The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(32)

* When B. F. Skinner discovered as a young man that he would never write the great American novel, he felt a despair that he claimed nearly drove him into psychotherapy. The legendary psychologist George Miller claimed that he gave up his literary ambition for psychology because he had nothing to write about. Who knows what mixed feelings William James experienced when he read his brother Henry’s first novel? “It would be interesting to ask how many psychologists come up short next to great writers who happen to be near them,” one prominent American psychologist has said. “It may be the fundamental driver.”

? A paper by this name did not appear until 1977, but it grew from ideas he’d formed a decade earlier as a graduate student.





4



ERRORS

By the time Amos returned to Israel in the fall of 1966, he’d been gone for five years. His oldest friends naturally compared the returning Amos to the Amos of their memories. They noticed a couple of changes. The Amos who returned from America appeared to them more serious about his work, and to have acquired a whiff of professionalism. He was now an assistant professor, with his own office at Hebrew University. He kept it famously spare. There was never anything on his desk but a mechanical pencil, and, if Amos was seated at it, an eraser and the crisply ordered file of whatever project he happened to be working on. When he’d left for the United States, he hadn’t owned a suit. When he showed up at Hebrew University in a light blue suit, people were genuinely shocked, and not just by the color. “This was inconceivable,” says Avishai Margalit. “This was something you didn’t do. A tie was the symbol of the bourgeoisie. I remember the first time I saw my father in a suit and a tie. It was like finding your father with a whore.” Otherwise Amos was unchanged: the last to go to bed at night, the life of every party, the light to which all butterflies flew, and the freest, happiest, and most interesting person anyone knew. He still did only what he wanted to do. Even his new interest in wearing a suit was more peculiarly Amos than it was bourgeois. Amos chose his suits only by the number and size of the jacket pockets. Along with an interest in pockets, he had what amounted to a fetish for briefcases, and acquired dozens of them. He’d returned from five years in the most materialistic culture on the face of the earth with a desire only for objects that might help him impose order on the world around him.

Along with a new suit, Amos also had a wife. In Michigan, three years earlier, he had met a fellow psychology student named Barbara Gans. They’d started dating after a year. “He told me he didn’t want to go back to Israel alone,” said Barbara. “And so we got married.” She’d grown up in the Midwest and had never been out of the United States. What Europeans often said about Americans—how wildly informal and improvisational they were—was, to her, even more true of Israelis. “All you had were rubber bands and masking tape, so you fixed things with rubber bands and masking tape,” she said. Though materially poor, Israel felt to her rich in other ways. Israelis—at least the Jewish ones—seemed all to earn roughly the same amount of money, and to have their basic needs met.

There weren’t many luxuries. She and Amos had no phone and no car, but neither did most of the people they knew. The shops were all small and particular. There was the knife sharpener and the stonecutter and the falafel seller. If you needed a carpenter or a painter you didn’t bother to phone them, even if you owned a phone, because they never answered. You went downtown in the afternoon and hoped to bump into them. “Everything was personal, all transactions. The standard joke was: Someone runs out of their burning house to ask a friend on the street if they know someone in the Fire Department.” There was no television, but there were radios everywhere, and when the BBC came on everyone stopped whatever they were doing to listen. Those words felt consistently urgent. “Everyone was on alert,” said Barbara. The tension in the air wasn’t at all like the strife in the United States over the Vietnam War. In Israel the danger felt present and personal: If the Arabs at every border ever stopped fighting among themselves, there was a sense, Barbara said, that they could overrun the country in a matter of hours and kill you.

The students at Hebrew University, where Barbara was given a psychology class to teach, seemed to be intent mainly on catching their professors in error. They were shockingly aggressive and lacking in deference. One student had so insulted a visiting American intellectual by interrupting his talk with derisive comments that university officials demanded he seek out the American and apologize. “I’m sorry if I have hurt your feelings,” the student had said to the visiting dignitary, “but, you see, the talk was so bad!” For the final exam in one psychology class, the undergraduates were handed a published piece of research and told to find the flaw in it. On Barbara’s second day, ten minutes into her lecture, a student in the back of the room screamed out, “Not true!” and no one seemed to think anything of it. A distinguished Hebrew University professor delivered a paper titled “What Is Not What in Statistics,” after which a student in the audience announced, loudly enough for many to hear, “This will guarantee him a place in Who Is Not Who in Statistics!”

And yet at the same time, Israel took its professors more seriously than America did. Israeli intellectuals were presumed to have some possible relevance to the survival of the Jewish state, and the intellectuals responded by at least pretending to be relevant. In Michigan, Barbara and Amos had lived entirely within the university and spent their time with other academic types. Here they mixed with politicians and generals and journalists and others involved directly in running the country. In his first few months back, Amos gave talks about the latest decision-making theories to the generals in the Israeli army and the Israeli Air Force—even though the practical application of the theories was, to put it mildly, unclear. “I’ve never seen a country so concerned with keeping its officials abreast on new developments in academics,” Barbara wrote to her family back home in Michigan.