the challenge of democracy

Political involvement too often ends up being the tail that wags the dog. We can become so focused on our side winning that we lose sight of the only justifiable reason to get involved with politics in the first place – to participate in a democratic process whereby collaborative solutions that serve the greater good have a chance to emerge. Attempts at persuasion are rarely successful, yet some people never tire of posting their polemics on Facebook or getting in people’s faces with flecks of spit flying from their mouths. Parties and family gatherings are ruined. Friendships are sacrificed on the altar of the all important cause.

The desire to obliterate our opponents can eclipse the advancement of what we say we are for. The current political process has become so polarized that agreeing on anything is impossible and nothing is ever accomplished. It is a climate that is ripe for trolls and other crazy-makers. Crazy-makers sow discord, create drama and distraction, make false or nonsensical claims, intimidate, and manipulate ‒ all in order to disorient people, throw them off balance, and cause them to doubt their perception, their memory, and even their sanity.

It is the nature of politics for there to be pathological participants and malignant conflicts, but our political situation seems particularly toxic. Certain segments of the electorate have influence that is disproportionate to their numbers. Hate-fueled rhetoric that would previously been isolated on the fringe has gained mainstream status, holding sway over otherwise decent human beings. Seemingly sensible citizens morph into to the modern equivalent of an angry mob with pitchforks.

Few experiences are more terrifying than being in the midst of an angry mob that is armed with the belief that they represent the majority and is emboldened by its allegedly democratic inspiration (rather than being duly constrained by a more truly democratic spirit of circumspection and respect for other points of view). The most atrocious collective decisions are frequently driven by the pursuit of what is believed at the time to be the greater good. We say we want people to be engaged and empowered. We celebrate free speech and a free press. We insist that everyone has a voice and vote. Nonetheless, no matter how necessary the basic rights and freedoms that we associate with democracy might be, they are incapable in themselves of producing wise collective decisions, a demonstration that there is more to a well-functioning democracy than “majority rules” and a reminder that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous.

The situation becomes even worse when information is manipulated, distorted, and filtered by powerful, deep-pocket enemies of a free, open, and inclusively participatory democratic process. Information available to us is never perfect to begin with, but in the skilled hands of unscrupulous demagogues who are able to massage and carefully craft what gets communicated to the public, it can be not only blatantly deceptive; it can be manipulated to provoke certain responses. Well-honed techniques of con artists – shilling, shell games, bait and switch, empty promises, playing on fears, flattering the mark, and outright lying – are all in display in the political arena.

Stupidity and cupidity can all too handily gain the upper hand and crush everything in their path. Breakdowns and roadblocks arise with frustrating frequency. That’s not surprising, given how difficult it is to have all of the pieces necessary for a wise democratic process fall into place. Even smart people who are united around a desire to do the right thing frequently not only fail to produce wise decisions; outcomes can be disastrous – thus the proverb, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” The danger is even greater when loyalty to the cause is strong, moral fervor runs deep, and passions are inflamed. The worst hatred is fueled by earnest devotion to causes and ideas that seem all important to those who believe in them. Historically, some of the most brutal wars have been fought in the name of religion.

As the popularity and persistence of urban legends and paranoid conspiracy theories illustrate, most people are far less interested in verifying what is being reported than they are in collecting factoids and seemingly plausible explanations that entertain and handily fill in some gaps in their narratives of what is going on in the world. The end result is that the process becomes a pooling of ignorance and a reinforcement of each other’s biases. When deliberation occurs in an echo chamber or in a black hole of misinformation, stupidity is multiplied. It’s garbage in, garbage out.

Democracy, in the words of Winston Churchill, is “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Without the checks and balances that are central to the democratic process, there are no real protections against violations of human rights and having basic freedoms trampled upon, but there is no guarantee that decisions arrived at through an ostensibly democratic process will serve the best interests of the participants, or even that they will not conspire to give away their own freedom. Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom argues that many people fear the existential uncertainty that comes with freedom and consequently retreat into authoritarianism and conformist huddling. Fromm, as a native German, witnessed the rise of Nazism first hand. Hitler’s abridgments of democratic freedoms and assaults on human dignity were very popular with the German people.

Fortunately though, even recalcitrant and impatient participants are able to work through difficult impasses if they have sufficient reason to do so, as is convincingly illustrated by the classic film “12 Angry Men”, which interestingly was made in the 1950s, a decade otherwise famous for mindless conformity in the US. The film is a story of a jury that threads its way toward a sound decision in spite of the fact that, in the beginning, eleven of the jurors have already made up their minds to take the line of least resistance and convict an innocent kid. What makes “12 Angry Men” such a powerful and relevant film is the high stakes involved and the improbability of getting to a happy ending. With the life of a vulnerable human being hanging in the balance, the dialogue hooks our emotions. It is easy to identify with each of the characters and to understand why the jury came so close to giving him the death penalty, how much easier it clearly would have been to do so, how much better sticking to their smugly self-righteous beliefs would have felt, and how much sense their false beliefs made to them prior to the uncomfortable questions that were raised by one lone voice in their midst.

So democratic decisions actually can be guided by intelligence and wisdom that are greater than the sum of the parts. But is it realistic to expect large democratic societies to find a way to overcome, with any consistency, the stupidity and cupidity that so often afflicts our social, economic, and political lives? 17^th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes didn’t think so. He wrote that without a strong top-down authority who can enforce the social order by invoking fear and awe, we find ourselves in a perpetual state of “war of all against all”. Human nature inclines us to be not only selfish, short-sighted, and mischievous, but also to even be horrifically inhumane at times.

Nonetheless, the familiar narrative about the selfishness that is inherent in human nature is only part of the story. Wanting to do the right thing is actually not an uncommon human attribute. History has demonstrated repeatedly that ordinary people, under the right circumstances, display amazing amounts of courage, compassion, and willingness to put their own personal interests aside. To be human is to embody a paradox. When someone says “I’m only human”, they mean that they are incapable of being perfect, but when they say “it’s the human thing to do”, they’re talking about an astonishing set of qualities having to do with empathy, conscientiousness, kindness, and being responsive to need. And the many wars throughout history notwithstanding, what is most salient is the natural human talent for cooperation and intricate coordination of complex collaborative efforts.

What can the fictional situation portrayed in “12 Angry Men” teach us about real world situations? Can we extract whatever it was that enabled the jury to avert an unconscionable verdict? One takeaway point might be that the film is about the importance of critical thinking. The approach used by the twelfth juror (played by Henry Fonda) was circumspect and probing. He asked reasonable questions rather than resorting to frothy or poignant pleading. He calmly urged his fellow jurors to take a step back and reconsider what they were about to do. The initial problem wasn’t that the jurors were uncaring. None of them argued that not caring was in itself the right thing to do. The jury’s deliberation raised complex questions about what it means to care, reframed their task, and shifted them into an alternative perspective. The jurors were, one by one, able to overcome blindness and numbness, gain a sense of proportionality, grasp the big picture, appreciate deeper moral implications, become concerned about actual consequences, and examine their priorities.

It is said that you can’t fix stupid, but people, in general, are not as stupid as they often seem to be. Contrary to all appearances, the kind of stupidity that can’t be fixed is not the problem. While there are plenty of obvious examples of stupid people doing stupid things and while even smart people have blind spots and biases, what gets us into the most trouble is not so much a failure on the part of individuals to think critically. The main problem we face is with the group dynamics in the process by which decisions get made. We need to learn how to find our way out of the collective blindness and irresponsibility that sets in as the result of tunnel vision, mob psychology, and demagoguery. In other words, the challenge that is in front us now is greater than the need for individuals to be better informed, to be better thinkers, and to make better choices. Our challenge is being able to foster an environment in which a truly democratic process is what people actually want. That involves swimming against the current. There is too much at stake to do otherwise.

Our problem is not a lack of ideas to choose from or a lack of talent. What we have trouble with is getting the ideas out of the heads of those who hold them and translating those ideas into actual action. While there is no shortage of astonishingly smart people, there frequently is a shortage of people who are willing to perform the crucial civic duty that was modeled by the twelfth juror in “12 Angry Men” – speaking up. That is perfectly understandable. It’s a great nuisance to go out on a limb and risk being greeted with responses ranging from being ridiculed to being subjected to the old human custom of killing the messenger. As in the Hans Christian Anderson folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, everybody is reticent to articulate the obvious. But there is another aspect to the problem that is even more difficult.  Even when individuals are willing to stand up and enter the fray, insistently challenging the status quo, their observations, insights, and questions fall on deaf ears, fail to generate any interest, and eventually die of neglect. It is a difficult problem because there is no silver bullet, and there are many obstacles. Therein is the crux of the matter under consideration here.

How can we bring about a more intelligent political process? What do we need to do that we are not already doing? There is no absence of efforts to elevate public discourse. The signal-to-noise ratio might be poor at times, but amidst the mindless (and sometimes hysterical) murmuring there is a tremendous amount of outright brilliance and remarkable resourcefulness. And while many of the ideas in the mix might be unrealistic or would lead to greater problems than the ones they are meant to solve, that is a necessary feature of the process. The main rule of brainstorming is to give even the most far out ideas a chance. Seemingly stupid ideas turn out to not be stupid after all. In fact, most real breakthroughs started out as ideas that seemed ridiculously unrealistic when they were first introduced, ran contrary to the best thinking of almost everyone in the discussion, and provoked fear and hostility because of how radically the ideas threatened status quo understandings.

That critical thinking can be so painfully lacking in public discourse is an obvious culprit. It is easy to be so caught up in emotionalism and self-absorbed nonsense that we fail to notice our false assumptions and flawed reasoning and forget to pay attention to the actual consequences of our choices. If more people made intelligent, evidence-based choices in the voting booth and in every area of their lives, we could easily solve many of our most troubling social problems. That is not to say people are stupid; they just lack the confidence, independence, and fortitude to question what seems obvious to everybody, so too often a herd mentality sets in. The rampant stupidity of smart people who have fallen under the spell of a herd mentality is well documented.

The most important argument for public education has always been that an effective democracy depends on an informed citizenry, but what that involves is not just knowing facts. It has been said that education is what remains after you have forgotten everything you learned in school. The critical thinking skills and intellectual maturity that remain after everything else is forgotten enable citizens to:

• Evaluate source material and discern the real from the deceptively plausible
• Assess arguments based on their merit rather than kneejerk, ad hominem prejudices
• Reach beyond the party line
• Recognize our own biases
• Compare notes with others, connect the dots, infer subtle and hidden details, and grasp the big picture
• See through the cover-ups and the manufactured narratives
• Hold politicians, ourselves, and each other accountable
• Adopt attitudes and practices that facilitate a deliberative collective decision-making process
• Nurture an environment in which insight can grow and complex problems can be patiently addressed by working together
• Listen
• Be OK with having our beliefs challenged

Being a responsible citizen is hard work; it’s even harder when we add in the responsibility for teaching each new generation to ask tough questions and to act on the inconvenient belief that democracy is worth the trouble. It is easier to make education solely about job training and to program children to be docile and obedient worker bees. Building indispensible skills and habits that support democracy (like questioning authority, fostering innovative ideas, daring to be creative, listening to opposing views, being open to surprise, resolving conflicts, and working together) is not even on most people’s radar, and the trend is understandably not favorable, given the uphill nature of the battle. The sentiment that has driven education reforms in recent decades has mostly led away from rather than toward the encouragement of the kind of critical thinking that equips citizens to participate in a robust democratic process. The whole question of why an educated citizenry is essential for democracy is swept under the rug.

Actually reaching viable solutions is complicated by many layers of difficulties. It’s like peeling an onion. Before we can get to the heart of the matter, we have to come to terms with challenges like moral ambiguity and the fact that we each have radically different starting points and wildly divergent guiding values and tastes. Even if we could even the playing field and include those who are systematically marginalized, even if more of us would diligently pursue objectivity and resist confirmation bias, even if we had a robust political culture with vital traditions upholding free speech and free press, even if undistorted information was readily available, even if what was most in the forefront were ideas based on an examination and well-reasoned analysis of the best evidence, even if creative approaches to problem-solving was the norm, and even if we were committed to work together, we would still be faced with honest conflicts around life’s thorniest questions.

There are no right answers to the most central ethical dilemmas human beings face. Life is full of hard choices and a lot of gray area. Ethics usually comes down to a question of priorities rather than whether we want to do the right thing. For example, if I encounter someone who is in distress, do I stop to help her? There is no universally applicable correct response. My decision will be informed by a number of factors. What is the context? Is the person a close friend or member of my family? Or is she a stranger or an adversary? How much trouble would helping her be? How risky does it feel? Most of us like to see ourselves as basically good people, but preserving our positive self image often comes at the expense of a coherent ethical rationale. How do we reconcile our lofty stated values with our actual choices? What is the ethical justification for caring more about whether our own children have braces than we care about whether another child has enough to eat or has a safe place to live?  Most people have an intuitive sense about that, but few can articulate it in a way that doesn’t sound like a rationalization for selfishness.

We can’t be expected to solve all the problems associated with insatiable human need, but does that mean that we don’t do anything at all and that we just block out any evidence of moral ambiguity or anything that would disturb our tidy little worldview? Few of us would want to be the kind of people who are completely indifferent or to live in a world where systemic injustice goes unchallenged and where huge numbers of human beings are deprived of any opportunity to achieve a decent human existence. But whom do we choose to help? How do we ration our compassion? We need to find a way to practice some sort of triage, focusing our efforts where we can actually do some good, but knowing how to do that is hardly easy or clear. We are not only plagued with “compassion fatigue”; we are also bombarded by too much information to process and too many images to make sense of. We suffer from sensory overload. There is a limit to what we can we can absorb and assimilate. Like the jurors in “12 Angry Men”, we have too much else going on in our lives to be bothered by the far reaching implications of just going with the flow. In the end, being intelligent, caring individuals is not enough to prevent collective stupidity and cruelty. All of us routinely default to plausible though untrue assumptions and fail to explore new information that challenges our worldview. 

What we are talking about is not just an unfortunate state of affairs whose less than ideal ramifications operate mostly in some abstract realm; it’s a real life situation with tragic consequences – missed opportunities, wasted talent, crushed spirits, empty lives, destructive animosity, and a lot of actual suffering. It’s a vicious circle that perpetuates an environment in which the people with whom we could arrive at solutions not aren’t our allies; they become our enemies. The remedy requires a certain amount of critical thinking, but that is well within reach of the vast majority of people. It starts off simply with the ability to step back and make room for a public conversation in which it is OK to introduce discomfirming information into the discussion and which is open to the possibility that our minds might be changed. It demands that we really listen to each other, especially those we tend to dismiss, either because we disagree with them philosophically or because they lack social standing.

Clearly, the solution would necessarily involve improved critical thinking skills. We need to foster qualities like honesty, the ability to recognize our own biases, commitment to maintaining a well lit place where information comes from reliable sources and is subject to verification, open-mindedness, and the habit of stepping back to gain perspective. In addition to critical thinking though, we obviously also need personal qualities like compassion, willingness, and courage, and at the collective level, we need a cultural transformation. We need a critical mass of people who:

• are motivated to pursue their best understanding of the greater good
• possess sufficient critical thinking skills
• are accurately informed to a reasonable degree
• honestly and responsibly assess, interpret, and integrate available information
• have the courage and commitment to speak up
• are open to and respectful with regard to other points of view
• contribute in a way that builds up a well designed, effective model of governance
• participate in a democratic division of labor whereby power is held accountable through a process of checks and balances
• are somewhat patient with and trusting of an inclusive process of deliberation
• are willing to compromise, put their differences behind them, move forward, and work together in good faith

engaging humanism

One of the most noticeable features of Christianity as it is commonly practiced is the way that the experiential and the emotional trump logic. Most Christians believe what they believe because it feels right to them, which is reinforced by tactile experience, such as the “bells and smells” in the worship experience. The liturgical art, at its best, is a theatrical production that engages all the senses, surrounding worshipers with beautiful architecture, icons, music, and incense. The multisensory experience even includes taste (e.g. bread and wine) and touch (e.g. passing of the peace).

The preaching and prayers are designed to foster spiritual experiences. They often manipulate emotions – fear, anger, shame, blame, the need to belong, the need to draw battle lines, and the need to identify, vilify, and exclude enemies, scapegoats, and anyone who doesn’t fit in. In order to avoid any sense of responsibility with regard to whatever might be going on outside their religious bubble, many use religious ideas like “be not anxious for the morrow” to perpetuate the air tight logic of plausible deniability.

It’s not farfetched to argue that the main problem with the most prominent public expressions of religious sentiment is ignorance, or at least a distaste for disconfirming information and a shortage of the kind of insight that could penetrate the veneer of self-deception. Another take on irrational beliefs though would be to say that those who hold them are stuck in an immature stage of intellectual development.

The severely truncated world of fundamentalism can only be sustained if the natural human talent for critical thinking is undeveloped, impaired, dormant, or suspended. The trend in healthy psychological development is generally toward an increased capacity for abstract reasoning. As children grow up, their ability to grasp abstract concepts increases. Young children are concrete thinkers. This is especially evident in very young children who lack a sense of object permanence. Their reality is entirely made up of what is immediately present.

Many adults find religion to be a convenient, cozy cocoon that is entirely made up of what is immediately present and that is perpetuated by filtering out or explaining away irrefutable evidence. Living in a fantasy world or an insulated bubble is usually inseparable from defense mechanisms like cognitive dissonance and psychological patterns of avoidance associated with the herd instinct.

My own life experience is a case study in how growing awareness and moving through stages of intellectual development fostered increasing openness and honesty with regard to religion questions. Like many children who were raised religious, I trusted what adults were telling me and accepted my parents’ religious belief – until adolescence when I began doubting what I had been taught. During college I quit going to church altogether.

Later though, as I progressed into adulthood, the thirst for a sense of the ineffable came to be a stronger need than having an intellectually sophisticated worldview or than the need for independence that had led me to question religion during adolescence. Where I went with that was to regress somewhat, but some of what drove me was a continuation of my natural movement away from the concrete thinking of my childhood. I needed a way to come to terms with what I didn’t or couldn’t understand. For this reason, I sought what I hoped would be a viable adult version of religious faith. 

While there was still a strong element of childish reification, it wasn’t a complete retreat. Abstract reasoning was a big part of my process in that I developed inferred understandings – like a child who, having come to terms with object permanence, infers that her security and wellbeing do not depend on her parent being immediately present. I filled in the gaps in my universe with a reassuring pragmatist understanding of faith.

I was, on the one hand, retreating from some of the wearying rigors of abstract reasoning, yet on the other hand, I was advancing toward an increasing awareness of imperceptible realities and a diminution of swaggering adolescent certainty. While I was responding to a felt need to reduce the unease of vaguely suspected truths by clothing them in concrete concepts, I was more driven by a desire to find a way to honor and accept the indeterminate nature of life. I latched on to an understanding of faith that was not merely a synonym for belief but was instead about relaxing my need to comprehend everything and letting go of what I could not control.

Often, particularly in times of crisis, relying on the ability to figure things out is a futile pursuit. This can lead to a somewhat desperate effort to fill the proverbial “God-shaped hole” (a curious notion that, in the first place, one could know what the creator of the universe is shaped like and, in the second place, that that shape fits snugly into an empty space in the human psyche, though perhaps not so strange for those who buy into the concept of the Imago Dei, the biblically inspired idea that the image of God is dynamically present within every living human being rather than idolatrously represented in graven images.

I resonated with the god of the Hebrew prophets, a god that challenged the tidy truths of polite society, not a logocentric or anthropomorphic god, but instead, somewhat in the spirit of the Judaic tradition of not pronouncing God’s name, a god that is too complex and unintelligible to be adequately depicted by means of concrete terminology or imagery. Eventually, my journey that had begun with an earnest desire for satisfying answers to my deepest questions led me to atheism.

Many nonbelievers have rejected religion primarily because of the way its attempts to explain life and the cosmos are demonstrably false and often ridiculous. It is easy to scoff at the delusionary “pie in the sky” mentality and at the childishness of the overly concrete ideas and imagery that abound. Religion, they point out, grew out of a primitive need to explain things, and obviously, just because there is no readily apparent explanation doesn’t mean that we should suspend the whole idea of natural law.

But where this often leads is to arguments against religion that themselves take place very much inside the box of concrete thinking. They take the “Show me – I’m from Missouri” approach. And while the lack of evidence truly is the crux of the matter (in that what’s at stake is not about whether atheists can disprove the possibility of God’s existence but is instead the question of whether or not there is sufficient warrant to believe), such an approach can nonetheless take us in an unproductive direction.

Besides questions about whether debating theists is worth doing at all, about when it might make sense to do so, and about what we would be aiming to accomplish, such debates can cause us to overlook the human aspect. Most of the time, belief is either driven by an emotional fixation, in which case no amount of logic is going to make any difference, or it is a way of coming to terms with life’s challenges, in which case what’s on the table is not the credibility of the claims being made but is instead whether or not the religious life is fruitful and satisfying.

The psychology of religion is complicated, as the baffling incidences of intelligent, educated, and sophisticated individuals who hold quite strange beliefs illustrates. However necessary the battle against superstition and against pathological avoidance of reality might be, the salient question is whether being free of religion is an improvement. Is such a life an attractive alternative to the cozy assurances of faith? Can it offer greater rather than less emotional richness?

What is the ultimate goal of disputing the falsehoods and empty promises of religion after all? Shouldn’t it be to promote a more open, enlightened, free, and prosperous society? Why must the case for secularism and humanism be so dry and uninspiring? Should we not pursue more rather than less deeply engaging understandings? It’s not as though we have to posit a supernatural realm in order to find a sense of wonder. The natural world offers plenty of awe-inspiring mystery.

Exciting developments on the cutting edge of science (cf. complexity theory and the study of subatomic particles) stimulate the imagination, challenge mundane perceptions, and loosen the grip of childish concrete thinking. The laws of nature are not so wooden after all. Conventional notions about cause and effect are shattered by breakthroughs initiated by revolutionary scientific work like Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

An enlargement of our understandings can foster a renewal of the humanist identity and facilitate our ability to:

• be comfortable with the unknown and the unknowable
• not have to have an explanation for everything
• be able to accept the existence of what we can infer but can’t touch or see
• move beyond beliefs that are based on as much or more of a need for pat explanations, for certainty, and for the elimination of doubt as that of fundamentalists
• embrace uncertainty
• lead with distinctively human attributes like softness, warmth, and joy
• be optimistic for no other reason than that being positive generates better outcomes than being negative
• celebrate the human ability to dream big, to break out of smallness, and to soar

What can be done about fundamentalism and terrorism?

Fighting against fundamentalism and terrorism is not only the wrong approach; it is even counterproductive. (For example, it would aid rather than deter recruitment.) The question we need to be asking instead is what we can do to take the wind out of their sails.

One of the main factors in the growth of fundamentalism and terrorism is a crisis (either acute or chronic) of meaning in the lives of those who flock to the sense of certainty that fundamentalist belief and some of the ideologies behind terrorism provide. I differentiate fundamentalism from religious beliefs that are conservative but not reactionary. Fundamentalism has always been more about rejecting modern secularist values than it has been an affirmation of anything positive.

If my diagnosis is apt, part of the cure might be to look for ways to enrich secularist culture. Secularism is known mostly in terms of what it is against rather than what it is for. Secularism is clearly an essential ingredient in modern democracies, but if the only thing people ever see is its rejection of the establishment of religion by the government, secularism is only present in a most people's awareness when it is fighting religion.

We sell ourselves short. Embodying the ideals of true secularism is actually a quite lofty goal. Imagine a society that would embrace the idea of people being able to work together toward deeply meaningful common goals in spite of differences that are deep, but not as deep as the human identity that would unite the common effort. I would gladly join forces with holders any religious belief to strengthen and deepen the connection that each of us could have with a larger version of humanity than our separate views can sustain.

breaking out of the cocoon

Anxiety and depression are common maladies these days, which is not surprising, given what it's like to live in the contemporary world. Perceptive, sensible, and sensitive people find it difficult to block out the awareness that we live in an uneasy present and face a perilous future. Some of us might be able to retreat into our respective cocoons. We might pursue resource-intensive diversions and max out our landfills with yesterday’s must-have consumer items, but in the end, not only is avoidance not the solution; it exacerbates the problem.

Our lives are not defined by baseline functionality. There’s more to being alive than breathing, meeting obligations, drawing a paycheck, and not dying, and there is more to enjoying life than avoiding unpleasantness and discomfort.

Avoidance is an obstacle to personal as well as collective wellbeing. Some of what is most biologically vital, psychologically compelling, and emotionally enriching in us goes to sleep. When we attempt to block out what we find to be unpleasant, we lose the ability to experience joy, delight, sublime beauty, and love. Life without a deeply humanizing dimension is flat.

We all crave deeper satisfactions. We can no more go without emotional sustenance  than we can go without food. A not insignificant percentage of infants deprived of physical affection literally die of neglect. Children who are not nurtured miss out on crucial developmental thresholds and suffer permanent deficits, sometimes even to the point of acquiring personality disorders.

Being resigned to just accepting what feels unacceptable leads to learned helplessness. Participating in solutions to social problems, by creating experiences of efficacy, contributes to a sense of empowerment and personal wellbeing.

picking our battles

We need to ask not only how to make things better but also:

• how to avoid making things worse by our well-meaning efforts
• how to not be driven crazy by frustration, impatience, and setbacks
• how to deal with disappointment and anger
• how to not descend into learned helplessness and/or cynicism
• how to tell the difference between important and unimportant
• when to compromise

It is at least as important to accept what cannot, will not, and/or ought not be changed as it is to work toward changing what seems to need changing. Accepting what I can't change is a process. It starts with the recognition that beating my head against the wall doesn't help anyone, that it usually makes things worse, and that it disables me.

Unfortunately, there is no switch with which I can turn off the compulsive rumination, agitation, and restlessness that won't leave me alone when I feel like I'm not doing enough. Letting go of the need to keep trying to do what can't be done or ought not be done is deeply and perplexingly challenging. The need to abandon futile pursuits is not always apparent and is often unpalatable or even painful. It can feel like being defeated.

There is a paradox involved in letting go. Something is required besides simple resignation.  There has to be a positive choice that offers an alternative to just dancing around the void created by the avoidance of choices that I don’t want to make, but what that positive choice is and how to get there are typically neither obvious nor readily attainable.

It's complicated.

When I recognize that the way I’m approaching things is flawed, there is also an inconvenient, and perhaps painful awareness that new and different choices have to come from somewhere besides the template within which I have always made choices and which is the only way of looking at life that I know. I can’t undo the old by means of the same thinking that produced it in the first place.

My habitual emotional, mental, and behavioral patterns may have been natural responses to what I perceived was going on at the time I adopted them, but I will inevitably encounter situations where they don’t work. Undoing them is not so easy though. It's far easier to avoid, deny, pretend, and forget.

Letting go of what I'm used to creates a terrible sense of vulnerability. That can be compounded by defensive reactions. However, if I allow myself to just feel the feelings, I can begin making peace with the stubborn realities that resist my willpower.

If I can disengage the grueling exercises in futility, the frenetically reactive spinning of my wheels, I can become fully present in the moment, remove energy from whatever it is that drives my fearful reactions, and direct that energy more constructively.

I will eventually sense some part my self that is free to make different choices.   

One of the hardest challenges in this process has to do with the fact that the emotional habits I have adopted are inseparable from my core beliefs about who I am and what my role in the world is. There is no way to change emotional habits without changing the beliefs that create them and no way to change my beliefs without changing myself from the inside out.  

But I  continue feeling the feelings. I begin recognizing my feelings for what they are, conditioned responses. I can choose to respond differently. Having the world be the way I want it to be or having it yield to my efforts to change it is a childish fantasy. Letting go of that fantasy is part of growing up. And I have to keep doing it over and over again.

Can we blame social problems on moral decay?

Moral decay is commonly blamed for all manner of real and imagined problems. It’s a convenient explanation, but even if there is something to it, what does that mean? Does everyone have to convert to evangelical Christianity?

Moral decay is in the eye of the beholder. Since there is no universally agreed on measure of moral wholesomeness, it is impossible to gauge whether moral decay is actually a problem. We can argue either side of the question, but there is no impartial referee to decide who wins.

So let’s look instead at some of the reasons people believe that the morality of our society is decaying: 

• They’ve been convinced of it by a preacher or a politician who has a stake in their believing it.
• They see the presence of different values in their midst (due to the increase of cultural and religious diversity in Western societies) through ethnocentric (or even blatantly racist) eyes.
• They don’t recognize that there are other moral philosophies that are at least as productive of true good as their own.
• They have a very backward understanding of morality.
• Their authoritarian personality can’t accept the fact that freedom from authoritarianism is something to be celebrated.
• They are homophobic and/or misogynistic and can’t handle the clear fact that liberation from certain traditional moral strictures is an unqualified good thing.
• They hate it when other people seem to be enjoying things that they needlessly deny themselves.
• They have forgotten the meaning of love.
• They are rigid and can’t deal with the moral ambiguities of their own choices, so they project their sense of guilt onto other people. 
• They equate the secularization of public institutions (which is not only necessary, given the fact that even theists can’t agree with each other about what values to follow; it is required by the US constitution) with an erosion of morality.
• They suffer from confirmation bias. (They don’t even notice the existence of disconfirming evidence.)
• The people they hang out with relay anecdotal evidence that supports their shared beliefs.
• They only watch, listen to, or read content they agree with. 

facing reality

Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Happiness that is not accompanied by self-awareness is fragile, empty, and often short-lived. Some people seem to go through life obliviously happy, but when a crisis comes up, if they have all their eggs in the basket of blissful ignorance, they will not know what to do. Or they will be trapped in their happy bubble and totally unavailable to the people around them. But it goes beyond that. People whose pursuits of happiness are based on avoidance of the truth are dangerous. They are some of the biggest supporters of fascism and the like.

Modernity as an experiment

We easily forget that democracy, religious freedom, and the commitment to being guided by reason and scientific evidence were uncertain experiments in the beginning. Our pioneering forebears recognized that there were no guarantees, no solid assurance that the whole project would be successful. It’s clear from the iconoclastic spirit of their innovations that they hardly viewed all the details of the social and cultural reforms they were undertaking as sacred, infallible, and final. The baton has been passed down from generation to generation, and it has been up to each generation to continue the ongoing work, accumulate new lessons, dig deeper, distill, refine, reframe the task, and eliminate what no longer works.

Sí, se puede

Gathering an unruly group of ordinary mortals and setting our sights on solving some of the most challenging problems humanity has ever faced sounds ridiculously grandiose and has about as much chance of success as an attempt to herd cats, but if we can break it down into modular micro tasks, we can seed a self-organizing benevolent storm to be reckoned with.

Because of the complexity of the problems, information overload, backlash, polarization, and gridlock, there has to be a division of labor that distributes the actual responsibilities involved in deliberative, forward-moving, democratic decision-making and in execution of the decisions.

It’s about being able to more broadly distribute the responsibility for facing difficult truths and coming up with creative solutions. An engaged citizenry could transform the entire political climate if we were able to break the effort down into intrinsically rewarding tasks that ordinary human beings could eagerly embrace.

If each of us can find ways to translate our own hopes and dreams of a more compassionate and just society into language, imagery, and action, we can create a contagious movement that others will want to be a part of. 

What is our legacy?

Nobody knows what the future holds, but it seems quite likely that human life as we know it will be radically transformed within the next few generations. Something has to give one way or another. I can imagine one or more of the following scenarios coming to pass:

• The gap between the haves and the have-nots grows to a point where an oligarchic ruling class has control over virtually all the world's wealth, and everyone else becomes serfs in a feudalistic social order.
• A major economic or geo-political event or a cascading series of events leads to an anarchic dystopia or to the rise of quasi-Orwellian society.
• Climate change leads to radical alteration of the environment that makes the earth far less hospitable not only to human beings but many other species.
• We get our collective act together and avoid or mitigate all of the above.

changing ourselves

Social change is paradoxical. As with a family in crisis, sometimes change happens only after we take the spotlight off the presenting problem. Blaming scapegoats or treating the symptoms doesn’t get us anywhere. We have to go deeper and find the root causes. Until we let go of the tendency to focus on the designated “problem child” and quit trying to change what is not in our power to change, the crisis just keeps getting worse.

The solution has to start somewhere, and we won’t get anywhere until we accept the fact that we can’t change anybody or anything but ourselves. We can only mitigate our participation in the problem, attend to our own psychological and emotional health, seek out our heart’s true desire, live our way into our own best version of self-actualization, and make waves that will overturn the apple carts of oppression, corruption, apathy, and complicity.

It might seem selfish to put so much focus on ourselves and our own wellbeing when other people have problems a lot worse than ours, but like the mother in the airplane who puts the oxygen mask on herself before getting a mask on her child, we aren’t any good to anyone if we are incapacitated.

Why Recovering Humanity?

I’m aware that what you find on my website will seem grandiose or self-important, but it’s something I have to do. I think many people can relate to what has prompted it – grave concern about global warming and other catastrophic problems we are irresponsibly handing down to our children and grandchildren and deep frustration because it feels like there is nothing ordinary people like you and I can do that will make any meaningful difference.

Current models of government are inherently undemocratic and unresponsive to the concerns of everyday citizens. They were conceived and designed by wealthy white men who felt that they had to guard against the hoi polloi taking over. Decisions are unduly influenced by money and entrenched power. Demagoguery and blatant corruption are commonplace. “Honest politician” is an oxymoron. Fatalism, apathy, and cynicism are rampant.

I find the collective learned helplessness that has set in to be unacceptable. I understand where it comes from, but allowing ourselves to be duped, either by wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing promoters of the jingoistic status quo or by the irony-steeped zeitgeist of the ostensibly detached and smugly superior (yet anxiously obedient, fad-following) devotees of the religion of being cool, is unconscionable.

Besides the risks of being judged as being driven by a vain pursuit of glory or by some ax-grinding agenda, besides the very real possibility that nothing will ever come of my determined effort to swim upstream, and besides the likelihood of coming across as inelegant, I have nothing to lose.

By the same token, I do have a lot to lose by not putting my dream of creating a more hopeful future out there. It’s a matter of conscience, but it’s also a matter of pursuing emotional and mental health. It’s about recovering humanity.

My fondest hope is that I will directly or indirectly initiate something that will go viral and achieve critical mass. I realize that much of what I have posted here is probably too demanding and heavy to penetrate a mass audience. There are too many words. It’s too much to absorb, too deep, and too serious. Yet perhaps someone who reads what I have written will glean something that will inspire them to create something that will catch on and ignite real change. The ultimate sign of success would be for others to take ownership, reshape the vision into something they can get excited about, and run with it.

But even if everything I am reaching for turns out to be an embarrassing display of a ridiculous, quixotic fool pissing in the wind or is just doomed to desolate obscurity, at least I will know that I gave it my best shot. After all, “it’s better to light a single candle than curse the darkness.”

Getting involved in something like this may not be your cup of tea, but you might know someone who would be interested. Passing it on to her or him would be a real contribution. Don’t do it as a favor to me or anybody else; do it for yourself, your children, and your grandchildren. And it costs almost nothing to vote for the basic ideas presented here by going to our Facebook page and hitting the like button.