Your Values Should Feel At Home In Your Workplace

August 19, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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.

Ready To Leverage Rapid Social Change

August 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Because of innovations in technology, the near-instant availability of vast stores of knowledge and a random web of expanding connections, we’re in a period of rapid social change today.

With rapid change comes an opportunity to re-think, well, almost everything we believe has been etched in stone. It’s a chance to return to fundamentals, to the underlying value-propositions that drive our most basic decision making.

– Does society have to be organized this way?

– Does every channel of government have to aim at maximizing some peoples’ wealth?

– Is our society’s aim of producing more stuff at cheaper prices (and the instant gratification that it brings to us as consumers) more valuable than having better jobs and additional leisure time?

– Should the price of human consumption today be the destruction of the natural world?

We might be able to allocate our social resources differently if we got back to basics. We might make different trade-offs. Periods (like this) of rapid change come with the realization that “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

At times like this, there are opportunities to harness key drivers of change so that when you come out the other end, the world is better off. For this, it helps to have a vision of the future that you want to live in. In prior newsletters, John Seely Brown and Jed Purdy were “thinking out loud” about their visions for that better future and, as a practical matter, how we can get there. Deeply humane ideas like theirs can help us to maximize the advantages of change in the “good work” that we’re trying to do, both in our paying jobs and outside of them.

This week the news story is about how to learn productive lessons from times of rapid social change in the past. Over the last few years, some forward thinkers in the UK have been creating educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux to produce a better tomorrow. Theirs are ideas for the classroom, the workplace, the community—wherever imagination has real problems to solve in a “white water world.”

History Gives Us Hope

One reason to believe that tangible, positive change is possible today is because it’s been possible during similar times in the past.

A group of scholars who are clustered around the University of Sussex have been presenting some of those history lessons along with their arguments for “seizing the days” that we’re in. The image that they use in their educational materials is the butterfly because it represents a point in the arc of change between chrysalis and taking flight. As teachers, they’re saying something about the potential of these times, but they’re also referring to us as individuals and the opportunities we have to “take wing” instead of drifting in complacency or thinking that whatever we do won’t matter.

The Sussex scholars know that their first task as teachers is to get their students to engage. As such they remind us that during other times of rapid social change, people just like us achieved real progress. Because history shows that humanity can learn to do things differently, adapting on the fly, we can do the same while bringing others along.

The Sussex scholars also have the real (as opposed to theoretical) world clearly in view. Their aim is to engage us in what they call “living exercises” to tackle The Problem as they see it today.

We are currently locked in to a high-carbon global economy by multiple factors. They include energy-intensive infrastructure, high-consumption culture, unequal distribution of political power within and between states, and an economic system dominated by finance that fails the poorest, takes infinite growth for granted, and resists reform, however broken it becomes.

This is the challenge they designed their teaching for, but the approach they take would likely succeed if you defined The Problem that we face today differently. That’s because:

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to the current economic system.’ And yet, as it also says in Proverbs (29:18) ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ Visualising what can be done, inclusively and progressively, to bring about a sustainable society is therefore our challenge …Only in this way might we overcome the ironic maxim of medieval historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that: “History teaches us nothing but just punishes us for not learning its lessons.’

History Provides Working Models

Promotional image for the booklet “How Did We Do That?”

The following historical examples are cited in a booklet the Sussex scholars compiled in 2016 and you can download here.

The examples that they discuss all involve (1) responses to a radical change in circumstances that would/could not have been possible in a less disruptive time, (2) rapid adaptation by the public, and (3) longer-term improvements thereafter, some expected and some surprising. Despite the length of the following quotes, I thought these authors needed to teach their history lessons in their own words.

IN THE WAKE OF RECENT ECONOMIC RECESSIONS, WORK WEEK & OTHER JOB-RELATED CHANGES

“Responding to a recession in the early 1990s, the public sector in the Netherlands began offering a four-day week to staff to save money. Since then it has spread and become common employment practice, with the option offered to workers in all sectors of the economy. As a result, job-sharing has become the norm in the health and education sectors. It is common to have part-time surgeons, engineers and bankers making the much hyped work-life balance in modern industrial economies a practical reality. One in three men either work part time or compress their hours, working five days in four to enjoy a three- day weekend. Three quarters of women work part time. The popularity of the different pattern is such that 96 percent of part time workers do not want to work longer hours.

“It’s not just liberal Northern Europe that’s seen the benefits of shorter working weeks. In the United States, in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 – faced with recession, rapidly rising energy prices, growing lines at food banks, rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures – instead of simply bringing a knife to public spending and pushing austerity measures, Jon Hunstman, Utah’s Republican Governor, surprised people with an experiment to save money. At only a month’s notice, 18,000 of the state’s 25,000 workforce were put on a four-day week and around 900 public buildings closed on Fridays. The impact of the scheme was studied. Eight out of ten employees liked it and wanted it to continue. Nearly two thirds said it made them more productive, and many said it reduced conflict both at home and at work. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism. There were other surprises. One in three among the public thought the new arrangements actually improved access to services. It wasn’t the main objective, but at a stroke the four-day week also reduced carbon emissions by 14 percent, a huge annual, climate-friendly saving.”

INSTEAD OF PRESERVING ITS BANKS, A COUNTRY RE-INVENTS ITSELF

“Iceland was at the heart of financial crisis in late 2008 and nearly destroyed by it. It built its economy around speculative finance but, after the meltdown, a ‘pots and pans’ revolution led to a process to draft a new citizen-drafted constitution, engaging half the electorate. Rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as the Nobel economist Paul Krugman points out, the country, ‘let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net’ and instead of placating financial markets, ‘imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre.’The constitutional exercise proposed a new approach to the ownership of natural resources for public good. Iceland now gets all its electricity and heat from renewable sources.

“The crowd-sourced constitution ultimately fell foul of legal technicalities and the Supreme Court, but that didn’t stop the new mood creating lasting conditions for change and the desire for new economic approaches. Where other countries largely let banks off the hook, in 2015 Iceland’s Supreme Court upheld convictions against bankers at the heart of the crisis. Finance is now so sensitive that when the Prime Minister was caught up in revelations from the release of the so-called Panama Papers, he was forced from office.”

WE COULD ALSO HAVE INVESTED IN A DIFFERENT FUTURE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

“The notion that you can’t ‘buck the markets’ was turned on its head by the 2007–2008 crisis when financial markets realised they couldn’t survive without a massive public bailout and long-term support…The novelist and observer of modern banking, John Lanchester, made this observation in his book about the financial crisis, Whoops!: ‘The amount of state intervention (in the banking system) in the US and UK at this moment is at a level comparable to that of wartime. We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system.’

“Lanchester was referring to the amount of money created by central banks and pumped into the financial system. It was used to recapitalise the banks after the financial crisis had destroyed money and the banks’ balance sheets. The method was given the technical term ‘quantitative easing’, but it was in effect printing money. In the UK the sum reached £375 billion…To put that figure into context, it is about double the UK’s combined health and education budget in 2017. In the United States between 2008 and 2015 a breathtaking sum of $3.7 trillion was mobilised. Meanwhile, across the European Union, the European Central Bank has been injecting €80 billion per month to stimulate the economy, a figure which only fell in 2017 to €60 billion….

“There was…a missed opportunity [here]… The alternative was highlighted by a report called the Green New Deal, published in 2008, which estimated that the annual spending needed in the UK to set the country on a path to low carbon transition was around £50 billion.That was not simply a ‘cost’ as it would have an economic multiplier effect, generate economic activity, creating jobs and tax revenues. It’s a sum coincidentally similar, in proportion to national income, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme in the United States.”

In other words, the £50 billion investment in “a low carbon transition” should be contrasted with £375 billion invested in the U.K.’s banking industry. Moreover, given the “wartime level” of social investment by the UK, the US and Europe a few years ago, stabilizing the financial system and a low carbon transition did not have to be mutually exclusive.

What else could America have invested in with portions of the $3.7 trillion that was mobilized to bail out this country’s banks? A 4-day workweek for every working age American? Universal health care? Whatever the trade-offs, when they are “thought through” beforehand, they can be considered and even implemented during times of rapid change when their advocates (and supporters) insist upon having that debate. In other words, we can leverage the lessons of history if we’ve learned them beforehand and strike while the iron is hot.

The radical circumstances that leaders and countries responded to above were all deep and unexpected economic events. It’s only fair to ask: how can we leverage continuous change (involving technology, the unprecedented availability of knowledge, and a world of random interconnection) to implement our visions for a better future? In this booklet at least, the Sussex scholars don’t say. But it would surely include leveraging the changing states of mind of citizens in democratic societies. They might include:

–alarm over the privacy of information—with the possible result that personal information is recognized as “personal property,” including the protections and value that come with private ownership;

–fear of massive forrest fires burning homes and communities—with its consequences for changes to climate-related policy; and

–revulsion over another mass shooting—with new priorities impacting the availability of guns and their ownership. In this regard, here is a video that effectively uses humor to describe Australia’s movement towards greater gun control after public revulsion following a mass-shooting incident.

A shift in the popular mood can combine with similarly disruptive social forces to precipitate change when enough people are envisioning and debating the better future that they want after the change.

Teachers Showing the Way

The Sussex scholars are motivated by values (like fairness and the pursuit of intangible “goods”), preferences (like collaboration) and insights (like seeing opportunity in new limitations and during times of crisis). They end their booklet with 12 “observations” that function like recommendations. Here are four of them, explained in light of The Problem as they see it:

– Fairness matters: Demonstrable equity matters for the public acceptability of rapid change. This is especially true if and where there is any perceived sacrifice to be made for the greater good.

– Working together works and creates new possibilities: The experience of acting collectively to solve common challenges itself creates self-reinforcing possibilities for further transformative action, often unanticipated.

– Accepting boundaries triggers innovation: Setting new parameters around consumption – such as introducing safe limits on the burning of fossil fuels – can unleash innovation and reveal great, nascent adaptive capacity. Businesses, societies and whole economies adapt to new ‘rules of the game’ remarkably quickly.

– Value experiences, not ‘stuff’: Material consumption of ‘stuff’ in rich industrialised countries can be substituted by spending on experiential activities that benefit well-being.

Even if you define The Problem that needs solving differently than they do, these 4 basic “observations” can serve anyone who wants to be an agent of change.

The people who are behind the booklet are principals at the STEPS Centre and the New Weather Institute. STEPS stands for “Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability.” The Centre describes itself as “an interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub” at the University of Sussex. The New Weather Initiative describes itself as “a co-op and think tank” that was formed:

to accelerate the rapid transition to a fair economy that thrives within planetary boundaries. We find, design and advocate ways of working and living that are more humane, reasonable and effective.

Our associates work through projects involving debate, thinking, trend-spotting, community, arts and culture. This means they are:

– organizing debates and seminars on how to think and do things differently to make rapid transition possible;

– publishing books and pamphlets about a future that works to make it more imaginable and achievable;

– talking to local government about using scarce resources more democratically and creatively for fair and planet-friendly economic transition;

– learning the lessons of history and applying them for successful, contemporary rapid economic and cultural change;

– bringing attention to what works, and how and where in the world a more fair and ecological economy is already growing;

– working with communities to discover what creates resilience, and about ‘the sort of environment, colours and patterns that give them identity’

– talking to businesses and services about re-imagining the human efficiency of involving employees and users;

– bringing together organizations and people with experience of doing things more effectively; and

– helping organizations re-discover the lost arts of using the judgment, honesty and loyalty of staff and customers.

While these organizations might inspire you, they might also be a resource in your own work given their desire to:

enlarge the conversation about rapid transition, and ensure that its best insights are brought directly to bear on how we live and make decisions – from the home, to local life, the workplace, to governments and international institutions.

If readers are aware of organizations that define The Problem differently than the Sussex scholars do here (or Purdy did last week)—namely, from an ecological perspective—while also providing a competing vision of the better future that they want to inhabit, I hope that you’ll drop me a line so that I can consider their work for an upcoming newsletter.

A Living Exercise

A couple of final observations.

The men and women I’ve called the Sussex scholars are noteworthy because, as they describe it, they are offering “a living exercise” in their rapid-change booklet and elsewhere. In other words, they want an engaged public to “live” their lessons with them as they struggle to leave a positive imprint on the future. I hope you’ll follow their work, as I do.

Unfortunately the teaching of history (like the rest of the humanities) is in decline. But it’s still possible to imagine a history course on incidents in the past where “change provided opportunity,” including examples like those above, others included in their booklet, and many other social transitions. A course like this would connect stories from history with the stories that kids (as well as the rest of us) want to write into our futures. How exciting would that be!

Because the best learning always gives us the chance to take the boldest flights we can imagine.

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This post derives from my newsletter this week. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe along with recommending it to friends. To receive these posts weekly, you can follow the link to your right.

See you next week.

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.

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

July 22, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrian Piper’s Valuable Witness

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

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

I haven’t seen it yet, but I hope to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrian Piper’s Most Important Achievements

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

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

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

Our Understandings Can Evolve and Complement One Another

July 15, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conflicting Moral Perspectives Can Enrich One Another

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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