False Beliefs

The persistence of beliefs in the face of contrary evidence has always puzzled me. It has also annoyed me. “Why don’t facts change our minds?” as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it in an article in The New Yorker (2/27/17).

She begins by citing a number of well-known studies that use the debriefing paradigm to present the facts. For example, subjects are first asked to judge pairs of suicide notes. Then they are asked to distinguish the genuine from the fake ones.

After they had made their judgments, some of the subjects were told they were experts at this task, while others were told they weren’t very good. However, there really wasn’t any difference between the subjects, as what they were told had no basis in fact.

In the next phase of the study, the debriefing procedure, they were told they had been deceived, that they had zero grounds for believing they were any good or poor in judging suicide notes.

In spite of the fact the subjects were informed about the deception, they continued to believe what they had been told. Those told they were good judges of suicide notes continued to believe they were good; those told they were poor continued to believe they were poor. Again, both were equally unfounded.

The researchers concluded beliefs are remarkably persistent in the face of contrary evidence. As a rule, individuals fail to revise their beliefs even after they have been refuted. If anything, they become more polarized, growing further apart as they hold to their beliefs more strongly.

While hundreds of subsequent studies have confirmed these findings, a straightforward explanation remains elusive. Kolbert asks, “How did we come to be this way?” In trying to answer this question, she reviews three recent books that have more or less come to the same conclusion.

The argument runs like this: The biggest advantage humans have over other species is not our ability to reason, but rather the ability to cooperate. “Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data rather it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborate groups.”

For example, say you believe the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is a “disaster.” Even though your belief is baseless, if a good friend of yours agrees with you, even though her belief is also baseless, it will nevertheless strengthen your belief. And if another friend agrees with both of you, that will even further increase confidence in your view. And, so it goes.

The fact that false beliefs persist may have had some original survival value, but that doesn’t necessarily account for their persistence in the contemporary world. I know of many individuals who disagree about Obamacare or, if you will, our current president, but who nevertheless remain on the best of terms.

While we may be extremely sociable and belong to several collaborative groups, not everyone with these groups agree on a variety of issues. And yet the group can function quite successfully and the friendships among its members remain intact.

From the Archives

I’ve been rereading some of my favorite books. The latest was Jonathan Rosen’s Joy Comes in the Morning. I wanted to write a blog about it but discovered I already had. What I wrote a while back still holds. It’s a wonderful novel.

A Dance with Religion

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime! Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalm 30:5

Deborah Green is a young, charming, rabbi. Her congregants and the patients she visits in hospitals draw strength from her and see something in her, even when she does not see it herself. In Joy Comes in the Morning by Jonathan Rosen, she is facing a crisis, one that has been brewing for some time.

Deborah has increasing doubts about her faith. She ministers to the ill, delivers her remarks eloquently, sings beautifully, and says her morning prayers with apparent passion. But all the while she senses it’s an act.

Faker! a voice inside Deborah cried. There’s nothing! But she kept talking, kept formulating words and thoughts. Tears ran down her face, not because, as sometimes happened she felt how near God was, but because she felt God was not there at all and that she was speaking aloud in a cold white room, for the benefit of an old lady.

On a visit to the hospital where Henry Friedman is recovering from his second stroke, she meets his son, Lev. He finds her talking to his father and doesn’t know who she is and asks her to leave. She explains why she’s there, they become friends and in time lovers.

Lev begins studying the Torah with her and discovers a vocabulary for what he has always felt. Paraphrasing an old rabbinic precept, Lev found a teacher in Deborah and got himself a friend.

But there was far more to Deborah than her rabbinical self. She likes stupid movies, was not averse to using profanity, and could be quite frivolous. In spite of her responsibilities, she continues to struggle with what she perceives as the emptiness of her life and decides to flee her synagogue, without telling anyone including Lev, who has no idea where she’s gone.

Outwardly she did her work, observing the social and professional and religious forms, but inwardly she felt that a bottomless darkness had opened up and that she was constantly tiptoeing around the rim.

It is to her sister’s home where she goes. There she spends weeks doing nothing, not thinking much, taking long walks and commiserating with her sister, as well as her sister’s partner who gradually helps her to regain her strength. Eventually she returns to her synagogue and to Lev.

Soon thereafter she is informed her contract will not be renewed. Deborah receives a scholarship to study in Jerusalem, marries Lev, and together they embark for Israel.

Elsewhere Rosen has written, Deborah recognized that the rules she lived by—and the rules she ignored—had been devised by humans, though she saw them as divinely inspired and therefore worth maintaining. As a Reform Jew she was not obliged to see Jewish law as immutable and binding and yet she chose to observe a great deal. Something in the tradition transcended the individual…so that she had a sense of spiritual well-being that lived beyond her traditional life. Lev recognized this in her and admired it intensely.

I first read Joy Comes in the Morning ten years ago and remembered it brought me great pleasure. Ten years later it still did. Doubts and questions and paradoxes speak to me. I latch on to those books that do this and find they continue to inform me and often deliver an important message.

The Third Swimmer

Until recently, Rosalind Brackenbury was a writer unknown to me. Somewhere I read about her novel, The Third Swimmer. I was drawn to the book by its depiction of pre-War London and, much later, by Brackenbury’s portrait of a village by the sea in the south of France.

The novel is the story of Thomas, an architect, and Olivia who meet just before the start of World War II. They are adrift, worried about a possible invasion and the destruction of their country.

Such damage: it made the whole of life so fragile that it almost stopped your breath. People had labored to build here, had lived all their lives trusting to the solidity of these streets; they had bought vegetables in markets here, and seen their children off to school, and come home from work—and it all could all be smashed in one night?

Out of the blue Thomas proposes to Olivia and equally surprising, she accepts. Thomas enlists in the army, while Olivia takes a day job.

In time, she begins an affair with one of the executives. They become close and their affair continues, in spite of the fact that the executive is married.

After the war, Olivia marries Thomas, but right from the beginning he senses that something is not quite right in their joyless marriage. Nevertheless, they stay together and have four children.

He has known, ever since their war-time honeymoon. His guess was that there was somebody else, another love, something impossible for her to forget in spite of what she protested.s

Several years later, Thomas arranges a trip to the south of France to try to recover their lost love. They drive to Cassis a small town on the coast, not far from Marseilles.

Out here in the sunlight, with madame bringing their breakfast, the hum of morning rising from the little town, shops opening, people sluicing water down the streets and across the dust of the square, it’s all right. The world they are in is all right, he thinks, it’s exactly as good as it can be, considering what has happened to it.

Rural France comes alive on these pages and so did their marriage after Thomas, in very rough seas, rescues a drowning woman far off the coast and barely survives himself. This brave act brings the two closer than they have ever been.

The way back always seems shorter than the way out. The roads of the south, which once seemed so endless, are quickly gone; the towns they pass through no longer look strange. On the drive up through France, she sits beside him.

Summer

A Commonplace Book of Summer
Summer has always been my favorite time of the year. And so I have always been intrigued by how do others view the summer months. To find out, I did a targeted search for the word “summer” in my commonplace book. Below are a few of the passages I found.

Shakespeare
Summer’s lease hath all to short a date.

Hemingway A Farewell to Arms
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Henry James
Summer afternoon—summer afternoon: to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Christopher Wilkins The Measure of Love
I felt like someone feels who spends a bright summer’s afternoon in a dark, smoky cinema, engrossed in some tenebrous gothic drama, only to emerge blinking into a world where it is still broad daylight and where there are shops and children and safety and laughter and people getting on with their lives.

Ann Patchett Bel Canto
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives.

Colm Toibin The Master
…he could not stop asking himself what he wished for now, and answering that he wanted only more of this—calm days, a beautiful small house and this soft summer light.

J. M. Coetzee Life & Times of Michael K
But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness.

Andre Aciman Out of Egypt
Summers were long in Venice, she said, and there was nothing she liked more some days than to take the vaporetto and ride around the city, or head directly for the Lido and spend a morning on the beach by herself. She loved the sea.

Carol Cassella Oxygen
…Seattle’s spectacularly brief summertime...

Ian McEwan The Child in Time
I don’t remember a hotter summer than this in seventy-four years. It’s hot. In fact, I’d say it was too hot. Stephen said that was better than too wet and his father agreed.

Elizabeth Hawes Camus, a Romance
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.”

Lily Tuck I Married You for Happiness
Anything can happen on a summer afternoon
On a lazy dazy golden hazy summer afternoon

Anita Brookner A Friend from England
One always expects the summer to last for much longer than it does: one forgets the very sensation of being cold.

Natalia Ginzburg The Little Virtues
There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer.

Alastair Reid Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner
I do not own a watch and pass the summer without ever knowing the time.

Richard Goodwin The American Condition
Now in Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day’s work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, artists, doctors technicians, poets, scholars.

Olah Olafsson Restoration
…summer arrived with the most glorious weather imaginable: hot, sunny days and warm nights.

James Salter The Art of Fiction

At the age of 89, just a few months before he died, James Salter delivered the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence Lectures at the University of Virginia. The Art of Fiction consists of the three lectures he presented then.

I’ve read most everything Salter has written and while I didn’t expect to learn how to write a novel, I wanted to know about his writing life and the writers who meant the most to him. They include works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel, Dreiser, Céline, Faulkner.

Salter raises the question: Why does one write? This is a question I have often pondered. To my surprise, Salter answers the question this way: …it would be truer to say that I’ve written to be admired by others, to be loved by them, to be praised, to be known. In the end that’s the only reason.”

I wonder how many writers would answer the same way?

Salter often spent time in France. He said he was always able to write there and that the French generally believe it is worthwhile to be a writer.

He spoke about the important elements in writing a novel. It’s never easy, you need to weigh each sentence, rewrite a great deal, observe closely and learn how to tell a story. “The narrative tells the story and story is the heart of things. It is the fundamental element.”

He spoke about some of the books he wrote, although he didn’t include his novel I like best, Solo Days. He described Light Years …”as being like the worn stones of conjugal life: everything ordinary, everything marvelous, everything that makes it full or makes it embittered—it goes on for years, decades, and in the end seems to have passed like things seen from a train, a meadow there, trees, houses, darkened towns, a station going by.”

The book represented the memory of those days, memories that are probably true for any marriage.

He wrote, A time comes when you are all alone, Celine wrote long before it actually happened to him, when you’ve come to the end of everything than can happen to you. It’s the end of the world, even grief, your own grief, doesn’t answer you anymore…”

And he concludes: “There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”

In the final analysis, this is the only reason I publish whatever I’ve written.

String Theory

I am reading David Foster Wallace’s String Theory, a collection of his essays on tennis. I am reading the book at the same time the Wimbledon tennis championships are being played. I’ve become a sort of tennis nut.

While Wallace was a very fine player, he never qualified for a major tournament. He wonders what makes a great tennis player? I think his answer is true for greatness of any sport and, perhaps, any form of superior performance.

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one…They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind…might well be: nothing at all.

I am reminded of how Woody Allen defined greatness during an interview at The New Yorker Festival in 2000. He said:

… you do what you do, you do what you do best, and if others like it or think it's great, then that's fine. And if they don't, that's fine too. But you always have to do what you like to do and what you do naturally. Talent is a gift, not something you can try to attain. You can work at perfecting it, but first it has to be there.

Malcolm Gladwell’s view of greatness (or success as he calls it) is a little more complicated. In Outliers: The Story of Success, he says there are five factors determining outstanding success: talent, hard work, opportunity, timing and luck..

Yes, you need to have a natural talent and practice, practice, practice. But you also need a fair amount of luck and be given the opportunity to express yourself, however you can do that.

Timing also plays a role, say in tennis, the opponents you play at that time, the stage of your development and something as simple as the time of the day, the light on the court, and how many hours you slept the night before.

Gladwell’s conception goes well beyond the simplicity of Woody’s and Wallace’s view. It recognizes the multiple factors that govern any behavior and the unpredictable way they combine in any individual. For this reason, it seems to me the most reasonable current account of “greatness” in any field.

The Lost Letter

But sometimes the only way to fight the enemy is to become them…

Jillian Cantor’s The Lost Letter: A Novel is part mystery, part romance, part history and along the way an introduction to philately.

Katie Nelson is a writer in Los Angeles, currently going through a divorce. Her father, Ted, was a stamp collector but is now suffering from dementia and lives in a memory care facility. While cleaning out their family home, Katie comes across her father’s enormous stamp collection. She takes it to a stamp appraiser, Benjamin, who discovers a rare stamp on a letter that was never sent.

We shift to wartime Austria that has been annexed by Nazi Germany. Kristoff is a young apprentice to a master Jewish stamp engraver, Frederick Faber. He lives with Faber’s wife and two daughters, Elena and Mimi, in a small village on the outskirts of Vienna. Early in the novel, Elena is on her way to to the post office but is presumably captured by the Nazis, since she never returns home.

The chapters switch back between wartime Austria and late 80s and 90s Los Angeles. Cantor skillfully constructs this dual timeline. Fredrick Faber’s wife is captured, he disappears while walking to the nearby village and Kristoff is forced by to engrave stamps for the Nazis.

After Hitler took over Austria, they did a series of stamps to commemorate Austrian buildings and landmarks. This stamp is St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Vienna. But it’s not supposed to have a flower in the steeple…I doubt it was a mistake…So then how did the flower get there?

Meanwhile, Katie and Benjamin go on a search for the origins of the rare stamp in her father’s collection. Together they travel to Wales to meet Mimi who lives in a retirement home, then to Berlin at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall where they eventually track down Elena who is living in East Berlin.

The story appears complex, but The Lost Letter reads quite clearly. Who is Kristoff and what happened to him after the war? Is Katie’s father really Ted? Why is Elena living in East Berlin? What is in the opened letter and is the stamp of any significant value?

Here I can only pose a few of the questions that make the novel such an exciting mystery. All of them are answered in the end, making The Lost Letter a moving tale of sacrifice, resistance and love.

The stamps were a connection to the past, his past, to this person he once was, this woman he once loved.

A Long Saturday

There comes a time when it’s too late for many things. George Steiner

A Long Saturday is a provocative exchange between the the eminent scholar, George Steiner and the journalist Laure Adler. The book-length interview treats the many issues that have occupied Steiner throughout his life—languages, culture, Judaism, literature and the Holocaust.

I quote below some of the Steiner’s answers that struck me as most interesting:

First, we have a fundamental philosophical problem. A critical judgment on a piece of music, art, or literature cannot be put to the proof. If I declare that Mozart was incapable of writing a melody (there are people who believe that), you can tell me I’m a poor fool, but you can’t prove me wrong. When Tolstoy said that Lear is an overblown melodrama by someone who doesn’t understand tragedy at all, you can say, “Mr. Tolstoy, I regret to inform you that you are laughably wrong.” But you can’t prove him wrong. In the end it’s scary: opinions are not refutable.

And a good guest, a worthy guest, leaves the place where he has been staying a bit cleaner, a bit more beautiful, a bit more interesting than he found it.

L.A. Do you define yourself as a Jew, as a Jewish thinker?
G.S. No. A European Jew, if you like. A student, I like to consider myself a student. I have teachers.

But really, what fascinates me most is the mystery of Jewish intellectual excellence. I’m not being a hypocrite: in the sciences, the percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates is stunning. There are areas in which there is almost a Jewish monopoly. Take the creation of the modern American novel by Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and so many others. The sciences, mathematics, the media, as well; Pravda was run by Jews.

For me, to be a Jew is to remain a student, to be someone who learns. It’s to reject superstition, the irrational. It’s to refuse to turn to astrologists to find out your destiny. It’s to have an intellectual, moral, spiritual vision; above all, it’s to refuse to humiliate or torture another human being; it’s to refuse to allow another to suffer from your existence.
There comes a time when it’s too late for many things.

L.A. I think I’ve read that you distinguish two types of people: those who read with a pencil, and those who don’t….
G.S. You have to make notes, you have to underline, you have to wrestle with the text by writing in the margin.

In the evening the officers played Schubert and sang Mozart; in the morning they tortured people in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Majdanek.

Leading historians believe that between August 1914 and May 1945, in Europe and the western Slavic world, more than a hundred million men, women, and children were massacred in wars, in concentration camps, and by famine, deportation, and major epidemics… It’s a miracle that anything managed to survive.

It is inconceivable that we keep people alive against their will, when their only wish is to leave this world. It seems grossly sadistic to me.