Photo: Julie Fouchet/Taamallah Mehdi/SIPA for Time Magazine
I've
been writing a lot recently about complexity and how it serves to make
many of our world's most urgent and profound challenges intractable.
Recent events have provided two extreme examples of this in New Orleans
and Paris respectively. What radically different approaches might be
used to address and cope with (not solve -- complex intractable challenges are not simply problems with solutions) these challenges?
Let's start with New Orleans. Chris Hallowell's 2001 book, Holding Back the Sea,
has just been updated to talk about the impact of Katrina, which the
book predicted. His publicist, in an e-mail to me, provides this
synopsis:
Proposals for houses
on stilts and building higher levees will not necessarily protect New
Orleans from another major storm. New Orleans was blessed with a
protective barrier of spongy wetlands that naturally soaked up
dangerous storm surges. Much of these wetlands have vanished (16,000
acres per year are still being lost) due to levee construction causing
these protectives areas to sink. Professor Hallowell believes that best
long-term solution requires massive movement of Mississippi River silt
to the outlying wetlands at the mouth of the river, restoring the
wetlands to their former strength and absorbency. "By trying to protect
New Orleans with an artificial levee barrier, we have destroyed a far
more effective natural barrier," claims Hallowell.
So rebuilding
the levees, even with massively expensive, higher, more high-tech
barriers, will only raise the ante and delay the inevitable. And
even if 'massive movement of Mississippi River silt to the outlying
wetlands at the mouth of the river' were an affordable engineering and
political possibility, to the point the levees could be removed, most
of the existing economic activity in the area would have to be
curtailed, reformed, or stopped altogether to prevent recurrence.
What's more, there is some real doubt whether the 'renewed' wetlands
would evolve in anything like the way the now-destroyed wetlands
evolved, in a succession cycle that took centuries -- it is possible
that just trying to 'restart' wetlands from something that looks like
their pre-destruction form might actually set off a completely
different, unpredictable succession cycle that might not protect New
Orleans at all.
This
is the gist of a complex problem: We cannot know all the variables and
we therefore cannot predict what will happen with any useful degree of
reliability. In such situations we cannot simply 'impose
solutions' and have any expectation that they will achieve the desired
results. We need to learn by trial and error, and minimize the damage
in the process. The only sensible things we could do
are simply unthinkable in a civilization that is incapable of
understanding the complex consequences of its actions and radically
altering its behaviours accordingly:
We
could raze and remediate what's left of New Orleans and move the entire
population to a safer, rebuilt city inland. Then we could try
Hallowell's massive rebuilding of the marshlands using Mississippi
River silt, assuming that wouldn't set off other unforeseen and
unacceptable ecological changes. And if that actually worked, we could
then start a new New Orleans on the site of the old one, with rigid
environmental safeguards to prevent economic activity from re-eroding
the rebuilt wetlands. Of course, we'd also need strong environmental
safeguards all the way up the Mississippi to ensure other areas of the
country didn't contribute to degrading the newly reconstructed area.
And we'd need strong environmental safeguards to guarantee no severe
oil-related 'accidents' in the Gulf.
Yeah, like that's
going to happen. Ergo, intractability. So what we will do is all we,
foolish, short-sighted, limited (in resources, money, and imagination)
humans can do: We will throw some government money at traditional
engineering projects -- levees -- to raise the ante with mother nature,
we will 'encourage' (bribe) the rich and powerful in the area to want
to reinvest in the city, we will leave the weak and poor, as always, to
fend for themselves with what if anything 'trickles down', and we will
throw the dice and gamble with lives and the environment.
And
when that doesn't work, either because we run out of money or because
nature responds next year with a more precise hit on the city, we'll do
what we always do when the cost of cleaning up our mess gets too high:
We'll walk away from it, like the giant toxic waste site it has already
become, and leave nature to clean it up in her own good time, and we'll
build elsewhere.
We shouldn't shed any tears or lose any sleep
over this completely unsatisfactory 'solution'. There are no simple
solutions to complex 'problems'. We cannot be other than who we are,
and that is what we (and all creatures for that matter) do under such
circumstances.
If you're not sufficiently outraged yet, I'm going to take a similar tack in describing approaches for Paris.
Let's start by dispelling some myths: What's happening in Paris (and will inevitably soon expand, copycat-style, to other cities) has almost nothing to do with religion.
The Paris suburbs are very much like America's inner city cores: While
Americans fled to the suburbs to escape new immigrant populations from
dating their daughters, abandoning the cores to the poorest new
immigrants, in Paris (and some other European cities) the whites stayed
put in their more durable cities and forced the new immigrants to find
cheaper places to live in the outer suburbs. So many of Paris' outer
suburbs, like America's inner city ghettos, are filled with new
immigrants, poor, unemployed and unemployable, uneducated, desperate,
often uncomfortable with the native language, ostracized and disliked
by the whites, bored and angry. The violence has been, for the most part, random, acts against property rather than people, and completely unorganized -- spontaneous, in fact.
The politicians, like their counterparts everywhere, are merely fanning the flames for personal political advantage, making a bad situation worse. The media, like their
counterparts everywhere, are encouraging an increase and a spread of
the violence by rushing to film every burning car and giving vandals
their own reality TV show. Religious leaders on all sides, like their
counterparts everywhere, are exploiting the situation to garner new
recruits for their particular brand of mindless groupthink. Without the
interference from the politicians, media and religious leaders, the
uproar over the original incident would have died down quickly.
The $64 thousand question now is whether this copycat violence will jump the Atlantic.
Part
of the problem, admittedly, is racism, by the white French in general
and by the police in particular. The French program of requiring quick
integration of minorities into the culture so that new immigrants and
the poor feel their situation is their own fault, rather than systemic
discrimination, has been much less successful than the comparable
American program. This is probably because the US has learned from the
race riots of the 1960s, which are a close analogue to the current
French rioting. In the aftermath of that, American liberals and
conservatives alike spouted the American Dream myth (anyone with
ambition and hard work can accomplish anything they want in America,
without breaking the law), and even supported token minority quotas to
give the myth some credibility. It doesn't matter that study after
study has shown that your chances of escaping the economic underclass
are lower in the US than in almost any other affluent country. If
enough people, including people who purport to really care about other
people, repeat a myth, it becomes undeniable.
There is no comparable rêve français to suppress the discontent of the immigrants in Paris' desperate and isolated outer suburbs.
The 'hand-up' social support infrastructure in Western Europe means
that their immigrants are not so destitute as those in the American
'help yourself' system, but they are more sanguine of the fact that the
system is rigged against them than most of the well-indoctrinated
American minorities.
So what approach could be taken to resolve
this intractable situation? The one that has been rumoured by French
right-wingers to be the goal of 'provocative' Islamic religious leaders
is autonomy. Let them
establish, govern and run their own communities, and police themselves.
This uggestion causes most of the French, who believe in integration,
to gasp. It would be an admission of failure of an important political
ideal. For that reason, it will never happen. It is also doubtful
whether in this situation it could really work -- self-run communities
only work when people in them can choose which community to belong to,
and can vote with their feet when the rest of the community does
something they don't like. The people in these suburbs are here because
there is no other place for them to go.
The tired 'solution' of
harsher law enforcement is equally unworkable. The police, it is
reported, have been quite content to let the arson of empty vehicles
continue -- they are smart enough to know that wading into such a
situation will only aggravate it. They have focused their attention on
crimes against people. Stricter laws and more police are not the
answer, as Freakonomics has argued so effectively.
The other proposal from the right is stricter immigration laws. That approach actually makes some sense -- provided
it can be equitably enforced so that people of no nation or race are
favoured (difficult but not impossible). It could well keep the
situation from getting worse, but it won't make it go away. Many of the
minorities in France and other European countries are second and third
generation -- they are French through and through. But they are still
discriminated against, economically disadvantaged, and ghettoized.
Here's my complete approach, as improbable as the one I suggested above
for New Orleans.
Introduce a
thorough and rigorous entrepreneurship program in all high schools and
universities. Change laws to make it easier to establish and succeed in
your own business and to employ others, by leveling the playing field
and by shifting taxes from employment to the use of non-renewable
resources and the production of non-reusable and waste materials.
Provide a safety net that protects you -- once -- from the economic
consequences of your business failing. Radically decentralize
authority, so that more decisions can be made locally by the people
themselves, while vigilantly monitoring standards of regulation and
enforcement to ensure they are equally applied everywhere. Use
government policy to redistribute wealth from rich communities to poor,
in granting contracts and establishing locations for government
services. Restrict immigration in a non-discriminatory way to levels
that do not threaten either the existing social fabric or the carrying
capacity of the country's land and infrastructure.
This is
unlikely to happen, but I have a sense it isn't as impossible as the
approach I suggested for New Orleans. I don't know if that's because
the Europeans are ahead of us in North America in their social
evolution, or because the scale of the challenge in New Orleans is more
massive.
I'm not an expert in any of the disciplines that would
be needed to vet the approaches I have outlined above, so it may be
that, beyond being very difficult to do, they might not work. But I
offer them as an example of the kind of complex thinking (no one size
fits all, no single action fixes anything) that we need to start
applying to the complex challenges we are grappling with today -- and
will grapple with more and more in the future. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
