Not long ago, a former colleague sent me a video clip that she needed my permission to use. In it, I expounded on the difficulties of doing what we call ‘public policy’ or the making of decisions impacting the broader good. During this aforementioned clip, I repeated a firm belief of mine … while doing policy may look easy, it definitely is not for the faint of heart. I even shared a favorite mantra of mine … the solutions of one generation are the scandals of the next. Problems we thought solved, or at least solvable, inevitably resurface again in even more intractable and diabolical forms.

So called ‘wicked‘ policy issues are the worst. Such challenges involve confusing or contrary goals, disputed or non existing evidence, competing or incomplete theories, and proposed solutions that reek of contradiction and difficulty. Even where solutions are forthcoming, and an apparent concensus achieved, it is not long before shortcomings are realized and unintended consequences emerge. No one can anticipate all the effects attached to a policy change. We cannot calculate all the intricate interactions that either emerge with time or sense all the subtle, unexpected impacts that eventually manifest themselves.

Such epiphanies were thrust upon me during the many years I was immersed in various welfare reform battles. In that contentious arena, one policy truism became an inescapable reality … it was impossible to please everyone. More likely, you would please no one. During those difficult days, I embraced another of my inviolable mantras … I knew I was approaching a truth on welfare reform when literally no one agreed with what I was saying. That made my professional road rather lonely indeed.

Now, some policy dilemmas were technical in character and, by virtue of their character, were beyond resolution. For example, there was the ‘iron law’ of welfare reform. In this conundrum, you could not satisfy certain ends simultaneously no matter how hard you tried. For example, you could not design a reform package that would result in adequate welfare grants while achieving target efficiency and fostering a positive labor supply … at least within acceptable cost parameters and at the same time. It just couldn’t be done.

Consider the following. You could achieve the goal of eliminating poverty by raising the welfare guarantee (what the beneficiary with no other income might receive) to sufficient levels. But then you would negatively impact positive labor supply expectations since beneficiaries would have little incentive to work. You might then fool around with what are called ‘marginal tax rates’ or the rate at which the benefits are decreased in the face of any earnings. Lower rates improve the reward for work (by putting more money in the persons pocket) but that erodes target efficiency … the proportion of welfare expenditures that go only (or primarily) to families below the poverty threshold. You might consider mandated work regimes, but those strategies quickly become budget busters. Just trust me on this one, you cannot resolve this small set of policy ends simultaneously. That is why the welfare debate endured for so long. [Note: these conundrums were resolved by pretty much ending cash welfare to poor families and accepting poverty levels higher than found in our peer nations but oddly enough acceptable to most Americans.]

Complicating policy even more are our diversity of values. For better or worse, we are a heterogeneous society. That is, we do not have a common culture based on shared understandings. We don’t even come close. Our governing norms are diverse and often contradictory even at their core. We disagree about the nature of truth, about our views of false positives and negatives, about what constitutes worth and meaning. Some of us see people as basically good, and we tend toward positive reinforcements to enhance that goodness. Others of us see people as essentially evil and tend toward universal punishments to effect proper behaviors. Compromise across such different world views is difficult, if not impossible. And such divergent perspectives are everywhere across this strife-ridden land.

The tendency for many (in America at least) to rely upon absolutes (an inability to engage in nuanced thinking) reflects on dimension of our national dilemma. Abortion is always evil and never can be tolerated for some. For others, it is a matter of basic individual choice and personal freedom. And for others, it is to be avoided when convenient, but we can consider the quality of life and other mitigating factors when deciding if it is appropriate.

Another example: Is it better to incarcerate 10 innocent men rather than let one guilty one go free or just the reverse? We differ greatly on such hypotheticals, yet such primordial dispositions frame our sense of what constitutes justice. And another: Should we grab onto an ancient text written over hundreds of years by wildly different authors and then organized by a committee driven mostly by politics and insist it is God’s word that would trump even our nation’s Constitution. Or should we rely upon, and be guided by, centuries of thoughtful evolution that has resulted in the scientific method, something that has opened up an unfathomable universe to our understanding. Finding common ground is difficult when their are rifts within our foundational thinking … when claims of divine inspiration are deemed superior to rigorous thinking and advanced thought.

The bottom line is this. Policy is hard because humans are involved. We sometimes can work together and solve intricate issues when they are technical in nature. We decided to put a man on the moon and did it. But those challenges that tap our human side are something very different indeed. We declared a ‘war on poverty’ and found that an unsolvable conundrum. Why? In part because we had fundamental disagreements on how people functioned and were motivated. We differed on the very nature of reality and truth.

And so I looked upon the beleaguered Presidents of three top universities … Harvard, MIT, and Penn. These are very smart people with years of management behind them. But they wound up being crucified for their defense of the principle of ‘free speech’ on campus. How could an inviolable foundation of intellectual life, a sacred belief within academia, bring them so low. [Note: the President of Penn has resigned while the other two are under withering fire.]

They fell from grace, not because they were crucified on the horns of a technical dilemma like the iron law of welfare reform. No, they ran afoul of a newer form of political persecution. In today’s gotcha world, the game involves putting leaders in impossible situations by confronting them with foundational beliefs that rub against one another with considerable fiction. Then, the inquisitors go in for the rhetorical kill. On either side of virtually all contemporary issues are partisans who hate those on the other side. This visceral animosity was made popular by Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s though previous versions existed (for example, in the pre-civil war 1850s). No compromise is tolerated. Governing is a zero-sum game. You lose if the other side doesn’t, even when they act on principle and for the common good.

When power is everything and winning is all, intellectual niceties such as science and evidence easily are sacrificed. Okay, some science is yet trusted, where only technical issues are involved (a smaller and smaller set). Increasingly, even once protected areas of rigorous inquiry are subject to partisan nonsense. Medical science previously was looked to as a way of advancing our health and well-being. Recently, however, even the most respected medical scientists are vilified and threatened with jail simply because that keeps members of the conservative base angry and inflamed. When we cannot trust the best science, whom can we trust?

While we try to govern and make decisions through accepted process and established evidence, it all comes down in the end to questions of trust. There is a great scene in the movie about the black woman who did the NASA calculations for the early space shots. When astronaut Scott Glenn had concerns about the numbers he was given based on computer algorithms, he asked that the ‘smart’ lady redo them manually. It was a matter of trust for him. Back then, he trusted a human over a machine.

I was thinking about this trust issue recently in the context of the evidence that the long expected (theoretically) Higgs Boson sub-atomic particle exists. The only way to prove it involved sending beams of protons hurtling at each other near the speed of light. This required an apparatus so big and intricate that it crossed the borders of two countries in size and involved fiscal outlays and intellectual resources from some 23 countries. Even then, the effects of the collision only lasted a tiny fraction of a moment before decaying. Difficulty did not matter. Detecting this elemental particle was seen as a fundamental step toward confirming the ‘standard model’ of particle physics. It was extremely important to those who worry about such things. When they discovered this long sought particle about a decade ago at an immense costs (the large Hadron collider alone cost over $9 billion back when it was built), the entire world of physics rejoiced. And the rest of the world believed they had actually found something worth being excited about.

But here is the thing. We mortals cannot verify that they found anything. In the end, we must believe their integrity and the scientific methods they used. Without such elementary trust, we risk reverting to a new ‘dark ages.’ We are in the atomic age because our leaders, driven by the necessity of war, believed in the math posed by a handful of scientists no one understood. We proceeded toward nuclear fission based on leaps of faith.

The Presidents of the major universities now under attack had a much more difficult task. When they testified before Congress, they were going to be crucified no matter what they said. Still, it struck me that they remained true to their calling as they tried to make intellectually nuanced arguments that they must have known would satisfy no political extremists in the end. When asked repeatedly why some students could express the most hateful opinions and inflammatory rhetoric calling that called for violence against others, they waffled and danced and kept talking about context and freedoms. They may have been correct but, in today’s environment where only absolutes satisfy, they were doomed to ridicule at the least, outright sacrifice by others.

I could not do any better. I would have defended free speech as a principle. I do believe that people have the right to say really stupid things and, if pressed, will fight for their right to be stupid. But I do have a line in the sand. I rather agree with the old adage that ‘you cannot shout fire in a crowded theater.’ (Was that Justice Brandeis?) Likewise, I don’t believe people can explicitly call for violence against others in public places and forums absent any cost. When you put others at imminent risk of physical harm or death, you have gone too far in my book. But that is merely my book.

I might have tried something like that were I in their shoes. And I would have fared no better than they. In short, there are no acceptable responses to today’s political questions or some of our wicked policy challenges. And so, doing policy these days is still not for the faint of heart. At the same time, someone has to step up to the plate and try. Otherwise, we are doomed.