Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

August 20, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

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

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

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

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

July 30, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.

The Inner Cultivation of an Ethical Life

July 16, 2017 By David Griesing 2 Comments

The long tail of summer always provides an opportunity to consider your life and work before it’s September again.

Taking a step back before stepping forward sometimes happens in the Christmas to New Years week too, but between then and now it’s easy to get caught up in your daily distractions until time-off slows you down into someone who can reflect again.

Heat, sand and ocean are lead characters in summer’s pause, particularly the ocean. Its surface moves, sparkles, crests and breaks: a skin of hyperactivity that endlessly draws your attention with its clutter of ridges and crashes, smells and spray. But diving in is something else again. Below its surface, the ocean is quiet and calm enough to leave the sand where it is. It’s a suspension of deeper, darker, blue, that doesn’t draw your attention as much as holding it.

So perhaps it’s fitting that The Dalai Lama wrote to America in the Wall Street Journal this week. (Sometimes when the mountain won’t come to you, you have to go to the mountain.) He probably knows that it’s best for him to visit at this time of year, when people are slowing down and might be more receptive. He writes because he’s alarmed by how little of our lives or work have been grounded in our obligations to love, be fair, seek justice, act generously, or respect the earth. He writes as if our connection to broader purposes had broken altogether.

Today the world faces a crisis related to lack of respect for spiritual principles and ethical values. Such virtues cannot be forced on society by legislation or by science, nor can fear inspire ethical conduct. Rather, people must have conviction in the worth of ethical principles, so that they want to live ethically.

Unfortunately, many don’t care, while others will say that they don’t have time.

The Dalai Lama knows this, of course. And there’s another thing he’s sure of. Wanting to live ethically requires “inner cultivation.” But, neither caring nor desire can be cultivated while you’re ricocheting from one demand or diversion to another. There’s simply no space for it.

When your days are like balls in a pinball machine, you work, you recover from your blows, you work again and recover some more, until it’s mid-July or the day after Christmas or you fall down broken.

When your days are like warm baths in small pleasures—amuse me/ shock me/like me, buy something/eat something/watch something—and the gratification is only interrupted when you’re pretending to work, there is no place for an inner life either.

Of course, you can be captivated by, literally be “a captive of” what’s happening on the surface in other ways too, but this part of summer always offers a chance to escape from whatever wheel of distraction you happen to be on.

A place for “inner cultivation” stands apart from the rushes of stimuli that are so easy to get lost in every day. It’s a space for wondering whether there are deeper satisfactions than the ones that you have now. It’s a time to explore whether you have the desire for anything more.

The “ethical conduct” that the Dalai Lama commends can only be found by leaving the sparkles, reflections, and wave action at the surface for the deep blue quiet that lies below.

It is where the active, noisy, and uneasy mind can find enough silence and calm to cultivate a future that can fill you out.

It is the only place where you can hear your wholehearted life beckoning.

One Way That Conviction Works

July 1, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

As a kid, I loved Otis Redding’s songs, especially “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” I still can’t say too much about that voice, those arrangements. Listen for yourself. Silk degrees.

After his groundbreaking performance at the 1967 Monterrey Pop Festival (“resplendent in a teal-green silk suit”), Redding hosted a bash at his Big O Ranch in Georgia. The local newspapers crowed: “Otis is having a royal barbeque.” He was all of 25.

But it was less upbeat for some in his guests. The Black Power movement was on the rise and many of Redding’s inner music circle were white, like R&B producer Jerry Wexler. “People were talking a lot of trash,” Wexler recalled. “What is whitey doing here?” For his part, Redding wanted everyone he loved to be around him as he moved from his mostly African American fan base and into pop’s mainstream. Redding did what he could to un-ruffle feathers across the divide he was straddling, but his guests could still recall the tensions decades later (from a new book about Redding by Jonathan Gould).

I grew up at a time when you could hear what people were calling “soul music” on the same radio station (WAVZ) as the Beatles and Glen Campbell. (Today, it’s hard to imagine that kind of musical or audience diversity at any point “on the dial.”) But back then it was possible to think that the venues where you could see these performers would have the radio’s audience. That wasn’t even close to being true.

As the Sixties wound down and the Seventies got started, I went with a friend to see the Temptations at the Oakdale Theater. It had gently elevated seating-in-the-round, with a tent overhead and open to the summer breezes down below. Sitting almost anywhere gave you an immediate 360, so it took no time at all to discover that we were the only white boys in the house. As the Temps got going—“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain”—maybe the audience was just as surprised to see us, but before long it seemed that everyone had switched to pretending that we just weren’t there. I’d never been a minority before, and it almost felt like I was crashing somebody else’s party. But the next couple of times, there was no doubt about that at all.

Five or so years later, a college friend went with me to see Patti Labelle (and her group Labelle) at Assumption College. I was thinking a good-girls-from-parochial-schools kind of environment. Moreover, Labelle had Top 40 hits with lyrics like “Gichie, Gichie, ya ya dada/Gichie, Gichie, ya ya here…” that they sang in costumes straight out of “Star Trek.” It would be fun, but hardly high-risk entertainment. Still as I settled in, it gradually dawned that once again I was one of only two white boys in the house.

But who cared? Patti was on fire as the set got going, and my second memory of the night was her telling us that fans always brought her drugs after a performance (figuring she had to be “on something” to deliver like that), but what she wished they’d bring her was a good hamburger, “because working this hard makes you so damn hungry.”

Everyone laughed, and the girls slid into a Gil Scott-Heron number called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” It’s an angry song, with some spoken word delivery that foreshadows rap. It’s also long, building in momentum and rage as it goes along. A minute or so in, Patti had the room in her hand. But just then, people starting turning around and looking our way, talking loud, leaning over—what are you doing here?—as we clutched our armrests in the middle of a long row. This’ll be just like shooting fish in a barrel, I thought.

And Patti thought so too because she put “Everybody settle down” into the song’s narrative a couple of times, and when no one did, she stopped the music altogether, which left some of the outcries hanging in the air above us. I don’t remember what she said next—maybe “we’re all in this fight together”—and tempers began to cool as the house lights came up. With all eyes looking from Patti to us she said: “Everyone is welcome here,” and that was the heartpounding end of it.

More than a decade later and this time in Philly, I either hadn’t learned or didn’t want to because I was making a beeline for The Rib Crib, a take-out joint one neighborhood away. It was a Friday night, the middle of summer, there’d be a big crowd on a main street, the place was practically “an institution,” and Fran would be with me: what could go wrong?

This time it was Charlie Gray who came to our rescue. Once inside, we were packed like sardines, the only “out-of-towners,” and the crowd in front of and behind us started getting rowdy about whether we belonged. “What are you doing here?” “Go back where you came from.” It was already loud in The Crib but our being there took everything up a notch and Charlie noticed.

Technically, we weren’t the only white people this time. Our shoulders were touching autographed pictures on the wall: Charlie with Al Martino, Charlie with Frank Rizzo, Charlie with Sylvester Stallone, so we recognized Charlie as he tried to break through the crowd towards us. A booming voice preceded his big heart, telling everybody just how welcome we were, how honored he was to have us, what could he do to make us more comfortable, maybe some sweet potato pie on the house, and just like that everyone went back to looking forward to their ribs.

Otis, Patti and Charlie tapped into their power and declared what they stood for when something important to them was at stake. They already knew what to say and how to act because surely they also knew already what it was like to be “different” in a suddenly hostile place.

Your experiences clarify what you value most; how you’ve lived and worked determines your priorities. And it’s with both in mind that you’re able to care for yourself and others the next time around. That’s why Patti and Charlie never hesitated when it came to standing up for me.

I loved great food and music enough to put my pride (and maybe my safety) in the hands of strangers. But it was always about more than the risk. By stepping outside my lines, maybe, hopefully, I would gain enough clarity and power to find my generosity too.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo: What We Hold in Common

January 11, 2015 By David Griesing 5 Comments

From a certain perspective, could those men who were shot by French police yesterday be any more inspirational?

Masked, sheathed in black, executioners pointing their weapons at a pleading, fallen policeman outside Charlie Hebdo’s offices just before they fired their fatal shots. An image on the front page of every newspaper in the world that said “You’re watching, we’re doing.”

We just walked into the offices of some of your grown-ups, men and women who made their livings mocking our beliefs. We shouted to God while we mowed the clowns down in a hail of bullets. Who’s laughing now?

I walked into a kosher market, because it’s better when there’s some punishment for the Israeli oppressors too. I called the authorities and said, “You know who I am,” and oh, by the way, “If you take down my brothers, I’ll kill more of these Jews.” Yes, we talk to one another and work together. In fact, we’ll will be talking for years about we’ve accomplished today, and how little you could do about it.

“How just three brave men who believed in martyrdom could disrupt an arrogant nation and rivet the world’s attention” is our story. We kept our heads down long enough to escape surveillance by your overburdened security systems. There are just too many of us now for you to keep track of. And you will be reminded again that we are out here waiting. You will be reminded again very soon.

If you and your family feel unwelcomed by society in the West, or are unemployed, undervalued, feeling bored or disrespected or both just about anywhere else, this is a way to take your talent, redeem your life, find your inspiration. Yes. Jihadist recruiters had their second best week after 9/11 this week, while we mostly responded with… sentiment.

If you and I are not afraid, surely it’s not because of our drones, or American advisors trying to mobilize frightened Iraqi troops, or even those women brigades of Kurdish Peshmerga warriors who are maybe the closest thing we have to our own “superheroes” in the battle against militancy.

But beyond our own adolescent yearnings for fast solutions and simple justice, there is surely fear along with the tug of something deeper that calls upon us to engage with this asymmetrical challenge more seriously–far more seriously than this week’s opportunity to set down some flowers and light some candles on blood-stained sidewalks. A pretty cheap response, when it comes down to it, because it costs us so little. In a clash of world-views, do we need any more reminding that three lone gunmen (and the legions behind them) are much more serious about the drift of the world than we are?

But still…in the coming weeks, we’ll be debating racial profiling (“I am Ahmed,” after all) and how no American college would allow its student newspaper to print politically incorrect cartoons like Charlie Hebdo’s.

Surely we’ll buy more guns (because after Sandy Hook, gun advocates said the tragic might never have happened if those first grade teachers had had their own guns), and just as surely someone will use theirs to shoot somebody who looks like the Enemy. Then, of course, we’ll have polarizing arguments about what it all means. But talk is cheap too. In the coming weeks, it will still be our sentiment and endless talk around those who want to annihilate the freedoms that give us the luxury of all this sentiment and talk.

We take our values for granted. We’re no longer even sure about the ones that we share. But Said and Cherif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly were not confused. Going forward, there will be plenty of people who want to provide for us a black & white moral clarity (Ms. Le Pen if you’re in France, fill in the blank if you’re in the U.S.). But wouldn’t it be better if we started re-learning for ourselves how to become clearer about the values that we’re committed to?

In a recent op-ed entitled “Democracy Requires a Patriotic Education,” former dean of Yale College Donald Kagan wrote the following about what he fears we are (and are not) being taught in our schools today.

We look to education to solve the pressing current problems of our economic and technological competition with other nations, but we must not neglect the inescapable political and ethical effects of education.

We in the academic community have too often engaged in miseducation. . .. If we encourage rampant individualism to trample on the need for a community and common citizenship, if we ignore civic education, the forging of a single people, the building of a legitimate patriotism, we will have selfish individuals, heedless of the needs of others, the war of all against all, the reluctance to work towards the common good and to defend our country when defense is needed. (emphasis added)

Maybe you cringed when you read the words “legitimate patriotism,” but Kagan is right.

We need to figure out how to stand together again, what we hold as precious in common and would be willing to champion together. They are the values that we would be willing to fight and even die for. Try to imagine what they are if you can. Try to imagine us coming together as citizens and finding the collective spirit to fight a war like World War II today (with all hands-on-deck, not just a few “volunteers”) and you can sense the gulf between our illusion of shared purpose and the reality.

We need to bridge this divide—moving from sentiment and debate to principles we share (whatever they are)—and do so quickly, before others jump in to do it for us when we’re even more afraid. After all, is there anyone who doubts that there is a gun pointed our way, and that it could be any of us there on the ground, pleading for life?

What is necessary is not cheap, but the alternatives, well we are starting to see the alternatives.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming)