It's Always Been This Way

Join me on an unexpectedly circular trip

Do you remember that picture I shared in last week’s newsletter about mercy? It’s from one of our family vacations to northern Maine when I was little. The most interesting bit about that picture, for me anyway, is that my brother David is in it. This is interesting because I have scoured my memory and I have no recollection of David ever being in Maine with us at all.

In fact, the whole conversation I was having with my mom, which led to me looking for that picture, began with me asking her if we always went to Maine when David was at summer camp because he was never with us. When I asked this, assuming she would verify, she looked at me like I was nuts. “Of course, David was there with us!” And when I looked at the picture and realized that I was four, which would have made David almost eight and not old enough to be away at camp, her incredulity made a little bit of sense. I mean, seriously, what was I thinking?

I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking about how those trips to Maine were idyllic for me.

Hours spent poking around in tide pools by myself— watching barnacles wink open and sea anemones wave at me, slipping and falling on seaweed, drinking ocean water out of my cupped palms, and collecting mussels to make chowder for lunch. Pumping water from the well, and the red and green handles on the buckets so you’d know which was clean water and which was dirty. The two-seater outhouse, which I would always visit with my mom right before bedtime, propping the heavy flashlight carefully so we wouldn’t have to sit in the dark. Walking a mile down the road with the rickety, wooden lobster crates to pick lobsters fresh off the boat with my dad. Sleeping in the Bear’s Den, our hosts’ shelter right at the top of the rock line, and peeking over the edge of the covers to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic. All three of my living grandparents visiting with us at various points. My Grandma Mary buying 60s-era Harlequin romances by the boxful from the used bookstore in Millbridge so she could read a new one every day and then pass it to me to read after her. My oldest brother Paul launching a homemade raft into the Atlantic and having to be saved by a fisherman before he washed out to sea.

I have years and years of memories in that place and not one of them features my brother David even though he was there. And you know why? Because by some miracle he was never cruel to me there. My only clear memories of David before I was 13 all feature him being cruel. So, if there’s no cruelty in my memories then my brain tells me he can’t have been there.

The point of all this is not to illuminate that my memory is clearly faulty because… of course it is. The point is to talk about cognitive biases, which are the ways that our minds trick us into believing things that are contradictory and/or patently untrue. Case in point, my assumption that somehow my parents found somewhere else for one of my siblings to be for every family vacation for years on end simply because I can’t remember him being there. How does that make any sense at all?

It is interesting to me that race didn’t change folks sense of moral decline, because golden age myths only apply in the U.S. if you’re white. Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Another set of cognitive biases that caught my attention this week was illuminated in an op-ed in the New York Times about perceptions of moral decline in society. The author described the studies that he and his co-researcher did on perceptions of moral decline spanning 59 countries, 60 years of data, and hundreds of thousands of people.

What they found was that, nearly universally, the people surveyed, regardless of race, political affiliation, or class, perceived a few contradictory and fallacious things. First, whatever country they found themselves in, they believed their society had been experiencing marked moral decline over the course of their lifetime. People were, the majority of respondents believed, less “kind, nice, honest, or good as once upon a time they were.” The reasons for this were two-fold. Respondents maintained that people became less moral over the course of time and that more recent generations were, overall, less moral than the generations that preceded them. Second, respondents believed that the people they knew personally and anyone who lived before they were born were exceptions to these rules. Both those groups were lovely, moral people.

How does this happen? How do people manage to carry contradictory, even mutually exclusive, beliefs about morality? (“Everyone you know is honest, kind, moral, and getting kinder and better over time” and “morality is heading straight down the toilet” can’t be true at the same time.)

The answer, according to the studies, lies in two cognitive biases. The first is biased exposure. Basically, people tend to filter for negative, rather than positive, information about unknown others. This is encouraged by news media’s focus on crime and calamity, and the internet’s relative anonymity, which often brings out the worst in people. Add to this perceptual propensity biased memory, which means that we also tend, over time, to forget the worst aspect of things that happened previously and remember the best, causing us to characterize the past as rosier than it was.

As the author so succinctly states, “If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.”

Golden age myths are a dangerous business. Politicians and talking heads, particularly of the autocratic and fascistic variety, love them. On a personal level, attaching ourselves to them impedes the veracity of our sense of ourselves and our history.

I will confess I started this project because I believed we were in an integrity crisis as a country, and potentially as a species. I was also concerned, and I’m still concerned if I’m being honest, that there are fewer clear avenues for moral and ethical education in the world today than there used to be. We don’t talk about civics or character much in school anymore, and fewer and fewer people are active in religion. Where are we supported these days in asking big questions about who we really want to be in the world or how to become that person?

Oh, right. Here we are, all drawn to this rambling conversation about integrity. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d also say many of you read the same books and newsletters and listen to the same podcasts that I do, which all tend to wrestle with big questions about identity, personal development, interpersonal relationships, and integrity.

The reality is that people have always worked to be and do good, to be honest, kind, and helpful to others, to communicate and connect. If we don’t have a place to do that work we make one. We always have and we always will.

While thinking about the Times essay, I remembered another wonderful essay about cognitive biases, written by Mike Sowden over at his newsletter, Everything Is Amazing. His essay (linked below) challenged the idea that historical people were dumber than us. In his usual wry fashion, Mike broke down how we tend to assume if we don’t understand someone it must be because they’re missing something obvious we already know. In other words, we write them off as idiots, approaching difference from a place of judgment instead of curiosity.

In modern times we also equate rationality with intelligence, which makes it hard to believe people in ancient history, when so much of daily life seems to have involved beliefs and practices which are now considered “irrational”, are as smart as people today. That’s just… wrong.

The Curious Idea That Ancient People Weren't Dimwits

Read the whole essay. If you do, you’ll notice that Mike links to another Substack newsletter, Experimental History. Specifically, he quotes author Adam Mastroianni’s essay on cognitive bias and the assumption that other people are stupid.

Historically, for example, many people assumed American democracy would immediately collapse because common people weren’t smart enough to rule themselves. In response, Mastroianni writes:

Two hundred and fifty years later, we’re still standing. It’s been rocky, but we’ve done pretty darn well for a country that people thought would immediately collapse into an anarchy of dunces. If we can go from “only kings and dukes could possibly become less stupid” to “anybody can become less stupid,” maybe we can make it all the way to “people aren’t fundamentally stupid to begin with.”

Getting there requires giving up on the very seductive idea that your mind just happens to contain every true belief. When people like the things you hate, when they vote for the wrong guy, when they devote their lives to things you think are pointless, the easiest way to deal with them is to assume that God didn’t put enough neurons in their heads. If only their brain functioned properly, like yours does! Then they’d see.

I think that we can outgrow our need for that idea. And I sure hope we do, because “people are stupid” is the gateway drug to a lot of worse ideas. When you write someone off as a moron, you suspend diplomatic relations; you declare war. This works the other way around, too—how can you have anything other than open hostilities with someone who has decided that your brain doesn’t work?

The radical idea that people aren't stupid

Here’s the funny, circular part of all of this. If you take the time to read the Times essay, which started this entire thought-train, (I’ve removed the paywall, so you can whether or not you have a Times subscription.) you’ll discover that it was also written by Adam Mastroianni. Which I didn’t even realize until hours into my reading and research, at which point I laughed out loud.

Do you think people have always been easily amused by themselves? Asking for a friend, who is me.

XO, Asha