January 20, 2023
Dear interested Readers,
It Is a Matter of Perspective
Most Monday mornings I am on a Zoom call with seven good friends. We are a “book group.” Over a few years, we have been through several books that discuss philosophical, ethical, political, and spiritual subjects. We call ourselves “small, small group” because we are a subset of another “larger” group that we call “small group” which has been meeting in person twice a month for a few years except for a COVID hiatus of over a year.
COVID prevented “small group” from meeting for over a year because the core of that meeting is about being together to share good food and drink while we discuss and explore the differences in our life experiences and current concerns. The meetings are a warm fellowship experience where we explore the meaning of life, including our personal experiences with aspirations, and doubts. We share our sources of strength, our sources of joy, and the things that make us worried about the future. Again, there is an acknowledgment of the spiritual dimension in life, but without the orthodoxy of any specific creed. I must confess that many of the ideas that I share with you were triggered by discussions in either the “small group” or the “small, small group.”
All but one of the members of the “small, small group” live in New London or one of the contiguous towns of the Kearsarge Region of the Upper Valley. All the local participants are also active in a charitable non-sectarian non-profit effort that we organized a few years ago called the Kearsarge Neighborhood Partners (KNP). In a very short time, KNP has evolved into an organization that directly addresses the social determinants of health by assisting people and families. We now have over 200 volunteers who have done thousands of hours of community service. KNP has a six-figure annual budget, an electronic platform, and one part-time paid coordinator. A quick visit to our website will give you a sense of the work we do as we assist people with what they can not do for themselves. We focus on transportation, financial counseling, support with navigating governmental bureaucracies, food insecurity, heating insecurity, loneliness, and isolation. We are happy to do small mundane tasks like picking up groceries, providing hot meals, mowing grass, and blowing snow. We’ll take your garbage to the dump if you can’t do it, or build a ramp for your wheelchair. Sometimes we just deliver cookies to someone who is surprised to know that there are people in the community who care about them. KNP is trying to add housing insecurity to the problems we address because housing is such a huge problem for many in our community. We are supportive of the efforts to build new housing in our region while we are trying to develop a mechanism for efficient home sharing as a more immediate approach to this big problem. We network and share resources with other charitable non-profits, and the town welfare officers in our region.
The “outsider” member of our Monday morning “small, small group” is Dr. Mark Bloomberg of Sudbury, Massachusetts. Mark has been an “Interested Reader for many years. Mark and I first met over a dozen years ago when he invited me to talk to his class at the Harvard School of Public Health because they had done a case study of our quality and safety efforts at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. Mark was a pioneer in the quality and safety movement of the eighties and nineties and served as the Corporate Medical Director at Tufts Health Plan for many years. Over the years since I have retired Mark and his wife have visited us in New Hampshire during fall leaf-peeping adventures. When I mentioned our book group in one of these notes, Mark emailed me and asked if there was room for one more, and we were delighted to say “Yes.” It’s great to have his “out of town” perspective.
Sharing articles and adventures are part of the fun of our “small, small group.” At some point in last Monday’s meeting I mentioned a recent article that I had seen in The Atlantic by David Brooks entitled “Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track: Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.” I shared the article with the group and Mark immediately offered a link to Jews United For Democracy where there was a one-hour YouTube presentation broadcasted about two weeks ago featuring an interview between Brooks and LA Times journalist Patt Morrison. If you click on the link, it is the program for January 4.
I am a fan of Brooks and immediately jumped on the link and was delighted to discover that the ideas from the recent article were exactly the same ideas that Brooks and Morrison had discussed in the Jews United For Democracy interview. I say this because the core topic of this letter is a combination of acceptance and gentle pushback on Brooks’ theme. You have many choices: read on, read the article, watch the interview or some combination of those three options. I hope you will choose to read on and augment what you read with the interview and the article!
When I read the title of The Atlantic article I immediately thought of Rutger Brugman and his book Humankind: A Hopeful History which I wrote about in June 2020. Then I thought of Stephen Pinker’s book ENLIGHTENMENT NOW: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress which I have also discussed before. The authors of both of these books use a lot of data to prove that no matter how bad you feel in the moment any objective examination of the big picture suggests that we have all seen worse; this moment is better than it feels to you; and just you wait, things will be even better soon. I wondered, “Has Brooks been drinking their Kool-Aid?”
The title does give Brooks a little separation. It’s one of those long titles which is almost like a forward or a condensation of what you are going to read. The first part, “Despite Everything You Think You Know, America Is on the Right Track” does suggest that Brooks is aligned with Brugman and Pinker, but then he adds his own twist, “Yes, America is a wounded giant—but it always has been, and the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.” The first part of the title suggests that Brooks believes we are getting “there” as Brugman and Pinker believe that “there” is some form of nirvana that we just don’t recognize. In the second part of the title, Brooks wants to humble us with our less-than-stellar history, but then tell us that we are better than we recognize. In the end, he wants you to believe that things are not as bad as you think and the odds are they will be getting better soon. I was skeptical.
Brooks begins by implying that negativity sells so we are inundated with media that creates and confirms the bias that things are bad and getting worse. His article is obviously an effort to reverse that reality. As we go forward any bolding of text is my doing. Brooks begins:
Negativity is by now so deeply ingrained in American media culture that it’s become the default frame imposed on reality. In large part, this is because since the dawn of the internet age, the surest way to build an audience is to write stories that make people terrified or furious. This is not rocket science: Evolution designed humans to pay special attention to threats. So, unsurprisingly, the share of American headlines denoting anger increased by 104 percent from 2000 to 2019. The share of headlines evoking fear surged by 150 percent.
After using our pandemic experience as a way of demonstrating his point, Brooks continues by telling us that the vast majority of us have bought the analysis and think that the country is in trouble. The catch is that though most of us think that the country is falling apart we are quite happy with our own personal experiences and economics. Honestly, I guess I fall into that category most of the time. I fill these letters with problems that seem to me to have no solution, but I am happy with where I am. I am not at all concerned that I am about to be the victim of events beyond my control. There is trouble in the world, but when I look closely at my little corner of the world I must admit that things are pretty sweet for me. My life is about as good as I might expect it could be. Brooks says:
This permanent cloud of negativity has a powerful effect on how Americans see their country. When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years. But when Gallup asked Americans in January 2022 if they were satisfied with the direction of the country, only 17 percent said they were, down from 69 percent in 2000. In other words, there was a 68-percentage-point gap between the reality people directly experienced in their daily life and the reality they perceived through the media filter.
Brooks goes on to point out that the vast majority of those who are most pessimistic about the country are the educated and affluent on both the left and the right. Data suggests that our working-class neighbors just shrug their shoulders and continue to bear their burdens.
Brooks wants us to understand that the pessimism of the educated and affluent is not new.
The first problem with all this pessimism is that it is ahistorical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era, the air has been thick with gloomy jeremiads warning of catastrophe and decline. Pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil.
I liked Brooks’ use of “jeremiads.” As you probably know the Hebrew prophet Jerimiah tried hard to get the Hebrew nation to return to a right relationship with God, and he warned them that if they did not mend their ways, bad things would happen. They didn’t change. The temple was destroyed, and they ended up as captives in Babylon. Brooks gives us the reference to make his point that we are wrong about history, or ahistorical, things have been worse before. We don’t live in “the worst of times.” We are fortunate to live in “the best of times.” Our recurrent prophets of doom have always been wrong. The frequent expectations of disaster rarely come true and have never presented a reality that we could not handle. I hope the current hype about the dangers of the debt ceiling and the war in Ukraine will end well like all of our other worries that the press “hyped” in the past.
Our confusion about history is not our only problem. Brooks informs us that our pessimism arises from our subjective feelings and our relationships. We are judgmental, and we don’t trust one another. It’s hard to deny that we have deep political divisions that make improvement difficult. He continues:
]
The second problem with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. I’ve written my share of pessimistic stories over the past several years; no one can accuse me of being a Pollyanna. My basic take is that life in America today is objectively better than it was before but subjectively worse. We have much higher standards of living and many conveniences, but when it comes to how we relate to one another—whether in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in the intimacies of family and community life—distrust is rife, bonds are fraying, and judgments are harsh.
Has Brooks just canceled his own analysis that things are good and getting better? He argues that we are frightened and distrustful, but we have one saving grace–we are creative.
But that doesn’t mean the future isn’t going to be brighter than the present, or that America is in decline. The pessimists miss an underlying truth—a society can get a lot wrong as long as it gets the big thing right. And that big thing is this: If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted.
I won’t argue with that assertion. Now that Brooks has explained why we are better than we think, he begins to talk like Brugman and Pinker. He points out how science and technology allow us to benefit from time-saving devices. A larger portion of the population benefits enormously from the progress that gives us “more” for less time working. The good news from his perspective is the rate of change toward “better” is increasing geometrically.
From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent, according to the book Superabundance, by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. That, too, frees up a lot of time and resources that can be spent on other things.
He congratulates us on the increase in the percentage of the population that has moved from a hard life of endless labor in mindless back-breaking jobs into more satisfying and rewarding work. He says:
It’s hard to argue that that money is being efficiently spent [for education]. But one result of all of this spending is a significantly better-trained workforce: Since 1970, the share of American workers in high-skill jobs has increased from roughly 30 to 46 percent. Another result has been the continued superiority of the American university system. According to U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, eight of the top 10 universities in the world are American.
Brooks is right that we spend a lot of money on education, but that doesn’t mean we spend it well or that we spend it in a way that promotes opportunity for everyone. If you are thinking that what he is saying doesn’t coincide with the world where you live, he throws more data at us:
When you throw in social benefits such as Social Security and unemployment insurance, median household income increased by 55 percent. For those in the bottom fifth of household income, the after-tax and transfer-income growth during that period was 74 percent… In 1993, 28 percent of American children lived in poverty. By 2019, that number was down to 11 percent. A better-educated society is a richer and more creative society.
One of my recurrent themes is inequality. Brooks pushes back on that concern also with a slight tip of the hat to progressive public policies.
We talk a lot about income inequality in this country. And it’s true that from 1979 to 2007, inequality widened. But since then, income inequality has fallen as working-class wages have risen and recent administrations have moved to redistribute wealth downward.
Brooks notes that until recently white men have been the big beneficiaries of “big education investments” leaving “the creative potential of most Americans unfulfilled.” Now things are changing and he makes his case with statistics about the recent successes of Hispanic Americans. The result is that we have “a lot more people with the skills to start companies, innovate, and create new things.”
I hope that he is right, but I don’t agree with the next point Brooks tries to make, and it is here that I think all of his attempts to build a “good vibes” outlook begin to crack. He wants to celebrate our increase in life expectancy primarily from better cancer care while barely mentioning the fact that life expectancies have recently fallen because of the magnification of inequalities by the pandemic and a host of other public health and access to care deficiencies. After celebrating how good our care is he gives a one-sentence recognition of several problems that collectively have undermined decades of progress toward better health and longevity.
American longevity rates have taken a beating recently because of deaths of despair—alcoholism, opioid overdoses—and because of the pandemic. But the long-term trend is still positive.
After suggesting that things are better than we think Brooks pours it on by celebrating the improved ability to comfortably retire that a majority but not all Americans enjoy.
Americans retire, on average, by their early to mid-60s, yet many now remain vibrant into their mid-80s. As a society, we haven’t begun to build the institutions to harness all of this talent. But those latent abilities are out there, waiting to be put to better use.
This is where Brooks moves from talking about what is to what could be. Remember that the last few words of the long title of the article were “the case for optimism is surprisingly strong.” Brooks writes:
…the United States has an excellent innovation infrastructure. America ranks second in the Global Innovation Index, behind only Switzerland. It leads the world in the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. It hosts the world’s most important capital markets, and they are growing…Especially since 2020, the U.S. has seen a surge in small-business formation…These investments and entrepreneurial energies produce such a steady stream of innovations and improvements that it is easy to take them for granted.
He is right about the benefits of our innovations in IT and the personal access we enjoy to amazing technology that has transformed how we live. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
Not so long ago, if you wanted to keep up with the Joneses in your entertaining life, you needed a whole room full of equipment: a TV, a VCR, a game console, a stereo system, a telephone, a camera. Now it’s possible to replace all of that equipment—plus maps and atlases, magazines and newspapers, even books—with a single smartphone.
His lists of good things recently developed that are going to be better yet soon include what he calls…
“the two most impressive innovations of recent years—mRNA vaccines and the stunning gains in artificial intelligence… we’re in the middle of a radical increase in the amount of intelligence in the world.
Brooks continues to sight more and more data points that are the basis of his contention that good things are coming. He begins to close his piece by saying:
I’ve bludgeoned you with statistics in order to make a point: Pessimism about our future is unwarranted. You may think that one major American political party has gone crazy, and I will agree with you. You can point to all of the ways in which life in America is infuriating and unjust, and I will agree with you there too. But the story of America is a story of convulsion and reinvention. We go through moments when the established order stops working. People and movements rise up, and things change. The culture is a collective response to the problems of the moment; as new problems become obvious, the culture shifts. We’ve been in the middle of one of those tumultuous transition periods since, I’d say, 2013. But 2022 evinced hopeful signs that we’re coming out of it.
I hope that he is right and that things will be better for more people soon. I agree with his final point that the great reason for hope emerging from 2022 is that the move toward a more authoritarian world has been slowed.
If there is one lesson from the events of the past year, it is that open societies such as ours have an ability to adapt in a way that closed societies simply do not…American voters seem to finally be adapting to the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy, forming a robust anti-Trump coalition that will significantly lessen his chances of ever working in the White House again.
I hope he is right. He ends with a reiteration of his faith in America as a “wounded giant” and admits that many of our wounds are self-inflicted, but we won’t quit. He contends that by nature we are defective, but that our defining capability is our persistence,
America is a wounded giant, and many of its wounds are self-inflicted. But America has always been a wounded giant. And it has always stumbled forward, driven by an inner turbine of ambition and aspiration that knows no rest.
I agree with Brooks that great progress has been made over the last century and especially over the last 50 years. I would say that the trends have improved even more over the last dozen years since the passage of the ACA. When measured as a population, we do have more comfort, more opportunity, and more access to satisfying life experiences. For the majority of Americans, life seems good. In my circle, people are buying expensive electric vehicles. They travel widely to the far corners of the earth. Their children and grandchildren are not only well educated: those educations were obtained at the finest colleges and universities on the planet. Most of us will live into our eighties, and I expect that a significant number of us will get well into our nineties, and some of us will become centurions. We may not personally be the scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are creating the abundance we enjoy, but we do own bits and pieces of the businesses where they work. Some of us check the DOW, the NASDAQ, and the S and P 500 more frequently than we check the weather. So I must say that in general Brooks is right.
Where Brooks is wrong is that his article suggests or implies that if most of us are doing well and if there is an improvement trend, those of us who have more than enough then should all be optimistic and bullish on America. Does he imply that those of us who have not yet enjoyed the full range of American benefits should just be patient because our time will come? What he does not discuss is the fact that as well as we are doing there are 40 million of us, many of whom are children, who don’t have enough, and will likely never sit at the table in this land of milk and honey. At best they might serve the table.
I found it interesting that Brooks presented healthcare and our life expectancy as one of the reasons to argue that we should be optimistic. He quickly blows off the pandemic as a problem solved with our fabulous mRNA vaccines. He briefly acknowledges our opioid and substance abuse problems and the remarkable and relatively new problem we call “diseases of despair.” He totally omits any reference to guns. It surprises me that in touting how progressive we are he fails to mention that we are the only developed country where firearms are the leading cause. of death in children.
I often wonder what it must feel like to be one of the forty million Americans who are worried about personal economics. Many Americans still go to bed hungry and are not certain that tomorrow they will have a place to sleep. Even after the ACA about 30 million Americans don’t have health insurance. I have no idea about the uninsured number of undocumented workers in our fields, factories, restaurants, and homes. I do know that most of the more than 11 million undocumented, and especially their children, have no access or limited access to healthcare. Fortunately, EMTALA, the 1986 law that requires that anyone with a medical emergency be seen without regard to their ability to pay, does provide our undocumented neighbors with some protection. You may not see them, but without these people who do the jobs that many Americans won’t accept the cost of your milk, eggs, chicken, and many other items that you take for granted would be much more expensive or frequently unavailable. These people are essential to our workforce and easy to overlook when we think, as Brooks would have us do, about how optimistic we should be about our future.
The situation is not new. This country began and has continued to be dependent upon an oppressed minority being available to ensure the comfort and prosperity of a majority that does not need to reflect on the fact that their comfort creates misery for someone they need not know. I know from other things that Brooks has written like The Second Mountain; The Quest for a Moral Life, that he is aware of the misery of the 15% of the population that answered that their personal life was not so good. He also gives evidence of that awareness in this paper. Maybe the difference between a conservative and a liberal progressive is a sense of urgency about the fate of those who for the moment are left out. He did write…
When Gallup recently asked Americans if they were satisfied with their personal life, 85 percent said they were, a number that has remained remarkably stable over the past 40 years.
15% (100-85=15) a measure of those who are left out of the picture for an optimist future does fit very nicely with our data about those in poverty and near poverty who have no healthcare, uncertain or inadequate housing, and are vulnerable to some inadequacy in their personal social determinants of health. I am concerned that Brooks is not alone in forgetting these people. Didn’t Jesus say that the poor would always be with us (Matthew 26;11), and wasn’t he referring to Jewish wisdom from Deuteronomy 15:11? Perhaps the ambiguity that is available as an excuse for the persistence of poverty that is possible when we lift scripture out of context allows so many of our legislators to focus their appeal on the 85% and shrug their shoulders at the misery of the 15%. Didn’t the Lord say they would always be with us?
I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. fully understood the pain that poverty produces and how it undermines the dignity of those in poverty in ways that will ultimately damage us all. Much of Dr. King’s speech when he accepted the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace was about poverty. Over the final four years of his life, he realized that we could never have racial equality as long as we had economic inequality for anyone in the community. The need to irradicate poverty for everyone was one of his key messages in his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, his last book before he was killed. It’s been fifty-seven years since King said in his Nobel speech:
“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”
One reading of Brooks’ article would suggest that we have made progress in reducing poverty by using our resources to “get rid of it.” In his book, King points out that after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voters Rights Act of 1965 many of his white liberal supporters thought our problems with race were over and there was a withdrawal of their active support that had been so crucial to the successes of the early civil rights movement. Time has proven him to be right as racism has persisted even as the lives of many black Americans have improved measurably over the intervening half-century.
Brooks is right that things are better. It is good to hope that the trends will accelerate and much sooner than another half century America will have achieved a “manifest destiny” without poverty and with healthcare that fits the picture of the Triple Aim, and every one of us will have a realistic opportunity for individual actualization. That was King’s dream. Brooks would argue that we are closer. I just don’t want us to forget that until we get there millions still suffer in a land where there should be enough for everyone.
Winter Is Trying To Reestablish Itself
As I finish up this note, we are in the midst of getting the last few inches of a dump of wet gloppy snow. The local skiers are happy. People will probably come up from Boston over the weekend to enjoy skiing at Mount Sunapee. Below is the scene from where I write as the snow falls.
Until now, we have had what I would call a “global warming” winter. We did have a big snowstorm a month ago, the week before Christmas, but we have had many days since then in the forties and a few when the temp hit fifty. I don’t know if there is a connection, but I do believe the evenings have been prettier than I remember in other colder winters. I am not complaining because I have enjoyed the brighter evenings with their pink glow. I offer the pink evening sky in today’s header as proof of my observation.
My son and his family in Felton, California, nine miles north of Santa Cruz on the San Lorenzo River, have had an unusual winter. The area seems to be an epicenter of the recent storms that have drenched California. President Biden visited the area yesterday to assess the damage and promise help.
Felton has had a lot of flooding and several of the main roads have washed out as the San Lorenzo River has come over its banks. This year it is flooding. Over the last few years, forest fires have been the problem. The summer before last they had to evacuate as the fires came within less than a mile of their home. Fortunately, they have witnessed the floods without being its victims. They live on high ground above the river and have not been flooded. Unfortunately, the high ground can become an island with no exit or access when the flood comes and washes out the roads.
The good news is that the West Coast’s “atmospheric river” storms have all passed through for the moment. We will be getting what is left of the last one here in New England sometime early next week. My Felton family is drying out, and we can return to our ongoing debate about whether it is better to have winter with occasional snow or live where earthquakes (the epicenter of the 1989 quake was a few miles away), forest fires, droughts, and floods are rotating possibilities.
I hope that where ever you are in the world this weekend you are like the 85% of Americans that David Brooks tells us are very happy, but that in some quiet moment, you might give some thought to the 15% who are so easy to ignore.
Be well,
Gene
