A wish for Asian University graduates

Asian University hosted its annual commencement ceremony last week.

It’s always a great pleasure to attend these ceremonies. It is, by far, the happiest event of our academic year.

The graduates look very scholarly in their caps and gowns. Polished and painted for the occasion, their faces animated with broad smiles, they appear almost unrecognizable, surreal. Are these the same sleepy students who dragged themselves from the dorm to attend my early morning psychology lectures? There must be some mistake!

Commencement draws friends and family members to celebrate an event many have sacrificed for, and anticipated for many years. Some may have, at times, wondered if this day would ever come.

Faculty members appear distinguished in colorful robes reflecting the diversity and international character of their academic backgrounds. Diplomats and distinguished guests are on hand to add an air of even greater importance to the occasion, as if such were needed. Flowers are blooming everywhere. Even the rain, which fell in sheets during the earliest portion of the day, cannot hold out long against the positive vibes our celebrants are putting out.

Commencement is an important event, a rite of passage. Traditionally, it is a time to reflect on what has been accomplished, and on what lies ahead.

At a minimum, we hope that our graduates will have absorbed some of our knowledge: the basic language, and concepts necessary for them to function as professionals within their respective areas of specialization. We hope their diplomas will offer them a means toward a lucrative and fulfilling career, or provide a strong foundation toward a more advanced degree.

But we wish more for them. Much more.

The knowledge we have provided our students during the four or so years during which we have commanded their attention is woefully inadequate. While it may represent the best our generation has to offer, it has, nevertheless, proven to insufficient for solving the greatest problems facing us in the twenty-first century. We need the help of their generation to construct new knowledge and find new solutions.

Our current state of knowledge has not provided a workable solution to the problem of a growing world population, and the resulting stresses this puts on our limited global resources. As our population grows, growth in food and energy production must keep pace. Can we continue to meet the most basic needs of our growing population? How will we do it?

Our dependence upon fossil fuels has gotten us into a jam. We now find that the planet which sustains our life, all life that we know of, is warming. Despite our understanding of this process, and the doomsday predictions, we appear unable to summon the will to take the necessary steps to curb this alarming trend. Our current state of knowledge appears insufficient to tackle the problem of global warming.

As human populations have expanded across the globe, the populations of other species are on the decline, and many are becoming extinct. While species extinction is a natural and ongoing process, scientists warn that the rate of extinctions is accelerating, from 100 to 1000 times the normal rate. This increasing rate of extinction is primarily driven by a loss of habitats, due to increased farming, deforestation, and fragmentation of habitats resulting from road construction. An extinct species is gone forever. Our current state of knowledge has proven inadequate to stop this heartbreaking trend.

As a result of climate change, coupled with the demands of irrigation agriculture and industry, global demands for water are on the rise. Many regions are getting drier. How will we meet increasing demand for this most precious of all resources? The solution has so far eluded us.

Poverty, racism, sexism, discrimination, inequality, torture, genocide, terrorism, the exploitation of women and children, the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, illiteracy, HIV-AIDS and other infectious diseases, universal access to healthcare, suffering brought about by natural disasters, the list of problems besetting us seems endless. How do we think about these issues? How might we think about these issues?

Yesterday’s solutions may have worked yesterday. Today’s problems require new, innovative solutions. We cannot rest on our laurels. We need constructive criticism of our most sacred cows. We need new knowledge, new solutions.

During their time with us, I hope our graduates will have sharpened their capacity for critical thinking and their sense of social responsibility. I hope they leave Asian U. with a sense of dissatisfaction with the limited knowledge we have given them, a readiness to imagine better solutions, and a determination that better ways of thinking and doing are possible, even necessary.

When it comes to thinking and acting on today’s important issues, I hope our graduates will do better than we have.

Understanding deviance and anarchy

The social chaos and anarchy that erupted in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina caught many people by surprise. It is interesting to consider how and why such a dramatic deterioration of society could occur so rapidly in a contemporary American city.

The majority of city residents apparently obeyed the official order to evacuate ahead of the storm. But after Katrina moved inland, marauding bands of people could be seen looting stores and businesses in some areas. Even some police and fire officials, who were supposed to be providing assistance or restoring order, were joining in the mayhem, according to local reports.

Reactions to this event have been varied. Some fault federal and local public officials for failing to rapidly mobilize sufficient manpower to protect property, maintain order, and supply relief in response to this natural disaster.

Many in the international community seemed surprised that so many desperately poor minorities were to be found within a seemingly prosperous American city. Some expressed sympathy for those who were without the financial wherewithal to evacuate ahead of the storm.

Stranded, and without essential resources, who could blame some for taking advantage of the vacuum of authority to help themselves to goods and supplies they needed to survive? In cases where items like guns and ammunition were taken, however, a sympathetic perspective on the activity seemed strangely inappropriate.

Some commentators have assumed that the people who engaged in the looting, including local cops, were basically criminals to begin with. According to this view, good, law abiding citizens would never engage in such illegal acts. There is, however, reason to be skeptical of such claims. Evidence from the social sciences suggests other possible conclusions.

First, it is helpful to understand that we humans have a bias towards attributing a person’s actions to characteristics of the person, rather than characteristics of the situation in which the actions occur. If we see a person displaying deviant behavior, looting, for example, we tend to attribute the behavior to a deviant personality within the looter. Deviance in this context refers to a violation of the norms of a community or society.

Likewise, if we see a person praying in a temple, we are inclined to think of the person as possessing spiritual qualities, or other favorable personality traits. Social psychologists refer to this bias as the fundamental attribution error.

Interestingly, when it comes to judgments about our own behavior, we seem to prefer situational explanations. Why was my coworker late for work? “He is a slacker.” Why was I late for work? “Slow moving traffic on the inbound highway.”

Experiments have demonstrated the existence of this bias quite convincingly. Evidence of the fundamental attribution error has been found among people the world over, although some cultures seem to exhibit a stronger bias than others.

Contrary to this bias, however, there is a substantial body of research in the social sciences demonstrating the power of situations to influence people, for good or for bad. Psychologist Stanley Milgram’s classic experiments showed how normal subjects could be influenced by situational factors to administer seemingly dangerous and potentially lethal electrical shocks to innocent people in compliance with instructions from a sanctioned authority.

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a study of criminal behavior that has formed the basis for a theory known as “broken windows.” He planted cars without license plates with their hoods up variously in a wealthy community, and in a poor, distressed neighborhood. Both cars were vandalized when passersby sensed that they had been abandoned. It was suggested that any sign of social disorder in a community would serve as an enticement to others to break the law.

Just as one broken window in a neighborhood can entice others to break more windows, crime feeds on crime, resulting in an increasing spiral of illegal activity. Likewise, according to social learning theorists, people are influenced by the behavior of others they observe around them. Thus, the spectacle of unpunished illegal acts being carried out by a few criminals could influence other typically law-abiding individuals to join in.

New Orleans, like other urban centers, undoubtedly has its share of social problems, including poverty, racial discrimination, and criminality. Nevertheless, conditions leading to the breakdown of social order during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are not unique to that city. This episode reminds us how fragile is this social order that we take so much for granted. However distasteful it might seem, the potential for lawlessness and anarchy lies within each of us, and in the situations that sometimes exist within our societies.

Gestalt switch: Changing our relationship with nature

The immense power and destructive forces of nature, revealed last December with the Asian tsunami, were demonstrated once again with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis have the ability to change us, change our ways of thinking about our world in dramatic ways.
When one’s perception of the world changes in a fundamental way, we sometimes speak of a “gestalt switch.” At such times one’s total perception of a phenomenon undergoes a revolutionary transformation. A veil is lifted. A previously hidden reality is revealed.
Using the famous visual examples, what was once the figure of a white goblet becomes the background to two profiles facing one another. What was once an ugly, disfigured hag is now a beautiful female face. Nothing about the object has changed. What has changed is something inside of us, our way of perceiving it.

At some point during human history, our view of our relationship to nature underwent a gestalt switch. As a consequence of this perceptual change, the human species has become extraordinarily successful in dominating the planet. This was not always the case.

Anthropologists tell us that humans lived largely at the mercy of forces of nature during roughly 99.994 percent of our time on Earth. During that time, human survival, like the survival of other life forms, was governed by such things as climate, the availability of food, disease, predators, and competition with other species for land and resources. Then, sometime around 12,000 years ago, humankind underwent a gestalt switch, a revolutionary change in our understanding of our relationship to nature.

As the last ice age drew to a close, we cleverly figured out that we could exercise some control over the forces of nature. Rather than rely upon the limited supply of edible wild plants and game animals available in nature, we could grow crops and domesticate the animals we needed for our survival. We had, to some degree, freed ourselves from subservience to the forces of nature.

But nature would not easily yield its dominion. Droughts could still deprive our crops of water, our animals and human populations of food and drink. Seasonal flooding could wipe out an entire harvest, placing our growing populations at risk for starvation, disease, destruction.

Then, around 6,000 years ago, we learned that we could assume even greater control over nature by shaping the landscape. Large scale water engineering projects, we discovered, could help reduce the risk of seasonal flooding. Reservoirs could be designed to hold large amounts of water, and make it available during times of severe draught. Populations grew. Civilizations began to form.

Around 2,500 years ago, a civilization of Greek speaking people around the Aegean Sea began a series of unique speculations about the natural world that would eventually develop into what we today call science. With the advent of science, mankind would come into possession of a powerful new tool we would use to further overcome the limitations imposed by nature.

We learned to use the discoveries of science to further increase food production, to develop vaccines and cures for disease. We further improved our technologies, our methods of waging war, and brought about an industrial revolution. We would create weapons of mass destruction, and use them against human populations.

Today, as we peer out at our vast universe using powerful radio telescopes, we get a greater sense of the destructive potential of natural processes in our universe. Although momentarily tranquil, our blue planet appears a fragile island of life within an otherwise sterile solar system. We can see the stars of our galaxy, bodies like our own sun, being born, moving through stages of development, and eventually dying as they use up their fuel, expanding outward and consuming any objects captured by their gravitational pull. Scientists predict that four or five billion years from now, our sun, too, will die, taking with it our system of planets. Earth, however, will have become inhospitable to life long before this occurs.

We humans have shown ourselves to be adept, at least over the short-term, at overcoming the limits set upon us by forces of nature in our tiny corner of the universe. The human species, like all species before us, however, is marked for extinction. Whether it will be by climate change, ecological degradation, collision with a comet or asteroid, or whether we will exterminate ourselves with chemical biological, or nuclear weapons remains to be seen.

Our control over nature is temporary. In the end, nature will undoubtedly prevail. We may, at best, hope to avoid a premature or self-inflicted demise. Perhaps our prospects to extend our survival will depend, not upon our ability to conquer nature, but rather understand it, and a determination to bring human activities into harmony with its powerful forces: a gestalt switch.

Gestalt switch: Changing our relationship with nature

The immense power and destructive forces of nature, revealed last December with the Asian tsunami, were demonstrated once again with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis have the ability to change us, change our ways of thinking about our world in dramatic ways.

When one’s perception of the world changes in a fundamental way, we sometimes speak of a “gestalt switch.” At such times one’s total perception of a phenomenon undergoes a revolutionary transformation. A veil is lifted. A previously hidden reality is revealed.

Using the famous visual examples, what was once the figure of a white goblet becomes the background to two profiles facing one another. What was once an ugly, disfigured hag is now a beautiful female face. Nothing about the object has changed. What has changed is something inside of us, our way of perceiving it.

At some point during human history, our view of our relationship to nature underwent a gestalt switch. As a consequence of this perceptual change, the human species has become extraordinarily successful in dominating the planet. This was not always the case.

Anthropologists tell us that humans lived largely at the mercy of forces of nature during roughly 99.994 percent of our time on Earth. During that time, human survival, like the survival of other life forms, was governed by such things as climate, the availability of food, disease, predators, and competition with other species for land and resources. Then, sometime around 12,000 years ago, humankind underwent a gestalt switch, a revolutionary change in our understanding of our relationship to nature.

As the last ice age drew to a close, we cleverly figured out that we could exercise some control over the forces of nature. Rather than rely upon the limited supply of edible wild plants and game animals available in nature, we could grow crops and domesticate the animals we needed for our survival. We had, to some degree, freed ourselves from subservience to the forces of nature.

But nature would not easily yield its dominion. Droughts could still deprive our crops of water, our animals and human populations of food and drink. Seasonal flooding could wipe out an entire harvest, placing our growing populations at risk for starvation, disease, destruction.

Then, around 6,000 years ago, we learned that we could assume even greater control over nature by shaping the landscape. Large scale water engineering projects, we discovered, could help reduce the risk of seasonal flooding. Reservoirs could be designed to hold large amounts of water, and make it available during times of severe draught. Populations grew. Civilizations began to form.

Around 2,500 years ago, a civilization of Greek speaking people around the Aegean Sea began a series of unique speculations about the natural world that would eventually develop into what we today call science. With the advent of science, mankind would come into possession of a powerful new tool we would use to further overcome the limitations imposed by nature.

We learned to use the discoveries of science to further increase food production, to develop vaccines and cures for disease. We further improved our technologies, our methods of waging war, and brought about an industrial revolution. We would create weapons of mass destruction, and use them against human populations.

Today, as we peer out at our vast universe using powerful radio telescopes, we get a greater sense of the destructive potential of natural processes in our universe. Although momentarily tranquil, our blue planet appears a fragile island of life within an otherwise sterile solar system. We can see the stars of our galaxy, bodies like our own sun, being born, moving through stages of development, and eventually dying as they use up their fuel, expanding outward and consuming any objects captured by their gravitational pull. Scientists predict that four or five billion years from now, our sun, too, will die, taking with it our system of planets. Earth, however, will have become inhospitable to life long before this occurs.

We humans have shown ourselves to be adept, at least over the short-term, at overcoming the limits set upon us by forces of nature in our tiny corner of the universe. The human species, like all species before us, however, is marked for extinction. Whether it will be by climate change, ecological degradation, collision with a comet or asteroid, or whether we will exterminate ourselves with chemical biological, or nuclear weapons remains to be seen.

Our control over nature is temporary. In the end, nature will undoubtedly prevail. We may, at best, hope to avoid a premature or self-inflicted demise. Perhaps our prospects to extend our survival will depend, not upon our ability to conquer nature, but rather understand it, and a determination to bring human activities into harmony with its powerful forces: a gestalt switch.

Crescent City in crisis

The beautiful city of New Orleans became a city in crisis after being devastated by powerful category 5 Hurricane Katrina on Monday, August 29.

In the aftermath of the storm, dead and decaying bodies were left lying in city streets. Displaced, disoriented, and despairing locals remained without food and water. By week’s end, according to news reports, conditions in the metropolitan area were worsening. Water poured through a deteriorated section of the levee system which ordinarily protects the low-lying city from encroachment by the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

Just as it seemed the worst of this natural disaster had passed, a man-made disaster erupted. New Orleans suddenly descended into anarchy. Armed gangs roamed neighborhoods. Robberies, rapes, even sniper attacks were reported. Stores and homes were looted, with some reports of police and firemen joining in the illegal activity. A forklift was commandeered, and used to break into a pharmacy. Neglected sick and elderly people were seen dying in the streets. As I watched the live reporting on CNN, my home town, “The Big Easy” seemed barely recognizable.

As a kid growing up in New Orleans, I developed mixed feelings concerning hurricanes. Although I realized they represented a danger, a part of me tended to view them as a colorful and exciting part of the local culture. Like Mardi Gras, summer outings to Ponchatrain Beach, and Christmas Day, the annual parade of hurricanes through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico sometimes introduced a welcome change from the humdrum of our daily routines.

With each new hurricane season, my family would inevitably find itself gathered in front of the TV to hear our trusted local weatherman Nash Roberts, give us the up-to-the-minute coordinates on the latest tropical disturbances threatening the Gulf Coast. We sometimes plotted their paths on hurricane watch maps provided by public service organizations.

For me and my family, living in a suburb of New Orleans, most of these storms never amounted to much. They would occasionally make landfall somewhere along the Gulf Coast far from New Orleans, or forge a path through the waters of the Atlantic to threaten our neighbors on the East Coast. New Orleans would occasionally be lashed by high winds, while excess rains produced minor street flooding.

As kids, my friends, siblings, and I generally considered a hurricane threat as potential for fun and adventure. Following heavy downpours we would often enjoy wading, or riding bikes through friendly neighborhood streams, while the City’s pumps struggled to remove the water from our sunken paradise. School closings occasionally provided an unexpected bonus.

New Orleans suffered significant damage and loss of life in 1965 when Betsy, a category 2 hurricane, came ashore. Trees were toppled. Branches and debris littered our streets. We were without power for several days. School was suspended.

A very severe category 3 Hurricane Camille came ashore in 1969. We were again left without electricity for many days. My brothers and I were soon recruited by neighbors to help polish off gallons of melting ice cream that had been stored in neighborhood freezers. What kid could ask for more?

Weathermen and commentators always made a point of emphasizing the dangerous aspects of hurricanes, and encouraged local communities to remain vigilant. Nevertheless, the tragic stories of deaths, demolished homes, and displaced families, which inevitably followed these storms, seemed remote from our idyllic world.

Watching the latest chaos unfolding in my home town, my emotions were torn. Although members of my immediate family wisely evacuated to safety, the condition of their homes remains uncertain. Moreover, it is unknown how long it will take to secure the levee system sufficiently to allow the city’s pumps to restore the area to dry land, and the city’s residents to return home.

A number of aspects of this tragedy scream for psychological analysis: the apparent risks taken by those who defied the mandatory evacuation order, the sudden rise of antisocial acts in the aftermath of the storm, the desperation of those battling one another for space on crowded busses evacuating the thousands of homeless refugees, the apparent lack of adequate preparedness by local officials, the neglect of flood prevention projects by Federal officials.

Because this tragedy has hit so close to home, rather than provide a detached psychological perspective, I will use this space to express my heartfelt sadness and condolences to my family, friends, and neighbors, the people of New Orleans and surrounding areas, and all those affected by the storm.

This is our “tsunami.” Our people have lost loved ones. Our homes are destroyed. The extent of our loss is still being realized. Our beautiful, historic city has suffered irreparable damage. Although we will, no doubt, recover from this tragedy, our city will never be the same. We will never be the same.

Our humanity outweighs our differences

There are many ways of dividing and subdividing the human race. We have males and females, young and old. We can divide people according to their countries of origin, and subdivide them according to regions of origin within the country.

We often assign people to various categories of social or economic class: lower, upper, middle, upper middle, lower middle, etc. We can make cultural, religious, and ethnic distinctions among people, and we can make distinctions based upon any number of physical characteristics, including height, weight, hair color, facial features, skin color, and body type.

We sometimes categorize people according to their respective sexual orientations: homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual. We even divide people according to their dominant political ideologies, such as liberal, conservative, neo-conservative, democrat, republican, labor, libertarian and independent, to name a few.

A person’s membership in a group often influences the positions he or she takes on issues of controversy. For example, the citizens of Iraq have, according to the media, experienced fundamental disagreements concerning key issues addressed by their new constitution. Positions concerning these disagreements have generally lined up according to citizens’ membership in one of the three major ethnic groups inhabiting the country: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.

Some groups, such as Israelis and Palestinians seem to have intractable differences and longstanding rivalries with one another, based upon conflicting claims of divine right over tracts of land. Much is made of the importance of one’s identity as an Israeli or Palestinian. This was painfully demonstrated last week when some people were evicted from land and homes in Gaza, while other people qualified to be granted land and homes, based solely upon their identification with one or the other group.

The Thai culture seems to promote the making of very fine distinctions among people, resulting in a highly stratified society in which everyone holds a position of importance or unimportance in relation to every other person in the society. These distinctions are based upon such factors as age, education, occupation, apparent economic status, and a host of other factors, combined in a way that can seem baffling to outsiders.

With so much emphasis upon various divisions, groups, and subgroups, the human race often appears very fragmented. We might feel quite alien from groups which, on the surface, appear so very different from us. With so many divisions, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that, as humans, we actually have much in common with one another.

All of us, of course, share a common biology. We each experience sensations, such as heat cold, hunger, thirst, and pain. Our prenatal development from a single fertilized egg to an embryo and a growing fetus followed a common path. Once born, there was a predictable and unvarying sequence in our growth and development. As infants we rolled over before we were able to sit without support. We stood while holding onto objects, then crawled, then began to walk, in exactly that order. We learned to communicate with others by using a complex language, the likes of which we do not find among the nonhuman inhabitants of our planet.

We are all social creatures. We form strong bonds, first with members of our family, and later with our friends. We exhibit bias in favor of members of groups to which we belong. We exhibit a vague mistrust of outsiders. We experience a range of emotions, such as liking, love, happiness, frustration, sadness, disappointment, anger, fear, agony and ecstasy. We laugh, cry, eat, drink, sleep and dream. We sing and dance to celebrate. We mourn the death of a loved one. We universally recognize basic emotions communicated in the facial expressions of another human, regardless of that person’s country of origin or cultural background.

There is a good reason for this similarity. We are all related. If we go far enough back into our human history, we find that we are, in fact, one family. Archeologists tell us that we are descended from a group of humans that originated in Africa in the distant past. In that sense, we may all consider ourselves Africans, members of our family tree having migrated far and wide to populate the globe. Many of our differences are the result of groups of our ancestors having lived in prolonged isolation from other groups, and having developed separate identities, cultures, and biological adaptations to meet the challenges of survival in a range of environments existing across our planet.

Divisions among humans will undoubtedly change over time, but never disappear. Disagreements and conflict among groups, likewise, seem inevitable. As long as we are human, I suppose we will favor our own groups, and look upon those who are different with a degree of suspicion and mistrust. By viewing our differences within the context of our much more fundamental shared humanity, however, we might learn to approach our divisions with greater sensitivity, appreciation, and tolerance of the interesting diversity present in our human family.