The Art of Listening at scale
Liberal and Conservative Solutions can Together Better Serve Society
If we progressives learned one thing from the recent national elections it might be that our orthodoxies proved incomplete.
Just as our abilities to listen to the electorate might have been constrained by a type of groupthink, is it possible that liberal strategies intended to address a fraying social fabric might be similarly limited?
Science oriented societies have proven human’s formidable intellect as applied to industry building factories, freeways, and fighter jets. In government and NGO spaces we build policies, procedures and programs. Today, many committed to creating a more just society decry the lopsided impacts of industry upon humanity. At the same time, progressives struggle to acknowledge the limitations and unintended consequences of the models we’ve implemented using similar science-driven solutions. Such solutions have not collectively strengthened communities to themselves surmount the social harms we decry.
In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, political scientist James Scott describes a 19th-century German effort to improve lumber industry performance. To make forests amenable to scientific methods, industrialists reduced trees to timber. Everything that was not a tree became useless underbrush - stuff that got in the way of efficiently harvesting wood. Insects, earthworms, bacteria and fungi were not of enough value to even mention.
Clearing away the underbrush, rationalists planted new saplings in neat rows. In the short-term the experiment seemed to go well. (Short term metrics can mislead). The planners discovered too late that the trees needed underbrush to thrive. Without the organisms considered needless and messy, the trees’ nutrient cycle and the well-engineered tree farms collapsed.
Addressing the plight one social service sector, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Edward Glaeser, and others have chronicled the failures of the engineered tree-farm approach to public housing. Critiques of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and similar public housing projects include top-down planning, the concentration of poverty, the lack of resident empowerment, and broken community ties, to name a few.
Yet, in the face of well-documented postmortems, social sector framers continue to separately design and implement solutions to social crises (mental illness, income inequality, housing, intimate partner violence, early learning, workforce development, and others) using rational models. Such models are grounded in an incomplete assessment of how humans thrive. The Puget Sound where I live, a region known for progressive thinking, business innovation, and substantial economic resources is no less subject to this orthodoxy.
Here, in 2005, civic leaders created the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. That year, King County and Seattle spent less than $75M across three publicly funded intersecting levies aimed at repairing social harms. Two decades on the county and city spend 6x that sum across five such levies. These investments do not include state, federal and foundation investments. They do not include business opportunity costs, nor the toll upon communities and workers who help others navigate harm. The models designed to mitigate human suffering have not delivered the intended outcomes.
Why?
In What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast? Nicholas Kristof offered one reason – that we liberals are more committed to ideology than outcomes. In A Hidden Reason Cities Fall Apart Thomas Edsall offered another – that civic funders are incentivized to focus on their organization’s global performance more than the health of the local economies where they live. During Jennifer Pahlka’s June 2023 podcast conversation with Ezra Klein she highlighted a third reason: liberals prioritize process over outcomes. We fail to establish the feedback loops that drive implementation accountability.
But most perfect storms result from the confluence of factors.
A fourth reason I offer is that social sector framers and funders prioritize “thing-based” rational logic models over relational solutions. The more quantifiable frameworks promised to legitimize the social sciences as more hard science-like. Government and foundation funders responded by baking logic models into resource justifications. The fulcrum of well-being for the disenfranchised and disaffected shifted from family and community to professional institutions (research, advocacy, policy makers, government, foundations and social service), and by extension the more countable outcomes programs could deliver.
More recent incremental efforts to move towards community or participatory funding have produced the scale of impact perhaps similar to J.C. Penny’s attempts to enter the on-line retail space - at the risk of cannibalizing their established business model.
People need more than programs. They yearn to be whole. They yearn to be nurtured in community not just by institutions. The combined work of Gregg Colburn, Jerusalem Demsas, Matthew Desmond, and John Powell examine compounding conditions that reveal the core drivers of homelessness: a housing shortage, a reservoir of social fragility, and the othering of people viewed as less deserving of dignity. All are fueled by disconnectedness.
Not only are Americans increasingly disconnected, but so too are our solutions.
Crisis-specific social solutions are disconnected from each other, from economic investments, from sustainability, and from the healing of trauma that promises to reconnect our souls.
Diverse perspectives (including those we label “conservative” and “liberal”) are essential when solving complex problems. Such challenges, when tackled from multiple points of view, spawn innovation.
Shifting Frameworks
Solutions are often found in new configurations rather than in new tools. On balance, healthy communities spawn higher levels of civic engagement and diverse durable economies. Only new models that incorporate a broader spectrum of ideas will produce regional social and economic outcomes that Puget Sounders desire and the nation might mirror.
We must shift from linear, atomized solutions that individual programs aim to control, to endeavors that also allow emergent outcomes influenced by the collective ethos. To achieve durable outcomes, community and institutions must prototype and refine models that incorporate the following intangible principles:
Power Shifting – Shift from institution-led solutions to solutions that also invite those living with the least power to co-design the future. We must also ensure that recipients and communities do not remain in survival mode, repeatedly dependent upon rescue efforts. They need space to build mastery, to envision futures for their grandchildren and power to execute on roadmaps towards such futures.
Healing – Shifting from solutions focused on provisioning of resources to solutions that also heal, disrupting the transfer of intergenerational trauma to the next generation. Such sacred approaches support self-regulation, social-emotional behaviors, strengthen parent child attachment than fuel children’s innate curiosity and creativity. Creativity, curiosity, and confidence are nurtured long before children begin school. Such healing will enable families to execute on visions for future generations.
Connectedness – Shifting from solutions that segregate people by class or social harm to solutions that also connect people across demographics. Connectedness will link participants served in one program with people and pathways provided by another, and catalyze bridging social capital.
South Central Foundation (Alaska), Agros International (Central America), and TAF Academy right here in King County each offer frameworks that incorporate all three principles. Locally, TAF’s model will also increase the availability of highly skilled workers and spawn business innovation, reducing income stratification and shrinking the reservoir in which future homelessness currently incubates.
Conclusion
All flourishing is mutual. It requires we listen to “the other.”
If our society is to undo widening economic stratification, fear, violence and repair costs, we must acknowledge that liberal and conservative ideologies are symbiotic just as are the innumerable life forms that constitute a forest’s ecosystem. We must identify our shared interests and together cultivate a society in which the maximum number of people live into their potential in greater harmony with each other.
As 19th-century German planners discovered, the work will be messy.