Relational

This is the last episode of Relational. As of December 30-ish, you'll be able to find all the episodes here. Bookmark that if you want them, because this Libsyn account will be going away. My view of Christmas has evolved through the years, and I think its curve says a few things about a lot of people's disenchantment with civic matters.

I think a lot of daughters, sons and grandchildren already have a hard time understanding their elders. But what we need to find our way back to is the courage to have messy conversations where success and ease aren't there for the plucking.

Car manufacturers weren't originally interested in safety features, but the tide turned. Good public health work takes a while. Tobacco companies seemed invulnerable until they weren't. We're jammed in a bad place on gun deaths, but it's not time to give up. The information environment is toxic, and is corroding community, but some flu seasons are severe too. Good public health work takes a while. If I fundamentally believe in what I'm doing, and I do, then going back to work at it with all the resources I have available is the right choice. The dumb mistake is impatience and judging outcomes based on short-term trends. Good public health work takes a while.

If my students don't cite their sources, I fail their papers for plagiarism. At the same time, I think academic publishing as a system is completely dysfunctional and unjust. We pick from what we can observe to weave a story that makes sense of our lives. Other people are telling stories that make sense to them but no sense to me. My story doesn't make that much sense when I examine it closely. It gives me a measure of empathy, but it also reminds me that there are some stories to beware of.

Bob Ewell was the villain of To Kill A Mockingbird, but what made To Kill A Mockingbird powerful left no space for a villain.

Science doesn't care whether you believe in it or not, except that science needs funding and scientists. People say they can't bring themselves to believe in the Bible, but they also can't bring themselves to give up substance abuse. People say true for you, but not for me, but pro-ana people say lethal eating disorders are a choice that ought to be respected. Young people need training in financial literacy, and a lot of older people who are deep in debt need financial counseling, and the same is probably true for our consumption of information.

If you start Stephen Hawking as center for your pro basketball team, either you've taken leave of your sense or you have to redefine the game. Democracy was invented in response to the yearning to have one's voice heard instead of being ruled by a despot. Adulthood was set at eighteen when the calendar test was the best we could do, but today we can use more penetrating measurements to design our social systems. We could consider restacking the incentives to participate in public life so that what newly emerging adults want today would be contingent on satisfactory participation. If we can require that parents care for their children, that logic might extend to both an implicit, socially-normed, and explicit, legally codified, requirement that people participate in the care and maintenance of their community.

We frame our sensory impulses into meaning. Radio and the phonograph moved music performance from something relational to something para-social, at least some of the time. That had to be disorienting as far as the experience of emotions went. Social media alienates us from real, contextualized approval It enables sharing of images and appearances, not experiences. Lessons are also uncoupled from experiences. All of the above makes me pessimistic about the possibility of empathy.

During the industrial revolution, the farmer was left behind, and so was the connection to the land and a lot of practical knowledge. Today, image seems to be replacing language, which leaves writers and readers behind, along with a lot of explanation and argument. And there's far too much willingness to frame social dislocation as heroes versus villains, but that's unacceptable.

Sometimes I think my job is a bubble, and other times I think it's a microcosm. One student I taught recently is enormously talented, but seems to run on grievance. The expectation that everyone go to college has its own maladaptive influence, and I respond to that as far as my strength will take me. But from human limitations, I think of a segment of my students as a faceless mass, those who aren't doing the work but won't ask for help. I think in the past decade or two, government acquired its own faceless mass and underestimated the scale of the shift.

In Robert Heinlein's Friday, one of the main characters says that rudeness is a symptom of a dying culture. That's not terribly original, but he also says they don't recognize it as desperate illness; they think it's a form of strength. Halloween is taking off with young adults, which may be a symptom of the difficulty of performing an acceptable identity. The same complexity may underlie the brittle terror of failure common to many young adults: a community with no connective tissue, no mutual stake in one another's well-being, has no safety net. Former top designers at Facebook and Google are taking drastic steps to cut off their exposure to their inventions, because the whipsawing of attention is a far bigger force than anyone is acknowledging. Donald Trump's presidency can plausibly be explained as a function of his ability to hold attention. All ethics are situational, and when people behave in unacceptable ways, the first step to bridge-building is to reverse-engineer the situation that gave r

In John 5, Jesus asked a paralyzed man at Bethesda pool, "Do you want to get well?" I worry that hostility and competitive escalation are being normalized and deviance is being defined down. But "this is not normal" is just another form of hostile confrontation, which is useless against Trump and Trump supporters, because they're the masters of it. Plus, his non-normalcy is his selling point, which is heartbreaking, because he's actually very normal: the outsider who isn't an outsider at all, but is out to enrich himself. If people had a bit more historical perspective, they could see more clearly how unconvincing his veneer is, but they're watching a movie. And not everyone wants to get well; sometimes nursing a grievance generates enough enthusiasm and energy to keep people going. Cults and addictions are, in some sense, hurts that people don't want healed. There've been public health campaigns that set out to equip entire communities to weed out an addiction, and maybe that's the right approach. But public

Today we have the illusion of control, and it raises our expectations unhelpfully. Our frustration tolerance may have been higher when we dealt more with the natural world and less with pushbuttons and apps. In some ways, I think Trump and Trumpism is the Ghost Dance for white Americans in 2017. I also think the Obamacare Repeal was a kitchen gadget -- appealing, but not in any way useful.

Contempt is a destroyer of relationships. Jesus warned against calling anyone a fool, saying it would put them in danger of the fires of hell. But the Bible also teaches that it's important to recognize a fool, and Jesus said not to cast pearls before swine. Is it possible to name a leader and his followers as fools, but do it with no contempt or hatred? If it's not possible, does the Bible command me to ignore what's plain, or even to lie?

Everything becomes more difficult: moving, thinking, sensing, earning, mastering.

Hillary Clinton says her biggest mistake was talking too much about solutions and not enough about how she understood people's anger. I still struggle to understand how we let the presidency shift from being an executive position to being a spokesmodel position. But where distrust overshadows a problem, the decisionmaker has to win my trust before any proposals can be evaluated on their merits.

Disjointed collection of thoughts this week. Communities don't decide things, and the belief that they do is wishful thinking, a smoothing out of difference based on cherry-picked observation. It must be wrenching to turn loose of the belief that you live in a sane public order, even if the evidence is compelling. No gaffe, no mistake, no outrage will ever be enough to change the minds of most Trump voters, because what counts as evidence is different, and where the current mess began and hit its crisis point looks different to his supporters.

This was a devotional I delivered to the newly-arrived first years and transfers during orientation. It was about community, and I forgot to record it, so I cheaped out this week's episode by recording the devotional so it wouldn't be lost to history. Back to civic life next week.

Naive intercultural communicators get angry when difference makes them feel uncomfortable, but skillful communicators rise to the challenge of translating. I'm still wrestling with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, and my need to metabolize revulsion into gratitude, into seeing what I look like to God, and into loving the way He loves. And I'm still trying to figure out what's changed about our consumption of information and messages, and how our selection process and our feeling of orientation interplays with our feelings of safety or endangerment,

Much of this is a little self-absorbed and self-pitying. I had a rather severe disappointment over the weekend, and it gave me a wake-up call about Facebook. Wake-up calls, and the peculiar concentration and essentialization of relational messages are the story of our past few months of unraveling community.