NORMAL ACCIDENTS

by William H. Benson

April 1, 2010

     Disasters surround us. They inundate our news-saturated minds, pierce our sense of safety, and disturb our sleep. That we live in a world filled with awe-inspiring technologies makes our lives vastly more comfortable and entertaining, but at the cost of heightened and frightening risks. Certain “technological systems” are prone to error and subject to a possible accident and a catastrophe that can and will kill the innocent, despite the presence of sufficient back-up plans and alternate routes.

     Most people fully recognize the danger inherent in certain systems, such as in aircraft and airways, nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, space travel, bridges, dams, supertankers, nuclear weapons, and biotechnology. Yet, we feel helpless to do anything; we rely upon the technology, but we are powerless to control any phase of it.

     For example, late last week a South Korean naval ship, for an unknown reason, exploded, severing the vessel into two parts, and drowning nearly half of the 104 seamen. Truly tragic it was, but not that uncommon on the high seas where marine disasters have thwarted men and women throughout humanity’s history.

     Homer said it best, that “humans tempt the gods when they plow these green and undulating fields,” called the seas.

     Also, out on that open sea in an ocean lane, “non-collision course collisions” actually do occur. “One would not think that ships could pile up as if they were on the Long Island Expressway, but they do.”

     There was the Titanic disaster on the night of April 14-15, 1912, when 1503 people perished “partly as a result of an overconfident captain imperturbably sailing into a field of icebergs at night, thinking he had an unsinkable ship.” The iceberg that the ship hit sliced open five watertight compartments: “[T]he designers had assumed that no more than three could ever be damaged at once.” And they were wrong.

     The worst commercial nuclear accident in the U.S. occurred on March 28, 1979, 31 years ago, at Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania, when operators made a crucial error at the same time that the equipment failed—a value was closed when it should have been opened. Despite Jane Fonda’s frightening portrayal in the movie The China Syndrome of what may have happened had Three Mile Island exploded, no lives were lost, fortunately.

     History’s worst nuclear accident that resulted in an explosion and a fire, happened on April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl, near Kiev in the USSR, now in the Ukraine, in which at least 31 people were immediately killed, and radioactive winds swept across Europe.

     But the worst explosion in terms of lives lost—3,849—was at a petrochemical plant that exploded at Bhopal, India, on December 3, 1985.

     The truly terrifying, and perhaps the next big accident, will be that of the supertanker loaded with chemicals. “A fair bit of the world’s sulfuric acid, vinylidene chloride, acetaldehyde, and trichloroethylene, etc. move by tankers that are unregulated, and often old, in poor condition, and traveling through winter storms.”

     Most experts attribute the cause of explosions and accidents to “operator error” or to “engineering and design flaws,” and that is mainly true. However, one writer named Charles Perrow has looked deeper into these accidents, and in his 1999 book Normal Accidents, Perrow has identified at least two common factors among them: 1) the tight coupling and 2) the sheer complexity of the pieces that have evolved into a system

     Perrow defines a “normal or a system accident” as that where “given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable.” This definition goes well beyond simple pilot error or an engineer seated at a drawing-table miscalculating a length of a line on a blueprint.

     The system itself can create the accident with its hidden interconnectedness, its fair chance of multiple failures, and its utterly incomprehensible design, for no one solitary person can know all the moving pieces and how they will interact when put into service.

     Another thinker, Dr. Andrew W. Lo, has added to Perrow’s two conditions a third: that of “the absence of normal feedback over an extended period of time.” When incidents rarely if ever become accidents, the notion spreads that the system has become less risky. When people with a Type A personality person think that that they are insulated from a diminished risk, they will take more risks. Accidents will happen.

     This is the world we live in; one that is fraught with real dangers due to our technological successes, in spite of our innocence and our noble intentions.  

EDUCATION REFORM

by William H. Benson

March 18, 2010

     The numbers are discouraging. In the first decade of the new millennium, only 68% of any freshman student could expect to graduate from high school four years later: 72% for girls and only 64.1% of the boys. As of 2003-2004, Nebraska ranked number one in its graduation rate, 87.6%, and Nevada ranked 51^st, 57.4%, lower than Washington D.C.

     And if a student happens by luck or pluck to graduate from high school, he or she faces an uphill battle at a college where graduation rates are even more abysmally lower: only 56% of the incoming white freshman students will graduate six years later, versus 43% of the Hispanic students and 40% of the African-American. Because so many bright students lack the funds and the emotional support, in absolute discouragement, they quit.

     These numbers underline U. S. education’s dismal state. Kate Walsh, the president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, said, “there was such a dramatic achievement gap in the United States, far larger than in other countries, between socioeconomic classes and races. It was a scandal of monumental proportions, that there were two distinct school systems in the U.S., one for the middle class and one for the poor.”

     Last week, it was announced that twenty-nine of Kansas City’s sixty-one schools will be closed by next fall in order to stave off the district’s bankruptcy.

     On February 23, in Rhode Island, Superintendent Frances Gallo, who oversees Central Falls High School fired all 74 of the school’s teachers. She had asked them “to work 25 minutes longer each day, eat lunch with the students once a week, and agree to be evaluated by a third party.” Because the teachers refused her requests—unless they were paid additional money, at a rate of $90 an hour—she fired them all, and received the commendation of both the Secretary of Education and President Obama.

     Sometimes, not always but sometimes, it helps to trace our way back to a difficulty’s origin to see how we arrived at where we are. In 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts provided for the establishment of reading schools because it was “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.” Deferring the issue of Puritan theology until later, the obvious point is that the colonial government decided then to pay for the business of educating children.

     Nothing of the same was decided for the colony’s other businesses—farming, husbandry, the retail trade, construction, or, most importantly, health care. Other than midwifery and prayer, there was little health care in early New England, but it must be underscored that the doctors were not taxpayer-supported then and would not enjoy such a privilege until the 1960’s with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

     But what if those early Puritan legislators had elected to earmark taxpayer’s funds for their citizens’ health care, and not for education?

     The teachers would work as the doctors do today. Students would have to schedule appointments with a teacher weeks in advance for a fifteen-minute office visit and a scrawled prescription to buy a book. Self-study would be the rule, but if a student demonstrated a skill or an aptitude, the doctor would order further testing and a stay in a dormitory.

     Students would pay for each office visit, and parents would pay for education insurance in case of a child’s catastrophic desire for more education. Nurses would oversee the student’s progress. The teachers would work hard all day—ten to fifteen hours or more—but then receive an excellent income.

     And the doctors would work as the teachers do now. All the sick would gather every morning in a hospital room where the doctor, with chalk and lesson plans, would teach about good health and then give out an assignment. After an hour, the sick would be shuffled off to the next room for an additional lecture and assignment. Doctors would dispense medicines freely in every classroom, and all would take the same prescription.

     The doctors would face constant discipline problems because the sick would not want to sit in a desk all day, but for all their efforts, the doctors’ would receive a far lower income than now but work less hours, perhaps, with weekends and summers off.

     Far-fetched these scenarios may be, something like them may have evolved if health care had been publicly-supported initially and education had been kept private.

     The question of the day is, “Should the government now expand its control of the health care business?” The question is a profound and polarizing one, and the wisest of the thinkers are struggling mightily for the correct answer. People’s futures, human talent, and achievement are all at risk, whichever direction they choose.

ON CRIME & PUNISHMENT

by William H. Benson

March 5, 2010

     In Boston, on March 5, 1770 on a cold, moonlit evening, when a foot of snow lay on the ground, a gang of several hundred hostile Americans approached eight British soldiers, the hated Redcoats, sometimes called lobster-backs, and began to taunt them. The crowd then turned ugly and began shouting at the soldiers, cursing them, and throwing snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, stones, sticks, anything they could pick up and throw. The cornered, terrified soldiers opened fire and killed five American men.

     The Boston Massacre, as it as since been called, was the opening salvo in what became the American Revolution. John Adams, a young attorney from nearby Braintree, Massachusetts, agreed to defend those eight British soldiers. Although he would later serve as a leader in America’s revolt against the British crown, Adams believed that it was his duty then to defend those soldiers from what appeared a most certain hanging.

     In preparation for the trial, Adams read the eighteenth-century Italian thinker, Cesare, Marchese di Beccaria, who had written an early work on the punishment of crime, titling it On Crime and Punishment. Beccaria had argued against the death penalty and torture, and had instead advocated for major reform of the criminal legal system, and that criminal justice should conform to rational forms of punishment.

     He presented certain enlightened principles: punishment should deter further crimes, rather than serve as a form of retribution; that it should be proportionate to the crime committed; that the certainty and promptness of the punishment, rather than its severity, would achieve the preventative affect; and that the proceedings should be made public.

Beccaria’s ideas were revolutionary in a day when capital punishment by hanging or firing squads was the rule.

     Standing before the jury, Adams argued that the British soldiers had acted in their own self defense when they had fired their guns into the crazed mob. “Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?” Adams asked. “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

     The jury acquitted six of the soldiers, and the other two, the jury determined, were guilty of manslaughter. But instead of being walked to the gallows, the two received a branding on their thumbs. For the rest of Adams’s life, he was pleased with his defense of those soldiers, calling it, “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces I ever rendered my country.”

      When he wrote the Bill of Rights, James Madison included Amendment VIII: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” That amendment eliminated any U.S. citizen from ever facing the more sadistic forms of torture: the rack, head screws, the use of boiling water, mutilations by cutting off tongues and ears and hands, and locking people’s feet and hands in stocks.

     Thirty years ago, a notorious white collar criminal and con artist, named Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., wrote a book of his life of writing phony checks all over the world. When finally caught, he was living in France, was tried and sentenced to six months at the Perpignan prison. He was thrown naked into a darkened stone hole five feet wide and tall, with only a bucket that was emptied whenever the guards wanted to.

     No letters, no visitors, no communication was allowed, no haircuts, no chance to shave or cut his fingernails, no light, and nothing to read. He slept on the stone floor. Food was scant. Insects and bacteria took up residence on his skin, and soon scabs ulcerated his body. The stench from the filth was suffocating.

     Six months later, the Swedes had their turn at Abagnale. He was tried and sentenced to six months in the Swedish prison, and was told, “You will find it very different from the prisons in France. In fact it is very different from any of your American prisons.” Frank was permitted to live in a dormitory at Lund University, where he could take classes or work at a job. He could wear his own clothes, in what he learned was a coed prison. He realized that “Swedish prisons actually attempt to rehabilitate a criminal.”

     Which system really works to deter the criminal—the barbaric French dungeon, the soft Swedish dorm room, or the cramped American cell with steel doors and bars? Or is branding a thumb a better option? The answer does not instantly appear, because governments and judges have learned that matching the punishment to equal the crime and thus prevent other crimes is an art not quickly mastered.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

by William H. Benson

February 18, 2010

     “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

     And with that brief introduction, Mark Twain began his story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, publishing it in 1885, on this date, February 18. No one knew then that a boy’s story, about Huck Finn, a fourteen-year-old boy, and Jim, a run-away slave, floating on a raft down the Mississippi River would earn its esteemed position in America’s literary works.

     Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . It’s the best book we’ve had.” And Harold Bloom, the literary critic, said that the first seven paragraphs of the book’s 19^th chapter contain “the most beautifully written descriptive passage in all of American literature.”

     You may very well ask, “Why read and then reread this classic? or any classic? Why read literature at all? What is the benefit?” Mark Twain, invariably the humorist, defined the classics as “those books everybody says you should read but nobody does.”

     Students, especially the English majors, read them. Almost twenty years ago, the film critic David Denby decided that he would sit again in a student’s desk to read and discuss the classics. “In the fall of 1991, thirty years after entering Columbia University for the first time, I went back to school and sat with eighteen-year-olds and read the same books that they read. Not just any books. Together we read Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Virginia Woolf. Those books. Those courses.”

     Except for the David Denby’s, deep reading of the classics is a talent few wish to master, and so it remains underappreciated, as a useless waste of our time. Unlike basketball stars, championship trophies are not presented to the most expansive readers, who can boast, as H. L. Mencken did, that he “read like an athlete,” when in his teens.

     Listening to the television is the skill most resorted to today; people listen to the sports newscaster, to the talking heads in a news studio, and to the empty heads who act and speak in some simple-minded television comedy or mystery. Conversely, to read is to tune in, listen, and catch the dazzling and daring ideas of the best thinkers from the past. 

     Yes, some of the great books, such as Hegel’s works, are exceedingly dreary, unintelligible, unfulfilling, and boring. Yet, only by reading them again and again, though, can a student gain that critical eye, discerning the good from the bad, the intelligent from the stupid, and the correct from the flawed. Nietzsche warned us to ask always, “Who is the interpreter and what power does he seek to gain over the text?”

     Sometimes the writer’s research leads him or her into areas that we, the readers, do not want to go, and so the texts swamp our very minds. A Newsweek writer wrote this past week, “Some works are overwhelming. We see authors struggling to create masterpieces that on almost every page threaten to collapse under their own weight. . . . But who wouldn’t rather read a flawed masterpiece than none at all. After all, not even Twain could figure out the right way to end Huckleberry Finn.”

     We read every day in the newspapers sorry tales of people who committed themselves to the most foolish choices that left them so vulnerable, so easily persuaded and intimidated, and so misled and gullible. They failed to ask beforehand Nietzsche’s question, “Who is the interpreter and what power does he seek over the text?”

     Certain texts will never go away. Harold Bloom said that “Freud, genius that he was, failed to apprehend the permanent power of texts that cannot vanish: the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. If asked the desert island question, I would have to take Shakespeare, but the world continues drowning in the blood-dimmed tide of its Scriptures, whether it reads them or not.”

     He also argued that “reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.”

     The next Great American Novel, that work which will eclipse Huckleberry Finn, is just ahead of us, perhaps around the corner, but few will recognize it when it appears, for genius is transcendent, beyond the limits of our thoughts, or as William Blake said, “The ages are all equal, but genius is always above its age.” Read well from those authors, such as Mark Twain, who dazzle us, our great cloud of witnesses to the human condition.

HAMPTON ROADS PEACE CONFERENCE

by William H. Benson

February 4, 2010

     Like a chess game, war moves through three distinct phases: a series of opening moves, a middle section, and finally an end game, the point at which one side capitulates to the other. In the dark days of 1942, Winston Churchill said, “This is not the beginning, nor is it the ending, but it is the beginning of the ending.” By the early days of 1865, Lincoln in the North and Jefferson Davis in the South were deep into their end games.

     By then the peace movement in the Confederate States of America was on the rise. If President Davis would have ordered his general Robert E. Lee to lay down his arms, Lee would have obeyed him, and Davis would have faced little political opposition. But, stubborn that he was, he would not admit defeat.

     To capitulate would mean that he would have to face hard questions: What kind of punishment would he and his fellow Southerners face? What will happen to their slave society? How will they hire the labor to work their fields? What will become of their government, their economy, and their theology? Would they have to admit that they were wrong about their slave-based society and their Confederate theology, of which Lincoln had said, “not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.”?

     On February 2, 1865, Lincoln slipped out of the White House, boarded his steamer the River Queen, and sailed south to Hampton Roads, a port in Virginia. There, on February 3, he, with his Secretary of State, William Seward, met the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, and his two commissioners, Robert Hunter and John Campbell, three Confederates who had dared to cross battle lines.

     The historian Carl Sandburg drew a close written portrait of the scene. “Five astute men of politics and law talked four hours in a steamboat saloon. What went on in the minds of the five men, the tangled cross-purposes underlying the words of their mouths, no onlooker could have caught and reported.”

     Stephens opened with a question to Lincoln: “Mr. President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble?” Lincoln carefully answered with his three requirements to end this Civil War: the restoration of national authority throughout all the states, no negotiation on the banishment of slavery, and a cessation of all hostilities.

     Seward then dropped a bombshell when he explained to the three Southerners that Congress on January 31 had passed the 13^th Amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation that outlawed slavery. The news visibly rattled the three commissioners.

     Hunter voiced the concern that all Southerners felt: “if the South should consent to peace on the basis of the Emancipation Proclamation, it would precipitate the entire Southern society into irremediable ruin. No work would be done, nothing would be cultivated, and both blacks and whites would starve!”

     Lincoln tried to allay their fears by telling a story of a farmer with the chore of feeding pigs one winter, a rustic story that seemed to have little relationship to the issue, but then Lincoln underscored the moral. “And so in the dire contingency you name, whites and black alike will have to look out for themselves; and I have an abiding faith that they will go about it in a fashion that will [please] you in a very agreeable way.”

     And yet Lincoln, tender he may have been personally, was determined to vanquish the rebellion and the rebels. Hunter finally summarized Lincoln’s arguments, “Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is not that about what your words imply?”

     “Yes,” said Lincoln. “You have stated the proposition better than I did.”

     Seward indicated though that to lay down their arms would not result in degradation or in humiliation, but that with peace, the Southern people would again be under the Constitution “with all their rights secured thereby.”

     Lincoln finally challenged Stephens to go back to his native Georgia and convince his fellow citizens in Georgia to withdraw their troops, end the war, and rejoin the Union. “Whatever may have been the views of your people before the war, they must be convinced now, that Slavery is doomed.”

     The Hampton Roads peace conference yielded nothing, as Lincoln had correctly suspected. The war continued for another two and a half months, and it ended very badly for the Southerners, a demoralized and beaten people, not what Lincoln had intended.

     February is Black History Month, the month of Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, and also that of Frederick Douglass’s, February 14, and the Hampton Roads peace conference, historians now consider, as just another missed opportunity to end a war.

POWER AND POETRY

by William H. Benson

January 21, 2010

     John F. Kennedy and Robert Frost met on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 1961 at the inauguration of the 35^th President of the United States. Kennedy’s associate, Stewart Udall, had first suggested that Jack should invite the nation’s most distinguished poet, Robert Frost, to speak at the inauguration, but Kennedy, at first, had hesitated. “Oh no. You know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of.”

     During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had ended his speeches by quoting Robert Frost’s memorable lines: “But I have promises to keep; And miles to go before I sleep; And miles to go before I sleep.”

     Both Kennedy and Frost were from Massachusetts: Kennedy from Hyannis Port on the coast, and Frost from Amherst, in the center of the state, where he was poet-in-residence at Amherst College, and that was about all they had in common, for in 1961, Frost was 86 years old, and Kennedy half that at 43. Where Frost was a distinguished poet, the grand old man of American belles letters, Kennedy was the wealthy scion of Joseph Kennedy, Catholic, Irish, a Navy man, and an exceedingly ambitious politician.

     And yet there was something within Kennedy that drew him to Frost. Someone said it was Kennedy’s “insatiable curiosity, his support of the arts in America, and his optimism.” Another said that his decision to include Frost at the inauguration “focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture.”

     Alice Roosevelt Longworth said: “The Kennedy’s were a fascinating incredible outfit. I had great fun with them, especially Jack. He loved to tease, and he could be very amusing. He also had a real feeling for learning. Both he and Bobby were eager to supplement their education by learning more. They really wanted to know.”

     The day dawned bright and sunny on the heels of a snowstorm just days before, and then after the swearing in, Kennedy spoke.

     “Let the word go forth . . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. . . . The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. . . . And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!”

     After the applause, Frost approached the podium, but because of the glare from the blinding sun, he discovered he could not read the 77 lines of the poem “Dedication,” that he had written for the occasion. After a few awkward moments, he instead recited the fourteen lines of “The Gift Outright,” a poem he had memorized.

     Frost’s private advice to the new president: “Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” Then in a thank you note back to Frost, Kennedy wrote, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

     During the last two years of Frost’s life, he continued to circle within the President’s orbit, but then on January 29, 1963, at the age of 88, the poet passed away. Of Frost, Kennedy said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

     On Saturday, October 26, 1963, Amherst College conducted a ground-breaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library and invited the president to give the key address, and in it Kennedy explored the distinctions and resemblances of power and poetry.

     “And it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths that serve as the touchstones of our judgment.

     “But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. I look forward to a great future for America—a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America, which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

     Lofty words, but well worth pondering today, and they were virtually President Kennedy’s last intellectual thought, for four weeks later on Friday, November 22, 1963, while riding in a Dallas motorcade, an assassin’s bullet ended his life.