide; apparently, we can no longer talk with those we perceive to be different. I don't think we differ from each other nearly as much as the mass media suggests. That said, it seems to me that Gottman's suggested strategies for keeping individual relationships happy and functional are relevant to what we need to do on a national level.

We have forgotten how to talk respectfully to one another, avoiding Gottman's "four horsemen," criticism, contempt, stonewalling, and defensiveness. We have forgotten that being in any functional relationship takes hard work and compromise. I believe that this difficult work has become logarithmically more difficult for two basic reasons: A) tribal ideologies running rampant and B) corporate money gushing through the political system. These two things distort the issues, cause us to create crude cartoons of one another, and permeate the national conversation with fear and loathing of each other.

Barking at each other never brings us any progress. We've seen that for years already. It will take lot of work, soul searching, and looking in the mirror to become more functional on a national level. It will take an act of faith that we can get along if only we worked harder to be civil. This is perhaps too much to ask in an age of widespread magic thinking and diminished attention spans.

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Stinky Farts, Stinky Thoughts

The impeachment hearings offer daily fodder to those who struggle to understand how the human mind works. Many people keep expressing frustration about the lies being told by the politicians. That raises the question: Did the brain evolve as a truth-seeking organ? What if the brain's main function is survival, not truth? What if the brain's main function centers on the "Four F's": Feeding, Fleeing, Fighting and Reproduction?  What if Truth is only a fragile, occasional, happenstance by-product of the brain's main evolved function?

That brought this Scientific American article front and center: "Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are? Do we perceive reality as it is?" Here's an excerpt:

One of the deepest problems in epistemology is how we know the nature of reality. Over the millennia philosophers have offered many theories, from solipsism (only one's mind is known to exist) to the theory that natural selection shaped our senses to give us an accurate, or verdical, model of the world. Now a new theory . . . is garnering attention . . . Grounded in evolutionary psychology, it is called the interface theory of perception (ITP) and argues that percepts act as a species-specific user interface that directs behavior toward survival and reproduction, not truth.

Lindsey Graham is now taking the position that the Impeachment is improper because not actual crimes were committed. The Democrats then carted out Graham's 1999 video where he said the opposite.  Every human being watching this drama unfold knows all of the following with a certainty:

  1. Graham meant what he said in 1999.
  2. Graham means the opposite today.
  3. Graham won't have much trouble doing some mental gymnastics to justify both positions.
  4. If a Democrat is impeached in the near future, Graham will revert to his 1999 position.

How is it possible for Graham to justify these diametrically opposite positions? The function of the human brain is well beyond my understanding, of course.  At this time, I would simply point out that one's own farts smell OK, whereas the farts of others are unpleasant. There's actually some science on why our own farts smell OK. I would simply extrapolate: Both our farts and our own dysfunctional thoughts get free passes.  Why?  Because they are our farts and our thoughts, not those of others.  And where our entire tribe farts, that's OK too, because it's our tribe and not some other tribe. Our crappy thoughts constitute our theories, meaning that the confirmation bias kicks in like a powerful optical illusion to help us ignore conflicting evidence.

Hypocrisy is an ancient problem, of course.  It goes back at least to biblical times:

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; ... You hypocrite! First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother's eye.

This hypocrisy continues to modern times:

Morality is difficult. As [psychologist Johnathan] Haidt writes on his website, "It binds people together into teams that seek victory, not truth. It closes hearts and minds to opponents even as it makes cooperation and decency possible within groups. . . . Morality binds and blinds. The metaphor [Haidt] uses to describe this idea is that we are 90 percent chimp 10 percent bee. That is to say, though we are inherently selfish, human nature is also about being what he terms "groupish."

The hypocrisy we are witnessing might be a little less distressing to the extent that we can accept the fact that the brain did not evolve for truth, but rather for assimilating resources to assist survival, utilizing the power of one's tribe whenever useful. If we can wrap our heads around this scary fact that the brain is much more geared for social power than truth, the impeachment hearings are nothing extraordinary. These hearings are merely more episodes of watching people gathered in tribes fighting for evolutionary fitness.

That said, this is an enormous and distressing price to pay in exchange for understanding.  But maybe it's . . . . true.   Maybe those moments where human minds transcend daily survival pressures to seek consistent principled truth are extraordinarily precious moments that need to be noted and celebrated.  Maybe we will never have a society based on truthful principles unless we work hard together.

Nietzsche pointed that being able to see truthfully is a moral issue. He wrote that one is truthful only to the degree that one is courageous. Maybe those fragility of those moments where people work hard and self-critically to embrace truth should remind us to appreciate what we have when politicians show the moral courage to act on principle.

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Law in the Trenches: A Warning that the Practice of Law is Not Always Glamorous

My friend Joe Jacobson has often regaled folks on Facebook with his stories from the legal trenches. I love how Joe keeps an even keel and works hard to give others the benefit of the doubt, even when things get thorny.

I usually get along swimmingly with opposing counsel. The better they are at trial law, the easier it tends to be to get along (a lot of people find this surprising). Today, however, I had a long difficult conversation with a young opposing attorney and I struggled to give the opposing attorney the benefit of the doubt. Here’s what happened. I hope you find this somewhat entertaining and doesn’t simply come across as whining.

Here’s the background: A federal judge appointed me to take over legal representation for a man who filed his own lawsuit alleging that he had been physically abused by prison guards. For technical reasons, only the guards are parties to the lawsuit, not the prison. I’ve taken a few depositions of individual witnesses, but I decided I needed a Rule 30(b)(6) “corporate representative” deposition of the prison to finish my discovery. This rule (30(b)(6) can be a power and powerful technique for learning information lodged in the inner belly of big organizations like prisons. Therefore, I sent out my subpoena and notice of corporate representative deposition last week, listing about 25 topics I wanted to discuss. The government attorney’s job is to fill the deposition chair with one or more witnesses who can answer my questions about those topics under oath.

Today’s phone call was from the government attorney, who was complaining about the way I set forth my topics. He annoyed me from the start with his know-it-all tone of voice. Here’s how the conversation went:

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