Since October of 2014, I have been privileged, as adviser to the Bowdoin Men’s Group, to facilitate weekly discussions among male students about what it means to be a man. The group has no political agenda; the only agenda is that set by the people present, who meet “in a spirit of willing vulnerability” to share insights and feelings that men share all too rarely with one another. The result is that, more than occasionally, we stumble onto something profound. This week was no exception.
The conversation was a difficult one to frame. We wanted to talk about what everyone else in the country is talking about—sexual assault—without the overlay of politics that seemed nearly unavoidable. But to get political would be to make the discussion about other people, and the distinctiveness of Men’s Group discussions is that they’re about the people in the room. So the question we explored is, “If for a third of the country, confessions of sexual assault don’t disqualify someone for the presidency, how does that fact affect us? What does it tell us about our own sense of ourselves as men?”
It would have been easy, as some of the participants observed, for those around the table simply to pat themselves on the back for being the good guys. But that’s not where we went. What we began to talk about was objectification, and that men’s objectifications of women, while wrong and often tragic, are not the only kinds of objectifications in which people indulge. This election and events leading up to it have exposed a number of chasms in American life in which one side objectifies the other, including race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and, of course, party. But the signal division right now is between elites and those who are described as “left behind.”
Bowdoin College and places like it consider it a principal part of their missions to bridge those chasms. Recruiting an intentionally diverse student body, the College seeks to encourage people whom our society has separated since birth to discover one another and even to discover themselves in one another. While, to be sure, colleges and universities across America have fallen short of this lofty goal, study after study nevertheless confirms that most students leave college far more accepting of people they had seen as alien when they arrived. Yes, there are disturbing incidents on campus, and colleges could certainly make more effective use of their diversity. But in a nation as segregated as ours in every sector except college campuses, it’s hard not to applaud this noble experiment.
All of that said, there’s one divide that college may not only be unable to bridge but may actually deepen: the divide between the highly educated and the relatively uneducated—the very divide driving this election. As Men’s Group thought about the sin of objectification, all of us had to confess to having painted with a broad brush many of those who, for whatever reasons, have been left behind educationally. Whether it’s Appalachia or the Rust Belt or rural America or Maine’s Second District (which has been described as “the Mississippi of New England,” a characterization whose intent is no kinder to Mississippi than to the Second District), many of us imagine monolithic populations that eschew objective facts, mistrust science, hold government in contempt and are especially susceptible to conspiracy theories. We look down our noses at their narrowness and quietly—or perhaps noisily—convict them of willful stupidity.
Some of you know intimately what I’m talking about, because you grew up in such places among such people. They are your parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles. And you know perfectly well they’re not willfully stupid. But they have been afflicted by inferior education, stifled opportunity and economic stress. And then there’s the fear of losing you to a world about which they know little, and your feelings of guilt about their fear—all of which makes the prejudice you encounter on campus against people like your family all the more painful.
So what does all of this have to do with Men’s Group and masculinity? The quality that many men have the greatest difficulty summoning—in large part because in our culture we are raised to think of it as a largely feminine trait—is empathy. Men, of course, aren’t the only people who objectify those they think of as other; we all do. But because our society places men’s capacities for empathy at risk, such compassion requires for a lot of them a conscious effort.
If ever our culture needed empathy on all sides—from men, women, the educated, the uneducated—it’s now. But while empathy across other social boundaries is made easier on campus by the simple proximity and shared experience of those on opposite sides, no such proximity or shared experience presently exists for those who are highly educated and those who aren’t. This is one problem schools probably can’t solve.
Developing such shared experience, increasing genuine engagement and breaking down the walls of mistrust may well be the most important work of our society’s emerging leaders—that’s you. You are learning to bridge all the other divides; this may be the toughest one of all. It may require you to develop new institutions and more inclusive social networks. It will certainly demand all of your creative intelligence and magnanimity of spirit. And it will challenge every ounce of your empathy. But America’s future may well rest on the willingness of your generation to take on this project.
As urgent as is the commitment of all of us to equal opportunity, it isn’t enough, because in a country as broadly and deeply unequal as ours, true equality of opportunity is likely to take generations to achieve. We can’t wait that long to learn to trust and value one another. Reconciliation begins with the recognition that those we have tended in the past to objectify are, like us, human beings and that, ultimately, our affirmation of their humanity is essential to our own.
No matter what happens on November 8, that’s the work to which we’re called on November 9.
Frank Strasburger is a parent of members of the classes of 2007 and 2008.