David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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A Class Apart

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What we want in America is a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, imposing economic equality through the redistribution of wealth has always seemed un-American. But there is a place where the needs for greater equality and a fairer playing field converge, and we are in that place today.

A good life and good work are not possible without the opportunity to make enough to meet our basic economic needs. In other words, every American needs a fair shot at the American pie, as opposed to an increasingly small piece of it. As the nation’s wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, fair opportunity disappears and makes the need for a national conversation about greater economic equality more pressing.

“Fairness” (in terms of opportunity) and “equality” (as a way to distribute wealth) are not the same thing.

Surveys regularly find that Americans accept a certain amount of inequality when it comes to wealth because of factors like individual merit. When one study asked about their ideal distribution of wealth, most responded with an allocation that was far from equal. People in the top 20% could have three times as much wealth as those in the bottom 20%, they said. In the article that reported these findings, this study’s author described the majority’s comfort level as “not too equal, but not too unequal.” By contrast, 84% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 20% today compared to only 0.3% in the hands of the bottom 20% (or more than 250 times as much)—an almost textbook case for “too unequal.”

In order to focus debate on this vast disparity of wealth in America, it will be necessary to bear in mind the differences between fairness and equality, because the distinction:

allows us to zoom in on certain critical questions that have long been of interest to political scientists and moral philosophers. When is it unjust to treat people the same—that is, which factors (hard work, skill, need, morality) are fair grounds for inequality and which are not? Which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit?

We can accept inequality under certain circumstances, but extreme disparities in wealth offend our basic sense of justice and fairness.

The richest 20% seem to know that there is something offensive about the gulf that exists between them and the other 80% of Americans. There was a piece in the New York Times last week that had a great deal to say about their (or our) discomfort with what the author called “the moral stigma of privilege.” Interviews with wealthy New Yorkers revealed that they routinely:

-take price tags and labels off expensive purchases so housekeepers and nannies can’t see the “obscenely high” amounts that they pay for items like “six dollar bread;”

-describe themselves as “comfortable,” “fortunate” or even “middle class” instead of rich or upper class;

-point out how “hard-working,” “charitable” and sensitive they are about “not showing off” what they have.

Their consideration, lack of ostentation, and other personal qualities seemed to be offered so that the interviewees can be seen as “worthy” of their privilege. “If they can see themselves [and the rest of us can see them] as hard workers and reasonable consumers,” the author notes, “they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American ‘middle,’ while remaining materially at the top.”

Whether rich people are also “good people” simply obscures the important issue however.

[W]hat’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

So the issue isn’t whether rich people are also nice and hardworking. Instead, it is whether we should tolerate a small percentage of our citizens having so much more than everyone else. Is this state of affairs “good” for us as citizens and as a country?

With more wealth concentrating at the top of society, it is hardly surprising that the populism behind movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party became even more pronounced in the last election. Wealthy, often urban professionals on the right and left coasts may be puzzled by it and disgusted with some of the key players, but somewhere within this political upheaval is the desire for a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work. To realize that desire will mean reducing the economic divide after an honest discussion with these same wealthy, often urban professionals about the inequality that benefits them most.

“A shot at the American Dream” was the chance that every returning soldier wanted to take in 1945. The G.I. Bill after World War II reduced economic inequality by providing a fairer opportunity (with the possibility of college and home ownership) to the mostly white men of every economic class who were coming home. After their own struggle for greater equality, women and minorities secured a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and work after the Great Society programs of the Sixties and the women’s movement of the Seventies. Indeed, many of the men and women who benefitted from that 30-year push for greater equality made it into today’s wealthiest class, or lived to see their highly educated children enter it.

Today, there is once again an urgent need to confront the economic disparities that have become entrenched since our last conversation as Americans about greater equality in terms of wealth and class. For the vast majority, a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work will not be possible until we do.

 

Our Mediating Devices

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I started this post with two different impressions about the phone and computer screens that stand between us and what we want to realize or accomplish—that is, the devices that increasingly mediate our everyday experiences. I still don’t know where to take these impressions.

Two articles about technology gave rise to them. One was about how “smartphone-savy millennials and Gen Zers” answer the doorbell by sending text messages instead of opening the door and facing the person who is ringing it. The other came after reading an interview about Microsoft teams that are building products which try to respond to human needs instead of asking the end user to do all of the adapting. The first story illustrates how smart phones diminish human interaction, while the second suggests a role for technology that actually might enhance the human experience. One seems a warning and the other welcome news.

Who knew that young people don’t answer their doorbells, and may even be “terrified” when they ring. I would have put this article in the armchair anthropology pile, but its observations and conclusions came from Christopher Mims, who studied neuroscience and behavioral biology before he became a technology reporter around 15 years ago. He also posts regularly about the intersection of these disciplines, and I invariably find myself nodding to his conclusions. So maybe something more is happening in these awkward exchanges that young people are trying to have with cell phones in between them.

Instead of answering the doorbell that announces an expected delivery of, say, a pizza, this teen through 30 cohort apparently would prefer that the delivery person text them when arriving so they can text back with payment, a tip, and a request to leave the pizza by the door. Both would prefer never to encounter the other. The talking heads who commented on this behavior included:

– a so-called “teen-whisperer” who said that text means “friend” while a door-bell says “outsider;”

– the founder of Ring, a WiFi connected doorbell that enables those inside to communicate with those outside without making eye contact; and

– a psychology professor who says this behavior suggests a further decline in face-to-face interaction by teenagers and young adults, with implications for their emotional closeness and mental health.

While young people may be on the leading edge of this kind of social change, I think what Mims is observing effects everyone who uses mediating technologies and not just young people. Do I bank on-line because I don’t want to deal with tellers? Do I click on a website’s customer service bot because I prefer it to conversation with an actual customer service representative? By doing so, am I slowly losing my ability to interact in an effective manner with other people?

And there are other questions too. What should parents do when their child rarely seems to interact with anybody live? What should I conclude from a table of college students at Shake Shack this week, all on their phones but never talking or making eye contact with one another? What do you make of people who email you at work when they could walk a few steps and either ask you or tell you something in person?

I don’t know what’s happening here, but it may be affecting our wiring at a very basic level. From a values perspective, it’s difficult to see how the “distancing” that our devices permit could be improving how we relate to ourselves or to one another.

Besides Mims, another voice in the space between human behavior and technology is Sherry Turkel at MIT. A TED talk that she gave a few years back catalogs similar concerns about the anti-social uses of mediating technologies.

On the other hand, when a mediating device tries to respond to human needs and create new possibilities it leaves a better impression.

Dave Nelson is Microsoft’s lead designer, and he makes many interesting statements in an interview he gave recently, including how early exposure to Flash technology allowed him “to make things come alive and get rich feedback from screens, which were traditionally hard to interact with.”

By the time he got to Microsoft, the desire for even greater responsiveness led him and his designers to focus more on meeting customer needs than on how to get people to adapt to a device’s limitations. As he put it: we began to look at “how we can get the computer to be more human-literate rather than making people more computer literate.”

The break-through came during exchanges between Microsoft engineers and customers while developing a new platform called Compass.

The engineers saw firsthand the range of emotions that real people had while working with their product. They saw the setup, the trepidation of trying to get in, the pain points, and the joy…This became the central turning point for our culture today. Now every single person in the [design] team has gone on site and spent time with our early customers. This has never happened before at Microsoft. The change in perspective for engineers and other personnel has been huge…It has put people at the forefront of our processes.

It should also be said that Microsoft’s designers had never been this integral to a product’s development before. They were suddenly interacting with people who don’t sit in front of screens all day—baristas in coffee shops, construction workers, health care professionals—who needed interfaces that streamline everyday work functions like scheduling. In a way, Nelson’s designers were learning how people speak so they could teach new Microsoft programs how to understand what was needed and be more responsive to those needs.

This story made me ask some additional questions.

– If new devices can sense our needs for better scheduling and work flows, can they also support and even encourage qualities that make us more human and less like machines?

– Can they enable richer human connections instead of making us increasingly isolated from one another?

– Will devices allow us to expand our capabilities at work or will they marginalize us until they eventually replace us in the workforce?

– Will our technologies enable greater human freedom and autonomy or herd us like sheep to buy certain things and behave in particular ways?

When I read this week about doorbells and Microsoft’s design team, I realized how little I’ve thought about these questions and that the future of technology for me extends no further than the features I’m likely to find in my next iPhone. Maybe it’s because this future comes so fast that all of our energy is spent trying to absorb what’s here instead of anticipating what might be coming next or thinking about its implications.

Still, concerns are being raised about the impact of recent technologies on human behavior. Frank Wilczek (from the “Learning By Doing” post two weeks ago), Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others recently signed an open letter about the urgent need for a debate about advances in artificial intelligence. But beyond this plea, few have been bold enough to propose how the human future should unfold in the face of these innovations, or to publically debate the proposals that have been made. It should also be said that almost none of the rest of us seem to be clamoring for such a debate.

Oscar Wilde famously said: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always headed.” Wilde said that a century ago, but instead of visions of more humane futures all we seem interested in today is the entertainment value of post-apocalyptic worlds. Articles about avoiding doorbells and technology that begins with human needs provide grounds for concern as well as hope when it comes to what’s next. Maybe they are as good a place as any to start the process of dreaming ahead.

The Work That’s Behind Labor Day

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Most Americans mark Labor Day as the unofficial end of summer. But since 1894, it has also been a national day of rest to celebrate the American worker. Earlier this week, I got ready to honor the day by visiting an exhibit at Drexel University called “Badges: a Memorial Tribute to Asbestos Workers.”

I was interested in the exhibit for several reasons.

Before, during and after World War II, the giant Philadelphia Naval Yard built and serviced many the country’s battleships and other vessels. Asbestos was used extensively for insulation at the Naval Yard, and tens of thousands of workers in my home town were exposed to it.

I was also in the Coast Guard, and ever since I have felt a connection to those who work in America’s ports. But there was another reason too. As a newly minted attorney, my first job was a clerkship for the judge who was presiding over a flood of asbestos cases brought by Naval Yard workers 40 to 50 years after they had been exposed to this hazardous material.

Almost every day for a year, I heard these men’s stories.  All suffered from mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis. None could breathe easily and all were seeking recovery from asbestos companies that had failed to warn them about the dangers they were exposed to. It was difficult to listen to their stories and impossible to forget them. My solidarity with these fallen workers also comes from sharing a courtroom with them.

 Over the years, millions were affected nationwide in a range of asbestos related businesses. As illness becomes apparent—asbestos lodges in the lungs and takes decades to manifest its injuries—the flood of lawsuits led to a 30 billion dollar trust fund established by the asbestos industry to provide compensation for worker claims. But asbestos itself has never been banned as a hazardous product, and according to one watchdog group, has resulted in approximately 200,000 additional deaths between 1999 and 2013, and another 12,000-15,000 every year since.

What intrigued me about the Badges Exhibit, was how its curators attempted to humanize the stories of the workers who were most affected. They show us the badges that the men and women who worked with asbestos actually wore on the job. Like time capsules, these badges bear not only their pictures but also the names of their employers and employee numbers in what are often beautifully crafted metal frames. As Earl Dotter, one of the Exhibit’s curators noted in an interview:

These badges personalized this large group of harmed ship builders, construction insulation workers, and more recently the 9/11 emergency responders I photographed on Ground Zero.

At the time, he also spoke about the impact that these badges had on him:

If in my subject’s employment or work experience they have been diminished, I need to show the causes of that diminishment, wherever that takes me.

Earl Dotter tells worker stories. To do so, he takes pictures, collects photographs, and tracks down memorabilia. It has been his job for most of his adult life. As he said elsewhere: “It was after the tragedies of 1968 [the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations] that I decided to fully devote my creative energy to socially useful photography.” The social use that he had in mind was improving working conditions in hazardous industries. Because he became convinced that working with asbestos could never be safe, he has also been telling everyone who will listen that it should be banned forever.

It is always interesting to learn how someone like Earl Dotter settles on the work of his life. When I conduct interviews about work, this is always my first question because the answer tends to illuminate everything that follows.

Dotter mentioned the Sixties as a catalyst for his social conscience, but I found this remark of his (from the same interview) to be telling as well:

Not too many photographers carve out this subject [hazardous work] as their own today and I still can’t figure out why. Sometimes, when entering a factory, I feel like I am on a movie set with colorful actors of all descriptions populating the moving stage. But what is even better, is it is real and a visually engaging opportunity for me to do useful work too.

For Dotter, being around men and women who were making things was exciting—a real life theater—and as he got to know these workers better, he wanted to help them as only he could.

You can see Earl Dotter’s photography at his website. When he’s not storytelling, he is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s School of Public Health and an advocate for worker safety.

The Badges Exhibit was originally scheduled to close on September 1, but has just been extended through mid-November. Additional information about it can be found here.

This Labor Day, when it is harder to find a factory where workers make things, this story about workplace hazards may seem passé. In the dangerous industries that remain, there are occupational safety laws and far greater accountability than the workforce enjoyed in the heyday of the Philadelphia Naval Yard. But there are still asbestos-related injuries and deaths, and workplace safety concerns continue to stalk many industries such as fishing and coal mining.

Moreover, unless you make your own work (like Dotter has done), work generally strikes a balance between the needs of those who “own the means of production” and the workers “who produce.” Sadly, those needs are not always the same.

Labor Day is a day to celebrate the fairness (and successes) of that balance when it is struck, but it is also for considering how to maintain that fairness in an era of rapid change. Our jobs today will be transformed by increasing automation from both robotics and artificial intelligence. Will we be helped by these developments or harmed by them?

Given the future of our work today, this cautionary tale about America’s asbestos workers could not be more timely.

Doing is Learning

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I come from a world of careful preparation.

Dot was an anesthesiologist who knew that you always got 8 things ready before you did the 9th thing, even when it was going to the beach. Frank was an engineer who was carefree to the point of irresponsibility in his off-duty life, but methodical in his professional one. I don’t remember my parents throwing themselves into projects and learning while they went along. Not even once.

Sometimes, though, preparation can be an impediment, even an excuse to avoid jumping in and figuring out how it all fits together.

Judging when you’re ready to “just do it” is part science and part art. The art is in knowing when jumping in could be good for you—that you’re talented and resilient enough to profit from the experience. It comes from the suspicion that learning it while you’re doing it will get you where you’re going a whole lot faster. So whether you take this advice also has to do with self-confidence, or your lack of it.

I don’t know whether Frank Wilczek knew that he was headed for a Nobel Prize when he took his leap from mathematics to physics with little of the necessary groundwork, but he certainly wanted to get someplace in a hurry. This is what he said about jumping into his new discipline in a recent essay:

         “My approach was different. I hadn’t taken many physics courses, so my preparation had gaping holes. I could manipulate the physics equations as abstract mathematical symbols, but I often had only vague notions about what the symbols meant. Conversely, if you told me about a situation in the physical world, I might have trouble figuring out which equations applied.

Nevertheless, I resolved to leap right to the frontiers of research. I found a great thesis advisor… and an important problem, and I went for it. I picked a subject area where nobody really knew what they were doing, so I didn’t start so far behind. I learned or improvised what I needed as I went along, made lots of mistakes –and got my thesis done quickly.” (emphasis added)

Wilczek didn’t recklessly jump off a cliff, but hedged his bets in a new area “where nobody really knew what they were doing” so he wouldn’t be so far behind. (That kind of judgment is pure art.) He also jumped because he didn’t know about either the meaning or the application of what he did know already, and that more preparation wasn’t going to solve either problem. (That kind of feeling seems more like instinct.) Wilczek sensed that what your actions mean and how your knowledge can be applied will only be learned by doing it.

In 2004, Wilczek won physics highest prize for a subject I can name—asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction—but not describe. When it may have counted most, his talent and ambition were undeterred by his lack of preparation for achieving it.

photograph by Justin Knight

Sometimes you write to yourself as much as to others.

I’ve often risked the death of a good idea by over-preparing instead of just grabbing it and running as fast as I could for the horizon. I call it the eat-first-jump-later phenomenon, because the eating almost always makes you too full to jump. I’ll do it later, after a nap and a walk with the dog, even though I know that it’s better to jump on an empty stomach.

So I’ve often been over-prepared and under-experienced, like I suspect many introverts are. Too much time spent in our heads and not enough outside of them.

There’s fear in over-preparers too, of course. What if I get it all wrong? (Nobody gets everything wrong.) What if I embarrass myself? (What, in front of the bystanders who aren’t risking much of anything?) I mean: what if ALL I show is how much I don’t know? (Well that dimension of embarrassment can spur your effort to avoid more of the same the next time around.)

Little experience jumping into action can also make you oblivious to the likely consequences when you finally do have the impulse or summon the courage. You’ve simply never learned how it’s best to feel and act in the heat of the moment.

Many years ago, I remember tripping and falling on an uneven sidewalk at the Penn campus. A group of West Philly teenagers watched me fall, and one started shrieking with laughter. I got up, approached, and with the side of my shoe upper cut her ample butt saying: “What’s wrong with you?” Of course, it was about what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t help myself. How much better if I’d been able to go over and thank her for giving me the best reason yet to watch where I was going. It would have demonstrated my self-control, and probably startled her more than I did with the bounce of my foot.

Mistakes are not excuses for your anger or confrontation. Instead, they’re lessons (gifts really) to learn from. I could merely have said, “Thank you young lady,” if I’d had more experience, on the ground, both making mistakes and handling their consequences.

So I’ve come to appreciate that the best antidote for the over-preparers and under-experienced is practice in taking those first steps into the relative unknown. Each time is an occasion to  trust that your instincts, know-how and better angels will help you make it to the other end.

Just like learning how to cook one simple meal instead of learning “how to cook,” the first step can be a simple one and, by hedging your bets, you can improve your chances of building self-confidence and overcoming your fears when the next opportunity beckons.

As a line from one of our Nobel laureate’s fortune cookies famously said: “The work will teach you how to do it”—in ways that preparation never can.

Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

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Chris Arnade may have returned to the roots of what has always been most important to him.

He grew up hardscrabble middle-class, where the choices were between new clothes and car repairs on the one hand, and a good education, on the other. He went on to become a successful Wall Street trader, but in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash left that career behind to try and capture the stories of downtrodden but hopeful men and women across America.

I’m not saying that this was courageous or that his life today is exemplary. (You can draw your own conclusions about that.) But there may be ties between where he came from, how he climbed so far up the ladder, what he realized once he got there, and how he’s chosen to live and work ever since. The moral arc we’ve taken since childhood is worth considering—particularly its pull on us to return.

When I came upon Arnade’s story recently, the facts of his past seemed to make powerful suggestions about the ways he’s decided to set his priorities today. Of course, it’s always perilous to select and then connect up the historical dots to your current realities, because hindsight can prove almost anything when it tries hard enough. But the values that you acted on as a child are always in dialogue with your current priorities, and it seems to me that Arnade’s story demonstrates the gravitational forces that are always at play in this kind of correspondence.

Arnade’s family stuck out in its corner of the rural South because of its well-known views on civil rights. His father was a Jewish academic who had fled Nazi Germany, while his mom was a socialist activist. Arnade played sports in high school and learned how to handle a gun, but recalls being ridiculed as a n—lover. Unlike the world of his family, is hometown of San Antonio, Florida was conservative, Catholic and a bit more down-on-its-luck.

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

His parents raised him along with six other siblings. While neither big families nor limited possessions were unusual in San Antonio, the Arnades used their limited resources to take their kids on far-flung research trips that opened them up to the wider world and ultimately to send all seven to college—opportunities that were almost unheard of in their community.

Beyond his family’s politics and commitment to education, Arnade’s upbringing made him something of an outsider in another way. He was neither his family’s youngest nor its oldest child. As he said later:

“Being caught in the middle you end up something of a watcher. You never fit in entirely.”

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

It was almost like being an immigrant, caught between his old country and his new one.

Arnade went to college at Johns Hopkins and ended up getting a doctorate in particle physics. He parleyed his comfort with numbers into a Wall Street job, selling emerging market bonds. Arnade made a lot of money and for the first time had a comfortable life, but several disruptions were soon to follow.

In the years between 2008 and 2012, the stock market crashed, the banks that lost billions for regular people were bailed out by the federal government, his mom (who had her own views about his career) died of cancer, his proprietary trading desk was closed under new regulations, and his fellow traders were complaining that Obamacare had raised their taxes.

It rankled Arnade, and during this time, he seemed torn to his co-workers. One reported that he’d leave work to take half-day walks, reporting back later that he’d taken pictures of poor people and those who had recently arrived in America. This is how Arnade describes that transitional time in a piece he wrote for Quartz:

“I had a very good life. So did the people around me. . .

 We were the front-row kids, and we felt we had done everything right. We had studied hard and gone to good schools. Most of us had parents who supported us. Our schooling got us good jobs that allowed us to live in nice neighborhoods.

Many of us were geeks, educated in the sciences, and steeped in clever rational arguments. With a PhD in physics, I was part of the wave of rocket scientists that changed Wall Street.

Buttressed by our math, our spreadsheets, our data, and our obsession with the rational, we had a confidence that grew into hubris as we entered and changed more and more industries, from baseball to finance, politics and journalism.

That hubris should have dissolved following the financial crisis in 2008. Our unchecked faith in numbers, and in ourselves, had proved disastrous. We should have admitted guilt and rethought the things we were certain about. Instead we focused on bailing ourselves out and moved along as if little had happened.

It was during this time that I started photographing New York City. I would go on long walks to escape the stress of my job in the aftermath of the crisis. I started letting my decisions be guided by unquantifiable things like empathy and curiosity rather than probability.”

When I confronted a similar career pivot, I had a refuge in the Coast Guard that was as far away for me as Arnade’s poor and immigrant sidewalks were from Wall Street. I thought about everything that was wrong with where I’d been, but never trusted enough to let my empathy or curiosity play much of a role.

With “big firm lawyer” behind me, I tried to plan my way to the future. (How much does my next job have to pay so I can cover my expenses? What values are most important to me? What do I want to be when I grow up?) My sense is that Arnade never analyzed the particles in his physics like I tried to do; his was more of a backward drift in the direction of his heart.

The job that gradually emerged for him was documenting the stories of poverty, addiction and finally, wherever there was a forgotten corner of America struggling for dignity. To find these stories Arnade travels the back roads, sleeping in his van or cheap motels. His wife was alarmed at first by his change of focus and loss of income, but she became his collaborator as he posts his visual chronicles on his Flikr account, in essays created for The Atlantic, or in videos about the aspirations of Trump voters.

Arnade seemed to be looking for the truths that had been masked by his upscale life.

In a 2013 interview on NPR, he recounts how one homeless junkie told him that do-gooders often “offer to buy me lunch. But very rarely does anybody ever ask me who I am.” So Arnade started asking.

After one conversation, he asked the call girl how she wanted him to describe her in the picture he had taken.  “As who I am,” she said. “A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” Encounters like this challenged his outlook. “I naively thought that I would see the same cynicism towards faith that I had, and I saw the exact opposite,” he said. Since their optimism seemed revelatory, he thought that it might say something to others too.

Arnade picture of Jose Villa in La Villita, New Mexico after Villa shared his American Dream: “To live a successful life on your terms, to be accepted by others on your terms, and to accept others on their terms.”

According to The Wall Street Journal story where I first learned about him, Arnade’s new career “is an attempt to reconcile his multiple identities.” Maybe. But it certainly includes a return to what he thought was most important to him as a kid. In that NPR interview about his new job, Arnade says: “This is more comfortable to me. This is what I grew up with.” And in what was described as a view from the back row interview, he had this to say:

“I often use my favorite example, which is McDonald’s. I grew up in a white working-class town, so for me, it’s kind of rediscovering what I already knew. But McDonald’s, which is viewed with contempt [by the front row], is actually a center of community, it’s where people gather. McDonald’s is not a joke.”

Of course, his kind of route is never a full circle. Everyone changes along the way, and the back row isn’t known for writing in The Atlantic, The Guardian, or being interviewed and profiled as often as he is. But Arnade has become a kind of megaphone for the values of his heartland, where residuals of respect, reverence, and outrage over injustice remain. It’s not only what he knew and felt was important back then, but his processing of it by that outsider’s perspective in all the years since.

Moral foundations are first established in childhood. They don’t determine what follows, but are always a part of the continuing conversation that conscience plays inside our heads.

Most people find it hard to look at themselves from a critical distance, decide what they should or should not do, and go on to act accordingly. What does my basic decency require me to do here, they wonder. One way to liberate the conversation from the confusion that surrounds it is to ask: what would the child in me do?

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

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