Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Read online

  Thus, I eventually learned to appraise, honestly, what I was or wasn’t capable of doing.

  8. Experience of previous crises. If you have already had the experience of coping successfully with some different crisis in the past, that gives you more confidence that you can solve the new crisis as well. That contrasts with the sense of helplessness, growing out of previous crises not mastered, that, whatever you do, you won’t succeed. The importance of previous experience is a main reason why crises tend to be so much more traumatic for adolescents and young adults than for older people. While the break-up of a close relationship can be devastating at any age, the break-up of one’s first close relationship is especially devastating. At the time of later break-ups, no matter how painful, one recalls having gone through and gotten over similar pain before. That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren’t painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

  9. Patience. Another consideration is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, ambiguity, or failure at initial attempts to change: in short, patience. It’s unlikely that a person in a crisis will figure out a successful way of coping on the first try. Instead, it may take several attempts, testing different ways to see whether they solve the crisis and whether they are compatible with one’s personality, until one finally finds a solution that works. People who cannot tolerate uncertainty or failure, and who give up the search early, are less likely to arrive at a compatible new way of coping. That’s why my father’s gentle advice to me on the park bench in Paris, “Why not devote just another half-year to graduate school in physiology?,” felt like a life-saver to me. Dad made patience sound reasonable to me; I hadn’t figured that out for myself.

  10. Flexibility. An important element in overcoming a crisis through selective change involves the advantage of a flexible personality over a rigid, inflexible personality. “Rigidity” means the pervasive belief that there is only one way. Of course that belief is an obstacle to exploring other ways, and to replacing one’s failed old approach with a successful new approach. Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one’s own choices as one was growing up.

  For me, learning to be flexible came later in life, as a result of expeditions that I began at age 26 to study rainforest birds on the tropical island of New Guinea. Detailed plans almost never work out as anticipated in New Guinea. Airplanes, boats, and road vehicles regularly break down, crash, or sink; local people and government officials don’t behave as expected and can’t be ordered around; bridges and trails prove impassable; mountains prove not to be where maps had shown them to be; and myriad other things go wrong. Almost every one of my New Guinea expeditions has begun with my setting out to do X, arriving in New Guinea, finding X to be impossible, and having to be flexible: i.e., to improvise a new plan on the spot. When Marie and I eventually had children, I found my experience of New Guinea bird expeditions to be for me the most useful preparation for being a father—because children are also unpredictable, can’t be ordered around, and require flexibility on the part of their parents.

  11. Core values. The next-to-last consideration, still related to ego strength, involves what are termed core values: i.e., the beliefs that one considers central to one’s identity, and that underlie one’s moral code and outlook on life, such as one’s religion and one’s commitment to one’s family. In a crisis you have to figure out where to draw the line in adopting selective change: which core values would you refuse to change because you consider them non-negotiable? At what point do you say to yourself, “I’d rather die, than change THAT”? For instance, many people consider family commitments, religion, and honesty as non-negotiable. We’re inclined to admire someone who would refuse to betray his family, lie, recant his religion, or steal in order to get out of a crisis.

  But crises can produce gray areas in which values previously considered non-negotiable do come up for reconsideration. To take an obvious example, a husband or wife who sues for divorce does thereby decide to break a family commitment to his or her spouse. The moral commandment “Thou shall not steal” had to be abandoned by prisoners at Nazi concentration camps during World War Two: food rations were so inadequate that it was impossible to survive if one did not steal food. Numerous concentration camp survivors abandoned their religion, because they found the evil of the camps impossible to reconcile with belief in a god. For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, “The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven’t found a solution to that dilemma.”

  Core values may thus make it either easier or harder to resolve a crisis. On the one hand, one’s core values can provide clarity, a foundation of strength and certainty from which one can contemplate changing other parts of oneself. On the other hand, clinging to core values even when they reveal themselves as misguided under changed circumstances may prevent one from solving a crisis.

  12. Freedom from constraints. The remaining factor to mention is the freedom of choice that comes from being unconstrained by practical problems and responsibilities. It’s more difficult to experiment with new solutions if you have heavy responsibilities for other people (such as children), or if you have to keep up with a very demanding job, or if you are often exposed to physical dangers. Of course that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to work through a crisis when you have those burdens, but they do impose extra challenges. In 1959 I was fortunate that, amidst the personal turmoil of having to figure out whether I still wanted to become a research scientist, I wasn’t having to wrestle with any practical constraints. I held a National Science Foundation fellowship that would pay my tuition and living expenses for several more years; the Cambridge Physiology Department wasn’t threatening to expel me, nor even requiring me to pass any exams; and nobody was pressing me to give up—except myself.

  Those are factors about which therapists have told me, or about which they have written, that affect outcomes of personal crises. What use can one expect to make of those factors, listed in Table 1.1, when one tries to understand the outcomes of national crises?

  On the one hand, of course it’s clear at the outset that nations aren’t individuals. We’ll see that national crises raise numerous issues—issues of leadership, group decision-making, national institutions, and others—that don’t arise for individual crises.

  On the other hand, of course it’s also clear that an individual’s coping mechanisms don’t exist in isolation from the culture of the nation and of the subnational groups in which the individual has grown up and now lives. That broader culture has big influences on individual traits, such as an individual’s behavior, goals, perceptions of reality, and handling of problems. Hence we expect some relationships between how individuals cope with individual problems, and how nations composed of many individuals cope with national problems. Among those relationships are the roles (both for individuals and for nations) of accepting responsibility for doing something oneself, rather than viewing oneself as a passive helpless victim; delineating the crisis; seeking help; and learning from models. Obvious as these simple rules are, both individuals and nations ignore or deny them depressingly often.

  To set a context for the ways in which nations do or don’t resemble individuals in how they cope, consider the following thought experiment. If one compares individuals drawn at random from around the world, one finds that they di
ffer for multiple reasons that may be broadly categorized as individual, cultural, geographic, and genetic. For instance, compare on an afternoon in the month of January the upper-body garments of five men: a traditional Inuit north of the Arctic Circle, two ordinary Americans outdoors on a street of my city of Los Angeles, one American bank president indoors in his office in New York, and one traditional New Guinean in New Guinea’s lowland tropical rainforest. For geographic reasons, the Inuit will be wearing a warm hooded parka, the three Americans will be wearing shirts but no parkas, and the New Guinean won’t have any upper-body garment at all. For cultural reasons, the bank president will probably be wearing a tie, but the two men on a Los Angeles street will be tie-less. For individual reasons, the two randomly selected Los Angeles men may be wearing shirts of different colors. If the question concerned their hair color rather than their upper-body garment, genetic reasons would also contribute.

  Now, for those same five men, consider their differences in core values. While there may be some individual differences between the three American men, they are much more likely to share core values with one another than with the Inuit or the New Guinean man. Such sharings of core values are just one example of cultural features broadly shared among members of the same society, learned as one is growing up. But individual traits differ on the average between individuals of different societies for reasons explicable only partly or not at all in terms of geographic differences. If one of the two Los Angeles men happened to be the president of the United States, his culturally derived core values—e.g., his values about individual rights and responsibilities—would have a strong effect on U.S. national policy.

  The point of this thought experiment is that we do expect some relation between individual characteristics and national characteristics, because individuals share a national culture, and because national decisions depend ultimately on the views of the nation’s individuals, especially on the views of the nation’s leaders who partake of the national culture. For the countries discussed in this book, the views of leaders proved to be especially important for Chile, Indonesia, and Germany.

  Table 1.2 lists the dozen factors that this book will discuss in relation to the outcomes of national crises. Comparison with Table 1.1, which listed the factors recognized by therapists as related to outcomes of individual crises, shows that most factors on one list have recognizable analogues on the other list.

  Table 1.2. Factors related to the outcomes of national crises

  1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis

  2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something

  3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved

  4. Getting material and financial help from other nations

  5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems

  6. National identity

  7. Honest national self-appraisal

  8. Historical experience of previous national crises

  9. Dealing with national failure

  10. Situation-specific national flexibility

  11. National core values

  12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

  For about seven of the dozen factors, the parallels are straightforward:

  Factor #1. Nations, as individuals, acknowledge or deny being in crisis. But acknowledgment by a nation requires some degree of national consensus, while an individual acknowledges or denies by himself.

  Factor #2. Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.

  Factor #3. Nations make selective changes in their institutions and policies by “building a fence,” to delineate institutions/policies requiring change from those to be preserved unchanged. Individuals similarly “build a fence” to undertake selective change in some individual traits, but not in other traits.

  Factor #4. Nations and individuals may receive material and financial help from other nations and individuals. Individuals but not nations may also receive emotional help.

  Factor #5. Nations may model their institutions and policies on those of other nations, just as individuals may model their coping methods on those of other individuals.

  Factor #7. Nations, just as individuals, do or don’t undertake honest self-appraisal. That requires reaching some degree of national consensus for a nation, but an individual does or doesn’t undertake self-appraisal by himself.

  Factor #8. Nations have historical experience, while individuals have personal memories, of previous national or individual crises.

  In two other cases the correspondence between factors is more general and less specific.

  Factor #9. Nations differ in how they deal with failure, and in their willingness to explore other solutions to a problem if the first attempted solutions fail. Think, for example, of the drastically different responses to military defeat on the parts of Germany after World War One, of Germany after World War Two, of Japan after World War Two, and of the U.S. after the Vietnam War. Individuals also differ in their tolerance for failure or for initial failure, and we often refer to that individual characteristic as “patience.”

  Factor #12. Nations experience varying limitations on their freedom of choice, for reasons especially of geography, wealth, and military/political power. Individuals also experience varying limitations on their freedom of choice, but for entirely different reasons, such as child-care responsibilities, job requirements, and individual income.

  Finally, for the remaining three factors, the individual factor serves just as a metaphor suggesting a factor describing nations:

  Factor #6. Psychologists have defined and written at length about the characteristic of individuals termed “ego strength.” That characteristic applies only to individuals; one can’t talk of national ego strength. But nations do have a national characteristic called national identity, which we shall have frequent occasion to discuss, and which plays a role for nations reminiscent of the role that ego strength plays for individuals. National identity means the features of language, culture, and history that make a nation unique among the world’s nations, that contribute to national pride, and that a nation’s citizens view themselves as sharing.

  Factor #10. Another characteristic of individuals that psychologists have defined and written about at length is individual flexibility, and its opposite, individual rigidity. This is a characteristic that permeates an individual’s character; it is not situation-specific. For instance, if a man has a firm practice of never loaning money to friends but is otherwise flexible in his behavior, he would not be branded as having a rigid personality. A rigid personality instead expresses itself in having firm rules of behavior for most situations. It is unclear whether any nation has analogous rigidity permeating most situations. For instance, if one were initially inclined to brand Japan or Germany as “rigid,” the fact is that both countries have been extraordinarily flexible at some periods about many important matters, as we shall discuss in Chapters 3 and 6, respectively. Instead, national flexibility may be situation-specific, unlike individual flexibility. We shall return to this question in the Epilogue.

  Factor #11. Finally, individuals have individual core values, such as honesty, ambition, religion, and family ties. Nations have what may be termed national core values, some of which overlap with individual core values (e.g., honesty and religion). National core values are related to but not identical to national identities. For instance, the language of Shakespeare and Tennyson is part of Britain’s national identity, but Tennyson wasn’t the reason why Britain refused to negotiate with Hitler even in the darkest hours of May 1940. Instead, Britain’s refusal to negotiate was because of a core value: “We shall never surrender.”

  As I mentioned in the Prologue, national crises raise additional questions that arise not at all, or else only as distant analogues, for individual crises. Those include:
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br />   • the crucial national role of political and economic institutions;

  • questions about the role of a nation’s leader or leaders in resolving a crisis;

  • questions more generally about group decision-making;

  • the question of whether a national crisis leads to selective changes through peaceful resolution or through violent revolution;

  • the question of whether different types of national changes are introduced simultaneously as part of a unified program, or else separately and at different times;

  • the issue of whether a national crisis was triggered by internal developments within the nation, or else by an external shock from another country; and