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Mean Culture, Mean Politics: A New Pandemic
By Shlomo Maital
A long time ago, I stopped watching Reality shows, because they were actually Unreality shows. To raise ratings and gain viewers, shows like Survival, and Trump’s The Apprentice purposely encouraged betrayal, lying, cheating, conflict and utter cruelty, believing this is what viewers wanted to watch. This is the culture of meanness. It is not what I practice in life, nor those around me. And at the place where I work, if you behaved like the Reality shows, you would be out on your ear in minutes.
Trump built a career in media by shouting “you’re fired!” – in the cruelest possible manner, to humiliate the candidates, on The Apprentice. Then, as President of the United States, he did the same – to his endless parade of hapless cabinet ministers. And in his recent 70-minute speech to the Republican Convention, he honed the politics of meanness, spewing hatred to the Democrats and to protesters and anyone who in any way opposed him.
The culture of meanness, born on TV, is now succeeded by the politics of meanness and hatred. Your politics is defined by whom you hate, not whom you support and love. You seek election and re-election by fanning the flames of hatred. The ‘law and order’ mantra is a thinly-disguised slogan for hating people of color, who dare to protest and demand their rights.
In his recent Op-Ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks paints a terrifying picture of where the politics and culture of being mean will lead us. And I have a dire prediction. Dnald J. Trump’s son Donald Jr. excelled in his Convention speech, in applying the politics of hatred, outdoing even his father (and that is very very hard to do)…and he will be the Crown Prince and successor to his vitriolic dad. So we will have a Trump fanning the flames of hatred for many many years to come (Don Jr. will be 43 in December).
Here is an excerpt from David Brooks’ column. It is very disturbing… the way back to sanity from meanness is long, winding and difficult. Maybe even not feasible….:
“I’ve been thinking about the two families we’ve encountered over the past two weeks. The Biden family is emotionally open, rendered vulnerable by tragedy and driven by a powerful desire to connect. The Trump family is emotionally closed, isolated by enmity and driven by a powerful desire to dominate. Occasionally this week one of the female members of the Trump family would struggle to stick her head above the muck of her family’s values and display some humanity. But Donald, Don Jr. and Eric showed no such impulse. Trump family values are mean world values. Mean world syndrome was a concept conceived in the 1970s by the communications professor George Gerbner. His idea was that people who see relentless violence on television begin to perceive the world as being more dangerous than it really is. By the 1990s it was no longer violent programing that drove mean world culture, but reality television. That’s an entire industry designed to give the impression that human beings are inherently manipulative, selfish and petty. If you grow up watching those programs, or starring in them, naturally you believe that other people are fundamentally untrustworthy. These days mean world culture is everywhere. It’s a siege mentality. Menace is everywhere. We’re on the brink of the cataclysm. This week’s Republican convention was a four-day cavalcade of the mean world alarmism. Mean world thrives on fear and perpetuates itself by exaggerating fear. Its rhetorical ploy is catastrophizing and its tone is apocalyptic. The Democrats are not just wrong, many speakers asserted this week, they are “subverting our republic,” abolishing the suburbs, destroying Western civilization and establishing a Castro-style communist dictatorship. The Democrats, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida said, want to “disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home and invite MS-13 to live next door.” ”
Find Meaning in Plague
By Shlomo Maital
New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks reminds us, today, that there is “moral meaning to plague”. He quotes Victor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning has influenced millions; in it Frankl describes how he survived the Holocaust death camps. He found meaning.
How can each of us find meaning, in this plague epidemic?
“Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person) and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.” (Wiki)
Work. Love. Courage. Pretty straightforward.
Work – we do what we normally do, only at home and online. Amazing how adaptable many people are, in their work. Special kudos to moms (and dads), who also care for young children.
Love. Care for others. Let’s follow a formula I find useful, that I have borrowed: When you wake, ask 2 questions: What shall I do for myself today? (If you are not happy, strong, healthy, fit, effective, it’s hard to help others). What shall I do for others today? And, when you fall asleep, ask, What did I do for myself today? And – what did I do for others today?
Courage. This may involve facing danger, opposition, humiliation. What is going wrong, that you can see, understand, and try to fix, or at least bring attention to it?
There IS meaning in this epidemic. I see it everywhere, everyone, every day. Let’s all work hard to find it and leverage it.
What Unites People? The Real Moderate Agenda
By Shlomo Maital
It has been a long while since I wrote a blog about New York Times columnist David Brooks. Today’s NYT (Feb. 27) has a wonderful column, worth summarizing. The subject: What glues people together? And, based on this – what would a ‘moderate’ political agenda look like, neither extreme right nor extreme left? In these days of vitriolic polarized toxic politics — moderate agendas seem either bland or non-existent.
Here are Brooks’ four key elements of a moderate agenda – policies that bring us together. The four super-glue elements that bind us together are: our children, our work, our communities, and our shared humanity.
- Our children: “Make sure children are educated by webs of warm relationships”
- Our work: “Help people find vocations in which they can serve their communities”.
- Our communities: “devolve power out of Washington (or your country’s capital city) to the local level”. All politics is local, it is said. But it is not. We can make it so.
- Our shared humanity: Let’s care about the elderly, the disabled, migrants, the ill, minorities…. People are basically good. Reject those who think and act otherwise. Reject politicians who seek power by appealing to base motives. Look for those who espouse good.
Can ‘left’ and ‘right’ unite under these ideas? Can this ‘center’ bring us together?
It’s worth a try.
The Age of Wonkery
By Shlomo Maital
In his New York Times Op-Ed piece, April 11, David Brooks supplies a crucial insight.
Once the thinkers of the world were intellectual foxes. In Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor, they had many many ideas and challenged all of them.
Today? We have wonks. They are hedgehogs. They have one BIG idea. And they sell it ferociously, regardless of the facts. In truth — they have given up thinking.
As Goethe observed, thinking is better than knowing (i.e. foxes are better than hedgehogs), but …looking is best of all. And wonks do not look (at the facts). Nor think about their Pablum ideologies.
So – we are doomed to live in the Age of Wonkery. Not too good for humanity.
Here is how Brooks frames it:
“People today seem less likely to give themselves intellectual labels or join self-conscious philosophical movements. Young people today seem more likely to have their worldviews shaped by trips they have taken, or causes they have been involved in, or the racial or ethnic or gender identity group they identify with. That’s changed the nature of the American intellectual scene, the way people approach the world and the lives they live. In his book, “The Ideas Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders. A public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance. A thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming.”
Brooks does not say this but — not only is President Trump a super-wonk but – he has peppered his so-called administration with similar super-wonks, who are not troubled by facts. And in upcoming elections in France, Germany and elsewhere, we see rising political parties featuring wonkery at its extreme (e.g. get rid of foreigners, anyone not like us, that will solve our problems).
What does this mean for thinking people? Continue to fight. Challenge unsupported ideas. Build on facts. Dig up the facts. Think through issues. And above all embrace complexity. Wonks simplify…violating Einstein’s rule, simplify as much as possible – but not more so. Life is complex. Truth is complex. It cannot be reduced to a single variable, a single formula.
Wonks succeed because people are confused by complexity and want simple formulae. Don’t give in. Embrace complexity as a way of embracing truth – and fight back.
Middle Class Blues: A Different Narrative
By Shlomo Maital
We are hearing endlessly about the struggling blue collar workers and the oppressed middle class, sinking into debt, losing jobs, struggling to stay afloat. We hear Donald Trump play on their fears and grudges.
There is another narrative, one given in today’s New York Times by David Brooks. It is about resilient workers and middle class people, who adapt, shift jobs, lose one and gain another, learn new skills – and stay afloat, endure and even prevail. And there are lot of them.
Here is how Brooks describes one such case:
A few weeks ago I met a guy in Kentucky who’d lived through every trend of deindustrializing America. He grew up about 65 years ago on a tobacco and cattle farm, but he always liked engines, so even while in high school he worked 40 hours a week in a garage. Then he went to work in a series of factories — making airplane parts, car seats, sheet metal and casings for those big air-conditioning fans you see on the top of buildings. Every few years as the economy would shift, or jobs would go to Mexico, he’d get hit with a layoff. But the periods of unemployment were never longer than six months and he pieced together a career.
So, how did he piece together a career?
His best job came in the middle of his career, when he was a supervisor at the sheet metal plant. But when the technology changed, he was no longer qualified to supervise the new workers, so they let him go. He thought he’d just come in quietly on his final day, clean out his desk and sneak away. But word got out, and when he emerged from his office, box in hand, there was a double line of guys stretching all the way from his office in back, across the factory floor and out to his car in the lot. He walked down that whole double line with tears flowing, with the guys clapping and cheering as he went. We hear a lot about angry white men, but there is an honorable dignity to this guy. Some of that dignity comes from the fact that he knows how to fix things. One of the undermining conditions of the modern factory is that the workers no longer directly build the products, they just service the machines and software that do. The bakers now no longer actually know how to bake bread.” But this guy in Kentucky can take care of himself — redo the plumbing at home or replace the brake pads.
And what was his ‘narrative’, his story, told to himself? One of betrayal, exploitation, deprival, social inequality? None of that.
It’s more of a reactive, coping narrative: A lot of the big forces were outside my control, but I adjusted, made the best of what was possible within my constraints and lived up to my responsibilities. ….
I adjusted. Made the best of what was possible. Lived up to my responsibilities. This is a narrative that I believe is far far more representative of the working middle class, than the Trump “I’m-a-victim” narrative: “Washington screwed me, so I will vote for a scoundrel, because he expressed my anger, even though he hasn’t a clue about what middle class life is about.”
People are basically resilient. They bounce back. And the ones with integrity do not cast ballots for those who cynically exploit the worst qualities among us – avoiding personal responsibility for our own fate.
How to be Passionate..and Compassionate
By Shlomo Maital
I once surveyed a group of 50 Israeli chip designers, gave them a list of key qualities that were important for innovators – and asked them to rank them. To my surprise, “resilience” came up first, by far. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from failure, adversity, disasters, and continue on to your goal. It requires a great deal of mental toughness.
Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks (Aug. 30) has many useful insights into this subject. “Making Modern Toughness” begins by quoting a common perception: “Today’s students are more accomplished than past generations, but they are also more emotionally fragile.” Kids in earlier days were tougher, many of us in the older generation say.
Brooks has second thoughts. “….let’s not be too nostalgic for the past. A lot of what we take to be the toughness of the past was really just callousness. There was a greater tendency in years gone by to wall off emotions, to put on a thick skin — for some men to be stone-like and uncommunicative and for some women to be brittle, brassy and untouchable.” The result, Brooks claims, was in some cases alcoholism or depression.
So, if we rethink toughness, for the modern age, for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what do we get? What does Brooks suggest?
“The people we admire for being resilient are not hard; they are ardent. They have a fervent commitment to some cause, some ideal or some relationship. That higher yearning enables them to withstand setbacks, pain and betrayal. Such people are, as they say in the martial arts world, strong like water. A blow might sink into them, and when it does they are profoundly affected by it. But they can absorb the blow because it’s short term while their natural shape is long term. There are moments when they feel swallowed up by fear. They feel and live in the pain. But they work through it and their ardent yearning is still there, and they return to an altered wholeness.”
In short: “True mental toughness that entrepreneurs and innovators need desperately come from the passion of believing fervently in a goal or mission. That that passion, too, is driven by compassion, by caring for others, and by the desire to change the world for them. In this way of thinking, grit, resilience and toughness are not traits that people possess intrinsically. They are not tools you can possess independently for the sake of themselves. They are means inspired by an end. …. We are all fragile when we don’t know what our purpose is, when we haven’t thrown ourselves with abandon into a social role, when we haven’t committed ourselves to certain people, when we feel like a swimmer in an ocean with no edge.”
I begin all my classes by asking students what their true passion in life is. Many do not know. They have not been asked that question, nor have they tried many different things to find out experientially. But often parents push their kids to ‘get on with it’, rather than try things.
When are people really tough? Brooks writes, “People are really tough only after they have taken a leap of faith for some truth or mission or love. Once they’ve done that they can withstand a lot.”
Have you taken that leap of faith? Changed your job, your profession, your destiny?
“We live in an age when it’s considered sophisticated to be disenchanted,” Brooks notes. “But people who are enchanted are the real tough cookies.”
Innovator! Be enchanted. Find your enchantment. If you do you will be able to undergo an almost unlimited amount of adversity. That’s toughness, of the right kind.
Pittsburgh: Rises from the Ashes
By Shlomo Maital
In today’s International New York Times (July 3), David Brooks makes an important observation. The political battleground in the U.S. and other countries has until now been: big government? Or small? Too much government? Or too little? This is changing, in the wake of Trump and right-wing nationalist parties in Europe.
The core issue, he says, in the coming decade, will be: open or closed? Open society, to trade, ideas, immigrants, information? Or closed society, with a big wall, protectionism, tariffs, and ‘immigrants not welcome’ signs?
Globalization began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nov. 9 1989. The unification of the two Germanys accelerated the European Single Market and boosted global trade. But the benefits of free open trade, which have been enormous for Asia, accrued mainly to the wealthy and better off, who make money from money. Blue collar workers in the West lost their jobs, as manufacturing migrated. This silent majority is no longer silent. And their pain has become a central issue in politics, in the post-Trump era.
Brooks, like all good columnists, leaves his office and goes out into the field, to see first-hand. He visited Pittsburgh. My sister lives in Pittsburgh, and I’ve been visiting her regularly since her marriage to Chuck, my late brother-in-law, a Pittsburgh optometrist, in 1952. I saw first-hand the smoky steel mills along the Monongahela River and saw the terrible pollution that coated Pittsburgh with a layer of dust. I saw them disappear, as Pittsburgh reinvented itself to become today’s modern high-tech city, financial center, healthcare center and home to a great university, Carnegie-Mellon. As Brooks observes, Pittsburgh today is amazing, with sparkling clean air, great restaurants, cultural events, an old train station rezoned into restaurants and shops… a stark contrast to many other rust-belt cities, like Cleveland, OH and Gary, IN, which have not done the same.
But nonetheless, Pittsburgh too has its community of losers, those who lost high-paying steel jobs in the heyday of U.S. Steel. Globalization may have produced net gains for Asia, and even for the U.S., but those gains were very very unevenly distributed, and the winners did not in the least compensate the losers. After a long delay, the losers are now generating a political reaction and near-counter-revolution.
It would be a shame if the benefits of globalization were reversed, simply because our political system was too lazy, stupid and short-sighted to realize that somehow, we have to find a way to help those who lose from it. Maybe a good place to start is Pittsburgh, as Brooks notes, which lost thousands of steel jobs and eventually created thousands more of service jobs.
I think we should recall China and its amazing Great Wall, stretching for some 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometers), completed around 1400-1600. The Great Wall kept out the Manchus and kept China whole and safe, at least in part. But it also kept out the world and led to 500 years of stagnation in China’s economy. Modern China has been a huge winner from globalization, because it has been smart enough to know how to reap the benefits. We should challenge other countries, especially the U.S. and Europe, to state: What is your strategy for evening the playing field, NOT globally but WITHIN your own country, to help those who have lost well-paying jobs to free global trade? Because if you don’t shape such a strategy quickly, you may find that politically globalization is no longer viable and is replaced by protectionism and modern Great Walls. Trump’s “build a wall and make them pay for it” will replicate itself elsewhere, if we do not act soon and wisely.
Lady Gaga – Revisited
By Shlomo Maital
In 2011 and 2012 I blogged about pop singer Lady Gaga twice. Once about her passion and connection with her fans (she records songs after long exhausting performances, capturing the intimate link with her audiences) and once about her foundation. Apparently even serious NYT columnists like Nicholas Kristof and David Brooks share my interest. Today’s International New York Times has a wonderful David Brooks column about Lady Gaga, who was given an award together with Sophia Loren, Herbie Hancock and other main-line celebs.
Lady Gaga’s speech was tearful. She recalled her childhood. “I suppose I didn’t know what I would become, but I always wantedto be extremely brave and I wanted to be a constant reminder to the universe what passions liks like. What it sounds like. What it feels like.”
Brooks expands on what it means to be passionate. “[People with passion] somehow get to the other side of fear. They get beyond that fog that is scary to approach. Once through it they have the freedom to navigate. They opt out of things that are repetitive and deadening. There’s even sometimes a constant recklessness there, a willingness to throw their imperfect selves out into public view while not really thinking beforehand how people might react.”
“Gaga is nothing if not permanently out there; the rare celebrity who is willing to portray herself as a monster, a witch or disturbing cyborg — someone prone to inflicting pain. Gaga is her own unique creature, whom no one could copy.”
I think we can all learn from this flamboyant pop singer known as Lady Gaga (whose real name is Germanotta). Be yourself. Be fearless. Try things. Get through the fog of fear and uncertainty to the otherwise, to the shores of Creativity Land. Be like Gaga. It’s worth a try.
High School Tech: What Schools COULD Become
By Shlomo Maital
In another wonderful column, David Brooks (NYT Oct. 16) describes a documentary film, Most Likely to Succeed, by Greg Whiteley, in which San Diego’s High Tech High is featured, started by San Diego high tech and business leaders. I can do no better than to quote Brooks’ words:
Greg Whiteley’s documentary argues that the American school system is ultimately built on a Prussian model designed over 100 years ago. Its main activity is downloading content into students’ minds, with success or failure measured by standardized tests. This lecture and textbook method leaves many children bored and listless.
Worse, it is unsuited for the modern workplace. Information is now ubiquitous. You can look up any fact on your phone. A computer can destroy Ken Jennings, the world’s best “Jeopardy!” contestant, at a game of information retrieval. Computers can write routine news stories and do routine legal work. Our test-driven schools are training kids for exactly the rote tasks that can be done much more effectively by computers.
In High Tech High….There are no textbooks, no bells… Students are given group projects built around a driving question. One group studied why civilizations rise and fall and then built a giant wooden model, with moving gears and gizmos, to illustrate the students’ theory. Another group studied diseases transmitted through blood, and made a film. “Most Likely to Succeed” doesn’t let us see what students think causes civilizational decline, but it devotes a lot of time to how skilled they are at working in teams, demonstrating grit and developing self-confidence. There are some great emotional moments. A shy girl blossoms as a theater director. A smart but struggling boy eventually solves the problem that has stumped him all year. In the school, too, teachers cover about half as much content as in a regular school. Long stretches of history and other subject curriculums are effectively skipped. Students do not develop conventional study habits.
Brooks is not uncritical of High Tech High. In this blog, I have also made the point that in order to foster creativity, you cannot discard the hard tough discipline of mastery – mastering old knowledge, while thinking about how to create new. Brooks echoes this thought.
The cathedrals of knowledge and wisdom are based on the foundations of factual acquisition and cultural literacy. You can’t overleap that, which is what High Tech High is in danger of doing. “Most Likely to Succeed” is inspiring because it reminds us that the new technology demands new schools. But somehow relational skills have to be taught alongside factual literacy. The stairway from information to knowledge to wisdom has not changed. The rules have to be learned before they can be played with and broken.
This is worth repeating. Innovation is INTELLIGENTLY breaking the rules. In order to break the rules intelligently, creatively, first you have to learn them. You have to know physics, to engineer wonderful new devices. The key is, can we teach physics, without ruining the creative spark in those we teach?
The Purpose of Life? Little Things Mean A Lot
By Shlomo Maital
In a recent blog, “Disney Theory of Life” (April 14), I referred to David Brooks’ New York Times column about the purpose of life. I offered my own theory, based on the Disney World mantra, “Make People Happy”.
In today’s New York Times, Brooks returns to this theme and quotes emails he received from readers. “I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact,” notes Brooks, “a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life.”
Examples? Kim (apparently a therapist): “Now my purpose is simply to be the person who can pick up the phone and give you 30 minutes in your time of crisis”. Terence: “big decisions have less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.” Hans: “At age 85, …I am thankful to be alive. If there is one thing that keeps me focused, it’s the garden. Lots of plants died during the harsh winter, but, amazingly, the clematises and the roses are back, and lettuce, spinach and tomatoes are thriving in the new greenhouse.”
So, bottom line? Follow the wise advice of a woman I read about (probably in the excellent AARP retired persons’ magazine): “Ask yourself each morning, when you wake: what will I do for others today? And what will I do for myself?” And, as you fall asleep at night, ask yourself, “what did I do for others today? And what did I do for myself?”
A kind word? A helping hand? A smile? Little things, tiny things. They add up to something really big. They give real meaning to our lives, one day at a time.
Here are the words to the lovely song, Little Things Mean a Lot,
Blow me a kiss from across the room
Say I look nice when I’m not
Touch my hair as you pass my chair
Little things mean a lot
Give me your arm as we cross the street
Call me at six on the dot
A line a day when you’re far away
Little things mean a lot
Don’t have to buy me diamonds and pearls
Champagne, sables or such
I never cared much for diamonds and pearls
’cause honestly, honey, they just cost money
Give me your hand when I’ve lost the way
Give me a shoulder to cry on
Whether the day is bright or gray
Give me your heart to rely on
Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show me you haven’t forgot
For always and ever, now and forever
Little things mean a lot
Give me your hand when I’ve lost the way
Give me your shoulder to cry on
Whether the day is bright or gray
Give my your heart to rely on
Send me the warmth of a secret smile
To show me you haven’t forgot
That always and ever, now and forever
Little things mean a lot
And, here is the link to Kitty Kallen’s lovely rendition of it. http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/kitty_kallen/little_things_mean_a_lot.html
TIMnovate 