It has not yet been a year since Civic Fields got off the ground. To me, it has felt a lot longer. We are now some twenty posts along and over 30,000 words in. I have tried to carve out a space here that mixes looking back at historic roots and staying current with the headlines. The summer slowdown has been good for me. I have been able to make significant progress on the book I am writing, and I have been able to pull away, if only briefly, from the urgency of “Now!”
As I have reflected on Civic Fields this summer—where it's been, where it’s at, and where it might go—I started reaching out to other writers. I am excited that a few have responded positively. I am looking forward to getting others involved here. Good things are in store, I think.
As for my own writing here, I have found myself wanting to be just a tad bit more philosophical (and even theological!). I am, and always have been, a thinker of many hats. When I first conceived of Civic Fields, I imagined writing about thinkers from a range of disciplines and periods that I have found particularly insightful and helpful along my own civic journeys, and I have done some of that here.
But I have also found myself chasing headlines a bit more than I would wish. We are living in disruptive times. A new era in American and global politics and governance is haphazardly unfolding these days. What seemed crazy just a decade ago now seems inevitable. I have taken to thinking of this as the start of the Fifth American Republic. As Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times has recently written (gift link), America, like France, has undergone throughout its history a series of different governing and constitutional regimes. Rather than thinking about American history as a big continuous story, we should think about it in chunks: the antebellum age, the post-Civil War decades, the post-World-War-I era, and the post-World-War-II epoch. I am not at all sure where exactly we are right now, but it is no longer in the long post-World War II era into which I was born. The Fifth American Republic is taking shape, however disruptively.
If I had one phrase to describe the shape this new era seems to be taking, it would be “games of chance.”
Games of chance are contrasted with games of skill. In the latter, great victories depend upon virtues or abilities developed over time into a kind of virtuosity or excellence that shines out over and above the rest. In games of chance, by contrast, some randomizing element keeps even skill or virtue from carrying significant weight with respect to outcomes. You might as well flip a coin. That’s what we’ve been doing electorally for the last decade as a country, and Donald J. Trump is now the great randomizing element subjecting the whole world to a big game of chance.
I know of a professor at another university who teaches a class on sports betting. He’s a big data analytics guy and can run the numbers with the best of them. He tries to teach his students how to do the same . . . sort of. Each week he and his students place a faux bet of some sort. He has his students run the numbers and wager on the most likely outcome. Meanwhile, each week, this same professor places a bet on the same event by flipping a coin. At the end of the semester, they tally the results: flipping the coin beats running the numbers every time. There’s a lesson in that for sports betting. It seems to be one that we’ve also embraced for the future of the country.
Of course, there is a way to master games of chance. You can set up a system that assures that you’ll come out ahead no matter on which side the coin lands. This is what sports gamblers who make a living off of it have done. And this is what those who’ve mastered the more serious games of chance in our society do, from financial markets to political power. There is a skill here, but it is a skill of oligarchy rather than democratic liberty.
Power in this country today rests generally in the hands of people who lack the kinds of virtues that would allow them to rise to the top in a more democratic world of games of skill. What so many in the halls of power do—especially during these Trump years where randomization has become a whole culture—is to try to engineer systems that ensure they win no matter if the coin lands on heads or tails. In the world of finance, this is called a hedge fund. In the world of politics these days, this is the purest way to try to understand what Trump has done and is doing. He will win either way. (Although, he’s now talking about wanting to go to heaven—here I am less certain. I don’t believe grace is a game he quite comprehends.)
We might also think of this in terms of cities. Among other things, this fall Civic Fields is going to visit Boston. We are going there (virtually) because Boston is a city founded on a few noble ideas and lots of blood, sweat, and tears. To be sure, it's also been a place marked by corruption, violence, and racism, but through all of this, a certain Bostonian yankeeism has helped the goods in the city outweigh its wrongs. Boston, I think it is fair to say, has functioned as the spiritual capital of the United States through much of its history. It is the city of the Freedom Trail, America’s only great pilgrimage path outside of the criss-cross walks of Washington D.C.. Boston has been a place of a generous patriotism where all fly the American flag, no matter left or right.
In the 1980s, in a moment of lucid insight, the late New York University professor and media critic Neil Postman argued that the city that would dominate American culture in the decades to come would not be Boston, but Las Vegas.
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 3-4)
But as things turned out, it was not just the entertainment aspect of Vegas that made it our national city, but its role as the capital of games of chance. Every time I turn on live television now (I watch live sports regularly), I am bombarded with sports betting advertising. It’s a symptom of a broader cultural crisis, one where dreams are no longer made true through hard work and persistence, but through getting lucky.
I have students who say they want to be “influencers” for a living—online personalities in a massive game of algorithmic chance. Others imagine being professional gamblers. Yet others game for being a day trader. And yet still others feel totally defeated by the seemingly random quality of the job market and sink into depression. It’s hard to stay positive when everything just feels like a roll of the dice.
Ours just feels like an accidental age. Next week, before we go to Boston, I am going to reflect a bit more on Vegas, the capital city of games of chance which has also become, perhaps despite itself, the capital city of contemporary American culture.
Still, there is so much good happening out there right now, and Civic Fields will not forget this. A few stories I have read about or heard directly about come to mind: an aging father reconciling with an adult child after years of estrangement; an ICE agent showing up at a house with undocumented children and encouraging them to go to school rather than taking them into custody; an FBI agent, forced to join ICE in the anti-immigrant crackdowns, who out of a concern for humanity alone refuses to wear a mask among his colleagues; former coworkers, out of touch for years, reuniting in a cancer ward to care for a friend; a small and dying church in the rough part of town that refuses to stop ministering to the poor despite the paucity of the church budget; poetry rather than porn scribbled on a bathroom stall; a powerful person who publicly admits having done wrong; another who gets fired rather than do what’s wrong; an artist, aware of all that is wrong in the world, still persisting in making beautiful things.
Such goodness is less visible but more real than our games of chance. It is one of the great insights of that old Bishop Augustine that evil and disorder are ever present, but at the very same time, ontologically speaking, thin and flimsy. Or as Hannah Arendt said, evil is so often banal. Good, by contrast, has weight; indeed, it can carry the whole world on its shoulders. So, despite the Vegas-ification of our country, thick cities like Boston still merit our praise. We’ll do that and more this fall on Civic Fields.