The Examined Year: 2020

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from our respective living rooms via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Ray Briggs
…continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy and Josh directs the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Josh Landy
Today, it’s a special edition of Philosophy Talk, “The Examined Year: 2020″—a look back at the philosophical significance of events and ideas that have shaped the past 12 months

Ray Briggs
…because the unexamined year is not worth reviewing.

Josh Landy
Although you might want to make that case for 2020!

Ray Briggs
Well, sure. Between the pandemic and the election, this year has been quite the test for truth here in the US. Later in the show, we’ll think about the Year in Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories with Tamsin Shaw, Professor of philosophy at NYU.

Josh Landy
Never mind truth—what about just life in general? So many of our interactions with other people have gone online this year, including all the teaching that you and I had been doing. So we’re gonna think about the Year in Virtual Learning and Communication Iris Berent, Professor of psychology at Northeastern University.

Ray Briggs
And in just a bit, we’ll check in with Karen Stohr from Georgetown. She joined us earlier in the year to help tackle your COVID conundrums. So we’ll ask her about the Year and Pandemic Ethics.

Josh Landy
Not everything that happened in 2020 was terrible. Millions marced for the rights of black Americans, a record number of US citizens turned out to vote, and one of our favorite poets, Louise Glück, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We’ll be hearing some of her amazing poems later in the show.

Ray Briggs
Still, the coronavirus really did dominate the year like nothing in recent memory. In fact, librarians and archivists have been relying on people around the country to submit photos, drawings, and diary entries to document the pandemic so that future generations can understand what we all went through.

Josh Landy
Here in San Francisco, KALW radio producers asked people to submit audio diaries. Our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, brings us an excerpt from that project.

Omolade Rosalyn Roddy
Today is Day 81. My name is Omolade Rosalyn Roddy. I live in Oakland, California. I am a psychotherapist. Right now I’m in Los Angeles. I traveled down here to spend time with my mother, who has been isolated. She would be considered one of the vulnerable populations. My family came to California to escape Jim Crow, and Klansfolks and racism of the South. However, my family talks about what they traded for the South as far as urban life and the things that family members were exposed to, but especially the police brutality. A week before I left, George Floyd was murdered. In talking with my mom, on my way up here, I knew that this was triggering for her. My mother grew up in what I call black Los Angeles, she grew up in Watts. We often talk about the murders of family members that have been unjust and at the hands of police officers. So when I arrive, we talk and we talk a lot—we’ve been talking a lot. And I can see that she’s feeling better—she’s feeling better just to be able to have someone to talk to and to touch and to hold, but also to be heard. It really feels good to be heard.

Male speaker
So today’s Day 81. I’m a shift manager at a grocery store in Sacramento. Here in Sacramento, we’ve got a curfew in effect through at least Sunday. I’ve got a note in my wallet—basically, it’s a letter on company letterhead saying that, you know, the person carrying this note is an essential worker. When I first saw this note, you know, 81 days ago, I was envisioning like National Guard stopping people on the highway and thinking that that wasn’t really going to happen. But with the curfew, it feels like more of a possibility.

Carmen Aguirre
My name is Carmen Aguirre, and today is Day 82. I am a public defender in San Francisco and I just returned from the office where we gathered to create something fines for protests for tomorrow. And I was thinking about the last time that we as San Francisco Public Defenders staged a protest, which was after the shooting death of Mario Woods by San Francisco police. And I remember feeling the same way, really angry and really sad. And this just feels so powerful, what’s happening right now. I mean, it feels like it’s the spark and everything’s just doused in gasoline. It’s just infectious. It feels incredibly exciting that we might have conversations about changing the criminal justice system. The mayor is talking about diverting money away from the police department. I would have never guessed I would have seen something like this. You know, I think the United States is having a real reckoning, and it’s about damn time.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that very moving segment, Holly. That report was part of “Day By Day: Quarantine Diaries” from KALW’s newsmagazine Crosscurrents. I’m Josh Landy here with my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and we’re taking a philosophical look at the past 12 months—it’s The Examined Year: 2020.

Ray Briggs
As the pandemic took hold last spring, we asked you to send us your COVID conundrums: practical ethical problems in your daily lives related to the new reality. And we invited an ethicist onto the program to help think them through—Karen Stohr, Professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

Josh Landy
Since March, Karen has also been writing a coronavirus ethics column for the Washingtonian magazine. So we asked her whether she’d seen any changes in the COVID conundrums people have been raising over the course of the year.

Karen Stohr
My sense is that the ethical questions have not changed all that much, although, as we’ve learned more about the virus and have more experience with it, our sort of comfort level with our answers might have changed. But I think now my sense is that people have, you know, sort of gotten used to it in some ways, and they’ve decided how it is that they’re going to live with the virus. And then we’re just sort of seeing how that plays out.

Josh Landy
And how is it playing out?

Karen Stohr
Well, with rising case, numbers everywhere, maybe not so well. The nation is very polarized around lots of issue—who knew that mask wearing was going to become the central ethical issue of 2020, or one of the central ethical issues? And I think that that has made it more difficult for us to figure out, for instance, how we’re going to handle things like holiday travel, people’s very real desires to see their family members, to celebrate holidays that matter to them, and at the same time keep everyone safe and try not to impose excessive risk on others. I think we have even greater need to be able to come together and work out how we can do these activities or not do them safely, but maybe also less energy and less willingness to come together around those questions. So I think that’s a bit of a problem.

Ray Briggs
So you suggested earlier that everybody had kind of settled on a personal approach and is now just acting it out. It sounds like maybe there’s more that we should be doing ethically. What does the more look like?

Karen Stohr
Well, I think that you know, as we all know, humans are really bad at calculating risk. And I suspect that many of us—and I think I’m in this category as well—are probably taking more risks than we might have back in March. And that’s probably irrational, because for most of us, we’re living with higher case loads than ever before. But I think that this idea that everyone is like, Okay, I’m going to do this, I’m going to go to the grocery store, I’m going to go to the gym, or I’m going to, you know, see my friends that I think now that we figured out our way of living with this. And for many people, this seems to have worked out okay, because they haven’t gotten COVID Or maybe their friends or family members haven’t. And so I think people feel more comfort with their behaviors. And maybe they even are taking greater risks than they used to, although that certainly doesn’t mean that those behaviors are okay, or that their risk taking is rational. But I think that this is potentially a problem because it also makes people probably less willing to engage in reflection and rethinking of their own behaviors.

Josh Landy
So that’s interesting the way you phrase that—”people taking risks.” Because the framing we often get, especially from the government, is about risk taking versus bravery. Like, you know, Don’t be a coward… Take your mask off… Go out there and start licking things, you know. And instead of it being framed as considerateness, it’s being framed as a question of courage, right. So “Don’t wear a mask, be courageous” as opposed to “Do wear a mask, be considerate.” Because it’s not just risk for me if I don’t wear a mask, it’s I’m endangering other people. Do you think there’s—have we gotten any better, we gotten worse on this front?

Karen Stohr
I suspect we’ve gotten worse, although I think mass compliance from what I can tell may have gotten better in many parts of the country. But I think that the people who don’t want to more wear masks are digging in. And I think that’s a great analysis of why—for reasons that are really unclear to me, or at least partly unclear, I think that mask wearing has been associated or attached to a certain kind of weakness. Also, I think you’re right, that it’s associated with a kind of femininity, which many people who identify as male want to reject. And so there is that kind of like, I’m tough, the virus can’t get me I’m stronger than the virus. I don’t need this mask, masks are for weaklings. How people square this with the fact that you know, everyone in an operating room is wearing a mask, there are all kinds of people who wear masks routinely, I don’t know. The significance of setting up as much as we can social norms and getting people to comply with them is, I think, understated and it certainly goes out the window when people are shouting about their freedom not to wear masks. I mean, I find it puzzling—I think people don’t see, well, you’re not free to, you know, walk into a grocery store without clothes on. So it’s not as if, you know, nobody can enforce any kinds of rules about what pieces of fabric are on your body. But I think that is a problem. And it’s even worse when people not just sort of don’t want to wear masks themselves, but berate or mock people who are wearing masks for excellent reasons. And I think that dynamic has gotten worse over the course of 2020.

Ray Briggs
I also have a question about how we reach people who are less hostile to mask wearing, but maybe irrational in sort of smaller ways. So one thing I’ve seen a lot of is, well, you know, I did everything in a safe and conscientious manner. So my family holiday gathering was okay, because everybody was safe and careful and six feet apart, sort of whether or not being six feet apart in an indoor area is actually effective. Do you have thoughts about how to guard against that kind of mistake?

Karen Stohr
I think this is a really tough one, because it is very difficult for us to see our loved ones as threats to us. And one of the challenges is sort of putting ourselves in the mindset of thinking, yes, even this person who I love dearly, might be the one to give me a serious illness, or vice versa, I might be a threat to them—we see strangers as the ones who are threatening us. And so people get very worried about passing encounters with strangers and not at all worried about having dinner with 16 of their close friends in their dining room with windows closed. But I think there is also a lot of magical thinking it’s like, okay, well, I’m sure I don’t really I’m sure I don’t have it, particularly with people who are asymptomatic, I feel fine, right? There’s no way or I haven’t been anywhere way except for the grocery store. And yeah, I just went to Home Depot for that thing. You know, we do a lot of rationalization to ourselves to sort of give us reasons for doing what it is that we want to do. And you know, the quarantining takes sacrifice, and that is for lots of us a difficult thing to do. And when the stakes aren’t immediately apparent to us, then I think it becomes harder to make the sacrifice because it’s just this vague sacrifice for people we’ve never met. And what we’re trying to protect them from is something that people aren’t even exactly sure how it works or how it’s transmitted, because they’re either not keeping up with the science or the science is just unclear as it evolves. And I think all those things make it really hard for people to see this as the kind of risk that it is and see themselves us to see ourselves as potential vectors of illness and potentially causing harm to other people.

Josh Landy
Karen, as I look back on the year, you know, there are a couple of things that particularly demoralize me about our collective response to the COVID outbreak, the pandemic, one of which is, you know, it’s the epidemic of coronavirus was accompanied by an epidemic of thoughtlessness. I mean, just folks, at least apparently seeming not to care about the potential damage they’re going to be doing to the rest of our lives and, and that sort of relatedly a willingness in some quarters to say, you know, what, if grandma has to die, so be it, we can’t sacrifice the economy, people are just gonna have to die—which struck me as at least somewhat callous. So I guess my question for you is, you know, has it been like this all along? I mean, that to me—maybe I’m a naive person, but that, to me felt like the revelation of some really troubling aspect of our moral landscape that I hadn’t been aware of, that these sorts feelings of indifference, to some extent to the suffering of others, are so profound and widespread, or am I mistaken about that? I mean, have they always been there?

Karen Stohr
Well, I suspect they have, it’s just they’re more explicit now, I think. You know, I think part of the problem is that we don’t have a good way of talking about the tradeoffs and the risks—the way in which people like, well, you know, if you’re just elderly or you know, immune compromised, just stay home, as if that’s a good solution as well. I think we do see a fair bit of callousness that I suspect was always there, but wasn’t always socially acceptable to express. And now it has a cover, because people can say, but look, you know, look at the ways in which the economy is suffering small business owners. And so there’s an easier way to sort of draw that comparison, but it is certainly callous. On the other hand, I think there are ways in which we’ve seen tremendous amounts of cooperation. I mean, I don’t think there’s any question that the work that a lot of healthcare providers are doing is just nothing short of heroic. But this idea that like when people look around and see others being selfish, I think that’s become palpable to us in a way that it wasn’t before. You know, a lot of organizations are using this, you know, we’re all in this together. And I think a lot of people, including a lot of young people—I certainly hear this from my own teenagers and my students—are like, No, we’re not. There’s a lot of people who are just doing whatever they want, and they just see them as selfish. And I think there’s a lot of resentment and I suspect that is going to outlast the pandemic for a while and I don’t know what to do about that.

Ray Briggs
Karen Stohr from Georgetown University on the Year in Pandemic Ethics. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re taking a philosophical look at ideas and events of the last 12 months—it’s the Examined Year: 2020.

Josh Landy
Coming up: what happens when most of our personal interactions go online? Can democracy survive the sea of misinformation and conspiracy theories we seem to be swimming in? And what can poetry do in this year like no other?

Ray Briggs
Learning, lies, and lyric poetry—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Josh Landy
Welcome back to Philosophy Talk. It’s the examined year 2020. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
and I’m re Briggs. We’re taking a philosophical look back at some of the big ideas and events of the past 12 months, because the unexamined year is not worth reviewing, whatever

Josh Landy
your feelings about 2020 at least one good thing happened. This year, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Louise Glück, one of the greatest of all living poets.

Ray Briggs
Here at Stanford, we’ve been lucky enough to have her as a poet in residence over the past half decade or so. Glück’s poems are mysterious, powerful and haunting. They have a way of staying with you for days, if not for life.

Josh Landy
So we asked our Director of Research Laura Maguire, to read a few of Glück’s poems on the show today, beginning with my all time favorite, “Ithaca.”

Laura Maguire
The beloved doesn’t need to live. The beloved lives in the head. The loom is for the suitors, strung up like a harp with white shroud-thread. He was two people. He was the body and the voice, the easy magnetism of a living man, and then the unfolding dream or image shaped by the woman working the loom, sitting there in a hall filled with literal-minded men. As you pity the deceived sea that tried to take him away forever and took only the first, the actual husband, you must pity these men: they don’t know what they’re looking at; they don’t know that when one loves this way the shroud becomes a wedding dress.

Ray Briggs
The incredible poem “Ithaca” by this year’s Nobel Prize recipient and literature, Louise Glcük read by our own Laura Maguire. We’ll hear more from Louise and Laura later in the show.

Josh Landy
It took a deceased 20 years to get back to Africa. How long is it going to take America to get back to rational thinking?

Ray Briggs
It might take some time. We’re facing an epidemic not just of Coronavirus, but also of misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 elections, vaccines and shadowy people whose names begin with Q

Josh Landy
Tamsin Shaw is professor of European and Mediterranean studies and philosophy at NYU. She’s the author of niches political skepticism, and she also writes a lot about Russian involvement in American politics. So we asked her why she thought conspiratorial thinking was so prevalent this past year. A lot

Tamsin Shaw
of those conspiracy theories have been around for the last four years, but I think they’ve really intensified. I think as the Trump administration became more desperate and saw themselves as much less likely to win the 2020 election, there was a much greater intensity to the fantasy element, those conspiracy theories, and just willing people to carry on believing in this Trumpism phenomenon. When

Josh Landy
I think about just how widespread and how mainstream and how popular conspiracies theories seem to have become in the year 2020, I think of two things is, you know, the demand side and the supply side, right, like people clearly want these theories. And then there are also people in power, who seem to have an interest in having them out there and sometimes in spreading them. So you have a minority political party that wants to seize and hold on to power, and the facts just out on their side. So one thing they need to this is a sort of 100 aren’t point right that the, you know, he says she says the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is somebody who doesn’t know the difference between fact and fiction. So, do you think there’s a reason to think of this as part of the Steve Bannon playbook flood the zone with excrement and just have as many crazy beliefs out there as possible, so people just cannot tell the difference anymore between truth and fiction?

Tamsin Shaw
Yeah, absolutely. That really is balanced playbook to spread as many conspiracy theories as he can. All of them with some sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, racist elements in them. So if you watch he made all of these quite terrible documentaries, or other propaganda movies, and if you watch those, there are these conspiracy theories about Saul Alinsky the 30s, community organizer, and there’s a subtle implication that the Jews are responsible for empowering blacks. And then there’s lots of footage of Angry Black people who are destroying America. So that’s one of his themes, but he has many of them. He’s obsessed with the crusades, and the Knights Templar. Actually, a lot of people don’t know that he was the first person to try to get the film rights to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, he’s really obsessed with those themes. But he doesn’t care whether or not they’re all compatible with one another in the Errol Morris movie about him. He talks about all these themes from gaming, he talks about karma, he talks about Christianity, it’s just a real hodgepodge of crazy ideas with the subtle racist undertones.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m kind of impressed by the the detail about the sort of anti semitic conspiracy theories, because one of like, one of the functions of that seems to be to sow dissent between blacks and Jews, which is kind of a common and old fashioned white supremacist tactic is to pit all of the people you don’t like, against each other.

Tamsin Shaw
Right? That’s a huge amount of that. And we saw with the Russian propaganda that was spread in 2016, that a lot of it was based on trying to create social divisions. I think there’s been Russian input into the anti Vaxxer conspiracy theories that could only exist if people had lost confidence to an enormous degree, and these scientific experts, but we’re also prepared to think it’s possible that they’re all colluding with one another. To say that these vaccines are safe, it takes a really bizarre and quite extensive set of beliefs about how it happens to take that seriously.

Ray Briggs
This feels like it links actually back to the pandemic, because it’s much easier to fragment people, if they sort of don’t have a lot of social contact. And one of the kind of reasonable effects of the pandemic is that we should be physically avoiding each other so we don’t get each other sick. But do you think that there’s sort of any kind of causal connection between, like these new circumstances we find ourselves in, and the difficulty of resisting divisive conspiracy theories just because people are more isolated?

Tamsin Shaw
I was wondering that just today, actually. I mean, it certainly makes sense prima facie that people are living living much more in their own internet bubbles rather than actually talking to one another, although I think those bubbles already existed. But yeah, I think just the fact of being alone and not having conversation and rational discourse with other people and having to defend your belief probably has some kind of cognitive impact. I think it’s clearly a really bad combination to have Social isolation plus all these existing very powerful conspiracy theories.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. It’s the examined year 2020. And we’re talking about the year in misinformation and conspiracy theories with Tamsin shore from NYU. One of the interesting things there, I mean, again, tragic thing is that this isn’t just coming from the right. I mean, obviously, a lot of it is and perhaps in the States, most of it is but you know, Georgia, oh Gambon, who’s a left leaning philosopher, said it I think, in March that COVID was basically an invented pandemic, right that the government had invented in order to impose a spurious state of exception, and that’s his thing is the state of exception. And it’s, you know, to kind of wage bio political war on the population essentially. Right. So, so this one does seem like it’s it’s a kind of a misinformation pop that crosses party lines.

Tamsin Shaw
I think that’s happened a lot in the last four years that the distinction between left and right has increasingly broken down. I think it goes back further than four years, it’s as soon as the left started to latch on to these right wing conspiracy theories about the inverted commas deep state, that you start to get a lot of convergence. I mean, that was certainly true amongst the supporters of Snowden and Assange, they were thought of originally as being left wing when in fact, none of those people had ever been left wing. And Assange had been explicitly aligned with the right in the Australian elections. And yet, they still have a lot of support on the left. And that mythology of the Deep State, I think, has driven this complete realignment of political views.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting. And one of the things I want to ask you about since you’re an expert on it is, is Russia, right, because we’re talking now about misinformation and conspiracy theories. What about actual conspiracies? Like do you worry that with all of these fake conspiracies out there, it’s easier for people to lose sight of actual collusion that that occasionally happens?

Tamsin Shaw
Oh, absolutely. I know, people who’ve been branded as conspiracy theorists, in fact, I’m sure I have been branded as one. But my friend, Carol Cadwallader in the UK, who’s written a lot about Cambridge Analytica and about links to Russia is often called a conspiracy theorist. And it was the same actually with the steel dossier, it’s very easy for people to say, to completely mischaracterize the form of the evidence that he has and say, this is all just crazy conspiracies. And again, Josh, it’s true that this is on the left as much as the right this idea that Russia gate is just all a hoax. I mean, the nation really ran with that view for the past four years, and I was really quite horrified at how much ignorance of the evidence you have to have in order to take that position. Right?

Ray Briggs
The presence or absence of like a supposed conspiracy doesn’t seem like it’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth. Are there better ways that we could educate ourselves to spot the difference?

Tamsin Shaw
Conspiracy theories, I think tend to be this is something Kasim kasama has written about, I really like his short book on conspiracy theories, they tend to be speculative, and they tend to be just joining the dots. So all of the evidences circumstantial, whereas if there’s a real conspiracy, you’re going to have other kinds of evidence, you’re going to have documents, you’re going to have sources, there’s going to be a strong train of evidence for each element of it. So I think it should be relatively easy to spot when something is just purely speculative. But also, I think, actual spirits, conspiracy theories like Q Anon, there’s a huge element of fantasy in them as there is with the Bannon, Knights Templar ones. And a lot of them come from the world of gaming now. And this really strong element of fantasy, I think, should always make people suspicious. I’m

Ray Briggs
wondering about the role of individual actions as well as collective actions and combating this information. It seems like we have a little bit of power each of us. So for instance, I could fact check articles before us sharing them on social media. And that’s like a small thing I can do. How much do you think you can do and what sorts of things should we be doing?

Tamsin Shaw
I think we have small amounts of power. Now, as you say, on social media, we can not spread misinformation. But I think if people were better organized, they could have a great deal more power. There’s models for that in Europe. countries like Finland and Estonia, places that have been on the front line of Russian propaganda for a very long time were citizens actually organized to counter different disinformation. And I think Americans will have to do something like that, because this onslaught of disinformation isn’t going away anytime soon.

Josh Landy
But I just wonder what could motivate people I mean, we’ve seen close to 300,000 people dying of a pandemic that shouldn’t have taken that many lives. And a lot of that has to do with misinformation being spread and eagerly consumed. And yet, there just doesn’t seem to be a widespread appetite for curbs on misinformation. Instead, what what are we getting? Now we’re getting more misinformation about the election. And no doubt, there’s going to be misinformation about the vaccines, where’s the energy gonna come from?

Tamsin Shaw
I think a big political reversal would make a difference, because they think there is very much a kind of top down character where people accept certain kinds of authority with these conspiratorial views. And some of them I think, are very thin, they’re based on fantasy, or they’re based on just wildly implausible claims. So for instance, the 911 conspiracy theories, before Bush’s reelection, I remember hearing that about a third of people in America thought that the 911 conspiracy theories were true and that the government had actually arranged the attacks on 911. And I remember thinking, if a third of people in this country think that’s true, then a bush can’t possibly get reelected. And B people should be on the streets, just an utter outrage about this. But I think it’s a very deeply rooted part of American culture. I mean, specifically, the deep state forms of conspiracy theory have been around since after World War Two, when, to be fair to people under Truman, the State Department was allowed to start putting up a great deal of propaganda abroad during the Cold War. And at the same time, although propaganda was officially banned domestically, the CIA doctrine of plausible deniability came into effect. And people understood that there are these institutions of government that are allowed to lie to them. And that didn’t help when the MK Ultra and mind control programs all became public. So there is just this real attachment in this country to the deep state as a source of conspiracy theories. And I think that really needs to be addressed somehow it really involves an incredibly unrealistic view of what the deep state, supposedly the actual intelligence agencies can really do. But people really attached to fantasies about that. I mean, that’s the most glamorous profession in the world. Being an intelligence agent. If you look at James Bond movies and all the Hollywood movies Jason Bourne, it’s so glamorized and yet it’s also so demonized and these conspiracy theories that just has a really odd cultural status.

Josh Landy
Tamin Shaw from NYU, on the year and misinformation and conspiracy theories, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, which the examined year 2020

Ray Briggs
coming up, we’ve all moved most of our personal interactions to screens and virtual spaces. Even the youngest among us, we’re still learning to interact socially. This hasn’t

Josh Landy
been a ton of fun. But our next guest has found a surprising silver lining. Amid the shared isolation.

Ray Briggs
It’s the year in virtual learning and communication, plus more Nobel Prize winning poetry and philosophy talk continues.

Josh Landy
Welcome back. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. We’re taking a philosophical look at the past 12 months. It’s the examined year 2020

Josh Landy
Let’s hear another poem from this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature Louise Glück. Here’s our Director of Research Laura Maguire reading “Memo from the Xave.”

Laura Maguire
O love, you airtight bird, My mouse-brown Alibis hang upside-down Above the pegboard With its dangled pots I don’t have chickens for; My lies are crawling on the floor Like families but their larvae will not Leave this nest. I’ve let Despair bed Down in your stead And wet Our quilted cover So the rot- scent of its pussy-foot- ing fingers lingers, when it’s over.

Ray Briggs
“Memo from the Cave,” a poem by 2020, Nobel laureate Louise Glück. We’ve all been living in our own virtual caves this year trying desperately to communicate with one another across the distances.

Josh Landy
So how well is it it’ll be working? Can online education teach people what they need to learn?

Ray Briggs
Iris Berent is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, and author of the blind storyteller how we reason about human nature. She also wrote a recent op ed in the LA Times about silver linings, and this year of distance learning, and how it can still respond to some very real psychological pressures.

Iris Berent
So there is this interesting literature that’s coming from experimental philosophy that says that people believe that each and every one of us possess this psychological core that defines who we are. And that psychological core, a true self is identified in two terms. One is, its moral in nature. And the second is, its identified with the mind rather than the body. So it’s not a dualism is the right way to explain who we are. But in our view, we do intuitively think about ourselves as mind and body separately. And we also think about ourselves as moral creatures. And my claim is that these two aspects of the true self, it’s morality, and it’s being in the mind, both are threatened by our current climate.

Josh Landy
So we’ve got this, we’ve got this core psychological self, that’s sort of moral in nature. But you say it’s been under assault this year, a kind of a double assault, so So tell us more about that.

Iris Berent
So I think one assault is coming from COVID. And it’s kind of a little more gentle, in the sense that what COVID is doing is making us really worry a lot about the integrity of our body. And this focus on our body takes us away in some way from who we are. What’s coming from Trump is playing direct assault, right? It’s an assault on fact, it’s an assault on morality, it makes everything relativized. And my claim that this is not just a political problem, it’s not just a social problem. It’s not just a philosophical problem. It’s a psychological problem. Because if, in my mind who I am, my core is moral, then by invoking this direct assault on morality, it’s really a direct assault on my psychological core. It’s really a way of canceling who I am. And learning is a way to address this pressure.

Josh Landy
So tell us a little bit more about that. Why, why is this a moment when learning is unusually important?

Iris Berent
So the argument is that learning is more than contents, right? It’s not just the transmission of information, but rather, there are some implicit assumptions that are affirmed when we are engaged in learning. So, you know, I did psychology of language, we’re asking what is the basis of the human capacity for language? We study experimental studies to address this question. So my, when my students come to class, then we are tacitly affirming that what we know matters, right? So the mind matters, the life of the mind matters. And truth matters, and fact matters. And in so doing, we are implicitly affirming morality. So the very act of learning is really an implicit way to affirm these two core values that happen to define our true self, our morality and our mind are immateriality. And these are the two values that are currently under threat. And in so doing learning is a way to kind of look within, we affirm our core or more in immaterial attributes. And in so doing, I think we are, we are affirming the true self and in so doing, improving our well being.

Josh Landy
I love what you have to say about the value of education, even remote education in these difficult times. But can we also talk about the difficulties I mean, I’m sure you must have experienced this, we’ve all experienced it for folks teaching K 12 You know, remotely have experienced the XOOM fatigue, you know, the difficulty reading, physical cues, the inability to make eye contact. So what do you take to be the main challenges?

Iris Berent
So there is no question that there are challenges and if possible, I would rather teach in person rather than online. You know, this is way beyond my expertise. I’m not an educator, an expert on education, but you Just from my observations, not being able to connect person to person, not being able to see all my students and ones, not being able to read their facial cues, I can see the old, you know, 70 of them on a single screen. All this really is a problem. And I, you know, I would rather not do it. My only argument is that if we have to engage in some form of learning, if Zoom is our only way of engaging in learning right now, it’s only is better than no learning at all.

Ray Briggs
I’m intrigued by this concept of a core self still, which on the one hand seems really important, and on the other hand, seems to maybe rely on assumptions that I am not sure exactly true. So I do have a mind I also have a corruptible body that is like inextricably linked to my mind, I do have morality, I know that the morality could break under enough pressure, how much fiction is required to keep up the kind of self image that’s required for self respect and participation in society?

Iris Berent
Lots of fiction, right? So this self is a psychological concept. And this is how we view ourselves. It may not be true. In fact, one of the arguments that I build in this book that I just finished the blind storyteller is that we are in fact blind to human nature. And it’s human nature that makes us blind to who we are. So when we talk about learning, right, the point there was that there are psychological principles that define how we think about our true self. We think about our true self as our mind distinct from the bodies of dualism. Intuitive dualism is one core psychological principle that’s important. Another is this notion that there is an essence from to me as a human being. And this is called psychological essentialism. Again, this is a psychological phenomenon. This is not a philosophical stance. And those two principles actually stand in conflict, they are at the tug of war. And the conflict between them really messes up who we are, who we think we are. And in fact, it can also mess up our notion of the truth of itself. So one interesting consequence of all this, as we think about ourself as one, right there is one true self. But in fact, dualism and essentialism, each provides a different answer to who the true self is. And when you look experimentally at how we think about the true self, we actually are getting two answers rather than one. So while explicitly we think, Well, of course, there is one true me, implicitly, there are two computations that are involved in that. So therefore, under the hood, they’re actually truth, two true selves rather than one.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, we’re talking about the year in virtual learning and communication with Eros barent, from Northeastern University. This is totally fascinating eras. And it sounds like what you’re saying is, look, we may well be getting it wrong about ourselves. But if it’s a choice between getting it right, and being moral, and good, and having a healthy human community, it sounds like you know, you’re with Nietzsche, you’re gonna choose the flourishing human flourishing over the truth. Is that true or misunderstanding you?

Iris Berent
Maybe a little bit. I’m I’m making no choices I’m describing what I see in the lab, and trailing

Josh Landy
are responsible.

Iris Berent
I try I try to do it to the best of my ability, and what we’re discovering. So I have lowered my expectations. That’s right. I are trying to figure out this, how things work under the hood. And given all the blindness that they see around and how dualism essentialism messed up with so many things, in fact, they totally mess up with our understanding of innateness. empiricism, in fact arises demonstrably from dualism and essentialism. So there are so many aspects of our psychological life that are totally messed up by dualism and essentialism that I have no great hopes.

Ray Briggs
So let me let me ask a question that’s less about should and ought and more about like what so you’ve you’ve told us like what the people you’ve observed believe right now. Um, and sometimes we change our mind. Like you know, I I used to think that believing in God was necessary for being good person when I was a kid, I no longer think that as an adult, and that’s gone. Okay, so people can change their beliefs and keep a sense of themselves intact. What are the prospects for changing sort of this inconsistent conception of a core self and still having something to base your values on?

Iris Berent
Absolutely. So I think the important point that you are alluding to is that cognition is not, you know, one sole instrument, it’s kind of an orchestra in the sense that we have different instruments. And yes, we have this intuitive psychological principles that keep whispering on the devil, then, you know, push us to all these crazy conclusions. But then we have rationality, and we have the capacity to think critically about ideas and to analyze them. And I think this is very well, our engine for change. I think it might also be helpful to recognize some of those forces that are working under the hood, because vision is power, so to speak, right? If we’re able to see who we are, and the forces that lead us astray, you might, perhaps be better able to conquer them.

Josh Landy
And the less sanguine about it, I remember reading some studies, although frankly, I’m not sure if they replicated but suggesting that if you convince people that free will is an illusion, it doesn’t go well. So I a little less sanguine, about, about the truth in this because I think it’s a really great question. But can I come back a little bit to the problems with online learning? I’m wondering a little bit. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about this, like, I, I’m wondering what’s going to happen, you know, in five to 10 years, with generations zoom, right. So we have all these, these kids, this K K through 12. Kids, you know, and, of course, a lot of K through 12. Education is not just learning but learning to learn. Right? It’s it’s the inculcation of good habits, you know, sitting still focusing, collaborating with other people and so on. Do you worry that this is going to be a generation of kids who sort of missed a year of that? And what kind of effects do you think it might have?

Iris Berent
Slowly. So starting in an educational system that is very inequitable, in a nation in which literacy is in danger. In all those things require a lot of practice. And I’m really worried about the kids who are going to miss a year, I’m worried about the social being well, being of this kids will have a lot of catching to do. And I’m afraid that by the time they get to college, it’s too late to catch up. So I think by then it’s it’s pretty much in stock. So there will need to be a lot of investment to correct this and to address inequity.

Josh Landy
Iris Berent from Northeastern University on the year in virtual learning and communication. We invite you to continue examining the year that was on our website, Philosophy Talk, or G, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you’d like to hear why Josh thanks, Louise Glücks “Ithaca” is one of the greatest poems ever written. Head over to the blog at Philosophy Talk dot o RG, where he’s penned an appreciation of this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature. We just

Josh Landy
have time for one more of Glicks amazing poems. Here’s “Mother and Child,” read once again by philosophy talks, Director of Research, Laura Maguire.

Laura Maguire
We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are. Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family. Then back to the world, polished by soft whips. We dream; we don’t remember. Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body. Machine of the mother: white city inside her. And before that: earth and water. Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass. And before, cells in a great darkness. And before that, the veiled world. This is why you were born: to silence me. Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece. I improvised; I never remembered. Now it’s your turn to be driven; you’re the one who demands to know: Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us; it is your turn to address it, to go back asking what am I for? What am I for?

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuam.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is director of research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners that are online Community of Thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed or mis expressed on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
…not even when they’re true and reasonable! The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot o-r-g, where you too can become a partner in our Community of Thinkers. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking