Twaddle, as the dictionary says, is “empty silly talk,” that is, “empty” in the sense that nothing is really being said, “silly” in the sense of being ridiculous or trivial or frivolous, and “talk” . . . well, in the sense that someone is saying or writing it. “Drivel” and “nonsense” might be other descriptives of the word.
When I put “altruistic” in front of it, I am talking about the tiresome nonsense that today is praised and promoted as ethical behavior, such as cleaning bedpans in nursing homes to demonstrate one’s unselfish public service and thereby become eligible to attend an Ivy League or other highly reputed college. Or the ads encouraging us to give five dollars to the Starbucks Foundation to help create jobs. (On job creation, see this.) Or to help promote economic development and create world peace by digging ditches in a third-world country
Not that there is anything wrong, demeaning, or unethical about these behaviors. I have not cleaned bedpans, but I have donated to charity and for pay I have dug at least one ditch. It is the disconnect stemming from a screaming ignorance of economics that stands out among those who say we should work side by side old people, poor people, and people living in abject poverty on the other side of the world to achieve world peace and prosperity.
The reasoning seems to flow like this (1, 2). If we work side by side these people, we will acquire a mutual understanding of each other, gain respect, and become friends. This, somehow, will make war obsolete because peace must necessarily follow from our friendships. Then justice, and finally—the greatest leap of all—economic prosperity (presumably, by digging ditches and building schools), will follow.
Friendship certainly does develop over weeks or months when one works beside a total stranger. It’s almost impossible not to become friendly on some level. But friendship does not guarantee peace. Blood relatives and neighbors have fought and killed each other in many a civil war (1, 2). Clearly, something more fundamental about human relationships than friendship must determine the causes of war and peace.
There is good reason why culture has been likened to an iceberg, with nine-tenths of its core values buried beneath surface appearances (and surface friendships that may develop in the Peace Corps and other missionary organizations). It is this depth of what defines a culture, or rather, the ignorance of it, that has led American presidents to naively assume boots on the ground can quickly turn a dictatorship into a free state.
The core value that made the United States great is its respect for individual rights, especially property rights. “Make trade, not war” is the slogan that should replace the familiar fluff from the 1960s. Trading goods and services with, as opposed to shooting bullets at, each other is the only way to prevent war and alleviate poverty. It means, however, keeping the government out of both our bedrooms and board rooms, something advocates of altruism almost never agree with.
Other forms of altruistic twaddle include buying expensive hybrid or electric cars or installing expensive solar panels—and I say “expensive” to emphasize that low income people are unlikely to participate in these markets.* And the newly approved benefit corporation that allows businesses to put social and environmental objectives ahead of profits. But about this last, Doug French at the Mises Institute commented: “While a business owner may make grand pronouncements that the environment or some social issue is more important than profits, what he or she is really saying is that the company believes these issues are more important than customers.” And: “The idea at the root of benefit corporations is that profit should be abolished.”
This is the ultimate consequence of altruistic twaddle. The twaddle may strike some, as it does me, as tiresome nonsense, but it is not harmless. People who perform these behaviors may do them for the warm, fuzzy feeling of being moral, or even more moral than thou, according the altruistic ethics, but in truth their ideas and actions harm consumers, harm the poor, harm the old, and harm those living in abject poverty on the other side of the world.
Self-interest, the profit motive, and capitalism are what create. Altruism destroys.
*I never say never to entrepreneurs, because some entrepreneur, some day, somewhere may, even in today’s government-hampered markets, figure out how to make these products cost effective and profitable when sold to low income buyers. Today, of course, aside from the inefficiencies of the technologies, these markets are shot through with government meddling and favoritism, ranging from tax credits to bailouts.
Postscript. I have never been a fan of the Peace Corps but the source of the reasoning in paragraph four above is the private nonprofit organization Global Volunteers. A labor of love of its entrepreneurial founders, the organization is billed as leader in the volunteer vacation movement. As I read through the site, I found myself faintly attracted to its mission and I think it is because anyone who works or aspires to work in a helping profession naturally would like to test his or her skills at helping. I know too much about economics, however, to think that this kind of volunteer work will ever achieve world peace or alleviate poverty.
One more question remains. Who actually is helped by missionary work? The helper’s self-esteem is surely boosted, but what about the unseen nine-tenths of the helpee? When rich Americans fly half-way around the world to spend their two-week vacations helping others who supposedly cannot help themselves, might there not be a touch of resentment lurking beneath the surface, not to mention feelings of inferiority?
For a different angle on this topic, see Coerced Altruism, Involuntary Servitude, and Contempt for the Less Well Off.
# # #
Follow-up:
Theory of the Big Mouth. In a short 2003 essay in the Atlantic titled “Caring for Your Introvert: The Habits and Needs of a Little-Understood Group,” Jonathan Rauch quotes silent Calvin Coolidge as saying, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?” A flood of responses from readers led to this interview: “Introverts of the World, Unite!” Rauch must be on to something!
My previous post discussed how mistaken thinking about research evidence in nutrition has led to a misleading or even false understanding of how we should approach and maintain our health. A broader question than the argument-from-uncertainty fallacy arises: what is it in the nature of scientific investigation that makes these kinds of errors possible? The short answer is that there is no free market in science that would facilitate the quick awareness of both innovation and error. What we have today is government domination of research that deflects attention away from concern for the constituents the science is intended to serve, for example, doctors and their patients in medicine, to compliance with the rules of grantsmanship and peer review the ultimate aim of which is publication for tenure and promotion in the cloistered academic world.*
Though data fabrication and other frauds do occur, the most important cause of flawed research is the “what do we have to do to get the money and then the publication” attitude. This expedient in the protected environment of academia leads to conventional, uninspired, and sometimes substandard, politically biased, and irrelevant work, much of it amounting to useless minutia. I don’t mean to imply that there is a willful disregard for truth or facts on the part of researchers, though again that sometimes does occur, but that the system in which academics compete for money and accolades predisposes them to pursue conventional lines of inquiry.
“The problem in science,” states the chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, “is that the way you get ahead is by staying within narrow parameters and doing what other people are doing. No one wants to fund wild new ideas.” Except profit-making private companies like Revlon. And peer review does not encourage originality or novelty. As British medical researcher David Horrobin pointed out in 1995, the acceptance of eighteen medical innovations was either delayed or thwarted by the process. The system is also notorious for not publishing findings that are negative, that is, studies that do not produce significant findings, on the alleged assumption that what works is more important and interesting than what does not.
In my 2007 posts (1, 2) on peer review I argued that fear of the new governs and that the process is no guarantee of objectivity. This last has been demonstrated by studies retrospectively analyzing the results of published work. How so? “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis,” in the words of Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz. The pressures of publication cause sloppiness and cherry picking of the data—data mining or data massaging, as researchers call it, to find something publishable. (Selection bias was the term used in last month’s post.) All of this then brings about a recurrent lack of replication of the original study. Failure to replicate puts the science back to square one. Often it is the private, profit-making companies, using the double-blind research technique, who cannot replicate the work of the academics, because academics frequently fail to double-blind their experiments.
Horrobin’s solution to the screening and gatekeeping process of peer review was to divide the research money equally among researchers, then let the researchers be guided by their own interests in choosing what to study. This would remove the rule-bound, paper pushing requirements of the bureaucracy and free scientists to do what they do best, namely research. Horrobin pointed out that research money was distributed in precisely this way prior to 1960 in Great Britain and resulted in more medical innovations then than since. Of course, the grant money Horrobin was talking about was from the government. Remove government involvement in research and let more retained earnings of profit-making businesses be made available and you will see more responsiveness to the market, that is, to the consumers of the research.
Bureaucrats—anyone who works for or is excessively regulated by the government, including college professors who are most of the researchers I am talking about—answer only to the requirements of the bureaucracy. Profit-making businesses, on the other hand, have a huge incentive to innovate, to increase their profits; if they make mistakes, they pay dearly, and not just in lost sales or return on investment. The bureaucrat’s response to anyone who complains about the conventionality or mistakes of present-day research is to say, “I just follow the rules. We have a process to follow if the rules need to be changed. It may take time, but that’s the way it is.”
Entrepreneurial innovators and innovative researchers don’t hesitate to go outside the conventional box, which means they don’t follow rules. Their attitude is, “What can we do to push back the frontiers of business or science?” To do that, they break rules.
*Two-thirds of the roughly $58 billion spent each year on research in universities is financed by the federal, state, and local governments, 59% by the US government alone.
The fallacy of the argument from uncertainty, or at least one form of it, might also be called the “it’s better to be safe than sorry” argument. For example, the European Union among other inanities recently ruled that children under eight must be supervised while blowing up a balloon, lest the children swallow or choke on part or all of the dangerous inflatable. How likely is this to occur? “Well, we don’t really know for sure,” the reasoning apparently goes. “We can’t be certain, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. An adult must be present.”
The problem with this reasoning is that it is asking opponents to prove a negative. “The balloon might cause choking. Prove that it won’t.” In logic proving a negative cannot be done; the burden of proof is on the one who makes the positive assertion. All that can be said accurately here is that the probability of choking is minuscule and parents must choose their own levels of risk tolerance. When pressure groups and their legislators tell us what to do, our freedoms and possibly our health become endangered.
This last is meticulously demonstrated in the exhaustive investigations of science writer Gary Taubes. In his two latest books, Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, Taubes reviews over one hundred years of research on the causes of several diseases of civilization, especially heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. His finding is that not only is the consensus of the past thirty to forty years wrong, but that it also was generated and is today still maintained by the argument from uncertainty (my terminology, not his).
The litany of contemporary nutrition says that we should eat a high carbohydrate, low fat—low saturated fat—diet in order to maintain our heart health, remain trim, and fend off diabetes. If overweight, we should of course exercise and cut back on the calories. Taubes found little sound evidence in the scientific literature to support these claims and indeed uncovered a wisdom that was conventional for over a hundred years, until after World War II, that said good health, including trim weight, is achieved by eating a low carbohydrate, high meat, fish, and fowl diet. That is, cut out the sugars and starches and eat as much of the rest as you want. Exercise? It makes us hungry, something from the foggy distant past that our mothers and grandmothers used to say; it does not cause weight loss. Cholesterol and saturated fat? No causal relation to heart disease. Go low carb for all three diseases.
What gives? Are today’s nutritionists lying? No, just “better to be safe than sorry,” so they seem to be saying. During the 1950s and ‘60s, the more rigorous scientific researchers said that data on fat and cholesterol in relation to heart disease were inconclusive, in particular the data of the Seven Countries Study, a project notably omitting France and other countries that would have contradicted the study’s findings. This study, the rigorous researchers said, was at most associational, not causal.
The promoters of the Seven Countries Study, however, said that lives were at stake. We can’t wait for “final scientific proof” (Taubes, p. 23). We must inform the public and have them change their diets. This attitude partnered with the ‘60s hostility to McDonalds and other high-fat fast food diets and culminated in the McGovern report of 1977 that made the litany virtually gospel. In the meantime, well-controlled experiments, right up to the present, continued and still continue to disconfirm the creed. Selection bias, the omission of anomalous data, is a term Taubes uses to help explain the championing of the litany.
In the course of his investigations, Taubes most importantly has liberated obese people from the tyranny of the “gluttony and sloth” argument. “You’re overweight because you eat too much and exercise too little.” Implication? Weakness of the will, bad character. Taubes and the more rigorous researchers? Clearly there is a genetic component to growing wide, just as there is a genetic component to growing tall. Causation indeed likely runs in the opposite direction. That is, we are not necessarily fat because we overeat and underexercise. Rather, we eat more because we are growing and become sedentary because we are fat.
The mechanism of obesity, writes Taubes (pp. 118-21), operates through the hormone insulin. The more carbohydrates we eat, the more insulin our bodies secrete, the more fat—for obese people, at any rate—is taken out of our bloodstream and stored in our fat cells. “Insulin,” as Taubes puts it, “works to make us fatter.”
Coercion in the public schools to make children eat “right” or less has become common, just as the European Union is now making sure children are not unduly exposed to those allegedly dangerous inflatables. Aside from the issue that governments have no right to tell us what or how much to eat, or how we should micromanage our children, how fallacy-proof is the scientific evidence that has led to these policies and near dogma about health and safety? How long before we’re all compelled to eat “right” or less?
Taubes has shown us how bad science can become a new consensus and lead to policy. I hope my attempt to condense his seven hundred pages into a few paragraphs is clear and correct. Why We Get Fat is only two hundred pages. I enthusiastically recommend that you read it. Taubes’ writing is sparklingly clear. His website is garytaubes.com.
# # #
This now completes five years of blogging. January 2012 begins the next five. Here are a couple of follow-ups on previous posts.
On Hitting . . . Dogs and Children. “With the popularity of The Dog Whisperer television show, books and products, the controversy over which methods are the most humane and effective ways to address behavior problems in dogs is dividing dog lovers all over the world.
“While animal behaviorists, trainers and other dog professionals recognize that the show is exposing dog owners to the possibility that their dogs’ behavior can be changed (and indeed, business is booming), the concern is that the show gives the false impression that behavior can be changed within a matter of hours and that the methods used are known to incite or increase aggressive behaviors.” Read more (1, 2).
Should Spanking Be a Felony? “Is it right or wrong to spank? It is not a question of right or wrong; in a way it is a case of cowardliness, for you are hitting someone not your own size. I don’t suppose you hit your husband when he is being a nuisance. Is it because you wouldn’t dare? He might strike you back. Of course, you’re perfectly safe hitting your child of three. She can’t strike you back.
“Spanking is an outlet for adult rage and frustration and hate. . . . Happy mothers do not spank . . .”
Independent judgment is both a personality trait, a distinctive way of thinking and acting, and a character trait, a moral conviction in the face of opposition or indifference to stand by one’s beliefs and values. A number of writers in their own nuanced ways have captured the gist of these traits.
The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, offers in his Stanford Commencement Address of 2005 (1, 2) an eloquent statement of independence:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Follow your own thoughts and emotions, Jobs is saying. Don’t give in to the edicts and requests of others.
Psychiatrist William Glasser in Positive Addiction (p. 3) ties independence to happiness:
As we grow, we should learn to judge for ourselves what is worthwhile, but it takes a great deal of strength to do what is right when few people will agree with us for doing it. Most of us spend our lives in a series of compromises between doing what we believe in and doing what will please those who are important to us. Happiness depends a great deal on gaining enough strength to live with a minimum of these compromises.
It is these compromises to please others, Glasser says, that create unhappy relationships and lead us to seek compensating behaviors, such as anxiety and depression, or worse. Strength to say “yes” to ourselves and “no” to possibly too-demanding and probing others is the path to happiness.
Daniel Greenberg, founder of the Sudbury Valley School, ties independence to the free society (The Crisis in American Education, p. 54):
Dependence, not independence, is the quality most suitable to authoritarian states. . . . The hallmark of the independent man is the ability to bear responsibility. To be responsible and accountable for one’s actions. To do, and to stand up for what one has done. Not to hide behind “superior orders,” not to seek shelter in group decisions, and to take strength from some heroic figure—but to be one’s own man.
The self-reliant and self-responsible individual, Greenberg is saying, does not unquestioningly take orders from authority. The citizen of a free society exhibits a healthy distrust of anyone in power.
Ayn Rand, by way of Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (p. 1019), places the source of independent judgment in one’s own mind:
Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life . . .
No one, in other words, can get inside our heads to make us do our own thinking or, for that matter, make us not think. Perception, judgment, decision making, and action all originate within our minds. Control of our lives, then, is internal. Letting others “pinch hit” for us is to allow them to do our thinking.
What encourages us to become independent? How can our children develop it? Perhaps Summerhill School founder, A. S. Neill, states the conditions best (Summerhill, p. 9):
Free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. Indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child.
By “free child,” Neill means one whose rights as an individual are respected by other children and adults in both home and school, and one who respects the rights of other children and adults in both home and school. Otherwise, the child is free to do whatever he or she desires, that is, is free of authoritarian edicts and bossing and bullying by others. Not surprisingly, Neill also ties independence to the free society as an essential requirement.
Independence and happiness require freedom because freedom produces independence. And independence makes happiness possible.
The impetus for this post is once again my daughter’s softball. She is currently playing in what is called “travel,” as opposed to “recreational,” ball and the seemingly endless string of practices and games almost every weekend tempt me to recite the title of this post to other parents. Not that I want to take anything away from my daughter’s talent and desire to excel in a fun sport, nor the same of the other parents’ daughters, but a sense of perspective may be in order, especially considering the low odds of winning an athletic scholarship to college, the risks of injury (1, 2, 3) and burnout before even getting to that point, and the studies that now show multiple sports experiences and deliberate (unorganized) play develop better perception and decision making than the single, year-round specialization many young athletes today endure. Sports, of course, are not the only activity of youth in which a nearly 24/7 pressure-cooker atmosphere exists. Music, dance, and drama teachers, and the children’s parents, not to mention the academic teachers, can also lay it on thick; the term “stage mom” (1, 2) that comes to us from the theatre keeps coming to mind.
Part of the obsession many coaches, teachers, and parents have about sports, or the arts and academics, stems from a misunderstanding of the differences between the less accomplished and the more accomplished, or between “amateur” and “professional.” By “professional” here I mean only a greater degree of skill and dedication, not “paid professional,” though the young persons may be aiming for professional careers in sports or the arts or science and the coaches and teachers may be grooming them for that goal. In softball the difference is between “recreational” and “travel” ball and in the arts it may be the difference between performing in the local community and attending a select arts high school. The assumed differences between these two levels, as stated by one youth baseball organization, include the possibility of failure and rejection in travel ball, but not in recreational; the alleged life lesson to sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow; and the supposed lack of need for instruction at this “nearly professional” level. There are kernels of truth in all three of these differences, but these kernels get distorted when coaches, teachers, and parents lose perspective, forgetting about the whole of life.
Take the difference about the possibility of failure. Even at a lower level of skill, such as in a marching band or softball, not everyone participates one-hundred percent of the time. Only some band members may perform in the pep band at basketball games and even fewer in the swing band. Soloists at the spring concert may be fewer than a handful. The same is true for softball; not everyone can be pitcher. More important, not achieving an initial goal need not be a viewed as failure. A clarinetist, for example, who transfers from a small-town marching band to an arts high school orchestra may not earn one of the top four positions in the orchestra. This eye-opening awareness of the greater skill of others should be experienced as motivator, not a threat to success or happiness. There is no more important attitude to cultivate than seeing others’ achievements as an inspiration.
To say that youth should sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow is misleading, especially if it is presented as “we expect you to give up your vacation” for the sake of softball, or music, etc. Paid professionals do not do this, except on occasion, mainly because they know their schedules well in advance. The problem with youth sports is that communication, advance or otherwise, is often lacking, leading to surprises in the schedule. Hard work, yes; and all children who enjoy an activity, whether it be sports, the arts, or a business or science club will, if not hampered by authoritarian adults, devote long hours of concentrated attention to improving their knowledge and skill. This concentrated attention is sometimes, unfortunately, interpreted by adults as “sacrifice” in the sense of giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower one. “Dedication” and “self-motivation” would be better descriptors.
The notion that higher levels of skill do not need instruction stems from the term “director,” such as the director of a play or conductor of an orchestra. Some coaches claim the same prerogative for their advanced teams. But direction means guiding the skills of others to produce the effect the director envisions. That in itself is teaching, and all directors, including conductors and coaches, provide a variety of instructions to their performers to accomplish what they want. That coaches at the highest level of professional sports are teachers became obvious during the 1987 National Football League strike when secondary players were hired as substitutes to play games while the stars were walking picket lines. Much commentary was made about the expert teaching abilities of various coaches. When a coach, or conductor or director, says that he or she assumes a certain skill level and is not there to teach, I would beware that blind obedience is what is wanted, as in “I expect you to have the discipline to do what I say.” “Discipline,” however, means acting in accordance with one’s own self-imposed guidelines. It is the mark of an advanced skill. Even at an advanced level, coaches, teachers, and conductors should aim to help turn caterpillars into butterflies.
Total commitment at the expense of everything else—spending every weekend and a few week nights on one’s sport or art, because “that’s the way we do it here” or because “that’s the only way to get a scholarship”—is obsession of the stage parent type. When the commitment does not originate in the child, injury or burnout or even parental estrangement can result. Perspective on why an activity is being pursued needs always to be kept in the forefront of parents’ minds.
The title of this post comes from psychiatrist and attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder (ADHD) critic Peter Breggin. It’s a variation of Maria Montessori’s line to “control the environment, not the child.” For Montessori, children develop healthy psychologies—become “normalized,” to use her term—by being left free to pursue their own interests and choose their own educational work, provided the surroundings of the classroom are made safe and stimulating. Drugs are a cruel and totally unwarranted control of the child.
Most children who exhibit the well-known ADHD symptoms are simply failing to handle the boredom, confusion*, or authoritarianism, or all three, of school, home, and other environments in which they live and play. They are not diseased kids, possessing neurological or biochemical imbalances, who require addicting, cocaine-like stimulants to cow them into submission. They are youngsters trying to learn, and have fun in the process, but their world is complex and often the opposite of fun, especially school. What they desperately need is to be left free as much as possible to pursue their own interests and, when they request it, one or several adults to be their friends, to pay attention to them, to listen to their pleasures and worries, and to be their coach and confidant. What they most decidedly do not need are William Glasser’s seven deadly habits (p. 13): criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, threatening, punishing, and bribing. All of these habits, of course, are staples of their world—and ours, but many children do not know how to cope with them. What they also most definitely do not need is to be made to feel stoned or spaced out.
Labeling children with ADHD stigmatizes them as inadequate and, as a result, induces unearned guilt, because the adults who recommend the drugs are actually blaming them for their behavior even though the theory behind the whole psychotropic drug mantra is materialism and determinism. A child who acts up in class, or who does not pay attention, according to the adults, must be controlled. Something, so the adults say, is wrong with the child, not with the adults’ methods of relating to the child. The message is clear. Donna Bryant Goertz says that medication today is the new spanking.
The evidence for a physiological basis of ADHD behavior does not exist. The experimental studies do not uphold the belief. This is especially confirmed when the ADHD researchers themselves admit that the children improve during summer vacation and when taught in smaller, more attention-focused classes. Indeed, when looking at the psychiatric professions’ nine symptoms of inattention and the nine symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity, I can say that I have often exhibited everyone of them—today, when I was a child, and in all the years in between. I also know too many highly successful people, and have heard of many others, who, if the medicines had been available when they were children, would have been drugged to the hilt and probably had their futures destroyed.
The criteria to look at concerning ADHD are Glasser’s (p. 256)**: if your child can watch and understand television, play video games, and use a computer, do better for some teachers than for others, do better in one subject than another that requires the same level of reading and understanding, and has good friends he or she enjoys being with, then it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong with your child. Glasser (click educational, last clip on the page) piercingly and humorously puts the issue in perspective when he says that the worst attention deficit disorders in the world are husbands and wives, because many of them so often do not listen to each other!
As I have said in these pages before, the solution to helping so-called problem children is to let them go fish. “Many are just plain bored of sitting at a desk in a classroom and are sick of having adults lord their size and power over them.” Going fishing, though literally possible at the Sudbury Valley School, is metaphor for getting adults off their backs and more generally for removing confusion and authoritarianism from their lives.
*I say “confusion” because some parents today who have rejected the authoritarianism of their parents and grandparents have nevertheless failed to provide structure and consistency for their children. Similar behavior can result. Some schools can also provide this confusion.
**I’ve simplified these criteria. See pp. 255-59 in Choice Theory for a fuller understanding of Glasser’s analysis of the so-called learning disabilities. Glasser calls psychotropic medicines “brain drugs,” refusing to grant them the honorific “medicines,” and refers to their side effects as effects. There’s nothing secondary or “side,” he says, about the effects of brain drugs.
The fundamental method of science is observation, so nineteenth century naturalist Louis Agassiz (pp. 40-48) stressed its importance in teaching and learning. As he told one student, “Take this fish and look at it.” Hours later, when the student wanted to know what to do next, Agassiz replied, “Look at your fish.” And still later, “Look, look, look.” For three days the student looked at the fish, then on the fourth, Agassiz presented him with a new specimen. Observation means using our senses to perceive the world. Figuratively, it means opening our eyes and looking at it. The more one looks, Agassiz was encouraging his student, the more one sees.
In the human sciences, psychology in particular, observation is also the fundamental method of acquiring knowledge. It means not just looking at human behavior, but more importantly at the mental content of human beings. Introspection, as I have argued before, is a legitimate method of science, actually a form of observation. Looking at the premises people hold in their minds, that is, their beliefs, values, and emotions, is key to understanding why they act the way they do.
The word “premise” refers to a thought or proposition assumed to be true that supports a later conclusion. In the face of an apparent contradiction—such as, on the one hand, the attacks made on McDonald’s and Walmart as less than virtuous companies and, on the other, the amazing job creation of the former and wonderful, inexpensive products of the latter made available to the masses—Ayn Rand’s line to “check your premises” comes to mind. Look deep, as Rand would urge, at all conclusions that lead to other conclusions and go all the way down to the starting points of one’s beliefs, values, and emotions.
Thus, when critics of McDonald’s and Walmart are pressed for their reasoning, their response might be something like this. “McDonald’s and Walmart are just seeking profits; the profit motive and customer satisfaction, after all, are opposed to each other.” Why are profits bad? “Because profit seeking is selfish.” But eating and drinking are selfish; why is the pursuit of self-interest when it doesn’t hurt others bad? “People can’t be left free to pursue their own interests; the poor especially don’t know what’s good for them. They aren’t able to distinguish good food and good products from the bad. The government has to regulate business and guide the poor in their choices.” Don’t the poor have free will and the ability to reason out their own choices? “We’re all controlled by our environment and reason can only go so far; it’s limited.” How do you know? “We can’t really know anything with certainty. In fact, people who claim certain knowledge are dangerous, potential dictators. We have to talk things over and let the majority vote for the best alternatives.”
Although many additional lines of questioning of these critics could be pursued, this example demonstrates the many premises (in this case, false ones) underlying a simple concrete conclusion. The more one looks at the premises people hold, the more one sees and comes to understand.
The same process can be performed on personal psychology. Although nothing in psychology is simple, consider the relatively uncomplicated phenomenon of stage fright, such as the anxiety an actor feels before going on stage or a speaker before delivering a lecture. Premises behind the fear might range from the thought “I can’t do it, I don’t want to do it, I’m going to be a failure and be humiliated, I have to get out of it” to “I hope I don’t make too many mistakes, I know I can do a good job, I’ll just keep working on my craft to polish it, I know that once I’m out there I will begin to relax.” Or something in between. Deeper exploration might find connections to similar premises that operated in similar situations in one’s early, formative years and might also reveal how choices made then produced feelings of anxiety that still operate. Looking at these earlier premises provides fuller understanding of how personal psychology develops, the role of choice in that development, and the role of choice in making corrections in the present—in this case, taking a deep breath, walking on stage, and delivering one’s lines or lecture.
Looking at a mind or looking at a fish, the process is the same. Observation is the method of science and the more one looks, the more one sees. Indeed, a modern-day Agassiz working in the human sciences might say to his or her students, “Look at your psychology. Look. Look. Look.”
And, of course, this directive applies not just to students, but to all of us. If we unfailingly “look, look, look” into our souls, we might be surprised by what we see.
