The fights we have to have!

The fights we have to have!

Torrey Orton

November 25, 2009

Three posts ago, I was worrying about facts we cannot easily have – independent, neutrally sourced and, therefore, compellingly convincing ones. In our times, the drives for such differentiating substance in our preferred arguments become more profound with each passing day. In tandem, the counter-pressures multiply – spin, playing the man, falsifying, lying. This is summed neatly in the present dilemma of climate change – a 'proven' event whose proof is constantly under duress, especially about its provability.

While the simple answer to doubters / deniers / sceptics is that the accepted risk of inaction is better than 50% and so action is unarguably demanded, this even does not suffice to quiet their multiplying fears of taking action. We are, I expect, on the edge of a plunge into increasingly violent disputation of the competing claims in this area among others.

The evidence for this is increasing rates and types of fragmentation of public organisations and institutions. In Australia this appears daily in two political activities: those of the governments and those of their oppositions. In the states, the oppositions are almost non-existent, and in many cases are riven with internal disputes. These are played out on the national stage most dramatically in the Coalition's floundering about climate change. Characteristic of the decline of the normal institutions of policy debate and delivery is the rise of fringe - right or left side – players, both personal and organisational.

The "death panels" debacle in the US healthcare struggle is examined in detail as a case of the fake news getting irretrievably out of the hands of the real news dealers – the media. It and struggles about the causes and responses to the GFC are two other highly disputed domains of public discourse. Throw in the war on terror and we have a plethora of too slippery to touch dilemmas. All that's left is the clatter of competing beliefs, and troops lining up to get into a fight (e.g. the Tea Party players in the same healthcare debate).
A similar tone exists across waters in the UK - "The debate over climate change is becoming more vitriolic by the week." Financial Times Editorial 24/11/09.

How can we learn when we think wrongly ?

"....when two experts are offering diametrically opposed views about the same subject, at least one of them has to be wrong." Michael Coulter in The AGE Nov. 1,'09. This is a model of digital, black & white thinking. For the major issues of our times multi-dimensional, continuous variable thinking is a minimum starting place. However, the above pressures and drives promote the opposite. They encourage us to make one of them be wrong to sustain our beleaguered simplicities.

An additional problem is that most of those charged with assuring our future(s) are only capable of thinking about our world through from paradigms and perspectives they learned (if at all) more than twenty years ago. These paradigms were themselves the products of the mid-thirties to mid-sixties, and can only be wielded as one edged swords in combats for which flails would be more appropriate weapons. In turn, the stress of life and the idea marketplace force those ideas to be simplified to variations of either/or when to varying degrees both/and is more suitable.

These two factors – need for simplification and shortage of conceptual complexity – yield the economic 'debates' in Australia (and US, UK, and …) which centre around a couple of concepts from Adam Smith (choice and market) and some monetarist adjustments of the last 50 years.

Here, by contrast, Robert Skidelsky tries to make sense of the struggle for dominance in explanations of the GFC.

.... "In my view, Keynes' major contribution to economic theory was to emphasize the "extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made". The fact of their ignorance forces investors to fall back on conventions, the most important being that the present will continue into the future, that existing share prices sum up future prospects, and that if most people believe something, they must be right.

This makes for stability in markets as long as the conventions hold, but they can be overturned in the face of bad news, because "there is no firm basis of conviction to hold them steady".

Tipping or chaos?

In essence, this is what happened last year, and is where we are in our various struggles now. What we can predict from that is hard to know. We are in the region of tipping points (Gladwell, 2000) or chaos points (Ervin Laszlo, 2006) which I want to characterize as long term trends punctuated by short-term excitements of their environments. These, in retrospect, look like the expected tipping / chaos points of the theories.

This is also the region to which our accrued knowledge of life threats – the deep schemas and behaviour patterns (read habits) for defending ourselves from potentially terminal events – is oriented. The most important of these for humans are not the ones poppsychs endlessly berate as the old brain, and evolutionary outmodes which block better relating, communicating, decision-making…on and on.

What we are blocked by are real fears based on long term of threats to our viability. These, appropriately, push us towards powerful actions and fights we have to have. I fear we are daily closer as the world we know is irretrievably splintered by uncrossable gulfs of mutual ignorance.

What to do? I can only hope that seeing is a step towards doing. I believe that this can often be the case, but big numbers make it likely to be a bumpy passage. This gulf can be as big as realising that a published writer on challenges for our times includes only one item I have on my list of challenges! And he's at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. If we do not agree on the problems we'll surely have trouble with the facts.