“If you find yourself having to tiptoe around others, you’re not walking with your tribe.”
The image/meme on my uncle’s Facebook page was those words typed on what’s meant to look like a torn scrap of paper above a blurred-out background. Based on most of his Facebook posts, I don’t think he and I would see eye to eye on many things – at least not politically. He’s one of my dad’s brothers. I don’t know any of my uncles on my dad’s side of the family very well. I certainly don’t know this one all that well – other than what he shares on FB. The other day I mentioned an interview with the author George Saunders and how he talks about finding an axis on which we might find connections with friends, neighbors, relatives with whom we otherwise disagree. I related to the sentiment in my uncle’s post. Perhaps this, the ability and desire to walk freely amongst your tribe, is the axis on which he and I would find common ground. I have a handful of hippie FB friends, mostly deadheads, who talk about their tribe – they’d also agree. I would have expected this type of a post from them.
I suspect I know the impetus of my Uncle’s post. If I had to guess, I’d say he is trying to make a comment about the censorship that many argue is taking place on social media. Facebook, Twitter, and others have taken the unprecedented step of banning or removing accounts that promote violent rhetoric – most notably the president’s. The Nation addressed this in a recent article about big tech and why we shouldn’t trust them to police speech – suggesting that the arsonists are attempting to recast themselves as fire fighters. The CEO of Twitter has admitted that he’s concerned about setting a dangerous precedent in limiting free speech. These are complicated issues that deserve serious consideration. Unfortunately, we live in an era of soundbites. Serious consideration requires nuance and I’m afraid we, as a society, have little patience for nuance. Serious consideration requires a common axis, common definitions, and the recognition that with any topic that has any level of moral ambiguity we’re simply arguing over where in the sand the line is drawn.
The way arguments about such things usually play out is that one side, feeling that they’ve been mistreated, trots out examples of hypocrisy in how the other side has been treated better. The pendulum then swings the other way and the roles are reversed. It’s the equivalent of when a child, caught doing the wrong thing, uses as their defense – well, so and so did it and they didn’t get in trouble. In the face of our own failings, instead of taking ownership it’s much easier to drag others down. I had a psychology professor that suggested most of our feelings of anger and resentment boil down to our fairness button being pushed. Kids will often point and say “not fair.” They’re good at this. By the time we reach adulthood, we’ve learned a lot of ways to rephrase and twist our basic feeling of “not fair.”
Many years ago I volunteered at a food pantry. I really enjoyed the company of my fellow volunteers – they were all nice and good people to be around – one of the best groups of “co-workers” I’ve had. We seldom talked politics or religion – though most of them were members of the church where the pantry was housed. Not through anything they did, I always felt a little sheepish or inadequate or “less-than” when entering the church as a non-worshiper (my own hangup). I remember one afternoon unloading a truck of produce, one of the volunteers and I were talking about unions. I believe the local school district was about to go on strike. From his stance, I’d guess he was anti-union – though he acknowledged the difficult work involved in being a teacher. When pressed for the reasoning behind his anti-union stance, he said that he worked a job for many years in which he had none of the protections that union members have. He could be fired, he had to work hard and negotiate raises based on merit, he didn’t have cushy healthcare, etc. etc. I pushed back and asked why he and his co-workers didn’t unionize to demand those things? Why instead of arguing for better conditions for himself, he’d rather see other people have lower working conditions. I don’t remember how the discussion ended – most likely an agree to disagree type of non-resolution. Now, with the renewed push to raise the minimum wage – I’m seeing a lot of the same argumentation. From twitter someone complained that raising the minimum wage in Texas would put a minimum wage job on par with a beginning teacher’s salary… For me, the answer is raise the teacher’s salary.
I think about that conversation a lot when I think about trying to find common ground with other people. I think about what my professor said and how so much of how we view our place in the world is driven by our perceptions of how we’re treated compared to how other people are treated – our sense of fairness and justice. Following the recent riots at the Capitol, there was a lot of talk about how the outcome and response would have been different if it were the BLM movement instead of the MAGA movement. I believe the response would have been more severe (there are recent studies that say the police are three times as likely to use force against left wing protesters). I suspect more people would have been shot, killed, and arrested. For those on the left, this pushes their fairness button. In recent days, politicians on the right have been pushing for unity and lowering the temperature. This too pushes against the fairness button, because many of those same politicians have been preaching division for weeks. One of the more reasonable quotes I’ve seen about all of this came from a BLM protester who said, he wants fairness, but for him that doesn’t mean killing and shooting the Capitol rioters – it means not shooting protesters of a different skin color and enforcing the law equally.
I began this post by talking about the desire to walk with one’s tribe. I began this post wanting to talk about nuance. My thoughts and writing have wandered around a bit, as I tend to do, because I have limited examples and even fewer answers. A few weeks ago I wrote about the toxicity of social media and my love/hate relationship with it. We so desperately want to walk with our tribe, and social media makes it so easy to “feel” like we’re walking with our tribe. To feel like we’ve been validated. In the late 1990s, Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone – a sociological work about the disappearance of community. He concluded that civic society is collapsing because of fewer people are participating in “groups” (church, VFWs, bowling leagues, unions, etc.) I’ve only read snippets and I know there have been counter arguments, but I can see how we’ve been in a long slide towards isolation and fewer commonalities. About five years ago, I spent many hours facilitating conversations with complete strangers about how to improve our community and what’s holding us back from achieving our goals. Our team facilitated over 30 such conversations, and I personally spoke with between 100 and 200 people. The overwhelming sentiment was that we no longer know each other, we don’t trust each other, we don’t feel connected to each other. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, allow us to feel a sense of connection, but is it real? Sometimes it seems like these platforms have become spaces for nonstop bickering – they seem to divide us in the worst and most extreme ways. We participate because we want to share, we want to be seen, we want to feel like we’re a part of something, anything. We want validation. And yet that participation ends up being superficial and isolating and seldom challenges us on our own opinions. People block or de-friend those who have different opinions and use their tribe’s likes and comments to shut down opposing views and validate their own.
I think the reason I have so much trouble pinning this topic down is because there are so few rules of conduct, behavior, or engagement. Because we are so fractured as a society, our tribes dig in more on their own moral superiority. I’m sure lots of essays have been written on the many modern ethical dilemmas posed by living in the 21st century (I admit, I’m too lazy to read them – another characteristic of life in a world of social media). I’m often left wondering, what is our responsibility in the public space, and how are we defining public space? If I hear someone make a racist comment, is it my duty to “correct” them? What about their “right” to say racist things? What is our obligation to promote truth when we can’t seem to agree on what the truth is? I’ve said this before – when I attempt to wrestle with these bigger ideas of how to be in the world, when I agree that we have a responsibility akin to that of the person who has escaped the cave, but am uncomfortable with the premise that any one person has ownership of enlightenment or what is true… I tend to want to withdraw entirely. I can see how monks in isolation might find peace having stepped away from all of this. Yet some nagging part in the back of my brain thinks that by opting out, they’ve chosen a path of selfishness.
The other night I started writing a story. It’s pieces from some other things I’ve written. It’s tentatively called The Slow Corruption of Donovan Andrew Jones and is about a character who becomes radicalized in the way a monk might be considered radicalized or Kerouac’s Dharma Bums might be considered radicalized . The novel of not fitting in is nothing new. Characters taking epic road trips, or dropping out, or longing for place are a staple of literature. They are expressive of the classic themes of man vs. (society, nature, man, self). I have serious doubts on my ability to improve upon any of these things. I have often wondered, aloud, why do I even write? Why blog, why make it public? I sometimes think it’s about defining and redefining my own public space, defining and redefining what I think my tribe looks like? Defining and redefining who the characters are and how they fit in with me and how I fit in with them.
I’ve worked on, and walked away from, this particular blog post numerous times over the past few days (I think I started it on Thursday). As with so many topics, I find myself squarely in the middle. To me, so many of the arguments in politics and over policy seem rooted in cruelty and bringing other people down because of our own misfortune or anger or jealousy. Some days, I want nothing to do with it. Some days, I start to feel like I only want to surround myself with kind and caring people, not the misery loves company crowd. I begin to think that life is too short to spend it arguing with people who are from radically different tribes…. But then I think about my “responsibility” as a citizen and fellow traveler on this planet – as a community member. Don’t I owe it to society to find common ground, to find that axis with others? Aren’t we in radically different tribes because we only seek out like-minded opinions? And what of truth? There isn’t a whole lot of middle ground between truth and lies… what is our responsibility to dispelling falsehoods?
And so I find myself debating politics with strangers because I want them to be less selfish, less cruel, and more open to lifting others up. It often feels like a fool’s errand… Don Quixote tilting at windmills. It doesn’t feel like the right path – I’m curious as to why so many of us do it. Perhaps, as Ram Dass suggests, we’re just looking for people to “walk us home.”