Hide Armor

Sometimes I'll glance down from an engaging activity to notice with surprise a trail of blood on my arm or leg, no memory of hurting myself.

Or perhaps I'll first notice a smear of blood on something I've touched before then realizing I've been bleeding. Maybe I'll find a bruise with no knowledge of the injury that must have occurred a few days prior.

I'm not a particularly careful person. I've come to expect some measure of bumping into things as I navigate tight spaces, of getting scratched as I brush against bushes and plants and artificial environments. It's so commonplace I don't notice when it happens. Small injuries so normal I tune them out, ignore the bits of pain and discomfort enough they never reach my awareness. Though I haven't made a conscious choice to be oblivious, I am.

Many sensations I might experience, I don't.

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed. . . . Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?¹

Having no sense of smell is often a blessing.

I don't mind changing diapers. (Can't tell when a diaper needs changing, but can easily get rid of it once alerted to the need.) I'm happy to be stuck with litter box duty. (Not aware that our house smells disgustingly of cat, but I'll clean up after the felines.) Taking out the trash is no big deal. (Have to check with others to determine whether something is still safely food or has aged into waste, but once needed I'll toss it without issue.)

My wife is a supertaster. She needs her food flavors subtle and soft, and many common foods are too much for her. The ability impacts her olfactory sense as well. Her nose knows. The slightest odors overwhelm her.

Even as a child, before I knew what other options existed, I knew I found the food of my central plains farm communities boring and bland. The few ethnic restaurants we'd sporadically sample thrilled me. Once I discovered Tabasco sauce, I begged my mom to always have some in stock. I need my flavors strong and robust. Even when I could still smell them. I wanted all the flavors, as vibrantly as possible.

A college roommate once told me he could tell early on a date when he was going to "get lucky" because he could smell his date's arousal. That is an experience I've never known. I had a sense of smell, just not that sensitive. I used to know when a skunk was near. Couldn't stand the smell of mildew. Found trips to the landfill awful.

How quickly each feeling starts to fade as you recalibrate your expectations. Maybe that’s why your childhood could feel so intense, because you were steadily burning your way through a roster of firsts. The more you repeat an experience, the less you feel its impact, almost as if your brain is gradually tuning out the world.²

Growing up on the plains of Kansas, we took most of our vacations in the mountains of Colorado. That destination was close enough to reach with a one-day drive and provided a complete change of environment and scenery. I have vivid memories of first stepping out of the car after arriving and inhaling, savoring the smell. That smell was how I knew I was somewhere else. The crisp, clean, less humid air; the coniferous trees and the aspens; the altitude--I'm not entirely sure what exactly created that scent I experienced nowhere else, but it was pervasive and ubiquitous. It was an emotion. It was the smell of awe, grandeur, vacation, relaxation, escape. Elsewhere. Of magic.

I don't know what magic smells like anymore.

I could swim before I could walk. I jumped off the high-dive at 18 months. My parents directed a wilderness camp each summer, and nearly every day included swimming in the camp pool. The water was a second home for me. I competed on swim team through the end of high school and enjoyed swimming in triathlons as a pre-parenting adult.

Bleach has always been one of my favorite smells. A laundry room. Bathroom cleaners. They offer the scent of chlorinated swimming pools. They smell like the refreshment of diving into a cool pool on a hot, sunny day. Of floating weightless, graceful, eyes and ears dampened to fully focus on skin and muscles and proprioception. It is the happiest of smells.

Swimming pools aren't quite so much my happy place as they used to be.

Sometimes you reach a point when you can’t feel anything at all, just a ringing in your ears.²

My parents and doctors always said our family had "hay fever." We sniffled and sneezed, had itchy eyes, kept tissues handy. It was a fact of life. As an adult, I was diagnosed in more technical language with chronic sinusitis and allergic rhinitis and similar. I've had more sinus infections than I can count. Too many courses of antibiotics. In recent years things have improved due to allergy shots and two sinus surgeries, but too late to save my sense of smell. It gradually faded until there was nothing left.

The "smell disorder" of the complete inability to detect odors is Anosmia. The absence of the sense of smell.

I haven't smelled anything in nearly fifteen years.

The world is more dull than it used to be. Less vivid. Less emotional. I think, perhaps, less joyful.

Less.

It's easier now to be detached.

Allergy shots are more properly known as allergen immunotherapy, also known as desensitization or hypo-sensitization. Immunotherapy involves exposing people to larger and larger amounts of allergens in an attempt to change the immune system's response.³

Desensitization.

You wish you could look around with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you felt them for the first time.²

I reference my Mennonite heritage somewhat frequently on this blog, as that background has strongly shaped who I am. (See here for a good example.) One of the veins of belief I would describe--though perhaps not articulate completely according dogma--is the calling to be a community apart. Based in the wish for life to be "on Earth as it is in Heaven," yet acknowledging the immensity of such a task. It starts with creating smaller pockets of faithful communities instead of engaging the main power structures. It is a withdrawal from common society, changing oneself and immediate surroundings instead of all of the earth. Creating new ways of being outside of the system, not reforming the system.

Last post I referenced an article, and I think this post has emerged out of further contemplation on it. Here's the relevant portion of the post:

This article resonates, both because it reflects my personal values but also takes the time to validate the authenticity and allure of Quietism, which I often feel on the verge of.

Everyday Philosophy: Is It Better to Debate People or Shrug and Drink Wine?

At its core, quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude. . . . 

It might be a philosopher’s fancy, but the entire point of discussing ideas with other people is to clarify those ideas and, we hope, move one step closer to something like the truth.

Your convictions are fine, and you might feel noble, but it is not the philosopher’s quest. Quietism is a form of capitulation. It’s giving up on working together to improve our ideas. . . . 

However calm and appealing the gallic shrug of quietism might seem, I do believe that we have to still engage with other people about almost all matters. This isn’t to say that we should always be looking for a debate, but I think we need to have them sometimes.

I take a "don't sweat the small stuff" and "pick your battles approach," responding to many things with quietism so I have the energy and capacity to properly engage with the really important things.

I constantly deliberate whether the detachment I aim for is a way of maintaining healthy perspective on the importance of events and my ability to influence them or if it is capitulation, a world-avoiding, life-sapping apathy.

Quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude.⁴

Often I'm not sure of the difference between serenity and apathy.

Is the ability to change diapers without sensory overload and instinctual disgust worth the loss of joy at smelling Colorado and chlorine?

The kaleidoscope of your emotions spun wildly throughout the day, all of it intense.²

Does dampened outrage and anxiety mean dampened joy and meaning?

It is said of thrill seekers, those who sky dive and bungee jump, drive too fast and look for constant opportunities for adrenaline rush, that they crave overstimulation in response to desensitization. They are non-tasters, opposite of supertasters, and need extremes to feel anything.

I regularly write about my constant quest to find magic in the mundane, awe in the everyday. (See here for a recent example, and here.) I don't just write about it, I seek it. I crave it. A longing to find beauty and connection. To find stimulation. To feel awe. To feel.

To feel.

What does it mean to feel?

Hide armor is made from the tanned skin of particularly thick-hided beasts, stitched with either multiple overlapping layers of crude leather or exterior pieces of leather stuffed with padding or fur.⁵

Recently I was asked to provide an introduction to myself for a new team at work. A part of what I offered, descriptors not part of the biographical details, was:

Idealistic

Cynical

Unintentionally aloof

Available

Unintentionally aloof.

I'm happy with my own company, and I've never been much for small talk. I often struggle to make conversation. Lately it's been bothering me, not so much because I worry about awkwardness and lack of interaction with others, but because my internal dialogue seems to be similarly lacking. I not only struggle for things to say to others, but to myself. My thoughts are quieter, and I'm not sure if that is a sign of serenity and contentment or of boredom and empty-headedness. Perhaps I've become completely withdrawn and vacant.

You understood that this intensity wasn’t going to last.²

Perhaps my hide has grown too thick, if I can't even tell when I'm bleeding.

I don't want to be aloof from the experience of life.

Some words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Etterath

n. the feeling of emptiness after a long and arduous process is finally complete—having finished school, recovered from surgery, or gone home at the end of your wedding—which leaves you relieved that it’s over but missing the stress that organized your life into a mission.

Norwegian etter, after + råtne, decay. Pronounced “et-er-rath.”

-----

Yu Yi

The Longing To Feel Things Intensely Again

The first note is always the loudest. The conductor snaps their baton, the strings slash their bows, and the symphony thunders to life before settling down into a reverberating hum.

So it is with every new experience. How quickly each feeling starts to fade as you recalibrate your expectations. Maybe that’s why your childhood could feel so intense, because you were steadily burning your way through a roster of firsts. The more you repeat an experience, the less you feel its impact, almost as if your brain is gradually tuning out the world.

But sometimes you reach a point when you can’t feel anything at all, just a ringing in your ears—until like Beethoven, you find yourself pounding the keys of your life, trying to make the ground thunder below your feet. It makes you wish you could look around with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you felt them for the first time.

When you were a kid, you could still get excited about things. You felt that pirate’s itch on the last day of school, the morning of your birthday, or the final turn toward your grandparents’ house. You could feel rich from the coins in your pocket or being offered a piece of gum. You remember how big the world used to be, how wandering into the next neighborhood felt like stepping into a foreign country. Adults swept over you like giants. Every rule was a decree, every sentence a life sentence.

Time moved differently then, if it moved at all, arriving in big scholastic chunks, and each arrival felt major. You’d start up the school year like a witness protection program, ready to be assigned new teachers, new skills, a new identity. In the summer, you could make an afternoon last all week long, riding bikes with friends or watching a trickle of water feel its way through the dirt. There were no phones buzzing in your pockets, no schedules, no hormones, no distractions—or maybe it was all distractions. Whatever it was, you tried to keep it going as long as you could, even after the streetlights turned on in the evening and you heard voices in the dark, already calling you home.

The kaleidoscope of your emotions spun wildly throughout the day, all of it intense. You could walk along howling or weeping or grinning like a goon. When you loved someone, you loved them openly and with abandon, squeezing hugs as hard as you could. When you found something funny, you could laugh so hard your diaphragm ached, your cheeks wet with tears, your temples throbbing. You could plunge into a book and come out gasping, stumble out of a movie looking at faces and colors differently, listen to a song on loop for weeks and feel it grab you by the throat every time. And you knew how to play, knew how to make your toys come alive in front of you, how to listen for their weird little voices.

But somehow, even then, a part of you understood that this intensity wasn’t going to last. There were moments late in childhood when you tried going back to play with your old favorite toys again, almost as a guilty pleasure, only to find you couldn’t do it anymore. They looked just the same, as you turned them over in your hands—but suddenly they felt like bits of fabric and molded plastic, with nothing left to say.

You’ll never feel same sense of peace you once felt, drifting off to sleep in the back seat of a car, only to find yourself teleported back into your own bed. You’ll never have friendships that occupy so much of your attention, spending hours together every day for months, which made even the slightest betrayal sting. You’ll never feel the mortifying terror of a middle- school bully or the heartrending agony of an unrequited crush. You should only hope that life never punches you in the gut the way it did then.

Still, every once in a while you catch yourself humming along to some silly pop song that once broke your heart at sixteen, trying to tap back into that feeling again. That was once your entire life. It was only a matter of time before the world took notice and turned down the volume.

The music is still in there somewhere, even if you can’t hear the notes. Besides, there’s some beauty left in echoes—in knowing you have a part to play and playing it well, in concert with those around you. And there are those rare moments when you can let yourself go, close your eyes and let your body move with the orchestra, the way that old trees swing back and forth in a windstorm.

You have to wonder what you’re missing, closing your eyes like that. No matter; keep playing. Play as well as you can, and let some other soul get swept away for a moment or two. Until like Beethoven, you look up from the keys and ask yourself, “Ist es nicht schön?”

“Is it not beautiful?”

Ancient Chinese 余忆 (yú yì), I remember. Compare the Mandarin 玉衣 (yù yī), jade suit. Before their burial, the corpses of Han dynasty royals were clothed in ceremonial garments made of jade—a stone believed to have preservative properties. Even then, thousands of years ago, people were trying to protect themselves from the ravages of time by becoming “jaded.” Pronounced “yoo yee.”

-----

Lisolia

n. the satisfaction of things worn down by time—broken-in baseball mitts, the shiny snout of a lucky bronze pig, or footprints ground deep into floorboards by generations of kneeling monks.

Italian liso, worn down, threadbare + oliato, oiled. Pronounced “lih-soh-lee-uh.”

The satisfaction of things worn down by time.

Broken-in. Rubbed smooth. Ground deep.

Worn down by time.

With satisfaction.

Make the Ones You Care About Feel Mysterious

In stories, trees are always angry.

The tumbleweed refused to tumble but was more than willing to prance.

The tortoise jumped into the lake with dreams of becoming a sea turtle.

They finished building the road they knew no one would ever use.

The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.

I'd always thought lightning was something only I could see.

I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend.

I think I'm probably corrosive.

He will debate the matter with you until you decide to wash.

Walk the thin line between apathy and calm.

They didn't have city killers then.

Make the ones you care about feel mysterious.

I haven't had a muse for words lately. Sometimes that indicates I'm anxious or vexed or down, but I don't think it does this time. I've been moving positively along the continuum from apathetic toward engaged at work lately, and am generally busy and happy with the family. I've been working with my hands and taking pictures for a creative outlet instead of writing. I wouldn't say I've quite been content, but not driven to articulate frustration or escape with humor. All the usual worries are there--major election in a month, after all, and worsening hurricanes and such--but I've been sighing and detaching more.

So this post will be and odd and random collection of things that have caught my eye the past month, starting with the first sentence above, stolen from my listening of The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison during my lunchtime walk today, the ones after from the Random Sentence Generator, with a few at the end taken from what follows. I had thought of doing something creative with them, but inspiration hasn't struck yet.

Speaking of random words, the other week I entertained myself during a slow moment at the library by going to "Philosophy" list of our new books webpage and arranged the first 25 titles into a poem. 

Understanding Consciousness

Devil's Contract

The Weirdness of the World

How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold

A Summer With Pascal

Hope for Cynics

Traveling Solo

You Don't Have to Do It Alone

First Love

Begetting

Beauty

Wonderstruck

Our Kindred Creatures

Should We Go Extinct?

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

Right Thing, Right Now

The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings

Hyperobjects

On Gaslighting

Being Philosophical

Perplexing Paradoxes

The Random Factor

Learning to Disagree

(Retrieved on Sep. 21)

On another day, just after finishing The Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy, I decided to make a booklist:

What Did I Just Read?

I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend. Unusual or experimental writing, unreliable narrators or narrators in unreliable situations, strange and off-kilter or simply unique. Often creepy. These are some I have particularly enjoyed.

I didn't add Bride of the Tornado to the list since I like Kennedy's Dare to Know even more, so here's what I wrote for my review:

Kennedy is a master of creepy, off-kilter, gnawing dread in this story of a teen girl in a middle-of-nowhere town on the plains that is constantly surrounded by tornadoes that almost seem sentient and predatory. Life in town revolves around avoiding the tornadoes and a nearly religious reverence for a boy who has the magical ability to fight and kill tornadoes. And the adults all seem to know things that the kids don't, things that make their behaviors sometimes feel cultish. It's immersive and atmospheric in a way that messes with your head.

These might really be my favorite kinds of books, I think.

A few days ago I shared this anecdote on Facebook:

Taking a walk break in the park behind the library. Noticed a guy walking by with his dog giving me a funny look. Realized he'd probably just overheard me making growling and coaxing sounds at a squirrel in the hopes of getting it to recreate a pose it had just struck so I could get a picture.

EDIT: This is the closest I got. It had turned fully toward me and advanced a couple of steps while maintaining direct eye contact, as though it hoped to intimidate me into retreating. Much different than the usual scurrying out of view. I was alternating between staying threatening and encouraging it to keep trying to scare me.

Someone responded perfectly (and accurately), That squirrel is giving solid "Come at me, bro" energy.

Speaking of Facebook, I reshared this meme with the lead: I think I'm probably corrosive.

Corrosive is one of the options from the NFPA 704, after all.

And that thought reminded me of this favorite quote:

“If things go badly for me tonight, I want you to stay with Mr. Wynter; he will pay you a decent wage.”

“Will he make me bathe?”

“No, he will debate the matter with you until you decide to wash.”

“Ah. One of those.”

― Eoin Colfer, Airman

Which I proudly claim as about me.

I said at the top I've been keeping busy making things with my hands. Here's something I posted to Facebook:

A couple of years ago I made staves of power for [Younger] (cat paw) and [Older] (dragon), and have recently finished ones for [Uncle] (owl) and me (nature).

When [Uncle] spent way too much money on a broom handle with cheap decorations at the Ren Fest last year, I said I would make him something much better. This summer I finally dug out the one I'd started a while back before losing my muse and finished it for myself, then got started on one for him. This morning I presented him with the finished product.

When people wanted more details, I shared the following elaboration:

I found sticks in the woods on my wanders. For the boys, two small cedars that had been recently cut to clear the trail and cast aside; for mine, a young tree that had just been broken off at the base due to weather or animals or hikers; for [Uncle]'s, a dead tree that had yet to fall over and start rotting (it broke off at the ground/roots when I tested it).

Growing up we had pocket knives and would whittle, but only to reduce and sharpen, never proper shaping or carving. So [Older]'s dragon was my first time carving something (with a cheap carving knife set from Amazon). I cut each of the scales, dug out the spiral of the shaft, etc.

Wrapped the handle area in leather cord, tied and glued the "magic items," stained and sealed. Cut a bit from an old flip-flop to glue to the bottom to save our floors.

[Younger]'s was similar and followed immediately after. Different colors and design and magic. The claws have broken due to rough use and I need to find something to glue in their place.

My nature one doesn't have much carving to it, but I wanted a bit more naturalistic and wild look. Attached are: a bit of horn for land animals; shells for water animals; feathers for air animals; a tiny "sword" from a flattened nail shape for metal; a rock for earth; a couple of acorns for trees (now just caps since the resin coating didn't preserve them as I'd hoped); and a few wood carvings I made: a ring, a key, and a disk. The shells came from the beach on our family trip to Maine. The rock came from the beach on our family trip to California. The acorns came from behind my library (workplace). The feathers I found on a walk at local park. It has a strap so I can hold it on my shoulder to be hands-free. And is lighter than the others since it's the only one I gave time to properly dry out before working. It's the most practical of the bunch (aside from the dangly bits).

For [Uncle]'s I learned to use the rotary tool (off-brand Dremel) [Spouse] got me for Christmas (or my birthday). That and experience/practice helped. I knew to start with a thicker stick so I'd have more ability to reduce to give it shape and dimension. I was able to go into more detail much more easily. He requested the owl and a more "wizardy" feel than my "druidy" one. [Older] and I made a trip to the store Third Planet for the "magic." I had thoughts and colors in mind, but didn't know what we'd get for sure until we saw what we could afford. We ended up with a lapis lazuli orb of power and some amethyst geode pieces to embed. The eyeball beads came from Michael's--I can't remember if amethyst or something similar. A grey stain, with some bits sanded after to get the brighter colors. Oiled and coated in polyurethane (like the rest).

This process is a nice distraction, a healthy obsession, and a flow-like meditation.

This article resonates, both because it reflects my personal values but also takes the time to validate the authenticity and allure of Quietism, which I often feel on the verge of.

Everyday Philosophy: Is It Better to Debate People or Shrug and Drink Wine?

At its core, quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude. . . . 

It might be a philosopher’s fancy, but the entire point of discussing ideas with other people is to clarify those ideas and, we hope, move one step closer to something like the truth.

Your convictions are fine, and you might feel noble, but it is not the philosopher’s quest. Quietism is a form of capitulation. It’s giving up on working together to improve our ideas. . . . 

However calm and appealing the gallic shrug of quietism might seem, I do believe that we have to still engage with other people about almost all matters. This isn’t to say that we should always be looking for a debate, but I think we need to have them sometimes.

I take a "don't sweat the small stuff" and "pick your battles approach," responding to many things with quietism so I have the energy and capacity to properly engage with the really important things.

Speaking of important things worth engaging in, I recently came a cross a video that is wonderful. Here's a link and a transcript of the slam poem.

Royce Mann, Age 14, "White Boy Privilege", Slam Poem

Dear women, I’m sorry.

Dear black people, I’m sorry.

Dear Asian-Americans, dear Native Americans, dear immigrants who come here seeking a better life, I’m sorry.

Dear everyone who isn’t a middle or upper-class white boy, I’m sorry.

I have started life in the top of the ladder while you were born on the first rung.

I say now that I would change places with you in an instant, but if given the opportunity, would I?

Probably not.

Because to be honest, being privileged is awesome. I’m not saying that you and me on different rungs of the ladder is how I want it to stay.

I’m not saying that any part of me has for a moment even liked it that way.

I’m just saying that I f—— love being privileged and I’m not ready to give that away. I love it because I can say ‘f——’ and not one of you is attributing that to the fact that everyone with my skin color has a dirty mouth.

I love it because I don’t have to spend an hour every morning putting on makeup to meet other people’s standards.

I love it because I can worry about what kind of food is on my plate instead of whether or not there will be food on my plate.

I love it because when I see a police officer I see someone who’s on my side.

To be honest I’m scared of what it would be like if i wasn’t on the top rung if the tables were turned and I didn’t have my white boy privilege safety blankie to protect me.

If I lived a life lit by what I lack, not what I have, if I lived a life in which when I failed, the world would say, ‘Told you so.’

If I lived the life that you live.

When I was born I had a success story already written for me.

You – you were given a pen and no paper.

I’ve always felt that that’s unfair but I’ve never dared to speak up because I’ve been too scared.

Well now I realize that there’s enough blankie to be shared. Everyone should have the privileges I have.

In fact they should be rights instead.

Everyone’s story should be written, so all they have to do is get it read.

Enough said.

No, not enough said.

It is embarrassing that we still live in a world in which we judge another person’s character by of the size of their paycheck, the color of their skin, or the type of chromosomes they have.

It is embarrassing that we tell our kids that it is not their personality, but instead those same chromosomes that get to dictate what color clothes they wear and how short they must cut their hair.

But most of all, it is embarrassing that we deny this. That we claim to live in an equal country and an equal world.

We say that women can vote. Well guess what: They can run a country, own a company, and throw a nasty curve ball as well. We just don’t give them the chance to.

I know it wasn’t us 8th-grade white boys who created this system, but we profit from it every day.

We don’t notice these privileges though, because they don’t come in the form of things we gain, but rather the lack of injustices that we endure.

Because of my gender, I can watch any sport on TV, and feel like that could be me one day.

Because of my race I can eat at a fancy restaurant without the wait staff expecting me to steal the silverware.

Thanks to my parents’ salary I go to a school that brings my dreams closer instead of pushing them away.

Dear white boys: I’m not sorry.

I don’t care if you think the feminists are taking over the world, that the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten a little too strong, because that’s bulls—.

I get that change can be scary, but equality shouldn’t be.

Hey white boys: It’s time to act like a woman. To be strong and make a difference. It’s time to let go of that fear.

It’s time to take that ladder and turn it into a bridge.

Transcript from the article Teen’s ‘White Boy Privilege’ Slam Poetry Goes Viral

He articulates it so well.

The hurricanes this past month had me revisiting this section of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010):

Whatever Nita thought of the scavenge opportunities, there was a lot of abandoned material spread out before them, and if Nailer understood correctly, this was just Orleans II. There was also the original New Orleans, and then there was Mississippi Metropolitan -aka MissMet-what had been originally envisioned as New Orleans III, before even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called "Orleans."

Some engineers had claimed it was possible to raise hurricane-resistant towers above Pontchartrain Bay, but the merchants and traders had had enough of the river mouth and the storms, and so left the drowned city to docks and deep-sea loading platforms and slums, while they migrated their wealth and homes and children to land that lay more comfortably above sea level.

MissMet was far away upriver and higher in elevation and armored against cyclones and hurricanes as none of the others had been, a city designed from the ground up to avoid the pitfalls of their earlier optimism, a place for swanks that Nailer had heard was paved in gold and where gleaming walls and guards and wire kept the rest of the chaff away.

At one time in the past, New Orleans had meant many things, had meant jazz and Creole and the pulse of life, had meant Mardi Gras and parties and abandon, had meant creeping luxurious green decay. Now it meant only one thing.

Loss.

More dead jungle ruins flashed past, an astonishing amount of wealth and materials left to rot and fall back to the green tangle of the trees and swamps.

"Why did they give up?" Nailer asked. "Sometimes people learn," Tool said. From that, Nailer took him to be saying that mostly people didn't. The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances.

The train curved toward the hulking towers. The shambled outline of an ancient stadium showed beyond the spires of Orleans II, marking the beginning of the old city, the city proper for the drowned lands.

"Stupid," Nailer muttered. Tool leaned close to hear his voice over the wind, and Nailer shouted in his ear, "They were damn stupid."

Tool shrugged. "No one expected Category Six hurricanes. They didn't have city killers then. The climate changed. The weather shifted. They did not anticipate well."

Nailer wondered at that idea. That no one could have understood that they would be the target of monthly hurricanes pinballing up the Mississippi Alley, gunning for anything that didn't have the sense to batten down, float, or go underground.

I don't think we're quite to "city killer" levels yet, but the damage is getting worse in new and unexpected ways.

This article caught my attention.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

The student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. . . . 

His students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. . . . 

For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” . . . 

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text. . . . 

According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not. . . . 

I previously blogged about Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World in Introspection and Contemplation.

This article is fascinating.

We Should Take Awkwardness Less Personally, and More Seriously

Embarrassment happens when an individual commits a social gaffe; its characteristic facial and bodily expressions involve a kind of apology. Embarrassment is thus a kind of social repair. But awkwardness is different: it’s not something an individual causes, and it’s not something an individual can resolve on their own; it’s a social rupture. The failure involved in embarrassment is a failure to conform to existing norms. Awkwardness is different: it happens when we don’t have a social script to conform to. In other words, embarrassment happens when we violate socially prescribed scripts; awkwardness happens when we lack prescriptions to guide us.

People often feel like awkwardness is about them – that they are awkward, or not. But awkwardness is a collective production. More accurately, it’s a collective failure. Awkwardness is a kind of normative negative space, offering what Adam Kotsko calls ‘insight through breakdown’. It arises when people find themselves suddenly without a social script to guide them through an interaction or an event. The term ‘script’ carries associations of playacting, and that’s not a bad way to understand awkwardness. But the lesson of awkwardness is that, in the dramedy of life, we’re not just the actors, we’re the writers. . . . 

Social interaction is a kind of performance in which we occupy various roles. When a performance fails, the actor feels discredited – to use Goffman’s term, he loses ‘face’. Maybe he’s trying to play a role his audience won’t grant him (for example, a failed attempt to flirt, or a rejected marriage proposal) or he loses his composure and botches the performance. . . . 

The social cues by which we navigate the world range from the explicit – a dress code; the ‘no presents’ written on a party invitation – to the nearly imperceptible. . . . When two people land on different answers: awkward! . . . 

Awkwardness is fundamentally a kind of social disorientation. There’s a certain comfort in being able to socially situate oneself. That’s not to say that hierarchies are comfortable or beneficial for everyone – far from it. But even as social rejection and downranking hurt, there is a different kind of discomfort that comes along with being socially lost and disoriented, and this is the discomfort associated with awkwardness. . . . 

We should be wary of labelling others ‘awkward’. This gets awkwardness wrong – it’s not a personality or character trait, but something that emerges from social interactions. Awkwardness requires the presence of others: individuals aren’t awkward, interactions are. This might seem surprising: people often describe themselves (or others) as ‘awkward’, and it seems that some people do have more difficulty navigating social interactions than others. But there are practical as well as theoretical reasons for resisting the idea that awkwardness is an individual trait. The label ‘awkward’ is not as innocuous as it seems: it’s ambiguous, and it obscures more than it reveals. . . . 

Because awkwardness is often aversive, those perceived as causing it risk ostracism. Changing social norms and rituals isn’t easy; adopting new ones can be costly. The person whose presence reveals the inadequacy of the status quo thus presents a threat. For example, in a department where the men routinely take clients to a strip club after dinner, or tell sexually explicit jokes in meetings, the presence of women colleagues might make things awkward, as they are forced to confront the clash between their workplace rituals and professional norms. One option would be to accept this conflict as of their own making, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. But too often, it’s the presence of the women that is blamed: now it’s awkward to tell those jokes, because there are women here. Blame falls on those perceived as different for ‘making’ things awkward. In many cases, though, it was awkward all along: that awkwardness was just being borne by someone else, as they tried to conform to others’ expectations. . . . 

It’s worth paying more attention to when and where it arises, and be more willing to tackle it head-on. An unspoken expectation in many social interactions is that people already know how to navigate them. People avoid admitting social ignorance, and we are embarrassed by those who do, as if they’ve violated some unspoken social norm. But why should not knowing which pronoun, title or fork to use be any different from not knowing where the bathroom is, or what time the café opens? The reluctance to ask that social norms be made explicit reveals a deeper expectation: that social interaction should appear effortless. Awkwardness highlights the fact that our interactions are scripted. Its aversiveness shows the extent to which people prefer not to be reminded of this fact. . . . 

For people who are neurodivergent, who struggle with reading facial cues, or who find themselves in unfamiliar social settings, the world is full of rooms with unpredictable, unreachable infrastructure. Awkwardness is a reminder that social infrastructure exists and that it is not equally accessible to everyone. . . . 

When awkwardness is understood as an individual failure to fit in, the response is supposed to be: do better; conform; learn the script. But that’s not always possible. Nor is it always desirable. In some cases, those norms are not serving everyone – or anyone. . . . 

Awkwardness isn’t something an individual should, or even can, fix on their own. To view awkwardness as shameful, or embarrassing, is therefore not just a philosophical mistake but a practical one: it is to miss out on an opportunity to repair the social infrastructure. . . . 

But it’s important, too, to be mindful of who’s doing this work. Because awkwardness is felt as a form of social discomfort, it doesn’t attach to everyone equally. Social expectations of who does the work to make others feel comfortable – and correspondingly, who is held accountable when people feel uncomfortable – intersect with scripts around gender and social status. Women are often tasked with managing others’ moods and are expected to get along with others; this ‘emotional labour’ includes the work of repairing social interactions that become awkward. There’s a privilege in not worrying about others’ discomfort.

Don't be afraid to make social norms explicit--and question them where needed.

A poem of randomness.

Laura Tanenbaum

WHAT IF I CAUTIONED YOU

found poem, fundraising texts

Can I tell you about my family’s farm?

We stood together under a HUGE tent,

a bit longer than usual.

More butterflies than a freaking’ garden.

Is there anything I can say?

What if I told you,

or what if I reminded you,

or what if I cautioned,

Cruelty and chaos.

I can’t even begin to comprehend.

Revenge and retribution.

STOP

13 million 35 million, 5 now,

10 now, 20 before midnight, 109,201

Any another amount. Anything at all.

Last chance

STOP2END

 

—from Poets Respond

I love it.

And, of course, always be brave enough to make the ones you care about feel mysterious.

Randomly generated by Inspirobot.

Expand Your Identities

I am a librarian

I am a father

I am a husband

I am overweight

I am a marginal Mennonite

I am a U.S. citizen

I am a Kansan

I am a reader

I am a thinker

I am human

I am a part of nature

I am a seeker

I am a hiker

I am socially awkward

I am white

I am male

I am straight

I am artistic

I am an educator

I am a public servant

Oh, shoot. I got to twenty and realized I didn't include "I am kind," which I definitely feel is a core part of my identity and should have been on the list. Of course, I could keep going, easily adding to the list until it is two or three times as long. Each "I am" statement lists an identity I hold. Some I was born with, some I chose; some can't be changed, most can; some are momentary or temporary states. Each is one aspect of who I am at this moment in time, potentially changing before the next moment and definitely fluid and shifting over the course of my life. I have many identities.

I recently came across this exercise, completing the statement "I am _____" twenty times, near the beginning of the book The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Jay J. Van Bavel and Dominic J. Packer. The Power of Us. Because, even though I am listing things about myself, each "I am" identifies me with others who share that same identity. I am not the only librarian, Kansan, father, or human. I am one part of each of those groups. Each is an identity largely defined by other people, often in contrast to other identities. I get to shape who I am, but so do all of my other social circles and groups, societies and cultures. We make our identities together.

As I wrote in my review of the book:

I am a librarian. I am a father. I am a Kansan. I am a husband. I am a hiker. I am many other things in addition. I have many identities. And each of those identities shapes my perspectives about both myself and the world. Each one influences my values, my priorities, who I identify with, who I shun. I don't exist in isolation, instead am part of many different groups. Really, I am never an "I," but am always part of an "Us." I take my cues from my groups, conform to them, am largely determined by them. The same is true of everyone.

In this book, Van Bavel and Packer delve into the science of group identities and how they make each of us who we are. Their writing is accessible and engaging, shifting easily from studies and data to personal anecdotes to analysis and impacts. They offer a variety of approaches to increased self-knowledge and self-improvement through the perspective of group identities, relevant and useful for everyone. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Often, we aren't even aware of all of the group dynamics we are a part of, both contributing to and being shaped by.

I rarely think to add the statement, "I am a leader," yet others seem to think that identity applies to me.

Recently, my wife and I were in the process of picking up our ten-year-old from summer camp when we walked past someone I recognized from college, nearly 30 years ago. He and I were on the cross country team together. Though we didn't keep in touch, I've noticed his career since: he's been a state representative, has founded a civic leadership organization, has run for governor, and heads a state health foundation. I've just quietly been an anonymous, forgettable librarian, and only expected to say a quick hello in passing.

He stopped us to talk, though, to introduce families and catch up a bit. Then he completely surprised me by describing me as an early example of leadership in his life. I walked on to the cross country team on our small state college and was never the best runner on the team. Yet, by my final year, our coach made me one of the team's two co-captains. I thought that was an acknowledgement of my hard work, dedication, and responsible nature, and not because I showed leadership. Except, my old teammate, a few years younger than me, told our families that I was the person who really welcomed him onto the team as a freshman and made him feel like he belonged, that he had a place on the team and could contribute.

I had no idea.

And a colleague at work recently transitioned to a new department, which means we won't be working together as closely anymore. In her gratitude card to me, she wrote:

I met you more than 15 years ago. You have been a rock, a constant, in my library journey and I've come to count on your steadfast presence and thoughtful observations as a touchstone. It has been a pleasure to work closely with you and I've learned so much from your kindness, careful consideration, and your example of leadership. Thank you.

Again, I am surprised and flattered that she would see me clearly as a leader. Others are always helping me better understand my identities.

Some highlights from The Power of Us (bold emphasis added):

As social psychologists, we study how the groups that people belong to become part of their sense of self—and how those identities fundamentally shape how they understand the world, what they feel and believe, and how they make decisions. . . .

Knowing yourself is about understanding how your identity is shaped and reshaped by the social world that you are inextricably embedded in—as well as how you shape the identities of people around you.

Understanding how identity works provides a special type of wisdom: the ability to see, make sense of, and (sometimes) resist the social forces that influence you. It also gives you the tools to influence the groups you belong to. Among other things, you can learn how to provide effective leadership, avoid groupthink, promote cooperation, and fight discrimination.

Our brains are designed for group identities. Being told we are part of even imaginary groups impacts how we think about ourselves and others. 

Assigning people to an arbitrary group can immediately affect patterns of brain activity, change how they look at others, and, at least momentarily, override racial biases. [Group studies have] fundamentally reshaped how we understand the nature of human identity. They have clarified to us that there is no true social vacuum. In many ways, the psychology of groups is the natural human condition.

-----

A great deal of coordination is accomplished via conformity to norms. Conformity has been observed in every domain of life where researchers have looked for it. Experiments have revealed conformity in fashion, political and musical preferences, moral values, eating and drinking behaviors, sexual practices, social attitudes, cooperation, and conflict. What people think, feel, and do is influenced, often to a startling degree, by what they believe everyone else is thinking, feeling, and doing. And because they are bound to groups and identities, the particular norms that guide people at any given moment can vary depending on which parts of themselves are the most salient and active.

-----

Social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information. We have conducted several studies in which we found that people tend to believe positive stories about their in-groups and negative stories about out-groups, no matter how dubious the information may be.

-----

Social identities provide potent incentives for cooperation. . . . people more readily cooperate and improve outcomes for everyone when they identify with their groups and adhere to cooperative social norms. This has critical implications for creating groups and organizations that function effectively.

-----

The point of examining bias, implicit and otherwise, is so we can understand that our minds sometimes produce behaviors and outcomes that are inconsistent with our broader beliefs and values. And recognizing this, we can take control, exerting agency to challenge ourselves and others to build a better world.

-----

Human beings’ most important social identities are created around and fostered by shared traditions, rituals, histories, myths and stories, memories of accomplishments, and joys. But they are also forged by adversity, hardship, and the ways people are treated and mistreated by others.

-----

What great leaders do, no matter their domain, is tell stories about identity. . . .

Iconic moments of leadership . . . are instances of embodiment. They are powerful because they capture an essence. But it is an essence not simply of the leaders themselves—their particular dynamism or brilliance or charisma—it is an essence of us, of the group as a whole. They are moments in which the actions of a leader exemplify something about who we are or perhaps who we aspire to be.

-----

People cooperate and coordinate with one another much more readily when they see themselves as sharing an identity. The identities we activate and act upon are often those that differentiate us from others, whether they be based on boundaries of occupation, religion, race, gender, or nation. But, as we have seen, people are also drawn together by common fate, when they recognize that they share the same set of circumstances and are ultimately subject to the same destiny.

-----

How much we offer help to other people, like so much else, depends on whether we see them as sharing a part of our identities. The philosopher Peter Singer refers to this idea as a “moral circle,” the boundaries of which determine who is deserving of our concern—and, of course, who is not. . . .

The boundaries of our identities are not fixed; they can vary across time and situations based on what is most salient. . . . the people we feel a responsibility to help and care for in any given moment is fluid.

You can expand your identities. I am not simply Kansan and American, I am human and I am a part of nature. And I want all members of all of my groups to be healthy and successful. So while my nation may be at odds with other nations, their citizens are still a part of my moral circle of "human," so I don't wish them harm or ill; we may have differences and conflicts to sort out, but my goal is to find an outcome that is good for everyone, not good for me and bad for them. I try to make my Venn diagram of identities as overlapping as possible.

Of course, one of the things about identity that makes inclusiveness so difficult is that our natures are attracted to the idea of exclusion.

The idea of “optimal distinctiveness” . . . the most compelling groups are often those that fulfill two basic but conflicting human motives: a need to belong and a need to be distinctive. People want to belong, but part of the power of a social identity comes from what it excludes—which helps people clarify who they are and who they are not.

As Brewer puts it, we seek to be the same and different at the same time.

It's easy to say, "Expand your identities;" it's much harder to do.

You can also expand a single group's identity from within:

The real benefits of dissenters come less from the ideas they espouse or suggestions they make than from the ways they change how the rest of us think.

When people are exposed to popularly held ideas, their thinking tends to be lazy and narrow, focused on whether or not the majority view is correct. But when they hear a minority point of view, a rarer perspective, their thinking expands. They start to ponder why anyone would endorse that idea. Truth be told, they often start to argue against it, but in doing so they are forced to cast a wider net of thought, considering and perhaps even questioning their own assumptions.

This is critical because this is how dissent can improve innovation, creativity, and group decision-making. Dissent is effective because it changes the ways that other people think. This means that dissenters do not actually have to be right to benefit the group—they just have to speak up enough to get others thinking. Their mere presence can spark more divergent thought and open up space for others to express alternative views.

Identifying with a group doesn't mean surrendering to groupthink.

And:

To put your country ahead of your party requires that you understand their two interests are not always one and the same—that the nation has an interest in maintaining democracy even when your own side loses an election or two.

Sometimes one identity is larger and more important than another.

A bit more about leadership:

Teams whose players agreed that “most members of the team trust and respect the coach” and “the coach approaches his job with professionalism and dedication” performed better. Indeed, teams’ trust in their coaches at the beginning of the season predicted winning a greater proportion of games during the season and it did so even when controlling for a host of other variables in the analysis, including players’ trust in each other, the overall level of talent on the team, coaches’ prior records of performance, and how the team itself had performed in the past. . . . 

It is not a shock, therefore, that research in the workplace shows that trust in leaders is associated with a number of good things, including better job performance, more altruism, higher satisfaction and commitment, and lower turnover.

Finally, as a marginal Mennonite, I am a lifelong pacifist who endorses nonviolence, so I was delighted to come across this section about the effectiveness of nonviolence, analyzing it through the perspective of identity..

Political scientists . . . examined the effectiveness of social movements in countries around the world between the years 1900 and 2006. They compared the success rate of violent versus nonviolent campaigns. Contrary to the intuition that deep changes come about only at the barrel of a gun, they found that over this long period of history, nonviolent campaigns were significantly more successful than violent ones. Whereas violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time, nonviolent ones succeeded about 53 percent of the time! Nonviolence was twice as effective at producing change.

Nonviolence worked for at least two reasons. First, it made movements more attractive to potential supporters, helping them build more inclusive social identities. Nonviolent tactics are perceived as more legitimate, bringing more people into the movement and gaining more support from outsiders. Second, when authorities used violence against nonviolent movements, it tended to backfire, increasing sympathy and support for protesters and activists. This reduced the number of people who identified with the police and increased the number who identified with the protesters.

Allegiances begin to shift. And in places where movements aspire to change regimes—to replace leaders and topple dictators—the allegiances of the security forces themselves are often pivotal. Police officers and members of the military are more likely to shift their loyalties when they are unwilling to take more violent action against peaceful civilians and fellow citizens. Regimes fall when they refuse to do so.

It is critical to note that nonviolent resistance is not passive resistance. Groups pushing for change need to draw attention to their cause. They need headlines. They need to raise consciousness. Often this means civil disobedience, causing a ruckus, breaking the law. We may see people doing things that ordinarily we do not like: spraying graffiti, blocking roads and railway lines, occupying parks and office buildings. These actions are designed not only to challenge people in power, but to get public attention and ultimately change public opinion.

This leads to what Matthew Feinberg and colleagues refer to as “the activist’s dilemma.” Protest actions like blocking highways and vandalizing properties can be effective at applying pressure to institutions and raising awareness, but these same actions may also undermine popular support for social movements. Finding the right balance is critical for instigating effective social change.

The media is also often crucial. Most people do not observe protests or other forms of collective action directly; they hear about them through news outlets. They way that the media frames protest and resistance—whom they define as the “good guys” and the “bad guys”—plays a key role in shaping public opinion. And the media too is responsive to protest tactics. . . . 

 . . . looked at different types of protests during the U.S. civil rights movement and the kinds of headlines that appeared in major newspapers. He found that nonviolent protests were associated with more headlines about civil rights and with greater agreement that civil rights was an important issue in subsequent public opinion polls. Violent protests, in contrast, were associated with more headlines about riots and stronger public endorsement of social control. . . . 

Each person must ask him- or herself these fundamental questions: Which whom do I stand? Whose cause has greater legitimacy? Who is on the side of justice and the moral arc of history? With whom do I identify?

The older I get, the more I believe all politics is a matter of identities. People don't vote for issues; they vote for those they identify with.

They'll say, believe, and do sometimes ridiculous and outrageous things just to display their group affiliations, to "validate" their identity credentials.

Or, choose where they shop for outdoor recreational supplies based on their identities:

That's a random meme that recently came across my feed.

I've long been interested in the work of George Lakoff (I think I first quoted him on this blog in Fiction Is As Essential As Nonfiction in 2009), and he's recently had a moment in the spotlight. His work has always been about the language of group identities in politics.

The Savvy Scientist Helping Democrats Become the Party of Freedom

You wouldn’t consider George Lakoff a likely candidate to save democracy. But what the Harris-Walz campaign owes him is immeasurable.

The repetitive use of the image and message of “freedom” in the Harris-Walz campaign, including in Harris’s video announcing her candidacy, comes directly from Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea.

Lakoff’s book, published in 2007 and republished this year, turns the GOP’s repetitious “patriotic” justification of reactionary policies on its head. . . . 

We cannot overestimate the importance of this rhetorical shift about freedom. After decades of Republicans wrapping themselves in the flag and claiming the mantle of freedom lovers, the Democrats are taking it back by redefining freedom along the lines that Lakoff teaches. . . . 

Another key Lakoffian concept adopted by the Harris-Walz team emphasizes the distinction between the “strict, stern father/misogynist” hierarchy of the Republicans vs. the “nurturant parent model” of the Democrats.

No one could exemplify the latter more as a candidate than Tim Walz, both in his biography and speeches. Lakoff warned me that it would not work to just give a rhetorical nod to the “nurturant parent model.” The Democrats need to offer and build models that exemplify caring and lifting up families and communities across America . . . 

Lakoff said that the way pollsters frame questions may miss voter motivations. He explained that pollsters typically assume that people vote “on the issues and on self-interest. Well, sometimes they do. But mostly they vote on their identity — on persons that they trust to be like them, or to be like people they admire.”

And:

How Democrats Snatched ‘Freedom’ Back from Trump and the Republicans

In 2006, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff published a book to address a striking political development: The quintessentially American concept of “freedom” had recently been commandeered by the right.

“There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews,” he wrote. The traditional view of freedom, as he saw it, was inherently progressive, all about broadening and upholding opportunities and rights for a growing range of Americans. But in the second view, freedom was a way of describing the case *against* this expansion, casting it as an imposition by government against an older libertarian, imperialist, pro-Christian way of life to which we needed to return.

After the patriotic rallying that followed 9/11, freedom became a “frame,” as Lakoff used the term — a metaphor that shapes how we think about things — associated primarily with conservatives. The era gave us Operation Iraqi Freedom and “freedom fries,” renamed to mock the French for their resistance to the invasion, and later the far-right Freedom Caucus in Congress. The effects of hearing this frame over and over were deep. By the time Donald Trump was elected, Democrats had to accept “freedom of religion” as a basis on which to contest same-sex marriage, “freedom to bear arms” as an argument for Americans’ having to live under an omnipresent threat from assault weapons and “freedom from regulation” as a reason to let corporations pollute waterways. To some extent, they ceded the case. When President Joe Biden argued against the Trump agenda this year, he more frequently cited “democracy” as the American value most in peril. . . . 

With decidedly restrictive Republican measures proliferating — bans on emergency abortion care, censorship of topics and books in schools, proposed political loyalty tests for federal bureaucrats, support for autocrats abroad, “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at their convention — the Trump campaign is having a harder time arguing that what they’re proposing is, in fact, freedom. American voters, with their attachment to their votes actually being counted, were mostly not fans of Trump’s refusal to accept election results in 2020 or a potential second loss in 2024. To many, Trump doesn’t sound like an avatar of liberty or self-determination. He sounds like an autocrat.

The overnight reembrace of freedom among Democrats pushes all of that back into its place. What if freedom was, all along, the bending-toward-justice model so many generations of Americans fought for? This reclaimed vision of American liberty fits comfortably with other slogans that have come with Harris’s rise to the top of the ticket. . . . 

Elections are not won on messaging alone. But snatching back the mantle of freedom after nearly a quarter-century suggests that Democrats have, at this late date, found a clear statement of purpose.

I am delighted.

One last, short quote from The Power of Us:

A recent study found that citizens’ faith in their governments tends to decline when the internet arrives. In Europe, the expansion of internet access was linked to increases in votes for antiestablishment populist parties.

That leads to another book I read recently, just as good and important, though I'm going to spend less time on it. Here's my brief review of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher.

“Someday, I bet we'll all be social media unicorns and walk around with phones on our foreheads.”

As I listened to the audio production of The Chaos Machine, I read that sentence in a book for kids written around the same time, Tangled Up in Luck by Merrill Wyatt. It seemed fitting, that depiction of kids doing what Fisher warns us about in his book, live streaming their activities to social media. He depicts many such instances and, unlike in that story, the destructive real-life outcomes that resulted.

Nothing in Fisher's book is unfamiliar, as everything he writes about has been widely covered in the news and debated for years. What makes it so valuable is the way he has compiled it all into one narrative, connecting and synthesizing and analyzing events with deep research. How, in situations time and again, in different locations around the world, over the course of years, the same dynamics have played out. How social media's inherent design to promote engagement feeds on aspects of human nature that lead to polarization and extremes. The tools, particularly the AI algorithms, support and even build tribal identities that fracture societies.

This is important knowledge that everyone needs to have. We're probably not going to stop using social media anytime soon, if ever, but we should do so with eyes wide open, fully aware of how it tries to manipulate and shape us. This is a book everyone should read.

The book is an in-depth, comprehensive consideration of how the core design of social media tools is based on connecting people through identities--sometimes ones the tools create out of thin air--and making those identities ever more extreme and divisive, with very real-world consequences.

The Power of Us says:

Social motives and beliefs can outweigh the desire for accuracy, causing people to be overly credulous when it comes to identity-affirming information. We have conducted several studies in which we found that people tend to believe positive stories about their in-groups and negative stories about out-groups, no matter how dubious the information may be.

That is the essence of social media.

So I was delighted when our nine-year-old recently read aloud this bit of a restaurant's activity placemat . . . 

Grown ups: Share your artist's masterpiece on Instagram and be sure to tag us.

 . . . then said, "They're just trying to make themselves popular. It's so obvious." A media literacy win.

One of the last times I got sucked into debating politics on social media--years ago, so this is paraphrased from vague memory--when I told him I disagreed he challenged me with something like: "Convince me I'm wrong. Bring your best argument so I can respect your intellect. Destroy me."

"But I don't want to destroy you," I responded. "I want to understand you. We're both represented by the same government and we need to figure out how it can represent both of our values and identities."

Don't feed trolls, don't get sucked into debates, never read the comments. Find ways to advocate your positions without demonizing the opposition. Verify your facts, don't belittle, tell your own stories. Fill your feed with your humanity and look for the humanity in the others you follow. Look to understand, not destroy.

Two short definitions from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Anaphasia

n. the fear that your society is breaking apart into factions that have nothing left in common with each other—each defending their own set of values, referring to their own cult figures, speaking in their own untranslatable language.

From anaphase, the stage in cell division when sister chromatids are pulled apart to opposite sides of the cell + aphasia, the inability to comprehend or formulate language due to brain dysfunction. Pronounced “an-uh-fey-zhah.”

And:

Hemeisis

n. the off-putting awareness of how deeply your culture’s norms are ingrained in your psyche—arbitrarily defining what you find shameful and admirable, private and communal, attractive and repulsive, fair and unfair—as if you’d been programmed in a way that you can’t control or even perceive, until you happen to encounter someone who has slightly different code.

Ancient Greek ἡμεῖς (hēmeîs), we (excluding the listener). Pronounced “hem-ey-sis.”

You've been programmed in a way that you can't control or even perceive.

I've read one other book recently that flows into the "us" theme: Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions by Batja Mesquita. My review:

A fascinating and stimulating book that proposes a shift in how we think about emotions.

Humans are naturally social and every one of us is socialized by our parents and others who surround us from the moment we are born. We learn what's expected of us to get along with others. Those expectations change from culture to culture, are different depending on the setting and context. A part of that socialization is learning how to "do" emotions. We all start with the same emotional potential, but what develops is determined by our situations. Not simply how we act, but how we feel. Mesquita makes a convincing case that our emotions don't originate inside of us and move out into the world, but are created in our social interactions, in the space "between us," and move outside in.

She concludes by considering the ramifications of such a conclusion, how the fact of different cultures having different emotions can create issues--and offers solutions for resolving such issues.

This is a thoroughly researched and documented case laid out meticulously by an expert, extensively illustrated by anecdotes from her lifetime of work in this field. Highly recommended.

And extensive excerpts:

Our brains and bodies do not come pre-wired for certain emotions, but they do prepare us each to have emotions that maximally serve us in respective social and material lives--emotions that are adjusted to our communities and cultures. In the most up-to-date science, nature is no longer contrasted with nurture: it is equipped for nurture. Our brains are dynamically wired through our experiences in specific social and emotional contexts, and this brain plasticity allows us to live in particular communities. It is our nature to be social--to make meanings and act with others in our social world. The wiring of emotions happens through experience and learning. Different experiences make for different emotions.

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MINE emotions: Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist (the latter meaning that they always have the same properties).

OURS emotions: OUtside the person, Relational, and Situated (the latter meaning that emotions take different shapes depending on the situation in which they take place).

There is a real cultural difference in the locus of emotions as either inside, in feelings, internal sensations, and bodily symptoms, or outside, in actions, the relationships with other people, and the situation.

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We raise our children to be good adults in our communities: adults who live their lives according to cultural norms, values, and expectations. Having the right emotions is an important part of being a good adult. In each culture, caregivers teach their children the emotions that support the cultural and social norms and values. Having these emotions makes you part of your culture. . . . 

We experience such emotions as pride, shame, fear, love amae, omoiyari, calm, and excitement because they are instilled in us by our parents and other cultural agents. Rather than emerging from someplace deep within us, these emotions have been conditioned by recurrent experiences within our cultures. . . . Becoming part of a culture, any culture, means to have OURS emotions--not exclusively MINE.

Emotions remain OURS into adulthood. The fabric of our emotions is woven into our interactions with others. These interactions account for how we feel and act.

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In each culture, certain emotions are right and others are wrong. Right emotions help to foster relationships that are valued in the culture and wrong emotions support condemned forms of relating. Right emotions are culturally encouraged and rewarded, and wrong emotions are culturally avoided and punished. This is, very simply speaking, the logic of cultural differences in emotions. Cultural differences in emotions owe their logic to an OURS model of emotions--to what they do in our social and cultural worlds.

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Emotions like anger and shame do something in the relationship with others. Anger is a claim for dominance, which is “right” in cultures that emphasize entitlement and individual autonomy, right in cultures where people compete for the scarce good of honor, but “wrong” in cultures that emphasize kindness for all living creatures or harmonious relationships. Shame is a bid for inclusion, typically (though not always) by submission. This is right in cultures valuing the interdependence of people, but wrong in cultures that value independence and assertion. Right shame can take the form of propriety, or it can come with assertive claims for respect and precedence; wrong shame can be marked by hiding from sight and hoping others won’t notice you too much. Emotions are prevalent when they are right and rare when they are wrong.

Is anger a healthy ingredient of every relationship? Is shame a self-destructive emotion? The answer is: it depends. When the emotion is right by your culture, it is healthy; when it is wrong, it is often unhealthy. . . . Those emotions that help to achieve sociocultural goals are associated with higher subjective wellbeing and greater health. People who have emotions that are more typical for the average person in their culture also report greater subjective well-being. When we have emotions that support our cultural values, we feel better and we even do better.

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Love is an invention of societies that are organized around autonomous individuals; it is needed less in societies where the relationship networks are unquestioned and permanent. It is no coincidence that love is so central in modern child-rearing: in WEIRD ["Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic"] cultures where we raise our children for independence, we need to assure them that we as parents stay close, because they are so special. As indispensable as it new seems to healthy child development, it has not always been the “right” emotion in the relationship between parents and children.

“I love you” is a fairly modern invention, but human relationships are not. No human being lives by themselves: we all need and value social relationships. But the “right” emotions, the emotions that regulate those relationships to the needs of the social context, are different. Love is right in an individualistic culture, where autonomous individuals seek to connect. Amae and fago may be the right emotions in collectivist cultures where relationship partners seek to meet each other’s needs. In cultures where strong ties exist and people are inherently interconnected, individuals may be more focused on limiting the burden on themselves, or avoiding the burden on others. It cannot be ruled out that some form of love occurs in these cultures as well, but love is not “right” in the same way as it is in WEIRD cultures.

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We should move away from a model of culture as something outside ourselves that imposes norms on the natural emotions that we have. Instead, we should recognize how we constantly enact culture in our everyday interactions, and how these interactions scaffold our emotional lives.

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Ironically, it may the difficulty of recognizing that linguistic equivalents do not refer to the same “emotions” that clouds our understanding of the emotions of a person from another culture. Having translations available, even imperfect ones, may seduce us to think that deep inside people from other cultures have the “same emotions.” It is this same difficulty that may account for the reluctance of many scientists to recognize cultural differences in emotions.

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We cannot understand the emotions of others unless we try to adopt their frame of reference. We need to understand the emotions of the Ta-Nehisis, Didis, and Ahmets of this world, by considering them within their social and cultural environment, and the goals they have for their relationships.

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It is hard to belong when you do not do emotions like the people around you. When your emotions are tied to a different OURS than the emotions of the people around you, you may not be well attuned to your emotional dance partners, and you may step on each other’s toes. . . . 

The reality of modern societies is that we come together as people from different cultural backgrounds (and different positions). We know that it takes more than a lifetime to grow new emotions--if that is even the goal. In the meantime, we coinhabit our organizations, our schools, and our neighborhoods. We meet as colleagues, neighbors, and citizens, but also as teachers and students, doctors and patients, therapists and clients, and bosses and employees. In all of these relationships, cultural differences in emotions may be the source of subtle misconceptions, even if we are not necessarily aware of them. In intercultural relationships, our emotions may act at cross-purposes . . . When some of us are in positions of power--as is the case with teachers, doctors, therapists, managers--our misunderstandings may hurt others’ chances. In those cases, emotions become invisible gatekeepers. If we don’t want that to happen, we need to look into ways of understanding emotions across cultures.

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In unpacking episodes, it is also important to check what emotions other people perceive--in themselves or in others--and what these emotions mean in the situation. People may describe the episode by one or more words or by expressions. The point is to understand how they conceptualize their own emotions, including what the emotion means to them in a particular instance. You cannot stop at a word if you want to unpack the episode: translations of emotion words are rough at best (chapter 6), and may have very different connotations and implications.

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I am very certain that I will never be able to make a go-to reference manual on cultural differences in emotions; nor will anybody else. To grasp the absurdity of the task, ask yourself: How would I deal with the emotions of a Dutch person, any Dutch person? (Substitute, as you wish, “Catholic Irish American,” “white American from Boston,” “Japanese from Tokyo,” . . . for “Dutch.”) What emotions do they have? How to understand these emotions? What do these emotions look like in behavior? The answers to those questions would all depend on who the Dutch person is, what their history is, their gender and position in society, their specific predicaments. It depends on what they as an individual specifically care about at that moment, what the relational context is, and what specifically is at stake. It will also depend on whom they are interacting with, and what these people’s responses are.

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Yes, emotions differ across cultures in many different ways. At the same time, it is possible to relate to other people’s emotions once you meet them on their terms, once you humanize them.

What is important in their lives? What kind of person do they want to be? What do they want from their social relationships? Or how are they constrained by these relationships? These are some of the questions that help you to unpack emotional episodes. My experience is that it is often easy to resonate with emotions, once unpacked, even if you realize they are incongruent with the ones you encounter in your life. It happens by seeing that people in other cultures are as human as the people in our own, having their own goals, and their own compelling concerns, which are sometimes different from the ones we are used to. It happens when you see how their ongoing social interactions and relationships afford different kinds of emotional episodes than the interactions and relationships in your life do. It happens when you realize that their dance is a different one than you are used to doing in your social environment. It happens when you realize their emotions are OURS, just as your emotions are.

That's almost an abridgment of sorts, as it captures her main arguments and takes you through the arc of her book.

The crux (TLDR) being: people with other identities will have different emotions than you, but you can understand them if you take the time to understand their identities.

One other, more specific quote from Between Us. The older I've gotten, the more I've come to believe in a parenting style similar to the one Mesquita describes from Japan:

In Japan, a young child is assumed to initially feel amae, which is a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver, usually their mom. Amae is recognized by the Japanese as an emotion. Mothers accept their child’s amae, and show them omoiyari, or empathy, in return. They indulge their child in ways that, to a Western eye, verge on spoiling, giving in to the child’s every wish. In doing so, they model the very emotion that they ultimately want their child to display: omoiyari. Omoiyari “refers to the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure and pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes.” The emotion is at the very center of the harmonious relatedness that is culturally valued in Japan.

Japanese mothers instill omoiyari in their child by embodying this emotion. While at first children are not expected to show any omoiyari themselves, over time the mother will encourage them to take her point of view, and help them to be sensitive to her feelings. Rather than telling the child what to do, Japanese mothers wait until the child is motivated to voluntarily follow the social rules in order to meet her expectations. Modeling and instilling omoiyari requires patience on the part of the mother, but is thought of as the only way to prepare a child for their adult role: taking the perspective of others, meetings one’s role expectations, and avoiding causing others any trouble. Perspective taking makes a person ponder about how they can improve to better meet others’ expectations, and to persevere and overcome externally encountered adversities.

The idea that omoiyari has to be cultivated, but cannot be forced onto kids until they are ready, prevails in Japanese preschool practices.

Calm, grace, unconditional acceptance, empathy, and understanding.

Of course, coming from the culture I do, I fail at modeling these as often as I succeed. Nevertheless, they are my goals.

Since I touched on politics and current events above, here's a recent article about how to use identity destructively.

‘Unhumans’: J.D. Vance and the Language of Genocide

J.D. Vance has enthusiastically promoted a book that uses genocidal language to stoke hatred toward both liberals and progressives.

Unhumans, by right-wing conspiracy theorists Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, offers a sinister thesis: Progressive-minded Americans are not humans. Instead, they are "communists." In turn, the authors define communists as bloodthirsty "unhumans" hellbent on the destruction of civilization.

Right-wingers, they write, must stop these unhumans with a policy of “exact reciprocity.” This means doing exactly to these so-called unhumans what the authors claim the unhumans are planning to do to them.

The 283-page screed reads like an effort to incite a civil war. It strains to create a sense of urgent terror in its readers. On nearly every page, it demonizes and dehumanizes “the left”– a vaguely defined group that apparently includes journalists (“the unhuman-occupied media”) and people who believe in things like diversity, equity, social justice and the rule of law. The definition is so broad that it seems most Democrats would qualify as unhumans. . . . 

J.D. Vance considers it an essential guide.

“In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags,” he wrote in a promotional blurb. “Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.” . . . 

Rebranding liberals and/or progressives as unhumans is the main goal of the book, and such dehumanizing language has often preceded genocidal behavior.

In Rwanda, the Hutus systematically stripped the Tutsis of their human identity by calling them “cockroaches” and “snakes” long before the massacres began. The Nazis did the same in Germany, depicting Jews as demons and vultures.

"Students of 20th century history will also recognize this pattern of dehumanizing language in the lead-up to the genocide committed by the Turks against Armenians, where Armenians were 'dangerous microbes,'" wrote William A. Donohue, a communications professor at Michigan State University, in 2019. "During the the Holocaust, Germans described Jews as 'Untermenschen,' or subhumans."

Name-calling is hardly a new trend in American politics. But the adoption of overtly genocidal language is a dangerous escalation. Creating an "out" group to persecute and punish is also a hallmark of fascism. And when you strip your opponents of their very humanity, you can justify any action taken against them.

"When we see people as less than human, as monsters, it feels less wrong to do horrible things to them," wrote Robinson, who interviewed philosopher David Livingstone Smith, an expert on dehumanization. "This is a seemingly obvious point, but Smith argues that it’s not obvious, because perfectly normal, moral people don’t notice themselves doing it. Dehumanization is, Smith argues, one of the most dangerous tendencies there is, because of what it implicitly licenses." . . . 

And a counterpoint:

Opinion: Embracing ‘Good Conflict’ After Assassination Attempt

We cannot ignore the fact that there are deep, fundamental divisions around where Americans want the United States to go. We should not paper over those divides. We need to embrace them.

I would argue that we need more conflict, not less. But we should aspire to a better kind of conflict, one that allows Americans to share what we’re angry about, discuss our differences and look for opportunities to find unexpected connections. . . . 

Every conflict has an understory — deeper, seldom-mentioned concerns that get at what people are really fighting about. Conflicts that appear to be about one thing are often about something else entirely, such as who’s in power or control, closeness and care, who is gaining or losing respect and recognition, or feelings of stress and despair. . . . 

Getting out of high conflict usually involves getting just a bit more open to understanding where the other side is coming from. We then become curious and can see that what’s going on is more complex than we thought. Instead of contempt or disgust, we let ourselves feel anger and sadness. Our reactions get less predictable, and we find ourselves more capable of surprise. . . . 

But there are barriers that keep us from moving in that direction. When one side feels like it’s being forced to accept humiliation, when public trust in institutions crumbles, when everything gets boiled down to us versus them, it pushes us away from being able to wrestle with ambiguity and nuance. And there are always fire starters — the trainers call them “conflict entrepreneurs” — who exploit resentment to advance their own agendas. . . . 

We have some choices: To see our political opponents as villains and ourselves as victims or heroes. To circle the wagons around our in-group to protect ourselves from what scares, threatens or disgusts us. Or, make it safe for those with whom we disagree to speak and participate. 

Sustaining a democracy is inherently messy. . . . 

"Different" doesn't have to mean "wrong."

On a different note, I recently came across this essay.

How Redefining Happiness Can Transform Your Life

For the last ten years, one question has consumed me: What is a better definition of happiness? As I read thousands of academic studies and hundreds of books by philosophers and theologians and artists and leaders, I traced two threads that appeared again and again: You need to be yourself, and you need to give of yourself. . . . 

Studies show that using your unique strengths makes you feel happier, helps you grow, and offers a venue for self-expression. People who are connected to others live longer, happier lives. Integrating the two leads to a sense of meaning and purpose makes an impact on the world and provides you with the feeling that your life matters.

Here was the answer to my question: To be happy, discover who you are, and share yourself in ways that help other people.

To be happy, discover who you are, and share yourself in ways that help other people.

Finally, a poem.

Uma Menon

GHAZAL OF AND

after Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Sometimes, in school, I felt lonely thinking about conjunctions and

commas. The sentence ended before I knew it, but I wanted and.

 

What is more beautiful than the place where two strangers meet?

Like seaweed washed ashore, I birth a sigh when I touch the sand.

 

I call too many places home, feel guilty for it. I want to be

faithful to one. Or maybe, instead, I want to stop loving land.

 

My mother used to tell me that good things come in threes.

Maybe she’s right. I wonder if she’s looking for a third hand.

 

When one leg moves, the other must, too. I want more freedom

than this. I relapse in the space between where my two feet stand.

 

Some nights, I want to listen quietly to friends who say nothing.

To be human is to want paradox. Two poles connected by and.

 

—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

AND (not OR)

Expand your identities.