“Where do you come from?” I asked the young women sitting beside me in the sauna yesterday. Her accent was faint, but her curiosity about the conversation I was having with an Englishman made it clear she wasn’t American.
“Ukraine,” she said. We were talking about public pools and public baths, the British love of cold water, and the new craze for ice bathing. She had been a lifeguard in Ukraine but didn’t know if swimming was more or less popular there than in other countries. And what she was really curious about was English and American accents. “Are there also dialects?” she asked.
Later, we were outside on the deck and I had a moment to say to her, “I’m hoping to go to Kyiv soon.”
My plans are not yet clear, but I have a route in mind - trains, of course, from Krakow, where I have old friends from a visit to Poland before the Wall came. She was excited. “When will you go?” she asked, “I have some places you should visit.”
My mind went to strategic spots with geopolitical significance.
“In the spring,” she exclaimed, “The botanical garden, it is so beautiful!”
Everyone else I talk to about my Ukraine venture wants to know about missiles, and war insurance. She thought only of the beautiful places she misses.
This has been true, I realize now, of every immigrant I’ve talked to. Here in the Berkshires I’ve talked to people from Vietnam and many Latin American countries, and just the other day to a man from Lanzhou, in western China. Every one has talked about things they miss, especially the food, even in the briefest conversation. Their eyes are misty with recollection.
The migrants at the southern border aren’t there because they prefer American food or American culture to their own home ways. They’d rather live in their own cities and villages, hearing familiar sounds and walking familiar streets and eating what they know is far better food than they will find here. Their wanting to come to a richer, and generally less troubled and repressive countries gives rich countries’ citizens a false pride. Imagine what it takes to get people to overlook US gun violence - let alone the lack of public transit and the mostly terrible food - and still want to live here!
I know we need to manage immigration much, much better than we do. (This is an issue in Europe, of course, not just in the US. And in the US it is of greatest importance because the Republicans have weaponized it in Congress and in the presidential campaign, and apparently plan literally to weaponize it if they win the November election. Gift article from Washington Post.) Open borders make no sense. Closed borders are equally stupid. But it seems impossible to manage the flow of people rationally and compassionately and affordably.
Reading about environmental sustainability has clarified the problem for me. Not because migration is today often the result of environmental pressures (though it is), but because migration is a perfect example of a problem that requires systems thinking, not typical political tunnel vision.
I ought to have dived into systems analysis a long time ago, but I only tuned in to the concept when I was looking through a book recently - a book I published incidentally - and saw an article entitled “Systems Thinking” (PDF). This led me to a writer who should be better known, Donella Meadows. Married to another scientist and one of her co-authors, I have a feeling that during her lifetime she did not get all the recognition she deserved. She was an MIT and then Dartmouth professor and an unusually clear writer, given her highly specialized profession, and best known as the lead author of the 1970 bestseller Limits to Growth. It’s her posthumous book Thinking in Systems that has me looking at immigration afresh.
What drew me to the title “Systems Thinking” was a long-held frustration that arose from the different areas I’ve worked in, published on, and written about: sports, religion, world history, China, global perspectives, sustainability, leadership, women and politics. I got to know experts working on all kinds of important issues, but what was missing was the connections between them. Yet I knew the connections were there, and that solutions couldn’t be solved in those academic silos. Or activist silos like “stop fossil fuels now” (generally by making a donation to a particular nonprofit).
This is in addition to the problem of nationalism in academia. It was incredibly hard, for example, to get US scholars to include anything about the world outside our borders even when they were writing about universal topics. This was especially noticeable when working on the Encyclopedia of Community, the subject I know most about and that’s closest to my heart (but I am not, as the SAGE website insists, connected with UC Berkeley). The US scholars were top-notch, but they rarely even knew one another, outside their own academic patch (sociology, or internet communities, or urban studies).
I am not going to suggest any kind of solution to immigration, except to say that we should all learn to think in systems. This is what I’ll be applying myself to.
Systems analysis, incidentally, is in an academic sense very much in the realm of computer science and maths - and probably now AI, though if the AI writing I’ve seen is any measure at all, it is not going to solve a human problem as complex as global migration.
There is one area in which I have been able to apply a systems approach already. I’m working on the new chapters for the new version of The Great Good Place, the book that coined the term “third place” (still used by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz even about his drive-throughs). As I worked through the material, I saw that there were certain elements that made third places - casual, regular social life - possible. I then realized that the same elements, put into place to create a healthy social environment, would put us well on the path to solving three major problems: climate change, loneliness, and political polarization. This will be the central theme of the new book. Third places are what Meadows called “leverage points,” the things that can tip a system in a new direction (PDF article on that subject here).
What might be a leverage point for other big problems, including migration?
PS: The Ukrainian student I was talking to mentioned the “purple flowers,” not knowing their name in English. From the photos, the flowers she was thinking of were lilacs, and I’ve used a photo here from a Ukrainian travel guide. This also spurred me to look for lilac gardens nearer home: there’s Lilac Park in Lenox, Massachusetts, only a short drive away, as well as the Harvard Arboretum, renowned for lilacs.
Meanwhile, we have snowdrops and the winter aconite is blooming, and I’ve started some sweetpea seeds, to go into pots today. I am hoping for a display like the one I had years ago, pictured at right. That was before deer started roaming the neighborhood, a problem I’ll have to face before planting them outside. Invasive species also require a systems approach!