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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.
Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.
For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪
Hi, I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm also Lacey Lamar. Just kidding. I'm Amber Revin. Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs,
To say that we are a divided society is not news. We seem to be at each other's throats over politics. But I'm an idealist. I believe that we can come together again.
And that's why I like to bring guests on this podcast who can offer clues as to how we can repair our wounds. That's why I invited Alexandra Hudson. She wrote a book called The Soul of Civility. And we talked about how in order to repair community, we have to create community. Now, most people think community is a thing that's out there. But it turns out, community starts a lot closer to home than you think. This is a bit of optimism.
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 to even ask the question or explore civility?
How did you even come to that as, you know, what problem were you trying to solve? Well, I've been thinking about questions about social norms and expectations my entire life. And Simon, I am constitutionally allergic to authority. I hate rules. I hate being told what to do. Generally, I followed them, though. They would lead to success in work and school and life.
until I found myself in federal government. I served in DC for one year, 2017 to 2018, a notoriously divided time in our world, in our nation's capital.
And that was an environment of anti-human flourishing. 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 thought they were my people.
But these are 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 matter 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. Right.
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 her confidence. And I felt like we had that 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. That just...
really threw me like kind of that spiritual, you know, emotional manipulation. I felt really used. I felt really instrumentalized. And what this experience clarified for me was several things. One is that these two modes, extreme hostility, extreme politeness, they seem like polar opposites, but they're actually very similar.
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 contingent sees 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 human.
And then another core insight that I derived from this experience was there is an essential distinction between civility and politeness. That politeness, I realized, 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 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 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.
It almost hearkens of Dr. Martin Luther King, "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 external, 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 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. 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, even at the expense of my colleagues, how do you teach people like that with a warped incentive structure, civility, 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 freedom.
are democracy, having just this fundamentally pro-human orientation to others in the world. 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'd 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 born 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 souls.
And I realized 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
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. 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 false sense of superiority, why would they give that up?
You know, why would somebody, because remember, it may be a false sense of superiority, but to the person who's experiencing it, it feels pretty damn superior. It's still power. Yeah. It's still power, even if it's perceived power, right? And why would they want to go first? Although I agree with your premise entirely, where do we start? How do we start? Who goes first? Yeah.
We do. You do, Simon. I do. So when I left government, I call myself a refugee from politics, from federal government. I came home from work one day and said to my husband, I'm done with Washington, done with politics. Let's move to Indiana. 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 her home that afternoon and I realized that
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 as
and known and loved in the fullness of who we are and not by virtue of these superficial things that the world wants us to assign our identities and value to. And we had unstructured conversation and seats of trust and friendship were built on this porch. And I was introduced to people I never would have met probably otherwise because 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, if we leave the house at all, we go from car to office and back again. And we have food, groceries, everything delivered at our fingertips. And we're not really put in proximity to people we don't like or just don't want to be around. And that's what's so beautiful about
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 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.
We'll be right back.
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For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.
Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.
For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.
Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I love this idea of porching. And I think that is an instruction of how to start. When I say who starts, the leader starts, right? The person who literally leads the way. Joanna's a leader because she chooses to go outside of the...
the ring outside of the gladiatorial sort of 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 they were that way. Because those people aren't wired that way. The environment incentivized them to act that way. And so the rules of the porch are different, which is if you come to my porch, you act with civility. You can disagree. You can dislike civility.
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?
I learned that I am more of a social animal than I think. I do need community, just like any other person does. That even if you're an introvert, we still long for community and relationship. And 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. 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 it takes just one person to help do that for a person. And that made me realize, like moving from D.C., it had been a very goal-oriented culture.
And it's not really always clear what the goal or the purpose is of the porch, right? Where people that like input output, if I invest my time in this, what am I getting out of it? And after a sit about on the porch for a few hours, it's not clear that we've gotten any closer to a promotion or whatever it is. 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. There's this beautiful essay called From Front Porch to Patio, written by a gentleman named Richard H. Thomas.
And he says 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 environment. It was fenced in. It was curated. You weren't just waving to strangers and neighbors who ever 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 entirely.
And so 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 ethos. And that's what's so beautiful about this porching revival is that it's a rebellion against that sort of individualism that is so defining of our current moment.
I think that's so true and it's so funny because it's unintended consequences, right? Air conditioning, television, all these things pulled us into the house and away from the community, away from the porch. And a porch is, if you think about it, like people who have less energy
sit on the front porch and help raise each other's children. And people have more, the wealthy, you know, they sue their neighbors because your branches are hanging over my fence, you know? And when you talk about civility, 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,
I think civility, the more I'm learning about it, civility is not an input, it's an output. Because you say, how do you change someone who's in a position of superiority to simply change the way they move? 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. And what I'm starting to understand is, civility is the positive result from community, right?
And you can more easily implement and build community than you can implement and build civility. We have to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.
Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.
For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.
Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia, and with the help of law enforcement, brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcast, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System.
Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is in
I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words.
that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I can't help myself but to play devil's advocate again, which is, 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 is 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.
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? 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 and
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.
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 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 requires vigilance. It requires patience.
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, but we each have way more power to either be a part of the problem or be part of the solution than we realize.
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 have a porch. In business, we would call that an incubator where you bring people with different points of view to help drive innovation. But the point is it's all based on people coming together in community.
you know, even if it's just a few people. And so I think what restores civility 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 and
I think that is what produces civility. I'm glad you used the word commune. The words community and communication share the same etymological root, communis. 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 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 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.
If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenik.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. It's produced and edited by David Jha and Greg Reutershen, and Henrietta Conrad is our executive producer.
For 25 years, Brightview Senior Living has been dedicated to creating an award-winning company culture so residents and families receive best-in-class services. Across our 50 communities, Brightview associates help deliver peace of mind, safety, security, transportation, daily programs, delicious food, and high-quality care if needed.
Discover how our vibrant senior living communities can help you live your best life. Visit brightviewseniorliving.com to learn more. Equal housing opportunity.
For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪
Hi, I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm also Lacey Lamar. Just kidding. I'm Amber Revin. Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs,
Answer your listener questions and more. The more is punch each other. Listen to the Amber and Lacey Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen, okay? Or Lacey gets it. Do it.
