Good Work Needs a Cup That’s At Least Half Full

January 12, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A counter-narrative I kept hearing before the New Year was that everything’s “so much better” than I think it is.

I’m fairly certain that’s not true, but my cup is still ” half full” (and probably a little more than that) as I start another year.

Since at least the Great Recession began in 2008, or maybe back to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, I’ve been see-sawing between pessimism and optimism. On the downside have been fewer haves, more have-nots (and less opportunity in the country I grew up in) as well as the political and environmental challenges to the ways that we live and work. On the upside, these have also been years of extraordinary innovation and I’ve gotten corresponding lifts from what our new smartphones, social networks, access to the world’s information, and gathering of “big” data (to explain just about everything) have promised.

As some promises were broken, others were kept. Ten years ago, it would have been cheaper to build new coal- or natural gas-based power generation than wind or solar, but not today. (It’s capitalism’s cost efficiencies not just government regulations that are closing coal-fired power plants.) At the same time, more and better data tells us that people around the world are healthier, living longer and that more are escaping dehumanizing poverty. This forward movement only seems to stall when the costs to the environment of more human development are factored in–so I’m back on the see saw again.

Since any good lawyer can marshal facts to prove his case for either pessimism or optimism, why am I so certain that I’m in positive territory? One part of my answer is self-serving, another part is based on experience, and still another from trying to register data-points beyond the next alarming headline.

For much of the past 10 years—and for several stretches before that—I’ve been my own boss, which means (among other things) that I have to create my own momentum every day. Because a pessimistic outlook kills my drive, I look for the good news even when I’m overwhelmed by the bad, and usually can find it lurking in plain-sight: steady instead of frantic, modest instead of boasting, less newsworthy but hardly non-existent.

This is more than a mind-game to get me to work every day. Optimism usually has the edge because the good news drowns out enough of the bad to settle me down somewhere above the tipping point.

I’m also helped by my recent experiences.

For example, I visited Baltimore just before Christmas. My home base of Philadelphia is the poorest of America’s 10 largest cities, but even with some of the sad neighborhoods that splay out around me, Baltimore came as a shock.

Because it’s always a quick read on people and place when you take public transportation, we dove right into the buses and trains after we arrived, trying to get around for a wedding Emily had to go to and to some side destinations that we had in mind together. I always get lost in a new city’s transit system, quickly needing “the kindness of strangers” to find my way, and this weekend we discovered some of what Baltimore is like today beyond its first impressions.

Strangers asking locals for help on the street are always vulnerable. But the distance between you is reduced by your need, as well as when your eyes meet, when a local’s mastery of bus color or route is demonstrated, and when you express your gratitude for the help you’ve been given. “Strangeness” shrinks further as such encounters multiply. This place that’s home to them but new to you becomes more familiar as you’re invited in by their hospitality.

What appeared to be the extreme poverty of Baltimore’s public transportation riders was completely forgotten in the generosity that these men and women kept on demonstrating as we learned our ways around on those cold, damp and gray December days. Among other places, their aid got us to the City’s art museum and to vivid paintings by Matisse that most may never have seen. But somehow “the closeness of home” in Matisse’s colors and forms were perfect embodiments of the hospitality that we’d gotten as we made our way in their direction.

A couple of days in Baltimore reminded me that a bigger story in America than any news story continues to be about the decency and generosity of its people, and how easy it still is to be welcomed into a stranger’s home.

My cup is more filled than empty for another reason too. As Matt Ridley echoed in an essay a couple of weeks ago: “good news is no news” at all, particularly when one’s fight-or-flight instincts are preoccupied by the next uptick in the threat level. Fill in the blanks with every calamity that’s worrying you most today and Ridley falls back on his data to counter your sense of impending doom:

How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better.

He doesn’t mean that there aren’t storm clouds, even some existential ones. Only, I think, that there are more reserves to weather them—and more forward momentum—than we’re able to recognize when our fields of vision are obscured by our fears.

For example, for those who argue (like me, sometimes) that we’re just “using the world up” and leaving nothing for future generations, Ridley refuses to let us lose sight of either our gains or our possibilities. He argues that we are also producing more economic growth today with fewer of the world’s resources than ever before, that is, with less water, less metal, less land, less of almost everything we once consumed. The situation in Britain (where Ridley is based) and in other “developed countries” does not reflect what’s happening everywhere else, but it’s not irrelevant either.

The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017… That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources are being consumed overall;
Britain is using 10% less energy today than it was in 1970, even though its population is 20% larger;
In the past twenty years, room size computers have been replaced by smartphones, with formerly standalone calendars, flashlights, maps, radios, CD players, watches and newspapers thrown in for good measure;
Widely used LED light bulbs consume a quarter of the electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light; and
The productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied with a shrinking amount of land (although, I’d add, the environmental costs of fertilizers, genetically modified seeds and pesticides must be factored in as well).

So my take on Ridley’s data-fueled sunshine is this: Yes, too many of us are still wallowing in consumption and heedless of the consequences, but there are also templates and practices that we’ve already put in place and can build upon—enough human ingenuity and positive momentum—that we’re not running on empty into the future, but instead have a tank that’s maybe, hopefully, a little more than half full.

Enough for cautious optimism.

Enough to preserve our impetus to act on the sense of urgency that remains.

Ridley’s argument builds on the data-driven encouragements of his 2010 book The Rational Optimist (you can read a review of it here) as well as on more recent findings by MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee in his excellent, recent More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next (2019).

(If you’re interested in delving deeper, here’s a link with an overview of McAfee’s More from Less argument that “capitalism, tech progress, public awareness, and responsive government [these last two aimed at halting environmental degradation in particular] are the four horsemen of the optimist.” Because I thoroughly enjoyed McAfee’s storytelling in a recent interview on Innovation Hub, you might appreciate his live take on our future possibilities too.)

Since the new work-year really begins tomorrow, I wanted to make one more year argument for what can be accomplished in our jobs as tech users, citizens and custodians of a fragile planet as long as we have enough hope.

It’s not just a theoretical hope that we’ll need, but one that’s confirmed whenever you ground your aims in other people at, say, a Baltimore bus stop. It’s when you have “the full-body experience” of dissenting while trying “to raise the consciousness level” of everyone who’s watching or listening, as I argued here last week in Finding a Better Home Through Action.

They are ways to be at home (alone with your work) and not “let the world turn in on you,” just as there are ways to be at home with the life force of others, either where you live or in a strange city,.

It’s inhabiting the jobs you are trying to do by finding “just enough hope.”

This post was adapted from my January 5, 2020 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

LA Claims the Future While the Rest of Us Argue About It

June 17, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I’ve been re-writing quite a bit since I got back from LA, mostly stories for the book and, in particular, the heart of a central story that I‘d never managed to find before. One of the wonders of “getting away” is the space you reclaim to tackle the problems that were resisting you before you left.

It’s not unlike breaking out of “group-think” by bringing in new energy and perspective to challenge the limitations that were holding you back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In thinking about this post, I remembered an observation I’d written down before I left but also didn’t know what to do with. It was made by physicist Geoffrey West in a book he wrote a couple of years back called Scale. Among many extraordinary observations, West noted that one of the reasons cities tend to outperform companies is because cities have more weirdos in them, that is, more people who challenge the prevailing norms or group-think.

Since I’m also still digesting my time in LA, I wondered whether some of the vitality in that city (and maybe in California generally) comes from the fact that there are more contrary voices–more weirdos–participating in the conversation that defines them. After mulling this over for the past couple of days, I’ve concluded that there may be something to it.

A year ago, I wrote two posts: Why Voice Your Dissent? and Dissent That Elevates the Group. In the first, I summarized some of the findings in Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers by noting how hard it is to find yourself outside of the mainstream and then to persist, despite your seeming disagreement with everybody else. Summarizing Nemeth’s research, I wrote:

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.

This pull towards conformity is powerful, but there are individual as well as group rewards when dissenters refuse to keep their contrariness to themselves. The courage to persist has three parts:

In addition to your knowledge and experience and what you believe to be true about them, the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced everyone in the group should want. A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but perhaps neither engage us as much as her hopeful vision about the future we are here to create together.

Cities more than companies listen to its dissenters more, and LA may listen harder than most. It stands on the frontlines of the future because it recognizes the outsized role that its idealists and oddballs have played in getting it there. I also think it’s because dissenting voices are raised less loudly and vindictively on the West Coast than they are on the East. People are more relaxed, or as Emily would say (now that she’s moved there from Brooklyn) they’re way more chill dad. The tenor of LA’s conversation leaves more cooperative energy for when the debate is done. It leaves more space to imagine something better together.

To the hard, gritty realities Los Angelinos confront every day (their tides of homelessness, miles of aging infrastructure, the domination of their cars and roads), they seem to have made room for softness too. They seem to have smoothed the grittier edges but not forgotten them, daring to relax enough to dream with their best dreamers about how to reach a more livable future. They seem to have found ways to remain optimistic in spite of their many challenges. Really, is there any existing option that’s better for the rest of us to follow today?

Here are a few recent experiences in LA that may have caused this question to linger.

1. Grand Central Market

It’s always dicey extrapolating what people are like from their built environments, but how they’ve created new homes and workplaces, shopping centers and entertainment venues (or re-inhabited abandoned ones) always provide clues.

When Emily was younger, we visited the zoo in every place where we traveled. It gave me a lot of anecdotal evidence about how locals thought about wildlife, nature, education, family outings and relaxation. For example, the zoos in London and Barcelona are very different, as you might imagine.

In these and other trips over the years, I’ve also managed to find the central food market wherever am. A benchmark for thinking about these marketplaces has been Reading Terminal Market in my hometown. It may be the most bustling and thriving institution in Philadelphia, regulating the flow of produce, seafood and meat coming in and going out while providing arrays of prepared food in an environment that balances the traditional with the up-to-the-minute. It also looks and feels both effortless and authentic given its time and place.

I could disparage many other cities’ tourist-oriented farmers markets, but I’d rather celebrate LA’s Grand Central Market located in a cavernous old building in the heart of its high-rise downtown. It was where I first started considering the combination of “gritty and soft” in the city.

The cavernous space was dark instead of bright from above. Its inner volumes cascaded down three or four partial levels from one elevation at the Bunker Hill entrance to the Market’s final landing on South Broadway. The building had been hollowed out, with its spine, service lines and ductwork visible, if you looked for them in the dim recesses on walls, ceilings and snaking through lower levels. Inside, it felt like what it was: the shadowy hulk of a re-purposed building.

All of the Market’s establishments—featuring far more prepared food than take-home-and cook—were lit at ground level, glowing like so many individual oases, each inviting exploration while you digested their descending panorama. Food is prepared or assembled in front of you, with seating right there or at tables scattered both inside and out. I made for my recommended breakfast at Egg Slut, whose name and menu perfectly embodied the customer indulgence that seemed to be the goal of every purveyor. Maybe I was too hungry or jet-lagged when I reached the Market, but it seemed like islands of hospitality and surprisingly inventive fare, all of them floating in a multi-tiered, post-industrial space. More friendly and warm than street-level in Blade Runner, but also not unlike it. Gritty and soft.

In succeeding days, I kept detecting this balance. LA is not a beautiful city. Much of it seems yellowed by the sun and little of it has been prettied-up. But everywhere, Los Angelinos seem to have burrowed into their mid-20^thcentury sprawl of storefronts and strip malls to create environments that are comfortable, nourishing and full of character. It’s a way that all of us might ride our present into our future if we chose to live within our means while being calmer and less frantic about it.

2. Brunch in Silver Lake

Atmosphere like this invites perspective about what should come next as well as advice for living better right now.

We were at a thoughtfully calibrated outdoor café in Silver Lake when a woman at the next table, who claimed to be 70 but looked 50, volunteered that Emily had beautiful skin and slender, powerful legs. (“I drink water all the time,” Emily said by way of response.) Apparently finding nothing about me to comment on directly, she spent the better part of our meal describing her odyssey as wife, mother, business owner, inventor, personal trainer, author, motivational speaker and yoga instructor and that if she hadn’t changed her life 20 years ago, she wouldn’t be here now. I must have seemed in imminent jeopardy to have aroused her like this.

She then outlined a punishing six-month program of bikram yoga and improved nutrition that made her energetic, hopeful and feeling younger than she had since she was in her twenties. I thought to ask her about her book, whether I could get a motivational tape on-line or see her TED talk but instead I asked her if that was the type of yoga where you sweat your toxins out. Of course it was and based on her apparent diagnosis, of course I said I’d look into it.

This stranger at the next table didn’t complement Emily’s skin and legs because “they looked good” but because of what both of them told her about Emily’s wellbeing. As for me, she didn’t want to sell me anything other than “a choice for me to consider” because taking it had already helped her so much.

LA has been criticized as a shallow and superficial place. I always think of stars or starlets congratulating everyone, thanking God, thanking the orphans of Mogadishu for their award when I hear that. We did see one Academy award-winning actor while we were in a sporting goods store there, but Mahershala Ali is anything but shallow and superficial and neither were most of the locals I met. Admittedly, it was a small random-sample.  But those I encountered seemed to have put their health and wellbeing in the present moment closer to the center of their lives and choices than many Americans in other parts of the country.

Being centered like this influences not only how people view the future course of their lives but also the long-term future they tend as custodians for their children and children’s children.  When you feel better, get your body and mind under control, there’s more room for optimism and broader responsibility (isn’t there?)

3. The Getty

The Getty Museum sits on heights that overlook Santa Monica Bay and much of the rest of the sprawling city. Locals as well as out-of-towners seemed to dress up to go there. The Persian girls were flamboyant, the Japanese men causally tailored to an extent I’d never seen before and the Japanese women and girls wore complex layers that all seemed part wedding gown and spring raincoat. Everyone at the Getty seemed to understand that they were visiting someplace special to consider treasures from the past. And it was special.

The works of art on display were often as spectacular as the surroundings and visitors. I was particularly dazzled by the collection of marble portrait busts by the West’s greatest carvers, including Bernini and Houdon. Their arrangement was also playful, with curators positioning them so they could interact with nearby paintings or other sculptures. For example, the busts above of Belesarius (a Byzantine general by Jean Baptiste Stouf) and a Vestal virgin (by Antonio Canova) were at opposite corners of a sun-soaked gallery, the goat gazing (longingly and hilariously) into the dove’s eyes.

Like the La Brea Tar Pit Museum chronicled LA’s pre-history (in last week’s post), the Getty seems to serve as a temple to the more recent history of Western art and culture.

It’s where LA says: this is the best of where we have been.

Being at the Getty also reminded me that Philadelphia’s largest foundation (the Pew Charitable Trusts) moved to LA not long ago to support a burgeoning contemporary art scene that has seen major new museums being built (the Broad) and existing ones expanded (LACMA) to celebrate new, experimental artists. LA is championing artistic expression in ways that rival New York, Paris and London.

It’s another way that LA is saying: the future is being envisioned and inhabited here. This is where we are going.

+ + +

The LA I saw offers a perspective that respects the past, striving to live with our history and pre-history and to understand what it is saying to us.

It provides some of the optimism that enables LA to step forward and say to other capitals: we’re not caught in your group-think and grid-lock. Instead, we’re already deciding where we should be going next.

We’re looking back in time for its lessons and encouragements as well as ahead from a center in the present that aims for health and wellbeing.

We’re repurposing our aging, urban sprawl into islands of comfort and hospitality.

We’ve made gritty soft, maybe because we’re more aware than others of what we have left to work with and are simply making the most of it.

Yes, LA was an eye-opener.

This post was adapted from my June 16, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

We Are Making a Difference

January 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we set out to make a difference with our work, we usually are. It empowers us by doing it and empowers others who are trying to change the same things. It’s the belief in possibility that makes a new year, well…doable.

I came upon a guy last week who begins his day reading these phrases:

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will.

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.

“When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something you have left behind…let it be something good.

However “make the most of it” that sounds, it’s about whether we dare to face forward and declare ourselves because none of us has an unlimited number of days ahead of us when we can.

Historian David McCullough has written a dozen or so highly acclaimed biographies about Americans like Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers and John Adams. (You may also know him as the sonorous voice behind some of Ken Burn’s public television documentaries.) When he was interviewed about Truman, McCullough discussed this same quandary: whether to bother standing up for what’s important when it’s so easy to give up before you’ve even started.

The interviewer began by noting that “your writing makes readers feel like they are there,” and McCullough replying that his writing this way is deliberate.

What I’m trying to do is show readers—especially young readers—that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today.

There were these moments when they had to be thinking, there is no way we can get this bridge built, or get this canal dug. But things worked out—because individuals behaved in certain ways, with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right thing.

And my hope is that these stories will inspire some readers to behave the same way in the face of the uncertainty in their lives.

I found the immediacy and uncertainty before what happens next to be most compelling in McCullough’s 1776. But for tiny acts of imagination and courage all coming together 250 years ago, America would never have happened. And I can be a part of the same miracle today—if I choose to.

In a strange twist of fate several years later, McCullough found himself talking with his new internist about the Truman interview, about how today is no different than it was in the past, and the amazing things we might accomplish by acting despite today’s uncertainties.

I try to make that point in every interview. It’s really the main reason I do the work I do.

McCullough’s rationale for his lifetime of work is sharing this knowledge. Everyone who went on to accomplish something important could just as easily have sat it out, yielding to fear or inertia It’s not just a perspective for the young but for those at every stage of life who have a limited time ahead to leave behind something that they can be proud of. And finally, It’s not only advice for opinion writers or biographers, but for everyone who employs their skills on the gamble that they just might achieve a good result.

Writing this morning, it is easy to see 2019 as a gathering mess. No wonder people are looking for “unicorns” like Beto O’Rourke “to save the coming day for us” so we don’t have to get down into the trenches and do the hard work ourselves. But why not be a part of it, putting the faith in our own judgments instead of in a savior’s, particularly when so much that’s good has already been achieved in our lifetimes?

I can’t be reminded enough about the positive side of the ledger that’s laid out in Steven Pinker’s books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) (according to the data: life, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise, and not just in the West, but worldwide), which builds on his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) (that we’re living today in the most peaceful era in history). Like David McCullough, the perspective of time helps me to overcome my excuses and failures of nerve.

In the last couple of days, there was also Greg Ip’s helpful column looking both back at the past year and forward into the new one in the Wall Street Journal. Ip called it “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” and he begins it with a promise:

If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year.

But what I liked the most about the column was his conclusion after reviewing the data about rising incomes and global progress.

Perhaps it…feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels.

Yet obsessing over [these remaining] perils is how we’ll likely solve them.

Ip is saying that with focus and forward momentum—we can do this, and I happen to believe he’s right. We still have the hard work of planting the seeds that are there, but the ground is also in better shape than our sky-is-falling fears like to admit.

I wrote several posts last year about the threat of technology that arrives and is widely embraced before its downsides are known or anyone has had a chance to put reasonable safeguards in place. Social networks and smart phones today, with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles soon to follow. The ethicist in me kept asking: “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, at least before we understand more of the implications than we do now.” So last year felt like frantically catching up with the aggregators who are selling our personal data and the too-big-for-our-own-good companies that no one worried about soon enough. Much of the time, it felt like not having enough fingers for the holes in the dike.

But still I railed against the privacy profiteers like Facebook and Google (for the sake of our ability to make decisions without manipulation) and monopolists like Amazon (because the free flow of goods and labor really is important). And all the while, others with similar sensibilities were jumping into these trenches too, with no certainty that anything would come of it. Well, this past week saw several news stories about progress that is being made where I doubted it ever would.

A story on January 11 announced that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would no longer be sharing their users’ location data with those who are selling it to trackers because of privacy concerns that had been raised. Yesterday, Sprint followed up with the same decision. It was a victory (for now) over some of the tech giants with a brand new cohort of privacy advocates behind it.

Last Friday, there was a news report that customers, investors and employees are challenging Amazon’s facial recognition software because of similar privacy concerns. A group of nuns who are also investors have submitted a resolution for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting. The company has refused thus far to halt the sales of personal data generated by its software, but it has been forced into a dialogue it would never have had without widespread pushback.

My favorite marker from last week also speaks to the critical mass of individual voices that have been building, one by one, against Facebook even when the odds against them seemed most daunting. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, was one of them. Despite becoming rich, having a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting on Facebook’s board for a time, and being a prominent member of the insider’s club in Silicon Valley, McNamee was one of the first to challenge Facebook’s excesses that nobody could ignore. It took his early critical statements along with the past 9 months of populist backlash to culminate in Time’s cover story this week—a testament to how voices both big and small can coalesce into a wave.

I want to mention something else too. I’m hardly a frontline tech commentator, but Roger McNamee signaled me through Twitter yesterday after I profiled his essay in Time. I’m not telling you this because it’s cool that he did but because taking a stand in your work, however you can, often puts you in the company of those you can be proud to be associated with. The experience of this kind of solidarity also helps me to forsake the safety of my fence and dive into the fray even when I’m reluctant to do so in the work that stares back at me every day.

It’s not just pushing the same rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down to its same old place. There is progress when I look for it, and I’m almost never alone.

There’s a wooden arch at our backyard entrance. It’s heavy with wisteria branches that are hung (as if for the holidays) with seedpods.

A few years ago, when Brendan Ryan’s painting crew was here gentrifying the place, I was outside, by this archway, talking to one of his painters when a prior generation of seedpods started popping like firecrackers, propelling their seeds loudly and with amazing velocity in all directions. It happened in March, with some change in temperature or water pressure that neither of us could feel triggering the explosion. We laughed when we realized what was happening, and eventually fell into quiet to absorb the miracle of it.

The wisteria was thrusting itself into the future.

Of course, we need more than nature’s rhythms to motivate us to get up and keep doing good work for another day or year. Plants also don’t make excuses, or have the luxury of feeling hopeless when their time has come.

But there are markers that bolster optimism when I bother to look, that help me to believe that I’m neither Sisyphus nor going it alone. Perspective. A record of progress. Occasions of solidarity. It’s about winning the game in my head so I have another day’s worth of fortitude to win it outside.

This post was adapted from my January 20, 2019 newsletter.

It’s Time To Envision a Better Future

August 5, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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 19^thCentury 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.