Random Acts of Criticism

The fact of the matter is, there is more content to read and interpret now than ever before in the course of human history.

Due to the ubiquity and persistence of Google in particular, and the internet in general, more people have more to read that ever before.

The problem is not that audiences have suddenly become alliterate, illiterate, or even semi-literate. The problem is not that there is an abundance of writing: good, bad, ugly and indifferent. The problems isn’t even in the declining power of the critic to influence and push a set of ideas.

The problem is that the act of criticism has always inherently been based upon an assumption of scarcity: both in content and in opinion.

Gatekeepers of all kinds exist to inform audiences about that which is “good” and about that which is “bad.”

But in a world where everyone can ignore the critic (or choose to revoke the critic’s power through denying them permission to influence a choice), the act of criticism has to shift from one of determining and enforcing a regime of quality to the act of educating, advocating and taking a position.

And defending it.

Of course, the critic should read, watch, listen or otherwise take in the content that they are seeking to critique. But if they don’t, then the audience owes them little in the way of attention and credibility.

Otherwise, the critic is no different than a member of the audience—albeit one with more reach, but not more impact.

Culture of Immediacy

The culture of immediacy that we have created with our digital social communication tools, has convinced our brains that problems of all kinds should be solvable immediately, to our specifications, and with little effort (or friction) on our part.

Here are a few examples. Your mileage (and examples) may vary:

Climate change could be solved tomorrow…if only the “right” people oversaw the solutions. Like the people who populate my Facebook feed…

Elections could turn out with the “right” outcome with results that I could see immediately…just like a Twitter poll does…

People could treat each other with fairness, justice, and equality in a pretty cool and hip way…if only it were the “right” people doling out the fairness, justice and equality…and all others who don’t agree (or aren’t hip or cool enough) could be blocked or never seen anyway….just like in my SnapChat feed…

Rights, responsibility, accountability, and freedom. These are human conditions that took centuries to adjudicate, argue over, and have conflict about, to come to the space of where we are now as a global culture.

They will not fall to the growing culture of immediacy anytime soon.

Netflix, podcasts, YouTube videos, search results. These are tools of communication that operate on the principles of speed to market (your eyes) and entertainment (your brain).

The slow, plodding things that need to change (i.e. systems) are hard to shift, require emotional energy in the face of human intransigence and institutional friction, and need conflict to change. It used to be that we recognized and passed on to the next generation, the idea that incremental change was enough and that lifetime change (on the scale of anywhere from 35.5 to 78.8 years) was enough to get a society and culture to where it could reasonably be expected to be.

But this idea of plodding, incremental change is slowly eroding in the face of collective minds, attitudes, and behaviors being transformed by the culture of immediacy that our digital social communication tools provide.

Combine this fact with the reality that the inner workings (both the how and the why) of our digital social communication have become incomprehensible for the average person and that we have elevated this incomprehensibility from a minor annoyance (think about how you could repair a car in your garage only 50 years ago) to a belief in the magical genius of self-interested companies (think Google and how the algorithm of search works), and we have a giant problem on our global cultural hands.

Relationships with people are boring, mundane, exciting, and thrilling.

Solutions to people problems cannot be solved through the clever application of another frictionless algorithm.

People cannot be inspired through speed, or motivated through impatience to change.

The hard work, the meaningful work, the work of people conflicting against other people, is the last thing that will survive the cult of immediacy we have built.

If we let it.

And the changes that can come about from that survival is worth leveraging all the immediacy-based, incomprehensible tools for good, that you can.

Grace from Here to the Moon

The steps toward forgiveness and reconciliation include the giving of—and getting of—grace.

We don’t often think about grace (other than maybe as a person’s name, in light of physical attributes, or as a ritual that some families perform before a meal) but the fact is, there used to be public, shared discourse around grace, regardless of politics, emotions, educational attainment, or material situation.

This was grace in the Christian conception of such a term, meaning “God’s unmerited favor.”

Webster’s New World College Dictionary provides this theological definition of grace: “The unmerited love and favor of God toward human beings; divine influence acting in a person to make the person pure, morally strong; the condition of a person brought to God’s favor through this influence; a special virtue, gift, or help given to a person by God.” This definition is based in virtue harkening toward a strong moral core.

Another way of framing grace is that it is getting what we least deserve, when we least expect it, through no effort of our own.

Getting grace implies faith and surrender.

Giving grace implies forgiveness and reconciliation.

Understanding and appreciating the depth of the need for grace and the skillset to give grace is implanted in people through developing a strong moral center.

This is deep and dark waters though, because moral centers (and the ballast that undergirds them) are so very rarely considered by individuals at depth, much less by societies at scale, in countries where the Church is no longer as powerful a moral force as it once was.

We outsource parts of our emotional life to politics that we used to outsource to the Church. The Church used to be a bulwark of morality—even in the face of conflicts so detrimental and consequential that they used to escalate to World Wars.

But the skills that undergird giving grace—such as humility, obedience, and discipline—are harder to acquire now than ever before both individually and corporately. And when the skills that undergird giving grace are lacking, getting grace seems as unattainable as going to the moon on the back of a cardboard rocket.

Grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation; these are what the world—and our civil discourse—need now.

Wisdom is a Skill

Wisdom is a skill.

In our modern era, that values speed over taking time, and that values the new over the old, wisdom is viewed, not as a skill, but as something unattainable.

This intellectual and cultural state of affairs has not always been the case.

As a matter of fact, when information moved slower (although from an individual’s perception, information has always moved faster than comprehension) wisdom was valued both as a skill and as an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual state.

Getting wisdom is more than about getting knowledge (which we can get from Google) or about debating about the “owning” of facts (which we now battle over publicly) or even about truth claims (which continue to be divisive); getting wisdom is about having the skill to know when to talk, and when to listen.

Be slow to speak.

Be quick to listen.

Be mindful of the power of knowledge.

Be engaged with things that are difficult.

Be a source of memory.

Wisdom is a skill, and the massively existential struggle of modernity is the tension between accepting the immediately available knowledge of the now, and the seemingly obscure wisdom of the past.

In that tension, there are a few critical questions we have to answer:

  • Do we ignore the past and barrel toward the future?
  • Do we engage with the skill of attaining wisdom, or do we continue to chase knowledge?
  • Do we search for meaning in our conflicts and communications, or do we channel our energy into forgetting, seeking closure, and “moving on”?
  • Do we look to the wisdom of the past without a critical spirit based in destruction, pride, anger, and arrogance, or do we abandon the pursuit?
  • Do we pass along the hard lessons to our current generations (sometimes in hard ways through hard conflicts) or do we allow them to sit in pretend ease?

The strategy is leveraging past wisdom to determine the answers to these questions.

And it’s not a strategy that we can outsource to our technological tools anytime soon.

The Moral Arc of the Universe

The moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.

And justice, supposedly, is blind.

Or so they say.

But people, with their prejudices, conflicts, disagreements, and dissensions, have trouble arcing towards blindness.

The issue with justice is not the fact of justice, that which is applied through the creation of laws, the codification of morals, and through genuine appeals to theology and philosophy.

The other issue with justice is that it’s application is often confused with something else.

Vengeance.

Because stories get closer to the truth of this than facts do, a character in a movie once stated that, “Karma is justice without the satisfaction. I don’t believe in justice.”

Many people and groups scream loudly for justice.

There are signs, placards, and bumper stickers with the phrase, “no justice, no peace” emblazoned upon them, but what they are really demanding is karmic retribution, not an arc of the universe bending toward justice.

Or peace.

Retribution, vengeance, revenge; wrongs righted with immediacy and swift, unambivalent consequences. Punishment, meted out by at the highest order, in the fastest way, with as few innocent people harmed as possible.

We are undergoing a global revolution where groups, cultures and individuals are confusing the potential, long desired outcomes of the revolution with their own personal desires for karmic retribution.

The narrative arc of the current revolution goes something like this:

Never before in the history of world is there access to more information, more money and more power to change the world in that ways that we would like it to be, rather than the ways that it has always been.

No longer will disparate groups and individuals wander the world, merely satisfied with the outcomes formerly guaranteed to them by “betters” or “others” in the social order.

We want more.

And if we don’t receive the more that we are guaranteed, then we will either move those in power to get it.

Of we will call for justice (and crank up the social pressure to conform) until we get the material outcomes we seek.

This narrative underlies current calls for justice, with the immediacy of the narrative following ever newly discovered injustices, as wave after wave of more access, more mobility and more individualized power seems to wash over the societies and cultures we inhabit.

But so what, right?

Well, conflicts occur when narratives differ, when perceptions of justice don’t match and when unanticipated disruptions happen. Conflicts happen when narratives of actual injustices (and perceived narratives of injustice) rub up against each other.

And when the only resolutions come in the form of power transfers and shifts, conflicts escalate quickly to violence.

One need only look at incidents around the United States (and the world) last year to see the evidence of this. With that being said, there are some critical questions to ask–and answer:

  • What are we to do?
  • What is the balance between justice, vengeance, and the more revolution that we are experiencing worldwide?
  • What is the most unambiguous way for all people (even those who have chosen not to participate due to inability, lack of ability or lack of interest) to benefit from the new largesse that technology promises to provide?
  • What are societies and cultures to do, even as the center disintegrates and the power holders in culture, media, and journalism and on and on, lose out in the shifting narratives of our times? Who gets to choose?
  • Who gets to make the world?

We don’t know the answers to any of these questions.

But far more energy should be spent on discussing and answering the questions, than on advancing a narrative that cries out for justice disguised as vengeance, while at the same time proclaiming that fairness and equitable treatment are the true goals.

On this day, let us commit to knowing the difference between justice and vengeance and to asking—and answering—the hard questions of the narratives that underlie our motive, our assumptions, and the ongoing global arc towards something that might eventually look like justice.

[Advice] Values and Character

Values and character matter more than educational level when hiring people in an organization.

We can debate why that fact is important, but many organizations suffer from the effects of ethical lapses, poor judgment calls, and eroding communication patterns because they valued education above values and character.

Education in employees.

Education in upper management.

Education in board members.

Organizations very often struggle to define their own ethics and values, and thus struggle to hire people that are—well—ethical.

But there is a way out of this:

Determine what organizational ethics are and stick to them. Make them an integral part of the DNA of your organization. Have the courage to stick with those ethics, even when they impact the bottom line in the short-term.

Hire ethical people. The fact of the matter is, most (if not all) organizations are in a global war to hire and retain the most talented people that they can. And if a small manufacturer in Scranton, Pennsylvania and a large manufacturer in Birmingham, England are trying to get the same employees, the one who has a clear ethical stance will go a long way toward being competitive.

Get rid of unethical people. The whine here usually is “Well, we can’t get rid of (insert name of employee who is liked/perceived as bringing value to the organization here) because then we would get sued.” The majority of states in the US are “at-will” employment states. With this in mind, building in arbitration clauses (there are two kinds of arbitration, binding and non-binding) to employment contracts, creating NDA’s and fashioning a system where employees are educated on what their rights are, allows the organization to get rid of unethical people.

In reality, for most organizations, a lot of this comes down to having the courage to focus around the long-game of developing and encouraging values and character, rather than the short-game of quarterly revenue growth.

HIT Piece 11.01.2016

I wish that you had more time.

Time to explore all that the world has to offer.

Time to be more.

Time to do more.

Time to have more.

Time to do the things that really matter in your life.

Time to develop more personally, professionally, and even spiritually.

Time to make the right decisions, for the right reasons, to impact more people positively in your life.

I wish that you had more time.

But you don’t.

And you’ve chosen to use the time allotted to you to do, well, those things that you believe matter, in the long run.

Whether you have considered the long run, or not.

[Opinion] The Quality of Mercy Doesn’t Scale…and Never Will…

From the Coliseum to Facebook, there has rarely been any mercy from the mob watching the participants in the arena.

The reason the writers of the Constitution favored a Republic over all else, was that they believed the mob was a dangerous, unpredictable force that moved without logic, rationality, reason, or mercy. And then the horrors of the French Revolution proved them correct about human nature.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible for individuals to stand-by, and watch degradations happen to others, people will. This is called the Bystander Effect.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible for the mass of people to suffer the injustices of the moment as long as those injustices do not personally affect them in any way, people will. This is called social proofing.

In modern times, we have psychological and sociological surveys, assessments, and experiments, that show that when it is possible to go along with others en masse as an event of any kind happens, because that even happening confirms a belief deeply and long held, people will. This is called confirmation bias.

The quality of mercy comes about when you know someone personally; when you are connected to their story intimately; and when you empathize with their struggle in a real and powerful way.

The quality of mercy cannot scale.

The outcomes of mercy—justice, forgiveness, reconciliation—can scale, but the actual quality of mercy comes along in an individualized process that cannot be scaled, and must instead be seeded, from one person to another.

No matter whether you’re among the mob watching in the Coliseum, or among the mob engaging on Facebook.

HIT Piece 7.05.2016

I’ve been disappointed before by finding out people’s secrets.

You know, the stuff that doesn’t wind up in public, or even on social media these days, but that often determines where people’s hearts—morals, mindset, and spiritual bent—really are.

The disappointment is palpable and is gut wrenching. But it is not surprising.

I am surprised only in that I am still searching for a moral man…

And that I might be foolish—and naïve—for doing so.

There is A New Year: 365 More Chances to Do It Right

We have a few people that we have worked with this year, here at Human Services Consulting and Training that we would like to thank this year:

To all of those who have worked with HSCT this year, thank you for your time, your efforts and your trust in our collaborative efforts to move toward education and understanding.

To all of those who we will continue to work with in 2015, just remember, January 1, 2015 represents the beginning of 364 continuous days to get it right, in peace, grace and love.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
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