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Erev RH 2010
I want to start by telling you about something that you will find very hard to
believe. (I know rabbis sermons often contain stuff that’s hard to believe, but
this is a bit different). Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are two Harvard
psychologists who devised a very simple experiment. They asked students –
this is Harvard remember – to watch a video: a video of 6 students , three
dressed in black, three dressed in white, passing a basketball to each other.
The task was simply to count the number of times the players in white passed
the ball. So not too complicated (even George Bush could have done this) –
how many times was the ball passed by players dressed in white.
During the video a person in a full-body gorilla suit walked into the centre of
the frame, pounded their chest and then walked off. They showed this video
first in the US, then to people all round the world. The results were uniform.
Fully half the people who took the test, in every country, when asked details
about the video did not notice the person in the gorilla suit. Many of those,
when shown the video again, protested that the video must have been rigged,
doctored, faked, this second time. People who had seen the gorilla first-time
round were incredulous – how could so many viewers miss something so
obvious?
Naturally we sitting here fondly imagine that of course we would have been in
that 50% who would have seen what was in front of our eyes. But Simons and
Chabris – in their now famous ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment – had stumbled
upon a basic lapse in human attentiveness. They called it ‘inattention
blindness’ – the failure to see something obvious, in front of our eyes, when
we have our minds elsewhere. (By the way you can see this experiment on
YouTube if you are interested). You, of course, will see the gorilla – because I
have told you it is there. And you will find it hard to believe how 50% of people
don’t see it.
In their new book ‘The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways our Intuitions Deceive
Us’ the authors describe a whole range of experiments to illustrate what they
call our ‘illusion of attention’ – that is that we are often unaware of the
limitations of what we perceive, not just visually (through our eyes) but in
relation to memory, knowledge and perception. We think we see and
experience the world as it is – but we are often distorting it, misapprehending
it, or in various ways misinterpreting it. In the end there are two main
messages in their book. Firstly, we are subject to powerful illusions about how
our mind works. And secondly, these illusions are difficult to shake, even when
pointed out with all the evidence – or in books like theirs.
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This isn’t about stupidity, or even arrogance – it is about something in us that is
so immersed in our own subjective worlds, our own personal way of seeing
and thinking, that we often just can’t look reality in the eye; and this is
combined with us overestimating our abilities to know and understand the
world around us.
They have interesting things to say about a range of issues like the MMR
vaccine scare and hedge-fund meltdowns, in relation to which, in both cases,
all the solid evidence was known about and yet dismissed by a good
percentage of those involved, who were unable (not just unwilling) to change
their way of thinking once they had one view lodged in their minds. Although
the authors don’t mention this, I think that climate change sceptics may fall
into this category, although in relation to the environment a better guide to
denial may be the poet’s words: T.S. Eliot’s ‘human kind/ Cannot bear very
much reality’.
I think that the ‘invisible gorilla’ experiment gives us plenty to think about. It
can teach us the value of being more modest, more humble, less sure of the
rightness of our thinking, more open to doubts about what we think we
definitely know, perhaps more able to tolerate uncertainty. Perhaps it can
point us towards appreciating the provisional rather than the definitive, the
‘maybe’ and the ‘perhaps’ of life rather than the ‘definitely’ and the
‘undoubtedly’. And this is all relevant to these Ten Days that are opening up
for us this evening as our New Year begins. Because questions about attention
and attentiveness takes us close to heart of what the High Holy Days are all
about.
We began the service with a prayer that said ‘Give us courage to be honest
with ourselves’ (p.131) – and that simple statement encapsulates the major
religious theme of these 10 days : honesty with our selves. And it is the most
difficult work of our lives because ‘inattention blindness’ isn’t just a physical
phenomenon it is also a psychological and spiritual one.
The call to be attentive, to pay attention to what is real and not illusory is, after
all, at the heart of Judaism, not just during these Ten Days: Shema Yisrael,
Hear, Yisrael – ‘Shema’ does mean ‘Hear’ but in the sense of ‘Pay attention’,
‘Pay very close attention’, because ‘Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad’ - ‘divinity
permeates all of being, and everything is connected to everything else’ (I’m
translating loosely - but trying to tease out the inner core of this verse, this
belief, this affirmation of Jewish purpose).
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Morning and evening, day in day out, we are called to be attentive to what is
really happening – in us, to us, between us, around us - and not retreat into
lives of illusion and delusion. And it is a very demanding call, this call, to hear
and listen and respond to what is happening within us and in front of us: the
injustices that need addressing, the people who need helping, the support that
needs to be offered, to our children, our parents, our friends, our colleagues,
our neighbours, and the strangers in our midst, who are everywhere, in every
land. The world could die through lack of compassion, through lack of
sustained attentiveness to what is real and what is really happening.
And I think – and this is a sobering and maybe disturbing thought as our New
Year begins with its opportunities for change challenging us and provoking us
– what I do think is this question of paying attention to what is in front of us is
getting more and more difficult. Because something is changing in our
consciousness as we become more and more dependent upon and embedded
within this huge world wide web of inter-related technology and electronic
networking that has grown up around us, and between us, over this last
decade. What does paying attention really mean now when at the same
moment you can be online paying your bills, and checking your email, and
Facebooking, and talking on the phone, while also maybe watching some TV or
listening to music?
How do you pay attention in a sustained way In the midst of this
transformation in what is possible? What are you paying attention to?
Although I’m a bit of a techno-phobe, and somewhat resistant
temperamentally to this fragmentation of attentiveness, I am fascinated by
what is happening, and yet at the same time I’m sometimes rather scared at
the implications of this ‘continuous partial attention’ [cf S.Craig Watkins: The
Young and the Digital: what the Migration to social Network Sites, Games and
Anytime, Anywhere Media Means For Our Future] which is required if we buy
in, literally and metaphorically, to this world. We might joke that ‘continuous
partial attention’ is just multi-tasking, and that’s what the world demands
now, and women might smile wryly and say, well you are just describing what
it’s like to be an ordinary mother – who has to pay attention to the children,
and write her reports and cook supper all at the same time... ‘and it didn’t do
me any harm’. Well, maybe, maybe not.
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Perhaps this latest technology-driven manifestation of ‘continuous partial
attention’ is nothing very new and my concerns about what it is doing to the
quality of our lives and our human capacities for attention, concern and
empathy are misplaced. I may be wrong about what it is doing to our psyches
and indeed the very structure of our brains (there’s growing evidence for
these changes in our neural wiring) – I may be wrong about what is happening
but I do know that it is addictive, it is the drug of choice of millions who
wouldn’t touch cocaine - they don’t call Blackberrys ‘Crackberrys’ for no
reason. There is a drive, powerful and increasingly irresistible, to be always
‘on’, anywhere, anytime, any place – like the old Bacardi ad but for real: go
online, stay connected, sense that constant unfolding newness, the potential
to be filled with new news. We can’t miss anything - and everything must have
our so-called attention: inboxes must be checked, home pages returned to, as
we skim and surf, and search, and become twitchier, and irritable, and more
task-oriented and pressurised, yet also more distracted, less able to
concentrate for very long on anything (like a sermon of more than 10 minutes),
and less able to listen – really listen – to another person. Which is actually part
of the essence of being human. We are more focused on the present moment
because more involved in what is happening now – but, paradoxically, less
connected to each other in deep and satisfying ways. It is a thrill to be able to
be in touch with the world in all its wondrous density and complexity – but
does it lead us into ways of honesty and charity, does it support us in our
weakness and fragility, does it hold us in our fears of illness and loss, does it
protect us from despair and anxiety?
‘Give us courage to be honest with ourselves’ : some of you, if you have stayed
resistant to the technological revolution of this last 10 years, may well be
looking at me as if I am slightly deranged – which maybe I am – but what I’m
trying to describe and evoke here is one aspect of the ‘invisible gorilla’ in our
midst. Maybe you see it, maybe you don’t – but this Facebook, MySpace, Bebo,
Twittering online world is not going to go away very soon, and I am suggesting
not that it is all bad, not at all – I think there are many benign aspects of this
inter-connectedness – but that it is infiltrating our consciousness in ways we
can’t see and that I suspect are not benign. I’m sure, for example, just to give a
last, small example, that it makes it harder to sit here in services where there
are few distractions and no hyperlinks. What we have over these 10 days is a
different way of seeing, a different way of connecting, it’s a call to slow down
from our somewhat manic lives, and to start to pay attention again to what
really matters – what used to be called ‘the soul’, some essence of us that
needs time and space, that needs to be nurtured, that needs attention, real
devoted, devotional, attention.
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So, this has been a sermon not on the ‘elephant and the Jewish question’ (as
the old joke has it1), but ‘the invisible gorilla and the Jewish question’. And
what it reminds me of, is the 19th century Hasidic story - and I’m going to finish
with this - about the disciple who approached his Rebbe and asked, "Rebbe,
every time I turn around, I hear about new, modern devices in the world. Tell
me, please, are they good or bad for us?"
"What kind of devices?" asked the Rebbe.
"Let me see. There's the telegraph, there's the telephone, and there's the
locomotive."
The Rebbe replied, "All of them can be good if we learn the right lessons from
them. From the telegraph, we learn to measure our words; if used
indiscriminately, we will have to pay dearly. From the telephone, we learn that
whatever you say here is heard there. From the locomotive, we learn that
every second counts, and if we don’t use each one wisely, we may not reach
our destination in life.”
And from the internet we learn what the mystics of old already knew: that
Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad – that everything is connected to everything
else, that we have the divine within us and that God holds us within Himself, so
to speak.
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Four doctoral students — a German, a Frenchman, a Russian and a Jew — took a seminar requiring
a paper about elephants. The German wrote about authority in elephant society. The Frenchman
wrote about the love life of the elephant. The Russian wrote about sharing among elephants. And
the Jew wrote about the elephant and the Jewish question.