What if the starting point was frailty?

“We talk about strengthening democracy. What if we used, as the starting point, the frailty of the human condition instead?”

-Lyndsey Stonebridge

I was honored to be included in a gathering recently of former guests, collaborators, and others related to The On Being Project. I have known and been mentored by Krista Tippett, the host of the podcast, for a long time now, and had a weekly column for many years at On Being when they did that sort of thing. One of the cutting-edge conversations I listened to live was between Krista, Lucas Johnson, who leads their work on social healing, and Lyndsey Stonebridge, a professor with a new book out on Hannah Arendt. The searching hour was focused on what Hannah Arendt’s wisdom tells us about our current moment.

A young Arendt, always with a cig in her hand.

Our current moment — what a fear-filled, breaking open and apart, full of potential, terrible moment this is. As the hour struck midnight and 2024 dawned, I felt like the anticipation of the presidential election moved into the center of public consciousness, and perhaps even more worrying, subconscious. This is on top of the deep pain so many of us are feeling over how Americans have talked about, or not talked about, the bloodshed in the Middle East. It feels like we are looking around at one another wondering, again, how can we possibly live together, much less learn, work, and worship together? Is there anything that unites us any longer?

And in the midst of this moment, Professor Stonebridge—invoking a long-dead, brilliant, and soulful thinker—says this thing that lights up a thousand connections in my own scared brain.

“We talk about strengthening democracy. What if we used, as the starting point, the frailty of the human condition instead?”

Frailty! The thing we don’t want to admit, especially as Americans, is the condition that unites us all so deeply.

It’s everywhere you look—in this space where I have newly been writing about my dad with dementia, his brain eroding and his essence shining with Buddha-like munificence, my mom—his wife of over 50 years and best friend of many more—by his side as he looses so much capacity. Your gorgeous comments and emails that say over and over again, me too, us too, you are not alone.

It’s also in the headlines of more mainstream papers—the childcare supply crisis, where we have underfunded and undervalued early education so deeply that we have essentially created an economy of magical thinking. If kids aren’t cared for, parents can’t work. If parents can’t work, there is no workforce. Period.

Our teenagers, too, are telegraphing their frailty everywhere and anywhere that we might listen—on social media, in the form of self-harm, through nihilistic acts of destruction. The other day, teenagers broke in and rampaged through my kids’ elementary school, pouring paint down the hallways and breaking the windows of the library. It was hard not to make a metaphor out of it—raging against the innocence of an elementary school, the loss of something sweet in a world full of ecological destruction, weaponized violence, and algorithms.

Arendt knew frailty in fraught times. Her father died of syphilis when she was just 7 years old. In her later years, she fled Nazi Germany after being imprisoned for doing research into antisemitism. And she weathered heartbreaks and professional homelessness and so much else through out her too short life (she died of a heart attack in New York in 1975, her last book left unfinished).

Art from Stonebridge’s new book.

What Stonebridge was pushing us to consider is what a different politics might look like right now, starting with a different starting point—one worthy of Arendt’s bright mind. What if, instead of assuming self-reliance, we assumed periodic, acute dependence, and lifetime interdependence? What if we built a country that worked for our children and our elders, our disabled and our sick, first and then delighted in how it worked better for everybody? What if we honored the people with gifts and training for meeting frailty—childcare workers and home healthcare aides, pastors and social workers, artists and disability justice activists—with the dignity and resources they deserve?

What if it wasn’t just our politics that began with frailty as the starting point, but our technology? What if the people architecting each new phase of artificial intelligence were informed by our country’s foremost experts in frailty? What if their goal was to free us up, not from the messiness of being human, but from the burden of all that prevents us from being more human more of the time—starting with the administrative crush of our healthcare and safety net systems?

What if we saw political leadership through this lens, asking, not who would we want to have a beer with, but who would we want to take care of our dying mother? Who would we trust to understand, not just the frailty of the commons in this fork-in-the-road moment, but the frailty of their own heart? What if we picked our leaders—whether school board members or presidents—not based on who can raise the most money or run the most strategic campaign, but who understands the tragedy and beauty of frailty most powerfully and knows how to carry it with them as they make decisions of real significance for other people?

Let’s stop strengthening democracy this year. Let’s start weakening delusions about the human condition, which will then help us reimagine democracy for a country, a people, as we really are—young and old and everything in between, and temporarily well and often sick, and sometimes abled bodied and sometimes not, sometimes broken hearted and sometimes full of joy and optimism, and tangled in relationships that hold us up through it all.

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Buy Professor Stonebridge’s new book here. Tell me where you are seeing frailty honored, in your own life, in the public square, politically. And as always, please share and subscribe so we can continue to build this world we want together.