What’s the explanation? What researchers think is going on, Vedantam said, is this:
When experiences feel good that’s usually a signal that they have served some kind of evolutionary purpose—so the brain evolved to find certain kinds of food tasty because eating those foods had survival value for our ancestors.
As a social species, being part of a group has survival value. Evolution also may have adapted the brain to experience a sense of reward when we did things with and for other people—dancing together especially in synchrony can signal that you’re actually simpatico with lots of other people. The researchers think this is why so many cultures have synchronized dancing and why it might have health benefits.
In an interview I did with the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, he instinctively echoed that finding: “We have such a fascination with new medicines and new cures, but if you think about it, compassion and love are our oldest medicines and they have been around for millennia. When you practice medicine you learn very quickly how much they are a part of the healing process.”
I have no illusions about how difficult scaling that kind of medicine is—or how many people will still be inclined to run away from the all and seek shelter as the other. The European Union was born out of a realization that after rivalries and tribal hatreds ignited two world wars, Europeans would be better off acting as a “common market.” But that insight seems to be wearing off lately—see the British vote to exit the EU. And it’s not only happening there. In the Middle East, a place that I have covered as a reporter/columnist my whole adult life, Israelis and Palestinians, Shiites and Sunnis, Iraqis and Iraqis, Syrians and Syrians are running, not walking, in the wrong direction. And, most sadly, many of them know it.
As I was completing this book, on May 2, 2016, The New York Times carried a story from Syria about the horrors of life there after five years of civil war. At the end, it quoted a mosque caretaker in Damascus, Salim al-Rifai, eighty-five, as saying that even the worst calamities did not last forever and “this, too, will pass.” But before it could pass, Mr. Rifai added, his countrymen needed to change: “We need to believe in God and do what he asks of us,” he said. “And we need to help each other to be human again.”
When 250,000 people are killed in a civil war, roughly one-tenth of a country’s population, it is safe to say that Syrians forgot how to be human in Syria. That is true of a lot of people in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, the Congo, Rwanda, Ukraine, and Bosnia as well—way too many of them reached a point where they hated each other more than they loved their own children. That is what forgetting how to be human actually looks like. It means killing another person on the basis of their sect, their religion, or the hometown listed on their ID card or revealed by their accent, even knowing that it means sowing seeds of hatred that will burn the very ground under all their children’s feet and their future. It is the opposite of building community.
There are countertrends worth noting. For instance, on April 22, 2016, Earth Day, world leaders from 175 countries signed the Paris climate agreement. While that agreement achieved the lowest common denominator of self-imposed emission constraints, it was impossible to ignore how high that lowest common denominator had become. Nothing as global as this long-sought accord to slow the dangerous rise of greenhouse gases had ever been reached before. Indeed, it may be this challenge from Mother Nature’s acceleration that finally gets humanity to shift its thinking from the other to the all. There is no better example of the choice we now have to either destroy everyone or fix everything than the choice of whether we rise to the challenge of climate change or not, noted Hal Harvey. With the steady drop in the price of renewable energy and efficiency, “it now costs the same to destroy the climate or save it,” said Harvey. “The price is basically the same, but at the micro scale there will be different winners and losers.” Coal and oil companies and traditional utilities will lose out. Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and efficient and distributed energy purveyors will win. “At the macro scale, though, the whole world will win or the whole planet will lose. The impact will hit every generation going forward and will not respect national boundaries in the least.”
It is our call. To repeat what President Obama said at Hiroshima: “We can tell our children a different story.” And we must. And it is not naïve. It is strategic. And it is a job for everyone—parents and politicians, teachers and spiritual leaders, neighbors and friends. If you’re looking for a story to start with, I can recommend the one told by the rabbi at my home synagogue, Kol Shalom, in Maryland, Jonathan Maltzman, as his opening sermon on the Jewish New Year in 2015. It went like this:
A rabbi once asked his students: “How do we know when the night has ended and the day has begun?” The students thought they grasped the importance of this question. There are, after all, prayers and rites and rituals that can only be done at nighttime. And there are prayers and rites and rituals that belong only to the day. So, it is important to know how we can tell when night has ended and day has begun.
So the first and brightest of the students offered an answer: “Rabbi, when I look out at the fields and I can distinguish between my field and the field of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A second student offered his answer: “Rabbi, when I look from the fields and I see a house, and I can tell that it’s my house and not the house of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A third student offered another answer: “Rabbi, when I see an animal in the distance, and I can tell what kind of animal it is, whether a cow or a horse or a sheep, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” Then a fourth student offered yet another answer: “Rabbi, when I see a flower and I can make out the colors of the flower, whether they are red or yellow or blue, that’s when night has ended and day has begun.
Each answer brought a sadder, more severe frown to the rabbi’s face. Until finally he shouted, “No! None of you understands! You only divide! You divide your house from the house of your neighbor, your field from your neighbor’s field, you distinguish one kind of animal from another, you separate one color from all the others. Is that all we can do—dividing, separating, splitting the world into pieces? Isn’t the world broken enough? Isn’t the world split into enough fragments? Is that what Torah is for? No, my dear students, it’s not that way, not that way at all!”
The shocked students looked into the sad face of their rabbi. “Then, Rabbi, tell us: How do we know that night has ended and day has begun?”
The rabbi stared back into the faces of his students, and with a voice suddenly gentle and imploring, he responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”
Hastening that heavenly day is the moral work of our generation. I don’t know where it ends, but I know where it has to start—by anchoring people in strong families and healthy communities. It is impossible to expect people to extend the Golden Rule very far if they are unmoored, unanchored, and insecure themselves. How to build strong families is beyond my skill set, but I know something about strong communities, because I grew up in one. And so I hope you’ll indulge me if I end this journey by taking you back home with me to discuss the final kind of innovation we need to promote resilience and propulsion in this age of accelerations—innovation in the building of healthy communities.
TWELVE
Always Looking for Minnesota
Anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighborhood square; going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves.
—Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’,” May 24, 2015
One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directl
y spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book.
The main refrain is:
I wrapped your love around me like a chain
But I never was afraid that it would die
You can dance in a hurricane
But only if you’re standing in the eye.
I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.
The closest political analogue for the eye of a hurricane that I can think of is a healthy community. When people feel embedded in a community, they feel “protected, respected, and connected,” as my friend Andy Karsner, whose father grew up in Duluth and mother in Casablanca, likes to say. And that feeling is more important than ever, because when people feel protected, respected, and connected in a healthy community, it generates enormous trust. And when there is more trust in the room, citizens are much more likely to mirror Mother Nature’s killer apps. When people trust each other, they can be much more adaptable and open to all forms of pluralism. When people trust each other, they can think long-term. When there is trust in the room, people are more inclined to collaborate and experiment—to open themselves up to others, to new ideas, and to novel approaches—and to extending the Golden Rule. They also don’t waste energy investigating every mistake; they feel free to fail and try again and fail again and try again.
“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,” argued Chris Thompson, who works with cities for the Fund for Our Economic Future, in an essay on its website. When people trust each other, they take ownership of problems and practice stewardship. The political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote a classic book in 1996 on why the most successful states and societies exhibit high levels of trust—Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity—noted that “social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between.” Where trust is prevalent, he explained, groups and societies can move and adapt quickly through many informal contracts. “By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means,” wrote Fukuyama.
It’s for all these reasons that Dov Seidman argues that trust “is the only legal performance-enhancing drug.” But trust cannot be commanded. It can only be nurtured and inspired by a healthy community—between people who feel bound by a social contract. “Trust is something that emerges from how people interact politically, for mutual benefit, through institutions,” adds the Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel. “Healthy communities build civic muscles that lead to greater trust.”
Indeed, the best explanation I ever heard for the emotional effect that trust has on a person or community came from U.S. surgeon general Murthy, who offered a beautiful analogy between the way trust breathes life into a community and the way our bodies pump oxygen into the heart:
The heart pumps in two cycles—systole, when it contracts, and diastole, when it relaxes. And one of the things we often think is that contraction is the most important phase, because that is what gets the blood pushed out everywhere around your body. But you realize when you study medicine that it’s in diastole—when the heart relaxes—that the coronary blood vessels fill and supply the heart muscle with the lifesaving, sustaining oxygen that it needs. So without diastole there can be no systole—without relaxation there can be no contraction.
In human relations, trust creates diastole. It is only when people relax their hearts and their minds that they are open to hear and engage with others, and healthy communities create the context for that.
Fortunately, America today is blessed with many healthy communities. It is why I often tell foreign visitors that if you want to be an optimist about America, “stand on your head,” because our country looks so much better from the bottom up than from the top down. What has been saving us at a time when our national politics has become increasingly toxic and unable to produce the social technologies we need to keep pace with the accelerations in the Market and in Moore’s law is the dynamism coming from our cities, towns, and communities, from the bottom up. They have given up waiting for Washington, D.C., to get its act together. Many of them are forging local public-private partnerships—involving businesses, educators, philanthropists, and governments—to put in place the tools they know their citizens and kids will need to dance in the hurricane.
And thank goodness—because the healthy city, town, or community is going to be the most important governing building block in the twenty-first century.
One of my teachers on this subject is Israel’s Gidi Grinstein, president of the Reut research and strategy group, which has been focused on reimagining communities in Israel. In this age of accelerations, he argues, we need to “reinvent the basic organizing unit of society.” Of course, as we discussed earlier, we still need federal and state governments to maintain the foundations of the national economy, and welfare, security, and health care. But more and more it is becoming clear, says Grinstein, that “the basic architecture of a resilient and prosperous twenty-first-century society must be a network of healthy communities.”
National governments are just too cumbersome, distant, and, in too many cases, gridlocked to have the agility needed in the age of accelerations, he argues, and the single-family unit is too weak to stand alone in the face of the hurricane-force winds of change, especially since many families, particularly single-parent ones, are living so close to the edge—without savings, pensions, or homeownership. Just one health, auto, or employment crisis can derail them. At the same time, such families lack the time and financial resources essential for ensuring their own employability and productivity in an era that demands lifelong learning to sustain lifelong employment and income.
Therefore, argues Grinstein, “a model twenty-first-century community would be one that is focused on supporting the employability, productivity, inclusion, and quality of life of its members,” at a time when more and more families need a local hand up to keep pace with the accelerating pace of change.
The healthy community is ideally suited to play such a role, Grinstein insists, “provided that its core institutions—community centers, parks, early childhood centers, schools, sports, arts and culture institutions, young and old adult centers—are reinvented.” That means, he explains, that schools will also act as adult lifelong learning and day-care centers, serving both children and their parents and the elderly, spawning social service groups that can actually make sure no family or child is left behind and forging partnerships with business to make sure they are teaching the twenty-first-century skills that are most needed. Because most people come through these community institutions on a regular basis, notes Grinstein, “they provide a natural infrastructure to support their employability and productivi
ty.”
When you make a community work, he adds, “you can really affect the quality of life for the vast majority.” And here is the good news: traveling around America today, you will find so much innovation happening at the community level. It is the opposite of what is happening on Capitol Hill. “The innovation needed to address the challenges facing our society is already sprouting among us bottom-up,” concludes Grinstein. “It just needs to be highlighted, modeled, and scaled.”
The St. Louis Park Story
I know a lot about this subject because I saw a healthy community get built, brick by brick, block by block, neighbor by neighbor, close up. It was the one that I grew up in: St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. And that’s why I am going to conclude this book with two chapters about where I began—literally: in the midwestern community I called home from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.
This is not an exercise in nostalgia. Returing to St. Louis Park is the appropriate way to close this book for two simple reasons. First, as I explained at the outset, a column has to combine three things: your own value set, how you think the Machine works, and what you have learned about how the Machine affects people and culture and vice versa. Well, my value set and my affinity for a politics that embraces inclusion, pluralism, and always trying to govern with Mother Nature’s best ideas—a mix of center-left and center-right—was instilled in me by the community where I grew up. And second, because those values seem more relevant today than ever in America as a whole, and in the world at large. At a time of rising racial tensions and political debates tearing at the fabric of our country, I grew hungry to understand what made that little suburb where I came of age politically such a vibrant community, anchoring and propelling me and many others. I found myself hungry to reexamine whether the inclusive tapestry I saw woven while growing up there a half century ago was just something I dreamt, or was real. And I wanted to assess how well those civic engines were still working today—with a much more diverse community—and whether those lessons could be shared and scaled.
Thank You for Being Late Page 42