Getting it Right; Getting it Wrong

One of the big questions for me over the last six years has been how could so many smart, talented people get things so wrong.  And one of my basic answers has been that  reason is not reasonable; reason serves irrational purposes. People, sometimes for the for better or more often for the worse, are driven by irrational impulses, and they use reason to rationalize or justify their fundamentally irrational objectives. It's important to have a good mind, but it's  more important to have a well-integrated soul life.

Reason is often like the clever trial lawyer hired to defend a guilty client. His purpose is to win, and his arguments have little to do with getting to the bottom of things. "Justice" as the TV lawyer says, "is God's problem."  The lawyer's only concern, like reason's, is to use every trick in the book to serve his client's interests. He seizes on every scrap of evidence that supports his client, and denigrates or makes seem ambiguous and uncertain any evidence that undermines his case.  The supra-rational transcendentals truth and justice are irrelevant to the process, and in our system, the lawyer would be guilty of malpractice if he were to make them the primary consideration when defending a guilty or predatory client.

I'm not knocking lawyers.  It's not their job to determine guilt or innocence--it's the jury's. But the jury often has a tough task to figure out the truth because the system is not set up to get to the truth but rather to provide two biased  and conflicting ways of connecting the evidence dots. The jury usually doesn't get to see all the evidence cleanly presented in the light of objectivity, and so making a  an objectively reasonable judgment is very rare. 

What faculties does the juror draw to make his or her judgment?  What is it in the human being that accepts or rejects one argument or comes up with a completely different way of connecting the dots? Is this ever a purely rational process? I don't think so.  Because a good juror has to sniff out the truth, and this sniffing out is not an objective rational process; it requires in addition to the evidence presented by the defense and the prosecution the use of subjective faculties involving intuition and conscience.  People who are good at this tend consistently to make good judgments in situations where the evidence is incomplete.  And let's face it, in real life we are forced continuously to make judgments when what we know for sure is far less than what there is to know.

Judgment is a faculty of the soul, not of the brain.  It uses the brain to organize the information, but ultimately judgment is a spiritual act, and everything depends on the habitual disposition of the soul. Is it inclined to take the evidence at face value, or is it intuitive and shrewd and capable of reading between the lines?  Is it lazy and just wants to take the path of least resistance? Is it biased in such a way that it is impervious to any evidence that does not fit into its preconceived notions?  Is it contrarian and goes in the opposite direction that the group goes regardless of well-established facts? 

The human reasoning faculty is endlessly ingenious in coming up with rationalizations to make any number of other flawed and distorting justifications seem reasonable.  The only way not to be seduced by the elegance of an well-presented false argument is to be able to discern the spirit that lies behind it.  The people who are good at this are the one's that usually get it right.  If reading Christopher Hitchens doesn't send a chill down your spine or stand your hair on end, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. His arguments are often as elegant as they are bogus.

There is something about the disposition of all our souls that inclines us to get things wrong. None of us is immune from the enormously powerful subrational forces that distort our ability to see clearly the evidence that is right in front of our noses.  And so the more interesting question for me is not how we so often get things wrong--that's easy--but how some people get it consistently right, especially when they are dealing with the murky psychic soup of human motivation and behavior.  That requires more than being smart; it requires wisdom, and wisdom only comes from having some understanding about the irrational topography of the human soul.

'Irrational', therefore, is not a bad word in my vocabulary, because while the irrational can be the cause of much foolishness and often enough downright evil,  wisdom is not a possibility unless one has made some attempt to embrace it.  When you read Shakespeare or Dostoyevski or Kierkegaard, you are entering a world dominated by the irrational, but you are also entering a world suffused by wisdom.  The difference, say, between Dostoyevski and F. Scott Fitzgerald has little to do with the reasonableness or talent of either writer, but rather with what either has to say about the dimensions and dynamics of the human soul.  Dostoyevski is a huge soul, and so the scope of what he writes is prodigiously wide in his probing the depths and reaching up toward the heights;  Fitzgerald is a little soul, and his scope is likewise very limited. Both tell the truth, but the the truth told by the former is deep and wise, and the truth told by the latter is at best superficially clever. 

There's nothing wrong with Fitzgerald and others of lesser talent so long as we're clear it's not great literature but rather diversionary reading  or entertainment, the equivalent of going to the ball game. One can enjoy a well-turned sentence in the same way he can admire a well-executed noon-to-six curve ball.  Both take talent, but neither requires largeness or soundness of soul.

So the real question is not whether someone is smart or talented, but the kind of soul he or she has.  We are too impressed in our culture by intelligence and talent, and not enough impressed by the Forrest Gump (small IQ, large soul) in us all that despite the limitations we all face comes up with the right answer, the deeply human answer. 

***

The Theological Angle: The measure of one's good judgment is his track record in getting it right when getting it right means contributing something fruitful, whether large or small,  that withstands the test of time.  And that capacity for making good judgments comes down to what I believe is a basic spiritual faculty, which whether one is religious or not, is used by everybody when they make good judgments.  And in my tradition that faculty is called the "discernment of spirits." It's the discipline of determining the source of the impulses that influence our moods, thinking, and behavior. 

These impulses can be broadly categorized as having either a subrational/ instinctual or supra-rational origin, i.e., from the domain of grace and freedom.  The discerner of spirits does not take the verbal content of anyone's speech at face value; rather he tries to understand the spirit that it serves-- most broadly,  the spirit of truth or the spirit of deception.  Anybody with a scintilla of common sense does this all the time when dealing with people, whether or not they think about it as spirits they are discerning.  And anybody with a scintilla of common sense cannot help but not take seriously anything he hears from most of the talking heads in the media.

The most common lie people tell is the one they believe themselves, when they ascribe noble motives to actions they perform that in reality were motivated by self-interested, subrational, instinctual needs. 

In the last year or so, I've become a fan of the Fox television series "House."  (See here for another piece I wrote about this show.) Gregory House is the tortured Ivan Karamazov in a shabby lab coat. He's  a physically and psychologically wounded but brilliant doctor who is an icon of the postmodern marriage of the rational/subrational.  In House's world everyone is a liar; everyone has something to hide, and often enough they are hiding it from themselves. In House's world there is no possibility for transcendent, supra-rational meaning, and he would accuse anybody who thinks there is such a thing of being a deluded jackass.

For him humans are simply talking animals whose sole purpose is to satisfy instinctual needs, and he cannot abide anybody who claims that he or she is motivated by ideals that point to anything higher.  He ruthlessly skewers anyone who represents himself as motivated by higher ideals, and he has great fun showing people how their ideals are a self-serving denial system designed to cover up darker, self-serving motivations they avoid confronting so they can feel better about themselves. He is, in a limted way, an excellent discerner of spirits.  He usually gets it right, not because he is a rationalist, but because he understands and accepts the dark subrational part of the soul.  His mistake lies in that he believes there is nothing else.

But that his picture of the human soul is limited does not mean that what he discerns is wrong.  He is usually right about people, because no one is immune from these dark, self-serving, predatory impulses.  It's what it means to be a human being in a fallen world.   No matter what we do, our motives are never pure. None of us could withstand House's accusations that these self-serving motivations influence just about everything we do. And it would be pointless for us to defend ourselves against him. But pure motives are not necessary to do the right thing.  Purity isn't the goal; discerning and doing the right thing is no matter how confusing our motivations might be.

Because House is right about about the omnipresence of darker motivations in the humn soul does not mean that they cannot be redeemed by their being mixed in with higher, supra-rational motivations.  House sees the one side and thinks that it explains everything, and it just doesn't.  We are none of us 'either/or'; we are 'both and'.  Or as Martin Luther put it, we are "simul iustus, simul peccator"--at the same time justified and sinner. The iustus part might be harder to detect in many people, but it's there insofar as they are open to and work with the supra-rational. We all, if we are normal decent folk, are a mix of both. That the peccator part persists and often gets the better of us does not deny that we are also able to work out of the justus part.

I would disagree with Luther to the extent that I think it's possible for the iustus part to play a more dominant role in the souls of some people than the peccator part.  It's rare, but it happens to the degree that a person becomes genuinely habitually disposed to the supra-rational. It's called being a saint. But nobody is more aware than the saint of what a prominent presence in his soul life the subrational peccator part plays, so he or she never feels like a saint.  So for practical purposes, Luther is right.  If someone thinks of himself as a saint, it's a sure sign he's probably in the grip of the subrational inclination toward grandiosity that is fed by the power drive. 

(I'd like also to be clear that the subrational part of us is not in itself evil anymore than it is in the animals, but it leads to evil when elements in it take over the soul in obsessive or compulsive thoughts and behavior, when it drives the bus rather than the spirit self driving it. The well-integrated soul to which I referred in the opening paragraph is one where all the element in the soul, subrational and supra-rational alike work together like the instruments in a well trained orchestra.  The spirit self is the conductor.)

***

So let's apply this line of thinking  to the human drama as it plays out on the political stage. The people who are attracted to politics are human beings who struggle with the same conflicts as the rest of us.  But if it's possible for the 'justus' part to play a dominant role in the soul lives of a rare few, it's more common for the 'peccator' part to play that role.  And in politics we too often find that to be the case.  Too often politicians are small souls, with predictably crude, self-serving ambitions, and their thinking and behavior follows from that. This is to be expected in House's world, and he would have no problem with it, so long as the politicians are honest about their motivations--they're just people being people. 

What he would not be fine with is the self-righteousness of the religious right and the insufferable sanctimony and naive idealism of so many on the liberal left.  And let's face it, isn't the debate between these two factions the baseline for 90% of what passes for political discourse in our society, whether in the legislatures, on the airwaves or in cyberspace?  Doesn't our our politics suffer from a kind of lowest-common-denominator syndrome in which crudest people grab the reins of power and set the agenda for everyone else?  And isn't it disgusting when they justify it by appealing to religious and democratic ideals?  I'm with House--the whole process is nauseating.

But unlike House, I don't think that because this is the way most politics is conducted that it's the only possibility.  Politics can be far more interesting and complex when it allows for the surprising to happen, and that surprise usually has an x-factor, i.e., supra-rational or spiritual origin.  It happens more than we think in the ordinary course of things, but to understand it better you have to point to modern prodigies of the political x-factor: Gandhi, King, Mandela cannot be completely explained as subrational politics as usual.  They, like all of us, are not immune from the influence of the subrational--nothing in human experience is pure. Nevertheless, they were working with something more than the same old predictable political motivations. I'm sure the Gregory Houses of the world would dispute it, but I will take them on in a debate any time any day. 

I'm not saying that these men didn't use their wits to play the game; it's rather a question of in whose interests they played it.  None of these men were saints. They were Davidic political figures, and like the flawed biblical King David, their greatness lay in the degree to which they were willing to work with the x-factor.  Other politicians throughout history have worked with it to a greater or lesser degree. At a lower level, I think Jack and Bobby Kennedy, while also profoundly flawed, had this Davidic quality, or were at least were waking up to it in a way that was unusual for such  high-profile politicians.  It is admittedly an arguable point, but I think it's a part of what made them unusual and memorable, and it's part of the reason that they were shot--the politics-as-usual folks understood what they represented, and did what they had to do to quash it.

I have been accused of being a liberal by people who think of themselves as conservatives.  They think of me in this way because of my vehement opposition to the crony-capitalist authoritarianism that now passes for conservatism in this country.  But I have argued that this is not really conservatism, and genuine, principled conservatives know it.  I also resist the liberal label because I am temperamentally more conservative than I am liberal.  I agree with the conservative perception about a certain kind of liberalism as being in a denial about metaphysical evil and the way it works in and through the subrational.  That this kind of liberalism tends to be naive in his longing for peace and justice, that it overestimates the ability of human beings to get along: Let's just all have a big group hug and get teary-eyed while we sing Lennon's "Imagine."  No thanks.

Conservatives tend to "get" evil in a way that this kind of liberalism seems immune to, and they understand that a liberal is a closet conservative who hasn't been mugged yet.  That he is a Dennis Miller before 9/11 or a Michael Richards who thinks he's not a racist. Liberals, in other words, are people who are alienated from what is darkest in their own natures, and they tend to be blind to  it in others as well.  They are naively optimistic about the human future, and think that all it takes is for people to be reasonable.

But the worst kind of conservative--Charles Krauthammer comes to mind--gives into the fear that follows from this recognition that evil is real, and goes into a quasi-paranoid delusory state that thinks no price is to steep to defend ourselves from this Evil they then project onto anyone whom they perceive as a threat. This is a type of security-obsessed conservative I cannot take seriously.

I can, however, take seriously the best kind of conservative in the Burkean mold who recognizes that there is such a thing as the supra-rational, but that its victories are rare and hard fought, that there are no easy solutions to the persistent and intractable problems inherent to the human condition. Who realizes that politics offers no ultimate solutions, and that the scope of what is possible in the political sphere is limited to the scope of the collective soul in the cultural sphere.  That a politics of the common good is impossible so long as self-interest is the guiding principle around which all politics revolves.  That there are no top-down progressive political solutions that can take hold in a society unless there have been changes in the cultural sphere that make the people receptive to them.  And that this receptivity is conditioned by the supra-rational, and yet that where the supra-rational is operative, anything is possible.

So why do we get it wrong?  Two things contribute most dramatically.  First, when we make judgments with incomplete evidence.  Second, when we are in the grip of subrational complexes that blind us to the evidence that is right in front of our noses.  The rationalist is at a disadvantage when it comes to making judgments that require evidence beyond what is objectively verifiable.  Rather the judgments of those who know how to navigate in the murky depths of the irrational are more valuable than those who are simply reasonable, especially if they are unaware, as they often tend to be, of how the subrational might have them in its grip. 

When do we get it right?  First, when we have the Gregory Houseian discernment to see through people's self-justifying b.s.  And second, we are more right when we discern and support those who speak in the spirit of truth, or to use Gandhi's word, satyagraha.  It's the only way we're ever going to move forward beyond the same old, same old, be it the same old left or the same old right.

Comments

[Matt Zemek]

I ache with the poignancy that accompanies a recognition of my own self in a naive, liberal past... and with the heartbreak that emerges alongside the dawning of the sobering realities pointed to in the final few paragraphs here.

Jack, this is such a gift. I keep saying it, but I keep meaning it. You see inside the soul so deeply and artfully. It is something to behold.

I'd be interested in a top ten list of books that help one see inside the soul and into the realm of the subrational. Dostoyevski would be on it, evidently. What other non-Shakespearian works would make the cut?

Thanks again--such needed insight and timely reminders about the human condition, internal and external.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

Flannery O'Connor would be another good place to start. Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer", one of my favorite books of all time, is an homage of sorts to both Dostoyevski and Kierkegaard. Kafka and Camus would also have to go on the list. Kafka was quite conversant with Jewish mysticism. Camus is just a great soul. I admire Nietzsche for different reasons--the same ones that incline me to admire Gregory House.

[Transatlanticgirl]

I'm interested that you chose Fitzgerald as an example of a "small soulled" individual--it's been a while since I've read The Great Gatsby, so I'm not going to dispute you-- but I'm curious--what aspects of his writing made you choose to hold *him* up as an example of small soulledness, rather than, say, Dan Brown?

[Jack Whelan]

Transatlantic Girl--

The point that I'm trying to make is that talent and intelligence have value only in relationship to what kind of soul they serve. Writers like Dan Brown don't help me make that argument because he has no talent and is not very intelligent.

Fitzgerald was both talented and intelligent, but when I read him I don't find any there there. His talent served the 1920s zeitgeist and when that dissipated, so did he. His contemporaries Faulkner, Hemmingway, and Wolfe had far more soul substance even if, arguably, they had less talent as writers. Hitchens and Krauthammer are similar to Fitzgerald but for different reasons. Both are talented and very intelligent, but which spirits do their intelligences and talents serve?