Dialogue this week at Humainologie Gallery and Store Use it or lose it

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."

- Oscar Wilde

Hello Dialogue Artists!

The Humainologie Gallery & Store was recently opened to provide dialogue artists and global citizens with a fulcrum, a place to put their lever to move the world. Call it a catalytic site, whatever. It’s for our use and our advantage. You’ve seen lots of small businesses open and close. This one is special. It’s ours. If we don’t use it, we will surely lose it.

The Humainologie Gallery & Store has a small lending library of the same books for which I’ve done synopses. Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book (synopsis appended here) will be available for loan later this week.

This coming Wednesday September 25 again we’ll meet at our fulcrum, 1514 Seventh Street SW, near the Analog coffee shop and Mona Lisa art supplies. It's near the corner of 17th Avenue and 7th Street SW. The dialogue starts at 6 PM.

I usually feel a little wiser after our dialogue events. Last Wednesday, Moose mentioned something I already knew, but hearing him say it in the context of his own experience brought a richness to my trove of wisdom. Thank you, Moose!

Here’s a short menu of possible topics for September 25 (choose just one):

1. (Your topic here)

2. What are the most effective ways to (a) choose your priorities for any given day and (b) accomplish those priorities? If you have any strategies you’ve found especially useful, please share them.

3. If a group of ten or twelve Calgarians are all facing financial challenges, what are some ideas whereby they could solve their financial difficulties by working together?

4. If you had to write a good short story, how would you go about it? (Note: If this topic is chosen, I’ll provide a couple of background resources for the purpose.)

5. If you had to choose one movie for our dialogue group to watch and discuss, which movie would you choose? Why that particular movie? How would you lead the discussion? (Note: If this topic is chosen, I could choose one of the movies suggested, watch it, and discuss it.)

Book: (Malcolm Gladwell) Talking to Strangers (2019)

Talking with strangers is essential to the transformation that’s in progress here in Calgary. Jane Jacobs knew that encounters with strangers enriched a city, provided the city is made safe for such encounters with “eyes on the street” and other factors. Malcolm Gladwell understands the importance of encounters with strangers, and that a stranger is usually trustworthy. Yet his book is about something different. It’s about how very limited we are in our ability to “read” the other person, especially one whom we are meeting for the first time. It reminds me of David Bohm’s point, that we need proprioception of thought, that we little understand how much our assumptions are shaping our observations. Bad things happen, Gladwell tells us, because we do not know how to talk to strangers.

His Introduction, entitled “Step out of the car!” begins with this: “In July 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland drove from her hometown of Chicago to a little town an hour west of Houston, Texas. She was interviewing for a job at Prairie View A&M University, the school she’d graduated from a few years before. She was tall and striking, with a personality to match. She belonged to the Sigma Gamma Rho sorority in college and played in the marching band. She volunteered with a seniors group. She regularly posted short, inspirational videos on YouTube…that often began, ‘Good morning, my beautiful Kings and Queens.’”

While driving in that small town near Houston, she changed lanes without signalling and was pulled over by a police officer. The interaction that ensued went horribly awry and she was arrested. A few days later Sandra Bland hanged herself in her prison cell.

Gladwell covers a lot of ground and presents many cases as he weaves the tapestry of this book, but it is the Sandra Bland case that forms the very, very detailed unifying thread. He returns to the story as he draws the book to conclusion. While he does not hide his outrage at what happened, he analyzes the case in a way that might help all of us get past any anger at the police officer, Brian Encina, who made so many errors leading to the tragedy. It might help all of us understand how Brian Encina’s errors are a mirror for our own.

Our limitations in this domain come with all sorts of costs, including fatal consequences. Judges for example must often make life-or-death decisions. Gladwell cites the case of the judge who sentenced Patrick Dale Walker. This young man was reportedly valedictorian of his class in high school. He’d put a gun to the head of his ex-girlfriend and pulled the trigger. Only because the gun jammed did she survive that episode. At the time of sentencing he seemed from his posture to be remorseful about what he had done. He was sentenced to prison and initially his bail was posted at one million dollars but later reduced to $25,000 because the judge felt that Patrick would have had time to cool off. Out on bail, however, he shot his ex-girlfriend to death.

That type of error in the courtroom is not uncommon. In a study comparing judges (who have the supposed advantage of seeing the accused face to face and even eye to eye) with a computer program that has only the facts of the case (the judges have those too), the computer program did better than the judges in making decisions about sentencing.

The judge had interpreted Walker’s behavior as penitent. Facial expressions can sometimes tell us quite a bit about a person’s emotions, but not always. To begin with, as anthropologists know, there are cultural differences in what a particular facial expression conveys. Gladwell cites a study done in the Tobriands, a tiny archipelago with an isolated population of about 40,000 people. When presented with photos of faces showing expressions that children in our culture had easily recognized as angry, sad, happy, and so on, the islanders were confused and had great difficulty identifying the emotions behind the faces. Their culture used a different set of facial expressions.

However, that doesn’t explain why the judge misinterpreted Walker’s demeanor. Nor does it explain why Neville Chamberlain was so misled by Adolf Hitler when the two of them met shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Chamberlain returned to England from that meeting thinking he had averted a major war. England rejoiced. This was better than Christmas. Well, maybe not. Chamberlain had grossly misinterpreted Hitler’s intentions based on his observations of Hitler’s behavior and on Hitler’s words.

Another violent form of behavior in which the perpetrator will often hide their intentions, is suicide. As he turns his attention to people who take their own lives, however, Gladwell is particularly interested in a different dimension of the general problem (how to prevent violence). It’s all about the physical context that’s conducive to violence or to deterrence.

More than a thousand people have committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco since it was first built. A “suicide barrier” on the bridge could prevent those suicides. Yet many thought it would waste money because the suicides would simply find another way to end it all. Two kinds of evidence are against that. Suicidal inclinations often crest over a relatively short time interval, then subside, making way for a satisfying and productive life. It’s a second kind of evidence that Gladwell describes, however, one that Jane Jacobs understood very well: A specific place is often associated with violence or other types of crime, which can be markedly reduced simply by altering the physical characteristics of that space. The suicide barrier was installed on the Golden Gate Bridge about a year ago.

It’s called “coupling.” Change something in the environment, and human behavior changes.* The Kansas City police department was able to markedly lower violence in a high-crime part of the city by using “routine” interactions with motorists to look for guns. This had been part of a carefully designed study in which they had collaborated with criminologist Larry Sherman. They focused on just one small part of the city selected for its high crime rate. Over time, the crime rate in that part of the city dropped significantly. Did it simply move to other parts of the city? No.

“Coupling” also applies to the availability of the means for violence. This applies not only to guns. An example cited by Gladwell is the phasing out of “town gas” from use in household ovens between 1965 and 1977 in England. Town gas contained carbon monoxide; the “natural gas” that replaced it doesn’t. Prior to 1965, town gas was often used for suicide. Sylvia Plath, the famous poet, had used it when she took her own life in London in February 1963. As “town gas” was phased out in England, suicides by that means gradually dropped to zero, and the overall suicide rate in England also declined significantly.

The success of the Kansas City study changed the policies of police and highway patrols in many parts of the United States, but with consequences quite different from those in Kansas City. In North Carolina the State Highway Patrol increased the number of traffic stops from 400,000 to 800,000 over a seven-year period. Total number of extra guns found as a result of that increase? Seventeen. “Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 [North Carolinians] in order to find 17 bad apples?” writes Gladwell. In Texas, a similar policy had led to that infamous arrest and then the suicide of Sandra Bland. Larry Sherman, the criminologist who had designed the study in Kansas City, pointed out that the policy changes (such as those in Texas and North Carolina) had often been inept applications of what had been learned in Kansas City. “’You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,’ Sherman says. ‘You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.’ To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath – ‘First, do no harm’ – applies equally to law enforcement.”

We have to evaluate strangers and it’s very important to talk with them; but it’s also important to understand how far our assumptions about people can lead us astray. Even if we work at it, of course, we are going to make mistakes, but so do neurosurgeons, even the best of them. You keep working at it.

*This phenomenon of “coupling” will seem self-evident if you think about it carefully.