Mourning in America

Walking into the public library this morning, I noticed the flag at half-staff. The occasion is the murder of 11 people in Pittsburgh, shot by an anti-Semite while they observed the Jewish Sabbath in a synagogue. At the sight of the flag my first thought was, "With the frequency of these kinds of killings, when will half-staff become the standard practice, and full-staff be the exception?"

It's impossible to put thought into these kinds of events without the mind being mobbed by emotions and notions clamoring for attention. Which ones to pursue? Which ones to allow to burn out? I let myself think for a little bit that half-staff days might be a good measure of sociopolitical climate change in the US, but then discarded the idea: in the first place nobody seems to be keeping track; in the second there are better indices of mass murders and hate crimes; and those better indices cover such deaths as those of Vickie Jones and Maurice Stallard, two African-Americans who were shot earlier in the week in Jeffersontown, KY, by a white gunman with apparently racist motivations, and who deserve their own half-staff remembrance, as do all victims of sectarian hatred, the bile in the American melting pot.

As I try to think about these things, I am influenced by the speech given by Rabbi Arthur Rutberg of Congregation B'nai Sholom, who spoke last night in Johnson City at a vigil in remembrance of the Pittsburgh victims. He talked about the fact that these were Americans struck down in the act of worship on what was to them a holy day. To me this is like a kick in the gut. If our constitutional pact of citizenship does not protect them, whom does it protect?

I am also influenced by having just completed a book by Michael Lewis called The Undoing Project, which is about the work of two secular Jews, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, to understand how the human mind actually functions when it thinks -- or tries to think.

I read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow a few years back and heartily welcomed the culture-clearing gust it blew into the study of the act of thinking. Regardless of what anyone thinks of Freud, he at least indicated the complexity that besets human brains in the process of cogitating, and yet for decades (if not centuries) the model of human thought was the one-dimensional rationalism of homo oeconomicus. Kahneman's book put paid to that notion and begins to scratch the surface of the layers of psychological bedrock that show "I think therefore I am" to mean little more than "hold my beer."

Throughout that book Kahneman credits his partnership with Amos Tversky as having produced the breakthroughs in speculation and modeling that led to this sea change in thinking about thinking, but the focus was on results, not on the partnership. Michael Lewis's book brings the partnership to center stage and in his usual, very readable way delves into the interpersonal dynamics that produced insights that might have gone undiscovered or undeveloped to either man working alone.

As such it underscores the necessary tragedy entailed by the hubris of human thinking, particularly in isolation. In Kahneman's words, from a 1973 talk, "an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of a jungle rat" had given itself "the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons." It was "troubling" (Lewis's word) that "crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority." Lewis adds, "the failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings," place the entire human race at the mercy of leaders who could doom it "by a series of avoidable mistakes."

But where the book hits hardest, right now, is with what is invoked by its title: the undoing project. It refers to the instinctive reaction that humans have to an unfortunate or tragic event. How might it have been avoided or prevented? This is the human brain working to "undo" the event. To Kahneman and Tversky it was useful to examine how people responded to questions having to do with, for example, the death of someone in a plane crash. In imagining that the person's death could have been avoided, what was easier to think, that the plane did not crash or that the person took another plane?

What anyone engaging with the Pittsburgh tragedy is doing right now, at some level, is trying to undo it. It is as natural a human response as any other emotion. Whether the response is Donald Trump's "more guns" or Moms Demand Action's "Disarm Hate," anyone pondering the event cannot help but try to imagine how it might not have happened. To say that there must be a period of mourning before thinking these kinds of thoughts is to believe in the man in the moon; it is positively inhuman to the point of being sociopathic. Anyone disavowing political intent in the act of mourning an event like this is too detached from actual grief to be listened to.

Kahneman and Tversky gave us a starting point: the process of undoing can be a positive one if we allow it to sift through all the wreckage of our tragedy-strewn thoughts and ideas. Nor is this something we can do by ourselves. In response to a situation like Pittsburgh -- or any other of the tragic killings so common in America -- we could assemble the will and the wit of the nation to think how it might not have happened so as to take appropriate action in the hope that it might prevent such events in the future.

It is the job of leadership to motivate the will and convene the wit of the nation to this end. Will this happen? One of the most discouraging things about these events is the evidence not only that such leadership is nonexistent, but also that its nonexistence is as quintessentially American as the bile in the melting pot. If that's the case, it's not something that can be undone.

That would be not so much mourning in America as just mourning America.