The Truth in an Easter Egg

Easter is just around the corner and it reminds me that one of the great traditions connected to that event is the Easter egg hunt. I have a suggestion: let’s all write our congressional representatives and senators and invite them to an Easter Egg Hunt on the Washington Mall. The purpose would be to condition them to actually look for an answer instead of assuming they already have one. Somehow they all seem to have lost their way to the truth and have lost the capacity to actually discover it. Since the truth is often hiding in the tall grass of doubt, maybe the Mall is not such a good place because the grass is too short to make the search an adventure. Maybe we need to move it out of town to some neutral ground where green blades of grass outnumber greenbacks. Maybe some farm in West Virginia could host the event. It could be a kind of Woodstock event for congress.

In any case, we need to encourage both Republican and Democratic congressmen and senators to cast off their cloaks of certainty and re-learn the scientific method of searching for truth they supposedly learned in high school. The scientific method, for the most part, is based on trial and error. You set up an experiment; you try out a hypothesis; it works or does not; and then you make adjustments and try again.
Right now both sides are approaching problem-solving entirely wrong. The Democrats come up with social programs and then sit on them like brooding hens, regardless of whether or not they will hatch some real results. The Republicans, rather than proposing fixes, simply want to burn down what they see as hen houses of brooding Democrats sitting on rotten eggs. Neither side continues to tinker, to experiment, to improve, to progress.

The whole process is a false binary in which conflict is supposed to result in the production of truth, when, in fact, the process always leads to merely a temporary victory for one side that will soon be reversed when the other side obtains a majority. Majority rule does not result in truth. The majority is almost never right no matter which side wins. Consensus is the only process that leads to truth because consensus is the only way a body of people can actually get there. Here’s why.
Back in 1906, an in-law of Charles Darwin named Francis Galton, the coiner of the term eugenics, of all things, went to a fair in western England where he tabulated the guesses by the participants in a guess-the-weight-of-the-ox-carcass contest. When all 800 of the contestants had finished guessing, none had come very close to the actual weight. When Galton calculated the mean of the guesses, the contestants as a body had come within a pound of the actual weight: 1,198 pounds. The mean was 1,197 pounds. Ironically, the guy who believed in eugenics had actually shown that a large body of regular folks could actually ascertain the truth while none of them could do so alone.

Would it not be a wonderful development if our elected representatives put away their one-sided certainty and actually did their own thinking, worked as a body, and reached consensus? We’d all be so much better off in developing and improving successful government programs rather than sitting on failures or throwing out the whole idea of government programs as a waste of money. Right now it’s a lose-lose deadlock.

There is too much emphasis on conflict in American culture and therefore in government as well. Our justice system is meant to operate on the principle that out of a fair and thorough conflict between prosecution and defense will result a fair verdict. However, we all know that the side able to afford the best lawyers has a better chance of winning regardless of the truth. We also know that the lobbyists with the most money have greater influence over congress than do the regular folks. If we could somehow find a way to elect politicians who can and will think for themselves and not be influenced by big money and party line then we have a chance of getting ourselves governed well rather than governed least or big, a Morton’s Fork at best. If we truly want to move away from adversarial thinking, we need to stop electing so many lawyers and start electing more scientists. Science is the most uncertain discipline where theories don’t pass for fact. That’s why there is considerable humility among scientists who seldom argue their case by ignoring evidence in order to maintain a belief.

The Easter egg hunt is a good place to start. Those congressmen who collect the most eggs get to lead the discussion and present their best legislation for consideration. It would be a far better system than the one we have now.

The Bully Pulp Pit

Congress is back in session. The Republicans are in charge. Instead of focusing on job creation and budget balancing, they go after the weakest thing they can find and try to squash it because part of its work flies in the face of one of their cherished principles: the rights of the unborn. They are busy swatting flies while the lion roars.
Funding for Planned Parenthood is on the block because it pays for poor people’s abortions. Better to have a child grow up to find out his father was a rapist. Better he grow up in a slum with a single parent who did not want him in the first place. That’s bound to have a good outcome. There may be occasional exceptions, but I will bet there are many more drug dealers than Lions Club members coming out of that scenario. Ensuring unwanted unborn rights and removing the rights of rape victims is small ball with little risk because the oppressed in this case have no political or economic clout. They are usually poor.
It seems that no matter what party is in power, there is a tendency to try for victories over small issues rather than go after big game. Health care was not exactly small game, but it was in comparison to the budget deficit, the recession, and job creation. The form of health care that eventually passed was somewhat flawed, but it still amounted to an attempt to get more comprehensive about health care in America. The way we had gone about it in the past was obsolete. We had to go in a different direction. We did, but not in an effectively sustainable one. The healthcare baby may be worth saving, but the bath water needs cleaning up.
Maybe political bodies and politicians themselves are like some college football programs that begin the season by playing some patsies before getting to the tough league schedule. Or maybe they never get to the tough schedule because they are too busy picking on small adversaries and claiming victory the way a bully does. Planned Parenthood is a small adversary. So are illegal immigrants small adversaries. And so are small town foreclosure sufferers.
A short alert by Freakonomics in the February 4, 2011 New York Times cited a study that links negligent or inattentive fatherhood to a propensity for bullying. Apparently the study points to the role of a child’s perception as to whether or not he or she is being paid enough attention by the father. If a child feels neglected by the father, he or she will have a greater tendency to bully.
If this is true, I wonder how many politicians, particularly Republican politicians, have been the victims of neglectful fathers. If their fathers were so busy making a living or getting rich that they did not spend time with their children, this phenomenon could explain the mean-spiritedness that characterizes some politicians in congress and in state legislatures today. They would rather pick on the little guy than go after big game such as the deficit and unemployment.
Whatever the case, I wish politicians would show a little more courage and go after the big issues rather than beat to a pulp the little issues and little guys that already live on the margin. Beating up little guys takes no courage at all.