It's the end of February and, by my self-imposed guideline, this newsletter should follow up on my Office Hour from earlier this month, where I talked about "Making Data Work Accessible," with a special focus on learning disabilities and neurodivergence. I'll get to that topic as soon as I can, but 3 things have happened in the last 12 hours that led me to write about something else:
I read an article that went to great lengths to criticize my academic field, social psychology (and I'm deliberately not linking the article or saying who wrote it, except to say that I've read other things that they have written and this was consistent).
I saw the movie Origin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and draws deep connections between the systems of oppression in America, Nazi Germany, and India.
I learned that a person I care about deeply was sexually assaulted.
I know that insults to my professional pride do not belong in the same category as these other, overwhelming horrors, but there is at least one thing that they all have in common: a meanness, be it petty or genocidal, accompanied by a sense of self-righteousness, superiority, or entitlement.
There are so many things in our world that are crying out for compassion and justice, and meanness doesn't help with any of them. Meanness is different from indignation, righteous anger, or the accumulated despair that drives so many oppressed people and groups to action. Rather, I'm talking about a kind of selfishness. I'm a religious person – something I don't normally mention on LinkedIn – and one of the best things I ever read about religion, broadly construed, comes from Terry Pratchett's excellent and silly book Carpe Jugulum. It describes an exchange between a priest, Mightily Oats, and our favorite witch, Granny Weatherwax:
There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats. “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ”
This idea – sin is what happens when you treat people as things – has stuck with me. Not surprisingly, "dehumanization" is one of the 8 "pillars of caste" that Wilkerson described in her book. (You can see the full list on the book's Wikipedia page.) Dehumanization, or at least an unwillingness to think about other people's humanity, also played a role in the 3 events that led me to write this newsletter today.
I know that two of these are huge problems and I don't mean to reduce them to interpersonal niceties. But I do think that overcoming smugness and self-centeredness can only help. It's why I thought of the song "Try a Little Tenderness." This song was written in 1932 but is best known for Otis Redding's 1966 rendition. Here's a video of Otis performing it on 9 December 1967.
Tragically, Otis, along with all but one of his band members, died in a plane crash the next day, 10 December 1967, so this was his last performance. But his message lives on, and it's something that I know we can all take to heart while we grapple with the enormous challenges facing our world, as well as our individual lives. While we work, we can also be a little more compassionate, a little more patient, and a little more tender with each other.