As November draws to a close, I’m winding down my extended discussion of the book Factfulness and its possible relevance to current American and global situations. The book’s themes are likely to pop up occasionally in future blog posts, but never at the level of this month’s concentration.
I’m not sure why the authors chose ten as the number of “instincts” they wanted us to watch out for. Lots of advice and self-help books have numbers in their titles—for examples, Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Arrien’s The Fourfold Way, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life—but most categories overlap in actual situations. Perhaps ten is a handy number, a little beyond our typical ability to retain all at one time, but the number of fingers or toes most folks have, the base number system used in most commercial enterprises around the world.
As I read and reread the various Factfulness chapters, I sometimes wished that the authors leaned somewhat less heavily on the distortions created by our instinctual tendencies. In their books, TED presentations, and gapminder website, the overwhelming number of examples they give are ones in which humans can be outperformed by “chimps,” Roslings’ stand-ins for totally random answers. (Given three possible answers, random responses would be right about 33 percent of the time.) Other recent psychological and sociological studies have highlighted some of the ways our earlier, partly “built in” ways of looking at the world do not fit modernity well. The one question on which most of Roslings’ respondents outperform “chimps” is the likelihood of continuing global temperature increases due to current high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Maybe the Roslings could have included just one or two other areas in which we humans are not worse than random in matching our perceptions to reality?
Since Factfulness came out, nearly a decade ago, I believe its relevance has only increased. The U.S. (and other “developed” economies) continues to grapple with multiple challenges. The Roslings, with their extensive long-term experience of the “developing” world, have done us a substantial service by focusing there, puncturing many preconceptions about the limited potential of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples (the so-called “global south”). Many in these societies are poised for continuing economic and cultural advancement. Near its conclusion, the book delineates five substantial global risks facing us in the 21st century: pandemics, financial collapse, world war, climate change, and extreme poverty. According to the authors, “…each has the potential to cause mass suffering either directly or indirectly by pausing human progress for many years or decades.” Any of these dwarf the overblown sense of risk many of us get exercised about in our instinctual responses.
What I liked best about the book was its concluding example—an illiterate peasant woman in what was then rural Zaire who may have saved Hans Rosling’s life with her insightful, impassioned speech and action incorporating appropriate responses to multiple misleading instinctual reactions:
“I was in a remote and extremely poor village, … part of a team investigating an epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo. … The research project … had been meticulously prepared. But I had made one serious mistake. I had not explained properly to the villagers what I wanted to do and why. … (I)t was only when I switched off [some needed, noisy equipment] that I heard the raised voices. … Then I saw: a crowd of maybe 50 people, all upset and angry. … I started to explain. … One man with a machete started screaming again. … Then a barefoot woman, perhaps 50 years old, stepped out of the crowd. …
[She drew analogies to previous measles research that resulted in vaccines to eliminate this dangerous childhood disease. She mentioned her grandchild, stricken with gonzo, suggesting that medical research might lead to breakthroughs against future additional cases.]
[Then] she turned her back on the crowd, pointed with her other hand to the crook of her arm, and looked me in the eyes. ‘Here. Doctor. Take my blood.’
I am amazed at how well [Factfulness] describes her [counter-instinctual] behavior. She seemed to recognize all the dramatic instincts that had been triggered in that mob [angry at Rosling’s inadequately explained attempt to draw their blood for research into a nutritional disease]. The fear instinct had been triggered by the sharp needles, the blood, and the disease. The generalization instinct had put me in a box as a plundering European. The blame instinct made the villagers take a stand against the evil doctor who had come to steal their blood. The urgency instinct made people make up their minds way too fast.
Still, under this pressure, she had stood up and spoken out [with both emotion and examples that resonated with her fellow villagers]. … (S)he had courage. And she was able to think critically and express herself with razor-sharp logic and perfect rhetoric at a moment of extreme tension. …”
In too much of the media exposure I get, in too many of my own reactions, I find evidence of “instinctual” responses and behaviors that can and sometimes do endanger the viability of our human enterprise. Remembering “factfulness” helps pull me back closer to reality.
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