Making my peace with King Arthur

Posted on 21 March 2026 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

What’s the appeal of Arthur, King of the Britons?  A few years ago, in a post about irony and democracy, I mentioned in passing that I’ve never been much interested in his stories, and I largely blamed my strong adolescent attachment to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  My favorite scene in that movie was when Dennis the Peasant questioned his authority: “Look, strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out swords… that’s no basis for a system of government.”  I much preferred that honest analysis to the tragic utopian dreaminess of Arthurian magic – and the playful irony throughout the movie was just plain fun.

But it probably predates that.  My mom had a considerable personal library of British history, but it was almost all on either prehistoric Britain (what we used to call “Celtic”) or England under the Plantagenets and Tudors.  She skipped over the centuries of Roman rule, the reigns of Alfred the Great and his fellow Anglo-Saxons, and the Norman conquest.  And that would include wherever in there the legendary Arthur supposedly fit.  I’m not sure why, but she did have a cynical streak.

So I’ve generally avoided Arthur, except, as noted, for the Monty Python parody, and some minimal exposure to Disney’s version of The Sword in the Stone.  I did watch a fascinating PBS show a few months ago, though, that shed some light on who the historic Arthur might have been. 

The Romans ended their occupation of Britain in 410 A.D., and supposedly the communities they’d founded instantly collapsed.  At least two early medieval documents (although not that early) mention a warrior (not a king) named Arthur who then stepped up to defend Britain against the Saxons, who’d been hired by the Romans as mercenaries and who often wanted to bring their families over from Germany and settle permanently.  

The PBS show, an episode of Secrets of the Dead, presented one archaeologist’s theory that the second most populous Roman city (modern-day Cirencester, about halfway between Oxford and Wales) was far enough from the Channel that its residents held out for quite some time.  They were even still building new Roman-style villas with mosaic floorings after 410.  They also had an amphitheater that was repurposed into a military base, with a new circular structure inside (possibly the inspiration for the Round Table myth?).  This warrior, Arthur, may have been based there, and after he worked with rulers throughout England (as shown by some unusual uniformity in military artifacts), there was peace between the Britons and the Saxon newcomers for maybe twenty years.

And I find that very cool.  Obviously my objection isn’t to the history of that era.  I presumably had thousands of ancestors living through those years.  So why have I been avoiding Arthur?

I know why I couldn’t get very far in The Mists of Avalon, although I’d been a great fan of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover books before the revelations about her home life.  Its feminist revisionary treatment of the Arthur story seemed to be hammering readers over the head with the message, “WOMEN ARE MISTREATED! MEN ARE BAD!”  My apologies to any of my readers who got farther in the book than I did and who may have discovered wonderful nuance – it just wasn’t there early enough for me.

When it comes down to it, I suspect my real objection to the stories about the legendary Arthur is that his earnest attempts to create a responsible and responsive government were overshadowed by the problems of his love life – the story of Queen Guinevere and her extramarital love for the dashing Sir Lancelot.

And that brings me to this weekend.  Our dear friend Ashley is appearing in a local performance of Camelot – specifically, the small-cast version.  I had definitely been looking forward to seeing it, and to discovering whether I’m familiar with more than two of the songs.  The very catchy “Camelot” theme song has been in my head, off and on, for weeks, and I’ve also often been humming the song that opens the second half, “If Ever I Would Leave You.”  (I have to admit, though, that my brain keeps confusing the latter song with “Some Enchanted Evening” – I think there’s a hint of melodic inversion between the two.)

Not only do I find all of Ashley’s acting and singing performances quite entertaining (she was a fabulous June Carter Cash in their production of Ring of Fire), it also seemed it was high time for me to make my peace with King Arthur. 

And of course it was grand fun.  The love between Arthur and Guenevere rang true, as did the different sort of love between Guenevere and Lancelot, and yet a third form of love between Arthur and Lancelot.  Mordred, who appears out of the blue in the second half, was excellent, his malice overturning all the work the other three had done to create a more civilized society.  He led the knights in singing “Fie on Goodness,” a true highlight.

Screenshot

I was especially delighted to learn that one major theme echoed my own long-standing interest in the problems caused by the ideal of “purity.”   Lancelot was its standard-bearer, insisting on his purity of heart and perfection of body, but it also turned out that the very laws Arthur had had written to replace brute force as the guiding power of the land were much too “pure.”  The moral of the story:  Make sure whatever laws you create are aligned with your principles!  These laws knew nothing of the compassion and mercy that were Arthur’s own guiding values.

By the end, it was clear – ideals are good, perfectionism is bad.  As Rebecca Solnit has so often pointed out, many Americans have been using perfectionism as an excuse to stay on the sidelines and as the basis for complaining about politicians who have to work within the reality of our times. 

And that brings me to the insight I wanted to share with all of you.  Irony can be great fun, but it too often goes hand in hand with cynicism.  Earnestness, irony’s opposite, can seem naïve – but it means we care.  That’s something I learned as a young adult, that choosing earnestness over irony can be the more productive and mature path.  Given how prominent the nastiest forms of irony have become in public life, I hope that we’ll also have earnest leaders, inspired by ideals but able to work with what we’ve got.  Just like Arthur!

And now that I’m more fond of Arthur (at least the Lerner & Loewe version, which was heavily inspired by the T.H. White version), I can turn my attention to Twain’s version.  By coincidence, the March 2026 assignment in my husband’s online book club is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  I suspect that Twain will also have things to say about the romanticism of chivalry, in his case probably comparing it with the virtues of American ingenuity.  From our perspective, they’re both a bit outdated – but that’s not Arthur’s fault.  I’ll keep reminding myself of his vision: egalitarian, communitarian, committed, principled.

If you live within a reasonable distance of downtown Eugene, Oregon, consider checking out Camelot: Small Cast Version at the Actors Cabaret.  The show ends next weekend, so don’t delay!

Photo credit:

“Fie on Goodness” – Actors Cabaret Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/actorscabaretofeugene/posts/pfbid0yUqdUqyPBmDBUHPP3GGbiEU31R2nX3ukAikHV5uMBPTeV6TYx3wv3RWgES2w6KPDl

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The ACK! factor

Posted on 24 February 2026 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Here in the United States, we are constantly seeing bad news. 

At this point in my little essay, conventional writing practices call for me to list the problems I think we’re facing.  That would let me signal to you, the reader, as to whether we’re in the same political camp and therefore whether it’s worth your time to keep reading.  I’m not going to do that, for reasons that should become obvious – meanwhile, please trust me.

Whatever our politics, we’re all seeing that things are rough, for many of us.  And we each have so little we can do, as individuals, to make things better.  The list is short.  We can vote for candidates who match our values and priorities.  We can tell our elected representatives what we think.  We can protest when things are going differently than we think they should.  And above all, we can stay informed and build community, so that if the time comes that we need to be personally involved, we’ll know what to do.

I fully support our committed engagement to democracy and due process.  And because I want us to stay engaged, I’m writing today to share a problem that’s become widespread – when our work to stay informed and build community can backfire on us.

One of our current favorite places to learn what’s going on and share it with others is in our social media feeds.  We see lots of messages conveying the implications of various facts and findings.  The people crafting these messages – memes and banners – are likely thinking that the more dramatic they are, the better – the more likely they’ll catch our attention and convince us it’s important to Do Something Now.

Here’s an example.  The more we can reduce our emission levels for atmospheric greenhouse gases like CO2, the less climate change the Earth will experience in coming decades.  Ideally, our target level should be zero, but that’s not realistic.  We’re not going to all immediately stop driving gasoline-powered cars, heating our homes with fossil fuel products or electricity made from fossil fuel products, taking airplane trips, building with wood and concrete, etc.  So the people who know much more than you or I do about what’s realistic and what the consequences might be have to pick a number, which is our target, and a date, by which we’d like to meet that target.  Back in 2018, the number was 1.5°C for our overall warming, and the date was 2030.  It’s a continuum, not an either/or thing.  The closer we are to the target, the fewer the effects of climate change on our future selves and our families. 

But numbers don’t catch people’s attentions like threats do, and a continuum is nowhere near as dramatic as either/or.  If attention and drama is our goal, which it very well might be if we want people to act, we need to rephrase things.  That’s why soon after that 2018 announcement, there were protesters waving banners telling us we had 12 years left to save the planet.

Twelve years!  ACK!

Whenever something is threatening our basic security – all those important things at the base of Maslow’s Pyramid like food, water, air, sleep, shelter, safety – our natural response is ACK, and we immediately focus all of our attention on getting those needs met.

When we’re learning about it from others, people with the best intentions who are trying to nudge us toward action, but the threat is not obviously immediately in our faces, we may still have the physiological reactions of ACK!, but we don’t have actions we can take that are guaranteed to put things right.  And when we’re facing a continuous stream of messages like that, the effects of our continuous stream of ACK! responses will build up and can affect us profoundly.

This all assumes goodwill on the part of the people creating these banners and memes.  When people believe what they’re saying but it’s wrong or misleading, that’s what we call misinformation.  Sometimes, though, the messages we see are actually disinformation – the deliberate spreading of false or misleading information.  For example, starting in 2016, a “troll farm” based in Russia used U.S. social media, especially Instagram, to discourage Black Americans from voting. And then, of course, people spread things along, and the effects can snowball.

So that’s social media.  What about traditional media?  For the most part, the news media are businesses.  They need to minimize their expenses while maximizing their sales.  To minimize their expenses, they usually can’t afford to spend much time on research – they have to go with whatever information is readily available, like government reports.  To maximize their sales, they need flashy headlines – they need to find (or manufacture) the drama in the facts.  They also need to focus on what’s happening right now – they can’t always invest in the slower stories.  Today’s bad news is simply more dramatic than long-term good news.  Hence, more ACK.

When we’re constantly exposed to ACK messaging, there are three logical directions we can go.  First, there’s denial.  We can protect ourselves by rolling our eyes and dismissing it all as nonsense, the ravings of hysterics.  Seeing these messages loudly dismissed as ravings does little to build bridges with the people who aren’t sure where they stand. 

Second, although we might think what we’re seeing is true, we realize that subjecting ourselves to these messages with no realistic way that we as individuals can fix these problems is harmful to us.  So we opt out.  We reject the context of public affairs as something that’s too much of a hassle, too harmful for our mental health, and we focus on our own lives. 

But if we’re opting out from the world of politics, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us.  Many young people today are trying very hard not to think about the state of the world, but still believe it’s too messed up or that the world may not even be there in the relatively near future.  It can be very difficult to commit to a productive path in life if one doesn’t believe, at heart, that there’s a point to even trying. 

The third choice is to accept that it’s our responsibility as citizens to stay engaged.  If the messaging is always negative, then we just keep treading water and feeling anxious, and maybe also depressed.  When we’re under stress, we’re more impulsive and make worse decisions than when we’re relaxed.   But when we’re facing big problems, we need to be confident that we can be our best selves.

Also, when we’re under stress, we oversimplify.  It’s much harder to embrace complexity when our mental resources are taxed by anxiety and threat. 

In his many best-selling books, the psychologist Steven Pinker makes the case that – despite what many of us think – life for humans has been getting considerably better.  Personally, I find him exasperating.  He’s oversimplifying in the other direction, generally ignoring racial issues and serious ongoing environmental problems.  But he does have a point.  Neither of my sons had to worry about getting drafted and shipped overseas to die in jungle warfare.  I can name many people who have lived for decades after receiving cancer treatment.  Skies and rivers and lakes are often cleaner than they were when I was born.

And it’s good for us to remember these things and celebrate them.

So today I want to tell you about FixTheNews.com, which I learned about back in August.  It’s by a small team in Australia who collect and share solid, verified, GOOD news.  You can subscribe for free and get an email every week or so with really encouraging news from around the world.  You can also contribute financially, supporting their work and getting even more good news.

Just in the past three weeks, here are some things we’ve learned about:

  • Only seven years ago, only 16.7% of India’s rural population had tap water, but that’s now up to 81%.
  • Vaccination rates in Africa have increased dramatically, protecting more people against malaria and other dangerous diseases.
  • China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked, and more than 90% of new investment in China supports clean-energy industries.
  • New research shows that combining solar panels with farming could boost crop output hugely.
  • The United Nations is providing one million hot meals a day to refugees in Gaza.
  • Amazon watershed deforestation has reached an 11-year low.

We can’t replace our current news diet with “all good news,” but we can balance it with services like FixTheNews.com – which can improve our mental health and expand our capacity for news overall.  Here are some potential side effects I can envision from having this kind of news in our lives:

  • Reminders that the world really is a complex place after all, and many of our fellow humans are doing wonderful things
  • Some glimpses of the bigger picture, so we can remember that political seasons change
  • Inspiration for young (and older) people looking for ways to make a difference
  • Simple moments of joy

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed with ACK, consider signing up for this service, or finding some other sources of positivity.  We’re in it for the long haul, after all.

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A bigger “we”?  Humanity as a group, not a category

Posted on 14 February 2026 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Lately I’ve been pondering the notes I have for Chapter 3 of my current work-in-progress, and I think I’ve had an interesting insight.  In this blog, I usually write about “societal meta-narratives,” the background “stories” (really just story-like frameworks) for how we think about the groups we’re in.  The protagonist, or point-of-view “character,” for these sort-of-stories isn’t individuals, it’s the group itself.  That is, it’s Americans, or the Cherokee Nation, or the Ukrainian people, or Mother Russia.

And more than that, it matters that the people in the group are thinking about themselves as a group, not as members of a category that the group happens to comprise.  This is an important distinction.  Left-handed people are a category, not a group.  Asian Americans are mostly a category, not a group.  Women are mostly a category, although sometimes they (we) have the sense of ourselves as a group.  For a long time, being gay meant you were a member of a category, and you would typically want to keep that category membership hidden – it wasn’t until activists organized LGBTQ people into a group that they could achieve civil rights.  Clarence Thomas is a Black American who doesn’t seem to prioritize his membership in that category and probably doesn’t find much personal value in its status as a group.

This group-ness I’m talking about is referred to in academia as “entitativity” – which is kind of a quirky word.  It refers to being an “entity,” but it’s also got the “-ta-“ part like “preventative” and “orientation” do, so even though it may be tempting to say “entitivity,” that’s wrong.  Entitativity.

Humanity, as a group, also has its meta-narratives.  They mostly fall into two categories – religious meta-narratives about the origins of humanity or our collective destiny, and environmental ones about our place as members of the Planet Earth ecosystem.  But in these meta-narratives, do we see ourselves as individual humans or as members of a group?

The Christian meta-narrative tells what will happen to humanity in the long term, but the Christian message is very much addressed to individuals.  We can each decide for ourselves whether to accept what Christianity offers.  And there’s a natural reason that the Christian message is addressed to individuals – when Jesus was preaching to his fellow Jews, they were subjects of the Roman Empire, and it was extremely dangerous for Jews to consider themselves a group, even in their own homeland.  They only dared act as individuals – and only in regard to their own private lives and personal thoughts, not politically.

The environmental movement has also had its moments of appeal to individuals.  Somewhere I have a copy of a book about “50 simple things you can do to save the planet” – and of course, we can each make choices to minimize our carbon footprints.  But it’s a lot easier to do that when our larger systems are supporting us, and at least to get past the start-up stage, larger systems are most effective when groups get involved.  Back in the late 1980s, I worked for a very cool little consulting firm that collaborated extensively with the Electric Power Research Institute, especially in its efforts to make electric vehicles a feasible option.  It took lots of funding to move past the old lead-acid batteries to the lithium-ion batteries often found in today’s electric cars and hybrids.  For funding like that, groups have to be involved, whether that’s governments or foundations making grants or businesses making investments.

But do humans like thinking of themselves as members of a giant group that encompasses all of us?  Ronald Reagan once said, in a speech to the United Nations, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”  He’s probably right, although my years of research on the “democidal mindset” tell me that we’d very quickly start blaming each other as possible collaborators while looking around for infiltrators.

The thing is, many of us – especially in the West – value ourselves as individuals first, and we may tend to be suspicious of groups, except the ones we deliberately choose to join, and (if we’re lucky) our families.  Groups can repress our individuality and take away our freedom.  Our childhood playground experiences tell us that – we might get bullied if we’re too different.  Our history tells us that – Stalin’s ideas of how to do socialism made life in the Soviet Union a nightmare for many.  So we’re often skeptical about groups.

Another complication is that it’s easy to stop thinking like a group and start pointing fingers.  It’s all very well to say that “humanity” created the climate crisis, but someone in a developing nation could reasonably point out that I spent years driving one car, and then another, with very poor gas mileage.  I’ve made choices that contributed more to our collective problem than they have.  They have a legitimate grievance against the American lifestyle, and they may not appreciate being lumped in with the “humanity” who caused the problem.

So… we need an idea of humanity being a group that feels fair to everyone, and that values individuality rather than smothering it right out of us. 

This is a topic that Rebecca Solnit often writes about.   She contrasts what others have called “atomism,” an Enlightenment idea of us each as essentially separate, with “interdependence,” where we each have a role to play through connection with each other.  Ironically, most atoms aren’t even as solitary and self-contained as the metaphor suggests; the vast majority bond with others to form molecules. Nevertheless, some places, like the United States, tend to valorize this idea that we’re each self-contained and self-sufficient. 

In a recent blog post, Solnit describes an “ideology of isolation,” a “sad and lonely” worldview that can even “divorce cause and effect,” since biology teaches us that we’re inevitably interconnected.  Rather than experiencing this connection, its followers “often seem miserable, angry, and eager to punish and harm.”  There may be momentary satisfaction in striking out, but that’s no way to live a life.

Anyway, back to meta-narratives.  Just like regular stories, meta-narratives tend to have a main character (our group) dealing with some problem over time and hoping for a happy outcome.  The tricky bit is that in environmental meta-narratives, our group (humanity) is both the protagonist and the antagonist – we’re collectively dealing with problems created by other humans, in the past and in the present.  So that was my question for this week.  Or rather, my insight for the week is that we need some good examples of this – actual stories that can model useful ways to think – that can encourage us to have better group-stories (meta-narratives) for the future.

In Greek tragedies, the protagonist is also the antagonist, because all the great things they achieve end up lost due to their tragic flaw.  But obviously, we don’t want the story of humanity to be a tragedy.  How can we be both protagonist and antagonist and come out okay?

I started by thinking about the Jungian Shadow.  Jung taught that each of us has a problematic side, a Shadow, that we normally hide away.  We don’t identify with it.  Jungian therapy can involve accepting that we have a dark side and making peace with it.  Instead of a tragedy, the protagonist recognizes their flaws and moves forward anyway, perhaps chastened, but ready to make things right.  Thinking about this storyline might help us with our group “story.”

The main example that came to mind for me was from Ursula Le Guin, who so often thought about these things first.  In A Wizard of Earthsea, young Ged releases a creature while studying at wizard school and has to travel the lands to overcome the creature… which turns out to be his own Shadow, or in the language of Greek tragedy, his hubris.  We’d like to think that the environmental movement has already had some success in teaching us that we can’t control Nature the way we once hoped we could – and that our efforts to do so have caused a whole cascade of problems.  A Wizard of Earthsea is very much about an individual on his own, though, and doesn’t really help us with the group aspect of our own story. 

I’m going to go off on a tangent for a moment.  There’s a whole genre of story in which a tragedy nearly happens but is averted at the very end, the eucatastrophe.  One example could be the Shakespeare play, A Winter’s Tale, in which the king makes lots of Very Bad Choices but gets to be happy at the end anyway, but that’s only because (a) he repented, (b) he got lucky, and (c) everyone seems to forget that his son died along the way.  Another example of a story that felt tragic all along but then turned out okay was the 1986 movie Belizaire the Cajun, but I don’t remember the details, and apparently it’s so obscure now that nobody’s even bothered to post its plot to Wikipedia. 

Probably the most famous eucatastrophe was written by the man who invented the term, J.R.R. Tolkien.  Spoilers for Lord of the Rings: Frodo fails, but he was kind to Gollum, so Gollum is there at the end, bites off Frodo’s Ring-wearing finger, falls into the lava while doing so, and solves the problem.

Eucatastrophe doesn’t work well in meta-narratives.  The most obvious example is that, despite the “Vanishing Indian” storyline so prevalent throughout U.S. history, our Native people are still here – but we still have far to go before they can be confident that we consider them a valued and active part of the American story.  In other words, living through a eucatastrophe means you were vulnerable, and you probably still are. 

A partisan eucatastrophe is even more questionable.  Suppose the 2016 Electoral College had chosen Hillary Clinton – there was some talk of it at the time.  The Democrats might have felt an immense sense of relief.  Crisis averted!  No.  One side’s “oh thank God” would feel very, very Wrong to the others.  (If Trump and his fans don’t want to admit that he didn’t win in 2020, imagine if his actual 2016 win had been negated like that.)

Also, in a eucatastrophe, the potential tragedy usually isn’t created by the people who need to resolve the problem.  We need to get back to that “protagonist and antagonist at the same time” question.

(My husband was an example of that while I was writing this.  He’d finished slicing some avocado for lunch, and he simultaneously tried to throw the peel into the trash and push the trash can to its normal spot, using his foot.  As he put it, “Hilarity ensued.”)

But then he did come up with a good example for me – everyone’s favorite Victorian-era social justice warrior, Charles Dickens, and his perennially popular story, A Christmas Carol.  As you probably already know, Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered miser who’s mean to his one employee, Bob Cratchit, even on Christmas Eve.  When he goes to bed that night, though, he’s visited by four ghosts. 

First, his late business partner shows up in chains, urging him to repent before it’s too late.  Bah, humbug.  Next, the Ghost of Christmas Past appears and takes him back in time to see the child and man he once was.  He’d been a painfully lonely child but his own first boss had been great fun; we see young Scrooge celebrating at Mr. Fezziwig’s Christmas party. Fezziwig is himself a capitalist, but as a small business owner he can optimize for multiple values, including employee well-being, rather than having to go all in on maximizing profits. Scrooge had been happy then, but as his interest shifted from love to money, his fiancée broke off their engagement.  So from this ghost, we learn that Scrooge’s personality was once well-rounded, but he chose poorly. 

Scrooge McDuck

Finally, the Ghost of Christmas Future shows us that not only has that Cratchit child died… but Scrooge himself is dead and nobody cared.  Scrooge is filled with terror, then awakens in a great relief to learn that all these visitations happened in a single night, and he still has time to put things right.  Henceforth he’ll take excellent care of the Cratchits, spend loving time with his own family, and give generously to other people in need.

The point is not that we need our billionaires to save us.  Rather, it’s that Scrooge learns to value his interconnectedness.  He’s still himself, but a much kinder and happier version.  He learns in three ways.  First, he remembers the value of friends and play, reawakening the joyful and sociable parts of himself.   Second, he experiences empathy, seeing what the lives of others are like.  And third, he is struck by existential terror, realizing that the real meaning of life comes from our connection with others, and that he wants to be remembered fondly when he’s gone (because he’s been good to people, not because he’s *ahem* plastered his name everywhere).

The overall message of A Christmas Carol is that interconnectedness is vitally important.  Whichever meta-narratives we choose to promote, let’s make the “we” of our stories as inclusive as possible, reminding those still stuck in “atomism” that connection has merit.

(Also, it tells us that capitalism can be okay if what we mean by that is supporting small businesses, not valuing profits over people.) 

And while we’re on the theme of connection, Happy Valentine’s Day.

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“Us” and “Them” and That Notorious Trolley

Posted on 30 November 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

I recently read a very well written and thought-provoking book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, by Joshua Greene, which came out in 2013.  I had so many thoughts that I decided to put them here rather than my usual short book review on StoryGraph.  If you’re interested in one psychologist’s unexpected and unusual ideas about moral philosophy and moral psychology, please read on!

This very interesting book starts with the premise that our feelings tell us what’s right or wrong when it comes to interacting with people generally like ourselves.  We feel concern for others who are physically near us, or sufficiently like us; we feel horror, revulsion, etc., at the idea of acts we consider immoral.  However, people from different cultural backgrounds – those from different “tribes” – can have different takes on these situations.  This is especially true for things one group considers sacred or blasphemous but others do not, but the problem can come up in conflicts about how to treat people, too.  Greene tells us, thus, that our emotions help us for “Me vs. Others” problems but not so much for “Us vs. Them” problems.

Since part of my background deals with serious “Us vs. Them” problems, like genocide, I was very interested to learn what Greene would propose for how we should extend our morality from how we treat people our in-groups to include people from various out-groups. 

Philosophy doesn’t give us many answers.  We know in theory that we should treat all humans as equally human, or that we should value all living beings, etc., However, the practical side of understanding that out-group members are just as human as we are tends to be undermined when they seem strange or “backward” compared to people like ourselves.  One answer is learning to extend our empathy to out-group members, by reading or watching stories about them that show us that they’re just like us in every way that counts, and that their differences are potentially cool rather than simply odd or maybe even wrong.  Another answer is to think in terms of “rights” that belong to humans and to some extent to animals, and I’ll come back to the idea of rights below.

Religion doesn’t offer many answers either.  The parable of the Good Samaritan fails when people don’t remember that Samaritans were a despised out-group – Jesus was teaching his followers that even someone you think is somehow a lesser person can be kinder than people who are just like you.  Mr. Rogers, a universally beloved ordained minister, also taught inclusivity.  On the other hand, just last night I was reading in the teachings of Confucius that you should “refuse the friendship of all who are not like you” (Analects IX.24, the Waley translation).  I’m not qualified to understand the context of that teaching, but its meaning seems pretty straightforward.

Another way to understand “Us vs. Them” is at the level of groups.  How should one group treat other groups?  In the 20th century we developed the idea of genocide as a moral wrong – we should not destroy other groups.  The idea of genocide has been extended to “cultural genocide,” which refers to the idea of eliminating a group without physical violence, necessarily, by encouraging its members to stop identifying with it.  An example is the slogan of the Carlisle Boarding School, which worked hard to strip away the “Indianness” of the Native children who lived there: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”  However, there can be times when most people agree that a group ought to be disbanded – an obvious example is the Nazi Party in post-war Germany.  Has philosophy addressed the idea of when that’s good and when that’s bad?

So I was quite interested to learn what Greene would have to say about these two “Us vs. Them” issues.  Unfortunately (for me), it turned out his project was something altogether different.  He wants to establish a “metamorality” that would apply when members of two “tribes” are part of the same system.  For example, how do we decide what the laws should be for abortion if we have “pro-choice” and “pro-life” people offering competing arguments?  He’s talking about Us and Them competing with each other for power and control over their common larger group – or else he’s talking about establishing moral rules to govern all humans.

Greene’s answer is a “practical” version of utilitarianism, which he calls deep pragmatism.  Our collective goal, he says, should be to maximize happiness (or quality of experience) impartially.  He emphasizes that the efforts to get there should be practical, rather than ideal – for example, we can ignore the idea that in theory, some person could be potentially capable of much more happiness than the average person, so that their preferences would tend to dominate.  I assume that he would also dismiss the “Omelas hole” idea that Ursula Le Guin came up with in her story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”  It’s about a city where everyone was perfectly happy and everything always ran smoothly, at the cost of one small child held in miserable captivity in a hole beneath the city.  Every citizen eventually learns that their happiness comes with this cost.  What would you do in that situation?  Although Le Guin presumably meant it as a metaphor for systemic injustice, if taken literally it’s just a thought experiment that’s unlikely to happen in the real world.

So how do we get to “deep pragmatism”?  I found Greene’s approach quite interesting. 

Back in early 2022, when we were all addicted to Wordle, I wrote a blog post about our two basic approaches to thinking and problem-solving: Wordle, fast and slow. Whenever we take in new information, we experience an automatic response – it’s cool, it’s threatening, it’s exciting, it’s boring.  Our emotional response involves emotion and our physical readiness to react (maybe fight-or-flight if it’s scary, maybe “let’s check it out!” if it’s intriguing).  This quick and effortless response comes from “System 1 thinking.” 

Sometimes, though, we can tell that the situation calls for more careful, conscious, deliberate thinking, which we call “System 2 thinking.”  Usually, this System 2 thinking supports whatever emotional assessment we’ve already made!  That’s known as motivated reasoning.  But if we believe it’s important to have a more purely analytical, rational, unbiased response, we can make an effort to carefully set aside our emotional reaction (to some extent) and consider what the best response would be without it.

Greene’s insight is that we also use System 1 and System 2 for our moral responses to situations.  He never refers to them as “System 1” and “System 2” (and he doesn’t even much discuss how these two systems are used elsewhere in processing information and making decisions), but he does provide the nifty analogy of using a camera – we can either use the “automatic mode” if we want to get our picture quickly, or “manual mode” if we think the photographic situation calls for more deliberate care with our settings.

For moral questions, then, he suggests that whenever there’s any sort of controversy about what is right, we should use our “manual mode” – our rational processes with our emotions set to the side – to discover which outcome is best overall.  And he believes the best overall outcome is one that provides the most net happiness overall. 

Greene develops his ideas by looking at how people answer the infamous “trolley problem.”  The idea is that people are presented with an either-or question about the decision they would make.  Personally, I have issues with whether this sort of decision fits with our plan to be practical and realistic, but let’s set that aside to see where Greene gets us.  A trolley is coming down the track, and five people are standing on the track.  Would you push someone onto the track, thereby stopping the trolley from killing the five people, but sacrificing that one person you had pushed?  Most people say no, they wouldn’t push the person.  But would you flip a switch, diverting the trolley onto a different track where one person is standing, so now the trolley will kill that one person instead of the five?  Most people say yes.  Greene says that both decisions are “rational” in that it’s better for one person to die than five, but our automatic emotional response is much stronger against killing one person by pushing them than flipping a switch to target them.

Greene and others have then used a bunch of variants on the question, redesigning the track in several rather odd ways, and discovered that two other features influence whether we’d make the “rational-but-too-emotionally fraught” choice of methods for killing that one person to save the other five.  One is that we don’t want to use killing as a means, but we’re relatively okay with killing as a side effect (collateral damage).  The other, related to that, is that harmful actions bother us more than harmful omissions (failures to act) do.  All three together are bound up in the “pushing” scenario, so it feels most emotionally wrong to us.  (As it should!)  So he wonders what it would take for us to be able to make the choice that most bothers our conscience, which would lead to the greater good, and says it would be to step back and weigh evidence.

Greene makes a point of contrasting his approach to morality with the usual approach: recognizing and respecting human rights.  I found this discussion quite interesting also.   Usually, he says, we talk about “rights” when we want to present our subjective feelings as matters of objective facts – jumping ahead to being rational without taking the necessary step of detaching our emotions first.  “Rights” allow us to rationalize our gut feelings without doing any additional work.  On the other hand, once we’ve done that additional work of thinking about what’s objectively best overall, then he thinks it’s fine to talk about “rights” because, as he says, “the language of rights actually expresses our firmest moral commitments.”  If there’s any controversy, though, that’s our signal (he says) to switching back into a more analytical mode and hashing it all out objectively.  (Oooh, “switching”… did I just use a trolley pun?)

Incidentally, I was just looking at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and thus represents what most of the world considers to be best practices.  Did you know that we all have a right to medical care, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, or disability? *ahem*

I liked seeing that Greene basically agreed with the point I was making in my all-time most popular blog post, on what’s wrong with Moral Foundations Theory. Jonathan Haidt says that liberals have two main moral foundations (harm/care and fairness) while conservatives have more foundations (loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity), with the implication that conservatives are thereby more “moral” than liberals.  But Haidt ignores that the way they’re asking the questions isn’t about loyalty, authority, and purity generically – they’re asking the questions in the context of being part of a “tribe.”  Conservatives are simply agreeing that they’re more tribal than liberals.  Greene agrees with me about that.   In my post, I also show that those on the political left are also known to make use of these same tools.  For example, environmentalists care about different types of purity than tribal conservatives do – they’re more concerned about the quality of our air, water, soil, ecosystem health, etc., rather than sex acts, and they use a different source of authority, which they also respect – the life sciences, not religion.  But they’re still enlisting those same foundations.

Moral Tribes was very interesting to read.  However, I felt that the author’s project failed on its own terms.  He kept stressing that his form of utilitarianism had to be realistic and practical, not idealized and theoretical. Yet he never acknowledged that the policy-makers he expected to step aside and think rationally about these morally laden issues would need to report their results to constituents who would, by and large, use System 1 to evaluate them – and very likely reject them for not saying things that match their intuition.  And the idea that every human being would themselves submit to this “set aside our biases and weigh the evidence impartially” step is extremely unrealistic as well.  It’s not unreasonable to conclude that something that fills us with deep distress is wrong.

(I also have to say that personally, I feel it would be horrific to flip that switch and kill the one guy on the second track.  I’m not sure that I could do it.  I don’t want to play God.  So for me, it’s hard to base an entire system of thought on assuming that I would do so and getting me to agree that it’s equally “rational” to push that other guy onto the track.  Sorry.  I don’t even like imagining it.  Would I be going too far if I were to say that subjecting the participants in psychological experiments to the trolley problem is itself maybe just a little bit morally wrong as well?)

Trolley photo source (cropped): Wikipedia, photographer Steve Morgan

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If only we had elves (or timelords)…

Posted on 25 November 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

One of my favorite things is making fun connections between the things I’m watching and reading, and this past week has been great for that.  I’ll start with Brigands & Breadknives, the third in a series by Travis Baldree.  His first book was a sensation when it came out in 2022: Legends & Lattes, set in a world that, like Dungeons & Dragons, is filled with people of all sorts of fantasy species.  Viv, an orc, had had enough of adventuring and decided the thing to do was to move to a new city and set up a coffee shop.  The locals weren’t familiar with coffee, but a shy little rat-person baker invented cinnamon rolls, and the new coffee shop was a success. 

The second book continued the cozy fantasy theme – we learned that earlier in Viv’s adventuring career, she was injured and had to stay in a small seaside town while recovering, and she became great friends with another little rat-person, Fern, a bookseller.  At the end of this second book, Bookshops & Bonedust, Fern had decided to relocate her bookstore to the city, beside the coffee house.  Now, in the third book, Fern has her own adventure alongside a legendary elf warrior named Astryx and a delightfully bonkers chaos-goblin.  Here they are:

So… speaking of booksellers having adventures, I’m now somewhere in the middle of the massive 12-hour Ken Burns documentary of The American Revolution, and so far my favorite story was in part two, the relief of Boston.  Early in 1776, before the signing of the Declaration, the British had occupied Boston, which had become too unruly with the Tea Party and all that.  One Boston bookseller was helping the colonists set up their fortifications outside the city, in the hope the British could be driven away. 

Our bookseller was not a soldier himself, but had read all about it – he was something of an artillery expert, based solely on book-learning, and when George Washington showed up, this looked like a great opportunity.  He sent the bookseller, along with some assistants, up to Fort Ticonderoga, New York, more than 200 miles away, to assess the equipment the colonists had taken in an earlier battle and bring back what they could.  So off they went.  They found the cannons, etc., loaded them up onto carts, and made their way back to Boston, stopping at inns along the way for encouragement and cider, and soon our bookseller was reporting to Washington:  “I’ve brought you 50 cannons, ready for your use!”  Washington was delighted, and next thing you know, our bookseller, Henry Knox, was in charge of the rebel artillery.  He would become the first U.S. secretary of war, and Fort Knox is named for him.  Reading pays off!

But “adventuring bookseller” wasn’t my first mental connection with Brigands & Breadknives – it was that one-eared elf, Astryx.  She’s over a thousand years old and has been wandering the countryside as a bounty-hunter for most of them.  And this summer I had been spending time with another wandering elf, who also lives in a world full of fantasy species: the wizard Frieren.  She’s also more than a thousand years old and also spends her time wandering the forests, but in her case she’s doing magical research, not engaging in gratuitous combat.  She did have what we would call an “adventure” once, though.  Some 60 years ago, she set out with two humans and a dwarf to liberate the lands from a Demon-King. 

They did so, after a ten-year quest, but ten years was nothing for her, and she didn’t give them much more thought before promising to meet again 50 years later.  As our story begins, she does meet up with her adventuring party again – but the leader, Himmel, is very old and near death.  After he dies, she suddenly realizes with regret that she barely knew him.  She decides to retrace the steps of their ten-year adventure and perhaps learn to make peace with the fleeting nature of human life.  (And just like Astryx, she gets to know a woman named Fern!)

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is a 28-episode anime series, and season 2 will come out in January.  It’s gorgeous and unusually thoughtful, and after the first few nostalgic episodes there’s also plenty of humor.  Highly recommended!

So I was thinking about Frieren and Astryx, two elvish women leading long and mostly solitary lives – there don’t seem to be many other elves, but there are plenty of humans, dwarves, etc., in their worlds.  What would it be like if we had people like that with us today – people who, say, had been in Britain before William the Conqueror did his conquering, or in China when its people were first inventing gunpowder and the magnetic compass, or who were personally familiar with the might of the Ghana Empire?  What could they tell us?  Could they even relate to us at all?

And then I suddenly remembered a paper I’d written on a very similar topic – the life of the title character in Doctor Who.  My paper, published as a chapter in the 2010 book Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside, addressed this very situation.  The Doctor (a timelord from the planet Gallifrey) has lived for at least 900 years (the Internet currently thinks about 4000 years, actually), and although he (or she) travels through space and time, the Doctor’s lifestyle is very much like that of Astryx or Frieren.  How can the Doctor possibly relate to ordinary humans?  In my paper, I propose that that’s the very purpose of the Doctor’s long series of “companions” – through empathy with their perspectives, the Doctor’s sense of wonder is continually renewed.  Through their eyes, this timelord regularly gets a fresh view of the universe.

(Ooh, all at once I’ve made another connection!  In Scott Slovic’s Going Away to Think, which I finished reading just a couple of days ago, he writes that travel is a way “to force one’s mind to create new maps of meaning. The mind thus destabilized and invigorated tends to see through established structures and patterns, even upon returning home.”  In other words, it reinforces the psychological trait of Openness, which gives us the flexibility to respond and thrive in new and strange situations, one of the most useful of all human traits.)

I can’t help but think that if our own lifespans were in the thousands of years, climate change wouldn’t be mysterious.  We’d all be personally familiar with it.  As it is, we’re not set up to experience something slow-moving as a crisis – our bodies and brains don’t work that way. 

And that brings me to the last show I wanted to mention, Sacred Planet with Gulnaz Khan, a four-part PBS series, which you can watch online.  Each episode shows us how a people are experiencing climate change, as witnessed by their own records and illustrated through their spiritual practices.  The first episode was about the Arhuaco people of Colombia, who consider themselves our elder brothers, bearing witness to environmental changes made through our collective actions.  In the second, we see the Sahara encroaching on communities in western Africa, where Muslims and Christians have been working together to save their villages.  The third takes us to Lake Suwa in Japan, where Shinto temples have kept records of a mysterious winter phenomenon, the sounds of the frozen lake, which now happens much less frequently than in the past.  Japan’s Buddhist temples have been promoting a method of creating green (thick, rapid-growing forest) barriers to protect the coastline from devastation by tsunamis.  In the last episode, which I’m still watching, indigenous people in Peru have long cherished their local glaciers, through rites now integrated into their practice of Catholicism, but those glaciers are disappearing.

We may not have thousand-year-old people, but we do have many very long-lived communities, and some of these communities are doing what they can to alert the rest of us to the problems caused by careless industrialization.  Like Astryx and Frieren, though, they’ve largely been marginalized.  Thanks to Ms. Khan and PBS, we can learn about them – and, I hope, learn from them too.

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Why horror?

Posted on 31 October 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

October is a great month for spooky reading!  I decided to pass on our online book club’s selection this month, Dracula, as I’ve already read it many, many times.  Instead, it seemed like a great opportunity to finally tackle The Philosophy of Horror, by Noël Carroll.  And naturally, once I got into it, I found myself making connections to political psychology, but I’ll get there in a bit.

For “horror,” Carroll has a rather narrow focus.  He dismisses literature focused on the uncanny as mere “tales of dread” (p.42) that illustrate the possibility that the universe is run by inexplicable forces.  He also dismisses Edgar Allen Poe as “terror, not horror.”  Instead, he’s interested in monsters.  He defines “monster,” which I’ll also return to shortly, then he devotes a chapter to a philosophical analysis of why we have an emotional reaction to horror movies, which makes a lot of sense while also not referencing any of the many works on emotional reactions to fiction that I’ve come across in narrative psychology. 

One interesting part is Carroll’s analysis of plot.  He describes a classic four-element plot of many horror stories: the onset of the problem or arrival of the monster, the discovery of the monster, the need to confirm the presence of the monster in the eyes of skeptical authority figures, and the confrontation with the monster.  Many horror stories contain all four elements, and every subset of them has been used in horror fiction. 

Another classic horror plot is the overreach, in which someone conducts a scientific or magical experiment involving forbidden knowledge.  Here there are also four elements:  preparation for the experiment, the experiment itself, the discovery of evidence that the experiment has boomeranged and produced a monster, and the confrontation with the monster.  It’s interesting that both types of horror stories are about knowledge – in the first, we’re shocked out of our complacency by discovering that our understanding of the world is inadequate, and in the second, someone deliberately tries to learn more than one should.

Another topic Carroll explores in depth is why, if monsters are so terrifying and/or repulsive, would we choose to subject ourselves to the experience of spending time with them?  Aside from the adolescent rite of passage that involves seeing how much gore we can tolerate (which he attributes to boys, but *ahem* I went through that stage too), he comes up with an interesting theory.  In horror, he says, strange and unexpected things command our attention and engage our curiosity in ways that are sustained throughout the work. 

I did have some head-scratching moments while reading the book.  For one thing, he refers to the costume for Chewbacca, the Star Wars Wookiee, as a “wolf outfit” (p.16). (What???)   

For another thing, on page 56 he talks about the rise of early Gothic horror literature as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment movement, as if he’d come to that conclusion entirely on his own, without any mention of Romanticism, the well-known reaction to the Enlightenment that was prominent in literature, visual art, and music, and that inspired the “volk” mentality that was so fundamental to nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere.  (If you’re interested, see my previous posts on Mary Shelley and the Schumanns.)  He does make the point, however, that the same curiosity, discovery, and rational problem-solving found in horror fiction are similar to the process and methods of the Enlightenment project of science. 

A third oddness is his assertion (p.192) that the target audience for my beloved Jason and the Argonauts is the same as for An American Werewolf in London.  I must beg to differ.

Anyway, back to the monsters. In Carroll’s definition, a monster must be threatening and also must violate our understanding of the basic categories we use to understand the order of the world.  This can happen in several ways.  Two mutually exclusive categories can be fused together, for example, living + dead = “undead,” like vampires and zombies.  Or, two mutually exclusive categories can exist in the same person, but at different times, like wolf + human = werewolf.  Or the same person can exist in multiple places, like a doppelganger.  In each of these cases, he tells us, this category violation produces “impurity,” in the sense Mary Douglas refers to in her classic book, Purity and Danger, and (he says) impurity leads to disgust and revulsion.  Another type of violation has to do with scale – something already creepy could be magnified into a much larger form (like giant ants) or could be collected into a much larger mass (like a flood of ants).

(Carroll’s definition doesn’t quite fit one of my old favorites, the 1957 flick The Monolith Monsters, in which fragments from a meteorite turn into gigantic monoliths that then shatter and start the process again, meanwhile draining all the silicon from everything they touch.  Threatening, yes, and certainly category-violating, but not exactly repulsive.)

(Also, his equation of “categorically impossible” with “disgusting” and “repulsive” is a misreading of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger.  Although some scholars have linked impurity and disgust, that’s not what Douglas was doing.  Rather, she tells us that such category violations are potentially powerful, psychologically, which can give them a major role in religion, and which can feel problematic (sometimes “matter out of place” = dirt).  Beyond what Douglas had to say on the topic, one glaringly obvious example is Jesus.  The idea that he could be both God and human caused considerable consternation to those among the early Christians who were philosophically minded – centuries of argument ensued – but none of them ever concluded that Jesus was in any way disgusting or repulsive.)

The “threatening and impure” themes in Carroll’s book then reminded me of the work I did in grad school with Gerard Saucier, where we studied the use of language to justify treating “out-group” members as worthy of mass slaughter.  In other words, it’s dehumanization to encourage genocide.   We studied numerous categories of mass violence, from ethnic cleansing and conflicts of religion or belief systems to settler colonialism and callous mistreatment of indigenous people. When the in-group felt the out-group was threatening (being the “wrong” ethnicity or religion or aligning with the wrong belief system), they were often targeted for elimination.  When the in-group felt the out-group was less than human, however, they could carelessly be used as tools or slaves (as in the rubber harvesting program in the Belgian Congo or the Mexican peonage system), or they could be forcibly relocated (as in the U.S. Trail of Tears), and if they didn’t survive, no big deal.  Those that were threatening and didn’t fit into the supposedly proper category (like being the “wrong” ethnicity for the country) could be treated as monsters, a frightening problem to be solved.  The list of metaphors for describing out-group members that I collected as part of the project illustrates this clearly: demons, cockroaches, murderous vultures, worms, savages, food for dogs, dangerous microbes, invasive germs, pigs, bloodsuckers, spiders, vampires, weeds, filth, maggots, abscesses, parasites, trash, swarms of insects.   Every one of those is a good candidate for horror, with the possible exception of weeds.  (Although if you’ve ever seen the blackberry vines in my part of town…)

In the United States, as we all know, we’re currently experiencing serious polarization, which on the one side has been deliberately cultivated by leaders and their favorite media, and which on the other side has reflected a great deal of shock and consternation that our neighbors could think like that.  Each side sees the other as problematic, and it can be very easy to dismiss the others and try not to have to deal with them.  We aren’t quite at the point of dehumanization, I hope, at least not for most of us, but the divides can be painful.

While I was reading Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, I was also still reading Steve Ellerhoff’s Jung and Star Wars, which I wrote about in my last post.  I came across a very useful quote on page 174. The context was very different (the life of Luke Skywalker), but I think it applies to our situation too.  Ellerhoff quotes Donald Kalsched: “[This] is our work – finding the humanity in the ‘enemy,’ even if the enemy has been possessed by evil.”  Our fellow Americans are, I hope, not “possessed by evil,” but many make the case that those on the opposite side of our political divide have been seriously deluded.  With this quote we can remind ourselves to keep recognizing their humanity, not reducing them to “threats” or “lesser” than ourselves.

And as the children show up on our doorsteps tonight, some of them playing at being monsters, let us remind ourselves that the original point of Halloween was the permeability of boundaries between sharp binaries – overcoming those rules tied to categories.  With Halloween, historically, the binary was life and death, but let’s extend that, if we can, to “us” and “them.”

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The retconning of America

Posted on 13 October 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This past weekend, it was great fun to discover that the bookstore clerk-owner I know as “Steve at Tsunami” has written a new book!  It’s a fun book, too, a Jungian look at Star Wars, and on Saturday we attended the book’s launch party, which was also tremendously fun.  (Steve can sing!) 

In the first chapter of the book, he looks at how complicated the Star Wars universe became for its fans when Disney bought the property from George Lucas and relegated the years and years of related Star Wars media to the status of “Legends,” so that Disney could tell its own stories and have them become the official “canon.”  Now the movies were still “true” – including maybe that fun 1984 TV movie, An Ewok Adventure — but the many, many Star Wars novels were not, like Dave Wolverton’s The Courtship of Princess Leia, which I’d enjoyed, and the Timothy Zahn books that my husband still talks about.  The twins born to Han and Leia never happened, nor did fan-favorite Mara Jade, who married Luke.

I first saw Star Wars on 7-7-77 at the long-gone Mayflower Theater on East 13th, here in Eugene.  I remember that the floors were very sticky, probably from the many wildly enthusiastic kids spilling their sodas in excitement.  I then saw The Empire Strikes Back in Beaverton, and Return of the Jedi at some theater near the Oakland Airport.  What a fun story!  For me, those movies were the Star Wars canon – I didn’t need the others, although I’ve seen four of them (I, II, VII, and Rogue One).  However, George Lucas did authorize an entire Extended Universe of all of those novels published up until 2012, and many of my favorite authors were among the contributors. 

In his book, Steve talks about the fact that Star Wars is a living mythology, and he takes more of a “polyphonic” approach, noting that just as in ancient mythologies there were numerous stories of the gods and their doings that were not always necessarily compatible with each other, so too we can embrace all of these versions of Star Wars as valid.  (I wanted to say “true” instead of valid, which is an amusing way to think about fiction, isn’t it?)  For a new viewer, focusing on what happens to Rey can be even more vital and compelling than what happened in the older movies, so their understanding of the Star Wars universe will be much broader and deeper than mine.

I’m not that far in Steve’s book, so I don’t know if he’s going to address the problem I’m concerned with, which is the frustration fans feel when they encounter “retconning.”  Short for “retroactive continuity,” a retcon is when what happens in a newer book or film tells us that something in earlier books or films wasn’t correct.  A handy example for people who are my age or older is the moment in the TV series Dallas when J.R. Ewing wakes up and the viewers discover that the entire previous season was “all just a dream.”  That is, things Dallas viewers had learned about the story world were not actually true in that world, after all.

A great recent example is the anime series Blue Exorcist.  Anime is often based on graphic novels (manga), and sometimes the filming schedule gets ahead of the manga, so the anime writers will have to create filler.  In Blue Exorcist, the anime writers had to invent a story for episodes 17-25 for season one… but meanwhile the manga writers had their own ideas of how to resolve the problems raised in episodes 1-16.  Season two of the anime then followed the manga – the anime just ignored episodes 17-25 and jumped back in time to the end of episode 16 and went on from there, with no in-story explanation at all.  Very confusing!

Adaptations change the story all the time.  In The Fellowship of the Ring, readers know that Glorfindel takes on the job of delivering a badly injured Frodo to Rivendell, but in the Peter Jackson movie, it’s Arwen.  There is no “really happened” to compare notes with; we just have two versions of the story, with one being true in one context and one being true in another.  A retcon would be if J.R.R. Tolkien had then gone back and told us that Glorfindel had never existed.  Poor Glorfindel.

Fans generally don’t like retcons.  They’ve created the story world in their minds, based on what they’ve read or watched, and they have feelings about the characters and what happens to them.  They very well might like to expand on what’s official, writing their own fan fiction or enjoying authorized or unauthorized works by others, but they still want things to be backwards-compatible with what they already know.  Taking that away feels like a violation of something they value.

Here’s a real-world example.  As of 2006, Pluto is no longer a planet.  Our solar system has eight planets.  How do you feel about that?

And now it’s time for me to connect things up with political psychology.  On October 9, Trump issued a proclamation of the importance of Columbus Day.   It’s today!  In his proclamation, he described Columbus as “one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth” and said that “we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.”

Ironically, as Heather Cox Richardson explained in her blog post last night, the creation of Columbus Day was actually intended as a celebration of American diversity.  The Christian nationalist Ku Klux Klan had been persecuting Catholics, and FDR wanted to acknowledge the value of our many Catholic citizens, including Italian-Americans, so this new holiday was created.

Nowadays, the persecution of American Catholics no longer makes the news (although individual Catholics like Joe Biden may beg to differ).  And nowadays, many people have come to think more critically about the European conquest of the Americas, acknowledging that tens of millions of Native people died in the process and that it has taken centuries for those of Indigenous descent to be treated with respect by the European-American majority.  Instead of recognizing Columbus, many states (including my own) now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day.

This reappraisal of our history can feel very much like retconning feels to fiction fans.  My grandpa was proud of his ancestor William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower (the ship, not the movie theater).  I was taught to feel proud that one of the original Pilgrims was part of my family tree.  (Bradford has something like ten million living descendants, so I’m not that special!)  However, since my grandpa’s time, we’ve been reconsidering Bradford’s legacy.

It’s my understanding that Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims did negotiate with the local people to be allowed to live on a specific patch of land, so I don’t feel too awkward about him.  However, a precedent had been set, and dozens and dozens of other people who came from England in the first half of the 1600s are also among my ancestors.  Surely they didn’t all ask the Wampanoeg and Narragansett and other locals for permission to claim other patches of land, nor did they stay put.

Those of us growing up in Oregon were also taught that our pioneers were special, helping to settle and civilize a vast continent that had been wilderness, or at least not optimally managed by the people who had already lived here, who had mostly “vanished” anyway.  Books like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States have helped set the record straight.  We now know that the United States largely stole the land we now live on.  Sometimes we made treaties that were ignored, and at other times we took the land we wanted and moved the Native people elsewhere.  If my grandpa were alive today, he might no longer be quite so proud of his own grandfather, who’d come out on the Oregon Trail and helped drive cattle between Oregon and California before settling, first in northernmost California and then up near Salem, Oregon.  Or if he had felt proud, now he might feel retconned.

There’s another important context in U.S. history where retconning has happened, and in this case it was deliberate.  In the South, the entire Lost Cause movement that romanticized the Confederate side in the Civil War – and even slavery itself – has been a deliberately orchestrated effort to help Southerners feel okay about how the South used to be and even to give them a sense of grievance for its loss.

One key difference between historical retconning and retconning in fictional worlds is that with history, the facts exist.  There can be different perspectives on what happened, but they can all be fact-checked.  Further, there’s an important arbiter of how we should craft our understanding of what happened historically, and it’s not the decision of who owns a fictional world’s intellectual property.  It’s ethics.  You and I are responsible for understanding what our ancestors did, and for listening to those who have most directly born its consequences. 

The thing is, when we learn more about the settlement of the United States, we get a much deeper and richer understanding of our world.  All of our ancestors were doing what they thought best, given the contexts in which they lived and their need to do well by their families, even though we now know that the net effect of their hard work also included costs to others.  We can value our ancestors and their decisions and the stories of their lives, and we can also value the Indigenous people and their decisions and the stories of their lives. 

In a way, it’s like fan fiction – giving us new layers to appreciate, more nuance, more perspectives. But it’s the real world – the Extended Universe of U.S. history looks not to Disney nor to George Lucas but to historically documented facts to tell us whether the stories we’re telling ourselves are valid.

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Individuals or groups – whose story should we tell?

Posted on 22 September 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Today I discovered that the New York Times has an interview with Elizabeth Warren on “America’s Next Story,” which got me excited.  I am quite fond of the senator and was curious to see what she would have to say on the current story of America – what we should be encouraging as our current group meta-narrative. Who are we?  Where are we headed?  What is our common purpose?

Would Warren have something to offer as a counter to Trump’s rhetorical campaign for reinvigorating America’s “greatness”?

Unfortunately, no.  Warren’s interview stressed her long-time understanding that the American economy is “rigged” – if a family has a medical crisis, a long-term job loss, or a death or divorce, the game is pretty much up for them.  No matter how hard people work, it’s difficult to afford basic childcare, let alone buying a house.  America isn’t taking care of its people as well as many other countries do.

These are worthy goals, but it’s a missed opportunity for Warren.   The story she’s telling is not a group meta-narrative at all, and I think there’s an important point to be made here.

Two Types of Meta-Narratives

Warren is sketching a story for individuals in relation to their country.  This is a powerful type of individual meta-narrative:  Individuals are the protagonists, and the United States should play an important role in their life stories. As she puts it, “we’ve got to make this country work better for working families, so that we have an economy where a family can work hard, play by the rules and build real financial security and the promise that their kids can do better than they did.”  There are important strategic reasons for proposing a story along these lines – for one thing, most Americans across party lines can agree it would be good, and many are coming to believe that the Trump administration is falling short of these goals.

But that’s different from a societal meta-narrative, the type I’ve dedicated this blog to talking about.  The kind of story I was expecting from Warren was a story with America as the protagonist.  What is America’s purpose, its role in the world?  How is America falling short now, and what should America be doing instead?

Warren’s story is about individual Americans and what their government should be doing for them.  That’s not the same as suggesting the next step in the story of America itself.

Part of a Group

The key difference is whether the people in the story are treated as category members or as essential elements in a group, the group that comprises our country.  There’s a vital difference between parts of our identities that are the categories we fit into, and the parts of our identities that tell us we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.  Being left-handed, or especially tidy, or able to play the piano are categories.  Being a Catholic, or a university student, or a lifelong resident of Montana makes you a part of a group.  Sometimes you can ignore the groupness and just go about your day; at other times it can be vitally important to you.

There’s this great word that’s hard to pronounce correctly that means groupness: “entitativity.”  Six syllables!  I confess I’ve written it as “entitivity” more than once, but no, it’s “entity” plus “-ativity.”

If you’re in a category that hasn’t yet started to think of itself as a group, it’s easy for the mainstream to pick on you.  Often category members are relatively isolated and easy targets for the power of the main group to treat them poorly.  Many social movements, like Black Lives Matter and its civil rights predecessors, along with earlier movements to promote women’s rights, gay rights, farm workers’ rights etc., have arisen when a few brave souls inspired members of a category to start seeing themselves as members of a group.

The 2016 Story

Warren’s strategy, addressing us as individuals who happen to fall into the category of “Americans,” is a lot like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.  Remember the leaked e-mails?  They told us that at one point the campaign was considering 85 different slogans… and every single one of them addresses the voter as an individual.  “Stronger together” – “You’ve earned a fair chance” – “She’s got your back” – “Making America work for you” – “A stronger America one family at a time” – “Progress for the rest of us” – “It’s about time… and it’s about you.”

Contrast that with making America “great again.”  With Trump’s slogan, the country is the hero.  Maybe it’s fallen on hard times, but with Trump, in theory, we could get it back on track.  It’s implied that if America is great, its people are happy and better off, but the point is that if you’re behind the MAGA campaign, you’re part of something bigger than your individual life.  You can have a noble purpose:  The restoration of the United States.

(I’m in Trump’s target category – very white, ancestors on this continent since 1620.  However, although I was raised Republican, I was also raised “cosmopolitan” rather than “tribal” and with plenty of social studies classes impressing the value of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into my psyche. Both of those factors pretty well inoculated me against MAGA.  I will note, too, that when I was a child, Oregon was famous for its progressive Republicans who were national leaders in environmentalism (Tom McCall), women’s rights (Bob Packwood), civil rights (Wayne Morse, who later changed parties), and even pacifism (Mark Hatfield).)

The Power of Group Stories

Group meta-narratives are potentially very powerful, both in motivating people to identify with the group and in making sweeping social changes.  Because they’re so powerful, anyone promoting such stories (ways to think about the world and our place in it) must be very careful to ensure their stories are ethically sound.  Woodrow Wilson’s “Make the world safe for democracy” could be an ethical goal, depending on how we go about it.  Manifest Destiny, the meta-narrative entitling those of us with European ancestors to displace the Native people and claim the entire breadth of the continent for ourselves, was clearly not ethically sound.  “Give [us] your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is a reasonable ethical message for a rich country that can afford to share its wealth and prospects with the rest of the world, although a case can certainly be made for due process.  Going to war against the Japan when its government chose to bomb Pearl Harbor may have been an ethical choice; treating our own citizens of Japanese ancestry as criminals was surely not.

With meta-narratives, it’s very much a question of ends and means.  An end may be worthwhile and highly motivating, but when the means involve harming innocents, the end cannot be justified.  Unfortunately, the process of creating groups out of categories makes it all too easy to set up an in-group versus an out-group, and the out-group becomes vulnerable.  The social movements of recent years have often had to focus on reminding the in-group that is America that we are all in it together – the very phrase “Black Lives Matter” is to remind us that Black people are part of the in-group, part of “us” and not an out-group at all.

What kind of group meta-narrative could the Democrat leaders offer?  Frankly, Trump is making it easy for them.  The United States created by the Founding Fathers was intended to be a land of justice, fairness, opportunity, due process of law, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly – a land where everyone has a say in the laws that govern us, and the confidence that those laws will be honored and apply to everyone fairly.  This vision, based on principles admired around the world, is what many of us were raised to understand as America’s true greatness.

It’s reasonable for political parties to have different beliefs about the relative importance of, say, national security versus individual opportunities, or whether the most vulnerable among us should be supported by all of us collectively or by private charities.  Personally, I’m looking forward to the day that we can return to taking our basic American values for granted and start focusing again on debating topics like these.

Now is when we need a Restoration meta-narrative, far more than in 2016.

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Psst, don’t tell the machines!

Posted on 3 June 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

Because the very topic of this blog, for the most part, is the science of using language to try to manipulate people’s beliefs, my reaction to the idea of allowing artificial intelligences (AIs) to harvest my content was a big nope.  We definitely don’t need AI to improve its skills in influencing us.  Already, the Claude AI is plenty friendly – when you have a conversation with “him” it feels very much like you’re chatting with a real person. Some people may even be improving their mental health by chatting with closely monitored AIs – it can be easier to open up to a machine.

However, my husband pointed out that if I want people in the AI community to read what I wrote yesterday, I should rethink my position.  Many people working on AI use it as a tool to summarize what’s being said online, and if I’m not letting AI read my posts, these people won’t know what I’m saying.

I’m reminded of a conversation our research team had a while back, when we were analyzing the language used to promote genocide.  By laying it all out in one easy-to-read document, were we providing a recipe for future disaster?  But we weren’t revealing any hidden information, only the patterns within.  History’s genocidal leaders have already been learning from each other perfectly well.  When Hitler was talking about annihilating the Jews, he explicitly referenced the Turkish genocide against Armenians.  It’s all pretty much intuitive, anyway.  The point was that what we were doing could be used as the basis for tools to monitor the speech of problematic leaders and let people know what was going on before it went further. 

So, thinking about it more, I realized that, well, first, it would be trivial for anyone who wanted AI to know the content of my blog to input it manually.  The same goes for any papers or books I write – they’ll already exist in electronic format, so uploading them would be simple.

Second, why should I think I’m smarter than a near-term AI?  The techniques I’m writing about should be even easier for them to learn about than it was for me.  Reading through a vast body of the texts promoting mass violence and the literature of the environmental movement, and looking for common patterns, and connecting them up with psychological theories… that’s probably a matter of seconds for even today’s AI.

What I’m doing is bring it to humans’ attention.  I’m telling humans that, hey, meta-narratives and salience markers are things people use to influence each other, sometimes with dramatic consequences.  Humans need to know this.  And if I want to bring it to human attention, I should maximize my opportunities for networking, no?

So… I’ve turned “third-party sharing” on (or back on, if that had been the default).  If you agree with me that it’s important for humans to know at least as much as machines do about how language can influence humans, please – help by sharing my work with other humans.

Image source (cropped)

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Dramatic language, and other dangers

Posted on 2 June 2025 by Laura Akers, Ph.D.

This past weekend, my husband participated in a Berkeley conference sponsored by the LessWrong community, an online group focused on rationality and decision-making.   Today he’s sporting a t-shirt he got there, which features the title of a forthcoming book by two leaders in the community, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.  

(And what a nifty way to publicize a book – send people out into the world wearing its provocative title!) 

The authors are highly concerned about the prospects for artificial intelligence.  Recently it’s become very convenient to use AI to answer quick questions – as long as one then follows up by checking the sources, as today’s AI is known to “hallucinate.”  In the future, however, we may be in for some serious problems.

The main issue is that it would be impossible for humans to fully supervise an artificial superintelligence (ASI).  It may set its own goals, and maybe even hide them from us – and there’s no way to guarantee that those goals would be compatible with our continued existence.  It may take over all the resources it needs to meet those goals, and any side effects for humans and the rest of the natural world would be irrelevant.  I like this paragraph from a booklet my husband brought home from the conference:

“Unless it has worthwhile goals, ASI will predictably put our planet to uses incompatible with our continued survival, in the same basic way that we fail to concern ourselves with the crabgrass at a construction site. This extreme outcome doesn’t require any malice, resentment, or misunderstanding on the part of the ASI; it only requires that ASI behave like a new intelligent species that is indifferent to human life, and that strongly surpasses our intelligence.”

Some leaders estimate the extinction risk for humanity at 10% in the coming decades; others think the risk is considerably higher.

Okay.

So I wanted to stop and think for a moment about the emotional impact of the book title.  It’s a meta-narrative – a story-like idea about a group (all of humanity) and its status over time (we could all die!).  It’s also a highly emotionally laden expression, fully charged with what I call “salience markers” to grab our attention, associate an idea with emotion, and potentially inspire us to act (vote, tell our neighbors, buy a book, attend a rally, change our entire lives).

My concern is that the title is so extreme that it could very well provoke the same type of denial we see with climate change. 

As we all know, climate change has been in the news for decades now, and although scientists and activists alike have stressed that we’re in it for the long haul whether we act quickly or procrastinate, many activists have used very strong statements to get attention, like “We have only 12 years to save the Earth,” otherwise “billions will die.”

The problem is, whenever we encounter something so strongly phrased, our first motivation is to defuse the threat. The simplest way to do so is to discredit it, not to fix the underlying problem. The stronger the statement, the greater the desire for denial.

Factual accuracy is not relevant in this context.

And when the problem is new and strange and something only a very few people know much about, it’s probably even easier to dismiss. 

This book title is using salience markers amped up to the max.  “All” and “everyone” are extremes, focusing on thoroughness.  There’s an us/them binary, pitting “us” against “anyone,” a threat that could come from anywhere, which also ties in to the family of salience markers that references hidden information. And of course “kill us” and “dies” are evoking that highly potent life/death binary.  They’re using language for maximum emotional impact.

That means the motivation to dismiss what they’re talking about as melodrama is also maximized.

One advantage that Yudkowsky and Soares have over the climate situation is that they’re experts themselves.  Although concern about climate change was originally bipartisan, many of us learned about it from Al Gore, and he had severely damaged the cause simply by being obviously partisan.  He’d been the Democratic vice president, after all, making him a “them” to Republicans who see U.S. politics as an us/them binary.  If Gore had made a point to always appear with a conservative who shared his concerns, like a high-ranking member of the military or a leader from our Christian communities, we’d probably be much further along in addressing the problem by now.  We don’t know as much about Yudkowsky and Soares so we’re much less likely to dismiss them as one of “them” – a group our very identity sets us against.

Another advantage is that superhuman AI requires investment – a lot of work would have to go into making it possible – whereas climate change is something that would happen if we don’t do anything.  In theory, we could solve the problem simply by stopping the work on AI development.  Or, at a minimum, we could figure out how to align the interests of future superhuman AI with the rest of the planet, including humanity.  It’s my understanding that many in today’s AI community are currently researching that very problem.

A third advantage is that AI is more like CFCs than climate change – if we can get the world’s leaders to agree, regulations could more or less solve the problem for us.  We should note, however, that the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would severely constrain our ability to supervise whatever it is the tech bros are brewing up.

Another complication is the partisan nature of messaging style.  Ever since Newt Gingrich, Republicans have understood the importance of using emotionally charged language to engage the public.  As George Lakoff has explained at length, however, the Democrats have long emphasized facts and figures and “rational” argument – the kind of discussions that are perfect for ironing out the details of policy but not for the earlier and at least equally important step of selling their ideas to the public.  As long as the Republican party is beholden to its high-tech backers, they’re unlikely to agree to regulate their behavior, and the Democrats aren’t even listening to language like “kill us all” because it’s the very opposite of cut-and-dry.

If the authors of this new book want to sway public opinion, it’s vital that they get their message right.  Perhaps they’ve already weighed the risks of appearing overly dramatic – or perhaps their publisher insisted on a title like that, and they decided the gamble was worth it.

In the environmental literature, though, books like The Population Bomb have had problematic histories – sparking a wave of activism and action, but also a backlash where people end up focusing on many of the book’s more extreme speculations and dismissing the entire issue out of hand because “it never came to pass” (as if the book itself didn’t play a role in averting the crisis).  I hope they don’t have the same thing happen to them. 

One of my colleagues (Branden Johnson) is embarking on a study about public views of global catastrophic risks and extinction events.  I’ll be interested to hear what he learns and whether the public is yet aware of superhuman AI.

Meanwhile, we should probably all be educating ourselves, right?

Sources:

“Unless it has worthwhile goals”; extinction risk: Machine Intelligence Research Institute.  The Problem. 2025.

“12 years”: Wagner, Gernot and Constantine Samaras. “Do We Really Have Only 12 Years to Avoid Climate Disaster?”  New York Times, 19 September 2019.  At https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/opinion/climate-change-12-years.html

“billions will die”: Lovell, Jeremy.  “Gaia scientist Lovelock predicts planetary wipeout.”  Reuters, 20 January 2007. 

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