Living together in times of moral alienation

Save the dates! My friends and I at Temescal Commons are going to host The Week this April (we’re doing it 4/21, 22, and 23). 

The basics: You get together 3 times, during a week (hence “The Week”). Every time you watch a 1 hour documentary film episode about climate change. And then the heart of the experience is a guided conversation for 30 minutes (or more if you want) to make sense of it all. These are free and self-organized all over the world — a beautiful way to make our personal grief, questions, desire for action about climate change more collective.

So here’s my ask: if this appeals, organize one in your local community and then tell me about it! I’ll write posts each day of the 3 days we gather about the conversation in Oakland. I’d LOVE to hear about your conversations with your crews. Where might the similarities and differences be? And maybe if enough people are interested we can even do a live zoom together and talk about our big take-aways? If you plan to organize a crew, sign up here please!

I’m excited that

Anya Kamenetz

of The Golden Hour is also going to host a crew and encourage her community to do so, too. Other writers that I know and love on substack are considering it as well, so hopefully we’ll have a big, deep group of people all over the place having these oh-so-necessary gatherings. Now on with the regularly scheduled program…  

---

So many conversations I’ve been having lately are circling around the same theme—how can we live, work, learn together when we feel such profound moral alienation from one another?

This has been rising along with the death toll in Gaza. Executive directors and CEOs are being called out by their younger employees for not saying something unequivocal and condemning of Israel’s retaliatory violence. The young people are saying, this is a clear case of excessive and immoral violence and we have to acknowledge it as an organization. The leaders are saying, of course I mourn all the dead, and taking sides feels too simple in this moment of deep, historic complexities.

Likewise, friends are calling out other friends—why haven’t you signed this petition in support of my politics? Where is your stand on social media. Silence is violence. The one being called out feels tied up in knots, believing deeply in taking inconvenient stands but also feeling like petitions and social media are anemic and flattening mediums unworthy of the crises in our midst. When can silence be understood as discernment? Silence, of course, can mean so many, many things.

And it’s not just the Middle East violence that is surfacing this acrimony. Situations closer to home are also producing fractures that many of us don’t know how to mend. The impending presidential election. Conflicts over endangering and/or free speech. Debates over how we educate our children and with what curricula.

The urgency and “say it plain” style of those calling for moral clarity has such power. It’s a relief to me, really, to hear that there are people for whom justification, compartmentalization, and hypocrisy will not go unnoticed any longer. It’s a beautiful and necessary part of human development—to feel (sometimes youthful, sometimes not) ethical and political rage and obey its intensity, the pragmatic consequences be damned. So many of our most laudable social and political evolutions have been deeply dependent on these voices, this energy, the bright, moral lines they draw in the sand of our easily distracted society.

But I also see where this urgency can lead us—myself included—to run roughshod over our own relationships, turning people we love into targets of our wrath. I’m reminded of a family hike in my 20s when, enraged by wealth inequality in America, I unloaded on my parents about hoarding money; it led, not to a cathartic or constructive shift in how any of us thought about class and risk and whiteness, but to me crying in the bathroom alone and my parents trying to figure out how the hell the daughter whose college education they had just saved dutifully for was now screaming at them for having done so.

It’s not that that conversation with my parents didn’t matter, but the blame and anger that I brought to it was not actually about them, it was about the system that created the circumstances in which they were, yes, complicit. It’s horrific to live in this world—hemmed into so many profoundly unjust systems. There is so much grief in your heart if you stay awake to it, so much powerlessness. It’s easy to lash out at those nearest us in the face of it.

The other thing I now understand about that conversation with my parents is that I had so little imagination or curiosity for the texture of their complicity; my dad’s emotional attachment to having money in the bank is not rooted in some Machiavellian greed, but childhood trauma—his family of origin was constantly going bankrupt and he was asked to answer the door for debt collectors as a little guy. So often we equate curiosity about what we regard as someone’s complicity with rationalization, when really it is humanization. It allows the relationship to endure and hold the very real conflict. It makes us smarter about why those who we disagree with think, feel, and act the way they do, so that we can, among other things, make change more strategically. It helps us, quite simply, stay human.

I was talking to Mary Knox Miller for her podcast (episode forthcoming) last week and she shared her concept of “human-first listening.” I liked that - it’s moving towards what I am aching for us to do in our families, neighborhoods, and organizations right now. How can we hold tension, surface uncomfortable truths, demand moral action, while being compassionate, curious, imaginative? One answer: hold, at the front of our minds, that the person we are fighting with is a lovable, flawed human, just like us, first and foremost.

But, as I told Mary Knox, I also worry that “human-first listening” could have an “I don’t see race” quality to it—an erasure of all the context that people bring with them when they try to have these conversations, as if we all have an equal stake in the consequences. We don’t. The parent of a transgender kid, for example, has way more to lose when people question standards of care for trans teens than a “thought leader” who finds the subject fascinating. (Here’s a helpful and widening synthesis from Kyle Ranson Walsh on that.)

I followed up with Mary Knox on this point of de-contextualization and she explained it this way:

Perhaps the antidote to moral alienation lies in slowing down -- intentionally taking time to discern. I’ve found if I create space between stimulus and response, there’s a better chance my reply will take into account three critical components: 1) a person’s humanity, 2) their circumstance / social reality / identities, and consequently, 3) their power / influence (or lack thereof). I also have to right-size my ego¹ by humbly acknowledging I can never fully understand another’s perspective. Yet, it’s the best chance of entering the conversation with compassion and the possibility of meeting as equals. 

Yes! We need to right-size so much these days. I have been thinking about how so many of us pretend to be middle class as another way of societal gaslighting that we do to one another. (You can use this calculator to determine whether you are actually middle class, a shrinking designation as the wealth gap grows and grows.) It’s as if we are saying, “I don’t see class,” as we either struggle financially, but pretend we are fine while putting ourselves into debt to buy the brands that signal as much, or stockpile money in mutual fund accounts, but wear shabby clothes and drive beaters so no one has any idea how thick our safety net really is. (In fact, this metaphor feels too flimsy for the kind of wealth so many people have to “fall back on”; what is far thicker than net?)

Just as some of us downplay how much money we have, so many of us downplay how much power we have. When confronted with urgent voices—our employees, our children, our neighbors—we feel misunderstood; but I’m not the enemy, we think. It’s Trump or Netanyahu, redlining or gentrification, abstractions like “structural racism” or “the fog of war” that can never answer back. And usually it’s accurate that someone does have more power than you, that a system, of course, has more power than you, but that also doesn’t mean you have no power. Each of us has power and influence and it should be a lifelong project to see that accurately and align our moral actions accordingly. These days, I find myself constantly stepping back from the social media fray and asking: how can I be a part of changing real material conditions for someone? What can my influence, my money, my energy do to make someone’s life easier today?

Maybe it’s a middle age thing that I feel so in middle of it all. I crave both—the bright moral lines of youth and the capacity to hold complexity and compassion of elders. I want money and power to be redistributed and I want acknowledgement that sometimes maintaining everyone’s dignity while doing it in the midstream of systemic savagery is really confusing. I want huge billowing banners that call for ceasefire and I want absolutely everyone’s suffering honored, no exceptions.

I want us to hear one another saying brave things with less defensiveness and witness one another taking unprecedented action with less ego so we can create a world, not a virtual world, but a real, tangible, material world, that is worthy of our children. My hunch is that that will take the fire of youth and the wisdom of elders, the power of taking responsibility and depersonalizing simultaneously, calling out and calling in, curiosity and no more excuses, compassion and impatience, love and guts.

---

If you want to read/listen more on this, here’s a piece I wrote way back (that got me into some very productive conflicts!), and another more recently, plus a Q&A on curiosity that has a lot of relevance, and here’s a podcast episode with pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber and artist Jen Bloomer that touches on some of this.

And I’d love to hear, where are you at with all this? What are you reading, listening to, and watching that is modeling a “third way”?

1. This phrase came from our conversation when I referenced the field of intellectual humility.