GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831), last of the great German classical philosophers.
By George Templeton
Rim Country Gazette Columnist
Look Away, This is nothing but Dismay
We are like the children in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. In his Penultimate Peril episode the hotel clock chimes out a warning, “Wrong, Wrong”.
There
are those who would not invent the wheel because it would eliminate
jobs for people to carry things! It seems an easy solution. But what
exactly does it mean? What really is significant? If we want to “Make
America Great Again” we should ask this question. A failure to build
the “Great Wall of America” along our southern border is not a
calamity. The real problems are the reality demons which complicate a
solution to the immigration problem. They slow or even stop progress.
How
can you be successful when you cannot agree on what you are trying to
do, when your probability of success involves mutually exclusive
events? The politician thinks he wins by wagering on both sides of the
coin toss. He is afraid to do his job because he might be found
accountable. Mathematics can help. The first step to understanding is
measurement, but we don’t need numerical calculation. We want a
rational process that moderates emotion.
Outcomes
depend on many variables. Each nuance adds another dimension making
visualization difficult. We see two dimensions easily. They form a
surface. Three dimensions make a volume. More than three dimensions
are possible but they do not make a simple mental picture. We have to
slice the object up, and examine the exposed surface. If we expect to
solve any complicated problem we want to discard as many weak variables
as possible. We try to pick variables that are pure and do not interact
with others. Interactions introduce interference, sums, differences,
and compromises causing the complexity of a solution to explode. If we
can identify independent variables, changes in them will influence the
outcome and not each other. It is wrong to think that making our
variables more precise, more complete, by introducing interactions will
help at this beginning point in our process.
The
difficulty of solving a problem depends on how we frame it. We should
not be like lawyer politicians who divide everything into guilty and not
guilty; who think that their winning is more important than the cost to
you. Everything that has a right side up also has an upside down. One
is often better than the other for seeing how things fit together. But
a rose is a rose by any other name. Symmetry is essential. Then
reality does not change depending on whether one sees it as a Republican
or a Democrat. Immigration is like that. It is about compassion, the
law, sanctuary, keeping families together, and providing the economic
growth needed to care for our elderly.
Human
problems are much more complicated than process engineering. They have
to be fixed one piece at a time. That takes longer than a single
political administration. Maybe we cannot control the variables or even
pick an accurate proxy for them. In that case they are uncertain. We
have to honestly express alternatives and make decisions based on
probability and tested results.
So
how does this relate to a wall and a government shutdown? These things
are unrelated. They are not like the deficit and debt. Our arguments
are superficial and hurtful. They reinforce dysfunctional behavior.
Managing Government
Big
projects, like fixing immigration, take a long time to implement. The
immigration problem dates back to the bipartisan McCain-Kennedy Secure America and Orderly Immigration Reform Bill
of 2005. President Bush backed a version of it in 2006, but the House
refused to vote on it. Another try in 2007 faltered in the Senate.
They tried again in 2013, after Kennedy’s death, and got a supermajority
of Senate votes, but once again failed to get a vote in the House. It
is unlikely that a three week stopgap government funding will make any
difference. When nature aims at a constant, the result is persistent
long term behavior. We must understand this to solve the problem. We
owe it to the legacy of our great patriots to try again. Dealing with
immigrant children seeking asylum requires faster and more limited
action, but effective problem solving relies on the same technical steps
described earlier.
Imagine
you are a project champion. You have to persuade your management,
using facts, to fund your project. If you try to mislead them with
fantasies, they will not forget. Success is more than building a wall.
You have to defend why you want one, what the return on investment will
be, where it will go, what the risks and alternatives are, and give a
cost benefit analysis. It should be a written proposal, perhaps fifty
pages long, measurable and quantifiable, and explaining when and how the
money will be spent. Somebody other than you will measure your success
and it will become part of the public record. All of the people who
will help you with the project must “sign in blood” and agree to
cooperate in implementing the project according to their area of
expertise. Your management might approve your project, deny it, or
request changes in the proposal.
There
will be periodic reviews. There are people who understand what’s going
on. You won’t find them in Congress. You would not rely on the House
or Senate to fix a semiconductor manufacturing process gone astray. Why
should you rely on politics to fix immigration?
Imagine
that you have an industrial crisis. Your process is out of control,
your product no longer works, and your customers are screaming to get
their orders filled. Suppose that you would not try to fix the process
unless you were allowed to smoke in the parking lot. That’s the way we
do it in government, with poison pills that that lead to an
unwillingness to act.
Isn’t
a chair more than the atoms it is composed of? A nation has no soul in
the same sense that a chair is only its atoms. A strong manager is not
one who coerces and forces others to do his bidding. He wants things
to turn out our way, the best way, the American way, not necessarily his
way. He would not use people as a means to achieve his end. That is
immoral.
It
is natural to view the brain as a computer. In this model, awareness
is important. It can be traced to particular regions within the brain.
Recent thinking claims that consciousness is much more than
perception. It is in how we decide. It has no particular region in our
brains. That is why our Supreme Court, that many people feel is
broken, is so interesting.
Neither Saint nor Hero
The
editorial claimed that President Obama made the Supreme Court rule as
he desired. They answered to him, and that upset conservatives. But
judges on the Court have long maintained that all they did was implement
the Constitution, not legislate from the bench. This was the intent of
the Founding Fathers. The court was to be our servant and not our
master, but what the Constitution means today is not always clear. At
times, the Supreme Court has seemed out of touch with community mores
like teaching creationism in public schools. In contrast, at the time
of the writing of the Constitution powerful corporations were not
people.
The
Founding Fathers did not anticipate that a nominated judge would
deliberately politicize the Court by taking sides and alluding to the
“deep dark state” which is our government. This drives a stake in the
heart of the American way. It seems that we are more concerned with
adolescent behavior than with the strong negative influence of
politics. For people to believe in our form of democracy they must see
that the Supreme Court is fair and apolitical, not ideological. The law
relies on consensus and persuasion, not force. So, how could we fix
our broken Court?
Supreme
Court justices have to make decisions that are controversial. Life
appointment prevents their corruption by politics and self-interest.
But where in the rest of the world do you have a job for life, a rubber
variable because technology can prolong living far beyond the point
where one remains productive. Where in business do you get to keep your
job longer than you can perform it? Programmed death is built into our
DNA. We could not be born without it. Insurance companies know this.
Perhaps we should listen to them, when we choose a maximum age for the
Supreme Court.
It
takes about ten years for a Supreme Court justice to learn their job
and to evolve into who they really are. This is another one of those
variables that justice is a function of. But doesn’t the job of serving
on the Court use people up and isolate them from changing reality? We
don’t give justices a sabbatical to renew themselves. They have the
views of prior generations, of tradition, instead of those for today. A
limited tenure would mean that a president could not put his timeless
stamp on the Court. Besides, a term limit would encourage presidents to
select a more competent, mature candidate.
There
aren’t enough justices. We need 12 instead of nine. That would reduce
the chance that a single justice could “swing” the court’s decision.
Because of the divisions in our society, many court decisions have
become split decisions. Five to four decisions are a 25 percent margin
in opinion. A seven to 5 decision would be a 40% margin. A single
justice would be less likely to sway the group. In addition, twelve
justices make it less likely for a single president to tilt the court in
his way. It would also allow greater diversity in thought to match our
society.
Hegel’s Dreams
How
can we entertain any change? We could take our cue from G.F.W. Hegel
(1770-1831), the last of the great German classical philosophers, who
taught about the importance of religious conviction in the collective
spirit of humanity. Morality, split between rationality and revealed
authority, divided humanity between reason and emotion. To appreciate
Hegel we have to believe in history and a doctrine of the Holy Spirit
instead of scientific revolution. But as we grow old, we become stuck
in the past instead of living in the present.
hree
years after fighting a surprisingly competitive Democratic primary race
against Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent,
is making another run for the White House.
