Over the past three weeks, Richard Rohr explored his longtime framework of order, disorder, reorder as the fundamental cycle of the cosmos — the cycle that we’re all invited to participate in as people, as citizens, and as creatures sharing a common planetary home.

There’s much that struck and stuck with me from that exploration, but one of the ideas that’s been most persistent is that going through disorder is essential (“there’s no direct flight from order to reorder,” as Richard often says), but staying in disorder is harmful.

As a society and as a species, we’re reckoning with a lot of disorder right now. We’re sick of our politics, our economics, our culture, and our history (at least as we’ve learned and inherited and continued to live into it).

But we also seem badly stuck — and many of our modes and media of discourse are actively and/or structurally keeping us there.

As Tanner Greer wrote in June, summarizing Marc Andreessen,

In the 21st century, the main question in American social life is not “how do we make that happen?” but “how do we get management to take our side?” This is a learned response, and a culture which has internalized it will not be a culture that “builds.”

I won’t be the first person to observe that it’s much, much easier to tear down, brush off, or grandstand in 280 characters than it is to build, engage, or empathize. But the cynicism that comes from staying in disorder is badly corrosive.

One of the great insights in design thinking is that the way forward is prototyping and iterating. This is extremely hard to do at scale: to pick an edge case, we can’t “fail forward” by amending the Constitution every month, even if that were politically possible.

But prototyping and iterating should be possible at smaller and more local levels, and I expect that’s where we’ll begin to see solutions emerge. We may never get a federal law about who can and cannot be bronzed, but lots of cities are taking long, hard, overdue looks at who their streets are named after and who’s been put up on pedestals.

Ultimately, the problem with endless critique and disorder — with trying to get management to take our side — is that, in a democracy, we are the management. Of course we have leaders, elected and not, but the system is premised on the ideas that they come and they go, and we should change them if they’re not taking us where we want to go.

So critique away. Just remember that the point of critique is to make room to create something better.

[This being 2020, I need to acknowledge the privilege argument here. Yes, it’s easy to say “Isn’t it time we just moved on?” from the safety and leisure of my desk. But I don’t mean to say that, in a few short months or years, we’ve all identified or confronted all the problems with the old order, so it’s time to just hustle along. Hardly: we’re still being called to our senses, and I expect — and hope — that will go on for a while. My point is that prophetic work is helpful, but piling on is not. Sooner or later, we’ll need people to build a future we can all live in.]

Two of the most interesting articles I read this past week each had to do with a different kind of essential literacy for the 21st century.

First was Rick Perelstein’s NYT article, “How Much Can 1968 Tell Us About 2020?” The historian’s answer, in a word, is probably not that much. This is a refreshing, bracing look at the importance of taking care with our similarities, differences, and path-dependencies. Invoking 1968 instantly conjures up certain images and storylines in many people’s minds, but those might not be predictive these days: even if we’re now seeing the biggest protests since 1968, we’re seeing them through post-1968 eyes — and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the outcomes are the same. (We might also wonder about the exact outcomes of 1968, of course. History didn’t stop then.)

The second was Zach Baron’s profile of Jason Lanier in GQ, “The Conscience of Silicon Valley.” [Hat-tip to Longreads for this one.] Lanier is hailed as a “tech oracle” and possibly “the last moral man” in the Valley; Baron, immersed like the rest of us even deeper in the internet’s imitation of life as a result of the pandemic, desperately wants to know if everything’s going to be OK. (Spoiler alert: maybe.)

So where does all this leave us? I’d argue it points to the two kinds of literacy most needed now: in the historical method, and in the changes wrought by technology.

It’s widely lamented that Americans don’t know their own history very well, but still less do many of us know the historical method well enough to apply it. On one level, whataboutism is about facts. But on another level, it’s often about false equivalencies, non-sequiturs, and mangled analogies. (“What about 1619?”, asks one side. “What about 1945?!” bellows the other.)

And then there’s technology — specifically the internet, and most specifically the social networks — which is changing not only what we see and claim to know, but who we are. (“[C]igarettes … kill you,” Lanier says, “but you’re still you.” In contrast, he asserts that social media addiction actually changes us as people.) In any case, what used to pass for literacy no longer suffices, as Kevin Roose’s writes in his NYT article “What if Facebook is the Real ‘Silent Majority’?“:

“We live in two different countries right now,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and digital director of Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Facebook’s ecosystem, he said, is “a huge blind spot for people who are up to speed on what’s on the front page of [t]he New York Times and what’s leading the hour on CNN.”

That’s exactly right: it’s easy for NYT readers to scoff at “those” people walking around in a reality of their own (or the president’s) making, but 40 percent of the country isn’t walking around in a consciously false reality. Are there monstrous, intentional falsehoods afoot? Of course. But they can’t be understood — historically, or in their persistent electoral efficacy — if they’re not seen in the context of an ongoing, evolving, multi-level, multi-media system.

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Speaking of history, the article I’m most looking forward to reading is “‘This Story Cannot Be Told Unless We Start From the Beginning:’ A Conversation on Black History, Sorrow, and Protest,” in the summer/fall Oxford American. It’s an interview with Minnijean Brown Trickey [one of the Little Rock Nine] and Crystal C. Mercer, moderated by Danielle A. Jackson.

Two tropes worth highlighting in the op-ed pages lately:

First, the usual suspects at the NYT and the FT are declaring the Republican Party brain-dead. Depending on the columnist, the party is officially out of ideas, actively brainwashing its base in an ecstasy of mutually-constructed hallucination, or worse.

The worst that most of them have to say about the Democrats is that they’re fractious and/or less than totally inspiring. (Good heavens — a candidate who doesn’t demand our attention every moment of every day! That doesn’t sound like a relief at all, does it?)

But the FT’s Ed Luce, in a multi-book review on the future of the West, lands a critique that ought to give lingering pause. Discussing Thomas Frank’s new book, The People, No, Luce writes that

Rather than blame themselves for [their] 2016 defeat … [Democrats] targeted the electorate. Much as Bertolt Brecht joked that communist dictators should dissolve the people and get a new one, America’s liberal cognoscenti would happily trade the country’s white working class for another.

Ouch. Four years later, the word “deplorable” is off-limits, but the sentiment is still clearly there.

Here’s where we need to get really clear about something, and it’s something that traditional conservatives, ever alert for relativism, ought to primed to see especially crisply.

Simply, put, there are problems with both parties — that’s plain to see. But, difficult as a heart transplant is, it’s still much easier than a brain transplant. And a kleptocratic cult of personality looks like brain cancer, not heart disease.

Anger and disillusionment are well deserved. Soul-searching is much needed, and a change of heart can’t come soon enough.

But our politics, always the realm of less-worse choices, has given us a choice between brain cancer and heart disease. Neither a diagnosis you want; both conditions the result of years’ or decades’ worth of lesser decisions.

We don’t get a chance to remake all the decisions that led us here. The only decision now is between these two ugly prognoses. And the only questions are, which one can we recover from — and which one will we pick?

Today’s a good day to think back to the day after election day, 2016. Plenty of people were stunned and sobbing; others pointed out that the sun had still come up and birdies still chirped that morning, as they would the next day and the days and years after that.

This morning, indeed, the sun came up and the birdies chirped. As far as we know, they don’t know or care that the Republican Party not only nominated the same candidate four years later, but didn’t even bother to update their platform in the process.

But more than 180,000 Americans weren’t around to see the sun come up or hear the birdies chirp. The question isn’t whether the earth will still be turning in four years — let’s not give the guy too much credit here — but whether we’d make the same decision today, or, if we did, whether we’d like the country we’d be living in after four more trips around the sun.

There’s a special thrill that comes from encountering fellow travelers — those who are also on the way, and who share at least our language if not our specific destination.

To walk together, even for a few steps, is a real treat that can keep us going much further along the road.

Genuine connection is always valuable. In the long and uncertain slog of a global quarantine, it’s vital.

As long as we’re assessing structural issues that shape our democracy, let’s not forget to keep an eye on the census even as we ask focus on the mechanics of mail-in voting.

In addition to everything else, this election will determine a redistricting — and the census will determine what those elected to Congress will be working with when they begin that project.

Until and unless the Supreme Court forces a fundamental redrawing, this is probably going to be a multi-decade fight: this redistricting will set the terms for the next decade, which might yield a Congress in 2030 that’s willing to consider writing sane district-drawing reform into law.

I’d rather not wait that long to see a change, but I definitely wouldn’t want to let the current problems ossify into accepted reality for another decade.

By far the most common assessment I’ve heard of the election is that there’s not much to be excited about, but the choice is clear. Let’s pause and think about excitement for a moment.

In the past 30 years, almost everything has gotten more tailored, local, “curated,” or “bespoke.” The most successful companies that Millennials have grown up with have figured out how to do this at scale: Apple made better design relatively accessible, Google and Amazon can find anything and know just what you like, and Facebook allows you to feel connected to the whole world while also curating your own little bubble. We’ve (re-)learned to eat local; shop small; and emblazon cars, laptops, and t-shirts with symbols of HOME^®.

The notable exception to this pattern is the presidency, which still follows the old three-network model. Even as the primaries have exploded to upwards of a dozen candidates per side, the final decision still boils down to NBC or CBS.

For people trained to eat more (local) kale, despise the first president we remember (but couldn’t vote for), and hang all our hopes and dreams on the first president we could vote for, this doesn’t match our expectations of the rest of life. Why shouldn’t we be excited? Even our co-working spaces urged us to “Do What You Love!” — and this is the presidency, for crying out loud.

Two rejoinders should be obvious by now.

First, be careful what you wish for: fringe presidents elected by a tiny, rabidly devoted group aren’t a good pick for a job that involves an awful lot of symbolic leadership of everybody. This isn’t just “I’m a Mac”/”I’m a PC” stuff; this is chat-room conspiracies vs. the New York Times.

Second, what’s the point of (and where’s the excitement in) “burning it all down” if not to be able to build afresh? Heaven knows we haven’t untangled every messed-up system we inherited, but it’s also clear that we’ve burned a lot: reputation, credibility, guardrails on the discourse of the world’s most powerful nuclear state (and, by imitation, a whole lot of wannabes).

There will always be radicals demanding more, faster. And that’s to be welcomed: dreamers and gadflies and prophets have always helped keep people in power honest and accountable, and they’ve pushed the Overton Window open.

And so, now that the choice is clear and we enter the final months of the race — and after five years of existential dread — how much more excited do you really need to get?

The other night, as I put supper on the table, I looked out the window for the umpteenth time.

After an afternoon walk and another masked dash through the grocery store, home felt more or less normal: all the usual conveniences worked, the street outside was peaceful, and the downstairs neighbors were partying loudly.

Sitting down to eat, I thought — once again — that Covid has changed everything, yet not much has changed in some important ways. If, for example, some major U.S. cities are underwater by midcentury, or if parts of the continent become essentially unlivable, we’ll have to make some adjustments that far exceed anything we’ve done in the past five months.

Might now be a good time to take a closer look at the longer term?

This past week, I enjoyed digging into the Oxford American‘s summer-fall issue on place. I imagine I wasn’t the only reader waiting to see what “a magazine of the South” would have to say in the summer and fall of 2020; as soon as I saw the cover, I thought they got it right — and the first several articles haven’t disappointed.

You can choose for yourself here; my favorites thus far have included “A Lesson in Acceptance” (on the Houston food scene mid-pandemic), “Ways to Keep Breathing” (a raw and searing take that goes way beyond “self-care”), and “Joyride” (on driving and singing and “speaking beauty into … children”).

One of my favorite tricks in the historical method is called “placement:” the process of reassembling someone else’s worldview. Who and what shaped them? How do they think the world works? Why?

The more I look around these days, the more I think about placement — in the obvious places, of course (how could he/they possibly think that way?), but also in the less obvious ones.

My own assumptions and expectations, for example, were deeply shaped by mid-20th century writing. I was into the Hardy Boys books by fourth grade and Tom Clancy by fifth; plenty of World War II books filled in around yarns of Soviet submarines.

Other people’s expectations — my parents’, my grandparents’, my peers’ — were shaped by their environments and narratives, too. And, talking with friends recently who are parenting a year-old daughter in the midst of Covid, I wonder how their little girl’s expectations are being shaped by everything happening around her.

Most of our expectations are being challenged now. That’s been true for a long time for some people, and it’s more recent for others, but reality — if we can look at it clearly — obviously doesn’t match the predominant narratives of the past century or so. (Looking at a photograph of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt the other day, I realized they lived in a country that’s almost completely foreign to the one we have now.)

Each of us is placed differently, but we’re all placed somewhere, somehow. No matter what we were taught or conditioned to believe, though, the question is, how might we create new narratives and expectations that are better guides to the world, the country, the communities, the families we actually live in now?