Peripheral Visions

seemed beyond my reach: “Purity is to will one thing.” Over the years, I’ve come to realize that those who will one thing are the most dangerous people around, even if that one thing is apparently something good. Uncomfortable as it often is to divide attention and balance competing goals, trying to put these together into some larger and more inclusive composition, that is the only way to live responsibly in the world. Blindness is likely to affect anyone who pursues a single goal, whether the quest is for the Holy Grail or return on investment, yet blindness of that kind is sometimes regarded as a virtue.
    The style of attention that either ignores an issue or becomes obsessive about it leads to single-issue politics and is often focused too narrowly to solve complex problems, like trying to prevent teenage killings with metal detectors in the school yard instead of job opportunities and social justice. When Californians began to be serious about the water supply, I was struck by the way some people attacked their water consumption as if they were mobilizing for a full-scale war to be fought and finished. Alas, what was needed was not a temporary obsession but men and women who would give, consistently, over time, 5.0 percent of their attention—or maybe 0.5 percent—to conserving water. It is not enough to ignore the issue and then focus in on it or to develop specialists at the cost of apathy in everyone else.
    In order to switch attention to an issue that has been out of focus, it is well to have held a place for that issue in a systemic mental model. In the same way, a cook keeps some pots “on the back burner” in the multiple pattern of attention required to produce a complex meal, and a gardener has an image of the changing impressions to be produced through the seasons, anticipating them with a multitude of tasks. Some issues come in and out of focus easily, depending on need. Some problems are ignored because they have never been defined as problems. When one is taken unawares, it is hard to tell whether attention was too narrow or the mental model incomplete.
    Ecological problems often develop in areas where no one is keeping watch, no one’s purposes are served by vigilance. Human communities always have some awareness that water supplies may be more or less clean, but since it has been possible to take the air for granted through most of history, air pollution took time to notice and attend to. Disease has always been seen as a problem to combat, but learning to focus on health is more difficult. In the same way, our preoccupation with deferring death has blocked attention to the learning involved in dying.
    It has often been said that human beings will only start attending to the worsening environmental situation as the result of disasters, but such shocks would have to be renewed repeatedly and on a steadily increasing scale. Fear is a poor teacher. Waiting for crises, mobilizing in a major way to deal with them, then shifting attention to something else because we can only attend to one thing at a time is not the way to solve the problems of the environment. We can only deal with these things if we have multiple patterns of attention. One necessary type of attention will indeed come from the professionals who concentrate, like chefs and surgeons, on one small part of the issue, one threatened species or region, and become crusaders, but crusading cannot do the broader task. What is needed is more like the kind of attention needed for housekeeping than the total mobilization needed to put out fires. You cannot put off grocery shopping until the children are starving, and you cannot provide for them by making an emergency effort and then turning away to attend to something else. In the same way, controlling the AIDS epidemic depends on persuading ordinary people, male and female, to give just a fraction of their attention to preventing infection, even when they are preoccupied with sex or looking for a fix.
    Life is complicated. It is simplifying but dangerous to have one overriding concern that makes others unimportant—rage or passion or the kind of religious exultation that seeks or inflicts martyrdom. The most striking cause of narrowed attention at the national level is warfare. In a complex world of conflicting priorities, going to war can be a tremendous relief. In peacetime, government has to balance off guns and butter, but when a nation goes to war, it goes to war to win, and