Unawareness Versus Denial

Grim's recent post Blindness put me in mind of things I wrote years ago.  This was the first post in what eventually became the series "May We Believe Our Thoughts." I don't think I'm going to reprise much of that, but I thought I would put this in anyway, partly because of the comments there.

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Because of the neurological research coming out over the last decade or two three, psychiatry is increasingly making a distinction between denial and unawareness. Some of the research is being done up at Dartmouth MS by folks I admire and used to work with, so I keep up with this more than other areas.

Everything has been in the "denial" category since Freud, or before: the idea that mentally ill people really do know, at some level, what reality is, but hide it from themselves. Therapy was a way of developing insight, and having the courage to accept the unpleasant.

Unawareness, in contrast, is the idea that certain brain dysfunctions make the owners of those brains unable to see their illness, no more than a blind person can see, or even more exactly, than a color-blind person can distinguish colors. Like an amputee who feels a phantom limb, or like Oliver Sacks, losing the sense of ownership of a limb after injury, they cannot perceive their illness, regardless of the evidence submitted. Dr. Flashman gave the example of the patients who believed he had implanted chips in their brain, shown their chipless MRI's. The responses were varied - my sort of chip doesn't show up...that's not my MRI...you doctored the photo... but none were able to muster even a 0.1% acceptance of the no-chip idea. Not even in theory. Not even as a "what if" scenario.

We are moving lack of insight from the "denial" pile into the "unawareness" pile, for psychotic disorders certainly, but even for mood disorders when they are untreated. How far will this go? Will it turn out that no depressed people ever respond to any offered advice or insight, but only to the intervention of attention, of exercise, of medication, of practicing agency? Lincoln's comment that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be might turn out to be completely untrue, and useful only for the reminding the folks outside the depression that nothing, absolutely nothing they advise is going to have the slightest effect.

I am increasingly convinced of this for many illnesses, and it makes me feel shame at the conversations I have had over the years with patients, attributing (usually, but not always, unconsciously) their lack of insight to some stubbornness or cowardice on their part - a refusal to engage reality rather than a biological inability to perceive it. It's not just a waste of time. It's thirty-plus years of unnecessary cruelty.

If you absorb this, you will see that it makes things both better and worse. If the patient is not going to be convinced, whether you explain for two seconds or two hours, why bother to give any explanation at all? Or if you listening to her for two hours will make no more difference than listening for two seconds, why listen at all? Isn't it just a waste of time and ultimately cruel, pretending to a patient that her opinion makes the slightest difference when if fact it doesn't? So let's just ignore everything she says until we get a guardian then, and hold her down and give her medicine and be done with it. Why any charade?

I don't think it takes much imagination to see that as a chilling scenario, and an enormously bad precedent to set.

But is badgering a deaf person because they can't hear any better? Because even if the mental health practitioner is speaking in the kindest tones, is really rooting for the patient to "get it," and has the best intentions, if we really think that underneath it all they are denying reality, that some trick or intervention on our part will help them turn the corner and begin to see, then badgering is what we are actually doing.

It gets worse. It may apply to a high percentage of all beliefs, not only to mental illness.

Update: Roper's comment reminds me that I have at least a half-dozen professionals reading here, so I should provide some links. Xavier Amador looks like he'd be pop psych, but he is not. His books cover a fair bit of the brain research. (as of 2011)

Laura Flashman

Thomas McAllister

Free Will and Neuroscience

I did a series - or more exactly, brought out a discussion - about free will last year, May We Believe Our Thoughts?  There's 28 entries on that, so browsing may be the order of the day.

Philosopher Eddy Nahmias, last seen as a contributor to The Oxford Handbook On Free Will has an interesting essay over at Big Questions Online whether contemporary neuroscience supports or challenges the notion of free will. He comes down in favor of the "supports" camp, while acknowledging that many others think otherwise. 

Via Maggie's Farm, specifically Bird Dog.  Which brings me to another point:  I used to have lists of things I should read that I felt bad about not getting to.  With the internet, and specifically people like BD who uncover lots of interesting stuff nearly every day, I have the additional problem of things I would really like to read that I can't get to.  There is just no way, and it hardly seems fair.

Free Will And Moral Behavior

Reason's Ronald Bailey has some excellent commentary on Gazzaniga's much-discussed new book about neuroscience and free will.

"Gazzaniga is right to worry. He persuasively cites a 2011 study in which researchers found that inducing disbelief in free will decreased helpfulness and increased aggression among experiment participants. He also notes that other recent studies reported that people were more likely to cheat in psychological experiments after reading passages that encouraged a belief in determinism. The researchers note with irony, “Perhaps, denying free will simply provides the ultimate excuse to behave as one likes.”

We have been over some of this territory in the May We Believe Our Thoughts series:  if we can demonstrate that there are times when our thinking is less free, it follows there are times when it is more free. (I have made a similar argument for altruism, whenever folks try to show that it does not exist.)  Free will versus collection-of-neurons-reacting is not an either-or choice, but a continuum.

HT: Bird Dog at Maggie's

Thoughts on American War and Death

We resolved, rather gradually but noticeably, to reduce the death rate of our soldiers by fighting war more expensively.  Learning as we went about the millions slaughtered in WWII on the Eastern Front, and concluding that Americans were somehow not like that, was likely the beginning.  We lost horrendous amounts of American soldiers by current standards, but not so many by international standards.  We began to see that we cared about individual lives even more than we had a generation earlier.

We went the technology route to wage war instead, increasingly clear that we were spending this money to reduce casualties.  By the First Gulf Wat we were quite explicit in our declaration that this is precisely what we are doing.  We've lost about 4,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We lost 4400 on D-Day.  Hell, we lost 750 in a training exercise (Tiger) for D-Day.

We have spent an enormous sum in dollars, comparatively few in lives on these two very small wars we are involved in.  That is exactly how we planned it, and with 4G warfare, drones, Stuxnet, and the like, we hope to make that even more pronounced.

An odd thing happened along the way.  We view war differently.  We say truly when we claim that losing soldiers is more expensive than losing money.  One would think, then, that the country would be less opposed to wars where we didn't lose soldiers.  But the reverse has been true in America.

The cost of lives lost is mixed.  We see it as tragedy and horror, but we also see it as providing a link to the cause.  Those who lost relatives often feel a deeper commitment to the rationale for the war, not less.  I noticed it in myself when a son went into the USMC in wartime.  We don't want to think there is no value in those deaths.  We will not see them as senseless.  The more soldiers we lose, the more valuable we think the cause was.

This is true in other countries as well, where long-deceased sons pictures are still displayed prominently, even when the cause was futile or evil.  It has something to do with the idea of sunk cost, and clan loyalty, and cognitive dissonance.  We value the cause, not for its own merits but because our loved one died for it.

Now that we are spending money instead of lives, that tie is weakened.  We say that soldiers lives are a greater loss, but we get something back, some psychic benefit.  But money spent is just money gone.  We don't see that we get much of anything back.  I am speaking at the most basic level here.  We can map out on paper what we gained for the loss of money or loss of lives, and we should make that calculation with our best reasoning, not our emotions.  But we will make the judgements largely with our emotions in the end.

As we reduce casualties and increase cost - a trend I expect to continue - we will increasingly see war as nothing more than a waste of money.  Whether we are right or wrong about any individual war will matter less and less.  It will cost money, we won't get a new pony from it, and we will see it as dollars pissed away.

Think about how this trade influences the populations of our enemies. At least along those primitive lines, they are cut from the same cloth we are.  If anything, this assigning of value to cause on the basis of how many sons they have spent over the generations must be even more powerful than it is for us.  Because sons are more valuable, they are paradoxically less of a deterrent loss to a nation.

We must learn to induce them to spend their money and not their sons on war.

Recent Conversations - May We Believe Our Thoughts

The full series of posts and discussion on how much we do - and do not - delude ourselves.

Complex Systems

David at Photon Courier has excellent commentary on Doerner's The Logic of Failure, experiments on complex decision-making and how it goes bad. All three links from within the article are worth pursuing.

From his review: 

The subjects who fail at this game, Doerner finds, are those who apply rigid, context-insensitive rules...such as "always keep the units widely deployed" or "always keep the units concentrated" rather than making these decisions flexibly. He identifies "methodism," which he defines as "the unthinking application of a sequence of actions we have once learned," as a key threat to effective decision-making. (The term is borrowed from the great military writer Clausewitz.) Similar results are obtained in another simulation, in which the subject is put in charge of making production decisions in a clothing factory. In this case, the subjects are asked to think out loud as they develop their strategies. The unsuccessful ones tend to use unqualified expressions: constantly, every time, without exception, absolutely, etc...while the successful "factory managers" tend toward qualified expressions: now and then, in general, specifically, perhaps,... 

The connection with government interventions seems inescapable to me.

Self-observation

In the "May We Trust Our Thoughts" series and Gardner's The Science of Fear which I just finished, I repeatedly ran across the laboratory evidence that people come away from having their ideas challenged with an even stronger belief in their original opinion. The act of defending seems to harden the thought.

I have to think this is variable. I know people who take being challenged as proof they are right. If this seems entirely backward, well, it is, yet I think most Christians know someone who regards opposition as proof that the devil is working against him, and thus proof he is on the right track. (I would use gender-neutral pronouns here, but I think this one is much more common in men. If you think otherwise, let me know and I'll change it.) I am also thinking of a particular political individual who seems to revel in the anger directed at him - as if that in itself were the goal, to bait and goad another tribe.

I get it that showing examples of one's opponents fuming, being jerks, and not responding fully rationally is rhetorically useful, as it carries the strong emotional suggestion that I am being the reasonable one here. My tribesmen are the reasonable people in this argument. But that is not a logical argument either. It goes no distance in establishing that one is in fact correct on the merits. It's a political sleight-of-hand masquerading as logic. It could be, and often is, that the anger and even rage one receives in response comes from one's own nastiness. The vicious put-down disguised in polite language carries a double danger. Bad enough that we be hypocrites, mock innocents who know we are driving in the poisoned blade while maintaining plausible deniability, as the politicians say. Far worse to have become gradually unaware of our own insults, until we speak to opponents that way because that is "what they deserve."

This strikes me as an especially dangerous aspect of human thought. I doubt I am immune to it. More likely, my impression that I respond to challenge by questioning my conclusions is but an artful disguise, to keep concealed from my self what My Self is doing. Still, I think it is important to at least make an appearance of an attempt. Much that is polite in discourse is not merely polite, not mere convention, but a reminder of what is required of us if we are to be our best selves. Argue with vigor and give a full-throated defense. But first, check whether you are actually right, or if your opponent may not have something worthwhile to add.

The Science of Fear

Why would a book that gives you evidence that the things that you worry about are not such a big problem irritate you?

Okay, that's easy. It's because you are worried about certain things, and yelling at yourself that it's not such a big deal only reduces that a touch, so you feel lectured to. Secondly, you have expended resources, physical or psychic, into problems that now seem small, so you feel a bit foolish, a little ripped off, a little sheepish, at having this pointed out.

Daniel Gardner's The Science of Fear has some minor flaws, I'll touch on those, but they shouldn't dissuade you from reading the book. We are hardwired for certain types of fear, which, once activated, we have trouble turning off. A whole lot of other people get resources from the tribe by exploiting our fears, so they have an interest in keeping us on tenterhooks.* Politicians, nonprofit advocacy groups, companies that produce safety goods or services, government agencies...

Okay, that's adding up to a lot of people who need us to be anxious in order to sell us alarms, foods, programs, wars, medicines... We spend a lot of our precious resources on things that we might not, hope not, ever use or need, in order to reduce our anxieties. And we do this within the context of western society which provides unimaginable wealth and safety. My theory is that a certain amount of worry is built into us, because the ancestors who worried lived to perpetuate their DNA. We may be able to redirect our worry to things that actually have a fair chance of harming us, and which we have some control over. But I propose that we cannot, at present, reduce the amount of worry in our lives without specific intervention, such as medication, therapy, or radical life change. Sumus quod sumus, we are what we are. You will always be this nervous. Your job is to direct the anxiety to the best targets.

Note: As you get older, what you worry about will change automatically, and you will be absolutely sure you are wiser. Uh, maybe so

Worried about the environment? A dozen medical conditions that aren't actually life-threatening? Crime? Terrorism? Gardner will give you the numbers, reminding you how small the danger is. And, he will demonstrate how misplaced fear costs us not only money, but lives. After 9-11, people drove instead of flying. But driving is dangerous, and the most likely number is that 1,595 people died because they drove instead of flying - about five times the number who died in the planes on Sept 11. We spend money to protect ourselves from extremely unusual risks, and don't protect ourselves against more common ones.

The Amazon reviews say that some people found the book too long, and the statistics a bit much, but everyone basically liked it. I vaguely see that, but thought the book was great. The readers of this blog are not going to find the numbers daunting. I thought it was about right. Additionally, he gives a good summary of the research into our fearful and risk-evaluating minds, and this fits very well with our "May We Believe Our Thoughts?" discussions. Some of the research, in fact, we have already covered here. The Science of Fear covers a lot of ground on confirmation bias, our attraction to certain narratives, and a half-dozen smaller brain quirks you had no idea were influencing you so much. Yet Gardner also demonstrates how we can override these tendencies with thoughtful risk assessment.

The quibbles: Despite his clear explanation that we perceive greater danger from cancer because we are living longer, and have greatly reduced other causes of death (many who face cancer today would not have lived to face cancer in the old days, having died in childbirth, or of diphtheria, cholera, or smallpox), Gardner still counts all deaths as equal in some other calculations. He contrasts deaths from terrorism with deaths from diabetes, smoking, and obesity, for example. But the lifestyle deaths occur later in life, taking 5, 10, 15 years off our total. Deaths which take fifty or eighty years off our expected longevity should be counted higher. (Historically, the opposite was sometimes true. So many children died before the age of five, and this was so expected, that these were counted - not very consciously - as of lesser value. We were habituated to 20% of all children dying, and thought it sad, but not a greater loss than an adult's death. This has shifted over the last 50-100 years). Secondly, Gardner does not weigh in on the less-measurable goods of justice, fairness, and culture. While this may be scientifically reasonable, seen as outside his purview as a risk-evaluator, it results in his setting these values to zero. This becomes important in his discussing risks in crime and terrorism. He undervalues all other possible benefits of deterrence, social pressure, and foreign policy in his number-crunching. He tips his hand as a Canadian of the center-left in some of his assumptions as well, but he is even-handed enough that these should be passed over without additional mention. He tries extremely hard to be fair, and few conservatives could match him in this.

Your politics will shift just a bit after reading this book, wherever you started from.

*WTH are tenterhooks, anyway? Ah. Mildly interesting.

Recent Conversations - May We Believe Our Thoughts

The full discussion on how reliable our thoughts, beliefs, and opinions really are.

Paranoia
Unawareness Versus Denial

May We Believe Our Thoughts - I

May We Believe Our Thoughts - II

May We Believe Our Thoughts - III

May We Believe Our Thoughts - IV

My Uncle Again

MWBOT5 - Jesse Ventura's Rant

MWBOT6

May We Believe Our Thoughts - Part I Revisited

Have We Got Choices? - MWBOT7

MWBOT8

Brains Betray Us - MWBOT9

The Lesson Plan - MWBOT Sidebar

Optimism - MWBOT10

Inertia and Saving Face - MWBOT11

The Real You

False Memories

Opinions

MWBOT14

MWBOT 15-16

Anosognosia

Dunning-Kruger Again

Self Observation

The Science Of Fear

MWBOT-15 & 16

Two links related to the subject. The research which shows that few of us know much of anything about politics. When you add in the folks who know something but it's all confirmation bias and minds made up beforehand, perhaps it's all worse than I have been suggesting. Money quote:

“Before you study public opinion, you ask why things aren’t better,” says (Bryan) Caplan. “After you study public opinion, you ask why things aren’t worse.”

Also, a return to Jonathan Haidt's commentary of liberal and conservative morality. I may go into some greater commentary on Haidt, because there remain amazing, even stunning blind spots in his reason, for all that he does see that many liberals miss. But even without my pointing out the pieces he misses, there's a lot of value here.

MWBOT-14

Good understands evil, but evil cannot understand good. It is an important theme in Tolkien (Gandalf’s explanation of Sauron’s expecting his enemies to do with the ring what he would do) and Lewis (the Dwarves in The Last Battle. Sadly, we also watch Susan go downhill in this way in the first two books, able to interpret Lucy’s actions only in terms of her own self-centeredness). It’s a fantasy standard, but not only fantasy: Chesterton’s Father Brown makes the claim explicitly in a few places, and it is the Harkonnen weakness in Dune.

But these are author-created. Do the authors reflect reality, or are they making characters conform to their beliefs? We see the idea in scripture, John 1:5,

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

but a critic could claim that is equally a put-up job. (Not all critics, would, BTW. There are nonbelievers who might grant that this is precisely the sort of thing the Bible does get right, without signing on to any more of it.)

I think we see it pretty clearly in international relations. Morris Childs, an American ex-communist who frequently visited the Kremlin and was trusted by the Politburo(Operation Solo), found that he had to spend most of his time in later years convincing the Soviets that the US was not preparing an imminent attack just because we had strategic advantage. That America might prefer to be left alone to engage in trade, rather than the headache of governing other countries, was beyond their comprehension. It’s hard to understand the behavior of Palestinians and half the Middle-East in terms other than a blindness that prevents them from considering another attitude to outsiders is even possible.

With a little imagination, most of us can carry this down to smaller groups (our own politicians, particular industries, local disputes) even to an individual level. But does that flow only one way? Might it not also be that good people do not understand evil ones? Such characters certainly show up in literature and popular perception – innocents who are so well-meaning that they trust the untrustworthy, believing them as kind as themselves.

We could get into the questions of morality that result, of the damage that the Neville Chamberlains of the world cause to innocents by failing to appreciate evil, but I would first like to go at the question of ability to understand evil. Could Chamberlain essentially understand that someone might be so evil as Hitler turned out to be, but only deluded himself otherwise – or was NC foundationally unable to even understand the depths of Stalin’s or Hitler’s psychopathology?

I know nice people taken advantage of by the selfish, or even deeply evil. Is their innocence real, or a self-deluding convenience, swayed by a pretty face or glib tongue? Perhaps I am asking the larger moral questions. Do we always let ourselves be fooled?

Paranoia

One of my paranoid patients uncovered the site Are You Targeted in his searching the internet for proof that he is being harassed by Hollywood and popular music, with messages directed specifically at him. He takes the existence of this site as evidence that his paranoid delusions are true: See, this is happening to other people, too! That different things are happening to those people, and they each have different experiences from each other, with only minor overlap, fazes him not. It's all tied in together somehow.

(The photo is from Ocala, FL)

My other really bright paranoid patient - she was a software developer up until a decade ago - has a different, nonelectronic set of delusions. A homeless person has been stalking her for at least three years, across three states, and recently revealed his existence by mistakenly leaving a purse she had lost in 2007 in a box in her apartment.

Here's the saddening, infuriating, and fascinating part. Both of them are now on medication, and are far more organised and relaxed. Both are able to coherently put on paper or into speech what they were unable to only a month ago. Then, additional notes up the side of the page, or between lines, or underlined and arrowed onto the back made their work unreadable. Now they can write in sentences and paragraphs. (I am overdrawing that somewhat, but the difference is dramatic.) Yet their delusions are absolutely untouched, with the possible exception of the fact that no new material is being added.

So there are two - at least two - parts to the illness, one which is treated by the medication and another which is untouched.

MWBOT13 - Opinions

My uncle, mentioned many times here, sends this article about how we use our reasoning to justify our opinions, not arrive at them. It's a short, punchy overview article, which gathers pretty flowers from this field of research without staying too long in any one place. But it does include some flowers I have missed in this discussion. Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite researchers on these topics, BTW. He is personally quite liberal politically, but keeps pointing out with amusement how biased liberals are in their thinking compared to conservatives.

Not the ironies of the author's language choice as well. In an article informing us that our opinions might be suspect, he still cannot avoid suggesting that it is other people's opinions that are suspect, not he and his friends. Sigh. They're getting closer over there. I should be glad, I suppose.

MWBOT12 - False Memories

From Wired, via Instapundit, the creation of false memories in advertising. I touched on advertising before, noting that despite the Chicken Little fears we keep hearing about, the ability to manipulate our behavior in this way occurs mostly at the margins.

This article does highlight the way that this ramps up, however. Popcorn adoration is still at the margins of deep cultural change, but the general idea, that untrue ideas can be implanted in the brain and felt to be real, could certainly create large changes for an individual. I don't think our brains are well defended against any of the visual and auditory technology of the last 150 years, actually. Our brains interpret images and sounds as real, and it takes a training override to see through them well. Usually, we do not "see through" the unreality of a technology very well until the next one comes along and supersedes it, making the old look shabby. Daguerreotypes doubtless look frighteningly realistic when they first came out. People listened to Wagner or Bach on 78rpm records and were transported.

The Real You

We tend to regard the self that one shows under provocation, or with a few drinks under the belt, as the "real you" coming out. Yet at the extreme we reject that entirely - what a person does under torture or drugged senseless we don't consider to be their real personality.

If some 80-year-old deacon who always knew he was attracted to children and might become disinhibited with alcohol makes it to his dying day with never the slightest inappropriateness to a child, do we say that his "real" self was a child molester, but it just never came out? I don't think anyone would say so.

Or what if he always knew he had an attraction to other males? I think there are folks who would say he was "really" a gay man.

Decent people wonder if they would be decent in harsh times, or whether they would easily slip into violence and thievery during societal breakdown. We pray we never have to find out. We might pray also that we never have dementia, which would reveal much of what has been on our minds all these years. (I call that "not enough fence to keep the sheep in") Is that, though, the real self?

CS Lewis admonished that we might be giving ourselves credit for cheerful disposition that is largely a result of good digestion, or focused discipline that is due more to our parents' efforts than our own.

We draw a line somewhere, and I don't know how consistent we are. Interesting to contemplate which is the real self among our friends and relatives.

MWBOT11 - Inertia and Saving Face

Online it is difficult to tell the difference between a person who is an indefatigable advocate, giving no ground for tactical reasons even when he knows he is wrong, and someone who simply doesn’t know when he is beaten. The former is annoying in a forum that is supposed to be for discussion, but it is the latter that is pathological.

Or perhaps there is no difference, and pathological types have found ways to get by in life by gravitating to situations where the former is functional.

In discussion, even rude people can be expected to give some minor ground – clarifying a term, making a distinction, acknowledging that there are also extremes in the other direction. Such acknowledgements may be tiny, yet they are crucial. An opponent who states “well, certainly, there are people actually missing a limb – I wasn’t talking about that” may go on to be quite obtuse in the discussion, but there seems a significant difference between that and one who twists your words into “so you think not wanting to work is as good an excuse as being an amputee, then.” No, you bufflehead. Don’t twist my words.

Anger or irritation can get any of our backs up, and we might dig in our heels unnecessarily, becoming more obtuse than we need. Yet I think this is something different.

Criminals deny guilt, and are remarkably resourceful in finding others to blame.

How much of our not changing our minds is unwillingness, because we want to save face, and how much is inability. The inertia of our ideas would seem to be somewhere in between, but which camp does it fall into?

MWBOT10 - Optimism

Via Ann Althouse, our tendency to optimism.

When we learn what the future may hold, our neurons efficiently encode unexpectedly good information, but fail to incorporate information that is unexpectedly bad.

"The Lesson Plan"

I know nothing about the Newport Beach Film Festival or of Libertas Film Magazine, but I found the experiment this documentary recalls intriguing. It fits both with my Tribes discussions and the recent MWBOT series.

Ron Jones, a puzzling mixture of grandiosity and naïveté, claims he intended this to be only a one- or two-day experiment, but it went on for at least a week. Other students remember a longer or shorter period (the incident was not well documented at the time). He admits he was so energized with the power and passion of his movement that he upped the ante each day, introducing new methods of mind control. On day 5, when he finally exposed the movement as a lesson meant to teach the students that they were no better or worse than the Germans, the young students fell apart in a fog of betrayal and emotional panic. The tearful interviews of his students 40 years later testify to the damage wreaked by the experience.

Trailer at the link.

MWBOT9 - Brains Betray Us

Linked from Insty, and fitting our recent topic. NPR reports a recent Edge conversation uncovering a lot of posts about "systematic cognitive errors." Example, Memory Is Rigged:

..human beings tend almost invariably to be better at remembering evidence that is consistent with their beliefs than evidence that might disconfirm them. When two people disagree, it is often because their prior beliefs lead them to remember (or focus on) different bits of evidence. To consider something well, of course, is to evaluate both sides of an argument, but unless we also go the extra mile of deliberately forcing ourselves to consider alternatives—not something that comes naturally—we are more prone to recalling evidence consistent with a proposition than inconsistent with it.

May We Believe Our Thoughts? Part VIII

Well, we've touched on the heritable and very early factors that might influence out thought down through our decades. We hope, certainly, that reasoning affects our beliefs, and Christians hope that the Holy Spirit affects how we view matters and what we choose to believe. I've rather dismissed how much advertising affects us, though I'm about to bring it back in a larger context.

Who we hang out with powerfully influences our opinions. One can modify that by examining who we regard as our True Peers versus who we spend more minutes dealing with. We might even regard people who we have little contact with as our social group: people we went to school with; coreligionists, especially in a small sect; members of our profession; a political cause with widely scattered members who keep in touch frequently.

I can intellectually trace for you how I came to move from socialist to postliberal, but it may just be that I hung out with evangelical Christians for religious reasons and found it more congenial to hold their politics as well. I have asserted before that bright students like to identify with those who claim to be the bright ones of society, and in their socially insecure highschool and college days adopt the views of those they think are coolest. I can certainly accuse myself of that, and have seen it in others. Law used to be a conservative profession, but as people saw how to use the law to effect social change, those interested in social change went into it, and it is more politically mixed now. Social work and psychology have been overwhelmingly liberal, and those entering those professions tend to acquire even more of those views. Librarians had the stereotype of being personally conservative and thus people expected a similar staunch defense of the status quo from them. But it is a female profession and thus focused on women's rights and women's lives, moving it into more liberal camps. First Amendment issues before the days of speech codes and political correctness tended to pit them against social conservatives. They work for governments and/or schools, allying them with Democrats - it is now a very liberal profession, partly because of who librarians associated with.

It's easy to see the evolutionary advantage of being in agreement with those around you. Yes, there may be some competitive advantage in showing the strength of independence within the group, but such things have their limit. If you live in Chief Wilbur's tribe, it is likely dangerous to take opposing views. We are social, we want to get along.

It's mostly a good thing.