The Niqab and The Visual Cortex

Most of what we’re reading these days about the niqab deals with the  arguments over facial coverings and whether these coverings are matters of “personal choice” or symbols of “cultural identity”. If the classification is “personal choice” then the Libertarian position is advocated. If the belief the niqab is a symbol of loyalty to a particular set of cultural values then the debate’s focus shifts over to the more involved attempt to decide if the values symbolised by the niqab are “congenial with” or “alien to” those of Western Liberal Democracy.

It is not necessary to into the details of why it is that the niqab is not required by Islam at all. Trying to parse the nuances of niqabs versus hijabs is likewise too  esoteric for this post. This comment only addresses the matter of a cultural (but, note, to explicitly religious) tradition which requires women to cover their faces while in public.

We all know these discussions. We have seen them unfolded with emphases on the emotional appeals (fear on the one side,  acceptance on the other),  ethical appeals (bigotry is bad, cultural loyalty is good) and longer term appeals to social and political abilities of Western society to absorb and integrate – into the broader values of Western Democracy – large numbers of people whose cultural history is neither Western nor democratic.

This comment is different. It deals with a speculation on the social implications of covering one’s face.

Facial recognition is something people do very well. We’re extremely good at it. Facial recognition software is still fairly primitive and consumes many machine cycles. Humans do it with something all primates and many other creatures have: The Fusiform Gyrus. (A brief aside. The fusiform gyrus is arguably not really part of the visual cortex but if the title had “fusiform gyrus” in it then the link to vision would not have been as obvious.)

We can ask a new question here: If “facial recognition” were not vitally important to human survival then why would Mother Nature (in the guise of Natural Selection) have spent all that time and effort creating such a highly evolved capacity?

Now I’ll speculate.

Facial recognition allows us quickly and accurately to determine if other people, from a distance, are family, village mates, familiar strangers (i.e. “safe strangers”), unfamiliar strangers (i.e. “who are those people?”), provocateurs, or enemies.

Facial recognition also allows us to evaluate the mood-state of others. Preoccupied (lost in thought), Confused (just plain lost), happy, unhappy, calm,  afraid, deranged, demented, scary, ill, well, and so on.

Walking around with our faces exposed to the community allows us to be fully engaged and involved in the Public Sphere. We are “in public”.  We are participating fully in the “visual presentation of self”.

People who walk around shrouded and with facial coverings are withdrawn from full participation in the Public Sphere.  Those who do so for “personal reasons” may make the others in the Public Sphere inquire about the individual. Friend? Enemy? Stranger? Mentally ill?

Perhaps in “niqab requiring” public spheres donning such garb allows people to be “appropriately invisible” – in the sense of “knowing their place”. In those cultures where the Public Sphere does not have an acceptable category for people who should “know their place by being individually invisible” then such attire not only attracts attention but invites one or two questions.

“Why are you hiding?”

“Should men also have to dress like this?”

The niqab is only worn in Islamic societies and Islamic societies are based on Sharia law.  Sharia law endorses many things. Including Jihad. Neither of these is truly compatible with “Western Values”.

Equating the niqab (and, in fairness, also the hijab) with the endorsement of sharia and jihad elides the meaning of the classification from “personal choice” to “cultural symbol”. Classifications are often not fully objective. The way we classify things determines how we react emotionally and socially to them.

Here is another “face covering” option. Is it to be considered a “personal choice” or “symbolic statement”? Would it arouse concern if someone wanted to be so attired and swear a citizenship oath? Would anyone be perturbed if members of the civil service dressed this way?

This option is fairly light-hearted. Other options — and they are easy to imagine — are much more “symbolically incendiary”. One fairly tame one allows us to ask if wearing a certain article of clothing while taking an oath is the equivalent to the Western meaning of “crossing ones fingers”. Western societies have two meanings for “crossed fingers”. One is “good luck”. The other is “the words I am speaking are invalid”.

It should not be overlooked that Islam has the concept of “taqiyya” which permits “dissumulation” (lying) for three reasons. Two of them relate to self-defense. The third to the prosecution of jihad.

This raises an interesting and officially “never asked” question: How can a person swear a holy oath in the name of a religion which permits lying?

Would asking for clarification be a politically incorrect microaggression?

Humans are social. Humans cannot live long or well outside a social context. It is only logical to conclude the most important sense we have – vision – should be optimally adapted to improve our chances to survive.

When we see things we cannot properly classify we seek more information. When the failure to classify increases the probability that a threat is present then the response is predictable as well.

When someone is compelled by cultural convention to “faceless” in the Public Sphere then that person is, arguably, compelled by cultural convention to be ineligible for full participation in the culture — second class. The forms of “public” nonverbal communication are reduced to: the observation of the walking gait, the various permitted fashion accessories, any bundles or burdens which they may have, and the direction of travel.

The Ideology of Multiculturalism demands that the host population make as many allowable accommodations to newcomers as possible. Multiculturalism, by its very nature, must keep “assimilation” and “integration” to an absolute minimum.

Meanwhile, the ideology of democracy usually means that “all people are equal”. To say “all people are equal” is another way of saying  that no people are inherently “second class”.

It is consequently essential to determine if the donning of the niqab is “personal” or “cultural”. This means we need to know what “culture” is before we can ask if all “cultures” are equally congenial with the constraints of coexisting in a “Multicultural Society”. There are some cultures which regard the “loss of face” to be so devastating as to justify suicide.

But by failing to articulate what, exactly, a “culture” is in the first place the ideology risks becoming incoherent and thereby self-destructive. One such incoherence is the inclusion in the Public Sphere of symbols which are, or can be interpreted as being, at variance with the fundamental values of Western Society itself.

Denmark, for example, has just recently decided that “foreigners” will not longer be eligible for Danish Citizenship. The term “integration has failed” sums up the Danish experience with Multiculturalism.

The multiple monologues on the status of the niqab in particular and Islam in general  in Western society have yet to begin to converge on the standards of an honest dialogue. This is clearly part of a much greater dialogue: one which deals with the uniqueness of Western Culture and whether it is worth protecting.

This dialogue is long overdue.

Addendum. Last week I walked past a woman I know. She was on the phone and she looked very sad. I waved and kept walking. Yesterday I saw her again. Again she was on the phone. This time she was smiling and looked very happy. I waved. She waved back. She said “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” I told her she seemed very sad to me last week and very happy now. I expressed my pleasure at this change. Her reply? “Thank you, thank you, thank you!!”  It is not necessary to continue with the substance of the conversation. It is enough to note it could not have happened at all if she had been wearing a niqab.

Artificial Apologies and Partial Rationalities

Not long ago someone use the Google “Photos” app to use artificial intelligence to go through a large number of photos and classify them automatically. Anyone who has taken hundreds of photos can appreciate the temptation to let someone (or something) else look after the sorting-out.

Most of the classifications were fairly predictable. One of them caused Google to issue a sincere apology for the unintended racism of the category applied to one photo.

“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened”

Google apologises for Photos app’s racist blunder – BBC News

Elsewhere in the story we learn the app sometimes classified dogs as horses. No doubt other errors also appear on a regular basis.

Anyone familiar with writing computer programs or the idea of fuzzy logic can appreciate the general problem.

Consider this example. On a scale of “1” to “4” for “birdness” (i.e. how good an example of a bird is this creature?) rate: chickens, bats, eagles, puffins, emus, ….

Bats?

Bats are not birds but a significant number of people will rank them with a “5”. Just outside the “bird” boundary. Why? Since they fly with wings and so do most birds the ranking illustrates the proximity of “bats” to the general category of “birds” along the crucial dimension of being able to fly.

The dimensions used in the classification process plus the precision with which each dimension is represented is the basis of being “correct” or “incorrect”.

In this case the software got the “primate” part correct but after that it did not get the type of primate correct.

What is really interesting here is not whether the person who wrote the software should get at least a B+ (but obviously not an A+) for the effort.

It’s the apology. It’s about “being sorry” for something which neither involves any kind of intentionality on the part of the person making the statement nor even any realistic chance the person offering the apology had any way of averting the event. It’s even about how to classify something as “racism” — a socially constructed term with ethical connotations — instead of a “classification error” as it relates to image processing software. In other words: “causality”.

It’s also about identity, individuality, group membership, and collective guilt.

And luck.

Everyone presently alive exists because their ancestors survived. Some of those ancestors were possibly saints while others were possibly psychopathic monsters. Each of the ancestors shaped the trajectory of history in such a way as to allow all of us to be here today. In legal doctrine there is a concept known as “the fruit of a poisoned tree”. It means evidence which is collected illegally cannot be used in court.

But what about the seeds of the fruit of the seeds of the fruit of the poisoned tree?

Are the children of war criminals guilty of war crimes? The grandchildren? Do we have to wait for ten generations?

And what about the rest of the people: those whose psychopathic monster ancestors have not yet been identified by the descendants of their victims?

It’s very difficult to discuss these ideas with examples which directly relate to present-day allegations of collective guilt, collective entitlement, collective identity, and each individual’s sense of self.

These matters often arise in the discussion of matters concerning preferential policies for hiring, promotion, and other forms of “restorative justice” when various social engineering devices are introduced in order to correct in the present injustices which happened in the past.

The counter-arguments normally involve claiming that those who get the benefits did not suffer the original injustice while those paying the price did not commit the original misdeeds. Victimhood gets inherited by one individual through the means of cultural transmission while guilt is inherited by others. In these cases it is clear that the concept of “culture” is assumed to be very real indeed.

It is interesting to notice how “cultural inheritance” arguments are considered gauche or invalid when discussing jihadis.

Which brings up the underlying feature of this episode. It yields yet more examples for “locally rational” or “partially rational” worldviews.

The major aspects of the worldviews will be the point of view of the individual who holds it, the dimensions and boundaries for the worldview, and the various statuses and classifications for those entities and processes which make the worldview function.

The narrator of the worldview may be speaking for individual or collective advantage, the general purpose of the narrative is either to enhance or diminish an idea or the identity of another, and the means for doing this can be emotional, logical, or the introduction of things purporting to be historical facts.

Recalling Aristotle’s categories for Rhetoric, these are appeals to emotion, appeals to tribal or ethnic values or advantage, and appeals to the more objective ideals of “logic and evidence”.

Thus we can have a Google executive classify a software glitch as “racism”.

Or we can have 25-year-old members of Culture A demanding apologies from 25-year-old members of Culture B for events which took place 75 years ago. And maybe they need to do this in order to maintain the respective traditions of both of their cultures.

Maybe it’s not “rational” for some cultures to mingle with others.

Maybe it’s easier for us to discuss these topics when the substantive details are furnished by software errors and science fiction stories.