And how could one possibly forget, of all others, this technique in the art of living?  It is conspicuous for a most remarkable combination of characteristic features…. But it does not turn away from the external world [as other ways to attain happiness do]; on the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to them.  Nor is it content to aim at an avoidance of unpleasure – a goal, as we might call it, of weary resignation; it passes this by without heed and holds fast to the original, passionate striving for a positive fulfillment of happiness.  And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any other method.  I am, of  course, speaking of the way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved.  A psychical attitude of this sort comes naturally enough to all of us; one of the forms in which love manifests itself – sexual love – has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness.  What is more natural than that we should persist in looking for happiness along the path on which we first encountered it?  The weak side of this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness for any other.  It is that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

From Civilization and Its Discontents, 1927.

No.  No I would not.

Discussing weight seems to be one of those social currencies that are divorced from their literal content, in much the same way “How are you today?” directed at strangers is.  I’m not really asking how you are, I’m telling you I want to appear polite and friendly but not much more.  I think that for many women, “Do you think I’m fat?” really means “Do you accept me and care about me?”  And the correct answer is generally yes, yes I do care about you and accept you.  But sometimes yes, you are also fat.  But I can’t say that I think you’re fat because if I do so, what is really communicated is “I neither accept nor care about you.”

So it’s a dangerous question, as countless sitcoms about hapless husbands can attest.  I don’t think we should take from this that women are manipulative or trying to trap the questionee; rather we should acknowledge that in our society it’s not okay to ask people if they care about us.  Can you imagine approaching one of your friends and saying, “Hey, I could really use a check in on this – do you still have lots of warm, affectionate feelings about me?  Are we still good friends?”

Until we’re allowed to do that, we’ll keep asking about our weight.

But of course it’s not a total divorce.  Lots of people, men and women and me, worry about being fat and this is why I think The Fat Question is so anxiety provoking.  Even if it’s mostly a check on caring and acceptance, it’s also got a measure of literal fat-worry mixed in.  So when I say “No, you look great” meaning “I accept you,” I am simultaneously saying, if the friend is indeed fat, “I am lying to you.”  Or if she’s not fat, “I’m not taking your worries seriously.”  You cannot, in fact, win.

And again, this isn’t a trap.  Consider that the anxious, conflicted uncertainty that the askee experiences is almost certainly the same feeling that the asker is enduring.  The fat question is in this sense a form of anxiety currency exchange in which the parties struggle over who ends up holding the basket, or rather the anxiety. You are being asked to take the burden of the unpleasant feelings for your friend.  The trick is in addressing the real concerns, caring and sometimes weight, without taking on the anxiety burden, which really is not yours.

So now I decide: do I never go to JBrydle’s house again because of its evil occupant, or do I return to the lair of the monster?  Both choices have consequences for the development of the phobia.

I am largely persuaded by learning/operant conditioning models of phobias.  This is based in notions of punishment and reward.  When something scares you, your anxiety rises.  Fleeing the scene of the frightening stimulus brings relief in the form of reduction of anxiety, and this is experienced as a reward.  The reward feels great, and increases the likelihood that next time you will be even faster to flee, or might flee from a lesser but related stimulus.  In this way the phobia becomes self reinforcing, and stronger over time.

The other option for phobia sufferers is to tolerate the anxiety and remain in the presence of the frightening stimulus until the anxiety extinguishes.  In this way, the reward from fleeing is absent.  Part of the definition of a phobia is that it is an irrational fear – truly, I have nothing to fear from a caged (or even loose!) tarantula.  Sticking out the anxiety can provide a new learning experience wherein my fear is demonstrated to be patently irrational, and I will experience the rewards of self efficacy and pride in ovecoming my hindbrain’s urging to flee.  In this way the phobia can be lessened over time.  But the key is tolerating the anxiety until full extinguishing, otherwise you are still rewarding fleeing from fear.

So last night I stuck it out, sitting on the couch in front of the spider’s glass tank and keeping a running monitor on my anxiety.  It lessened significantly as the evening wore on, but obviously there was lingering fear as demonstrated by a night of bad dreams.  If I want to  keep making progress on this fear, I should keep hanging out with Mr Spider – not my idea of fun but unavoidable if I want to stop being afraid.  And if I want to be free to visit my friend.  And this is the real crux – I don’t want to be prevented from living my life the way I like because of a stupid phobia.

As a side note, I don’t think learning models are the whole story for phobias.  They are tenacious buggers and tend to creep back over time – why should that be if there are no new frightening learning experiences?  In fact there cannot be new frightening learning experiences, because as I stated above, all phobias are irrational.  We use the word “irrational” because there is nothing objectively frightening about the feared object or situation – once the phobia is treated once, it should not be possible for the phobia to come back because the object/situation is not frightening and therefore cannot provide frightening new learning experiences!

But phobias do come back.  And learning models are pretty bad at explaining the genesis of the phobia, for the reasons in the previous paragraph among others.  I think it is much more likely that there is a psychodynamic component to the origin of the problem.  Analytical writers propose that phobias function as a sort of specialized displacement for certain types of unnamed or unacknowledged fears, and this strikes me as probable.  Learning models work if you commit to repeated, ongoing iterations of the treatment, but there is clearly more going on.  Another piece is the evolutionary element – only certain things can become phobias, and these are largely things that would have been dangerous in the early evolutionary environment.  Phobias probably represent an overactive state of something that was useful for our ancestors.  But we are still left to figure out why this person and not that, why this phobia and not that.

Begin quotation:

One clear and important distinction between fantasy and religion is the knowledge of its source.  People generally attribute their personal fantasies and dreams to themselves and to events they’ve experienced.  They also know or assume that public fictions (novels, movies, cartoons, etc.) were created by specific people who had particular intentions for doing so.

A religious text is another story.  Followers believe it to be the work and word of deities themselves.  Believers assume that sacred doctrine was first heard or transcribed in some long-forgotten time by chosen prophets or sages who were faithfully repeating or imaging what the deities had directly said or shown to them.

Accepting a text on authority and faith implies that the listener or reader suspend the universal constraints on ordinary communication, that is, pragmatic considerations of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1996).  In ordinary communication, the listener or reader “automatically” attemps to fill the gap in understanding between what is merely said or written and what the communicator intends the listener or reader to think or do as a result.

In ordinary communication, there is almost always such a gap.  For example, if someone says to you “That’s just fine,” you willimmediately try to figure out what in the previous conversation or immediate environment “that” could possibly refer to, what is “fine” about it, and why it is “just” fine.  This search, in turn, takes cues from the phonetic and syntactic structure of the utterance istself (e.g., phrasing, stress, intonation), surrounding environment (the presence of a broken wine  bottle in the dining room floor), recent memory (you had just asked to taste your dinner host’s special reserve), and background knowledge (your host tends to be ironic whan angry).

Moreover, you, the hearer, automatically assume that the speaker also shares many of these same background assumptions with you and, furthermore, that the speaker made the utterance knowing that the two of you shared enough of these background assumptions for you to readily understand what the speaker intended.  Both of you also automatically assume that you, the hearer, will make the appropriate inference to the speaker’s intentions on the basis of considerations of relevance: you will attempt, with the least cognitive effort, to infer sufficient information to understand the speaker’s intentions.  You stop cognitively processing information the moment the communication makes sense. (If there were no such stopping rule, inference and interpretations would go on forever.)

Depending on the circumstances and what you know or don’t know about the speaker’s past intentions, you may suspect that the speaker is attempting to lie or deceive.  Alternatively, you may doubt that the speaker really knows what he or she is talking about, or is adequately aware of the kind or extent of knowledge that you share, or properly assesses your readiness or willingness to make the appropriate inferences.  Finally, you may have reason to interpret the speaker’s utterances figuratively, say, as a metaphor or parable, or perhaps simply as a bit of fanciful fun.

In everyday communication, humans effortlessly, but necessarily and unmistakably, make these many assumptions and inferences.  Often, they do so very many times in a single minute of ordinary coversation.  In interpreting a religious utterance or text, however, people need to do very little of the sort.  Ordinarily, believers assume that the utterances or texts connected with religious doctrines are authorless, timeless, and true. As a result, people do not apply ordinary relevance criteria to religious communications.

Because divine statements are authorless, it makes little sense to try to infer intent from their mode of presentation.   For example, the bodily gesticulations, phrasings, and intonations in the utterance of a biblical, Quranic, or Later Vedic passage cannot be God’s, Allah’s, or Vishnu’s.  They can be only the speaker’s (unless there is cause to believe that God is directly communicationg through the deity, as in a public revelation).  Interpreting what the speaker intends by uttering the passage is one thing; interpreting what the deity intends can be indefinitely many things (expressed, in part, by indefinitely many speakers and interpreters).

Timelessness implies that cues from the surrounding environment, background knowledge, and memory are all irrelevant – or equipotentially relevant, which amounts to irrelevance.  God’s message, therefore, can apply to any and all contexts and to each context in indefinitely many and different ways.  To be sure, people interpret God’s message in particular ways for specific contexts, but they have no reason to ever stop interpreting.

Finally, the fact that God’s word is accepted as true on faith – come what may – entails that it can never be false or deceptive or merely figurative.  Ordinary preoccupation with lying and false belief in communication therefore plays no role in interpretation (or at least no consistent role).  Neither can failed attempts at verification or confirmation of this or that aspect of the information represented in a religious statment, or inferred from it, undermine the audience’s belief in the statement’s truth.

On the contrary, apparently disconfirming evidence only seems to make believers try harder to understand the deeper truth and to strangthen religious beliefs.  For example, after reading a bogus article on a new finding from the Dead Sea Scrolls that seemed to contradict Christian doctrine, religious believers who also believed the story reported their religious beliefs reinforced (Batson 1975).  For believers, then, confidence in religious doctrine and belief can increase through both confirmation and disconfirmation of any factual assumptions that may accompany interpretation of those beliefs.

Faith in religious belief is not simply another manifestation of a general psychological propensity to reduce “cognitive dissonance” by ignoring or reappraising information that is contrary to one’s views (cf. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956).  It is the direct cognitive result of suspending the relevance criteria that universally apply to ordinary communication.  If faith is, in part, willingness to suspend ordinary pragmatic constraints of relevance, then beliefs held in faith become not only immune to falsification and contradiction but become even more strongly held in the face of apparent falsification or contradiction. Apparently disconfirmed religious beliefs show only the superficialty of one’s current interpretation and point to an even deeper but more mysterious truth.

End quotation.  pp.91-93

It is certainly true that merely seeking positive feelings is a terrible way to run one’s life, and our feelings can mislead us, but this is not what I mean.  We can’t rely exclusively on our feelings for making evaluations and decisions, to the extent that we do not understand them or feel unequal to managing them.  But as feelings can mislead us, so can our thoughts, and running one’s life purely on cognition also strikes me as a terrible way to be.  If it is even possible, which I don’t see any evidence for.  Certain feelings were identified by Darwin as primary and are generally accepted as such today still, meaning we come packaged with them and cannot “remove” them (surprise, fear, rage, joy, sadness, disgust and possibly contempt).  Feelings are real and they are with us to stay, so we need to consider how to deal with them in our quest to become rational.

Maybe this is a problem of terminology.  If being “rational” is definitionally a product of exclusively cognitive processes, then I suppose it is, by definition, irrational to consider your feelings.  But in that case I do not wish to be rational.

I don’t think that’s actually the way we should define rational.  If it were, it would be a rather stupid and useless term – no one lives that way and no one should want to.  The point of being rational is to honestly and openly consider all factors weighing on a decision or problem, in order to remove biases and assumptions, to consider all consequences, and to seek the truth.  I consider the most useful and meaningful definition of “rationality” to be the full acknowledgement of reality, relevant informing factors and potential outcomes, when making evaluations and decisions.  This cannot be done without a consideration of emotional factors.

Here is one reason why: You cannot remove a bias from or undue influence of feelings if you are not aware of them in the first place.  For many people they translate this to mean “To avoid the undue influence of feelings, you must ignore or shut out feelings!” but of course this is absurd.  Feelings can be suppressed and repressed but they are still there, acting to affect you (and your thinking processes, subsequent choices, etc.), only in this case they act outside your awareness.  It looks good on the outside but actually the rational process is severely compromised; is the mere appearance of rationality good enough?  It shouldn’t be, for a skeptic.

Here is another:  Feelings are consequences of your choices, not merely for your inner state but for your interpersonal interactions also.  As long as you (and others) have to live with those consequences, which you (and they) do, it’s only reasonable to consider them during the initial process.  This is nothing more than acknowledging reality and as such I consider it an integral part of being rational.

Here is a third:  Skeptics talk a lot about the cognitive errors and faults that we are prone to, and some instances of these are surely driven by nothing more than accidents of evolution that have resulted in strange glitches in our cognitive architecture.  But many more are directly related to underlying emotional factors operating outside of awareness.  It is impossible to be rational, in my sense of reflecting reality and considering all relevant factors when making evaluations, without also having emotional health. The reason for this is that emotional health comprises an awareness of one’s own emotional function and the ability to flexibly choose how to respond in any given situation, in a manner that is adaptive.  Without this awareness and flexibility, our emotions master us and drive us to behave in distinctly irrational ways, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it or not.

Unhealthy emotional function leads to all manner of behaviours and interactions that meet the definition of irrational (perhaps they represent a common cognitive fault), but to stop the inquiry there by shouting “Cognitive fault!” is short sighted.  What is the cause of this fault, in this case, with this person?  Merely classifying it is not sufficient – how to meaningfully make the perpetrator aware of what they have done such that they can in future avoid it (without, to name one common outcome, merely shifting the emotional burden onto a new “cognitive fault”)?  This requires seeking emotional wellness, the removal of maladaptive, inflexible responses – which itself requires, to begin with, awareness of the very existence of the problem.

Most people are woefully unaware of their emotional function and so their attempts at rationality often feel conflicted; unsatisfying and confusingly so.  Everything makes sense about this decision, why am I not happy about it? Because there is an enormous element of reality that has been ignored: emotions.  When reality is being ignored, there is no rationality.

Emotional wellness is a key component of rational function, as I define it.  I consider definitions of rationality that only consider cognitions useless for real world function and as such irrelevant.  In order to actualize as a rational being, consideration of emotional factors is necessary.  In order to accurately consider emotional factors, emotional health is required.

Positive reinforcement: strengthening a tendency to respond in a certain manner by presenting a pleasant event.

Example: Giving an ice cream cone to a child after they clean their room.  (The behaviour reinforced is cleaning the room.)

Negative reinforcement: strengthening a tendency to respond in a certain manner by removing an aversive agent.

Example: A three year old shouts “Please can I have an ice cream please please please please please please (etc.)” over and over until the ice cream is given to them, at which point they stop shouting.  (The behaviour reinforced is giving the child ice cream.)

–

So the key is that in both cases, a certain behaviour is being reinforced, in other words rewarded with the goal of making it more common.  This is the opposite of what most people mean when they say “negative reinforcement,” which is actually…

Punishment: A noxious or unpleasant stimulus imposed on someone in order to reduce the frequency of a particular behaviour.

Example:  Shouting at a child after they drop their ice cream cone on the floor. (The behaviour being punished is making a mess.)

1. No one seems interested.  The few times I’ve gone this route I am greeted with the cricket chirps of uninterested readers not leaving comments.  Whereas if I say anything at all about God, y’all come pouring out of the woodwork and it’s good times!  I take your silence as indifference.

2. I am have affectionate feelings about this field and hate writing little snippets that will just utterly fail to get across the whole coolness of the idea/concept/whatever.  To borrow a term, it’s like irreducible complexity (except it’s not irreducible, of course, just complex) – it has taken me years of study to get to where I am, which is by no means expert, yet even so it seems to me that any bit of knowledge I have is so bound up in other knowledge that you can’t really “get” that one bit if you don’t have the other bits.

Which I guess means I don’t have a career as a science writer ahead of me.  It probably also means people more expert than me just shake their heads at the wonder of trying to tell me stuff that is much beyond my current level.

3. I am really not an expert.  I surely know more about this field than your average person off the street, but mainly what I know is the rough outline of the bounds of the field and where I could get information I need.  Relatively speaking, there’s not much up in my head about psychology yet.  I am but an egg.

That about does it.

I get that pretending to kill yourself is a bad thing to do and can hurt others, but I do not understand the dismissive “it’s just for attention” attitude.

First, why is is bad to seek attention?  We all thrive on it.  Being placed in solitary confinement is the worse punishment we have (in the absence of torture).  Neglect is the worst kind of child abuse.  Everyone hates to be ignored.  Everyone loves to know others notice and care about them.

I think when people express annoyance this way it has less to do with seeking attention per se and more to do with feeling manipulated.  I think it would probably be more accurate to say, “That guy is trying to manipulate me,” in a disgusted tone of voice instead of “That guy just wants attention.”

And when it comes to talk of suicide, I always wonder why no one else seems to wonder, “If he’s pulling so hard for attention, why does he need it?” People don’t do things for no reason.  And if you can set aside your irritation at being manipulated, an important problem presents itself: what is motivating this antisocial, unpleasant behaviour?  What has gone wrong for this person?

I think it’s cruel and oblivious to just dismiss attention-seekers out of hand simply because they are seeking attention.  That’s a bad reason to shut off the sympathy valve.  How to deal with the problem is a whole other issue, but my point is that there is a problem.  Something has gone haywire and this person, this annoying, manipulative, immature person, needs help.

We shouldn’t reserve our concern only for those people whose pathologies manifest in ways we do not find personally vexatious.

This blew my mind.  I haven’t heard this before but Husband tells me it was quite common in his community of Christians back in the day.  To be honest it’s just never a thought that has ever crossed my mind.  For one thing it implies an ongoing belief of God (behaving as a good Christian curbs my good time, so I’m going to reject the restrictions); when I say I don’t believe in God, I really, truly do not – and if there is no belief, it is meaningless to say there is rebellion against the figurehead.

But I certainly don’t just do anything I like, and I never considered atheism as a state which permits that when other states do not.  So I really am not sure what to say to her about this.  To my mind it’s just self evident that you don’t need Christianity to be a moral person – the mere existence of someone like me proves it, but so do the cultures world wide which have not been Christian yet embrace the usual moral precepts.

Which begs the question, what is morality?

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.

-Jonathan Haidt, psychologist, morality researcher

The specifics vary with culture and time, but there are five general categories (“virtues”) of moral emotion/thought that all humans are heir to, according to Haidt:

1. Fairness/reciprocity.  Anyone who studied first year psychology learned about this when they studied Kohlberg, who thought all morality came from these principles.  And they are ubiquitious – but they aren’t the whole story.

2. Harm/care.  Carol Gilligan famously challenged Kohlberg with these additional moral principles.  Her error was attributing them to women, saying this is the basis of a distinctly women’s morality.  Actually they are an intrinsic element of all people’s moral sense.  Even men.

3. Authory/respect.

4. Ingroup/loyalty.

5. Purity/sanctity.  Disgust regularly trumps other feelings on tests of moral reasoning.  We see this element in restrictions on hand washing, eating, sex (and menstruation), and so on.  When someone says, “Sacrilege!” this is the moral sense which has been offended.

Haidt explains:

Virtues are socially constructed and socially learned, but these processes are highly prepared and constrained by the evolved mind. We call these three additional foundations [3, 4 & 5] the binding foundations, because the virtues, practices, and institutions they generate function to bind people together into hierarchically organized interdependent social groups that try to regulate the daily lives and personal habits of their members. We contrast these to the two individualizing foundations (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity), which generate virtues and practices that protect individuals from each other and allow them to live in harmony as autonomous agents who can focus on their own goals.

People who self identify as liberals endorse the first two virtues, whereas people who self identify as conservative (which has huge overlap with religiousity) endorse all five.  Conservatism, in this light, hits more of our moral senses.

In my experience many atheists fall into the “liberal” camp insofar as they consider justice and harm primary considerations for moral thought and behaviour.  Yet what the conservatives, and religious, have on their side is a conception of morality that is broader than mere “right and wrong,” extending also into “community maintenance and building.”

Haidt levels the following criticism of the new atheists, whom he says mount straw man attacks against religion:

a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.

b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectively—or ignoring it—to justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

This is something I have written about here before.  The arguments against religion are not irrelevant, but they’re only a part of the story.  Husband’s friend who feels in her gut that my atheism is little more than a bid to sidestep responsibility to moral behaviour is expressing something that we can predict from this model of morality.  It’s why the contradictory, nonsensical and unbelievable content of the Bible is really not very important to Christians.  There is something bigger going on, and it is hitting all the moral receptors, and that makes it tremendously urgent and tremendously powerful.  We’re talking about the underpinning of what makes society possible for humans – moral behaviour as so much more than just what is fair and what avoids suffering.  The Bible, in this sense, is carrying a lot more baggage than at first glance it seems to.

I find this interesting because it gives a window into why religion is so important to people.  I don’t believe religion is necessary for the stable functioning of good societies, but the fact that stable, good societies are necessary goes some way to explaining the importance of religion, which satisfies all those related moral senses.

Read Haidt’s article in full.

Protest, despair, detachment.

Brief aside: I noticed when I was off the pill that my appetite fell away.  For the months I was off it I ate way less and experienced less hunger than I had in years.  I lost weight without even noticing.  And I felt pretty mad about all the times I’d gotten down on myself for being a greedy pig because I always seemed hungry… when the whole time it was the fucking medication!  So I am looking into other options because this hungry all the time stuff?  It’s fucking bullshit.

Anyway then I went back on the pill – and my appetite returned.  It brought its friends the fats too.  So I am on a diet.  And I think I have passed through protest and despair and am solidly into detachment.  I am not very interested in food, don’t have trouble resisting it, and am losing weight, hooray.

But you know this is indicitave of a sad, painful inner state of affairs.