We can't give up now!

John A Powell

We hear it whispered that our cherished American experiment in democracy – which we used to be so proud of – will soon go belly up. Neersaysers say that either our rapidly rising national debt will bankrupt us or that newly powerful nations like China will crush us.   

But, to me, the biggest danger to our survival is our raging cultural wars, which are destroying us from within – the same way an autoimmune disorder destroys the human body from the inside out.

I’m acutely aware of how important the human body is right now after recently returning home from Concord Hospital, where they magically replaced a faulty valve in my heart through a catheter, sending me home the very next day. My recuperation is a powerful reminder that a person is pretty useless without a healthy body, just as a country can’t fight itself out of a paper bag if it is divided against itself.

 Thirty years ago, the sociologist James Hunter came up with the term “cultural war” to describe this widening societal divide that is turning neighbors into enemies. Since then, the situation has worsened so much that he has written a new book warning us how “culture wars have so thoroughly poisoned American politics that they’ve  made authoritarianism dangerously attractive to too many.”^⁠1

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, NH was already starting to divide into camps, but I was still able to talk to acquaintances on the other side of the divide, engaging in amiable conversations about politics as if we were talking about which is better, a Chevy or a Ford. My arguments didn’t gain any converts, but I didn’t hate my opponents, and they didn’t hate me.

Hunter notes that such exchanges, even though they didn’t change minds, were valuable in enabling each side to view each other as fellow citizens, not the enemy. Now that has changed: Nothing is a laughing matter; everything has taken on life or death importance, as Hunter notes:

“America's culture wars have metastasized so that many groups believe they are in a maximalist battle against their own extinction. Whether it's far-right [white nationalists] panicking over the declining white birth rate, or academic theorists popularizing the belief that words are violence...”

We are increasingly viewing each other no longer as neighbors but as enemies. The gap is becoming unbridgeable. In this new cult of the individual, old community guidelines and aspirations have been trampled in the dirt.

We are exhausted from the continuing rancor and distrust while bracing ourselves, after the results of the election, for more hard times ahead. Enough is enough. Under the circumstances, it would be tempting to roll over and give up. But we can’t. There is more at stake than we realize.

What our founding fathers held dear was the  Latin phrase embedded in our national motto, E pluribus unum, which translates to “out of many, one.” According to Hunter, this was the “founding aspiration and glue that holds our country together.” A crucial part of this agreement that makes Democracy work is  “that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead, we’ll talk through those differences.”^⁠2

The key phrase is “we will talk through our differences.”

Throughout history around the world, there has never been a civil war that didn’t start as a culture war. To forestall that possibility, we have to regain the fortitude and discipline to work through difficult issues in a responsible manner without flagrant lies and grandstanding.

Throughout our history, we have a decent track record in bridging our differences democratically, except, of course, for our Civil War. That exception led to the unimaginable slaughter of 620,000 of our fellow Americans, our own flesh and blood.

Tragically, we are approaching that danger zone once again as politicians like Trump delight in dividing us one against the other, paralyzing our democratic way of life, and replacing it with a transactional society where the person in power always wins; you know that  person: the one, screaming in your ear, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ 

It’s time for calmer heads to prevail. 

I recommend “The Power of Bridging” by John A. Powell, a law professor and civil rights advocate. It is “an insightful and moving exploration of belonging, bridging, and interconnectedness, challenging readers to embrace empathy and understanding in a world where everyone deserves to feel valued and accepted.”^⁠3 

Powell makes one feel as if you are in the presence of Ganghi, as you can appreciate listening to this interview: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101907966/john-a-powell-on-polarization-and-the-power-of-bridging.

xxx

¹ https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/08/09/culture-wars-james-davison-hunter-politics

² https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/05/20/culture-war-politics-2021-democracy-analysis-489900

³ https://www.amazon.com/Power-Bridging-Build-World-Belong-ebook/dp/B0D12W25YY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3754IUHSQKGN4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.vFoJ4QWnWak1ifLbpz6N-H5-u5qJkvZZbLlyxG-Iw2kRU6vKENiTaPhBnyzC-9afOS-3k6kQ1OES4qGJ7vizaOpHiFy7Syoyqv_EbvsPo5Z1tjDIcRgDGIjNaPYNmRirJ9krKK7-pD4ISVotya8U8tv0fsrRxbjjz_oP_U9fcTUJd2Ee0UvbNtevDlb5biyZAz70NATVXhL4r7qsjaLjazATyW73wu6rTTq_BYqdnzY.5velM9ggHV9-5htpr4vVirEC7cRLZ7_PMbvFnPXKxvo&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+power+of+bridging&qid=1737258282&s=books&sprefix=the+power+of+bridging%2Cstripbooks%2C111&sr=1-1

Photo credit: www.johnapowell.org

 

What's happening to our mojo?

I’ve always had a terrible sense of direction, and with the advent of smartphones and  GPS, it’s gotten worse. In the past, to avoid getting lost, I had to pay close attention to the physical landmarks along the way. 

That’s a long-winded way of saying I had to be mindful, aware of what I saw as it whizzed by my windshield: the picturesque decaying barn on the hill, the adorable little girl with the big backpack waiting for the school bus, a ray of light illuminating the church steeple in a spiritual glow…

Now, I only have to program in my destination and then zone out in a high-tech slumber, robotically following Siri’s directions: “Stay in the center lane, take a right at the next light, proceed to the route.” It’s like time travel: Getting in my car is now like entering Dr. Who’s phone booth — like magic, I find myself transported to my destination with no recollection of how I got there.

I feel like I’ve been shortchanged: 

Eliminating my self-directed quest to plan my route deprives me of the satisfaction of plotting my own course through life, making me utterly dependent on technology that’s a foreign language to me. It makes me feel more like an autotom and, regrettably, less of a human being.

It’s not just when I’m driving. 

While I don’t get an endorphin high shopping in a supermarket, I throb with a surge of well-being whenever I work in my garden, even if I’m just pulling up weeds. In the same way, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction when I cook a good meal rather than going out, a real sense of mastery when I successfully complete even a minor home repair, or the sense of accomplishment I feel admiring the walkway I just shoveled.

But, sadly, every way we turn, new labor-saving devices are encroaching on us, determined to immobilize us, turning us into couch potatoes as sedentary as our houseplants. Rather than taking a chance of breaking out in a sweat, we have recently fallen for a new breed of mechanical aids like high-tech vacuum cleaners that suck by themselves. 

Rather than using the time saved by these labor-saving devices to practice new skills like cooking, gardening, or home repair, we choose, instead, to spend big money on spas and gyms, which, sadly, only makes us feel worse when we discover that we can’t magically grow perfect bodies like we see advertised on TV.

Worse news is on the horizon: Elon Musk is designing robotic personal assistants in the shape and size of real human beings, which are anticipated to make their debut in 2026. They will take care of everything – probably even sex – so that we never again have to get out of bed.^⁠1

It all leads to the question: What are human beings good for? What is our purpose? Is it just to shop until we drop or marathon-watch every new series on Netflix? The key question is, where is our agency? That’s according to  L.M. Sacasas, in his substack post “Life Cannot Be Delegated.”^⁠2  

He cites Lewis Momford’s definition of what makes a person’s life full and whole: it is one “in which we might find meaning, purpose, satisfaction, and an experience of personal integrity. This form of life cannot be delegated because, by its very nature, it requires our whole-person involvement.”^⁠3

What makes life memorable and indelible is what we choose to pursue whole-heartedly with total body and soul involvement, “not through technologically mediated distraction and escapism.^⁠4”

Full-person involvement has a spiritual component, as Rainer Maria Rilke gently reminds us: Not only is it the only way to self-actualize, but it’s also the path to finding God– using whatever name we might choose to label the pinnacle of life.

“Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor;
it thinks us out of our world.”^⁠5

xxx

Illustration credit: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-robots-are-entering-the-public-worldwith-mixed-results-4ff8d11a

¹ https://www.mountbonnell.info/elons-austin/elon-musks-humanoid-robot-the-game-changer-set-to-transform-everyday-life-by-2026

² https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/life-cannot-be-delegated?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6980&post_id=153663623&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ktp62&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid

⁵ https://www.lauriedoctor.com/musings/2020/8/18/only-in-our-doing-can-we-grasp-you-rilke 

Hope isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice

 

A transactional ethos has overtaken our land. We can see its most extreme form in Donald Trump. We also see it blatantly showcased, not only by greedy plutocrats but by the titans of high-tech, many of which now pledge allegiance to Trump.

These titans aspire not to make things better on Earth but to build massive rocketships to send colonists to impregnate new virgin planets after we have wantonly raped this one.

Trump anointed two of these titans, Musk and Ramaswamy, to be his efficiency czars, tasked with cutting two billion from our budget. They regard themselves as superior beings, dismissive of both their fellow humans and Earth itself.

We are in big trouble!

Neo-Nazis are marching in our streets to support Trump’s agenda of  ‘might make right.’ Ethics will no longer matter, making the notion of right and wrong seem quaint. Nothing will have innate worth, specialness, or sacredness since everything from now on will be transactional. The only thing that matters will be whether you can be useful to the supreme ruler.

Viktor Frankl, survival of the Nazi concentration camps and author of the perennial best-seller, “Man’s Search for Meaning, “ has persuasively argued that the final end result of transactional thinking is death camps. He explained that when a society’s value system is based solely on an individual’s usefulness, then it is inconsistent “not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.^⁠1

Trump typifies this model, disparaging our soldiers who die in defense of our country as ’suckers and losers,’ and telling his nephew, Fred, that people with certain types of severe disabilities “should just die.”^⁠2

Conversely, Frankl, following in our best humanistic tradition, asserts that a person’s value is based not on crass transactions but on our innate dignity and rests on “the unconditional value of each and every person.” With Trump’s election, We must all stand up and defend our sovereign rights.

Time and time again, we hear people say: “But I had no choice.” However, based on his experience in the death camps, Frankl maintains that there is always one final freedom. We can choose our attitude towards events. 

Dr Stephen Covey, who was influenced by Frankl, reiterates this truth, stating that our ability to change and how we react to what happens to us is a function of choice: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”^⁠3

As Americans, we face a choice of surrendering, which is what MAGA is counting on, or rising up to defend our dignity and welfare– along with those of our fellow citizens.  We must hold on to hope that is strong and sturdy, as in the way ‘prairie mystic” Carrie  Newcomer defines it: Hope is not a feeling; it is a choice.^⁠4

In the end,  it is up to us.

As Frankl wrote in a postscript to “Man’s Search for Meaning” in 1984:

“For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense:

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.^⁠5”

xxx

Photo Credit:

A photo I took of the sculpture by the African artist Chuke: “Statue of Limitations” (2018) Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA

Footnotes:

¹ Frankl, Viktor E. “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (postscript to Man’s Search for Meaning). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984

² https://www.justsecurity.org/98261/disability-think-differently-trump/

³ Pattakos, Alex., and Dundon, E. (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work, 3rd edition. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

⁴ https://carrienewcomer.substack.com/p/hope-ishope-is-not/comments

⁵ Frankl, Viktor E. “The Case for a Tragic Optimism” (postscript to Man’s Search for Meaning). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984

What mattered in our election was not an intelligent strategy but catering to primal urges

 

I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ‘50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist.

That’s not just my opinion.

 

Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.“ “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”^⁠1

I rebelled: I wanted freedom!

I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through him, I discovered – beneath my button-down, crew-cut-shorn, prudish existence –  a subterranean world of primal drives, clarifying everything the ’50s considered taboo. Freud snapped the chains that confined me, changing life into an adventure rather than a gulag experience.

He also piqued my interest in psychology, leading me to Columbia, where my excitement was dashed. In true 1950s fashion, academia banished Freud in favor of experimental psychology. Rather than studying people, we conducted animal experiments with white rats and then expected to magically extrapolate our rat data to humans. 

I dropped out of Columbia because the chains had tightened around me again: The rats lost, Freud won.  You might say that Freud greased the skids that launched me into the ‘60s, but only after a heart-rending detour to Vietnam.

The 1960s liberated not only me but our country, overthrowing the age-old conservative mandate of patriarchy, white man rule, and missionary-only sex; In its place, we advocated equal rights for all.

Unfortunately, our cultural revolution produced a vicious backlash, accelerating after the election of our first black president and coming to a head today. Unprecedented social change at whiplash speed was too much for the old guard.  Conservatives called the 1960s a “crisis in democracy.” This was an Orwellian phrase that meant the opposite: they were livid because we had too much democracy.

Over the intervening years, Democrats contributed to the problem by overplaying their hand, ignoring 70% of their base, white, working folks, and instead catered too much to special interest groups, no matter how valid their claims. 

Brewing inside this combustible mix, a counter-revolution was gaining momentum.

Traditionalists and increasing numbers of the working class, along with the business class, gathered under the Republican banner, asserting they were the silent majority, promoting biblical religion, punitive justice, and white supremacy while railing against homosexuals, abortions – and, god forbid, trans people. At first, Republicans hid their intentions by using dog whistles or coded language to speak to their base without promoting outrage.

That is until Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator, ditching code words to point-blank call a spade a spade: Mexicans are rapists, blacks come from shit-hole countries, democrats are communists, and women are nasty with blood coming out of their wherever. NY Times columnist Ezra Klein considers this disinhibition to be “the engine of Trump’s success.”^⁠2

The fact that Trump is reveling in the primal dregs of his unconscious is a sure indication that Freud’s concept of the irrational unconscious is back in vogue. Then, as now, regular folks are yearning for freedom, triggered by existing in a stifling, bureaucratic world with no agency. Of course, Trump eggs them on,  yearning to be their pied piper.

Psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart has accused liberals of ignoring the crucial importance of irrational drives to fuel mass political movements – drives first identified by Freud: “Proponents of progressive ideals must instead take the reality of aggression, racism, and sadomasochism seriously as enduring political feelings, including in their own ranks, that require constructive political redress,” 

Rather than surrendering to these primal feelings, as the Republicans have done, it’s up to Democrats and Independents to promote politics that restrain and redirect these urges. The first step  is “to stop vainly demanding that people be more reasonable.”  That’s like Nancy Reagan’s solution to drug addiction, which was to just say no. 

The truth is people aren’t always reasonable.  As Freud showed us – each of us has destructive, irrational desires swirling around our cranium, always primed to pounce. 

In the ‘60s, we channeled our unconscious rage by breaking free of the Puritan ‘50s and speaking truth to power about military overreach, patriarchy, and rampant discrimination against all who were not white. Now, Trump is doing the opposite by speaking power to truth.

Trump is channeling our primal distress at being unmoored and over-regulated to mount a counter-revolution against the ’60s. ‘Make America Great Again’ is a code word for a return to ‘the good old days’ of slavish conformity, misogyny, and blatant discrimination aggressively enforced by rich, white men.

Personally, I prefer the Sixties. How about you?

xxx

¹ https://s-usih.org/2016/11/trump-out-of-the-shadows-of-the-sixties-social-movements/

² https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/11/maga-trump-psychological-appeal/680722/