It’s All of Us: or, Believing Can End Suffering; It's a Kind of Love

One of my favorite things I've written on this blog, over ten years ago in Imagination: Not Just for Kids, summing up thoughts about the imaginative play of groups of children, along with role-playing games like D&D and other adult equivalents, is:

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own?  How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us.

I've regularly revisited that thought and referenced it in other posts, such as here, here, and here. It makes a good introduction for some related thoughts today, all leading up to two long sections about a couple of excellent books I've read recently about refugees and immigrants.

The last time I cracked open The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to take in a few more new words, I was struck by part of its description of Amicy, which is the mystery of what goes on behind the scenes of your social life:

It’s comforting to imagine that conspiracies run our world. To think there is some hidden order to things, a superstructure held high over our heads by a shadowy cabal of insiders. Of course, there’s no hidden order—but then again, of course there is. It’s all of us. We’re all insiders, managing an intricate web of relationships, deploying hundreds of unseen gestures and soft power plays, soaking up gossip with all the urgency of counterintelligence. It’s at once mundane, and yet no less chilling than any other conspiracy, because it leaves you questioning the very fabric of reality, wondering what you don’t know. . . . 

None of us knows the full picture of what’s really going on. All we know for sure is that some mysterious force is working behind the scenes to keep our communities intact and our relationships running—sometimes smoothly, sometimes not. But we all sleep a little better, knowing some sort of conspiracy is afoot. Otherwise we’d be tossing and turning all night, haunted by the notion that we’re all just acting alone.

We are each a small fraction of that powerful, amorphous force known as "us," slightly shaping it even as it shapes us.

This essay is basically one person's report on another, older thinker; it, nevertheless, is fascinating and eloquent. I love it.

The Magic of the Mundane

There is nothing simple about passing through a public space. Instead, we are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing, for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility’. . . . 

Goffman’s ‘microsociology’ reveals that even the most incidental of social interactions is of profound theoretical interest. Every encounter is shaped by social rules and social statuses; ‘whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact’. Such interactions contribute to our sense of self, to our relationships with others, and to social structures, which can often be deeply oppressive. Never mind the dealings of the courtroom, the senate, or the trading floor, it is in the mundane interactions of everyday life, Goffman thought, that ‘most of the world’s work gets done’. . . . 

Goffman eschewed this macrosociology in favour of analysing minute face-to-face interactions. He examined, for example, how Baltasound locals greeted one another as they passed on the roads, how they changed their behaviour depending on whether they were among customers or colleagues, and how they dealt with social gaffes, such as getting someone’s name wrong.

In this PhD research, we find the kernel of Goffman’s most famous idea: that social interactions are governed by a complicated set of norms and expectations he called ‘the interaction order’. Understanding this interaction order was key, he thought, to understanding how humans develop individual and group identities, how relationships are formed and navigated, and how systems of exclusion and oppression form. . . . 

Just as an actor behaves differently on stage from in the wings, so too does each of us alter our behaviour depending on the context. When we are in the presence of others, we strive to present ourselves as occupying a particular social role, be that an employee, an employer, a teacher, a student, a neighbour. We use our bodies and our words to give off certain strategic information. . . . 

His point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience. . . . 

It is tempting to think that the primary goal of conversation is the exchange of information. Indeed, this remains an assumption in much contemporary philosophy of language. Goffman shows us that conversation is far more than this and can be just as much about preserving each other’s sense of self as about communicating facts or opinions.

The interaction order governs far more than just our conversations. Goffman thought that we were subject to invisible rules even when merely existing in the presence of strangers. Consider how you act when you sit next to a stranger on the train or pass someone you have never seen before in the street. It’s likely that you will momentarily glance over them – a mere flicker – then conspicuously look away, like a car dipping its lights. Through this procedure, ‘the slightest of interpersonal rituals’, you abide by what Goffman calls the ‘norm’ of ‘civil inattention’; you subtly acknowledge the other’s presence, while signalling that you have ‘no untoward intent nor [expect] to be an object of it’. . . . 

While Goffman loved to shine his sociological torch on the intricate web of social norms, he saw no intrinsic value in the norms themselves. In fact, he was often highly critical of their exclusionary potential. . . . he showed great sympathy for the plight of ‘deviants’, people who did not or could not comply with the interaction order, for psychological or physical reasons, and who were therefore excluded from social participation. . . . 

A stigmatised person, Goffman argued, will forever remain a ‘resident alien’. Her ostensible inclusion in any community will always be provisional and precarious, and she will live in fear of discomfiting those who deign to include her. Such a person will be expected to extend to her new community an acceptance that they will never quite extend to her in return. She can hope for, at best, a ‘phantom acceptance’, which in turn allows for a sense of ‘phantom normalcy’. . . . 

What we might write off as personal awkwardness is in fact evidence of acute attunement to social norms. Features of our bodies, our behaviours and our minds that others have told us are inherent flaws are in fact of no moral significance – their alleged defectiveness stems from arbitrary social standards of ‘normality’. And ultimately, it is only once we grasp the contingency and artificiality of such social norms, especially those that oppress, that we can begin to transform them.

We are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order.

Being a member of society requires constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures.

A person’s identity is the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience.

How systems of exclusion and oppression form. . . . A stigmatised person will forever remain a ‘resident alien’.

As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager. Scientist is harder, but still a performance, inherited and learned.

That's from the book Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri.

This is a fascinating, passionate, personal, and complex book about a complicated, abstract, slippery concept, that of interpersonal belief.

The Library Journal review calls the book "genre-defying" and Publishers Weekly says it's "wide-ranging." My library assigned it Dewey Decimal number 177.3. I was curious just what category that puts it into, and the breakdown according to LibraryThing is: Philosophy and Psychology > Ethics > Social Ethics > Truth - Slander - Flattery. After reading the book, I think that fits pretty well. This is Nayeri's exploration, from her very personal perspective, of the subjective, social, cultural nature of truth. Some have power to define what is "true" while others don't. There are myriad dimensions to this idea, and Nayeri considers many of them.

Some authors try to hide their backgrounds and biases behind a veneer of attempted neutrality; Nayeri does the opposite. Her life experiences are central to her thoughts about her topic, so she openly--and vulnerably--brings them forward in her considerations. The book almost reads like a memoir at times, which is part of what makes it so hard to classify, as she weaves stories from her personal life into every topic that emerges in this wide-ranging journey.

The central theme that runs through the book is the plight of international refugees seeking asylum, and the bureaucratic processes they must navigate in the hopes of being believed as truly in need of sanctuary. It's a difficult process, made more so by the desperate, powerless state of being a refugee.

Nayeri herself experienced the process with her family as a child, fleeing from Iran due to religious persecution after her mother converted to Evangelical Christianity. Both of her parents were doctors, and their education and status surely helped. Before becoming a writer, she went to Harvard Business School and was trained by a top management consulting firm. Her perspectives from both her non-Western refugee background and her upper-class education inform her thoughts and emerge as themes. Another major one is her life-long struggle with her mother's faith, particularly her inability to find anything authentic in their church's practice of speaking in tongues. Most personally, she tells the story of her refusal to believe the mental illness diagnosis of her significant other's brother.

The book moves constantly from stories of those refusing to believe the genuine need of asylum-seekers, which outrages Nayeri, to stories from her life where she has refused to believe others, often causing them pain and hardship.

It is searing, insightful, and layered, and compels readers to think deeply.

Highly recommended.

As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager. Scientist is harder, but still a performance, inherited and learned. Sometimes the drama boils over; sometimes it's a pot on low simmer. In fields where expertise is harder won, more grueling and high stakes, archetypal expectations fall away--one performs brain surgeon as much as CEO, but only by completing brain surgeries. Do that well and you're free to smell like bubblegum and wear boat shoes to work. A CEO is all theater, aped and perfected in private, then trotted out publicly to varying degrees of success. There are some excellent fakers out there.

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McKinsey [management consulting firm] had taught me how to be a twenty-two-year-old who knows nothing but is treated like a savior with all the answers. . . .

Arguing against yourself is also a business school trick. Within the Western dogma of personal power (a belief that other people's potential is enriching, and their need toxic), arguing against yourself is a signal that, to survive, you need nothing from the other person, even if they hold your life in their hands. . . .

[A refugee wrote], "If you are a good storyteller you will be trusted, get a life, and escape from hell. But what do you need to do to be trusted, if telling the truth is not enough?"

The truth isn't enough. Most people aren't even listening for it. They're listening for something else. . . .

Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed--how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts. Some of that, we were taught, is achieved by developing a reputation for honesty, for precision. Some is communicated through signals and codes, the kind that exist in every profession. My classmates and I had privileged upbringings: not all wealthy, but from educated families (like mine, who were doctors), or trained at prestigious firms and universities. We knew how to dress and had internalized the language of the trusted classes. Over hundreds of case-method discussions, we taught it to each other.

Before we decide how to listen to a story, we put people on a spectrum. Do they come to us with need or with potential? Should we listen with our guard up or our imagination on? Will aligning with this person benefit or drain us? How does the storyteller signal, even before that first interaction, that they are worthy of an unguarded, imaginative listen?

Anyone with a boss knows the basics: lock eyes, shake hands firmly, under-promise, over-deliver, repeat. At Harvard Business School, we picked up other ways to affect the need/potential calculus. . . .

Later I went through the list and tried to figure out what it would be like if a refugee in an asylum interview had this same education. . . .

Refugees come with need, so we tell them that there is no room for human error or flaws. Their stories are shorn of trivial oddities, stripped of color, subjected to absurd burdens of proof.

It didn't take long for me to decide that Josh wasn't sick, but grifting. . . . The cure wasn't therapy; it was work. Just hard, exhausting, meaningful work. "Josh isn't sick," I said to Sam, "and it's not about genetics or my fears for our baby. He's a privileged white boy. Safety nets beneath safety nets."

I thought: these beloved children of successful parents, they can never do wrong, are never allowed to suffer. Not just consequences, but everyday discipline, too.

-----

Just as grief performance is shaped by culture, so is all storytelling. But it is also singular. Stories worth telling are created by our relationship with culture--they are strange, unrepeatable. That's what makes them worth telling.

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Who is hardest to believe, I ask [doctor] Adam, and who does most of the disbelieving?

Of countless medical biases he's seen, Adam describes three notable ones: the Google bias (used to dismiss teens and the elderly), the poverty bias (used disproportionately against poor people of color), and the you-should-be-healthy bias (a quick way to disbelieve women).

In training, the young [asylum caseworker] graduate is told that her job is to root out inconsistency. Then a ritual begins, a drumbeat of danger and despair that over weeks and months wears her down. The ritual changes her. How can so many people come out of the same country with the exact same injuries? How can so many people have crossed the same bridge, met the same smuggler, worn out their shoes on the same treacherous mountain? It seems impossible that she should meet twenty men a day, all dark, with the same face, the same stature, branded with the same scar patterns, running from the same villain.

"They look exactly the same," she tells her supervisor. "They're taking the same meds. Telling the same story. Why are the scars so alike?"

If she had spoken to a survivor thirty years past her pain, or a lawyer, or a charity worker, these men and women might have told her: Because something big is happening inside their small country--a tiny patch of the earth is spewing out refugees now. Yes, they are all young, brown men with many shared traits, and they look the same to you because you are white. They are fleeing a common villain, and that villain does have a single brand, a torture device, that he favors. As for for why they tell their story the same way, it is language, culture, the fact that they all learned English storytelling from the same five helpers along the way.

Instead, the senior caseworker shrugs, "They all buy their tall tales and fake papers from the same lot. God knows, probably they get themselves branded by the same thug."

-----

Believing against all reason is something to be proud of, because it shows the depths of her trust. This is the logic that evangelical churches use when they gather children in a circle and bid them to speak in tongues. "If you believe enough, you can do it! If you can't, it's only because you doubted." It is eerily like the "I believe" chants that bring Tinkerbell back to life. . . .

I didn't read Western storybooks until I was ten, and when I did, I found them bizarre. Why are American children told, in dire times, to close their eyes and wish harder? That chanting "I believe" will stay a fairy's death? . . .

Soon I learned that the fairy tales were only the beginning of a long and alarming education for these lucky kids. This collective fairy tale conditioning--the doctrine of exceptionalism of the elect, a chosen few who get to speak their desires and expect fulfillment--prepares for an unexamined adulthood in which the believer never questions why so many of her wishes have been fulfilled till now (never considering the accident of birth, the privilege of race, class, and nationality, even the kindness of neighbors, or the strength of a community). It also means she never has to face such questions in the future, since she is trained to proudly and boldly believe against data, history, science, and reason. After all, faith, according to every storybook tale, is worth so much more. And those who truly believe are so few, and ever rewarded.

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When a president calls migrants "thugs" or "criminals," he enters those words into history, an accusation that their children and grandchildren will have to answer for decades, privately, in the subconscious of their neighbors and classmates and coworkers. Simple visual metaphors become red herrings in the public memory. Once refugees are a swarm, Mexicans are rapists, women are banshees, it is trying, Sisyphean work to untangle the image from the reality--the red herring remains lodged at the story's center. For a red herring to be forgotten, a single compelling and inevitable truth has to emerge and overpower the trick. . . .

The fossilized lie is public memory. . . . For an opportunist and a grifter, truth is a feeble match for a good performative.

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Believing can end suffering; it's a kind of love.

The fossilized lie is public memory. Truth is a feeble match for a good performative.

Believing can end suffering; it's a kind of love.

I have to admit, I was compelled for this context more by the introduction and conclusion of this essay than the personal story in between--though the entire thing is worth reading.

I Rebuilt My Self-Esteem by Changing the Story of Who I Am

Your sense of who you are is deeply entwined in the stories you tell about yourself and your experiences. Storytelling is a big part of how we develop a view of our lives . . .

I found a different story to tell about my family and about my life. This rewriting of my story has parallels with the process of ‘narrative therapy’ – which has to do with finding more positive ways to interpret and tell our life experiences. . . .

We’re born without words, let alone stories, Adler explains, ‘and storytelling is a skill we learn from other people. So it always comes from outside at the beginning. Indeed, even when we tell a story to ourselves, we then put that story out into the world and get feedback on it. In a way, then, our stories are always these negotiations with other people.’ Sometimes they unfold directly through dialogue with the people in our immediate lives, such as our family or friends – but, other times, they’re broader cultural stories.

Our stories are always these negotiations with other people.

In my introduction to the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodward, presenting some of its main ideas, I wrote:

Once a culture is geographically established, it is very hard to change and only does so gradually and incrementally. Those who move into an established nation find themselves adapting to and adopting its ideals, cultures, and values instead of changing it.

Woodward was describing regional differences in the U.S., but the idea came to mind while I was reading Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan.

Abramitzky and Boustan make a compelling case that many of the common narratives about immigration are not supported by facts and that new stories need to be told. Technology has allowed them to gather long-term, wide-ranging data in massive amounts never available before and see what picture that data paints. Their main conclusions, in their own words:

We will provide evidence that will revise myths about immigration in three major ways. First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts. Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of US-born workers.

Their writing is clear, readable, and engaging, sharing their data point-by-point in compelling narratives, making strong and convincing arguments. Immigration is good for the U.S., and they make policy suggestions based on their conclusions. Perhaps most important is sharing new narratives about the topic of immigration, ones based not on assumptions and "common sense," but the large pools of data these authors have collected.

More from the introduction:

The very power of such large datasets is that we do not need to rely on the recollections of a small number of immigrants who left diaries or memoirs, and we do not need to wonder whether a particular story is typical or an exception.

Indeed, when we turn to the big data, we find that many of Americans' widely held beliefs about immigrant success do not stand up to scrutiny. . . .

We will provide evidence that will revise myths about immigration in three major ways. First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts. Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of US-born workers. . . .

The true ascent for immigrant families happens in the next generation. We find in the data that the children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially children of poor immigrants, are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents. The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago. . . .

All in all, we find a common immigrant story of strong economic mobility in both the past and the present. This shared immigrant experience is all the more remarkable given the dramatic changes in immigration policy over time. . . . The American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago. . . .

The data shows that current immigrants do not assimilate into US society any more slowly than past immigrants. Both in the past and today, immigrants make tremendous efforts to join American society. . . .

When we look to the evidence--either for past or the present--we do not find that immigrants steal the last slice from a fixed pie. Rather, immigrants help the economy grow, contributing to science, innovation, and culture. . . .

The data conveys a clear message: immigration is good for America, and immigrants and their children ultimately become Americans, both then and now.

That's the essence of a really clear and straightforward introduction that deftly summarizes everything that follows. Here are a few other excerpts that jumped out as I was reading:

The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor US-born parents.

What's more, no matter which country their parents came from, children of immigrants are more likely than the children of the US born to surpass their parents' incomes when they are adults. . . .

Not only does upward mobility define the horizons of people's lives, but it also has implications for the economy as a whole. Some voters worry that poor immigrants will drain public resources, but this concern doesn't take into account the very real possibility of upward mobility. A 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report found that first-generation immigrants use more public services than they pay into the system in terms of taxes, in large part because of the cost of educating their children in public schools. "However," the report concludes, "as adults, the children of immigrants (the second generation) are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population." Even immigrants who come to the United States with few resources or skills bring an asset that is hugely beneficial to the US economy: their children. The rapid success of immigrants' children more than pays for the debts of their parents.

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We think that immigration policy should take the long view, acknowledging that upward mobility takes time, and is sometimes measured at the pace of generations, rather than years. children of poor immigrants from nearly every country in the world make it to the middle of the income distribution by adulthood and so the fears of creating a permanent immigrant underclass are entirely misplaced.

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These findings carry a lesson for today's highly fraught immigration debate: far from consigning themselves to permanent outsider status, as many fear, immigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans.

The common pace of cultural assimilation then and now is even more remarkable when we consider that, in the past, policymakers imposed explicit attempts to "Americanize" immigrants and their children, whereas today there is a growing acceptance of immigrant cultures. Indiana and Ohio went so far as to ban the German language in the aftermath of World War I. Public schools in the past were conducted entirely in English, and some politicians worry that the bilingual educations programs offered today will hold immigrants back. Yet, despite these different approaches toward assimilation policy, immigrants pick up English at a similar pace and find ways of joining American society on their own.

These days, the United States has very few policies designed to address immigrant assimilation. But this hands-off approach seems to be working. So we encourage policymakers to stay the course here, allowing immigrants the time to join US society at their own pace.

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Immigrants are nearly twice as likely as the US-born population to be scientists or inventors. In recent years, around 14 percent of the US population was born abroad. But these foreign-born residents contribute significantly to innovation, making up more than 20 percent of resident patent holders, nearly double the share that we would expect from their percentage in the population.

Immigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans.

And this, near the end, makes me especially hopeful that the culture and those identities will be especially open to difference, to being inherently broadly shared.

Immigrants have made so many contributions to culture that it seems obvious--like second nature--that new arrivals will contribute to local cuisine, fashion, music, and the arts, creating a form of cultural fusion. Yet this outcome is not a foregone conclusion. If you travel today to a European country with the same share of foreign-born residents as the United States--say, Italy or Spain--you will primarily find Italian or Spanish restaurants. Maybe you'll find a few Colombian or Moroccan spots interspersed in the city center, and certainly some ethnic options in immigrant neighborhoods--but nothing like the range of choices you can find in all US cities, and even many of our small towns. So the special recipe to cultural fusion is not only immigration but also a society open to immigrants and willing to learn from the diverse experiences they bring.

Take the long view.

A slight twist of nuance to conclude. The power of trust.

I Trust You to Do This

It seems that even at a young age, children understand the value of trust and are willing to behave more honestly in response to feeling trusted by others. . . . 

"As a social species, establishing mutual trust would have conferred survival advantages for our distant ancestors,” he says. “We could speculate and say that human beings have learned that it’s good for you to respond in a trustworthy fashion if somebody has trusted you just in the same way as you trust somebody who has been trustworthy.”

Zhao says that for parents and educators, realizing the power that trust, rather than threats or punishment, can have in nurturing integrity in children is valuable.

“Our results demonstrate that clearly articulating trust can reduce dishonesty,” she says, “and this highlights the need for parents and teachers to consciously show and express trust to children through everyday asks. Rather than assuming children infer trust through actions alone, directly conveying it may be key. We recommend teachers intentionally entrust students with tasks and responsibilities, no matter how small, while explicitly telling them. ‘I trust you to do this.’”

Harris says there’s also a broader general lesson that can be learned. 

"If you treat a child in ways that they understand to be positive, you might well be helping them to put their best foot forward,” he says. “Not just with respect to cheating, but perhaps in other domains.” He says that thinking about the results of this study reminded him of an experience back at Oxford University, where he studied and taught before coming to Harvard.

“I used to teach in Oxford, which is divided into colleges. And each college is, up to a point, fairly autonomous in its mini democracy,” he says. “I noticed that from time to time, there would be murmurs of colleagues who were a complete pain in the neck, and sometimes, the president would adopt the strategy of giving this person some responsible job. Oftentimes it worked. This person, being endowed with responsibility, stopped being such a pain in the neck and stepped up to the plate.”

Clearly articulating trust can reduce dishonesty

Believing is a kind of love.

Belief in all of us.