David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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We’re Mostly On Our Own When Seeking a Good Life & Good Work

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For a semester or two in college I wanted to be a political cartoonist, but after drawing 3 or 4 for my college paper I gave it up as a career—although not gladly at the time. I was all over the place, and liked how confining my message to a panel or two simplified to the essentials what I had to say for myself.

A good cartoon is like fitting your point of view into Twitter’s original 140-characters. There is a discipline to visual or verbal restrictions like that, and I tend to drift out of the lines into smoke and blather without them. Unfortunately, political cartoonists are going the way of the printed newspaper and Twitter is letting us blubber on almost indefinitely these days.

That’s by way of saying that both of the stories below feature cartoons or cartoon-like images, because they make their points far better than I can.

The first is about how organized religion no longer provides a space where most of us can meet regularly to figure out how to do good work and to live a good life. To the extent that houses of worship occupy our lives at all, most of them are no longer in the “values-forming” business. The second story is about Adrian Piper, an artist and philosopher who has found some of her own ways to fill this void.

I hope that you’ll reach out and tell me what you think.

Where Can You Go Today To Consider Doing Good Work or Living a Good Life?

Many gatherings in the name of religion today are neutral containers that contain platitudes about love, respect or tolerance, tell stories about how much Jesus gave for us, or how hard Moses fought against our sinfulness. They rarely speak to what we’re going though in our lives or connect us to other people’s struggles and the wider world. They fail to give us a context for deciding what we should and shouldn’t do when we’re at home or at work–how we should act, the choices we should make. As a result, many of us who were raised in houses of worship have decided that it’s not worth returning to them.

On the other hand, those of us who continue to meet around a religious campfire do so less to develop our Judeo-Christian values and more commonly to confirm the political convictions that we’ve brought with us.

In her forthcoming book, “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity,” Penn professor Michele Margolis argues that:

Most Americans choose a political party before choosing whether to join a religious community or how often to attend religious services.

According to her statistics, since 1970 many who identify as Democrats have stopped going to church altogether while many Republicans have continued to attend religious services because doing so validates their political values. Smaller numbers of Democratic congregations have also begun to pursue their own progressive political objectives. Over the same 40 years, churches and synagogues that lack a political agenda have struggled to survive.

Before 1970, nearly all American houses of worship tended to have a politically diverse membership according to Margolis. As important social institutions, their religiously-sanctioned civility reduced political bias and fostered tolerance in their communities. This kind of civility is essential to productive, democratic exchange, and no other social institutions in America today are providing the moderating effect on our politics that houses of worship once did.

We need a place where we can meet to develop the values (like generosity of spirit) that are necessary if we’re to have an effective civic life.

Given escalating levels of political animosity, sociologists and political scientists have been looking into how the social exchanges between an individual and the groups that he or she belongs to affect that person’s politics.  One study that Margolis cites has demonstrated that our meeting places (such as churches and schools) play a major role in determining how much partisanship influences our personal values. Another has confirmed what common sense had previously suggested, namely, that your exposure to conflicting political viewpoints  enhances your respect for differing opinions; clarifies the bases for your own points of view; and improves your tolerance for and acceptance of those who disagree with you.

Without social institutions that can moderate our partisanship today, it’s difficult to imagine how Americans will learn how to cooperate again so we can start solving the important problems that affect us all. I’m thinking about providing affordable health care, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, and investing the monies that we need to support the oldest and educate the youngest in our society.

Rising hostility along our political divides and gridlock in government are our consequences as citizens of losing that shared space. But there are personal consequences too.

As our churches and our schools (America’s colleges and universities, in particular) have become places that confirm our partisanship instead of reducing bias and fostering a diversity of opinions, we are increasingly on our own when deciding what to do and not do with the rest of our lives and work. Many if not most of us have no place at all where we can ponder with others how to live a good life or do good work.

Perhaps in response, the ways that Adrian Piper has been living and working may help us fill at least some of this void.

Adrian Piper’s Valuable Witness

Artists can see into the future better than the rest of us. Given their own visions of a life worth living, philosophers use the rigor of their arguments to tell us how we should live and work to claim that future. Adrian Piper has been filling both of these roles since her work began in the 1970’s.

You may have caught some of the publicity around her current show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The museum is currently hosting the largest exhibit it has ever mounted of a living artist’s work (a 50-year retrospective of Piper’s contributions).  Embracing her dual commitments, the New York Times reporter who covered the show said: “you see thinking happening right before your eyes.”  It’s a dynamism that makes “the museum feel like a more life-engaged institution than the formally polished one we’re accustomed to.”

I haven’t seen it yet, but I hope to.

Adrian Piper is a white-looking black woman. Not surprisingly, race and gender have been two of her lifelong preoccupations, but that doesn’t mean she falls into a presumed political category. Instead Piper seems to know more about “our fishbowl” because essential parts of her have spent so much time outside of it.  As a result, she’s ended up approaching nearly everything “her way.”

And that, I think, is why she’s useful for us to turn to as we face the gap that’s been left by the social institutions that once helped shape our convictions. Piper has figured out how to sponsor her own dialogue about what’s important and what’s not with the wider world—and then to tell us about it.

Piper went to art school in New York City at the end of the 1960’s. Over the next ten years her texts, videos and performance art aimed at challenging viewers and readers to take a clear-eyed stand for themselves. For example, she often used her own body as a primary image for unannounced public performances, such as walking City streets soaked with wet paint or wearing an Afro wig, fake mustache and mirrored sunglasses to confront people with the stereotype of a young aggressive black male whom she called the Mythic Being. During this time, Piper also got her doctorate in philosophy from Harvard. She has been producing works of art and philosophy ever since.

In a 1981 essay called “Ideology, Confrontation and Political Self-Awareness,” Piper discussed concepts she explores through her art and later expanded upon in her 2-volume “Rationality and Structure of the Self, published in 2009 and 2013, respectively. At the great risk of over-simplifying what she has to say, a key theme is that our beliefs (or ideologies) go unquestioned until they are attacked by new experiences that introduce doubt. Oftentimes, we either don’t allow our cherished beliefs to be interrupted by doubt or aren’t aware enough to realize that they have been undermined.  According to Piper, doubling-down and obliviousness are responsible for “stupid, insensitive, self-serving [behavior], usually at the expense of other individuals and groups.” Her antidote is acknowledging these doubts and continuously questioning our beliefs: a kind of moral nakedness.

Adrian Piper, Everything #2.8, 2003. Photocopied photograph on graph paper, sanded with sandpaper, overprinted with inkjet text.

I can’t do justice to Adrian Piper’s art or philosophy here, but I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to explore both of them further. The following quotes, from an interview she gave when her exhibit opened at MOMA, may help in peaking your interest.

Truly Opening Your Mind in the Face of Someone Else’s Arguments

To really read any discursive text… is a disturbing and cognitively disorienting experience, because it means allowing another person’s thoughts to intrude into your own and rearrange your beliefs and assumptions — often not in ways to which you would consent if warned in advance. Even when you deliberately decide to learn something new by reading, you put yourself, your thoughts and your most cherished suppositions in the hands of the author and trust her or him not to reorganize your mind so thoroughly that you no longer recognize where or who you are. It’s very scary; hard, painstaking work of determined concentration under the best of circumstances. So particularly with philosophical texts, the whole point of which is to reorganize your thinking, people often don’t really read them at all; they merely take a mental snapshot of the passage that enables them to form a Gestalt impression of its content, without scrutinizing it too closely.

Second-Guessing Your Own Judgments (and Why Women Are Particularly Good At It)

As an attitude…epistemic skepticism consists in always second-guessing your own judgments — about yourself, other people and situations; always monitoring those judgments to make sure you’re seeing clearly, have the facts right, aren’t making any unfounded inferences or deceiving yourself, etc. Women are particularly skilled at this because their judgment, credibility and authority start to come under attack during puberty, as part of the process of gender socialization. They are made to feel uncertain about themselves, their place in society and their right to their own opinions. If that socialization doesn’t work, they can’t be made to obey, to defer and to depend on others to make important decisions for them. Obviously this is a horrible, misogynistic practice, now known as “gaslighting” after the 1944 George Cukor film. But the benefit is precisely this self-critical attitude — of careful review of and reflection on the adequacy of one’s own thought processes.

For several years, Piper challenged the orthodoxy of how philosophy was written and taught in the U.S., and suffered both academically and personally for the stands that she took. Today she lives in Berlin.

Adrian Piper’s Most Important Achievements

I can name four off the top of my head:
(1) To have taken care of my mother during the last two years before her death from emphysema.
(2) To have escaped from the United States with my life.
(3) To have successfully treated most of my post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms myself, by writing “Escape to Berlin.”
(4) To have finished “Rationality and the Structure of the Self “at the same standard of quality I apply when I criticize other philosophers’ work — thereby demonstrating to my own satisfaction that it is not an unrealistic or impossible standard to meet. Of course you do have to be willing to get kicked out of the field in order to meet it.

It is essential to have social institutions like churches and schools to build and test your convictions. But it is also possible to do some of that work on your own, as Piper has done. It involves presenting yourself to others honestly and forthrightly (her art), always second-guessing your beliefs (her skeptical attitude), and using a journal or other kinds of writing to see your way through the triumphs and disappointments of living a good life (her books).

(This post was adapted from my July 22, 2018 newsletter)

 

 

Our Understandings Can Evolve and Complement One Another

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The heat makes everything slow down in July. Like these horses, who were excited to be let loose in a new grazing field, I’ve been slowing down and grazing on some new stories.

They argue that the stands we take on the job should be flexible, nuanced and generous—as opposed to their opposites. They counsel patience and the ability to hold competing perspectives at the same time. They build on topics that have been covered here before.

Here’s some of what I’ve been chewing on this week.

Commonly Held Views on What’s Good and Bad Are Always Evolving

As far as morality is concerned, we’re fish in a fishbowl.

We have an internal compass that determines which way to swim, when to open our mouths for food, what kind of fish we think we want to be. But we’re also in the water, in a bowl on a table, with light from a lamp or window coming in, and big faces that appear periodically above the rim or in front of the glass to look at us. As a fish, our vitality, beauty or even personality affect what happens around us as surely as the external environment we’re stuck in influences the choices that we make inside.

The first story is about how the music that we’re playing inside our fish bowl and the external forces that are judging its suitability can affect one another. It’s about American Christianity’s slow embrace of rock-n-roll, what it initially heard as “the sound of sin.”

How long it took the churches to move from condemnation to accommodation is chronicled in Randall Stephen’s The Devil’s Music.  He begins with the extraordinary Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who blurred the lines between gospel and pop in the 1930’s, and ends in 2001 when Christian rock outsold jazz and classical music combined. How it eventually happened is suggested by the following quote from William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army:

The music of the Army is not, as a rule, original. We seize upon the strains that have already caught the ears of the masses, we load them up with our great theme—salvation—and so we make the very enemy help us fill the air with our Savior’s fame.

When opposition persists, bridges between the sides get built and a middle ground with a new understanding of “what’s good” emerges. It rarely happens without pain, and usually takes a long time. If you’re interested, the link to Stephen’s book comes with a Spotify playlist that doubles as a soundtrack for rock-n-roll’s 60-year moral evolution.

In other areas, conflicting priorities between traditional religion and, say, minorities within their communities of faith, are still playing out. For example, the Mormons and the Anglicans have both subjected their LGBTQ believers to condemnation, shunning and banishment over the years. Two related stories this week come from inside these believing communities.

Places like Utah with its large Mormon population have unusually high suicide rates, particularly among young people. Some Mormons and former-Mormons have begun to insist that the seemingly irreconcilable tension between an individual’s sexual identity and his or her faith is one reason that young Mormons are taking their own lives.

A new documentary called “Believer” is about the rock band Imagine Dragons and its straight Mormon members who staged a concert in Provo, Utah last August to celebrate the LGBTQ members of the Mormon community. It’s not a great documentary, but the story behind how this massive public statement came together and the Latter Day Saints responded is consistently compelling. Both sides believe that they are championing a life or death issue (an individual’s sexual identity in this life vs. his or her eternal salvation). Moreover, individuals with personal stakes in the Church, like members of this rock band, are risking their own ostracism by trying to bridge the moral divide. The moral courage is palpable. The moral evolution is one step forward and one step back.

While several testimonials in “Believer” are moving, I wasn’t prepared for the gut-wrenching interview on BBC America with an Anglican woman who has been struggling with her faith and sexual identity for more than 30 years. It is impossible for me to describe her internal moral struggle as well as she gives voice to it; you have to hear it for yourself. It is also unclear how the Anglicans will respond. What is clear is that pain like this “from within their ranks” will be difficult to ignore and a catalyst for eventual change.

Today, where many of our moral commitments are shallow instead of deep, it can be difficult to imagine individuals who have not one but two life-or-death issues struggling inside of them. (“Why not stop being a Mormon or an Anglican?” “Well, it’s not that easy for me, because my faith is also my life.”) It may be even harder to imagine individuals who see their work as helping to bridge these kinds of moral divides.

However “post-belief” and “enlightened” we think we are, these kinds of slow and painful evolutions affect us all. Who among us isn’t challenged by the gapping moral divide between the blue Coasts and the red Heartland in America today? What are the names of this conflict’s many victims?  And who is risking their standing “in their own righteous communities” to help bridge this divide so that–slowly but surely–we can begin to move forward?

Conflicting Moral Perspectives Can Enrich One Another

I’ve written here before about the tension between the perspective of science and that of the humanities when it comes to how we do our jobs. Where science aims at objective certainties, the humanities champion personal and subjective truths, for example, not just what the evidence says but also what it means. Instead of picking one or the other, I’ve argued that each perspective has its essential contributions to make. (For example: September 24, 2017 newsletter – a Yale neuroscientist seeks input from philosophers; May 6, 2018 – social scientist and philosopher Amartya Sen argues that our material needs co-exist in a moral exchange with our spiritual needs.)

I’ve also written here about how our reliance on “objective” technology and data needs to be humanized by our “subjective” priorities. As part of the work that we do, we need to ensure that these tools aren’t merely used to manipulate us as consumers or citizens but also to enrich our lives. (August 6, 2017 – we’ve gotten a vending machine from our on-line technologies instead of a banquet according to Jaron Lanier; September 10, 2017 – some designers at Microsoft start with human instead of market-driven needs when designing our mediating devices.)

Lastly, I’ve questioned whether economics and the “invisible hand” of the market should be trusted to deliver what people need and want. (September 24, 2017  – the human side of markets in the writings of Adam Smith; October 15, 2017 –considering how humans actually behave wins Richard Thaler the Nobel Prize in economics; April 18, 2018 – whether other economic benefits like good jobs and fair competition should weigh as much if not more than convenience and low prices: a challenge to Amazon.)

Since I’m usually arguing that the balance between these different ways of understanding needs to be restored, it’s easy to forget how beautifully these understandings complement one another. This week I stumbled upon a beautiful illustration of that complementarity.

Alan Lightman, who is a physicist at MIT as well as a novelist, has just published a new collection of essays where he wonders out loud about whether a scientific understanding of the world diminishes its emotional impact or spiritual power. In Searching for Stars from an Island in Maine, he repeatedly concludes that far from diminishing one another, these different ways of understanding amplify our sense of reverence and wonder.

While reading reviews of Lightman’s book, I discovered what his fellow physicist Richard Feynman said in a 1981 interview about an artist appreciating a flower:

The beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. … At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. … The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.

The vacation months of July and August are for refreshing ourselves with the beauty, meaning and wonder of the world and the people who make our lives worth living.  They’re for starting with “Feynman’s flower” –with all of those humane concerns of ours—and adding the scientific, technological and data-driven understandings that can (and should) deepen our appreciation of them in the work that we come back to do.

(This post was adapted from my July 15, 2018 Newsletter.)

Why Voice Your Dissent?

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Groupthinking

The pull to go along with the crowd is always present. It’s even more insidious because we’re often unaware of how strongly we’re being pulled. We simply go along with what everyone else is saying and doing.

The urge to belong is elemental. We want to be liked, respected, even protected by the shelter of the wider group. When differences arise, there is an overpowering “strain for consensus,” narrowing what divides us so we can huddle around what we agree on—even when that agreement is vague or represents the lowest common denominator.

We don’t want to be perceived as “different from everyone else,” even when we know (or at least suspect) that the herd is moving in the wrong direction. That’s because raising a dissenting voice has consequences.

Because your dissent challenges a majority’s certainty, group members almost never like it. When you speak your personal truth to the group’s collective power, they’ll ridicule you or paint you as a crank. Even when you change a group member’s private views with your logic and conviction, she’ll rarely acknowledge it publicly and almost never give you credit. Dissenting seems a thankless task.

Dissenters also have to be willing to go it alone, and that takes personal courage. As a result, thinking about his or her dissent, it’s always easier for a potential dissenter to conclude:

  • the group is unlikely to accept my position anyway, so why bother raising it;
  • the personal costs to me of speaking up are just too great; or
  • I just don’t care enough about the group or my point of view to speak my mind.

I’ve certainly used one or more of these excuses many times over.

Dissenters As Troublemakers

I just finished reading Charlan Nemeth’s new book In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. I picked it up for several reasons.

Troublemakers promised to discuss the impact of dissenter Edward Snowden’s disclosures about government wiretapping, the value to Lincoln and to America of having his principal rivals (a band of dissenters) as his key Cabinet advisors, the “choreography” that Henry Fonda employed in “Twelve Angry Men” to turn his lone dissent into a verdict embraced by all of his fellow jurors, and the colossal failure of groupthink in JFK’s Bay of Pigs fiasco. I picked up her book for the stories she’d be telling, but also because I’ve paid some of the costs of troublemaking over the years and wanted to see whether they were worth it.

I’d like to share with you some of Nemeth’s study-based conclusions about groupthink, consensus, dissent, enabling dissent via diversity or a devil’s advocate, and how the common presumptions about dissenters don’t have to be true.

GROUP THINK

People automatically follow the majority as much as 70% of the time, even when the majority is wrong. People do so because the group “works on you” to conform in blatant as well as subtle ways. Moreover, the remaining 30% are not unscathed by group pressure. In one study, even though the minority disagreed with the group, many reported that the majority was “probably correct” because the group must know something that they didn’t know.

CONSENSUS

Consensus changes our thinking in ways that are narrow and controlled, whereas dissent broadens and opens our thinking. Nevertheless, because of an ever-present “strain for consensus,” when most group members know the majority’s views up front, studies repeatedly show that group members want to find out more about why the majority holds its views so they are more comfortable supporting them rather than exploring grounds for disagreement when they have that choice. On this point, Nemeth writes: “Simply knowing the majority position is enough to shape and bias the search for information. We don’t just follow the majority position; we willingly search for information that corroborates it.” Other studies indicate that people are careful to share with other group members ONLY the information they hold in common while withholding information where they might differ—a result that further narrows and controls consensus’ views.

DISSENT

Even one dissenter in a group makes a profound difference in the range of issues the group considers and the creative ways that it goes about processing them. Notwithstanding the likelihood of hostile reactions, a dissenter has the floor and can argue his position because he is the focus of attention and communication. There is no question that he needs to be courageous in order to do so, but his courage can also be contagious, increasing the likelihood that other members of the group will speak up even if they don’t agree with everything he’s saying. “In witnessing dissent,” Nemeth writes, “they seem to be reminded that their actions should mirror their beliefs” and that it’s a mistake to follow the majority blindly.”

EFFECTIVE DISSENT

Research shows that a necessary requirement for effective dissent is consistency. Backsliding as well as compromise undermines it in the absence of new information. In other words, the dissenter needs to hold her ground.  Group members rarely admit publically that they changed their minds because of a dissenter, but they are often persuaded privately, which liberates them to consider not only the dissenter’s opinion but also other opposing views. Writes Nemeth: “I believe that part of the reason dissent opens the mind is that it makes us question our positions. Faced with an alternative conception of reality and a different way of thinking, we are brought closer to the kind of thinking we do when developing a position rather than defending or changing one.” In other words, dissent operates like a mental re-set, allowing us to reconsider what we know and believe to be true.

DIVERGENT THINKING

The most durable problem solving considers as many issues, obstacles, perspectives and opportunities as possible before reaching a conclusion, while groupthink and the pull of consensus tend to be both shallow and brittle. Dissent also changes more minds and hearts than is publically evident, which means that when we speak up, we’re having more impact than we know. One place where the impact of a dissent is clear is at the Supreme Court. From studying the high court’s opinions with and without a dissent, a strong dissenting opinion nearly always produces more “integrative complexity” in the majority’s reasoning than is evident in its unanimous opnions. The majority is not only more aware of differing views but is far more likely to respond to them in reasonable and creative ways. The same divergent thinking is unleashed in nearly every group where even a lone dissenter presents her consistent opposition to the group’s consensus.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATES AND GROUP DIVERSITY

Nemeth also challenges efforts to take “the sharp edge” off dissent with a devil’s advocate and politically correct notions that “diversity within a group” is all you need to produce divergent thinking. She calls devil’s advocates offering dissenting viewpoints “pretend dissent” which group majorities almost uniformly disregard because of the lack of conviction behind them. Assuming that a group with gender, race or sexual-preference diversity will produce divergent thinking is similarly misguided. Divergent thinking is only enhanced when group members have “opinion diversity” based on their different skills, knowledge and backgrounds AND are willing to speak up when what they know and believe to be true is challenged by the majority.

OUR PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT DISSENTERS ARE WRONG

Nemeth wants to give dissenters “a better name.” Instead of seeing them as objects of ridicule or hostile parties, she’d prefer us to see them as not necessarly angry, argumentative, ego-driven or obstacles to the group’s moving forward. It’s where recalling the dissent voiced by the real Edward Snowden and the fictional Henry Fonda resonates. Both were tenaciously consistent and consistently earnest in their dissent.  Neither raised his voice, appeared holier-than-thou or ever lost sight of what they wished to accomplish. They weren’t negative for the sake of being negative.  Even when dissenters sound like voices “crying in the wilderness,” the consistent and courageous ones don’t want to offend. Instead they want to wake the others in the group out of their sleepwalking, whether that group is a jury room or the American people. When dissenters have good intentions and treat others with respect, it is hard (and hardly ever necessary) to offend.

These are some of the main points in Troublemakers, and I recommend it both for the nuance of Nemeth’s arguments and for her well-chosen stories. The benefits to group decision making are clear from her analysis.  What Troublemakers doesn’t answer is why individuals “care enough” to take up the lonely mantle of dissent in the first place.

Why Voice Your Dissent?

Voicing your dissent begins with a realization about what you know and believe given your group’s deliberations. Nemeth acknowledges the power that comes from recognizing them—and how you never want to lose them—without elaborating on the deeper motivations behind your convictions. Knowing what you know and believing what you believe seems to be a form of recognition tied to personal identity, but again, Nemeth delves no deeper here.

She does talk about the courage that you need in order to dissent. While Nemeth doesn’t say, courage for her might be similar to Aristotle’s concept of courage, which is the motivation you have between acting recklessly and being afraid to act. In other words, you find your courage where feelings of recklessness and fear of acting balance one another. It’s about finding that happy medium.

Courage is easier to find in some situations, and becomes more reliable when you learn how to find it when you need it. You learn how to be courageous by being courageous, and one way is by being a dissenter when what you know and believe is challenged.

In a short essay several years ago, Gordon Marino argued that boxing is another way to find that balance, a surprising argument until you think about it.  Being in a boxing match provides you with measurable doses of fear while helping you manage your reckless impulses in real time.

While Aristotle is able to define courage, the study and practice of boxing can enable us to not only comprehend courage, but [also] ‘to have and use’ it. By getting into the ring with our fears, we will be less likely to succumb to trepidation when doing the right thing demands taking a hit.

Other “jobs” provide opportunities for courage if we recognize the opportunities and act on them. It can be as close as the next community meeting where what you know and believe to be true is called into question by the group’s evolving consensus.

It is not just “knowing what you know or believing what you believe,” but also having the courage to declare it. It is caring enough about yourself to demonstrate who you are—the ever-present impulse to be “true” to yourself. Of course, the basic human desire to express your convictions in order to help the group is the other essential motivation behind dissent. It’s for me but also for you.

The motivations behind dissent are the same motivations that drive all good work.

Notes to readers: Much of the content in this post also appeared in the June 3, 2018 newsletter. 

A Swaggering Story That Speaks to Our Time

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There are three extraordinary aspects to the storytelling in Marshall, a new movie appearing in theaters this week.

Its protagonist, Thurgood Marshall, was the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Several years before he took the bench, Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, a high court case that found state laws establishing separate schools for black and white children to be unconstitutional. But long before his career peak or landmark victory, Marshall was a young NAACP lawyer struggling to represent a black defendant who was charged with raping a white woman.

That courtroom is where most of this movie takes place, and it’s the first story element that struck me. Marshall was virtually unknown back then. He seems to think he’s “all that,” but unlike the swaggering hotshot that we’re meeting for the first time, we know something that he doesn’t, namely, all that he’ll go on to accomplish. This absence of knowledge means that it could be anybody’s bright future that glitters in his eyes.

The second arresting feature is Marshall’s complicated, flawed personality.

We meet a whip-smart prankster who can be charming but also full of guile. In action, his bravado makes him the life of the party one minute and an arrogant jerk the next.

Before the Connecticut case, we see Marshall enjoying the high life of jazz era Harlem. But he also decides to leave his beautiful wife and celebrity friends behind to fight for civil rights in some of the most hostile corners of America. To leave these comforts for a life of combativeness and fear is either the definition of foolhardy or tremendously courageous.

It is the ambivalence of these details that enable us to share in his story. Brazen but also exposed, this Marshall is never too good to be true. It may have been the bright future in this man’s eyes and his relatable personality that caused Chicago’s Chance the Rapper to buy out two theater seatings of the movie—his announcement appears below—so that kids from his old neighborhood could encounter a role model who feels like the real thing.

What really got my attention though was the third turn that the story takes.

As the trial unfolds, Marshall confronts the fact that he is an out-of-state lawyer who cannot speak for himself or his client in this courtroom. Because he was not admitted to practice in Connecticut, Marshall literally has to “speak through his local counsel,” a young insurance attorney unversed in either criminal law or racial animosity. In other words, without his rhetorical skills and righteous passion, what everyone knows is Marshall’s best hand has been tied behind his back and that he has to learn to fight without it.

Chadwick Boseman, the actor who plays Marshall, described this element of the story in an interview when the movie was released:

Jeffrey Brown:  You wanted to make your big courtroom speech?

Chadwick Boseman:  Had to, you know. But the more I read it, I realized that this was the exact obstacle that would make the movie interesting. The truth of the matter is, when you’re acting [in the courtroom scenes] you’re silent. Your non-verbals are dialogue, subtext. And that’s actually just as hard, if not harder, than having the huge speech at the end….

Of course it is. A lot harder.

The young Thurgood Marshall was a black lawyer in a hostile community that had already made up its mind about the guilt of his client. The future of the NAACP, particularly financial support for the organization, depended on his success in cases like this one. As if these pressures weren’t enough, Marshall had to improvise his client’s defense with an untested accomplice at his side. He didn’t know where his attitude and talents would take him, but they would have to be enough. And all the while, he carried his own baggage.

During the same interview Reginald Hudlin, the film’s director, emphasized that the Marshall he wanted to portray was not an angel but a saint. He explained the difference this way:

Well an angel kind of implies perfection. A saint means, you know, you push through your humanity. You do something greater than.

That’s what Chance the Rapper wanted those young audiences in Chicago to see.  A flawed individual, not unlike them, pushing through his circumstances and his humanity.

There is some real hope in that.

 

Your Upbringing Always Affects Your Principles

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

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

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

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

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

Arnade photo of pawn shop in San Antonio Florida

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

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

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

Another Arnade photo, of a Quik Mart in San Antonio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—just like Chris Arnade might be asking.

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