The Imitation Game

I've been researching an article about Eugenics in Ontario based on an interview I did with a curator at the Guelph Civic Museum and as usual, I've begun to obsess about about the issues that it raises. At the same time, I recently rewatched a movie about the computer pioneer Alan Turing and his work for British Intelligence during WWII. It's titled The Imitation Game and it focuses mostly on the personal life of Turing, which raises some pretty important issues that our entire society is currently dealing with. 

This is implied by the title and high-lighted in the pivotal interview with a police detective who arrests him for being gay and ultimately destroys his life simply because it's "the law". The key issue is that very many people in our society have to imitate an ideal that somehow or another has become a key part of their survival. If you can't play the role and dance to the right tune, your parents, your boss, the police, or someone else in the machinery of life will crush you like a bug. Luckily I can add a clip from the movie where the amazing Benedict Cumberbatch---as Alan Turing---talks about his famous "Turing test". This test is a way of trying to figure out if a computer is "conscious", "thinking", or, "aware" like a human being. 

In the movie, this is a metaphor for how one person relates to the other. In the specific case where the police detective is literally putting Turing's life on trial, he is trying to figure out if Cumberbatch's character is a "real human being" (ie: someone he should care about and protect) or if he is "just a poofter" who deserves to be ground under the heel of the criminal justice system. In a reverse sense, Turing is trying to figure out if the detective is a sensitive, intelligent being or else a macho robot who has no problem with destroying someone else's life simply because he is different. Unfortunately, the detective fails the test and can't understand that Turing is really a human being instead of just a two-dimensional, cartoonish "pervert".

Turning failed in his attempt to stay "in the closet" and as a result ended up losing his university position, was "chemically castrated", and---possibly---committed suicide as a result. Hardly what I'd call proper treatment for all the service he'd rendered the country during the war.

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I'm going to be honest in this oped. For most of my life I've thought that things like gay rights are fundamentally a distraction from dealing with more important stuff like climate change. My simple calculus was that discrimination sucks, but people have been surviving it for thousands of years. But climate change will totally screw over the entire human race, minorities and all. So I thought "let's save the entire human race first before we fixate on these lessor issues". Indeed, sometimes I thought the elites were fixating on gay rights because they are something that can easily be accommodated without threatening the existing economic and social structures that are stressing our ecosystem to the breaking point.

This point of view is shifting, though. For one thing, being somewhat engaged with the "New Green Deal" folks has opened my eyes to the idea that we are never going to get enough "buy in" from the general public unless we are willing to bring in the masses of people who have supported right-wing populists like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, etc.

Unfortunately, a lot of those folks have already bought the line that helping people in distress is part of the problem, not the solution. But I think that part of this anger comes from feeling that all the support being supposedly "lavished" on gays, refugees, minorities, etc has meant that nothing is being done for them. As a matter of fact, I do think that there are legitimate complaints being raised---they are just being aimed at the wrong people. Immigrants and gays didn't get rid of all the good jobs and punch rents through the roof. But no one other than the populists seem to be willing to talk about those particular things and posit the sorts of radical solutions that a lot of voters "feel in their guts" as being necessary.

In practical terms, this played out with Hilary Clinton getting the Democratic nomination instead of Bernie Saunders, which meant that Donald Trump was running against a candidate who seemed to believe that everything in the USA is just peachy the way it is. If no one else wants to even admit that you have a problem, then the guy who says he has the answer is the only game in town---no matter how lame that answer really is.  

I think that "progressive" people need to come up with answers to the things that are bugging at least a significant fraction the folks supporting right wing populism.

But the research I'm doing with regard to eugenics has got me thinking that the real problem is that the only way we are going to get real consensus in society is if we finally stop forcing people to play that damn "imitation game".

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I wonder if part of the reason why so many people who read this blog won't subscribe and help pay for it is because in some way they think that I am a "stinking capitalist pig"? How about I turn this idea on it's head? The business model I'm following is that I am offering an important public service to the community for free. Nothing is behind a pay wall, so cost is not an issue for being able to read it if you have access to the web. (Which almost everyone does because of the free access computer pools at the public and university libraries.) If you think that local, in depth coverage of news is an important public good, I'm inviting you to use Patreon or Pay Pal to help support this public good. (Thanks to the anonymous individual who gave me money via some third party company I'd never heard of before.) 

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I've written a bit about this in the past in other venues. For example, here's a post in another blog where I discuss the idea that women have to always smile at everyone they meet. That's just as much a part of the "imitation game" as gays being in the closet. It's also part of what men go through when they are taught to be "tough" and "stoic". These things cause real problems in people's lives. Women don't get listened to, and men end up being emotionally fragile people who's only way to deal with unbearable situations is to explode into violence. (We all know how much these two strategies are helping the human race deal with it's problems!)

There's a deeper level to this than just the suffering we inflict upon individuals who can't dissemble enough to "pass" as fitting the artificial definition of humanity that our current society is built around. The problems we face as a species all seem to come down to one macro problem---we don't understand subtleties very well. Every economic decision we made is all based on money and any consideration of how it affects people or the environment rarely makes it to the board room where all the decisions get made. Our criminal justice system is based on the idea that people freely choose to commit crimes without any understanding of how important our previous history is to the choices we make. We compound this idiocy by then assuming that if we act viciously enough towards incarcerated individuals they will miraculously become saints by the time their sentence expires.

We smash, we destroy, we act out, we "dumb down", we ignore, we force people to "shut up", etc, etc. The problem is that if we continue to act like ignorant boobs we simply cannot have 9 billion people using modern technology and hope to have anything like a functioning ecosystem. We can no longer force the wide variety of human beings to act out an "imitation game" where they try to act as if the tinker-toy culture we have inherited makes any sense at all in the time of climate change, CRISPR, artificial intelligence, atomic weapons, etc. Just as we have to learn to embrace complex ecosystems instead of boring monocultures; we also have to learn to embrace all of humanity in it's diversity. People who think differently have a lot to offer us, if we'd just listen to them, to leave them their own corner of society instead of continuing to smash their round pegs into square holes.

Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of
who do the things that no one can imagine.
Alan Turing, c/o IEEE Spectrum.