Reconciling Jaimeness

I am a big fan of TV shows like 'The Wire' and plays like 'Wicked'. The Wire leaves you deeply unsettled for the first few episodes of each season. There is no clear, self-contained point of each episode. There is no narrative structure we can smugly project forward in order to guess what happens. Unlike Friends episodes which can be summarised as 'The one with...', it is more like being parachuted into a real life situation. You have to watch and slowly (most of) the mist will rise.

I like this because it allows characters to build in bits and pieces. You aren't instructed who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. There are good cops and bad cops. There are good drug dealers and bad drug dealers. Good cops do bad things. Bad cops do good things. Really bad people do heroically good things. This seems to reflect the way the world is better than 'The Good Witch of the North' and 'The Wicked Witch of the West'. Which is why I loved how 'Wicked' turned the whole story I grew up with on its head while sticking to the 'facts' and time line of the story. It was an interpretation. Much like we view history.

Reading 'The Fall of the Ottomans', I am struck by how the Muslim world's path towards a secular society with constitutional rule was interrupted and halted by the European Game of Thrones otherwise known as the First World War. I am no historian, but it is hard to figure out a good or bad side from what I have read.

Rebecca Davis touches on this in a chapter of the hilarious 'Best Whites and other Anxious Delusions' recounting how she guards against being charmed by people she is interviewing. Only to find out they are rapists or murderers. The world makes more sense when people are good or bad. The idea that we can be charmed by evil is deeply disturbing. Just like it is almost impossible to know how much of our success to attribute to privilege, we have absolutely no idea what sort of evil acts we are capable of give the right toxic mix of circumstances. If you don't want to believe this, don't read 'The Lucifer Effect'.

Early examples of fallen heroes for me include Hansie Cronje and Lance Armstrong. Of the two I am struggling with at the moment, one is fictional. I don't know how on earth to emotionally respond to Jaime Lannister. Progressively through Game of Thrones they have turned him from an evil dude into someone it is harder and harder not to like. But then there is that scene. The one that makes Borat look like a politically correct movie. I had even 'forgiven' him for pushing a little boy from a tower. That scene on the other hand... The real life one is Bill Cosby. I grew up with the friendly, funny father figure from The Cosby Show. I can't reconcile that character, and the public persona of the actor, with his Jaimeness.

I can see why we like clarity. We can throw water at a problem and watch it melt away. Reality is much more messy.

Doubt or Contempt

Hanlon's Razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

As we stumble through life figuring out each complicated situation, we have enough of a difficult time working out what motivates ourselves. Sometimes we do things that seem Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We may regret stuff but we have to get on with it and most people somehow manage to put themselves in the category of good person. Giving the same benefit of doubt to others is perhaps where we sometimes struggle.

Source: thementalist.wiki.com

Allowing people the benefit of doubt has to be a key to happiness. It is simpler to categorise people and put them into a box as soon as they disagree with you on a point that 'no good person would disagree with'. We also like conspiracy theories. We like a good moan. And who doesn't like a bit of mob justice righteous indignation? Someone does something wrong and people gather together to get the torches and pitchforks. As soon as the benefit of doubt falls away, contempt sets in and this mixture of anger and disgust is hard to shed. Psychologist Paul Eckman claims signs of contempt are one of the best predictors that a marriage or relationship is doomed.

The fact that good and evil aren't neatly separated unsettles us. People like to believe for example that the Holocaust would never have happened in America. If you are in a persecuted group, you like to believe you would never do the same to anyone else. Stanley Milgram's experiments are disturbing showing 2/3rds of ordinary people able to commit what can only be described as evil when in the wrong circumstances, leading to a possible definition of evil as willingness to blindly obey authority. Morality and psychology is messy. We are still figuring things out. We are still figuring ourselves out. Philip Zimbardo's talks about Milgram and his work in the TED talk below.

I am a big believer in giving the benefit of the doubt. I also believe that having compassion rather than forgetting or excusing is necessary. Evil doesn't exist as separate category and most times something horrible happens we have to figure out how that happened. How can we try stop it happening. Many moral questions are really messy and contradictory. Saul Smilansky looks at 10 of them that will make your head spin in '10 Moral Paradoxes'.

The one making my head spin at the moment is hearing about Bill Cosby. Having lost heroes like Hansie Cronje and Lance Armstrong, I don't like the idea of losing another one. I guess the point that Zimbardo makes above is that both heroes and evil doers are ordinary people, but that is hard to process. I don't know where to place the benefit of doubt here either. The Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile scandals have shown how much has been covered up. The issue with rape allegations is that often it is incredibly difficult to prove since there are normally no witnesses so courts of law are not really a great way of stopping anything. It is something we have to stop though. What do you do when the law doesn't help?

A bit of a rambling post, but as a believer in benefit of doubt, and of avoiding anger and contempt - this news story is making that hard.

No Enemies

Following the advice of the two Joshua's - Foer and Waitzkin, I have been re-reading some of my favourite books. The argument being that we have sacrificed depth in our attempt to cover as much ground as possible in the 'infinite library'. An infinite library because it is only possible for us to read a small fraction of what has ever been written, and more and more content is being generated every day.

One of those books is 'The Happiness Hypothesis' by Jonathan Haidt which had a profound impact on me when I first read it. The book is an attempt by Haidt as a moral psychologist to summarise the core themes in the many streams of ancient philosophical and religious attempts to lead the way to enlightenment/happiness/contentment/salvation/[pick a word of your choice].

One point that resonates strongly with me is the idea that we as people strongly identify with narratives. In a complex world, we like to create simple plots with simple allies and enemies. We like pure evil because it gives us a moral mission to right the injustice. We thrive off righteous indignation and band together in our contempt for those who don't see the truth.

Maybe we are slowly moving away from this. It means our Bond movies are becoming more complex and our TV series (e.g. The Wire) are becoming more grey. In a cosmopolitan world, many of our friends come from other groups so it becomes harder and harder to define others as evil. With many of our heroes falling (Hansie Cronje, Lance Armstrong, Oscar Pistorius) we feel less comfortable in being able to identify pure evil. It feels good to identify pure evil because we can say we aren't evil.

Exciting (but more complex) times

Wicked!

It took a little convincing, but I got three friends who hadn't even watched the wizard of oz to go to Wicked with me last night. I was surprised... I really thought Oz was a part of most people's growing up. Saying's like showing someone what's 'going on behind the curtain' etc. are obviously not as common as I thought.

I panicked a bit in the opening scene when I thought I may take some serious abuse. But as the story warmed up, I was really enjoying the clever twists and turns on such a 'well known story'.



Much like Clint Eastwood's two films from two sides with 'Iwo Jima' and 'Flags of our Fathers', and Heroes where you can't really tell which side is good and which is not.

It reminded me of a book I have been wanting to read by Philip Zimbardo called 'The Lucifer Effect'. It challenges the concept of good and evil and whether or not there are good or evil people.

There are lines in 'Wicked' that are very clever. The old concept of the victor writing the history books. Everyone else who disagrees with you and your concept of morality being evil, and everyone who agrees with you being good.

The Nature Of Evil

Philip Zambardo looks at the nature of evil in this TED talk, and has done a book on the subject entitled `The Lucifer Effect'.

I must admit as an aside that whenever I hear stories of the fall of Lucifer as `God's favourite angel', and then the arch-angel Gabriele being sent to throw him out of heaven to descend to the newly created hell, I struggle to see the distinction between the main Monotheistic religions and the religions of Greece and Rome.

Anyway...

This talk is not about religion, it is about good people becoming evil... and how we stop it.

I think the concept of good people and bad people is a very very fuzzy one. It is really very difficult to know how we would act in extreme situations. Some of the experiments Zambardo refers to reflect just that.

As another aside... Sorry, it is late and my mind is wandering...

I recently tried to restrain myself as someone mentioned how much they hated Cape Town because of the explicit contrasts between wealthy and poor (especially as you leave the airport), and the fact that most of the people serving this person were black. The wealth was clearly extracted from these poor people, and the evil is self evident.

That there is truth in what he said can not be disputed. What lead to the anger is the fact that that racism and exploitation is not unique to South Africa. In the time I have been in Vancouver (a city which is very easy to fall in love with and very easy to live in), I have seen but a handful of `First Nation' (read Native Americans) people. Disease ravaged over 90% of the population of this continent when Europeans arrived, and to a large degree the rest were subjugated.

Later `generosity' to a minority should not EVER be compared to the opposite degraded majority in Africa. I think to pat yourself on the back that you are not as evil as others is a very very dangerous thing to do.

Evil is prevalent in the world. We are not in control of where we are born, but I don't think that absolves us of all responsibility... I think in fact it increases our responsibility where we are all responsible for all evil in some way.

Maybe that seems like an overstatement, and maybe it is... but I think it is hard to say that given similar circumstances and environments (random birth aside), we would have acted any differently to other `evil' people.

The only thing we can do is, learn and look forward... I think.