Can You Hear the Bells, America?
We’d better, if we want American society to realize its immense potential.
At American Purpose, Katherine C. Epstein asks her fellow citizens, “Have you forgotten for whom the bell tolls?”
I share her concern that as a nation, yes we have. And even if one needn’t approach the current American social and political situation through the specific image of John Donne’s tolling bell, I still worry that we the people aren’t even in the epistemic or attitudinal ballpark to grapple with her warning.
“In a national orgy of intellectual incuriosity and uncritical thinking, we’re reducing each other to inhuman caricatures. This anti-humanism both creates and is sustained by the perception that we’re living in a state of emergency, confronted by political opponents—nay, enemies—intent on ending the American experiment. Curiosity about one’s adversaries—about how they think or see the world—has come to seem sinful.”
Epstein’s essay—well worth reading as soon as you have the time—contains much to think about and grapple with beyond the excerpt quoted above, and while I cannot do it the justice of a full length engagement or analysis here, I will try to amplify the complex harmonies of its argument in another way. Below I share three questions that came into my mind after reading the piece.
I offer these questions in, and submit them to, the spirit of reflection, which dwells within us all (even if it all too often goes neglected). Reflection, which should precede any serious offering of commentary or criticism, is one of the truly liberal arts we will need to recover if we are to get through this tech-and-rudeness-accelerated cultural mess and (re)establish America—one coherent nation, sea to shining sea—as a healthy, functioning, vibrant and free society, where truly the bulk of the people are meaningfully free (economically, socially, psychologically and of course politically) to live the lives that they want to lead, free from burdensome government or the angry “join-or-die” demands of rival political tribes. This vision—dare I say any positive vision of the American future—will hinge upon whether we in aggregate choose to lean more into our differences and divisions (the shared road of extremists left and right) or choose to tone down the rhetorical expressions of our overstimulated political selves—fed a cheap diet of doom porn by people who want to capture our attention and clicks for dollars—when we meet face to face in the real world and when we engage in the serious business of trying to keep going the world’s oldest extant constitutional republic.
The three (sets of) questions are:
1) Do you make it a habit to attempt to understand the minds, attitudes, beliefs, and opinions of other people who think (very) differently than you do? When was the last time you tried?
2) If “yes” and “recently,” do you know if you succeeded? Do you have an idea of what “success” here even means?
3) If “no,” do you think this is a sustainable attitude in a large and diverse democracy, especially if those you make no attempt to understand are likely to return the non-courtesy? Would you want to live in a place where nobody makes a serious attempt to understand the mindsets, beliefs, and convictions animating those who think differently from them? Would you want to live in a place where nobody thinks of anything but their own glorified sense of tribe-aligned self-identity, and where sympathy ends at the boundaries of one’s own group?
Our tired culture-wars clashes, I submit as someone who would feel quite comfortable describing himself as part of Epstein’s “exhausted majority," are unsustainable and unreflective of our collective human potential as (globally speaking, very privileged) Americans. In the course of subsequent posts to this space I intend to say much more about what I think some of that potential of ours might be, and how we might hope to realize it.
P.S. Special thanks to @TomsTakes98 for spurring me to get this out the digital door sooner, rather than later!
Image: Bell Tower of Mission San Gabriel from the front, 1900. Wikimedia Commons