Tag: peace

Revolutionizing Social Media Interaction for a Brighter Future

As we get closer to the American elections, and then moving into the Canadian elections next year, I find it more and more imperative that we work to effect a fundamental change in the way we interact with social media and, by extension, how we interact in real life. Over the last ten years or so my concern over the culture has grown from mild alarm at some people’s online behaviour, to something approaching real fear that we are at a tipping point into another real-world dark age, specifically with respect to intellectual and cultural decline. And violence.

It’s not all bleak though. Thanks to many private conversations, I know I am not alone in my concern, and I do see signs that there are public figures with a legitimate desire to change this trajectory, as opposed to leveraging the culture for their own personal gain. And considering the magnitude of people who, exclusively through social media, get their news, form their opinions, and – maybe most troubling – learn how to communicate, social media is where it has to start.

If we can do it, it won’t be through any kind of censorship or similar attempts to control how people use their favourite platform though. It has to be you and me. We have to change the nature of our posts. And so I had this idea of a filter, or sieve, that we can apply to our more meaningful posts to both increase their effectiveness, and also combat the culture that is propelling us toward a precipice.

Consider this. If you want to engage in political posts on social media, that is your choice, and I support it. Keep in mind though that these posts are, by nature, argumentative, in that political posts always argue for or against some candidate or issue. Which on its own is not a problem. Argument (or debate) is not a fight. The idea that arguing equals fighting is something that’s manifested because people like getting attention and scoring points. True argument is not a contest, but a means to pursue truth and, conducted properly, is how we progress. Because the acquisition of truth can never be considered a loss, proper arguments have no losers, and in that sense they have no winners either, because to win an argument someone would have to lose.

But many people argue poorly, because they argue for points.

In the philosophical study of argument there are many identified fallacies. If you’re not familiar with the idea of a logical fallacy, think of these as techniques or strategies that falsely trick you into thinking they are effective. When you employ them you or your audience may think you’re “winning” but you have not made a true case. To avoid this, and hopefully steer us away from the precipice, I ask that you apply what I’m calling an effectiveness sieve to your words before you click that post button.

Run your post through the following sieve. If you can’t answer yes to all three sieve questions, refine your thoughts until it passes them all, then go ahead and put it out there.

  1. Do my words avoid belittling, shaming, or otherwise personally attacking someone who doesn’t agree with my position?
  2. Does my post allow for (and even maybe invite) respectful discourse with someone who disagrees with it?
  3. Does my post offer information/education that someone who disagrees with me might not have considered?

You can actually stop reading here, if you like. The value of each question is probably self-explanatory. But if you want to dive a little deeper into the reasoning behind these criteria and their relationship to common fallacies, or to reflect a little more deeply on whether or not your own posts are effective, read on.

(A word of warning though: I use examples below to illustrate the points and a lot of them are, by design, inflammatory in concept and language. I am not expressing my views in any of them – I am parroting posts I have seen in my social media feeds.)

Sieve Question One
“Do my words avoid belittling, shaming, or otherwise personally attacking someone who doesn’t agree with my position?“

Fallacy This Helps Avoid: Ad Hominem (Attacking the person)
This occurs when instead of challenging an idea or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be aimed at a person’s membership in a group or institution.1

How to tell
Imagine that someone who holds an opposite position made a post worded like yours. Would you take it as a personal attack, or would you view it as someone simply supporting ideas that you disagree with? Keep in mind that we can challenge ideas without attacking the people who embrace them. In fact, this is the only way to dismantle dangerous ideologies. In democratic societies where change essentially requires consensus, attacking opponents instead of ideas is possibly the worst way to stimulate progress. Consider this example:

Example 1
“Considering the unbelievable depths of stupidity you display in believing that climate change is a hoax, it would obviously be a waste of time explaining the facts to your fascist republican ass.”

Example 2
“You have been duped by the lamestream media, so I will leave you to your weak-minded, sheeple liberal delusions about how solar power will ‘save the planet'”

Example 3
“I read conflicting views on whether climate change is real, if it is a concern, and if it is totally caused by human factors. I am not an expert, and it’s not always easy to filter out the real experts from the ones who claim to be. And even then, it’s not always easy to filter out which experts, if any, are twisting their analyses to suit some underlying agenda. However, the scientific consensus points at climate change being a real danger, and being attributable to human factors. The recommendations to address it seem to be a net good, even if the premise that we are the problem isn’t totally correct.”

It should be obvious what’s happening in the first two examples. There is no attempt to change anyone’s mind. It’s just mud-slinging peppered with tired insults engineered to pump up the audience members who agree. Neither post does anything to address the issue of climate change itself, and just drives a wedge between people who hold opposing views.

Meanwhile, if I’ve crafted the third example well enough, hopefully you can see that there is no evidence of ad hominem at all, and even though the poster is leaning toward one “side”, they have not shut down engagement.

Sieve Question Two
“Does my post allow for (and even maybe invite) respectful discourse with someone who disagrees with it?“

Fallacy This Helps Avoid: Straw Person
This occurs when, in refuting an argument or idea, you address only a weak or distorted version of it. It is characterized by the misrepresentation of an opponent’s position to make yours superior. The tactic involves attacking the weakest version of an argument while ignoring stronger ones.2

How to Tell
This is often used in conjunction with the ad hominem fallacy because it adds even more punch. After all, only moron would believe a weak argument. Most people have no desire to engage in discourse with someone who starts off with the premise that “Your position is weak, because it supports x so I am right and you are wrong and unless you can see that you are an idiot.” Consider the contentious example of abortion:

Example 1
“Pro-choice? So you think that murdering babies is ok!?! I guess you don’t care about the lives of the babies who get killed.”

Example 2
“Pro-life? So women should have no say over what happens to their own bodies?!? I guess you don’t care about the 13-year old girl who was brutally raped and is now forced to carry and give birth to the child of the man who scarred her forever.”

Example 3
“I struggle with the abortion issue. I believe it is a clear and terrible breach of fundamental human rights to tell someone else what they can or can’t do with their own bodies, regardless of the circumstances but especially when there is physical/psychological trauma involved that can be addressed with an abortion. But I am also really troubled by the fact that I am in no position to decide whether a viable fetus, at any stage of development, is a human life, and I don’t see how anyone could be, really. The issue feels like being offered only two choices where each choice is loaded with ethical downsides, and there is no option to not choose. I worry that in order to alleviate the moral weight of each choice, people downplay or even outright lie about the consequences of their position. So although I land on the side of pro-choice, I do not do so lightly, and I am aware that it feels like I have made a moral choice to prioritize the essential rights of the mother over the potential rights of the unborn child. I hope this choice is correct.”

Consider the first two examples. Will a pro-choice person who just got told they murder babies want to engage in anything other than hurling insults with this person? Will a pro-life person who just got told they don’t care about the effects of rape on a 13 year-old girl want to engage in anything other than hurling insults with this person? By attacking a weak/distorted version of the other side, each has set it up so that any engagement by someone with an opposing view will manifest as some level of support for the weak/distorted claim.

Meanwhile, in the third example, the author has ultimately stated a position. Would a pro-x person be open to understanding the author’s struggle? Would a pro-life person feel safe to engage in discourse? Does it seem that there is the possibility that anyone who engages – including the author – might change their minds about anything surrounding the issue, including about people themselves who hold the opposite position?

Sieve Question Three
“Does my post offer information/education that someone who disagrees with me might not have considered?“

Fallacy This Helps Avoid: Irrelevant Authority
This is committed when you accept, without proper support for an alleged authority, a person’s claim or proposition as true (and that alleged authority is often the person employing the fallacy). Alleged authorities should only be referenced when:

  • the authority is reporting on their field of expertise,
  • the authority is reporting on facts about which there is some agreement in their field, and
  • you have reason to believe they can be trusted.

Alleged authorities can be individuals or groups. The attempt to appeal to the majority or the masses is a form of irrelevant authority. The attempt to appeal to an elite or select group is also a form of irrelevant authority.3

How to Tell
Are you claiming that some position is wrong? If so, have you explained how you know this? What authority are you citing? Or are you claiming expertise and asserting “Thinking x is wrong!”

Example 1
“Jordan Peterson says switching to a meat-only diet literally saved his life. Vegans are slowly killing themselves.”

Example 2
“I lost 30 pounds when I went vegan and feel so much better. Eating meat is asking for heart disease and dementia.”

Example 3
“It makes sense to at least consider evolution when determining what a ‘healthy’ diet looks like. Before humans had access to foods not native to our geography, the only people that would have survived would be the ones who thrived on what was available. So if your ancestors evolved in warmer climates, it would make sense that your constitution would welcome more grains and vegetables, whereas ancestors in colder climates would have evolved to thrive off meats.”

Consider the first two examples. Jordan Peterson is not an authority on nutrition (he actually takes great pains to make that clear whenever he talks about his diet). So while he has said that a carnivore diet works for him, it is not evidence that the carnivore diet is better than others. In the second example, the author is actually setting themselves as the authority. Neither example offers any warranted expertise or education and are strictly anecdotal claims.

In the third example the author poses an idea that promotes questioning and further research. They are not claiming any personal authority, or even choosing a side, even though they may have a preference. They are presenting an hypothesis that can be (and probably has been) analyzed by experts.

If you’d like to read more about informal fallacies often used in argument, I recommend this link from Texas State University. It lists the common ones and provides explanations and examples. One of my favourites is Begging the Question, which I always laugh about because it’s a phrase that gets used so often, and almost always incorrectly, while at the same time the real fallacy gets used regularly in arguments.

In any case, I hope we can all change the way we interact on social media and beyond. I really do believe we need that flavour of revolution.

Thanks for reading,
Rich

  1. https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/ad-hominem.html ↩︎
  2. https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/straw-person.html ↩︎
  3. https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/irrelevant-authority.html ↩︎

A Different Kind of Ceasefire

If you scream long enough into a canyon, your throat will burn, and the echoes of your anger will wash back on you. But the canyon stays the same.

This is what it’s like to argue on social media, and yet so many of us feel somehow compelled to do it anyway. Myself included.

Example: During the 2008 war in Gaza, I made a lot of noise on social media in support of Israel’s right to defend her citizens from attacks originating within Gaza. Then, as today, so many people and institutions globally disagreed. In one particularly strange interaction I had at the time, the person who was arguing with me said that because Israel has military superiority, they should take no action whatsoever, and simply allow Hamas to continue to fire rockets. And if some Israeli citizens should die, well, that’s better than what happens in Gaza when Israel tries to take out rocket installations. The argument is more or less the following: You know how businesses just have to accept some amount of theft as a cost of doing business? This is like that. Israel has to accept the death of her citizens as the cost of doing life. After days of trying to highlight the ludicrousness of the argument, I let it go. The only thing that changed was my blood pressure. Lesson learned. Social media is no place for reasoned debate, and it’s certainly not as though any Facebook post or argument is going to swing the Middle East to peace. In general, people don’t want truth, they just want to win. And they keep score by how many people are on their side. By engaging, you give them an opponent, an audience, and a scoreboard to erect. So I decided that I would never again engage this way on social media. Then October 7th happened.

You didn’t need to consult Nostradamus to know what was going to happen next on social media, and I said to my wife “I will not scream into the canyon again. I know how that goes.” And I didn’t. At first.

Now, regarding the conflict, my support for or feelings about Israel are not important for the purposes of this article. I am not interested in arguing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For one, while I have studied the history of the region and have learned a lot, I am not a scholar of it, and so I am not qualified. But more importantly, the people you end up arguing with are even less qualified, as we see almost every time. In fact, it seems the less they have studied the history, the more qualified they feel to make righteous proclamations. This is not a new phenomenon, but we have social media largely to thank for highlighting, amplifying, and ultimately weaponizing this endearing quality of the keyboard zealot.

So, against this backdrop of my perspective, let me paint a picture.

In the days immediately following October 7, a social media friend of mine who I respect started posting about Palestine. The first inkling I had that there was something odd there was when he said that he found himself having to remind himself that not all Jews are Israel. How, I wondered, have we come to a place where a good person has to engage conscious effort to remember that a Jewish human is separate from Israel, lest he attribute all the evil he feels is perpetrated by Israel to any Jew he meets? I don’t understand this need to consciously humanize someone by distinguishing them from a country. There is a lot to consider there, and I am not a psychologist, but it’s very telling. Because that seems to be a fairly pervasive perspective, whether perpetrated purposely, or adopted subconsciously. The notion that if you hate Israel, you must therefore hate Jews is a deliberately propagated idea, as well as a sadly seductive one for essentially good people to embrace, since statistically most people have not met, or are not aware they have met, any Jewish people in their day-to-day life.

I gave a lot of thought to this from my own perspective. When Russia attacked Ukraine, I didn’t have to remind myself that not all Russians are Russia. When al-Qaeda flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I didn’t have to remind myself that not all Muslims are al-Qaeda. I have read about the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, and let me be very transparent here – I know almost nothing about this situation except for a few articles I’ve read, which does not remotely make me an expert or qualified to have an opinion. Still, even if I believe the worst, I don’t have to remind myself that not all Chinese people are China.

Why then, did my friend feel that he had to consciously separate Jews from Israel? It sat in my thoughts for a while. In the meantime, he started posting in support of Palestine. Which is okay. I support the Palestinian’s right to a state as well. But his support was manifesting as an attack on Israel. As we’ve seen, there is this sentiment that in order to support Palestine, you must demonize Israel, because according to this narrative, it must be Israel that is standing in the way of a Palestinian state. There is a clear and large contingent that believes that you can not be pro-Palestinian without being anti-Israel. You know what? Even though I strongly disagree with that mutually-exclusive ideology, even that doesn’t bother me on the surface of it. What frightens me is what this viewpoint implicitly permits and promotes.

My friend’s first post on this topic following October 7th was not a condemnation of the massacre. It was that meme that is a collage of four maps, that many of us have seen, that paints the picture that since 1947 Palestine has slowly disappeared to be replaced by Israel. He posted the image with the quote “Free Palestine”. I know him to be a good and caring person, so I responded with a link to an article that shows how that meme is insidiously misleading and does not tell the story accurately, and serves mostly to fuel righteous rage in the hearts of people only cursorily familiar with the history of the region and the resulting conflict. My assumption in posting the link being that he would read it and at the very least admit that there is room for doubting the “Israel-as-conquerors” narrative. Aside from a like, nothing much came of my response. Still, I took the like as a good sign.

A few days later, he posted again. This time it was an image of a google search for Palestine, with a corresponding map that does not show Palestine on it. This time his quote included the plea “How do you erase a country?”, along with wondering why the world cares so much when Russia attacks Ukraine but seems to support Israel wiping Palestine from the map. No mention made of the Hamas massacre, and what the world’s reaction should be to that. This was very hard for me to read and reconcile with who I know he is. And that’s when I really broke my rule of not engaging. I responded with “Was Palestine ever a country?”

It was not an appropriate response. Although it was intended to determine if, in his understanding, Palestine had ever been a country, it was poorly timed, not totally well-phrased, and not appropriate to the sentiment he was displaying, so it landed badly with him. He took it as me not sympathizing with Palestinians in Gaza (I do), and being insensitive to their misery (their misery eats at my gut in more ways than I can articulate here). That said, my question, taken simply as it is written, is valid. Was Palestine ever a country? I have researched the answer. If you’re reading this, please research it as well. I am not trying to answer that question here, only point out that given the history of the region and the current accusations, it is a question whose answer matters, just as the answer to the question of who can claim to be indigenous to the region also matters. What happened as a result of me asking was very telling. There were two interactions of note.

One was very positive. My friend and I had a days long, mutually respectful conversation over private message, that resulted in a deeper understanding of each other as humans. We could agree that we support Israel’s right to exist, and that we condemn Hamas’s terrorism unequivocally. We agree that Israel is not evil, and specifically that the rights of women, the full citizenship rights of all non-Jews in Israel, and the celebration of Israel’s LGBTQ+ community is to be applauded, especially in contrast to the same issues in Gaza under Hamas rule. We agree that Hamas’s October 7th attacks and stated desire to continue them paints Israel into a moral corner from which there is no painless exit. We could not come to a complete agreement on how Israel should handle and respond to Hamas’s aggression and terrorism. And since neither of us is a military strategist, political science expert, or clairvoyant able to look into the future and then look back at whether or not current decisions played out optimally, our failure to agree is not objectively important. He also subsequently made two posts that I appreciated more deeply than he probably knows. One showing an understanding of the difficulties faced by Israel in the ongoing conflict, where he even quoted Golda Meir, and one where he shared my “How Does it Feel to be Jewish” article, and cautioning people who are passionate in their support of Palestinians not to conflate their feelings about Israel with anti-Jewish sentiment. This kind of interaction and outcome is proof that long-form, respectful discussion can bring progress.

The second interaction I want to highlight was with another Facebook friend of his, who decided that my response asking if Palestine was ever a country was his chance to vomit his hatred of Israel, Israelis, the entire western world, and, if I had let him continue by continuing to engage, very likely his therefore justified hatred of Jews. I will summarize the brief exchange.

First, he told me that I should read up on all the lies that “Israel and its colonial allies have flooded the mainstream media with”. The classic “do your research” response of the instant-expert. My response was to ask him how he, personally, knows these are lies, and could he please cite sources. His response was then to list all the tired claims and rants, with no sources. The idea being I guess that because he says so, it must be true, especially if he uses exclamation marks. But maybe my favourite part of his rant was when he told me that “Jews who survived the Holocaust condemn Zionism, which is what Israeli extremists follow.” Dear reader, I have three holocaust survivors in my family alone, and have met dozens more. I didn’t ask him how many he knows personally, or has met, but I would be surprised if the number is greater than zero. His speaking on their behalf, attributing the exact opposite of their sentiments regarding Israel to them, left me without words, but seemed most likely attributable to his reliance on memes and TikTok for his worldview. It was clear there was going to be no way to have this conversation productively, but I persisted a little longer as a sad kind of experiment. I once again asked him to cite his sources for this, since it was clear that he himself was not a primary source. And how many of us are? He finally did. His source … wait for it … was three TikTok videos of caricatured Israelis (perhaps you thought I was being facetious above), and, of course, Roger Waters, the knower of all things.

At this point I could see where this was headed, although it really was clear from the outset. A kaleidoscopic chaos of memes and assertions based on his beliefs, quotes or perspectives from single anecdotal sources that bolster his position, with no interest in actual research or fact-finding. I disengaged, with the sentiment which I hold sincerely: “I hope in our lifetimes we witness a peace we can both live with”. His response was “Good luck finding your sense of history and humanity”.

And that’s how it’s done by the keyboard warrior. When all you have informing your outrage is programmed vitriol and hate, the classic way out is to accuse any opponent of precisely what it is you are guilty of. It’s the grown-up evolution of “I know you are but what am I?”

So what does all this have to do with the title of this blog entry? What ceasefire am I talking about? Well, consider what have we seen since October 7th, from a wide range of people and institutions. Immediately on learning about the massacre, the posts began: “Free Palestine!”; “Israel is genocidal!”; “I am not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist!”

To many of these theoretically well-meaning people, the terror attacks were not a call to condemn terrorism, or to acknowledge the pain of knowing that a terrorist organization is now holding Jewish babies hostage. Nope. They were a call to break their own social media ceasefire and renew their own brand of attacks on Israel. And you know what? If you really feel there is evil being done, and you want to stand and show your opposition to it, I can’t fault you for that, even if I can rightfully expect you to research it diligently and see if it jibes with reality.

No, what I question is your timing. Many – I’d dare to say most – people in this category, believing their calls to be righteous and just, don’t have a personal stake in the conflict. They are not Palestinian. They are not Israeli. They are not Muslim. They are not Jewish. They have never been to a country in the Middle East. They can launch grenades from their keyboard and not worry about the shrapnel tearing into their own skin, or the skin of their families. They are simply swept up in the tide of anti-Israel rhetoric. A tsunami of hate catalyzed by the seismic act of burning Jewish babies, gang-raping Jewish grandmothers to death, and capturing babies to take as hostage (I can’t believe I am using the word “capture” and “baby” in a sentence).

Many of the people carried on this tide are openly and aggressively antisemitic, but that’s not even my point today. My point has to do with the ones who are not. And I believe, or maybe it’s better to say I want to believe, that these are the majority. This meteoric rise in righteous indignation, nominally against Israel, is not coincidentally correlating with the meteoric rise of hate crimes against Jewish people and property, large public rallies calling for the extermination of Jews, and the consequent DEFCON 1 feeling that is permeating every Jewish person I know. There are Jewish students on campus just wanting to get to class who are being verbally and physically harassed by protestors. There are Jewish students on campus who had to lock themselves in a library to stay safe from the mob. There is now a stronger need for security presence at Jewish simchas. “Simcha” is the Hebrew word for a celebration, and in fact derives from the word for happiness. And now we need armed, visible security to experience that happiness safely. Taking down mezuzahs and hiding other outward symbols of our faith is becoming common. I’m guessing you don’t realize it, but it is your attacks on Israel that are lending support and legitimization to this open hatred of Jewish people. Even if you feel like Israel and Jews are completely separate entities in your mind, this is not the case for most people on either side of the conflict. So you are lending strength to the people who really just hate Jews. Who want to kill us. They are using your attacks to justify and fortify their hate speech, to fuel their violence, and to further their agenda to exterminate Jews. You are making them feel safe to broadcast their hatred. Think about that. You are turning dials that increase the feeling of safety for people who want to finish Hitler’s holocaust, thus simultaneously reducing the safety of Jewish people. By being complicit in equating Jewish humans with a country, you are literally dehumanizing us. And is it helping a single Palestinian in Gaza?

If this is you, your attacks on Israel aren’t making anything better for anyone whose plight you seek to remedy, only making life terrible for us. Please consider a humanitarian ceasefire, so that we can find some room to breathe, and reevaluate where our safety lies.

Because right now, it feels like nowhere is safe.

I Have Never Felt More Jewish

On October 16, which was about three and a half weeks ago, I wrote a poem titled That’s Our Daughter, and a few days later I wrote a piece titled “How Does it Feel to be Jewish”. I posted both here, in my blog.

Prior to this, I hadn’t written anything in my blog for three years. If you’ve read either of those then it’s no mystery what led me to write and post. October 7 shook us in a way that we are all still trying to metabolize. I wish we didn’t have to. But no matter how much our souls try to reject the poison, there it is. And there is no antidote. We just need to learn to function with it pulsing through our veins. Even as the world seems determined to pump more of it in.

Unlike other major events I’ve lived through in my life, I can’t tell you exactly where I was when I learned about what happened. I thought that might just be me, but I’ve read this sentiment from other Jewish people as well. I can tell you where I was when I heard about the first plane flying into the WTC tower on 9/11. I can tell you where I was when I learned that my best friend’s eight year-old son had died suddenly. Hell I can even tell you where I was when I heard that Gretzky got traded from the Oilers. But this one … nope. No idea. And I think that’s because I am still finding out. In fact, I didn’t know right away that there had been a massacre. The way news reaches me, personally, I first heard that Hamas was firing rockets into Israel again. The news of what they had done on October 7th snaked into my awareness later, very slowly. And I still wasn’t processing it. Then I saw a video of a young woman being dragged from a jeep by Hamas terrorists. She had clearly been raped. She was bleeding from her head and her crotch. And the whole thing slammed into me in that moment. She could have been my daughter. She is our daughter. I am still haunted by her reality, and the reality of her parents and family. It sent me into a depressive state I had no way to navigate, and so I did what I often do, which is to start writing.

I wrote “How Does it Feel to be Jewish” to articulate to myself how it felt. When I was finished, I was not thinking about whether it was any good. And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to click submit, and in fact almost did not. I wasn’t expecting the response it got. My Facebook post about it was shared almost a thousand times. Here on the blog site it has been viewed just under two hundred thousand times. It even got picked up by The National Post, which is surreal. Although I believe these facts, I still don’t really understand them. I have been overwhelmed by the response. I’ve received comments, private messages, texts, and even had people from my past or my family’s past reach out to tell me they read it and it touched them, and to share their own experiences. And I keep thinking, But I’m not special! But it slowly dawned on me. The response isn’t even remotely about me. It is about us. I am not special. WE ARE. Jewish people are special.

I know, I know. You want to respond with “All people are special!”. I will tell you right away – I agree. I agree with all my heart. All people are special. All of us are born with potential for profound humanity. Even now, my faith in humanity has not been shaken, even in the face of the recent cementing of my understanding of humans. Most people are good. My claim that Jewish people are special is, in fact, a result of the fact that all people are special. Any human could be born Jewish. And any human that is born Jewish will then live a life as a Jewish person. This is not a statement about religion, belief in God, observance or nationality. It’s just true. If you are born Jewish then the life you lead will be led as someone who was born Jewish. That can take you in many directions. But it can’t take you away from the fact of your birth. With rare exception, this means you become aware over time that there aren’t very many of us. In Canada we make up one percent of the population. Worldwide, it’s about two tenths of a percent. This has the effect of isolating you locally, while promoting a sense of community globally. Many of us tend to feel connected to each other precisely because there are so few. And if you are a Jewish person living today, then Israel as a modern Jewish state has been around for most and likely all of your life. No matter where you stand on the conflict, this is true. You may love Israel. You may hate Israel. You may support Israel fully or you may have criticism. But Israel has been there. October 7 was a massacre of Jews. It was deliberate murder, torture, and rape. What it has done to pretty much every Jewish person I know is manifest as an attack on our global community. And while it is deeply heartening to receive support from outside that community – and there has been plenty – we also see the hate that has been freed. We see how quickly the rape of our daughters, mothers and grandmothers has been brushed aside. We see how it catalyzed renewed calls for our extermination. The sentiment “Hitler was right” trends. Hitler didn’t try to erase Israel. It wasn’t even a country at that time. Hitler meant to erase Jews. We know what “Hitler was right” means.

We also see, as Mayim Bialik put it, the mysterious struggle some prominent institutions seem to have to find the words to condemn the terrorist acts of October 7. Or as she also said, the swiftness with which the very meaning of terrorism has been redefined by many so that it does not include the beheading of our babies. We see that clear hate speech is being tolerated under the nominal umbrella of nuance. And believe it or not, for us, it’s not even about blaming anyone, although there are plenty of institutions and even people we can blame. It’s a collective understanding that we get it. Again. The only community we can count on without reservation is ourselves.

Now, when we talk to each other, even when it has nothing to do with current events, there is a deeper connection. When we read each other’s posts and stories, from people who never had much presence on social media before, we understand. We’re like any other group of people. Some of us get along in our day-to-day and some of us don’t. We disagree with each other on many things and we agree with each other on many. But all of that has been put aside, because we understand our world in a way that I am glad others do not. We didn’t ask to be a group for whose extermination open calls can be made, without repercussion, in our home countries. We just are. So now the deepness of our connections is made manifest. A deepness many of us probably weren’t aware of.

I was at a Bat Mitzvah recently, and at the end of the service, the congregation sang Hatikvah. I went to Hebrew school for twelve years. I know the words and can sing them without conscious thought. In the thousands of times I’ve heard it or sung it, I have never been impacted by it the way I was this time. It brought me to tears. And it was not because of a connection to Israel, although anyone reading this would find that the most obvious explanation. What was in my heart at that moment was a connection to Jewish people. All of them. Everywhere.

I have never felt more Jewish.

“How Does it Feel to be Jewish?”

I’m Canadian. I was born in Montreal, spent time living in Calgary, and now reside in Toronto. My first language is English, which I speak with a weird fusion of Montreal and Calgarian accents. I’m white. I don’t “look Jewish”.

But I am.

I went to Hebrew school until the end of grade 9, when I entered the public school system. The public high school I went to was in a neighbourhood that had a high density of Jewish families, so even though I was no longer in Hebrew school, there were still plenty of Jewish kids around, though we were not the majority at the school. My friend group in high school was about 50% Jewish. We were all very close. It was a good time. We shared holidays. We experienced teenage angst. We learned to drive and we learned to derive (calculus joke – not sorry). We would not have said we were “tolerant” of each other. That would have made no sense to us. We were friends. We enjoyed our friendships. We enjoyed sharing our experience. I didn’t know how rare that was for a Jew in the diaspora because it’s all I had known. Then I went to university.

I studied mathematics at The University of Waterloo. It was, and still is, a great program. A lot of my Jewish friends chose to go to universities based on the Jewish population there, but I did not. Waterloo had the best math program, and math was my thing, so that’s where I went. Waterloo had almost no Jewish students. In all my time there I only met 3 others. And in my specific program, the Math Teaching Option, I was the only one. It didn’t bother me. I made a lot of great friends. I actually thought it was cool to experience a world outside the Jewish bubble I’d grown up in. It felt more real, because it was.

For better and for worse.

This was the first time in my life I would hold the designation “the Jewish person I know” in the eyes of many of my friends and acquaintances. Definitely not the last though. As a Jew living in Canada, you learn that’s very often what you are. You become the representative for an entire religion which has many sects, exists in many cultures, and has that country in the middle east that is in trouble all the time. People don’t generally discover that I’m Jewish right away because my Judaism is not discernible by my looks, demeanour, or dress, and I don’t lead with my name and religion anymore than anyone else does. But once they do find out, the questions start. Here are some of the questions I’ve been asked. I know you are going to think some of these are not true. I assure you they are.

“Is it true Jews love money?”

“So what’s the whole story of Israel and the Palestinians anyway? Why don’t they want peace?”

“Your nose looks normal. Did you have a nose job?”

“Do Jews really have horns and a tail? Do you shave your horns down?”

“Do Jews really use Christian blood to make the bread they eat on Passover?”

Crazy, right? But you get used to it. Sometimes I answer patiently. Sometimes I play it off as a joke. Sometimes I use sarcasm. It depends on who is asking and how I am feeling. But of all the questions I’ve been asked, the one that I always think of first when this comes up, and the one whose answer I’ve thought about most often, came from a fellow student in the Teaching Option at Waterloo. I think she was waiting for a moment when she could ask the burning question she was trying to wrap her head around. We were at a barbecue with a large group, and found ourselves sitting next to each other. She looked at me with a kind of confused wonder and asked

“So how does it feel to be Jewish? Like, to not have the love of Christ in your heart? That must feel so weird.”

I was struck right away with the understanding that to her, I was an alien. More than that, that I was an alien who knew it and knew what it would be like to be a native, was choosing not to be, and could therefore explain how it “felt” to not be something I had never experienced being. We had both grown up in Canada. We both spoke the same language and were both interested in becoming high school math teachers. We took the same classes and had occasionally worked together on the same assignments. My perspective to that moment had been that we were peers. It shifted immediately when I realized what her perspective was.

My answer at the time was to play it as a joke. I said something like “Feels amazing. Like a party in your head that never stops.”

But I wish I could go back in time and answer her properly. Here’s what I’d say.

When you’re young, it feels beautiful. You learn songs and prayers that children all over the world are learning. Every Friday night you have dinner with your extended family at your grandparents house and the food is amazing and there is so much love.

When you get a little older, you learn that there are a lot of people who will assume you’re Christian and wish you a Merry Christmas, and you should say “Thanks! Merry Christmas to you too!”

When you get a little older still, you learn that there are times when you should deliberately hide your Judaism, because even though we are proud Jews, you don’t have to advertise. You also develop an instinct for when to hide it. It’s a gut feeling. Sometimes you get it wrong though, and then you get blindsided by a visceral hate you can barely comprehend. The day I got beaten up by two kids who wanted to see my tail is a particularly painful example. I had zero clue what they were talking about. I didn’t know there were people who believed Jews had horns and a tail. I was so bewildered and scared, that if I could have shown them a tail to make them stop, I likely would have. I was 12 years old. I never told anyone.

As you get older you begin to understand that there is a significant segment of the world population that hates you. They never met you, but they hate you. They hate you so much they want to kill you. They believe once Jews are dead their problems will go away. You learn about the holocaust. You learn that’s why your uncle never talks and has a number tattooed on his arm. You learn that’s why your father has no cousins, and so you have no second cousins on your father’s side. Because even though his father was one of ten children, he was the only survivor of Hitler’s drive to exterminate Jews. You learn that during the holocaust, most non-Jews did nothing to protect their Jewish neighbours, and often betrayed them. You learn that during the holocaust, nations denied Jewish refugees entry. You learn that Canada was one of those nations. You learn that it’s history, but a history that we should never forget.

Then you learn that there are organizations whose charter it is to kill all Jews. And although they are in the Middle East, you learn that they have visible support in this endeavour all over North America. You learn to live with the low thrum of fear that someone will target you, or an institution you frequent, because of this hatred of Jews. You see it happen regularly. You learn that over the last few years in Canada, religiously motivated hate crimes have declined overall, but hate crimes against Jews have been increasing. According to Statistics Canada, they have increased by 52% since 2020.

Suddenly being the “only Jew someone knows” becomes complicated. You have a responsibility to represent all Jews. To explain Israel. To show that we’re human. I’ll say that one again: In interactions where you are the only Jew, you consciously make efforts to demonstrate that you – and by extension all Jews – are human. It’s a heavy responsibility. But you take it on. You have no choice. It’s literally about survival.

Then one day, in 2023, over 1400 Jews are massacred in a single day. Babies are murdered in front of parents. Parents are murdered in front of children. Families are burned. Woman are gang-raped and taken prisoner. It is all filmed by the people doing it so that they can share their victory with the world on social media and news sites. And in the days that follow, you watch people celebrating that it happened. You see further calls for death to Jews. You see this in Canada. Friends tell you to be balanced. Celebrities cheer the murderers. Elected politicians in North America call an event during which a terrorist is filmed cutting a Jewish child out of its mother’s womb, thus killing them both, a heroic act of resistance.

And next, the world starts accusing Jews of genocide.

That’s how it feels to be Jewish. I wish I’d told her. Though I doubt she’d have understood.

Heroes

Lately I have been thinking a lot about my heroes. In order to help clarify my thoughts, I thought a blog post might be useful. I’ll start with some clarification about the way I am applying the word “hero”, because I think it can have many meanings.

For me, a person who rushes into a burning building to save a baby is heroic, and I stand in awe of that kind of bravery, but I am not talking about that kind of hero. Then there are the people we see repeatedly doing amazing things in some specific context. For example Michael Jordan often did heroic things on the basketball court, most notably for me was game 5 of the 1997 finals when Jordan, sick with either flu or food-poisoning, still managed to lead the Bulls to victory. But I’m not talking about that kind of heroism.

What I am talking about is when I encounter someone who has amplified some trait or combination of traits I sense in myself, and that I would like to amplify as well. I could probably use the term “role model” here more aptly, but I also find that this term is not as charged with the energy I am trying to convey. The word hero works better.

When I was younger I didn’t realize this – I thought my heroes were demonstrating something I didn’t have, and that drew me to them. As I got older I started to discover that in reality what was happening was they were showing the trees that my seeds could grow into. They were showing that it works, and that it can stand you well. They were showing me that I was right to want to nurture those aspects of my character. So who are my heroes? It’s an interesting list. In many cases there is overlap, but not all. And sometimes the heroism is derived from a very narrow slice of what is undoubtedly a complicated synthesis of things I either don’t know about, or else don’t value in this sense. So I guess my list is kind of like a Frankensteinian conglomeration of pieces, each amplified, that make up the parts of me I like the best, and want to amplify.

Maybe one day I will write out the list, and do my best to identify how each person comes to be there. But today I want to talk about one hero specifically. Because she left us today, and I am feeling the loss intensely. And she is a most unlikely hero.

I’m talking about my dog, Tryxi.

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We said goodbye to her this morning. It was hell. The whole family was there, along with our wonderful vet, who loved Tryxi almost as much as we did. There’s no surprise here for any dog owner. Dog owners all understand how much we love them. And any dog owner who has lost a pet knows there are no words for the pain of that day and that moment. But she was suffering terribly, poor girl. Cancer was eating away at her from the inside out and she had lost her muscle mass, her appetite, and much of her enthusiasm. Although she was happy about people right until the last moment. She loved her people.

So let me tell you why Tryxi was my hero.

Tryxi spent most of her days in my wife’s home office, guarding my wife and the house from her doggy bed. When the four of us (my wife, myself and our two kids) would gather in the kitchen or family room for family time Tryxi always made sure she was there too, the proximity being important to her and to us. Whenever my daughter was sad, she would hug Tryxi and it would be better. Ever since my heart attack about 3.5 years ago I have had bouts of anxiety that cruelly give me chest pain. Hugging Tryxi took the pain away.

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Tryxi never tried to make anyone feel better, or better about themselves. It just happened because she accepted everything as true. If she sensed sadness she never tried to tell the person to make the sad go away. She just absorbed it. When she sensed happiness she ran with it. Tryxi never lied – to herself or to anyone. If she found something to be irritating she said so (as experienced often by our other, younger dog, Moose the pug). When she was in pain Tryxi never thought about whether it was fair or not. She never felt sorry for herself. She also never congratulated herself for anything.

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Tryxi was naturally strong. She destroyed many a Kong in her time – even the “Extreme Kong”, designed for the toughest chewers, was no match for her and lasted less than 20 minutes. Her thighs rippled with muscle even when she wasn’t moving. And yet Tryxi never, ever, used her strength to hurt anyone or anything. She would use it readily to establish her presence, or to solve a problem, but never in aggression. Tryxi knew exactly who she was without anyone having to tell her, and certainly without having to have conversations with herself about it. If she liked something she loved it. If she didn’t like something she ignored it. Her default position was love and calm. Anything that happened that took her away from that place was always viewed as a temporary distraction, and she would deal with it then patiently wait the return to baseline. Without judgement or remorse. Even as she was deteriorating, her attitude stayed like that. She was waiting for her peace.

This morning she found it. She knew it was coming and she wasn’t afraid. It was what she was waiting for.

Tryxi has been my hero for years. I am changed because of her – because she showed me that I could amplify those traits that I saw in myself. I do my best to calmly accept the moment. To live now. To enjoy the love that is always there. To bring peace to others. To not judge. To not waste energy fretting over what is “fair” and instead to use my energy to live fully.

She was a good girl. She is my hero.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Gracefully Honest

In this blog I will talk about honesty – something I think many well-intentioned people struggle with. This is because sometimes it seems like lying is the right thing to do – and in some rare cases, it is. To paraphrase Sam Harris, when Nazis came looking for Anne Frank and her family, anyone lying about them not being hidden in the building was certainly doing the right thing.

That said, in all but the most extreme cases, people choose dishonesty for misguided reasons. This happens because sometimes the truth hurts. In fact, sometimes, truth is used as a weapon.

The confusion is, in part, because while honesty can be a good thing, there is no guarantee that it always is. Honesty must be wielded virtuously, which is not automatic. In fact on its own, honesty is not a virtue.

Honesty is not a virtue

In classical antiquity, there are the four cardinal virtues. In brief, here they are (these definitions are mine – for more formal details, check this link):

  • Prudence: The ability to judge the appropriateness of a possible course of action.
  • Courage: The strength to act in the presence of fear.
  • Temperance: The exercise of restraint in feeding an appetite.
  • Justice: The purest form of fairness, in a righteous sense.

So honesty is not a cardinal virtue. Now over the centuries, philosophers and theologians have added more virtues to the cardinal four. Of these there are three that I think are moral necessities. These are “love”, “charity” and “kindness”.

Still, on it’s own, honesty is not there. This is because honesty can be used morally (specifically in the context of love, charity and kindness), but it can also inflict pain – intentionally or not. Let’s have a look at that second situation first – the “brutal” honesty.

Brutal honesty

“I am going to be brutally honest with you.”

How many times have you encountered that sentiment? How many times have you said it? Let’s stop to consider what it prefaces: that the person is about to lay some bit of perspective on you that they know is going to hurt.

This is usually justified by the idea that you are deluded somehow, and need to “snap” out of it. Or you need a “hard” dose of reality. Or any other number of violent paradigm shifts the perpetrator feels they are uniquely prepared to impose. Because, after all, the world is full of people willing to coddle you, creating the need for someone righteous enough to tell you the truth, even though it will hurt.

This is bullshit.

This “brutal” honesty is really an attempted behaviour modification through punishment. The shock it is expected to impose is designed to somehow shine light on a deficiency in perception, so that you cease your persistence in pursuing some vision. A vision which, according to the person with the flashlight, is a fantasy. It tends to come from a place of anger and – make no mistake – is meant to make you suffer for whatever pain your apparent delusion has been causing them.

People who use this phrase like to project pride in their willingness to use it. You may hear them boast such claims as “Hey, I call it like I see it”, or “I’m a straight-shooter”. It comes with admonishments like “The truth hurts”, or “If you don’t want to hear the truth then you don’t want to be around me”. They may be offering honest assessments, but they are nested in dishonest motivation, even though the motivation is sitting right there in the phrase. Brutal is not a nice word.

Definition of brutal
“Brutal.” Merriam-Webster.com, Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brutal. Accessed Mar. 2017.

Check out that definition. There is nothing in there that speaks to any kind of morality or good intention, and certainly nothing virtuous. Even the entry about brutal truth contains no compassion. Accurate? Yes. But unpleasantly and incisively so.

So then someone who prefaces the delivery of truth with “I am going to be brutally honest” is – by their own admission – embarking on a non-virtuous wielding of honesty as a weapon to deliver misery. I propose that in the vast majority of situations, the fundamental reason for this is that even though they are using the word, they are not being honest about their own motivation – the desire to be brutal.

But I don’t want to be brutal!

It’s okay – I know. This notion of brutal honesty leads to a concern from good people who don’t want to be brutal. There is a perception that if the truth is brutal, or perhaps unsavoury, then a lie would be better. Keep in mind though that lies come with a heightened anxiety of their being discovered. This often leads to uncomfortable situations, where additional and more elaborate lies are needed to maintain the facade of truth.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way to be honest and virtuous. I call it “graceful honesty”.

Honesty with grace

First, let’s have a look at the definition of grace, so that you can understand why I chose that word. Grace has many meanings, so I have highlighted the ones I am applying in this context:

Definition of grace
“Grace.” Merriam-Webster.com, Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grace. Accessed Mar. 2017.

Recall earlier, when I spoke about the three virtues of “love”, “charity” and “kindness”. In many ways, the word grace encapsulates these, and so I choose it to describe the type of honesty I mean.

First, be honest with yourself

Graceful honesty isn’t difficult, but it does require some practice if you are not in the habit. The key to it is when you find yourself either tempted to be dishonest, or about to be brutally honest, you stop and spend some time being honest with yourself first. If your motivations are virtuous, then there will be a way to communicate honestly with grace. Conversely, if your intentions are nefarious, then hopefully you will be honest with yourself about that and choose some other course, having recognized the toxicity of your initial instinct. The key then, is to use self-reflection to uncover and put words to your motivation. I don’t want to use too many specific examples here, because it is easy to make arguments about the inaccuracy of an example as it applies to yourself, and then decide the concept is flawed, but I’ll indulge in one in the hope that it will be a good springboard.

Dinner at Kelly’s

Suppose you have been invited to dinner at your friend Kelly’s house, and you just don’t feel like going. The likelihood is that if you decide not to go, you will fabricate an excuse. Further, the excuse probably has a half-life greater than a few hours. What I mean by that is that it’s probably a concocted scenario that will likely be referred to at a later date. For example, you may claim “my kid is sick”, which you can bet Kelly will ask about in the next day or two, and may even ask your child. In this case you will have to remember the excuse so that you don’t accidentally contradict it later, and you may even have to recruit your family to perpetuate the dishonesty – something they are more likely to forget about, since they are not vested in the lie. Result? Anxiety.

Instead, consider this. You really do value your friendship with Kelly. You also don’t feel like going. Before choosing to be dishonest, you can spend some time in honest self-reflection. Why don’t you want to go? Be super analytical about that. You may discover that you actually do want to go, or you will confirm that you don’t. If you truthfully don’t want to go, you will now be better able to put into words what the real reason is, which will of necessity consist of the factors that are outweighing your legitimate desire to spend time with Kelly.

If you tell Kelly exactly that reason, and if Kelly is a good human, she will understand, because you have been fully honest and presented the reason in full context of how you struggled with the decision. She will appreciate the conflict, and understand the conclusion, even if she is disappointed.

But wait you say! I know Kelly! She would never understand! She would just be insulted! Well, I’m not foolish. I know this is also a possibility. But here’s the thing: this is only the current state of your relationship because of a history of implicit dishonesty about motivation. Which means there is room for more honesty – on her part and on yours. See, if at the core you both value each other and the friendship, then you mean no insult, and so how can she be insulted? And the core is all that actually matters – because it is impossible that either of you wants the other to be upset. That core exists, and honesty will land you there. Graceful honesty.

Graceful honesty doesn’t mean everyone is happy

In the example above, Kelly is probably going to be disappointed. You might also. That may seem contrary to virtue, but it isn’t. Not if you were honest about the factors that outweighed your desire to go. Disappointment isn’t a monster to be avoided at all costs. It’s a natural consequence of not being able to implement more than one choice at a time.

One of the great contributors to dishonesty is a desire to keep everyone happy – or at least not miserable. But it’s a trap. Lying by definition creates a false narrative. Perpetuating this to maintain a state of happiness, in fact maintains a state of delusion. One from which the participants (barring tragedy) must eventually emerge, and who’s discovery is unlikely to legitimize the illusion of peace they were enjoying. Put simply, the lie just sets everyone up for a bigger fall.

But life isn’t about being happy all the time! We all know this. We all experience negative emotions like sadness, anger, and disappointment. For the most part we don’t let these things impact the zoomed-out graph of our lives. Yet we find ourselves willing to skirt honesty with others to somehow shield them from these normal experiences.

Have you ever said something to someone in anger that you later regret? I’m betting you have. I’m betting some if it was pretty damn poisonous, and required a lot of apology, replete with the sentiment “I didn’t mean it”. But is that really true? More specifically, does “I didn’t mean it” mean the same thing as “it wasn’t true”?

My experience tells me that what we are really trying to say is “I regret using honesty to hurt you – it isn’t consistent with how I feel about you.” This can be about something you’ve been holding in for a while, or it can be about an emotion that was real in that moment, instigated by the anger. For example, “I hate you!” during an argument isn’t totally untrue, just imprecise: it really means “I hate this feeling I’m having right now that you are causing”, and it is 100% true. It is also 100% forgivable, because it is 100% understandable.

If you think about this for a while, you will see that the real mistake is not being honest earlier, when graceful honesty would have worked: “I love you, and I’m in it for the long haul, but I do get irritated when you don’t put the cap on the toothpaste. I do not equate this behaviour with you, and my irritation is therefore not aimed at you, but the behaviour.”

That last quote is wordy and annoying, I know. But it’s the idea I am trying to communicate, not a recipe for how to tell your husband to put the damn cap on the toothpaste. Very often we don’t disclose little irritants like that because we are concerned it will be taken as criticism of a loved one we don’t want to hurt, as opposed to observation of a behaviour that is independent of the reasons we care about the person exhibiting it. Graceful honesty would disclose all of that, and keep the barbs from growing onto a club that could be wielded in anger.

See, hiding the truth is silly. We are all in this reality together. We should share it. All of it.

Honesty is the sharing of reality.

Think about it. How can honesty be anything else? But as I said earlier, to do it with grace requires a deeper searching of our own motives than we normally do. So the next time you feel like a lie is warranted (or if you are tempted to inflict pain with truth), ask yourself why. What is motivating you? Who are you trying to protect? Who are you trying to help? When you feel the truth needs to be hidden, put away the issue whose truth is troubling you for a moment and look at the feeling itself – it will be the source of the honesty you should embrace. The reality you should share. It is the only way to build and maintain relationships that have value.

Thanks for reading,

Rich

Open-Mindedness

Recently I have been thinking a lot about why so many people seem inconvincible of certain things which I hold to be true. And while I could certainly make a list of some of these things, that is not the intention of this blog entry. Instead, I have been reflecting on open-mindedness and wanted to share.

Many people – myself included – often enter into discourse with someone of a differing opinion with the intention of convincing them to change their mind. For example, maybe your friend Paul thinks all trees in your neighborhood that are taller than 12 feet should be pruned to 12 feet or less, so as not to obstruct anyone’s view of the lakefront. You know that he’s clearly wrong! You get into a discussion. Only it’s not really a discussion – it’s an argument each of you is trying to win. Maybe out of frustration you start incorporating personal attacks. Maybe you get so angry at Paul’s refusal to capitulate, as well as the horrible things he is saying about you, that it ends your friendship. Maybe in the middle of the night, Paul prunes all of your tall trees. Maybe the next night you erect a 30 foot statue on your lawn directly in Paul’s line of sight to the lake … and so on.

It’s sad, and you don’t even like the statue, but what choice is there? Paul must be taught a lesson.

I wish this was hyperbole. Sadly, it is not. And the conclusion is clearly suboptimal.

Well … let me construct a basis for discussion with some (hopefully) fair assumptions. In doing so I’m going to have to use a little bit of math terminology, and it occurs to me that some people might not know precisely what I mean, or even be put-off by some of my more mathematical references. If you think this might be the case, I ask you to bear with me. The concepts and symbols I use are the best way for me to illustrate my point, and I’ve included here a bit of a math lesson, in case it is not something you’ve encountered in your life – it will clarify some of the words and concepts I use for the rest of this article. Of course, if you feel there’s no need for you to read this section, by all means scroll past it and keep reading (I won’t feel bad).

Some Math concepts

Sets
Mathematicians like to talk about collections of values that are somehow related, and when they do, they use the word set. We use curly brackets to list the objects (known as elements) of a set. So for example the set F=\{apple, orange, banana, kiwi, peach, nectarine\} is a set I have named F, and just so you know, it is the set containing all the fruits I might bring to work with me in my lunch. A subset of a set S is another set that only contains elements from S. So for example M=\{apple, kiwi\} is the set of fruits I brought to work in my lunch on Monday, and is a subset of F. On the other hand, A=\{apple, pineapple, banana\} is not a subset of F.

A Little Bit of Algebra (Apologies to the Arithmophobic)
Consider this simple algebra equation:
\displaystyle 3x+4y=7
The x and y are understood to be symbolic of numbers, but the use of symbols mean that they vary – which is to say, they are variable. The equation is a statement. In this particular statement,
x = 1, y=1
would be a valid solution (i.e., the equation becomes true), since
3\times 1 + 4\times 1=7.
So would
x = 5, y=-2,
since
3\times 5 + 4\times (-2)=7.
However
x = 5, y=2
would not be a solution (i.e., the equation becomes false), since
3\times 5 + 4\times 2=23,
which is not 7.

Statements
In math and philosophy, a statement is a sentence that must either be true or false (but not both, and not maybe). Very often the truth value (i.e., “true” or “false”) of the statement depends on values for variables contained in the statement. The algebra equation above is a statement. Another example is the statement “I like cheese”, which contains two variables: “I”, and “cheese”. If the “I” refers to “Rich Dlin” (i.e., it is me speaking and not you), and the “cheese” refers to “Havarti”, then the statement is true. If the “I” is “Rich Dlin”, and the “cheese” is “Cambozola”, the statement (I promise you) is false. Notice that if the “cheese” were to refer to “gingerbread cookie” the statement would be nonsense, since “gingerbread cookie” is not a cheese – even though it is true that I like gingerbread cookies, it is irrelevant in the context of this statement. A mathematician would say “gingerbread cookie” is not an element of the set of all cheeses. Going back to the algebra example, {(1,1),(3,-2)} is a subset of the set of solutions to the equation given. The actual set has an infinite number of solutions in it, but that’s more than I need to talk about here. What I will say is that the truth value of the statement “Three times John’s favorite number plus four times Gail’s favorite number will yield seven” is:

True if (“John’s favorite number“, “Gail’s favorite number“) belongs to the set of solutions of 3x + 4y = 7,

False if (“John’s favorite number“, “Gail’s favorite number“) does not belong to the set of solutions of 3x + 4y = 7, and

Nonsense if, for example, John claims his favorite number is “cinnamon“. Be on the lookout for nonsense – it is surprisingly common.


The Assumptions
Ok. Welcome back. Here are the assumptions I was talking about:

All questions have a right answer …
… when the answer is justified properly with a well framed statement.
The truth value of the statement may be subject to variables that change which answer is correct, but with a fixed set of values for the variables, there is a right answer. For example, the question “Should all trees taller than 12 feet in our neighborhood be pruned?” could be answered “Yes”, justified with the statement “It is unacceptable for some trees in our neighborhood to block sight lines to the lakefront”. Note that here the answer to the question is “yes” if the statement is true, and “no” if the statement is false, and may reasonably depend on whether or not the tree is also so wide, or part of a grove, as to make it impossible for a resident to see the lakefront from a different angle standing on the same property. It may also depend on whether 12 feet is a reasonable height with respect to whether or not sight lines get blocked. In this case these variables need to be introduced into the statement, or else agreed upon as not being variable.

The right answer may well not be knowable …
 … even with the variable values fixed – which doesn’t mean there is no right answer!
As an example, consider the question “How many humans are alive on Earth right now?”

  • The number changes many times in a short span of time. So the truth value of the answer depends on what time it is indexed to.
  • The answer is subject to a definition of “alive”, and the answers to whether or not some organisms are living humans are in dispute.
  • “On” Earth needs to be defined. If I am in an airplane, am I on Earth? What if I am in low orbit?
  • However there is an answer, if we fix the variables.
  • There is currently no way, even with the variables fixed, to know the answer.

Knowing the truth is inherently valuable.
This is a big one. Many people demonstrate by their behavior that they do not adhere to this assumption. A simple example is the person who refuses to go to the doctor about a problem because they are afraid of what they might find out. In some ways, not wanting to know the truth is a human quality, especially in situations where a false belief has spawned an entire tree of values and beliefs we have been living by. If the root belief is false, what happens to the tree?

When it Comes to Truth, What We Want Doesn’t Matter
So with these assumptions, my position is that for any belief I hold, I am either right or wrong, and that I may not be able to tell. So then what am I to make of someone who disagrees? Can I immediately conclude that they are wrong? Clearly not. However I freely admit I want them to be wrong, so that I don’t have to be. After all, being wrong has some negative implications. On a fairly benign end it means I have been somehow deluded, which injures my pride. On an extreme end it may mean I have to discard an entire tree of conclusions that were premised on my error, leaving behind a buzzing hive of uncomfortable questions and observations about my previous behavior. But if the root belief is actually wrong, what choice do I really have? Since it is rooted in falsehood, the whole tree is an illusion anyway.

Here is a hard truth: What we want has nothing to do with what is true. I want there to be peace in the Middle East. But there is not peace in the Middle East, and no amount of wishing on my part, no matter how fervent, can alter the truth value of this or any other statement. On the other hand, what is true can and should definitely impact what I want. What we all want.

Ok. Here is another statement that is tautologically true: In the set of things I hold to be true, some might be false. And from a probability perspective, I am also comfortable saying that in the set of things I hold to be true, some are true, and some are false. I want to say “most are true and some are false”, but I am honestly not sure I have a reasonable argument to claim that, so we’ll leave it there as a desire more than a fact.

Shades of Gray
Now I will focus on statements where the truth depends on fixing values for the variables in the statement., which to me is the core of the shades of gray argument: In cases where there is a continuum of possibilities between true and false, almost everything in the set of things I hold to be true lies somewhere within the boundaries of the continuum, rather than on one of the ends.

Here a philosopher or mathematician might (and should!) argue that there can be no continuum between true and false, since those are binary options. My response is that I am talking about a sphere of reasonable answers centered on the truth, where anything outside the sphere is easily demonstrated to be false (or worse, nonsense), but things get a little more touchy inside the sphere. This is a consequence of my point about the truth of a statement depending on fixing values for variables the statement depends upon. To elaborate on this, I am going to define something called an assumption set.

Assumption Set
Suppose a statement depends on a set of variables. For example, consider the statement “Running is good for you.” The truth of this is not absolute. It depends on some variables:

  • How much running (the quantity of the running)?
  • How intense (the quality of the running)?
  • What preconditions do you have that running would exacerbate (e.g, bad knees, asthma, heart problems)?
  • Where do you plan to do your running (road, track, beach)?
  • and many more.

So before we could discuss whether the statement is true, we would have to fix values for these variables. I call these fixed values the assumption set. So for example an assumption set for this statement could be
R=\{45 minutes per day, at 80\% of maximum heart rate, \{sensitive to sunlight, plantar fasciitis\}, track\}.
Notice that one of the elements (the preconditions) in this assumption set is itself a set – that’s completely acceptable. On the whole, I would judge this assumption set to be a reasonable one – which is to say, the elements of the set have a probability associated with them that makes them not unexpected in the context of discussing the claim that “Running is good for you.”
Another assumption set could be
S=\{15 hours per day, at 120\% of maximum heart rate, \{multiple hip replacements, torn Achilles tendon\}, Interstate Highways\}.
On the whole, I would judge this assumption set to be very unreasonable – which is to say, it is highly improbable that this would be an assumption set on which the claim “Running is good for you” would be a relevant discussion.

Reasonable Answers (Approximately True?)
A reasonable answer to a question can be defined as a statement that is true when evaluated with a plausible assumption set. That is to say, the assumption set is comprised of elements that have probabilities high enough that if we observed them we would not be surprised. In situations where the variables are in constant flux, the approximate truth value of a statement may be argued as the one that holds given the most likely assumption set. In cases like this, we may generalize a statement as true, while being willing to challenge it in the face of a game-changing assumption set. We maybe won’t talk about who gets to define “plausible”, even though there are times when that becomes the most relevant thing.

Arguing(?) With an Open Mind
Here I have chosen to use the word “arguing”, even though in truth I prefer the word “discussing”. That’s because most people seem to think that discussions between people in disagreement need to be arguments. I disagree. Remember the assumption that we are not right about everything? And remember the assumption that knowing the truth is inherently valuable? These two should premise every discussion we enter into. So when discussing the answers to questions, or the truth about statements, we need to do our best to remember that what we are trying to do is get as close to the center of the sphere as possible, because that is a good thing to do, and because we may not be there yet.

Of course, we all think we are closer than an opponent. If not, we wouldn’t be having the discussion in the first place. But keeping in mind that if two people are in disagreement, one of them must be wrong, a productive conversation is one where at the end of it the parties have converged on something they both hold to be as close to true as they can see getting. When this happens, the world gets a win. I’ll list some techniques for true open-mindedness.

Discussing With an Open Mind

  1. Remember that you might be wrong.
    Put another way, be willing to change your mind, or adjust the approximate truth of what you believe.
    See, you believe that you are probably right. You may even believe that you are certainly right (although for the truly reflective, certainty is a pretty difficult thing to attain). But your opponent has the same thoughts. Both of you probably have many reasons for these. And they probably have a lot to do with assumption sets, and which one of you is applying the most plausible set. Sometimes the discussion is not about the truth of the statement but on the plausibility of the assumption set. Keep that in mind. Yours may be the less plausible. Or maybe both assumption sets are equally plausible, in which case the statement can be split into two (or more) more detailed statements that include some of the differing assumptions explicitly. But keep in mind that emotional attachment to an assumption set can and will blind you to the plausibility of an alternate set, and ultimately cause you to refute a statement with unreasonable (even fanatical) obstinacy.
  2. Have higher expectations for yourself than you do for your opponent.
    This means you need to challenge yourself to inspect the assumptions and claims of yourself and your opponent objectively, even if they are not doing the same thing. When you do this – and do it out loud – they hear that. Look at elements of the assumption sets and objectively evaluate their probability. Also evaluate whether they change the truth value of the statement or not. And be prepared to evaluate whether or not they render the statement as nonsense – this happens surprisingly often but it’s not obvious until it is isolated. Discussing things this way models a behavior that is necessary for the two of you to converge on a conclusion you both agree with. And if you are consistent with it, your opponent will often adopt the same style, if only because they think this is the way to convince you they are right.
  3. Thank your opponent, regardless of the outcome.
    I don’t mean this as a politeness. I mean this in the most sincere sense. Any opportunity we get to reflect on our set of beliefs is valuable. Sometimes your opponent and you will converge. Sometimes you will not, and they leave the exchange completely unmoved, perhaps even claiming “victory”. This is sad, since the only true victory would be a convergence of opinion, but ultimately it is not relevant to your own experience. Make it so that if you have moved on a topic, it is because you discovered something you were not considering, or were considering incorrectly, and now you are closer to the center of the sphere of truth. If you do not move, make it because you were not presented with any strong evidence that you needed to. In either case your beliefs will have been strengthened in some way, either because you changed to something as a result of new insight, or because you were challenged in some way, and it was unsuccessful. For this you have your opponent to thank.

How to Spot Real Open-Mindedness
Many people claim to be open-minded. It may be true, or it may be a trick (some people say it so that when you fail to convince them of something it will prove they were right). True open-mindedness doesn’t mean you are ready to believe anything. It means you are willing to change your mind when presented with evidence that objectively compels you to do so. If you know of (or are) someone who has changed their mind in the moment, during rational discourse, but who was fairly slow to do so, they are probably the type of person I am describing. This goes back to my point that we are probably not right about everything we believe. Which means mind-changing can occur. Which means if you’ve seen it occur, it occurred in someone with an open mind.

Thanks for reading,

Rich