Tag Archives: connection

Monster Mash: A Call for Reconnection in Policy and Community, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Feb
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - Scooby-Doo Image (21166023) - Fanpop

Monsters Unleashed – Fanpopfanpop.com

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. George Orwell

My biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we’re advanced in every way except in our humanity.  Bryce Dallas Howard

The tortures mankind devises for its amusement will surely render the devil redundant. Reed King

You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. Jeff Phillips

We may be monsters, but we are each other’s monsters. L. Grey

Their lies are shrouded in beauty, attractive and believable to the average person. Jessica Scurlock

She was lucky enough to know little enough to fear nothing more than wasps, the dark, and the darker figments of her imagination. Angela Panayotopulos

No one wants to die, said Becka. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.  Margaret Atwood

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued, at times perplexed, at other times even disgusted at the degree to which dystopian thinking and imagery has influenced – surely infected as well – our social and political life.

What moved me to start writing on this topic and stop procrastinating over it was an image on my twitter feed this past Sunday morning, one of many posts in the post-Musk era full of monstrous venom directed at others, of violence in all its diverse manifestations, of lies and manipulations which represent, among other things, a down-payment on a world of fear and unaddressed longing, of political impotence and resource scarcity, that seem set to bring us down to levels that those who study the human condition have long recognized (and feared) our capacity to descend.

The image I refer to was of a classroom-style space in which sat a group of Russian children wearing masks and listening to a middle-aged woman speak on the topic of war.  These children were perhaps of middle school age, still not so far from those days of being fearful of the dark, of imagining all sorts of monsters under their sleeping places.  Not so far from needing the reassurance and stability of older persons that there really aren’t monsters under the bed, that it is OK to sleep secure in the knowledge that we erstwhile adults are doing all that we can to ensure a brighter, less fearful future for their still young lives.

Such reassurance was not exactly what was communicated through this particular post.  What was “shared” was the view that “War is victory. War is love. War is friend. War is the future of the world”.

Well, if war is the future of the world, then these young lives are doomed to intersect with violence and deprivation which make the monsters under their beds seem like Sesame Street characters in comparison.  If war is not the future of the world, and there are still plenty of us determined to make this so, then this “sharing” takes its place among the most monstrous lies that could be perpetuated on young minds, minds which are able to imagine the carnage to come but can do little or nothing at this point in their lives to divert its impacts.

Lest we insert my post into some dynamic of now-rampant superpower confrontation wherein the evildoers are conspiring to “educate” their own next generation, we don’t have to look far within our own contexts for those monsters we choose over and over to feed instead of tame.  In my own country, the media is saturated with trailers for films and other accessible video that feature more shootings and explosions in a sixty-second commercial than any child needs to see in a lifetime.  We have proven ourselves ready to believe anything about the world (or each other) that we feel could strengthen our hand while we enthusiastically project into the universe the evil that we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves.  We set up schools to reinforce white privilege and glorify figures such as Adolf Hitler, run by people who are otherwise categorically opposed to the “indoctrination” of schools.  We use the machinery of politics to divide and deny, and we use the language of religion to win assent from people who don’t seem to recognize (or perhaps care) that their economic and spiritual pockets have yet again been picked.

The characteristics of societies given over to dystopian worldviews are more common than we might otherwise think, people who have come to expect so little of others or themselves, people who have accommodated themselves  to levels of violence and inequity which undermine prospects for caring and reconciled communities, people who believe fervently in the presence of monsters lurking in their sleeping spaces but who have also largely scorned  the rhetorical reassurances of those in authority who themselves have too-often failed the more important test of reassuring actions.

It is commonplace in social commentary to reflect on our “advances” as a civilization, clever as we surely are, but less to acknowledge the degree to which many of these advances create new obstacles to access by most of the world’s peoples, obstacles which take many forms and which are more often protected than challenged, sometimes at the tip of a firearm.   In my own country, but not my country alone, we continue to innovate in ways that both solve problems and create new ones without careful scrutiny of the gaps which our innovations are more likely to widen, the gaps which serve the interests of some but stoke the grievances of many, the genies which we so willingly let out of their bottles with not a clue in the world as to how to get them back in should that be required.

It is difficult for me at times to grasp what precisely we are up to as a species, why we find so much comfort in what are demonstrably our more troubling human impulses, why we insist on turning difference into occasions for hatred, why we take umbrage at the things others do and the ideas they hold without investing a single moment trying to understand the common complexities of people, their fears and loathings, their opinions and failings, their aspirations and dreams.   I don’t know that I have ever lived through a time when people presumed to know more about their political, cultural or religious adversaries based on assumptions, caricatures, stereotypes – none of which could stand at face value the test of evidence generated from direct, human interaction. We have literally become adept at creating monsters with little or no corroboration regarding what exactly people have done (or thought, or believed) to warrant this unseemly designation.

Last week, I indulged a “538” podcast with Robert Waldinger, a Harvard professor who has been chronicling – and lamenting – the gradual but consistent demise of human connection which has had – and is having —  grave impacts on our politics, our religious faith, even our personal health.  Waldinger describes a society of increasingly isolated and lonely individuals, people who report having few friends of any quality, fewer and fewer trusting bonds, fewer too of the complex human connections that can contextualize our overly muscular, abstracted and increasingly digitally-enabled  condemnations of others we do not know, have little interest in knowing, and to whom we seem content to posit  as existential threats rather than as life and health-saving ties that bind. 

Clearly we have decided in too many instances, as the great Wendell Berry once noted, that we would prefer to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  Consumption, acquisition, doubling down on the “beautiful” words that obfuscate more than illuminate and that we simply “need to believe,” getting our “kicks” by condemning all that we fail to understand, projecting evil into the world that we haven’t yet had the courage to confront within ourselves.   These lines are hardly inevitable, but they are trending in directions that may well at some point make monsters of us all.

As one strategy for getting beyond my deep procrastination regarding this piece, I listened to a rendering of “Monster Mash,” a fun tune from long ago that got many in its day off the couch, away from the television, and on to the dance floor.   It was a “graveyard smash,” we were told, so much so that even corpses were ostensibly inspired to leave the cemetery for an evening and join the fun.  I fear that the next version of Monster Mash will be less about playful music and more about words which foment hatred and mistrust, words which signify our generalized intent, if that Russian woman prophesies correctly, to put “others” in their graves rather than invite them out for some genuine human interaction on a dance floor, real or metaphorical.  

More and more, some quite powerful thinkers are coming around to the view that our nations are only as healthy as the bonds which connect us to one another.  This is important work that has the potential to contextualize our policy, improve our personal and social health, and overcome the abstractions that serve only to increase populations of monsters, real and imagined.

For the sake of ourselves and the sake of our world, let’s reconnect.

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Power Grid: Accompanying the Traumatized and Those who Serve Them, Dr. Robert Zuber

22 Aug
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To know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden. Goethe

When the remembering was done, the forgetting could begin.  Sara Zarr

The ripples of the kind heart are the highest blessings of the universe.  Amit Ray

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.  Amy Tan

I am weary of this frail world’s decay.  Murasaki Shikibu

I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.  Albert Schweitzer

When you don’t think you can, hold on.  James Frey

While riding the subway to and from our shared office this week, I noticed a new public service announcement among the placards which adorn each of the cars.   This one read, “connections are stronger than addiction.”  

This reminded me of what has now been years of accumulated evidence from neuro-biology that humans are, indeed, “hardwired for connection,” that as Dr. Amy Banks and colleagues put it over a decade ago, before the onset of a death-scattering pandemic and the systemic degrading of our politics, “we need to get back to the real basics of having relationships be at the center of our meaning.”

The implications of her work (and others in her field) lie far beyond the realm of the drug and alcohol addictions which were the sub-text of the subway messaging.  Indeed, one can make the case that our “addictions” are, perhaps even more than they always have been, much broader and more pervasive than substances alone: the stubborn habits of the heart that bring pain to ourselves and others but that we feel powerless to change; the ideas and values which we have allowed to ossify into conspiracy, becoming more and more divorced from any human realities they might once have been intended to address; the defensiveness that rises to the surface at the slightest provocation, indeed often absent any provocation at all; the paranoia which comes from social isolation (often now self-imposed) and which attempts to project on to others a malevolence which has often taken shape first within our own souls.

As at least some have been reminded during this seemingly endless pandemic, connection remains a good portion of the cure for what now ails us.  Unfortunately, it has also become uncomfortably clear across lines of age, of gender, of race, of culture, that we simply don’t know enough about each other — or perhaps even care to know — to nuance our responses to the complexities of other lives, to see the flaws but also the promise, to appreciate the contributions more than the inconveniences, to resist the rush to judge and to punish which often serves interests far darker than any alleged nobility of justice.   We have “wearied of the world’s decay” in part because our experience of that decay is less and less first-hand, a product of images that tell us less than we think they do, as well as accounts from diverse media that tell us mostly what some think we want to hear or, perhaps more to the point, that share only what they think “our hearts will allow us to know.”

If as the neuro-biologists increasingly accept, that we are “hardwired to connect,” then much of our current behavior constitutes a dangerous denial of our very essence, a particularly distressing challenge to those who seek to keep connection at the heart of their own life’s mission, but also for those have suffered in greater measure and who understand the degree to which the “ripples of kind hearts” are indispensable to their own healing, indeed to the full restoration of their own capacity for kindness and compassion. 

This week at the UN, amidst some appropriate hand-wringing over the fall of Afghanistan and its implications for everything from women’s rights to state corruption, amidst the latest crises of high winds and shifting earth heaped upon the already-traumatized people of Haiti, we gratefully joined with others in modes of reverence, mourning and connection.  At a series of events honoring the sacrifices of peacekeepers, UN field personnel and humanitarian workers (as part of World Humanitarian Day), an array of speakers paid homage to those who choose to place their life energies at the service of others, to stay the course and “hold on” when others would be tempted to flee the scene or lift their hands in desperate frustration, those who choose to remain at their demanding posts, insisting as one staffer boldly said this week  that threats from terrorist violence, a pandemic and climate-related factors often closing in around them are simply not enough to “deter humanitarian vocations,” are not enough to distract their attention from those “traumatized from attacks” including women made widows and children made orphans by weapons, famine or other forms of abuse.

While many in the audience resonated with the words of UN High Commission Bachelet honoring this “work of a lifetime,” to accompany survivors and raise our voices on their behalf, many also recognized that this is now, in places from Yemen to Tigray, much easier said than done.  Yes, we must learn better how “to support each other” along life’s journey.  Yes we must, as SG Guterres notes this week, place more services at the disposal of those facing unimaginable “heartbreak.” And yes, we must continue to honor and support the sometimes-incomprehensible risks taken each and every day by humanitarian workers in conflict zones — but this requires the rest of us to ensure an end to the violence which complicates every facet of their life-preserving work and which also claims the lives of far too many of the workers themselves well before their time. 

And then there were the discussions focused on the survivors themselves, survivors of often horrific terrorist violence which represented, as noted by the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, “attacks on humanity itself.”  As USG Voronkov acknowledged, there are times when our preoccupation with fighting terrorism “obscures our view of the victims who need more from us.” Indeed it can also obscure from view the testimony of victims who know for themselves what they need in order to overcome the trauma that generally lingers longer than they could possibly have imagined, trauma that, as one said, can change life dramatically “through no fault of your own.”

And what did they say they most need?   For starters, they need people around them who can resist the temptation to forget, to forget about the dark side of the what this world can continue to offer up once the remembrances have concluded and the symbols of honor have been stored away for another year.  Moreover, survivors of terror, or mass atrocity violence, or sudden displacement or tragic personal loss recognize that the pain can never be healed through social isolation, can never be restored by allowing personal trauma to metastasize into a life force, an addiction if you will, one which denies the core of our biological essence.  It was so encouraging to hear one survivor after another call for “platforms for healing and connection,” for “powerful victims’ networks” which can help restore something close to full functionality in this challenging world.  It was also encouraging to note the support expressed by survivors for the humanitarian workers who so often stand in courageous attention between those vulnerable persons for whom “time seems to be running out” and the person-centered services that can help them re-engage with more of the life which can still be experienced in many places as a kind of “inhabited garden.”

For those who doubt that lives of trauma can become lives of healing and purpose, for those who believe that the deep pain of violence and abuse is forever consigned to impede and isolate, we end as we began, with words from Amy Banks and her neuro-biology colleagues, those who understand that lasting change in our distraught human community is still possible despite all contrary evidence.  The key to this change, they make clear,  is within us, in the quality and steadfastness of our “motivation and interest in making different choices which will stimulate new areas of the brain and re-wire us.”  And as they know, and as the survivors of violence and abuse we heard from this week and those humanitarians who accompany them also know, there is no choice more impactful to healing and change than the choice to connect, to widen our circles, to reinvest in what we think we know of others including those we have already “given up on,” to have the courage let whatever kindness we have at our disposal flow to every corner of life that needs it, to refute the lonely conspiracy and paranoia that a life of isolation and distance is prone towards, to affirm what is most natural to us rather than investing in what are often vast quantities of energy required to keep connection buried under layers of resentment, suspicion and grievance.

Every once in a while in our UN spaces, the traumatized and victimized among us serve up reminders to those of us who seek to “re-wire” our national and global institutions, to both recover the core of why they were founded in the first place and help them meet current expectations. One such reminder is directed squarely at us; that we also can recover and nourish that capacity at the core of our human condition, the connection that alone can ease the deepest pain, stem chronic suffering, vanquish isolation, and restore that kind, human presence which can steadfastly rewire our institutions and refresh relationships with those they are mandated to serve.

The good news is that we still have what it takes to do this, though we must resolve to return to the path of connection without delay.  The longer we deny who we truly are, the longer we bury the power of our own hardwiring, the longer we will have to deal with the consequences of people and institutions being less, sometimes far less, than we need them to be.

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