At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Shaylyn Romney Garrett-- writer, speaker, and thinker-- who is trying to change America and the world for the better through connection and community in order to heal and renew our societies. Shaylyn is the coauthor with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which provides critical insights for weaving a stronger, more united future for our country. Today, it seems the only thing we can all agree on is that America is in a bad place and on the wrong track. So Shaylyn and Professor Putnam engaged in vast, data driven work to examine the last 125 years of history through four lenses-- economic, cultural, political, and social-- to better understand ‘how we got here’. They made a breathtaking finding: all four lenses map the same trajectory, a trajectory that looks like an inverted bell curve. At the turn of the 20th century, we were extremely polarized and narcissistic across economic, cultural, political, and social matters, after which things started moving in a better direction for the ensuing 70 years until about the mid 60s, when everything started sliding back to the way it looked at the beginning of the 20th century. You could characterize that 100 year period as an I-We-I-century: polarized and narcissistic at the beginning and end, but unified and communal in the middle. Today, our country looks very similar to the America from the turn of the century- Gilded Age America. The lesson, however, is surprisingly optimistic. Instead of disparaging, The Upswing teaches us to learn from and act upon what actually happened after the Gilded Age: an age of unprecedented peace and shared prosperity. We’ve been here before and we can get out of our current toxic culture if we learn from and build on historical precedents. One thing we learned during the last upswing is that progress didn’t come overnight. It took 60+ years, and even with all that was accomplished, not everything changed and progress around things like race and gender were insufficient. We have to do better in creating OUR upswing, and Shaylyn was the perfect guest to guide us in doing so. Thank you for listening!
