By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
In Maryland, a seven-year-old boy is suspended from his school under its “zero tolerance” policy because he nibbles a pastry into the shape of a handgun and says “Bang!” “Bang!” (Here). In California, a high school principal refuses to let an ambulance come onto a football filed to tend to a seriously injured player citing school board rules. (Here). A nurse at a home for the aged ignores the furtive pleas of a 911 dispatcher and refuses to perform CPR on a woman dying of cardiac arrest because she says its policy not to do it. (Here). She won’t even get someone else to do it.
These grotesque examples of indifference to any form of reason are becoming all too common as we find ourselves governed more by rules than by the judgment of people. These stories got me thinking about the need for rules in a complicated society and their limitations. It also got me wondering why wisdom and its country cousin, common sense, have been banished from most every discussion of decision making. Here’s John Maynard Keynes in his famous treatise on decision making, Treatise of Probability, discussing how to make the right decision:
If, therefore, the question of right action is under all circumstances a determinate problem, it must be in virtue of an intuitive judgment directed to the situation as a whole, and not in virtue of an arithmetical deduction derived from a series of separate judgments directed to the individual alternatives each treated in isolation.
Armed with that little tidbit, I searched the entire work and found exactly zero uses of the word “wisdom” in Professor Keynes’ detailed analysis of doing the right thing. How can that be?
Wisdom is a an old-fashioned word. It hearkens back to Solomon and Solon. To Plato and Socrates. Aristotle explained that practical wisdom is one part moral will and one part moral skill. It means a human action premised on experience or intuition that achieves the best possible moral result. Not efficient. Not effective. Not even the most profitable. But the most moral result.
At its core, it is about the time and thought necessary to achieve deep understanding. Both are in short supply these days as we measure our progress by how far we’ve gotten or by how much we have obtained and how fast we did it. The process by which we achieved these things is less important that the result. And it is this philosophy that has laid waste to ethics, judgment, and most importantly wisdom. In this race to “Just Win Baby,” we have ossified our capacity for wisdom under a steady stream of rules, regulations, guidelines, and protocols. But why?
Speaking at a TED conference in 2009, Professor Barry Schwartz examined the problem and offered an explanation in the context of a study done of hospital janitors. Schwartz looked at the job descriptions of the janitors. The explanations of employment were big on such rudimentary tasks as cleaning, restocking, and sanitation, but not one mention of anything involving human interaction. As professor Schwartz remarked “the job could just as easily have been done in a mortuary as in a hospital.” But that assessment did not match what the janitors considered the most important aspect of their jobs. In responses to questioning from researchers, one janitor, Mike, explained the most important thing about his job was caring for patients. Like the time he stopped mopping a floor because Mr. Jones was finally up and around from surgery and had just left his bed to get some exercise. Another custodian, Charlene, told of ignoring the orders of a supervisor to vacuum the visitors lounge because family members of a patient who dutifully arrived every day to be with their loved one were finally getting a chance to take a nap. And, Luke, who scrubbed the floor of a comatose patient’s room twice because the emotionally drained father at the bedside didn’t see it the first time and insisted it be done. No argument. No rebuttal. No peevishness of any sort. Just compassion.
These types of interactions aided in patient care and were beneficial to the hospital beyond the mere improvements to sanitation and overall cleanliness. As Professor Schwartz reminds us, “kindness, care and empathy” were essential parts of these janitors jobs, yet not word one about them in their job descriptions nor the rules promulgated by their supervisors to guarantee their performance. In fact, the rules were silent on this human component even as strict compliance with the rules would have resulted in the opposite effect. Rule breaking –when the circumstances demanded it — was found to be an equally essential component of their performance as was reasonable compliance in the successful execution of their jobs. The janitors thus exhibited the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to exercise their discretion when the need arose resulting in the best moral result. Why then can’t we allow experienced people to exercise judgment when the need arises?
Professor Schwartz says the answer is fear of catastrophic results. Sure, rules can mitigate against disasters such as when one has no idea what to do, but what about when good, experienced people are penned in by the rules? The sad fact is that wisdom suffers. It suffers because compliance with rules insures mediocrity and banishes excellence. Winston Churchill used to like to spout this adage (attributed to RAF pilot Douglas Bader), “Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.” And it was Thomas Edison who remonstrated against mindless adherence to convention saying, “Hell, there are no rules here – we’re trying to accomplish something.” Like Churchill, Edison, and those janitors wise people can make exceptions to rules and improvise. And in these against-the-grain actions, they contribute to a better overall result than any blind obedience to the rules could muster.
The disheartening truth is that many leaders simply don’t want the best results. Instead, in an effort to secure their positions, they want mediocre results devoid of controversy. Why strive for excellence and bear the attendant risk, when C plus work will keep your job? We expect wisdom from our leaders and too often we get rules. Vague, incomprehensible guidelines tailored to nothing except the most obvious situations which are many times the least important situations. By reducing humans to mere instrumentalities of the rules with no discretion to modify them when circumstances so warrant, we achieve the foolish results recounted above. Can every person demonstrate wisdom? Likely the answer is “no,” but wisdom is learned not passed exclusively through the gene pool. As our janitors amply prove, it takes moral education and enough time to garner the necessary experience to let it bloom. Reducing people to automatons for carrying out rules is a sapping away of their humanity and an insult to their dignity as sentient beings. We need to encourage the exercise of judgment and not condemn its every failure.
We need something else, too. We need to allow for error. We need to understand that sometimes discretion is not properly exercised but that the measure of an action is mostly its intention and not always its result. Too often, the fear of negative consequences stifles any real excellence. Take the nurse at the home for the aged. Her fear of dismissal from her job and any attendant liability permitted her to sit idly by while another person died. Take away that fear and you would almost certainly have had this person, sworn to reduce suffering, giving all she had to save another person. As a lawyer, I know full well the burden on actions that the liability system has on risk taking, but the law is not static and this is precisely the reason for Good Samaritan laws that protect benevolent human action when the intentions are true.
We need to unshackle people and allow the extraordinary things they can accomplish to happen when given the chance. And there may yet be hope. In January, United Airlines passenger Kerry Drake was making a mad dash flight home to Lubbock, Texas to visit his dying mother one last time. Drake knew that if he missed his connecting flight he surely would never see his mother again. His layover in Houston was only 40 minutes and time was of the essence when he boarded his flight in San Francisco. That first leg was delayed well beyond any hope of making the second flight. United’s captain radioed Houston to ask them to delay the connecting plane. They did and despite the FAA’s and United’s own rules to keep flights on time, 20 minutes after it was scheduled to take off it got airborne with Kerry Drake aboard. Kerry Drake made it to his mother’s hospital bed only hours before she passed away.
United’s spokesman, Rahsaan Johnson, summed up the situation beautifully, “United tells employees that being on time and safe are the highest priorities, but we also empower [them] to make decisions out of the box to help customers who have a special need like Mr. Drake’s.”
Now that’s wisdom.
Source: Fox News; NPR and throughout.
~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger
We went back to the golf course last night after HumpinDog got run off after saving golfie guy from the rattler (or from falling outta the tree). I left a turd on the front yard and the rest of the pac was over there where they have the sign that says #1. Well I had to go over and tell to disregard the number one only sign and give it a number two. And they all did and it was a bit untidy. Then we went down about a hundred yards to the place where they want you to pee (by the #2 sign) and drowned all the grass. Contrarians we are when they start off with a No Dogs Allowed! sign. Also, they dont spull real good because they use the word Tee instead of Pee on that First Pee ground.
Mark,
I’m sorry I called you Larry. When I saw the blog I was more interested in reading it, than noting who wrote it.
A nurse at a home for the aged ignores the furtive pleas of a 911 dispatcher and refuses to perform CPR on a woman dying of cardiac arrest because she says its policy not to do it. (Here). She won’t even get someone else to do it.
That’s because she was DNR.
My Mother also had a “Don Not Revive” order on her, by her own request.
And this woman’s family also said she had requested it.
But yeah zero tolerance policies are still useless.
Larry
A very thoughtful piece that is more complex than it appears on the surface. Reading it sent me off on two strains of thought, though there are many more facets that are also worthy of exploration.
The first is that we are living in a time where bureaucracy is held up as the highest standard. For some reason the idea of bureaucracy has been a process stamped on to a stereotype of government. However, our ruling corporate structure is in many ways far more bureaucratic and hence more conformist than our governmental agencies. This is of necessity from the standpoint of corporate management which requires adherence to “corporate norms” for one to succeed. It is subtly conveyed in MBA programs and theory.
It is most often inculcated by managers who think that rigid job descriptions, conceived by technocrats who wouldn’t ever do those jobs, should define each employees actions without latitude for individual decisions. Behind this all is a terrible job market that forces this conformity lest one is fired and is the unable to find other employment.
The second aspect that comes to mind is that our culture has come to lack empathy for those less fortunate. If you ponder it “reality TV” exemplifies this.
Sadism reigns on reality TV, whether it is viewing “cracker shows” like “Honey BooBoo”, so we can laugh at the foibles and ignorance of “lower class individuals. Donald Trump’s show where he embarrasses minor celebrities for their lack of competence and they allow the humiliation of being insulted by this clown, in the vain hope they can regain some of their tarnished glory. The list goes on, but the bottom line is enjoying ones superiority over other people, or enjoying watching people being treated sadistically.
That our country’s system seems to be falling apart is to a large degree due to
the destruction of our overall sense of commitment to the community at large and its current celebration of chimeric individuality.
@ross
“constitutional democratic republic”
At the time of the ratification of the US Constitution, there was debate about whether we should have a democracy (direct, participatory decisions about laws and the allocation of resources) or a republic (a representative form of government). Jefferson and the democrats lost hard.
What we got was a republic dominated by the urban financial interest. Only white, land-owning men could vote until 1850 or so, women didn’t get the vote until 1920, and blacks didn’t get full rights until 1965.
In this context, “representing the interests of the citizens” is better understood as “representing the interests of the wealthy.”
In the Federalist #51, Publius wrote:
“Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”
That is, the US government was founded with the elites in power, and designed from the ground up to be difficult to influence. The “interested combinations of the majority” to be guarded against is the laboring masses.
Furthermore:
“It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure”
which is clarified a bit later, that with a fragmented majority and a powerful minority, there will be:
“less danger to a minor from the will of a major party, there must be less pretext, also, to provide for the security of the former, by introducing into the government a will not dependent on the latter”
Most people are process-oriented, not substance-oriented. So, if it’s policy to call and let someone know you’re going to be late, most people will make a call, and if someone answers, they’ll explain they’re running late, and if no one answers, they’ll say: “I called”.
This mindset is partly the result of not being willing to pay enough to attract employees that can be trusted to exercise good judgement.
Process, procedures, policy, and software, are substituted for the perceived higher costs of more capable employees.
Great article Mark Esposito. Thank you for discussing so powerful a human condition. Wisdom or lack of it effects us all..
This is a link to a Huff PO article about the nursing home. I felt anger towards the nurse at first. …. However after reading the comments of many Huff Po-ers, there may be many mitigating facts to support this womans decision. ( some claim she is not a nurse)
I would like to see the medical profession take, on administering CPR to an 85 yr old person. I want to know if there was a DNR request in her files, I have seen a persons life prolonged by good intentions,… yet the extra life was filled with pain and misery.
This IMO is not as cut and dried as I thought at first glance.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/nursing-home-cpr-case_n_2804575.html
rafflaw:
“While I agree with the premise, I do have concerns that there are too many people out there who do not have the common sense or wisdom to think or act outside of the box.”
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I think we can teach wisdom. It’s not genetic or based on social station as I tried to show with the case of the janitors. It takes time and experience. If we continually tell people by word and deed that their discretion is never to be trusted they start to believe it. It’s like lamenting that there are no more fine race horses after we’ve closed down all the tracks thus justifying why we closed down all the tracks.
Isn’t the whole point of a “constitutional democratic republic” (representing the interests of the citizens) that the people’s wisdom is supposed to be enacted into laws? Maybe campaign finance reform is what we are really talking about here!
Indigo:
“where I said that “the notion that we should be governed by rules rather than the judgement of people is the cornerstone of civil society,” that’s difficult to argue with.”
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And I wouldn’t argue with it. I simply saying pasting the word “law” onto irrational rules will not make them otherwise,
I fully agree with Locke.
The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings, capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom.
~Second Treatise of Government, Ch. VI, sec. 57
It would be hard to argue that adherence to the rules in the examples in the piece promote law’s beneficial ends.
Great article Mark. It got me thinking on a damp and dreary morning. While I agree with the premise, I do have concerns that there are too many people out there who do not have the common sense or wisdom to think or act outside of the box. Your nurse example of refusing to even call 911, let alone do CPR on the victim in my mind is an example of someone who should be in a different profession. How in heck can it be against policy at a nursing facility to call 911 for a stricken patient or resident? Something is wrong with that person that rules or a relaxing of rules will not help.
@mezpo
Your Coke quote is about commonlaw.
It may make more sense in a British context, but where I said that “the notion that we should be governed by rules rather than the judgement of people is the cornerstone of civil society,” that’s difficult to argue with.
In his Second Treatise, Locke wrote:
“Sect. 6. But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions”
There’s your reason — in the “state of nature.”
Locke continues: “Sect. 13. To this strange doctrine, viz. That in the state of nature every one has the executive power of the law of nature, I doubt not but it will be objected, that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases, that self-love will make men partial to themselves and their friends: and on the other side, that ill nature, passion and revenge will carry them too far in punishing others; and hence nothing but confusion and disorder will follow, and that therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.”
The Hobbesian state of nature is unpleasant, so humans enter into the social contract.
Again, Locke:
” I easily grant, that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniencies of the state of nature, which must certainly be great, where men may be judges in their own case, since it is easy to be imagined, that he who was so unjust as to do his brother an injury”
Thus:
“Sect. 95. MEN being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. ”
This is Locke’s thinking behind one of his earlier premises:
“Sect. 3. Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.”
Hayek’s formulation of this philosophy is quite kosher, as I noted earlier.
In addition to the “letter” of the law, there is the “spirit” of the law also which is more important than the actual letter since written law has loopholes. There are also “exigent circumstances” where in emergencies like someone yelling “help” where law enforcement can enter without a a judicial warrant.
The United States is a rule of law nation by design.
Indigo:
“Actually, the notion that we should be governed by rules rather than the judgement of people is the cornerstone of civil society, specifically, rule of law.”
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Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason… The law, which is perfection of reason.
~Sir Edward Coke
Judgment is the foundation of all law and and true judgment is based on reason.No reason; no viable law.
The police, FBI and intel agencies are also bound by the Supreme Law of the Land, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights! Can anyone name one agency in the entire United States (local, state, federal) that abides by the Fourth Amendment as written? What about the Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment, Seventh Amendment or Eighth Amendment? Just one agency.
“These grotesque examples of indifference to any form of reason are becoming all too common as we find ourselves governed more by rules than by the judgment of people.”
Actually, the notion that we should be governed by rules rather than the judgement of people is the cornerstone of civil society, specifically, rule of law.
Liberty in society is freedom from the arbitrary exercise of authority (authority in a broad sense, including the authority of might-is-right that supposedly predominated in the Hobbesean war of all-against-all). In a strict sense, liberty is having to obey only the law, and not the whims of others.
The issue, on your analysis, is that the liberty of first responders or teachers is restrained by rules that are based not on general principles, but which are for all intents and purposes arbitrary. Some ordinance gave some body the authority to establish arbitrary restrictions on the behavior of others.
While I’m not a huge fan of Friedrich Hayek’s economic though, his formulation of Rule of Law in Chapter 6 of 1944’s “Road to Serfdom,” is quite kosher:
“In our age, with its passion for conscious control of everything, it may appear paradoxical to claim as a virtue that under one system we shall know less about the particular effect of the measures the state takes than would be true under most other systems and that a method of social control should be deemed superior because of our ignorance of its precise results. Yet this consideration is in fact the rationale of the great liberal principle of the Rule of Law. And the apparent paradox dissolves rapidly when we follow the argument a little further.
“This argument is twofold; the first is economic and can here only briefly be stated. The state should confine itself to establishing rules applying to general types of situations and should allow the individuals freedom in everything which depends on the circumstances of time and place, because only the individuals concerned in each instance can fully know these circumstances and adapt their actions to them. If the individuals are to be able to use their knowledge effectively in making plans, they must
be able to predict actions of the state which may affect these plans. But if the actions of the state are to be predictable, they must be determined by rules fixed independently of the concrete circumstances which can be neither foreseen nor taken into account beforehand: and the particular effects of such actions will be unpredictable. If, on the other hand, the state were to direct the individual’s actions so as to achieve particular ends, its action would have to be decided on the basis of the full circumstances of the moment and would therefore be unpredictable. Hence the familiar fact that the more the state “plans,” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.
“The second, moral or political, argument is even more directly relevant to the point under discussion. If the state is precisely to foresee the incidence of its actions, it means that it can leave those affected no choice. Wherever the state can exactly foresee the effects on particular people of alternative courses of action, it is also the state which chooses between the different ends. If we want to create new opportunities open to all, to offer chances of which people can make what use they like, the precise results cannot be foreseen. General rules, genuine laws as distinguished from specific orders, must therefore be intended to operate in circumstances which cannot be foreseen in detail, and, therefore, their effect on particular ends or particular people cannot be known beforehand. It is in this sense alone that it is at all possible for the legislator to be impartial. To be impartial means to have no answer to certain questions — to the kind of questions which, if we have to decide them, we decide by tossing a coin. In a world where everything was precisely foreseen, the state could hardly do anything and remain impartial. “
There was a guy on the golf course which is next door to the marina. He was up on a low branch of a tree howling because there was a rattle snake under the tree making rattle noises. One of our dogs ran in there and barked the snake away. Then the jerk from the Clubhouse for the golfies came out and ran the dog off and pointed to the No Dogs Allowed! sign.
We have a pac within the dogpac. Next time leave golfie in the friggin tree and leave well enough alone.
Nations can and do go crazy en masse then generally turn on those who are still sane within them.
The world or should I say the US has gone mad! Any person who assumes that common seance guides any institution in America is now well and truly warned.
Bankers can commit massive frauds and go free. Big Pharma uses us all a lab rats. But a boy who nibbles a pastry is punished because a teacher sees a sugar filled weapon. Zeo tolerance for pastry guns but rules requiring real guns in schools OK! No judgement.
Life and death being determined by generally applicable rules that protect no human. No ambulances on the field and no CPR at the nursing home.
We are truly a country with no brains, no judgement and no sense of proportion.