Avoidance Art
The pandemic can be blamed for many things. Fleeting is the apparition of gross social inequality which roars into the collective mind.
And roars out, which is what America is witnessing currently.
‘We’ — to coin a pronoun in ill-repute these days — are sicker than we thought, more unequal than we can imagine, more collectively fragile than we accept.
“NIMBY Cognition:” as the 2022 books close, America’s ‘in case you didn’t notice,’ bucket list of “not now’s” gets a cursory review.
Child Tax Credit.
Affordable Housing.
Expanding Disability Relief.
Student Debt Relief.
Asylum Seeker Protection.
Assault Rifle Bans.
Hurricane Disaster Relief and Flood Preparedness.
Avoidances: even this partial list tramples the imagination. Horizons evaporate like mirages. Analysis fails to convince one of causes and remedies.
In another dimension, where what ‘we’ used to call ‘foreign affairs,’ resides moral hypocrisy. One recent example: with nary a connect-the-dots nod, Congress approved an irresponsible military allowance and reneged on pledges of climate destruction-related funding. (1,2) As if to invent the counter-intuitive excuse that military build-up and the risk of climate destruction are not linked.
Another dimension, another avoidance: funding the defense of sovereign Ukraine. As a billion-dollar defense bill ‘teetered,’ one could hear ring the “how long will this go on” alarm bells. (3)
The nativist natives, the NIMBY brokers, are at work.
America hedges.
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy on December 21 (4) correctly distinguished for his US Congressional audience, what is ‘charity’ and what is ‘investment.’ ‘Look not at what Ukraine can do for you, look at what you have done for Ukraine.’
“Against all odds and doom-and-gloom scenarios, Ukraine didn’t fall. Ukraine is alive and kicking. Thank you. And it gives me good reason to share with you our first, first joint victory: We defeated Russia in the battle for minds of the world. We have no fear, nor should anyone in the world have it. Ukrainians gained this victory, and it gives us courage which inspires the entire world.
Americans gained this victory, and that’s why you have succeeded in uniting the global community to protect freedom and international law. Europeans gained this victory, and that’s why Europe is now stronger and more independent than ever. The Russian tyranny has lost control over us. And it will never influence our minds again.”
His speech hit a note: Ukraine doesn’t have representation in Congress, except a moral one. And despite Republican poli-cognitive blocs, Ukraine’s defense as moral challenge is equally shared. Zelenskyy brought a Ukrainian flag plucked from the front. A “show and tell” moment. Polite applause.
Few cheers from the Republican side.
The symptoms of NIMBY cognitive imbalance entail loss of perception, particularly scale and pattern recognition. Consider sustaining a false appraisal of one’s environment against new information. Consider blindness to evidence which challenges one’s notion of ‘property.’ Consider propaganda and its utility to suppress agency: the relentless drum beat of “they are coming to take away your freedom,” when in fact, the freedoms of what one speaks one is being asked to barter; or worse, have already been bartered.
Are there antidotes to NIMBY cognition?
According to Dr. Ellen Langer (5) one is what she proposes as “Mindfulness,” the title of her study, as opposed to “mindlessness.” The payoffs, emotionally, physically and mentally, are legion, and to those who reflect, who test their “mindsets,” transformative:
“The creation of new categories, as we will see throughout this book, is a mindful activity. Mindlessness sets in when we rely too rigidly on categories and distinctions created in the past (masculine/feminine, old/young, success/failure). Once distinctions are created, they take on a life of their own. Consider (1) First there was earth. (2) Then there was land, sea and sky. (3) Then there were countries. (4) Now there is East Germany versus West Germany. The categories we make gather momentum and are very hard to overthrow. We build our own and our shared realities and then we become victims of them — blind to the fact that they are constructs, ideas.
“… To be mindless is to be trapped in a world in which certain creatures always belong to the Emperor, Christianity is always good, certain people are forever untouchable, and doors are only doors. (6)
What Sanger casts as her cognitive net is “abundance.”
“One of the main reasons we may become entrapped by the absolute categories we create (or are given by someone else) rather than accept the world as dynamic and continuous is because we believe that resources are limited. If there are clear and stable categories, then we can make rules by which to dole out these resources. If resources weren’t so limited, or if these limits were greatly exaggerated, the categories wouldn’t need to be so rigid.”
Zelenskyy’s speech is an example: an ‘ask’ framed as a “thank you,” a sincere gesture of gratitude. More than what America has promised, what America will deliver.
Consider another antidote to NIMBY Cognition originally proposed to nineteenth century American readers by Alexis De Tocqueville. De Tocqueville’s book, Democracy in America provided a shift of context: America through the observations and witness of a foreigner. A popular read in the 1850’s, Democracy in America could have more currency today than a few lines accorded it in high school American History surveys.
“Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people. I readily discovered the prodigious influence that this primary fact exercises on the whole course of society . . .
I soon perceived that the influence of this fact extends far beyond the political character and the laws of the country, and that it has no less effect on civil society than on the government; . . . The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.” (7)
One doesn’t have to go far or “lean in profoundly,” to find current examples. As Langer proposes, they are obvious to the alert, to those willing to risk letting go of familiar mindsets.
Former Deputy Assistant to the President (2017–2019), Fiona Hill illustrates in her book, There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century (2021):
“I was at Harvard for the entirety of the 1990s, studying for graduate degrees and working simultaneously as a tutor in the undergraduate residential houses and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Along the way I made the decision to stay in the United States, and in 1995, I got married. As I progressed through my new American life and was absorbed into my husband’s sprawling midwestern family, the United States writ large — not just writ small in Boston — started to look a lot like the United Kingdom that I had left behind. Spatial inequality was an issue in America as well. The United States was not the land of opportunity for everyone in every place. There were plenty of towns and regions that Americans wanted to leave behind.” (8)
One of the notable yet underappreciated and least trumpeted social legislative successes of the past year was the inclusion of the family sick leave provisions in the stimulus bill subsidies. (9) Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Sen. Patty Murray had devoted nearly eighteen and ten years respectively and multiple Congressional sessions to getting it passed.
It’s an old social benefit — to support young families in juggling work, family and financial planning — at a vulnerable stage in child nurturing and family security.
What is the federal government’s interest in family sick leave?
Simply answered, ‘it’s the right thing to do.’
DeLauro and Murray used their legislative expertise to keep ‘family sick leave’ on the table simply because the opportunity was not going away. What could go away, however, were the categories and mindsets of avoiding the problem/opportunity. In the present, acting ‘mindful,’ DeLauro and Murray successfully advocated for family need — not for votes, not for donations.
It was simply a matter of time and of seizing an opportunity.
December 28–31
Notes
1-’Military Allowance’
2-’Climate Destruction Funding’
3-’Alarm Bells’
5-Mindfulness (1989)
6-pp. 11–12. What Dr. Langer cites as her argument is based on clinical research among which the following study stands out. She writes,
One day, at a nursing home in Connecticut, elderly residents were given a choice of houseplants to care for and were asked to make a small number of decisions about their daily routines. A year and a half later, not only were these people more cheerful, active, and alert than a similar group in the same institution who were not given these choices and responsibilities, but many more of them were still alive. In fact, less than half as many of the decision-making, plant-minding residents had died as had those in the other group. This experiment, with its startling results, began over ten years of research into the powerful effects of what my colleagues and I came to call mindfulness, and of its counterpart, the equally powerful but destructive state of mindlessness.
7-Bill of Rights Institute, from Democracy in America. Of mention here was that De Tocqueville claimed America’s treatment of Native Americans and the practice of slavery were glaring exceptions to his observations and conclusions.
8- pp. 179–180
9-See Would’ Coulda’ Shoulda,’ Medium.
