David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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How Stepping Back and Really Noticing Can Change Everything

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Pieter Bruegel’s The Battle Between Carnival and Lent

I’m frequently reminded about how oblivious I am, but I had a particularly strong reminder recently. I was in a room with around 30 other people watching a documentary that we’d be discussing when it was over. Because we’d all have a chance to share our strongest impressions and it was a group I cared about, I paid particularly close attention. I even jotted down notes from time to time as something hit me. After the highly emotional end, I led off with my four strongest reactions and then listened for the next half hour while the others described what excited or troubled them. Most startling was how many of their observations I’d missed altogether.

Some of the differences were understandable, why single “eye witness accounts” are often unreliable and we want at least 8 or 12 people on a jury to be sharing their observations during deliberations. No one catches everything, even when you’re watching closely and trying to be insightful later on. Still, I thought I was better at this.

Missing key details and reaching the wrong (or woefully incomplete) conclusions affects much of our work and many of our relationships outside of it. Emotion blinds us. Fear inhibits us from looking long and hard enough. Bias makes us see what we want to see instead of what’s truly there. To get better at noticing involves acknowledging each of these tendencies and making the effort to override them. In other words, it involves putting as little interference as possible between us and what’s staring us in the face.

As luck would have it, a couple of interactive challenges involving our perceptive abilities crossed my transom this week. Given how much I missed in the documentary, I decided to play with both of them to see if looking without prior agendas or other distractions actually improved my ability to notice what’s in front of me. It was also a nice way to take a break from our 24-7 free-for-all in politics. As I sat down to write to you, I thought you might enjoy a brief escape into “how much you’re noticing” too.

The Pieter Bruegel painting above–called “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent”–is currently part of the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work at Vienna’s Kunsthistoriches Museum. Bruegel is a giant among Northern Renaissance painters but most of his canvases are in Europe so too few of us have actually seen one, and when we have, they’ve been in books where it’s all but impossible to see what’s actually going on in them. As it turns out, we’ve been missing quite a lot.

Conveniently, the current survey of the artist’s work includes a website that’s devoted to “taking a closer look,” including how Bruegel viewed one of the great moral divides of his time:  between the anything goes spirit of Carnival (the traditional festival for ending the winter and welcoming the spring) and the tie-everything-down season of Lent (the interval of Christian fasting and penance before Good Friday and Easter). “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” is a feast for noticing, and we’ll savor some of the highlights on its menu below.

First though, before this week I’d never heard about people who are known as “super recognizers.” They’re a very small group of men and women who can see a face (or the photo of one) and, even years later, pick that face out of a crowd with startling speed and accuracy. It’s not extraordinary memory but an entirely different way of reading and later recognizing a stranger’s face.

I heard one of these super recognizers being interviewed this week about his time tracking down suspects and missing persons for Scotland Yard. His pride at bringing a remarkable skill to a valuable use was palpable–the pure joy of finding needles in a succession of haystacks. His interviewer also talked about a link to an on-line exercise for listeners to discover whether they too might be super recognizers. In other words, you can find out how good you are “with faces” and how well you stack up with your peers at recognizing them later on by testing your noticing skills here.  Please let me know whether I’ve helped you to find a new and, from all indications, highly rewarding career. (The test’s administrators will be following up with you if you make the grade.)

Now back to Bruegel.

You can locate this central scene in “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” in the lower middle range of the painting. Zooming in on it also reveals Bruegel’s greatest innovation as a painter. He gives us a birds-eye view of the full pageant of life that embraces his theme. It’s not the entire picture of “what it was like” in a Flemish town 500 years ago, but viewers had never before been able to get this close to “that much of it” before.

It’s also a canvas populated by peasants and merchants as opposed to saints and nobles. They are alone or in small groups, engaged in their own distinct activities while seemingly ignoring everyone else. In the profusion of life, it’s as if we dropped into the center of any city during lunch hour to eavesdrop.

The painting’s details show a figure representing Carnival on the left. He’s fat, riding a beer barrel and wearing a meat pie as a headdress. Clearly a butcher—from the profession that enabled much of the festival’s feasting—he holds a long spit with a roasted pig as his weapon for the battle to come. Lent, on the other hand, is a grim and gaunt male figure dressed like a nun, sitting on a cart drawn by a monk and real nun. The wagon holds traditional Lenten foods like pretzels, waffles and mussels, and Lent’s weapon of choice is an oven paddle holding a couple of fish, an apparent allusion to the parable of Jesus multiplying the loaves and the fishes for a hungry crowd. On one level then, the fight is over what we should eat at this time of year.

As the eye wanders beyond the comic joust, Carnival’s vicinity includes a tavern filled with revelers, on-lookers watching a popular farce called “The Dirty Bride” (that’s surely worth a closer look!) and a procession of lepers led by a bagpiper. On the other hand, Lent’s immediate orbit shows townsfolk drawing water from the well, giving alms to the poor and going to church (their airs of generosity equally worthy of closer attention).

Not unlike our divided society today, Bruegel painted while the battle for souls during the Reformation was on-going, but instead of taking sides, this painting seems to take an equal opportunity to mock hypocrisy, greed and gluttony wherever he found it, making this and others of his paintings among the first images of social protest since Romans scrawled graffiti on public walls 1200 years before. While earlier paintings by other artists carefully disguised any humor, Bruegel wants you to laugh with him at this spectacle of human folly.

It’s been argued that Bruegel also brings a more serious purpose to his light heartedness, criticizing the common folk by personifying them as a married couple guided by a fool with a burning torch—an image that can be found in almost in the exact center of the painting. The way they are being led suggests that they follow their distractions and baser instincts instead of reason and good judgment. Reinforcing the message is a rutting pig immediately below them (you can find more of him later), symbolizing the destruction that oblivious distraction can leave in its wake.

Everywhere else Bruegel invites his viewers to draw their own conclusions. You can follow this link and notice for yourself the remarkable details of this painting along with others by the artist.  Navigate the way that you would on a Google Map, by clicking the magnifying glass (+) or (-) to zoom in and out, while dragging your cursor to move around the canvas. Be sure to let me know whether you happen upon any of the following during your exploration (the circle dance, the strangely-clad gamblers with their edible game board, the man emptying a bucket on the head of a drunk) and whether you think Carnival or Lent seems to have won the battle.

Before wishing you a good week, I have a final recommendation that brings what we notice (say in a work of art) back to what we notice or fail to notice about one another every day.

The movie Museum Hours is about the relationship that develops between an older man and woman shortly after they meet. Johann used to be a road manager for a hard-rock band but now is a security guard at the same museum in Vienna that houses the Bruegel paintings. Anne has traveled from Canada to visit a cousin who’s been hospitalized and meets Johann as she traverses a strange city. During her visit, he becomes her interpreter, advocate for her cousin’s medical care, and eventually her tour guide.  But just as he finds “the spectacle of spectatorship” at the museum “endlessly interesting” as he takes it in everyday, they both find the observations that they make about one another in the city’s coffee shops and bistros surprising and comforting.

Museum Hours is a movie about the rich details that are often overlooked in our exchanges with one another and that a super observer like Bruegel brings to his examination of everyday life. One of the film’s many reveals takes place in a scene between a tour guide at the museum (who is full of her own insights) and a group of visitors with their unvarnished interpretations in front of  “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent” and other Bruegel paintings. You can view that film clip here, and ask yourself whether the guide is helping the visitors to see what is in front of them or diverting their attention away from it.

As we shuttle between two adults in deepening conversation and very different kinds of exchanges across Vienna, Museum Hours asks several questions, including what any of us hopes to gain from looking at famous paintings on the walls of a museum. As one of the movie’s reviewers wondered:

“Is it to look at fancy paintings and feel cultured, or is it to experience something more direct: to dare to unsheathe oneself of one’s expectations and inhibitions, and truly embrace what a work of art can offer? And then, how could one carry that open mindset to embrace all of life itself? With patient attention and quiet devotion, these are challenges that this film dares to tackle.”

That much open-mindedness is a heady prescription, and probably impossible to manage. But sometimes it’s good to be reminded about how much we’re missing, to remove at least some of our blinders, and to discover what we can still manage to notice when we try.

Note: this post was adapted from my October 14, 2018 Newsletter.

Good Work’s Foundations

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I saw rooms full of models of imagined buildings and cities at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. The artist was Bodys Isek Kingelez from central Africa. Pictured above is one of his futuristic building models. They reflect “dreams for his country,” known during his life as the Belgian Congo and later as Zaire. Kingelez said he was envisioning “a more harmonious society” than he saw around him.

Artists are sometimes better at envisioning than the rest of us. It can be even harder for us to bring a better future into our day-to-day work—but when we do, our hopes pull us forward, particularly as we struggle to realize them.

Acting on what we hope for is one of good work’s foundations. So are acting out of our aim for both generosity and autonomy on the job. I’ve been thinking about demonstrations of generosity, autonomy and acting on hope this week from teacher/writer Roxanne Gay, actor/rap artist/omnivore Riz Ahmed, and activist/public intellectual Rebecca Solnit, respectively—3 powerful voices with a lot to say about how we spend our time and talent every day.

Generous Judgment

Generosity is about acknowledging the autonomy or self-determination of others (like co-workers, clients/customers, suppliers, members of your business and non-profit communities) in the course of your work.

You probably know comic Louis C.K. Highly acclaimed, his semi-autobiographical cable TV show Louis and stand-up comedy specials have won 6 Emmy awards, a Peabody, and star-struck interviews at places like Fresh Air. To me, his comedy seemed deep, subtle, smart, and self-aware. Until late last year, when he was “outed” by several women who worked with him, it seemed that Louis C.K. could do no wrong. They accused him of pretty egregious conduct that reminded me of apocryphal stories I used to hear about neighborhood “flashers,” only this time much worse, because he was not the sicko stranger in a trench coat. Instead, several in his reluctant audience had tied their careers to his.

As the story came out (on the heels of Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose and others), I was surprised by the “not enough” of his public reactions and the suggestions around them that he had previously tried to bully his accusers into silence. Well this week, less than a year after the revelations first surfaced, Louis C.K. returned to a thunderous reaction “on the come-back trail.” The crowd that felt lucky enough to be at a NYC comedy club for his unannounced performance was reportedly ecstatic.

Clearly, Louis C.K. didn’t know how to handle the “world of hurt” around his abusive conduct when it first came out and was similarly clueless when he concluded “that all had been forgotten” and “it is time for everybody to just move on.”  In a New York minute, Roxanne Gay told him otherwise.

It might have been easier for Louis if his comeuppance hadn’t been in the New York Times. But she didn’t just excoriate him. She met him like she acknowledged his intelligence, his talent, his fans who might still learn from what she was about to say. Instead of writing him off as a perverted loser, Gay told him what he (along with others who don’t know but need to hear) what should be done by adults who behave this way. It was a gift he may not have deserved, but it was a judgment that was elevated by the light that she brought to it.

“If Louis C.K. doesn’t know what to do when he’s caused this kind of damage, then I’ll try to explain it,” she seems to say—so he can make it right this time, and others like him can learn what they need to do too. Anger followed by patience in that New York minute was an act of generosity. Indeed, it’s a balance that elevates nearly everything that Roxanne Gay does.

While you should read her entire commentary, this is Gay on Louis C.K.’s “comeback road”:

How long should a man like Louis C.K. pay for what he did? At least as long as he worked to silence the women he assaulted and at least as long as he allowed them to doubt themselves and suffer in the wake of his predation and at least as long as the comedy world protected him even though there were very loud whispers about his behavior for decades.

He should pay until he demonstrates some measure of understanding of what he has done wrong and the extent of the harm he has caused. He should attempt to financially compensate his victims for all the work they did not get to do because of his efforts to silence them. He should facilitate their getting the professional opportunities they should have been able to take advantage of all these years. He should finance their mental health care as long as they may need it. He should donate to nonprofit organizations that work with sexual harassment and assault victims. He should publicly admit what he did and why it was wrong without excuses and legalese and deflection. Every perpetrator of sexual harassment and violence should follow suit.

Moral condemnation is easy but describing the “road someone needs to take back” requires a comprehension of the pain that was caused, the actions that would be necessary to alleviate it, as well as the belief that he could act on your advice. Most judgments fail to include these components, but Gay’s has all of them.

The Christian lesson of the crucifixion is infinitely more powerful because it is followed by the resurrection. We’re expert at crucifying people today—at work, and otherwise—but too often seem to be unconcerned about their ability (and ours) to rise afterwards. It’s not about forgiveness but the hard-won path to change.

The last time I wrote about Roxanne Gay on this page was in January.

Creative Autonomy

Autonomy is actively making the most out of what you have, identifying what is important to you, and putting yourself on the line to achieve it. Autonomy is self-determination.

In the limited series The Night Of  (on HBO), Riz Ahmed played two roles:  the role of a Pakistani student wrongly imprisoned at Riker’s Island for murder and a role beneath his acting that involved you as a viewer in a separate dialogue. You could feel Ahmed’s intelligence, focus and humanity whispering through his role—his interior life giving the 6 episodes counterpoints beyond the writing, directing and acting. (“Whatever he was saying and doing, he was always simultaneously maintaining a second conversation with you about what both of you might be thinking.”)

A profile with that line and additional suggestions about Ahmed’s perspective was this week’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine. You can sense what’s unique about him from the first impressions that Ahmed made on his profiler about his jobs as an actor and musician, pathfinder, role-model and activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t get animated. He does. Talking with Ahmed can be a little like sparring, a little like co-writing a constitution, a little like saving the world in an 11th-hour meeting. He interrupts, then apologizes for interrupting, then interrupts again. He can deliver entirely publishable essays off the top of his head. He pounds the table when talking about global injustices, goes back to edit his sentences minutes after they were spoken, challenges the premises of your sentences before you’re halfway through speaking. This is what happens when you cut your teeth on both prep-school debate teams and late-night freestyle rap battles, as Ahmed has. He is like someone who wants to speak truth to power but now is power — famous enough, at least, to have people listen to his ideas. He is like someone very smart who also cares a lot. He is like someone who doesn’t want to be misunderstood.

Not surprisingly, much of Ahmed’s edge comes from being a Pakistani-Brit, rising from one competitive lower school to another. Along the way, he felt his separateness as a South Asian but always “believed that the flag of Britain should and would obviously include him.” That is, until Al Qaeda’s attack on Twin Towers, which happened the month he matriculated to university and made it even more burdensome to be a Muslim. It was there that he made a critical life choice.

[H]e found himself at Oxford University, just after 9/11 — a brown kid surrounded by the acolytes of seemingly ancient white wealth, who sometimes did have a way of talking to him as if he were a shopkeeper. Rather than retreating into Oxford, he decided to make Oxford come to him. He started organizing parties that celebrated his music and cultural touchstones, parties where he would get on the mic over drum ’n’ bass records. Soon enough, the event he co-founded, “Hit and Run,” moved to Manchester and became one of the city’s leading underground music events.

What could have been angry rejection and a retreat to the company of other South Asian Muslims instead became his invitation for Oxford to join a broader conversation that he was sponsoring. It was a place where he mashed up Pakistani melodies and rhythms with British rap (just as rap was rising to become the most popular music in the world.) As Lena Dunham observed about him, he combined the bravado of someone in the hip-hop world with the intensity of someone who’s mounted a barricade.

Creating this platform was a singular act of personal autonomy (as well as generosity towards others) that has informed Riz Ahmed’s work ever since. He wants to initiate a conversation that’s big enough for him and for everyone else. It’s a theme that shines through every corner of his remarkable story. I hope that you’ll enjoy digging into more of it.

Living Your Vision

Envisioning is living the future that you hope for through your work.

I read Rebecca Solnit’s “Hope in the Dark” traveling to and from New York City. In a nutshell, it’s about living what’s important to you, even though there is no assurance or even likelihood that the better world you’re working for will get any closer as a result. As her title says, it’s hope in the dark.

Americans in particular tend to want more certainty than that. We’re not accustomed to a continuous struggle for a better world or trying to “live our hopes”–particularly when they may never be realized–every day. Instead, we tend to respond to a crisis/problem/challenge, declare victory or defeat, and go home to wait for the next one to demand our attention. Our responses are generally to emergencies that interrupt the normal flow of our lives. We don’t tend to see struggling for what’s important to us as a daily commitment.

Solnit argues that treating struggles for justice, fairness, freedom, for greater opportunity, self-determination or a healthier planet as isolated emergencies results in abandoning our victories while they’re still vulnerable and conceding our defeats too quickly. When we’re committed to achieving what’s truly important to us, Solnit argues: “It is always too soon to go home.”

She illustrates her point by recounting a story she wrote several years back about pay equity for women:

[A] cranky guy wrote in that women used to make sixty-two cents to the male dollar and now we made seventy-seven cents, so what were we complaining about? It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated to acknowledge that seventy-seven cents is better than sixty-six cents and that seventy-seven cents isn’t good enough, but the politics we have is so pathetically bipolar that we only tell this story two ways: either seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the pint of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static. What’s missing from these two ways of telling is an ability to recognize a situation in which you are traveling and have not arrived, in which you have cause both to celebrate and to fight, in which the world is always being made and is never finished. (italics mine)

It is because the struggle is never easy and never done that Solnit quotes the poet John Keats, who called the world with all of its suffering “this vale of soul-making.” While “Hope in the Dark” is mainly Solnit’s call to continuous political activism, her arguments apply equally to declaring what’s important to you though the work that you do, that is, to any kind of acting on your convictions. To borrow the force of her argument, your jobs become  “toolboxes to change things,” places “to take up residence and live according to your beliefs,” and, as Keats would say, “vales” where your soul is made because it is where a sense of meaning, purpose and wholeness (as opposed to partial victories or defeats) can be found.

If you’re unfamiliar with Rebecca Solnit, “Hope in the Dark”‘s 100-odd pages would be a splendid introduction.  Her “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise In Disaster” such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina is a beautiful argument that we’re far more and far better than we often think that we are.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 2, 2018 newsletter

Your Values Should Feel At Home In Your Workplace

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Values grounded in religion are moving into the workplace.

What might have been commonplace a hundred years ago for a church-going public became increasingly uncommon over the past 50 years as fewer people identified as believers and the Supreme Court circumscribed the role that religion had once played in public life. Among other things, that meant that most workplaces became religion-free.

At the same time, the American worker was introduced to so-called “corporate values.” As religious values had before them, the hope was that corporate values would provide commitments that the entire workforce could rally around to realize the company’s objectives. In my experience, corporate values have largely failed to either unite or motivate most employees—which is one reason why companies are reaching for deeper, and more explicitly religious hooks to drive that kind of unity and engagement today.

Another reason is the increasing alignment of “political values” with “religious values.” You’ll recall that discussion here a few weeks back, and it didn’t take long to discover how this development was manifesting itself at a local company.

The underlying business insight—that corporate values have proven shallow and largely meaningless—can’t be denied, but dressing work-oriented values in religious garb seems misguided for any company that ties its success to a workforce with diverse talents and experience. Since every company should be aiming for this kind of workforce diversity, employers should be creating work environments where the value priorities that its employees bring to work as opposed to the business owner’s religious values can be advanced.

Before elaborating, some context about the larger forces that are at play here might be helpful.

An Historical Perspective

Cyclical developments that play out over extended time periods can often help to explain what’s happening now.

Last week’s newsletter was about how change agents at work can take hope as well as practical advice from prior historical events when turbulence (like economic recession) permitted the reappraisal or outright rejection of basic assumptions in the workplace. Organized religion also tends to react to moral decline in predictable ways when viewed from history’s perspective. During times when the public seems to have abandoned its moral foundations, religious forces have always seemed to rise up to re-establish them in the workplace and elsewhere.

For the past 400 years, America has witnessed periodic social movements that were aimed at bringing those who had strayed into “sinfulness” back towards “godliness,” or at least “more upstanding” ways of living and working. Moral decline followed by moral revival is part of who we are.

Some of these movements—like the First (1720-60) and Second (1800-1850) Great Awakenings—spanned decades and altered the public’s perceptions of “right and wrong” before the American Revolution and Civil War. More recently, Evangelical Christianity and its political acitvism have been fighting to restore our moral foundations today. In other words, from an historical perspective it’s almost inevitable that concerns about our moral fitness would eventually find their way back into the workplace.

Religious Values Where We Work

The local news article this week was called “Putting Faith at the Forefront: Burlco’s Productive Plastics Brings Corporate Ministry to Work.”  Burlco is Burlington County, New Jersey and Productive Plastics is the company’s name.

Just inside the entrance to the workroom at Productive Plastics Inc., which molds plastic into parts for manufacturing companies, is a place to post prayers.

A sign above the section reads, “Welcome to Our Prayer Wall,” in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, and a notepad and pen hang at the bottom of the space. Tucked into the wall are folded pieces of paper, each left by an employee and containing prayers offered up anonymously.

The company’s goal is an audacious one: To encourage all members of Productive Plastics to pray together for each other.

The prayer wall was discussed at Productive Plastic’s monthly “Caring Team” meeting earlier this month when managers, employees and two “corporate ministers” gathered to share ideas about employee well-being and “ways in which the company can better reflect its core values.

The company is privately held. It’s also “an openly Christian business,” so new employees know its owner’s commitments before signing on to work there. John Zerillo, Productive Plastics vice president of sales describes the company’s focus on its workers as follows: “We’re not there to proselytize. We’re there to care for the needs of the people.” By addressing these needs, Zerillo says the company is no longer losing employees “like we used to.”

The company’s CEO, Hal Gilham, initiated the change. After overcoming some personal challenges, Gilham regretted that he couldn’t extend his faith into his work life. He joined the Philadelphia chapter of C12, a network of Christian CEOs, business owners and executives and made the decision “to extend his born-again Christian values to the way he runs Productive Plastics.”

Beyond the annonymous prayer wall and prayers that employees voluntarily share with one another, each work shift starts with a “Take 5 Meeting.” The first 4 minutes are mandatory where meeting leaders share company notices and manufacturing priorities. The last minute—a short Biblical passage to keep in mind for the day—is optional. Outside its facility, Productive Plastics flies a Christian flag below the American flag. Its four “core company values” lead off with “honor God in all that we do,” followed by develop people, a relentless pursuit of excellence and the need to grow profitability.

Apparently by way of the C12 organization, the company has also hired Lifeguide, a “corporate chaplaincy service” started by Paul and Amy Shumski after years of doing traditional pastoral work. Lifeguide chaplains are available to employees at Productive Plastics who are experiencing work and life problems that affect their jobs and want someone to discuss them with on a confidential basis. Lifeguide charges companies that hire them around $5 per week per employee. According to Paul Shumski’s video presentation at C12, Lifeguide was already working with 7 companies in the greater Philadelphia area by 2017.  When interviewed by the newspaper, Amy Shumski said Lifeguard “respects all beliefs” and tries to give employees “skills to help [them] handle their situations” rather than solve their problems for them. The article also indicated that there are at least two non-Christian employees in the company’s workforce.

In digging below the story, one question I had was whether these corporate chaplains also see themselves as missionaries seeking converts to their Evangelical Christianity.

My research couldn’t locate a website for Lifeguide and their ministry referrals may come through the C12 network. Dave Shoemaker, who runs the C12 branch in Philadelphia, introduced Paul Shumski’s corporate chaplaincy presentation in 2017 by saying:

70% of employees do not darken the door of a church. How are they going to find out about Christ?

In the talk that followed, Shumski indicated that he has had over 1800 conversations about spiritual hope in the workplace over the years, that at least 174 employees looked at religious texts during Lifeguide counseling (some for the first time), and how grateful he was for one employee who had “found Jesus” through his workplace ministry.

C12’s website includes a Vision Statement (“To Change the World by Advancing the Gospel in the Marketplace”), a Doctrine Statement (“Jesus Christ is Lord, the whole Bible is wholly true, God has an eternal plan for each believer’s life, and that plan includes their business”), and a library of resources about Christianity and business that appears to be shared by other local C12 groups nationwide.

Some Thoughts

While writing this newsletter, my research didn’t go deep enough to reach conclusions about either Lifeguide or C12, but the story about the rise of Christian chaplaincies in American workplaces did highlight the problem that led me to write my book. Moreover, C12’s and Lifeguide’s approach also differs markedly from the solution I’m proposing.

The Sixties in America challenged traditional authority of every kind. Among other things, mainstream churches lost millions of believers, the objective “truths” of science and social science swamped the more subjective “truths” of religion and the other humanities in colleges and universities, and, for many Americans, values that had been shaped by worshipping communities were replaced by individual perspectives on what is “good” and “bad,” that is, when people bothered to build new moral frameworks at all.

When moral perspectives get watered down or are abandoned altogether—and people become increasingly shallow, materialistic, selfish and self-absorbed— religious revivals like America’s Great Awakenings periodically jump into the void, seeking to restore the nation’s moral compass. The overlapping of Christian Evangelical values with conservative political values is today’s version of this moral revival.  It aims to restore the traditional Christian values that many Americans rejected during the Sixties and to give our lives and work a sense of meaning and purpose that they currently lack.

When I started writing WorkLifeReward, I was also concerned that we had torn down the traditional value frameworks and not replaced them with new ones. For many people, morality became increasingly personal and self-contained—private spirituality with little or no public face. Other people seemed to lack direction in life altogether. I was interested in a moral framework that included work because work is about improving more than ourselves. It reflects commitments to others and, more generally, to the world—my internal well-being as well as what I do beyond my selfish concerns.

I was convinced that it would be impossible to “turn back the clock” and restore religious groundings for those who had left them behind. But at the same time, I wanted to identify basic imperatives that would be compatible with traditional beliefs for those who continued to hold them. I also feared the practical consequences of alienating people who could never accept a religious value system; it would exclude too many people who should have the opportunity for a committed and meaningful life but didn’t know how to realize that opportunity. In other words, even if the Lifeguide chaplains aren’t missionaries, they begin their outreach from a moral framework that too many Americans have already rejected as a point of departure when seeking to live their values through their work.

So I took a different approach. I proposed two basic priorities–for personal autonomy and generosity–that can be actively nurtured by non-religious as well as religious people in every kind of work that they do. Moreover a foundation that’s based on these personal values might be able to do a more comprehensive job of filling the moral void that exists today.

My argument—greatly stripped-down here–is that all people at work want to develop and grow in ways that they need to (in terms of competence, collaboration, and aspiration) along with realizing goals that are important to them personally (from bringing well-made products to consumers to improving their community or even the world in some way). This is the value of autonomy that every employee brings to work. Generosity is simply the complementary commitment to acknowledge and support the same drive towards autonomy in others.

These commitments are durable enough to provide the personal meaning and sense of purpose that is lacking today.  We don’t “find” these values in the workplace. Instead, we bring these commitments with us when we go to work, hoping to nurture them there as well as in every other part of our lives.

In the same way that it is difficult to be a person who lives (and works) their faith, it takes effort to live (and work) the values of autonomy and generosity. A commitment to individual and collective flourishing is compatible with all traditional religious values, and drives similar levels of motivation and engagement. The first two “corporate values” in every company should be to support their employees’ autonomy and generosity (instead of their boss’s version of them). And when employees don’t experience a commitment to these basic values where they work, they should bring their energy and talent to a workplace that will support them.

Even in America, the revival of moral foundations doesn’t have to be religious in nature.

Note: this post is adapted from my August 19, 2018 weekly newsletter.

It’s Time To Envision a Better Future

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At a time of year when everyone around me seems to be slowing down, I’ve been ramping up to envision the kind of fall and winter that I want to have.

On the writing front, I’ll be seeking a publishing deal, but first I have to finish two projects.

My book alternates between arguments about finding good work and free-standing but related short stories that consider jobs, values and motivations from more personal perspectives. I’ve almost finished writing the story that ends the last chapter. My arguments are already fleshed out. With both in mind, I can turn to writing the submission package that will sell the book.

There’ll be a gratifying sense of completion when I finish these preliminaries, but also a point of departure. As I finish these projects, I’m also be envisioning the future that I want next–which is to bring out a book that can reach the audience it’s intended for.

The picture above speaks to me about this kind of “looking forward.” It’s one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s watercolors, painted when he was first envisioning the world of “The Hobbit.” (It, along with other of his visualizations for that book, is currently on view at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.) As a storyteller, Tolkien used watercolors like this to help him “see” what he’d soon be writing about.

His image projects a sense of order, calm and beauty onto a Middle Earth that would soon be challenged by evil forces. It’s a utopian view of the future that tells you what you’ll be fighting for when the battle is joined. For my book, I’m creating a hopeful vision that can help me to counter the stress and rejection that are likely ahead of me. And last but hardly least, Tolkien’s watercolor also recalls how little optimism there is in our collective envisioning today. We can all see dystopian futures ahead, but too few of us can see better ones.

What is it about our time that makes it so difficult to envision a better future for ourselves, for our children, and for their children? Why is there so little optimism today, and who can help us to find a measure of hope?

John Seely Brown, whose vision I tried to capture here last week, is not the only one who is cautiously optimistic in the face of a future that is hurtling at us faster than we can process it. But before introducing Jed Purdy’s ethics and field of vision, a few more words about the deficits of hope and attention that need to be confronted before we can look into the future with any confidence.

One Perspective on Today’s Pessimism

Espen Hammer, who teaches philosophy at Temple University, has been thinking about “utopias” or “visions of a better world” recently, and why they’re playing almost no role in our conversations with one another today.

He reminds us that debating the futures we’d like to see has always driven progress before, “providing direction and a sense of purpose to struggles for social change and emancipation.” But after reviewing the impact of this process through history, Hammer notes in a recent New York Times essay that optimistic debate about the future that we want for ourselves has largely ground to a halt.

Today, the utopian impulse seems almost extinguished. The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behavior. The utopias of technology are less impressive than ever now that — after Hiroshima and Chernobyl — we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

In other words, Hammer is less optimistic than Brown when it comes to “utopias of technology” and has no hope at all for “utopias of justice.” Instead his imagination is clouded by “the two fundamental dystopias of our time: those of ecological collapse and thermonuclear warfare.”

It’s a bleak prognosis.

The only glimmer of hope that Hammer can identify is found in “nature, and the relationship that we have to it.”  But instead of envisioning a better relationship with the natural world, all Hammer can say is that “we desperately need to conceive of alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.”

Is our hope today really this desperate and uncertain?

A Tipping Point

Unlike Professor Hammer, I think we’re at more of a tipping point when it comes to the possibilities of technology, justice and humanity’s co-existence with nature.

We’re at a point where individuals with bold utopian visions—together with those who believe in them—can tip the balance in favor of a better future. But many of us-most of us-nearly all of us are either oblivious or like deer frozen in the headlights. Far too often, it’s been my story too. But our clouded future merits a more active response, particularly when individual willpower can still make a difference. Unfortunately, I can always find reasons to explain away my failures to act.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything More Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My Self-Worth Is So Tied To My Politics That I Can’t Escape the Circus of It For Long Enough To Envision a Better Tomorrow

The widening political divide is another trap. The vision we have of our ideal selves—for example, what we believe about freedom or social justice—is so caught up in the political logjam that we are increasingly unable to solve shared problems with anyone who has “conflicting” values or to summon up the vision that real solutions require.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

Of course, these “reasons” are also “excuses” that my willpower can overcome. So I write as much for myself as this newsletter about individuals who face the same personal shortcomings and dystopian futures that I do but can still manage to act with something like hope:

-how dissenters like Edward Snowden share a vision of the future they believe in, invite others to join it, and, by doing so, enable everyone involved in the debate to clarify their own commitments (6/3/18 and 6/10/18 newsletters);

-how Martin Luther King framed the world that he wanted to live in, and how when facing our own moral choices about the future we can ask ourselves: “If MLK would be on the other side of where I happen to be on this question-why?” (4/15/18); and

-how German philosopher Jurgen Moltmann attempted to find a glimmer of Christian hope in the ashes of Nazi Germany by grappling with the crucifixion as well as the resurrection (7/23/18).

The internal and external challenges to a hopeful future are daunting, but so are the consequences when we remain on the sidelines because of our cluelessness, future shock, inertia, lack of information and deficits of courage.

The Future of the Anthropocene

Jed Purdy is a Duke law professor who also teaches at the school’s Kenan School of Ethics. In writings that culminated in “After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene” (2015), Purdy defined the “age of humanity” when humanity became a force, perhaps the dominant force, in shaping the planet. In an interview when his book was published, Purdy said ours is an age “when there is no more ‘nature’ that’s independent of human activity.”

Because the fates of nature and humanity are interdependent today, Purdy argues that the future of the world “is an unavoidable political question” and that “world-making” going forward is “a collective project, like it or not.” He elaborates on one way that this kind of political problem-solving can play out:

Because the economy is, in a sense, what produces ecological reality under Anthropocene conditions, this means the economy, too, has to be a political problem. Instead of absorbing ecology into the existing economy, we should think about [other] possible economies in relation to the possible ecologies we’d like to inhabit.

In other words, instead of using “nature” simply to fuel our economic wellbeing, we should consider the kind of “natural world” that we want to live in as an essential part of the political debate. “Nature” has value to us separate and apart from its economic utility in the discussion that we need to have. If we fail to honor this critical distinction, Purdy fears that “nature” will continue to be degraded if not destroyed altogether.

For Purdy, it’s a question of ethics, and of expanding our priorities, because:

what people believe and value, how they see the world, can enable them to organize and act politically in ways that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, otherwise. Imagination frames problems and changes the boundaries of possible response.

But for the political exchange between humanity’s (economic) and nature’s (ecological) priorities to be vibrant enough, we also need to expand the framework of what we value beyond our economic well-being, complimenting our material priorities with our non-material ones–much as economist/philosopher Amartya Sen has also argued. (Sen’s thinking was briefly discussed here on 5/6/18.) By way of example for the political debate that he has in mind, Purdy recommends:

what the Romantic social movement around the early Sierra Club did, or what certain aspects of the food movement are doing now. Start with something that was regarded as a burden or a bad thing—deserted and unfruitful high mountains, [local farm] labor in the dirt—and turn it into a source of satisfaction, build new kinds of community and identity around those, and feed them back into the political system as demands to create the infrastructure that makes those newly valued ways of living possible.

It would produce a richer array of priorities and, at least potentially, the kind of political exchange that could strike a more productive accommodation between nature and humanity in the Anthropocene.

While Purdy is as disgusted as anyone with the current state of political discourse, because political decision-making on a broad enough scale is the only mechanism that’s available to build a better future, he won’t give up on politics. Still, Purdy’s hope that we’ll be able to come together in a political framework for the sake of the world is both narrow and cautious.

Currently, there are no institutions, movements, or even feelings of commonality that could support acting on the scale of climate change…[but] I’m not prepared to say we should treat our contingently broken and incapable politics as if it were some kind of intrinsic ethical constraint.

His vision for a natural world we want to live in may seem “utopian”—or pie in the sky—but Purdy and others are struggling mightily to see the future in broad enough terms that healthier more sustainable ways forward can be proposed, debated by the world’s stakeholders, and acted upon before the challenges ahead become even more daunting.

I keep coming back to this quote from the end of the equally tumultuous 19thCentury when Oscar Wilde was struggling to envision a better future.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.

With whatever optimism and focus we can muster, I keep telling myself that each one of us has a role to play in envisioning–and making–that better world.

See you next Sunday.

 

Why Voice Your Dissent?

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Groupthinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissenters As Troublemakers

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

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

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

GROUP THINK

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

CONSENSUS

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

DISSENT

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

EFFECTIVE DISSENT

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

DIVERGENT THINKING

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

DEVIL’S ADVOCATES AND GROUP DIVERSITY

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

OUR PRESUMPTIONS ABOUT DISSENTERS ARE WRONG

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

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

Why Voice Your Dissent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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