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.


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“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.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~