Seriously, how divided are we?

Gasping for inspiration I have taken to researching various strategies for engaging folk with “opposing” political views. My newest pastime: removing ideologically curated cotton from my ears.

To listen, primarily. Hopefully, to imagine.

This exercise, call it “post-Trump cleansing,” has brought home the meaning of shared language and history, of shared experience, of shared ANYTHING.

Along the way I ask myself, are we THAT DIVIDED? Or to put this a bit differently, who’s interested that “we are so divided” or interested that “we choose” to see ourselves this way? Is this systemic?

In a recent essay on the art world fracas revolving around a proposed Philip Guston Retrospective, art critic Peter Schjedahl offers a view of our struggle with “divided-ness:”

Cold winds are blowing from the future onto aspirations to provide society, or even segments of society, with a capacity to bridge differences with mutual respect. I’ve often reflected that uses of “we” in critical writing are unavoidably presumptuous though they are rhetorically meant only to invite, or perhaps seduce, agreement. I’ve never felt less confidence in the pronoun, at a time of alienations that recall what W.B. Yeats perceived in another pandemic year, 1919: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” (1)

What can “we” do?

For starters, “we” can look at “obstruction,” the subversive of progress.

“Obstruction,” it has been proposed, is a way station on the path to oppression. Makes sense: what’s comstraining our thinking and action is removal of consequence by ourselves and/or by others. As Jack Nicholson incriminating himself, so poignantly shouted out in the movie, “A Few Good Men” (1992), “You can’t handle the truth.”

What’s different?

For one, we identify the players and their roles. Consider that “We are” — at every level — workers. We hardly talk about how we are workers and those who have — David Foster Wallace (2) comes to mind — are frequently debunked. We ridicule those who have “wasted time,” “wasted a life.” We extoll careerism, we wallow in status obsession, we eschew happiness for “progress.” We trade reckoning, which takes time and effort, for forgetting and burying which doesn’t. Haplessly, we turn and look away.

Seeing ourselves foremost as workers, reveals a mutual goal-setting glue and here’s where the obstruction part begins to play out: we can depart from work, we can walk off the job. For those who traffic in scarcity, who seek control of resources, the option to walk, to lose focus, can be exploited and harnessed.

Confused over what we can become, we are stalled over seeing what we are. Trump has given a taste of this phenomena and his minus 4 years “in office” have been a banquet of sorts. We don’t like chaos, we are fearful of chaos. And perpetrating chaos, a practice revered by Trump and fellow criminals, is the prime obstruction, the roadblock to actualizing our worker roles.

Post-Trump, we have two choices: we can recall or we can forget. The cognitive research scientist and educator Gordon Pask (3) once summed up our effort to make sense of chaos as recognizing patterns and transforming them by a process of explication, a process of what can be demonstrated. This, more than duplication of results, is what distinguishes successful learning and apprehension from rote regurgitations.

Without obstruction, rendering chaos into sustainable activity is daily stuff. It’s what we do. With obstruction, we can opt out.

Recall is sticky. Recall needs affirmation. In every sense recall is our job.

Moreover, obstruction clouds perception, future understanding. Trust in what we see and what we feel is marginalized. Not only do we opt out, we appear indifferent. Some of us cheer while others repeat footsteps. This is not a dance; this is a trance.

Walter Lippmann once said “What we see is what we define; (now) what we define is what we see.” Lippmann was warning about the new television appliance soon to become an American household fixture. Because of TV’s immanent modality — picture — TV would eclipse radio as the purveyor of news, and serve as a resource for image and news manipulators. Recently, Chuck Todd of MSNBC has said as much about the demise of local (print, TV) news gathering, forcing appetites to gravitate to Facebook and Twitter.

These macro media focused musings do not help us reflect on the choice(s) before us and our capacities at reckoning. As reporter-researcher Masha Gessen points out in a recent on-line New Yorker column (4), remembering, not nostalgia, is critical. She reports about two therapists in Adelaide, Australia who practice a form of therapy that addresses collective trauma. They call it “narrative therapy”:

Their work, which has included indigenous communities in Australia, has been applied all over the world. The approach involves a number of methods including storytelling, letter-writing and rituals. People may tell what they did and what was done to them, they may tell their stories repeatedly in specific settings and formats, and they may produce a record of the telling. This approach accomplishes several goals. By creating new rituals, it gives voice to people who have not been heard in public. By focusing on the acts of telling and listening, it may challenge assumptions about justice as the act of meting out punishment… The goal of reckoning is moral restoration.

Pask didn’t offer up a therapy for obstruction except to delineate it as “the enemy of progress”:

We can go up a level and obstruct the explication process by subsuming the role as in “now you are doing this” which is a departure. I call this “upping the level” the enemy of progress. (5)

Likewise, Gessen doesn’t offer up a therapy for obstruction in her column. She does however accurately portray the stakes of NOT reckoning:

Of course, this process can’t succeed as long as nearly equal numbers of Americans live in two non-intersecting realities. But such a process is also our best hope for reclaiming a shared reality. When you have a deep, festering wound, you do not heal it by pretending there was no injury: you clean it out, and then you stitch it up.

December 12

1- Peter Schjeldahl, “Us Cosmopolitans,” The New Yorker, October 19, 2020; originally published online, October 12 as “Philip Guston and the Boundaries of Art Culture”

2- David Foster Wallace, “This is Water,” Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

3- Gordon Pask, (1928–1996)

4- Masha Gessen, “Why America Needs a Reckoning with the Trump Era,” New Yorker (on-line column), November 12, 2020

5- From notes taken by the author, after a presentation by Gordon Pask, “Self-Organizing Systems,” delivered at the seminar, “Interpersonal Relational Networks,” CIDOC, Cuernavaca , Mexico, June, 1971