Let's Find Common Ground - Hidden Progress: A More Hopeful Future

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Sometimes the future can seem dark. The pandemic drags on. Climate change is upon us. Political polarization remains toxic. When stories of division fill the headlines it’s easy to feel like the only way is down. But what if that’s not true? What if we gave less airtime to voices of doom and more to voices of hope? Our guests on this episode are Zachary Karabell and Emma Varvaloucas. Zachary is the founder of The Progress Network, Emma is its executive director. The Progress Network focuses on what’s going right with the world and amplifies voices of optimism. Zachary joins us from New York and Emma from her adopted home in Greece, where she’s gained an outsider’s perspective on the US. Emma and Zachary are also the hosts of the podcast ‘What Could Go Right?’

Sometimes the future can seem dark. The pandemic drags on. Political polarization remains toxic. When stories of division fill the headlines, it's easy to feel like the only way is down. But what if that's simply not true? What if we gave less airtime, less space, to voices of doom,

and more to voices of hope. There's this Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Nuntite. Our guest today is Zachary Carapel and Emma Valvallucas. Zachary is the founder and Emma is executive director of the Progress Network, an organization that focuses on what's going right with the world. In this episode, Zachary and Emma discuss why it's important to amplify voices of optimism and the possibilities

for a more hopeful future. Zachary joins us from New York and Emma from her adopted home of Athens, Greece. Ashley kicks us off today. The Progress Network launched during the pandemic, which on the surface might not seem like the most auspicious time. Zachary, why create the Progress Network in the first place? This is an idea devoted to worth paying so much attention to all the dystopia and dysbaptic despair in the world that we're not paying sufficient attention to the idea that things might turn out better than we think.

And that a public conversation is also a way in which we all collectively are shaping our future. And so the public conversation that is dominated entirely by negativity about the future has the risk, as people like Carl Popper and others have talked about, of hassling the future of our fears rather than creating the future has the risk as people like Carl Popper and others have talked about of Hasening the future of our fears rather than creating the future of our dreams And I know that can sound hopelessly utopian in its own way But you know, we could use a little more utopian spirit animating our Collective discourse about how we deal with our problems

But we decided that launching during covo was actually right, because it was a low point of collective sensibilities about the future of the planet, the future of human beings, the way societies were meeting the challenge. And I think it turned out to be, you know, exactly the right time in its own strange way. It's very easy to think of the current moment during our pandemic as being a moment of unique tragedy and an example of how things are going to hell for many people. How do you present a case that there are many examples of quiet progress as opposed to loud catastrophe? Part of it was an idea of there are lots of these voices that you just are are many examples of quiet progress as opposed to loud catastrophe.

Part of it was an idea of there are lots of these voices that you just articulated that really nicely Richard that do have that sensibility, but they are atomized in a world of noise, so that they're less than the collective of some of their parts. And the point of the progress network was to create a platform or a network call what you will that would try to create some critical mass and connective tissue between these disparate voices, disparate not by sensibility, just disparate by atomized and in noisy culture. So initially it was, we'll just create a megaphone and a platform that will boost and amplify and connect.

But partly because of COVID, we started doing more events. Yeah, and the pandemic is actually a great example too, because on the one hand, of course, of endemic is an enormous tragedy. But we also were vastly better prepared for this pandemic than any other point in human history. We knew how the virus is being transmitted very quickly. We developed vaccines very quickly from an execution perspective, maybe not so great, but there is a lot that happened in this pandemic that there's no way that could have happened even 10 years ago. So even in the midst of very intense strategy, there is a lot of quiet progress going on. And sometimes we just, we need people to point

it out for us because that's not what we're used to hearing in the news. All show is called Let's Find Common Ground. And I was wondering if you think that the catastrophic view of the world is part of this problem. Does it fuel all this sort of conflict and disagreement that is the whole reason you started the progress network in the first place? So I think there's a check in an egg question, right? Is intensely negative pessimistic, despairing, collective dialogue, a byproduct of genuinely negative trends, right? The planet is warming, there's a discernible rise in authoritarian governments that are not always efficient efficient but are continually brutal.

There is a collective sense that there's no collective, there's a pandemic. So there's a bill of particulars that you can list that lead to a sense of, huh? This is not the most optimal. But I do think that a belief in your collective ability to solve real problems is a necessary ingredient in solving those problems. And that, to some degree, what's been striking, for instance, in the United States, is really the cultural shift from a culture that was naively optimistic about its ability to solve problems to one that is, I think, probably unresumably pessimistic about its ability to solve problems to one that is I think probably

unreasonably pessimistic about its ability to solve problems. America is frequently gripped by moral panics and sometimes the body politic does swing somewhat wildly from one thought to another. Emma, how does it look to you in Athens, this sense that America, which has always been thought of as a country of optimism, is now gripped by pessimism? Yeah, I mean, certainly I think having far more dysfunctional government than the United States for far longer, and in many ways have far more dysfunctional society, you know, for the last 50 years than the US.

And at a place where there's a lot less opportunity, generally, it does feel sometimes that, like, the sort of moral panic and the hysteria in the US, like, is in fact hysteria. Because, you know, a lot of people here, when I say, oh, I came to Athens from New York, they look at me and they're like, why? Like, why would you do that? Why would you ever decide to come here? Because America is still like the land of opportunity and the place where you can really make it.

So it's strange that actually when you're inside the United States, the general tenor of the conversation is like we're kind of terrible and we're moving towards chaos and destruction. or moving towards chaos and destruction. Progress, progress, I should say. Progress often happens slowly and quietly. One example is the fact that there's this big decline in the number of babies to die in the early months of their lives. But disasters are often sudden and dramatic.

Do you think this affects the way we all view the world? Yeah, I mean, there is just a human tendency, which we all know, to pay attention to drama and change. It's why most, you know, plays, most narrative, most shows, have an arc. Even romance has an arc, right? You meet someone and then something bad happens and then eventually something good happens.

But stories of things progressively getting better are almost de facto in terms of human beings storytelling. They're not stories. They may be facts, but they're not stories, because they lack that, that umph. And it requires effort to turn that into a story. So Walter Isaacson recently wrote this book, The Code Breaker is about the massive work underway

in terms of unlocking the genome and some of the technology behind our mRNA vaccines. And he managed to make that a story of innovation and change, he did the same with Einstein. We have done that in the past. There are heroic narratives of look at what people did individually and collectively to surmount problems, but you need a receptive culture for those to be interesting stories. And you need to somehow, I think, change the culture a little

bit in order to make it more receptive. And that's also part of the point of the progress network. And in some ways, the pandemic helps a little bit with that because, you know, as Zachary said, we first were thinking, okay, we're going to launch in April 2020 and then the pandemic hit. We were thinking for a moment, like, how do we tell people that the future might be better in the midst of a short-term future where everything is undeniably a lot worse. But actually that kind of extreme badness leads to a hunger and a thirst, I think, for people to receive information that is more quietly inspirational and it has that positive story arc that Zachary is talking about. It's also not a crowded space. No, it's not. It's not.

Emma, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your faith, because you're a Buddhist, and I was wondering if your religion helps you navigate some of these big shifts we've been undergoing lately, especially perhaps the pandemic. Yeah, definitely. I mean, something that people may or may not know about Buddhism. It's really great for tempering your expectations. There's four noble truths in Buddhism and the first noble truth is that life inevitably contains suffering, which sounds extraordinarily basic, but it's something that if you go from that as a starting point, that despite everybody's

best intentions, and despite all the good there is in the world, that it's just of the nature of human existence for there to be suffering. People die, we grow old, we face married kinds of problems that you know in our life that we have to deal with. And starting from that point of just, you know what? I'm going to counter-suffering in my life. It's up to me to figure out how to respond to that in an inspired way. It has been very helpful to me.

Rather than the thing going from a starting point of, I expect things to be wonderful and I'm disappointed. I think that I'm alone in my suffering, one suffering and other laterizes. Emma Thorver-Lukas and Zachary Carabell on Let's Find Common Ground. I'm Ashley and I'm Richard. The holiday season is about to kick off, and Tuesday November 30th is Giving Day. This podcast is free to listen to and produce for Common Ground Committee, a nonprofit organization that promotes constructive ways to find common ground at a time of deep division.

If you're giving on November 30th, please remember us in your plans. Just go to commongroundcommity.org to donate. We also have a complimentary downloadable holiday guide and blog post on the website. It's called your essential guide to civil political conversations. Plus a webinar on the same topic. Again, go to commongroundcommcommittee.org to find out more and have a good Thanksgiving. Yeah, and now back to our interview with Zachary Carabell and M.O. Varva Lucas.

Let's talk about climate change. We're well aware in the media of the possibility of catastrophe. We hear about that a lot. Can we change the lens so that the emphasis is more on trying to find agreement or common ground on the future of the planet and less on just doom and gloom? Yeah, I think so. I don't understand why the lens of climate change has been a catastrophizing one because when the issue for a started being talked about, there is so much work to be done to just bring people onto the perspective of,

this is a serious issue that needs to be paid attention to. I think we've kind of moved past that point. I think that for the most part, the world understands that this is a serious issue we need to pay attention to, and that we would do better to not understand it as an existential risk to humanity, because I think that that shuts people down and turns people off and understand it more as yes.

This is a very serious issue, but let's come together in a sober headed kind of way to figure it out. And I think part of it too is Even the really bad climate change we're talking about is going to leave However many billions of people on happening the planet and living their lives Maybe living their lives in a way that is less optimal than we would like. But there's a lot we could be doing to focusing on, okay, what does a lived life look like in a warmer world?

And it's not, we're all going to be dead, right? It's we're all going to be here. So what does that look like? How do we make sure we create the most constructive planet for that? And less hospital, does not mean inhospitable. So, there's a lot of angst or hysteria, even some people might say in the US, over things like race and gender and gender identity, to the extent that you'd think that America was torn apart by this stuff.

But is it really, I mean, who's stoking the outrage here? Yeah, so we had Jonathan Hyde on our podcast recently, Jonathan is a progress network member, and he had a little phrase from David Brooks that I thought was really applicable for this, which is that David Brooks calls the culture wars the rich white civil war, meaning that the people who are really stoking those fires are both from the right and from the left a particular cohort being rich and white and for people who don't fall into those, you know, sex, so to speak. The culture wars aren't actually as flaming as they may seem online. work member Bobby Duffy who's done some interesting research in the UK about how the culture wars start in the media and then filter down to the rest of society.

And I believe that's what we've seen happen in the US as well, that there's a lot of arguments going on in various publications and in various newspapers and various magazines, places online. And that starts to feel like that's actually the conversation that's going on on the ground in the US. And I'm not sure that it really is. I mean, certainly when I look at my own experience on a day-to-day level, even with people that might not fully agree with me, we're not kind of hating on each other and being unable

to communicate with each other the way that it seems sometimes when you read some of these columns and these articles about the culture wars. So from where you sit Zachary, do you think that polarization in America is getting worse? Or do you see some hopeful signs that people are now realizing that this is a real problem and it's holding up progress in many spheres of our public life. So, my first professional incarnation was as an historian, and I trained as an historian, I got a PhD in history, and from my vantage, America has always been intensely polarized, but that there's a baby boom generation that had an experience of sort of faux consensus Cold War generated that really only existed for a brief period of time in the mid-50s

into the early 60s, and then a kind of, you know, magical redox moment in the 80s. And I think that that illusion of consensus shapes a perception of polarization. What I mean by that is the perception, the polarization is somehow anomalous and negative and decline as opposed to much more of a steady state. and decline as opposed to much more of a steady state. So I think the United States, like many societies, has been full of intense, angry, brutal, hateful conflict. And while that is in no way something one should celebrate, the belief that that's aberrant, or that there is a point from which we have declined and are therefore spiraling down.

I just think there's a complete misreading of our past in a way that both the left and the right are equally guilty of. So I don't look at our present polarization and go, oh my god, I look at it and go, this is part for the course. What's different is an expectation that it would be different and a belief that it's inherently bad. Even the most stable societies today got there after a long period of really negative stuff happening over a lot of centuries and that informs my view. Now it's really good to be reminded of that because even if you just go back to the 19th century and think about a the civil war in the US, and then be what immigrants had to put up with when they came over to places like Ellis Island and the in great resentment of the population that had been there for, you know, tens of years or a hundred years, I mean, that alone shows

you that there was plenty of conflict in the 19th century. Yeah, I mean, there were signs in the 1850s, you know, no Irish allowed when this wave of Irish immigrants come in in the 1840s because of the potato famine. It's not as if, I mean, the fact that Emma Lazarus' poem graces the statue of liberty of gives you tired, you're hungry, that there is a welcoming mantra that evolved over time did not mean that people were actually that welcome. And we chronically forget this. You know, we tell our Americans are very good at telling themselves a fictional story of who they are and trying to live up to it.

A personal question, Emma, why did you decide to get involved with the progress network? I was facing, as a millennial, a lot of very deep uncertainty and just upsetness about the world. I looked around, I looked at the narrative around climate change and that not only the world might end in 20 years, but that we had done it. We had destroyed the only home we'd ever known and were humans of terrible. I was in journalism school when journalism was in a very steep decline and right during the financial crisis.

I was told, while I was in school, like, there's no way you're going to find a job. It's a terrible job market. Like, we don't know what your future is going to look like. And so there was something very, very attractive about the progress network and the sort of like, to me, which was a counterintuitive and refreshing idea that we could talk about things in a more constructive way. And that's not to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that the problems don't exist. It's just that there might be a better way out there to deal with things.

Finally, Zachary, are you worried about competition that there'll be other groups in your field that'll crowd out the progress network? No. You want more, you don't want less. I would love there to be 14 progress networks. Even if they had the same name, I don't care. I care about the amplification such that this is more part of our conversation. And it's probably not going to happen through mainstream media, which I am, you know, often in and therefore complicit with. But there's so many channels and pathways to ideas entering the world by virtue of the technologies that we've created over the past 10 to 20 years. So I'm an optimist in the sense of, I believe this to be possible.

And I hope that this is only one of many similar and like-minded endeavors. Zachary Carabell and Emma Valverluchus of the Progress Network on Let's Find Common Ground. Emma and Zachary are also the hosts of their own podcast, aptly named, What Could Go Right? This is Let's Find Common Ground.

I'm Richard Davies. And I'm Ashley Milntite. Thanks for listening. This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. is part of the democracy group.