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.

Reports from a team of Cambridge scientists last week presented a theory explaining how an asexual organism (a tiny invertebrate pond-dweller, the bdelloid rotifer) has been able to survive 80 million years without sexual reproduction.

In a related article scientists from the University of Sussex show that the rate of mutation in a range of sexual organisms is lower than it would need to be if sexual reproduction occurs to guard against the harmful effects of mutation.

All of which seems quite new and interesting to those of us who haven’t been keeping up with the theories of evolutionary biology. But apparently the elusive evolutionary benefits of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction have been much hunted and seldom in clear view for quite some time.

I also read the first two parts of a fascinating essay by Errol Morris “Which Came First, The Chicken or The Egg.” Although it’s about photographs from the Crimean war, the Morris piece reminded me, as did the two science reports, that evidence and hypothesis make a far less solid foundation for our understanding of the world than it sometimes seems. Morris’s article also makes a powerful case for the importance of careful, methodical, skeptical inquiry. It may be a long time before we know as much about the wending path of evolution as we once thought we did. And for this reason what we think we know can’t tell us as much as we might hope.

But if we look through the other end of the telescope things become a little less dizzying. We can ask the question: Do we need to know the details of each stage and step of evolution to know that organisms evolve? If organisms evolve, what can this tell us about the purpose of evolution?

For the past few mornings when I’ve walked into my office and pressed the light switch, the lights have flickered on and then off. Only after repeatedly pressing the switch off and on again have they remained “on.” Through my experience I know enough about electrical circuits to deduce that there is a loose connection somewhere.

I don’t know very much about electricity. As far as I understand it, there’s a flow of electrical current (electrons). I couldn’t design a generator. I would be able to replace a light switch, but that’s about it. My point is that I don’t need to know about electricity to turn on a light. When I press the light switch, the lights generally come on.

The concept of evolution says that living organisms tend to improve their ability to survive by becoming better adapted for survival over time. Using the parallel of the light bulb, understanding that this happens doesn’t require us to know exactly how it happens.

I’m immediately struck by the thought of extinction. (Yesterday I was reading Mo Willems story about Edwina — the dinosaur who didn’t know she was extinct — to my son; highly recommended.) Species that become extinct at first seem to be counter-examples of evolution. But when we think again, we realize that they instead provide evidence that a species won’t survive if it is not well adapted to its environment.

Another possible counter-example: Genetic weaknesses. Genetic weakness that can be produced by in-breeding (either by cultural or social practice or by design). But this again supports the general concept that evolution works more effectively when such circumstances don’t interfere.

Generally then, we can say that as time passes organisms tend to become incrementally better adapted to their environment. This is actually a much narrower conceptual risk than to accept the specific details of the evolutionary process itself.

But I believe we can even take another step away from the whole question and ask whether the principles of space and time provide a philosophical basis for the concept of evolution. (An approach I pursue in my book LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive.)

The principles of space and time show us that things will continue to exist in space if their form remains stable over time. If we think about fundamental particles and the way the stuff of the universe has persisted we can understand that stable particles and stable conglomerations of matter predominate. The same is true of living organisms. The more stable and persistent organisms, the ones that evolve, survive, and adapt, tend to predominate over time. Extreme circumstances can produce counter-examples, but then statistics will take over again and evolution will tend to win out over time.

While it’s helpful to be skeptical, methodical, and careful, and remember that we know a lot less than we’d like to think we do; we also perhaps know a lot more than we sometimes care to imagine.