Sometimes, the hard part of being a humanist is all the goddamn humans.
At the cell and tissue level, they’re pretty nifty, but once they start perambulating around they’re mostly all about stomping on you.
I’d probably be happier if all my interactions with the world were with computers and embryos. OK, and libraries. Libraries are cool. Especially computer-accessible libraries with books about embryos.
I can cope when you’re reduced to electrons and photons.
“Hello, stream of bits,” I’d say with my own spray of bits.
“You’re looking lovely, ray of light!” I’d radiate.
I’d happily arrange pixels to say, “You can’t screw me over now, abstract pattern of simplified information!”
But people…people mostly suck.
Sorry, people.
If it helps, just remember that you’re looking at a stream of electrons rendered into an array of photons. It’s how I’m trying to see you, after all.
I feel like I’m being threatened? Why are you holding a disruptor?
Fair point, though. People do suck rather impressively.
I agree in principle, stream of electrons rendered into photons, but can’t help wondering what prompted the sentiment to be rendered into publicly available photons this way.
Be careful what you wish for.
Dude, no VagueBooking.
Yes, people suck.
To diverge for a moment to people who don’t suck, PZ, are you or your students at all involved with AISES? The Leadership Summit is going to be in Rochester, MN in April.
AISES: American Indian Science and Engineering Society
We have a chapter here, but I’m not directly affiliated with it.
Were you reading your junk inbox again? It’s never a good idea to wade through dreck.
I prescribe a dose of polonaise motion and some body patterning gradients, preferably with lots of good photon type illustrations.
well I did it again I am still awake and reading something.
I can easily feel that way most of the time especially when I think of “People” in the abstract and often do.
I have lived with it all of my live?
The other day for no discernible I could make out nothing had changed in my life nor in the world at all I just felt good. I’ll take it any way I can get it!
I won’t put links in this time but I am very fond of these two songs
“I don’t worry about a thing” by Mose Allison and “Box of Rain” by the Greatful Dead , they seem to express what I need to remember when I am getting too tied up with the “fucking reality” of the way things are going.
people!
uncle frogy
There are days when I think switching from brachiation to bipedal locomotion was perhaps a bit of a mistake.
Multicellularity was the tragedy.
Becoming a eukaryote set the stage for a billion years of disillusionment.
My recommended cure for this sort of melancholy are discworld novels, especially City Watch novels. They have no compunction about pointing out the various awful bits about people but somehow still manage make you feel a little bit better about them. If it doesn’t work there are worse placebos than a book by Terry Pratchett. In fact there are probably none better.
[last minute addendum. Please read the last paragraph first.
Sure, all the evil in the world has been perpetrated by humans. Spiders and snakes and tornadoes and bushfires might be very terrible indeed, but evil is purely human.
That said: the vast majority of the people you encounter do not suck. They’re just trying to get by as best they can and wish no harm on you or anyone else. Because they have no interest in impacting on your life you don’t notice them. The people ahead of you in the line who are waiting calmly, the driver who signals in plenty of time, the waiter who served you without fuss or drama, all these folks fade from memory as if they never existed. They are the ghostly good.
The bad ones, they stick in the memory. Anger and adrenalin seem to act as a fixative, aided and abetted by “How was your day honey?” retellings. Not to mention our old friend Confimation Bias, our insidious and inevitable distorter of perception.
I used to be a retail manager. I was in charge of dealing with all the difficult customers, and over the years it ground me down. I got to the point where I hated humanity universally and inequvically. Something had to change. So I started to pay attention, I kept track.
I knew precisely how many customers had purchased something each day, and I had resonable estimates of the number of who had left empty handed. The math wasn’t hard, on average I was dealing with one problem customer every two weeks. The numbers weren’t even close.
I began teaching the staff to respond to bad interactions by paying attention to the ghostly good customers, to respond to the shits who decide to take out their bad day on the captive audience behind the till by being excessively nice to the next customer. Almost without fail the recipient of that unexpected kind regard from a store clerk responded with kindness and appreciation of their own, tempering the perception that everyone is an asshole.
I pay attention to the ghostly good. They are all around. I value them enough to remember them even though they did nothing to impact upon my life, livelyhood or mood. I value them *because* they did nothing to impact me, just as I did nothing to them. Dwelling on the everyday assholes gives them an undeserved currency so I do my best to forget them.
Of course my success with this strategy might just be a result of the privilege of my circumstances. I recognise that my world is set at the lowest difficulty rating, that disadvantaged folk’s have a vastly different experience. Ah fuck, all that annoying ipad typing and I just now realise that of course I feel like the majority don’t suck because they don’t view me as lesser. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I’ll let it stand because I think it’s a good reminder to us privileged ones to appreciate how easy we have it, and it can be a successful strategy given the right circumstances. I’m also going to use this as a goad to keep working towards a world where everyone shares those right circumstances . Sorry folks, I’m an idiot, but I’m working on it…
FossilFishy:
There’s one hell of an example of that here: https://proxy.freethought.online/arun/2016/03/18/he-found-death-through-his-love/
At least I know where my towel is.
FossilFishy #13 wrote:
There’s obviously a very wide range of circumstances in which people find themselves, but I would think that it would be only the very, very UNprivileged — those in violent or abusive circumstances on a consistent basis, struggling to even survive — who could or would sincerely agree that the vast majority of people who surround them are actively malignant and there is no such thing as the “ghostly good” as you call it (I like that term.) Even that poor couple murdered by relatives probably had many friends, and met or could potentially meet many people who would smile back at them if they smiled first.
The example you gave from your own life didn’t involve socialites dealing with their butlers, but retail clerks dealing with their customers. So I suspect your words of wisdom is good advice for most, in most circumstances. When sociologists travel around the world measuring which societies are “happiest,” the results don’t track much with privileged advantages of wealth. If I remember it correctly, as long as someone doesn’t perceive themselves in imminent danger, they set themselves and their circumstances as the norm and handle it from there.
PZ nails exactly why I cannot identify as a humanist. Humans as a species are fucking terrible. Call it misanthropy, call it whatever you want, but I see it as an observable, evidence-based fact. And I don’t assume intentional malice to conclude this.
That said, I love and care deeply about many, many actual humans. And this may sound…odd? But giving up hope for us as a species has actually been liberating for me in a positive way. It helped me prioritize finding and spreading joy in the here-and-now, and doing what I can to ease the suffering of sentient beings while I’m alive. (Ironically, such efforts can have the side effect of giving other people hope.)
*sings* “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world…”
I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.
–Linus van Pelt
Needs some Ambrose Bierce
@17
See, I generally agree that I think that the crud outweighs the cream by an order of magnitudes when it comes to humanity, but I still identify as a humanist because there’s no way to tell someone’s a dick until I hear about them, so I’m willing to give the vast majority of humans the benefit of the doubt and advocate for them, if only to help the unidentified nice ones.
Re: The ghostly good and/or evil of humanity— the way I see it is, the vast majority of humans are able to understand that “good” and “evil” exist as opposing concepts, and the vast majority of humans desire to do good and oppose evil. The problem is that actually learning what good and evil are requires they be taught by a society that, by and large, already knows and society consists of individuals that never learned because they grew up in a society that didn’t know and so on and so forth.
Luckily, it does mean that we can make creaky incremental progress; slowly convince enough people that one specific evil thing is evil or one specific good thing is good, and we can make that common knowledge for everyone in the future. Unfortunately, that won’t help anybody now. And knowing that the person beating you up for being “lesser” could have been a good person if only all of society hadn’t collectively taught them you were lesser does not make them any less evil or you any less injured.
@Fossilfishy #13:
I’ve had the same distinction in my mind for a long time, but I never had a name for the good people you don’t notice. “The ghostly good” is solid gold genius, and I am totally stealing it. Thankyou.
The sad part is that what allows you to cope with the bullshit is also, in a way, the cause of said bullshit. Now, obviously there’s enough horrible stuff going on in the real world, but a lot of online fuckery is based on the misconception that any horrible deed done seemingly doesn’t cause real harm to real people anywhere. It’s just electrons and photons at that point. I’m not harming a human being, I’m just attacking a nickname. A twitter handle. Not an actual person, right?!
You have my (useless) sympathy, PZed. I look at much of humanity, and their failure to act like actual humans — thinking, empathetic, sympathetic, caring, sharing — and despair. People who treat other humans as things. Which is, to me, the only real sin (thank you Terry Pratchett). I look at myself, though, and see the same thing — different failures, but, in many ways, the same. And find myself eyeing the large bottle of pain pills.
Keep the black dog at bay. Please.
I hate when I get in these moods. I hope you feel better soon, PZ. Take care of yourself.
Hmm. I don’t use the “humanist” label, but whatever you call it, it has something to do with how I should act. It’s not because somebody’s nice to me that I should act like a non-asshole toward them. What they’ve done (or how you characterize them) is one thing, and what I’m going to do about it is another thing. Sure, I’m more likely to be especially nice to people who are friendly to me. Maybe I’m not being fair sometimes, so I should try to do better. But anyway, reciprocating a favor isn’t the only reason (or even the best reason) why I should do good stuff rather than bad stuff.
I mean, even if I know for sure that someone’s a murderer, no doubt about it, that doesn’t license me to behave immorally toward them. If I was on the jury that was about to convict them, I’d want them to be treated fairly and humanely in prison. Knowing how wretched the prison system is, that obviously doesn’t count for much. But the point is that, in a much more ideal system than we really have, I don’t think I’d be doing something wrong to them by sending them to prison, since it wouldn’t amount to punishing them or getting revenge. It would be right to protect society from them, and it would be right to get them to a place where they could be helped into becoming a better and less dangerous person.
See, I don’t think my view on the matter would necessarily lead to treating a dick unfairly too, or at least in a legal sense. If I was put on a jury for aforementioned murderer, I’d try and give them a fair cop so as to encourage a legal system that is fair towards the not-awful people that I actually care about.
Sure, I was just responding to what you said in your comment, which maybe didn’t express how you really think about it. (Maybe it will stop PZ from going on a rampage too … but it probably won’t help anybody.)
To put it a different way, I don’t think it matters morally, whether you have a generally positive or negative view of humanity, whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic about our future, etc. Maybe you believe every other human being is a giant asshole, and you’re not giving them any benefit of the doubt at all. Every last one of them is doing terrible, terrible things.
I don’t get how that affects what you ought to do. If you should still do the right thing (and “identify as a humanist,” whatever that does*), because there’s no sense in saying “I should do the wrong thing,” then it’s not actually because you have a belief that there’s a chance that some of them are generally good people who will be nice to you in return. Nor is it that those people deserve to benefit from acting-the-way-you-should, while the assholes don’t deserve that. Either everyone “deserves” to be treated fairly or nobody does, because one person being treated unfairly means everybody is (lots are treated better, one is worse, which obviously isn’t equal).
*This is part of the reason why I don’t like the “humanist” label. It’s not clear what it’s supposed to be about. Under the surface at least, although many humanists won’t admit it, the idea often seems to be that humans are special or inherently good. Then the problem of evil reappears, in a naturalistic form, and you have to try to explain away all of the obviously evil shit humans do all of the fucking time. The same boring old apologetics resurfaces, and it’s as if people think it makes a moral difference that magical deities aren’t being invoked this time around. Good luck with that, I guess, but it’s a losing battle. If it’s not a claim like that about humans or human nature, and you also really do think we shouldn’t abuse puppies for instance (which aren’t humans, it hardly needs to be said), then “humanist” just doesn’t look like it’s even trying to capture what your moral system is about. And if that’s the case, then what is it doing? I can understand that it’s a convenient term, because other people in your group already use it, but that’s not helping anybody else understand what it’s supposed to be expressing. Anyway, sorry, maybe this is derailing the thread, so I’ll leave it at that.
I’m not attempting to propose some sort of moral system where everyone should do one thing or the other, I’m just explaining how I, personally, reconcile my generally pessimistic view of humanity with my support for humanistic values. I believe that things should be fair and balanced, even to the assholes, because thats the best way of ensuring the nice people will be treated fairly too.
Vivec 20:
Everyone’s a dick, at least sometimes, and always potentially. Even Jeezus! (See Matthew 15:22-26).
consciousness razor: is it possible to derail a vaguebook post? I DON’T THINK SO.
It helps to think of people as a blob of quarks. Mostly strange and anticharm, but with a fair amount of down and bottom.
blf @31:
No, mostly up and down, but unable to tell the difference.
I know I am an anxiety prone person, I am probably overreacting, but… Is Pr. Myers getting depressed ?
(It looks like that to me, also it doesn’t look like him, the happy atheist, too much.)
The mere fact that this blog poste does not have a title suggests to me that he thought “Why bother ?”
Should we be worried ?
FossilFishy, I take your point about the view-of-one-who-is-not-generally-treated-as-lesser – but I still think your active dis-invisiblising of the ghostly good (and passing that on to others) is a very fine idea.
Ogvorbis, hope the black dog keeps away. Maybe it can go and hang out with my … well, dark-grey puppy, and the two of them can leave people the hell in peace.
@30
Sure, but I’m drawing a line between people that are dicks and nice vs people that are just dicks.
@Rob Grigjanis #32:
I’m not sure whether I should weigh in here, or just charge in.
Nope, pretty much all down.
‘Bye.
Yes, people suck.
They can be great sometimes, though.Some of them.
People are wasteful, they waste all the food
People are hateful, and people are rude
But god I love some people sometimes
Because people are very, very special
And people are impatient, they don’t know how to wait
People are selfish, people are prone to hate
But god I love some people sometimes
Because people are the greatest thing to happen
People are my religion because I believe in them
People are my enemies and people are my friends
I have faith in my fellow man
And I only hope that he has faith in me
Andrew Jackson Jihad – People
Here’s my problem with the “people are evil” meme: Why are people evil? Well, look at all the horrible things that they do:
Here’s my problem with the “people are evil” meme:
Q: Why are people evil?
A: Well, look at all the horrible things that they do: wars, crusades, genocide.
Q: So, crimes against humanity?
A: Yeah.
Q: Which is evil.
A: Um…[div null error, reboot].
Yeah, you could bring up extinctions and climate change and all, but nature’s an asshole too so that just leads to the same error via a slightly longer path.
People: Can’t live with them and can’t justify nuking them from orbit.
Ogvorbis:
Don’t fucking do that. Don’t. My life sucks enough, it would be so much worse without you.
Have a few songs.
Humans in general? Pretty sucky.
The humans I know and love? Still have sucky moments.
Humanity as a concept, however, is/was a nice try.
I feel that way sometimes – and then I hear something like this
https://youtu.be/is0Lb4cj_3c – Barcarolle form “The Tales of Hoffmann
And then Hoffmann loses his reflection and Schlemil is killed.
As I moved further to the progressive/humanist/SJW side of things I find that I care more about humans in general and am more often infuriated by individual humans. Is it a paradox that I want what is better for all humans but I don’t want to deal with any of them?
https://youtu.be/MI0-rUHorj8
Unfortunately this
Either way it’d be a fractional contribution.
</snark>