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Listening in a time of disinformation
Dec 10, 2024
The very fabric of truth is unraveling at an alarming rate; Howard Thurman's wisdom about listening for the sound of the genuine is not just relevant but urgent. In the face of the escalating crisis of disinformation, distortion and the unsettling normalization of immoral and unethical practices, particularly in electoral politics and executive leadership, the need to cultivate the art of discernment and informed listening is more pressing than ever.
Thurman, a theologian and civil rights leader, understood that a more profound, authentic sound can guide persons toward justice, compassion and truth amidst the cacophony of life. Thurman believed sincerely in the spiritual discipline of listening. More specifically, listening for the genuineness in sound — truth. Such sound or truth is imminent from within ourselves and reverberates in the world around us. In the face of lies, manipulation and the erosion of ethical standards, especially in the current presidential transition, Thurman's admonishment to listen for the genuine remains a beacon of hope and a practical strategy for resistance and transformation.
How do we listen for the genuine in such a fraught and confusing time? First, commit to honesty and truth-telling, even when difficult or uncomfortable. This means seeking out credible sources of information, fact-checking and being willing to question and challenge false or misleading narratives, especially those who seek to justify their l behavior.
Second, it is helpful to listen intently to and amplify the voices of those historically marginalized and silenced. The authentic sound of justice and equity often comes from the edges and fringes of society, from those who have the most to lose when the truth is distorted and ethics are abandoned. By centering the perspectives and experiences of the most vulnerable, we can gain a greater sense of what is truly at stake in this moment. This is a humane responsibility we all share and a powerful source for encouraging change.
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Listening to the genuine is about more than just absorbing information or perspectives. Genuine listening is a powerful tool that catalyzes discernment and action, enabling listeners to distinguish between the proverbial noise and the deeper sound of truth and moral rightness. This type of attentiveness is not a passive process. On the contrary, genuine listening is an active intellectual exercise that provokes critical thinking, ethical reflection, compassion and integrity, empowering us to make a difference.
Acknowledging the sound of the genuine also warrants a thoughtful and intentional response or action. When we hear the ring of truth, it demands that we not only recognize it, but that we mobilize in some way. This might mean challenging or correcting the inaccuracies and misinformation that surround us, whether in our personal conversations or in the public discourse. It could involve advocating for policies and practices that align with ethical standards and promote justice and equality. At times, it may even call for engaging in diverse forms of activism, from signing petitions and attending marches to contacting our elected officials and volunteering our time and skills to causes that matter.
Listening to the genuine and then acting in response has the potential to give way to a different kind of body politics and society — one that is grounded in plausible and substantiated premises, rather than lies and propaganda. A society built on the genuine would be one that upholds morality and ethics at its core, rather than self-interest and greed. It would be a society that shows a deep and abiding concern for the collective good of all people, recognizing that our individual well-being is inextricably tied to innumerable others.
In this kind of society, we would work together to address our shared challenges and to build a future that is more just, equitable and peaceful for all. I concur with Thurman that listening for the genuine sound is both spiritual and political. This particular approach to activating auditory perception is a way of tuning our hearts and minds towards the deep. Listening to the sound of the genuine is a means of radical resistance to inhumane, immoral and antidemocratic forces.
In the crucible of this moment, revisit Thurman's wisdom, like me. Listen and seek out sounds of the genuine, within and without self. Allow truth to serve as a compass in the face of disinformation, authoritarianism and acceptance of flawed efficacy.
Johnson is a United Methodist pastor, the author of "Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race in Your Community" and program director for the Bridge Alliance, which houses The Fulcrum.
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President-elect Donald Trump and President Joe Biden meet in the Oval Office on Nov. 13.
Jabin Botsford /The Washington Post via Getty Images
Selfish Biden has given us four years of Trump
Dec 10, 2024
It’s been a rough go of it for those of us still clinging to antiquated notions that with leadership and power should come things like honesty, integrity, morality, and expertise.
One look at any number of Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks and it’s clear those things no longer matter to a great number of people. (Hell, one look at Trump himself and that’s painfully, comically obvious.)
But these long-gone vestiges of a forgotten America, one in which criminals don’t get to be president and sex offenders don’t get Cabinet posts, got another blow Sunday night when the outgoing president went back on his word and pardoned his son.
President Biden, after insisting he wouldn’t, signed a “full and unconditional pardon” for any offenses his son Hunter had committed, which includes lying about drug use when buying a handgun, tax evasion, and other charges.
The defenses of Biden’s craven last-minute flip-flop came rolling in from many on the left who’d previously spent years wagging their finger at Trump’s nepotism and clear corruptibility.
But the pardon didn’t go over well with many others, including some Democrats who still seem to at least know the value of appearing to care about honesty and hypocrisy.
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But for those of us who simply believed the whole point of Biden was to save us from Trump and Trumpism, it was just the latest in a long line of disappointments from a man who turned out to be a lot more self-interested than he promised.
In 2020, many of us voted for Biden not because we liked his policies, but because he was qualified, decent, and had the best chance of stopping Trump.
And importantly, Biden signaled over and over again that he would serve only one term, and that mattered. After all, we weren’t voting for a lifetime of Biden or Democratic policies, but merely a means to an end: get Trump out for good.
As early as 2019 he indicated to aides that he wouldn’t run again, and as recently as July 2024 he acknowledged that he’d initially run with the expectation that he’d “pass it on to somebody else.”
Not only did he run again, he effectively shut out a Democratic primary. Then, even with dismal polling numbers, an obvious decline in his mental and physical faculties, and his own party members begging him to drop out, it would take months before Biden would do the right thing and step aside.
While Vice President Kamala Harris ran as good a campaign as she could have in these circumstances, Biden’s obstinance hardly gave her a shot.
But it wasn’t just Biden’s selfish decision to run again that ushered Trump back into the White House where he was never supposed to be. It was his policies, too.
Eager for an early win, Biden ignored warnings about inflationary policies from a slew of economists — in his own party — and signed a massive stimulus package that sent prices soaring. The inflation rate was 1.4% when he came into office, peaked at a painful 9.1%, and is now down to 3.3%.
Then, he ignored a chance to lower prices when he decided to not only maintain Trump’s tariffs, but hike them an additional $18 billion, an average annual tax increase on U.S. households of $625.
For the purposes of politics, Biden also rolled back Trump’s approval of the Keystone Pipeline, a project that Biden’s own Energy Department estimated would have created up to 60,000 jobs and generated an economic impact of up to $9.6 billion.
Also for the purposes of election-year politics, Biden forgave $175 billion in student debt— a cost passed on to taxpayers when many were struggling to pay for basic needs.
For political reasons, too, he undid Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and opened the border to a flood of asylum-seekers — and countless others who would take advantage of our intentionally broken immigration system. For months he insisted there was no migrant crisis, until he tried to reverse the order — again, in an election year.
Most importantly, these policy decisions on the economy and immigration didn’t work. Americans felt the effects of them everywhere. But secondarily, they most certainly inured to the benefit of Trump
While Biden is obviously not the existential threat to democracy that Trump is, he showed us that he wasn’t, in the end, willing to put country over party, or country over himself. Biden was motivated by politics and personal grievances, hubris and partisanship.
While that hardly makes him unique, it does make him a failure at the one thing many of us elected him to do: He was meant to save us from Trump, and instead he seemingly did everything he could to invite him back in.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
©2024 S.E. Cupp. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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People gather to watch the reopening ceremony of the Notre Dame Cathedral on Dec. 7.
Telmo Pinto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Cherishing our institutions: Notre Dame’s miraculous reopening
Dec 10, 2024
We witnessed a marvel in Paris this weekend.
When a devastating 2019 fire nearly brought Notre Dame Cathedral to the ground, President Emanuel Macron set the ostensibly impossible goal of restoring and reopening the 860-year-old Gothic masterpiece within five years. Restorations on that scale usually take decades. It took almost 200 years to complete the cathedral in the first place, starting in 1163 during the Middle Ages.
Could Macron’s audacious challenge — made while the building was still smoldering — be met?
In the weeks following the disaster, more than 340,000 donors responded to Macron’s clarion call by contributing over $900 million in restoration funds. Under his direction, an extraordinarily talented leadership team led by Philippe Jost marshaled 250 companies and painstakingly coordinated a vastly complex endeavor. Thousands of workers who have dedicated their entire careers to restoration came out of the woodwork.
In addition to the financial resources, Macron’s appeal ignited a passion in these 2,000 workers, many meticulously trained artisans, to rise up to the challenge. As an indication of their level of devotion, the onslaught of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic (less than a year following the commencement of the restoration work) would only hinder but not foil their efforts.
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To avoid any doubt regarding just how miraculous this feat was, please read The New York Times’ wonderfully detailed profile of the overall effort as well as an illustration of the power of Notre Dame’s symbolism throughout the world. The Times described the effort to reconstruct the lattice-like roofing structure dubbed “the forest,” originally sourced from timber of 800-year-old trees:
“Each oak tree had been selected to match the contours of the ancient beam it would replace. The tree was then carved to duplicate the peculiarities of the hand-tooled silhouette of the original, with the medieval carpenter’s mark even tattooed back onto it. ‘Faithful’ only began to describe the effort, which was not for show. The public won’t get to see the rafters that are now behind the restored ceiling vaults.”
The history of cathedral is so rich that Victor Hugo advocated for its preservation and lauded its significance in France's cultural heritage in his famous novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” published almost 200 years ago. Under its now restored roof, Mary Queen of Scots was married, Joan of Arc beatified, Napoleon crowned and Charles de Gaulle celebrated. The cathedral has been so central to France that it serves as ground zero from which all distances in the nation are measured.
We must not fail to recognize the symbolism of this astonishing and successful venture. Notre Dame is not only among France’s most cherished institutions; it is arguably one of the greatest accomplishments of western civilization. What does its miraculous rebirth represent in a 21st century ravaged by war and destruction, where zeitgeist forces seem all too eager to demolish rather than preserve and reform our institutions? As the Times reports, “For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure — that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.”
During this same past weekend a different set of activities was proceeding on this side of the Atlantic. In Palm Beach, Florida, President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team has been busy mapping out its plans for the new administration. Trump is surrounded by both loyalty-hardened advisors and a fresh group of tech-wealthy oligarchs lining up to do his bidding. We now hand over leadership of American institutions to these latest stewards.
As I have frequently written about in this series, the leaders of many of our current institutions must be held accountable for their failures. The most effective institutions need to be respected, but can only be sustained through adaptation and modernization. As David Brooks wrote recently, “Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.”
So what concerns me is the level of disdain that Trumpism in general seems to hold for these same institutions. At almost every turn, the MAGA minions have willingly attacked both their legitimacy and the kinds of people who work for them. In a Substack essay, Damon Linker writes: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”
Admittedly, many of our nation’s institutions are led today by an elite establishment positioned left of center that has failed millions of working class Americans over recent decades. But as opposed to endeavoring to increase their representation in the ranks of such institutions with an eye towards reform, politicians in Trump’s reinvented Republican Party have openly degraded and attacked their very legitimacy in recent years. Instead of constructive critique, they openly disparage mainstream media platforms, take control of the governing boards of state university systems and prohibit the teaching of disfavored ideas in public schools. Conservative media sources portray teachers, professors, scientists, journalists and civil servants as ideological enemies to be punished or ignored.
As they sit around the conference room tables at Mar-a-Lago, I imagine many on Trump’s transition team truly believe that tearing down is easier than reforming, preserving and rebuilding. I can only hope that they also watched the reopening of Notre Dame this weekend and heeded the important message illustrated — that the latter is indeed possible if the will is tenacious and paramount.
Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” and serves on the Advisory Council at Business for America. This is the 15th entry in what was intended to be a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.
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The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks.
Michael Viard/Getty Images
Can the mighty rhizome teach us how to find a new social paradigm?
Dec 10, 2024
America is grappling with the implications of the election, and many are perplexed, even shocked about just how fast our society seems to be changing. Most people believe that our two-party system of democracy is stable and the uprising of authoritarianism and divisive red-versus-blue tribalism is an abrupt and anomalous change.
If you imagine our civil society as an organism, one would think its reaction would be to try to reclaim its previously perceived stable state. However, in nature, many organisms are well-equipped to embrace new realities and adapt in order to persist. For our society, we need to support and guide social change that can progress our democracy into a new paradigm. We can do this by stepping back and building new relationships for the purpose of understanding across our differences and creating change together.
I study change processes as they occur through transformative learning networks. These loose- knit social networks prioritize learning from others. To move through complex crises and spawn new realities, the people who gravitate to these networks take risks by disrupting their usual social patterns to build new relationships and understanding across ideological, institutional and geographic boundaries. These networks can give way to new professional fields, new schools of thought and even new organizations. For example, the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network started as a group of individuals from different walks of life who all wanted to build community resilience in the face of wildfires; they just had different ideas about how to do it. Acknowledging that wildfire management is too complex for a single approach, they pooled their diversity of experiences and connections to innovate new solutions.
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We have all heard the phrase “the only constant in life is change,”attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with proclaiming, “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”Human communities have evolved with a set of evolutionary biases that enable us to ignore and resist change. A prime example is our collective ability to discount the very real evidence for and effects of climate change. We fail to notice all the pieces of change as they assemble themselves until we are surprised by the qualitatively different state in which we find ourselves.So here we are, stunned and unsure how to make the next move.
In the mighty rhizome, nature demonstrates for us why change may surprise us and how, while we cannot stop change, we may be able to guide the change we want to see in the future. If you have ever weeded a garden you know about rhizomes. Invasive weeds (like Japanese knotweed and giant horsetails) and pretty ones (like wild iris) are all subterranean organizers. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end, they are decentralized, they struggle and spread underground hidden from our view and occasionally surface into the sunlight in bombastic manifestations showing us an organism we forgot existed has only gained vigor while we were not paying attention.
Even though we cannot see most of the rhizome's biomass and activities, underground it gathers energy, branches, twists and turns, breaks through barriers, and expands its network until it is ready to show itself again. The rhizome is a prolific botanical metaphor used by French philosopher Deleuze and his social activist collaborator Guattari along with contemporary organizational philosophers and change scholars to understand the complexities of social change as non-linear, heterogenous, non-hierarchical and subterranean.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks, create new bonds, branch out and break through the barriers that constrain us. Engaging in civic society, participating in new relationships and learning from those who are engaged across social and political spectrum can help us reconfigure our understanding of our possible futures and gather our collective strength until we are ready to emerge as something new.
Connecting across our differences is scary. Thanksgiving tables across the country last month were full of anxieties associated with communicating in spite of our differences. We may prefer our instinctual draw to familiar homogeneous social gatherings that reinforce our biases and to fall in line under hierarchical organizational structures that provide clear rules on how we must behave. But, if we take on the rhizomatic view, we can instead be comforted by the knowledge that change happens through subterranean activity and if we want to be part of that change we need to build uncomfortable connections so we can learn together and imagine a new future.
So take a risk, be disruptive and find new people who challenge your assumptions and build friendships that create conditions for you to learn new things. You never know — you may be starting a new social movement.
Risien is the director of transdisciplinary research at Oregon State University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
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