Opening Salvo // Taking the Wheel
Americans should recommit to one another, our country, and the world
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
FROM VOLUME 3 // ISSUE 4 // SPRING 2022 // LIONS & LAMBS
“At least they know what they’re fighting for,” I said of the Ukrainians.
I admitted recently to a colleague who specializes in fragile states—places where lawlessness and corruption find safe harbor and lead to mass dysfunction—that I was feeling a strange pang of jealousy at the clarity of purpose now animating the Ukrainian people in their fight against the Russian government. Here in the U.S., we are tearing each other apart over dogmatic political ideologies. It’s becoming more and more common for people who do not report having a religious affiliation to place politics in its stead. This move can come with its own orthodoxies—and in many cases, unfortunately, not much grace or forgiveness. This is the case even as we peaceably live among people with many different religious faiths.
We can tolerate, even celebrate, that our brother has fallen in love with and married someone from an entirely different religion, which may have a contrary worldview to ours. But if that brother does not stand with us on something more mundane—he will not put the right sign in his window, or read the right book, or perform your political liturgy—he is a heretic who must be cast out. We didn’t even unite over a global pandemic; it only entrenched our divides. Nicholas A. Christakis, head of the Yale Human Nature Lab, summarizes America’s existential threat to itself in his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.
“[T]he United States seems riven by polarities—right and left, urban and rural, religious and a-religious, insiders and outsiders, haves and have-nots,” he writes. “Analyses reveal that both political polarization and economic inequality are at century-long peaks. American citizens are engaged in vocal debates about their differences, about who can and should speak for whom, about the meaning and extent of personal identity, about the inexorable pull of tribal loyalties, and about whether the ideological commitment to the melting pot of the United States—and to a common identity as Americans—is feasible or even desirable.”
The project manager in me is constantly turning over the feasibility question in my head. Do we teach skills for political depolarization? How do we bring people together? Do we have a scale problem that would be ameliorated by a more regional approach?
On the question of desirability, I am much less equivocal: If the war in Ukraine does not wake Americans up to the idea that an imperfect liberal democracy is preferable to a finely tuned authoritarian regime, we are really in trouble. As an American, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech—these are sacrosanct to me. Even in elementary school, I did not want to say the Pledge of Allegiance, because I thought it violated the principle of freedom of religion; for someone who didn’t believe, it was compelled speech to say the words, “One nation, under God.” I suppose, like many people, I just don’t want to be told what to do—by the government, by my school, by my employer, or by the acolytes of any particular ideology.
The creeping authoritarianism in America comes, for instance, in the form of the right wanting to ban certain books in public schools, as well as the study of critical theory and its derivatives, and the left wanting to institute mandatory diversity training and equity pledges based on… critical theory and its derivatives. I do not consent to the right’s book bans, nor to the left’s cultural bullying and ideological myopia.
As an American, I have that choice: There is no fifteen-year prison sentence in America for reporting the facts of what you see in front of you, as there is now in Russia. I will not be told what books I may read, what words I must say, what people I may speak with, or what ideas I may explore.
Stifling free expression and entrepreneurship simply does not work. I still remember my father, a nuclear scientist, telling me in high school that no food could be found in Moscow in 1990, when he visited the Soviet Union on a scientific exchange after the explosion at Chernobyl. During college in the mid-’90s, I walked the streets of the former East Germany just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and wondered at the lack of color and life. In the Czech Republic, I talked with a young entrepreneur about the tradeoffs of an open society. I traveled to China in 2002, and felt the chill of reading an English-language newspaper and recognizing the pen of a government censor, as well as an actual chill: There was no heating system in many of their buildings.
To honor the Ukrainians, we ought to cool down our culture war and our power-hungry thirst for cancellations and defenestrations. Photojournalism and video footage from the resistance in Ukraine makes me even more invested in defending freedom of speech, legally and culturally.
To help the Ukrainians, Western countries need to send more than thoughts and prayers, and should jettison the silly stunts. Musical directors taking Tchaikovsky off of the program for the coming season is something akin to the U.S. Congressional cafeteria renaming French fries “freedom fries” because the French were hesitant to ally themselves with the U.S. when we made the tragic decision to invade Iraq. (Shall I keep putting Russian oil in my gas tank, but stop practicing Tchaikovsky’s Chanson Triste on my cello and call myself a freedom fighter?)
I was struck by the vignette of an older woman in Ukraine standing on a chair in the countryside, dismantling the sign at a crossroads to make it harder for Russian forces to find their way. This image sticks in my mind in part because this act of resistance seems so quaint in an age of satellite-based navigation. But since Russian tanks have been stopped by simply running out of gas, we can hope for their internet to go down as well.
No such internet-based navigation systems existed when explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and voyaged to the South Pole. If you weigh heavily that the ship did not reach its destination, missing it by less than 100 miles, the expedition was a failure; the Endurance was crushed in the ice flows before sinking to the bottom of the sea.
It was a success, though, if you value that Shackleton’s particular leadership—attentive to the physical needs of others, cultivating their skills and nourishing their perseverance, mindful of their morale and spirit—facilitated the survival of the crew in the viciously inhospitable Antarctic for over a year.
The Endurance is one of the many shipwrecks that Christakis studied as he was researching Blueprint. Through extensive datasets and cross-cultural study, Christakis reports that “the news is not all bad” when it comes to who we are as a species: We are lions, but also lambs, and the two might yet lie down together. “Human nature contains much that is admirable,” he writes, “including the capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning, all of which allows us to form good societies[.]”
The remarkably preserved Endurance, the ship’s wheel standing proud on the deck, has just been discovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. It’s a reminder that adventures and experiments do not always go as planned, even when those experiments are countries. But in wreckage especially, our survival kit is one another. It’s time to renew our commitment to our friends, neighbors, communities, country, and species. //
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