Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 365

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal," by Ben Sasse.

It turns out that the massive economic disruption that we entered a couple of decades ago and will be navigating for decades to come is depriving us psychologically and spiritually at the same time that it’s enriching us materially. The same technology that has liberated us from so much inconvenience and drudgery has also unmoored us from the things that anchor our identities. The revolution that has given tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to live like historic royalty has also outpaced our ability to figure out what community, friendships, and relationships should look like in the modern world. As reams of research now show, we’re richer and better-informed and more connected—and unhappier and more isolated and less fulfilled.

There’s an interesting military phenomenon that applies to this political moment—and even to my TGI Fridays outburst. In urban combat training, there is a well-documented tendency to shift our focus from a distant but important target to a less important but closer target. If you’re being attacked and your threat is fifty yards away, but a closer target pops up, you’ll turn your attention to the new target—even if it’s less of a threat. We tend to want to knock down the easier stuff. Conversely, we want to ignore or deny challenges that are farther out or more difficult. 

It seems clear that in America today, we’re facing problems that feel too big for us, so we’re lashing out at each other, often over less important matters. Many of us are using politics as a way to distract ourselves from the nagging sense that something bigger is wrong. Not many of us would honestly argue that if our “side” just had more political power, we’d be able to fix what ails us. Fortunately, we can avoid addressing the big problems as long as someone else—some nearer target—is standing in the way of our securing the political power even to try. It’s easier to shriek at the people on the other side of the street. It’s comforting to be able to pin the problems on the freaks in the pink hats or the weirdos carrying the pro-life signs. 

At least our contempt unites us with other Americans who think like we do. 

At least we are not like them.

Above all, this book is an urgent call to name the problem that’s ripping us apart. 

It’s not taxes or tweets; it’s not primarily politics or polarization; it’s neither an unpredictable president nor the #Resistance that wants to impeach him. It’s not a new bill or a blue-ribbon commission. The real culprit has less to do with us as a polity and everything to do with us as uprooted, wandering souls. 

Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us. What’s wrong with America, then, starts with one uncomfortable word. 

Loneliness.

A senior producer at one of America’s largest cable news networks once let me in on “rule one” of their segment selection: “We only do two kinds of stories,” he told me—“those that make people who love us love us more, and those that make people who hate us hate us more.” Following the New Yorker’s piece, I asked some publishing executives about this line. The responses were nearly uniform: the same logic is becoming the norm at print publications as well. I asked them to unpack this logic. 

“There are no possible 70-percent-of-America audiences anymore,” one executive explained. “All we can do is try to create ‘stickiness’ among the 1 percent of the readers we have a shot at. So that means getting attacked is almost as valuable as being loved.”

“Oh, come on!” the host replied. “You know how the game is played. You’re a big boy, and it’s just a game.” 

No, it’s not—at least not to me. 

I don’t fly away from my wife and kids five days a week to be part of some high-stakes Harlem Globetrotters show. I actually believe that America is an exceptional nation and that the republic is worth struggling to preserve. I don’t much care about their treatment of me, but I am disgusted by the way so many media personalities view our nation as their personal vending machine. In exchange for wild accusations and exaggerations, they get rich and famous—and we, their viewers and listeners, get a shallower, angrier, less workable America.

No responsible parent would willingly hook her child on heroin. No careful mom and dad would let their kids eat nothing but cake and candy. But there’s compelling evidence that many of the apps on our tablets are as addictive as heroin and as unhealthy as an uninterrupted diet of sweets—and by design. We know the harms of drugs and sugary foods. 

The new digital addictions are at least as dangerous.