Every time some corner of the world
suffers a new catastrophe the media reviews all the major ones of recent years:
Katrina, Sandy, Sandyhook, now the latest-Nepal. Meantime there are the chronic
ones, like the wars in Africa and the Middle East that go on and on, assorted
hurricanes and typhoons, droughts like the one devastating the food growing
farms of California.
Something that strikes me about the
responses to such catastrophes is how the survivors immediately rebuild the
same buildings, the same infrastructure – as what was just destroyed. Why not
build multi-family buildings of concrete and steel that can withstand 200 mile
per hour winds? To make that affordable, of course, many families would have to
agree to occupy condos, and thus get the benefit of group solutions. They would
have to learn to debate and cooperate with neighbors in group management.
I think I know part of the answer.
We humans are creatures of habit, we get used to what we have had before and
don’t feel comfortable with having to adapt to changed conditions. I can
understand this concretely in my own experience of such a simple thing as
having to learn the rules of a new Windows environment on my computer. I don’t
want to spend time learning a new way to set up to write a blog or a book, even
though they theoretically would lead to more efficiency. I just want to keep
doing my work with the habits I have gotten used to. How much more important,
then, to keep living in the same house, or one as similar to your old one as
possible – in the same area, the same neighborhood.
We can see this principle at work
too, I believe, in the recent wave of “conservative” political movement in many
countries around the world, including our own. I remember reading an interview
in which a reporter asked a young woman after an election—I believe it was in
Turkey—why she had voted for the conservative party, even though they proposed
things she did not favor, “I just want
things to go back to the way they were,” she had replied. New ideas about many public policies that have
come upon the globe in the last half century too fast for many people. They
might appeal to intellectuals and entrepreneurs, but for many ordinary people
the reaction is just like my reluctance to learn new Windows rules.
