Beyond Rivalry

A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news.

Examples from the magazine include:

"An overheating lightbulb triggered a fire alarm in the City Art Gallery in York yesterday afternoon. Fire crews were not needed."

"Top jockey Frankie Dettori told the Daily Mirror that he had never had sex in a stable."

"Prince Andrew has worn the same tweed jacket twice in five years."

I'd imagine many of us come across these sorts of items ourselves with jarring regularity, these 'news' stories, or tidbits embedded in news stories, that we read and think "wtf?" or "slow news day, eh?"  I'd hate to keep the non-news I stumble across to myself, so I'll share it here from time to time; feel free to contribute others.

"John Mayer admitted on Tuesday night to 'hooking up' with a fan in the past." [10 July]

"Thousands of canceled flights may vex travelers: Fliers should be ready to be flexible as airlines cut capacity and schedules" [10 July]

"Swastika ('卐') tops Google's search list, then disappears" [10 July]

"An initial examination of the plane that had maintenance problems while carrying Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama found no evidence of missing parts or tampering, federal investigators said Thursday." [10 July].

"An elderly Indonesian woman famed nationwide for supernatural skills in lengthening penises has died, reports said Thursday." [10 July]

and  

Court: Wisconsin Law Bans Sex With the Dead, which is unfortunately not as superfluous at it sounds ... [Reported today]

On the face of it, this study (described below) seems to challenge the Buddhist ideas that letting go of distraction (labelling it as such, and not following its threads) and practicing mindfulness are tools towards more compassionate action ... (also, NYT article on distraction and its deleterious effect on creativity and critical thinking), although it seems perhaps that what's actually at stake in this study, and in Buddhism as well, is finding an end-route around habitual thinking (and its attendant fantasies, judgments, status-check-ins, comparisons, opinion-making, ego defenses, etc.) rather than the pure benefits of distraction as one way to do it:

"Why We're All Moral Hypocrites", by Robin Nixon at LiveScience, posits that we are more lenient on ourselves than others, that we "judge others more severely than we judge ourselves. ... [We] are loathe to admit, even to ourselves, that we sometimes behave immorally.  A flattering self-image is correlated with rewards, such as emotional stability, increased motivation and perseverance."

The article describes a recent study in which 42 students were asked to assgn tasks to themselves or to the 'next participant.' The tasks might be "tedious and time-consuming" or "easy and brief." The students could also opt to have a computer assign the tasks, randomly. The researchers found that 85% of the students "passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task -– leaving the laborious one to someone else" and they characterised their decision as fair. Another group of 43 students, merely observers of all this, considered the actions unfair.

Then the researchers "'constrained cognition' by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others."

The analysis: "[W]e are intuitively moral beings, but 'when we are given time to think about it, we construct arguments about why what we did wasn't that bad.'" [That explains the hypocrisy, in restrospect, but not the partiality, in the moment -- unless perhaps the partiality is habitual, an action formed and/or strengthened by being justified day by day with a succession of persuasive defensive arguments ...]

The lead researcher even went so far as to say that their research suggests that "ubiquitous Blackberries and iPods may make society more just." 

Notes from Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety (2004). This is the seventh post on this topic; the first is here.

PART II: Solutions

CHAPTER 1 - PHILOSOPHY 

Dueling! For duelers, others' opinions were the only factor in forming their sense of self. If others judged a dueler effeminate, foolish, a coward, a failure, dishonorable, he could not remain acceptable in his own eyes. He would sooner die or kill than let an unfavourable assessment go unanswered.

We may not duel but we may have extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others.

Socrates, on the being insulted in the marketplace, was asked, "Don't you worry about being called names?" He replied, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?"  <-- misanthropy as a response

Socrates and others refute the suggestion that what others think of us must determine what we think of ourselves.

[Socrates' response in this anecdote, though, seems like a reaction to feeling keenly the sting of the other's barb; he may not 'believe' the other's view of him, but he also has to create some kind of defense against it, indicating to me that it matters more than he wants it to, that it infiltrates his psyche at least a bit. Maybe not, though.]