Community education. Democratic education. Popular education.
LIVE WITH OUR HEADS IN THE LION’S MOUTH:
Weaving stories of resistance and community.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1. INTRODUCTION: We understand the world through our stories.
The majoritarian project.
“A Swinish Multitude.”
Education for action.
• Democracy takes talk.
• The truth is not enough.
• Self-interest is not self-evident.
• We won’t find enough usual suspects.
• How we learn shapes what we learn.
• Democratic education efforts don’t always reach far enough.
# It’s easier to expend most of our educational effort with people like us.
# Democratic education programs tend to operate in a hothouse environment.
# Education through action is not always available.
# We don’t always get to new understandings.
# Much of what passes for political education is little more than top-down training.
# Sometimes we trade opinions without addressing the underlying experiences, commitments, and frames of reference.
The story telling species.
• Political stories.
• Stories matter.
# Making excuses.
# Stories guide us by explaining the world.
# Stories to solve problems and build democracy.
# Ideas and institutions.
A provocation.
A note on terminology.
Please comment.
My own story is in process.
Next steps.
Update ‘09.
2. LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE, LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER
2A. MAN IN THE MOON: processing the world.
Making sense of the what we see and hear.
• We sort new information into categories and patterns.
• We use schemas to focus on what’s important and filter out what’s not.
• Schemas help us fill gaps in the information we get from the world.
“Can you read this?”
• We match patterns to solve problems.
• We’re not aware of all the work our brains are doing.
There are big advantages to thinking the way we do.
• Reducing the world to stories and schemas helps us make decisions efficiently.
• Don’t spit into the wind: Our worldly knowledge keeps us on track.
• Our skill at seeing and matching even incomplete patterns lets us develop new combinations.
Gremlins in the data stream.
• WMD, anyone? It’s easier to see what we expect than what we don’t.
• Like selective perception, social roles simplify our lives by limiting information and options.
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?-- drawing conclusions from poor or incomplete information.
• It’s hard to see or anticipate massive “threshold effects”.
We’ve got to trust our personal experience while stretching beyond it.
• Sometimes we exaggerate the likelihood of what comes easiest to mind.
"Risk Assessment"
• We tend to remember the instances which suppport a claim and overlook contrary or missing data.
• Sometimes we see meaningful patterns where there is only coincidence.
• It’s hard to imagine very large-scale risks.
• Sometimes we apply the wrong patterns or analogies to a problem.
• We need imagination; but don’t be handing over the keys to con men.
• The made environment short-circuits the worldly reality check.
“Some information environments.”
# In a world without automated media, frequency and intensity is a fair approximation to a signal’s importance.
# In a world without automated media, repetition usually signifies multiple independent sources, implying a greater chance of accuracy.
# As institutions standardize communications, we lose the richness of meaning.
# By overwhelming us with information, the media machines distract us from key issues.
# Repetition can make lies more acceptable as well as more believable.
2B. PRECIOUS MEM’RIES.
It's hard to separate the good and bad information in memories.
• Sometimes our memories mix together several distinct events.
• Sometimes we construct or reconstruct memories in the light of later events and perspectives.
• We can be led to false memories.
• Institutions adopt and promote the memories that serve their own interests.
• Forgetting as policy.
2C. THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT: Reconciling behavior and belief.
Cherished lies.
“Hope is not a delusion.”
Investing in our stories.
• Our model makes us feel successful.
• We adopt the bosses’ Story.
• We like to keep our beliefs consistent with our experience and actions.
# Inconsistency is stressful, and we work hard to reduce it.
# Small steps can lead to lifetime commitments.
# We try to bring our beliefs in line with our actions, when we take responsibility for those actions.
# Bloody hands: we can't admit we were wrong.
# Stand and be counted: defending our public positions.
# Explanations become commitments.
# Inventing the self.
• The Self is a kind of explanation.
• The Ambassador.
# The Stockholm Syndrome: victims come to identify with their abusers.
• Sweeping back the sea: the endless task of justifying injustice.
• The Green Zone: thinking inside the boxes.
That’s not my story, but I won’t tell you what is: silent resistance.
Action and belief in context of the group.
LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE, LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER:
Apply understanding to action.
2D. CONDITIONS AND CONSTRAINTS: The challenge of sharing political stories.
• Some goals of political education.
• Where we share and develop political stories: common venues and conditions.
# Campaigns.
# In the course of mobilizing constituencies.
# The corporate mass media.
# The ‘net will set us free.
# Structured discussions.
# Casual conversation.
• Stress is a necessary but not sufficient condition of change.
Helpful dynamics.
• It’s not easy to make us obey gangsters.
• We have more than one idea.
• I count at least 3 chances to change our minds.
• Dissenters can move groups, sometimes.
• We learn and change because we need to, not to please each other.
2E. POLITICAL TALK ON THE GO: Turning our stories into conversations.
Educational safety and health.
• Democratic learning requires both risk-taking and respect.
• Safer space in organizations.
# Cultivate critical solidarity.
# Make room for new ideas.
• Explain what we mean.
Get it on the table.
• Some rules of engagement.
# Discussion takes time, but we’ve got to start the process somewhere.
# Political workers have to be as careful as anyone else of stereotyping folks.
# The environment has to be doubly safe.
# We can distinguish problem-solving talk from power plays.
• The chance to consider many sides of an issue strengthens our conclusions and political commitments.
# Acknowledge the dominant ideas.
"Omelet."
# Preempt the lies.
Raise questions.
• Question the sources, look behind the slogans.
• Highlight the contradictions, ask for explanations.
Tap into our repertoires and build on our strengths.
”Learning from experience takes practice.”
Generate alternatives.
Risk, cultivate, and systematize dissent.
Open up our stories.
• Pay attention to how we develop stories.
• Reconsider the frames of reference.
• Don’t act on crummy information.
# Don’t rely on self-serving information.
# Get a second opinion.
# Apply the right information to the question at hand.
# Listen for new insights.
# Don’t wait for perfect information, but don’t stop looking, either.
• Learn how to change our minds.
• Remember with purpose.
Weave our stories from the best materials.
Tell the truth.
• Talk beyond the slogans.
• Avoid double standards.
# Back up our claims.
# Resist romanticizing.
# Celebrate survival. Then organize for justice.
# Walk the walk.
# Explain how we apply our standards in different situations.
Think big.
• Data insufficient.
• Pandering is for pimps.
• Tiptoeing around the hard parts means stumbling in the dark.
• Mental maps are not fixed; we can redraw them.
• Put some meat on them bones.
• We can handle complex ideas.
• Connect the dots.
• Cut some doors in the walls; let the light in.
• Painting the big picture together.
Expand the spaces and opportunities for talk.
3. INTEREST, EXPECTATION, RISK & ACTION
3A. I KNEW THE ANSWER, BUT THEN I LOST IT: The puzzle of self-interest.
3B. THE PLANET OF RIGHT AND WRONG
An excursion into altruism; some stories of self-interest and self-sacrifice.
• Investing in our communities.
• Competition and cooperation in game theory.
• Giving more than they get.
• Suffering and sacrifice.
• Do it for the children.
• Sacrificing the labor force.
• Honor and dignity.
• The road to hell . . .
• Frankly, m' dear, I just don't give a damn.
3C. CALCULATING SELF-INTEREST (OR NOT)
Prioritizing needs and goals.
• Balancing short- and long-term interests.
• Picking the best path to reach our goals.
• Shuffling goals.
• Sustaining stories.
• We simplify our choices to reflect long-term strategies more than short-term gain.
Our expectations shape our politics.
• Some common expectations.
• Lots of ways to calculate risk and reward.
"Class is a set of expectations and explanations. "
• Let justice roll down like dice: expectations of fairness.
• Pfooey on Ptolemy: my kitchen is not the world.
• Miracles await: unrealistic expectations.
# Sometimes we expect too much from ourselves and each other.
# Sometimes we expect too little.
# Sometimes we can imagine a better world but not how to get there.
Mutual or collective self-interest is even harder to figure.
• Elite-serving systems of cooperation.
# Clientelism.
# The Good King.
# The Lord is King.
• What we expect of ourselves and each other; the roots of trust and dis-.
# We can misread our neighbors’ self-interest.
# It’s easy to mislead and misunderstand each other.
# We start with different models of human nature.
# Some of us walk around in disguise, or hide in dark corners.
# In a top-down but mobile society, we have little leverage with our neighbors.
# Some people making a living by sowing distrust.
# Misplaced trust can lead to distrusting everyone.
# Defining our community is necessary, risky, and insufficient.
# Sometimes, though, our stories of distrust are nothing more than rationalizations after the fact.
• Recognizing stakeholders: interest and expertise confer standing.
# Stakeholders in democratic movements and organizations.
# Self-interest, knowledge and democratic decisions.
Our stories of self-interest help us understand each other and find common ground.
INTEREST, EXPECTATION, RISK & ACTION : Apply understanding to action.
3D. GET REAL: Clarify our expectations.
• Reconsider our expectations.
• I have been to the mountaintop: envisioning democracy.
# We make the path by walking and imagining.
# Keep our eyes on the prize, hold on.
3E. GET SERIOUS: Clarify our self-interest, goals, and strategies.
• Talk about our own self-interest and the risks of change.
• Distinguish survival choices from long-term commitments.
• Practice taking responsibility.
# Bring hidden decisions to light.
# Tell the truth about what we want.
• Track our progress.
3F. GET TOGETHER: Compare expectations, coordinate strategies.
• Identify expectations we share, and draw some conclusions.
• Focus on the big goals, over the long term.
• Recast the language of altruism to emphasize acting together responsibly.
• Tackle the trust issues.
# First of all, let’s don’t sell ourselves short.
# Don’t underestimate the neighbors.
# Make the rules we need; change them when we need to.
# Speak for ourselves.
# Don’t blame others when it’s really our own fears we are acting on.
# Examine the roots of our distrust.
# Don’t assume gangsters will act as we would.
# Give each other one more chance.
# Fragments of conversations about dis/trust.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
1. INTRODUCTION: We understand the world through our stories.
Community education. Democratic education. Popular education.
LIVE WITH OUR HEADS IN THE LION’S MOUTH:
Weaving stories of resistance and community.
1. INTRODUCTION: We understand the world through our stories.
The majoritarian project.
“A Swinish Multitude.”
Education for action.
• Democracy takes talk.
• The truth is not enough.
• Self-interest is not self-evident.
• We won’t find enough usual suspects.
• How we learn shapes what we learn.
• Democratic education efforts don’t always reach far enough.
# It’s easier to expend most of our educational effort with people like us.
# Democratic education programs tend to operate in a hothouse environment.
# Education through action is not always available.
# We don’t always get to new understandings.
# Much of what passes for political education is little more than top-down training.
# Sometimes we trade opinions without addressing the underlying experiences, commitments, and frames of reference.
The story telling species.
• Political stories.
• Stories matter.
# Making excuses.
# Stories guide us by explaining the world.
# Stories to solve problems and build democracy.
# Ideas and institutions.
A provocation.
A note on terminology.
Please comment.
My own story is in process.
Next steps.
Update ‘09.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I think we need a new story, don't we? The stories that are told and retold are not getting us where we need to be going.”
-- N.G., in a discussion about the Middle East, 7-30-06
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WE UNDERSTAND THE WORLD THROUGH OUR STORIES
The majoritarian project.
In the 30 yrs since the Reagan backlash scoured our land from end to end, like ten thousand of those colossal mining machines that strip mountains bare, I have often wondered how so many of my fellow citizens can support such destructive people and policies. That’s the origin of this set of essays.
First I want to understand why so many of us prefer rule by hired killers instead of democracy, or can not tell one from the other. Second, I want to figure out how to build very strong and wide grassroots support for a more democratic way of life.
Circa 2004 my brother Ord was grumbling about politics and his neighbors. He’s always getting into arguments at work. “I’m elitist and proud of it,” my brother said. “Anybody can see what a disaster the Bush presidency has been. How can so many people keep voting Republican? They must be stupid.”
My brother and I both have a lot of opinions, and we don’t see each other often, so our conversations can take the form of alternating outbursts. Strange for someone opposing the party of the billionaires to call himself elitist, but I think I know what he meant: that he has more knowledge, sense and generosity than the professional-class rightists around him, whom he takes to be the real People, the majority. Since Ord knows very well how much I prefer more disguised forms of snobbery, I took his stupid remark to be a measure of his deep frustration. He didn’t know how to help other people see what he sees; what’s worse, he was beginning to think it’s impossible.
The 2008 elections brought a big sigh of relief, among other things, to my brother and me and many other folks. We’re on the right track after all. We are not so crippled by racism and militarism that we dare not consider other possibilities. The issues Reagan and Rove sought to settle for good in favor of corporate and presidential power have pulled open like a sucking wound. We have the best chance in years to change the terms of the debate, to revisit what we mean by community, to build a lasting majority for democratic solutions.
But we haven’t done it yet. The ‘08 elections brought renewed participation by millions of voters, and reshuffled hundreds at the top of the dominant institutions. Of itself, that’s not enough to steer those institutions in a radically different direction, never mind replace them entirely.
One reason is that the crisis that brought him to power also limits Obama’s options. How many trillions have been committed already to reinflating the corporations? Most of this will come out of the muscle and bone of programs that help people. Worse, much of the effort has been couched in terms of restoring the status quo ante, as if the mess we’re in now didn’t grow directly out of the skewed incomes and hyperconsumption of the last several decades.
The trouble is, it takes power to restructure the options, and it takes different choices by all of us to build that power. This is true whichever party is calling the shots. It wasn’t Roosevelt who established an era of unprecedented prosperity for U.S. workers, but the labor movement. LBJ did not grant civil rights, but encoded the rights people were winning with their blood.
So it’s very dangerous to give up the majoritarian project, whether out of frustration like my brother, or complacency from recent electoral results.
There’s no way around it: we have to tackle head-on the anti-democratic ideas, assumptions and loyalties that power the right-wing base in this country, and keep the rest of us from developing long-term alternatives to the economic, ethnic and gender violence we face every day. And that means my brother and I and all of us will have to challenge each other more directly and persistently than we have done these last many years.
Why do we act so often against our own interests? It’s one thing for oil billionaires to invest in rule by Halliburton. How could the rest of us seem for so long to accept or applaud the corruption, the murders, the physical and intellectual poisoning of our kids and our communities?
It’s the old challenge, once falsely labelled “false consciousness”-- the traditional preoccupation of the left, much the way ex-pats sit around the Burger King in Kuala Lumpur to grouse about the peculiar ways of the natives. Some early revolutionaries complained that, although the corporations were killing people by the millions (and still do), workers were slow to rise up in self-defense. They didn’t understand their own self-interest, was the idea.
Later on I’ll write a bit about what “self-interest” could possibly mean. Here I simply ask, if I’m so smart, how come so many people still don’t agree with me? If democracy is such a swell thing, how is it that so many seem ready to trash it?
For me, the issue comes up most pointedly when I hear people around me parroting some corporate nonsense. The 17 year old black kid in my GED class, for instance, who complained about high taxes. The abused women who said they need to beat their kids for their own good. The Teamster from Oak Ridge who said of a community organizer, “He’s OK, except for those anti-nuclear friends of his.” The teachers dedicated to their immigrant students who nonetheless think immigrants cause this country’s problems. Where to start? How can I, in a few minutes, begin to challenge a lifetime of training-- including my own?
After the fact I can usually think of some slogan or other, but really it probably wouldn’t help. “What about the sick workers?” I asked the Teamster. “I heard that there’s a lot of cancers in Oak Ridge.” But of course he already knew about the sick workers, including members of his local, and had already figured that into the equation. For him, the bottom line was high-paying jobs. If they could make the bomb factory safer, well, so much the better. He doesn’t lack knowledge, and I don’t believe he’s any greedier than I. But his calculations come out differently. What can I say to help him look at things from a different perspective?
The political folks I know don’t take my brother’s blame-the-victim attitude. Usually our explanations run to how clever or comprehensive are the corporate propaganda and electoral machines, how effectively they exclude people from the political process, especially in contrast to our own puny reform efforts. (During the Halliburton years we would hear all the time how “brilliant” Karl Rove was. Lefties would say it. As if a hamster couldn’t win an election, given an overwhelming advantage in cash and other means of coercion.) Ever since Mussolini --let’s say, at least since the medieval pogroms against Jews and Muslims-- the right has been very quick to catch up with all the left technologies of mobilizing people. Investigations, demonstrations, boycotts, internet petitions and fundraising, political art, the gangsters will almost always have the resources to do us one better. And if those don’t work, in half the world they still have the power to fire us, jail us, rape us, kill us.
Do you think the U.S. elections of 2008 swept all away all those constraints? For sure, the economic shocks have weakened the dominant institutions. Let’s not kid ourselves, though, that Halliburton and its allies in the media, universities, churches, and governments around the world will peacefully accept their losses.
Still, it’s quite a conundrum: we demand democracy, but find it hard to accept that a lot of non-billionaires like and support Halliburton, sometimes to the point of giving their lives to keep it in power. We respect our neighbors’ abilities too much to simply say they’ve been hoodwinked. I argue below that the very characteristics that make us so capable in most situations carry with them certain limitations that lend themselves to the Halliburton agenda.
At the same time, most people are only very loosely and contingently committed to the regime, if at all. People resist every day, in large and small ways, more or less deliberate and coordinated. The marketing gurus, pollsters and televangelists believe they can control this majority just by pushing the right buttons. They spend hundreds of billions a year to pave over our minds. We can’t afford to leave the field, but it’s hard to know how to stay.
I said two things to my brother. First, I said, I’m glad you spoke your mind, but calling people stupid doesn’t seem persuasive or productive. More important, we got to listen carefully to what our neighbors have to say. I’ve learned that we have many different ideas in our heads: lousy ones injected by our bosses, and good ones that come from first-hand experience and the tools we use to make sense of it. Mining experience for insight, helping folks analyze and strategize, is the job of anyone who wants to change things in this country.
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“A Swinish Multitude”
That’s what Eddie Burke called the French workers and peasants two hundred years ago (Reflections on the Revolution in France, cited in Herzog 505). He was worried sick that the English lower classes might hear about the French Revolution and want one of their own. Back then, the lords’ project was to hog the government for themselves and a few of the middle class, on the grounds that most people weren’t fit to think for themselves or govern themselves.
Well, people fought their way into the political system, but it seems like we hear the same complaint in every generation: the masses are too stupid to trust with governing themselves. A century ago Gustave LeBon railed against collective action in The Crowd: “The mob man is fickle, credulous, and intolerant, showing the violence and ferocity of primitive beings, . . . women, children, savages, and lower classes . . . “ (Atkinson 727).
A generation later, H.L. Mencken ridiculed small-town white fundamentalists, calling the anti-evolutionists at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial yokels, peasants, “gaping primates,” “the anthropoid rabble” (F. Allen 259-61). It was the age of the engineers and technocrats: automobiles and radio, IQ tests (and sterilizing the low-income women who failed them), the great public works of Roosevelt and Stalin, guys with lab coats and furn names peering into the atom and out to the cosmos-- a thrilling March of Progess hindered only by the antique prejudice and superstitions of the unenlightened masses.
Partly, too, I think, the modern contempt for grassroots action came out of my parents’ generation’s experience of the rise of Fascism in Europe: seeing in newscasts millions of Sieg-Heilers swarming to catch a ride on the death machine. And of course the great postwar anti-colonial movements just confirmed for those fond of empire that Africans and Asians simply weren’t ready for the powdered wigs and elegant insults of proper parliamentary procedure.
I like science fiction, and I notice that many writers of the time trusted technology a lot more than people. In Asimov’s “Nightfall” (1941) for instance, a fear-driven mob attacks scientists on the verge of a great discovery; then everyone goes mad and civilization collapses. Ten years later Kornbluth wrote a couple of stories (“The Little Black Bag,” “The Marching Morons”) depicting societies in which a hidden elite of geniuses runs the government and economy for the benefit of the stupid, irresponsible, dependent, and demanding majority, who have to be patronized and flattered and have no clue they are not really in charge. Robert Heinlein’s heroes perpetually outwit foolish bureaucrats and their vile attempts to impose the mediocrity of the masses on aw-shucks down-home technowizards.
More recent apocalyptic fantasies --you know, the world blows up, the Country-Boy-Can-Survivors must defend civilization and their women against the mutants-- are a great source for white-boy libertarian disdain. Here’s how one reader describes Craig and Lex Gallagher, the heroes of Blindsided, by Dick & Leigh Richmond-Donahue:
. . .this steely duo represents an idealized version of how Earth Changers like to see themselves. They're intelligent, professional, financially self-sufficient, hard-headed, loving, and tough when they have to be. Craig is also quite icy about the worth of other people. Lex is more the gooshy 'liberal' type, but she eventually comes around to his way of thinking, and the novel unintentionally dramatizes an attribute that Earth Changers probably wouldn't claim: they don't care much for their fellow man (Heard 111).
A virtual coiled spring of can-do, Craig is forced into action . . . . For him, individuals are little more than a mob waiting to happen. He mulls their awful power. 'Mindless. Primitive. Huge dinosaurs made up of individual bodies, wasting, destroying, without purpose except a lust for revenge. Against what? Against 'them.' . . . . Yes, unless this was brought under control, quickly, the mobs would form' (112)
A central theme of Blindsided is that hard-core protective measures will be necessary as human vermin scatter from their disrupted urban nests (117).
The internet fairly sings with that peculiar white-boy whine. Talk show ideologues pose as the Voice of the Common People to disguise their loathing for same, while the mere sensationalists make their living goading low income, Black and Latino guests to perform the worst stereotypes on national TV. Chuck Shepherd has very successfully translated the people-are-fools business into print with his “News of the Weird” syndicated column-- a mainstay of my town’s yuppie liberal weekly, and probably yours. Black people can get in on it, too-- the op-ed pages must employ half the country’s Black Republicans, to scold the unwealthy for their shiftless behavior.
People I might otherwise admire can express similar attitudes. I’ve heard some people call themselves “rationalists”. I know little about them except what I’ve read in their publications. They investigate cults and popular pseudo-science. They criticize racism, homophobia and other prejudices. These folks (any women?) seem long on the need for being reasonable but not much interested in social analysis. They suggest that religious and ethnic conflict are irrational personal choices (much the way certain environmentalists talk about our consumption of energy or meat), rather than highly rational strategies for survival and power in particular social contexts.
Without understanding the social and economic bases, it’s easy to look down on other people. According to one review of Taverne’s The March of Unreason,
This cogent restating of the case for science, reason, optimism and the other values of the Enlightenment is clear about its opponents. They include anyone who uses alternative medicine, or who buys organic food, or worries about genetic modification, or opposes nuclear power, or likes post-modernism, or doesn’t vaccinate their children properly, or distrusts scientists, or believes the Bible, or dislikes global capitalism or thinks that human progress damages the environment. In Dick Taverne’s view, all these wrong-headed beliefs are part of the same batty, sentimental, mindset that ultimately threatens democracy (“Open up their eyes.” The Economist, 4/2-8/05 v. 375 n. 8420 p. 76.)
I don’t know if self-described rationalists see themselves as smarter than everyone else. But the implication that reason is something separate from and above our bodies and our social selves reminds me of Mosquito Coast, Peter Weir’s film based on Paul Theroux’s book of the same name. A smart Yankee tinkerer, fed up with the corruption and shortsightedness of the world, carries his family off to Central America to start a new life and a new community. His benevolent dictatorship of reason brings immediate success and ultimate catastrophe; his engineering mind blinds him to the needs of his family and the messiness of the world.
Those of us who call ourselves progressives are by no means immune from the temptation to disdain our neighbors. One way to understand the early Progressive movement is as a push by the desperate middle-class to reassert its moral behaviors and lost importance in the face of the vulgar, newly dominant robber barons, on the one hand, and radicalizing immigrant workers on the other. Cantor puts it this way:
Wilsonian progressivism signified an educated middle class seeking to gain power and extend its learning and code of rationality and efficiency to every walk of life. Wilsonianism’s fundamental dogma was that centralizing power in the hands of an educated and professional elite was the salvation of the country. It had no qualms whatsoever about the corrupting tendencies or practical incapabilities of power. Science and humanistic learning could provide an answer for everything from slums, public health, sanitation, and crime in the cities to war and imperial control internationally-- if only the right kind of people were in power (249).
Ehrenreich, Frank, Metzgar and others have described in painful detail how professional-class, professionally arrogant reformer types have used and abused the lower-income people they claim to be helping. Southern Appalachia, where I live, was for decades a key market for professional do-gooders like myself. Our occasional practice of romanticizing hardscrabble mountaineers, gangstas or Asian peasants in no way remedies our ignorance.
Even so, the Progressive emphasis on learning supposes that almost anyone can join the “right kind of people,” provided they have the right opportunities to be exposed to the right ideas. We share with many right-wing Christians a patronizing faith that, properly educated, our neighbors too will see the Light-- that is, the fixed truths that we’ve already discovered. Certainly my deeply-ingrained habit of mind is that, if other folks talk to the people I talk to and read the books I read they will come to conclusions much like my own. Only a small part of my brain understands that the same information will have very different meaning to folks who don’t share my privileges.
Still, I’m quite sure that democracy and a truth-seeking education go hand in hand; cannot succeed without each other.
I bring all this up, of course, because writing about how other people think is a very dicey proposition, and has been used very often to impose destructive standards on people already pushed around too much; to blame the victims, sow distrust and undermine democracy. The first person to whom I mentioned this project hated it immediately for that reason. We are right to be wary of knowledge that can be used against us. Nearly a century ago, during the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” William Jennings Bryan undertook to defend biblical literalism largely because of his fears of Social Darwinism. That was the racist perversion of the new science of evolution to justify the European conquest of “primitive” peoples as “survival of the fittest”. Examining how we learn can easily be seen as implying that there’s something wrong with us, that we need some outsider to fix us up.
So let me say it: I do want us to change our understanding. We’ve got a lot of problems that we are not dealing with very well. And I don’t like to admit it, but I’m as confused and scared as many other people. I think we can get a better handle on what the world is like --what I’m calling our Stories-- and that will let us develop better solutions. I need your help.
I’m sure I’ve made mistakes here. But there’s already a very crowded industry of sucking up to Halliburton by pissing on the rest of us. They don’t need me. That is not my project.
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LIVE WITH OUR HEADS IN THE LION’S MOUTH:
Weaving stories of resistance and community.
1. INTRODUCTION: We understand the world through our stories.
The majoritarian project.
“A Swinish Multitude.”
Education for action.
• Democracy takes talk.
• The truth is not enough.
• Self-interest is not self-evident.
• We won’t find enough usual suspects.
• How we learn shapes what we learn.
• Democratic education efforts don’t always reach far enough.
# It’s easier to expend most of our educational effort with people like us.
# Democratic education programs tend to operate in a hothouse environment.
# Education through action is not always available.
# We don’t always get to new understandings.
# Much of what passes for political education is little more than top-down training.
# Sometimes we trade opinions without addressing the underlying experiences, commitments, and frames of reference.
The story telling species.
• Political stories.
• Stories matter.
# Making excuses.
# Stories guide us by explaining the world.
# Stories to solve problems and build democracy.
# Ideas and institutions.
A provocation.
A note on terminology.
Please comment.
My own story is in process.
Next steps.
Update ‘09.
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“I think we need a new story, don't we? The stories that are told and retold are not getting us where we need to be going.”
-- N.G., in a discussion about the Middle East, 7-30-06
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WE UNDERSTAND THE WORLD THROUGH OUR STORIES
The majoritarian project.
In the 30 yrs since the Reagan backlash scoured our land from end to end, like ten thousand of those colossal mining machines that strip mountains bare, I have often wondered how so many of my fellow citizens can support such destructive people and policies. That’s the origin of this set of essays.
First I want to understand why so many of us prefer rule by hired killers instead of democracy, or can not tell one from the other. Second, I want to figure out how to build very strong and wide grassroots support for a more democratic way of life.
Circa 2004 my brother Ord was grumbling about politics and his neighbors. He’s always getting into arguments at work. “I’m elitist and proud of it,” my brother said. “Anybody can see what a disaster the Bush presidency has been. How can so many people keep voting Republican? They must be stupid.”
My brother and I both have a lot of opinions, and we don’t see each other often, so our conversations can take the form of alternating outbursts. Strange for someone opposing the party of the billionaires to call himself elitist, but I think I know what he meant: that he has more knowledge, sense and generosity than the professional-class rightists around him, whom he takes to be the real People, the majority. Since Ord knows very well how much I prefer more disguised forms of snobbery, I took his stupid remark to be a measure of his deep frustration. He didn’t know how to help other people see what he sees; what’s worse, he was beginning to think it’s impossible.
The 2008 elections brought a big sigh of relief, among other things, to my brother and me and many other folks. We’re on the right track after all. We are not so crippled by racism and militarism that we dare not consider other possibilities. The issues Reagan and Rove sought to settle for good in favor of corporate and presidential power have pulled open like a sucking wound. We have the best chance in years to change the terms of the debate, to revisit what we mean by community, to build a lasting majority for democratic solutions.
But we haven’t done it yet. The ‘08 elections brought renewed participation by millions of voters, and reshuffled hundreds at the top of the dominant institutions. Of itself, that’s not enough to steer those institutions in a radically different direction, never mind replace them entirely.
One reason is that the crisis that brought him to power also limits Obama’s options. How many trillions have been committed already to reinflating the corporations? Most of this will come out of the muscle and bone of programs that help people. Worse, much of the effort has been couched in terms of restoring the status quo ante, as if the mess we’re in now didn’t grow directly out of the skewed incomes and hyperconsumption of the last several decades.
The trouble is, it takes power to restructure the options, and it takes different choices by all of us to build that power. This is true whichever party is calling the shots. It wasn’t Roosevelt who established an era of unprecedented prosperity for U.S. workers, but the labor movement. LBJ did not grant civil rights, but encoded the rights people were winning with their blood.
So it’s very dangerous to give up the majoritarian project, whether out of frustration like my brother, or complacency from recent electoral results.
There’s no way around it: we have to tackle head-on the anti-democratic ideas, assumptions and loyalties that power the right-wing base in this country, and keep the rest of us from developing long-term alternatives to the economic, ethnic and gender violence we face every day. And that means my brother and I and all of us will have to challenge each other more directly and persistently than we have done these last many years.
Why do we act so often against our own interests? It’s one thing for oil billionaires to invest in rule by Halliburton. How could the rest of us seem for so long to accept or applaud the corruption, the murders, the physical and intellectual poisoning of our kids and our communities?
It’s the old challenge, once falsely labelled “false consciousness”-- the traditional preoccupation of the left, much the way ex-pats sit around the Burger King in Kuala Lumpur to grouse about the peculiar ways of the natives. Some early revolutionaries complained that, although the corporations were killing people by the millions (and still do), workers were slow to rise up in self-defense. They didn’t understand their own self-interest, was the idea.
Later on I’ll write a bit about what “self-interest” could possibly mean. Here I simply ask, if I’m so smart, how come so many people still don’t agree with me? If democracy is such a swell thing, how is it that so many seem ready to trash it?
For me, the issue comes up most pointedly when I hear people around me parroting some corporate nonsense. The 17 year old black kid in my GED class, for instance, who complained about high taxes. The abused women who said they need to beat their kids for their own good. The Teamster from Oak Ridge who said of a community organizer, “He’s OK, except for those anti-nuclear friends of his.” The teachers dedicated to their immigrant students who nonetheless think immigrants cause this country’s problems. Where to start? How can I, in a few minutes, begin to challenge a lifetime of training-- including my own?
After the fact I can usually think of some slogan or other, but really it probably wouldn’t help. “What about the sick workers?” I asked the Teamster. “I heard that there’s a lot of cancers in Oak Ridge.” But of course he already knew about the sick workers, including members of his local, and had already figured that into the equation. For him, the bottom line was high-paying jobs. If they could make the bomb factory safer, well, so much the better. He doesn’t lack knowledge, and I don’t believe he’s any greedier than I. But his calculations come out differently. What can I say to help him look at things from a different perspective?
The political folks I know don’t take my brother’s blame-the-victim attitude. Usually our explanations run to how clever or comprehensive are the corporate propaganda and electoral machines, how effectively they exclude people from the political process, especially in contrast to our own puny reform efforts. (During the Halliburton years we would hear all the time how “brilliant” Karl Rove was. Lefties would say it. As if a hamster couldn’t win an election, given an overwhelming advantage in cash and other means of coercion.) Ever since Mussolini --let’s say, at least since the medieval pogroms against Jews and Muslims-- the right has been very quick to catch up with all the left technologies of mobilizing people. Investigations, demonstrations, boycotts, internet petitions and fundraising, political art, the gangsters will almost always have the resources to do us one better. And if those don’t work, in half the world they still have the power to fire us, jail us, rape us, kill us.
Do you think the U.S. elections of 2008 swept all away all those constraints? For sure, the economic shocks have weakened the dominant institutions. Let’s not kid ourselves, though, that Halliburton and its allies in the media, universities, churches, and governments around the world will peacefully accept their losses.
Still, it’s quite a conundrum: we demand democracy, but find it hard to accept that a lot of non-billionaires like and support Halliburton, sometimes to the point of giving their lives to keep it in power. We respect our neighbors’ abilities too much to simply say they’ve been hoodwinked. I argue below that the very characteristics that make us so capable in most situations carry with them certain limitations that lend themselves to the Halliburton agenda.
At the same time, most people are only very loosely and contingently committed to the regime, if at all. People resist every day, in large and small ways, more or less deliberate and coordinated. The marketing gurus, pollsters and televangelists believe they can control this majority just by pushing the right buttons. They spend hundreds of billions a year to pave over our minds. We can’t afford to leave the field, but it’s hard to know how to stay.
I said two things to my brother. First, I said, I’m glad you spoke your mind, but calling people stupid doesn’t seem persuasive or productive. More important, we got to listen carefully to what our neighbors have to say. I’ve learned that we have many different ideas in our heads: lousy ones injected by our bosses, and good ones that come from first-hand experience and the tools we use to make sense of it. Mining experience for insight, helping folks analyze and strategize, is the job of anyone who wants to change things in this country.
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“A Swinish Multitude”
That’s what Eddie Burke called the French workers and peasants two hundred years ago (Reflections on the Revolution in France, cited in Herzog 505). He was worried sick that the English lower classes might hear about the French Revolution and want one of their own. Back then, the lords’ project was to hog the government for themselves and a few of the middle class, on the grounds that most people weren’t fit to think for themselves or govern themselves.
Well, people fought their way into the political system, but it seems like we hear the same complaint in every generation: the masses are too stupid to trust with governing themselves. A century ago Gustave LeBon railed against collective action in The Crowd: “The mob man is fickle, credulous, and intolerant, showing the violence and ferocity of primitive beings, . . . women, children, savages, and lower classes . . . “ (Atkinson 727).
A generation later, H.L. Mencken ridiculed small-town white fundamentalists, calling the anti-evolutionists at the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial yokels, peasants, “gaping primates,” “the anthropoid rabble” (F. Allen 259-61). It was the age of the engineers and technocrats: automobiles and radio, IQ tests (and sterilizing the low-income women who failed them), the great public works of Roosevelt and Stalin, guys with lab coats and furn names peering into the atom and out to the cosmos-- a thrilling March of Progess hindered only by the antique prejudice and superstitions of the unenlightened masses.
Partly, too, I think, the modern contempt for grassroots action came out of my parents’ generation’s experience of the rise of Fascism in Europe: seeing in newscasts millions of Sieg-Heilers swarming to catch a ride on the death machine. And of course the great postwar anti-colonial movements just confirmed for those fond of empire that Africans and Asians simply weren’t ready for the powdered wigs and elegant insults of proper parliamentary procedure.
I like science fiction, and I notice that many writers of the time trusted technology a lot more than people. In Asimov’s “Nightfall” (1941) for instance, a fear-driven mob attacks scientists on the verge of a great discovery; then everyone goes mad and civilization collapses. Ten years later Kornbluth wrote a couple of stories (“The Little Black Bag,” “The Marching Morons”) depicting societies in which a hidden elite of geniuses runs the government and economy for the benefit of the stupid, irresponsible, dependent, and demanding majority, who have to be patronized and flattered and have no clue they are not really in charge. Robert Heinlein’s heroes perpetually outwit foolish bureaucrats and their vile attempts to impose the mediocrity of the masses on aw-shucks down-home technowizards.
More recent apocalyptic fantasies --you know, the world blows up, the Country-Boy-Can-Survivors must defend civilization and their women against the mutants-- are a great source for white-boy libertarian disdain. Here’s how one reader describes Craig and Lex Gallagher, the heroes of Blindsided, by Dick & Leigh Richmond-Donahue:
. . .this steely duo represents an idealized version of how Earth Changers like to see themselves. They're intelligent, professional, financially self-sufficient, hard-headed, loving, and tough when they have to be. Craig is also quite icy about the worth of other people. Lex is more the gooshy 'liberal' type, but she eventually comes around to his way of thinking, and the novel unintentionally dramatizes an attribute that Earth Changers probably wouldn't claim: they don't care much for their fellow man (Heard 111).
A virtual coiled spring of can-do, Craig is forced into action . . . . For him, individuals are little more than a mob waiting to happen. He mulls their awful power. 'Mindless. Primitive. Huge dinosaurs made up of individual bodies, wasting, destroying, without purpose except a lust for revenge. Against what? Against 'them.' . . . . Yes, unless this was brought under control, quickly, the mobs would form' (112)
A central theme of Blindsided is that hard-core protective measures will be necessary as human vermin scatter from their disrupted urban nests (117).
The internet fairly sings with that peculiar white-boy whine. Talk show ideologues pose as the Voice of the Common People to disguise their loathing for same, while the mere sensationalists make their living goading low income, Black and Latino guests to perform the worst stereotypes on national TV. Chuck Shepherd has very successfully translated the people-are-fools business into print with his “News of the Weird” syndicated column-- a mainstay of my town’s yuppie liberal weekly, and probably yours. Black people can get in on it, too-- the op-ed pages must employ half the country’s Black Republicans, to scold the unwealthy for their shiftless behavior.
People I might otherwise admire can express similar attitudes. I’ve heard some people call themselves “rationalists”. I know little about them except what I’ve read in their publications. They investigate cults and popular pseudo-science. They criticize racism, homophobia and other prejudices. These folks (any women?) seem long on the need for being reasonable but not much interested in social analysis. They suggest that religious and ethnic conflict are irrational personal choices (much the way certain environmentalists talk about our consumption of energy or meat), rather than highly rational strategies for survival and power in particular social contexts.
Without understanding the social and economic bases, it’s easy to look down on other people. According to one review of Taverne’s The March of Unreason,
This cogent restating of the case for science, reason, optimism and the other values of the Enlightenment is clear about its opponents. They include anyone who uses alternative medicine, or who buys organic food, or worries about genetic modification, or opposes nuclear power, or likes post-modernism, or doesn’t vaccinate their children properly, or distrusts scientists, or believes the Bible, or dislikes global capitalism or thinks that human progress damages the environment. In Dick Taverne’s view, all these wrong-headed beliefs are part of the same batty, sentimental, mindset that ultimately threatens democracy (“Open up their eyes.” The Economist, 4/2-8/05 v. 375 n. 8420 p. 76.)
I don’t know if self-described rationalists see themselves as smarter than everyone else. But the implication that reason is something separate from and above our bodies and our social selves reminds me of Mosquito Coast, Peter Weir’s film based on Paul Theroux’s book of the same name. A smart Yankee tinkerer, fed up with the corruption and shortsightedness of the world, carries his family off to Central America to start a new life and a new community. His benevolent dictatorship of reason brings immediate success and ultimate catastrophe; his engineering mind blinds him to the needs of his family and the messiness of the world.
Those of us who call ourselves progressives are by no means immune from the temptation to disdain our neighbors. One way to understand the early Progressive movement is as a push by the desperate middle-class to reassert its moral behaviors and lost importance in the face of the vulgar, newly dominant robber barons, on the one hand, and radicalizing immigrant workers on the other. Cantor puts it this way:
Wilsonian progressivism signified an educated middle class seeking to gain power and extend its learning and code of rationality and efficiency to every walk of life. Wilsonianism’s fundamental dogma was that centralizing power in the hands of an educated and professional elite was the salvation of the country. It had no qualms whatsoever about the corrupting tendencies or practical incapabilities of power. Science and humanistic learning could provide an answer for everything from slums, public health, sanitation, and crime in the cities to war and imperial control internationally-- if only the right kind of people were in power (249).
Ehrenreich, Frank, Metzgar and others have described in painful detail how professional-class, professionally arrogant reformer types have used and abused the lower-income people they claim to be helping. Southern Appalachia, where I live, was for decades a key market for professional do-gooders like myself. Our occasional practice of romanticizing hardscrabble mountaineers, gangstas or Asian peasants in no way remedies our ignorance.
Even so, the Progressive emphasis on learning supposes that almost anyone can join the “right kind of people,” provided they have the right opportunities to be exposed to the right ideas. We share with many right-wing Christians a patronizing faith that, properly educated, our neighbors too will see the Light-- that is, the fixed truths that we’ve already discovered. Certainly my deeply-ingrained habit of mind is that, if other folks talk to the people I talk to and read the books I read they will come to conclusions much like my own. Only a small part of my brain understands that the same information will have very different meaning to folks who don’t share my privileges.
Still, I’m quite sure that democracy and a truth-seeking education go hand in hand; cannot succeed without each other.
I bring all this up, of course, because writing about how other people think is a very dicey proposition, and has been used very often to impose destructive standards on people already pushed around too much; to blame the victims, sow distrust and undermine democracy. The first person to whom I mentioned this project hated it immediately for that reason. We are right to be wary of knowledge that can be used against us. Nearly a century ago, during the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” William Jennings Bryan undertook to defend biblical literalism largely because of his fears of Social Darwinism. That was the racist perversion of the new science of evolution to justify the European conquest of “primitive” peoples as “survival of the fittest”. Examining how we learn can easily be seen as implying that there’s something wrong with us, that we need some outsider to fix us up.
So let me say it: I do want us to change our understanding. We’ve got a lot of problems that we are not dealing with very well. And I don’t like to admit it, but I’m as confused and scared as many other people. I think we can get a better handle on what the world is like --what I’m calling our Stories-- and that will let us develop better solutions. I need your help.
I’m sure I’ve made mistakes here. But there’s already a very crowded industry of sucking up to Halliburton by pissing on the rest of us. They don’t need me. That is not my project.
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Education for action.
Education for action.
For awhile I worked for a consumer group, then at a community education center. Later I taught GED classes for adults, and now I teach in the public schools. Here's what I think now about political education.
• Democracy takes talk.
It was bizarre. One day in the fall of '08I was standing in line at the P.O.; as usual, I’d squeezed in just before closing. I noticed the woman ahead of me, who was carrying a bunch of envelopes stamped with logo of a big local union. I struck up a conversation, asking about the union, describing my small experience with it, and the people we knew in common. She responded chattily. Then I asked about how folks were viewing the upcoming electoral campaign. She told me who the union was supporting, no news there, and didn’t say much when I asked how the members were talking about the candidates. Then a couple other guys in line chimed in, talking favorably about Obama while sneering at politicians in general. At this point the union staffer said, Well, you can get in trouble talking about politics, and clammed up. The 2 guys, several feet away, continued to talk in whispers.
If paid staffers won’t talk politics, no wonder the rest of us hold back. O, we have our reasons. By definition, there’s a lot at stake when we discuss things we care about. It takes patience and skill to listen closely and explain ourselves clearly, to explore disagreements while affirming what we share. And where are we going to learn such skills? Not in places where hierarchies rule, and the most useful verbal skills are flattery and evasion. Women have traditionally been assigned the maintenance work of listening, accepting, soothing and nurturing, but that doesn’t necessarily engender learning.
The union woman did tell me where the nearest polling place was, and when it would be open. No doubt she votes in every election. But how does she make up her mind? What does she consider? What are the most important issues for her, and how does she think about the rest of the community? What does she think about people like me? She wouldn't say.
John Dewey wrote about “deliberative democracy,” the idea that it’s not enough for people just to vote their druthers, and majority wins. Before we decide we need to be talking with each other, to share and develop our ideas together. The best decisions come from gathering the information and sorting it out together.
I think that’s right. When something big comes up, we don’t just jump into it without thinking. When the issue involves the whole community, naturally we want to find out what other people are thinking and see what kind of agreement we can reach that makes sense to everybody. We know from research that that’s probably how some small-town governments operated, and very small bands of people even before there were any towns. We try to recreate that kind of deliberative environment with local grassroots groups, or when we hold conferences on particular issues.
For the most part, though, we live in such huge communities nowadays, our relationships with others can be so shallow, and our unscheduled time is so limited, that it’s hard to talk about the things we don’t already agree on. If talk is the requirement for deep democracy, we’ll have to learn to talk even in hostile circumstances.
I used to hope that some bold candidate would use electoral campaigns to push the national dialog and change the terms of debate. Now I see that will happen only at the margins, even with gifted wordmongers like Obama. The system we have practically forces politicians to play it safe, assembling a winning plurality by pushing as many of the favorable buttons as they can, and avoiding the dangerous ones. Changing paradigms is work that has to happen between or in spite of electoral campaigns.
There are some great cultural and political education programs going on in communities and unions all across the country. But these generally require a long-term commitment on the part of staff and participants, and are always pushing against constraints of their own (see Democratic education efforts, below). I’d like to see a way we can talk politics in less structured circumstances, in the course of our daily dealings with friends, family and neighbors.
• The truth is not enough.
We have an advantage over the death-dealers: we don’t have to lie. We’re not selling nuclear waste or war or fear of women. We’ve got generations of (mostly) excellent research and analysis to inform our understanding and our ambitions. But some of our neighbors can’t understand what we say, and it’s not just a matter of high-falutin’ language. The facts we can marshal depend so much on context to be understood.
In April, 2004 a bunch of Iraqis lynched four American contractors and hung two from a bridge. My local paper showed the photo: a mangled body suspended above a gleeful crowd. The picture provoked quite a furious debate in the letters page. Most people were outraged to have to see something so upsetting over their morning coffee. But several writers defended the decision to publish. Some took the picture as proof that war is savage and pointless, and called on Halliburton to bring the troops home. Others, however, simply saw further evidence of heathen barbarism, that can only be contained by staying the course.
Here’s another: the income tax. My state, Tennessee, still doesn’t have an income tax; instead we have a lottery very high sales taxes, including a tax on food. There’s no dispute about the facts: these taxes hurt low and middle income people a lot more than a progressive income tax. There’s plenty of information available and the concept is not that complicated. But to get at the popular resistance we have to understand the bases for their suspicion of the government, the context of the state budget crisis, and probably also something about decoupling payment from services, the way a yearly tax does.
The courts and contract negotiations and public hearings demand that we develop very detailed knowledge of the issues, but it’s not a mountain of data that changes public opinion and ultimately, the balance of power.
. . . we had to find out why this has happened to us in our communities. Why? So I’m trying to study and figure out and look at different movements for justice and I’m getting pretty lost. I can’t study the issue any more, the environmental issues. I’m a victim of exposure, I know everything there is to know about perchlorethylene and tetra, I know everything there is to know about benzene, but honest to god I feel just so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. The issues are circular, there’s no answers to these issues. I’m scared to death of the greenhouse stuff. I mean I just can’t even read about the ozone hole, I just feel so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. So, understanding that, I am not trying to work on environmental issues as much as I am trying to work on people and building leadership. Because that’s the only thing that is giving me strength is in other human beings (HREC, STP #5).
We’ve seen a very interesting conflict of perspectives with the market meltdown starting in 2007. It seems indisputable to me that Halliburton let the pirates run wild, yet as the crisis deepened there was a growing chorus of rightist media blaming, you guessed it, Big Government on the one hand, and homebuyers on the other. You can see how the privateers would be a mite concerned that this too-close-to-home failure could take the luster off unregulated capitalism, now that so many U.S. residents are getting a bigger dose of what folks in other countries have suffered decade after decade. The talking heads that rushed to cover up the crime are no more than jail trustees, so it’s hard to tell how much the rest of the inmate population have bought their excuses. Judging by the talk shows, we’ve finally sussed out the real culprits behind the sub-prime mortgage mess: immigrants.
Finally, let me give you some examples from the ‘04 election. A friend of mine was canvassing for unions in West Virginia. The responses included elaborate defenses of Halliburton (paraphrased below) by people who had plenty of contrary information (10-15-04):
• gay white guy: I’m concerned with equality, including equality for gay people. But we shouldn’t change horses in midstream. Kerry’s a northerner.
• white guy, railroad worker: Bush has been a nightmare for jobs, health care, Social Security . . . but I have to vote to defend unborn babies.
--canvasser: You’re concerned about more than yourself.
--guy: Exactly. I’ve been born again. I know Bush is just using Christianity for political gain, but I have to choose between old people and young people [by which he meant fetuses].
• African American woman cashier, union member: The biggest issue is jobs. I know Bush represents the rich and the corporations, and my sisters are strong Kerry backers. But Kerry flip flops too much. We shouldn’t change horses in midstream.
--canvasser: Why is changing scary? Do you feel safer with Bush?
--woman: Yes. There have been no more terrorist attacks.
--canvasser: What about rising anti-U.S. sentiment around the world?
--woman: I don’t believe it. After all, there were WMD in Iraq.
Most canvass operators warn their volunteers not to get into discussions. All we’re looking for is turnout, they say; we’re not going to change any minds at the doorstep. Reassure people when they have doubts, or change the subject. Avoid controversy. Sensible tactics for the moment, maybe, my friend thought-- so when do we try to change minds?
As Beverly Brown put it about the same time (10-24-04): conservatives would have to inhabit a different universe with different rules (e.g. about gender) to be able to vote for Kerry.
I’m sure you can come up with plenty of your own examples. Facts make a difference when people share some underlying perspective on the world (the inherent moral superiority of U.S. policy, or not; I earned that SUV and vacation home; people are inherently wicked; and so forth). By itself new information can’t move people from one big idea to another.
This would be true even if the major media weren’t run by a very small number of rich people, if the schools and churches were democratic, if our employers weren’t scanning our email. As it is, we have to compete with legions of Karl Roves and James Dobsons. If our only banner is Just the Facts, Ma’am and our primary vehicle sound bytes on the 6 o’clock news, we are playing on their turf and by their rules. In the last several years hundreds of thousands have marched against corporatist trade conferences cities around the world. Speak truth to power, right? It’s a yawner for the press. They undercount the numbers and say the movement is losing steam. They broadcast the grandstanders who break windows, and ignore the issues. The police funnel the crowds into free silence ghettos far from the conferees and the press.
It’s not simply a matter of shaving our ideas down to appealing phrases. These have their uses. Our slogans may resonate with some of the stories that people carry in their heads but won’t speak unless they’re prompted. Our signs and chants signal pandering politicians that there is a market for truth-telling. But soundbytes and slogans are just too shallow to carry system-challenging arguments. Or, depending on their outrage quotient, they may strengthen the regime in the long run, by alienating people from any political participation at all.
There was a discussion on All Things Considered (NPR, 4-15-04) about attack ads in the presidential campaign. One guest expert explained that attack ads are designed, not to persuade people to change their votes --that’s way too big a gulf to cross, in most cases-- but to discourage opposing voters from voting at all. That’s something a smear campaign can manage with relative ease.
We don’t want to shut people out. We want to bring people into the process. That’s a core part of our project. Unlike the campaign consultants, we do have to move folks to big ideas (or, as I’ll argue below, help our best ideas emerge from cold storage).
For awhile I worked for a consumer group, then at a community education center. Later I taught GED classes for adults, and now I teach in the public schools. Here's what I think now about political education.
• Democracy takes talk.
It was bizarre. One day in the fall of '08I was standing in line at the P.O.; as usual, I’d squeezed in just before closing. I noticed the woman ahead of me, who was carrying a bunch of envelopes stamped with logo of a big local union. I struck up a conversation, asking about the union, describing my small experience with it, and the people we knew in common. She responded chattily. Then I asked about how folks were viewing the upcoming electoral campaign. She told me who the union was supporting, no news there, and didn’t say much when I asked how the members were talking about the candidates. Then a couple other guys in line chimed in, talking favorably about Obama while sneering at politicians in general. At this point the union staffer said, Well, you can get in trouble talking about politics, and clammed up. The 2 guys, several feet away, continued to talk in whispers.
If paid staffers won’t talk politics, no wonder the rest of us hold back. O, we have our reasons. By definition, there’s a lot at stake when we discuss things we care about. It takes patience and skill to listen closely and explain ourselves clearly, to explore disagreements while affirming what we share. And where are we going to learn such skills? Not in places where hierarchies rule, and the most useful verbal skills are flattery and evasion. Women have traditionally been assigned the maintenance work of listening, accepting, soothing and nurturing, but that doesn’t necessarily engender learning.
The union woman did tell me where the nearest polling place was, and when it would be open. No doubt she votes in every election. But how does she make up her mind? What does she consider? What are the most important issues for her, and how does she think about the rest of the community? What does she think about people like me? She wouldn't say.
John Dewey wrote about “deliberative democracy,” the idea that it’s not enough for people just to vote their druthers, and majority wins. Before we decide we need to be talking with each other, to share and develop our ideas together. The best decisions come from gathering the information and sorting it out together.
I think that’s right. When something big comes up, we don’t just jump into it without thinking. When the issue involves the whole community, naturally we want to find out what other people are thinking and see what kind of agreement we can reach that makes sense to everybody. We know from research that that’s probably how some small-town governments operated, and very small bands of people even before there were any towns. We try to recreate that kind of deliberative environment with local grassroots groups, or when we hold conferences on particular issues.
For the most part, though, we live in such huge communities nowadays, our relationships with others can be so shallow, and our unscheduled time is so limited, that it’s hard to talk about the things we don’t already agree on. If talk is the requirement for deep democracy, we’ll have to learn to talk even in hostile circumstances.
I used to hope that some bold candidate would use electoral campaigns to push the national dialog and change the terms of debate. Now I see that will happen only at the margins, even with gifted wordmongers like Obama. The system we have practically forces politicians to play it safe, assembling a winning plurality by pushing as many of the favorable buttons as they can, and avoiding the dangerous ones. Changing paradigms is work that has to happen between or in spite of electoral campaigns.
There are some great cultural and political education programs going on in communities and unions all across the country. But these generally require a long-term commitment on the part of staff and participants, and are always pushing against constraints of their own (see Democratic education efforts, below). I’d like to see a way we can talk politics in less structured circumstances, in the course of our daily dealings with friends, family and neighbors.
• The truth is not enough.
We have an advantage over the death-dealers: we don’t have to lie. We’re not selling nuclear waste or war or fear of women. We’ve got generations of (mostly) excellent research and analysis to inform our understanding and our ambitions. But some of our neighbors can’t understand what we say, and it’s not just a matter of high-falutin’ language. The facts we can marshal depend so much on context to be understood.
In April, 2004 a bunch of Iraqis lynched four American contractors and hung two from a bridge. My local paper showed the photo: a mangled body suspended above a gleeful crowd. The picture provoked quite a furious debate in the letters page. Most people were outraged to have to see something so upsetting over their morning coffee. But several writers defended the decision to publish. Some took the picture as proof that war is savage and pointless, and called on Halliburton to bring the troops home. Others, however, simply saw further evidence of heathen barbarism, that can only be contained by staying the course.
Here’s another: the income tax. My state, Tennessee, still doesn’t have an income tax; instead we have a lottery very high sales taxes, including a tax on food. There’s no dispute about the facts: these taxes hurt low and middle income people a lot more than a progressive income tax. There’s plenty of information available and the concept is not that complicated. But to get at the popular resistance we have to understand the bases for their suspicion of the government, the context of the state budget crisis, and probably also something about decoupling payment from services, the way a yearly tax does.
The courts and contract negotiations and public hearings demand that we develop very detailed knowledge of the issues, but it’s not a mountain of data that changes public opinion and ultimately, the balance of power.
. . . we had to find out why this has happened to us in our communities. Why? So I’m trying to study and figure out and look at different movements for justice and I’m getting pretty lost. I can’t study the issue any more, the environmental issues. I’m a victim of exposure, I know everything there is to know about perchlorethylene and tetra, I know everything there is to know about benzene, but honest to god I feel just so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. The issues are circular, there’s no answers to these issues. I’m scared to death of the greenhouse stuff. I mean I just can’t even read about the ozone hole, I just feel so, I’m so I can’t take it any more. So, understanding that, I am not trying to work on environmental issues as much as I am trying to work on people and building leadership. Because that’s the only thing that is giving me strength is in other human beings (HREC, STP #5).
We’ve seen a very interesting conflict of perspectives with the market meltdown starting in 2007. It seems indisputable to me that Halliburton let the pirates run wild, yet as the crisis deepened there was a growing chorus of rightist media blaming, you guessed it, Big Government on the one hand, and homebuyers on the other. You can see how the privateers would be a mite concerned that this too-close-to-home failure could take the luster off unregulated capitalism, now that so many U.S. residents are getting a bigger dose of what folks in other countries have suffered decade after decade. The talking heads that rushed to cover up the crime are no more than jail trustees, so it’s hard to tell how much the rest of the inmate population have bought their excuses. Judging by the talk shows, we’ve finally sussed out the real culprits behind the sub-prime mortgage mess: immigrants.
Finally, let me give you some examples from the ‘04 election. A friend of mine was canvassing for unions in West Virginia. The responses included elaborate defenses of Halliburton (paraphrased below) by people who had plenty of contrary information (10-15-04):
• gay white guy: I’m concerned with equality, including equality for gay people. But we shouldn’t change horses in midstream. Kerry’s a northerner.
• white guy, railroad worker: Bush has been a nightmare for jobs, health care, Social Security . . . but I have to vote to defend unborn babies.
--canvasser: You’re concerned about more than yourself.
--guy: Exactly. I’ve been born again. I know Bush is just using Christianity for political gain, but I have to choose between old people and young people [by which he meant fetuses].
• African American woman cashier, union member: The biggest issue is jobs. I know Bush represents the rich and the corporations, and my sisters are strong Kerry backers. But Kerry flip flops too much. We shouldn’t change horses in midstream.
--canvasser: Why is changing scary? Do you feel safer with Bush?
--woman: Yes. There have been no more terrorist attacks.
--canvasser: What about rising anti-U.S. sentiment around the world?
--woman: I don’t believe it. After all, there were WMD in Iraq.
Most canvass operators warn their volunteers not to get into discussions. All we’re looking for is turnout, they say; we’re not going to change any minds at the doorstep. Reassure people when they have doubts, or change the subject. Avoid controversy. Sensible tactics for the moment, maybe, my friend thought-- so when do we try to change minds?
As Beverly Brown put it about the same time (10-24-04): conservatives would have to inhabit a different universe with different rules (e.g. about gender) to be able to vote for Kerry.
I’m sure you can come up with plenty of your own examples. Facts make a difference when people share some underlying perspective on the world (the inherent moral superiority of U.S. policy, or not; I earned that SUV and vacation home; people are inherently wicked; and so forth). By itself new information can’t move people from one big idea to another.
This would be true even if the major media weren’t run by a very small number of rich people, if the schools and churches were democratic, if our employers weren’t scanning our email. As it is, we have to compete with legions of Karl Roves and James Dobsons. If our only banner is Just the Facts, Ma’am and our primary vehicle sound bytes on the 6 o’clock news, we are playing on their turf and by their rules. In the last several years hundreds of thousands have marched against corporatist trade conferences cities around the world. Speak truth to power, right? It’s a yawner for the press. They undercount the numbers and say the movement is losing steam. They broadcast the grandstanders who break windows, and ignore the issues. The police funnel the crowds into free silence ghettos far from the conferees and the press.
It’s not simply a matter of shaving our ideas down to appealing phrases. These have their uses. Our slogans may resonate with some of the stories that people carry in their heads but won’t speak unless they’re prompted. Our signs and chants signal pandering politicians that there is a market for truth-telling. But soundbytes and slogans are just too shallow to carry system-challenging arguments. Or, depending on their outrage quotient, they may strengthen the regime in the long run, by alienating people from any political participation at all.
There was a discussion on All Things Considered (NPR, 4-15-04) about attack ads in the presidential campaign. One guest expert explained that attack ads are designed, not to persuade people to change their votes --that’s way too big a gulf to cross, in most cases-- but to discourage opposing voters from voting at all. That’s something a smear campaign can manage with relative ease.
We don’t want to shut people out. We want to bring people into the process. That’s a core part of our project. Unlike the campaign consultants, we do have to move folks to big ideas (or, as I’ll argue below, help our best ideas emerge from cold storage).
• Self-interest is not self-evident.
• Self-interest is not self-evident.
It’s too slippery an idea. There are a lot more people hurt by this economy than rewarded, but people think about both the short- and the long-term, and switch back and forth as it suits all sorts of non-economic interests-- our needs for respect, structure, agency . . . . When is it in my interest to go on strike, given all the hazards and rewards, and the uncertainty of winning in the end? When does it fall to the boss’ interest to settle a strike? He’s thinking about all the lost production, but also about his long-term reputation for toughness. Halliburton kills and kills, but also provides paychecks and parades; how much I suck up to it depends on how I read the world in general. We can’t rely solely on some fixed idea of self-interest to guide our political strategies.
I wish I’d said to the Oak Ridge Teamster, “I know nuclear workers don’t want to make money by making other people sick.” Just by way of experiment. Sometimes we expect that people react only to immediate self-interest, and don’t see what Scott calls the “moral economy” behind our actions-- the web of stories and justifications that help us make sense of the world and move through it. No doubt the bomb workers have their own moral boundaries; I just don’t know where they lie.
• We won’t find enough usual suspects. That’s the term some of us use to describe the activists we can always count on, the people who show up again and again to fight the good fight. It’s a pretty narrow demographic, and we have to reach beyond it.
What makes some people more open to democracy than others? There have been all sorts of studies correlating personality and childhood experience with political tendencies (for a review of the literature, see Jost et al). For instance, some social scientists claim that people who are most afraid of change are more likely to be politically conservative. No doubt there are such relationships, but they’re very hard to measure. How can you tell that a person is intolerant except by her political acts? As a rigid, fearful introvert I should be a Republican, according to some studies.
The fact is, though, all sorts of people kiss ass or resist for all sorts of reasons, conscious or otherwise. Anyhow, to the extent that personality is a function of biology, it’s outside the reach of education. To the extent it’s a product of parenting, then it’s the “authoritarian” parents we have to reach, so that they can raise more democratic kids. To the extent that it’s what we tell ourselves --about how much control we have over our circumstances, for instance, or whether we are basically good or evil or neither-- then personality is product of our stories, and that’s something we can do better.
• So this is the other element, not much explored by political workers: the fact that how we learn shapes what we learn. The structures of our thinking and of the brain itself don’t determine our politics but they do tend to channel our perceptions and ideas in certain directions. These “cognitive-motivational processes” and the stories we derive from them can help explain our political choices.
• Democratic education doesn’t always reach far enough.
None of the points above are new; in the past century, many very insightful people have practiced and written about experience-based democratic education. I had a brief glimpse of that when I worked at a community education center in Tennessee. We’d hold workshops on racism, the South’s economy, rural school systems, the effects of strip mining and toxic waste, and many other concerns, and we’d invite low- and middle-income folks from all over the country. Diverse voices, a safe space, and a determination to act allowed us to tackle some very tough questions.
But we didn’t go far enough. We couldn’t:
# It’s easier to focus most of our educational effort with people like us. Where I worked, for instance, while the participants did in many ways represent quite a broad range of citizens, they also self-selected for activism. These were folks who’d already decided to act, to seek systemic change. What about the much greater number of people who may still be in reactive mode? (I mean this in two ways: actively reactionary --that is, fighting any small gain for democracy-- and aimlessly passive, responding late and inconsistently to pokes and prods from the political environment.) Often participants practiced what they’d say to the neighbors once they got home, which helped a lot in the context of campaigns for specific goals; but didn’t necessarily touch folks’ underlying world views.
# Democratic education programs needn’t be as rare as they are, but even so, tend to operate in a hothouse environment. Workshops insulate participants somewhat from the daily shriek of corporate culture, so we can hear each other. On our own, back in the community, we have to maintain our hard-won insights in the face of the constant corporate presence and reinforcement for our worst prejudices. We have to shout above the howl of racism, sexism, militarism and the rest of mainstream ideology; pass notes through the bars; or tap codes on the plumbing.
In structured workshops we can foster the time and trust to hear each other, and dig deep into the issues. At work, or in the mall, or on the bus, or behind a sign in a picket line, it’s much harder to get beyond the level of trading slogans. The slogans stand for something big and important, bigger sometimes than the sloganeers themselves see-- that’s what we have to excavate. It’s hard, though, to get at these core beliefs in the course of casual daily relationships.
# Education through action is not always available. The most effective workshops take place in the context of political action, where communities are pushing the boundaries and discovering what can be done. The kind of work we did was not just education for action, it was education through action. Attending a public hearing is a terrific lesson in power, if you know what to look for.
Even activists, however, don’t always have a chance to gather later on and discuss what they’ve seen. Two people taking part in the same political event might see
a) corporations have too much power in government, or
b) the government is deeply corrupt.
Both true, but there’s a world of difference in what they suggest in terms of action. One analysis gives us hope and focus, the other sends us home with an excuse to not bother.
Nor does the action-reflection process always include a close look at our underlying assumptions. If you believe, as many do, that people are good or bad by nature, you may see a corrupt government as something unchangeable, something indeed to stay far away from, instead of a set of people moved by interests and ideas that we can affect. Or you may thank god for getting the boss to give you a raise, instead of appreciating the hard and risky work of union members over many months.
And education-through-action doesn’t begin to engage the majority of our neighbors whom we are still trying to encourage to take the first step; whose political action to this point consists of cussing under their breath the powers that be, while practicing don’t-rock-the-boat.
# Because peer-learning situations require us to focus on building trust and strengthening relationships, we don’t always get to new understandings. We end up emphasizing what we have in common while papering over differences of interest, style and understanding. We can have very successful meetings but later on, when we go into battle, those divisions can come back to trash our efforts.
I remember how surprised I was to find that some of my colleagues and I had very different ideas of what a democratic organization might look like. To me it’s very obvious that we need large organizations to counter the corporations and their armies. Such massive groups, especially if they aspire to be democratic, would naturally require major management and coordination skills-- the kind I believe I have. This notion appalled my friends; having been betrayed by unions, national environmental groups, mainstream churches and the government itself, they figured the best alternative would be a loose network of local groups. Almost reflexively they acted to undercut anything more grandiose. We worked at cross-purposes for years, talking past each other without realizing it.
The urge to make nice was both a necessity and a potential trap in a series of environmental workshops I took part in. We worked hard to build a level of trust among the participants, most of whom were meeting each other for the first time. Sometimes we just couldn’t bridge the differences; I remember one particular conversation where big city and small town folks ended in frustrating and demoralizing misunderstandings. It was very painful, and made us want to shy away from the tough stuff. But we knew we had to get at the hard parts, and we regularly ran a session called Barriers and Contradictions, to do just that. I wrote at the time,
Perhaps the environmental movement can do what we were unable to do during the sixties, the end of the sixties, throughout the seventies, and that is, unite the various fight-back movements against the systems and the violence the system perpetuates . . . . Conflict isn’t necessarily negative. Conflict is what many times moves us forward. (HREC, STP #3).
We made progress. Given the short time we had and the need to build trust, however, we had to leave a lot of issues lying on the table-- everything from gender to war, child-rearing, and the role of prayer.
# Much of what passes for political education is little more than top-down training, as when advocacy groups campaign to turn out the vote, but offer little room to discuss the issues. Voter turnout is important, but not enough. Voting is only a small part of democratic participation. Unions and other membership groups often have broad visions of justice for the whole community, but when they don’t engage their own members in fashioning these, for whatever tactical reasons, it undermines their work in the long run. Newer ways to use the internet let the leadership respond better to their constituents, but that’s not the same as the rank and file debating and setting the agenda.
# Sometimes we trade opinions without addressing the underlying experiences, commitments, and frames of reference. I know a woman heavily involved in anti-abortion work. Ever since I’ve known her, she’s talked about “doing what it takes” to defend those who can’t defend themselves-- fetii, demented people in nursing homes, and the like. With the proper encouragement (readily available on the internet) I believe she'd be ready with the rag in the gasoline can. When she was a kid she witnessed multiple rapes of her younger sister by their father, and did nothing about it. It seems likely that if she ever had a chance to talk safely about what happened to her, if she could ever trust anyone enough to do that, she could become less judgmental of herself and others, and might find her way to a different political understanding.
I want to get at this underlay. Somehow we encode our knowledge and experience into rules of thumb for political action (and by that I mean everything from telling racist jokes to joining the military, cheating one’s employees, voting, riding a bike to work, or bringing the kids to a picket line). I want to understand how come I live in the same world as the guy next door, but he and I come to very different conclusions. I want to study our Stories.
It’s too slippery an idea. There are a lot more people hurt by this economy than rewarded, but people think about both the short- and the long-term, and switch back and forth as it suits all sorts of non-economic interests-- our needs for respect, structure, agency . . . . When is it in my interest to go on strike, given all the hazards and rewards, and the uncertainty of winning in the end? When does it fall to the boss’ interest to settle a strike? He’s thinking about all the lost production, but also about his long-term reputation for toughness. Halliburton kills and kills, but also provides paychecks and parades; how much I suck up to it depends on how I read the world in general. We can’t rely solely on some fixed idea of self-interest to guide our political strategies.
I wish I’d said to the Oak Ridge Teamster, “I know nuclear workers don’t want to make money by making other people sick.” Just by way of experiment. Sometimes we expect that people react only to immediate self-interest, and don’t see what Scott calls the “moral economy” behind our actions-- the web of stories and justifications that help us make sense of the world and move through it. No doubt the bomb workers have their own moral boundaries; I just don’t know where they lie.
• We won’t find enough usual suspects. That’s the term some of us use to describe the activists we can always count on, the people who show up again and again to fight the good fight. It’s a pretty narrow demographic, and we have to reach beyond it.
What makes some people more open to democracy than others? There have been all sorts of studies correlating personality and childhood experience with political tendencies (for a review of the literature, see Jost et al). For instance, some social scientists claim that people who are most afraid of change are more likely to be politically conservative. No doubt there are such relationships, but they’re very hard to measure. How can you tell that a person is intolerant except by her political acts? As a rigid, fearful introvert I should be a Republican, according to some studies.
The fact is, though, all sorts of people kiss ass or resist for all sorts of reasons, conscious or otherwise. Anyhow, to the extent that personality is a function of biology, it’s outside the reach of education. To the extent it’s a product of parenting, then it’s the “authoritarian” parents we have to reach, so that they can raise more democratic kids. To the extent that it’s what we tell ourselves --about how much control we have over our circumstances, for instance, or whether we are basically good or evil or neither-- then personality is product of our stories, and that’s something we can do better.
• So this is the other element, not much explored by political workers: the fact that how we learn shapes what we learn. The structures of our thinking and of the brain itself don’t determine our politics but they do tend to channel our perceptions and ideas in certain directions. These “cognitive-motivational processes” and the stories we derive from them can help explain our political choices.
• Democratic education doesn’t always reach far enough.
None of the points above are new; in the past century, many very insightful people have practiced and written about experience-based democratic education. I had a brief glimpse of that when I worked at a community education center in Tennessee. We’d hold workshops on racism, the South’s economy, rural school systems, the effects of strip mining and toxic waste, and many other concerns, and we’d invite low- and middle-income folks from all over the country. Diverse voices, a safe space, and a determination to act allowed us to tackle some very tough questions.
But we didn’t go far enough. We couldn’t:
# It’s easier to focus most of our educational effort with people like us. Where I worked, for instance, while the participants did in many ways represent quite a broad range of citizens, they also self-selected for activism. These were folks who’d already decided to act, to seek systemic change. What about the much greater number of people who may still be in reactive mode? (I mean this in two ways: actively reactionary --that is, fighting any small gain for democracy-- and aimlessly passive, responding late and inconsistently to pokes and prods from the political environment.) Often participants practiced what they’d say to the neighbors once they got home, which helped a lot in the context of campaigns for specific goals; but didn’t necessarily touch folks’ underlying world views.
# Democratic education programs needn’t be as rare as they are, but even so, tend to operate in a hothouse environment. Workshops insulate participants somewhat from the daily shriek of corporate culture, so we can hear each other. On our own, back in the community, we have to maintain our hard-won insights in the face of the constant corporate presence and reinforcement for our worst prejudices. We have to shout above the howl of racism, sexism, militarism and the rest of mainstream ideology; pass notes through the bars; or tap codes on the plumbing.
In structured workshops we can foster the time and trust to hear each other, and dig deep into the issues. At work, or in the mall, or on the bus, or behind a sign in a picket line, it’s much harder to get beyond the level of trading slogans. The slogans stand for something big and important, bigger sometimes than the sloganeers themselves see-- that’s what we have to excavate. It’s hard, though, to get at these core beliefs in the course of casual daily relationships.
# Education through action is not always available. The most effective workshops take place in the context of political action, where communities are pushing the boundaries and discovering what can be done. The kind of work we did was not just education for action, it was education through action. Attending a public hearing is a terrific lesson in power, if you know what to look for.
Even activists, however, don’t always have a chance to gather later on and discuss what they’ve seen. Two people taking part in the same political event might see
a) corporations have too much power in government, or
b) the government is deeply corrupt.
Both true, but there’s a world of difference in what they suggest in terms of action. One analysis gives us hope and focus, the other sends us home with an excuse to not bother.
Nor does the action-reflection process always include a close look at our underlying assumptions. If you believe, as many do, that people are good or bad by nature, you may see a corrupt government as something unchangeable, something indeed to stay far away from, instead of a set of people moved by interests and ideas that we can affect. Or you may thank god for getting the boss to give you a raise, instead of appreciating the hard and risky work of union members over many months.
And education-through-action doesn’t begin to engage the majority of our neighbors whom we are still trying to encourage to take the first step; whose political action to this point consists of cussing under their breath the powers that be, while practicing don’t-rock-the-boat.
# Because peer-learning situations require us to focus on building trust and strengthening relationships, we don’t always get to new understandings. We end up emphasizing what we have in common while papering over differences of interest, style and understanding. We can have very successful meetings but later on, when we go into battle, those divisions can come back to trash our efforts.
I remember how surprised I was to find that some of my colleagues and I had very different ideas of what a democratic organization might look like. To me it’s very obvious that we need large organizations to counter the corporations and their armies. Such massive groups, especially if they aspire to be democratic, would naturally require major management and coordination skills-- the kind I believe I have. This notion appalled my friends; having been betrayed by unions, national environmental groups, mainstream churches and the government itself, they figured the best alternative would be a loose network of local groups. Almost reflexively they acted to undercut anything more grandiose. We worked at cross-purposes for years, talking past each other without realizing it.
The urge to make nice was both a necessity and a potential trap in a series of environmental workshops I took part in. We worked hard to build a level of trust among the participants, most of whom were meeting each other for the first time. Sometimes we just couldn’t bridge the differences; I remember one particular conversation where big city and small town folks ended in frustrating and demoralizing misunderstandings. It was very painful, and made us want to shy away from the tough stuff. But we knew we had to get at the hard parts, and we regularly ran a session called Barriers and Contradictions, to do just that. I wrote at the time,
Perhaps the environmental movement can do what we were unable to do during the sixties, the end of the sixties, throughout the seventies, and that is, unite the various fight-back movements against the systems and the violence the system perpetuates . . . . Conflict isn’t necessarily negative. Conflict is what many times moves us forward. (HREC, STP #3).
We made progress. Given the short time we had and the need to build trust, however, we had to leave a lot of issues lying on the table-- everything from gender to war, child-rearing, and the role of prayer.
# Much of what passes for political education is little more than top-down training, as when advocacy groups campaign to turn out the vote, but offer little room to discuss the issues. Voter turnout is important, but not enough. Voting is only a small part of democratic participation. Unions and other membership groups often have broad visions of justice for the whole community, but when they don’t engage their own members in fashioning these, for whatever tactical reasons, it undermines their work in the long run. Newer ways to use the internet let the leadership respond better to their constituents, but that’s not the same as the rank and file debating and setting the agenda.
# Sometimes we trade opinions without addressing the underlying experiences, commitments, and frames of reference. I know a woman heavily involved in anti-abortion work. Ever since I’ve known her, she’s talked about “doing what it takes” to defend those who can’t defend themselves-- fetii, demented people in nursing homes, and the like. With the proper encouragement (readily available on the internet) I believe she'd be ready with the rag in the gasoline can. When she was a kid she witnessed multiple rapes of her younger sister by their father, and did nothing about it. It seems likely that if she ever had a chance to talk safely about what happened to her, if she could ever trust anyone enough to do that, she could become less judgmental of herself and others, and might find her way to a different political understanding.
I want to get at this underlay. Somehow we encode our knowledge and experience into rules of thumb for political action (and by that I mean everything from telling racist jokes to joining the military, cheating one’s employees, voting, riding a bike to work, or bringing the kids to a picket line). I want to understand how come I live in the same world as the guy next door, but he and I come to very different conclusions. I want to study our Stories.
The story telling species.
The story telling species.
We are the only critters that tell stories. We can guess that people were telling stories the day they invented language, sometime in the last 100,000 years (the earliest art forms we know of --the earliest symbols-- go back about 70,000 years).
We tell all kinds of stories-- about where we came from, what’s possible for us to do, why there are differences among us, what it means to succeed or fail, what it means to live and then not live any more. We don't have just one story, though we are driven to act as if we do. Our stories are based on how we interpret our experience, and no one story can explain everything, and no two stories can be perfectly consistent.
In recent decades stories have been the focus of a field of study called narrative psychology. The idea is that we base our sense of self and actions in the world on the stories we have constructed. We make up stories about the world and ourselves to guide our decisions. Our stories explain how the world works, who we are and what to do. In an important sense, “We are the stories we tell” to ourselves and each other (Gerbner 7).
We know that stories are key to integrating our thinking and behavior, and our communities as well. We know that we see the world through the lenses of our stories; they can make some things easier to see and others much harder. Once established, they can be very hard to change.
• Political stories.
The reason I want to know more about stories is that they precede and in some way enable political action. Politicians and pollsters have known forever that we vote our stories, or the lies they can sell us. Democratic educators help people tell their personal stories, weave them together to form a stronger, truer whole, and use them to guide our political decisions.
As the cultural divide in this country deepens (or rather, as the authoritarian perspective loses its near-monopoly of political talk), the political-story model has gained currency among the professors, pundits and political consultants. Capek wrote of “The ‘environmental justice’ frame” back in 1993, while Ariana Huffington speaks of the “frames” that bound our political views. In 2005 Safire complained on "Meet the Press" that "we're in the grip of a narrative" of a failed presidency -- which could be corrected, of course, not by competent policy but by changing the narrative. And Halliburton's liar-in-chief Karl Rove was notorious for
his unshakeable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't-- whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.
"What's needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a 'big-picture case based on core principles." . . . Instead the Democrats float bland Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like 'Together, America Can Do Better'" (Rich, NYT 6-18-06).
It's been decades since I been to school, I missed generations of professor-talk, so I'm not sure how the playazz come by their "narrative" narrative. But I do remember Kuhn's 1962 book about scientific paradigms, and how that informed a lot of insightful or silly cultural and political work. Politics-as-story is not just a crit/lit conceit, already passé, or a set of borrowed buzzwords. It's powerful because it helps explain how we think and act politically. Story-telling is a model of thinking that corresponds in some part to how our minds really work.
So what do I mean by story? I was not shocked to realize that the consultant types tend to talk of stories as a sort of commodity, that can be packaged and sold like SUVs, or as a panel of hot-buttons that they push to make us jerk in unison-- in other words, the same old product with a new name. Dawkins talks of “memes”, a foolish attempt to attribute gene-like stability and transmissibility to what the rest of us call “ideas”. At other times "narrative" seems to be used as a more discreet term for stupid prejudice-- Those People are stuck in a rut of ignorance.
I've heard democratic educators talk about stories mainly as the expression of people's experience; as in, I some from this kind of background, these have been my struggles, this is what I want for my future. But I think stories are more fundamental yet.
When I capitalize Story, I mean a unit of thought that brings together for one person or many a hundred different ideas and experiences. A Story is an explanation that does not simply express our experience but actively shapes it, just as Kuhn's "paradigms" shape scientific research, and determine the very questions that we ask. A Story in this sense is something like a paradigm-in-progress, a big idea under construction, a way to express and make sense of the world. We may draw on very diverse experiences to build our Stories, but they can become very solid, lasting and apparently unified frameworks that guide our political commitments.
Maybe it would help if I sketched a couple examples. My Government Story may have started this way:
--I value sharing. I grew up with a fair passel of siblings. My father's mediocre career did not inspire me with visions of great individual achievement. I was still pretty young when I touristed through Southeast Asia, very well treated by strangers who were often themselves on the brink of starvation. I fear being dependent on any single individual, so instead I depend on broad public access to education, housing, and health care.
--I hated school. I hated the rules, too, but followed them well enough to please the teachers. I have some of the skills that let me take advantage of large organizations, as employee or consumer.
--My image of arrogant, childish, and destructive capitalists is much more vivid than that of arrogant, meddling, sinister government bureaucrats, though I grew up with little personal experience of either. I was born during Truman’s presidency; New Deal hopefulness was still in the air.
--From there it was studying history and politics in school, and slowly edging my way into political work. My Government Story says: democratic government is good.
I'll have to imagine what the Anti-Government Story consists of:
--Daddy as the lone hero, put upon by his petty bosses. Daddy become Batman and Rambo, the lone-wolf avengers, or maybe the 113 clones of maverick TV detective, scorning bureaucrats and bad guys alike. The technical geniuses of Heinlein and a dozen other science fiction writers, thwarting the smothering hands of petty bureaucrats. Daddy Warbucks, with his faithful oriental servants, jetting from continent to continent to chastise commie union leaders.
--the direct experience of mean-spirited, judgmental, uncaring, incompetent, burned-out bureaucrats in court, at the Welfare Dept. or Motor Vehicles, the visit from Codes Enforcement, etc. (Plenty of private sector bureaucrats, too, but somehow they all add up to Big Gummint.)
--intrusiveness: Mountains of nearly unintelligible paper for tax returns or business loans. Zoning regulations. Boxes to check race on questionnaires. In a workshop one day we were talking about civil disobedience. Is it ever OK to disobey the law? Yes, a couple women piped up, like when the government won't let you beat your children. Then, too, it's the government that buses kids to integrate schools, and forces them to study science.
--promises and expectations. Private sector bosses can be both more forbidding and also much cozier than impersonal, rule-laden bureaucracies. Most of us spend far more time with the workplace boss. Government workers are supposed to take care of me, that's their job. What I really appreciate is the card my employer sent last Christmas-- so thoughtful!
--foreign territory: waiting rooms crowded with strangers, high counters like barriers, maybe black people behind the counters, sometimes signs in other languages, vast but mysteriously inaccessible records. Some offices don't display religious symbols.
--corruption: We know more about government crimes than private: terrorizing Native, Black and Chicano communities; sterilizing low-income women; the radiation, syphilis and LSD experiments; McCarthyism; Watergate; Waco; Viet Nam, El Salvador, Iraq . . . .
These experiences and trainings can all add up to a militant hatred for, not corrupt government, but government in general (except for the military).
When I compare these story elements, it becomes clearer to me that our attitudes towards taxes, war, abortion, affirmative action, sex, drugs and rock & roll are intertwined with a much larger set of ideas and experiences, and that no amount of new information will change my neighbors' minds (or my own) until we can untangle these threads and themes and fashion new stories.
Political work is all about stories, and that's nothing new. When the first priest-king climbed a pyramid to cut out the heart of a captive and hold it up for the crowd to see, he was telling a story to keep himself in power. But democrats have no pyramids or slaves. We have to unravel the slave stories even as we work to assemble our own big story from a million personal tales. At the same time as we tell our stories, we have to be listening to our neighbors’. A colleague said that when we share our stories, and stitch them together into a meaningful whole, we will have a truer understanding of the world and the foundation for a strategy of liberation.
What I want to do here is to consider how we make stories in the first place, how we share them, and how they guide our political work. I want to encourage more political conversation in our daily work, and more effective conversation, by getting at our deepest political hopes and fears.
We are the only critters that tell stories. We can guess that people were telling stories the day they invented language, sometime in the last 100,000 years (the earliest art forms we know of --the earliest symbols-- go back about 70,000 years).
We tell all kinds of stories-- about where we came from, what’s possible for us to do, why there are differences among us, what it means to succeed or fail, what it means to live and then not live any more. We don't have just one story, though we are driven to act as if we do. Our stories are based on how we interpret our experience, and no one story can explain everything, and no two stories can be perfectly consistent.
In recent decades stories have been the focus of a field of study called narrative psychology. The idea is that we base our sense of self and actions in the world on the stories we have constructed. We make up stories about the world and ourselves to guide our decisions. Our stories explain how the world works, who we are and what to do. In an important sense, “We are the stories we tell” to ourselves and each other (Gerbner 7).
We know that stories are key to integrating our thinking and behavior, and our communities as well. We know that we see the world through the lenses of our stories; they can make some things easier to see and others much harder. Once established, they can be very hard to change.
• Political stories.
The reason I want to know more about stories is that they precede and in some way enable political action. Politicians and pollsters have known forever that we vote our stories, or the lies they can sell us. Democratic educators help people tell their personal stories, weave them together to form a stronger, truer whole, and use them to guide our political decisions.
As the cultural divide in this country deepens (or rather, as the authoritarian perspective loses its near-monopoly of political talk), the political-story model has gained currency among the professors, pundits and political consultants. Capek wrote of “The ‘environmental justice’ frame” back in 1993, while Ariana Huffington speaks of the “frames” that bound our political views. In 2005 Safire complained on "Meet the Press" that "we're in the grip of a narrative" of a failed presidency -- which could be corrected, of course, not by competent policy but by changing the narrative. And Halliburton's liar-in-chief Karl Rove was notorious for
his unshakeable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't-- whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.
"What's needed, wrote Michael Tomasky in an influential American Prospect essay last fall, is a 'big-picture case based on core principles." . . . Instead the Democrats float bland Band-Aid nostrums and bumper-sticker marketing strategies like 'Together, America Can Do Better'" (Rich, NYT 6-18-06).
It's been decades since I been to school, I missed generations of professor-talk, so I'm not sure how the playazz come by their "narrative" narrative. But I do remember Kuhn's 1962 book about scientific paradigms, and how that informed a lot of insightful or silly cultural and political work. Politics-as-story is not just a crit/lit conceit, already passé, or a set of borrowed buzzwords. It's powerful because it helps explain how we think and act politically. Story-telling is a model of thinking that corresponds in some part to how our minds really work.
So what do I mean by story? I was not shocked to realize that the consultant types tend to talk of stories as a sort of commodity, that can be packaged and sold like SUVs, or as a panel of hot-buttons that they push to make us jerk in unison-- in other words, the same old product with a new name. Dawkins talks of “memes”, a foolish attempt to attribute gene-like stability and transmissibility to what the rest of us call “ideas”. At other times "narrative" seems to be used as a more discreet term for stupid prejudice-- Those People are stuck in a rut of ignorance.
I've heard democratic educators talk about stories mainly as the expression of people's experience; as in, I some from this kind of background, these have been my struggles, this is what I want for my future. But I think stories are more fundamental yet.
When I capitalize Story, I mean a unit of thought that brings together for one person or many a hundred different ideas and experiences. A Story is an explanation that does not simply express our experience but actively shapes it, just as Kuhn's "paradigms" shape scientific research, and determine the very questions that we ask. A Story in this sense is something like a paradigm-in-progress, a big idea under construction, a way to express and make sense of the world. We may draw on very diverse experiences to build our Stories, but they can become very solid, lasting and apparently unified frameworks that guide our political commitments.
Maybe it would help if I sketched a couple examples. My Government Story may have started this way:
--I value sharing. I grew up with a fair passel of siblings. My father's mediocre career did not inspire me with visions of great individual achievement. I was still pretty young when I touristed through Southeast Asia, very well treated by strangers who were often themselves on the brink of starvation. I fear being dependent on any single individual, so instead I depend on broad public access to education, housing, and health care.
--I hated school. I hated the rules, too, but followed them well enough to please the teachers. I have some of the skills that let me take advantage of large organizations, as employee or consumer.
--My image of arrogant, childish, and destructive capitalists is much more vivid than that of arrogant, meddling, sinister government bureaucrats, though I grew up with little personal experience of either. I was born during Truman’s presidency; New Deal hopefulness was still in the air.
--From there it was studying history and politics in school, and slowly edging my way into political work. My Government Story says: democratic government is good.
I'll have to imagine what the Anti-Government Story consists of:
--Daddy as the lone hero, put upon by his petty bosses. Daddy become Batman and Rambo, the lone-wolf avengers, or maybe the 113 clones of maverick TV detective, scorning bureaucrats and bad guys alike. The technical geniuses of Heinlein and a dozen other science fiction writers, thwarting the smothering hands of petty bureaucrats. Daddy Warbucks, with his faithful oriental servants, jetting from continent to continent to chastise commie union leaders.
--the direct experience of mean-spirited, judgmental, uncaring, incompetent, burned-out bureaucrats in court, at the Welfare Dept. or Motor Vehicles, the visit from Codes Enforcement, etc. (Plenty of private sector bureaucrats, too, but somehow they all add up to Big Gummint.)
--intrusiveness: Mountains of nearly unintelligible paper for tax returns or business loans. Zoning regulations. Boxes to check race on questionnaires. In a workshop one day we were talking about civil disobedience. Is it ever OK to disobey the law? Yes, a couple women piped up, like when the government won't let you beat your children. Then, too, it's the government that buses kids to integrate schools, and forces them to study science.
--promises and expectations. Private sector bosses can be both more forbidding and also much cozier than impersonal, rule-laden bureaucracies. Most of us spend far more time with the workplace boss. Government workers are supposed to take care of me, that's their job. What I really appreciate is the card my employer sent last Christmas-- so thoughtful!
--foreign territory: waiting rooms crowded with strangers, high counters like barriers, maybe black people behind the counters, sometimes signs in other languages, vast but mysteriously inaccessible records. Some offices don't display religious symbols.
--corruption: We know more about government crimes than private: terrorizing Native, Black and Chicano communities; sterilizing low-income women; the radiation, syphilis and LSD experiments; McCarthyism; Watergate; Waco; Viet Nam, El Salvador, Iraq . . . .
These experiences and trainings can all add up to a militant hatred for, not corrupt government, but government in general (except for the military).
When I compare these story elements, it becomes clearer to me that our attitudes towards taxes, war, abortion, affirmative action, sex, drugs and rock & roll are intertwined with a much larger set of ideas and experiences, and that no amount of new information will change my neighbors' minds (or my own) until we can untangle these threads and themes and fashion new stories.
Political work is all about stories, and that's nothing new. When the first priest-king climbed a pyramid to cut out the heart of a captive and hold it up for the crowd to see, he was telling a story to keep himself in power. But democrats have no pyramids or slaves. We have to unravel the slave stories even as we work to assemble our own big story from a million personal tales. At the same time as we tell our stories, we have to be listening to our neighbors’. A colleague said that when we share our stories, and stitch them together into a meaningful whole, we will have a truer understanding of the world and the foundation for a strategy of liberation.
What I want to do here is to consider how we make stories in the first place, how we share them, and how they guide our political work. I want to encourage more political conversation in our daily work, and more effective conversation, by getting at our deepest political hopes and fears.
• Stories matter.
• Stories matter.
Most of all it’s been hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that our beliefs shape our decisions, rather than the other way around. After all, so much of what we tell each other are evasions or rationalizations after the fact, high-sounding excuses for selfish or fearful actions. It seems a lot easier for us to find a principle that justifies what we want to do, than to follow our principles when they run against our desires.
# Making excuses. For instance, recently I was reading Harris' The End of Faith. It's an ambitious critique of religion in general. Like a lot of commentors, however, Harris reserves a special hostility for Islam. He backs up his argument with plenty of quotes from the Koran to show that holy war is a central, not deviant, element of Islam. Now, I haven't personally compared the body count in the various holy scriptures, so I can't be sure which god is the most bloodsoaked. But it's not fair to blame the world's violence on religion. Very few people murder or enslave --or sacrifice their own lives-- because Jesus whispered in their ears. We have much less mysterious reasons for what we do. Religions don't govern (though religious elites sometimes do, as in Iran); at most, they make rulers’ policies more acceptable. The same must be said for the many racist, sexist, militarist, boot-licking corporate scientists.
In fact, people all over the world show the same wide range of behaviors no matter what religion we belong to (or don't), and we always seem to find some authority to justify our actions. Let me take just one example from hundreds you and I could come up with. Theravada Buddhism claims, among other things, that there is no creator or savior god, that suffering is caused by attachment to the world, and that escape from countless rebirths requires extinguishing the self. Now you'd think that folks with these beliefs would act very differently from you or I. But according to Melvin Spiro, that's not the case. He found that Burmese Buddhists have acquired a whole set of religious practices that permit them to strive for wealth, kill animals and people, and seek help from various gods and spirits. Perhaps you can think of Christian practices that seem a stretch from Scripture-- say, that line about not killing.
We can likewise discount all sorts of political dogma. We invaded Iraq to spread freedom. Freedom means tax breaks for billionaires. Freedom means regulating sex but not the economy. We protect freedom by punishing immigrants. My neighbor said we have to save Operation Iraqi Freedom by censoring TV news. You know all these.
We tell a lot of stories just to make ourselves feel better. I want to feel valuable and valued by the bosses, so I tell myself how superior I am to the rabble. I want to steal my neighbor’s land without losing my sense of self-righteousness so I convince myself and the judge that she’s a witch; he hangs her forthwith. I’m afraid to stand up to the boss so I blame women who stand up to me. Endless ugly stories to cover our ugliest impulses. If stories are only the public excuses for doing what we want to do, they are not important; they are only misdirection to cover our true motives.
My point isn't that we are merely hypocrites, but that we can easily tailor our beliefs to our practices-- and that's a universal habit. And if our beliefs are so elastic --so convenient-- how can we insist that they determine our behavior?
# Stories guide us by explaining the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
--Alisdair McIntyre (Frykholm 16).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In fact many stories are more than excuses. We really do need ways to understand the world and what we need and how to get it. We develop our own stories from the stories we hear, the experiences we have, and what we want; in turn, our stories tell us what we can do and the best way to do it.
For example, it’s not always obvious that helping our neighbor or ripping him off would benefit or harm us. Two people in similar circumstances, with similar experience, may come to very different conclusions. My story might tell me that family is sacred, but that I have no responsibility for the folks across the street or on the other side of the world. Or I might see breaking and entering as immoral, and risky to boot, but spraying my lawn (and the neighborhood) with pesticides as a perfectly respectable thing to do. Knowing the law or the effects of malathion or the pawn shop value of the neighbor’s CD player won’t really help us understand these political calculations. For that we need to turn to the stories that encode our needs, experience, and strategies. Many experiments and surveys have demonstrated the common-sense proposition that our political acts depend on our understanding of the context and our own roles.
We also see every day how lies preempt truer stories and keep us from solving our problems. The folks who take their privileges for granted --who imagine it’s their own moral superiority that makes them healthy, or rich, or white, or straight-- will never understand their neighbors, because they cannot understand themselves. People who think conflicts in the Middle East are just protrusions of a much vaster, cosmic, necessary war between good and evil will continue to resist building peace in the here and now. Those of us who imagine the triumph of unregulated capitalism is somehow ordained by nature, like gravity or entropy, have no way to prepare for or deal with either global resource crises or the commercialized dissolution of our communities. If we define responsibility in such a way that blowing up a bus is terrorism, while the much deadlier policies that deny health care to millions, spew poisons into the air and water, and arm gangsters have no author, how can we ever hope to trace basic cause and effect in our world? If we understand freedom to be tearing across the mountains in an ATV, or treating other people like dirt without any backtalk, we might despise the people who think first of food, shelter and peace. If we think social rules pre-exist society, that their purpose is to control naturally weak and destructive people rather than to help us, then we have no way to justify adjusting the rules to our needs. If our solidarity with the oppressed is exhausted by defending bunnies or fetuses --so much cuter than ugly, messy, annoying people-- how can we even see ourselves and our fellows?
Some other poison paradigms: the ideas that
• order cannot exist without someone to tell us what to do
• we can trust authorities, because they know more than we do, because they have to keep secrets, but we can trust them because
• gods, presidents and CEOs can claim credit for all that’s good in the world, whereas suffering and killing are clearly the fault of the natural order, or people with funny names
• the United States is a uniquely good force in the world; indeed, it has a divine mission
• nature can be industrialized like some immortal factory robot, churning out endless treasure at ever increasing rates, with never a faltering, breakdown or undesigned variation-- and we can bet our very survival on such a fantasy
• things must be getting better because there is more stuff to buy.
# Stories to solve problems and build democracy. Our stories matter in another sense, too: they are one of the few fields where we can achieve an edge over the control freaks. Even in crisis, the corporate/Christian partnership has a vast superiority in terms of communicative and coercive resources. I’ll be so happy if the likes of Al Franken can establish a viable national leftish radio talk network, and if MoveOn doubles the funding going to liberal programs. I am marginally less grumpy since a Democrat took the White House. But there’s no way grassroots folks can outspend or out-threaten Halliburton and the other local gods. There’s no Democrat in sight who would challenge the institutional bases of Halliburton’s power, because there is not yet the popular base for such a project. (Obama has written about this, but showed precious little effort to change it in his campaign.) There are few legislative campaigns which, even when they win, undermine Halliburton’s authority. The fitful Living Wage campaign of the 1990s was one of the exceptions, because it demands that we think about sharing wealth on the basis of need-- which, far more than the relatively tiny cost, is why it was so bitterly resisted. When the Halliburton’s Treasury Secretary Paulson started buying bank stock at the end of 2008, to rescue big investors, he specified that he was buying non-voting stock: We’ll give you the money, but we don’t dare tell you what to do with it. It didn’t even occur to Osama’s finance gurus to challenge AIG’s awarding of hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars to its top execs, until the national wave of revulsion.
I think the financial crisis is going to wipe away some of this fussiness. Big government is back!-- at whose service remains to be seen. Nonetheless, we have to expect the corporations will continue to dominate the media and the courts and the economy without a much more fundamental political shift in this country. So we have to push radical change against and within very formidable institutions. We’ll have to reach beyond the standard sources of power, stop playing by the rules, and mobilize folks even as we are entangled in business as usual. Telling stories more effectively can help us do that.
We don’t necessarily need new stories. Folks already have all sorts of helpful understandings and strategies. A big part of our task is to help these emerge above the stinking cesspool of lies, spread them around and put them into action. We’ve always claimed to be The People, United, who Will Never Be Defeated. Well, the only guide to unity and victory and what we do after that are the stories we tell.
Segrest starts Memoirs of a Race Traitor this way: "I have struggled to find a voice to bring you back these stories [of racism and fighting racism]. . . . Could I turn bits and pieces of a large, bloody, violent puzzle into a coherent story that would move both ordinary and powerful people?" (p. 1). I have seen how powerful stories can bring us together or tear us apart; how they can set us up for submission or for successful resistance. And if some stories are not true, they still serve a purpose, creepy though it might be. It’s up to us to figure out what that is, and expose the lie. In this set of essays, I want to examine how we make our stories, and why, and maybe how we can change them to be more truthful and useful.
# Ideas and institutions. I don’t know if you remember Werner Erhard’s The Hunger Project. Yeah, he’s the guy who invented the est seminars, very big in spiritual circles circa 1971. Somebody in the organization decided it would be nice to help poor people. So they set up scores of discussion groups around the country, to discuss hunger. The idea was that people were starving because they weren’t thinking right about hunger. They were too negative. They just needed to think more positively.
That is not my claim.
To be clear: when we try to choose the best path for ourselves and our communities, the biggest obstacle is not lack of understanding but lack of choice. The main reason my neighbors and I don’t always have the same politics is that we don’t share the same range of options. If we all had access to good education, health care and jobs, we’d be a lot better situated to resist the killers who run this planet. Very few of us would choose to rob our neighbors and the next generation if we had easier ways to make a living and explore the world. So if we can push the new president to put into place a better health care system and reestablish some base level of worker rights, that will help make room for a more productive politics. Defending and enlarging the web of public social services has the net effect of making us less dependent on the axis of weasels (which is why they are so intent on trashing it.) But a healthy, functioning democracy requires changes even more fundamental.
Again, the puzzle is how to structure a better society before we achieve a shared understanding of the common interest. As long as the corporate-religious alliance has millions of dependents, it has the power to set the rules. We have to illumine and build the common interest despite a thousand institutions and policies designed to divide us. So thinking nice thoughts is not the whole of the revolution. Sharing them is a good way to start.
Here’s how I understand the civil rights and women’s movements of the last half century: the struggle had enough disruptive power to force institutional changes, and at the same time generated a substantial though often fairly shallow buy-in by broad sections of the nation. The incompleteness of our understanding of and commitment to these democratic gains, the unequal way the costs were spread, and the shifts in focus from education to regulation allowed right-wing preachers and politicians to mobilize many people in a fierce backlash against their neighbors.
We also know that the Reaganists were unable to overturn all the institutional advances, and that fact of somewhat greater opportunity has, over two generations, truly changed how most of us think and act. (For this reason I don’t agree with Piven and Cloward [1977] that institutionalizing reforms must inevitably weaken and corrupt political movements, though certainly we see plenty of examples.) Then I think how much further along we could have been, had we continued to push the debate even after the first policy wins.
To me, this business of political education is not a substitute for radical institutional change, but the indispensable preparation for it, and the ongoing necessity as we implement those changes.
Most of all it’s been hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that our beliefs shape our decisions, rather than the other way around. After all, so much of what we tell each other are evasions or rationalizations after the fact, high-sounding excuses for selfish or fearful actions. It seems a lot easier for us to find a principle that justifies what we want to do, than to follow our principles when they run against our desires.
# Making excuses. For instance, recently I was reading Harris' The End of Faith. It's an ambitious critique of religion in general. Like a lot of commentors, however, Harris reserves a special hostility for Islam. He backs up his argument with plenty of quotes from the Koran to show that holy war is a central, not deviant, element of Islam. Now, I haven't personally compared the body count in the various holy scriptures, so I can't be sure which god is the most bloodsoaked. But it's not fair to blame the world's violence on religion. Very few people murder or enslave --or sacrifice their own lives-- because Jesus whispered in their ears. We have much less mysterious reasons for what we do. Religions don't govern (though religious elites sometimes do, as in Iran); at most, they make rulers’ policies more acceptable. The same must be said for the many racist, sexist, militarist, boot-licking corporate scientists.
In fact, people all over the world show the same wide range of behaviors no matter what religion we belong to (or don't), and we always seem to find some authority to justify our actions. Let me take just one example from hundreds you and I could come up with. Theravada Buddhism claims, among other things, that there is no creator or savior god, that suffering is caused by attachment to the world, and that escape from countless rebirths requires extinguishing the self. Now you'd think that folks with these beliefs would act very differently from you or I. But according to Melvin Spiro, that's not the case. He found that Burmese Buddhists have acquired a whole set of religious practices that permit them to strive for wealth, kill animals and people, and seek help from various gods and spirits. Perhaps you can think of Christian practices that seem a stretch from Scripture-- say, that line about not killing.
We can likewise discount all sorts of political dogma. We invaded Iraq to spread freedom. Freedom means tax breaks for billionaires. Freedom means regulating sex but not the economy. We protect freedom by punishing immigrants. My neighbor said we have to save Operation Iraqi Freedom by censoring TV news. You know all these.
We tell a lot of stories just to make ourselves feel better. I want to feel valuable and valued by the bosses, so I tell myself how superior I am to the rabble. I want to steal my neighbor’s land without losing my sense of self-righteousness so I convince myself and the judge that she’s a witch; he hangs her forthwith. I’m afraid to stand up to the boss so I blame women who stand up to me. Endless ugly stories to cover our ugliest impulses. If stories are only the public excuses for doing what we want to do, they are not important; they are only misdirection to cover our true motives.
My point isn't that we are merely hypocrites, but that we can easily tailor our beliefs to our practices-- and that's a universal habit. And if our beliefs are so elastic --so convenient-- how can we insist that they determine our behavior?
# Stories guide us by explaining the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
--Alisdair McIntyre (Frykholm 16).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In fact many stories are more than excuses. We really do need ways to understand the world and what we need and how to get it. We develop our own stories from the stories we hear, the experiences we have, and what we want; in turn, our stories tell us what we can do and the best way to do it.
For example, it’s not always obvious that helping our neighbor or ripping him off would benefit or harm us. Two people in similar circumstances, with similar experience, may come to very different conclusions. My story might tell me that family is sacred, but that I have no responsibility for the folks across the street or on the other side of the world. Or I might see breaking and entering as immoral, and risky to boot, but spraying my lawn (and the neighborhood) with pesticides as a perfectly respectable thing to do. Knowing the law or the effects of malathion or the pawn shop value of the neighbor’s CD player won’t really help us understand these political calculations. For that we need to turn to the stories that encode our needs, experience, and strategies. Many experiments and surveys have demonstrated the common-sense proposition that our political acts depend on our understanding of the context and our own roles.
We also see every day how lies preempt truer stories and keep us from solving our problems. The folks who take their privileges for granted --who imagine it’s their own moral superiority that makes them healthy, or rich, or white, or straight-- will never understand their neighbors, because they cannot understand themselves. People who think conflicts in the Middle East are just protrusions of a much vaster, cosmic, necessary war between good and evil will continue to resist building peace in the here and now. Those of us who imagine the triumph of unregulated capitalism is somehow ordained by nature, like gravity or entropy, have no way to prepare for or deal with either global resource crises or the commercialized dissolution of our communities. If we define responsibility in such a way that blowing up a bus is terrorism, while the much deadlier policies that deny health care to millions, spew poisons into the air and water, and arm gangsters have no author, how can we ever hope to trace basic cause and effect in our world? If we understand freedom to be tearing across the mountains in an ATV, or treating other people like dirt without any backtalk, we might despise the people who think first of food, shelter and peace. If we think social rules pre-exist society, that their purpose is to control naturally weak and destructive people rather than to help us, then we have no way to justify adjusting the rules to our needs. If our solidarity with the oppressed is exhausted by defending bunnies or fetuses --so much cuter than ugly, messy, annoying people-- how can we even see ourselves and our fellows?
Some other poison paradigms: the ideas that
• order cannot exist without someone to tell us what to do
• we can trust authorities, because they know more than we do, because they have to keep secrets, but we can trust them because
• gods, presidents and CEOs can claim credit for all that’s good in the world, whereas suffering and killing are clearly the fault of the natural order, or people with funny names
• the United States is a uniquely good force in the world; indeed, it has a divine mission
• nature can be industrialized like some immortal factory robot, churning out endless treasure at ever increasing rates, with never a faltering, breakdown or undesigned variation-- and we can bet our very survival on such a fantasy
• things must be getting better because there is more stuff to buy.
# Stories to solve problems and build democracy. Our stories matter in another sense, too: they are one of the few fields where we can achieve an edge over the control freaks. Even in crisis, the corporate/Christian partnership has a vast superiority in terms of communicative and coercive resources. I’ll be so happy if the likes of Al Franken can establish a viable national leftish radio talk network, and if MoveOn doubles the funding going to liberal programs. I am marginally less grumpy since a Democrat took the White House. But there’s no way grassroots folks can outspend or out-threaten Halliburton and the other local gods. There’s no Democrat in sight who would challenge the institutional bases of Halliburton’s power, because there is not yet the popular base for such a project. (Obama has written about this, but showed precious little effort to change it in his campaign.) There are few legislative campaigns which, even when they win, undermine Halliburton’s authority. The fitful Living Wage campaign of the 1990s was one of the exceptions, because it demands that we think about sharing wealth on the basis of need-- which, far more than the relatively tiny cost, is why it was so bitterly resisted. When the Halliburton’s Treasury Secretary Paulson started buying bank stock at the end of 2008, to rescue big investors, he specified that he was buying non-voting stock: We’ll give you the money, but we don’t dare tell you what to do with it. It didn’t even occur to Osama’s finance gurus to challenge AIG’s awarding of hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars to its top execs, until the national wave of revulsion.
I think the financial crisis is going to wipe away some of this fussiness. Big government is back!-- at whose service remains to be seen. Nonetheless, we have to expect the corporations will continue to dominate the media and the courts and the economy without a much more fundamental political shift in this country. So we have to push radical change against and within very formidable institutions. We’ll have to reach beyond the standard sources of power, stop playing by the rules, and mobilize folks even as we are entangled in business as usual. Telling stories more effectively can help us do that.
We don’t necessarily need new stories. Folks already have all sorts of helpful understandings and strategies. A big part of our task is to help these emerge above the stinking cesspool of lies, spread them around and put them into action. We’ve always claimed to be The People, United, who Will Never Be Defeated. Well, the only guide to unity and victory and what we do after that are the stories we tell.
Segrest starts Memoirs of a Race Traitor this way: "I have struggled to find a voice to bring you back these stories [of racism and fighting racism]. . . . Could I turn bits and pieces of a large, bloody, violent puzzle into a coherent story that would move both ordinary and powerful people?" (p. 1). I have seen how powerful stories can bring us together or tear us apart; how they can set us up for submission or for successful resistance. And if some stories are not true, they still serve a purpose, creepy though it might be. It’s up to us to figure out what that is, and expose the lie. In this set of essays, I want to examine how we make our stories, and why, and maybe how we can change them to be more truthful and useful.
# Ideas and institutions. I don’t know if you remember Werner Erhard’s The Hunger Project. Yeah, he’s the guy who invented the est seminars, very big in spiritual circles circa 1971. Somebody in the organization decided it would be nice to help poor people. So they set up scores of discussion groups around the country, to discuss hunger. The idea was that people were starving because they weren’t thinking right about hunger. They were too negative. They just needed to think more positively.
That is not my claim.
To be clear: when we try to choose the best path for ourselves and our communities, the biggest obstacle is not lack of understanding but lack of choice. The main reason my neighbors and I don’t always have the same politics is that we don’t share the same range of options. If we all had access to good education, health care and jobs, we’d be a lot better situated to resist the killers who run this planet. Very few of us would choose to rob our neighbors and the next generation if we had easier ways to make a living and explore the world. So if we can push the new president to put into place a better health care system and reestablish some base level of worker rights, that will help make room for a more productive politics. Defending and enlarging the web of public social services has the net effect of making us less dependent on the axis of weasels (which is why they are so intent on trashing it.) But a healthy, functioning democracy requires changes even more fundamental.
Again, the puzzle is how to structure a better society before we achieve a shared understanding of the common interest. As long as the corporate-religious alliance has millions of dependents, it has the power to set the rules. We have to illumine and build the common interest despite a thousand institutions and policies designed to divide us. So thinking nice thoughts is not the whole of the revolution. Sharing them is a good way to start.
Here’s how I understand the civil rights and women’s movements of the last half century: the struggle had enough disruptive power to force institutional changes, and at the same time generated a substantial though often fairly shallow buy-in by broad sections of the nation. The incompleteness of our understanding of and commitment to these democratic gains, the unequal way the costs were spread, and the shifts in focus from education to regulation allowed right-wing preachers and politicians to mobilize many people in a fierce backlash against their neighbors.
We also know that the Reaganists were unable to overturn all the institutional advances, and that fact of somewhat greater opportunity has, over two generations, truly changed how most of us think and act. (For this reason I don’t agree with Piven and Cloward [1977] that institutionalizing reforms must inevitably weaken and corrupt political movements, though certainly we see plenty of examples.) Then I think how much further along we could have been, had we continued to push the debate even after the first policy wins.
To me, this business of political education is not a substitute for radical institutional change, but the indispensable preparation for it, and the ongoing necessity as we implement those changes.
A Provocation.
A Provocation.
Here’s the proposition. I’m going to sketch out some of what we know about how we construct our explanations and cling to them or change them when we’re under stress, because how we learn affects what we learn. I’ll outline what our stories do for us, as individuals and in groups. I’ll touch on some of the common elements to many stories, such as how we deal with uncertainty and responsibility, how we understand bosses and subordinates, our models of individuals and social systems. I’ll explore some stories that bind us to Halliburton, and some that help us cut the chains. I’ll write a little about what it means to be doing this project-- I’m looking for a Story, too.
I’m going to suggest what all this might mean for political education work (see the "Apply . . . " sections). Appreciating how we make stories helps us better understand our neighbors, nurture political conversations and community stories, and solve problems together.
I’ll argue that tiptoeing around the wedge issues is not the pragmatic response but a sure road to defeat. To build a lasting mass base for democratic change, we cannot put off challenging the core of the corporate ideology, as risky and expensive as that will be. To change the rules of the power game, first we’ll have to change the terms of debate. I have no intention of suggesting that words and stories are the same as power (if that's your thing, just tune in to the Visualize Your Wealth! scams on late night TV). Rather, we need the right words and stories to organize, analyze, strategize, and coordinate.
This is not going to be a review of the mass media or an analysis of the political forces. Lots of other folks have already written about these things, some very well. I think it’s beyond dispute that criminals still control many important institutions and that we have to build the democratic movement in spite of that. That makes it all the more urgent to mobilize the resources we do have: people and the ideas that can hold us together, structure our work, shape our strategies and prepare us to govern. As I read this to myself, it seems crazily ambitious. But I don't know that we have a choice.
This is my database: the stories I tell myself; conversations with friends and colleagues and the people in my classes; lots of books on psychology and politics. My experience is very limited. I’m a straight single aging still healthy white guy with no kids, a good income and many fears. I worked for political groups for a few years. I’ve tried to stretch my brain beyond these boundaries but there’s too much I don’t understand and can’t even imagine. So I hope readers can point me and each other to the universes I’m missing and misreading. I have to start in ignorance or not start at all.
I can’t point to a single idea here that is original. Nor is this an academic study. I'm not trying to prove a new discovery. Rather, I'm trying to encourage a practice. I want to bring together a mass of related information, as confirmed or contradicted in my limited experience, and suggest ways to apply it to our political understanding and action. A very great shortcoming, I’m embarrassed to admit, is that in the process of writing this I have consulted only one colleague; so this draft will have to serve as the provocation for feedback from many.
My first goal is to push discussion about political education, with particular attention to this key element that I call Story. I hope most of all that educators would read this, and other people doing political work. I’d really like to hear back from readers, including the many who will disagree with my conclusions. I hope to review a lot of research in ways that can be brought to bear on education and organizing today.
The Christian theorist Augustine outlined one kind of research project: “We should, finally, inquire as to what it is that makes one a heretic so that, in avoiding that with the Lord’s help, we may avoid the poison of heresies . . . ” (Bosmajian 41).
My questions lie in the other direction: How can we spread the heresy of democracy? How can we bust up authoritarian lies and make our own stories more truthful? How can we foster stories that lead to collective political action? How can I learn to look after my neighbors and stand up to the gangsters? This is only a part of the work we need to do, but it underlies the rest.
A friend and colleague challenges me to write something practical, something we can really use in our political work. Gee whiz! Is that all? But yes, that’s my goal, too.
I hope that our work teaching and learning will not just slow the corporate juggernaut, will not just recover a few feet of ground lost over the past 40 or 400 years. I’d like us to change the terms of debate and build a broad, deep and lasting popular base for democracy.
I hope experienced activists, organizers and political educators will read and discuss this, and anyone else who practices democracy.
A note on terminology.
You’ll see that when I refer to politics or political work, I don’t mean just parties or voting. For me, politics is almost anything we do that affects other people. Democratic decision-making is something I’d like see prevail throughout our communities.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
" . . . I had better explain first what I do not mean by socialism . . . . What I really mean is a more genuine democracy, where the citizens of our country have more direct access to all the decisions that affect us, not only in the political but also in the economic arena” (Segrest 242).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don’t think we have a fixed, monolithic ruling class. I don’t think Georgie was the main player in the Bush Administration. I think we have been ruled for years by a succession of murderous cliques dominated by wealthy investors acting through many institutions, and “Halliburton” is my shorthand for the 2000 - 2008 coalition, as well as for the company itself. That the regime in the U.S. is not so brutal as elsewhere gives me no shivers of gratitude; Halliburton is just a local name for worldwide institutions that require theft and murder on a grand scale. In a very direct sense, our relative comfort here is paid for by many people in other countries. But here I’m not concerned with exactly who done what to whom. I also call the people in power parasites, death-dealers and other unflattering but all too true descriptors. I hope that doesn’t make this harder to read.*
I don’t know enough yet to venture to characterize the Obama government, and probably the main players don’t either. It’s no surprise to see many of the same old faces and interests.
Readers may be confused by the inconsistent way I use “we” in the following pages. By “we” I mean me and other people in our many capacities as learners, educators, nurturers and killers. It’s clumsy but I don’t know a better way to put it. My perspective is unmistakably limited by my experience as an old straight white guy of the U.S. middle class, but I know that other folks here and overseas have paid the highest price for gangster rule. The struggle for democracy is as transnational as Halliburton and Al Qaeda.
I refer to people with politics similar to mine as do-gooders, lefties, liberals, radicals, pinkos, or progressives. There are important historical and current differences in what these words have meant, but I don’t know much about them. For my purposes, the bar codes are less important; here I’m concerned mostly with methods.
Please comment.
I’m still trying to figure out the best format --I’m very clumsy at bloggery-- but there are slots for comment throughout this series of essays.
* I don’t want to assume too much. In case you’re not sure who I refer to so rudely, I mean the people who could make good health care available to all, but do not; who could build affordable housing, but do not; who could arrange safe working conditions for their employees, but do not; who could shelter refugees, but do not; who could give food to the hungry, but throw it away instead; who could live plentiful lives without wiping out whole ecosystems, but do not; who claim women and children as property; who set neighbor against neighbor fighting for crumbs; who could help their neighbors but instead rat them out; who bully the least protected people in our society; who recruit children to fight their wars; who routinely rape, torture, starve, assassinate and bomb in order to boost their prestige and profit margins; who walk past the bodies unseeing, and act surprised and annoyed to find spatters on their shoes . . . do you get the idea? Do you know who I’m writing about?
Some of my friends prefer not to dwell on such unpleasantness. With all the problems, the world is slowly getting better, they would tell me (before 2008, anyway). We can download movies on demand! We have so many ways to treat cancer now! Look at all the Indians who have moved up into the middle class! I think their optimism would be dented a bit if they had to live a week in that desperate “middle class”, or on the front lines of the resource wars, or in the ever expanding urban and rural wastelands on every continent. We can’t assume the world somehow magically gets better by itself. We have a lot of work to do.
Here’s the proposition. I’m going to sketch out some of what we know about how we construct our explanations and cling to them or change them when we’re under stress, because how we learn affects what we learn. I’ll outline what our stories do for us, as individuals and in groups. I’ll touch on some of the common elements to many stories, such as how we deal with uncertainty and responsibility, how we understand bosses and subordinates, our models of individuals and social systems. I’ll explore some stories that bind us to Halliburton, and some that help us cut the chains. I’ll write a little about what it means to be doing this project-- I’m looking for a Story, too.
I’m going to suggest what all this might mean for political education work (see the "Apply . . . " sections). Appreciating how we make stories helps us better understand our neighbors, nurture political conversations and community stories, and solve problems together.
I’ll argue that tiptoeing around the wedge issues is not the pragmatic response but a sure road to defeat. To build a lasting mass base for democratic change, we cannot put off challenging the core of the corporate ideology, as risky and expensive as that will be. To change the rules of the power game, first we’ll have to change the terms of debate. I have no intention of suggesting that words and stories are the same as power (if that's your thing, just tune in to the Visualize Your Wealth! scams on late night TV). Rather, we need the right words and stories to organize, analyze, strategize, and coordinate.
This is not going to be a review of the mass media or an analysis of the political forces. Lots of other folks have already written about these things, some very well. I think it’s beyond dispute that criminals still control many important institutions and that we have to build the democratic movement in spite of that. That makes it all the more urgent to mobilize the resources we do have: people and the ideas that can hold us together, structure our work, shape our strategies and prepare us to govern. As I read this to myself, it seems crazily ambitious. But I don't know that we have a choice.
This is my database: the stories I tell myself; conversations with friends and colleagues and the people in my classes; lots of books on psychology and politics. My experience is very limited. I’m a straight single aging still healthy white guy with no kids, a good income and many fears. I worked for political groups for a few years. I’ve tried to stretch my brain beyond these boundaries but there’s too much I don’t understand and can’t even imagine. So I hope readers can point me and each other to the universes I’m missing and misreading. I have to start in ignorance or not start at all.
I can’t point to a single idea here that is original. Nor is this an academic study. I'm not trying to prove a new discovery. Rather, I'm trying to encourage a practice. I want to bring together a mass of related information, as confirmed or contradicted in my limited experience, and suggest ways to apply it to our political understanding and action. A very great shortcoming, I’m embarrassed to admit, is that in the process of writing this I have consulted only one colleague; so this draft will have to serve as the provocation for feedback from many.
My first goal is to push discussion about political education, with particular attention to this key element that I call Story. I hope most of all that educators would read this, and other people doing political work. I’d really like to hear back from readers, including the many who will disagree with my conclusions. I hope to review a lot of research in ways that can be brought to bear on education and organizing today.
The Christian theorist Augustine outlined one kind of research project: “We should, finally, inquire as to what it is that makes one a heretic so that, in avoiding that with the Lord’s help, we may avoid the poison of heresies . . . ” (Bosmajian 41).
My questions lie in the other direction: How can we spread the heresy of democracy? How can we bust up authoritarian lies and make our own stories more truthful? How can we foster stories that lead to collective political action? How can I learn to look after my neighbors and stand up to the gangsters? This is only a part of the work we need to do, but it underlies the rest.
A friend and colleague challenges me to write something practical, something we can really use in our political work. Gee whiz! Is that all? But yes, that’s my goal, too.
I hope that our work teaching and learning will not just slow the corporate juggernaut, will not just recover a few feet of ground lost over the past 40 or 400 years. I’d like us to change the terms of debate and build a broad, deep and lasting popular base for democracy.
I hope experienced activists, organizers and political educators will read and discuss this, and anyone else who practices democracy.
A note on terminology.
You’ll see that when I refer to politics or political work, I don’t mean just parties or voting. For me, politics is almost anything we do that affects other people. Democratic decision-making is something I’d like see prevail throughout our communities.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
" . . . I had better explain first what I do not mean by socialism . . . . What I really mean is a more genuine democracy, where the citizens of our country have more direct access to all the decisions that affect us, not only in the political but also in the economic arena” (Segrest 242).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don’t think we have a fixed, monolithic ruling class. I don’t think Georgie was the main player in the Bush Administration. I think we have been ruled for years by a succession of murderous cliques dominated by wealthy investors acting through many institutions, and “Halliburton” is my shorthand for the 2000 - 2008 coalition, as well as for the company itself. That the regime in the U.S. is not so brutal as elsewhere gives me no shivers of gratitude; Halliburton is just a local name for worldwide institutions that require theft and murder on a grand scale. In a very direct sense, our relative comfort here is paid for by many people in other countries. But here I’m not concerned with exactly who done what to whom. I also call the people in power parasites, death-dealers and other unflattering but all too true descriptors. I hope that doesn’t make this harder to read.*
I don’t know enough yet to venture to characterize the Obama government, and probably the main players don’t either. It’s no surprise to see many of the same old faces and interests.
Readers may be confused by the inconsistent way I use “we” in the following pages. By “we” I mean me and other people in our many capacities as learners, educators, nurturers and killers. It’s clumsy but I don’t know a better way to put it. My perspective is unmistakably limited by my experience as an old straight white guy of the U.S. middle class, but I know that other folks here and overseas have paid the highest price for gangster rule. The struggle for democracy is as transnational as Halliburton and Al Qaeda.
I refer to people with politics similar to mine as do-gooders, lefties, liberals, radicals, pinkos, or progressives. There are important historical and current differences in what these words have meant, but I don’t know much about them. For my purposes, the bar codes are less important; here I’m concerned mostly with methods.
Please comment.
I’m still trying to figure out the best format --I’m very clumsy at bloggery-- but there are slots for comment throughout this series of essays.
* I don’t want to assume too much. In case you’re not sure who I refer to so rudely, I mean the people who could make good health care available to all, but do not; who could build affordable housing, but do not; who could arrange safe working conditions for their employees, but do not; who could shelter refugees, but do not; who could give food to the hungry, but throw it away instead; who could live plentiful lives without wiping out whole ecosystems, but do not; who claim women and children as property; who set neighbor against neighbor fighting for crumbs; who could help their neighbors but instead rat them out; who bully the least protected people in our society; who recruit children to fight their wars; who routinely rape, torture, starve, assassinate and bomb in order to boost their prestige and profit margins; who walk past the bodies unseeing, and act surprised and annoyed to find spatters on their shoes . . . do you get the idea? Do you know who I’m writing about?
Some of my friends prefer not to dwell on such unpleasantness. With all the problems, the world is slowly getting better, they would tell me (before 2008, anyway). We can download movies on demand! We have so many ways to treat cancer now! Look at all the Indians who have moved up into the middle class! I think their optimism would be dented a bit if they had to live a week in that desperate “middle class”, or on the front lines of the resource wars, or in the ever expanding urban and rural wastelands on every continent. We can’t assume the world somehow magically gets better by itself. We have a lot of work to do.
My own story is in process. Next steps.
My own story is in process.
I have quite personal concerns in writing this. I was born smack in the middle of the last century, and by the time I started to pay attention to politics, it seemed for a while that, with all the strife, the world was going in the right liberally direction; more understanding, more freedom. What kind of progressive doesn’t have faith in Progress?
But good models have been hard to come by. I read about the Social Democrats of Germany, millions of members, and how they were tamed by imperial militarism and swept away by the Nazis. I read how some old-time commies, incredibly brave, resourceful and self-sacrificing in the face of corporate thugs and czarist torturers, turned into murdering lickspittles of Stalinism. From afar I saw how the failed dictatorships in Russia, Iran and a dozen other places gave way to merely shabbier despotisms.
I wasn’t prepared for decades of Reagan backlash, the renewal of the religious wars at home and abroad, and the persistence of carefully nurtured hatreds. A friend remarked once that New York City is very cool, all the different kinds of people riding peacefully on subway. I didn't feel even slightly reassured. We've been reminded too forcefully in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Russia, Africa, Iraq and Los Angeles that decades of apparent neighborliness don't erase cherished enmities; that perfectly normal folks go about their daily routines, and would snatch a machete in a heartbeat if the local Osama called. The day after 9/11 a colleague remarked of Iran and Pakistan, We should kill 'm all. 200 million people, I said. Kill 'm all, she said. She had experienced exactly one day of TV terrorism. I meet many perfectly nice people --nicer, in fact, than I-- who think they’re helping the world by promoting, paying and arming the most vicious killers on the planet.
It bothers me that my neighbors and I have such different understandings of the world we share. I want to know why. Really, I’d like everyone else to see the world exactly as I do; short of that, I suppose I can learn to see it the way they do. Maybe together we can reach an even better understanding.
Second, I need a Story, too. I need an understanding that will help me figure out what to do next, and how to love the world as it tries to squash me. I can’t quite fit into the stories I’ve heard, so I'll have to cobble one together for myself.
Next steps.
At some point I may post my name. It seems the responsible thing to do. But I’m new to this medium and I want to gauge how it’s working. I also don’t want to risk messing up my fragile personal and professional life unless I have to; the ideas I write about seem quite bland and apple pie to me, but possibly they’ll provoke offense even beyond the people I am happy to offend. I notice some of the other web publications I admire are likewise anonymous, so that’s how I will remain for now.
As you will see right off, these essays are not nearly complete. As soon as I win the lottery, I’ll have time to write about how we develop stories to define ourselves and our groups, manage uncertainty, choose sides, set boundaries, allocate responsibility and blame. I’d like to explore common political stories like the ones we tell about government and individual freedom. Most of all, I’d like to rework my ideas to include readers’ insights. Not soon, though, you may be relieved to read . . . .
Update 09. I update this introduction soon after the 08 election. Like many others, I was pleased with the outcome. Staggering under the cost of the economic and foreign policy catastrophes, voters finally pink-slipped the Halliburton gang. (Bad as it is, as yet we’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg --literally-- of the world wide environmental disaster). Dire circumstances compel us once again to see democratic government as our support rather than our enemy. Some good folks have taken government posts, which will help even if the new president turns out to be as conservative as he promised during the campaign. I like that the new crowd continue to keep health care on the agenda, and so forthrightly connect it to the health of our economy as a whole. After so many squandered lives and opportunities, we’ve got a chance now to start repairing some of the devastation of nearly 30 years of Reaganism. Despite all our problems, I see many people ready to work harder than ever to rebuild our communities.
Just as important as the new leadership, more of us may be ready to think about new ways of doing business. The failures of unregulated markets and the imperial presidency have the rightist ideologues sputtering indignantly, scrambling to regroup, frantically digging up the old slogans to see which will stick. Younger voters especially, heirs of earlier democratic movements, and emerging from the meanness of the Reagan backlash, may be less haunted by traditional racism and sexism than people my age. More of us will come to realize what our grandparents knew: choosing gangsters as leaders does not protect us.
Still yet, we know this is at best a beginning. The magnitude of the crisis (by which I mean the latest sudden drop in incomes, employment and household assets, as opposed to the steady, murderous pace of capitalism when it’s happy, keeping billions of us on the edge of beggary, sickness and death) demands bold action but leaves the new regime little room to maneuver. We see plenty of the same old faces back in power, running the same old institutions. The Democrats’ electoral majority is nothing like a policy consensus, and includes a lot of folks who would like nothing better than a return to the status quo before the bubbles burst, as if we could have one without the other. Not to mention the one half of voters who judged Democrats to be scarier than climate change, the recession, and Mideast wars. I live in Tennessee, where the corporation Christians won more votes in ‘08 than four years before.
Max Planck famously suggested that new ideas triumph not by persuading everyone of their superiority, but because devotees of the old ideas eventually lose power or die out (Gratzer 304). But there’s no sign that our authoritarians are anything but hale and hearty and ready for new adventures. We’ve seen before how lightly reality weighs on true believers; the would-be Rambos, for instance, who clamored to invade Iraq as a way to “get over” the U.S. loss in Viet Nam. And that was in more prosperous times than these. When we look back to the economic troubles of the 1920s and ‘30s, here they engendered powerful grassroots movements and a lasting liberal coalition; in Germany they begat Hitler. Just tune in to the talk shows and rightist blogs. In addition to their usual racist and sexist rants --politely termed “cultural” conflict-- they’ve trotted their core agenda more nakedly than I’ve ever heard before: saving billionaires from taxes, unions, environmental regulation, and thrifty consumers. They try to depict the new administration as tools of the corporate looters, while demanding policies that attack workers, consumers, and the government programs to help them. Halliburton himself, dethroned but not defunct, makes the round of infotainments, determined that the U.S. shall not take one step back from the oil wars.
If the current economic morass displaces many millions from homes and jobs, if the billionaires lose too many privileges, if the new administration stumbles (as it will), we know already who is poised to deal the bullet behind the ear, or (more likely) the death of a thousand cuts. We fought our neighbors when we were rich, biting and gouging each other for crumbs from Halliburton’s table; now that the pickings are so much slimmer, how can we learn to stick together?
In any case, a democracy cannot afford to shut out half the population. Nixon tried to, Rove tried to, but their goals are different from ours. Fletcher and Gapasin (52) note that the lack of common ideas in unions means widespread passivity by the rank and file, and control by a small group at the top. We could say the same for our country as a whole.
When we look for historical comparisons, we see that much of the New Deal of the 1930s was a top-down technocracy of do-gooder WASPs making vast decisions for the rest of us-- thank goodness for the rank and file union members who fought for a much more ambitious agenda. Where I live, the Tennessee Valley Authority was a good example of the good work of the New Deal, and of its gradual corruption. The TVA brought electric power and other economic projects to this region of the upper South, and a model of relatively progressive labor relations. It’s one of the few large government corporations to survive and prosper. There was never a strong system of democratic accountability, however, and the next generation of technocrats ended up burning many billions of taxpayer dollars doing the dirty R&D work for the nation’s nuclear powermongers.
Likewise, in the coming years a charismatic and lucky new president with the right package of patronage could renew the fortunes of the Democratic Party without ever strengthening democracy itself. He might win limited reforms without challenging authoritarian ideas, leaving them to fester and infect a new generation. He could even start big new programs without winning broad buy-in, and thereby pave the way for another Reaganist revival.
Early as it is, the Obama crew may be approaching a crossroads. I think they believed they could help many people and revive the corps at the same time. The genii of high finance tell us that the economy can’t get better until they do. They ought to know, right?
As I write, that rationale and hope seems ever shakier and more unlikely. I like the president’s efforts to reach out to a broad range of people, and I hope that doesn't turn out to be simply conceding high ground to rightist leaders. Rahm Emmanuel is correct: Rush Limbaugh does not represent tens of millions of white people. As a one-time stockbroker himself, Emmanuel should know with equal confidence that the billionaires do not represent our best hopes for a healthy economy. They have declared a capital strike, yanking resources out of our economy as fast as they can separate the gold from the arsenic, doing to the U.S. what they’ve done over and over to Asia and Latin America. The established economic decision makers and processes have been poison for the U.S. and the world; restoring their power can only hurt the rest of us. What’s the priority: propping up Wall Street or making sure there’s safe, productive work for everyone? Policy makers say it's the same thing, in the face of recent devastating evidence to the contrary. However, that’s not Obama’s choice to make, it’s ours. When push comes to shove, we need to be clear among ourselves what we want.
And as I look to the future, if through hard-fought battles we can restore some of the security, cooperation and freedom Halliburton stole from us, I don’t want to see the next wave of corporate pirates and their groveling servants in the universities, media, and churches telling us once again how inefficient, old-fashioned, and disobedient democracy is, as they have done after every tiny advance or desperate repair job in the past. We need to know what is causing all this death and destruction. We need to know it well enough to be determined not to let it happen again and again. All of us.
So we have no reason to rest easy about the narrow political breathing space won in 2008. It will be nice if Obama dials down the wars a bit, and the tax breaks for billionaires. It would be swell if he actually tried to pry loose the corporations from their stranglehold on Congress and the courts, though at this point we have no reason to think he could do so, or cares to. It would be totally unrealistic to imagine we will see any lasting structural change for the better unless many millions of people organize for it, democratically. The president knows that and has said so himself.
That’s why I take this change of regime to be an opening that we have to widen and push through together. Many of us reckon the hardest work has yet to be done.
I have quite personal concerns in writing this. I was born smack in the middle of the last century, and by the time I started to pay attention to politics, it seemed for a while that, with all the strife, the world was going in the right liberally direction; more understanding, more freedom. What kind of progressive doesn’t have faith in Progress?
But good models have been hard to come by. I read about the Social Democrats of Germany, millions of members, and how they were tamed by imperial militarism and swept away by the Nazis. I read how some old-time commies, incredibly brave, resourceful and self-sacrificing in the face of corporate thugs and czarist torturers, turned into murdering lickspittles of Stalinism. From afar I saw how the failed dictatorships in Russia, Iran and a dozen other places gave way to merely shabbier despotisms.
I wasn’t prepared for decades of Reagan backlash, the renewal of the religious wars at home and abroad, and the persistence of carefully nurtured hatreds. A friend remarked once that New York City is very cool, all the different kinds of people riding peacefully on subway. I didn't feel even slightly reassured. We've been reminded too forcefully in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Russia, Africa, Iraq and Los Angeles that decades of apparent neighborliness don't erase cherished enmities; that perfectly normal folks go about their daily routines, and would snatch a machete in a heartbeat if the local Osama called. The day after 9/11 a colleague remarked of Iran and Pakistan, We should kill 'm all. 200 million people, I said. Kill 'm all, she said. She had experienced exactly one day of TV terrorism. I meet many perfectly nice people --nicer, in fact, than I-- who think they’re helping the world by promoting, paying and arming the most vicious killers on the planet.
It bothers me that my neighbors and I have such different understandings of the world we share. I want to know why. Really, I’d like everyone else to see the world exactly as I do; short of that, I suppose I can learn to see it the way they do. Maybe together we can reach an even better understanding.
Second, I need a Story, too. I need an understanding that will help me figure out what to do next, and how to love the world as it tries to squash me. I can’t quite fit into the stories I’ve heard, so I'll have to cobble one together for myself.
Next steps.
At some point I may post my name. It seems the responsible thing to do. But I’m new to this medium and I want to gauge how it’s working. I also don’t want to risk messing up my fragile personal and professional life unless I have to; the ideas I write about seem quite bland and apple pie to me, but possibly they’ll provoke offense even beyond the people I am happy to offend. I notice some of the other web publications I admire are likewise anonymous, so that’s how I will remain for now.
As you will see right off, these essays are not nearly complete. As soon as I win the lottery, I’ll have time to write about how we develop stories to define ourselves and our groups, manage uncertainty, choose sides, set boundaries, allocate responsibility and blame. I’d like to explore common political stories like the ones we tell about government and individual freedom. Most of all, I’d like to rework my ideas to include readers’ insights. Not soon, though, you may be relieved to read . . . .
Update 09. I update this introduction soon after the 08 election. Like many others, I was pleased with the outcome. Staggering under the cost of the economic and foreign policy catastrophes, voters finally pink-slipped the Halliburton gang. (Bad as it is, as yet we’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg --literally-- of the world wide environmental disaster). Dire circumstances compel us once again to see democratic government as our support rather than our enemy. Some good folks have taken government posts, which will help even if the new president turns out to be as conservative as he promised during the campaign. I like that the new crowd continue to keep health care on the agenda, and so forthrightly connect it to the health of our economy as a whole. After so many squandered lives and opportunities, we’ve got a chance now to start repairing some of the devastation of nearly 30 years of Reaganism. Despite all our problems, I see many people ready to work harder than ever to rebuild our communities.
Just as important as the new leadership, more of us may be ready to think about new ways of doing business. The failures of unregulated markets and the imperial presidency have the rightist ideologues sputtering indignantly, scrambling to regroup, frantically digging up the old slogans to see which will stick. Younger voters especially, heirs of earlier democratic movements, and emerging from the meanness of the Reagan backlash, may be less haunted by traditional racism and sexism than people my age. More of us will come to realize what our grandparents knew: choosing gangsters as leaders does not protect us.
Still yet, we know this is at best a beginning. The magnitude of the crisis (by which I mean the latest sudden drop in incomes, employment and household assets, as opposed to the steady, murderous pace of capitalism when it’s happy, keeping billions of us on the edge of beggary, sickness and death) demands bold action but leaves the new regime little room to maneuver. We see plenty of the same old faces back in power, running the same old institutions. The Democrats’ electoral majority is nothing like a policy consensus, and includes a lot of folks who would like nothing better than a return to the status quo before the bubbles burst, as if we could have one without the other. Not to mention the one half of voters who judged Democrats to be scarier than climate change, the recession, and Mideast wars. I live in Tennessee, where the corporation Christians won more votes in ‘08 than four years before.
Max Planck famously suggested that new ideas triumph not by persuading everyone of their superiority, but because devotees of the old ideas eventually lose power or die out (Gratzer 304). But there’s no sign that our authoritarians are anything but hale and hearty and ready for new adventures. We’ve seen before how lightly reality weighs on true believers; the would-be Rambos, for instance, who clamored to invade Iraq as a way to “get over” the U.S. loss in Viet Nam. And that was in more prosperous times than these. When we look back to the economic troubles of the 1920s and ‘30s, here they engendered powerful grassroots movements and a lasting liberal coalition; in Germany they begat Hitler. Just tune in to the talk shows and rightist blogs. In addition to their usual racist and sexist rants --politely termed “cultural” conflict-- they’ve trotted their core agenda more nakedly than I’ve ever heard before: saving billionaires from taxes, unions, environmental regulation, and thrifty consumers. They try to depict the new administration as tools of the corporate looters, while demanding policies that attack workers, consumers, and the government programs to help them. Halliburton himself, dethroned but not defunct, makes the round of infotainments, determined that the U.S. shall not take one step back from the oil wars.
If the current economic morass displaces many millions from homes and jobs, if the billionaires lose too many privileges, if the new administration stumbles (as it will), we know already who is poised to deal the bullet behind the ear, or (more likely) the death of a thousand cuts. We fought our neighbors when we were rich, biting and gouging each other for crumbs from Halliburton’s table; now that the pickings are so much slimmer, how can we learn to stick together?
In any case, a democracy cannot afford to shut out half the population. Nixon tried to, Rove tried to, but their goals are different from ours. Fletcher and Gapasin (52) note that the lack of common ideas in unions means widespread passivity by the rank and file, and control by a small group at the top. We could say the same for our country as a whole.
When we look for historical comparisons, we see that much of the New Deal of the 1930s was a top-down technocracy of do-gooder WASPs making vast decisions for the rest of us-- thank goodness for the rank and file union members who fought for a much more ambitious agenda. Where I live, the Tennessee Valley Authority was a good example of the good work of the New Deal, and of its gradual corruption. The TVA brought electric power and other economic projects to this region of the upper South, and a model of relatively progressive labor relations. It’s one of the few large government corporations to survive and prosper. There was never a strong system of democratic accountability, however, and the next generation of technocrats ended up burning many billions of taxpayer dollars doing the dirty R&D work for the nation’s nuclear powermongers.
Likewise, in the coming years a charismatic and lucky new president with the right package of patronage could renew the fortunes of the Democratic Party without ever strengthening democracy itself. He might win limited reforms without challenging authoritarian ideas, leaving them to fester and infect a new generation. He could even start big new programs without winning broad buy-in, and thereby pave the way for another Reaganist revival.
Early as it is, the Obama crew may be approaching a crossroads. I think they believed they could help many people and revive the corps at the same time. The genii of high finance tell us that the economy can’t get better until they do. They ought to know, right?
As I write, that rationale and hope seems ever shakier and more unlikely. I like the president’s efforts to reach out to a broad range of people, and I hope that doesn't turn out to be simply conceding high ground to rightist leaders. Rahm Emmanuel is correct: Rush Limbaugh does not represent tens of millions of white people. As a one-time stockbroker himself, Emmanuel should know with equal confidence that the billionaires do not represent our best hopes for a healthy economy. They have declared a capital strike, yanking resources out of our economy as fast as they can separate the gold from the arsenic, doing to the U.S. what they’ve done over and over to Asia and Latin America. The established economic decision makers and processes have been poison for the U.S. and the world; restoring their power can only hurt the rest of us. What’s the priority: propping up Wall Street or making sure there’s safe, productive work for everyone? Policy makers say it's the same thing, in the face of recent devastating evidence to the contrary. However, that’s not Obama’s choice to make, it’s ours. When push comes to shove, we need to be clear among ourselves what we want.
And as I look to the future, if through hard-fought battles we can restore some of the security, cooperation and freedom Halliburton stole from us, I don’t want to see the next wave of corporate pirates and their groveling servants in the universities, media, and churches telling us once again how inefficient, old-fashioned, and disobedient democracy is, as they have done after every tiny advance or desperate repair job in the past. We need to know what is causing all this death and destruction. We need to know it well enough to be determined not to let it happen again and again. All of us.
So we have no reason to rest easy about the narrow political breathing space won in 2008. It will be nice if Obama dials down the wars a bit, and the tax breaks for billionaires. It would be swell if he actually tried to pry loose the corporations from their stranglehold on Congress and the courts, though at this point we have no reason to think he could do so, or cares to. It would be totally unrealistic to imagine we will see any lasting structural change for the better unless many millions of people organize for it, democratically. The president knows that and has said so himself.
That’s why I take this change of regime to be an opening that we have to widen and push through together. Many of us reckon the hardest work has yet to be done.
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