Healing the World, Healing Ourselves

Democracy Newsletter: January 2024

By Steve Zolno

​Our discussion for December 13, 2023, centered around the book The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, by Shawn A. Ginwright, 2022.
 
The author is an Oakland activist who runs a program for inner-city youth to help them move in the direction of identifying their strengths and working toward careers. He also is on advisory boards at both Stanford and Harvard universities.
 
Perhaps the most important theme of this book is, no matter how much change we may be able to make in the world, it doesn’t necessarily lead to personal healing: “I’ve come to realize that as a society, we don’t really do a good job at preparing, teaching, or training people how to be vulnerable, cultivate empathy, practice self-reflection — all the stuff that makes us human.” (Page 2)
 
Personal transformation is an essential part of the task to transform society: “Just like the absence of disease doesn’t constitute health, the absence of violence doesn’t constitute peace” (Page 7) … and part of the process of changing society is agreeing on a clear vision forward: “Our work at social change has become an effort to make better maps without a clear, compelling destination.” (Page 12)
 
Our inveterate tribalism often keeps us from seeing the other person beyond our preconceptions: “An issue that keeps us from progressing is the extreme polarization in our society that keeps us from being able to have a genuine conversation.” (Page 15)
 
The author reminds us that our judgments of others sometimes lead us to consider them less than human, which makes genuine dialogue impossible: “No human is intrinsically better or worse than the next. While it’s true that the conditions of our lives are different, we should be careful not to confuse the conditions of a human with the quality of the human themselves.” (Page 16)
 
It is easy to think that an accurate description of a problem fixes it. But to move forward, we must agree on a vision and a way to approach it: “Our tendency is to get locked into hindsight and never move past it. I’ve seen this happen with community activists, social service professionals, and corporate leaders.” (Page 46)
 
Truth and truth-telling are essential elements of both personal and societal growth. In 1955, Mamie Till, mother of Emmet Till, received the murdered body of her 14-year-old son. Rather than just bury him, she held an open-casket funeral to which thousands eventually came: “It was perhaps her truth-telling that sparked the movement for civil rights. … Researchers … learned that if you care about someone, you are more likely to be honest with them. But research also shows that speaking truth to power is good for our health.” (Page 57)
 
We cannot move forward in a meaningful way unless we first clarify the direction we want to go. Being anti-racist or anti-war doesn’t clarify the kind of society we want: “It is not enough to define our work by what it is in opposition to. … Do we want to live in an anti-racist society or a society based in belonging?” (Page 83)
 
One way to transform society is to provide opportunities for young people on a path toward criminal behavior to see themselves as capable of developing talents to contribute to society. It is not easy to turn people around who are headed in the wrong direction, but programs that show them support and have them learns skills that change their self-image often work: “If someone is willing to see these young men as human, even when they show up with inhumane behavior, it affords them the ability to act from their core rather than as the person society conditioned them to be.” (Page 103)
 
In experiments with young children, they consistently show empathy for others, a quality that often is eventually unlearned. The author asserts that those qualities can be relearned: “Research illustrates that we have been hardwired to care, and we neurologically are wired to connect with others, because mirror neurons in our brains are stimulated when we’re interacting with other people. Care is our collective capacity to express concern and empathy for one another. It requires that we act in ways that protect, defend, and advance the dignity of all human beings, animals and the environment.” (Pages 120–21)
 
In our interactions, we often take on a rigid position that prevents us from hearing the other person and working together toward solutions: “Most of the time we don’t question what we see; we just act on it as if it were true. When we make a pivot in our perspective and become aware that it is limited we … pull back and become curious about a possible bigger picture.” (Page 154)
 
We only can progress toward the society we want by clarifying and working toward that vision. Focusing only on what we don’t want doesn’t move us forward: “We can never achieve what we want simply by pointing out what we don’t. This is why I’m cautious about the term anti-racist. It does a good job of articulating an active and engaged stance against racism but what comes after that? Being racist and anti-racist are two sides of the ‘not’ coin, which never gets us to what we really need and want, which is belonging.” (Page 177)
 
The polarization in our country and world, where people see those with whom they disagree as the enemy, and often less than human, only can be overcome when at least those on one side of the divide agree that they must see the others as equal human beings: “Has our country become so divided that we see each other as evil, the ultimate form of dehumanization? I have to see you as human, even if you refuse to believe that I am.” (Page 188)
 
If we are constantly stressed by the state of our world and our efforts to fix it, then there is very little reward for us in the present. Just as important is learning to create a sense of inner peace as well as outer peace while our struggle continues: “Justice is not only an outside game that comes from marches, rallies and legal victories. It also is an inside game that requires we cultivate spaces of solitude, reflection, and vision. … Grace is giving ourselves and others undeserved permission to be human. … It’s hard to practice grace with others if we don’t first practice it with ourselves. In our journey to create a more just world, all of us must learn to be more human and lean into the courage to create a world based on love and justice.” (Pages 233–35)

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Steve Zolno graduated from Shimer College with a bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences and holds a master’s in Educational Psychology from Sonoma State University. Steve has founded and directed private schools and a health care agency in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the author of six books.

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