Be Honest. How Many Neighbors Can You Name?
Maybe detoxing our democracy starts at home
I’ll be honest: I only know a couple of neighbors’ names. I wish I knew more. I wish I knew the woman down the street who, every few days or so, descends from the steps of her home to sweep her street corner. She’s older — maybe early 80s — and she’s sprightly, despite the visible hunch. She never stops at just her corner either; she makes her way up and down a two-block span, cleaning the bus stops, the sidewalks and occasionally our driveway when enough debris has collected around the drain. My guess is she has lived on this street longer than most.
It’s a busy street, a thoroughfare in the Outer Richmond neighborhood of San Francisco that leads straight to the Pacific Ocean. With the constant stream of traffic, it’s easy to forget that we live in a neighborhood, that we form part of a neighborhood, that we are, ourselves, neighbors. Every time the old woman approaches with her dust pan and broom or when the neighbor on the east side of us texts me to move my car so I don’t get a parking ticket on street cleaning days, I’m reminded of this part of my identity.
I’ll be honest again: being someone’s neighbor has meant very little to me over the years. After college, I moved from place to place, city to city, country to country, barely lasting two years in any location. Rootless and restless, you might say. Now in my early 40s, I can say, with some smugness, I have lived in the same city for eight years. Yet, it’s only recently that I’ve started to reflect on what it means to be a neighbor.
And it matters to me now more than ever. It matters to me not only because I’m a new mom who wants to raise her daughter in a vibrant neighborhood, thick with relationships. It matters to me not only because of a pandemic that has created hardships — seen and unseen — throughout our city. It matters to me because our public discourse is toxic, and it has spilled into the various nooks and crannies of our lives.
We are siloed and cut off from one another. We are heads down in our devices instead of heads up in the present moment. We read and listen to media that conform to our world view. We have homogenous relationships that reinforce our views while limiting our exposure to views that might be different. And we trust each other less, believing that most people most of the time just look out for themselves.
Maybe all of that would be okay, manageable, work-around-able except that the way we exchange ideas with ‘the other’ — if we exchange them at all because we’ve retreated too far into our algorithmically curated echo chambers — looks more like a tennis match. We volley furiously back and forth, not wanting the ball to rest even one second on our side of the court. If you’ve ever done couple’s therapy, you’ll know this style of relating to one another can have catastrophic consequences. My husband and I have learned that playing catch, where you ‘receive’ what the other person is throwing before throwing it back, is a better strategy, especially if your goal is to stay married (which it is).
But why are things so bad? Why have we let things get this bad? Is it as Robert Putnam wrote over twenty years ago in the essay “Bowling Alone” a consequence of the eroding of civil society, of associational life, of community and connectedness? Is it as Ben Sasse, the junior US Senator for Nebraska, writes in Them because we are lonely? And if we are estranged and lonely, how do we repair? And what does it really mean to repair?
Contemporary Judaism embraces a concept of tikkun olam — repair the world — a calling to support the welfare of all of us not just the Jewish community. I grew up in a Christian family, later married into a Jewish one and today attend a Unitarian Universalist church. The moral imperative of tikkun olam, that each of us has a part to play in healing our communities, moves and inspires me. So, too, does the parable of the Good Samaritan and Jesus’s call to love my neighbor as myself.
I know empathy gets a bad rap in politics, especially as research shows that liberals and conservatives tend to show more empathy for their own than their other, but I will offer this: we could all stand to understand each other better. This doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other or even feel each other’s pain. As Paul Bloom writes in Against Empathy, “we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.” While I lean liberal, I start every morning scrolling through Jonah Goldberg’s Twitter feed, among other conservative writers, so I can get a sense of a conservative’s take on the news of the day (as well as a steady stream of Jonah’s endearing dog photos). I don’t do this to bolster my own point of view. I do this to give me a more holistic view. I do this because shutting myself off from the people with whom I disagree would only impoverish my view. Maybe this seems wishy washy and unprincipled, but I’ll take it over extreme polarization even if the center has become a lonely place to loiter in.
Senator Sasse pointed out in an interview in late 2018 that “40 percent of Americans think the other party is evil.” I would bet my bitcoin password (if I had one) that this percentage is even greater today. Part of the problem he argues is that we’re missing “shared facts.” Gone are the days when we all tuned into Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw for our nightly news. Gone are the days of shared cultural touchstones like “I Love Lucy.” Gone are the days of anthem rock that packed us into huge stadiums together as columnist David Brooks lamented on the fragmentation of music.
The political philosopher John Rawls believed that discussion — a sincere exchange of ideas — could broaden our perspective and constrain our partiality. Yet as legal scholar Cass Sunstein wrote in a seminal paper on group polarization, when a group is homogeneous and the same message gets repeated over and over, discussion will only move people further in the direction they’re already heading — a behavior that social media algorithms induce with remarkable effectiveness.
It would be easy to turn this essay into a screed about Facebook, Twitter and all the rest for accelerating the trends toward extreme polarization and enabling their worst unintended consequences. Plenty of smart people have already done a serviceable job of that here and here. We have a sense of the problem and its scale. Do we also have a sense of what to do about it? Short of resurrecting Lucille Ball, where do we begin?
I say hooray for Facebook for recently announcing it will no longer promote political groups on its platform and also limit political messages in its News Feed. But is that sufficient to the task? Sunstein suggests that “the largest lesson provided by group polarization involves the need to structure processes of deliberation so as to ensure that people are exposed, not to softer or louder echoes of their own voices, but to a range of reasonable alternatives.” Recent experiments of online social networks point to this same conclusion.
I believe Facebook and others like Nextdoor can evolve their platforms in ways that enable people and communities — online and offline — to deliberate and not escalate, to disagree and not demonize. These companies have the tools, the people, the resources and the user base to start experimenting. I also believe we need to incentivize entrepreneurs and startups to find new ways to make democracy work better in a digital age. I don’t know if there’s ever been a startup incubator focused on deliberative democracy, public discourse and citizen engagement, but I’ll be the first to raise my hand up for it. As Maggie Koerth and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote recently on the FiveThirtyEight blog, “we have to admit that we won’t get out of this hole with the same tools that dug the pit.”
Leveraging the might of technology and innovation is one place to start, but it isn’t the only place. To rebuild our social capital, we also have to start by reaching out. The literature on loneliness, a robust topic right now, points to the paucity of meaningful relationships in our lives. Yet it’s our connection to one another that can give us purpose — the kind of connections you rely on when life gets really hard and vice versa, the kind you call on when one of your parents dies and you need them to leave their family vacation in Colorado and fly to Texas to help you plan the funeral. “If you have community,” Jonah Goldberg said in a touching podcast about family and loss, “you don’t need to turn to politics for meaning.”
I wish I had understood this concept of community earlier. I wish I had possessed the wisdom, amid my peripatetic lifestyle, to stay connected to the people I cherished most. I wish I had known the neighbors whose lives I intersected with over the years — the older man with the three-legged dog in Santiago, Chile; the younger woman who played “I Will Survive” on repeat in the apartment below me in New York City; the nice lady who let me know my cat was sunbathing in the middle of traffic-heavy Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC; and yes, the old woman with the hunch who still sweeps the debris from our sidewalk. I have this piercing feeling that my life would be so much richer if I had just introduced myself. What the heck am I waiting for?
