• 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.