I have been to the mountaintop: envisioning democracy

• I have been to the mountaintop: envisioning democracy.
What if there could be such a thing as a world of freedom, justice, and plenty? To be ready to stick our necks out for a better future, we’ve got to be able to envision it, but that’s not so easy.

Scott (1990 pp. 81, 101-2) reminds us that serfs and slaves can envision freedom even if they’ve never had that experience. I’ve also noted how powerful and long-lasting can be the memories activists have of their movement days, the unity, caring and relative fearlessness they felt-- the exaltation of the democratic struggle as much as the practical achievement of justice.

But we can also imagine the Big Rock Candy Mountain, benevolent aliens from the Planet Calliope, and our enemies roasting in hell-- hopes that are hard to turn into programs. Commonly, our ideas of a better world take the form of trickster stories, where the little guy uses the big shots’ greed and arrogance to beat them at their own game. Coyote, Brer Rabbit, Pedro Urdemala or Mullah Nasrudin can ridicule the powerful, and come out on top, but they don’t show us a world without bosses. I myself am partial to Brecht’s Pirate Jenny, but her world is just a fantasy of destruction. A traditional way to express the yearning for justice was to refer to a Golden Age when lions gambol with lambs, or to the Sleeping Emperor, who will come back to right all wrongs. Perhaps the myth of a just king expressed our real experience of love and security with our parents; but it’s not a model of independent choice or democratic governance.

In the past century many of us have seen more concrete hopes raised and at least partly dashed: centralized socialism, revolutions in many countries, counterculture communes, grassroots labor and rights movements. We can appreciate how much those folks achieved, even as we remember the goals and see how far we have to go.

Then there’s the unpleasant fact that living in the vision can be dangerous. On the one hand, we need to fight every day for justice; on the other, we could get our heads cut off.

So it’s not suprising that it’s easier for us to identify the great risks of change than the hypothetical benefits. For example, Henry quotes several women who said that a scarcely imaginable gender equality is not worth losing such privileges as having doors opened for them, having men check the oil in their cars, and in general, of having the respect due them (not always paid on time, they admit) for playing the Woman’s role in our patriarchal society. Much of their tone was defensive, as they tried to juggle conflicting sets of new and old expectations.

Here in the U.S.A. most of us do benefit, at least a bit, from war, pollution, and the other policies that keep the trinkets flowing into our fists. To the extent that we depend more on husbands, employers, vendors, bureaucrats and commanding officers than on our neighbors and co-workers, it’s very costly to disrupt the first set of relationships for the sake of the second. And because we do have some degree of choice in this society, (cf. Scott 1990 p. 22), we tend to identify with the whole system. We may get so focussed on crumbs from Halliburton’s table that we fail to see the feast (see Talk about our self-interest, below). Or, even as we cuss the powers for their unfairness, we counsel our children: life isn't fair, suck it up, tough it out, don't rock the boat. Only now and then do enough of us agree that fighting back is less dangerous than the violence and humiliation we suffer now. Always the risks of change are clearer to us than the promises of some uncertain future.

How can we make clearer the possibility of a much better future?


# We make the path by walking and imagining. During the 07-08 presidential campaign John Edwards blamed the corporations for a lot of our problems, and promised to fight them as president. Probably a lot of his listeners agreed with him about the corps, yet only a relatively small percentage voted for him. I wonder if that’s because it’s hard to imagine a world without very large companies calling the shots. Edwards said he’d fight them, but if that’s all it took, we’d all be in porker paradise by now. How would we get our movies, phones, drugs, sneakers, cosmetics, toilet bowl cleaners, games, guns, SUVs, ATVs, food and water without the bounty of Exxon, Newscorp, Google, Toyota, Citigroup, Gazprom, and all the other transnationals that grace our lives? (Wait a mimup. I get water from a local non-profit. How strange! Must be some kind of mistake.)

As far as I know, Edwards never did come up with a clear proposal for a different role for the corporations. Well, sure-- he didn’t want to sound like a crazy man. But he sounded crazy anyway, promising to take on the corps, and I think folks didn’t buy it.

Hope is a kind of commitment. When we pin our hopes that something good will happen if we make this or that choice, we are putting parts of our lives on the line. To take the risks of political change we need to see plausible pathways from here to our ideals; at least glimpses of sky through the shadows of the forest. When we've come to accept corruption as an ingredient of everyday life, it takes more than shaking our fists to construct alternatives. It's like wanting to build a great cathedral without a floor plan; seems too abstract to invest our hopes in.

So part of the task of envisioning alternatives is to see that better world more clearly in our minds. And the only way I can think of to do it is to work both ends toward the middle, like the first railroad across the continent. Or perhaps like a spider, weaving its web back and forth from our reality to our ideals, bridging the span at first with the most delicate of threads, then reinforcing them, building in strength and depth and dewdropped detail.

For the most part, this work has to take place in structured discussions over time. We can start with what we know.

• I think people who work for democracy start with the good relationships they know about personally-- good experiences with family, friends, co-workers, partners in political work. That’s how we know we can depend on each other and treat each other fairly, and together accomplish what needs to be done. We can’t extrapolate directly from the local to the global, because the scales are so different, with different kinds of dependencies and communications challenges. We are not dependent children. We mostly don’t live in very small towns. We can’t all produce all our own food. But we can know from our own small circles that justice for each makes us all stronger.

• There are all sorts of planning exercises for groups with common goals. Before we look too far ahead, we inventory what we've got: what’s good and bad about our lives today, and how might we like to see them in five or ten years? We think about what our days, families, neighborhoods, and jobs could become. Maps and budgets can help with this process. And we can push it further: what do you hope to see in your country and world? What’s the role of nature in your life, and how could it change? The responses will lead to additional questions about how to get there from here. What else do we need to know, and how could we find out? What can individuals do, and what can only be done by groups acting together?

• We can practice getting off the grid: diversify our dependencies, solve problems directly rather than through the courts, and so on. There’s a big literature out there. I don’t propose this as the whole of the program. The dominant system can easily accommodate isolated groups of counterculturalists, while the whole world is not big enough for 7 billion to live that way, without immense structural changes. For me, the goals of such practice would be to
a) develop templates for realistic solutions to the problems of living in a truly democratic society.
b) position ourselves for less dependence on corrupt institutions, the better to fight them, and
c) consciously model the possibilities for others.

This is really a research program, and we can design practical experiments and feedback. Of course we also need plans for getting the resources to support this work, and for sharing what we learn.


We can also approach the envisioning piece from what we want:

• Because even thinking about structural change is so stressful, we can decouple the visioning exercises from personal obligation. We start with just the wish lists, the hypotheticals. Or: imagine what the world will be for the grandchildren, as an accomplished fact, after we’re long gone. We can pretend the revolution already happened. Then someone’s bound to ask: so how do we get there?

• Our political rituals generally revolve around dead heroes and pledges of loyalty. How about celebrating our goals as well? Next year in Jerusalem, the democratic society open to all . . .

It’s hard to get at these big ideas in casual encounters with the neighbors, but we can refer to them. We can explain our consumption choices, put hot topics like immigration, gay rights, or energy costs in context, and compare how we deal with friends and family to how the big institutions treat us. We can revive the old traditions of Carnival (other societies have different names for it), where we experiment with new costumes and behaviors; where with joy and love we bust the boundaries of the social roles we’ve been assigned. What we endure now is not the only possibility.


# Keep our eyes on the prize, hold on. Remember I mentioned how important the sustaining stories are? That is, the explanations we hold in reserve to help us keep going when our plans go awry. Once upon a time I figured that, while justice was a long shot, it wasn’t so distant as to be impossible. I thought I’d like to try it for a while. And if the work hasn’t panned out as well as I’d hoped, I don’t regret it. I’ve seen enough to know I haven’t wasted my time. Meanwhile I keep one hand gripping the death machine, in case I get too scared.

For most people the risks have been much greater. But I’m guessing that we all have to come to some understanding that keeps us going in hard times. What is our way of living in the world? It’s a bit tricky, because we need to trust our knowledge while at the same time keeping open to new information and ideas. Some people and groups have chosen to cut themselves off from the world as best they can, turning their eyes to heaven or the immigrant-tended gardens in walled-off enclaves. Many more of us rely on the constant support of our partners in the struggle. Ultimately, though, we have to know how to keep doing the work even when the payoff is uncertain. Why do we choose to live the way we do? Let’s share the sustaining stories as well as our dreams of the future.

A primary way to do this is through music and art. I’ve written little about these because I know so little. Jane Sapp knows a lot, including:

Music and that dash of passion allows you to take risks. Wherever that place is that art takes you to, it is a place that enables you to take risks that you would not ordinarily. I know that place because I am an artist. It is that place in which intellect and feeling or passion have come together in a way to forge something new, something bold (Belenky, Bond & Weinstock pp. 235-6).

The clearest Story I’ve heard comes from that tune by Florence Reese:

Which side are you on? Which side are you on?