Design – MarkCleaveland.org

It’s a bit ironic

It’s a bit ironic that walking along the sidewalks this morning, I looked up to see a sign advertising the Chattanooga Design Studio. A wide crosswalk. A few homeless. Young couples Sunday sleepy, and then I was walking through the old Read House building where a Gospel Breakfast was taking place. Design. Beliefs. The Bible Belt. That’s as good a place to start this post as any, and what’s a belt for but to hold up a pair of trousers? And what are a pair of trousers but beliefs with which we clothe portions of our being?

First though, a mea culpa. I didn’t *plan* on blog posts that would end up going on and on about design, history, contingencies, or words-as-objects, and yet here I am. There’s another bit of irony for us, though. Planning…or lack thereof, and design. Sometimes the plan only emerges from the doing, and so there is hope that some sense will emerge – sense or hot mess.

“Pollock”by Piutus is licensed under CC BY 2.0

So, in my last post I suggested that our psyche is a designed thing. Indirectly, to be sure, but the idea is in there. The logic goes like this: all objects have a history, history is the accumulated processes that led to the object existing – some might go so far as to add “…and provided its purpose,” but let’s not go there just yet. Words are objects as much as can openers or bible belts – objects shaped by the happenstance of their histories. The same, though goes for our psyche. It’s an object, too. One that we happen to inhabit, and one that sticks to the skin like a wet shirt on some days, but nonetheless, an object. And if we want to talk about the history of a psyche, well, what we are talking about is the science of psychology.

Psychology is a science. I think anyone reading this knows that, but I’d like to take a moment to make sure that we all know what a science is, exactly, because to put it bluntly, science is a process for designing beliefs. A cabinet maker designs and crafts cabinets. A tailor designs and creates clothing. Scientists design and create beliefs. Particular sort of beliefs, to be sure, but beliefs, nonetheless, that emerge from the contingencies of their craft.

Now, science isn’t the only process for designing beliefs. There are lots of others. Let me give you an example.

Gone Phishin’

About three months ago I was targeted by a phishing exploit. I received an email that seemed to be from my Department Chair, and the whole thing went like this:

“Hi. Sorry. I’m in a meeting. Could you do me a favor?” “Sure. I’m not available until 10:00, but can help out then.” “I’ll still be in the meeting.” “No problem. How can I help?”

At this point I received a message asking if I could go get a gift card for $500, write down its code, and email it back. To my credit, when I read the ask for a gift card, I became suspicious. However, NOT to my credit, this suspicion didn’t immediately kick in. It took a moment to wade through a variety of other beliefs. There was the irritation about the presumption of being asked to do such a strange favor (“The favor is for me to get a gift card?!”) There was the self-criticism for having agreed to do the “favor” in the first place (“How could you be such a sap?”). At the same time there was a bit of ego patting related to being “the person” that my chair was turning to for a favor. Yeah, I wanted to believe that I was the type of person that others could count on.

All of those thoughts and emotions were triggered and played themselves out over 10s of seconds, and only then, did another belief begin to arise. “Wait. Am I being played?” This belief then led me to check the real email address of the sender. My mail client only showed a name as the originating email. But my chair’s name had been spoofed, so that hers was the name displayed on the “From” line of the email. Digging out the actual email address, though, provided the evidence I needed to realize that the emails were coming from a stranger. Who exactly I was communicating with, I have no idea. Only that they were trying to take advantage of the way that I construct my beliefs about the world, and that for a moment, it had worked. I had been led to believe that I was communicating with a particular person.

Sadly, these experiences with scammers are becoming more and more frequent. Buttons pushed. Psychological dials turned. And out pops a belief.

Here’s another one, which isn’t all that different from the frequent phone calls some of us get from the “IRS” telling us that we have urgent back payments to make.

Your in trouble, but we can get you out of it. Just provide your password, and everything will be a-ok!!

Now of course, as long as we aren’t the one who fell for the scam, it can be tempting to mock those that did. “OMG, how could someone fall for that!? What idiots!!” For that matter, let’s throw in the belief that a race of reptiles is secretly running the world, that the Denver airport is the nexus of a New World Order, or that Jimi Hendrix made a pact with the devil that allowed him to play the guitar in the way that he did. [Head palm] How can anyone be so stupid?

It reminds me of one of the great smack downs in literature, a fantastic scene in Hamlet in which Hamlet tears into the puffed up, suck-ups Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me. You would seem to know my stops. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak? ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

“Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” Take that scam artists, fake news, conspiracy peddlers, propagandists, and politicians. You won’t fool us.

And yet…

… we all do have beliefs, and our beliefs do come from somewhere. Most of us would claim that our beliefs, unlike so many others, are grounded in evidence. Except that what qualifies as evidence never gets much examining and our belief about ourselves being guided by evidence also doesn’t get much questioning. Hamlet believes that he cannot be played upon like a pipe, and yet there are many instances in which he is played. He believes that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are merely playing at being his friends. He believes that his Uncle murdered his father, he believes that others have tried to play upon his love for Ophelia in order to pump him for information, and he believes that Ophelia allowed herself to be so used. In other words, Hamlet swims in currents of beliefs that have been triggered by processes of some sort while mocking the processes that would have him embrace particular beliefs. In another part of the play he spits out, “Seems madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems,” as if to say, “everyone else’s beliefs are wrong, but not mine. Mine are capital-T true.”

Imagine that each lit node is a belief that is currently “turned on” by the circumstances of experience

If we take a moment, it is relatively easy to become aware of at least some of the processes that design our beliefs. In other words, to become aware of the manner in which all of us are “played like a pipe.” The preacher stands before the congregation and states that god is love and we accept this statement because the preacher is an authority figure. He stands alone before a group, with the other group members apparently attentive. He often is positioned above everyone else and wears robes that indicate a particular status and area of expertise. He is a particular age, has a particular color of skin, way of arranging his hair, and uses terms and phrases that make sense because they are said with inflections that we hear as conviction or urgency. Most of us, if we take a moment to reflect on our own thinking, would recognize that all of these “triggers” construct a potential belief that “here is a person that I can trust and whose own beliefs I will use to guide my own.”

This says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of the beliefs, by the way. That’s not something I care to get into. The important point for right now is to simply recognize that beliefs don’t just spontaneously occur. They are built from particular processes that act on all of us. It is these processes that scam artists conduct like an orchestra. It is these processes that build up, brick-by-brick, the conspiracy theories that haunt the internet. But really, these histories of belief are ubiquitous. They lead the child to blame themself for their parent’s divorce. They haunt the teen who looks in the mirror with self-disgust. They spur the athlete to run just one more lap. The bonds of trust and friendship that make our day-to-day living more meaningful and the superiority complex of the psychopath – all are the clothing of belief.

I’ll get back to the particular sorts of beliefs that science constructs, but I think maybe I’ll sit with beliefs just a bit longer. For example, it is a common misconception that beliefs are “stated things” – a sort of creed or set of values to which we pledge allegiance. For a psychologist, that statement is true: creeds and values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are explicitly stated things. In the same way that a dinner jacket is only one category of clothing, creeds and values are only one category of belief. There are many other types that emerge from the factories of our psyche’s design. Perhaps we keep them hidden, and speak them only to ourselves, but perhaps not, because we don’t have the words to speak them. Yes, some beliefs reside within the realm of words. Others might more accurately be said to lie within the body: emotional beliefs, reflexive beliefs. We also have what we might as well term perceptual beliefs: beliefs that give us, for example, the meaning in a visual scene. And finally, when beliefs are combined with judgments of value, then we have moral beliefs that guide us to approach, avoid, defend and eliminate – sometimes others, but yes, sometimes ourselves.

“Kayaker at Great Falls, VA”by pthread1981 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
(Cropped)

So sure, all of us are being played, day in and day out. We have all, at least on occasion been led to believe whatever it is that we believe. We’d like to think that we’re the one doing the designing, but at best we participating in design processes that shape our psychology. Even if you are convinced that you base your living on evidence, think of all the “evidence” you never have the opportunity to experience. The saying, “He was born on third base, and believes he hit a triple” emerges, after all, from a narrow read of the evidence – the narrow slice that a single consciousness inhabits — and the goal is to become aware of history, explicitly choose from the objects it offers, and consciously project the meaning that they offer into the future. That’s the goal.

All objects have history

All objects have history, and that goes for words and thoughts and the pile of can openers sitting on a shelf at Target. Of course, objects are only the surface of underlying processes. We see the can opener, but not the processes that molded, shaped, assembled and transported it into our slice of consciousness. Similarly, we encounter a word – hear it, use it – mostly without thought, or if we do give it thought, it’s kind of like this:

Design (n): “A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is made.”

Or my favorite:

“Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” “Origin: late middle english from latin designare”

We can then go to find out that the latin designare was used in various ways so that it might be closer to “indicate,” “show,” “point out,” or “designate.” In other words, we end up with something that resembles a genealogical tree, with words sprouting off from one another across time, and it’s the words that we see / hear, just like it is the leaves of a tree and the shade of their canopy that we notice on a hot day.

But like I say, objects – and words are objects – are only the surface of underlying processes. They point elsewhere. Or to use some academic jargon, words are signs, which is just a fancy way of saying that words are “stand ins” for other things – the understudy that gets called up when the original actor comes down with strep throat. However, I’m not referring to that kind of “stand in.” Rather, I’d like us to take just a moment to think about how words are the bubbling output of something hidden. The social interactions across generations; the reverberations of a voice echoed within a womb; the pruned and flowering of an associative network of neurons within a nervous system.

In other words, we’re back to the tree metaphor that once led to designare and spread outward to “designate,” “indicate,” “point out,” and “design.” Each of these a specimen pinned under the glass to be cataloged and characterized. There are other things that could be noticed, though. Like, why did this tree of words grow in this particular way? Why did others take the form that they did? Why did that shoot emerge when it did, and why did that lineage seem to stop growing when it did?

This is a roundabout way to say that history is process, and it is process that throws and churns up the objects that inhabit our living. The poetry that we hear and the ears with which we hear it. The opportunities that we perceive and the mind that perceives them. The emotions that drift across our awareness, and the behaviors that emerge from their approach and departure. And yes, the can opener that sits on a shelf at a local Target. All are objects of history, which is to say that all are designed and open to change.

In psychology we call these historical processes contingencies, and maybe I’ll get around to writing about contingencies more explicitly some day. For right now, though, I’d like to stay focused on the idea of “design.” Because one way to think about contingencies is that they are the processes that mold our awareness, behavior, and all of the objects (animals, plants, roads, cars,…) with which we coexist. This design – or shaping in the psychological lingo — is happening whether we realize it or not, and I think I’d like to spend a bit of time writing about it. Indirectly at first, and then maybe a bit more directly. The idea is to spend some time thinking about a psyche – its habits, emotions, assumptions, self-talk, memories, i.e., all of the psyche’s production – as “stuff” that is available to notions of design.

Maybe. After all, this blog is an experiment.

Let me wrap up this post by quickly describing two stories: one famous and one personal, both of which relate to design. The first is a famous quote by the English theologian and writer, William Paley taken from his book Natural Theology.

“Let’s say you’re walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn’t think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.”

A form must have a maker…or at least a process that makes

This quote from over 200 years ago, is an example of what is known as the “intelligent design” approach to understanding the forms of our existence. If you look back up at our dictionary definition of “design,” you immediately see where the quote is coming from: “Purpose or planning that exists behind an action, fact, or object.” In other words the notion of design is closely associated with notions of purpose. If an object is designed, then the object has purpose (and conversely, if a behavior seems to have purpose, then it must be designed). Paley wasn’t the first person to suggest that design implied the workings of a deity; in more ancient times, for example, the Pythagoreans pointed to mathematical regularities as evidence of divine creation. Furthermore, more recently, the notion of design and purpose has been co-opted by evolutionary theorists through assumptions of optimality. The idea is that the processes of design that exist in the natural world will produce forms that optimally solve particular problems. That is their purpose. So, whereas someone like Paley might look at the fin of a shark and inquire as to its divine purpose, an evolutionary theorist would look at the same fin and inquire as to the problem it has been optimized to solve.

Anyway, I’m bringing up Paley and “intelligent design” not to critique their ideas, but to simply point out that there is a long pedigree behind notions of history as process, and process as design. For some, that design (and therefore that history) is ipso facto evidence of a creator, and we, as elements of that creator’s design, possess purpose. For others, that design is evidence of a variety of scientific processes that reside under the umbrella of evolutionary theory.

Let’s get off the high horse, though. Blog post #2 and we’re already re-litigating the Scopes trial. What does design mean on a personal level? The answer to that question might take quite a few blog posts. To start an answer to that question, let me tell a story from when I was a kid.

Growing up in southeastern Tennessee with three brothers, my parents were keen on getting us outdoors. For family vacations we camped, went to beaches and canoed. When I got older canoeing turned into white water kayaking, and to this day I love the sound and rush of white water. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, when I was a kid, canoeing was a bit terrifying! You see, when we went canoeing it was my dad with my oldest brother and me, and it was my mom with my other two brothers. The river of choice was a nearby class 2/3 river named the Hiwassee, and from the perspective of a young boy, inevitably bad things happened when our boats set out on that river. Boats flipped sending sputtering and gasping bodies downstream. Boats flipped pinning sputtering and gasping bodies against rocks. Boats flipped stranding sputtering and gasping bodies on small islands (only to be found much later in the day). It didn’t help that one of the more intense stretches of the river was named the Devil’s Shoal.

“File:Hiwasseerivermap.png”by Kmusser is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5

Anyway, as you can imagine the anxiety would build as the cars with their canoes strapped to their roofs bumped up the gravel road to the put-in. My poor oldest brother developed a genuine phobia.

All of this changed though, one day when a family friend of my parents took me down the river. His name was Dr. Collins, and in my experience he was a kind man, one who would join my father to coach a motley crew of a baseball team one year. On this trip down the Hiwassee he asked me join him in his canoe, and as we paddled and slid down the river, he talked. See the way the river looks there? It means this. Feel the way the boat is being tugged? Look at how the current is filling in behind that rock. See the deep rise of those waves? Hear that rush? …The entire trip down, Dr. Collins urged me to notice bits of the Hiwassee river in a way that I hadn’t before, and in noticing the river became process. There was no overcoming the river and its devil, but there was a way to find purpose within its signs – to design an awareness and set of behaviors that turned anxiety and terror into a sort of collaborative appreciation.

The paddler spoke to the river and the river answered back.

***

What I’m Listening To: The New Mastersounds

Jazzy / Bluesy / Funk at its best. If this music doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what will. Saw this band perform live in Atlanta at Terminal West. So incredibly tight with rhythm handoffs and musical swagger, and so incredibly loose with their absence of overly scripted patter. If you have a chance to see them live, do yourself a favor and take it!

Something that got me thinking: Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is an interview with Terri Gross mostly about Coate’s new novel The Water Dancer. Coates is incredibly articulate and refreshingly blunt. His points about wanting to write a pulpy / adventure story that didn’t involve the vengeance constructs that are typical of the genre was interesting to me, especially given something like “Django Unchained,” which is a fantasy of pure vengeance. Coates’ angle is that vengeance wasn’t something “socially allowed” in African American history the way it has been in White history. Vengeance was typically and dominantly inflicted on blacks. Coates also raises the idea that the notion of “courage” within an African American pulp narrative would necessarily be different from the mainstream because of the manner in which the individual relates to the social system. I can’t do his ideas justice, though, so listen to the interview!…and then think about what the average superhero movie is saying, exactly.