To succeed we must all agree on what we are trying to do

 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.