The View from Outside

Finding common ground in fractious times

A fame flower (Phemeranthus parviflorus) shines for a few short afternoon hours among sedges on a small prairie island on ancient lichen-crusted granite, above my childhood home. Such small and intricate beauties are far too easily overlooked. Photo by the author, July 18, 2024.

I’ve noticed there is – perhaps not surprisingly – an inverse correlation between the length of my writings and the level of engagement.  If that correlation holds this one will have a readership of approximately two.  That said, I feel that I would like to spread this message far and wide, so please share if it resonates with you.

A month ago I attended a dinner party where the question was posed: “What’s the deal with Trump supporters anyway?”  Various hypotheses were proposed: brainwashing, grievance, hatred.  I found myself remaining silent but wishing to simply say: “They inhabit a different socially constructed reality.”  And none of those words are inflected so as to imply judgment: not “they” as opposed to us, not “different” meaning false, not “reality” as in delusion.  Simply a statement of fact, implying that it is necessary to step outside of some stories in order to see inside of others.

We all inhabit overlapping and intersecting socially constructed realities – shared stories and assumptions and religions and cultures and identities that together comprise our worldview.  It is very difficult to see our own stories for what they are from within, and much easier to point out the flaws in others.  My own life path has been a sequence of stepping out of these stories, into my own authenticity, and so I think it will help to begin by telling my story.

Embodiment and immersion (1985-1997)

I arrived on this planet on the summer solstice in 1985, landing as an only child to slightly-outcast parents inhabiting a small house surrounded by wild lands in the Minnesota River Valley.  I was often alone but never bored, discovering and redirecting small creeks, chasing and catching fireflies and skinks, sowing seeds, poking my young nose into ephemeral flowers, watching autumn spiders build their intricate webs, basking on sun-warmed rocks, climbing trees to watch sunsets serenaded by wood thrush and ovenbird, watching the ever-shifting patterns of clouds, running freely in rainstorms and blizzards.  I felt content, happy, as though I belonged.

“Socialization” (1992-1999)

A child raised in forests and gardens and streams cannot bear to sit at a desk for seven hours, practicing cursive Q’s and long division.  There are no insects at a desk, no growing plants, no shifting clouds, no rain, no birdsongs, no wafting fragrances, no hummingbirds popping in to investigate.  Just the same artificial veneer surface bearing clumsy engravings of generations of students and a few pieces of fossilized gum affixed to the underside – the static outlines of which I had fully investigated by day two.  Though perhaps not intended as such, this sort of school is effectively a boot camp for young beings, stifling an innate sense of wonder and presence and replacing it with an emptiness within which the “age-appropriate” values and knowledge can be instilled.  I railed against this imposition, found myself assessed by child psychologists who offered their suggestions as to how I might best be tamed, made to sit placidly and recite facts and take notes.  And over time I succumbed, constructing a mind-identity that could work within the constraints, feeling my innate sense of wonder and presence retreat as if behind a veil, adopting the socially constructed realities of the people around me.

In pursuit of knowledge (1998-2007)

Once separated from our innate sense of being and presence, we naturally seek external validation.  This is what drives us to strive, to compete, to “win”, to define ourselves as members of some group as distinct from or opposed to other groups.  I discovered that I had a capable mind, quick to grasp and nimble with logic, and so I proceeded to bring home medals and awards at spelling bees, math contests, knowledge bowls.  I poured my focus into assignments and stressed about exams, fearing that anything less than a perfect score would render me less valuable, less worthy of respect.  And I sought knowledge of the natural world, learning taxonomy and cell biology and genetics, animal behavior and ecology and physiology, hoping all the time that sufficient depth of knowledge would substitute for the sense of connection I felt as a child.   It didn’t work. 

I followed my passion for science to a degree in biology with a focus in conservation, intending to make a career of it.  But I could not resonate with the assumed atheism, the unquestioned assumption that the scientific method was the only valid way of gaining knowledge.  I began to question our chainsaw- and herbicide-intensive management in the name of “ecological restoration”, a process in which the land itself was assumed to have no voice.  I struggled to see warblers and prairie clovers as data points to be counted, rather than beings with whom to seek communion.  Though I considered graduate school in ornithology, I ultimately could not maintain this paradox and remain comfortable within this imposed structure.

I stepped outside of the socially constructed reality of science.

The false prophet of progress (2008-2016)

What to do with a scientific background, a desire to save the world, and a need to get the scientific method  - the socially constructed reality of science - out of my relationship with nature?  My mind told me that fossil fuels were the primary problem, and an inspired idea about hydrogen from photosynthesis led me to a Ph.D. program at Oregon State University, attempting to re-engineer the oldest and simplest photosynthesizers, the original oxygenators of our atmosphere and progenitors of chloroplasts, to transform captured sunlight into to renewable hydrogen rather than carbohydrates. 

I simply assumed, as it seems most people did and many still do, that the only thing standing between our coal- and oil-powered dystopia and a future of abundant green energy was an investment of dollars and experimental creativity.  The deeper I delved into the cutting edge, the more I began to question those assumptions.  My project was modestly successful at its stated goals, but I was growing weary of press releases promoting lab “breakthroughs” as the green energy solutions of tomorrow without looking at the bigger picture.  To replace natural gas, for instance, bio-solar hydrogen would not only have to generate the fuel but would need to separate it from oxygen and water vapor, compress and store it, maintain the cell culture indefinitely against contaminants and back-mutations aiming to grow, and build and maintain the infrastructure – all for less than 25 cents per square meter per day which is the actual value of the energy produced.  And that, to put it simply, was never going to happen.

At the same time, I began to question whether a clean energy breakthrough – even if it were possible – would ultimately be a good thing given that our species currently seems hell-bent on infinite growth on a finite planet.  What if our progression of technology is not a one-way trip to Star Trek but a fossil-fueled orgy of conspicuous consumption soon to burn itself out as we necessarily learn to live within the natural cycles and energy flows of our solar-powered living planet? 

Once my degree was complete, I left labs and pipettes behind and entered the world of organic farming and seed growing, developing simple and appropriate-scale machines that filled a gap between working entirely by hand and the expensive high-tech gadgetry of “modern” agriculture. 

I stepped outside the socially constructed reality of progress.

Politics of hate (2016-2020)

My family always voted Democrat, and so did I.  Democrats cared about the environment and about people, so the story went, and Republicans cared about big business and the Bible.  I even mostly batted a blind eye when “hope and change” Obama kept us fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and carried out drone assassinations across the Arab world, when his administration bailed out the big banks at the expense of working people everywhere.  But then came Donald Trump, and everything changed.  Suddenly my CNN-watching, NPR-listening friends hated him, hated and feared his supporters, and Democratic politics became first and foremost about finding a way to take him down, while everything else from health care to living wages to actually crafting a platform that voters might prefer to Trump’s ended up on a back burner.  I’m not personally a fan of the man with orange hair, but some of my Democrat friends were starting to scare me, and the whole rising conflict felt like a distraction from the ongoing military imperialism and corporate kleptocracy that was fully supported by both parties.

I stepped outside of the socially constructed reality of politics.

COVID-19 and the reign of terror (2020-2021)

I don’t need to recount the events of 2020; they are still in recent memory.  What surprised me most, personally, was the dominance of a fear mindset in our response, even once it became clear that the virus was not the Black Death and no amount of lockdown was going to make it go away.  At the time, I had just read Year of Wonder, a historical fiction novel set during one of the last plague outbreaks in England, and I was inspired by many of the characters’ choices, even in the face of quite-probable death, to choose to gather, to be present with the sick, to love rather than fear each other, to avoid assigning murderous responsibility to chains of transmission.  I hoped to see that mentality arise during covid, but instead the media and the “experts” all promoted fear.  Even when our elders in nursing homes told us they didn’t fear death, being not that far from it already, but would we please stop by to visit, we stayed away or were banned from entry.  Communities of faith that chose to gather in spite of the risks were not held up as examples of love but as dangerous and self-centered rulebreakers.

Among those who eschewed the public health edicts there arose an equal and opposite fear: covid was a ploy by governing elites to impose a system of compliance and control that would destroy personal freedom, lock our bank accounts, and lead to a totalitarian world of subservient serfdom.  I could almost see where they were coming from, but that fear didn’t resonate with me either. 

In the summer of 2021 I found myself riding a train, making music with strangers in the lounge car in defiance of mask mandates, sharing mead in a sleeping car while rolling across the Montana prairie.  It felt like breaking out of a spell, and I pledged never to go back, regardless of the real or alleged dangers.

I stepped out of the socially constructed reality of fear.

Vaccination nation (2021-2023)

From the beginning, it was assumed that the pandemic would be ended by a vaccine – that is simply how the archetypal story plays out in movies and boardrooms and statehouses.  I am in no way opposed to vaccines as a tool of medicine, although part of stepping out of the progress story, for me, involved exploring the unique role that vaccination plays in our modern psyche.  In addition to their useful immunological roles, vaccines appear to be the sacraments with which believers in progress baptize their children, and as such they are afforded a certain sacred and untouchable status.  Whistleblowers who question the safety of aspirin or herbicides are respected, while whistleblowers who question the safety of any vaccine (or any combination thereof) must be debunked, discredited, and assigned conspiratorial motives.  It is extremely challenging, to say the least, to conduct objective science in this political environment.

I also knew a few things about the warp-speed covid vaccines in development that gave me pause, and that no amount of “official” assurance could negate.  I knew that they were unlikely to be much more effective than natural immunity, which at that point most people had acquired or would soon acquire.  I knew that no truly effective coronavirus-family vaccine had yet been developed, and some animal trials had produced concerning results in terms of worsening future disease.  I also knew that the vaccines in development used new genetic technologies – causing human cells to produce foreign proteins – which had not previously been deployed at any scale and which caused some serious side effects when trialed to treat genetic diseases.  All of which tipped the scales toward “no” for me, at whatever point these vaccines were offered.

But this is not really a story about vaccines.  It’s a story about social movements, and how quickly one can go from upstanding citizen to persona non grata, simply by failing to fall in line or being a member of a particular group.  I was in no way prepared for how quickly the story shifted from “vulnerable people can get vaccines, yay!” to “everyone can get vaccines” to “everyone should get vaccines” to “everyone must get vaccinated to have equal rights under the law” to “unvaccinated people are selfish and deluded conspiracy theorists who deserve to die”.  It helped me to understand the experience of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or transgender people in conservative states, or women finding their own reproductive sovereignty embroiled in a bitter culture war, or targeted racial and ethnic and religious minorities all through history.

The people who believed the vaccine story - who supported my exclusion from travel, from employment, from restaurants and conferences and festivals - included some of my friends and family.  And I could have disowned them, decided that they showed me who they really are, broken ties and started a new life.  But I didn’t do that, and I could see that – from within their story of perfectly safe and effective vaccines that arrested covid transmission – their perspective made sense.  And I refused to dehumanize them, sharing my reasons for my choices which were very much not the crackpot theories attributed to “anti-vaxxers” on the news.  And, to their credit, my friends and family refused to dehumanize me, even if they still viewed me as dangerous to be around.  And then the story changed, as it turned out that the shots were indeed somewhat less safe and quite a bit less effective than originally hoped, and the whole discriminatory episode quietly ended, as inevitably happens although sometimes after much violence and suffering.

Even when I was one of the bad people, the hated ones, I refused to accept a world divided into “us” and “them”, a world in which we judge each other’s intrinsic worth based on the stories we believe, the socially constructed realities we inhabit.

I stepped outside of the socially constructed reality of separation.

Beyond separation: finding common ground

For me, stepping out of the last of the socially constructed realities facilitated a sort of dissolving of ego and anxiety, a re-discovery of childlike wonder, a profound spiritual re-awakening that I have written plenty about so won’t repeat here.  And I realize that very few people had childhoods like mine, with an experience of belonging and connection in nature to step back into.  But it is never too late to start.

If we step outside of stories, of socially constructed realities, it can be tempting to simply step into others: to convert to a new religion, to switch political parties, to identify with a new “us” opposed to a different “them”.  To avoid that it is necessary to step into a personal experience of existence, an internal reference that does not depend on authorities or doctrines or dogmas for truth.  That might seem daunting, but our living planet gives us ample opportunities.

A hummingbird is not socially constructed.  Nor is a tomato, nor a river, nor a mountain.  Nor are our animal bodies, which live, die, bleed, feel pleasure and pain regardless of our divergent stories.  We are all made of the same stuff – the same miraculous stuff that forms hummingbirds and tomatoes and rivers and mountains.  And if we believe we have souls – aspects of embodied divine consciousness – then it is a strange story indeed that would suggest that some people have superior or inferior souls.  In our divinity, too, we are the same inside.  We can choose to spend less energy focused on the abstractions and stories that divide us and more on growing gardens, watching moonrises, celebrating harvests, exchanging gifts, telling stories, sharing music and poetry.  We can build our own realities rooted not in media or fear but in shared experience and immersion in our living Earth.

A call to action

In motivating a call to action I have often seen adaptations of the famous quote by Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

My question is: What do I accomplish by speaking out, by condemning “them”, by allying myself with a broader “us”?  Is this not the same mentality that justifies taking sides on a grand scale, creating military alliances, risking world wars, keeping political parties in line in opposition to a common enemy?

World War II could not have been avoided by condemning the Nazis more strongly or speaking out more loudly.  The war could only have been prevented by understanding why that particular story appealed to a majority of the German people at that time and telling a different story: one that offered them dignity and hope but without the dehumanization of others.

I am seeing calls to action based in fear – suggesting that we do this thing or that thing to influence the upcoming election.  Here is mine: stop dehumanizing people.  Stop judging them.  Relax the separation between yourself and others that defines you as comparatively good.  Accept that good people sometimes believe harmful stories, inhabit socially constructed realities within which othering is accepted and encouraged.  Ask yourself: have I ever believed such a story?  Do I perhaps believe one now?  Do I believe the world would be better off without someone or without a whole group of people?  Am I making assumptions about other people that might be wrong?  Rich people?  Poor people?  Homeless people?  Immigrants, legal or otherwise?  Unvaccinated people?  Less-educated people?  Jews?  Christians? Muslims? Atheists? Israelis? Palestinians?  Russians?  Ukrainians?  Republicans?  Trump supporters?  Democrats?  If I have made such judgments myself, can I then accept the goodness, the inner divinity of people who judge me, or who judge those I consider allies? 

Once you have stopped judging people – really and truly, not just pretending as a matter of strategy – then find the people in your life who believe harmful stories and talk with them.  Talk with them about tomatoes and moonrises and children and hummingbirds, look kindly into their eyes, show that you care about them and respect them, and then ask them what appeals to them about the stories they believe, the socially constructed realities they inhabit.  What do they love about Donald Trump?  Why are they afraid of immigrants?  Why can’t they respect people who choose to forego particular vaccines?  And then challenge them, gently.  You say you don’t like immigrants but what about Emiliano who works at the mill, Marisol whose restaurant you love so much?  Help them to see the flaws in their stories, the way their judgment of others doesn’t align with their own values.  Help them on their own personal journeys to step out of socially constructed realities, into their own authenticity.

Nothing is accomplished by punching Nazis except soothing your own ego, impressing your friends, and making angrier and more violent Nazis.  The same logic applies to all call-outs and condemnations.  Yes, some people are too wounded or shielded or angry or mentally ill to be reached, but they are a small minority.  People have healed rifts and reconnected after genocides and civil wars.  We are not there yet, and with wisdom we can avoid going there.  Suspend judgment, don’t presume motivations, avoid contempt, talk to others, listen to them, honor their presence.  That is how we will actually build a more harmonious world, and we will grow our own capacities for love in the process.  Who is with me?