America Needs to Favor Understanding Over Explanation
Bob Deutsch
These days conflict is everywhere: on presidential campaign trails, in protests against political institutions, worldwide, and in American schools. Both in the media and in schools one topic that inundates partisan divisions is the Israeli-Hamas war. At the street level of emotion, the idea of colonization is what large segments of populations seem to be responding to — a situation in which those with more power restrict the freedoms and threaten the people with less power. Especially at this point in time, many across the globe are disgusted and feed up with such a situation. Furthermore, each day they see in media the devastation of Gaza and the desperation of its civilian population. Much less frequent now on our screens are scenes of Hamas’ October 7th raid. And viewer’s response to what they see is “Enough!” And that response encompasses more than Israel v Hamas.
This situation is aggravated by America’s general tendency to focus only on the surface of a story. America’s inclination, particularly in times of high emotion, is to choose one of the two extremes and not allowing immersion in the more difficult task of addressing the deeper complexity of the issue.
Americans tend to take one extreme side or the other of a controversary because it’s easier. It activates a quick, instinct-like response, no thinking required. In their personal lives and in their business and political models, Americans like fast. And with speed the imprint of context is lost.
In America, explanation is favored over understanding.
Explanation operates by looking at a problem from the outside and through successive approximation arriving at an “answer.” In contrast, understanding entails experiencing a problem from being inside of it and comprehending it as it unfolds.
In addition to the primacy of vision and demand for speed there is a third problem: yes, nowadays things are complex, but they are felt as complex not because we have few ready-made answers, but because we have too many answers. Americans are flooded with answers.
A stream of answers is always at American’s fingertips. Just go to Google or to an AI system, not to mention one’s favorite media outlet. Answers are there. The problem is we don’t know how these answers were arrived at, how any particular answer is linked to other relevancies, what the boundary of an answer is and how to use an answer to be a better critical thinker. The result: we are less equipped to deal with the world then we were before these technological advances. We feel we know more than we really do. As a participant recently said in one of my focus groups discussing technology, “Things are always advancing, getting better, sometimes for the worse.”
In America’s rush to fast answers, fast solutions, quick management and immediate dominance, the time it takes to appreciate what lies underneath the seeming obvious is compressed out of existence. Hamas seeks the annihilation of Israel and the Israeli response is never again. Both are living in a bygone era: Hamas seeking to resurrect a centuries-old caliphate and Israel making up for a more-recent past. But for both of them this is an example of neurosis — reacting to a present situation as if it was repeating the past. The problem is the current context cannot support their desires. Each cannot win and each does not realize that.
But Humans Are Capable of Imagination.
The answer is imagination. John Lennon was not “a dreamer,” he was a good cognitive analyst. I hope he’s “not the only one.”
The biggest enemy of imagination is cynicism, the assumption that everything in the end will turn out bad so you might as well play at life as if it is a zero-sum game. My gain is your loss.
A remedy for cynicism comes from two cognitive capacities the human mind already possesses: creating metaphor and integrating paradox. In other words, creating something new.
As a cognitive anthropologist I study the question, What Really Is Creativity? In that pursuit I have been extremely fortunate to have talked with and observed some of the world’s most creative people, including Nobel prize winners, novelists, singer-songwriters, musicians, poets, playwrights and philosophers. It is these people who made me realize the great value of metaphor and of integrating paradox.
One such person is Wynton Marsalis, the renowned jazz musician and composer. He has a profound insight: new things are created when opposites are merged. His example is that jazz was created by combining the raucousness of Saturday night and the piety of Sunday morning.
This merging requires introspection, intuition, an open mind and a way with words. Not canned words or scripts, but thoughts that even may arise from one’s unconscious. As Quincy Jones says, “The unconscious is where all the goodies are.” Under such circumstances, surprises can and do occur. These bolts from out of the blue fly in the face of what is presumed “the best.” They can come from anywhere, from anyone, not just from people commonly called “iconic.”
That’s the American dream. Equality.
