Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The New York Times
August 25, 2009
Findings
Guilt and Atonement on the Path to Adulthood
By JOHN TIERNEY
Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home.
Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to be in fine condition, except that you’ve secretly rigged it to break spectacularly as soon as the child handles it.
When your precious toy falls apart, express regret by mildly saying, “Oh, my.” Then sit still and observe the child.
The point is not to permanently traumatize anyone — the researchers who performed this experiment quickly followed it with a ritual absolving the child of blame. But first, for 60 seconds after the toy broke, the psychologists recorded every reaction as the toddlers squirmed, avoided the experimenter’s gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands.
It was part of a long-term study at the University of Iowa to isolate the effects of two distinct mechanisms that help children become considerate, conscientious adults. One mechanism, measured in other experiments testing toddlers’ ability to resist temptations, is called effortful self-control — how well you can think ahead and deliberately suppress impulsive behavior that hurts yourself and others.
The other mechanism is less rational and is especially valuable for children and adults with poor self-control. It’s the feeling measured in that broken-toy experiment: guilt, or what children diagnose as a “sinking feeling in the tummy.”
Guilt in its many varieties — Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. — has often gotten a bad rap, but psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness. Too little guilt clearly has a downside — most obviously in sociopaths who feel no remorse, but also in kindergartners who smack other children and snatch their toys. Children typically start to feel guilt in their second year of life, says Grazyna Kochanska, who has been tracking children’s development for two decades in her laboratory at the University of Iowa. Some children’s temperament makes them prone to guilt, she said, and some become more guilt-prone thanks to parents and other early influences.
“Children respond with acute and intense tension and negative emotions when they are tempted to misbehave, or even anticipate violating norms and rules,” Dr. Kochanska said. “They remember, often subconsciously, how awful they have felt in the past.”
In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.
“If you have high guilt,” Dr. Kochanska said, “it’s such a rapid response system, and the sensation is so incredibly unpleasant, that effortful control doesn’t much matter.”
But self-control was critical to children in the studies who were low in guilt, because they still behaved well if they had high self-control.
“Even if you don’t have that sinking feeling in the tummy, you can still suppress impulses,” Dr. Kochanska said. “You can stop and remember what your parents told you. You can stop and reflect on the consequences for others and yourself.”
But what if your child lacks both self-control and guilt? What can you do? And should you feel guilty for doing a lousy job of parenting?
Well, you could blame yourself, although researchers haven’t been able to link any particular pattern of parenting to children’s levels of guilt, says June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University. But Dr. Tangney, who has studied guilt extensively in both children and adults, including prison inmates, does have some advice for parents. (To offer your thoughts on parents and guilt, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“The key element is the difference between shame and guilt,” Dr. Tangney says. Shame, the feeling that you’re a bad person because of bad behavior, has repeatedly been found to be unhealthy, she says, whereas guilty feelings focused on the behavior itself can be productive. But it’s not enough, Dr. Tangney says, for parents just to follow the old admonition to criticize the sin, not the sinner. “Most young children,” Dr. Tangney said, “really don’t hear the distinction between ‘Johnny, you did a bad thing’ versus ‘Johnny, you’re a bad boy.’ They hear ‘bad kid.’ I think a more active, directive approach is needed.”
She recommends focusing not just on the bad deed, but more important, on how to make amends. “Both children and adults can be surprisingly clueless about whether and how to make things right,” Dr. Tangney said. “Little kids are overwhelmed by the spilled mess of milk on the floor. Parents can teach and support them to say ‘I’m sorry’ and to clean it up, maybe leaving the kitchen a little cleaner than it was before.”
That was the same atonement strategy, by the way, followed by the experimenters in Iowa who tricked the children with the broken toy. After the 60 seconds of angst, the children were asked what had happened and then were told that the toy could be easily repaired. The researcher would then leave the room with the broken toy and return in half a minute with an intact replica of it. The experimenter took the blame for having caused the damage, reassuring the children that it wasn’t their fault and that the toy was now as good as new anyway.
No harm, no foul, no guilt. If only the rest of their lives were so simple.
Further Reading
Guilt and effortful control: Two mechanisms that prevent disruptive developmental trajectories. G. Kochanska, R.A. Barry, N.B. Jimenez, A.L. Hollatz, J. Woodward. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009.
Guilt in Young Children: development, determinants, and relations with a broader system of standards. G. Kochanska, J.N. Gross, M.H. Lin. Child Developoment, 2002.
On the importance of distinguishing shame from guilt: Relations to problematic alcohol and drug use. R.L. Dearing, J. Stuewig, J.P. Tangney. Addictive Behaviors, 2005.
August 25, 2009
Findings
Guilt and Atonement on the Path to Adulthood
By JOHN TIERNEY
Here is an experiment you don’t want to try at home.
Show a toy — a doll, say, or a model boat — to a toddler and explain that it it’s something special you’ve had since you were little. Ask the child to be “very careful” with it. Hand over the toy, which appears to be in fine condition, except that you’ve secretly rigged it to break spectacularly as soon as the child handles it.
When your precious toy falls apart, express regret by mildly saying, “Oh, my.” Then sit still and observe the child.
The point is not to permanently traumatize anyone — the researchers who performed this experiment quickly followed it with a ritual absolving the child of blame. But first, for 60 seconds after the toy broke, the psychologists recorded every reaction as the toddlers squirmed, avoided the experimenter’s gaze, hunched their shoulders, hugged themselves and covered their faces with their hands.
It was part of a long-term study at the University of Iowa to isolate the effects of two distinct mechanisms that help children become considerate, conscientious adults. One mechanism, measured in other experiments testing toddlers’ ability to resist temptations, is called effortful self-control — how well you can think ahead and deliberately suppress impulsive behavior that hurts yourself and others.
The other mechanism is less rational and is especially valuable for children and adults with poor self-control. It’s the feeling measured in that broken-toy experiment: guilt, or what children diagnose as a “sinking feeling in the tummy.”
Guilt in its many varieties — Puritan, Catholic, Jewish, etc. — has often gotten a bad rap, but psychologists keep finding evidence of its usefulness. Too little guilt clearly has a downside — most obviously in sociopaths who feel no remorse, but also in kindergartners who smack other children and snatch their toys. Children typically start to feel guilt in their second year of life, says Grazyna Kochanska, who has been tracking children’s development for two decades in her laboratory at the University of Iowa. Some children’s temperament makes them prone to guilt, she said, and some become more guilt-prone thanks to parents and other early influences.
“Children respond with acute and intense tension and negative emotions when they are tempted to misbehave, or even anticipate violating norms and rules,” Dr. Kochanska said. “They remember, often subconsciously, how awful they have felt in the past.”
In Dr. Kochanska’s latest studies, published in the August issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, she and colleagues found that 2-year-olds who showed more chagrin during the broken-toy experiment went on to have fewer behavioral problems over the next five years. That was true even for the ones who scored low on tests measuring their ability to focus on tasks and suppress strong desires to act impulsively.
“If you have high guilt,” Dr. Kochanska said, “it’s such a rapid response system, and the sensation is so incredibly unpleasant, that effortful control doesn’t much matter.”
But self-control was critical to children in the studies who were low in guilt, because they still behaved well if they had high self-control.
“Even if you don’t have that sinking feeling in the tummy, you can still suppress impulses,” Dr. Kochanska said. “You can stop and remember what your parents told you. You can stop and reflect on the consequences for others and yourself.”
But what if your child lacks both self-control and guilt? What can you do? And should you feel guilty for doing a lousy job of parenting?
Well, you could blame yourself, although researchers haven’t been able to link any particular pattern of parenting to children’s levels of guilt, says June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University. But Dr. Tangney, who has studied guilt extensively in both children and adults, including prison inmates, does have some advice for parents. (To offer your thoughts on parents and guilt, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“The key element is the difference between shame and guilt,” Dr. Tangney says. Shame, the feeling that you’re a bad person because of bad behavior, has repeatedly been found to be unhealthy, she says, whereas guilty feelings focused on the behavior itself can be productive. But it’s not enough, Dr. Tangney says, for parents just to follow the old admonition to criticize the sin, not the sinner. “Most young children,” Dr. Tangney said, “really don’t hear the distinction between ‘Johnny, you did a bad thing’ versus ‘Johnny, you’re a bad boy.’ They hear ‘bad kid.’ I think a more active, directive approach is needed.”
She recommends focusing not just on the bad deed, but more important, on how to make amends. “Both children and adults can be surprisingly clueless about whether and how to make things right,” Dr. Tangney said. “Little kids are overwhelmed by the spilled mess of milk on the floor. Parents can teach and support them to say ‘I’m sorry’ and to clean it up, maybe leaving the kitchen a little cleaner than it was before.”
That was the same atonement strategy, by the way, followed by the experimenters in Iowa who tricked the children with the broken toy. After the 60 seconds of angst, the children were asked what had happened and then were told that the toy could be easily repaired. The researcher would then leave the room with the broken toy and return in half a minute with an intact replica of it. The experimenter took the blame for having caused the damage, reassuring the children that it wasn’t their fault and that the toy was now as good as new anyway.
No harm, no foul, no guilt. If only the rest of their lives were so simple.
Further Reading
Guilt and effortful control: Two mechanisms that prevent disruptive developmental trajectories. G. Kochanska, R.A. Barry, N.B. Jimenez, A.L. Hollatz, J. Woodward. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009.
Guilt in Young Children: development, determinants, and relations with a broader system of standards. G. Kochanska, J.N. Gross, M.H. Lin. Child Developoment, 2002.
On the importance of distinguishing shame from guilt: Relations to problematic alcohol and drug use. R.L. Dearing, J. Stuewig, J.P. Tangney. Addictive Behaviors, 2005.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
NYT
August 19, 2009, 9:30 pm
Self, Meditating
By Robert Wright
This Friday I’m heading up to rural Massachusetts in hopes of getting born again — again.
Six years ago, in the same locale, I attended my first and only silent meditation retreat. It was just about the most amazing experience of my life. Certainly it seemed more dramatic than my very first born-again experience — my response to a southern Baptist altar call as a child, which I wrote about in this space last month.
I came away from that week feeling I had found a new kind of happiness, deeper than the kind I’d always pursued. I also came away a better person — just ask my wife. (And neither of those things lasted — just ask my wife.)
So with the retreat approaching, I should be as eager as a kid on Christmas Eve, right? Well, no. Meditation retreats — at this place, at least — are no picnic. You don’t follow your bliss. You learn not to follow your bliss, to let your bliss follow you. And you learn this arduously. If at the end you feel like you’re leaving Shangri-La, that’s because the beginning felt like Guantanamo.
We spent 5.5 hours per day in sitting meditation, 5.5 hours per day in walking meditation. By day three I was feeling achy, far from nirvana and really, really sick of the place.
I was sick of my 5 a.m. “yogi job” (vacuuming), I was sick of the bland vegetarian food, and I wasn’t especially fond of all those Buddhists with those self-satisfied looks on their faces, walking around serenely like they knew something I didn’t know (which, it turns out, they did).
Yes, the payoff was huge. But it’s unlikely to be as big this time around. It’s famously hard to replicate the rapture of your first meditation retreat. Last time, during the first half of the week, my apparently prescient unconscious mind kept filling my head with that old song by Foreigner, “It feels like the first time, like it never will again.” I’ve never especially liked that song, and during those first few days it joined the list of things I hated.
What I hated above all was that I wasn’t succeeding as a meditator. Now, as the two leaders of this retreat were known to point out, you’re not supposed to think of “succeeding” at meditating. And you’re not supposed to blame yourself for failing. And blah, blah, blah.
Well, they were right: To “succeed” I really did have to quit pursuing success, and quit blaming myself for failing. And some other things had to go right.
And what was “success” like? Well, to start at the less spiritual, more sensual end: By the time I left, eating the food I’d initially disdained ranked up there with above-average sex. I’m not exaggerating by much. When I first got there, I didn’t understand why some people were closing their eyes while eating. By the end of the retreat, I was closing mine. The better to focus on the source of my ecstasy. I wasn’t just living in the moment — I was luxuriating in it.
Also, my view of weeds changed. There’s a kind of weed that I had spent years killing, sometimes manually, sometimes with chemicals. On a walk one day I looked down at one of those weeds and it looked as beautiful as any other plant. Why, I wondered, had I bought into the “weed” label? Why had I so harshly judged an innocent plant?
If this sounds crazy to you, you should hear how crazy it sounds to me. I’m not the weed-hugging type, I assure you.
And as long as we’re on the subject of crazy, there was my moment of bonding with a lizard. I looked at this lizard and watched it react to local stimuli and thought: I’m in the same boat as that lizard — born without asking to be born, trying to make sense of things, and far from getting the whole picture.
I mean, sure, I know more than the lizard — like the fact that I exist and the fact that I evolved by natural selection. But my knowledge is, like the lizard’s, hemmed in by the fact that my brain is a product of evolution, designed to perform mundane tasks, to react to local stimuli, not to understand the true nature of things. And — here’s the crazy part — I kind of loved that lizard. A little bit, for a little while.
Whether I had made major moral progress by learning to empathize with a lizard, let alone a weed, is open to debate. The more important part of my expanding circle of affinity involved people — specifically, my fellow meditators.
At the beginning of the retreat, looking around the meditation hall, I had sized people up, making lots of little judgments, sometimes negative, on the basis of no good evidence. (Re: guy wearing Juilliard t-shirt and exhibiting mild symptoms of theatricality: Well, aren’t we special?) By the end of the retreat I was less inclined toward judgment, especially the harsh kind. And days after the retreat, while riding the monorail to the Newark airport I found myself doing something I never do — striking up a conversation with strangers. Nice strangers!
My various epiphanies may sound trite, like a caricature of pop-Buddhist enlightenment. And, presented in snapshot form, that’s what I’m afraid they’re destined to sound like. All I can say is that there is a bigger philosophical picture that these snapshots are part of, and that I had made some progress in apprehending it by the end of the retreat.
The “apprehension” isn’t just intellectual. This retreat was in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes gaining insight into the way your mind works. Vipassana has a reputation for being one of the more intellectual Buddhist traditions, but, even so, part of the idea is to gain that insight in a way that isn’t entirely intellectual. Or, at least, in a way that is sometimes hard to describe.
On Thursday night, the fifth night of the retreat, about 30 minutes into a meditation session, I had an experience that falls into that category, so I won’t try to describe it. I’ll just say that it involved seeing the structure of my mind — experiencing the structure of my mind — in a new way, and in a way that had great meaning for me. And, happily, this experience was accompanied by a stunningly powerful blast of bliss. All told, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more dramatic moment.
This retreat is coming at a good time for me. In June I published a book that I’ve been feverishly promoting. Publishing and promoting a book can bring out the non-Buddhist in a person. For example, when book reviewers make judgments about your book, you may make judgments about the reviewers — ungenerous judgments, even.
Also, you’re inclined to pursue the fruits of your activity — like book sales — rather than just experience the activity. Checking your Amazon ranking every 7 minutes would qualify as what Buddhists call “attachment.” And attachment is bad. (Oops: I just made a judgment about attachment.)
In fact, in general I’ve been living like someone who hasn’t been meditating with much regularity or dedication, who has strayed from the straight and narrow. It’s time to start anew.
At the end of my first retreat, still reeling from that Thursday-night experience, I told one of the meditation teachers about it. He nodded casually, as if the insight I’d had was one of the standard stops on the path to enlightenment — but far from the end of the path. Through truly intensive meditation, he said, the transformation of your view of your mind — and your view of your mind’s relationship to reality, and your view of reality itself — can go much deeper than I’d gone.
That would be interesting! But this week I’d settle for half as deep.
Robert Wright
Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “The Moral Animal,” “Nonzero” and, most recently, “The Evolution of God.”
August 19, 2009, 9:30 pm
Self, Meditating
By Robert Wright
This Friday I’m heading up to rural Massachusetts in hopes of getting born again — again.
Six years ago, in the same locale, I attended my first and only silent meditation retreat. It was just about the most amazing experience of my life. Certainly it seemed more dramatic than my very first born-again experience — my response to a southern Baptist altar call as a child, which I wrote about in this space last month.
I came away from that week feeling I had found a new kind of happiness, deeper than the kind I’d always pursued. I also came away a better person — just ask my wife. (And neither of those things lasted — just ask my wife.)
So with the retreat approaching, I should be as eager as a kid on Christmas Eve, right? Well, no. Meditation retreats — at this place, at least — are no picnic. You don’t follow your bliss. You learn not to follow your bliss, to let your bliss follow you. And you learn this arduously. If at the end you feel like you’re leaving Shangri-La, that’s because the beginning felt like Guantanamo.
We spent 5.5 hours per day in sitting meditation, 5.5 hours per day in walking meditation. By day three I was feeling achy, far from nirvana and really, really sick of the place.
I was sick of my 5 a.m. “yogi job” (vacuuming), I was sick of the bland vegetarian food, and I wasn’t especially fond of all those Buddhists with those self-satisfied looks on their faces, walking around serenely like they knew something I didn’t know (which, it turns out, they did).
Yes, the payoff was huge. But it’s unlikely to be as big this time around. It’s famously hard to replicate the rapture of your first meditation retreat. Last time, during the first half of the week, my apparently prescient unconscious mind kept filling my head with that old song by Foreigner, “It feels like the first time, like it never will again.” I’ve never especially liked that song, and during those first few days it joined the list of things I hated.
What I hated above all was that I wasn’t succeeding as a meditator. Now, as the two leaders of this retreat were known to point out, you’re not supposed to think of “succeeding” at meditating. And you’re not supposed to blame yourself for failing. And blah, blah, blah.
Well, they were right: To “succeed” I really did have to quit pursuing success, and quit blaming myself for failing. And some other things had to go right.
And what was “success” like? Well, to start at the less spiritual, more sensual end: By the time I left, eating the food I’d initially disdained ranked up there with above-average sex. I’m not exaggerating by much. When I first got there, I didn’t understand why some people were closing their eyes while eating. By the end of the retreat, I was closing mine. The better to focus on the source of my ecstasy. I wasn’t just living in the moment — I was luxuriating in it.
Also, my view of weeds changed. There’s a kind of weed that I had spent years killing, sometimes manually, sometimes with chemicals. On a walk one day I looked down at one of those weeds and it looked as beautiful as any other plant. Why, I wondered, had I bought into the “weed” label? Why had I so harshly judged an innocent plant?
If this sounds crazy to you, you should hear how crazy it sounds to me. I’m not the weed-hugging type, I assure you.
And as long as we’re on the subject of crazy, there was my moment of bonding with a lizard. I looked at this lizard and watched it react to local stimuli and thought: I’m in the same boat as that lizard — born without asking to be born, trying to make sense of things, and far from getting the whole picture.
I mean, sure, I know more than the lizard — like the fact that I exist and the fact that I evolved by natural selection. But my knowledge is, like the lizard’s, hemmed in by the fact that my brain is a product of evolution, designed to perform mundane tasks, to react to local stimuli, not to understand the true nature of things. And — here’s the crazy part — I kind of loved that lizard. A little bit, for a little while.
Whether I had made major moral progress by learning to empathize with a lizard, let alone a weed, is open to debate. The more important part of my expanding circle of affinity involved people — specifically, my fellow meditators.
At the beginning of the retreat, looking around the meditation hall, I had sized people up, making lots of little judgments, sometimes negative, on the basis of no good evidence. (Re: guy wearing Juilliard t-shirt and exhibiting mild symptoms of theatricality: Well, aren’t we special?) By the end of the retreat I was less inclined toward judgment, especially the harsh kind. And days after the retreat, while riding the monorail to the Newark airport I found myself doing something I never do — striking up a conversation with strangers. Nice strangers!
My various epiphanies may sound trite, like a caricature of pop-Buddhist enlightenment. And, presented in snapshot form, that’s what I’m afraid they’re destined to sound like. All I can say is that there is a bigger philosophical picture that these snapshots are part of, and that I had made some progress in apprehending it by the end of the retreat.
The “apprehension” isn’t just intellectual. This retreat was in the Vipassana tradition, which emphasizes gaining insight into the way your mind works. Vipassana has a reputation for being one of the more intellectual Buddhist traditions, but, even so, part of the idea is to gain that insight in a way that isn’t entirely intellectual. Or, at least, in a way that is sometimes hard to describe.
On Thursday night, the fifth night of the retreat, about 30 minutes into a meditation session, I had an experience that falls into that category, so I won’t try to describe it. I’ll just say that it involved seeing the structure of my mind — experiencing the structure of my mind — in a new way, and in a way that had great meaning for me. And, happily, this experience was accompanied by a stunningly powerful blast of bliss. All told, I don’t think I’ve ever had a more dramatic moment.
This retreat is coming at a good time for me. In June I published a book that I’ve been feverishly promoting. Publishing and promoting a book can bring out the non-Buddhist in a person. For example, when book reviewers make judgments about your book, you may make judgments about the reviewers — ungenerous judgments, even.
Also, you’re inclined to pursue the fruits of your activity — like book sales — rather than just experience the activity. Checking your Amazon ranking every 7 minutes would qualify as what Buddhists call “attachment.” And attachment is bad. (Oops: I just made a judgment about attachment.)
In fact, in general I’ve been living like someone who hasn’t been meditating with much regularity or dedication, who has strayed from the straight and narrow. It’s time to start anew.
At the end of my first retreat, still reeling from that Thursday-night experience, I told one of the meditation teachers about it. He nodded casually, as if the insight I’d had was one of the standard stops on the path to enlightenment — but far from the end of the path. Through truly intensive meditation, he said, the transformation of your view of your mind — and your view of your mind’s relationship to reality, and your view of reality itself — can go much deeper than I’d gone.
That would be interesting! But this week I’d settle for half as deep.
Robert Wright
Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “The Moral Animal,” “Nonzero” and, most recently, “The Evolution of God.”
The New York Times
August 19, 2009
Critic’s Notebook
What They Brought to the Table
By FRANK BRUNI
FOR proof that Communism was bound to fail, pull a chair up to the table of a restaurant critic and his three guests. Then watch what happens after he tells them what to order, the food has been delivered, and everyone begins to take bites of everything, making a broad sample of the menu.
Jane tries some of the gnocchi Dick has passed to her, and curls her lip.
“My pork loin is much, much better,” she proclaims, with a resounding emphasis on the word “my” and no hint of recognition that the loin wasn’t her pick: the critic randomly assigned it to her.
“True,” Mary chimes in, affirming the pork, only to add, “My short ribs are the best thing on the table.”
“Well, I love my gnocchi,” Dick counters, possessive and prickly. He’s defending more than dumplings. It’s his very discernment that he’s standing up for, even though it never came into play. And he accentuates his pique by wresting the gnocchi from Jane. Like a kid in the schoolyard, he wants his ball back.
All in all, the scene — a composite of dozens like it — is a case study in the potent impulse toward ownership. And it’s just one of many lessons in human nature and behavior provided by the restaurant dinner table.
My five-plus years of nightly restaurant visits with guests in tow have exposed me to more than an array of amazing food. They’ve given me a special vantage point onto people’s temperaments and tics, especially (but not solely) in regard to eating and food. On top of a culinary education, I have gotten something of a psychological, sociological and anthropological one.
I learned that the world is divided into the hoarders and the sharers, and into the perpetually slighted and the eternally grateful; that the diners who eat the least are the ones who pretend to eat the most; and that no manner of advance instruction can prevent guests from saying your real name and even referencing your last three reviews loudly, repeatedly and in direct earshot of the restaurant manager. There’s a reason most people don’t go into the spying business. They have no aptitude for it.
I learned that the desire to turn everything into a competition runs just as deep as the impulse toward ownership, at least in America.
“First, second, third, fourth” was a string of words I heard time and again, as someone at the table took it upon himself or herself to rank the appetizers in precise order of appeal — and then to do the same, 45 minutes later, with the entrees. For many tablemates, saying yea or nay to a dish wasn’t judgment enough. They itched to dole out medals: gold to the squid à la plancha, bronze to the beets.
I learned, too, that there is little sense to the eating rules many people adopt and to the peeves and peccadilloes they nurse.
My friend K. swore off veal, citing her sorrow for calves that would never grow to be (slaughtered) steers, but she ate young chicken and the littlest of lambs. She also ate foie gras, though animal rights advocates have protested the treatment of the ducks used to make it more vociferously than they have the lot of those calves.
My frequent companion T. ordered foie gras whenever he had the chance and thrilled to the presence of calf’s liver on a menu, but he spurned sweetbreads, on account of their being organ meat.
I had more than a few companions who rejected food based solely on its texture (eggplant dip), shape (tendrils of octopus) or color (uni).
And while my friend M. had no complaint when duck, lamb or pork came to the table in slices, she fumed if her steak arrived as anything other than one solid slab of meat, feeling insulted and infantilized by the cutting of it before it reached her. People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want.
Dining with a critic doesn’t exactly facilitate that. I typically ate out with three other people, so a large number of dishes could be tried, and began each meal by telling my guests which dishes should or shouldn’t be ordered, in accordance with my progress through the menu on any earlier visits.
Reactions ranged.
“So I can’t get the steak?” my friend R. said one night, his pout so pronounced he was like a male Jolie: Mangelina. I apologized. I explained: I’d capitulated to the last steak maniac, on the second visit to the restaurant, and there really, truly, honestly wasn’t any way to justify a third examination of the steak.
“Oh, O.K., I understand,” he sighed, not sounding O.K. at all, and making me feel like the Grinch Who Stole Sirloin.
Many guests, I could tell, experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance over being treated to a meal in a restaurant — which is, after all, a theater of pleasure — but having to follow the precise, constricting script of a petty culinary dictator (that would be me). Maybe the hoarders were just struggling with that confusion.
Then again, maybe not.
When they liked the dish in front of them, they’d forget that they were supposed to eat no more than a quarter of it, to preserve enough for the other three diners, including me, to have a good taste.
“Oh, I lost track!” they’d say as they passed a nearly empty plate.
The sharers, in contrast, would be so frightened of consuming so much as a strand of angel hair beyond their allotment that they’d merely stare at the dish, visibly petrified.
I’d say: “Please, please have some. You didn’t have any.”
“But I did,” they’d usually protest. “Didn’t you see?” In fact I had been watching, and my observation, coupled with the survival of a full portion on the plate, was how I knew that nothing had been consumed.
The pretend eaters who amused me the most, though, were the skinny men and women who had developed a whole theatrical routine — a pantomime of gluttony — to obscure their asceticism. It wasn’t enough for them to be thin; they had to pretend that it was a fluke of metabolism, magical and effortless.
My friend A. was like that. I told her that we were going to a new steakhouse in Brooklyn.
“Steak!” she exulted. “Excellent! You’re too good to me!”
Reading the menu, she homed in on what promised to be the heftiest cut of beef: “Can we get the porterhouse for two? Oh please, oh please! And the fries? I’m dying to try the fries.”
We got the porterhouse, we got the fries, she loaded up her plate, and then she commenced such frantic knife and fork movements that a veritable cloud of dust rose around her — I was reminded of a Road Runner cartoon.
When the dust settled 15 minutes later, I took a close look at her plate, and almost nothing was missing. The food had just been reconstituted and rearranged, a Picasso of its former self.
Some companions kept track and kept count. They noticed if the four restaurants they’d accompanied me to all wound up with one-star ratings, and they wondered whom I’d taken to the restaurant that just got three stars. Guilt more than girth is a critic’s fiercest enemy.
But dining with a critic just as frequently brought out the protective, gallant side of friends. One frequent review accomplice noticed early on, and without my saying anything, that I felt abashed and anxious about my role as portion policeman. So he did the job himself, reprimanding hoarders and reassuring sharers. I, in turn, tried not to throw more one-star than two-star restaurants his way.
Companions were fixated on stars, their obsessions underscoring a human itch to codify, categorize, rank and render a verdict.
Often, toward the end of a meal, I’d catch one of them making odd, half-hidden hand signals in his or her lap, flashing one finger, then two — or two fingers, then three — while watching for me to shake or nod my head. The companion wanted to know what the star rating was likely to be. Sometimes I obliged, but usually not.
But what fascinated me most was the inherent resistance to setting aside individual will for communal mission. When a meal began, I’d always explain that everything we ordered would be shared equally, so it didn’t matter who actually asked for the lobster versus who took charge of the vegetarian cassoulet.
This explanation seldom made a difference.
“Remember, I don’t eat pork,” L. said one night when I asked if she’d be the one to request the pork entree I needed to try.
“Yes, yes, of course,” I sputtered apologetically. While the pork would rotate to her at some point, it seemed fair enough that she not begin with it. “You ask for the salmon. I’ll ask for the pork.”
Then I turned to another tablemate and instructed him to order the nightly pasta special.
“You’ve already tried the rib-eye on another visit?” he asked, clearly bummed to be missing the steak. No one ever, ever wanted to miss the steak.
I told him that I had not, in fact, tried the rib-eye — “I saved it for all of you tonight!” I crowed — but was going to assign it to our fourth tablemate, who then piped up to say that he would be more than willing to trade it away for the pasta if that was best. He didn’t sound willing at all.
“Remember, you’re all just temporary custodians of the dish you’re asking for,” I said, “and won’t eat more or less than a quarter of what’s randomly in front of you.” I was putting the hoarders on notice and the sharers at ease.
I was also, apparently, bucking human nature. Each guest seemed to think that what he or she wound up ordering was a matter of identity, a reflection of self. And more often than not, he or she would go on to describe and defend that dish as the very best.
Even if it wasn’t the steak.
August 19, 2009
Critic’s Notebook
What They Brought to the Table
By FRANK BRUNI
FOR proof that Communism was bound to fail, pull a chair up to the table of a restaurant critic and his three guests. Then watch what happens after he tells them what to order, the food has been delivered, and everyone begins to take bites of everything, making a broad sample of the menu.
Jane tries some of the gnocchi Dick has passed to her, and curls her lip.
“My pork loin is much, much better,” she proclaims, with a resounding emphasis on the word “my” and no hint of recognition that the loin wasn’t her pick: the critic randomly assigned it to her.
“True,” Mary chimes in, affirming the pork, only to add, “My short ribs are the best thing on the table.”
“Well, I love my gnocchi,” Dick counters, possessive and prickly. He’s defending more than dumplings. It’s his very discernment that he’s standing up for, even though it never came into play. And he accentuates his pique by wresting the gnocchi from Jane. Like a kid in the schoolyard, he wants his ball back.
All in all, the scene — a composite of dozens like it — is a case study in the potent impulse toward ownership. And it’s just one of many lessons in human nature and behavior provided by the restaurant dinner table.
My five-plus years of nightly restaurant visits with guests in tow have exposed me to more than an array of amazing food. They’ve given me a special vantage point onto people’s temperaments and tics, especially (but not solely) in regard to eating and food. On top of a culinary education, I have gotten something of a psychological, sociological and anthropological one.
I learned that the world is divided into the hoarders and the sharers, and into the perpetually slighted and the eternally grateful; that the diners who eat the least are the ones who pretend to eat the most; and that no manner of advance instruction can prevent guests from saying your real name and even referencing your last three reviews loudly, repeatedly and in direct earshot of the restaurant manager. There’s a reason most people don’t go into the spying business. They have no aptitude for it.
I learned that the desire to turn everything into a competition runs just as deep as the impulse toward ownership, at least in America.
“First, second, third, fourth” was a string of words I heard time and again, as someone at the table took it upon himself or herself to rank the appetizers in precise order of appeal — and then to do the same, 45 minutes later, with the entrees. For many tablemates, saying yea or nay to a dish wasn’t judgment enough. They itched to dole out medals: gold to the squid à la plancha, bronze to the beets.
I learned, too, that there is little sense to the eating rules many people adopt and to the peeves and peccadilloes they nurse.
My friend K. swore off veal, citing her sorrow for calves that would never grow to be (slaughtered) steers, but she ate young chicken and the littlest of lambs. She also ate foie gras, though animal rights advocates have protested the treatment of the ducks used to make it more vociferously than they have the lot of those calves.
My frequent companion T. ordered foie gras whenever he had the chance and thrilled to the presence of calf’s liver on a menu, but he spurned sweetbreads, on account of their being organ meat.
I had more than a few companions who rejected food based solely on its texture (eggplant dip), shape (tendrils of octopus) or color (uni).
And while my friend M. had no complaint when duck, lamb or pork came to the table in slices, she fumed if her steak arrived as anything other than one solid slab of meat, feeling insulted and infantilized by the cutting of it before it reached her. People are as strange about eating as they are about love. They want what they want.
Dining with a critic doesn’t exactly facilitate that. I typically ate out with three other people, so a large number of dishes could be tried, and began each meal by telling my guests which dishes should or shouldn’t be ordered, in accordance with my progress through the menu on any earlier visits.
Reactions ranged.
“So I can’t get the steak?” my friend R. said one night, his pout so pronounced he was like a male Jolie: Mangelina. I apologized. I explained: I’d capitulated to the last steak maniac, on the second visit to the restaurant, and there really, truly, honestly wasn’t any way to justify a third examination of the steak.
“Oh, O.K., I understand,” he sighed, not sounding O.K. at all, and making me feel like the Grinch Who Stole Sirloin.
Many guests, I could tell, experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance over being treated to a meal in a restaurant — which is, after all, a theater of pleasure — but having to follow the precise, constricting script of a petty culinary dictator (that would be me). Maybe the hoarders were just struggling with that confusion.
Then again, maybe not.
When they liked the dish in front of them, they’d forget that they were supposed to eat no more than a quarter of it, to preserve enough for the other three diners, including me, to have a good taste.
“Oh, I lost track!” they’d say as they passed a nearly empty plate.
The sharers, in contrast, would be so frightened of consuming so much as a strand of angel hair beyond their allotment that they’d merely stare at the dish, visibly petrified.
I’d say: “Please, please have some. You didn’t have any.”
“But I did,” they’d usually protest. “Didn’t you see?” In fact I had been watching, and my observation, coupled with the survival of a full portion on the plate, was how I knew that nothing had been consumed.
The pretend eaters who amused me the most, though, were the skinny men and women who had developed a whole theatrical routine — a pantomime of gluttony — to obscure their asceticism. It wasn’t enough for them to be thin; they had to pretend that it was a fluke of metabolism, magical and effortless.
My friend A. was like that. I told her that we were going to a new steakhouse in Brooklyn.
“Steak!” she exulted. “Excellent! You’re too good to me!”
Reading the menu, she homed in on what promised to be the heftiest cut of beef: “Can we get the porterhouse for two? Oh please, oh please! And the fries? I’m dying to try the fries.”
We got the porterhouse, we got the fries, she loaded up her plate, and then she commenced such frantic knife and fork movements that a veritable cloud of dust rose around her — I was reminded of a Road Runner cartoon.
When the dust settled 15 minutes later, I took a close look at her plate, and almost nothing was missing. The food had just been reconstituted and rearranged, a Picasso of its former self.
Some companions kept track and kept count. They noticed if the four restaurants they’d accompanied me to all wound up with one-star ratings, and they wondered whom I’d taken to the restaurant that just got three stars. Guilt more than girth is a critic’s fiercest enemy.
But dining with a critic just as frequently brought out the protective, gallant side of friends. One frequent review accomplice noticed early on, and without my saying anything, that I felt abashed and anxious about my role as portion policeman. So he did the job himself, reprimanding hoarders and reassuring sharers. I, in turn, tried not to throw more one-star than two-star restaurants his way.
Companions were fixated on stars, their obsessions underscoring a human itch to codify, categorize, rank and render a verdict.
Often, toward the end of a meal, I’d catch one of them making odd, half-hidden hand signals in his or her lap, flashing one finger, then two — or two fingers, then three — while watching for me to shake or nod my head. The companion wanted to know what the star rating was likely to be. Sometimes I obliged, but usually not.
But what fascinated me most was the inherent resistance to setting aside individual will for communal mission. When a meal began, I’d always explain that everything we ordered would be shared equally, so it didn’t matter who actually asked for the lobster versus who took charge of the vegetarian cassoulet.
This explanation seldom made a difference.
“Remember, I don’t eat pork,” L. said one night when I asked if she’d be the one to request the pork entree I needed to try.
“Yes, yes, of course,” I sputtered apologetically. While the pork would rotate to her at some point, it seemed fair enough that she not begin with it. “You ask for the salmon. I’ll ask for the pork.”
Then I turned to another tablemate and instructed him to order the nightly pasta special.
“You’ve already tried the rib-eye on another visit?” he asked, clearly bummed to be missing the steak. No one ever, ever wanted to miss the steak.
I told him that I had not, in fact, tried the rib-eye — “I saved it for all of you tonight!” I crowed — but was going to assign it to our fourth tablemate, who then piped up to say that he would be more than willing to trade it away for the pasta if that was best. He didn’t sound willing at all.
“Remember, you’re all just temporary custodians of the dish you’re asking for,” I said, “and won’t eat more or less than a quarter of what’s randomly in front of you.” I was putting the hoarders on notice and the sharers at ease.
I was also, apparently, bucking human nature. Each guest seemed to think that what he or she wound up ordering was a matter of identity, a reflection of self. And more often than not, he or she would go on to describe and defend that dish as the very best.
Even if it wasn’t the steak.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The New York Times
August 18, 2009
Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers
By BENEDICT CAREY
PHILADELPHIA — The Army plans to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in emotional resiliency, military officials say.
The training, the first of its kind in the military, is meant to improve performance in combat and head off the mental health problems, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, that plague about one-fifth of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Active-duty soldiers, reservists and members of the National Guard will receive the training, which will also be available to their family members and to civilian employees.
The new program is to be introduced at two bases in October and phased in gradually throughout the service, starting in basic training. It is modeled on techniques that have been tested mainly in middle schools.
Usually taught in weekly 90-minute classes, the methods seek to defuse or expose common habits of thinking and flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration — for example, the tendency to assume the worst. (“My wife didn’t answer the phone; she must be with someone else.”)
The Army wants to train 1,500 sergeants by next summer to teach the techniques.
In an interview, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, said the $117 million program was an effort to transform a military culture that has generally considered talk of emotions to be so much hand-holding, a sign of weakness.
“I’m still not sure that our culture is ready to accept this,” General Casey said. “That’s what I worry about most.”
In an open exchange at an early training session here last week, General Casey asked a group of sergeants what they thought of the new training. Did it seem too touchy-feely?
“I believe so, sir,” said one, standing to address the general. He said a formal class would be a hard sell to a young private “who all he wants to do is hang out with his buddies and drink beer.”
But others disagreed, saying the program was desperately needed. And in the interview, General Casey said the mental effects of repeated deployments — rising suicide rates in the Army, mild traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress — had convinced commanders “that we need a program that gives soldiers and their families better ways to cope.”
The general agreed to the interview after The New York Times learned of the program from Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, who has been consulting with the Pentagon.
In recent studies, psychologists at Penn and elsewhere have found that the techniques can reduce mental distress in some children and teenagers. But outside experts cautioned that the Army program was more an experiment than a proven solution.
“It’s important to be clear that there’s no evidence that any program makes soldiers more resilient,” said George A. Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. But he and others said the program could settle one of the most important questions in psychology: whether mental toughness can be taught in the classroom.
“These are skills that apply broadly, they’re things people use throughout life, and what we’ve done is adapt them for soldiers,” said Karen Reivich, a psychologist at Penn, who is helping the Army carry out the program.
At the training session, given at a hotel near the university, 48 sergeants in full fatigues and boots sat at desks, took notes, play-acted, and wisecracked as psychologists taught them about mental fitness. In one role-playing exercise, Sgt. First Class James Cole of Fort Riley, Kan., and a classmate acted out Sergeant Cole’s thinking in response to an order late in the day to have his exhausted men do one last difficult assignment.
“Why is he tasking us again for this job?” the classmate asked. “It’s not fair.”
“Well, maybe,” Sergeant Cole responded. “Or maybe he’s hitting us because he knows we’re more reliable.”
In another session, Dr. Reivich asked the sergeants to think of situations when such internal debates were useful.
One, a veteran of several deployments to Iraq, said he was out at dinner the night before when a customer at a nearby table said he and his friends were being obnoxious.
“At one time maybe I would have thrown the guy out the window and gone for the jugular,” the sergeant said. But guided by the new techniques, he fought the temptation and decided to buy the man a beer instead. “The guy came over and apologized,” he said.
The training is based in part on the ideas of Dr. Aaron Beck and the late Albert Ellis, who found that mentally disputing unexamined thoughts and assumptions often defuses them. It also draws on recent research suggesting that people can manage stress by thinking in terms of their psychological strengths.
“Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, ‘Something’s wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,’ ” or P.T.S.D., Dr. Seligman said. “The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don’t end up with P.T.S.D.; many experience post-traumatic growth.”
Many of the sergeants were at first leery of the techniques. “But I think maybe it becomes like muscle memory — with practice you start to use them automatically,” said Sgt. First Class Darlene Sanders of Fort Jackson, S.C.
To track the effects of the program, the Army will require troops at all levels, from new recruits to officers, to regularly fill out a 170-item questionnaire to evaluate their mental health, along with the strength of their social support, among other things.
The program is not intended to diagnose mental health problems. The results will be kept private, General Casey said.
The Army will track average scores in units to see whether the training has any impact on mental symptoms and performance, said Gen. Rhonda Cornum, the director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, who is overseeing the carrying out of the new resilience program. General Cornum said that the Army had contracted with researchers at the University of Michigan to determine whether the training was working, and added that corrections could be made along the way “if the program is not having the intended effect.”
This being the Army, the sergeants at the training session last week had questions about logistics. How would teachers be evaluated? How and when would Reserve and Guard units get the training?
Perhaps the biggest question — can an organization that has long suppressed talk of emotions now open up? — is unlikely to have an answer until next year at the earliest. But the Army’s leaders are determined to ask.
“For years, the military has been saying, ‘Oh, my God, a suicide, what do we do now?’ ” said Col. Darryl Williams, the program’s deputy director. “It was reactive. It’s time to change that.”
August 18, 2009
Mental Stress Training Is Planned for U.S. Soldiers
By BENEDICT CAREY
PHILADELPHIA — The Army plans to require that all 1.1 million of its soldiers take intensive training in emotional resiliency, military officials say.
The training, the first of its kind in the military, is meant to improve performance in combat and head off the mental health problems, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, that plague about one-fifth of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Active-duty soldiers, reservists and members of the National Guard will receive the training, which will also be available to their family members and to civilian employees.
The new program is to be introduced at two bases in October and phased in gradually throughout the service, starting in basic training. It is modeled on techniques that have been tested mainly in middle schools.
Usually taught in weekly 90-minute classes, the methods seek to defuse or expose common habits of thinking and flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration — for example, the tendency to assume the worst. (“My wife didn’t answer the phone; she must be with someone else.”)
The Army wants to train 1,500 sergeants by next summer to teach the techniques.
In an interview, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, said the $117 million program was an effort to transform a military culture that has generally considered talk of emotions to be so much hand-holding, a sign of weakness.
“I’m still not sure that our culture is ready to accept this,” General Casey said. “That’s what I worry about most.”
In an open exchange at an early training session here last week, General Casey asked a group of sergeants what they thought of the new training. Did it seem too touchy-feely?
“I believe so, sir,” said one, standing to address the general. He said a formal class would be a hard sell to a young private “who all he wants to do is hang out with his buddies and drink beer.”
But others disagreed, saying the program was desperately needed. And in the interview, General Casey said the mental effects of repeated deployments — rising suicide rates in the Army, mild traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress — had convinced commanders “that we need a program that gives soldiers and their families better ways to cope.”
The general agreed to the interview after The New York Times learned of the program from Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman, chairman of the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center, who has been consulting with the Pentagon.
In recent studies, psychologists at Penn and elsewhere have found that the techniques can reduce mental distress in some children and teenagers. But outside experts cautioned that the Army program was more an experiment than a proven solution.
“It’s important to be clear that there’s no evidence that any program makes soldiers more resilient,” said George A. Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. But he and others said the program could settle one of the most important questions in psychology: whether mental toughness can be taught in the classroom.
“These are skills that apply broadly, they’re things people use throughout life, and what we’ve done is adapt them for soldiers,” said Karen Reivich, a psychologist at Penn, who is helping the Army carry out the program.
At the training session, given at a hotel near the university, 48 sergeants in full fatigues and boots sat at desks, took notes, play-acted, and wisecracked as psychologists taught them about mental fitness. In one role-playing exercise, Sgt. First Class James Cole of Fort Riley, Kan., and a classmate acted out Sergeant Cole’s thinking in response to an order late in the day to have his exhausted men do one last difficult assignment.
“Why is he tasking us again for this job?” the classmate asked. “It’s not fair.”
“Well, maybe,” Sergeant Cole responded. “Or maybe he’s hitting us because he knows we’re more reliable.”
In another session, Dr. Reivich asked the sergeants to think of situations when such internal debates were useful.
One, a veteran of several deployments to Iraq, said he was out at dinner the night before when a customer at a nearby table said he and his friends were being obnoxious.
“At one time maybe I would have thrown the guy out the window and gone for the jugular,” the sergeant said. But guided by the new techniques, he fought the temptation and decided to buy the man a beer instead. “The guy came over and apologized,” he said.
The training is based in part on the ideas of Dr. Aaron Beck and the late Albert Ellis, who found that mentally disputing unexamined thoughts and assumptions often defuses them. It also draws on recent research suggesting that people can manage stress by thinking in terms of their psychological strengths.
“Psychology has given us this whole language of pathology, so that a soldier in tears after seeing someone killed thinks, ‘Something’s wrong with me; I have post-traumatic stress,’ ” or P.T.S.D., Dr. Seligman said. “The idea here is to give people a new vocabulary, to speak in terms of resilience. Most people who experience trauma don’t end up with P.T.S.D.; many experience post-traumatic growth.”
Many of the sergeants were at first leery of the techniques. “But I think maybe it becomes like muscle memory — with practice you start to use them automatically,” said Sgt. First Class Darlene Sanders of Fort Jackson, S.C.
To track the effects of the program, the Army will require troops at all levels, from new recruits to officers, to regularly fill out a 170-item questionnaire to evaluate their mental health, along with the strength of their social support, among other things.
The program is not intended to diagnose mental health problems. The results will be kept private, General Casey said.
The Army will track average scores in units to see whether the training has any impact on mental symptoms and performance, said Gen. Rhonda Cornum, the director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, who is overseeing the carrying out of the new resilience program. General Cornum said that the Army had contracted with researchers at the University of Michigan to determine whether the training was working, and added that corrections could be made along the way “if the program is not having the intended effect.”
This being the Army, the sergeants at the training session last week had questions about logistics. How would teachers be evaluated? How and when would Reserve and Guard units get the training?
Perhaps the biggest question — can an organization that has long suppressed talk of emotions now open up? — is unlikely to have an answer until next year at the earliest. But the Army’s leaders are determined to ask.
“For years, the military has been saying, ‘Oh, my God, a suicide, what do we do now?’ ” said Col. Darryl Williams, the program’s deputy director. “It was reactive. It’s time to change that.”
The New York Times
August 18, 2009
Basics
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop
By NATALIE ANGIER
If after a few months’ exposure to our David Lynch economy, in which housing markets spontaneously combust, coworkers mysteriously disappear and the stifled moans of dying 401(k) plans can be heard through the floorboards, you have the awful sensation that your body’s stress response has taken on a self-replicating and ultimately self-defeating life of its own, congratulations. You are very perceptive. It has.
As though it weren’t bad enough that chronic stress has been shown to raise blood pressure, stiffen arteries, suppress the immune system, heighten the risk of diabetes, depression and Alzheimer’s disease and make one a very undesirable dinner companion, now researchers have discovered that the sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.
Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.
In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”
Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”
The truth is, Dr. Sapolsky said, “we’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.”
And though perseverance can be an admirable trait and is essential for all success in life, when taken too far it becomes perseveration — uncontrollable repetition — or simple perversity. “If I were to try to break into the world of modern dance, after the first few rejections the logical response might be, practice even more,” said Dr. Sapolsky, the author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” among other books. “But after the 12,000th rejection, maybe I should realize this isn’t a viable career option.”
Happily, the stress-induced changes in behavior and brain appear to be reversible. To rattle the rats to the point where their stress response remained demonstrably hyperactive, the researchers exposed the animals to four weeks of varying stressors: moderate electric shocks, being encaged with dominant rats, prolonged dunks in water. Those chronically stressed animals were then compared with nonstressed peers. The stressed rats had no trouble learning a task like pressing a bar to get a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, but they had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar, as normal rats easily did.
But with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.
According to Bruce S. McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, the new findings offer a particularly elegant demonstration of a principle that researchers have just begun to grasp. “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ,” he said. “Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”
Stress may be most readily associated with the attosecond pace of postindustrial society, but the body’s stress response is one of our oldest possessions. Its basic architecture, its linked network of neural and endocrine organs that spit out stimulatory and inhibitory hormones and other factors as needed, looks pretty much the same in a goldfish or a red-spotted newt as it does in us.
The stress response is essential for maneuvering through a dynamic world — for dodging a predator or chasing down prey, swinging through the trees or fighting off disease — and it is itself dynamic. As we go about our days, Dr. McEwen said, the biochemical mediators of the stress response rise and fall, flutter and flare. “Cortisol and adrenaline go up and down,” he said. “Our inflammatory cytokines go up and down.”
The target organs of stress hormones likewise dance to the beat: blood pressure climbs and drops, the heart races and slows, the intestines constrict and relax. This system of so-called allostasis, of maintaining control through constant change, stands in contrast to the mechanisms of homeostasis that keep the pH level and oxygen concentration in the blood within a narrow and invariant range.
Unfortunately, the dynamism of our stress response makes it vulnerable to disruption, especially when the system is treated too roughly and not according to instructions. In most animals, a serious threat provokes a serious activation of the stimulatory, sympathetic, “fight or flight” side of the stress response. But when the danger has passed, the calming parasympathetic circuitry tamps everything back down to baseline flickering.
In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.
Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”
It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain.
August 18, 2009
Basics
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop
By NATALIE ANGIER
If after a few months’ exposure to our David Lynch economy, in which housing markets spontaneously combust, coworkers mysteriously disappear and the stifled moans of dying 401(k) plans can be heard through the floorboards, you have the awful sensation that your body’s stress response has taken on a self-replicating and ultimately self-defeating life of its own, congratulations. You are very perceptive. It has.
As though it weren’t bad enough that chronic stress has been shown to raise blood pressure, stiffen arteries, suppress the immune system, heighten the risk of diabetes, depression and Alzheimer’s disease and make one a very undesirable dinner companion, now researchers have discovered that the sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.
Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.
In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”
Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”
The truth is, Dr. Sapolsky said, “we’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.”
And though perseverance can be an admirable trait and is essential for all success in life, when taken too far it becomes perseveration — uncontrollable repetition — or simple perversity. “If I were to try to break into the world of modern dance, after the first few rejections the logical response might be, practice even more,” said Dr. Sapolsky, the author of “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” among other books. “But after the 12,000th rejection, maybe I should realize this isn’t a viable career option.”
Happily, the stress-induced changes in behavior and brain appear to be reversible. To rattle the rats to the point where their stress response remained demonstrably hyperactive, the researchers exposed the animals to four weeks of varying stressors: moderate electric shocks, being encaged with dominant rats, prolonged dunks in water. Those chronically stressed animals were then compared with nonstressed peers. The stressed rats had no trouble learning a task like pressing a bar to get a food pellet or a squirt of sugar water, but they had difficulty deciding when to stop pressing the bar, as normal rats easily did.
But with only four weeks’ vacation in a supportive setting free of bullies and Tasers, the formerly stressed rats looked just like the controls, able to innovate, discriminate and lay off the bar. Atrophied synaptic connections in the decisive regions of the prefrontal cortex resprouted, while the overgrown dendritic vines of the habit-prone sensorimotor striatum retreated.
According to Bruce S. McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, the new findings offer a particularly elegant demonstration of a principle that researchers have just begun to grasp. “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ,” he said. “Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”
Stress may be most readily associated with the attosecond pace of postindustrial society, but the body’s stress response is one of our oldest possessions. Its basic architecture, its linked network of neural and endocrine organs that spit out stimulatory and inhibitory hormones and other factors as needed, looks pretty much the same in a goldfish or a red-spotted newt as it does in us.
The stress response is essential for maneuvering through a dynamic world — for dodging a predator or chasing down prey, swinging through the trees or fighting off disease — and it is itself dynamic. As we go about our days, Dr. McEwen said, the biochemical mediators of the stress response rise and fall, flutter and flare. “Cortisol and adrenaline go up and down,” he said. “Our inflammatory cytokines go up and down.”
The target organs of stress hormones likewise dance to the beat: blood pressure climbs and drops, the heart races and slows, the intestines constrict and relax. This system of so-called allostasis, of maintaining control through constant change, stands in contrast to the mechanisms of homeostasis that keep the pH level and oxygen concentration in the blood within a narrow and invariant range.
Unfortunately, the dynamism of our stress response makes it vulnerable to disruption, especially when the system is treated too roughly and not according to instructions. In most animals, a serious threat provokes a serious activation of the stimulatory, sympathetic, “fight or flight” side of the stress response. But when the danger has passed, the calming parasympathetic circuitry tamps everything back down to baseline flickering.
In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.
Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”
It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain.
Friday, August 07, 2009
August 6, 2009, 10:01 pm
Seven Lies About Lying (Part 2)
By Errol Morris
2.
This is the second and last installment of “Seven Lies About Lying.” Read the first installment.
Ricky Jay and I had begun our discussion of lying and deception with the story of Joseph, specifically with (Genesis 37:29-34) [3]. It’s worth a closer look. (Here is a summary.) Joseph is the 11th and favorite son of Jacob. His father had made for him a magnificent coat — a coat of many colors. Several of his brothers out of jealousy decide to kill him. Reuben, the oldest, convinces the other brothers to throw him in a pit instead. He is then sold as a slave to a band of traveling merchants. The brothers kill a goat, cover the coat with blood and then show the coat to their father. (This version is from the Blue Letter Bible, but I have also included in the footnotes the King James and several other translations.)
29 When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he rent his clothes
30 and returned to his brothers, and said, “The lad is gone; and I, where shall I go?”
31 Then they took Joseph’s robe, and killed a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood;
32 and they sent the long robe with sleeves and brought it to their father, and said, “This we have found; see now whether it is your son’s robe or not.”
33 And he recognized it, and said, “It is my son’s robe; a wild beast has devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.”
34 Then Jacob rent his garments, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days.
In “Joseph’s Tunic” (ca. 1630), Velazquez has seized on one moment from the story (Genesis 37:33-34).
The brothers’ return with Jacob’s coat. But is it a lie or a deception? Or both? Joseph’s brothers show the torn (and bloody) coat to Jacob, their father, who jumps to the conclusion that his son has been killed by wild animals. “It’s my son’s robe; a wild beast has devoured him.” But the Bible doesn’t say that the brothers actually lie to their father. Rather they deceive their father by showing him the bloody coat and their father draws the incorrect inference, namely that Joseph is “without doubt torn to pieces” [4]. The brothers’ claim is, of course, disingenuous at best: “This we have found; see whether it’s your son’s robe or not.” But the brothers know it’s Joseph’s robe. And they haven’t exactly found it. They “manufactured” it.
In the Velazquez painting, there is no lie. No linguistic misdirection. Just five of the brothers deceiving Jacob, the father, by displaying Joseph’s torn and bloody coat. It is the “ocular proof” that Othello demands from Iago. And like Desdemona’s handkerchief it leads to a false inference and to an error, although not quite as tragic as the error made by Othello.
Velazquez’s interest in naturalism, the reddish-brown of the dried blood, focuses our attention on the brothers’ attempt to deceive Jacob. The robe is not that bloody. Jacob merely jumps to the wrong conclusion that Joseph has been killed by wild animals. Two brothers seem actively involved in the deception. Two seem hidden in the background, and another stands with his back to us, hiding his face from his father and from us.
Contrast the Velazquez with a Bible illustration of the same scene produced a couple of hundred years before “Joseph’s Tunic.” It is from “Speculum humanae salvationis” of Cologne, ca. 1450. [5] The hyperbolic treatment of the blood makes it much easier to believe that Joseph was actually devoured by wild animals. It also makes it much easier to believe that Jacob was deceived by the brothers. With all that blood there was less of a reason to lie. Graphic horror instead of the subtlety of “Joseph’s Tunic.” There is no academic distance here, as there is in the Velazquez.
These two images have much to teach us about the relationship between deception, lying and the truth. But they also teach us that deception depends on visual clues, as much as it depends on language. Just what (if anything) do the brothers say to Jacob? Perhaps the say a lot. Perhaps they say nothing other than what is recorded in the Bible. Is it a lie? Or just a deception?
We think we know what a lie is, but the moment we try to define it, we run into trouble. Take the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. (A dictionary definition in an essay should be seen as a red flag, or at the very least, an amber cautionary light, but please bear with me.) According to the O.E.D., a lie is “a false statement made with intent to deceive.” The O.E.D. complicates matters by telling us that to deceive is “to cause to believe what is false, to mislead as to a matter of fact, to lead into error” [emphasis mine] [6]. It also tells us that “in modern use, the word [“lie”] is normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided, the synonyms falsehood and untruth being often substituted as relatively euphemistic.” This is where the trouble begins. Are “falsehood” and “untruth” really synonyms for “lying?” Is lying an attempt merely to mislead or an attempt to get someone to believe that which is false? Or is lying used in two different ways? Here, I believe the O.E.D. is merely reinforcing a standard confusion. I would argue that all that is needed for lying are beliefs about what is true or false — not knowledge of what is true or false [7].
The fact that there are these two senses of lying gets us into trouble. When we focus on intent, the goal of lying seems utterly clear. When we focus on truth and falsity, we are often led into error — to the seven lies about lying that follow [8]. Each of these seven principles about lying, often taken to be true, I believe are false. Whether we are lying about lying or merely self-deceived about lying, I will leave for the reader to decide. (Please be assured that I am not discussing the morality of lying, simply misconceptions that we have about it.)
1. Lying is the opposite of telling the truth. It is often assumed that when we lie, we know the truth — that our brains are reality recorders or truth recorders. (This idea is similar to the naïve view of photography — namely, that a photograph provides a truthful copy of reality. And to answer true or false questions about reality all we need to do is read the answers off of a photographic image.) But we can think something is false, without it being false. And we can think something is true, without it being true. Here’s an example of how you can lie and tell the truth at the same time. If you think Abraham Lincoln is alive and you go around telling people that he is dead, you’re lying, but what you are speaking is the truth. The idea that the brain is a truth recorder persists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary [9]. The phenomenon of false memories, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and so on all emphasize our ability to stray from the truth and to be unaware of it. They all speak to the fact that what we believe to be true and what is true are two very different things.
2. Lying is telling a falsehood. This is the flip-side of No. 1, and it leads to the preposterous idea that truth and falsehood can be determined with a machine. Lie detectors — from the polygraph to Charles McQuiston’s voice stress analyzer to brain scans — depend on the view that truth can be recovered from the brain or the body [10] [11]. As such, they are routinely used to determine whether someone has committed a crime. But if someone who has committed a crime believes he is innocent, then his false claim of innocence wouldn’t be caught by the lie detector. The machine, at best, does not determine whether a statement is true or false, but only whether there is a disparity between what is believed and what is communicated to others. [12] I have often wondered about standards of proof — what one person versus another person will accept as proof. Say, a quantum field theorist versus a reporter for The National Enquirer. In this Enquirer article, Julio Platner, a businessman, reports on his abduction by aliens. But did it really happen? The Enquirer is clearly concerned about this very question.
To further check Platner’s story, The Enquirer had a tape of his statements analyzed using a Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), a device used by more than 300 law enforcement agencies to determine if someone is telling the truth by measuring the stress in his voice. Declared Charles McQuiston, a former U.S. intelligence officer who coinvented the device, Platner’s voice is completely stress free. “He’s telling the truth — no doubt about it.” Added Dr. Adolfo Pizarro, the physician Platner saw after his abduction, “In my professional opinion, there was an extraction of blood or some material. I have treated him for six years and can declare that Platner has always been calm, sound and sane. He’s well-respected and an ideal citizen.”
Platner’s voice is “completely stress free,” but that doesn’t mean (even if you buy into McQuiston’s argument) he was abducted by aliens. It only means that Platner believed he had been abducted by aliens. But what if one of the aliens had warned Platner that he would be very sorry if he ever revealed his abduction to another earth-creature? Wouldn’t that create “stress in his voice?” And given McQuiston’s criteria wouldn’t that mean he had not been abducted. (From the drawing Platner provided, it seems as though he had fried eggs for breakfast.)
3. Lying leads to narrative inconsistencies. The common wisdom is that people whose stories change are telling lies. But it’s often liars (not truth-tellers) who are able to tell consistent stories. They have their stories down. They practice them, plan them and achieve complete consistency in every retelling. Those of us who are trying to tell the truth (or at least recalling memories about what we believe to be the truth) probably will provide inconsistent narratives. Memory is, of course, not infallible. We casually rely on it but often don’t realize how a version of events based on memory may change. To make matters worse, we often impose a spurious narrative consistency on our beliefs so that they accord with others. Sadly, when there is a contest between the facts and our narratives about what we have experienced, our narratives invariably win. People repeat narratives not observations [13]. Sir Walter Scott wrote, “O’ what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” (Marmion, Canto VI, XVII) But why should we think that the truth is less tangled than a lie? Scott also wrote, although it is rarely quoted, perhaps because it isn’t part of a cautionary tale, “I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.”
4. Lying can never be justified. There is the extreme view that lying is always bad, and hence can never be justified. The philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that one should always tell the truth. It was linked to his “categorical imperative,” Kant’s version of the Golden Rule. Would you like others to lie to you? Then don’t lie to others [14]. Thomas Jefferson, in a similar vein, wrote to his nephew, “Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty, by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. This increases the difficulties tenfold; and those, who pursue these methods, get themselves so involved at length, that they can turn no way but their infamy becomes more exposed. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him” [15].
In the face of these moral prohibitions, is the implacable fact that lying is endlessly justified. Often it takes the form of the argument that the ends justify the means. We generally suppose ourselves to be moral creatures and when an apparent example of our immorality appears we find a way to rationalize that behavior. Early commentators on lies and lying recognized this. St. Augustine, who became one of the first taxonomers of prevarication, provided a hierarchy of really rotten lies, sort of acceptable lies, indifferent lies and beneficial lies. He was even willing to admit that lying was sometimes not so bad [16]. Of course, the taxonomy of lies leads to the slippery slope, where various justifications are brought to bear on various ethical problems, including lying. But who decides which justifications are acceptable and which are not? If justifications of our actions were scrupulously disallowed, how would we be able to function?
5. Lying will be punished. Perhaps. But not as often as truth-telling. Lying effectively in many situations is generally superior than telling the truth, because often we have to search our minds for the truth, whereas a good lie can be easier to produce (though of course caution is indicated if the lie can be easily unmasked). Invariably a skillful liar makes a calculation about his chances of being exposed and avoids situations where a lie can be revealed. Lying is punished only if it is detected. A more reasonable assessment would be that ineffective and unskillful lying is severely punished. No one is held in greater contempt than an unskilled liar.
6. Lying is avoidable. Mark Twain, in his essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” realized the importance of skillful lying, “No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.” Twain goes on to make an event stronger point: that lying is unavoidable. “No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances — the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation – therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools — even in the newspapers” [17].
7. Lying is a threat to the truth. No. Lying and the truth can exist side-by-side. In No. 1 and in 2, I have tried to disconnect lying from truth and falsehood. We lie based on what we believe — I would also like to remind readers that all sorts of lies have been told throughout history — billions upon billions of them. (A conservative estimate.) But the real problem is not lies but people believing them. If people weren’t so ridiculously credulous, lying would be a far more risky enterprise. I have already mentioned that lies are about things we believe, not things we know. Here’s one compelling reason. If lies are told to someone about what they already know, they wouldn’t be effective. If I know something, then it is extremely difficult for someone to lie to me about it. I know that I am writing this essay in Cambridge, Mass. You could tell me otherwise, but I wouldn’t believe you. I’d just think you were a liar. I know that I’m in Cambridge, Mass. Period.
Lies are effective because we are insecure about many of our beliefs and are quite vulnerable to the suggestion that those beliefs might be false. And they work because we might be predisposed to believe them already. Othello doesn’t know that Desdemona is faithful. Indeed, he fears the opposite. Iago is able to lie to Othello precisely because Othello’s passions are enflamed by jealousy and it is possible for him to imagine Iago’s claims as the truth.
And there is another dirty little secret about lying — in the pursuit of truth, some lying is invariably necessary. Kant, who was searching for some universal moral principle, believed that if everybody lied the world would fall into shambles. Nobody would ever trust another person. But everybody does lie, the world does function after a fashion, and it is not at all clear that, if lying were eliminated, the world would be a better place. My hunch is that if we ever find so-called intelligent life on other planets or in other galaxies, they will be adept liars, too.
I asked Ricky Jay about a world without lying.
RICKY JAY: When you’re talking about Kant and trust, it made me think of one of the ways I tell people about the con game. I say, “You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you can’t be conned, because if you were, you would be living in a world with no trust. That’s the price you pay for trust, is being conned.” And it’s very easy to substitute being lied to. Right?
ERROL MORRIS: Tell me more.
RICKY JAY: Well, it’s hard to reduce these things down to a sentence or two. But somebody once asked me about that. It was one of these things that I blurted out in an on-air interview, and then afterwards thought about it, and realized it is legitimately what I feel. It’s the price you pay. Yes, you have Bernie Madoff, but if everyone you knew spoke the truth, it would be almost as terrible as if everyone you knew lied.
We navigate through a farrago of lies, deceptions and self-deceptions. But they do not prevent us from seeking the truth, from looking outside our mental prisons and trying to uncover the true nature of the world that surrounds us.
“Joseph Being Sold by His Brothers” (from the Casa Bartholdy fresco cycle), an 1817 painting by Johann Friedrich Overbeck, depicts the underlying reality of what “actually” happened to Joseph. The sons tell their father, “This have we found: see now whether it is your son’s coat or not.” But they didn’t find the coat, and Joseph wasn’t eaten by wild animals. He was sold into slavery, as seen in the Overbeck. A cropped image from Wikipedia provides only a detail from the complete mural. The full mural shows more of the story of deception: in the foreground, the well into which Joseph was thrown and, on the extreme left, the goat that was sacrificed [18]. The Bible story contains a curious admixture of lies, deceptions, self-deceptions and false inferences. As such it provides a good object lesson for real life. The two paintings – the Velazquez (1630) and the Overbeck (1817) – are tidy bookends to any story about lying. They portray the lie and the underlying reality that the lie is designed to hide.
Of course, there are terribly injurious lies — lies with intent to do harm, to hurt and to betray. But once again truth and falsehood have little to do with it. William Blake wrote in “Auguries of Innocence”:
A truth that’s told with bad intent,
Beats all the lies you can invent.
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank Charles Silver, who has read repeated drafts and contributed many central ideas. And my wife, Julia Sheehan. I would also like to thank my researchers Ann Petrone and Julie Fischer, who read the drafts and made many helpful suggestions. And Ricky Jay who kindly consented to talk with me about lying and deception; also, for the use of the handbills and posters from his extensive collections.
Finally, I would like to urge readers to contribute their own examples of lies, lying and deception, by leaving a comment on this post.
FURTHER READING:
Sissela Bok, “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” second edition (New York, 1999) An updated version of St. Augustine.
Ricky Jay, “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies,” (New York, 2003)
A brilliant compendium of oddities that gets better with every re-reading.
David Lykken, “Tremor in the Blood: Use and Abuses of the Lie Detector” (New York, 1998) The standard reference work on lie detection.
Margaret Talbot, “Duped: Can Brain Scans Uncover Lies?” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007. An excellent history of modern ideas about lie detection. Alas, she doesn’t bring up the central argument against lie detectors (and fMRIs, in particular) that neither truth or falsehood is inside the brain, and hence cannot be recovered with a machine. Any machine.
Mark Singer, “Secrets of the Magus” (pdf), The New Yorker. A profile of Ricky Jay.
Mark Twain, “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.” An 1885 address to the Historical and Antiquarian Society of Hartford, Conn. Twain defends skillful lying, which he declares to be “the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend.”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The story of Joseph is from Genesis. It contains several examples of deception and lying. Genesis (37:29-34): Blue Letter Bible – Revised Standard Version. 1996-2009.
[4] Other Translations:
King James Version:
And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no.
World English Bible:
They took the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father, and said, “We have found this. Examine it, now, whether it is your son’s coat or not.”
Douay-Rheims:
Sending some to carry it to their father, and to say: This we have found: see whether it be thy son’s coat, or not.
Webster’s Bible Translation:
And they sent the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it is thy son’s coat or not.
[5] Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague, from “Speculum humanae salvationis” of Cologne (manuscript “Den Haag, MMW, 10 B 34″), biblicalart.com.
[6] A number of writers have suggested that lying is not linguistic. I would beg to differ, as can be seen in my discussion with Ricky Jay. There can be no lying without language. To lie, you must start with a statement that you believe to be true or false. Deception, on the other hand, does not require language. You can deceive without words. The story of Joseph, insofar as the brothers present the bloody robe to Jacob, and Jacob makes the incorrect inference ( “…a wild beast has devoured him” ), is about deception rather than out-and-out lying.
[7] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges these difficulties and proceeds to provide a couple of dozen definitions, examples and counter-examples of lying. The end result, how-ever, is to make the overwhelmed reader wonder whether lies and lying have any coherent meaning at all. Instead of proliferating definitions – not unlike a nuclear arms race – I would like to point out that we have a number of serious confusions about lying and try to clarify them.
[8] The number “seven” has a well-established provenance with respect to lying. Shakespeare in “As You Like It” speaks of “a lie seven times removed.”
Touchstone: Upon a lie seven times removed: — bear your body more seeming, Audrey: — as thus, sir. I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier’s beard: he sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in the mind it was: this is called ‘the retort courteous.’ If I sent him word again, it was not well cut, he would send me word, he cut it to please himself: this is called the ‘quip modest.’ If again, it was not well cut, he disabled my judgment: this is called the ‘reply churlish.’ If again, it was not well cut, he would answer, I spake not true: this is called the ‘reproof valiant:’ if again, it was not well cut, he would say, I lie: this is called the ‘countercheck quarrelsome’: and so to the ‘lie circumstantial,’ and the ‘lie direct.’
[9] We have audio discontinuities, particularly those in speech, which can interfere and distort our reality. And many cognitive discontinuities include semantic, topic and criterial ones. This is also represented on film, where we miss frames of information. This problem is particularly pronounced with foreign films where experiments have shown that we experience a discontinuity in understanding a film when our eyes shift from the subtitles to the picture itself. The most common discontinuity is the saccade, the discontinuous jumping from place to place of our eyes. We don’t even notice it, thinking our view of reality is continuous, just as we are unaware of the blind spot in our eyes where we cannot see a thing.
[10] There are many different kinds of lie detectors. There are lie detectors that depend on autonomic responses (blood pressure and skin conductivity), like polygraphs, and others that depend on the measurement of brain activity — specifically, by measuring cerebral blood flow. There are even a number of new corporations devoted to this methodology — No Lie MRI (a catchy rhyme) and the Cephos Corporation.
Their Web site states under the banner, New Truth Verification System, “No Lie MRI, Inc. provides unbiased methods for the detection of deception and other information stored in the brain.” This is O.K. as far as it goes, but it is followed by the even stronger claim, “The technology used by No Lie MRI represents the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history!” The investigator is (essentially) looking inside the subject’s head. The idea is based on the premise that lying takes more effort than truth telling and hence requires more blood flow. As a result of this increased blood flow areas of the brain “light-up” in fMRI scans. I don’t doubt that areas of the brain light up and that fact may mean something. But, once again, fMRIs [functional MRIs] do not get around the fact that the brain is not a reality recorder nor a truth recorder, namely that reality isn’t “up there” to be re-covered in the first place. And so, it’s hard to look at these new high-tech brain scans as anything more than updated versions of phrenology.
[11] “India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated,” The New York Times, September 14, 2008.
[12] Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. Is anyone suggesting that they should have used a lie detector to decide whether he was telling us the truth? The truth of Galileo’s ideas hinge on the evidence presented for his beliefs (or on our unsuccessful attempts to falsify them), not on our ability to scan his brain. It’s not what is inside someone’s head that matters, it’s what happens in reality. Two separate things are at stake here: detecting lying and determining the truth. Clearly, it is possible to detect one without determining the other.
[13] Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker, “A liar’s testimony is often more persuasive than a truth teller’s. Liars are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble. Similarly, according to DePaulo and Bond [Bella DePaulo, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Charles Bond, Jr., of Texas Christian University], subjects who spontaneously corrected themselves, or said that there were details that they couldn’t recall, were more likely to be truthful than those who did not—though, in the real world, memory lapses arouse suspicion.”
[14] Kant wrote, “There are therefore, ethical rules which impose a plain obligation and render the action obligatory – as for instance “Thou shalt not lie.” (Kant, Lectures on Ethics); also “…to be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Appendix I), and “I cannot wish for a general law to establish lying be-cause no one would any longer believe me, or I should be paid in the same coin.”
[15] “The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Including All of His Important Utterances on Public Questions, from State Papers and from his Private Correspondence.”
[16] St. Augustine lists eight types of lies. “The first type of lie is a deadly one which should be avoided and shunned from afar, namely, that which is uttered in the teaching of religion, and to the telling of which no one should be led under any condition. The second is that which injures somebody unjustly: such a lie as helps no one and harms someone. The third is that which is beneficial to one person while it harms another, although the harm does not produce physical defilement. The fourth is the lie which is told solely for the pleasure of lying and deceiving, that is, the real lie. The fifth type is that which is told from a desire to please others in smooth discourse. When these have been avoided and rejected, a sixth kind of lie follows which harms no one and benefits some person, as, for instance, when a person, knowing that another’s money is to be taken away unjustly, answers the questioner untruthfully and says that he does not know where the money is. The seventh type is that which is harmful to no one and beneficial to some person, with the exception of the case where a judge is questioning, as happens when a person lies because he is unwilling to betray a man sought for capital punishment, that is, not only a just and innocent person but even a criminal, because it belongs to Christian discipline never to despair of the conversion of anybody and never to block the opportunity for repentance…. The eighth type of lie which is harmful to no one and beneficial to the extent that it protects someone from physical defilement, at least, from that defilement which we have mentioned above.” (Augustine, “On Lying,” Treatises on Various Subjects)
[17] Mark Twain: On the Decay of the Art of Lying.
[18] Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Joseph and His Brothers,
Neoclassicism and Romanticism
Seven Lies About Lying (Part 2)
By Errol Morris
2.
This is the second and last installment of “Seven Lies About Lying.” Read the first installment.
Ricky Jay and I had begun our discussion of lying and deception with the story of Joseph, specifically with (Genesis 37:29-34) [3]. It’s worth a closer look. (Here is a summary.) Joseph is the 11th and favorite son of Jacob. His father had made for him a magnificent coat — a coat of many colors. Several of his brothers out of jealousy decide to kill him. Reuben, the oldest, convinces the other brothers to throw him in a pit instead. He is then sold as a slave to a band of traveling merchants. The brothers kill a goat, cover the coat with blood and then show the coat to their father. (This version is from the Blue Letter Bible, but I have also included in the footnotes the King James and several other translations.)
29 When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he rent his clothes
30 and returned to his brothers, and said, “The lad is gone; and I, where shall I go?”
31 Then they took Joseph’s robe, and killed a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood;
32 and they sent the long robe with sleeves and brought it to their father, and said, “This we have found; see now whether it is your son’s robe or not.”
33 And he recognized it, and said, “It is my son’s robe; a wild beast has devoured him; Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.”
34 Then Jacob rent his garments, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days.
In “Joseph’s Tunic” (ca. 1630), Velazquez has seized on one moment from the story (Genesis 37:33-34).
The brothers’ return with Jacob’s coat. But is it a lie or a deception? Or both? Joseph’s brothers show the torn (and bloody) coat to Jacob, their father, who jumps to the conclusion that his son has been killed by wild animals. “It’s my son’s robe; a wild beast has devoured him.” But the Bible doesn’t say that the brothers actually lie to their father. Rather they deceive their father by showing him the bloody coat and their father draws the incorrect inference, namely that Joseph is “without doubt torn to pieces” [4]. The brothers’ claim is, of course, disingenuous at best: “This we have found; see whether it’s your son’s robe or not.” But the brothers know it’s Joseph’s robe. And they haven’t exactly found it. They “manufactured” it.
In the Velazquez painting, there is no lie. No linguistic misdirection. Just five of the brothers deceiving Jacob, the father, by displaying Joseph’s torn and bloody coat. It is the “ocular proof” that Othello demands from Iago. And like Desdemona’s handkerchief it leads to a false inference and to an error, although not quite as tragic as the error made by Othello.
Velazquez’s interest in naturalism, the reddish-brown of the dried blood, focuses our attention on the brothers’ attempt to deceive Jacob. The robe is not that bloody. Jacob merely jumps to the wrong conclusion that Joseph has been killed by wild animals. Two brothers seem actively involved in the deception. Two seem hidden in the background, and another stands with his back to us, hiding his face from his father and from us.
Contrast the Velazquez with a Bible illustration of the same scene produced a couple of hundred years before “Joseph’s Tunic.” It is from “Speculum humanae salvationis” of Cologne, ca. 1450. [5] The hyperbolic treatment of the blood makes it much easier to believe that Joseph was actually devoured by wild animals. It also makes it much easier to believe that Jacob was deceived by the brothers. With all that blood there was less of a reason to lie. Graphic horror instead of the subtlety of “Joseph’s Tunic.” There is no academic distance here, as there is in the Velazquez.
These two images have much to teach us about the relationship between deception, lying and the truth. But they also teach us that deception depends on visual clues, as much as it depends on language. Just what (if anything) do the brothers say to Jacob? Perhaps the say a lot. Perhaps they say nothing other than what is recorded in the Bible. Is it a lie? Or just a deception?
We think we know what a lie is, but the moment we try to define it, we run into trouble. Take the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary. (A dictionary definition in an essay should be seen as a red flag, or at the very least, an amber cautionary light, but please bear with me.) According to the O.E.D., a lie is “a false statement made with intent to deceive.” The O.E.D. complicates matters by telling us that to deceive is “to cause to believe what is false, to mislead as to a matter of fact, to lead into error” [emphasis mine] [6]. It also tells us that “in modern use, the word [“lie”] is normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided, the synonyms falsehood and untruth being often substituted as relatively euphemistic.” This is where the trouble begins. Are “falsehood” and “untruth” really synonyms for “lying?” Is lying an attempt merely to mislead or an attempt to get someone to believe that which is false? Or is lying used in two different ways? Here, I believe the O.E.D. is merely reinforcing a standard confusion. I would argue that all that is needed for lying are beliefs about what is true or false — not knowledge of what is true or false [7].
The fact that there are these two senses of lying gets us into trouble. When we focus on intent, the goal of lying seems utterly clear. When we focus on truth and falsity, we are often led into error — to the seven lies about lying that follow [8]. Each of these seven principles about lying, often taken to be true, I believe are false. Whether we are lying about lying or merely self-deceived about lying, I will leave for the reader to decide. (Please be assured that I am not discussing the morality of lying, simply misconceptions that we have about it.)
1. Lying is the opposite of telling the truth. It is often assumed that when we lie, we know the truth — that our brains are reality recorders or truth recorders. (This idea is similar to the naïve view of photography — namely, that a photograph provides a truthful copy of reality. And to answer true or false questions about reality all we need to do is read the answers off of a photographic image.) But we can think something is false, without it being false. And we can think something is true, without it being true. Here’s an example of how you can lie and tell the truth at the same time. If you think Abraham Lincoln is alive and you go around telling people that he is dead, you’re lying, but what you are speaking is the truth. The idea that the brain is a truth recorder persists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary [9]. The phenomenon of false memories, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and so on all emphasize our ability to stray from the truth and to be unaware of it. They all speak to the fact that what we believe to be true and what is true are two very different things.
2. Lying is telling a falsehood. This is the flip-side of No. 1, and it leads to the preposterous idea that truth and falsehood can be determined with a machine. Lie detectors — from the polygraph to Charles McQuiston’s voice stress analyzer to brain scans — depend on the view that truth can be recovered from the brain or the body [10] [11]. As such, they are routinely used to determine whether someone has committed a crime. But if someone who has committed a crime believes he is innocent, then his false claim of innocence wouldn’t be caught by the lie detector. The machine, at best, does not determine whether a statement is true or false, but only whether there is a disparity between what is believed and what is communicated to others. [12] I have often wondered about standards of proof — what one person versus another person will accept as proof. Say, a quantum field theorist versus a reporter for The National Enquirer. In this Enquirer article, Julio Platner, a businessman, reports on his abduction by aliens. But did it really happen? The Enquirer is clearly concerned about this very question.
To further check Platner’s story, The Enquirer had a tape of his statements analyzed using a Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), a device used by more than 300 law enforcement agencies to determine if someone is telling the truth by measuring the stress in his voice. Declared Charles McQuiston, a former U.S. intelligence officer who coinvented the device, Platner’s voice is completely stress free. “He’s telling the truth — no doubt about it.” Added Dr. Adolfo Pizarro, the physician Platner saw after his abduction, “In my professional opinion, there was an extraction of blood or some material. I have treated him for six years and can declare that Platner has always been calm, sound and sane. He’s well-respected and an ideal citizen.”
Platner’s voice is “completely stress free,” but that doesn’t mean (even if you buy into McQuiston’s argument) he was abducted by aliens. It only means that Platner believed he had been abducted by aliens. But what if one of the aliens had warned Platner that he would be very sorry if he ever revealed his abduction to another earth-creature? Wouldn’t that create “stress in his voice?” And given McQuiston’s criteria wouldn’t that mean he had not been abducted. (From the drawing Platner provided, it seems as though he had fried eggs for breakfast.)
3. Lying leads to narrative inconsistencies. The common wisdom is that people whose stories change are telling lies. But it’s often liars (not truth-tellers) who are able to tell consistent stories. They have their stories down. They practice them, plan them and achieve complete consistency in every retelling. Those of us who are trying to tell the truth (or at least recalling memories about what we believe to be the truth) probably will provide inconsistent narratives. Memory is, of course, not infallible. We casually rely on it but often don’t realize how a version of events based on memory may change. To make matters worse, we often impose a spurious narrative consistency on our beliefs so that they accord with others. Sadly, when there is a contest between the facts and our narratives about what we have experienced, our narratives invariably win. People repeat narratives not observations [13]. Sir Walter Scott wrote, “O’ what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” (Marmion, Canto VI, XVII) But why should we think that the truth is less tangled than a lie? Scott also wrote, although it is rarely quoted, perhaps because it isn’t part of a cautionary tale, “I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as it was said to me.”
4. Lying can never be justified. There is the extreme view that lying is always bad, and hence can never be justified. The philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted that one should always tell the truth. It was linked to his “categorical imperative,” Kant’s version of the Golden Rule. Would you like others to lie to you? Then don’t lie to others [14]. Thomas Jefferson, in a similar vein, wrote to his nephew, “Nothing is so mistaken as the supposition, that a person is to extricate himself from a difficulty, by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice. This increases the difficulties tenfold; and those, who pursue these methods, get themselves so involved at length, that they can turn no way but their infamy becomes more exposed. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him” [15].
In the face of these moral prohibitions, is the implacable fact that lying is endlessly justified. Often it takes the form of the argument that the ends justify the means. We generally suppose ourselves to be moral creatures and when an apparent example of our immorality appears we find a way to rationalize that behavior. Early commentators on lies and lying recognized this. St. Augustine, who became one of the first taxonomers of prevarication, provided a hierarchy of really rotten lies, sort of acceptable lies, indifferent lies and beneficial lies. He was even willing to admit that lying was sometimes not so bad [16]. Of course, the taxonomy of lies leads to the slippery slope, where various justifications are brought to bear on various ethical problems, including lying. But who decides which justifications are acceptable and which are not? If justifications of our actions were scrupulously disallowed, how would we be able to function?
5. Lying will be punished. Perhaps. But not as often as truth-telling. Lying effectively in many situations is generally superior than telling the truth, because often we have to search our minds for the truth, whereas a good lie can be easier to produce (though of course caution is indicated if the lie can be easily unmasked). Invariably a skillful liar makes a calculation about his chances of being exposed and avoids situations where a lie can be revealed. Lying is punished only if it is detected. A more reasonable assessment would be that ineffective and unskillful lying is severely punished. No one is held in greater contempt than an unskilled liar.
6. Lying is avoidable. Mark Twain, in his essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” realized the importance of skillful lying, “No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.” Twain goes on to make an event stronger point: that lying is unavoidable. “No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances — the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation – therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools — even in the newspapers” [17].
7. Lying is a threat to the truth. No. Lying and the truth can exist side-by-side. In No. 1 and in 2, I have tried to disconnect lying from truth and falsehood. We lie based on what we believe — I would also like to remind readers that all sorts of lies have been told throughout history — billions upon billions of them. (A conservative estimate.) But the real problem is not lies but people believing them. If people weren’t so ridiculously credulous, lying would be a far more risky enterprise. I have already mentioned that lies are about things we believe, not things we know. Here’s one compelling reason. If lies are told to someone about what they already know, they wouldn’t be effective. If I know something, then it is extremely difficult for someone to lie to me about it. I know that I am writing this essay in Cambridge, Mass. You could tell me otherwise, but I wouldn’t believe you. I’d just think you were a liar. I know that I’m in Cambridge, Mass. Period.
Lies are effective because we are insecure about many of our beliefs and are quite vulnerable to the suggestion that those beliefs might be false. And they work because we might be predisposed to believe them already. Othello doesn’t know that Desdemona is faithful. Indeed, he fears the opposite. Iago is able to lie to Othello precisely because Othello’s passions are enflamed by jealousy and it is possible for him to imagine Iago’s claims as the truth.
And there is another dirty little secret about lying — in the pursuit of truth, some lying is invariably necessary. Kant, who was searching for some universal moral principle, believed that if everybody lied the world would fall into shambles. Nobody would ever trust another person. But everybody does lie, the world does function after a fashion, and it is not at all clear that, if lying were eliminated, the world would be a better place. My hunch is that if we ever find so-called intelligent life on other planets or in other galaxies, they will be adept liars, too.
I asked Ricky Jay about a world without lying.
RICKY JAY: When you’re talking about Kant and trust, it made me think of one of the ways I tell people about the con game. I say, “You wouldn’t want to live in a world where you can’t be conned, because if you were, you would be living in a world with no trust. That’s the price you pay for trust, is being conned.” And it’s very easy to substitute being lied to. Right?
ERROL MORRIS: Tell me more.
RICKY JAY: Well, it’s hard to reduce these things down to a sentence or two. But somebody once asked me about that. It was one of these things that I blurted out in an on-air interview, and then afterwards thought about it, and realized it is legitimately what I feel. It’s the price you pay. Yes, you have Bernie Madoff, but if everyone you knew spoke the truth, it would be almost as terrible as if everyone you knew lied.
We navigate through a farrago of lies, deceptions and self-deceptions. But they do not prevent us from seeking the truth, from looking outside our mental prisons and trying to uncover the true nature of the world that surrounds us.
“Joseph Being Sold by His Brothers” (from the Casa Bartholdy fresco cycle), an 1817 painting by Johann Friedrich Overbeck, depicts the underlying reality of what “actually” happened to Joseph. The sons tell their father, “This have we found: see now whether it is your son’s coat or not.” But they didn’t find the coat, and Joseph wasn’t eaten by wild animals. He was sold into slavery, as seen in the Overbeck. A cropped image from Wikipedia provides only a detail from the complete mural. The full mural shows more of the story of deception: in the foreground, the well into which Joseph was thrown and, on the extreme left, the goat that was sacrificed [18]. The Bible story contains a curious admixture of lies, deceptions, self-deceptions and false inferences. As such it provides a good object lesson for real life. The two paintings – the Velazquez (1630) and the Overbeck (1817) – are tidy bookends to any story about lying. They portray the lie and the underlying reality that the lie is designed to hide.
Of course, there are terribly injurious lies — lies with intent to do harm, to hurt and to betray. But once again truth and falsehood have little to do with it. William Blake wrote in “Auguries of Innocence”:
A truth that’s told with bad intent,
Beats all the lies you can invent.
Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank Charles Silver, who has read repeated drafts and contributed many central ideas. And my wife, Julia Sheehan. I would also like to thank my researchers Ann Petrone and Julie Fischer, who read the drafts and made many helpful suggestions. And Ricky Jay who kindly consented to talk with me about lying and deception; also, for the use of the handbills and posters from his extensive collections.
Finally, I would like to urge readers to contribute their own examples of lies, lying and deception, by leaving a comment on this post.
FURTHER READING:
Sissela Bok, “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life,” second edition (New York, 1999) An updated version of St. Augustine.
Ricky Jay, “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies,” (New York, 2003)
A brilliant compendium of oddities that gets better with every re-reading.
David Lykken, “Tremor in the Blood: Use and Abuses of the Lie Detector” (New York, 1998) The standard reference work on lie detection.
Margaret Talbot, “Duped: Can Brain Scans Uncover Lies?” The New Yorker, July 2, 2007. An excellent history of modern ideas about lie detection. Alas, she doesn’t bring up the central argument against lie detectors (and fMRIs, in particular) that neither truth or falsehood is inside the brain, and hence cannot be recovered with a machine. Any machine.
Mark Singer, “Secrets of the Magus” (pdf), The New Yorker. A profile of Ricky Jay.
Mark Twain, “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.” An 1885 address to the Historical and Antiquarian Society of Hartford, Conn. Twain defends skillful lying, which he declares to be “the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend.”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The story of Joseph is from Genesis. It contains several examples of deception and lying. Genesis (37:29-34): Blue Letter Bible – Revised Standard Version. 1996-2009.
[4] Other Translations:
King James Version:
And they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no.
World English Bible:
They took the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father, and said, “We have found this. Examine it, now, whether it is your son’s coat or not.”
Douay-Rheims:
Sending some to carry it to their father, and to say: This we have found: see whether it be thy son’s coat, or not.
Webster’s Bible Translation:
And they sent the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it is thy son’s coat or not.
[5] Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague, from “Speculum humanae salvationis” of Cologne (manuscript “Den Haag, MMW, 10 B 34″), biblicalart.com.
[6] A number of writers have suggested that lying is not linguistic. I would beg to differ, as can be seen in my discussion with Ricky Jay. There can be no lying without language. To lie, you must start with a statement that you believe to be true or false. Deception, on the other hand, does not require language. You can deceive without words. The story of Joseph, insofar as the brothers present the bloody robe to Jacob, and Jacob makes the incorrect inference ( “…a wild beast has devoured him” ), is about deception rather than out-and-out lying.
[7] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges these difficulties and proceeds to provide a couple of dozen definitions, examples and counter-examples of lying. The end result, how-ever, is to make the overwhelmed reader wonder whether lies and lying have any coherent meaning at all. Instead of proliferating definitions – not unlike a nuclear arms race – I would like to point out that we have a number of serious confusions about lying and try to clarify them.
[8] The number “seven” has a well-established provenance with respect to lying. Shakespeare in “As You Like It” speaks of “a lie seven times removed.”
Touchstone: Upon a lie seven times removed: — bear your body more seeming, Audrey: — as thus, sir. I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier’s beard: he sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in the mind it was: this is called ‘the retort courteous.’ If I sent him word again, it was not well cut, he would send me word, he cut it to please himself: this is called the ‘quip modest.’ If again, it was not well cut, he disabled my judgment: this is called the ‘reply churlish.’ If again, it was not well cut, he would answer, I spake not true: this is called the ‘reproof valiant:’ if again, it was not well cut, he would say, I lie: this is called the ‘countercheck quarrelsome’: and so to the ‘lie circumstantial,’ and the ‘lie direct.’
[9] We have audio discontinuities, particularly those in speech, which can interfere and distort our reality. And many cognitive discontinuities include semantic, topic and criterial ones. This is also represented on film, where we miss frames of information. This problem is particularly pronounced with foreign films where experiments have shown that we experience a discontinuity in understanding a film when our eyes shift from the subtitles to the picture itself. The most common discontinuity is the saccade, the discontinuous jumping from place to place of our eyes. We don’t even notice it, thinking our view of reality is continuous, just as we are unaware of the blind spot in our eyes where we cannot see a thing.
[10] There are many different kinds of lie detectors. There are lie detectors that depend on autonomic responses (blood pressure and skin conductivity), like polygraphs, and others that depend on the measurement of brain activity — specifically, by measuring cerebral blood flow. There are even a number of new corporations devoted to this methodology — No Lie MRI (a catchy rhyme) and the Cephos Corporation.
Their Web site states under the banner, New Truth Verification System, “No Lie MRI, Inc. provides unbiased methods for the detection of deception and other information stored in the brain.” This is O.K. as far as it goes, but it is followed by the even stronger claim, “The technology used by No Lie MRI represents the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history!” The investigator is (essentially) looking inside the subject’s head. The idea is based on the premise that lying takes more effort than truth telling and hence requires more blood flow. As a result of this increased blood flow areas of the brain “light-up” in fMRI scans. I don’t doubt that areas of the brain light up and that fact may mean something. But, once again, fMRIs [functional MRIs] do not get around the fact that the brain is not a reality recorder nor a truth recorder, namely that reality isn’t “up there” to be re-covered in the first place. And so, it’s hard to look at these new high-tech brain scans as anything more than updated versions of phrenology.
[11] “India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated,” The New York Times, September 14, 2008.
[12] Galileo believed that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa. Is anyone suggesting that they should have used a lie detector to decide whether he was telling us the truth? The truth of Galileo’s ideas hinge on the evidence presented for his beliefs (or on our unsuccessful attempts to falsify them), not on our ability to scan his brain. It’s not what is inside someone’s head that matters, it’s what happens in reality. Two separate things are at stake here: detecting lying and determining the truth. Clearly, it is possible to detect one without determining the other.
[13] Margaret Talbot writes in The New Yorker, “A liar’s testimony is often more persuasive than a truth teller’s. Liars are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble. Similarly, according to DePaulo and Bond [Bella DePaulo, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Charles Bond, Jr., of Texas Christian University], subjects who spontaneously corrected themselves, or said that there were details that they couldn’t recall, were more likely to be truthful than those who did not—though, in the real world, memory lapses arouse suspicion.”
[14] Kant wrote, “There are therefore, ethical rules which impose a plain obligation and render the action obligatory – as for instance “Thou shalt not lie.” (Kant, Lectures on Ethics); also “…to be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency.” (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Appendix I), and “I cannot wish for a general law to establish lying be-cause no one would any longer believe me, or I should be paid in the same coin.”
[15] “The Life and Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Including All of His Important Utterances on Public Questions, from State Papers and from his Private Correspondence.”
[16] St. Augustine lists eight types of lies. “The first type of lie is a deadly one which should be avoided and shunned from afar, namely, that which is uttered in the teaching of religion, and to the telling of which no one should be led under any condition. The second is that which injures somebody unjustly: such a lie as helps no one and harms someone. The third is that which is beneficial to one person while it harms another, although the harm does not produce physical defilement. The fourth is the lie which is told solely for the pleasure of lying and deceiving, that is, the real lie. The fifth type is that which is told from a desire to please others in smooth discourse. When these have been avoided and rejected, a sixth kind of lie follows which harms no one and benefits some person, as, for instance, when a person, knowing that another’s money is to be taken away unjustly, answers the questioner untruthfully and says that he does not know where the money is. The seventh type is that which is harmful to no one and beneficial to some person, with the exception of the case where a judge is questioning, as happens when a person lies because he is unwilling to betray a man sought for capital punishment, that is, not only a just and innocent person but even a criminal, because it belongs to Christian discipline never to despair of the conversion of anybody and never to block the opportunity for repentance…. The eighth type of lie which is harmful to no one and beneficial to the extent that it protects someone from physical defilement, at least, from that defilement which we have mentioned above.” (Augustine, “On Lying,” Treatises on Various Subjects)
[17] Mark Twain: On the Decay of the Art of Lying.
[18] Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Joseph and His Brothers,
Neoclassicism and Romanticism
Seven Lies About Lying (Part 1)
By Errol Morris
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
— Emily Dickinson (#1129)
1.
I was talking to Ricky Jay about lying and deception. I had an example from the Bible, specifically about Jacob and his 12 sons. (Five of them are depicted by Velazquez, above.) Ricky interrupted: “Which one? Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Napthali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulon, Joseph or Benjamin?”
“Uh . . . Joseph.”
Ricky Jay is an actor, bibliophile, historian of magic, arguably the greatest living sleight-of-hand artist, and a master of the art of deception. He seemed to be the perfect person to consult on the relationship between deception and lying. After all, it’s his business. I was telling the story about how the brothers sell Joseph into slavery.
ERROL MORRIS: They take his coat, rip it, smear it with blood, and show it to Jacob. They don’t tell Jacob that Joseph was eaten by a wild beast; Jacob makes the false inference himself. My theory is that deceit does not require language. To lie, you have to make a statement. You have to say something in words for it to be a lie. But deceit only requires misdirection. All it requires is the intent to have someone think something that is different from what you believe.
RICKY JAY: Right, it can be verbal.
ERROL MORRIS: It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Whereas lying has to be verbal.
RICKY JAY: Lying has to be verbal. Do I believe that?
[a pause]
ERROL MORRIS: And it can’t be accidental. You can accidentally deceive somebody, but you can’t accidentally lie to somebody. If you’re lying to somebody, you have to know you’re doing it.
RICKY JAY: I’ve written about verbal deception, for example, the P.T. Barnum sign – “TO THE EGRESS” — to make someone believe something that was other than what was intended. Even though there was nothing wrong with it — it’s deceptive. [The sign is intended make people believe that they are about to visit some exotic animal, rather than heading to the exit.] I wrote an article about verbal deception in “Jay’s Journal” on the Bonassus.
The Bonassus was presented in 1821 as this extraordinarily exotic creature. I’ll read just the opening: “The Bonassus, according to contemporary handbills, has been captured as a six-week-old cub deep in the interiors of America …” —blah, blah, blah… “It was presented to a populous eager for amusement and edification” — this was in London — “whose appetite for curiosities both animal and human was insatiable.” The attraction said, “A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud.” And underneath the line, “ ‘Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall look upon his like again.’ — Shakespeare.”
And I say,
“Using every conceivable method of prevarication, the playbills of the day unabashedly conceal the true identity of the newly discovered Bonassus, this new genus” — that’s a quote — “of the African Kingdom had never before been seen in Europe. He was none other than the American Buffalo. As for never seeing his like again, in 1821 the buffalo was the most numerous hoof-footed quadruped on the face of the earth.”
ERROL MORRIS: Perfect.
RICKY JAY: This is an issue called “Verbal Deception Deciphered.”
ERROL MORRIS: You were also telling me about a magician who refuses to lie.
RICKY JAY: He died recently. His name was Jerry Andrus, and he lived in Albany, Ore. And he always claimed that it was because he lived in Oregon that he had to invent his own stuff. He really was an original thinker in terms of magic. He just died. He was almost 90. [1]
But he wouldn’t lie in doing an effect. So if he said, “I’m going to place this card in the middle of the deck,” then that’s what he did. [Ricky picked up a deck of cards and proceeded to offer an impressive display of legerdemain.] If I say to you, “I’m going to take this card, whatever it is, the King of Clubs, and you can see that I’m going to push that, right, into the center of the deck.” O.K., you saw me do that clearly?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
RICKY JAY: And yet, the King of Clubs is right here. [It is sitting at the top of the deck.] So I truly did not push it into the center of the deck. I made you think that I pushed it into the center of the deck. But I didn’t push that card into the center of the deck and then show it to you on the top of the deck.
ERROL MORRIS: You may not be lying, but you’re still deceiving me.
RICKY JAY: Right, I’m absolutely deceiving you. He would also deceive you. He might go so far as to say, “It may appear as though I’m putting the card in the center of the deck.” But he would never say, “I am putting the card in the center of the deck.” He would not lie.
ERROL MORRIS: But doesn’t that alert people to the fact that they are being deceived? Doesn’t that make it more difficult to perform the trick?
RICKY JAY: Yes! It does make it more difficult, but that’s just the kind of guy he was. So he would never say, “I’m dealing the King of Clubs on the table,” and deal the bottom card and not the King of Clubs. He would not lie. He was an enormously principled fellow.
ERROL MORRIS: But do you have a problem lying?
RICKY JAY: Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects. It’s creative, how you do it. I could, indeed, put the King of Clubs in the center of the deck. So in this case, I want you to see that the King of Clubs is in the center of the deck. All right? That’s not a lie. And yet the King is now on top. I don’t think this was in his repertoire. But in that effect I did not lie to you at all. So that’s kind of fascinating.
ERROL MORRIS: I wonder if this bears out what I was saying before, the difference between a lie and a deception, that he would not allow himself a verbal lie.
RICKY JAY: But he would still absolutely deceive you.
ERROL MORRIS: But not lie.
RICKY JAY: You could wonder whether I’m lying to you now, about those two things and how they differ, because you don’t know. Because I know that you can’t follow the sleight of hand I’m doing to absolutely know for certain. And I’m not going to expose the method to show you that, but as your friend, I’m going to tell you that nothing about this was a lie. Everything I said in the transmission of these two effects was true. But in magic, there is magician to magician lying and obfuscation. To obfuscate the reconstruction of the effect – when a magician is fooled by another magician doing magic. In my career that’s not been the major passion, but it’s been the passion of a number of my mentors. The crowning achievement for them would be to create magic good enough to fool other magicians. For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that’s entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well. But it’s an entertainment art. Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians. You don’t want the magicians to be able to reconstruct it. So in the course of it, the other magician is not only being fooled by the physical deception, but made to think that something might have happened which did not happen, and if you thought that, you could never reconstruct how the effect was done.
ERROL MORRIS: So there’s a misdirection followed by a lie.
RICKY JAY: In any order. But you’re right, the lie part is verbal. You’re saying, “Remember, you shuffled the cards. Remember, you divided the deck.” And in this list of things you’re doing, one of them may be untrue. You may be lying. Ah, I did shuffle the cards. I did this but I didn’t do that. You’re reinforcing something that never happened.
ERROL MORRIS: A deception and a lie.
RICKY JAY: Deception is one of the things that I’m interested in. It’s a major component of my work. If someone said you had to sum up your interests in life in one word, the word would probably be “deception.” I think it encompasses more things I’m interested in than any other single word I can think of. Brindemour’s illusion of levitating a man. A 17th century engraving of a two-headed archer, which portrays him as a legitimate human anomaly. That clearly can not and did not exist. Right? The Davenport Brothers, who were the first performers to become famous from the cult of spiritualism, who convinced people that they were able to make manifestations while locked within a sealed cabinet. Incredibly successful. Chabert, the human salamander, who entered an oven with a raw steak in his hand: he emerged tartar, the steak was cooked to perfection. All of it based on real deception.
P.T. Barnum’s sign “TO THE EGRESS” is Ricky Jay’s example of a linguistic deception that is not a lie. There are no false statements — just a concatenation of misleading descriptions and associations. [2] You might think that once we have distinguished between lying and deception (and two kinds of deception, verbal and otherwise) that our problems are over. But lying is often identified with the avoidance of the truth or the acceptance of a falsehood. And it is to the theme of lying, truth and falsehood that I turn in the second part of this essay.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For more information see the Andrus Web site, jerryandrus.org.
[2] Ricky is uncertain about whether the sign was designed to remove customers from the premises or merely to get them to pay for admission twice. You leave the show, then you have to pay to get back in.
By Errol Morris
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
— Emily Dickinson (#1129)
1.
I was talking to Ricky Jay about lying and deception. I had an example from the Bible, specifically about Jacob and his 12 sons. (Five of them are depicted by Velazquez, above.) Ricky interrupted: “Which one? Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Napthali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulon, Joseph or Benjamin?”
“Uh . . . Joseph.”
Ricky Jay is an actor, bibliophile, historian of magic, arguably the greatest living sleight-of-hand artist, and a master of the art of deception. He seemed to be the perfect person to consult on the relationship between deception and lying. After all, it’s his business. I was telling the story about how the brothers sell Joseph into slavery.
ERROL MORRIS: They take his coat, rip it, smear it with blood, and show it to Jacob. They don’t tell Jacob that Joseph was eaten by a wild beast; Jacob makes the false inference himself. My theory is that deceit does not require language. To lie, you have to make a statement. You have to say something in words for it to be a lie. But deceit only requires misdirection. All it requires is the intent to have someone think something that is different from what you believe.
RICKY JAY: Right, it can be verbal.
ERROL MORRIS: It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Whereas lying has to be verbal.
RICKY JAY: Lying has to be verbal. Do I believe that?
[a pause]
ERROL MORRIS: And it can’t be accidental. You can accidentally deceive somebody, but you can’t accidentally lie to somebody. If you’re lying to somebody, you have to know you’re doing it.
RICKY JAY: I’ve written about verbal deception, for example, the P.T. Barnum sign – “TO THE EGRESS” — to make someone believe something that was other than what was intended. Even though there was nothing wrong with it — it’s deceptive. [The sign is intended make people believe that they are about to visit some exotic animal, rather than heading to the exit.] I wrote an article about verbal deception in “Jay’s Journal” on the Bonassus.
The Bonassus was presented in 1821 as this extraordinarily exotic creature. I’ll read just the opening: “The Bonassus, according to contemporary handbills, has been captured as a six-week-old cub deep in the interiors of America …” —blah, blah, blah… “It was presented to a populous eager for amusement and edification” — this was in London — “whose appetite for curiosities both animal and human was insatiable.” The attraction said, “A newly discovered animal, comprising the head and eye of an elephant, the horns of an antelope, a long black beard, the hind parts of a lion, the foreparts of a bison, cloven-footed, has a flowing mane from shoulder to fetlock joint and chews the cud.” And underneath the line, “ ‘Take him for all in all, we ne’er shall look upon his like again.’ — Shakespeare.”
And I say,
“Using every conceivable method of prevarication, the playbills of the day unabashedly conceal the true identity of the newly discovered Bonassus, this new genus” — that’s a quote — “of the African Kingdom had never before been seen in Europe. He was none other than the American Buffalo. As for never seeing his like again, in 1821 the buffalo was the most numerous hoof-footed quadruped on the face of the earth.”
ERROL MORRIS: Perfect.
RICKY JAY: This is an issue called “Verbal Deception Deciphered.”
ERROL MORRIS: You were also telling me about a magician who refuses to lie.
RICKY JAY: He died recently. His name was Jerry Andrus, and he lived in Albany, Ore. And he always claimed that it was because he lived in Oregon that he had to invent his own stuff. He really was an original thinker in terms of magic. He just died. He was almost 90. [1]
But he wouldn’t lie in doing an effect. So if he said, “I’m going to place this card in the middle of the deck,” then that’s what he did. [Ricky picked up a deck of cards and proceeded to offer an impressive display of legerdemain.] If I say to you, “I’m going to take this card, whatever it is, the King of Clubs, and you can see that I’m going to push that, right, into the center of the deck.” O.K., you saw me do that clearly?
ERROL MORRIS: Yes.
RICKY JAY: And yet, the King of Clubs is right here. [It is sitting at the top of the deck.] So I truly did not push it into the center of the deck. I made you think that I pushed it into the center of the deck. But I didn’t push that card into the center of the deck and then show it to you on the top of the deck.
ERROL MORRIS: You may not be lying, but you’re still deceiving me.
RICKY JAY: Right, I’m absolutely deceiving you. He would also deceive you. He might go so far as to say, “It may appear as though I’m putting the card in the center of the deck.” But he would never say, “I am putting the card in the center of the deck.” He would not lie.
ERROL MORRIS: But doesn’t that alert people to the fact that they are being deceived? Doesn’t that make it more difficult to perform the trick?
RICKY JAY: Yes! It does make it more difficult, but that’s just the kind of guy he was. So he would never say, “I’m dealing the King of Clubs on the table,” and deal the bottom card and not the King of Clubs. He would not lie. He was an enormously principled fellow.
ERROL MORRIS: But do you have a problem lying?
RICKY JAY: Not only do I lie, I take real pleasure in lying, in the transmission of magic effects. It’s creative, how you do it. I could, indeed, put the King of Clubs in the center of the deck. So in this case, I want you to see that the King of Clubs is in the center of the deck. All right? That’s not a lie. And yet the King is now on top. I don’t think this was in his repertoire. But in that effect I did not lie to you at all. So that’s kind of fascinating.
ERROL MORRIS: I wonder if this bears out what I was saying before, the difference between a lie and a deception, that he would not allow himself a verbal lie.
RICKY JAY: But he would still absolutely deceive you.
ERROL MORRIS: But not lie.
RICKY JAY: You could wonder whether I’m lying to you now, about those two things and how they differ, because you don’t know. Because I know that you can’t follow the sleight of hand I’m doing to absolutely know for certain. And I’m not going to expose the method to show you that, but as your friend, I’m going to tell you that nothing about this was a lie. Everything I said in the transmission of these two effects was true. But in magic, there is magician to magician lying and obfuscation. To obfuscate the reconstruction of the effect – when a magician is fooled by another magician doing magic. In my career that’s not been the major passion, but it’s been the passion of a number of my mentors. The crowning achievement for them would be to create magic good enough to fool other magicians. For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that’s entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well. But it’s an entertainment art. Dai Vernon, the greatest sleight of hand figure in the history of the art, rarely performed. But he invented magic and had an enormous influence on the whole range of sleight of hand. And so often the magic he was doing was to fool other magicians. You don’t want the magicians to be able to reconstruct it. So in the course of it, the other magician is not only being fooled by the physical deception, but made to think that something might have happened which did not happen, and if you thought that, you could never reconstruct how the effect was done.
ERROL MORRIS: So there’s a misdirection followed by a lie.
RICKY JAY: In any order. But you’re right, the lie part is verbal. You’re saying, “Remember, you shuffled the cards. Remember, you divided the deck.” And in this list of things you’re doing, one of them may be untrue. You may be lying. Ah, I did shuffle the cards. I did this but I didn’t do that. You’re reinforcing something that never happened.
ERROL MORRIS: A deception and a lie.
RICKY JAY: Deception is one of the things that I’m interested in. It’s a major component of my work. If someone said you had to sum up your interests in life in one word, the word would probably be “deception.” I think it encompasses more things I’m interested in than any other single word I can think of. Brindemour’s illusion of levitating a man. A 17th century engraving of a two-headed archer, which portrays him as a legitimate human anomaly. That clearly can not and did not exist. Right? The Davenport Brothers, who were the first performers to become famous from the cult of spiritualism, who convinced people that they were able to make manifestations while locked within a sealed cabinet. Incredibly successful. Chabert, the human salamander, who entered an oven with a raw steak in his hand: he emerged tartar, the steak was cooked to perfection. All of it based on real deception.
P.T. Barnum’s sign “TO THE EGRESS” is Ricky Jay’s example of a linguistic deception that is not a lie. There are no false statements — just a concatenation of misleading descriptions and associations. [2] You might think that once we have distinguished between lying and deception (and two kinds of deception, verbal and otherwise) that our problems are over. But lying is often identified with the avoidance of the truth or the acceptance of a falsehood. And it is to the theme of lying, truth and falsehood that I turn in the second part of this essay.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For more information see the Andrus Web site, jerryandrus.org.
[2] Ricky is uncertain about whether the sign was designed to remove customers from the premises or merely to get them to pay for admission twice. You leave the show, then you have to pay to get back in.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
The New York Times
August 2, 2009
Modern Love
Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear
By LAURA A. MUNSON
LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.
Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.
Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”
But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.
Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.
“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”
His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.
He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.
So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”
Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.
Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”
You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.
My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.
But I wasn’t buying it.
I said: “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”
“Huh?” he said.
“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you’re talking about.”
Then I repeated my line, “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”
“Huh?”
“How can we have a responsible distance?”
“I don’t want distance,” he said. “I want to move out.”
My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.
Instead, I went to my desk, Googled “responsible separation” and came up with a list. It included things like: Who’s allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who’s allowed keys to what?
I looked through the list and passed it on to him.
His response: “Keys? We don’t even have keys to our house.”
I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.
“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”
“I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need ... ”
“Stop saying that!”
Well, he didn’t move out.
Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”
But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.
MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”
I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.
I know what you’re thinking: I’m a pushover. I’m weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I’m probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I’m not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.
I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.
Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.
I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say “Don’t take it personally” when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.
Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not — it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.
And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.
But I didn’t.
I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.
And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.
It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”
He was back.
And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.
When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.
My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We’ve since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.
My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.
But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.
Laura A. Munson is a writer who lives in Whitefish, Mont.
August 2, 2009
Modern Love
Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear
By LAURA A. MUNSON
LET’S say you have what you believe to be a healthy marriage. You’re still friends and lovers after spending more than half of your lives together. The dreams you set out to achieve in your 20s — gazing into each other’s eyes in candlelit city bistros when you were single and skinny — have for the most part come true.
Two decades later you have the 20 acres of land, the farmhouse, the children, the dogs and horses. You’re the parents you said you would be, full of love and guidance. You’ve done it all: Disneyland, camping, Hawaii, Mexico, city living, stargazing.
Sure, you have your marital issues, but on the whole you feel so self-satisfied about how things have worked out that you would never, in your wildest nightmares, think you would hear these words from your husband one fine summer day: “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. I’m moving out. The kids will understand. They’ll want me to be happy.”
But wait. This isn’t the divorce story you think it is. Neither is it a begging-him-to-stay story. It’s a story about hearing your husband say “I don’t love you anymore” and deciding not to believe him. And what can happen as a result.
Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.
Let me be clear: I’m not saying my husband was throwing a child’s tantrum. No. He was in the grip of something else — a profound and far more troubling meltdown that comes not in childhood but in midlife, when we perceive that our personal trajectory is no longer arcing reliably upward as it once did. But I decided to respond the same way I’d responded to my children’s tantrums. And I kept responding to it that way. For four months.
“I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”
His words came at me like a speeding fist, like a sucker punch, yet somehow in that moment I was able to duck. And once I recovered and composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t buy it.” Because I didn’t.
He drew back in surprise. Apparently he’d expected me to burst into tears, to rage at him, to threaten him with a custody battle. Or beg him to change his mind.
So he turned mean. “I don’t like what you’ve become.”
Gut-wrenching pause. How could he say such a thing? That’s when I really wanted to fight. To rage. To cry. But I didn’t.
Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”
You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.
My husband hadn’t yet come to this understanding with himself. He had enjoyed many years of hard work, and its rewards had supported our family of four all along. But his new endeavor hadn’t been going so well, and his ability to be the breadwinner was in rapid decline. He’d been miserable about this, felt useless, was losing himself emotionally and letting himself go physically. And now he wanted out of our marriage; to be done with our family.
But I wasn’t buying it.
I said: “It’s not age-appropriate to expect children to be concerned with their parents’ happiness. Not unless you want to create co-dependents who’ll spend their lives in bad relationships and therapy. There are times in every relationship when the parties involved need a break. What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”
“Huh?” he said.
“Go trekking in Nepal. Build a yurt in the back meadow. Turn the garage studio into a man-cave. Get that drum set you’ve always wanted. Anything but hurting the children and me with a reckless move like the one you’re talking about.”
Then I repeated my line, “What can we do to give you the distance you need, without hurting the family?”
“Huh?”
“How can we have a responsible distance?”
“I don’t want distance,” he said. “I want to move out.”
My mind raced. Was it another woman? Drugs? Unconscionable secrets? But I stopped myself. I would not suffer.
Instead, I went to my desk, Googled “responsible separation” and came up with a list. It included things like: Who’s allowed to use what credit cards? Who are the children allowed to see you with in town? Who’s allowed keys to what?
I looked through the list and passed it on to him.
His response: “Keys? We don’t even have keys to our house.”
I remained stoic. I could see pain in his eyes. Pain I recognized.
“Oh, I see what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re going to make me go into therapy. You’re not going to let me move out. You’re going to use the kids against me.”
“I never said that. I just asked: What can we do to give you the distance you need ... ”
“Stop saying that!”
Well, he didn’t move out.
Instead, he spent the summer being unreliable. He stopped coming home at his usual six o’clock. He would stay out late and not call. He blew off our entire Fourth of July — the parade, the barbecue, the fireworks — to go to someone else’s party. When he was at home, he was distant. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t even wish me “Happy Birthday.”
But I didn’t play into it. I walked my line. I told the kids: “Daddy’s having a hard time as adults often do. But we’re a family, no matter what.” I was not going to suffer. And neither were they.
MY trusted friends were irate on my behalf. “How can you just stand by and accept this behavior? Kick him out! Get a lawyer!”
I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.
I know what you’re thinking: I’m a pushover. I’m weak and scared and would put up with anything to keep the family together. I’m probably one of those women who would endure physical abuse. But I can assure you, I’m not. I load 1,500-pound horses into trailers and gallop through the high country of Montana all summer. I went through Pitocin-induced natural childbirth. And a Caesarean section without follow-up drugs. I am handy with a chain saw.
I simply had come to understand that I was not at the root of my husband’s problem. He was. If he could turn his problem into a marital fight, he could make it about us. I needed to get out of the way so that wouldn’t happen.
Privately, I decided to give him time. Six months.
I had good days, and I had bad days. On the good days, I took the high road. I ignored his lashing out, his merciless jabs. On bad days, I would fester in the August sun while the kids ran through sprinklers, raging at him in my mind. But I never wavered. Although it may sound ridiculous to say “Don’t take it personally” when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.
Instead of issuing ultimatums, yelling, crying or begging, I presented him with options. I created a summer of fun for our family and welcomed him to share in it, or not — it was up to him. If he chose not to come along, we would miss him, but we would be just fine, thank you very much. And we were.
And, yeah, you can bet I wanted to sit him down and persuade him to stay. To love me. To fight for what we’ve created. You can bet I wanted to.
But I didn’t.
I barbecued. Made lemonade. Set the table for four. Loved him from afar.
And one day, there he was, home from work early, mowing the lawn. A man doesn’t mow his lawn if he’s going to leave it. Not this man. Then he fixed a door that had been broken for eight years. He made a comment about our front porch needing paint. Our front porch. He mentioned needing wood for next winter. The future. Little by little, he started talking about the future.
It was Thanksgiving dinner that sealed it. My husband bowed his head humbly and said, “I’m thankful for my family.”
He was back.
And I saw what had been missing: pride. He’d lost pride in himself. Maybe that’s what happens when our egos take a hit in midlife and we realize we’re not as young and golden anymore.
When life’s knocked us around. And our childhood myths reveal themselves to be just that. The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within. Relying on any other equation can be lethal.
My husband had become lost in the myth. But he found his way out. We’ve since had the hard conversations. In fact, he encouraged me to write about our ordeal. To help other couples who arrive at this juncture in life. People who feel scared and stuck. Who believe their temporary feelings are permanent. Who see an easy out, and think they can escape.
My husband tried to strike a deal. Blame me for his pain. Unload his feelings of personal disgrace onto me.
But I ducked. And I waited. And it worked.
Laura A. Munson is a writer who lives in Whitefish, Mont.
