Philosophy McNuggets III

I want to describe a situation that I periodically find myself in, and you can see if it sounds familiar.

I feel like I am under tremendous pressure to get things done, and I don't have nearly enough time. It's kind of like the feeling of being overwhelmingly busy, multiplied by 10, but with one very strange catch: I can't actually figure out anything to do. I feel like there are a hundred things that need doing, but when I think about what I should get done first, right now, nothing comes to mind.

It took me a long time, but I finally figured it out. That feeling means that there is one thing I need to do—one thing which, for some reason, I really don't want to do. It might involve making an unpleasant phone call, or installing an unfamiliar piece of software, or trying to fix something that I don't know how to fix. Whatever it is, it will not necessarily take a huge amount of time, but it does cause me huge discomfort to think about.

Once I identify that one thing and just get it out of the way, suddenly the pressure is gone, and I can calmly go about doing the other things that actually have to get done.

Rusty once commented that the mystics and sages are obviously lying when they say, "I have found the truth, but I can't tell you what it is; you have to find it for yourself." How convenient! If they had really found the truth, they could tell us!

Here's why Rusty is wrong.

Suppose I were to describe my house to you. "You walk in the front door, and you're in a small open foyer. To the left is a hallway, to the right is the living room, and in front is the kitchen. Now, if you go down the hallway, you pass two bedrooms on your left, and then..." As I'm talking, you're building an image in your mind, and the image is accurate, as far as it goes.

But then you come visit me. As you walk in the front door, you exclaim: "This isn't what I was picturing at all! Yes, everything is where you said it was—foyer, hallway, living room, kitchen, and so on—but I had a pretty vivid mental image and it looked quite different. Actually, I'm already starting to forget what it looked like." I tried my best to describe my house, and you tried your best to understand, but your imagination was quite different from the reality.

But here's where it gets more interesting. To whatever extent that your imagination was correct, it's because you've seen other American middle-class homes—so you know what a living room, kitchen, and bedroom look like. If the only dwellings you had ever seen were igloos, your mental picture would be even less accurate.

I hope that point is clear. What we do, with words, is conjure up in the listener's mind a new experience, built from the experiences that the listener has already had. The closer this new experience is to the listener's old experiences, the more accurate the result. If you try to describe "red" to a man who has been blind from birth, your failure will be much more profound.

Little wonder, then, that when people have an enlightenment experience—something totally outside our normal experience at the most fundamental level—they invariably exclaim, "Everything is one, just like you said. Absolute truth, beyond dualism. Life is an illusion. There is no self. The truth is always present, but I just didn't remember that I knew it." In short, they blurt out the exact same nonsense that their teachers have been saying to them for years. And then they follow it with: "But it isn't anything at all like I imagined. It's totally different. I had it completely wrong."

The Olympics could learn something from the X-Games.

Let's say you're watching the Olympic uneven parallel bars competition. Each girl does a routine, and she is judged on how difficult it was, how artistic, how beautiful, and so on. But if she puts one toe out of place, lands less than perfectly, or slips off a bar, she will certainly lose. As a result, each girl is motivated to choose a routine that is pretty difficult, but well within her abilities.

The rules for X-Games half-pipe skateboarders are similar, but with one little twist: each guy gets three tries to do his routine, and each of the three tries is scored, and only the best score counts. If he lands on his back twice, but manages the routine perfectly once, he's going to get a great score. As a result, he has to choose something very difficult—something he will probably mess up once or twice—because, after all, everyone else is going to.

If the Olympics would adopt a similar model for some of their competitions, the routines would immediately become more challenging and more interesting.

Ken Wilber commented once that the acid test of any ethical system is the lifeboat scenario. Sure, we'd all like to save everyone in the lifeboat. But the scenario forces you to pick some people to save, and some people to throw out, and that's when you start to see what a particular philosophy is really all about. That, to Wilber, is where it gets interesting.

I thought about it a while, and decided I don't agree. The most interesting ethical questions to me are not the ones where some reasonable people might choose Course-of-Action A, and other reasonable people might choose Course-of-Action B, and you have to strain your brain to decide which side you're on. The most interesting ethical questions to me are the ones where any reasonable person would select Course A, but I find myself doing Course B anyway. "Should I mow the lawn, or should I take nap? Either decision I make, I will feel fine tomorrow morning after a good night's sleep. And Joyce really wants that lawn mowed. Quite honestly, I can't think of a single good argument in favor of the nap.

"zzzzzzz..."

St. Paul in Romans 7:15 gives my all-time favorite Bible quote: "What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I."

And speaking of Christianity...you want to make yourself more sensitive to stereotyping? Start to watch the way Christians are portrayed in popular media. Mrs. Kim (Lane's mother) in "Gilmore Girls." Mrs. Pingleton (Penny's mother) in "Hairspray." Christians are always narrow-minded, often pushy, sometimes sadistic, and nearly always kind of stupid. When Buffy Summers wants her mother to try home-schooling, she argues, "It's not just for scary Christians any more." None of these examples is particularly interesting by itself, but if you start to see the trend—and also see how rare the counter-examples are—I think you'll be amazed that you never noticed it before.

Chess and Go are the greatest board games ever invented. What do I mean by that?

Let's say you put two chess players in a room, and they play ten games, taking turns being white. And let's say one of those players wins 9 out of 10 games. He will always win more or less 9 out of 10 games if these two players compete; he is that much better.

Now, take the winner, and put him in a competition with someone who will beat him 9 times out of 10. Then, take the winner of that, and find an opponent who will beat him 9 times out of 10...and so on. I'll bet, off the top of my head, that you could line up 25 people next to each other, such that each person in line would win 90% of the games against the person on his left. That, to me, is a measure of how good a game chess is. It's a quantitative measure of the richness of the game, of how much there is to learn.

Of course, no one in the world could beat me in 9 out of 10 games of tic-tac-toe, or of War. Some people could beat me in 9 out of 10 games of checkers, but I seriously doubt you could line up 25 people, or even ten. So checkers is richer than tic-tac-toe, but less so than chess.

I'm going to divide all chores into two basic categories. The first category is chores that take a fixed amount of time; the second category is chores whose time scales linearly. Here's what I mean by all that.

Sweeping the floor is a good example of the first category. Suppose you sweep the floor every day, and suppose it takes you 15 minutes to do so. On Monday, you are very busy, so you don't bother sweeping the floor. On Tuesday, you sweep the (now extra-dirty) floor, and it takes you...15 minutes, and the floor is clean again. Every time you skip floor-sweeping, you actually save yourself 15 minutes.

Doing the dishes goes in the second category. If you skip your 15 minutes on Monday, then the dishes are going to pile up. By Tuesday night, there are twice as many dishes as usual, so you will have to spend 30 minutes. Every time you skip dish-doing, you do not save yourself any time; you just move the time from one day to another.

This seems to me like a tremendously important distinction, and I don't know why I don't hear more people talking about it. When in a crunch, you should always skip the first kind of chore rather than the second.

Voter registration is always a popular "good-guy" cause. The more people who vote, so the theory goes, the more democratic our system really is. And if we could just go house-to-house and make them all vote, make sure that every single American checks one of these boxes whether he wants to or not, why, by golly, we'd be a great democracy then!

I don't buy it. When people vote without any particular knowledge, they hurt our democracy far more than they help it. Personally, I follow national politics at a low-to-medium level, but local politics not at all. Therefore, I do vote in some national elections, but I don't vote in local elections, even if I happen to be in the ballot box anyway. I hate to think that my vote, based on the literature I picked up outside the polling station, would cancel someone who has been following the issues for months.

Some people argue that if only the knowledgeable vote, then the government won't be properly representative. What about the rights of Ignorant-Americans? What Congressman would stand up for them if they didn't vote?

Here is my response. The ignorant vote encourages Congressmen to pander, which is completely different from representing their interests. If I want to court the ignorant vote, I'm going to fill my speeches with the right buzz-words ("peace" for the liberals, "family" for the conservatives, "justice" and "America" for everyone). It doesn't matter what I actually do, because they won't know about it anyway, right? You can't vote your own interests if you don't know the issues. If you voted for Obama because he happens to be tall, or because he happens to be black, or because he looks good and speaks eloquently, you aren't "enfranchised"—you're a sucker.

You're not alone, either. 2 out of 3 Presidential contests are won by the taller man. Because so many voters choose a candidate for superficial reasons, our electoral dialogue is reduced to sound bytes and innuendo. Candidates are terrified to say anything that won't fit on a bumper sticker; and if they do, the media won't report it. You probably remember Joe the Plumber and "that one," but can you articulate the differences between Obama and McCain's educational policies?

I say, if we could get rid of all the random votes—if we could somehow filter out all the noise from people who vote because they heard a catchy slogan—if we could narrow it down to only voters who know where the candidates stand on a few important issues, why, by golly, we'd be a great democracy then!

I'm going to end this essay with a little observation that is not philosophical at all—purely practical—but it is on the very top of my list of "things I wish someone had told me years before someone actually did." It is what to do if you have a bad case of poison ivy.

When you have poison ivy, that horrible itch is the result of histamines that your body is producing. So, take a shower. Let the water fall on the rash. Then, start turning up the water temperature...hotter, hotter...as hot as you can stand it. Spray that way-too-hot water on every part of your skin that itches.

What you will feel is indescribable. It feels a bit like the poison ivy itch, magnified by a hundred, which is pretty much what it is: hot water doesn't suppress the histamine reaction, it brings it all out at once. For me the sensation is intensely pleasurable, but even that is beside the point. The point is, once all those hista-meanies have come out, they are used up. You don't itch at all for hours. When the itch finally does return, of course, it's time to do it again.

This is not something I made up, by the way. Joyce found it in one of her many home-health type books that come from the American Medical Association. But for me, it has been a life-saver. If it is useful to you, think of it as a "thank-you" from me, for getting through all my philosophical rambling!

Hungry for more? Order an extra-large basket of Philosophy McNuggets IV!

In terms of voting, I think that "prejudiced, fearful, small-minded" and other such epithets are often used to mean "people who don't agree with me." You think Israel should belong to the Jews? Why then, you're prejudiced against Palestinians. Oh, yeah? Well, you're prejudiced against Jews! And so it goes...I'm cheerfully willing to let people vote if their prejudices don't happen to line up with Kenny Felder's prejudices (of which I have many). But I want to keep out the people who cannot identify a single specific issue on which the candidates disagree. If the candidates took all the money they currently pour into bumper stickers that say "McCain/Palin" or "Obama/Biden," and put that money instead into position papers, the world would be a better place—even if it still elected people who don't agree with Kenny.

The Christianity one is tricky—yes, there are lots of negative portrayls in media but there is still the fact that a major political player can't be an atheist and there was no "under God" in the pledge when I was a kid.

I'm not sure Romans 7:15 presents an interesting ethical question so much as an accurate description of human nature. I had an English teacher who tried to convince us that people always do what they think is best at the time. If you choose to take a nap, you're deciding that's what's best for you at that moment. I disagree. You even admit you can't find a compelling argument for taking a nap. Sometimes we do what's right. Sometimes we do what feels good or is easy, knowing full well it's not "right." Sometimes that matters more than other times. Joyce will likely either get over her concern about the tall grass or she'll mow it herself without deducting too much from your "relationship credit."

That's it! That's exactly what I'm trying to say! That is the most important and vexing issue.

I'm not sure why it's the most important or vexing issue. Because it's what causes us to buy a Starbucks coffee instead of donating that money to the poor?

To put it another way, all you can possibly ask of yourself—the only standard you can possibly use when evaluating yourself—is how well you did in living up to your own beliefs.

I see. I didn't get that out of your nugget at all. Your mom's right—it's all about balance. There's a reason you can only donate so much blood so often—so you can stay healthy enough to keep donating throughout a lifetime. Most of us never come close to pushing the balance on the really important things, though.

By the way, you probably know that checkers has been "solved" by computer—another demonstration that, although it is a wonderful game, it is not as deep as chess.

thanks for the ramblings—great way to start my day. something to obsess over besides wondering why i think the word "barrel" should have two Ls.

I absolutely loved these gems...and I couldn't find a single thing I disagreed with in them. (Perhaps these two observations are related.)

All of this connects to my other thought, which is that I don't think you should try to place all of the emphasis on whether or not you follow your ethical code. I think there are lots of important and interesting dilemmas of the other type, where you have to a make a tough decision about what is right. I read an editorial once that claimed that in almost every case we know what is right and the real question is whether or not we do it. That struck me at the time and the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that it simply isn't true. Not even approximately. Life is full of decisions where people try to decide whether to do the right thing but it's also full of decisions about what is right. So I think in a sense the real observation to be made here is more of the type that you made with the chores. Ethical dilemmas break into two very different categories—deciding what is right vs. trying to follow through on what you've decided—and people don't talk much about this distinction.

I agree completely with all three of your points. The only thing I would say is that, on your third point, I was precisely trying to make that distinction, but I was disagreeing with Ken Wilber who finds the "hard to decide" kind of ethical dilemma the most interesting, whereas I find the "easy to decide, hard to follow through" kind most interesting. But this isn't just a matter of aesthetics: I think it is the most interesting in the sense that I think it is both the most common, and the most important.

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