To be an American

I ended my last blog post wondering what simple response would most Americans agree on to the question: what does it mean to be an American? A good follow up question is to ask how we can ritualize that answer?

We are a large and diverse population but we are all protected by the Constitution. We too easily forget about those protections. Here is what I propose: a bizzaro Purge day. Instead of one day a year when there are no laws, one day a year we exercise our rights protected by our laws. Some examples:

• Exercise your freedom of speech. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, a blog post, or a social media rant about how terrible your elected officials are. 
• Enjoy your free exercise of religion. Pray to a different God for a day (this clearly breaks a commandment, so proceed at your own risk). Attend a different church. What are they gonna do, kick you out? So what. Then stand outside the church with a sign that says—oh, that reminds me ... 
• Exercise your freedom of assembly! Attend a rally, even if you're the only person there, even for something completely benign or senseless. "No More Mondays!"
• Share on social media the most searing journalistic critique of the government, something controversial. Your Facebook friends might be able to block your unpopular views but the government cannot.
• Use your right to petition. Send an email to your congressional representative about how much you hate Mondays.
• Second amendment time! Buy a gun. Don't like guns? Buy a used gun and turn it over to your local police department.
• Third amendment time! Let a soldier into your home ... then kick their ass out! (Thank them for their service.)
• 21st amendment! BUY ALCOHOL. 
• If it's a voting day, vote. If not, register to vote.

There are endless opportunities to take advantage of the freedoms afforded to all citizens. Make sure you're using them, even if you don't need them. 

All right, so when do we do this? Easy: September 17, Constitution Day. 

I know you can piss all over this post with some "until all of us are protected under the constitution, none of us are." Sure, civil asset forfeiture is a clear 4th amendment violation that happens every day in many poor communities. Sure, voter suppression clearly violates people's constitutional rights to vote. We should not ignore these things. 

But one day a year, put that all aside and just be grateful. Join your fellow citizens and participate in this universal experience of celebrating the rights we do have. It's the American thing to do.

Assimilation vs. Multiculturalism

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

In How To Be An Antiracist, Ibram Kendi examines three approaches for dealing with race in America: Assimilation, Segregation, and Antiracism. 

It's fair to say that segregation as a theory has lost. In its place, it evolved into some combination of desegregation, antiracism, and integration into a new term that, when you get down to it, is not all that different from segregation: multiculturalism. It's segregation without the coercion. (I'm describing theories here, not practice. In practice, housing discrimination and zoning have resegregated communities, not multiculturalism.)

In the essay "Unbecoming American", Johann N. Neem writes beautifully about being an Indian immigrant, what it means to be an American, and how that meaning is fading.

"Last year, when I ran into my son’s coach at the mall, he stumbled awkwardly after asking me if I was Christmas shopping, as if he’d committed an offense against my brown skin. In fact, I was Christmas shopping and I was as miserable as he seemed to be about finding myself at the mall. Why would he think I would feel more welcome by being excluded from American traditions? There is a big difference between asking non-Christians to pray and inviting them, as fellow Americans, to sing carols, eat cookies, and share good cheer. The inability of well-meaning progressives to understand that difference may result in an America with many small tents next to a larger but less inclusive one."

It's a long and wonderful essay, but this paragraph nicely describes his three different versions of America. 

• Assimilation: asking non-Christians to pray. 
• Multiculturalism: many small tents next to a larger but less inclusive one. 

He also describes a third way, which I will get to, that includes an invitation to "sing carols, eat cookies, and share good cheer."

Spaces

Kendi also wrote about the concept of black spaces. Professor Roderick Graham explains the idea here, quantifying it by measuring levels of anxiety among African-Americans in spaces where they are the minority (non-HBCU colleges, white-collar offices, etc.). This is why we now have "safe spaces."

In the political landscape, the idea of spaces is kind of like the libertarian idea of federalism or localism; instead of a strong central government, you divert power to the many individual state and local governments. 

In order to unite the 13 original colonies, the founders had to agree to respect some level of sovereignty. States needed to be safe spaces, but in order to unite, they needed something similar to assimilation. Or, as Stephen Pinker explains in Enlightenment Now, an appeal to Humanism.

“History confirms that when diverse cultures have to find common ground, they converge toward humanism. The separation of church and state in the American constitution arose not just from the philosophy of the enlightenment but from practical necessity. The economist Samuel Hammond has noted that 8 of the 13 British colonies had official churches, which intruded into the public sphere by paying ministries salaries, enforcing strict religious observance, and persecuting members of other denominations. The only way to unite the colonies under a single constitution was to guarantee religious expression and practice as a natural right."

The states didn't agree on a single religion, but they agreed on the right to practice and not intrude on other states' religions.  

Universal Programs or Universal Culture

I think the crux of many contemporary American problems is that we still haven't decided if we are a multicultural or an assimilationist society. Are we going to have our own spaces or are we going to expect shared spaces? The answer is important because this decision will affect policy.

Multiculturalists tend to be progressives, and progressives tend to want strong national programs like Medicare for All, Universal Pre-K, and free college, in addition to more support for current national programs like social security and public education.

Progressives have not made much progress on these issues. My theory is that on things like healthcare, there are too many cultural values baked into it. How are we ever going to get a country to decide on a national healthcare plan that includes things like abortion, birth control, gender transitional surgery, hormone therapy, or conversion therapy? 

It's the same reason why is Tom Cotton trying to ban the 1619 Project from being taught in public schools? Because everyone is trying to insert their own space into a national program that is supposed to serve everyone.  

Multiculturalists 🤝 Libertarians

One solution is for space-loving multiculturalists to create a natural coalition with space-loving libertarians: abandon national programs and use states and localities as spaces to create their own unique cultures.

I saw a progressive friend retweet a tweetstorm from Martellus Bennet about the education system. I wonder how many libertarians nodded along as they read this tweet, using the same argument they use for the dissolution of the Department of Education.  

Not just some generic idea of what education is. Geography plays a major role in what kids are interested in and how the learn. Design the schools for the communities that they exist in.

— Martellus Bennett (@MartysaurusRex) August 3, 2020

The uniformity of national programs necessarily rejects multiculturalism. 

Other countries can get away with universal healthcare because there is a dominant culture and civic pride. In “This Is How Scandinavia Got Great” David Brooks writes:

“They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person...

Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town...

Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms."

Why don't we have something like bildung taught in our schools? It's simple: we are diverse and multicultural, the Nordic countries are not. They assimilate. We sort. (side note: Canada might be an exception. They have a very diverse population and universal healthcare. With the Canada Health Act being signed in 1984, it looks like they got it passed right before a surge of immigration. I wonder if it would pass today, as their affective polarization is increasing and ethnic diversity tends to decrease trust.)

If you want space, you cannot have national programs. If you want national programs, you'll need something like Humanism, and a dash of assimilation.

Infinite Reversals

Noah Smith wrote a column arguing for expanding Medicare. He tweeted about hating market-based solutions to healthcare.

Yep. If someone says we should move toward "free market health care", don't take them seriously. Free markets are great for some things, but not for health care. We need government health care to free our businesses to focus on markets that actually work. https://t.co/sO2NuBpYng

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 13, 2020

I decided to ask Noah what he thought of Switzerland's model, which uses only private insurers and has 100 percent coverage. This was his response: 

We tried something like it with Obamacare but it was too vulnerable to political reversals.

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) August 13, 2020

I worry that this is the trend for all newly proposed federal programs; they are all vulnerable to political reversals. 

Inclusive American Culture

Kendi might argue that assimilation is just whiteness, just giving into Tom Cotton's world view. I would argue that a better version of assimilation is more like Humanism: we should be many small tents under one big tent. 

We shouldn't push our religious or ideological views on others, but we should view things like singing Christmas carols and decorating a town tree as more American than religious, an invitation to celebrate the human spirit in a uniquely American way.

An example of good cultural appropriation is the Holyoke St. Patrick's Day weekend. Holyoke, Mass. was known as the Paper City for all the downtown paper mills that sprung up during the industrial revolution. The city attracted many Irish immigrants, setting the stage for what has become the second-largest St. Patrick's Day parade in the country, in a city of roughly 40,000 people. 

Today, more than half of the residents are Hispanic, and yet St. Patrick's Day weekend is livelier than it has ever been. Show up and you'll see Puerto Rican children with green shamrocks painted on their faces. You can grab a Guinness at an Irish-themed bar, walk across the street and order Dos Equis at the Latin American Motorcycle Association. The phrase "Everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day" has never felt more real because the event celebrates the community and welcomes everyone.

Like the Holyoke St. Patrick's Day Weekend, there has to be a national common human experience that holds us together. Something more unifying than libertarian and multicultural spaces. Something more inclusive than monoculture. Something less coercive than a national program infused with one tribe's values. 

If both tribes can agree on a simple question, we can solve this problem. 

The question? What does it mean to be an American?

Cheat codes

I was reading an assigned poetry book for a college course several years ago. One of the poems began like this:

Up up down down left right left right B A start. 

The professor, a gen Xer, and I, a Xennial, were the only ones in the class of early Gen Zers who got the reference. That sequence is the cheat code to the game Contra on the original Nintendo system.

When I was a kid, everyone knew that code. It passed from gamer to gamer, like a piece of juicy gossip. The author of the poetry book is a Gen Xer who grew up in North Carolina. I had no idea how prevalent this code was so far from my home town. Although my generation's childhood was more sheltered than, say, the Boomers, we still grew up before the Internet was a thing. That means this cheat code spread due to the strength of social capital.

I'm not sure the same phenomenon can happen with today's kids, especially in a post-COVID world. But I'm not sure that it matters. 

The other day I finally gave in to my eight-year-old son's pleading and played Minecraft with him. His depth of knowledge of the game exceeds the cumulative knowledge of all the games I have ever played. He knows how to craft and enchant complex weapons, how to build portals, and he beats me in combat with ease, all while calling me a "newb."

He's played online with a friend a handful of times, otherwise he has learned all of this on his own. When he's not playing Minecraft, he's watching videos of YouTubers playing Minecraft and learning from them.

When I was a kid, playing video games was a social event. You learned how to beat Don Flamenco (dodge his big uppercut, then alternate left and right hits to the head until he falls) by playing with friends. My son learns these things on his own. While he is probably lacking in the development of social skills, his technical knowledge has far surpassed any level I could ever have attained.

I definitely worry about the decline of social capital, and if this is evidence of that, but I also wonder if it even matters. I wonder if technology has made it so he'll be able to solve problems on his own. 

I still think social skills are important for mental health. Having a community reduces the odds of being a mass shooter or being seduced by radical ideology. But I'm no longer convinced you need it for professional success.

The Imbalance of Cultural Power

tldr

• Our system of government is set up to encourage equilibrium, which prevents an ideological takeover of the state.
• We have no such system to prevent an ideological takeover of the market or the culture.
• We're probably just going through a "tight" culture phase as a response to a perceived threat, and things will level out on its own with time.

I.

I sense a contradiction in the mind of our Founding Fathers. One the one hand, they seemed concerned with "factionalism" and the tendency for societies to fall into a sort of dictatorship. Built into many of their ideas was the concept of equilibrium. They used checks and balances to ensure that one party could not overwhelm and control the government.

However, they were also a tolerant society. They focused on things like freedom of religion and the sovereignty of states. This is where American multiculturalism began.

The contradiction I'm referring to stems from the idea that, in the absence of a cultural equilibrium, one culture could come to overwhelm society and punish dissenters. "Punish", in this sense, does not mean via the state, but rather via the market (getting people fired) and the community (social isolation). 

So why, if the founders were worried about the balance of power, did they never think of the potential for a culture coup?

It's possible that they thought they solved this worry with laws written to ensure freedom of religion. Specifically, there is the No Religious Test clause which states that "no federal officeholder or employee can be required to adhere to or accept any particular religion or doctrine as a prerequisite to holding a federal office or a federal government job." 

At the time, culture mapped pretty well onto religion, so that took care of the problem. It also mapped pretty well onto geography, thus federalism helped ensure a healthy balance of, and respect for, power at the state level. So a religious belief couldn't turn our federal government into a theocracy and the states could, to some degree, maintain their specific culture.

But the founders probably never envisioned a future in which religion would decline so much that new secular beliefs, unbeholden to these laws, would arise in their place and threaten the balance of power.

I wonder how the founders would feel about Ibram Kendi's vision of an antiracist amendment that would be "comprised of formally trained experts on racism" who, among other things "monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas" and would be "empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas."

How does it sound if we tweak that just a bit? A Christian amendment comprised of formally trained experts on Christianity to monitor public officials for expressions of heresy and be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their antichristian policy and ideas.

I think this idea is highly unlikely to pass (however, there is apparently a reeducation camp going on for white males working at the federal government's premier nuclear research lab) but I do worry about cultural power.

II.

Things look much different now in 2020. It seems that, at one point, one's country of origin predicted one's religion, which predicted one's culture. Now, culture is different. I'm not even sure if it's the right word because what I'm talking about is more of an ideology. 

Whereas ethnicity or religion might have predicted how one voted, today the strongest predictor is whether you drive or pickup or a Prius. And the origins of this behavior begin in elementary school.

Paul Graham uses a four quandrant model to describe different personalities. 

"Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top.

 The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded."

He then goes to characterize the type of school-aged child who fits in each quadrant.

"The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite."

When they become adults, the groups begin to materialize as such:

"The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" ... The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is "To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is 'Eppur si muove.'"

III.

It's easy to picture the aggressive-conventional "tattletales" as the law-and-order, authoritarian types. While this type would be in my outgroup, I'm not worried about them because the law is tied to government and our founders built in a system of equilibrium to hold different groups in check. So while I disagree with their worldview, I don't worry about a coup.

However, there is another group that fits into this quadrant: the cancel-culture left. Rather than tattling on those who break laws, they tattle on those who break cultural taboos, like writing about transgender issues (Google "Jesse Singal" and "trans") or group IQ differences (Google "Sam Harris" "IQ" and "race") or even totally benign issues (Google "David Shor" and "Civis Analytics").

It might sound uncouth to compare social justice advocates to anti-immigration conservatives. The knee-jerk response is to say something like "after 400 years of oppression it's about time someone stands up for racial justice and punishes some rule-breakers!"

But here is the thing: according to this model, the aggressive conventionals are probably the ones who kept slavery in place. Graham writes:

"Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.

Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders."

Think about John Lewis' concept of "good trouble" and the tactics of civil rights activists that included breaking rules and pushing boundaries. They were definitely aggressive-independents. Today's social justice activists are more about punishing people, with calls for arresting the cops who shot Breonna Taylor, punishing Derek Chauvin, and ending qualified immunity so we can punish the cops who broke the rules. They are definitely aggressive-conventionals. So while both groups are pursuing social justice, the types of people drawn to the cause now come from a different segment of the quadrant (independent rule breakers to conventional tattletales).

What seems to be happening is that the aggressive conventionals have captured a great deal of cultural power and there doesn't seem to be any equilibrium to push back on them when they move from the motte ("cops shouldn't get away with murder") to the bailey ("Trader Joe's is racist"). More troublesome, they have no incentive to push back on themselves, only a greater incentive to seek out further rule-breakers.

"Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned."

IV.

This puts me in a tough position because I agree with a lot of the ends of aggressive social justice advocates (housing reform, police reform) but I just can't go along with their means. 

After listening to a discussion of this "successor ideology", Ross Douthat predicted (1:14:13) that this movement might last about ten years before crumbling. He's probably right; if they are led by aggressive-conventionals and don't develop any type of internal structure for civil discourse, and continue to place such high value on punishing rule-breakers, they are bound to turn on one another before taking over anything.

The only faction strong enough to fight back is the Trump right, which I want no part of (Ironic that the strongest cultural groups are both aggressive conventionals; most people are passive conventional). I can join the fight when I agree, but eventually, my moral impurity will be exposed. Or I can sit back with the rest of the quadrants and watch it all burn, even if it takes ten years. 

Graham thinks the independent-minded will eventually build their own institutions to protect themselves. We're starting to see some of that with journalists leaving legacy media for Substack and independent podcasts. I'll be more impressed if academics leave higher education to start their own new institutions. 

V.

A final theory for what is happening comes from Michelle Gelfund's "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers." She describes tight and loose cultures and how perceived threats like social instability, ecological challenges, high population density, and the decline of social order lead to cultural tightening and stricter social norms.

Threat drives power to aggressive-conventionals. Trump voters perceived threat from immigrants, elites, and the global order. In response, progressives perceived threat from Trump and his constant norm-breaking. This likely explains the growth of cancel culture on the left; if they don't have political power in the White House they can at least have cultural power on Twitter.

So it's possible that we're stuck in an authoritarian feedback loop, with right and left aggressive conventionals pushing back on one another (and even some ingroup fighting on the left) and leaving less and less cultural space for the independent-minded.

Gelfund says that you want to aim for a Goldilocks situation. 

"cultures that are either wildly loose or wildly tight have higher suicide rates, less happiness, more instability. The extremes are really bad and the internet is a context that has gotten extreme, so we half to give up some of that freedom for some order, and it’s a principle that we have to negotiate."

In all likelihood, our society is just going through a "tight" culture phase that will loosen on its own, as it always does.

A near-future conversation with my son

Come here, my son. I'm going to tell you a story.

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Yes, it is going to take a while. 

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No, put - put your phone down. Just listen.

So you know how you go down our street and you go past the farm on your left that sells ice cream and those chocolate-dipped Oreos you like? Then you go past that open field on the right that eventually leads to a tree-covered hill. Well, on top of that hill and behind those trees, there are three houses, all in a row. The first house you come across, as you travel down that lonely, backcountry road, is owned by a Richard Adams. 

At Mr. Adams' house, you'll see a big sloping hill in the front yard before the grass disappears into that thicket of maple trees. When your Nana was young, she went to a birthday party there for Mr. Adams' son, Bobby. It was in the winter and the kids would sled down that big hill. When they got to the bottom, Mr. Adams would be waiting on his snowmobile with a rope tied to the back and he would use that rope to pull Nana and her friends up to the top of the hill again.

!

Yeah, it was pretty cool.

When my dad was young - when Papa was young - town sports were different. You weren't grouped together randomly. You were paired with the kids in your neighborhood. So Papa lived in the Plains; you remember where my grandma's house was, right? Yeah, so that neighborhood. Papa played with all the kids who lived there. Where Mr. Adams lived, that would be considered the Falls. So Bobby and David went to school with Nana and played on the Falls sports teams, which Papa said always had the best teams. 

So anyway, Mr. Adams owned all that land and he gave some of the property to his sons, Bobby and David. When they grew up, they built their homes on that land. Those would be the next two homes down that road. If you squint hard when driving by you and see them through the trees.

David got married and had three kids; Bobby had two. Bobby's oldest son was named Rob, who was in my grade. He lived in the next house after Mr. Adams'.

So you know how if you follow that road next to our house it takes you to that golf course? One summer I worked there with Rob, cutting grass. But that's not what I want to tell you about Rob. What I want to tell you about Rob is a story from the third grade.

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Because the background is important, all right? Now just listen. 

So in third grade all the students in all the classes had to write a short autobiography. Then, the teachers took the writings and published them in a little booklet and everyone got one of the booklets to take home. It was the first time you got to read the works of students in the other classes.

Anyway, I'm reading through it and I get to Rob's class. I can't remember the teacher's name, but I read Rob's autobiography and I learn that he is the descendent of John Adams. Yes, that John Adams. And, of course, John Quincy Adams too.

Now, up to that point, the president's were just a bunch of names I was vaguely aware of because Nana bought your uncle and I these placemats that had all the presidents and their pictures on them. But now, for the first time, one of those pictures meant something. It felt real. I felt I had a connection to our country, our town, and my classmate. John Adams was just the second president, but now his story was Rob's story. And now that I shared a school and a town with Rob, it became my story. 

Rob had a cousin, Dan, the son of David, who grew up right next to him, the last house on that stretch of road. I still see Dan when I play basketball sometimes. He lives in town now has two kids that you share a school with. I'm telling you all this because now this is your story too.

Now, when you learn about history in high school, you're probably not going to learn much about John Adams, or his son for that matter. But there are some things you should know about him.

First, he was one of the only few Founding Fathers who did not own slaves. It's easy to say slavery is bad now; he actually said so at a time when it was popular. I tell you this because the history you are going to learn is different from what I was taught. There is more of a focus now on all the bad things our country did. And learning about it is going to make you feel bad. And you're going to wonder if we're the bad guys. 

You're going to search for redeeming qualities in our founders and discover many troublesome and problematic things. You're going to feel the heavy weight of genocide, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, foreign invasions, internment camps, police chokeholds, and housing discrimination. You're going to want to cry. You're going to feel angry. You're going to want to fight something, even if you don't know what that something is. You're going to want to tear down everything with any tie to our evil past, even if you don't know what to replace it with. 

But eventually you'll grow weary. It's exhausting being mad all the time. You'll focus on the few things you can improve; your family, your community, your health and spiritual well being. You'll learn to let go of all the things that only bring you frustration. And you'll want to take another look into our past and see if there was anything worth believing in. 

It is then that you'll discover John Adams.

But there is more to him.

You'll learn about something called the Boston Massacre: A group of British soldiers shot several Massachusetts citizens.

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Well, we were still a part of Britain at the time. It's complicated. I don't want to spoil it for you. Just know that the people of Massachusetts hated the British and things were really tense during this period. 

So anyway, the British soldiers kill a bunch of people but it's not clear who instigated the whole thing. The British seek out John Adams, who was a lawyer, to represent them in court. Now, he's conflicted. He doesn't think much of the British himself and he wants America to be free and autonomous. 

He believes that the soldiers were provoked and knows that if he doesn't help them, they won't get a fair trial. So he has an incentive to let them lose. If he helps them, everyone in Boston will hate him for siding with Britain. So he has a disincentive to help as well. 

But, as a lawyer, he believes in laws and rules and blind justice. You see, John Adams wants to build something new in America. But he wanted it built on moral grounds. And that meant standing on the side of justice, even when that means helping his enemies. If he couldn't do that, he didn't feel he had any right building a better America.

So he defended the British soldiers in court and they were found not guilty. What he did was brave. It's not enough to stand up for justice when it's convenient for you and your friends. Bravery is standing up for justice knowing that the people who see you as "on their side" are going to hate you for it. Bravery is risking social isolation for doing what's right.

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How do I know so much? There is a 6 part series about John Adams on HBO. You can binge it in one weekend.

Now, because John had these beliefs, he didn't have a lot of friends. He started off cordial with Thomas Jefferson, but they soon became enemies. They had opposing views of war, freedom, and the size of government. Jefferson was also the owner of many slaves.

Now I want to tell you another story.

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No, not about Jefferson. About a boy your age who lives in Virginia. Right now, his father is telling him about a classmate who is the descendent of Thomas Jefferson. The boy is learning about Monticello, a historical landmark just a few miles down the road. This is Jefferson's mansion. The boy is going to visit Monticello and be amazed when he learns about the genius of Jefferson. He's going to read the words Jefferson authored, the Declaration of Independence, and be inspired by his writings on the spirit of freedom. The fact that Monticello was built by slaves will not be stressed to this boy, just a footnote in the long history of Jefferson's amazing accomplishments that created the prosperous society we enjoy today.

If it seems logical to find identity and inspiration in John Adams, based mostly on where you are born, know that it will seem logical for someone to find identity and inspiration in Jefferson, Adams' enemy. 

In my lifetime there have been two elections in which the person with the most votes did not win. You can blame that on the electoral college, which is just a way of saying you can blame that on John Adams. Adams wanted a strong central government because he didn't totally trust the will of the people. I'll never agree with that, but I like the guy because, in him, I see a part of myself. I see him whenever I think of Rob, Nana and Papa, our road with the farm that sells ice cream and the chocolate-dipped oreos you like, the golf course behind our house where Rob and I used to cut the grass, or the row of Adams' houses I pass on my bike ride. And now, I see him in you. So I excuse it. 

As such, that boy in Virginia can excuse Jefferson's view that blacks were a lesser race because Jefferson has become a part of his identity.

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The point? I'm not saying that there are no wrong ideas or beliefs. I'm just saying that trying to understand people is really really hard. But I still expect you to do it. The more you understand people not like you, like the boy from Virginia, the less you'll jump to hate. The less you hate, the happier you'll be. 

?

Oh, make no mistake. Trying to empathize with your enemies, or even trying to walk away from the fight, will put a mark on your back. You'll get called out for your privilege. You'll get called out for your complicity.

Justice is important. But, if at least once in a while, you don't see that your enemies are being treated unjustly, or you fail to call out your side for being unjust, you're probably less concerned with justice than with being liked. That is not the country John Adams wanted to create for us. If, at least some of the time, justice doesn't make you unpopular among your family, friends, and community, then you're probably doing it wrong.

This country has a long and messy history, but at some point you have to accept it as part of your identity. Ground that identity in one single person you can believe in. Find your John Adams. Maybe it's Frederick Douglass. Maybe it's Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Maybe it's Donald Trump (please no). Find one person and say, "this is what it means to be an American." You have my permission to ignore the rest.

Look, I haven't figured out this shitstorm yet and you probably never will either. Just try to look for the best in people. It's tiring work, but not nearly as tiring as being angry all the time. Even John Adams and Thomas Jefferson became friends again before they died. Some of it was due to the exhaustion of bickering and some of it was due to adapting charitable attitudes and focusing on the universal human experience.

Have you been on your phone this whole time? Did you hear anything I said? Nothing! Forget it. Here's the tl;dr version: the descendants of John Adams live in our town and go to your school. Our country's history involves a lot of people who did or believed in terrible things, but some of them were kinda awesome. Find something to be proud of and make that the basis of your identity. 

Just watch the John Adams series, okay? It's really good.

E Pluribus Pluribus

I.
Sometimes you see something worded so perfectly you wonder how you never saw it that clearly before. This happened when I read this blog post which asked the question: Who is responsible for your feelings?

He describes two different cultures that have different answers.

"In culture A, everyone is responsible for their own feelings. People say mean stuff all the time - teasing and jostling each other for fun and to get a rise. Occasionally someone gets upset. When that happens, there's usually no repercussions for the perpetrator. If someone gets consistently upset when the same topic is brought up, they will either eventually stop getting upset or the people around them will learn to avoid that topic. Verbally expressing anger at someone is tolerated. It is better to be honest than polite.

Respect comes from how you contribute to the shared values of the group. At work, you get respect by doing your job well. Amongst your friends you get respect for being an easy person to keep as a friend - maybe you organise events, or make everyone in the group laugh. Respect flows from action to person.

Conflict is often resolved simply and quickly - if someone has a problem with someone else, they can say so immediately and openly. They can express their anger in a hostile way if they want to. And the other party is welcome to respond in kind. At its worst, this looks like barely restrained violence. But at its best, this often looks like open, comfortable and fun goal-oriented ribbing."

This sounds a lot like the culture of dignity, which I will return to in a moment. The writer continues, describing the second culture.

"In culture B, everyone is responsible for the feelings of others. At social gatherings everyone should feel safe and comfortable. After all, part of the point of having a community is to collectively care for the emotional wellbeing of the community's members. For this reason its seen as an act of violence against the community for your actions or speech to result in someone becoming upset, or if you make people feel uncomfortable or anxious. This comes with strong repercussions - the perpetrator is expected to make things right. An apology isn't necessarily good enough here - to heal the wound, the perpetrator needs to make group participants once again feel nurtured and safe in the group. If they don't do that, they are a toxic element to the group's cohesion and may no longer be welcome in the group. It is better to be polite than honest. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, it is better to say nothing at all.

Respect in culture B flows to you from the way you make people in the group feel. The core value of the group is "I want to feel supported and respected". In a work context, once someone has been hired they are welcome and included socially no matter how good or bad their work is. Making sure everyone feels welcome and included is held in higher regard than the work itself. 'Be someone your coworkers enjoy working with.'"

Now the author reveals what is at the heart of the cancel culture debate; it's really a debate about who is responsible for your feelings. Here is a clear example of Culture B:

I sent a version of this to the editors of Vox. (I have redacted some bits that are internal to Vox and shouldn’t be aired publicly.) pic.twitter.com/splNNSMivd

— Emily VanDerWerff 😎 (@emilyvdw) July 7, 2020

Emily feels unsafe working at the same business as someone who signed the same letter as someone who holds views Emily finds offensive. To Emily, her unsafe feelings are the responsibility of her employer. She is clearly more comfortable in Culture B.

II.
I knew these cultures sounded familiar and suddenly I remembered reading about the evolution of conflict resolution. It began with honor culture.

"In honor cultures, it is one’s reputation that makes one honorable or not, and one must respond aggressively to insults, aggressions, and challenges or lose honor. Not to fight back is itself a kind of moral failing, such that 'in honor cultures, people are shunned or criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so.'"

It later evolved to dignity culture, which was still in place when I grew up.

"a culture of dignity is one in which public reputation is less important. Insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery. It is even commendable to have “thick skin” that allows one to shrug off slights and even serious insults...

When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions, such as negotiated compromise geared toward solving the problem (Aslani et al. 2012). Failing this, or if the offense is sufficiently severe, people are to go to the police or appeal to the courts...

But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries ... The ideal in dignity cultures is thus to use the courts as quickly, quietly, and rarely as possible." 

Finally, we have moved into the third phase, Culture B, or victimhood culture.

"Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response...

A culture of victimhood is one characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight, combined with a heavy reliance on third parties.  People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large." 

The transition from honor to dignity just seems like the transition from barbarism to a more civilized way of dealing with conflict. However, the transition from dignity to victimhood sounds like what Tyler Cowen means when he talks about the increasing feminization of society.

It should be noted that Cowen does not mean feminization in a pejorative sense, and the cultural change doesn't correlate 100 percent with the male/female distinction. In fact, the author of the first blog post notes that feminist Camile Paglia is a woman who  actually feels more comfortable in Culture A, the one that seems more conducive to masculine, "thick skin" behavior.

It seems clear to me that the shift is a result of more women entering the workforce and capturing more cultural power. Cowen notes that among the 10 best-selling books of the decade, all have female protagonists, and the top seven are authored by women.

III.
In his assessment of this cultural change, Jonathan Haidt seems to imply that the culture of dignity is the preferable one, as the concept of having thick skin maps pretty well onto his ideas of cognitive behavior therapy, immersion therapy, and antifragility. These ideas show that, in order to overcome anxiety, one needs to be exposed to it in small, tolerable doses. But the amount of immersion necessary for each person to overcome their anxiety probably depends on their levels of neuroticism, and in some Culture A environments, the atmosphere can be overwhelming for certain people.

Let's be honest: honor, dignity, and Culture A were created and enforced by male-dominant societies. I don't think they should be deciding what is best for an increasingly egalitarian workforce. However, I do agree that walling oneself of from things that trigger anxiety will only weaken the individual, but the amount of exposure needed to adapt to anxiety-triggering actions and words varies from person to person.

But that doesn't mean that Culture B is the superior one. A complete change to a victimhood, Culture B workplace environment will eat itself whole. Or, I'm wrong and it will develop its own internal rules and norms that allow it to function properly. Either way, I agree with the author's conclusion.

"Arguing under the banner of "fighting for diversity" that culture B is the only acceptable culture is ironic and a little sad. We aren't all the same....Being nice out of obligation is like mandated consent - its impossible to achieve and it makes a liar out of everyone who tries. 

I think we need to accept and allow that some workplaces will stay in the classic masculine culture A style ... Assessing culture fit at a new workplace should go both ways - during a job interview you should decide if the place you're considering working will be a good space for you to learn and grow." 

IV.
All of this debate of culture raised a new question for me: Do Enlightenment Liberals, meaning the type of people who signed the Harper's letter, have the same problem as woke liberals in regards to Robin DiAngelo? In other words, because open debate and the free exchange of ideas works for them, they assume it will work for everyone else?

They appreciate free speech and exploring uncomfortable ideas because they feel it helps them reach deeper truths. But for people in Culture B, this never happens. This approach only causes unnecessary anxiety. Is Culture A failing to recognize that the benefits of free speech are never enjoyed by those in Culture B?

There is a common response from communists that, when directed to all the failed communist revolutions, they say that real communism has never been tried. Even anarcho-capitalists will say that a real free market has never been tried. I'd like to propose that real multiculturalism has never been tried.

Until now.

Most conflicts seem to be about people trying to create a space that works best for people like them. We're trying to create rules that work for everyone. We're trying to create one set of laws that apply to numerous cultures, beliefs, and behaviors.

And it's just not working. And it makes me despondent, because I really want it to work. My hope is that we can get to a point where we at least appreciate that people respond to their environments differently.

Maybe one culture cannot arise out of many cultures. Maybe the only thing that comes out of many cultures, is many cultures.

An Antiracism for the rest of us

You don't have to be a capital-A Antiracist to do your part to fight racism. You don't have to be an activist. You don't have to put out a personal statement or Instagram your new copy of White Fragility so everyone in your feed knows how woke you are. You don't have to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your front lawn.

You can do it your own way; you don't have to be bullied into following someone else's prescription. Some things you can do on your own, some you can start in your community, some you can petition your local representatives for their support.

As I see it, the two biggest injustices to African Americans are policing and housing discrimination. Poverty is the biggest problem but I believe it is mostly caused by housing issues. So here are some things you can do to help combat racism.

Things you can do on a personal level.

Donate to organizations like Campaign Zero. They have identified the eight policies that correlate with police brutality. If you live in a leafy, white, low-crime suburban neighborhood, you can try to defund your local police department. But if your cops aren't killing people, you're better off supporting organizations that address the cops who are.

Listen to black voices. More specifically, listen to black voices who think like you. If you're a Trump supporter, follow Candace Owens and Terrence Williams. If you're a traditional conservative, follow Lester Holt, Colin Powell, and Condeleeza Rice. If you're a libertarian, follow Kmele Foster and Thomas Sowell. If you're a traditional liberal, follow John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Chloe Valdary, or Ayishat Akanbi. If you're a progressive, well, you're probably already doing this.

Research shows that people have a stronger bias against political ideology than against race. The point here is to combat the availability heuristic. If the only prominent black people you see are constantly espousing viewpoints you disagree with, you will begin to see all black people as being in your outgroup. However, if you purposefully expose yourself to black people who think like you, you will begin to see them as being in your ingroup.

Things your local community can do:

Start a neighborhood support network. Mansa Keita notes the benefits of mentoring a young person of color.

"The biggest benefit? Networking. A lot of jobs aren’t found via applications or “merit”, a lot are about who you know and who recommends you."

You don't have to necessarily adopt a "little" as he suggest, but you could start a Facebook group for your community's black residents and let them know of upcoming job opportunities at your work. Or offer to be a reference for them.

Start an opportunity council. "Opportunity councils could be made up of a broad cross-section of leaders in the city, such as school superintendents, mayors, council members, local newspaper editors, and community members from high- and low-opportunity areas." The whole point is to improve opportunities for those with less opportunity, notably African Americans.

Things your local government can do.

Help societal reintegration. Two facts: one, black men are overreprented in the prison population (more on this later). Two, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck. You can create something like the Women in Recovery program and help connect the formerly incarcerated with their families and help reintegrate them into your community.

Build affordable housing. Apartments are a good start, but it could even be just building more starter homes. In short, increasing the supply of available housing decreases the cost of housing. If you're a leafy suburb dweller, your local government can work to change zoning laws that will make it easier for low income Americans, many of whom are minorities, to move into your community.

This isn't just about access to better schools, it's access to social capital, like the job networking I mentioned earlier. So much learning in school comes from a student's peers. There is so much benefit just to being around kids whose parents expect them to go to college.

Does your safe neighborhood employ cops who practice broken window policing? Probably not. Guess who would love to not be stopped and frisked by cops every day? The low income black residents who can't find housing in your town. BUILD MORE HOUSING!

Vote by mail. It's simple. It's a low risk for fraud. More importantly, it makes it easier for people who don't normally vote, people who are disproportionately black, to participate in democracy.

Things your state or national government can do.

Vote libertarian. Just kidding, sort of. But seriously, they are the most serious about ending the War on Drugs, which just puts a lot of black men in jail, and all the other policies that disproportionately affect black Americans, including:

End qualified immunity.
End civil asset forfeiture.
End the drug war.
End overcriminalization.
End no-knock warrants.
End militarization of police.
End mandatory minimums.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) June 7, 2020

Start gun buyback programs. Why are certain cops more violent? Because they police violent neighborhoods. In a country with more guns than people, they are fearful that a citizen might be armed and shoot at them. Remove that fear by reducing the supply of guns and you can reduce the anxiety and false positives from cops who shoot unarmed citizens.

Things that will REALLY help but you'll never actually do.

Sell your house, at a loss, to a black family. Move to a poor black neighborhood. Buy a house at a markup. Send your children to the local public school. All their classmates will benefit from their presence. Don't worry about the quality of education; research shows that kids end up like their biological parents. They are going to be fine. The biggest change will be to the family who now lives in your old community.