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“A Counterculture of Commitment” Speech
At graduation this past May, I gave the graduate commencement address: “A Counterculture of Commitment.” The video and transcript are below:
Delivered May 24, 2018
I am sure many of you have had this experience — it’s late at night and you start browsing Netflix looking for something to watch. You scroll through different titles — you even read a few reviews — but you just can’t commit to watching any given movie. Suddenly it’s been 30 minutes and you’re still stuck in Infinite Browsing Mode, so you just give up — you’re too tired to watch anything now, so you cut your losses and fall asleep.
I have come to believe that this is the defining characteristic of our generation: Keeping our options open.
There’s this philosopher, Zygmunt Bauman — he called it “liquid modernity” — we never want to commit to any one identity or place or community… so we remain, like liquid, in a state that can adapt to fit any future shape. Liquid modernity is Infinite Browsing Mode… but for everything in our lives.
I’ve been thinking about this recently because leaving home and coming here is a lot like entering a long hallway — you walk out of the room in which you grew up and into this place with thousands of different doors to infinitely browse.
And throughout my time here, I’ve seen all the good that can come from having so many new options. I’ve seen the joy a person feels when they find a ‘room’ more fitting for their authentic self. I’ve seen big decisions become less painful, because you can always quit, you can always move, you can always break up… and the hallway will always be there. And mostly I’ve seen all the fun people have had experiencing more novelty than any generation in history ever experienced.
But as I’ve grown older here, I’ve also started seeing the downsides of having so many open doors. Nobody wants to be stuck behind a locked door, but nobody wants to live in a hallway either. It’s great to have options when you lose interest in something, but I’ve learned here that the more times I do this, the less satisfied I am with any given option. And lately, the experiences I crave are less the rushes of novelty and more those perfect Tuesday nights when you eat dinner with the friends who you have known for a long time, who you have made a commitment to, and who will not quit you because they found someone better.
I have discovered in my time here that the people who inspire me the most are those who left the hallway, shut the door behind them and settled in. It’s Fred Rogers recording Episode 895 of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood because he was committed to advancing a humane model of children’s television. It’s Dorothy Day sitting with the same outcast folks night after night after night because it was important that someone is committed to them. It’s not just the Martin Luther King who confronted the fire hoses in 1963, but the Martin Luther King who hosted his thousandth boring planning meeting in 1967.
When Hollywood tells tales of courage, they usually take the form of “slaying the dragon” — it’s all about the big, brave moments. But I’ve been learning from these heroes that the most menacing dragons that stand in the way of reforming the system or repairing the breach are the everyday boredom and distraction and uncertainty that can erode our ability to commit to anything for the long haul.
I love that the word dedicate has two meanings— first, it means to make something holy; second, it means to stick at something for a long time. I don’t think this is a coincidence: We do something holy when we choose to commit to something. And, in the most dedicated people I have met here, I have witnessed how that pursuit of holiness comes with a side effect of immense joy.
We may have come here to help keep our options open, but I leave believing that the most radical act we can take is to make a commitment to a particular thing… to a place, to a profession, to a cause, to a community, to a person. To show our love for something by working at it for a long time — to close doors and forgo options for its sake.
We often assume that some acute and looming threat — be it a foreign invader or a domestic demagogue — will be our downfall. But if we were to end, that end is just as likely to come from something far less dramatic: our failure to sustain the work.
It is not only the bomb or the bully that should keep us up at night — it is also the garden untilled and the newcomer unwelcomed, the neighbor unhoused and the prisoner unheard, the voice of the public unheeded and the long-simmering calamity unhalted and the dream of equal justice unrealized.
But we need not be afraid, for we have in our possession the antidote to our dread — our time, free to be dedicated to the slow but necessary work of turning visions into projects, values into practices, and strangers into neighbors.
That is why, in this age of liquid modernity, we should rebel and join up with a counterculture of commitment consisting of solid people.
In this age of Infinite Browsing Mode, we should pick a damn movie and watch it all the way through… before we fall asleep.
The Revolution of the Bleeding Heart
Martin Luther King often described his moral vision as one of “agapic love.” Agape is Greek for “distinterested love” — to King it was “a love in which the individual seeks not his own good,” but the good of his or her neighbor. Agape “does not discriminate between worthy and unworthy people” — it is about “discovering the neighbor” in every person it meets. It is not “weak, passive love” but “love in action.” It seeks to “go to any length to restore community.”
King’s vision of overflowing love — beyond worthiness, beyond borders — reminds me of one of my favorite Catholic symbols: the bleeding heart. The writer Lewis Hyde calls the bleeding heart “the image of the Christian era.” If tribalism was about keeping the spirit of community (the tribe’s lifeblood) flowing inside the boundaries of one’s tribe, Christianity was to be about welcoming all into the community. Hyde summarizes the promise of Christian grace in these terms: “If we only open the heart with faith, we will be lifted to a greater circulation” and “the spirit may cover the world and vivify everything.” In the Christian heart, all Others are to become Brothers — our compassion, not our genetics, is to connect us.
The bleeding heart was a revolutionary symbol and the plea for agapic love was a revolutionary call. I say revolutionary because the idea of loving beyond the boundaries of your tribe ran counter to common beliefs and practices. People were used to loving their Brothers and fearing the Others. Whole systems of law and exchange and war were set up to differentiate how you treat neighbors from how you treat strangers.
And yet, for many, the revolution of the bleeding heart took hold. For some, it came directly through religion. For others, it came through the universalist politics of classical liberalism or socialism. For most, it came through the revolution burrowing into daily life, through ideas and practices in music, science, books, and commerce that aimed to turn strangers into neighbors.
Despite all of the ways in which we fail to live up to this revolution, its core idea remains the dominant creed in our country today. You can tell that it is because everybody pays lip service to it. No matter what our leaders do, most still feel compelled to justify their actions in terms of bringing people together, loving across divides, and seeking solidarity in mind and heart rather than in blood and soil. Universal love remains America’s professed state religion.
And yet, of course, we are not practicing what we preach. Despite the politicians’ applause lines and the dreamers’ song lyrics and the greeting cards’ cliches, love has not held sway in 21st century America. We are not discovering the neighbor in every person we meet. We are not going to any length to restore community. We are not trusting that grace will lift us up if we open our hearts. In fact, we are often doing the exact opposite: treating our literal neighbors as threatening strangers, spending our energy affirming divides, and letting fear be the doorman of our hearts.
And worse over, we have baked our apostasy into our institutions. We have built and tolerated laws and markets and customs that reinforce our loneliness, heighten our anxiety, and estrange our most vulnerable neighbors.
In our culture, the bleeding heart’s status has shifted. What was once a powerful and inspiring symbol now represents, Hyde observes, a person of “dubious mettle with an embarrassing inability” to limit his or her compassion. It is now considered foolish and sentimental to have a heart “that does not keep its own counsel” — that “touches others with feeling, not reckoning.”
And yet, this is not what we preach in public. When we talk about who we are — when we teach our children who to be — we still celebrate building bridges and lending hands and opening up our hearts. That is what is especially disturbing about our time — the eerie detachment between what we say we believe in and what we actually do.
How did we let this happen?
Well, we need to remember that the revolution of the bleeding heart was never supposed to be easy. All revolutions of society are also revolutions of the soul. You transform the world, but you also transform yourself. And transforming ourselves is just as difficult as transforming the world — often, it is more difficult.
Discovering the neighbor in every person we meet is hard. Going to any length to restore community is hard. Opening up our hearts to others in the face of fear is hard. When part of our soul remains tribal, doing any of this even feels unnatural. The easy way of dismissal and division and hard-heartedness is appealing.
And yet, the revolution is appealing, too. So we try to have it both ways.
One way we do this is through carve outs. We say “we love all people” but then mess with the definition of “people.” We open our hearts up to some people, but come up with exception after exception after exception as to why other people don’t deserve our love. “But they’re criminals.” “But they’re terrorists.” “But they aren’t pulling their weight.” “But they knew what they were doing when they made that choice.” We are full of love for all people, but we let our conception of “people” become swiss cheese.
Eventually, when we carve out enough exceptions, we forget the original message. The message becomes so disfigured that we no longer recognize what we once believed. We start resenting having to genuflect to the revolutionary creed — “why do we have to keep talking about compassion?” “Why do we have to pretend those kids are as worthy as our kids?”
Soon, preachers from the old creed of tribalism rear their heads. They not only don’t practice what we preach — they don’t even preach it either! They are here to free you from the burden of the bleeding heart. They celebrate closed-heartedness. Their heresy is tantalizing. “Instead of twisting yourself into knots carving out exceptions, why not just give up the faith?”
But many of us hold strong against this temptation — against both the temptation to give up and the temptation to carve up our love. We know that messing with the definition of “people” is against the spirit of the law. “Everybody in, nobody out,” we affirm.
And yet, we still find a second way to have it both ways. We say “we love all people” but then mess with the definition of “love.” In this second way, it’s less about carving up and more about thinning out — lowering our standards for what it means to love someone.
Deep love is about encountering real people — being vulnerable, entangling ourselves in relationship, making commitments. But deep love is scary, so we often substitute shallow love in its place. In lieu of real encounter, we offer money or votes or often just sentiment. When we put up yard signs or send monthly checks or post the right thing online, we might be doing something useful — but we are not engaging in the deep love that our revolution calls us to engage in. We are opening up our hearts, but we are hardly letting any blood out.
Some might say that the call for deep love is all well and good, but the money and the votes and the sentiment are what really get the job done. But as of now, there isn’t enough — there isn’t enough money and there isn’t enough votes and there isn’t enough sentiment to get the job done yet. When we don’t practice deep love, our shallow love dries up as the excuses pile on. “I just don’t have time.” “It’s all just too much to think about right now.” “I just feel like nothing really makes a difference.”
And furthermore, when we don’t practice deep love, our criticism of those who carve up their love is neutered, for the battle appears to be just between those who implicitly limit their love and those who admit to doing so.
I mentioned that America’s uneasiness is caused by the disjuncture between what we say we believe and what we actually do — between the revolution of the bleeding heart and our routine apostasy. Built into this uneasiness are two ways out: to change what we believe or to change what we do.
The sales pitch of those in the seat of power today is the former: to give up on the revolution of the bleeding heart. No more need to thin out your love, no more need to carve up your love, they say… we can give up on the revolutionary project.
For America’s unvulnerable majority, this is indeed a path out of our uneasiness. If we gave up, there would be no longer be a disjuncture.
But we know that’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable because we don’t want to leave our vulnerable neighbors behind. It’s unacceptable because we know walls lock people in as much as they lock people out. It’s unacceptable, because after experiencing how open-heartedness has enlivened us, we can’t imagine going back.
So that leaves us with the second path out of our uneasiness: changing what we do; turning what King would call a “weak, passive love” into a “love in action.” It is to reject carving up our love, but it is also to reject thinning it out, as well. It is the path of not only pushing for the revolution of the bleeding heart to further transform our world, but also pushing for it to further transform ourselves. And in doing, our message will ring truer, our tools will be more abundant, and our task will feel attainable.
This is a hard path, of course. If it wasn’t, we would have already taken it. But that’s where grace comes in — here to help us, when we’re ready, to be lifted to a greater circulation. Long live the bleeding heart.
The Harvard Law Forum, Fall 2017 Roundup
The Harvard Law Forum, the speakers I have been running for two years now, just closed its Fall season. Here’s a round-up of talks from the past semester:
Race, Class and the Future of Solidarity with R.L. Stephens — November 16, 2017
R.L. Stephens is an elected member of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America and the former A. Philip Randolph Fellow at Jacobin Magazine. His writing on race, class and social movements has appeared in The Guardian, Gawker, and Jacobin. He was a campaign strategist at labor union Unite Here in Chicago and previously participated in a campaign to end unfair scheduling practices in the retail sector while working at Gap. He graduated from George Washington Law in 2014.
On November 16, 2017, he came to the Harvard Law Forum to share his thoughts on class, race, and the future of solidarity.
The Case for Medicare for All with Tim Faust — November 9, 2017
On November 9, 2017, health care expert, Jacobin writer and HEAVYxMEDICAL co-host Timothy Faust came to Harvard Law School and made the case for a single payer, Medicare for All health insurance system.
Ralph Nader — November 8, 2017:
On November 8, 2017, Ralph Nader — consumer advocate, public citizen, Harvard Law alumnus, and one of The Atlantic’s 100 most influential figures in American history — came to Harvard Law to inspire students to deploy their education for justice, democracy and the public interest.
Fighting for Access to Justice in the Halls of Congress with Rep. Susan W. Brooks and Rep. Joe Kennedy III — November 6, 2017
On November 6, 2017, the co-founders of the bipartisan Congressional Access to Legal Services Caucus, Reps. Joe Kennedy III (D-MA) and Susan W. Brooks (R-IN), came to Harvard Law School to talk about the importance of funding for civil legal aid for impoverished Americans.
Racism and Climate Change: Putting Racial Justice at the Center of Systemic Transformation with Jacqui Patterson — October 30, 2017
Jacqueline Patterson is the Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program. She has worked as a researcher, advocate and activist for women‘s rights, violence against women prevention, HIV & AIDS treatment, racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice.
On October 30, 2017, Patterson came to Harvard Law to discuss the intersection of racism and climate change— to show the Harvard community how to “put racial justice at the center of systemic transformation.”
Lawyers, Monopoly Power and Breaking up Amazon and Google with Matt Stoller — October 19, 2017
Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets program, where he researches the history of the relationship between concentrated financial power and the Democratic Party in the 20th century. Prior to joining the Open Markets program, he was senior policy advisory to the Senate Budget Committee on trade, competition policy, and financial services. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic and The Nation.
On October 19, 2017, he came to Harvard Law School to share insights on the relationship between the legal profession and monopoly capitalism… and let students and faculty know what they can do to protect open markets from the distortions of monopoly power.
Our Bicentennial Crisis: A Call to Action for Harvard Law School’s Public Interest Mission
Last month, to coincide with Harvard Law’s bicentennial, I published and distributed a report: Our Bicentennial Crisis: A Call to Action for Harvard Law School’s Public Interest Mission.
It aims to document: first, the crisis of mass exclusion from legal power for the average American (in the criminal justice, civil justice and political 
systems); second, Harvard Law’s failure to address this crisis, and the inaccurate excuses our school community tends to give for not addressing it; third, what accounts for this civic deficit; and fourth, twelve reform proposals that aim to help us better live up to our mission.
Judge Learned Hand, of the Harvard Law School Class of 1896, once said: “If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: thou shalt not ration justice.” When we celebrate our third century a hundred years from now, it is my fervent hope that they say of our generation of Harvard Law School students, faculty, staff and alumni: “they helped keep our democracy.” If this is to be the case, it will be because of reformers in our community who put in the work in the coming decades to better align our school with its public interest mission. I hope this report is a useful tool for their efforts. Let’s get to work.
Here are relevant links regarding the report:
- Executive summary in The Harvard Law Record: http://hlrecord.org/2017/10/our-bicentennial-crisis-a-call-to-action-for-harvard-law-schools-public-interest-mission/
- Full draft of the report: http://hlrecord.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/OurBicentennialCrisis.pdf
- Ralph Nader editorial on the report: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-harvard-law-school-matters-a-new-critique_us_59f37200e4b05f0ade1b56e7
Essay on left-liberal divide in Current Affairs
I had an essay on the left-liberal divide in the Democratic Party published in Current Affairs. I tried my best to have it be something that people from both sides of the divide could read and feel that their concerns are respected. But also, to respect some of the less reconcilable differences between the two sides, I tried to additionally propose healthy processes through which those differences could be arbitrated: processes that neither quiet internal dissent nor risk more Trump-Ryan-McConnell power. Excerpts:
Such cross-divide conversations are hard— and with the release of Hillary’s new book and Bernie’s Medicare for All bill, it is likely to get harder. But I believe in the old Mister Rogers maxim: what’s mentionable is manageable. In that spirit, I aim to persuade: to build up intra-party understanding by, first, doing my best to articulate what I believe each side feels; and, second, attempting to identify a few prospective patches of common ground.
These divisions may have started the left-liberal conflict, but what has sustained the conflict has been the fact that because both sides are developing into integrated political tribes. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, political tribalism begins with shared intuitions: we first feel what is politically right, then later muster arguments to support our intuitions. When people who share some intuitions about politics find each other and discover they share other intuitions, they begin to form political communities to collaborate on mustering arguments for their shared bundles of political intuitions. Out of these political communities emerge leaders and institutions that further surface and solidify their connection and creed. The tribal formation is complete when these communities establish a unified tribal narrative— complete with stories of the past, present, and future; heroes and villains; and direction for what members should be doing. At its most extreme, tribal participation approaches a religious experience, as theologian Harvey Cox explained well in The Secular City: “In secular society politics does what metaphysics once did… It brings unity and meaning to human life and thought.”
This would move our conflicts — over which candidates are worthy of trust, over what voters actually want, and over the reality of certain larger forces — away from the neverending shadow-boxing ring and toward resolution in the court of public opinion. Primaries, for example, will help resolve the strategy divide, surfacing whether “pragmatism” or “idealism” wins in general elections, as candidates of different persuasions win primaries and test their pragmatist/idealist orientation in general elections. Issue campaigns, meanwhile, will surface the extent to which the party has been corrupted by nefarious structural forces. One need not endlessly discuss whether this or that politician is a “neoliberal shill” if you can resolve the question by launching issue campaigns that dramatize these larger forces at play and see whether said politician supports the campaign. If they do, they may be worthy of more trust. If they do not, they may be worthy of a primary challenge.
Read the whole essay — How to Heal the Left-Liberal Divide — here.
All Rise! roundup, Season 2
At Harvard Law, I co-produce All Rise!, a podcast of longform interviews with HLS professors and other figures in the law. We just finished Season 2:
Here’s episode 6 with Constitution expert Michael Klarman:
Here’s episode 7 with municipal broadband expert Susan Crawford:
Episode 8 with HLS student organizations coordinator Tracey-Ann Daley:
A special episode 9 with prison education advocates Max Kenner and Vince Greco:
Episode 10 with Critical Race Theory expert Khiara Bridges:
Episode 11 with death penalty expert Carol Steiker:
Episode 12 with HLS’s negotiation and mediation sage Bob Bordone:
Episode 13 with Demos President Heather McGhee:
And Episode 14 with federal judge Nancy Gertner:
You can subscribe to All Rise! on iTunes here.
Patriots
My favorite 4th of July song is “I am a Patriot”- originally written by E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt and covered wonderfully by Jackson Browne and Eddie Vedder. The chorus nails what patriotism means to me:
“I am a patriot and I love my country
because my country is all I know.
I want to be with my family,
people who understand me —
I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
I don’t love my country because it’s the best. I don’t love my country because our people deserve any more care than any other people do. I don’t love my country because it’s uniquely great or just. (In fact, in many ways, my country is especially troubled.) I don’t even love my country because it’s the one I would necessarily choose.
Rather, I love America because I didn’t choose it. It’s like my family or like the rights we were promised in the Declaration of Independence: inalienable. These people – my fellow Americans – are the ones who understand me. This homeland – our patria, from Yosemite to my neighborhood strip mall – is all I know. Like Van Zandt says: I’ve got nowhere else to go.
And, honestly, as far as countries to be born into and peoples to be stuck with, I feel blessed to be part of this country and these people. I get to share a national heritage with martyrs for freedom like John Brown and Nat Turner, Viola Gregg Liuzzo and Harvey Milk. I get to be raised by the nation that fostered innovators like Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Settlement Houses’ Jane Addams, the Girl Scouts’ Juliette Gordon Low and A Change Is Gonna Come’s Sam Cooke. I get to draw on a legacy of dissent that includes pacifist Jeanette Rankin and indigenous leader Winona LaDuke, unionist Eugene V. Debs and voting rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer.
If I were to forsake this country due to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington’s hypocrisy, I would lose with it Martin Luther King and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s calls to live up to the Framers’ promise. If I were to forsake this country due to Harry Truman and Henry Kissinger’s bombs, I would lose with it Eleanor Roosevelt and Daniel Berrigan’s peacemaking. For every John D. Rockefeller, there’s a Rachel Carson. For every Roger B. Taney, there’s a Thurgood Marshall. For every Donald J. Trump, there’s a Dolores Huerta. The same nation that polluted the world’s airwaves with the schlock of Madison Avenue filled the world’s pages with the jubilation of Walt Whitman. (He sure was right about us: we are large; we do contain multitudes!)
What’s most wonderful about America, though, is that we, more than most other nations, are brought together not just by our shared past, but rather by our shared future. Because of this, a single generation of Founding Fathers cannot and should not be the last word on what and who we can and should be. Instead, every American is called to be continuing Founders of what our nation is to become. And that patriotic calling — to conserve and reimagine, to defend and build, to achieve and realize our country — is what I celebrate on the 4th of July.
As is tradition, we hope to answer that call in a way that grows our Freedom, which to me is defined by Empowerment and Solidarity: devolving power so that more of us can realize our dreams and building community so that more of us can see each others’ dreams as our own.
In that project, our generation of Americans, like each previous generation, has a long way to go. But before we can change a nation, we must be members of it. And to be a member of a nation is to love it with our hands and heads and hearts… to be a patriot.
To all those old American patriots who got us to where we are today and to all those young American patriots ready to stick it out through this decade’s storm and continue the work of leaving our country better off than we found it: a happy 4th of July to you!
Snakes and Samaritans
A lawyer once asked Jesus of Nazareth what one must do to be on the path of righteousness. Jesus answered with two challenges: first, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and second, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The lawyer responded, as lawyers tend to do, with a meticulous question about particular definitions, asking Jesus: “And who is my neighbor?” This happened to be one of the most important clarifying questions in world history. To answer it, Jesus launched into a parable, one which two millennia later, is perhaps his most beloved: The Parable of the Good Samaritan. Here’s how it goes (paraphrased from Luke 10:25-37):
There’s a man walking on a road to Jericho. He’s attacked by robbers, stripped of clothes and left for dead. One guy walks passed him. Another guy walks passed him. Everybody walks passed him… except for one guy, the Good Samaritan, who, instead of walking passed him, walked up to him, bandaged him up, took him on his own donkey and brought him to an inn. He gave the innkeeper money to look after him and said he would be back to check on him.
Jesus ended his parable with a question for the lawyer: “Who was being the most neighborly to the stranger?” The lawyer responded, “The one who had mercy on him… the one who entered into his troubles.” Then Jesus advised: “Go and do likewise.”
In his speech this week marking a hundred days in office, Donald Trump read from the lyrics of a song, “The Snake,” a riff he had perfected in his 2016 campaign stump speech. Here’s how the song goes:
“On her way to work one morning, down the path alongside the lake, a tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-frozen snake. His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew; ‘Oh well,’ she cried, ‘I’ll take you in and I’ll take care of you.’ ‘Take me in tender woman; take me in, for heaven’s sake; take me in, tender woman,’ sighed the snake. She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk and laid him by her fireside with some honey and some milk. She hurried home from work that night and, soon as she arrived, she found that pretty snake she’d taken to had been revived. She clutched him to her bosom: ‘you’re so beautiful,’ she cried. ‘But if I hadn’t brought you in by now you might have died.’ She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight. Instead of saying thanks, the snake gave her a vicious bite. ‘I saved you,” cried the woman. ‘And you’ve bitten me, but why? You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’ ‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin.‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’”
The message of Trump’s parable is not just opposed to Jesus’ parable– it is, in fact, the direct inverse of it. Jesus’ lesson is that we should turn the strangers we encounter into neighbors by reaching out a helping hand. Trump’s lesson is that to help a stranger is foolish, for people from outside groups possess certain inherently dangerous qualities, just like animals.
With his parable, Trump is not only failing to practice tenderness– he is actively condemning it. As Pope Francis explained in his TED talk this past week, tenderness “is the love that comes close and becomes real.” To be tender is “to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other… to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to take care of those in need.” It is to be “on the same level as the other,” lowering ourselves, as God has, so that we can best speak “the real, concrete language of love.” Loving one another, acknowledging one another, listening to one another, humbling ourselves to care for one another… this is what Trump is rejecting when he mocks the tender-hearted.
Francis reminds us that “tenderness is not weakness… it is fortitude.” Tenderness is the path that “the strongest, most courageous men and women” choose. To be unable to practice tenderness is, in fact, a sure sign of weakness. And when power is bestowed on men who are too weak to practice tenderness, Francis warns, bad things happen.
A weak man can be neighborly to those who are exactly like him. A weak people can hold together a nation where everybody looks and thinks and acts the same.
But the challenge and promise of America is that we don’t look and think and act the same. To be held together as a nation, we need to do the hard work of turning strangers into neighbors. To do this work, we need to be strong… strong enough to practice tenderness. This is the work of mercy that makes a country what it is: not the thickening of its outlines, but the deepening of its solidarity. We are fortified as a country by our open hearts, not our closed borders.
If I die from a snake bite, so be it. We’re all going to die some day. We can’t control how or when it happens, no matter how much security we have. What we can control is how we live while we are alive. And I would rather die as a neighbor than live as a stranger.
The Scharff Alternative
(originally published in the Falls Church News-Press)
In the late 1950s, the social critic Paul Goodman tasked himself with figuring out why so many young people were failing to adjust to society and instead turning to lives of, as it was called back then, “juvenile delinquency.” Whereas many had already put forth their own culprits – rock and roll, Soviets, soft fathers, etc. – Goodman’s conclusion would stand out because he would be the first to argue, shockingly, that perhaps society was not worth adjusting to. Goodman titled his “report” Growing Up Absurd and made the case that the white picket fence lifestyle that kids were failing to prepare for was neither meaningful nor enlivening. Later on, Martin Luther King echoed Goodman, telling young people that they should be “proud to be maladjusted” to common evils like bigotry, poverty, and militarism.
Because of teachers like Goodman and King, a generation built an alternative to their parents’ suffocating Mad Men culture. But, as happens with the passage of time, when my generation reached high school, new absurdities had cropped up. To be a well-adjusted Millennial teen was to curate your individual identity at the shopping mall, praise the profiteers of the latest digital distractions, and study hard in school so as to “compete in the global economy.” When we resisted this path, most adults told us: there is no alternative.
However, if you were lucky enough to wander into the social studies wing at George Mason High School over the past 18 years, there was always an alternative waiting for you. There was someone there who would encourage you to listen to that voice whispering from your social conscience. There was a teacher there who saw education not as the pouring of the previous generation’s knowledge into the next generation’s empty heads, but rather as the sparking of our curiosity and moral imagination. His name is Jamie Scharff and he is retiring this year after 29 years of service.
Scharff avoided the pitfalls of the run-of-the-mill gadfly teacher. First, he did not hide his beliefs behind a faux neutrality. In fact, everyone at school knew what he thought about things. But he would not let us take his word for it and would follow up any opinion with ardent recommendations of books to read, documentaries to watch and thinkers to check out if we wanted to learn more.
Second, Scharff never let his students get cynical. He always paired criticism of the latest modern absurdity with positive alternatives of communities fighting back. Some days it was documentaries on worker cooperatives. Other days it was articles on indigenous communities fighting climate change. Sometimes it was Scharff’s own choices, like when he would explain why he taught a certain way or how his house’s geothermal system worked. Perhaps my favorite example is how, whenever a quiz bowl tournament got too competitive – Scharff was the coach of Mason’s team (and, yes, there is a funny irony to a teacher who despises fact-based education coaching a sport based on memorizing facts) – Scharff would call the team into a huddle and pretend to draw out basketball plays to run, a reminder that we were all there – in the tournament, and perhaps on this Earth, generally – to have fun, learn, and work together.
Just like how Kafka’s distinct style earned him his own adjective, Scharff’s blend of social criticism, humane hope and hearty jokes did, too. Over the years, I have often heard Mason alumni refer to certain challenges to the conventional wisdom as “Scharffish.” And perhaps Scharff’s greatest legacy is the hundreds of students who are bringing Scharffish perspectives to their work around the world. Ralph Nader (who Scharff turned us on to) once said that “the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.” And that’s just what Scharff did.
Pete Seeger (who Scharff introduced to us, too, of course) used to share a parable about a big seesaw. The side of the seesaw on the ground had rocks of injustice on it. The end in the air had a basket quarter-filled with sand. Some people, Seeger explained, have teaspoons and are trying to fill up the basket, one teaspoon of sand at a time. Most people are scoffing at them, saying they are putting in all this work and nothing is changing. But one day, Seeger reminds us, that basket is going to be so full that the whole seesaw is going to flip in the other direction. And people are going to ask, “how did it happen so suddenly?” The answer, of course, is: all those teaspoons over the years.
One day, some of my generation’s seesaws will flip and we will overcome a few of the unjust absurdities of our day. When people ask how it happened, here’s the answer: the countless teaspoons from people like Jamie Scharff.