Why Voice Your Dissent?

June 5, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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.

An Awesome Table

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Awe can be expected, but never planned because there’s always an element of surprise—before being floored.

You can set the table for surprise, but never serve it to yourself.

For me, Rome is one of the world’s most splendid tables—and once again, it didn’t disappoint.

Work Life Rewards

When you’re open enough to be surprised by a human touch or the meaning below the surface, the relief of them is like water on dry ground. They enable the next effort and opportunity. They’re how what’s brown becomes green.

But however much we try to sustain ourselves and resist the tug of preoccupation, these recognitions about life tend to slip away, and the doors that let in the fresh or even fragrant air are opened less frequently.

Life and work begin to seem petty, predictable and ungrateful; the political discourse nothing more than coarse, small and insulting, with nary a grace note. Of course, you shut yourself in, but it’s barren and unrelieved with too little life.

Making yourself available to awe flings open the doors and windows.

Aren’t vacations for letting the amazing pull you out of your rut and catapult you towards heaven?

Looking up into the dome of Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane

“Beam Me Up, Scottie”

Even the best trans-Atlantic flights leave you disoriented on arrival. Little did I know that my imbalance was about to enter the spin cycle on the cab ride from Fiumicino to my hotel.

The mom of a high-school son and college daughter who drove me immediately talked about her 12 shifts on/2 off, back and forth at 48E, for those arriving in Rome or departing at very high speeds through its swirl of traffic. I asked: “So what do you do when you’re not working?” and she said matter-of-factly: “Defensive shooting.” As it was dawning on me that this was “using a gun to protect yourself” she was fastening her iPhone to a dashboard mount and launching videos of her darting through an obstacle course, firing at random shapes as they emerged from behind trees or around corners. Something like the FBI training center at Quantico.

“Who took these?” I asked. “Oh, my coach gets a keek out of me,” she said (which I rapidly translated from the Italian) “so he is always taking them.” He must have had a crush on her, and I could certainly see why as she whipped through an intersection at an impossible speed and I gave myself over to the ride. “Do Italian men like their women to use guns?” I couldn’t translate what she said in response, but some of it was “there are not too many of us,” and the rest of it was something other than “No.” Doors that had been closed were already opening, and I’d barely just gotten there.

We talked about ancient pissoirs we were passing, the easiest way to get an audience with the pope, the visiting time with the best weather and fewest tourists (before Easter), hand gun regulations in the EU, a particularly egregious assault on a woman she seemed to know, something about “immigrants from the south,” how guns are treated unfairly and knives are not, what was most exceptional about her son, and where she liked to travel most (the Middle East). Like Bernini’s David whom I met a few days later, I was fully locked and loaded by the time I got out of her cab and dove into my first afternoon.

Ciao Roma!

Santa Prassede

Between the jet lag and the cab ride, I was primed for awe but never realized how much until afterwards.

Rome’s seven hills make it anything but flat, so it was down to Barberini Plaza from the hotel and up to the intersection of two narrow streets where, in each direction, there’s a clear view of the obelisks and monuments of four distant plazas (“a masterpiece of Baroque city planning”) if you can brave looking amidst the racing traffic.

I was headed towards Santa Maria Majore, a 4^th Century basilica that was another down-then-up walk away. It felt good to get the blood flowing.

The basilica was vast, golden and humming with a life that included stand-up confessions being heard from open windows in the side aisles and the murmurs of afternoon mass from a hidden chapel. The pictures I’d seen in art class now had a context. I could appreciate the distinctiveness of the church’s soaring, rectangular space and spiraling, cosmatesque floors. I’d finally stopped for long enough to realize that this wasn’t Kansas anymore.

I knew there was another ancient church nearby and got directions. As I approached Santa Prassede, I might have seen the chance of being thunderstruck if I’d been thinking about anything other than finding my way to its simple doorway in the suddenly fading light. The place announces itself so softly, you barely know that it’s there.

You cross into St. Prassede from the side, expecting a similarly modest vestibule within. At first, it is hard to tell. There is more light from its candles than its electricity and it takes time for my eyes to realize how much it soars. There are mosaics on every surface of the apse that looms to the right behind the main altar, their tiny squares of gold and glaze not quite resolving into pictures in the half-light.

This space is also a hive of visitors, but here they’re more hushed and reverential as they cluster in groups or wander into alcoves. Their reserve tells me to approach more gingerly this time, and I sit in a pew to figure out how. An organ below the altar begins to trumpet through the gorgeous fragments of an unfamiliar hymn. He’s practicing I realize, and his repetitions and variations cushion us all with sound as the shadows lengthen and the sun sets. The dusk is rarely as hopeful as the dawn, and more mysterious.

Roman churches are often dark when you enter them, particularly on late fall afternoons, but a euro in a light box can usually be counted on to illuminate the Caravaggio painting or Bernini sculpture that you’ve come to see. You pay as you go when lighting candles as well. I had noticed such a box with its 1E sign in the front as I looked around but didn’t know what it would light.

A young man and woman came in just after me. As I watched them, she seemed tentative and stood off to the side, but he was more purposeful, kneeling and crossing himself at various stations before lying prostrate on the floor before the main altar for 30 seconds or maybe a minute. My own reasons for being there seemed inadequate in the face of his, but then he walked to the light box.

I took in a breath the way you do when the water suddenly goes over your head. The room had changed that much. Everyone looked towards the light with hungry eyes including the young man, his arms stretched out in an embrace. The volume of space, the envelope of music, and how we shared them were so ravishing as to be unnerving. This picture only gestures towards its suddenness and three-dimensionality.

Awe overtakes and sometimes overwhelms you. You feel you know something bigger and truer without being sure of exactly what it is. It engages your head but also your heart. You might also call it delight, amazement or wonder. It’s a channel that suddenly opens and disrupts you with a sense of deeper possibilities.

And I’d found it on my first day away.

The Bonus Round

As I’m writing this post, there’s a knock at my door and it’s a neighbor with cookies. Our friendship goes back decades to when her marketing company designed a logo for a company I was starting. Our work together made her friend as well as colleague.

She said this will be her happiest Christmas in years. She’d had a child 40 years ago as a college freshman, gave him up for adoption, had gone on to marry and have a family, and in September this son had found her, after searching for more than five years.

He is “amazing, successful, handsome, writes beautifully, is insightful, has his own beautiful children” and now has returned to her, a gift she’d never expected. He became a surgeon but could never have known that he came from a long line of doctors and surgeons, including her father and his grandfather.

The wonder of it was all over her face. She didn’t know she could still be this surprised. She was lit from inside with awe, and it had changed everything.

The Shortest Day of the Year

Last Thursday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. From here on, every day until the summer solstice (6 months from now) is longer and a little brighter. It’s the backstory of the season’s holidays. These are the days for new beginnings and for miracles like Christmas.

The authors of our calendars knew what they were doing when they began each year with a measure of awe.

Note to readers: in a different form, this content was included in my December 24, 2017 Newsletter, the second of what turned into three posts about awe.

An Antidote is Awe

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m about to fly out to a place that filled me with awe before, both as a teenager and as a parent. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that mix of wonder and apprehension that you only feel when you face something that’s exponentially vaster and less comprehensible than the realities you struggle to manage every day.

As much as I’ve poked fun at friends this year that “Your sky is not falling Chicken Little,” it seems undeniable that we’re in the most unsettled time since the early Seventies when I first took this trip. So once again I’ve been thinking about antidotes like awe (and its sidekicks beauty and timelessness). As the following observations attest, you don’t necessarily need a plane to get there.

Awe Can Come From the Sounds of the Words

As part of his project “to re-wild” our language, one of Robert MacFarlane’s recent “words of the day” on Twitter was “roke,” for the thick morning mist that rises like smoke from the ground and water. This picture of it was taken by John & Rosamund MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane is a naturalist and the author of a new children’s book called The Lost Words.

The book is his and illustrator Jackie Morris’ response to a controversy that, at first, sounds peculiarly British. In 2007, the kid’s version of the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it was adding words like “broadband” to its new edition while removing a host of other words that it found to be “less in use.” Many of those words—including acorn, blackberry and bluebell—put names to things that are experienced in the natural world. Did their removal from the dictionary signal a deeper loss about what we know and don’t know?

Philosopher A.J. Ayres has argued that without a word for something, you are unable to conceive of it. Your imagination, your ability to conceptualize, and your vocabulary are closely intertwined. As a word like “acorn” departs the lexicon, it becomes harder for you to imagine that nut which falls out of oak trees to the delight of squirrels and other managers of their winter stores. Surely, the dictionary’s culling would contribute to these words’ disuse and eventual oblivion.

In the controversy that followed, MacFarlane, Morris and others wrote an open letter to the dictionary’s editors that stated in part:

“There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.”

The editorial changes marked a alarming shift from the natural playground outside to the screen-centered world inside. To repair some of the broken connections, MacFarlane and Morris decided to collaborate on The Lost Words, each one of which had been removed from the dictionary.

With gorgeous illustrations and poems that are meant to be read by children or to them out loud, The Lost Words is intended to operate like a “spell”—as in leaving you spellbound or in awe of a word and where your imagination takes it.

These are some of MacFarlane’s poetic conjurings around the lost word “otter”:

Otter enters river without falter—what a supple slider out of holt and into water.

This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a sure heart-stopper—but you’ll only ever spot a shadow-flutter, bubble-skein and never (almost never) actual otter….

In one interview, MacFarlane said:

We wanted to make a spell-book in two senses—in that children spelt these words but that there was also this great sense of enchantment; that old magic of speaking things aloud.

MacFarlane is often asked whether he is hopeful about the future. “The bigger picture is dismal,” he says, mentioning plastic pollution, climate change and extreme weather events. But he’s also concerned about feeling paralyzed in the face of it.

Small acts of care are crucial—grass-roots charities, individuals, books, words, [all] are doing magic work—so to say there’s no point is an abandonment of everything. Hope is a greater agent for change than despair.

You can follow his hopeful words on Twitter too @RobGMacFarlane

Great Teachers Share Their Awe

The shortest path to continuous learning comes from cultivating the desire to be surprised and amazed. The best teachers have this desire, and their life’s work is sharing their intoxication with others who want to have it too. For them, it’s an essential part of completing who you are.

A teacher can stimulate a compulsive kind of curiosity by recounting how a book, an experiment, a theory or an equation is still exciting to him or continues to affect her. “Thrilling.” “Gorgeous.” “Amazing.” “It can still send shivers down my spine.” Students can always follow scents of engagement like this because they can feel how they bring their teacher to life.

Why math, history, chemistry or English actually matter requires witnesses who have already been convinced and can share their belief. For teachers like this, the goal is not to transfer content into rows of empty boxes but to foster “a quality of mind” that inspires students to pursue their own questions while showing them how to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. It’s releasing the intrinsic sense of wonder in every learner instead diverting it into the extrinsic search for grades or the approval of others.

On the most basic level, infectious curiosity becomes a part of every learner’s agency. You complete yourself by your continuing willingness to be surprised and amazed.

To be awestruck.

Awe Follows Invitations to Get Lost in Something Bigger Than Yourself

I recommend Casper Henderson’s A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels. It’s a rambling, lively and insightful discourse on the wonders that are all around us.

Like MacFarlane (another Brit), Henderson is careful with his words. “I prefer the term ‘wonder’ to ‘awe,’ he writes in a short essay about his new book in The Guardian:

For me, awe, even in its everyday clothes, is redolent of something that almost overwhelms us. Wonder, by contrast, is a state in which we remain in possession of our intellectual faculties as well as feel emotionally elevated. It has much in common with awe, but it also overlaps with curiosity. ‘When experiencing wonder,’ writes the scholar Matthew Bevis, ‘it feels as if we know something without quite being sure of what we know.’

Wonder is a state of deep attention in which we feel good and think clearly, and connect to phenomena beyond ourselves.

For me, whether you’re mindful or just about to lose it, what’s interesting about these phenomena is not just the mental focus they invite but also the unconstrained emotions they unleash.

For example, when considering rainbows, full-moons and meteor showers, Henderson notes how little the scientific explanations for these occurrences interrupt our experience of their majesty. Whatever our minds tell us, we are still delighted, amazed and almost lost to reverie when we see them.

There is also tremendous emotional gravity around our knowledge that world leaders in America, Russia and even North Korea have the power to launch a nuclear attack. Musing about a president’s access to the nuclear codes, Henderson manages to co-mingle our consideration of this awesome destructive power in his hands with its tragic and very human consequences by citing a jaw-dropping proposal that was made early in the Cold War:

[I]nstead of having launch codes in an attaché case carried by a young officer constantly at the President’s side, the codes [could] be surgically implanted in a capsule beneath the officer’s heart. Then if the President decided that the murder of tens of millions of people was necessary, he would himself have to access the codes by using a butcher’s knife to gouge out the young man’s heart.

For me, anyway, the wonders (like this) that Henderson describes are always on the cusp of lapsing into deep and uncontrollable awe. While becoming more mindful of the wonders around you may be exactly what you need to counter your screens’ addictive attractions, what makes his book so fascinating is its many invitations to get lost in contemplations that are so much bigger than yourself.

The Awesome Edge

Some really interesting things can happen when you leave the familiar behind and inhabit—if only in your mind for a limited time—what lies beyond it.

Victor Turner called this a liminal space, where the reality between the familiar and the unfamiliar tend to blur. From looking at rites of passage or transition rituals in many cultures—such as transforming a boy into man—Turner believed that when you are at the tipping point between one state and another, the dividing line between your individuality and a wider sense of shared meaning gets blurred. You are not only a boy, but also a vital part of a tribe. Not one organism, but united with the entire natural world.

It’s very trippy stuff, but Turner also argues that liminal spaces provide access to thoughts and emotions that can’t be accessed in any other way.

I had one of those experiences several years ago, when I left my freshman year in college for bootcamp in the Coast Guard. One of the short stories in my book describes the edge of my known world this way:

The Coast Guard’s training center juts into the Atlantic churn at the tip of New Jersey, and its southwest watch station sits on a ghostly beachhead whose brow meets the whitecaps when the moon is out. The watcher’s charge is to look out for anyone who is trying to infiltrate our clambake (or escape from it) when a gate of sorts opens between the fence that extends to the high water mark and the retreating tide.

During my duties at this station during “the mid-watch” from 2-6 a.m. one February morning, I could see:

the stern markers of passing trawlers, somebody on watch there too. There were buoys in the straits, candles that I’d learn to keep to my right when following a channel. Under the torn up dark there were even planes on their way to Newark or Philly, their taillights dipping beneath the clouds and their pilots looking down to see where the water turned to land.

I was sick, sleep deprived, feeling sorry for myself, 19 and wondering what I had to hold onto. I knew where I was coming from, but not what I wanted to go back to.

You have to go out—sometimes very far out—and experience something like awe before you can come back in to reassemble the pieces. It may be the only way to refresh what’s really important.

Place Settings for Awe

Shortly after this post, I am flying out for a week in Rome.

I’ve experienced place-induced awe more than once when travelling.

Looking out over the rooftops in East Jerusalem, descending the slick rocks behind a waterfall in Venezuela, drowning in the flower clogged prairie of western Colorado in late June. I’ve also experienced it in Rome. Like Jerusalem, it’s a place where one layer of history is piled on top of another while at the same time it is intensely lived in—through daily use—by everyone who’s there now.

Because they are living so hard and so well, no one in Rome is interested in turning the city into a theme park, so the immensity of time and lived experience is almost everywhere.

I can’t believe how much I’m looking forward to the pageant of it, the food, and the vistas that keep opening up and down its seven famous hills. When the jet lag has been slept away, or maybe while I’m still in its hazy focus, I might even feel its special kind of awe again.

Note to readers: in a slightly different form, this content was included in my December 10, 2017 Newsletter, the first of what turned into three posts about awe.

A Class Apart

September 17, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What we want in America is a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, imposing economic equality through the redistribution of wealth has always seemed un-American. But there is a place where the needs for greater equality and a fairer playing field converge, and we are in that place today.

A good life and good work are not possible without the opportunity to make enough to meet our basic economic needs. In other words, every American needs a fair shot at the American pie, as opposed to an increasingly small piece of it. As the nation’s wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, fair opportunity disappears and makes the need for a national conversation about greater economic equality more pressing.

“Fairness” (in terms of opportunity) and “equality” (as a way to distribute wealth) are not the same thing.

Surveys regularly find that Americans accept a certain amount of inequality when it comes to wealth because of factors like individual merit. When one study asked about their ideal distribution of wealth, most responded with an allocation that was far from equal. People in the top 20% could have three times as much wealth as those in the bottom 20%, they said. In the article that reported these findings, this study’s author described the majority’s comfort level as “not too equal, but not too unequal.” By contrast, 84% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 20% today compared to only 0.3% in the hands of the bottom 20% (or more than 250 times as much)—an almost textbook case for “too unequal.”

In order to focus debate on this vast disparity of wealth in America, it will be necessary to bear in mind the differences between fairness and equality, because the distinction:

allows us to zoom in on certain critical questions that have long been of interest to political scientists and moral philosophers. When is it unjust to treat people the same—that is, which factors (hard work, skill, need, morality) are fair grounds for inequality and which are not? Which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit?

We can accept inequality under certain circumstances, but extreme disparities in wealth offend our basic sense of justice and fairness.

The richest 20% seem to know that there is something offensive about the gulf that exists between them and the other 80% of Americans. There was a piece in the New York Times last week that had a great deal to say about their (or our) discomfort with what the author called “the moral stigma of privilege.” Interviews with wealthy New Yorkers revealed that they routinely:

-take price tags and labels off expensive purchases so housekeepers and nannies can’t see the “obscenely high” amounts that they pay for items like “six dollar bread;”

-describe themselves as “comfortable,” “fortunate” or even “middle class” instead of rich or upper class;

-point out how “hard-working,” “charitable” and sensitive they are about “not showing off” what they have.

Their consideration, lack of ostentation, and other personal qualities seemed to be offered so that the interviewees can be seen as “worthy” of their privilege. “If they can see themselves [and the rest of us can see them] as hard workers and reasonable consumers,” the author notes, “they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American ‘middle,’ while remaining materially at the top.”

Whether rich people are also “good people” simply obscures the important issue however.

[W]hat’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

So the issue isn’t whether rich people are also nice and hardworking. Instead, it is whether we should tolerate a small percentage of our citizens having so much more than everyone else. Is this state of affairs “good” for us as citizens and as a country?

With more wealth concentrating at the top of society, it is hardly surprising that the populism behind movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party became even more pronounced in the last election. Wealthy, often urban professionals on the right and left coasts may be puzzled by it and disgusted with some of the key players, but somewhere within this political upheaval is the desire for a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work. To realize that desire will mean reducing the economic divide after an honest discussion with these same wealthy, often urban professionals about the inequality that benefits them most.

“A shot at the American Dream” was the chance that every returning soldier wanted to take in 1945. The G.I. Bill after World War II reduced economic inequality by providing a fairer opportunity (with the possibility of college and home ownership) to the mostly white men of every economic class who were coming home. After their own struggle for greater equality, women and minorities secured a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and work after the Great Society programs of the Sixties and the women’s movement of the Seventies. Indeed, many of the men and women who benefitted from that 30-year push for greater equality made it into today’s wealthiest class, or lived to see their highly educated children enter it.

Today, there is once again an urgent need to confront the economic disparities that have become entrenched since our last conversation as Americans about greater equality in terms of wealth and class. For the vast majority, a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work will not be possible until we do.

Our Mediating Devices

September 10, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I started this post with two different impressions about the phone and computer screens that stand between us and what we want to realize or accomplish—that is, the devices that increasingly mediate our everyday experiences. I still don’t know where to take these impressions.

Two articles about technology gave rise to them. One was about how “smartphone-savy millennials and Gen Zers” answer the doorbell by sending text messages instead of opening the door and facing the person who is ringing it. The other came after reading an interview about Microsoft teams that are building products which try to respond to human needs instead of asking the end user to do all of the adapting. The first story illustrates how smart phones diminish human interaction, while the second suggests a role for technology that actually might enhance the human experience. One seems a warning and the other welcome news.

Who knew that young people don’t answer their doorbells, and may even be “terrified” when they ring. I would have put this article in the armchair anthropology pile, but its observations and conclusions came from Christopher Mims, who studied neuroscience and behavioral biology before he became a technology reporter around 15 years ago. He also posts regularly about the intersection of these disciplines, and I invariably find myself nodding to his conclusions. So maybe something more is happening in these awkward exchanges that young people are trying to have with cell phones in between them.

Instead of answering the doorbell that announces an expected delivery of, say, a pizza, this teen through 30 cohort apparently would prefer that the delivery person text them when arriving so they can text back with payment, a tip, and a request to leave the pizza by the door. Both would prefer never to encounter the other. The talking heads who commented on this behavior included:

– a so-called “teen-whisperer” who said that text means “friend” while a door-bell says “outsider;”

– the founder of Ring, a WiFi connected doorbell that enables those inside to communicate with those outside without making eye contact; and

– a psychology professor who says this behavior suggests a further decline in face-to-face interaction by teenagers and young adults, with implications for their emotional closeness and mental health.

While young people may be on the leading edge of this kind of social change, I think what Mims is observing effects everyone who uses mediating technologies and not just young people. Do I bank on-line because I don’t want to deal with tellers? Do I click on a website’s customer service bot because I prefer it to conversation with an actual customer service representative? By doing so, am I slowly losing my ability to interact in an effective manner with other people?

And there are other questions too. What should parents do when their child rarely seems to interact with anybody live? What should I conclude from a table of college students at Shake Shack this week, all on their phones but never talking or making eye contact with one another? What do you make of people who email you at work when they could walk a few steps and either ask you or tell you something in person?

I don’t know what’s happening here, but it may be affecting our wiring at a very basic level. From a values perspective, it’s difficult to see how the “distancing” that our devices permit could be improving how we relate to ourselves or to one another.

Besides Mims, another voice in the space between human behavior and technology is Sherry Turkel at MIT. A TED talk that she gave a few years back catalogs similar concerns about the anti-social uses of mediating technologies.

On the other hand, when a mediating device tries to respond to human needs and create new possibilities it leaves a better impression.

Dave Nelson is Microsoft’s lead designer, and he makes many interesting statements in an interview he gave recently, including how early exposure to Flash technology allowed him “to make things come alive and get rich feedback from screens, which were traditionally hard to interact with.”

By the time he got to Microsoft, the desire for even greater responsiveness led him and his designers to focus more on meeting customer needs than on how to get people to adapt to a device’s limitations. As he put it: we began to look at “how we can get the computer to be more human-literate rather than making people more computer literate.”

The break-through came during exchanges between Microsoft engineers and customers while developing a new platform called Compass.

The engineers saw firsthand the range of emotions that real people had while working with their product. They saw the setup, the trepidation of trying to get in, the pain points, and the joy…This became the central turning point for our culture today. Now every single person in the [design] team has gone on site and spent time with our early customers. This has never happened before at Microsoft. The change in perspective for engineers and other personnel has been huge…It has put people at the forefront of our processes.

It should also be said that Microsoft’s designers had never been this integral to a product’s development before. They were suddenly interacting with people who don’t sit in front of screens all day—baristas in coffee shops, construction workers, health care professionals—who needed interfaces that streamline everyday work functions like scheduling. In a way, Nelson’s designers were learning how people speak so they could teach new Microsoft programs how to understand what was needed and be more responsive to those needs.

This story made me ask some additional questions.

– If new devices can sense our needs for better scheduling and work flows, can they also support and even encourage qualities that make us more human and less like machines?

– Can they enable richer human connections instead of making us increasingly isolated from one another?

– Will devices allow us to expand our capabilities at work or will they marginalize us until they eventually replace us in the workforce?

– Will our technologies enable greater human freedom and autonomy or herd us like sheep to buy certain things and behave in particular ways?

When I read this week about doorbells and Microsoft’s design team, I realized how little I’ve thought about these questions and that the future of technology for me extends no further than the features I’m likely to find in my next iPhone. Maybe it’s because this future comes so fast that all of our energy is spent trying to absorb what’s here instead of anticipating what might be coming next or thinking about its implications.

Still, concerns are being raised about the impact of recent technologies on human behavior. Frank Wilczek (from the “Learning By Doing” post two weeks ago), Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others recently signed an open letter about the urgent need for a debate about advances in artificial intelligence. But beyond this plea, few have been bold enough to propose how the human future should unfold in the face of these innovations, or to publically debate the proposals that have been made. It should also be said that almost none of the rest of us seem to be clamoring for such a debate.

Oscar Wilde famously said: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always headed.” Wilde said that a century ago, but instead of visions of more humane futures all we seem interested in today is the entertainment value of post-apocalyptic worlds. Articles about avoiding doorbells and technology that begins with human needs provide grounds for concern as well as hope when it comes to what’s next. Maybe they are as good a place as any to start the process of dreaming ahead.