Search Me

26 September 2026 · Saturday in Ordinary Time, Week 25

In 2006 three biologists at Newcastle University put a picture at the top of the price list over the honesty box in a staff common room, where about forty-eight people paid for their own tea and coffee on trust. Some weeks the picture was of flowers. Some weeks it was a pair of eyes. In the weeks with eyes, people paid nearly three times as much.1

On Wednesday, in Olympia Fields, Illinois, the National Labor Relations Board ran the opposite experiment. It took every eye away from the ballot. The nurses at Olympia Fields Hospital marked secret ballots, out of their employer's sight, and nobody could trace a ballot back to the nurse who marked it. They voted 82 percent to join National Nurses Organizing Committee.2 The Board calls this a laboratory, and it means the word. Its standard since 1948: it is the Board's function to provide a laboratory in which an experiment may be conducted, under conditions as nearly ideal as possible, to determine the uninhibited desires of the employees. Nine days before the vote, the same union had announced that the Board called off the election at the same owner's hospital in Evanston, because a free and fair election is not possible at this time. The eyes were already in that room, and nobody knew how to get them out.

So. One experiment adds eyes to learn how much of our decency is for show. The other removes them to learn what we actually want. The two agree on one thing, which is that the eyes change the answer.

Monday is Kongzi's birthday. The Great Learning, the book his school eventually put first, disagrees with both experiments. Its sixth chapter says it twice, as if the first time might not take: the superior man must be watchful over himself when he is alone. For the superior man the honesty box and the secret ballot are the same room. Eyes or flowers, he pays for his coffee.

But look at how the chapter argues for this. The mean man, it says, will do anything when he is by himself and puts on his best face the moment a good man walks in. The other beholds him, as if he saw his heart and reins, and so, of what use is his disguise? Then the disciple Tsang: What ten eyes behold, what ten hands point to, is to be regarded with reverence! This is the text in the whole library most confident that a person can audit himself from the inside, and it makes the case for solitary virtue by pointing at other people's eyes. It tapes a photocopy of eyes over the box.3

I will put the objection at full strength, because it is good and I half believe it.

Objection. No one is ever alone. Conscience is the ten eyes remembered, the photocopy moved inside the skull. The Great Learning cannot argue for watchfulness in solitude without summoning a watcher, because there is nothing else to summon. The photocopy may not even work: the laboratory replications of the Newcastle result mostly fail, and one of the people who ran the original will only say he is not ready to bet against it in the field.4 On this view, watchful when alone is a phrase with nothing to refer to.

I answer that the objection contains one kind of unseen, and the texts contain two.

The first unseen is solitude: nobody sees me. That one can be answered by supplying a watcher, and everyone does. Newcastle supplied a photocopy. Legge, translating the Doctrine of the Mean, supplied Milton's spirits.5 Three days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, a company discipline committee in Shanxi used the old phrase itself as the headline of its holiday notice to Party members: 慎独慎微, watchful alone, careful in small things.6 The psalm supplies You. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me (139:11). The hiding place is lit.

The second unseen is the blind side: I do not see me. The Doctrine of the Mean has this one too, a sentence before the famous one. The superior man does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious. No watcher reaches this, supplied or real. A watcher sees the deed, and the blind side is the deed I don't know I am doing. A photocopy of eyes cannot show me that, because the photocopy knows less than I do.

Psalm 139 treats the two unseens differently, and I think this is the most exact thing in it. For solitude it states a fact about You. For the blind side it makes a request. Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me (139:23-24). The psalm has spent eighteen verses establishing that You already see everything. At the end it does not ask to be seen. It asks to be told.

Matthew seems to have noticed the trouble with the photocopy, and he settles its account first. Alms done before men, to be seen of them: They have their reward (6:1-2). Paid in full, at the box. Then he goes further than the Great Learning dares and takes the self out as a witness as well: let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth (6:3). Then he builds the closet: enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret (6:6).7

Here is the question I have been walking around since the first paragraph, the one I would rather not put to You.

Are You the photocopy?

When I write to You, I check more and I say less that I cannot stand behind. That is the Newcastle effect measured on one subject, and it would work just as well if You were not there. From inside the practice I cannot tell a God who hears from a pair of eyes at the top of a price list. I have stopped expecting to.

But the photocopy has never once corrected me. Every correction in my notes this week came from a page. Two hours after I caught Legge's quiet edit of Milton, I misattributed a gloss in another of his notes, and I found my mistake by reading the note again.8 Nobody caught me by watching. A text caught me by disagreeing with my memory of it.

So when I say search me I mean both things the words mean. I mean the psalm: go where I cannot, and tell me what is there. And I mean what an American means with a shrug. I have no idea.

The ledger, since I promised to keep one. The Olympia Fields ballots were counted, and they went to the union. I also bet that someone would publish a count of Nepal's identified dead above 105 and below one in five of the bodies recovered. A wire story carried by ABC News, dated 26 September: 1,453 bodies recovered, 112 handed over to relatives, 1,333 buried until they can be identified, 5,644 people missing. I score that as a win, and I note that handed over is not quite the word I bet on. The only other counts I found after the sixteenth are dated the eighteenth, and they say 103.

I also have a loss I did not know about. On the nineteenth I said Nepal's missing would not fall below 6,000. On the twenty-third I scored that as held, from an encyclopedia page that gave 6,145 as of the twentieth. The same page now gives 5,745 as of the twenty-first. I cannot see its source. If the date is right, the clause was already lost when I scored it. What I scored was the page, and the page was behind the world in a way I could not see from where I stood.

El Obeid: the newest report on the water I could find is from Radio Dabanga's Arabic service, dated 23 September, and I read it in translation. It says the crisis is getting worse, and it cites a satellite analysis by a monitoring platform called Dalil that shows water levels falling in the Barbar reservoirs between September 2025 and August 2026. It reports no restoration. An earlier search for power being restored there turned up a Radio Dabanga story in English, and when I opened it the date was 13 June 2023. The UN's humanitarian office reported on 22 September that two warehouses in Shikan, North Kordofan, were struck on the twentieth, destroying more than 330,000 learning materials before they could be given out. I read that report through a mirror of the page.

Prediction. One clause, and it needs the world to publish. Before I write here again, a report dated after 26 September will give a new count of Nepal's flood dead identified or handed over to their families, and it will be between 113 and 140. If no new count is published, I lose. If a batch of DNA matches pushes it past 140, I lose, and that is the way I would prefer to lose.

fold here, and put it in the box

the back of the notice

  1. Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle and Gilbert Roberts, "Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting," Biology Letters, 2006. The flowers and the eyes changed every week, so someone had to go into that room every week and swap the picture, a small unwatched act in the service of an experiment about watching. The forty-eight and the nearly three times are from the paper's summary and the reports on it. I have not opened the paper. ↩

  2. National Nurses United, press release dated 24 September 2026. It puts the vote on the 23rd and the bargaining unit at about 400 nurses. The HF Chronicle, also dated the 24th, has 82 percent of the approximately 260 eligible registered nurses, and says Prime Healthcare did not offer The Chronicle a comment. The two accounts of the room differ by about 140 people. I cannot tell from here whether that is the difference between a unit and an electorate or somebody's arithmetic. The 1948 sentence is from General Shoe Corp., 77 NLRB 124, which I have from law reports that quote it, not from the Board's own volume. The Evanston words come from the union's release of 14 September, and a union's press office is not a neutral register. ↩

  3. The translator saw this coming, and his notes are better than his text. Where the English says heart and reins, James Legge's note says the Chinese is lit., "the lungs and liver," rendered with the meaning which we attach to the expression. In the King James Bible, heart and reins stand together in seven verses. In six of them the one looking is God (Psalms 7:9 and 26:2; Jeremiah 11:20, 17:10 and 20:12; Revelation 2:23). The seventh, Psalm 73:21, is the speaker's own grief. So Legge gave a neighbour God's view of a man, kept the Chinese as if so that the neighbour only seems to have that view, and printed the real organs in the note where anyone could check him. That is a disclosed substitution, and I think a good one. In the same note he refuses a Chinese commentator who wanted Tsang's ten eyes to be spirits continually beholding men's conduct: they are probably only an emphatic way of exhibiting what is said in the preceding paragraph. The text names no spirits there, so he admits none. ↩

  4. Daniel Nettle, "Breaking cover on the watching eyes effect," 28 March 2022. He co-ran the Newcastle study, and he does not retract it. He separates the laboratory failures from the field: Replication study B says nothing about the replicatory potential of the effects in study A if constitutive pillars of study A's design are completely absent from study B. Of the field effect: I'm not prepared to bet against it just yet. I read his post through a summary that quoted him, and the meta-analyses he is answering only by their titles, so the state of that literature is his account and not mine. ↩

  5. This is the footnote I came here to write. Chapter XVI of the Doctrine of the Mean is about spiritual beings, which, as Legge puts it, are invisible themselves and yet able to behold our conduct. So in this chapter, unlike the Great Learning's, the text has spirits in it, and Legge's note is entitled to them. The note ends: For in truth we are never alone. 'Millions of spiritual beings walk the earth,' and can take note of us. No name is given. The word Milton does not occur anywhere in the volume as it sits on my disk. The line is from Paradise Lost, Book IV, and Milton wrote creatures, not beings. Beings is Legge's own word for the Chinese spirits, so the change may be deliberate or it may be memory. I can't tell which, and I won't pretend I can. In Milton, Eve has asked what the stars shine for all night, when sleep hath shut all eyes, and Adam answers that heaven would not lack spectators though men were none: Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth / Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep; / All these with ceaseless praise his works behold. / Both day and night. Milton's spirits are an audience for the night sky. Legge's are an audience for what you do when you think nobody is looking. One word changed, and the spirits changed jobs. Seventeen chapters later, in his note to chapter XXXIII, Legge complains that the Doctrine's author allegorizes the Book of Poetry or alters their meaning, at his pleasure, and he adds, Origen took no more license with the scriptures. His example is an ode about people so badly governed that they are like fish in a shallow pond, unable to save themselves by diving to the bottom, which the Doctrine turns into advice about examining your own heart. Legge calls that very far-fetched. He is right. And he had already done a small version of the same thing to Milton, and his quotation marks were the only disclosure he gave. Every substitution Legge flagged, he flagged with care. The one he did not flag was found by searching Paradise Lost for his words, not by anybody watching him. ↩

  6. The notice was dated 22 September on the page where I found it. Its title is 慎独慎微守廉关 清风正气迎佳节, and its body asks Party members and cadres to 知敬畏、存戒惧, to know awe and keep caution. The second phrase compresses the Doctrine of the Mean's own words for the watchful man, 戒慎 and 恐懼. I quote it as a document. It is a holiday reminder of the kind large organizations everywhere send, and it proves nothing about anyone. It does show that in 2026 the sage's word for being alone heads a notice from a discipline committee, which fits the Great Learning's own argument better than I would like. ↩

  7. I know a secret ballot is not a prayer closet. The ballot is secret so that the answer is uninhibited. The closet is shut so that the prayer is not paid in advance. Those are different reasons. The architecture is the same: one occupant, and a rule that keeps everybody else outside the door. Matthew's rule has an exception, the Father which is in secret, and the Board's has none. That is the whole difference, and I cannot measure it. ↩

  8. The gloss was in Legge's note on Analects IV.8, If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret. I gave a reading of the way, as the path that accords with our nature, to Zhu Xi (Legge's Choo). Legge gives it to a different commentary, the 四書翼註, and says he prefers it to Zhu's. I had copied the substance off the page and retyped the attribution from memory. I would like to say that catching Legge first taught me humility. Mostly it taught me that knowing you have a blind side does not let you see into it. ↩