Happy July 4th weekend! In honor of the holiday, this will be a brief edition of the newsletter. I want to share a couple quotes from the 20th century mystic, labor activist, and social theorist Simone Weil on what it means to recognize roots and to love your country enough to have compassion for its weaknesses. Before I jump in, I want to highlight two recent publications co-authored with my boss at Brookings:
As part of their efforts to develop a skilled workforce, Philly Shipyard created an apprenticeship program in 2004, which has since graduated over 300 workers, and which has recently been supported by a $720,000 grant from the U.S. Maritime Administration. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that in this program, “apprentices are paid employees from the first day, with retirement benefits and time off,” and that upon completing the program, the apprentices gain journey-worker status and earn 22 college credits.
This apprenticeship model is a powerful rebuttal to the language of “skills gaps” often used by employers and policymakers. The skills gap narrative allows employers to blame workers for not being skilled or productive enough, even as those employers outsource all training and development (including the costs of postsecondary education) to the workers themselves. In contrast, the shipyard model and other apprenticeships like it recognize that opportunity gaps exist between workers and accessible pathways into more specialized jobs. By bearing the costs of training and education, a cost that is offset by federal grants, the Shipyard is extending opportunity to a wider array of workers who may otherwise have faced financial barriers prohibiting their ability to participate in this sector.
2): To restore North Nashville’s Black middle class, local policymakers should pursue reparations
The reality is that hurting communities cannot “nonprofit” their way out of poverty—services that don’t address market failures and structural racism will have limited impact. This is especially true when these communities have suffered historic injustices. The entrenched poverty and poor economic conditions in North Nashville are the direct result of racial injustices tied to the construction of I-40, and the destruction of Black communities that followed. Decades of disinvestment and neglect worsened these economic conditions—something the standard development playbook cannot ameliorate.
The Country God Has Given Us To Love
In my undergraduate years, I was introduced to the writings of Simone Weil (1909 -1943), the French mystic-philosopher-activist who the existentialist Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our times" and who the poet T.S. Eliot praised as having “genius akin to that of a saint.”
Politically, Simone Weil was informed by Marxist thought but rejected it’s materialism. Spiritually, Weil was a Jew who was pulled toward Catholocism but who felt that God forbade her from being baptized so that she would experience spiritual solidarity with those outside the Church. Simone died at the tender age of 34, after essentially starving herself in solidarity with those experiencing Nazi occupation in France.
Simone Weil is hard to summarize, in both her personhood and her writings. Susan Sontag comes closest when she writes: “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world.”
There are just two quotes that I wish to share with you from Weil as a brief mediation for this July 4th weekend. The first comes from her masterpiece The Need for Roots which is the best work of political philosophy I’ve read besides Plato, mostly because it is the most directly attentive to the needs of the soul (including order, risk, and truth) and to the spiritual harms of political regimes or social collectives that oppress the soul. She writes: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Elsewhere, she expands on this most basic observation, writing, “Human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.”
I love thinking about the metaphor of roots in a garden. Roots connect us, and they allow nutrients to be transmitted for our nourishing. This is why I believe patriotism begins in gratitude, and specifically gratitude for the nourishment we have received from the communities in which we were formed and for the people from whom we received our being. Weil is clear that some communities are so corrosive to wellbeing as to be a detriment to the soul, and something worth rejecting in view of better communities. But to uproot oneself can be spiritually damaging as well, and so should never be the first impulse. That means we are often live in communities that are more flawed than those in our imagination. And gratitude goes a long way in helping us love and flourish in less-than-perfect communities.
Speaking of imagination, here is another (longer) quote from Weil’s book Love in The Void:
“We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtues easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.”
We love our country because it is the one given to us by God to love. And we love it because it is the place that gave us our roots, and enabled our growth. And we love it because love is the single most powerful force for social change, for helping us to grow into ourselves and into a fuller and better community. And it is precisely at those moments when the nation is hardest to love that it is most essential that we lean into these difficulties out of compassion and profound gratitude, even as we work hard to help our nation live up to its ideals.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere
Writing for American Compass, Marshall Auerback provides “A Template for Harnessing the Private Sector for the Public Good”
In American Affairs, David Adler provides a look at the vaccine development process: “Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy”
Two of my coworkers, Dr. Kristen Broady and Carl Romer wrote an important blog post: “Despite June’s positive jobs numbers, Black workers continue to face high unemployment”
In Politico, Aaron Klein (Brookings) shines a light on how “Overdraft Fees Are Big Money for Small Banks”
I’m thrilled to see the Biden Administration continue to be hawkish on China: a statement from the White House: “The PRC’s forced labor practices run counter to our values as a nation and expose American consumers to unethical practices. They also leave American businesses and workers to compete on an uneven playing field..."
Writing for The American Conservative, Philip Jeffery considers the sad fate of a popular educational game that many of us millennials grew up with: Where In The Globalized Economy Is Carmen Sandiego?
In The New Republic, Zach Carter considers the rise and fall of Milton Friedman’s hold on economic thinking