Mind Reading for Fun and Profit

The Joys of Excusing the Obvious

Mind Reading Validity Is Just Assumed

During the first Christmas holiday break that followed 9/11, I cracked open a copy of the Koran and read it through. I was well and truly thunderstruck by what I found there. The contents were, of course, appalling, what with their explicit anti-Semitism, genocidal ideation, and the thoroughgoing denial of the deity of Christ. But what I found more shocking than any of those things was the extent to which the text of the Koran, easily found by anyone with even a smidgen of curiosity, was so starkly at odds with everything then being said about Islam by the political class and the media. It was so shocking to me - just how divorced the “official pronouncements” were from what was staring anyone in the face who bothered to look.

This has been on my mind for several reasons the last few weeks. Not least because I’m in the middle of re-reading and serializing some chapters from a book I wrote about my late daughter. Early in the process, when my daughter first started going off the rails, I was curiously reluctant to interpret her actions at face value. I spent an absurd amount of time ruminating over what psycho-therapeutic answer might explain the choices she was making. The idea that she might actually have given herself over to some dark appetites and self-destructive affections was a very hard pill to swallow. So we tried to figure out something, anything, that could act as a substitutionary vehicle which could carry the blame and help us to avoid the obvious but excruciating conclusion about her actions.

Deeply embedded in the Western imaginarium is the assumption that especially evil and depraved actions almost always have some environmental explanation beyond their being simply, well, evil depravity. Wherever you turn, descriptions of the most heinous actions are routinely leavened with back stories about the difficult childhoods of the perpetrator. The problem with this kind of thinking, of course, is that it amounts to a kind of mind reading exercise in which causality can never truly be proved. In its essence it is a kind of superstitious embrace of the notion that the labyrinthine recesses of a human mind can be navigated by outsiders. We moderns conceive of ourselves as something like psychological cave spelunkers who, though we cannot really descend into the cave, we must believe that we can nevertheless readily uncover the hidden and often unstated motivations which lead others to make their observable choices. Notice my choice of wording there: they were “lead” to make choices by prior life experiences. The unstated presupposition, to be more explicit, is that they themselves, in the present, were not making unbidden moral choices in accordance with their own volitional desires. Something about their past has, in some way, “lead” them to do it.

Ancient Wisdom

The heart is deceitful above all things

and beyond cure.

Who can understand it?

“I the Lord, search the heart and examine the mind,

To reward each person according to their conduct,

According to what their deeds deserve.” Jeremiah 17:9-10

In contrast to our modern presumption that we possess the ability to read minds (we don’t openly call it “mind reading”, but that omission merely facilitates the self-deception) the ancient prophet Jeremiah suggested that mind reading is most especially not the purview of human beings.

The prophet, in the section of his book quoted above, explicitly raises the question of who has the ability to understand the human heart. Having established that the human heart is incurably deceitful, he asks, “Who can understand it?” The conundrum, as framed, is that anyone who might want to understand the human heart is himself already hampered by being in possession of his own incurably deceitful organ.

But happily (fearfully?), God himself volunteers for the job. Indeed he appears to lay exclusive claim to that activity. But he then does a curious thing by going on to suggest that conduct and deeds are themselves the moral signifiers of our state of mind. Jesus, I assume, reworded this very principle in the New Testament when he said “by their fruit you will know them”.

The idea here seems to be that we are incapable of reading minds and hearts, such pursuits being the domain of God himself. We need only believe the evidence in front of our eyes if we want to understand what kind of person we are dealing with. It is all we have to work with.

This is, I’m afraid, much more difficult than it sounds. George Orwell famously observed that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”. Alas, I’m afraid we often actively resist seeing what is in front of our nose, especially if it is horrific or even merely unflattering toward ourselves.

The beauty of mind reading is that it allows us to manage our own discomfort by excusing or explaining away things that would otherwise require something of us that we would prefer not to give.

The Actual Point I’m Trying to Make

You may be, like me, following the events taking place in Israel. The reactions online have been, shall we say, illuminating. Mind reading has been well in evidence as people have attempted to “explain” that what we are seeing is not actually what we are seeing. It’s justified. Or explainable. Or at least understandable. Or must be interpreted in light of historical events having precisely nothing to do with the women and children who are being murdered. This whole thing has had an eerie resemblance to that Christmas 20+ years ago when what I was reading with my own eyes was so at odds with what the talking heads of that time were saying.

I wonder what would happen if, instead of mind reading, we took the actions of the perpetrators at face value. What would we conclude? I’m referring now to actions like parading (and desecrating) the naked dead bodies of Israeli women through the streets of Gaza. Producing a video of a young family with three small children as one of the daughters is taken from her family and murdered in front of her parents and her siblings. There was no apparent reason for this other than homicidal sadistic cruelty. Also possibly psychological terror propaganda: after recording the family’s traumatic reaction, the video recording was uploaded to the world as a kind of triumphant exultation and celebration. A very elderly wheelchair-bound holocaust survivor has been hauled off into captivity in Gaza. Four year old children, torn from their families are now just…gone. Hundreds of innocents taken captive and now held hostage. There are allegedly even scores of Americans held hostage and among the dead. (I mention the American connection only because of some I have read who have insisted that none of this is an American concern.)

If as moderns we weren’t given to mind reading as an exculpatory exercise, and chose instead to straightforwardly draw conclusions from these actions themselves, what might we conclude we were dealing with? Who might we conclude we are dealing with?

Just asking.