One sunny Sunday morning several years ago, I flew into Perth, Western Australia. It was a working trip, so I had with me several suitcases, including a 70-pound trunk filled with books and papers.
At the airport taxi stand, I started to apologize to the driver for burdening him with such a quantity of luggage. A huge smile on his face, he scooped up my heavy cases and deftly hoisted the trunk onto the roof of his cab.
Delighted with the sunshine and his friendly, upbeat demeanor, I thought I'd found utopia. On the ride into town, catching a glimpse of Perth's famous black swans on the river, I asked my new friend what he liked most about living in Perth.
"Well, it's not as bad as a lot of other places."
"How's that?" I asked, more than a little baffled by his response.
"There isn't as much crime. There isn't as much pollution. There isn't as much poverty. It's not as bad as a lot of other places. Yeah, that's what I like best about living here."
Well, I suppose that's one way of looking at it.
Even today, I still find it curious that problems are so central to our awareness.
It seems to begin very early in our lives. Researchers put small tape recorders on the backs of 5-year-olds. They found that today's children are growing up in homes where as much as 90 percent of the conversation is about how bad things are, what was done wrong, who is to blame, and what not to do.
As we become adults, the deficit mindset is reinforced as we are swept into the intellectual climate of critique that has expanded in the last several decades. We are taught valuable lessons in how to be critical and analytical, to deconstruct, expose, debunk.
This worldview is fortified by deep and pervasive cultural and intellectual traditions.
The idea of original sin, according to defrocked priest Matthew Fox, has dominated Western culture for more than a thousand years, providing a foundational belief for many. (It wasn't always so. Fox tells us that creation itself--the original blessing--was at the heart of Christianity until St. Augustine in the fourth century.) A friend who is a devout Catholic has told me of the prayer before communion that begins "Lord, I am not worthy" (words he has boldly replaced with "Lord, I am worthy, for I was made in Your image").
Today, such long-held beliefs have been supplemented by modern social science, which has provided a generous supply of new models of human deficit.
Here's one example: In the space of just a few decades, professional diagnostic terms--depression, attention deficit disorder, codependency, addiction--have spread widely in popular culture. This language, and the disease-oriented framework it reflects, have come to dominate how we think and talk about our inner lives. We may even have learned how to be mentally ill.
With all of this energy devoted to a deficit-oriented worldview, is it any wonder so many of us grow up believing that problems are at the center of our lives? Or even that people don't have problems, they are problems, and that life itself is a problem to be solved?
Our attention to problems is understandable. It may be that we're born with our brains hard-wired that way. After all, our ancestors had to be acutely aware of danger in order to survive.
On top of any innate tendencies, we also wire our brains through our daily actions. We human beings are intensely social creatures. We learn by watching and copying what other people do. Researchers who study how our brains work are finding that this learning happens through the operation of special brain cells called mirror neurons. These cells perform a most amazing function: When you sit perfectly still and watch someone else do something, your mirror neurons fire exactly as if you were doing the action yourself. You can literally feel what the other person is going through.
This astonishing discovery starts to explain why we tend to take on the feelings, language, and beliefs of those around us--why we follow along when our lunch companions complain about how bad things are. The study of mirror neurons is beginning to provide a biological understanding of empathy, human connection, learning, and even the transmission of culture.
There's more. A constantly repeated behavior creates and reinforces pathways in the basal ganglia, the part of the brain where habits live. When we habitually focus on problems, we may actually change our own brains in ways that make it more likely we'll continue to pay attention to problems.
With all this going on inside our brains, it starts to sound like it might be a large task to rewire ourselves in another direction. The encouraging news, it seems to me, is that it is possible. After all, if we've learned our problem-oriented culture by imitating other people, we can learn (and teach) new behaviors in the same way. And new habits can replace old ones.
But it's reasonable to ask at the outset: Why make the effort?
After all, there is a certain liberation in being critical and cutting right to the problem. And better to be a staunch social critic than a feeble apologist for an unjust status quo--if we see those as the only available options.
Yet as we'll see, we pay a high price when we let criticism become the dominant way we look at the world. I believe it is time to reconsider the utility of the deficit-based stance, just as we've worked to rise above other aspects of human behavior that have outlived their usefulness.