Trust in a complex world

I think the conclusion to my book, Trust in a Complex World, written almost two years ago, offers some useful context around the daily drumbeat of news and the accompanying emotions:
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"All things considered, the prospects are troubling. The near-term future is likely to be full of conflict and crisis, as the increasingly urgent systemic problems overwhelm our ability to build trusting, collaborative relations. If we can muddle through this, it will be by developing the possibility of a richer kind of community than the abstractly tolerant model of the modern era – a community where people seek to understand each other more deeply, help each other to learn and develop, and face complex common problems together.

Four basic points in conclusion:

First, the profound shift in sensibility – moving from a view of humans as morally stable and independent actors, towards a view that we are essentially social, continuously shaped by our relations. As the range and density of communication has grown over the past century and a half, more people have been drawn from their tight harmonious circles of family and friends into rich communication with many cultures. Increasingly we embrace the value of learning from diverse experiences.

The interactive perspective is complex: there are few solid touchstones for right and wrong. We expect ourselves and others to learn, to understand, to be open, yet also to be reliable. This complexity is, however, necessary in a world one where we deal frequently with people different from ourselves, and where there is great need to work together on systemic problems.

Second, the deep anxiety, disruption, and conflict implied in this shift. The changes I have pointed to – the widening of communication networks, the mixing of races and ethnicities, the changes in gender roles, the demands for multicultural recognition – are disturbing. They lead to uncertainty: we don’t quite know what to expect from others or what we can count on from them in the future. They lead to insecurity: there is less confidence that if one plays one’s part, the community will be supportive. They destabilize identities, as people get conflicting messages about what is valued and rewarded. Expectations of marriage, of friendship, of employment become more fluid; loyalty is weakened. Walls dividing public from private are constantly breached. People find themselves challenged by others who get up in their faces and demand to be respected for who they are, not merely assimilated to some common template.

The resulting uncertainty may cause anomie, a sense of loss of bearings. Many people are attracted to nostalgic images of smaller, simpler, more personal communities, where we knew who we were dealing with. Some react more strongly – pulling back to narrower communities, seeking certainty in established principles, defending their sense of right and virtue. These reactions can polarize societies, and can lead to violence among those who feel most threatened by the emerging moral claims.

Third, the enormous positive potential of these developments. Humans have for millennia trusted each other within circles of thick, stable relations, with a core expectation of unquestioned loyalty to a strong shared moral view of the world. There was little meaningful interaction among these communities: they either remained separated, or they fought. Now, for essentially the first time in history there are is an expanding realm of relations that cross these walls, with many people seeking enthusiastically to experience diverse cultures, food, art, music, ideas – constructing communities on the fly, piecing together a sense of self flexible enough to travel widely, capable of understanding and working with many kinds of people.

Over the last century or more we have enormously increased the range of communication, so that most people have far more knowledge than before of foreign nations and diverse groups; and we have developed much higher capacity for extended collaboration on complex projects. All this is enormously exciting – an excitement coming not from rallying around a flag, but from learning, stretching, doing more. It gives us a glimpse of community that is not thick, but rich.

Fourth, the work needed. There has been much practical learning about how to encourage understanding and collaboration: I have underlined mechanisms of reflection, sharing, deliberate purpose, process management, platforms, and network orchestration. But these are still in their infancy, not generally understood or applied. We are just beginning to learn about creating effective purposes, as opposed to empty slogans; about building successful platforms that draw energy from the diversity of their members; about processes that can organize around complex tasks without relying on fixed rules and hierarchies. My motivation in this book has been to clarify a bit both the basic sensibility and what is needed to make it work in practice.

Communities are extremely complex, built from interwoven expectations among innumerable people, extending far beyond direct personal relations; supported by institutions that spread, socialize, and enforce those expectations; deeply embedded in identities, so that people gain a sense of meaning and virtue from participation in the community. As these patterns are built there are always profound disagreements and reactive movements. The process of working through the implications of a new sensibility is long and contested.

Meanwhile, crises are brewing. Climate change could easily exacerbate conflicts as groups blame each other – there is plenty of that going on already – and thus spiral into a vicious circle of mistrust. Growing inequality is a major threat to community, but there is no agreement within classes or across them on what to do about it; the resulting cynicism could easily produce not a solution, but a withdrawal that would further erode the sense of shared responsibility. The danger of major harm caused by small groups of fanatics leads to wide anxiety; the more security agencies try to gain control of the Internet, the more legions of hackers perfect means of evading them.

There are plenty of solutions to these and other problems. What we lack is a unified vision of which one we want and how to implement it. But after centuries of avoiding value discussions, we are not very good at sober discourse on issues that touch on deep beliefs. There is more shouting than dialogue.

The task of building a unifying and widely inspiring purpose is just beginning. It has to move towards an image of expanded community, with wide and rich global links. The natural reaction to discomfort is to pull back to narrower thick networks of support and agreement; but this reaction – seen in varied forms on both the Left and the Right – divides us further and exacerbates the problems. Rather than separating, we need to connect more, and to develop further the embryonic mechanisms that coordinate those connections into understanding and collaboration. As in the Christmas gathering with which I began, we need to bring the world in around the hearth, and the family out into the world, if we hope to find our way through the complexities we all face.

Hope

Trump is just the latest and most frightening manifestation of a growing trend. Everywhere we look, narrow, tribalistic movements are growing in power – seeking to build walls and to assert the preeminence of particular moralities. Brexit; separatist movements among Catalans, Scots, Basques, Croats, Bosnians, Walloons - to stay only within Europe; the spread of, anti-immigrant fervor in Europe and the US; and fundamentalist rejections of the whole modern enterprise, including not only the violence of Muslim extremists but also the ideologies of many Christian and Hindu groups – these appear to be signs of a fundamental breakdown in trust and a fragmenting of community.

Some people say that trust is easy to destroy and hard to build; some say it is necessarily undermined by high diversity. Such interpretations lead to deep pessimism. They suggest that we are in for a long winter of mutual suspicion, an accelerating spiral in which everyone withdraws into homogeneous groups and fighting for position.

But the history of trust suggest that this view leaves out at least half the story. This moment is extremely unusual, perhaps unique, in the power of an inclusive counter-movement of people who actively embrace diversity, who believe deeply not only that other people should be tolerated but that they bring something positive – that we can learn from them, develop ourselves, improve the world by actively working to understand others outside our tribe. This basic sensibility has often appeared in the past among small cultural elites of artists and philosophers, but today it has spread quite widely through the general population. The age-old move to exclude is encountering determined resistance.

A few recent reminders:

• After the killing of a Catholic priest near Rouen, Muslims across France and Italy flocked to Catholic masses in a show of solidarity, and were widely welcomed. The leader of Italy's Union of Islamic communities called on his people to "take this historic moment to transform tragedy into a moment of dialogue."
• On the day after the shooting of police officers in Dallas, “Black Lives Matter” marchers confronted a largely White “All Lives Matter” counter-demonstration. There were fears of violence. Then the leaders crossed to the middle of the street to meet; and soon the two groups came together to physically embrace each other. They said, and enacted, “This has to stop. No more walls.”
• While politicians across Europe are paralyzed by conflicts over immigration, a wide network of civil society groups is working actively to accept and integrate those fleeing their homelands. In formal and informal associations, they are building refugee centers, finding homes, developing educational systems, conducting dialogues about their needs and the problems of inclusion.
• In the last decade there has been a sudden shift in a centuries-long battle over the acceptance of gays. Among young people in particular, but quite widely across the population, there has been a dramatic rise in willingness to recognize gay relationships. This has been driven by dramatic movement in public opinion, which has rapidly grown much more tolerant of diverse sexual orientations.

These events, and many others,  are indicators of a deep shift in sensibility developing over the last century or more – a sensibility of “No more walls”, of active embrace of diversity. My own research indicates that in the U.S. about 40% of the population shares this sensibility pretty clearly, while fewer – around 30% – reject it. So there is a strong base for the battle against Trumpism, and LePenism, and Brexitism.

This is a historic change. Since the 17th century we have tried to avoid conflict by  respecting boundaries, tolerating others as long as they don't invade our space.  That is what is brought into question now: the density of relations and ease of interaction have increased so dramatically that the boundaries are always porous. Other groups knock on our doors demanding respect, not just tolerance. We need their cooperation to solve urgent social problems.  Their religion, food, music, art, pictures of their children and cats jostle for our attention.

Those who react by trying to close down – the 30% – can do so only through extreme repression, and at the cost of giving up the richness of a diverse world. They do have the advantage, however, of a strong and unified ideology, referring to clear images of the past rather than hazy images of imagined futures.

The inclusive sensibility lacks such a clear political program or voice. Neither liberalism nor conservatism captures it. The young, who are most open in general to the rapid global exchanges of the internet, have low engagement with traditional national politics, which they see as beside the point. The more politically active of them are working in voluntary associations, from local organic coops to global NGOs.

The challenge now is: How can we develop a politics of inclusion? Its practices are half-formed, just taking shape. They include an explosion of civic organizations aimed at improving relations in local communities, raising consciousness of interdependence, reaching out and understanding others. They have started building a practical foundation for building on the genuine advances of the past century, and permanently overcoming the age-old attraction of tribalism.

Three things for progressives to do during the holidays

For those of us who did not vote for Donald Trump, the holidays ahead will be tinged with sorrow and dread. The best way to deal with that is to do something constructive. It’s hard, especially for us older folk, to break out of established routines;it’s easier to complain and reinforce each other’s feelings than to act. But here are three simple, practical things that we can all do:

1) Listen to your Trumpist relatives and friends.

I have been interested to learn how many people in my circles know people who voted for Trump. The New York Times had a front-page article about the awkwardness this will cause at holiday meals as people try to avoid the subject. The thing to do is: don’t avoid it. Ask them how they feel, why they voted that way. Listen. Try to understand. Don’t argue, don’t judge, don’t try to convince them they are wrong. Listen to them, as the philosopher Gadamer says, “in the belief that they could be right.”

It is very hard to hear views which you find abhorrent. But it’s time for a little humility. And by doing this, you gain at least two advantages. One is that you may actually understand better the dynamics of Trump’s support. At the very least, this will help for the next battle. Sun Tzu’s famous advice has unfortunately been lost in the Democratic party:

"If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. But if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat."

But it’s not just a tactic; it’s about helping in this small way to break the vicious dynamic of mistrust that has divided the country. The majority of Trump supporters don’t really agree with his policies, but they feel that something needs to change; and many feel despised and humiliated by the elites of the coasts and the cities. It’s largely up to us to change that – to show that we are willing to listen and engage them.

In this regard, two quotes to ponder, attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.”

and

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”

2) Reach out to Muslims

One of the many dangerous aspects of Trump’s world view is that he would isolate Muslims, make them feel like second-class citizens. American has largely avoided terrorist attacks from inside the country in large part because we have been remarkably successful in making Muslims feel at home. In Europe, Muslim ghettos full of hopeless youth have become breeding grounds for destruction.

But despite the power of Trump as President, there is a good deal all of us can do every day to diminish that danger. A young Muslim woman interviewed on This American Life expressed fear that she would no longer be able to wear her hijab, that she would be subjected to increasing discrimination; but she also said:

“"I'm hoping there will be more people who feel like the old woman today who reached out to me just to just kind of make eye contact, to smile. And that's really my hope. Because that's what I feel like America should be. And I feel that despite what the polls show, more people in America are good than are bigoted and awful"

We can all do at least that that - make eye contact, smile.

3) Support civil society groups

In the last fifty years an unprecedented growth in civil society institutions. Americans have always been good, as Tocqueville pointed out, at getting together to do something without waiting for a government mandate. But the recent growth of associations – for civil rights, for the environment, for community action, for mutual aid – has been explosive. The Internet has further accelerated the trend, The extraordinary advance of the gay rights movement was driven almost entirely from civil society, with government coming in mostly to to certify it. It’s a whole arena of action that Trump can’t stop.

So we need to do everything we can to bolster it. Each of us needs to pick a few key associations and engage in supporting them. Give them money – that’s the easiest thing to do during the holidays. Tell people to make donations to them rather than giving you gifts. If you can, do some work for them. Whatever it takes, this is how we can continue to move progressive causes forward while government policies and laws regress.

What do we do now?

In a Trump world, what do we do?

The first thing is, we need to stop focusing so heavily on the political arena. Liberals have an almost reflexive tendency to turn to government as a solution to social problems. But politics has been largely frozen for some decades now – not only in the US but in most of Europe and other industrial nation as as well. Most progressive energy has been spent simply trying to hold off the reactionary tide. Now the dike has been breached, and many progressive political advances are likely to be lost in the flood: health care reform, labor laws, environmental protections, affirmative action, financial regulations, redistributive policies.

But politics is not all there is. There is civil society, and there is the economy; and in both those areas progressive ideas have considerable power and can grow even in a hostile political climate.

Civil society – people’s everyday relationships and values – is now deeply split. About 30% of the country, by my estimates, wants to return to a kind of tribalism. They feel lost in the cultural changes of the last few decades – the internationalization, the influx of immigrants, the emphasis on inclusion for disenfranchised groups such as Blacks to gays, the commercialization and flaunting of sexuality. They have felt at home and comfortable in a culture, largely rural, held together by strong families and churches, racially and ethnically homogeneous. They therefore reject the basic idea of diversity and inclusion. This goes way beyond the few who have turned to explicitly white-supremacist ideology; most are simply trying to preserve the way of life they love.

Against this, and the main source of hope, is about 40% of the country that have embraced an active culture of diversity – who believe that “foreign” people bring something positive, that we should seek to learn from them, develop ourselves, improve the world by actively working to understand them. This large segment thrives on the rich mix of ethnicities and experiences, and on cultural fusions in music, food, and art. This basic sensibility – similar to “cosmopolitanism” of the past – has often appeared among small cultural elites of artists and philosophers, but its spread through the general population since the 1960s is historically unprecedented. It has spawned an ecosystem of associations, media, curricula, and habits that are now deeply embedded for a large part of the population. This forms a basis of visceral resistance to the age-old tribal impulse represented by Trump, a resistance that is likely to last.

The most plausible progressive task for now is to build on those gains in civil society. Many of the “new” progressives have already been going in that direction for some decades – emphasizing mutualism and social entrepreneurship rather than government regulation. They have been somewhat disengaged from politics, which is part of what has allowed the conservative counter-revolution to gain  steam. But the corresponding advantage is that the current political crisis doesn’t much affect them: they can continue many of the things they have been doing. Those of us who have focused more on government policies would do well to turn some of our attention there.

In this task surprising support can sometimes be found in the world of business and markets. The ability to succeed in a market economy can free socially-conscious groups from dependence on government, which is essential now. Furthermore, big corporations can be valuable allies. Many really believe in encouraging diversity because it improves their competitive capabilities: corporations on the whole have resisted conservative efforts to roll back affirmative action regulations. Some have become champions of environmentalism because they genuinely recognize the potential economic costs. They do not support tribalism: their outlook is generally international and  cosmopolitan. And they have been in the forefront of development of techniques for managing collaborative alliances and networks.

Thus social entrepreneurship and corporate alliances – a linking of civil society with the economic sphere – have gradually become important elements of the progressive movement. For example:

• Those of us who have fought for environmental regulations are in despair. But in the meantime a network of social entrepreneurs have created technologies that make many polluting industries obsolete, even without regulations. For instance, in the last few years hundreds of housing units – apartment buildings as well as individual houses – have been built to near-zero emissions standards, at about the same initial cost as standard construction, and with much lower maintenance cost over time. So there is suddenly a huge economic incentive to for an action which could make a major difference in efforts to save the planet.
• The government recently promulgated Obamacare regulations shifting the basis of health care compensation fee-for-service, which encourages multiplication of high-cost procedures, to fee-per-person (capitation). This encourages an approach of maximizing population health, which is much saner from a social point of view. The Republicans may repeal Obamacare, but insurance companies generally support the move to fee-per-person and population health because it works better economically; so they are likely to stick with it even if the government regulation disappears. Civil society groups have already become active in helping build population health through improved nutrition and mutual support. There is a natural alliance here among these groups, care providers, and insurance companies which could make a very positive difference in care provision.

I am not arguing that government is unnecessary in these and many similar cases. In a healthy system effective regulation would also be an important element. What I am arguing is that even in the wasteland that is likely to be the political landscape of the coming years, there is much that we can do to contribute to a better world.

Saving the world with Passive Houses: the role of civil society in social change

A lot of young people I know are rather skeptical of government and not very involved in the political process, but they are very active in making social change through social entrepreneurship. They feel that they can most effectively improve the world by working in associations and shared projects rather than by passing laws and regulations.

Here’s an example of the difference in perspective. The classic form of the environmental movement puts pressure on arms of government to take action against climate change. They want to change the tax structure, or to put limits on certain kinds of cars and buildings, and so on. That entire approach has now become so intensely polarized that little progress is possible. The political arena has become a battle between a side that wants to impose its view on others – that is, after all, what the environmentalists want to do – and a side that resists, trying to preserve their way of life.

But there is also a very different strand. A friend of mine (not particularly young, by the way) has built a Passive House apartment building in Boston. Passive House is a set of construction standards and technologies that reduce emissions from the built environment by 90% or sometimes more. If it is used for housing the growth of population in India and China and Africa over the next decades, it will make a huge difference to our fates. But we don’t need regulations to make that happen. The technology has been advancing with extraordinary speed. It is now possible – as of just the last year or so – to construct such a building for the same price as “regular” construction. And it brings huge ongoing benefits. The maintenance costs are much lower; energy consumption costs are hugely reduced; health of occupants is improved; it’s pleasant to live in. It simply works both in economic and human terms. Once the word is out, why would anyone not build that way?

This is a case where civil society can do some things that government can’t. It takes some of the pressure off law and regulation. In the last half century civil society has gained a lot of capacity: people can come together much more easily around projects. They are taking on big issues: health, refugees, climate change. To the extent they work, they avoid the polarization of political ideologies.

A central problem of the twentieth century was working out the relation between government and economic action: in what circumstances laws and regulations were needed, in what circumstances it was better to let contract take over. Maybe a central problem of the twenty-first century will be to work out the relation between government and civil society. Civil society isn't the whole solution, by any means, but most analysts haven’t really explored or grasped what it can bring, and how it can change the policy debates.

Humans

Humans

We have a Goldendoodle that we love very much, found abandoned in the streets of New Haven, a total sweetheart.

We were listening to a story on NPR about Trump, whom we do not love. There was an interview with one of his delegates from the midwest – dedicated to the cause. We learned that she and her husband had a truck farm, that she had never been politically active before but was excited to be going to the convention, even though it would cost her thousands of dollars that she did not have. Then in the background there was the sound of barking. She explained that one of her sidelines and great pleasures was raising … Goldendoodle puppies.

Photo from her Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rita.gaus

Humans are everywhere, even among Trump supporters. 

Company loyalty

The decline of corporate loyalty exemplifies the problem of trust in a fast-moving world. The great companies of the past have struggled to sustain a sense of trust from their employees, while new ones have often built trust and enthusiasm on a new basis.

Most of the great companies of the 20th century built trust through a culture of familial loyalty: employees expected to spend their whole careers with the company, and in return they were expected to identify deeply with it and to be willing to sacrifice for it. But in the competitive pressure-cooker of the 1980s and 90s, most of those companies – notably icons of the old order like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Procter and Gamble – abandoned that deal. They embraced layoffs, first in crisis, but increasingly as a regular way of doing business, a constant rebalancing.

Now many companies have gone towards the opposite extreme: using material rewards to motivate, giving up on loyalty and trust and a sense of community. That is effectively breaks an old culture, and may make change easier. But it does not make a culture in which people are willing to work together.

Large companies like Google or the “new” IBM, as well as myriad smaller organizations in fields from technology to social enterprise, do something different. They don’t promise stability and security; they promise challenge and growth. Employees are drawn to them for the opportunities to build their skills and their reputations, and perhaps to advance exciting projects and purposes. They don’t particularly expect to keep working there for their entire careers.

That is all very well – in some respects it’s terrific – but it also creates a lot of problems. It’s terrific from the companies’ side because it maximizes their flexibility; it’s also good for employees in that it opens up a world of new choices. While lifetime security at one company has some attractions, it’s incredibly soul-deadening as well. Companies of the past, in exchange for security, demanded conformity, obedience, deference. The new deal allows much more personal agency and encourages more diversity.

But if the new deal at work is good for some people, it is very bad for others – for those who don’t have the skills to make it in the new world; for those who are unfortunate, choose the wrong company at the wrong time, and wind up unemployed; for those with children who need to save reliably for college; for those who don’t like the intense stress of continual uncertainty and challenge.

If business and society want the advantages of flexibility, innovation, responsiveness, they need to pay the costs. They need to help people to replace job security with career security. This certainly involves extensive support for education and training. It almost certainly requires some basic minimum income, or a lifetime Social Security, to carry people through the vicissitudes of uncertain careers. It requires better information to help match people to opportunities, and better regulation of employers who take advantage of the flexibility.

For the moment, most of the costs are borne by the employees, They are the ones who have to figure out how to get through transitions, save in a completely unpredictable environment, build networks of support, find information about possible paths forward. Companies and society, especially in the U.S., bear very little cost for layoffs. There’s growing anger about that unfairness. If trust is to be maintained, and the potential of an advanced economy is to be realized, those burdens will need to be rebalanced.

Sorority racism

The recent conflicts  in the US over race have involved a confused mix of two very different strands, one old and one new. The protests over the shooting of Black youths in Ferguson and elsewhere are of an unfortunately old kind: a struggle for equal rights and equal treatment before the law. This was the core of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s that brought down the Jim Crow framework, equalized access to the vote, won formal rights in job and housing markets. Whites who have long seen themselves as allies in the battle for equal rights are quick to support protesters in this new conflict. But when Blacks protest the name of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, or the quality of the food at Oberlin, or the nature of Hallowe’een costumes at Yale; when they talk of “privilege” and “safe spaces” -- they are entering another arena entirely. Long-time White allies, who have marched and fought for civil rights, feel alienated, often angry. They are excluded; their good will in the fight for equality seems no longer to count. The Black demands seem to them petty -- how can “micro-aggressions” like bad food be put in the same league as Black lives at risk on the streets? These protesters have gained admittance to elite universities, they have won the battle for that right: why are they still complaining?

This is what Chris Rock, at the 2016 Oscar ceremony, called “sorority racism”:

”Is Hollywood racist? You're damn right Hollywood is racist. Is it 'burning cross' racist? No. Is it 'fetch me some lemonade' racist? No. It's just the [racism] that you've grown accustomed to. It's sorority racist. It's like, 'We like you, Wanda, but you're not a Kappa.'”

The new issues, though they sometimes adopt the language of “rights”, are not about rights. Everyone has a right to be treated according to the law, but no one has a right to name a building or determine food choices. The more telling and accurate word, widely used in these protests, is “comfort”. Blacks are demanding to feel comfortable, accepted, included.

This seems petty only to people who themselves feel comfortable. But we can all put ourselves in this situation: you become a member of a group, but you don’t really know the rules, you don’t know how to win respect, you are afraid of making a mistake that will make everyone laugh at you. It’s a severely crippling experience. Most of us say as little as possible. We would like to be invisible. We keep our opinions to ourselves. We self-censor.

There is now a large body of research showing the long-term damage. Students who feel uncomfortable perform less well. Employees who feel uncomfortable do not contribute as much.  In boards of directors of major companies, new members from formerly excluded groups -- women and minorities -- feel uncomfortable and so don’t speak their minds. These lead quickly to vicious circles: the students, the employees, the board members confirm the old suspicions that they are not as good. And then it doesn’t matter what rights they have: they are back in their old position at the bottom of the status hierarchy, unheard.

If we want to include new groups in our community, they have to feel comfortable. And it is always a messy process, because to feel comfortable they have to violate the unspoken rules of the existing in-group. They must have the space to be “off”, different, not quite fitting in. They are necessarily going to say things that we, the Whites who have set the rules of civil dialogue, find strange and offensive, that we don’t “get”.

We’re into a new phase. Equal rights have been achieved in many arenas, but that is simply not enough for citizenship in today’s society. We need equal inclusion, which has been achieved almost nowhere. That will take a lot of work, a lot of humility, a lot of misunderstanding and overcoming of misunderstanding.

Brexit

The Brexit vote is a reminder of how weak trust in “the system” has become. Brexit advocates were driven primarily by the feeling that forces from outside – international experts, politicians, bankers, the European Union – had let them down; they feel less secure, less prosperous, and less hopeful than the past. These sentiments, which can be seen growing in polls over the last several decades, have been catalyzed by the immigration crisis, which threatens a wave of outsiders that exacerbate the sense that they have lost control of their own lives. The vote is essentially saying, “We have to take control again; we can’t trust anyone else.”

But it’s important to note that even many on the other side of the Brexit issue feel somewhat skeptical about the system. The young, broadly speaking, were opposed to the split but not very enthusiastic about voting. They, too, don’t believe that the system really works very well, or that it’s worth investing energy in. Unlike the pro-Brexit voters, they do not want to pull back behind their wall – quite the opposite; but they feel they can continue to reach out, to travel the world, to enjoy multiple cultures, to start global entrepreneurial ventures no matter what the formal governing system is. They have a different perspective, one which puts much less importance than classical liberalism on the role of government.

So it’s not that a majority, even in England, want to shut down. About 37% of eligible voters voted for Brexit. Almost 20% didn’t vote – and polls suggest that the majority of those were pro-Europe but lacked passion for the issue. That is the danger and paradox of our age. Those who want to shut down, to return to a nostalgic past, have clarity and passion. Those who want to open up are more scattered, and many are not convinced that the current institutions are the best way of doing it. 

The good news, the extraordinary news, is that perhaps for the first time in history, those who feel strongly that they want to rally their tribe against the outside are in a minority. The bad news is that they know clearly what they want, while progressive forces do not. There is great danger in shutting down, and great danger that a minority could make it happen; but there is hope in the gradual growth of a perspective that extends beyond tribalism.

Government as an instrument of change

I think that we liberals often overemphasize the power of government.  The enormous victory of the Civil Rights Act and other legislative and judicial advances have led us to slight the hard work of building broad support. In the last few decades, conservatives have been better at that.

Basically, you can't force people to do the right thing. No society can be healthy unless most of the people, most of the time, think the laws are good and are glad to obey them. When that isn't the case, you end up with all sorts of distortions: cynicism, manipulation, evasion, hidden resentment, sometimes open resistance.

Thus there's a necessary balance between government and civil society. When you pass a law, you need to ask: is there enough support? If not, you need to get to work building it. FDR, it is said, told his backers when they proposed policy changes: “I agree with you. I want to do it. Now go out and make me do it.”

This is why I'm having doubts about President Obama's entry into the transgender debate. His attempt to use executive power to force North Carolina to back down on their restrictions has polarized the issue. Those of us who agree with his moral stance feel heartened that justice is being done; but in regions where most people are less supportive, the lines may instead harden. If people are forced to allow transgenders into the bathrooms, they will find other, perhaps uglier, ways to harass them. And even those who are sort of sympathetic may take offense at the entry of the distant government using compulsion, overriding their local officials to whom they feel much greater loyalty. When people are dug in to a moral view, legal change is more likely to catalyze opposition than change.

Lasting change requires the mobilization of civil society - bringing together associations, spreading the moral argument, convincing waverers. And we on the Left have not done that well. The implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. a great advance in social rights during the 1990s, has fallen short of expectations because the movement has not been well sustained. The legal shift on abortion has fallen even further short of its moral goals because it has sparked intense movements of opposition. These conservative movements have made great gains on the local level, winning over city governments, counties, states. They have been able in this way to greatly weaken the effects of liberal legislative triumphs in much of the country.

It hasn’t been all one-sided, of course. The gay rights movement, like the civil rights movement before it, did indeed build wide popular understanding and support before the major legislative and judicial strokes; the government action came as a codification and recognition of a shift in civil society. That’s a more lasting and effective path to change; we need to rebalance our attention.

Safe surveillance?

In my last post I made the reluctant argument that we need to come to terms with the need for surveillance. Given the increasing danger that one person or a small group can cause almost unimaginable horror, we have to be able to prevent it.

Is it possible to have surveillance without tyranny? I have a glimmer of an idea.

The problem is basically one of scale. If there is a file on every US citizen, then many thousands of people will have to be involved in gathering the information, collating it, putting it into patterns, making decisions. There are so many points at which that information may be misused or hacked that it’s basically impossible to prevent. That path leads to nothing but bad results.

But the technology community has begun to develop an answer. It’s called “homomorphic encryption”. It makes it possible to process encrypted data without decrypting it first. The Hacker Lexicon says:

“A homomorphically encrypted financial database stored in the cloud would allow users to ask how much money an employee earned in the second quarter of 2013. But it would accept an encrypted employee name and output an encrypted answer, avoiding the privacy problems that usually plague online services that deal with such sensitive data.”

In other words, the many thousands of people who touch the data could gather and analyze it without ever being able to see people’s names or identifying information. There might be “files”, but no one looking at those files  could tell whom they referred to. They could sift it for patterns that might indicate terrorist plotting, but they would not know to whom those patterns pointed.

That might make it feasible to cut down actual intrusions into personal privacy far enough to bring to bear the traditional mechanism of protection: judicial review. When law enforcement officials found threats in the data, they could ask a judge for the right to decrypt it. It would be like asking for a wiretap. It’s a violation of privacy, but one hedged with enough protections that we have agreed it is worth it to reduce crime. 

Homomorphic encryption is technically very difficult and still quite slow, but it has been improving rapidly and is getting close to feasibility. If this could work, it could reconcile defense against the growing threat of lone-wolf attacks with the rights of personal privacy and dissent.

Terror and surveillance

Attacks like the one in Florida this week, under the banner of ISIS, create a terrible bind for progressives and liberals. We can argue with conviction and evidence that the best way to minimize the danger is to unite with the Muslim community so they will offer no shelter or encouragement to extreme ideologies, and will join in thwarting terrorism. The right-wing impulse to exclude and harass Muslims has exactly the opposite effect, increasing the sense of alienation among marginalized youth and giving them a sense of grievance and unfairness to feed their darker impulses.

But that isn’t quite the whole story, and the rest is not so easy for a liberal view. Nowadays the threats have reached a new level. It has become easy for a single individual or a very small group to wreak very great damage. And it’s getting rapidly worse. If we look only a little distance into the future, with the increase in the complexity of digital connections and the rise of powerful technologies of destruction, that danger will become intolerable. We cannot allow even a little chance that a few people might set off an atomic bomb in one of our cities, or genetically engineer super diseases, or disrupt the programs that keep planes flying and water flowing.

But how to keep those risks near zero? Surveillance of Muslims certainly won’t do it: we have seen many times that the sense of grievance can come from many sources other than religious fanaticism. Dylann Roof took his inspiration for the church massacre from racist ideology; Timothy McVeigh’s bomb was motivated by anti-government frenzy; Adam Lanza’s school shooting seemed driven by personal feelings of romantic rejection. Sociopaths can always find a reason, and their weapons are only growing more powerful.

The only solution that I can see to such danger is surveillance of everyone. If someone is plotting mass destruction, we need to know.

I don't like that conclusion. The risks of tyranny and the loss of privacy are also intolerable. But as the potential rises for private people to do enormous harm, the rights of privacy have to be questioned. President Obama, who was a great advocate of civil liberties before becoming President, has pushed strongly for stronger surveillance capabilities. If he, who is basically on our side, sees that need, we should take it seriously – and try to find a better answer. 

I think the answer is probably to focus on how to prevent abuse of surveillance, rather than on stopping surveillance per se. We recoil from this almost instinctively: the idea that some power can keep tabs on our private lives conjures up images of Orwell’s 1984 and of Bentham’s panopticon prison. The trope that absolute power corrupts absolutely runs deep in our culture. But have we really put our minds to changing that equation? Is it possible to have enough surveillance to prevent the harm that terrorism can do, and the right controls to prevent misuse of that knowledge? I haven’t seen any serious treatment of that possibility – and it may be the only way out of our terrible dilemma.

Is Facebook bad for us?

No, it isn’t.

Many people think that social media are turning us into a nation of slugabed narcissists. But studies show something different. People are on the whole less isolated than they used to be; heavy internet users have the typical number of face-to-face connections, plus, in addition, robust networks of online connections many times larger. They are also socially active – more engaged than most politically and in social-benefit associations. They are less limited by views of in-groups, more willing to learn from unfamiliar perspectives, better at bridging across groups. They are better at managing complex and cross-cutting commitments, such as the balance of work, family, and friends. They are more open to sharing and exchange with others. Some studies also find that they are more trusting than average, and more open rather than narcissistic.*

Fears of fragmentation of the web into homogeneous echo chambers appear so far inaccurate: though there is high fragmentation on hot-button political issues, general news consumption is far less polarized online than offline, and Internet users are more likely to be influenced by new information outside their normal orbits.

People are not only communicating more, but they are communicating more widely and and in more diverse ways about complex topics like family, happiness, health, and career, as well as opinion-based or cultural issues like music and politics.

Yes, there are a lot of cats on social media; but cats create connections among people, and moreover there is much more than that. A friend of mine, a full-time competitive athlete, developed complex intestinal symptoms. She talked about it with various family members, team members, and doctors, but didn’t get much help. Instead, by far the best support came from web forums of people with similar experiences. From people she did not even know, she gained not only knowledge but also emotional comfort, understanding, and hope that she was unable to get from her close connections.

The internet is opening channels of real and rich exchange unprecedented in human history. Perhaps our greatest hope for the future is the fact that teenagers in Tehran and Beijing are downloading and sharing Western music and comedy shows. The pen-pals of the past have been multiplied a millionfold in friends on Facebook. These connections may in time build a foundation for understanding and peace. 

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* The evidence for claims throughout this post is cited in  Trust in a Complex World, chapter 4, section "Evidence".

Postmodern marriage

“Marriage is a great institution - but who wants to spend his life in an institution?” 
- Groucho Marx


Marriage is the locus (when it works!) of our deepest and most trusting relationships. But marriage today, increasingly unmoored from traditional constraints, is very hard to sustain. It is possible to achieve a successful and lasting relationship of deep trust without sticking to convention, crossing wide differences of background and worldview -- but you have to work at it. And it often fails.

In most past societies, it was not necessarily easier to be married, but it was certainly easier to stay married: everyone knew the right way to act, without much question, and the right way did not include the possibility of ending the relation. The initial choice of mate was tightly constrained by the need to the community “in order” by class, status, tribe, familial nexus. Once the knot was tied, the community, normally acting through some form of church, maintained that stability by making sure it could not be untied.

The role of the community has slowly weakened over the past few centuries, and the space for individual choice has grown. Still, even a half century ago the vast majority of people in the industrial democracies married within their close circles of region and status, and followed traditional ceremonies in which the community witnessed and took responsibility for their vows of permanent fidelity. Divorce remained rare.

Something really “broke” within scarcely more than the last half century. Today when one goes to a wedding, it is very often constructed as a personal statement, a reflection of the couple’s world view, rather than as an affirmation by an existing church. In my recent book, Trust in a Complex World, I tell of a wedding I attended in a Calvinist church just outside of Geneva – the site, in Calvin’s time, of one of the the most extreme forms of community-dominated marriage. Yet here we had a female Calvinist minister standing aside and letting the couple pronounce vows they had written themselves, after readings from Martin Luther King and French poets, while friends performed music by the altar. They pledged their love, but there was no assumption that they were locked in: the witnesses all “knew” that people can grow in different ways, and we would never think of imposing a judgment that they must stay together if they themselves did not continue to feel it.

And that kind of marriage, as everyone knows, takes continual and deliberate work. Researchers have confirmed this: Galena Rhoades, for example, finds that “Couples who slide through their relationship transitions have poorer marital quality than those who make intentional decisions about major milestones.”  

Most important: this is not just an elite phenomenon. Cosmopolitan elites have tinkered with marriage for almost all of human history, but they have not encouraged the rest of society to join in. Men and women have largely suffered in silence, the men in bars and the women in the home. Now self-help books by the hundreds are sold in pharmacies in small towns and discussed among friends, with the consistent message that partners should open up, discuss issues with each other, work things through as equals. Another set advises on divorce: how to get free of a bad marriage, how to navigate the emotional challenges. Even reality TV has adopted the message: shows like “Married at First Sight,” “Surviving Marriage,” and “Neighbors With Benefits” bring couples’ struggles and discussions into the open for all to see and comment on.

This is historically new. The current sensibility, now spread quite widely: that marriage is a relation constructed by those who enter into it, not defined by an outside group; and if it is to last and reach its full value, they must work on it seriously and continuously. They undertake that work, rather than simply choosing a predefined path.

There is great promise in this for liberation of the human spirit. But there is also great danger and trouble as we learn to navigate the new territory. One student of the field finds, “The average marriage today is weaker than the average marriage of yore, in terms of both satisfaction and divorce rate, but the best marriages today are much stronger, in terms of both satisfaction and personal well-being.”

Marriage is, in this sense, a paradigm for all community life. Old communities are weakening everywhere, causing enormous distress, fragmentation, and conflict. But new relations are also emerging – based on more diverse relations, wider choice, more equality. But they we have a lot to learn before they become true forms of community that we can count on.

(image: http://goo.gl/uUKgVF)