Outside The Box

“I may have told you this before, but I’m going to tell it again.” These were the words that preceded many a “Floyd Story,” the name coined by the kids in our circle of friends who grew up listening to my dad’s jokes, remembrances, and often-repeated tales.

Dad’s sense of humor was in some ways almost medieval, as described by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, where the laughs were louder the second and third time around because storytelling was a communal experience where everyone shared in the anticipation of the punchline. The number of reruns streaming on television suggests we have inherited at least some of that capacity.

Dad could talk the bark off a tree. Ask him the time, and he would tell you how to build a watch. He had enough wind to blow up an onion sack. Sometimes he would smile with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and say, “It’s the Maney side of the family,” referring to his mother’s people, known for their gift of gab.

Once, on a family road trip, Dad talked across the entire state of Ohio. As we crossed into Michigan, he started to retell stories of his years working in a mobile milk lab, which we had heard back in Kentucky. And Tennessee. My mother, whose wit was just as keen but a sniper compared to his machine gunner, gently laid her hand on his arm and said, “Can’t we just listen to music for a while?”

The communal experience is our topic of discussion this week, and it has suffered greatly since Dad lived the life that inspired his trademark stories. From the 18th-century settlers through modern times, communities like those in our neck of the woods were held together by shared faith and values and the necessities of isolation. Until the end of the Civil War, the idea of statehood bound geographically separate communities. From the First World War until modern times, our nation enjoyed the cohesiveness of widely shared faith and values, patriotism, and common enemies. Our civil society has eroded from the tumultuous 1960’s through the acceleration of discord which marks the current age.

Some might correctly point out that the generalizations in the previous paragraph overlook minorities, the marginalized, and the enslaved—those excluded from the larger communal experience. Unfortunately, these topics are frequently weaponized now, creating resistance instead of empathy, deepening divisions and further eroding our civil society. These often told tales have become constant reminders that each Balkanized faction is the victim of some other faction.

Much of the effort to include the marginalized is simply a redrawing of arbitrary boundaries to exclude everyone else, and the extremes are just as ugly as the worst offences of those who once drew the lines with little resistance. Instead of becoming a more inclusive society, we are more divided by identity and ideology, more positional, and more radical at the fringes.

Several factors feed this fire, and I suspect that an egalitarian society was never the true goal of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement. We are influenced by generational change, and by powerful ideologues who sincerely wish to replace our government and economy with some mutated form of socialism. The discord is also actively encouraged by our adversaries who are intent on weakening our national resolve by any means possible, just as our government meddled in the business of other nations for generations.

There is also a biological basis for our divisions. Dunbar’s number is the theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. It was proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s. Based on research into primate brain sizes and social group sizes, Dunbar extrapolated that humans can comfortably maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. Anyone outside that group is “the other.”

For civilization to function, there must be mechanisms to override these biological limits of the human brain: shared faith and values, patriotism, political affiliation, fear of the ruling class and common enemies can all contribute. There is no race, class, or politics at a Georgia game, for example, just the enemy on the other side of the field. Understanding why having enemies is essential to maintaining an empire is like having the Cliff Notes for the entire history of warfare.

Our lines are drawn, and they are constantly maintained. Only 62 percent of Americans consider themselves to be Christian. Fifty four percent in a recent poll felt patriotic. Thirty nine percent of Americans overall – and 66% of democrats – now view socialism favorably. With our foundations weakened, the common denominator for our shared experiences is now primarily the constant flow of manipulative and partisan information and entertainment which herds us into opposing groups held in a state of perpetual conflict by fear of the other.

Unless we act to break the connection, we are exposed to an unrelenting barrage that breaks silence, slams, pushes back, sparks outrage, goes viral, shocks fans, triggers backlash, calls out, shuts down—and exposes everything but “the truth.”

Some days, just one more headline, one more talking head, one more meme, or one more video and I would throw my laptop into the creek. Too often, I don’t even have to look for bad news because it shows up in my inbox, sent by friends and associates because misery loves company. Where this all ends is anyone’s guess, but I don’t like the possibilities suggested by history. As for now, I can only repeat my mother’s plea, “Can’t we just listen to music for a while?”