I just finished up The Magicians, by Lev Grossman.  It features a bunch of students learning magic in an English-style school named Brakebills, who afterwards travel to an also-magical land named Fillory, which has talking animals and tree spirits and is to be ruled over by two queens and two kings.

The story is partly about the kind of stories that people tell themselves about themselves, and how these stories can aid or destroy one’s ability to be happy.  But writing against the background of Hogwarts and Narnia, as Grossman has done, allows Grossman make points about storytelling and about human nature far more effectively than he could have if he had been writing in a vacuum.

The contrast makes everything stand out more boldly–you can ask yourself if the image of human nature offered by Lewis or by Grossman is more accurate, or how the two complement each other.  If The Magicians had somehow impossibly been written, word for word, in a world without Hogwarts and Narnia, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as it is.

Let me look at a similar case where a narrative is enhanced by springing from another narrative.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre describes how the Greek playwright Sophocles took a traditional character from Greek mythology, Philoctetes, and used this well-worn character to make a point about incoherences in Greek standards of morality.  That he was taking a traditional story would allow him to make his points more clearly than making a new story, because everyone would know the assumptions made in the original story.  That is, because everyone knew exactly how all the characters in Philotectes would normally behave, Sophocles could easily show serious problems with this normal kind of behavior.

What I’m getting at is that derivative narrative is a very useful thing.  In some ways, it has enormous advantages over original works.  The Greeks made derivative fiction ad nauseam with their characters, after all–there were four Philoctetes made by different playwrights, and Philoctetes is a fairly minor character in the array of stories the Greeks received from their tradition.  Hamlet was one entry in a long line of riffs on the same story.  And Watchmen loosely bases itself on previous comic-book characters, and certainly bases itself on archetypical comic-book characters.

Given this, why does fanfiction have a bad reputation?  Given that many of the myths and plays that scholars scrutinize now are, so far as content goes, fanfiction based off earlier works, why do people sniff at it now?

I’m going to guess that it has to do with intellectual property.  If you could make a profit writing fiction featuring characters from other intellectual properties, writers would probably do this–and we would see an evolution of stories like the Greeks saw an evolution of stories.  But you cannot do that and make money, generally speaking, because people own characters.   So a large number of skilled writers decide not to write fanfiction, which leaves a great deal — although not all — of fanfiction being written by unskilled individuals who like to insert themselves as love interests or just write straight-up porn and who generally give fanfiction its bad name.

But I think fanfiction in itself has no literary problems, and I don’t see any reason that there could not be great works of literature made that were fanfiction.  My favorite work is, of course, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.  But there are others which are good, and so far as I can tell there’s no reason to sniff at the genre in general.

Once upon a time, in a timeless pseudo-Renaissance kind of era, there were two small kingdoms.  Let’s call them Florin and Guilder.

—

Florin and Guilder for the most part live in peace.  Each is ruled by a moderately benign, excessively decorative, and surprisingly sane monarch.  Each trades with the other, and each benefits from comparative advantage in a way that would make Ricardo and Smith smile: Florin has a great deal of timber and pasture on its rolling hills and often-painted hills, while Guilder has greater mineral resources in its mountains and desserts, and has much better fisheries.  The two countries throw actual Renaissance fairs, complete with enormous quantities of doubtfully-sanitary food and dangerously-violent forms of entertainment.  They speak languages closer together than, say, Italian and Spanish are today–their people can converse with each other with only a little difficulty, which smooths the differences between them.

Of course, there are some cultural differences.  Florin, for instance, has a fairly strict and hierarchical religion, which spread from a single prophet about five hundred years ago.  Most of the important events in life take place beneath the auspices of its hierarchy: One cannot get married, or become king, or become a knight, or get buried properly without one of them present.  This is not to say that they are oppressive.  On the contrary, their priests are carefully trained to help people with their personal difficulties in psychologically sophisticated ways; their monasteries support and train people without sustenance or trade, and their monasteries also provide homes for children abandoned by their parents.

Guilder, on the other hand, is dominated by an older and looser religion, completely without hierarchy, which perhaps hearkens back to the nomadic period the Guilderians have relatively recently emerged from.  The relation of man to the gods is scarcely mediated at all–to speak to them, you merely need go to a high place, a massive rock, or any of innumerable hallowed grounds which have been handed down from time immemorial.  The gods speak to each individual as an individual, and not through any other organization.  This sort of religious individuality also is present in their attitude towards the other matters in life.  Burial is properly handled merely by your own relatives, and not by anyone else.  You contract marriage with someone by sleeping with them; there need not even be witnesses to any formal agreement.  The king becomes king through acclamation of his lords, without any particular person anointing him.

Of course, the theologians of Florin and the wandering gurus of Guilder like to argue over which of these is better.  The theologians, for instance, often say that it is important for one’s king to be formally recognized by the gods, from whom all authority comes.  They point out that the Guilderian gurus are very often charletans and frauds, who have no training in helping people and who muck up people’s lives.  They say that the attitude of the Guilderians, who lack a ceremony for marriage, weakens the bonds of family; a few portray the Guilderians as sexual deviants.  On the other hand, the Guilderian gurus often criticize the people of Florin; the people from Florin, they say, forget the meanings of things by draping them all in ceremony and ritual and gold cloth, as if that were what makes them important.  And they scorn the people in Florin for requiring large marriage ceremonies: in Florin, a father is held responsible only for the children of his wife, and can forget and ignore his natural-born sons as he chooses; in Guilder, a man is held responsible any child he fathers, and all children inherit from their father equally.  Those from Florin, the gurus say, build and visit brothels as they please–but a man from Guilder requires more self-control.

These differences rarely come to the fore; the theologians and the gurus are pretty much the only ones constantly shouting in each other’s faces about it.  After all, the only people who spend a significant amount of time in both Guilder and Florin are merchants, and they have every reason to be polite; and after all, they see far weirder things in far weirder places.  So the people of one country don’t actually care, for the most part, how the the people of the other one lives.

So they continue in peace.

One day, a princess from Guilder visits Florin as part of her education.  She meets the high prince of Florin, next in line to the throne after the king dies.  No one is really sure what happened next, apart from the almost undeniable physical facts.   Some people say that the princess seduced the prince to try to gain the throne of Florin for Guilder.  Other people say that the prince took shameful advantage of the princess by promising eternal love.  Other people say even more nefarious things about plots long in the hatching.  In pretty much any story, either the prince or the princess is the villain taking advantage of the other.

In any event, after returning to Guilder, it soon becomes evident she is pregnant.  She bears a son with an unmistakable likeness to the prince of Florin.  The political situation in the capital of Florin quickly boils over; the prince goes on a hunting trip to escape the mess that he has made.  His horse bolts while he is hunting, and he tumbles off a cliff and dies.

By the laws of Florin, the son of the princess is a now bastard, who might receive special treatment from the king of Florin if the king feels nice, but who is owed absolutely nothing by the king.

By the laws of Guilder, the son of the princess is the rightful heir to the throne of Florin.

This is problematic.  It might mean war.  No one wants it to mean war; the mostly-decorative kings are old and tired, and really would like to ignore all the young knights clamoring for blood and glory, each sure that they can win the war in a fortnight.  But the kings need some pretext to ignore them; the people are restless.

So they decide to hold a debate, between one of the foremost theologians in the University of the capital of Florin, and the guru who is acting advisor to the king of Guilder.  It is a public debate, to be held before an audience of… as many people as can be in an audience, in the age before microphones.  In retrospect, this will appear to be a stupid idea; but it seemed like a good idea to each of the kings when they first heard it.

The stands are packed in the hastily-redecorated theater in Florin.  The theologian from Florin stands draped in the richly decorated robes of his office, the guru from Guilder in a plain grey tunic.  Each of them thinks the other is trying to make a ridiculous statement by dressing this way.  A mediator stands between them, from the land of Amry Esu.  He coughs, looks at the resolution, and frowns, but reads it any way.

“Resolved: The bastard of the dead prince is not heir to the throne of Florin.”

The guru from Guilder looks surprised for only a moment, before the corner of his mouth twitches up.  Typical ham-handed, pejorative terms to expect from a Florinese theologian.  He speaks, slightly sotto voce, to the mediator.  “We cannot debate that.  To say ‘bastard’ is the same as saying that he is not the rightful heir, which is what we’re here to argue about.”

“Well, what should we say?” says the theologian.  The mediator, the guru, and the theologian are all standing close together now; the mediator has ushered them together, so that they are being watched but not heard by the audience.

“We should debate whether the dead prince’s orphan is heir to the throne,” says the guru.

“Absolutely not,” says the theologian.  “Orphans are children abandoned by their rightful, legitimate parents; that’s what the word means.  Bastards are those conceived outside of a legitimately sanctioned marriage.  We should call things what they are, and what the child is is a bastard.”

“That’s what you think,” says the guru.  “But other people disagree with you.  The language of Guilder doesn’t even have the word ‘bastard’ in it–we don’t judge children arbitrarily by the actions of their father.  We just call a child who has lost his father an orphan, and that is what this child is.”

“It would be an offense against truth for me to call the child an orphan,” returns the theologian.  “It would prejudge the entire debate.”

“And it would be a lie, and an insult directed at our innocent princess and her son, to call the child a bastard,” says the guru.  “Our people”–he gestures to the audience, which has people from Guilder as well as Florin in it–“would not hear of it.”

The theologian from Florin sighs, as if irritated but unsurprised by this irrationality from the guru.  “How about this–you can add a little preface, telling the audience that by calling the child a ‘bastard’ you do not mean to concede the matter to me.  I’ll give you an extra minute of time if you do that, so you’ll have more than enough time to explain, and even add some more rhetorical flourishes.”

The guru snorts.  “An extra sixty seconds, for a word carrying that weight of meaning?  Before this audience?  So you can use the word the nobles of Florin hurl at each other when they are drunk, or when they want a duel?  So you can use that word, that word smelling of the tavern and the whorehouses of this city?  The child is an orphan–at least your language has a word for it, even if you don’t use it for everything that you should.  You can have an extra thirty seconds to explain what you mean by the word ‘orphan.’  Surely your in-depth academic training equips you to make a little distinction like that.  You do that all the time in your academic debating shows.”

“Absolutely not,” the theologian says, also glancing at the audience.  “If this were an academic debate, we could redefine the word.  But here, we must use words with the meanings they have.  Every orphan is a legitimate child, so I will not use the word orphan, nor accept it in the text of the resolution.”

The mediator speaks.  “Perhaps we can use some kind of neutral word.  Say, the ‘child’ of the dead prince.”

The theologian looks at the mediator like he is insane, or has just ignored everything he has said.

“No.  ‘Child’ is a word that is only used for the results of a lawfully contracted marriage.  This was not a lawfully contracted marriage.  ‘Naturalchild’ is the word that is used to indicate a bastard.  Sure, under some circumstances, people casually use ‘child’ as if it refers to either, but when one is speaking formally, among nobility, under circumstances like these, everyone would notice.”

“Ok,” says the guru, who actually rolls his eyes, “how about infant.  Can we debate using the word ‘infant’?  Or does your language literally not have any way of referring to young people without needlessly dragging in what you see as the sins of their parents?”

“Fine,” snaps the theologian.

“Good,” says the guru.

So everyone returns to their places, and the mediator reads out the resolution: “The infant of the dead prince is not the rightful heir to the throne of Florin.”

And the debate starts; the theologian has the floor first.  In his opening statement he refers to the child as a bastard every chance he gets.  Every time he does so, the guru shakes his head a little.  Why is the theologian so perverse, he asks himself.  He can tell that the Guilderian audience is becoming incensed: Every time he uses the word, it is as if he is asserting that the Guilderian marriages of many people in the audience are on the same level as fifteen-minute arrangements in a whorehouse; that the Guilderian princess acted like a whore or in any event like an easy woman; and as if the child could somehow be tarnished by the actions of the child’s parents.  The debate should be about the nascent field of international law and how it resolves disagreements among the laws of nations, he thinks–but he also just keeps thinking about how damn irritating this proud, self-confident, book-learned Florinese puppy is.

So when he speaks, he gives his carefully thought-through speech on the historical antecedents of this case.  But he also makes sure to refer to the infant as an orphan.  He notices that the Guilderian audience squirming, and he likes this.  It feels really good; he bets that they’re thinking of how it isn’t the case that their marriages are something real and proper, just because they had someone else say a few words around them; he bets that the men are feeling guilty for things that they’ve done, or children they’ve abandoned.

The debate ends, and each of them feels confident that they’ve laid down a tight, waterproof case for their respective nations.

Later, incensed by the debate, the two countries go to war.  Thousands die.  Neither country wins any battles definitively, and they come to an uneasy peace two years later–which, as far as wars go, is pretty short.  The infant dies of the flu when he is only ten months old, which is part of the reason the war is able to come to such a quick end with such few casualties.  Until each of their deaths, both the theologian and the guru are confident that they did the best they could in the debate, because they only ever referred to things by words that were true and accurate and reflected reality.

Introduction

I’m going to explain two different versions of Hell, then remark on the tenability of holding that either of them are really part of Catholicism.  One of them is, I think.  The other isn’t.

(I’m interested in this because I think only one of these versions is really morally tenable–and a while back people criticized me [for which I am thankful! criticism is good] for criticizing an idea of Hell that Catholics do not ostensibly believe in.)

(A lot of what I say could apply to every version of Christianity, I think, but I’m focusing on Catholicism because I know it best.)

Distinguo

There are at least two ways of talking about Hell.

The first is the way that preachers, writers of spiritual works, and the Bible seem to talk about Hell.  In this way of speaking, Hell is the place where divinely-ordained punishments inflict pain eternally on those who have offended God.  The pain is to a great degree physical, and is not self-inflicted by the sinner; Hell has flames, brimstone, lakes of fire, and wailing and gnashing of teeth.  The pain breaks off the pleasure of the damned’s earthly life; the damned may have enjoyed their time on Earth, but now they regret it.  And the people in Hell are confined to Hell by God against their will.  This is, generally speaking, the popular manner of conceptualizing hell.

St. Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life speaks about a “dark city, reeking with the flames of sulphur and brimstone, inhabited by citizens who cannot get forth.”  One could easily pile up examples of this vision of Hell from sermons, devotional works, and the popular imagination, but something like this idea of Hell is also easy to find among the theologians.  A majority of theologians have held there is pain of sense in Hell; Aquinas held that there was a literal fire inflicting pain on people in Hell; scriptural references to Hell as such a place abound.

The second idea of Hell is a little less obvious.  Under this scheme, people in Hell torment themselves through their own interior disorder, because they have turned away from the goodness that is God; so their pain is to at least a great extent self-inflicted and internal.  The pain is a continuation of the disorder that the sinner already began to inflict on himself in Earth through his evil actions; those who tore themselves apart through lusts or inordinate passions in life now find themselves forever at the mercy of the same.  And finally, the people are in Hell because they want to be there; having fled God, this is the most pleasant place they could possibly be.  This is, generally, the more intellectual manner of conceiving of Hell, at least right now.

Examples are a little more important for this way of understanding Hell.  C.S. Lewis’ allegory about Hell in The Great Divorce is a preeminent example of this; in it, Napoleon forever paces his gigantic, empty palace, muttering desperately about how his failure was anyone’s fault but his own.  In this, his lack of self-knowledge and narcissistic ambition punish himself; he cannot turn to any goodness at all, because he can never admit that he is flawed–and so he also cannot turn to Goodness in God.  You can see a character heading towards Hell, so conceived, in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation”–actually, you can probably see characters heading towards Hell, so conceived, in very nearly all Flannery O’Connor’s short stories.  The general characteristic they share is massive self-ignorance: they all have great, public flaws, which are visible to everyone around them–but they refuse to see these flaws and willfully blind themselves.  This willful blinding of the self prevents them from following good on Earth, and correspondingly prevents them from taking pleasure in Good after life.  (Of course, many of her short stories also feature God’s grace enlightening them to this fact through the bizarre and grotesque–but that’s another subject.)

The difference between these two Hells is important for what follows, so I’m going to draw the contrast between them a bit more explicitly.

People in the former Hell are there because God has forced them there; they wish to leave because they are in pain, and they would leave if they could.  People in the latter Hell are there because they shy away from anything that would break their self-conception, and accept no goodness that does this; because of this, any place apart from Goodness is the most pleasant place for them in the entirety of the universe; they want to be there.  The doors of the former are locked on the outside; the latter, on the inside.

The torments in the former Hell are(principally) external punishments inflicted on the sinner; the torments in the latter are the sinner tearing at himself.

The punishment of the former Hell stops the joys and pleasures of the prior life (which may have been quite pleasant) and makes them seem pale and insubstantial; the punishment of the latter Hell begins even during one’s life, and is merely a continuation of the misery in which one has already plunged oneself in life.

In short, in the former, God is the keeper of the cell, creator of the rack, and one who has cut off all one’s fun; in the latter, you yourself keep the cell, create of the rack, and destroy your own life.  This contrast is certainly a little stark–you could try to soften it, for instance, by talking about how Hell could easily have both physical and psychological pains.  But they are irreconcilable at least in aspects–it cannot be the case that you would like to get to Heaven and not like to get to Heaven, for instance.  So I’ll let it stand while starting the historical overview.

Which of These Versions of Hell is Christian — History

I’ve tried to dig up every description of Hell I can find in the Old Testament, New Testament, and Church Fathers, and Church Fathers, to see what version of Hell Catholicism endorses.

I would provide the references that I’ve found, but I don’t see much point in it–see the appendix for a few, if you’d like.  Every description that I can find lines up with the first idea of Hell, not the second.  People in Hell want to leave and get to Heaven, but are walled out from it; the pains of Hell are contrasted with the pleasures they enjoyed on Earth; the pain is inflicted by some external thing.  Enumerating these passages would be tedious–if you know of any passage that contradicts me, please tell me, but in the meantime I’m going to move on to issues that seem more interesting.

As far as I can tell, the earliest Christian writer who talks about Hell in a way resembling the second manner is Origen, in the early-third-century-work De Principiis: he interprets a vague passage in the Bible as a metaphor supporting his way of talking about Hell, with little internal textual support.  Of course, Origen is one of the most (infamously) Platonist-influenced writers, and what he says has clear antecedents in the Platonic tradition, so this doesn’t seem terribly helpful for someone who wants to say that the more modern version of Hell is actually based in Scripture, Tradition, the Deposit of Faith, or anything Jesus actually said.  Having a guy who became a heretic because of his opinion about Hell (albeit because of his opinion about Hell’s eternity) be the first one to advance your opinion about Hell is pretty much a worst-case scenario.

When I’ve told friends that I can’t find anything like this version of Hell in Scripture, friends have said that, well, you need to interpret the Bible.  They’re surely right that you have to interpret anything.  But you can’t just make interpretation say anything you want–you have to have intra-textual support for your interpretation, or else you’re just making stuff up.  Origen has to turn an apparently unrelated passage in Isaiah into a metaphor for his view, to try to make it make sense–but if you allow yourself to (1) turn vague passages into metaphors for your view and (2) dismiss contradictory passages as metaphorical, then you could interpret anything to mean pretty much anything.

Of course, you could have a principled argument for such an interpretation.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, though.  Moreover–the only principled argument I can imagine for this conclusion, given the apparent contents of the Bible, would proceed from the idea that this idea of Hell is incompatible with God’s goodness, and that God would never establish something like that, and that therefore such descriptions of Hell must be metaphorical.  It would, in short, turn on arguing that if Hell is what it seems to be described as in the Bible, then God is a monster.  I imagine most people would be reluctant to argue this–it’s awkward saying that God as described by the Bible is monstrous, so the descriptions must be metaphors.   And this is why, so far as I tell, apologetic discussions of Hell more or less assert Hell is a particular way without showing that teaching about Hell is that particular way.

Another Reason to Think the First Version of Hell is the Catholic Version

If Hell is a place that you go because you will not let goodness break your image of yourself, then the Church seems much less important for salvation.

After all, there are surely plenty of Catholics who die while turned away from goodness and self-knowledge–although they have taken the Sacraments.  (This seems pretty necessary given that there seem like plenty of Catholics who live this way–it’s easy enough to find someone who seems ready to turn Catholicism into a tool to attack others and never reflect on his or herself.  I’m pretty sure a fair number of sermons worry that Catholics do this all the time.)

It also seems likely there are many non-Catholics who die while ready to follow goodness and truth anywhere, although they haven’t taken the Sacraments.  (This seems pretty necessary given that you can find non-Catholics who live this way.)

If the psychological model of Hell is true, then it seems like the Catholic should go to Hell while the non-Catholic should go to Heaven.

The Church has been pretty adamant that generally speaking this isn’t what happens, though–that Baptism and Confession and being a member of the Church are actually really, actually, quite key to salvation.  The Council of Trent anathematizes those who say that Baptism is optional for salvation; in the same place it anathematizes those who say water is optional for Baptism, just in case you want to squeeze in salvation through a metaphorical kind of Baptism.  (I have no idea how this is consistent with modern Church teaching, but that’s not my point at the moment.)  This is in keeping with the Church taking Baptism very seriously, to a rather problematic degree, even in modern times.  You could find similar statements about Confession very easily.  The Church has generally taught, in many places, many times, and many ways,  you can’t make it to Heaven outside of the Church.

Suppose you wanted to trash all the above tradition in favor of a more internal model of who makes it and who doesn’t.  If this is the case, then I don’t see what the point of the Church is, other than to be one of the organizations that makes people better so they’re good enough not to go to Hell.  And again, this kind of opinion seems pretty well and thoroughly condemned.

So, if the psychological model of Hell is true, then people would seem to go where the Church is pretty adamant they don’t go.  So the psychological model of Hell must not be true–or at least a Catholic cannot hold that it is true.

I’m not really sure about the particular argument I just gave.  I am quite certain that someone reading this has some kind of a sophisticated theory in mind which slips away from this argument–I’ve tried a few on for size myself, but none of them leave me feeling satisfied.  Everything seems inevitably to slip afoul by making the Church superfluous (can’t say that) or making the Church only good for making people morally better in a natural way (can’t say that either).  I’d be happen to listen to some such theory if it does manage to evade these problems, but I’m not going to try to imagine them all at the moment–comment away if you think you have a robust one.

Another Consideration

Attempt to hold the whole of Catholic art, song, sermon, and theology on Hell and the Last Judgement before your minds eye.

So we have nightmares in miniature by Bosch; we have The Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, where Christ sends the damned into punishment; we have every manner of torment that the damned attempt to escape in Dante’s Inferno; we have thousands of sermons or spiritual works on the eternity and pains of Hell, such as Bellarmine who speaks of the fire “whipped up by the breath of Almighty God” to punish sinners, or of De Sales who urges you to “stir your soul to terror” and then explains why you should be in terror; think of the purported visions such as that of Fatima, which speak at length of human souls like “transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze” being tossed up and falling into Hell alternately; think of the enormous amount of dread focused in prayer and piety on the hour of death and on judgement, when neither St. Paul himself nor any man sits secure but lives in fear in trembling, when only a few shall enter through the narrow road, when the rex tremendae majestatis comes to judge, and even the just require mercy, and when finally Christ thrusts who he will not save into the eternal fire prepared for Satan and his kind.

If Hell is not a place where people are unwillingly put after a judgement, then all this is scarcely intelligible.  If people wish to be there, after all, surely they wouldn’t require a judgement to be put there.  So if the psychological model of Hell is right, then it seems like enormous quantities of Catholic piety, closely connected with Catholic doctrine because of how they are tied up with the idea of the Last Judgment, are just wrong.

Final Point

You can actually make a point appear stronger by not arguing for it, and weaker by arguing for it.  Giving someone an argument lets them think of counter-arguments, and if you’re sufficiently clever you can think a counter-argument to anything.  So after thinking of a counter-argument to a position you dislike, you can think “Hey, this position seems weak.  I don’t need to accept it.”

…but really, what we should be asking is not “Do arguments absolutely speaking force me to accept something, or can I wiggle out?”  We should ask “What does the preponderance of the evidence point to?”  I don’t know any good arguments to the effect that Hell is like the psychological model.  So far as I know, the model came from people trying to make a barbaric institution sound sensible.  But this model does not appear to be reflected in Scripture; it doesn’t mesh well with Church teaching about sacraments and the necessity of the Church; it doesn’t mesh at all with centuries of spiritual works and reflection on judgment and the last things.

So the preponderance of the evidence seems to be that the psychological model of Hell is wrong: The Church does not seem to teach that people in Hell actually want to be there, nor does she teach that the punishments they suffer there are principally self-inflicted.

*Appendix on Scripture and Fathers on Hell, Which You Are Welcome to Skip*

The Old Testament doesn’t give you much either way.  The Hebrew word sheol seems to mean the subterranean abode of the dead in general, not a place for punishment.  There is at least one verse which seems to support the idea that rich people who were happy will be a lot worse off once they get there (Psalm 49), and generally it doesn’t seem to be a nice place, there is no terribly specific information about it.

The New Testament is a great deal less ambiguous.  In the New Testament, the people in Hell are held there by chains or chasms; they are thrown alive into Hell; they are like the virgins who wish to be in the wedding feast, but cannot make it (2 Peter 2:4, Mt. 25: 10, 2 Thess. 1:9, Rev. 19, and so on).  People are physically tortured in Hell (Mt. 5:29-30, Mk. 9:43-48, Mt. 10:28).  Those who were happy on earth are no longest happy in Hell (Lk. 16:19-31).  I don’t really feel like going through all of these and other places in detail, because they’re all quite obvious, and probably quite present-to-mind to the reader.  In any event, they each support the earlier, less psychological model of Hell: it seems a place where one is unwillingly kept, to be tortured, for the things one enjoyed on Earth.

So I don’t see any support for the psychological model of Hell in the New Testament–if I’ve missed a location, please tell me about it.  What of the Church Fathers, then?  (Note–my model for digging up references here is performing full-text searches on the CCEL.  It is probably leading me to miss things, but it shouldn’t bias me in one direction or another as far as I can tell.)

Early on, the Fathers seem far more likely to say “Hey, you’ll go to Hell for this,” than to explain what Hell is like.  The First Apology of Justin (chapter 19) says that Hell is where the wicked and non-believers go.  Ignatius’ Letter to the Ephesians says that you can go to Hell for teaching false things.  In his Letter to the Philadelphians (chapter 3) he’s even more strict and talks about how you can be condemned to Hell for spending time with unbelievers.  The rule is hard to square with the psychological model of Hell–spending time with people doesn’t seem to turn you into a self-deceiving person, and indeed might seem to indicate the opposite–but in any event provides no support for the psychological model.

Tertullian’s discussion’s of hell, unsurprisingly, seems more inclined to the non-psychological side.

In another author in the early 3rd century, though, you can finally find discussion of Hell which is readily recognizable as belonging to the psychological side.  This passage and this author disagree with me, so I should quote them at length

We find in the prophet Isaiah, that the fire with which each one is punished is described as his own; for he says, Walk in the light of your own fire, and in the flame which you have kindled. By these words it seems to be indicated that every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into some fire which has been already kindled by another, or was in existence before himself. Of this fire the fuel and food are our sins, which are called by the Apostle Paul wood, and hay, and stubble. And I think that, as abundance of food, and provisions of a contrary kind and amount, breed fevers in the body, and fevers, too, of different sorts and duration, according to the proportion in which the collected poison supplies material and fuel for disease (the quality of this material, gathered together from different poisons, proving the causes either of a more acute or more lingering disease); so, when the soul has gathered together a multitude of evil works, and an abundance of sins against itself, at a suitable time all that assembly of evils boils up to punishment, and is set on fire to chastisements; when the mind itself, or conscience, receiving by divine power into the memory all those things of which it had stamped on itself certain signs and forms at the moment of sinning, will see a kind of history, as it were, of all the foul, and shameful, and unholy deeds which it has done, exposed before its eyes: then is the conscience itself harassed, and, pierced by its own goads, becomes an accuser and a witness against itself. And this, I think, was the opinion of the Apostle Paul himself, when he said, Their thoughts mutually accusing or excusing them in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my Gospel.

This seems to be evidence for the individual supporting the psychological theory of Hell.  The problem, though, is that the author here is Origen; and Origen’s interpretation seems to be more or less made up, as far as I can tell.  Isaiah 50:11 could just as easily be interpreted to mean the opposite of what Origen says it means; after all, it goes on to say in it that “this is what you shall have from my hand: you shall lie down in torment.”  As far as I can tell the first passage from Paul (1 Cor. 3:12) could as well be talking about crappy good works as it is about other things.  And so on and so forth.

I’d like to note that the only conditions under which Origen could manage to advance the psychological view of Hell is as the only view of Hell (which he does not in fact attempt to do) is by taking (1) an ambiguous or vague passage as a metaphor for what he means and by (2) taking passages that disagree with him as metaphorical.  I’m pretty sure such a standard of interpretation would allow you to interpret anything to mean anything.

I recently read something by an atheist who claimed that it was obvious that there was no God, shortly after which I read something by a theist who claimed that it was obvious that there was a God.  Both of them took seeing the truth of their claim to be an elementary test of rationality or of good faith in seeking the truth.

I think the lesson to be learned from this has nothing to do with God.

First–what you see as true often seems obvious.  It’s hard to imagine that other people would not see what you see as true as obvious, without imagining also that these other people are stupid or malicious.  I think this is mostly a failure to imagine the other person’s perspective with anything remotely approaching verisimilitude.

Second, and more importantly–I think it would be best if people thought of the word “obvious” as something to be predicated not of states-of-affairs, but of states-of-affairs-as-seen-by-people.  Most claims regarding obvious truths will appear non-obvious if you come from a community that sees the claim in question as false.  Those who see the claim as obvious will say, of course, that coming from that particular, claim-denying community gives one a particular epistemological or motivational disadvantage.  But those who come from that particular community will also say that the one who sees the claim as obvious comes from a similarly disadvantaged background.  The exchange is circular–calling something obvious is pointless, and as a whole this again points to the idea that one should think of the word “obvious” as something to be predicated of states-of-affairs-as-seen-by-people.

Third–really, just don’t say that what you’re arguing about is obvious.  You’re arguing about it, after all.

I was recently reading a (really excellent) book on Neural Networks and Deep Learning. The author spends a lot of time explaining both how to train neural networks and why why this can be very difficult.

(Start Jargon.) One of the problems that you can run into while training a neural network–while using sigmoid neurons, the mean-squared error loss function, and stochastic gradient descent–is that when the parameters for certain neurons are very far wrong, these neurons learn very slowly because changes to the weights of the neurons only offer small decreases to the loss. (End Jargon.)

Let me rephrase that. Sometimes neurons in neural networks learn slowly, even when they very far are wrong, because the rate at which neurons learn is proportionate to the improvement in network behavior that occurs because this learning.  Due to the structure of the sigmoid neurons, when the neuron is far from its ideal value, any improvements made to it only improve the network by a small amount.  So, to a certain degree, individual neurons–and thus part of the network–learn slowly precisely when you really want them to be learning fast–when they are most in error.

The author of the book then comments that humans are not like this at all.  And he shares the anecdote of when he was playing the piano as a kid, and started on the wrong octave in his recital, and how he resolved never ever ever to make that error again–and indeed never did.  So he says that humans seem very unlike sigmoid neural networks in this respect; when we are in error, we learn from it quickly.   (He then explains a different loss function which helps resolve this error, but that’s not important right now.)

The thing is, I think humans might actually be really like sigmoid neural nets in this respect.  We do often learn most slowly when we are most in error, and for pretty much the same reason that sigmoid neurons often learn slowly–our rate of improvement is often proportionate to the effect of our improvement, and improving when you are very far from correct can have very little influence.  Let me explain what I mean.

Imagine that you’re in ancient Rome.  There are a bunch of different philosophies to choose from.  You are, let us say, an hylomorphist Aristotelian; you think that every living thing is the way it is because it has some immanent form inside it, which is a principle of life and of unity.  But then you run into an atomist; the atomist thinks that every living thing is the way it is because it is made of a bunch of little pieces which interlock and hook together and somehow make living things do the things they do.

You argue over this.  Maybe you’re convinced by him.  Maybe you aren’t.  Suppose you are.  In fact, your opinion is now much closer to the truth than it was before–atomism has subsequently been shown to be a really useful way of trying to explain reality, although no one has yet figured out what to make of hylomorphism.  But, although you’re correct, this knowledge doesn’t actually help you navigate the world better.  Applications for atomism are still far away; knowledge of the scientific method, which would help you produce applications from atomism, are also still far away; the social and technological apparatus necessary for atomism to be useful are all far away.  So your correct opinion has pretty much no influence on your life.

And indeed, this is one of the reasons that your conversion to atomism is unlikely.  If the atomist were able to better navigate reality, in demonstrable ways, then it might be harder to resist conversion.  But, even though atomism is closer to the truth, it is still so far from the truth in other respects that it is about as useless as hylomorphism; so it is easy to not convert to it.

Here’s another analogy.

Imagine that you’re learning to golf.  A friend of yours is teaching you.  He notices that your grip is totally wrong, so he spends 15 minutes showing you exactly how to grip the club.  And afterwards, you take a few more swings–and you still suck just as much as you did before, because to swing well you need to have more go right than just your grip.

Now, if you manage to remember how to keep your grip as you learn the rest of the aspects of golf, this knowledge might be useful.  But as it is, it will be hard to remember, because this knowledge doesn’t really do anything for you, yet.  And generally this is one of the things teachers might be good for–they keep you going down the correct path, even when that path doesn’t result in any visible improvement.  But despite teachers, that the grip seems useless is certainly going to slow down the speed at which you learn it; if you had everything else right, and then improved your grip, you can bet that the speed at which you learned the grip would be much greater.  So once again, learning is slower when you are far from where you should be than when you are close to it.

Let me speak more generally.

There are fields of knowledge, and fields of error.  Fields of knowledge are things that attempt to describe reality, and actually do so–chemistry, for instance.   Fields of error are things that attempt to describe reality, and systematically fail–alchemy, or astrology, for instance.  I think one of the reasons that people are willing to remain in fields of error is that you don’t see any improvement when you begin to leave such a field–you pretty much stay as good at understanding reality as you did before.  Only once you have exited some erroneous field, and begin to enter some accurate field, does your skill-at-life improve.  Until then it just seems like you are trudging away from some field, and gaining nothing in return.  And, given this, this is why it is easy to remain in a field of error–it takes a long while for you to begin to benefit from leaving it.

You can compound this problem with the fact that humans don’t like to admit that they are massively wrong.  Instead, they like to think that they were basically right, to make small concessions to inescapable arguments against their position bit by bit, and generally to reluctantly retreat before an enormous mound of truth.  This just guarantees that, as you retreat from a some field of error, you’ll take an eternity to begin to benefit from it.  Which–because the speed of human learning often depends on the visible increase in skill that we get from that learning–once more will the speed of learning slow to a crawl.

So yeah, I think humans are pretty cool being in error.  I think this is good to know, because, knowing this, one can try to speed up the rate at which one admits that one is in error, and move to a place where the truth benefits one.

Also titled, It is Impossible To Seek Evidence that Confirms Your Hypothesis, only Evidence that Tests It, Except for Maybe in a Few Odd Cases, And I Think Not Even Then

(I have a feeling I’m getting the titling capitalization wrong.)

(Caveat Lector: I have stolen examples freely in the below from friends, LessWrong posts, books, and other locations.)

0. Intro

Sometimes Very often, one is not certain whether a particular statement is true or false. To resolve this uncertainty, one can seek evidence. The point of this post is that it is impossible to seek exclusively confirmatory or exclusively disconfirmatory evidence.

To put this another way, it is impossible to seek out confirmatory evidence without at the same time risking disconfirmatory evidence. To put this yet another way, it is (at least almost always, and probably always) only possible to seek to test your hypothesis–to seek evidence which will move you to think either that a hypothesis is more likely or less likely to be true. You cannot seek evidence that will move you to think that a hypothesis is more likely to be true, without running the risk of finding that your hypothesis is less likely; and you cannot do the reverse either.

This post will also show that any procedure that promises to make you more confident in a hypothesis, without the accompanying risk of making you less confident in your hypothesis, cannot actually provide evidence.

There’s a mathematical way of saying this, which is superior to the non-mathematical way. But I’m going to attempt to describe this first with words, rather than with math. After I’ve tried to describe it non-mathematically, I’ll move on to the math, which will, at that point, hopefully make sense.

1. First Examples

Imagine that a doctor thinks that a particular chemical substance is likely to cure cancer.

So he decides to set up an experiment to test this. He would like to have definitive evidence, after the experiment is over, that it cures cancer. So he sets up the experiment very, very carefully: he draws from several different demographics when assembling his control and experimental groups; he tries to ensure that each group is large enough to detect even small differences in outcome with p < 0.01 significance; he is really careful to try to anticipate and avoid potential confounders; he does all the double-blinding that every good scientist would do; he probably does all sorts of other things that I can't even name because I don't know enough about experimental design. He wants the evidence that pops out of this experiment to be weighty. And he goes through all this, performs the experiments, waits five years for a bunch of data to come in, and eventually finds that he can't reject the null hypothesis--the drug probably does nothing for cancer. And all the careful design of his experimental procedure now only means that this is a more crushing refutation. Note that the only possible way he could open himself up to evidence in favour of the hoped-for outcome was by opening himself up to evidence against the hoped-for outcome. If he had screwed up the experimental design, so that it was more likely to show the experimental group getting better than to show the control group getting better, apart from the efficacy of the drug--well then, obviously the inertness of the drug could not have been indicated by the experiment, but equally obviously the experiment would be useless as evidence showing that the drug was effective. In short--because finding evidence for his hypothesis necessarily involves the possibility of finding evidence against it, you ultimately would have to characterize running the experiment as an attempt to test his hypothesis, not an attempt to confirm it, even if that is what he wanted. Here is another example. Imagine that someone creates a new aluminum-steel alloy. They want to show the world that it is, per unit weight, stronger than titanium. Well, in this case the only thing they can do is set up an experimental rig that smashes into it and see if it breaks more slowly and rebounds more effectively than titanium. And of course, in doing this, they also run the risk of finding that it actually breaks faster and rebounds less effectively than titanium. To show that it is stronger--as they hope to do--they also necessarily run the risk of showing that it is weaker. Again, you can't seek to confirm that what you wish to believe is true; you can only test it. The reason for this is that, if the test that you perform is not causally entangled with the thing that you wish to examine, then it cannot provide evidence for your favoured hypothesis about the examined thing: if the test apparatus shows that the steel-aluminum alloy does not break, regardless of whether it is actually strongest, then it cannot provide evidence for the alloy being the strongest. But if the test must be causally entangled with the thing that you wish to examine, then it also necessarily involves the risk of providing evidence contrary to your hypothesis: it risks showing that the evidence does not turn out as your favoured hypothesis predicts that it would. Well, someone could object--maybe this is true of the hard, experimental sciences. What about something else, such as history? It works the same in history. Suppose I'm interested in knowing whether Roger Bacon anticipated some optical notion heretofore attributed solely to Christiaan Huygens; I think it would be awesome if he did. So I decide that I'm going to go through every text attributed to Bacon, as well as every questionable text and every oblique reference I can find to him and his works in the corpus of 13th century literature. 25 years, 20 scholarly articles, and 1 dissertation later, I complete my survey--and find, to my dissatisfaction, that Bacon did not anticipate Huygens. This is contrary to my wishes, but now far more definitively proven than it would have been if I did nothing. Again, the opportunity of finding evidence in favour of a hypothesis must be balanced by the opportunity of finding evidence contrary to it. Ok, well, you could say--maybe this is true of academic things. What about people's personal lives? Same here. Suppose you would like to find if someone is trustworthy. If that's the case, then you'll probably have to trust them with something--whether big or small. And doing this involves running the risk of having them betray you, and finding that they are not trustworthy. I could go on with examples forever, but I hope my initial point is clear. You cannot seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis; you can seek merely to test a hypothesis. 2. An objection, turned into an advantage

Here’s an objection I suspect some people are thinking about: It really feels like you can seek confirmation of a hypothesis. Let’s look at a case when it feels like you’re successfully seeking confirmation of a hypothesis.

Suppose I think that the Earl of Oxford was Shakespeare. I cannot really give any arguments for it, though, if you ask me for arguments. So I go to the library, check out a dozen Oxfordian books on Shakespeare, and read them all. I also browse through a bunch of Oxfordian websites online, and look through all of their arguments. I also look through their dissection of all the anti-Oxfordian arguments, just for completeness’ sake. So now I’m able to give a dozen different arguments and pieces of evidence in support of the Oxfordian cause, whereas before I wasn’t able to; I was in a prior state of ignorance, and deliberately sought confirmatory evidence that allowed me to be in the posterior state. So it seem to me pretty clear that I was able to seek and to find confirmatory evidence in favor of my hypothesis.

And this is a fairly universal experience. I can start by thinking that some proposition is true, and by wishing that I had more evidence that it was true. To find such evidence, I can read books by other people who think that this proposition is true. And then I find that I apparently have attained confirmatory evidence in favour of my hypothesis, which I have sought. So it seems false to say that I cannot seek out confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis.

I’m not going to address this argument directly, at first. Let me give an analogy.

Suppose you’re interested in whether a particular die is loaded or fair. If it is loaded, it is loaded so that the higher triplet of numbers (4,5,6) comes up far more frequently than the lower triplet (1,2,3) of numbers. If it is fair, then members of each triplet will come up with roughly equal frequency. A good way to test this would be to roll the die 100 or 1000 times, and count how many times it comes up high and how many times it comes up low.

We’re not really interested in doing this tedious experimental work ourselves, though, so we ask a friend to do it and record his results on each throw.

After the experiment, we ask him how it went. And he says “Well, it came up high on the 3rd, 4th, 10th-13th, 16th, [insert long sting of text], 89th, 91st, 95th-98th, and 99th rolls.”

We say “Um, so you mean it came up low on the other rolls?”

He says, “Oh, no, I don’t mean to imply that. It is conceivable that it could have come up low or high on them. I’m just not reporting them, right now.”

And we ask to ourselves, “Hmm… so is this evidence in favour of the die being loaded? All of the instances that he reported were instances which were high. The particular series that he gave us is the kind of series you would expect if the die were loaded. But on the other hand, if he has resolved only to report rolls where it came up high, that doesn’t count as evidence pro at all–he’s just tilting his reporting of the experiment so it seems that it came out in favour die being loaded.”

So we ask him, “Had you resolved to report only on those aforementioned throws before you actually made the throws?”

There are two ways he could respond at this point.

Suppose he says “Yeah, before I rolled the die, I decided only to report the 3rd, the 4th, the 10th-13th, [etc], rolls. And then I stuck to that resolution after I rolled the die.” If he is telling the truth, then we actually do have evidence that the die is loaded–it’s as if he had performed exactly the experiment we wanted to perform, merely with a smaller number of rolls. If the die were not loaded, we would have expected this sample to indicate that the die were not loaded; we were open to refutation as well as confirmation, and so we have found that we in fact genuine evidence in favor of the loading.

On the other hand, suppose he says “Nah, I decided just to report on those throws after I had made them,” and then winks. If this is the case, then we have a very strong suspicions that he is only reporting on throws which turned up with members of the higher triplet. And if he’s filtering the evidence in this way, then we obviously do not have real evidence in favour of the dice being loaded. His resolution to only report evidence that seems to favour the point that the dice is loaded makes the so-called evidence not evidence at all.

So in this case, our friend can only offer real evidence to us if he has resolved to offer all the evidence he finds, whether it supports or does not support the hypothesis that the die is loaded. If he is deliberately filtering out evidence in accord with whether he likes it or not, then he isn’t offering evidence: he’s offering a simulacrum of evidence, which is designed to produce assent but which has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.

Let’s turn to books.

Suppose that a Scientologist is uneasy in his Scientology. So he reads a bunch of books on Scientology by Scientologists, and in the books he finds all sorts of bits of evidence in favour of Scientology. He finds many stories about people who went through their auditing treatment, and whose lives then improved in amazing ways; these stories are evidence that auditing works, he thinks, and if auditing works, well, this is evidence for the historical stories about Thetans that the practice of auditing is based on. He also finds stories about how people tried to dig up scandals about Scientologist leadership, and about how these attempts were thwarted and turned out to be based on lies; and if the arguments against Scientology turn out to be based on lies, he thinks, then surely these arguments are not formidable. And he also finds really insightful and interesting things that L. Ron Hubbard said about human nature, which really help him explain himself to himself and navigate the world better; and if some of the things that L. Ron Hubbard seemed really enlightening, he thinks, then maybe he should be more trusting when L. Ron Hubbard says something counterintuitive. All the things that the books says might be true as well–he could verify them all through third sources. And so he seeks bits of information and evidence for Scientology; and so he keeps himself in his delusion.

It’s pretty obvious that the author of the book on Scientology is acting like our deceptive friend in second imagined scenario above. Just as the friend reports only evidence which seems to suggest that the die is loaded, the author of the book is only reporting evidence which suggests that Scientology is true: each is only reporting evidence that appears to favor a particular hypothesis.

And, I hope it is now evident, if the author is doing that, then the evidence that they are reporting simply should not count as evidence, just as our friend’s supposed evidence simply should not count as evidence. You can find pieces of evidence to support any hypothesis you please–the world is very large. And this means that, when arguing for a point, everyone has the opportunity to filter and select like the Scientologist author or the die-rolling friend. But if the die-rolling friend is not providing actual evidence, because he filters–and he clearly isn’t–then neither should the scientologist author or any author who reports only on positive evidence be seen as actually providing evidence. That they’re acting as this kind of filter rules out the possibility that they are providing evidence: instead, they’re providing what I see as a very dangerous, rhetorical simulacrum of evidence.

Of course, this simulacrum of evidence can be improved; both our friend and the scientologist could really work on presentation. Our friend above could include a few cases when the die roll turned out low–that would make it look more like he was being honest. Similarly, the Scientologist author could include a few cases when Scientology was abusive and deceptive, and admit that some unfortunate abuses have occurred–and thereby gain a greater appearance of honesty.

Our friend could even be really devious–he could include all the die rolls, but then mention that his die-rolling technique was bad in certain, particular cases–“Really, I wasn’t rolling the dice so much as setting it down; I wasn’t following the ISO-312 Die-Rolling Manual; and there might have been a magnet near these die in the case of these rolls”–and then, having performed unequal scrutiny on different die-rolls, show how miraculously the really good rolls were only those that turned up higher. The scientologist author could do something similar, and provide a few of the genuine arguments that people make against scientology–but then hold them to much higher standards of evidence than he holds other arguments, or present them in rhetorically unsatisfiying manners.

But doing all this would merely window-dressing which is designed to make the evidence-substitute look like real evidence, as the two examples should make clear.

What one is doing, then, in the case of the Oxfordians should be evident. If the authors that you read are acting like the scientologist author, then what they give is a simulacrum of evidence. If, on the other hand, they present the best evidence in both directions, the most deadly attacks on their own position, as earnestly and rigorously as they present those for the other position; if they have spent equal time searching for flaws in their own arguments and for the flaws in the arguments of their opponents; if they have tried to see the world through the eyes of their opponents, and tried to examine how their supposed evidence would seem in such a case, and how their opponents might effortlessly explain it; if they have done all this, then there is a small chance they are presenting real evidence. Even after reading authors like these, it is still best to read counter-arguing authors, as everyone knows–it’s hard to present evidence for a position you disagree with fairly, even if you’ve resolved to try to do so.

And if the author you read did all this, and if you followed this writing pattern, then reading them might not convince you of the Oxfordian hypothesis–it might convince you of the opposite. So once again, it seems that if one wishes to deal with real evidence in favour of a hypothesis, you cannot ensure that you will not also encounter real evidence against it. You cannot search for confirmatory evidence; you can only search for a test.

3. More objections, which are hopefully fairly stated.

I just laid out a really, really high standard for writers. Let me attempt to meet it.

For a while I wondered whether what I have said applies to the domain of mathematics. The line between valid and invalid arguments seems to be sharper in mathematics than it is everywhere else. A valid mathematical proof, baring you insanity or a mistake made within the proof, seems like fairly absolute evidence for what the proof purports to be a proof of. So, supposing that I sought a proof for a mathematical theorem and found it, it seems like I’ve sought confirmatory evidence without running the risk of finding disconfirmatory evidence.

I think ultimately this is wrong. I could have made a mistake in my proof–this happens all the time. Alternately, while searching for a proof, I could stumble across a reason for thinking that the theorem is false–this kind of thing also happens. And if I search for a proof for a while, and fail to find one, then that fact itself could be evidence against the existence of a proof. So searching for a proof in math does not, as far as I can tell, provide a chance for confirmatory evidence without disconfirmatory evidence.

Suppose, though, that we grant that you can do this in math. I’m ok with that. Mathematicians generally aren’t involved, qua mathematicians, in the kind of disputes and cases of tendentious reasoning that the rest of the world is involved in–or at least that’s what it looks like from the outside. And math is pretty far removed from the rest of a lot of things. So I wouldn’t really mind including an ad hoc exception for mathematics, although I think it is unnecessary.

One could try to extend this (probably unnecessary) ad hoc to things like philosophy, but that would pretty clearly be unneeded. If we are to have an ad-hoc addition to the theory for mathematics, it would only be because it is (nearly) impossible for a conscientious individual to offer unsound arguments in mathematics. (Again, I think this is pretty clearly false.) The notion of proof, of what constitutes acceptable premises, and of what constitutes acceptable work–all of these are far more hazy in philosophy than in mathematics. So the ad-hoc extension does not work, as far as I can tell.

Another counter-argument you can give to this standard is that it would make everything that people write interminably long. I concede that this counter-argument is the case. But sometimes if you are interested in the truth you have to read interminably long things. That’s just how life is.

4. Another counter argument, which isn’t actually a counter-argument at all

Here’s another counter-argument.

Suppose that Kimiko, a high-school student, thinks her boyfriend Bob is cheating on her with Tracey, even though Bob claims that he never even talks with her. Naturally, as the trusting soul she is, Kimiko decides to a install a backdoor in Bob’s cellphone, so she can remotely monitor whether he receives or sends any compromising texts or calls. She installs it early one morning at school, and she checks the backdoor fours hours later at lunchtime. There are two possible results she could find after checking: Bob might have sent / received a message or call, or he might not have sent / received a message or call.

If Bob has received or sent a sexy message, this serves as extremely strong evidence that Bob is cheating: if Bob gets a message from Tracey saying “Beast w. 2 backs 2nite!” then Bob is very probably cheating. On the other hand, if Bob has not received or sent such a message, this is only very weak evidence that Bob is not cheating: even if he is cheating, he might not communicate with her every four hours. Both the world where Bob is cheating and the world where Bob is not cheating would very likely lead to a situation where Bob does not receive any message from Tracey–and for this reason, his not receiving a message seems like only weak evidence that he is not cheating. On the other hand, the world where Bob is cheating is far more likely than the world where Bob is not cheating to involve such a message, so receiving such a message is very strong evidence he is cheating.

So it seems as if Kimiko can seek evidence confirming that Bob is cheating, at least inasmuch as the strength of the possible evidence confirming cheating is different from the strength of possible evidence disconfirming cheating.

The problem is that I actually agree with everything stated above–it’s actually quite vital to my point, and not a counter-argument at all. However, it still would be wrong to characterize Kimiko’s actions as an attempt to confirm cheating, for the following reason.

No messages from Tracey would likely happen in both worlds where Bob is cheating and worlds where Bob is not. So we actually have a relatively low expectation of seeing any message, although a message would be relatively strong evidence. Similarly, because a message from Tracey would almost certainly only happen in a world where Bob is cheating, and perhaps not even in that, we have a strong expectation of seeing no message, which serves as weak evidence that Bob is not cheating. So even though possible evidence is strong in one direction and weak in the other, this is balanced by having a strong expectation of the weak evidence and a weak expectation of the strong evidence.

Let me give another example to try to illustrate the idea.

Suppose I’m going through Roger Bacon’s letters, over the course of going over the entirety of his work. It might be that many of his letters deal mostly, although not exclusively, with matters of a personal nature. So I have very little expectation that I’ll run into any theories previously attributed solely to Huygens in these letters–although, if I run into an apparent instance of such a theory, I’ll have to revise my certainty about Bacon’s opinions drastically. So I have an (extremely) low expectation of (extremely) strong confirmatory evidence while reading these letters. On the other hand, if I don’t run into any such theory, I’ll only revise downwards very slightly the probability that Bacon anticipated such a discovery, because this is not the first place I would expect such a discovery to be written down. So I have an (extremely) high expectation of (extremely) weak disconfirmatory evidence.

One way to say this is that, on average, your anticipated future opinion after running into evidence must be, on average, the same as your current opinion. If you anticipate really strong evidence that might move your opinion a great deal in one direction, but cannot see any way for there to be really strong evidence that moves your opinion in another direction, then you must have only a very weak expectation of very strong evidence in one direction and a very strong expectation of very weak evidence in the other direction. This is why you cannot seek confirmatory evidence, then–your anticipated future average opinion must be the same as your current opinion.

Let me give one more example.

Suppose you are a Catholic, and you hear about some supposed miracle. The Catholic Church tends not to actually endorse miracles; it tends to be reluctant to say “This is miraculous and a sign from God.” Furthermore, you know that there are many fraudulent miracles in all religions; the Catholic Church is no exception. So you think that this particular miracle is very likely a fraud as well, but investigate it nevertheless.

Now, if you investigate extremely carefully, and find no conceivable scientific explanation for the phenomena, then you have pretty good evidence for Catholicism. But you did not expect to find such a miracle when you started to investigate the miracle; you thought it was probably a fraud. So you had a weak expectation of strong evidence, starting off. If, on the other hand, you were to find that the miracle was a fraud; well, that’s what you expected anyhow. You had a very strong expectation of this extremely weak evidence that Catholicism is false, although this evidence is so weak it is probably not even worth keeping track of mentally. (To see that it is nevertheless contrary evidence, imagine what it would be like to investigate a thousand such supposed Catholic miracles and to find every single one of them to be frauds. The thousand is composed of ones; each of the thousand shifts probability by a calculable amount, given a particular amount by which the complete thousand shifts probability.)

5. You’ll skip this part

Now, there’s actually a mathematical way of saying, and proving, what I’ve been trying to say above. I was originally going to go through this really slowly, but then I realized that (a) everyone who doesn’t like math would probably skip this section anyhow and (b) everyone who does like math would prefer that I just give the proof. So let me give the proof.

In the below, “H” stands for the hypothesis under consideration and “E” stands for yet-to-be-found evidence supporting “H.”

1. P(H)
2. P(n) = P(n,m) + P(n,~m)
3. [From 1 and 2]: P(H) = P(H,E) + P(H,~E)
4. P(n,m) = P(n|m)P(m)
5. [From 3 and 4]: P(H) = P(H|E)P(E) + P(H|~E)P(~E)

This formula [P(H) = P(H|E)P(E) + P(H|~E)P(~E)] says most precisely what I am trying to say above.

It means that a weak expectation [low P(E)] of strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis [higher positive P(H|E) – P(H)] must be accompanied by a strong expectation [high P(~E)] of weak evidence contrary to the hypothesis [slightly negative P(H|~E) – P(H)]. This is like the case with Kimiko and Bob.

It also means that a medium-strength expectation [middling P(E)] of strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis [higher positive P(H|E) – P(H)] must be matched by a medium-strength expectation [middling P(~E)] of strong evidence against the hypothesis [lower and negative P(H|~E) – P(H)]. This is like the case with the cancer-curing drug.

6. Finis

Why should anyone care about the above?

Well, I think it is important to show that you cannot actually seek confirmatory evidence in favor of a hypothesis. You can seek to convince yourself that a particular hypothesis is true–but what you seek in so trying to convince yourself is not evidence, but a simulacrum of evidence. That seems important, because it can help one distinguish, in one’s own actions, between when one is performing an exercise in self-directed rhetoric and when one is attempting to find the truth.

In my experience, making this distinction is difficult to do; I still wonder all the time which one I’m doing.

A friend with whom I was discussing religion once said that, even if religion wasn’t true, it has at least produced good people who have tried really hard to help other people: there are no atheist Mother Teresas.

I thought about this for a while. I don’t think there are any atheist Mother Teresas–that is, there are no atheist individuals who are very famous for helping the poor; in any case, I couldn’t think of any. One could try to explain this in a few ways.

The obvious explanation is that Christianity makes people more likely to be charitable than atheism. This could be true even if atheism is true and Christianity is false. This would be awkward: we like true beliefs to lead to behaviour we like, and false beliefs to lead to behaviour that we dislike, but there’s really no guarantee of this. Kids might behave better before Christmas, but that doesn’t mean Santa exists.

There are, however, alternative explanations; furthermore, you could even try to construe the lack of atheist Mother Teresas as an advantage for atheism. I’ll start with one alternative explanation.

Thought Experiment

Suppose the world consists of 950,000 Christians and 50,000 atheists.

Imagine that you’re a Christian who wants to start an organization to help the poor. You have two options. You could just try to help the poor without explicitly aligning yourself with Christianity: You could simply start an organization to feed the hungry without any religious trappings at all. Or you could try to help the poor while explicitly aligning yourself with Christianity and appealing to Christian principles and Christ’s sayings.

If you do the former, it seems likely that both Christians and atheists will contribute evenly. On the other hand, if you do the latter, it seems likely that Christian donations will increase by a little bit per capita while atheist donations will drop to almost zero per capita. If individuals in both groups give approximately the same amount in the first case, then even a modest increase (say, 10%) in the average Christian donation in the second case more than overwhelms the entire loss of the atheists.

So if you’re a Christian, and you want your charitable organization to receive lots of money so it can help the poor very effectively, you’re likely to start an explicitly Christian organization. If your particular branch of Christianity has a mechanism by which the founders of organizations are generally venerated and become famous, then if your organization is successful you’ll likely be venerated and famous. (There are, after all, at least cults of personality around the founders of pretty much every religious order in existence.)

Imagine, on the other hand, that you’re an atheist. You also have two options. You could just try to help the poor without mentioning that you’re an atheist–or you could start an explicitly atheistic charitable organization. If you do the latter, you might have a slight increase in donations from atheists–but this increase will be completely overwhelmed by the loss of all the Christian donations you might otherwise have received.

So if you’re an atheist, and you want your charitable organization to receive lots of money so it can help the poor very effectively, there’s very little chance that you’ll start an explicitly atheistic organization. And the kind of organization you do found is probably going to be some 501c3 somewhere, which doesn’t have any specific mechanism for venerating the founders of the 501c3. So it’s relatively unlikely you’ll become famous.

So, in a world much like ours, we might expect there to be very few visibly atheistic organizations helping the poor (because atheists want to help poor people effectively) and very many visibly Christian organizations helping the poor (because Christians want to help poor people effectively). So the first reason that we do not see any atheist Mothere Teresas is that atheists love poor people.

More Awkward Considerations

The above points out that, even in a world with atheists who want to be charitable, we might not see many or any explicitly atheistic charitable organizations.

One might well point out, of course, that the goal of charity is not to produce people or organizations famous for charitable giving. The goal is to help people. People have criticized Mother Teresa on the grounds that she is was not effective in doing so.

It’s hard to discuss the efficacy of Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity. Everyone seems to accuse everyone else of insincerity in the discussions about it: one is either blindly following a cult or viciously attacking a saint. I’m going to try, right now, to focus on things that everyone can agree on.

One of the things the Missionaries of Charity are sometimes attacked for is not doing their absolute best to alleviate human suffering. People who say this will bring up a supposed lack of proper cleanliness in their homes for the dying; a lack of palliative care; a lack of training of the nuns; and the general fact that the Missionaries of Charity seem not to care so much about making people get better. So someone like Aroup Chatterjee does not deny that the Missionaries of Charity alleviate human pain and suffering; he points out instead that, relative to the enormous quantities of money the Missionaries of Charity receive, the amount of good they do seems relatively small.

In responding to this, more than once I’ve heard defenders of Mother Teresa say something like the following: Well, sure the Missionaries of Charity may not be using the money they receive with absolute efficiency to improve life on earth. They don’t act like GiveWell. But that isn’t really their goal. Their goal is to help poor people know they are loved, and to bring souls to Christ. Suffering on earth simply doesn’t matter as much to them as it does to an atheist, just like happiness on earth probably will not matter as much to a theist as an atheist.

Let me draw back a bit. Since I’ve left Catholicism, at least one of my friends has often confronted me with the apparent meaninglessness of suffering in the atheist scheme. Apart from moving someone to action or providing insight into life–suffering is completely purposeless to an atheist. To a Catholic, on the other hand, suffering can be meaningful by being joined to Christ’s suffering on the Cross, which itself works to help everyone else on earth. I’d agree, prima facie, this seems like a nice feature of Catholicism–it means that you can tell yourself, even when life really sucks, that that crumminess of your life can help everyone else so long as it is joined to Christ’s suffering.

With this in mind, let’s look at a somewhat famous thing that Mother Teresa said in an address to the National Prayer Breakfast on February 3, 1994:

One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, “You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus — a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you.” And she joined her hands together and said, “Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me.”

…and this anecdote is either inspiring or horrific, depending on how you view it. As I said, from one perspective, it’s nice to think that your suffering has meaning. But on the other hand, if you think that suffering has this meaning, and that God hurts those closest to him, is it likely that alleviating this suffering will be as high a priority as it would otherwise be? If you think suffering is a positively good force in the world, will you try to get rid of it in the same way that you would if you thought suffering was a complete loss?

That was a more general consideration. Let me return to the more concrete matter–suffering and happiness on earth.

It seems that atheists, in helping people, can really only have happiness on earth as their goal. Catholics on the other hand, have both happiness on earth and later happiness in heaven as their goal. This is what, in fact, the Catholic defenders of Mother Teresa point out when other people point out that her actions did not seem best calculated to help people out; her actions and her beliefs were entirely consistent, and indeed so far as I can tell Catholics should not be bothered by hearing that her actions were not best calculated to make people have a good life on earth. She would not have said that they were.

Of course, this does not mean that religion does worse than atheism so far as helping people on earth. Even if Catholics split their efforts between earth and heaven, it may be that their Catholicism motivates them to such effort that a fraction of this effort is greater than the totality of atheist efforts. And it might seem that this is likely the case–there are a host of hospitals, schools, and universities founded as Christian efforts, but none that I can think of founded as atheist efforts.

A few more last things

Part of a response to this accusation would be what I said in the first part–atheists aren’t likely to found explicitly atheist charities. Indeed, it would be kind of stupid. Atheism is a lack, not a presence; you don’t found charities that are explicitly not anything else, so why found a charity which is explicitly not religious? And indeed, this is is a problem with the terms of the comparison–given that atheism is a lack of belief, and Christianity is a positive belief, it seems like the right comparison would be between Christianity and something like Secular Humanism–which does have a long record of charitable activity.

Suppose, though, that we look through history and find that atheists are generally speaking less interested in charity than religious people. Suppose we even choose something like Secular Humanists, and find that they’re less effective than Christians. Does that mean atheists must be less likely to be charitable than religious people?

Well, not really. Atheists have been a tiny and unpopular minority for much of history. It might be that being a tiny and unpopular minority saps your motivation to do charitable works. Jews probably didn’t found as many charitable institutions as Christians during the Middle Ages; but it would probably be a bad idea to use this particular piece of evidence to show that Jews are likely to be less charitable than Christians.

So, in conclusion. We have no reason to think that atheists would found explicitly atheist charities, and atheists have not historically been in any position to found charities. Those who do found charities are not as likely to become as personally famous for it. So, even if atheists — or secular humanists — are just as likely to want to help other people as Christians, we would not expect any to become terribly famous for it qua atheists. And furthermore, we have every reason to think that any atheists who do work to bring about earthly good will be more efficient in doing so than Christians. So in all, I don’t think Christianity has a great advantage–if any advantage at all–over atheism in this respect.

PS: If you’re interested in organizations which are not explicitly religious, but which aim to help people help people on earth as effectively as they can, see The Centre for Effective Altruism and GiveWell. These are data-driven organizations which constantly try to optimize their ability to help others, as far as I can tell. These aren’t explicitly atheist, explicitly religious, or explicitly anything–but they do try to help people help other people as best they can. And that seems like it should probably be one’s priority when giving.

I recently read The Way of Kings, a long (~1000 pages) fantasy novel which is the first of what is projected to be a long (10 books) series.  A friend had been bugging me to read it for some time–I haven’t read much contemporary fantasy, so I was initially reluctant to read it, and did not expect that I would like it.  It was nevertheless superb; I’m looking forward to reading the next novel in the series.

There’s a fair amount of terminology for world-specific things and phenomena in the the book–shardblade, soulcaster, thunderclash, oathpact, brightlord, songling, stormlight and so on.  These words made me wince when I first read them.  There were a few reasons for this.

One reason was that new words pull me away from unconscious immersion in a book, and this unconscious immersion is a large part of the reason that I enjoy reading fiction.  Another was that, early in the novel, I couldn’t see any need to invent new words for all these different things, given that they seemed to have real-world correlates; and so I was irritated that the author was inventing new words unnecessarily.  Another reason was probably the feeling that these new words in fantasy novels were somehow low-class, and the feeling that reading them made me feel low-class.  And you could at least partially subsume all of these reasons beneath the human dislike of certain kinds of novelty–we just feel uncomfortable with new things, often.

After a while, however, this discomfort disappeared.  Currently the words “feel” fine, if that makes sense.  They don’t jerk me out of complete immersion.  The world is familiar enough to me that the differences between shardblades and swords, or songlings and birds, seem obvious; it makes sense to have different words for these things, and it would strike me as obviously wrong to subsume them all beneath one category, just like it strikes me as obviously wrong to subsume fish and whales beneath one category.  And because I found that The Way of Kings seemed to point out interesting things about human nature, and had arresting one-liners and parables in it, just like real literature by famous people studied in English departments–because of this I of course feel that it isn’t low-class.  I like it, after all, so it must not be–right?  And, again, you could at least partially subsume many of these beneath mere exposure effect, which causes humans to sometimes think better of things simply because they encounter them more often.

So I started out disliking and uncomfortable with the novel and its vocabulary, and have ended up liking and quite comfortable with both.

Here’s the problem. I’m pretty sure that an uncomfortably large quantity of the credibility we give to various philosophies and religions comes simply from the comfort we feel with their vocabulary and worlds. And the comfort we feel with such vocabulary and worlds is to an enormous extent merely a function of how much time we’ve spent with them. So the credibility–or the need-to-be-taken-seriously-as-perceived-by-myself–of a particular worldview is to a great degree a function of something that has nothing to do with truth of the system.

Let me explain how every mechanism that made me more comfortable with The Way of Kings, a completely fictitious world, also works to make people more comfortable with particular philosophies–and thus to see them as true.

1: Comfort and unconsciousness

New words pull you away from unconscious immersion in a story.  But they also pull you away from fluent reasoning within a particular domain.

Right now, I’m going through a class on inferential statistics on Udacity, because I don’t think I really know enough statistics stuff. A big part of learning statistics is learning the terminology well enough that you don’t need to think about what the terms mean. Take a term like “standard error.” Before learning statistics, this phrase meant pretty much nothing to me. Now, if you asked me to paraphrase the term, I’d say something like “the standard deviation of a collection of sampling distributions drawn from a single population, which (holding certain things constant) tends to have roughly the same value as the standard deviation of the population divided by the square root of the number of samples in each sampling distribution.” (This is probably off by a bit; I’m still learning.)

Now, the interesting thing about this is that learning to do statistics easily doesn’t involve merely learning that “standard error” is a shorthand for something like the above. It involves this, yes. But it also involves learning to forget this, at least on the level of working memory–because if the only way you know of handling the term involves reciting it back to yourself, then you’ll have filled up most of your working memory on that single term, when your working memory might be needed for many other things. So gaining fluency in a particular domain involves learning what terms in that domain mean–but also involves, as you ascend to higher levels of abstraction, learning how to use terms without thinking about how these terms were constructed.

That was an analogy using statistics to explain using fantasy novels to explain a particular human bias. Moving back to the fantasy novel: As fluent reasoning within statistics involves forgetting terms while using them, so also unconscious, completely immersed reading of a novel involves forgetting the terms in the novel while using them. If I read “Stormlight leaking from his shardplate, Brightlord Adolin surveyed the Parshendi lines,” my ability to read with complete unconscious immersion depends on my ability to understand the terms involved in the sentence without consciously attempting to understand them. And, of course, my ability to do this is pretty much directly a function of how often I have seen the terms used before.

Moving back to philosophy–my point here should now be pretty clear. My ability to read “substantial form is the first principle of action, but not the proximate principle” easily is also, to a great degree, a function of how often and under what circumstances I have seen the above terms used before. If I’ve spent more time with a thing, I’ll be able to read it without consciously thinking about the words; and so I’ll feel more comfortable with it and so I’ll be more likely to think that it is true. And this happens just because I’ve spent time with a thing, and so one can be lead to think a thing is true in a way that has nothing to do with the truth of the thing.

2: Consistency with your past self

We respect decisions that we make in the present partly because they’re the same as decisions we made in the past.

Suppose that you’re thinking about going to Starbucks. The coffee is pretty expensive there–but on the other hand, you can recall having gone to Starbucks 50 times in the past, and you don’t think any of those times were bad decisions. You can’t quite recall why you made those decisions–but you must have had some good reason to go 50 times. So you go again, following the advice of your past selves.

In short, to change your mind about a habit or action implies that your past self was mistaken, and sometimes radically mistaken. Rather than consider this possibility, we usually just follow our past selves. Sometimes this is fairly innocuous. Sometimes it is not. In The Crucible Judge Hawthorne decides certain people must be hung as witches, more or less on the grounds that if he decided that they were innocent then he would also have to conclude that an already-hung group of people was also innocent, which would be horrific.

In the case of reading fantasy–well, if I’ve spent 1000 pages reading a particular novel, surely it is reasonable to conclude that the novel is good, right? 1000 pages of reading is a fair amount of effort, and I’m not the kind of person who expends effort for no reason. So I’ll likely conclude that what I read is worth reading. It definitely isn’t crud.

So let’s turn to philosophy. Imagine that you’ve put a great deal of effort into reading Hegel. You’ve tried deeply to understand him; you’ve poured through the literature about him; you can trace his influences onto later thinkers and the way he was influenced by prior thinkers. Because of this, there’s almost no chance that you’ll approach the question of whether Hegel is worthwhile in an objective fashion. Even if you attempt to do so, you’ll be much more ready to entertain arguments that he is worthwhile than those that he isn’t; you’ll probably spend more time on counter-arguments against arguments that Hegel is basically worthless. A desire for consistency with your past selves keeps you in the same groove that you’ve already been in. And the same is true for people who follow Aristotle, Aquinas, Bostrom or Yudkowsky.

3: Conclusion

I’m going to admit that writing this wasn’t moved entirely by the above incident.

For a while I’ve felt a fair amount of anomie about what things are worth reading. A lot of philosophers think that a lot of other philosophers aren’t just wrong but worthless. A lot of scientists think the same about all philosophy; and a lot of philosophers think the same about the philosophical opinions of scientists. And this is the case despite the fact that many members of these groups would fail an ideological Turing Test regarding the groups they disparage.

And basically, I think the kind of comfort they feel with their own beliefs, and discomfort they feel with the beliefs of others, caused by the kind of mechanisms recounted above, really makes more sense of the respect / disrespect they have towards the beliefs of others than does any kind of intellectual causation. I can’t think of a way to reliably quantify this, though.

This post is about why particular kinds of moral difficulty are, ah, indeed very difficult.

This post was going to give a few tentative ways unravel these two kinds of difficulty, but then I realized I wasn’t sure about how to do that, so I’m not actually going to try at all. I’ll pose a difficulty without a solution instead, apart from saying “You should be aware that this is a problem.”

(Edit: The original version of this post was about how Left / Liberal individuals and Right / Conservative individuals prefer to see two different kinds of moral difficulty as paradigmatic of all moral difficulty. This might be true, but I’m really more interested in the thing itself than in the sociological preferences of large groups about the thing. So you can ignore the final section below, if you want.)

Anyhow, the first step is to explain what these two kinds of difficulty are. This is pretty simple.

The kinds

Sometimes you’re pretty sure what the right thing is, and the difficulty of doing it springs from the pain of doing it.

It can be difficult to cease watching Youtube videos and go help your spouse with the laundry, but it is also pretty clearly right. I sometimes find it difficult to go do the chores I owe my roommates around the house, although doing these chores is also pretty clearly right. And far, far away from such things on the scale of difficulty, it could be the case that risking your own life for someone else is clearly the right thing to do, but this wouldn’t automatically make it easy.

On the other hand, sometimes you aren’t sure what the right thing is, and the difficulty of doing it springs from this uncertainty.

It can sometimes be hard for a parent to know if or how he or she should punish a child for a particular offence, for instance, because it’s hard to know what is best for the child. It can also be hard to know whether it’s right to tell someone that they are doing something wrong or foolish, because telling someone this is often delicate and difficult and dubious of outcome. And far, far away from such things on the scale of impact, the question of how one should treat a prisoner who has knowledge that could save the lives of one’s fellow soldiers is very difficult.

So some moral difficulties revolve about the difficulty of doing, and some about the difficulty of knowing. I’ll call these the first and second types.

The difficulty within each kind of difficulty

One of the characteristic ways to fail at either kind of difficulty is to intentionally or semi-intentionally mistake it for the other kind of difficulty. Let’s first look at times when people manage to intentionally mistake the first for the second kind of difficulty.

Consider someone who is watching movies on Youtube, when he should be helping his wife. He might tell himself that he’s had a long day at work, and that he needs to relax, and that watching the slow-motion destruction of watermelons is a legitimate and good way to relax. He could tell himself that really, it’s a hard call, with good arguments to be made on either side; that it is a morally ambiguous, difficult-to-decide problem; and that ultimately he is going to have to come down on one side or the other with what subjectively feels like unsatisfactory evidence. This is probably, although not necessarily, mostly bullshit. But with it he can still obfuscate to himself that the moral challenge springs from pain, by acting as if the challenge springs from the difficulty of knowing.

Or think about Uncle Andrew from The Magician’s Nephew. Uncle Andrew manages to trick a child into accidentally entering an unknown and possibly dangerous world, and by doing so blackmails a second child into entering that world to rescue her. The second child, reasonably enough, asks Uncle Andrew why he is so evil. Uncle Andrew responds with a great number of vacant generalities about how what he is doing is for the good of humanity, though it is difficult; about how hard moral choices need to be made; and so on and so forth. All this is garbage; it’s clear that Uncle Andrew has given himself over to an ignorant desire for fame and power, and by doing so has failed the first kind of difficulty. But by disguising the first kind of difficulty as the second, he’s managed to hide his wickedness from himself. Doing so, of course, hurts both himself and others, as the story makes clear.

(No, I’m not committing the sin of generalizing from fictitious evidence I’m just trying to explain what I mean, so that instances you’ve experienced will come more readily to mind.)

So those were instances where, faced with the pain of doing the right thing, people try to make themselves think that the right thing is hard to find; they were cases where people intentionally mistake the first kind for the second kind of difficulty. But people also intentionally mistake the second for the first; when faced with a difficult and ambiguous situation, they hide this fact from themselves by pretending that they need merely overcome pain.

Imagine a mother who is trying to follow some particular conservative regimen to train her child–one that involves extreme physical punishment or isolation, one that is dependant on negative rather than positive reinforcement. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that she sees this discipline as tied up with her religion and entire worldview; imagine that such a discipline has actually worked fairly well in the past; imagine that now, it doesn’t seem to be working very well with one child. Suppose, at this moment, the child is being punished, crying, and has been both for some time, because the mother is trying to follow the method. This pains the mother–and she considers briefly that maybe the method is wrong. But this interferes too much with the totality of her worldview–it might invalidate many things she holds–so she mentally veers away from such a consideration. So she thinks to herself that, though it is difficult for her to do what she is doing, and the pain that she is putting her child through pains her, it is certainly right for her to do it, so she must work through the pain. Or, in short, rather than dwell on the possibility that she has stumbled across a difficulty regarding what she should do, she re-conceptualizes herself as merely in a situation where the right thing is difficult to do.

Similarly, think of someone who is in a military somewhere. Suppose that this military has, previously, fought solely just wars for the defence of the nation from genocidal maniacs; so the soldier is proud of his service in the military. But then he is reassigned to a special detachment, and which will torture prisoners. He immediately feels uneasy about this–after all, this seems wrong, and possibly ineffective as well. But this is an uncomfortable way of formulating the matter to himself–so he reformulates it by thinking “Well, though this may be difficult, and painful for me to do, I’m doing what the command structure says; and they’ve never been wrong before. So it’s my duty to work through the pain, and not be a coward.” So, as in the prior case, he reformulates a problem that is truly about what he should do so it is merely a problem of working through emotional pain.

Generally speaking, then, we can try to turn away from either kind of difficulty by thinking of it as the other kind. In each case, faced with a genuinely painful situation, we attempt to save face by pretending that it is another painful kind of situation–although, in each case, it is the kind of pain that we secretly prefer. When confronted by a situation where it is simply our duty to do something directly painful, we pretend we are faced by an ambiguous moral choice so that we can avoid this direct pain. And when confronted by an ambiguous situation where we should call into question our habits and standards of actions, we pretend we are faced by something directly painful so that we can avoid so calling ourselves into question.

A bit more meta digression

This might just be a reflection of a universal problem in all end-directed activity. Whenever pursuing any kind of goal whatsoever, one can run into painful difficulties. Sometimes you ought to just endure the pain and go through it. And sometimes the pain is a symptom of the fact that you should be doing something quite differently. And it is very hard to know which is the case.

Leaving that aside, however–although I think treating it at this level would probably help solve the problem.

The difficulties different people prefer

Edit: Warning! Perhaps excessively sweeping generalizations below!

The above all seems probably true; the below is more tentative.

It seems to me, probably, that Right / Conservative types prefer to talk about moral difficulties of the first kind, perhaps because they think mistaking the first for the second is really, really dangerous.

So they like literature about people in morally unambiguous worlds, who do the right thing which is clearly before them; worlds where people who do bad things are like Saruman or Wormtongue or Boromir; worlds where bad people are those who needlessly spin ambiguity out of situations where there is none. Reading this kind of literature decreases salience of the second kind of moral difficulty–which in turn decreases the probability that you’ll think of the second kind of problem, and try to use it to squirm out of your duty.

It also seems to me, probably, that Left / Liberal types prefer to talk about moral difficulties of the second kind, perhaps because they think mistaking the first for the second is really, really dangerous.

So they like literature about people in more ambiguous situations, who perhaps have to see the flaws in their prior moral commitments; worlds where people who do bad things are like Hathorne in the Crucible or the Grand Inquisitor in The Brother’s Karamazov; worlds where bad people are those who think they have sight, though they are blind. Reading this kind of literature decreases the salience of the first kind of moral difficulty–which in turn decreases the probability that you’ll think of the first kind of problem, and use it to avoid facing the true difficulty of your situation.

They’re both right in seeing the great danger that follows from making this mistake; I really just think this danger is unavoidable, however. There is no safe path, and people who try to bend to one direction or another because they see no danger from that quarter are less safe than those who see that there is no safe path.

PS: I think the above can (likely) be made to work on many different general moral theories (virtue ethics, utilitarianism, etc), so I don’t mean to commit myself to any in particular by the above.

I wrote this a while back, rather intentionally in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. It might mean something about interpretation, maybe. Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Not sure.

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Handbook

Roughly two months before my wedding, I read part of the Handbook. I had it for about sixteen minutes and have not seen it since; it may be that no one else will ever see it again. But, though I may have lost the last remaining work about the Handbook–save for this, a memory-blurred copy of a poor translation of an ancient account–I do not write because of regret.

It was late afternoon. My fiancée and I were in a used-book store in Washington, DC; I cannot recall the address, although I could still guide you to the place. I’m not sure if the store is still there, though: it specialized in philosophy, theology, mysticism, and hermeticism, and usually had few patrons. We were both in the back of the store, where the least movement makes the light swarm with dust. She was searching for particular works about Melanchthon; I was glancing over another section in the half-serious hope that I might find something that would help me understand Kierkegaard without actually being about him. I saw that they had some volumes of his letters; besides his letters was a thick, dusty, red-orange book in poor condition. It had been stored in excessive heat, or been printed on cheap paper, or both, because the pages were brown. I judged from the binding that it had been printed about 1910. The spine was illegible; and, moved by nothing but curiosity, I opened it.

The book fell open to the beginning of the translation. Extensive notes were scribbled in the margins, but the handwriting was bad and I did not read them: I think they were in French.

It was titled simply “Translation of Record Found at Site 53a.” It did not say from what language the record was translated. All this was likely explained in the front-matter of the book; but I neglected to search for context and instead began reading immediately. Because of the front cover, the formatting of the page, and the binding of the book, I suspect the translation was by some scholar in imperial Britain; nevertheless, this opinion was produced instantaneously in me when I opened the book, and I could not argue for it save on the basis of that first impression.

I read only a few pages. So far as I can recall, what follows is what I read. My memory has been dulled by time and further studies, but I trust my memory of this more than I would trust my memory of many other things: when I close my eyes, I can still see some of the words in their places. What follows, then, is not a verbatim record, but I am confident it keeps the sense intact. On the other hand, I am also confident that I have not reproduced the style: I regret this failure rather little, because I think that the translation itself was very poor. It was too easily intelligible to be a good translation of a text from a place remote in time, space, and culture; some of the words were obvious transformations of a word from the original language into a word with imaginary Greek or Latin roots. But it is time to stop warning you of the deficiencies of what follows and give it to you.

Translation of Record Found at Site 53a

Our history has been that of the Handbook since it was written. Thus, what I write is useless: so long as our city survives, so will the Handbook; and if some catastrophe destroys both city and Handbook, this record also will be destroyed. I hope that one of these statements is false, and thus I write, although certainly in vain.

The author of the Handbook was a poet, although some now argue that he was a god in disguise, others that he was possessed by a demon, others that he stole the Handbook from the gods or the demons, and others that he never existed. We still possess what some say are his earlier works, none of which approach the Handbook in beauty or in danger: nevertheless, even in them he managed to weave old legends and myths together into something new. Some have said his skill making these woke in him a new desire: the more he took from the past, the more he realized that his own works were only derivatives that took past themes and changed them, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

He came to want something that would not be a renewal but a creation. And he also wanted to write something that could never be treated as he and others had treated past poets: he did not wish his work to be merely the first of a long line of variations. He wanted it to say something that had never been said before and would never be said again; according to some he wished to speak a “word that would be the first and the last of its kind and of all kinds.”

The stories say that he began by trying to digest all the wisdom that had come before him. He had already memorized the poets; now he argued with the sages and the legislators; he spoke with the sailors about the ocean, with farmers about the earth, and priests about the gods. This took him twenty years. And, having sailed the seas, spoken with the wise, crossed mountains, and learned from all men, he shut himself in his estate to write.

Before he died, he ordered a slave to burn what he had produced. No one knows why. Some argue that he wished it to be burnt because it was incomplete; most disagree, arguing that a work of such beautiful, elusive order could not be incomplete. Others say that he foresaw what would happen if it were not burnt. The slave did not destroy it; the poet’s heir thanked the slave for saving the poem, before killing the slave for his disobedience. When men first began to read the Handbook, they judged it to be nothing but a beautiful poem about the creation of the world.

So it seemed at first. It was of great beauty: he had formed phrases, themes, and patterns that were both clear and infinite, like the sky on a clear day. Then he took these phrases, themes, and patterns and shattered them, mixed them, and transformed them into other things and into each other; he brought them together, split them apart, and unified them all in the end. At least, he appeared to unify them by the end; others said that in the end all things fell apart in chaos.

And soon men pointed out the poem could not simply be about one single first act of creation. It discussed everything in the universe, although it discussed each thing from the point of view of its origin–or perhaps from the point of view of its termination: battles, wars, lover’s quarrels, the founding and fall of cities, bronze statues, carvings, the despair of the philosophers, the fates of families and of stars, animals in the wilderness, storms in the sky, seams of rock in the ground, a man’s dying breath. So others pointed out that the it seemed to be simply about the universe, and about all things. Yet this explanation was still more unsatisfactory. It could not explain the unity of the work; moreover, it could not explain the hints that the author dropped, from time to time, that he was not simply describing but doing.

So others said that the author was writing about the poet’s own tasks. Others said that he was writing about creation as something in which all men, somehow, took part. Yet others said that he wrote a story that could not be finished, because the universe had not yet ended. And even then, some said that to understand the work in full would be to end the universe.

To one who has not read the Handbook, it will be difficult to see why anyone cared. But to read the handbook was to live differently; it was intriguing, obscure, confusing, obscene, and as perplexing as life; perhaps more so. Even those who cannot understand our language admit, on hearing it, that it is beautiful to hear. Bits of the poem can get locked in your head; they will jumble around, interlock, and reveal something that you did not see before. And then you must ask yourself whether you really saw what you think you saw–and, if you did, whether all the others ways of looking at it are false. To listen to the poem is to be drawn into it.

Men gave these early answers because men mostly asked the wrong questions, nearly all now think. Soon others pointed out that, because its author was known as a poet, everyone had expected a descriptive, narrative poem about how things happen. Their expectations had blinded them. So others said that one could interpret the Handbook as an ethical philosophy describing what should happen. Others said that one could interpret the Handbook as describing how to make things happen. And so soon astrologers and alchemists said that it described how all things in the universe proceed, and thus how we could alter them.

One alchemist, a student of the Handbook, said that it had revealed to him a new explosive, useful for little but mining and warfare–and useful most of all to show that his interpretation of the Handbook was true. Many who followed this alchemist’s instructions could not see, indeed, how he had drawn his powder from the pages of the book; but many others swore that he had done so in most elegant fashion. Interest in the book increased. Architects wondered if a wonderful architecture could be drawn from it; farmers examined its pages for advice on farming; generals and those who would be generals studied its pages to try to draw from it a way of bringing order from chaos.

And one man did so, or said that had done so. Our city was threatened by a league of surrounding nations, for we had grown prosperous since the Handbook was found; some said we were so because of it, some said despite it. In either case, we were soon surrounded and besieged: the engines outside hurled corpses and rocks over the city walls. None of the generals dared lead the army into battle, for defeat and subsequent death, suicide, or shame seemed certain. The counsels of despair and surrender grew more and more tempting when, as they argued in the inner citadel, the old men heard that one of our youths had seized leadership of our military and was leading them outside. The elders issued an order telling him to retreat; he only received the order after he had already crushed the enemy. He credited the Handbook with showing him how, in his and not in the Handbook’s words, “conflict holds all things together, and that is strongest that seems weakest.”

The elders, not pleased with this, ordered him executed for disobeying their orders. He executed them instead; and thus began the series of short-lived dictatorships in which we have lived till this day.

More now seem to interpret the Handbook as a guide to living. Some say that it describes the way in which, in the conflict of daily life, one can find happiness. A brand of practical philosophy grew from it; adherents to this philosophy profess to enjoy sudden misfortune even more than sudden fortune, and congratulate each other upon losing a wife or a child, catching a dangerous and incurable disease, or being robbed by highwaymen. On the other hand, there is another moral philosophy whose adherents–officially banned from the city, but who are nevertheless numerous–see such conflict as productive, as the Handbook seems to state. They therefore fire buildings, murder, and sow false rumors, in order to bring about a better world. Many of their adherents are sincere in their beliefs: after robbing someone, they often covertly plant the loot on someone else, not to make themselves appear innocent, but to promote greater uncertainty and therefore goodness in the world.

These different interpretations have spurred new interpretations of the Handbook, in turn, to explain them. Some said the Handbook said nothing: it was a mirror and a light for the reader’s mind in the act of reading, and revealed to them what they had already unconsciously conceived. Others said that the exact opposite was the case: the Handbook said everything, and said it simultaneously. Others pointed out that the two were equivalent. Others said that it had been created to point out the futility of all interpretation; others that it had been created to show the importance of interpretation for anything.

The most successful sect of recent times held that it was the work of a god. For them, the Handbook was an incompressible, unrepeatable work, written in such a way that any interpretation, other than the Handbook itself, necessarily falsified it. Because it could not be interpreted, it could not be explained, they held; and so they said that all one should do is memorize it and repeat it to oneself. This sect also believed that it also set forth a path of life, which, like the Handbook, could be seen but not explained. Arguments soon arose over what this path involved; those who defended their own position were killed by the priests of the central sect as blasphemous interpreters of what could not be interpreted. One of the priests became ruler of the city for several months, until he too was overthrown.

Others hold that it was meant simply to taunt human understanding: it had been written, not by a god, but by a demon, who had imbued it with the power to drive men mad in reading it. Others hold that it does not matter whether it was written by a god or by a demon, for the product of a divine or demonic intellect would be equally incomprehensible and equally deadly to those mortals who attempted to comprehend it. A sect arose consisting of those who refused to read it, and which would not admit any who had read it to its ranks on the grounds that they had been driven mad or possessed. The sect spread quickly, until its leader was found also to have erred and read it himself. Others, finally, held that the Handbook does not exist, and that men create its text as they read it.

I, however, have found the key to the work. It is found in the numbers of the books, compared to the the four cardinal directions and the four mean terms between them.

…

My fiancée spoke my name. I read one more sentence, then reluctantly glanced up and saw her. She held a bag of books in one hand; the sun was in her hair. So I forgot, for the moment, the Handbook; I closed the book, kissed her, took the books from her, and slipped the translation into her bag so we could buy them all together. We bought the books, put the bag in the back of my car, and went to dinner. Later, when I dropped her off, I forgot to retrieve the book from the bag, as I was very in love.

I remembered my mistake the next day, and asked her about it, but she said there was no unfamiliar book in the bag. I have examined her apartment–now our apartment–the floor of my car, and even the old bookstore, but I have found nothing.