Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 405: How You Can Help End Polarization and Inequality – and Get Happier, Too | Robert Putnam & Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

In this episode, Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett discuss the recent book they co-authored, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.Robert Putnam is perhaps best-known for his seminal book Bowling Alone, about the increasing atomization and isolation of American society. He is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University. Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer and social entrepreneur who holds a BA in History from Harvard. Content Warning: There are multiple references to racism and racial violence in this episode.Click here to give a gift subscription to the Ten Percent Happier app.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/putnam-romney-garrett-405See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. We are living in a pretty ugly moment in many ways, inequality, polarization, self-centeredness. They're all peaking. And it can all make you feel hopeless and helpless. But here's the good news. We have been here before and dug ourselves out.

And it is possible for you as an individual to contribute to solving this problem once again. And the very work of contributing is likely to make you happier. Just to note when I talk about the ugliness of the current moment I'm talking specifically about America, but the social dynamics we're gonna discuss today are relevant in many parts of the world. And the individual happiness inducing work that my guests are going to propose, that advice is universally applicable.

Speaking of my guests, I have two of them today. Robert Putnam is a name you may have heard me mention before, or you may have just heard about him in any number of other ways. He is perhaps best known for his seminal book, Bowling Alone, which was about the increasing atomization and isolation of American society. Putnam is the Malcolm Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard. He's the author of many, many books, including his latest, which is called the Upswing, how America came together a century ago, and how we can do it again.

Also on the show today is Putnam's co-author on the Upswing, Shailin Romney Garrett, who is a writer and social entrepreneur, who holds a BA in history from Harvard. In this conversation, we talk about something Putnam and Garrett called the I-We-I curve. It starts this curve in the gilded age of the late 1800s, an era of polarization and individualism, that then gave way to the progressive movement.

That's progressive with a capital P. So not to be confused with today's progressives. These capital P progressives showed up on the scene in the early 1900s, and later on in that century, in the 1960s, the trend kicked off by the capital P progressives was reversed, and we've been descending ever since back into self-centeredness and division. So that's the I-W-I curve. We then go on to talk about how we today can learn the lessons from that process and apply them to right now. In other words, how we can swing back towards we

on the I-W-I curve and how that work, really is stuff all of us can do. And in fact, we'll make each of us happier in the process. We also talk in this episode about the giant asterisk next to the success of the capital P progressives. It's a warning about what went wrong last time and how the success last time carried the seeds of its own demise and how we can do it differently this time.

Content warning here, just a heads up. There are multiple references to racism and racial violence throughout this time. Content warning here just a heads up. There are multiple references to racism and racial violence throughout this episode. Also an audio note. There's some background noise underneath Shaolin's voice throughout the recording. That is as I often say the nature of remote recording in a pandemic. One item of business before we dive in. If you're still looking for a holiday gift, you can avoid the supply chain woes and send your loved ones mindfulness this year with a subscription to the 10% happier app. We're offering gift subscriptions at a discount through the end of this month. No shipping required, your gift will be delivered directly to your email inbox. Get a gift subscription by visiting 10% dot com slash gift. That's 10% one word all spelled out dot com slash gift. All right,

we'll get started with Robert Putnam and Shalin Romney Garrett right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course

Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm all one word spelled out Okay on with the show Hey y'all is your girl Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress singer and entrepreneur on my new podcast All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Bob and Shayla, welcome to the show. It's good to be here. Thank you. Bob, let me start with you. What is the I.E.I. curve?

It's a statistical curve that shows how American society has changed over the last 125 years. It measures the degree of political polarization, the degree of economic inequality, the degree of social isolation, and the degree of self-centeredness. And that curve looks like an inverted U curve. America starts at the end of the 19th century in what's often called the Gilded Age when America was very unequal, very polarized, very self-centered, and very socially isolated. And then beginning at that point, for the next 60 to 70 years, America moves in the

right direction. On all those measures, we become steadily more equal, less polarized, less self-centered, more altruistic, and more socially connected with our friends and neighbors and family. And then, roughly speaking in the middle 60s, all those lines turn and they go in the wrong direction for the last 50 years up into where we are now, we've become steadily more polarized, steadily more unequal, steadily more self-centered, and steadily more socially isolated. And we use the word, the i we i curve as a shorthand to refer to that curve.

Just as a point of interest, Shaylin, as you're putting together these graphs, how are you measuring equality polarization, social connection, and self-centeredness? Great question. So the IWI curve, as Bob described, is really a compendium curve. It's a curve that brings together multiple strands of data. But in particular, these four areas, these four lenses, economics, politics, society, and culture, and each of those has their own curve that looks just like the IEI curve more or less, but underneath each of those individual curves is scores of different datasets that come together to sort of form a measure of polarization, for example, or a measure of economic inequality. So for each of those, you have multiple strands of data making up the bigger picture, if that makes

sense. So for example, with polarization, there's many different ways that you can measure this. One would be, for example, how often members of Congress support legislation introduced by someone from the opposing party or not? Another measure of that, very different measure of that, would be how does the average American feel about someone who identifies as a different party than them? So that would be something we call affective polarization. Yet another measure polarization might be the rate at which Americans engage in split ticket voting. So that would mean, for example, I would vote for a Democrat for president, but then in maybe local races or for mayor, I might vote for a Republican. Do I split my ticket between the two parties or do I vote for one party all the way down? And so you can measure those trends over time. And when you put those all together,

it gives sort of an overview measure of polarization. And the same could be true of all the different lenses that we're using to look at American society. There are many different strands of data that come together sort of braided together to show this larger Iwi-i phenomenon. Dan, if I can just jump in for one second, what that means is that underneath that simple curve that I described, we have 20 or 30 separate independent measures of

all of these measures, they all tell the same story. Now, that's not where the book ends, because we want to use that curve then to try to figure out how we got where we are now and how we could get out of it. But underneath that is just a rock solid statistical foundation. Does that make sense? It does. In fact, I'm grateful to both of you for making sense. And as somebody with a unhappy history with math and speaking on behalf of everybody in that category, I appreciate your clarity and your willingness to dumb it down for people like me. Well, Dan, I'm with you in that category. Bob is the statistician among us,

and I'm really the storyteller, so you and me stick together. Well, now that you said that, Shaylin, I want to hear a story. So I want to hear what happened in 1910. You call this period the upswing. What was going on there? Right. So again, what we're talking about is the story beginning in the Guilded Age in American history. So we're talking about the 1870s, 80s, 1890s,

this moment in the wake of the Industrial Revolution when we had, according to the data, which we've now described, deep polarization, deep economic inequality, deep social isolation, and extreme cultural narcissism. And this was a moment that looked remarkably even breath-takingly like the moment we're living in today. There were many commentators and analysts decrying the end of the American experiment. All is lost.

Democracy has descended into tyranny and plutocracy. America has gone off the rails, and this is the beginning of the end. Which again, sounds familiar to what we often hear today. However, what the story of the upswing tells us is that none of those Doomsday prophecies were realized. On the contrary, in the wake of the last Guilherty Age, America entered a multifaceted, multi-decade upswing in which year upon year, those problems began to reverse themselves and continued to do so for some 70 years. And the era that really comes on the heels of the Guilherty Age is an era called the progressive

era. Now, it's important to just pause and be clear that we're not using the term progressive in the same way that it gets used today. Today, the term progressive is what we might call small P-progressivism. That's the leftmost end of the political spectrum, right? This progressive era that we're discussing that happened in about 1900 was capital P- P progressivism. It was a movement that was incredibly diverse.

It was bipartisan. In fact, one historian called it a movement so diverse as to be barely coherent. But it was a movement of people who had this compelling desire to repudiate the downward drift of our nation. And they had a galvanizing belief in the power of ordinary citizens to do that.

And they entered the fray and really set in motion a sea change that helped us reclaim our nation's promise. And so the real question of the upswing, the book, is how did they do that? What did that movement look like? What were the key components of it? Who were these progressives? And how is it that they managed to engineer a 70-year upswing in a moment when things looked really dark? Bob, what's the answer to that question? The reason that we have done this study is because of this astonishing parallel between the plate that we face now. In great detail, we don't have to time to go through all the details, but it's not just the statistics.

Life in America, ordinary Americans then felt very much the way it does now. And then we got out of it. So the question is, how do they do it? It wasn't inevitable, but we can look at their, the capital P progressives, strategies, and characteristics to see, well, it worked for them then, what about now? First of all, remember at the base of this study is a lot of data, and statisticians faced with this problem would ask, well, what is the leading indicator? That is, what's the one that moved first when it began to turn because people would think,

well, if that's a clue to what the causal process is, and if we could somehow move that variable first, then everything else would follow, it would be a simple story. And most people think, most Americans and many, certainly many, socialists think that economics is the prime mover everything. If you can change economics everything else will follow. But the astonishing thing is that economics was if anything the lagging variable it moved last. Now I don't I might be careful here. I don't mean to say that we don't think that changing economics and economic inequality is an important on the contrary. I think it's very important, but it was not the thing

equality is unimportant on the contrary. You think it's very important, but it was not the thing that moved first last time. And it's not likely to be what moves first now. So if that wasn't what moved first, what was? But if you look at the data and you also look at the historical record, it's clear that what it's seen, at least it seems, that what moved first somewhat surprisingly to us was the cultural or moral shift. Americans began to think about their moral obligations to one another in a different way. Darwin had just published his book about evolution and the lesson that people took away from

that is, everything is great if you just, if everybody looks out for number one, and you devil take the hindmost survival of the fittest that's what people thought ought to apply to society. Darwin did not think that but people called social Darwinists mistakenly applied his theory to society and what that meant was if everybody just looked after their own interests it would all work out for the best, and the devil take the hindmost. Even now, a morally repugnant theory. But what then happened is the social darwinism began to be replaced by something that came to be called the social gospel. Among evangelical Protestants there began to be a movement of people who said, wait a minute, read the darn Bible. a movement of people who said, wait a minute, read the darn Bible. We ought to be looking about at the least of us, not the most, not be worshiping self-interest, but we ought

to be paying attention to the people who were left behind. That's what Jesus said, they said, and they were right. And that movement, the social gospel movement, that moral reawakening, a conception that we had obligations that were primarily to other people. Then it spread actually well beyond religion, it spread into the society as a whole. And that's the matrix out of which these capital-people-gressive reformers came. They were all people who had experienced this sense of moral reawakening, a sharp sense that we had obligations to other people. And it was not finger shaking at somebody else. They were turning the finger inward and they were saying, it's us too.

We have got obligations and we are the ones who've got to, first of all, take account of our own moral obligations to other people. And then out of that movement, I don't want to say magically, but it was a startlingly powerful effect. That's what our data show, actually, startlingly power effect, that big social change began, first of all, in the heart, that is with people saying, I've got to change. in the heart that is with people saying, I've got to change.

I love to quote one of these social gospelers because I think it provides such a clear exposition of what we're saying. So this is a quote from Washington Gladden who was the theologian, a preacher who was preaching this social gospel. And he said, it is idle to imagine that changes in our governmental machinery

or in the organization of our industries will bring us peace. The trouble lies deeper in our primary conceptions. What we've got to have if we want the true democracy is a different kind of men and women, men and women to whom duties are more than rights and service dearer than privilege. So this call is not just for a morality that is about getting into heaven,

it's a morality that is about shaping society through the mechanisms of democracy. And that's what's so interesting about how this social gospel comes to influence American society more generally. So who are these progressive reformers that are having these moral moments and these changes of heart? Well, many of them are very young.

The vast majority of progressives who were doing movement-making change were 30 or younger when they rose to prominence as reformers. They were very young. They were young people who lived in an America that looked completely different than the America their parents or their grandparents had lived in. Remember, this movement was happening on the heels of the Industrial Revolution, when millions of Americans had moved out of small towns and off of farms and into these big, bustling industrialized cities.

And so they really had this sense that they had to invent solutions for a totally changed world. And one of the ways that they were inventing new solutions was inventing new ways of bringing people together. Again, one of the byproducts of industrialization in this huge demographic shift was a lot of loneliness. Those social institutions, that civic infrastructure that held America together when it was largely a rural nation,

just weren't gonna cut it once we were on the lower east side of Manhattan or on the south side of Chicago. And so you had all these younger farmers saying, wait a minute, this eye focused mentality, this eyes focused morality about getting ahead. This is taking American in completely the wrong direction. We have to invent a new way of being. And I'm going to start with bringing people together, mostly because for a lot of them,

they were very lonely. And so they begin to create associations, new ways of bringing people together to kind of fight the hyper individualism of the age. And as they do this, they realize that bringing people together has power to create change in a democracy. And so they build vast new stores of social capital, which is the value that relationships bring to society. And this is partly what fueled this upswing for decades. And so you had settlement houses and service organizations and civic associations that were creating all of these new face-to-face ties, particularly amongst unlike groups. And so the association building, that's this sort of antiquated term that the progressives

would have used, today we would call it connection or we would call it relationship or community building, but they really forefronted this as what they were doing in their movement, and it created ways of bringing people together not only to feel better and to sort of feel less lonely and isolated, but also to then begin creating citizen-driven change. You should tell the story of the rotary. It's a perfect example of what you just said, because it's very clear what was happening there. Yeah, so one example of these reformers was a guy named Paul Harris, who actually moved to Chicago from a rural upbringing to become a lawyer. So he was part of this demographic shift. And he was just frankly really lonely.

He was struggling to come up with ways to connect with people in a city where he didn't know anyone. So he has this idea that he's gonna invite a few colleagues and develop a lunch club sort of for professionals. And it starts out with just a handful of men meeting together, purely for social reasons. And that morphs over time into something that really touches a nerve for other lonely professionals

in these cities. And the movement starts to spread to other cities and it gets bigger and bigger. And then as you see the movement change over time, it adopts this motto of service above self. So it changes from just this organization of being something about bringing people together for the sake of bringing them together for their social health, but into something that becomes about societal health. So then the rotary Club starts engaging in not just lunchens, but service projects.

Building public toilets, I think, was the very first service project that the Rotarians undertook in Chicago at a time, again, when you had masses of new immigrants living in tenements, and there was really not enough public infrastructure to handle that massive new influx. And so they're building pro-social solutions that come out of the fact that they've now come together

and can work together. Much more of my conversation with Robert Putnam and Shaylin Romney Garrett right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just gonna end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud

from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans formed the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other.

And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wonder App. Bob, you mentioned there were several lessons from this period. Anything that we haven't talked about yet. Yeah, there are a couple I'll mention too, and then Shane and I'll leave the last one, the downside to you, because there is a lesson that tells us something we shouldn't do, that they did, that we shouldn't do.

But I want to still now focus on other things that the progressive, remember capital-people progressives, these are these young people now most living in cities and they're morally not just rejuvenated, they've had a moral awakening and they want to change society in all the ways that we would like to change society now, that is make it less polarized, make it more equal and so on. So where did this process begin? There are some historical accounts of the progressive area that describe it as if it were a top-down that somebody in Washington or maybe somebody in Harvard or something had this great idea and then that spread across America.

That's exactly wrong. Exactly wrong. This is not a top-down movement. It's a bottom-up movement. And it starts by people working in their own communities. Remember, these are these young people scattered around America, wanting to do something to fix America, and they begin at their own front doorstep. They begin at the neighborhood level. They begin at the city level. They begin, in some cases, a state level. And they begin operating in what, one of them called, Laboratories of Pharmacrosis. That's where the

term Laboratories of Pharmacrosis comes from. It comes from one of these progressives who said, let's try out a million different ideas. Some of them won't work, but many of them will, they believed, and it turned out they were right. I want to just tell one quick story because I just think it's a wonderful story. Now we're talking about America at the end of the 19th century, remember? Lots of people had been raised in farms and many people are still living in rural areas, but the skills that were going to be needed in the new industrial age were different from the skills that were going to be needed in the new industrial age were different from the skills that had been needed on the farm. And so that required a new kind of education

and it required a high school education. Now, probably many of your listeners will think as I did, when I began this project, well, wait a minute, didn't God invent the high school? It must have been around forever. But the short answer is no. It was invented in America via something called the high school movement in small towns

in the middle of America in 1910, plus or minus a couple of years. And when I say high school, public high school, I mean, every kid in town, just by virtue of being a kid, doesn't matter what their mom or dad does, would get four years of free secondary education, a big deal. So it turned out to be a really big deal. And then you ask, well, where did that come from? Well, it came from small towns, and that meant they had to pay higher taxes, including the rich folks.

They had to impose taxes on themselves to pay for this new innovation because they wanted to help all the kids in town. Estonishingly within a couple of decades, virtually every community in America had a high school starting from these small little towns in the middle of America. And we think that's important for a number of reasons. And by the way, it turned out to be an enormously productive innovation. I mean, economic historians tell us now that most of American growth throughout the entire 20th century was due to high school education. So it was a huge deal that helped all Americans, everybody got richer, a lot richer over the course of that

over the 20th century on average. It particularly helped poor people, poor kids, because it was available to every kid in town. And where did it come from? It came from small towns in the middle of America. That's a story that in itself, that's a little jam of a story that has enormous implications for America right now, but that lesson and the broader lessons, of course, that I've described namely that this is a bottom-up moment, now to top-down moment. The political leaders of the country were lagging in decadre. The progressive era did not come from some national charismatic leader saying, I know the way, follow me, I can fix this.

It was exactly the opposite. The charismatic leaders, the leaders who did show up in the movement came along to amplify and support what was fundamentally a bottom up grassroots driven movement. I love that we're not for these small town capital P progressives. We wouldn't have all this great storytelling around high school, you know, Archie comics, mean girls, 16 candle. So they gave culture not just the economy. Yeah.

Sure. So if I could just add one more piece to this, as we spend a lot of time now lauding these progressives, these capital-peed progressives, who again were both Democrats and Republicans, and they were coming from different social classes. And there is important to point out that there are some cautionary tales here, not everything that they did was wonderful. And we highlight a number of these sort of cautionary tales in the book, but I just want to bring out one here, which is that the we that these progressives were

supposedly building us toward, was not inclusive. So many of the progresses were themselves racist. The we that we were building toward was highly racialized. And in fact, a lot of the structural inequality that we are now reckoning with as a nation was sort of built into many of their innovations and many of their federal programs

that resulted from those grassroots innovations. And so there's a sense in which during this period of American history, the needs of people of color were sort of sacrificed on the altar of progress, which for people of color is a very familiar story. And so if we're looking to this era as a sort of inspiration for how we could bring about another upswing today, we can't omit that lesson, which is that whatever we, we would hope to build and reorient ourselves toward today to sort of emulate this upswing that happened once before, that we absolutely has to be fully inclusive. We can't just kick that goal down the road again and say,

we're going to fix these other things and we'll take care of that full inclusion piece later on because that's what the progressives did last time. And the result of that, to a certain extent, meant that the upswing had knit into it the seeds of its own demise. I mean, that upswing ultimately turns downward. And a lot of that has to do with the unfinished business of racial reconciliation in this country. I want to talk about that down turn, but just to put a fine point on what you're saying that, and what we'll get into this in more detail when we talk about, you know, practically,

what we should do now, given what you're teaching us, on the white supremacy baked into this capital P progressive movement, you're saying, let's look at some of the spirit of this movement, some of the policy of this movement, but let's set aside and, you know, exturpate all redlining segregation, voting restrictions, lynching, all of the horrible things that happen in this very same period. Well, I don't think it's just set it aside and say, oh, let's do this and not that, but let's say, look, let's talk about the ways in which they were baked in together, right, that in some ways we were being told in order to get progress, we had to do these

racially based policies, right? And we can't make that mistake again. They were saying we can't get the progress without pressing. Not exactly, but in order to get bipartisan coalitions and in order to get legislation passed or different things, right? We can't make this about including everyone necessarily. Let's start with this piece of the American electorate and then we'll, you know, deal with the rest later on. I don't think we're saying the progressives actually caused racism in America. That goes back way before this, obviously, to slavery. And in the period of the late 19th century,

there was a brief period called Reconstruction, when in fact blacks were making a lot of progress. This was after emancipation. The first 20 or 30 years after emancipation, blacks began to make lots of rapid progress. And then in the South, white southerners turned to terrorism. That's not an exaggeration. That's what the Ku Klux Klan was, in which they murdered lots of black people and said, not here. And so when the progressive era opens, blacks are in terrible shape, not caused

by the progressive era, but they're in terrible shape because of the racism that had been baked into American society, had been briefly halted by the and reversed by the civil war and emancipation, but now is back in full swing. I think the critique that we're making of the progressives is not that they caused this basic problem of racism. That goes back a long ways, but they didn't do enough to fix it. And therefore, if we're looking to them for inspiration, as we are for good reasons, we talked about earlier, there are a lot of really good things they do.

We can't forget that they omitted what was probably the biggest problem of all. They just ignored the biggest problem. And because they were personally racist, they probably didn't even see the problem. There were some respects in which there was improvement in black-white equality. During the growing we period, that is the period that we're praising in the, you know, up until the 1960s. I'm not talking about inclusion now, because it was that whole period, it was a period of segregation.

And lots of black people were excluded from graduate school and professions and so on. But if you look at black, white equality, the ratio of black life expectancy to white, life expectancy, the ratio of black, high school graduation, to white, expectancy, the ratio of black high school graduation to white high school graduation, the ratio of black income to white income, the ratio of black wealth or home ownership to white home ownership. There was progress during that period. Blacks were

closing the gap mostly by their own efforts. We're closing the gaps with whites. I don't want to trigger code what was happening because we never got near and we never have gotten near to equality. But we were moving in that in the proper direction and that trend continues up until the mid-60s. Then it stops. Now let me fast forward to something that happened after we wrote this book and after we told this story. And that is the summer of 2020, 18 months ago, and George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis. And that triggers a revival of the Black Lives Matter movement. And the reaction was not just about the murder of Black men by white policemen.

That's of course an important part of the story, but it's also America's unfulfilled promises of the Civil Rights Revolution had we had not made any progress, no progress from the mid-60s until 2020. I mean, it's astonishing actually. America signed a promissory note in 1965 and we said we're gonna fix things and we did nothing. The position that the average black person in America

feels and correctly, their historically right is we've done essentially nothing for the last 50 or 60 years. I'm trying to put the framework of this IWI curve and of our historical analysis out there so that people can see the things that we're seeing on our television screens now have their root in this long history that we've talked about. have their root in this long history that we've talked about? So just to reset for a second. So we have the Guilded Age when we're seeing spikes

in cultural narcissism and inequality and polarization. And then around 1910, we've got this upswing with the very serious asterisk of the capital P progressives at the tip of the spear of that particular upswing, we're either actively racist or accommodating racist and we're not in any way really, meaningfully thinking about the welfare of non-whites. And then in the 60s, we get the downswing from something of a high watermark in pro-social attitudes and again with the asterisk in mind. So what happens at that point that we get this, the up swing ends and everything

turns in the other direction? Well, maybe just to build on the discussion we were just having, it's no surprise that the landmark civil rights legislation passes at the peak of this we sentiment, right? America had slowly over the course of these decades moved in the direction of being closer to that ideal of full inclusion and equality, and it's at the peak of that we feeling that we're able to muster enough political will to pass landmark civil rights legislation. However, what happens immediately in the wake of that, it's very clear, strikingly clear actually in the survey data, how quickly white Americans turn from supporting the civil rights legislation to instantaneously saying,

yeah, but let's not get to ahead of ourselves in implementing that. The survey data shows quite clearly that white Americans who were in favor of the Civil Rights legislation all of a sudden say, oh, well, not in my backyard, right? And interestingly, that white backlash to the Civil Rights Movement is a really important part

of this story of the broader turn in America back towards this eye mentality, right? And the fact that we had not done the heart work, the underlying work of racial reconciliation meant that was still a source of triggering this turn toward narcissism, right? That the idea that this is a zero sum game between the races, that really it's just a giant competition. And when that becomes really real in the wake of the civil rights movement, we get this broader turn toward I. Now, did white backlash to the civil rights movement cause the broader turn back toward I? That's really not possible to say, but was it bound up with it?

Absolutely. And so turns out that a more eye-focused society is not hospitable to racial progress. And that's a really important lesson because again, going back to that idea of if we want the two democracy, we need a different kind of men and women. What we need is men and women who don't believe that society is one giant zero-sum game, but actually believe that we're all better off game, but actually believe that we're all better off, when we're all better off, that actually true self-interest, or as Alexis de Tocqueville put it, self-interest rightly understood, is thinking in the long term about the fact that what's good for everyone actually circles back to being good for me. And I think in the last half century what we've really seen is a complete imbalance

in our idea about sort of the balance between liberty and my ability to do whatever I want and my responsibility to those around me and my willingness to work together towards shared goals. And we're not here saying that the solution to hyper individualism is hyper communitarianism that we all just need to sort of move on to communes and engage in communism and socialism and that solution. Too often, it's hurt that way, right? But in fact, what we're saying is that those two things have gotten completely out of whack. We've way over-emphasized individualism. self-interest rightly understood, realizing that when we invest in what is collectively good for all, in the end, we create a society that is better for everyone. That's the lesson we believe of the upswing. Of course, we never did that in the context of full inclusion.

We didn't do that in a way that wasn't racialized, but we have the opportunity now to do that. And again, looking at the upswing as this movement that was driven by young people, what gives us some hope today is that America now rests in the hands of the most diverse generation in American history. If anyone is going to be able to set a new North Star or put us on a course toward a Wii that is fully inclusive, we believe that it's the post boomer generations today. There really is a chance to do this up swing again, but get it right this time. And instead of knitting into it again, as I've said, the seeds of its own demise set us on a course toward an even higher trajectory of what is possible when we move toward we. Much more of my conversation with Robert Putnam and Shaylin Romney Garrett right after this.

Putnam and Shailin Romney Garrett right after this. What can we do now? And I think this audience is going to be very focused on what can I do? Shailin, you've talked about heart work. What does that mean practically in a human mind and a human life? Right. I mean, I do think when you hear us talking about needing to move in the direction of we, there's this temptation to say, Oh, well, that's just a whole bunch of combi on nonsense, right? All you need is love never really got us

anywhere. But again, looking back at the lessons of history, I think it's really interesting that the progressives again, the capital P progressives from this historical era were characterized by moral awakening, moral indignation. But there's a couple of ways that moral indignation can manifest. One is looking around in society and saying, well, those people are the problem. Those are the bad apples, and if we could just expel them from society, then we would all be fine. Right? That's one form of moral indignation. Another form of moral indignation is what the historian Richard Hofstetter called moral

indignation directed inward. And that was really what characterized of the heart work that these progressives of another era were beginning to do. Many of them were themselves elites who had benefited from an unequal polarized society, but they began to ask themselves how they had been complicit in creating this terrible situation in America. It wasn't just about the Robert Barons. It was about all of us who had been silent through all of it and just sort of taken what came to us and said, you know, good luck to everyone else. And so I think that when we're talking about that heart work, we're talking about moral

indignation directed in work. It's very easy to engage in moral indignation directed outward. And we see a lot of that in the public square today. We don't see as much of the other kind of moral indignation. But I do think that we are seeing some signs. I mean, look at Francis Hogan's testimony before Congress, right? Look at this Facebook whistle blowing. This is the person who built these algorithms, herself built them, and is now standing up in front

of God and everyone to take responsibility for the havoc that has wreaked on our society. And we're not all working at that level of society, but we're all working at some level in our lives, either in a way that promotes this society's one giant competition mindset or that promotes the mindset that we all do better when we all do better. And so I think doing that heart work is to ask ourselves how we can begin to reflect that more we focused ethos right where we are, right outside our own doorstep.

So what does that look like practically? Well, take my situation, for example. For a long time, I lived in southern Utah. I only recently moved to the East Coast. I lived in southern Utah for a long time in one of the reddest parts of a red state. And I don't share that political persuasion. But I was surrounded during 2020 with a lot of anti-black lives matter sentiment. And in fact, right across the street from me in my own neighborhood, my neighbor put

up a giant back the blue flag that I had to look at every single morning sitting at my desk looking out the window, seeing this huge symbol that to me felt like a really inappropriate reaction to the sort of racial reckoning that was happening in America. And I had two choices. One, I could look at that and say, well, that's a form of political signaling that tells me exactly who that person is.

I dismiss that outright and I want nothing to do with that person. He's the problem in our society. And because he's the problem, he's not worthy of me even interacting with him. That's one reaction that I actually think is quite common today when we encounter people who don't share our views. But I chose to take a different path. And that was to begin to get to know that person as a person, as a neighbor, right, to engage not in political conversations, but in neighborliness conversations.

And ultimately, I became friends with this person. He actually became my best friend in the entire neighborhood. He ended up helping my family move. We ended up helping him and his wife with several things. And we share completely, he's a Trump supporter. I am not. We do not have the same worldview when it comes to politics.

And yet here is a person that I can understand his humanity and I can see who he is and recognize that he is an American just like me. And I think that one phrase that I love to turn to from the progressive era is that many of the progressives talked about building a nation of neighbors, of restoring that idea of neighborliness as itself a really important and fundamental democratic act. And so that's one way in which we can begin to

write where we are, literally, right outside our doorstep, create associations across lines of difference that help us to recognize that those people aren't the problem, that the problem is actually that we were refusing to talk to one another. And beginning there, I think is an incredibly important starting point. I understand we're now really talking about history. We're talking about today in America. What should I do? And remember, one of the lessons from that period was that it was a grassroots bottom-up movement that turned

it around. It came from ordinary people and ordinary towns and had different views about everything, but recognized that they had a shared interest in the education of their kids, that they had a shared interest in the education of their kids, or in the cleanliness of their streets, or in the quality of the air that they were having to breathe because of a nearby factory. So I'm not talking policy wants. I'm talking about just ordinary neighbors in a community, getting together to solve local problems across all sorts of lines of difference. And that's the way America turned itself around back then. Neighborhood by neighborhood, people fixing local problems. Now, flash forward to now in America. Shannon and I recently were speaking to a group of people

in Kansas City, Missouri. Very divided, the town is very divided, but there's a group of people who are insistently getting together intentionally crossing party lines and crossing lines of economic lines and so on, to figure out what are the problems here in Kansas City? And how can we fix those? Those are people who right now in America are emulating doing the same thing as their

predecessors more than a hundred years ago, and we know it worked a hundred years ago. That's where all these great things like the high schools came from There's also a lesson here for I mean a practical lesson here for people who are somewhat older Remember the last time it wasn't people in their 50s and 60s who were solving these problems It was young people so don't just give lip service to young people Listen to what they're saying and let them be leaders. That's what it took last time. When I hear the term heart work, I mean, again, not the kind of term that I personally would use, but I think I know what you're pointing at. When I hear it,

I think of it a very broad way, capacious way, and absolutely the things you're describing, getting involved locally, and also getting to know people with whom you have differences and seeing what lies beneath the slogans, et cetera, et cetera, all will be included. But I would also include, and I think a lot of the listeners on the show would include things that might be labeled,

quote unquote, spiritual, sort of inner work. Is that something that the two of you also envisage? Yeah, I mean, for sure when you look at the social gospel movement, that was a movement of Christians challenging other Christians to look at the spiritual foundations of their faith. At the time, they were living a highly individualistic form of spirituality, a spirituality only focused on what was in it for me in the life here after, and focusing on my personal sins and whether that was going to exempt me from heaven. And the social gospel was asking people to say, now wait a minute, I don't think that's

actually what the gospels are teaching. And what we need to look at is a spirituality that begins to focus us on one another. And that is really interesting in terms of it being a critique of spirituality coming within a spiritual community and directing it toward itself. Right? Again, that's that moral indignation directed inward. And I definitely think though there's also this interesting point, which of course, dovetails with your work, Dan, which is that both the investor of evolution and the time that we're living in now were characterized by overwhelm. By just like a complete, like when it was fascinating, because it was my job to dig into the

gilded agent into that era and to really paint a portrait of what life was like then. And it was astonishing to me the extent to which on just a day-to-day lived experience level, people described it very much the way that they would today. This relentless pressure to get ahead substance abuse was rampant. There was a real sense of consumerism. People were being bombarded all the time by advertising. When you look at the social commentary of the day, these are the things that people are decrying as problems, right? This relentless sense of agitation and activity and we can never keep up. That was what the Industrial Revolution brought to Americans who a generation before had been

living these sort of more rural existences that were much quieter and much more centered. And now we had this sort of frenzy of the Industrial Revolution. I think that we experience a lot of that today, right? The frenzy of the digital age and the sense in which the individual is sort of lost in a system over which he has no control. And I do think that there was a real call in that time for a recentering on values. And when you get into a debate about values,

of course, a lot of people might say, well, isn't that exactly what's causing our biggest cultural arguments? Is the question of morality and questions of values well? When you talk about morality in terms of abortion or those choppy surface level forms of morality that get talked about in the public square, yes, those can be quite divisive. But if we get down to a deeper center underneath those choppy politicized versions of values, we actually find quite a bit of resonance across all forms of spirituality, right? And so there's a sense in which dropping down into something that is not defined by the noise of the day, but that's actually defined

by a deeper sense of values, puts us directly in touch with the morality that we are calling for, which is a morality of mutual obligation. It's not a morality of one particular religion. It is a morality of relationship. And that's really the hard work that we are talking about. And when it comes to racial reconciliation, how far are we willing to take that morality of relationship? Are we willing to just take it into a circle of moral concern that includes people who look like us? Or are we willing to take that into a much more universal sense of who is our neighbor, who is our brother, and who is the other in which we are engaging in relationship, particularly as

that's expressed in democracy. And so to me, that's what I see is necessary. I think we're so responsive to the noise and the choppiness on the surface of what we're experiencing in our society that we lose the depth of our values that are actually always there, They always have been there. And we're in a moment where we need to call ourselves back to that center. I'm sticking on the subject of spirituality, but I want to draw an analogy to the history

that we've been talking about here, which was in the earlier period, the period of the social gospel, what was crucial was not just religion per se, but what kind of religion? That is, was it a eye-focused religion or a we-focused religion? We made that clear in our historical account, I think. But now let's say the same thing about spirituality. Because I think there are two kinds, I'm simplifying here, but there are two kinds of spirituality, too. There's this kind of spirituality that media is self-focused.

I'm spiritual and I want to be in touch with the larger universe or however one would describe that spirituality. And then there's a spirituality, which is we focused, which is focused on connections with other people. And so just as we would warn about not all religions alike, and you can have an eye-focused religion or we-focused religion, but I think that it's important to not just say spirituality, it'll leave it at that, but to say, right, spirituality-focused, we-focused, community-focused, connection-focused spirituality. We focused, community focused, connection focused spirituality. And one fascinating thing to point to right is what was Tom Wolf describing in his famous article, the me decade that came about in the 1970s, right? He was focusing actually on this form of spirituality.

It's a really interesting artifact this moment when the we turns to the eye, in our eye we eye curve, Tom will phrase this essay detailing this movement in spirituality toward an eye centric form of spirituality. And we are living in a deeper form of that today. And so the question is, how do we take that movement of looking inward, but use it to help us find an expression in the outward in our relationships with one another. I think that's a beautiful place to leave it. This was absolutely fascinating and I thank you both. Thanks, Stan. It was a lot of fun for us too. Thank you. Yeah.

An honor to be on this podcast. You've had some really fascinating people and you're doing awesome, incredible work. So thank you for the opportunity. It was great. Thanks again to my guests, fascinating conversation. Thanks as well to the people who work incredibly hard to make this show happen. Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Casimir, Justin Davie, Kim Baikamumb, Maria Wertel, and Jen Poient.

And also the good folks over at Ultraviolet Audio who do our audio engineering. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-replus

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