Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.
Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, dedicated to finding Signal in the Information Apocalypse.
Last week, I was invited to speak to a lunch gathering in a nearby town about Braver Angels. I serve as an ambassador for their message. Here is a quick video that explains their mission/purpose:
Initially, the organization was named ‘Better Angels’, a nod to the end of President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural speech on March 4th, 1861:
“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Before I spoke to the group, I watched a video from the recent Braver Angels Convention, held at Gettysburg, PA just after the 4th of July. The speaker (Jonathan Rauch, author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth) does an excellent job of framing the moment we are in as a nation— the systemic drivers of conflict, but also the bright spots (One of them being this ‘Hidden Tribes’ report from the organization More In Common. Note the ‘exhausted majority’ they break out, comprising two thirds of the population.).
The actual talk is about 50 minutes followed by Q&A, well worth the time investment.
Some of the points that he makes track with one of the first essays I posted online— This is partly an education/civics issue, and partly sense-making issue, but both of those lead to the conclusion that this is a national security issue. And for my international friends, I know you are dealing with many of the same things in your countries, as well— it just shows up as a more local variant.
So, what did I say?
Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Connection Crisis
In the first part, I framed out what is now getting popular traction as the ‘Polycrisis’— the set of complex, interconnected problems facing the world. The political stuggles in the United States are a subset of the Polycrisis. A potentially large subset, but I think it’s valuable to situate the them within the bigger group of problems: Ecological, Psychological, Spiritual, Economic, Cultural, Political, and Technological. There is more that I’m omitting in the interest of brevity. And, as everything we need to know about nonlinearity we can learn from a 1970’s commercial about chocolate and peanut butter, these problems can compound to become greater than the sum of their parts. They are all Wicked Problems, not in the sense that that are evil, but that they are resistant to measures to decrease their severity. It’s difficult to even define the contours and context of the problems, let alone figure out what steps to take to address them.
Then, I talked about the Metacrisis (And here’s where it can get confusing— lots of people use the term Metacrisis to refer to the Polycrisis). Today, meta is used in a many different ways. Here is Jonathan Rowson’s (co-founder of Perspectiva) explanation:
“Meta means many things. It’s simplest, it means after. But it’s sometimes used to mean between. It’s sometimes used to mean within. It seems to change its meaning slightly, depending on what it’s describing. It has chameleon quality in that way. So the first thing about meta is to realize it means many things.”
Here I am using Metacrisis to mean the crisis within the crises, if that makes sense (ha- see what I did there). It is the sense-making crisis we find ourselves in. It has elements of Ontology (Study of whether certain things actually exist, and how the things that do exist can be grouped.), Epistemology (Study of knowledge and different methods of gaining knowledge), and Axiology (Study of values).
We are losing our collective, society-level grasp on reality, in our ability to develop a consensus view of it. The reasons for are numerous. Three of them might be:
Degradation of shared narratives— religion, civic engagement, common media consumption— No more Walter Cronkite.1
Splintering of our attention spans through technological devices and social media, resulting in shallow, scrolling-type behavior but less deeper thinking.
“Echo Chambers” of polarization due to cable news and social media business models which incentivize anger and fear-based stories over others, since they percolate through networks faster and increase viewership/engagement.
After giving some context for the environment, I talked about Braver Angels. The convention members wrote the following platform over the weekend. Here is a recent press release detailing the five Call to Action items that any citizen can take to help hold our nation together:
“At our recent Braver Angels National Convention in early July in Gettysburg, more than 600 delegates—linked to more than 200 organizations—committed to lead a movement for civic renewal,” said David Blankenhorn, Co-Founder and President of Braver Angels. “Never before in our history have Red, Blue, and Independent Americans come together in such numbers determined to heal our divisions and protect America’s promise.”
The Rise for America campaign offers citizens the chance to get involved and take action to help build bridges between opposing sides. By fostering respectful dialogues and engaging in deep listening, individuals can resolve divisive conflicts and create connections that change relationships to strengthen our democratic republic.
Participants in the fall 2023 campaign have the option to take at least one of five different actions designed to depolarize our political conversations. Braver Angels will act as a resource providing supporting materials and guidance to everyone who undertakes these initiatives. The five actions include:
Hosting a Braver Angels documentary party in your home, neighborhood, or organization, using a link and discussion guide provided by Braver Angels.
Bringing family and friends to attend a Depolarization Within workshop hosted by Braver Angels, which teaches individuals how to examine attitudes and beliefs from their own and others’ perspectives.
Coordinating an introduction to Braver Angels through an Ambassador-led presentation for local groups in your community.
Training to become a Debate Chair for community, high school, and college debates, encouraging critical thinking and civic engagement among Americans, organized by BridgeUSA and Braver Angels.
Creating a unique event or action of their own personal interest, which they feel would be most effective for engaging people in their own community.
I want to stress two key points here in closing.
One, none of this work is designed to change someone’s mind about a given issue. Humans are incredibly obstinate creatures, emotionally tied to our convictions about the world. But, the work is about fostering civility between those who disagree, and working to achieve correspondence with one another, what I call Attunement.
Two, as Rauch notes in his talk, we are not as divided as we’ve been led to believe by what we see on mainstream and social media. False polarization is when we have a caricatured view of our political adversaries, and attribute beliefs and characteristics that they actually don’t have.
Most humans can see that something is deeply wrong with the world in the 2020s, and want to do something to help. As I said last week, we can’t hide from this. We have to roll our sleeves up and get to work. We have to make the “post-tragic” turn— The transition from naive optimism, to cynical nihilism, to a mature, pragmatic optimism. Find something that you can do, to put your shoulder to the wheel in service of other humans. Volunteer. I promise you will find it rewarding, not only for those you help, but for yourself.
Have a great week everyone!
This one cuts both ways, right? Getting rid of gatekeepers in media is both good and bad in some respects. A diversity of independent thought is important to achieving correspondence with reality, but too much results in niche, boutique, curated little gardens of worldviews, which are utterly unintelligible to one another.
This is encouraging, Adam. Thanks for sharing and for taking part. Wicked problems bring to mind the Allenby & Sarewitz book, *The Techno-Human Condition*, which explains how simplistic thinking and acting often spawns complex problems that further simplistic thinking and action cannot make sense of or resolve. I would welcome any approach that can de-escalate the deep distrust and animosities among diverse Americans. E Pluribus Unum.
Great article, which describes our current stuck state of ideas. We have retreated into trite black and white simplistic answers, but we forget our situation is usually always more nuanced than we think.