Community Starts at Home with author Alexandra Hudson | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

I guess first and foremost, I always am curious as to why someone feels the need to spread the message that they spread. You know, like, I always want to know what the origin story is. So what was the motivation for you, you to even ask the question or explore civility? Like, how did you even come to that? As you know, what problem were you trying to solve?

Mm, well, I've been thinking about questions about social norms and expectations my entire life. My mother is called Judy, the Manners Lady. So she's this internationally renowned expert on manners and etiquette. And I remember growing up, she would ask my brothers and I to set the table just so. Forks here, knives here. And Simon, I am constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate rules. I hate being told what to do. And so I would say, why, Mom? Like, why are we doing it this way? And why don't we eat with our hands or chopsticks like other cultures? Is there anything morally, inherently superior to the way we do it? Is it just because some self appointed manners lady from another era decided that we should and is that the best way to do it? And so I always hungered for kind of a moral and philosophical underpinning behind why we do things the way we do them. You know, I always questioned, as I mentioned, the social norms, expectations my mother asked us to follow generally. I followed them, though, that she promised they would lead to success and in work and school and life. And she was right. Until I found myself in federal government, I served in D.C. for one year, 2017 to 2018. A notoriously divided time in our world and our nation's capital. And that was an environment of anti human flourishing. And that was the real impetus for galvanizing me to think deeply about what are the timeless principles of human flourishing, what are the norms, habits, orientations, values, rituals that support this joint project of living well with others that is not doing so well right now. So I was in government and all of a sudden, everything I thought to be true and good about the world, about getting along with others across difference, about myself, questioned and refuted. And I saw these two extremes. On one hand, there were people who were hostile, they had sharp elbows, they were willing to step on anyone to get ahead. And on the other hand, there were people who were polished and poised and polite at first. I. They were my people. But these, the ones that would smile and flatter me and others one moment and stab us in the back the next, undermining us the moment we no longer served their purposes. And that really threw me for a loop the second Contingent, especially because one thing my mother had said to me growing up was that manners mattered because they were outward expressions of our inward character. And yet here I was surrounded by people who are well mannered enough and yet ruthless and cruel.

So at least the ones who are outwardly ruthless and cruel, you knew what you were going to get, exactly, and you could manage accordingly. But the more threatening ones were the ones who presented themselves as nice and cordial and cooperative, but in reality were as ruthless, if not more ruthless than the outwardly ruthless ones.

It was guerrilla warfare. I didn't know when I was being manipulated. And when, for example, I'm a Christian, I'm a person of faith. One woman who was my superior would pray with me at lunch and really kind of drew me into confidence. And I felt like we had that, you know, spiritual camaraderie. And then I come to realize that she's undermining me, lying about me to our superiors and trying to get me fired. And I came to that. Like, that just really threw me, like kind of that spiritual, you know, emotional manipulation. Another time, a male colleague came up to me and said, will you please help me with this project? You're the only one that can help me. And by the way, you look radiant today. And I said, you know, like, happy to help, no problem. Didn't realize he was asking me to do the entire project for him, but I did it. Wanted to be a team player, did the work. And then he takes my work, puts his own name on it, passes off at his own, takes all the glory and the meetings associated with it that he was not prepared for because he didn't actually do the work. And then the moment he got what he needed from me, gone were the pleasantries and niceties. And that felt really hard. That felt really shortsighted as well. It's like we were colleagues, we were going to be working together. Beyond that, I'm not going to be as inclined as forthcoming with my assistance in a future time. Like, we're. We're going to be interdependent going forward. And so that I felt really used, I felt really instrumentalized. And what this experience clarified for me was several things. One is that these two modes, the extreme hostility, extreme politeness, they seem like polar opposites, but they're actually very similar. Both the extreme hostility and extreme politess, they insufficiently see the gift of being human, and they use other human beings as means to their selfish ends, as opposed to respecting people as ends in and of themselves. Just because we're human beings with Equal moral worth, the hostile contingencies, other people as pawns to be steamrolled and silenced and bullied into submission. And the polite contingent sees others as pawns to be manipulated and then discarded the moment they're no longer useful. And then another core idea, insight that I drive from this experience was there is an essential distinction between civility and politeness. That politeness, I realize, is etiquette. It's technique, it's manners, it's external. Whereas civility is internal. It's a disposition of the heart, a way of seeing others as our moral equals who are worthy of a bare minimum of respect just because of our shared moral worth and status as members of the human community. And that crucially, sometimes actually loving or respecting someone requires being impolite, telling hard truths, engaging in robust debate. That's not, you know, sometimes that's uncomfortable, sometimes feelings get hurt, but that's actually a way to love and respect others. And so I came to realize that what we need more of in our, in our world today is not politeness, not the appearance of respect, of love, but civility, the disposition of actually respecting others, even if it requires having uncomfortable conversations sometimes.

So, so let me say it back to you so I'm clear. So you can have somebody who has a disposition of civility and they can be polite or impolite. That is not the judgment. Right. It goes, it sort of, it's almost hearkens of Dr. Martin Luther King, you know, do not judge me by the color of my skin, but the character of my heart.

That's right, that's right.

Which is the color of the skin is the, is the external. Whether some, whether someone's polite or impolite is simply an external. And we must not judge their character simply by how they present themselves, but rather it is the motivation underlying the character of their heart, which is, are they civil or not civil?

That's exactly right. And too often we're content with people who just do and say the right things. And I say no, no, no, I say no, let's actually focus on cultivating an orientation, the right orientation and the right disposition towards others that actually respects them and isn't content with just people pretending, giving lip service to.

So this is all beautiful and magical and idealistic. And trust me.

When it comes to idealism, I mean, hook, line and sinker.

I'm in the right place.

I'm in the right place, however, putting my cynical hat on, which is if you have a culture of dog eat dog and the only way you can get ahead is by putting yourself first. Like it's a culture of. Of self promotion and a culture of self advancement, even at the expense of my colleagues. You know, 1. How do you teach people like that with a warped incentive structure? Civility, you know, can you. Even.

When. When there's no incentive to be civil?

My answer to that is that civility is both an inherent good and it's actually an instrumental good as well. It's an inherent good because treating others with decency and respect is good in and of itself, full stop. But treating others with decency and respect also supports the tenets of a free and flourishing society. It supports our democracy having just this fundamentally pro human orientation to others in the world. And I'm really glad that you mentioned Dr. King, because he's actually central to my philosophy of civility. When I was in this kind of antagonistic, divided, hostile time in government, I was invited by the Aspen Institute on a retreat with other congressional staffers, some political appointees, just people across the political spectrum, to discuss the role of civility in American public life. And while we were There, we read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. S letter from Birmingham Jail. And I had read it before, but it was like a close rereading and something about classic works. You get something new out of them every time you read them. And so I had several, you know, really important insights while reading Dr. King's letter, one of which was that the true moral foundation for civility. And borrowing from Socrates, Dr. King makes an observation about segregation. He says segregation is mutually harmful. It hurts both parties. It hurts the segregated by giving them a false sense of inferiority. And it hurts the segregator by giving them a false sense of superiority. It deforms their soul. And I realize that the same is true about incivility, that when we. When people act with ruthlessness and cruelty and malice to their fellow human beings, yes, they dehumanize the other. They degrade the dignity and personhood of the person towards whom they're acting. But they also hurt themselves. They make themselves a little bit less human and less humane. It's mutually mutually harmful. But the inverse is also true. Acts of charity, kindness, compassion, grace, those are mutually ennobling. They make both parties more human and more humane. So acting well with justice towards others, as Socrates says, that is its own reward, and acting unjustly is its own punishment.

But who goes first? You know, doubling down on civility when you're the degraded only has people stab you in the back more and take more advantage of you, right? Like the More civil, the more civil you acted in government, the more you're just a pawn of the manipulators. Right. And the person who, even if they have a full sense of superiority, why would they give that up? You know? You know, why would somebody. Because remember, it may be a false sense of superiority, but to the person who's experiencing it, feels pretty damn superior.

Still power.

Yeah, there's still, it's still power even, even if it's perceived power. Right. And, and why would they want to go first? I, I, although I agree with your premise entirely, where do we start? How do we start? Who goes first?

It's a I, yeah, we, we do. You do, Simon. I do. So, so when I left government, I, I call myself a refugee from, from politics, from federal government. I, I came home from work one day and said to my husband, I'm done with Washington, with politics, let's move to Indiana. He's from Indiana originally. It's where he grew up in a Thai little Amish town in northeast Indiana. And my husband smiled and he said to me, okay, sounds good, we'll move to Indiana, no take backs. And a few months later we moved out to the Midwest. And we've been here five, six years now. When we first moved here, we didn't know many people. And one day a woman came up to me after church and she said to me, hi, I'm Joanna Taft, Would you like to porch with us sometime? And I never heard the word porch used as a verb before, but I was curious and we didn't know many people, so we went to our home that afternoon and I've realized that Joanna is staging a quiet revolution against our atomized, divided, egotistical, fractured status quo. She had curated people across race, class, geography, politics, just to inhabit a shared space, to be seen and known and loved in the fullness of who we are and not by virtue of, you know, that the superficial things that the world wants us to assign our identities and value to. And we had unstructured conversation and seeds of trust and friendship were built on this porch. And I was, you know, introduced to people I never would have met, probably otherwise, because again, to this point, about there being much the same about this problem, because human nature doesn't change. There are many important things that are different. One example is the fact that it's very easy to go through life and not really encounter people we don't want to encounter. We know this is true virtually, where we can unfriend and just curate and subscribe to the people that we want to have our virtual ecosystems occupied by. But even physically, you know, if we leave the house at all, we go from car to office and back again, and we have food, groceries, you know, everything delivered at our fingertips, and we're not really put in proximity to people we don't like or don't, just don't want to be around. And that's what's so beautiful and radical about what Joanna was doing on her report. She was intentionally getting people out of their silos, out of their bubbles, into a shared space to build these seeds of trust and friendship that are so lacking in the world today. And I actually had the privilege of traveling the country and meeting and studying and walking alongside people like Joanna with and without a front porch who are doing the same thing. They're saying, I can't control who's running for president, who's in the White House, who's tweeting what, what the scandal of the day is, But I can control myself. And I am going to make my world, my community, my sphere of influence, better, stronger, and more beautiful. And there is profound power in that. That's an empowering message that it is a superpower, but it's one that we can all acquire and start doing right now. It just starts with seeing the outsider and seeking to transform them into the insider, the stranger, into the friend, and weaving that social fabric and just how we live our lives. That's where the stuff of, you know, democracy is sustained.

I love this idea of porching, and I think that is an instruction of how to start, which is, yes, you know, when I say who starts, the leader starts, Right? The person who literally leads the way. Joanna is a leader because she chooses to go outside of the.

Ring, outside of the, the. The gladiatorial. Gladiatorial sort of, you know, grounds and goes outside of that space and says, I will porch. I will invite people who don't look like me, who have different politics than me, who have a different point of view than me. I may violently disagree with them, but we will porch. And the rules of the porch, because the rules of where you worked in government were dog eat dog. Those were the rules. And everybody played by the rules. And those rules were set by the leaders. Right. Because those rules were, if you played that way, you got rewarded with bounty, recognition, and promotion. And so that's why the, that's why they were that way. Because those people aren't wired that way. The environment incentivize them to act that way.

Yes.

And so the rules of the porch are different which is if you come to my porch, you act with civility.

That's right.

You can disagree, you can dislike, you can be polite and you can be impolite, but you act with civility. And that's why it works. What did you learn about yourself on the porch?

What I learned about myself, I learned that I am more of a social animal than I think I realized about myself. That, you know, it's. I do need community, just like any other. Any other person does that. Even if you're an introvert, you still. We still long for community and relationship. And. And I saw. I was really intentional. And it takes work. It takes a lot of work. And I was intentional about curating that. And this is one other beautiful thing that I learned from Joanna. You know, she sat us down on her porch that day and asked us questions about ourselves. Who were we, what were we passionate about in life? And then by the time that we left the porch, we had introductions to 10 new people around town, many of whom were not even on the porch, but just people that she thought could help additionally plug us in and make Indianapolis feel like home. And I realized that that's what. That's what people want and need. They want to feel seen and known and loved. And it takes just one person to help do that for a person. And that made me realize, like, how can I live my life with greater intentionality and greater purpose and seeing the outsider, seeing the person in need, the person who's lonely around me. It's really easy to go through life from point A to point B, very instrumental, very focused on our go. And Joanna, like my mother, like my grandmother before her, are excellent at looking kind of like having. Not monovision, that's very common, but what's it called? Pan vision, the panopticon, or like, just constantly looking out for the needs of others around them and seeing needs and going out of their way to brighten people's day. And so I learned about myself. It was kind of, you know, convicting just how moving from D.C. it had been a very instrumental culture, very goal oriented culture. And it's not really always clear, you know, what the goal or the purposes of the porch, right where we're people that like, input, output, you know, if I invest my time in this, what am I getting out of it? And after a, you know, sit about on the porch for a few hours, it's not clear, like, you know, that we've gotten any closer to a promotion or, you know, whatever it is. Like, it's not really, but it's good for its own sake, and it's beautiful just to be in the presence of others. And that's just an immeasurable gift. And so I was kind of convicted about just that sort of myopic, instrumental view I had of relationships with people that I was trying to. Kind of shedding as I moved from D.C. to Indianapolis.

And have you. Have you hosted your own porch?

You know, I have, yeah. We. We've had. We've lived in two historic homes since we've lived here in Indianapolis. And. And we. We recently had a big house crisis. Our. Our pipe burst in our third floor a year ago, now destroyed half our home. So we've kind of been in survival mode as we've been in reconstructing it. But we have big. A big front terrace right now. We can't wait to host porch parties as soon as we're kind of back in the home. But there's a. To further the porch, really, for one moment, there's this beautiful essay called From Front Porch to Patio, written by a gentleman named Richard H. Thomas. And he says that 100 years ago, these great big historic homes, like Joanna's, like the homes I've lived in here in Indiana, they had these huge front verandas. And that architectural motif marked a cultural one, that it was a communal statement. You passed, you know, you got home from work, you had your tea or dinner on the porch, and you waved high to strangers and neighbors alike. And it was just. It wasn't quite the intimacy of the living room or the public space of the sidewalk. It was just this quasi public space. It was a statement that you were part of the community. Jane Jacob called this Eyes on the street. And then he talks about how over the last 100 years, slowly the front porch moved to the side of the home and then to the back into the modern patio. And the patio was an altogether different environ. It was fenced in. It was curated. You weren't just waving to strangers and neighbors, whoever happened to pass by. You invited people over, just people you wanted to be around. And then to make matters worse.

Things like television and air conditioning drew us into the house and outside of being with others and more individualistic and touching entirely. And so that that architectural shift of the front porch, the patio, marked a cultural one, one from communitarianism to more individualism that defines kind of the 21st century modern. Modern ethos. And that's what's so beautiful about this porching revival and is that it's. It's kind of. It's a rebellion against that sort of individualism that is so defining of our current moment.

I would, I mean, I think you're so. I think that's so true and it's so funny because it's unintended consequences. Right. Air conditioning, television.

Yes.

All these things pulled us into the house and away from the, away from the community, away from the porch. And you know, I think the. There's a porch is. If you think about it like people who have less sit on the front porch and help raise each other's children and people of more. The wealthy, you know, they sue their neighbors. Because your branches are hanging over my fence, you know, and you talk about civility. The more that, the more that we are, the more that we retreat from our neighbors, the more we lack civility. Like I said, neighbors suing neighbors for silly things, you know, versus when we're out front on the porch, you know, I think civility, the more I'm learning about it. Civility is not an input, it's an output. You know, because you say, how do you change someone who's in a position of superiority to simply change the way they. It's like the odds are unless you completely change the incentive structure, it's just not going to happen. And no one wants to go first. Right. Which was the struggle I had, understanding how we bring civility back in. And what I'm starting to understand is, is that civility is the positive result from community. And you can more easily implement and build community than you can implement and build civility. You know, I hate to say it, but what you experienced in your government job, you know, is that unique to your government job? Or do we live in this world of short termism, selfish motivations? The company's not going to look after me, so only I can look after me. And I will be polite because that is the tool of advancement. But if I am civil, I will get stabbed in the back.

So an undercurrent that I like to talk about is that there is much the same that is about this problem. There are some things that are different, but fundamentally this is a timeless problem, one we've been grappling with for a long time. This is about the most important question of our day. How do we flourish across deep difference? This is also the defining question of democracy, of the classical liberal project. How do we peacefully coexist amidst competing visions of the good and different paths to pursuing the good? Yet as I researched on this topic, I realized that this is a timeless human question. This is the defining human Question. How do we overcome the self love in our nature and flourish in society? There is this duality to our nature that makes this a timeless question. We're profoundly social as a species, doggedly social, resiliently social. As long as we've been around, in all times and places, we've come together in groups because we know that we're more likely to survive and flourish in relationship with others. The Greek word for person is proposon, which means, which means he who stands before the eyes of others. We become fully human. We're actually people in the eyes of others. And I'm sure you're familiar with this lovely concept popularized by Desmond Tutu of Ubuntu, right? This African proverb and concept of a person becomes a person through others like this. Across time and place, we've known that we come together and we are our best selves, become fully human in relationship. And yet morally and biologically, we are defined by self love, driven to meet our own needs before others and those two facets of who we are, intention. And that is why this thing called life together across time and place is always fragile. Friendship, marriage, civilization, democracy, it is never a foregone conclusion. The moment you put a marriage, a democracy, a civilization on autopilot and just assume it will always continue, that's the beginning of the end. That it requires vigilance, it requires attentiveness, it requires an act of the will, daily act of the will on behalf of each of us to cultivate this project of relationship. And that's fundamentally my theory of social change as well. I want to equip and empower and encourage people that yes, this is a timeless, intractable problem. There is no question, and this is a serious problem. It's the reason I'm exploring this problem right now. But we each have way more power to either be a part of the problem or be part of the solution.

And so what I'm learning or what I have learned from you is that what someone has to do is take the risk to, to have a porch. In business, we would call that an incubator. You bring people with different points of view to help drive innovation, you know?

Right.

But it's. The point is it's all based on. It's all based on people coming together in comm. In community, you know, even if it's just a few people. And, and so I think the, to everything you're saying about social media looking, you know, you go onto a bus.

There'S this great comedian, I've forgotten his name, there's a comedian who said, you know, I grew up. Mindfulness is a thing that is a modern experience. He says, we didn't have mindfulness when I grew up. He said, you know, I used to have to rewind the VHS tape before I took it back. I just sat there and watched it rewind. Mindfulness, you know, he's like, I used to go to the bathroom, and I would just go to the bathroom. You know, I didn't bring my phone with me. Mindfulness, he says, I used to sit on the bus, and I would just watch condensation drip down the window. Mindfulness, you know, and. And the point is, is like, if you go on the bus or the subway now, you know, people sit in. In their. A full. A full bus of people sitting looking down or a bus stop, right? Sitting looking down, you know, and we don't even look up and recognize and commune. And I think the. What restores civility in our. In our. In our nation is our willingness to commune. Our willingness to make eye contact, our willingness to say hello, our willingness to say, I'd like to hear your ideas, or what do you do for a living? That's interesting. Tell me more. And that's the solution, which is to go from inside our houses and with our heads down on our phones and come out to the front porch. I think that is. That is what produces civility.

I'm glad you use the word commune. The words community and communications share the same etymological root communists. And it shows about the relationship, the important and inextricable link between community and communication. And the irony of today is that with our smartphones, we're in constant communication with everyone, everywhere. But it's impoverished, right? And we're. Our community really is impoverished. There's a plethora of. We learned this during the pandemic when all of a sudden, everything was virtual, yet it wasn't the same. You know, like, we missed the corporeal.

We lost community.

We did. We did. In really, really important ways. And that's what's beautiful about the porch. It's corporeal, like you can. You can virtually porch. And I think Joanna did experiment with that during the pandemic, but it's not the same. And there's something special and irreplaceable about the magic of presence with others.

Yeah. Alexandra, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

Such a privilege. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. My pleasure.

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