For a long time, I’ve been drawn to mosaics. I remember making a mosaic as an art project when I was a Camp Fire Girl – pushing tiny smooth stones into wet mortar held by the top of a cottage cheese carton. (These tops used to be metal rather than plastic!)
There was – there is – something magical about a larger pattern emerging from many smaller pieces.
Fast forward through the decades, decades in which I admired mosaics where I happened upon them – from the fabulous designs of the Antioch Mosaics at the Baltimore Art Museum to the vibrant colors and images on a tall wall along a street in Puerto Ayora in Galápagos.
Some years ago, I began making paper collage-mosaics from cut-up pieces of old Christmas cards. My favorites are the ones where I simply pick a color or a theme and then let the pieces flow. The blue of Lake Superior on a calm day. The brilliant yellow leaves of a Wisconsin forest against a crystal-clear sky in autumn. The deep blues and greens and browns of summer in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
There’s something about paper and glue and scissors that takes me to a different place. And I’ve found that with color and shape and flow I can say things to people I care about in a way that goes deeper than words.
When I sit at my dining room table as the collage-maker, I envision the pattern and place the pieces accordingly.
In the mosaic that is the United States, in contrast, We the People – the pieces of the collage – have agency as to where we place ourselves and, even more importantly, what direction we choose to face.
At the same time, we are influenced by the narratives and norms we internalize and the institutions we navigate.
For the past half-century, we have been inundated with stories and messages that have told us we are always and only in it for ourselves: We are self-satisfaction-optimizing “economic actors.” We have been advised that our world is zero-sum: If someone wins, then others necessarily lose. We have heard, over and over and over again, the message that we are tribal to our core: There is an insistent drumbeat that “us vs. them” is inevitable.
Internalizing and acting on these stories, we have accepted the meteoric rise of wealth for a few individuals and the diminishing of opportunity and security for many millions of us. We have backed away from ideals of equity and justice. We have distanced ourselves from each other to the point that “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” is affecting our health. We have lost trust, and with it the capacity to pull together for everyone’s benefit.
We have moved toward a collective set of interactions in which extractive economics and responsive-to-the-rich politics feed each other – a “vicious cycle” as described by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
It hasn’t always been this way. In direct contrast to this Great Divergence, the Great Convergence of the middle of the 20th century saw greater equality, broad-based gains in folding previously excluded or marginalized people into the polity, more solidarity – a “virtuous cycle.”
Though various people have various explanations for why the shift from virtuous toward vicious occurred, a common thread is the recognition that the prosperity and equality, the collective-ness of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s left a lot of people out. And that expanding “We the People” spurred a backlash of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear that created openings for all kinds of divide-and-conquer moves.
That backlash is still playing out – witness last month’s election! – but even as it does, the pieces of our national mosaic are beginning to shift and re-orient themselves again.
This is where civity comes in. Civity is the foundation for moving back toward a virtuous cycle. Civity is opening ourselves up to greeting rather than fearing people we might initially experience as “other.” Democracy thinker Danielle Allen calls this “difference without domination.”
It begins, as did the shift away from the first Gilded Age over a century ago toward the Great Convergence, with ordinary people talking and organizing and agitating and innovating different and better ways to be with each other.
We the People create our own mosaic.