Why Couldn't We See This Coming?
[i]
By Charles Rush
November 2, 2008
Romans 7: 15-20
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.2Mb) ]
“I have become a
problem unto myself”
– St. Augustine
rl Barth taught us to prepare sermons with the bible in one hand and the paper in the other. Today, I will try to do just that with thanks to Professor Barth, who is now on the other side. And my thanks to David Brooks, whose columns for the New York Times have been on a role lately.
Last Tuesday,
David was particularly prescient, and sparked the idea for this sermon.[ii]
He was taken by a piece of testimony from Alan Greenspan that also caused me to
pull off to the side of the road and write it down.
Mr. Greenspan,
the iconic Sphinx from the Federal Reserve- and I remember in the late 90's
seeing his portrait hanging on the walls of offices of investment bankers- was
testifying before Congress on how this all went wrong, and what his role and
the role of the Federal Reserve might have had to do with it. At some point,
one of the Congressmen asked him if he had made any mistakes in the conceptual
model that he was working with that encouraged ‘free markets and a relaxed
approach to regulation.'
Mr. Greenspan
actually made a startling response- and a profound one- that took me all the
way back to reading Adam Smith's The
Wealth of Nations in college. You may recall that Adam Smith argued that
markets function with an ‘invisible hand' promoting the social welfare of all
society when each person looks after their ‘enlightened self-interest'. It is
not perfect but on the whole, markets have a way of working things out,
rewarding prudent investors and punishing foolish ones, so that, on the
aggregate there is relative social prosperity and wealth for all.
If that is the
case, then how did this happen? How did it happen that these storied financial
firms ran themselves into the reef- one after the other after the other, and
this list would have been very long had not the governments of the world
stepped in?
So what was the
problem with his modeling? This was his answer, “I made a mistake in presuming
that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were
such as that they were the best capable of protecting their own shareholders
and their equity in the firms.”
People didn't
follow their own ‘enlightened self-interest'. This is one of the fundamental
axioms of not only the capitalist enterprise but also John Stuart Mill, Jeremy
Bentham, and a host of English thinkers that have insisted on a pragmatic view
of human nature and social structures.
Christian
realists have been critical of this view from the beginning because it doesn't
appreciate what we used to call the ‘sinful character' of human nature. I say,
used to, because Sin has been so overhyped and wrongly interpreted that it is
practically useless in our world. But the insights about sine are not useless,
at least not in their profoundest explication.
Christians have
argued since St. Augustine that humans are, so to speak, all sinful. We are
born this way, so to speak. At this moment, just forget everything you learned
growing up on this subject, and grant me one more paragraph.
It is not that
babies are sinful inherently and need a priestly blessing lest they go to hell,
a truly problematic idea that has been taught by the Orthodox Church for a very
long time.
No, in its
profound treatment, the best analogy I can come up with is a dysfunctional
alcoholic family. Children who are born into these families are damaged by the
social dynamics of their families before they actually understand that they are
being damaged. They are shaped, limited, truncated- but since this is all they
know- they aren't even aware of the damage they have… not until they are much
older and can step outside their social system and look at it with the help of
a friend or therapist.
So too with our
societies… Slave owning societies don't really understand how they are
dehumanizing themselves and their slaves to the extent that they are. We can
look back, from outside those societies and it is clear to us, but when you are
born into it, you get it but you don't really get it. Ditto, women in
patriarchal societies- why don't women in Afghanistan just rebel under such
oppression? They get it but they can't really get it because they are born into
it, aren't educated, don't have much opportunity to step outside of it…
Likewise
Summit… Here I falter because the fish can't see the water he swims in- but I
presume my grandchildren will think we were scandalous in our misuse of plastic
and prodigal in developing clean energy for our environment. We know this but
we can't stop doing it.
We are deformed
before we really even understand that we are being deformed.
So why didn't
we see it coming? A large part of this answer is that we created it,
participated in it, profited from it, and couldn't really see what was plainly
in front of us. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book on the coming collapse
entitled “The Black Swan” that drew upon some important new work in social
psychology. This work shows the human tendency to allow our biases to focus our
attention in such a way that we actually pre-select facts that we want to
notice that fit into our presumed interpretation of what we are looking at, so
that we discount overt evidence that contradicts our interpretation, and we
deflect our attention away from important data that would reverse our position.
Likewise, we tend to overvalue recent memory when we interpret the future, so
that when things are going up, we tend to presume an overly optimistic view of
the future. Likewise, we tend to presume that all manner of blind luck is
actually our clever skill. There is much more, I must skip, but a large part of
the answer is that we just don't see what is right in front of us.
So now, we have
even stand-up comics, explaining how credit-default swaps work, how ridiculous
the scheme was that we could purchase insurance on products that we didn't
actually own, and use the incentives from those derivative products to actually
push healthy companies into a downward spiral that they couldn't stop, so that
a few people made money while the firms themselves flew straight into the
ground. From a distance, everyone is scratching their heads about what idiots
we were. But it is not that simple. It is actually fairly complex.
And we have
done it over and over and over and over. I remember being vividly awakened
watching a short film on Germany. Germany was such a sophisticated intellectual
society, all the leading universities in the 19th and early 20th
centuries… I'm watching this documentary and it featured a book burning in
Nuremberg by the Nazi's in 1933 or so. I could see the titles of some of the
books- Hegel, Fichte, Shopenaur, Heine- people holding them up with glee,
tossing them into the fire. How in the world did this actually come to pass?
Stanlye Milgram
wondered the same thing after War was over. He was a psychologist at Yale and
he devised a little experiment to try to unpack this phenomenon. He placed an
ad in the local New Haven paper asking for volunteers to study memory.
People
answered. Showed up on the very impressive leafy campus of Yale and made their
way to the psych lab in Linsly-Chittenden Hall. I just love to say that “Please
attend a stimulating discussion in Linsly-Chittenden Hall”.
There you were
met by a professor in a white lab coat, the symbol of scientific dispassion in
the 50's, and escorted to two rooms. Each participant was shown both rooms, one
for the controller, the other for the one taking the memory test. You chose
straws to see who would be where and both of you were given a basic set of
instructions.
The lab
professor went with the controller into the control room where you were met
with a very sophisticated, computer like piece of machinery that had 30
switches on it. Prior to that both of you saw what the test-taker would go
through. There was a table in that room that had two straps that held your
hands on the desk and a place where an electrical shock was administered. Both
of the participants were strapped in and shocked with a fairly good shock so
that they could see what it felt like. It hurt.
The controller
was told to ask some memory questions. If the answers were correct, nothing
happened. If they were wrong, the lab professor asked you to flip a switch to
shock your partner. I know- this sounds like Dr. Vinkman in ‘Ghost Busters'.
Now there were
30 switches, each increasing in strength of shock. The tenth level listed the
voltage as (150) and written above it were the words “Strong shock”. Above
number 17 was “Intense Shock”. Above number 25 was “Danger, Severe Shock” and
at 29 it was simply marked XXX.
As the
experiment began, the test-taker would do okay, but then he would start missing
questions, and the lab professor would instruct the controller to push a lever
for a shock. The question that they wanted to know was, how far would you go up
the scale in shocking people?
After about 8
shocks or so, the controller could hear, the test-taker actually shout, “Ouch”…
After a few more, they scream “Ow… let me out of here.” Naturally, the
controller would look up at the lab professor. The lab professor would shrug
impassively, “Ask him the next question”.
After a couple
more, the test-taker would yell, “You have no right to keep me here”. Again,
the lab professor would just say, “keep going”.
After a couple
more, the test-taker would yell, “I absolutely refuse to answer any more! You
can't hold me here! My heart's bothering me.” If the controller told the lab
professor that they didn't want to go on anymore, the lab professor would just
say we have to complete the experiment and remind you that you volunteered for
this.
After a couple
more, there was just silence from the test-taker. This would, of course,
produce confusion in the controller, who was concerned and not sure what to do.
The lab professor would say, “Give him 5 seconds to respond. If he doesn't say
anything, consider it wrong.”
If the
controller dissents, wants to quit, the lab professor would remind them of
their responsibility for the experiment and that you have to keep following the
rules to the end.
And now comes
the XXX shock. There are not one, but two.
Okay, so how
far would you go?
How many of you
here would shock someone 30 times to the XXX point? How many 20 times- til they
won't respond? How many 10 times? My what a moral group you are! What do you
think Professor Millgram discovered? What percentage went all the way to XXX?
65%... 2/3rd's
of everyone that took the experiment ignored the screams of their fellow man,
listened to the authority figure that was right beside them, and obeyed the authority
figure rather than follow the plain evidence of their ears or the inner
admonitions of their conscience.
I know, you may
be thinking that the moral of the story is ignore those bastards from Yale. But
it is not that simple.
Milgram
actually did 19 variations on this experiment. He got rid of the august
authority of the impressive buildings of Yale and moved the experiment to a
basement in Bridgeport. Result: same. He used women instead of men. Result:
same. They eventually replicated this experiment all over the world. Result:
same.
We humans
aren't nearly as moral as we think we are. We are shaped by the social
structure and the authority figures around us way, way, way more than would
like to admit. This is the old saw every teen presents us with such emotional
pique, “Dad, everyone's doing it”. And this is the excuse practically every
adult runs for under interrogation, “I was just following orders”. There is
something disturbingly malleable about human nature that defers to authority
and deflects responsibility- and this is what is profound about the way sin
works.
And here is
another piece that you may find surprising. You may presume that the volunteers
were poor, uneducated, or have esteem issues. These variables don't actually
hold up. When Professor Marc Sageman studied 400 al-Qaeda members who were
prepared to die in the name of jihad, he found that “75% of them came from the
upper class or the upper-middle class. 90% came from intact, caring families;
66% had gone to college; 66% were married; most had children and jobs in
science and engineering.”[iii]
Professor Sageman concludes that this particular study shows them to be the
‘best and the brightest of their society'.
The point is
that, no, there is no correlation between education/class/emotional maturity
and moral independence. Similar studies have been done on suicide bombers in
Palestine and elsewhere with much the same results.
In fact, the
consensus opinion from the social psychologists at the present is summarized by
Professor Mahazarin Banaji. ‘What social psychology has given to an
understanding of human nature is the discovery that forces larger than
ourselves determine our mental life and our actions- chief among these forces
[is] the power of the social situation.'[iv]
Reinhold Niebuhr
made the same point as a theologian back in the 20's before social psychology
could put statistical analysis on what Christians had been talking about for
years. His book was titled “Moral Man and Immoral Society”. In that book, he
attempted to explain how relatively nice people, who are relatively genteel,
and certainly not given to overt acts of evil, can participate in social
structures in ways that actually can produce a great deal of social misery for
certain parts of the society and still think of themselves as good people.
In fact,
Professor Milgram found a couple insights on how to encourage resistance and
fully ten ways you can encourage compliance to authority.
On the
resistance front, provide models of rebel was chief among them. If you allowed
people to see others dissent, they were empowered to do it. Similarly, they
found that proximity was crucial. People have a harder time inflicting injury
when they are right next door and find it easier when they can hear the same
distress muffled over a speaker, suggesting the injured is far away.
What makes it
easier to obtain uncritical compliance?
1. prearranging
some form of contractual obligation. This is your job
2. giving
participants meaningful roles. Make them responsible.
3. present some basic rules up front; regardless of whether they
are actually later followed, you keep telling people that we are doing this
because of the rules.
4. Alter the semantics. We call this spin. Give ugly outcomes
clinical names.
5. Create a system for the diffusion of responsibility or the
abdication of responsibility, so that no one really knows who is responsible.
6. start a path that opens the door to bigger outcomes. Begin with
insignificant acts.
7. Create successive steps that are more dangerous
8. Gradually change the nature of authority from reasonable to
unjust and do not acknowledge the transformation.
9. Make exiting difficult- having a bonus at the end; and allow
verbal dissent to relieve the stress of conscience
10. Off the ‘big lie' to justify the goal.
Hermann Goering stumbled on this in the early stages of Nazism that people are
more willing to believe ‘the Big Lie'. Stalin perfected the big lie and the
pygmy Mao deployed it on the biggest scale.
Hannah Arendt once described the transformation of Germany
under the ‘big lie' that the Jews were the cancer on the body politic of German
society by saying that it galvanized ‘the crowd' to become ‘the mob'.[v]
It loosed the normal constraints of decency, giving ordinary people permission
to inflict serious cruelty on Kristalnacht 70 years ago.
Why is this
important? It underscores the fact that the problem is not simply with one or
two bad apples in the bunch, the preponderant majority of us are not really to
be trusted to stand in resistance to the prevailing peer pressures and culture
of the workplace, the political order, etc..
It underscores
for us of the importance of creating social structures that have healthy
incentives directed to fostering the social good. As Aristotle observed 2500
years ago, we are only become as excellent as the societies in which we live.
It underscores
the importance of having a balance of powers in our social structures to
prevent any one group of us from being able to accidentally or unwittingly
causing tremendous social havoc through our insufficiently self-critical acts
of hubris. As the founding fathers of our country noted with realism “We are
all great guys and we all need to be saved from ourselves.”
This problem in
human nature is never going to be eradicated. It can only be anticipated and
corralled. Practically every generation has lived through some crisis of their
own making that led them to proclaim ‘Never Again' and some other crisis
happens in the next generation that sparks the cry one more time.
I wish I could
tie this up neatly with a bow but I can't. But do your part. I'm sure you are
as tired of this never-ending political campaign as I am but vote. Winston
Churchill, a critical realist about human nature if ever there was one,
remarked that “Democracy is the worst form of government… except for all others
that have been tried.” No one is going to fix this except you and you and all
of us… Amen.
[i]
This sermon lifts heavily from a fine short article written for the Yale Alumni
magazine by Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford. He was friends with Stanley
Milgram who performed a series of very important studies in 1949 that were
summarized in the documentary film “Obedience”. You can find the original
article in The Yale Alumni Magazine
(January/February, 2007) pp. 40-47. I was quite familiar with Milgram's work
from writing my dissertation. I am indebted to my colleague, Rev. Julie
Yarborough, for leaving the article on my desk a year and a half ago, and to my
own blind luck to find it in a pile of books right in time for this sermon.
[ii]
David Brooks, “The Behavioral Revolution” NYT, (Tuesday, October 28, 2008), p.
A31.
[iii]
Op cit., p. 46.
[iv]
Ibid. p. 47.
[v]
See “The Origins of Totalitarianism” where she has a chapter devoted to this
thesis.
© 2008
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
