In praise of tacit knowledge: lessons in listening part 2

For someone who lives by words, I have a surprising proclamation to make: we rely too much on language. Hear me out, because I know what it is to rely on language. Years of philosophical training encourage such reliance but ultimately reveal its limitations.

There are multiple ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating—sensation, emotion, movement, sound, shapes—and it is impossible to reduce all that is worth knowing to factual statements. In fact, most of what gets communicated even in speeches is conveyed at the level of gesture, posture, vocal tone, and so on. (Which is why email is notorious for sparking misunderstanding; it is too easy to misread...or, perhaps, too easy for the actual meaning to poke through the veil of words.) I was discussing this sort of thing recently with a very interesting woman from Wyoming whom I met at a cafe last week. 

I had been reading the New York Times and was annoyed by yet another article touting some quality that purportedly makes humans superior to other animals. I wondered aloud why we expend so much effort delineating difference rather than recognizing our kinship.* My accidental lunch companion, who works with horses for a living, responded by telling me about Buck, a Sundance Festival award-wining film about a cowboy named Buck Brannaman who “helps horses with people problems.” He learned natural horsemanship from Tom and Bill Dorrance and Ray Hunt, who inspired a new way of engaging with the animals. There's a brief trailer clip for the film at the link above that gives you an idea what all this is about, but at bottom it's about respecting the horse's tacit knowledge of the world.


As my Wyoming companion waxed poetic about these horsemen, it became clear that as much as she enjoyed visiting Manhattan—she had, in fact, grown up here and was back to help care for her 91-year old mother—she also felt alienated by an implicit dismissiveness toward the beauties of rural life and subtly demeaned by a contempt toward nature her urban counterparts didn't realize they had. That, perhaps, is the most difficult thing about contempt: it's a moral prejudice rather than a language statement we consciously believe.

It was only after we parted company that I re-discovered Verlyn Klinkenborg's New York Times column about the rural life. In honor of my lunch companion, then, as well as a more humble and open way of living, I’m going to quote an obituary Klinkenborg wrote in 1999:

There is no such thing as a horse whisperer. There never has been and never will be. The idea is an affront to the horse. You can talk and listen to horses all you want, and what you will learn, if you pay close attention, is that they live on open ground way beyond language and that language, no matter how you characterize it, is a poor trope for what horses understand about themselves and about humans. You need to practice only three things, patience, observation and humility, all of which were summed up in the life of an old man who died Tuesday in California, a man named Bill Dorrance.

Dorrance was 93, and until only a few months before his death he still rode and he still roped. He was one of a handful of men, including his brother Tom, who in separate ways have helped redefine relations between the horse and the human. Bill Dorrance saw that subtlety was nearly always a more effective tool than force, but he realized that subtlety was a hard tool to exercise if you believe, as most people do, that you are superior to the horse. There was no dominance in the way Dorrance rode, or in what he taught, only partnership. To the exalted horsemanship of the vaquero —the Spanish cowboy of 18th-century California—he brought an exalted humanity, whose highest expression is faith in the willingness of the horse.

....what you could learn from Dorrance was a manner of learning whose subject was nominally the horse but that extended itself in surprising directions to include dogs, cattle and people. If you learned it, you would know it was nothing to boast about.

There is no mysticism, no magic, in this, only the recognition of kinship with horses. Plenty of people have come across Bill Dorrance and borrowed an insight or two, and some have made a lot of money by popularizing what they seemed to think he knew. But what he knew will never be popular, nor did he ever make much money from it. You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity. It is hard to put a price on accepting that everything you think you know about horses may change with the very next horse.

“You cannot sell modesty or undying curiosity.” You can’t buy them, either, and that’s actually good news. It means they are within the reach of every single one of us, if we are willing to practice.

It seems to me that our culture actively encourages us to mistrust others, to adopt a "moral prejudice" that is inimical to curiosity, let alone honesty, respect, compassion, love, and understanding. The pervasiveness of manipulation by the advertising industry, politicians, media moguls, and corporations demands we become more discerning, not less; the manipulation is blatant, so ubiquitous that it has become invisible. (The Union of Concerned Scientists says that the average American is exposed to three thousand ads each day.) Is this why we simply shut down, shut away, shut off? How do we protect ourselves from harm and yet remain open to one another? For starters, we need to be curious, and we need to listen.

Considering a recent kerfluffle on a New York Times comment thread, it seems to me that we get into trouble precisely because 1) we assume we already know what we need to know about a situation, and 2) we are quick to assume that others, in general, are ignorant. In the first instance we foreclose our own curiosity; in the second, our humility. We would do far better to assume that we have limited knowledge and others might have something to teach us, even in areas in which we have expertise. But the very same belligerent, self-satisfied incuriosity that dominates our public discourse —c.f. the comments beneath virtually any YouTube video clip— reinforces the notion that other people are uninformed or worse. I would argue that ideological intransigence is much more dangerous to democracy than simple lack of knowledge.  As long as our arrogance-cum-ignorance keeps us from questioning ourselves or others, all it will take is a comely face or the mere appearance of confidence to disguise intellectual and moral rot. 

________________

* Subject for another post. Here I'll simply note that the leading candidates (language, the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, etc.) all fail the task, and that looking to define humanity by selecting one quality that appears to be unique seems to me to be a pretty muddle-headed way to prove superiority, which itself is a muddle-headed project.


In praise of curiosity: Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn Glennie is probably the leading percussionist of our day—and she is profoundly deaf. Listening to her TED talk could be one of the best things you do with the next eighteen minutes: https://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen. 

Culling geese

The New York Times reported recently on the generosity shown toward turtles nesting at JFK. Apparently there is a bitter dispute going on in the NYC community about how officials treat geese, however, and a comment had led me to look further into the issue. The comment thread revealed some of this bitterness, and I had wanted to give a fuller response than I could fit into the comment box, so I post it here:

Brian (#47): I appreciate your responding to clarify your position. You seem firm that the geese must be culled. This was not clear from your earlier comment, which didn't even mention culling—in fact, I didn't know about the culling until Ellie's comment prompted me to wonder what she meant by saying that "geese are a whole different story." (So at least one person here did not know what she was talking about.) It seems the debate is, at root, a conflict between moral perspectives on how we interact with the rest of our ecosystem.

As for your implicit accusation that people who object to the culls are mawkish sentimentalists, and that "the real problem" lies with them, I'd like to point out that the New York Magazine article quotes the president of the Humane Society as agreeing that there is a problem (and even helping with the egg-addling) but also criticizing the USDA for being historically inclined to kill animals. He then notes a successful relocation program that took place with gulls near JFK in the 90’s.

Here are some facts from the same article, which I'll assume for argument's sake are correct: in 2010, the geese numbered ~257,000 in NY state. 15,000-20,000 Canada geese currently live year-round in the metro region. Over the past three decades, there have been “as many as” 315 bird-plane collisions each year.  The USDA decided, by methods not described, that a mere 5000 birds is an “acceptable” number.  If they mean to leave 5000 in NY state, that’s quite a massacre they propose; if they mean only in the metro area, that’s still a significant cull. The article doesn’t mention the number of planes that fly over the city, but 300 collisions actually isn’t much—and even if you kill birds that are nesting near the airport, this doesn't do anything to reduce the risk of migrating (non-NY-resident) geese getting sucked into plane engines. In fact, the famous Sullenberger landing in the Hudson River was forced by just such migrating geese.  

Furthermore, it is valid to ask whether culling birds on Riker’s Island and Prospect Park is going to do much to reduce an already-low risk: a report covering 1912-2002 estimated that bird strikes cause 1 human death per 1 billion flying hours. Air travelers face greater danger from a plethora of other possible events. Needless to say, the birds come out much worse.

I have several objections to the culling described in the article, some moral, some practical, and some a mixture of both. The most salient here is the tremendous waste of it all: as the article notes, there are “...alternatives which are probably much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending hundreds of adult geese to suffocation chambers, double-bagging their carcasses, and dumping them in a landfill.”  (You know something is morally objectionable when "suffocation chamber" becomes an acceptable euphemism for "gas chamber.") Apparently I’m not the only one troubled by this waste: a June 15 cityroom article in the NY Times informs us that this year, the culled geese are at least going to be sent to slaughterhouses in PA and distributed to food banks. 

One last point. We define “pest” rather arbitrarily as anything that competes with us. Yet humans are responsible for soil degradation and contamination, massive deforestation, the eradication of 50% of ocean-dwelling species in just the past half century, the slow suffocation of trees* and a host of other environmental catastrophes. We have also shown remarkably poor prognostic ability when manipulating species to try to control some small part of nature in one region, which invariably has profound and unpredicted consequences elsewhere.  I’m not sure we can afford to be killing off massive numbers of animals when we have no idea what the effect on the ecosystem will be. In any case, if we wait long enough, the geese will die off on their own through some combination of effects of toxins in the environment and climate change. Then again, so will we. So maybe we should be focusing on bigger problems.

*The entire earth has effectively become a gas chamber for trees: go to Wit's End, click on links for research about dying trees, and get very, very depressed. 

Recommendation: "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You"

Eli Pariser, of MoveOn.org fame, has just come out with a book about how the internet filters information for us—even when we don't know it, and don't want it to. Pariser takes the experience I touched on in The Trouble with Choice, pursues it to its roots, and explains it better than I ever could.

The consequences of this kind of filtering for our political and social life are enormous. Democracy is hard enough when we share the same facts; it is impossible if we are being shunted into parallel universes. 

In March, the TED conference invited him to preview his call for an ethical, open internet. With Bill Gates and Google executives in the audience (!), he made a powerful case: here's a 9-minute video of his talk. It's truly eye-opening.

Pariser's work, interestingly enough, confirms my recent experience of doing internet research for this past week's series on drug shortages.  I found out about the shortages initially through a subscription medical journal, but when I googled to find more widely available reports, I got hardly any useful hits. I found this puzzling, but was even more perplexed when I would perform the same searches again a day later, then the day after that, and so on, and each time get more and more relevant hits that had clearly been there all along. If you've ever noticed this pattern yourself, you've got to watch the video.

And if you haven't noticed this happening, then you really have to watch the video.

Is democratic discourse even possible when healthcare professionals behave like this?

Faith in democracy rarely survives a scroll through a blog's public comments section.

To wit: Yale psychologist Rebecca Puhl, PhD wrote a blog entry on Medscape (a site for health professionals) entitled, "Harsh Comments During the Holiday Season" in response to Alastair Macaulay's New York Times review of the NYC Ballet's new production of The Nutcracker. Macaulay had criticized a male and female dancer for their lackluster performance. Here is the offending paragraph, which was, by the way, embedded within an otherwise glowing review of the opening night performance:

"This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity. Ashley Bouder (Dewdrop) has the brilliance they lack, but also a greater and more tough-grained hardness."

Because Medscape requires a subscription, here is Dr. Puhl’s response to the Macaulay review:

Many people enjoy the holiday ritual of attending the Nutcracker ballet this time of year, and a couple of weeks ago a review of George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” at the New York City Ballet appeared in the New York Times. In part of his review, the writer Alastair Macaulay criticized the body weight of Jenifer Ringer, cast as the Sugar Plum Fairy, who according to Macaulay, “looked as if she’d eaten one sugarplum too many.”

These comments spurred considerable media attention, including a televised interview with the ballet dancer Ms. Ringer herself, who has battled with anorexia and overeating.

If a dancer doesn’t conform to the strict (and often unhealthy) ideals of thinness expected in ballet, does it reduce the quality of the performance? Are these expectations appropriate, or just reinforcing stigma? Ms. Ringer is a talented ballerina performing in a prestigious ballet production – her high profile role and the quality of her dancing speak to those talents.

This criticism sends yet another concerning message to young girls, who may face terrible pressures, negative body image, eating disorders, and other potential health problems in order to conform to excessively thin body types that have become the norm in the ballet world. Is this really necessary? Instead of instilling shame, stigma and harmful health messages on girls and women who love to dance, let's embrace and applaud them regardless of what size of tutu they wear.

Dr. Puhl, whose research specialty is weight bias, seems to have been overly sensitized by her occupation. She grand jetéd to the conclusion that Macaulay was insulting the female dancer's weight (she was apparently unconcerned about the male dancer), launched an attack on the "strict and unhealthy ideals of thinness" expected in ballet (forgetting that professional dancers have to be healthy enough to jump, twirl and kick most of their waking hours), and conflated “girls and women who love to dance” with NYC Ballet prima ballerinas who are called to somewhat higher standards.

Dr. Puhl seems to not understand ballet or criticism; the issue is not whether Ms. Ringer is talented, but how she performed on a particular night in a particular role. The real surprise of the blog, though, was the harshness, vindictiveness, simple-mindedness, and ignorance displayed by so many of the blog’s commenters—healthcare professionals, no less!—who leapt onto the eating disorders bandwagon without having bothered to check the original review. Some suggested ballet should be forced to change its standards and be boycotted until it does; many commenters searched for still photos of the female dancer in question and concluded that she was perfectly lovely and thin (it never occurred to them that one cannot evaluate a dancer or dance performance by looking at still shots). There were numerous ad hominem attacks on the critic, and some gratuitous gay-bashing. (A few comments, one of which suggested torture and death for the critic, were so inflammatory they were later removed by the blog’s editor.) The solid majority of commenters were able to see the issue only through the restricted lens of eating disorders, and a startling number evinced no understanding of the role of a critic.

What concerns me most, however, is not the clear ignorance of the healthcare-blogging public in matters of art. It is the ignorance of how to read critically, to analyze an argument. It is the fact that the people entrusted with our care (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, psychotherapists) seem so disinclined to question assumptions or check their sources or even control their hostility. This does not bode well for democracy. Eating disorders are evidently a hot-button issue, but are they any more volatile than, say, taxes? education? the environment? social security? Democracy works only if the citizenry is educated and committed to acting responsibly and honestly. There are many ways to cheat the system, as we have seen over and over again. But when the system is so weakened from within, what recourse do we have?

Lest my gentle readers think that I am over-reacting, I will now provide a glimpse of the comments.

The Data

I spent a considerable amount of time reading through all 195 comments and categorizing them to get a clearer picture of the state of this particular hive mind. Five comments were so off-topic or hard to decipher that I had to discard them. Otherwise, the breakdown was as follows.

Agree with Dr. Puhl’s post (“supporters”): 157. (= 80.5% of total comments) Of the 157, there were 59 calm supporters who wrote nothing harsher than “I looked at Ms. Ringer’s photos and she’s not fat” or “The reviewer’s comments are probably fair within the ballet workday, but are appalling in the healthy context. Maybe ballet should die a lovely death.” (Well, ok, that last comment isn’t terribly calm, but wait until we get to the hostile categories.) There were 8 autobiographical supporters who relayed personal or familial experience with eating disorders. 9 supporters were markedly ignorant about ballet (e.g., “the name Sugar Plum Fairy suggests a full-figured woman anyway”), 16 were markedly ignorant about the nature and purpose of reviews (“I doubt if the critic could have performed the piece as well as she did.”). The comments in this category were striking for their reliance on homilies: there seems to be something about adopting the position of criticizing someone else for their criticism that pushes one toward banality. Below are excerpts from comments in this category:

“ ...people who criticize others are trying to compensate for their own shortcomings...”

“... Abe Lincoln once said it is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.”

“... I hope her parents taught her the old saying, ‘I'm made of rubber, You're made of glue, Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you!’”

“...do not judge and be kind to one another”

“...let him who is without sin cast the first stone”

“...As for the critic I would offer Proverb 14:23 All hard work (ballet dancer) bring a profit but mere talk (critic) leads only to poverty.”

“...as the old saying goes ‘no one has ever erected a statue or named a hospital in honor of a critic.’"

“...The Bible has great wisdom – ‘Be slow to anger.’ Let me add Be very slow to criticize.”

“...the most critical are those who have nothing to write home about themselves”

Seven commenters (the objectifers) seemed to be trying to use science to tamp down the emotional quotient: they wanted to make the question about whether the dancer had a “normal” BMI (body mass index) or not. Early on, one poster rightfully pointed out that normal BMI ranges are not applicable to professional athletes, but that didn’t stop four subsequent commenters from continuing to speculate about Ringer's BMI based on her photographs (!).

Now we get to the hostile categories (63 total, or 32% of total comments): 10 were angry toward the critic (e.g., “I’m seeing red!” “shame on this chauvinistic creep”), 12 were nasty toward the critic (from “he’s insane, he should have his nuts cracked” to calls for him to be fired, physically punished, or assassinated), 23 employed ad hominem attacks and speculations (he must have eating issues; he is sadistic and misogynistic, jealous, envious, soul-sick; “This old fool needs a new hairdo. When I did a Google search and saw his photo I thought what a jerk!”), and 3 homophobic comments assumed any dance critic must be gay and proceeded to conflate homosexual with pedophilic, sometimes with unintended self-contradiction: “...Since most skinny formless women are under age 13, the men/women attracted to that look are closet child abusers. In fact, it is my understanding that unwanted sexual advances is one of the risks for young women who go into ballet and female gymnastics.” (If the problem is pedophilic homosexuality, one wonders where all the sexual advances toward women come from.) 11 posts were angry-dismissive toward other commenters, and 2 were angry-oppositional (e.g., “Maybe Jenifer Ringer and all the other whiners should take a trip over to namby pamby land and get a dose of self-confidence. They should also realize no one wants to watch a Sugar Plum Fairy shake like a bowl-full of jelly...” Um, wouldn't that require a trip away from namby-pamby land?).

One post from a hospice nurse was in a category of its own: an over-reaction that was both wierdly morose and poignant:

This article and your message have upset me. My dream has always been to go to the ballet in a big city instead of watching on TV. But now in this terrible recession, I have started to walk and talk with my money. Too many in my family are unemployed or underemployed. From now on I will not watch ballet on TV and I will put aside my dream. Anyway, there are better things in my life now, like our first grand daughter and first grand son. I will give them my time, bake cookies, buy books published here in the USA. I did not go shopping after Christmas this year. I think we all need to use our assets to change what is so wrong in this world. We do not need goods made in foreign countries. We do not need to see dancers kill themselves in order to be accepted into dance companies. I do not approve of the way girls and women are treated in the fine arts and entertainment world. Never have. Now I have a good reason to not even watch The Nutcracker on TV ever again.

Among the mere 22 (11%) who voiced non-hostile disagreement were 6 who accepted Dr. Puhl’s premise but thought that obesity is a bigger problem to worry about than anorexic dancers. One of these thought we should be just as concerned about males with eating disorders.

Out of all 195 posts, only 16 (8%) expressed polite, thoughtful disagreement with Dr. Puhl’s premise. Comment #93 summed up the situation nicely: “it seems many commenting here are not fans of ballet and don’t understand critics...” Some urged an attitude of respect toward professional critics (“Ballet is art...those who spend a lifetime studying an art form are likely to have opinions based on some substance....”). Comment #49 (mine) took a step back and referred to the original review, which I was prompted to read only after finding flaw with Dr. Puhl’s reasoning:

Before we all form a cavalry on our high horses, let's look at the quote in context, near the end of an overall glowing review of this new production of the Nutcracker: 

"This didn’t feel, however, like an opening night. Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity. Ashley Bouder (Dewdrop) has the brilliance they lack, but also a greater and more tough-grained hardness." 

The core criticism—about both Ringer AND a male dancer (which no one seems to be comparably up in arms about)—is about their dancing. The critic thinks they lack depth, complexity, brilliance, lapidary hardness.

To me, the reference to sampling sweets is not a veiled reference to corpulence but to a sense of a post-prandial somnolence, a soporific or even lazy quality in their dancing that he felt did not equal the technique and artistic imagination of the other dancers in that particular production, on that particular evening. It is akin to saying a few dancers in a ballet about a bacchanal looked like they'd had one too many glasses of wine. You wouldn't interpret that as a comment on their personal alcoholism—you would assume, rightly, that it was a reflection on how they danced.

Four comments applauded this “rational viewpoint” (thank you, #51, 123, 174 and 175), but the vast majority of the subsequent 146 kept riding their high horses. #186 expressed the same wonderment I felt when returning to the blog a couple days later and seeing how little influence my “rational viewpoint” had exerted:

Wow, I have to say that as a veterinarian, I am truly amazed (appalled) at the level of professionalism (what professionalism???) demonstrated by my human doctor counterparts on this particular blog. Amongst professionals in my chosen field, there is a level of respect, tolerance, and courtesy when engaged in professional blogs, even when opinions differ. Perhaps this is why so many of my clients tell me that they wish I could be their personal physician instead of their MD.

I hope to examine, in future posts, other situations in which respectful discourse seems compromised and to understand why this happens. Perhaps by understanding the categories we might fall into, we’ll be better able to recognize the pitfalls and avoid them ourselves.

* * * * *

P.S. Macaulay himself responded to general media brouhaha here. ("Judging the bodies in ballet.") His account of the whole kerfluffle, as well as the requirements of ballet and of reviewing, is worth reading; some of the NYT reader comments, apparently, were also "obscene and abusive."