Strengthening Our Communities: Robert Fuller on the “Rankism” of Somebodies and Nobodies

We spend quite a bit of time trying to strengthen our communities by discussing and attempting to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. We also, in our better moments, pursue the concept of the common good, as I recently wrote in a set of reflections centered around Peter Block’s new book, Activating the Common Good: Retaining Control of Our Collective Well-Being. In the best of situations, we seek positive solutions, promote and provide training, and attempt to inspire inclusion by listening as much as speaking when identifying ways to foster the levels of transformation we recognize we need to achieve. But then we often look around and throw our hands up in despair over our apparent lack of significant progress.

Writer-physicist-educational reformer Robert Fuller, more than two decades ago, attempted to lead us beyond what he referred to as the “isms”—racism, sexism, ageism, and numerous others that by now we can easily rattle off in our sleep: “In the U.S., perhaps twenty percent of us have suffered directly from racism, and about fifty percent from sexism,” he suggested in Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank (published in 2003 by New Society Publishers). “But virtually all of us suffer from rank-based abuse—which I shall be calling ‘rankism’—in one context or another, at one time or another. Sooner or later, everyone gets taken for a nobody. Sooner or later, most of us treat someone as a nobody.”

His writing in Somebodies and Nobodies and the sequel All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity remains clear, compelling, and inspirational, which suggests to me that perhaps its time to circle back to what he suggested and see how it might push us a few steps along in our efforts to change the world around us with small, steady doses of empathy and a desire to do more than talk—in essence tackling rankism as the overall element that encompasses all the other isms: “Attacking the familiar isms singly, one at a time, is like developing a different chemotherapy for each kind of cancer” he writes in Somebodies and Nobodies. “To go after rankism directly is to seek to eliminate a whole class of malignancies.”

In the early sections of that initial book, he links rankism to assaults on personal dignity, and he explores that theme more fully in All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity: “To be ‘nobodied’ carries the threat of being deprived of social and material resources critical to our well-being,” he writes in that sequel. “Such threats are tantamount to blackmail or extortion, forcing people to subordinate themselves so as to avoid the fateful consequences of ostracism. The need for dignity is more than a desire for courtesy. Dignity grounds us, nurtures us, protects us. It’s the social counterpart of interpersonal love.”

None of what I have written so far is in any way meant to denigrate the great work that so many colleagues are doing in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Nor is it meant to detract from the work of the many writers whose work I continue to absorb and admire. But what I do find in Fuller’s work is an invitation to look at a larger, less commonly examined field of play to think about the underpinnings of so much of what challenges us and to quickly move it into a personal, story-based level that pushes theory into the background and invites us to feel the impact of what rankism produces.

It’s personal for Fuller, as it should be for us. When he tells us how he went from holding positions of authority (where respect was a given) to a position where, without a formal, impressive title, he found himself receiving short shrift from those around him, he calls up our own recollections of times when, because we were “outranked” by someone else, we were made to feel insignificant. It is not a large bridge to cross: by employing even a modicum of empathy and thinking about how those around us feel when subjected to the stings of rankism we ourselves have experienced, we take a small yet essential step toward understanding the terrible impacts rankism has on those whose age, race, gender, and other elements of who they are subjects them, in turn, to rankism.

He leads us further down this painful path of reflective inquiry by reminding us that one of the more pernicious effects of rankism is burnout—the absolute loss of all that a person might bring to our communities because, having been rankismed to death, that person no longer cares enough to attempt to share what they might otherwise have contributed to what Peter Block and John McKnight call our “abundant community.”  The implicit challenge here is to catch ourselves in those awful moments when we are subjecting someone to rankism (or any of the other isms) in our workplaces, our learning spaces, our social gathering places, and all the other onsite and online spaces we inhabit; stop ourselves; acknowledge what we have just done; and attempt to reverse the damage we are causing to ourselves, our colleagues, and other members of our precious, struggling communities that benefit from what a commitment to inclusiveness in all its forms is capable of producing.

It’s a lofty, difficult to achieve goal, and Fuller invites us to rise to the challenge through his own optimistic, soaring prose—an invitation to strive for a set of interconnecting communities capable of producing what we so far have not managed to produce: “As rankism, like racism, falls into disrepute, the partisan insults, put-downs, and smears we have become accustomed to will find less favor with the electorate,” he writes with tremendous hope in All Rise. “Sneering at opposing views, contempt for nonbelievers, and personal attacks will all backfire, discrediting the purveyors and not their targets. There is no reason to expect dignitarian politics to be less argumentative, but there’s every reason to believe it will be more civil.”

And that remains the challenge we must pursue if we are going to bring the best of ourselves to the Sisyphean task of creating the communities of our dreams.

Festina Lente: Speed (and Not So Speedy) Reading in a New Year

When I was in middle school, I was fascinated by the concept of speed reading—the possibility of letting my eyes race over pages of words with the speed, grace, and agility of a figure skater on sheets of pristine ice. Gliding. Barely making contact with the surface. But understanding, through that race toward goals never clearly quite in focus, that time was an adversary to be challenged by speed that packed the deepest, richest experiences possible into each moment we are granted—the antithesis of a wonderfully paradoxical Latin phrase I have grown to very much admire over the past several years: Festina lente (Make Haste Slowly).

My love of the concept of speed reading left me with a great sense of anticipation after I eagerly enrolled in a six-week summer-school course designed to provide learners with the ability to read and absorb content at speeds hitherto only imaginable through dreams and fantasies. And it was with a great sense of disappointment that I arrived in that “portable classroom”—one of several temporary structures filling a parking lot just beyond the more permanent buildings of that particular campus as if in recognition that was what taking place there was not designed to be part of the more well-established permanent campus that served students in that particular neighborhood—to learn, on day one, that the speed-reading course materials had not arrived. And would not arrive. So the speed-reading course was reverting to a more traditional English Literature survey.

The disappointment did not last long. Thanks to a wonderful English teacher (Peggy Cornell) who knew exactly how to inspire a love of literature in our mother tongue, I was introduced to a variety of writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Daphne Du Maurier. Although she didn’t have the resources to deliver on the promise of radically increasing the speed at which we read, she pursued a highly ambitious program that had us devouring quite a few books in that short period of time and, in the process, making at least some of us even more aware than we already were of how much there was to read and how little time we had to read even a fraction of all that was so enticingly available to us.

Over the years, I have eagerly devoured numerous fiction and nonfiction works in English, and occasionally ventured (with varying levels of success) into works in Japanese, French, Spanish, and Italian. (Out of all of them, the dives into Italian-language books, particularly fiction as well as nonfiction from Italo Calvino and Andrea Camilleri—including Camilleri’s lovely collection of essays, Certi Momenti, which, sadly, does not yet seem to have been translated into English—have been most fruitful and long-lasting.) There are times when I race through books because I need to finish them for a project I am pursuing or because I need to return them to my local library before they become due. There are other times when I race through them only because I suspect they hold something that would be useful to me even though I’m not finding them particularly enjoyable. While reading fiction—particularly mysteries by writers including Kelley Armstrong, Michael Connelly, Margaret Maron, Walter Mosley, Marcia Muller, and, most recently, Christoffer Carlsson (Blaze Me a Sun) and Emily J. Edwards (the Viviana Valentine playfully noirish send-ups)—I find myself racing toward the conclusion of the novels because I am completely immersed in the worlds the writers have created and want to experience them with the smallest number of interruptions possible.

I have also, during the course of those many years of reading, seen my attitudes toward and perceptions of what reading entails evolve tremendously. As a teenager, I felt as if reading made time travel possible: I could be in any period of time, in any place, through the eyes (and words and imagery) of the writers whose work I was devouring. As an adult traveling and living for extended periods of time in Israel and Italy, I found books in English and other languages to be among the tools available to me to open doors to levels of understanding about the people, places, and cultures I was encountering. As an adult learner engaged in a massive open online course that combined an intensive reading of a printed publication with online explorations of sources that the writer had incorporated into his own nonfiction work, I became aware of how the act of reading no longer was controlled or limited by what appeared between the covers of a printed page; by reading the book while also following links to online articles the author cited, reading that particular book made the book something comprised of the physical object and the online resources I was exploring.

There have been times, as I noted in a recent post here on my Building Creative Bridges blog, when I’ve been lucky enough to have people around me who want to do more than simply race through a book and move on to the next one on an ever-growing pile of books begging to be read. We pace ourselves. We read a book over a period of a few or several weeks. We spend time talking about what the book means to us. What we admire about the content, the writer’s voice, and the overall style. How the act of reading that particular book at that particular moment provides a unique experience for each of us and for us as a group of avid readers who gain so much from the time we put into reading and discussing what comes our way. And even what it adds to our appreciation of all the books that came before it. There are even times when after reading something as luxurious and well-crafted as Andrew Sean Greer’s The Path of Minor Planets, we feel we are done with the book after several weeks of conversation. Move on to the next book we have chosen. Find that the next book is not nearly as appealing of what we have just finished reading. And circle back to one more (unanticipated) week of exploring all that the previous book meant to us since we recognize we weren’t quite done with it, or it with us.

As I read Amor Towles’ exquisitely crafted A Gentleman in Moscow, I’m seeing my attitude toward reading evolving yet another step. My usual approach to racing through a book as quickly as possible so I can immerse myself, start-to-finish, in the world the writer has created, has been turned on its head as we near the halfway point of reading A Gentleman in Moscow. The language is stunningly beautiful. The narrative flows as gently as a river flows through a Central Valley California town on an enticingly warm summer evening just after sunset. The structure is an integral part of how the story is unfolding and is told; no filmed adaptation would ever capture all that goes into the experience of reading the story and experiencing it through Towles’ book. And the main characters are so appealing that we want to have them in our lives as long as possible. So I find myself again thinking of that phrase I so adore: Festina lente (Make Haste Slowly). And it is quickly pulling me farther and farther away from the teenager who was disappointed that a class in speed reading was, in fact, not going to reveal the mysteries of reading (and absorbing) text speedily.

I steadily find myself moving toward the “lente” part of festina lente. Appreciating that there is as much to be gained by lingering with a book as long as possible (just as more and more frequently I am luxuriating in lengthy, relaxing conversations with friends instead of trying to cram as many gatherings as possible into whatever time is available to me on any given day) rather than racing through it with a sense of anticipation of how much more awaits me between the covers of other books. And if that wonderful teacher, Peggy Cornell, were still here, I’d take the time to call her or send a note to tell her how glad I am that she gave me so much more than I would have received if speed reading had been what she actually had delivered.