Our month-long European
extravaganza is at en end. We’re finally home, and I really know how Dorothy
must have felt. (That’s the Dorothy from Kansas not my mom from Perth Amboy,
NJ.) This is really our own warm, comfortable bed, and we’re eating our own
delicious healthy food, and snuggling with our own two adorable dogs. After the
long anticipation, the trip already feels as dream-like and distant as Oz.
We saw palaces in
London, art in Amsterdam, and every fairytale castle and cathedral from
Budapest to Prague we could squeeze into our twelve-day, Danube riverboat
tourathon. It’s like we rolled up a Euro, and snorted two thousand years of
European history at a single sitting, and now as we sift through our memories and
pictures under the warm October sun I’m trying to grasp what it all meant. What
did all that grandeur and destruction, all that refinement and brutality add up
to?
Ultimately, I find that
I took one picture that enables me to makes sense out of this swirling,
majestic, insanity and put it in some kind of perspective. Here it is:
I took this at the
Amsterdam airport prior to our afternoon flight to Budapest. As you can see
from the map illustration on the sign we were well off the main concourse with
our gate buried deep in one of those desolate backwater wings. We hadn’t eaten
since breakfast, and in the mean time had been run through a grueling
technological gauntlet: first we had to figure out how to extract our e tickets
from a foreign kiosks, (it took many, many tries before we could figure out how
to insert our passports just right so they would scan) then we confronted another first,
an automated machine that tags and loads our checked baggage.
We confronted a large
white drum with a curved, smoked plexiglass door. After running the barcode of
your boarding pass over a scanner the door opens, and you place your luggage
inside, a white light flashes around the bag confirming its correct placement,
and then one of those long adhesive tags prints out that you adhere to the
handle of your bag. When you press the button acknowledging that you have
successfully completed this portion of the operation, the door slides closed,
the shelf with your bag tilts backward, and your luggage disappears (presumably
to a conveyor belt and not a dumpster.) I imagine this will show up in US
airports in the next few years, and another twenty or thirty thousand jobs will
disappear.
By the time we made it
through the security ritual, we were stressed, tired and hungry. After a very
long walk through empty airport corridors to our particular backwater we were
happy and relieved to see one, lone food concession where we could grab
something to eat while waiting another hour for our flight. But when we finally
reached the snack bar we discovered the sign.
Why did they need this
sign? If we got to the concession, and nobody was there we would probably
assume that it was closed. We would probably not have guessed “hiding” because
the area was so small. Why not a sign that just said, “Sorry, we’re closed.”
Why did they feel the need to add, “Open 24 hours”? Were they concerned that
without that additional comment the irony of their closure would be wasted?
Finally, why in a Dutch airport was this unnecessary, intentionally ironic sign
only printed in English? Was marketing helping them irritate a particular
target audience?
All right, it was
probably just a mistake; an oversight that seemed like a good idea at the time.
What may seem more absurd is why I bother obsessing over these things,
collecting pictures of them, writing at length about the irritating quirks of
bathrooms and bagels while all around me are the wonders of the old world. Beyond
the amusement they provide me, they are constant reminders of a deeper and more
serious problem that I have spent my entire working life trying to solve. Let
me show you the results of another “it seemed like a good idea at the time”
moment.
Here is snapshot I took
of a statue in Nuremberg.
Not much of a photo, I
admit: an uneventful street scene with fairly non-descript buildings, you can’t
even see the statue that well. But that statue, in fact this particular view of
that statue, caught my attention as we came around the corner because the
instant I saw it I realized I had just looked at this scene, from much the same
vantage point in another photo just five minutes before. It was blown up to
mural size in the alcove of a building a few blocks away. It was taken the year
I was born, 1949. Here it is:
Ninety percent of
Nuremburg looked like this after the war. Sixty percent of Budapest was
destroyed as the Russians advanced from the east, and the Germans blew up every
bridge across the Danube to make their stand on the western side of the river.
In the US, where over fifty percent of our population can’t place Iran on a map
or name their member of congress, World War II seems as distant, and as
relevant as the War of the Roses, but in Europe it’s like it happened
yesterday. The loss of a few buildings and some three thousand lives on 9/11
changed the politics and culture of this country forever. Imagine if you
experienced your entire continent reduced to rubble.
But for the Germans,
Hitler seemed like a good idea at the time. He curbed runaway inflation,
revived the economy, put people back to work, and erased the humiliation of the
Treaty of Versailles transforming Germany into a major European power. Who knew
it would all end like this? Not being able to see the unintended consequences
of our actions when it comes to café signs is just silly and irritating, but
our inability to see past short term gains to the long term implications of our
choices around war and climate change are catastrophic.
Why do these blind spots
exist, and what can we do about them has been the koan of my life. My year of
world travel has given me the opportunity to see the pervasive consequences of
this human failing while also learning more about why this occurs, and what we
might do to produce better outcomes.
For example, the night
we got home, Shar and I snuggled up in bed, and turned on a prerecorded episode
of Bill Maher from the night before. The great environmentalist, Bill McKibben
was the final guest. Mckibben sited a study by Stanford agronomists that predict
that for every one degree increase in global temperature rise we will lose 10%
of our worldwide grain harvest, and that over the next few decades, if we
continue on our current course, the temperature will rise four or five degrees.
In response, Will Cain, a young, affable, conservative talk show host launched
his counter argument.
“Let’s say all your
arguments are valid: that the climate is changing, I should hope it’s changing
since that’s what climate does, and that the change is man made. My concern is
with these calls for massive collective action. I think we need to be a little
bit more humble in the face of limited and fallible human knowledge. In the 17th
century Thomas Malthus predicted massive human starvation as we ran out of food
for the exploding population, but that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because
he couldn’t predict chemical fertilizer and the green revolution. It didn’t
happen because he couldn’t predict the steam engine.
It’s a mistake to
presume that circumstances today can simply be projected into the future
because none of us can predict the solutions that future technology will
provide.”
McKibben’s response:
“What technology do you think will replace the state of Iowa?”
Then the former
Republican representative from Florida, Mark Foley, chimed in, “The other day
it was 83 degrees in Miami while on that same day it was 118 in Chicago. That’s
the reverse of what we would expect so I think we need to be cautious with our
predictions.”
McKibben: “That’s why
we’ve been tracking world wide trends for over 330 months. Every one of those
months has been hotter then the corresponding month in the preceding years.
Telling me that it was hotter on one particular day in Miami then it was in
Chicago is not even an argument.”
Both McKibben responses
were cogent and funny. They shut down the arguments of the other side, but they
didn’t explain why, no matter how many facts we marshal, no matter how many
scientists we line up, these arguments just will not die.
David Suzuki, the
brilliant Canadian environmentalist, provides an explanation that gets at the
root of the problem. Climate change, like many other big problems we face, is
accelerating geometrically, but our brains naturally think arithmetically
because that’s the scale on which most of the problems we encounter everyday
occur. How do you deliver an abstract message like that to a lay audience in
the sound-bite driven world of mass media? Listen to this.
Suzuki invites us to
play with a simple thought experiment. Imagine a test tube in which you are
going to grow a bacterial culture. You place a single bacterium in the test
tube, and the bacteria population is going to double every minute. So on minute
one you have one bacterium, minute two you have two, minute three you have four,
than eight, and so forth. At the end of 60 minutes the entire test tube is
full; every ounce of air has been consumed and all the nutrients eaten. On what
minute will the test tube be half full? Our arithmetic brain immediately makes
a correlation between time and volume. If the test tube is full at sixty
minutes it must be half full at thirty minutes. But then we remember that we
were told this population is growing geometrically, doubling every minute, so
if the test tube is completely full at minute 60 it must have been half full at
minute 59.
This is a jolt to the
way we normally think about things, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of
how difficult this type of problem is to grapple with given our everyday way of
thinking. If the test tube is half full at minute 59 then it is only a quarter
full at minute 58. At minute 57 it’s only 12.5% full, and at minute 56 it’s
6.25% full. Here’s our problem! It’s minute 55, the test tube is just barely 3%
full, and fifty-five generations have gone by. In human terms that would be
close to two thousand years. How do you convince the other bacteria that though
all this time has passed with no problem, and you’ve consumed only 3% of the nutrients,
in five minutes you will fill the entire volume, consume all the resources, and
all be dead? Where McKibben’s clever arguments won’t do the trick maybe
Suzuki’s striking parable will.
That’s the thinking side
of the problem. For me, the feeling side of the problem is even more daunting.
Here is the issue: if you have not received nurturing love from your parents as
a child, and if you have not seen that kind of deep, physical affection shared
by the adults around you, then those neural pathways will go largely
undeveloped. Without those pathways how will you recognize those same
expressions of love as an adult? I have heard this conundrum raised by Sharon
in the context of neurofeedback, by George Lakoff from the standpoint of
linguistics, and from the renowned doctor and psychologist Tom Herrington as to
how families screw up their kids.
I believe this may
explain my deep discomfort in Baroque cathedrals. I think the snaps below are
from the Abbey at Melk, but could as easily be from any one of them from
Budapest to Prague.
This is bling on
steroids: gold everywhere and though the scale is monumental, every inch is a
study of exquisite detail and artistry. In every one of these cathedrals I
notice two things about myself: I am stunned by their grandeur, and they leave
me feeling like crap. I couldn’t say why exactly until we got to Prague and I
saw the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Vysehrad. The moment we walked
in I felt calm, happy, and loved being there. I know these pictures don’t come
close to capturing the experience, but let me show you at least a bit of what
we encountered.
Although this cathedral
had its beginnings in the 11th century, the art nouveau interior we
are looking at was added in 1902.
Ground level in the
bling church is dark. All the color and light is way up on the ceiling aka.
Heaven. These are folks that are into hierarchy up to their miters: God is a
king, heaven is a kingdom, and in case you are not picking that up from the
symbolism they have fronted the whole show with a gold crown that’s the size of
a Volkswagen. The architecture is designed to make worshipers feel small. Not
so the church in Prague. Here the colors are warm, the art lovingly depicts
nature, children, and animals, and I can feel this God right here with me
rather then as some wrathful, distant asshole, running the world like a greedy
accountant.
Linguist, George Lakoff,
says that the difference between liberal and conservative value systems can be
understood in terms of the family metaphors that each group uses to make sense
of the world. Conservatives subscribe to a “strict father” family. From this
perspective the world is seen as a dangerous, often hostile place in which
willful, self-indulgent children must be disciplined and punished by a strict
father if they are to survive and prosper. Liberals, on the other hand, use a
“nurturant parent model” which assumes that children inherently know what they
need and should be allowed to explore the world with the parents’ guidance and
protection. This view values respect and compassion over obedience and
punishment. Which church do you think is being run by a greedy accountant?
Obviously, I’ve got some
issues with hierarchical religion. However, in the town square of Regensburg,
Germany I was confronted by a religious miracle that has forced me to call all
these judgments into question. Again, A picture can hardly capture the
astonishing nature of this spiritually transforming experience, but at least it
can give you some idea of what a life dedicated to divine revelation can
accomplish:
I’m not there yet, but I
keep trying.
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