Information, Occam's razor and moral judgment: The Changeling, by Victor LaValle

 It has been a while since I have read Victor LaValle, and that is a shame.  This man can write.  This morning, we turn to his novel, The Changeling.  There are noises about adapting it for some sort of production, and insert rant here.  Read the book instead.  This one is a sort of creepy, modern fairy tale although the most interesting observations I draw from it come from what seemed to be a throwaway line by one character, making a deeper point that I do not know if LaValle, himself, fully appreciated.  Let us consider the relationship between information, Occam's razor, and morality.

LaValle's tale centers on Apollo Kagwa, who is the son of Lillian, a Ugandan immigrant who settled in New York, and Brian West, a parole officer who was following up on matters at Lillian's workplace, which was how they met.  After some time, they got together, and had Apollo.  Brian, however, was a little nuts, and left the picture.  Apollo grew up to become a buyer and seller of rare books, and in the course of things, he met Emma Valentine, a librarian.  They married, and had a son-- Brian.  Then Emma started acting strangely.  She became distant from baby Brian, problems ensued, and eventually, she killed him, saying that it wasn't a baby, while torturing and nearly killing Apollo.  She then disappeared, and things do not go well for Apollo, who flips out himself, gets locked up briefly, and goes on a bit of a quest to find Emma.

Should Apollo have believed Emma that that thing was not a baby?

You.  You, presumably, live in the real world.  Well, assuming there's a "you," which there would be if anyone read this damned blog, but let's skip that detail for the moment.  I am blathering to myself.  You have a newborn.  Your spouse acts very strangely, and says that the newborn is not a baby, and wants to kill it.  Do you a) trust your spouse, or b) get the fuck out of there, taking the baby, and maybe call the cops, psychiatric help, etc.?

Please tell me this is not a hard choice.

To be fair to Apollo, there isn't a lot of "I'm going to kill this thing, because it's not a baby" as lead-up.  Emma is acting messed-up, and saying that it isn't a baby, but she doesn't give a lot of direct warning about violence.  Still, do you believe in magic, or crazy people?

Occam's razor says that the person talking about magic or some such is a crazy person, rather than attuned to the supernatural.  So if you apply Occam's razor, that is your best inference.

That is what Apollo does.  And then, after Emma kills the baby/not-a-baby, with Apollo chained to a live radiator for extra-special shits and giggles, Apollo goes on a quest to find Emma.

He finds William Wheeler, or at least, that's the guy's pseudonym.  Wheeler poses, first, as a guy trying to buy a valuable book, and then latches onto Apollo.  He says he wants to help Apollo find Emma, which leads them out onto a boat trip up the East River to North Brother Island.  (I had to look it up.)  There, they find a group of women hiding out after having similarly pulled the same thing as Emma, and they nearly kill Apollo, because he was looking for Emma.  To be fair, he was running around like a madman, and I'd be scared if I were them, but that's not a justification for murder most foul.

Anyway, the scene is set like a weirdo battered women's shelter, except that instead of women just escaping abusive relationships, it is for women who murdered their babies/non-babies, and are hiding from their husbands, who are trying to track them down because, you know, dead babies!

Remember, Emma bike-locked Apollo by the throat to a live radiator to strangle-burn him while she murdered their baby/not-a-baby in the other room, and it's the thing on the left-side of the slash unless you believe in magic.

And by this point in the storyline, the reader is given no actual evidence of magic.

But the women on North Brother Island are going to murder the fuck out of Apollo, like he's a rapist, or a molester, or an actual child-murderer himself, hunting down an innocent.

Which... do you believe in magic?  Because maybe Emma did the right thing, if magic is real.  Otherwise, she flipped out and murdered her and Apollo's baby, and her buddies on North Brother Island are going to murder Apollo for finding where she's been hiding to escape the law, having murdered their baby.  Take your pick.

This whole thing has a tinge of "believe all women," which would be better as, "listen," but that's rather the point, isn't it?  Particularly when it turns on, you know, magic.

Anyway, eventually, you do get confirmation that magic is real.  Here's the real deal.  Long, long ago, a small group of Norwegian immigrants set out for America on a ship that simply was not fit for the voyage.  One member of the group cut a deal with a troll.  Get us to America, safely, and I'll give you babies.  The troll does not exactly want to eat them.  The troll wants to try to raise them, but... it's a troll.  It will not exactly win any indeterminate-pronoun-parent-of-the-year awards.  So the troll gets the boat to America, and the descendants of trollman periodically kidnap a baby, and leave it in a cave in a forest in Queens, swapping it out for a troll baby, magicked up by the parents' hopes and dreams, but eventually, the spell will be broken, a parent will flip out and kill the troll baby, because, dude, troll.

So that was what happened.  Emma eventually saw through the spell, as did other women, and "William Wheeler" was a descendent of trollman, trying to keep the bargain.

OK, but you, the reader, don't see confirmation within the story that magic is real until late in the novel.  I mean, it's a Victor LaValle novel, and given the marketing and all that, it is not going to be one of those things where it is set up as creepy and weird but everything has a natural explanation, but still.  It takes place in New York City.  Several boroughs, the East River... It is New York.  If you are in New York, you may see some very strange things.  However, your default assumption should not be magic.

And here we come to the throwaway line.  Near the end of the novel, Apollo finds Emma, and they reach some reconciliation.  Apollo tells Emma that he should have believed her.

Um... no!  He shouldn't!

And Emma tells him that she would not have believed him.  This was the line.  The key line.  To my mind, the single most important line in the book.  When her mind cleared, after going through her own shit, she understood that expecting Apollo to believe in magic made no sense.  To reuse that old line, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

"It's not a baby."  That is an extraordinary claim, and without extraordinary evidence, Occam's razor says that the person saying it is nuts.  And to be sure, William Wheeler was doing other things to mess with Emma's head, and make her look and feel crazy, but that central claim?  That was an extraordinary claim.

With zero evidence, as opposed to extraordinary evidence.

Emma understood, upon reflection, that she should not have been believed.  Or at least, she said so.  And she should not have been.  This also means, though, that the attempted murder of Apollo on North Brother Island must be viewed in different terms.  That was not a women's shelter keeping out a rapist.  If Emma should not have been believed, then that attempted murder was not morally justifiable.  Cal, the woman running that island and that operation, had a lot to answer for, because we are told that they were regularly murdering husbands in search of wives who had done exactly what Emma had done.

Not rapists, not abusers, not child-molesters... just husbands who saw their wives murder their "babies."

The entire morality of that operation flips once you realize that Emma's statement was not merely a reciprocal statement in response to her husband as they reconciled, but a real observation about the nature of information and morality.

Emma's actions look better when you understand the true state of that world, although you can ask whether you would do what she did, or check yourself into an institution for treatment.  North Brother Island?  They look worse.  They are murdering innocent people, knowing that those people are innocent, and it is their knowledge that puts their actions in the proper context.  Emma puts their actions in the proper context.  If she knew that Apollo should not have believed her because she wouldn't have believed him, then Cal and her group had no right to be murdering all of the husbands that they were murdering.

Yet, did LaValle fully appreciate this point, or did he merely want to write the image of an empowered women's shelter?  Unclear, and that is what is odd here.

One of the most important points about disagreement is that you must try to understand why those who disagree with you do so, both the ideological and informational bases of those disagreements.  Within the realm of good faith dispute, understanding the informational and principled basis of disagreement will hopefully reduce one's own confidence, and one should always strive to put one's self in another's mindset, both ideologically and informationally.

Alas, there will also be times when understanding another's informational situation will make that person's actions look even worse.

I wish the world weren't so, but even without magic, seeing what others know will sometimes reveal the depths of their depravity.  Sometimes far away, sometimes up close.  Sometimes unfortunately close.

Jayme Stone, "Troll Kingdom Polska," live.  The studio cut is on Room of Wonders.