Death in numbers: Revisiting One Human Minute, by Stanislaw Lem

 It is time, once again, to revisit Stanislaw Lem.  This morning, we consider "One Human Minute."  You can find the short in a compilation of the same name, with several other pieces that are not quite as good, although still worth reading.  There is a reference here, which is Lem's A Perfect Vacuum, in which he compiled essays he wrote as fictional reviews of books that do not exist.  "One Human Minute," the titular piece in this compilation, is an essay in this form.  It posits something like an Almanac or Guinness Book of World Records, using tables of statistics to describe what happens during one minute across the globe, noting that the rotation and tilt of the globe will create all times of day and the range of seasons simultaneously (that latter is not quite right, but go with it), so an examination of one minute, across the globe, is a snapshot of humanity.  Let us consider.

Lem uses two writing devices.  The first follows from the simple observation that death on a large enough scale becomes difficult to contemplate in anything except numbers which are indistinguishable from each other, and hence, so devoid of emotional content as to be meaningless.  The difference between your reaction to 10,000 deaths and 50,000 deaths is non-existent, and fundamentally impersonal.  You go about your day after a mild reaction, in contrast to news of one death in your family.  The impersonal nature, and your inability to grasp differences on that scale both contribute to your reactions.

Lem, then, tells you that the fictional piece he reviews somehow makes a set of statistical tables convey the horrors of evil and death at scale.  While Lem presents no such tables (just a few numbers), Lem's writing can evoke reactions, and he can convince you of the moral considerations of the horrors in the world, along with your own cognitive biases and blind spots.  The point is not to present a moral framework for thinking through complex issues in the world, national or foreign affairs, but rather, to note that you can have no such framework without understanding the issues of scale.

The other device, perhaps more challenging, is the device on which I will push back here.  The fictional almanac compiles data on death and crime and horrors and such, and Lem's review of the fictional work goes back and forth on the following question.  Is there more evil in the world than good, or is it merely easier to measure evil because it is easier to measure that which is brutal than less quantifiable but no less important features of human existence?  Blah-blah, love is all you need.

Death is easy to count.  Murder is easy to count.  War draws our attention, and war is why I am revisiting this Lem gem.  The entreaty to find perspective on death at scale is an important one, and one I make on a regular basis.  Indeed, Lem's very process of going through so many causes of death, all occurring during the course of a minute about which you never think should sound familiar, because I so frequently remind anyone who reads or listens about all of the causes of mortality about which nobody thinks, so many of which are far more lethal, by the numbers, than that which draws attention.  Why do you think that I work so assiduously to remind people about waterborne pathogens and malaria?  Yet the point is not to cause an emotional reaction, because your emotional reactions are useless.  Policy matters, and if you respond to emotional reactions with poorly conceived policy, that's the problem.  Lem's trick is to acknowledge the human reliance on and unreliability of emotional reactions, and so to posit statistics as a motivator when in reality, that doesn't happen.

It's... cool.

But I already covered that.

We can count that which is brutal, but does that mean that statistical analysis necessarily portrays that which is dark, ignoring that which is good because that which is good is harder to study quantitatively?  Lem muses over this philosophical question, and it is worthy of consideration.  Can we count deaths?  Murders?  Casualties of war?  Clearly.

Can we measure familial or romantic love?  No.  Does that make either less important?  That is the question Lem poses.

But here is what he misses.  One human minute.  Which one?  Built into his description are cross-tabulations, implied or roughly described about death rates and horrors, but all happening at once.  One time.  A single now, as per the concept.

In response, I pose Steven Pinker, who examines precisely these kinds of questions, not by examining one minute, but by examining changes over the years and centuries.  Rather than computing deaths by each cause across the globe in one minute, he asks, how have mortality rates changed over time?

In Lem's essay, the Almanac, or whatever we choose to call it, goes through multiple editions, with revisions, including a computer program to go back through time and provide historical data and make projections into the future for 100 years.  Yet, Lem did not do the analysis, being Stanislaw Lem rather than Steven Pinker

Pinker actually did go back through history, and crunched some numbers on life expectancy, deaths in wars and all sorts of other shit.  In other words, if we want to know if life on Earth is getting better or worse, Pinker tells us, or at the very least, he got the ball rolling on that method.  To shift Beatles references, I have to admit, it's getting better all the time.

And that's by the quantitative method, which Lem posits will present the evil rather than the good because the evil can be counted and the good cannot.  I would say that longer life expectancy, increased literacy rates, higher standards of living, access to healthcare, and I could keep going (go read Pinker), but I'd say that's all good.  Fewer casualties in war?  How you count that is up to you.  I call that improvement, since utopianism is a path to ruin, but you may compare a non-zero death toll to the hypothetical ideal of zero if you so choose.

Look at me, an optimist.  How'd that happen?

Point being, if you want to see the real world study that Lem discusses, the better version is probably Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now.

Having a clear view, morally and rationally, of war and death is difficult.  You are presented first with the challenge of understanding scale when your brain really cannot understand numbers even into the double digits.  You can represent them algebraically, but your conceptualization of numbers becomes quickly distorted.  Your emotional reactions, then, are similarly distorted.

You think that you are responding to the scale of death.  You are not.

Let me say this again.  You are not responding to the scale of death because your brain cannot process those kinds of numbers.

I will, as usual these days, pick on the leftists and pro-Hamas useful idiots first.  They claim (and may even have convinced themselves) that they are responding to the scale of death on the Palestinian side.  They are not.  No human brain can grasp numbers at the order of magnitude of 10^4 as anything other than algebraic representations, and bluntly, the leftists who have whipped themselves up into a froth mostly do not even remember how exponents work, if they ever knew, because their side has now rejected objectivity and correct answers in math as white supremacist tools of oppression, and I wish that were even slightly exaggerated, except that I have the documentation, and I brought the receipts.

Your brain cannot grasp 10^4, which is why we write it in that manner.  You do not respond to the number.  You respond to the moral claim.  There are different ways to make moral claims.  In the case of October 7 and the Israeli-Palestinian war, the moral claim reduces to one of the following two value systems.

1.  Terrorism is evil, and a nation has a right of self-defense.

2.  Whoever is stronger is the oppressor, and is evil, and whoever is weaker is the oppressed, and is good.

Value System 1 puts you on Israel's side, and Value System 2 puts you on the Palestinian side.  Neither is an evaluation of the number killed.

Hamas apologists and their useful idiots have a favorite tactic at the moment, which is to point to a death toll on the Palestinian side in order to shock you with a number on the order of 10^4, but as Lem noted, you have no reaction to the number, because you cannot have a reaction to the number.

Kurt Vonnegut used the Dresden firebombings as a plot device in several novels, most notably Slaughterhouse Five, not merely because he lived through them, but because they were an important moral and philosophical point of war.  More than any action on the Allied side (even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would say), it could have been called terrorism, and the death toll was on the 10^4 order of magnitude.  In historical terms, even modern leftists don't often agonize over Dresden, too busy they are calling themselves "antifa," just as nobody really agonizes over German civilian deaths.  Why not?

The moral claim.  If you accept the moral claim that one side in a war is evil, and must be defeated in war, you recognize the unfortunate inevitability of civilian casualties.  Unfortunately, we do not have universal agreement that when one side has, as a goal, the genocide of the Jews, they are evil.

The death toll for Jews in the Holocaust was 10^6.  Add Romany, gay people and everyone else, and that brings the death toll up to 10^7.  How different is your reaction seeing 10^7 compared to 10^4, honestly?  Not very, and Stalin's death toll was 10^7, as was Mao's.  The death tolls of so many other mass murders and genocides are lower.  How do we consider the Armenian genocide?  Khmer Rouge?  Rwanda?  Darfur?  So many.  Your reaction is not to the number, not even to 10^6, nor 10^7.  You have no moral reaction to those sequences of four characters, written thusly.

It is to the moral claim.  The reason there is a common reaction to the Holocaust, but not to Stalin nor Mao is the left's refusal to grapple with the record of communism.  It's not the number, it's the moral claim.

Even for the Holocaust, it is the moral claim.  Try saying the word, "pogrom," to a Jew, and see if you observe a facial expression in any way similar to the one you observe when you use the word, "Holocaust."  It is the moral claim, not the number.

It is the same for the Hamas apologists and useful idiots, keeping in mind, of course, that Mahmoud Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation, if we can call it that, on a Holocuast denial conspiracy theory of the most vile sort.

For them, too, it is the moral claim, except of course that their moral claim is blinkered.  They accept the moral claim that Palestinians can kill Jewish civilians, but reject Israel's right of self-defense.  The numbers are, as they are for everyone, without any moral weight because no one can grasp such numbers.  That's Lem's point.

So whose moral argument do you accept?

I will not even pretend to find value in Value System 2, but nor is my purpose this morning to make that case, yet again.  Rather, my purpose is to observe that the comparison is always one of value systems rather than numbers.

It is the fallacious moral argument, not the number, which blinds Hamas apologists to the reality of the moral asymmetry.  They are not actually aghast at 10^4.  Were they aghast at 10^4, they would have panic attacks at any mention of the name, Joseph Stalin, given that he murdered more people than anyone in history, followed by Mao.  They would recognize the connective thread of Marx, of communism, and of conflict theory, but they cannot because the activists are either original formula Marxists, descendants of Marx in the form of postcolonialism (Edward Said), CRT, queer theory, or some variant, or they are just sympathetic to Marx, and they cannot accept the consequences of looking at those numbers in the way that Lem wants, and in the way that One Human Minute demands.

The fictional almanac proposes turning mass death, numbers that we cannot conceive, into something as moving as literature.  To do so might, in principle, force a kind of logical, philosophical, and moral clarity that we do not observe.  Moral judgment requires clarity.  Clarity of scale, and clarity of standards.  Scale would require seeing Stalin and Mao, and indeed, Marx, for who they were.

Keeping in mind that Lem wrote from behind the Iron Curtain, as a Polish author, and while he was not exactly an authoritarian, nor was he dreaming of pulling an Ayn Rand.  He had sympathies with the underlying philosophies of Marx, if not the totalitarianism.  At least, one sees that in some stories.

Anyway, scale would require seeing and understanding the numbers as they are, and responding accordingly.  Yet reason would require seeing more than just a number of deaths.  If there is a right of self defense, at both the individual and national level (I have considered this repeatedly, including in my series on Musonius Rufus), then to kill in self defense results in a death that is different, morally, from killing because you belong to an organization founded with the expressed purpose of killing the Jews, as Hamas was.

Lem proposes turning a number into more than a number, yet to attach emotional weight to the number by making the number more cognitively coherent still does not clarify the moral stakes, because that is precisely what you bring to the interpretation anyway, and that is precisely why so many are willfully self-blinkering.

If it were purely a numbers game, the same people decrying 10^4, which they cannot grasp, would declare Stalin and Mao, not heroes of the revolution, but the worst monsters in all of history, or perhaps secondary to the greatest danger, Marx.  If it were purely a numbers game, they would ignore 10^4 and worry about the 10^6 who die every year due to waterborne pathogens, and more still malaria, all easily preventable.

The numbers cannot be comprehended excepted algebraically, and people do not think algebraically.  They think-- or so they think-- morally, so their interpretations of the numbers depend on their moral frameworks.  10^4 becomes the worst atrocity in history if committed by someone you want to kill for other reasons, even if that 10^4 happens in self-defense, and is exacerbated by the original attackers hiding behind human shields.  Meanwhile, you ignore 10^7 if it would do too much damage to your ideology, and 10^6 annually, easily preventable, is nothing because it is ideologically useless.

Would adding shade and color to the numbers change these cognitive biases?  No.

Indeed, upon reflection, it may be easier to formulate coherent policy in the absence of the titular almanac about which Lem writes.  Which way do we see more cognitive bias: the emotive reaction, or abstract principles and cold math?

Blind justice requires blindness.  There is value, I think, in maintaining an emotional understanding of stakes, but one needs abstraction in order to formulate rational responses to any situation.  The titular "One Human Minute" seeks to de-rationalize by adding emotional weight to abstract numbers, but that way lies so many cognitive biases.

The Buchler-Gekko rule always applies.  Math, for lack of a better word, is good.  Math is right.  Math works.  Math clarifies, cuts through.

As long as we remember that coding and classification matter.  A death caused by a terrorist group whose stated mission is killing the Jews is not the same as a death caused by a nation's attempt to defeat that terrorist organization.  A baby dismembered or burned alive by that terrorist organization, because they want to kill the Jews, is not the same as a death caused because the terrorists hide behind babies as human shields to try to get as many of their own people killed as possible to manipulate useful idiots around the world.

The count matters, but your moral framework determines how you classify deaths within the count.  So, if you willfully blind yourself to facts, like one side's use of human shields to drive up its own civilian casualties to manipulate you, you will be unable to assess a count.

Count, but count with an understanding of process and a defensible value system.

Hampton Hawes, "Numbers Game," from For Real!