Tag Archives: Stephen Pinker

Loving What is Available to our Ears

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

“Swoon” is an old but good word. I see it as a particular form of ecstasy.

There are rough estimates by those that study such things that perhaps five to ten percent of the population experience what is sometimes called “musical anhedonia.”  This is the clinical term used to describe a person who is mostly immune to the pleasures of music. The late polymath and neurologist Oliver Sacks isolated and studied this phenomenon, which can be imagined as an unaccountably empty room in a person’s otherwise complex life. I would guess that there is an additional ten or fifteen percent who can’t muster much enthusiasm for any form of music. They would have probably included my father, who was in most ways a great dad. But for him music was a disposible experience: occasionally OK, but not worth much attention. During my high school years we had some tense exchanges over how much of my summer work money should be spent on the glories of the Count Basie Band or North German organ music. Record stores were one of the joys of my life but alien places for him. If music meant anything, it was bandleader Lawrence Welk’s corny covers of pop songs on ABC television. Welk is perhaps what Jello with marshmellows is to those who love fine dining. We did the smart thing and declared a truce.

Ironically, a person’s musical anhedonia is probably harder on avid music lovers than the people with this trait. Those of us who are “sound centric” are surely mystified by others who are indifferent. We all know the experience of discovering that a person we are close to is not appreciating what is at the doorstep of their ears. The effect is like taking someone to the Grand Canyon and discovering that they see it as nothing special. What does not produce a rich and fulfilling experience in another can be a puzzle.

A comment once made by the influential psychologist Stephen Pinker partly reflects this unexpected vacuum of feeling. He once compared music to “auditory cheesecake:” certainly OK, but “biologically functionless.”

Really?

The statement is stunningly dismissive. The comparison of a piece of unhealthy food with a consequential form of human expression suggests the kind of indifference that is so puzzling about musical anhedonia. More than most, a psychologist should know that most of us need music to complete the space between what we can verbalize and and experience that goes beyond what words can express. Music can be its own therapy.

The Victorians understood what it meant to “swoon” over something. The word has gone out of favor but was usually meant to suggest a profound emotional response to someone or something: a trigger to feelings of ecstasy. Old it is. But it’s a good word, and it works for all of us who can name exactly what it is about a musical forms that can send us to welcome arcadias. Those prompts represent our musical melting points: perhaps a chord sequence in an old pop hit, a mix of voices or instruments, the “resolution” of a dark section of a classical piece that resolves in sunnier key.

There were surely saw swoons to see a few years ago in a video concert of In Performance at the White House. The guests were in the East Room listening to singers that meant a lot to the Obamas. When the singer Usher led into the first chords of the Marvin Gaye classic, Mercy Mercy Me, the faces of the staffers and First Family in attendance lit up like signs in Times Square. Check out the video below. The audience swayed; they smiled; many found it impossible not to move with the rhythm of Gaye’s catchy song. It’s as good a representative moment as any to sense why so many musicians and appreciators live to listen.

Because They Said So

Models, Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

We assume we can be in charge because our language easily lets us imagine it.

Rhetoricians like to say that language has its way with us. The phrase is meant to be a reminder that everyday language steers us to conclusions that usually promise more than we as individual agents can deliver. Word choice can easily create perceptions that can make the unlikely more likely, the improbable possible, the fantasy an outcome that will surely happen. We can tie a wish to an action verb, and we are off and running, creating expectations for circumstances that probably will not materialize. Who knew that simple verbs like “is” and “will” can trigger phantoms of deceit?  The phrase “because I say so” is a pretty empty reason.

What seems inescapable is that the ease of committing ourselves to the control of events verbally is easy but difficult in actual practice. This reality is something we’ve come to know all too well in any period of war, where action verbs suggest more control than we actually have. In his recent speech to military leaders, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted that “Either we’re ready to win or we are not,” overstating a single two-tailed option the belies the functions of any military in these complicated times. Hegseth’s language fit the warrior ethos” and “male standard” that he was peddling. But problems associated with foreign policy and its entanglements are highly variable. These words hardly hint at the peacekeeping that arguably remains the long-term burden of the American military. In addition, the Secretary must know that nearly 20 percent of our troops are women. As is so often the case, circumstances on the ground tend to get lost in the neon glow of rhetoric too dim to clearly see the Truth.

Blame our overly deterministic language.

We construct the world as a web of causes and their presumed effects. It’s natural that we will place ourselves and our institutions in the driver’s seat. We assume we can be in charge because our language so easily lets us imagine it. Blame our overly deterministic language as well as the hubris it encourages. Both set up tight effects loops that seem clear on the page but elusive in life.

If we put individual verbs in a lineup, they look more or less innocent: words like affect, ready, make, destroy, are, causes, starts, produces, alters, stops, triggers, controls, contributes, changes, and so on. In the right company they are suggestive. But let them lose in the rhetoric of a leader determined to make his or her mark on the public stage, and they can be vacuous. This is the realm of the familiar idea of “unintended effects,” where what we intended and what actually happens are different. Verbs flatter us by making us active agents, but as President Trump has learned about Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, fantasies of power and control suggest more order in human affairs than usually exists.

There is another interesting twist here. The use of verbs to project expected outcomes is ironically aggravated by our devotion to the scientific method. As Psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, we can’t do science without buying into the view that we can identify first causes. That’s fine for discovering the origins of a troublesome human disease. But even though this logic has spread through the culture, it cannot hold when we immerse ourselves in the infinite complexities of human conduct. Discovering as opposed to fantasizing the reasons and motivations of others is difficult. Add in large entities such as nations or tribes, and first causes of their conduct are often unknowable. And so strategic calculations based on efforts to influence or control behavior are bound to produce disappointment.

It’s a great paradox that we are so easily outgunned by the stunningly capricious nature of the human condition. Take it from someone who has spent a lifetime writing and teaching why people change their minds. We have models, theories and loads of experimental research. But making predictions about any specific instance is almost always another case of hope defeated by extenuating circumstances. We may be able to say what we want, giving eloquent expression to the goals we seek. Our verbs may sing their certainty. But forces we can’t predict are going to produce their own effects.