Perri Nelson's Website 

Perceptual filters

The last couple of years have been interesting ones for me, as in the expression “may you live in interesting times”. This has led me to do a lot of thinking about my life, my political viewpoints, my religious viewpoints, and where my priorities lie. My life and my philosophy are still works in progress and just about everything is subject to revision as I learn new things, but the basic foundations are probably relatively solid after nearly half a century. Some of the conclusions I've reached are uncomfortable, others less so. I find that as I grow older I become increasingly suspicious of the motives of others, and frustrated at the limited information that I have with which to make truly important decisions. About the surest thing that I have learned is that deception abounds in this world, and self-deception is particularly prevalent.

It's not surprising to me when politicians lie, nor when they or their supporters lie about it. It's a time honored tradition in politics. Politicians lie about their records. For example a prominent junior Senator recently claimed on the campaign trail that he was instrumental in the passage of a certain piece of legislation. What that means is he voted for it. He didn't sponsor it. He didn't co-sponsor it. He was instrumental in the passage of the legislation in much the same way that a fret on a guitar is instrumental in the making of a blues classic — he was a part of the instrument, not the musician. Another prominent junior Senator recently told multiple versions of a story apparently meant to display her courage under fire, each version more harrowing than the last — until news reporters that were with her at the event told a significantly different tale. Apparently she misspoke.

We expect politicians to lie. We expect their ideological supporters and opponents to lie. When a politician tells the truth the easiest way to defuse the damage is to call it a lie, even if you have to lie yourself in order to make the case. We expect lies from our political opponents so much that there's no need for fact checking. For example, some years ago a certain political executive  was giving an annually required speech. He made a particularly famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) statement about what one particular governmental body had determined about the activities of another world leader. Almost immediately his political opponents and their ideological allies in the major media were calling his statement a lie. They sent a junior level diplomat out to go “fact check” the story, at the same time arranging the deception that he was going out at the behest of the political executive's second in command. Upon his return he spoke to the legislature, who found that his report bolstered the executive's statement.

You would think that it would stop there, but deception is a way of life in political circles. Our man with no investigative experience next spoke to the media about his trip and his report. The tale he wove was somewhat different than the one he had passed on to officialdom. He told a tale that said that the alleged activities of that world leader never took place. The executive's political opponents pounced upon it and branded his statement a lie. When the governmental body that the executive had spoken about spoke up and confirmed his statement it was too late. The damage was done — or rather it was just beginning. Soon lie after lie would be compounded upon lie after lie in the way that these things always go. The tale continued for years until finally a man who had nothing to do with the original statement — which happened to be true by the way — was prosecuted for lying about something that had nothing to do with any crime, while the original liar was lauded by the media and his allies, and while the crime that the prosecutor was supposedly investigating turned out not to be a crime at all.

Lying in political circles is so expected that it's even considered to be Constitutionally protected. Last October I noted a victory for free speech when the Supreme Court of the State of Washington found a law prohibiting political opponents from lying about each other's records to be an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment. Apparently, honesty isn't the best policy, at least not in politics.

Just as we cannot trust politicians, we cannot trust the people who tell us about them. Our news media expects us to trust them — after all, they only report on the news they don't make it, at least that's the cant that we are fed. But it turns out that the cant is wrong. The news media has a history of slanting the news to suit their own agenda, whatever it may be. Surely you've heard the term “yellow journalism” before — the idea, if not the name goes back a long time before 1896. Of course the time honored practice of “tarting up” the news, to borrow a phrase from Mr. “fake but accurate” Rather, continues today. Image editing tools are used by news agencies and photographers, giving false impressions of events. Who can forget the way that Time Magazine altered O.J. Simpson's mug shot, giving him a more sinister appearance.

Sometimes the truth just doesn't work for the news outlets. Rather than being advocates for the truth it seems that some reporters want to recapture some of perennial third-party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader's glory days as a ¿consumer advocate? That seems to be what happened to NBC News in 1992. It seems that they wanted to do a hit piece on General Motors like Nader did, but instead of the Corvair they picked on pick–up trucks — exploding pick–up trucks that is… except they had to fake it. And there some of you were thinking if you wanted faux news you had to go to Fox News. Of course CBS and NBC tried their hand at fiction, but neither of them came close to the mastery of creative writing exhibited by Jayson Blair at the New York Times, although Dateline NBC (Weren't we just talking about them?) must have admired him a lot — after all, they had Katie Couric interview him shortly afterward — before she hopped networks and went to replace that other fiction peddler at CBS.

A quarter of a century ago everybody wanted to read a fascinating novel by a Socialist writer named Eric Blair who, I'm fairly certain is no relation to Jayson Blair, Kevin Bacon notwithstanding.  According to the "about the author" style first page immediately behind the cover of my battered "Signet Classics" paperback edition…

He was born in Bengal in 1903, educated at Eton, and after service with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma returned to Europe to earn his living writing novels and essays. He was essentially a political writer who wrote of his own times, a man of intense feelings and fierce hates. He hated totalitarianism, and served in the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War. He was critical of Communism but considered himself a Socialist. He hated intellectuals, although he was a literary critic. He hated cant and lying and cruelty in life and in literature.

Here's a small sample of Eric Blair's work…

Winston dialed "back numbers" on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother's speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

…

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of the Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound tracks, cartoons, photographs — to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. … Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed; always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.

When I first read these words, I thought that they were mere fiction and that George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Blair) was describing a hypothetical world under a socialist or other totalitarian government. 1984 was published in 1949 — 59 years ago. At the time I read it, I thought it was a novel about a nightmare society of the future but I was wrong. The novel was apparently an accurate representation of how history was treated in Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 

We can't trust politicians. We can't trust the objective news media. We can't trust the state. Who can we trust? How about the new media? Well… maybe not. How many of you remember seeing this photograph passed about on blogs during the 2004 election cycle? Well it's not real.

They never spoke together at the same rallies. Although they really did show up at one together in 1970, at which they both spoke, but at completely different times it was two years before Jane Fonda's infamous trip to North Vietnam.

And let's not even get started on who we can trust when it comes to religion. But I will say this about that, hoping even so to avoid the Nixonian and of late the Clintonian (or is it Obaman? Too much news, too little short term memory) air…

When it comes to religion, ecumenicalism is most definitely wrong. Well, maybe that's not quite what I mean to say, but certainly the idea that all religions and all faiths hold equal truth has to be. The idea that all religions are equally valid can only be true in one instance — if they are all equally false. Too many religions are mutually exclusive. Oh they may all hold a nugget of the truth, somewhere, but the best lies have to have some verisimilitude. And please don't get the idea that I have no faith. I am a Christian although I have been known to backslide more often than I'm comfortable with. To me this implies that Judaism holds a great core of religious truth. Jesus was, after all, a Jew, and the Jews are still God's chosen people. It also implies to me that Islam is a lie, because Christianity believes that Jesus was more than just a great teacher and prophet, Christianity believes that Jesus is God.

Having said that, I have a couple more observations to round it out — atheism is a belief system; it merely denies God; and science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, despite what some scientists might say, because science will not accept as evidence any supernatural explanations. It is based upon natural observation, repeatability, testability and rejects out of hand any explanation based upon supernatural intervention. Despite the power over nature that science has given us, there remain a great many questions that science cannot answer. We cannot know what things were like before the universe began, no matter how far back we run the equations. We cannot know what physics is like at the singularity of a black hole, the mathematics breaks down. Yes, physicists and cosmologists can speculate about these things, but we cannot know. Ultimately precise measurement is impossible, despite the finer and finer accuracy with which we can split the second or imagine shorter and shorter distances. At the smallest scales the very act of performing the measurement alters that which is measured.

We know, based upon what we can see and measure (or I suppose if we want to keep to the theme, based upon what astronomers tell us - or rather what we are told that astronomers tell the tellers can be seen and measured), the the universe is incredibly vast. Some estimates purport to give the total number of particles in the universe. These estimates, though based upon measurements that we might assume to be reasonably accurate, are of course pure speculation. Even so, the computational power doesn't exist to take that vast number of particles, their positions and their momenta and work either backward or forward to any given point in time. Even if it did, we cannot know the positions and momenta of the particles to program into our computations because the very act of taking the measurement of one property affects the other in unpredictable ways. At a fundamental level our mathematical understanding of the world works out to probability and statistics. The mathematics is highly refined and it allows us to make incredibly accurate and non-intuitive predictions about what particles will do under controlled circumstances, or in very specific scenarios, both on the scale of the very small and on the scale of the very large.

But it still comes down to probability. We can program a simulation, but no matter how good the simulation it's not reality. A simulation can give us an idea what happens, but observation always holds a surprise for us somewhere. We can run the mathematics, but our understanding doesn't cover everything, there's an element of the random in the computations and while we don't allow it as an explanation, divine intervention could occur and never be detected because we can't observe all events at all times from all frames of reference at once.

Earlier, (much earlier, I know) I noted that as I grow older I become increasingly frustrated at the limited information I have to make truly important decisions. I just gave what I believe to be one reason, here's some more.

The Library of Congress is the "largest library in the world by virtue of its size and the enormous variety of its collections".

Today's Library of Congress is an unparalleled world resource. The collection of more than 130 million items includes more than 29 million cataloged books and other print materials in 460 languages; more than 58 million manuscripts; the largest rare book collection in North America; and the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.

In 2007 the collection consisted of...

Total of 138,313,427 items in the collections, including:

• 20,854,810 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
• 11,478,022 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material
• 105,980,595 items in the nonclassified (special) collections. These included:
  • 2,955,493 audio materials, such as discs, tapes, talking books, and other recorded formats
  • 61,432,879 total manuscripts
  • 5,317,279 maps
  • 14,833,797 microforms
  • 5,517,882 pieces of sheet music
  • 14,364,982 visual materials, including:
    • 1,204,781 moving images
    • 12,520,442 photographs
    • 92,960 posters
    • 544,142 prints and drawings

That's a lot of information. Fortunately I'm a fast reader. Unfortunately I'm not a library or institution, so I can't borrow materials from the Library of Congress, so if I want to read what's there, I'll need to obtain a reader registration card and go physically visit the collections. While I'm at it, I'm going to have to learn 460 languages, and hope to do somewhat better at retaining the information I read than I did in school. I'm going to have to be quick about it too. I'm 48 years old. According to Encarta I've got a maximum of 74 more years to get it all read, although according to Encarta again, it's probably more like 29 years, assuming I'm average. I'm afraid that I just don't have enough time, and never did.

Even if I had the time, and the inclination, and was independently wealthy and didn't need to work to earn the money to pay for my food and clothing, and if I was willing to abandon my family (which I most definitely am not) — If I somehow managed to slog through it all, including all of the new information that some 6 billion or so other people are generating all of the time — why then I'd have to filter it all and decide what was true and believable and what wasn't.

I just have to face it. I'm finite. There's a lot of things to know and learn out there, and I simply don't have the capacity to know and learn them all. And, try as I might, I simply don't have the capacity to know for certain which bits are true and which are false.

I spent a large portion of my youth simply doing as I pleased. I wandered from left to right, up and down, forward and backward, tossed to and fro by the winds of chance and time. I had some incredible opportunities and squandered them. I took other opportunities that I never realized were there for the taking. I believe that I've been fortunate in my life because of much that I have, and much that I have experienced. I have also been foolish from time to time, and it has indeed resulted in "interesting times" for me. I've also come full circle in many of the things that I believe in. I have been a conservative, an anarchist, a rebel, an anti-capitalist, a socialist and a liberal (modern day liberal that is) in my lifetime.

I have to assume that some similar ideological and spiritual cycle has taken place for many of us, although I have no real way of knowing. I do believe that we each have had unique and different experiences one from another. If I'm at all honest with myself then I have to admit that my opinions are no better, nor worse than anyone else's. At times, I try, I try so hard, to be scrupulously, meticulously, carefully as honest and righteous as it's possible to be. But as I told you deception abounds in this world, and self-deception is particularly prevalent. No matter how hard I try, I ultimately learn of my failure in some area where I wasn't looking, or even where I was looking, but simply didn't see.

Still, I am who I am (and I am not that "I Am"). If you've read anything else I've written, I'm sure you know that today I consider myself to be a conservative. I believe in individual opportunity, individual choices, individual responsibility, and individual consequences. I believe that despite the obstacles we each owe it to ourselves to learn what we can, to choose wisely that which is best for ourselves as individuals, and to love and help one another. I also believe that we each must ultimately face the consequences of our choices alone, whether we choose to act as a victim, a predator, or as a human being. I also believe that you have to choose what you believe in, and that you have to stand for it, or you'll fall for anything. There's too much information and too much misinformation out there for any one of us to know the whole truth and what's best for someone else. Don't dictate my choices to me. Let me be at liberty to make them for myself. I'll accord you the same privilege.

And I don't want YOU, or or the government getting in the way of that.

Agree with me or disagree as you choose. But hey, let's discuss it, even if we don't agree. How else can we grow?