Dr. Michael F. Mascolo is a Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College and Academic Director of the Compass Program — a transformational higher education experience based on principles of self-cultivation and mastery. He is also the Director of Creating Common Ground, a nonprofit devoted to helping people bridge divides on contentious interpersonal, social, and political issues. Beyond that — who cares? The important stuff happens when we speak.
Michael's Research
A Quote From This Episode
Resources/Authors Mentioned in This Episode
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Dr. Michael F. Mascolo is a Professor of Psychology at Merrimack College and Academic Director of the Compass Program — a transformational higher education experience based on principles of self-cultivation and mastery. He is also the Director of Creating Common Ground, a nonprofit devoted to helping people bridge divides on contentious interpersonal, social, and political issues. Beyond that — who cares? The important stuff happens when we speak.
Michael's Research
A Quote From This Episode
Resources/Authors Mentioned in This Episode
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in wherever you are in the world. A fun conversation today, an interesting conversation today, a big conversation today. I have Michael Mascolo. And he is a professor of psychology at Merrimack College, and Academic Director of the campus program, a transformational higher education experience based on principles of self-cultivation and mastery. He's also the Director of Creating Common Ground, a nonprofit devoted to helping people bridge divides on contentious interpersonal, social, and political issues. Beyond that, who cares? I have to say, Sir, that's probably one of my favorite bios ever. That's the best one so far.
Michael Mascolo 0:47
Does anybody really listen to these things, the bio parts? We want to get right into the talking and the interesting part of it.
Scott Allen 0:54
Well, I am so appreciative of your time today; what did listeners need to know about you? What can they only learn here at Phronesis about Mike? What do you think?
Michael Mascolo 1:04
Oh, gracious me. Well, you just said it, it was the ‘who cares’ part, and it's about whatever we want to talk about here. What can we learn about me? I'm interested in development. I'm a developmental psychologist. And I think that the best way to think about the world is to ask “How can we promote development? How can we promote development in people? How can we promote development in nations? How can we promote development in learning? Whatever it is, everything develops. And how do we develop that? That's what I'm about.
Scott Allen 1:36
I love it. I love it. Something that really stood out for me, and this is going to prop up our conversation today, but something that was on your website in your bio at Merrimack was this really, really interesting phrase. And the phrase went kind of like this -- you have this interest, yeah, you just said it, in development -- but ‘how people function as whole persons.’ Wow, that's talk about going straight to some of the big questions here.
Michael Mascolo 2:10
Okay. Whole persons, kind of a mundane issue even though it's profound, I think. People take psychology courses. And students, want to major in psychology, and they get this course ‘Introduction to Psychology,’ and they open this big book. And this big book is divided up into chapters on sensation, perception, motivation, and emotion. And you take the person, and you break it down into all these little tiny, tiny parts. And then, Humpty Dumpty gets broken down, and nobody ever puts Humpty Dumpty together again in, at least, psychology. We're very, very good at studying the left nostril for 10 years, and then we move to the right nostril, and we're surprised by it. So, many people don't recognize themselves in psychological theories because they're so tiny and isolated. But we act and function as whole beings. We are whole beings. We are whole thinking, feeling, experiencing, relational beings. And perhaps, the most important part of what it means, at least, to me, to be a human being, is that we are in part who we think we are. We are, in part, how we represent ourselves to be. We are our value judgments. We are our identification with moral systems, with systems of value. And a person comes into being, it seems, to me, when a person identifies with some system of values, and then seeks to live that system of values. And this goes back to Aristotle, the virtues, and how it is that people come into being and become happy not by pursuing pleasure, status, or power, but instead by pursuing virtue, pursuing the good. What makes people happy is not the Snickers bar, or getting the job, or any of those things. Those things are short-lived. What makes people happy is virtue, doing good, contributing to the world, being able to end the day and look at it and say, “That was good, I have done good, and the world is a better place, hopefully.”
Scott Allen 4:17
So what I heard you say, is, in part, becoming a whole person is once we've identified our values, and started living them, started living into those and starting being whole with those values, right?
Michael Mascolo 4:30
Absolutely. I think that where we are right now in this technological, scientific, secular age, and I say this too as an atheist, incidentally, is that we are a people who, I think, are searching for meaning, searching for purpose, searching for connection. We’ve dismantled so many social institutions, we've dismantled religion, we've dismantled value systems, and people feel lost. And I think they feel lost because there aren't communities of shared values. This is where our polarization comes from, in part, our political polarization, our social polarization. We seem not to have things to believe in to guide our lives, and all we're left with is this kind of retreat into the self, retreat into me. This kind of radical meism. I have to come up with my own values, and my own morality, and I look inside myself, but there's nothing there to find. The values are to be found between you and me. They're not me, but they're relational. That's where we find our values; to connect to some larger hole. And that's what makes us humans, I believe.
Scott Allen 5:39
Well, I was having a conversation with a guest a few months back, and we were talking about faith. And it's an interesting conversation because, as you watch a lot of these… I had this conversation yesterday with a friend at lunch who was talking about how his place of worship, the numbers have just decreased. And there's probably, in this 350-person sanctuary, 50 people over two services. It's just; no one's there. And it's fascinating because if you think about it, to your point, it used to be, regardless of your belief set; Sunday mornings, large factions of our country went to a place, had some fellowship, and hopefully, heard a good positive message, had an opportunity to reflect. And, in many places, that has decreased. So, even if you think about the activity of going somewhere, being with others, connecting, having a good message, reflecting, it's interesting because, to your point, that seems to have, well, if you look at the statistics and the data, that's decreased dramatically. So, what fills that void? It's just a fascinating question.
Michael Mascolo 6:55
That is the question: What fills that void? And, for me, and perhaps I'm being cynical, I don't see much that fills the void. What fills the void is stuff, buying things, and status. Politically, what fills the void is being better than you, being more moral than you, and being right. But nothing that's really, really sustaining. And you talk about churches and the like, but why should people go to churches when churches are very doctrinaire so often? There's only one way of being, and this is the way in which you're supposed to be. It seems to me that we need ways of talking, communicating, and dialoguing, that we're listening closely to each other, we’re open to what the other person has to say, and we're open to the possibility of transformation through other people, and they are to us as well. There's a way in which we can bring people together, in that way, we'll have a chance to resurrect or bring back some sort of shared value system. Without it, we're empty.
Scott Allen 8:00
There is a really interesting blogger; his name is Tim Urban. And he talks about the need, he frames it as there's a need for what's called an Idea Lab. And this is, I believe, in many ways, your passion right now, where people can gather, people can bring their different perspectives and create a space where they can dialogue, where they can have a conversation, where they can seek to understand, and, at least, better understand someone's lived experience. And engage in that conversation where ideas can be bantered around. He calls it the Idea Lab. He feels that we're missing that space where we can freely dialogue and learn from one another. And that seems to be similar to kind of what you're suggesting here.
Michael Mascolo 8:52
Yes, I think it is. Let me back up a second, though - ideas are my life - I'm an academic. But, in recent years, I've come to see kind of the failure of logic, and of rationality, and of being… Just trying to solve problems through ideas. Don't get me wrong, ideas are absolutely central. But what's prior to them is emotion, it seems to me. It's relating. In other words, if you and I want to come up with ideas together, the first thing we've got to do, it seems to me, is to see each other's humanity. We have to start with empathy, we have to start with compassion, and we have to start with understanding. So often, we speak just long enough… We listen, I'm sorry, just long enough so that we plan what it is that we want to say next, we don't listen to what the person is saying. So, if I listen carefully to you, and I hear the things that you're saying, and I hear your plight, I can now begin to understand why you think the way you think, and I have compassion for you. Now we're connected, now we can begin to work together because I care about what you think. It’s not a matter of simply debating ideas in some abstract land. Because we respect and care about each other, we can come up with ideas that neither one of us could have come up with on our own.
Scott Allen 10:12
The thing that he talks about is just some of the demographic shifts in the United States, where there are so many fewer purple communities, so to speak. The communities, demographics-wise, are becoming bluer and redder, which then leaves a little bit of a void for people to be around others with different perspectives, and to engage with others with different perspectives. And so not only do we have these online digital echo chambers, but we can have echo chambers in our communities where we simply just choose to be around people of like minds.
Michael Mascolo 10:49
And then, we get ‘work at home.’ I'm just my own echo chamber now. There's a philosopher, a wonderful philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas, who was a Holocaust survivor. And people say, “Wouldn't we all get along better if we just realized that we are all humans and of the same species? If we all agreed that we were humans, we could get together, and we treat each other well.” Levinas says, “No.” He takes the thing and flips it - he says, “Every time you come up with a definition of what a human is, and you say, ‘This is what all humans are,’ somebody's not going to fit that definition, somebody's going to fall off the bandwagon there, and they're going to become ‘other.’ What we need instead is we need to see that each person is an infinity.” Each person, when I talk to this person when I talk to you, Scott, you're an infinity, and you have something that's going to say to me that I've never thought of. I need you, I need you, I need your humanity, which is different than mine, to augment me. I can't do it myself. And so, go to your point, when we're geographically isolated when we are isolated on Facebook, when we are isolated in our homes, we don't have the benefit of the other checking us, we don't have the benefit of the other to insert ideas inside of us that are going to challenge us and move us beyond who we are right now. Isolation is killing us. This polarization is killing us. We need community. How do you get it? That's a hard question, especially in modern-day capitalism with all of our isolation.
Scott Allen 12:36
Talk a little bit about some of your efforts. What have you been experimenting with? How do we promote that dialogue where people can get out of their homes, get into their communities and get into spaces where we can set a baseline of our humanity, build a relationship, and then dialogue?
Michael Mascolo 12:54
Yes. The most recent work I'm doing is the nonprofit; Creating Common Ground. And that has a whole bunch of prongs to it that are related to what you just said. Amongst the things that we're doing, there is there are three basic categories of things that we do with the people. And the first is we try to teach people conflict management skills to improve their relationships. We are told that communication is the most important part of a relationship, but nobody ever tells us how to communicate. We have workshops, etc., that teach people how to do that. And then, we do the same thing in a political context. How do you get people of diverse political orientations to listen to each other and actually solve problems, rather than beat each other up and try to be morally superior to each other, which is what we've got right now? That takes a good deal of moral and intellectual humility. That's the second thing we do. And the third thing is what might be called self-cultivation seminars. What is important in your life? Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I would prefer to soften it and say “The unexamined life is not fully lived.” We got to examine our lives. What are your values? How is it that people can become better versions of themselves by identifying their values, going out into the world, becoming better slowly over time, and particularly, through connection? Then, how do you connect? I'm going to say something that I don't like, which is that the technology we have these days is destroying us. The technology that we have today is wonderful. It's both wonderful and horrible. We are doing it right now as I look at you smiling. We’re connecting, and this is good. We can connect over technology. It is possible, you have to do it right. We can create communities. There's a wonderful project in California called ‘The Circling Institute.’ They do, in my opinion, really wonderful things where they help people to learn how to listen and be present for each other. There are perfect strangers who get together in these circles that they have, and they leave feeling transformed. It's possible, we can do it.
Scott Allen 15:13
Talk a little bit about number two there; what have you seen? Can you tell me a story?
Michael Mascolo 15:17
A year and a half, every Sunday night for two hours every week. And I got a small group of people, six people, six people of different political persuasions. We got together, I taught them the methods of conflict management that we use. One is called collaborative problem-solving. And the other one is a highfalutin term called dialectical problem-solving. First, you try to solve problems together, second, you confront your ideologies directly head-on. So, I taught them these approaches, and then I mediated a series of conversations in which this group of six were asked to propose ways to solve three basic problems essentially. One was -- we started easy -- school uniforms, capital punishment, and then, race relations with police. Over the course of the year and a half, we had these discussions, all filmed and videotaped, and all the rest of it. And the level of consensus, the level of shared understanding on each of these problems, this group of diverse people was able to come up with massive agreement, massive common ground on how to solve these problems. At the end of this mass agreement, there were always some lingering ideological clashes. And then, when we address them, we got partial, reasonable, moderate progress there, too, where one would expect to get none. To get people together, and the second you begin to look at separate political ideology from human need, people begin to understand it, and they begin to work together. Take, for example, race relations with the police, an enormously difficult topic. Once you begin to get rid of the rhetoric of whether or not police are all bad, or somehow, if the city is bankrupt, or whatever it is, and you begin to ask questions about what is it that people of color need from the police? What is it that police need from their citizens? You immediately get to respect, you immediately get to understanding, and then, people begin to propose solutions about how it is that you can get people from the constituent community together with police and partnerships to learn from each other; they're getting to know each other. These are the proposals that people came up with. They can be solved, but not if we see each other as stupid, “My nemesis, my opponent is stupid, crazy, out of touch, or evil.” Second, if you do that, it's over. You got to see beneath the ideology to the human beneath it.
Scott Allen 18:09
Yeah. And something I reflect on, Mike, is it's such big business, whether it's conservative talk radio on one end, or, on the other end, you can go to late-night comedy. At times, the late-night comedians are, “This person is crazy, and wacko, and goofy, and terrible.” And then on the conservative talk radio, it's, “This person's crazy, wacko, and terrible.” And billions of dollars are being invested and reinforcing those narratives. I keep going back to this book because he has an interesting perspective, Tim Urban does, he calls it, ‘The Real Politicians of Washington, DC.’ It's like we have this reality TV show and our cast of characters. And that's what's presented to the American public. And he starts naming senators who are trying to do good work that you've never heard of. So, how do we disrupt that system that is a multibillion-dollar industry, keeping us agitated, scared, worried, and a little bit on edge is big business. And it's almost like the Dorito for the mind. They've figured out the recipe that will make me click, you know.
Michael Mascolo 19:35
We've gotten way too big, as far as I'm concerned. Smaller -- I think I could be wrong -- I think smaller is better, and find ways to work locally in our communities. We shouldn't have such enormous businesses. There used to be monopoly antitrust laws that have begun to be eroded over and over again, and companies get bigger and bigger and bigger, and they want one thing, and that is shareholder profit. This is going to sound… I don't care what it sounds like. This may sound idealistic; I don't care. I think that our problems are often philosophical in nature, they have to do with our beliefs about what it means to be a person or that we think that what it means to be a person is a self-interested ‘me’ focused individual, whether that person is a CEO, the head of a family, or what have you, we're in trouble. I think that what we need is a new conception, not an individualistic one, but a relational conception of what a person is and what a corporation is so that a corporation ought not to be simply interested in profit; a corporation should have at least three motives. A corporation should have… Yes, they need to be interested in profit, they need to be interested in prudence, they also need to be interested in virtue, and they also need to be interested in care. Those three things. Profit is okay, but what type of company am I? What do I stand for? What do I care about? What am I doing that's good for my workers, for my customers, for my community? And care? How do I act in ways that care? There are companies that do this. Look at Market Basket in Massachusetts, a remarkable store that runs multiple stores, a chain of stores as a family. At Market Basket, they have people working during the day, not at night, so they can answer people's questions. Everybody who works there is trained in every other aspect of the business so that they can rise. If there's a problem, people try to solve it internally. That's a way of defining who I am as a corporation that is moral and good, not simply profitable. Get a politician of note to begin to actually have the courage to say, “It is important that we work toward being virtuous and good, not simply selfish. We need a relational understanding of what it means to be a person.” Little by little, by little, by little, people will begin to reflect and, hopefully, change what their motives and values are for living.
Scott Allen 22:18
Back to your comment earlier about emotions, start to feel what that difference is like, right?
Michael Mascolo 22:25
That's a wonderful point. Yeah.
Scott Allen 22:27
I imagine those six individuals who walked out of that room after...was it 18 months, you said? I imagine they walked out different people partly because of how they felt to get through some of those difficult conversations.
Michael Mascolo 22:41
I want to think so. Very early on, I remember one individual who was talking. It was very early on, and he was just so excited about what was happening amongst us. And he was excited about that people from different persuasions were talking and not killing each other. That was it. They were talking civilly. For me, I want people to solve problems; I want people to go beyond that. I think we did that. But people like nothing better than to contribute to each other's well-being. It feels good when we affect other people's lives, and we are more enhanced when we contribute to the well-being of others. That's a feeling. That's a deep feeling. You have that feeling; you act on it. And I am not at all convinced that companies can't cultivate that sort of a mindset, that sort of a belief system. We got a better society because we got better people because we have better values.
Scott Allen 23:42
And I think there are some deep human needs to your point earlier of connection with others, of feeling a sense of purpose, “Why am I here? What am I trying to accomplish? What problem am I working on that I'm passionate about that really keeps me engaged and really, really fueled?” And I think of digitization, online connectivity. I think of some of the corporate establishments; many elements of the context are not going anywhere. But the opportunity of how do we facilitate that shift? What experiments will help scale some of that? And I know that you had said that it starts local, and we start with those local conversations, and I'm just really, really interested in that question. Do you have any other ideas on how we scale that, how we train folks to identify what it is they value, to help give them the skills to engage in the difficult conversations, create spaces for those conversations to occur, get some self-efficacy and some confidence around the fact that we can do this work, and I felt it, and I know that this can happen? And then, again, to your point, we started working on some of the real work, right?
Michael Mascolo 25:03
So what if we had some national people, people who have means, who have resources? You said that I had said earlier that start local; you're right. It needs not just to be local; it needs to be both local, it needs to be global as well. We can take examples of conversations and ways of communicating that occur locally, and we have the technology and the means to broadcast them globally. Here's an example of how this is done.
Scott Allen 25:34
And you know, what's beautiful about that idea is it would align with the reality TV culture. We have the news outlets playing ‘the real politicians of Washington DC,’ that's the reality television narrative they're communicating, regardless of whatever side you're on. At times, you've got your heroes, and you have your villains. But what if we created opportunities for people to peek into that? Because that's real. That is real. And that's very… Again, if I think of what if a documentary or a series on any one of the streaming services was produced based on the conversations you facilitated? A) It's very interesting television, and B) It is educational.
Michael Mascolo 26:23
I think that people resonate and gravitate to things that are better and more sophisticated than what they already know if you build a better mousetrap. What we have right now is people engage in a lot of banal, lowest common denominator types of activities. Films that are based on vengeance. We get into Facebook, and we attack each other. We watch reality TV to see people. Well, you know what? If you come up with a better show, if you come up with something that people are longing for, you show them that they can be connected and have them participate in that; they'll watch that they'll engage in that. We got to build it, though. I'm convinced that we can use technology for good.
Scott Allen 27:14
I think of that television show Sunday morning. They play the trumpets at the beginning, and it's on CBS. And it's like all just a series of good positive stories or check-ins with people you're familiar with. But it's life-affirming, it's life-giving. I don't walk away from it feeling drained and tired like I do from other things. (Laughs)
Michael Mascolo 27:42
I'm reminded of many years ago when I was looking for cooperative ways of teaching people cooperative rather than competitive ways of being together. There were people who talked about games. So, we have competitive games all over; everything's competitive, competitive, competitive. And there are good things about competition; we don't actually bring them out, but there are good things about competition. And then, people said, “Hey, you can come up with a cooperative game that is just as exciting as a competitive game.” I said, “No, you can’t.” Well, you can, simple stuff, like okay, we all have to create this farm together, we have to figure out how to plant these seeds and put them in the ground before the sun goes down. So, if you will, we are all working together you will, competing against the sun. It’s a lame example; I grant you; it could be done.
Scott Allen 28:34
Yes. Well, I think it can be done in business as well. You have a B corporation that is trying to not only, to your point, make money but leave the world a better place, you're going for that both ends in the mission of the organization, and individuals within the organization are cooperating to create something that's going to make a difference and going to leave the world a better place. And so, I, for sure, think it's a wonderful concept. Okay, if we go back to kind of one of the original places we started, which is a question that you are interested in, which is really, how do individuals become whole persons? What I'm gathering out of our conversation so far, and you can let me know, Mike, if I've caught it or if I'm missing some big piece, but you have an individual who is clear and present with what their ethics are and what it is that they value. You have an individual who is in the community, and that means that they are in the community engaging with others, and oftentimes, engaging with others, not like themselves, and engaging in healthy ways with others, maybe not like themselves. And then, you have an individual who has a purpose, or a problem, if we want to frame it that way. But there's something that gets them up in the morning that they're passionate about, and it’s a fuel to guide their efforts. Am I missing anything?
Michael Mascolo 30:05
Yeah, you got it, man; I think it's great. If I had to add anything to that -- thank you, it feels wonderful to be heard -- I've come to believe almost this might be a bit hyperbolic, but I've come to believe that there's only one question: What is good? What is the good? What is good for me? What is good for the world? What is virtuous? What will lead to well-being? And we don't think that way. We assume that everybody has their own interests, we assume that everybody is self-interested, has their own goals, and we think that what is good is that which brings pleasure. And to be sure, we want pleasure; we want fun. But there are higher pleasures, there are greater pleasures, there are deeper pleasures, and those are pleasures that give our life meaning. They are the pleasures that come from purpose and a higher-order being. What's going on right now between us? You are engaged in this podcast; I'm sure that there is something that you're going to get from this in yourself and your goals, your personal goals. When we look at it, we see a person who is engaged in the act of goodness, of trying to interview people, of trying to make the world a better place, and that's what's fueling you, I would think, and that's what gives this meaning for you and sustains you over three years plus, or whatever it is. And why can't that be our model right from the start with our children, rather than destroying them with the way in which we engage in education? And what if we taught our children in ways that helped them to identify the good in their world and to create the potential within themselves to want to contribute to the world in that way? We do that; you got a different world. Maybe idealistic, but guess what? I don't care.
Scott Allen 32:07
Well, Mike, what's caught your attention recently that you would want listeners to be aware of, something that you've enjoyed?
Michael Mascolo 32:17
Well, strangely enough, as someone who doesn't read a lot of fiction, I just got done reading, listening to, and reading ‘Brothers Karamazov.’ Dostoyevsky’s wonderful, crazy, long, wonderful, epic. So there's that, you can't go wrong with the classics. And right now, I'm reading ‘All Things Shining', which is a discussion of meaning that has been created in different ways at different epics in human existence, and drawing on the classics, and that sort of thing, with an emphasis on how can we get a spiritual and moral sense back into our culture in these secular times. And again, I say that as a non-believer. I'm a non-believer who believes we need more spirituality.
Scott Allen 33:08
Sir, I really, really enjoyed the conversation. I'd love to have you back and continue the dialogue because I think some of these big questions are at the core of some of the struggles that we have and not only as individuals but as families. I really appreciate your time, and I appreciate your work. Thank you, sir.
Michael Mascolo 33:29
My pleasure.