July 29, 2022
Dear Interested Reader,
Do We Have The Will and Mindset To Improve Our World?
My Dad was a theologian who became a minister to earn a living. His sermons were built on his conservative theology and were full of stories. In his sermons, he was adept at using stories from literature and life as well as the stories in the scriptures to elucidate his theological conceptualization of the mysteries of God and to convince his congregations just how easy it was to get into heaven. All you have to do is ask. He was evangelical but not political. He believed strongly in personal freedom but also in the responsibilities of citizenship and the separation of church and state.
I believe that it was because of his belief that we were commanded to love one another that the secondary objective of his preaching was to promote ways of avoiding both generalized and personal versions of “hell on earth” while waiting for the next life. He believed that once we individually settled the issue of the hereafter there was much work that we needed to do here with one another. That posture was best summed up by something that I never heard him say from his pulpit but frequently heard him say at home. As a child, I was always a little confused when I would hear him say with some enthusiasm, “Heaven may be my home, but I’m not homesick yet!”
His focus on improving life on earth for families and individuals was more than talk. As he approached retirement at age sixty-two he did a remarkable thing; he enrolled in a three-year program of clinical pastoral counseling offered by Andover Newton Seminary in Newton, Massachusetts in conjunction with The Worcester State Hospital which was near his home in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. At the time my parents were living in Shrewsbury because he was the administrator of Southern Baptist Churches in New England, an assignment that he took at the end of his formal professional career after being the president of a small Baptist college located in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains in the northwest corner of South Carolina near where he was born and raised in the mill villages of Greenville, South Carolina. At the end of the three-year program in pastoral counseling and at age sixty-two, he was credentialed with the privileges of a clinical psychologist. Dad’s transition annoyed me a little because he had once advised me not to “waste” my medical education by becoming a psychiatrist.
With his credentials in hand for his next career, he “retired,” and moved with my mother back to her childhood home which they owned in Lincolnton, North Carolina. Lincolnton was a relatively rural town then, but over the past forty years, it has become a southern version of a quaint bedroom community for Charlotte which is about thirty-five miles to the east. It was 1982 and there were no licensed mental health workers in the entirety of Lincoln County (Named for Revolutionary War General Benjamin Lincoln who led troops in the South, not Abe.) Even now, small town and rural North Carolina has a huge deficit of mental health providers. There are still some counties in rural North Carolina without mental health services, and the state ranks forty-fourth in mental health access. [Click on the link and listen to the short interview or read the transcript.]
Dad purchased land in a doctor’s office park near the county hospital and built an office. For years he rented half of the building to a local urologist and saw his patients in the other half of the office space. Many of the patients whom he saw were referred by the local courts for evaluation, and he had an active office practice of referrals from local PCPs. He purchased consultation time from a psychiatrist in Shelby, North Carolina, about forty miles away, who would provide prescriptions for those patients with anxieties, depression, and more serious mental problems that needed medicines for their emotional/mental conditions.
Gradually, his practice melded with his substitute preaching which he was often asked to do by nearby churches when their minister was away, and he began to serve as an interim minister for churches in transition for up to six months at a time. Between his late sixties and early nineties, he did eighteen interims. During that time he was twice the minister of the First Baptist Church in Lincolnton and had one extended pastorate of the First Baptist Church of Saint Simons Island in Georgia where my parents had a vacation home. He was always busy. In his work as an interim pastor, he combined his counseling skills with his preaching which in my mind represented a union of his advocacy of living a productive life on earth while preparing for what might come next. He’s gone now, and his story is over. He died in September 2018 a little less than three months shy of his ninety-eighth birthday.
My dad’s story is interesting to me for his versatility and the fact that he was a lifelong learner who was continuously asking himself what he was “called” to do next. I believe that the stories he told in his sermons contain some lessons that might be worth considering now. As much as he looked forward to the next world, he worked into his nineties trying to make a difference in this world. In fact, I believe his life is a story worth telling in a world that needs more people working toward positive objectives that benefit and instruct others. We are all on journeys that touch others. As Kim Stanley Robinson emphasizes, we are all part of an “actor-network” where our individual use of our agency determines the outcomes which, like it or not, determine the realities we all share.
I doubt that my dad ever thought about actor networks since the concept evolved in the eighties after he finished his training and while he was very busy with his practice which he conceptualized as a ministry. I always suspected that his goal was to contribute to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth one life at a time. If you can say the words of “The Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father,” you might notice that the words do suggest a kingdom on earth:
…thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…
I have always thought that the citizens of that kingdom should all be blessed with equity. There should be no want for housing, access to education, or child care. Everyone should have adequate nutritious food, work that supports self-esteem, and health care that is easily accessed, timely, affordable, effective, and focused on the needs and desires of the recipient. Everyone should have the chance to live to their full potential. The fact is that all of those things are possible now. The only barrier is a collective will. It’s a reality that Maritn Luther King, Jr. said we should recognize over fifty years ago when he said:
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age…The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” pages 174-175.
Poverty and economic inequity were what Lyndon Johnson was talking about when he envisioned a “Great Society.” We have more than enough for everyone to have “enough” even while the most fortunate will always have much more than they need. The fact that we don’t enjoy such a world now more than fifty years after it was possible is a problem of will and mindset.
Eight days ago, David Brooks published a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times entitled “Is Life a Story or a Game?” I was surprised to see it because he rarely writes more than one column a week and frequently goes longer between offerings. On July 21 he published two columns. At virtually the same time that he wrote about whether life was a story or a game, he published “I Was Wrong About Capitalism”. Both are worth your attention and both are applicable to the thought process behind this piece, but as you must appreciate by now this piece is about stories. Brooks begins by telling us who he is:
I’m a liberal arts type, so I see life as a story. Each person is born into a family. Over the course of life, we find things to love and commit to — a vocation, a spouse, a community. At times, we flounder and suffer but do our best to learn from our misfortunes to grow in wisdom, kindness and grace. At the end, hopefully, we can look back and see how we have nurtured deep relationships and served a higher good.
What is remarkable to me is that a label that Brooks would put on himself is “conservative.” I would label myself as a “liberal or socially progressive.” Yet, I totally understand Brooks’ self-description and could say, “Ditto for me.” The line between conservative and liberal blurs when we consider stories with relationships and a search for the greater good. We are both story people even though we have lived under different labels. Brooks goes on to describe another orientation to life which he implies covers a majority of people these days. His reference is to the work of British author Will Shorr who has written a book entitled The Status Game. [The link will carry you to a very thought-provoking analysis of Storr’s thesis.] Storr claims that we are all driven by a search for status. This drive has “Darwinian” benefits for the individual as the review points out:
In The Status Game, Storr clarifies that status seeking isn’t a frivolous activity: it’s intricately intertwined with our ultimate evolutionary goals. For all social creatures on planet Earth, high status brings abundance: finer food, more land, and more romantic opportunities (for men at least). “The higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. It’s the essence of human thriving. It’s the status game.”
At times the status game may look like stories, but those stories are part of the search for status. They are stories about personal accomplishments like the stories that Donald Trump tells in which he is either always the rich genius, a hero, or lately the victim. The status game has a downside:
In The Status Game, Storr reveals the doubled-edged nature of human status seeking, documenting how striving fuels the best and worst aspects of humanity. Whilst scientists and inventors wanting to make a name for themselves drives human progress, people’s desire to get ahead of the competition also results in murder, war, and even genocide.
Brooks lets Storr expand on his thesis about how we are motivated by our desire for status. In essence, he says that status makes us feel good.
Status isn’t about being liked or accepted, he [Storr] writes; it’s about being better than others, getting more: “When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good.”
High-status people are healthier, get to talk more, have more relaxed postures, get admired by their social inferiors and have a sense of purpose, Storr argues. That’s what we’re really after. The stories we tell ourselves, that we are heroes on journeys toward the true, the good and the beautiful — those are just lies the mind invents to help us feel good about ourselves.
There is certainly some truth in that analysis. When I was a house officer you could see the “game” being played on rounds every day. I would be surprised if that is still not true. Stories and games blend when we tell stories about ourselves to inflate our status as we play the game. Humility is not an asset when playing the game.
Brooks is not buying the game as the core asset that Storr sees it to be. Storr is a bit too Darwinian for Brooks.
I think Storr has been seduced by evolutionary psych fundamentalism. He is in danger of becoming one of those guys who give short shrift to the loftier desires of the human heart, to the caring element in every friendship and family, and then says, in effect, we have to be man enough to face how unpleasant we are.
But I have to admit, the gamer mentality he describes pervades our culture right now.
I like the position that Brooks takes primarily because I can’t see a road to social justice, equity, or access to healthcare that improves everyone’s health if we are all self-absorbed playing the status game. Brooks points out the downside of the status game at the national and international levels:
American politics, too, has become more a war for status than a way for a society to figure out how to allocate its resources. Donald Trump’s career is not mostly about policies; it’s mostly about: They look down on you. I will make them pay.
Foreign policy sometimes looks like a status game with Vladimir Putin and his humiliation stories: The world does not see and respect us; we must strike back.
In the companion article “I Was Wrong About Capitalism,” Brooks talks about his own personal evolution. He is able to say the equivalent of:
“That was my position then. Now, I see that I did not see the whole picture. I see things differently now.” [My words. Not his.]
Brooks describes what is lacking in the status games we play:
:
The status-mad world that Storr describes is so loveless — a world I recognize but not one I want to live in. Ultimately, games are fun, but gaming as a way of life is immature. Maturity means rising above the shallow desire — for status — that doesn’t really nourish us. It’s about cultivating the higher desires: The love of truth and learning and not settling for cheap conspiracy theories. The intrinsic pleasure the craftsman gets in his work, which is not about popularity. The desire for a good and meaningful life that inspires people to commit daily acts of generosity.
I think Brooks is suggesting that we need to move from a search for self-promoting and self-interested status seeking toward caring deeply about others. That attitude even more than the beauty and the miracles of science was what drew me toward the practice of medicine, and I believe that those attitudes must spread beyond medicine and art into all of our interpersonal relationships and public policies if we are ever to achieve anything like the Triple Aim which my father would argue would be a room in God’s Kingdom on Earth.
I like the way that Brooks comes full circle from stories to games to stories again. He finishes:
How do people gradually learn to cultivate these higher motivations? To answer that, I’d have to tell you a story.
That takes me back to Dad and his stories and his own story. All of his stories were descriptions of the possible even when they included the downside outcome of not choosing the greater “possible.” As I have been writing I fear that you might think the title of this piece, “Do We Have The Will and Mindset To Improve Our World?” is not quite right. I tend to choose a theme and then try to explore it. In an attempt to link my title with what I have written and what I have lifted from Brooks and others let me just say that I would answer the question the title poses by saying that I do not think at this moment there are enough people, in and out of healthcare, who do have the will and the mindset to improve healthcare or on a larger scale what troubles our nation and our world. The world is struggling with war, increasing inequality, and global warming at this moment, and the outcomes of those struggles are uncertain.
Many people are discouraged and feel burned out. It is a sense of loss and impending disaster that saps most remaining resilience. Many feel overwhelmed by the multiple challenges that face us/them. Whether we accept the concept of global warming as truth or fiction, the world seems to be moving at a faster and faster pace toward something that might be an extinction event. While we are “slipslidin’ away” many are playing status games to try to advantage themselves. [Did you see the movie “Don’t Look Up”?] The game-playing folks seem oblivious to how their efforts work against their own greater good.
I hope that there will be more storytellers with inspiring descriptions of generosity that include utopian visions of what might be possible. Don Berwick has always been a storyteller of the possible. We need visions of the possible to enable a collective mindset and will for equality if we are to avoid the equivalent of hell on earth and move positively toward an earthly kingdom of enough for everyone which would be some kind of paradise.
It Was Too Much Fun To Pass Up
In the letter for July 15th, I tried to describe how much fun I had been having going to concerts on the town green this summer despite my fears of contracting COVID. The B5 variant is very contagious. I know of at least one case of outdoor transmission that has occurred at a local outdoor concert.
My church provides free popcorn to the people at the concerts on the New London Green. Our deacons maintain a corn popping machine that sits at the upper end of the green and volunteers carry the product around to those sitting on lawn chairs and blankets listening to the music. Recently one of the popcorn deacon ladies came down with COVID the day after a concert and was sick enough to go to or local emergency room. Her co-worker on the popcorn machine developed COVID a few days later. It seems like an example of an outdoor transmission. The fact that they were working together doesn’t prove that lady one gave COVID to lady two, but it is suggestive enough to make me worry.
In the July 15th letter that described the great time I had listening to “Nick’s Other Band” on the town green in Wilmot Flats I made the statement that despite the fun I might miss, I was not going to anymore large outdoor gatherings. I gave up my tickets to the Red Sox this year since the fear associated with the idea of being shoulder-to-shoulder with people I did not know at Fenway Park trumped my desire to see baseball. Given the disappointments of this Red Sox season, it looks like I did not give up much.
I failed in my resolve to give up live local music. A few days after I swore off outdoor concerts for fear of COVID my friend Steve sent an email to forty-five of my closest local friends suggesting that we all get together at the Bradford Center Meeting House (click to see more pictures) for another evening of enjoying Nick’s Other Band.
The Bradford Center Meeting House is a grand old antique building as you can see in today’s header. The Bradford Center Meeting House is a long way from much population density. It’s about fifteen miles and a half hour from my house. To get there you leave state highway 103, go through a covered bridge, and climb through beautiful vistas of the nearby hills and farms on a winding country road. It seems most of Bradford has moved away from its “center” and the Meetinghouse over the last one hundred and fifty years. I could not get the entire scene into the picture but if you click on the link you can see that the old Bradford school house is just to the left along with a great antique two-holer outhouse sitting between the school and the meeting house.
The band was great. The music of “Nick’s Other Band” is infectious and people, mostly children, and women get up and dance. I am “dancing impaired” so my wife has to dance with the other ladies. It looks like “Nick’s Other Band” is mostly playing private events until late August but their schedule says that they will be in Warner, New Hampshire, the next town to the east of Bradford and two towns south of me, on August 22 and will also play a free outdoor concert in Little Compton, Rhode Island on August 24. Catch them if you can.
My COVID fears persist but my crowd is vaxed and double boosted. I just try to place my fold-up rocking chair at the periphery and hope that distance makes as much difference as we once thought it did. I fear it will be a long time before we can go anywhere with other people without some concern. I hope that you are having a COVID-free summer with a combination of appropriate caution and some good luck.
Be well,
Gene
