Christopher Schroeder

Category: national

  • Why We Work and What We Need

    Why We Work and What We Need

    Don’t retire, says oncologist, bioethicist, and Affordable Care Act advisor Zeke Emanuel in his new book. This recommendation, which is considered his most controversial, reflects the reality that jobs provide purpose, structure, and socialization, which must be replaced by those who do decide to retire or otherwise leave the workforce.

    Emanuel reportedly wrote this book as a result of his frustration with the wellness industry that he argues offers unproven, and expensive, health recommendations, such as the recent peptide craze. Emanuel instead wanted to provide a science-based, and straightforward, approach to healthy living, such as sufficient and satisfying sleep, healthy and balanced diet, and adequate physical activity.

    Emanuel isn’t wrong about the part jobs can play in preventing cognitive decline. However, he overlooks the precarity and other risks of anchoring purpose, structure, and socialization to employment for anyone, including older workers.

    Perhaps this suggestion reflects the challenge of find these elsewhere as my retirement experiences revealed. Other retirees seem to have similar challenges finding encore careers, which are often more about impact instead of income.

    Such pursuits needn’t be as elaborate as the ones at Harvard for example or Stanford where participants spend a year and $50,000-$60,000. Still, more options, or sources of structure, purpose, and socialization, need to be available for everyone, including older people.

    Otherwise, our society risks more widespread cognitive decline, especially given the numbers of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. These might feel more pressure to stay in jobs, and spending the one life they get doing something that should be a means, and never an end.

    That could actually apply to all Emanuel’s recommendations as well.

  • Once Again

    Once Again

    Yoni Appelbaum, an Atlantic editor, asks in a recent article about American history in terms of its past and future.

    In it, Appelbaum highlights the need for a “coherent national story” as a way of surviving our politically polarized times. He explains that a more mainstream work-in-progress narrative he reports is contested by a “settler-colonial,” and white supremacy account, which appeals to the left, and a timeless American values version, which appeals to the right. He concludes by reporting that some consider this lack of a shared story as the beginning of the end while others hope that such a possibility will motivate Americans to renew its commitment to a more perfect union.

    Appelbaum’s survey of competing narratives might be a useful way of understanding contemporary political conflicts, but its central insight about the need for a shared perspective isn’t news, or new. Similar observations were offered in the middle of the 1980s culture wars by E. D. Hirsch Jr., who used his literacy research to challenge American education.

    Hirsch, who was alarmed by the state of literacy, confirmed conclusions about comprehension and context. These led him to challenge both educational pluralism, or the common belief that locally-relevant content should be taught in schools, and educational formalism, or the widespread belief that reading, writing, and presumably thinking are skills that can be separated from content.

    Schools instead should teach cultural literacy, or a shared cultural context, especially in English and history that like math and science need a canonical curriculum. Such an approach, which would challenge cultural fragmentation, would also increase students’ reading and writing abilities and even potentially their social participation.

    Hirsch’s perspective has problems. He oversimplifies both the politics of cultural literacy for example and differences among ways of reading, writing, and thinking (i.e., his “linguistic literacy”), which are better understood as cultural practices.

    Nonetheless, Hirsch seems genuinely concerned about a more equitable society. He both recognizes the value of cultural diversity and acknowledges the existence dominant culture without defending it. He also argues that a cultural literacy approach is especially useful to ethnic and economic minorities, who are less likely to be exposed to this dominant culture outside of schools and as a result are more likely to be marginalized and excluded if not introduced to it within schools.

    Hirsch in other words argues for a shared perspective, which he calls cultural literacy and what every American needs to know, as the basis for understanding each other and participating in society. In doing so, he suggests that this perspective, which goes beyond a shared historical narrative, is a challenge he was confronting in the 1980s culture wars that we’re still apparently debating today.

    Hirsch’s account also alludes to a bigger issue. Both Appelbaum and he frame their concerns as American, but Hirsch’s account of his and others’ research suggest that these could quite possibly be human concerns, ones that might be more evident in culturally diverse communities and societies but nonetheless are relevant to human comprehension and communication.

    Shared cultural contexts might be necessary for humans to understand each other and collaborate together, in which case these challenges could be much older, and at the same time ones that our ancestors have managed for millennia.

  • The First Thing We Do

    The First Thing We Do

    I admire Zindy Marquez’s courage in confronting those of us who are retreating from “sustained advocacy, policy reform, civic engagement[,] and long-term commitments” to “racial justice” as these have become “politically and culturally unpopular,” and think she is right.

    I agree that those who believe that the United States isn’t still shaped by institutionalized inequality are ignoring “the very systems that continue to produce inequitable outcomes today,” and that such “coordinated” efforts misrepresent the past and distort the present to dictate an unequal future. And I accept her claims about the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and the communities with which it collaborates.

    I just think she has offered an incomplete account of the problem.

    Marquez to her credit mentions those who found the pursuit of social justice “easier in theory than in sustained practice,” but she ignores both the history of this inconsistency and the conditions of its continuation. In contrast, I would include the hypocrisy among activists, lawyers, teachers, and others

    Such conditions have been convincingly documented by Musa al-Gharbi (2024) in WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE. He offers in this book a compelling account of the way that symbolic capitalists, or those whose status or prestige comes from the knowledge economy, have used social justice discourse, and especially cultural identity discussions, to increase their own influence while ignoring the underlying economic conditions, including their own position within such a hierarchy.

    Anyone who hasn’t read this book and cares about social justice should do so to discover the ways that we maintain existing inequalities while espousing the opposite. Such insights might make us more likely to make more productive changes, or at least more aware of the efforts we need to make if we’re to do so.

    These efforts could also challenge the persistent impression among some that progressives cannot be trusted to work and live with professional and personal integrity, which might mean more allies. If nothing else, these reduce the source of examples used by these “coordinated” critics.

    This fuller account might mean we avoid replacing one social hierarchy with another, which merely reverses this discrimination without moving the United States forward. At least it offers a more appealing account of institutionalized inequality and more convincing arguments about alternative, including shared sacrifices for a greater good.

    Those who pursue greater social justice do much harm by promoting our intellectual and moral superiority. Instead, we should demonstrate the existence of this discrimination, including the part we play in perpetuating it, and the greater benefits of more equitable options, and must do so in good faith over and over, and not just in our political ideas but also our personal choices with an obvious respect for everyone, including those with whom we disagree.

    That is a better, and potentially more productive, way to care for our entire community as we pursue a more perfect union, one in which everyone is more equal than we all are now.