Amy E. Herman - Fixed - How to Perfect the Fine Art of Problem Solving

The Raft of the Medusa by Thodore Gricault, 1819, oil on canvas.

Gricault, Thodore (17911824). The Raft of the Medusa [Le radeau de la Mduse]. 1819. Oil on canvas, 491.0 x 716.0 cm. Inv. 4884. Photo: Michel Urtado. Muse du Louvre, Paris, France RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Then, take a breath and let your mind wander.

What did the chaos of the preceding scene bring to mind? A natural disaster? A human-made catastrophe? The current state of your country? Maybe you were reminded of more personal scenarios: office drama, an argument at home that got out of hand, Zoom Thanksgiving. No matter who you are or where you live, chances are you can relate to the desperation depicted above.

The painting, Thodore Gricaults The Raft of the Medusa, recalls real-life events when a French frigate, the lead ship in a convoy of four, wandered away from its companions and ran aground thirty miles off the coast of Africa. It may seem like a disaster from long ago (in fact, this painting depicts the events of July 17, 1816). But the failures that led up to it could have just as easily come from some of the disasters of last week, or a disaster that might happen today or tomorrow. For instance, the person responsible for the shipwreck was an inexperienced middle-aged political appointee. He was white, well-off, and so incompetent that he mistook a far-off cluster of clouds for a nearby coastal mountain and, believing he was farther out to sea (despite the appearance of whitecaps around the boat), steered straight into a sandbar. Even after the ship lodged firmly in the sand, he refused to free his ship by throwing its fourteen cannons (weighing forty-two tons) overboard. Being grounded so close to shore shouldnt necessarily have led to tragedy. A plan was drawn up for the other ships in the convoy to save the weapons and gold on board and ferry all the passengers to shore. But when a storm began to tear the Medusa apart, the captain panicked, scrapped his plan, and quickly boarded one of the six lifeboats, whose limited seating he reserved exclusively for the ships officers, the territorial governor, and their families.

In this stunning display of incompetence in a crisis, its hard not to see parallels to our own day. The captain consigned nearly half of the ships passengerscivilians and lesser seamento the poorly built raft. Although it had originally been built as a place to stow the cargo, instead he loaded it up with peoplelots and lots of people. It was rickety and rode half underwater, and its sizesixty-six feet long and twenty-three feet wide (almost exactly the width of Gricaults painting)might have been big enough for a roomful of ravers on spring break, but not for 146 men, an unfortunate woman, and a twelve-year-old boy. Under the new plan, they all headed out to sea, with the raft pulled on tow ropes behind the lifeboats. For all the haste, for the first mile or so, this jerry-rigged setup worked fine.

Until it didnt.

The oarsmen in the lifeboats quickly realized that the lifeboats would be going nowhere if they had to pull so much more dead weight to safety. The captain, fearing that the instability of the arrangement would endanger the passengers in the sturdier craft, ordered the ropes to be cut, leaving their compatriots on the raft to fend for themselves, with no steering, no sails, and only a barrel of wine and a tin of biscuits by way of supplies. Alone on the open sea, the crowd on the raftyoung and old, Black and white, male and female, experienced and notfought viciously and descended, with astonishing speed, into cannibalism. After eating their hats and belts, they started eating each other. When the raft was rescued just thirteen days later, only fifteen people were left alive, five of them barely. One of the crew who rescued those on the raft wrote, Those I saved had eaten human flesh for several days, and when I found them, the ropes that served as stays were covered with pieces of meat they had hung up to dry.

This horror story rocked France, and the harsh light it cast on the regime threatened the newly restored monarchy. Royalist forces covered up the atrocity, publishing a notice that the 148 had been lost at sea, until 2 of the survivors (the ships surgeon and an engineer, who can be seen in the painting conferring by the mast) wrote up an eyewitness account of life on the raft (later expanded into a book) that contradicted the official version of events. The book became a bestseller in France, which kept the callousness of the aristocracy in the headlines. As a result of this notoriety, the captain was put on trial and his light sentence at the end of the proceedingsonly three years in prison, and not deathset off a furor.

So did the nearly life-sized The Raft of the Medusa when it first appeared in Paris three years after the wreck, as part of the Salon of 1819. In a reflection of the divided political landscape of the day, critics battled over its value, praising its timeliness, ridiculing its inaccuracies (the starving survivors look more like refugees from a weightlifting competition). One even blamed the artist for starting a race riot, since a Black man was featured in the paintings focal point. On seeing the work, Louis XVIII chose to ignore the political implications and graciously focused instead on the great accomplishment, telling the artist, Monsieur Gricault, youve painted a shipwreckand here the king paused, as if in anger, before wittily concludingwhich is not one for you! But a discouraged Gricault, who felt the reception hadnt met his own high expectations for the work, cut the painting from its frame and lamented, Its not worth looking at.

The Louvre and its millions of visitors would likely disagree. Today, The Raft of the Medusa (although not acquired until 1824, after the painters death) currently occupies an entire wall in the illustrious museum. The painting is raw, complicated, and gruesome. It covers contemporary politics and history (both of painting and of France), and it took years of meticulous study followed by feverish concentration in a remote studio to finish, and later to navigate its public reception. As such, I believe its a perfect primer for solving complex problems.

Problem-solving is a critical survival skill because things go wrong for all of us all the time. Working through problems is critical for productivity, profit, and peace. Our problem-solving skills, however, have been short-circuited by our complicated, technology-reliant world. For the first time in human history, many of us share the same best friends: Siri and Alexa. Weve become increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, even to fuel our imaginations. The downside to the internets speed at spitting up answers, however, is that we have allowed our own reasoning skills to be dulled or underdeveloped. Why learn how to fix something when Google can do it?