Memory Magicians
🔮And red slippers...🔮
“Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.” -Oscar Wilde
I rarely write about Israel.
While it’s possible that nothing of what I write may be particularly useful 😜, I always felt I had nothing unique to add to the conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And given that the odds of someone getting mad at you for your opinion are relatively high, it seemed better to lay low. I can show my support and solidarity in other ways.
However, if part of the reason I write Moneyball Judaism is to introduce new ideas to help us reexamine how we think about Jewish organizations, avoiding applying those concepts to such an important topic over time felt silly. After October 7th, it became impossible to avoid it.
As a result, for the next several weeks, I will focus on concepts and book recommendations that help explain why many highly invested in their opinions about the conflict may be ignoring the cognitive biases at the heart of their passion. The concepts are value-neutral; one could easily apply them to justify current opinions or refute others. And so, a word of caution: I urge you to think about these concepts and use them to better understand your views rather than the other “side.”1
Let’s begin with a question: Do we remember the conflict accurately?
Leveling and Sharpening
I am not an unbiased observer of current events.
And neither are you.
Even if we do not want to admit it, most of us begrudgingly know that when we see an event in the present that affects us personally, we engage in confirmation bias and focus more on the details that reconfirm preexisting beliefs. However, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not exclusively a conflict about the present; it’s also a conflict about the past.
For example, my favorite history book about the Palestinian-Israel conflict is Side by Side; it presents parallel histories of Israel and Palestine so that readers can see how the same historical events are interpreted in opposite ways. However, I love the book because it implicitly concedes that people cannot remember essential historical facts objectively, meaning objectively interpreting what those facts mean is almost impossible. One reason for this is this week’s big idea, leveling and sharpening.
Leveling and sharpening were identified in The Psychology of Rumor by Gordon Allport and Leo Postman (A&L) in 1947. A&L argues, "As a rumor travels, it tends to grow shorter, more concise, and more easily grasped and told” with “fewer words…used and fewer details…mentioned.”2 Two of the components of this process of detail reduction are leveling and sharpening:
Leveling refers to how “details are eliminated in…mouth-to-mouth transmissions.”3 As memories are shared more and more, fewer details from the story are shared. And as fewer details are shared, the stories lose their nuance in transmission.
Sharpening is the “selective perception, retention, and reporting of a limited number of details.”4 As people remember fewer details, specific details develop greater or lesser significance based on the person's perspective. Along with perspective comes cognitive bias.
A&L argues that leveling and sharpening are a “reciprocal phenomenon” and “one can never exist without the other.”5 As specific details of the memory are omitted, the ones retained are given greater emphasis. Thus, for the person recounting the memory, while the core event of the memory remains, in some sense, accurate, the nuances of that memory become less accurate.
Before considering how this affects the other side of wherever you sit on the political spectrum, think back to core memories of significant moments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whatever the event, A&L argues that people use sharpening to achieve a sense of closure, satisfying the urge to “make…[our] experiences as complete, coherent, and meaningful as possible.”6 Once you recall how you made meaning from that event, imagine the conclusions someone with opposite opinions might draw. In doing so, you will understand how people can level and sharpen the same event into vastly different interpretations.
Which brings us to the Troubles.
Say Nothing
To avoid diving into specific details about matters related to Israel and Palestine, my book recommendations will not focus on this event but on others with similar features. This brings us to this week’s book recommendation, Say Nothing.
“The Troubles” refers to the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland between approximately 1968 and 1998 between those who wanted to remain a part of Great Britain and those who wished for the province to become a part of Ireland. Say Nothing is a book by Patrick Radden Keefe based on an article he published in The New Yorker. It is currently a miniseries on Hulu.
Say Nothing chronicles the Troubles through the story of the murder of a woman named Jean McConville and the roles and biographies of several significant figures in the IRA, primarily a woman named Dolours Price.
McConville was a widowed mother of 10 children who was abducted and murdered by members of the IRA in 1972.
Price was a former member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) sent to prison for a 1973 bombing in London.
While there is widespread agreement that the IRA abducted and killed McConville, there is a disagreement as to whether or not McConville was a British informant, with McConville’s children insisting she was not and Dolours Price insisting that she was. This is not a small question: While no murder should be justified, if McConville were an informer, her abduction would be seen as the kind of actions engaged in by enemy combatants in war. If McConville was merely a civilian and not an enemy combatant, one might argue that those who abducted her committed a war crime, which has far more significant legal consequences.
For our purposes regarding leveling and sharpening, much of the debate regarding McConville centers in Say Nothing on a pair of red slippers:
In an interview with the BBC, McConville’s daughter Agnes recounts that her mother was wearing a pair of red slippers the night of her abduction, what Radden Keefe describes as “something out of a fairy tale.”7
Price and other IRA members claim that McConville was wearing the same pair of red slippers when she stood behind a curtain and identified IRA members for British law enforcement. Because the curtain did not reach the floor, one person saw the red slippers, recognized them, and concluded that they belonged to McConville.8
Of course, seeing a relatively ordinary pair of red slippers is hardly proof that a specific person was an informant, a point emphasized by Radden Keefe. And, in particular, Radden Keefe notes in Say Nothing that Price’s insistence that McConville was an informer can be motivated by a variety of factors:
“Was Price consciously lying about the woman? Or had she coped with her own sense of culpability by remembering Jean McConville as something less than human? For most of her conversation with Moloney, she maintained her steely resolve. But it could sometimes feel like a pose, a form of armor.”9
In other words, even if Price wants to make amends, anyone who went through what Price did would have reason to level and sharpen their memory. Radden Keffe notes at the end of the book that “Memory is a slippery thing,”10 and it is challenging to separate memory from worldview when speaking with those invested in an outcome.
Returning to Israel debates, when people cannot even agree on what happened in the past, emphasizing specific details while minimizing others, it shouldn’t surprise us that the narratives we land upon tend to maximize making our views look moral and righteous and assuming the worst of those who disagree with us. To use my favorite metaphor, this is one of several ways each plays a role in allowing this conflict to sink deeper into the tarpit.
To start thinking about how we crawl out, stay tuned for next week.
Bringing Say Nothing to Hulu
160,000
The number of people surveyed in the OECD’s decennial report on adult skills. Warning: The data on reading skills is disturbing.
What I Read This Week
Nuclear War and Proud Prophet: For reasons I cannot explain, recently, I’ve been reading some material on how vulnerable we are to nuclear war. Warning: This is not for the faint of heart, but if you want to learn more, read this piece or this book.
Embrace Messy Meetings: In his interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook conference, Jeff Bezos made the case for embracing messy meetings. I loved this idea.
Is Technology Worthy of Our Faith?: Greg Epstein is the humanist chaplain at Harvard University and is producing some fantastic writing on our misguided faith in technology. Here’s an excerpt.
The Phony Comforts of AI Skepticism: Casey Newton continues to be one of my most important teachers about AI. And this piece shook me.
The Case for Not Overthinking: Just click and read. (See what I did?)
Remember the hot-cold empathy effect?
When we disagree with someone, we always assume that we are being more rational than we are and that they are being more emotional than they need to be.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 306.
Ibid., 307.
Ibid., 355.