Living Inside the Dreams of Dead People

Or: Stories and Insights

A series of sketches to begin, moving into meatier topics in the second half.

Whenever people tell us stories about important complicated things, we should remember to ask one key question: does anyone suffer because of this story?

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Quote source

During my walk at the park the other morning, I caught myself muttering to a tree, "Dude! Those are some pretty curves."

hashtag anthropomorphizing

I've been involved for a number of years with an initiative that brings high school students from different schools together to talk about race and racism. It started with my library, and we're currently trying to rework the program as something community-based instead of library-based to increase capacity and scope. I recently drafted my understanding of the organization and our work:

Race Project KC begins with two basic ideas: humans are innately social and humans are instinctive storytellers. Thus, the power of strong social bonds depends on the sharing of stories. RPKC brings young people from all walks of life, all parts of the KC community, together to encounter stories of Kansas City past and present. We create safe spaces where participants then share their personal stories with each other, how their lives intersect, are informed by, and continue to inform that collective community story. They tell stories of their identities, perspectives, and experiences and they commit to hearing, understanding, and appreciating peers with different stories. Through this process, RPKC helps dismantle barriers that divide our community to weave together a more united, common narrative that includes everyone.

I really like that. It's likely it will get reworked and not "stick" before all is done, but I think it captures my values about how to build community in general, in any context:

Society begins with two basic ideas: humans are innately social and humans are instinctive storytellers. Thus, the power of strong social bonds depends on the sharing of stories. Community building brings people from all walks of life, all parts of the community, together to encounter stories of our collective past and present. We create safe spaces where participants then share their personal stories with each other, how their lives intersect, are informed by, and continue to inform that collective community story. They tell stories of their identities, perspectives, and experiences and they commit to hearing, understanding, and appreciating peers with different stories. Through this process, we work to dismantle barriers that divide our community to weave together a more united, common narrative that includes everyone.

That process is how we all become stronger together.

From George Lakoff:

Why Is Empathy Central to Democracy?

When I was seven years old, I asked my father what the word “democracy” meant.

He replied: ‘You’re not better than anyone else, and no one else is better than you.”

"Better than" meant "more deserving than."

Even a seven-year-old could get it.

If you don’t care what happens to other people — if you only care about yourself — why would you care to live in a democracy? . . . 

Empathy is the central component of a healthy and functioning democracy. That’s because democracy is based on the principle of equal representation. Empathy is necessary to understand and respect the perspectives and experiences of diverse individuals and communities. . . . 

In a democracy, empathy can help foster social cohesion and build bridges between groups with different interests and beliefs. It can also encourage citizens to engage in civic activities and to work together towards common goals.

Empathy is also crucial in ensuring that the needs and interests of all members of society are taken into account when making policy decisions. By understanding and empathizing with the experiences of marginalized or disadvantaged groups, policymakers can create policies that are more equitable and just. . . . 

Empathy is the heart of democracy. Citizens care about other citizens. Freedom means freedom for everybody. That's government of, by, and for the People.

See also: Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

A couple of stories my nine-year-old wrote recently at school:

I Don't Know 5

First I would give myself wings. Then I would give myself the ability to change my skin to its surroundings. Then I would give myself gills and telekinesis. Then I would make it so I can choose when everything I touch to melt or not whenever I want. And I would be able to turn on and off for telepathy or in other words mind reading. And I would be able to teleport. And these would let me catch my prey and devour my enemies.

Why the rumors about Ms. [Teacher] are true. First, she is absolutely strict and mean and rude and she thinks she's funny but she isn't. And because she bullies everyone just in a conversation. She also yells at people for going to her table for help. That is why I think that the rumors about Ms. [Teacher] are true.

Two posts ago, in We Are All Necromancers, I shared the following meme and responses from Facebook.

Soon after that, I shared it at work for team-building there.

I responded: I generally hope to accomplish C3$ - Gryphon, Apothecary Satchel, Tea of Wisdom - Though part of me secretly wants to be E4% - Unknowable Sea Entity, Raven Familiar, Capn' Firebeard's Special, so that probably comes through every so often.

A couple of days later, this showed up on my locker.

A colleague made one for each person who responded. :-)

Some of the books I've read recently, especially those I wrote about in my last post, The Stories We Tell, helped me see a prominent theme in many of the books I read--and inspired me to make a booklist at work:

Stories We Tell

Humans are instinctive storytellers, understanding our knowledge and experiences in narrative form. If you want to understand a person, figure out the stories they tell themselves. If you want to understand yourself, pay attention to your internal narratives. If you want to understand the world, look for stories.

The list includes:

• The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
• Imagination: The Science of Your Mind's Greatest Power by Jim Davies
• You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney
• Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us by Mark Yaconelli
• Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey
• Land of the Dead: Lessons From the Underworld on Storytelling and Living by Brian McDonald
• Sweet in Tooth and Claw: Stories of Generosity and Cooperation in the Natural World by Kristin Ohlson
• The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives by David Mura
• Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality by Hector Macdonald
• Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri
• The He-Man Effect: How American Toymakers Sold You Your Childhood by Box Brown
• Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-believe Violence by Gerard Jones
• Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar
• The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination by Philip Ball
• Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte
• Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words by Jenni Nuttall
• I Is An Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary
• Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
• The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• The Myth That Made Us: How False Beliefs About Racism and Meritocracy Broke Our Economy (and How to Fix It) by Jeff Fuhrer
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
• Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice by Sonali Kolhatkar
• Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom From Young Children at School by Carla Shalaby
• Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio by Jessica Abel
• The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
• What If This Were Enough?: Essays by Heather Havrilesky
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-delusion by Jia Tolentino
• Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam
• Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob
• Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
• What We See When We Read: A Phenomenology by Peter Mendelsund
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
• Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story by Randy Olson
• Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky
• The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher
• Playing With Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy
• Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
• The Talk by Darrin Bell
• 300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso
• Honeycomb by Joanne Harris
• Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked by Devon Price
• Why We're Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding by Bobby Duffy
• The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman
• Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff
• Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think by Helen De Cruz
• Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling by Philip Pullman
• The Bully Book by Eric Kahn Gale
• Poison for Breakfast by Lemony Snicket
• Unstoppable Us. Vol. 1: How Humans Took Over the World by Yuval N. Harari
• Unstoppable Us. Vol. 1: Why the World Isn't Fair by Yuval N. Harari
• We, the Curious Ones by Marion Dane Bauer
• Godless by Pete Hautman
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better by Will Storr

An interlude from the bible:

1 Samuel 8: 4-5; 10-22

Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah, and said to him, ‘You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.’

So Samuel reported all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the Lord will not answer you in that day.’

But the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel; they said, ‘No! but we are determined to have a king over us, so that we also may be like other nations, and that our king may govern us and go out before us and fight our battles.’ When Samuel had heard all the words of the people, he repeated them in the ears of the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to their voice and set a king over them.’ Samuel then said to the people of Israel, ‘Each of you return home.’

Which sets the stage for the next section.

Of the book Unstoppable Us, Vol. 2: Why the World Isn't Fair by Yuval Noah Harari:

Marvelous storytelling.

Harari takes a long, complex, convoluted idea about the nature of human societies and turns it into an accessible, engaging narrative covering the span of human history since the Agricultural Revolution. It is a clear, concise, compelling narrative. Halfway through I became worried it was turning too strident and propagandist, but that turned out to be part of a larger story and made sense once it fit into place with what followed.

So, the book's title asks why the world isn't fair. Its answer, in brief: Agriculture and harmful Stories.

The creation of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago led to changes in humans and the way we interact with the world and each other, which in turn led to collective, shared stories that are beneficial for some and harmful for others. In between was a long, cumulative chain of what Harari calls "unintended consequences."

To quickly go through the steps along the way: the advent of agriculture was the first time humans, on a large, organized scale, controlled our environment instead of adapting to it (as hunter-gatherers had for the thousands of years prior). Humans controlled where plants grew, where they didn't (trees, weeds, and similar), where water flowed (irrigation), and more. That changed the way we thought about the world, the fact that we could alter the world to fit us instead of changing ourselves to fit it. Domestication of animals followed swiftly, as we also realized we could control the animals we wanted to use. Farming and herding allowed far more people to live in far less space, so soon we made larger buildings and settlements to further control our environments. Each new solution brought different problems, though, so the adaptations had to continue.

Once collections of people became larger, they needed better ways to coordinate and cooperate--and every solution continued the mindset of having power and control. Kings and priests began to lead the people. Taxes became necessary to support the governments the kings and priests led to coordinate the cooperation. Writing became necessary to keep track of taxes and economic exchanges. Bureaucracy became necessary to keep track of the writing. Socioeconomic inequality became the entrenched norm for human societies. If people could own plants, animals, and environments, they could also own other people--slavery. (The 10 Plagues of Agriculture, from the book's most prominent graphic: Unbalanced Diet, Hard Work, Drought, Flood, Pests, Plant Disease, Animal Disease, Human Disease, War, Slavery.) On and on to the world we know today.

All of it enabled, both the good and the bad, by the ability of humans to have society-wide shared beliefs. Because everyone agrees to accept the same ideas and beliefs as true and abide by them. For a government to work, residents must agree to accept that government as valid. For money to have value, everyone must agree on the value and must honor that agreement. Society works, in other words, because of shared stories. Someone tells a story, others endorse it, and it spreads until everyone decides together make that story our shared reality. These stories are powerful tools that have led to humans controlling the world, all of our amazing accomplishments. These stories are powerful tools that have cause oppression and wars and the suffering of millions. Power comes from stories, both the power to harm and the power to heal.

And it all started with the Agricultural Revolution.

That's the story this book tells. It is a powerful story. Both depressing and hopeful; you can't fix a problem unless to you understand the causes of the problem, so much of the book is about how the world has become so unfair--but the end is about how to use that insight to be able to make the world more fair.

Powerful and compelling.

Excerpts:

This revolution changed the way humans lived. Instead of wandering around looking for wild figs, fish, and rabbits, they went to the field every day to dig and sow. But the Agricultural Revolutions changed something even more important: it changed the way humans felt about the world--and about their place in it.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, humans didn't try to control much. They gathered wild fruits and hunted wild animals and occasionally burned a forest or dug a trap, but they only rarely told plants where to grow, or water where to flow, or rocks where to roll. After the Agricultural Revolution, farmers became control freaks. From the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep, people like Wheaty and her family were busy telling the world around them what to do.

-----

In much the same way, humans gained control over goats, cows, pigs, horses, donkeys, chickens, ducks, and a few other animals. The world had never seen anything like it: never before had one kind of animal succeeded in controlling another. Sharks don't control fish, lions don't shepherd buffalo, and eagles don't keep sparrows in cages.

By controlling animals like sheep and horses, humans got a lot of power.

-----

Controlling animals and plants made farmers far more powerful than before. But power isn't happiness, nor is it peace. . . . When you try to control others, you often make them seriously unhappy--and you often end up unhappy yourself. That's exactly what happened in the Agricultural Revolution.

The farmers thought that the things around them--wheat plants, water, and sheep--should do exactly as they were told. That demanded a lot of hard work from the farmers, and eventually they found that they too were doing what somebody else told them to do. They were more and more controlled by priests and chiefs.

-----

Farmers were different from gatherers, and not just in how they lived and what they ate. They were also different in how they thought. To be a farmer meant to constantly worry about the future and delay gratification in the present. That is still one of the most important things kids learn.

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There were many advantages to having a large kingdom like ancient Egypt, but controlling a big kingdom was a big headache. The pharaoh had to organize so many people and so many things. And to do that, two very important questions needed answering: "Who owns what?" and "Who owes what?" . . . 

To keep the kingdom going, the pharaoh demanded that people give him a large part of their property. . . . 

This is called taxes--the taxes that still worry adults even today.

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It's very interesting that the first name in history that has reached us belonged to a geek who spent all day counting grain rather than a great conqueror, a poet, or a prophet. And the first texts in history contain no philosophical insights, no poetry, and no stories about kings and gods. They're boring economic documents recording property ownership and tax payments.

The fact that they're boring is the whole point. Nobody needed to write down the exciting things. People remembered them perfectly well in their brains. Writing was invented for the boring stuff.

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Bureaucracy, like taxes, is something that adults are scared of. They would rather spend a day with three ghosts and two monsters than an hour with one bureaucrat. The word bureaucracy comes from bureau, which is a writing desk. Bureaucracy means "to control people by using writing desks."

Imagine someone sitting at a desk full of drawers. The person takes a document from one drawer and another one from a second drawer, then reads them carefully before writing a new document and putting it in a third drawer. That's a bureaucrat. Lots of people know how to read and write, but the bureaucrats also know which documents go into which drawer. That's their secret power. They can find stuff--and also make stuff disappear. That's how they control people.

Bureaucracy works like magic. In fairy tales, you read about sorcerers who can create or destroy entire villages by uttering a spell. Bureaucrats can create or destroy villages by moving paper around. An evil bureaucrat can make a village starve just by putting the paper with the village tax record in the wrong drawer. A good bureaucrat can rescue the village by finding the missing document or deleting the name of the village from the king's tax list. One stroke of the pen and a hundred people are saved.

Some people think that those in power rule everybody else with swords and guns. It's true that warriors with swords and guns are useful for conquering a kingdom. But when you want to rule the kingdom, you need bureaucrats sitting at their desks and moving documents around. . . . 

You may not know it yet, but your future often depends on bureaucrats and the papers they keep in their drawers.

So bureaucrats are very powerful people. They're the closest things we have to magicians and sorcerers.

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The only way to keep order--in a house or in a kingdom--is to have lots of people who follow the rules all by themselves, without needing rewards or punishments. But why would they do that? Because they believe in the rules. That's the secret of every successful system: people obey the rules because they believe in them.

But what causes people to believe in the rules? More important, what causes even poor and enslaved people to believe in rules that make them so miserable?

The answer is stories! You may think there's nothing useful about telling stories, but it's actually the greatest power humans have. It's our secret superpower! By convincing people to believe in the rules, a good storyteller can do the work of a hundred soldiers far more efficiently.

Humans started relying on stories long before the rise of ancient Egypt, and even before the Agricultural Revolution. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans were already using stories to unite several bands into a tribe and establish rules that every tribe member followed. This is what made humans powerful and allowed them to overcome all the other animals.

Lions and wolves can sometimes cooperate but only in very small numbers. You could never get a thousand lions to work together on something because lions don't have stories. When a story inspired a thousand humans to cooperate and set up a tribe, that tribe was far more powerful than any pride of lions or pack of wolves. A human tribe with a good story was the most powerful thing in the world.

After the Agricultural Revolution, priests and chiefs used stories to convince people to work hard, build temples, and guard walls. As villages grew into cities and tribes grew into kingdoms, the stories also grew. Small tribes could manage with small stories, but to create a big kingdom you needed a big story.

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So what are countries? They're not something everybody can see and feel in the outside world, like the Mississippi River. And they're not something only one person can see and feel in their own mind, like a dream.

They're the third kind of thing: shared dreams--dreams that many people dream together. And these shared dreams are created by telling stories. You tell a story to a million people, and if they all believe it, they dream together.

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The fact that things like the dollar, the United States, and ancient Egypt are dreams doesn't mean they're not important. These shared dreams are some of the most important and powerful things in the world. Thanks to them, humans can work together to build cities, bridges, schools, and hospitals.

These dreams can last a very long time, thousands of years even. People die, but their dreams live on because their children and grandchildren keep dreaming the same dreams. You could say we're all living inside the dreams of dead people. It's dead people from the past who first dreamed up the money we use, the countries we live in, and the gods we believe in. We could come up with new dreams too so one day, when we're dead, other people might go on living inside our dreams.

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All these dreams and stories can be extremely useful. If people didn't tell stories and dream things together, our world would be completely different: strangers wouldn't be able to cooperate, and humans would probably still be insignificant animals living on the African savannah. People in ancient kingdoms wouldn't have built dikes, reservoirs, and granaries, and today there would be no countries, no schools, and no hospitals. There would be no cars, no airplanes, and no computers.

But dreams and stories can also be very harmful. They often justify unfair rules, like the rules in some countries that say men are better than women or Brahmins are better than Dalits. Sometimes people believe a story so passionately that they go to war and kill millions of people because of it.

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No matter how powerful a story is and no matter how many people believe it, we can eventually realize that it's just a story. We may be trapped inside the dreams of dead people, but there is a way out.

Stories are tools. They can be very helpful, but if a particular story makes people miserable instead of helping them, why not change it?

So, whenever people tell us stories about important complicated things, we should remember to ask one key question: does anyone suffer because of this story? If we realize that a story is causing a lot of unnecessary suffering, maybe we should use our storytelling superpower to change that story.

Even stories that people believed for a very long time can be changed in just a few years.

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Stories are the greatest human invention. We rule the world thanks to stories. They make us far more powerful than chimpanzees, elephants, and dogs. But stories can also be our greatest enemy. If we forget they are our own creation, we might become their prisoners. When millions of people believe a bad story, it's like being trapped in a nightmare and not being able to escape. So humans have a big problem. If we blindly believe any story we're told, we might start doing terrible things, like shooting girls who want to go to school or killing millions of people in unnecessary wars. On the other hand, if we just stop believing all the stories, that wouldn't make a perfect world--that would be chaos.

There's no easy solution to this problem. As you grow up, you hear many stories, and an important part of growing up is learning which to keep, which to change, and which to abandon.

Kids have one big advantage over adults here: they haven't heard the stories as many times. . . . By the time you're fifty, you've heard it thousands of times and you've even told it to your own kids. It's much harder to change your mind.

So, if a bad story needs changing, it will probably be kids who do it.

That means you have a big responsibility--and a great opportunity. And remember, if you're not sure which stories need changing, you can ask that important question: does this story cause suffering?

If a story causes a great deal of suffering, be very careful about that story. Best of all, talk to someone who's suffering because of it, and ask them to tell you their story. Than open your mind and your ears . . . and listen.

Whenever people tell us stories about important complicated things, we should remember to ask one key question: does anyone suffer because of this story?

From George Lakoff:

The Power of Unconscious Thought

Ninety-eight percent. That’s an estimate of how much of human thought is unconscious.

Most of your ideas, thoughts and opinions exist in your brain without you having any awareness of them. They just seem to automatically be there. . . . 

These unconscious beliefs help determine our deeply-held moral, social and political beliefs.

Powerful metaphors and frames, often repeated by politicians and the media, sink into our unconscious and create a concept of "common sense” — even when the ideas behind them are the opposite of sensible.

We use these unconscious ideas to navigate social and political issues. These unconscious frames are not neutral. They are carefully constructed to evoke certain associations and emotions. The importance of these unconscious frames in politics cannot be overstated.

Politicians and their strategists craft messages to resonate on a deeper, often emotional level. They operate on the level of our values — both conscious and unconscious.

The way an issue is framed can result in a significant difference in public perception. . . . 

See also: The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain

This really resonates with me:

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time

The school is organized around an acronym I’d never heard before—SPICES—that stands for principles I know well: simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality, and stewardship. Those aren’t the only pillars of Quakerism, but they’re big ones, and seeing them all together got me thinking. Sitting in the meetinghouse one Sunday morning, after nearly an hour of silent worship, I had a Queen’s Gambit moment. Whereas the chess champ saw pawns moving across a phantom board, I saw each child-rearing best practice I’d been writing about line up with a principle of Quakerism.

The Religious Society of Friends—“Quaker” being a derogatory term, reclaimed—is a hard faith to explain, because it tries to eschew dogma. It’s now possible to be a Muslim Quaker or a Hindu one, or to not believe in any god at all. That said, Quakers all over the world tend to talk about the same principles and take part in some of the same practices. For example, in place of rules, Quakers publish “advices and queries,” which prompt individuals to make good, considered choices. Attendees of Quaker meetings near me were recently asked to ponder: “Do I make my home a place of friendliness, joy, and peace, where residents and visitors feel God’s presence?” The children’s version read: “In what ways am I kind to people in my home?” Certain expectations underlie these questions—that one should try to be kind, for example—but so do with curiosity and an openness to differing answers.

As it turns out, leading with questions is a great way for parents to talk to children. Encouraging kids to come up with their own solutions grants them autonomy. And as Emily Edlynn, a psychologist and the author of Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, told me, kids who feel like they have control over their life experience better emotional health, including less depression and anxiety. Fostering kids’ autonomy has also been tied to children building stronger self-regulation skills, doing better in school, and navigating social situations more effectively. Best of all, once kids get used to the self-discipline that comes with exercising autonomy, it can become habitual. Give your kids agency in one area, and they tend to “develop internal motivation even for things that they do not want to do,” Edlynn said, “because they’re integrating the understanding of the ‘why’ those things are so important.” . . . 

In addition to sit-ins, both civic and domestic, Quakers have a tradition known as “spiritual gifts.” That involves treating individual talents as assets that belong to the community and ought to be developed in ourselves and encouraged in others. For parents, this means focusing on what our children choose to do, are good at, and enjoy. You can’t ignore your kids’ weaknesses—but you can spend less energy on them. . . . 

But perhaps the most important element of Quaker parenting is the edict to “let your life speak.” In practice, that looks like apologizing to your kids freely, saying please and thank you, and, yes, trying not to shout at them. It means acting in accordance with your values, such as when my grandma took me to pack toothbrushes and soap into “kits for Kosovo,” and when my kids make PB&Js for our unhoused neighbors or bring games to a family shelter. The idea, supported by common sense and reams of research, is that kids develop empathy by living it alongside their caregivers. What’s more, another study establishes that knowing that their parents value kindness above achievement protects kids’ well-being.

Infused in all of these practices is the conviction that children are not lesser proto-adults, but fellow beings worthy of respect and agency regardless of their behavior. The closest that Quakers come to dogma is the belief, first expressed by the religion’s founder, that there is “that of God” in every person, children very much included. That’s why, as Friends and Their Children notes, Quakers try to make children feel “welcome at the very centre of life”—a concept quite similar to the “unconditional positive regard” that psychologists today know leads to secure kids. Children who feel valued in this way, and who believe that what they do adds value, generally come to understand that they matter. And a sense of mattering makes kids more likely to be happy, resilient, academically high-achieving, and satisfied with their life, as well as less likely to struggle with perfectionism or addiction. . . . 

So here I am, nearly 375 years after Quakerism’s founding, asking my kids questions, giving them bounded autonomy, and nudging them to invest in their strengths and be stewards of their community—all while communicating that their worth is in no way contingent. Put together, these Quaker practices result in a parenting style considered ideal by psychologists.

Of course, my pacifist Mennonite background has much in common with Quakerism.

Empathy. Inherent value. A sense of mattering.

I grew up in smalltown Kansas, two different towns, for the most part. Life there had a touch of income inequality and the tiniest hints of diversity, but you had to look pretty hard to see it and overall there was a general sameness to everyone and everywhere.

In college I married a southeast Asian refugee immigrant who had grown up, for the most part, in poor, urban Kansas City on the Kansas side. After college we moved to KC and she got a job teaching in her old high school. For our first year we lived in a converted third-floor attic apartment in a big old home in a historic neighborhood in urban KC on the Missouri side, near the big art museum and university and all the known, named parts of town--but also near the street that unofficially divides the "nice" part of town from the "bad" part of town, the "white" part of town from the "black" part of town, created due to real estate redlining and school district boundaries. You could walk from our apartment a few blocks to an entirely different environment--well, not directly, because all but the major roads were permanently blocked off to further entrench the divide--could see starkly the segregation and radical income inequality with just a mile's difference.

The next year we bought a house near her old neighborhood and job in poor, urban KCK, a majority minority area. She sponsored cheerleading and other extracurricular activities, and constantly broke the advice to avoid giving students rides home, so we were out and about at all hours of the day (and night) in all the neighborhoods covered by, what I liked to call, the most urban high school in Kansas. We had dogs, and I ran them in the miles around our house nearly every day. While she did that, I attended a seminary that had a campus in the older, poorer, minority part of KCMO. I worked on Sundays with the youth at a church in far northern KC, near the airport, almost entirely white and, if not wealthy, certainly not poor. And we made extra money during the summers (and sometimes after school) working for families who needed someone to watch their children and get them to activities. The family we were with the longest (major phone company executives) lived in the richest "new money" part of town in Kansas (where Patrick Mahomes and similar buy when they move to town), and we hung out at their very posh country club ("Kansas City's premier golf and country club experience" on their website) for tennis and golf and swimming; plus took them to competitions at other country clubs in the area.

Every day, for a good 3-5 years, I moved from pockets of extreme poverty to extreme wealth, both extremes new to my general life experience. I didn't just move through them, I dwelled in them, got to know them. Became, in some small way, a little part of them. (Sometimes I even rode my bike the ten-ish miles from one to the other, seeing all the gradations along the way.)

I remember being constantly amazed at all the wealthy neighborhoods and conspicuous wealth and thinking, if they gave up just 10% of their wealth, would they miss it? Probably not. Yet that 10% would more than double the wealth of someone in the part of town I just came from.

That thought didn't come from a book or a teacher or a politician. It wasn't taught to me or imparted by someone. I reached the conclusion on my own. Just a tiny bit of wealth redistribution would do wonders for so many in our society. Just a tiny bit.

Anyway, I was reminded of that recently watching this interview on The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart interview of Matthew Desmond

Description - "Poverty, by America" author Matthew Desmond shares how the US could end poverty if the top 1% of Americans just paid the taxes they owed.

Not adding any new taxes on anyone. Simply paying the taxes already owed under existing tax laws yet unpaid. And not everyone, merely the top 1% richest. That amount, in and of itself, if distributed to the poorest in our country, would mean not a single person would have income below the official poverty level.

Poverty, by America blurb:

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.

That's a story that needs to be told much more prominently.

Finally, a poem.

Executive Orders

by Tonya Lailey

Who, in a back room, prepares the folders? The ones

that look like menus from ’80s family restaurants.

In the office, there’s always a person, let’s be honest,

a woman, who procures the staff birthday cards

then devises a way to circulate them—in a binder, a folder,

within a pad of paper—for discreet signing by fellow

workers. Does the executive-order-folder-preparing-

woman take care of the White House birthday cards

too? I wonder. May I take your order? Does she

say that before whisking the folders off

to the Office of the Federal Register to be given

a sequential number?

 

In today’s New York Times photo, just one folder lies

open on the high gloss of the Resolute Desk. Oak

rests below the thick polish. Timbers taken from the British

ship that shares the desk’s name. Earlier NYT photos

showed folders in stacks, like at a hostess station

where families wait to be taken to a table. I remember

those months too, when there were so many birthday

cards to sign at work that eventually I just signed

my name without much thought for whom it was for

or what anyone else wrote. I’d grab a juicy, inky

marker, like a Sharpie, and use my time to form every

letter in my name, as if that were the gesture, as if

that were the work. I learned recently of an English

ancestor on my dad’s side, who mastered his art of making

wooden bowls. That’s what he learned to do in life,

so that’s what he did. He turned wooden bowls

with a pole lathe. Elm mostly. I read he didn’t concern

himself much with what happened to them

after he’d made them. I once found a photo of him

in his work shed in an archive online. He and his lathe

in a murky light. Behind him, tower after teetering tower

of empty wooden bowls.

 

from Poets Respond

Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Whenever people tell us stories about important complicated things, we should remember to ask one key question: does anyone suffer because of this story?