I was struck by the observation made by two comments on my last blog, the point that, in the quest for efficiency – and higher profits in the case of corporations – both government and industry are effectively destroying redundancy in industry and infrastructure and in the production of goods and services.  That lack of redundancy, inventory, or reserves results in higher costs, often the destruction of businesses, and unsafe or dangerous conditions for millions of people.

Airlines, for example, strive to fill every seat on the plane and have virtually no back-up aircraft available – and even if they do, airports have no more landing/take-off slots. So… when bad weather or other delays occur, thousands upon thousands of passengers may literally have to wait days or weeks to make a business trip or return home.  Last summer a crane knocked over one power pole here in Cedar City.  One pole on a residential street, and a quarter of the town was without power for the entire day. Again, here in Cedar City, one of the pumps providing water to the town failed, and it took two weeks to get and install a replacement pump – and for two weeks severe water restrictions were in place because the city didn’t have a replacement pump. 

One of the reasons for the financial melt-down of several years ago was another lack of redundancy, if you will – the lack of capital reserves on the part of banks, investment banks, and brokerage firms.  To be “efficient” and squeeze every possible drop of profit from their investments, they leveraged themselves to the hilt… and they had no reserves left when large parts of their portfolios went sour.

State governments are guilty of the same sort of short-term thinking.  They cut taxes or spend more funds when tax revenues are good, never setting aside reserves, and then have to cut services or raise taxes at the very time when such cuts are not only the most painful, but when such cuts have a multiplier effect that makes the economy even worse.

All this so-called efficiency is nothing of the sort.  What the quest for efficiency has become is an on-going pressure to get more work out of fewer people and more profit out of less investment, all of which results in the inability to deal adequately with the inevitable but unpredictable disasters that will always occur, whether caused by weather, human error, or economic collapses of one sort or another.

There’s a point where the pursuit of efficiency becomes, as the old saying goes, “penny wise and pound foolish,” and most businesses and governments passed that point long ago.  What’s even sadder is that those who guide both don’t have either the wisdom or the guts to say, “Enough is enough.”

Last week the winter resort community of Brian Head [Utah] lost electric power for 19 hours during a bitter winter storm.  Because the outage was caused late in the day by a downed power line and insulators broken by subzero temperatures, blinding snow, and high winds in a mountain area not accessible except by foot or snowcat in the winter, it was more than twelve hours before power crews could even locate and then reach the site.  This loss of power caused an estimated $30 million worth of damage to more than 200 condominiums and resort homes from frozen and burst pipes.

There are, of course, a few questions as to why this happened.  How could so much damage occur in such a short time?  After all, I live some thirty miles away, as the crow flies, from Brian Head, and the temperatures here weren’t that much colder. In fact, we turn the heat down from 65 degrees to 50 at night, and the house didn’t even cool fifteen degrees that night.  But then, we have a well-insulated house, and the starting temperature was 65 degrees.  The majority of the dwellings damaged in Brian Head were rental units, many of which were unoccupied at the time, and the baseline heating level was probably around 50 degrees. Second, those units were not all that well insulated and depended on continuous power in the winter.

Even so, what happened in Brian Head illustrates just how dependent how most of us in the United States are on the continuous flow of power, water, and other infrastructure services.  We’re also often ill-equipped to deal with massive disruptions, as witness what happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  Our daughter and her husband in Houston, not even in the direct path of the Hurricane, were without power for nearly a month because the power crews could not get to their street because the number of downed trees overwhelmed their capabilities.

Yet neither the majority of Americans – or U.S. politicians – seem to recognize either our degree of dependence on our infrastructure or its deteriorating state.  The electric grid is outdated and held together with creative fixes… and hope.  Tens of thousands of bridges are deteriorating.  The water system serving New York City is over a century old and leaks millions of gallons a day.  The list goes on and on… and only when there’s an emergency – or a disaster – does it seem like either businesses or government even take notice.

They’re all like the rental property owners in Brian Head – build it and operate it as cheaply as possible, regardless of the possible damages and costs if something goes wrong – just another example of short-term thinking on the part of both the public and the private sector.

The headline read “Useless Degrees?”, and the newspaper story went on to tell about a state lawmaker who was upset about the fact that too many students, especially here in Utah, obtained degrees in areas of study for which there were either no careers or very few jobs for the number of students with academic degrees in those fields.

This sort of questioning raises a fundamental question about both the value of an undergraduate collegiate degree and the purpose of such a degree.  Is the principal purpose of an undergraduate degree to provide what amounts to vocational training or is it to teach the student how to think?

Immediately, of course, the response from most people would be:  “Why not both?”

The problem with the “both” answer is that learning “how” is often very different from learning how to ask “why.”  Asking why often requires challenging the status quo, and accepted beliefs, as well as examining what lies behind what created society, or a certain discipline, in its present form.  The original concept of the university was based on educating a comparatively small percentage of the population to question and to master a limited number of high-level skills, such as law and medicine, and later engineering. Other skills were learned on the job through what amounted to apprenticeship.  Today, however, many occupations require young people to have a much higher degree of knowledge and skill and some form of formal education in order even to be considered for employment. Part of this is because society has become more mobile and businesses are often reluctant to spend the money and time to train people in order for them to master skills and then leave and use those skills elsewhere

The problem that colleges and universities face is that, first, many are not equipped to operate as high-level vocational schools, nor to determine which students belong in what field of study, and even when they can, societal expectations essentially restrict their ability to determine which students take which courses.  Second, not all students are suited to all disciplines, and very few know their strengths and limitations.  Third, our society is changing rapidly enough that any “vocational” education provided to a student will be time-limited because the field itself will either change drastically over the course of a student’s later life or may even vanish.  This is one reason why many educators fight the idea of “vocational” education and emphasize trying to teach students to think. Another reason is simply that universities shouldn’t play occupational “god” and insist they know what a student should study, although it’s fair to say that they are equipped to determine, by allowing a student to try a course and fail, what a student should not study.  But, of course, giving students such a choice is expensive, both for the student and the institution.

As many of you know, my wife is a college professor, and I’ve taught at the collegiate level.  So it’s likely that I’m apt to see matters in a different light from that politician who wants more students to obtain degrees in math, sciences, health care, and computer-related fields.

From a student’s point of view, there’s one critical question that should drive a choice of a collegiate major or field of study:  Does the student have the aptitude for that field?  I’m not talking so much about preparation as the raw capability.  No matter how great the desire, in some fields, without certain basic aptitudes, a student will not succeed. I think it’s more than fair to say that, although I’m fairly bright, I’d never succeed as a music major.  I can’t tell whether I’m on pitch/key, whether I’m singing or playing an instrument.  Nor do I have any sense of rhythm.  It doesn’t matter how bright I am.  Without those capabilities, I’d fail at music.  Other students and relatives I’ve known simply have limited mathematical capabilities. Others didn’t develop linguistic skills early enough in life, and therefore will never succeed in areas requiring written skills.

Yet our collegiate system encourages students to follow what they think their “passion” may be, regardless of what their abilities may be.  This often results in a student taking far more courses than required to get a degree… and higher costs at state-supported schools… and law-makers wanting to mandate restrictions or higher costs.

Even if colleges become what amount to high-level vocational institutions – which I think would be a disaster for the United States – such a change wouldn’t address the problem of students not knowing what their capabilities and desires are.  The capability problem could be addressed by a secondary school system that demanded more rigor and course content, and less teaching to the tests, but less teaching to the tests would result in less certain assessment, etc., all of which points out the basic problem:  Education is being labeled as the cure for everything, and it’s not.  Education in itself cannot instill drive or ambition.  Nor can it provide discipline or self-discipline, not without the support of parents and community.  Nor can it provide the desire to learn, only the opportunity.

For all these reasons, among many others, while education is vital to society, what kind of education is best depends on the student, and no one kind of education, with a simple degree path of the sort that everyone from lawmakers to parents seem to be demanding, will suffice.  One size never did fit all, and neither will a simple fix, even one backed by law, achieve any real solution.

Last week I watched a political talk show which included a pair of “liberals” and a pair of “conservatives.”  Among other things, for some reason, the subject of evolution came up, possibly because the moderator wanted to show the conservatives as either not excessively bright or not excessively consistent, and out of nowhere one of the liberals [non-American] made the statement, “You’ve seen the evidence that bacteria grow and change in response to exposure to antibiotics, how their descendants become resistant?” Then came the follow-up question, “If you can accept evolution on the bacterial level, why can’t you accept it on a higher level, as in the case of humans?”

One of the conservatives immediately made the point that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove human evolution, just “scattered” fossils.  The other one had no response. In point of fact, there’s a great preponderance of evidence, and the volume of that evidence grows every year.  But… no matter how great the evidence becomes, it won’t ever be enough to convince individuals such as those whom I observed, neither of whom, I might add, could be considered stupid or unintelligent.

So why do intelligent and thinking individuals, often those who have been incredibly successful in various fields, find it so hard to accept a mounting stack of evidence that reinforces the accuracy of the theory of evolution?

The simple answer, and the one most often offered, is that they truly believe that the theory is not correct – but not one of those people, including scientists, can offer evidence to the contrary.  The best that they can offer are various reasons along the lines of:  there isn’t enough evidence; the theory doesn’t explain “X” [and there are several different Xs]; there’s no way evolution could result in a being as complex as a human; etc.  None of these reasons refute evolution; they’re merely reasons for insisting that, until the theory is perfect and airtight, evolution can’t possibly explain the development of life on Earth.  They’re all rationalized forms of denial.

The real reason, it appears to me, for most unbelief in evolution, as illustrated by the exchange dealing with bacteria, is that most who reject evolution want to believe that human beings are truly special, and that, being special, we’re different from all the other species that have ever existed, even when DNA analyses show that over 99% of our DNA is the same as that of chimpanzees. 

This feeling of being special and different can inspire someone to great accomplishments, but it’s also dangerous.  It’s the same sort of rationalization that supported slave-holding.  It’s the same sort of mindset that allows financiers to think they’re so much superior to the “little people” their schemes fleece, the same sort of mindset that’s behind every ethnic-cleansing movement in history.  Yes, each of us is indeed different in some degree from anyone else, even from an identical twin… but that difference, held up against the universe, pales in comparison to our similarities.

Denial of evolution is more of a scream of protest that humans, especially the screamers, are truly different and special, and that’s more than ironic, because all too many of the monsters of human history have said exactly the same thing, in one way or another, even creating massive monuments to prove their difference and specialness.

In 1967, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the massage,” often as not corrupted to “the medium is the message.”  What he meant was that the medium had become so all-embracing as to massage the receiver and to affect the meaning of the message.  In the years since, particularly in the last decade, Americans and, indeed, most of the technological world embraced the corrupted version of his philosophy with a vengeance, despite the fact that, in fact, the medium is NOT the message, because all form has to have some sort of content.

The problem is and has always been that the obsession with form [the medium] tends to dilute the content to the point where it’s so vapid at times that the information content and value is insignificant, trivial, or irrelevant.  Even when it’s not, that content is often overpowered by the form of the message… or in the case of Twitter, e-mail, texting, etc., the existence of so many competing message-forms. As I’ve noted before, the amount of “real” information I receive, either in paper or electronic form, is less than one percent of the total information sent to me.  I’m fortunate; I can read quickly and dismiss the junk without missing much.  I’ve learned that most people can’t, and, because they can’t, or won’t spend the time to sift logically though all those “communications,” many just prioritize by the flash of what hits them, by, if you will, the effectiveness of the massage created by the form of the message.

Do all those tweets, texts, voice-mails, and even cellphone calls really carry any meaning?  Aren’t most of them merely reaching out so that their senders and receivers can be reassured and “massaged” in some way?  All this massaging is having an effect, and much of it is anything but good.  Mayors in several cities, and legislators across the USA, are calling for restrictions on cellphones, ear buds, and other devices being used, not just by drivers, but by pedestrians as well, as the number of fatalities caused by both distracted drivers and walkers/runners has begun to increase markedly. 

This wide-spread need for instant reassurance and instant information is also reducing the attention span of students and younger Americans, and recently a large number of professionals have begun to publish books and studies on the deleterious effects of too much instant communication.  Interesting enough, several of these have been called “attacks on the information age.”  Yet, none of the critics are attacking the technology; they’re attacking the way in which people are using it and the growing dangers posed both to individuals and society by such uses. 

Another impact of the growing impact of the “medium massage” is the dumbing down of mass media to make it “more reassuring.”  One example is in cinema. My wife is a movie buff, and over the years I’ve been exposed to movies I never knew existed, but one thing that’s become very clear to me is that many third-rate movies from fifty years ago have better writing [not necessarily better plots] and more clever dialogue than most first rate movies today.  Why?  There may be a number of reasons, but I think the bottom line is simply that there was more emphasis on message and meaning than on medium.  Special effects and brilliant cinematography are now what draw the most viewers, not provoking and insightful dramas.

I’m not attacking the media or the technology, but I am attacking the glorification of the gadgets and the use of technology to swathe users in continuously-communicating social reassurance.  A social massage once in a while is fine; continuous social massaging is like any other addiction – destructive, and it’s well past time to call it what it is.