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| Cover of a book I only heard about this evening |
The conversation was fairly personal, about how the man's daughter, I think—or someone female—seemed to be estranged from him. He seemed to be talking to another man, but I'm not sure. It didn't matter. But, without wanting to, I had become interested in the conversation. And I didn't appreciate having been drawn in.
The discomfort wouldn't go away. On the drive home, I told my wife about it and surprised myself by pronouncing, "It was an inappropriate conversation to have in a public restroom."
As soon as I heard myself say "inappropriate," I began to wonder what basis I had for the judgment, and I quickly realized that the only reason I had for saying what I did was that the conversation had made me feel uncomfortable. My "logic" seems to have been that, because the conversation was inappropriate, it had made me feel uncomfortable .
But for us to judge the acts or activities of other people as inappropriate because they "make us feel uncomfortable" would be anarchical—disorderly because of the absence or nonrecognition of authority [according to a web dictionary I consulted].
Maybe some of us don't care about anything but the way we feel, and that's reason enough for us to make the judgment without a second thought. That's reason enough for some of us to oppose same-sex marriage without needing to write a letter to an editor explaining why we voted for "the marriage amendment."
But I think most of us want the world and the people around us to fit together in an orderly manner, so we look for an authority that we think other people will (or should) respect, or look for reasons that we think will (or should) be recognized as authoritative. What, for example, does Miss Manners say about having personal conversations in the hearing of strangers? Or what verses of the Bible show why same-sex marriages are abominable? (I lost count of the letters about the marriage amendment, but there seemed to be about as many for as against—or maybe about 60/40.)
We look for something to justify our position and get others to agree with us (we hope).
Why do our minds work that way? Why do we feel first, then (if we have the need) look for reasons to justify it? Because, according to Gary Marcus, in his 2008 book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind [according to Annie Murphy Paul in her April 27, 2008 review ("Patch Job") in The New York Times; I haven't read the book], "the brain, like the rest of the human body of which it is a part is an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole" [as Miss Paul summarized it].
Our ability to form beliefs quickly and act on them for self-protection evolved first, and our brains still depend on the machinery that supports that ability. The need and the ability to justify, either to ourselves or others, evolved latter. Most of us, much or most of the time, seem to use the ability not to decide what to believe, but to justify what we already believe, for reasons that have little to do with evidence.
My friend Chuck, who brought the book to my attention this evening in an email, wrote that "Kluge cites research on how reasoning works in practice. It’ll scare the hell out of you."
Perhaps it would, if I weren't already aware that the mind, like the body of which it is a part, evolved by adapting earlier components to new uses. It doesn't work like the text-books on logic say it should. But it did take me a long time to see this, and it was a scary realization.
Miss Manners, by the way, in one of her columns, wrote that
...to eavesdrop is rude. The fact that people in public places may not be able to avoid hearing others talk is no excuse; they must pretend they have heard nothing.They shouldn't report the talk to their wife.
Or blog about it?
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