Forest Rangers in Community

A kind of entity that may exist in a community: one that sees its role as developing the capacity of the community to address shared problems and opportunities.

Note that the role is developmental, and not focused on execution. There are a myriad of entities in any locale that are working directly on projects. This is a different kind of entity – whether it be an organization, a coalition, a loose association, or something else – that can be seen as part of the “civic infrastructure” of a place.

Such an entity is analogous to the role of, say, a forest ranger. A forest ranger sees their role as tending to the health and development of the forest that is in their charge. They are not in control of the forest. They harness resources that enable the forest to grow, and heal, itself. Sometimes the ranger engages in direct intervention, but this is not the norm.

Note that the forest ranger often lives in the forest itself – they themselves are part of the ecology that they seek to develop. And also note that there is rarely just one.

Not every locale has such an entity. Not every forest has a ranger. But some do.

Not every forest needs a ranger. But some do.

Naming Public Issues: Economic Concerns Illustrated

Two reasons that people find it difficult to work on shared problems are that the way they are talked about obscures their nature, and an assumed course of action is implied even though there is not broad agreement on either.

When developing materials for people to deliberate together on shared problems, we try to mitigate those reasons by finding a way of stating it such that almost all would agree that it is indeed a problem that we must talk about in order to decide what to do. Such a shared problem might also be called an issue. The challenge is to determine and state what is at issue in a public way.

In order to develop these ideas, we start by listening to people’s concerns about the general topic. What people say when talking about what concerns them can give a window into what it is they feel is most valuable, and that they feel is at stake. Listening closely, and making sense of what is said, can help zero in on the issue.

Concerns about the economy – a broad topic — provide one example.

Many express worry over how well the economy is working for people. That is an abstract way of putting it, and the way it shows up in ordinary speech might be something like “The rich get richer and working people have it harder and harder.” This sounds clear, but even this plain language obscures a number of embedded issues.

Consider this (literal) napkin drawing that was sketched in a recent informal conversation by people thinking about the topic. The axes are amount of wealth (vertical) and time (horizontal). The graph shows the wealthy (top line) earning more and more, poorer people (bottom line) earning less and less, with the amount needed to just get by in between them (dotted middle line).

 

Different aspects of this set of facts trouble people in different ways, expressed as basic concerns. This is shown by the circled numbers:

1. 1. The rich make much too much
   2. The vast difference in income between the rich and the rest is unfair
   3. Working people make less and less each year
   4. More and more people don’t make enough to get by
   5. The rich make too much more than they need

Any one of these ideas may be in play when someone says they are worried about “economic inequality” or “economic opportunity.” (And of course there may be other embedded concerns.)

Keeping these different concerns conceptually distinct is important in developing a clear statement of what is at issue. Different concerns will suggest different underlying problems, and different remedies, some strikingly so.

The challenge is to find a way of stating the shared problem – the issue — such that most all can see their interest reflected in it. Too often, when it comes to the economy, the dominant political discourse takes one of the specific concerns above, and treats that as the whole issue.

 

Leadership Paradox

I recently began formally mentoring someone, and so I have been thinking about the nature of leadership. There’s a bind that “leaders” face. It has to do with the expectations of those who are led, and of the person who is trying to be a helpful leader.

Consider the teacher of yoga class. They “lead” the class.

On the one hand, as a member of the class, I want someone to inspire me and instruct me, to push me to do “better” and to “improve.”

But on the other hand, in reality the effort I make is personal. My yoga teacher does not actually make me perform “better,” but instead sets me up to unlock the capabilities I already have. True, she or he may invite me to try to work beyond my limitations. And true, I may practice with others, and the feeling of being in community may lift me. But it is always me, on my mat, alone, making the effort.

The abilities I have are all already locked within me.

And so here is the leadership paradox: If I am a leader, I have knowledge to pass on and I know that I might be able to spur others to self-surpass. But would it not be a shame if what others take away from me was that I “made them do well?” For then, what they learned was that they need someone else in order to perform.

As a leader, I want to awaken people to what they already have the capacity to do. I want to cultivate the sense that a leader is unnecessary — if not now, then soon.

As a student, what I may then learn is that self-surpassing is always fundamentally available to me, solely through my own efforts.

Ways of Addressing Political Division

Broadly speaking, I am in a field in which many are trying to address the political division that appears to be increasingly engulfing our nation.

One way to make sense of all these efforts is to explore what appear to be the assumptions underlying their approaches. What do the designers of an initiative think will happen if their work succeeds? Why will it do so? Some might call this their theory of change.

There appear to be three main such theories:

1. If more people interacted with one another more, they would be less likely to engage in extremely divisive rhetoric and behavior. This appears to be the thinking behind a number of initiatives that aim to “bring people together.” Sometimes these initiatives are focused on making space for interactions that do not currently have such space. Often, attention is given to unlikely pairings and diversity of thought among these groups. (Examples: World Cafe, National Conversation Project.)
2. People need interventions in order to break out of their in-group tribalism and see people from other groups as fully human. The idea here is that people are divided, in conflict, due to psychological reasons or habits of thought that can be overcome. Initiatives that operate on this assumption tend to rely on highly trained moderators and specialized interaction mechanisms. (Examples: Living Room Conversations, Better Angels.)
3. If people could face and work through the inherent trade offs and tensions between different ways of looking at difficult public issues, some common ground for action might emerge. In this view, it is the issues themselves — and how they are presented — that divide people. If they are reframed people can address them with less rancor. Such initiatives put a lot of care and thought into how they present the issues to be discussed. (Examples: National Issues Forums, Everyday Democracy.)

The divisions between these ways sets of assumptions are not rigid. But in looking at the field, for the most part there appears to be a dominant assumption at work.

What other assumptions are missing from this list?

A Theory of Community

 

1. Human beings are innately social. We live together in groups.

2. Living together brings a number of benefits: we can protect ourselves, we can pool resources, we can find safety when vulnerable due to illness, we can raise children, we can better shelter ourselves from elements. These things motivate our group life. In part, they are why we live in society rather than apart.

3. Living together also brings with it a set of challenges, related directly to the benefits:
   • Crime. Fellow group members threaten us (either physically, or our property). How do we protect ourselves?
   • Economy. The place in which we live become a locus of exchange. How do we make it one where we can thrive?
   • Poverty. Differences in how exchange takes place creates some who have too few resources. What do we do about people who have trouble surviving (poverty)?
   • Health. Proximity brings with it increased disease. We depend on others to care for us when vulnerable. How do we care for group members?
   • Education. Our young ones must acquire the norms and habits that we require of one another. How do we create citizens of our group?

   • Environment. The byproducts of life become concentrated (waste, extraction of resources). How can we manage this?

4. These challenges are not problems to be solved, but conditions to be managed. The possible ways to address them are myriad, require collective actions, and there is not an objectively correct outcome.

5. Any group of people living together in a place will face such challenges. These are the challenges that come with being a “community.”

6. These problems, in varying degree, face everyone in the group. Everyone is therefore trying, in their own ways to address them. This is happening throughout the group, always.

One definition of community:

• The places where, and collective means by which, such opportunities and challenges are collectively addressed.

Explanation Day

For his column commemorating Independence Day, my friend and Hofstra University professor Michael d’Innocenzo points out that in fact July 2 was the date that the Continental Congress took the decision to become independent. And indeed, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, John Adams predicted that “The Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America – I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival.”

But it was not the decision that is now celebrated; it is instead the document explaining its necessity. One might call today “Explanation Day.”

Even more important was Adams’s view of what led up to the Colonies’ declaration:

“Time has been given for the whole people, maturely, to consider the great question of independence and to ripen their judgments, dissipate their fears, and allure their hopes, by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it, in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings, as well as in private conversations, so that the whole people in every colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own act.”

One gets the sense that across the countryside, people have been talking about independence, weighing its pros and cons. In taverns, at crossroads, in kitchens, stables, salons. All throughout the nascent America. Thomas Jefferson’s document captured its ethos.

Michael points out: “Adams’ approach to transformational change in politics and society is worth bearing in mind during our current polarized political season. John Adams had confidence that Americans can engage in communities of discourse in which their views can ‘ripen’ so that common ground for action is found.”

This is the democracy that lives, persists, grows whether the political system is amenable to it or not. The ordinary exertion of self-governance by everyday people. I see it happening all around me today, even as worried think-pieces tell me “democracy is dying.” I have not yet brought out my funeral clothes. The institutional mechanisms of democratic government may be under great stress, but the roots still grow.

The Problem(s) With Facts

My friend, David C. Barker of American University sent me a copy of his new book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. It is an important addition to the current questions about “facts,” “truth,” “interpretation,” and “polarization.”

Co-authored with Morgan Marietta of UMass Lowell, the book is quite a comprehensive and I commend it to you.

In particular, the two write a remarkably clear description and outline of the the problem(s) with much of what people suggest as solutions to the “facts” puzzle. It is not so simple as just getting the right information out there.

I hope David won’t mind if I quote at length from the introduction which lays out some of the book’s argument; it is worth reading in its own right:

[T]he most commonly offered correctives—education and fact-checking—are not effective and may actually be counterproductive. Perhaps the most consistent (and sobering) finding across many recent empirical studies is that specific fact perceptions are not predicted by education or political knowledge. The evidence demonstrates that as citizens rise in political sophistication, motivated reasoning becomes stronger rather than weaker. Our findings regarding value projection reach the same conclusion. As cognitive resources grow, citizens simply become more adept at attaching their priors to their perceptions.

Contributing to education’s lack of efficacy in reducing DFPs [Dueling Fact Perceptions] is the erosion of trust in traditional sources of knowledge. Recent national surveys demonstrate that a surprisingly large proportion of Americans hold a low degree of trust in the knowledge created by universities. When the primary institution that discerns and disseminates knowledge for the nation is no longer trusted, this fosters a susceptibility to alternative sources of information. Our data bear this out more precisely. The changes in the perception of the university as an external source of authority are another foundation for pessimism about the effective role of education in creating a consensus.

For some of the same reasons, fact-checking does not ameliorate divisions in fact perceptions in the intuitive way we might expect. . . . [W]e provide a critical assessment of the epistemological foundations of the fact-check industry, and . . . reinforce other scholarly findings that citizens tend to reject the fact-checks that dispute their prior beliefs. Greater education merely facilitates this process. This is the case even among people who are predisposed to trust fact checkers, even when the perception relates to a candidate from the same political party. These findings further reinforce our conclusion that politically motivated fact perceptions are at least as much about value differences as they are about partisan tribalism and external leadership.

Finally, we find that the durability of DFPs is a reflection of the ideological symmetry of their origins. While some scholars have suggested that dueling facts are essentially a phenomenon of the Right, driven by conservative values and Republican leadership, it became clear in analyzing several years of survey data that this is simply not the case. . . . [T]he influence of value projection and partisan leadership is remarkably symmetric across various DFPs, and in some ways we find evidence of liberal asymmetry. . . .

Perceiving the world accurately has always been difficult, but the polarization problem has increased the epistemological problem. Unfortunately, there is more to the origins of dueling facts than laziness by the public and lying by elites; the core problem is not merely miseducation or misdirection but divided values projected onto perceived facts. Greater education and political sophistication are employed to sharpen rather than dull the connections between the strength of internal beliefs and the perception of external realities. The consequences of the dueling facts phenomenon include a degeneration of the close tie between education and democracy.

I urge you to buy and read the whole book.

A Personal Mission of Agency

Each year-end I look back and reflect. I look at all areas of my life: family, professional, personal, spiritual, physical, financial.

Across all of the major areas of my life, this has been a pivotal year of conceptual progress for me. I developed great clarity on my personal mission. And three ideas that began to gel for me in 2017 continued to gather strength.

Thinking about 2018, it is fair to say that this mission and corresponding three ideas have revolutionized how I approach almost all of my interactions.

My mission: To spread personal and collective agency. This is true in my professional life (where I explore ways that people can develop their own sense of democratic power) but also across my personal life — where I see my role as creating the conditions in which others can see the power and ability they already have.

Three principles have increasingly governed how I think about this mission:

1. I increasingly see propagation as the key means by which personal agency spreads. This recognition must be passed on from person to person to person. Through direct contact. I am convinced that as an individual my highest and best use is in fostering this spread. More and more, I am trying to organize all of my work with attention to how it might later propagate – not just from me to someone else, but from them to yet another. This is a kind of intentional “viral” strategy.

2. I have come increasingly to place learning at the center of all of my interactions. This is the central consequence of the above point. All progress, whether personal or collective, starts with a mindset change. That means that my task is not just to convey “knowledge” but a way of thinking. Agency must be learned, it cannot be taught. I try to interact in ways that encourages others to discover for themselves.

3. More and more I try to act through attraction. If propagation is the means by which personal agency spreads, and if learning is fundamental to that, then the nature of my interactions changes. When interacting with people, my task is to invite and interest them.

The future may always bring more change and upheaval, for me and for others, so I hesitate to say this is all set in stone. But looking back it is remarkable to me how powerful these ideas have been in my inner life over the past twelve months. I am looking forward to seeing how they further take root in 2019.

Two Competing Mythologies

Many people speak of a “tribalism” that seems to be on the rise in America and in our communities these days. By this they appear to mean, for the most part, a bipolar set of group identities, locked in conflict with one another and whose boundaries are based in large part on antipathy toward the other. In other words, two “tribes” each internally united by their hatred of the other.

I thought I would examine the apparent mindsets of these two groups. (I recognize there are not only two such groups but I am responding to the dominant narrative.) My circle of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances spans both groups both in terms of social media exposure but also, more important, personal face-to-face interactions. I wanted to get a sense of the internal story of a generic member of each. It is relatively easy to articulate, from each perspective, the case against the other (indeed Axios reports on a study from Survey Monkey that indicates each group sees the other as primarily “ignorant” and “spiteful”). But I wanted to get a sense of the best positive case each group might make to itself about itself, and how that would then interface with the story they might tell about the other.

Group One:

Collective security drives the story this group tells about itself. The world is dangerous and we must band together in order to survive.

In a world where our survival depends upon cohesion, what is our strongest imperative? Maintain order. We value order above all, and shun disorder. There have to be rules, they must be followed, internal enemies must be overcome.

This organizing concept of order can be seen in the story this group tells about its rivals. They are a “mob.”

This organizing concept can also be seen in the virtue signals that group members use to reinforce their group membership. In everyday interactions, it is easy to see exaggerated displays of deference to protocol, reinforcement of hierarchy, expressions of opposition to protest, and statements of loyalty to authority which often serve as evidence of piety.

Group Two:

This group’s story rests on being treated fairly. In a dangerous world in which we must work together in order to survive, I must know I am not being taken advantage of by those with more power in the group.

How does this translate into a driving value that we share and propagate? Demonstrate compassion. We show compassion above all, and shun meanness. People must be treated fairly, that means especially the vulnerable. Inequitable outcomes must be corrected.

The story this group tells about their enemy group: they are “hateful” people.

The virtue signals people in this group deploy are similarly easy to see: exaggerated displays of intra-group empathy, expressions of guilt about one’s privilege, expressions of opposition to “hate,” and displays of anger at perceived injustice towards other marginalized subgroups.

Most of my professional work is aimed at undermining this polarized way of looking at what is a much more nuanced landscape. For instance, it is simplistic to think there are only two such “tribes” and to treat them as monolithic. Note, too, that the fundamental drivers of each group’s story are universal: all human beings want to be treated fairly, and all human beings need collective security. So it is not strictly correct to say that there are “order” people and “compassion” people. These are constructed identity groups.

However, I still feel it can be useful conceptually to examine the two competing self-mythologies. They are, after all, the stories we tell ourselves. I need to understand and empathize with people’s starting points before I can see them as whole beings.

Three Problems of Modern Life

Public life is beset by three problems. Each is an extreme expression of a fundamentally human trait, exacerbated and amplified by some aspect of modernity.

1. Anonymous Atomization. It is a normal aspect of the human condition that we struggle to really take others into account as anything more than actors in our own dramas. Our modern society has amplified this to the extent that we have, each on an individual level, lost most of our sense of connection with others. We live in separate bubbles and the more our lives become driven by free choice, the less we see other people as “real.”
2. The Promethean Impulse. We want definitive answers and certain results, and we have built system upon system to make us more efficient. We live in a world of interlocking institutional mechanisms. The desire for assurance is natural. The myth of Prometheus is about humans’ yearning for technical power. Today’s scale has made this the only sort of knowledge. This has squeezed out our fundamental human abilities to manipulate our environment through small-group, collective behavior. When faced with a problem, our first thought is to search for an institutional or organizational response. This creates a bias toward ever more mechanistic responses.
3. Hyper-tribal-polarization. Humans naturally form groups and identify with them. Our most fundamental evolutionary piece of learning is that survival is collective and therefore our membership in a group is our one of our chief imperatives. This group identification is a double edged sword, and can create conflict between groups where they compete for some perceived or actual power or resource. Yet if survival is collective, then problems are best solved with others. In today’s environment, first two problems above have intertwined to create a hyperpolarized world of conflict in which our group identification is so strong, and our denial of out-group people’s humanity is also so strong — that we hate, and we even proclaim it as a mark of our allegiance. We hate to the extent that we cannot solve collective problems, we cannot interact individually with members of other groups, and indeed we ostracize those in our group who dare to behave moderately.

Are these the only three problems? No. But they are ones I have been thinking about the most over my career.

The good news is that the remedy in each case is within each individual person’s control. All by myself, without needing outside help, I can try to see other people as human beings, look to my immediate companions for problem-solving, and behave in more loving ways to my so-perceived enemies in other groups.

José Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930, Fresco, Pomona College, Claremont, CA.