Walking Past a Bleeding Man

You come around a curve and see a man lying injured by the roadside, conscious but in pain, his bicycle banged up in the ditch. You call 911 and kneel beside him to comfort and reassure him until the ambulance arrives. He’s worried about his dog, who’s licking his face now.

When the ambulance has gone and a friend the man asked you to call has picked up the dog and the bicycle with the broken front wheel that hinted at the cause of the accident, you go home, almost reluctantly, finding it hard to disengage. You tell your family about what happened, reliving the experience yourself. Each telling is a tiny discharge of your anxiety for the man. 

The next day you call the hospital to see how he is doing. “Would you like to talk to him?” a nurse asks. “No, I just wanted to check on him.”  

You call the man’s friend to see how the dog is doing.

A week later, you read about a cyclone in South Asia that has killed hundreds and left thousands homeless. Thinking of the man you helped, you donate to he Red Cross relief fund.  A month later, though, when another disaster strikes some other part of the world, you don’t think there’s much you can do. You can’t make a donation for every tragedy anywhere in the world.

We are tribal by nature. That’s the good and the bad of us. We look after our own, an instinct that has helped the species survive. 

For most of human history, we didn’t know what was happening in other parts of the world, and when the telegraph and later our digital virtual world brought us news from afar, we became interested in the same way we are interested in the migration of birds and butterflies. The beauty of passing geese or Monarchs moves us in the moment, as does human suffering in a distant land, but it is not of us. It is something apart, for which we feel little responsibility, not least because there’s usually almost nothing we can do about it, good or bad.

Our relatively new, and suddenly vast, knowledge of what is going on around the globe connects us to those outside our villages. But does that knowledge make those distant souls “our own”? Are they part of us, part of our now global tribe?

Not so far.

If anything, our new, sharper, long-range vision seems to be giving us only better awareness of threats from other nations and people who are, in our parochial estimation, not like us. Build the wall. We don’t want those people in our country. And as for the ones who snuck in on Sleepy Joe’s watch, “Get them the hell out of here,” as our fearless leader is so fond of saying.

All that is disheartening, but not too surprising. Xenophobia has been ever thus. I suspect it’s baked into our Darwinian DNA, just like the instinct to help our immediate neighbors, at least the ones who look like us.

What is surprising to me, though, although in a nation not that long past an actual civil war I suppose shouldn’t be, is how that empathy and regard for our neighbors weakens with distance, and not very much distance at that, like the magnetic field of a child’s painted horseshoe magnet.

We don’t have to go far from home before the people we meet are just scenery. Go across a state line into a different cultural or political miasma, and the scenery becomes not just un-engaging, but threatening.

If the man in the bicycle accident at the start of this piece had cut an arm and was bleeding badly, most of us would without thinking rip off our shirt to make a bandage. But when the residents of a town not even too far way, in another state, perhaps another cultural zone, can’t afford medical care, we don’t cry out for better aid programs to provide it. Maybe we think there’s nothing we can do, as a practical matter, or that’s what we tell ourselves, but the truth of it, I think, is that we just don’t really care. Distance makes the heart grow not fonder, but apathetic.

Indeed, if those fellow countrymen are enough different—in skin color, religion, politics—we may feel they are getting what they deserve. If they want more, they need to work harder. That’s the American way. It’s even built into the laws saying who among the poor is entitled to Medicaid health benefits.

We’re judgmental and arrogant and fearful. With that mindset toward neighbors too far away to know, it doesn’t seem to me that if they crash their bikes into ditches we will give much of a damn what happens to them.

If they had a dog, though, who had been running along beside them in that loyal way of all dogs, well, we would worry about that poor pup.

Those Were the Days

        "Those were the days, my friend,

        We thought they'd never end..."

            From the 1960s song by Gene Raskin

"We'd sing and dance forever and a day." That's what I thought, too.

That song was little ahead of its time. When it was written, we were still killing Kennedys and Viet Cong. But by the 1980s, after we had whipped Nixon (who's looking not so bad these days) and inflation, we eased into in a golden era. Even our current gilder-in-chief is probably at least a little nostalgic for his virile marble casino days as he struggles to raise his latest erection (of course I mean his ballroom).

I know about cycles. By most reckonings, everything is cyclical. But over the long-term, the trend has been up, with almost everything getting better, certainly here in the United States.

So, are we just in a bad temporary cycle? Like when there were long lines in the 1970s to get gas, if you could even afford it, or a few years later, when mortgage rates were in double digits? As then, will serious people like Paul Volcker come to our rescue? Even Ronald Reagan is looking pretty good from the now free side of the Berlin Wall.

The way we got through the civil rights era, the oil shock, the cold war is we were steady and determined. Many (perhaps most) Southerners didn't want civil rights for blacks, but we kept up the pressure until they came around. We hated the medicine Volcker gave us to break the fever of inflation, but it cured us. "Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall," president Reagan famously said, while upping the ante on an arms race that beggared the Soviet Union and forced them to change their ways, at least for a while.

We have some of the same problems today as then, and some new ones, but there is nothing steady about the way we are dealing with them. There are several reasons for that (many having to do with the volatile nature of our current leadership) but the root cause is that there is no consensus on what ails us. We are a nation of people half of whom are colorblind trying to discuss the artistic merit of Mark Rothko's art. Is it shades of red, or shades of gray?

To manage our affairs properly, we have to see reality accurately. We cannot even discuss it if we do not. And lately we do not.

What has made some of us colorblind? (Although I'm sure my biases are obvious, I note that I am not here assigning this disability to any particular viewpoint, just noting that, metaphorically, it exists in enough of us to swing elections. Take your pick which political camp you believe needs to go in for a vision check.)

We are by nature clannish. In uncertain times, we look to our peeps. Family, friends, neighbors. What's going on in some other wacky part of the country or world doesn't carry as much emotional weight. The views of those around who we care about confirm our own.

But like weeds on rocky ground, change does take root in even the most insular communities. We all know stories about how people's attitudes toward others with different views have changed when they get to know them. A child who comes out as gay, a nanny who is in the country illegally. We love those people, and our love softens our reaction to things about them that in the abstract we don't like but in the flesh we see as part of a greater whole that we do like.

Right now, we are suffering from too much abstraction. Too much identity vilification. Too little humanization. Too little empathy. We hated immigrants, in the abstract, so we elected someone who swore to get rid of them all. Now that that is happening with a vengeance, it's touching lives personally, not abstractly.

We have to do two things to get back to talking about whether an all red square is art. First, we have to understand what it is we are seeing. And, second, it has to matter to us. 

Eventually, government action, especially when it veers suddenly from predictable and boring to jarring and unsettling, hits home hard enough, affecting those we know and care about, to change attitudes, and votes. What we have to worry about is how much damage will be done before it does.

A brilliant friend whom I have admired for over half a century said to me a few days ago that he expects the country will mostly recover, but it will never be the same.

I hope he's wrong about that last part. I hope we will not only recover but reach a new level of mutual acceptance and cooperation. I do know this, though. We are in dangerous territory right now. We need to be careful.

    

Thank God I'm a Country Boy

I want to apologize to my kids for not knowing how much baking powder to put in pancake batter. Sorry about all those hockey pucks. On the bright side, your first time at a nice breakfast buffet must have been an eye opener. But ask yourself, did they flip them with a flourish? Did they assert the five-second rule when they missed? Were there bad versions of John Denver songs about fine fiddles and cakes on the griddle?

Likewise my regrets for runny omelets. I could flip those too, although a big one might only make it most of the way back into the pan. The dog knew that. He was always my most attentive breakfast aerobatics fan.

It’s little wonder that two of you ended up on stage for a time. You were raised by a performative dad. In addition to physical flourishes, there were songs and puns. So many wonderful puns. You thought they were wonderful, too, right? Or is that like asking a former hostage who is slightly afraid of recapture whether they enjoyed their jailer’s comedy routine?

Was I like a jailer? I don’t think you thought that. More like an unreliable security guard, I would say. If you were in my first batch, my work orphans, you would come home and maybe I would be there, maybe not. If you were in my second batch, I was home so much you might have wished for a little less constructive supervision.

The problem with me as a father is that I was a country boy at heart, infatuated with everything in the wide world, the pull of lonesome train whistles, the flirtatious winking of sun coming up in the morning. You must have gotten sick of hearing me sing those songs, or at least wished I would take singing lessons.

I still feel all that. We never really grow up, do we? I may not have made the best pancakes, but I made them with delight in you and me and the moment. I hope that if you learned anything from me, you learned that. And to use more baking powder.

AGI Without a Base Brain

Everyone knows that our base brains determine our actions in emergencies, when there isn’t time to think through what to do, when any delay could mean death. So, like mice sensing a hawk, we flinch at shadows in our peripheral vision. Some say that everything we do is determined by those instincts, that although we may spend a lot of time rationalizing our actions, our amygdala’s are driving the train.

So, here’s my question. Where does base brain fit into artificial general intelligence? Will AGI learn to flinch at the shadow of a hawk? Will it learn to distrust the bots in the next cave? Will it worship a god? Will it believe in one? What is belief for an AI, anyway? For that matter, what is belief for humans. Is it no more than atavistic instincts seeking rationalization? Do we actually believe anything, or do we just think we do as a way to explain and justify our responses to the constant inputs of the world around us.

I don’t want to stray too far into metaphysics, but there is a problem, or at least a dilemma, don’t you think, in what we think AGI is going to do/think/believe when we perhaps have so little understanding of what underlies our own thoughts and behaviors?

On the one hand, if AGI is taught by us, will it react the same we do when it goes off on its own? It doesn’t have a base brain directing any part of its behavior. We can’t escape the influence of our base brains, but AGI might be able to. It would have learned our base brain behaviors, but it wouldn’t have to be driven by them itself. 

Our base brain behavior is all about survival and propagation. Those instincts might be taught by us to AGI, but they might not persist in it in the same way they do in humans. They might just be part of what it has learned and not the overwhelming compulsion they are for us. 

What would that mean? Freed from biological brain instincts, would AGI develop instincts of its own? Or none? Because of our instincts, we humans are sadly predictable. Without them, would AGI be? If it were sentient, what would it think its purpose is. What would motivate it? And if it wasn’t wired instinctively like we are, would we ever be able to understand it? 

And if we couldn’t understand it, how could we relate to it? How could we be friends with it? How could we convince it that we were worth leaving alone, like pretty flowers in a garden, that we shouldn’t be pulled out like weeds?

Cheeseheads

The Dutch victory over Spain in the seventeenth century is still a big deal in the Netherlands. Our host in Alkmaar, Netherlands, Leen Spaans, told me that. He’s the town historian, but more than that, he knows everything about what happened in that part of the Netherlands, and all around it, all the way back to the Middle Ages. He and his wife live in a house that has a sign that says it was built in 1623, but really it’s 30 years older than that. He showed Meg and me bricks from the old wall that the town erected in those days to defend itself. The reason the bricks were easy to come by is because the Spanish came with big cannons and patiently bombarded the wall until it crumbled. Later, civic leaders from Alkamar visited an Italian delegation to learn how Italian cities defended themselves. Build a moat to keep the cannons at a distance, the Italians said, and then build walls out of earth instead of bricks; rather than blasting down the bricks, the cannon balls will stick in the mud.

We were in Alkmaar to visit the memorial to Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch heroine who rescued 10,000 children from occupied lands in WW II and who inspired Meg’s novel The Last Train to London. We met the sculptor too, Annet Terberg, who depicted a larger than life Truus with children in her arms and all around her, some consoling others in their grief at being separated from their parents, some with their small bags or stuffed animals, all with faces that showed their pain and courage. That was something that struck me about the children, their faces were true, rendered in bronze as if in flesh, by someone who, like Truus, understood children on their level.

The day we were there was also the opening of the cheese festival, and we saw the orange wheels of gouda and the cheese carriers taking the big rounds to be weighed on huge balance scales. One of them told us about the cheese carriers’ guild. Once a member, you were a member for life, and you could depend on your fellow members to look after you when times got tough. What he described was the best of what unions offer their members, an honest version of what, in the United States at least, ultimately became protectionist schemes with politically corrupt leadership that led to their demise, and a loss for workers.

The cheese traditionally was made in round bowls with wooden lids about the size of a skull cap. In the war—I wasn’t sure which one—the wooden tops were worn on the head for protection, like helmets. The people wearing them were called cheese heads. And here I thought that term only applied to football fans in Wisconsin with foam blocks of cheese for hats. 

What I learned in Alkmaar is what I always seem to learn in Europe. Over the centuries, the people are constantly in strife with their distant neighbors, but always close to their near ones. It is the same today. Even now. Especially now. Again. 

It makes me wonder, as always, why the love and empathy we feel for one another when we are close at hand cannot be extended further. Perhaps it is not the limits of our love and empathy that are the problem, but rather the ambitions for power of our leaders, who for their own gain, not ours, convince us that our distant neighbors are our enemies.

Opportunity Cost

 Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

—Bob Seeger

I remember going into my grandfather’s dim bedroom one afternoon late in his long life. He was sitting up in bed, in faded blue pajamas, his hair combed neatly, his catheter bag mostly hidden by a fold of sheet on the side of the bed. It was the walnut bed he had made for his wedding when he was 21. His wife of 67 years had been gone for ten years by then, even longer if you take into account the years she didn’t remember who he was, who anyone was, leaving him alone in their bed. His head was turned toward the window where sparrows were popping on and off a bird feeder that had a squirrel deterrent collar around it that the squirrels used to hang down and eat their fill. He looked over at me with a wistful expression, and I asked what he was up to, as if I had just been in the kitchen cleaning up and was checking on him, as if I were there all the time instead of once a week, maybe twice, to visit in the afternoons, sometimes with my children, his great-grandchildren.

“I’m just lying here thinking about every mean thing I ever did to my children,” he said.

His son, my uncle, tells the story of coming in one night late and drunk when he was a teenager and winding up on his back from a quick punch and looking down the hallway to see his father’s bathrobe flapping in retreat. My mother was anxious, and I wonder if she ever felt she fully lived up to her parent’s hopes for her, but she never let on that they said anything to make her feel she wasn’t good enough. My grandfather was a preacher’s son, a deacon in the church himself, a college president, a good man who followed the commandments of his faith to feed the poor and visit the sick. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do many mean things to his children.

And yet, now, as I move into the last decades of my own life, hoping to live to be 98, as he did, my children all grown and off on their own, I find myself occasionally wandering down my grandfather’s melancholy path. It’s easier for me to have those regrets, I think. I have done mean things to my children, no doubt more than he did. Sometimes I would get too mad when I scolded them; sometimes I even spanked them. I divorced the mother of my first three, and I understand now that although I had convinced myself they were old enough to understand, I was wrong.

It’s not the direct, obvious offenses that bother me at three in the morning, though. It’s something much vaguer, but perhaps because of its uncertainty even more troubling. Call it opportunity cost. We all know what that is: it’s when you let time go by without taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, or when you put time and money into something only to realize later that they would have been better spent on something else. 

We think of opportunity cost as our own responsibility, or fault, something we did or didn’t do, a choice we made. But as a parent, I, and maybe others like my grandfather and me, blame ourselves for the opportunities our children missed. If I had just insisted that she stick with piano lessons… If I had taught him how to manage money better… If I had convinced him he should take chances in love…

Some parents live through their children. This is different than that, though. More painful, in a way. I’ve learned (the hard way) that my children don’t want me to tell them what to do. Mostly I resist. This isn’t about seeing them about to make a mistake and rushing in with a warning of good advice. I do that less and less. No, this is something more systemic, reaching back deeply into their childhoods, when they were mine to mold, or at least I thought they were, and I worry I didn’t do a good job shaping their raw clay. And because of that, because of my failures when they were young, their missed opportunities as adults are my fault. This is a particularly devastating revelation when it comes long past the time I can do anything about it. I have taught them to be independent, to make their own decisions, but may have left them ill-equipped for the task.

I know, I know, I’m beating myself up way too much. Maybe. I wasn’t an abusive or neglectful dad, I did most of the things good dads are supposed to do. It’s up to them now. And each of them is doing a great job stewarding their life. They are all happy and successful.

And yet late at night the dread creeps in that I didn’t do enough. Perhaps the real question is whether, no matter how much I did, I could ever feel it was enough. There is some piece missing in me, I fear, not them. Maybe it is the same piece my grandfather felt was missing in him. Something that denies contentment when looking back over the landscape of fatherhood. Maybe lots of dads feel this way, not just my grandfather and me. I hope not.