A Time Outside This Time

by Amitava Kumar

  “If you remove all six legs,” the scientist concluded, “the flea cannot hear.”

  20.

  I took a dislike to a talkative multimedia artist from Mexico named Claudio, who had arrived at the villa a week after me. The unending drama of the self, et cetera. But then I found myself seated across from him at lunch and he told me that he was working on an app that will have information about parents seeking asylum in the United States and their children who have been separated from them. Later, over cocktails in the evening, he asked me if I had a “theory” about Donald Trump. I said that I didn’t and tried to focus on my drink. Undeterred, Claudio said he would like to conduct an experimental survey in which at least two thousand people across America would be asked if they thought Trump was one of the following:

  Unconventional but truthful

  A liar with something to hide

  A bullshit artist who didn’t care about the truth or lies

  What would such a survey reveal? Claudio thought that was a good question. To his mind, it would tell us more about the American people. Claudio said that if most Americans chose the first option, we would know they were immature and lied to themselves. If they chose option two, they showed themselves as mature but with perhaps too rigid a sense of truth and lies. The third option, which Claudio thought was the best answer, would tell us that Americans were not delusional. But, and here he laughed loudly, his goatee pointing up at the sky, this answer would throw up the critical question: If the majority of the voters thought he was a con artist, why the hell did they elect him?

  A couple of hours later, an email from Claudio popped up in my in-box. It was an extract from a philosopher’s treatise on the nature of bullshit:

  Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

  I saw Claudio again but didn’t have much to say to him, and yet the thought that was sparked by his email has never left me. If Trump was only a liar, perhaps the right response would be to be an active archivist, cataloging truths. But what to do with a bullshitter? The point is not to do anything with him at all—or with Modi, for that matter—but to attend to the minds of those who voted for him. What made them so susceptible to bullshit? Or, as Vaani would put it, and in fact does put it, a bit too often, we operate with biases that our rational minds aren’t even conscious of. And we do this even, or particularly, when we think we are being most rational. Maybe. But my position is closer to that of a frustrated Hillary Clinton, who said that you could put half of Trump supporters in “the basket of deplorables.” I’m quite aware of my biases and I’m also confident that I’m right when I say that Clinton’s reading of Trump and this particular half of his supporters was unimpeachable: “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people—now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.”

  21.

  More about bias. This from an article published in The New Yorker: “As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now.” The article goes on to present the findings of a psychology experiment conducted at Stanford University. Researchers gave students prompts with opposing views on capital punishment—whether that form of punishment deterred crime or not. Although the experiment was designed with compelling statistics, the data were wholly made up, fictitious. “The students who had originally supported capital punishment rated the pro-deterrence data highly credible and the anti-deterrence data unconvincing; the students who’d originally opposed capital punishment did the reverse. At the end of the experiment, the students were asked once again about their views. Those who’d started out pro–capital punishment were now even more in favor of it; those who’d opposed it were even more hostile.” Psychologists call this “confirmation bias.” For proof of this bias, take a look at the debates on Twitter. My own bias in this matter is that I’m sure studies have been conducted during which participants, after being informed at length about confirmation bias, proceed to behave exactly as before. Novels, then, and the characters in them, appear either real or implausible to the reader depending on the latter’s preconceived notions and biases. I’m not writing to change your mind. I cannot change your mind.

  22.

  In 2010, a psychologist named Amy Cuddy, along with two collaborators, Dana Carney and Andy Yap, published a study on how a person’s body postures associated with power affect that person’s feelings, hormones, and behaviors. In particular, the researchers claimed that body postures associated with dominant behavior (“power posing”) for as little as two minutes can increase testosterone levels, decrease cortisol levels associated with stress, increase appetite for risk, and cause better performance in job interviews. Other researchers, however, found it impossible to replicate these results. One of Cuddy’s collaborators, Carney, even disavowed the original results. In fact, this particular experiment is often cited in research circles as a prime example of the replication crisis in psychology. And yet, and yet. A TED talk by Cuddy where she famously preached “Don’t fake it till you make it—fake it till you become it” has been watched more than 57 million times. A self-help book authored by Cuddy about these findings was a bestseller and translated into thirty-two languages. What a remarkable feat of storytelling this experiment is! How seductive is the theory that all you need to succeed in a job interview is to slip into the bathroom stall for two minutes prior to the meeting and spread your arms out wide and tell yourself that you are powerful!

  Tiny tweaks lead to big changes!

  Two minutes will change your life!

  Sale ends soon!

  23.

  The “Findings” column in Harper’s Magazine serves as an introduction to what is fascinating and at the same time risible about experiments and research. Here are some findings from scientific journals published in “Findings”:

  Rude sales staff increase the desirability of luxury goods.

  Americans who have just ridden an up escalator are twice as likely to donate to charity as those who have just ridden a down escalator.

  Scientists do not know why cranes sometimes dance alone.

  Rich parents favor firstborn children more than poor parents do.

  Doctors found that some American children are prevented from playing outside because their parents dress them too fancily.

  Tylenol may reduce existential dread.

  Kentucky is the saddest state.

  (On the other hand, think of all the novels and their hectic plots. The eager mythologies. In the name of imagination, the many disavowals of authorship and ideology. Not to mention the sentimentalism that, to be honest, also infects the present author.)

  In other words, let us not give in to superstition but let us also not fetishize science. Stephen Jay Gould was a famous scientist who died in 2002. In May one year, on his death anniversary, a photograph was posted on Twitter of a slightly heavy man with a mustache (with an unfortunate resemblance to the odious Tom Friedman) standing next to a statue of a dinosaur and the following quote, which is a rebuke to science’s hidden assumpt
ions: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

  24.

  Consider for a moment our daughter, the scientist, conducting her experiments even though she was just three at that time. Vaani was a great believer in breastfeeding. And, at three, our daughter received, in addition to regular food, a suckle in the morning and once again at night. Piya would press a hand to her mother’s breast and appear to weigh it before applying her mouth and then after a while move to the other breast with the signature remark: “This one not working.”

  Have I been tempted to conduct an experiment with my daughter? Yes, but only for a moment, and for no longer than that because I cannot tolerate the cruelty of offering a treat and then withholding it. I’m referring to the marshmallow experiment. We have all probably watched the videos on YouTube of little kids who are sitting at a desk with a marshmallow in front of them. The researcher has told them that they can eat the marshmallow when they are left alone but, if they wait for fifteen minutes, they will get a second marshmallow. Two-thirds of the children, we are told, do not wait. (The script applies to a president widely seen as childish. At the time of Trump’s inauguration, a cartoon by Paul Noth in The New Yorker showed the chief justice administering the oath of office to Trump while holding a plate with a single marshmallow on it. The caption read: “You can eat the one marshmallow right now, or, if you wait fifteen minutes, I’ll give you two marshmallows and swear you in as President of the United States.”)

  25.

  Should one come to fiction to escape from the lies? No, literature, too, is seeded with lies. How could it be otherwise? I came across an article by Peter Maass with the following headline: “Peter Handke Won the Nobel Prize After Two Jurors Fell for a Conspiracy Theory About the Bosnia War.” The conspiracy theory that the jurors on the Nobel committee were duped by was touted by two obscure German books—which claimed that a small public relations firm in the United States named Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, working for the Bosnian government, spread propaganda against the Serbs.

  Maass calls the conspiracy theory “a vast rewriting of history.” (Elsewhere, reporting on Handke’s arrival in Stockholm, Maass explained the mantra of the genocide denier: “Throw doubt into the air so that people begin to question the truth.”) He details how a French journalist’s interview with an executive from the PR firm gave rise to the conspiracy theory. Maass himself had been a reporter for The Washington Post during the war in Bosnia. During his visit to one of the concentration camps run by the Serbs, a note was slipped to him by a prisoner. “About 500 people have been killed here with sticks, hammers and knives. Until August 6, there were 2,500 people. We were sleeping on the concrete floor, eating only once a day, in a rush, and we were being beaten while we were eating. We have been here for 75 days. Please help us.” This is terrible and moving but what Maass’s article also shows us is how difficult it is to erase from the public sphere (“the bowels of the internet”) a discredited, dishonest story. Truth might appear pure and incontestable but lies live forever.

  Maybe it’s because I feel I’m stranded in Europe right now that I feel one shouldn’t be stranded without the right sense of history.

  26.

  There are scientists among the fellows at the villa—there is also a doctor and policy expert in the form of Jimi Adeola—and there is a secret I have kept from them. I’m a writer who writes a mix of essays and literary fiction but I find fascinating the stories that researchers tell about science. The story that Jimi told me about stolen penises is the best I have heard here.

  From my journal, a near-random example from Vaani’s research: Psychologists at Yale found that participants in a study perceived others to be more generous or caring if they, the participants themselves, were holding a warm cup of coffee as opposed to iced coffee.

  I once said to Vaani that when I come across a report like this one I marvel at the story line. The researchers seem to have drawn out from the chaos that surrounds us a simple truth about human behavior. Vaani doesn’t agree with me entirely; as I have said, she is a believer in data. (Talking of data, she told me in an email two weeks ago that we know that COVID-19 is going to be more dangerous than the SARS outbreak from seventeen years ago because the total number of casualties in China from SARS numbered 774. And in January alone, in China, there were 908 dead from COVID.)

  In March 2018, a study published by researchers at MIT said that false news on social media spreads six times faster than news that is true. Robots, the study found, spread truth as well as falsehood at the same rate, but not humans. Which means that human users always spread fake news faster and better than they do the truth. Why does this happen?

  The MIT researchers claim that fake news has a higher level of diffusion because it is “novel.” This term irked me for professional reasons. I had just published a novel when I read that report. Were the researchers saying that there was something in common between fake news and whatever it was that I was writing?

  There was a statement in the report that was particularly bewildering: “We found that false rumors were significantly more novel than the truth across all novelty metrics, displaying significantly higher information uniqueness, divergence, and Bhattacharyya distance.” I contacted the researchers and sought clarification. I was told that I could think of novelty “as simply meaning that which you have not seen before.”

  That was helpful, but I disagree strongly.

  Unlike literary fiction, what we call fake news most deeply conforms to a popular prejudice. It is formulaic, often sentimental, and has about it a quality of sickening repetitiveness. For several weeks in 2018, a doctored video showing a kid being kidnapped was circulated in India on WhatsApp. The video ended with corpses of children lined on the floor. Despite wide coverage of the story and police warnings about not believing rumors, the same video led to lynchings of innocent people in one town after another. There is nothing novel in what we witnessed with tragic regularity.

  The kidnapping video being circulated was actually from another country: it was shot as an ad for an organization in Karachi, Pakistan, concerned with the safety of children. Now it had been edited in a way to show only an act of abduction. And the image of the children lying dead on the floor? It was from Syria. The children being shown as victims of kidnappings in India were actually victims of a distant war.

  At the end of that original video the child is returned to his friends and a banner is unfurled: it contains a warning about how easy it is to abduct children and how we must take care of them. In a BBC interview, the Pakistani adman who created that video, Asrar Alam, responded to the horrific use to which the doctored video has been put. Alam said, “This is very devastating for me. I don’t have words. I want to see the face of that man who edited that video for bad purposes.”

  When I heard Asrar’s words, I felt I could identify with them. It is a writer’s desire to give a shape and a voice to a character, however villainous. In the age of the Internet, the person you are interacting with online is frequently anonymous; the person threatening you, often in the most graphic and intimate terms, is hiding behind an invented name. Perhaps Alam was saying that he wanted to give evil a face because the idea of a faceless enemy was unbearable to him. Perhaps he was saying that the universe described in the fake video had no feeling, no interiority. In any case, I saw that he was appealing for the presence of something—someone—human. This is the realm of literature.

  Genuine surprise, of the sort one finds in a story by, say, Anton Chekhov or Alice Munro, shakes us out of our complacent understanding of the world. It makes us skeptical of what we thought we knew about ourselves and, more than that, about others. But not fake news. It exists to create die-hard believers in an incomplete and intolerant view of the world. Good
writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, does not, like a pious police announcement, appeal for calm; instead, it disturbs and challenges beliefs in a way that fake news doesn’t and can’t.

  Against simplicity, complexity. Against judgment, understanding. Against fake news, the radical surprise of real life.

  27.

  On April 23, 2013, the Associated Press tweeted a piece of breaking news. “Two explosions at the White House and Barack Obama has been injured.” The tweet from the AP Twitter handle was fake news, of course, and later a group called Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for it. But, nevertheless, computerized trading algorithms reacted to this tweet, and began trading according to predetermined rules about responses to such crises. What was the result of the fake tweet? The stock market went into a tailspin, wiping out $136.5 billion in equity value. In just six minutes! This reveals the terrible danger of fake news—but also, no less clearly, the inherent trap of living in societies whose modes of functioning are governed by automated algorithms. (A smaller truth: it is entirely possible, dear reader, that algorithms devised by those who serve a distant and powerful corporation have determined, based on your previous choices, that this book you are holding in your hands should be brought to your notice. For which I’m thankful but yet resentful of the arbitrariness of the judgment, lacking nuance or any real engagement with you. A few different clicks and, who knows, you would be seeing an ad for a memoir written by Steve Bannon.)