By Fauzia Burke
On Sunday, August 29th, an HBO movie on Temple Grandin’s life won 5 Emmy Awards. What an exciting night for her and everyone involved in the project! If you have never read anything by Grandin, I would recommend it highly. Full disclosure, I did promote one of her books called Animals in Translations, which changed in many ways how I think and relate to animals.
A few days ago I read something else Grandin has written. She wrote a foreword to a new book due to be published in October. It is a fascinating book and one that addresses issues close to all our hearts. Why can’t we solve our problems anymore? Why do threats such as the Gulf oil spill, worldwide recession, global warming, terrorism, and pandemic viruses suddenly seem unstoppable? These are the questions Rebecca Costa confronts – and offers a solution to – in her widely anticipated, game-changing book, The Watchman’s Rattle.
Costa pulls headlines from today’s news to show how accelerating complexity quickly outpaces the rate at which the human brain can evolve new capabilities to manage it. With compelling evidence based upon research into the rise and fall of the Mayan, Khmer and Roman empires, Costa shows how complexity causes a civilization to quick-fix problems by focusing on mitigations — instead of finding permanent solutions — which leads to frightening long-term consequences. Eventually, a society’s ability to solve its most threatening problems becomes gridlocked, progress slows, and collapse ensues.
With that said, I will turn the forum over to Temple Grandin. Hope you find her comments, responses and observations as interesting as I do.
“Critical Thinking is Required to Solve Problems Instead of Blind Ideology
By Temple Grandin
One idea in this book that I could relate to was the disturbing fact that when the Mayan civilization faced mounting problems with drought and food shortages, they stopped thinking in a rational manner. The government became gridlocked and they lost the ability to find real solutions to their problems. When the problems with food shortages became more, and more difficult, fighting increased. They stopped working on finding better ways to grow food and conserve water.
Today our government is gridlocked. When I was a child in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the government actually got useful and exciting things done. The Republicans built the interstate highway system and the Democrats went to the moon. These projects would never make it through the maze of regulations that we have today. Another important idea in this book is the observation that too often people campaign and protest earnestly and vigorously either for or against something, but they often have no concrete solutions. In some cases, the people who present real solutions are attacked.”
You can read the rest of Grandin’s essay on Rebecca Costa’s website where you can also see some interesting videos on complexity, evolution, gridlock and brain research.
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