Sometimes it is amazing to think we can remember events in the far and distant past. Three mornings ago, huddled over my usual first cup of coffee, still hazed in the drifting images of dreams that yet lingered, one of those memories, long stashed away somewhere in my mind, aimlessly awakened, like the b-roll of an old black and white movie, and, for a moment, took me back into my past.
Summers in New Haven are miserable. The humidity of Long Island Sound is trapped between the Island and the hills that stand north and east of the city. My father, never one to suffer patiently, was attempting to fix the stairs at the back of the house. Tiny drops of water whisked around his bald head, dripped over his glasses, and disappeared into his wet white tee shirt. His sight was terrible as it was. With the sweat washing over his glasses, well, he became ever more impatient and unsettled.
Never one to think before I spoke, or so he told me many times, and precocious at 7, I watched perplexed as he first tore away and then began replacing the lower steps. I understood what he was doing — at the 5,000 foot level as we say these days. But from a practical perspective, well, there had to be a better way. I wasted no time in telling him so. My father stopped working. Put the hammer down. Paused for a moment and then more or less looked over his right shoulder at me.
“What would you do?” he asked.
I, or course, told him. Keep in mind that my father was an engineer. I was just a precocious child given to reading everything I could find and pondering whatever happened to be in front of me. As we often say today, rebuilding stairs was clearly outside my wheelhouse. And yet, that hadn’t stopped me.
When my father finished listening, he stood up, looked down at me, and said, “While what you suggested might work, it’s too complicated.” He then explained all the reasons why my design was not workable. When he finished, he said, “The simplest solution is always the best.”
The simplest solution is always the best.
I have carried those words with me my entire life, and, I admit, during my days in information technology, they served me well. And he was right. Usually, even when faced with complex problems, the solution is simple. Usually.
But this isn’t about my time in IT. It’s about applying my father’s words — his version of Ockham’s Razor — to the life we live in the world today.
Twenty years ago, I found myself teaching full time in a small college northeast of Tampa. Most of my time there would be spend teaching required courses, and one of those courses was Contemporary Moral Problems. I’d spent much of my grad school time at Yale studying ethics, but, to be honest, it wasn’t high on my list of things to teach. I decided I’d try to engage the students quickly because I thought they’d be even less interested in studying ethics than I was. So, I walked in the first day and posed a real-life problem. “You find an underage student drinking in the dorm. What is the ethical thing to do?” I had already prepared my response to each of the answers I thought I would encounter.
The response I received was one I never thought I’d get. The resounding answer was that they would do nothing. Generally, their responses fell into two categories. The first, “it isn’t my business to judge someone else’s behavior,” and the second, “if that’s what he/she wants to do, if he or she feels that what they are doing is right for them, who am I to judge?” Both responses, in retrospect, are simple solutions to complex problems. Live and let live. It isn’t MY problem. It isn’t MY responsibility. Yes, a simple solution to a complex problem. Just walk away. If it doesn’t impact My life, it isn’t MY problem.
Moral problems are rarely simple, however.
They are more like rabbit holes and rat mazes than they are like properly designing the back stairs to the house where I grew up. I’ve also learned that, sometimes, attempting to solve complex problems with simple solutions can result in chaos. Instead of solving the problem, the problem becomes worse. Sometimes, what appears to be a simple problem is simply a smaller part of a larger nexus of complex, interrelated problems. Sometimes, what appears to be a simple problem, isn’t a problem at all. It’s the end of a long series of interwoven problems that lead to utter chaos. The problem is that we don’t see, can’t see, or won’t see, how complicated and complex the problem is.
That’s where we are today.
Whether we are on the right or the left, conservative, liberal, moderate, we seem to think we can fix whatever problem we face simply by passing a law, creating a social program, ending a social program, or by clinging to some time-worn ideology that, at some point in history, made sense. History teaches us, I would argue, that passing a law, creating or eliminating a social program, clinging to an ideology, never solve our problems. They represent the pretense that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that if we fix one small part of a complex problem, we have fixed all of it.
If madness is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then we are mad and have been mad for a long time.
Take for example the current debate about healthcare. We’ve tried passing a law. We call it ACA. At best, it sort of worked. Revoking it will sort of work — insofar as all the problems associated with it will disappear — but revoking it ignores the fact that healthcare is a deeply complex collection of problems that dates back well-more than 50 years.
To fix healthcare, we need to address the problem of tort reform — which has been talked about for over 50 years but which we have never addressed. To fix healthcare, we need to address the fact that Americans live a fundamentally unhealthy life style. Again, we talk about it, but, other than smaller portions of soft drinks in cans, we have done little to address this. To fix healthcare, we need to fix the problem of preexisting conditions — insurance companies in general and health insurance companies in specific are in the business of assuming risk. But, they are also in the business of making money and they control which risks they will and won’t take. Then there is the rising cost of healthcare, fueled in part by the fact that so many of us don’t have and can’t afford healthcare, but find ourselves in a situation whether we wish to or not, when we have to get healthcare. So, those of us who use the system simply have to pay more to cover the cost of those who can’t pay. We talk about the escalating cost of drugs, but we can’t seem to find the moral, and political, will to fix the problem. Subsidizing the cost of prescriptions doesn’t fix the problem. It just kicks the can down the road. And now, on top of all that, we have the growing presence of for-profit healthcare.
If you think that this essay is about solving healthcare, it isn’t. It is about changing how we look at — and presumably solve — the problems we face. If madness is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, then we are mad and have been mad for a long time. We can’t legislate morality, and yet we try to. We can’t legislate away any of the problems we face, and yet we try and try and try. Then, when it all falls apart and the legislation doesn’t work, we are always shocked, dismayed, perplexed.
Yeah, well….
To solve our moral problems we need to look closely at ourselves and our world. We need to think about how we see the world and how we understand who we think we are. As long as the dominant model that underlies our understanding of who we are and the world we live in is rooted in the 18th Century, and as long as the inherent racism of that model remains unchallenged, we can pass all the civil rights legislation we want. Racism will still remain. We can pass all the anti-discrimination legislation we want, we can demand that people be sexually inclusive, that the right to one’s own sexual expression is guaranteed under the law, and we will likely only make the discrimination worse.
I can’t make you like me. Hell, I can’t make you accept the fact that I live next door. The problem with the Progressive Agenda is that it presumes you should care about me, that you can be made to care about me, when in fact, caring about anyone other than yourself and your family is foreign to capitalism. The assumption that the solution to every problem we face is for the government to pay for something isn’t tenable. You can’t spend your way out of the problems we face. Fixing healthcare, for example, isn’t like buying a new car when your old one finally dies, and yet that’s the way we seem to think about it.
Unless you retreat to a cabin alone in the woods, all human actions are entwined and all human relations are interrelated.
The problem with the Conservative Agenda is that it chooses not to see that the Rugged Individual was a myth that never worked, never had any viability and was never ever real. The assumption that underlies the Conservative Agenda, the assumption that if we’d all just step up and take care of ourselves, we wouldn’t need any “entitlements,” fundamentally ignores the fact that some of us just can’t. Some of us need help. The equality inherent in the Conservative Agenda, the idea that we can all make it if we just work hard enough, that theoretical equality of opportunity is sufficient to fix all our problems, is as false as the idea that the earth is the center of the universe. The Conservative belief that making the wealthy wealthier will somehow benefit the rest of us failed 30 years ago, and yet, here it is again. Social Darwinism has been dead for more than a century, and yet….
Unless you retreat to a cabin alone in the woods, all human actions are entwined and all human relations are interrelated. Everything you do impacts me, and everything I do impacts you. So, what are we to do?
First, we can recognize the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves. We are confronted with deeply complex problems that took centuries to create, and which will take time and patience to unravel and solve. Second, we need to stop looking at the world the way our predecessors have for generations. We don’t live in their world. The problems we face couldn’t and didn’t exist in their world. So, looking backward won’t do us any good, except to see how we got here and what didn’t solve our problems. Third, we need to let go of the dog whistle words that we inherit from our ideologies. What a Republican means by equality and what a Democrat means are two different, mutually exclusive experiences. In fact, equality is an illusion. No one equals anyone else. This isn’t a math problem. Humans, all humans, are different. Distinct. Unique. Fourth, diversity is divisive. As long as I see all the ways in which you are not like me, I will never see all that we have in common. We are, despite our differences and our uniqueness, human.
A long time ago, growing up in rural New England, there were only 4 TV stations, one of which was out of New York. It showed only reruns of black and white TV series from the 1950s. One was Broken Arrow. In one episode I have never forgotten, a Native American and his wife were cornered by white farmers who want to take their land, and who see the Native Americans not as human, but as savages. Overcome with sadness and tears, the woman sinks to her knees with her hands clutching the legs of her husband. The hero of the series said to the white farmers, “See, she’s crying — she’s human.”
And that is the point. We are all human, and all that matters is determining what the human and humane course of action is. Kindness, love, patience, care, know no color, no ethnicity, no political affiliation, no religion, no sexual orientation. They know only our humanity. It is time to be human.
