Mobs Are Like Weapons Pointed at All of Us

November 30, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

For years now, I’ve been drawn to the mind of Robert D. Kaplan. It’s not that I’ve always agreed with him, but his insights have rarely failed to pull me in.

Maybe it’s for all the reasons that I wrote last week’s post, A Deeper Sense of Place is an Anchor in Turbulent Times. For much of his lengthy career, Kaplan has written about geography’s influence on politics and national power. He believes that where a people are located,” the place they “call home”—it’s proximity to powerful nations, it’s access to river systems, the extent of its undeveloped frontier, its natural resources (or lack of them), whether they’re protected by mountain ranges or oceans—has “a determining effect” on how these people view themselves and the world around them.

The importance of place was my way into Kaplan’s writing because, in my gut, I always felt he was right.

Three years ago, I wrote about a book by Kaplan called Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World (2017). It was another illuminating read. This was a time when the executives helming America’s tech companies were still using their prominence and financial clout to lecture the rest of us about “what progress should look like” from their ideological points of view. In that post, I wondered how their rugged individualism, honed on technology’s frontier, jived with Americans skepticism about ideologies and their commandments, another take-away from the “frontier mentality” that Kaplan ascribed to most Americans.

Frontiers [like America’s] test ideologies like nothing else. There is no time for the theoretical. That, ultimately, is why America has not been friendly to communism, fascism, or other, more benign forms of utopianism. Idealized concepts have rarely taken firm root in America and so intellectuals have had to look to Europe for inspiration. People here are too busy making money—an extension, of course, of the frontier ethos, with its emphasis on practical initiative…[A]long this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of ‘commonsense’ and ‘self evidence.’ In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own, in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.

In the tumultuous years that have followed, my question has been answered in part by a populist, Know-Nothing revulsion aimed at “thought-leaders,” big-shots and experts of all kinds who think they know better.

So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this same three years has brought Kaplan to the short essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal this week. It’s called “The Tyranny of the 21st Century Crowd” and it came with the following elaboration: “Mobs that form from the bottom up may prove even harder to defeat than totalitarian regimes.” (Here’s a link that makes his essay available beyond the usual paywall.)

What does any of this have to do with our work next week, the work that all of us should be doing, or the over-all quality of our lives at this place and time? As it turns out, quite a lot.

I had dinner this past week with a small business owner whose office is indirectly buffeted on a regular basis by mob-related mentalities. One of his longtime employees—someone who happens to have an advanced degree—is from a family of anti-vaxers, refuses to send her child to a school that requires vaccinations, and is pushing hard for an accommodation to move her work (from live to remote) to another state where she thinks the schools will be more lenient. A second longtime employee is a member of two oppressed groups (based on age and on race). This employee apparently doesn’t feel like working any more, but also holds the implicit (if meritless) threat of a discrimination action if he is either disciplined or fired. Of course, getting an 8-hour workday out of either of these “disgruntled employees” has turned into a daily minefield.

I couldn’t help but sympathize.

Who needs the expense and aggravation of being dragged by either of these people into a courtroom because they believe (and therefore can claim, without evidence) that their employer is treating them unfairly by refusing to give them what they want?

How can my friend (indeed how can anyone) run a business today when employees can assert the abridgement to some freedom- or identity-based right when all he is demanding is that they come into the office and do the work that they’re being paid to do?

I got a close-to-the-ground view of the mobs that loomed behind my friend’s two employees over dinner this week. But beyond examples like these, Kaplan foresees today’s mob-based threats causing wider, deeper and even more troubling consequences for a way of living and working that we assume is far more resilient than it actually is.

_{Pavlov’s dog parade is by a favorite artist, the late cartoonist and social commentator Saul Steinberg. (If it looks familiar, I also featured it in my post, We’re All Acting Like Dogs Today, on the refusal by regulators (and the public behind them) to confront the user manipulation and mob tendencies that are an inherent feature of dominant tech platforms like Google.Twitter and Facebook.)}

While Kaplan implicitly acknowledges the American peoples’ general hostility to foreign ideologies like communism and fascism, along with its “heartland’s” hostility to the progressive ideologies of the East and West Coasts, he certainly recognizes the populist impulses that bubble beneath all of these debates.

For Kaplan, the Peoples’ arguments over their deeply held political beliefs usually represent “a profound abasement of reason.” In other words, populists of all stripes generally feel the rightness of their views instead of reasoning themselves into the convictions that they hold. Under these circumstances, it’s difficult if not impossible to foresee how America willl be able to maintain its democratic way of life when every quadrant of our politics is being actively overtaken by its own version of a mob. (While Kaplan doesn’t delve into these divisions, George Packer recently described “the four political belief systems” that are operating in the U.S. today in “How America Fractured Into Four Parts,” an article of his that I discussed here in June.)

What Kaplan does do is quote liberally from a book about mobs that I’d never heard of: Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.
Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the ‘questioner,’ and the accuser. ‘When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd ‘is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.’
The tyranny and violence of the mob reaches its crescendo when it exercises the monopoly that it believes it has on virtue. ‘If you don’t agree with us,’ Canetti says of them, ‘you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should not only be denounced, but destroyed.’ Then he deploys notions about nations and their exercise of power to provide historical perspective as well as a glimpse into the future of America’s power. Where once America’s (and the West’s) power resided in its political, educational and media institutions and in the civic cohesion they produced, today that foundation is increasingly undermined not by counter-institutions (that seek social change for the better) but by mob power (whose primary interest is in weakening, when not actively seeking to destroy, the institutions that once bound us together).
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were defeated by U.S. military and industrial power. Civilizations rest not only on intellectual and cultural foundations but also on coarser aspects of strength and power. The historic West, which is ultimately about the freedom of the individual to rise above the crowd, survived the 20th century thanks to American hard power, itself maintained by a system of individual excellence in the arts and sciences, in turn nurtured by an independent and diverse media. But that media is now becoming immersed in the crowd, where it demands virtue in its purest ideological form, so that much of the media too often plays the role of Canetti’s accuser.
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism….
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

The self-censorship that this kind of tyranny causes and the masks it forces us to wear are more isolating than any restrictions that were imposed during the pandemic. Reasonable people withdraw from free exchange for fear of having their livelihoods and reputations challenged by self-righteous mobs. Effectively “lobotimizing ourselves,” we mask up to avoid being “destroyed.”

_{One of the Saul Steinberg and Inge Morath images from The Mask Series (1959-1963).}

Reading Kaplan’s essay reminded me of a book that I hadn’t read since college, The Revolt of the Masses by Orega y Gasset, a Spanish essayist.

Sounding like an Old Testament prophet 85 years ago, Ortega wrote about the undermining of “liberalism” by mobs of communist and right-wing agitators. He feared the “tyranny of [any] majority” and the “collective mediocrity” of the “masses” (and the so-called “mass-men” that populated them). Ortega believed they threatened both individuality and freedom of thought with annihilation. Much like Kaplan, he wrote:

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear that this ‘everybody’ is not ‘everybody.’ ‘Everybody’ was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialized elite groups. Nowadays, ‘everybody’ is the mass alone.

Twenty years later, in Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell’s sobering account of his own time fighting for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War), the eventual author of 1984 and Animal Farm reached the same conclusion as Ortega about the mobs of the left and the right that were squeezing the life blood our of their homeland. It was an experience that eviserated the romanticism that an idealistic young man had once felt for his own republican principles.

Even with their differences, Orwell, Ortega and Kaplan would probably agree that it was the power of America and the West—the only champions of “liberal” values left standing—that liberated at least some of the civilized world from the mobs that were overtaking it before World War II. As we sit here today, it’s hardly misplaced to wonder: Who, if anyone, will do so again?

In the course of his essay, Robert Kaplan doesn’t mention the mob that attempted to interrupt the Electoral College vote in Washington last January; not a woke mob enforcing its virtue from prominent positions in the nation’s media and universities, but a MAGA mob that was encouraged by a president who’d just been defeated at the polls.

The “insurrection” was another side of the same coin.

In a post from a month before the Capitol assault, I wrote about “the big lie” that was told to the German people following their defeat in World War I. “You didn’t actually lose,” conspiracists told them. “Our terrible surrender was the result of a plot by leftists, Jews, bankers and others who stood to gain from it.” That it was a lie hardly mattered, because it fed so seamlessly into the resentment, anger and economic hardship that many German soldiers, their families and communities were already feeling. It was these “regular people” who fed the mobs that led to national socialism and, only twenty years later, a second world war.

I think the wrong question to take from these historical similarities is whether Donald Trump is another Adolf Hitler. Instead, as I wrote a year ago:

Are there genuine parallels between Germany in the 1920s and 30’s and the U.S in the 2020’s and 30’s?
Were there political leaders (both then and now) who were willing to tell “a big, almost preposterous lie” if it could stoke existing grievances and rally their supporters so they could gain additional power?
Did the German people permit their leaders to send fellow Germans who were supposedly to blame for their tribulations to concentration camps?
How could so many free people, who had enjoyed democracy and the right to determine their futures, been overtaken by such a lie?
Surely, they knew then (as we know now) what was happening around them, as reporters today are called ‘enemies of the state’ and election officials are targeted for assassination.
Did they pretend (and are we pretending now) not to see the breakdowns in the fabric of our society that continue and only seem to get worse?
To paraphrase [the poet, W.H.] Auden: “Did the best among us on both sides really lack conviction, while only the worst / were full of passionate intensity”?

In a new HBO documentary about last January’s revolt of the masses, called “Four Hours at the Capitol” (link to the film’s trailer), a police officer who was interviewed recalled a piece of advice that he had gotten during his military training as he thought back to where he found himself that day:

Individuals aren’t usually a problem. But when they get together and create a mob, then, the mob is the weapon.

Too few in America and in the West today are actively trying to disarm these weapons, which are being stoked every day by social media, by too many in the legacy media, and by the demagogues who give voice to every flavor of them.

Will we need the purifying force of another world war—another battle to the death for the best and against the worst in our civilization—in order to break the hold that mob rule increasingly exerts over our politics, our freedom of speech, and our ability to be anything more than mass-men or -women in one frenzied crowd or another?

Maybe Kaplan and his intellectual forebears give us an alternative vision to hold onto: a view of America and the West that once again has the fortitude to stand up against every kind of mob in the world–not because of our theoretical beliefs about democracy and our Enlightenment traditions, but because we cherish our freedom and individuality for their practical benefits and refuse to give them up because weapons keep being pointed in our direction.

This post was adapted from my October 17, 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 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.

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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.

How Toxic Is Masculinity for Men?

March 28, 2021 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Social isolation has reduced the space between us and where we fall short, providing some particularly uncomfortable close-ups. That includes the part of masculinity that’s depressing and harmful to men before it’s toxic to anybody else.

Elderbrook is the stage name of the English musician, songwriter, producer and singer behind a remarkable 4-minute music video that has, over the past year, invited millions of us to consider the emotional isolation of men who show up for a group therapy session because they know they have a problem (but not what to do about it) until somebody in the group finds the courage to break their isolation.

Elderbrook wrote the mesmerizing music and vocalizes the lyrics, which are about the absence of companionship when something bad is happening to you, that is, when someone who’s not there when you need them might have helped “in keeping me sober.” For the flow and rhythm of the interactions between the ensemble of characters, Elderbrook’s voice is accompanied by an electronic music collective called Rudimental, which is a big deal in Britain but mostly under the radar here.

The gifted director who visualized the narrative is Luke Davies, the choreography (that fits this assortment of clueless blokes to a tee) is by Jacob Holme, and the lead actor is Michael Socha, who is pictured above and plays his part throughout with a non-comprehending beauty. All of these elements come together in a mix of throb, gut-punch and whimsy that speak with terrific economy to how utterly alone men can be and what needs to happen before we do something about it.

I found it jaw-dropping.

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Here’s how the video opens:

You’re about to enter some kind of group dynamic where you’re expected to contribute—a meeting, a book group, a seminar room with limited students—and a big part of you “would just rather not today.”

They’ll want me to open up, show who I am, know what I’m talking about, have something to say, share.

Call it performance anxiety, because all things considered, on most days I’d rather not.

And because it’s a group therapy room for just men, it’s even harder.

You come to deal with whatever’s been going on with drugs, alcohol, depression or just being messed-up, and it can get pretty personal.

I don’t want to look at the stain in my drawers let alone his drawers!

Maybe they’ll want me to make some gesture at taking care of one of my fellow losers. Or maybe, one of them will want to start doing that [shi~ver] to me.

They always said, “you’re not good with emotions,” that you keep what’s hurting you at bay or push it down.

Yeah, it is pretty thin ice. I might fall through and keep falling, so I hold on to the brittle however angry or irritable I get when it’s tested, or beat myself up with only a beer for sympathy, so I suppose they’re right.

What good is anybody in here for that?

And besides, they’ll be holding a pretty sad safety net.

So the first thing I’ve got to do is get it up to walk in the room with the rest of ’em instead of bolting for the stairs.

Today, it’s a long hesitation but I decide to step in anyway, and suddenly I find myself in a silence of furtive eyes, waiting for the so-called therapy to start and the first shoes to drop.

The boss starts canvassing for volunteers. “Who wants to go first? Do you Kevin? Michael?”

Then I hear some background music and, against all odds, it’s my feet that want to start talking.

I stand up like the prototype man, like Popeye—making arm muscles with both hands next to my shoulders to show how strong I either am or not, while shuffling a bit tentatively.

And then I’m off.

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Here’s your link to the “Something About You” music video. Watch it now if you can. Then think about it for a minute or two and maybe watch it again.

I can’t get over it, and maybe you’ll feel the same—particularly that part when two men make cautious eye contact and start to approach one another, and maybe you’re feeling some of the anxiety our culture has taught us that something “forbidden” or at least “not quite right” is about to happen.

Call it Taboo. Call it an acknowledgement of vulnerability. Call it one of many insights in a startling stream of them.

After he wrote and recorded “Something About You,” Elderbrook sent it out to film directors to get bids on content for the video. The request mentioned the summery nature of the track, but Luke Davies (who went on to win the bid) also heard a melancholy sadness, and “after listening to the song for an hour and a half” came up with the inspiration for a men’s self-help group (as he recounted in an interview after the music video went viral). Never really imagining that Elberbrook and his team would go for any of it, Davies had always wanted to make a short film that included line dancing “as a kind of metaphor for something else,” so he built dancing into his bid as well. And then there was this final association:

I always think of cowboys and for me, cowboys are an archetypal symbol for men. I think of Clint Eastwood and all these Hollywood archetypal superheroes before there were superheroes.

True creativity is always a leap into the dark, and Elderbrook ended up loving where Davies wanted to take his song.

Interestingly, after the performers were hired and the “cowboy” rehearsals had begun, Davies dropped on the actors that there would not only be line dancing but also “slow dancing,” and, for all the obvious reasons, he was worried about their reactions. This is how he describes what happened next, and (given the theme) the reality in that room was pretty magical in its own right.

The whole day, without a doubt, was one of the most satisfying and enjoyable shoots of my life. I gotta admit, all the dancing was so much fun to do, especially the slow dancing on rehearsal day, because the actors had no idea it was going to be a part of the music video.
They knew there was going to be line dancing but I hadn’t told them they were going to be slow dancing. And these guys had only met each other a couple hours ago. I was like ‘right, ok so everyone stand in the middle of the room, here are your partners, now I just want you to sort of hug each other’. They hugged each other for about a minute. And once we had done that and got the awkwardness out of the way, we just started slow dancing for a bit.
And what was weird is that I thought that people might be funky or not take it seriously and be embarrassed but straight away, people were just so emotional leaning into each other and it was quite romantic and funny seeing a bunch of blokes slow dancing.

You can see how well it turned out, but in some ways the story behind this little film was just beginning. The choreographers posted a how-to-do-the-line-dance instructional video on You Tube shortly after “Someone Like You” began to attract attention, and it beautifully reinforced the overall simplicity of the message: This isn’t so hard to do. And then, all of a sudden, there were young men dancing to it in a “Together is Stronger” challenge on TikTok.

Because men who let their guards down together really do become stronger.

Negative emotions eat away at you when they don’t get out, and men often have a harder time than women getting them out. No one denies it. It’s society’s, your parent’s, your own advice to “just suck it up,” to put your negative feelings behind you or bury them deep inside instead of working (even dancing) your way through them.

For example, depression is a self-aggression of trapped emotions that tends to reinforce its isolation at every turn—with booze, drugs and even deeper withdrawals. Ultimately, the answer is putting the pain into words. (If you’re interested in the deep scholarship behind this, I’d recommend Dr. Judith Herman’s landmark Trauma and Recovery.) Unfortunately, there haven’t been many translators–between the medical community and the rest of us–who have talked about men’s particularly constricted side of it, at least in vivid voices that make both the problem and its possible solutions come alive.

Davies, the director, was aware of all that because he saw the problem in men from his own family and suspected that it had to exist everywhere.

There is basically a group of people that needs our help and support [but isn’t getting it]. The bigger idea that we’re exploring is masculinity and within that, the unrealistic standards I think society sets for men. You only need to look at mental illness, depression and suicide numbers among young men to see how much of an issue it is and I think part of that has to do with the fact that men find it difficult on the whole to talk feelings.
Some people have seen [the video] as like an attack on toxic masculinity, which for me it’s never been about. I know toxic masculinity exists and I do think it needs to be discouraged but at the same time, I think people who are most guilty of it are also kind of the victims of this idea of not being able to talk about emotions and being vulnerable.

In other words, men can be as toxic to themselves as they can be to others, and maybe that’s the root of the problem.

Elderbrook and Davies have told at least part of this story about men and their feelings brilliantly, economically and interactively. They’ve shone a light. And who would have thought that they’d do so by inviting us to slow dance.

This post was adapted from my March 21, 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.