NOTICING a Third Way for America (Part 1)

Jan 28

Awe & Murmuration

Why am I here? Why am I pitching my two cents into this political cross talk, argument, judgement, protest, opinion, mockery, lies, and truth? I too howl. So I mean no disrespect, but it’s dull and predictable. Democrats’ activism failed at the ballot box.

But more than that, democracy (small ‘d’) lost far too much. Not just because 50.1 percent voted MAGA and 29 percent refused to vote, the ongoing repetitive polarities continue to continue. Neither side is changing their game. Einstein said it, and I paraphrase: doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of different results is nuts. A new song is needed to do something that delivers desirable results.

I am here to say, let’s look at a Third Way. To be clear. I am partisan solely to the Declaration of Independence, which established the unalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Fundamental are the ideals of Equality, Justice, Consent of the Governed. We have the Right to Alter or Abolish government. I am notproposing a third political party.

A Third Way opens a way to keep the promise of the Declaration of Independence. A promise that is our gift and our task to make happen. A Third Way is a means to take effective political actions to raise all boats, and to ensure they stay afloat. This Third Way resounds, reverberates, pulsates like a heartbeat from the center of Earth. The ancient African philosophy of Ubuntu sings out our deep common bonds: I am because you are.

I am here because you are here. You are the people who care, who have expertise, savvy, wit, presence of mind. You are Substack writers and readers who can make a difference. The kind of difference I want to make is to open minds to the emerging, persuasive science of awe. The benefits of awe are vital to the politics necessary for democracy to be what we want it to be.

I’m going to tell you about two parts that compose, like a song, the Third Way. You could call the Third Way a two-part invention of Awe and Murmuration.

Until recently, there was no science of awe. This mysterious force in our lives has been largely dismissed as sentimental or just that occasional sensation of Whoa!

“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world,” says Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and the faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Awe is now recognized as the eighth emotion. As scientists try to figure out this incredible, singular emotion and where it fits in the emotion space of human beings, experiments in 26 cultures around the world show that awe can repair body and mind. It can deepen social relationships. It can metamorphose our sense of loneliness into the rhythms of being part of a community.

But, one might ask, what’s awe got to do with this big mess we’re in? Because awe is a survival mechanism, and survival of each and every US citizen and democracy itself is on the line. The emotion of awe was preserved in our evolution for a reason. “If our ancestors didn’t get into a social collective,” says Keltner, “they were done. That’s how we survived.” Awe generates the desire to be, prosocial. We are born to help or benefit another person or group. “Standing on the bare ground,” wrote Emerson, “all mean egotism vanishes.” But no one has to take the scientific findings or Emerson’s word as gospel; it’s in your body and you know it when you feel it. You are aware of and humbled by the vast complex world which we share, not as political partisans but as a species.

You might recognize the experience of awe when you stand on a city street in Rome on which humans have walked for over two thousand years or a shoreline in the Pacific Northwest where the sky and ocean become one horizon in shades of blue that can’t be named.

Or, you might, as I did, look at a film that captures the spectacular flight of thousands of starlings making astonishing, rapid, synchronized arabesques against the light of a winter sunset. The way starlings murmurate confounds. Our minds can’t make sense of how they do it. A murmuration doesn’t fit into anything we know. Suddenly we are aware of so much that we don’t know but we could discover. All actualities follow possibilities.

There is something else about awe important to know. About one-quarter of the awe experience is dread and terror. It is “the dark side of the sublime.” Like all its other aspects, it too is huge, vast, and profoundly unfathomable. Think about being in the center of Hurricane Helene. Cars are floating in the streets. Witness the first days following the instant of the 2025 Inauguration. The Executive has unitarily ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to publish the weekly morbidity and mortality reports. What? The reports are essential to scientific publication of timely, reliable, authoritative, accurate, objective, and useful public health information and recommendations. The Executive’s directive is a threat to our lives. We repeat again and again, This is horrible. This doesn’t make sense!

But even the negative aspect of awe is vital to democracy. Why? Because it is materially real. Put yourself in the middle of Hurricane Helene again. Boats are flipped up into trees. Because you, individual you, or I, can’t change the course of a hurricane. For all individual citizens to be safe, we need to change direction together. This is a place where the prosocial aspects of awe are salutary. Standing on the bare ground…all mean egotism vanishes. Awe is foundational to the Third Way. Awe will help us break this spell of doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of different results. When in trouble, change direction. Together.

Let’s catch our breath. Let’s stand still for a moment. Let’s look at starling murmurations. It turns out that how starlings do starlings is really interesting. Perhaps the starlings’ how can show us how we can make the Third Way happen. The purpose? So that our democracy protects everyone. Including all that breathes on planet Earth.

Murmurations are leaderless. Leaderless! Birds in the center keep track by watching the edge. How do they do it? Because of the “Rule of Seven.” Pick any one bird out of thousands and that bird’s movement is influenced only by the seven nearest neighbors. In perfect synchrony. And nothing else. The seven adjacent. Amazing, no?

The individual’s need for safety may be one evolutionary reason for a starling murmuration. Should a predator lunge through the murmuration, nearly all survive. Their survival is the result of the quick sensing of the Adjacent Seven. Even if one bird does not feel the Predator’s threat, the neighbors do. When they swerve, they all swerve. As to us individuals on the ground, we cannot swerve from the Predator. Human survival is communal. When in trouble, change direction.

The combination of a flocks’ need for safety and the human need for a stable, just society suggests an idea. What if each of us, individuals who are the body politic, took advantage of what each of us embodies: the need for safety and harmony?

The pattern to guide us is the Declaration of Independence. It is the first formal statement by a nation's people asserting their right to choose their own government. Our Founding document declares its own Adjacent Seven. The unalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and the implicit right of Equality, Justice, the Consent of the Governed, and the Right to Alter or Abolish government. It is our song to sing.

The real world threat of the American oligarchy occupying the White House is our call and our cue to turn to the Declaration of Independence to be guided, once again, by those remarkable adjacent seven values. Values which have inspired awe around the world for centuries.

Yes, with every headline we are feeling dark awe. Fury resounds. But instead of being frozen by it, let’s put our rage and fear to work. The research shows that we can build the recognition of positive awe into our every day lives. To have infinite humility, gratitude for, and curiosity about the complex mysteries of the human condition feels happy. Awe sharpens critical thinking. The purpose of the Third Way is to release ourselves from the obliterating, isolating effects of the polarities by making active use of the emotion awe.

NOTICING a Third Way for America (Part 1)

Awe & Murmuration

NOTICING Adjacent Sevens (Part 2)

NOTICING the Internet Greek Chorus