“To me, it’s about systems and complexity,” said Dr. Keshet to me across the cafe table at Union Square. “I’m interested in seeing how individuals adapt to collective information and vice versa.”
Itay is an ER-doctor-in-training at the New York Hospital in Queens. (He prefers to be called “Ty” because, he explains, his full name sounds rather vulgar when pronounced phonetically.) He was born in Israel, lost his mother and raised himself in a warehouse in Toronto, broke the law and got arrested in Las Vegas, restarted his life as a soldier on the West Bank, saved lives in Indonesia, played samba music in Brazil, went back to college at the age of twenty-one to study evolutionary biology and do graduate research in neuroscience, became a local musical celebrity with his nonprofit organization “Streets Are for People,” graduated from medical school in Australia, and now he stays up days and nights to fix broken limbs and collapsed organs in an emergency room in Jamaica, Queens. He also happens to be my husband.
Okay. Not my real husband.Ty and I got “married” last year at Surreal Estate, an artist/activist collective full of freegans and anarchists in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Given the countercultural politics of the place, ours was a spectacular anti-wedding: a bike parade full of colorfully-adorned Bohemians, with my dear friend “Johnny Bubonic” dressed as Death with a scythe, pulling the two of us in a shoddily-crafted, dumpstered go-cart: our newly-wed carriage.
At the time, Ty was volunteering in an ER room in a poor neighborhood in the South Bronx. He told me he wanted to practice medicine in the U.S. because in Canada, he was afraid he would get stationed somewhere he would prefer not to be, like the Yukon, since Canadian doctors are public servants and have little control of where they are initially assigned to work. Ty preferred to choose his own hardship, and locate himself in the worst neighborhoods of NYC. Since I attended a ghetto public school on the Grand Concourse and grew up in the NYCHA projects of East Harlem, I sympathized with his social justice aims. Ty said he needed to be a U.S. citizen in order to practice in the states, and asked if I would marry him. It sounded kind of fishy to me at the time, but I’m a Chinese immigrant and therefore quite familiar with fishy: familiar with the “Paper Wife” phenomenon, and happy to extend the analogy to a MD-bearing save-the-world Paper Husband, “a Jewish doctah” – every Chinese mother’s dream. At the time, I was also reading Engels, and thinking about the institution of monogamous marriage as a form of inherent injustice to women, so I enthusiastically embraced ways to “subvert the Patriarchy” by exploiting marriage for its legal benefits, ignoring its “oppressive social, material, and religious constructions.” I figured since I wasn’t doing anything with my coveted American marriage privilege at the time, when Ty popped the question, I said, “Sure thing, man.”
We had a crazy, surreal wedding, with a Do-It-Yourself/pots-and-pans participatory music jam, and a cross-dressing rabbi wearing gold tzitzis (Talmudic tassels) dangling over blue polka-dotted shorts. But we never actually went through with the court process in the end, for fear of unpleasant legal consequences.
One year later, Ty is working in Queens (he legally married a lovely West Virginian lady), and I am back in college, and we met at Barnes and Noble in Union Square, where Patti Smith was giving a poetry reading.
Okay. Now after this indulgent little cheeseball-story, here’s where I’ll start getting to the real themes of this blog, by examining the complexity of moral decision-making and creating environments of “Good”:
Of course, it’s bad to break the law and screw with the government. But is it bad to want to be an ER doctor at one the poorest hospitals in a cosmopolitan city of great class division? It may be bad to shun the Yukon, which also deserves competent doctors. But should a new MD who has paid immense dues studying in another country, Australia, have a right to choose which foreign country he serves, especially if his aim is to help a greater number of people by working in a more densely populated area? Also, is it wrong to want to help such an individual by breaking a law?
What about hipster anarchists in Brooklyn, creating idealistic art communes to better the world, which inevitably gentrify or white-wash the low-income Hispanic neighborhood they have pushed into, that does not understand or welcome them, because these hip and trendy party animals lead the wave of social injustice that they are simultaneously and hypocritically protesting? And what about libertarian socialism, Chomsky’s golden dogma, the misunderstood contemporary “anarchist” who is more often a bookish librarian with gentle utopian ideals than a bomb-happy black-masked terrorist – what’s good about that whole movement? What’s bad? How does that ideological system even work? (More on this in another entry.)
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“I’m starting a blog project on good and bad environments in New York City. I was wondering if I could interview you. Can you tell me, from your experience growing up: what makes a good environment for growing a healthy, moral, and happy human being and citizen? What makes a bad environment?”
I popped this question over coffee.
“Well, first we’d have to define what good and bad is,” Ty replied, “And that’s a heavy topic.”
Ty begins to arrange the objects on the table to create a visual aid for me, in preparation for his heavy lecture. He slides over to me a cup of whole milk, and places a thick napkin underneath it. “So I did my graduate research on retinal ganglion cells,” he began, “These cells are the first agents of the central nervous system that help determine the Edge of a visual image.”
What’s the Edge?
“Well imagine a sunset,” said Ty. “There’s the sun,” he points to the cup of milk, “and there are the oranges and blues of the sky, the colors of the sunset in that area of the sky that is just beginning to change,” he points to the white napkin and the brown table. ”In order for our eyes to perceive of each of these gradient colors as separate entities, we need to impose order upon the stimuli that we get from these objects, and establish a sort of boundary, where one color ends and another begins.
“But in reality, there’s no clear boundary,” Ty continues, “Actually, there are lots of specs of bright red among the orange, and lots of orange among the blue, and if we were to focus on each of these separate specs in the mosaic separately, we would be unable to tell what the gradations of the sky are. But the retinal ganglion cells help to order these images by eliminating bad data that it perceives as static, irrelevant, contrary to the picture, in order to help create an Edge, a visual boundary that creates our understanding of groups of stimuli as separate, independent objects.”
“The retinal ganglion cells do this work of recognizing good data and ignoring bad data even before the signals reach the brain. It’s a completely unconscious and reflexive process, so we do are not aware of it happening. If we were, we would become very confused, and it would be very hard for us to identify objects.” Because we would be so caught up in the empirical analysis of things that we wouldn’t be able to see the overall picture.
“So the retinal ganglion cells impose order on image, reflexively, even before our brain begins to process these images consciously.”
That’s a human need, explained Ty, to create order. Order is beautiful. Disorder and chaos is ugly. But order is mechanically imposed by the eye, and we human beings are helpless but to do it: to impose beauty upon our lives. That is the Good.
And there are physical, biological properties of the human organ, the eye, that makes it find certain arrangements more pleasing than other arrangements, Ty explained, “Like the golden ratio in nature. We all see the world using a common tool [the eye], so we all share a common bias, and this bias is biological. Beauty is order on a biological level.”
Disorder is like static. Bad data points that contradict our imposed image are blocked out, so we don’t even perceive them. “The eye inhibits stray reports, artificially ordering the world we see.” Creating laws of morality, laws of society, laws of beauty, philosophies of being; creating lessons embodied in stories: “This is a basic symptom of the need to create beauty, to create order.” And this is Good.
—-
Notions of morality and beauty come reflexively from our own perceptions, and are imposed upon our lives, to help us recognize and create order in our world; yet our perceptions are largely biologically determined, in accordance with the evolutionary accidents of our species, so they are often shared across humanity. Ty calls these helpless human acts of imposing beauty on the world and desiring to live in accordance with the impositions: Good.
“But of course, there are individual variations. Not everyone sees everything the same way. That is why we usually dismiss the idea of Good and Bad as being relative,” Ty exerts.
So you don’t think Good and Bad is relative?
“Well, no. There are certain variations in perception on issues of complexity, but there are greater overarching biological inclinations that dictate common human responses.”
We share 99.99 percent of our genetics with other members of our species. This strongly dictates what we find pleasing: ethically, aesthetically, socially. Like murder: that’s a definite no-no that everyone can agree upon. But the seven deadly sins? How many of them seem truly deadly? What about those variations in areas of complexity? How do we decide what is Good and what is Bad in those places of ambiguity? How do our many independent minds with different perceptions within a species come upon a common decision on what to do as a society? How do we collectively decide upon what is “Good” in areas characterized by a blurry and ambivalent Edge?
“For my undergraduate thesis,” Ty began, “I wrote about bees and ants: how the hive decides on new places to live when an old place is overcrowded. Individual members of the group have to go out to scout the different options that are available and communicate their opinions to the group. The group ‘votes’ on these options and decide on the best option together. It’s a somewhat democratic process.”
Bees reach a point of population overload, where there are too many bees in a hive, and a new queen is born. At this point, half of the colony must split up and find a new place to create a new nest for the new queen. They must do this quickly, before the honey in the nest runs out. However, since bees are creatures of the air, with precarious nests that perch upon trees, it is of utmost importance that they choose a Good location: on a stable branch, in a good environment, relatively hidden away from predatory birds. Finding the best possible location is very important since they can not afford to make a mistake, so many scouts go out and come back with different messages. How do they collectively choose the best possible option from various individual sources of information?
One worker bee goes out and scouts around until he finds a good potential spot. He goes back and communicates this message in a series of movements called the “waggle” dance, communicating distance, height, and direction through variables in his figure eight motion. He communicates how positive, or how Good the location he found is through the number of times he repeats his dance. Other bees copy him. So if the place is deemed a very positive location for a new nest, the finder-bee will dance for a longer period of time, thereby making it more likely that other bees will copy him and pass the wave of information along. When the whole hive reaches a tipping point of action, when the majority of bees are dancing in agreement, and the nest heats up to a threshold temperature, all the bees will head in the direction of their dance, having reached a collective decision based on individual insight.
Ants do a similar thing when they have to search for a new nest. But because they are on the ground, and are more susceptible to being attacked by predators, it is more important for them to find a quick solution that is not very far away. They do not invest as much as bees do in creating a home, so they have less to lose if their new nest is sub-optimal, because so long as they have not lost too many lives, they can always move again to a new location when disaster strikes. Given their differing priorities, ants and birds communicate the “Good” in different ways.
Ants communicate through pheromones, chemical “smells” that they pass on to one another. The ants will go out to find good spots, and after they’ve found a spot, they will come back, and “pick up” other ants along the way home, by passing over the smell and convincing the other ants to climb onto their backs. The strongest and most competent ant will come home with the most ants on its back, and so its group will bear a stronger pheromone scent, and its opinion will be more influential than that of a weaker ant. Therefore the decision-making process for ants is not a participatory democracy like that of the bees; in fact, it’s a meritocracy, favoring the best qualified ant for leadership.
Since there is a higher risk of predatory attack for ants on the ground than for bees in the air, it is more important for the decision made to be expedient than perfect, so there is a lesser need for democracy and accuracy, made possible by the bee dance-debate, and more emphasis is placed on going quickly to the nearest place as chosen by the most competent member of the ant colony.
So bees and ants seem to determine what is “Good” for the colony in different ways due to different biological needs. The individual perception influences the collective will, which influences individual action, in a complex discourse.
—–
Bees have a more democratic collective decision-making process, and ants are more oligarchic? (Ty nods.) Does that mean that bees are actually better decision-makers because they take more time to find the correct path of action, as confirmed by everyone in the hive?
“Well, yes and no,” Ty replied. “Like many other things determined by popularity, timing is crucial. A bad choice suggested in the beginning of the decision-making process will gain more momentum over time and be more influential than a good choice suggested at the end of the process, which simply does not have enough time to gain momentum.”
So sometimes bees will choose a less-than-optimal choice for a new nest simply because that idea has been circulating around for a longer time, and more bees are copying that idea when the collective reaches a tipping point of body heat. Luck plays a large role.
Obviously bad ideas will be rooted out because other bees will not copy the dance. But okay ideas brought up in the beginning of the “discussion” may reach a fair amount of momentum before a new, better idea is brought to the hive, and by that time, it may be too late to change the decision of the hive because the first idea had too much of a head start.
So like Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” idea, and like the web 2.0 dynamics of crowd-sourcing information (for example on Wikipedia), the mechanism of a trend does not necessarily correspond with finding the best solution. Timing and luck play a crucial role, too, in beehive democracy.
As I was leaving Barnes and Noble, I briefly thumbed through the first chapters of a book by Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. The book criticizes the arbitrary evolution of software language, how certain solutions that may not be the best possible solutions to a cognitive problem, such as the choosing of “files” to organize information in the Mac, become standardized over time, and new language become written on top of the old language, making it difficult to change practices that are suboptimal because so many new advances have taken place. Thus, many other choices that were just as good or maybe even better become “rooted out” in the evolution of the computer system, just as features in the biological evolution of the human species have often been accidental, with each step in evolution rooting out other possibilities that might have been just as Good.
“Complex adaptive systems,” Ty explained enthusiastically. “The outcome of one choice indirectly impacts so many other factors in so many ways that are impossible to completely account for. So it is very hard to point out the cause and effect of anything, as in the Newtonian model. Instead, everything is very interrelated, very arbitrary, and very complex.”
That’s Good.
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Well, now that we’ve figured out what Good is and isn’t, how do you characterize your own upraising? Which were good environments and which were bad environments? – I asked Ty, after squeezing my brow through all of his fascinating, but rather tangential, explanations of biologically-based ethics.
“That’s hard to say. When I was a kid, home with my dad was a bad environment after my mom passed away. He lost his will to stand up straight and started taking it out on me and my little sister.”
Ty ran away from home at age sixteen and started making a living “phreaking” or hacking old telephone systems that were based on the mechanical wiring model (not electronic or digital, so the lines were mechanically connected together when a phone call was made. It was possible to “tap” into those BBS wares with a “Captain Crunch Whistle” at 2600 Hz and in 66 milliseconds through a process called “Blue Boxing,” which reversed the routing function of the phone line and made the line into a command source instead of a receiving source, allowing it to be “hacked.”)
Ty made a living phreaking and giving people “free” long-distance calls, and a started a profitable small company as a (law-breaking) sixteen-year-old. He also started a collective living space in a warehouse in Toronto and created a “family” with other runaway kids, much like the society of couch-surfers and punk kids at Surreal Estate in Brooklyn.
Ty also went to DefCon annually in Las Vegas, a conference of hackers and brilliant con-artists of the mechanical telephone system. Eventually, he got caught and arrested.
“At that point, everybody thought it was over for me. It was done. I was nineteen years old, and I had greatly fucked up.”
But then Ty went and served in the Israeli armed forces in the West Bank, and began working as a paramedic, finding his calling in medicine. He was determined to prove everyone who doubted him wrong, and become a doctor. He was twenty-one years old when he decided to start college.
A bright and motivated student, Ty finished an undergraduate degree in Evolutionary Biology, a master’s in Neuroscience with extensive published research, and continued on to finish medical school, specializing in emergency medicine.
“I am crazy determined,” he told me, “I structure every part of my personal environment, every relationship, to facilitate my success. I don’t let anything get in my way.”
Not laws about citizenship. Not ideas about marriage. Not lies of convenience. Nothing is impossible and anything goes, because Ty is out to help people, and he has a plan to save the world, revolving around revolutionizing the way emergency medicine is taught. He has ideas for starting a medical school in the future with a more effective and more fair system of transmitting important information to more people: democratizing medicine, a common good.
“I’m a narcissist,” Ty affirms to me. It doesn’t sound very sexy.
What do you mean?
“I’m really self-driven and I have tunnel vision. I step on lots of people along the way, usually the people who care about me the most and put the most into me, like my romantic partners. But I never intend on hurting anyone, and I do it all for the good purpose of helping people whose lives are in danger.”
Ty wants to be an international disaster relief doctor, and be on the scene of every humanitarian crisis, from Katrina to Haiti. How can that be selfish?
There’s the old saying about aid workers – they are either: 1) missionaries, 2) mercenaries, or 3) misfits. When you sign up to volunteer on international humanitarian projects with the Red Cross, the first question they notoriously ask during the interview is: “What are you running away from?” Why would you leave the comfort of your home and all of your loved ones to run across the world and help people you don’t even know at the risk of your own life? You must be: 1) either a missionary with a zealous ideology you want to push onto the world, 2) a mercenary in the sense that you personally benefit in some way from the suffering of others, or 3) a misfit who never belonged anywhere and so choose to continue always from place to place, calling everywhere and nowhere home.
“Which one are you, Ty?” I asked him, “A missionary, mercenary, or a misfit?”
“Oh, I’m definitely a mercenary,” Ty replied. “I mean, I do this for myself. Deep inside, I need to feel needed. It’s a selfish thing. Being the hero at the end of a long shift of work, having saved fifty or more lives in the course of a day: that makes me feel good. It’s narcissism.” He was quite certain.
“…Although it’s probably the best kind of narcissism there is, since I use the narcissistic drive to help others, and I just try to minimize harm to other people who care for me, my friends and personal relationships, which I tend to neglect in favor of my narcissism.”
Narcissism. That sounds inherently bad, doesn’t it? I am guilty of the same thing. I started out in college studying avidly under Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute, believing in his neoliberal ideals of development and “saving Africa,” dreaming of going to those “wild and impoverished” places with engineers, doctors, and social entrepreneurs, fighting poverty and improving life for everyone there. I went to Guatemala and worked with a fair trade organization called Mercado Global, working as a jewelry production manager with seven different indigenous women’s artisan cooperatives. When I went back to college, I started a student group for fair trade, and brought over thirty undergraduate students to Guatemala on a two-and-a-half-week program that I planned for everyone, raising money for scholarships for the kids I met there. I did this while neglecting my boyfriend, friendships, and family in the United States, and selfishly took their patience for granted time and time again. I also made hurtful and selfish decisions, thinking they were necessary or for the best. My desire to “save the world” was very ego-driven and often resulted in me betraying the interests of the people who loved me the most, who invested the most care into me.
“It doesn’t seem fair – karmically, right? Like these people are feeding Good into you, but instead of giving it back to them, you’re trying to push it onto other people who have nothing to do with you, to abstract kinships with strangers,” I concur with Ty, “It’s easier for me to take in a homeless person to my couch, and feed her or him for months, or help an impoverished child from another country, than to look out for the immediate needs of my friends and family.”
I feel like a bad person, often. I feel irresponsible. I know I am narcissistic. I know I hurt people. I never intend to. It confuses me to no end, the messes I make, and it causes me so much paralyzing guilt sometimes, to the point of self-loathing. Ty agrees with me on all these points.
“All I want to do is to be good to people, but often I am so ego-blind, I make decisions that are just so damaging to the people immediately in my life. But I will without hesitation give the shirt off my back to any stranger. It’s baffling. Is that Good? Is that Evil?”
“I don’t know,” Ty and I again concur. It’s probably pretty bad. It’s narcissistic mercenary behavior. “But I guess the most important thing is just to be aware of these tendencies in ourselves and make sure to cause the least damage possible. Be as good to everyone as you can. Avoid creating situations or environments for yourself where you are likely to repeat past mistakes.”
What else is there to do? We are who we are: neither good nor bad, relatively benign for narcissists. We have good intentions.
—-
I sometimes get very frustrated with myself – I admitted to Ty.
These patterns. These behaviors in relationships, under authority, in institutions, I can sometimes be so neglectful of the most important things! I never intend to hurt anyone; in fact, all I ever do is dream about how I can help others. Why do I still end up hurting so many of the people closest to me? I feel so alone at the end of the day. And the more guilty I feel, the more I feel I need to withdraw from everyone, to protect them from further damage from me.
I sometimes feel like the Trickster, the mythological archetype of the cayote or raven (Native American myths), or Prometheus or Hermes (Greek), or Anansi the Spider (West African folklore). There is a quote that resonates with me from poet and cultural critic Lewis Hyde:
“A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. He is the spirit of the road at dusk, the one that runs from one town to another and belongs to neither.”
The trickster is often depicted as a character “of the doorways” because he is at the boundaries of many different cultures, following no proscribed set of rules or morals but always going along with his own ideas, eager, in fact, to destroy cultural notions of what is taboo. He is clever and creative, but so driven by his base instincts for sex and food, that he often gets himself into trouble. He is both a wise man and a fool, a cultural destroyer and the source of new cultural creations, popular among artists and rebels, those who renew and redefine culture by transgressing it.
“In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the crossdresser, the speaker of sacred profanities….Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox….At one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself….He knows neither good or evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being.”
I make a life out of confusing boundaries: racial, sexual, class-related, mixing among very different populations of people in New York City, trying to find common ground or redefinition. (That is what this blog is about.) In that sense, I sympathize with the trickster. However, I would like to believe that both Ty and I hold strong convictions and moral values in terms of our desire to “help others in distress,” though we are so intent on our own success and achieving our “dreams” that we often harm people along the way. Perhaps our ambitions are out of proportions with the moral imperatives we assign to them; sometimes we seem to have no regard for legal conventions. But we have all the best intentions.
Then again, as the saying goes, “the way to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Ty and I asked ourselves at the end of our conversation: how do you keep a trickster in check in a relationship? Someone who lingers at doorways, who is hollow inside like a narcissist, who shows disregard for social conventions, who can wreck enormous damage on other people in a relationship?
You can’t put a zero next to a one because the zero is too hungry and the one is too naive. But what about two zeroes?
Maybe two holes, two doorways, two roads leading out, can somehow make for one whole open space, one place devoid of entrances or exits, one consistent and balanced plane?
—-
It’s a complex system: how our society decides what is Good and what is Bad. And certain figures that transgress these notions, “tricksters” or artists, intellectuals, or revolutionaries, or whatever else, can sometimes greatly alter the value system of a social group if she or he is able to communicate her or his message in a way that creates a wave, a tipping point. This wave is often destructive in its point of origin but it results in a shifting of society and social values that is creative.
I would never have chosen to be a trickster. How much better it would be to be the archetypical hero! Perhaps that’s what every trickster thinks to himself, and perhaps that is the problem…. In the long run, the colony balances itself out, and each individual plays a very very small part indeed. So go on with the wave or create new ones; it doesn’t really matter. Start early if you can.
“Emergency disaster medicine is beautiful to me,” concluded Dr. Keshet, as we were leaving the cafe. “There is so much chaos, so much uncertainty, so many decisions that need to be made. And I enjoy making order of that chaos.”