Love and Trust: People, Community, Government
David Brooks at a 2016 International City Managers Association meeting spoke of the need of more love—the kind that lasts—in our jobs and communities. “Our society has become over politicized and under moralized.” Brooks identified the underlying issue as a growing isolation in society where more people live alone and no longer affiliate with “middle circle” organizations like the PTA, the Elks, and religious institutions.
In a speech full of lessons in creating a richer moral life on both a personal and professional level, Brooks covered what he sees as the root of the current polarization in the United States. He described an “epidemic of loneliness”, a “crisis of trust”, and the idea that so many people are falling through the cracks.
One method for social amelioration for local government leaders in concert with local community organizations is to “create platforms where intimacy can happen…I’ve never met so many lonely young people and very old people who are lonely. ”
Beyond Brooks’ analysis, at a deeper level, we need new thinking. We have extolled individualism (separateness) without appreciating the Greek idea of individuation (greater identification with diversity and interdependence). The consequences of our widely accepted thought-form is the mental model of atomized individualism. Man is seen as a calculating creature with other persons being potential threats, potential competitors for social recognition and wealth, reinforced by a hyper-competitive capitalism. In the survival of the fittest, many atomized individuals feel beat down and alienated by a production-consumption ethos instead of being lifted up by a greater awareness of the needs of the Human Family.
To rectify this, we need a different conception of a human being as being able to define themselves and thus reflect their individuality in self-chosen, humane groups, expressing and fitting their potentials in circles of communities. These communities –some temporary, some more permanent and intentional–is where one is able to join with the joys and pains with others and provide mutual aid when appropriate. Human solidarity suggests that we are “better together” and through time, we can ripen together more gracefully.
Brooks said that working in public life means being called to use your talents to help others and while that can be humbling, it also provides the chance to look outside oneself and ask , “What is life asking of me?” Brooks suggests that by serving others we can bring the language of intimacy out into the public square, though it may be uncomfortable, and can begin to heal society.
Seneca said that “where there is no love, there is no community.” An expression of love inspires the heart to desire to listen and strive for mutual understanding with others. Active listening involves silencing one’s own chatter in order to listen quietly with an attitude of respect toward others. This motive animates our intuition. Empathetic listening enables us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes–appreciating their strengths, weaknesses, and conditions–without necessarily agreeing with them. Compassionate listening goes beyond empathy through turning our whole being guided from our innate wisdom to desire to understand, drawing out a person’s strengths, and being helpful. It draws on our heart quality to inspire our mind to see beyond external differences and policy positions in order to intuit and discover an underlying basis of commonality of interests and shared interdependence in human communities.
Listening and discovery require patience. With patience fueled by love, our reason can be uplifted and imbued with our heart quality to inspire new and more expansive thinking. For natural conversation pointing to truth seeking involves getting to the heart of the matter–the inner, many times unspoken truth in the silences, dissolving barriers. As the Talmud says, “What comes from the heart, enters the heart.” An aim of social harmony informed by truth-seeking can be combined with a sense of fraternity such that moral communities can search for the good without always having to agree. Thus, it is in the archetypal model of the Greek polis that human beings have an appreciation of their interdependence and that they exist as a moral community.
It is in the public square that people deliberate, however provisionally, on “what is the good?” Even polarization and extreme events, born of human suffering, can heighten each person’s sense of personal responsibility for their communities. It forces people to engage and help others, up close and personal, rather than relying and blaming social institutions or clinging to outmoded abstract ideologies such as “liberalism” or “conservatism”. It evokes a politics of humane authentic action, not simply a “talking shop”. In the accumulation of spirit of love and fraternity, the good can be “compounded” and approximate that of the whole community, not simply for those who have benefited from the community in exercising their particular talents or capabilities without regard to the mute and the meek who also contribute.
The subtle and shifting question of who is included and excluded in varying formal and informal circles of community, with their varying webs of differences in partially open systems, is a challenging governance question. For example, in the Christian Science Monitor Weekly, August 29,2016, rural sociologist David Peters who studies heartland inequality at Iowa State University says, “Residents and community leaders do, however, have this power to build up trust in the community…(in order) to marshal investments and resources. Yes, it is difficult. But it’s within their power to change. He points to a recent survey of 99 struggling farm towns, “We find that communities that have higher levels of social capital–the level to which people trust one another, and whether they’re tolerant of different opinions and allow newcomers to be involved in decision making and power structures–those tend to have better economic and demographic outcomes.” p.15
Nonetheless, citizens and public managers working together can express the joy of integrating different levels of desires and needs while also sustaining the political and economic capabilities of all the people and the natural world through the provisioning of foundational merit public goods as public policy. We need a generosity of spirit in order to–“Think global, act local, engage the good, appreciate limits.”
