Category Archives: Discussion and Philosophy

Here is where I can rant about issues, or just calmly discuss them.

Facts vs. Feelings–an overdose of human interest stories?

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The other day my husband told me that he was listening to gaming podcasts on his way to work instead of National Public Radio. NPR had been deluging him with human interest stories on Syrian refugees and other people in desperate circumstances. The constant tug at the heartstrings was making his morning drive a depressing and exhausting start to the day.    

I’ve heard that listening to stories about other people is a good way to develop the ability to empathize, to see the world through someone else’s eyes. I firmly believe this. Stories also give us a way to peek into other cultures and other living conditions. We need these stories. And some of these stories, certainly, should be about refugees. About migrant workers. And about children trying to survive in lands controlled by warlords.

But it is also true that one can get too much. Being bombarded by intense depictions of all the terrible things going on in the world can result in a sense of helplessness. Feeling helpless leads to paralysis, not action.

Obviously it is far better to be a commuter listening to a heart-rending story about a Syrian refugee, and feeling depressed about it, than it is to be the Syrian refugee. I don’t want to lose sight of that. But sympathetic suffering is not in itself an improvement in the world. It is good when it leads to reducing others’ suffering. No doubt the reporters on NPR hope their stories will inspire people to act. Probably they do, sometimes.

But compassion and sympathy are not sufficient for right action.

I don’t listen to NPR (or any radio, really) but there is something I have noticed both in Facebook posts and, I think, in newspaper editorials. There is a lot of appeal to emotion.  For example, I see a lot of the stories about undocumented/illegal immigrants that are focused on good people in untenable situations. I hear, for instance, about the children of such immigrants who fear being sent back to a country they have never known. I hear about people who have been valued contributors to their community for many years, but who could lose everything they have worked to build.

I don’t hear much about how we can create a workable, fair, compassionate and enforceable immigration policy so that we can avoid such situations in the first place. I don’t hear much about it from the left, and I don’t hear much about it from the right either. The appeals from the right seem to be equally emotional stories about hard working men and women (especially men) who can’t find jobs because the work has been taken by undocumented/illegal workers. (Exactly what jobs these are is a bit vague–presumably not the jobs that went overseas or that became obsolete, since they couldn’t have taken those jobs.)

Having a strong desire to improve things is not enough. Coming up with good policies requires knowledge of facts and context. Knowing which policies to support requires the same. Heart-stirring stories are good (in moderation.) Thoughtful discussions of cause-and-effect, historical background, and basic principles are also important.

If people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, then possibly I shouldn’t be posting this. My knowledge of practical details on most of these subjects is embarrassingly low. Then again, the fact that I’m falling short doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.
 
So, don’t get overwhelmed by the vastness of human need. Just pick your patch and dive in. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.

Finding the Right Words–the importance of correct terminology

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I am periodically reminded of how important it is, when talking to an expert in something, to use the correct words.  There are a lot of words that I know the meaning of only in a general sort of way. That’s good enough when I run into them in a story or hear them in a conversation about something else, but not adequate when I need to communicate a problem.
Imagine the following conversation.
Me: “My computer doesn’t have enough memory.”
Husband-who-works-with-computers-professionally: “Really? Not enough memory?”
Me: “Yes, my computer keeps saying it doesn’t have enough space to back up my Scrivener files.”
Husband: “Oh, your hard drive is full.”
Me (suddenly remembering that there is such a thing as RAM): “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
Husband: “I’ll take a look.”
I’m not saying that actually happened, mind you… but there are a lot of terms associated with computer use that  haven’t always been clearly distinct in my mind. There’s the computer itself (whatever components that refers to), and then there’s its operating system, any applications that have been loaded onto it (including a browser), and then a bunch of other files created by using those applications. It’s taken me a while to distinguish between the applications and the (data) files created with them. It doesn’t help that the applications are also themselves comprised of files. It’s easier to keep straight if I think about the files for my novel, Adrift, and distinguish them from the Scrivener program I used to write them with.
(A slight digression. Think of those scam calls—“Hello, I’m Betty from Windows, and I’m calling about your computer…” “No, you aren’t, because Windows is an operating system, not a computer company, and anyway Microsoft isn’t going to give me that kind of personalized attention unless I first give them buckets of money.”)
There are many other areas where I discover my vocabulary is lacking. The construction of my own house is a bit of a mystery. It has joists, studs, drywall (which is the same as sheetrock, I think), and up above it has a roof with rafters, eaves, gables (maybe?), and soffits (is that part of the roof?). I don’t think much about these words when I read them in passing, but when someone is discussing potential damage to the floor from a leaky shower and whether it has affected the joist, suddenly I’m interested.
I also need the right words so I can describe a problem over the phone accurately—and without sounding stupid to myself. I don’t want to tell the plumber, “The problem is the bathroom sink. The faucet. I mean, the tap. That thing you turn to start the water where one is for hot and one is for cold.” I’ve used the word “tap” before, but in the moment when it matters,  I find myself wondering, “Is that the tap?”
Inadequate vocabulary is most a problem in discussing subjects that, while important, are not of interest to me.  Since I’ve never been particularly into cars, it was some time before I really caught on to the distinction between “wheel” and “tire”. I always sort of thought of them as a unit, the four round things that roll. But don’t tell your husband you think the wheel is damaged when you really mean the tire. You could give him a heart attack. Or a stroke.
Okay, I’m exaggerating as a lead-in to my last set of examples—medical terms. As a kid, I lumped together “heart attack”, “stroke”, “heart failure”, “cardiac arrest”, “coronary”, and “apoplexy” as terms for a bad thing that could happen suddenly and which seemed, in popular expressions, to be linked to sudden shocks or anger.
Now that I’m older, I know that heart attacks involve a problem with the blood supply to part of the heart muscle, and strokes involve a problem with the blood supply to part of the brain. Not the same thing. On looking the other terms up, I find that “coronary” is often used to mean “heart attack” and “apoplexy” to mean “stroke”, but that heart failure means the heart is weak and not working very well, and that cardiac arrest just means the heart has stopped for whatever reason.
But being older and (a little bit) wiser doesn’t mean there aren’t other health-related words I’m misusing. There was some word I used in describing a problem to my doctor which I later realized probably had a very specific meaning for the doctor, and not the meaning I had intended. Further, the doctor, being used to the specific terminology, probably didn’t even realize that I was using it loosely and inaccurately. And that is a communication problem.
I wish I could remember now what the particular word was. Instead, I’ll just offer as an example “dizzy” versus “light-headed”, which apparently have slightly different uses.
Using the right words is important. With them, you can be precise in describing a problem with your computer or your health. Without them, you can inadvertantly create a lot of confusion. Eight-plus years studying philosophy contributed to my concern for correct use of words (“if…then…” is not the same as “if and only if”), but it didn’t teach me how to distinguish a joist from a stud, or a trot from a canter. Some distinctions only get learned when experience makes them relevant.

Death of a Squirrel–animals and moral inconsistency

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The other day, I ran over a squirrel.
It wasn’t all that surprising. There are lots of squirrels, and they do run across the roads. But I’d been dreading this occurrence and hoping that, with careful attention, I might go my entire life and never hit a squirrel. (It’s too late now to hope that I’ll never hit a deer, though I hope never to hit another one.)
So this squirrel ran out in front of me and I wasn’t able to avoid him. There was a small thud/crunch noise as I drove on.
Now what should I do, I thought. As a person who cares about animals, big and small, what should I do?
I turned around and drove slowly past the scene of the scrunch. Was it dead? It certainly wasn’t moving. Other cars passed it. I drove on without stopping.
It was a squirrel. Had it been a dog or cat, my day would have come to a screeching halt. I would have been bound to investigate, tend it, and—horrible day—notify its owners. The incident would probably have become fodder for bad dreams.
But it was a squirrel, a “tree-rat”, and they get run over all the time, don’t they? There are lots of squirrels. It wasn’t even a turtle or an owl, which probably would have caused me to stop and investigate its condition, maybe call CLAWS or some similar organization for help.
Where’s the consistency in any of this?
It makes sense that I wouldn’t react the same way as for a person. Human animals and other animals–different cases entirely. Had it been a person, even if only mildly injured, more than my day would have come to a screeching halt. My life would never have been the same.
And no person was concerned in the incident–almost certainly there wasn’t any person who knew and loved this squirrel. Probably there wasn’t any person who could even have told it apart from any other squirrel.
But is that really all there is to it? Whether a person is involved? Had it been a feral cat, I’m pretty sure I would have been more concerned, even with no owner to worry about. And is my concern with owls and turtles strictly about their value to the environment?
Should morals be consistent? As a (lapsed) philosopher in ethics, I want to say yes. Inconsistency suggests there is a problem, either with our principles or with our behavior. People who treat other groups of people badly, if faced with the apparent inconsistency, try to rationalize. “Those” people are different in ways x, y, and z—not like “our kind,” and not deserving of the same treatment. Most of those differences are either irrelevant or false. (Some differences may be real and a result of different cultural upbringing, but that doesn’t justify disrespect. Complicated subject and not relevant here.)
Going back to my original topic—clearly animals are not “our kind”, but they are all animals. Why the enormous inconsistency in how we treat them? Some wild animals get fed (birds, usually—please DON’T feed the deer), while others are hunted. Some animals we eat, but require to be treated and killed humanely. Some animals we take to the vet and go to great lengths to help, because we love them. Sometimes the animals we eat and the animals we love are of the very same species.
We loved our guinea pigs–I’m not even saying how far we went to treat them when they got sick. And yet, the recent newsletter from Heifer International had an article on guinea pigs–easy to raise, tasty, nutritious–with photos of a cuyeria where they serve various dishes of cuy (guinea pig). And photos of pens of adorable red-and-white piggies, all destined for the cuyeria. And why not—guinea pigs are no more special than rabbits and cows and goats.
Inconsistency.
Even at the very vet where we took our darling piggies for help, they also sold frozen baby rats and mice (pinkies, fuzzies, weanlings) to feed pet snakes. Snakes have to eat, too. So they went to great lengths to help some rodents, and deliberately killed others. You might say that really they were just trying to help the owners, the humans, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  They really cared about our piggies. They would not have taken it lightly if we had said, “Oh, we don’t actually mind what happens to them. Do whatever you want.”
And yet, suppose we tried to be consistent. Suppose we cared about all animals, because all animals can feel pain. It would still be true that snakes need to eat rodents, cats need meat-based food, the wild owls eat the baby squirrels and fieldmice …
Most of the time, I ignore the inconsistency. Having a child makes that more difficult. I think most children have that moment when they realize that the meat they are eating was once an animal, and ask “Why do we do this?”. At that moment, parents have to reopen a question that they may have been ignoring since the moment when they had that realization and asked their own parents. For parents in some circumstances, the answer is easy—“We eat animals because we have to.” Sometimes raising livestock or hunting is the difference between sustaining life and starving. For parents in more prosperous circumstances, the answer has to be different.
The inconsistency nags at me. The squirrel. The bird my cat tried to bring in yesterday. (Why couldn’t it have been a vole? They keep eating my plants.) The vet’s office. My daughter who is a vegetarian. Sandu, in my novel Adrift. (His father can truly give him the easy answer, but why did the One design the world in such a cruel way?)
I should be wrapping up this post with a conclusion. Something satisfying, yet thought provoking. I don’t have one. I don’t know if I ever will.
Till next post.