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Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal Hardcover – 1 Nov. 2018
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- ISBN-101250193680
- ISBN-13978-1250193681
- EditionFirst Edition
- PublisherSt. Martin's Press
- Publication date1 Nov. 2018
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions16.28 x 2.76 x 24.26 cm
- Print length272 pages
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Them
Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal
By Ben SasseSt. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2018 Ben SasseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-19368-1
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Epigraph,
Introduction: More Politics Can't Fix This,
PART I COLLAPSING TRIBES,
1. Our Loneliness Epidemic,
2. Strangers at Work,
PART II ANTI-TRIBES,
3. The Comforts of Polititainment,
4. The Polarization Business Model,
PART III OUR TO-DO LIST,
5. Become Americans Again,
6. Set Tech Limits,
7. Buy a Cemetery Plot,
8. Be a Smarter Nomad,
Conclusion: We Need More Tribes,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,
About the Author,
Also by Ben Sasse,
More Praise for Them,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
OUR LONELINESS EPIDEMIC
Why the Chicago Heat Wave Isn't Capitalized • Loneliness Kills • Not All Depression Is Depression • The Prophet of Social Capital • The Scissors Graph Society • Haves and Have-Nots • Fathers and Margins for Error • Can We Admit the Goodnight Moon Gap Yet? • The Parent Lottery • How to Be Happy
In the summer of 1995, Chicago experienced the deadliest heat wave in U.S. history. For seven days in July, the upper Midwest sweltered under three-digit temperatures, and the Windy City had no wind. The Chicago Tribune compared the humidity to "roasting under a wet wool blanket." On Thursday the 13th, the mercury sat at 106 degrees, but the heat index cracked 120 at Midway Airport. Temperatures fell at night, but only to the high 80s. I've been in Middle Eastern cities on 115-degree days, but this was worse.
Chicago wasn't built for this kind of heat. Many residents didn't have air conditioning, and those who did ran their units so relentlessly that parts of the power grid collapsed. Electricity went out around the city, leaving people to bake in brick apartments.
Heat exhaustion takes a terrible toll on the body. An elevated heart rate, muscle cramps, and nausea can be accompanied by fainting, seizures, and hallucinations. Most people can manage 48 hours of intense heat, but after that the weakened body begins to fail. Without medical attention, the kidneys and other vital organs shut down.
Chicago's hospitals and morgues filled, and the Cook County medical examiner was forced to store human remains in rented freezer trucks. Coroners initially counted 465 dead, but many of the dead weren't discovered until weeks later, when the stench of decomposition oozed from homes and apartments. Researchers would eventually tie 739 deaths to the week's weather.
Chances are, you've never heard of this extraordinary episode, and I likely wouldn't have either except that Melissa and I were living in Chicago at the time. We'd just gotten married and moved into a tiny apartment in Evanston, across the street from Northwestern University's football stadium. We were fortunate: Our window air-conditioner managed to alleviate the scorching heat. The only ill effect we experienced was when the dashboard of Melissa's eighteen-year-old clunker cracked from daily baking in the sun.
Why the Chicago heat wave Isn't Capitalized
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control, descending on Chicago, hoped to prepare for future heat waves by identifying which populations were most vulnerable and why. Many of their findings were unsurprising: those who lacked air conditioning died at higher rates; the elderly and the sick were at greatest risk; and among the elderly and the sick, those without caretaker relationships, or without ready and reliable access to transportation, fared worst.
But sociologist Eric Klinenberg found himself puzzled by one part of the story: How was it that so many people could die unnoticed in a city of 2.8 million citizens? Klinenberg began an investigation that lasted more than five years. His initial findings simply echoed those of the CDC. But then he struck on something surprising: At a glance, three of the ten neighborhoods with the lowest number of heat-related deaths, Klinenberg found, looked demographically just like the neighborhoods with the highest number — predominantly poor, violent, and African-American. Race and poverty could not fully account for who died and who survived.
The crucial variable, Klinenberg discovered, was social relationships. In neighborhoods that fared well during the heat wave, residents "knew who was alone, who was old, and who was sick," and took it upon themselves to do "wellness checks." They "encouraged neighbors to knock on each other's doors — not because the heat wave was so exceptional, but because that's what they always do." By contrast, areas with high death tolls were areas that previously had been "abandon[ed] ... by businesses, service providers, and most residents"; only "the unconnected" remained. They died alone because they lived alone. In the final analysis, the difference between life and death, Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago concluded, was connections — or what he labeled "social infrastructure." Isolation turned something dangerous into something deadly.
More than two decades later, schoolchildren across the country still know the tale of how in 1871 Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern, igniting a blaze that devoured Chicago, but few will ever learn about the (never capitalized) heat wave of 1995 — even though it killed twice as many people as the (always capitalized) Great Chicago Fire. Why?
Part of the answer is that Currier and Ives's images of the Chicago conflagration were impressed onto the imagination of nineteenth-century America. But that's only another way of saying that the heat wave victims died out of the nation's eye, just as they lived out of their community's eye. Their deaths have gone unremembered because their lives went unnoticed.
Loneliness Kills
In classic works of literature, people often die from extraordinary rejection or loss. Shakespeare's King Lear, Ophelia, and Lady Montague die from grief; Hugo's Jean Valjean dies after losing Cosette; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is so convinced she's unloved that she throws herself under a train.
Though it might be tempting to chalk these deaths up to literary melodrama, the American Heart Association says that death-by-heartbreak is in fact quite real. In "broken heart syndrome" (technical name: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy), rejection or loss causes stress hormones to flood the body, mimicking the effects of a heart attack. "Tests show dramatic changes in rhythm and blood substances that are typical of a heart attack," the AHA reports. And, though rare, it is possible for otherwise healthy people to die from this condition. Everyone has heard of elderly couples who die within weeks or months of each other.
But is loneliness an out-of-the-ordinary event? Must its consequences take the form of sudden death? What happens when loneliness builds over time? It turns out that this is precisely what is happening in the United States today, in epidemic proportions.
Eric Klinenberg's research inaugurated the "loneliness literature" — sociological and medical research into the effects of community on well-being. Scientists are now showing that loneliness affects the brains and bodies of millions of people, in measurable and alarming ways.
Breakthroughs in imaging technology are producing an explosion in what we know about the human brain. For example, neurological scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that our response to emotional rejection lights up the same brain region that registers emotional response to physical stress, giving rise to the same health effects: increased stress hormones, decreased immune function, and heart problems. So it comes as no surprise that lonely people get sick more often, take longer to recover from illness, and are at higher risk of heart attacks. According to researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Chicago, emotional stress causes us to age faster — and it turns out that chronically lonely individuals are more prone to Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Studies suggest that one lonely day exacts roughly the same toll on the body as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.
Among epidemiologists, psychiatrists, public-health officials, and social scientists, there is a growing consensus that the number one health crisis in America right now is not cancer, not obesity, and not heart disease — it's loneliness. And with our nation's aging population, it's only going to get worse.
Shakespeare and Tolstoy, it seems, were on to something. Loneliness is killing us. According to a seminal report from the Dahlem Workshop on Attachment and Bonding, "Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans." Brigham Young University's Julianne Holt-Lunstad has been studying data from 3.5 million Americans over nearly four decades. According to her findings, lonely, isolated people are somewhere around 25 percent more likely to die prematurely — not just from suicide (which has been spiking across multiple demographic categories in the United States in the last two decades), but from any of an array of health problems. Similarly, University of California–Irvine social ecologist Sarah Pressman has been comparing the mortality effects of loneliness to various better-understood causes, such as obesity, heavy drinking, and smoking. Persistent loneliness reduces average longevity by more than twice as much as heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity (in fact, loneliness drives obesity, not vice versa, as previously thought). The research of loneliness experts John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick confirms that loneliness alters behavior and physiological response in ways that are "hastening millions of people to an early grave."
Men are especially at risk. One comprehensive study of 67,000 American men found that bachelors under the age of 45 were far more likely to die in a given year than their married male peers. It turns out that men, unlike women, tend to stop forming friendships once they begin careers or marry — for most men, by their early thirties — which makes them particularly susceptible to disruptions in their social networks later in life. For most men, marriage and children constitute their chief points-of-entry in adult life into any broad community, and their sources of social support atrophy quickly when those vanish. Elderly men are the loneliest demographic group in the United States. Of the lonely dead discovered in the wake of the Chicago heat wave, there were a stunning four times moremen than women.
Doctors are sounding the alarm about what public-health experts now call our "loneliness epidemic." Former U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy speaks widely about the physical toll of persistent loneliness. As he told the Boston Globe, the conclusion is clear: "The data is telling us ... that loneliness kills."
Not All Depression Is Depression
How widespread is our problem? A fifth of Americans volunteer that loneliness is "a major source of unhappiness" in their lives, and a full third of those over the age of 45 confess that "chronic loneliness" is a fundamental challenge with which they are struggling.
These numbers are huge, but they actually understate the problem. Part of the difficulty of capturing the gravity of the crisis is that our terminology is fuzzy — for example, we don't consistently differentiate between "social isolation" and "loneliness." "Social isolation" is when a person objectively lacks relationships. Klinenberg and other researchers found that it's entirely possible, as in Chicago in the summer of 1995, to be socially isolated even while surrounded by millions of people. But loneliness is a more expansive category than isolation. According to psychologists, loneliness is not merely isolation or an individual's "perception of being alone and isolated," but rather the "inability to find meaning in one's life." Sociologists sometimes describe the concept as "a subjective, negative feeling related to deficient social relations," or the "feeling of disconnectedness" from a community of meaning. It's hard to measure, and perhaps even harder to talk about clearly.
Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, clinical psychiatrists who also happen to be married to each other, argue in their important book, The Lonely American, that much of what is called "depression" might actually be chronic loneliness. They observed in their practices that many of their patients' descriptions of depression were tied to accounts of isolation. "We began to notice how hard it was for our patients to talk about their isolation, which seemed to fill them with deep shame," they write. "Most of our patients were more comfortable saying they were depressed than saying they were lonely" (their emphasis). After reading Olds and Schwartz, I began to ask psychiatrists and psychologists whether they had noticed anything like this in their own work. A flood of agreement followed.
One therapist exclaimed: "Oh, heavens, yes! The number one reason people think they're coming into my office is self-diagnosed depression. But most of the time, my conclusion is that their challenge is lack of community and healthy relationships. My fear is that my profession is just prescribing them a medication, because that's the easiest path out of the appointment."
Before continuing, let's be clear: Lots of Americans do, indeed, suffer from depression, and breakthroughs in psychotherapy methods and pharmacology have changed lives — and surely saved many. My purpose here is simply to relate what many mental-health professionals have observed: that sometimes what patients think is depression is actually a response to deep-seated loneliness.
Loneliness is surely part of the reason Americans consume almost all the world's hydrocodone (99%) and most of its oxycodone (81%). Recently, in New York Magazine, journalist Andrew Sullivan laid out how these drugs are often used to dull something more than physical pain — what he calls "existential pain." Explains Sullivan: "The oxytocin we experience from love or friendship or orgasm is chemically replicated by the molecules derived from the poppy plant. It's a shortcut — and an instant intensification — of the happiness we might ordinarily experience in a good and fruitful communal life." Sullivan describes a scientific experiment that compared how rats in different situations responded to the presence of an artificial stimulant (water with morphine: rodent heroin). A rat alone in his cage drank five times as much morphine water as a rat whose cage included food, colorful balls, an exercise wheel, and attractive lady-rats. "Take away the stimulus of community and all the oxytocin it naturally generates," Sullivan writes, "and an artificial variety of the substance becomes much more compelling." Every day in the United States, 116 people die from an opioid-related drug overdose. According to the CDC: "In 2016, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and illegal opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl) was 5 times higher than in 1999."
The natural, healthy stimulus of community is vanishing, and the damaging health effects of persistent loneliness are being compounded — by drug overuse and abuse, which now claim more lives in a year than diabetes, liver disease, pneumonia, or the flu. This is very bad and very new.
The Prophet of Social Capital
What is causing this pervasive experience of alienation? Why are so many more Americans isolated and alone than half a century ago?
To help answer these questions, there's no one better to consult than Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam, who has been chronicling the collapse of neighborly America for a quarter century. Putnam asks the big questions: What makes life livable in a big, diverse democracy like ours? What are the ties that bind us together? What causes those ties to fray or unravel? Why are so many indicators of social collapse currently spiking?
In the early 1990s, Putnam took note of a curious phenomenon: While there were more bowlers in America as a share of the population than at any time before, fewer of them were joining bowling leagues. People were doing various things — but they weren't doing them together. Putnam was teasing out the connection between community life and personal fulfillment: "Though all the evidence is not in," he wrote, "it is hard to believe that the generational decline in social connectedness and the [associated] generational increase in suicide, depression, and malaise are unrelated."
Putnam used bowling leagues as his shorthand, but he found similar trends across many types of social and service organizations. From bridge clubs to alumni groups and veterans' associations, memberships were aging and nobody was joining. Between 1975 and 1995, membership in social clubs and community organizations such as the PTA, Kiwanis, and Rotary plummeted. Same with labor union membership and regular church attendance. (Recently, overall participation in youth sports leagues has dropped as well.) Locally organized churches declined, with more anonymous, commuter megachurches absorbing their members.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Them by Ben Sasse. Copyright © 2018 Ben Sasse. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : St. Martin's Press; First Edition (1 Nov. 2018)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1250193680
- ISBN-13 : 978-1250193681
- Dimensions : 16.28 x 2.76 x 24.26 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 1,544,051 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 3,253 in Civil Rights & Citizenship
- 38,870 in Computing & Internet
- 45,447 in Sociology (Books)
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I wasn’t disappointed. I already knew that Senator Sasse is a convinced and unashamedly Christian voice in the public square. But I discovered he is also an above average writer, with an easy and riveting style even when writing about complex – and somewhat controversial - matters pertaining to our public life.
In this book you will get to know Ben Sasse, the small town Nebraska boy (he attended a Lutheran day school), the sports fan, the devoted husband and father. He and his wife have purchased a home in the small prairie city where he was raised. Ben now commutes weekly between DC and Fremont, NE in order to raise his own kids while simultaneously engaged in debating important national issues on Capitol Hill – did you catch his masterful put down of the raucous behavior of his Republican and Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Kavanagh hearings, lecturing them on the operation of the Supreme Court as envisioned by the Founders and outlined in the Constitution?
His Lutheran roots show up in a number of places as he nicely unpacks the doctrine of vocation, two kingdoms, etc. As a college student he was involved in Campus Crusade and began to read theology in earnest. The writings of R C Sproul converted him to a Calvinist understanding of the reformation. Though he spent some years as President of a Lutheran college, he is currently a member of a PCA congregation in Fremont. Still, he calls himself a “Lutero-Calvinist,” saying he is “in love with the Lutheran tradition.” He counts among his closest friends none other than Mike Horton of White Horse Inn fame, who is a great fan of Lutheran teaching. All of which explains why you will find so much of this book solidly rooted in theology. For example:
"We all remember that our Founders had strong views about freedom and equality and about how government depended on the consent of the governed. But we tend to forget that our system rests on an even greater core conviction: human beings are fundamentally fallen, selfish, and inclined to let our passions run roughshod over our reason. Simply put, the founders believed that we’re very broken.
"….Colonists taught their children that imperfect human beings could see the world only imperfectly, through unreliably self-centered lenses. Children learning their alphabet from the New England Primer, the most important and most widely read textbook in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, began with human fallibility from the letter 'A': 'In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.'” (140)
His analysis of the aforementioned vitriol in public discourse is intriguing. We hate each other, Sasse claims, because we are lonely. The ties that used to bind previous generations to family, friends, neighborhoods and communities are no longer in place, so America is suffering from a “loneliness epidemic.” I find this personally gratifying, because in my 1994 book “Dying to Live” I used precisely that phrase to describe what day-to-day existence had already become way back then in a frenetically busy, but ultimately lonely world.
The greatest health crisis in America, Sasse writes, “is not cancer, not obesity, and not heart disease – it’s loneliness.” Citing research by health professionals, he states: “Persistent loneliness reduces average longevity by more than twice as much as heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity. (In fact, loneliness drives obesity, and not vice versa, as previously thought.)” (23)
As an attempt to treat their persistent loneliness, Sasse theorizes, people create “tribes” of “us” vs. “them” to create an artificial sense of identity and belonging. Secure within their tribe, they lash out and hurl personal insults at the opposition instead of engaging in reasoned and intense dialogue. He calls all of us to examine the alliances we have formed in the culture wars: “There is a deep and corrosive tribal impulse to act as if ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ but sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jackass.” (156)
The Senator does not suggest a truce or compromise on any of the important moral and civic issues facing our nation, but he does advocate for debate instead of hate. “I’m not advocating for a ‘mushy middle’ on policy, as if just singing ‘Kumbaya’ and ‘splitting the difference’ between conservative and progressive policy proposals would somehow work,” writes Sasse. “I don’t think it will. But debating policy and demonizing our debate partner are fundamentally different things.” (242 f.)
Daily bread, according to Dr. Luther, includes “devout husband or wife, devout children, …good friends, and faithful neighbors.” Dr. Sasse suggests we re-cement the ties of family, friendship, and community as a remedy for the hatred dished out regularly and routinely in our society. The antidote to loneliness is, of course, love – not what too often passes for love, but the genuine variety that is born, nurtured, and carefully tended within caring familial relationships and deep friendships. The senator is refreshingly personal and transparent about how both these essential components in human life transform and give meaning to a busy public life.
This book, more than any I’ve read, has given me a healthy respect for the power of technology for good or for ill. Rather than usher in a new information age of an informed and motivated citizenry, computer technology has instead amped up division among us and diminished our social capital.
"Social media companies promise new forms of community and unprecedented connectedness. But it turns out that at the same time that any Billy Bob in Boise can broadcast his opinions to thousands of people, we have fewer non-virtual friends than at any point in decades. We’re hyperconnected, and we’re disconnected." (28)
"The smartphone, with its endless apps, is designed to whisper to you that the thing you are doing is not the thing you ought to be doing. The phone isn’t encouraging your progress; it’s causing you stress. Want to know what hostile AI looks like? You’re holding it." (196)
Of course, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, we are compelled to tote around the very treasure that is destroying us. Few of us have the luxury of living or communicating off the grid, without our technology. How, then, shall we live? Sasse candidly shares his successes and failures with us in devising a way to use his devices rather than allowing them to use him.
Some of the rules or guardrails are relatively obvious: "Turn off most notifications and alerts. Stop checking in on retweet counts and likes. Read the comments on your posts only at a predetermined time (or just don’t read them). Unfollow the politics addicts. Have places your phone is never allowed—such as at the dinner table. Take regular social media fasts—times of the day and days of the week where you don’t open the apps. Constantly ask yourself: Two weeks from now, will I wish I had spent the ten minutes I’m about to spend on Twitter reading five pages of the book I’m carrying around instead (and oh, this plan requires constantly carrying a book around)? One of my most important rules is that I never allow any long chunk of work time to be interrupted by social media. Instead, I look at it primarily only in small, hard-to-use, backend-constrained chunks of time—boarding a flight or at the end of a workout." (196 f.)
So, no - I haven’t seceded entirely from the social media swirl; but I have cut way back. Because like many, I rely on Facebook to promote and manage the non-profit I work for, I’ve kept my Facebook account for the time being. But I’ve resolved (for better or worse) never to post anything more on my personal timeline – nor ever again to waste literally hours endlessly binge-scrolling through everybody’s take on matters great and small. I’ll get my news from the Wall Street Journal and NPR (just to keep matters balanced), but I’ve resolved not to become just one more “Billy Bob in Boise” broadcasting my opinions to thousands of people who themselves are endlessly scrolling through the detritus of shock and dismay, looking for something to repost to their own circle of “friends.” I prefer my friends real rather than virtual anyway.
Don’t get me wrong; Sasse’s book is not a diatribe against how social media has created the tribalism phenomenon in our country – you may or may not be led to the self-imposed fast I have embarked on. But you will find this remarkable book enlightening and inspiring on numerous levels regarding civic and political life in our land. Do yourself a favor and read it!
Harold L. Senkbeil
Waukesha, WI
hsenkbeil@doxology.us
A publicly funded education system was the seedbed for the healthy home and community life Sasse had, and yet he takes exception publicly funded housing. We can’t say the difference is that housing doesn’t produce income because neither does the skillset associated with high school sports, not really. It is a skillset that is not immediately employable and provides scholarships for only a handful. The poison inside the particular housing project Sasse sites came from, it would seem, over-concentration not entitlement. There was no space to even breath in—created by tower upon tower—with no thought for how the immediate area would provide jobs for that number of people. There is the implication that the occupants became indolent and criminal simply because the housing was provided. We must ask the most important question, where were the jobs for 25,000 people packed in that tight? What about schools? I feel like Sasse is saying, if only you were raised like me, you’d be fine. And he’s right but the people in our country who need the most help do not get into trouble because they were given things, they get into trouble because of being deprived of things.
He mentions the breakdown of the black family in the 1960’s and the knee-jerk reaction to talking about that. It isn’t that people don’t want to talk about the decline black family, it is the ridiculousness of supposing that when statisticians became a thing and started looking at the black family they supposed the problem was new because it had been newly observed. The black family didn’t start breaking down in the 1960’s, it started breaking down in the 1600 and 1700’s. It was decimated, broken, terrorized, tortured, exploited and then marginalized, denied justice, dignity, education and so forth, for hundreds of years. It didn’t start in 1960. So the functional applicability of the ‘if only you could be raised in a close knit small town everything would have turned out ok’ thesis depends on which town and what color you are.
Seeming to wave that off, Sasse does not lean on the PhD much. I have heard him give speeches in which he did. Stellar speeches. His books, however, are anecdotal. There are statistics, peppered here and there. Statistics, however, very often do what the statistician wants them to do and the blind spots in any given study tend to be the places that need the closest examination. I don’t see that examination in this book.
The premise that Family is everything is solid. Yes, absolutely, and so it follows, as night the day, that we need to be honest about what we did to the black family while white families were becoming independent, prosperous, educated and organized. Sasse’s grandfather would have born at a time when it would have been possible to have heard first hand accounts of the civil war. And it’s not as if the war ended and half the nation suddenly realized they had been wrong and quickly moved to rectify, feel empathy, connection and respect for the people they had brutalized. That’s not how that played out, not for generations after. To this day.
That money won’t solve problems misses the fact that pretty much everything costs money. Including the structureS of the school and small town he loved. Sasse mentions the billions the Gates poured into education with no measurable improvement. The point being, as a generalization, that giving people money doesn’t work. But there is no doubt that raising teacher pay and cutting classroom size in half would improve quality of life and expand the capacity of the teachers. Gates desire to do good is so admirable, his approach though has an Achilles heel. He asks himself what would do the most good quantitatively, broad scale. He wants to make the biggest impact. It may be that in this, as in many things in life, the solution is counter intuitive. Our nation is, famously, a champion of the individual. It may be that principle has some magic, it may be that improve lives better not on the broad scale but one by one, asking what would improve things for the individual student, the individual teacher? Changing the circumstances they function in rather than the system. Raising pay and lowering classroom size are on the top of the list and I don’t think Gates even glanced at that.
That parents are what matters most for successful student, yes, absolutely, if education is a priority for parent kids do well but a teacher who is making rounds with 15 children learning to read is going to have twice as much time to do that as a teacher with thirty, and if that teacher can afford life he/she then experiences greater health and less stress because of that, translating into greater energy and focus in the classroom. It wasn’t that money failed, it was about not seeing what would make the most difference, it was more personal, I think than Gates imagined.
If it is the feeling of connectedness and purpose that are the seedbed for a happy productive life then there is no way around accepting the way astute, entrenched, experienced and mindful black scholars feel. The suggestion that we take away more things, my guess is, isn’t going to wow them. That entitlement is where the mess all begins dramatically misses the bullseye. It is my observed experience that we find that is is deprivation, actually, that creates the kind of greed that becomes criminal, where as being carefully nurtured satiates, meets needs, avoids the desperation deprivation creates.
Sasse’s book goes beyond feeling connected, it really is about feeling admired. Sasse returns and returns and returns to they way the community saw and valued his father. It seems to be that being seen and being valued are what create connection and purpose. And we, as a nation, have marginalized people and we, as corporate run nation generate wealth, quite often, by exploiting people and decimating small towns. For example, Romney ran for president touting his experience saving business; what he didn’t mention was he did it at great personal profit and catastrophic loss for workers. Our brand of Conservatism works when you have what you need and have always had it. Our Conservatism needs to find a way to work the rest of the time. It needs to be honest with itself.
I think it may be arguable that conservative values sustain happy families when the family was happy to begin with, had what it needed to begin with. I do not think liberal values create dependency I think they create charity, which creates hope. Giving people a conservative amount of space in which to live is not as healthy a solution as giving a liberal amount of space in which to live. The conservative amount of work available to 25,000 people created problems that a liberal amount of available jobs would not have created. The project Sasse criticizes failed because it was broad scale and impersonal. It didn’t value the individual. It did not fail over entitlement it failed over logic, reason, foresight and intent. It was too conservative a scope. It missed critical considerations inside a broader more liberal picture. It wasn’t that it provided too much it was that it didn’t provide enough. The gaps created places to fall into.
I admire Sasse. I think, though, to be more effective he needs to get outside his own experience. I think he is a good public servant who could be better. A good man who could be better.
I was a little shocked when I began reading this book on how divided America is to read Sasse’s critique of America culture and how our problems stems from loneliness. I did wonder if he makes more out of the problem of loneliness than it deserves. He also suggests that the decline of the traditional home as another reason for society’s problems. I hope his ideas are debated. Perhaps they can play a role in building a more civil society. That said, there are critiques he makes that will make everyone a little uncomfortable. He challenges an article that identifies the genesis of nasty politics from the 1994 election and Newt Gingrich. Sasse suggests that Gingrich was only a backlash of nasty politics of the Democrats against the Robert Bork nomination to the Supreme Court in 1986. (Personally, I’m old enough to think the issue goes back further than 1994 or 1986). But those on the right can’t rejoice, for in the next chapter, he challenges Fox News and suggests they profit greatly from monetizing the fear. He particularly attacks Sean Hannity for not only preying on this fear and inciting rage, but also ignoring any evidence he finds inconvenient. By the time most readers with die-hard political positions, whether on the right or left, have finished the first half of the book, they’ll have found cherished positions challenged. Sadly, many will probably skip the second half of the book where Sasse suggests strategies for building bridges instead of walls.
Sasse grew up in a small town in Nebraska. It was a place with strong rivalries between towns and sports played a major part of these rivalries. He idolatrizes his father, who was a coach. He obviously grew up in a traditional family. Sasse, himself, attended college on a wrestling scholarship. He would later earn a Ph.D. at Yale in American history and became the president of a small Midwestern liberal arts college. He also comes from a strong Lutheran Church background. His experiences with small towns, family, sports, religion, and education come together in this book as he seeks a way to bridge in the impasse that exists within American society.
Sasse’s eureka moment of his childhood came when he attended a Nebraska football game. There he was in the big house in the prairie, with 100,000 other folks, all in red, cheering on the cornhuskers. A few rows a way he spotted a group of people from a neighboring town that was a big rival of his town. These were folks his town cheered to their demise at Friday night football games, yet here they were, enemies, cheering on Nebraska. The problem caused by isolation (and loneliness) when we maintain isolation is that we fail to realize that we often have a lot in common with those we see as “them.” He learned from an early age that these folks from a rival school district weren’t really enemies. However, Sasse doesn’t suggest we end rivalries, for competition helps us be our best.
In the second half of this book, Sasse lays out several ideas on how we can begin to break down the walls separating us from them. In his first chapter in this half, titled “Become Americans Again,” Sasse provides a civics lesson about what should unite us. I found it refreshing to read a Lutheran who can write like a Calvinist as he calls for us to admit our that we’re all flawed. He encourages us to set limits on our (and our children’s) use of technology, to be more open to diverse debate within the university (an idea, he points out, that he and Obama agree on), and to develop roots while also exploring outside our own tribe. While most readers won’t agree 100% with the author (and I assume that would be fine with Sasse), Americans would be better off we seriously debated his thesis as we seek to breakdown the divides that separate us. This is a good book for all Americans to read (and maybe even those in Russia or China to read to learn more about what America should look like).