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Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Lately, I’ve been listening to Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the 1925 trial of John Scopes for defying Tennessee’s ban on teaching the theory of human evolution in state-funded schools. I first stumbled across as a young grad student. Buried in research about the Hays Code (that governed the production of films) and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (the Congressional witch-hunt that sought to root out Communists from the American government), I just could not comprehend how American society could produce and permit such severe regulation of artistic output, foment such fear about people’s political philosophies, and just look the other way as thousands of people were marginalized, stripped of their dignity and civil liberties, and derailed from their careers on the basis of propagandic and wildly irrational fears. That could never happen again, I surmised. Silly, silly Bill.
Larson’s account of the trial was riveting for me - not because of the event’s inherent drama that Inherit the Wind captured. The trial itself was a spectacle that never intended to highlight the intersection of faith, science, civil society, and public education. Though it prompted some legal debate on the free exercise of religion clause, the trial wasn’t a demonstration of extraordinary jurisprudence. Instead, it was a platform for the egos of William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, a launching pad for a small town trying to get on the map, and a salacious “trial of the century” for journalists whose currency was scoop and sensation. Larson frames the jousting between Bryan and Darrow as the penultimate contest between two great titans and standard-bearers for emerging wings of American culture, Fundamentalists and Modernists. Not unlike other meta-pissing contests between privileged, straight, and white men, the players didn’t anticipate (or didn’t care) about the fallout. Instead of elevating the national dialogue about civil rights and education, the trial reduced the debate to polar extremes and contributed to increasingly tribal social divisions that now threaten the project of American democracy altogether.
Returning to the book now, I’m more aware of the broader conditions that produced the Scopes trial, an historical context with eerie parallels to our current context. The early twentieth century included a series of wars that tested the imperial and economic reach of Europe and the US and that left the Middle East both impenetrable and vulnerable. A pandemic with contested origins prompted a global public health crisis was quickly politicized and exposed the chasm between rich and poor. Particular companies and sectors wielded disproportionate influence over American governance and social engagement. Movements emerged to respond to systemic injustice, segregation, and marginalization, to demand rights for women, for immigrants, for people of color, and for economically disenfranchised and under-resourced communities. Panic in response to widespread abuse of an intoxicating substance sparked moralistic debates and wide-reaching reactionary laws and bolstered an underground infrastructure for a shadow economy. And instead of coming together as citizens to discern a constitutional vision for navigating such upheaval, Americans soldered religious, economic, and cultural identities into opposing (and frequently internally-feuding) tribes.
We haven’t made much progress in the debate between science and religion. Even characterizing it as a debate, I risk reinforcing the notion that they’re essentially incompatible. Though most folx are somewhere in the let’s-get-along mainstream, the camps are still dominated by extreme and extremely loud minorities: in one corner, the fundamentalist Christians who deny the insights of science, and in the other the fundamentalist rationalists who deny the insights of religious experience. What do the extremes have in common? They deny the rest of us the promises of a pluralistic democracy. Social media give us front row seats to the ways these convictions seep into and poison discrete relationships. Once established friends, respected colleagues, and loved family members now sling accusations of idiocy at anyone who doesn’t support their full platform. Folx who once sought common ground with each other now wish all sorts of immediate and ultimate harm on each other. Maybe these extremes were simmering just below the surface the whole time - they emerged in the 1920s and are breaking through again. I just didn’t anticipate the ways vitriol, rabid and easily triggered hatred, and the dissolution of trust and optimism would come with a global crisis. I couldn’t have imagined that nationalism that would roar so hideously from different corners and seek out exclusive, not common, ground.
This is a lot to take for an introverted optimist, but I’m buoyed by a couple of things. First, I’m critically aware that we’ve been taught or conditioned to accept inevitability, to believe that history is history because it was inevitable. In the family of cynicism, inevitability is a sibling to fatalism, that all-too-attractive beast who spawned hits like “Everything happens for a reason,” “It is what it is,” and “There just aren’t enough workers.” Each of those quips seeks to soothe us, to help us let go of the problems of right-and-wrong that nag and haunt us. I’ve always adopted an alternative to inevitability: agency. I recognize and emphasize that we are equipped with the capacity to name our experiences and understand how they impact the ways we navigate the world. This makes it easier to counter the inevitablists with nuance - “Everything happens because someone made it happen,” “It is because something else was,” or “There just aren’t enough workers who will degrade themselves for unlivable wages and undignified conditions.”
Second, I’ve had a front row seat to meaningful and visible change that has the potential to veer us away from cynicism and away from combative tribalism. In the past year, I’ve been engaged in a fascinating dialogue between leaders in higher ed, healthcare, and business to discern what Glenn Llopis characterizes as a shift from the dominant ethos standardization (that sacrifices humanity to the gods of efficiency and profit) toward one of personalization (the radical notion that the person is the starting point for constructing the systems and structures that help us navigate the world). Llopis prompted this dialogue well before the pandemic consumed us and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd enraged us, but the experience of 2020 only magnified the need to reconsider the world we’ve constructed. That reconsideration means examining and clarifying the purpose of each industry, of each organization, of each individual.
I’ve been part of a consortium that grew out of this dialogue and that meets every few months. Last week, Llopis convened the third Leadership in the Age of Personalization summit and kept returning to five questions to facilitate our reflection and ability to identify and effect needed changes - Who do you let in? How do you see those you let in? Who do you let them be? What do you let them do? How do you let them do it? In the dialogues that proceeded from these questions, I kept returning to agency, mindset, and purpose. I heard, across sectors and across different individuals’ experiences, consistent hunger for reclaiming the human aspect of work (agency), for reframing how we and others understood our missions and capacities (mindset), and for charting a meaningful course toward ethically sound and sustainable desires (purpose). Some folx shared insights that should’ve been obvious to all of us (“If you’re not evolving as an individual, you’re not capable of evolving anything else”). Some shared experiences that demonstrate and amplify a call to recognize that difference is the norm, not the exception. Some used their wit to reveal deep wisdom (“Never had a fight that a calculator can solve” and committing to move away from the world of “male, pale & stale”).
One question lingers for me: How do you ask others to bring their authentic selves to work when you don’t know who they are? This taps into my experience as an educator - I really saw the most fundamental purpose of my job as a teacher as inculcating in students the skills and language to recognize their and others’ gifts, limitations, and needs - but the reserves of energy and motivation that I relied on dried up because I wasn’t able to bring my full, authentic self to work. How can I ask students to be their fullest and best selves when I’ve chosen to leave part of myself at the door? This points to related question that leaders need to address: How do you ask others to bring their authentic selves to work when you don’t know who you are? It’s too easy to hide behind abstractions like “the great resignation” and avoid making the changes (and the sacrifices) necessary to really make work person-centered, to really make schools student-centered, and to really make healthcare patient-centered.
The changes needed and desired in society begin with the changes needed (and not always desired) in individuals who hold the reins. In “The Pandemic is a Portal,” Arundhati Roy framed the pandemic as a tragedy and, importantly, as an opportunity to shed the layers we need to shed and shape the world we want to live in, fueled by a newly magnified awareness of our grief and vulnerability, of the fragility of our lives and our planet. We can rebuild the world into a better one - not perfect (is “perfect” really a thing?) but one in which we do not devolve into tribes, in which national conversations are not driven by pissing contests among the stale, pale, and male set, in which we start with the person to build our homes, expand our common grounds, develop our industries, and construct our worldviews. We just have to dismantle the hurdle of inevitability, reinforced by reticence and our grips on power. Leadership limited to telling everyone else what to drop and what to pick up dismantle that hurdle - intentional, personal transformation will.
