I am away for about 10 days to attend a workshop in Florence. I have had to shake the cobwebs off some of my past work in industrial ecology. I was invited based on some past work in that field. Not a bad way to get the summer started.

This intriguing news item appeared today in the NYTimes.

In what could prove to be one of their most far-reaching decisions, psychiatrists and other specialists who are rewriting the manual that serves as the nation’s arbiter of mental illness have agreed to revise the definition of addiction, which could result in millions more people being diagnosed as addicts and pose huge consequences for health insurers and taxpayers.

The revision to the manual, known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., would expand the list of recognized symptoms for drug and alcohol addiction, while also reducing the number of symptoms required for a diagnosis, according to proposed changes posted on the Web site of the American Psychiatric Association, which produces the book.

In addition, the manual for the first time would include gambling as an addiction, and it might introduce a catchall category — “behavioral addiction — not otherwise specified” — that some public health experts warn would be too readily used by doctors, despite a dearth of research, to diagnose addictions to shopping, sex, using the Internet or playing video games.

I have been arguing for a long time that consumption patterns in the US show signs of addiction. So do uses of technology beyond playing games on iPhones and iPads. The mindless use of technological artifacts to solve "problems" may also be a form of addiction. The "problem," some incomplete concern, remains while the superficial symptoms may be temporarily mitigated or disappeared. Habitual, that is mindless or unreflected, actions, are fundamental to living. We could not get through a day without them. Cognitive research is finding that, in contradistinction to older models that trace action to some rational decision-making process in the body, most of what we do is habitual in nature, triggered by cues arriving through our senses.

Since, as the Times stories continues, the DSM takes on an authoritative role in deciding what ailments can qualify for medical insurance or be considered in adjudicatory proceedings, the line between addiction and habit needs to be very carefully delineated. Addiction can be defined as habitual use of something that may solve one problem temporarily, but also produces a negative or pathological unintended consequence. Addiction to drugs tears down the body eventually and leads to antisocial behavior.

Shopping, the transaction that precedes consumption, is an inherent part of the basic life processes in this modern economy where we do not create everything directly out of natural sources. We have been shopping in one form or another since we left the cave. So shopping is a basic habit for life. The important question for both therapists and people like me who are concerned about sustainability is when and why does shopping turn addictive. It's addictive when there is no completion involved; when it becomes the end, rather than the means to serve some domain of care. Bush's admonition after 9/11 to go shopping was an invitation to addiction, shopping without any mindful end in sight.

The harm created by addictive shopping is the failure to address what is missing from the shopper's life; what unfinished acts of caring linger. I use unfinished in the sense of non-routine gaps between what the actor is doing and the conditions that would constitute completion. We have many areas of care that require continuous attention, but since we cannot do more than a few things at a time, there will always be such incomplete domains. Addictive shopping ignores impacts on the Earth (absence of care for it), and uses resources better spent to address other domains. If you think that this talk about shopping addiction is bunk, go the web and search for it.

The use of social media is another activity that can easily slip from a useful habit to an addiction. It has the positive function of connecting the user to the world of events and people. But when its use turns people into things, when friends become an abstract concept defined merely by someone's name on the wall, its use takes on an addictive tone. The connections it produces are temporary and fritter away real relationships, as the meaning of friend hardens into a lifeless object.

Making these kinds of uses of technology and and mindless shopping qualify to be called addictions is a timely recognition of a deep cultural problem and one that is fundamental to the unsustainable state of today's world. Unconstrained and mindless shopping places a load on the world it cannot take any more. The transformation of people to means, a risk that any technology carries, breaks down human relationships central to the health of the whole person.

I wonder, however, how effective it will be for therapists to add shopping or Facebook addiction to their list of services treated. Addiction is not embodied solely in the addict. It always (perhaps with a few exceptions) occurs in some context surrounding the addict. The family or other contextual contents are a part of whatever is supporting the habit. It is possible to gather in all the parties in cases of alcoholism and other drug uses in attempting to change the systemic context. The 12-step method relies on placing the addict in a supportive community.

But where is that community for shoppers? The culture itself is shouting out messages to buy this or that. No therapist will be separate the addict from the ubiquitous barrage of messages to buy something. The same is true for addiction to devices and the "games" they offer. The harms caused by addictive use of drugs and other substance that harm the body are reflected in societal norms, giving care-givers a standard from which to operate.

It is completely different with the "new" addictions that may become recognized in the DSM. There is no associated societal norm that recognizes the harms. It is just the opposite. There is no safe haven for the addict to retreat to. I am reminded of what R. D. Laing called insanity: "Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world." Simply replace "insanity" with "shopping addiction" and you will immediately see the dilemma we have placed ourselves smack dab in the middle of. We can either ignore the insanity of the world and continue to stigmatize those who are most perceptive about it, or change the world and allow both it and its inhabitants to flourish.

Welcome to the surreal world of today.

IN the sprawling outskirts of San Jose, Calif., I find myself at the apartment door of Katherine Ziegler, a psychologist and wantologist. Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?

This opening from an article in the NYTimes, by Arlie Hochschild of Second Shift fame, really shook me up. Hochschild suggests that the professional appelation was strange-sounding to her. It’s not just the name that gets to me. It’s the very idea that we should require therapy or coaching to calm our anxieties over what to buy next. This is not the same as therapy for addiction to consumption although it comes close. Hochschild’s thesis is that so much of what we “want to have” in our daily lives comes from the market that we develop pathological symptoms by the choices and the transactional nature of the process.

I couldn’t agree more strongly. More evidence that have fallen deeper into the “having” mode of lie that Fromm writes about. How bad does it have to get before everything that makes us human and differentiates us from other animals becomes just another innovation brought to us through the magic of the invisible hand? She continues:

In the 1940s, there were no life coaches; in 2010, there were 30,000. The last time I Googled “dating coach,” 1,200,000 entries popped up. “Wedding planner” had over 25 million entries. The newest entry, Rent-a-Friend, has 190,000 entries. . . And, in a world that undermines community, disparages government and marginalizes nonprofit organizations as ways of meeting growing needs of working families, these are likely to proliferate. As will the corresponding cultural belief in the superiority of what’s for sale. . . The bad news in this case is the capacity of the service market, with all its expertise, to sap self-confidence in our own capacities and those of friends and family. . . Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

The story continues with a turn to the emotional and concerns about this “outsourcing” trend on emotional health.

As we outsource more of our private lives, we find it increasingly possible to outsource emotional attachment. A busy executive, for example, focuses on efficiency; his assistant tells me, “My boss outsources patience to me.” The wealthy employer of a household manager detaches herself from the act of writing personal Christmas-present labels. A love coach encourages clients to think of dating as “work,” and to be mindful of their R.O.I. — return on investment, of emotional energy, time and money. The grieving family member hires a Tombstone Butler to beautify a loved one’s burial site. [This one sounds so cold and crass, and has to be about the most inauthentic action possible. Is care really present here?]

I think this is more serious than simply a psychological issue. It is an ontological issue--fancy words for saying we have lost our understanding of what makes us human. We are caring creatures, and caring means acting out of a sense of attachment or connection to whatever is at the other. The market is fundamentally impersonal and amoral. I am fond of quoting Robert Heilbroner, so apologies to those who have already seen this often in my blog: "A second, less familiar but no less serious objection is that a general subordination of action to market forces demotes progress itself from a consciously intended social aim to an unintended consequence of action, thereby robbing it of moral content."

But others see this trend as a very positive move, like the Wall Street tycoon in my recent post, who argues that more inequality is good for us. One of the many comments that Hochschild’s column produced came from Derek Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for their website. He writes, not surprisingly for a business editor,

It seems to me that we should want, if not desperately crave, the kind of affluence that makes food so cheap, and shelter so available, and medical care so affordable, that we have money left over to pay people to help us meet our "higher" needs. Rather than fear the anxiety economy, I welcome it with anxious and trembling arms. It's a badge of wealth and something of a miracle that today, uniquely within the sweep of history, we finally have the time and cause to debate whether we're spending too much money nursing our neuroses and investing directly in our happiness.

I think he missed the point entirely, something that business commentators so often do. Hochschild, as am I, is lamenting the disappearance of “non-market” activities that historically were delivered by two or more persons in the context of a caring relationship, and their reappearance as impersonal transactions in the “market” where they eventually become commodified by the inexorable workings of competition and efficiency.

Finally, today, I wanted to see how long this term has been around and tried a web search. Of the roughly 5000 hits on the word, wantology, I found only a few that were not triggered by Hochschild’s article. The earliest I found was a pointer to Jean Slatter, who has been consulting and giving lectures on wantology since 2005 or so. She is the author of Hiring the Heavens. Hochschild cites her in her new book, The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, on which the Times article was based.

The other that caught my attention was an ad for courses and a handbook from “The Organization Zone.” They have already branded the name. Fast work. The organization and handbook, Want-ology Workbook: Really Get What You Really Want, are the work of Kevin B Kreitman. Here’s a few words from their website.

To get what you really want, you have to know what you really want. Feel really secure that your dream job won't trap you in a nightmare. And feel confident that you can avoid jumping "out of the frying pan into the fire" when you decide to go for it.

Want-ology® is the fundamental course that will focus you on what you truly want in a way that will enable you to make your dreams come true.

I guess I am way behind the times. My children have done all right in their lives with names plucked from a book of names, but mostly out of conversations with family and friends. My spouse and I were the nameologists, but we missed knowing that. But then we were also not worried from the moment we discovered them in utero about the nursery school we “should want” them to go. The professional potty trainer that Hochschild mentioned would never have had the patience we brought to the process and would have created an entirely different bond with the kids, but maybe that would have been a good thing. I doubt it, as I doubt that any of these outsourced human-centered activities can be provided by the market without costs that far outweigh the profits they provide to the economy.

Some things never or rarely change. My wife recently took a course about great American migrations, which finished by reading about the Dust Bowl in the 1930‘s. What I report below comes from the book they read, The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan. Egan writes about those who stayed behind through terribly difficult times and the events that were going on to address the human and natural disasters. The extent of the damage is hard to visualize today. Egan writes. “One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been ‘essentially destroyed’ and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.” Bennett is Hugh Bennett, the man who Roosevelt had assigned to deal with the tragedy.

The book reports the debates about the causes back in Washington. “A Harvard geologist” consulting to the Department of Interior argued that an “irrevocable shift in nature was underway,” and there would be at least 100 years of desolation. The experts at the Department of Agriculture thought the cycle was much shorter, and the drought was due to a much shorter periodicity. It had not rained for four years by then. Egan writes further, “The system was broken, just like the land. The debate was whether to start from scratch, with radical new methods of farming, or give up on the southern plains forever.”

Bennett argued against those who wanted to keep offering monetary incentives to stay on the land. He had been allotted a few millions for his brand-new agency, the Soil Erosion Service to provide “relief.” Instead, he wanted to change farming and soil conservation practices, and keep people on the land. Although looking to technology to mitigate the conditions, he looked beyond nature as the cause and, argued that this was “not just another natural disaster or an epic drought. It seemed like something caused by man, a by-product of hubris and ignorance on a grand scale.”

Bennett lobbied to get money and authority from Congress to establish a new permanent agency to heal the land. He wanted the money to stabilize the land for “generations to come.” Many scoffed at him. Egan writes, “‘If God can’t make rain in Kansas,’ one Congressman asked, ‘how can the New Deal hope to succeed.’” Bennett plowed ahead and avoided the charge that Roosevelt was playing God. “His [Bennett’s] idea was much simpler: change human behavior, not the weather.”

That’s enough history. The book is a graphic and often moving tale of hardship mixed with stubbornness. Now, with this brief extract, I want you to jump ahead about 80 years to the present, and to global climate change instead of drought in the Dust Bowl. For me, the parallels are striking, instructive, and disturbing. The incessant and unending debates among the heads of agencies and advocates of all stripes has an eerie resemblance to the story Egan retells. Technology reappears as the Band-Aid to counter the “natural” causes. Any contribution of human agency is strongly contested.

The New Deal program Bennett was able to establish involved buying back the land from the homesteaders to whom it had been given over a couple of generations. Many were extraordinarily stubborn, to the extent of forming a “Last Man Club,” vowing to stay and fight the plans to resettle the inhabitants of the southern plains. I can imagine the same issue will arise when people are forced to flee from low-lying lands being inundated by rising sea level. I just saw a remarkable documentary, The Island President, about the recently deposed President of the Maldives that’s already losing its country to the Indian Ocean.

Although the drought had parched the plains for 4-5 years, it tool a singular event to give it its name. On April 14, 1935, a huge storm, described as a “black blizzard” took away even more of the little topsoil that was left by then. The next day, reporters started referring to that day as “Black Sunday” and to the region as “The Dust Bowl.” The name still lives as a metaphor for the ravages of nature abetted by the helping hands of humans. Ironically, the storm deposited dust as far east as Washington, DC just as Bennett was pleading for his case before the Congress. During his testimony, clouds of dust coming from the southwest darkened the skies outside the Capitol. The noticeable impact was startling. Egan writes, “Within a day, Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil.” What kind of Black Sunday will it take to wake us up?

The New York Times ran a highly provocative story, reporting on a book by Edward Conard (rhymes with canard) about to hit the streets. Conard was a partner in Bain Capital before he retired. He’s right up there in the wealth stratosphere along with his old chum, Mitt Romney. The Times article identifies him as “a member of the 0.1 percent. His wealth is most likely in the hundreds of millions; he lives in an Upper East Side town house just off Fifth Avenue; and he is one of the largest donors to his old boss and friend, Mitt Romney.”

Conard makes no apologies about being superrich. He argues conversely that it is the superrich to whom we owe the efficacy of our economy. Maybe, but we also owe them a major hand in bringing down the system a few years ago. Conrad admits to a mistake or two in the system. Because of this stigma, many of the wealthy are hiding in gated communities and exerting their wills on the rest of us through the anonymous channels being used to corrupt fund the democratic political process. Conard is different, the Times reports.

Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.

Conard contends that nobody really understands the economy. All those Nobelists that study the impacts that both consumption and investment spending are wrong. The Times article continues.

Conard understands that many believe that the U.S. economy currently serves the rich at the expense of everyone else. He contends that this is largely because most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

I won’t repeat the economic arguments for or against his “counterintuitive” model; you will have to read the whole story. (For me, as I have written, most of economics is not intuitive or counterintuitive, it is a misguided quasi-science that has caused at least as much mischief as good.) I will take a shot at his statement that inequality is good for us, however. I have reported in the past on the work of Wilkinson and Pickett, in their book, The Spirit Level. The two authors present a series of graphs each displaying a measure of some social bad against a standard measure of income inequality for a variety of relatively affluent industrialized countries. The US is the worst performer in every case, often lying well beyond the position of others on the graphs. We have both the highest inequality and the worst record. The measures of social bads include teenage pregnancies, life expectancy, a general combined health index, crime, social mobility and so on. I show one case below. All look pretty much the same.

His conclusions are the same as all results gotten by looking at the world through a soda straw. Maybe the numbers alone show the relationships he claims. It is strange in this case that with thousands of economists churning the same data, he comes up with such different results. The data that Wilkinson and Pickett present are “counterintuitive, I am sure in his view. They show that inequality does just the opposite. It all depends on what measures you are using. I will take indices of human well-being over money every day.

ps. The Times also wrote, “Romney has also said that rising inequality is not a problem and that the attention paid to the issue is ‘about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.’” He didn’t read The Spirit Level either.

pps. The Bugatti Veyron in the photo goes for a mere $1,700,000.

Once again, my thoughts are triggered by a David Brooks oped column. He writes in today’s NYTimes (4/27/12) about learning in a big way. The headline, “Is Our Adults Learning?” is strange. I can’t figure out if it means something important or is simply the output of a headline writer that didn’t learn enough in school. I think it is the latter. Irony at work in the real world.

Brooks is laying down a case for what some call small-scale social experiments or, maybe in this context, large-scale experiments. Arguing that the models that experts use to predict the future under various scenarios are not up to the job, he offers up the possibility of real learning by trying out (experimenting with) policies or strategies and seeing what they actually produce in the messy world out there instead of in the pristine inner guts of some supercomputer. He thinks this way can avoid the arguments among experts, macro-economists in his example, about the effectiveness of some proposed “answer” to a big problem like the financial meltdown and also the postmortems that are usually nothing more than I-told-you--so exercises.

What you really need to achieve sustained learning, Manzi [author of the recent book, Uncontrolled] argues, is controlled experiments. Try something out. Compare the results against a control group. Build up an information feedback loop. This is how businesses learn. By 2000, the credit card company Capital One was running 60,000 randomized tests a year — trying out different innovations and strategies. Google ran about 12,000 randomized experiments in 2009 alone.

These randomized tests actually do vindicate or disprove theories. For example, a few years ago, one experiment suggested that if you give people too many choices they get overwhelmed and experience less satisfaction. But researchers conducted dozens more experiments, trying to replicate the phenomenon. They couldn’t.

Brooks talks about randomized experiments that Visa and Google used to test theories that were supposed to provide bigger profits. Drug companies are required to show the effectiveness and safety of their drugs in real trials. What’s missing in this excellent article is the magic word, pragmatism. These companies were being pragmatic, learning from experience, not computer modeling trials. Pragmatism, is both a philosophy about how we think, and a practical framework for getting what we want out of life. The latter feature applies both to individuals and to organizations.

Pragmatism is a dirty word even though it is practiced everywhere. Some say that being pragmatic is a cop out. Rationalism, the only way to truths one can trust and apply, is based on the positive knowledge we have collected over time through rigorous applications of method. Anything else is suspect and subject to distortion and abuse. Pragmatic is a pejorative term when directed at politicians. In the popular media, it connotes weakness and uncertainly. To avoid being tarred with this image, political leaders fall back on the advise of experts and their computer models, whether the computer is a big mainframe kludge or some inner machine in their brains.

It is true that sometimes these models produce the desired outputs, but not most of the time. Far-reaching policies and strategies put in play by both governments and businesses often become croppers. Brooks argues, as many do including myself, that the models being used cannot capture the realities of our complex, messy, ever-changing world: “…no model can capture enough of the world’s complexity to yield definitive conclusions or make nonobvious predictions.”

Pragmatism, as a philosophy, is a different way of thinking and acquiring knowledge about the world. It holds experience, itself, not the theories and conclusions we derive from experience, as the primary source of understanding the world. The contentious feature of pragmatism is that the truths produced by experience are always contingent. A new experience may negate an old truth. Surprise--this is the way that even science proceeds, except that “experience” is confined to rigorous, controlled experiments and a priori hypothesis testing. Pragmatism relaxes this rule and accepts observations from life itself.

Pragmatism is also a way of life, a philosophy based on practice and applied in practice, an interesting virtuous circle. Unlike the objective, floating-in-air contextless aura of positivism, pragmatism is grounded in life; the truths it seeks are always directed toward some tangible end. John Dewey, one of our great thinkers, called it “the comprehensive art of the wise conduct of life itself,”

Pragmatism cannot be put into play without keen observation powers available. After all, it is a form of continuous inquiry, learning as you go. I often use the metaphor of gardening to describe pragmatism in action. Gardeners can and do learn their skill, mostly in the course of tending to their fields. Organizations, especially government agencies, are not set up to operate in this way. Careful, continuous observation and learning take money, patience, and a different kind of competence, more akin to wisdom than intellectual power, all of which are lacking in the structures of our institutions today.

The presumption that the world will turn out the way models forecast diverts attention away from the need to carefully watch the process as it unfolds. The present primary framing of problems is to deal with the symptoms, wait for a while (usually until the leadership of the firm or the government has changed) and put a new theory-based regimen into play. Carl Lindblom, in a classic article described the process of public administration as “muddling through.”

Why then bother to describe the method in all the above detail? Because it is in fact a common method of policy formulation, and is, for complex problems, the principal reliance of administrators as well as of other policy analysts. And because it will be superior to any other decision-making method available for complex problems in many circumstances, certainly superior to a futile attempt at superhuman comprehensiveness. The reaction of the public administrator to the exposition of method doubtless will be less a discovery of a new method than a better acquaintance with an old. But by becoming more conscious of their practice of this method, administrators might practice it with more skill and know when to extend or constrict its use. (That they sometimes practice it effectively and sometimes not may explain the extremes of opinion on "muddling through," which is both praised as a highly sophisticated form of problem-solving and denounced as no method at all. For I suspect that in so far as there is a system in what is known as "muddling through," this method is it.)

Pragmatic sounds to me less pejorative than Lindblom’s phrase, “mudding-through.” The essence is the same. Language shapes the actions we take. Tiptoeing around a word or phrase means that we will not step firmly into the plot that needs weeding, and rest satisfied with applications of some magic weedkiller we can spray from afar. Solutions that come from the lab are no different than those those coming out of a computer.

The time has more than come when we need to embrace pragmatism as the better way to move along the paths we choose. It is the only way to become wise about the complexities of the world. Wisdom, not smarts, is the critical operative word for governance. Attaining flourishing, the essence of sustainability, absolutely demands pragmatism. Even Brooks infers to its potential, ending his column with:

Still, things don’t have to be this bad. The first step to wisdom is admitting how little we know and constructing a trial-and-error process on the basis of our own ignorance. Inject controlled experiments throughout government. Feel your way forward. Fail less badly every day.

Sherry Turkle wrote the front page cover story in the NYTimes Sunday review on April 22. The title, “The Flight from Conversation,” is about the negative effects of all the digital devices and programs that have come to dominate our lives everywhere. Turkle, an MIT scholar, has studied the impacts of technology on the workplace and other familiar arenas of life. Her latest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, spawned the Times article.

The gist of the story and her book is that recent developments in social media and the devices that support it are denuding the richness from our major means of relating, speaking to one another.

Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another's point of view.

This concern is not foreign to this blog and my work. It is not only this particular genre of technology that reduces our capacity to be; it is all modern technology that stands between us and our intrinsic way to be human. It is not only other people that are messy. It is the world itself. Technology rests of a foundation of scientific knowledge about the world obtained by taking on little parts of that world at a time. The result is that we know lots about little pieces of the world, but little about the whole system.

A little thought will lead you to the realization that every time you use a technological device, your smartphone or a light switch, your action is confined by the designer’s or engineer’s limited model of the world used to create the device. Given the inevitable reductionist context for that model, the world that you, the user, are thrown into is but a shadow of reality. The richness that always is present when you are, gets diminished, if not lost entirely.

That’s why conversations become simply the transmission of words without the clothing they wear in face-to-face interactions. The designers of these tools for conversing start with a fundamental error about the nature of talk or messaging in any form. The message is not in the medium, it is shaped by the interpretation of the receiver. Listening is simply another way of interacting with the world. The better choice for describing that interaction and, consequently, the way to design humanizing tools to intervene in that process is the cognitive model of Humberto Maturana.

Maturana claims that the structure of the cognitive system, usually collapsed into the brain, at any moment determines the body’s response to incoming signals. The meaning of incoming messages is created by the history of the receiver, captured in the massively interconnected system that produces memory--a record of all life’s experiences. It’s what the memory does that determines how a message is interpreted. Further, the memory is modified by the interaction, itself, to embody this latest experience. Like the aphorism that one cannot step into the same river twice, one does not “hear” the same message twice, even if the words are the same.

Turkle points out that messaging always takes place in a context, a messy one, in her words. Messy gives a negative sense that I think is a bit misleading. I would rather describe it as I did above as rich. The spoken words flow into the body along with all sorts of other signals coming from other features of the world present to the listener. The richness of those signals depends on the depth of his or her presencing; the more present, the richer. With a device in between the speaker and the hearer, there is no presence at all. The nuances that Turkle refers to are all gone.

Relationship is not some thing or feeling; it is the name for actions between two actors. That is it described as something to have comes from our misuse of language that, in turn, comes from our existential belief that we live in a having, not being, mode. Like the saying that if all one has is a hammer the world becomes nothing but a bunch of nails, the world becomes nothing but a lot of things to possess. Actions become reified and become things. In the Being mode, that I claim is essential to flourishing and thence to sustainability, the manner by and the context in which the interactions take place is what is important.

Relationship implies some context of caring, not in the psychological sense of a feeling for each other, but in attending to ends of mutual concern. The concern could be about some action to be done. That’s the dominant use of words; to coordinate action among people. The words are more likely to fit when the speaker understands the context in which both actors are embedded. The words could also be uttered out of concern about the other’s situation, in which case the words ought to reflect the speakers assessment of that condition. Without presence, it is exceedingly difficult to know where the other is, to use the vernacular for someone’s state of being at the moment.

Like all forms of technology, the devices and programs Turkle writes about take root only when they provide some service. They must have some measure of utility, but all, as I note, have a potential to produce unintended consequences due to the inherent nature of technological artifacts. Unfortunately the potential for such outcomes is rarely understood or is simply ignored during the process by which they are born and appear in the marketplace. Big impacts, like global climate change capture headlines. The more insidious ones that fritter away our humanness show up in the often arcane work of scholars and appear only occasionally in public media. I fear that the “Flight from Conversation” will accelerate the impoverishing of the meaning of relationship that is already in poor health.

I’m watching the rain replenish the Earth today. It needs it in Massachusetts which is many inches below normal at this time of the year. I don’t keep weather records of my own, but there is little normal about what I have been observing locally and on the national news. Anyway, the rain which may present us also with flash floods later today is most welcome.

I began this day at our Cinema Club, which presents an about-to-be-released indie film, but unannounced until we show up. We have seen some winners lately, including Separation and Monsieur Lazhar, both of which were terrific. But today, probably in honor of Earth Day, we watched a documentary, The Island President, a real-life story about the Maldive Islands, an archipelago of several thousand islands in the Indian Ocean. Two stories are entwined: one about the establishment of democracy, the other about the plight of the Nation at the hands of global warming, creating the inundation of the many Maldive islands.

A new President, Mohamed Nasheed, was elected in 2008, ousting a dictator who had ruled for 30 years. Nasheed had been imprisoned several times, but kept alive a freedom movement that finally won the first real election in those 30 years. Nasheed and his inexperienced Cabinet had many issues to handle, but none as daunting as the existential threat to their nation at the hands of the rising ocean. The Maldives are the lowest lying nation in all the world. By the time Nasheed took office, great damages had already occurred with the shorelines becoming badly eroded.

The new President took on this issue in anticipation of the 2010 Copenhagen Conference, which was to move the international climate change action agenda forward. Those who follow the climate change issue know that the Conference produced essentially no action. But for Nasheed and the Maldives it was a major event. In the lead-up to the Conference, Nasheed and others formed an alliance of low-lying nations, and developed a cohesive bloc to support their peculiar and urgent needs for action to halt the increasing levels of greenhouse gases. At the Copenhagen Conference, his persistence and leadership led to the issuance of a report which all the attending nations signed onto. It was small feat to get this result since China and other major powers wanted to prevent any agreements to be officially recorded. The cost of getting through the political morass was a toothless agreement with no required follow-up. The 350 ppm level of greenhouse gases, generally agreed upon as a “safe” level was not included.

The lessons I tool home are several:

1. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. It didn’t yet, but the film showed what a single individual could do against tough odds.

2. Climate change is real and already with us. It may be too late to stop the temperature rise and its consequences at a tolerable point, if one deems that tolerable is morally acceptable, and adaptation, the strategy being forced on these low-lying countries, is economically and technologically very challenging. Most are poor and have little infrastructure in place on which to built the seawalls necessary to buffer the rising seas. The is no high ground to which they can retreat to get out of harm’s way.

3. Garett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is an all too accurate portrayal of the destructive power of self-interests aimed at using a scarce natural resource. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize in Economics in part for her work in refuting Hardin’s harsh conclusions, the need for coercive intervention, and showing that excessive use could be curbed by collective action by the interested parties. I am afraid that Hardin is right in this case, with one unfortunate variation. The parties, as the Copenhagen Conference illustrated (The movie gave us a candid camera view of the proceedings.) that there is little likelihood that the great powers of the East and the West will voluntarily agreed to act to reduce the level of greenhouse gas emission. No magic bullet exists, and in my opinion none will emerge in the window we have, so countries would have to stop growing the way we have been. We are not going to make sacrifices to enable China and India to “catch up” with us. So the Planet will suffer along with all of us.

I thought for a moment that we are committing suicide by our refusal to see the tragedy working itself out, but it is more accurate to say we are committing homicide because it is future generations of humans who will suffer. Even Hardin’s solution of some coercive institution intervening and setting limits won’t work simply because there are no such institutions around. The United Nations, designed, in theory, for conflict resolution and enforcement of some basic moral ends, is toothless here. It can only intervene, in limited ways with conflicts among Nations, but has no means at all to intervene with a war against the Earth itself.

The avoidance of the tragedy is possible only if Nasheed’s commitments to democracy and to the preservation of the Earth spread to other leaders, big and small. The film clearly shows that the time is now; maybe its images and story will get people moving. I doubt if enough people will take time to see it, however. We are lured into theaters by the Angelina Jolie’s and Brad Pitt’s of the celebrity world. No actor could, however, portray the grit and commitment shown by this film’s real-life hero to his people and the Globe.

ps. Nasheed was ousted by a coup, fomented by forces loyal to the previous regime just two months ago in February, 2012. Another tragedy.

When I was a boy
World was better spot.
What was so was so,
What was not was not.
Now I am a man;
World have changed a lot.
Some things nearly so,
Others nearly not.

There are times I almost think
I am not sure of what I absolutely know.
Very often find confusion
In conclusion I concluded long ago
In my head are many facts
That, as a student, I have studied to procure,
In my head are many facts..
Of which I wish I was more certain I was sure!
…
There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know.
Everybody find confusion
In conclusion he concluded long ago
And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight...
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
Oh-h-h-h-h-h Sometimes I think that people going mad!
Ah-h-h-h-h-h! Sometimes I think that people not so bad!
But not matter what I think I must go on living life.
(Credit to Oscar Hammerstein from The King and I)

I am, as I think I have said, writing a book with my former student, Andy Hoffman. It is going to be set as a conversation between Andy and me. In getting going, I have been thinking about how I want my persona to show up. Of course, I will show up exactly as how each reader creates an image, no matter what I intend. Anyway, I got thinking about problem-solving as a possible way to frame what keeps me going. I am a pretty good problem solver, but, with a little reflection, I realized that this is not what I really love to do, and that is solving puzzles. These two mental exercises are not the same and the difference is important to my/our pursuit of sustainability.

Let me start with a conventional statement about problem-solving.

When a problem comes along, study it until you are completely knowledgeable. Then find that weak spot, break the problem apart, and the rest will be easy. - Norman Vincent Peale

Peale’s quote reflects our cultural proclivity, well-honed ever since René Descartes developed his early version of what has become the scientific method. I am quite good at following Peale’s advice. After all, I have spent more than a third of my adult life at MIT as a student and then as a researcher. But it’s not the problems, big or small, that need to be addressed; it’s the puzzles that need solving, but these two kind of solving are quite different. I think I have been attracted to puzzles, not problems, for quite a while. Puzzles are easily trivialized as games or diversions. Sudoku, KenKen, crossword puzzles, and a myriad of puzzle apps for mobile devices. I do Sudoku and Kenken and the New York Time puzzles faithfully (in ink), and maybe this love for puzzles has spilled over into bigger things for me.

Sustainability is a big puzzle. It’s not just a complicated problem to solve. I looked up a few definition, hoping to get a clear sense of the difference between problems and puzzles. Puzzles have a few defining characteristics. They are enigmatic, baffling, bewildering, or perplexing. They test one’s thinking. Dealing with them requires ingenuity and persistence. “Solving” them may require an ability to recognize patterns and other higher-order properties of the puzzle. They cannot be simply defined and broken into small chunks.

Problems are questions we have to answer before proceeding on a predetermined path, perhaps in life or just in a math quiz. Problems arise without warning when our actions are stopped for any reason at all. In every case, problems have a fairly well-defined context out of which they emerge. Puzzles, other than diversionary things like jigsaw puzzles, emerge when a whole mess of troubling perceptions confront us, and all the paths we had thought were open become hidden by a cloud of bewilderment, to pick one of the several possible words to describe the loss of clarity and coherence.

Puzzle solving requires a different approach. The belief that there is an “answer” doesn’t fit, obviating all standard methodologies for problem solving. I am quite fond of the work of Rittel and Webber who coined the phrase “wicked problems.” On reading their paper closely, I would say that they are really talking about puzzles, not problems. And their 10 points about recognizing and dealing with wicked problems is really about taking on puzzles. Complexity creates puzzles to solve. I use “solve” with an implicit sense that one never solves puzzles in life, only in games. Unscramble maybe, or any other word that connotes removing the bafflement so that the puzzle can now be deconstructed and broken into problems that are solvable in the ordinary sense of the word.

The challenge in matters of sustainability or any other significant societal set of concerns is that bewilderment is a no-no in public life and in virtually every position of power. Hesitancy which will always accompany confronting on a puzzle shows “weakness.” Mencken might have been talking about puzzles, not problems, in his famous quote: “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

Our society will need to learn the difference between puzzles and problems if we are to begin to address our big and baffling concerns, like sustainability. First, we need to be clear about the two words and their differences. Then we have to stop equating problem-solving skills with leadership. We need to attack our incapacity for dealing with puzzles from the top and from the bottom. Our schools are moving farther and farther from teaching the appreciation of puzzles and the critical skills that are needed for dealing with them. Teaching our children better math and science may expand their economic horizons, but it will surely limit their ability to work with the big puzzles facing us, today, and the even bigger ones that will face them as adults.

David Brooks, writing in today’s NYTimes, pointed to just the opposite: how our educational system is failing in this area.

Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But, in their landmark study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that. The exact numbers are disputed, but the study suggests that nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college.

Maybe our centers of learning should scrap the present pedagogy, and let the students spend more time solving puzzles on their ubiquitous devices. The results he writes about may be related to the myriad of apps available to distract the students from their studies. Could it be that this so-called wasted time could actually produce some real puzzle-solving skills if properly harnessed?

I have just finished reading the final essays from my classes at the Marlboro College Graduate School MBA in Managing for Sustainability. One about providing services instead of products, per se, struck a chord. I have been studying, for a while, this alternative to the more common direct purchasing offers made by companies catering to consumer market. The subject of the potential eco-efficiency of services compared to product markets has been around for a couple of decades, at least. For a time, it was a serious topic in my old field of industrial ecology. The provision of automobile sharing, as in Zipcars, is one of the few cases where this idea has taken root.

The interest in services, as opposed to owning after purchase, lies in the lowering of environmental impacts potentially available by reducing the number of cars or vacuum cleaners, etc. Sharing can produce numbers of lifetime uses of shared devices far greater than are available from single-owner devices that spends most of their lives in the closet or garage. The potential savings depends on the contributions to impacts from the manufacturing and disposal phases of the life cycle relative to those coming from its use. For cars driven by a single owner everyday, the use phase tends to dominate, but for the stereotypical “little old lady,” the opposite may be true. in this case, it would be better for the environment to share the use of a single vehicle. In addition to the environmental benefits, sharing systems can provide social benefits by enabling those who cannot afford to purchase the device to use it on demand.

The concept is also consistent with the need to rebuild community as a precursor for sustainability. Single purchases rarely create connections to the nameless, faceless salespersons in the hygienic surroundings of bigbox stores. I did, however, recently have an experience at Sears that runs counter to this. In the past 3 or 4 years, several of our major appliances have needed to be replaced. These were installed 30 or 40 years ago when appliances were built to last and they certainly did. When the refrigerator failed a few weeks ago, we went to Sears again, and as we walked into the appliance section, one of the salesmen approached and said, “I see you are back again.” Pretty remarkable these days in the commodified atmosphere of shopping.

I hauled out the manuscript of a talk on so-called, product-service systems (PSS), I delivered at a conference of the European Roundtable on Cleaner Production at least 10 years ago. The paper was directed more to introducing the basic concepts of sustainability that I now routinely discuss and teach, but then these ideas were a little foreign both to me and my audiences. Unlike the position taken at that conference, I now think that PSS can contribute to sustainability in a categorical different manner than eco-efficiency. The use of a device taken out of the closet is existentially distinct from one borrowed or rented for a specific use.

In the first case, once the user has gotten over the initial learning phase, each successive use will be transparent, as the device becomes, in Heidegger’s language, ready-to-hand. This means that it will be used without consciously thinking about it. It becomes a piece of equipment that is always waiting to be picked up and used whenever the actor starts to act to satisfy some intentional objective requiring its services. The device may have been purchased without much thought, under the the persuasive power of advertising or some other social context. So many devices are omnipresent in almost every setting today that people seem to go through each day picking up one device after another. The automaticity that surrounds this scenario strongly suggests that the actors are operating in an inauthentic mode, and are not mindful of whatever domains are being taken care of. The mindlessness inhibits the actor from making any conscious, reflective assessment of satisfaction amidst the continuous flow of activities, and may shape repetitive, additive-like behaviors.

The use of shared or rented devices produces an entirely different existential experience. Whenever an actor intends to do something requiring a device that is not ready-to-hand, a breakdown occurs in the mindlessness of the flow that has brought the actor to that moment. The actor becomes conscious of whatever was the intention, and must stop before continuing toward its completion. The missing presence of the needed device or service becomes obtrusive, that is, it takes over the moment and forces the actor to reflect on the situation. Voila, the actor can now examine (reflect on) what has been going on, and continue or not, but whatever decision is made, the choice will be authentic. Further, the actor can examine the intention itself and recognize what domain of care was to be addressed. The veil of need that is so present in ordinary mindless activities becomes transparent and the actor can proceed towards genuine satisfaction.

This integral scene in the playbook of sharing can be made more powerful if the process of procuring the services involves an further explicit step: revealing the underlying domain of care. A rental or sharing agency could routinely ask the customer/client for what purpose, or more precisely, what domain of care is the target of the object being sought. The question further deepens the reflection process and can explicate the specific domain and the whole concept of care. This process would, of course, require the cooperation of the source agency and the procurer who might object to the incursion on privacy. If sustainability were high on the values of both parties, this potential obstacle would disappear. Zipcar could ask each user to think about a question like, “What cares will renting this vehicle satisfy?” Taylor Rental might ask a similar question to a customer looking to rent a log-splitter. The answers are not as important as the raising of consciousness of care, not of need, as the parent of intention and action. I have often written that we will have a real shot at sustainability when the greeter at the entrance of every WalMart’s asks everyone walking in, “Do you really need the things on your list?’ or “What cares brought into the store today?”