Imagining Itself (Part XVI: Premeditation and Impulse)

In his 2011 brick of a book “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Steven Pinker makes the astonishing case that society has become progressively less violent throughout recorded history. Despite the many vicious atrocities of the 20^th Century, the number of global per capita deaths due to violence were actually relatively few when compared with the savagery of previous centuries. He lays out the evidence in a whopping 840+ pages of historical detail and closely argued commentary leaving little room for serious disagreement in what is about as close to an offensive weapon as a paperback could possibly get.

Pinker attributes the gradual civilising process to a variety of factors including the rise of reason, prudence, empathy, human rights and self-control. What struck me especially through his discussion of our inner demons and better angels was the degree to which imagination is profoundly implicated in the slow ascendency of civilisation and enlightenment.

As is to be expected, Pinker is quick to quash any notion that there might be an evolutionary basis to the progressive decline in violence - the timescale is simply too short. Nonetheless, there are numerous points throughout the book where it is clear that evolution - of the cultural kind – has provided important ways to reimagine, reconceive, anticipate and avoid many of the more fraught interactions with our fellow human beings. It should also be noted that without the capacity for imagination it is inconceivable that any such humanisation process could have been possible.

In a chapter on the subject of self-control, Pinker mentions a study conducted by psychologists Douglas Kenrick and David Buss in which 70 – 90% of men and between 50 – 80% of women admitted to having at least one homicidal fantasy in the preceding year. If these figures are in any way accurate then Pinker is right to remark: “The small number of premeditated murders that are actually carried out must be the cusp of a colossal iceberg of homicidal desires submerged in sea of inhibitions.” Moreover, whatever laws, morals, taboos or other forms of deterrent or self-control serve to inhibit these murderous intentions, they would be meaningless if we had no means to contemplate their consequences. Instead we would be little more than ungovernable bundles of urges with no possibility of premeditation or self restraint. Furthermore, while we may be uncertain whether the tendency to imagine violent acts (not to mention consuming representations of them) either increases or diminishes our propensity to carry them out, it is nonetheless true that the ability to anticipate situations in which one is likely to be the victim of violence have a significant influence on our behaviour; on the places we are likely go and the kinds of confrontations we are prepared to let ourselves in for. Discretion truly is the better part of valour.

Pinker also discusses the research of Richard Tremblay, a psychologist who studied levels of violence across various age groups. His work shows that it is not the testosterone driven years of late adolescence in which humans are at their most violent, as one might expect, but in fact during the terrible twos.

A few days ago my soon-to-be-3-year-old son accidentally clipped my forehead with a sturdy cardboard roll. It barely deserved to be acknowledged so I laughed it off. But just as I did so I detected the faint glimmerings of a realisation dawn upon his face as he contemplated – with a chuckle - the ramifications of what had just happened. As far as he was concerned he had been the direct cause of the “event” for which there had been no penalty. With no intuitive understanding the difference between intentional acts and accidental events, his response was far more predictable for me than it was for him. I tried to pre-empt it with a “Don’t you dare!” But his self taught lesson wasn’t yet complete and within a moment he had shoved the roll painfully into my cheek which was met with an angry reprimand and a scowl. There is no such thing as unintended malice and every parent will mete out this lesson instinctively, just as I did.

As children become increasingly capable of controlling their actions (literally of premeditation) we begin to expect more of them in terms of self-control and the more likely we are to judge them on the consequences of their actions. What further proof do we need that consciousness, imagination and morality develop throughout childhood and are to a significant degree formed and informed by culture?

 “To contemplate a horrible possibility, especially while smiling, is already to do something bad. The thinking may be morally bad even if it is never voiced and has no effect on anyone else.” -Derek Melser

Whilst I would agree with Melser that there is definitely something morally wrong about the person who gloats at another’s suffering, I’m not at all sure that we can generalise about all forms of imagined horror. The Health and Safety officer who takes pleasure in omitting a real and present danger from a Risk Assessment is doing something genuinely reprehensible, but their taking pleasure at contemplating likely causes of injury or death and bringing them to people’s attention is by no means morally bad, quite the reverse. When my son chuckled at his dawning epiphany I didn’t reprimand him for his thought, in fact I smiled along knowingly in the hope that he would manage to avert his impulse. Such moments of self-restraint are a vital part of the humanising process and there is genuine pleasure to be had in successfully overcoming the demons of our nature.

As Tremblay’s research shows, children of my son’s age are particularly poor at inhibiting their behaviour. They are impulsive because they haven’t yet learnt the knack of contemplating in imagination what they can only do in deed. Encouraging imagination undoubtedly brings with it the possibility that some people will use it to attempt to deceive the rest of us. But the solution is not for the rest of us to simply inhibit our darker acts of imagination. Perhaps one of the principal reasons we are so fascinated with crime - and why we consume representations of it in such vast quantities - is not because we take pleasure in the suffering of others but because crime provides insights into the possible deceptions that others might try to perpetrate against us. After all, the most vulnerable angels are those who can't imagine what it takes be a demon.

Shallows and Depths

In the comments section of my last post, Brian makes a distinction between what he calls shallow and reassuring narratives and deeper more questioning ones. He mentions the work of the German sociologist Theodore Adorno who was highly critical of the Culture Industry (a term Adorno coined with Max Horkheimer in 1944) and its control and dumbing down of mass culture. Brian’s comments, particularly the notion of “reassuring narrative”, touches on some thoughts I’ve been mulling over recently about the nature of fantasy and escapism and whether these are as harmful or unhealthy as is often claimed. Brian’s mention of Adorno reminded me of an essay entitled “Cult of Distraction” by an friend and teacher of Adorno’s: Sigfried Kracauer who in 1926 wrote:

“The bourgeois middle classes… maintain the illusory claim that they are still the guardians of culture and education. Their arrogance, which creates sham oases for itself, keeps the masses down and denigrates their amusement… They claim the status of high art while actually rehearsing anachronistic forms which evade the pressing needs of our time.”

It might be said that these “pressing needs of our time” (then or now) are a wider social phenomena which have little to do with the often far more strongly felt pressing needs of individuals which much culture provokes, feeds, reassures, engages and sometimes even creates (as Adorno and others have noted). Many Marxist thinkers perceived such individualistic ‘needs’ as a distraction (or, in Adorno’s case, a “deception”) and instead urged for an art that would expose the ‘real’ social relations in operation in any given situation and how these function as the actual but otherwise unrecognised cause of discontent at the level of the individual.

But Marxists are not alone in this disavowal of distraction, escapism and fantasy. Freud too believed that fantasy was a form of wish fulfilment. Similarly Piaget interpreted childhood fantasy as a maladaptive pattern that is gradually superseded by more rational logical behaviours. Montessori too advocated ‘real’ play in preference to fantasy play - though, interestingly, her grandson tells of how she read fantasy stories to him at a younger age than she suggested for other children.

The bourgeois denigration of the masses amusement that Kracauer speaks of is as widespread today as it ever was. But in developmental psychology, at least, researchers like Paul L. Harris are beginning to show how childhood fantasy is a fundamental site of rationalisations about cause and effect and even of moral reasoning. In fact it is children who cannot play at make-believe who suffer the most serious developmental difficulties.

But at the adult level the attitude persists that all forms of fantasy and escapism are a frivolous, shallow, meaningless waste of time and are deleterious to insightful thinking (as Adorno claimed) and that the only culture worthy of our attention should be a challenging, thought provoking, critical and self aware one.

Presumably even the deepest thinkers need to take a break from the taxing practice of gazing into the fathomless pool of revelation occasionally. Sometimes a little reassurance is the perfect salve, especially in lives that are otherwise solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And who is to say that such distractions do not provide other goods than amusement alone – just as fantasy is of benefit to the development of children? And, as a further point of contrast: how numerous I wonder are those unfortunate individuals that, due to their highly educated academic insight, are now unable to fully immerse themselves in the pleasures of fiction or illusion? – though fiction, it seems, is particularly prone to this malady (see here for example). 

“Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.” -Jonathan Swift 

Or, as Adorno, laying it on thick, put it:

“The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.” 

Adorno’s essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered”, from which the above is taken, is not wrong by any means, but in his determination to get at the truth, he generalizes, oversimplifies and overstates the case. In fact he does exactly what Nassim Taleb warns of in my last post.

It’s probably evident by now that I’m not at all convinced that fantasy is such a harmful thing as is so often claimed (though it’s probably really just a question of degree) and I’m also not so sure that it is deleterious to insightful thinking either. As Adorno acknowledges:

“It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being, produced an airtight case proving the regressive effects of particular products of the culture industry.” 

Nor has it yet. And this is probably because insight is a two way process between a curious object and an inquiring mind, and curious objects can be found wherever one looks deeply, not just where depth has already been excavated through the insight (or deviousness) of others, whether they be heavyweight thinkers or even self-serving functionaries of the Culture Industry.

The Inequality of Nice

"And this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! — It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; — people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word." -Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

In two consecutive tutorials last week I encountered the word “nice” being used to justify a decision about the presentation of artworks for exhibition. Should I have been surprised that two final year students should feel so comfortable using such an unqualified term during a tutorial? At one point, I asked one of the students to substitute the word “appropriate” as a means of highlighting the issue. At least when you use the word “appropriate” you have to think about how something is appropriate: appropriate to what?

If we wish to talk about artworks in anything other than the most superficial terms then the word nice has very little to offer. Nice is a nice word, which is another way of saying that it signifies absolutely nothing other than vague approval based upon no other criteria than gentility and convention. Nice demands no explanation. Nice is good and not nice is bad. According to many people, swearing is bad because it's “just not nice”.

Now, I’m all for people being nice and I'm all for nice weather, nice company, nice conversation, nice food and nice wine. But at some point, when we're wanting to understand a little more about what we do and like, we have to begin to think about our criteria a little more deeply.

Recently I've been thinking quite a lot about the issue of swearing and the extent to which our attitudes towards the use of expletives are often predicated upon contextual usage rather than simply meaning. Nice may not be a swearword exactly but its meaning is no less dependent upon user and context (and therefore it can actually be mildly offensive if used inappropriately, as Jane Austen was clearly aware). My nice is not your nice, but we have a tendency to use the term as if we had a shared understanding and agreement about its meaning.

It might be worthwhile to consider the idea of connoisseurship in this context. I have some serious reservations about the idea of connoisseurship because I think it tends towards exclusivity and critical stasis, however I'd be very wary about telling a wine connoisseur that they can pick up a nice bottle of Rioja from Asda for £3.99. My nice isn't their nice, but I'd certainly be keen to test their nice and to know the criteria they were using to form their opinion, and in the process, I’d hope to refine my own version of nice. The point is an important one I think, because it goes some way to explaining an unavoidable inequality in the way that experts and novices use commonplace language in relation to their specialist field. If a wine connoisseur tells you that your local supermarket is selling a nice Rioja for £3.99, it's probably worth a trip to buy a whole case.

The Pleasure of Knowing

“I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like”

This phrase juxtaposes two kinds of knowledge: knowledge about something and knowledge of something. I may know of your best friend but this doesn’t mean that I know about them. If I knew about them I might like them, but I can’t really like anything much (apart perhaps from the most primitive pleasures) without further knowledge.

The implication of the phrase is that knowing is somehow opposed to liking or that liking precedes and is superior to knowing. This isn’t just anti-intellectualism but a privileging of sensory pleasures over cognitive ones. There’s knowing and knowing. The more we know, the more refined our understanding and the greater the scope for pleasure.