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The front page of Sunday's New York Times carried an eye-opening story about statements a number of Congressional Representatives--both Republican and Democratic--had entered into the Congressional Record before the House vote on the health care reform bill. The eye-opening bit was that it turned out the statements had been written not by the Representatives themselves, or even by a member of their staffs, but by a couple of lobbyists paid by the biotechnology firm Genentech.
How did the ghost writing come to light? As with many a class cheating scandal, what let the cat out of the bag was that so many of the Representatives used the lobbyists' words whole cloth. And someone (presumably someone at the Times) noticed how, well, similar all the statements were.
The revelation should have been at least highly embarrassing to the Representatives involved. After all, if they'd pulled that stunt in a classroom--lifting someone else's words and presenting them as their own--they'd be slammed for cheating and plagiarism, and probably for violating the school honor code, as well. At the very least, they'd flunk the paper. At some schools, they might find themselves expelled.
Of course, one could argue that we don't hold politicians to the same standard as schoolchildren. After all, most national politicians have speechwriters who craft their public words for them. But, still. There's a line between having a staff person take your ideas and craft them more articulately, and taking a propaganda statement from a private, vested interest ... especially one that, in some of the cases, had given you campaign money ... and parroting it verbatim as your own words. Especially because the statements were submitted into the record at the request of the lobbyists, not because the politicians felt an innate need to add those particular words to the debate. It's duplicitous, because knowing the source changes how you consider the argument.
The staff people interviewed for the article argued that the lobbyists' statements reflected points of view supported by the Representatives in question. But surely, even if they didn't grasp the ethical implications involved, wouldn't those responsible have felt at least a little queasy about how it would look, if discovered? That it would risk the appearance of a member of Congress being little more than a Charlie McCarthy puppet mouthpiece of a lobbying or pharmaceutical firm? Not to mention a copycat puppet, repeating the same exact words as 40 other Representatives?
Apparently not.
"This happens all the time," one lobbyist said. "There was nothing nefarious about it."
"We were approached by the lobbyist, who asked if we would be willing to enter a statement in the Congressional Record. I asked for a draft. I tweaked a couple of words. There's not much reason to reinvent the wheel on a Congressional Record entry," one Representative's chief of staff shrugged.
That, to me, was the real eye-opening part of the article. I'm always fascinated when I read statements by people that reveal far more than the speakers intended about the lenses through which they view the world, especially in terms of what's "normal," "fair," or "right."
I had the same reaction when I read the resignation letter of an A.I.G. vice-president in the op-ed section of the Times last winter. The executive in question was part of the infamous London financial products division that is generally credited with doing more to bring down the global economy than any other single group of financial sorcerer's apprentices. But miffed that he was being asked to give back part of his hard-earned $750,000 post-tax bonus, he announced that he was going to give it all away and was resigning, because the request was so unfair.
His lengthy venting and argument made far less of an impression on me than the fact that this man actually thought it was a good idea to send his letter to the Times for publication. It was a fascinating window into the mindset of those whose sense of high-dollar entitlement and low concern for the impact of their risky, short-term profit schemes outside their own bonus goals had caused such immense and widespread damage. To him, $750,000 was the least he deserved for actions he still found no reason to fault. His view of normal had become so warped that he truly didn't see what he had done wrong.
The same seems to have been true of the Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot their Minneapolis, Minnesota, destination by 150 miles because they were so engrossed in a personal computer scheduling task that they forgot to fly the airplane. Speaking to the press right after the incident, the first officer said, confidently, "It was not a serious event, from a safety issue."
Really? One hundred and forty-four passengers were aboard a plane being flown by two pilots who hadn't so much as looked at an instrument in over an hour (or they would have seen the alerts), or talked to a controller, and had no idea where they were, or what their fuel or any other status was, while blazing through airspace off flight plan, and therefore without permission and potentially into other aircraft flight paths, putting an entire national defense system on alert ... and it wasn't a serious event, from a safety perspective?
The FAA clearly saw it differently, revoking the pilots' licenses within days of the incident. But ... wow. How could the pilots themselves not understand the severity of the transgression?
The answer, I think, is the same in all three cases. It's something the pilots I flew with in Africa called "normalized deviance." In terms of bush flying in Africa, what that means is that a normal pilot, even with back-country training in the U.S., would consider a landing on a dirt airstrip that was half covered in water, deteriorating, crooked, and wedged in between ridge lines to be a very hazardous maneuver. But in Africa, most of the airstrips are like that. Most of the time.
At first, new pilots in Africa approach that kind of strip with caution. But humans are amazingly adaptable creatures. After landing on runways like that every day for several months, that "deviant" condition becomes the norm. It no longer generates the hesitation or discomfort it once did. So what pilots consider a "high risk" landing becomes something even further out of the box. The pilots' view of what "normal" is becomes skewed ... with the end result that transport/cargo aircraft in Africa have an accident rate 13 times that of the rest of the world.
It's similar to the "bubble" phenomenon people talk about with politicians: the skewing of "normal" perspectives and reactions by abnormal surroundings. To such an extent, in many cases, that those involved no longer even grasp that their view of "normal" has become warped, or at least detached from that of most other people.
That doesn't excuse the behavior, of course. And not everyone, even in the same circumstances, surrenders all connection with their old sense of right, normal, fair, or safe. But the Northwest pilots had probably spent so much time letting the airplane fly itself that they no longer saw anything wrong with that. The A.I.G. vice-president had been overpaid and judged only on his own financial "kill" rate so long that he'd obviously lost sight of what a "normal" salary was, or any sense of responsibility for how his actions might be connected to real people or harm done in the world. And the relationship between Congress and lobbying firms has evidently grown so cozy over time that the idea of providing an unedited mouthpiece for industry PR departments, even if "only" in the Congressional Record, doesn't even seem to raise much of an eyebrow on Capitol Hill anymore.
If that realization doesn't disturb us overmuch, perhaps it's because we're suffering from a kind of normalized deviance of our own, in terms of our expectations. And that, at least, should disturb us.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
There's been a lot of discussion, this week, about whether President Obama has fulfilled enough promises or expectations of change since his election a year ago. "I voted for him, and I really thought everything would be different," one disappointed voter from Iowa said in a televised interview. It would be easy to dismiss the expectations of such voters as unrealistic or naive, but we often expect more from big watershed events, and in more sweeping, immediate fashion, than life dishes out. Consider, for example, another important anniversary coming up on Monday: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On November 9, 1989, after weeks of protest and slow chiseling away of the East German Politburo's power, the East German government announced that henceforth, East Berliners could travel freely to the west. Faced with massive crowds at the border checkpoints, the guards opened the gates, and people streamed through. A party erupted on top of the wall, and people started hacking away at it with hammers and picks.
It was a celebration and global party; the end of an era that had brought incalculable pain to millions of Germans separated from family members and death to thousands, over the years, who had tried to cross over to the west anyway. I wrote about some of the sacrifices, and the lingering legacy of the Wall, in an essay on this site last May, after a German artist released an exhibit sparked by the anniversary of the Wall's demise.
Given all the damage and fear it caused, the fall of the Wall was truly an historical watershed moment to cheer. But then the celebration and festivities ended, and the real work of reunification began.In the moment of celebration, it seemed all good. The rift was healed; the country would be united again. Cue the trumpets and national anthem. Roll credits. If the story had been a Hollywood movie, it actually would have ended there, because the morning after is always messier and less satisfying than the triumphant night. Every screenwriter worth their salt knows that.
There were, of course, some things that did change immediately. People could travel back and forth across the border. Restrictions ended. But national, economic, and social integration and change proved far more challenging than perhaps even anyone in 1989 would have predicted.
Many in the West resented the tax they had to pay to upgrade the infrastructure, buildings, and resources in the east. And "Ossies" (Easterners, from the German word "Ost" for East) found themselves in a no-man's land between cultures. They were suddenly without the social security of the Russian/East German state system, but were still often considered second-class citizens by their western counterparts. Their knowledge of Russian and German didn't help them in an economic world where English had become the common language. For all the celebration on November 9th, change brought with it a disruption of the world they'd known ... and gave rise to fear.
In 2004, 15 years after the Wall came down, I spent some time in the eastern German village of Krausnick, in the Spreewald, or Spree Forest. Krausnik was founded in 1004, so it had seen a lot of changes. It has also seen a lot of battles. In 1945, more than 30,000 German soldiers and 10,000 civilians from the area were caught by the advancing Russian army and slaughtered over the course of a week. Looking at some of the dilapidated houses and crumbling stone walls in the area, I could imagine the Russian soldiers advancing over the land, and the terror that sight must have bred.
One would think, after a massacre so terrible, that the Russians would have been hated forever. But when I visited, there was still a memorial in the center of the village celebrating the Red Army heroes who had died there "in the war against Fascism, 1941-1945." The same soldiers, mind you, who had killed so many of the local people. And as I watched, a couple of older villagers carefully cleaned the memorial and planted new flowers in front of it. The Russians had been gone for 15 years. And still the villagers preserved the memorial with loving care.
When I asked about it, several people told me that, in truth, they actually missed the Russians, because at least then, you had security. You didn't have to worry about losing your job or not being able to pay your rent. All you had to do was keep your head down and your nose clean. It was nice, they acknowledged, to not have to wait 20 years for a bad car. But you had new burdens of figuring out how to pay for that car, now.
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, Germany is still struggling to fulfill the promise of that event. And that's a change that, at least in theory, everyone in Germany wanted. Imagine if the country had been deeply split on the basic premise of reunification?
Consider the events of July 2, 1964. On that date, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Its passage was the result of years of effort and struggle, and the signing of that Act separated American history into "before" and "after." As with the Berlin Wall, some things changed immediately. On July 3, 1964, discriminating against a person on the basis of the color of his or her skin was suddenly illegal. But life did not change with the stroke of a pen. Four years later, not only had glorious change not triumphantly come to pass, but both Martin Luther King--who had been present at the signing ceremony--and Robert Kennedy, one of the Cvil Rights movement's heroes ... were dead at the hands of assassins.
Change--especially nationwide change--is a slow-moving train. Power shifted with the Civil Rights Act, and the wheels of change were set in motion. But a year later, a black person--especially in the South--might not have noticed that much tangible difference in their life. Forty-five years later, we still fight some of those battles, as the events of the past year have certainly illustrated.
Symbolically, many things can change in a day. A law is passed, a wall comes down, a couple gets married, or a person is elected President. The event that initiates the change is called a watershed, because it marks the moment and place where the course of things turn in a new direction. But even in the best of circumstances, it takes a while after that event for any visible shift to become evident. Especially in a deep, complex, and layered environment where all the currents aren't headed in the same direction.
It's a point worth remembering. Too often, we look to those big, symbolic events as magical tonics that will change everything overnight--maybe because we were fed so many "and then they lived happily ever after" endings. More than one person has imagined that when they got married (or became a parent, or got that new job, or that new ... fill in the blank) they'd magically become happy ... only to discover that it takes a lot of work, patience, and time to make the promise of that symbolic change anything close to real.
The truth is, even events as big as the demise of the Berlin Wall don't change a country or the world overnight. They just make a new kind of change possible. Even if the journey turns out to be longer, rockier, and more complex than we wished or imagined ... or a Hollywood screenwriter would have written it.
Photo Credit: Flickr User antaldaniel, wikimedia commons
Photo Credit: Flickr User antaldaniel, wikimedia commons
One hundred years ago this month, two intrepid explorers returned from the Arctic reaches and declared that they had reached the North Pole. Not together, but on competing expeditions to become the first person and team to the Pole. Robert E. Peary led one expedition, and Frederick A. Cook led the other. And each declared the other's claim to the Pole untrue. Today, of course, that kind of controversy could be settled far more easily. At the very least, we would expect a GPS track record showing that the Pole had been reached, and airborne photographs or other corroborating evidence might be required, as well. Without that technology, however, the claims were a little harder to confirm. It's not like there was an exact marker at the spot, because nobody had been there before. And unlike the peak of Mt. Everest, the landscape at the precise location of the North Pole doesn't look distinctly different from the rest of the terrain--for hundreds of miles in any given direction.
So the controversy has raged for a full century. But here's the interesting part. As more data about the expeditions, and about the North Pole, have emerged, it seems more and more likely that neither man actually reached the Pole. As John Tierney wrote recently in the Science Times, Peary supposedly took no celestial navigation readings on his final push to the Pole, until one day he took a single reading, looked very disappointed, and then declared that the observation--which he showed to no one--confirmed that he'd arrived at the North Pole, exactly. Cook had neither a trained celestial navigator nor the skill to make the observations himself. Without that skill, how on earth (so to speak) could he have reached the Pole, or known precisely when he was there? The modern-day consensus, according to Tierney, is that Peary got closer than Cook, but that neither man got closer than perhaps 100 miles away. 
Yet a full century and much more advanced data analysis and evidence later, Peary and Cook still have ardent supporters who adamantly believe that their hero told the truth. They suggest that it might have been possible for either explorer to have found the Pole without clear celestial sightings, by studying wind patterns in the snow, or observing shadows, or even by compass, even though a compass needle gets extremely erratic near the Earth's poles. Apparently, some of the Peary/Cook advocates are more comfortable with contorted logic than simply acknowledging that, given more data, it appears their initial impression of things was ... ummm ... wrong. Peary and Cook are not the only explorers to have die-hard believers who have clung to a set vision of their heroes' lives despite the emergence of countering evidence. David Roberts, an editor at National Geographic Adventure, encountered a startling backlash of anger and even threats after writing a feature article last spring (which he's expanded into a soon-to-be-released book) that solved the mystery of a young adventurer's disappearance--but not the way some of the adventurer's admirers wanted it solved.
In 1934, at the age of 20, Everett Reuss left civilization to go live in the wilderness ... and was never heard from again. A whole folk myth movement sprang up around this young man who seemed to have slipped so completely into the wild that he eluded discovery for the rest of his life. An annual art festival in Escalante, Utah, is even named in his honor. But Roberts, who researched the case for 10 years, finally discovered evidence that Ruess had been murdered by two members of the Ute tribe almost as soon as he'd begun his journey. There was a witness to the murder, an unearthed skeleton, and DNA tests that were compatible with other family members.
The mystery, it seemed, had been solved. But the hue and cry surrounding Roberts' piece was both angry and loud, catching both Roberts and the Reuss family by surprise. "We all want our heroes to succeed," Reuss' nephew Brian surmised, in an attempt to explain the uproar. (A couple months ago, I wrote a longer essay about the Reuss controversy.)
Perhaps. But I now think there's more to the equation; tendencies that affect how we view information about not just heroes and adventurers, but also issues and events that affect local and national policy and action.
How is it that people can cling to an opinion or view of a person, event, issue of the world, despite being presented with clear or mounting data that contradicts that position? The easy answer, of course, is simply that people are irrational. But a closer look at some of the particular ways and reasons we're irrational offers some interesting food for thought.
In a recently published study, a group of researchers from Northwestern University, UNC Chapel HIll, SUNY Buffalo and Millsaps College found that people often employ an approach the researchers called "motivated reasoning" when sorting through new information or arguments, especially on controversial issues. Motivated reasoning is, as UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman put it, the equivalent of policy-driven data, instead of data-driven policy.
In other words, if people start with a particular opinion or view on a subject, any counter-evidence can create "cognitive dissonance"--discomfort caused by the presence of two irreconcilable ideas in the mind at once. One way of resolving the dissonance would be to change or alter the originally held opinion. But the researchers found that many people instead choose to change the conflicting evidence--selectively seeking out information or arguments that support their position while arguing around or ignoring any opposing evidence, even if that means using questionable or contorted logic.
That's not a news flash to anyone who's paid attention to any recent national debate--although the researchers pointed out that this finding, itself, runs counter to the idea that the reason people continue to hold positions counter to all evidence is because of misinformation or lack of access to the correct data. Even when presented with compelling, factual data from sources they trusted, many of the subjects still found ways to dismiss it. But the most interesting (or disturbing) aspect of the Northwestern study was the finding that providing additional counter-evidence, facts, or arguments actually intensified this reaction. Additional countering data, it seems, increases the cognitive dissonance, and therefore the need for subjects to alleviate that discomfort by retreating into more rigidly selective hearing and entrenched positions.
Needless to say, these findings do not bode well for anyone with hopes of changing anyone else's mind with facts or rational discussion, especially on "hot button" issues. But why do we cling so fiercely to positions when they don't even involve us directly? Why do we care who got to the North Pole first? Or whether a particular bill has provision X versus provision Y in it? Why don't we care more about simply finding out the truth--especially in cases where one "right" answer actually exists?
Part of the reason, according to Kleiman, is "the brute fact that people identify their opinions with themselves; to admit having been wrong is to have lost the argument, and (as Vince Lombardi said), every time you lose, you die a little." And, he adds, "there is no more destructive force in human affairs--not greed, not hatred--than the desire to have been right."
So, what do we do about that? If overcoming "the desire to have been right" is half as challenging as overcoming hate or greed, the outlook doesn't seem promising. But Kleiman, who specializes in crime control policy and alternative solutions to very sticky problems (his latest book is "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment"), thinks all is not lost. He points to the philosopher Karl Popper, who, he says, believed fiercely in the discipline and teaching of critical thinking, because "it allows us to offer up our opinions as a sacrifice, so that they die in our stead."
A liberal education, Kleiman says, "ought, above all, to be an education in non-attachment to one's current opinions. I would define a true intellectual as one who cares terribly about being right, and not at all about having been right." Easy to say, very hard to achieve. For all sorts of reasons. But it's worth thinking about. Even if it came at the cost of sacrificing or altering our most dearly-held opinions ... the truth might set us free.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Lanz, photolib.noaa.gov, Wikimedia Commons
President Obama is going to Capitol Hill tomorrow to try to convince legislators, and the associated national audience, to support health care reform. He's got a tough battle in front of him...in part because of people's fears about what that change might mean. We might lose the health care and choices we have now. We might have to wait to see doctors, or to have operations. And so on.
But all of that presupposes that we (we being the working, insured population of America) have something worth keeping, choice, and access now. And the option, if reform doesn't happen, of keeping our insurance and service delivery the same.
Neither of which is necessarily true.
I called the benefits person and said there had been a mistake, and I wanted to change my health insurance back to a PPO plan, even though I recognized that it would cost me more in premiums.
"You can't do that," she answered. "We don't offer a PPO. We only offer an HMO."
"I don't have any choice at all?" I asked.
"Sure you do. You can opt out in the next open enrollment session, which is in three months."
"Opt out?"
"Opt out of our health plan altogether."
"So then what insurance would I have?"
"You wouldn't have any."
I called the benefits folks at the old corporate owner, just to make sure I wasn't imagining that I used to have it better. If I recalled, I told the woman I spoke with there, we'd had several types of plans to choose from, back in the days when they were in charge.
"Well, we actually discontinued that. Now we only offer people one health plan, too. It's just that the plan we offered happened to be the one you had anyway."
So despite the fact that I'm a gainfully employed, working adult with supposedly "good" health insurance, I actually have no choice about the kind of health care plan, and therefore the kind of health care, I can get. What's more, the type and quality of that insurance coverage obviously can be arbitrarily and summarily altered, at any time, without any input from me. So ... even if an overhaul of our health care coverage reduced choice and control (which is not at all a given), it wouldn't really be any different than what I'm facing now.
As a matter of fact, my parents, who are on the government-run system called Medicare, have more choice and control in their health care I do. Of course, when my dad needed a knee replacement, and I found the doctor who seemed best for the job, I was told, in July, that the first office appointment available was in early November, and the first potential surgery date would be in late January. So even when we have reasonable choice, we don't necessarily have reasonable, or easy, access.
Which leads me to wonder, what the heck are people so afraid of losing?
James Surowieki offered some interesting potential answers to that question in last week's New Yorker. Multiple psychological studies he referenced have apparently shown that most humans are susceptible to something called the "endowment effect," which means we tend to over-value things we own. We wouldn't imagine selling old Aunt Martha's silver collection for less than $5,000, for example, even though we wouldn't pay more than $500 for an identical set from someone else's attic.
So we tend to think our insurance is better than it is, simply because it's ours. But Surowieki thinks there's another psychological effect at play, as well: something known as the "status quo bias." In short, we fear losing more than we care about gaining, so we fear changing what we have for an unproven "other," even if what we have isn't so terrific. Nobel prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Avos Tversky called this inclination "Prospect Theory," explaining that people had to feel like they would gain far more than they stood to lose before they would gamble on the outcome. Which, in the context of health care, means that in order to get enthusiastic about changing the system, the perceived benefit would have to be not just equal, or a little bit better for less money, but several times greater than any perceived cost, risk, or negative trade-offs. That's a pretty high bar to clear.
We also are susceptible to a clear and simple fear of the unknown. Known misery, or "the devil you know," is more comfortable to us, in many ways, than the great unknown, even if the unknown offers the possibility of far greater improvement or rewards. It's why so many people stay in bad relationships or jobs. Among other things.
Important to note, however, is that all of those effects are irrational tendencies, not recommended strategies. We may overvalue the status quo and fear changing it, but that doesn't always lead to a happy ending ... especially when the world is changing around us, or the status quo is a sinking ship.
And that's the other important point worth considering in all of this. It's not even a matter of changing the status quo. The status quo is changing itself. So we don't really have the option of not changing. Not because the system is broken, or will bankrupt our children, but because our insurance is being altered on us now, whether we like it or not. Employers are cutting back benefits and options, and that trend isn't going to reverse itself without some serious restructuring.
So ironically, the only way to keep our health care from changing is to change the system; take the control of our choices away from our employers and give us more choice in what kind of insurance we opt in for. Or as Surowiecki put it: "if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it."
Note: I will be offline for the next week, returning September 18th.
Photo Credit: Flickr User Oswaldo Ordonez (Orcoo)
Photo Credit: Flickr User Oswaldo Ordonez (Orcoo)
I was on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning with Kerri Miller yesterday, discussing uncertainty, change, and how to successfully cope with the fear that comes with those things. We didn't discuss the health care debate. But our conversation was relevant to the discussion. "Why," a caller wanted to know, "do so many people tell you that you can't succeed when you say you want to try something different or go out on your own?"
The conversation went back and forth a bit, partly because the reasons are undoubtedly complex, and also because I hesitate to assign motivations to people I've never met. But after Kerri pressed the question a third time, I finally answered, "Fear." In the context of the caller's question, I meant that some people resist leaving secure and known circumstances or places because they're afraid. Afraid of change, afraid of the unknown, and afraid about their ability to do well in the wilderness of a changed or uncertain environment. But they comfort themselves by saying that it can't be done, or that striking out into something new is an irresponsible or bad choice.
Why do they try to discourage others, as well? Because if someone else "escapes," or succeeds at a new or passionate pursuit, the naysayers might have to look more honestly at the real reasons for their own reluctance. And facing your own fears is a lot harder than convincing everyone else to have them, too.
I think that last bit also at least partly explains the vitriolic tone of some of the recent discussions about changing our health care system. Frank Rich wrote a column that spoke to this point a couple of days ago. In the same vein of the marriage counselor mantra, "what you're fighting about isn't what you're fighting about," Rich says that he doesn't believe the anger at the proposed health care plan is really about the proposed health care plan.
"The twisted distortions about 'death panels' and federal conspiracies 'to pull the plug on grandma' are just too unhinged from the reality of any actual legislation," he argues. "Those bogus fears are psychological proxies for bigger traumas." What traumas? The economy and job loss? "That's surely part of it," Rich says. "So is fear of more home foreclosures and credit card bankruptcies. So is fear of China, whose economic ascension stands in stark contrast to the collapse of traditional American industries from automobiles to newspapers. So is fear of Barack Obama, whose political ascension dramatizes the coming demographic order that will relegate whites to the American minority."
In other words, all the hyperbolic rants could be boiled down to, "I want my world back!"--a wish whose futility only fuels the angry fires. Change is coming. Slowly but surely. And that may be part of the problem. Not the change itself, but the relative slow pace of its process.
Ernest Gann, a brilliant writer whose memoir Fate is the Hunter paints a gripping picture of the early, dangerous years of airline flying, talks about the difference between fright and fear. Fright, he says, is a sudden emotion that is actually useful because it sends adrenaline through the body and focuses the mind on fixing whatever caused the fright, or adapting to the new circumstances. Fear, on the other hand, is an insidious emotion that takes longer to set in but, if allowed to take hold, degrades thinking and performance to the point of disaster.
Humans, in other words, react better to a sudden change in circumstances than they do to a slow shift that allows them too much time to think, and allows fear to creep in around the edges. And the longer any amorphous fear sits there, the more it grows. Especially if a person feels helpless to do anything about it.
Several researchers and business consultants say the same thing. Dr. Mark Feldman (who wrote Five Frogs on a Log) and Alan Deutschman (who wrote Change or Die) both conclude in their books that quick change, even if brutal, is far more successful in the long run than slow change. A slow pace gives people time to feel scared about the change, and to grow correspondingly more resistant to the process.
Which is to say, if the health care system had just changed one day, we might complain, but we'd adapt. (Same with the country's demographics or economic standing in the world.) But one of the problems with a participatory, democratic process is that it's slow. And that gives fear time to gain a foothold ... and even hijack any rational thought or discussion.
So what do we do about that? Unfortunately, the process isn't likely to speed up, especially now. And when people get really afraid, they often stop listening altogether. But perhaps President Obama would do well to dust off FDR's famous "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," speech and give it an updated spin. Because the truth is, we adapt to change better than we imagine we will, when it finally comes. It's our fear of it that's debilitating. I've often said that the best antidote to fear is knowledge; we cease to fear things we know and understand well. But on that long, hard road to knowledge, a little inspiration never hurts.
(Photo: Flickr User Rob Stemple)
There's been a lot of discussion, as Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings have gotten underway, about the idea of judicial "neutrality." Sotomayor has argued that every person's perspective is influenced by their life experiences, and that as a Latina woman, she brings not only a different, but also a valuable, perspective to the Court. Some opponents have argued that her frank admission of that influence and perspective make her unqualified as a judge.
I've never met Sonia Sotomayor. I can't see inside her head. But for the past 20 years, I have worked as a female journalist and writer in the field of aviation--a field that is not only 94% male, but has maintained that percentage, unchanged, for the past 50 years. (The percentage of female commercial pilots within that 6% has increased over time, but the overall male/female ratio has remained pretty constant.) And that experience has taught me a lot about "norms", assumptions, lenses, and bias.
I remember reading somewhere that power politics are always better understood by those on the bottom than those on the top. A large part of the reason for that is, if you're in the majority of a system, industry, or group, surrounded by people who share your experience and views, the world as it is doesn't look out of place, manufactured, or tilted in your favor. It looks normal. But if you're a minority, you are always aware that your experiences, view and perspective are different. So you can't possibly mistake any of that for some kind of accepted norm or pure, objective truth.
But whether we see it or not, we all are a product of our experiences, and those experiences give us a particular set of lenses through which we view the world. They influence how much weight we give to different factors in an argument, and what we tend to believe, out of what we're told. A friend of mine recalls an old General Electric training film, apparently produced in the hopes of improving tolerance across widely varying age groups in the company's workforce, that was called "We Are What We Are Because of What We Were, When." Which is to say, if your formative experiences were the Depression and WWII, it left you with a different set of lenses, sensitivities, and beliefs than if you grew up in the tumultuous 1960s.
Likewise, someone who grows up in an immigrant family, scraping to maintain a small business, will intuitively understand the challenges of that situation better than someone who was born into money and privilege. A woman who walks through the world her whole life aware of her vulnerabilities will intuitively understand another woman's fear of sexual assault, pregnancy, or abuse far better than she can intuitively understand a man's fear of being falsely accused of having a role in those things.
Not that we can't cross those bridges, or get beyond our own lenses. And just being part of a particular group doesn't mean you share the same lenses (think Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas). But the bottom line is, there are some viewpoints that, for reasons of our background, personalities, experiences and beliefs, we intuitively understand and resonate with. Others, we have to work to understand. And succeeding at that cross-understanding is tougher than we sometimes give it credit for being.
The first step in that process, however, is recognizing that there is work to be done; that the lenses through which we intuitively react to and interpret facts, events, and situations, are not objective and clear. And at least Sotomayor recognizes that her lenses exist. The notion that a human can read the facts of a legal case, compare it against the words in a 200-year-old document, and then simply analyze or rationally deduce a single clean, correct answer is idealistic at best, and disingenuous, at worst. It avoids taking responsibility for our intuitive resonances and filters. It also avoids acknowledging the need to balance those subjective filters by making a concerted effort to see not only the words and facts, but the words and facts as they might appear through a different set of lenses.
After all, if truth and justice were easily discernible through logic and careful, objective reading of facts and application of precedent, the Supreme Court wouldn't need nine justices. One would do. There are nine because it's understood that little in the realm of human endeavor is simple, clear, or objective. Least of all humans.
The second step in that process, however, is actually seeing the world, or particular situations, through someone else's lenses. And that's hard to do without having some diversity in the group. At the same time as stepping into a male field taught me very quickly that my own perspective on the world was not the only, or even dominant, one, I know my presence there has helped some men to view situations or issues differently than they did before. And I'd like to think we're all the wiser for it.
It's said a picture is worth a thousand words, driving home an entire story with instant, lasting impact. But which thousand, what story, and with what impact?
It's a question that has been asked a lot, lately, as the debate has raged--even within the electronic pages of this very website--over President Obama's decision not to release more of the infamous "torture photos." But an article about a photo exhibition that just closed at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris this past week made me think about the subject from yet another angle.
"Controversies: A Legal and Ethical History of Photography" (headed next to South America) focuses not on insider policy-making or accountability from photographs of dramatic events and people ... although a photograph from Abu Ghraib is included in the exhibition. It looks at the mixed and complex issues involved in how a wider public views images. Why is one photograph controversial and another not? If a photographer is in a disaster zone, is it inhuman to photograph the carnage instead of trying to help? In viewing riveting images, when are we seeking a better understanding of the world--or having our understanding of important world events expanded--and when are we being voyeurs?
And somewhere in all those tough questions, a realization that the photographer or publisher doesn't, in the end, control how the public or world will interpret or react to a given photo. Alex Gibney (who has written some powerful posts--well worth reading--about the abuses and torture he discovered at Bagram prison in Afghanistan) took issue recently with Philip Gourevitch, the New Yorker writer whose articles and book about the Rwanda genocide brought the horror home to America, for arguing in a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece that while releasing the first round of photos from Abu Ghraib was important, releasing more would be counter-productive.
Gourevitch's point was that while the initial photos were important, because they proved the abuses were taking place, more photos of the lower-level individuals inflicting the abuse ran the danger of not only angering the Muslim world, but also distracting attention from the now-really-important issue. Which isn't whether the abuses took place, but who, far higher up on the chain of command, issued the orders that allowed them to happen? No corporal or captain is involved in making policy, or abuses a prisoner if those above them, who do make the policy, issues orders against it. But the photos are so riveting, they might obscure that non-visual, and more complex, part of the story.
Gibney disagrees, arguing that editors will use discretion with the photos, and that we need to see all the photos to see how widespread the abuses and breakdown of command were, so we can hold those responsible accountable. Of Gourevitch's more nuanced argument, he says, "one can get hung up on the duality of semioticians until, one day, you wake up and nothing means anything anymore."
As it happens, I majored in semiotics. And while I never want to read another Foucault essay--which is to say, I'm with Gibney on the arcane nature of some theorists in the field--semiotics at its core is actually quite practical. And quite relevant to the discussion. At its core, semiotics says that no matter what message I send out into the world, whether in image or print, or spoken word ... I do not control how it is interpreted. And it will be interpreted quite differently by different people, depending on their backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences.
Gibney wants the pictures released to achieve a particular goal he believes they will achieve. Gourevitch--who has some experience in trying to present horror in a compelling way to the world---is less convinced that the photos will achieve the goal that those who want them released hope they will. The public, and the world, will react in uncontrollable ways to the photos. Which is one of the points of the "Controversies" exhibit. The public may not view the photos and make the link to demanding accountability from the commanders and politicians who set the policy. They may remain riveted on the photos as voyeuristic passers-by view a car wreck, or demand the particular people pictured be punished, instead. The general public, even here in the States, is funny that way.
But the Times article on the exhibition raised one other important point, as well. Not only can stark, shocking images divert the public's attention to a detail, rather than a complex, systemic problem that led to that captured moment in time ... graphic photos can sometimes detract, rather than attract, attention to a horror. Writer Michael Kimmelman talks about Susan Sonntag's reaction to seeing photos of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. "A part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead," Sonntag said. "To see something," Kimmelman concludes, "is to face the prospect of becoming inured to it."
I think that's true. And I think those of us who have been in conflict zones, or have seen tragedy come alive before our eyes, have to remember that what is bearable--and even critically important--to us, having seen it unfold in person, can--in too large a dose--be too much for someone far away, who has no context or relief in which to place the pieces we want to show them. And so, the reaction can often be to shut down. To become numb. To turn away. What do we do with all those photos of bashed-in children's heads from Rwanda? Or those horrible images of rape and abuse by our own soldiers? Yet another photo? And another? We go numb.
It's a survival mechanism. Soldiers learn to deal with too much death the same way. In much the same way as, having lost 25 friends over the years to airplane crashes (a liability that comes with the territory of having worked in the high-risk end of the industry), I no longer feel grief or horror when one of those dreaded phone calls come. "Who is it this time?" I ask, as I feel my emotions shut down and pull back somewhere safer inside me, until I can find a way to process the unprocessable. Our psyches have safety valves in them that shut down when we are faced with more than we can handle.
Which is all just to say that, among the vast complexities that come with how we photograph humans, and how we distribute those images ... it's important to think about not only how the international public will actually interpret what they see ... but also how they will react to it. And if the goal is to focus people on the fact that a very complex horror did occur, and generate an emotional and political reaction that heads resolution in a productive direction ... nuance, context, and semiotics matter. Like cayenne pepper in a recipe, a certain amount of graphic intensity may be essential to make a point, but too much can lead to a reaction very different than what the creator intended.
In a column that came out yesterday in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof explored some of the emotional "hot buttons" that separate the thinking of "liberals" and "conservatives." (The column was a follow-up to an earlier column he wrote about how people tend to use the internet to seek news and information that reinforces already-held positions.) Part of the reason the two groups have difficulty engaging in meaningful discussion, Kristof said, was that the two camps don't just think differently. They feel differently. They react strongly, and in different ways, to different scenarios and cues.
No big news flash there. What any of us hold as core values ... emotional or otherwise ... informs our worldview, and influences how we interpret information or events.
More interesting to me was Kristof's take on a solution to the impasse. "How do we discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical?" Kristof asked. How, indeed?
A prerequisite for any progress, he acknowledged, is an admission that the "other" side of an argument has at least some legitimate concerns. But Kristof also quoted University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, who said that "our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games." Therefore, according to Haidt, "the best way to open the mind is through the heart." Kristof expanded on this to suggest finding moderates on the "other" side and eating meals with them to build emotional bonds that allow a differing point of view to make it through to the other side.
I'm not sure I agree with Haidt about our minds being designed solely (if, in fact, he meant that) for social games. Our ability to reason is as legendary as our ability to manipulate. By the same token, the number of people who like me very much but won't for two seconds entertain a discussion point that challenges a position they hold is legion. Which means ... what?
Well, for one thing, it means that I'm not sure lunches or emotional bonds alone ... while certainly helpful additions to the equation ... are enough to tip the balance, or create suddenly-improved communication between opposing camps.
In my experience, there are two factors that seem to make the biggest difference as to whether or not two people can have a meaningful and productive discussion from different points of view (assuming both are fairly self-assured and reasonable beings):
1. The first factor is whether the people involved see the world in black-and-white terms, or in more complex shades of gray. For those who see the world in absolute terms of black and white (on the left or the right), the only choice of movement is all the way to the other side. Which is an awfully long distance to move an opinion. People who are more inclined to see the world in nuanced shades of gray, on the other hand, can consider a slightly different shade without feeling their basic values threatened. The options for movement, and therefore their potential willingness to consider another perspective, are far greater.
2. The second factor is how skilled, practiced, and comfortable both participants are in the art of critical thinking. The website criticalthinking.org offers more definitions of what critical thinking consists of than anyone probably needs. But at its most exemplary, the site says, critical thinking is based on "clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness." Critical thinkers "avoid thinking simplisitcally about complicated issues and strive to appropriately consider the rights and needs of relevant others." And "they realize that no matter how skilled they are as thinkers ... they will at times fall prey to mistakes in reasoning, human irrationality, prejudices, biases, distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and taboos, self-interest, and vested interest."
Which is to say, people skilled in the art of critical thinking make a practice of questioning everything. Even their own opinions. They don't necessarily sit in the middle ground of any debate, but they understand the potential fallibility of sources, and acknowledge the legitimate existence of other points of view ... subject to examination, along with their own. Meaningful exploration and discussion of issues, therefore, becomes possible. Even productive.
In theory, this is the strength and purpose of a liberal arts education (one intended to provide general knowledge and foster intellectual capabilities and reasoned, rational thought). And to the degree that this teaching happens, I think it is a strong and important argument for a liberal arts education.
But here's the bad news. How many of us actually put our "gut" opinions or the information that comes at us daily through the rigorous filters of a critical thinker? I don't have the answer to that, but the results of a 1995 study done by the Center for Critical Thinking aren't encouraging. In a study of 140 professors at 66 public and private universities in California, the researchers found that while an overwhelming majority (89%) claimed that critical thinking was a primary objective of their instruction, only a small percentage (19%) could give a clear explanation of what critical thinking was. And from the respondents' answers, the researchers concluded that only 9% were teaching with a view toward critical thinking on a typical day in class. And that's professors tasked with teaching the subject. How must the rest of us fare?
Granted, that's only one study. And clearly, there's a lot more to the subject than one column or post can cover. Like so many issues in the world, it's complex. But developing the ability to step back a step and question where opinions come from; objectively consider and dissect an argument for its strengths and flaws, look at what the source of any information is and through what biases, values, assumptions, or lenses we or others are filtering that information, consider what other information might exist to counter or support any given "fact" ... and, yes, consider that we, too, might have to adjust our views or thinking in the end ... is central to upgrading both the level and of productivity of discourse in this country.
Critical thinking acumen doesn't get mentioned as often as the other skills we test for or examine in education debates. But it's essential if we want to "discipline our brains to be more open-minded, more honest, more empirical." And it's every bit as important as math, science, reading or writing in terms of being an informed, discerning citizen in an increasingly complex world.
Lane Wallace
