United States-ians’ left eyelids start to twitch when we see the facilities afforded school children in Europe, but when we go shopping, we believe with confidence, “nowhere else in the world can people browse through such abundance—AND with plenty of free parking.” Shopping is so inscribed in our national DNA that even a Marxists may want to take this next bit sitting down.

Just off the main street in the part of Istanbul where you’ll also find Hagia Sophia and the Blue Masque, you enter the Grand Bazaar through an uncelebrated hole between a two minor establishments. There’s no big sign, but everyone knows where it is. You find yourself in a very old hallway with a painted, vaulted ceiling. You come to a place where you must turn. You do, and you stop. You must stop. You are looking down a covered shopping avenue that appears to go on forever. It boggles the mind. If there were a heaven for a teenager with birthday money in their pocket, this would be it. It is bristling with every kind of shop from sportswear to leather to spices to jewelry, as you might expect.

You begin to walk forward and every 150 feet, you come to another intersection where once again, the beautiful hallways go on in every direction. Say you are looking for a hand-painted serving bowl. You enter not the first shop displaying these wares, but the fifth or tenth, because though each shop has hundreds of plates, cups and bowls on display, and each is hand-painted with high-craft precision and lusciousness—all Turkish made, each shop’s inventory is also distinct so
you must weigh and choose. The moment you enter, you have a one-on-one relationship with the owner or one of his two (at most) assistants. You point to a bowl and ask the price. He smiles and tells you a high number as his eyes move to his assistant to let him know to bring apple tea for you while you talk. You tell him you can only pay a fraction of that price. He shows you other lovely but less expensive pieces, though sees you are not interested. He gives you a much lower price
for the one you want.

You sip the tea, thank him, say again how much you love the work but it simply is not possible, etc. You leave. Later you return still saying your friend is interested in something else in the shop. You continue to eye the piece. Your friend discovers they do not have precisely what he is looking for, but somehow the conversation about the original piece you wanted begins again with the owner. Soon you leave with the extraordinary work at a criminal price, yet the storeowner’s grin allows you to know he got his. You go on to see hand-woven silks, clothing, and tiny electronics and are met with the same experience each time you enter a shop. Some of the displays are pleasantly weird.

Oh, you arrive and leave in clean, safe, fast public transportation (ouch).

Yes, we have craft fairs and the works are excellent, but you don’t feel as good about bartering. Further, you can’t buy the clothes you have to wear to work as you can in the market here, and when the fair is gone, what do you do? I know, shop online! Somehow silk and spices don’t quite come across in that medium. So you go to Nordstroms to buy something made by a machine, with the help of an underpaid Asian (the Turkish craftspeople are likely underpaid too). What you get is like a million other of the same now circulating throughout the US.

I’m sorry, ya’all—it’s a new world. I’m just saying.

We both have identity issues, and things we can learn from each other. Both have struggled for centuries to understand how a powerfully religious population can nest in a modern society whose face to the world is secular—and like ours, visibly focused on commerce. Mostly, it works. The percentage of Muslims (and Christians) who are non-pluralist fundamentalist, like Rick Perry’s associates at the New Apostolic Reformation, is apparently low enough that they don’t see a way to dominate the country’s politics.

Having been the seat of two empires, the people of this city might have a few words of caution to offer the US. Istanbul is literally built on the rubble of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. After millennia of glory, by mid-twentieth century, Istanbul was a broken down shell of its former self with a pall of melancholy hanging over the city. Like Baltimore at the end of the 1960s, residents who were left must have looked around them and wondered, “We were great once—what went wrong?” There’s something destructive to the self-esteem and self-efficacy of a population that goes through this. Orhan Pamuk writes about it beautifully in his book, Istanbul. As a Baltimorean, aware of what our city must have been like in its past hay day, and aching for the renaissance I know is coming, I can relate. We share something else. Just as Baltimore is suspended between Northern industrial and pragmatist sensibilities, and the conservatism of the South—often locking us into what feels like rigor mortis, Istanbul is where East meets West. The air seems compressed under the pressure, but they’ve used this to their advantage.

Istanbullas rebuilt. Unfortunately, most of the great houses in Istanbul were wooden and were torched to make room for new development. We have brick. Good choice. (Maybe I can sell formstone here!). Now the city is once again thriving cosmopolitan metropolis, with a population that went from 500 thousand to nearly 10 million. (Watch out New York, we’re on your heels!) What’s more, Turkey’s GDP grew 8.9% last year. That’s where our story and theirs diverge.

I check out my take on all this with Barbaros, a gentleman who spoke enough English to help me communicate “vermouth” to the bartender. He’s lived here all his life, though travels and sees his country from the outside as well. He confirmed my understanding of his city and his country, but worries about their future—the economy, etc. He also worries about something new—and very old, and unsettling. Turkish Prime Minister, Erdogan, as you may know, has thrown down the gauntlet with Israel. We shared a drink. Not all that far from where my country’s treasure and blood soak the soil, we spoke few words to know what each other thought about empires.

What happened? We came so far. The stories I grew up with had us all on rockets to Venus by now. The heights we could achieve required only that we imagined them. We’ve done so much: liberty, laws, science and technology (though I admit, free renewable energy remains on my wish list) but the largest human problems—such as how we treat each other and the world around us, remain sticky and unsolved. And we mistake one kind of problem for another. For example, a million people die annually from malaria, or so we are told by various international health organizations, but it’s not really true. They die because they don’t have mosquito nets. They die for lack of resources. They die because those in wealthier nations only feel the need to contribute to solving problems, not to actually solving them. As it turns out, most in the developed world consider a million deaths a year in a far away country to be tolerable. But I digress.

Back to the subject at hand: whither the West. What if we’ve gone down the wrong path? What if here in the US (and elsewhere too) we’ve built a nation to do something that isn’t as valuable as we thought it would be? Generating big money for a small percentage of the population, though it appears as significant national wealth, isn’t a very good method of creating sustainable wellbeing for most people.

Oops. We thought it would be. Hell of a try though. Though studies have born this out and determined that the ability of wealth to increase happiness is far more questionable and minimal than we might have thought, particularly for wealth above a certain functional level, we haven’t seriously questioned the way in which our national policies make voracious wealth-building our national mission. It’s another episode of Those Darn Humans: just look at that wacky species ignore reliable information to their own detriment.

I had the opportunity to talk with Carol Graham, author of numerous books linking economics with wellbeing—happiness in particular. She’s involved in the global discussion about whether gross national happiness should be the measure of a nation’s success, as it is in Bhutan. There is an American movement to make GNA our nation’s measure of success. Guess where it’s based? You guessed it, Vermont. (Unless Hurricane Irene washed it away).

I’m a bike commuter. I love it. But nearly everyday, I see my fellow cyclists do things that hurt their interests and mine too. I want to say they are being stupid (oops, I said it) but what I mean is that they are being human. Keep in mind that I love these people. They reduce congestion and pollution while they stay in shape, connect with the out-of-doors, save money and get to work—all at the same time. I wish everyone would. (In Copenhagen, when the traffic light changes, thirty bikes go past first; then the cars. What’s not to like?) Like me, the cyclists I talk with are cycling advocates, generally speaking, and would like to see more bikes and fewer cars. But riding is a risky in Baltimore. The city is only beginning to make room for us, and there is some real animosity between drivers and cyclists. There are more drivers than cyclists, and they vote. So, you’d think that all cyclists would want to act as if they were ambassadors for cycling in order to help build positive feelings about cycling and cyclists among the population overall. This might eventually lead to more bike routes, more bike lanes, more bike paths and less hostility. But because a huge factor in human behavior is expedience, cyclists do certain things that improve their short-term objectives a little, but that ultimately hurt their long-term goals a lot. They regularly run traffic lights to shave a few seconds off their commute times. Even though Maryland law says that cyclists have to obey essentially the same rules as cars, off these cyclists go—whizzing through intersections at the moment they think they’re safe, though the light is red. It irks drivers to no end to see cyclists do what they themselves cannot do. Further, despite that the city spent some of the little money it has to build a separate bike path next to Falls Rd., cyclists often choose to ride out in the road instead. I feel like a tattletale—a traitor for reporting this, but it’s true and it’s important. What does it say to city drivers and city taxpayers who see it?

Humans, right? We are complex. We do things for lots of intermingled reasons. Separate parts of our brains compete to rule our behavior. Older, reptilian areas wrestle with centers of emotion and neo-cortical thoughtfulness, reason, and foresight, and the biggest brain part doesn’t automatically win. We subvert our own thoughtfulness by deploying it to do the bidding of the reptile. We rationalize to avoid inconvenience even when that inconvenience will multiply over time as a result. A bike commuter might say to himself, “Hey, drivers treat me like shit anyway and the city obviously doesn’t care about me either. I owe these people nothing. They can bite me.” Here, a biker consults her sense of justice in order to justify, rather than act in her own interest and in ways that benefit everyone else as well.

Is the human ability to know better a curse when we can still choose to act worse?

The easy explanation for why Talulah didn’t even consider trying to build her art career before “falling back” on teaching is that fear held her back. Writer/blogger Seth Godin calls it “the lizard brain.” “It’s always fear,” Godin says.

I don’t know, it seems to me that it’s pretty unusual to judge yourself as the one in 1,000 artists who will be able to live on your work. What kind of person would believe that they could do that?

It’s what we expect a lot of people to do. We look at people who come from difficult circumstances—people who might become that one in a hundred or even one a thousand if they achieved in the way we might like them to—escaping the orbit of their surroundings. While we might understand Talulah’s decision, many would judge others who don’t muster exceptional strength. You just want to ask them, “Are you that person? Are you exceptional? Where would you be by now if you were?”

WhoWeAm has spent this past year looking at cultural dynamics, but equally puzzling are the choices we make as individuals.

Why would Jerry by that truck? He knows his truck is part of who he is, and that who he is is the most important thing to him. He doesn’t want to be seen as “one of those people who drive high mileage cars and worries about the air all the time.” He wants to be the guy who drives a big truck. He knows that science supports the notion that the climate is changing but he doesn’t make his decisions about what to drive because of what a bunch of scientists say.

For some reason, I’m trying to put together a more comprehensive picture of why we humans do what we do. I’ve been working on it for a while. I think that once you get past the emergency or reptilian stuff (HELP—I’m burning/starving/ suffocating, etc.) it boils down to this: I think people make decisions to extend and support their idea of exactly whom they are and the world they fit into. I think once they have it, people hang on to these ideas like grim death. They’ll run into a hail of bullets, vote against their interests, hurt themselves on purpose, or go bankrupt if they can confirm and buttress their image of themselves in the world. It’s the first thing people grab when they get out of bed in the morning and it’s the last thing they set down when they go to bed at night—then they dream it. So here’s a simple, fairly clear and misleading diagram of what I’m talking about.

This diagram includes the following pretty well established truths:
• Our environment has a big influence on us.
• We experience our environment through our senses: our biology, and that biology is also part of our environment
• Culture is a construction that is a response of our biology to our environment over time. It’s also part of our environment. We also perceive our environment through the lens of culture.
• A single individual is very influenced by, and is also a part of that environment. We perceive the environment through the lens of our personal beliefs and attitudes.
• (This where my observations depart from the literature as far as I can tell). Both cultures and individuals form identities and worldviews. I think that cultures make decisions based on identity and worldview just as much as individuals do.

This diagram is misleading because it’s neat and clean and makes things that are really complicated and not very well understood look simpler than they are. I like this one better.

What do you think? Why do you think Jerry bought the pickup truck? (And please don’t say, “Because he likes pickup trucks.”)

It expresses a mistrust of science and government so one would think: Tea Party. Not so. Ask Arianna Huffington. Despite that the data on the cost-benefit ratio for using vaccines to stall pandemics is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccines—those data aren’t driving Ms. Huffington’s thinking. What does? Hard to say, but mistrust is rampant. I googled the word “vaccines” and 4 of the first 5 listings were anti-vaccine sites. One was a rock band—great name: Vaccine.

So, you can beat the virus and not end the disease. At the root is a factor even the military now deal with nearly everywhere they go. It’s those pesky hearts and minds. Populations of humans, as it turns out, will not simply roll over for what others have decided will help them, even when it will. In trying to promote the notion that we should begin to look at our world through the lenses of culture and human nature, I’ve learned that even the best educated people often have no framework with which to see and appreciate this alternative point of view. It’s just not how we think.

Nonetheless, I keep trying. Now I’m working with the Institute of Medicine on a video installation for their annual conference. They’d like to help researchers, public health organizations and clinicians look beyond the end of their syringes to better perceive those whom they are puncturing. It’s become obvious that “target populations” will have to agree on the benefits of a vaccine for its delivery to work. Still, most of these scientists and practitioners were brought up at time when the science of medicine and nearly everything it produced was perceived as the shining knight on horseback come to rid the world of disease. I know how creating this shift in their perception will be. It is ironic these modern medical professionals have their own cultural dynamic, and it too can reject otherwise informed thinking. How can I spread the virus of the idea that cultural dynamics matter a lot more than people think?

I’ll end with a question: Would you give your child a vaccine? If not an exhaustive review of the literature and the advice of the most knowledgeable medical scientists, what guides your thinking?

But the roundworm says no. The roundworm has been the subject of neuroscientists’ long search to unlock the mysteries of neural circuitry so that one-day, we might explain the human brain. Humans have maybe 100 billion neurons in their brains; roundworms have only 302, exactly. It’s understandable why we might think that given enough time, diligence and creativity, we can figure out the neural basis of the decision tree that determines these organisms’ behavior. Nope. Thirty-seven years on the project and things just keep getting more complex. We’re not even close to fully understanding how the neurons ultimately determine the final decisions that worm makes.

It’s funny how the tiniest cloud on the horizon can turn into the most turbulent storm. Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity in 1916 and if Newton had been around, he’d be all, Doh! Every time we think we’ve found the answer, we see a wider view of a vast landscape that just won’t behave. Antibiotics yield to drug-resistant strains. Fillings give you mercury poisoning. Hydroelectric dams turn into ecological disasters. It’s as if we climb and climb and climb to reach the top of the pyramid, only to have it expand around us and leave us entombed in ignorance until we can climb out again into the light.

Maybe next time we get to the top, in the brief moment just before things go dark again, we should consider leaping up to a new pyramid—one that’s hovering upside down, above. Though it has a structure too, the inverted pyramid doesn’t play by our old rules. It floats above the earth with no visible means of support. As we climb up, it gets bigger, not smaller. The more we explore it, the more there is to explore. Our drive was to reduce complexity, but it’s complexity that makes things work: beauty, ecosystems, good stories and roundworms. We have tried to understand ourselves as good or evil, rational, driven by Freudian dreams, possessed, a machine like process of chemicals and electricity—only to find we’re all of that and a great deal more. We have no idea how much more. Turn Maslow and Bloom upside down, we’re still climbing.

Those of us who have been producing the weekly films for this column are going to take a break from that for a few weeks. Instead, I’ll be doing some written posts during the summer—sharing some of our thinking as we move forward with WhoWeAm.

Last night we had a feedback session where we showed some of the films we’ve been posting to a group that came together for one of the Design Conversation evenings at the Windup Space—which I highly recommend. It seemed that people were engaging with the films and understanding enough of what we were trying to do to offer some great thoughts. For example, we heard that the word “culture” is not really workable. It has too much baggage. It’s confusing. For one thing, people start thinking about “high culture” versus “low culture” which is really not an issue we focus on. Despite the language problem, people easily latched on to the idea that a media project that asks all of us to pause and think about who we are and who we want to be is timely right now. It’s in the air. After all, it seems we’ve tried everything else. We’re encouraged to be seeing evidence of a shift toward this kind of thinking in lots of places lately. More on that later.
We have ideas about where we’d like to go with our project, but would also like to continue to hear from you.

What would you do with a project called WhoWeAm? What do you think it’s about?