The quality of audio here isn't too good. You may have to strain your ears a bit to hear this. But plug your headset on, and this may just be the best one odd hour you'll invest in a very long time.
I think it mandatory everybody in the world takes this up in much the same way all of us learn a to a language. You don't just future proof yourself, you learn to think as well.
Animated adaptation of a commencement speech given by George Saunders at Syracuse University, May 2013.
Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you).
And I intend to respect that tradition.
Now, one useful thing you can do with an old person, in addition to borrowing money from them, or asking them to do one of their old-time “dances,” so you can watch, while laughing, is ask: “Looking back, what do you regret?” And they’ll tell you. Sometimes, as you know, they’ll tell you even if you haven’t asked. Sometimes, even when you’ve specifically requested they not tell you, they’ll tell you.
So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.
But here’s something I do regret:
In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her Convocation Speech name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. She wore these blue cat’s-eye glasses that, at the time, only old ladies wore. When nervous, which was pretty much always, she had a habit of taking a strand of hair into her mouth and chewing on it.
So she came to our school and our neighborhood, and was mostly ignored, occasionally teased (“Your hair taste good?” — that sort of thing). I could see this hurt her. I still remember the way she’d look after such an insult: eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear. After awhile she’d drift away, hair-strand still in her mouth. At home, I imagined, after school, her mother would say, you know: “How was your day, sweetie?” and she’d say, “Oh, fine.” And her mother would say, “Making any friends?” and she’d go, “Sure, lots.”
Sometimes I’d see her hanging around alone in her front yard, as if afraid to leave it.
And then — they moved. That was it. No tragedy, no big final hazing.
One day she was there, next day she wasn’t.
End of story.
Now, why do I regret that? Why, forty-two years later, am I still thinking about it? Relative to most of the other kids, I was actually pretty nice to her. I never said an unkind word to her. In fact, I sometimes even (mildly) defended her.
But still. It bothers me.
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
Now, the million-dollar question: What’s our problem? Why aren’t we kinder?
Here’s what I think:
Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).
Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.
So, the second million-dollar question: How might we DO this? How might we become more loving, more open, less selfish, more present, less delusional, etc., etc?
Well, yes, good question.
Unfortunately, I only have three minutes left.
So let me just say this. There are ways. You already know that because, in your life, there have been High Kindness periods and Low Kindness periods, and you know what inclined you toward the former and away from the latter. Education is good; immersing ourselves in a work of art: good; prayer is good; meditation’s good; a frank talk with a dear friend; establishing ourselves in some kind of spiritual tradition — recognizing that there have been countless really smart people before us who have asked these same questions and left behind answers for us.
Because kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything.
One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.
Congratulations, by the way.
When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .
And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.
So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.
Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.
And someday, in 80 years, when you’re 100, and I’m 134, and we’re both so kind and loving we’re nearly unbearable, drop me a line, let me know how your life has been. I hope you will say: It has been so wonderful.
Congratulations, Class of 2013.
I wish you great happiness, all the luck in the world, and a beautiful summer.
Jeff Bezos comes across to me as a psychologically deranged man. I am willing to punt Amazon will not outlast him. But before I get to that, take a few minutes off and listen to this video.
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave the Baccalaureate address to Princeton University's Class of 2010. Bezos graduated from Princeton in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He was introduced by Princeton University President Shirley M. Tilghman. Bezos spoke to the Class of 2010 about the difference between choices and gifts.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon delivers the graduation speech at Princeton University in 2010
I discovered this very recently after I stumbled across a very compelling post on Medium by Julia Cheiffetz, an Executive Editor at Harper Collins Publishers. It had me stunned for a while. I had a baby and cancer when I worked at Amazon. This is my story, she wrote.
She concluded: "Jeff: You asked for direct feedback. Women power your retail engine. They buy diapers. They buy books. They buy socks for their husbands on Prime. On behalf of all the people who want to speak up but can’t: Please, make Amazon a more hospitable place for women and parents. Reevaluate your parental leave policies. You can’t claim to be a data-driven company and not release more specific numbers on how many women and people of color apply, get hired and promoted, and stay on as employees. In the absence of meaningful public data — especially retention data — all we have are stories. This is mine."
Until then, all I had heard were stories of what a great company Amazon is and the genius that is Jeff Bezos. If you listen to his speech above for instance, it is easy to think of him as a super intelligent human with a heart. And why not?
"What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices," he tells the students.
But between Julia's essay and a pointer that led me to a long investigation by the New York Times on what really happens to people Inside Amazon, particularly white collar workers, I am compelled to once again reassess Jeff Bezos.
The New York Times writes, "Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.
In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)
But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer."
And then there is this little bit from the report that stayed in my head: Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”
Or for that matter consider this damning part from the New York Times story:
A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” — because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.
A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.
The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my focus stayed on my job.”
With this kind of relentless monitoring of its people, An obsessive man unwilling to let go. There is a dichotomy between his public persona and how he runs the entity.
I'll be damned if I'm wrong. In the 20 odd years I have spent as a journalist, I have witnessed from close quarters Indian entrepreneurs build organizations ground up at the cost of pretty much everything else in the wake of liberalization. I am not at liberty to discuss their names right now. But as things are, and it is time to cede ground to their younger generation, they face resentment and unwillingness to take the baton up. It's their children's way of showing them the middle finger for the years of neglect they suffered. Eventually, these organizations will end up in the hands of Private Equity sharks who will not hesitate to divy it up in any which way that suits their interests. The first signs of fissures in the Indian context are already visible. But like I just said, more on that sometime later when I am at the liberty to talk names and people.
As for now, take it from me. The likes of Amazon will not last forever. My primary concern is what of all the e-books that I have accumulated. The only way I can think up is to save them as .pdf files at multiple places on various cloud platforms. Because the half life of technology and technology companies is getting shorter and shorter.
Once upon a time whoever would have imagined Enron could go bust?
F1 Legend Ayrton Senna: Image used under Creative Commons from Wikimedia
During one of our weekend meet-ups, my psychologist Kuldeep Datay asked of me what I thought was a simple question: Who is your hero?
I have two. Formula 1 racing legend Ayrton Senna and Christiaan Barnard, the South African doctor who conducted the first human heart transplant. From the time I was a boy, between the both of them, they epitomized everything I wanted to be.
Senna’s nickname was Magic. With good reason. He drove like magic. How could any human drive like that? I carried pictures of him everyplace with me. Car magazines that detailed stories of his exploits on the racing track against his rivals Alain Prost and the then upcoming Michael Schumacher filled my rucksack. My laptop had his image plastered as the wallpaper.
I would have given an arm and a leg to watch Senna go head to head against the clinical machine that was Schumacher. In the few races that they did get close, Senna’s driving prowess drove Schumacher’s crazy, and his car oftentimes into the wall.
Then there was Dr Barnard. I don’t think I will ever forget that one night I was up flipping through the pages of Reader’s Digest at my ancestral home in Fort Kochi. I stumbled across the story of how the first human heart transplant was conducted. As stories go, what a story it was. By then, it was clear in my mind when I come of age, I would grow up to be a surgeon in the class of Dr Barnard who worked magic like Senna.
Fate had other plans and led me to a fun pit called the newsroom. Here too, in my head, through all of these years, I tried to write and edit stories imagining myself to be somebody as crazy as Senna and Dr Barnard.
“Then” asked Datay, smiling. “Where is Charles Assisi? Have you found him?”
The question had me stumped. He went on to explain that people often latch on to a single personality or two. They idolize them and gloss over their own frailties. Why? Why not start on a clean sheet instead and find who you really are and what you stand for? Thought embedded, I went home.
It’s been a few weeks now. An exercise has begun. I haven’t concluded it. But I think I get the import of Kuldeep’s question. This exercise will last a lifetime. So, while Senna and Dr Barnard will stay in my head, more people need to be examined and added. Who knows? Some may have to be purged at some point as well as I go along. Senna and Barnard included. Now, there are no holy cows.
What follows is a list in no particular order. It is not a comprehensive one either. Just a few jottings around some people from my diary as I go about compiling traits I would like to cultivate and those that I want to cull out of myself.
The true measure of Lincoln’s greatness may well be known to most Americans. But to me, the magnitude of what he accomplished and the complexities he had to deal with were first revealed by K. Ram Kumar, who used to sit on the board of directors at ICICI Bank. He chose to give it up to pursue a personal passion.
Lincoln took over as president of the US at a time when the southern belt was opposed to his candidature for presidency. They threatened to secede from the Union and said a civil war would ensue on the back of a promise he had made if he came to office—that he would abolish slavery.
That Lincoln eventually managed to pull it off is one thing. But after he assumed office, he drafted the support of three cabinet ministers. The real story lies there. All of them had run against his candidature. It was political genius at its best and complexity at its peak.
Ram Kumar introduced me to the nuances of these settings through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Team of Rivals. Steven Spielberg made a movie out of it as well. It took Goodwin 10 years to research what could possibly have gone through Lincoln’s mind. How he managed the conflicts and put in place the foundations of what is now a superpower continues to keep me riveted and in awe of the man. While the movie is an outstanding one, may I assure you that the hours and days invested in the book will be time well invested.
The more I read about him, the more I am convinced what an ungrateful lot us Indians are. Platitudes are mouthed in his name, but what has really come of his vision? Come to think of it, how does a man from the lowest strata of society—the Mahar community (or untouchables)—in 1891 grow up to earn doctorates in economics both from Columbia and the London School of Economics? How did he campaign and negotiate for India’s independence? How did he evolve into the statesman who drafted the Constitution of India in the finest traditions of democracy?
If Ambedkar had his way, India would by now had a uniform civil code in place. Article 370 of the Constitution, which he opposed so vehemently and which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, would never have been a contentious issue.
Way back then, he had the foresight to bluntly tell Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah: “You wish India should protect your borders, she should build roads in your area, she should supply your food grains, and Kashmir should get equal status as India. But the Government of India should have only limited powers and Indian people should have no rights in Kashmir. To give consent to this proposal would be a treacherous thing against the interests of India and I, as the law minister of India, will never do it.”
Sheikh Abdullah circumvented him and approached Nehru, the ball went into the hands of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, and between the both of them, they quietly acquiesced. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and Patel, the so-called Iron Man of India, let Ambedkar down.
Worse still, while Nehru could see the merit in the Hindu Code Bill Ambedkar had crafted and that it held the potential to elevate the status of women in Hindu society, when the moment of reckoning came, he caved in to pressure both from the Congress and the emerging Sangh Parivar. Amedkar had the vision to see the fissures all of these issues could cause India. It was glossed over.
Nobody had the spunk then. Nobody among the current lot of India’s elected leaders has the spunk either. If only they had a fraction of what Ambedkar had!
I am not a Gandhian. I refuse to be one. And I refuse to address Gandhi as Mahatma either. That out of the way, if my personal interpretation of him is correct, he was among the shrewdest men India has ever seen.
By the time the British had colonized India, Gandhi figured out that if India needed freedom, violent opposition was not an option. The British empire would have crippled the fight even before it started. That is why the non-violent movement. It was, for all practical purposes, guerilla warfare of the kind Sun Tzu would have approved of. The British, with all the arms and monies in their hands, hadn’t encountered opposition in this guise. They didn’t know how to deal with it.
And so, in spite of the ideological differences that existed between Ambedkar and Gandhi, much like Lincoln’s “team of rivals”, in a strange way, they worked towards the same goal. Like I articulated above, what I admire about Gandhi is not his so-called austerity or ahimsa as a principle, but the fact that he deployed it tactically.
Gandhi had the patience to frustrate the bollocks out of any army and the charm to beguile masses of people into following his perverted logic. I suspect, if in his reckoning taking up arms would have been a better way to go about things, he wouldn’t have hesitated to do that either.
I know it is terribly unfair to club all three of these intellectual powerhouses into one bucket. But I do it because between the three of them, they challenged all of the notions I was weaned on as a young boy growing up in a traditional Catholic family. They compelled me to question all of the Abrahamic gods I was taught to worship.
One thing led to another until I threw all of the texts I was weaned on. They compelled me to question authority—obnoxiously so if required—and put me on the path to freedom from the oppression that is religion in all its forms.
I cannot help but watch this man and his crazy ambitions with awe. After a string of failures, including one where he was ousted as co-founder at PayPal, this man thought up Tesla, an electric car that is now part of the mainstream. But what gets my attention, and pardon my expression, is that he has the gumption to put his monies into a projects that can potentially help humans colonize Mars. Incidentally, he happens to be the 83rd richest man now and is a darling in Silicon Valley. His ambitions and audacity are to die for.
***
My list can go on and on.
But it’s time I pause and plant a thought. One of the most compelling lessons I learnt recently is that when somebody makes a point, imagine yourself to be a trial lawyer. Then argue against yourself to demolish your arguments. At the end of the exercise, does your position still stand? If you do, you got something to fight for. Else, go back and rethink.
If I were to do that, a few things emerge right away.
Senna died young. He needn’t have. What Senna fanatics like me think of as magic was actually reckless. Much the same can be said about Damon Hill, who was propelled into the limelight after Senna died and had to take Schumacher head on.
Their rivalry is legendary and I rooted for Hill. He was as crazy as Senna. Schumacher-baiters like me always thought of him as clinical. But it was actually a mind ticking away—learning from each failure. So much so that he thought Schumacher slammed Hill for “purely dangerous driving” while Hill laughed it off and claimed “I only made it hard for him to pass”. “Take that Schumi,” I would high-five with my pals.
In hindsight, there is no taking away that Schumacher is revered as among the greatest drivers that ever lived. A little after his retirement in 2012, a tragic skiing accident in December 2013 sent him into a coma and his fans sobbing with sorrow. And I confess to a lump in my throat now that we will never know if this man will ever walk unaided again. Since his exit, Formula 1 races don’t feel the same. His current condition is shrouded in secrecy.
Dr Barnard was a sex maniac. His personal life was miserable and he often used to taunt his third wife Karin about not being able to keep up with the prowess that Viagra conferred on him. He would go jaunting all over and bed as many women as he possibly could. He loved the limelight and the attention his exploits on the surgical table conferred upon him. He eventually dumped Karin for a 28-year-old Viennese medical student.
Lincoln had a penchant for dirty jokes and took his presidency a little too seriously. What popular history overlooks is that anybody who stood in his way was trampled over. So much so that he holds the record for any American president who shut the most newspapers, arrested political rivals, censored pretty much every mail and executed the most American citizens without trial.
As for Amedkar, in spite of his Dalit origins, he looked down upon Adivasi tribes. He thought them inferior beings. In his writings, his describes them as “the aboriginal tribes of India... Why has no attempt been made to civilize these aborigines to lead them to make a more honorable way of living?” These parts of history have been conveniently airbrushed. Surprisingly, he didn’t see any dichotomy in that.
While on Gandhi, like I said earlier, I refuse to call him Mahatma because he was plain stupid and perverse. He let his wife Kasturba die of bronchial pneumonia and adamantly declined to administer her with penicillin—but treated her with water from the Ganga and said “let god’s will be done”.
I would have forgiven him if he had applied the same principles to himself. But six weeks after she died, he came down with malaria and when wracked by pain, he didn’t let god’s will be done. Instead, he took the doctor’s advice and consumed quinine.
When it came to him, his “bankruptcy of my faith” argument did not hold. And how can we not deplore his shameful experiments when he slept naked with teenage girls to “test his chastity”? For that matter, how about his friendship with Hitler, to whom he wrote letters where he signed off, “Your sincere friend”?
As for the trinity of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, when looked at from a dispassionate prism, how different are they from any religious fanatic? Most recently, for instance, I tuned in to watch a conversation between Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, a New Age spiritual guru whom I personally despise as a charlatan.
I was hoping to watch a demolition. But to Chopra’s credit, for all of Dawkins’ aggressive posturing, he confused Dawkins with mumbo jumbo.
Waking Up, a book by Harris that I am now reading tries to explain why spirituality and religion need not necessarily be tied together. I am still to complete it—but whatever little I have isn’t impressive enough.
The problem with the trio is their posturing and is best exemplified in a tweet Dawkins once put out: “Religion is an organized license to be acceptably stupid.” What comes across as stupid to my mind is that the trio think it stupid that their ideas cannot be challenged. How much more arrogant can any human get?
I cannot speak for Hitchens now that he is dead. But Dawkins and Harris are certainly sexist and have on public forums implicitly stated men are more drawn to atheism than women—in language that is nothing but demeaning of women and their intelligence.
Then there is Musk. Sure, he now wears the crown of the next Steve Jobs. But he is as cranky as Jobs as well. Like most successful people, there are unsubstantiated stories of him leading a rather peculiar personal life. He takes criticism personally. When his stock prices take a hammering on Wall Street, it cuts him deep. He needs to be lavished with praise. When journalists who have test-driven his cars give it bad ratings, he comes out in the open and accuses them of having vested interests to drag his company’s stock prices down. Then there are other quirks that can fill a book.
Now that the trial lawyer in me has argued around the frailties of all these men, do they still stand to scrutiny?
Well, let me put it this way. They are human. They have frailties. I get Kuldeep’s larger point in that it would be rather silly on my part to revere or emulate one or two of them. Instead, what if I were to pick a few traits from each of these people that appeal the most to me and reject everything else they stand for? What if I were to stay at work on those traits and keep adding to my repertoire as I meet new people, and subtract the undesirable as I travel the distance that is life?
Eventually, I may just find the Charles Assisi I want to be. Or maybe I might just die trying. But at least it’s worth giving it a shot.
I know one thing for sure—the day my wife stops reading these pieces I write, at the end of which she shakes her head, looks at me and mutters “dongi” (fraudster), I will stop work on this series.
This piece was originally published in Mint on Sunday. All copy rights vest with Mint and may not be reproduced without permission from the Editor
If this place has done its job and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.
When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.
As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”
The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of research showing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-five years ago, a statistical analysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. The analysis turned out to be flawed, but fears took hold. Scientists then carried out hundreds of studies, and found no link. Still, fears persisted. Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction in autism—yet fears grew. A British study claimed a connection between the onset of autism in eight children and the timing of their vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retracted due to findings of fraud: the lead author had falsified and misrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to confirm the findings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leading to outbreaks of measles and mumpsthat, last year, sickened tens of thousands of children across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and resulted in deaths.
People are prone to resist scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs. They don’t see measles or mumps around anymore. They do see children with autism. And they see a mom who says, “My child was perfectly fine until he got a vaccine and became autistic.”
Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can say that children get a vaccine every two to three months for the first couple years of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to follow vaccination for many kids. You can say that the science shows no connection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread, it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people’s brains—especially when they do not trust scientific authorities. And we are experiencing a significant decline in trust in scientific authorities.
The sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied U.S. survey data from 1974 to 2010 and found some deeply alarming trends. Despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educated conservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had the highest level of trust in science and the scientific community. Today, they have the lowest.
Today, we have multiple factions putting themselves forward as what Gauchat describes as their own cultural domains, “generating their own knowledge base that is often in conflict with the cultural authority of the scientific community.” Some are religious groups (challenging evolution, for instance). Some are industry groups (as with climate skepticism). Others tilt more to the left (such as those that reject the medical establishment). As varied as these groups are, they are all alike in one way. They all harbor sacred beliefs that they do not consider open to question.
To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing. You have to be able to recognize the difference between claims of science and those of pseudoscience.
Science’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another.
It’s not that some of these approaches never provide valid arguments. Sometimes an analogy is useful, or higher levels of certainty are required. But when you see several or all of these tactics deployed, you know that you’re not dealing with a scientific claim anymore. Pseudoscience is the form of science without the substance.
The challenge of what to do about this—how to defend science as a more valid approach to explaining the world—has actually been addressed by science itself. Scientists have done experiments. In 2011, two Australian researchers compiled many of the findings in “The Debunking Handbook.” The results are sobering. The evidence is that rebutting bad science doesn’t work; in fact, it commonly backfires. Describing facts that contradict an unscientific belief actually spreads familiarity with the belief and strengthens the conviction of believers. That’s just the way the brain operates; misinformation sticks, in part because it gets incorporated into a person’s mental model of how the world works. Stripping out the misinformation therefore fails, because it threatens to leave a painful gap in that mental model—or no model at all.
So, then, what is a science believer to do? Is the future just an unending battle of warring claims? Not necessarily. Emerging from the findings was also evidence that suggested how you might build trust in science. Rebutting bad science may not be effective, but asserting the true facts of good science is. And including the narrative that explains them is even better. You don’t focus on what’s wrong with the vaccine myths, for instance. Instead, you point out: giving children vaccines has proved far safer than not. How do we know? Because of a massive body of evidence, including the fact that we’ve tried the alternate experiment before. Between 1989 and 1991, vaccination among poor urban children in the U.S. dropped. And the result was fifty-five thousand cases of measles and a hundred and twenty-three deaths.
The other important thing is to expose the bad science tactics that are being used to mislead people. Bad science has a pattern, and helping people recognize the pattern arms them to come to more scientific beliefs themselves. Having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust. It doesn’t mean poring through the evidence on every question yourself. You can’t. Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person, scientist or otherwise, to convincingly master more than corners of it.
Few working scientists can give a ground-up explanation of the phenomenon they study; they rely on information and techniques borrowed from other scientists. Knowledge and the virtues of the scientific orientation live far more in the community than the individual. When we talk of a “scientific community,” we are pointing to something critical: that advanced science is a social enterprise, characterized by an intricate division of cognitive labor. Individual scientists, no less than the quacks, can be famously bull-headed, overly enamored of pet theories, dismissive of new evidence, and heedless of their fallibility. (Hence Max Planck’s observation that science advances one funeral at a time.) But as a community endeavor, it is beautifully self-correcting.
Beautifully organized, however, it is not. Seen up close, the scientific community—with its muddled peer-review process, badly written journal articles, subtly contemptuous letters to the editor, overtly contemptuous subreddit threads, and pompous pronouncements of the academy— looks like a rickety vehicle for getting to truth. Yet the hive mind swarms ever forward. It now advances knowledge in almost every realm of existence—even the humanities, where neuroscience and computerization are shaping understanding of everything from free will to how art and literature have evolved over time.
Today, you become part of the scientific community, arguably the most powerful collective enterprise in human history. In doing so, you also inherit a role in explaining it and helping it reclaim territory of trust at a time when that territory has been shrinking. In my clinic and my work in public health, I regularly encounter people who are deeply skeptical of even the most basic knowledge established by what journalists label “mainstream” science (as if the other thing is anything like science)—whether it’s facts about physiology, nutrition, disease, medicines, you name it. The doubting is usually among my most, not least, educated patients. Education may expose people to science, but it has acountervailing effect as well, leading people to be more individualistic and ideological.
The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words.
Even more than what you think, how you think matters. The stakes for understanding this could not be higher than they are today, because we are not just battling for what it means to be scientists. We are battling for what it means to be citizens.
