“It Takes a (Moral) Village…”

By oneself is wrong done,
By oneself is one defiled.
By oneself wrong is not done,
By oneself, surely, is one cleansed.
One cannot purify another;
Purity and impurity are in oneself.
—The Dhammapada

On July 15, 1979, then President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to the nation that history would come to call the “Crisis of Confidence” speech. In it, President Carter laid out the case that our society was suffering from a malaise of self-indulgence where “too many of us now worship consumption” and “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” He argued that as a country, we had adopted the mistaken understanding of freedom as “the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” and he astutely observed that “that path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

Well, here we are, nearly 50 years later, and as Ron Lieber of the New York Times recently pointed out, we are well on our way to that failure. He is worth quoting extensively here:

Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half…

Research by Tim Kasser and Jean Twenge showed that materialism among 12th graders increased over time, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Generation X, and then stayed at those historically high levels among millennials. “There was a trend underway at the time Carter was making this speech, and it basically just amplifies in the next 10 years rather than being suppressed,” said Mr. Kasser, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College, [who] watched these developments with a sense of foreboding, because his research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability…

And finally:

We will be tested again. Next time it may be a climate-related catastrophe, driven in part by the very patterns of consumption that Mr. Carter warned against in his speech. He called for turning down the thermostat in the winter and for 20 percent of the nation’s energy to come from solar power by 2000 — all these years later, we’ve done neither.

Which turns out to be truer than even I would have thought when I recently learned from a story in the local press of a couple paying nearly $900 for their heating bill this past month. This for a row house in the urban heat island that is the city even in winter. This for a place less exposed than my own three walls (I’m a duplex) and with fewer square feet. $900. What temperature, I thought, do you keep your house at??? For perspective, my largest heating bill ever was a little over $200.

However, putting my (self-righteous?) indignation aside, as we prepare to eulogize and bury President Carter this month, what strikes me most about his words all those years ago and the world we’ve created since is that the “village” has clearly been falling down on the job of “raising its children.” I may agree with the words attributed to the Buddha at the start of this essay that each of us is solely accountable for our individual moral character. Yet as I read these same words again, they remind me, too, that our moral nature is also a social construct. There truly is no such thing as a “oneself” in utter and absolute isolation; it takes indeed a “village” to make a self. What is more, it takes that same “village” to hold that same self individually morally accountable, and the paradox of this great truth is what our culture stumbles so badly over.

Take my discipline, for example. Everyone is rightly concerned about the declines in language and math skills seen since (and attributable to) the pandemic. But the interventions have focused almost exclusively on tutoring and other individualist efforts when the larger cause—absenteeism—has received proportionally little attention. “Chronic absenteeism [however] is not just bad for kids; it is bad for society. Learning is first and foremost a social endeavor, and kids learn to be part of a cohesive community by going to one every day” (Anderson & Winthrop). In other words, unless one is an integral part of the “village,” neither “village” nor “child” can thrive.

Which is the power of ex-President Carter’s example to us following his loss to Ronald Reagn in 1980. He chose to remain part of the “village” to the day of his death, holding both himself and others accountable for their choices and their actions and the impact of these on the larger world. With his hands, heart, and mind, he built literal villages as well as metaphorical ones, and those in turn helped raise tens of thousands out of poverty and into more participatory lives in their communities. He fundamentally embraced the paradox of the moral character of the relationship between “village” and “child,” and the lives he touched both directly and indirectly remain the better for that. His was very much a life worthy of modelling.

Would that the same could be said of all the political leaders in our lives.

References

Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.

Carter, J. (July 15, 1979) Crisis of Confidence. PBS American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/.

Lieber, R. (Dec. 29, 2024) Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism But, Alas, Wrong About Us. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html.

Prudente, T. & Gardner, H. (Jan. 5, 2025) Think Your BGE Bill is High? Rates are Rising. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/bge-rates-maryland-utility-winter-storm-ZT4JQLC3OZCCTMHPWNAVVS2LHY/.

The Death of Science?

There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn

They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada

If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one. First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around). Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services! Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.

“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask. Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country. H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive. “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple: there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields.

Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world. If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore. As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”

Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers. Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation. Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption. And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country. And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.

Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries. All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”

And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible: that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.

Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991. As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20^th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.

Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support. The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise. But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month. Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”

But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must. We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country. Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can. In labs and research centers. In classrooms and homes. In legislatures and city halls. In movies and museums. Even in the kitchen!¹ Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”² It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity. But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.

Coda

During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland. Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed!

However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:

The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory. Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer. Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again. It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).

For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5. Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:

Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?

¹For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

²To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.

References

Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.

Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.

Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science. Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.

Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.

Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).

Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2^nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.

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.