The Middle Shelf: Part 11- A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

Hello Middleshelfers

The path to common ground can sometimes be guided by looking back to where we have been in order to find the path to where we can be going. If you have been following our book recommendations during the month of July, you know that we have been focusing on aspects of the beginnings of our nation, how we celebrate and the people who were influential to America’s beginnings.

Most of us probably can name at least a few of the “Founding Fathers,” such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.  However, one of the Founders who often gets lost and might well be the most relevant to issues taking place today is John Jay who was the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Today, most scholars agree that Jay has been sorely overlooked and considering that John Adams said of Jay, “he was “of more importance than any of the rest of us,” historians now seem to be attempting to rectify the neglect.

There is much about Jay that is worth highlighting such as his writings in The Federalist Papers, his tenure as Governor of New York where he sought penal reform, fought for the abolition of slavery, and “in 1799 succeeded in passing a gradual emancipation act, whereby children of slaves became free on their 25th birthday for girls and 28th for boys, thus bringing about the emancipation of all slaves in New York.” Interestingly, he is also known as the Father of Counterintelligence.

However, it was his appointment by George Washington as the first Chief Justice that is particularly germane to our current national scene.  Washington had offered Jay any spot in his cabinet that Jay wanted, but he chose the Supreme Court instead.  While he only presided over four cases during his tenure, those cases included Chisolm vs. Georgia.  Jay ruled in favor of the right of people to sue the states. The decision, in that case, was later overturned by the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment of the Constitution, and subsequently modified to some extent to allow for appeals in the federal courts.  However, Jay’s philosophy was on display in the original ruling when he wrote:

“[T]he people are the sovereign of this country, and consequently … fellow citizens and joint sovereigns cannot be degraded by appearing with each other in their own courts to have their controversies determined. The people have reason to prize and rejoice in such valuable privileges, and they ought not to forget that nothing but the free course of constitutional law and government can ensure the continuance and enjoyment of them.

At a time when we continue to discuss some of the same issues and try to reach common ground over what roles do “the people” play versus the government, John Jay seems to be a worthy person to read about.  While there is actually a dearth of books about him compared to the other Founders, two of the most recent is John Jay: A Life From Beginning to End by Hourly History and John Jay: Founding Father by Walter Stahr.  Both books seek to explore the crucial roles and ideas of Jay and bring him to the forefront of the Founders.  So if you want to learn a little bit more about the Supreme Court through the eyes of its first Chief Justice at a time when we are gearing up to debate the role of the Court, Jay’s biographies are an excellent place to start.

 

The Middle Shelf: Part 10- A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

It’s Thursday again CGC MiddleShelfers and we hope everyone had a great 4th of July!

In last week’s book entry, we took a look back at how previous generations celebrated the Fourth of July.  We thought that we would stay with the patriotic theme albeit through a historical lens for the month.  Much is made of and written about the Founding Fathers and we will spotlight them next week.  However, we decided because of the many issues currently being hotly debated in our nation impact women in particular. It seems germane that as the nation examines and continues to discuss the origins of the guiding documents and institutions as they relate to the rights of women, we look back at the roles and extraordinary contributions that women played in creating our country.

Additionally, it is particularly relevant since:

“according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, a total of 455 women have filed as candidates for Congress, easily topping the old record of 298 in 2012. Fifty-one women have entered Senate races, compared to 40 who set the previous standard in 2016. Gubernatorial candidates are even more striking: 60 this year, far exceeding the 34 women who ran in 1994. This influx of women in public roles is matched by a rising tide of females behind the scenes who are running campaigns themselves, not just serving male bosses”

 

Cokie Roberts, an award-winning journalist, and author has written two books about women who influenced the shaping of our country.    In Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, Roberts introduces the reader not just to the more prominent women most have heard of such as Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and Mollie Pitcher, but she includes the stories of some lesser-known women who had a substantial and transformative impact of the men who framed our nation’s principles.

Her companion volume, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation, continues to highlight these and other women such as Rebecca Gratz, Louise Livingston and Sacagawea, using private journals, correspondence and some previously unpublished sources to explore their accomplishments.

If you also happen to have an elementary school-aged child you read to or buy books for, Independent Dames: What You Never Knew about the Women and Girls of the American Revolution by Laurie Halse Anderson, is worth checking out as well.

Thoughts from our President on July 4th and how it should inspire us.

As is my family’s custom, on the morning of July 4  we attended a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the original Bill of Rights to a packed house at the iconic Unitarian Church on Nantucket. The reading was preceded by audience participation in the singing of patriotic American songs including “America The Beautiful”, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, “It’s a Grand Old Flag,”, and others. It was a rousing event, one that amid the celebration reminded me of how hard it was to get where we are today as a country.

But for the first time, I can remember, it wasn’t all rah-rah. Two passages from the Declaration generated specific applause from many in the audience who saw  them in the light of our current political situation:

“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

“He (the King) has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the reasons for it, there was great significance in that applause. The fact that Americans can freely and openly express their grievances with not just our government but the person leading it and not fear repercussion is a freedom that enables our country to continue to not just survive but thrive.

I happened to sit next to a young woman from Chile who is doing a summer internship involving historic preservation here on the island. We had a great conversation. It was exciting for me to see her thoroughly engaged and enjoying the experience of witnessing how Americans feel about their country, even when they express their displeasure.

As inspired as I was by the festivities I, too, felt emotions this year I had not previously experienced at these Declaration readings. Recalling my visit to Charlottesville earlier this year I found myself wondering how the Black Americans in the Nantucket audience were feeling during the reading. They were there and fully participating in the celebration. But do they feel differently about the country than I do? What was in their thoughts when they heard these words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?

America has its challenges, but July 4th reminds me that living Americans have more fundamental things in common than they have differences. My hope is that we can increasingly work outward from those common elements and shared culture. If we can each harness the spirit and deep resolve behind the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in our civic engagement we can find common ground, make progress on the issues that divide us and make this already great nation even better.

The Middle Shelf: Part 9- A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

It’s Thursday again CGC MiddleShelfers and we hope everyone had a great 4th of July!

How will you be celebrating the Fourth of July if at all? Will you attend a town or city-wide parade? Watch some fireworks and put out the flag? Or will you simply enjoy a mid-week day off or start a longer vacation?  Do you think that of all the holidays that we observe in the U.S. this should be the one that unites us all under one common ground view? As we reflect on what the Fourth of July means to our nation, it might be worthwhile to look back at how previous generations celebrated the holiday and this week’s book recommendation does just that.

“We shall become a people when each fraction of the total population, so much of which is foreign in our big cities, has something so definite in common with the rest that it feels that it belongs not merely to the voting population but to the social community. We shall become a people when in our times of rejoicing we come together and express those feelings which are given to us, in ways that are mutually intelligible and happy.”

If the above quote sounds like something you might have heard or read this week on the news, it is in fact taken from a book dated from the late 1800’s early 1900’s that included a compilation of articles on how our nation should be spending Independence Day. Available as a free download from the Russell Sage Foundation, in Independence Day Celebrations, Five Articles by Luther H. Gulick, William Orr, Inez Gardner, and Lee Hanmer, the authors detail the why and how of celebrating our nation’s July Fourth festivities. However, the book is more than a blueprint for how to hold a parade or set off fireworks. Rather it is more a series of commentaries on why we should celebrate and how to do so as a community.

While the book certainly includes some descriptions and terms that today might not be considered politically correct, the theme throughout the book is centered on the fact that towns and cities alike were best served when all of the residents participated in the celebrations by bringing their unique and individual heritages to the forefront. For example in detailing the celebration held in Springfield, Massachusetts, the article explains:

“Most impressive and significant was the contribution of the various races and nationalities that help make up the citizenship of Springfield. In a population of 80,000, representatives of thirteen peoples were found who by their interest, enthusiasm, and public spirit furnished the climax of the parade. Three great divisions of the human family appeared in this pageant of the nations; in the ranks were the offspring of four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa, America. Chinamen, Ethiopians, English, Scotch, Irish, French, Germans, Italians, Greeks, Swedes, Poles, Armenians, and Syrians strove, in cordial emulation, to show the characteristic qualities of each people, and the contribution each was made to American life.

“Surely no citizen of Springfield, young or old, could see such a historic pageant of races and nationalities without gaining some appreciation of the nature of the modem contribution to our national life, or could escape having his outlook broadened by some glimpse of the America of the future that is to come out of this mingling of races and race-ideals, or could fail to see the great possibilities for improvement in the amalgamation of many of these people bringing traditions of such beauty and nobility.”
While the book is somewhat dated and anachronistic in places such as its discussion of the perils and frivolity of fireworks, often making the use of pyrotechnics sound like something out of the Music Man’s mantra of “we’ve got Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pool!”, the book offers a look back on the times when people were migrating to cities and small communities were seeking to maintain their unique traditions while also absorbing a less homogeneous population. The book is a short read but worth checking out to see that over 100 years ago communities were trying to come to grips with who we are and a proper means to celebrate who we could become.

“As a people, we are in the making, plastic, responsive, receptive. Such a spirit will take the best among all the influences that bear upon it. Our civilization is in a “nascent state”, with its power of affinity at its strongest, and its capacity for assimilation most vigorous. Such occasions as the popular festival of Independence Day constitute a rare opportunity to minister to the multitude, and rightly to shape and fashion our characteristics as a people. No more inspiring or ennobling call ever came to mankind.”

The Middle Shelf: Part 8 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

It’s Thursday again CGC MiddleShelfers,

As you know by now, each Thursday we have been bringing you suggestions for reading books that in some way may move the needle towards common ground.  We typically look for new releases with a few of the classics thrown in for good measure.  Our criteria have been non-fiction and to try and present both sides and/or a centrist point of view.  However, this week we thought we would try something a little different and throw it back to you for suggestions as well as some insight on what is on the reading table of you and your friends.

Also, given that this is the first official week of summer and you might be focused on kids getting out of school, graduations and other family events, we wanted to keep things a little lighter.  So with that as the mindset, we started to look at the mid-year 100 books we should all read type lists.  Lo and behold, even for these lists there really is no unanimity.  Of course, there are some crossovers that appear on all the lists but it appears reading is individual in taste even for scholars and book editors.

What we did find interesting is that on most of the general lists as opposed to a specific genre (mystery, science, etc.), novels seem to dominate rather than non-fiction.  The thought perhaps is that novels are more timeless and deal with human emotions while non-fiction is often more influenced by the shifting currents. Not so surprising is the fact that some of the lists include books about food and culture as people have realized that common ground is often found around a good meal. However, we tend to agree with the author of the Esquire list that:

“While a great novel can be engaging, there’s nothing quite like a true story—whether that story comes in the form of deep reporting, memoir, or personal essays. Nonfiction gives us the chance to look at the world around us and learn something about how we fit within it. And nonfiction also tells us a lot about ourselves.”  

Below are links to the book lists we found from the U.S. and Great Britain. The one from PBS is actually a poll for the Great American Read (novels only) which you can still vote on.  Do any of these books in your opinion offer some ways to achieve common ground? Do town-wide reading challenges often held by libraries help bring a community together as everyone reads and hopefully discusses the same thing?  If you were making a list of must reads for people looking for common ground and how to really talk to one another which books would be on your list?

Top 10 Book List for this Week

 

 

The Middle Shelf: Part 7 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

Among the ways that we hope to achieve common ground is through seeing if we can at least get people on the same page as to what issues and facts are being debated.  Once that is achieved, debates and discourse should be somewhat easier.  You have the same starting basis and then layer in the […]

The Middle Shelf: Part 6 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about the fact that in the search for common ground, it seemed that the search would need to involve getting a better understanding through reading of the views of the “other” or those whose opinions we fail to immediately understand.  Along these lines, we have noticed a few trends that have been emerging of late in new books that are being published.  The velocity of books trying to make sense of what signals people and pundits might have missed, and which have resulted in overt polarization, seems to be speeding up.  Each week there is at least one new book from all sides that looks to explain why we are where we are and why we should not be so surprised that common ground is lacking.

This week’s recommended books are no exception.  Three books have recently come out that make the attempt to point to causes and effects that should have been picked up along the way.  All three have something in common in that they were written by journalist/commentators that are looking back on what they themselves failed to notice were trends in attitudes.  In essence, all three of these books are mea culpas by longtime observers of the political spectrum who missed the signs over the last few decades of just how polarized we were becoming because they had been insulated to a large degree.

In The Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, syndicated columnist and CNN contributor Salena Zito, and veteran Republican strategist Brad Todd, tackle the question of whether or not the election of Donald Trump was a “fluke” or truly a tectonic shift that will impact our nation and elections for years to come.  They traveled through 10 states and interviewed over 300 Trump voters and came away believing that the media did and continue to get it wrong in how his base is characterized.  The book is sympathetic to its subject, and according to some reviews perhaps a bit too much, but its premise that the media and politicians missed the depth of the dissatisfaction is well documented. It cautions against using simplistic terms like male or working class to describe those driving this movement.

Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable, by former senior political CNN analyst Bill Schneider, takes a somewhat different approach in his attempt to answer the same questions. His focus is on the last 50 years of elections and the impact of the New America of diversity that became a force in the 1960’s ran up against backlash from the Old America in 2016 could have been expected from the presidential elections during that time span.  “Tracing the development of the growing rift over the decades, he examines the forces that have produced America’s present “gridlock and dysfunctional government,” chiefly the separation of powers built into the Constitution. He makes a strong case that voters have increasingly placed values over interests and that public opinion often rules: The “intensity of opinion matters, not just numbers.”

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America’s Fifty-Year Fall–and Those Fighting to Reverse It, by journalist and attorney Steven Brill covers roughly the same time period that Schneider’s book does.  Regarded as a progressive and liberal, Brill’s book is worth noting for two reasons; the first being that he    pinpoints his own profession of lawyers as partly accountable the current dysfunction claiming that there is a:

“new aristocracy of rich knowledge workers, high-achieving, well-educated individuals who have gravitated to law and finance, inventing financial instruments and corporate legal defenses that fed greed but “deadened incentives for the long-term development and growth of the rest of the economy. Brill calls these individuals, who want to hold onto their wealth, the “protected,” as opposed to the rest of society, “the unprotected,” who need government to act for the common good.”

However, he also spends time searching for and highlighting current national and local groups that are actively working to get past the polarization and seek solutions and common ground.

All three of the books can be added to possible reads that might help to explain how we reached a place where discourse is especially difficult but also to help on the road to a better understanding of the reasons behind opinions other than our own.

The Middle Shelf: Part 5 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

Columnist, radio host, lawyer, and cable commentator Michael Smerconish has just released a new book with a title that may well sum up the current political landscape for those of us trying to reach common ground. While primarily based in Philadelphia, Smerconish has a national audience.  In Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right, American Life in Columns, Smerconish compiles over 17 years of his writings for a number of newspapers and where needed, provides updates on how his opinions have evolved to become more centrist.  As former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says in his review of the book:

“If only more of the country could be as passionate as Smerconish about the need for change, we could end partisan gridlock and get our politicians working for the people again. I have always believed in Dwight d. Eisenhower’s wisdom that the center of the road is the only usable space and the extreme left and right are the gutters, and Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right says this perfectly.”

A couple of side notes worth mentioning about the book:

Smerconish now identifies himself as an Independent but had been a life-long Republican until 2010. He previously had worked for Vice-President George H.W. Bush and Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo when he became a Republican.  However, in 2008 he began to break with the Republican Party endorsing President Obama because he felt that the Republican’s failed to capture Osama Bin Laden. As time had gone on he began to move away from the Conservative views to a Centrist position. In an op-ed in 2010 for the Washington Post, he wrote,   “Buying gas or groceries or attending back-to-school nights, I speak to people for whom the issues are a mixed bag; they are liberal on some, conservative on others, middle of the road on the rest. But politicians don’t take their cues from those people. No, politicians emulate the world of punditry.”

His latest book, especially the updated afterward that follow many of the columns, is worth taking a look at to see how someone who is so well-entrenched in media now tries to walk the middle ground in an effort to alleviate some of the polarization that may well have been caused by talk radio and cable shows.

 

 

 

The Middle Shelf: Part 4 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

In discussions on why common ground is often so difficult to reach, there is a lot of talk about echo chambers, tribes and especially the popular rationale of not being able to understand “the other.”  Of course, the notion of “the other” is subjective depending on who you are, where you might have been raised, what your socio-economic and demographic identity may be, not to mention gender, religion and the list goes on and on. We tend to see things through frameworks and breaking through those to understand a different view is hard.

One of the things that all of the panelists that CGC has had at its forums have been adamant about is that to reach common ground or at the very least to try to bridge some of the discourse, people should READ.  Reading about the ideas and lives of those we do not agree with or understand at least offers some jumping off point to gain insight.  To that end, this week we are putting the spotlight on three books that try to open windows into the thinking of who or what may be your “other.” These are not easy reads in the sense that depending on your vantage point you may find them uncomfortable.  However, part of the challenge in trying to find common ground is to at least try to hear many voices.

Two of the books came out originally in 2016 with the paperbacks recently being released. These both explore in different ways what could be called the “Trump voter,” though they offer a much deeper analysis of those in America who for many years have felt that the nation was passing them by.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance tells the story of Vance’s family who despite some upward mobility where he was raised in Middletown, Ohio could not escape their Appalachian roots.  Vance, a Marine veteran, Ivy League law school graduate and a leader in Silicon Valley offers a poignant memoir of both the rise and fall of the white middle class and the cultural and social impact that it has had on multiple generations.  However, the book remains somewhat controversial because while it has been embraced by many conservatives as a tough love view of the rural poor, many progressives believe that it reinforced myths about the poor.  Regardless of which side of the aisle you are on, this book offers a starting point for discussion on the subject of can we have any common ground on how we view the causes of poverty versus personal responsibility.

While Vance’s book is more memoir than study, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild offers a more analytical approach to trying to understand the sources of anger many missed.  Hochschild is a retired award-winning U.C. Berkeley professor of sociology.  The book is based on a five-year study where she immersed herself with Tea Party loyalists in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She chose a state that she saw as a paradox.  Her goal was to bridge what she calls her liberal “empathy wall” to better understand the Right. As one reviewer put it:

“In her attempt to climb over the ’empathy wall’ and truly understand the emotional lives of her political adversaries, Arlie Hochschild gives us a vital roadmap to bridging the deep divides in our political landscape and renewing the promise of American democracy. A must-read for any political American who isn’t ready to give up just yet.”
Joan Blades, co-founder of LivingRoomConversations.org, MomsRising.org, and MoveOn.org

While both of the above offer views of some constituencies on the white southern and rustbelt Right, the just-released I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown is a memoir of a middle class African-American woman who puts her personal story of growing up in Toledo and Cleveland, Ohio in the context both of race and her work in churches. Interestingly enough, she grew up in Ohio like J.D. Vance but offers a different perspective as an African-American and woman.  She is a writer with a degree in social justice and she has “worked with nonprofits, churches, parachurch ministries, and universities in both the urban and suburban context for the advancement of racial justice and reconciliation.”

Brown has worked hard through her activism to try to bridge the divide but this book pulls no punches when it comes to her anger over what she sees as systemic racism even among liberal whites.  She is not offering any absolution and while advocating reconciliation she also describes an exhaustion she feels from battling.

None of these books offer solutions. What they do offer as we search for common ground are windows into why some people feel disenfranchised and why polarization has no easy fix except to keep trying. A reviewer of Hillbilly Elegy summed up the situation thusly:

“All these books are inarticulate attempts to describe the true scene that now has been revealed to us. We don’t know how to talk about this; we don’t know how to talk to each other. One day we may stumble into a lexicon and a strategy for solution, but the way forward, for now, is to first learn to listen to each other and reflect upon our own distorting frames.”

 

 

 

The Middle Shelf: Part 3 – A CGC Guide to Finding Common Ground through Reading

One of the seminal books that should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand polarization and how there could be a possibility of bridging divides and reaching common ground is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. While the book has been out since 2013 we still want to recommend it because we find the author’s empirical approach to polarization based on his work as a social psychologist to be a rational way to view politics during this rather confusing time.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at the NYU-Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995-2011) at the University of Virginia.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of American progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. He was named a “top 100 global thinker” in 2012 by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the 65 “World Thinkers of 2013” by Prospect magazine.

Haidt considers himself a centrist politically. A couple of years after he wrote the book, he explained that his main goals in writing The Righteous Mind was to “examine through applied psychology how moral psychology can help us understand the forces making American democracy so dysfunctional? Also how can moral psychology help citizens understand each other across the political divide?” 

What he found was that all political movements have blind spots even among those that acknowledge moral truths. The three pillars of political thought being the left right and libertarian, according to Haidt, all have their truths about how to create a society that is humane. The problem is that ideology, even if well meaning, can distort and make us blind to how others think.

Few books on this type of subject begin with the origin of life starting with bacteria! By looking at morality through both cultural and biological lenses, we can get unique insight into how humans make judgments. It is a multi-genre study that takes the reader across the academic fields of study ranging from social and political sciences as well as the humanities.

In his introduction, Haidt notes that there are aspects of the topic that are not easy:

Etiquette books tell us not to discuss [politics and religion] in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity.”

The book is divided into three parts or principles:

  • Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second
  • There’s more to morality than harm and fairness
  • Morality binds and blinds.

Throughout the book Haidt offers graphics to illustrate his points. One of the ones we found particularly enlightening was:

 

There is so much more about this book that makes it an excellent addition to your summer, or any season, reading list. For more on this book please visit Jonathan Haidt website. 

As always, we would like to hear from you about your summer reading plans. Are there new books or any classics you think are worth reading on the road to common ground? Let us know what you think of our first two choices.