Beyond Rivalry

A short McSweeney's list: Phrases I'd Rather Not Be Used At My Funeral by Harry Burt, with my anxious additions:

"autoerotic asphyxiation" [likewise: "left 10-inch clawmarks"]

"found by cadaver dogs" ["according to the forensic entomologist"]

"hopped up on goofballs" ["ate her weight in Oreos"]

"minutes from rescue" ["last-second airline flight change"]

"prehensile tail" ["cascading sheets of mucus"]

["salvaged what we could," "leaned over the rim a smidge too far," "must have been in unimaginable pain," "what's that on his forehead? 'syawliarT'?"] 

In a continuing series ...

I've been saving them up for this post.

It's Lovely! I'll Take It!, "a collection of poorly chosen photos from real estate listings. With love." And comments. Don't miss it.

potentially nervous:  "The world's going to hell. Here are some bunny photos."

How I Spent My Stimulus. Tell your story.

Kim's Page o' Chopsticks. Chopstick wrappers, actually. (Thanks, Mike.)

The first of the five feet that have washed up so far in British Columbia has been identified as belonging to "a depressed man who went missing a year ago." (Previous stories linked here.)

At the heart of Tilly's book Why? (see previous post) are the four kinds of reasons he posits: conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts.

Conventions and codes don't posit cause-and-effect; they simply appeal to socially appropriate formulas as explanation:

CONVENTIONS -- Conventionally accepted reasons. Examples: My train was late, I wasn't in the mood, she's just lucky, gotta run, I'm so busy, 

CODES -- Rules, basically. Particularly relevent in law, medicine, the military, government, religion, diplomacy, sports and so on.  

Stories and technical accounts do posit cause-and-effect:

STORIES -- Explanatory narratives, usually used for exceptional, unusual, or unfamiliar events.

TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS --  cause-and-effect explanation used by authorities and specialists in their fields (engineers, physicians, programmers, artists, etc.)

To show the difference among these, Tilly starts the book with a discussion of causes put forth early on, by politicians and survivors, for the 9/11 terrorists attacks: 

 

Story: Terrorists did it, but lax officials let them do it.

Convention: Modern life is dangerous.

Code: Because we have freedom to defend, we must combat terror.

Technical accounts: (Not many given initially. Later, specialists gave accounts of "how airplane crashes brought down supposedly unshakeable buildings, what went wrong with American intelligence," etc.) 

He notes that "intermediate forms of reason giving exist. One form sometimes mutates into another as people interact. In religious communities, 'God wills it' stands halfway between a convention and a story, having more or less explanatory power depending on prevailing beliefs about divine intervention in human affairs."

He also makes clear that all of these ways of relating are also used to accomplish things other than give reasons. For example, stories also "amuse, threaten and educate;" technical accounts also "display their providers' expertise and signal where the experts stand on divisive issues;" conventions also "mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, fill lulls in conversations, and convey accumulated ideas from one generation to the next."

More about each:

CONVENTIONS

Conventions, like etiquette, "mix propriety and self-interest."  Etiquette "consists of supplying appropriate, effective reasons why -- for things you do, and for things you won't do. Good etiquette incorporates conventional reasons. The reasons need not be true, but they must fit the circumstances" and, even more, the relationship.

Some conventions consist of 'serviceable excuses' that try to normalise relationships. An example Tilly gives is of someone who's illiterate asking a stranger in a store to read something for them, with the explanation that they forgot their glasses. Other examples of 'serviceable excuses' we give to conceal "our suddenly revealed incompetence" include Sorry - I thought this was someone else's office, These gears always grind, The map was wrong, It's too loud to hear anything, etc. We use these to avoid embarrassment, to "prove that the relation between ourselves and others is not what it might seem." Sometimes, Tilly notes, we give similar explanations not to express our social competence but to "explain a failure as a result of excusable incompetence" (my watch stopped, I'm sick, I'm new in town, I've never done this before, etc.)

Tilly says that justification occurs in all types of reason-giving, but that "justification by means of convention ... has a peculiar property: participants rarely take the reason proposed seriously as a cause-effect account, and more often treat it as a characterization of the relationship, the practices, and the connection between them. A good reason offers an acceptable characterization." 

CODES

Using codes as reasons is all about matching the case at hand to the code in the book: "Asked to justify a decision, adjudicate a dispute, or give advice, skillful users of codes find matches between concrete cases and categories, procedures, and rules already built into the codes. Like conventions, reasons based on codes therefore gain credibility from criteria of appropriateness rather than from the cause-effect validity that prevails in stories and technical accounts."

"Sermons, classes, Power-Point presentations, manuals and how-to books often present codes: briefly stated principles followed by practical applications. Their very formats separate them from everyday social interchange. ... Job applications, survey interviews, resumes, obituaries, and citations for honors typically require either their authors or some specialist to convert accounts initially presented in story form into stylized facts to match well-established codes."

Tilly gives lots of legal and medical examples, especially malpractice. 

STORIES

Stories "truncate cause-effect connections. They typically call up a limited number of actors whose dispositions and actions cause everything that happens within a delimited time and space. ... Stories inevitably minimize or ignore the causal roles of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, incremental effects, simulataneous effects, feedback effects, and environmental effects."  

(All those errors and effects are what interest me -- as well as what the 'actors' think, feel and do -- and may explain an aversion I have to stories that omit those messy things.)

Stories make meaning, make "the world intelligible. ... Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic or exemplary events. ... [T]hey often carry an edge of justification or condemnation. ... The story usually gives pride of place to human actors. When the leading characters are not human" ... (animals, God, storms, etc.) "they still behave mostly like humans. The story they enact accordingly often conveys credit or blame. ... Stories exclude ... inconvenient complications [like those errors and effects named above]. ... Even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved."

Elements of stories and when we choose to tell them:

• Stories explain events in question, when conventions and general principles won't do
• Stories often assign blame to the actors involved, omitting other non-actor causes
• There are master stories that recur frequently[ i.e., myths?]: "A let B down and B suffered," "C and D fought to a standstill," etc.
• Stories usually have some kind of moral, even if subtle through assigning praise or blame

This paragraph was most enlightening for me, articulating something felt but not always consciously understood: 

"As with conventions the choice of stories obviously has consequences for later relations among the parties to the stories, and typically involves justification or condemnation of certain practices. If I tell you that a mutual friend has cheated me, I am simultaneously aligning you with me against the friend and warning you not to trust the friend .... That is why hearing stories often upsets us and sometimes incites us to challenge the teller: if we accept the story, we take on the consequences."

"Superior stories" are those that are simplified to the greatest degree and are also closest to truth; that is, they get their cause and effect right. These stories are widely accessible and persuasive.

TECHNICAL ACCOUNTS

Technical accounts "combine cause-effect explanation (rather than logics of appropriateness) with grounding in some systematic specialized discipline (rather than everyday knowledge). ... They assume shared knowledge of previously accumulated definitions, practices and findings. For that reason, outsiders often consider technical accounts inpenetrable because they are so hermetic or ... filled with jargon." 

Their relationship work is that they "signal relationships with possessors of esoteric knowledge, saying you're one of us to other sympathetic specialists, marking differences within the field from others with whom the author disagrees, providing introductions to the field ..., and establishing the author's respectablity vis-a-vis respectful nonspecialists."

Technical accounts use codes to match and measure cases against norms and standards, and they go on to posit cause and effect based on this.

Tilly's examples concerns violence, crime, the National Academy of Sciences, privatizaton of common resources, property rights, Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel, etc.

(I find most of the examples in this book pretty tedious and very skippable.) 

My Conclusion 

After reading this book, I have the sense that pretty much every reason we give others or ourselves, or hear from same, is either formulaic or a highly simplified mythic account. Is that it?

I've been trying out reasons in my head -- all stories, so far, because that's the only place where it seems that complexity and doubt could enter -- conventions are not complex per se, codes may be complex but are also pro forma to some extent, and technical accounts aren't that useful for discussing ordinary relationships) -- for various actions I've done, and even when they sometimes include mention of coincidence, feedback effects, incremental effects, etc., they still, I can't help but notice, omit a lot of contributing factors, either because I want to minimise those factors when I present the reasons to myself, or the story gets unwieldy with so many offshoots -- perhaps with cause-and-effect accounts, there is a tendency to weight the contributing factors and to present those writ bold because they seem significant and seem to account for most of the outcome. My life experience, though, tells me that my justifications and reasons-giving after the fact are liable to be misinterpretations of reality, the result of my mind imposing actions, feelings and thoughts (and cause and effect hypotheses) into a biased framework.

I understand, reading this book, why I have felt at times so slighted by someone I considered a friend, when he listens to my story (sometimes a reason-giving story, sometimes not) and responds with what feels to me like a pat convention ("You know it's wrong to do that." "Well, these things happen." etc.)  I've done the same thing and felt the chilling effect it's had on the reason-receiver, too. Now I wonder if answering a friend's drama with a conventional response always necessarily reveals either (1) an intention to push the other away, to make an intimate relationship more distant, or, likewise, (2) an intention to change the relationship's power balance -- the one offering the convention is in effect saying, "I'm superior," or is at least making a claim to more power than she currently has within the relationship. 

Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) writes (almost a year ago):

"We know from workplace studies that the biggest factor in employee satisfaction is the degree of control workers have over their jobs, assuming other factors such as the pay and the hours are somewhere in the normal range. People like choice more than they like the thing they choose.

 

"When you make your own choices, you manipulate cognitive dissonance in your favor. No matter what you choose, it seems like a better option than it really is because you chose it."  

 

I don't think any 'real' Buddhist would say this, but it seems to me that most of Buddhist practice, at the core, is meant to be a remedy for this seemingly universal human tendency to equate a sense of control with happiness.

Most of life is not controllable. We don't have a choice about many things. Being born and dying, for instance. :-) We often can't control our own thoughts and actions, much less those of other people, or circumstances. So this tendency to equate control with happiness leads to suffering, as we see again and again that we are not 'the deciders,' and even when we are the deciders, we decide wrong. Still, we try to be the deciders. It feels good to be in charge rather than to be told what to do or to have circumstances forced upon us. 

Making choices and feeling in control is a key way of finding ground. Feeling we're in control gives us the illusion, first of all, that there's an "I," an identity that is constant and solid, and second, that we have power, that we can determine outcomes. And we do have power. We can affect some outcomes. There's also luck, timing, and other people's power,  which thwart our sense of control, and even when we do exert control, there's our own ambivalence about alternatives (which diverts our power), our indecision, our poor judgment, our lack of wisdom, and the unravelling of unforeseen consequences, which remind us that even when we act with control and power we may not actually control outcomes.

I guess the question is, if I  consciously and over-and-over choose to let go of needing to feel a sense of control in order to feel happy, am I still holding on to a sense of control in making that choice? And what then?

 (photo: cat, staring up at bird's nest)

I read about sociologist Charles Tilly's book Why?: What happens when people give reasons ... and why (2006) at about the same time I watched a "House, MD" episode (It's A Wonderful Lie) in which House says, "The only reason to give multiple reasons is that you're searching for what the person wants to hear." That struck me as exceedingly true, and I thought that Tilly might have more to say about what's behind reason-giving. 

Tilly says that reason-giving happens only in relationships (and only in human ones) and he makes a direct connection between reason-giving and status within the relationship, or, the perceived equality of the relationship. The main determiner of the kind of reason we give is not the behaviour we're explaining or the situation, but rather the relationship we have with the person to whom we're giving the reason:

"Reason giving resembles what hapens when people deal with unequal social relations in general. Participants in unequal social relations may detect, confirm, reinforce or challenge them, but as they do so they employ modes of communications that signal which of these things they are doing. In fact, the ability to give reasons without challenge usually accompanies a position of power."

Reason-giving can be verbal, and it can also be through pantomime, or "body gloss." He offers the example of a girl entering a congregating area in a ski lodge, who wants to "see and be seen by boys," giving for all the world the "appearance of looking for someone in particular." She's proferring an unspoken reason for being there, for looking around, one that contradicts or hides her true reason.

As Tilly notes early on,

"people do not give themselves and others reasons because of some universal craving for truth and coherence. They often settle for reasons that are superficial, contradictory, dishonest, or -- at least from an observer's viewpoint -- farfetched. Whatever else they are doing when they give reasons, people are clearly negotiating their social lives. They are saying something about relations between themselves and those who hear [or observe] their reasons." 

Reasons, Tilly says, are always given to define, or redefine, the relationship between the parties. They are given to create, confirm, negotiate, or repair relationships.  "Appropriate reasons vary dramatically with the equality, inequality and intimacy or distance of the relationship." Superiors can give perfunctory reasons to inferiors, as can those in distant relationships. In fact, it would likely be "intrusive or embarrassing" to give elaborate reasons to someone you don't know well. Inferiors, otoh, usually have to offer defensible and sometimes apologetic reasons to superiors, as do intimates. Though there is much social pressure to give appropriate reasons to each other, most of us are skilled at this and so usually don't notice reasons unless the reason given doesn't match our view of the relationship.

I'll post soon about the four types of reasons Tilly identifies and explores. (And yes, many reasons are combinations of the four, not pure examples.) 

In the Boston Globe, a 5-page piece by Vicki Constantine Croke about making tough veterinary care decisions features a lovely story about Mark Podlaseck and his goose with cancer, Boswell, who seems to like The Iliad.

22-stone (300 lb.) white sheep, outcast among other animals, comes to live in home of British family. Affection all 'round.  CNN video.

Overcoming Bias points to an article in the July 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (links to full text here but it's fee-based, or available through your library system) that examines four psychological experiments and concludes that when we feel a weak sense of personal control, we are more likely to believe "in the existence of a controlling God" and to defend "the overarching socio-political system." The authors discuss "the implications of these results for understanding why a high percentage of the population believes in the existence of God, and why people so often endorse and justify their socio-political systems." Sounds interesting -- I hope to read more when the July issue is available via my library system's EBSCOhost subscription.

This hypothesis seems in line with earlier reporting correlating that the longevity of communities with their religious underpinnings (religious communities last longer than secular ones, on the whole) and finding that the communities persist longer when those underpinnings (and the lifestyle they lead to) are stricter, more controlling.

Marginal Revolution commented on the same article, hypothesising that similar effects may hold for medicine and media, i.e., that we'd be more likely to believe that doctors are effective when our health is in jeopardy and that we'd be more likely to believe in media accuracy when we believe we need that media information in order to be safe. In all cases, we want to feel that someone is in control.

From Gil Bailie's mostly dormant website:

"Following another avenue of escape, which seeks its justification in a grandiose theory, there are those who wish to recognize only collective sin, 'objectivized' sin, 'social' sin, i.e. the sin committed by others. A universe is constructed where evil is everywhere denounced, but no where admitted; where it is always endured, never committed. By thus 'transferring the evil which is in man to the evil in the structures' -- called 'structures of sin' -- one is led, in addition, to the idea that man is essentially good, and that it is only society which corrupts him, and that he has no need of conversion of heart." -- Henri de Lubac

I think this is a danger for those of us who use a Girardian lens (seeking "justification in a grandiose theory"?), to see more and more clearly others' violent mimesis, scapegoating, the mechanism of sin for what it is in every interaction we observe, to see it woven into the fabric of society and institutions, while we remain blind to the way it flourishes in each of us.