Indulgence effect. Column in ComputerreOnline #77

{ "translated_text": "←\nDmytro Shabanov\n→\n\nMechanisms of Choice\nIndulgence Effect\nTrue Values\n\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #76\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #77\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #78\n\nAnd I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother…\nMatt. 5:22\n\nI began to write a column about what circumstances might determine the value of anything (apart from the obvious – cost and usefulness). I didn’t finish it. Debates that I am involved in pull me away, distract me. Fine. The high stuff – next time, and now – about black‑and‑white thinking.\n\nI will start with a video. A quiet evening in the family of Richard Dawkins. The fireplace is lit. The head of the household sits with an “Apple” laptop and reads readers’ letters aloud. To whom he reads, it is not visible. To the third wife? To the daughter from the second marriage? At least, to some women. The letters provoke laughter among the listeners. Find out what they write to him. My English was not enough to understand everything, but at the link I gave, the player has a CC button – it brings up Russian subtitles.\n[IMG_1]\nHe receives letters from defenders of the faith, Christians. Some simply insult the author of atheist books as a fool. Some wish misfortunes that may befall him, desire a tragic and painful death for him, eagerly await the hellish torments that will be his.\nWe have already seen (heard, read, smelled…) something similar quite recently, haven’t we? At least regarding girls guilty of inappropriate behavior. One should stop being surprised, yet I still cannot get used to it.\nAnd it is not only the sweet laughter of women, who probably love the addressee of these letters, that surprises me (I see nothing funny in these letters; to me it seems a cause for sorrow). I will risk asking a question that many have recently raised: how can people who spew hatred outward consider themselves Christians? And it is not only that they violate the founder’s covenants of their religion.\nI do not wish to offend anyone’s feelings, but may I try to formulate? The call to renounce such behavior contained in the Sermon on the Mount is something more than a categorical covenant of the founder of Christianity.\nI will try to substantiate this unhurriedly and begin with the phrase whose beginning is given in the epigraph. It is known in two versions. Here is the more widespread one:\n\"And I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother in vain shall be judged.\"\nThere is also another, rarer version, found, in particular, in very old sources:\n\"And I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be judged.\"\nOne must not forget that the reference is not only to a brother, but simply to another person, and not to an earthly court, and not so much to a trial as to condemnation (at least for this anger).\nHow to explain the discrepancy of versions? Perhaps two hypotheses. According to the first, the author of the saying “And I say to you: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you and pray for those who persecute you” distinguished vain from non‑vain anger and condemned only the vain. Unfortunately, a copyist of the source texts omitted the word “in vain” by oversight.\nThe second hypothesis is that the word “in vain” is foreign to the text in which it appeared. It was not in the original version, but some copyist, whose mind could not accommodate the idea that any anger deserves condemnation, inserted it of his own accord.\nAccidental loss or intentional insertion? Let us not delve into source‑critical discussions. As far as I understand, neither version can be finally proven. But which is psychologically more credible? Both in our everyday life and in the daily life of early Christians, the first corresponds better. The general direction of the Sermon on the Mount – the second.\nI am an agnostic. I explained my views on the question that has broken many copies in a column about Dawkins’s book \"The God Delusion\". I respect sacred texts and consider many of them testimonies of heights accessible to the human spirit. I am quite persuaded by the arguments of Dawkins and many other atheists about why people who sought answers to the most difficult questions in their lives found them in belief in a god who set both the laws of nature and the laws of morality. This god resembled the people who invented him, or perhaps not even them, but their strict fathers. Not God creates people in his image, but they create him! Otherwise it is impossible to explain why, regarding a benevolent and omnipotent God, it is claimed that throughout eternity he will amuse himself with endless tortures of disobedient people. I understand Nietzsche, who felt revulsion at the suggestion of one of the early fathers of the Christian church that observing the suffering of sinners would be one of the heavenly bliss. Nietzsche did not make a temporal correction, that very moment when persecuted Christians inserted the word “in vain” into the Sermon on the Mount to justify their anger toward their persecutors – and, essentially, why should he have made such a temporal correction?\nNevertheless I consider that perceiving one’s interaction with the world as a dialogue is adaptive. On what basis? At least as a result of reflecting on one’s experience, “having passed half of earthly life” – the maximum of realistic spans corresponding to the current way of life. When you perceive your actions as some kind of replies in a dialogue with the world around you, and external events as answers to them, life somehow becomes better and easier to live…\nOne should get rid of anger and hatred not because (well, if you wish, although from my point of view this is an unnecessary clarification – not only because) God wants it.\nOne should get rid of anger and hatred not because (with the same clarifications) some being in this or that world will punish you for violating this prohibition, and reward you for complying.\nOne should get rid of anger and hatred because it will make you more adaptive and happier today.\nIt is a difficult task. It is probably true that no one has fully achieved it, not even the one who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. At least, that is how I tend to interpret the episode with the fig tree that was cursed for being fruitless, even though the event did not occur in the fruit‑ripening season. Doctor Zhivago (i.e., Pasternak) softens this plot, does not mention that “it was not yet time to gather figs”, yet his “I thirst and hunger…” marks a considerable immersion in passions.\nThe fact that the task of eliminating anger and hatred cannot be solved completely (or almost completely) does not make its solution meaningless. And do not be deceived by psychologists’ advice that, for health, it is better to express accumulated anger than to suppress it. From the point of view of hormonal regulation of behavior, expressing is better than suppressing, and not feeling – much better than expressing. From the perspective of societal and world reaction to our replies in that dialogue I mentioned, suppressing anger may turn out to be more adaptive than expressing it, but its absence is still unrivaled.\nReturning to the “letters of anger”. The passions and desires demonstrated by their authors are far removed from the Sermon on the Mount, even more so than Dawkins’s position. Yet similarly unsightly effects are observed on a different ground than Christianity.\nI have experience that helps to better understand Dawkins’s position (albeit on a smaller scale). About ten years ago I read a half‑mad little book that frightened citizens with the danger of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It was published with funds from a foundation headed by the well‑known Russian biologist Alexei Vladimirovich Yablokov. I wrote an open letter to Yablokov with a critical analysis of this book. My acquaintance sent this letter to the mailing list of the International Socio‑Ecological Union. Yablokov, of course, replied respectfully, but besides his reply to my email, a number of letters arrived from the same category as those read by Dawkins. No, they were not from Christians, they were from environmentalists. Most letters were not original. On the basis that I criticized a campaign against GMOs, the authors of the letters concluded that I was paid by biotech companies. Thirty silver coins, for which I must die, were mentioned in almost every letter. Several contained wishes for my painful death and described the torments my correspondents wanted me to endure. In several it was emphasized that I should, before my death, witness the painful death of my children…\nWhat struck me most was a letter sent by a Russian environmentalist, a biologist who at the time was in the United States. He wrote roughly the following: “It is clear that you have grasped the problem. Yes, the book you reviewed is a shoddy work. Redo it so that white threads do not stick out of the seams. And stop babbling that deception is unethical. Leave the ethics talk to American housewives. Our goal is to stop GMOs, and we must do it by any means.”\nIf the more naïve environmentalists allowed themselves to hate and slander in the name of what they consider nature protection, the author of this letter, although capable of keeping his emotions in check, consciously chose to lie in the name of that goal. Does the end justify the means?\nI encountered another recent example of hatred eruption. Remember the column about animal‑rights activists? I probably need to explain why I entered their territory…\nI work in population ecology of amphibians. Currently my team and I are trying to refine a technology for accounting green frogs by their photographs. Almost every individual has a unique pattern. By comparing series of photos taken at different times, one can recognize “familiar” frogs. By the decrease in the proportion of repeat encounters in subsequent samples one can estimate the total number of individuals in the studied populations. This work involves a number of subtleties that we are gradually learning to handle…\nThe second object of interest to me is the gray toad. Unfortunately, that technology will not work there: gray toads are too similar to each other. Thinking about what objects a similar method could work on, I recalled stray dogs: they are very diverse.\nStray dogs in cities are a fairly important problem. Obviously their populations need to be managed, and for that one must know their actual condition. I realized that I was ready to engage in work on determining the numbers and turnover of such groups. I found colleagues interested in this problem. I tried to find potential clients who could pay for such work, perhaps not at the initial stage, but, with a good outcome, after obtaining the first results. One of my first findings led to a column written a couple of issues ago, another (with some trepidation) I offer to your attention now. Here, read the comments. I will not quote; as always – a mixture of insults and wishes of evil, both toward the object of vilification and its family.\nI know almost nothing about the animal shelter discussed on this page. It may (or may not) be that its work includes violations of animal‑care rules and fabrications. If so, those shortcomings must be eliminated. Does the outpouring of hatred by animal‑rights activists contribute to solving this problem? I think not.\nMy colleagues and I have reflected. It is quite likely that reliable data on dog numbers are needed by no one: neither by those who profit from regulating their numbers, nor by those who defend their “rights”. Dive into this topic – you will drown in endless wars. Abandon such plans? We will consult. Yet the fact that this field of work is splattered with hatred carries part of the blame of the animal‑rights activists…\nThus, someone justifies his unbridled behavior by reference to faith, someone by appeals to the necessity of nature protection, someone by defending humanity.\nActing in the name of lofty ideals, people release the reins of self‑control, nurture hatred and cruelty within themselves, spill them outward, become infected by them from like‑minded individuals. What to call this lamentable phenomenon? My term – “indulgence effect”.\nWhat remains is to understand how to combat this effect, not so much in others as in oneself. Righteous anger broke out in almost every person. A normal reaction to such outbursts is shame, loss of strength, emotional emptiness. Probably the cause of the indulgence effect is that people susceptible to it feel a spiritual uplift from fighting for true ideals.\nReturning to the epigraph. If this phrase is read with the word “in vain”, every hysteric born of hatred could be justified by saying it is not in vain. I think such behavior can never be allowed to oneself. Never‑ever.\n←\nDmytro Shabanov\n→\n\nMechanisms of Choice\nIndulgence Effect\nTrue Values\n\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #76\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #77\nColumn in KompyutereOnline #78" }