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.

Bringing a Child Into a World Like This

April 26, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

_{(photo by Issac Quesade/Unsplash)}

Is having a child today—or a grandchild—an expression of fervent hope or an involuntary invitation that you’re handing down to someone who’s unable to refuse it?

It’s a fair question, relating to what are (perhaps) our first jobs: as parents, as caregivers, as either believers or non-believers in the world to come.

Because every newborn is an embodiment of hope, our answers make us grapple with the future as we see it today.

These days, Tomorrowland is no longer the Jetsons flying cars from their open-to-the-sky houses with friendly robots inside, impossibly dressed as maids. Today, it seems closer to Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist The Road or last year’s best picture contender, the farcical Don’t Look Up–harsh and cruel on the one hand, shallow and in-denial on the other.

I’d briefly thrown this question out to you before. That post was in the summer of 2017, years before a pandemic disrupted daily life, environmental collapse was something other than science fiction, or we had a 24/7 view of annihilation in a peace-loving country that often looked surprisingly like our own.

Even if you keep shutting off the news for the sake of your sanity, the brain still completes its gloomy pictures. But then we’re reminded, there have been victories too: those nurses in the terrible breach, that rebound in the numbers of whales plying our oceans, those Ukrainians serenading their fleeing breathern with folk songs and accordions in train stations. Bleak with shafts of sunlight I’d call it, but as the tribulation (a biblical word) piles on, still bleaker than it seemed only five years ago when people were already asking: “What if you decide to bring a child into this world? What do you owe her?”

Before reaching for the bottle, perspective helps. This is neither the first nor will it be the last time that the future looks bleak. In 1891, almost 25 years before the catastrophe of World War I, Oscar Wilde did what great artists always do. He looked out and realized that something was tragically missing in a world that was already marching off to war amidst destructive new technologies and social upheavals, with callow leaders and millions of oblivious bystanders along for the ride. As far as Wilde could tell, no one seemed to be envisioning a better world any more, even though that’s the only world any sane person should want to be heading towards. As he said at the time:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading.

Isn’t utopia the future that we want for our children? Not some nostalgic past that never really existed but a sustainable place with wiser leaders, where humanity is enhanced by its technologies instead of subjugated by them, where we flourish by celebrating our common humanity instead of preying on one another. But none of us will ever reach such of place unless we can imagine it first.

One of my favorite writers is Michael Chabon (check out his marvelous Moonglow if you’ve somehow missed it) and I happened upon an essay of his this week where he (like Wilde before him) looked around, shortly after the turn of a different century, and noticed that something was terribly missing. His queries around “what that was exactly” were prompted by his discovery of an audaciously hopeful scheme that had been launched some time before. It was called the Clock of the Long Now. A tee-up to Chabon’s essay on Longreads described the powerful response that a few visionaries had made to “a disappearing future”:

One of the grandest gestures toward imagining the future is the Clock of the Long Now. Originally conceived by inventor, computer scientist, and Disney Imagineering fellow Danny Hillis, and expected to cost in the tens of millions of dollars, the clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Besides being a tremendous feat of engineering, it’s also a tremendous statement of faith — building it is a bet that there will be humans around over the next 10 millennia to hear its bells ring.

To Chabon, the Clock of the Long Now seemed a utopian commitment, not to a destination on a map but to something that feels just as bold today: that we, our children and our children’s children actually have “a Long Now” stretching before us.

As Chabon quickly understood, the point of this invention was not to measure our passage of time into an unknown future or to celebrate the strange race of creatures that built it. No, it had little to do with our time-keeping or technical wizzardry. “The point of the Clock,” he writes, “is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future.”

‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without….
Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?

No, we probably can’t—or think we can’t. But the Clock of the Long Now wants to recover that loss, quite literally, as an emblem of belief in horizons that extend beyond the screens that we’re holding in our hands and their always-in-the-present diversions.

Chabon laments that Americans (as a culture and a country) are no longer caught between the poles of “the bright promise and the bleak menace.” Now (and he wrote this 15 years ago) we seem to have mostly the latter and little of the former. I think it’s one reason why we’ve been so gobsmacked by the nobility of Ukraine’s resistance in the face of barbarism—all of these people (where did they come from?) so full of “the promise” in spite of “the menace.”

Asking similar questions, he ends up thinking about his young son, with a tremendous sadness, given how different Chabon’s own speculations about The Future had been when he was that age:

If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.

So in response, Chabon tells his son about the Clock of the Long Now, and while he did so his son “listened very carefully” before asking, “Will there really be people then, Dad,” ten thousand years from now? “’Yes,’ I told him without hesitation, ‘there will,” [although, to himself] I don’t know if that’s true.” Chabon confirmed this Truth to his boy because he felt that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. “[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.”

Just think about that for a minute. What you believe, what you hope, and how you’d answer that child, who embodies “a far longer now” than you do, when she begins to wonder about what lies ahead.

Doomsday scenarios around climate catastrophe have lent a powerful sense of urgency to questions around giving birth or refusing to do so. If what’s ahead are more devastating floods, wildfires, famines, mass migrations, ferocious competitions over scarce resources, and increasing strife among nations, it sometimes appears that all we have to look forward to is an even more Hobbsian world of tooth and claw–and no place for children.

In my own travels through this quandary, I couldn’t help but notice that there are hundreds of articles out there trying to find the “fairness” to future children in our having them today, with most concluding that we should forego childbearing altogether. In particular, these debates have been catnip for philosophers, with one in The New Republic (“Is It Cruel To Have Kids In the Era of Climate Change”) beginning his take on it this way:

In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what ‘the best thing of all for men’ is. ‘The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,’ Silenus replies: ‘not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.’

If that were in fact true it would simplify matters enormously, not only for those of us who are here now but for all the rest who might be coming. But is it really this black and white?

In a different essay, another philosopher (who specializes in the “ethics and metaphysical issues regarding birth, death and meaning”) invites us to weigh the plausible (as opposed to existential) risks that are facing both us and that future child.

Against “the near-certain” threat of a “global warming apocalypse” today, she recalls the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus in 1798 that a human population boom would outstrip the world’s food supply (“Imagine if everyone decided to stop having children back then to avoid the ‘inevitable’ famine?), and somewhat more humorously, The London Times’ prediction in 1890 that by 1940 there would be so much manure piling up after the horse drawn carriages that “every street in London would be buried in nine feet of manure.” (“Imagine if people had decided it was wrong to create a child to wade through the muck?”).  As a result, her analysis concludes more equivocally than Silenus’s. Her “tipping point” for the question ‘Is life a worthwhile risk?” is whether or not you happen to believe the climate-related forecasts.

And I suppose to some extent that’s true.  But it leaves us (unhelpfully) in the middle of the climate believer/denier debates, when I think what we need is a sign post that will get us to a more enabling place, to help us decide the matter “in our hearts” (if you will), that brings us to a stand that’s more embedded in human nature than in risk analysis as we consider whether “bringing a child into a world like this” is justifiable.

Which brings us back to Nietzche.  Because, as the New Republic essayist eventually tell us, the great German philosopher didn’t agree with the answer that the satyr Silenus gave to King Midas. In Nietzche’s worldview, you should never wish that you hadn’t been born, nor should you refuse to bring children into the world because of the miserable state in which you currently find it.

To some extent, this is because living has always involved both tragedy and triumph. Only today, amidst the cosseting and complacency of a society as rich as ours do we seem to have forgotten this basic tension in our existence. (Before Nietzche and long before Amazon and the Metaverse believing people called these deeply human realities “sin” and “grace.”)

So the Nietzche readers among you will also recall his “Will to Life,” his “triumphant Yes” to the question of human existence, his “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest of problems.” To be human is always to struggle to find ways to affirm the force of our lives in the full knowledge that death is also roaming among us.

That’s maturity. That’s what every parent who should be a parent understands.

As they make it “their own work” to fight against what’s unfair and unacceptable, these parents teach their children by their examples, standing right there alongside of them as their kids learn how to do the same thing.

These parents believe in The Future, which is why they answer “Yes” (without hesitating) when they’re asked, “Will there be a future ten thousand years from now?” even though we can never be sure. That hope is always tentative, contingent, and we’re big enough to handle its uncertainties.

All that good parents can be sure of is that they’ll be standing next to that child while he or she begins to claim his or her part of it, that no child in this family will ever have to face The Future alone. Likewise, it’s a standing-on-shoulders legacy that can continue as long as the young and their nurturers are giving a “triumphant Yes” to whatever tomorrow holds in the overlapping work of their lives.

Yes!, even when our streets are clogged with nine feet of sh*t and the warm sun of springtime has just come out.

This post was adapted from my April 24, 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.

A Different Future Will Get Us Out From Under the Cloud

March 20, 2022 By David Griesing 2 Comments

It’s hard when you’ve been through a difficult time (like we all have since the coronovirus landed), finally feel that you’re coming out of it, and then discover that the promised relief has suddenly been snatched away. That’s how the last three months has felt: with the lull in vaccinations, the resurgence of the virus, and the lingering impact on schools, work and the ability to keep your chin up.

I’m writing this on the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, and the recaps around that day have been everywhere. I mostly stopped paying attention after the wake-up-call of one of them, Frontline’s review of the terrorist attack and the fear and disasters that followed (right down to the botched evacuation from Kabul’s airport two weeks ago). Their documentary, America After 9/11, made this passage of time feel “all of a piece,” twenty years when I’ve felt that we’ve mostly spiraled downward as a country, both here at home and out in the wider world.

It only made the cloud that was pressing down already feel that much heavier.

In thinking about recent debacles, I often “follow the money” as I look for the culprits in a saga like these post 9/11 years have been: the sheer, staggering cost to all of us (in dollars) and for more than a few of us (in post-traumatic stress, dismemberment, addiction, and lives lost on the battlefield or to suicide).  For example, I realize that my daughter has known almost nothing other than these sad 20 years.

Perhaps numbed by these human costs, my alarm only escalated when I saw (as you saw) America leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars of vehicles, weapons, equipment, uniforms, indeed whole military bases when we departed from Afghanistan and nobody, nobody seemed to have made a list of it all so those of us who had paid for it knew we’d left behind, what it had cost us, and why we thought it was “Ok” to just pass it on to the Taliban.

Trillions of dollars were apparently spent in our foreign wars since 9/11. What does that level of spending even mean? It numbs the mind until you start breaking it down and realize that the cost of a single Humvee could support a family down the street (wherever you live “in our homeland”) for a year or more. No one seems to want the public of you and me to know the specifics beyond these unfathomable cost estimates—because then, presumably, someone would have to be held accountable, like you would a thief who’s gotten into your house (or shop or school) and is made to empty his pockets, one item at a time.

It’s a convenient slight of hand—this vaporous expense—because the industry behind the war machine we’ve abandoned near Kabul stands to become even richer if we “ditch the old stuff” and get to make a newer, shinier, even more expensive war machine the next time around.  Because after all, when we’re confronted with some new threat, we’ll say, as Americans always seem to say when we’re afraid: “Of course. Buy it. We’ll worry about whether we can afford it later.”

The cloud that presses down continues to grow as I appreciate how little discussion there’s been about this aspect of the bungled evacuation from Afghanistan, indeed our abandonment of all our post 9/11 nation-building and democracy-exporting efforts. The cloud further discombobulates when I realize that we’ll do it all over again if we don’t pause, re-think and ultimately re-group very differently as a result of these misadventures.

Of all people, it was Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and U.S. president during much of the 1950’s—this man who helmed our last great war—who said it most eloquently, perhaps because more than almost anyone he knew what he was talking about and had the gumption and stature to speak the truth. Something brand new had come out of WWII, a military-industrial complex, that was bigger and more worrisome than any commander-in-chief or even government could control. If we’re not mindful (Eisenhower warned), this new war machine will jeopardize the health of our country and its brightest prospects in the future.

Eisenhower put his warning into his farewell address to the nation at the end of his term—literally his last important words to us as president, and surely his most prophetic.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society….
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Over the past 60 years, Eisenhower’s worst fears have largely been realized, their frightful impacts “economic, political, [and] even spiritual.”

Moreover, it bears noting that the military-industrial-complex has grown beyond the companies, consultants and influence peddlers that had already joined forces by the 1960s. For example, attempts are increasingly being made to integrate the Silicon Valley tech companies more closely into governmental functions like data capture, surveillance, cyber-security and cyber-warfare. (See “As Google, Microsoft and Amazon Seek Bigger Defense Role, Some are Leery,” an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday of last week.)

Of course, there are several reasons for the alarming rise of disruptive, profit-oriented “power centers” like this and similar ones that seem to always want to slow dance with our government. There are also reasons we never get around to pushing them away. The same pharmaceutical industry that rips the public off in most years comes to our rescue with a revolutionary vaccine—so it can’t be that bad. The military-industrial-complex (or MIC) that gorges itself on billion-dollar defense budgets saves us from more terrorist attacks after 9/11, so it too can’t be that bad.

These periodic reprieves make us (and our elected representatives) seem to forget all the bad stuff for a while and we never find the will to do all the post-mortems that we (and they) should also be conducting–like why prescription drugs are orders-of-magnitude cheaper in Canada or Mexico, or why the entire American government seemed to be hoodwinked into the Iraq war by “weapons of mass destruction.” Any impetus for reigning in these industries seems to be undermined by their occasional but far-too-expensive star-turns as “national saviors.”

Moreover, a megadon like the MIC operates in and provides high-paying jobs in every US city, state and territory. Because it’s a manufacturing and job machine too, it makes regular and generous campaign contributions to every elected official where it operates as “a cost of doing business,” or, more accurately, as “a cost to keep the business coming.”  Since most elected officials easily spend as much time fund-raising as governing, there are powerful financial incentives to refrain from “biting the hand that feeds them” and even cutting the MIC back down to where it already was when Eisenhower rang his alarm bell.

The difficulties of “oversight and management” of the MIC are further compounded by two other factors, locked without end into their own, counterproductive back-and-forth.

Millions of Americans work in companies that contribute to our seemingly perpetual war efforts (indeed, a few of you might be reading this now). Once again, it feels like “biting the hand that feeds you” to question the implications of your work, at least until your son comes home from war with traumatic brain injuries or you’re shocked into wondering “how it was all worth it” while watching something like our sad retreat from Kabul two weeks ago.

But even then, even with personal or citizen-based horror about the MIC’s impacts, the impetus to do something about it, to complain or protest, to agitate for a different way of conducting America’s affaris, is undermined (somewhat) by self-interest—it’s my paycheck, after all—but even more so by fear:  fear that if “I” want our country to spend less, do less, dismantle the-worst-of-the-MIC, then when the next national security threat appears (because of course it will, and of course we won’t be ready for it), “I’ll” be blamed for wanting us to cut back on our so-called “defensive and offensive capabilities”—like failing to manage a winning football team effectively. This vague concern about complicity silences the better angels that tell us: surely, there are higher motivations than fear that WE COULD AND SHOULD be responding to as individuals, as communities and as a country.

It all seems too big to do much more than stew about. But isn’t awareness that you’re a drunk or an addict (with the MIC as your fear-reducing drug) the first step towards a cure?

Despite new news cycles about virus patients triaged in Idaho hospitals or our kids being afraid to go back to school, I’ve been trying to linger over the SYSTEMIC imbalances (I think the word is right when used here) that the military-industrial-complex has introduced into my life and work because it seems to me that much of my life and work would have been different (and better) these past 20 (or more) years if we’d been working to achieve different priorities as a country—priorities with aspirations like the moon-landing a few years after Eisenhower spoke—instead of whatever shell-game we’ve been playing ever since.

Awareness of how our national treasure and bandwidth are being spent is, I think, the first step towards choosing to spend these scarce commodities more judiciously.

For example, some of us want to de-fund the police to allocate energy and resources to other community priorities. I think it’s far more complicated than that because police departments are (among many other things) just the tip of the MIC iceberg.  All you need to prove it is to see local police departments like ours in Pennsylvania taking to the streets with military grade equipment that they’ve gotten as surplus from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What we’re fighting, and shouldn’t be fighting, is all around us.

_{Pennsylvania police departments have received more than $6 millionin military ordinance over the past few years.}

I’m writing about this particular cloud today because, eventually, we’ll learn how to manage Covid-19 more effectively and because our 24/7 news cycles suddenly stopped covering the incompetent way that we just evacuated ourselves out of our country’s longest war. Our whole, sad, 20-year experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, from beginning to bitter end, merits enough of our attention to reach at least the beginnings of a judgment—and maybe, several judgments about it.

I think our experience requires following the money and wondering whether the priorities we’ve been financing are really worth as much as we’ve been paying (economically, politically and even spiritually) for them: because in a world of limits, if you’re paying for one thing you’re NOT paying for some thing else—and bearing the opportunity costs.

As I sat down to write to you yesterday, on 9/11, my plan was to acknowledge the cloud I’ve been operating under (that maybe you have been operating under too) for the past month or so and point in a more optimistic direction. I wanted to look back with you from 2050 and glimpse the world that even now we’re beginning to create to meet the demands of a healthier, more sustainable planet. (Instead, I’ll do that next Sunday, in a Part 2-post.) But as you’re suspecting from my shift from the objectives of a military-industrial-complex to those of a carbon-reduced environment, our priorities will need to change as we stumble towards a different and more necessary future.

In the meantime, we’ll start to confront our financial limits, how much we can put on the credit card without a pay-off, what we can and cannot afford. Even in a fear-inducing world, a free society can only afford so much security—and, after all is said and done, HOW MUCH MORE SECURE DO YOU FEEL in the wake of our government’s flushing trillions of your dollars away? If we’re serious about healing our home-planet, we’ll have to “right-size” the military-industrial-complex that purports to protect our corner of it.

There’s simply no alternative.

It will be a messy, polarizing discussion, two steps forward and one back, with gridlock for years at a time (because that’s what a democracy does), but a debate about our biggest most expensive priorities may already have begun at the Kabul airport—and the more voices that join in that debate the better.

Follow where the money’s been spent and where new dollars are going. Priorities are realized with budgets and by those with the wisdom to guide those budgets into accountable actions.

The debate that we’ve been needing to have for at least 60 years may finally be getting started.

(By the way, the illustration up top of a human under a cloud, was created by Simone Golob.)

This post was adapted from my September 12, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Instant History of the Past Week in Ukraine

March 7, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, we’ve all seen the pictures of mothers with their children and old people fumbling in distress in Ukraine—to leave the bombing, to find refuge.

Maybe because they cut so close to the bone and because we’ve seen so many similar images from Syria, Greek islands, Afghanistan and Myanmar, our early warning systems kick in and we become numb before they can sink their teeth into us too deeply.

But we’re less likely to shut ourselves down when events fall outside familiar grooves, not “more victims/different country” but something it’s harder to recall seeing: like those clips of Ukrainian men (and more than a few boys) who’d been living safely in Europe but left their families, friends and jobs behind to board buses and trains for their homeland this week, drawn by some quixotic but irresistible impulse, even though they never held rifles before, had been warned away by their country’s on-going destruction, and knew they might never survive their rescue attempts.

We couldn’t take our eyes off uncommon valor like that, or stop wondering what we might do in their shoes.

When poet Stephen Spender recalled similar impulses almost a hundred years ago, it wasn’t a fool’s errand in a jaded eye but the fragrant whispers of a flowering nobility that he captured.

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
(“The Truly Great,” 1928)

It shows how far we’ve come (or fallen) that the perfume of greatness seems so unfamiliar today, but also through the magic of our technology that it somehow got embodied by these heroes on our news screens this week.

Who fights for one’s country these days? Who leaves so much behind to step into the jaws of the beast in a vain or noble attempt to stop it from closing? Observers like us in the West saw and felt what Spender was describing this week.

And we couldn’t take our eyes off of it. It surprised, maybe embarrassed us, as we confronted our own convictions or their shallowness. But while those closest in, the French, Germans or Poles, wondered whether they’d do the same, they also looked to their fears as a world of ordered boundaries was upended. The unthinkable Bear at the door was all too thinkable now.

Exactly one week ago, as a result of the West’s changed perceptions about Ukraine and the heroism of its president and people, several “historic” things happened. I’d call it a kind of awakening. And while it usually takes the perspective of 20 or 50 or even 100 years to decide “what just happened,” I was persuaded—by sharing the perspective of an economic historian from Columbia and his interlocutor—that several developments in recent weeks really did change the historical arc that we’ve been traveling on. We realized certain things, made some momentous decisions as a result, and implemented them with lightening speed and lethal effect. As a result, I’m persuaded that nothing that follows will ever be the same as it was only a few short days ago.

In addition to the obvious pitfalls of writing an “instant history of the past week,” there are some advantages.

Informed historical judgments can place the rush of on-going events in a broader context. They can put characters like Putin, Zelensky and Biden, themes like sanctions, supply chains and energy interdependence, into a story that tries to make sense of its sub-plots.

And you don’t have to buy-in completely to this kind of storytelling. Instead, you can use such explanations as hypotheses to be proven or disproven by whatever happens next on the world’s stage. But this time you bring with you a few suspicions that you’ve almost nailed down.

_{Ukrainian civilians confront a convoy of Russian troops this week in a vain but valiant attempt to turn them back.}

I became interested in the explanations of history in college. Not as a professional interest but as a continuing sidelight that’s has made me follow “the world news” everyday and always wonder what it meant.

I took a course that became three courses about the sweep of historical events and I was hooked: trying to answer questions like “what explains” a Napoleon or a Hitler, or how “the Black Death” in Europe undermined feudalism? (The beginning of an answer to this last one: by helping increasingly scarce laborers to appreciate their economic value.)

I took this interest into what seemed to me the historic events of my lifetime. Globally, it was the end of the Cold War, the recent pandemic. (Why did they happen? What would follow?) And from a more localized, American perspective: the cultural shifts of the Sixties (involving the civil rights of African Americans and women, Earth Day and the environmental movement) and finally, 9/11. It was sometimes possible to see the Before-and-the-After side-by-side because the changes around each one of them were so profound.

A two-part conversation between Ezra Klein, at the New York Times, and Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia, identified similarly transformative moments around the recent invasion of Ukraine. (This paywall-free link is to both a transcript of their exchange and a recording of their conversation.) It was compelling that Part-One of their get-together occurred almost immediately Before and Part-Two immediately After the unprecedented response to the invasion by a startlingly unified West last Sunday. Klein called Tooze back this past Monday to reflect on events that neither of them had predicted just nine days before.

I’ve separated my summary of their observations in Part One from the comments they made in Part Two of their conversation. Taken together, I’d argue that five historic changes either happened or can be confirmed around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over the past several days.

PART ONE OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (FRIDAY FEBRUARY 25)

1. A Western-Liberal illusion was shattered.

Once Russian military forces crossed the Ukrainian border and invaded its sovereign neighbor, it was no longer possible to believe that the benefits of international peace, finance, law, trade and cultural exchange would outweigh national grievances and territorial imperatives that lingered from a previous age. No invading army had crossed a national border for 50 years. It could no longer be assumed that the mutual advantages of a global “community,” following an ideological Cold War with the West, would constrain either Russia’s desire to expand its sphere of influence against the constraints of NATO along its eastern flank or China’s claims on Taiwan or over the South China Sea to the beaches of Japan, the Phillipines and Vietnam.

Russia’s seizing of Russian-speaking Crimea and support of “breakaway “republics” in the Donbas region of Ukraine had not been enough to dispel the West’s illusion that all nations shared its dream of global prosperity and harmony. Neither had China’s subversion of Hong Kong, in violation of its 50-year treaty with the UK, or trade sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. But those rose-colored glasses finally shattered when Russia marched into Ukraine.

Tooze and Klein saw foreshadowing from Russia and China around 2008, after Russia had recovered from the economic devastation following the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s and China pivoted from the Beijing Summer Olympics to the rise of a Xi Jinping. Back then, both China and Russia started chaffing publically about the dominance of the global framework that had been established by the U.S. and Europe a half century before. After the Russian invasion 10 days ago, the West could no longer operate on the assumption that free trade, open communications, and the greater prosperity of home populations would make Russia and China “just like us,” freer, more open and democratic. The world is divided again, less because of communist ideology and more because of national aspirations that cannot be denied.

2. Russia and China effectively used the West’s open, global framework of trade and finance to build “war chests” that could enable them to resist the West’s dominance within their geographical “spheres of influence.”

Since its near financial collapse in the 1990s, and particularly after the sanctions that followed its seizure of Crimea in 2014, Russia used its access to the international banking system to build its financial reserves through its energy and natural resource sales, reduce its dependence on foreign currencies like the dollar or Euro, and make itself more impervious to external interference, including economic sanctions. (Adam Tooze discusses the financial games that Russia played at length if you want to read more about them.) For its part, China also used free trade and access to a global financial system to enrich and strengthen itself at the West’s expense. Once again, wrapped in the illusion described above, the West was slow to appreciate the negative consequences that came with what it believed was “its benevolent dominance.”

3. Supply-chain security involving critical materials becomes a central feature of every country’s defense policy.

As a consequence of #1 and #2, the interdependence of energy and semi-conductor markets (to take just two examples), impose limits on Western sanction regimes and make the future take-over of a country like Taiwan (which leads the world in the production of semi-conductors) even more fraught. Only a couple of years ago, few observers in the West were concerned about these supply constraints and the necessity of home-grown accessibility to critical products and resources.

These three changes in Western perception all hardened with the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, as recently as last weekend most observers believed that the invasion would quickly overwhelm its resistance, that Europe would continue to tolerate unpredictability around Russian energy supplies, and that Russia’s economic interdependence with Europe (i.e. the benefits of prosperity all-around) would continue to keep Europe safe and secure.

As a consequence, the West’s initial responses to the invasion—which had been telegraphed for weeks—“meant to sanction Russia, to cause pain to the country and particularly to its ruling class, but not to crack its economy, not to cause undue harm to their own economies, which are interwoven with Russia’s,” as Klein described it.

Then last Sunday, perhaps after viewing a week of Ukraine’s brave civilian resistance, watching its nationals return to fight, its grandmothers face tanks, and listening to the eloquent pleas of its president to NATO, the EU and the US, the West was ready to make even more fundamental departures with its past.

_{Throughout the invasion, Zelensky has maintained regular video contact with the people of Ukraine and the world outside, bolstering not only Ukrainian morale but also summoning Western solidarity and resolve that had never existed before.}

PART TWO OF THE KLEIN/TOOZE CONVERSATION (ON MONDAY MARCH 1)

4. The West declares economic war against another nation for the first time since World War II.

Last Sunday, the EU and US announced economic sanctions on Russia’s Central Bank and virtually all of its other financial institutions in a bid to bring the country to its economic knees as the punishing cost for its invasion of Ukraine. It’s an economic war that’s not only been brought to Russia’s leader and the oligarchs behind him. It’s an economic war that is likely to have devastating and long-lasting consequences for the Russia’s 145 million people. Adam Tooze:

[W]e are now applying Iran-style treatment to not just a nuclear power, [but to] the number two nuclear power in the world, the old Cold War antagonist, in the middle of an active shooting war in which we are taking sides [and] in which they are not making the progress they expect. And we are threatening by this means to deliver a devastating blow to their home front. I mean, panic in the streets, total disruption of the ordinary lives of tens of millions of Russians.

Today, every American going to the grocery store or looking for a used car is worried about price inflation. But in one fell swoop, the Western sanctions implemented by a united West on Sunday launched “a full out economic war” with far more profound “inflationary” consequences for every person who relies on the ruble to live day-to-day. Coupled with the EU’s unprecedented decision to send military arms to Ukraine (and Germany’s reversal of its earlier refusal to do so), Tooze accurately analogized these counterstrikes to the aggressive American posture immediately before it entered World War II (with its Lend Lease program in support of its European allies). Indeed, it was enough of a body-blow that Putin put his country on nuclear alert immediately thereafter. One result is that a nuclear war, unthinkable just a week ago, is today more of a possibility than it has been for over 35 (and maybe 60) years, depending on how you calculated the Soviet threat level in 1985 and 1960.

It doesn’t take boots on the ground to go to war today. While the West is struggling mightily to avoid a larger conflagration, the economic war it has launched is real and its consequences deep and possibly irreversible. And instead of taking weeks or months to mount, this kind of war began almost instantaneously, impacting a global network of trade, insurance and currency exchange fine-tuned to global disruptions that are far more modest than this invasion.

But another way to assess the damage is from the perspective of the average Russian. According to one report this week, “the fall of the ruble since Russia invaded Ukraine could add 4 to 5 percentage points to Russian inflation, which [already] stood at 8.7% in January.” That’s another order of magnitude reduction in what Russians could buy with their rubles a little more than a week ago. Tooze again:

[T]here is serious reason to worry about lower middle class Russian households [in particular]. They’ve been squeezed hard over the last five, six, seven years. Their incomes have not been going up. They’ve been piling up debt. One of the first things that happened today is the interest rates went to 20 percent. So that’s going to immediately bite into your income. So there is a serious risk here of major economic and social fallout.

We’re talking the destabilization of an entire economy from the ground up.

While it will take the Russian economy some time to “devalue” itself, the impacts on its citizens will escalate in the coming weeks and months with particularly grave consequences for these same lower-income folks who, until now, have been the bulwark of Putin’s “democratic” support. Couple that blow to its citizenry with the escalating costs to the country of an invasion (that was supposed to be over by now) and of fighting a Ukrainian insurgency (if it ever succeeds), and Russia could soon be flirting with the same economic bankruptcy that it faced after the Cold War. And from what Tooze, Klein and others seem to be saying, China either can’t or won’t come to Russia’s rescue.

So however much it is obscured by the daily blizzard of “news” and our other diversions, for the first time in most of our lifetimes, we in the West are on “war-footing,” and have no way of knowing where this confrontation will go next.

A final Before-and-After event also happened last Sunday.

5. The defeated countries in World War II—Germany and Japan—are either bolstering (or considering bolstering) their military capabilities for the first time since they were pacified 75 years ago.

In this regard, Germany announced (in some shame over its lack of preparedness) that it is authorizing an unpredented increase of $110 billion in its defense budget. Moreover, for the first time since its creation, the EU (as a unanimous block of 28 nations) has authorized the delivery of $500 million in weapons to a country that’s not an EU member. This is on top of armaments and military supplies provided by the US and NATO. (The icon of St. Javelin, up top, is Ukraine acknowledging one of America’s most appreciated military contributions, namely the Javelin anti-tank missile.)

Moreover, as China engages in saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Japan is also actively contemplating its rearmament. With these developments, the so-called Pax Americana that was promised after the Cold War but already wobbly before Sunday, was surely dead thereafter.

Five developments that have likely changed the course of modern history.

After the terrible loss of blood and treasure in Afghanistan by many of these same Western countries—economic losses that have yet to be quantified for those of us in these democracies who have covered them—it (sadly) appears that we are off to the same bloody and costly races again, with hardly a pause to take a decent breath.

Of course, the consequences are not only to where the West spends its money but also to where it doesn’t (either because of massive new defense expenditures or the lack of available band-width to consider anything other than national security concerns). For example, how do we also fight a war against global warming and biodiversity loss and on behalf of a habitable planet? Is this battle now, somehow secondary to our survival?

What really happened over the past seven days is that half (or more) of the world suddenly changed its priorities—and it’s not at all clear that in that flash, enough of the citizens of the West have even noticed.

This post was adapted from my March 6, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.