Month: August 2020

Elderhood and citizenship

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Stephen Jenkinson’s book Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble. I’ve been following Jenkinson for a few years after being introduced to his work on dying through the Pondercast podcast and am always eager to find more of his thinking.

I think Come of Age is possibly easier to read if you’ve listened to some of his talks and can hear his voice in the writing, or watched the short documentary about him on Vimeo titled Griefwalker. But his points about our lack of elders—particularly that being an elder has nothing to do with being elderly; it’s something cultivated and earned—made me think about whether we’re in a similar place with citizenship. We have legal citizens of societies, and plenty of people who agitate and complain about politics, but what does it mean to be an engaged, involved citizen? It’s hard and boring and often daunting work but it’s demanded of all of us if we want our societies to function. I’ve been pushing for more people to vote for many years, but we don’t just need voters; we need citizens in the same way we desperately need elders.

I am fortunate to have had a few people in my life whom I think of as elders. Unfortunately, they all died when I was young. I think I’m always searching for more, even if unconsciously.

Grief and gratitude

Grief comes close on the heels of gratitude these days, especially when I’m out in nature. Is this just part of being a grown-up, I wonder? Maybe it’s been true ever since humans became conscious and hits us sharply when we face human-caused suffering like war and environmental degradation.

I sat by this stream for a few minutes the other day after hiking up a mountain to pick huckleberries. Filled with gratitude. A few minutes later a woman walking up the trail with an empty huckleberry container caught me hugging a tree. I hope it gave her a few moments of joy, delight, laughter, or at least a bit of lightheartedness to her day.

I recently read a short piece in MIT Technology Review about how to talk with family or friends who are enmeshed in a cult or conspiracy theory.* I am fortunate that my friends and family are generally science-respecting people of reason. We tend to argue about details and strategies, not politics or facts. But many of my friends struggle with loved family members or longtime friends who they feel they’ve lost to conspiracies or cults.

The point that really stuck with me from the Technology Review piece, which relied on academic researchers and active members of the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, echoed something I’d read from Steven Hassan, an escapee from the Moonies cult who now devotes his life to studying cults and helping deprogram cult members: remind people of who they were. Who they’d been before joining the cult or getting drawing into the vast web of information that can be connected a million different ways as evidence of any theory that can be dreamt up. Don’t point out the differences; just keep connecting them back to their former self.

(The lure of conspiracy theories is one of the hundreds of reasons I am such an advocate for embodied, hands-on learning, especially in the sciences. We all benefit from remaining grounded in the real, physical world.)

This advice might not release someone from a cult or a conspiracy’s charm, but it probably can’t hurt, and it reminded me of an essay on Aeon that I probably send to people more than any other.

“Escape the echo chamber,” by C. Thi Nguyen, details the differences between echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, most importantly how the latter protects members from outside information (like a cult), while the former filters all such information throw its chosen groupthink lens (like a conspiracy theory). “In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined,” Nguyen explains, using Rush Limbaugh as an example.

Nguyen makes the case that you can’t reach people in an echo chamber by trying to reason with them. All you can do is to keep providing a space or place for them to turn if they ever try to leave the echo chamber, and erode their trust in the echo chamber if it’s possible. Members within the chamber, cult, etc., find themselves quickly on the outs if they ever disagree with something the group says or believes in. For someone to take that risk, they have to have someone outside the group they can trust.

WhatsApp groups can evidently behave similarly, with members afraid to contradict groupthink belief. I’ve never used WhatsApp so don’t know the feel of the space, but have found myself on the wrong end of group norms in a Facebook group more than once. One conversation was about female writing mentors intertwined with criticism of older male writers (much of it valid criticism). I hazarded to say that all of my writing mentors had happened to be older men and I’d always found them willing to give supportive guidance when I asked. It was the wrong thing to say in a group that by that point disallowed almost anything good said about men. (I am all for down with the patriarchy, but maintain that the white patriarchy hurts everybody, including men. Who was it who said that before we teach boys to break girls, we first have to break the boys?)

It was a short lesson in groupthink that is too easily enabled by social media but that has likely always existed in humans in some form since we became self-conscious beings. The Moonies didn’t need a WhatsApp group to lose their independence of thought and action.

Nguyen’s essay and the Technology Review article are reminders that of the many ways to deal with these situations, the most effective are probably with compassion.

What’s interesting is that, for all the noise that thought leaders and mass media make about our society’s so-called divisiveness and polarization, you don’t have to look far to find people who are truly trying to understand one another, who make an effort to find common ground and build trust. Difficult conversations are happening all around you, right now, and people’s perspectives are always shifting; it’s just that you won’t generally see these efforts happening on public-facing platforms. They’re awkward and sometimes tense. But they’re happening because people don’t want to be polarized.

Perhaps the healthiest thing we can do for our society right now and into the future is to begin dismantling the fixed idea that deep divisiveness is what defines us. To act and speak from the belief that humans care about one another. Conspiracies dazzle far too many, and cults provide a sense of safety in an uncertain world. But believing that we are divided and that echo chambers provide no way out does nothing to serve us.

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*A friend recently pointed out that “conspiracy theory” is usually used derisively, and my neighbor stopped me mid-conversation last week to remind me that not all conspiracies are theories. She’s right—I enjoyed the BBC miniseries Cambridge Spies, which details a pro-Soviet conspiracy high in the British government that was quite real—but I haven’t yet found replacement phrasing that more specifically describes belief in a far-fetched and improbable conspiracy that is most definitely not true. (Think Pizzagate.)

Boots, lightly abandoned

These shoes have been in this location since about mid-lockdown, which is something like five years ago in Covid time (in real time about four months). For the first two weeks I thought someone would come back for them, but all the neighborhood children have played and biked and run up and down the road all summer long and the boots have stayed. To mangle Hemingway: “For free, child’s shitkickers, lightly abandoned.”

A long time ago I registered a domain name called War on Reason. This was during the George W. Bush years, when Congress passed the Patriot Act so quickly they seemed to intentionally be thumbing their noses at the Constitution, and our president and his administration mired the country in an unjust war that cost trillions of dollars and an estimated hundreds of thousands of lives. When I registered the domain name, my sister was a sergeant with the Army Reserves, and her entire battalion was being deployed to Iraq (my sister, being pregnant at the time her battalion was sent, never ended up serving overseas).

The world felt insane, which can be a hard thing to remember in the exhausting and nonsensical times of 2020. Because my sister was in the military, I paid close attention to inexplicable stories, like how soldiers had to pay for their own body armor and in-country flights home, but military contractors could make $10,000 per day. Considering the ragged state of the Veterans Affairs office and the dire lack of treatment for post-deployment illnesses PTSD, I spent a lot of time wondering what my tax dollars did once they landed in the Pentagon’s black box budget.

What I really couldn’t figure out was the ease with which millions of Americans were willing to forego basic, once-treasured freedoms as soon as our leaders told us we were under attack and had to go knock down the bad guys. The Hermann Goering quote about how you could easily convince an unwilling populace to support a war by telling them they’re being attacked was in regular circulation among friends and acquaintances. Goering was a high-profile Nazi who was tried at Nuremberg, where he once said to an American intelligence officer and psychologist that “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

That this quote now feels tiresomely familiar feels . . . tiresome. As much so as the quip about how those who don’t learn history are destined to repeat it, while those who do learn history are destined to watch everyone else repeating it.

I let go of War on Reason partly because the ideas I had for it became too large for me to feel comfortable wrangling, and also because I was very busy working as a copy editor for textbook publishers and complaining about how standardized testing leads increasingly to substandard education (I still do both the job and the complaining). And this newsletter isn’t a way to reboot that idea. But as I’ve been working over the past few months on a new book proposal (more about that soon-ish but not today), I’ve gone back to the questions that prompted it, and the repetitive nature of our societal mistakes.

I have a deep interest in land ownership and the commons, and how the theft of the commons strangles freedom—and has in fact been strangling freedom for hundreds of years. I’ve written two long essays on the subject, for Aeon (“Who Owns the Earth”) and more recently for the Center for Humans & Nature (“Reclaiming the Ancient Roots of Ecological Citizenship”), and an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on the essential role that public lands play in ensuring freedom.

It took me a while, but I finally began to see that “the commons,” which was originally land and access to water for grazing, encompasses a far larger reality: it’s our air, soil, and water, yes, but it’s also information and belief, freedom of movement and freedom to think. Our societal landscape has become just as impoverished, restricted, exhausted, and saturated with toxins as our physical landscape. And this is nothing new. The American Scholar recently published an essay on Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor whose armies conquered Germanic tribes nearly 2,000 years before there was such a thing as Germany. While he was busy conquering, a smallpox pandemic was ravaging the Roman Empire, killing millions.

Despite the lives lost to both war and the pandemic, it was misinformation, writes Robert Zaretsky in the essay, that Marcus Aurelius thought the greater threat:

“For corruption of the mind,” he writes, “is a far graver pestilence than any comparable disturbance and alteration in the air that surrounds us; for the one is a plague to living creatures as mere animals, and the other to human beings in their nature as human beings.”

So while this newsletter is a new foray to me (though in some part also a nod back to a somewhat intellectual blog another friend and I used to write on motherhood and philosophy called Pooplosophy), it is also my own small foray in the war on reason, a reminder that we are all, every single one of us, trying to figure out how to be human, and that where that exploration takes us is linked at a fundamental level to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Reason isn’t just about modern scientific discovery or the world-shifting paradigms of the Enlightenment. It is, at its core, an exploration of how we live together.

Welcome to The Commons. I write about the long struggle between private property rights and the health of the commons, and how it affects everything from the air we breathe to the social fabric that binds us together. “Walking compositions” are, loosely, a photo combined with something I was thinking about while walking. Usually while walking my dog, who would rather be chasing deer.

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