01. Think about why people shop at overpriced joints like Whole Foods. We know we can’t rely on the FDA so we delegate the FDA’s job to a commercial entity spouting marketing messages about purity and ethical sourcing. We’re paying to delegate that set of decisions.

The idea of ego depletion posits that each decision we make eats into our selves a bit, until after too much analysis and too many decisions we’re left hollow, without the resources that allow us to fit together and function personally and socially.

That’s pretty relevant in the context of big data, which means more information, which means more decisions to be made. It’s already it’s too much data and too many decisions and, at this point, if you stand under the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you might get knocked out and buried by falling fruit and never seen again.

But choosing not to know isn’t real innocence any more than refusing to make a decision is.

Instead of analyzing individual decisions, those of us who feel compelled to both know and decide will be increasingly forced to categorize or delegate our decisions. Delegating data dependent decisions to real people for thoughtful analysis will become a luxury reserved for the very wealthy; while as public institutions fade away, most people will fall back on categorization or commercial delegates.01 The less capable we are of individual analysis, the more prone we are to rely on stereotypes, stale logic, or marketing.

Aphasia

01. Isn’t it fascinating how things loop back through history, both culturally and scientifically? We couldn’t have had feminism if we’d gone on being obsessed with how men are animals and women weak, but now we are finding that despite what we’d had to tell ourselves in our efforts for parity between the sexes, we’re very different from one another—and our physical fragilities are often distinctly defined by sex. And we couldn’t listen to all those cranks in the early part of the twentieth century who were talking, as it turns out, with some insight about the “devitalization of the soil” and what that would do to our agricultural system and to us, because they were also spouting about racial fitness and who should and shouldn’t get to breed based on the knobbiness of their cranium. There are these little eddies of pseudoscience where truth gets trapped like hair in the shower drain, but almost no one has the stomach to stick their arm down and poke around.
02. Again, the blops of truth floating in a murky mess of something else—those people who say that the harm already done is so egregious that simply treating the child with ordinary, consistent kindness is not enough are probably right. I weep like a sponge every time I hear that This American Life episode on unconditional love.

My website got devoured by spambots, but the timing was great because as it happened, I didn’t have anything nice to say, and so was overflowing with nothing. When the train of thought gets going too relentlessly in one direction, it usually just derails in a twisted wreckage of half finished sentences and eye rolling and nothing gets written down. For example, the other day I was reading ancient Bowlby on attachment theory (A beautiful triumph of observation, studded with a variety of little sexist nuggets that tie it securely to its era.01 ) because sometimes I need confirmation that I have not broken my child, as he still regularly sobs when I leave the room for thirty seconds or a work day. (I know, I know—but these things aren’t rational. “The goal of the child is to remain near the caregiver” was reassuring.) Somehow from there I moved on to reading about the peculiarly American phenomena of attachment therapy, wherein attachment theory is used to justify some truly terrible things done to the most powerless people. Attachment therapy purports to be a way of curing the secondary injury done to babies and little children when previous neglect or abuse leaves them without the emotional/neurological(?) equipment to form a meaningful, trusting bond with their caregiver. It is inherently coercive, and is associated with physical and mental violence against children. Wikipedia, last I checked, notes the American-ness of attachment therapy and relates it to American wealth allowing international adoptions from countries where children may have had poor care in early childhood. Attachment therapy manages to place the onus on the affected child to change to accommodate the adults, rather than the other way around, which a really basic reading of the research on attachment would indicate.02 It occurred to me that that’s the part so specifically American. We have an awful national capacity for feeling victimized by the powerless. At first glance, attachment therapy seems so bizarre that one assumes it must be some odd cultural anomaly, but look again and it’s not. It’s an almost inevitable boiling up of our national outrage toward the helpless. Who could possibly be more helpless than children injured by adults? There’s a deep and horrible cynicism in the idea that we need to constantly defend ourselves from being manipulated by the truly powerless; that we need to demonstrate to the helpless the depths of their subjection.  We need them to know that we will break them permanently should they make any attempt to use any small resources of volition they might scrounge together. Because, god forbid we, the ones with the power, ever “feel manipulated.”

And since that pretty much covers the way we feel about everything from newborns to school teachers, garbage collection, and foreign policy, that’s about where the train derails and I need to go lie down. However, instead I ordered The Road to Evergreen (the comments thread in that link is worth reading), in which Rachael Stryker looks at the wreckage of the colliding cultural assumptions surrounding attachment therapy.

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And speaking of childs, an update on mine. Aurelito-Roly is three and a half now, long-legged, and eats more than I do. He told me a joke the other morning that went like this: “This is a bird sauce joke. Bird, bird, bird! (Pause.) That’s not a bird, it’s a sauce!” Pretty sure he’s a genius and will be our ticket to wealth and fame. Speaking of which, we have started to look at schools (If we manage to send him to a good public preschool next year, we will be rich—rich, I tell you! Babysitting is expensive—expensive, I tell you!) and world, I want to apologize, at least temporarily, for sighing and going limp when you started talking about finding a school for your child, because I am right with you, talking a hundred miles and hour and clutching my forehead. I don’t give a damn about eventual ivy league schools, but I hate the idea of sending someone I love off to something he detests or is bored by every day, all day. We are about twenty minutes away from a couple of really wonderful progressive public schools in East Harlem, bursting with violins and drums and cooking and ceramics and dancing and guinea pigs and ice skating in Central Park; and we are pinning an awful lot of our hopes on the lottery admission process for one of those. Unfortunately everyone else we know is too.

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And I just thought of one other thing—remember that story about James Fallon’s work? He found, using PET scans, that serial killers all had in common a pattern of low activity in the orbital cortex, but that that pattern alone was not enough to predict sociopathic behaviour.

The end.