It's All Contingent

It is, I think, an established fact or at least truism among professional pollsters that you can draw pretty much any desired answer to any specific question, if you precede the question with other questions crafted in the right way. Want to prove that The Voters support Tough On Crime measures? Or the reverse? Craft your sequence of questions appropriately.

At the same time, in this century, we have philosophers who are fond of posing questions about whether one would, or would not, save the baby under this circumstance or that.

The essential feature of a philosophy, or or a system of ethics, is that it should reliably produce the same answer repeatedly, when confronted with the same problem, repeatedly.

This isn't how people work, at all, so in a large sense this sort of thing is an utterly bankrupt procedure. I have become convinced that our actions, our ideas of right and wrong, and all our more nuanced judgements, are highly contingent. They depend upon the sequence of questions leading up to the question of interest. Our entire sense of society is built around weirdly arbitrary not-even-rules like "is the baby nearby, or on another continent?" and "am I related to the baby?" and "do I know the baby's parents?" and so on, to say nothing of "I got paid yesterday" versus "I don't get paid for another three weeks" and also the weather and phase of the moon and how pleasant the clerk was just now.

You could probably make some evolutionary argument, to the effect that we human apes are always optimizing for local something-or-other and as such all decisions are made in the context of a gestalt where-are-we-now. But it doesn't matter where it comes from or why, what matters to me here and now is that this seems to be the way we work. We arrive at conclusion A here and now, and presented with what is apparently an identical problem save perhaps for some trivial details tomorrow, we arrive at precisely the opposite conclusion, not A. This is normal, this is human. Our ideas of ethics, of philosophy, of meaning, being built on the idea of repeatability, are bankrupt and wrong in human terms.

When we come upon a scene in the real world, our reaction to it, our understanding of it, is contingent in the same way. I come across a group of homeless people in the park, and because I am a good liberal I am sympathetic to their plight and mentally cut them some slack. Except when I don't. Sometimes I long to horsewhip their filthy littering asses out of my park and down to the Mission to clean up and dry out and get a goddamned job. I am the same person. The situation is the same. But the gestalt where-am-I-now is always in flux, and as such, my reaction varies.

Insofar as we react to a photograph as-if it were the real world, our reaction to is it necessarily contingent in the same way and for the same reasons.

In general it seems reasonable that the more powerfully the hand of the author can assert itself in a work of art, the less contingent the meaning is likely to be. In this case I refer to the "meaning" that some normie will make of it, not some scholarly interpretation. So, a movie or a novel is likely to be understood in relative terms in a less contingent way than a painting, which in turn is (generally, relatively) understood in a less contingent way than a photograph, which itself falls to the contingency with which we understand the world as a whole.

There are, I think, two quite separate factors here. The first is that a heavy-handed author leaves less room for interpretation. In the limiting case all you can do is accept or reject the conclusion. The second factor is that preparation of the viewer business that pollsters know about. You can, at least in theory, warm the viewer up to your ideas. In this latter case, the Art or whatever is the whole thing, all the context, the text, the pictures, whatever, and the viewer is assumed to bringing whatever they are today to it. But the Art as a whole can in theory modify the condition of who-you-are to a degree and bring out some kind of reaction which is.. I don't even know. Is it better or worse? It's probably different, and maybe more profound? If the purpose of Art is to affect the viewer rather than to simply lecture, I guess the idea of changing the who-are-you-now gestalt is desireable.

A photograph more or less by itself, especially a documentary-styled photograph, lies fairly far on the contingent end of things. We're likely to make sense of it based on who we are, but more than that, on who we are at this moment. You as the artist can try to shape the experience, or to nail down the meaning, but the photo itself is elusive.