Relational

Mediated messages teach us that heroic struggle against an enemy or threat is normal, and some groups like anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists seem caught in that. If Trump supporters are wavering, and they might be, it's an opening to welcome them back, to reconcile with them and push for strength in unity. And the best thing to do with my sometimes unmanageable emotions is to pray them; not pray about them, but pray them, full strength, straight to God.

When you're caught in the grip of a powerful feeling that you can't easily explain, you're susceptible to someone else's narrative. I worry that we put separating allies from enemies ahead of addressing problems. "Health care is a human right" is just the latest example of clinging to positions while stubbornly ignoring interests. It further strengthens our shared habit of infrahumanizing those we recognize as other. If we could make the implicit emotional yardstick into an explicit step in filtering, we might root it out and do a better job assessing evidence.

I've been getting angry at people who seem to me to be stupid and driven by hatefulness. Naturally, that anger is pushing me to think and say hateful things, which means I'm no better. But when I turn the lens around and think about needs and deserts in reverse, it cools me off a bit.

The etiology of our civic illness looks a lot like the dysfunctions of a family divided by addiction. The vector of this illness is the view that elections are games with rules to guard against unfairness, and with resignation to game-playing and manipulation. We need to find a way to realign the incentives and rewards of electoral politics so that people who are good at governing make it into the top decisionmaking roles, instead of those roles going to the best manipulators.

Some of the ways we get what we want in relationships are not sustainable. They work until they don't, but the point at which they lose effectiveness or even backfire is not always clear. Demagoguery mobilizes people, but it depends on fear and anger, which are aversive. It's like a Ponzi scheme; it depletes its own fuel, or at least I hope it does. There's no point to making the argument about how Trump voters would've criticized Trump's behavior if Obama or Clinton had done the same thing. What we need is to give leaders incentives to solve problems, not leverage and exploit them. The problem is, we have no consensus about what constitutes a need. If we could get fed up with being manipulated, and work to improve our understanding of one another's needs, we might make progress.

Whole grains don't have the glycemic load that Wonder Bread has. It's very profitable to sell sugar, salt and fat-heavy foods because they elicit cravings. It's very profitable to tell stories with jump-scares and endless cliffhangs, or write sitcoms with rapid-fire punchlines, or sell news stories with never-ending conflict. But all the new movies are sequels; no one can tell a new story today. Or write a new song with substance. Or propose a bill that's designed to address a problem, rather than winning the competition with political rivals. Gutenberg's movable type standardized spelling, and it seems as though Google should've standardized narratives and background knowledge. It looks, though, as though there's a reaction against it, a grabbing for flotsam to stay afloat in the vast, undifferentiated ocean.

Once, we judged nature, plants, animals and people by what we observed: reputation was everything. Then, with the spread of reading and scholarship and education, we governed our behaviors and choices with more or less explicit norms. But norms weakened and were discarded: some had to do with wealth, with race, with sex, and we regarded the abandonment of those norms as progress. Today we see norms breached every day and the world becomes more alarming because of it. I find it increasingly plausible that I might be blinded by my complacent acceptance of the previous order as natural and inevitable, and current trends might just be demonstrating to me how wrong that is.

I get most puzzled when Trump supporters aren't moved by blatant reversals like failure to repeal Obamacare, or cuts to farm insurance. It takes me back to the Rodney King riots, and the question, "Why are you burning down your own neighborhoods?" The people who did the burning had reached the end of a long unfolding experience of humiliation, pain and desperation. The people who asked the question took a snapshot of the situation, summarized it and judged it. Relationships yield a shared history, an understanding of where powerful feelings and complex motives come from. People with no relationship have no understanding of that kind of ambivalence. In particular, powerful people have a tendency to treat others as objects, not as those whose experiences yield conflicting feelings and needs.

People who were attracted to Trump believed he wouldn't be worse than what they had.  Even if that seems facially absurd to me, disconfirming people's lived experience is a relational dead end. People who feel critically insecure, who live in crisis, are more likely to be opportunistic with power and grab for it on a small scale, without thinking about larger questions or the long term. I get uncontrollably angry sometimes, and I think about horrible things happening to the targets of my anger. But what I really want is God's justice; and not just punishment of wickedness, but the precise blend of judgment and mercy that will glorify Him. And the Bible promises me that I'll get exactly what I want, which I need to remind myself of over and over again.

"Fake news" and motivated reasoning may be right-wing relativism, something once commonly set aside as the essential failing of the left. Click bait is yoga for belief structures, and people whose beliefs are pleasantly challenged dozens of times each day are primed for motivated reasoning. People who feel insecure, but are pushed to the back of the line repeatedly, may become desperate. Desperation and pain are easily confused with anger and rage. Desperation and pain are powerful motivators, especially when set beside other groups' alienation and apathy. The wave of desperation and pain is almost a force of nature, and not a sinister conspiracy by any political strategist, and reminding myself of that makes it easier not to hate my political opponents, since they're as bewildered as I am, and probably nearly as troubled. What outrages opponents doesn't necessarily outrage supporters, but the outrage gap is a force driving still more polarization. People on the left are also guilty of motivated reasoning, by

Jury nullification and religious liberty protection both sound good until you remember that they also protect what you oppose. The United States has until now been categorized as having a universalist, as opposed to particularist, culture. It does seem as though standards of conduct, or even standards for accepting evidence as factual, are no longer universally applied. Cultural change usually is slow, but cultural distortion can be sudden. It's possible the confluence of a lot of factors put strain on our consensus until something like an earthquake shattered it. If that's true, maybe it's possible to rebuild.

Lincoln is the most popular choice as the greatest president in history. He kept the country together through a period of polarization that dwarfs the current one. He chose to forgive and welcome back white supremacists who betrayed their country and often fought against their own family. Trump is in many ways Lincoln's mirror image, a man who can't forgive anything. More importantly, though, the people in my political neighborhood who are ready to give up on Trump supporters really have no excuse. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in a similar situation: his opponents were exponentially worse than anyone I find opposing me today. He didn't give up on them because giving up was simply not an option. The current eruption is the reemergence into the open of the same ideas and forces that we thought the civil rights movement had wiped out. The work that faces us is the work of very slowly, patiently, showing up each day and coexisting with the neighbors we don't understand and don't respect. Giving up on one anothe

Ebonics was controversial in the nineties because talk radio hosts needed fresh material, but really it was all about teaching a way of speaking to students whose parents spoke differently. Barack Obama came under fire because of what his pastor said, but he wouldn't denounce his pastor for the same reason he wouldn't denounce his grandmother. Lately, people who agree with me politically have been arguing in favor of giving up and writing off Trump supporters as crackers, stupid, beyond reach. The system-level conflict between the polarized wings of our political spectrum has its roots in the violence done to deliberation by past court decisions. Loving people includes accepting their flaws as part of them, just as they accept my flaws as part of me. We should be willing to love people who belong to our community, flaws and all, flawed ideas and all, instead of infrahumanizing them and dismissing them as enemies. We teach propaganda techniques to students, but I increasingly am of the opinion that there's one

We need a foodie movement for relationships and civic engagement. Once, the United States was in love with McDonald's and Wonder Bread and Velveeta, because manufactured, uniform, predictable food was futuristic. Then came food television and hobby obsession, and food appealed to the senses and had a lot of potential for novelty and stimulation. We need to find our way out of this by being excited to do more of something new and enjoyable, not by being worried about how we have to abandon our current behaviors. We already place a lot of emphasis in this culture on the pleasure of friendship, but it's predictable and uniform friendship, with hostility toward the outgroup of people who are different. But foodies rediscover foods they hated when they were children, and they're triumphant when they reclaim them with new preparation techniques. I long to see the day when Facebook and text messages, and easy agreement in general, are the Velveeta of human connection.

We used to think addiction was a moral failing, and you could persuade an addict to not be addicted, but now we know better. I think there's an epidemic of addiction to hostility. I used to find Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter baffling, but they make sense when you start to think of them as drug dealers. Addiction is to some degree self-medicating against hurts, and to some degree quieting the craving even when the addictive substance no longer provides pleasure. Reasoning with an addict gets you nowhere, and addicts will twist and distort reality to rationalize their choice. A lot of what Watzlawick et al. said about family systems used addiction as its example, and systems of relationships are homeostatic and hard to reframe. Martin Luther King, Jr. managed to reframe the system nationwide, but it took a very long time, lots of public confrontation, and a very exhausting commitment to love instead of meeting hostility with hostility.

I've been struggling to contain my anger, and that's a problem. I shouldn't be angry at poor reasoning if I have any business being an educator. But more to the point, attacking Donald Trump, insulting him, belittling him, is like spitting in the ocean. How many times does it make sense to repeat the same outrage over the same set of complaints, before it becomes plain that doing so is a waste of time? The better approach is to redirect, look elsewhere, find solutions that factor him out. And even this is a symptom of a larger problem that we keep retrying what we've done before, because we're too risk averse to take bold steps and try new things.

People all over the world seem to want a strongman to impose order: Putin, Trump, Erdogan, Chavez, Duterte. Sometimes we gather information for the purpose of accurate understanding, but far more often we cherry-pick information to support what we've already made up our minds to believe. Narration is the reordering and reframing of information to make it satisfying and streamlined, and there's a purpose for that, but it's always a distortion. I am baffled about the stubborn refusal of my political opponents to confront reality, but I've spent a generation blinding myself to the imperfections of reality because I stayed locked to the world to which I aspired, and now my world is eclipsed while theirs is most salient.

Not everyone in the world, or in human history, finds dogs adorable; to lots of people, they're as dirty and unsafe as rats. Even where dogs are tolerated as working animals, playing with dogs is often the kind of thing kids do, but not adults. But today more and more people idealize and romanticize their dogs, including anthropomorphizing their behavior and expressions to make them miniature humans. Years ago, I worked in a church nursery with two year olds, and I surprised myself by liking their company more than I liked people my age, because they were so uncomplicated and easy to please. The idea of psychological neoteny suggests that where people have to repeatedly re-learn the world, they stay in a state of arrested childhood where everything is about play. Loss of control is tolerable in small measures, but very aversive if too exaggerated, and I think the obsession with dogs is another symptom of anxiety over loss of control. And I wonder if stuffed animals are next.

When I was little, I often hit things if they didn't do what I wanted them to do. We try to solve gun violence by restricting gun ownership, or stop abortion by criminalizing and punishing it, when both problems are complex. The Versailles Treaty didn't put a stop to wars in Europe, but the Marshall Plan did. One way to understand the Republican Party's current makeup is the arrangement into philosophical Republicans vs. grievance Republicans. People who don't believe there's any response to their problems will engage in fear control; that can take the form of cynicism and bitterness. It's hard to find the motivation to reweave community from friendships on up, through the grass roots, but the alternative is unacceptable.

Jesus had to ask for the denarius with Caesar's picture on it because He didn't have one Himself. The world measures value by wealth, pleasure, success and fame, and Jesus gave all those away radically to take our punishment and reconcile us to God. I am not surrounded by monstrous, despicable Trump voters: I am on mission. Mission leaves no room for anger or disgust; mission is first and foremost about love. I am surrounded by Trump voters, and they are surrounded by my kind, and we are all sinners, and I am the worst. In the vision in Daniel 7, beast after beast comes out of the sea, but the Ancient of Days sits in judgment over all, and gives the Son of Man a kingdom that never ends. God knows right where I am, and is providing everything I need to do His work. And if I am repelled by the decisions of the Trump Administration, that just stops me deceiving myself about the fact that I live in an unjust and Godless social order, and always did, even during the Obama years.