Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

We're going to talk today about social miracles, and I claim this is one of your best, 10 best ideas of your lifetime. Maybe that's, I mean, it's number 10, it might be number three, who knows, but.

Agnes:

That can either be a compliment or an insult, depending. But let's go with it. Okay, you explain what you take social miracles to be.

Robin:

So, I take it that we have characterizations, almost definitions, of many kinds of social interactions, including apology, trust, forgiveness, gifts, seduction, And you notice that if you look carefully at our requirements and definitions of such things, they're typically really hard to satisfy. And so probably aren't actually satisfied. Nevertheless, we usually accept the actual performances or acts under those labels as acceptable. and go on with it, but we all apparently retain the option to reject them as insufficient. And according to your analysis, we should all agree on that. That is, if we, in fact, look at what you did and compare it to the definition of requirements, we should all agree that in fact, it was insufficient. and yet we accept them. So if you think, well, somehow we achieved this impossible thing, I guess you want to call that a miracle. I think we might want to say, well, we're accepting miracles as existing, even though they're not. That's maybe what we'll talk about here. That would be my summary that We demand crazy high standards for a lot of common social interactions, and we can't meet them, but we act as if we do.

Agnes:

Right. So, I mean, whether or not These are miracles, just depends on whether or not we actually believe that they've been met. And I guess I think that the claim I was making is insofar as you engage in the social practice of apologizing and forgiving and trusting and giving gifts and seduction, Insofar as you engage in all those practices, you... unless you do so in a kind of cynical or detached or something else way, the standard way to engage in them just requires you to believe in miracles. It's part of the practice. Part of the social practice is the idea that there are miracles. That's actually part of what we're like communicating, I think, in some of these acts. So that suggests we believe in miracles. Whether we're right to or is another question. But, you know, if we can just go on the assumption, look, we all do participate in these practices, then it follows that we all do believe in miracles.

Robin:

Although we might ask, how deeply do we believe in them? So if you think of it like actual religious miracles, like the tears on the wall of a church or something that's supposed to look like the Virgin Mary or something, right? There's a sense in which you look at them and you can kind of go, yeah, I kind of see it. And then other people more skeptically can come along and say, oh, come on, maybe show you it in a different light or other things and try to take that away from you. And you might resist that. We might see that you're trying to believe in it. And you might accept their arguments and still say, yeah, but there's a sense in which it's a miracle. And we might be then in that sort of intermediate position where we kind of know they aren't meeting the criteria. in a literal sense, but we're doing something like accepting it as if it were a miracle.

Agnes:

Well, I think that believing in miracles doesn't actually require you to believe that any miracles have taken place. Um, all you got to believe is that they could take place, right? So, um, I think that in some of these cases, like, so the, the, the sort of account that I gave of apology is like a lot of apologies, the kind that we are invested in our everyday life. What we're saying to each other when we casually apologize and forgive is something like, if push came to shove, we could do the miracle. We could do the miracle version of this. And so that doesn't actually require us to do the miracle. And in that moment, though, there may be moments when that, you know, kind of challenge gets sort of actually, where we're actually faced with it. Um, but, um, but we just have to affirm a shared commitment to that possibility. So we're in effect announcing ourselves as people who believe in miracles. And that that's part of what it is for us to be socially bound together, like to live together with each other, is to say, hey, we believe that of each other that we can perform these miracles. And so you may say, like if you're very skeptical and you're like, I don't know whether any of these miracles have ever happened, that still leaves up in the possibility that they could happen. And if you want to say, I mean, you know, I think that there's a question where we put our reallys. So you might come up with a very good argument as to why this can't happen. And I think in a minute, we should actually go through an example so that it's clear what we're talking about. And so we might say, really, you recognize that there's no such thing as an apology. But the next time you apologize and you, you know, engage in this ritual that includes a commitment to the miracle of apology, you might say, well, really you do. And it's kind of hard to know where to put your really. Whether the really you is the one who listens to abstract arguments or the really you is the one that walks around in the world apologizing, forgiving and giving people gifts. you know, no matter how many arguments we make to the person. So I'm willing to grant, like, look, there seem to be two things here, and it's just not obvious how to prioritize them.

Robin:

the ambiguity of at what level we're making what claim is part of our response to making awkward claims. I mean, I think we see this all through the world of awkward claims. When people make claims that they find hard to support, they often spread out into a wide range of ways they interpret it. So just like, is there a God? If you want to say there's a God, but don't want to defend The usual way there's a god, you multiply all these different possible gods there could be, and all the different possible relationships he could have to you, and all the different possible relationships gods could have to the world. By the time you've spread out a thousand different variations, it becomes hard to refute your claim that there's a god, because I could only refute these one at a time, and you've still got a thousand more. Um, so it seems to me that goes along with the idea that we are declaring some things to be miraculous and we're going to hold onto that and we're going to push back against skeptical or analytical, you know, attempts to rebut our claims that these things happen and they actually achieve these miraculous conditions.

Agnes:

Okay, let's, let's, let's, um, I mean, sorry, my thought here is that the reason we push back is that we have to believe in these things. And so we do believe in them. And, and, and that that's like, uh, that's run deeper in us than any argument that we can give is that this is like a condition on, say, our social life or something like that. So you could be right that we're, you know, multiplying meanings and things like that in order to hold on to these things that we need. But that would just be to say even more of a sign that we really do need to believe in this thing and that we keep trying to defend it against, you know, against analytical arguments that on some level we must recognize. put it under threat if we didn't recognize that we wouldn't be bothering to do the defenses. So let's give an example. I, I, I, let's start with apology and forgiveness, but then we can move on. I'm also very interested in the seduction case, which I don't talk about. And then there's a couple of other cases that I'm interested in, cause I'm actually not sure whether they are cases of social miracles. Um, so, um, uh, so we'll talk about apology and forgiveness. The other two cases that I'm interested in are, um, humor and, um, The fact, I don't know what the word is for this, but the fact that you often have more ideas when you're talking to someone than you do when you're by yourself. So that you can come up with solutions to problems, you can come up with new accounts, new theories, many of us, better if there's another person there who's willing to listen to them.

Robin:

Let's start with apology.

Agnes:

Yeah, start with apology, okay. So the idea is that in order to apologize to you, I have to do two things. The first thing is I have to take responsibility for a wrong thing that I did. And so I have to see that wrong thing as like my action, something that I freely chose to perform. I wasn't forced into it because then it's not my fault. Um, but to freely choose to do something is just the same thing as to see that thing as a good thing to do. That's what it means to freely choose, at least better than your other alternatives. In fact, probably the best alternative you had under the circumstances. That's what it is, really choose something. And so one thing I have to do is say, I did this really good thing. Okay, that's part of it. The other part is I have to say that the thing I did was bad, and that I regret it, and that I don't look at it from the point of view of me, the agent, I look at it from the point of view of you, the victim, and say I disavow it, and I reject it, and I don't see it as a good thing to do. I see it as not choice worthy. I can't even understand how anyone could possibly choose it. Um, so I think I just have to do both those things and I apologize to you. I have to say, I chose this good thing and it was me that chose it. And I have to say, this is unchoosable. No one could ever choose it. Or at any rate, I can't understand that all the point of view of the person who would choose it. All right. So my claim is it's just very, very hard to see how you can do both of those things at one at the same time. And in fact, if you look at why apologies get rejected, They get rejected because the person fails to do one of those two things. So either they didn't really take responsibility. They didn't really see it as their fault. They made excuses. Or on the other hand, they were really sincerely sorry. They didn't feel bad. They didn't regret. They weren't pained by it. Those are the two things that people can fail to do. They could, of course, fail to do both of them. Um, but usually it's the one or the other and, and it, and, and my claim is it's not surprising that people fail at one of those two things because it's really hard to see how you could do both of those things.

Robin:

Now, you're a fan of Socrates. I am indeed. And in a conversation of this sort with Socrates, he would typically be a point to notice, hey, there's a contradiction here. Therefore, you can't do both and take that as a premise for further analysis. So we're making an unusual move here. compared to a Socratic conversation, we're not accepting a purported contradiction as a contradiction. We are somehow declaring that it looks like a contradiction, but not really, because we're going to believe that it's not a contradiction and that both sides can be satisfied.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess. What I'm trying to do right now is just describe what's happening in Apology. I'm not yet trying to evaluate it. And so it may be that it turns out to be impossible. But the point is that Apology requires you to do those two things, whether or not it's possible to do both of those things. I agree we can then ask whether it is possible. It's interesting, I find it interesting, that this practice doesn't exist in the ancient world, so we can't directly ask Socrates. There is no such thing as apology. I mean, there is a text called Plato's Apology, which is the speech of Socrates at his trial, but it is not an apology. It is just of the Greek word apologia just means a speech of self-defense at a trial. You don't apologize. You explain why they shouldn't actually be putting you to death, which is what Socrates does. So he does not apologize. So that, that, you know, this is a, this is a kind of, it's a kind of, um, post-Christian phenomenon, the apology. And that itself suggests we, it's going to be hard to say no society could exist without it because there are societies that existed without it. Um, uh, but, um, uh, but yeah, it, it, it, um, it is calling upon you to do something that, uh, I'm gonna grant is like, it's pretty hard to see how anyone could achieve it. Maybe should I add forgiveness? Okay. Basically, forgiveness, because forgiveness is not excusing the person, forgiveness is not saying that what they did was okay. That's considered different from forgiveness. Forgiveness requires you in effect to say of the person, you are responsible for this. Um, I am gonna, like, um, blame you for it, but then also I'm gonna not blame you for it, and I'm going to relieve you of responsibility. So I'm both holding you responsible and relieving you of responsibility at the very same time. That's what forgiveness is. That is also, I think, equally paradoxical. Apology, I think, is more paradoxical because apology only exists to anticipate forgiveness. So in effect, I'm performing this miracle so that so that you'll perform another miracle, which you won't necessarily perform no matter what I do and which I can't cause you or make you perform. So they're both weirdly miraculous. But for apology, I think is more so.

Robin:

So let's try to be methodical here. We have apparent definitions of characterize, you know, behavior, apology and forgiveness. They seem to make sense, but then we have people actually acting as if they think they are giving apologies and giving forgiveness, and we have other people accepting those things. So the first question might be, how sure are we that people accept your descriptions as what these things mean, because maybe they're contradictory behavior is somehow a rejection of those definitions, or perhaps they accept them separately, but don't notice the contradiction. Could they just be in the habit of imposing these constraints haphazardly, and so they haven't actually noticed that the combination is impossible? I mean, we're struggling with how to interpret this combination of phenomena where there is this definition that people would seem to nod to, but yes, they seem impossible together, and yet people act as if they're doing this thing, that that's the thing we're trying to struggle with.

Agnes:

So one thing that I, you know, draw attention to in the essay is that we, and that I think may be part of the explanation of how people engage in this activity, in the face of its contradictory quality is that we very much normalized apology by apologizing in many, many contexts that don't really require an apology. So if I'm walking through a door and it slams in your face, I'll say, I'm sorry. Um, even if it's pretty clear that, um, I, I couldn't have seen you there, um, or that even, you know, that I, maybe I was being negligent, but I, it may be very clear I wasn't intending you any harm. Cause there, there's no story on which I could have been intending you harm. Um. And so we've gotten very used to apologizing when there isn't really any guilt that needs to be either assumed or taken away. And that has normalized apology for us. And all of those everyday apologies sort of make apology feel very accessible. And they make it like in those contexts, we don't feel like we have to meet these very high standards because in a sense, we're not even really apologizing. So I don't know what the right way to put this is, but it's like we've domesticated apology.

Robin:

Okay, so there are all these cases in which we know we're not doing a real apology, but we're sort of going through the motions of indicating the idea of apology.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

It doesn't seem to be central to the concept of a social miracle because many of your other examples don't seem to be ones where we pretend them all the time.

Agnes:

What's an example where we don't pretend it all the time? Gifts, we pretend it all the time. Trust, we pretend it all the time.

Robin:

Seduction.

Agnes:

Seduction. Seduction's an interesting one, but I kind of think we pretended that one too. Like, for instance.

Robin:

So, just to be clear, we mean consensual seduction of some sort, perhaps, as what we're, or the reference that is, in some sense, people get seduced, but the question is, what conditions does that seduction meet, I guess?

Agnes:

Right, so okay, let's talk about seduction, because I wanted to talk about it, and it's not in my essay, but I think it's an interesting case. So the idea is, you know, if I'm seducing you, then I'm kind of giving you reasons to be attracted to me. That is, I'm putting enough on the table that then you're like, okay, she's met the seduction requirement. I'm into her now. And then there's a question, okay, what does that take? That is, what is it going to get? You know, what, what do I have, what's enough for me to do in order for you to say yes to my advances? Um, and, um, you know, uh, the thought that we've talked about in the past is that sort of what each person wants is to be wanted. And so I've got to give you this feeling that you're wanted in some way.

Robin:

OK, so I was thinking of different impossibility. There could be several impossibilities associated here. So I agree. One potential possibility is that I'm getting from you what I wanted and you're getting from me what you wanted. And that has troubles when what we want is to be wanted. Yeah. But if I just wanted a pretty brunette and you just wanted a handsome blonde or something, and we both happen to be those things, then there isn't a problem with us each getting what we want. But the more that what we want is for the other person to want us, then the more it might not work. And so, yes, there is a sense in which it looks on paper like those are hard to match, but then people seem to say, act as if I'm getting what I wanted. Yes. Without clarifying very clearly what it is they're getting. Right. The other thing I was thinking of, and we can talk about either one of these as you prefer, is the idea of a consensual seduction, which isn't very explicit, that is.

Agnes:

I'm just not sure what you mean by that, so you have to explain.

Robin:

I just meant, you know, there's this idea that, you know, popularized the last 10 years in college campuses about having to give explicit requests at each stage and get explicit assent at each stage before things go forward.

Agnes:

What you're giving consent to is sex, not seduction, right?

Robin:

Well, I mean, the idea is that it's not, right, but if the idea is that you want it, so that's the seduction, but that people typically don't wanna go through all those explicit approval steps. So the question is, did you get permission? Was it consensual if you didn't explicitly ask for permission? And then the idea that it actually gets in the way to explicitly ask for permission, that's something more of a social miracle. There are people white at the end of the process say it was consensual even though they didn't ask and get explicit permission. That seems to be an interesting kind of impossibility, but it's different than the matching of desires.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So we're thinking of sexual consent. as a social impossibility. Okay, good. I think it's gonna be better to say sexual consent than seduction. Okay, fine. But that's what we... Seduction for the other case. Okay, I was thinking about the seduction.

Robin:

I mean, in fact, mostly we want sexual content in the context of seduction. We're not so interested in prostitution consent or other reasons for consent, right? uh or even you know feeling sorry for you consent the usual concept of sexual consent is seduction right um i mean i think that

Agnes:

the very idea of seduction has become a bit passe. It's not clear to me that people even believe there is such a thing anymore. They think there's sex. So when you say, well, it's in the context of seduction, it's not clear to me that that's quite right or that that's a natural way to put it. But in any case, I kind of see what you mean in that it seems like the idea of consent is like a, It's like we're imagining some kind of contract that could be taking place.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

No one can really specify what it is to opt in to the contract, what it is to sign your name. And, or what the contract actually says. Um, and in a lot of ways, the, even the idea of a contract doesn't make any sense because I, if I agree to something and then like five minutes later, I'm like, no, then you can't hold me to my contract. So what kind of contract is that? Um, so, um, so it's, it, there's like a faux contract. Um, and. I agree and I think that maybe we might think of the idea of sexual consent as a new social impossibility that we've recently created. I think that's actually a plausible way to think about it. And that this is why a lot of people complain about it, because they complain, but I want to know, like, what are exactly the hoops I got to jump through so that I can go to those? And then I'm guaranteed to be fine. And it's like, when are you guaranteed to get a gift that's going to make someone grateful? Or when are you guaranteed to get a forgiveness? You're not going to be guaranteed. And so that in effect, what they're doing is rediscovering the frustration of the latitude that social impossibility gives you.

Robin:

So the reason why we switched to these examples is I claim they less have the cloud of, you know, imitation versions of them around that where we pretend to do them. Like we do with our apology.

Agnes:

No, I actually think that that's true about consent. But I also think that with consent, we are, in fact, as a society, like caught in the paradox and totally bewildered by it and constantly asking ourselves, wait, how is this supposed to work? And people will write books. I recently did an event on one. I'm like, sort of what is consent and reinventing consent. And we're not doing that as much with apology because we think we got apology in our back pocket. And so if your question to me was, if it's so paradoxical, how are we just like going about doing it? And my answer was, we're normal. We've normalized it. And that's not true with consent. But we are puzzling over consent. And it's not clear that we're kind of comfortable with it in the ways that we're kind of comfortable with apology.

Robin:

So I'd like to move to theorizing about why this phenomena exists. So we never said explicitly, but you wrote an essay, published an essay recently in The Point Magazine, whose title is... The Paradox of Apology. And I, the day it came out, wrote a response blog post called Social Miracles as a hostage exchange. In your post, in your article, you just present this concept of a miracle and notice that it's puzzling, and you don't offer an explanation. And, but you might have one in mind and we'd be interested in hearing that. I suggested an explanation, which I analogs to hostage to exchange. So in the ancient world, and even sometimes more recently, to say empires or Kings want to make peace treaty with each other. And one way to implement that treaty would be to exchange their sons and have their son live in the other person's castle. And now, if one were to betray the other, their son might be forfeit, and they wouldn't want that, so they are binding themselves together by making themselves vulnerable to each other. And we might say, this is a common thing. We might even say, this is what say intimacy is or many kinds of relationships where people open themselves, become more vulnerable, allow themselves more to be hurt by the other and mutually doing that together can bind them together better because not only are they showing that they're willing to do that, but they are committing themselves to letting the other person hurt them if they get mad at them. So we might say, well, by say, committing to this concept of apology and forgiveness, we commit to saying, if you want to say that I didn't give a sufficient apology, I'm gonna let you do that. I'm committing to giving you the option to just reject my apology. You need no condition for that. You need to give no explanation. Merely invoking the definition will do it. And then I'm going to have the option to reject your forgiveness as inappropriate forgiveness. Um, that's an option I have.

Agnes:

That seems actually less true to me. Um, that is, um, this is like a, it's not clear to me that the apology forgiveness is as bilateral as it sounds. Um, I guess because. people, there's not much of an incentive for rejecting forgiveness. But at least that doesn't seem like a thing. So it definitely seems like I'm giving you, I'm not just giving you the latitude just sort of to decide that my apology isn't good. I think you have even more latitude than that. You might decide that it's good and just say, I cannot find it within myself to forgive because look at what you have to do in order to forgive. I gotta do the impossible thing. I just, I can't do it. It's more like that. It's like, I think you have just double latitude. Okay. Yeah, like even if I'd perform the miracle, you can still say, I can't perform this miracle because of the thing you did was so serious and bad.

Robin:

Right, and so similarly we could say with love or seduction, I always have the option to say I'm not getting what I want from our relationship because it's always going to be possible to point out in fact that the things I want are in bed by the relationship. It's always going to be possible to point out in the sexual encounter that I didn't give or get consent because it's actually really hard to achieve that. And we're just giving all of our associates all these options to challenge and reject social acts that we could have done as best we could. And that's a way in which we're making ourselves vulnerable to each other and giving each other options to hurt each other in arbitrary ways that can actually bind us together.

Agnes:

Right. So so it seems to me that we are. In doing this, we're resisting something, we're resisting the thought. that what we get from one another is sort of easily specified. It's like, if I could just, if what I, like, remember the thing where it's like you wanted a brunette and I wanted a blonde and so you can give me what I want, I can give you what you want, each person just get, can cash out of that exchange, right? I mean, it would work better if we were not giving each other ourselves, if it was like a thing that I had and you, well, I think, and I, right? I think- I can swap myself.

Robin:

I find another blonde and I say, hey, I want to leave, but here's a blonde. You're, you should be fine.

Agnes:

Exactly, exactly. Or just like how Comp thinks of sex as just, it's like the renting of sex organs. Each rents to the other their sex organ and then everybody's happy. But yeah, swapping yourself out would be another way. So the point is that, um, we want to think of ourselves as like getting more from each other than we can easily specify or make clear. And that's part of what it is to have a bond between two people or in a group. Um, the, the more substantive bond involves saying something like, we can give each other more than we can imagine. And that's why we form a real pair or a real group.

Robin:

So you might think of it a way as sort of resisting a legalistic accounting. Like I might say, okay, I wanna break this off, what do I owe you? I wanna be fair here, what do I owe you? And you wanna have the option to say, there's nothing you can give me that will be fair. you do not have the option to leave and give me my fair compensation.

Agnes:

Exactly, right, exactly.

Robin:

And so we're making these relationships where there is no fair out, and there's also, with respect to each accusation, in the court of law, we say, okay, there's assault, there's a definition of assault, and we ask to meet these definitions, and we ask our witnesses to testify to it. We're saying, within a relationship, that's not how it's gonna work. Um, I'm not going to be held to some definition of, you know, my complaint I have against you and you can't defend yourself by looking at the definition and showing that it wasn't met. I get to just arbitrarily complain if I want to. And so do you. and we're going to push away these legalistic conceptions or responses. Law doesn't get to come in here and decide who's right and who is wrong and who owes what.

Agnes:

Yeah, and so I feel like we're coming up against something that helps with a thing you've puzzled over, which is why don't people want more law in their lives, right? So you've offered that, like, hey, we could just adjudicate this in a more legalistic way, which is gonna be a way that does away with that latitude that the social impossibility gives you. And people don't want that. And in effect, they don't wanna live in a world without social impossibilities. And that's because they would just not, they would feel very alone in that world. They would feel like they were not bonded to other people.

Robin:

Now, this feels comforting and even good in a context of a pairwise intimate relationship, but we're applying these social impossibilities at much larger scales.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

And then, you know, for example, apologies, like there are cases where people were complaining in public and demanding public apologies. And now, if people can arbitrarily reject those, people can't just break off the relationships to the people in the same society here. Is it broken in some sense to even have social impossibilities in larger societies where we can't walk away from the relationship?

Agnes:

I think that one definition of a libertarian is somebody who doesn't believe in social impossibilities at a larger scale.

Robin:

They may not recognize that definition yet.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, but that's like, and I often find when I'm talking to libertarians be like, I wanna be like, okay, but what about the family? Why is that so special? Why is all this magic work in the family when it doesn't work in the nation or something? Right. But before trying to defend that definition, I think public apology, I almost had, I did have discussions of public apology in this essay that I cut, and I kept changing my mind about it, but where I landed on it was, I think public apology is apology without any prospect of forgiveness, which is its own kind of paradox. That is, in a way, I think the real paradox of public apology is, on the one hand, Everybody is cynical and skeptical about public apologies. I've never really heard anyone say, there's a good public apology. You know what? I forgive this person. And on the other hand, people demand public apologies all the time. They're like, how could they not apologize? How are we supposed to move on if they don't even apologize? So we sort of demand them, but we don't offer any prospect of forgiveness. It might be that because you gave the apology, you can keep your job. or things go on as, like, the apology might do some work, but what it doesn't give you is forgiveness. I just don't think there is such a thing. How would the public even forgive? It doesn't really make any sense. Because one person could forgive, but the whole public?

Robin:

So there's a kind of... But there's still degrees of acceptance of the apology, even if there's no forgiveness.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The apology could become acceptable, but still, I just think it's part of what apology is, that it aims at forgiveness. And so this is part of, I think, why we feel like public apologies are never sincere. Because it's part of the sincerity conditions of an apology that it looks forward to the possibility of forgiveness. And the person giving the public apology can't look forward to that, and so they can't be sincere. And so they're not sincere. And then we blame them for that.

Robin:

I mean, I think they might hope that, you know, in the privacy of their own homes, the people they're apologizing to would, you know, feel some forgiveness. They're just never going to be able to verify or see. And that's the difference.

Agnes:

Okay, but like that, that private that private forgiveness might correspond to the person having a private hope, right? So, like, as I'm apologizing on Twitter, whatever, on social media, on TV, I might think deep down in my heart, maybe at home somebody is gonna be saying I forgive her. But in terms of what I say out loud, in terms of what I convey, in terms of my affect, which is in the public speech, all that is not part of it, right? And so I, um... Uh, I just think people are very, very bad at hiding what sorts of reactions they anticipate to the thing that they're saying. And so someone giving a public apology will be very bad at hiding their understanding that no public forgiveness is worth coming.

Robin:

So sometimes when you apologize, you make a gesture of some extra effort or a gift or a sacrifice in order to emphasize your apology. But it seems like whether that's a sufficient or appropriately sincere gesture or sacrifice is also subject to social impossibility. I mean, this certainly reminds me of race relations in the sense that if there has been a sense of some races being wronged and others wanting to apologize and make further gestures in order to acknowledge and compensate somehow for the wrongs, and they seem to be stuck in the situation that they're There is no way for the person making the gesture of forgiveness here to ensure they do the right one.

Agnes:

That's right. And I think that, in effect, suppose that I'm only willing to apologize to you if I know in advance that this is gonna work and that you're gonna take my apology and then things are gonna be different. I think that probably the apology thing's not gonna happen in that case. That is, there's no apology I can give you that's gonna satisfy you under those circumstances. There might be stuff, there might be an exchange we can have, but it won't be an apology exchange.

Robin:

And so... But certainly in pairwise individual relationships, we often do make gestures, and they are accepted.

Agnes:

Absolutely, but we don't, we don't guarantee. Yeah, exactly. So if you want to say, well, the problem these people face is that there are no guarantees. That's just the normal problem that everybody faces.

Robin:

Right. But at least in the personal relationship, there's a time limit, like, you know, give them a week or something or a month or something. And you'll know at the end of that whether they did accept it.

Agnes:

I mean, sometimes I guess I think that some, in some cases,

Robin:

Or there's a point at which you could just walk away and say, okay, I tried, I quit now.

Agnes:

I think that that's right. And so this may be related to the libertarian thing. I think that it's very hard to walk, like you might say, well, it's really hard to walk away from your fellow citizens or something, or everyone in your neighborhood. I think it's pretty hard to walk away from your family members too, though. And they hold you hostage in a significant sense. Right. you know, your sibling or your child or your parent won't forgive you, um, like you might just feel like, okay, I just have to keep on trying. Um, and there's no guarantee that anything I do is ever going to work. And so it doesn't seem that different to me than the social case.

Robin:

But you don't have to keep on trying. That is, many a person who tries to make a conciliatory gesture and then has it not accepted for a while does give up on it.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, You don't have to keep on trying, but there's a cost to giving up, which is that these people are never really going to be out of your life. So your life will just be less pleasant because you're going to have to be dealing with these resentments.

Robin:

It often depends on how much they're going to express it. So as you know, like often people have a tiff with each other a bit. And then they just go past it and forget about it. They don't necessarily solve it. They don't necessarily allocate blame or whatever. They just get past it and forget about it. If one of them wants to keep bringing it up, then it can remain. But if neither of them brings it up for a while, they will typically see it as forgotten. At least, unless they'll know that if they were to probe on it later, that they could flare up again. But right, there'll be a way in which if you stay away from it, it probably will not.

Agnes:

That seems a pretty good description of how race stuff works. It's just like, it's just a question of, you know, Where does it flare up and in what context and whatever? I think most say, like, let's say interactions between black and white people, like where I live, which is about 50% black, 50% white, there's not much of a tincture of race relations issues there. It's mostly just sitting under the surface And then, yeah, it's gonna flare up under certain conditions. So that seems very analogous to the family case.

Robin:

Right, now I guess maybe we could point to how any situation where one might give an apology or give a forgiveness, often we face social pressures from third parties to give a apology or forgiveness, and that social pressure is to accept them.

Agnes:

Yes, absolutely.

Robin:

And that also presumably happens at our larger social scales. And there's a question of how appropriate all those pressures are. There's a sense which, save for race relations, many people might say, hey, this is a long time ago. It's time to forget about it. Let's just get on. And other people say, no, I don't want to forget. It's not done yet. We haven't dealt with it.

Agnes:

Right, right, so in that case, there's just social pressures on both sides, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

There's a group of people pressuring in one way, and there's a group of people pressuring in the other. And it's pretty hard to know which group, if any, is correct. That's often, often the family are gonna be in that situation, right? There's like a feud between two parties, and like, one group of family members is telling the one person, just let it go, and the other person is telling the other side, like, just apologize, or they might be doing both.

Robin:

And the following I think is the one piece of analysis we most can offer people in these situations. People like us, smart analytic people, are tempted to analyze these situations in order to figure out who is at fault and who should be doing what, right? We say, well, you know, let's just sit down and go through the details and apply our definitions and figure out who should be responding how in these situations. And our analysis, our meta-analysis now says, that's not going to work.

Agnes:

I mean, it might work in the same sense that lying on the ground and groveling at someone's feet might work, that a person might decide that that act symbolizes the perfect combination of avowal and disavowal, and now they did it, but that's the way it would work if it worked. It wouldn't work by actually sort of resolving the issue. I think that that's right. I've been thinking about your initial thing about like, what would Socrates say? And I guess I think I now have a tentative answer, which is that, um, Socrates tends to think that when the description of what you're doing is impossible, then that isn't really the thing that you're trying to do. There's some other thing that you're trying to do. And so what he would do is he would try to figure out, look, when I apologize, it appears like what I'm doing is trying to avow and disavow the very same thing, but that can't really be what I'm doing, that doesn't make any sense. And so then the question would be, what is it that we're doing? And I think the answer is not obvious, but... There is a straightforward answer, which is, I want you to pretend

Robin:

that there is logic here and the logic is the answer, but also give me the discretion to reject you or not at my discretion. Sure, but that literally, we could say what you're actually doing is literally what people want.

Agnes:

I think that Socrates would say when we have institutions like this, we have them because there's some non-messed up version that doesn't involve pretending, that is the thing that we're imitating. Um, and the question is just to find what is the real thing. Um, and, um...

Robin:

So there's a presumption here that if we knew what the real thing was, we could name it and say it directly, and we would all be okay with that because it would be the real thing.

Agnes:

I don't think Socrates thinks that as soon as you recognize the real thing, it replaces the fake version. Because we're pretty sure it's the fake version.

Robin:

Okay. But maybe with some adaptation, we could come to accept a replacement.

Agnes:

Yes. Yes. And that seems actually like pretty plausible to me about apology and about consent. If you think of both apology and consent as like... to different degrees, recent innovations. There are things that human beings have done without for a long time and then they come into play. And then if Socrates is right, there are attempts to do this other thing that they don't do that well. And that if we could just do that thing, yeah, we could stop apologizing and we can stop worrying about consent. But until we know what that thing is and we kind of work our way into realizing that that's the thing we really want, we're going to keep going through this kind of play.

Robin:

So in my blog post, I suggested another category of social miracle is admiration flattery. That is admiration can look a lot like flattery, but it's not supposed to be flattery. And so the thing we're supposed to be doing is sincerely and honestly admiring and praising someone. And there's the problem that we might well be doing that for other reasons because people tend to reward us for saying nice things about them. We might want to ingratiate ourselves with them. So, you know, an admiration that is sincerely unaccepted as such seems somewhat socially impossible in the sense that how are they supposed to believe that you aren't flattering them? It seems hard for them to be able to judge that. Yeah.

Agnes:

I mean, what could be taken is where you just wrote it in your diary and you never thought that they were going to see it.

Robin:

Right. But the vast majority of apparent flattery isn't like that.

Agnes:

Right, so we want admiration that's communicated to the person.

Robin:

And at convenient times. So it's typical if I come to your house for a dinner party to pray something about your home or your furniture or the food in the context of the dinner party. So since that's accepted, it's gonna be hard to believe that I'm doing it sincerely because there's the expectation that I'll do it and that it'll be positive. Right. So it seems a bit of a social miracle that I say, what a beautiful, you know, mirror you have, and you accept that as a sincere praise.

Agnes:

Yeah, I'll tell you a version of this that I find particularly, I don't know, grading or something stands out to me maybe more than to other people. It's like in academic conferences at the end of the conference, people will always say, this was so great, this was such a great conference, so I'm so glad, thanks everyone or whatever. And I feel like they didn't spend one second comparing this to other conferences, asking themselves what they actually learned, what was so great about it. And so I'm very much like feeling like this is just pure flattery. I'm unable to.

Robin:

So here you're less willing to embrace the miracle.

Agnes:

Yes, yes. I mean, that's right. I'm not willing to embrace that miracle. But when someone comes to my house and they praise my cooking, I'm totally willing to embrace it. And so maybe that's me being a bit of a libertarian in that I have trouble accepting the miracle when it's on this larger scale.

Robin:

on. So I brought this up because you talked about Socrates and being honest. And so this is an essential honesty question here. Like, is it possible to have this true thing? So, you know, there's this fake, according to Socrates, there's this fake thing we're doing, which is flattery. And then there's the true thing we really want. and is there a feasible true thing that could be put there in its place, the true admiration that I say when I come to your dinner party, or that I say at the end of the conference, is there such a thing?

Agnes:

No, no, no, so the right way to think about it is not that I want true admiration and what I'm giving you is false admiration. The right way to think about it is that admiration itself isn't really the thing we were after. There's another thing. That is admiration contains in it a contradiction. Um, the contradiction being that, um, you know, I'm, you have to accept it as sincere, even though you have plenty of reason to think of it as insincere or something like that. Um, and the thought would be, there's something else that you want from me in the place of admiration. And I can give you that, and then you wouldn't want admiration anymore. It would be the true admiration, but it wouldn't even really be admiration anymore. It would be something different, something that doesn't have that contradictory character to it.

Robin:

In some sense, we know what that is. I.D., we want your allies, your associates to assure you that they like you and they intend to continue to be with you and they respect you and love you. But we all, I think, believe that if they just said those words directly, it wouldn't work.

Agnes:

Right. Well, the problem is that those words are not the bond. They're just a description of a bond.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And so you want the bond.

Robin:

And the flowery seems to be the most effective way we know so far to signal that bond. And so the question is, is there another more effective way to signal that bond than the one when we're actually using?

Agnes:

Right, well, I mean, you might say, suppose you could just directly, suppose you didn't have to rely on a signal of the bomb. Suppose that somehow you could just directly perceive the bomb. Then you wouldn't need any signals, right?

Robin:

Right, but that just might be impossible, that is. There might just be an indirection. The thing I want to see is inside you and I can only see it indirectly and I have to do indirect things to show you something because I can't show directly. And so the question is, is the flattery the most effective direct thing to do?

Agnes:

I guess it's not obvious to me that the thing that you want to know is inside me, because the thing that you want to know about has to do not with my beliefs or intentions about you, especially on the theory that the social miracles are there to sort of say the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, right? It's not anything that's in me. It's something about the relationship between the two of us. I don't see why it's in principle impossible for me to be in direct contact with that relationship somehow.

Robin:

The whole phenomenon of social miracles is something of a lie. I mean there is a sense in which declaring that we are achieving social miracles is a way in which we are misleadingly or falsely making statements in order to signal this bond we have. So the question is, you might think, okay, whenever there's a misleading way to do something, there should be a non-misleading way to do it. That's better, but that claim goes up against the challenge. Well, we keep trying. We can't find it. What makes you so sure it's there?

Agnes:

Yeah, right, so right, I mean, and I don't think I can be sure, what I was doing here was answering your earlier question, what would Toppity say about this?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And the answer is he would say, well look, the thing we gotta do if we're gonna understand this is to try to figure out, this is a placeholder for something, what is it a placeholder for? So it's not a lie, it's a placeholder. And, But you may be right that we're not gonna find it. That is, you can't find anything until you actually do find it.

Robin:

There's this classic observation that has a lot of truth to it, which is if I want to signal a bond to a group or even an individual, saying things that are true, doesn't show as strong a bond as my willingness to say things that aren't true and act like I believe them, because that's more costly. And I'm only willing to do that costly signal for somebody I really care a lot about. And that's a story about how religions, people bind together by sincerely devoting themselves to crazy, sandy things that they all share, that they can identify who they are from the people willing to do that. And then we might say we do that in our relationships too. We bound ourselves to each other by being willing to believe in miracles. And the fact that they are hard to believe in is part of the cost that we are willing to pay to show that we are willing to pay that cost to be bound to our associates. The story that believing crazy, impossible things is a costly signal of a valued bond.

Agnes:

So I think that, um, like that's, it's a theory that gives up at a certain point, and maybe you should give up at that point. But, um, the point being, why is it that this is what we have to believe? Like, why do we have to believe that I can avow and disavow and that, you know, you can both hold me responsible and absolve me? Um, and, Um, and I guess I think, um, unless, unless we have a story to tell, like a plan, or the society that doesn't need these, that can do without social miracles, which I've not yet heard such a plan, um, then, Either you decide as an intellectual that you are going to be on the hunt for this explanation that makes it make sense. You're not going to pretend you have it when you don't have it. So you're not going to lie, but you're going to be like, I'm, I'm on the track of it. I'm looking for it. Um, either you decide that or you decide that as an intellectual, you're at war. with the group that you're in because you are the purveyor of destructive insights where you understand that your society can't survive your insights. Um, it seems to me that that's your choice and both choices are truthful choices. That is, you don't have to be committing yourself to lying in order to make the one option, but you are committing yourself to doing something that you don't know whether you can do it or not.

Robin:

Well, the choice to realize that telling people that social miracles are impossible would be destructive of their social relationships would then probably imply the choice that you don't tell them so much about it.

Agnes:

That's just another way to be at war, is if you hide your views from the people around you. Right, so I'm saying that's one option, is to be at war. And then if you don't like that option, then you're gonna take on a difficult thing that you don't know that you can do.

Robin:

But even under the scenario that there is some other set of social behaviors that could achieve the same bonding without these mislapses, you would still face the case that even if you found it, there would be work in getting people to switch to it.

Agnes:

Sure.

Robin:

and they might not even wanna do that work. And so you might not have actually found a way out.

Agnes:

Well, I think that as long as you keep committing, so as long as even after you find it, you're like, now I'm gonna figure out how to get people to agree to this, and that's my new project. As long as you're sort of committed to not giving up, you're not at war.

Robin:

That seems wrong to me. It seems to me like you might have a hope that somehow the war will eventually end, but you are at war in the interim. You actually still have the conflict in the interim. Either you expose these things and cause destruction, or you keep them quiet. You have that choice, and that choice is forced on you and continues until you not only find the solution, but find a way to implement it, which could be a long way off. So until then, you're stuck.

Agnes:

I don't think so. So I think that you could see yourself as working collaboratively with this society. You say, look, what we are doing is working on something better to put in the place of this placeholder. And I'm working on this with you, society. That's a speech act you can make that recognizes the necessity.

Robin:

But in the interim, you still have the choice. Either you say it out loud or you don't.

Agnes:

If you say we're looking for something to fill this placeholder, then you haven't said this is a lie. It's not a lie. It's an attempt to get at another thing that we haven't figured out yet. If you say it's a lie, then you're at war.

Robin:

There's the question of whether I say these conditions, the usual conditions of apology, can typically be met. I either say they can or I say they can't. That's a question right now, and regardless of my hopes for the future of finding some other way to do that, if I say right now, these conditions can't be met, and other people hear that, then that will, you know, tear at their relations. That's, you know, I can't escape that fact, that trade-off by hoping for some future day in which that no longer is the choice because that is the choice right now.

Agnes:

I think, um,

Robin:

Let me make an analogy. Yeah, go ahead. Think of an analogy of the war between Robbers and the robbed, potentially robbed. Part of the war is we have locks on our doors and we have safes that we keep things in. And we pay this cost continually to prevent the robbing. And then there's some rate at which robbers rob and that we prevent it. And that's just a war we're stuck in. We might hope that someday, for example, with crypto or something, we will be able to store our assets in a way that the robbers just can't get at it. And therefore we won't need locks and safes to block them. And we could all agree that we're working toward that future date where we have another approach to preventing robbery. But until we get to that future date, here we are with robbers and locks, and we are paying these costs.

Agnes:

So another way to think about it is when a child really wants something and they have their heart set, right? And they can't have the thing that they want. And so you can sort of say that to them. But there are often ways you can say that where you can sort of convey to them, again, this isn't always going to work. It will often backfire. The thing that you think you want isn't the thing you really want anyways. And so by not giving it to you, I'm not taking any real thing away from you. Um, and, um, and that, and something like, look, if there were a thing that you really wanted, as much as you think you want this ice cream cone or this Lego set or whatever, I would give it to you. And so it's sort of like, if there were something that there's something we're like grasping and we're grasping it by means of the concept of apology and apology doesn't work for it, but you could still be saying, yeah, but we're onto something. There's something we're after and we're going to get that thing. And, you know, maybe not right away. Um, but, but I'm committed to like finding what that thing is and figuring out how to get it. Um, and, um, I do think that that's, um, it's, at least possibly a way to put the observation such that you're not at war, not even in the mean.

Robin:

Well, I think we're a bit over an hour here.

Agnes:

Okay.

Robin:

Would you like to summarize what we've said a bit or any final words?

Agnes:

Um, you're better at summarizing. Why don't you summarize? Is there anything else I want to say?

Robin:

Well, we agreed there's this phenomena of social miracles where we seem to have these somewhat impossible to meet definitions. And then we go through some examples of apology, forgiveness, seduction, desire. And we puzzled over why this thing exists. And in the last third of it here, we've been talking about, could we get out of this? We find a way to not have social miracles of the sort we have. And I'm more leaning towards sometimes there's just Troublesome equilibria that are expensive and awkward and that make people lie. And you want to hold on to the, there has to be some way that we never, we don't have to lie. Some solution to all social problems where the lies would go away. And you, that's really important to you to hold on to this possibility.

Agnes:

Yeah, and I will just strengthen it. Like, it's not that the lies will go away in the future. They got to go away immediately. That is, um, um, that's where I want to say, and I'm not sure I can say, but I want to say, no, look, there's a way for me to tell the truth about apology. say something like, look, I don't see how we can both avow and disavow without thereby undermining this really important bond. Um, and the way to do that is to say, we don't see it yet and we're going to see it somehow. And in the light of that future point of view, we may even decide the original way to put an apology was very messed up, but we're not going to decide that yet until we have like the new thing. So there has to be a way to interact truthfully and there has to be a way to be truthful, even in the here and now. by, I guess, replacing what would have been a description of something as a contradiction or a lie by saying, we are, as you get, ignorant.

Robin:

I'd like to continue this conversation in the future. And the only question is, is this the best example to go with? Because I think we've often had this sort of an issue where I say, well, here's a problem with the world, and I guess we're stuck. And you have hopes that somehow by reframing and reseeing that we'll be able to do much better. And I'm just not sure this is going to be the best example to go into for that. It might end up being, but I'd want to like do a little survey and see if I can find something easier because there's a lot of issues mixed up with apology, say.

Agnes:

Yeah, I agree.

Robin:

Anyway, but enough for now.

Agnes:

OK.