Transcript: Rachel Cohen

An interview with the Washington-based Vox reporter

There has been a story on the progressive left for some time now that individual actions are largely futile. That for society to change, we must instead focus on systems. My guest on the program this week belongs to a generation that was raised on this message. But now she’s written a powerful piece about the costs that come with such a worldview — and how volunteering in her community helped her to rethink it.

Rachel Cohen is a reporter for Vox.com, covering American social policy. Her essay is “Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering.”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the interview for free here.

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TH: It's nice to have you on. You recently penned a piece for Vox that meant a lot to me. That essay is titled “Why I Changed My Mind About Volunteering.” It's about your personal evolution, in terms of thinking about how we effect change in society, and it did make a splash. It was even cited in The New York Times by David French. I want to start today with the experience that triggered your thinking on all this. You cover America's homelessness crisis, among other topics. A reader reached out to you to say that they often feel helpless and asked what they could do to offer practical assistance to people living on the streets. Your initial impulse was to think structurally: Who to vote for, what changes in society in terms of building codes to lobby for — these kinds of solutions. But some people who work in the sector told you that passing out socks might be a better place for people to start. This is a paradigm shift and got you thinking about some important broader cultural trends. You write, “The reporting left me uneasy. Why did I think only about structural change and disregard more immediate help? And why don't I do more of those day-to-day charitable things, or know many people who do either?” Describe for us some of the cultural shifts that have displaced that way of thinking about social change.

RC: Yeah, it was a pretty jarring thing to look around. I think most people in my social circle — professional, and acquaintances, and family — we all probably agree on most things, about what we think should happen in politics or policy. Over drinks, we would all agree. But then at the end of the day, no one is actually doing much, paying much of a price, giving much of their time. There's a way that you can feel, “Well, as long as my opinions are on the right track, then that's the most [important thing]. Anything else is not effective, or not worth the time.” I think what happened was I realized how little it takes to get to the point where you can rationalize away doing anything. It's not even that hard. 

You can just be like, “This wouldn't even help that person.” Or, “This could even make that person's life worse, so I shouldn't do it.” Getting to a place where you can justify not being generous or being kind. When I realized that it can be easier than I thought I was like, “Wow, you actually need to be much more proactive about not getting to those places given how easy it is. How easy we make it for people. Because there are all these talking points that we all learn and we all share.” So that was a part of it.

But to your question, I think I became very hung up on this idea of: Why did I think it wasn't effective? Why did that word feel so normal to use and to think about? What does it mean to be evaluating all of these things through this lens of effectiveness? Where did that come from?

That sent me on this big journey. I didn't even put in everything in the piece that is relevant. There's also this whole thing that really blew up in the 2010s around evidence-based policy. Which, of course, has good intentions and good motives, but can create the space to reject lots of things that are very good under the banner of, “We don't have the good evidence to justify that being worth your time.” There's all these ways that things that have good intentions have had, I think, more negative consequences than many people realized at the time. And that was true for a lot of the things I talked about in my piece.

TH: It's interesting. I come from the progressive left and I was an environmentalist as a teenager. I remember the point at which this all changed. I'm older than you. One day we were all taking the bus, bringing our own shopping bags, trying to purchase sustainable goods, and the next day people were saying, “We can't buy our way out of an ecological disaster.” Of course that's a valid point. And there was — as you say in the piece — a relief to this focus on collective action. But it also, in the end, it led to a kind of futility politics: You can't make massive changes, so you don't even try, and you consider it a waste of time to try. It's ultimately safe, as you also point out in the piece, because we don't make personal sacrifices. How did you think through these bigger trends?

RC: I was a student at the time when a lot of these ideas were coming in full force. I remember reading essays and magazine articles that were in response to what many of the activists and intellectuals saw as the failure of what happened in the 2000s. The 2010s was supposed to be this more enlightened decade, where the answers are clear, the opponents are clear, the bad guys are clear, what we need to do is clear. I think what was really exciting, especially for me as a college student. It felt like the playbook to making lasting, effective, real change was so clear. It was so spelled out. 

It was an exciting time. I was like, “Of course I'd want to protest with my friends and be in this mass movement.” All these other things that I had previously done [like volunteering], and maybe didn't think critically about, suddenly were laced with a lot more [doubt]. They were not just ineffective, but actually could be detrimental to real change. Over time, this really crystallized for me.

Take reading tutors — it's a very important thing. We know, actually in the world of evidence-based policy, that reading tutors are really important for helping people improve their reading skills and literacy. But a lot of the groups that support organizations like Reading Partners, or other tutoring organizations, are backed by foundations with wealthy donors that I was reading about in my twenties. I thought, “Those donors, they don't want real change. They just want to fiddle at the margins. Sure, they'll support tutoring, but they're not going to actually redistribute their wealth. These incremental, moderate reforms are actually holding kids back.” There's all these arguments piled on top of one another. Individually, they all made some sense, but then you take a step back. I also was thinking about the Effective Altruism movement. What is the best use of my time? What can make the biggest difference?

But then you get to the point where you're like, “Wow, I know a lot of people, including myself, that have some time to spare — and no one is tutoring young kids. Nobody is giving their Saturdays to do this. Why is that? How did we get here?” Add to that fact, people say they are lonely or disconnected. And you just start to think, “Okay, maybe things went too far. Maybe there are grains of truth here. But also, we didn't really think about the cost of following this all the way through.” Do we really want to live in a world like that?

I finished the piece — I hope it is clear that I'm still thinking through all these things — but I was like, “I don't think this is the direction I want to go in anymore. I feel like I underrated certain consequences by adopting this worldview that felt really good.” I want to stress that you felt really certain that you were following a very just and effective playbook of how to live your life. Now I don't know if that's true.

TH: I applaud you for changing your mind, and for being open to changing your mind. It's a hard thing to do — for all of us, all the time. But to do it in public is something else. And I think part of that is why you got such an incredible response to your piece. It is a hard thing to do. It's wonderful to watch that happen in another writer.

Speaking of grains of truth in arguments against individual action, there is an argument on the left — which is, again, valid — about the “nonprofit industrial complex,” as some people call it. How these organizations are incentivized not to solve problems, but to perpetuate them to justify their own existence. Again, it leads to a resignation to the status quo.

But there are good people doing good work in a lot of these contexts. I did a radio series from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver a while back, where addiction and homelessness is absolutely heartbreaking. The ones out there on the streets were the faith-based NGOs. It was not the leftists that I know who were at the street-level trying to do something. In your view, how do we begin — and I mean we as in the collective we of society — how do we begin to break out of this form of cynicism, which is at heart a form of paralysis?