Thank You For Being Late

Thomas Friedman feels like an old friend at this point.  His voice is calm and rational and he talks about things that seem irreconcilable or impossible in measured tones of patient optimism.  His most recent book, subtitled An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, was given to both me and my son by another optimist, my Aunt Julie – someone who has, at best, cautiously embraced technological change – the central theme of this book.  So she must have been taken both by the evidence that Friedman marshals that we have passed a critical moment in technological advances, and he does, indeed, make a compelling argument for the confluence of the technologies of the smart phone, Artificial Intelligence and the capacities of the cloud creating a new world order he characterizes as a supernova that we don’t yet appreciate, and that this wave is something that we should stay on top of especially if we, like my son, are about to enter the workforce.  If we don’t stay on top of it, the message is, we will be drowned by it (can you tell that I am returning from a vacation that included body surfing in big waves generated by a distant tropical storm?).

This book was published before Trump’s election and it was anticipating – or aware of – some of his early campaign rhetoric, but did not, I don’t think, take seriously the possibility that he might get elected, even though the British Exit from the European Union was cited as a current measure of our cultural zeitgeist.  Friedman is terribly concerned by the breakdown in the ability of Washington to work collaboratively, something that has, at least to this point in the summer of 2017, only been exacerbated by the Trump presidency.  Even more, the country is deeply divided, with Trump having historically low rates of approval at this point in his presidency – 40% of the electorate disapprove of him – but incredibly high rates of approval among registered Republicans – 85% of whom approve of him.  So the only way, I think, to get that 40% overall number is to realize that almost no one who is not a republican approves of Trump, but almost everyone who is, does.  Ouch.

My Aunt Julie is a political conservative – but a liberal human being who has travelled to over 100 countries.  She has done a lot of travelling in what Friedman calls “The World of Disorder”, the places where the rule of law does not exist.  She is, I think, an old school conservative – and Friedman lists the progressive accomplishments of a variety of republican leaders – though he neglects to include Nixon’s opening of trade with China – something that Aunt Julie used as an opportunity to become one of the first American tourists there in many, many years.  All that said, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Julie had voted for Trump – though I haven’t asked her.  But I think that Aunt Julie, in part by her having recommended this book to me, is not really the person that we need to worry about.  And we do need to worry about people.  You see, Friedman is proposing that, to move forward in this new world, we need to do that as a community – we need to have support from others to make transitions – we need to figure out how to harness the power of the hurricane while living in the relatively still center of it – a center that is always moving – but one that we can stay safely inside of when we have others who are working with us to track the progress of the storm.  To simply stick a stake in the ground and stay here – as Trump seems to be proposing with his Make America Great Again agenda – and the do nothing congress is doing with gridlock – would, in the long run, doom us to failure.

So who is it that we need to bring on board?  Who do we need to convince that what Friedman is saying makes sense?  And how do we go about doing that?  Friedman’s proposal is that we have leaders who do that.  Fortunately he is banking as much or more on local as national leaders; people who work to build communities wherever we are.  Friedman literally goes home to the town of St. Louis Park – a town that can be seen as a suburb of Minneapolis – St. Paul, but a town that Friedman takes pains to point out is a complete community – not a satellite.  This town was the first to welcome Jews who emigrated from the Minneapolis ghetto they had shared with African Americans until the 1950s.  The town today has held onto the embracing ethos that was in place then and more than 40 languages are spoken by its 47,000 residents.  At its heart is a strong school system that is well funded by local taxes and attracts superb teachers.  Also at its heart is a sense of trust – among and between city leaders who work together to solve problems – and between the leaders and the citizens, citizens who understand that the leaders have the best interests of the community in mind and, when those leaders mess up – as they did when they bought a Wi-Fi system paid for by the city that would provide free internet access for the town and it failed when the solar panels driving it didn’t melt the snow and ice covering them – the citizens forgive the council members and asked them what is the next thing that we are going to try because they get it that the council members were doing their best to do something that would make everyone’s life better.  Friedman acknowledges, however, that one thing that has buoyed this community is the relative stability of the local economy – one that has led to real economic growth of 2% per year for decades – and one that has meant that people’s children end up earning more than their parents did – a pillar of the American dream that has not occurred in the places chronicled in Hillbilly Elegy, a book that discusses rust belt cities in Ohio and holler towns in Kentucky.

Somewhere in between Friedman’s St. Louis Park and HillbillyElegy’s Middletown lie a lot of people.  These people are frequently smart and capable.  They may own small businesses or work for them.  The central metaphor of this book will, however, be lost on many of them because the central metaphor is that our society should mirror mother nature and evolve a la Darwin’s theory of evolution.  I hate to tell you this Tom, but a lot of people don’t buy evolution.  In fact, according to my history of psychology text, fewer people believe in the US today believe in evolution than did in the 1920s.  Ironically, as we become more enamored of technology and as it takes over more and more of our lives, we seem to have figured out how to separate it from the science that spawned it.

Evolution was a hard thing for me to wrap my head around.  When I read Darwin, much of his evidence for evolution had to do with relatively quick adaptations to the environment.  Moths that were white and were quickly eaten when the bark was black were suddenly dominant after white ash from industry covered the bark and the black moths were easily spotted prey.  Evolution as a whole has taken a whole lot longer and has involved many more parts than Darwin could have known about.  I learned at the natural history museum in Chicago last summer that that our atmosphere was generated by sea plants and animals – land animals couldn’t have existed until millions of years of oxygen had been collected in the areas around the earth – and the atmosphere fended off many of the deadliest of cosmic rays.  Or at least that is how I remember it.  In any case, it took me a long time to realize that a million years is a long time and that a lot of mistakes can be made in that time in the process of discovering a mutation that is helpful rather than harmful.

But some very smart people don’t buy that.  They have a much narrower view of history and, on top of that, they have some kind of belief system that generally includes the ways in which the world will end in the relatively near future – and some kind of grand cosmic scheme will be realized.  There is an almost surreal fascination with this.  But I am getting derailed.  The point is that Friedman thought he was preaching to the choir – he thought he was talking the rational majority of us, but at this moment it feels like the rational ones are in the minority.  I think if he were to rewrite the book today he would have to acknowledge that our “world of order” has many more powerful lines of disorder in it than he originally imagined.  And I think he would have spent more time talking about the importance of education – in both the world of order and the world of disorder.  We need a population that can think in order to stay ahead of this supernova.  We can’t just access facts on the web, we have to have a cogent approach to the world as a whole and to learn about how we use evidence to make decisions – not just intuition and folklore.

One of the striking moments in the documentary about building the biggest house in America, The Queen of Versailles, is when the mother of the title is worried about their losing their wealth and that the children may have to get an education because the wealth would have protected them from having to prepare for a vocation, which is what she experienced college and graduate school as being about.  Unfortunately the board and administrators of my liberal arts college agree with her and are trying to market us as a means to a financially secure future.  I don’t disagree that this is a byproduct of a college education, but my belief is antiquated one – one that is a holdover from when landed gentry were the only ones eligible to vote.  Education should provide an informed electorate.  If we are going to govern ourselves, we need to be prepared to think like governors – and we need to cooperatively utilize our strengths to build the best possible union. 

As a psychoanalyst and an educator, I am aware of multiple ironies at this point.  One is that education, like evolution, inevitably leads to change, so those who are entrenched in positions that don’t acknowledge the supernova and its impact are not going to support education.  At this point I can hear the reluctant wife quoting the former secretary of the Veteran’s Administration, Eric Shinseki, who stated that if you don’t like change, you will like irrelevancy even less.  The more immediate ironies are that teachers like me, who are change agents and tend to be supportive of personal and cultural change -  tend to work in institutions that are very conservative and slow to change.  Well, the supernova, I think, has us in its cross hairs.  We need to figure out how to use it to educate – though it is, in its current configuration, best at conveying facts, not at teaching how to think – and interact – like governors.  I am also aware of psychoanalysis as a discipline that emphasizes the functioning of the individual over the functioning of the group – not that we haven’t, since Freud, had a lot to say about the ways that groups function.  But I think we need to up our game on that front – and even more to track the ways in which the supernova is impacting the functioning of the individual.

Ironically in terms of the culture as a whole, which seems to be headed for a foxhole, and the corners of that culture that I am most identified with, this book clarifies that the supernova positions us to be able to cooperate on a scale that was unthinkable before.  We are within spitting distance of a worldwide community where we can figure out how to be virtually in touch with virtually everyone on the planet.  We can (and Friedman maintains will) build communities that address and solve problems and, he maintains, our diversity as a species – the range of abilities that we have and that can be harnessed, will continue to allow us to adapt to the changing environments in ways that allow us reap the rewards of the problem solving that we accomplish.  Implicit in his thinking may be that, despite our potential for huge communities, it is smaller ones - ones in which we actually know the others in the group - even if they live half way around the world - that may best fuel the kinds of changes that we need to adapt to survive as a species.  In a week when our president seems to be urging North Korea, the most disordered part of the disordered world, to wreak havoc on the world of order – and is encouraging us to be barbaric towards them, I am ready to bet on small rather than large communities.  I am also hoping that Friedman’s (and Aunt Julie’s) optimism is well placed.

Post Script: This post led to a correspondence with Aunt Julie in which she clarified that she did not vote for Trump - she is a fiscal, but not a social conservative.  We have not finished the conversation about our values and how they mesh and contrast, and probably never will; one of the joys and frustrations of being human.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...