Presented to Alaska Professional Communicators March 2, 2017

Presented to Alaska Professional Communicators March 2, 2017

The communicators:

First, a disclaimer. What I have to say comes in the form of a ramble of loops and disconnects. I’m an essayist and this is how I think and how I build my essays. And I am a retired English teacher, so my thoughts are informed by what I’ve read over the years, too. There will be references to different writers and books, some of whom I’m sure you know, others, maybe not. There will not be a quiz on the material.

What I offer in the talk that follows is not an answer of any kind but rather many questions. These are questions I hope you’ll help me bang around in the conversation that follows and that you’ll carry around with you for some time in your heads and your hearts.

So to begin:

Here’s a short piece I wrote, one of a series, “The World’s One Hundred Best Ideas.” I began this series as a response to a mailer offering lectures on somebody else’s One Hundred Best Ideas, ideas such as rule of law, democracy, monotheism. I wanted a list more grounded in the world we know, in our ordinary ideas. I’m not sure what it means that six years into this project I’ve yet to reach my goal of one hundred. But here’s one for you, one based on cleaning out my parents’ house after my mother died, one of two references in this talk to that archeological exercise:

Anti-matter

Down in the basement I found years of back issues of Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook, Women’s Day, each no doubt containing a recipe or a holiday decorating tip, mildewed and damp and fused together. I put them in trash bags and threw them in the truck. I took all the empty and carefully washed jelly jars from the fruit cellar, bagged them and dragged them out to the truck. Leftovers from a life.Matter.

At the dumpster site, I heaved them, dozens of bags, over the metal walls, heard the crashing ruin of all those jars. And I thought what my mother had thought as she saved them, that all matter had potential energy, that a useful future was possible for everything.

What matters? The question rises up in my head like a photographic negative, rendered fresh and clear when seen in opposition to its self. Anti-matter, it had to be there, offering a solution, before any physicists thought of it.

Somewhere in the universe, then, as I shatter bottles and jars, indiscriminately turn intentions into waste, some other force pulls them together again, makes all whole.

**

Buried in that piece is the question: What matters? We’ve reached a moment in our public discourse where this question cannot be more pressing. On the most basic level, our question must begin with what might be called “the facts of the matter.”

If I had been asked to give this talk two years ago, or maybe even just one year ago, I would have begun by saying: We are rich in facts, as rich in facts as we have ever been, but are poor in meaning.

What I meant was that we now have at our fingertips, on our computer keyboards, notebooks, cell phones vast encyclopedias of simple information. We can and do bring that information forward in an instant to do things as simple as check the weather, settle bar bets, chase down the out-of-the-way fact that two decades ago might have cost us a half day’s worth of research in a library. Pretty nice, huh?

And I stand continually amazed at the armies of people out there who compile and build these monuments of information on the Internet. Look hard enough and you can find an old film clip of my high school basketball team in action from just a year after I played. Look not so hard and you can pin down a fact I’d been hunting for an essay I’d been working on: Johnny Majors did fumble a punt return that cost the University of Tennessee the 1957 Sugar Bowl.

But if you look for information concerning figures such as George W. Bush or Fidel Castro, you’ll find something more complex and harder to reckon with. The entries of both men have been regularly revised on Wikipedia with rival factions constantly “correcting” the entries. Up for grabs are not questions of dates of birth or time in office, but the hard judgments on what the accomplishments of each of these men mean, of how they might be measured.

We could look up Pluto and learn that small rock on the outer fringes of our solar system has been downgraded by some, but not all, from a planet to a dwarf planet, and by others to no planet at all. Still, it remains the object it is: a rock out in space. Even an object as seemingly solid as a rock seems to evade our goal to find it a meaningful spot in our thinking. How could it be otherwise for George Bush or Fidel?

It’s possible we started down this road somewhere in the closing years of the nineteenth century. As the study of physics advanced, scientists had some notion we would arrive at what could be called a Unified Field Theory, an all-encompassing theory of how the physical universe worked. It would be nice and neat and complete, all in one package. Explaining the nature of light was a sticking point. One way to solve questions of light’s movement was to suggest there was a substance called ether out there everywhere in the universe that made a medium light could pass through.

In 1887, the Michelson-Morley experiments seemed to demonstrate there was no such thing as ether or an ether wind that might be detected through the earth’s rotation.

This opened the door for Einstein and the theory we call relativity. Einstein lived his life out thinking we might recover a Unified Field Theory. His scientific rival NeilsBohr thought otherwise. In Bohr’s view the idea that our knowledge of physical science would be knowable in an absolute sense went out the window and was replaced with probability. Certainty was replaced by likelihood.

And in a very important way, this is how we live now. This is what determines our insurance rates as drivers, how much we pay for life insurance, how we project our state and federal budgets as we go forward, how we plan our days based on the weather forecast.

A big part of our brains, though, still craves certainty, constancy. Let me give you a very concrete example of this. After my wife Margo developed breast cancer for the second time (there are 45 different kids of breast cancer, by the way), her tissue was analyzed genetically and we were shown a chart of the likelihood of recurrence in her case. A jagged line predicting recurrence climbed from around seven percent to around ninety-three percent with a bar dropped right around thirteen percent. That mark represented Margo’s likelihood of recurrence if she took no other treatment at this point. But what we should notice is that there was no zero on the graph for anybody, nor was there any 100% either. Those two elements of certainty had been removed in favor of mere likelihood.

This is how Margo would plan her life going forward, based on that number, that percentage.

And, in fact, this how we plan our lives in smaller ways every day.

What does that mean to you if you are a writer, a journalist, a public media person? Is this a good thing or not? Here’s a way this uncertainty has come to be used, mostly for ill: We could make a graph similar to the graph Margo was shown indicating the likelihood of a person suffering from lung cancer based on cigarette consumption. And just like the breast cancer graph, if it were honestly drawn, there would be no absolute options. A person could smoke his or her whole life and not die of lung cancer. Likewise a person could never smoke and die of lung cancer. Unburdened by that certainty,the tobacco companies ran a decades-long campaign based on the notion that there is no absolute link between smoking and cancer. And it worked remarkably well. We now see that the sugar industry used many of those same tactics, and the fossil fuel industry now is doing the same.

Modern science—not just the science of physics but the other sciences including social sciences as well— operates more on probabilities than certainties. We humans, creatures of habit that we are, like certainty and we don’t like to change. So when we’re told nobody can say for certain that our activities cause climate change, that’s a big relief. We don’t really have to stop doing any of the things we’re doing.

What’s a writer to do? Because just to make it messier: Here’s what began to happen to journalism in the 1960s: Writers like Tom Wolfe began to argue that the notion of “objectivity” as a journalistic standard was not only impossible, but not necessarily desirable. Wolfe was primarily a features writer in those days, so maybe the impact of subjectivity mattered less there. But it quickly moved into very powerful works where journalists who’d been covering the hard news of Vietnam, in this instance, began to write book length treatments of their work, books like Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie or David Halberstam’sThe Best and The Brightest. These writers combined facts—often very disturbing facts and facts that had been obscured or even misrepresented by our government—and judgment. Thought we might call their judgment “analysis.”

Take a look at the New York Times, and you’ll see that paper has begun labeling some of its stories “analysis” to distinguish them from more traditional news—which we could describe asinformation relayed in as unbiased and factual manner as possible.

Unfortunately, it may be too late to rescue factuality from the spray of material that comes at us every day. There are two problems here: One is the lack of certainty that’s become an element of how we know what we hope we know. The other is our craving for that very certainty, and how eager we are to have it.

Years ago, during the Regan years, an article appeared in The Atlantic Monthly about the situation in Nicaragua. There were Sandinistas and there were Contras. And as the author of the article would have it, we Americans had divided these two groups into good guys or bad guys, the division based as much on our personal politics as anything else. The problem was (and remains) that these labels were too simple for the political reality on the ground. As The Atlantic writer would have it, our desire to keep it simple would prevent not just us citizens but our elected representatives from getting a handle on the issues. And as long as we kept insisting on these simple labels, we’d never arrive at complex solutions that complex questions require of us.

This problem has not gone away. If anything, it has grown worse. Remember, in the 1980’s, we had no twitter, facebook, instagram, or even plain old e-mail. We are, as I felt just a couple of years ago, rich in information—whether it’s accurate or not. And in all this we still would prefer our information to be clear and unambiguous and simple.

Here’s another problem, another thing we people like: stories. We want stories (or narrative if you want to use that word which means an event told over a stretch of time). We’ve been telling stories as long as we’ve had language , telling these stories in part as a means of remembering. The question might be, though, how stories help us remember.

In Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spiderwoman, we find two prisoners in a Brazilian prison, a political prisoner, Valentine, and a gay prisoner, Molina. They pass the time by telling each other movie plots. After Molina tells a long movie plot about a brave young German woman, Valentine explodes: “You idiot! That’s a Nazi propaganda movie.” Molina replies, “But it’s so beautiful.”

No doubt it is beautiful. But all wrapped up in that beauty is a message, an implicit message. Think of this as the little glob of cheese you may give your dog with a pill stashed neatly inside. It goes down much better that way, doesn’t it?

This might be a good time to consider the novelKiss of the Spiderwoman versus the pretty good movie made from it. Reading the novel and watching the movie are two very different experiences, and that may matter, too. Among the great miracles of reading is the gift the written word gives to all readers: We can stop and ponder what we read at any minute. We can go back and reread. I want to note that Puig uses some other interesting tricks in his novel. Positioned against his plot involving Valentine and Molina are a number of footnotes, scholarly articles on questions of human sexuality. At points, the footnotes almost crowd the narrative off the page. And here we see different problems at work. What’s a reader to do? She could read the narrative to a stopping point and go back to read the footnote. She could stop reading the narrative and read the footnote in its entirety, or she could do what some of my students did: just skip the footnotes because they were boring.

Think what that reaction means to you, fellow writers, and how it means in terms of transmitting information versus telling a good story.

In a recent article in the New Yorker (“Good Behavior” in the January 23 issue). I read of a young woman, Maya Shankar, sent from the Obama White House to try to sort out the mess of lead in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water. This young woman quickly recognizes that the citizens of Flint have no trust in their state or federal governments. Armed with facts, she and her crew attempt to “nudge” the people of Flint back toward trust and, more importantly, to meaningful community actions.

At one point, a community organizer Art Woodson, asks Shankar how she is feeling about her work now that Trump has won the election:

She replies, “As a person…I feel incredibly shitty, all the time since the election.”

“Woodson hollered with delight. ‘Wow!’ he whooped.’See I trust you now! What you just said? I got your back! …’”

Shankar says, “But here’s the thing, Art. We can’t say that stuff as government—we can only say that stuff as individual people.”

Art replies, “…That’s the problem. That’s why Donald Trump won, because he says things that the government normally doesn’t say. He said it. But you saying what you just did, that’s what people want. People want realness.”

What is this thing called realness versus the dry facts a government might offer? Is it something close to what Stephen Colbert back when he was a character on his satiric “Colbert Report” called “truthiness?” Do we want the real or the appearance of the real? Much of our modern fiction after all, is called realism, and it became popular for a reason. We like the appearance of the real even if it isn’t exactly real.

A way to think of this problem as it pertains to factuality goes just that way: We love a story. It helps us remember. And at the same time it infects us with its information. I’m going to bet you are going to remember the story I just told you about Margo’s cancer. Maybe you will remember the numbers I used which did, in fact, come right off the graph Margo and I looked at in her oncologist’s office. They are factually accurate. So if wrapped in that narrative is material that is factual, if it is honest, maybe there is no harm. But if it is not?

In this same article I read:

The President-elect, it turned out had a gift for the behavioral arts. He intuitively grasped “loss aversion” (our tendency to give more weight to the threat of losses than to potential gains), and perpetually maximized “nostalgia bias” (our tendency to remember the past as being better than it was). He made frequent subconscious appeals to “cultural tightness” (whereby groups that have experienced threats to their safety tend to desire strong rules and the punishment of deviance), and perhaps most striking, his approach tapped into what psychologists call “cognitive fluency” (the more easily we can mentally process an idea, such as “Make American great again” or “Lock her up!,” the more we’re prone to retain it). Even his Twitter game was sticky: “Crooked Hillary!” “BUILD THE WALL.”

As the article notes: What social scientists have learned (and perhaps what good propagandists have taught them) is that repetition of key words stick. So to say, “Obama is not a Muslim” does no good because it simply connects Obama and Muslim in people’s minds. Or consider maybe the least gifted president in the area of behavior arts in my lifetime: Richard Nixon. Every time Nixon said, “I am not a crook,” he wound up simply associating the idea of crookedness with himself, the last thing he intended.

You can see where this is headed. Because of our craving for certainty, a person with duplicitous intent can wrap a non-fact or what somebody might call an “alternative fact” into a tasty glob of narrative and we will wolf it right down. I have a hunch this kind of duplicity, like story telling itself, is as old as language. How early in the game did we learn the power of the convincing lie? You can dig into your own childhood or the childhood of your kids and most likely find some good examples.