In Praise of Bias

     People often speak as though a writer’s bias is an undesirable thing, indicating a beclouded vision. Yet surely the only unbiased person would be one who has never had a thought or made an observation. In fact “bias” is what enables significance and instills meaning into what would otherwise be mere information. Far from warning readers to beware, an openly confessed bias promises well-thought-out conclusions and the active engagement of the author.
     In fact bias is universal. Perhaps the writer who pretends to objectivity might be honestly unaware of bias, leading the reader to wonder how much else he or she might be in the dark about. A great proportion of our intellectual blind spots arise because certain assumptions strike us as so self-evident or natural that they seem raw data rather than conclusions. It is just such ideas, often the idées reçues of an entire culture, that an original author will seek to interrogate or at any rate to reinforce in an original manner. As Max Friedländer noted in commenting on the case of forger Han Van Meegeren , “Forgeries must be served hot,” since the tell-tale stylistic nuances, the assumptions characteristic of each age are invisible to viewers at first, but inevitably emerge as obvious with the passage of time. The very same principle applies to reasoning and logic.
     Worse but less insidious is the intentional concealing of bias. The consciously deceitful propagandist need not concern us. Everyone will find such a fraud offensive (with the exception of sophistic rhetoricians to whom falsity may present an opportunity for a more dazzling epideixis). In such cases the writer, aware of the deception, can only be thought to consider a legitimate case unconvincing. Such arguments are far from insignificant – they are the very stuff of advertising and political discourse -- but such biases are less likely to hoodwink the alert reader or listener if they cannot deceive their own creator.
     This principle emerged clearly during the late 1960s when many concluded that it was impossible to be apolitical. Passivity in the face of injustice came to be regarded as tantamount to endorsement of the status quo (particularly when combined with other clues such as the pursuit of income), while such transgressive practices as dope-smoking and gay sex naturally, though not inevitably, situated people in the opposition , and poverty implied integrity. These are, of course, biases and less than absolutely predictive, yet they possess both meaning and analytical value. Like other prejudices, stereotypes, and clichés, they were found to be quite often true.
     Some, but not all biases, are also value judgments. I recognize my bias against Western movies and musicals as individual and subjective; I would not argue the inherent superiority of who-dun-its, but I would not voluntarily spend an evening watching John Wayne drawl as he rides through the sagebrush. Likewise, my fondness for ancient Skeptics, medieval troubadours, and early modern avant-gardists is not prescriptive, nor is my coolness toward Chinese traditional music or the Grand Ole Opry. I recognize my unfortunate sluggishness to appreciate the work of artists and writers younger than myself. Most blues music is for me good, while all polkas with the exception of those written by Chopin are not.
     Yet I do not deny that I hold biases about biases. Father Arrupe’s “preferential option for the poor” is a good bias to me as is affirmative action while sexism, racism, and homophobia are bad ones. These preferences may be traced to morality, but the association is not necessary. If I encounter an individual with a prejudice in favor of bland food, I will prejudge that person’s other values as dubious, while I will be predisposed in favor of the attitudes of a cook with an ample spice cabinet. I would be more likely to agree with the judgment of a leftist opera buff than a reactionary Nascar fan. The fact is that biases are so potent in human social relations that I never encounter a Nascar fan in my social circles. Such an event would be as unlikely as dinner with Republicans. (A radical car racer might be an interesting character; a conservative lover of La Traviata sounds boring.)
     Intelligence is no safeguard against bias. Indeed the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky has indicated that intelligent people are not only fallible like everyone else, but that they are in fact slightly more likely to make erroneous decisions based on bias.
     The word itself derives through French, Provencal, and Latin from the Greek epikarsios meaning “athwart, crosswise, at an angle,” and that is the basis for its applications in tailoring and the sport of crown green bowls. The quality of obliqueness it shares with metaphor and other rhetorical figures is what opens biased judgments to significance based on connotation, association, and implication. Such ambush on a question from an angle other than warp or woof often releases insight. Biases are instrumental in weaving a texture of meaning that may be decoded (not always accurately) like a poem, a profile, or a tone of voice.
     My biases include a preference for black over blue, red wine over white, pinot noir over cabernet, for lamb over beef, pork over chicken, for spinach over chard, cauliflower over broccoli, cherries over grapes, pears over apples, hazelnuts over Brazil nuts, and, I must confess, peanuts over all tree nuts. Bring me a heap of beans rather than of meat. I like Victorian houses rather than modern ones, cities over suburbs, San Francisco over Los Angeles, Iowa over New Jersey, but the Northeast over the South. I have a bias in favor of traveling anywhere outside of my own country such that I have never seen the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. Talk is more pleasant than television, the fall preferable to the spring, and the mountains to the seashore. I would never ever dye my hair. I always wore a tie while teaching. Though biased against church-going Christians, fundamentalists, and hierarchies, I feel sympathetic toward Meister Eckhart, Quakers, and the Catholic Worker movement. I like Plato rather than Aristotle, the Greeks in general more than the Romans, the Nibelungenlied better than Roland, troubadours before trouvères, Wyatt before Surrey, Lear before Hamlet, Keats better than Shelley, Pound more than Eliot. The early poems of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly are far superior, I think, to their later work.
     The value of biases need not arise from their truth. Naming a few among my myriad biases sketches my nature with greater precision and accuracy than the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. To eliminate my biases would be to erase the host of specifics that define me far more than my physical features. The fact is that bias cannot be avoided. There is no escaping the perspective through the holes in the front of the skull. Even a physicist contemplating subatomic particles must view the spectacle of existence using all-too-human eyes and a brain full of assumption derived from teachers and words and the chances of grants and fashions in science, but, far from lamentable, these limitations give a point to science as they do to art and to life.

The Mannerly Hedonist

     In the fifties James Olds and Peter Milner demonstrated that rats allowed to electrically stimulate a particular area of their brains, thought to be the “pleasure center,” would do so in preference to all other activities, including eating, to the point of exhaustion and finally death. This happened not only to rats with addictive personalities or those with insufficient self-discipline, but to all rats. How could it be otherwise? All creatures seek to avoid pain and to experience pleasure. I cannot tell to what extent the human brain might make a telling difference, but I feel as though, in their situation, I would prove more rat-like than angelic. Desire makes the world turn – whatever other motive could exist? From where could it come?

     Yet hedonism is less straightforward than it might seem. To begin with, it can lead to widely various decisions. In an address to the inmates at Cook County Jail (printed in Crime and Criminals), Clarence Darrow, the great defense attorney, says that the inmates, like himself, have regularly made the choices that seemed to them most likely to lead to happiness. For him it was attending law school; for them, perhaps, burglarizing a house. A man who thinks of the latter as his best opportunity needs, Darrow suggests, not some mystic moral regeneration, but more practical choices.
     Some would expect that, though the demise of the strung-out rodents did not deter their fellows from pursuing the same path to perdition, perhaps we two-leggers could imagine inevitable ill effects vividly enough to alter our compulsions. The implications of addiction, whether to over-eating, opiates, video games, money, romance, or power, suggest that such prudence is far from certain. Epicurus specifically taught his followers that the only way to increase happiness is to reduce desire. But can happiness exist without desire?
     In recent years the study of well-being has been quantified and researchers using the terms hedonic adaptation and then hedonic treadmill have indicated people’s experience of subjective well-being is highly relative. (I am thinking of Brickman and Campbell in the early seventies and then Eysenck in the nineties.) Not surprisingly, an individual in a given set of circumstances will feel satisfaction if the situation has slightly improved and dissatisfaction if it has recently declined. Such changes are temporary as the person adjusts to a new norm, reacting only when there is a fresh movement up or down. Some are happier than others, but this tends to correlate with permanent personality types more than outward conditions. Across a broad range of settings one will find populations with roughly the same distribution of happy and unhappy people. Those living with little feel no lack until they know of others with more, and even in a concentration camp people could have “good days.”
     On the other hand Socrates says in Plato’s Apology that even the King of Persia with his unlimited luxury and power still had “few” days or nights of net pleasure. The millionaire yearns to be a multi-millionaire, the privileged child becomes neurotic, the successful seducer seeks novelty, the CEO wishes to lead an even bigger corporation.
     An artist wishing to create a masterpiece may be miserable while a stamp collector may regularly enjoy more modest goals. The Buddhist pursues the big payoff of enlightenment, but perhaps that goal only sheds a more modest radiance on the small daily routines of everyday experience. The person with a satisfying marriage or a fulfilling job doubtless enjoys more net happiness than the high-stakes player who occasionally makes a hit.
     Human pleasure is often strategically based on a kind of speculative cost accounting. Though I might wish to snatch my neighbor’s venison haunch or Smartphone, I refrain from doing so if he will likewise leave my things alone. His mate may be desirable, but I expect I will find more suffering than delight in seizing her. To the Cyrenaics altruism led to pleasure. In this way nearly all moral choices may be rationalized, but human ingenuity devised a way to enhance the rewards of ethical behavior. The good person learns to feel satisfaction at doing good. The day can be a series of self-congratulations for the moral individual. The glow that even casual church-goers feel is distributed through the entire week. The selfish person is always meeting the challenges and the hostility that arises from less than open-hearted decisions and doubtless generates anxiety and apprehension, feeling isolation rather than support. The difference is central to the well-being of such a profoundly social animal as Homo sapiens.
     For the more subtle, the game goes on. Plato, in the myth of the ring of Gyges (Book II of the Republic, 359a–2.360d) posits the question of whether one might enjoy doing injustice were there no chance of being caught. For the philosopher at any rate (II, 612), virtue is its own reward because the soul is divine and it departs from its own nature when it accedes to vice. Given a continuous history of war and exploitation of others, it may seem dubious whether such a conviction has sustained many humans over the years, but the fact is that society is based on the voluntary cooperation of most people most of the time. Given the inherent selfishness of the ego, one can only conclude that this route seems most likely to bring happiness to such social animals as ourselves. No culture anywhere lacks moral rules; indeed, those of traditional societies are rigorous and demanding. To “break the law” in a small village would destroy one’s vital connections. Only a madman or one corrupted by the values of what passes for more advanced cultures would dare be a deviant.
     Religion has typically challenged the ego, asking for humility if not for the actual extinguishing of self. But surely the seeker after nirvana or heaven aims for pleasure. Mother Teresa lived the life she thought would give her the greatest joy. The Buddhist monk who told me a week ago, “Perhaps you will reach enlightenment before I do,” must have relished his own grace. The psychologists can tell us of people today who cut themselves for the good feeling that it brings.
     The definitive human skill is the manipulation of symbols; and naturally the practice of this ability gives us pleasure, pleasure of the same sort enjoyed by the house cat on the hunt. It is not the stomach full of mouse that the tabby pursues as much as the full feeling of felineness. For humans, the most common form of recreational symbolic play is conversation. Most people in the developed world experience constant stimulation by stories on television and film, lyric-like word strings in advertisements, graffiti, and bumper stickers, and a host of other inputs. With Smart phones and tablet computers, people tend even more today to be constantly absorbing symbolic patterns for the sheer fun of it. No single experience may be significant, but they supply themselves with an unending series of small and completely reliable satisfactions.
     As with the refined philosophical morality of the Platonist, there is the aesthete’s pleasure in sign-juggling, either as creator or consumer. Art is nothing if not the creation and consumption of symbolic structures for their own sake. The pleasures of decoding Chaucer’s Middle English, discerning the dance within the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet, recognizing the antecedents of a contemporary poet, feeling a minute thrill at a turn of phrase, every reader’s experience, somewhat different for each but always derived from the rich suggestibility of the text, all these joys of literature are joys indeed. The same, of course, is true of other arts and well beyond. In Heian Japan the sophisticated Fujiwara aristocrats competed in inventing new aesthetic delights like moon-viewing parties and other expressions of miyabi. One who cultivates a connoisseur’s taste whether in opera, wine, or NASCAR competitions, has simply learned how to obtain pleasures unavailable to all.
     The true hedonist, then, is no disordered dissolute boor, but the most moral, polite, and sociable of people, likely to be quick with a thank you note, well-versed in Beethoven quartets, perhaps holding a highly valued recipe for Thai tom yum soup. We cannot always dodge suffering, but we can always seek pleasure. If we share this tendency with the microbes, let us not lament the fact, but make the most of it. Finding ourselves waiting about in this anteroom of death, if we wish to pass our time in the best possible manner, we may find beautiful behavior and beautiful art more crucial to our well-being than promiscuity and intoxicants.

Still Biking

     It’s getting cool out there on the trail – middle thirties when I rode a few days last week. Today was balmier (in the fifties) and I reflected again about the peculiar phenomenon of my hour and a half a day biking habit. In spite of a lifelong prejudice against physical culture, this morning found this aging aesthete still at it. Like all unlikely anomalies, the dissonance demands further investigation.
     The obvious motives remain valid, of course: first of all, the cardio-vascular benefit which, while it will not beat the reaper, may keep him at bay a while. In addition the biker is allowed the pleasures of an extra thousand calories at table. But surely such rational explanations may cover less straightforward ends.
     I have come to think that I probably do it – such is human perversity – simply because it is difficult. A moment’s reflection suggested that pursuing such ambitions has been a pattern of my life.
     Contrary to the career-minded youth who welcome our universities' transformation into vocational schools, I pursued studies of no value in the marketplace: poetry, dead languages, comparative literature, and literary theory. As a graduate student, I declined to teach essay-writing, declaring that I was a critic and not a pedagogue, though prudent elders cautioned that a teacher of expository writing is more marketable. As a student, I gave my first attention to my least “useful” subject, Classical Greek, though I had no prospect of teaching it, and it played no role in my dissertation.
     When I took the grand tour of Europe, I simply flew over without reservations or itinerary and proceeded to seek the very cheapest accommodations and cuisine, confident that this policy would guarantee the richest experience. Whether that expectation was true or not, it complicated the traveler’s task immeasurably.
     Similarly, living at home on a few thousand a year meant all sorts of making-do, dodges and makeshifts to get by, all of which would have been unnecessary had I taken the high road to the bourgeoisie which was readily available (at least at first).
     I have regularly worked in situations that were unpaid or underpaid: VISTA volunteer, free-lance writer, occasional translator, substitute teacher, adjunct professor, chair of several non-profit (or, as I sometimes like to say, “anti-profit”) organizations. My income, well below the government’s official poverty line, for years created barriers between me and my less scrupulous associates. Integrity was closely bound with penury in my mind, precisely because living without money was challenging enough to be an ordeal, a test of ability. Whatever one thinks of such an attitude, and I realize it is daft to many, it is no easy matter to practice. We always made all food from scratch, buying only basic materials, and yet we ate like luxurious gourmets every day. I drove ancient cars so debilitated that one could hardly know upon setting out whether the vehicle would safely return to its home in a few hours. I regarded the difficulties with the same proud relish sometimes evident in an expatriate in the Nigerian bush explaining his dealings with the bureaucracy or a New Yorker talking about how he found his apartment.
     My politics have always been impossibilist in the sense in which that term was used at the 1900 Paris Congress of the Second International. To me structural change is the precondition of meaningful reform. Though I have not been as rigorous in recent years about maintaining an exclusively extra-parliamentary opposition, I have never seen the victory of a candidate I fully support and I never expect to.
     Surely the pattern of making things hard for myself could arise from ego as well as from the cultivation of arete. There may be some allure in the ability to refer casually to knowing ancient Greek or propelling myself twenty-two miles a day, as I was pleased to do (the latter boast, that is) when a workman arrived just as I breezed in the driveway. Braggadocio, of course, was considered salutary by the Greeks, an inspiration of excellence. For Aristotle the same word meant both ego-satisfaction and magnanimity, a great-heartedness in generosity. Pride for him was “crown of the virtues” as it encourages all the others. (Nicomachean Ethics 4,3) Nietzsche need not have fulminated against Christian humility; few Christians, indeed, really reject pride with the author of Proverbs 11:2: “When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.”
     Furthermore, pride is strangely elusive. Is the soldier’s valor the less for his pride? Are intellectuals indicted by their very reasonable presumption that they excel the norm in thinking? Father Damien who died with his lepers may have been the most egotistical of men, “headstrong and bigoted,” according to the Rev. Hyde, but that has little to do with his work or, indeed, I would say, with his saintliness.
     Claiming neither the saint’s self-sacrifice nor the hero’s fearlessness, I see no harm in mentioning when appropriate my bicycling, my passing acquaintance with Greek particles, or my familiarity with a few back lanes in Kathmandu. Though it may matter to no one else, to me the difficulty of earning each of these remarks is of primary importance. Tossed into this life, we look about at the marvels on every side. A sporting spirit will want to create a few challenges so one knows at least that one has played before the game is over.