 |
| Marie Snyder at her desk---channelling a "state trooper" vibe. Photo by her. |
In this part of my conversation with Marie Snyder we get a little more "practical" as we talk about the importance of moral reasoning and how much people benefit from being able to think rationally about what it means to live an ethical life. As you will hear, both Snyder and myself believe that people who turn their back on religion often throw out the "ethical baby out with the religious bathwater" when they become atheists.
I recently heard an interesting podcast by Tim Harford about how Florence Nightingale used a debating technique to get the leaders of the British Empire to take seriously the relationship between cleanliness and the spread of disease. She was having a hard time getting the "establishment" to apply what she'd learned about polluted drinking water nursing wounded soldiers during the Crimean War to the population of cities where hordes of people were dying of diseases like dysentery, cholera, and, typhoid. What she decided to do was send a special type of chart to various important people (including the Queen), one that would tell them at a glance how important unblocking the sewers and cleaning up the drinking water had been for mortality in the Crimean soldier's hospital. Her hope was that a similar regime in cities could cut deaths among civilians too.
Here's an excellent video that accompanies a paper presented to the Royal Statistical Society by Hugh Small that explains what Nightingale was doing with her poster campaign.
And here's a bar chart that points out a key part of Small's argument.
Remember that the sanitary commission from England arrived in the Crimea and started cleaning up the hospitals in March of 1856. But according to the bar chart above, deaths started to decline in February and March---before the commission's changes could be instituted. Moreover, there seems to have been a bit of a "rebound" in disease deaths in June.
There are many reasons why this could have happened. The war went through "ebbs and flows" and there were changes in seasonal weather. This would have meant that men entered the hospital in better or worse conditions, which affected their ability to fight off disease. With hindsight we now know that "the Lady with the Lamp" was absolutely right about the need for sanitary sewers, clean drinking water, and, scrupulous hospital hygiene. But at the time, this "noise" could have been seen by some as evidence for the view that disease was pretty much inevitable and there wasn't much anyone could do about it.
According to Small, Nightingale specifically chose the rose chart because it would hide the premature decline and rebound from the casual viewer. As he explains it
in management consulting one tends to use graphics to present messages, not data, and there is a rule number zero that ‘your graphic should support the message, the whole message, and nothing but the message’.
I've presented this example in some detail because I want to use it to talk about the difference between dialectic and debate. The bar chart is dialectic because it clearly shows complexities that would be of use to people who want to know the "picky details" of a complex situation. In science and as a general rule, it is a good idea to share the complexities because it helps the group learn more about what is really going on. That's a very good thing in dialectics---which is about collectively finding the Truth. In contrast, the rose chart was designed to hide "picky details" and focus on the one, big point: that when the hospitals were cleaned up, death rates by disease dropped dramatically. This is a situation where people aren't trying to find the Truth---instead it is an attempt to pound the Truth into the heads of indifferent people who have a vested interest in not admitting to an unpleasant reality.
Florence Nightingale and her "rose chart posters" is a classic example where it appears that "the ends justified the means". Not only was she trying to fight an entrenched political culture that didn't want to spend astronomical amounts of money building water treatment facilities and sanitary sewers. Moreover, no matter how much she was adored by rank-and-file soldiers, she was still a woman trying to exert influence in a profoundly sexist culture.
To use Snyder's analogy, Nightingale wasn't content to make a fancy shot---she wanted to win the game of pool because it was about saving thousands of people's lives!
This is the sort of complexity that people need to understand when they are contemplating what they see in politics or general public discourse. In an ideal world no one would be using rhetorical tricks to win debates---instead, we'd all be using logic to navigate complex issues through dialectic. But the question arises---"How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" Alas, I fear that if we just use dialectic and the "other side" insists on debates, it will be a case of "bringing a knife to a gun fight".
I've been thinking about this for quite a while and I think it might be useful to seriously consider how we could "rejig" our political conversations to force them to be more dialectic than debates. I don't think that this is impossible, because there are all sorts of rules of discourse (eg: no hearsay evidence allowed) that have been developed to do something similar in criminal trials. Years ago I tried to "tamp down" the dysfunctional rhetoric at a particular political party's conferences. One particular experiment involved forcing people raising issues about a piece of policy to never make statements. Instead, I tried to get people to always frame their concerns in the form of a question.
The change was sort of like this. (This is a real example that is referring to a resolution that would have forced every riding association hosting a party conference to only serve vegetarian food.)
"This policy is an attempt to force specific dietary preferences on every single member of the party!"
became
"Is the implication of this policy that the party should dictate the dietary preferences of everyone in the party?"
My attempt was to "turn down the heat" and to give people with controversial ideas lots of opportunity to explain why they were proposing them.
I believe that this little change actually worked very well to "nudge" the discussions away from rhetoric-laden debates towards more useful dialectics. Unfortunately, without someone (ie: me) enforcing this rule, people quickly forgot to use it, and, the party quickly drifted back to the default. (This is a problem with any new idea in institutions---people are socialized to do things one particular way by our culture, and, it is very hard to change these ingrained habits.)
But the first step is to understand the difference and admit that there may be a better way of doing things. Snyder is to be commended for explaining the difference between dialect and debate to her students. Perhaps one of them will come up with a whole set of improvements to the way we manage collective decision-making---something like a Robert's Rules for Using Rational Dialectics to Govern Meetings!
If you wonder what I was getting so upset about, here's a link to the article I wrote about coffee pods.
Snyder mentions the "banality of evil", which comes from the philosopher Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem. I'd suggest anyone who's interested should read the book, as it raises one of the seminal philosophical questions that arose during the 20th century: "Where does evil come from?"
People use the term "evil", but rarely have any sort of grasp upon it. The point that Arendt made after studying the trial of Eichmann was that he wasn't so much a monster as rather a bureaucrat who's pursuit of a career got in the way of considering the real consequences of his actions.
I reread the book a few years back and the thing I remember most from it was a scene where Eichmann was having a meeting with the Chief Rabbi of some European city. (The SS often worked with the leadership of the Jewish communities---this allowed them to minimize the "fuss" of their policies and in exchange the leadership were able to forestall their own demise for a little while.) The Rabbi was trying to plead for the lives of his people but all Eichmann wanted to talk about was how his career had "stalled" and that he realized he'd never get promoted past the SS equivalent of Lieutenant-Colonel. That's the "banality" of modern evil in a nutshell---it's done by people who have no greater concerns than things like their career and how to pay the bills.
Here's a You Tube video that does a pretty good job of explaining the concept.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Snyder's attempts to get university lecturers to explain what sort of moral reasoning they use to make their own ethical choices. It has resonances with what Alain de Botton says in the following TED talk about using culture---Plato, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, etc---to develop moral reasoning. It is a good idea, but there's something about modern academia that has selected against or beaten down any interest in teaching practical moral reasoning to undergrads.
Just to give one example of how it could be done comes from when I was in graduate school. I was really good at symbolic logic, which meant that I got stuck doing the tutorials. The textbook that the department used was something that one of the profs had written on his own and was filled with lame attempts at humour. For example, it did a lot of tongue-twisting word games. (One dumb example that sticks in my mind is something about "bumble-bees knees".)
Symbolic logic was by far the most well-enrolled course in the department---primarily because it was the only "humanities" course that didn't require students to write essays. There was a requirement that all science students had to take at least one course in the humanities---perhaps to expose them to ethical reasoning through reading Shakespeare. As a result, it was massively taken by foreign students in science programs who had "issues" with their English. (Of course the blather about "bumble bees knees" did wonders to help their comprehension.)
As part of my duties, I had to give a tutorial lecture once a week. These were attended by a great many Chinese students who I could tell were having trouble with the course for language and cultural issues more than the subject matter. (If you can handle university level calculus, there's no reason at all to fail symbolic logic!) One day I took "the bull by the horns" and wrote a relevant syllogism on the black board.
"I rented a room to a Chinese student once. He was a slob. Therefore all Chinese students are slobs. Therefore I will never rent a room to a Chinese student again."
After I wrote that and read it to the class, you could have heard a pin drop.
I then announced to the class something to the effect of the following.
"This is an illogical argument. Logic isn't just playing word games---it's about finding the best way to live as an authentic human being. Tell me why it is illogical and you will have a concrete argument about why prejudice is wrong."
I don't think that these kids had ever been exposed to the idea that there was an interface between reason and ethics. I don't know why it is that academics have so totally separated the two, but it is a fact that they have.
(Incidentally, I think students liked my tutorials. It was a very long time ago, but I met some of these students out of class and several made a point of calling me 'teacher' and one even bowed to me. I got a gift mailed to me from Hong Kong after a student graduated and went back home. Even today I get a bit verklempt when I think about that.)
Here's that TED talk by Alain de Botton that I mentioned above. It does a good job to expand on the issues that Snyder raises.
&&&&
I shamelessly plugged my latest book (Digging Your Own Well: Daoism as a Practical Philosophy) in this interview and I'm going to finish this article by including a excerpt. If you'd like to purchase a copy, you can get an Ebook from Smashwords, an paperback from Lulu, and, it's also for sale at the Bookshelf Cafe downtown. (If you can't afford to purchase a copy, you can also borrow it from the public library.)
When I was a child one of my teachers used to write sayings on the blackboard every morning. One that stuck out in my mind was “Be a live wire and you won't get stepped on!”. At the time, I thought that it meant that people shouldn't be afraid of standing up for their rights, asserting their interests, or, showing off their abilities. It struck me as an advertisement in favour of the value of being “pushy”. As a child, I thought that this was a bit odd, as my family had always taught me that that was being rude.
Why did that teacher write it on the black board?
Totally unconsciously, she was promoting a “practical philosophy”. In particular, she was promoting a sort of optimistic, liberal, 20th century view of “individual progress”. Contrast that with this similar piece of folk wisdom: “The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down.” That is a Japanese proverb that seems to suggest that it is dangerous to be a “live wire”. Not only will being “live” not keep you from being “stepped on”---it will positively ensure that you will be.
Which one is right?
Well, that's an important question because depending on how you choose, you will live your life in a particular way and either reap the benefits or suffer the consequences. The practical philosophies that I mentioned above---Greek, Indian, and, Chinese---are all coherent collections of ideas about how you should live your life. They all suggest that it is better to follow an internally consistent series of maxims instead of simply bouncing through life following whatever random ideas your culture (eg my elementary school teacher) chooses to insert into your consciousness. This book is an attempt to expose the reader to one of those schools of practical philosophy: Daoism. My hope is that some of you will see the great wisdom that I have found that it brought to my life, and how it helps me navigate the day-to-day problems that I face.
And in the case of that maxim that my home room teacher wrote on the black board, a Daoist would probably have written “Be like water”. That is, find effective “work arounds” for life's problems instead of either vainly fighting against impossible odds or just doing what everyone else does. (Digging Your Own Well: Daoism as a Practical Philosophy, p-12)
&&&&
No comments:
Post a Comment