Homeland Security Watch

Comment by Philip J. Palin

June 25, 2010 @ 3:22 am

John, Thanks especially for reminding us that hope remains (actually, I think much more than hope remains).

For human nature Hope remains alone
Of all the deities; the rest are flown.
Faith is departed; Truth and Honour dead;
And all the Graces too, my friends, are fled.
The scanty specimens of living worth,
Dwindled to nothing, and extinct on earth.
Yet whilst I live and view the light of heaven,
Since hope remains and never has been driven
From the distracted world–the single scope
Of my devotion is to worship Hope.
When hecatombs are slain, and altars burn,
When all the deities adored in turn,
Let Hope be present; and with Hope, my friend,
Let every sacrifice commence and end.

Theognis of Megara, translated by John Frere

Comment by Art Botterell

June 25, 2010 @ 12:11 pm

Obviously nobody wants to be seen arguing against hope. Then again, we in emergency management are tasked (indeed, generally have volunteered) to address precisely those situations that most folks hope won’t arise.

The New York Times website has been running a fascinating series by Errol Morris entitled “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.” (“Anosognosia” is defined in Wikipedia as “a condition in which a person who suffers disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.”)

Morris interviewed various psychologists, neurologists and others on the topics of denial, self-deception and general cluelessness. A couple of quotes caught my eye. One was from social psychologist David Dunning of Cornell:

Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.” It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.” He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”

Another is from V.S. Ramachandran of UCSD and the Salk Institute, responding to Morris’ question, “Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances?”:

Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it’s a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified…It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

I’ve frequently said that emergency management is largely the management of denial processes at the individual, organizational and social levels. Having read the Morris series I’d expand that to include other forms of self-deception.

Hope, like other emotions, can be a powerful object of rhetoric. Emergency managers frequently appeal to various emotions in order to motivate groups and individuals, including leaders. And indeed it’s only hope that causes us to bother. But is there some degree of danger in drinking our own Kool-Aid?

I’d suggest that one challenge we’ve faced with in the early years of the Homeland Security era has been the tendency, especially when faced with a paucity of evidence to inform our choices, to substitute passion for understanding. That’s indubitably human, and it may well be characteristic of the beginnings of any new enterprise.

But by the same token, a key characteristic of maturity is the tempering of passion by experience.

Comment by William R. Cumming

June 26, 2010 @ 12:45 am

Well hope springs eternal. Guess that is the best thing about humanity. And of course often not what we know or what we don’t know that kills US but what we think we know that we don’t know that kills US.

Well for me the fundamental flaw in the whole Homeland Security paradigm is that terrorist activity and threats to the US all started on 9/11/01. My guess is 100 years down the road that event as dramatic and perception changing as it was and is will be viewed from the perspective that it was NOT even a catastrophic event but an excuse to bring forth a new agenda for a National Security/Homeland Security State that kept the military/industrial/academic complex fed and housed while continuing to starve things like our civil foreign policy efforts and assistance and detract from the fundamentals that drive terrorism, including religious fanaticism, desire to keep women in ignorance and under the control of males, etc. etc.
By the end of this century environmental issues may well call for the best and brightest talent just to fill MASLOV’s heirarchy of needs to some degree fulfilled. After all with over 2 billion people having NO access to clean drinking water that would seem to be a factor in indicating a wrong sense of priorities. But hey I do hope all people on the face of the earth can get their basic 3 galleons of water daily without parasites and disease vectors.

Comment by George

July 19, 2010 @ 10:59 am

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