Tom's Musings

I suspect that many of us have read or heard the commencement address by documentary genius Ken Burns at Brandeis University. It was, as expected, eloquent and profound. What touched me was his allusion to what a young man said during a public speech in Springfield Illinois in 1838. That tall, lanky young man told the assemblage that the American Republic would not be destroyed by any army from a foreign shore. No, any serious attack on our institutions and our tenets of self-governance would come from within. We are our foremost worst enemy.

Of course, Ken was referencing a young Abe Lincoln who later would lead this country during a contest in which his dire prediction almost came to pass. Over 600,000 lost their lives in a civil war to test whether ‘this nation, or any nation so conceived’ could be sustained. I suspect that most have concluded that this long ago conflagration, horrific as it was, did preserve the union for all time. If only that were so.

Back then, our political landscape was a mirror image of today’s divisions and discontents. The Republican Party, born in the 1850s as the Whig Party disintegrated, would have been seen as the liberal party of that day. Republicans, in general, opposed the extension of slavery, favored public investments in infrastructure, leaned toward a stronger national government, and endorsed initiatives to improve the human capital and educational status of the nation’s citizens. Even as the civil war raged, Republicans passed legislation to establish land grant colleges, extend railroads across the country, and create a standardized national currency.

The party of Jefferson and Jackson had a distinctly separate vision for America. Democrats of that era saw nothing wrong with slavery. They disliked any (or most at least) forms of centralized control. Thus, they were strong proponents of State’s rights and local authority. It also might be argued that the Dems back then were suspicious of democracy, believing that wealth and privilege were signs denoting those who were graced by Providence to lead and govern over their less lifted brethren.

Democratic strongholds, not surprisingly, were found in Southern states (a pattern that would generally remain until the partisan realignment of the 1960s Civil rights era). The Confederacy overwhelmingly leaned to the Democratic Party. The political disposition of the Confederacy did not well serve their cause. Each state was seen as sovereign entity, much like the original Articles of Confederation did among the original colonies … an arrangement which proved a disaster. Thus, the central government in Richmond could only petition the several governors to help in the rebellion. Their core value of decentralized authority hindered any long-term pursuit of a coordinated strategy in this massive conflict of arms. Lincoln’s powers were more substantive and effective over time.

I offer the brief historical view above to suggest that while much has changed over the past 160 or so years, many things have not. The two major political parties have switched positions. The Republicans are now seen as representing conservative values that favor limited government (even though they are not consistent in this), while the Democrats are perceived as the liberal party which favors a proactive government. While this simple distinction is accurate on the surface, it fails to capture the essential differences (namely the radically distinct perceptions of society) each side embraces.

Even as the party roles were reversed over time, as they were, the two major political parties continued to embrace radically different conceptions of the good society. James Henry Hammond, a Democratic U.S. Senator, gave a speech in 1858 laying out his ‘mudsill’ theory. It was a succinct summary of the philosophy underlying the principles of his party and a justification for the exploitation of others. According to his philosophy, every society needs a docile and less educated population to do the grudge work of society. Not surprisingly, he and his compatriots saw slavery as the natural order of things. The white paid laborers in the north represented somewhat of a violation of this natural order, and posed a threat to the existing equilibrium.

In a larger sense, the then Democratic Party (like the the Republican Party now) felt more comfortable in a society where social and economic classes were rigid and hierarchical. An educated elite were rewarded for their efforts by enjoying material wealth and, by God’s graces, were destined to rule. The lower classes, while enjoying privileges that a white skin might bestow on some, could never arise above their station. That would not be natural. This view was not all that different from older, feudal organizations of European society, nor the caste system found in Asia, nor the elitist system found in 20th century Britain. Society was hierarchical, rigid, and ordained from above. Governance was authoritarian and, at best, paternalistic. Every person was relegated to their preordained place in this ordered world.

The other side saw a different vision. A persons success would be determined by their innate skills and efforts. Ideally, everyone would have an opportunity for advancement and success. Any individual ought to have an opportunity to participate in the governance of society. Thus, basic educational opportunities spread more quickly in the North while suffrage was more acceptable when it finally came to those groups who had been ignored for so long. Social mobility, the proverbial American Dream, was something to be valued and preserved and even fostered through public efforts.

Today, those two competing visions once again are vying for dominance just as they were in the anti-bellum era and as they have simmered in softly spoken, yet undeniable, ways throughout our history.

Think about the underlying message we hear from the Republican base and the wannabe despots they support. They appear quite satisfied with the hyper-inequality that has increased since the Reagan revolution in 1980. They have no problem with declining social mobility as educational opportunities are priced out of reach of the less firtunate and public educational institutions are starved of resources. They attack most forms of a liberal (in the classic sense) education as they strive to turn post secondary schools into hi-tech vocational institutions … learn to do but not to think. They try to whitewash history to sanitize the past by eliminating anything that makes kids uncomfortable.

Worse, the new Republican Party has renewed the age-old attack on universal suffrage. They have remade gerrymandering into an art form. In Wisconsin, voters statewide vote Democratic but almost two-thirds of the Assembly seats are held by Republicans due to skewed voting districts. (Note: the new State Supreme Court has addressed this farce). Where they can, Republicans continue to purge minorities from the voting rolls while making it harder to vote in general. It is difficult to sustain the majority support essential to electoral success when you continuously vote against the interests of the vast majority. They can only retain their offices either by scaring the public with bogus fears (an alien invasion) or engaging in classic forms of emotional misdirections … abortion or gun confiscation.

Ultimately, they know that retaining power over the long run will be difficult. So, the insiders have formulated more drastic measures, one being the so-called 2025 plan. If Trump gains the White House again, the hard right leaves no doubt about their intentions. They intend to fabricate an excuse to turn America from a government of laws to one run by a narcissistic strongman. They will do what they accused the Democrats of doing but without a shred of evidence.

Their new America will be based on fear, retribution, and unleashed power. Their model will be the Nazi usurpation of complete control in the weeks after Hitler was named Chancellor by President Hindenburg in 1933. Some crisis (the border or rigged elections or China) will serve as a convenient excuse to usurp more power to the center. The justice system will be weaponized to go after enemies, the civil service will be turned into a supporting cast of incompetent lackeys, and constitutional protections for average Americans will be eviscerated.

The new Republican Party has no truck with traditional democratic checks and balances. The Trump cult wants a strong man in charge who will attack all the people they despise without constraints. It will be a society where the powerful control and dominate the weak and the defenseless. It will be a society where the weak and vulnerable will be crushed and forced to serve the elite according to the ‘mudsill’ perspective of society. They seek nothing less than a return to the 1850’s south or even further back in time.

We often hear that the next election is the most important in history. This time, that assertion just may be true.

It is official. I am older than dirt. I am an octogenerian, have been for almost a week now. 🙃 Or, to be technically accurate, I am now in my ninth freaking decade. Put that way, there may be trees in the petrified forest younger than me. The only way to accurately measure my age is through carbon dating.

I can remember far back in the previous century wondering if I could possibly live long enough to usher in a new millennium. After all, I would be 56 in the year 2,000. Oh my god, that struck me as impossibly old. No way could I last that long. After all, I came of age when a popular mantra was ‘don’t trust anyone over 30.’ But my 30th birthday came and went. Then five more decades came and went along with the Y2K fears that our digitally dependent civilization would collapse when midnight struck while ushering a new century on January 1, 2000. I even watched as Sydney first celebrated that moment, and realized that the world really had survived 🥳, as had I.

So, how do I feel about being so ancient. Pretty good, actually. My condo neighbors regularly gather to chat and to dump on Trump. While the Association is not deed restricted by age, it might as well be. We are all old. And we are all highly educated and successful. We are retired academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other assorted professionals. Many matriculated from the best universities in the land. Yet, none of us seem eager to turn back our personal clocks. We had good lives but are desperately concerned about the future given the various looming threats to our climate, our political system and American democracy, and the uncertainties emerging from the specter of artificial intelligence (to name a few).

Most of my geezer friends and I realize that the world we entered back in the 1930s through the 1950s was not a happy place. There was war, economic disasters, famine, genocide, a host of totalitarian regimes, and a looming nuclear age where an atomic holocaust seemed more than likely. No, it was not a pretty place globally.

Even America faced horrendous problems. We still had legal apartheid that relegated many minorities to lives of isolation and oppression. Women were generally treated as 2nd class citizens. I still recall a colleague from the Wisconsin Law School. She graduated (in the 1950s) at the top of her law school class, one of only two women. The Dean at the time told her that no major law firm in Wisconsin would possibly consider her. She somehow managed to get a position on the law faculty at Wisconsin and become a towering force in her profession.

Certainly, we were not living in anything close to the ideal worlds presented on TV family sitcoms. I’m my situation (as a child), we lived in a cold water flat with no central heating (I could see my breath at night). We had an ice box, no car, a party line telephone shared with 3 other families, among other privations. But no one else had much either, so such challenges never bothered us. I started earning money by delivering papers early on and never stopped working. Even, after retirement, I continued writing books.

Despite all our challenges back then there remained a pervasive sense of hope and opportunity. I could work and scramble my way through a competitive high school and a decent (private) university on my own (no financial help from family), then head off to India in the Peace Corps. I experienced little anxiety about my future, assuming that this really was a land of opportunity. There would be challenges, of course, but I had faith that things would work out. And I was correct, America (back then) had become a real land of opportunity … a moment of promise that began to evaporate with the Reagan revolution that started in the 1980s.

Mostly, though, surviving this long has permitted my cohort to see many amazing things. As a youngster in grade school, I was assigned the honored position of ink well filler. That’s right, we had pens that had to be continuously refilled with ink. At home, we finally got a TV after most other homes had them. Still, you had to struggle with the vertical and horizontal controls to get a picture. Many a time, I accompanied my dad to a store where we got the vacuum tube’s checked. And believe it or not, to change the channel (we had only four at most), we had to walk all the way to the set and turn a clunky nob. Worse, the stations would cease broadcasting around midnight, at which time they would sign off with the national anthem.

But there was other entertainment in the busy streets. The milk man, the coal man, the ice man (who delivered blocks of ice to our ‘ice box’), and a variety of other vendors were frequent visitors to our hood which was over run with kids (large Catholic families). I can still recall running after the ice or milk truck to purloin chunks of ice on hot summer days.

You could get your knives sharpened or buy used rags and so much more. I have a picture (somewhere) taken of me sitting on a horse in front of our flat … yet another itinerant vendor wandering through. In the late 1950s, when I was sick as a dog for several days, my folks broke down and called a doctor (a rarity indeed since they cost money). He came to our flat to check me out … a freaking house call 🏠 if you can believe. That was a good thing. My appendix had burst, and I was near death. I was rushed to the nearby hospital and directly into surgery.

Without cell phones and social media, we were raised the old fashion way. My parents told me to get out of the damn house and not to return until the street lights came on. Kids then were not kidnapped. If any were abused, we never heard about it, nor did our parents seem to worry. (After all, the sign my parents made me wear saying ‘please take this brat‘ did them little good.

Often, as I marauded the streets with a gang of neighborhood ruffians, my long-suffering folks would change the locks or quickly move to an undisclosed location. But they couldn’t lose me no matter how hard they tried. When I got a bit older, my uncle gave me a set of golf clubs. They were so ancient that the shafts of the so-called irons were made of wood. A couple of my buddies and I would walk several miles (uphill at the end) toting our clubs to a local 9-hole course. We could play all day for one buck before trudging home as the sun set. We were tough.

I could go on but you get the picture. The pace of change has been dizzying and accelerating. We did live during an epochal period of historical transformation. The angst we see, particularly among the young, may well be the result of this unprecedented pace of change. Many are ill equipped to handle it. My suspicion is that this unnerving period of exponential change has disoriented those incapable of dealing with uncertainty. They seek authoritarian voices who will calm their fears. Unfortunately, that is like seeking a magician who can hold the tide back. Ain’t going to happen

These eight decades have been one helluva ride. However, I’m glad it is coming to an end. I really am getting way too old for this shit.

Previously, I touched on what it meant to articulate a moral center, how difficult that endeavor is … if you take the challenge seriously that is. And there’s the rub. How many of us approach the task of centering our world view in a thoughtful and serious fashion. Or, how many of us simply accept what we are given and go through life spewing forth scripted clichés.

I can still remember my mother once again disapproving of my behavior, or the way I looked, or what I believed. If I questioned her ‘wisdom,’ she would give me her patented look of exasperation and thinly veiled disgust. ‘Everyone believes (or thinks or does) this,‘ remained her final argument.

It mattered not what the issue might be since we were touching upon a universal truth according to her worldview. Inevitably, I would scrunch up my face. ‘Everyone in the whole world … really? Do you mean kids in remote China believe and act this way?’ My small acts of rebellion would never win the day for me. No, it merely would result in a rising level of exasperation on my mother’s part. Her world was one of absolutes.

And so was my early world. It was Catholic, ethnic, working class, a world refined in a constrained petri dish of struggling tribalism…an us versus them mentality. Stereotypes and prejudices were omnipresent. It was a stark world of good and evil, of light and dark. Shades of gray, of nuanced or complicated thinking, were discouraged.

I apologize if I’ve shared this too many times in the past but I can recall sitting in my High school religion classes arguing (only inside my own head of course) with the structures being passed on as absolute truth. In that dogmatic world, children were cast into some unthinkable eternity because they had not been baptized? Silly birth control prohibitions were imposed when, even then, we could see that growing populations would create huge societal issues. Ancient gender roles remained within the institutional arrangements of the Church, even as the wider world offered women a taste of equality and opportunity. The infallibility of the Pope (in matters of faith and morals) continued even as the history of the Papacy was rife with atrocious scandals. The list was endless.

Yet, cultural bubbles are immersive and confining. When you are inside, you cannot easily detect the character of the prison in which you are incarcerated. It is, in the end, your world, much like the fish in the fish bowl. Contradictory input is something to be ignored or actively refuted. Most of us have difficulty accommodating diverse thought and contradictory ideas with some of us have more difficulty than others in breaking free from established precepts. After all, cracking open one’s worldview can be traumatic. It is the framework within which we organize the amazing array of stimuli that represents that complex world out there. It is not as if what we understand that reality is, in fact, our creation of reality. We assume all see the same reality even as our individual world is partly a social artifact, something created through the prism of our personal filters.

I can recall confronting my own core set of assumptions and beliefs. That started in high school and accelerated in college. Early on, it was more a process of questioning the religious scripts imposed on me, starting with the precepts contained in the Baltimore Catechism in which we were indoctrinated by the Catholic authorities early on. Then, it was too early for me to do any major restructuring. I merely pushed some beliefs to the side, dismissing them as being illogical or contravening common sense while maintaining the essential architect of my childhood version of reality.

Later on, in college, the challenges to my personal orthodoxy became too numerous. It soon was impossible to patch up my existing edifice. I had to articulate a new structure or rationale for my approach to things. At first glance, that might seem a significant undertaking. Yet, two factors rendered the process doable.

First, I was now operating outside my bubble. The Catholic Church, throughout its history but particularly after the Reformation, spent enormous resources and energy on developing and nurturing separate institutions in the areas of education, health, and so many others. All these efforts were designed to separate and protect the flock from competing views and influences. I would create my own philosophy of life.

Second, I found that I didn’t have to jettison my core or fundamental dispositions. Upon deep reflection, it turned out that my new moral center, while not based on any formal religious or established institutional dogma, reflected Christ’s teachings as well as that of many other major spiritual gurus. Essentially, most ancient moral teachers of note preach some forms of civility, compassion, and community with love and acceptance operating as the key bonding agent. In short, I did not have to transform my world view. I merely had to base my belief system on a more intrinsic type of rationale as opposed to extrinsic mandates and fear of punishment. The good is remarkably self-evident.

Eventually, I sensed that my moral center was going to wind up where it did no matter what. I was predisposed to certain foundational sentiments … equality over superiority, acceptance over division, love over rejection, peace over violence, and kindness over the alternative. I was destined to be a do-gooder (most of the time). Perhaps that is why, even as a teen, I sought work that was aimed at helping others…hospital work, helping disadvantaged kids, making a hopeless stab at becoming a Priest, and then a stint in the Peace Corps. It might help explain how swiftly I embraced progressive politics and my profession of teaching and doing public policy work related to poverty and helping the poor.

And yet, I always remained somewhat detached. I did policy and not politics. I mostly focused on programs and institutions, and not people themselves. I circled problems from 30,000 feet as opposed to getting into the trenches. In some ways, I never got involved.

Is that wrong? I’m not sure. But I have always felt a little guilty about that. I’ve had to accept that, while I’m a decent schmoozer, I am not instinctively comfortable around people. Perhaps, if I were to do it all over again, I would step out of my comfort zone to be a better people person. Perhaps!

While I have more to say on this topic, I realize that the process of settling on how one should center one’s life never ceases. It is an ongoing process. In a way, it is like science. The rigors of analytics seldom give consumers final answers but rather the most defensible answer available based on existing evidence and assessment. However, new evidence is continually available. Long ago, the best minds saw the earth about us as the center of everything. A century ago, our understanding of the scale of the universe was confined to the Milky Way, our own galaxy, in which we were minor players. Today, we know that there are at least two trillion galaxies out there. Our existence is peripheral indeed.

We must keep reexamining everything, changing our minds based on our continuing sifting and winnowing of the world about us. Our belief systems are similar … we arrive at a set of conclusions only to question them once again. At least we should keep questioning them. It is the journey itself that makes the most sense, not easy answers grabbed onto as lifelines. Such a never-ending journey makes life harder, even uncertain. However, I personally would have it no other way. Struggling to understand the majesty and mystery of what is out there is an exilerating endeavor. I know it is hopeless. Yet that is the very quality that makes it such a seductive aspiration.

A great deal of focus, along with spirited discussion, is being directed on the protests that have upset life as usual upon college campuses these days. It strikes me that I must get in touch with my old friend (and former colleague) who serves as the right-hand person to the current University of Wisconsin’s (UW) Chancellor. She might help me get the inside story playing out on at least one campus. As of yet, I haven’t bothered her since she is swamped by daily crises.

You might recall the UW campus being a hotbed of radicalism back in the 60s. I missed most of that excitement since I was in India from 1967 to 1969. However, I was heavily involved in the early anti-war and civil rights protests at Clark University as well as those occurring in Milwaukee and Madison upon my return. Back then, I examined the issues that prompted my generalized anger rigorously. I cannot make the same claim about what has prompted today’s discontent, at least not to the extent I did in my youth when I first experienced my rebellious spirit. Still, I probably should assume the experience has not changed that much.

A lack of intimate knowledge, however, does not stop me from spouting off on the current controversies. Unsupported opinion is an inexpensive commodity of which I enjoy a ready and never ending supply. Let me start, though, with a general observation. I’m generally heartened by the tempest on at least some of our campuses. I had thought that recent generations of students had degenerated into little more than passive sheep who had been seduced into a collective coma by social media along with an debilitating angst about their financial futures. Remember that I spent many years  in front of college classrooms, though, in truth, I was more of a full-time policy wonk than a teacher. Most of my students struck me as uninvolved and self oriented, at least compared to the memories of my own cohort. They appeared to be more focused on how they would fare in their adult life than in how society was doing.

It was different in my day, or at least what I recall from my rebellious days in the 1960s. My cohort spent hours fiercely debating the issues of the day … war, poverty and inequality, civil rights, what constituted a just society, and other such matters. To be honest, things back then had little to do with the ‘happy days’ ambiance portrayed on sitcoms from that era. We had legal apartheid in much of America, women were treated as second-class citizens, and civil strife and violence were everyday occurrences. In the 1960s and early 70s, it has been reported that there were several bombings daily, though most were inconsequential. A few, however, were very big indeed … the Sterling Hall bombing on the UW campus being one of the more disasterous events. The wife of the researcher killed during that bombing later worked at my UW research entity. She always served as a reminder of those days when rage surpassed reason.

Despite all the anger (and some ridiculousness) during the 70s, we were optimistic. Unlike the deeper pessimism and a more global angst I sense today, we believed we were on the cusp of a new world …  at least until we sobered up or the euphoria of our weed wore off (the latter anesthetic I seldom used).

As I have oft mentioned, we believed that our generation would create a new world of hope and opportunity. More importantly, we presumed that a more society would exist when we took the levers of policy. Little did we realize that the entrenched forces of the right were regrouping, would articulate a comprehensive strategy for recapturing political control in the early 1970s (the famous memo by future Justice Lewis Powell), and would soon begin the long march toward controlling our major institutions (or trying to at least). Most importantly, they focused on reshaping the default lines in our political discourse.

I have often wondered whether there was there something special about my cohort that was born just before the baby boomer generation came along. (I was born in 1944). We poked our heads out of the womb to see a world riven with war, violence, authoritarian rule, and separated by all kinds of irrational tribal divisions. We grew up in an environment dominated by a fundamental contest between competing ideologies where a final apocalypse seemed imminent. The infamous doomsday clock always seemed poised to strike midnight. I recall diving under our grade school desks to practice avoiding being incinerated when the Russkies dropped the big one on our sorry asses. We (I, at least) matured in a rather sanitized, vanilla world of commonly accepted cultural norms. We clung ferociously to our world views which seemed threatened by unseen evil ones bent on destroying us. Worse, both sides had the means to obliterate the other. I never expected to make it to my 20s. Finally, we graduated high school (1962) just as the age innocence collapsed into an era of questioning.

A world divided into good and evil has an artificial aspect to it. While I never doubted that the Leninist-Stalinist form of Communism was seriously flawed (a sick joke, really), it did develop as a crude attempt to deal with the hyper-inequality and oppression within the Czarist system it tried to replace. That is, it was born of good intentions.

America, on the other hand, was a land that practiced outrageous forms of hypocrisy as it touted itself as a beacon of democracy. Not only did we (at the time) permit legal apartheid to continue but overthrew elected governments we didn’t like and vilified those who did not follow the party script (remember the outrages of the McCarthy era). We sometimes out Sovieted the Soviets in the pursuit of defeating the Soviets. It was sometimes hard to identify the good guys from the bad.

The Gaza situation is similarly ambiguous. Hamas clearly carried out outrageous acts of terrorism last October. Some 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds more kidnapped. That seemed like unwarranted terrorism until one realizes that Israel had 5,200 Palestians incarcerated in their prison system (Hamas was seeking a prisoner exchange). The Israelis also had ghettoized the Arab population in a tiny strip of land with few opportunities and less hope. This was a situation destined to see escalating rage and suspicion on both sides. In such an environment, rising irrationality and escalating violence is the only certainty. I am reminded of Ghandi’s famous aphorism … an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Yet, I find it hard to witness the Israeli government (not all Jews) implicitly endorsing a form of genocide, an ungorgivable tactic practiced on them throughout history.

In my early years, I never ceased in my dislike for authoritarian regimes. However, the more I learned (no one indoctrinated me as far as I know), the more I questioned the political and cultural precepts in which I was raised. My greatest epiphany was that the world was not black and white. That is, there were few easy answers. Ambiguity was everywhere, and ambivalence would prove a fundamental aspect of the human condition.

Yet, we (I) still had to choose with respect to the defining international issue of the day (racial civil rights was an easier issue). In the end, the more I studied and debated, the more I rejected my country’s position. The ‘domino’ argument was a thin reed on which to justify a war halfway around the world in Southeast Asia that ultimately would lead to millions being killed (that war directly led, for example, to Cambodia’s killing fields. Can anyone argue with a straight face that the fall of Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh’s decades long fight for independence would result in the Commies showing up on America’s west coast. Wow!

No great issue is simple, however. There are intricate moral and practical complications that must be sorted through. But, in the end, the decisions we make come back to our moral center. Thus, knowing our individual core world view is desperately important. And sorting through the labyrinth of conflicting facts and claims is a necessary step toward determining where we stand. It is never easy but always necessary.

I cannot know if the students protesting today have gone through an exhaustive analysis to arrive at their positions. I cannot determine if they are prepared to be disappointed, as they likely will be. However, I am glad they are out there. It suggests that they care … and that they care about creating a better world. They cannot succeed in their fullest ambitions but the effort is likely as important as the results.

The book cover at the beginning is a fictional work exploring my own struggle as a young man. It does contain, or was inspired, by my own experiences during the 1960s. I tried to capture the struggle we faced, the choices and pressures we experienced. Of only one thing am I certain of today. I became a better person for confronting the moral questions of my day. I’m happy to see some young people doing the same today (or trying at least).

The great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with expressing the sentiment that ‘you have no right to yell fire in a crowded theater.’ That is, there are inherent limits to free speech. But his observation did not emerge entirely from his own fertile mind. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several well publicized incidents where malevolent individuals did just that. Someone would yell ‘fire’ in a crowded venue when none existed. Lives occasionally were lost, or injuries ensued, in the subsequent panic and stampede to safety.

The ‘fire in the theater’ metaphor might be considered a false positive error. One raises an alarm when no danger exists. I suspect there are false negative errors out there as well where real warnings that are merited are not raised, are drowned out by other noise, or are ignored by most. In effect, this second type of error may well be far more serious.

In prior posts, I focused on a crisis brought on by one dominant feature  of our digital age … social media and its societal consequences. Clearly, the incentives and algorithms embedded in our contemporary communication modalities have led to a form of hyper-tribalzation which may well obviate the positive aspects of American democracy. The upcoming 2024 Presidential election may confirm the worst fears of a pessimist like me 😨. I hope that, on November 6, I am not lamenting the fact that our experiment in self governance had a good run (but is over) and that I’m now forced to seek asylum in another country. I’m too old for that shit.

To be fair, a number of observers again are shouting fire 🔥, but to surprisingly little effect. They are pointing to digital based capabilities that have already matched the limits of human cognition and which exceed what our best minds can do in many areas. The future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) can not yet be fully imagined. However, it promises to be the most explosive and consequential transformative moment in the evolution of our species. To some, it might well mark the end of our species. Yet, most of our public discussion focuses on the NFL draft and which teams fared comparatively well in what is at best a meaningless game.

Really! Here we are, looking at one of those seminal moments in time when everything might fundamentally change. And yet, except among a few eggheads and authors, no one seems to be paying attention. Certainly not enough attention.

For arguments sake, let us say that life has been around in this planet for some 3 billion years while recognizable humans (or proto-humans) have been around for at least 200,000 years. We have seen a number of fundamental transition points as life forms increased in diversity and complexity. Our more or less human ancestors experienced and survived several salient transformations. One might cite tool making, the mastering of fire, the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of (some) animals, and the development of urban centers as earlier moments on the path to the world as we now understand it.

More recently (and over a period of time that represents little more than a nano-second in history), we have seen several major evolutionary moments. Small tribes evolved into larger forms (with increasingly differentiated social roles) and eventually into empires. These transitioned into better organized nation states and cultures where trade and the spread of goods and ideas became common. Slowly, knowledge was preserved and consciously communicated across generations. It was recorded in written form, with Gutenburg’s printing innovation (around 1440 CE) being cited as the most important leap forward in the last 1000 years. This was followed up by the introduction of science and inductive reasoning (first in the Islamic Golden Age and then by Francis Bacon in Europe). Then, we really took off with one transition after another… the industrial revolution, the transportation revolution, the communication revolution, the digital revolution, and so much more.

Until the end of the 18th century, learned men (and women) looked back in time for inspiration. They focused on ancient golden ages for truth. Suddenly, the shift was to the future and what we might create with our own energy, effort, and inspiration. Somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, the head of the U.S. Patent Office proffered a belief that the utility of this service might be coming to an end. He thought that most things of use to society had already been invented 🤣. Not quite!

Rather, the pace of change has increased exponentially. Our awareness of the world about us also expands at a breathtaking speed. As has often been said in recent years, there are more scientists working today around the globe than have lived and worked throughout our entire history as self-conscious and thinking beings.

Simply consider our universe. A mere century ago, our best minds, using our most advanced technologies, envisioned that our own Milky Way constituted the expanse of the cosmos (or at least all that we could measure). Today, we know that there are at least 2 trillion galaxies out there stretching 93 million light years across. But wait! We now speculate that the universe is 250 times as big as that … something unimaginable to us and which dwarfs our puny human concerns.

In my head, I keep returning to one more immediate conundrum … why do so many Americans adore a man who has shown absolutely no concern for them or their issues, who demonstrates zero ability to lead either in the private or public sectors, and who evidences serious forms of mental instability 🥺. And these are Trump’s strong points.

There are many possible responses to this puzzle of course. But one possibility is that the pace of change has overwhelmed many. We are inundated by input 24/7 through our phones and other devices. Our senses are overwhelmed. Unless you are wired correctly, and have been trained to filter and organize this ongoing stream of new and often conflicting information, you will be buried in cognitive confusion and emotional angst. What is the average person to do? Most are tempted to create a safe bubble and screen out things that disturb their established priors.

The MAGA crowd, and similar tribes in other countries, cannot deal with the ambiguities and disruptions embedded in a continuously changing world. They seek stability and the known. They can no longer make sense of a society where the old rules no longer suffice, where change in omnipresent, and where continuous adaptation is an essential life skill. And so, they look to and for what they consider a strongman like Donald Trump for comfort … someone who, in reality, is as weak and powerless as the proverbial wizard in the Land of Oz. They look to a con man and snake oil salesman.

And so, I think this is a good time to yell fire! The prospect of AGI will disrupt everything we know about life, our social order, and our place in human evolution is all too real. There is a decent probability that homo-sapiens will stand aside (more likely be pushed aside) to be replaced by entities far better (cognitively) than we. Already, at the very beginning of the AGI era, these machines outdo the best humans at complex games such as chess and the infinitely more complex Chinese game of Go. They can simulate virtually all advanced human abilities, and at a demonstrably higher level.

What will they do as they access the entirety of human knowledge? What will happen when they acieve self consciousness and awareness? Who can, or should, control our very own creation? These are the questions that should be at the center of today’s societal dialogue. But it is not.

My last blog explored the societal downsides (some of them at least) of social media platforms. I focused on the systemic processes inherent in their operational models that tend toward increased tribalization and radicalization, or what we think of as identity politics. In this new humble offering, I share my personal experiences on Facebook.

[Note Bene: Other than Facebook, I ignore most social media platforms. I explore YouTube very occasionally but only to look at reenactment of historical events like Civil War battles. I did join Twitter but exited when Elon Musk bought it.]

I had never considered joining any of the platforms that were all the buzz some 15 years ago. But around 2009, I bought an updated smartphone and saw how easy it was to join Facebook. I joined mostly out of curiosity. Slowly, it must be acknowledged, I was drawn in … especially after I was able to connect with my old college sweetheart from the 1960s. Cool, I thought.

Over time, I found my number of so-called ‘friends’ growing … not totally sure why. I never spent much time on the platform … usually surfing the posts of others and reposting those I thought humorous, thoughtful, or politically spot-on. Undoubtedly, others agreed since my number of friends soon hit 5,000 (their limit). Then, people started joining me as what were termed ‘followers.’ My reach was spreading quickly.

As these numbers grew, so did my problems with Facebook. I kept getting punished by being unable to use the platform (put in Facebook jail or what I called their Gulag) for increasing amounts of time. Yet, my number of friends and followers kept going up … first to 10,000, then to 20,000, and finally approaching 30,000. Toward the end, I was adding 50 to 100 new followers most days. A few of my posts would get hundreds and even thousands of responses. I felt like a ‘rock star.’

I’m retrospect, my increasing number of stints in the Facebook gulag occurred as they (and other social media giants) were coming under increasing scrutiny for negatively impacting both society and our political institutions. So, I guess I fell victim to their blind lashing out at what they considered serial miscreants. Of course, they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) look at their core business model as the source of the problem (see my prior blog). No, they went after individual ‘bad actors’ like me 😉.

Their efforts were, however, laughable in the extreme. I was being thrown in jail for using humor and irony while others were systemically promulgating hate and thus consciously dividing us as a society. Yes, there were some real bad actors out there (like Russian trolls in St. Petersburg being paid to intetfere with the 2016 election). I was not one of them (though I am for sale given the right bribe 😀). But the real culprits, those who were profiting from corporate decisions that subtly tore America apart, remained unexamined.

In my professional life, I spent a lot of time looking at how organizations are structured and how their institutional cultures function. Facebook’s had a ‘community standards’ program which was purportedly designed to protect consumers from nefarious sorts who spread misinformation and hate filled propoganda. Admittedly, this is a huge task given the numbers of daily posts. Unfortunately, their attempt was totally laughable … one of the most inept self-policing efforts imaginable. It is as if they consciously were trying to screw things up. This is to be expected given the growth of the platform and the financial risks associated with any honest attempt to address the issue.

To start with, the threat was less about individuals posting clearly offensive material as opposed to systemic faults built into the bedrock of their business and operating models. It is the increased engagement fed by heightened emotional content leading to more corporate profit cycle I explored in the last blog. They would lash out at my humor (and other hapless individuals) while ignoring their own algorythms that led the unsuspecting FB user deeper into paranoid conspiracy worlds but, and this is critical, kept them engaged and thus boosting revenues.

For example, around one election time, I posted a meme that said Election day is next Tuesday for Democrats and next Wednesday for Republicans. It was clearly a joke. You had to see the humor, either that or believe that Republicans are as dumb as they apparently are. But it was another 30 days in the FB slammer for me.

You never knew when the hammer would fall. Sometimes, you could not even figure out what your crime was. They would merely refer you to their community standards statement which was so vague as to be worthless. Anything could be a crime or nothing might be. Thus, there was no way to correct your behavior to avoid future penalties. The process was mysterious and seemingly discretionary. Thus, it was entirely useless and pointless.

On the community standards propoganda they did agree to share with us, the FB brass claimed to take into account the context in which memes were posted and that they made every attempt to be culturally sensitive. They implied that posts were scrutinized carefully before the hammer fell. You would have to be naive beyond description to believe that one. I was convinced that any humans involved were outsourced cheap labor from Malaysia who could not possibly understand sophisticated humor. More likely, these decisions were made by digital algorithms focused on preselected targets.

When I would get back on (after serving my penalty), typically for short periods of time before the hammer fell again, there was a lot of traffic among my FB friends about the crazy reasons individuals were being punished. The FB decisions all seemed bizarre and random. And no one could comprehend why I was picked out AS A CONVENIENT PUNCHING BAG. I was, after all, pretty funny and quite inoffensive (though liberal). Most argued that right-wing trolls were trying to get me off the platform and that I should prune my friend and follower lists of said reprobates (an impossible task).

I recall one time when I posted a defense of part of their own community standards rules. In one section, they argued that certain words were not inherently offensive. It was how they were used that was the problem. I agreed with this and wanted to show support. However, I did use a few examples of what I was talking about. Another 30 days in their Gulag for my attempt to DEFEND THEIR OWN RULES.

Eventually I was banned for life a second time! The first time occurred, as I noted, when I had 30,000 friends and followers. I almost packed it in, but eventually got back on as Jim Corbett … quickly getting back up to 7,000 friends and followers before (after a series of minor incarcerations) I was hit with my second lifetime ban. My unforgivable felony this time was a beauty.

I posted the picture above. It is the 1936 Olympic games with the iconic Jesse Owens getting a gold medal in the long jump competition. (He won 4 gold medals, thus infuriating Hitler with his Aryan superiority nonsense). I am certain that the white man in the podium is a German athlete named Lutz. He helped Jesse in the competition, during which they became good friends. And despite his Nazi salute, he was not a Hitler fan. His opposition to the regime eventually got him sent to the front lines in Italy during the war where he was killed.

The version of the meme I posted contained a comment that FDR, fearing a reaction from southern Democrats, never invited the Game’s American hero (Jesse Owens) to the White House. I added a personal comment that FDR was in a tough place politically. He needed those votes from the Southern Racists in his own party to get his economic programs passed and thus lift the country out of a global depression.

That was it! My post recognized an American hero and tried to explain why an iconic President made an unfortunate (in hindsight) decision. Seems innocuous enough. But no matter … I was again banned for life. I still can not believe it. Even as social media was leading society into a tribalized, highly polarized, society, I was deemed a threat for posting a picture of an American icon during an historical moment we treasure to this day (the relatively recent movie titled Race highlighted Jesse’s accomplishments). The incompetence of Facebook beggars the imagination.

Once again, I managed to get back on under my own name. However, I can only access FB on my phone (not my computer) and I only seem to have limited access. But it is something. Of course, each time I must start from scratch. After a year, I have accumulated somewhat more than 4,000 friends once again. Oddly enough, I have not been thrown in their jail once this time around. I have no idea why since I have not changed my approach or behavior in the least. I still post a selection of humor, wisdom, and mild political views.

I find it all amusing. The FB guardians went after harmless folk like me with a vengeance while groups clearly hostile to our best interests seemed beyond reach. I guess you batter the easy targets while letting the real miscreants get away, especially if they are embedded within your own organization. So sad. Then, again, perhaps it is all be design, or am I falling into the conspiracy trap into which they guilessly lead so many others 🤔.

I’ve been reading and thinking about social media recently. 🤔 Mostly, I’ve been noodling how a technology that was purported to generate a revolution in human consciousness and social relations led, in fact, to a form of tribalism that has resulted in hyper-polarization and worse. As always, the specter of unintended consequences (though obvious to any reasonably intelligent observer who thought about this for a moment) has bitten us in the ass.

This potentially is a huge topic, so I might approach it in bite-sized chunks. To start, two initial assumptions about social media innovations (e.g., Facebook, Twitter or X, YouTube, etc.) deserve mention:

1) The level of sharing enabled by such technologies was expected to create a new level of communications that can literally transform how we govern ourselves and our social relations. Some anticipated that an evolved form of democracy would emerge. And 2) such hyper-forms of connectivity will bring us together and unite previously distinct social and political tribes. Yes, a new form of interconnected society based on an unprecedented level of sharing was promised to us, at least in the early days. Old divisions would dissipate, even disappear, in this brave new world.

What, however, do we have? We have increased partisan and ideological polarization almost beyond description. We have a new generation of divisive politics and tribal hatred that beggar belief and challenges our comprehension. In the U.S., old political disputes where individuals adhered to separate belief and normative positions have always existed. Members of political tribes argued passionately but yet managed to converse, compromise, and conducted our public affairs. Remember when Ronald Reagan and ‘Tip’ Oneil got together and shared laughs. Now, members of our political tribes demonize one another as if the others were Satan’s kin. Talk of a final disintegration of America’s democratic traditions is entertained by very serious observers. Civil conflict, if not all-out war, is anticipated by many. A movie was just released envisions a dystopian conflict that erupts as America disintegrates into warring factions. We now demonize each other in ways seldom witnessed in the past. I’ve seen conservatives being interviewed expressing a desire to kill all Democrats and liberals.

It is argued that sectarian violence and divisions around the world have been attributed to the destructive effects of these major communication applications. Sectarian violence is not new of course but persuasive arguments are being put forth that flare-ups, accompanied by widespread mayhem and even killings, have erupted in Myanmar, Brazil, Sri Lanka, India, and many other places around the globe. The resurgence of far right and hate-dependent political movements has occurred in several European countries (e.g. Hungary). These events and trends increasingly are seen as emerging from these new technologies gone amok. I must admit that the supportive arguments for this hypothesis are rather persuasive.

Though they should have seen this coming, the top-level officials of these platforms continued to spew pollyannish statements right up until Trump was elected in 2016. In the aftermath of this disaster, a number of top Facebook executives ruminated on what went wrong.

The author of The Chaos Machine put the hand wringing as follows: “The results of the 2016 election show that Facebook has failed in its mission,” one executive posted on the companies internal message board. Another messaged that Newsfeed (a Facebook feature) optimizes for engagement (more users on the platform longer). “As we learned in the election, bullshit is highly engaging.” Another wrote, “Facebook (the company) is broken.”

What I find remarkable is not that the designers and executives of these companies finally saw the downsides of their creation but that it took them so long. The unintended consequences attached to their creations should have been obvious from the beginning. I mean, these are what I call ‘brittle bright’ folk. They are logic and math whizzes who can unravel the most complex of intricate puzzles. But they are also incredibly narrow in their thinking and their approach to things, often lacking elementary understandings from history while being constrained by the limits of the ‘quant‘ mindset where optimization and efficiency trump (no pun intended) all else. All challenges are technical in character and as well as all solutions. In short, I remain stunned by their naivete and provincialism.

For now, quick comments on their two most obvious blind spots. As noted, the prosletyzers of the social media revolution argued that their platforms would create a kind of universal town hall meeting where the collective wisdom of the crowd would prevail and common sense reign. Sure! This is what happened during the French Revolution where a more universal democracy would prevail, or so the revolutionaries argued. Everyone called each other citizen, and all were equal. Soon, some were more equal than others, and the guillotine was busier than ever. And remember the Communist revolution and worker’s Soviets that would soon replace the state with localized people’s governments. They very quickly evolved into a dictatorship of the proletariat where a select few ran everything.

Organic democracies emerging from either ideology or technology are fictions. There are few shortcuts to governing well and competently. It takes hard work and constant diligence. Easy solutions appeal only to the simple minded.

The second, though related, blind spot is that more and more communication would miraculously lead to shared values. The more we exchanged thoughts and norms, the closer we would come to a contemporary utopia. Social and ideological frictions could be worked out through our new hyper-communication technologies. Soon, ancient conflicts would be diminished while new agreements were forged. Right, and I have some wonderful land in Florida for sale.

Here is how all these social media platforms actually operate. They are trapped by market dynamics. They are driven to grow and thus reap ever more profits. To do otherwise would confront, even deny, the imperative that governs all large enterprises. Social media networks grow by steadily increasing engagement … more users who stay on longer. Then, you can sell more advertising and grow even faster. Thus, ‘engagement’ becomes the prime outcome measure that drives all corporate decisions. That’s just common sense.

But how to increase engagement? Psych 101 provides the answer. Provide content that appeals to core emotional feelings. The key is to arouse people (though steering people to sexual content might get you into trouble). So, the solution is to steer people toward content reflecting their emotional normative or political priors. But engagement is limited and will soon go extinct if the same material is offered. You have to keep upping the ante by exaggerating the emotional impact of subsequent offerings.

Think about demagogues like Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson. Their claims become increasingly bizarre to keep their audience hooked. Soon, Jones is claiming that the Sandy Hook kids who were gunned down by a mass murderer never existed … the event was staged to take away everyone’s guns. You link users who have identified their initial leanings to ever more egregious content of heightened emotional impact. They will keep hitting the lever to get an ever more impactful hit (increased levels of dopamine) of moral outrage and identity confirmation. Soon, you are steering them into the realm of the paranoid, worlds all but untethered from reality.

It is not long before you have large groups that believe Hillary Clinton runs pedophilia rings out of pizza parlors or that vaccines kill hundreds of thousands of people while implanting the vaccinated with brain-alternating devices designed by Bill Gates and paid for by George Soros. . And these gullible people believe they have done their own research.

The process is remarkably simple and transparent. Market imperative demand profits. Social media profits are based on engagement (number of users plus intensity of use). Engagement demands playing upon initial differences in emotional and normative values. Protocols then facilitate linkages to ever more highly emotional content feeding on those initial differences while amplifying the messages beyond reason. Soon, a moderately conservative or liberal individual succumbs to radical beliefs and positions.

The end result is a radicalization of many users and the demonization of those who don’t agree with them. The people running these platforms are quants by nature. They are outcome driven and prize optimization strategies. Thus, both the culture of the marketplace AND the culture of their technical training and orientation. Both lead them in a similar direction. What they typically don’t possess is a sense of history, context, and a broader understanding of things we usually label as wisdom. They are remarkably narrow while seeming to be whip smart..

The imperatives just described are not new. Simply think back to the days of yellow journalism from well over a century ago. You had many competing local newspapers, the social media of that day, if you will. They also were driven by engagement … how many consumers bought their product as opposed to someone else’s. Inevitably, they also evolved toward making larger and larger unsupportable statements in each edition, hyperbololic claims to grab the reader’s attention and to keep it. Often, each paper had its own political and ideological orientation. The process hasn’t changed much over time. The technology (and its potential impacts) has. Sadly, the potential damage has increased exponentially.

My bottom line is that anyone with any sense of perspective or history could have predicted what would happen. But few did. Did they merely overlook the obvious, or were they merely blinded by power and greed? All we really know is that the stakes are huge!

The pic above was from my career at the University of Wisconsin (UW). At that moment, I was being taped while expounding wisely on the topic of using evidence to make public policy decisions. Excerpts from this interview are still being used many years later. By the way, the issue of Evidence-based Policymaking was one of the several themes on which I focused during my academic career.

I must note that, in some respects, I was a terrible academic. I could never focus on a narrow, single topic and then drill down to where I arrived at that point where I knew everything about essentially nothing. No, I was attracted to the bigger societal topics, the more challenging the better. I most enjoyed seeing relationships among seemingly unrelated issues. I was, alas, a big picture guy who wanted to both understand and to change the world.

Still, I was good (or decent at least) at many things in my career. I was a competent and well-liked leader of a research entity on campus. I could raise research money with relative ease. I could administer complex research projects that might confound many eggheads. I was on the speed dial of reporters around the country to comment on poverty related and welfare reform issues. I was on the road constantly while consulting in D.C. or with state and local governments on a variety of human services and welfare reform innovations. Finally, I was asked continuously to give talks or participate in conferences and like events (apparently, I was edifying or at least entertaining). In short, I was a very busy man.

Yesterday, however, I was walking with two neighbors whom I consider close friends … which is odd since I never think of myself as having friends. The female half of this couple had earned an MSW in social work at UW shortly before I began teaching at the school. She asked something along the lines of whether she might have profited from being a student in one of my classes.

My immediate reaction was to say … of course! But her query got me thinking seriously on this matter. In truth, I didn’t have to teach. I was busy enough, and more importantly raised enough money, to focus only on research, consulting, administration, program and policy development, and giving talks to a variety of audiences. Yet, no matter how busy I was in these other areas, I made time for teaching. That, to put it mildly, was not always easily done.

I gave my friend, and her spouse, a cursory response at the time. But this morning, on further reflection, I sent them an email. An abridged version of this missive is below:

……………………………………………….

Ann … your question about the teaching part of my career got me thinking. I had reservations about being a traditional scholar (which I wasn’t). I rebelled against the narrowness imposed by the academic culture (all about publishing technical work in specialized peer reviewed journals targeted to narrow audiences to the virtual exclusion of all else). And don’t get me started on faculty meetings, which were a form of excruciating torture and irrelevance.

But I did enjoy teaching even when I didn’t have the time to devote to it (there were semesters when I taught full time, was the Acting or Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), was the principle director of several research projects,  consulted with the feds and with state/local governments, raised research money, and gave many talks around the country). That frantic schedule might well be responsible for the nightmares I still have. 

However, my time in the classroom remained special … to the point where I was determined to teach no matter how frantic my life had become. Shockingly, I came to believe I was talented at it (my supply of endless BS apparently had one positive use). I mentioned one incident yesterday, but there were many such memorable feedback moments. For many years, I would get emails or other communications from former students thanking me for changing their lives, etc. That made it all worthwhile. 

Just one additional story. An undergrad approached me after my policy class one day (I mostly taught graduate students, but I did get stuck with undergrads on occasion). She went on and on about how hard my course was, how she had to study for it all the time, etc. I worried she might have a breakdown (it happens on college campuses far too often). So, I must have stored her name in my head (most undergrads were indistinguishable).

Anyway, a few years later, I had another of those seminal ‘moments.’ At one of the unending conferences I attended, an economist sidled up to me at the buffet line. He was an IRP affiliate on the faculty of Georgetown University (at the time as I recall) whom I knew quite well. He asked if I recalled a certain student (and threw out this name). It hit me (though the last name was different than his), that he was referencing that gal I feared I had driven to desperate straights back in the day. It turned out she was his stepdaughter. My immediate reaction was… ‘Oh my god, he’s going to sue me for the years of therapy she needed after suffering through my class.’

But he shocked me by next saying that she always told him I was the best professor she had at UW and that she had kept all the class notes from my course. That was an epiphany for me. Here’s the thing! You NEVER knew the impact you were having in the classroom. I then recalled a few of my college instructors who had an outsized effect on me. They had no idea that their off-hand comments or casual vignettes shared in class were normative or intellectual turning points in my life. 

Bottom line, my teaching experiences (while a modest fraction of what I did as an academic) remained very consequential to me, irreplaceable, in fact. Apparently, I did impart lessons that shaped many young lives.

Teaching proved well worth the effort no matter the personal cost. This insight has always brought me great comfort. I might have earned far more money had I pursued other career paths, but passing lessons on to the next generation can not be matched for personal satisfaction.

Sorry about the length here. I got started and then carried away. Thanks for asking that question. 👍 
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On occasion, I am asked for recommendations by parents trying to help their kids decide on an undergraduate college. In this regard, I can only speak for myself. At research-focused universities like the University of Wisconsin (which ranks 8th in research spending) many students can get a fine education. It helps, however, if they are self-starting and know where they are going in life.

I was clueless upon entering college. Fortunately, I went to a small, liberal arts university in my hometown (we had no money). Clark University was a very good, but not an elite, school. But it had two advantages. It had the right scale (small and manageable) and undergraduate teaching was prized. My life trajectory was fundamentally transformed there.

Certainly, some of my colleagues at U.W. did try in the classroom. But that is NOT what the scholarly culture rewards, especially at the undergraduate level. You won’t lose points in your annual reviews (which determine pay and promotions) by teaching well but only if your students don’t revolt and you can keep them quiet without breaking a sweat. Devoting too much time to this task suggests you are not a serious scholar … the kiss of death.

At the end of the day, three foci stand out to me as the most profitable and personally rewarding. 1) Keeping the Institute for Research on Poverty afloat; 2) consulting with governmental bodies on innovative policies and programs; and 3) teaching. This last one likely is the most rewarding of all but that remains a close-run thing

Amidst the growing political turmoil we see about us, I am sinking into a sense of ennui, if not outright despondency. I have often noted that the world into which I was born had horrendous challenges. A World War was raging. Genocide and mass murder were facts of life around the globe. We had legal apartheid in the U.S. even as we touted the grand principles of democracy and opportunity for all.

And yet, as a young man, I believed things would get better. I had a visceral hope that my generation would lead the way toward a more inclusive and just society. After all, we were the emerging generation of hope in the aftermath of a global conflict. We would spawn a generation of change agents … the freedom riders, a youth that overwhelmed Kennedy’s Peace Corps with willing recruits, and idealists who opposed a senseless war on the other side of the globe. Surely, we would realize the so-called American dream when we took control of things.

When I became an adult (doing and teaching public policy), I found that principles are one thing while practice is quite another. The meme above has remained my core mantra throughout my life. Strip away all the nonsense, and this simple principle constitutes my core values, my most fundamental spiritual core, and my essential politics. It is a bit like the lesson attributed to Christ … spirituality is all about love and kindness. Nothing more!

Designing and implementing the apparati through which to achieve our noble goals, however, is quite another thing. There are challenges everywhere with unintended consequences and tradeoffs dogging even the most well-intentioned reformers at every step. Yet, our aspirations never dimmed, nor our hopes for a better world. At least, not until now. The devil is in the details. No question. But our aspirations must never erode nor fade.

Fast forward several decades and what do we have. About half of the states have separatist movements that advocate a political disconnection from the national government. A movie is about to be released (Civil War). It depicts the breaking apart of the U.S. into warring factions. The producers rushed it into production since they feared that reality would overtake art, making their work an historical piece as opposed to a morality tale. (Note: I personally believe that Lincoln’s dream of a United country may be over.)

We have a nation divided in two utterly distinct halves that cannot understand one another. A Trump supporter being interviewed recently unabashedly asserted that he wanted to hang all Democrats from the highest trees. I wish I could claim that is an isolated opinion.

Our divide across values and politics continues to widen even as we fail as a workable society. The litany of American shortcomings is too long to list here. A few examples must suffice:

* We have experienced a growing hyper inequality since 1980. While worker productivity has grown by some 70 percent over recent decades, their pay has stagnated for the most part while compensation for those at the top has skyrocketed.

* We have the most expensive medical system for providing health care in the world, yet mediocre (at best) health outcomes. We have some 40,000 amenable deaths annually because people cannot afford care or essential medicines. No other advanced country presents their citizens with such draconian choices.

* We are the world’s shooting gallery. In excess of 100 gun related deaths per day occur in the U.S. Again, no other advanced nation comes close to such self-inflicted carnage. A number of our peers have fewer such deaths in a year.

* In the past, we have been the defender of democracy and Western values in a world under threat from totalitarian regimes. Now, we are in danger of becoming one of those regimes. The Republican candidate for President openly supports anti- democratic strongmen and promises to give the worst of them (e.g. Putin) free reign if elected. Oh, and he intends to stay in office no matter what. Democracy be damned as inconvenient to his narcissistic aspirations.

* We spend endless amounts of time debating athletic contests or the fate of the Kardashians while the existential threats associated with global warming and the AI revolution loom.

The most discouraging fact about our contemporary situation is that a major party endorses this national failure, what can only be described as a collective insanity. I mean, really? We have a Republican base that devoutly adheres to the most insensible and outrageous conspiracies. No, Hillary Clinton does not run a pedophilia ring out of a string of pizza parlors. And no, the solar eclipse yesterday did not mean the Rapture was about to commence. OMG!

I look at the MAGA base today with disbelief. I could understand the Republican Party of my youth. Eisenhower was a fine man and a good President. Even Nixon espoused some excellent policies though he was flawed as a human being. But the party of today is dominated by people I cannot pretend to understand nor with whom any constructive dialigue is possible.

Nothing, however, is more incomprehensible than those claiming to be Christian while devoutly following the worst example of a human being possible. The meme below captures my total confusion on this matter completely.

What astounds me is that we have learned so little from the historical record. We seem to have forgotten the lessons hard won from our own prior experiences. Do we not remember the bitter conflicts to defeat Fascism or to face down Communism? Have we already forgotten the pain suffered by minorities simply hoping to use public transportation,to vote, or to live without fear?

If we have forgotten such things, I’m not shocked. The old saw that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it remains instructive today. On occasion, I have seen interviews with young people who cannot answer the simplest questions like who fought in our Civil War. They may be great digital gamers but stunningly ignorant about the great questions we face. I can remember spending hours upon hours in college debating what kind of society we should construct. I taught at the University level for many years. I seldom witnessed the same intensity among my students.

Now, I look about me and see societal and political failure everywhere. It is as if we’ll have a collective form of mass amnesia. But is that surprising? After all, the right wing is desperately trying to whitewash our historical record, ban the classics of literature, and erase any hint of past struggles for a better world. Who else did such things. Oh yes, totalitarian regimes on the left and the right.

Perhaps it is time for another book. It won’t help the world, but it might do wonders for me. A good rant might just be what the doctor ordered, if one could actually get a doctor’s appointment these days.