The dreaded yet inevitable future has arrived, and
I, along with all the other baby boomers who are fortunate enough to have
survived our own excesses, am indisputably and irrevocably a member of the much
maligned older generation, but elderhood, at least to me, feels curiously
different from what I envisioned it would be like. Somewhat surprisingly, like
most of my peers, I didn’t end up being nearly as stupid and insensitive as I
feared I would become. I might not be as wise, as open to new ideas, as loving,
as engaged, and as responsive as I wish I were. My passion has often come out
sideways even after I was long past the point where, having reached a certain
chronological age, I should have become more even tempered. I haven’t always
practiced good sense, even after I had accumulated enough experience to be
guided by lessons I should have learned. Getting burned and feeling foolish has
often left me discouraged, disheartened, and reticent. But while I might have
lost touch with my heart at various points along the way, I’m not dead yet, and
I have a deep understanding of the words that were written and put to music by
one of the icons of my generation, “I
was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”
Much of what I have learned along the way has been
agonizing, often mostly due to the embarrassment and sorrow that came with the inescapable
recognition that the worst of what I was a part of or witnessed was utterly
preventable, but the pain has also been tied to a death of innocence and an
ensuing recognition that the human condition is inherently bumpy, jarring, and
unrelenting. Civilization might have come a long way toward softening some of
life’s harshest edges for some, but for many denizens of the planet, life is
still, to borrow from
Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” and is haunted by
“continual fear” and “danger of violent death” without any of the refuge provided by the refinements of art, literature, or social institutions. It is a problem that is complicated by many layers of difficulties. It’s like
peeling an onion. Before we can get to the heart of the matter, we have to come
to terms with perilous potential pitfalls that could doom our efforts or thwart
our best intentions before they even see the light of day.
Even if we could clearly identify the problems
that need to be solved and realistically assess the challenges, even if we had
a robust political culture with vital traditions upholding free speech and free
press, even if we could even the playing field and include those who are
systematically marginalized, even if undistorted information was readily
available and verifiable, even if more of us would diligently pursue
objectivity and resist confirmation bias, even if what was most in the
forefront were ideas based on an examination and well-reasoned analysis of the
best evidence, even if creative approaches to problem-solving were the norm,
even if we were to hammer out a clear vision for achievable objectives, even if
we recruited an army of idealistic and spirited optimists who want to have a
positive impact on the world around them, even if we were committed to work
together and overcome our animosities, even if we were to break the solution
down into bite-sized tasks that can be delegated to specific individuals, even
if we were to hatch a concrete plan with a complete set of marching orders,
even our execution was flawless and all our little efforts effective, and even
if our patient perseverance paid off as significant incremental gains
accumulated and turned into tipping points, actually achieving viable solutions
would still be maddeningly elusive.
There are considerable obstacles involved in
overcoming the fear of change and achieving critical mass, but those obstacles
are not the only challenges we face. Actually reaching viable solutions involves
resolute trudging through unfamiliar territory that is full of unanticipated disorienting
difficulties. Life is challenging not only because of the sheer size and
complexity of the
problems, not only because of the obscurity of the leverage points, and not only because
of how unclear we are about what will even work and how muddled our efforts
tend to be, we also are faced with realities like competition for scarce
resources and unintended consequences.
Usually, a sufficient number of small benevolent
deeds can be counted on to swell into a rising tide that lifts all boats, but
ultimate outcomes are always unpredictable. Sometimes even when we pursue our
highest and most widely agreed upon ideals, our well meaning efforts morph into
unfortunate twists and turns and aggregate into unforeseeable social realities
that are unexpectedly more disruptive than the sum of their parts. Most of our
worst social problems are the consequence of wounds we inflict on ourselves and
each other, but assigning actual responsibility and doing something about the situation
is difficult because the blows are mostly administered with “elbows rather than
fists”. Some of the worst historical occurrences have been set in motion by
good or innocuous motives on the part of basically decent people pursuing their
best moral instincts and making what seemed to them to be virtuous choices on
behalf of their families, their religion, or their ethnic group. Unfortunately,
the most vulnerable members of society and the greater social good got elbowed
in the process.
Large, complex social problems are tricky because
their solutions are counterintuitive. What would seem to be the obvious and
most natural responses can be way off base even to the point of being
counterproductive. We are often in danger of making things worse. Every move we
make sends ripples throughout our entire ecosystem, sometimes amplifying
themselves in startling ways. A classic, though perhaps hyperbolic,
illustration of how seemingly insignificant activity can become magnified within
complex systems is the theoretical possibility that a flutter of a butterfly
wing in Brazil can set up air currents that will accelerate and intensify to
produce a tornado in Oklahoma. Contemporary society is an especially volatile,
complex system. Industrial capitalism has fostered economic development and
created prosperity for unprecedented numbers of people, but our affluence has come
at a cost. Our enhanced lifestyles have caused an alarming depletion of natural
resources, thereby disrupting the increasingly fragile ecosystem of which we
are inescapably a part.
And the modern sensibility, a culmination of
millennia of striving toward the advancement of civilization, has led to a
weakening of cultural traditions and social institutions that formerly afforded
a measure of stability and restraint. So besides the utterly predictable byproducts
of our consumer society like climate change, there have been some regrettable ricochets
from efforts that were aimed toward fostering a society that would be more
rational and measured. We no longer burn heretics at the stake or brutally
torture common criminals in public, but the very social currents that so called
enlightened attitudes set in motion have awakened and unleashed some disturbing
upsurges of human inhumanity that provide glimpses into what members of our
species are capable of. Current and recent generations have witnessed the rise
of fascism, two world wars, genocide on an unprecedented scale, heartbreaking deluges
of war refugees, and the mass incarceration of groups of people who have
conveniently been deemed human refuse and scapegoats. And instant global
interconnectivity provides recruits for all manner of groups driven by hatred
and propagates mob behavior that is larger in scope and, at times, even more
dangerous than the angry crowds with pitch forks that terrorized earlier
generations.
From a purely psychological point of view, it is
eminently understandable that so many resources are invested in the
construction of well insulated cocoons. Some of what drives the retreat from
meaningful engagement is what
Martin Seligman named
learned helplessness. Learned helplessness refers to an outlook on life that is a natural response to
being ground down by situations in which all efforts to achieve any gains are
futile. The concept was prompted by a lamentably cruel experiment involving
dogs that was staged against the back drop of the famous experiment with dogs
by
Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov discovered
that dogs can be conditioned to react to certain stimuli in specific ways.
Pavlov’s discovery was developed into a psychological concept that came to be
called
classical conditioning. In order for classical conditioning to be operative, the stimuli have to be
consistently linked to the delivery of tangible rewards or punishments. The
experiments that prompted Seligman to come up with the concept of learned
helplessness explored what would happen if the reward system was arbitrary and contradictory.
Eventually, the dogs became despondent, resigned, listless, and defeated to the
point of being reduced to a virtual state of paralysis.
It is not difficult to extrapolate the findings of
the experiment and find a similar pattern among human beings. Many of us find
ourselves in baffling circumstances that can lead to an attitude of resignation
and to beliefs that are alternately darkly fatalistic and dangerously delusional.
The human experience is characterized by bewildering unpredictability and
arbitrary outcomes. Participation in modern society, in particular, is fraught
with snares. The common tendency to attribute life’s events to capricious
forces is unsurprising, as is the irresistible trend toward retreating into
submissive acquiescence, silos of isolation, mistrust of outsiders, impotent
rage, or kneejerk blaming of convenient scapegoats. As
Thoreau wrote, “
the mass of [humanity] lead lives of quiet desperation. What is calledresignation is confirmed desperation.” And it is a vicious circle. Learned helplessness only worsens the plight. Fearful
and anxious hordes of ordinary people who are overwhelmed by free-floating
feelings of helplessness create fertile soil for systemic injustice and all
manner of atrocities.
The crux of the cure is a prescription that is
unapologetically uncomfortable, not because medicine ought to taste bad, not
because suffering and struggling are good for us, not because people need to be
humbled by experiences of powerlessness or shamed into submission; instead, unease
is the only honest response to what is going on. Talking about modern global
realities honestly and comprehensively visits upon us a considerable degree of
anguish, especially if we are fully awake. Not only is it agonizingly difficult
to pay attention to what is going on, to empathize, to honestly face the depth
and the breadth of social and economic injustice, to be besieged with feelings
of impotence and frustration, and to somehow summon a human response regardless
of how difficult it is; plotting a course is complicated. Being human is
unavoidably untidy and unwieldy. To quote the common paraphrase of a passage
from a
poem by
Robert Burns, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Human history is full of
unintended consequences that turned into tragic turns for the worse. Not only is
life untamable; we often make things worse when we try to get it to settle
down. Even the most well thought out and carefully designed remedies proffered
by those who want to shape reality to their own views, rather than the other
way around, are inevitably shortsighted. They miss subtle but crucial nuance and
are out of touch with concerns about pragmatic viability.
It is not hard to understand the impasse that led
an exasperated
D. H. Lawrence to write to
BertrandRussell, in the aftermath of
their intense but short-lived friendship, “Get back to mathematics where you
can do some good; leave talk about human beings to alone.” Some of the problem
has to do with what we might call the nerd factor. With notable exceptions, the
smartest people aren’t typically the best at achieving the kind of success that
involves irrational leaps toward prioritizing the bottom-line, thus the quip
sometimes used by those who feel intimidated by someone’s intelligence or
education, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” It is impossible to
both conceptualize reality in a way that
totally makes sense
and be effective.
Russell embodied the relentlessly systematic pursuit of consistency that
characterizes many modern intellectuals, and consequently, he underestimated
life’s complexity and unwittingly trampled on delicate realms that are greater
than what he could envision.
So while Russell,
Lawrence’s
feelings notwithstanding, actually did make some significant contributions to
philosophy, his blind spots exemplify the overconfidence that comes with
classical conditioning. It is not surprising to find out that Russell was an
enthusiastic fan of Pavlov and, by extension, subscribed to the modernistic
understanding of the universe upon which classical conditioning is based, a well-behaved
and orderly mechanism that is governed by Newtonian laws.
Classical conditioning in its varying
forms is arguably the bane of modern existence.
Lawrence was not alone
in his scorn toward the kind of thinking that Russell epitomized. Classical
conditioning has provided
inspiration for
dystopian fiction.
Dissatisfaction with
modernism in general characterized much of twentieth century philosophy.
Russell’s point of view and the simple, innocent
desire to make things better have their appeal; nonetheless, frequent
disappointment, frustration, setbacks, backlash, and outright defeat are
unavoidable. Even our most worthy efforts lead to suboptimal outcomes. And
that’s on our best days. Nonetheless, concerns about the inefficacy of many of
our efforts are mostly moot. The fact is that we usually don’t make it to the
point even of being able to make hopeful stabs in the dark. Learned
helplessness is commonplace, not just because of insurmountable obstacles,
overwhelming difficulties, elusive leverage points, and unpredictable outcomes,
and not just because the opposition to the greatest good for the greatest
number is so well-funded by deep pocket special interests. Most of the time,
how to go about finding common cause is hardly clear because of inherent moral
ambiguity, honest conflicts around life’s thorniest questions, radically
different starting points, wildly divergent guiding values and tastes, competing
priorities, and colliding differences in style.
There are no right answers to the most central
ethical dilemmas human beings face. Life is full of hard choices and a lot of
gray area. Ethics usually comes down to a question of priorities rather than
whether we want to do the right thing. For example, if I encounter someone who
is in distress, do I stop to help her? There is no universally applicable
correct response. My decision will be informed by a number of factors. What is
the context? Is the person a close friend or member of my family? Or is she a
stranger or even an adversary? How much trouble would helping her be? How risky
does it feel? Most of us like to see ourselves as basically good people, but
preserving our positive self image often comes at the expense of a coherent
ethical rationale. How do we reconcile our lofty stated values with our actual
choices? What is the ethical justification for caring more about whether our
own children have braces than we care about whether another child has enough to
eat or has a safe place to live? Most people have an intuitive sense about
that, but few can articulate it in a way that doesn’t get sidetracked by
cognitive dissonance or sound like a rationalization for selfishness.
The desire to block out any evidence of moral
ambiguity or anything that would disturb our tidy little worldview is perfectly
understandable, but at the end of the day, few of us actually want to be the
kind of people who are completely indifferent to the fact that huge numbers of
our fellow human beings are deprived of any opportunity to achieve a decent
human existence, nor would we deliberately choose to live in a world where
systemic injustice is never challenged. We can’t be expected to solve all the
problems associated with insatiable human need, but that doesn’t mean that we
don’t do anything at all. But whom do we choose to help? How do we ration our
compassion? We need to find a way to practice some sort of triage, focusing our
efforts where we can actually do some good, but knowing how to do that is
hardly easy or clear.
Our only chance to overcome learned helplessness
and reclaim our dignity and self-respect as human beings would start with doing
what we can to rekindle passion, rediscover innocent hopefulness, and renew our
resolve to pursue the dreams of who we can be. Lawrence’s
chiding of Russell was justified. He further elaborated his point in another
letter, “Even your mathematics are only dead truth: and no matter how fine you
grind the dead meat, you’ll not bring it to life again.” Finding our hearts
might involve more unlearning than learning. We can’t respond humanly unless we
let go of the need to have everything neatly fit into a well-ordered set of
explanations. However, the disturbance doesn’t stop there. Not only does the edgy
verve of the heart wreak havoc on the logically consistent castles in the air that
are imagined in intricate detail from within the sterile realm of the pure
intellect (Lawrence was hardly the first right-brained aesthete who has
deployed the language of the heart to wage war on the abstract precision and
theoretical soundness that left-brained intellectuals are so fond of), challenges
can also originate on the other end. In fact, we need large doses of critical
thinking to uncover what is hidden from casual observation, to connect the dots,
and to question complacent intuitive heuristics and overly confident snap
judgments.
Back and forth communication between the
idealistic zealotry of our hearts and the measured pragmatism of our heads
complicates things, but it is indispensible. Sometimes what the heart produces
is raw and reckless youthful energy that, like a bratty, rebellious, and
impetuous child, is brimming with uninhibited urgency, rampant restlessness,
unbridled agitation, and dangerous excess, and is in need of a calm adult
response and a gentle but firm guiding hand. In other words, the likes of both
Russell and Lawrence bring something important to the table. And they need each
other. Neither can afford to become smugly insulated from the unsettling
interactivity that is an inevitable feature of being a member of the human
race. To be human is to, sometimes pointedly, sometimes tentatively, sometimes
desperately, clamor for solutions that are both compassionate and effective.
Responding to the most challenging demands we face
usually begins with an emergence of a restless and agitated mood that is enflamed
by youthful dissatisfaction with the status quo and goaded by an edgy sense of
urgency, and then, if the mounting rumblings find some resonance within the
mainstream, a more emotionally detached contingent join the cause, and the nascent
movement becomes a focused, strategically effective, concerted effort by virtue
of being restrained, pruned, shaped, and channeled by intellectual discipline. Thus
the complex and disquieting intersection of, the heart and the head, two
incommensurable points
of view, each informing and challenging the other, brings unforeseeable variables
into the equation and intensifies ethical dilemmas. But in addition to the intense
tug-a-war between the passionate, impatient heart and the cautious, cool head, there
is an even more unsettling drama that stirs things up and upends the orderly
diagrams, graphs, charts, and blueprints that are tirelessly turned out by the
would-be architects of a more satisfactory world.
The dynamic interplay of the two contending
dispositions that vie for our allegiance doesn’t play out in a vacuum. There is
also a natural and inevitable cross-pollination between personal and collective
arenas. The main problem with conceptually neat approaches and overly
simplistic solutions (especially if there is moralistic agenda) is that they are
fundamentally anti-democratic, and as a consequence, they tend to crash and
burn or never even see the light of day because of their inherent frailty, a
lack of buy-in, frontal opposition, passive-aggressive foot-dragging, and outright
sabotage. Solving real problems entails keeping our eye on the ball, somehow
finding common ground amidst jarring upheavals, the disorientation that comes
with change, the intractable controversies, the pummeling antagonism, and the rough
and tumble process of negotiating and building consensus. The verb “compromise”
is frequently disparaged because of the way it is used to refer to acts that
reduce, weaken, corrupt, erode principles, undermine integrity, sacrifice
quality, or endanger chances for success; nonetheless, our only path to sanity entails
working with each other in spite of abundant examples of bad blood and
insurmountable differences in a long history of frequent failures to reach any
agreement regarding some of life’s most central themes.
Even kindergarten children understand the concept
of playing well with others, but what it takes to find common ground and how to
get there so we can work together relies on a myriad of tacit understandings
that have to be acquired along the way and on an adult perspective that grows
out of the experiences that come with showing up for life, many of which are painful
– the mixed results of good-faith hit-and-miss efforts, picking up the pieces
and moving on, letting go of false assumptions and expectations, being seasoned
by a deep acceptance of imperfect outcomes and inalterable givens, winnowing
the disappointments and the surprising successes of trial and error problem
solving, ripening, fermenting, maturing, mellowing, gaining stability and flexibility,
learning how to optimize, and falling into a sustainable marathon pace, loping
along with relentless steadiness and with an eye toward the future and abundant
new possibilities. Words that would adequately articulate the extraordinary
wisdom, subtle insight, and deft discernment of ordinary human beings elude our
grasp because so much of what makes even the most commonplace perception
possible is ineffable or intangible.
Truth with a big T is of no use. In fact, it gets
in the way. If there is any such thing as universal truth that can be glimpsed
by actual human beings, it is a moving target. There is disconcerting irony in
the recognition that, however excitable and volatile the heart might be, it
provides our only way into the eye of the storm. When we say we need to get to
the heart of the matter, that we need
to identify and advance that which is most central and essential, we are talking
about finding something that is located smack dab in the middle of a tempestuous
dynamic that is disorderly, disturbing, and ever-changing rather than reasonable,
customary, predictable, and respectable. How to deal with that is not something
we can figure out and nail down. The only way to build a stable basis for true
understanding is to reach deeper, to go beyond the limits of cerebral comprehension,
and to plunge forward along a path that involves trust, vulnerability, intimacy,
unguarded acceptance of radical uncertainty, and a thorough immersion in our deepest
and most passionate yearnings. What the heart knows is eternally new and full
of promise. Our best response to challenges is to honor what we know but don’t necessarily
know we know, and as Lawrence
put it at the end of one of his letters to Russell, “Stop working and being an
ego, & have the courage to be a creature.”
