Having a Plan Turns Bystanders into Helpers

October 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

“If those around him had known how to intervene to stop him, it would never have gotten to this point,” someone might have said about New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently.

I wasn’t expecting to write about bystander interventions today, but was jarred (as many were) by the longstanding accommodation of Cuomo’s harassment. His temper, directed at everyone in his orbit, was a common secret. Like Churchill once said about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Cuomo was apparently another “bull who brings his own china shop with him.” But in addition to the tolerance that those around him had for his temper tantrums, Cuomo’s groping and touching were also common knowledge. Many around him knew he was grabby with women, but none of them intervened to stop him (or protect him from himself), so apparently it became “the way that things were for years” if you were in the Governor of New York’s orbit.

The longstanding tolerance for Cuomo’s conduct reminds me of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long run of predatory behavior in Hollywood. Like Cuomo, those in Weinstein’s sphere of influence were afraid of crossing him because they relied on the power of his support and feared the wrath that might jeopardize it. Too many came to feel that accepting Weinstein’s abuse was the price of admission. And because (like Cuomo) the power disparities between Weinstein and almost everyone else were so profound, “the way he acted” became an open secret, widely known and effectively normalized, while he continued to groom his prey and damage more lives.

Because so many in the entertainment business “knew about Harvey,” those who were “in on the joke” regularly got to have an uncomfortable laugh when somebody (usually a comedian) had the gumption to drag the stinking truth onstage.

As reported by one outlet after his first accusers got press coverage, the finger pointing had been ongoing in mainstream comedy for years. For example, Weinstein’s behavior was a punchline in the TV show “30 Rock,” where the character played by Jane Krakowski says in one episode: “I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions out of five.” And while announcing actress nominees for an Oscar in 2013, comedian and comedy writer Seth MacFarlane joked in front of Weinstein himself, the rest of those in the “live” audience, and the 40 million people viewing on TV: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” As time goes on, we’ll probably hear about the jokes that staffers and favor-seekers in Albany were telling one another about Cuomo too, instead of doing anything more than laugh among themselves about it or cringing in a corner as he headed their way.

Part of what was so compelling here was the high visibility of Weinstein’s and Cuomo’s misconduct. After all, they were acting out their dark fantasies in Hollywood and the Empire State, with their wall-to-wall press coverage, enterprising scoop-hunters, and hangers-on with blackmailing agendas. Yet for both of them, it took years and a long trail of victims before collective action started to puncture their skeevy underbellies.

Clearly, some basic checks and balances were missing in the workshops that Weinstein and Cuomo once dominated.

Clearly, far too few at their stratified elevations knew how to inoculate their workplaces from the diseases that undermined them, along with every individual who worked with these two and tacitly permitted their misconduct.

Clearly, Weinstein/Cuomo/comedians Bill Cosby and Louis CK/artist Chuck Close/ former House Speaker Dennis Hastert/former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick/former Olympic gymnastics’ doctor Larry Nassar/all those victimizers in the American military who continue to act with impunity towards their subordinates: each of them was or is enabled by others in their reigns of terror, and it was more than their closest victims that lost something of value by not having healthier places to work before “what almost everybody seemed to know already” finally became unacceptable.

In the wake of the report about Governor Cuomo by New York’s attorney general in early August, there was a brief interview with an employment law professor named Marcia McCormick about redesigning employee training and reporting systems to fight sexual harassment in the workplace. What caught my attention was the interview’s focus on “activating bystanders” who already knew about the harassment so they could join in the fight against it.

This angle in the discussion could be traced back to a 2016 report by the EEOC (or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) which insisted that victims were not the only ones who needed to know the rules about workplace harassment and discrimination; every employee needs to be empowered to challenge both perpetrators and their fellow employees to drive predatory conduct out of the workplace. Said Professor McCormick:

[B]ystander training in particular is very effective, to allow co-workers [of the person being harassed or discriminated against] to intervene in ways that are not [as] risky to them…[W]hen people complain about discrimination against themselves…they are perceived to be whiners. Their complaints are sometimes not taken seriously…[but] when a person advocates on behalf of another, that usually doesn’t happen…[R]eporting by a bystander doesn’t trigger the same kind of psychological backlash and potential for retaliation that the person who experiences it might.

Moreover, when all employees are trained to recognize, intervene and demonstrate their solidarity with targets of illegal behavior, they are better able to disrupt new overtures before they happen and help victims to report and gain more backing from fellow workers afterwards.

A 2018 article in Harvard Business Review acknowledges that empowering an entire workforce like this is a lengthy and difficult task (far more so than having “a canned training session” and an employer’s checking “the legal liability box” afterwards) but when executed properly, empowerment training almost immediately begins to deter likely perpetrators, from the boss’s office on down. This is how one expert described the root problem that needs confronting to the article’s author:

Jane Stapleton, co-director of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and an expert in bystander interventions, told me about an all-too-familiar scenario: Say there’s a lecherous guy in the office — someone who makes off-color jokes, watches porn at his cubicle, or hits on younger workers. Everyone knows who he is. But no one says anything. Co-workers may laugh uncomfortably at his jokes, or ignore them. Maybe they’ll warn a new employee to stay away from him. Maybe not. ‘Everybody’s watching, and nobody’s doing anything about it. So the message the perpetrator gets is, My behavior is normal and natural,’ Stapleton said. ‘No one’s telling him, I don’t think you should do that.’ Instead, they’re telling the new intern, ‘Don’t go into the copy room with him.’ It’s all about risk aversion — which we know through decades of research on rape prevention, does not stop perpetrators from perpetrating.

Once again, when the bystanders aren’t empowered to act, harassing and discriminatory behavior is “normalized” in the same way that rape or child abuse is normalized when the family where it’s happening pretends that it’s not.

Enabling bystanders, the author writes, “is leveraging the people in the environment to set the tone for what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable behavior.”

_{A still from the 1985 movie, Witness}

Because I’m sometimes unable to act on my best (or even better) impulses when confronted with something that seems wrong, I spent a lot of ink in early book drafts considering how any of us might do a better job of it.

From behavioral studies that delved into the mechanics of helpful intervention, it seems that the cure for bystander inertia comes in two doses: already having a better plan in mind before the unacceptable happens and seizing the occasions to act on your plan when it does.

The deeper I dug, the more I appreciated how visualizing the path we want to take before being called up to act almost always improves our responses. It’s the difference between being ready when the time comes versus having to make up what you’ll do (or far more commonly, refrain from doing) on the spot. But this requires preparation. You have to want to act in a certain way—like treating others in the same compassionate way that you hope they’d treat you in similar circumstances—so you’ll make the effort to devise a plan that you’ll already have it in your pocket when the need arises.

If it’s really as simple as that, why weren’t more people in Weinstein’s or Cuomo’s or other predatory orbits—and why aren’t more onlookers of “bad stuff” generally—able to follow their better angels and intervene to stop (or at least help in stopping) the damage that they’re witnessing?

In my case, I’ve usually been delusional enough to imagine that “I’ll be as brave as my best hopes” when I’m called upon by circumstance to right some wrong, or stand up for somebody who needs my help. Unfortunately, whenever I’m surprised by the need to intervene in a bad situation, I usually find it easier to fret about my skill set, whether I want to get involved or have enough time, or if someone else is in a better position than I am to step in and make a difference. In other words, my hoped-for better self usually never shows up and I end up making lame excuses to explain to whomever’s listening why I failed to do much of anything at all.

In research I did at the time, I learned that it doesn’t have to be this way, that even considering my thoughts and feelings more deeply in advance of witnessing, say, sexual harassment at work or one stranger being tormented by another, would likely have enabled far better responses on my part.

One study I found had some of the study participants attend a lecture on the ethics around rescue and the bystander effect (where they’d presumably imagined their own responses to various situations) and other study participants who missed that lecture, before all of them encountered a stranger who’d actually fallen and couldn’t get up outside the lecture hall. While the scenario was staged by the study’s authors, its findings were not: 43% of those who’d just attended the lecture ended up coming to the victim’s aid, while only 25% of bystanders in the study who’d missed the lecture stopped to offer their help. It’s a resonant statistical difference between those who already knew something about overcoming bystander reluctance and those who never may have thought about it at all. (Notwithstanding these findings, I still recall being surprised and disappointed by the fact that only 43% of the lecture goers actually stopped to apply what they’d just supposedly learned!)

Another study revealed that even taking a relatively minor step “in the right direction” (beyond just learning more about it and imaging how you might act beforehand) makes an additional difference in determining how you’ll act or fail to act going forward. This tendency was demonstrated by an experiment in which some teenagers pledged to remain virgins until marriage while others in the study were never given the option to make such a pledge. Given teenage hormones, It doesn’t seem like much of a commitment, but this study found that those who took the pledge had sex much less often than the non-pledgers. Indeed, even the non-pledgers who said in advance that they supported abstinence before marriage ended up having sex far more frequently than their pledge-taking peers. In other words, even as small an act as making a verbal commitment tended to reinforce attitudes and lead to behavior that was consistent with one’s helpful intentions going forward.

To test this behavioral guidance system—and to pay-it-forward on behalf of all who had came to my assistance over the years when my car has broken down on a busy road—I did some of my own committing in advance. The next time I saw a car broken down in traffic, its driver in distress and I could pull over safely to help, I promised do so. I rehearsed the likely scene in my mind, and a couple of months later the opportunity presented itself.

A woman outside of her car was being confronted by an angry truck driver during rush hour on North Broad Street in Philadelphia after an apparent collision. I could and did pull over and offered her my assistance which, after some initial surprise (who is this white guy in a suit offering to help me?), she ended up being visibly grateful for.

Without an action plan, I would likely have found a dozen excuses for not stopping. Once I acted, I knew even better what I’d do the next time, the likely range of emotions I’d feel while intervening, and the best part, how I’d feel afterwards—which was genuinely enabled. On the other hand, without a plan of action beforehand, my hopes alone about being a helper would likely have left me at the bystanding sidelines.

When we want to, it’s not so hard to empower ourselves towards helpful action.

It’s not so hard to train ourselves to help confront the Weinsteins and Cuomos who can end up dominating our worklives by finding ways to move in a constructive way beyond the “common secrets” and “inside jokes” about the boss or “that guy over there” or the touchy-feely holiday party.

It’s learning about the bystander inertia that naturally holds us back by plotting our ways to helping when the need arises.

Maybe when more of us make this commitment, there will be enough people in every workplace who are ready, willing and able to intervene on behalf of victims who will almost never be vindicated when standing alone.

This post was adapted from my August 8, 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.

What’s In a Face?

October 6, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I come from people who loved to search faces.

As a kid, my folks would visit a honky-tonk strip in a place called Savin Rock early on a Saturday night and, of course, they’d take me along. They’d park in a good spot on the main drag, open the windows and gaze out at the passing stream. Or we’d set out on foot, find a roost near the cotton candy stand or similar attraction, and go to work from there.

We had more than a little interest in what our passers-by were wearing (or in their gay abandon, not-wearing), how they were enjoying themselves (besotted in pairs and threesomes), but the main thing was their faces. They seemed to be masks as well as portals: about their workweeks, their illnesses or desires, about the boats their grandparents had come over on, the churches they’d attend tomorrow, or the suburbs they were aiming for. It was as if you looked hard enough, you might see it all there.

We were spectators who’d come for the faces.

The muttered comments from dad or mom were rich to a kid. I suppose that some were judgments of a sort. Marking distance while they gazed, maybe saying “We’re better than this. Look at how far we’ve come.” But I don’t remember the superiority in it. They genuinely seemed to want to make sense of it all, of this colorful slice of the world on parade and how they fit into it. We didn’t go so much to laugh or to pity but for the enjoyment of locating ourselves in the hot mess of it all as it seemed to teem by.

It’s a proximate experience that I’ve really missed during the past year and a half.

The crowds I’ve seen from afar while walking or driving have often seemed irresponsible or even dangerous. It’s literal masks I’m looking for now, or how few are wearing them. Since they’re outside like I am I know how foolish this is, but the crowds still draw me in less and make me more wary. They’re other people instead of the same people, less a pageant that I’m a part of too. I miss what seems like an old chronicle (although it’s only a short time ago) about who they are, where they’re going and seem to have been, or what I’m doing here in the middle of them.

Those triangles of eyes, noses and mouths that pull in our attention even as newborns are apparently embedded as essential markers of danger or promise in the most basic instincts of our brains. Is she friend or foe, is he caregiver, stranger or something different than either of those things, but still “of interest”?

When Wally looks up to read me, it’s not at my hands or how I’m sitting. What he’s after is a dog’s kind of facial recognition.

We look for that, and need that, too.

+ + +

With deadly germs around, it seems safer today to search a stranger’s face through the eyes of an artist, whether it’s a painter, a sculptor or a photographer.

Aside from pictures of family and one increasingly infamous ancestor, the only portrait I have at home is of The Queen. Although clearly a violation of protocol, I mean it no disrespect by keeping it over a commode so I always have it to look at when I’m standing in front of it. A sign of the times, it never looks back while I search those lines and folds of powdered skin for clues about her gravity, about who she really is. Because it’s a good portrait and perhaps because she’s sat for them so often, she’s known how “to do the portrait-thing” forever so it’s full of information that she wants us to have and little that she doesn’t. Even if This Queen doesn’t live forever, she’ll still be sharing her majesty with me in this theater of perceptions she was so clearly “in on” creating.

_{“Lightness of Being,” by Chris Levine (2004)}

When I go to a museum these days—at least when I did before the lockdowns—I’d go to see one or two things that I missed having a conversation with or simply wanted to learn more from. The regular aim was targeting my attention instead of bringing it “to all of European Art since 1850” or to everything that the curators had decided to hang up on a wall from the Orient or ancient times.

It turns out that being more selective about my attention has also carried over into what I’ve been doing in museums after I’ve covered my destination pieces and places.

For example, when I flew out to see Emily in LA a few years back and we went to The Getty for the first time, I knew “what I had to see” but quickly discovered that those who had staged the galleries I was seeking had played their own games with the objects of my affection. So, while I searched the face of Rembrandt’s “Old Man in Military Costume” for clues, I eventually noticed that I wasn’t the only occupant in the gallery who was doing so. A marble bust in the same room (Bernini’s “Pope Paul V”) was searching the Old Man’s face too—its sight lines arranged “just right” by the staff—so that the rest of my visit involved noticing the interplay between “must see” works and how there always seemed to be other Star Gazers who’d been strategically arranged to see them too.

_{Because of the distance, my camera couldn’t capture Bernini’s “Pope Paul V” (1621) gazing over at Rembrandt’s “An Old Man in Military Costume” (1630-31), and certainly not when I was eye to eye with the Old Man himself, but here are the two of them as they looked that day.}

The aim for Rembrandt and Bernini and maybe for their time was to capture the essence of their subjects by using all their artifice and painterly tricks to find the truth in their sitter’s faces. These days, of course, truth is a far more slippery agenda, approached, if at all, with irony and trepidation—more mask (in the pursuit of) than a sign promising what’s true over its portal.

Among many other things, “this way that we see things today” is what made John Vincler’s short essay this week (the latest of his “Brush Strokes” columns for The Paris Review) so illuminating.

Vincler was writing about the contemporary portrait painter Michael Borremans and his pilgrimage to see his first Borremans’ portrait “live” in one of New York City’s art galleries. The visit last December was a birthday present from his wife, his “out” after being cooped up for months during the pandemic. He’d wanted to go and search the painted face in “Study for a Bird” for what mere reproductions of it might have been less able to tell him.

_{Michael Borremans, “Study for a Bird” (2020)}

To look at this image of it, “Study for a Bird” is slightly unsettling, somehow ajar. What’s going on under her chin or at the back of her neck? What is she wearing, why is she wearing it, and how does this headpiece direct our attention around the hollows and elevations of her face? Surely these are some of the questions that lead Vincler to say:

[t]he people in [Borremans’s] portraits often seem as if they are playing a role in some mysterious production, adding a layered tension to an existential question they ask of both themselves and the viewer: What am I doing here?

The same, I think, could be said about earlier portraits of his, like “Columbine” (note the slip in her left eye) and “The Hood” (the smudge at her mouth, along with that vaguely animate thing that’s perched on her shoulder). How do we pass through these “cues,” these intentional masks or diversions, on our way to The Truth about these subjects? What does the visual pathway that Borremans lays down for us tell us about reality today and the roles we’re playing in it?

It’s like he doesn’t want us to know anything for sure, or as an art critic wrote about another of Borremans’s portraits:

‘The painting somehow manages simultaneously to speak clearly and to stutter.’

_{Michael Borremans, “Columbine” (2008) and “The Hood” (2007)}

It’s often interesting how artists talk about their work, and that’s certainly true about Borremans, who lives and works today in Ghent, a Belgian city that’s been associated with great artists for centuries. Here he is, explaining “how he first came to work in this structurally abstruse way,” in a 2015 interview and commentary.

It’s really a philosophical question about what truth can be. And truth is just as much in the lie as in something straightforward or honest. All of this came very organically for me from the way I perceived the world since I was a child: that there’s a variety of interpretations of something called ‘truth’. And I was always cautious about it. As an adolescent, that’s where my fascination for cinema came in. They build decors; they fake everything to make it seem real. And if they do it with that,’ he continues, warming to his mistrust, ‘they do it with everything. To have it is to use it. Landing on the moon, wars – you never know. So therefore in my work I want to give information in a way that’s clearly incorrect, not fitting, out of place. I think that’s more honest.’

This variability of truths seems well-suited for today, when we can’t even agree on whether the virus that’s roaming this land like a reaper is real, or that it’s actually killing us.

+ + +

Looking into the faces of Borremans’s subjects—staged as they are—isn’t the same as watching a parade of faces in a place like Savin Rock, or even the expressions of the confinement-rejecting walkers who stream past my front porch all day, every day. But there are similarities in the exchange. We look into these faces and they look back, telling us something about where we are–“doesn’t anyone else see this too?”–and how those fleeting recognitions make us feel less like strangers, if not quite companions of one another on this strange trip we’re all on?

In Vincler’s essay, after viewing Borremans’s portrait and starting to write about it, he tells us (with obvious nostalgia) how he remembers the similar joys of searching the commuters’ faces on a subway that he’d taken regularly to work not so long ago.

Taking the subway means daily having at least one person’s face across the aisle and many faces in your line of sight. You can’t help but study the concentrated face of a reader, the elsewhereness of a daydreamer, the sadness here, the exhaustion there, the twitchy concentration of a game player, the open face of the tourist, and even the practiced but not quite impervious shell of the city dweller, lightly armored in sunglasses or headphones. In staring at the face in Borremans’s portrait. . . I was . . . reminded of the experience of moving through a city, the mix of intimacy and alienation that comes from incessant, packed proximity with strangers. It was okay to stare there in the gallery, to contemplate the dignity and complexity of this subject, with the strange costume, the visage part mask and part portal, suggesting something as awesome and truly unknowable as an individual person. Isn’t this a paradox, to be made to remember the faces of strangers?

And how great it would be to stare into and search our ways through them again, just like we used to, face to face.

In the meantime, Michael Borremans’s portraits provide us with some suggestions about what we might see when we can finally do so again, whenever that is. Ambivalence, containment, resignation, foreboding and, at times, even some humor in the face of it all. (His picture up top is called “Man Wearing a Bonnet” after all, from 2005.)

There’s something true, if not exactly truthful, about each one of them. And even that sense of recognition feels good.

This post was adapted from my August 1, 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.

We Don’t Have To Be Productive All the Time

July 19, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Yesterday, when I sat down to write to you I didn’t really feel like making the effort. Instead, a few relaxing hours with a slow cup of coffee were calling to me. But then my thoughts challenged my feelings.

“Being useful on a Saturday morning means writing to you,” I told myself. Producing Sunday’s newsletter is on the schedule, how I’m adding (as opposed to subtracting) something to the cosmic balance sheet on this particular day.

Then I worried: Is writing this week’s post just one more unnatural way that I contort myself into Being Productive or, because it’s nurturing a community and not merely commodifying one, is what comes naturally to me here fundamentally different from the urgency that drives me at most other times?

I hoped it was the latter, because I can imagine that writing to you is not “more work” (or really “work” at all) but instead its polar opposite: an essential human interaction that’s valuable in its own community-building way, with no purpose beyond initiating a good conversation around a campfire that we’ll gather around remotely after I press “Send” every Sunday morning.

But as I dug into writing the paragraphs below, every coffee-calling part of me knew that I’d probably gone back to work instead.

We’ll get back to my conundrum later, after considering why it matters to think as well feel our ways through a version of my same, basic question:

Even when we don’t want to be working, why does it feel like we always are?

The Problem

It’s amazing, really, how much we’ve bought into the myth of continued “productivity” and “usefulness” today. Indeed, our language tells us about the depths of our belief, since the opposites of these two words (when applied to people) are almost always negative. If they’re not “productive” and “useful,” they must be “lazy” and “useless.”

None of us want to be a parasite (which is another trope). Instead, we want to contribute to that overall balance sheet, and so an entire system has been created to support, measure and reward our productivity and continued usefulness, not for it’s own sake but to sustain the system itself. You could call it 21^st Century capitalism or simply a giant hamster wheel that provides all the rationales we’ll ever need to keep on going—never getting off of it until all our energies are spent and we’ve been reduced to uselessness in it’s final form, which, of course, is death.

In the ultimate fantasy about Hamsterdom, maybe our continuous push to be useful (and never concede to retirement) can even delay the inevitable. Not worked to-death exactly, just denying its bitter aftertaste.

She was productive to the very end, god bless her. What a good life she had. That’s how I want to go too! Never a burden to anybody, she worked until the very end.

To some extent, we’ve all bought into this fantasy, but what about the price we’ve been paying to maintain it? Because oftentimes, work can be “life” (as in “life-force”) threatening.

Undoubtedly, it’s why the work we’re always doing feels exhausting. It is exhausting, sucked-dry to the marrow exhausting, because we’re condiioned to work and be productive and never be a burden to anybody, except, of course, to ourselves.

In this, we’re both the enablers of and the fuel for Hamsterdom’s productive fires, and, from its system perspective, the best part is that we’ve come to believe that working this much is actually good for us too! Busy hands are happy hands. Generous hands. Building character.

Well, it’s the ultimate hoodwink.

Indeed, this colonization of our vital energies is so complete that it’s almost imperceptible to us on most days, but we can still get glimpses of what we’ve lost when we consider our so-called “time off.”

Even our play or leisure time today is increasingly turned into a productivity challenge or been repurposed somehow as a marketable product.

How many photos can I take at a Second-Line parade in New Orleans or while I’m visiting Jerusalem? (Last week’s post.) How many experiences—photographic or otherwise—can I consume on my vacation before I’m “full” and feel I’ve made “the most of my time away?” How many pictures can I post about it? How can I improve my fitness or knowledge or adaptability today, help my kids get into better schools, show my neighbors an even more beautiful garden, whatever it is, because I’ve only got this little block of “free” time before I’m supposedly “back to work”?

Or approached somewhat differently:

If we’re smarter than hamsters, why aren’t we working ‘only enough’ to enable us to get off that treadmill for meaningful chunks of time so we can enjoy the convivial life that we’ve otherwise been missing?

Part of why I’m asking these questions today comes from reading a series of thought-provoking essays by Tedd Siegel, a prolific writer who’d been wondering the same thing and found himself in conversation with a range of others who’d been wondering about it too. (This will take you to his starting block essay, in a rich and continuing series of them.) Siegel begins with an observation:

[T]he deal we’re being offered (work yourself to death for the next thirty years while you build your human capital) requires each of [us] to take out a mortgage on the self that [we] know can never be paid off. The deferral of most personal goals to an imagined future, in exchange for laboring continually for the goals of their employers, lies exposed as a rotten deal….We’ve played by a set of rules that was too optimistic, too individualistic, and too lacking in urgency for change.

Siegel writes to agitate for that change, and he identifies several root causes for the state of our near-ceaseless work today. One results from the shift (particularly in developed countries) from a manufacturing to a service and finally to today’s digital economy. (With my asides to Siegel’s observations) this caused:

a qualitative change in our relationship to our jobs. Our jobs are more intimate to us [today], more reliant on our interpersonal aptitudes and emotional intelligence. [We are not just cogs-in-a-wheel making widgets anymore. For this new hamster wheel, we have to go to school first, know how to trouble-shoot, etc.] Neoliberal capitalism [as he calls it], has us constantly concerned with its problems [meaning that we take our work home with us], integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done.

(Once upon a time, a fellow lawyer was onto something when she asked me whether I was billing the time I spent thinking about my cases in the shower.)

As he got going, Siegel eventually introduced me to Jenny Odell, who’s a professor at Stanford, and her 2017 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  Two words became important to him and to me in her book title. The first is “Nothing.” Odell doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing nothing at all, just nothing that Hamsterdom wants us to be doing (which includes relaxing and zoning out). The second word is “Resisting.”

Throughout her book, Odell argues that all of us should create an autonomous zone of resistance to Hamsterdom’s relentless demands—a protected and even defiant place where we hold onto aspects of our lives that cannot (and never should be) optimized. It’s making a deliberate conscious choice, every day and maybe several times as day, to carve out a space for living in a way that cannot be appropriated or assimilated by the market’s logic and turned into a deliverable—because we simply won’t allow it.  (For example, in the era of Google and Facebook, that includes taking back our attention from companies that are selling it to others by turning off their apps on our phones and laptops.) Then, and most importantly, the autonomous zone we’ve recovered will allow us, at long last, to enjoy a version of “a satisfying, collective life” that’s entirely apart from work.

For Odell, the act of resisting-in-place “is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” It begins with a very specific way of “doing nothing” that involves learning (or more accurately, re-learning) how “to redirect and enlarge our attention.”

And how will we spend all of this liberated attention?  Once again, Odell’s answer is something that humans have always known instinctively how to do, at least (it seems) until quite recently. It involves nothing more complicated than rejoining the conviviality of a collective life with other people.

The Way We Were

Like Siegel and Odell, James Suzman has been troubled for some time by the impacts of modern work on our lives and wondered, from his perspective as an anthropologist, whether humans are hard-wired “to work this way” or whether it was cultural imperatives (culminating in Hamsterdom) over-riding our essential natures. His research took him to hunter/gatherer communities where he could observe human behavior before “all of this civilization came along,” and it resulted in a series of books, most recently, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2021).

Suzman discovered several things in the course of his research, among them that we are not, as humans, naturally inclined to allow work to take over our lives.

In fact, all the way back to our hunter/gatherer forebears, humans viewed their time and proceeded to organize it in ways that maximized the convivial zone of collective life while safeguarding its refuge (by, for example, ensuring that community members never felt devalued by someone else’s status or driven to distraction by internal competition). Indeed, hunter/gather groups like the Ju/’hoansi, some of whom still live in southern Africa, went to great pains to ensure that they only worked the amount that was absolutely necessary to support the time they spent together. Concluded Suzman:

Half of the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognise that lots of these things [about working] that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature.

For example, the Ju/’hoansi have a fundamentally different view of scarcity (or “enough”) than we seem to. In the course of his observations, Suzman found that the Ju/’hoansi rarely stored food that they had hunted down or gathered for more than a few days. Trusting that their environment would always provide for them, they worked to meet their immediate needs and then stopped, rather than worrying about shortages and planning ahead. (By way of contrast, we might ask ourselves: Is our modern view of “enough” programmed and encouraged by a perpetual consumption machine urging us on, or do we actually “need” all the stuff that we buy, especially when we might be doing something far more satisfying with our own “hunting and gathering” time?)

The Ju/’hoansi also go to great lengths to regulate their group dynamics to ensure a general harmony when they do what’s most important to them, namely, sharing in one another’s company. That means they don’t want any hunter in their midst to get too big for his britches. Whenever one of the hunters returns with a big kill, they told Suzman: “we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” It’s a practice that’s known among researchers as “insulting the hunter’s meat.”

According to Suzman, the Ju/’hoansi also “insisted that the actual owner of the meat, [that is] the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal.” This helped keep the most talented hunters’ egos in check while, at the same time, allowing arrow owners like “the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted and the lazy [to get] a chance to be the center of attention once in awhile.” Group harmony, not one-upmanship, was important to hunter/gatherers. (We, by contrast, live in countries where someone who is perceived as “the most successful businessman” can be elected president, where nearly everyone can name the richest man in the world [Jeff Bezos], and somebody like Elon Musk has millions of social media followers following his every utterance. Every once in awhile, wouldn’t we be a lot better off “insulting the hunter’s meat”?)

Suzman’s Work book, and his scholarship generally, has provoked a great deal of commentary among professional commenters, including Derek Thompson, who writes regularly for The Atlantic. In a piece from earlier this year, Thompson adds some heft to Suzman’s observations by noting some recent polling data and how the Ju/’hoansi differ from us when it comes to time. (I’d seen this U.S. polling data reported elsewhere, but it had a particular resonance in the context of this conversation.) Notes Thompson:

When a recent Pew Research Center survey asked about the secret to happiness, most Americans, of all ages, ranked ‘a job or career they enjoy’ above marriage, children, or any other committed relationship. Careerism, not community, is the keystone in the arch of life.

This finding is particularly striking since “it doesn’t have to be this way” given our hardwiring as a species. Our preferences today also tend to justify Jenny Odell’s conclusion that our commitment “to working all the time” has been so engrained in us that only “active resistance” will overcome it.

For me, Thompson’s most insightful paragraph related to our relentlessly future-oriented view of time and our unwillingness (despite the prompts of our yoga apps) to live, even for a few short minutes, in the present and leave our worries about the future behind.

[M]odern civilization is a shrine to the future. The shift goes back to the agricultural revolution, which subjected humans to farming cycles that separated planting and harvest by many months, and continued with the rise of finance. But a fixation on the future by now goes far beyond crop cycles and long-term loans. It is at the heart of our concept of education and corporate development, which presumes that young students and workers will gladly spend decades honing skills that they will be well compensated for only years later. The least controversial values in America today—the importance of grit, the hope for progress, the dream of social mobility—assume that the future is always changing and that our inclination is always to wish for better.

Thompson goes some distance towards explaining why we are where-we-are with our work, but he has little to say about what we can do about it beyond being aware that it doesn’t have to be this way. Suzman presents a longer chronicle of human labor in Work: A Deep History, but he “gestures towards” instead of “describing a way off” of the work wheel that’s endlessly depleting us today. For that, we need to return to the roadmap that Jenny Odell hands to us in How To Do Nothing.

A Way Forward

_{Getting back to the commons of a non-working life.}

Odell flat out rejects two of the most obvious reactions to the burnout of working today, namely: “temporary life hacks designed for increasing productivity once [we go] back to work” and “saying goodbye [to the workplace] permanently, and neglecting our responsibility to the world.” To her, there is essential work that’s always waiting to be done but it is equally essential to nurture our “non-working” lives.

As already telegraphed above, Odell’s “third way” involves active resistance to Hamsterdom’s forces so we can decide for ourselves—autonomously or outside the logic of the market—that:

Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

To protect these “inalienable rights,” all of us need to create and protectively manage a zone where we can “resist in place” despite the 24/7 ubiquity of modern capitalism’s siren call.

Like the Ju/’hoansi, Odell asks how much work is “enough work” to maintain this non-working zone, but unlike these hunter/gatherers she recognizes that limiting the amount of work and “resisting in place” will be far easier for some than for others. Economic needs may be so great that some individuals will find her kind of resistance difficult to afford.

To this quandary, Odell finds hope for “a way out” in “collective refusals,” where groups of people join with one another to hold open a space for more resisters to join them, at least to the extent that they can. Odell’s “refusal, boycott, and even sabotage [would be] like a crowd of Thoreau’s [at Walden Pond], refusing [the unnecessary benefits of modern working life] in tandem.” Amongst these “Thoreau’s,” other resisters might be empowered to work at least somewhat less in order to better enjoy the company of friends, families, and nature, as well as their own curiosity, playfulness, contemplation and “un-marketable” creativity.

Tedd Siegel elaborates on the mechanics of Odell’s resistance even further:

[T]here is a kind of tipping point with respect to immiseration that… brings things out into the open. This is because some people’s misery counts for more than others on the terrain of public discourse. Once the middle class and the professional classes join the ranks of the miserable, it starts to become possible [for nearly everyone] to talk about the problem at the level of the system itself.

In other words, it begins by facing our exhaustion, appreciating that everything from sustainability to human attention is being turned into a commodity, and wondering about the essential pleasures we’re missing as a result because our world of work can’t figure out a way to make a buck off of them.

Isn’t enjoying those essential pleasures more important than working all the time? Then surely we should “make room” in our working lives for them by actively starting to “resist in place”–not tomorrow, but today.

Derek Thompson concludes:

Happiness means being just rushed enough [by all the work that’s waiting for me].

After reading Jenny Odell, I might change this to say:

Working enough to be happy means actively resisting work’s relentless undertow, every single day, in every job that I do.

(Would I be lying if I said that writing this newsletter to you is a fruit of that resistance instead of more of the same? Unfortunately, I may still be too enslaved by the demands of Hamsterdom to even be able to tell.)

This post was adapted from my June 6, 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.

The Giving Part of Taking Other People’s Pictures

June 14, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.

I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.

In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?

What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?

(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)

Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?

Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.

A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.

My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.

Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

*_{A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007}*

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers. While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:

Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?

Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied.

Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.

As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.

What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses. As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea.

For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera?

My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.

In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras.

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation,

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

*_{Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.”}*

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”

Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity.

Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

_{Here’s a gentleman I’d just purchased something from at the annual flea market.}

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week?

Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?

Yes, probably.

But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.

Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.

It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one.

+ + +

(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 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.

The Spark of Getting Out of Your Head & Into Somebody Else’s

April 18, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

There are many voices urging us to bridge the divides in our society, but not nearly as many explaining why it would be good for us too if we learned how to bridge them.

Luckily, recent research in neuroscience has been proving that Perspective Taking—or making the conscious effort to stand in the shoes of people who are different from us—activates regions in our brains that make us more innovative and creative overall. In other words, Perspective Taking is not just a one way street. It also produces reciprocal benefits for whoever’s making the effort.

I’ve talked here several times about how toxic it is to “civic friendship” when we no longer bother to understand where “those other people” are coming from or what we still might have in common with them. Democracy relies on civility and common purpose in spite of our occasional differences, and yet we rarely hesitate before writing off fellow citizens who disagree with us about immigration or climate change or voting. Without even thinking, we ask ourselves: How can they be so wrong when we’re so right?

After the last presidential election, I waded into these turgid waters with two posts. They argued in favor of so-called Blue State Americans shutting down their knee-jerk reactions, shovling their class prejudices about “rednecks” and similar demonizations to the side, and being curious enough about where Red State Americans are actually coming from to make an effort to understand them. Not to agree with, but simply to consider the different priorities that are motivating them. These posts were “Stop the Steal” Throws a Match on a Dry Forrest and Healing a Divided Country Requires Understanding Others.

Now, research is telling us about the rewards that are available when you make the effort to see your life or work from somebody else’s point of view. Whenever you encourage yourself to “stand in someone else’s shoes” out of curiosity or an acknowledgement of your biases, brain science is proving that your fields of imagination will expand, making you more creative and innovative in all of the interactions that follow.

Part of it is going deeper than appearances and ferreting out information that challenges your preconceptions. For example, Niccolo Machievelli (who’s often described as a “classical realist”) wanted to discover everything he could about his opponents before he was facing off against them. 500 years ago, he wrote:

“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

A deeper understanding of others applies to more than political adversaries, of course. It can be your customers and clients, the co-worker who’s always challenging you at meetings, the regulator who suddenly shows up in the workplace, the protestor who’s in your office parking lot. The more you know about where “these other people” are coming from, the more effective you can be when interacting with them. (What “hot buttons’’ of mine are they pushing and how do I turn them off? What are our shared objectives, where is our common ground?) By asking and answering such questions, you can gain a broader perspective along with the new options that it affords.

When I was still practicing law, Fran and I co-wrote an article about perspective taking, although we didn’t call it that back then. We titled the piece: “Why Didn’t My Attorney Call Me Back (and How Do Clients Feel About That)?”

Sure, lawyers are busy—shuttling from one crisis to another—but being unresponsive to your other paying customers says loudly and clearly, “my time is more important than your time,” and it’s one of the legal profession’s most persistent complaints. On the other hand, understanding client irritation to the point of changing the way you practice makes your work more valued by others, more profitable to you, and ultimately more satisfying too because perspective taking literally “hacks” your job. Once you understand a need that you failed to appreciate before, it forces you to become more innovative and creative in meeting it, leavening other aspects of your work at the same time.

In other words, your discovery that others see your priorities differently leads you—through a more creative application of your problem solving skills—to a broader perspective on your work than you had to begin with. In a burst of discovery, you’ve realized that you’re not the only one who is right all the time.

Today, brain science is providing us with a view of the neurological processes behind Perspective Taking. While there are technical descriptions of the brain’s functional areas in the following quotation, the gist of it should still be pretty clear.

When we are trying to solve a problem, the frontoparietal attention network activates, meaning that areas at the front and the side of your brain are at work. However, when we take the perspective of another person, we engage a different network, often called the “mentalizing,” or theory-of-mind, network. This has two key components: the temporoparietal junction, located just above and behind the ear, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the middle of your forehead. These areas help us understand what others know, want, need or find important.
Importantly, the “mentalizing” network partially overlaps with the so-called default mode network. This term was initially chosen because researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that this network became active when people took a break from active problem-solving. After years of research, we now know that this network is activated during exploration, imagination, innovation, thinking outside the box, and engaging in mental time travel by thinking back to the past or imagining possible futures. For those reasons, we often call it the “exploration” network. Thus, perspective taking engages both the mentalizing and exploration networks, perhaps because getting inside someone else’s head requires getting outside our own.

To summarize: the Attention network (or rational problem solving) plus the Mentalizing network (trying to understand others) in our brains also activates our Exploration network (thinking outside the box). Obviously, this is a richer and potentially more fruitful mix of brain power than relying upon the problem-solving function alone.

The description of brain coordination above was provided in an article called “Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions.” It was one of several offerings this week in the KnowledgeWharton newsletter from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. Intriguingly, the authors’ lab at Penn was “investigat[ing] what happens when we turn the [Exploration or thinking outside the box] network up or down” by improving perspective taking. Does it make people in the workforce more innovative and creative overall?

Their answer was a pretty emphatic “Yes.” .

What the Penn researchers concluded was that “practice makes perfect” when their study participants combined both perspective taking with problem solving and started appreciating the work-related benefits that follow. As neuroscientists, they might also describe their findings this way: our neural pathways become more fluid when we traverse them more frequently because of the advantages that we feel we are gaining by doing so.

In the course of their research, these neuroscientists also developed several exercises that improved the brain’s fluidity and the creativity and innovation that it unlocked.

They asked study participants to reflect on recent perspective taking and share the experience with colleagues. In a second study, they asked them to visualize future applications of perspective taking, paying attention to the details and writing them down beforehand. Other “muscle building” exercises for the brain included having more conversations with total strangers, trying out new things (like learning a new language or playing a new instrument), and reading novels that transport you into the minds of different characters.

By encouraging exercises like these, the researchers were taking advantage of the fact that:

the human brain is nature’s greatest statistical pattern learning device. This means that the more you exercise perspective taking (whether remembered, imagined or real), the more it will be reinforced. Over time, perspective taking is likely to become more automatic.

In sum, as you start to experience the value of this way of mental processing—by inviting the perspectives of others into your problem solving—you’re likely to keep repeating it.

Wishing to share their Eureka Moment more widely, the Penn researchers also developed something that they call The Nano Tool so that the rest of us can become more creative and innovative at work and outside of it. Despite the fact that its name conjures (for me, at least) a headset with beeping electrodes and matted hair, it’s actually more of “a hand-out” with additional exercises that can be used to activate more “problem-solving through perspective taking.” It’s well-worth checking out.

Finally, while perspective taking provides the kind of problem-solving boost that business school types are always eager to promote, I can easily envision some of its most transformative applications in our collective considerations of politics, race, class, religion and other social dividers. We might quickly discover that we’ll be benefiting ourselves at the same time that we’re strengthening our social bonds.

+ + +

Post-script:

Along with you I suspect, I’m finding the transition period between a hard year and what I’m hoping will be an easier one a bit of a challenge. As my mother used to say, I’m feeling “betwixt and between” or “at 6’s and 7’s.” Anyway, I saw the picture below after the devastating floods in Australia recently, and thought it seemed an apt metaphor for today, but I’m not sure why. (Maybe I’ve just taken on Wally’s perspective.) If you have any ideas about why this picture of dogs in crates being rescued seems right for these times, feel free to send them along.

This post was adapted from my March 28, 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 too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

« Previous Page
1
…
3
4
5
6
7
…
23
Next Page »