Article archive / August 1, 2016
Originally published: . Volume 7, No. 8. Source pages: 2.
Leadership in a Storm-Driven World, by J. Nelson
“When the world is storm-driven and the bad that happens and the worse that threatens are so urgent as to shut out everything else from view, then we need to know all the strong fortresses of the spirit which men have built through the ages.”
The classical Greek scholar, Edith Hamilton was writing in her preface to The Greek Way, and World War II was darkening on the social horizon. She studied the simplicity of the writings of Greek poets and philosophers, about wisdom and truth.
“The eternal perspectives are being blotted out, and our judgment of immediate issues will go wrong unless we bring them back,” Hamilton wrote, and cited that Socrates agreed. We “wander in error” unless we “seek the true and divine.”
Hamilton, and also Socrates for that matter, could have been talking about mindfulness, or slow think, or statistical, scientific problem-solving.
I’ve been grateful and honestly just a bit surprised by the healthy leadership expressed by our Governor through these turbulent and dangerous times, these “storm-driven” days in our state. Gov. Edwards communicated with messages that called upon us to remember the principles that are the foundations of our society: peaceful resolution of conflicts, justice, truth, and more subtly, our higher power, our tolerance, our patience.
Leadership in this country seems more challenging to me than ever before because of several issues. We are more divided into subgroups than I can ever remember. Leaders seem less qualified and less competent and more politically opportunistic than I can ever remember. Technology has created a virtual world with an overwhelming amount of information that is both speeded up and at the same time truncated. The news media seems more removed from its core values, than I ever thought possible. This stewpot is what we human beings are basing our perceptions, opinions and decisions upon.
I was horrified when I first viewed the cell phone video of the police-involved death of Mr. Sterling. My initial reaction was, “Oh my God, they just shot that poor man.”
But then I watched it again. And then read the audio transcript, and the accounts of the witnesses and the analysis of two experts. Then I looked again at the video. Things didn’t look as simple or as clear to me as the first time I watched. I saw more things that don’t make sense, I had more questions.
I have no idea what the DOJ will find in their investigation, if the officers were incompetent or if they did something illegal, or if they were within the law and behaved in self-defense.
I am glad that the country is trying to understand if there is injustice toward minorities in policing and looking at policing in general. I’m glad for the public to be trying to find out the facts. I’m glad for science being applied to our problems and wish we were better at our jobs.
I do know that human perception is terribly flawed, and that our brains, as Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, are machines designed to jump to conclusions.
I also know that subgroups can add to this by promoting group- think, which is more and more the rule rather than the exception, as I was once taught. We are creatures designed to accurately perceive reality, and at the same time to actively distort it, depending on the situation, as evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has explained. Distorting information is not just the trait of a neurotic, it is human nature. It’s everyone’s human nature.
It is nice to see a leader, our Governor, that communicated with the “fortresses of the spirit” underlying his words. I wish he had been speaking in Kansas City.
We have psychologists who are making tremendous contributions. But I believe the psychology community can do more to help–– to help our citizens, our leaders, and ourselves. With all we know about this area, dual mind, motivated reasoning, flaws in human judgment, and on and on, we can help in building more slow-think, mindfulness, and science into our modern society.
I think we can do this. And in a storm-driven world, I think we must.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.