Rational Philosophy

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

“Today, I am not the person I was ten years ago.” Karl Svensson, a convicted murderer, told his Swedish classmates at medical school when his past caught up with him. The prestigious Karolinska Institute eventually side-stepped the unprecedented question of whether to expel Mr. Svensson simply because of his past criminal acts — once a neo-Nazi, apparently, Svensson’s crime had been deemed a hate crime. Instead, the institute expelled him on a technicality — he had falsified his high school records by substituting his assumed name for his birth name of Hellekant.  The story raises two very interesting questions: 1. Can we change? and 2. Should a person who has committed this kind of crime be allowed to practice medicine (or another similar profession)?

The New York Times editorial board has endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate. Its opinions supporting the endorsement of Clinton for the Democratic and McCain for the Republican vote make fascinatingly candid reading. The Times’ opinion of Clinton again raises the question of whether someone, fundamentally, can change. It left me wondering whether Clinton has changed, and, if so, whether she has changed enough to overcome the disadvantages in her character that have revealed themselves so often in the past — her divisiveness and “I know best” intellectual hardness. The Times uses the example of her “famously disastrous foray” into trying to solve the healthcare issue to support its premise that she has changed and now displays a new understanding of what’s to be done.

I’ve written before about our capacity to change as it relates to the concept of free will and personal development. Being conscious allows us to choose between options, and to select options that may be difficult, unattractive or counter to our immediate instinct. Through this reasoning we can see that it is possible to develop new levels of awareness and new patterns of behavior, to make choices different from those we would have made in the past.

But if we examine the concept of behavioral change we find a composite concept. And we tend to conflate and confuse its constituent parts: When I ask, “can we change?” I could really be asking two separate questions. The first: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different immediate responses?” And the second: “Can someone become altered such that the same impulses will lead to different eventual responses?”

Ten years go, in an angry confrontation, Svensson reacted violently. His immediate response was to be urged to violence. And he acted on this immediate response by lashing out.

To say that Svensson’s immediate response may have changed, we would have to believe that he would not feel urged to violence if faced with a similar confrontation ten years on. I would say that we have very little reason to believe that Svensson or anyone could change in this way simply through reflection and remorse. Our immediate, instinctual response is pre-conscious, and therefore isn’t subject to conscious influence.

On the other hand, to say that Svenssion’s eventual response may have changed seems a much more reasonable and rational conclusion. Svensson, still feeling a violent urge, could now have a modified conscious response and resist the desire to lash out.

Svensson’s classmates were split over whether he should be allowed to stay on. Those that supported him said that he’d paid his debt and, by inference, should be trusted to have changed his conscious response to confrontation. But we can infer that those of his classmates who still distrusted him understood and feared that his immediate response to confrontation (or other stress) could and indeed would still be violent.

Should a violent killer, rehabilitated in his conscious actions, be trusted in the medical profession? To answer that question we would need to understand the degree and range of provocation that Svensson may react violently to, and the strength of his newfound ability to keep his emotions in check. In the absence of reliable ways and means to measure these variables, it would seem reasonable for society not to want Svensson providing medical care. Svensson has rights of freedom, but it also seems reasonable for society to say that he has forgone some of those rights (such as an unfettered choice of career) by his past actions.

So to Hillary Clinton: Although the circumstances are very different, we are confronted with the same logical argument. As I understand it, the instinctual fervor of Clinton’s liberal ideological passion inspired and limited her original approach to tackling the healthcare issue. Her newfound understanding means that she’s better able to consciously override her immediate divisive response. But the concern remains that she would encounter similar instinctual responses in a broad range of political situations.

As we’ve seen with Bush and as tends to happen to those in high office, the stresses and demands of the job certainly don’t make it easier to overcome one’s immediate responses. As the Times’ opinion points out, Clinton has been succumbing to these impulses during her campaigning, underscoring the perspective that we have reason to doubt that she has truly learned to keep her immediate responses in check.

Obama, on the other hand, reveals a more promising character for non-devisive leadership. This then narrows the gap between the candidates that the Times claims to exist, and perhaps even makes Obama the more logical choice. It becomes a matter of character versus experience. I for one would choose character every time.

ÂÂ