Martha Graybow, from Reuters, looks at what the
US Clergy think about the mortgage mess in today's Washington Post. I agree wholeheartedly that there are "spiritual solutions to economic problems" but don't see them mentioned in that article.
One characteristic of spiritual solutions is that they tend to look at the bigger picture, in all three dimensions of space, time, and social scale. Like great health care, the solutions are proactive, preventing the car crash in the first place, not miraculously repairing the damage and deaths following it.
The solutions involve what seems to be a lost art these days - understanding the actual causes of outcomes, and the consequences of our own actions, and then, gasp, altering our behavior so we don't get into trouble next time.
The USA has made the news lately for the poor state of health here, and I'm not talking about insurance but simply the physical health of people. The upper quarter of white American males, for example, are less healthy than the bottom quarter of white males in England.
Why? Compare the strategies. England, with universal care, tries to prevent health problems and helps people eat well and stay fit and not do dumb things. The USA tries to have the most astoundingly heroic rescue and repair service so we can smoke, drink, and do dumb things, and then not have to face the consequences, sometimes. Of course, the culture of abandon of self-control is spread widely, and the access to repair-services is restricted, which makes for many sick poor people. What's less recognized is that even the rich end up worse. No doctor can make you better after a heart attack and transplant than you would have been if you'd stayed fit in the first place, either physically or psychologically.
With airplanes with those T-shaped tails, with the small wings ("elevators") up high on the tail, there is a design issue. If the plane descents at the wrong angle, turbulence ("stalling") from the body of the plane surrounds the tail, which loses the ability to change the angle of the plane. If you get into this condition, typically, the plane will descend into the ground before the airport. Not good.
Pilots have a question: "What do you do when you get into this condition?" and the answer is "Don't get into that condition."
And here is the difference between a novice learning lessons too late, and professionals. Professionals figure out what it takes so they don't end up in that condition, and what kind of training they need to do that, and build it into the training program so they can, in fact, "not do that." Social wisdom from other people's experience is built into everyone's training or retraining. That works, going forwards. It doesn't fix the past, of course.
So, when we look at an equivalent question to the mortgage mess, such as "What would it take to get young people not to drive too fast on icy roads?" the answer that comes to mind is "It would take a miracle."
Precisely.
It would take maturity, training, a social ethic of responsibility, a social ethic of competence, and an ability to overcome the impulse to rush and damn the consequences. All of these things are possible for people, and some people can do all of those.
The "miracle" isn't that the people wake up one day and are suddenly good drivers, but that they have the social support system that, over a long period of time, gives them the internal capacity to master skills, to survive the short-term costs of responsibility, to overcome temptation and the short-run impulses to cheat, etc.
What's "miraculous" is that this "bounce-shot" works, when you can't sink the pool ball in the pocket directly. If you try to do this activity on your own, you'll generally fail. It's hard, and it involves persistence and local costs for some distant future benefit, and you'll run out of steam regardless how well intentioned the start is.
This "steam" to keep on going is crucial. We aren't taught about this in school, sadly, despite the fact that everyone knows about it and I believe it would stand up to rigorous experimental designs and tests.
Where does this "steam" come from? What gives young people the ability to say "No!" to drugs or speeding or ill-advised sex, or the ability to stay in school, or the ability to say "No!" to a dangerous mortgage, or the ability to rise above ego and consult with others and avoid putting their foot in that mortgage bear-trap in the first place?
Some kind of larger scale, persistent social structure is needed to hold this learning and navigational advice, and some kind of practice and habit is required to develop the strength to "obey" or "submit" to that outside higher authority when the inside impulses all want to go the old way.
For pilots, professional organizations and ethics may be enough, although federal standards help somewhat. Great pilots are far above what standards require, because they use outside social support to keep themselves in line.
For most of us in daily life, we need some kind of equivalent. Organized religion has historically served this role, when it doesn't get lost in itself and lose its own way.
So, while the government's "abstinence only" method of birth control is demonstrably broken and ineffective, the reason is not that abstinence may be a good practice for teens (and others), but that it is simply not possible for fragmented individuals, on their own strength, to carry out that practice and survive temptation.
In between the chaos of everyone repeating every mistake over and over, and the rigidity of dead dogma controlling every aspect of everyone's lives is a sweet spot that can provide make good pilots or drivers of us all.
These kind of problems are not healed by prayer after the crash, but by organized activity long before the crash designed to prevent it from ever happening.
Like Mr. Rodney Dangerfield, prevention "don't get no respect." It works, it can work, it has worked, it will work - but it's an organized social activity, not something an individual does for or to themselves.
In the mix of making it happen are deeper spiritual issues of identity, motivation, purpose, awareness, externally-based stability and power, and "steam".
God, we all could use more "steam." We just wish it was free.
It's not free, but it is affordable. It's something we can do for each other that requires no huge government program and, in fact, would probably choke and die if the government tried to run it.
At this point, most people look, sigh, and turn sadly away saying "They'll never do that."
I'd like to see what would happen if the 3 hours a day of TV indoctrination encouraged social responsibility with eyes open, instead of discouraging it and encouraging blind yielding to whatever impulse the advertisers or politicians can create in us at that second.
I think the change would indeed justify the term "spiritual" sufficiently to use that word even in an academic sense. Actually, I think the reconnection to the larger "us" goes deeper, but even if it only went this deep, it would be worth investigating.
And I'm confident that, like discovering the planets, if we charted out all the known effects and watched behaviors, we'd see patterns of unexplained variation that would cause us to look even deeper for something else going on.
It's a fascinating question. Meanwhile, short term, there are solutions to our problems but we refuse to accept them, wanting, I don't know, something more glamorous or short-term.
Being able to say "yes" to saying "no" is enough of a miracle to pray for daily.
We're still trying to build some sort of moral-Rambo model, where we have internal strength that doesn't require external support -- a GPS that works without satellites. And, sure, there are inertial navigation units that weigh 200 pounds we could carry around with us, even though they drift over time. That's a stupid solution when there are satellites in place already, so the GPS in our phone can be so tiny we don't notice the weight.
Same with wisdom. Satellites and a receiver is a better model.
Is this hard to do? Well, yes and no. Is it hard to use structural and civil engineering principles and computer-assisted design to make graceful bridges that don't fall down? Yes, but it is doable and we'd be pretty stupid not to have some group of people that learn it and do it for us.
Is it harder to make social structures that don't fall down, don't become corrupt, give us daily strength to persist our lessons and still have dynamic ability to adjust to changing times? Probably not that much harder.
We've just never tackled the problem that way, because even pondering questions of what determines our behavior or allows corruption to creep in raises emotions and resistance.
Still, it seems an obvious way to go. We just need to keep on asking "Why" one more time, and saying, ok, how can we tackle this problem in social engineering even with resistance and opposition and those who prefer these subjects not be studied?
This is nothing new. T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from the Rock (1934) says
There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet
There was no exception to the general rule.
and
In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar
where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech.
and
If men do not build
How shall they live?
That's the "new bricks" metaphor this weblog site is named for. It's a good idea.
photo credit: I35W bridge collapse photo from
Poppyseed Bandits
