Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

No Wall Between Amigos - La Lomita Chapel

No Wall Between Amigos

The crisis continues at the U.S.-Mexico border.

By Sandi Villarreal 

November 2018, Soujourners

 A SMALL WHITE CHAPEL sits just a couple hundred yards north of the Rio Grande river in Mission, Texas. While the chapel no longer hosts an active parish, its interior shows signs of frequent use. Prayer candles and silk flowers line the altar and the base of a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe. An entryway table holds dozens of prayers, written on folded loose-leaf paper. Children’s composition notebooks, filled with more handwritten prayers, are stacked in piles.

“Please watch over our brothers, sisters, and all the children being held hostage at the border,” one prayer says. And another: “Please bless our health & the children being separated from their parents @ the border.”

La Lomita Chapel is now part of a municipal park and serves as a rest stop for passersby—while Border Patrol trucks sit just outside the park entrance and a helicopter circles overhead. The chapel land was originally granted to Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate priests in the mid-1800s. Given its location—midway between mission centers in Brownsville and Roma, Texas—La Lomita served as a meeting place and “housed transient visitors to the mission,” according to a historic marker on the site.

I visited the chapel, quite by accident, during a reporting trip at the border at the height of the family separation crisis. The separation of parents and children moved the hearts—and wallets—of people across the nation. But that fervor waned after a U.S. District Court judge gave a July deadline for reunification and more than 1,500 children were reunited with their parents, largely thanks to the efforts of faith groups and advocates. For many, it seemed, the story was over. The reality is that the crisis continues.

As of this writing, 497 children remain separated from their parents, 22 of whom are under the age of 5. More than 300 parents have been deported, and many who signed a waiver to be reunited say they were coerced. Children, including some babies and toddlers, haven’t seen their parents in months. It’s likely that some of those children will never see their parents again.

Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

But even that tragedy is just part of an overwhelming story of what happens every day at our border as hundreds of families cross from South to North seeking refuge and finding a broken system with little space to accommodate them. Instead of engaging in efforts to fix the system, the Trump administration has zeroed in on one “solution”: erecting a border wall.

Last year, Father Roy Snipes, who serves at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church and watches over the nearby La Lomita mission, organized a prayer walk and rally at La Lomita protesting the proposed border wall. The current plan would cut off the historic site and place the chapel between the wall and the Rio Grande. Residents’ signs listed a host of environmental and humanitarian grievances. The most pressing? Immigrants demonized by the Trump administration are, quite literally, their neighbors.

“No wall between amigos,” read one of the church’s signs. Though plans and congressional funding are still on track to build a wall along the border through parts of Hidalgo County, the faith resistance continues.

The prayers of the faithful lifted at La Lomita Chapel serve as a reminder that the story of Christian faith is one of migration, of sojourning, of welcoming—and of warning to those who refuse their welcome. As Snipes put it at the protest, “We continue the journey through time into eternity, and we know we are only here for a little while, so we make haste to be kind and we are quick to love.”

 

Unfamiliar words: fugacious

Likely more than you want to know:

fugacious: according to Merriam-Webster, lasting a short time, evanescent.

"Fugacious is often used to describe immaterial things like emotions, but not always. Botanists, for example, use it to describe plant parts that wither or fall off before the usual time. Things that are fugacious are fleeting, and etymologically they can also be said to be fleeing. Fugacious derives from the Latin verb fugere, which means "to flee." Other descendants of fugere include fugitive, refuge, and subterfuge."

Examples of fugacious:

The rock band's rise in popularity turned out to be fugacious, and within two years its members had moved on to other careers.

"The maple leaves are a yellow light signaling me to slow down and take in the last pulse of color of a fugacious fall."
— David Johnson, The Daily News of Newburyport (Massachusetts), 26 Nov. 2013

 

If one turns to the OED, fugacious is defined as "apt to flee away or flit," and then breaks the definition down into its uses in different contexts:

a. Of immaterial things: Tending to disappear, of short duration; evanescent, fleeting, transient, fugitive.

b. Of persons: †Ready to run away. Also humorously (of persons), fleeing; (of things) slippery. rare.

c. Of a material substance: Volatile.

d. Botany and Zoology. Falling or fading early; soon cast off. Cf. caducous adj.

 

Brouhaha (and the OED)

One of the pleasures of being a writer—or a reader for that matter—is an affection for words and their meanings. The finest and most well known English dictionary, far and away, is, of course, the Oxford English Dictionary, largely because of its inclusion of the historical evolution of each word's usage. The OED is published in several volumes, and in two volumes requiring a magnifying glass to read, but in this digital age, it is far more easily accessed online, with its own website. The OED, even on its website, is not inexpensive to use. An annual subscription to the online version now normally costs $295/year, but now, in celebration of its 90th year of publication, the OED is available for $90/year in the U.S. and £90 in the U.K. Most public libraries subscribe to the OED, and the library subscription can be used for free from one's home.

Obviously, there are other reputable dictionaries, of which one, Merriam-Webster, has a "Word of the Day" email newsletter, with definition, usage, pronunciation, and commentary about word origins. 

The occasion for these notes is that today's Word of the Day is one of my favorite words which I have too little occasion to use. The word is "brouhaha," meaning "a state of commotion or excitement: hubbub, uproar." 

Merriam-Webster continues its Word of the Day message: "Some etymologists think brouhaha is onomatopoeic in origin, but others believe it comes from the Classical Hebrew phrase barukh habba', meaning 'blessed be he who arrives' (Psalms 118:26). Although we borrowed brouhaha directly from French in the late 18th century, etymologists have connected the French derivation to that frequently recited Hebrew phrase, distorted to something like brouhaha by worshippers whose knowledge of Hebrew was limited. The word eventually came to be used in a sense similar to 'applause' and in the sense of 'a noisy confusion of sound'—the latter being the sense that was later extended in English to refer to any tumultuous and confused situation."

Examples of brouhaha (again, from Merriam-Webster):

There was much brouhaha in the tabloids over the young actor's sudden marriage to the woman who had been his high school sweetheart.

 

But where do you go, when the temperatures are soaring and you want to cool off but without all of the brouhaha that comes along with a trip to one of our more popular, crowded city beaches?

Rebecca Solnit on storytelling and "calling things by their true names"

I don’t know why, but it's been a while since I have received the wonderful weekly called Brainpickings, a splendid collection of short essays by its creator, Maria Popova. So I was glad when today’s email included her most recent issue. Of the several intriguing pieces therein I found one that particularly stands out for me, because it is focused on the theme of storytelling, and because it is a description of the latest book of essays by a favorite writer, Rebecca Solnit: Call Them by Their True Names.

Since coming to my current abode among the redwoods of northern California, I've had many opportunities for exploration and growth, one of them being membership in a weekly group called "Searching for Meaning." We focus each week on aspects of our experience during the past few days in which we have found ourselves seeking and sometimes finding new meaning in our lives. So I found particular satisfaction in Rebecca Solnit's characterization of that process: "Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it's an individual or the earth itself.; and toward the historical record. It's also a kind of self-respect...The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you."

______________________

 

Rebecca Solnit on Rewriting the World’s Broken Stories and the Paradigm-Shifting Power of Calling Things by Their True Names

“Finding the words is another step in learning to see," botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers dignity upon life. If to name is to see and reveal — to remove the veil of blindness, willful or manipulated, and expose things as they really are — then it is in turn another step in remaking the world, another form of resistance to the damaging dominant narratives that go unquestioned. Walt Whitman knew this when he contemplated our greatest civic might: "I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy."

A century and a half after Whitman, Rebecca Solnit — one of our own era’s boldest public defenders of democracy, and
one of the most poetic — explores this crucial causal link between the stories we tell and the world we build in Call Them By Their True Names — a collection of her essays at the nexus of politics, philosophy, and the selective record of personal and political choices we call history. Composed in response to more than a decade’s worth of cultural crises and triumphs, the pieces in the book furnish an extraordinarily lucid yet hopeful lens on the present and a boldly uncynical telescopic perspective on the future.

Solnit writes in the preface:

"One of the folktale archetypes, according to the Aarne-Thompson classification of these stories, tells of how “a mysterious or threatening helper is defeated when the hero or heroine discovers his name.” In the deep past, people knew names had power. Some still do. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, buffer, muddle, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness. It’s not all there is to changing the world, but it’s a key step.

"When the subject is grim, I think of the act of naming as diagnosis. Though not all diagnosed diseases are curable, once you know what you’re facing, you’re far better equipped to know what you can do about it. Research, support, and effective treatment, as well as possibly redefining the disease and what it means, can proceed from this first step. Once you name a disorder, you may be able to connect to the community afflicted with it, or build one. And sometimes what’s diagnosed can be cured."

That, indeed, is what the philosopher and Trappist monk Thomas Merton celebrated in his beautiful fan letter to Rachel Carson after she catalyzed the modern environmental movement by speaking inconvenient truth to power in exposing the truth about pesticides, marketed at the time as harmless helpers to humanity — an act Merton considered “contributing a most valuable and essential piece of evidence for the diagnosis of the ills of our civilization.” Such naming of wrongs, betrayals, and corruptions unweaves the very fabric of the status quo. It is, Solnit argues, “the first step in the process of liberation” and often leads to shifts in the power system itself. In the age of “alternative facts,” when language is used as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, her words reverberate with the irrepressible, unsilenceable urgency of truth:

"To name something truly is to lay bare what may be brutal or corrupt — or important or possible — and key to the work of changing the world is changing the story."

More than a century after Nietzsche contemplated truth, lies, and the power of language to both conceal and reveal reality, Solnit writes:

"There are so many ways to tell a lie. You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that the white kids are 'hanging out' but the Black kids are 'loitering' or 'lurking.' Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them."

What, then, can we do as namers and storytellers, as part of the truth-telling brigade that stands as warden of reality? Solnit offers:

"Precision, accuracy, and clarity matter, as gestures of respect toward those to whom you speak; toward the subject, whether it’s an individual or the earth itself; and toward the historical record. It’s also a kind of self-respect… The search for meaning is in how you live your life but also in how you describe it and what else is around you."

The precision and respect of our words add up to the precision and respect of our stories — something Virginia Woolf implicitly recognized when she asserted that “words belong to each other” in the only surviving recording of her voice. When James Baldwin insisted that "we made the world we're living in and we have to make it over," he did so with an eye to storytelling as worldbuilding. Solnit addresses this — the remaking of stories as a remodeling of the world — in another piece in the book, exploring the responsibility of those tasked with telling the world’s truths: the writers, journalists, and storytellers whose words shape our understanding of reality. She writes:

"Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. Being a public storyteller requires the same skills with larger consequences and responsibilities, because your story becomes part of that water, undermining or reinforcing the existing stories. Your job is to report on the story on the surface, the contained story, the one that happened yesterday. It’s also to see and sometimes to break open or break apart the ambient stories, the stories that are already written, and to understand the relationship between the two."

In a testament to the crucial importance — and difficulty — of breaking out of our presentism bias and taking a telescopic perspective of the past, she adds:

"There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those 'dominant narratives' or 'paradigms' or 'memes' or 'metaphors we live by' or 'frameworks.' However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions.

[…]

"Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making, in this kind of writing."

In a sense, what Solnit is advocating for is the opposite of revisionist history — the opposite of the convenient erasure of wrongdoings and betrayals over which the lulling stories of the status quo are written. I think of it as revisionist future — the act of courage and creativity required for changing the terrain of reality by imagining alternative landscapes and new pathways of possibility. “We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice,” Ursula K. Le Guin observed in her poignant reflection on how imaginative storytelling expands the scope of the possible. “We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom.”

But the most powerful and transformative imagination, Solnit reminds us, is the informed imagination:

"The writer’s job is not to look through the window someone else built, but to step outside, to question the framework, or to dismantle the house and free what’s inside, all in service of making visible what was locked out of the view. News journalism focuses on what changed yesterday rather than asking what are the underlying forces and who are the unseen beneficiaries of this moment’s status quo… This is why you need to know your history, even if you’re a journalist rather than a historian. You need to know the patterns to see how people are fitting the jumble of facts into what they already have: selecting, misreading, distorting, excluding, embroidering, distributing empathy here but not there, remembering this echo or forgetting that precedent.

"Some of the stories we need to break are not exceptional events, they’re the ugly wallpaper of our everyday lives. For example, there’s a widespread belief that women lie about being raped, not a few women, not an anomalous woman, but women in general. This framework comes from the assumption that reliability and credibility are as natural to men as mendacity and vindictiveness are to women. In other words, feminists just made it all up, because otherwise we’d have to question a really big story whose nickname is patriarchy. But the data confirms that people who come forward about being raped are, overall, telling the truth (and that rapists tend to lie, a lot). Many people have gotten on board with the data, many have not, and so behind every report on a sexual assault is a battle over the terms in which we tell, in what we believe about gender and violence."

An illustration by Arthur Rackham from the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm

 

She considers the only antidote to these age-old stories:

"Journalists are the story-breakers whose work often changes the belief systems that then drive legislative and institutional change. It’s powerful, honorable, profoundly necessary work when it’s done with passion and independence and guts."

Building on her previous history-informed insistence that "the grounds for hope are in the shadows, in the people who are inventing the world while no one looks, who themselves don't know yet whether they will have any effect," she highlights our warped weighing of which stories matter. Exactly half a century after Hannah Arendt — another of our civilization’s great political minds — considered the power of outsiderdom and asserted that “we humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human,” Solnit writes:

"We tend to treat people on the fringe as ideologues and those in the center as neutral, as though the decision not to own a car is political and the decision to own one is not, as though to support a war is neutral and to oppose it is not. There is no apolitical, no sidelines, no neutral ground; we’re all engaged.

[…]

"I think of the mainstream media as having not so much a rightwing or leftwing bias but a status quo bias, a tendency to believe people in authority, to trust institutions and corporations and the rich and powerful and pretty much any self-satisfied white man in a suit; to let people who have been proven to tell lies tell more lies that get reported without questioning; to move forward on cultural assumptions that are readily disproven; and to devalue nearly all outsiders, whether they’re discredited or mocked or just ignored."

Solnit turns to the largest-scale cultural assumption, erected by our civilization’s most unforgiving institutional, corporate, and political power structures — the selfsame assumption Carson had begun to dismantle half a century earlier — from which arises our largest-scale truth-telling responsibility:

"For journalists and for human beings generally, the elephant in the room has been there for a long time. It’s not even the elephant: the elephant in the room is the room itself, the biosphere in which all life currently known to exist in the universe is enclosed, and on which it all depends, the biosphere now devastated by climate change, with far more change to come. The scale is not like anything human beings have faced and journalists have reported on, except perhaps the threat of all-out nuclear war — and that was something that might happen, not something that is happening. Climate change is here, and it is changing everything. It is bigger than anything else, because it is everything, for the imaginable future.

[…]

"Future generations are going to curse most of us for distracting ourselves with trivialities as the planet burned. Journalists are in a pivotal place when it comes to the possibilities and the responsibilities in this crisis. We, the makers and breakers of stories, are tremendously powerful.

"So please, break the story."

Complement this particular portion of Call Them By Their True Names with Iris Murdoch on why storytelling is essential for democracy, Ursula K. Le Guin on the power of language to transform and redeem, and Susan Sontag on storytelling and what it means to be a decent human being, then revisit Solnit on breaking silence, living with intelligent hope in dispiriting times, catastrophe as a catalyst for human goodness, the rewards of walking, how maps can oppress and liberate, and why we read. [See elsewhere in Brainpickings for discussion of all of these.]

 

 

The Deep Stories of Our Time — Arlie Hochschild

I don't usually post longer pieces on Reckonings, but this one is a great exception, and in the accessible form of a conversation, an interview by Krista Tippett, founder of the valuable online program "On Being," with well-known scholar, writer and teacher Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her many books include The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. If you would rather listen to their conversation rather than read it, you may do so here.

FROM KRISTA TIPPETT’S “ON BEING,” October 18, 2018

 

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD

The Deep Stories of Our Time

 

One of the voices many have been turning to in recent years is Arlie Hochschild. She helped create the field of the sociology of emotion — our stories as “felt” rather than merely factual. When she published her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, in the fall of 2016, it felt like she had chronicled the human dynamics that have now come to upend American culture. It was based on five years of friendship and research in Tea Party country at that movement’s height, far from her home in Berkeley, California. Her understanding of emotion in society and politics feels even more important at this juncture. So does the reflective, self-critical sensibility this experience gave Arlie Hochschild on her own liberal instincts. Caring, she says, is not the same as capitulating.

ARLIE HOCHSCHILD: It doesn’t mean that you’re capitulating — that’s the misunderstanding, I think, especially on the left. “Oh, if you listen to them, that means you’ve been taken over.” Not at all.

TIPPETT: It just means being emotionally intelligent.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. We all need to be makers. If you want to make a social contribution and help build a public conversation about the big issues of the day, you have to really be good at emotion management. It’s a contribution to the larger whole, to be really good at that.
TIPPETT: You were the child of a Foreign Service officer, so it sounds like you grew up all over the world.
HOCHSCHILD: I lived in Israel, from age 12 to 14 — very pivotal experience. Then Wellington, New Zealand. Then my folks were in Ghana, and I spent a summer in Ghana, but by then I was in college. Then they were in Tunisia. I was very fortunate, really, to get to experience all of that.
TIPPETT: Was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood in your family or in those places?
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, I would say. My parents were very religious Unitarians. For Unitarians, the message I took away is that it’s a very big world, and we have to learn to get to know and empathize with people in radically different cultures. I think by the time I was 16, I had that message, but I felt something missing. I got interested in the Quakers, who seemed to be much more “OK, gang, so what are we gonna do about it?” Unitarians were very talky, [laughs] big talkers — talk, talk, talk. Quakers, they were doers.
TIPPETT: I think how you’ve spoken about how living in that diplomatic world — you are known within sociology as the founder of the sociology of emotion. I just want to summarize — and tell me if I get this wrong, but it feels important. I want to really dive deep into that the backdrop, in terms of how we analyze and address political and social dynamics, especially in a time of discord like this, where the sides become more defined, and everybody seems incomprehensible to everybody else. You describe in the book: There are ways of thinking about how people are being manipulated or bought; there are ways of analyzing how people are being misled; and then there are ways of us describing how we’re just different and that there are distinct cultural values. You’ve said that for you, and especially as you’ve watched these last few years unfold in American and, now, global life, what is missing for you in all of this — while all of these ways of analyzing are useful — is an acknowledgment of the reality of emotion in politics.
HOCHSCHILD: Right, and empathy. The idea of emotion being basic and foundational to social and political life is not new. Max Weber talked of it and Emile Durkheim, so that’s not new. But I found that this important, foundational reality of our feelings — we didn’t have a language, a way of conceptualizing it that was useful. Certainly three decades ago, the idea was that either you were thinking, or you were emotional.
I thought, “There’s something wrong about that because when you’re emotional, you are seeing the world in a particular way, and you have thoughts about the way you see it; you are thinking. When you’re rational — take the stock exchange, where people are making these “rational” decisions about buy/sell/buy/sell stocks on the stock exchange. They are excited, they’re elated, they’re depressed — they’re emotional. These two are intertwined in ways we have not carefully understood. So, yes, it led me to become extremely interested in emotion, in managing emotions, evoking emotions and suppressing emotions, in daily life and in work. I got interested in that.

TIPPETT: I think that’s so important, yes, that we don’t have a language for it but that also, especially in the late 20th century, I think, we don’t know how to take emotions seriously. [laughs] I think this is such an important statement you make, that runs all the way through your work, that, also, we think the other side is being emotional, and we are not. And the really important realization is that this a piece of how we are all inhabiting the moment.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. Exactly.
TIPPETT: And that it’s social. That’s one of your big points that this line between our private emotional lives and social realities — acknowledging that is just being reality-based. It’s kind of like being in the world as it is and not as we fantasize it should be.
HOCHSCHILD: Right. In my latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land, I got very interested in something I call the “deep story,” which is a way of thinking about emotion. I live and have long taught sociology at Berkeley, in California, which is a blue state, as you know, blue town.
TIPPETT: I think I’ve heard that, yeah. [laughs]
HOCHSCHILD: And in 2011, I realized that, already, the country was falling apart. There were increasing divides between Democrats, Republicans, left, right, and that I didn’t understand those on the right, and that I was in a bubble. So I determined to get out of my bubble and come to know people that were as far-right as Berkeley, California, was left, and to try and climb what I called an “empathy wall” to permit myself a great deal of curiosity about the experiences and viewpoints of people that I knew I would have differences with. It turned out to be an extraordinary experience. It took me five years of really getting to know people, asking where they were born; where their school was; what row they sat in, in school; what their favorite thing to do was; where their ancestors were buried, and in the course of going fishing with them, in the course of really getting to know them, I came up with this idea of a deep story as a way of getting to emotion.
TIPPETT: That wasn’t a phrase you’d used before, the “deep story”?
HOCHSCHILD: No.
TIPPETT: The "narrative as felt." Right; that’s such an important — how would you start to tell the deep story of our time as you inhabited it in that experience?
HOCHSCHILD: What I came to feel and realize is that both the left and the right have different deep stories. What is a deep story? A deep story is what you feel about a highly salient situation that’s very important to you. You take facts out of the deep story. You take moral precepts out of the deep story. It’s what feels true. I think we all have deep stories, whatever our politics, but that we’re not fully aware of them. They’re dreamlike and are told through metaphor.
The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you’re waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve. It’s like waiting in a pilgrimage, and the line isn’t moving. Your feet are tired. You feel you are properly deserving of this reward that’s ahead. And the idea is, you don’t begrudge anyone in this right deep story. You’re not a hateful person. But then you see — the second moment of the right-wing deep story — somebody cutting ahead of you. Why are they getting special treatment?

Then, in another moment, the president of the country, Barack Obama, who should be tending fairly to all waiters-in-line, seems to be waving to the line cutters. In fact, “Is he a line cutter?” — the idea is. How did his mother — she was a single mother, not a rich woman — afford a Harvard education, a Columbia education? Something fishy happened. That was the thought there.

In a final moment, someone from the coasts, someone highly educated, someone from that so-called elite, turns around, and they’re really close to the prize, or they have the prize. But they turn around and look at the others who are waiting in line and say, “Oh, you backward, Southern, ill-educated, racist, sexist, homophobic redneck.” That is the estranging thing, that insult. And then they felt like strangers in their own land. “Wait a minute.” They would say — one man told me, “ I live your metaphor.” Another one said, “You read my mind.” Another one said, “No, you have it wrong. The people in line are paying for the line cutters, and that’s why we’re enraged.” Another one said, “Oh, look, we leave that line. We secede. We’re getting another leader.” They gave it different endings. But, you can see, it’s my effort to get at feeling and how detached it can become from facts.

TIPPETT: Yes, and something I think a lot about, and this comes through in you talking about the deep story — as you said, facts and moral precepts arise out of the deep story...
HOCHSCHILD: No; actually, we take them out of it.
TIPPETT:We take them out of the story.
HOCHSCHILD: We remove them from it. It’s not about facts, and it’s not about moral attitudes, either. It’s a felt truth.
TIPPETT: Yes, embodied.
HOCHSCHILD: In fact, when I went back and forth between Berkeley and the people I came to know and really respect in the “other world” of the South, Southwest Louisiana, I came to realize that they were looking at different truths.
There are facts. I believe in the reality of facts. But the deep story — and again, we all have a deep story — it repels certain facts that don’t fit it, and it invites other facts that do.

TIPPETT: You, in Strangers in Their Own Land, take up what you call a “keyhole issue” to go deep into, what are the dynamics that collect around a specific subject and to really understand the dynamics. You talk about the “great paradox.” You point at this dynamic that in the part of the country that you were in, there is, first of all, an abundant and beautiful natural environment and great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.
I think that’s such an example of where people from the outside of all the dynamics that go into that would say, “It’s just obvious.”

HOCHSCHILD: But, you know, there’s a background. I think, partly, the people I came to know in Louisiana felt that the federal government was a bigger, badder version of local government. The truth is that in the state of Louisiana, the local government, that is, the state government, has not protected people from pollution.
TIPPETT: There's this passage in Strangers in Their Own Land, that — as an example of this, and maybe this is the person you’re talking about: Harold. “The state always seems to come down on the little guy,” he notes. “Take this bayou. If your motorboat leaks a little gas into the water, the warden'll write you up. But if companies leak thousands of gallons of it and kill all the life here? The state lets them go.” That example hits home. I can see that.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes. The big companies are so rich and powerful that they basically have bought the legislature. In other words, the companies have outsourced the moral dirty work to the state. They say, “OK, let’s get a legislature that goes along with our development. Let’s talk jobs, jobs, jobs.” So the companies, with the money that the state gives them in this — I think it was 1.6 billion dollars that was, in the last five years, offered to the companies…
TIPPETT: In Louisiana?
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, to come in with that public money, which came from taxes — they then can make donations to the Audubon Society or for new football uniforms for LSU games. They’re looking good and setting up third grade classes in chemistry. Meanwhile, the state officials, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, is being very weak and giving out permits, as one of the people I interviewed said, “like candy.” The state looks terrible, but the company looks good. It’s kind of emotional, actual, manipulation, you could say, to get you to feel like the company is your friend and to feel like the state is your enemy.
TIPPETT: You also describe this interesting dynamic that, again, is nuanced. It’s not something that would be obvious to anybody — a lot of this is true. For example, you have this chapter called “The Rememberers,” and there’s this amazing sentence about a sociological understanding that memory, just in general, is an indirect expansion of power. And then you say, “So ironically, strangely, embarrassingly, the memory of Southern environmental glory fell, in part, to respectful clerks in federal offices and to northern environmentalists.” There’s so much complexity there.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, doesn’t it break your heart? It does mine, because the people I came to know, know more about the environment — they know which fish are in what area , where you set the crab pots, what ducks you can shoot at what period of the year. They love their land. And yet they’re caught, the people working in the plants. I talked to a woman — I asked, “Do you talk to your neighbors about the environment?” She said, “Our neighbors work in the plants, and I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I don’t want them to feel accused.” As if the people working in the plants would take on the guilt.
TIPPETT: Right, or as though the guilt belongs to them.
HOCHSCHILD: Poor person, you know what I mean? It’s not their personal guilt. It’s a company policy, and it’s the absence of regulation. There are rules here; California has very strict rules. We enjoy a cleaner environment as a result. It’s at that level. The guilt is not a personal one. That, I felt, was very poignant and sweet of her to be mindful that an operator might feel accused. That’s how poignant this whole thing gets.
TIPPETT: It does. What you are shining a light on is the human complexity here. It does make things messy. But again, this is saying, “Let’s deal with reality, not wishful thinking.”
HOCHSCHILD: And let’s talk about reality and not wishful thinking by having a civil, respectful, public conversation, where nobody is bullying, conversationally, anybody else. You’re coming together to see if there can be common ground on the environment. There can be, I think. The people I came to know are very interested and very approving of renewables. In fact, there’s something called the Green Tea Movement that is a Tea Party that’s all for renewables. But we’re not even finding that common ground because we aren’t even respectfully reaching out to look for it. We’re in our bubbles still. In fact, I think that problem remains with us. Especially on the left, I think, there’s a rigid sort of inward-turning, I would say. I find it very sad. I think we have to reach out looking for potential common ground.
TIPPETT: We started out speaking about your work in sociology and your focus on the sociology of emotion and taking emotion seriously. It’s hard for me to imagine anybody could argue that emotion doesn’t, in fact, seriously matter in politics now. Then there’s an obvious extension of that here, which is that we need emotional intelligence, right? That’s what mediation too. We need to say, this is as important as all of our other forms of intelligence that we wield very confidently and boldly.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, absolutely. You could say that much of my work — I’ve done nine books now — has been an effort, one way or another, to honor, and try and get the world to honor, the importance of emotional intelligence, especially as used by service workers: caregivers, child care workers, elder care workers — anybody in the service industry is using emotional intelligence. It matters enormously that we all learn to do it well and don’t sneer at it but in fact see that, really, the crust of society is very thin. It needs water and sun and nurture so that it’s not as brittle as it has now become in America.
TIPPETT: Our life together needs caregiving. [laughs] I feel that we actually possess more intelligence about how to be in relationship where difference is present and where true misunderstanding is present. We have a lot of intelligence about that in our families.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, we do. When I set out on this odyssey, I got two kinds of responses, which were very interesting. One was, “Oh, I couldn’t do that; I’d be so mad. Those people are wrong.” And the other one was “Oh, you’re going where? You’re going to the center of right wing…? Oh.” They wouldn’t say it, but the kind of facial expression — “Maybe you’re pretty ‘right’ yourself.” In other words, you’re going to an enclave in which you will be embraced as “similar.”
What was missing from those two responses was the idea that you can be exactly who you are and take your alarm system off, climb an empathy wall, and get to know people on the other side of it. Then I got, “Oh, you must be especially empathic.” No. Not at all. In fact, I think we’re all actually extremely good at it. The only thing is, we don’t apply that skill, that knowledge, to getting to know the “other,” whoever we define as other. That’s the only thing different I did.

TIPPETT:I looked at and read a number of interviews you gave and have given across the years, and I noticed that a great number of especially, let’s say, the “progressive” interviewers, they remark with great astonishment on your kindness, [laughs] kind of like, “How could you be so kind?” In a way, it models the rut we’re in.
HOCHSCHILD: Right, or “too kind” — foolish. “It’s a fool’s mission. What are you doing?”
TIPPETT: Somebody said after Charlottesville, “Now that we’ve seen that...”
HOCHSCHILD: “How can you talk to these people?”
TIPPETT:To me, another great paradox of engaging difference, which you describe — you said, it’s not about going in and saying, “Change my mind. I want to be a Republican.” Or “I want to join the Tea Party.” Or expecting them, because they engage with you, to say, “I want to be at Berkeley.” [laughs] So you didn’t change your politics, but what you said — and I think this is true, and I know you’ve seen this as a sociologist, across all kinds of meaningful encounter with a difference — you said, “It enlarged me as a human being.”
HOCHSCHILD: It did, to be able to imagine myself into a different heart. One man told me, “Look, we have similar minds, and we have similar hearts, but we have different souls.” I thought that was so interesting. So I said to him, “Thank you for saying that. Would you be a co-sociologist with me and figure out how the souls are different?” He looked at me — [laughs] scratched his head, “Well, I’m not sure I know what you mean, but sure.”
This empathy thing — another wonderful encounter was with a gospel singer who was sitting across the table at a meeting of Republican women of Southwest Louisiana. She said, “Oh, I love Rush Limbaugh” I first thought, “Oh, my goodness.” Then I thought, “Wonderful. Here’s a chance for me to get larger here.” So I said to her, “Could we meet sometime this week for some sweet teas, and you can explain why you love Rush Limbaugh?” She said, “Yeah, sure.”

The next day we were meeting for sweet teas, and she explains, “I love Rush Limbaugh because he hates feminazis.” I thought, “Oh, my goodness.” So I ask her, “Well, what is a feminazi?” “Well, it’s a feminist who doesn’t like children, wants men to cook...” She goes on to “environmental wackos, these people that want to regulate us to death.”

After I’m asking her, she stops me and says, “You’ve told me that you come from ‘the other side.’ Is it hard for you to listen to me?” I told her, “Actually, it’s not hard at all. I have my alarm system off, and I’m learning about you, and you are doing me such a big favor to share your thoughts. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” Then she says, “Take your alarm system off? I do that too. I do it with my kids. I do it with my parishioners.” I thought, OK, let’s start with that, a little common ground.

TIPPETT: We, in fact, do that all the time. It’s a habit we have. We do it at work, because you can’t just blurt out how you really feel about what someone said at every moment.
HOCHSCHILD: No, there are rules about that, and there should be. It’s kind of the ground rules of social life that we can get, really, better at it than we are. So that’s a great invitation. It doesn’t mean that you’re capitulating. That’s the misunderstanding, especially on the left. “Oh, if you listen to them, that means you’ve been taken over.” Not at all.
TIPPETT: It just means being emotionally intelligent.
HOCHSCHILD:You've developed a way of talking. Actually, that is a fundamental floor of social interaction when you barrel on in there and ignore the competence and identity…
TIPPETT: And just the dignity of people.
HOCHSCHILD:…of the person you’re talking to. It’s just counterproductive.
TIPPETT: It is counterproductive, and the way people talk down to any point that might be made, I sometimes want to say, “Do you want to be right in every moment, or do you want to be part of the larger healing?”
HOCHSCHILD: That's right. We all need to be makers. If you want to make a social contribution and help build a public conversation about the big issues of the day. In order to do that, you have to really be good at emotion management. It’s a contribution to the larger whole to be really good at that.
TIPPETT: One of the poignant things throughout Strangers in Their Own Land and this time you’ve spent in Louisiana is — it’s the Bible Belt. One of the things you found, which I think is an interesting critique for the side that considers itself to be enlightened, is that a lot of the things that are coming at people as “what needs to be done” in fact is not about repairing, not about how do we get whole. You said, the question of how could repairs be made, a lot of people find that their Bibles are more useful, in that sense, than the government.
HOCHSCHILD: So that’s a question: OK, what has the government done for you? Maybe they have a point. Maybe it hasn’t lived up to its promise, or maybe it’s getting blamed for things it didn’t do. Let’s figure that out. Let’s have a respectful public conversation about just that: Is the government, in fact, letting people down? Or are they expecting too much of it? What’s the record? Let’s talk about that, the specifics.
TIPPETT:There’s a paragraph in your book — or maybe this was in another interview you gave — you said, even among the most ardent and extreme people you met over five years of research, you found specific issues on which there was potential for coalition: safeguarding children on the internet; reducing prison populations for nonviolent offenders; protecting against commercialization of the human genome; pushing for good jobs; rebuilding our rail system, roads, and bridges; and our social infrastructure. It’s so interesting to think about what if we started by saying what we could start talking about tomorrow.
HOCHSCHILD: Right. There are low-hanging fruit. That’s right. And do it in the spirit we’ve been talking about.
TIPPETT: In Strangers in Their Own Land, near the end you say you write a letter to a friend on the liberal left. I should say, you imagine, “If I were to write to my friends in Louisiana on the right, or if I were to write to a liberal friend.” There was a sentence in your letter to your friend on the liberal left. Again, it’s humanizing, and it’s provocative in a human way: “Consider the possibility that in their situation, you might end up closer to their perspective.”
HOCHSCHILD: That’s it. [laughs] I think that’s true — that we are products of our own experience. What if you grew up in a family — so many said, “Oh, we were poor, but we didn’t know it. Had a great childhood, but we were poor. Didn’t know it.” OK, what if that had been your experience? What if your dad’s job and how much he earned was the central fact of your life? What if it was a blue-collar job, but you felt put down for doing that blue-collar job?
I think that there’s something actually missing in the entire vocabulary we have for talking about social class, because I didn’t go just to another region or to people with different political views. I went to a different social class. And there is a lot of sneering on the left at the blue-collar class. They’re furious at it. “Look, we’re the daily workers. We are climbing the telephone pole to repair your telephone wire. We’re repaving your roads. Who are you to put that down?” There’s a lot of humble pie to eat here. I think it’s a problem I didn’t know when I set out that I would come back and be as critical of the little cocoon I’ve long been in, here, as I am.

It’s not only a contempt that really bothers me now whenever I hear it or see it, and that is buried to some degree, but there’s a kind of reluctance to reach out. It’s as if, on the left, there’s a lot of good political will, but it’s gotten curled up onto itself and become a kind of a self-monitoring program, “Oh, you said this wrong or that wrong,” instead of reaching out to build coalitions — because we’re a big country. Not everyone’s like us; not everyone’s like them. What we need are sturdy coalitions. And I think labor unions — when the labor movement was much larger, there was a way that people of different colors and classes got together. When you had a compulsory draft, people of different colors and classes got together in a natural way.

TIPPETT: It was an experience.
HOCHSCHILD: Public schools have done this. But we’re down on those crossover, connective institutions. I think we need to build another one. I would like to see a civil service, one year required of everyone.
TIPPETT: Of everyone.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, of everyone, and you go to a different region and get to know people — first of all, get to know how to treat people respectfully and listen actively and be immediate. Everybody should learn those skills. And then go across to see if we can rebuild that connective tissue.
TIPPETT: I'm sure people have said to you, and I get into this conversation myself, this critique that there are all kinds of groups of people, including people of color, who have long felt like strangers in their own land in this country.
HOCHSCHILD: Oh, definitely; especially now.
TIPPETT: Yes, and especially now, yet again. And it’s the critique that white people wake up to this phenomenon when it’s about other white people. How do you work with that in your mind?
HOCHSCHILD: I say it’s true. I think it’s an important insight. Yes, I think it’s an excellent point. For example, the opiate addiction problem has been — now they’re called “diseases of despair,” which is kind of a compassionate way —
TIPPETT: And the crack epidemic was not, yeah.
HOCHSCHILD: Yes, whereas the crack epidemic in the inner cities, which hit blacks, wasn’t this benignly...
TIPPETT: It was criminalized.
HOCHSCHILD: That's right, and worse. It’s a point that should be broadly received.
TIPPETT: I want to draw to a close. This has been just such a big, wonderful conversation. I’m curious; you say somewhere that “the English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world and of having that interest welcomed.” You said, “Some of its own kind, mutual, is created.”
I just found that intriguing because I think so much about the power of words. Are there words you’re using now? Perhaps that gets at symbols and how important that is for us in constructing our world.
HOCHSCHILD: Well, I use the word “empathy.” It’s something we’re all capable of, and we, in a way, carry around empathy maps of who we should and shouldn’t feel empathic with. And we need to enlarge those maps and shift them. Maybe there are different kinds of empathy. One is, you could call it pragmatic empathy, to see if “OK, let’s see if we can heal this divide.” You’ve got a purpose to it. Then some is just there, and it doesn’t have that purpose. So that’s a very special word. Having it returned is, you’re seeing the humanity of the person you’ve reached out to — like Madonna Massey, this gospel singer, did to me: “Oh, I do that too,” she says.
TIPPETT: Right, when you talked to her about the empathy wall, and she said, “I have one of those too.”
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, and she said, “Oh, you’re my first Democratic friend.” [laughs] So we laughed, we could laugh; it was a new pool of laughter possible that started with an absolute acknowledgement of our differences.
TIPPETT: I think that’s a good metric: Have you created a new pool of laughter possible. That’s good. [laughs]

I want to ask you as we close, and perhaps thinking about how you continue to live with this, not just what you learned as a scholar, but what you learned as a human being — right now, as you look around in the world and as you move through this experience that has changed you, what makes you despair, and what is giving you hope?

HOCHSCHILD: Well, I’m a positive person, I would say [laughs] and tend to see the glass half-full. I think we’re at a moment of challenge as a culture, but we’ve been in those moments before. I think it’s time for us to look at leaders who have been real models of repair. Let’s look at Nelson Mandela, for example. His country was going to go to war with itself. It was bitter. If you look around the world, it’s hard to find a place pre-Mandela that was more bitterly divided, black and white. And he did it differently. He did it like Gandhi. He was a unifier. He was a guy who was very good at talking across these hardened lines. We have a lot to learn from Nelson Mandela.
TIPPETT: Studying that kind of history and that kind of leadership.
HOCHSCHILD: Yeah, Martin Luther King — these were people who were not off in their corners, just separating themselves off, but were good at saying, “Look, there are better angels here. Let’s access them and create public conversation about a problem, see where we can go with it.” Let’s think of those positive leaders and look to them and learn from them because they were real experts in empathy and pragmatism.
TIPPETT: I really like keeping that “and” — empathy and pragmatism go together. This is a weird connection to make, but I think it’s in the afterword of your book that you mention Café Gratitude in Berkeley, which I didn’t realize had closed until I read that because it was kind of an institution there. It was a raw vegan place, and you were imagining, with these new sets of eyes you have, you were thinking about some of your Christian friends in Louisiana. You were thinking, maybe they would hear about Café Gratitude and think, “Oh, it’s a hippie place.” But maybe they would see that there are some real echoes there with their Christian way of —
HOCHSCHILD: A touch of church.
TIPPETT: Yeah, a touch of church. I was sad that it had closed, and I looked online, and I found this article in, I think, the Berkeley student newspaper. It was kind of an obituary for Café Gratitude, and the student was saying that they loved the daily question that they used to ask there. The examples they gave were: “What are you grateful for?” or “Who can you forgive?” Those are actually questions, for example, that Nelson Mandela asked, very surprisingly, given what he’d been through.
HOCHSCHILD:  Yes, that’s right. Imagine. We have a lot to learn. Don’t know if we can live up to his model, but it’s worth a good try.
 

 

Gandhi in current scholarship

Drawn from an excellent article in The New Yorker by Pankaj Mishra, "Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age," in the issue of October 22, 2018.

 

Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote. And even Gandhi’s harshest detractors do not deny that he steadfastly defended, and eventually sacrificed his life for, many values under assault today—fellow-feeling for the weak, and solidarity and sympathy between people of different nations, religions, and races.

No one would be less surprised than Gandhi by neo-Fascist upsurges in what he called “nominal” Western democracies, which in his view were merely better at concealing their foundations of violence and exploitation than explicitly Fascist nations were. He thought that democracy in the West was “clearly an impossibility so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions persists,” and as long as legislators act like a “prostitute”—his infamous term for the British Parliament—and voters “take their cue from their newspapers which are often dishonest.”

True democracy, or swaraj, involved much more participation from citizens, he believed; it required them to combine self-rule with self-restraint, politics with ethics. Turning his back on his middle-class origins, he brought millions of peasants into political life. To him, the age of democracy—“this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor”—was a cause for celebration, and he conceived of democracy as something that “gives the weak the same chance as the strong,” in which “inequalities based on possession and non-possession, colour, race, creed or sex vanish.”