Rational Philosophy

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

The Hotel New Yorker, Abu Ghraib, and surreptitious sampling.

Nikola Tesla, perhaps one of the most brilliant people of all time, spent the latter years of his life holed up in The Hotel New Yorker, Room 3327, a mental prisoner of sometimes odd thoughts. Tesla, who died in 1943, supported the idea of selective breeding: “A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit,” he said, “than to marry a habitual criminal.” “The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization.” Tesla clearly had a particular view of human rights.

Tesla also hoped to be able to capture and replay people’s thoughts by recording the impact of thoughts on the optic nerve, essentially photographing the mind through one’s eyes.

One thinks that perhaps Errol Morris has pondered on Tesla’s optical ideas. Writing for The New Yorker Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris explore the pathology behind the notorious photographs that exposed and compounded the wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. Gourevitch and Morris stitch together a careful and compelling perspective on the actions of the young MPs who debased, abused and documented their ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. The structure of implicit and explicit endorsement by Military Intelligence, and, by association, the military chain of command, peels away the easy conclusion that the MPs were just bad people doing bad things. As one reads the article one begins to have the uneasy impression that one is somehow culpable, too.

And lawyers have begun to challenge the practice of “surreptitious sampling” of DNA by law enforcement agencies. Bypassing legislation that prohibits unwarranted search and seizure, law enforcement officers have been quietly and successfully collecting indirect DNA samples from suspects (from cigarette butts, coke bottles, drinking glasses, etc.). The lawyers claim that this violates the suspect’s right to privacy.

“Unlike garbage that can be withheld or destroyed before it is released into the world,” reads the motion to suppress the DNA evidence in one case, “we cannot do so with our biological tissues.”

“We conclude that under the circumstances, the expectorating defendant had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his spittle,” the Mass Appeals court ruled in another case, “or in the DNA evidence derived therefrom.”

Does one have any particular right to the privacy of one’s DNA? How is a DNA sample different from a photograph or a mental picture? Could a suspect challenge a candid photograph or an eye-witness ID as an infringement of privacy?

I expect that most of us feel the emotional pull of the right to privacy. We live with ourselves, with our thoughts. We can withdraw into ourself. We can choose not to disclose. As we grow up we develop what we might call a sacred pact of privacy with ourselves. As Schopenhauer pointed out, we only know the world through our experience of it, and our only immediate experience is the experience of our self.

On the other hand, privacy is one wall of the mind’s prison. Just as Tesla locked himself into the habit of threes (he would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three) we lock ourselves into a prison of the mind that reveres privacy. As Gourevitch and Morris astutely draw out, the MPs in Abu Ghraib took photographs in part as an attempt to break down that wall of privacy, to reveal themselves, to deprive themselves of some responsibility for their actions.

To exist, we must act in the world; we cannot avoid it. Existence sentences us to participation, however reluctant, however minimal. And, as we act in the world, we create and leave behind traces of ourselves, whether they be ideas, influences, creations, physical remnants. These traces, I would argue, must be embraced as the residue of our existence, for good or ill. We have a right to them only in as much as a prisoner has a right to the bars of his cell.
“He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene… His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor’s instinct and practical American sense.”

So said Nikola Tesla of Thomas Edison.