Answers can be found in questions

June 29, 2009 7:57 AM

The Death of Why in Los Angeles Times

Answers can be found in questions
by Gregory Rodriguez
Los Angeles Times
June 29, 2009

With apologies to Nike, if the United States were a for-profit venture, its slogan would be "Just do it."

Few would dispute the notion that we are an action-oriented people. From an early age, Americans are bombarded with the message that actions speak louder than words and that talk is cheap. Who among us as a child opening presents on his birthday really believed the moral that it's the thought that counts? Come on!

To the extent that we do value thinking, it's usually as a means to action. We're taught to want solutions, find answers, get to the bottom of things. We pride ourselves in our pragmatism.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once put it, "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing." That's so American.

OK, I'm not about to repeat the hackneyed liberal charge that we are a nation of unthinking dolts, or H.L. Mencken's famous dictum about "the booboisie." I think our orientation toward action has a lot to do with the fact that our country was founded on and built around some rather lofty ideas: freedom, equality, liberty. You can envision U.S. history as the constant uphill battle of trying to turn those ideas into reality. In the beginning, there were ideas. They demanded action.

The reality is, we don't see a big dichotomy between action and knowledge. Knowledge gets us where we want to go. In fact, now more than ever, Americans seem to have a grasp of this fact or the other. Having flattened the world of news and knowledge, the younger generations in particular have trillions of facts at their fingertips. "Search" has made us all drive-by scholars.

This, according to liberal think-tanker Andrea Batista Schlesinger, has only heightened our collective "obsession with answers." The problem, she says, is that we're less and less likely to be engaged in the questions.

Quick access to facts has made us too impatient to engage in lengthy deliberation, "deep inquiry" or discernment. In her new book, "The Death of Why?," Batista Schlesinger -- until recently, the executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York -- makes a passionate case for inquiry qua inquiry. She links the future of the American experiment to the extent to which we teach our children how to ask questions.

Even as society more and more limits its definition of civic engagement to results-oriented activism, Batista Schlesinger defines it as teaching Americans to discuss problems and giving them the intellectual skills to navigate our democracy.

For example, she acknowledges the uptick in youth political involvement in the Obama era -- they voted, gave money, sent e-mails. She nonetheless questions young people's depth of engagement in the political process. She suggests that it's not enough to mobilize people to advocate for this or that position. What's more important is cultivating long-term, patient "skills of inquiry, problem solving and creative thinking." As Batista Schlesinger puts it, "We have the mistaken belief that even the most pressing challenges facing our country -- climate change, globalization, healthcare, poverty -- are problems to be 'fixed' once and for all, if only we can find the right solution and the right person to implement."

This overwhelming preference for outcome over process is part of what has led to the ideological polarization of the country. The desire for certainty -- hard facts, quick answers -- in an uncertain world leads people to take refuge in political or religious ideology. Ideological solutions -- whether from the left or the right -- generally offer us simple answers to complex problems.

In a way, Batista Schlesinger is asking us to take a step back from politics in order to gain newfound respect for the political process. She advocates for what she calls "slow democracy." She's also asking us for a little humility and to embrace a healthy dose of doubt. Our salvation lies in our willingness to rethink the world in its ever-changing configurations.

"What we need to acknowledge, now more than ever," she writes, "is that we do not know everything. We cannot know everything. Knowledge changes. ... The future is a moving target, and the ground beneath us will never be still. The only thing we can count on to see us through an uncertain future is our ability to ask questions."

— Andrea Batista Schlesinger