What Unites Us?

I really enjoyed David Brooks Op-Ed in the New York Times today. With the announcement today that Tony Blair would be stepping down on June 27th, Brooks was reflecting on Blair's legacy, and noted that he will be remembered as an "anti-Huntingtonian". This apparently refers to the position taken by Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who asserts that that which divides the peoples of the world culturally presents an incredible challenge to inter-cultural interactions. Taken the next step, this infers that we really ought to stay out of each other's business - that well-intended actions that span these divides is as likely to produce unintended negative consequences as it is to achieve whatever positive outcomes may movitate them.

According to Brooks, the Blair counter-position lies in a belief that increasing global interaction and interdepence require us to call on our universal, shared human values, and that these can in fact prevail over cultural differences. And while we may continue to make ham-handed mistakes of catastrophic proportions in our cross-cultural interactions, the difficulty in engaging effectively across that which divides us by no means relieves us of the obligation to strive to do so.

In my personal journey, I have come to a strongly held faith that, while people on the surface may seem incredibly diverse, once one penetrates beneath the surface layers, our shared humanity makes us much much more similar than different. And in fact my personal experiences in cultivating relationships with those with whom I share little culturally have always borne this out. I'm convinced that, when viewed outside a cultural context, my life experience and that of, say, a Kalahari bushman, are essentially similar. We're both born as high-potentiality, unformed bits of protoplasm, with similar physiological infrastructure and innate capacities, into social networks that value family and community. We strive to organize and make sense of our lives and our environments by creating an internal operating system that is continually updated based on our experiences - creating layers upon layers of beliefs and assumptions that create the shortcuts by which we can constantly progress our personal functionality. (This is what we commonly refer to as "personal growth".) And I believe that much of what I and my Kalahari brethren experience as suffering is actually the result of "bad coding" - the 1/10th of a percent of our personal programming that is inherently dysfunctional, that which arose from unfortunate incidents in our past and/or our personal misconceptions and the innocently inappropriate beliefs and assumptions that made their way into our personal operating systems as a result. At our essence, we live, we love, we laugh, we cry, we grow and age and die, aware of our morality, wishing a better future for our children and generations to come - we are human.

And paradoxically, I hold if not a belief at least an aspiration that, as so often has happened in the course of human events, having a common enemy will unite us. As the world gets small and issues become not just theoretically but practically global shared concerns (e.g., global climate change, pollution, waning energy reserves, global terrorism and fundamentalism, risk of global pandemics, etc.), that the nuances that distinguish us culturally will be overcome by our needs to address the challenges that we share, those that threaten our livelihoods, well-being, and even existence without discrimination.

Those elements that distinguish us culturally, that seem so insurmountable when it comes to achieving global harmony, pale in comparsion to both the aspects that we share as fellow members of the human race, and the challenges to our continued existence on this planet. And though it seems to be human nature to seek out the differences that divide us, as globalization moves from a concept to a reality of everyday life, the opportunities to transcend and unite seem greater than ever. I choose to have faith in humankind and our collective ability to rise up and meet our shared challenges - and assert that those who choose otherwise risk authoring a self-fulfilling prophesy.

India

Recently I had the opportunity to visit Mumbai, India. It was my first trip there, and it was a real eye-opener.

The trip came up as a result of some consulting work I’m doing with a client who is looking to expand its operations there. It was a bit of a whirlwind – about 30 hours of travel each way for a total of about 72 hours on the ground. But what I saw left an impression that will stay with me a long time.

Arriving at Mumbai airport at about 1:30 am, it looked like any other airport in a lesser-developed nation. Kinda crowded, disorganized, a little run down. The first real shocker though was stepping outside. Even at that hour, the commotion was overwhelming – hundreds of little “autoricks” (three-wheeled, motorcycle-powered covered rickshaws) jostled for position while their drivers called out for passengers. And the pollution! Thick clouds of exhaust fumes, mixed with the smoke from household heating and cooking fires (that I later learned were fueled in part by dried cow dung), had my asthma in full flare in no time. Toto, we definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Fortunately it was a short (albeit chaotic, more later) drive to the Hyatt Regency, as modern and Westernized a hotel as you’d find anywhere. Check in was a bit of a hassle, but once I was in my room it could have been a hotel in any major US or European city.

The next morning we headed out for our client’s headquarters about noon – many Indian businesses keep later-than-normal business hours to accommodate interaction with European and US operations. The drive to the office was another new experience. First off, not surprisingly they drive on the left (British colonial heritage I suppose). Well, sort of on the left – the reality is that lane markings, where they exist, are taken as a kind of a suggestion, not meant to be taken too seriously. Along a downtown thoroughfare that in the US would be two lanes in each direction, you might see autoricks as many as five across in each direction, constantly maneuvering for position. Not only that, but they are competing with pedestrians walking alongside and sometimes up the middle of the road. And these pedestrians might be accompanied by goats, cows, or even elephants.

The sides of the streets are lined with storefronts – just concrete block shacks, really, opening out onto the street. One might be selling cigarettes, the next groceries, the next might be an auto repair. People are milling around everywhere, doing business, moving from place to place. And behind this row of storefronts is an entire community, living in shacks with corrugated steel roofs. Children, elderly people, dogs, all huddled together in the most densely populated living conditions I’ve ever seen. No plumbing, and mostly no electricity, except where the more industrious types have hooked up to power in nearby buildings, stringing cables precariously over the rooftops of this shanty town. The conditions are, by any western standard, truly terrible.

And yet, the people seem to be very well adapted. They just go about their business, be it running the bicycle repair shop, or hauling wood for the fires, or fetching water, or laying bricks. In some respects I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this – it’s just what life is like there for them, I suppose. But I found the spirit, industriousness, and resiliency of the people really inspiring.

Once we got to our clients’ offices, it was pretty much like any other business environment. Many a little more densely packed than a US office, maybe the building exteriors were a little dirtier owing to the pollution. But a desk is a desk, a computer is a computer, and people were getting down to the business of business. The office workforce in India is made up of generally very well educated people, working for a small fraction of US wages. As an example, an entry level job requiring a basic college education, that might start at $45,000 in the US, pays about $5,000 per year in India. It doesn’t take much figuring to see why the economy over there is booming. Especially since just about everyone speaks English, making it easy for them to work for US and British multinationals.

As the telecommunications infrastructure in India continues to improve, and prices continue to drop, just about any kind of office work can be done just as effectively over there as over here. We visited a large subsidiary of an investment bank, where professionals with advanced degrees were doing equity research, foreign exchange settlement, and derivatives pricing – again, all at a fraction of US wage rates. You wonder how long it can continue, before the price of labor gets bid up to the point that the arbitrage opportunities go away. But a lot of people are betting that it’ll last for a while – bets that take the form of dozens of new office towers, rising like stacks of chips in a casino. India’s wager on the global economy is paying off big-time, and it looks like their run will continue for quite some time.

Embracing Uncertainty

All we know for sure is that we don't know for sure.

Over a decade ago, a dear friend gave me a copy of Margaret Wheatley's masterwork, "Leadership and the New Science". I remember reading it for the first time, my mind practically exploding with new ideas - to the point that I could only go for a few pages at a time, and had to stop to reflect on what I had just read.

Facing a long series of plane flights, for some reason I was inspired to find my old copy and bring it along for the trip. I hoped that this second reading, after so much time had passed, would offer some of the thrill of the first. I'm 50 pages in and definitely not disappointed.

One theme of the book is the interplay between "things" and their "relationships". Wheatley characterizes Newtonian thinking as being focused on "materialism and reductionism" - isolating things into discrete elements that can then be examined and described as independent items. She refers to "new science" as that collection of disciplines that represent "... underlying currents [that] are a movement towards holism, toward understanding the system as a system and giving primary value to the relationships that exist among seemingly discrete parts". As an illustration, she shares a quote attributed as an ancient Sufi teaching that "You think that because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and".

What I've read so far has made me think a lot about things that appear on the surface to be paradoxes, or dualities, or forces in tension that seem to want to be balanced. Having grown up as an engineer, it's natural for me to look for answers, to seek solutions, to boil things down to distill what appears to be the root truth. But what I've learned is that certainty only comes in stick figure form, that anything that's worth thinking about is too rich to be distilled to simple elements. There is no either/or, no truth to be found at either end of the spectrum. Anything that appears to be forces in tension resolves not in either direction, but in a new vector that points to an unseen and larger force.

In this respect, certainty is not something to be sought out, it is an enemy to be avoided. Seeking answers is a path to insignificance - seeking questions is a journey to be embraced.

May you live in perpetual confusion and disorder, for here all that is beautiful awaits. And here you may find the truths that cannot be known with certainty.

Free Will: Fact or Fiction?

Experiments suggest that conscious choice is an illusion ... what choice will you make as a result?

Interesting article today in the NYTimes Science section entitled:

"Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't"

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The article suggests that recent experiments tilt toward the deterministic version of explaining how stuff happens - ie, that ultimately, we're just biological machines whose actions are determined by the chain of events to which we're exposed. And, if you could solve all the equations, you could determine how people would act - thus refuting the idea of free will. My favorite line of the piece says that "... the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control." What a great metaphor!

While the science is intriguing, the bottom line for me stays the same. Maybe free will exists, or maybe it's an illusion. But since we'll never solve all the equations to find out (in my lifetime at least), then it becomes a bit like Pascal's Wager. Which is a better way to lead your life - assuming free will exists, or assuming it doesn't?

For me that's an easy answer - assuming I have free will makes me morally responsible for my actions, and for me, that's a better way to live my life.