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2007
On Biases
Martin Melaver, CEO
A Yemenite bus driver, a Druze security guard, an Israeli school teacher, and an American businessman were once traveling together in the north of Israel on the Syrian/Lebanese border . . . sounds like the makings of some off-color ethnic joke.
Actually, all four of us were traveling together, accompanying my daughter and her 8th-grade classmates on their end-of-year school camping trip. It was a wonderful three days together. Among other things, I was reminded of just how culturally diverse Israel is. We mixed with a religious group of school girls, who waited patiently till all the boys exited the cool springs we were swimming in, so that they could modestly splash about. We camped along Arab high-school-ers, also on their annual outing. We watched a group of recent Russian school girls playing soccer in long skirts in the parking lot at the end of one of our hikes, all yattering in Russian with one another. Our guide, a 72-year old Israeli-born organic farmer from Yokneam, spoke a good bit about Druze customs and history since we were in an area long populated by this unique Muslim sect.
With all this peaceful pluralism, however, there were still the quiet one-one-one conversations that typified tribal stereotypes and suggested that group biases die hard if at all. Our farmer-guide asked me quietly why we had chosen a Druze to be our security guard when there were plenty of Israeli Jews who could fill that role. Our Yemenite bus driver argued passionately with the Ashkenazaic owner of the ice-cream truck parked at the end of one of our hikes about equality (or lack thereof) between the Ashkenazic and Sephardic groups in this country. No one seemed to have much of a kind word for the black-dressed ultra Orthodox. And so it went. Peaceful, warm relations among our diverse group mixed with heated, critical stereotypes of “those others.” The apparent contradiction reminded me of biologist Edward Wilson’s salient comment, in his work Consilience, about the challenges of transcending millennia of biases which tribes have for one another.
You see these biasescloser to home. At our own company, despite a univocal passion for environmental issues, I have colleagues that harbor a belief that global warming might still be a political myth foisted on the nation by the left. Some of my good friends in the environmental movement seem equally skeptical of developers and believe we collectively are the bane of the poor state of affairs we find ourselves in. I tend to cast a critical eye at government officials at the state, regional, and local levels for what I perceive to be a lack of leadership and incapacity to shape planning along watershed lines. And so it goes. Hope for a coalescence that transcends political and professional boundaries – in the interest of shaping a healthier land-community ethic – is mixed with a personal bias about the self-interestedness of “others” who seem unwilling to work for the greater good of all.
And the question bugging me during my recent camping trip with my daughter and her class asserts itself in the context of the environmental issues we are all facing: how do we get beyond these biases? Will it take a crisis of monumental proportions before we all start working together seriously? Or will it be too late to address or redress the consequences of what we have been sowing for so long? Maybe putting these biases on the table, recognizing them for the critical obstacles they are, may be a first step? I hope so.
Two men were standing next to each other in a line of urinals, relieving themselves. One turns to the other and asks, “Were you circumcised by Rabbi Gershon?” The other, a bit surprised by the intrusion, acknowledges that in fact Rabbi Gershon had circumcised him as an infant. “Why do you ask,” he responded. “Well, said the first man, “Rabbi Gershon cuts on the bias. You’re pissing in my urinal.”
Maybe by first acknowledging our biases, we’ll stop pissing in each other’s well.
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