The Hidden Half — Michael Blastland on the Unexpected Anomalies of Life

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The Hidden Half — Michael Blastland on Choice Blindness and Collective Incoherence

“We dream of laws and general truths; the practicality is often a patchwork of unexpected anomalies.”

Michael Blastland. (2019). The Hidden Half.

Kierkegaard’s note

In Volume XVIII of Søren Kierkegaard’s journals rests a classic passage: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” This seems reasonable enough at first, given the arrow of time points only in one direction for us living things—a direction that is inherently uncertain and frequently surprising. 

What is often omitted from Kierkegaard’s quote, however, is the second half of his reflection: “The more [this proposition] is subjected to careful thought, the more it [appears] that life… cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely for [us] to… [look] backwards.”

Reflecting on his own profession, writer and broadcaster Michael Blastland asks a similar question in his book The Hidden Half: “How much is storytelling after the fact? Are we really spotting order, a pattern of cause and effect, or are we weaving together selective details to justify whatever pet theory we hold?”

Surgeons and boxers

Blastland points, for example, to the life and narrative of the former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. Biographers, for one, tend to draw on his childhood trauma, family deaths, dangerous neighborhood, and street fighting escapades to explain the evolution of “Iron Mike”. We should suppose, however, that Tyson’s siblings grew up under similar conditions. Yet his brother Rodney went on to pursue a career as a specialist surgical assistant. He saved lives in the operating room, while Mike annihilated others in the boxing ring.

Of course, we are not here to unpack the molding of the Tyson family. Blastland’s point is simply that life is typically less obvious than it seems. There is a hidden half. A “mass of uncommon factors”—“an enigmatic alchemy of often transitory influences and impulses.” While a narrative may seem coherent, there are often many ways to rationalize the same set of facts. And there are even more confounders and contingencies that elude our knowing. Rerun history under slightly altered circumstances and things might look altogether different. Perhaps Rodney might have been the world champion, or Mike an expert surgeon. 

Choice blindness

This irregularity and fickleness also applies to our beliefs, preferences, and decisions. Our behavior is rarely as consistent and fixed as neoclassical economics might have us assume. Blastland points, in particular, to a humorous yet frightening political questionnaire that he ran with volunteers. In it, he asked participants to record on a ten-point scale how important or unimportant policies like increased healthcare spending or additional tax cuts were to them.

Sometime later, Blastland returned to the volunteers with their answer sheets and asked them to explain the reasons behind their choices. But here’s the twist. For those participants who said that they were only in slight favor of some policy priority, Blastland secretly modified their answers to say that they were now in slight disfavor of it. Unaware their scores had been changed, these volunteers began to explain their new position as if it had been their choice all along.

While these participants were contradicting themselves, they had no awareness of doing so. They took their answer sheet as given and began to rationalize to the best of their ability. This is an instance of what psychologists call “choice blindness”. While this is a somewhat contrived experiment, the result is frightening because such behaviors probably occur in everyday life without our knowing. People exhibit opinions with great gusto without considering how they got there in the first place. As Blastland notes, “many of us are [just] making it up on the spot”—“inventing and improvising” to fit some arbitrarily preheld notion.  

A complex mass

The Fukushima nuclear disaster is another illuminating example. Blastland says “two views stood out” when he interviewed people about the largest nuclear meltdown since Chernobyl. One camp, he notes, saw Fukushima as the “ultimate evidence” that nuclear power is a cataclysm-in-waiting that humanity must abandon. The other camp, however, saw it as “clear evidence” that modern nuclear power is worth the risk. After all, it took the most powerful earthquake in the recorded history of Japan to trigger the disaster. And despite the meltdown and contamination, there were no deaths or lingering harms to human life.

The peculiarity here, Blastland notes, is that both sides had used the same evidence—the Fukushima disaster—to reinforce their respective fears or hopes in nuclear policy. We soak our interpretations in “a complex mass of reasoning, experience and emotion.” As Blastland adds:

“One big event is not one big event in isolation… A large part of its meaning is hidden in the tangle of contextually varied associations… The bigger the event, the more associations it’s likely to have, and the more likely… its implications are to be contestable—and so the more likely that any mansion we build with this big piece of evidence will appear absurd to other people.”

Michael Blastland. (2019). The Hidden Half. 

Collective incoherence

The sociologist Duncan Watts would agree. He contends that “the problem with social science is not so much that it has one theory for one thing and another theory for another thing, but rather that it has many theories for the very same thing. Even worse, these theories—although often interesting and plausible when considered individually—are fundamentally incoherent when viewed collectively.”

Just consider, for instance, the extraordinary market valuations that technology companies received during the dotcom bubble in the late nineties. The high prices of these internet stocks implied that these companies were the next big thing. And while investors were right about the Internet and emergence of giants like Amazon and Microsoft, the nature of competition reminds us that not every company can be successful. So while the narratives and prices of these companies appeared individually plausible, their collective valuations suggested delusion.

Indeed, much of this is a dilemma. Not only do we have to contend with a mass of variables and choice blindness, we have to grapple with the inconsistency and incoherence of our collective beliefs. Ideas and opinions that seem reasonable in isolation are sometimes absurd at scale and as a part of the whole. Is it no wonder that people choose to ignore all this? We would otherwise swim in an overwhelming sea of potentialities. It sometimes astonishes me that the social sciences have made as much progress as it has so far.

Farmers, chickens, and uncertainty

The situation reminds Blastland of Bertrand Russell’s parable of the farmer and the chicken: “Every day, the farmer came into the farmyard to feed the chicken. And so, every day, the chicken waited for the farmer in expectation. Until one day, just before Christmas, the farmer wrung its neck.”

In Blastland’s eyes, societal attitudes and behaviors are often more akin to that of the chicken than that of the farmer. We live largely in expectation of regularity and predictability, ignorant of the hidden forces that determine our experience and unfolding. So we coo and bob with complete abandon.

Is there anything we can do about all this? A good starting point, Blastland says, is to admit that “we don’t know the half of it.” This requires us to embrace what Mervyn King and John Kay call radical uncertainty—that there are significant potentialities in life that we cannot imagine, specify, and quantify with confidence. What is the probability of nuclear armageddon or extra-terrestrial life? Sometimes we just do not know enough to be able to pinpoint a number.

Indeed, negative capability—one’s “being in uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts, without any irritable reaching”, as the poet John Keats writes—is a valuable trait. We have to give our experts the space to express their doubts and unsureness without fear of negative opinion. Likewise, we “should not pretend”, Blastland writes, that “luck won’t play a part at the individual level.” Policies and strategies that work in one channel or jurisdiction may fail in another due simply to random variations of subtle local factors. 

Remember the marmorkrebs

If all else fails, just remember the marmorkrebs, says Blastland. Marmorkrebs are a newly discovered species of crayfish. What makes them unique among other decapod crustaceans—like the crab, prawn and lobster—is that marmorkrebs reproduce asexually via parthenogenesis. Baby marmorkrebs will hatch from an unfertilized egg with the same genetic identity as their mothers.

Stranger yet is the variety of marmorkrebs to be found. Despite sharing identical genes and environments, these marbled crayfish can grow up to express very different traits. As Blastland notes, “among identical batch-mates in the same conditions, one crayfish [can grow] to be twenty times the weight of another.” And if you raise them “together in one tank, they soon [organize] into hierarchies, some submissive, some dominant.”

If it isn’t the genes or their environment, what explains the variation among them? Scientists do not yet have a full answer. As Blastland writes, “we’re left to wonder if the causes lie beyond discovery, maybe hidden in the minute detail of the marmorkrebs’ experience… [or] in an element of pure, lawless randomness at a primitive stage of development, buffeted by more randomness along the way.”

“The marmorkrebs remind us all”, he adds, “[of] how much we can miss, how much remains hidden, and what dangerous fools we can be whenever we think that we know.” Yet, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, and businesspeople will espouse just the opposite. They dare not to be seen in uncertainty or unknowing. To them, not having something to say or answer is socially unbearable.

But as the hidden half shows:

“The anarchy of life frustrates our plans and purposes, limits our power, confronts the human ego. Be humble, it says, for I am greater than you.”

Michael Blastland. (2019). The Hidden Half. 

Sources and further reading

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