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.