Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

We have entered the 'After Babel' stage of existence

Jonathan Haidt

On Wednesday, Feb. 28, at 3 pm ET (12 pm PT), Citizen Connect will stream “After Babel: The Fragmentation of Everything,” with special guest Dr. Jonathan Haidt. The program is presented in partnership with Florida Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Village Square, an organization with a mission to build civic trust between people who don’t look or think alike in American hometowns.


Learn more about the program and register here.

Program description: What if, at a pinnacle of our civilization’s technological achievement, everything just broke — the institutions we’ve come to rely upon in navigating a modern complex world, the shared stories that hold a large and diverse democratic republic together, and even a common language through which to navigate the rising tide of crisis. According to renowned social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, this describes our current reality, one that he calls “After Babel.” In this new normal, we are scattered by a digital environment into feuding tribes that are governed by mob dynamics and driven by a minority of ideological outliers, made stupid at warp speed by group think, and — thanks to social media — armed with billions of metaphorical “dart guns” with which to immediately wound “the enemy” in ways that are hardly only metaphorical. What could go wrong?

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

About Dr. Haidt: Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He’s the author of four books, two of which became New York Times best sellers, including “The Happiness Hypothesis,” “The Coddling of the American Mind” and “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” — and the forthcoming “The Anxious Generation.” He’s been named a top 100 global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine and one of the world’s 65 best thinkers of the year by Prospect magazine. His four TED Talks have been viewed more than 7 million times.

Read More

Crowd Surfing Through Revolution
silhouette photo of man jumped off on top of people inside party hall
Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

Crowd Surfing Through Revolution

Picture this: A person launches themselves into a crowd at a concert, and for a moment, everything hangs in the balance. Will they fall? Will they float? It all depends on countless hands moving in coordination, strangers united in a common purpose. Some push up while others stabilize, creating a dynamic, living system that defies gravity.

At this moment, we are all suspended between falling and flying, carried by a wave of global resistance that nobody controls but all can help shape. Think about what makes crowd surfing work. It's not just about the individual being carried – it's about the collective choreography happening beneath. With too much force in one direction, you fall. Not enough support in another, you crash. The magic happens in the balance.

Keep ReadingShow less
Threat Minimizes Compassion
Polarization and the politics of love
Polarization and the politics of love

Threat Minimizes Compassion

Threat minimizes compassion. This connection helps to explain two seemingly unrelated questions: Why do those who voted for President Trump seem not to publicly express much concern for the thousands of government workers fired since Inauguration Day? And why do liberals often seem not to talk as much about drug deaths as other issues like gun deaths?

The answers are multi-faceted, of course. This article will focus on one of many reasons: the potential victims of these actions and situations (government workers and drug users) are often directly or indirectly seen as threats by the other side, and it is hard to feel the pain of those who seem to threaten us. Institutions can also be threatening, based on the actions taken by people within those institutions.

Keep ReadingShow less