“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah
“It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern.” Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow
“Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice, and plain common-sense.” W.E. Dubois, author of Souls of Black Folk
“Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.” Jawaharial Nehru, Indian anti-colonial nationalist, first prime minister of India and author of The Discovery of India
“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.” Margaret Mead, American anthropologist and author of Culture and Commitment
“The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man. . . . it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.” Sigmund Freud
In the helping profession, context is critical. When counseling people how to navigate their worlds more effortlessly, it’s important to know the conditions and standards in the places they live, learn and work. When I worked in corrections, for example, we found that we needed not only to understand the family and neighborhood contexts in which the inmates were raised, but also how those contexts might influence how well they were able to re-integrate into society after their release from jail. Context matters.
In parenting, consistency is key. Kids need to have some predictability in their lives. If they have to get out their mood detectors every time they enter a room to determine the psychological climate in their house, they will always be on edge, guarded, protective and anxious. Consistency builds trust and serves as the best teacher for any behavior. Consistency is also the foundation of effective organizational leadership. Employees don’t perform at their best when they are never sure how a leader is going to “show up.” Consistency matters.
Culture, of course, ultimately determines the success of any strategy. If the norms and values of an organization are not aligned with the stated objectives, then the desired outcomes will fall short of expectations. In over five decades of work on culture change, I have found that the values of respect, openness, innovation, interdependence, integrity, excellence, generosity and trustworthiness are the essential foundations for any organization. When those values anchor the purpose and influence the priorities, anything is possible. Culture matters.
As readers of this blog know, the last several posts have addressed the Israel-Hamas war. In all of those posts, I have not positioned myself or pretended to have expertise in the Middle East conflicts. I am neither Jewish nor Palestinian, and I live in a white bubble in Northern Michigan. As far as I know, a bomb has never been dropped in my town and there is very little diversity here. What I have tried to do in my posts is to leverage my experience in organizational change to offer perspectives and possibilities that help me process what’s going on. Hopefully, they are helpful to you as well.
What struck me in the last week was the testimony of the University Presidents of Harvard, MIT and Pennsylvania before Congress re: how their Universities were addressing antisemitism and Islamophobia in the darkness of the Hamas-Israel war. In response to the question, “How would you respond to calls for the genocide of Jews?”, all three Presidents responded in one way or another, “It’s context-dependent.” Penn’s president answered, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.” The Harvard President responded, “It depends on the context.” The MIT President said, “It would be investigated as harassment if persuasive and severe.”
While I believe the university presidents were right to cite context as a critical variable, they were wrong not to explicitly condemn the moral bankruptcy and egregious unacceptability of advocating the genocide of any population. So yes, in my mind, they blew it. They fell into the trap of a Trump-loving sycophant advancing the far-right agenda against elite educational institutions, where about 2% of the faculty are Trump supporters. They let their intellectual arrogance override their responsibility to champion psychological safety. In this case, although their answers might have been technically, legally and intellectually correct, a simple “Yes” would have derailed Stefanik’s attack.
Having said that, I have sympathies for these three outstanding women and wonder if male presidents would have received the same backlash. Elizabeth Magill received her BA in History from Yale, clerked for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, became the Provost of University of Virginia and Dean of the Stanford Law School before becoming President of U Penn. Claudine Gay become the first African American President of Harvard since its founding 368 years ago. She was educated at Stanford and received her PhD from Harvard before serving as Harvard’s Dean of Arts and Sciences prior to her appointment as President. Sally Kornbluth is a cell biologist and was a distinguished faculty at Duke before assuming the Presidency of MIT. She is Jewish. All of these women are extremely bright, thoughtful and committed to free speech AND safety. As academics, I understand their reluctance to give a Yes or No answer to a highly complex and nuanced situation. It’s hard to answer any highly charged question without taking into account context, consistency, and culture. And that’s the real reason I’m writing this post.
Instead of demanding or providing simplistic answers, I believe it’s more constructive to live in the right questions, i.e., what is the context, how consistently are we addressing free speech issues across constituencies, and how well does our culture support free speech and safety? Stefanik was not interested in exploring those questions. She simply wanted to stick it to the elites. Sadly, she was successful.
It appears that the far right likes to pick and choose in its free speech campaigns: it condemns speech that is offensive to conservatives, makes white kids feel uncomfortable, or threatens Jews. What’s not consistent is the application of principles that make these campaigns just or right. The motivations underlying the banning of books and CRT in order to avoid white discomfort or conservative offense are very different from the reasons for banning hate speech that threaten Jews. To me, MAGA motivations behind all these situations are suspect.
In Times Opinion, Maureen Dowd, Michelle Goldberg, David French and Bret Stephens have all written columns on campus speech. I highly recommend all of those articles. They all do an excellent job of addressing how context, consistency and culture are at the heart of this issue. To be consistent in my approach to commenting on the Hamas-Israel context, I will address the generic constructs surrounding these 3C’s. Hopefully, that will help us shape our local cultures to be free AND safe. To do that, let me return to the quotes listed at the beginning of this post.
In the first quote, Adichie implores us to see all conflicts in their current and historical contexts. It is easy to see how the Palestinian people in Gaza have been stripped of their human dignity by Israel and reduced to pawns in this conflict by Hamas. Understanding context from the points of view of all people involved is critical. I have tried to summarize the historical context in previous posts.
In the second quote, Kahneman suggests that the less you know the easier it is to fit everything you do know into a coherent pattern. I believe he implies that the consistency of our story may be more important to us than its completeness. It seems to me that there are two sides to the consistency issue, neither one of which bridges divides. One the one hand, if we are too bound to a consistent narrative, no matter what that is, it is unlikely that we will understand the complete story. On the other hand, if we are not paying attention to consistency then we are vulnerable to applying double standards. For example, questions are often raised about holding Israel to a higher standard in the conduct of its war AND not applying the same standards for the safety of other marginalized groups to Jewish safety. Consistency matters here.
In the third quote, Dubois raises yet another issue related to consistency. He asks when our need for political (or ideological) consistency and sensitivity to legal precedence becomes more important than doing what’s right and just and makes plain common sense. In the case of the university presidents, I would argue that their adherence to academic norms and values (most things are more complex than they appear) and their legal coaching prior to the Congressional hearing kept them from saying, “Advocating the genocide of any group is in violation of our codes of conduct.” In this case, consistency may get in the way. Whew, so complex.
For me, in the fourth and fifth quotes, we get to even more complex challenges. Based on a long struggle for freedom, Nehru concludes that we need to create a culture that widens the mind and the spirit. And after a long career in social and anthropological research, Margaret Mead concludes that we can only achieve a richer culture by recognizing the whole gamut of human potentialities and weaving a less arbitrary social fabric in which all people feel a sense of belonging. Without real cultural change, we have little hope for lasting peace. Culture matters.
Finally, let’s return to Freud to confront the real obstacles to cultural change: our innate tendencies for aggression and our instinctual dispositions. Again, our machoism, militarism, and materialism keep getting in our way. I’m not sure how we turn that around.
I guess I keep coming back to my mantra that the questions we live in may yield more productive results than the answers we are so sure about. Being willing to ask hard questions and listening to “answers” that may be hard to hear leads to courageous and constructive conversations. For me, open communications yield better results than censorship, and yet hate speech and actions can’t be tolerated when individuals feel threatened and unsafe. It’s so hard, but dealing with what’s hard and complex is far better than hiding behind what seems simple and safe. As Cat Stevens sings, “All the tears that I cry keeping all the things I know inside – it’s hard, but it’s harder to ignore it.”
In a recent column in the NYT, Sophia Rosenfeld, who teaches a free speech class at Penn, discusses how student diversification, political polarization, and social media amplification have all played a role in making courageous conversations even more difficult. Her experience, however, is that students can handle these conversations if they agree on rules of engagement and are encouraged to discuss their differences openly and respectfully.
I’m hoping that the tears that we cry knowing all the things we know outside will not keep us from doing the hard work of courageous conversations. I’m hoping that more people will read Adichie, Kahneman, Dubois, Nehru, Mead, Freud, and many others to deepen appreciation that there are very few simple solutions to complex problems. And I’m hoping that university presidents will champion the right to express uncomfortable or offensive speech while condemning the expression of threatening speech that makes people feel unsafe. May it be so.
Also published on Medium.
