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Value, Communication, and Power

Over a year ago, Jonathan Haidt published a story in The Atlantic, explaining “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” A year later, life doesn’t seem to be getting much smarter.

Haidt’s central, structuring image is the Tower of Babel, the human construction that so incensed God, largely because it represented the power of human beings when they communicate, cooperate, and create. The core of this power, at least as I read the story, is the first piece: communication. God removes a common language. Removal of language is removal of power because humans simply do not do valuable things without others. Destruction is inherently self-focused while creation is inherently others-focused.

Haidt’s short cultural history of the last decade is compelling in its thoroughness, whether or not you agree with his premise. His thesis relies on three pillars of social connection in a time when loyalty to religions or despots or vague tribalism no longer serves that purpose (or so we thought, maybe). We might still have, according to Haidt: “social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three.”

Shared stories are especially interesting to me because they are difficult to quantify or conceptualize in a value-vacuum. They require listening, bravery, and most importantly, acknowledging shared humanity. Sharing stories means valuing each other, and value has meaning only when it is expressed, either positively or negatively, in any venue, large or small. The value you place on other people is articulated in conversations with your friends over coffee, Supreme Court rulings, and your over-coffee discussions about Supreme Court rulings. Value is expressed, and therefore made real, when you cut someone off in traffic, as well as the time you chose not to do so, just as it is when a political leader publicly defines groups as enemies or your great-aunt refuses to do the same.

Value is also expressed in, well, value. When we choose not to provide access to certain institutions, certain areas of the economy, certain paths to happiness, we explicitly and monetarily devalue the people who need that access. When we force people below the poverty line by directly excluding them from the few paths that exist to make personal economics work, when we suggest there is something inherently flawed in them, rather than in the system that produced the settings of their stories—often generations in the past—we are devaluing them not in some symbolic or metaphorical way but in a concrete way, one that I can quantify because it has numbers.

I’m still more interested in the shared stories. We cannot have a shared story if you do not believe my personal one has value, or if I believe that about yours. Cohesion requires connection, which requires communication, which requires respect, which requires access, which requires language. I wonder what shared stories we have been writing in the year since Haidt’s Atlantic article. There are some stories of horrific cruelty and some stories of kindness and beauty. They are often directly connected, sometimes as sequels.

I have learned that, even when we lack power, we have ways to claim our voices. Legal ugliness and ethical befuddlement seem to be pretty darn solidly fused to the ground, but they are not the only stories. We can write stories, too, and those stories, from the bottom up, are the stories that become the defining narratives that might shape the top, as well. They certainly are the stories that scare the people doing the silencing. At least I’m still hoping.

If you haven’t, yet, I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s story, old-ish, but jarringly relevant.