Leadership in an Age of Accommodation or When Humans Think More About Each Other Than They Do About the Real World

Politics, unlike science, has an inherent and intense focus on other human beings. It consists primarily of persuading other human beings by whatever means to act as the persuader wishes. This means, among other things, that politicians and much of the public believe that problems and their solutions are resolvable by persuading other people to one's own view.

There is, however, a third element in the problems and opportunities human beings face--the real world. Humans and their societies exist in a natural world that sets its own conditions for human welfare and survival. Yet this third element is often taken for granted and rises to the political surface only as a last and often too late resort.

A leitmotif of the Obama administration has been bridging the gap between the left and right in this polarized society. The method has been to accommodate the demands of both sides, although there has been, in my opinion, far more “reaching out” to the right than to the left. This effort at accommodation has thus been intensely focused on the human beings that comprise both sides. As a result the real world external to human concerns with other humans continues to take a back seat, although lip service to the inexorable demands of the real world continues to be heard. This process of trying to get both sides, each focused on its own beliefs and values, to in some sense become one can, given the fantasy and deviousness that inhabit the human mind, go on forever.

As an alternative, I suggest that the Obama administration needs to shift its focus to the real world which conditions human existence. In so doing it must enlarge its scope and begin developing policy from a global, species-survival, point of view rather than the narrowness of the “national interest.”

To do so it must aim for a knowledge-based society, which is the only basis we have for keeping the real world in focus. We have the disingenuous, knowledge-subverting corporate media and the faith-based (ignorance-based) powers to contend with. If this goal is pursued the government would actively promote knowledge. Obama has at his disposal the wherewithal to launch a massive campaign to get people to understand knowledge, the fascination it can hold for humans, the degree of reliability it provides compared to any other method for dealing with our fate as humans. People would understand that knowledge, while it it tentative as distinct from certain, offers the highest degree of reliability. It will no longer be enough to base global warming decisions on a lack of certainty as distinct from overwhelming probability as G. W. Bush and self interested corporations have.

As people learn to rely on knowledge they will see why it is necessary to apply this approach to human beings themselves. The American people were gulled into a war of aggression basically because they did not know how to assess the outrageous corporate interests at work in promoting that response. Had they effectively known that corporations have repeatedly used the American military for their own purposes (read marine general Smedly Butler's early 20th century account) they would have known where to look.

If the Obama administration were to begin using the resources of the federal government to massively promote knowledge as a primary value, by making the extent of human knowledge effectively known to people, if every challenge to knowledge, e.g. creationism, was challenged for its lack of evidence by the government, were people taught what constitutes evidence, how to evaluate claims of fact and the necessity to do so and supported in that effort,we might begin to develop a knowledge-based culture.
Such an undertaking would require the consummate statesmanship that Obama has the oratorical gifts to enunciate and motivate. One wonders however,whether he has the conceptual gifts to grasp the fundamental requirements of our time. Mankind's technological capability will overwhelm it unless humans understand the context in which it is to be employed. Notably, people who know what to do in an emergency do not pray or indulge other myths, they act on what they know. In global warming, global resource depletion, and overpopulation, humans face the greatest emergency they have ever faced. This, at root is why knowledge must be given priority, as Socrates observed so many millenniums ago.

Bob Newhard