Random walks through the internet: from dissonance to consonance

For better or for worse, my highly analytical mind can’t handle an inconsistency. And the inconsistency that I have been trying to resolve for myself since about 2015 is this:

How is it possible that my maternal grandmother, Ethel Ladas, described herself as Algonquin, while her mother, Angélique Maheux, described herself as Odawa?

Although the Algonquin and the Odawa are both Algonquian, they are distinct nations, with distinct traditional territories, even if those territories overlapped in more recent history. So, strictly speaking, my grandmother and great grandmother were describing themselves as belonging to different nations.

In Europeans terms, it would be a bit like one was saying she was from Germany and the other from Austria. Yes, both nations are, broadly speaking, “German” but they are two very different nations.  

As is so often the case, the answer was at my fingertips all along. 

Yesterday, I was again looking through the parish records that are available on the fantastic website, http://www.weskarini.ca/ — parish records, which I might add, I have looked through many many times before. Fortunately, yesterday, for whatever reason, my brain spotted the key piece of information that makes sense of the apparent inconsistency. 

Angélique Maheux’s paternal grandmother was Louise Wabadik, who was married to Simon Kaponiching, an Algonquin. Louise’s father, Laurent Echkipakis, is described in the parish record as “Ojibwe,” which I’m willing to bet was a catch-all term used by the parish priest for multiple nations, one of which very likely would have been the Odawa. And, finally, to put a nice bow on it, Angélique also went by the name Wabadik, a name she gave to my grandmother, Ethel. 

So, if Angélique was Louise’s namesake, it seems likely they had a close relationship and, given Angélique’s identification with the Odawa, it is safe to assume Louise was Odawa, given the description of her father’s identity in the parish record. Meanwhile, Angélique’s father and grandfather and great grandfather were Algonquin, so it would be perfectly reasonable for my grandmother to describe herself as Algonquin, even if her own father was French.   

Mystery solved. 

I wonder if this is how Nancy Drew felt after she cracked a particularly tough case with a clue that had been hiding in plain sight.

I am also somewhat pleased by the resolution to the story because I discovered the crucial  fact yesterday after a random walk through the internet. I actually had to go through my search history today to remember why I even landed on the Weskarini site yesterday.

The resolution pleases me because I only unearthed the original mystery after another random walk through the internet led me to Desmond Moreton’s article about Frank Maheux, Angélique’s husband and Ethel’s father, in which she is described as Odawa, a description that did not resonate with my memory of how Ethel described herself. So, one random walk has answered the question that another random walked posed many years ago. I’ve always appreciated the symmetry of a story that comes full circle. 

If you’d like to know more about my effort to make sense of the discrepancy, I’ve written a number of posts reflecting on it, which can be found here.

Ultimately, I may be the only person in my family who has ever given this a second thought (never mind the very many thoughts I have actually given to it), but, if you are on your own random walk through the internet and our lineage overlaps, the key record is here.

Why aren’t more teams outside of sport playing Moneyball? Because they’re human, stupid.

After reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, I asked myself: why hasn’t this data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent been embraced by more teams and organizations outside of professional sports? Why, after all of these years and with the very tangible success of professional sports to look to as an example, why are we still evaluating and recruiting talent like we always have? 

After all, when you cut through the sound and the fury of Lewis’ tale, the innovation described in Moneyball is pretty straightforward. Billy Bean and Paul DePodesta of the Oakland Athletics use data to identify players who are undervalued by other teams and then sign them to contracts at a bargain price. Essentially, they get more for less by exploiting information the other teams ignore. It’s smart, but it’s also a tactic that every bargain hunter, thrifter and value investor understands. Because the core idea described in Moneyball is so straightforward and has been so widely celebrated, you would think (or, at least, I would) the data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent described in Moneyball (or something approximating it) would have swept through all other industries by now.

Instead, it seems that most teams and organizations rely on recruitment practices that are probably older than baseball. You know the drill: after a largely arbitrary sorting process based on self-reported data points (i.e. a resume is pulled out of a hat based on a crappy keyword search or because a friend-of-a-friend recommends that it be pulled), the evaluation of a potential hire boils down to a highly subjective gut-check, which may or may not be based on an assessment of the candidate’s skills in highly artificial circumstances. A few reference checks later — which everyone agrees are useless — and, blammo, a new hire is being onboarded. If a professional sports team recruited like this, it would be out of business in no time. How is it possible that so many teams and organizations continue to recruit in this essentially arbitrary fashion? 

Overlooking the rhetorical nature of my question, you might reply, “well, probably because most teams, organizations and industries don’t have access to the kind of dataset baseball has. Baseball has always been kind of nutty for numbers.” To which, I might reply, great point, Dave, but there is no necessary reason why a baseball-like dataset couldn’t be developed and maintained by, say, a professional association. Isn’t the market supposed to identify opportunities like this and fill them? Potential employers, it is fair to say, would probably pay oodles of money to access this kind of data, if it led to better and less costly hires. Moreover, I would quickly add, not giving you a chance to get a word in edgewise, because that’s how I roll, once someone is hired, a team or organization can create and maintain as much data about the new hire and their performance as they would like. So, if some hungry-for-success team or organization wants to evaluate a new hire based on their contribution to the success of the team or organization, generating the right kind of data should be a straightforward exercise once the person is onboarded.

Instead, much like the recruitment process itself, the evaluation of new hires seem to be largely a matter of feel. If a new hire “fits” into their new team and seems to contribute, the recruitment process is normally judged a success, whether or not the person measurably contributes to the success of the team or organization. To be fair, group harmony and team cohesion is always going to play a role in any team’s success. However, group harmony and team cohesion are very often a by-product of team work rather than a catalyst for it. Whether or not a person “fits” is probably irrelevant, so long as they make some effort to cooperate and work well with others. Proximity and time will take care of the rest. 

Before you interrupt me with another objection that I already have a clever reply to, it was probably around this point in my thinking and writing that the penny dropped. Duh, Sterling, of course, most organizations and industries hire based on “feel”, where “feel” more or less translates into, “yep, gut sure says that they’re like me.” We humans are tribal. From the very outset of our lives, we tend to form relationships and social groups based on physical proximity and physical similarities. Why would it be dramatically different for the workforce? Well, Sterling, I guess I was assuming that competition and/or the desire to achieve our aims would have nudged us to adopt more rational, coherent and less arbitrary approaches to building teams and organizations. Whether an organization is for-profit or not-for-profit, it makes much more sense to recruit people who measurably contribute to the achievement of the organization’s aims rather than people who just happen to look and talk like the friends-of-friends we have in common.

Think about it, if the jocks — of all people — have figured this one out, why hasn’t anyone else? 

Then, it was around this point that another penny dropped for me. Most people agree that Michael Lewis’ version of the events in Moneyball “torques” the facts for the sake of a more compelling story. In particular, it seems likely that there was far less conflict and debate about the data-driven approach Bean and DePodesta championed. Strictly-speaking, once a certain caricature of scouts and scouting is set aside, the difference between player evaluation and acquisition as it was traditionally done in baseball and the approach described in Moneyball is one of degree rather than kind. Moreover, by the time that Beane and DePodesta had turned to data to drive their player acquisitions, amateur data aficionados had already been using data to dissect and criticize professional baseball’s approach to player evaluation and acquisition for some time. The notion that data could lead to better recruitment practices was already well and truly in the air.

It’s also important to remember that Bean and DePodesta were evaluating and recruiting players who had already been through a very long and very difficult vetting process. To be among the players who are even on the radar of being considered for a spot on a professional baseball team, a lot of people in the baseball community would have already vouched for that player in some way or the other. It’s not like the Athletics were using data to recruit hockey goalies to be catchers or signing Tim from the mailroom. If a team is trying to decide between signing this guy and that guy, and everyone already agrees that both of them are part of the very exclusive club known as professional baseball, why wouldn’t you roll the dice and pick the cheaper guy if the data also seems to predict he would do fine. Shorn of Lewis’ drama, the Athletics faced a pretty simple choice. On the one hand, they could continue evaluating and recruiting talent as they always had and expect the same middling results or, on the other, they could take a chance on a newish approach broadly recognized as having some merit, generate results no worse than they might otherwise expect, and save money while doing it. Really, when you think about it, it’s a no-brainer, but, “the not-so-remarkable tale of safely entrenched insiders making an even safer bet that works out better than expected” doesn’t make for compelling dust jacket copy.

With all of that throat-clearing now well in hand (uh, gross), the answer to the question I started with is this, I think: teams and organizations outside of professional sports haven’t yet broadly adopted a data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent because, all things considered, the age-old approaches work well-enough; as a result, no well-established insiders have felt compelled to try something new. On the one hand, successful organizations tend to attract a lot people who have already been vetted in some fashion. Randomly picking, more or less, among those people who present themselves for selection is probably a safe bet and, if random selection is a safe bet, why not also pick people “like me,” if it will make you and everyone else on the team feel more comfortable with the new hire. On the other hand, struggling organizations tend to cut employees rather than than make new hires and, you can be sure, any hires they do make are going to be on the safe and familiar side. In other words, even after very many years of working together in groups to achieve different aims, it seems that we humans haven’t confronted any situation that would compel us to change how we recruit people or how we evaluate their contributions to our efforts. And, if it hasn’t happened yet, don’t hold your breath! Businesses fail every day and entire industries have collapsed over the years and yet these very negative consequences have not driven business or industry insiders to fundamentally and systematically rethink how they evaluate and acquire talent. If it hasn’t happened yet, I doubt it it will happen anytime soon.

Now, if you are like me, at this point, you might be somewhat disheartened to realize that organizations build their teams using methods that wouldn’t look out of place on the schoolyard (i.e. pick that kid, he dresses like us!). However, if you are a normal human being, you are probably actually thinking, “Are you serious?” Did you really only just figure out that hiring decisions are primarily an exercise of “like” hiring “like”?” Well, sort of. I have always understood that humans have a habit of grouping together based on superficial similarities and excluding those who are superficially different, but I have always thought of it as a bad habit, which would eventually be broken, both at the individual and group level, either consciously as people and societies matured or unconsciously through something like competition. What has dawned on me (thanks to Moneyball and baseball!?) is that the human tendency to socialize, build teams and act collectively by looking for and finding people “like us” is so fundamental that nothing will ever compel us to change, other than a true evolutionary shift in our DNA, which, strictly-speaking, is just a fancy way of saying, “if people who embrace difference reproduce more than all those other people who prefer homogeneity.” It’s “we like us” and “different like them” all the way down. 

Moreover, on a personal level, it is also dawning on me that whatever I have accomplished in my life is probably best understood as being a consequence of my similarities to others  rather than my differences. I’m not a beautiful unique snowflake; I’m a me-too drug. And, yes, while I am one hundred per cent talking about social privilege, I am also driving at something that runs deeper. Returning again to evolution (which probably should be the subordinate clause that starts every discussion about human nature), in my experience, evolution is often characterized as a triumph of difference because it is a heritable difference in phenotype that leads to a reproductive advantage that, over many generations, leads to a new breeding population. Hurray for difference — so long as you overlook the fact that the difference is one tiny bit in a whole lot of sameness. Without the sameness, the little bit of difference wouldn’t ever take hold in a breeding population. To put it bluntly, if you are too different, your difference ain’t being passed along to anyone because you won’t get the opportunity to reproduce and, if you are really different, the breeding might not even work. In other words, what makes you and me human are the ways in which we are the same; insofar as we aspire to be unique, it it only possible because we are like others — and not in spite of it.

And that is the moral of a completely different after-school special than the ones I watched growing up.

Writing: what I’ve learned

In the beginning, writing was a fun school assignment. It was a way to compete with my friends. It helped to wean me off my toys, offering an age-appropriate medium for the expression of my imaginative impulses.  

Then, when I was sixteen, going on seventeen, while hiking across a glacier in the Rockies, I experienced something I couldn’t quite make sense of. In response to the experience, I tried to make sense of it by writing a poem. It was, I think, my first true poem. I also now suspect that I turned to the page only because I had no one else to talk with about the experience. 

If writers, like super heroes, have secret origins, my experience on the glacier and my effort to make sense of it with words is my secret origin. Like every super hero’s secret origin, it has shaped everything else that has come after. I never finished that first true poem; I don’t think I’ve ever stopped trying to write it either. 

Twenty-nine years after that first unfinished and forever-revised poem, I now know this about writing: Luke got it backwards. Flesh becomes word, and not the other way around. The marks on a page don’t affect us. We affect them. The influence we suppose we feel in words originates in us. We make marks work. We make marks words. The power of words is us imaginatively transubstantiated.

The power of writing, then, is always the power of a community. Like a currency, writing is only as influential as the people who call it their own. If you want to craft writing that wins friends, influences neighbours, or earns money and acclaim, the marks on the page are probably the least important consideration.

Don’t write each day; instead, ingratiate yourself each day to the right people. It’s gatekeepers all the way down.

I also now suspect that words have limited efficacy when it comes to making sense of the kind of experience I had on the glacier. The experience originates, I think, in a part of our brains that experience, know, and understand without using the marks, sounds and physicalizations we learn as children to express as language. If this suspicion is correct, it is probably impossible to express in words the experience I had on the glacier. My adolescent turn to words, poetry and writing, to make sense of my encounter with the infinitesimal nature of human experience, was probably futile from the outset. 

Fortunately, writing has helped me to understand myself, others, and the world around me, even if it can’t magically motivate people to action or express the inexpressible. Despite its mundane limitations, writing can be very satisfying, especially when I catch in words some feeling, intuition or idea that had previously seemed ineffably out of reach. Rationally, I know writing — my writing — is little more than an elaborate game of solitaire; irrationally, I also know that it feels important. I’ve always been one of those kids who takes play very seriously.

In another twenty-nine years, I will be seventy-four, going on seventy-five. With so much life left to learn from, I wonder who I might yet become. Will the person I am today be as much of a stranger to me then as that sixteen year-old is a stranger to me now? It seems likely. It also seems likely that the different texts I have created or will create will be insufficient to forge a persistent identify over time. My past selves, my present selves, and my future selves, like any other reader, make of texts whatever they bring to them at the time of the encounter. There is no indelible message that can be preserved in the bottle of my words, even for my future selves. Waves in the ocean of experience leave no trace. 

If all of this is true, why write at all? It’s a fair a question, and one that I often ask myself. If there are so many other enjoyable activities that are much more likely to win friends, influence neighbours, and earn money and acclaim, why bother writing, why persist in a habit which serves no greater purpose than its own perpetuation. At the age of forty-five, going on forty-six, this is my answer: writing deeply is like breathing deeply; you understand its value, whenever you take the time to do it.

Frank and Angélique Maheux: Correcting My Record

Some time ago, I discovered that Desmond Morton, a highly esteemed Canadian historian, wrote an article about my maternal great grand father, Frank (Francois-Xavier) Maheux. The article is based on the letters Frank wrote to my great grand mother, Angélique, after he enlisted to serve in the First World War. The letters, along with some other materials, were donated by my great aunt to the Library and Archives Canada in 1977. 

Overall, the article is very good; however, in a quick aside, Morton describes Angélique as “the full-blooded Odawa [Frank] had married in 1905 when he had worked in a lumber camp near her reserve.” When I first read the article, Morton’s claim that Angélique was Odawa struck a dissonant chord. My maternal grandmother, as far as I can remember, identified as Algonquin. She even ran an organization called the “Congress of Algonquin Indians,” which I was able to confirm thanks to the magic of the internet. On the one hand, I had the official record of a well-respected Canadian historian and, on the other hand, I had my memory, the unofficial record of the internet, and an inference that, astute readers will note, I was not, strictly speaking, entitled to make.

The short version of what followed is this: at first, I believed Morton’s claim about Angélique’s identity. Then, after a while, thanks to the magic of the internet, I discovered information that implied my memory was correct. I found marriage and birth records that connected Angélique patrilineally to the Algonquin First Nation and to Kitigan Zibi, a reserve also connected with the Algonquin First Nation. I also discovered that she was an informant for an unfinished book on Algonquin culture that is now in the possession of the Canadian Museum of History. When I went to look at the materials for the book at the museum on the same day that I went to look at Frank’s letters in the archives, I found a story about nosebleeds in the materials for the book that I also happened to see mentioned in Frank’s letters earlier that day. On top of all that, I found artwork signed by my grandmother and my great aunt. My inner detective was satisfied. Case closed.     

Well, almost. My inner academic decided that it wouldn’t hurt to reach out to Morton to see if he would be willing to do a correction. I did a bit of digging on the internet and, sure enough, I found an email address for Morton at McGill. I guessed that it wasn’t monitored anymore because it looked like Morton had well and truly retired. I, nevertheless, sent the email address a polite note, not ever expecting to get a reply. A few months later, to my great surprise, an enthusiastic reply arrived from Morton, we had a brief exchange, in which he thanked me for the new information, expressed particular interest in Angélique’s role as a cultural informant, and said that he would look into the possibility of correcting the record. Although I didn’t necessarily expect a correction to ever materialize, given his other commitments, it was more than enough for me that my email had been acknowledged by Morton and that he would do what he could to correct the record if it was feasible. Finally, case closed.   

Meanwhile, thanks to the posts I shared about my efforts to muddle through all of this history, two cousins who I hadn’t heard from since I was very young contacted me through Facebook. After swapping family stories for a while through Messenger, one of them created a private Facebook for people who are the descendents of Frank and Angélique to share stories and pictures. As more and more extended family were added, more and more stories and pictures were swapped. Then, the motherload was shared. Another cousin had paid the archives for a digital version of Frank’s letters and she shared the files with us. For me, this was like manna from heaven. I had always wanted to read the letters in their entirety; however, there are far too many to easily get through all of them while sitting at the archives. Now the opportunity had come at last! 

Around the time Frank’s letters were shared, I learned that Morton has passed away. This news reminded me of the notion I had to correct Morton’s article. I decided again that it couldn’t hurt to reach out to the journal that had published Morton’s article to see if they would consider a correction. Because I remembered my grandmother identifying as Algonquin, it never occurred to me to think that my extended family might identify with a different First Nation and, most importantly, so might Angélique. Instead of discussing Morton’s claim in the Facebook group, I sent a note directly to the editor of Canadian Military History, to see if they would be friendly to a correction.    

To their immeasurable credit, the journal was friendly to the idea of adding a note to the digital version of the article; however, the editor gently (and wisely!) suggested I check with other family members to sort out what the correction might look like. That made sense to me. Plus, thanks to Facebook, I now had the easy means to consult an engaged cross section of my extended family. And so I did, and within a few minutes of asking for advice on how to write the correction, I learned from two cousins that they specifically remember Angélique identifying as Odawa, in one way or another. It turns out Morton was not wrong to describe her as Odawa. I let the editor know that Angélique’s identify was more complex than I had realized and that a correction wasn’t required. For me, a puzzle, nevertheless, remained. On the one hand, I had the birth and marriage records. On the other hand, I had my cousins’ memories. Was it possible to reconcile them? After a bit more digging, I’ve come up with a plausible answer.

Many of the names used by settlers to distinguish between the different indigenous peoples and nations were invented or misapplied by the settlers themselves. Notably, the name “Algonquin”, I have learned, wouldn’t have been recognized by the people it has named for much of their history. It is also falling out of favour among those very same people today. Crucially, as one of my cousins mentioned on Facebook, in Angélique’s own language, she probably would have referred to herself as Anishinabe, whenever she had reason to describe herself in a way that didn’t reference kinship and place. And while there are very many reasons, for better and for worse, that indigenous people may have come to use and even cherish some of the names they found in settler history books, there is no reason to expect their attitude to those names to be uniform or even consistent over time. If it was expedient to use one name invented by settlers rather than some other name invented by them, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference because they had their own name for themselves in their own language. As a point of contrast, think of all the different names Europeans have for the people we call German in English. In some contexts, they are German; in others, they are “Allemand”; and people from Germany don’t insist that they be always be called, “Deutsche.” From this perspective, in the case of Angélique and my grandmother, it seems entirely plausible to me that they used whichever settler name was most useful given their aims at any particular time and the context in which they were using it. 

With all that in mind, it’s probably worth returning to the original aside that kicked off my adventure in history, for one final fact check. In it, Morton describes Angélique as “the full-blooded Odawa [Frank] had married in 1905 when he had worked in a lumber camp near her reserve.” Although, as I have discussed, it’s not necessarily wrong to describe Angélique as Odawa, Morton’s very specific claim about Angélique’s blood quantum is strange. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in Frank’s letters that can be used to draw that inference. Genetically-speaking, Angélique probably wasn’t “full blooded”, but, outside of settler history, that point is irrelevant to her identity. I can also say with some confidence that Frank and Angélique were married in 1906, because their ten year anniversary is mentioned by Frank in one of his letters and it is is dated January 1916. Finally, it is also probably worth emphasizing, that the reserve closest to Baskatong Bridge, where Angélique and Frank were married and lived for a good part of their lives, is Kitigan Zibi. At the time of the article’ publication, it was known as River Desert, and probably would have been described by the community that lived there as an Algonquin reserve rather than as Odawa. Today, the community call themselves the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. 

Ultimately, I won’t ever know with much certainty the names my great grandmother and grandmother mostly closely identified with when they described themselves. However, “Anishinabe” seems like a pretty plausible option, and is much more appropriate for today’s time and context. It also aligns with the expressed wishes of the community that they lived in close proximity to. So, from here on, I will say that my great grandmother and grandmother were Anishinabe, and, in the course of their lives, they lived at Baskatong Bridge, Maniwaki and Ottawa. If pressed by someone to use one of the names found in settler history books, I will shrug my shoulders and use it as an opportunity to discuss the myopic nature of settler history.

And, as far as the “official” record goes, thanks to the internet, I have now probably entangled Morton’s article with my own muddled attempts to make sense of his claims about Angélique’s identity. As a result, anyone who is interested in the article, Frank or Angélique will also be able to easily find the additional context my account provides. More importantly, thanks to the hard work of indigenous scholars and the emergence of Indigenous Studies over the last few decades, I doubt any future historians who takes an interest in Angélique’s story will take Morton’s description of her identity or my account of my effort to make sense of it as definitive.

Between the wake of living and the insensibility of death: the experience of now

It’s an old and familiar trope; as a young man, it would enrage me.

Picture it: an old person, who is tired of living, decides that they are ready to die. Then, they close their eyes and die, as if the matter was decided in that moment — probably after some important milestone had passed and some important wisdom had been imparted.

The decision itself to die is not, I think, the key issue. Death as the ultimate sacrifice, in the name of some higher principle or for the benefit of some other person, has always tickled my adolescent fancy. Likewise, for as long as I can remember, I have always thought suicide to be an appropriate response to a cruel and terminal illness, even if it isn’t the choice I would make for myself.

I think the trope enraged me because it eulogized a decision to acquiesce to death’s inevitable and final ushering for no other reason than the old person’s indifference to life. The old person could live longer; they simply choose not to because they don’t much see the point in living any longer. It seemed to me to be the ultimate betrayal of the very idea of life, in all of its stubborn glory. Death is not an undiscovered country; it is an insensibility to be resisted at all costs until the very moment of consumption and consummation.

However, now that I have made it to middle age, I have found that the trope no longer enrages me. The decision to acquiesce to death, however unpalatable such acquiescence  may be to me, even seems to make sense, once the nature of lived experience is rightly understood.

When I was younger, lived experience seemed much more concrete and enduring, even after it had already been lost under the wake of living, because the amount of lived experience I could remember seemed to be much more than the experience I had forgotten. Sure, I couldn’t remember every detail of waking life but, on the whole, it felt like my experiences lived on with me in my memories.

At forty-five, however, the ledger of memories and lived experience is not at all balanced. I have undeniably forgotten much more of my life than I can now remember. I can no longer pretend otherwise: experience is gone forever once it is lived and our very fallible and fleeting memories can’t preserve or resurrect it. In terms of the experience of lived experience, the only difference between living and death is that the now of living is experienced and the now of death is not. The past is as unknowable as the future, whatever the fantasy of memory might otherwise try to tell us.

Now that this insight has taken root, it has become much easier for me to imagine a time when I will be able to look forward into death and look back onto life and not really see that much difference in terms of the experience of lived experience. As a young person, the experience of now was a supernova that illuminated all horizons; today, it is a star bright enough for me to look back with fondness and forward with anticipation, despite the shadows growing all around me; looking out towards 80 or 90 (and, hopefully, 100 or 120), it is very easy to imagine that the experience of now might feel like a pale dim light in a universe of nothing stretching in all directions. If that is the case, persistence for the sake of persistence might not seem to really add or subtract from the final ledger; and acquiescence to an insensible future might not seem so different from an attachment to the insensible past. Maybe, just maybe, I will also be ready to close my eyes and slip away quietly.

But, let me say this now! If some future Sterling starts nattering on about going gently into that good night, he is a rogue and a fraud! Here me now and believe me later: attach every machine, do all the surgeries, and give me every drug; do whatever it takes to keep my faint ember of consciousness aglow, no matter the suffering I may endure. I expect future Sterling will feel the same; however, because younger Sterling would probably be enraged at my defence of the enraging trope, I shall err on the side of caution: let my will today bind his then. If future Sterling ever loses sight of the faint ember of his experience in the engulfing insensibility of past and future, give him a stiff rum or two and send him to bed. I’m sure he will be fine in the morning. He’s probably just had a bad day. Plus, if he has got to go, he will probably want to go quietly in his own bed, enveloped in  a nice light glow.

Losing my religion: the unknowable self and the myth of a well-ordered society

I suspect that you and I don’t really know anything.

Today, thanks to a lot of trial and error, we humans have a pretty good understanding of what we need to do to distinguish between plausible and implausible beliefs. If we run controlled double-blind and repeatable experiments that generate a sufficient amount of data of sufficient quality, we can use statistical methods to confidently identify those beliefs that are false and those that are plausibly true but still in need of further testing. Considered from this perspective, it seems pretty obvious to me that you and I don’t really know anything. Most of our beliefs have not been tested in this way. 

To start, almost all of our beliefs about the universe are taken on faith that the people doing the work of understanding the universe are doing it correctly. To be sure, this is probably a sensible approach for you and I to take. It certainly seems much more efficient to rely on a specialized community of inquirers to undertake this work, but it doesn’t change the fact that you and I don’t really know what the scientific community knows. Their well-tested beliefs are, for us, articles of faith, even if we can expect them to be much more reliable than the articles of faith generated by theologians interpreting ancient texts. And if this is true, it is true whenever we rely on others to formulate and test beliefs on our behalf. Beliefs that we don’t test ourselves are, for us, articles of faith. 

With that conclusion in mind, take a few minutes to catalogue all the beliefs that you have and rely on each day that are formulated for you and/or tested by others. If you are honest with yourself, I am pretty sure the list will be quite long. And while it is tempting to believe that we have good reason to rely on others for all of these beliefs, I’m willing to bet that you have not tested that belief either. I, for one, can admit that I have not tested it — and most of my other beliefs. I also feel pretty comfortable guessing that you and I are in the same boat. 

And this, I think, is the crucial consideration. We might be able to shrug off the fact that particle physics is for us a matter of faith, but I suspect it will be much more unsettling to realize that you and I never properly test a whole range of beliefs that fundamentally shape our sense of self, our identity, and our daily experience of living.

Consider: Am I happy or unhappy today? Am I happier or less happy than I was yesterday? Last week? Last year? Am I better off now than I was three years ago? Am I consistently making choices that support my well-being? Did I go to the right university? Was I right not to go to university? Am I in the right career? Are my goals for the future the right goals? Am I with the right partner? Would I have been happier with no children or more children? Am I the person I wanted to become? Who was I? Which of my memories are accurate? How accurate? And so on. For all of these questions and many more, there are objective and measurable answers. I’m also willing to bet that your answers to these kinds of questions are a mix of educated guesses, received wisdom, and Magic 8-Ball proclamations. 

To further complicate matters, it is very likely that some of these questions can’t ever be properly answered. We could, for example, carefully track our self-reported experiences of happiness over a long enough period of time to come up with some plausible theories about what makes us happy and then test those theories with more data. However, we probably will never be able to adequately test whether any particular life choice was the right one to make. There are no do-overs in life. As a result, we can’t even generate the data that would put us in a position to make a valid assessment. Furthermore, in the face of this certain uncertainty, it seems likely that we can’t even reliably assess these choices in the here and now because we don’t have the well-tested beliefs upon which to assess the expected outcomes. So, even if we want to evaluate our life choices before we make them (overlooking the important consideration that many people don’t), we don’t even have the correct data for that evaluation. 

One plausible way to sidestep these concerns is to simply stipulate a lower burden of proof for these kinds of beliefs. Perhaps, it doesn’t really matter if we have properly tested beliefs about our happiness, our favourite foods, or our career path. One might be happy to claim that the good life requires only that we can tell ourselves a convincing story in the here and now that we are happy, well-off and that the events of our lives brought us here. All’s well that we can describe as ending well! And while I suspect that this tactic might actually be the best explanation for our species’ reproductive success up to this point (i.e. that we have a curious ability to reimagine suffering as a net benefit), I remain suspicious of the notion that we should lower the burden of proof for these kinds of beliefs. A delusion is a delusion is a delusion, even if we can convince ourselves that we are happy about it. 

In the face of this uncertainty, however, I suspect the only appropriate conclusion is to give up on the notion that we can ever definitively know ourselves. We are constantly evolving animals that are bound in the flow of time and, as a result, there are beliefs about ourselves of which we can never properly test. We have to rely on hunches, received wisdom and wild guesses because we have no other option. It isn’t because we are inherently mystical or otherworldly. It is because we are constrained  by our temporal existence. The much larger and crucial delusion, I think, is the belief that we could know with certainty who we are and what we value. Once we give up on that idea, the notion that we don’t know ourselves with God-like certainty seems much less unsettling and becomes just another mundane limitation of human existence. 

And while this conclusion might be well and good on the personal level, it creates one teensy-weensy little issue when we turn our attention to society and its organization: the fundamental and essential assumption of a liberal democracy and a market economy is that you and I can know our own well-being and happiness, know it better than anyone else, and reason effectively about it. Thanks to research in neuroscience and behavioural psychology, we now know with some certainty that these assumptions are false. We are poor reasoners in general but especially about what we value. Additionally, many of our beliefs about our own well-being are demonstrably false (i.e. people remember happiness that they did not experience and forget pain that they did). So, if it is true that most of our beliefs are inadequately tested and that we can’t even make accurate judgments about what we value or think to be good, democracies and markets are, at best, arbitrarily organizing society and, at worst, guaranteed to do it poorly. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. And to be clear, this is also true for authoritarian strong men, councils of nerds, and any other social-political system that depends on anyone looking deep within themselves to figure out who they are, what they value, or what they want to become. The root problem is the practical constraints of inquiry. There is no social architecture that will solve that problem for us.  

What then of politics, society, and its organization, if we can’t count on people knowing themselves with any certainty? 

First, I think we need to recognize and accept that our present-day social and political habits, institutions, and systems are largely the consequence of chance (akin to biological evolution), prone to constant change, and persist only as long we allow them to persist. They are an expression of our need to organize ourselves, they reflect the environment in which they developed, and they emerge like any other natural phenomenon. They can become better or worse (relative to a host of benchmarks), none of them will magically persist over time, and there is no reason to think that solutions from hundreds and even thousands of years ago will work for today’s challenges. We need to accept that society’s organization is an ever-evolving and accidental by-product of the on-going effort to solve many different, discrete and often intertwined problems. 

Second, I think we need to get out of the habit of appealing to any claims that rely on introspection alone, in the same way that we almost got out of the habit of appealing to claims about the one true God. There are a lot of well-tested and plausible beliefs that we can use to guide our efforts to organize ourselves and direct our problem-solving efforts. The challenge, of course, is that even well-tested beliefs don’t all necessarily point to the same conclusion and course of action. In those cases, we must resist the temptation to frame the debate in terms of largely unanswerable questions like “what’s best for me”, “who’s vision of the good life is correct,” or “who worships the right God.” Instead, we need to look to well-tested beliefs, run good experiments, and always account for all the costs and benefits of whatever approach we settle on in the here and now, recognizing that with new evidence we may need to adapt and change.  

Finally, for those of us who think that we should settle our disagreements based on well-tested beliefs rather than dubious claims grounded in introspection, we need to lead by example. I think this will primarily involve asking the right sort of questions when we disagree with others. For example, what well-tested evidence do we have for one conclusion or the other? What kind of evidence do we need to decide the matter? What experiments can we run to get the necessary evidence? We will also need to get in the habit of discounting our own beliefs, especially if they are based on nothing more than introspection or received wisdom. And this might actually be the toughest hurdle to overcome both personally and practically. It is very natural to become attached to our own bright ideas before they are properly tested. Once attached, it becomes much easier to discount the evidence against them. To further complicate matters, humans also seem to be too easily motivated to action by strongly-expressed convictions that align with preconceived notions, whether they are well-tested or not. Asking for evidence before action and expressing doubts about one’s own convictions might not resonate with the very people we need to sway. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there is no easy general all-purpose way to solve this problem. People who want to motivate others to action will always need to strike the tricky balance between rhetoric and honest communication. We don’t need to be puritans about honest communication but we also shouldn’t use the human condition as an excuse to spin outright lies — even in the service of thoroughly tested beliefs.            

Descartes is often credited with kicking off modernity when he famously doubted the existence of everything but his own thinking mind. In the very many years since he reached his pithy and highly quotable conclusion, we have learned a lot more about the best methods of inquiry and have developed a well-tested and always evolving understanding of the world. More recently, thanks to those methods of inquiry and their application in neuroscience and behavioural psychology, it is becoming increasingly clear that we can’t know much of anything from introspection alone — including ourselves. There is nothing you, I, or Descartes can know with any certainty by looking inwards for answers. Unfortunately, we continue to rely on habits, institutions, and systems which presuppose that you or I have privileged and certain knowledge about our own well-being, values, and optimal outcomes. This may partly explain — in conjunction with other issues (hello, massive inequality) — why liberal democratic political systems that rely on free markets are in crisis these days.

It was fashionable in the late 20th century to talk as if we had escaped modernism, but postmodernism, I think, only takes Descartes’ modernism to its logical conclusion, while willfully overlooking the fact that we humans have become pretty good at understanding the world around us. To set ourselves on a new path, to really escape the gravity well of modernism, we need to set aside the Cartesian notion that the aim of inquiry is absolute certainty and that such certainly can be found through introspection. Instead, we need to accept that we really don’t know ourselves, whatever our heartfelt convictions might tell us, and look instead to well-tested beliefs to guide and organize our lives, both individually and collectively. 

Unreal city: a black hole of dazzling light

I remember the moment, but I can’t place it in time.

We were returning to Waterloo from Toronto. It was night. The stream of lights heading east on the 401 was an endless milky way.

It struck me: behind each set of quivering headlights, there was at least one person. It struck me: on one side of this narrow strip of highway, heading east towards a moderately-sized metropolitan city, there was a galaxy of human experience, unique distinct breathing and, like me, living at the centre of its own universe. It struck me.

At high school in Ottawa, I remember it often felt like I was surrounded on all sides by unknown, colourless, cardboard people, who reappeared over and over again like the recycled backgrounds of a low-budget cartoon. Many years later and long after the moment of dread on the highway heading west from Toronto to Waterloo, it struck me: I was as colourless and unreal to the unknown others as they were to me.

I now live in Toronto, a city as unreal as Eliot’s. From my window, I see towers and towers of existences. When I walk to and from work, there is always a hornet’s nest of activity. When I shop within minutes of my home, I see faces that I know I will never see again. Like a shovel of dirt from a wild and healthy field, these few blocks of my existence are teeming with life.

If I reflect for too long on the scale of life in this city and on this planet, it obviates me. If I focus instead on the energy, colours and details of this urban microcosm, I am dazzled by it all, and happy to play the role of cardboard cutout to the unknown universes of life booming and buzzing around me.

Oh, unreal city, at the centre of a black hole where all light is trapped, could it be as dazzling as this?

The lottery of life: the not-so-secret to my (sort of) success

Believe it or not, I have spent much of my life not fully aware that fitting-in and ingratiating oneself to a group is the key to success.

I understood, of course, that currying favour was a thing that people did to succeed, but I probably thought (or hoped) that it wasn’t a necessary condition of success. It has finally truly dawned on me that social acceptance is the key driver of everything we humans do or don’t do, whether we are successful or not.

Because this now seems to me to be such an obvious and simple truth, I can’t help but wonder — out loud, of course — why it took me so long to figure it out. The answer to that question also now seems pretty obvious too: privilege.

I was able to overlook the very obvious and essential role of social acceptance in human achievement only because I am a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, settler male who is reasonably tall. Society is pretty much designed to accept people who look and talk like me. It is baked right into the system. To be accepted, I only need to exist. As a result, it was very easy for me to take it for granted. Like fish everywhere, I overlooked the very stuff I was awash in.

It also occurs to me that I have been able to play out my adolescent fantasy of being a L’etranger-philosopher-king-without-a-cause only because of that baked in social acceptance. I can “take risks,” “blaze my own path,” and “speak truth to power” precisely because I’m not really ever putting myself at risk. Society has always got my back.

At this point, I can imagine one totally reasonable response to this “discovery” and my decision to share it: “Well done, Dr. Privilege, you finally figured out what people have been telling you for decades. What do you want? A hero biscuit?”

I hope not. My aim here — I think — is to acknowledge the lottery that I have won simply by being born. I also want to flag the idea of privilege for people who might be similarly naive. If I overlooked the full impact of privilege in my life — and I am a reasonably well-attuned to issues of social justice — I’m sure that I’m not alone. We all have our blind spots, I suppose.

If the concept of privilege is new to you, this is a good introduction:

Privilege 101: A Quick and Dirty Guide

If the concept is familiar to you and you know some good introductory resources, please share them below. I am sure I have more to learn.

Another utterly mundane conclusion: my place in our history

Some of my ancestors were Irish, but I am not Irish.

Some of my ancestors were Indigenous, but I am not Indigenous.

That is the utterly mundane conclusion I have reached, after reflecting for some time on the history and heritage of my ancestors.

I may be a product of their genetic material, their choices, and their histories, but my identity is not their identity, and my community is not their community.

I am that I am because of the life I have lived and the communities I have been a part of, and I have never been a part of a Irish or an Indigenous community.

So what am I?

I am Canadian, I suppose. I was born in Canada. I am recognized by the state as Canadian, and other Canadians recognize me as Canadian. I have benefited tremendously from my membership in this community, and I have contributed to it as well.

True, I have no particular attachment to the Canadian community, broadly construed, or to what is sometimes said to be our Canadian identity, but my personal feelings are irrelevant.

Membership in a community isn’t determined by the feelings one has for it. It is determined by the relationships one forms and maintains. I may not feel any particular affinity for my community, but it does not change the fact that I am a part of it.

Until I am rejected by Canadians or accepted by some other community, I am Canadian, a settler, and all that it entails — for better and for worse.

Disco Polo Music: a reminder from Warsaw

I’m in Warsaw, Poland. A world apart. One more world apart. One of many.

I have discovered Disco Polo Music. I am entranced by its congenial, hyper-sexualized tribalism. It evades banality because it is paradigmatic, pure, and distilled.

A minority linguistic community created and championed this style of music because it mirrored and championed the minority linguistic community.

I am reminded: it is Disco Polo Music all the way day.

*

On the train from Berlin, I passed through lives and worlds and histories. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions: full, complete and unencumbered by my existence.

As I watched the vast flat fields and imagined the millions of men and women who have marched east west, west east, and back again, I felt and knew and saw the futility of living a life in the hope of being a story in future histories.

I am reminded: writing is hubris — but so what? From the perspective of history, living is too.

*

Some time ago, I diligently journaled every day for a year. It was stream-of-conscious, pure and distilled.

Some time after, I reread it, hoping for insight. Instead, it was mundane, banal, repetitive.

At the time, I was disappointed. It amounted to so little. Now, I understand that it had provided an important insight.

Without the discipline of an audience, real or imagined, my thoughts, my mind, my identity, they are mundane, banal, repetitive.

I am reminded: there is no value without valuers and fame is its prophet.

*

I sometimes think that my conversion to atheism was the ultimate career-limiting move.

There is nothing I have written or thought or done that couldn’t have been dressed up in the clothing of theology — and, in so doing, groomed it for a vast community eager for meaning.

Even now, I could dress up my words, thoughts and ideas in the comforting clothes of theology. My actual beliefs are irrelevant to the meaning that others draw from my words. Writing in the name of God would be no more false or untrue than the plausible deniability of fiction and the implausible truth of non-fiction. It would be a lie no worse and no better than the lie at the heart of everything.

I am reminded: I am that I am.