Category Archives: Random Blogging

(Positive) Signs Of The Times

One of the multiple newsletters that hit my inbox comes from Religion News Service. (Given the influence of religion–especially Christianity–on American policy, it has always seemed prudent for this very irreligious observer to keep tabs on what’s happening to and among the purportedly pious…)

Recent reports have signaled a welcome–if belated–effort by those I consider to be genuinely religious to respond to the ugly perversions that excuse bigotries of various kinds as exercises in “sincere” religious belief. I’ve previously shared statements from “Christians Against Christian Nationalism.” Here are a couple of other examples:

Within the last two years, students at religious schools across the country have made headlines pushing back against university policies regarding LGBTQ students or staff.

They’ve staged a monthlong sit-in at Seattle Pacific University, a private school associated with the Free Methodist Church, against a policy that forbids the hiring of LGBTQ people. They’ve called on Baylor University, that affirms marriage between a man and a woman as the “biblical norm,” to officially recognize an LGBTQ student advocacy group. They’ve protested at Brigham Young University after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which operates the school, said same-sex romantic behavior was “not compatible” with university rules, despite the removal of the “homosexual behavior” section from its Honor Code, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The article reports that students at more than 100 campuses staged a walk out on Oct. 11–coming out day– to protest religious exemptions to Title IX, “carve-outs”  that allow discrimination against LGBTQ students by the presumably devout.

One university observer was quoted as saying that students “are done being told that in order to be a good Christian, that means you must be a white, straight Christian, or embrace white, straight Christian values.”

An equally intriguing story involved a massive ad  campaign. Dubbed the “He Gets Us” campaign, it is a $100 million effort to “redeem Jesus’ brand from the damage done by his followers, especially those who say one thing and then do another.”

The campaign, funded by the Signatry, a Christian foundation based in Kansas, will expand in the next few months, with an updated website, an online store where people can get free gear if they forgive someone or welcome a stranger, and an outreach program for churches, all leading up to a Super Bowl ad.

Lee said organizers also want to start a movement of people who want to tell a better story about Jesus and act like him.

Our goal is to give voice to the pent-up energy of like-minded Jesus followers, those who are in the pews and the ones that aren’t, who are ready to reclaim the name of Jesus from those who abuse it to judge, harm and divide people,” Lee said.

Jason Vanderground, president of Haven, a branding firm based in Grand Haven, Michigan, said the movement hopes to bridge the gap between the story of Jesus and the public perception of his followers. The campaign has done extensive market research and found that, while many Americans like Jesus, they are skeptical of his followers.

That last observation reminded me of a bumper sticker I’ve seen a couple of times, proclaiming something along the lines of  “Jesus–Protect Me From Your Followers.” It also reminded me of that quote from Mahatma Gandhi–“I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.”

The president of the marketing firm handling the campaign said Christians see their faith as a great love story, while increasing numbers of others see Christians as a hate group.

“Jesus said people are going to know my followers by the way they love each other and the way they interact with each other,” he said. “I think when we look at American Christianity now, we don’t see nearly as much of that — and that concerns a lot of people.”

We certainly haven’t been seeing much loving-kindness from the loudest, ostentatiously pious, self-identified Christians–or for that matter, from the fundamentalists of most religions.

Religion and philosophy can assist people in finding meaning, in dealing with the complexities of life and  wrestling with its inevitable moral ambiguities. To appropriate another observation, religion can be used as a shield or a sword. When people find comfort in their beliefs, using those beliefs to shield them from life’s “arrows,” it serves a defensible purpose. When it becomes a sword with which to label and attack unbelievers, dissenters, and various “others,” it is no longer defensible.

Apparently, a lot of genuinely religious folks are fed up with the hypocrisy and hatefulness of their sword-brandishing brethren. I’d call that a positive sign.

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And I Had High Hopes….

When Barack Obama raised zillions of dollars from millions of small-dollar donors, I was ecstatic. It seemed to me that his success in online fundraising–fulfilling the promise of earlier efforts by Howard Dean and John McCain–would counter the outsized influence of big money donors.

After all, no public official was going to feel indebted to someone who’d sent in $20 dollars-or even $200. Campaigns would be funded by small-dollar gifts sent by regular, mostly non-ideological voters who’d decided they liked Candidate A.

How naive I was….

A guest essay in the New York Times took a look at the current, ugly status of online fundraising. Not that it will come as a shock to anyone who sent $3 or $5 dollars to a candidate only to have their inbox subsequently buried in hysterical, overwrought and frequently inaccurate appeals for money–contributions that would be matched or doubled and would allow Candidate Y to meet the onslaught of scurrilous attacks from Opponent Z.

The overwhelmingly positive narrative about the power of small-dollar online fund-raising began to congeal: Grass-roots fund-raising is pure and good. Big-dollar donations from corporate cronies are suspect. This is what democracy looks like!!!

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. It turns out that Americans don’t just vote for certifiable nutcases and nice but clearly unelectable candidates–they also send them money.

As it turned out, grass-roots fund-raising is also what ending democracy looks like. As with any other mass movement, people-powered campaigns followed the standard Hofferian trajectory: beginning as a cause, turning into a business and becoming a racket. Our online fund-raising system is not only enriching scam artists, clogging our inboxes and inflaming the electorate; it is also empowering our politics’ most nefarious actors.

It is how Donald Trump and his cast of clueless coupsters raised nine figures to “stop the steal” that they had fabricated to try to stay in power. It is one way our most extreme candidates dominate the conversation and gain power in our political system. It has redirected money from politicians who work to find compromises that might just help people, diverting it instead to those who either have no chance to win or, worse yet, can win and want to undermine that work for their own ends. And it’s hard to imagine how we can stop it.

The author pointed to an example “of the hellscape to come.”  Remember when South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at President Barack Obama during an  address to a joint session of Congress?  After the Democratic-controlled Congress censured him, Mr. Wilson’s campaign team used that incivility to fundraise. The campaign “uploaded fund-raising pleas to YouTube” and bought ad space on The Drudge Report.

In just 12 days he collected more money than he’d spent during his entire previous campaign.

The lesson wasn’t lost on those who raise money for campaigns.They could raise money and gain influence without bothering to build relationships and coalitions in Washington and back home. They could bypass all that by “being jerks on the internet and calling out their voters’ enemy du jour in the most ostentatious manner they could summon.” (Josh Hawley raised $3 million after he was pictured giving a salute to the rioters about to storm the Capitol.)

It’s created a perverse incentive structure, empowering the congressional shock jocks at the expense of actual legislators. Meanwhile, a series of court decisions supercharged political fund-raising generally. The new no-limits era allowed big donors to maximize huge contributions to political committees and blasted billions in dark money through the system, continually raising the stakes of each fund-raising deadline.

The elevation of the small-dollar donor has created other nightmarish unintended consequences, however. Democratic candidates with no hope of winning are raising ungodly sums from online liberals drawn to their flashy videos and clever slams. This is particularly the case when said candidates are running against notably loathed Republicans. In 2020, this meant Jaime Harrison, the current Democratic National Committee chairman, raised a record-breaking $131 million in his campaign against Senator Lindsey Graham, despite the fact that Mr. Harrison lost by double digits and never really had a prayer….hundreds of millions of dollars are being pumped into hopeless hype candidates.

As the essay notes, it has become a race to the bottom, inflaming a party’s base voters.

Can we ever know the full effect that years of emails, texts, Facebook ads and viral Twitter ads with doom-driven fund-raising appeals have had on the average voter’s conception of the country and politics? How those stimuli may have contributed to the radicalization of their recipients, especially those who aren’t in on the joke (a nihilistic campaign politics trope in which the strategists make arguments they know are phony)?

So much for my early optimism….

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I Sure Hope This Is Correct..

Most of us have participated at some point in the (largely unanswerable) debate about “nature versus nurture.” Are humans hard-wired to do thus-and-so, or have we been socialized into a culture that expects/rewards it? I recently came across an article addressing a related issue: is our evident tribalism, our “us versus them” default, genetic? Or is it attributable to culture?

Here’s the lede

More than 200 million people were killed in the 20th century due to war and acts of genocide. Many of these conflicts were rooted in ethnic, national, religious, political, or other forms of identity-group conflict. The 21st century is already filled with similar horrors. For many scholars and much of the public, this pattern of between-group conflict emerges directly from humanity’s deep, evolved sense of “us” vs. “them.” To state it simply, human nature is “tribal.” It’s how we built cities, nations, empires. It’s also how each one of those things has crumbled.

But this is not true. Human intergroup conflicts and how they relate to human nature are neither about being “tribal” nor about some evolved, fixed hostility between “us” and “them.”

The argument isn’t that humans don’t create divisions/antagonisms with those they encounter; clearly, “we have the capacity to classify and develop mental shortcuts to use classifications once we have created (or learned) them”. The point is, however, that categories like “us” and “them” are flexible. They need not set up what the author calls “a conflictual relationship.” Neurobiologists have determined that the biological bases of that classification process aren’t “hard-wired.”

Rather, our neurobiology reflects a highly flexible system that can represent the self and others. Additionally, how “us” and “them” are divided can shift quickly and dynamically. This is a very different reality from the assumption of a natural, inherent “us vs. them” mentality.

Scientists have also found that humans have the capacity to have “harmonious interdependent relationships that cross group boundaries.” (Sociologists call those relationships “bridging social capital.”)

Decades of study of intergroup dynamics in primate societies, human foraging groups, and small scale societies reveals that natural selection has shaped a greater reliance on tolerant between-community relationships in humans than in any other primate species (or possibly any other mammalian species).

Even the argument that the “us vs. them” mode of existence came into being with the evolutionarily recent advent of agriculture, cities, states, and nations is not correct. Humans are neither Hobbesian beasts nor Rousseauian egalitarians; we are a species that is characterized by between-group relations that are complex and dynamic, good and bad. There is no doubt that between-group conflict had a role in our evolution. But the fossil and archaeological evidence casts substantial doubt on whether such conflict was prevalent at the level and pervasiveness to support an “us vs. them” human nature argument.

The author takes offense at the use of the term “tribalism” as a shorthand for the “us versus them” thesis–a use to which I plead guilty. He points out that the term “tribe”  identifies a societal structure that is “older,” more “primitive,” and less civilized than European forms of society, and argues that the term thus carries misleading historical and cultural assumptions. I’m not sure I agree with that characterization, but I do see his point.

But that does not mean humans are naturally peaceful or always getting along. No other species creates cash economies and political institutions, changes planet-wide ecosystems in a few generations, builds cities and airplanes, arrests and deports its members, drives thousands of other species toward extinction, and intentionally hates and decimates other groups of humans. But why all this is the case is not a simple “us vs. them” story.

The author argues that invoking the notion of “tribalism” for the world’s problems is misleading–it suggests that our conflicts are pre-ordained by our hard-wiring, when the various ways in which we “slice and dice” our fellow humans is far more malleable. We are not biologically-impelled to fight those who are dissimilar, and we are capable of defining and redefining those dissimilarities in a multitude of ways.

Today, conflict between groups, peoples, and identity clusters are entangled with extreme economic inequality and the ongoing violence of nationalism, religious conflict, racism, and sexism — all complex realities with histories, dynamic social processes, and multiple, often different, factors shaping outcomes. There is no simple “natural” explanation for the messes we create.

Ultimately, it’s the culture that determines whether we prize co-operation or conflict.

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Birth Pains?

Any woman who has given birth will confirm that the process is painful.  That analogy gives rise to a more positive way of looking at the multiple, seemingly insoluble problems we humans currently face–perhaps we are experiencing destruction that is necessary to make way for the birth of a better future.

That, at least, is the argument of The Great Progression, according to an article in The Big Think.

The author, one Peter Leyden, says that a “slow-moving, pro-progress story is being missed by most of the mainstream media chasing the minute-by-minute story of crisis and decline.”

The time has come for a positive reframe of what’s really going on in America and the world right now, and what’s actually going to happen in the near future. For far too long we’ve been looking at our current situation and the coming decades through the lens of the past.

Most people are stuck in the familiar default frame that sees many of our old systems breaking down in the face of myriad challenges like climate change, polarized politics, economic and social inequities, the paralysis of liberal democracies, and the rise of authoritarian states.

Yet we’re now at the point where we can view what’s happening, and what’s soon coming, through the lens of the future. That view sees the many nascent systems emerging that are superseding the old ones breaking down. This perspective sees many slow-moving positive developments coming to head, transformative technologies ready to scale, and new trends building to the tipping point. This perspective focuses not on breakdown but on rebirth.

Needless to say, this version of humankind’s current situation is infinitely preferable to the view that we are all doomed…..

Leyden writes that we will lay the foundations for a set of new systems over the next 10 years, after which they will “scale in the next 25 years.”  He calls this the story of The Great Progression, and asserts that

there’s also an emerging majority of smart, decent, and practical Americans who are realigning and getting positioned to make rapid progress in the years ahead.

This pro-progress story gets even better when you step back and think about the really big picture, when you think through how people living decades if not centuries from now will look back on our times. From that vantage point, we’re arguably at the beginning of a transformation that is going to change the world in profound and largely positive ways.

In the next 25 years, Leyden says, we will deal with climate change through transitions  from carbon to clean energy, and from internal-combustion engines to electric mobility. We will reinvent cities, scale up new industries and build a much more environmentally and socially sustainable society.

We very likely will reform capitalism around new economic priorities that counter the current imbalances and inequities. And we can be expected to revitalize our democracies and push back on authoritarianism around the world. People in 50, 100, or even 500 years from now may well look back on our era and marvel at the transformation that we’re about to go through.

Well, I’m certainly up for all those things…

Leyden says the evidence for this transformation is all around us–in powerful new tools like artificial intelligence, and unprecedented knowledge like the ability to understand and engineer the genomes of all living things. The  remainder of his essay lays out his version of the next 25 years, and he says we should hear him out because “I’ve been through this drill before, 25 years ago, and that story proved to be very prescient.” (This was a reference to his co-authorship of The Long Boom, a History of the Future, 1980 to 2020, a story for WIRED, which later became an influential book in multiple languages.)

It’s hard to debate his statement that the world we older people have spent lifetimes mastering is coming to an end. That, at least, seems self-evident.

Every one of those systems arguably is being superseded by new systems much better suited for the 21st century. Our uber-challenge is now climate change and so our energy system must shift to clean power and our transportation system to electric. Our culture now is dominated by the huge Millennial generation and our politics are becoming more progressive. Our economics is raising the role of the public sector and capitalism being pushed to include all stakeholders. Work is now taking place much more virtually, and production is on the cusp of becoming biological. And our geopolitics is recentering on Asia, and in particular on the new superpower, China.

The essay is long, and his evidence is at the link. It’s worth your time to read–and may lighten your mood…..It did mine. After all, he could be right!

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The Past Is Present

Our family just returned from an all-weekend celebration of my husband’s 90th birthday. Our daughter arranged it all–a party (at which he was surprised by the President of Indianapolis’ City-County Council, who read a Council proclamation issued in his honor), and a weekend trip to New Harmony, Indiana, where our family “took over” an entire, fairly large restored Victorian bed and breakfast.

For those of you unfamiliar with New Harmony, it’s a small historic town tucked into the southwest corner of the state. The entire town is a historic landmark; settled in 1814, it was founded as a “Utopia.”  Twice. It was first a spiritual sanctuary for the Harmonie Society–a German religious order– and then as a haven for international scientists and scholars led by Robert Owen. (Owen’s version might have lasted longer had he included some farmers and folks who could work with their hands along with the intellectual glitterati he assembled..)

Owen’s vision for “a New Moral World” of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity is the better-known of the two experiments. Owen believed that a utopia could be achieved through education, science, technology, and communal living–elements that would foster  a “superior social, intellectual and physical environment” based on his ideals of social reform.  In January 1825 he signed the agreement to purchase the town from the Harmonie Society, renamed it New Harmony, and invited anyone who agreed with his vision to join him.

According to various accounts, the experiment attracted “crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers” in addition to the scientists, artists and intellectuals Owen recruited. Almost immediately, members began arguing about inequities between workers and non-workers, and the town’s overcrowding. The lack of sufficient housing and the settlement’s inability to produce other needed goods has been attributed to a shortage of skilled craftsmen and laborers.

There’s lots more information about New Harmony and its  utopian history online–if you’re interested, Wikipedia will get you started.

We assembled at the Visitor’s Center on Saturday morning for a tour. The Center is in a world-famous contemporary building designed by Richard Meier sometime in the 1960s. A walking tour took us to several of the original structures, most of which have been carefully restored, and we learned that Robert Owen’s partner in “Utopia II” was a man named William McClure, who was a great proponent of education and the dissemination of knowledge, especially via newspapers. ( Evidently, the contemporary McClures Magazine is named for him. The things you learn…)

McClure was every bit as interesting as Owen, although his name is far less well-known (at least to me). President of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from 1817 to 1840, he came to New Harmony during the winter of 1825–1826, and brought with him a group of artists, educators, and fellow scientists from Philadelphia. They arrived aboard a keelboat that became known as the “Boatload of Knowledge.”

McClure directed the settlement’s schools, which became the first public schools in the United States open to both boys and girls, and established one of the country’s first  trade schools. He also established The Working Men’s Institute, a society for “mutual instruction.” It includes the oldest continuously operating library in Indiana, as well as a small museum.  The terms of his will included a provision bequeathing $500 to any club or society of laborers in the United States that established a reading and lecture room with a library of at least 100 books–and some 160 libraries in Indiana and Illinois took advantage of the bequest.

We visited an exhibit showcasing McClure’s printing operation, which included examples of the newspapers and other materials he produced, and I was especially struck by a placard he’d printed. It was headed: HEAR! and read

JOSEPH SHOWERS, Treasurer of Posey County will divide time with, and reply to, JUDGE J. PITCHER at New Harmony, Wednesday, September 4th, 1872 at 7 o’clock PM at POSEYVILLE, Thursday, September 5th at 7 o’clock PM …

Three other sites and times were also listed. Then below those listings:

Come out citizens and taxpayers and hear a complete and thorough vindication of the honesty and integrity of your County Officers against calumnies now being circulated by unscrupulous politicians for mere partisan effect.

I would say that some things never change, but obviously the grammar and vocabulary of those political “calumnies” has degraded rather significantly.

Political misinformation and mudslinging aren’t new. The methods of their dissemination, however, are. It would be fascinating to know just how many voters of Posey County attended these events that “divided time” and allowed candidates to “reply” to accusations. It would be equally interesting to know just how common these face-to-face debates were.

Most of all, it would be helpful to understand which elements of Robert Owen’s Utopian vision worked, and which ones didn’t, and why.

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