Weaver Fever

The other Weavers.

Last March, the public intellectual David F. Brooks was appointed one of the 35 Executive Directors working under the leadership of the president and CEO and five executive vice presidents of the Aspen Institute, a title that is alleged at www.payscale.com to go with an average salary of $158,579 (at least according to Dr. Google's report),

to spearhead a bold new project aimed at bridging the differences that divide Americans and seeking out a compelling common ground. The project will include a series of workshops in diverse communities across the nation in order to identify unifying themes and promising partners. The initiative’s longer-term goal is to draw attention to organizations that are effectively healing social divisions, to see how their efforts can be applied to the national level, and to create a network and set of permanent structures to allow for planning, dialogue, and action.

The project now has a name, "Weave: The Social Fabric Project", an associate director, a program coordinator, and a program manager, and some territory on the Aspen Institute website, including

• a video by David Brooks; 
• a manifesto by David Brooks (extracted from his about-to-appear book The Second Mountain, with a link to the book's Amazon page so you can order it right away); 
• an invitation to "share your stories" about a monthly theme (this month: "Having Fun in Community"), "contribute writing", and "stay connected" (by getting on the mailing list);
• a useful links page, to Aspen Institute tools, featured organizations, helpful readings on the "Relationist life style", alternative sets of rules for having productive conversations, and nine regularly scheduled dinners where productive conversations might take place, a pretty original feature (but you have to click the links to find out where the different dinners take place); and
• a blog of sorts, with posts by three people including the associate director, and links to some of Brooks's Times columns.

Not including today's column, "A Nation of Weavers", which introduces the project to his Times readers (he dropped us a hint in mid-January) but I'm sure it'll be up there soon, in which he explains what led him to this project, the desire to respond to the current crisis with "something extra"

We don’t have anything as dramatic as Pearl Harbor, but when 47,000 Americans kill themselves every year and 72,000 more die from drug addiction, isn’t that a silent Pearl Harbor? When the basic norms of decency, civility and truthfulness are under threat, isn’t that a silent Pearl Harbor? Aren’t we all called at moments like these to do something extra?

My something extra was starting something nine months ago at the Aspen Institute called Weave: The Social Fabric Project. The first core idea was that social isolation is the problem underlying a lot of our other problems. The second idea was that this problem is being solved by people around the country, at the local level, who are building community and weaving the social fabric. How can we learn from their example and nationalize their effect?

Apparently designed to illustrate the phenomenon described by Anand Giridharadas in his Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World:

a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can--except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. We see how they rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; how they lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways; and how they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. We hear the limousine confessions of a celebrated foundation boss; witness an American president hem and haw about his plutocratic benefactors; and attend a cruise-ship conference where entrepreneurs celebrate their own self-interested magnanimity. 

I don't have much to add to that, except to note that Giridharadas presented his first sketch of this gloomy view at an Aspen summer conference in 2015, and it was very shocking for the thought leaders in the audience, which included David F. Brooks, and I did a job on the resulting column, and I still like what I wrote then.

The Giridharadas talk was apparently pretty stern for Aspen, telling (wealthy) people committed to making a positive difference in the world that their charitable activities, conducted even as their businesses keep doing serious harm to the world, were analogous to rich medieval sinners buying indulgences; we need to stop prettying up the surface and start questioning the underlying system. They're using political power to get legislators to protect their inequality, they're dumping their risks onto workers ("Uber's owners have a lot of security but they deny any responsibility for their workers' 'lives, health, desire for career growth'"), and the owners of capital—shareholders—are so far up the food chain as to be invisible and can't be approached to deal with the bad-actor CEOs.

For some sampling of the way Giridharadas thinks, which is indeed pretty impressive and radical by Times columnist standards, you might have a look at this on the superficiality of contemporary US philanthropy, and this on "double-talk" at Lyft and Uber. It must have been startling indeed for the Aspen worthies assembled for heavy hors d'oeuvres and heavier self-congratulation.

Brooks actually sums it up pretty decently, and then, in keeping with his current "conservatives who love Dorothy Day" tone, praises its "patriotism" and "passion" but worries a little about the consequences if anybody was to start taking the message seriously:

He didn’t offer a policy agenda to address these deep structural problems, but his description of them implied that government would have to get much more heavily involved in corporate governance and private-sector investment decisions than ever before.

Wouldn't that be spooky!