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Psychology

Big Words

Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly is the title of a decade-old Princeton study by cognitive psychologist Danny Oppenheimer who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon. The paper won the Ig Nobel Science Humor award which recognizes “achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.” Which it does indeed, as does its author (who introduces himself on his university website with” Some people say I like corny puns. There’s a kernel of truth to that, I’ve got an ear for puns that pop… ” )

The paper reported on a clever set of 5 studies that found basically that less complex writing is preferred over more complex one, and the author’s intelligence is judged more positively when writing simple texts. “The negative consequences of needless complexity were shown in widely disparate domains (personal statements, sociology dissertation abstracts and philosophical essays), across different types of judgements (acceptance decisions and intelligence ratings), and using distinct paradigms (active word replacement and translation differences). The effect was demonstrated regardless of the quality of the original essay or prior beliefs about a text’s quality. All in all, the effect is extremely robust: needless complexity leads to negative evaluations.”

https://www.affiliateresources.org/pdf/ConsequencesErudite.pdf

The assumption was that something that feels less fluent (because you have a harder time processing it) is associated with a less intelligent author. This was confirmed when a manipulation of how easily we can read a text, by presenting it in an impossibly hard font, also led to a negative judgement of the text author’s smarts. The reader could not easily process the text and so laid that at the feet of the author, even though it had nothing to do with the expressed ideas of the article. In summary, then: We protect ourselves from feeling dumb by blaming the writer.

Be careful, then, with using big words, if your writing aims at impressing other people. If, on the other hand, you just want to have fun cranking your brain, by all means adopt a commodious vocabulary as a meritorious selection over quotidian asseveration…… 

Here are the biggest words you might want to avoid (actually they are the longest, but sufficiently obtuse for my purposes):

http://mentalfloss.com/article/50611/longest-word-in-the-world

I’ll end with today’s favorite: FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, the longest non-technical word in English, which refers to the act of describing something as having little or no value.  Like complex word use.

Then again, I might go for the longest German word at 80 characters:

Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, the “Association for Subordinate Officials of the Head Office Management of the Danube Steamboat Electrical Services,”

given that German is my first language, one for which Mark Twain observed: “Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.”

Just don’t judge my intelligence by it…..

Photographs today are of extremely simple utterances found on the street:

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The Rise of the Phoenixes

Yesterday I wrote about laughter, today it shall be tears. Rest assured not mine, or at least not publicly.

I will discuss them in the context of the confession of a Netflix addict, yours truly, who has been hooked on a Chinese Soap Opera for the last several weeks.  The Rise of the Phoenixes has me mesmerized and I am trying hard, and largely unsuccessfully, to figure out why exactly.

A word of warning, you don’t want to start watching this, unless you care to waste 45 minutes x 70 (no typo) episodes of your life’s time. Even I will not make it to the last episode, particularly since it doesn’t have a happy ending. (How do I know? Why, I do the same for Tv that I do for books, I always check the ending out first, and don’t even think about calling me on this, I’ve had that debate too often…)

My entire knowledge of China consist of having read Clavell’s Tai Pan  and other such beach novels, and a serious perusal of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong in an equally serious book group of my first year at university, aged 17. Man, were we naive.

So why am I glued to a historical drama, whose every allusion (as critics claim) to contemporary Chinese society escapes me? The story has a few main strands. There is the old emperor who’s 10 sons fight for succession, with every court intrigue imaginable, killing each other off if need be. There is a rival empire trying to restore past glory and usurp the current realm. There is boy meets girl mixed in (in sort of a Chinese variation on taming of the shrew), with girl having to pretend to be a boy until another scheming courtier unravels the secret and has her (almost) executed.

 

There is no other way than to describe the visual experience as Vermeer meets Dior meets Monet meets Eisenstein. The colors and lighting are straight out of the old Dutch Masters. The costumes are exquisite, ever changing, subtly matched in color to amplify the gilded surroundings and intricate carvings of the palace interiors. The (rare) outdoor shots along willowy waterways or bridges are reminiscent of french impressionism. And the battle scenes choreography would make Sergey Eisenstein proud.

The intellectual experience, if you dare to call it that, is one of extreme gendered display: with few exceptions, all the background women are scheming, nasty, power hungry or push-overs who spend 18 years parked in cold corner of the imperial palace, waiting for a turn as concubine. They all have secrets in their past, and are meeting sordid fates, never being shown in positive relationships. Then there are the men, spread across a much larger canvas of possible qualities, and often in buddy relationships or with side kicks, blurring the lines between servant and master, teacher and friend. Our hero stands out as breathtakingly beautiful (a 42 year old actor playing a prince in his 20s and you believe it in a second) and smart and just and beloved by all, including our heroine who, alas, can’t marry him. As long as she plays a man, she also has friends and social contacts and guards that adore her (the kind that can fly through the air in true Chinese martial arts-movie fashion.) And she manages to rescue our hero multiple times, while serving as the smartest scholar in the land at the side of the emperor. Almost impressive enough to let you forget the negative portrayal of the rest of the fair sex…..

 

The emotional experience, then, must be what draws me in. For one, the pace is glacial, as to be expected when you fill 70 episodes, which means lingering camera shots, endless scene changes that allow you to take in the sets, instilling a sort of meditative trance while being awash in all that color, particularly if you let the Chinese rush over you and ignore the subtitles (which translate the same word in 100 different ways…) Secondly, there are the tears – I knew I was getting to them eventually. There are harsh ones, copious ones, silent ones, noisy ones, forced ones, spontaneous ones, fearful ones, enraged ones, elegant ones, swallowed ones, single drops to flowing streams, nose running and all: and they are primarily displayed by all the men!  I have never seen so many men crying with abandon around every corner! Yes, the women cry as well, but the real focus is on all those machos, dissolving.  Throws out of the window everything I ever learned about emotional display rules in collectivist cultures.

 

And now I better get back to episode 21 to see who rescues whom from the next looming palace intrigue, leaving someone in tears before being thrown into the dungeons.

Photographs are from the PDX Chinese Garden.

 

 

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The Faghag and her friends in the summer of love

I have a tendency to burst into spontaneous laughter when I read something funny. This amused my mother, irritated my father and baffles my husband to no end. As to my sons, they just roll their eyes. As they also do, incidentally, when I crack some jokes myself; the Heuer-Humor, as they call it, seems to be the kind that elicits, if any at all, amusement with a side of head shaking.

If you look at the scientific literature, this turns out to be true for women’s attempts at humor in general. Men don’t laugh as much at women’s jokes as women do, and certainly not as much as women laugh at men’s jokes. The gender differences are striking. If asked what is desirable in a partner, both genders give high value to “having a sense of humor.” Except that they mean two very different things: women want a man who can make them laugh, men desire women who laugh at their jokes.

Here is the long argument – my summary below:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/plight-of-the-funny-female/416559/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=5bf662079ac56400011d1fc9_ta&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1mG0QaQcnRb9y7m7XHxefbRyJehreLajvWiFHhxYes7VG31FgEc1hmhvI

Why should that be? Evolutionary psychologists (yes, that line of psychology seems exempt from extinction) have some handy explanatory moves: Humor is linked to intelligence (true fact: there is a correlation between IQ points and ratings of funniness in men.) Women want smart men (the old supporter theory,) therefor they go for funny. Men don’t like women to be smarter than themselves (indeed those correlations are also established) and so avoid the comediennes among us.

If you observe men and women in social settings, not only do women laugh more, but they do so with increasing frequency if men are nearby. This is the kind of laughter by the way, that researchers called “posed” in contrast to the spontaneous laughter that cracks you up, whether in company or not. These two kinds of laughter have distinct physiological profiles that we can measure, and also allow us inferences about the social function of posed laughter: as a tool for communication, support, social cohesion, mating and – alas, – condescension and exclusion, when people get laughed at rather than with.

Men try harder at making jokes and more often; even if they fall flat repeatedly –  eventually they get better at it. We women, who do not get rewarded for being funny, on the other hand, give up trying early on and so never develop the ease or repertoire necessary to make people laugh, regardless of gender.

Lucky for us, however, not all of us do give up. Some have the courage, determination and talent to become outstanding stand-up comics. You can go see for yourself: we have one of the funniest (and as it turns out most incisively intelligent, sarcastic and wise) female performers coming to town this week, with several shows to choose from. Penny Arcade, the NYC icon of irreverent political humor, is back with a variety of skits.

November 29-December 1, 2018
Venue: Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave, Portland

  • November 29—The Faghag and Her Friends in the Summer of Love (work-in-progress) – 7:30pm
  • November 30—Longing Lasts Longer – 7:30pm
  • December 1—Longing Lasts Longer* – 7pm
  • & The Girl Who Knew Too Much (work-in-progress)* – 9p
  • Tix here:https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/34673

 

I saw Longing Last Longer earlier this year and share Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly’s assessment: “I laughed, I cried, I remembered, I dreamed, I longed, I saw the light… There shouldn’t be an empty seat in the house!”

This time I look forward to The Faghag – a trip down memory lane of the 1960s gay bars in New York and P’town.  Let’s hope my laughter doesn’t interfere with my camerawork…..

Here is a (longish) piece on the artist’s background and philosophy ever since her years as part of Andy Warhol’s entourage: https://www.thedailybeast.com/warhol-stonewall-and-where-lgbtq-activism-went-wrong-penny-arcade-takes-center-stage

Portraits were taken this February. Link below is a TED talk on the different kinds of laughter I described above.

 

 

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Patterns

Here is the chain of events that led to today’s blog. Another one of those days of just me and the dog at home. I: trying to play the piano, as I only do when no-one is around given how much my skills have deteriorated these days. The dog: doing his best to make me stop, sharing that quality assessment, I guess. I: trying to explain to him the complicated structure of Bach’s fugues and how I needed to concentrate. He telling me in no uncertain terms that he hates counter point and really wants someone to throw a  ball.

Guess who won?

And guess who, reduced to reading, came across an interesting essay by Freud, flagged by someone who wrote about Bach’s ability to invoke both joy and fear, horror and beauty, exact opposites in his compositions?  Freud’s (1910) essay is called The Antithetical Meaning of primal Words (Über den Gegensinn der Urworte) and starts with a reference to his work on dreams and their ability to combine contraries into a unity – said simply: something can stand for both one meaning and its opposite. He then introduces an 1884 text by a historical linguist, Karl Abel, that describes at length a peculiarity of ancient languages. They contained, according to Abel, numerous words that have two meanings, one the exact opposite of the other. Some old Egyptian word might mean wet as well as dry, for example. Further, he claims, there were compound words that bind together things of opposite meaning (old- young, far-near) but they express only one of them.  All this was postulated for Egyptian, Semitic and Indo-European languages (and, coincidentally published at the same time in the late 1800s when Marx had written extensively about dialectics…)

Freud enthusiastically took off with finding words in the more familiar Latin that seemed proof for this: altus means high and low, sacer means sacred and accursed, and so on. Then he explored German, and wouldn’t you know it there were words with opposite meaning: e.g. Boden meaning the lowest part of the house as well as the attic… voila, archaic languages provided the pattern that re-appeared in dreams.

You can read his deductions now linking this perceived pattern to the analysis of dreams yourself (if you are not distracted by a bored puppy…) https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Antithetical.pdf

Only one problem: The bulk of Abel’s work was thoroughly discredited, it’s a croc; and that was already established by serious philologists in the late 19th century, for sure at the time of Freud’s writing. Freud was clearly seduced by a claimed pattern that fit with his hypothesizing around his discoveries and methods in his psychoanalytic studies. Whether he willfully ignored or was just hopelessly blind to the state of the art in linguistics, who knows. It is certainly the case that we are all subject to this kind of confirmation bias.

Independent of dreams, it is a fact that contradictory emotions can be experienced when listening to a single piece of music, and that patterns can be woven into compositions that are of a dialectical nature. Nobody did that better than J.S. Bach. Which was what started this whole train of thought….

Photographs today of some lovely point/counterpoint reflections, collected during fall.

 

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Reality Check

This week’s report on one of the loveliest weddings I ever attended will conclude with a few observations.

Observation #1: Everyone is a photographer now, although they all leave their cameras behind while on the dance floor…..

 

 

 

Or they check on the images immediately….

Observation # 2: I cry at weddings. Never mind that I know the political roots of the institution, the oppression it was associated with for many centuries and in many cultures. I am moved to pieces when I look at a happy couple, so full of hope for the future, and families merging, differences be damned.

Observation# 3: People always throw around these statistics that marriage improves your physical and mental health, assuming there is a causal relationship. It is indeed the case that compared to singles, married people live longer, have fewer strokes and heart attacks, recover faster from them if they get them, are likely to survive cancer longer, and have fewer incidence of mental health issues, particularly depression. But these findings have to be looked at with caution because they are largely correlational. That means any number of other factors could account for them.

For one, there is a gender differential. Men profit from marriage much more than women do when it comes to health effects.

Secondly, people in unhappy, stressful marriages are way worse off than singles who have a good friendship support network.

Third, people who have already compromised health might not get married in the first place, and so when they have worse outcomes for coronary diseases it is because of their original health status, not their married life. Isolation leads to depression, and it is the absence of any partner/family network rather than the marriage status that might account for higher rates of depression in singles.

 

The health advantages of marriage

The effects also seem to solidify when a marriage lasts for a long time, (counted as 10 years and up), while the positive effects are not pronounced in shorter marriages. With this said, my current favorite bride and groom will have a long marriage, excellent health, no regrets that they tied the knot and will live happily ever after.

 

My current favorite singles, on the other hand, can also rejoice: there are nifty benefits out there:

https://health.usnews.com/wellness/mind/articles/2018-02-12/5-health-benefits-of-being-single

And just think: girls night out whenever you want!

i’m giving the last word to  Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro:

 

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Conflict Solved

I came of age during a feminist wave that pretty much condemned the desire to be or make oneself beautiful. It was never exactly clear to me why a movement towards androgynous looks – so obviously tending in the direction of the masculine away from the feminine – was a sign of strength, rather than a narrow reaction to society’s demands on women.

But the question remains: Can feminists embrace beauty and beautification, or is it a sell-out to The Man? Is it just one more thing where women are not in control of their fate, but trying to live up to ideals set for them by someone else?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The advantage of having raised feminist sons is that they are perfectly able to solve the conundrum for you when you mull over this at the dinner table, while trying to explain how you are drawn to photograph all the beauty found in people’s hair, their necklines, the way they dress, and, let’s not forget it, their feet. Have to photograph that coveted footwear!

“Of course you can enjoy beauty, Mutti! That is different from  forcing ideals onto people, or body shame them when they don’t reach them, or fill their heads with preoccupation with looks rather than ideas. You want to honor bodily autonomy, in both women and men. And you want to think through your choices – if three hours of putting on make-up stops you from volunteering it might not be a cool choice, but you still are free to choose. If your choices are driven by a desire to conform, or please, or not be excluded, maybe think again.”

 

 

 

Indeed, I think we want  to free ourselves of gender expectations, but be free to express our gender anyway we want – if that includes stereotypically feminine aspects, from heels to nail polish, so what. We should simply not judge or be judged by ways of self expression. I know that when it comes to theory – in fact I brought my infant sons dressed in perfect pink into my graduate class room to have my students react with glee or frowns or astonishment or pure joy – to discuss gendered issues. I also let my boys play with Barbies which they coveted at childcare, and am certain I would have found that unacceptable if they had been daughters because of the body image issues. But when it comes to practice – myself drooling over lace and pearl- studded veils, or frilly pink, or shining tresses –  I still have pangs of bad conscience.

 

 

 

 

I also remember the far more consequential discussions among women, myself included, who had to make choices after mastectomies. Do you opt for breast reconstruction, or not? It involves serious additional surgery, money and potential obstacle to easy detection of cancer recurrence. Do you opt for false bras, or go flat? Does it matter that you are 30 or 50 or 70 years when the plague hits, partnered or still searching? When looks and sexuality are directly linked in a society that is so focused on these specific body parts, “free” choice is made maddeningly difficult.

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a37113/can-beauty-culture-and-feminism-co-exist/

So there  – here is the juxtaposition of theory and practice, my dialectic approach to fashion: I document the beauty around me, adore it, allow myself to buy funky clothes as long as it doesn’t involve cutting the budget for charity and includes second-hand stores, I skip make-up, and dream of high heels.  A start.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I plan to wear unmatched socks, too!

Musical choice today is the Marshallin from Strauss’ Rosenkavalier who bemoans the loss of beauty and the burden of aging when inside she is and feels like still the same young person she always was.  But then she declares that all that matters is how you tackle it.  Onwards!

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Street Roots

 

After a week of portraying travel options mostly linked to the past, today I want to direct us to the present. The here and now where we are all called upon to walk on paths shared with those who are less fortunate than most of us. And with those who are steadfastly around to help them. Traveling, in other words, not necessarily for fun and adventure, but for the larger good. Good for social justice as much as for your soul. Down a road that is not necessarily comfortable, either.

These thoughts were triggered by attending a breakfast fundraiser at the ungodly hour of 7:30 in the morning, in the company of hundreds of other slightly bleary-eyed souls, to celebrate the incredible work of Street Roots, our local weekly newspaper produced and sold by people experiencing homelessness and poverty. Here is what they do:

 

From a beginning of a few volunteers 19 years ago, they have grown to a large organization winning prizes for their journalism, winning political battles affecting housing and poverty, and, most importantly, giving voice to those who are not usually listened to, with their contributed articles and in their interactions with those of us who buy the paper. More detailed history here: http://streetroots.org/about/work#history 

The organization has a fighting spirit, in the best possible meaning of the word, not shy to risk losing donors if demanded by principle (they lost an annual $10.000 grant from the PDX Archdiocese for refusing to take Planned Parenthood off their resource guide for people in need, not exactly peanuts.) But they also fight for cooperative action, as was evident by the wide range of city players and business donors present at the breakfast, willing to engage across social class, political and economic divides.

Metro

Portland Fire and Rescue

Trimet

Portland Housing Bureau

 

Kaia Sand, recently appointed executive director of Street Roots, embodies these core values of principled defiance and energetic partnership quite well. (She’s also one of those more interesting poets meandering at the crossroads of literary art and activism – more on that on another day.) http://kaiasand.net/#wavebook

 

 

The award procedures for Vendor of the Year and Keystone member of the Street Roots community were moving,

and I was lucky enough to be close to a beloved 4-legged companion of one of the honorees,  Migo the best dressed dog in recent memory.

 

Still resonating is the keynote address by Michael Buonocore, executive director of  Home Forward, (the former Housing Authority of Portland,) which provides access to affordable housing and services for people facing low income, addiction, disabilities and other issues making it difficult to maintain a safe existence.

http://www.homeforward.org/home-forward/welcome

 

He called on everyone to choose what I called a difficult path at the beginning of today’s musings: to engage in honest interaction with those outside of our comfort zone, when encountering them on the street, when put off by their attire, when seeking distance because of the potential threat to our own emotional well being while confronted with misery.” LEARN TO SEE EACH OTHER. ”

It might provide the best traveling companions yet!

PS: On my way home from the bus after the event I came by this under the bridge that carries the Highway traffic. A steep cement slope, noisy and full of exhaust gases, attracts sleepers desperate to be dry. Regularly dispersed.

 


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Coincidence?

Here is an interesting speech on luck by a Harvard luminary for a commencement some years back.

http://www.harvard.edu/president/2012-baccalaureate-service-updraft-inexplicable-luck

What about those who happen to pay with their lives for being less privileged? (Bad) luck, random event, coincidence? Organizations like Black Lives Matter believe that the frequent police violence against Blacks is anything but. So did many other people, at least when surveyed in 2015.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/systemic-racism-or-isolated-abuse-americans-disagree/392570/

Law enforcement officials, as you might have anticipated, disagree. Maybe a look at the numbers would help to figure this out. Except that numbers are hard to come by.

Just yesterday The Atlantic published an article that offers some statistics about crimes committed by police, on- and off-duty,  collected by private individuals, stating “Former FBI Director James Comey went so far as to say in 2016 that “Americans actually have no idea” how often police use force, because the federal government has not bothered to collect the relevant data. Although the FBI now plans to track the number of people killed by police across the United States, by early 2018 only 1,600 of the more than 18,000 state and local law-enforcement agencies had agreed to submit data for the project. And initial data collection had not yet commenced. “

Here are the numbers collected the private database ( I can, of course, not vouch for how comprehensive they are or whether correctly collected. But they agree with other patterns I have seen from other sources.) The numbers ain’t pretty.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/amber-guyger-fallout-how-common-is-police-crime/569950/

 

But what about the racial bias? The tightest case analysis I could find comes from a 2017 report in the Tampa Bay Times. (Actually I didn’t find it – I’m just lucky to live with guys who bring them to me…) The reporters examined every Florida police shooting between 2009 and 2014 (so even before the Trump disinhibition pattern of racial animosity officially set in) using police reports, law suits, news articles and autopsies to determine the patterns.

There were 827 people shot, 673 of them were either black or white. More (343) black people were shot than white ones (330)  – despite the fact that in Florida Whites outnumber Blacks 3:1. If you conservatively disregard all cases that involved violent crimes or threats against police officers, you are left with 147 shootings. Of those 97 were black victims vs 50 white ones.

If we look at unarmed people being shot, Blacks outnumber White 2:1. Pulled over for traffic violation? Blacks shot twice as many times as Whites. They are three times as likely being shot if there was a chase on foot. Same for being suspected of a minor crime, smoking pot or no crime at all. Blacks are four times as likely to be shot in the back.

And if you look at cases where many of these factors intersect, you have the scenarios for many of the more controversial police shootings in the nation.

http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/

Unlucky numbers.

Telltale numbers.

 

Photographs are from Miami Beach.

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Randomness

 

This is an anatomically correct replica of the brain.

It was knitted across a full year by psychiatrist Dr. Karen Norbert of the National Bureau of Economic Research at Cambridge, MA.  https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4245919/Psychiatrist-knits-anatomically-correct-woolly-brain.html

Cut or nick one little thread and whole parts of it will unravel. Which is, of course, exactly what can happen when something goes wrong during fetal gestation or a difficult birth or any other number of causes. We have known for years, for example, that when you are born has some link to the possibility of developing a certain disease, like asthma or other respiratory conditions or all kinds of heart disease (yes fellow March babies, that’s us.) Health status is correlated with what happened to the mothers during pregnancy in particular environments lacking in Vitamin D, or exposing you to flu viruses, increasing the likelihood of high fevers, or making them take certain medications for seasonal allergies and the like. Or taking any kind of medication that turns out to have averse effect. Or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, for that matter.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4986668/

There is reason to believe (if you do a meta analysis of many hundreds of studies) that this is also true for mental conditions like ADHD or schizophrenia, with the latter still being mostly correlated with parents genetic predispositions, but additionally associated with birth month.

So the random fact of having been conceived during a certain season of the year will affect the fragility of  your brain and body in diverse ways. The random fact of having no timely access to a safe place to give birth can harm your brain. The random fact of some gene mutating and being sent off into your DNA can undermine your health. As a consequence you are outside of societal norms and often have a difficult time to be integrated.

All this came to mind when I met with, photographed and talked to people who are living with developmental and intellectual  disabilities. The folks I met happen to have found a community that embraces them and supports them to succeed in areas that are often closed off to this constituency: the arts and performance domain. And succeed they do – the music I heard performed by them knocked me off my chair. But the random assignment of falling outside of what we as a society deem the norm, has usually bitter consequences.

Here is the full report:

PHAME: The Dignity of Risk

 

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Luck

Perhaps it is no accident that we found ourselves discussing the issue of luck at a place that serves fortune cookies. Surrounded by large Chinese families, screaming babies, delicious food, a general hustle and bustle at this huge restaurant where we regularly meet friends, the talk turned to randomness and moral privilege.

I learned – since I grab my education even with my mouth full of fried rice – that the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Moed Katan quotes Rava, one of the rabbinic text’s greatest sages, saying that “length of life, children and sustenance depend not on merit but rather on Mazzal.”  That debate started around the belief that people who die young had been punished for a reason, while those who lived long did so on merits. Rava countered those assumptions with an examples of two equally upright rabbis, Rabba and Rav Hisdah, who died young and aged respectively, and whose families experienced corresponding economic decline and ascent. Rava’s assumption that outcome is not divinely predetermined but due to chance factors predates the copernican revolution by about 15oo years!

So what does Mazzal refer to? Plain luck? Matters outside of your control? Elements of our lives over which we have no direct influence – our genes, the place where we were born or when, the socio-economic class we grew up in – or simply randomness?

I am not sure if that was ever clarified by Jewish sages, but I know that the issue is not exactly resolved today either. So many people cling to the notion (phrased by psychologist Barry Schwartz) that People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. In this case you assign credit for outcomes, good or bad by assuming it all or mostly lies within the realm of your own responsibility. Correspondingly, you have no moral obligation to help those who suffer bad outcomes, since it’s their own fault.

Alternatively, you acknowledge that outside chance factors play a huge role in outcome; if they systematically disenfranchise some we might be morally obliged to help them overcome harsh factors that led to their disadvantaged lives if we have been the more fortunate ones.

What we know from psychology is that you bring with you a genetic makeup that sets the path; you also encounter environmental influences that shape you and which play a role in your ability to escape a given path, should it be a bad one.  The interaction of these factors try to explain the range of control you have over your fate.

Note that both, genetic make-up and the context you find yourself in, happen to you – if you happen to be born with a certain genetic predisposition towards a disease and you are born in a country where that disease can be fought with easily accessible drugs you are in the clear. If you are born in a country without access to those meds you are sunk. Same for having a specific intelligence level and lucking out on having a rich daddy or not, access to a good school or not, neighborhoods without lead in the water etc…. in other words, both what you bring and what you encounter are pretty much outside of your control when you are young.

What about when you are an adult? Does the merit assumption kick in when you are old enough to take your fate into your own hands?  Can you take on responsibility over your life’s circumstances? Make god decisions based on deliberate, rational reasoning rather than following spontaneous base impulses? Maybe that is where you deserve moral credit and the whole idea of meritocracy resides: you keep your impulses in check and choose the high road? Miraculously your hard work gets you access to education, riches follow? You don’t smoke so don’t get cancer? Life improvement is all about personal choice?

Won’t work. Both the capacity for deliberate, rational thinking as well as the need to apply it are unevenly – and unjustly – distributed.

Using rational, deliberate, slow and measured thinking thinking is difficult; additional strain on your system leaves few resources that you can use to accomplish this difficult task. In other words, the capacity that leads to better behavior is dependent on having more basic needs already fulfilled: enough food, physical shelter, educational training and habituation. Your ability to use it depends on external factors, in other words.  And even if you were able to use it, say, to decide that hard works gets you into situations that improve your state – access to education which in the end is what it’s about in societies like ours, is not guaranteed. Exclusion on the basis of race and class and set early in life cannot be overcome by good decision making alone.

The need to apply self control is differentially distributed as well – again an external factor. If you have enough external resources – money, lawyers, social and political connections – you don’t need to curb your baser impulses. You just need to have someone clean up their horrid consequence. (Note, I didn’t need to mention any names.) In contrast if you are a female black tennis player and loose it with the umpire, you are held to the highest degree of demanded self-control, needed to not be censured and punished.

Of course if you acknowledge all this, the lucky feel threatened, since they cling to their belief that it is all about their own actions. That opportunistic assumption has moral consequences – how we all engage in projects to assure a more just distribution of resources.  Luck,then, has pretty harsh effects beyond the positive ones of singling out the lucky ones.

Below is a link to a good summary article.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege

Photographs today are of swallows – long thought to bring luck to the farms where they nest.

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