Putting the Process First

Any action, in the basic, philosophical sense, has two parts. There is the process, that is, the actual carrying out of an act and how it is performed (the means), and there is the result, the change, gain, loss, or alteration that was made to the previously existing state of whatever was acted upon (the end). While no one would dispute that results eventually have to matter, I believe that our current economic crisis has a lot to do with our society’s obsession with the end, rather than the means.
Take the housing crisis for example. Why should a house in 2007, that was in no way different than it was 5 years ago, suddenly be worth $100,000 more than it was in 2002? As we all know now, there is no good reason, because there was no means by which that value was added, yet if people went along with the end, they stood to make a lot of money…so no one said anything. Now our banks are failing, foreclosures are up, and many people have lost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in the stock market.
Unfortunately, this is not the only area in our society where the end has outweighed the means. Look at No Child Left Behind’s effect on schools. Instead of hiring the best teachers and using the most effective means of instruction in the classroom, schools are in a state of constant change because they are measured by arbitrary standards that don’t account for changes or variations in student demographics. Look at our automobile industry. Look at the loss of blue collar manufacturing jobs in general. Putting the ends before the means can explain nearly every product recall (the recent peanut butter fiasco), every sacrifice of product quality, every occurrence of poor customer service, and every industry that moves overseas instead of employing U.S. workers.
Alternately, in the areas where it would make sense to examine the ends, our society obsesses about the means for ideological reasons. We can’t have universal health care, because that would be socialism, never mind that the cost in the end is astronomical and is one of the reasons U.S. industries can’t compete with foreign competitors. Likewise, we have to harshly punish criminals because they broke the law, never mind that our prisons are absolutely bursting with people convicted for non-violent crimes or parole violations, or that we have the largest prison population in the world.
There’s the old question about whether the ends justify the means, and I think that regardless of what we are doing, we need to examine both to see if they are really serving our interests. Coaches emphasize the process, the means their athletes use to compete. I think that our society would be wise to do the same. We need to get back to emphasizing quality during the process, rather than justifying a shoddy process because it produces the results we desire, or because we are ideologically attached to the process, as in health care and criminal justice. Eventually, bad means come home to roost and produce bad results.
After all, who do you want at the plate in the ninth inning with runners in scoring position: a baseball player that has hit a screaming line drive to the shortstop three times in a game but has a zero batting average, or the awkward second baseman who got lucky once on a swinging bunt and is batting .333?