Life is not a laboratory
On serendipity, decision-making and the romance of reality
There’s a popular pseudo-quotation, usually attributed to Einstein and often made into a meme, that goes something like: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results’.
That Einstein never said it seems less important than the fact it’s obviously not true. And that what’s described is not in any sense a definition of insanity seems less important than the fact such behaviour is not even irrational.
Don’t you find that, in real life, you often do the same thing and get different results? Perhaps especially when you’re trying to get the same results? I’m thinking especially of amateur cookery, where what you thought was a reliable technique can drive you mad precisely by producing different results. More consequentially, there is the so-called replication crisis in psychology and the sciences more widely. Some of our finest minds are doing the same thing over and over and getting different results. It’s almost as if reality is more complicated than the systems we devise to understand it.
More happily, our seemingly irrational efforts to get different results by doing the same thing are sometimes rewarded. And not only because, like someone practising sport or music, we gradually learn to do properly what we were previously getting slightly wrong. I can claim no credit at all for the fact that, at the fourth time of asking, restarting the router restores my internet connection. It just happens like that. Sometimes, that is.
So, it’s strange that people repeat the quote with such confidence, and not only with reference to simple things about which it might be expected to be true, even if it is not. But also about far more complicated phenomena.
Dating, for example. Perhaps it’s true that some people are drawn to the same ‘types’ and repeat what seem like the same mistakes. But no two human beings are really alike; if anything, the mistake to imagine you are ‘doing the same thing’ with someone who in fact makes it completely different. That is, the mistake is to assume it’s all about you and the things you do or don’t do. (Disclaimer: sometimes it might be about the things you do or don’t do, but this isn’t an advice column.)
The dating game versus real life
Taken to an extreme, this is the tragedy of the ‘pick-up artist’, that (surely?) mostly mythical character who is constantly tweaking his chat up lines and running through a battery of creepy techniques to get women to yield to his advances. In doing so, he is fixating on the most superficial aspects of an encounter between two human beings in the belief that he can crack the code. All in pursuit of the most superficial of connections.
What’s morally objectionable about it is the disregard for any given woman’s particularity. A person with a life, a family, hopes and dreams, likes and dislikes, is reduced to a mark, who might or might not be persuaded to have sex. What’s tragic is that the man himself is also erased. His personality is not decisive; his technique is. Even if he succeeds, it won’t be because the woman likes him – whoever ‘he’ is – but because she’s drawn into his game just for long enough for him to get what he’s convinced himself he wants.
Anything deserving to be described as meaningful sex, let alone love, is irreducibly contextual. It happens in the context of not one but two intersecting lives. Lives embedded in a particular time and place. Lives rich with meaning and potential. Lives fated to end, sooner or later, in death.
People in their twenties and thirties sometimes talk about their dating preferences, even their approach to relationships, in what we might call the present tense perpetual. As if they can look forward to an infinite number of partners in a future without beginning or end. There must be an eerie lightness about any relationship conducted in the present tense perpetual, but an awareness of our mortality eventually catches up with us all. And something different surely happens the first time someone begins even to consider, as a theoretical possibility, those weighty words, ‘till death us do part’.
The not-so-funhouse mirror image of perpetual dating is singleness as an identity, and in its saddest form, the ‘incel’ phenomenon. Not, indeed, the ‘insing’ phenomenon. Incels are involuntarily celibate, not involuntarily single. They have grown up in a culture in which a young man can supposedly expect both to remain single and to have lots of sex. No wonder they are miserable.
Yes, no doubt there are some men and a few women who can pull off that combination with aplomb, at least for a season. But the idea that it could ever be the norm, or even that it’s what most people want, is absurd. And yet, ever since the so-called sexual revolution, popular culture has not only presented casual sex as something worth pursuing for its own sake, but also imagined it to be the almost-standard way to initiate a relationship.
Perhaps it is this ‘romanticisation’ of the casual encounter, rather than anything about technology itself, that has made online dating such a disaster for so many. After all, the technology lends itself just as readily to old-fashioned matchmaking based on deeper compatibility as to sexual hook-ups based merely on hotness. Many people can and do meet their future spouses through specialist dating apps that do much the same job as the marriage brokers and Emma Woodhouses of old.
The difference lies in the way people use such apps, and to an extent the character of apps themselves; perhaps things have moved on enough now that those looking for a partner do not find themselves on the same one as those after something far more fleeting. That they ever did is testament to the widespread acceptance of a sex-first approach to relationships.
What makes that so disastrous for online dating is the same thing that would make it disastrous for anyone foolish enough to depend on it offline. It means everything hinges on someone’s subjective performance in the most superficial of circumstances: whether they have the hot looks and impressive-sounding job to stand out among countless others on an app, or the particular kind of charm needed to chat someone up in a bar.
Many, many people are never going to get lucky in such circumstances. And if you make the mistake of thinking that’s all there is to it, things look pretty bleak for them. Some observers even describe it in evolutionary – or frankly zoological – terms. They suggest average men can’t hope to compete with the strutting alpha males who inevitably get all the ‘best’ women. You have to wonder whether such observers grew up in families or have jobs.
In real life, finding a partner surely has less to do with your ‘game’ than with the world you’re immersed in. And in a world of complicated other people, online or off, your superficial charm or lack of it just isn’t all that decisive. You will succeed and fail depending on what you have to offer in the context of two real lives. That’s why the best advice for insings is the boring old advice: join a club, take a class, put yourself in the way of people over a period of time. And don’t be afraid of ‘doing the same thing in the hope of different results’. There is wisdom in the even more boring advice simply to be yourself.
Choosing uncertainty
It's not that our actions and choices don’t matter. In fact, they matter in some contexts much more than in others. That’s why we put so much effort not into pursuing ends directly but into getting ourselves into a better position. The right school or university, the right job, the right friends even. It is a mark of modernity that individuals have the freedom to shape our own lives to an unprecedented extent. But, of course, our lives also continue to be shaped by the world around us. Relationships are only the most intimate example of how dependent we are on the actions and choices of others. We are also affected by the actions and choices of people we don’t even know.
Politics is the sphere in which we reckon most explicitly with competing interests, intentions and ideas about how our lives should be. And modern democracy gives us unprecedented power to shape our collective life, for better and worse. The outcome of an election affects those who voted the other way no less than those on the winning side. But our awareness of this can cause us to overstate the importance of politics, as if the election of Donald Trump rather than Kamala Harris determines everything that will happen in the US, and the rest of the world, for the next four years. It matters a great deal, of course, but only up to a point.
The more heated our political differences are, the more we are drawn into the illusion that politics decides everything. But even if we all agreed on a particular vision and associated set of policies, our collective choices and actions would be constrained by circumstances. As Karl Marx famously wrote, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’.
This is why the ‘historical argument’ against communism itself is so unsatisfactory. ‘Communism didn’t work in Russia. It didn’t work in China. Eastern Europe. Latin America. Why should it work next time? Trying again is the definition of insanity!’ You don’t have to be sympathetic to communism to understand that history is more complicated than that. Even if, for the sake of argument, communism a terrible idea, the idea itself, in all its varieties, is just one factor among many determining the outcome.
Other no less important factors include the socio-economic development of the country in question and its geopolitical position – these have literally never been promising – not to mention the ability and resolve of its would-be revolutionaries, including their sensitivity to the circumstances and the resulting opportunities. In any case, there is no clockwork relationship between the attempt to bring about a more egalitarian society and the assorted failures of ‘actually-existing socialism’.
Reducing history to a single set of inputs and outputs is not only undialectical, as a Marxist might put it, but also un-conservative. A Burke, an Oakeshott or a Scruton would insist that human affairs are not like laboratory experiments (or at least they wouldn’t be if laboratory experiments could be relied on to produce consistent results). For conservatives, human nature might be too flawed to make social equality a sensible goal, but the ways in which our plans might go awry are more complicated and surprising than any causal or systematic connection we can imagine.
Nevertheless, we can’t do without politics. However ambitious or otherwise our goals, we need to make decisions about our collective life. And, if we are wise, those decisions will be informed by an understanding of the limitations and possibilities of our given circumstances – much more than by a commitment to any given ideology, whether of left, right or centre.
To take a more mundane example, both Keynesian and monetarist policies historically produced the desired results until they didn’t, repeatedly. Is it insane to try either again? Not exactly. It’s just that you have to consider a lot more than the merits of those policies in isolation. You have to ask why they work when they work, why they don’t when they don’t, and what’s likely to happen in current conditions.
This is not to say there is no place for political principles or convictions. These are especially important when we ask what we mean by a particular policy ‘working’ or otherwise. Take Brexit. Much of the debate before the vote and since has been at cross purposes. A sense of place ‘versus’ modern, enlightened values. Political accountability ‘versus’ economic stability. No one was or is exactly against any of these things. But people on either side of the divide weighed them very differently, which is why they were so often unmoved by the arguments of the other side. Nevertheless, it is only with reference to such ends that any meaningful argument was possible.
Remainers were probably more guilty than leavers of believing theirs was ‘the right answer’ rather than a choice between two valid options. After all, they were right that Brexit would lead to great instability in return for uncertain benefits. Leavers were left in no doubt they were voting for a logistical nightmare – for making things ‘not work’ at least for a time. And yet they decided it was worth it. Brexit voters did not believe the political status quo was worth preserving. They hoped Brexit would enable something better.
This was despite the fact that the circumstances were far from amenable to Brexit, above all because of a chronically weak economy and a parliament that was overwhelmingly hostile to the whole enterprise. As the old joke goes, ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. But here was a referendum, and enough voters took the opportunity when it was offered.
There was a tendency during the campaign to talk as if voters faced a choice between two alternative but equally fully-formed futures. Even if the terms of Brexit had been properly defined in advance – which, infamously, they were not – this would not have been true. The decision certainly cut off certain possibilities, but like any decision it opened up others.
For a generation, it had been political ‘common sense’ that Britain was better off in the EU. And not necessarily because of any particular benefit, but because it put the country in a better position. Brexit voters decided that was no longer true, if it ever had been. Perhaps they – we – were right. But in a sense, it was a vote against the idea that this is the kind of thing you can be right or wrong about. It was a decision, not an exam answer. And unlike a laboratory experiment, life goes on.