Frames and religious truth

If the meaning of words depends on context, and you move to a new context, then what does it mean to have "the same message?" And, generally, if you don't move at all but just wait, a new context will come to you. Then what does it mean to be faithful to the original message?

This problem is faced by all organizations or religions that survive a long time, and has a lot to do with what is required in order to survive a long time and across multiple contexts and cultures.

Sincere thinkers in Islam are struggling now with both the problems of "same message in different cultures" and "same message in different times." These problems are at least as large as the clash with Western values, that are visible daily on TV and over the internet.

This is not an easy conversation. In some parts of the Mideast, it seems there is an attempt to preserve the message, seemingly put at risk by Islam's heyday of leading the world in technology, by preserving the culture in which it was written, which means denying the last 700 years of technical progress. That's not working very well.

Spreading Islam to other cultural areas of the world has its own issues. Here's a few excerpts from a piece by Tom Peter in the Christian Science Monitor "Cultures clash in US Mosques" (May 17, 2007). (bolding added).

Like any good Muslim, Ali Karjoo-Ravary went to mosque on Friday seeking spiritual inspiration. What the 19-year-old Iranian-American found, however, was something completely different.

... Even as he made out the imam's words, the message made little sense. "The entire sermon was about 'Don't let a girl pat your back. It can lead to things,' " Karjoo-Ravary recounts.

The imam's disconnect with American culture shocked Karjoo-Ravary. Trying to gauge the reaction of other young congregants, he spotted a cluster of teen­agers and 20-somethings toward the back of the mosque... The entire group had tuned out the sermon and was texting busily.

"There's just a very different worldview."

Though much attention is given to sectarian differences within Islam – such as Shiites versus Sunnis – equally sizable gaps can exist between regional variants. Every culture that adopted Islam infused its local traditions into the religion – from the food eaten at religious holidays to the social boundaries between men and women. Provided these indigenous customs don't clash with the theological core of Islam, this is perfectly permissible, says Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who leads the Al-Farah Mosque in New York City.

In the US, however, the regional varieties are coming closer together, which can create friction.

"The immigrant generation is still living psychologically in their homeland," says Imam Abdul Rauf. "The second generation is the one that begins to assert itself as belonging to the new society."

Though Abdul Rauf moved to America at age 17, he spent his childhood in Egypt, Malaysia, and England. The experience, he says, taught him the difference between "what is religious and what is cultural."

"In our communities, the challenge is people who just won't let go of ideas that they think define Islam when in fact it just defines the culture in which they were born," says Asra Nomani, a second generation Muslim-American in Morgantown, W. Va., and author of "Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam."

"When [immigrant imams] are helping you and answering your questions, they're giving it from the perspective of wherever they're from without taking into consideration where they are, what's the context, what's the country like, what's the culture of the country," says Gulrukh Rahman, a Pak­istani Muslim in New York City who has lived in the US for 12 years. "A lot of that is pushing young people away from the mosque."

Those who embrace foreign imams are often urged to withdraw from American culture, says Ms. Rahman. She worries that these communities will become completely shut off and needlessly reclusive.

"We have to integrate," says Nehela. "I teach my brothers and my sisters here that you have to build a strong relationship with your neighbors. Get to know them and help them."

Of course, this is not just a problem of religions. Any long-standing legal tradition has the problem that precedents use words and concepts in ways that may not make any sense today, and the question is who is authorized to recognize that and "change the law" in order to preserve the spirit of the original? Once you open the door to changing the law, how do you stop total collapse from all inconvenient precedents?

Again, the problem is that there is huge value stored in the level of control embodied in the existing set of laws, that are always fighting forces that would break or dissolve them. How do you preserve the values of the past without necessarily clinging to the ways these values were expressed in the past. Can content be distinguished from accidents of context?

Similarly, if religion A at one time in history says "X", and religion B at another time in history, in another place says "Y", what is a valid way to determine whether X and Y are the same or different, after accounting for the change in context?

This gets into the nuanced area of distinguishing the "spirit of the law" from "the letter of the law", which a good judge will pay attention to. Many parties today, with very high priced attorneys, stay within the "letter of the law" while grossly violating the spirit. This seems wrong.

So if we believe that crowds have wisdom and emergent perception, and we are trying to figure out what different religions "saw" or "see", we can't get hung up on the words used and try to compare "the letter of the law" -- we need to punch through to the spirit of the law and compare that, corrected for the change in context in space, time, and culture.

And, in turn, that requires some wisdom in distinguishing between, basically, pixels and "an image". Images, it turns out, are subtle things, and far more subtle than strings of symbols or words.

For one thing, images ride up over their pixels with a life of their own, independent of the pixels. You can take a picture of George Washington and change every other pixel to pure
black, or white, or a random mix of the two, and you can still "see the image". No pixel matters or is critical, and yet, they all matter. It's not a picture of my cat.

Most arguments about religion, it seems to me, get lost in comparing letters of the law, or words, or pixels, and lose track of the entire bigger picture. Molehills are made into mountains dividing philosophies and moralities that are almost identical in terms of what behavior they exhort, giving many a convenient excuse to ignore them all.

All of which comes to the realization that understanding how content and context interact is not only a problem of science, or of commerce, or management versus labor, or medicine versus surgery, or clinical health versus public health, but it is also a core problem of theology and interfaith relationships. The battles between subgroups within a religion over meaning of some small thing can blow it all out of proportion, and end up being more widespread and violent than battles between religions.

And, of course, as in "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", differences in unspoken context can complicate communications between men and women every day.

Some of the differences may be honest differences, some may be efforts to subvert or hijack the point, but I suspect many differences are figments of our minds and we are killing each other because we simply don't grasp the power that world-view and perspective and context have to alter the meaning of content.

Any way we can find to educate ourselves and our children in the power of context and how failure to account for it can cause misunderstanding and conflict would seem like something we should focus on and support and include as part of our K-12 education.

And, for passionate atheists like Richard Dawkins, I'd suggest that in understanding why religion is so widespread and powerful, they need to stop looking at the content and discounting this word or that, and look instead at the context, at the frame that religions bring to surround thinking about real-world problems, and evaluate the impact of that frame.

As I quoted Snoopy saying in my last post, effectively, frames change everything. Some things you need to believe to see. If we recast what we see as battles to the death over values into questions of accounting for different frames, most of the causes of or excuses for violence go away.

I've been framed!

There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."

We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.

It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!

My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:

Did you ever notice
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?

This cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.

This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.

This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.

That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.

We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."

Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.

It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?

Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.

It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.

Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.

It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.

Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."

At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.

There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.

Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.

Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.

Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".

The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.

The insights are that

• content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
  
• you cannot change one without affecting the other;
• if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.

In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.

This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.

Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.

Implications
==========

Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.

It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.

In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.

Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).

Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.

This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.

Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.

If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.

(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)

Discussion of hybrid images

Detailed commentary on slide from my recent presentation

Slide 29 - Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe?

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required. The original covers a larger portion of the torso and the effect is much more pronounced.

===== Extended commentary on how the way humans process images can cause interpersonal conflict ==

You can see smaller partial versions of it here. The MIT Hybrid Image page is here with a three faces that are both smiling or/and frowning, depending on your distance. This illustrates the problem with the terms "or" and "and" when considering phenomena that cover a broad range of scales simultaneously. It can cause amazing conflict by two viewing groups who can't understand why the other group, looking at the "same thing" on a different scale or from a different distance, can possibly be so stupid as to see the "wrong" thing.

Another "angry illusion" on www.hemmy.net shows an angry and a calm face that change to the other expresion as you move further away.

It may be that a number of international conflicts are due to this exact phenomenon, or its analog, where those close to the front lines perceive very clearly one thing, and those at a comfortable distance away perceive something entirely different, leading to total internal chaos because of the mistaken stereotype that a perception "must be one or the other". It could explain some "you had to be there" excuses.
The sad truth is, like thinking there must be a "best", this is another comforting and simplifying error on the part of humans. Some things are both "chickens and eggs", and almost everything takes on that property as soon as you close the feedback loop of causality so A causes B which in turn causes A, and let it stabilize into a strange resonance state that we simply never see when feedback is not involved.

Regardless, this is one way that the situation at "the front lines" of an organization might be astoundingly different than the way it is so clearly and unambiguously viewed at the top. Repeatedly, the question asked by CEO's or top officials is "Why bother going down there? I can see from here!" The answer is that even you would see why if you went. That's why Toyota has a policy of "Genchi Genbutsu" -

You have to go down there and take the time necessary to settle down and actually see things from that viewpoint before you rush to judgment or speak or come up with "a plan" that won't have such a high risk of being nonsense or worse.

All our images, including mental ones that use the same hardware in our brains, have the problem of "filling in" gaps for us (to be "helpful", like Microsoft Word's paperclip) whether we asked them to or not. There is no way for us to know by looking at our mental picture that our head has papered over details it couldn't make sense of and replaced them with something that made more sense to it. (almost the definition of a magnetic "stereotype" that grabs hold if we get anywhere near it.)

Life is "fractally complex" and sometimes the fine-grained details change the entire equation. There are shapes, like the famous snowflake curve, that can be filled with paint but not painted. Our intuition misguides us. The "genchi genbutsu" rule of thumb is probably the safest bet.

Along with the other rule of thumb - "the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail." If it occurs to you that maybe you should go and look for yourself, don't put it off.

(from Rules of Thumb.)

Put in other terms, it's possible that there is way more energy in the high-frequency "details" than the low-frequency "overview", and that the details do NOT "go away" and can NOT be "put off till later."

That is pretty much the case with the Escher "Waterfall" picture. The tiny details that were wrong, that our eyes "helpfully" insist on discarding entirely for us from each local area of the picture, actually are coherently and systematically wrong and do not "cancel out." They are not "negligible" precisely for that reason.

In mathematical physics terms, we are used to the high-self-energy, low-interaction-energy world, where the inner product is
dominated by |a| and |b|. We tend to forget about <,> and can get away with it when thinking about rocks and simple machines. But when we get to social interactions, or plasma physics, or galactic centers and black holes, the interaction term <.> dominates, and the self-energy terms are negligible. 1 + 1 becomes dominated by the nature of "+" and doesn't care much about "1" any more. We have about zero intuition regarding that world, although we can compute the equations for it and simulate it.

Our problem is that we are trying to use cold-earth mathematics to design policies for high-energy social interactions. We try to leave out all the feedback, and all the cross-product interaction terms, and then are baffled that our results don't match the data. Hmmm.

The lessons we should learn from "system dynamics" or books like "Feedback control of dynamic systems" is that not only is the feedback usually not negligible, it actually dominates every other factor. If you want a good "first approximation", leave out all the other stuff and put back in the feedback structure and see what that gives you!

Are important vertical or horizontal loops clearly broken? Are unexpected loops clearly present, given observed behavior? Start there. If you get a "hit" don't bother with any other details until you get that fixed, because they'll all become irrelevant as soon as you reconnect, or disconnect the flow power loops. These are the kinds of "facts" that are way more important than legacy "data" that so confidently (and incorrectly) extrapolate to tell you your quest is "impossible" and "nothing can be done about that."

This whole subject touches a point that Frank Drake and Carl Sagan used to make repeatedly in class, back in my astrophysics days at Cornell University in the late 1960's. (Sagan was briefly, my advisor before he left for JPL to work on launching Voyager) I was a grad student at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, acronym "CRSR", but we all called it "Charlie's Radio Service and Repair. " The group did many things, including running the world's largest radio-telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - made famous in the movie Contact (Jodie Foster) and also some James Bond movie where they fought in huge antenna.

Speaking of which, I see the Arecibo radio telescope will close if they can't raise $4 million this year. It's a sad loss - I was yelled at once by the designer of the antenna (who was my roommate) because I wasn't"symmetric about my z-axis". That was the night, after two months of struggling, he finally solved the 4-page equation for his PhD thesis, which he couldn't resist phrasing in the thesis as "It is obvious that ... "

But the passing of Arecibo, a very large but single dish, is part of the larger trend that synthesized virtual arrays made of of may smaller component telescopes are far cheaper to make and maintain and extend. As with "supercomputers", they stopped making "one" huge computer finally and now are grappling with the problem of how to get 800,000 smaller computers to "work together".

Amazing how that question keeps coming up.

Anyway - in what I term "Drake's Other law", Frank taught us that

Every time humans move to looking at a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum, we don't see just different sides of the same old things -- we see ENTIRELY NEW PREVIOUSLY UNSUSPECTED things going on.

So, back in visual days, no one knew the center of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius, but blocked by dust. We had to look in the radio frequency spectrum to discover that we were, like the Andromeda galaxy, in the midst of a huge "dish" of stars, about 2/3 of the way out from the center in one of the spiral arms.

My point is that, the same thing seems to be true of our observations of this "LIFE" thing we are part of. Every time we rotate the microscope lenses and change to a larger view, the whole nature of LIFE changes, as dramatically as Marilyn Monroe's image changed into Albert Einstein when you changed the viewing scale.

I warned about this in another post as well, discussing the properties of "mid-field" components of a radiation pattern of an antenna. The field is "obvious" and we can measure it reliably with technical equipment, and it clearly falls of as the inverse of the radius.

I said then

The cleanest and least ambiguous example, physically, is the middle-range field of a radiating dipole antenna. As discussed in a prior post, very near the antenna the power falls off as the inverse of distance. At long distances, the stable pattern can be measured to be falling off as the inverse cube of distance. And, in between, in the really annoying and complicated mid-range field, the pattern is unstable and appears, if measured, to fall off as the inverse square of distance. Worse, in the mid-range, some fields build up that behave as if they are about to be radiated into space, but then sort of change their mind and get basically sucked back into the antenna.

Very near the antenna, less than 1/10 of a wavelength away, life is good and the equations are easy. Very far from the antenna, over 100 wavelengths away, life is good and the equations are different, but easy.

In between, things get extraordinarily messy. Power seems to get created out of thin air, then go away again, if you "neglect" all the terms that are "negligible" at each end, but not in the middle.

There's a lesson there. In the creation of LIFE ON EARTH, we're in the "middle" part. You can't assume any term is "negligible" -- you have to check it out and be sure it is. And even then, you could be wrong tomorrow about what it turns out was true today.

You end up learning what it means to say "The future isn't what it used to be."
If the past changes in the future, and the future has changed from the past, you really can't be sure any extrapolation of the "present" is reliable, whether you can "prove it" or not.

It's all in the wrist

Most of us aren't Einstein. People aren't born fluent in reasoning.

There are holes, gaps, blind-spots in our reasoning and perception. Magicians, con-artists, and some advertisers make good use of those to fool us.

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required.)

This makes it hard for us to make good decisions, especially social decisions.

Here is a made up example that illustrates a common problem that doesn't even have a name-- at least I don't know what it's called.

Suppose I walk into 10 rooms and shoot a person in each room, killing them. That would clearly be homicide.
Suppose instead I lock each of them in their room, seal all the doors and windows and cracks, and they die of suffocation. It's still homicide, but getting fuzzier and harder to see.
Now suppose instead of those methods, I release 1000 mosquitoes into each room, and let's say that 900 is sufficient to kill someone by each drinking one drop of their blood. The numbers may be off but you get the idea. At the end of the day, the poeple are all dead, due to my actions, and it is still homicide, but with a bioweaopon, I guess you'd call it.

Now suppose instead that I and 9 buddies each release 100 mosquitoes into each of 10 rooms, so the total is still 1000 per room. The people in the rooms still end up dying, but now no one person has released enough harm to any one person that it was fatal.

In this case, is anyone "guilty" of anything? Under American law, I suspect they are guilty only if someone can prove conspiracy.

Now suppose 10 people who don't know each other and never talk each release 100 mosquitos into each room for different reasons. All ten people in the rooms die.

Suddenly, now, no "crime" remains on the table. The "criminal action" has "gone away", and yet, the victims are all still dead at the end of the day.

Finally, suppose that 1000 mosquitoes are only enough to kill one in 10 people, if that one is unusually sensitive. Most people, 9 out of 10, can easily handle 1000 mosquito bites, say.

So, the 10 perpetrators each release 1000 mosquitos , 100 per room, and only 1 person, predictably, always dies, but we don't know in advance which one of the ten it will be. And let's say that happens every day for a year, so at the end of the year 365 people are dead.

Is anyone guilty of anything?

Here's the problem. On a collective scale, if you stand way back, there is a clear causal relationship between the mosquito release and the deaths. If you get up close, the relationship seems to go away - at least its now become so fuzzy that no jury would convict any individual mosquito-breeder for releasing a sub-lethal dose of 100 mosquitoes that demonstrably, in zero cases, by itself, would ever be fatal.

This becomes like the picture of, uh, Einstein (if you stand close) and Marilyn Monroe (if you stand far away) that I posted at the top and repost here:


If you back up 20 feed (7 meters) and look at that picture, it's the actress Marilyn Monroe.
If you sit at your computer, it's a picture of Alfred Einstein, the scientist.

Anyway, the problem described is an analogy to many of the problems Public Health has to deal with, and problems that large cities or nations have to deal with on a regular basis.

There is a hole, a gap, a blind-spot in our reasoning and perception, for this kind of distributed action that "goes away" when seen close up, but is clearly there when seen from "far away."

Or, in the case of the poor people who are stuck in urban ghettos, this kind of problem is very real when they are the ones dying, and the frustration is very real when they can't figure out how to make their case that the killing should stop.

Worse, it's not just the jury that won't convict anyone - it's that the perpetrators may individually each feel sincerely that they are not doing any significant harm and they can't figure out what the fuss is about. Sadly, the dim perception of a possible problem to a possible hypothetical victim has far less weight than the very clear perception of very clear profit from some enterprise such as selling cigarettes, or liquor, or guns, or predatory check-cashing, or predatory home-mortgages, etc.

In the suburbs, these don't add up to a lethal concentration, and the reported problems from the slums are interpreted as "something wrong with the people who chose to live there."

From the slums, the question is "Why do they keep doing this to us?"

Outrage, violence, or riots are ineffective at making the case. They generate a lot of attention, but then no one (from outside) can see what everyone (inside) is so excitedly pointing at.

On an international scale, I have to wonder how much of the violent resistance to the US and perception of the US as "the great Satan" is similar -- a protest over policies and actions that arrive diffusely but are experienced in concentrated form by the victims.

We need, as a planet, as humanity, better tools and better words for this sort of thing, so we can discuss it intelligently. This is one kind of "system effect" with profound implications and "unintended consequences" of the worst kind.

It is not unknowable. The problem is very clear, mathematically. It is easy to simulate it and show the effect, and, like the Einstein/Monroe picture, show how different it looks from each viewing location (inside and outside, in that case.)

After studying this, I think this effect is remarkably widespread, because it evades our perception. It causes management and labor to battle. It causes commerce and the poor to be in conflict. It causes the US and poor nations to be in conflict.

It seems like we should make a priority funding project to get researchers in such things to figure out how to make this visible, tangible, perceivable to everyone so we can resolve the abuse/oppression/exploitation cases that are accidental and inadvertent and unintentional.

Intentional abuse is a different story, but Systems Thinking shows that many problems are actually unintentional and completely unrealized and effectively impossible to view in the direct sense we normally see things. So, let's lower the conflict temperature by resolving the unintentional ones first, that we may all agree on if we all could simply see.

Remembering our soldiers

Countries still send their youth to fight and die, or come home injured and changed, for causes too often "long ago forgotten."

In the US, memory seems to be very short, and even the returning soldiers from last year are themselves forgotten in corners of Walter Reed, or in our homeless shelters or in cardboard boxes on the streets.

While violence and war seem to be the last resort of those incapable of any higher form of civilization, those who go are often motivated by their understanding of what will protect and serve the rest of us, and deserve our respect. That applies as well to "enemy" soldiers and injured civilians as to our own.

This is one of the most obvious "multi-level" activities of mankind, where "the Nation" is off fighting one kind of war on one level, and armies are fighting a different war on a different level, and individuals and small teams are fighting a third kind of war on a different level.

And, the "causes" of war, or intervention points to stop wars and achieve "just and enduring peace" are similarly clouded by all the factors this weblog discusses, from feedback processes to distant causality and the aggregate impact of many "small things" that we don't realize add up to a dominant force.

I'm reading a book titled "Social Injustice and Public Health", (Oxford, 2006) by Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, which is the textbook for a course I'm taking later this summer. The editors, Levy and Sidel, previously edited two other books "War and Public Health" and "Terrorism and Public Health." Their main thesis is that social injustice underlies these problems -- war, terrorism, and public health -- and that those visible downstream outcomes cannot be resolved until the underlying problem of social justice is solved.

This is similar to the central thesis of the book Peace - More than an End to War, published by the Baha'i Publishing Trust in 1986. Quoting from the forward of that book,

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior - individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international - based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation,which, unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

The Baha'i teachings prescribe education for world citizenship, the fostering of effective communication, and the eradication of prejudice. The advocate social reconstruction and administration based on the principle of the oneness of mankind. Each of these behavioral changes supports the others...

While there are many misguided and less noble motivations for warfare, one of the most consistent one, on all sides of any such conflict, is the belief that sacrifice and even death are worth it in the struggle to make a world safe for our children to grow up free of terror, discrimination, disease, and oppression. I suspect no nation has ever gone to war without believing that they are champions of this effort and that they are fighting some version of evil personified. Dehumanization and demonization of "the enemy" is always rampant.

Yet, 50 years later, these people like us that we had perceived as demons are often our friends and allies, and now we've shifted to perceiving other groups as demons.

Surely, our linear minds think, there is someone out there to blame for what is going wrong, and it surely couldn't be ourselves.

One of the most important lessons of "systems thinking" is explained well using a class role-playing simulation of a massive instability in the production and distribution of the alcoholic beverage beer, in MIT Professor Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. Orders fluctuate wildly until companies start failing, but there is, it turns out, no one to blame. The system is to blame. The overall structure of the interactions is to blame, and, literally, every person in the system is behaving rationally and sensibly and no one intends the whole thing to go so wrong.

I can't think of anything more important for people who want to "stop war" or "end violence" to understand than that lesson. Often, no one is to blame, and everyone is to blame, for sustaining a structure that results, inevitably, inexorably, in us demonizing each other, and killing each other, instead of watching our children play soccer together.

The problem is that warfare has always been an inefficient and ineffective method of accomplishing the goal that everyone on all sides wants, ultimately, of a peaceful world with stable, thriving communities, economic prosperity, physical health, and an opportunity to move closer to nature and our particular view of God without being demonized ourselves for doing so.

We all want what our bodies and spirits are designed for and optimized for - social connectivity to each other. We want to belong, and to belong to something larger, and belong to something larger that has noble purpose and that may demand something of us but that sustains our best self in return. When that connectivity breaks down, as all the social epidemiology literature shows, when we become fragmented and disconnected, it is inevitably followed with depression, deteriorating personal physical health on many fronts, sometimes violence, and often death. We were never designed to try to face life alone, and it doesn't work well. Even the cells in our bodies, if removed from our bodies, commit suicide ("apoptosis"), apparently seeing no reason to go on.

This seems to be a deep, profound, and multi-level need, the need to belong, to reassemble all the loose parts and form a fabric, a community, a society, a culture.

One problem is that on different scales, individuals, groups, cultures, and sometimes entire nations and peoples are perceived as "not us" by other people, and efforts are made to marginalize, detach, suppress, or kill them outright - singly, in groups, or in massive genocidal wars. Needless to say, the attitude becomes mutual and self-reinforcing.

From the model I've been painting in the weblog, we may be able to view this in the framework of "regulatory feedback control systems" trying to do what they always do - namely, figure out where their own parts are, reassemble the parts, figure out what parts don't belong, get rid of those parts, and re-stabilize the whole thing in some kind of sustainable shape -- homeostasis in the case of humans, allostasis in the case of other beings or other levels of life, "system stability" in terms of large, complex computing systems and ecologies.

Now, that process is unstoppable and comes with the territory. You can't have Life without that process on every level, from sub-cellular components such as mitochondria to nations. There is nothing wrong with that design. It's a great design. It got us from a sea of hydrogen to the complex muli-leveled beings we are and the world we've built around ourselves and the natural world we've inherited, even if we seem bent on destroying as rapidly as possible.

What is killing us, and resulting in pain and violence at all levels, is not that process, but disorders of that process.

It is quite like our relationship with microscopic organisms known as bacteria. There are millions or billions of different kinds of bacteria, and for the vast majority of them we get along fine. In fact, there are some we literally could not live without, populating our intestines. Even some of the "diseases" that "we" get turn our to be the unintended side-effect of the bacteria themselves getting a disease from the much smaller viruses. We are not, or should not be, at war with bacteria. Coexistence dominates, and there are only a few places where it breaks down, and even those are malfunctions on the pathogen's end. It makes no sense for a pathogen to kill its host, and then have to go find another.

It is, on that scale, a poor business model.

Similarly, the cells of our bodies are not our enemies as humans. Occasionally, one goes crazy and starts ignoring the larger body and grows itself unboundedly, and we call that "cancer", but for the most part the health of our cells and the health of our bodies are fully compatible and, in fact, more than compatible, they are mutually supportive. It's the ultimate win-win solution.

It is, in my mind, a very similar process that we're fighting on a whole different scale with our economies and religions and armies.

Religions have disorders at the entire entity level because they can't resolve clearly what part of themselves is "them" and what part is "other", and we end up with "autoimmune disorders" where one part of the religious body turns on another part of the religious body and tries to destroy it. Sects develop and intersect warfare results. The body religious rips itself apart, to no one's benefit.

Immune systems are great, except when they go wrong. But it is not the concept of an immune system that should be discarded - it is the disorder of the immune system that needs to be repaired. You cannot make a living, sustainable anything without an immune system.

So, our attention then is turned, inevitably, onto how our social immune system makes the subtle but absolutely critical distinction between "me" and "not me", or "us" and "not us". Which thing out there should be preserve and healed, and which thing out there should be attacked and destroyed? This turns out to be a very hard question.

But, it turns out to be a very hard multi-level question, a scale-invariant question, a problem that is instanced on every single level of every living thing that ever was or will be.

In that is our hope, because, even though no one level tells us enough to "find the answer", the fact that all levels have this problem means we can pool data, trade notes, combine our insights from every level into a single master picture and then, I believe, we will be able to simply look at see what to do. It should be obvious, once we get the right viewpoint. It should be unambiguous, because it should be beautiful, simple, elegant, and have "white space" all around it. We should "resonate" with it, because it will be the answer our own body, our own psyche, our own family, our own community needs as well.

So, if we just accept the working hypothesis that "life" exists at every level, and then extend everything we know across levels, it should turn out we already know the answer. The "life sciences" should inform the "social sciences", and vice versa, because we all face the problem of supporting a multi-level mutually compatible immune system and the associated "identity" that the immune system is pledged to defend, at the price of death if necessary.

The expression of this identity at the social and national level can be perceived as "prejudice", when it attempts to divide one part of the human body from another and turns one part of our Body on another in the form of warfare or discrimination or suppression or exploitation.

Put most simply, that can't be good. It is an auto-immune disorder. It turns us on ourselves.

If our health is actually dependent on the health of the people around us and our connectivity to that, which it is, then it seems to follow that we want more of that, not less of it.

As Fisher and Shapiro note in their book Getting to Yes, after analyzing how to stop the Soviet Union and the USA from annihilating each other in a global thermonuclear war, there is a level upstream from the details of "position" where we can look at "interests" and realize that both sides, regardless how much they may hate each other at this moment, actually are made up of humans and actually have common interests - and if we can meet those human interests in some new way, the old "positions" that led to conflict can be released without struggle. The intractable simply dissolves.

This is the sort of thing that Kim Cameron experienced at the Rocky Flats nuclear waste-dump in the work I described yesterday - Making the Impossible Possible. It can work. It has worked. It does work. It will work.

We have a much larger problem than resolving the "Mideast crisis" facing us. The development of nuclear power is widely advertised as "the threat", but it is nothing compared to the threat of biological weapons, which almost any country can already develop. Unlike nukes, that at least mostly stay where they're used, aside from toxic plumes of fallout that will kill everything for the next 50,000 years -- the biological weapons can literally take on a "mind of their own" and decide that they will turn around and destroy their creators, then go on to destroy the rest of human life on the planet. That is not cool.

And, no missile defense shield or "Star Wars" project can stop such an onslaught, once it begins.
Such a thing can be launched, stupidly, by almost any two countries that decide the only way one of them can exist is to destroy the other.

The largest threat to the Homeland Security of the USA, in that light, has nothing to do with nukes or an "axis of evil", but has everything to do with any two countries or cultures or sects of a religion that get it into their heads that they should attack each other with bioweapons, which then spiral out of control around the globe.

There is only one defense for that threat to our lives and our children's lives and the entire future of the human race - and that is to tackle the disease and disorder of our collective immune system that keeps causing "some of us" to abruptly perceive "others of us" as mortal enemies that must be attacked to keep the whole body healthy and operational and to restore "homeostasis" on a larger scale.

As I say, I think we know a lot about regulatory control feedback systems, and we have an unimaginably huge computing capacity on the planet that is mostly used for video games and unused 2/3 of every day while we work or sleep. We have a global communications system with wearable camera-phones and wireless internet. Never before in history has any civilization had such powerful tools to use to tackle any social threat.

The threat is that our collective immune system, on a planetary scale, has not yet been stabilized and keeps mis-identifying parts of our own Body as "enemies" who must die.

It's an issue of who "we" are, at the core, and finding common ground with every other human on the planet -- which shouldn't be too hard in the space age, because we're all standing on the same little ball floating in a very hostile very large space out there.

Through the matter of how our individual and population healths are intertwined on a physiological and psychological and spiritual level, there is no "them" that is not, ultimately,
also "us." "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is redundant, because our neighbor turns out to be another side of ourself.

I recall the day our infant daughter Kelly saw something interesting waving in front of her face and reached out and bit down on it, as infants tend to do. The something was her own large toe.
It took about 2 seconds for this realization to work its way through the system and the shock and horror and pain to "click" and get her to stop biting her own self. Once the issue was "realized" there wasn't a problem in getting her to "disengage."

On a planetary scale we are not just "one people" but also one "meta-organism" with a life on its own level that is higher than our own, and that we share. We have a society and civilization and we have values and "epigenetic" information that was hard won that we want to pass on to our children's children.

It's time to tackle the job of healing that meta-organism's immune system, which will be reflected in the removal of "prejudice" of all types and the partitioning of the world into little subsections that think each other is some kind of enemy agent.

It's not that we shouldn't be fighting a war against bad things and evil, but that the bad thing we need to fight has to be "prejudice" and narrow-minded, short-sighted, selfishness that threatens to kill us all downstream of its own bloody in-fighting.

I think the framework I've laid out, mostly built on Baha'i and Public Health's best teachings, may be a way to approach that problem with new eyes, new tools, and new hope.

If so, maybe all the wars everyone has fought will be finally "worth it" and we can stop the rest of the wars forever, and actually heal this disorder instead of just living with it and dying from it.

Some people have found it strange that I spend a lot of time on a "public health" weblog talking about military leadership and US Army Doctrine. I don't see these as incompatible, and I want to address that question. The US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100) seems to me a marvelous work, even if it now superseded by FM6-22. The description of the doctrine is of a fighting force with tremendous focus on integrity, character, humility, strength, and being a learning organization that learns from every mistake and is agile and not hung up on outdated concepts or models of the battlefield, but can quickly process new information and develop a new model of what's going on. What is not to like there? If there are problems they are from failure to live up to that standard, not from the standard.

Here's a few excerpts from that manual:

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.

1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you speak.

1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless there was a good reason...

1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it must be developed over time.

1-15: People who are trained this way will accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.

1-23: you demonstrate your character through your behavior.

1-56: Effective leaders strive to create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their subordinates to seize the initiative and act.

1-74: The ultimate end of war, at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.

4-9: Be aware of barriers to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still talking.

4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes to mind.

4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all the time, even when no one is watching.

Such a group is not "the enemy." These aren't the words of people with an objective of hatred and destruction. These aren't the techniques of evil.

The people aren't the problem. The army is not the problem. Individual decisions are not the problem. The problem traces back, up stream, to our collective human immune system. Like Peter Senge's example, even when everyone does the right thing with the right intentions, this sucker breaks down. OK, fine, we've identified the issue, and some tools.

We owe it to everyone who fought to get us this far, preserving the values they understood our future depends on, to complete the job, repair the planet, and restore a vital peace that finally works correctly and doesn't keep veering the car off the road into the trees.

And we owe it to our veterans not to leave them homeless and abandoned. The weapons may have changed, but in a larger sense, we still need to "complete the mission" and protect our future. It's not "their war" and it's already "over here."

It is immoral and twisted to send our children to fight and die to protect some set of values that we are all not involved in protecting through our own daily lives. If these values are not a big deal, then bring the army home. If they are a big deal, why aren't the rest of us working on all the other fronts possible to resolve the conflict and all future conflicts?

"Memorial Day" 2007