Think Your Issue

The following series of comments were written over the months of June, July and August 2006 and first posted on www.ilfpost.org, the blogsite of the International Leadership Forum.

Think Your Issue is relevant at every level. Some problems do require rapid action – but they also deserve reflection. Some problems can actually be solved – but the solutions, successful and unsuccessful, deserve pondering. And the most profoundly human way to respond to the changes and disruptions that occur within individuals, communities, and ecosystems is to think them through together.

Back in 1986, when I started work with my colleague Richard Goldsby on a book about dawning global awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we chose the title Thinking AIDS in order to emphasize the fact that the emergence of a new disease was a moment to stop and think about human society and the complex interplay of culture and biology in which we live, about what can be managed by technology and what cannot. Of course there has been a need for thought and research about treatments, about public education for safer sex, about a host of specific policy questions. But more fundamentally there was a need for thought about social justice, globalization, responsibility in public and private behavior, and the realities of ecological diversity within and between organisms including microbes and humans. Where did we end up? With brilliantly designed medications that control or postpone the ravages of HIV that have huge financial costs and side effects, and that fool members of our own society into risky behavior in the belief that the problem has been solved while leaving millions of poor people untreated.

Thinking is not easy, especially in the context of fear, as Michael Crichton points out in his critique of environmentalism, but the acknowledgment of danger is necessarily an ingredient in thought. Thinking is not easy in the context of intense suffering, yet we know of men and women who have contributed profound thoughts from the depths of disease or imprisonment.

As a society, we have a can-do attitude toward problem solving that often pushes us, with insufficient pondering, into discovering and applying a quick technical fix. Biomedical research tends to look at basic physiological processes through the lens of possible treatment, and to link treatment to specific narrow etiologies. Like everyone else, I would like someone to prescribe a pill for whatever ails me this week, even if the effect is only palliative. In many parts of the world, patients insist on shots for every malady, believing that only if the doctor gives them a shot of antibiotic will they be cured – and the effect is to reduce the curative value of antibiotics. Psychotropic medications can be applied to virtually all mental health problems – but the effect is to make us abandon efforts to understand the connections between chemistry and experience, and the importance of insight.

The lineal thought patterns that race ahead to the quick fix make us ignore the fact that most problems are systemic and non-linear, with multiple interacting causes. Attempts to address them require action on several levels, watching carefully for unanticipated consequences and side effects, and above all for the ways in which attempts at solution can make problems worse.

Disasters like the tsunami and Katrina demand thought. Philanthropy is important, but how many people sent money as a way of avoiding thought? All disasters tend to amplify social inequalities and it is notable that both in New Orleans and in the nations impacted by the tsunami the wealthy have seen opportunities for land grabbing and real estate profiteering while the poor have been displaced. The political process pushes palliatives, short term solutions, promises, and, of course, the blame game. Some of our best minds, often sitting in those institutions called think tanks, are focused on how to use or defuse these disasters for the next election, not on ways to modify our social habits.


Think Your Issue II: Anger

Was it fear or anger that has made us so unthoughtful in our response to 9/11? Both tend to create stupidity – and probably there has been a mix. But let’s look at 9/11 to explore the way we think about intention and causation.

Certainly the terrorists set out to hurt America both concretely and psychologically through the loss of lives and the destruction of symbolic sites. In the days that followed, American morale was deeply shaken, a sense of invulnerability was lost and financial markets dropped. Those consequences were undoubtedly intended. But what had the greatest impact across the country was not the number of deaths (considerably lower than original estimates) but the visual image of the towers collapsing, one after the other. There is, in fact, some disagreement about whether the terrorists could have predicted the pancaking of the twin towers. If so, then the attack had consequences that went beyond the intentions of the attackers, and it is worth asking which consequences were predictable and which were surprising, which served the terrorists and which worked against them. The same is true of the American response which has created so many ongoing problems.

Could the terrorists have predicted that their coup would be followed by an upsurge of American unity and resolve? They should have, for this question has come up repeatedly in relation to civilian bombing. The Germans, for instance, expected British morale to collapse during the blitz, and the American military were appalled at the continuing resistance of the Vietnamese to devastating casualties. Casualties appear to have surprising consequences. Something to bear in mind.

In any case, it is surely paranoid to think that the terrorists foresaw that the same bombing that created unity and resolve could in turn lead Americans to do themselves such profound harm through their reactions. They are simply not that smart. It’s comforting to know that we are not the only stupid kids on the block. The strikes against Afghanistan were fairly predictable, although the terrorists do not seem to have been entirely ready for them since their organization and communications appear to have been genuinely weakened or at least decentralized. But could the terrorists ever have dreamed that the United States would seize 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq, miring itself in a hopeless struggle and alienating both its European allies and the entire Muslim world? Could they, in their wildest dreams, have planned for a sequence in which the American government would be shown up before the world as violating the rights both of its own citizens (by domestic spying) and of Arab prisoners (by torture and illegal internment)?

Human rights and democratic process are not matters of great concern to terrorists, yet it was in this area that they dealt the most severe wounds to the United States. Did they foresee the way in which politicians like Bush and Giuliani would posture and talk tough for the cameras, building their careers on the fallen towers? Could they predict that debate in Congress would virtually be silenced and the role of the press would be undermined?

Efforts at defense against future attacks in the U.S. were also predictable, but these also have paradoxical effects. Did the administration recognize that concentrating on airport security would be reassuring in the short term but would maintain higher levels of anxiety (and irritation) over time? Those who were children in the fifties have vivid memories of the fears raised by air raid drills in which we were told to hide under our desks. Did the terrorist visualize thousands of hours spent waiting in lines and millions down the drain as part of their effect? What a coup! Was anyone in government smart enough to see political advantage in keeping people scared or has that been an unexpected bonus?

The short term effect of almost any outside attack is to increase support for the administration in power and decrease thoughtful debate. But it is interesting to wonder whether the terrorists would even have seen these effects, which may ultimately be the greatest reason for mourning, as worth celebrating.

Causation is a funny thing. The terrorists did not intend the Iraq war, but Bush’s advisors apparently intended it long before 9/11. The terrorists merely created the opportunity to carry out plans already developed. (One could argue that early U.S. support of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship led to both Iraq wars. That was not intended either.) The Bush administration, of course, planned on a rapid and successful campaign in Iraq and instead found themselves mired in conflict and increasingly isolated on the world stage. Bin Ladin’s followers certainly lucked out in unintended consequences, for surely the Bush administration did not intend the present mess. “Shock and awe,” we were told, would be a quick, cheap, painless solution, but this quick fix, with its overdependence on military technology, made things worse, especially for the Iraqi people, and crippled policy making in the U.S.

One of the risks that all governments face is that in identifying an enemy they become progressively more like that enemy in a vicious circle of escalating armament and reprisal. Not only has the United States incurred enmity throughout the Muslim world, it has created possibilities for Muslim politicians hostile the U.S. to seize increasing power. There is an eerie symmetry between U.S. President George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmood Ahmadi-Nejad: both have expanded their power by appealing to the most regressive and provincial parts of their religious communities, and neither has much respect for historical veracity. Back and forth, around and around, who benefits? Over and over, policies of reprisal have fairly similar consequences, which are often unforeseen. It is profoundly sad to watch the State of Israel, founded in hope, succumbing to the role of oppressor.

Do we have the capacity to learn from experience? Think your issue. Learning from experience depends on reflecting on it. Every action taken is likely to have multiple consequences that are not easy to foresee unless the right questions are asked. Most important, sometimes an action has the effect of increasing the problem it was meant to address.


Think Your Issue III: Climate Change

Vice president Gore has made a movie which attempts to do two things: it attempts to make Americans really worried about climate change, worried enough to change their behavior, and it attempts to teach them to think about the issue. Personally, I would go for the thinking. Fear sometimes works against thought and fades faster than understanding. Threats are not enough, isolated facts are not enough, we have to understand the pattern, and Gore has some great diagrams.

It is almost impossible to talk sense about climate change without some grounding in systems thinking because there is so much that seems counter-intuitive if you look at the parts in isolation. Causation does not proceed in the same way as logic. In logic, we try to avoid circular arguments, but in systems circular causation is common, and gradual changes can be self-reinforcing so they loop back to become runaways. What we have regarded as a stable pattern that made life on the planet possible has proved to be the result of many interlocking factors, such that a small change in one can lead to massive change, and interventions have paradoxical outcomes and unexpected consequences.

My first thought on encountering contemporary earth systems science was that it is the place to start teaching children to think in terms of systems with many interacting parts. But then again, perhaps it is the adults who impose lineal thinking on children by insisting, through curricular structures and testing procedures, that they pay attention to one thing at a time, rather than to the whole picture.

Even the simple distinction between weather and climate is part of a big and important idea about how we think. Consider a recent spring day in New England, where I live, a day of cold, miserable drizzle. On a day like that, someone is sure to say, “Well, I guess all that stuff about global warming is a bunch of hooey.” I hear it every time the mercury drops. The truth is that just as one swallow does not make a summer, so no one day’s weather proves anything about climate. Nor is climate a matter of local averages. One day’s weather is what it is, neither usefully representative nor predictive. But of course we make the same kind of intellectual misjudgment when we judge whole populations by a few cases (or pass legislation that hampers everyone’s lives based on one scandal, one tragic accident, one horrendous crime).

We have another problem in New England: To hear people talk, all weather is abnormal. If you don’t like the weather, they say, wait a while and it will change. But in any system, as with the temperature of a house that is controlled by a thermostat, what appears to be stability can be recognized as a matter of fluctuation. The weather fluctuates – of course – with the seasons. It fluctuates from day to day and from year to year. Without the human capacity to keep records, the awareness of fluctuations could block awareness of climate change and can still make us dubious. But we aren’t dependent on mentally averaging the fluctuations to understand change but on carefully accumulated scientific knowledge. If the system is destabilized by a change in average temperature, much greater fluctuations are likely. That’s the extreme weather that has been occurring.

Not only does a cold spring not contradict global warming, we have to consider that in an unstable future New England might either become tropical or arid, might get considerably hotter or be plunged into a new ice age. Here’s how the ice age would work. When water is chilled in the northern hemisphere it sinks, allowing warmer water to move northward – our friend the Gulf Stream – which is balanced by the cold water flowing southward along the ocean floor. This creates a big figure loop-de-loop called the Atlantic conveyor, governed by differences in temperature and salinity. When a lot of ice melts, as it is doing unexpectedly rapidly due to increases in average temperature (with some local patches of increased ice), it produces fresh water run-off which can halt this exchange. The melting of polar ice caps will cause low-lying communities to be flooded. If the Atlantic conveyor is halted, the Eastern United States and Europe would become dramatically colder.

It’s tempting also to impose familiar judgments of good and bad on parts of systems. Global changes in average temperature are due to unprecedented increases in CO2 in the atmosphere, which are largely due to human activity. So is CO2 a bad thing? Life of course depends on a cycle in which humans and other creatures breathe in oxygen and get the energy for their lives by metabolizing food, breathing out CO2. Plants take in CO2 and use solar energy to make (by photosynthesis) the compounds that are the basis for all food and also exist in fossilized form as coal and oil, releasing oxygen.

CO2 is not bad – skeptics are right that we should not call it a “pollutant,” as it is indeed part of life. But humans today are releasing growing quantities of CO2 by burning fossil hydrocarbons created by plants in earlier ages to obtain the energy that runs cars and factories and heats our houses,. Lots of things can be toxic when they get out of proportion. The problem is that our input into a balanced system is throwing it out of balance. The increasing CO2 in the atmosphere has the effect of retaining solar radiation, like the glass on a green house, rather than letting it bounce back into space. Throwing the system out of balance creates perturbations (as the warming of the ocean is creating stronger and more devastating hurricanes from year to year).

What humans tend to do is to tamper with some part of a larger system without noticing the wider side effects.

What else inhibits thinking about this “inconvenient truth”? Humans have difficulty thinking about problems that do not have a predictable date line (all the experts predicted that there would be terrorist attacks within the US, but little attention was paid because no date was specified). We can’t just say it will happen after our life times – it could happen within a decade (not overnight as in the scare movie The Day After Tomorrow). Humans have difficulty thinking about problems that do not have a clear pattern of assignable interests and jurisdictions. Averting catastrophic climate change is everyone’s job – and no one’s; it calls for a level of global cooperation never achieved before (during an era of go-it-alone politics). The solutions will require long term, sustained effort – maintaining a balance, as dieters discover, is much harder than making a quick change. And it’s unpleasant, taking some of the fun out of a new SUV. Just how adaptable is human intelligence for long term survival?

Can we think about and discuss this issue? Do we as individuals and as societies have the intelligence to link this issue to our political processes and to the choices we make in our lives? Serious thinking is about recognizing patterns and connections.


Think Your Issue IV: Aging

Aging? Who wants to think about that? Probably most people don’t want to, but they do, usually with anxiety and without bringing much intelligence to bear. There are those reminders that keep you from forgetting for too long. A few gray hairs, a receding hairline, a forgotten errand. And, of course, an invitation to join the AARP when you turn fifty. So we begin to take sensible steps for financial security and sustained health and try to deny the other stuff through disguise or humor instead of thinking it through.

Thinking about aging is blocked by anxiety about what can happen when bodies and minds break down: we fear rejection, abandonment, penury, and a painful death. We fear being a burden, and take precautions to prevent it. But we also fear becoming useless or irrelevant without seeing the new ways in which older adults are contributing and influencing society.

Age is an issue that really cries out for thought in a broader context. How much of our thinking about aging comes from images seen in childhood in an era when health was different? Could thinking honestly about aging and death lead to broad social conclusions about how society reproduces itself and manages both change and continuity, instead of just personal strategies? Could we become a society that celebrates aging as a time of growth, as a time of becoming more rather than less? It is profoundly worrying that at a time when we are living longer we are thinking shorter.

We know that aging and death happen to everyone, but at some level we think of them as inappropriate invasions rather than as integral to personhood and humanness. The habit of thinking of aging and death (like work and child bearing) as punishments imposed on humankind is probably older than the Bible. In some traditions, all illness and death are explained as the result of malevolent forces. In our society, aging and death are seen as flaws to be fixed by technology and a can-do attitude, or at least concealed by cosmetics and age-segregation. Like the denial of sexuality, the denial of aging and death create a habit of distorted and non-systemic thinking that blocks understanding of our species in the natural world.

Why not regard the presence of older adults as intrinsic to humanness, one of those oddities of the human species, like language or opposable thumbs or the separation of sexuality from the estrus cycle, that have made cultural evolution possible? In some species – mostly social species with a substantial capacity for learning – survival past the age of reproduction seems to offer selective advantages. Anthropologists have documented the fact that, cross culturally, human infants with living grand parents (especially the maternal grandmother) have a better chance of survival to adulthood.

Perhaps the presence of adults with a very different depth of experience is not an inconvenience but a necessity. We may prefer fair weather for outdoor play, but the rain is an essential part of the balance. Oddly, we think of longevity as a sign of progress but not as a cause of progress – we are proud to keep people alive longer but have forgotten how to value their contribution. Just possibly, a society with larger numbers of seniors might be more peaceful, less aggressive, and have a longer perspective.

But that cannot happen unless older adults, as individuals, stop hiding their age and instead claim it with pride and assert the unique value of what they have to contribute. The effort to look younger does have advantages for the individual and feels good at first, but it involves a subtle long term undermining of self respect. It certainly sells products, but it has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing prejudice.

We need to rethink the role of elders – of whom we have more than ever before – in society. Why are elders so valued in some traditions and marginalized in others? How does longevity need to be reinterpreted in an environment of constant change? Answers to this question can lead to new kinds of participation, new ways of distributing property, and an increased emphasis on lifelong learning and adaptation to change.


Think Your Issue V: Faith Riven Debates

Americans today are sharply divided and antagonistic about matters of religion. Suddenly the separation of Church and State seems to be under attack in a new way, and at the same time sectarian conflicts are increasing all over the world. Differences that could once largely be ignored have suddenly become important, destroying practical working alliances and friendships, as if it is no longer possible to “agree to disagree” about faith and get on with practical efforts.

The key issue is not the specific historical creeds but differences in the logical structures of belief and the importance of integration and consistency in the way beliefs are held, the kind of truth they are felt to represent. There are some believers for whom the separation of Church and State is literally unthinkable, for life does not make sense unless all of the details are seen as reflecting a divine plan. For others, such a separation is not only a protection but is deeply appropriate to the way they live their faith.

Theologians and historians of religion tend to be concerned with doctrines and doctrinal differences, but ordinary believers often see things differently. The great majority seem to accept the idea that religion can be fairly loosely coupled to the rest of life, related to most decisions in a rather general way in the context of community norms. For them, affiliation with a religious community affirms that the universe is in some sense benevolent and that virtuous behavior does matter. Ceremonies and scriptures are valued as reminders of that affirmation and ways of sharing it, but the specific details are fairly loosely connected. Faith, in this sense, is more a character trait, what Erik Erikson called “basic trust,” than an opinion, one that sanctifies the common sense of a particular time and place and may, in doing so, support tolerance. In this sense, faith no doubt has a positive effect on the behavior and well-being of hundreds of thousands of human beings, everywhere on the planet, within the context of every kind of creed or practice. In the United States, many people take it for granted that the system of government is good and therefore generally compatible with their faith.

Most human beings accept the assumptions of their societies without checking out all the connections and live easily with substantial inconsistencies, which is probably healthy up to a point. At the same time, all human beings have some tendency to seek order among ideas and to avoid furnishing their brains and memories with an unintegrated miscellany. The search for some degree of unifying meaning is probably universal, but happily it is not always carried to its logical conclusion. For where consistency is important, the premise of an all-powerful God intimately involved with human affairs cannot but define all other reality both broadly and in very specific ways. It is not just part of the picture but the overwhelming fact that defines all the rest. Logically, the actual existence of an omnipotent deity, both loving and judging, cannot be a small matter, cannot be peripheral, but is rather the basis against which everything else is judged. Eternity trumps the present. Not surprisingly, religious traditions undergo waves of systematization and demythologizing, of purging and heretic hunting, in the search for consistency.

Believers around the world and throughout history have accepted the legends of their communities without the criteria that would allow them to critique their literal truth as they may do today, and have revered great bodies of tradition combining very different kinds of ideas. But as logic and verification became more of an issue for western thinkers, the sentences in which beliefs were expressed underwent a subtle shift in meaning that made them increasingly vulnerable to question. Some simply discarded them, while some seized on the assertion of the inerrancy of scripture as the great simplifying solution – the great restorer of consistency. Unconsciously, believers had adopted an altered (and narrowed) concept of truth, for which the model was science. Thus, “creation science.” The intellectual pattern of fundamentalism is, in my view, a very modern phenomenon (the movement itself, within Protestant Christianity, asserting the inerrancy of scripture, is a late 18-19th century phenomenon). Others, also often unconsciously, came to regard religious language as expressing a different kind of truth, more similar to poetry than to science.

Both Christianity and Islam have gone through eras of open discussion, speculation, and diversity, allowing the blossoming of imagination and the arts, followed by eras of systematization and rigidity, including witch-hunts and persecutions of heretics. These different processes and emphases show up today in differences between styles of belief within these huge communities, as individuals strive for their own consistencies. Tens of thousands of Catholics would say they are loyal to the Church but don’t believe the Church should decide issues like the use of birth control for them or for others. Tens of thousands of Muslims who are not sympathetic to terrorists feel a lingering respect for the commitment that inspires suicide bombers and the attention they command.

Those who reject the more extreme affirmations of faith sometimes feel a bit apologetic, as if their compromises represented weakness, and hesitate to reject the extremists. The martyr, after all, is playing a winning card in the argument both with believers and unbelievers, by asserting that faith is absolutely central, more central than life. When individuals choose or seek martyrdom they may indeed be striving to convince themselves that they really mean it and that they are acting in alignment with their most basic identity. Not surprisingly, coercion and the willingness to take the lives of others often accompany the willingness to give up one’s own life, just as they do for patriots who follow their belief in a political system into danger in warfare. Those who call for moderation and tolerance are easily painted as lukewarm – as wimps.
We do have to learn more about how to honor and converse with respect with all those, of whatever tradition, for whom faith is a general premise compatible with a broader tolerance, those who can live with a degree of ambiguity and do not resort to violence to prove their sincerity. We have to learn that we can be faithful without asserting that all disagreement is evil or demonic. But it’s important to recognize that for many people this kind of faith, that stops short of asserting literal and overwhelming truth, just doesn’t make sense. So we should also continue to beware of the minority for whom “faith” is so absolute that it literally makes discussion impossible.