“What are you going to do with that settlement land? Give it to some smelly Arab? He’s just going to plant a few olive trees, build a shack and then squat on it. At least an Israeli is going to do something productive with it!”
We were all little bit drunk.
I am sure the alcohol made it easier for her to say what she really thought. I know it made it easier for the devil in the back of my head to snap up and start talking.
It jumped right into the case.
“Just what I would expect from a fat spoiled brat like this. She has no idea. She’s lived in her upper-middle-class cocoon exclusively and she’s been rendered completely incapable of even imagining what other people might be going through. She has been smothered without her noticing. I can feel your contempt, and I am here to tell you that it is justified. This person is contemptible,” said the little devil.
Experience is our gold coin. We value the activity of consciousness exclusively. Talk of worth comes down to the coin and nothing else. A common currency binds us too, by assuaging doubts about other minds. We can’t know with complete certainty that other people’s experience closely resembles our own, but everyone knows what constitutes a treasure. An inclusive reverence for our shared impetus to open our eyes each morning is circumstantial evidence of common experience. But sometimes circumstantial evidence is practically as good as definitive evidence, just in case, even if things are not exactly as they appear, they might as well be.
Still, it leaves room for doubt, and doubt is there for us. It naps in the back of everyone’s head until it feels the jolt of a dilemma. Then it wakes instantly, ready with an alternative explanation. While other people may not be hell, they are the source of most dilemmas. We bump into each other in pursuit of our experiential needs. Hunger may be impeding your appreciation of a good story, but there is only one piece of bread for the entire audience. It may be too cold to step out of the tent to see the Milky Way without a blanket, but your brother is sleeping under the other half of your only cover.
In effect, we have to leave some coins on the ground at the crash sites in order to get by, with the reasonable expectation that we will find more pennies along our new path. You get to see a child next to you in the audience enjoying his morsel of bread. You can share a peaceful cup of coffee with your brother in the morning. That’s how it is, as long as we believe in the common currency. And here is where the little devil pipes up.
It points out that you really have no way of knowing that the coins falling from the other persons hand are not lead discs painted gold. Sure, they may look exactly like your own coins, from the way they catch the light to the way they bounce off the ground, but it is conceivable that they are just very good fakes.
It is possible that other people’s basic experience is not really the same as our own. They may treat it as though it were, but if you were really able to slip into their skin, you would find their conscious activity impoverished. A host of plausible explanations supports the assertion. Maybe some deity has decreed it so, or at least left it to the afflicted, whose actions or decisions have subsequently merited the defect. As with so many anatomic traits, genes may determine whose experience is gold, and whose is lead. Perhaps certain cultures stunt a person’s capacity for deluxe experience by stomping on any signs of self-expression from an early age.
The sheer quantity of plausible explanations for the low relative worth of other people’s experience supports the truth of the assertion. If we even suspect that it is true that others are dealing in lead coins while we deal in gold, then we must change our terms, given the fundamental value of experience. What is their hunger to ours if our hunger detracts from an appreciation of art which is beyond their capacity? What is their experience of warmth to ours when our warmth permits an appreciation of stars and galaxies, while theirs merely permits sleep?
For consistency’s sake at least, we must treat people according to the relative worth of their experience. It makes sense then, if the richness of another person’s experience seems to be about half (may be 5/8 ?) of our own, then when push comes to shove, we may reasonably eliminate one of them in our favor.
That is what the little devil has to say. Its argument is immediate and concise, with a veneer of wise skepticism. It appeals especially to those who favor right wing political philosophies, and those who have previously been subject to its analysis. The former typically suspect anything promoting equity (the associated subsidy robs its recipient of an opportunity to demonstrate virtue, as they can never know how much they achieved on the basis of their own merits). If experience for some is relatively impoverished, attempts at equity on any front are futile. The devil’s argument fits particularly well with extreme far right political beliefs such as fascism, in which human nature is presumed to be corrupt yet salvageable by virtuous devotion to the nation and its leader. The exalted will be recognizable by their armbands, and the irredeemable, by their tattoos.
It is difficult to see how to derail the argument from experiential poverty once it has built up some steam. It is a self-sustaining argument, and one that is directed toward a single end because, although multiple etiologies are possible the result is the same: a social emulsion of capable and disabled persons which will naturally begin to separate. Those with defects can never understand the greater needs of the whole people. The only reasonable move on the part of the intact is to preempt the natural process of separation by actively separating themselves from the defectives, along with the resources appropriate to the elevated needs of the intact.
The separation needn’t be too gentle either. After all, any suffering experienced by the disabled will necessarily be less than the suffering of the capable under the constraints of the social emulsion. Of course, the defective people won’t take this lying down, and one can expect their response to be no more humane than their disability allows. By this mechanism, the treatment of the whole people by the defectives comes to precisely resemble the treatment of the defectives by the whole people. This convergence can even convince the defectives that the roles have been reversed. After all, the acts licensed to the supposedly intact in the course of separation look just like treatment one might expect from the experientially impoverished in response to, from their perspective, unreasonable demands from the other side.
I don’t know how to shut the devil down. Its argument prevails on the basis of even tiny doubts. An effective inoculation would need to induce tolerance for uncertainty, in each individual, of the uniform value of individual experience. From the Neolithic agricultural revolution to the Industrial Revolution, our species has shown a willingness to exchange large chunks of lifespan for relief of uncertainty. And we are easily induced to doubt other people’s nature when we cannot square their behavior with what we consider human nature. We might not win this one as long as there is more than one of us,
Dedicated to the Game 