Relational

Our founding narratives all emphasize courage: colonists, pioneers, soldiers at Normandy. Our cautionary tales are mostly about cowardice: isolationism, the McCarthy era. Today we wildly exaggerate how dangerous things are if they're vivid and easily imagined. We circulate warnings to meet some need, to scratch some itch. We're trying to observe something invisible, trying to name the nameless. We don't know how we relate to one another anymore, and that anxiety turns us away from acting courageously. I've neglected how my faith fits into all of this, which will be next week's episode.

Lately, it's a serious charge to call someone biased. Some things shouldn't include bias; those usually involve measurement or fairness. All communication is made up of the objective and the interpretive, and the interpretive precedes the objective. Credibility is based on trustworthiness, but values shouldn't have to correspond perfectly, because that never happens. Conflict is easiest to manage when goals overlap, but all of us have some overlapping goals; our anxiety drives us to demand perfect overlap. That insistence is raw material for people who exploit it to produce wealth and power, but they're poisoning and heating up the interactional climate. What became of courage?

We distrust experts and professionals. Language blurs instead of clarifying. We suffer from complexity fatigue. Higher education distorts the workforce. We treat concentrated wealth as the good life. The media uses fear and conflict to draw customers, and its operational mode creates the appearance of bias. Our devices foster deindividuation.

Elections, and civic life in general, are systemic. Blaming individuals, or profiles of individuals, for political outcomes is like blaming drops of water for a sneaker wave. We do a terrible job thinking about systems, because simple explanations comfort us, and because the information age inflates our sense of our own influence. Addressing systemic phenomena and trying to manage them requires patience and deep investigation, which is not the most comforting option.

You trust someone if you believe they won't hurt you even if it benefits them. We tend to trust in the early stages of a relationship when there is high uncertainty, when there are lots of gaps in our knowledge of another person. We interpret trustworthiness based in part on our self-esteem, attachment style and ability to separate thoughts from feelings. Economic dislocation and rapid social change can produce anxiety. Giving your anxiety a name and a face and turning it into an enemy relieves that anxiety, especially when you can then band together with allies. When the people who champion that change dismiss you as backward, insult you, and announce you have no place in the changed world, the enmity becomes stronger. Demagogues stay powerful by telling their audience not to trust, or even listen to, anyone who disagrees, but demagoguery only works when it finds an audience. Maybe our problem isn't doubt, but false certainty. Maybe the caricature we've drawn of our enemies is what relieves us of the drive t

People want to learn everything about an athlete, an actor, a musician, or a hobby. What if they put that much motivation and energy into making their communities better? It's so much better to work toward things that are meaningful than to work explicitly for pleasure. But we use entertainment to escape, because we feel pressure that manifests itself as fear. The changing world is scary, and especially the changing economy. Our leaders use fear tactics. Many of the pathologies I see every day are symptoms of systemic, society-wide fear control. If only we could believe collectively that engaging others was safe enough to make the world better a little at a time.

It kills me that young people don't participate in civic life. Because of consumption patterns, we glamorize youth, so it's attractive to disdain politics. What we call immature is more properly the condition of being overwhelmed, and it ought to stir us to help. In childhood, relational positioning entirely overwhelms content, but adulthood begins when a reasoned decision is more important than loyalty. Trump can insist, but we should respond by encysting. Joining the fight with Trump gives him fuel, when instead we should extinguish what he ignites. In the past, generational change wore down racism and other prejudices, but today, filter bubbles might be weakening that effect. Younger people don't feel as safe talking out a half-formed idea, and the unwillingness to do that cripples participation in civic dialogue.

Our culture has an unhealthy relationship with humor. It might be a form of coping with the awareness that our power is fading. Humor feels like it should be powerful, but in fact it isn't. Humor doesn't translate well across gaps in understanding. Jokes at the expense of people to whom we feel loyal aren't funny. Mocking people with whom we've aligned ourselves poisons a relationship. Disconfirming someone's fears or resentment over problems that never seem to get any better is short-sighted and cruel. Even if we're right and what we mock is absurd, content doesn't work without a relationship, and the mocking poisons the relationship. Humor is good for accenting enjoyment of time with loved ones, and for breaking the ice with strangers. But humor does not solve problems, and it doesn't persuade those who disagree.

I've had entirely the wrong idea about government. That doesn't mean I need to let them off the hook -- it means I need to get better at being properly critical. Trump voters are not stupid or evil, and neither am I. I am not superior to a Trump voter, and a Trump voter is not superior to me.

The way I'm thinking is not working, so I need to do a housecleaning. It's not okay to hate. Every utterance has a content dimension and a relational dimension. In public life, we've reached the point where content does nothing, because relationships have become so unhealthy.