A Dangerous Division

Extreme partisanship is a slippery slope. Is there a path forward?

The famous “Robbers’ Cave” experiments conducted by the pioneering social psychologist Muzafer Sherif with middle-class summer campers in the 1950s are textbook examples of what seems to be our innate propensity to form “in-groups” that readily bond with one another while becoming antagonistic toward members of “out-groups.” We are, it seems, about equally prone to cooperate or to fight with one another.

We can see this “we-they” tendency -- sometimes referred to as the “amity-enmity complex” – at work in team sports like college football rivalries, in the sometimes deep religious divisions between, say, Sunni and Shiite Muslims or Catholics and Protestants, and, most important, in the long, blood-stained history of warfare between human societies, from the Neolithic to the twenty first century.

Especially troubling is the fact that this polarizing propensity in humans can all too easily run amok and produce mutually self-destructive outcomes.  A legendary symbol of this syndrome is the notorious (murderous) feud between Hatfields and McCoys in Appalachia in the late nineteenth century.  Perhaps the most dramatic recent example was the deadly soccer riot in Egypt a few months ago.  However,  the most costly and destructive examples of irrational human conflicts can be found in senseless wars, like the American Civil War and World War One, where wealth was squandered, millions died, and compromises between the combatants became impossible.

It seems that our tendency toward xenophobia can become highly toxic when it is linked to substantive political conflicts – a territorial dispute, control over valuable resources, or a power struggle.  The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, in the preface to his famous treatise, On War, characterized warfare as a continuation of politics “by other means.”  Others have noted that this aphorism also seems to work well in reverse:  Politics is a continuation of warfare by other means.  As one of our founding fathers, James Madison, truly observed, “The seeds of [political] faction are sewn in the nature of man.”

Our tendency to political partisanship can become especially self-destructive when a society has a wide economic gap between the rich and the poor.  As Plato warned over two thousand years ago in The Republic, extremes of wealth and poverty can divide a society into two warring camps.  Unfortunately, the so-called Gini Index number (the well-known measure of economic inequalities) for this country is now the worst in the industrialized world, and we are well into the danger zone for deepening social conflict. The national credit downgrade that resulted from the debt ceiling fight in Congress last year is just one example of the potential damage that this partisanship can do, and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements may be just a foretaste of more widespread and damaging social turmoil to come.

What can be done to avoid this slippery slope?  First, we need to remind ourselves that we are all stakeholders in this country.  We have many interests in common, and none of us wants to live in a hostile and angry environment, or deliberately cause harm to others (with a few outrageous exceptions, it seems). Although there are serious and legitimate divisions among us over some highly contentious issues, the only way to avoid lasting damage to our nation is for all sides to use the fairness principle as a guide in trying to find a resolution.  This means acknowledging the legitimacy of our different interests, listening respectfully to all points of view, and trying our best to accommodate and strike a balance between these conflicting concerns.  Above all, it means reining in our innate partisan impulses.

In a civilized society, compromise is a moral priority, not a cop out. This is the only constructive path forward.

  

Lessons of the Titanic

A tragic tale of hubris and human errors, and a litany of “what ifs.”

Everyone thinks they know the Titanic story. Indeed, it seems that almost everyone has seen the famous movie, where a reenactment of this great maritime tragedy, in April 1912, provided a vehicle for a doomed (fictional) love story.

The real story, which was overshadowed in the movie and in various superficial historical accounts of the Titanic disaster, is that it provides a morality tale for the ages. The many “what ifs” – circumstances that could easily have been altered – make it an enduring object lesson. At least eight and perhaps more mistakes (human errors) contributed to what might have resulted in a very different outcome, though some uncontrollable “external” factors also contributed.

The ship itself performed magnificently. In its time it was a great technological achievement – the largest and most luxurious passenger ship ever built. It was (mainly) the human failings – by the managing director of the White Star Line, the builder of the huge ship, and crucial decisions that were made as the disaster unfolded, as well as some “bad luck,” that doomed this grand ocean liner and some 1500 of her more than 2200 passengers and crew.

A major contributing factor was hubris – an exalted conviction, especially on the part of the managing director J. Bruce Ismay, the chief designer/builder, Thomas Andrews, of Harland and Wolff, and the crew, that the ship was unsinkable because of the watertight compartments that divided it into some sixteeen isolated sections. As Andrews put it, the ship was its own lifeboat. Unfortunately, the water tight bulkheads were open at their tops and if too many of them in the bow (five or more) were breached, they would fill up and force the bow down, eventually flooding all of the other compartments one by one. This is exactly what happened.

The supreme over-confidence in the integrity of the ship helps to explain many of the other “what if” mistakes that were made. Perhaps the single most important human culprit was the ambitious, autocratic White Star director Bruce Ismay, who was aboard the Titanic for its maiden voyage and who ordered the experienced senior captain Edward Smith to abandon caution and race to reach New York in record time. A surviving witness documented a key conversation in the café in which Ismay was pressuring Smith to beat the record of a sister ship.

Absent this pressure for speed from the boss, some of the other “what ifs” might have had different outcomes. There were repeated wireless radio warning messages about icebergs from other ships in the area, most of which inexplicably never reached the bridge. A final one, just two hours before the disaster, from the Mesaba, a ship that was directly ahead of the Titanic, warned of a large ice field and many icebergs. It never reached the bridge.

Then there was the cavalier disregard of the unusually dangerous environmental conditions, a flat calm and a moonless night that made icebergs very hard to spot at any distance, along with a careless, even negligent failure to ensure that the lookouts had binoculars. These essential, age-old shipboard tools had mysteriously gone missing or were never brought aboard during the fitting out of the brand new ship.

Hubris also accounted for the astounding revelation after the fact that there were only half as many lifeboats as were needed for all of the passengers and crew. These had been constructed but were removed at the last minute to reduce the “clutter” on the first class promenade deck. It was presumed they would never be needed.

Some of the other “what ifs” fall into such categories as operators’ errors, bystander’s confusion (or perhaps selfish risk-avoidance), and production pressures on the builder. The biggest mistake happened on the bridge. When the lookouts and deck officers belatedly spotted the deadly iceberg (at 11:40 PM), the officer in charge, first officer William Murdoch, instinctively ordered the engines to be thrown into full reverse while the rudder was put hard over. However, the engine reversal had the tragic consequence of reducing the ability of the ship to respond to its relatively small rudder. A difference of only a few feet would likely have prevented or minimized the collision with the iceberg.

As for the bystander’s role in the tragedy, most if not all of the passengers and crew would very likely have been rescued if another, smaller commercial vessel -- a “mystery ship” whose lights could be seen in the dark and was only about 19 miles away -- had responded to the Titanic’s radio distress calls and the highly visible distress flares. At the inquest following the sinking, the captain and other crew members from the Californian testified that they thought the flares were much farther away, and when the Titantic’s lights disappeared they assumed that it had in fact sailed away. The Californian did not receive the radio distress calls, it was claimed, because its Marconi wireless radios had been shut down for the night. It also happened that the Californian had shut down its engines and was dead in the water because of the captain’s apprehension about the extreme iceberg hazard.

We will never know whether there was more to the story of the Californian’s failure to respond. What we do know is that it could have reached the Titanic in plenty of time to save everyone. The ultimate rescue ship, the Carpathia, risked the icebergs to race to the scene, but it took four hours. By then, only those in the lifeboats were still alive. Most of the 1500 men, women, and children who perished froze to death in the icy waters (one degree above freezing) in less than an hour.

A final “what if” was a problem, recently discovered, with the ship’s rivets. Given the tight production schedule while the ship was being built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the builder had to scramble to procure the millions of rivets that were required to tie the ship’s steel plates together. Many small suppliers received contracts and many of the rivets were evidently of inferior quality. Later, when the Titanic hit the iceberg, it was not the steel plates but the rivets that gave way, opening up a seam that ran for more than 300 feet. What if the rivets had been of higher quality? Perhaps fewer compartments would have been breached, and we would be remembering only the anniversary of a near-tragedy.

There have been many other man-made disasters before and since the Titanic, but none has illustrated more compellingly what we can learn from our past mistakes. The real Titanic story was a tale of ambition, over confidence, denial, self-dealing, cowardice, bravery, perhaps lethal production compromises, simple human errors, and, of course, “bad luck” (unexpected and uncontrollable conditions) that can conspire to turn a great human achievement into a great human tragedy.

If there is an ultimate epitaph for the Titanic and its ill-fated passengers and crew, it is that they were the victims of human errors. We can honor this sad legacy by learning from it.

Economic Inequality Is the Culprit

Our appalling social and health problems are symptoms, not the disease.

The Occupy Wall Street/99% movement, which is about to re-emerge from a winter break, dramatized the fact that the extremes of wealth and poverty in America are the worst by far in the industrialized world—a total reversal of our status after World War Two.

What is not so well appreciated, even now, is the overwhelming evidence that this gross income disparity has produced massive collateral damage to our health and well being as a nation. It turns out that many of our public health problems and social/psychological pathologies are strongly correlated with the degree of income inequality. It is no coincidence that, in international comparisons with other rich nations, we now rank very poorly in our quality of life measures—also in sharp contrast with previous generations.

As the distinguished public health researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett conclude in their bestselling book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, “The truth is that both [our] broken society and the broken economy resulted from the growth of inequality." The authors document in detail that, across all of the rich countries and even in state-by-state comparisons among our 50 states, the degree of income inequality is highly correlated with such things as levels of social distrust, mental illness, teenage pregnancies, crime and incarceration rates, homicide rates, infant mortality rates, life expectancy, obesity, educational performance and school dropout rates, teenage pregnancy rates, and (not surprising) upward economic and social mobility, or the lack of it.

The differences are stark. The data amassed by Wilkinson and Pickett show that the most unequal societies (most notably the U.S.) have a six fold difference in the level of social distrust. Their mental illness rates are five times higher, and their citizens are also five times more likely to be imprisoned, six times more likely to be clinically obese and have a difference in murder rates that is off the charts. “Inequality seems to make countries socially dysfunctional across a wide range of outcomes,” they conclude.

Although all of these urgent social problems need to be addressed and dealt with in their own terms, it is clear that they are also symptoms of a deeper underlying cause. Indeed, even our economic safety net programs, like welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and unemployment benefits, are only expensive band aids. To make any real change, we also need to address the root cause of the problem—our deep economic inequality and the spreading poverty and the decimation of our middle class. Wilkinson and Pickett rule out the usual suspects – ethnic differences, single parent families, bad schools or poor teachers, taxes, oppressive government regulations, etc. They describe the insidious effects of income inequalities at length.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s prescription for the problem is at once heartening and daunting. “What is most exciting about the picture we present is that it shows that reducing inequality would increase well being and quality of life for all of us.” Alas, that’s easier said than done.

In fact, the underlying cause of these extreme inequalities, and therefore the key to a solution, goes even deeper. The historic roots are ultimately ideological, and political. It is rooted in an ancient conflict between two competing views of humankind and society. On the one hand, there is the vision of society as an interdependent community with a common good and shared obligations—the so-called "organismic" model that traces back at least to Plato’s Republic. This has been opposed by an individualistic model of society (often associated with the ancient Sophists) as simply a “marketplace” where our relationships are defined by the pursuit of our own self interests, often in competition with others. Both of these ancient ideologies have some truth to them, but both have been used to justify different economic outcomes over the years. The Platonic model dominated during the New Deal era and beyond in the U.S. Now the Sophist/capitalist model is in the ascendancy.

But the debate about these two visions of society goes on. It is implicit in the ongoing conflict (and the policy differences) between conservatives and progressives (and between Republicans and Democrats), including their competing views of the role of government. In other words, any effort to mitigate our deep economic inequality will need to start by changing hearts and minds, and that’s no easy task. So, stay tuned to the historic political debate that is just getting started in this election year.

And the Moral Is…Morals Matter

Goldman Sachs and the “Gospel of Selfishness.”

The sensational public exposé of the moral climate at Goldman Sachs – a leading Wall Street bank – by a disillusioned executive this past week comes as no great surprise.

The great “vampire squid” (as it is affectionately nicknamed) has become a poster child for rampant greed, regardless of the damage it causes to others. It seems to embody Ayn Rand’s “gospel of selfishness” and Gordon Gekko’s famous speech in the movie Wall Street that “greed is good.” As one of Ayn Rand’s fictional characters tells us: “All that proceeds from man’s independent ego is good…The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself…His moral law is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.”

As various commentators on Greg Smith’s cri de coeur in The New York Times have noted, there is nothing new in the Goldman Sachs’ story. Greed is as old as, well, who knows? Greed is inevitable. Just look at the past history of Wall Street and other financial centers. So, let the buyer beware and, let’s get back to greed as usual. It’s good for business.

But this is a cop out. The issue is a whole lot more complicated than that. For starters, the capitalist free market ideal is about mutual benefit. You make money by benefitting others not by exploiting them, or cheating them. Markets require fairness and fair dealing, otherwise it becomes a form of “predatory capitalism.”

Once upon a time, fair dealing and serving the interests of your clients/customers was the guiding moral principle on Wall Street, even though it was sometimes abused. It was enshrined in the ethical codes of Wall Street firms and in the legal principle of “fiduciary responsibility” – the contractual obligation to put your client’s interests ahead of your own. This strong moral standard was reinforced in two ways. One was the private partnership model, where the banks were owned by groups of partners who had to put their own fortunes at risk and who could only make money when their clients did as well. The other incentive was a tough and aggressively enforced set of financial regulations under the Glass-Steagall Act, which was enacted after an earlier orgy of greed on Wall Street during the 1920s and the great stock market crash in 1929. These regulations were designed to backstop our imperfect moral sensibilities.

Now both of these restraints are gone. The partnership model has been replaced by a public stock ownership model in which the top executives take risks only with other people’s money and benefit from trading commissions and bonuses based on short-term profits. And thanks to heavy bank industry lobbying, the Glass-Steagall Act has been repealed. The new Dodd-Frank regulations, enacted after the 2008-2009 financial meltdown are much weaker and are already under attack. Worse yet, there is now a prevailing climate of amoral group-think on Wall Street. Since everyone else is doing it, it’s OK to exploit your customers if you can.

The problem with this ethic is that it produces rot in the foundation of the system. Predatory, exploitative behavior – rampant greed – destroys trust, and trust depends on moral behavior. Indeed, it was a loss of trust that lay at the heart of the financial meltdown that has done so much harm to our economy and our people. When the banks stopped trusting one another because of doubts about their honesty and their behavior, the system “froze up.”

So, the way out of the woods for Wall Street seems clear. The principle of honest dealing and fiduciary responsibility must be reinstated as a basic moral standard that everyone should adhere to, and this must be backed by tougher and more zealously enforced rules. As Adam Smith himself warned in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, everything in a free market depends on a moral foundation of trust and “justice” (not doing “injury” to others). As a Stoic and Christian, he stressed that “There can be no proper motive for hurting our neighbor.”

When “Denial” Can Be Deadly

Have you noticed? We’re in a war for our survival.

We are faced with a truly alarming world-wide survival crisis, yet the global response so far has been (largely) myopic and self-destructive. I’m talking about climate change, of course. There is good reason to believe that the situation is much worse than most of us realize, thanks to the disinterested work of some respected independent researchers and accumulating evidence. (I’ll get to this.) If we don’t wake up from our delusional complacency and take drastic remedial steps, now, we are likely to see a global catastrophe within most of our lifetimes.

Here’s one factoid that might get your attention. California currently produces about one-quarter of all the fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S. each year. As desertification creeps northward during the next 20-30 years, California may experience a mega-drought. It’s happened before. Among other things, this would have a huge impact on global food prices, and it will affect you personally. And this says nothing about the potential shortage of rainfall in our Midwest grain belt. Oh, and don’t plan on moving to Texas.

The definition of a climate denier is somebody who still thinks the Titanic is unsinkable, despite the evidence to the contrary. Well, we are rapidly approaching that iceberg, and we need to make a radical course change before it’s too late.

Who says so, you might ask? In fact, a small but growing number of researchers who are free to look objectively at the data and draw realistic – not politically correct – conclusions. One of the most prominent is the respected scientist William Calvin at the University of Washington, who has written sixteen books, including three increasingly-urgent books about climate change. (http://williamcalvin.com) Then there is the new independent study by Nathan Myhrvold, the well-known former chief technology officer at Microsoft and his co-author, the respected climate scientist Ken Caldeira (Environmental Research Letters, 7, 2012). There is also a new report in the works from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Here is the situation in a nutshell. Climate change is happening much more rapidly than was previously estimated; the consensus projections have been much too conservative. The upcoming report from the IPCC is said to contain a new estimate that average U.S. temperatures will increase by two degrees Fahrenheit by 2028. (The global average increase will be 2.6 degrees by 2048.) More important, these averages smooth out and obscure the increasingly violent local weather extremes that will become the norm – devastating droughts, massive floods, deadly heat waves, raging wind storms, rampant rain forest fires, rapidly melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels and, most serious, drastic shortfalls in food production, deadly civil conflicts and even, possibly, the collapse of some populations and civilizations. As Calvin puts it, “the most pessimistic scenarios in the past have not been pessimistic enough…Things will probably be much worse and probably much sooner” than we are expecting. In any case, he asks, “why gamble?”

The heart of the problem is that it is already too late for measures that would only slow the increase in carbon dioxide emissions – like conversion to solar, wind and nuclear power. To reduce the impact of global warming, we must also reduce the 40 percent excess of heat-trapping CO2 gases that are already in the atmosphere. In other words, we must clean up the mess we have already made. Calvin estimates that we should extract something like 30-60 gigatons of carbon per year from the atmosphere for the next 20 years -- or sooner if possible. An idea like doubling the global stock of forests (to increase photosynthesis) is not nearly enough to do the job and is not really feasible.

Calvin proposes instead a massive program to develop vast plankton farms off the continental shelves, with windmills to drive push-pull pumps to help create plankton blooms and recycle their wastes into the ocean depths. He calls for a program comparable to the Manhattan Project in World War Two, which led to the Atomic bomb. Of course, our all-out national effort in that war was possible only because the attack at Pearl Harbor shocked this nation out of its head-in-the-sand denial about the threat we faced.

This time, we will need to use our rational faculties and our imagination as a way of overcoming our innate tendency to avoid “an inconvenient truth” (to borrow the title of Al Gore’s climate change movie). Perhaps we should all read the Pulitzer-prize winning scientist Jared Diamond’s profoundly disturbing book about the fate of past civilizations called Collapse. And if you don’t like Bill Calvin’s proposed solution, maybe you can come up with a better one, because this is a problem that cannot be wished away. We will have to muster the collective courage (and resources) to move beyond the denial stage -- or else.

“Moral Hazard” or Moral Myopia?

The psychological principle of “just deserts” has run amok.

During one of the Presidential TV debates, Representative Ron Paul was asked whether a person who does not choose to purchase health insurance coverage should later be refused medical treatment if he/she is unable to pay for it, even if it is life-threatening. Rep. Paul -- a physician who opposes the new “Obama care” health insurance mandate -- responded (to loud audience applause) that people should accept the consequences for their decisions. In other words, the needy person should be allowed to die.

This was a particularly egregious example of the currently fashionable economics term “moral hazard” -- the idea that a person should pay for their voluntary bad decisions, whether it be failing to purchase health insurance or defaulting on their home mortgage. In both cases, so the reasoning goes, people should have known the risks, and “irresponsible behavior” should not be rewarded. This would only encourage more of the same.

There is, in fact, much evidence that our innate sense of justice and fairness includes the principle of “just deserts” -- due rewards for merit and, conversely, equivalent punishments for our transgressions and the harm we may inflict on others. For instance, many Americans are still angry about the taxpayer bailouts for the Wall Street banks in 2009 followed by a quick return to giving multi-million-dollar bonuses to the bank executives who had caused the financial meltdown. It seemed they were being rewarded for their malfeasance.

There is also much evidence, both in economics and in psychology, that our behavior is influenced by various “incentives” -- the potential for rewards and the risk of penalties. Thus, health insurance co-pays are often used to deter the overuse of covered services. Likewise, good health habits may be rewarded with lower premiums, a good driving record may result in lower auto insurance premiums -- and vice versa. And gambling casinos can be depended upon to keep your money when you lose.

But many situations in life are more complicated, especially when it involves public policies that encompass a large class of our citizens. There is an old saying “you can never do just one thing” – meaning that there may be many indirect and unintended consequences associated with your actions, and these unanticipated effects may outweigh what you intended to do. Thus, a moral hazard may be the lesser hazard in some cases.

A prime example is the current debate over government assistance for distressed home owners. Early on, the Florida Attorney General opposed the idea with the warning: “Don’t reward those who simply choose not to pay their mortgage.” More recently, the CNBC TV commentator Rick Santelli opposed the new $26 billion package of mortgage relief measures saying that we should not “subsidize the losers’ mortgages.” Indeed, is it fair toward those who have conscientiously continued to pay their mortgages to aid those who have not?

What these and other critics seem to be saying is that, if a homeowner fails to make the payments on their mortgage, it’s their own fault. But wait a minute. The mortgage mess in this country is a lot more complicated than that. The vast majority of those who have fallen behind or defaulted on their mortgages are victims of the financial meltdown and the worst recession since the 1930s. They lost their job or saw their income dry up. The few who “chose” to stop paying their mortgages are already paying a price with a bad credit rating that will follow them for years to come and perhaps hinder their ability to get a future job. Do we refuse to help the many who involuntarily stopped paying their mortgages to avoid rewarding the undeserving few? Why not screen the applicants to weed out the “cheaters”?

Then there are the many millions of homeowners who have not defaulted but are struggling with high payments and can’t refinance at today’s lower interest rates because the current value of their home, thanks to the recession, is worth less than the mortgage. Helping these “underwater” mortgage holders to refinance is hardly a case of moral hazard.

Of course, there are also homeowners with mortgages they should never have taken on in the first place. Some no doubt can be blamed for these mistakes. But what about the predatory mortgage brokers who knowingly seduced people who were not qualified to take on “toxic” mortgages that they could not pay, or who trapped mortgage applicants with “teaser rates” and well-hidden escalator clauses? Who is really to blame?

There is also another fairness principle that needs to be considered here. Most of us are more than willing to help those who have what could be called “no-fault” needs (to borrow an insurance industry term) -- needs that are not the victim’s fault. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis are obvious examples. We don’t blame the victims in these cases. Nor should we blame the victims of an economic tsunami.

Indeed, most of us are inclined to give people a second chance if they are willing to learn from their mistakes. We do this for corporations when they are allowed to declare bankruptcy and start over. And even our all-knowing credit agencies allow people to rebuild their credit scores over time.

Finally, there is the huge indirect benefit that the $26 billion mortgage relief program could provide to every homeowner if it helps to revive our moribund housing market and increase home values.

So let’s keep moral hazard in its place and stop the hypocrisy of applying it to homeowners while excusing the banks.

Laughter as Therapy

A crazy idea for a crazy time.

First, you must not take this too seriously – but you should also take it to heart. And that’s the mantra, and the model, of Patch Adams.

Dr. Patch Adams, MD is a legend. (They made a movie about him in the 1990s starring Robin Williams.) After a “traditional” medical school education, Adams rebelled against the authoritarian, pill-pushing, robo-doctor model of medicine and pioneered a more humane approach based on laughter, love and caring as primary forms of medical treatment. And guess what? It works. Adams’ Gesundheit Institute has become world famous as a place where fun and healing go hand in hand. Clowning around (in moderation) seems to make for better doctors and happier, healthier patients. Call it laughter therapy.

Maybe laughter, love and caring would also work in our politics. Just imagine if the presidential candidates showed up for their next TV debate with rubber noses and were tested for their skills as stand-up comics. (Did you say it’s already a comedy?) Or what if President Obama and House Speaker Boehner wore clown costumes for their next meeting at the White House. I know, that’s no laughing matter, but maybe it would help. Or what if politicians who fail the Washington Post’s “Pinocchio test” for mendacity had to wear a Pinocchio nose of the appropriate length. Fat chance, you say?

The larger point which Patch Adams has amply demonstrated is that laughter can be a potent influence for the better in our lives – and maybe in our politics as well. Remember the line from the old popular song, “Be a clown, be a clown, all the world loves a clown…” Better yet, if we could all get in touch with our inner clowns and act out our latent Charlie Chaplin – or Patch Adams – from time to time, the world would probably be a better, more caring place. It’s certainly worth a try.