My second question is below:Redner’s work is no walk through a rose filled park. It can be a little depressing. He does in this final chapter offer some help for the future. What do you think are his most practical suggestions? What could you actually do beginning tomorrow to help protect what is left of civilization?
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chapter
7
The Beginnings of a New
Stage in History
H
umanity has reached an important point in its history. As we’ve
indicated, we’re at the end (perhaps a bit past the end) of the adolescent “all you can eat” era on Earth. While many feel that it’s time for big
changes, there isn’t a clear idea of the what, how, and where of the changes
needed. Many now realize that the main drivers of the deterioration of
humanity’s life-support systems—overpopulation, overconsumption by
the rich, and the use of environmentally malign technologies—all must be
dealt with. But despite abundant warnings from the scientific community,1
increasing population and consumption remains ignored by politicians,
economists, and the general public. We’ve pointed out the adaptability and
great capacity of the human mental system, but now it’s time to specify
social and political recommendations that could lead to an attractive and
possible human future.
There is an authentic conservative view of human nature and its consequences for politics and social action, one more traditional than ours. It holds
that competition and conflict are innate and predominant in human affairs,
and individualism and individual action will always dominate social concerns. (This view is not that of the lunatic fringe, “birthers,” and “death panelers” who are influencing the modern Republican Party in the United States
and the neo-Nazis who are gaining adherents in Europe.) This view sees it
as a mistake, often counterproductive and certainly unwise, to try to change
something as deeply rooted as what its holders view as “human nature.”2
It’s a point of view, traced as a rule to the eighteenth-century British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, that is respectful of the status quo. It
assumes that public and government institutions and the society’s norms
87
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H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe
of behavior have developed over millennia to good effect and shouldn’t
be overthrown capriciously. It is “conservative” in the true sense as to how
society should approach change.3 So, any dream of an overarching or global
(in both senses) management of human action just can’t happen, and to
think otherwise is just indulging in 1960s “Kumbaya” wishful thinking, and
possibly would open the door to such radical catastrophes as the slaughters
that followed the French and Russian revolutions.
The influential conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott ridiculed
as “rationalism in politics” the reconstruction of traditional social institutions, customs, and morals on the basis of theory.4 In his view, attempts to
force a society to change due to an intellectual idea are likely to do damage to traditions grounded in centuries of practical experience. Oakeshott
expressed scorn mostly for the social schemes of the planners on the Left,
but he also criticized right-wing plans.
In modern America, one major justification for the conservative
approach was the failure of several attempts to change society. One was the
attempt, through the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States. “Prohibition” led
to large illegal operations controlled by gangsters who made fortunes selling
illicit hooch. The amendment failed so disastrously that it was repealed in
1933. Another failed attempt to change society, this time more influential,
was the urban renewal movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that also
led to gang formation. While social planners’ housing developments sprang
up throughout the United States, England, and France, the most famous of
these was the Chicago (housing) “projects.”
The aim was empathetic and compassionate: Get rid of the shacks that
the poor (predominantly black) people lived in, dwellings lacking good
sanitation, good heating, good services. Put the people in well-constructed,
well-heated, and well-cooled apartments in well-designed, large high-rises
(to keep cost down), and it would be a great improvement in their lives. Out
of the favelas, into safe, secure, solid apartments. It sounded good.
But the devil lay in the details. One of the main building projects was
placed between two of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park
and the Gold Coast, close to Michigan Avenue’s high-end shopping district. So this made Cabrini-Green, begun in 1942 and completed in 1962, a
great place for selling drugs, and with a population largely of young people
who didn’t have jobs, it produced gang violence and conflict. In one nineweek period in 1981, ten residents were murdered and thirty-five wounded
by gunfire.5 Vandalism flourished as gang members covered walls with
graffiti, broke doors and windows, and jammed the elevators to foil their
competitors.
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The architectural design didn’t help: the planners fenced the buildings
to prevent residents from throwing garbage over the railings, from falling,
or from being thrown off. This made it look like, well, a prison. There were
famous photos of the piles of garbage, which once made it up to the fifteenth floor, and the water and power often went out. Did the social planners’ compassion for the poor improve their lives? It seemed a great day
for people living in squalor when these “projects” were built, and another,
greater day when they were dynamited and demolished.*
Conservatives could make a similar case for the poor results from the
trillions of dollars of foreign aid that the West has spent, with generally
good intentions, for development in poverty-stricken countries. Of course,
empathy alone isn’t enough; good intentions mixed with good analysis is
what’s needed. We’re beginning to see this in foreign aid, where the different “traps” that countries suffer from are better understood. The remedies
are different for countries suffering from bad governance or from civil war,
or for those with rich natural resources and the corruption, theft, and arms
acquisition that result from exploiting those resources. It’s been well said
that “diamonds are a guerilla’s best friend.”6
When aid funds are tracked, the situation can seem very bad indeed;
one study found that of those funds given to the Ministry of Finance in
Chad for rural health clinics, 99 percent didn’t reach the clinics. Empathy
and compassion are nothing without competence,† so due diligence needs
be applied.7
But on the thought that it’s not desirable or possible to change or tinker
with “human nature” and established social mores, the conservative view
is simply wrong. Indeed, the conservative idea that past arrangements are
best for the present grows more untenable every day as human behavior
and technologies transform the world and produce new opportunities and
dilemmas. We must learn from history but not be paralyzed by it.
* But a good example of rather nonempathetic urban development is Robert Moses’s
plans to have New York build seemingly every possible highway in the city, plans that
were stopped due to protests. The best book on Moses is probably Robert A. Caro, The
Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
† Alex de Waal, for instance, documented, that our initial humanitarian and liberal tendencies have gone wrong in Darfur. It would seem obvious that bringing war crimes
charges against Omar Hasaan al-Bashir, the head of the Sudan, was a good idea. De
Waal counseled against it, saying that al-Bashir would react violently and the rebel
groups would be emboldened. Sure enough, it was a disaster; al-Bashir shut out Oxfam
and Save the Children, expelled aid workers, and allowed violence to increase. Alex
de Waal, ed., War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Cambridge, MA: Global Equity
Initiative, Harvard University, 2007).
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H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe
The term “human natures” is properly plural; they always change generation to generation as the environment develops people with very different views.8 We get prepared early on for a certain lifestyle, for our future
behaviors. Like George H. W. Bush, most people think our current way of
life is inevitable and unchangeable. Indeed it’s a common function of the
human mental system to simplify the world and to produce a kind of psychological inertia, to assume the future will be like the past and that it has
always been the same. This is obviously wrong, and our adaptations to the
changing world begin, actually, before birth.
In the first few days of their lives, French infants cry differently than do
German babies. The French infants cry with a rising intonation; Germans
with a falling one. Kathleen Wermke analyzed more than twenty hours of
recorded cries: “Newborns prefer exactly the same melody patterns that are
typical of their respective mother tongues. . . . As a result, they reproduce
exactly the same intonation patterns that are typical of their respective
mother tongues.”9
A key to changing human nature and expanding empathy for others
may be found in research on how people respond to their surroundings.
David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, noted that “[it
isn’t] possible for any set of men to converse often together, without acquiring a similitude of manners.”10 In Hume’s philosophy, people (sometimes
called “Humean” beings) are sensitive to changes not only in their immediate personal environment but also in the social and the global environment.
That understanding of the crucial role of environments led to tests of
the so-called broken window theory. That theory postulates that the more
disorder, even petty disorder like broken windows or graffiti, is evident in
an environment, the more that incidents of petty crime and further disorder will spread among people. The same theory predicts that favorable
trends will also spread. New York was counting on the spreading of positive
trends in the mid-1990s when they started an anti-graffiti and street cleanliness crackdown. This campaign coincided with a decrease in petty crime,
but since this was a quasi experiment (at best), we can’t really know what
the cause of the decline in crime was and it produced much consternation
among those graffiti artists and litterers who felt discriminated against.
The crackdown was and is controversial, for it was initiated in the
administration of Rudolph Guiliani, which often harassed innocent people who were deemed to be antisocial by the predominantly white police
department. And no one has defined the term disorder. Psychologist Kees
Keizer and colleagues set about trying to test the broken window theory.
They conducted their experiments on unsuspecting members of the public in two situations: either a norm was violated or not (example of norm
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| 91
violation: graffiti right next to a “No graffiti” sign). They tested whether
seeing disorder isn’t just priming people to commit the same crime, but to
commit crimes in general.
So what did they find? In six experiments, they found the percentage of
people violating the norm was consistently two to three times greater when
the norm was violated in the environment to which they were exposed.
The violations included littering, trespassing, and even stealing money from
a mailbox.11 The experiments suggest interesting possibilities for creating
environments that expand empathy, in which improved environments and
sprucing up areas, fostering larger groups and cooperative ventures, can
increase empathy.
But there are a lot of determinants for antisocial or criminal actions,
of course, even for something as important as suicide: people commit suicide more when it’s nice out more than when the weather is poor.12 So our
immediate surroundings affect us greatly: runners go faster when they are
paced; women eat one hundred calories less per meal when they are eating
with men than if they are dining only with other women (men don’t care
so much who they eat with, the animals).13 Now the challenge is to further
redesign our surroundings in order to redesign our behavior.
One way of redesigning surroundings to move to a more cooperative
human society might be to adopt the Sabido method, based on research by
Stanford University social psychologist Albert Bandura.14 His techniques
have been successfully employed to increase the acceptability of family
planning. It involves writing and producing serialized dramas on radio and
television that can win over audiences while imparting socially beneficial
values. The method bears the name of the pioneer of this entertainmenteducation strategy, Miguel Sabido, who was vice president for research at
Televisa in Mexico in the 1970s. Character development and plot lines provide the audience with a range of characters—pseudokin—that they can
relate to. Some characters are good, some not so good, and the plots lead
them through evolutionary changes. Characters may begin the series desiring to have large families, and then through interaction with other characters, twists and turns in the plot, and sometimes outside intervention,
they may end up deciding to stop at two children. Under the guidance of
Bandura’s findings, the serial dramas are not soap operas in which characters wallow endlessly in the seamy side of life. The serial dramas portray
people’s everyday lives and realistic solutions to their problems. The dramas
are aimed at increasing empathy, altering norms, reducing discrepancies in
power relations, linking people to support groups, and so on.
Sabido took the classic literary device of character growth and developed the process in a way that enabled TV series to tackle the most sensitive
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H u m a n i t y o n a Ti g ht ro pe
of subjects—sex, abortion, family planning, AIDS—in a nonthreatening
and even enlightening manner. By transmitting values through the development of pseudokin, the Sabido method has proven able both to attract large
and faithful audiences and to stimulate thoughtful discussions throughout
Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Sabido’s first soap opera to promote family planning was Acompáñame
(Accompany Me). Acompáñame was a nine-month dramatic series that
showed the personal benefits of planning one’s family by focusing on the
issue of family harmony. The Mexican government’s national population
council (CONAPO) reported the results as follows:15
• Phone calls to the CONAPO requesting family-planning information
increased from zero to an average of five hundred a month. Many people who called mentioned that they were encouraged to do so by the
soap opera.
• More than two thousand women registered as voluntary workers in the
national program for family planning. This was an idea suggested in
the telenovela.
• Contraceptive sales increased 23 percent in one year, compared to a 7
percent increase the preceding year.
• More than 560,000 women enrolled in family planning clinics, an increase
of 33 percent (compared to a 1 percent decrease the previous year).
During the decade 1977 to 1986, when several Mexican soap operas on
this theme were on the air, the country experienced a 34 percent decline
in its population growth rate. As a result, in May 1986, the United Nations
Population Prize was presented to Mexico as the foremost population success story in the world.
Thomas Donnelly, then with United States Agency for International
Development in Mexico, wrote, “Throughout Mexico, wherever one travels,
when people are asked where they heard about family planning, or what
made them decide to practice family planning, the response is universally
attributed to one of the soap operas that Televisa has done. . . . The Televisa
family planning soap operas have made the single most powerful contribution to the Mexican population success story.”16
Similar programs introduced in Tanzania at the end of the last century provided dramatic evidence of the approach’s efficacy. Before the program was broadcast in the test area, many people believed gods dictated
how many children they had. Following the broadcasts, there was a significant rise in the use of contraceptives in the test area, and the same was
observed when the broadcast was later played in the previous control areas.
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There and elsewhere the Bandura approach has also had dramatic effects on
changing behavior relative to AIDS.17 So behavior, even in important matters such as family size, can be changed, and quite rapidly at that.
It’s easy to imagine that similar programming could prepare people
to join in actions that involve coordination with other …
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