Life in 4D: Radically Moderate Politics
Escape the tribal binary and explore the world in 4D
On Tuesday, I discussed how to use the radically moderate framework to survive the next two weeks. In this post, I want to expand on using that framework to think about politics and the policy issues you care about more broadly.
One of the worst things you can do is to align your politics solely behind a specific person or party. Our system encourages this, especially for roles like the president or Senate, so people tend to vote based on party or individual preference.
Unfortunately, voting in this way triggers tribal impulses, making politics feel like a zero-sum game instead of exploring the non-zero-sum ways we could solve major problems if we engaged in bipartisan discussions.
It also incentivizes us to think solely about our own tiny part of the landscape and what a particular politician is offering us specifically, activating identity-driven voting.
That’s ok in small doses, but we have to be able to zoom out and see how our desires and goals interact with those of other people.
To break out the political binary, we need to see policy and political problems in 4D.
The easiest way to do this is to explore our shared landscape and get to know the other people in it. We can do this by working in diverse environments or traveling a lot, but let’s be real: most of us don’t have that kind of time or freedom.
For all the rest of us, the next best thing is reading, watching and listening to media that helps us think about our 4D world in complex and nuanced ways.
But to do this well, we need to structure our reading, listening and watching to help us access all four dimensions. Here are some media consumption experiments to try out this week that can help you escape the binary and get back into 4D. If nothing else, they’ll keep you off social media for the next week and probably bring your blood pressure down by an order of magnitude. So give ‘em a try!
Explore the First Dimension: Investigate the Hyperlocal
The first dimension is hyperlocal: individuals and maybe families. You start exploring this space by thinking about your goals, values, and the issues that matter most in your life. If you haven’t identified these yet, take a few minutes to reflect on experiences and why they matter to you. After this though, we need to get acquainted with the lives of other people, including those who are totally different from us. Thinking in 4D means being able - in some minimal sense - to put ourselves in the place of other people whose values, goals, and challenges may not look anything like our own.
Experiment: autobiography and memoir are incredible opportunities to get into the head of someone we’ll never meet and whose situation in our shared landscape is dramatically different from our own. I still remember how powerful it was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school (even if the ending wasn’t entirely accurate). Me Talk Pretty One Day was a vacation read years ago that I still remember vividly. The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr got me interested in her own fascinating series of autobiographies (including The Liar’s Club). All of these people lived lives that were totally different from my own middle class upbringing. But I was exposed to ways of living, value systems, and ways of thinking about and navigating the world that I could not have otherwise accessed, at least not easily and without a lot of effort.
Survey the Second Dimension: Scan for Length and Breadth
The second dimension involves surveying the social, political, and moral landscape. Here we can think about other people but also about the policies, laws, and regulations that shape our shared world. Many of us focus on political issues we hear about in the media, which often appear hyper-polarized, like immigration or abortion. Not only are Americans not actually that polarized on these issues in particular, they may not even be the most relevant for most Americans lives. The policies politicians and the media spend time feeding us are usually those with strong affective effects. That’s by design. People have strong feelings about them and it’s easy to get people to act on those feelings. Polarizing content makes money and gets votes. In addition to being actively harmful to our democracy, the focus on those few flashpoint issues leaves a lot of the political landscape totally unexplored. It also reduces our complex landscape to binaries. To break past that we need to explore the full range of political and social issues from a range of perspectives.
Experiment: There are lots of ways to do this (including some of the suggestions above and below), but one straightforward way is to read about policy and the news from multiple angles. Fortunately, it’s getting easier to do this because people are sick of fragmented, polarized and siloed news. Tangle News and All Sides are great outlets that give you different takes on a single issue. You can also use the Media Bias Chart to find sources from across the political spectrum [Note that the goal isn’t necessarily to avoid bias altogether, but instead to get perspective from a range of positions so you get a fuller view of the landscape. Simply being a centrist news outlet doesn’t mean you’re reporting on the most important things or even doing it well.] Another amazing resource is Solutions Journalism; you can search their giant database for thoughtful and stories that “complicate the narrative” (click that link for a great discussion resource for classrooms or hard Thanksgiving Day conversations) on almost any topic.
Dig Into the Third Dimension: Find the pits
The third dimension can support the first two by identifying the “pits”—less visible but significant societal struggles. If you haven’t experienced them first hand, it’s easy to miss the hidden pits in healthcare or immigration or criminal justice that other people are stuck in. If you’re not a single parent managing a child’s chronic illness, for example, you may have no idea how much time and energy they spend navigating insurance reimbursements or healthcare bureaucracy including appointments and referrals. Pits are sometimes really hard to see if you don’t access complicated systems like healthcare, the criminal justice system, and immigration law on the daily. But we can still learn about these pits secondhand.
Experiment: There’s really great investigative journalism out there doing deep dives into the pits people can find themselves in. Examples include Radley Balko’s work (particularly this piece on the byzantine and abusive traffic and court system faced by low-income people in Ferguson, Missouri) or Nina Bernstein’s work, including a devastating piece about a daughter’s struggle to care for her dying father. American Public Media’s podcast In The Dark (Season 2) about the prosecution of Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime helped illuminate for me the way local prosecutors have outsized impacts on people’s lives, often in deeply tragic ways. Broad, diverse reading and watching and listening can help you understand hidden pits in our shared landscape and can help you determine how to incorporate them into your own political and policy thinking.
Explore the Fourth Dimension: Time Travel for Perspective
Finally, the fourth dimension involves getting historical context. This one is almost trite, because we all know the cliche that if we don’t learn from the past we’re doomed to repeat it. But it’s really easy to forget that past because it’s hard to access and sometimes kind of boring.
Experiment: One solution is to read some good historical non-fiction once or twice a year. I don’t do this often enough, to be honest, but historical non-fiction like King Leopold’s Ghost or Six Days of War can give us really incredible insight into how we got where we are today. Reading books like these also help us realize how complicated our shared landscape is and why some conflicts seem intractable (and may in fact be, at least without some massively disruptive event). There are also some great YouTube channels like The History Guy and historical podcasts like History That Doesn’t Suck that make it easy to
Tradeoffs, Complexity, and Humility
This kind of reading, listening, and watching helps me stay connected to people and perspectives that I would otherwise miss entirely in my pretty insular and kind of lame life. It also helps develop an appreciation for tradeoffs since it’s pretty hard to read widely without realizing that there’s no free lunch. People have to make hard sacrifices and difficult decisions about what to give up all the time in an infinite number of contexts. That’s just human life.
It also reminds us that the world is much more complex than our own lives might be (though mine feels complex enough, thankyouverymuch) and that, in turn, supports the radically moderate virtue of humility. Knowing that there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of books and articles and podcasts and YouTube shows out there that we will never have time to consume should remind us that our shared landscape will always be something of a mystery to us. We can explore small parts and even shape our own local landscape, but there’s much more we don’t know and will never be able to access. And that’s ok. But in recognizing that reality we also have to recognize that we can’t know what’s right for other people. We have to trust them to try to tell us themselves. And then make sure we’re actually listening.
Things I’m listening to, watching, and reading now:
We Live Here Now, is a podcast about what happens when MAGA and the liberal elite collide. It’s nuanced and empathetic and provides insight into where people get their political beliefs and why it matters. I’m enjoying it a lot so far.
My kids loved the documentary On the Way to School. It’s a fascinating look at how kids from four different countries navigate daily access to education. It’s upbeat and sometimes heartbreaking but eye-opening. It also avoids the dangerous trap of poverty porn. These kids are cheerful tiny heroes and they make me proud to be human.
Sometimes too, you just need to give yourself a break and do something fun. I’m currently reading Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn series. At the very least it’s teaching me a lot about life in early 20th century London (and sometimes New Zealand).
What About You?
Next time you’re looking for a podcast, book, or movie to pass the time, ask yourself if there’s something out there that can help you explore parts of our four dimensional world that you don’t know or haven’t thought enough about. I’ll try to add more here as I think of them, but I would love to hear from you too. So…
What about you? What books, podcasts, and movies have immersed you in our 4D world? Which ones had the most impact in terms of introducing you to ideas or perspectives that were previously unknown? Drop recommendations (or anything else you’d like to share) in the comments!