The New Year

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers,
our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
―Carl Sagan

While my experience of the new year traditionally aligns more with that of the Jewish calendar due to its chronological affiliation with the start of school each fall, the simple truth is that, technically, each day any of us wakes up is the start of the next year of our life.  In fact, for most of human existence, the chronological documentation of the passage of time was a nebulous process at best, recognizing and adapting to seasonal changes but little more than that (hunter-gatherers don’t have weekends).  However, with the rise of agrarian cultures—with their scribes and accounting systems—calendars were born, and we now have atomic clocks that lose only 1 second every 300 billion years.  Which means one might argue that each moment of “now” you experience is officially the start of a new year.

Yet, the conscious marking of another year can have value as a means for taking stock of ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a society, and when we do that here at the start of 2024, what confronts us is sobering.  Here are just some of the “highlights:”

• We face a war of aggression and attrition in the Ukraine, with frightening parallels in our current U.S. response to that of Britain and France to the Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland in 1938—threatening democracy now as it did then—and we face a war of retaliation and revenge in Gaza that threatens to degenerate into a genocide of the Palestinian people (and these are just the armed conflicts that get all the international press). 
• We have destabilized the planet’s climate to where once extreme weathers are now annual events—the correction of which would require the complete upheaval of our totally fossil-fuel dependent world economy—and we have generated an international migration “crisis” in response (that shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with basic organism population dynamics) as the animal, Homo sapiens, leaves untenable environments for more tenable ones.
• We are currently engaged in a blind, headlong rush to develop AI technologies that threaten everything from jobs (both so-called “white-” as well a “blue-collar” ones) to national security to our very capacity to determine what is true versus what is false (and if we think the tech companies are suddenly going to regulate themselves, we have only to look at the $11 billion dollars they made off of our children in 2022 to dismiss that “magical thinking”).
• What’s more, here in this country, we have an avowed authoritarian indicted with 91 felony charges running for President, aided by power seekers willing to “burn the village down to save it,” who is the front-runner for his party’s nomination and who joins all the other authoritarians he so admires, posing the greatest risks to democracy since the Second World War.

Add in a population so polarized by social media and “cancel culture” (both from the Right and the Left) and we have a society ripe for civil conflict.  Indeed, for those of us who know our American history, the last time this country was this divided over its values—unable to compromise and to govern (with actual physical threats being made in our chambers of power)—it was the year 1860.  Also, a Presidential election year. And arguably the most important election year in our nation’s history.  Until maybe now.  Is 2024 our next 1860?

As always, I look at this question through the lens of an educator as well as that of a citizen, and for the past couple of years, through work I have done as a teacher fellow with the Mill Institute (whose mission statement might best be summarized as “less certain, more curious”), I have worked with others in the profession to identify key features of constructive dialogue around contentious issues and to develop methods for nurturing such dialogue in schools.  Like others before us, we have recognized that most value disagreements involve well-intentioned positions on both sides and that demonizing the other reduces their story and oversimplifies ones’ own, resulting in the diminishment of everyone.  Thus, finding ways to engage students and educators alike in practicing these two tenents has been the focus of our work (and we have developed a number of training resources for anyone interested).

But what has come out of this work for me regarding this essay’s primary topic is the awareness of two dilemmas.  The first is that—as former Stanford dean, Julie Lythcott-Haims, puts it—“we’re in desperate need of humans who can grapple openly with ideas, and disagree, as reasonable people will, without villainizing each other,” and yet developmentally, “today’s adolescents aren’t making it all the way” to this capacity for “adulting” because the cultural bubble of social media promotes a rigid understanding of right and wrong.  The reality is that you never have to listen to the other person anymore, never entertain any truth claim their position might have on you, because you can simply scream your own sense of rightness (and righteousness) on these platforms instead.  Hence, dilemma number one for me is whether we have the necessary critical mass of individuals in our society capable of the constructive dialoguing we will need to prevent a repeat of 1860.

The other dilemma for me, though, is that the value’s contest of 1860 forces the acknowledgment that some conflicts in values are beyond dialogue.  The impasse over slavery did not allow for a constructive compromise; there is no possible positive spin on slavery.  One part of our society held and defended an utterly abhorrent set of values and were prepared to kill and to die for them.  When values become that diametrically opposed, the resolution, I fear, boils down to power—as it did for four of the ugliest years of our nation’s history—and I am left wondering whether today’s culture wars have not reached that same equivalent point.

However, I remain committed to paradoxical thinking—to “both/and”—and if the young person who wrote about his generation’s developmental conundrum was capable of the necessary self-diagnosis to change his own personal growth path, I have optimism for others to do likewise (especially if exposed to the training available through the Mill Institute as well a similar organizations committed to constructive change).  Moreover, if the people of Poland can use their demographic power to peacefully overturn the illiberal values of their country’s authoritarian leadership—interestingly enough for our own 2024 election, mainly over laws outlawing abortion—then perhaps our society can successfully resist the illiberalism threatening our own historical ideals. 

The choice in the New Year is ours.

References

Bensinger, K. (Dec. 21, 2023) Troll Army for Trump Spins Online.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://digitaledition.baltimoresun.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=b0dd69b9-e81e-4555-beba-da94f444f1f2.

Gottlieb, Z. (Dec. 10, 2023) Listen Up. The Closing of the Teenage Mind is Almost Complete.  The Los Angeles Times.  https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-10/los-angeles-high-school-cancel-culture-free-speech.

Harvard School of Public Health (Dec. 27, 2023) Social Media Platforms Generate Billions in Annual Ad Revenue from U.S. Youth.  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/.

Schmitz, R. (Dec. 11, 2023) Poland Elects New Prime Minister, Ending Right-wing Party’s Rule.  NPR.  https://www.npr.org/2023/12/11/1218635775/poland-elects-new-prime-minister-ending-right-wing-partys-rule.