I’m suspending this list. However, I will be sending occasional notices to Wade’s Friends. If you did not receive the following Wade’s Friends email recently and want me to subscribe you to this list, please reply YES to this post. If you did receive it, I apologize for the cross-posting.
Wade
+++++
Dear Friends
In recent weeks, dialogues with associates and reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death have prompted significant changes in my beliefs about the Compassionate Humanity Community website.
Accordingly, I’ve rewritten the Preface, which articulates my motives, and modified the homepage.
I no longer propose replacing the “Top-Down System” with a “Bottom-Up System.” Instead, I propose steadily reforming “the System” to make our society more compassionate, just, and democratic.
I use “would” and “could” to describe possibilities rather than a more ambitious vision imagined in the present tense.
Nevertheless, I still advocate a pragmatic idealism that affirms ideals as goals while accepting that we’ll never fully achieve them.
With the new Preface, I peel away surplus language and express my core beliefs.
I believe this worldview fills a void; it presents unique proposals for action.
The new Preface and homepage aren’t perfect. I’ll constantly improve them and the rest of the site and would greatly appreciate your assistance.
So please read the Preface and leave a public comment using the form at the bottom of the page.
For 60 years, my colleagues and I organized egalitarian, supportive communities. Now, I sum up what I’ve learned.
As I peeled away the layers of my motivations for writing this book, I repeatedly asked myself, “Why do I want to do that?” and concluded:
I feel morally obligated to encourage compassionate action, help empower individuals and communities, nurture deep respect for everyone’s essential equality, support the right to self-determination, and strengthen justice and democracy throughout society.
So, on this website, I present resources to clarify what humanity is facing and what we can do about it.
The modern world foments ruthless competition, suppresses cooperation, and advances selfishness. Individuals, organizations, businesses, and nations compete relentlessly to gain more power, money, and respect — by any means necessary.
Politicians, for instance, take extraordinary measures, including waging war, to stay in office, and nations inflame conflicts between foreign forces to enhance their power (divide and conquer).
These problems are interconnected. They reproduce and reinforce each other.
Society integrates our multiple systems into a single self-perpetuating social system that encourages everyone to climb social ladders, look down on, exploit, and dominate those below, and submit to those above.
Various problems such as climate change, unrestrained capitalism, and autocratic politicians are symptoms of this underlying root cause, the Top-Down System.
This reality calls for replacing this system with a Bottom-Up System dedicated to serving humanity, the environment, and life itself (day by day, in countless ways, face-to-face, person-to-person) and maximizing democratic control in every arena.
Society could ensure that everyone has enough to live comfortably within caring communities. This security would free everyone to pursue their dreams, care for their families, and engage in other creative and rewarding recreational activities.
Humanity will never fully achieve this ideal. Nevertheless, guided by pragmatic idealism focused on winnable objectives, practical steps can move in this direction. This ideal can serve as our North Star. Step by step, steadily moving in this direction, compassion-minded people can minimize problems and pioneer new solutions.
Improvements in each arena can strengthen each other in a positive upward spiral. This growth can lead to the emergence of a society that looks and feels fundamentally different. New structurescan organize activities to nurture compassionate action, mutual support, self-determination, individual liberty, community empowerment, and true justice.
Successful efforts can demonstrate models for others to adopt, adapt, and scale up. Each success can generate unforeseen ripple effects and open up new achievable objectives.
Regardless of who wins elections, each nation needs an effective independent force to hold elected officials accountable and push for policy improvements — a movement similar to yet more powerful than the union, civil rights, and women’s movements — a movement of movements whose members, beyond politics, work to transform the whole society into a compassionate community dedicated to relieving suffering, promoting justice, and spreading joy.
A network of small teams whose members build trust, affirm core principles, and support each other with self-improvement could be the foundation for this movement.
United behind a shared commitment that our primary problem is the Top-Down System and the solution is a Bottom-Up System, this movement could mobilize enough people to persuade their government to improve lives with new policies while engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, including strikes, when necessary.
Unfortunately, however, ego-driven power struggles, arrogance, judgmental criticisms, scapegoating opponents and allies, and other personal weaknesses produce lingering resentment, divide people, and weaken organizations.
James Baldwin declared, “I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous, and people are not yet willing to pay it.”
All of us are victims of society’s programming, but we have the power to create alternative futures. If political and social activists face these realities, confess personal mistakes, and resolve to avoid them, they can overcome divisive habits and enhance their power. Movement members could support each other with self-improvement and cultivate a sense of belonging to a large, global community.
This digital book, rooted in a unique worldview, promotes the development of this movement. It integrates the personal and the political and affirms self-development as an inherently worthy goal and a way to nurture fundamental social transformation.
As such, it aims to fill a void. I know no activist organization whose members set aside time to support their self-improvement.
I welcome the opportunity to discuss these ideas with you and others. I will dialogue with an open mind. My learning is an ongoing process.
One study found that testosterone-related increases in anger and hostility did not affect assertiveness. However, another study found that high-testosterone students entered a room more quickly, focused more directly on their targets, and displayed a more forward and independent manner.
Testosterone is a steroid hormone that is associated with dominance behaviors in both animals and humans. Some of the ways testosterone is associated with dominance and status include:
Social dominance
One study found that adolescent boys who were perceived as socially dominant by unfamiliar peers had higher testosterone levels.
Status-seeking
Testosterone is associated with status-seeking motives in human social interaction.
Social hierarchy
High levels of testosterone promote behaviors intended to enhance one’s status over other individuals and to climb up the social hierarchy.
Endogenous testosterone promotes behaviours intended to enhance social dominance. However, recent research suggests that testosterone enhances strategic social behaviour rather than dominance seeking behaviour. This possibility has not been tested in a population whose members are known to vary in social status. Here, we explored the relationship between pre-existing social status and salivary testosterone level among members of a rugby team at a Japanese university, where a strong seniority norm maintains hierarchical relationships. Participants played a series of one-shot Ultimatum Games (UG) both as proposer and responder. Opponents were anonymised but of known seniority. We analysed participants’ acquiescence (how much more they offered beyond the lowest offer they would accept). The results showed that, among the most senior participants, higher testosterone was associated with lower acquiescence. Conversely, higher testosterone among the lower-status participants was associated with higher acquiescence. Our results suggest that testosterone may enhance socially dominant behaviour among high-status persons, but strategic submission to seniority among lower-status persons.
How a Leading Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals Traps Patients
Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found.
By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas
Acadia Healthcare is one of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals. Since the pandemic exacerbated a national mental health crisis, the company’s revenue has soared. Its stock price has more than doubled.
But a New York Times investigation found that some of that success was built on a disturbing practice: Acadia has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary.
Featured in the film, Man of La Mancha. Peter O’Toole dreams of unsullied love and unending gallantry as Don Quixote in this magnificent film version of the stage success. Sophia Loren and James Coco round out the cast.
Lyrics
To dream the impossible dream To fight the unbeatable foe To bear with unbearable sorrow And to run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong And to love pure and chaste from afar To try when your arms are too weary To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest To follow that star No matter how hopeless No matter how far
To fight for the right Without question or pause To be willing to march, march into Hell For that Heavenly cause
And I know if I’ll only be true To this glorious quest That my heart will lie peaceful and calm When I’m laid to my rest
And the world will be better for this That one man, scorned and covered with scars Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable The unreachable The unreachable star
And I’ll always dream the impossible dream Yes, and I’ll reach the unreachable star
COMMENT: Kamala Harris largely off-loaded the “joy” onto the speakers and presentations that preceded her, as she presented a steely, anger-tinged, prosecutorial acceptance speech aimed at convincing voters of her Commander-in-Chief credentials. She also avoided talking about poor people. These measures may help her win in November. However, this article reports how many Democratic Party efforts do aim to reduce poverty.
The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rates down, but their approaches could hardly be more different. The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rateThe presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans. [behind paywall] (read more) (posted in Poverty)
If Your World Is Not Enchanted,
You’re Not Paying Attention
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 11
L. M. Sacasas
Aug 22
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. In this installment, I return to a perennial subject for me: attention and its moral dimensions. Because I do come back to this topic more than most, I sometimes feel as if I ought to give it a rest. But I continue to think that it is a vital matter, and a key to so much else. So, once again, some thoughts about attention, enchantment, and, ultimately, love.
Disenchantment is one of the most venerable, and contested, concepts in the vast literature devoted to understanding the state of affairs we call modernity.
The term was popularized by the eminent German sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. It is an English translation of a German word, Entzauberung, that means something like “de-magic-ifcation.” To say that the modern world is disenchanted is to say that it is no longer experienced as a realm of magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents. According to some accounts, it also means that we inhabit a world bereft of any intrinsic meaning or purpose and which thus generates relations of alienation and exploitation.
I am, of course, glossing a long and multi-faceted tradition of scholarship, which has more recently included arguments to the effect that we have never been disenchanted or that the world remains enchanted (although more like enchanting) if only we’re willing to embrace certain modes of being. The former position is staked out by Jason Josephson-Storm in The Myth of Disenchantment, and the latter claim is argued by Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life. And while I do have my own lightly-informed positions on these debates, I certainly don’t intend to adjudicate them here.
Instead, I simply want to posit one idea for your consideration: Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention.¹
In other words, what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?²
In suggesting this correlation between attention and enchantment, I am partially endorsing Bennett’s argument that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” Bennett, a political philosopher interested in the ethical dimensions of enchantment, which she treats more like a state of wonder, believes that enchantment is something “that we encounter, that hits us, but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies.”
One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.
The Little Owl, Albrecht Dürer
As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. According to Roberts, achieving this kind of knowledge and quality of experience requires “time and strategic patience,” which is a form of “immersive attention.”
To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”³
This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.⁴
After all, attention can also be understood simply as the name for the contact the mind makes with the world, and, if it is sufficiently attenuated, our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer. This, too, is one of the concerns animating Bennett’s explorations of enchantment. “You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it,” she adds, “in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.”
In her view, the story we’ve been told about disenchantment already conditions us against the attention that we must necessarily bring to the world in order to perceive its enchanted quality. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think more than the story of disenchantment is at work here, but she is right to observe that we are trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.
What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.
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1 I know. The word “just” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If you pushed me for greater precision, I would drop it. But it has a certain rhetorical force I want to retain, at least initially.
2 It is intriguing and suggestive to me that critical scholarship on attention arises, more or less, at the same time, the late 19th and early 20th century, as the sociological literature on disenchantment. Make of that what you will.
4 It may seem tangential, but I’ll just tuck this paragraph from one of C. S. Lewis’s letters here for the sake of whoever finds it interesting: “Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when the family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air & later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”
So much for The Politics of Joy. As CNN’s Audie Cornish stated immediately after Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, “Some were saying she was a joyful warrior. Tonight she was a warrior.” Harris did not ride the convention’s wave of positive energy. It was as if she had not watched her own convention.
On August 7, in a CNN analysis, Stephen Collinson reported, “Happy warriors Harris and Walz propose(d) an antidote to Trump’s American carnage” He reported, “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to make America joyful again. The vice president’s rocking rollout of her running mate on Tuesday sent jolts of energy through a huge crowd, as the pair personified the extraordinary transformation of the 2024 election campaign.”
Yesterday, after Tim Walz’s inspiring speech, I commented, “As individuals and as a society, we can tap into love and control hate. The Kamala Harris campaign against Donald Trump will test this belief.” Following the Obamas’ Tuesday night values-laden speeches, I expressedappreciation for their
rare affirmations of two principles at the heart of the Compassionate Humanity Community project…. Michele used a great phrase that was new to me despite how obvious it is. It hits the nail on the head: ‘ensuring that everyone has enough.’… (And) Barack once again addressed the need for self-improvement to overcome personal weaknesses that society inflames…. We need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices…. We need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process.
On Thursday night, however, Harris relied on righteous anger to present a traditional Democratic laundry list of policy goals “on behalf of the middle class.” Harris reverted to the emphasis on an “opportunity economy” that enables “more” people to “get ahead” of others and enter the middle class, as I had feared prior to the emergence of the campaign’s joyful concentration on positive values. Starting gate equality prevailed.
Her strident speech emphasized a prosecutorial pursuit of justice. It was more the politics of anger than a politics of joy and compassion. It was a politics of power.
On the issue of Palestine, however, she backed away from the forceful use of American leverage to protect the Palestinians. She said their suffering was “devastating” and “heartbreaking,” but she did not say the Israeli attacks were unjustified. She supported Palestinian “self-determination,” but she did not affirm a two-state solution or call for the settlers to stop their West Bank expansion. She gave no indication she would consider placing conditions on American military aid to Israel.
On the domestic front, she gave little or no backing for cultural and personal change. She concluded, “Let’s vote for it.”
Fortunately, Donald Trump will likely continue to operate “on tilt,” mentally and emotionally confused and irrational. Harris will likely win in a landside as Trump implodes, but she may fail to cultivate deep transformation.
When I recently added “spread joy” to the CHC mission statement, I worried the phrase would be too “New Age.” I had studied The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and have often used the phrase “contagious happiness” that I picked up from the Buddhist monk Ajahn Amaro. I didn’t know the Harris campaign would unleash a tsunami of joy.
Since Lucinda Williams’ concert Sunday at the Stern Grove Festival, her song, ”Joy,” has haunted me. She sings
You got no right to take my joy, I want it back I’m gonna go to West Memphis and look for my joy
This song inspires me and reinforces my commitment to enjoying my work, which is inherently rewarding and rooted in compassion. When I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, I do something else.
Humans are torn between love and hate. Resolving this fundamental contradiction is ongoing and never final.
Because the “reptilian brain” is the oldest part of the brain, some people believe hate is stronger than love. This part of the brain regulates breathing, the heart rate, and the “fight or flight response” at super-fast speeds and is often unconscious. Bad actors and difficult conditions can quickly trigger fear, which can lead to anger and hate.
Humans, however, are also instinctively compassionate and cooperative. If early humans had not learned to cooperate, they would never have survived. These instincts are now deeply embedded. Compassion is also deeply rooted in the brain.
The predictive paths from compassion to vital exhaustion and negative emotionality were stronger than vice versa… Overall, high compassion appears to protect against dimensions of stress from early adulthood to middle age, whereas this study found no evidence that dimensions of stress could reduce disposition to feel compassion for others’ distress over a long-term follow-up.
Humans learn to love in the tactile warmth of the womb and while being cared for as infants.
However, whether love or hate is a deeper and stronger instinct is ultimately an irrelevant academic debate. As individuals and as a society, we can tap into love and control hate. The Kamala Harris campaign against Donald Trump will test this belief.
Have no doubt about it, however. As Thomas B. Edsall wrote on August 21, “Trump Isn’t Finished.” This essay is so good and so important that I pasted it into a Google Docso anyone can read it without a New York Times subscription.
Edsall reports:
The corporate qualms that surfaced in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection have been subordinated to the prospect of billions in tax breaks for business and the rich if Trump returns to office.
According to OpenSecrets, of the $472.8 million Trump and allied PACs have raised through the middle of this year, a quarter, $115.4 million, has come from the securities and investment industry, the financial core of the Republican establishment. In 2016, this industry effectively shunned Trump, giving him a paltry $20.8 million.
Moreover, several other factors also pose dangers. This time Trump will have a clear agenda, a carefully prepared list of prospective loyalists to appoint to key posts, and a better understanding of the workings of the federal government. Trump has driven Republican opponents out of elective office. And he has a friendly 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.
Sean Wilentz argues, “Many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda.”
And Timothy Snyder warns:
Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure, which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.
To counter this threat, America needs a powerful, unified grassroots movement, a movement of movements. Even if Harris wins, Trump will not go away unless Harris wins in a landside, MAGA candidates lose across the board, and the Republican Party excommunicates Trump and reconstitutes itself.
Regardless, however, even if that scenario ensues, an effective, independent movement will still be needed to counter the opposition, pressure the Democrats, hold them accountable, and get them to do more than they would otherwise.
As I discussed yesterday, the standard Democratic starting-gate-equality stance emphasizes “opportuntiy” and neglects the needs of those who fall behind or never get out of the gate. The typical abstract commitment to “never leave anyone behind” is empty. “Building the middle class” ignores poor people.
Michele Obama, on the other hand, articulated a goal that could help unify a broader-based movement: “ensuring that everyone has enough.” This position has more substance.
So does Barack’s affirming “the freedom to provide for your family if you’re willing to work hard.” Moreover, these formulations avoid the negative implications of the “get ahead” rhetoric.
Moreover, a new, unified grassroots movement will need to provide mutual support for self-improvement to deal with divisive personal habits. Barack confronted this issue when he said, “We need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices. And that if we want to win over those who aren’t yet ready to support our candidates, we need to listen to their concerns and maybe learn something in the process.”
Unfortunately, however, since their speeches, I’ve heard no one echo or amplify these positions.
Another major problem is the narrow emphasis on elections. Yes, elections are important. However, year-round precinct organizing could help transform the Democratic Party into a force that serves local needs, engages in ongoing political action to advance the Party’s platform, and wins elections.
