Category Archives: life

May 21, 2009 · 5:14 am

The truth and mirrors

mirrorphoto

The eye of the beholder sees many things, and the beholder alone is the judge of what he or she sees.  The beholder sees beauty, or ugliness, or truth, or lies, and the beholder knows something.  The thing about eyes, however, is that they look out, not in.

Adam Smith, the great moral philosopher and economist, wrote that the solitary person “could no more think of his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind, than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.” The solitary person, in other words, can know little of himself – and so we need others.  “Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted [i.e. lacked] before.” This was key for Smith, for he believed that by considering the judgments and opinions that other people have of our actions, we achieve the basis of a moral society.

For Lou Reed, the mirror held the promise of love for those who couldn’t see their own beauty.

I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know …

When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind …

I find it hard to believe you don’t know
The beauty that you are
But if you don’t let me be your eyes …

Michael Jackson took this a step further, hoping that the mirror could help a person look inside.

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways …
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change

Jackson’s use of the mirror was a kind of solipsistic (or maybe just plain lonely) version of Freud’s:  “The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”

But mirrors are tricky.  They are passive reflectors.  Place a lie in front of a mirror, and you will see only a lie.  Mirrors confuse and when combined with smoke, serve to hoodwink and swindle people out of the truth and what is real.  The mirror, a hoped-for source of truth, gives the world to magicians and con artists.

In the Middle Ages, ambitious politicians and intellectuals wrote books called Mirror of Princes, in order to curry favor and win state positions by writing about how a real prince could reflect the qualities of an ideal prince.  An elaborate form of flattery, it was a way to get a job, but the Mirror of Princes literature was a corrupt thing, the falsification of what mirrors were supposedly created for.

Machiavelli exploited the lie of the Mirror of Princes to write the definitive satire of political philosophy, The Prince, seen only in its reverse-mirror image of “Machiavellian” self-interested intrigue, deception, and cruelty.  Machiavelli wrote his satire only too well, and his republican and democratic self has been lost to history (except for the community of political theorists, who are a small community indeed).  Machiavelli was a good guy, who survived torture and other awful events for his commitment to democratic republicanism.  Such is the danger of playing in front of mirrors.

In The Lady from Shanghai, Orson Welles created the classic mirror scene, in which his central characters meet in a fun-house mirror maze and proceed to have a shootout amid the dozens of reflected images of themselves.  Just who would kill whom is a matter of luck, but both Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth are mortally wounded, and their stupidity allows Michael, played by Welles, to walk away free.  The beauty of the scene consists in the way that the mirrors only serve to reflect the hubris of everyone involved, amplifying the conclusions that one might have hoped to see.

Mirrors can show us only what we put in front of them.  Our fun-house mirrors create images that satisfy and mollify at the expense of the truth.  We use mirrors to convince ourselves that we can see objectively, when we’re only seeing what we want to see.  Francis Bacon observed that “… human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”

IMG_1601There are mirrors, and then there are fun-house mirrors, and then there are false mirrors.  Mirrors can’t solve our problems or help us find the truth.  Only honesty can, and that’s a thing apart from mirrors.  Don’t seek the truth in a mirror.  Close your eyes and seek the truth within.  You may not see it, but you may find it.

Credits

Adam Smith, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, in The Essential Adam Smith, ed. R. Heilbroner (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 101.

Lou Reed, “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” recorded by the Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967.

Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror, Bad, 1988.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Aphorism 41.

7 Comments

Filed under existentialism, fiction, life, love

Tagged as , , ,

April 17, 2009 · 4:57 am

The truth and us

zebras-1

There’s no one else just like you.

That’s right – your fingerprints, your DNA, your handwriting, the way you walk, and so on – all this is distinctly original.  Our brains are hardwired to discern the smallest features that distinguish one face from another, so that we never forget a face, even at a distance.

Then again, on another level, there are a lot of people just like you.  Most people, in fact.  Look at the diagram of the bell curve.

normal1

In the middle of the curve is the average, also called  the “mean.”  68% of people tend to be clustered closely around the average – within one standard deviation, as it is called.  This is true of anything that is randomly distributed – height, IQ, athletic abilities, some behavioral characteristics, and much more.  Most of what your we think of as unique is, in fact, randomly distributed and subject to a whole set of scientific laws that we’ll never be able to change.  Indeed, the illusory character of uniqueness is captured perfectly by the term standard deviation.

Go out two standard deviations from the mean, and you have accounted for about 96% of all people.  The people who really make things happen lie in the “tails,” two standard deviations or more out from the mean.

The territory of the tails, on both sides, includes the super-geniuses and super-morons, the saints and sociopaths, the superstars and the ne’er-do-well’s.  Each tail has about 2% of the population, which means that about 4% of people are truly unique.  Only one of the tails contains the people that are usefully unique; the other contains the 2% who must be institutionalized or monitored in some important, and usually costly, way.  In a lot of ways, parents playing the odds just might hope their kids are more like everyone else than not.

Think about it this way:  all leopards have spots, and no two leopards have the same spots.  The same goes for zebras and their stripes.  Penguins can distinguish the call of their mate from among thousands of squawking birds in the colony.  But they all look and sound the same to me, and they’re all beautiful, too.

Maybe the same goes for us.  What do the zebras see when they look at a crowd of people?

It’s great to be yourself, an individual, someone with special talents.  But every once in a while, it’s good to celebrate what we are just as much as what I am.

__________

Credits:  Photo of zebras, being all different from each other:  http://animalphotos.info/a/topics/animals/mammals/zebras/.

Graphic of normal curve and distribution by http://classes.kumc.edu/sah/resources/sensory_processing/learning_opportunities/sensory_profile/bell_curve.htm.

6 Comments

Filed under individuality, life, normal distribution, statistics

Tagged as , , , , , ,