With Upward Mobility Frustrated at Every Turn, Let’s Revitalize the American Dream

October 6, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As I write this, tens of thousands of people are waiting in line in London “to pay their respects” to the Queen. This is no casual choice, since the viewing-line stretches for miles and it could take you a day to reach your goal, which is a walking glimpse (and perhaps a bow of the head or bended knee) before her standard-draped coffin in Westminster Hall.

If you were lucky enough yesterday, the trajectory of your arrival might also have coincided with the brief visit by the Queen’s children (and new King) who were there paying homage to her memory at the compass points of her resting place. But the lines that kept forming outside didn’t need the glimpse of any living royal.

Some asked why so many would wait so long to just walk by.

In my own wondering, I learned that since at least World War II, the Brits have developed a curmudgeonly fondness for standing, waiting for something and ambling towards “whatever it is” with others, chatting and complaining as they go. In the War years, the quest was for rations; today, it’s for a different kind of sustenance.

The British are known for their love of getting in line, which in Britain has long been called a ‘queue,’ from the French word for tail. It was once said ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’

Despite the solitary joke, joining a queue is essentially a group experience, the participants joined by a common desire about what they’re likely to find at the end along the way.

Jenny Muskat, a middle-age woman from London, emerged from Westminster Hall late Thursday and said it took her ‘only’ six-and-a-half hours of waiting. She said she had been unsure earlier in the day about joining the line, but was happy she did after making fast friends with others in the queue. ‘We spent all these hours together, we laughed together, we just now cried together, and it was beautiful,’ she said.

What most of these Brits are doing—and it seems incomprehensible to some—is investing a great deal of time and effort to express their collective respect. They’re saying by this stupendous outpouring: “Thank you. As our Queen, you have given me, given all of us a great deal. In fact, you’ve given us a view of our best selves: Steady. Gracious. Tireless. Of our wry sense of humor. Thank you for being there, for making the rest of us look this good for all these years.”

Masses of people “paying their respect” seems almost unthinkable at a time when irony and cynicism make short work out of anything that’s cherished. People on social media were incredulous that anyone in their right mind would wait for that many hours to walk past a box with a body in it. If a national figure with millions of followers like Donald Trump (certainly a ”comparable” in terms of devotion) were to die tomorrow, the crowds would surely come out, but their gathering would be more of a political act, a kind of middle finger to everyone who didn’t come out, instead of a mass demonstration of respect for public virtues and the personal impacts of their mirrored glory.

_{The Queen’s Queue}

To me, the Magic of the Queen derived from the fact that she was always, throughout her very long life, a kind of cipher. We knew what she wanted us to know about her, and almost nothing more—those virtues again, like steadfastness, self-restraint and even nobility while she was greeting “her people” and accepting their hellos and flowers in her “walkabouts” at another town hall or soccer field.

Because the Queen was a kind of screen, her subjects and other admirers could project what they wanted onto her—a sense of majesty or a quintessential Britishness—and see such qualities reflected back upon them. Her fans are grateful today, eager to express their thanks and respect, because this idealized Queen made these “commoners” feel better about the parts of her that they see in themselves, and that at a time when almost nothing else in modern life does.

The closest that Americans come to this kind of “give and take” with popular figures tend to involve individuals with two qualities that are very different from those that the Queen projected and then returned by way of “reflected glory.” Our idealized figures are usually both “self-made” and “very rich.” The clearest example I can think of is Steve Jobs, who turned his particular mirror back on the rest of us by encouraging the dream that we could also transform the world (and become fabulously rich in the process) by having an idea and a garage in which to realize it. Interestingly, some of Jobs’ unshakable aura may also have come from his timing. In the years after his passing, social media’s cynicism and irony have done a better job of rightsizing his successors (like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) so that their reflected glories are much less desirable to see in ourselves.

Instead these days, most of us have to project our plans about “making ourselves” and “becoming rich” onto a faceless American Dream, while hoping that what gets reflected back encourages our self-sacrifice, inventiveness, hard work and everyday desire to give our children better lives than we’ve had. Unfortunately, while millions continue to believe in that Dream, its promises are no longer encouraging most of us to work harder to achieve it. Instead, those workers who are paying attention in the lower 4/5ths of our economy feel stifled, stuck, betrayed, undermined and “quietly quitting” instead of having their upward mobility encouraged and advanced.

I say “those who are paying attention” because the “tradeoffs” of a top-down, government-managed economy (from the more entrepreneurial one that we had until the 1970s) were not only greater “fairness to all” (without regard to individual talent or effort), but also more material well-being (that is, more stuff) so that hopefully no one would feel quite so badly about the loss of an economic upside, and well-oiled corporations could reap more profits by satisfying our consuming desires.

Having this glut of stuff, along with the distractions of entertainment and social media—its full-bore anesthetizing effects as the years spooled on—are what Aldus Huxley forecast in “Brave New World Revisited,” written in 1932. In a prior post called Whose Future Should We Fear Most (which contrasted George Orwell’s and Huxley’s forecasts through today), I tried to capture the context for mass sedation that Huxley’s book so accurately anticipated.

In our era of 24/7 entertainment ‘on demand,’ of non-stop drama from our ‘news’ outlets, and of a constant barrage of social media updates, none of us ever has to pay much attention to what is happening in the so-called “real world” or the roles we should be playing in it. There is always a new ‘prompt’ from our phones, watches or “smart” speakers to provide us with a refuge from reality. The soma of near constant screen distraction and ‘the internet of things’ has also become a fixture of our daily lives in the four score years since Brave New World was published.

Too many who are no longer animated by the American Dream or disappointed by its promises have also been reduced to passivity by these diversions. They simply can’t be bothered to muster a justifiable sense of outrage before Netflix or YouTube suggests the next thing for them to watch.

But as inflation bites and more data gets mustered, it’s amazing to me that anyone “who’s not already rich or totally checked out” can avoid a sense of outrage and its class-driven political upheavals.

In a post from a couple of weeks back called The Great Resignation is an Exercise in Frustration and Futility I cited data suggesting that government management of the economy has caused the middle, lower middle, and lowest economic classes to realize essentially the same income at the end of their working (or non-working) days due to government transfer payments. But these redistributions of wealth also stifle upward mobility. Mass quitting followed by a frantic search for “better lives via better jobs” is not only a fool’s errand but also an invitation to deeper resentments against “capitalism” and “the American way of life.” It embodies the reality that most Americans these days feel stuck on their rungs of the economic ladder.

The effective death-knell for upward mobility may be saddest for previously disadvantaged people who have struggled and saved and sacrificed so that they could reach the middle classes only to find that they’re still experiencing economic anxiety over the costs of health care, education, a comfortable retirement or an unexpected emergency. It’s hard working rural or immigrant whites, urban Blacks, second or third generation Latinos who finally thought they’d broken through—were on their way to the Dream they’d projected their hopes upon—only to find that nothing but futility was reflecting back on them and making them feel like failures.

These white, brown and black Americans have sometimes directed their anger and bitterness towards the poorest among us who seem to be living as well as they are, or towards rich/oblivious Progressives at the top of the pile who can afford to have privileged views since they come at the expense of the remaining 80%. Instead of having someone to be thankful for (like the Queen) or to aspire to be like (such as Steve Jobs), Americans have been finding scapegoats for their rage like Black Lives Matter and its supporters or the Coastal Elites.

Notwithstanding where we find ourselves today (and in spite of all evidence to the contrary), the American Dream still encourages more hope than it can deliver on, and the country’s ire still hasn’t turned on the richest 20%, or the corporations that are also accruing a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth.

Instead, there are enough folks in that lower 80% who still believe they can hit the economic jackpot that neither the “Occupy Wall Street” uprising of 2011 nor Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism movement in 2016 could enlist enough of the disgruntled masses. Moreover, while President Trump was directing his ire at poor and often minority protestors after the death of George Floyd, he and Congress enhanced the protections for the richest Americans and our most profitable corporations in the so-called Tax Reform Act of 2017. Like we were his game-show contestants, he continued to hock the Dream by telling us: Everyone in America can be a billionaire, just like me, once we rid ourselves of all these freeloaders.

Our increasingly empty Dream was about to lose even more of its hold on our imaginations during the pandemic. As a consequence, the pressure in the pressure cooker for the vast majority that finds it nearly impossible to better their circumstances will continue to build against the way that our elected leaders (both Democrat and Republican) have managed the American economy and designated its winners and losers for the past 50 years.

So where do we go from here?

Like an anti-addiction program, the first step is acknowledging the overwhelming evidence of the American Dream’s fragile state. In 2015, according to a study reported in Fast Company, the U.S. already ranked “among the lowest of all developed countries in terms of the potential for upward mobility, despite clinging to the mythology of Horatio Alger.” That article, called “The American Dream is Dead: Here’s Where It Went,” provided a breakdown of the developed countries where your chances of rising economically were the strongest.

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Finland
4. Canada
5. Australia
6. Sweden
7. New Zealand
8. Germany
9. Japan
10. Spain

America is simply not the Land of (Economic) Opportunity that it once was.

In my Great Resignation post, I joined Nobel-Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps in waxing nostalgic for a more-entrepreneurial/ less-government-managed economy given the psychological and economic benefits that it brings to everyone who’s willing to work hard to get ahead. But Phelps didn’t provide much of a roadmap to recover our economic vitality when he wrote “Mass Flourishing.” On the other hand another economist, Oren Cass, has several ideas about boosting upward mobility for all American workers given the much-changed country that we’re living in today. (See my 2019 post A Winter of Work Needs More Color for an overview of Cass’s proposals, including incentivizing all of the country’s working families instead of subsidizing only a few of its most impoverished ones.)

In line with both Phelps’s and Cass’s thinking, we need to come to a more inclusive approach to the harms that follow when we stifle individual initiative and deprive a vast majority of the workerforce of its financial and psychological rewards.

A study that was reported out of Yale University this week argues that the lack of upward mobility early in life increases mortality rates in all young adults who confront it. While the emphasis in the study’s presentation was on groups that suffer the most (like young urban Blacks), it’s important to note the pernicious effects that are felt by every young person when they feel that they can’t improve their personal fortunes. A similar message came from studying pockets of white rural America that are dying from opioid abuse and suicide as chronicled in Angus Deaton’s and Anne Case’s ground-breaking “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” a book I briefly discussed here in another earlier post.

Many of the researchers and prognosticators who have confronted these problems have argued that “intergenerational wealth accumulation” is essential for upward economic mobility. In other words, how much your parents or even grandparents “had” and “left to you” may be as significant (if not more) to upward mobility than your personal work ethic. Some observers, like the author of this New York Magazine essay, clearly agree:

Without the safety net of accumulated family wealth, the children of self-made men and women can be ‘unmade’ in a hurry. With such wealth, by contrast, the trust-fund deadbeat’s child can follow her grandparents’ footsteps back through Harvard.
Thus, making America an exceptionally [upwardly] mobile society [again] will require a greater degree of income and wealth redistribution than most politicians would dare to suggest: To get more poor kids up the ‘ladder of opportunity’ we’re going to have to shorten the space between its rungs.

With my caveat that it’s not just “poor kids” but (more accurately) nearly everyone in the middle, lower middle and lowest classes, I am reluctant to argue that the same bipartisan government that nearly killed the American Dream should be given the mandate of “redistributing” the accumulated wealth at the top of our economy’s pyramid. But something needs to be done. If unlocking the nation’s sleeping economic vitality can’t be driven by wise leaders, than it is likely to be advanced by protests (and worse) on the streets.

Projecting my hopes for upward mobility onto the American Dream doesn’t have to become a reminder of my failures as a worker, it simply doesn’t. And allowing that kind of resentment to keep accruing is a dangerous thing.

Just as the Brits saw their reflected glory in their Queen and wanted to thank her for it, we can recover our reflected glory in the promises of that Dream—but we’ll have to want it as a country, almost more than we want anything else, given how hard that revitalization process is likely to be.

This post was adapted from my September 18, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Too Many Whose Jobs Aim To Hold Us Together Are Falling Apart

August 19, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

While the institutions that serve our most important commitments generally receive our support (or at least our tax dollars), we’re not sustaining the flesh and blood workers who toil within them, too often treating them like disposable assets that are easily replaced–when nothing could be farther from the truth.

In our schools, it’s the teachers, administrators and PTA members who aim to assure parents and communities that their children are reaping the benefits of a good education.
In our libraries, it’s the librarians who select and recommend the books that will be available for a community to read.
In our houses of worship, it’s the men and women “of the cloth,” who stand between their congregations and an outside world that’s sorely in need of their faith, hope and love.
In our police and military organizations, it’s the officers who try to bridge a community’s desire for safety with the common threats that it faces every day, whether near or far from home.
In our political organizations, it’s the public servants who safeguard our votes and the overall integrity of our governance from the mobs that increasingly threaten them from all directions.

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served.

Sadly, too many of them are collapsing under the strain of conflicting desires within these same communities.

Where does the rising toxicity of this “push and pull” leave these essential workers? Far too often, it’s hurt, demoralized, disabled.

And where does it leave the rest of us when they can’t do their jobs anymore, when “other good men and women” see what happened to them and decline to take their places, when their jobs go unfilled or are taken on by those with far narrower views of the public interest?

Where do their voids leave the rest of us?

_{There are increasingly divided pews in America’s houses of worship.}

I have a personal perspective on one of these pivotal jobs that recently got activated while reading an interview with a pastor who’d been forced to abandon his ministry—and his “calling” in life—because of divisions within his congregation that even his Job-like efforts had been unable to bridge.

Before I headed to law school, I studied the history of religion in America as well as ethics in the company of a much larger cohort of men and women who were pursuing careers in the ministry. “Master of Divinity” was the professional degree they were after as they studied the Old and New Testaments, the rituals of liturgy, the growing competition between psychologists and ministers, and how to give an engaging sermon on Sunday mornings.

It was a “slice of life” that came vividly back to me when I read Dan White’s heart-breaking interview in the New York Times this week.

Fresh in my mind as I read it was a post I’d written back in January called “Turning On The Rescuers.” You may recall its story about a school superintendent in Joplin Missouri who courageously stepped into the breach after deadly tornados destroyed half of his community’s schools. Although the multi-year rebuilding effort that followed exhausted him, his personal consequences worsened when some disgruntled residents drove him from public office with cruel allegations after their hopes around community rebuilding became mired in frustration. Their attacks made him contemplate suicide and, after a period of recovery, take a new job with an organization that counsels former public officials on how to redeploy their leadership skills after vocal minorities among their constituents undermined them. At the time, he called it “an exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.”

(Sad to say, it’s a next generation American job if there ever was one: rehabilitating helpers that are abandoned by their communities when some of its attack dogs turn them into targets.)

These men and women occupy pivot points between their institution’s lofty commitments and the public’s demand that its interests be served.

Dan White, Jr. wanted nothing more than to bring a community of the faithful together. Originally from upstate New York, he became a Baptist minister in the early 2000’s. After a terrible flood devastated the towns around his church, he deepened his vocation by seizing an opportunity to grow his caring community when he jumped into the recovery effort.

We were going to take care of people who weren’t inside our Christian community… caring about people you wouldn’t actually be friends with [already] and helping them overcome that boundary. And so that was another big moment for me in rallying people to care [about one another].

At the same time, his outreach coincided with growing publicity about sex abuse involving the clergy, with many no longer seeing pastors as “shepherds” as much as “wolves.” After attending some social events and “taking the air out of the room” when he identified himself as a minister, White said he stopped sharing with strangers “that I was a pastor,” for the first time feeling “some shame about having that role.”

He began to re-focus almost exclusively on his congregation and, in particular, on their building of a “multipurpose space” (for youth groups, for refugees, to have a place to gather for coffee) and while the majority of his church supported it, a few were opposed. White thought that limited dissent was normal until some who were against the new space made it personal, threatening to “ruin him” if he went forward with it. These opponents sent a mass email to the entire congregation accusing him of being “a bad leader.” As he later described it:

a little faction of people in our church [contended] that this decision was really just my mastermind psychological skills to convince people to do something they didn’t really want to do with their money.
And I realized at that moment that being a pastor is this really precarious little spot you sit in that people project all of their wants, and needs, and demands, expectations, unrealized hopes onto you. And when you don’t meet them, they are posed with a response. Either they’re going to reject you, or ruin you, or abandon you.
And that’s ultimately what started to settle into my own ministry, was just this fear of being abandoned and losing people, and being interpreted in very villainous, demonizing ways and not knowing how to like — that’s the shame. Not knowing how to get that off me.

Around the 2012 election involving Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney, White began to feel even more demoralized about his commitment to bring people together in a caring community. “A dear friend whom I loved” in the congregation approached him and said that as a conservative, she didn’t feel safe in his church, felt “judged here,” and couldn’t remain “with this kind of judgment.” White apologized profusely, told her “you do belong here,” but couldn’t change her mind. Within days, another couple told him about their need to depart because there was “no space for us here” with their more liberal views. White described how he was “in shock” that people with contrary political perspectives “didn’t think they could belong in the same community. And I didn’t really have words to keep them.” When they left his church, it felt like they were abandoning him too.

Matters hardly improved as the next election approached. White characterized it this way:

the election of Trump just threw battery acid on the whole reality. Where people would never have felt comfortable calling another brother or sister in Christ, you know, a horrible name like a Marxist or a white supremacist or a baby killer, I mean, these things just started to — they were just flowing off people’s tongues when Trump got elected.

And then in 2020 came the pandemic, with new opportunities for divisiveness and demonization, like when a church stops meeting in person to reduce Covid’s transmission or decides to reopen, but with a mask policy.

For White, It had finally become too much.

He appreciated the extent of his downward spiral when he took a vacation with his wife. White was shocked by his need to sleep for long periods. When he was awake, his hands were often shaking so much he suspected Parkinson’s. But neurological testing after he returned to work revealed something else entirely: signs of post-traumatic stress. Except instead of PTSD, which is often connected to the experience of a single violent act, his injury was from the accumulation of trauma he’d experienced over almost 20 years of ministry.

How he’d gotten to this traumatized place became clear after a therapist encouraged him to do “an emotional and relational audit.” With her encouragement, White mapped out:

people that I had loved that were no longer in my life. I had to name people that had attacked me. And then I also had to name events that I was privy to in people’s lives that were traumatic for them, and I had to be present to them.
And I mapped out, over a period of 20 years, over 180 people that had come into my life or left in my life. And I had just tucked all of this stuff under the carpet. And what she called it — she’s like these are all little deaths. These are all little deaths that you’ve experienced. And you haven’t grieved [over] any of them.

Instead, he carried the grief and loss inside, and slowly but surely they were breaking him down.

Even with this insight, White was “really having a hard time believing that something I loved” had damaged him this much. He also knew that he’d probably have to stop being a pastor to escape the trauma, but “I just didn’t want to give up on people, and I love them, and I didn’t want to be a quitter.”

When you are “called” to a career by your convictions but become unable to do it because of factors beyond your control, you can suffer “moral injury,” or the same kinds of trauma that many health care professionals experienced during Covid when they could no longer be caregivers in the ways that they needed to be within an overwhelmed health care system. (I wrote about this previously in “The Moral Injury to Caregivers When They Can No Longer Provide Care.”)

White went on to leave his church, to tears from some in his congregation but also to accusations of abandonment from others in their hour of need, so even as he walked out the door he continued to be torn apart. Without a job, he had the space to realize that he couldn’t be alone among faith leaders in suffering this kind of damage, while also realizing that his colleagues had never talked to him about the destructive forces that were buffeting them. He also searched for, but couldn’t find, a version of the Betty Ford Rehabilitation Center that poorly paid pastors could afford. Mulling over its necessity led White and his wife to open a healing refuge for burned-out pastors, which they run to this day.

Much like that former school superintendent in Joplin Missouri, White is working to heal moral injuries suffered in a different (but related) corner of the job market. He and his fellow pastors share the experience of being vilified for their efforts to bring people together during divisive times. But the injuries they share go deeper than name-calling and hurt feelings. When members of their congregations could no longer remain, they abandon their pastors as well–a string of “tiny deaths” that need to be mourned before healing can begin.

We know that injuries like this are occurring in other “pivotal jobs” too—to our teachers, librarians, school board and PTA members, to our election officials and vote counters, to members of our police forces and to key military personnel—all of whom need to be ready to deliver on our most important commitments while being assailed or abandoned at every turn by those they are struggling to serve.

These beleaguered men and women are a dwindling civic resource, and nearly impossible to replace when they leave public service.

The dog days of August are as good a time as any to think about where we’re headed when it comes to some of the most essential jobs in our communities and what we can (and must) do to shore up the brave individuals who are still bold enough to do them.

This post was adapted from my August 7, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (because of reader reactions) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Turning on the Rescuers

July 25, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Just as I was starting to settle into a new year, I was seized by this story on the radio.

It was about a kind of pattern: how people who dive into natural disaster recovery–helping to produce miracles while doing so, and being initially heralded as miracle workers by nearly everyone–seem to become, in the months of hard work and challenges that follow, scapegoats for everything that has not been achieved, and eventually a kind of public enemy.

These first responders often lose their jobs and the luster (if not more) on their reputations as the community around them frays, becomes less willing to follow anyone’s hopeful lead, the disillusion sets in, the naysayers step up, and fingers of blame get pointed.

In this particular story, the arc from celebrating the rescuers to demonizing them was navigated by a heartland community. “The fixes” were to schools destroyed by a deadly tornado and to improving the overall quality of education during rebuilding efforts in a small Missouri city. Their catastrophe always required group commitment, sacrifice and solidarity—not merely the efforts of a few first-responders—but the community that initially followed their lead and called them heroes melted into disappointment as their efforts fell short of its differing hopes, and many of their fellows eventually turned on them.

Somebody has to be to blame, you see. Surely the shortfalls that followed are not my fault, me and my neighbors, due to our failure to cohere, to bury our selfish interests, or to give our initial “heroes” the benefit of our doubts. The “mess as we see it” has to be the fault of the folks who jumped into the breach in the first place.

I almost said: foolishly jumped into the breach.

But what would saying this mean? If the most willing and most able of a community’s possible saviors hesitated–and then stepped back, shaking their heads–when they’d almost joined the rescue effort after an unprecedented weather event, an out-of-control wildfire, too much water or not enough?

What would it mean if good men and women decided that it wasn’t worth the inevitable death threats, the risks to their families and their own mental health, the possible loss of their jobs and reputations if they were to step up and respond to a physical calamity in their community when they might be in the best positions to do so?

Would saying “I pass” matter less if the calamity affected everyone’s health (like a pandemic) or the community’s ability to govern itself and fend off chaos (given its political divides)?

Political philosopher Edmund Burke famously said, in a phrase that’s almost become hackneyed in its repetition:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men [and women] to do nothing.

So what would it really mean if enough good men and women regularly decided that it wasn’t worth the personal costs “of their coming to the rescue” because of the likelihood that their own community would eventually turn on them in personally destructive ways?

_{When the going gets rough, it’s always easier to say “No” than to say “Yes,” and
to continuously put our support behind our initial “Yes.”}

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before.

In recent history—which is written from the distance of a half-century or more—few leaders twinkle more brightly than Winston Churchill.

I fell in love with him and his leadership style all over again while I was reading Eric Larson’s recent book about the man behind-the-scenes at Dunkirk and the Blitz—a biographical sketch that was only possible because of newly accessible diaries that had been written by members of Churchill’s family and staff at the time. (Here’s a link to my discussion of that often delightful profile in “Two Books Worth Reading” from around a year and a half ago.)

Yet despite Churchill’s ultimately heroic efforts to step into a breach that had been created by flailing national leadership at the dawn of World War II, the British peoples’ gratitude wasn’t deep enough or its memory long enough to continue to back him after the War had been won, and more than his ego suffered as a consequence.

Churchill not only lost that post-War election, he became a scapegoat for those who bemoaned the cost in lives and sterling of the War effort, the loss of the British Empire, and once Victory in Europe was declared on VE Day, a “victory” that no longer tasted quite as sweet.

_{British voters didn’t give him a vote of confidence or help him to guide their country into peacetime. It’s hardly of a stretch to say that they blamed Churchill for everything that hadn’t gone the way that they would have preferred it.}

We’re also seeing this movie today.  Whatever you may think of Anthony Fauci (infectious disease doctor, media personality and CDC spokesman), ask yourselves:  Does any 81-year old man really need daily death threats, to put his family in regular peril, to risk a long and hard-earned reputation for admitting when he’s wrong and helping his country stave off deadly viruses? In his fall from early hero to current villain in many eyes, what’s most amazing to me is that he hasn’t already said: “To hell with it.”

That’s also what grabbed my attention in the story I was hearing about Joplin Missouri.  Looking back nearly a decade—from disaster in 2011, to interventions by the first responders, to celebrating these individuals as community heroes, and to the mental health toll that followed for so many of them as members of their community proceeded to tear them down—I was struck by what seemed to be the increasingly inevitable “life cycle” of hero-to-villain.

Both Churchill and Fauci would surely have identified with these Joplin officials who struggled mightily to help rebuild a mile-wide stretch of town that had been torn to shreds by a deadly, 200-mile-an-hour, so-called “multiple vortex” tornado—only to have too many of these locals eventually turn on them when their post-disaster hopes were frustrated by a lack of funds or a unity of purpose.

There’s one more thing that peaked my interest in this story. I’ve spent time in Joplin, Missouri so I felt that I knew at least something about this place and its people.

Some years ago, Joplin was ground zero in a multi-district securities matter that I was involved in as a lawyer. I was headquartered for a month of depositions in nearby Springfield (see The Simpsons) and made a kind of pilgrimage to nearby Joplin, where key players in the alleged investment scheme lived. The cases involved the buying and selling of interests in ethanol plants, ethanol is a by-product of corn, and there are cornfields nearly everywhere in these parts. At the time, I visited Joplin for its silo-full of ethanol entrepreneurs and accountants and because I wanted to know whether their “famous” barbeque was as good as everybody said it was. (“Yes,” to that!)

Anyway, the tornado clusters that hit Joplin several years later were devastating to this farming and light industrial community. They killed 158 people outright, injured more than 1100, and caused property damage totaling $2.8 billion, the highest in Missouri’s history.

Joplin’s loss and recovery are also relevant today because of the devastating series of tornados that ripped a 100-mile long path through Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri (just to the south-east of Joplin) less than a month ago. The life-cycles of hero-to-villain are likely just beginning to turn for the first-responders in those near-by communities.

Immediately after the Joplin tornado struck in 2011, those with the relevant job responsibilities there immediately stepped up and several were interviewed for the story that followed, including Bryan Wicklund (Joplin’s chief building official, who confronted how ill-prepared the community’s building standards had been); Keith Stammer (the City’s emergency management director who had to coordinate relief efforts and wanted to “think big” when rebuilding); and C.J Huff (the school superintendent who confronted serious damage to more than half of Joplin’s schools). Vicky Mieseler, the executive director of mental health clinics in Joplin, and Doug Walker, a clinical psychologist who travels worldwide helping communities struck by disaster, were also interviewed for this story.

Their accounts were as sad as they were striking, Huff’s (the school superintendant’s) story in particular.

Mieseler (the local mental health worker) recalled that the best thing that happened after the tornado struck in May was hearing Huff tell the community’s parents that students would be able to go back to school in August, only three months later.  Given the extent of school building damage and the fact that many students and residents were homeless, his announcement had a stunning impact in countering the community’s despair.

Against the Herculean timeline he set for himself, Huff marshaled local resources and managed to re-open schools in August by building classrooms in abandoned big-box stores. During those early months, he describes himself as “a walking heart attack” as he tried to make the school year happen:

I gained about, gosh, 60 pounds, I think. I’m a stress eater. And we all have our coping mechanisms, and mine was ice cream and lots of coffee – lots of coffee and lots of ice cream.”

It made Huff a local hero, and he soon became a national one too, building on a reputation he’d earned before the tornado by helping to launch Bright Futures, an initiative that brought together the school district, local businesses, faith-based organizations and community members to help meet students’ most basic needs, an effort that had grown to 30 affiliates across several states.

_{During Huff’s heroic phase: President Obama honored him at a local graduation ceremony one year after the tornado, but as re-building continued and hit the inevitable potholes, his growing notoriety may have worked against him.}

As the nitty-gritty of rebuilding Joplin’s schools continued, growing community push-back began to take a toll on Huff. Doug Morris (the disaster psychologist) says Huff became exhausted and distraught as locals began to fight his proposals, and ultimately him personally, at almost every turn.

Huff was demonized by some residents. He says he considered suicide….

Those attacks included a Change.org campaign to terminate his employment as school superintendant (the termination petition ultimately gained 486 signatures) and the platform became one of several sounding boards for his opponents. The comments posted there refused to give him any credit for his early accomplishments or much (if any) support for the school rebuilding efforts that he championed:

_{– T Carl: It’s time to take action. CJ Huff has performed gross misconduct in his role as Superintendent of our school system. He is a detriment to our kids, the parents of Joplin’s school children and the taxpayers of Joplin, MO.

– Brayden Provins: He’s the worst superintendent the school district has ever had. He’s ran the schools into the ground.

– J. Benifield: I have several grandchildren in the Joplin R-8 school district, with some BULLIED everyday. No one does anything about it and Mr. Huff seems to think there’s “no problem with bullying”….yes, yes there is. These kids don’t need all of this drama from Mr. Huff. His disrespect is deplorable. He needs to focus on the kids AND teachers. We CAN do better}.

_{– Randy Long: He is all for himself and not the kids or the teachers.}

Local mental health worker Miesler said Huff was hardly alone in experiencing these kinds of attacks from Joplin residents. “Several years after the tornado,” she said, “you started to see major change in leadership positions” across the community. In addition to Huff, who went on to resign of his own accord, this included the Joplin’s City Manager among many others.

Huff, who is now working as a disaster consultant, reports that “every single one of his [current] colleagues” is a former public official who was ousted from his or her role after responding to a local disaster. He went on to lament:

One of the things I learned is that when emotion and logic collide, emotion wins every time. It didn’t matter what we brought, whether it was data or subject matter experts. It didn’t matter.

And about these former public official and new co-workers, he said with a rueful laugh:

We call it the exclusive club that nobody wants to belong to.

Maybe Huff, the other former leaders in Joplin, and public officials elsewhere who had been ousted after responding to community disasters let their initial status as local heroes go to their heads and started to act arrogantly and unresponsively. But then again, maybe not. I couldn’t gather enough information for this post to know whether Joplin’s post-tornado leaders acted like heroes throughout or devolved into something far less than that. It’s certain that Huff and the others weren’t perfect.

But the two mental health experts who spoke in this story did so because they believed that the hero-to-villain life cycle after natural disasters is an increasingly common one today. It apparently happens almost everywhere, with considerable health consequences for the initially acclaimed rescuers. What these mental health experts didn’t say—and maybe didn’t have to—is that it’s not just those who step into the fray during natural disasters. Those who attempt to provide leadership in any kind of community crisis today are likely to face the same retribution and personal health consequences despite being celebrated in the early days as heroes.

No one should jump into the fray of an emergency who isn’t both willing and able to do so. But if you can do it and deep-down want to do it because of your abilities and the extent of your community’s need, will any reasonable person actually “jump in” and “take the lead” if they know what they’re probably “buying” for themselves and their families at the back-end?

Community members who lack these rescuer’s abilities, track records of service, courage and strength of character can turn on you in a flash, accusing you of serving yourself instead of them, of being incompetent, deplorable and worse. “Sticks and stones,” yes, but their daily assaults can be debilitating, especially when the stakes are high and fewer and fewer around you “seem to have your back.”

The shame, of course, is that good men and women—and maybe the best of them—will step back from any kind of crisis leadership, leaving it in the hands of the less able and less bold, or even to charlatans.

Perhaps this is what we are already seeing in those who stand for elected office, run our school boards, libraries, and other community organizations: far fewer good people than we need to do our most important public work, because we’re scaring them away before they even get involved.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but increasingly it seems to be.

This post was adapted from my January 9, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Who We Go-to To Learn How to Get There

July 5, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For just about anything you can think of, somebody’s posted a YouTube video to show you how.

It’s like we’ve moved Dad on-line and then made him available to everyone. Literally.

I tuned in to one of them, Rob Kenny and his “Dad, How Do I?” tutorials, because one of you thought that I should. (Thanks, Brian!)  Dad, how do I tie a tie? Dad, how do I shave? Dad, how do I fix my running toilet?

That last one’s had 1.1 million views, so lots of us “kids” are watching.

Rob Kenny’s advice is sincere, never scrambled with snark but always accompanied by a mayonnaise of Dad jokes that make him break up a little when he tells them, pulling you into their vibe even though you can’t remember ever thinking that jokes like this were funny. They pull you into a heartland kind of conspiracy, like the “just-right porridge” did in the wandering fairy tale.

You see, Rob Kenny lost his dad when he was a kid and it made him realize that other kids had lost (or never had) their dads either, so he initially started posting his everyday advice as a kind of public service, never expecting for the hole to be as big as it was or for so many to feel that he was helping to fill it.

When Rob Kenny was having a bad week recently (and hadn’t posted his next vid when he’d planned and viewers were hoping), he got on the horn anyway, to “buy himself some time,” talking about how much he appreciated everyone’s comments on his last dollop of advice—“I’m new at being out in public like this” he explained, but your writing to me things like “Protect this man at all costs” helps me so much “because I need protection” so much–and then How Proud He Was of all the generous people who took the time to care about him back.

To him, it seemed to demonstrate their good character, even those like Joseph, who’d written (like he was some kind of tough guy): “This dude is making my eyes sweat.”

Rob Kenny’s “I am proud of you” post, which comes with an almost tearful dad-joke along with his struggles to get though Teddy Roosevelt’s “Daring Greatly” poem (from those halcyon days when our presidents were also poets) moves straight though the heart of maudlin with the sincerest of intentions.

For me, It brought some tonic to another long week (when is the last time somebody said “I’m proud of you” just for making it through?), and it got me thinking about how much we all need not only hands-on guidance but also an attaboy now and then, even when it comes at the arms-length distance of a YouTube video or an article in the New Yorker, or a self-help book that you can spend all the time that you need with.

Because the best of this kind of outreach conjures those extraordinary times when you were huddled knee-to-knee or hunched elbow-to-elbow over whatever it was, and somebody who cared enough was actually there with you showing you how.

The life-blood in these kinds of tutorials comes from memories like that.

When I was in “start-up business mode” several years back and thinking about ways to change the world for the better, I had the idea for a school, or maybe just an area in every school, where you could learn about practical things that no one else seemed to be teaching.

There were places in my high school like wood shop and the typing pool where certain crafts and skills were taught. Indeed, showing how close we were to the cusp at the time, BHS had already re-branded “home economics” as “cooking 1-2-3” so that boys wouldn’t feel too threatened to take it (and I could learn how to make pecan pie by the last class.) But there was no one there to teach me the soup-to-nuts of traveling by train or reading a roadmap, fixing a broken toaster or finding my way out of the woods if I got lost, traveling in a foreign country or changing a flat tire (although my fellow “industrial arts” students, who’d go on to become our town’s mechanics, might have helped with that last one if I’d asked).

Perhaps because “practical” was not one of the first 10 or 15 words that anyone would have used to describe me, I was drawn to this gapping void in my own experience and maybe in the educational system generally. This un-met dimension of schooling would need to have guides who could show the uninitiated how to do all of those things that had somehow fallen through the cracks of our formal educations.

I got far enough with this idea to wonder how I’d sell it to boards of education that (unfortunately) were already struggling to keep the school systems that they had already both functioning and safe. What was the “value-add” that parents and other civic-minded individuals would be willing to pay for in order to produce more fully-rounded graduates and a more capable community? That’s where the waves of my enthusiasm hit the shoals of feasibility. But I never abandoned the idea entirely.

At least intially, I returned to the need itself and where my urge to satisfy it had come from. I don’t recall wishing that my dad had taught me how to solve all of these lingering mysteries. Instead I came to realize that he’d actually given me some of the tools that I needed to solve them myself. As a businessman who was always on the road having “to figure things out,” he was a regular demonstration of how to turn conundrums into solutions. It was an internal discipline that I had in me too, however little I’d acted upon it.

So if my “problem-solving” innovation was unlikely to fly in our school systems, maybe I had my own ability to find the practical, step-by-step paths that could lead me (rewardingly) to the bottom of whatever I was most curious about. It was a revelation that tracked my other dad-like substitute, the Cub Scout manual, in which every challenge (from making a fire in the woods to creating a successful lemonade stand) began with wondering how and ended after taking one practical step after another.

In the ensuing years, I effectively brought that imagined part of schooling into my head, encouraging its problem-solving wherever curiosity took me, and thinking nothing more about it until I stumbled upon one of the most extraordinary things that I’ve ever read in New Yorker magazine.

_{This isn’t a picture of Kirk Varnedoe coaching the Giant Metrozoids, a well-named team of 8-year old boys learning the art and science of football twenty years ago. Indeed, it’s not even a picture of football players and their coach. But it might help you begin to imagine the accomplishments that a cohort like this can aim for together on a field of dreams.}

During the late 1990s, when Kirk Varnedoe was the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he volunteered to help Luke, the son of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, and a clutch of other City boys eager to learn the game of football on a playing field in Central Park. Since Varnedoe and Gopnik already knew one another from their full-time pursuits, on an extracurricular voyage like this one it was like Odysseus finding his Homer.

In the first 10 minutes, Gopnik realized that great teachers can “de-mystify” a painting as well as an athletic pursuit and that Varnedoe was world-class wherever he exercised his vocation. In fact, Varnedoe’s instincts as a field guide were so strong that he’d considered becoming a football coach after graduating from college, offering this post-mortem some years later on why he’d taken a more high-falutin direction.

if you’re going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.

But of course, the underlying instincts don’t go away, they just get channeled into explaining, say, something as inscrutable as abstract expressionism to the un-convinced, which Varnedoe went on to do in the Mellon Lectures that he gave (to near unanimous acclaim) in the early 2000s at the National Gallery of Art. It was during this same span of years that also brought his de-mystifying abilities back to some 8-year old boys who wanted to explore the mysteries of football.

If your New Yorker subscription will get you over its paywall, you can read “The Last of the Metrozoids” here. You can also subscribe, “get a free tote,” and read it from “the inside” in the same place. Otherwise, you’ll have to trust in my ability to cull some of its best passages from my own torn-out copy of it and to include them here.

Gopnik sets the scene magnificently:

The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice. Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett, talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go. Will and Luke and Matthew, very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can’t we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we’re ready; and Gabriel, just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. ‘OK, he said, very gently…’Let’s break it down.’

After returning to basics they could easily swallow, Gopnik says: “They followed him like Israelites.”

What none of the boys knew however was how far back-to-basics they’d need to go before they actually picked up the ball and threw it around, or even learned which way to run. But Varnadoe understood that this game was less about what “you did” and more about what “you all did together.” So he continued by further bringing their enthusiasm to ground.

‘No celebrations,’ he said, arriving at the middle of the field. ‘This is a scrimmage. This is just the first step. We’re all one team. We are the Giant Metrozoids.’ He said the ridiculous name as though it were Fighting Irish…The kids stopped, subdued and puzzled. ‘Hands together,’ he said, and stretched his out, and solemnly the boys laid their hands on his, one after another. ‘One, Two, Three together!’ and all the hands sprang up. He had replaced a ritual of celebration with one of solidarity—and the boys sensed that solidarity was somehow at once more solemn and more fun than any passing victory could be.

Varnadoe also knew that what they were doing there was about more than the game. They’d all come (himself included) as one thing and by the end of their time together would leave as something else, because learning is always about transformation too, from one level of knowledge, appreciation or physicality to another. At this point, Gopnik disclosed the depth of Varnadoe’s own transformation, from a “fat and unimpressive” kid before he’d become a football player in college. About that earlier time Varnadoe said:

You were one kind of person with one kind of body and one set of possibilities, and then you worked at it and you were another. The model was so simple and so powerful that you could apply it to anything…It put your fate in your own hands.

So he endeavored to put the same kind of fate in each of the Metrozoid’s hands.

As the morning progressed, Varnadoe instilled the lesson by drilling the boys down into each step that they’d be taking on this field when they were ready.

He had them do their first play at a walk, 6 times [Gopnik reported from the sidelines], which they clowned about, slow motion when they were inclined to be ‘terrier quick,’ but he still had them do it. Then they ‘ambled through it’ [making the proceedings take on]… a courtly quality, like a seventeenth century dance.

But the boys were beginning to see how the game was a series of basic steps that they could master, and that they needed to know how to do each step slowly before they could speed it up, and certainly before they could combine it with other steps. “You break it down and then you build it back up,” is how Varnedoe put it.

Some of his teaching also involved recognizing that every boy would come to his “de-mystification” differently—some emotionally, some through reasoning, and others more viscerally, through increasing their body awareness. So when circumstances called for it, he’d take, say a kid who seemed afraid of the football, to the side for some one-on-one instruction. But instead of focusing on the kid’s occasional successes and many failures, Gopnik described Varnadoe’s ability to engage the boy’s deeper drives.

When he caught [a ball], Kirk wasn’t too encouraging; when he dropped one he wasn’t too hard. He did not make him think it was easy. He did not make him think that he had done it when he hadn’t. He made him think that he could do it if he chose.

Between the master and his chronicler, “The Last of the Metrozoids” blew me away when I first read it and still blows me away today because there is something almost supernatural about those who know how to build up the capabilities of others, are lucky enough to be captured in the act of doing so, and somewhere down the line, share those bits of magic with the rest of us.

This post was adapted from my March 20, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Divided We Fall

May 29, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s a kind of truism for a democracy like ours: When we’re divided we fall.

We’re not at that precipice, but it sure feels closer. In my feelings about how likely the danger really is today, I’m grateful to have traveled around this country and to have spent time in places like Missouri and Wisconsin so that I know such places as more than fly-over country and their inhabitants as people who are not that different from me.

In an important recent essay that we’ll get to in a minute, Jonathan Haidt describes these folks (who are, in fact, most Americans), as “the exhausted majority,” tired to the point of retirement of all the noisy damage from the progressive and MAGA extremes that tend to monopolize our airways and screen time. I remember meeting many of these same people when I was just a kid. Back then, they were called “the silent majority,” and while they might have seemed more prominent in places like the Mid-West, I think that’s just because they weren’t so easily obscured by the “always on” self-promotion that blares from media centers on the Coasts and from a few big cities in the middle.

I know that these Americans are everywhere because I’ve come to know many of the “silent and exhausted” as my neighbors in what otherwise seems like the bluest of blue cities. They’re here, they vote, they’re concerned, involved and a check on even Philadelphia’s excesses. Indeed, it’s the volume, the sanity and the decency of America’s vast waistline that keeps our feet (as a nation) on the ground and our head a lot clearer than it would otherwise be.

We’d be closer to the precipice without them. At their best, they operate like an anchor against our worst political impulses.

It’s the volume, sanity and decency of America’s vast waistline that keeps our feet (as a nation) on the ground and our head a lot clearer than it would otherwise be.

Some of my closest encounters with “just plain citizens” have happened in jury rooms. As a lawyer, I’m always surprised when I get accepted onto a jury (I recall a time when my profession was an immediate disqualifier) but now I get on panels routinely and, once I do, I try to melt into the crowd, someone whose expertise is a resource instead of an excuse for having a weightier point of view. From inside that room, I’ve been repeatedly reminded of what our forebears in English jurisprudence had discovered about juries: their power to project a community’s values and good sense onto a set of circumstances—in other words, to figure out “what happened” and “what society should do about it” by demonstrating their collective wisdom.

Serving as a juror has become one way to remind myself about the arrogance and elitism of professional classes and experts that think they “know better,” and it’s always been a rejuvenating way to re-involve myself in my community (“Jury Duty Is a Slice of Life That You Want to Have”). Wearing a juror badge a few years back also got me thinking about another civic commitment that can bind instead of divide us from most other Americans, namely thinking (in the sense of deliberating) about the dollars-and-cents investments that we make in our local, state and federal governments when we pay our taxes (something discussed in last week’s post “I Could Turn Myself Into a Tax Deduction (or Then Again, Maybe Not)”) Don’t I want to make wise, as opposed to mindless investments in my country, and aren’t those investment decisions worth talking about with others who are making them too?

There’s another area where we’ve lost but could easily recover our sense of community. The personal and financial burdens of America’s war-making would almost certainly be borne more equally—and at least some of our foreign wars might not be fought at all—if instead of being waged by a proxy army of “volunteers” with few other options, our military ranks were comprised of everyone’s children via a “universal” draft. Without that common investment, wars in places like Afghanistan are simply abstractions for too many until we’re confronted with a debacle like the evacuation of Kabul last summer. (In this regard, you might want to check out Andrew Bacevich’s Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.) These are all places where Americans are meeting today—or could be meeting—across their divides.

Greater participation in civic commonalities like jury duty, tax paying, war-making and avoiding would all help to bind our communities together. National disasters can too. I’m thinking about the ways that “regular” people came together in ways that neither government nor governmental authorities (like FEMA or the CDC) could manage in the wake of 9/11 or the recent pandemic. In the later, the essential workers that we celebrated as heroes were regular folks who weren’t tweeting about their accomplishments or sacrifices, they were simply showing up to some very hard jobs day after day. (As I’ve mentioned here before, Rebecca Solnit writes magnificently about the everyday people who did the same after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and similar catastrophes in A Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster.)

These are places where Americans are meeting today—or could be meeting—across their divides.

But while regular/silent/exhausted/essential/middle Americans are surely a corrective in a democracy like ours, they may not be able to produce enough “spontaneous and timely” action to keep us from the precipice that we still seem to be heading towards. It’s out of that concern that Haidt, a social and moral psychologist at NYU, wrote an excellent article in the April 2022 issue of The Atlantic called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” You need to read it, because no summary of it that I can give here will do it justice. (If you confront a paywall in your efforts to do so let me know and I’ll get you a copy.) You also need to read it because despite its look-twice-at-it title, Haidt makes his argument for confronting our stupidity astutely and methodically, because perhaps more than any other critical observer, Haidt has been struggling to explain and then reduce our values-driven polarization since his ground-breaking The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion almost ten years ago.

In his Atlantic essay, Haidt’s argues that the confluence of social media platforms and trends in our politics have brought us closer to the edge as a cohesive nation than we have been since the Civil War. Because I’ve not seen this urgency expressed so simply, straightforwardly and elegantly before, I’ll highlight a couple of pieces of “evidence” that he cites (because they made better sense to me when viewed in his wider context), but I won’t attempt to summarize the entire waterfront that he covers here.

We all need to struggle against the stupidity that increasingly confronts us in our daily attempts to make sense of it all. His argument (which includes proposed “solutions,” that are brilliant in their modesty, nuance and precision) may be the perfect place to start.

_{The social media megaphone with some of its tokens of our current “stupidity,”
according to Haidt.}

The childlike innocence of emojis that express our approval or disapproval, our “liking” and then retweeting or “sharing” what we like, all appear to be pretty benign, at least at first. But given the state of our politics in, say, 2011, these simple emotional messages on social media were anything but when they dropped, unannounced, into our lives.

I remember something about the state of our affairs 10 years ago. For one thing, while the Great Recession had happened in 2008 and 2009, for many businesses (including this family’s) its most challenging consequences were only felt years later, from 2011 on. At the same time, the US was still mired in two wars—first Afghanistan and then Iraq—and the political divisiveness around Bush-era decision-making in those wars and, to a somewhat lesser extent, from FEMA’s bungling after Katrina in New Orleans, had failed to produce a new consensus around Obama’s presidency, as we were soon to discover in the awkward launch of “Obamacare” in March of 2010 and the rise of the Tea Party in the mid-term elections of 2012.

Into this increasingly turbulent political landscape, a couple of seemingly modest, “user-friendly” innovations were introduced on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Perhaps it took a social psychologist like Haidt to recognize how efficiently “emojis, likes, retweets and shares” divided the world between “good” and “bad” and how effectively they amplified the morally-charged and highly-emotional judgments of a very small group of political partisans for the first time in the history of communication.

In other words, something entirely without precedent in human social, cultural, political and psychological experience had happened, and only now are we identifying the root causes as we confront the damage that’s been done in the intervening years by the Far Left and Far Right.

The first thing that Haidt’s essay managed to crystallize for me was how small groups of highly motivated people at both ends of the spectrum succeeded in polarizing the entire political debate by additional orders of magnitude, and the kind of narcissism that drove these small numbers of people when they had the opportunity to exert their influence over almost everybody else.

My second revelation was how vulnerable we are when it comes to governing ourselves given the foundations that are essential to cohesive decision-making in a democracy like ours, particularly when we’re confronted with the rise of new technologies and global conflicts that are likely to present further challenges of an existential nature to “our way of life.”

These arguments about manipulation and urgency of the moment are why we should all care about this. Let’s consider Haidt’s words in these regards.

Around 2011, a small group of people who aspired to be “thought leaders” saw the self-promotional value of new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter:

they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand[s]—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time [actually] connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation…the intensification of viral dynamics. [the italics are mine]

With “like,” “re-tweet” and “share” buttons fully deployed, the social media platforms developed algorithms that could put in front of each user the kind of content that could generate her “like” or encourage him to immediately “share” what he’d seen with others. The social scientists who guided the design of these algorithms soon had research in hand which proved that the posts that triggered emotions—especially anger directed at perceived enemies—are the posts that are most likely to be shared. Helping to prove his “they’re making us stupider” thesis, Haidt notes:

One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the ‘Retweet’ button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, ‘We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.

As Haidt goes on to explain: “[t]he newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves” given the expedited ways we could now endorse an inflammatory message and spread it around. The question, of course, is whether our democratic institutions and our on-going conversations as citizens are resilient enough to survive this kind of barrage.

According to Haidt, the pied pipers who lead this destructively stupid parade are drawn from of a very small number—less than 15%—of America’s population.

The ‘Hidden Tribes’ study by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the ‘devoted conservatives,’ comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the ‘progressive activists,’ comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society.
What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: ‘Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.’ In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.

In addition to being lethal weapons in their own right, the weaponizing of uncivil discourse is likely to get worse in coming years. New technological advances and bad actors in places like Russia and China who see an upside to themselves in destabilizing America will see to that.

These arguments about manipulation and the urgency of the moment are why we should all care about this.

On the new technology side, Haidt reports that “artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation.” (Indeed, in many places it already seems to be doing so.) Moreover, advances in the art of “the deep-fake” will make it more difficult to disbelieve our eyes when we see a deliberately altered and misleading image pop up on our screens.

There will also be implications for America’s ability to “hold its own” in the face of an increasingly hostile world.

We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.

How close do we have to get to the precipice before we’re mobilized to do something about it—not through government necessarily, but as citizens who can speak out and mobilize from our silent/exhausted/essential/ middle, that is, in the voice of our vast majority?

_{The Piper had taken out the rats before he took out the children.}

I led off with an image of the Pied Piper (up top), trailed by his captivated young followers, who were being lured from town by the Piper’s malice after the townspeople had failed to pay him for his earlier work, which was to lead the town’s rats to their eventual demise.

It’s a chilling story, originating in medieval German folkfore, picked up by Goethe in Der Rattenfanger, the Brothers Grimm in a cautionary tale, and Robert Browning in one of his poems. Entranced by the brain-dulling notes of his flute, both the town’s rats and eventually its children are led to their doom. In the process, the Piper becomes a universal bogeyman, “one very grim reaper,” who uses his seductive wiles to administer some very final consequences.

His mind-dulling ways seem relevant here too.

Whether we are “on social media” or not, millions of us are caught up in the emotionally charged messaging that blares almost constantly from its direction. Just listen for the extremist din around “Roe vs. Wade” this week, or about Clarence Thomas’s or Anthony Fauci’s “lack of objectivity” last week.

Today’s pied pipers on the Left and the Right adroitly hook us through our confirmation biases, which are our tendencies to always be on the lookout for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs and ways of understanding all manner of things. It’s a tendency that makes us “stupider,” according to Haidt, because “[t]he most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs” [italics mine]. Unsurprisingly, it’s also the most reliable way to get smarter.

Moreover, the extremists’ self-policing tendencies on social media—their constantly ferreting out deviators from their perceived orthodoxies, whether “woke” or “MAGA” in nature—have a milder, but still perceptible impact on the rest of us too, who gain some easy comfort from affiliating with our perceived tribes. For while these inquisitions to enforce “true beliefs” are most damaging to the small minority of extremists, it’s almost impossible to escape their toxic effects. As Haidt writes:

People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.

In other words, the darts we’re shooting at ourselves to align with our tribal instincts have their own detrimental effects. In Haidt’s parlance, as all this conformity is making us stupider, the internal threats (from tech advances) and external threats (from hostile adversaries) are getting more worrisome.

“The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction
with people who don’t share your beliefs.”

In a post here from several months back (“The Way Forward Needs Hope Standing With Fear”) I discussed a lesson from Buddhist Pema Chodron, who (at 85) is the principal teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. With hope as we usually understand it, there is always a fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass, Chodron says. But accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear can liberate you from fear’s constraints, because instead of being tentative or even paralyzed by your alarm about the future, it is possible to generate as much curiosity about your fears as you have about your longings. It’s cultivating your curiosity about what you dread that can loosen fear’s disabling hold.

I hope you find, as I did, that Haidt’s essay helps to engage exactly that kind of liberating curiosity. What sometimes appears to be a dead-end today may become a hopeful way forward if our curiosity can enable us to do something about it.

This post was adapted from my May 8, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.