Book Review: In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

I didn't plan on writing a review of In the Shadow of the Banyan (by Vaddey Ratner). I read it to pass the time, rather than as part of some kind of study or writing program. But now that I've read it, I have some thoughts about it.

The book is a novel, based on the author's actual experiences as a young girl, member of the Cambodian royal family during the time of the Khmer Rouge, an anti-royal, anti-Western Communist revolutionary group that killed millions of Cambodians through purges, overwork, and underfeeding. She journeys from a relatively sheltered situation at the beginning of the book (a child who lives in the imaginal and familiar world of family, stories, Asian Buddhism, Hindu myths), through a series of progressively darker dislocations and losses, until she is struck dumb. She manages to survive (mirroring the author's survival) and make it out of Cambodia with her mother.

I thought of not writing this review, because the thoughts that I had feel like ones that are underdeveloped at this point, or that might not fit what I want to write about in this chapter of the blog, but something insists in me that I do write, and maybe I'm writing notes for later writing that explores the following subjects in more detail.

I identified with three themes that I saw in the book: The imaginal world, the Revolution, and the cross.

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The spiritual/imaginal world was something that the narrator's grandmother, and the narrator, both spent a fair amount of time in, as though when we are new to the world, or not long left in it, we are better able to see things like tevodas (angel-like beings), ghosts, or connect with the story of Indra, with mythical explanations for things. I don't remember there being any moments where the imaginal world appeared in the sensory world (the "real" world), but the grandmother and narrator were able to see it. I think that there is a part of me that lives in that world -- in fact, that's the world of philosophy, though it often presents itself prosaically and mechanistically. And, I sometimes feel (sometimes too much) that I belong there more than I do in the sensory world. I'm not sure I have much of a point to make in bringing this up, but that was my reaction.

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The Revolution spoke to me, because of how much the revolutionaries were into willing and working. The book shows how some of them were heartless, psychopathic, and corrupt, and this makes me think that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous.

I know that some of my past writing (notably How Can We Love?) could, perhaps in its emphasis, if not its text read carefully, be considered a broadly left- (or "revolutionary humanist"-) leaning thing. It has some of the spirit of Revolution, even though it says on the surface of it things that go against Revolution. I think I would say now that the book is flawed, to the extent that it lends itself to a revolutionary humanist reading, because that was not my intention. But it is a somewhat revolutionary thing and that gives me one reason to want to think about the dangers of the revolutionary spirit.

In the Shadow of the Banyan mentions that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge between the Cause and the Party. The Cause was idealistic, but the Party took over. Causes tend to draw on one kind of energy, that of ordinary people, non-psychopathic human desires. But parties can focus on their own well-being, rather than devoting themselves fully to a cause, and outcompete groups still into causes. This is a pessimistic thought, and it's worth noting that there are a lot of places where parties exist but do not wipe out idealism. (Moloch seems like an undefeatable dynamic, but for some reason it doesn't always rule.) There is a tension between Party and Cause tendencies in a society, and it's wise to be concerned about how any cause could turn into a purely partisan thing.

I know that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous, but, as long as the status quo needs to be changed in some way, it is necessary, and perhaps revolutions, or the spirit of revolutions, is needed to maintain the status quo (if you don't fix things, you decay, and some fixing is "microrevolutionary"). A Communist rejoinder to a book speaking of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge might be "fair enough, they were corrupt and captured by psychopathy, and the empowerment of the corruption and psychopathy was enabled by the revolutionary spirit, but you should also do a calculation, alongside that of the death toll from the Khmer Rouge, of the lives lost due to the corruption and psychopathy that prevents capitalist society from doing the most it's really capable of doing to help the poor". (This sounds like something an effective altruist or EA-type person might try to calculate, or already has.) It may turn out to be the case that revolutionary Communism always turns out to be worse for people, but capitalism (or "capitalism+" (plus civil society? the state?)) that isn't doing its best also (less visibly) has blood on its hands.

As is often the case, formulas are dangerous. If you're into Communism or capitalism, you need to be into the good version of that, because the bad version is as bad as the ideology you reject, or perhaps worse.

Should we think in terms of "blood on people's hands"? I think there is an awful truth to it. The moral truth is something that, when comprehended, causes people to do the moral thing. Is it perhaps misleading to talk about "blood on people's hands", is that a deceptive truth? Perhaps for some people, it is deceptive, and for others, it is basically non-misleading. I think that we gaze at the harshest moral truths and then walk away from them to do our relaxed versions of good. (I think that the Drowning Child Illustration is one of the harshest moral truths and generally EAs walk away from it to do their relaxed version of good, as much as that relaxed version of good might burn them out.) If we never gazed, we might never change into the much more mundane, if still countercultural, versions of ourselves that live in the shadow of the gaze.

I try to focus on saying what's true (because I'm a writer, and I feel like that's my "professional" responsibility). I don't think that the Khmer Rouge's worldview is correct, as much as they might be on to something when they see the moral truth of people held down by the ruling classes, or suffering or dying prematurely. For instance, this life is not the limit of our existence, as they thought, and so purity is something that is not desperately urgent. Purity is something that is necessary, and will come in its time -- the sooner the better, but not desperately soon. I think that MSLN / New Wine System-descended thinking is good for addressing both revolutionary humanism and traditional evangelical religion in their crazily desperate (and on their view, completely necessary) sense that they have to do radical good (on a societal and personal level) NOW, that time is running out for people who must get the essential good (a nice life, or conversion to Christianity) in this life, with death coming all-too-soon.

I understand that the Khmer Rouge, as Communists, were atheists. I believe that God exists, and if I'm correct in that belief, then the emphasis on human well-being found in Communism (as well as in other forms of humanism) could easily be misguided if it ignores God, how our relationships to God are the most fundamental field of altruism. Much of what revolutionary (or microrevolutionary) humanists want to achieve is somewhat orthogonal to people's relationships to God and may not be as valuable, necessary, or urgent as it seems. Making things better from an atheistic standpoint could, in some cases, be dangerous or harmful from a theistic standpoint.

I feel a strong momentum in the direction of secular humanist altruism. For instance, it's relatively easy for me to feel a sense of outrage, or something like that, at things like physical poverty. I think I am somewhat wired to responding to the vivid, loud, and obvious, as I suppose most of us are. The habit of wanting to remove suffering or prolong life, in this life, is not the worst habit. But I have to remember that there's more to the truth than this life.

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Finally, I saw the cross in Ratner's/the narrator's experience. Not that she pursued the cross, although her father did in a fairly obvious way, but in that she underwent the cross. There was a moment toward the end where, to me, it seemed like the narrator died inside in a somewhat good way, and thenceforth had nothing to lose, and little (or less) to fear. (See chapter 29, pp. 295 - 296 in first hardcover edition.) That is one dimension of undergoing the cross, that it pushes us to the point that in some sense we are okay with dying or our death (maybe this is something I can validly connect to the moment in the novel). We are made to be willing to die by being forced close to death, and having "died", we are free. Maybe we have some free will in the matter? I'm not sure, but the narrator was given a gift at that moment of "survivable death" (again, if I'm reading this right). I may want to look at In the Shadow of the Banyan when I someday write a proper book on the cross.

Flat View of Experience

According to simantism, every experience, every simantic word, is spoken to you by God. Therefore, in reality, every moment, whether good, bad, or ordinary, is divine.

In evil moments we may find it impossible to see God, but it must be through God that they are spoken nonetheless. God has to speak things to us that he would rather not.

Dreams, hallucinations, and peak experiences are taken to be more divine than others, by some people. But God is not found in the experiences themselves. Experiences are like poems, and God is like their poet. You can know something about a poet through their poetry, but a poet can write a lot of different poems, which say different things. How do you really know a poet? How do you get from only knowing what someone says, to knowing what it's like to be them? We can have many experiences of God, but we know God by kinship.

Pascalian and Non-Pascalian Nonzeros

Pascalian and non-Pascalian nonzero chances, definition: Any conceivable thing has a nonzero chance of being real -- we can call that the Pascalian nonzero chance. When we have some more solid reason to believe in something, the chance of it being real is also nonzero, is somehow higher, and can be called a non-Pascalian nonzero chance.

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In estimating risk and reward, there are two kinds of nonzero chances I know of: what I will call "Pascalian" and "non-Pascalian".

Blaise Pascal proposed a famous Wager, which goes something like this:

If God exists:

Being aligned with God promises eternal life. Value = infinity.

Not being aligned with God promises hell. Value = minus infinity.

If God does not exist:

Being aligned with God promises a finite life, followed by annihilation. (That life might be better or worse because of your alignment with the God-idea and God-community which must stand in for God if he doesn't exist.) Value = something finite.

Not being aligned with God promises a finite life, followed by annihilation. Value = something finite.

Expected value calculations are made by multiplying the expected payoff of a course of action by its likelihood. Investment is risky but can be rational if the expected profits are high enough. If you have good information about the likelihood and reward, if you keep pursuing investments with high expected values, in the long run you will win big at least a few times, and make up for all the times you don't. You can make expected value a part of your lifestyle, pursuing all kinds of rewards, so that at least one will take. This approach can be used when evaluating whether to invest in alignment with God.

Is it ever rational to act as though God doesn't exist? Seemingly, not if there is a nonzero chance of God existing. Can anyone be 100% certain that God does not exist? Is there any possible way that God could have been the one to create and sustain the world? One would think there is. So if there is a tiny but nonzero chance that God exists, you multiply that by the infinity of eternal life and still get an infinite payout. So your expected value is infinite, no matter how small that tiny but nonzero chance is. Likewise with the negative payout that comes with not being aligned with God. But if you don't align yourself with God, the most you can expect is something finite, a finite life. Align yourself with God, then, no matter what the truth is.

Inspired by Pascal's Wager, some people have discussed Pascal's Mugging. It goes something like this:

A man walks up to you on the street. He says, "I know you're a rational person. So I have an offer to make you. If you give me $100, there's a nonzero chance that I will give you any finite amount of goodness you want -- just name your price. There's a nonzero chance that I have magical powers." A truly rational person, aware of expected value theory, will seemingly have to offer the mugger the money, in order to follow the dictates of reason which they always do. So knowing this, a mugger can exploit rationalists, by playing on their devotion to expected value.

But rationalists (and atheists) hardly ever seem to want to fall for these appeals. I don't know if real Pascal's Muggings happen (although scams do, and appeals to enormous but unlikely future goods occupy some minds), but I would bet someone has offered Pascal's Wager to an atheist, and the atheist was unimpressed. But what's wrong with the Wager and the offer in the Mugging? If you stick to the possibility and logic, they look pretty good. Why do we have an intuition against them?

I'm not sure this really explains the intuition, but I can think of one problem with Pascal's Wager, which is that you have to ask "which God?". Any conceivable thing has a nonzero chance of being real -- we can call that the Pascalian nonzero chance. When we have some more solid reason to believe in something, the chance of it being real is also nonzero, is somehow higher, and can be called a non-Pascalian nonzero chance. Well, if being aligned with God requires us to do certain things and hold certain attitudes, we want to know which God that is, to know what those behaviors and attitudes specifically ought to be. If any one deity can be considered to possibly exist simply because he is conceivable, then why not all the other conceivable ones? If we have to satisfy every conceivable deity, we may end up with all of their demands cancelling each other out. And if they don't, it will probably take too much of our time to figure out how they all add up and balance. Deities could be into all kinds of things, in all kinds of proportions, to all kinds of tolerances.

Perhaps a similar objection can be made to the Mugger. Yes, there is a nonzero chance that the mugger is both honest and possessing sufficient magical powers, but if that chance is exactly as high as the chance that anything conceivable can be true, then it is equally likely that some magical thing will happen to cancel out the good the mugger promises (a leprechaun interferes, perhaps). Then if I take the offer, I'm out $100 and I don't get anything back in the end.

What is the size of a Pascalian nonzero? I don't know if anyone has defined it. A solid 1% chance is definitely non-Pascalian. That's something you can work with. 0.1% or 0.01% are also okay. If you keep adding zeros, though, at some point you get Pascalian. Presumably in people's minds (or guts) there's some exact quantification of "Technically it's got a nonzero possibility because it's conceivable". But I'd be hesitant to mention what it is for me, perhaps because if I did the math I'd have to do something I didn't want to do. I would have been hoping the low number I'd assign to my Pascalian nonzero would make it effectively zero in all practical calculations, but some mugger could offer me a sufficiently high reward, and I'd feel rationally compelled to give him $100.

Position and Rate of Change

Students of calculus or physics know about position and velocity. Velocity is the rate of change of position.

If you have wealth, then where are you going? If you lack, then you move, there is velocity to you. But if you are perfectly satisfied, you don't move. You have no velocity, and so you lack lacking.

If you are perfectly wealthy, you are not attracted to anything or anyone. You are alone on a deeper level.

It matters that you are attracted to something or someone, and it matters to what or to whom you are attracted. Desire is a lack, and part of love is desire, so in order to love, you must be somewhat poor.

Are you poor, or is poverty ruling over you? If you don't eat for 10 hours, is it you who become hungry, or just your stomach? But it is possible for you, the real you, to be oriented toward something, to be attracted, to lack.

Seeing Potential

People can seem like they don't have potential, or aren't real people. But then you see them in the context where they are most truly themselves (e.g., singing a song they wrote). And then you see how they are deep and worth paying attention to.

It's as though the role society wants everyone to inhabit is that of the "typical" person. No dreams, no depth. But people can escape that role by doing what they love.

A parallel to Gell-Mann Amnesia. People are spun to us according to society's narrative (they spin themselves by adopting the roles we elicit.) We sometimes see people's reality, then when the moment is past, we forget.

The Statue Guide

There is a statue which was not made by a human being, which stands in the heart of a certain city. It is 500 feet (~166 m) high and can be seen from miles away.

A young boy saw that statue and saw the life in it. He wanted to go see it, and his parents took him once. He looked up at it from its feet and it didn't look quite the same to him. But he believed in it, and touched the statue's feet, polished by the touch of other citizens.

From then on, he knew that the statue was for him, and he went about his normal days as a young boy, not thinking too much of it.

He read the newspaper when he had nothing to do after school, and saw that there were blind people who had trouble finding the statue. People tried to give them very good directions, but it turns out that it's hard to give directions to blind people if you're sighted.

This weighed on him. He decided that he needed to learn how to make better directions for blind people to find the statue.

He forgot about this in the short run, but remembered it with his whole life. He found that while a sighted person only needed to be shown the statue from a distance, and told "just find a way to get through the streets -- you'll make it", a blind person had to be told to go from this street to that street -- the city has a lot of canyons cutting streets into pieces, so there's no one or two streets that can get you to the statue. And unfortunately, in this city there are blind people who can't even process the idea of a street and must be told precisely how many steps to take in which direction, orienting themselves to the sounds and smells along the way.

So he knew that what he must do was to become blind himself, and even damage his ability to process streets, in order to enter into the reality of the blind people he wanted to guide to the statue. So he let his eyesight dim, from reading old street maps, and learned to read Braille.

And he worked diligently, as a guide for the blind, proving from Braille maps exactly where the statue ought to be.

He had always been content, as when a boy, to let the statue be off in the distance, but one day he wished to see the statue, to believe in it. So he looked up the route to get from right where he was to the statue, and carefully followed it, avoided getting hit by a car, avoided tripping on the cracks in the pavement.

And he arrived at where the statue ought to be, but he could not see it. Eventually someone led him to the foot of it, and he touched the foot. He could only believe that the rest of the statue was there.

Video Poem: A fly's freedom

I was inspired to write this when I was catching a fly to release outside. My usual technique is to isolate the fly in the room I am in (easy when I'm in my bedroom using my laptop), and then open the curtains on the window, or the window itself so that fresh air comes in. The fly's deepest longing (if I judge by behavior), is to be outside. It will fly to that window even though it is closed, and spend its time there.

The fly doesn't understand how the human world works, and is just trying to do what it knows best. It's actually doing the wrong thing sometimes by staying near the window. If there's a door open somewhere else in the house, it should just find the door and fly out the house. But it doesn't know any better, and just thinks (or acts like it thinks): the appearance of freedom shows where you get freedom.

Sometimes this leads to the death of flies. I used to kill flies when I saw them on the window, rather than catch them and release them. So in that version of the human environment, the desire for freedom, seeking it the best way the flies knew how, led to death. They should have increased their intelligence and flown nearby the front door, so that they could slip out whenever the humans opened it.

But because I am actually a good person with respect to the fly's desire for life and freedom, the environment that I create makes it so that when the fly, unjustified though it may be in assuming this, thinks (or "thinks"), "I will go toward freedom -- it's right there, I can see it -- I can smell the fresh air -- somehow that's the way out", it's actually a trustworthy move for the fly to make, in ways that it does not understand.

I approach the fly with a small glass cup and put the cup over the area on the window or screen that the fly is on. The fly thinks the cup is prison, and it is. It takes off -- some flies more untrusting than others -- flies around inside the cup. Eventually, it lands on the inner surface of the cup long enough for me to quickly pick up the cup and put my hand over the opening. Now the fly is very much a prisoner, and is taken far away from the promise of freedom, through the rest of the house to the door.

I open the door and keep the fly inside its transport, and then step outside and close the door, so that if I release the fly it doesn't go straight back into the ultimately unwelcoming human environment. Then I take it down to the most favorable part of the back yard, near the compost heap, which I assume is where a fly would most like to be, and where I assume it is best to be a fly -- although flies are perfectly capable of getting around, to seek their own best environments. Then I let the fly go. Sometimes it takes a moment to grasp that it is free, or I help it out of the glass cup. And then it flies away.

Because the fly looks for freedom so predictably, I was able to capture and imprison it, and give it true freedom.

An MSLN view: we might have different intuitions about life depending on whether we find ourselves in the presence of a beneficent super-human environment (whatever is beyond human agency and/or our ability to sufficiently mentally grasp), or a negative one. The MSLN assumption is that we should adjust our priors in the direction that there is a being who would be inclined to help us, and might do so. And so if that is true, we should go toward freedom, like a fly trying to escape the spacious prison of a house.

The End of the World Affects Motivation

One thing that affects a person's motivational structure is the rational or irrational belief that "the world is ending". Another way to look at this is that there is a certain field in which one can work, and if the field will be there, it's worth working in it, and you are motivated. But if the existence of the field is uncertain, you start to feel doubtful about working in it, and you lose motivation.

"World-ending" can come on a spectrum. The strongest world-ending would be the non-existence of all that exists. But people don't worry about that, and I don't know of a reason to think that will happen. I can think of a couple of less-extreme but still decisive world-endings, that have some basis to be foreseen. God (or the metaphysical organism) might see fit to end the current system, the current world. We would survive, but assuming that work we do now would make a difference in 100 years the way we thought it would now wouldn't make sense if this happened. A second is, we invent artificial intelligence that can change things so fast, so out of control, according to thought processes so foreign to us, that while we might exist after this rapid change (this "Singularity"), efforts that we expend now might have little to do with the way things are after it.

Neither of these two world-endings is certain to happen in my lifetime. But I can sense them affecting my thought process, from time to time. They can be demotivating. One of the best ways to motivate yourself to work in the present is to make a plan for the future. Suddenly, you will have a lot of intermediate steps to work on, in the present. I think our culture (or, a lot of it) has forgotten the future or never saw it, so that now we don't reach for the future and make the present better in the process. When I am most liberated from the present-only mindset, I can see numerous opportunities to make the present or near-future better. But when I am stuck in the present-only mindset, these things which I might do, even for the present, disappear to me.

I think I remember reading an anecdote about someone who worried about nuclear war in the 1950s and thought that worrying about bridge design didn't make a lot of sense, but then decades later was grateful to the people who did think about bridge design, since nuclear war hadn't happened to that point, and a person needed to drive on bridges after all. (I want to say the anecdote might have been about Richard Feynman.) So we might hope that someone cares about the future even though it might not come. What if the Singularity, or the Apocalypse, or the Changing of the World, don't come for another 100, or 200 years? With respect to my lifetime, I then need to think long term, and there is a place for long term thinking, to address the field of earth in the 2100s or 2200s.

Edit (11 Sep 2020): after learning more, I think I would say "the Singularity" (as defined in this post) "may never really occur" (something so powerful and strange as to obviate current human investment in the future) "but many people think it will come in the next 50 years, if it does." I may write a longer post about this.

I think the MSLN answer to this question is to say: "What is most important is not altruism, but to be an altruist. An altruist necessarily cares about effectiveness. But being an altruist, to the best of your ability, or in whatever other way necessary becoming like God in who you are, is necessary at all times, no matter how futile things seem." Your horizon is always far in the future, with respect to your life on earth, and so if the things that you do here end up being mere gestures after the Singularity gets through with them, or after the world is ended by God, then at least you, with your inner being, survive to the next world. The field of you, of who you are, remains relevant, regardless of what happens with the outside world. So, if you have the time, work in whatever way you can, and if that way that you work presupposes that there is a relevant future, live that way, so that the imperishable part of you can certainly be invested in.

Empathy of the Image of Suffering

I'm reading a biography of J. R. R. Tolkien. He fought in World War I. There's a description of trench warfare in the book: no sleep, cold, wet, people froze to death, had lice, got diseases, and when they tried to fight, mostly they just got killed, and there was chemical warfare. Tolkien lost all but two of his childhood and college friends to the war.

Tolkien was scarred by the war, but went on to be a father and husband, write books, have a career. Reading the description of World War I, I had a feeling of "how could a person live through that?" But I think I was getting caught up in the image of hardship and suffering, rather than the reality. I don't know what trench warfare is like from personal experience, so instead I imagine the way it is. To actually go through it is to have to live through it, you're living through it, you can live through it (although not everyone survived). Death is something you live through when it comes, you're living through it, in a sense you can live through it, it is something you can bear when it comes.

One of the failure modes of empathy is when it becomes about the image of someone else's suffering or hardship rather than the reality. The person who is living through it can get through it, or even die from it in an acceptable way, but the person on the side fears for them, feels pity for them, feels discouragement for them, based on the image. Cowardice or lack of self-confidence, self-pity, and a spirit of depression make it harder for a person to live through their real suffering and hardship, and can be communicated from the "empathy of the image" person to the person actually suffering.