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)

Political correctness

We have to take on political correctness. It’s a major force driving support for Donald Trump. Saying it shouldn’t do that won’t work. It could contribute to a Trump victory. 

 The Atlantic has a piece by Conor Friedersdorf called “A Dialogue With a 22-Year-Old Donald Trump Supporter”. This young man is white, has a bachelor’s degree, lives near San Francisco, and makes somewhat over $50,000 a year. He says:

“... it's almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion.  Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. There is no saying “Hey, I disagree with you,” it's just instant shunning. Say things online, and they'll try to find out who you are and potentially even get you fired for it. Being anti-PC is not about saying “I want you to agree with me on these issues.” It's about saying, “Hey, I want to have a discussion and not get shouted down because I don't agree with what is considered to be politically correct. ...  I feel like I have to hide my beliefs….

“Having Trump in the White House would both give me more confidence to speak my own opinion and more of a shield from instantly being dismissed as a racist/xenophobe/Nazi (all three things I have been called personally).”

In my experience he is right in saying that open discussion around issues of race and gender is often suppressed. In my classroom students shy from such conversations as if skirting a minefield. If forced to take a stance they tread with extreme caution. You can feel the fear of getting burned or touching off an explosion. This is not something that they learn in college – they come to college with it. I don’t quite know where it does come from, but the air is heavy with it.

There’s some good reason for: women and minorities have felt that they can’t speak freely. In order to overcome that, those of us who have always felt comfortable speaking our minds need to start thinking and learning.  But shutting down questions and doubts doesn't encourage thinking and learning.

We could dismiss this young Trump supporter with scornful and clever retort. Conservatives have coined a term – “snowflakes” –  to express their contempt for minorities and liberals who (as they see it) feel so frightened that they melt at any discomfort. We could easily turn that around here. Is not this conservative a “snowflake”? Just because people call him bigoted, because he feels uncomfortable, he withdraws and takes shelter an extreme view that he doesn’t even really believe in. Ha!

But though it might feel satisfying to turn the tables in this way, it’s not the point. As a practical matter, this backlash, this resentment at being silenced, is an important factor in Trump’s support, and our smart argument won’t change that. As a moral matter, what progressives believe in more than anything else is inclusion, diversity, openness, sharing. It is simply wrong to shut down any group, to make them feel that they have to hide their beliefs. Those are two good reasons for us to take careful stock of ourselves and to improve our understanding of, and dialogue with, the critics of political correctness.

(Image: https://goo.gl/iCsQOx)

It's possible to overcome deep mistrust

The polarization we are experiencing now is nowhere near as bad as the situation in Europe after World War II. The French and the Germans were about as mistrustful of each other as any two groups can get. They had fought two horrific wars within a half-century, killing many millions of people; there as hardly a family that had not lost members. They had a long history of conflict long before that. Each was proud of the achievements of its own culture and scornful of the other’s. The most basic and destructive human emotions were rampant – humiliation, self-righteousness, vengeance. Yet less than a half century later they were leaders together in a unified Europe, and the thought of conflict between them had become almost unthinkable. Borders were open, people moved back and forth with hardly a thought.

How could this happen?

There were three main elements, as described by Alice Ackerman. The simplest was “the humanization of relations among leaders”: in various symbolic ways the leaders of the nations showed respect for each other and avoided the language of self-justification. More complex and long-term was the deliberate development of a web of interdependencies for both security and economic purposes. Finally, the governments also established many programs for cultural exchange among the citizenry, such as youth and academic exchange.

All that relied on the wisdom of rather extraordinary political leaders. Assuming that we can’t count on that now – probably a good assumption– are there any useful lessons we can draw?

There was one vital element that did not rely on government: an extraordinarily wide effort by private citizens to build relations across the border. A wave of partnerships created feelings of linkage: for example, the practice of “twin-towning”, bringing French and German communities into a sense of mutuality and shared identity. Many other civic partnerships similarly promoted common efforts around research, tourism, vocational training, sports, and other areas of daily life. Historians from both nations got together to revise textbooks and national histories. Religious organizations helped people express their sense of grief and collective mourning. These efforts started almost immediately after the war and continued for many decades, creating a deep network of connections and understandings.

Some of these are are things that we could imagine happening now, that we could all help make happen now. For the deepening conflict with the Muslim world: Twinning with towns in Syria or Egypt could build a sense of understanding and desire to help that could reduce the cycle of mutual blame. Joint histories could build new interpretations of the relation between the cultures. Religious exchanges and shared processes of dialogue and understanding, spread widely enough, could soften the polarization of views.

We’re in a spiral of mistrust, and it will take these kinds of deliberate actions to reverse it.

Notes towards a progressive vision

The progressive vision is still at a very early stage. It centers on a shared sense that diversity is a good thing, that we should broaden community through political and cultural inclusion, and that the rise in inequality is destructive. It involves values of wide participation, understanding, sharing, openness, and collaboration. There is now probably a majority in the U.S. who accept this point of view in a general sense. But when we get to details – what does it look like, what are the institutions that make it work, how does it affect daily relations and ways of life? – there is far less agreement. We need to do a lot of work to develop the vision to a level needed for the challenges we face.

For example:

• We need to sort out our ambivalence about government. Progressives generally favor the welfare state, including government programs to reduce inequality and help the poor. Yet many also have a deep suspicion of big bureaucracies and technocracy – this phase of progressivism, after all, began in the anti-Vietnam War movements. There is hostility to many aspects of government, such as the police and the military and the spread of surveillance.

One strand of progressivism wants to avoid the issue by retreating to local communities with local food and energy. That’s a hopelessly impractical solution – partly because we all depend to an extremely high degree on the global economy (even local farmers use tools and seeds and money and ideas from all over); partly because very few people would support the policies that would be needed for the model to spread widely; partly because we need large-scale governance to deal with extremely threatening issues like climate change and pandemics.

If we accept the complexity and interdependence of the world, we need a much better model of government. The direction should be towards more participation and inclusion, but government will always need to involve effective policing and defense. In an era of high complexity and interdependence, in which disgruntled individuals can wreak unprecedented havoc, surveillance in some form will be absolutely necessary to prevent major disasters. As for the welfare state, it has been ineffective in stopping the spread of inequality everywhere. Support has been declining for many decades – not only in the U.S., but throughout the industrial democracies of Europe. Even in the Scandinavian heartland, conservative parties have risen in strength after a long period of almost unquestioned dominance.

We need an idea of government that is different from the welfare state of the past, without falling into simplistic localism. Various efforts to square this circle, such as ideas of “participatory” and “deliberative” democracy, remain very undercooked, with few good models and no plausible ideas for how to achieve this kind of governance at a societal or global scale.

• Our focus on diversity and inclusion is still just an impulse, not a program. The almost reflexive progressive belief that Europe should embrace the suffering refugees of the Middle East, for example, has sparked a furious backlash of extreme right-wing populist movements seeking to retreat behind walls. And that’s not surprising: no community can simply throw open its doors to a sudden influx of strangers without fragmenting. Building community is slow work; inclusion of new groups – whether immigrants or internal groups that have been kept subordinated – takes a great deal of patient interaction and efforts to understand across differences, a learning of new frames, and long practical working-through of mechanisms and routines that everyone can feel comfortable with.

Conservatives have a point: “conservatism” at its heart is a preservation of the past, a sense of continuity and identity. We all need that: we can’t just fly around experiencing new things all the time– we need a home to come back to. Conservatism in its pure form is stagnant; liberalism in its pure form is chaotic and exhausting. The current polarization has pushed the conservative and liberal views towards their extremes.

Progressivism needs to find a balance that moves towards greater inclusion without losing touch with the past. But we haven’t built a shared vision of what that might look like. How do we actually achieve inclusion? There are many experiments and models of dialogue– most of them failures, none of them at large scale.

• We sorely lack an economic model. The idea of a “sharing economy” is attractive, but in real life it is mixed in with a new form of capitalist division and many types of social disruption – of taxi drivers, neighborhoods, small businesses. Some parts of it, like crowdsourcing, verge on old-style sweatshops.  And no one, to my knowledge, has produced a plausible model of what an entire economy might look like on a sharing basis, or on any other basis that reflects progressive values. A few niche areas seem promising – bartering of home arts and crafts, open source software – but they don’t plausibly solve the problem of how most people are supposed to make a living.
• We’re pretty intolerant of conservatives. We think they are stupid, or evil. Of course, they think that of us as well; but a movement that centers on inclusion should do better in reaching out. We’re not going to succeed unless we can engage with most of the “heartland” – the Trump supporters who are fed up with everything, the gun supporters who worry about losing their freedom. There are obviously some lines that have to be drawn, but if we exclude most of the country we’re not going to get anywhere. The work of inclusion includes them: understanding better how they see the world, what offends them about us, what they like; building something with them that they can feel part of.

There has been progress in progressivism, slow but real. I’ve seen some meetings in recent years that have been remarkable at including diverse people – blacks and latinos, unions and community groups, environmentalists and business leaders – in serious, respectful conversation, without the posturing and treading-on-eggshells quality that marks the early phases of developing relations. The success of the gay rights movement has been extraordinary. But it’s still a very small start.

Conservatives have a big advantage: they are, in general, trying to preserve something that exists or has existed – a way of life they actually know. That gives them a unifying concreteness of vision that is a strong basis for collective action. We, by contrast, are trying to build something to reflect an abstract set of values and hopes. There’s a lot of work to be done to make it real.

Solutions: a new phase of capitalism?

Many businesses in the last decade have started using the word “solutions” to describe their approach and strategy. They contrast this to a “product” orientation. In a product orientation you start with what you make, and then you try to sell it on the market; in a solutions orientation you start by interacting with customers, understanding their needs, and then you try to figure out what value you can add. It’s a huge mental and organizational shift. Thirty years ago IBM made big proprietary computers, and its engineers concentrated on making them faster and more powerful. Now they provide a variety of “on-demand” products and services, with heavy reliance on alliances and open-source sharing, that they combine in flexible way around clients’ needs. GM s similarly trying to rework its model, from perfecting and differentiating their cars to providing transportation solutions. Indeed, one can see a similar move under way in practically every major industry.

It strikes me that this may be a pretty fundamental shift in capitalist markets. Think of Adam Smith’s definition of markets: you make something, then you sell it. As Marx put it, all you care about is the “exchange value”, what people will pay for it. But if you add this initial phase of collaboration with customers, and you add the need to form alliances and partnerships, you’re no longer in a simple market. What Marx calls “use value” –  the actual usefulness of the product – moves from the background to the foreground of the producer’s mind.

Middle-level IBM managers and engineers told me:

“Sometimes the solution will be an IBM product and sometimes the best fit for that customer will be a competitor’s products. I should think that what’s right for the customer even if that means IBM not getting some additional revenue. And I have done this a number of times. … What maximises IBMs revenue in the long term is helping our client succeed and making the best recommendation to the client that ultimately will mean that they have more money to spend on IBM elsewhere.”

“We want to develop a long term business partnership - not just somebody who comes and buys some servers, but we want to become business partners with the largest businesses in the world. I think the overall frame that all these things go into is long range thinking instead of short range thinking.”

Obviously there’s still a lot of short-term thinking in business. But this argument that there are solid business reasons to prioritize solutions rather than profit is rather new in the heart of capitalism. It’s a claim that you can’t really win on exchange-value without focusing first on use-value. This idea has spread across a wide range of companies and industries, including many of those with the highest gross margins. They believe, and seem to be demonstrating, that they are profitable because they are useful. That’s pretty radical.

The bathroom controversy

President Obama makes one of the best statements I have seen about the need for understanding.

“The civil-rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday,” Obama told George Stephanopoulos. “But it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation, and sought to understand the views—even views that were appalling to them—of the other side.”

But it seems to me there is a strange inconsistency. In the recent conflict over transgender rights in North Carolina – the bathroom controversy –  Obama has brought down the full weight of the Federal government to force the state to change its recent law. Thus the issue has become, in the current lingo, “politicized” – or more exactly, polarized.

I think it is right that transgendered people be treated as full members of the community. Obama thinks it’s right. We have a kind of righteous impatience – a determination to force resisters to give in. It makes sense, of course, to use the power of government as a vehicle. But I am also worried that this fails to understand the views of the other side, and thus closes off the “possibility of reconciliation”.

Over the last few decades there has been a quite rapid extension of rights–  to ethnic and racial minorities, to women, to varied sexual preferences, and so on. We are seeing now that although some of those extensions have been accepted quite broadly, others have produced a resistance that may have gone underground for a time, but now is flaring forth in the intense rebellion of the Right. Forcing clearly has its limits.

How do we get a better result? Obama has the answer, I think, in the quote above: seek to understand the views – even views appalling to us – of the other side. I certainly don’t have such an understanding in this case. And it is dangerous to use the power of government without more understanding.

Prisoners

It's the surprises that teach us things -- surprises in dealing with others who are unfamiliar, who see the world differently.
 
The first time I walked into a prison, I lost two quarters from my pocket in the couch. This was in my graduate school days, when I was working in a penal reform project in a women's unit for nonviolent offenders, mostly drug charges.  The inmates were clearly suspicious of me and my colleagues; I could feel a vast gulf between their experience of the world and ours, and I had no idea what they were thinking. So I was pretty surprised, as i walked out, that one of the young women came running after me to hand me my 50 cents. I didn't know why - maybe fear, maybe currying favor, or maybe some human connection.

Some time later my colleague and I, as good psychology students, were leading a discussion group aiming to explore moral reasoning. We asked them to think back to their early childhood, to imagine themselves back in that time, and to recall a conflict they had experienced. There was a brief silence, and then several inmates burst into tears. I remember being baffled, embarrassed - and then mortified, as it emerged that the kinds of conflict they were remembering were not the kind of sibling rivalries or playground spats that came to my mind, but things altogether darker and more violent.

There was nothing romantic here. These women would cut each other for a cigarette, and would maintain a lie so brazenly in the face of the evidence as to make me doubt my own senses. I could never trust them. But as different as they were from me, there was a human connection. 

We can never really understand others (or even ourselves). But trying to understand makes a difference. I think I sometimes surprised them; they certainly surprised me, and stretched me beyond what I was.

What's wrong with us?

It’s worth remembering, as everyone bemoans the state of our politics, that our problem is neither new nor specifically American. It can’t be blamed on Trump, or on the machinations of the Koch brothers, or the financial crisis of 2008, or on Millennial narcissism, or even on the rise of inequality. It goes back before all those, and spreads wider. They are manifestations of a growing breakdown, not causes of it.

The starting point can actually be dated pretty accurately for the U.S.. Sometime around 1970, within a few years either way, confidence in the major institutions of industrial democracy took a sudden fall. A few years earlier, around 80% of the population had felt a good deal of trust in government, business, and unions; by the mid-70s, that number was about half that. It has bounced around a bit, but it has never reached anywhere near the old highs and keeps dropping again to new lows.

In western Europe the decline started later – largely in the 90s – but has followed a similar trajectory. In Scandinavia and Germany, the social-democratic consensus eroded; in the UK, Thatcher took a hammer to decades of Labour dominance. Trust in government declined significantly throughout the region. There has been no steadily rising replacement for the old centers of confidence: the populace have oscillated unhappily among available choices, throwing out the incumbents almost every chance they get.

What can explain such a wide and deep disenchantment? It has to be something big. It’s not inequality, because it started before inequality took off. I would explain it in terms of the rapid growth of interdependence and interconnection after World War II that disrupted traditional ways of life and broke down long-standing patterns of status and deference. From one point of view, the period since the 1950s has been one of enormous expansion of opportunity for minorities, for women, for gays; from another, it has been a period of rising confusion and blurring of identity – for white males, to be sure, but also for everyone else. Formerly excluded groups have gained hugely in terms of formal rights, but they still feel excluded and subordinated. No one quite knows what’s up and what’s down in the social scene.

The disruption of social norms opens the way for demagogues who say they can make everything all right again by stopping the spread of diversity and closing the borders to outsiders. Again, this is happening throughout the industrial democracies: nativist populist parties are on the rise everywhere. There’s no quick fix. We need a progressive vision that most people can feel a part of, and that will take decades to build.

Rallying the troops

Steven Hill, in the Huffington Post, pens a fine example of left-liberal outrage at a new form of capitalist trickery:

"A new and alarming mash-up of Silicon Valley technology and Wall Street greed is thrusting upon us the latest economic fad: the so-called "sharing economy." Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Instacart, Upwork and TaskRabbit allegedly are "liberating workers" to become "independent" and the "CEOs of their own businesses." In reality, these workers also are contractors, with little choice but to hire themselves out for ever-smaller jobs ("gigs" and "micro-gigs") and wages, with no safety net while the companies profit.

This is rhetoric calculated to rouse those who already agree. It’s certainly not going to convince anyone outside the tribe. I ask myself, what good is that kind of writing?

It is good if there’s a clear fight. If you need to draw the battle lines, then you want everyone on your side to get excited about a focused problem. You don’t win if everyone is saying, “Well, but on the other hand …”, especially if your opponents have the simple certainty provided by Ayn Rand-type ideology. So heated words fill the bill.

But this is not a clear fight: it’s complex. I have ridden with Uber four or five times, and each time the driver has been someone who has benefited from the flexibility of the work in order to pursue other interests: a middle-school principal who wanted some extra cash for his wedding; an Afghani who had interpreted for the U.S. military, been given expedited citizenship, and hoped to start a restaurant; an old Eastern European craftsman who had formerly owned a small business, had retired, but wanted to bring in some extra money and keep himself busy. They all said they were pleased with the work – and none of them would have been able to meet their needs in the familiar model of full-time, long-term employment.

Similarly, I know several young people who started out in standard work – lawyers, predominantly, with prestigious, stable jobs that would have led reliably to a career of “good work” – but who abandoned the safe ship outside the harbor and have swum to the gig economy in one way or another: writing apps, starting web services, freelancing. The pay is low, the uncertainty high, but they would not go back.

I’m not arguing the opposite side. “Standard” work is still what most people want and need, and there are certainly many venal practices in the new business models. I’m just saying that turning this into a polarized issue, suggesting that the whole sharing economy thing is merely a trick of the enemy, not only oversimplifies but actually shuts off important avenues of progress. It would be foolish and harmful to simply shut down the sharing economy. It doesn’t add to credibility to act as if that’s what you want.

There is a place for “Well, on the other hand …” when issues and interests are complex. To be fair, Hill does propose, at the very end of his piece, a solution that could be a practical remedy to some of the downsides. My feeling, however, is that it would have a much greater chance of actually working if Hill sought less single-mindedly to rally his own side. One thing we’ve learned from Obamacare is that if you win a pitched battle, you get locked in afterwards; you can’t experiment, deal with the complexities, and learn.

It’s exciting to rally your side and to participate in a mass oppositional movement. It’s just not very constructive for complicated issues.

Loving America

I am struck by a recent blog by the strong conservative Christopher Chantrill: “I Want a President Who Loves America.” Here it is taken as given that Obama hates America. But why? No real reasons are given, in the blog or in the comments. There is some talk about leftist radicals in general, and a frequent disdainful references to a statement Obama made in the 2008 campaign about “fundamentally transforming America.” But there is no mention of actual policy issues.

What is driving the intensity of anti-Obama feeling here is that he is seen as outside the clan. “Fundamentally transforming America” shows disloyalty: it is the kind of criticism you don’t make in public. The commentaries on Chantrill’s blog, very much an insider discussion among self-defined conservatives, go off into a battle over defining the clan boundary. Is Ted Cruz in? Some say yes, because he loves America; some say no, because he was born in Canada. Rubio? A number reject him because of his foreign influences. But Obama! – Obama in this view is not even close, he’s just a concatenation of foreign ties and allegiances. It’s not that he’s Black: that never comes up in the discussion, and my sense is that it’s genuinely not the main issue. It’s that he is proudly multicultural, proudly cosmopolitan, willing to see good things in other countries, willing to criticize the U.S. So he cannot be trusted.

I think I understand that part. What I don’t understand, really, is how it feels from the inside. What is the nature of Chantrill’s passion, as seen in the intense use of the word “love”?:

“... life is not easy for America lovers, and all you lovers know why. It is hard to keep the flames of love burning bright when it is so much easier to burn up with hate. In fact, for most of us, we have to be threatened with the loss of those we love in order to remember how important our loves and our loved ones are to us.

That’s the great contribution that President Obama has made to America. He has reminded us how much we love our country and how important it is for America lovers to elect and have once again a President that loves America.”

This is a very deep feeling. I might say I love America, but Chantrill would no doubt say I don’t. There is indeed something really different about it. I feel that America is my home and that it is in many respects extraordinary, but it’s not everything. Other countries have their virtues: I love French cheeses and Chinese dumplings, and I don’t think we have any writer to match Shakespeare. America also has many flaws and has committed many sins, from slavery at home to support for dictatorships abroad. My feeling for America does have something special about it, a depth and fullness far beyond my feeling for any other nation; yet I would not call myself a “lover.” It’s not absolute. It warms, but it doesn’t burn.

Chantrill thinks, apparently, that because I don’t burn with love I must “burn up with hate”. But I don’t. I don’t fully understand Chantrill, and he doesn’t understand me. I don’t think I can express this difference in a way that Chantrill would find true. It has nothing to do with reasoned argument.

So is understanding hopeless?

One of my favorite jokes is, “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.” Chantrill thinks there are two kinds of people; I don’t. And that may be the essential difference that defines us as two kinds of people. Obama is outside the line because he doesn’t see a line. Those of us who think we can bridge any cultural gap can’t bridge that one.

The good news, from my perspective, that there are more people than perhaps ever before in history who embrace multiple loyalties and identities, and thus don’t see a need to divide the world into friends and enemies. The wall-builders, like Trump and Chantrill, are loud and shrill in part because they are on the defensive and in the minority. We may not be able to come to understanding, but the current is not likely to reverse.

Is America ripe for tyranny?

Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine, thinks so. The rise of Donald Trump has terrified him, as it has most of the intelligentsia. His response is deeply conservative: that’s what happens when you have too much democracy, when you give too much power to the unreasoning, emotional, masses, when the established status order crumbles.

I see it quite differently. First of all, we were much closer to tyranny in 1933: when Roosevelt took office, a delegation of national leaders pleaded with him to take dictatorial powers to manage the crisis. (He refused, though he may have regretted it later!) Second, what is astonishing from a historical perspective is that the Trump backlash, potent as it appears, is really a minority movement; whereas for most of human history appeals to nationalism, tribalism, hostility to immigrants have been pretty reliable ways to rally the population as a whole, now we are deeply split. Sanders' supporters, like Trump’s, feel the system is failing them, but they are almost on the opposite extreme in terms on "the Wall" and anti-immigrant views in general. Global, as opposed to national, identity continues to grow slowly worldwide. My rough estimate from my own research is that around 25% of US  citizens are pretty strongly pro-tradition and nationalist, and 30% is pretty strongly "progressive" – supporting feminism, cosmopolitanism, diversity. The rest are uncertain but lean towards the latter.

This is a dangerous moment, of course: a major terrorist attack could rouse the uncertain middle to react by supporting Trump. But otherwise there is perhaps less chance than ever before that the exclusionary view will win, and more chance that we will in the end respond to this ugly reaction by embracing diversity more enthusiastically than ever.

Local food

Food is a paradox. Many of us now are attracted to local, sustainable, food, organically grown in the sun and clean country air. That was pretty how things were a century, or certainly two centuries ago: few chemicals, everything fresh and local (there was no refrigeration), no agribusiness interests. But – here’s the paradox – at that time food was also a lot more expensive and a lot worse. A century ago food required over 40% of the household budget in the U.S.; now it’s about 15%. There were only a few foods available, and the quality was often poor. Lard was a staple. People just didn’t eat as well. It was also not much fun to be a farmer: the hours were extremely long, the labor backbreaking, the returns meager.

So what we want is to go back to the good parts of the past, but not the bad parts. That pretty much describes how we all feel about a lot of things in this unstable age. We’d like the stability and warmth of small towns, but not their suffocating conformity and limited horizons. We’d like the job security of traditional corporations, but not their bureaucratic rigidity and hierarchical control. We like to hear authentic music from isolated regions, but we’d go crazy if that was all we could hear year in and year out.

It’s not easy constructing a life that keeps the good and shucks off the bad. There are many organic farms near me in central New Jersey, but they’re struggling and they’re expensive. Most of the farmers love the land, the animals, the change of seasons; they just don’t love the backbreaking, grinding labor and the poor return. The ones who grew up in the life are selling their land and moving to cities, as farmers have been doing for generations; the newcomers are often giving up.

Does anyone have a way to square this circle? Not that I know of, not yet. The good news, perhaps, is that a lot of people are working on it.