The Messy Middle

The world we study for

We ask children to spend a dozen or more years in school, preparing to live life out in the world.

We separate the things they learn into modular classes on different subjects. Math. Physics. History. Logic. The building blocks of adult existence, we tell them.

We give them tests to make sure they understand the material. We want correct answers. We make sure there are correct answers. We want to be able to defend that we're asking good questions so we can demand good answers. Answers that are clear and precise. That's how we score success. Numbers of correct answers.

The logic we teach is equally precise. It's not enough to know things. One must be able to start with things that are known, apply rules of implication, and conclude new things. It's impossible to know everything about the world, so you need some way to infer new things from existing things. Logic is key.

The world we're left to confront

Alas, the actual world is nothing like what most schools prepare kids for. It is not arranged in neat little packages, everything is mixed together. There are no clear right or wrong answers, everything seems a jumble. Even logic itself seems sometimes to lead crazy places.

That last part, about logic, comes as a surprise to many, but it really shouldn't. It turns out that the logic we learn in school is not as applicable to the real world as we are led to believe. It can sometimes help, but it can sometimes play tricks. Let's look at why that is.

On constraints and overconstraint

I'm going to use some terminology here that some people might know, and some might not. They aren't hard concepts, but I want to just make sure we're all on the same page.

If I speak of constraints, I mean the things that you might see in the right hand column of a shopping page like at Amazon where you're searching for a toaster and you can click boxes saying that you want it to be green, no more than 14 inches high, and under $30. Whatever comes back to me should satisfy those constraints.

You might specify constraints at a dating site, too. Maybe it gives you a chance to specify things like that the person should be the same height as you, good looking, funny, smart, high income, humble, kind, and likes long walks on beaches. So you punch all that in and nothing comes back. That's called overconstrained. It means you specified so many things that you're being unrealistic.

Our world is regularly overconstrained

Constraints are ways of saying what we want, but only certain constraints are possible to satisfy at the same time as others. We can't have everything. It's not about the number of constraints, and yet if you're not paying attention to which constraints are compatible with which others, the more constraints you add, the less likely it is that you'll be able to satisfy them.

• We want a house in a nice neighborhood that is also cheap, has a big yard, and is downtown where it's close to restaurants.

• We want politicians that are able to get elected but also don't take special interest money, are going to make disruptive change, and are not going to be kept from being elected by entrenched powers.

• We want restaurants that offer delicious food but that are super-cheap, pay their servers well, are not too crowded to be easily seated, and yet don't go out of business while they're never full.

• We want a diverse world, yet somehow also always one that specifically agrees with our own sensibilities.

So often, the things we demand of the world are not even themselves consistent. In effect, the world is overconstrained. It could not even exist in a form that matches our own constraints.

Our inconsistent world

Physics isn't bothered by such inconsistency because Physics isn't built on our descriptions, our descriptions are built on Physics, sometimes badly.

Also, Nature does not name things. Nature does not describe things. Nature just is. And nature is consistent. It is just Physics played out. And Physics is consistent.

It's our language, our culture, our personal preferences that are inconsistent. So when I speak of “the world” or “our world,” I usually mean to imply “in the way we have conceived and spoken of it.” And when I say “I usually mean,” I mean just that—sometimes yes, sometimes no. Please don't ask me to be consistent. 😀

Descriptive inconsistencies by themselves are harmless. People enjoy books of fiction all the time because they do not confuse what happens in stories with real life. The only problem comes when description, especially inconsistent description, is asked to do double duty, to also be statements of fact that can be reasoned about by logic.

It's not all terrible

But let's give ourselves some credit. We are born into a world where we receive a mass of nerve signals as our only initial input, yet somehow from that we infer that language is going on around us, and we figure out how to learn it just by watching and listening. We are helped by society to study what is already known about the world, and within our all-too-short lifespans, we find that vast complexities, from genetics to the far reaches of the Universe are within our grasp. And we navigate disciplines like psychology, sociology, economics, the weather, and even the arts, even as none of these lend themselves to precise formulas.

So I think we can be forgiven a bit of approximation, overgeneralization, and, yes, inconsistency. To ask better might put all such ambitions out of reach. Frankly, it's stunning we can do any of that in so short a time, so we owe ourselves a collective pat on the back before we stress overly.

Our disappointed children

And yet, a world full of overconstraint and inconsistency is one where that logic we taught in school does not apply. In traditional logic, the way you often prove something is to show that thinking the opposite would lead to a contradiction. But if contradictions are already there waiting, that means you can prove anything.

Contradiction is table stakes in our world. It's the beginning of the story, not the end. It can't be a proof technique because the contradiction was there before you started your proof.

We teach children that contradiction implies a problem, and then we turn them loose on a world full of contradiction. Is it any wonder that upon being thrown unprepared into a world that is nothing like the world we prepared them for, the first thing they do is call adults hypocrites? It's what we trained them to do!

It takes our children time to figure out the world they end up in. And by the time many do, they're the adults the next crop of kids will arrive to despise as hypocrites.

The gaps we've left

We never taught them a Philosophy of Inconsistency, but they needed something like that before we turned them loose on the world. Inconsistency is everywhere and we should have prepared them for that. And for the fact that the answers might not be easy. Instead, right down to the bitter end, we require modular, teachable concepts with measurably right answers.

There are even common memes that mock people for just showing up and participating, as if that is not award-worthy. And yet “just trying hard” or “keeping things in perspective,” is literally the best you can do in many arenas of human endeavor.

Parenting is often said to be that. Just showing up day after day, even if the rest is not perfect, counts for a lot.

Preparing for the real world

Perhaps the final year or two of school should not be about modular topics, grades, and correct answers. Maybe it should be about confronting a messy world where all the subjects are mixed together in a blender, and where there are not always answers. They're going to be forced to cope anyway, better it should happen with a teaching staff still handy to help in the transition.

Politics, especially, is full of contradictions. If people are not careful, they'll fall victim to politicians using logic against them. “We can't do that,” the politician may say, “because that will lead to a contradiction.”

Lead to a contradiction? The contradiction was already there, waiting to be exploited! But people new to the game may be easily tricked if they don't realize it, or its implications. We need to teach not just how to use logic, but when not to use it, lest they be tricked.

Hypocrisy can't be used to disqualify people, or everyone will be possible to disqualify. Instead, we need to learn to manage hypocrisy, to keep it to a minimum in various thoughtful ways.

And I've lost track of how many times as a manager I've said to my reports that sometimes sense of humor is what gets you through the hard days, especially when you can see an excess of constraints makes the requested form of success literally impossible. Would it be so bad to have a class in things like that?

The problem to be solved by all this would be to properly set expectations for these kids—emerging adults really—so when they're out in the world, they know what success looks like. Because right now, some of our best and most hard-fought outcomes look like failures to them, like giving in or selling out.

Rethinking Virtue

And while we're rethinking the curriculum, I have one very specific nit to pick, because it follows from everything we've just discussed and it will give us better terminology to talk about what success really looks like in an overconstrained world.

There is a body of thought begun originally by Aristotle with his “Nicomachean Ethics,” the more modern rendition of which is “Virtue Ethics.” I'm a big fan of this idea. Most of it, anyway. I just think we have to make some adjustments to it in order for it to make sense in this inconsistent world we've built. It's got some cool ideas, but it sets us up to be confused in precisely the way learning traditional logic does.

So, of course, I have my own variation that tries to preserve the parts I like and be more realistic about the rest.

The problem with Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics speaks of virtue as “the mean between unreasonable extremes.”

For example, it reasons that “spendthriftiness” is unreasonable for being too careless with money and that “miserliness” is similarly unreasonable at the opposite extreme, so it concludes there is some mathematical ideal, a “mean,” that exists in between these unreasonable extremes, just waiting for us to zoom in and locate it precisely.

I don't agree. It's just not that simple. There is no such place, I would argue. Because we have an inconsistent world, any simple rule that comes of mathematics or logic will be seen to have exceptions. The world is just too messy.

Dreaming impossible dreams

But does the fact that the goal is unachievable mean it's improper to try?

No, I don't think so. It's OK to dream the impossible dream. It gives life purpose and dignity and honor, actually.

I just think it should not be described as some pristine mathematical thing, waiting to be proven, lest we pass straight by it when it presents itself not in regal threads but in peasant clothes. We should instead drive a stake into the ever-shifting sands at a plausible place I call the Messy Middle, chosen to best accommodate any facts we know or reasonably expect. Then, when materially new information arrives—and it will—pull up that stake and find it a better place. Wherever that stake is at any given time, that's the Messy Middle. Always defend that.

Dynamic curve-fitting is a better mathematical metaphor than golden mean, if one insists on sounding mathy but only because, to some degree, curve-fitting has an implicit “Philosophy of Messiness” deep in its design. It is one of the ways mathematicians confront chaos and pretty it up, quite as we are doing here.

And the reason I say “dynamic” is that I'm pretty confident that whatever place we stake out, initially or later on, will keep moving as more data comes in. There will be no easy answer that works for everything. And it won't be approaching some well-defined spot like a mathematical limit might. It will probably just wobble about chaotically.

In other words, compromises will be made to absorb new cases, and we just have to be prepared to defend them. It doesn't matter to be 100% perfect. What matters is to be committed to caring, and to always be doing the best we can.

Justice, and what just is

This is how what passes for Justice works in our inconsistent world. We can't totally define it because the world is just too complex. All we can do is commit to a Theory of Justice and then when faced with new data, revise the theory and try again. There will never be true Justice, alas. But what matters is that we don't stop trying.

Justice is not a place on a number line, between unreasonable extremes. Justice is instead a hygiene, an ongoing process of managing things, that compensates for the elusive nature of a concept we can't quite define precisely, yet that we still value immensely.

Justice, and other virtues, must be ever defended against incompleteness, and also against claims of hypocrisy. No easy task. But it starts by understanding that the hypocrisy arises not from the application of Justice but from the problem description. Once we understand that, we're better positioned to manage it properly.

Recap

Borne of overconstraint, there could be no other ending to this story.

The Messy Middle is not, in the Aristotelian way we're taught, some pristine “mean” waiting to be uncovered, but more just a stake in the ground at a place we must accept and defend in spite of its messy origins. We must learn to live with it there, even as we must also commit to pulling it up and adjusting its position when, inevitably, the need arises.

What's really vexing about maintaining the Messy Middle is that it becomes hard to distinguish weasely people from heroic people. Both require shifting. But the ability to distinguish weasels from heroes is not something the Universe offers a clear path to. If one is going to be a hero in such a world, they'd better be prepared to navigate the mess, and to defend right from wrong on some basis more solid than citation of ever-present contradiction.

Not a fairytale ending, but a believable and workable one, I think. And it seems clear to me that the Universe doesn't offer us a better option. So stand by that mess proudly. Commit to defending against what criticisms inevitably come. Be that hero—to young and old alike.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay began as a post on Mastodon, but has been very heavily edited since then.

I used a public domain image of a nautilus shell from publicdomainpictures.net to produce the two graphics: one that shows the shell in its original form, and another edited by me using Gimp to replace the crisp center of the nautilus spiral with a fogged out center, representing the Messy Middle.

I used Claude Opus 4.8 as a syntactic, grammar, and editorial cross-check on my writing as drafts evolved, but not to do any of the actual writing.

Law and Ordering

“First They Came” | ”Als sie kamen”
by Martin Niemöller

There's been a lot of erosion of US democracy lately. The latest is the case of Kilmar Abrego García's deportation. It should matter to everyone because of the specific precedent it sets.

But it's part of a general trend for how many precedents are being set. The order in which things are happening is not accidental.

In many ways, what I'm going to say here is just a restatement of the famous Niemöller poem. Great poetry often captures an idea crisply, and certainly that poem does. But some things are important enough to say a lot of different ways, and this is certainly one.

So, at the risk of redundancy, let me just say that there's a very specific ordering in which laws and norms are being stretched and broken. It goes from “most acceptable” to “least acceptable” in our society for whose rights we'll tolerate violating. We as a society have grown used to some of our members being abused. They know this ugly truth, and they're exploiting it.

As I explained in my essay Political Terraforming last fall, the goal is plainly just to eliminate all rights. But they can't do it all at once. There's a clear order in which this has to be done.

In effect, there is an aspect of this which is its incremental and creeping nature. We see that as a kind of icky feeling as we wake each morning to look at the Internet, but it's not just that. It's tactical. The Overton window can only stretch at a certain rate. It's apparently fast, but not infinitely fast.

The US right now is a herd of animals where the weakest are at the outside, being picked off one by one by his wolves. We've arranged ourselves with the weakest, least overall-acceptable people at the outside, and too many of us comfort ourselves that we're safe because we're not on the outside (yet).

There's some part of this that's shock and awe, trying to go as fast as possible before anyone can react at all. But there's a slowness component to it, too.

With the system—and our own sensibilities—overwhelmed, citizens are forced to prioritize which indignity to be responding to at any given time. This Gish gallop of disgusting acts is so vast that one cannot respond to everything. So the Project 2025 goal is to lay a foundation of precedents, breaking prior norms, moving the Overton window while most people aren't yet noticing or caring because they're busy with other indignities.

So, amid the flurry of things that every day assault us citizens, they're going slowly enough that the part involving precedent setting passes unnoticed. In this way, by the time it matters for mainstream America, the aspiring dictator will be poised to say “This is just how it's done. You've lost your chance.”

We must not let these things pass unnoticed. It matters to catch them and object to them before legal precedents are set. And, for those of us who think we are not immediately threatened, it matters to see that really we are. It's coming for all of us, and soon. The damage will be done by the time it gets to many of us. So none of us can afford to postpone our outrage and involvement.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

We The People must not let them divide us. We must stand as one.

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This post began as a comment on reddit. It's been tidied up and expanded, and the formatting has been adjusted to be suitable for a web venue. The reddit post is best seen as a first draft.

The graphic was downloaded downloaded from Wikimedia (which says it is in the public domain), and then cropped and scaled using Gimp.

My Secret Shame: Confessions of a Republican Wannabe

On a site like Open Salon, it's often assumed one is a Democrat. I'm not. I'm an Independent. I do admit it's hard to tell the difference sometimes, but is that my fault? The Republicans seem never to offer me a credible alternative.

Of course, you could make the claim I should be checking out the Green Party or the Libertarian Party. Nice try, but no dice. There are a couple reasons for this. First, I'm old enough to have thrown away my vote on third-party candidates before; been there, done that. Voting on principle is nice, and I'm all for changing our voting system to use preference-order voting, but absent that, I'll vote where my vote can make a difference, thank you.

And, frankly, I think the thing that holds these third parties back is their stubborn insistence on principle. Principles are great, but as I discussed in The “Two Unprincipled Parties” System, it's the unprincipled nature of the Democratic and the Republican parties that keep them in active contention. That nature allows the parties to dynamically adjust their platform in order to respond to changes in public sentiment. Contrast this with the Green Party or Libertarian Party which are wedded to ideas and hence incapable of changing in order to acquire more votes.

There are occasions where I've gone so far as to call myself a “Republican Wannabe,” not because the Republican Party of late (by which I'm afraid I mostly mean “within my lifetime”) offers much of anything I'd ever “want to be” but because the words the Republicans often say they are about don't sound bad. I wish there really were a Republican Party that was about small, fiscally responsible government that cares about personal liberty and privacy. They sometimes spout such words, but their actions don't match, and I just can't bear it.

I did actually vote for Bill Weld, a Republican, to be Governor of Massachusetts. He was socially liberal, compassionate, strong on crime, and fiscally responsible. A good mix, I thought. But, alas, not typical of what the Republican is selling these days.

Also, my desire for small government is not dogmatic in nature. So while I liked how Jesse Ventura borrowed from Lincoln in saying that government should only do for people what they can't do for themselves, I find it's not always so easy to say exactly what people can and cannot do for themselves.

For example, it might seem that health care is something people can arrange for themselves. But I've watched health care play out over a lifetime, and it's clear to me that health insurance has gone from a well-meaning pool that protected people from unknown health risks to a cynically and scientifically run system that tries to most efficiently separate people from their money, maximizing profits while minimizing its own responsibilities. Saying health care is something people can do for themselves depends on whether you just mean that there are insurance policies for sale or whether you mean that people have a legitimate and compassionate set of choices. So just because I favor small government over large doesn't mean I favor it for arbitrary reasons; there are a lot of reasons to suppose that the smallest workable and fair government really does need to address health care, and to believe that this cannot be left to the individual.

So please don't assume when I say I'm for small government that I mean to say I oppose some particular set of issues. What I mean, rather, is that if all other things are equal, I prefer small to large. But sometimes small doesn't work, and I'm open to discussion on some matters that others might not be.

What I want from the various parties is to provide me a different perspective about how to think about problems. I want options I can evaluate freely without regard to where they came from. I assume that the very different perspectives of each party will provide me with a rich variety of options. What I care about is workability to really solve the stated problem, not some idealized notion of a problem. And there are two things that really catch my eye a lot with Republican options: First, they seem to go out of their way to be mean-spirited and to make life miserable for people who are just trying to get by—they're forever trying to sell their policies by demonizing someone, and in the process they often don't actually solve the problems they set out to solve. And second, their solutions are often very fragile. They work really well if you make the right assumptions about the people involved, the order in which things happen, etc., but they leave people helpless if they deviate even a little from the norm (often, but not always, a norm characterized by being economically well-off, healthy, white, straight, male, and Christian).

The Republicans say they're about family values, but that turns out to be code for something much more sinister. To me, family values means something that promotes the notion of people helping people, of people treating each other kindly, of people within a family loving one another, of people wanting children to grow up happy and healthy. But many gay families pass this requirement and yet are shunned by the so-called party of family values.

The Republicans say they're about fiscal responsibility, yet they orchestrated the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the world. And why? Because they effectively enshrined the notion that “greed is good,” a claim that is so obviously ridiculous it's a wonder it wasn't laughed out of the room the moment it was first said. But, of course, people who desperately want to believe a selfish thing will find themselves highly motivated to stretch in what they are willing to believe.

The Republicans say they're about the Constitution, but when attempts are made to enforce privacy rights or free speech rights, we find them making exceptions. In fact, I honestly think that before the neocons took over the party, the Republican Party really was about this one. And there are a few lonely voices even now within the Republican Party that pay lip service to this issue. But when push comes to shove we see party line votes on matters that do not uphold free speech and privacy rights.

I really just don't like the idea of aligning with a party; I fear the notion of “toeing someone's party line.” I like independently evaluating issues on their merits. When I voted for Weld in the Massachusetts primary, I was going to be out of town and had to vote absentee. To do that, I had to declare a party and was temporarily a Republican for a few weeks near the election. I recall worrying that I would die in an accident and that my tombstone would read “he died a Republican.” So maybe it's not fair to say I actually want to be a Republican. But I do covet the issue space that the Republicans allegedly care about, and I do think they're falling down in their duty to offer me options that fit in that space.

I refuse to give in and simply call myself a Democrat. I continue to hold out the hope that the Republican Party will surprise me one day with good ideas that will give my preferred status as an Independent a legitimate sense of identity distinct from being a member of the Democratic Party. But some days keeping that hope alive is like trying to keep a candle burning in the winds of a hurricane.

Here I sit, trying to decide what I think of Judge Sotomayor. In spite of her being the clear choice of Obama and the Democrats, I'm really quite annoyed by that controversial ruling Judge Sotomayor has written about controversial free speech rights of school children, the one Paul Levinson has written extensively about. The details of that ruling trouble me a great deal. I'd like to ask her a great many questions about it.

But even as I'd like to consider the ruling, and the candidate, with an independent eye, I have my television tuned in to all kinds of ridiculousness from the sitting Republicans that once again threatens to embarrass me if I go that way. I am incensed about the petty set of things the Republican Party has chosen to make into talking points, stupid issues that are not at all good reasons not to make this woman a Supreme Court Justice.

Quiet down, Republicans. I can't figure out if this candidate is a good choice for the Court, but if you don't stop saying completely idiotic things in opposition, I'm going to feel driven to side with her merely because you have once again made it utterly unpalatable to ever even consider the possibility of an opposing point of view. For once, please don't be your own worst enemy. Just once, I'd like to feel I had a choice.

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Originally published June 1, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, republican, independent, democrat, republican wannabe, own worst enemy, shooting itself in the foot, republican party, sonia sotomayor, sotomayor, supreme court, court, justice, appointment, supreme court justice, candidate, bill weld, jesse ventura