Building a World

                Democracy is an evolutionary and aspirational project.  Democracies are continually faced with the need to redefine and redirect themselves as the conditions of their existence change.  One of the structural failures of our democracy has been our inability to create and sustain an educational project that fulfills this need.  We have settled on an educational system that promotes class stagnation and political inaction.  The potential is there to do more, but the debate over our schools is mired in the tired and failed language of individual performance and testing.  We have adopted the attitude that reading an isolated text on your own and answering questions about it is enough.  An educational system that is capable of sustaining and invigorating a democratic society has to have as its main goal the building of democratic practices that allow democracy to adapt and flourish.  We’re doing exactly the opposite.

                I’ve written before that, following an earlier critique of our nation, that education has become ‘extractive,’ working to funnel public money and energy into the hands of the rich.  Another way of putting it might be to use the image Ramon Feenstra uses and say that education has been kidnapped, it no longer produces democratic outcomes and is strangled by a managerial class of politicians, business leaders and bureaucrats that all want schools to support their goals.  Dewey thought that education and inquiry were at the heart of an evolving democracy.  We have moved over time to an educational system that promotes a sedentary instead of a dynamic image of the world.  We’ve constructed schools to teach kids the way it is instead of engaging them in the possibility of what could be.  We stifle instead of grow their creative energy, and then wonder why they seem so unenthused to be there.  Education is not a factor in economic and social mobility (not that there’s much of that going on anyway), and it creates the undemocratic and unnatural feeling that learning is something done for someone else’s interests.

                Maturana says that we ‘bring forth a world,’ it isn’t just sitting there as an objective reality.  In the process of bringing forth a world, we have to conserve and tend to the transgenerational links that allow us to evolve while preserving our social and structural couplings to a world that sustains us and is in turn sustained by us.  Hannah Arendt wrote that the ultimate goal of education was preserve and celebrate a common world of our potential.  You can’t develop a standardized test for that.  You can’t farm that out to a state committee on outcomes.  It has to be woven into the daily fabric of interactions that reinforce the importance of the democratic values we want to work toward.  Every word and every action is both important and impossible to undo.

                The transgenerational trust is broken.  We are not passing a sustainable, let alone a better or more promising world.  We’ve treated our time here like we were in a temporary rental that was going to be someone else’s problem soon, so why fix it.  There is no process or institution in our world that could do more to address this than education, but only if we stop the madness.  The imagination that it takes to dream a new world and bring it into being is there, but it’s buried under a curriculum designed to fail instead of promote that dream.  Kids will learn to read and do math – maybe they’ll even learn it better if it’s their idea.  Education is a conversation that unites us to ever changing and evolving people and circumstance.  It can’t be so scripted that it shuts out insight, experiments and joy.

                Instead of sending our children off to ‘learn’ what the world is all about, we should be sending them off to build and play.  If we knew the answers we wouldn’t be where we are now.  They certainly need help and guidance, and we need our faith rekindled by their faith.  Democracy requires participation in the most active and creative sense possible.  It’s more than a tweet or an Instagram or a blog post.  In order to build and grow a democratic world, schools need to redefine their goals and change their practices.  Schools need to be part of what brings us together and not an instrument for segregation and marginalization.

The Circus

                We’re in the middle of a full-blown political circus.  Nothing that happens in the next month or so has anything to do with the problems we face or the future we hope to build.  But the circus will dominate the news and draw all the oxygen out of the room until it packs up its tent and leaves town.  Our politics has been trending in this direction for a while.  The lies and misinformation used to be spread by politicians who knew they were lies but told them to rile folks up, thinking they would be able to control the damage once they were in power.  Now the circus is led by an orange mutant, the biproduct of a drunken one-night stand between the Bearded Lady and the Sword Swallower, who doesn’t know that the lies are lies.  This is what it looks like when political cynicism devolves into political malevolence. 

                It’s not that the issues at stake aren’t real and consequential; they are.  It’s just that we live in a political system that has lost the ability to self-correct its tendency to embrace the absurd.  How do you impeach someone who violates his constitutional oath three or four times a day?  Impeachment was meant to be a serious remedy imposed on serious situations involving serious people.  Even in 1974, when Republicans were in the early stages of learning how to do this, that was still true.  Now we’re all spilling around the center ring trying to catch the clown car.  Clinton’s impeachment was already more frivolous than Nixon’s, not just because of the severity of the charges, but because the people directing it had already abandoned any pretense of reality.  In this case, the Democrats are sincere, but they’re too late.

                The show trial in the Senate will be, as one of my former colleagues used to say on underdeveloped student essays, ‘too brief to mention.’  The last thing that the circus can abide is evidence and logic.  We’re going to be treated to kabuki theater at its minimalist best.  We all know how this is going to turn out.  We all know that this is going to be an act of desperate distraction, and we know it’s going to work.  My point is not to denigrate what the Democrats are trying to do; they have no choice.  My point is that we know it’s going to fail because the systems and protocols we used to reference in hushed tones as the pillars of our democracy have crumbled.  Even the night watchman got drunk and went home.

                I think the proper response to all of this is to stay focused on the long game.  We gave the liar a chance to come clean because it was the right thing to do not because we thought it would work.  Our job is to stay focused on what’s outside the tent, the things that we can influence.  What we can do is build and plan for the next election.  What we can do is to give the 53% of the people who think Dumpty should be removed from office a way to follow through on that plan.  Let the House make its case.  Let the evidence pour over the deaf ears of the Senate majority, and then let’s plan for their defeat.  The long game is not just a return to where we were but the formation of a new democracy.  I wrote after his election that Trump didn’t know how to govern, so he would try to rule.  A minority party in a democracy has little else to hang their hat on.  The correct response is not to try to convince them of their errors; the correct response is to defeat them.

                Enjoy the show.  Most of the characters will be so over-blown and extreme that the only response will be laughter.  Watch the circus; stay for the fireworks, and realize that there is going to be a huge pile of elephant dung when this is over.  This is an opportunity.  We are both blessed and cursed to be living through the transition from a formal democracy to a more essential and radical form of democracy.  I don’t presume to know what that should look like, but I’m excited about the possibility of being a part of the conversation.  Don’t fight over what was.  Build what’s next. 

Fluidity

                As we face what I think will be a phase of unprecedented change, I think we should take a moment to think about how we think about change.  Our orientation, born in the Enlightenment and continuing through modernity, has been to plan for change in a rational, pragmatic and systematic way.  We have tried to control the rate and scope of change by moderating its impact through laws, protocols and institutions that are fundamentally resistant to radical change.  Even our politics is built around ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ reform instead of revolutionary upheaval.  You could argue that for the most part that has been productive and beneficial choice.  The problem we now face is that all of that moderation and reform has papered over some fundamental flaws in the way we think about our political and social reality. 

                In the aftermath of WWII, a new world was formed.  You could argue that that world started after the first World War and gained steam in the Great Depression, or you could go back to the rise of the administrative state during the 19^th Century, but the world that we are watching fall apart before our eyes came out of the chaos of the last war.  It was marked by things like the Marshal Plan and the social programs that Western democracies put in place to create order and balance.  The programs fit the times, and it’s hard to argue that they were unsuccessful. Now, however, they look pretty shop worn and anachronistic.  They worked because the world they created was mostly a reformed continuation of the world that existed before.  That is, while the change was profound, it was really just a further iteration of what had been.  What we face now is completely different.  Doing a better job of what we’re doing won’t help if what we’re doing is the wrong thing.

                I was thinking about this in the context of an article about Quantum Theory and the multiverse.  The theory says that we are only one of an almost infinite array of possible universes or realities.  The image that is often used is that we’re a hologram or a video game, which I don’t think is a particularly useful way for us to approach the issue of unpredictable uncertainty.  Einstein was famously at odds with Bohr over the unpredictable nature of the Quantum equation, saying that “God doesn’t play dice.” Well, it turns out she does.  The uncertainty in Quantum Mechanics has an ancient counterpart in cultures that eventually evolved, through different religious roots, the practice of Buddhism.  In that practice, the material world is an illusion, including the self, and the life energy that we are all a part of is beyond our control.  Buddhism, in all its various forms, uses that insight to tune an individual and conscious release or enlightenment from the forms that tie us to our illusion of reality.  We have to find a way to think of this somewhere between the video game and Satori.

                There are going to be a lot of plans in our future, but we have to stop thinking of plans as solutions.  If democracy has a future (you watch the news and tell me what you think), we have to learn to flow to that future.  We have to learn to disengage from the formal structures we’ve used to protect us from chance, from the game of dice that we are inevitably caught up in, and open our selves up to new possibilities.  We need to existence as continual and imaginative reinvention of being.  This isn’t a problem of more, better or bigger data.  All data is always already part of a measured conclusion and not an invitation to openness.  Music, art, dance and stories are better ways to construct a communal mindfulness. 

                My sense is that this what Dewey, in his dry early 20^th Century prose, was trying to get at in his writing and thinking about art, education and democracy, which I think are inexorably intertwined.  Our own mindfulness is essential, but it will not be enough.  We have to start building schools and communities with these principles and practices at their core.  We rode rational discourse and deracinated scientific practice as far as it would go.  Can we be spiritual without withdrawal?  Can we let change happen without fear or predictability?

               

Tomorrow

                My prediction is that the next few weeks will be a test case for just how much of our democracy has survived the Trump presidency.  It is likely that two months from now we will have witnessed the collapse of the constitutional practice of checks and balances as both the legislature and the courts will abandon the rule of law.  When we reach that all but certain conclusion, it is time to stop fixating on Trump and his Republican enablers and start planning what we are going to do next.  The path forward is not the political calculations of a bipartisan government.  Quite probably by the end of January we will be in what amounts to a cultural civil war.  This is no time for polite discourse or timid compromise.  The only choice left to those of us who still want to live in a democracy is to quickly gather our limited resources and plan for battle.

                We are at a distinct disadvantage because the Republicans have been pursuing a minority rule strategy for several decades now.  A long time ago, they abandoned the idea that the majority should govern or that laws and historical protocols should be followed.  Mitch McConnell has been operating in this mode his whole career.  Playing catch-up is never fun, but the longer we wait to start, the harder it will be.  I think the first thing we have to do is to take a sober accounting of the situation.  It makes no sense to me to continue to operate as if our democracy as it existed can be saved.  It can’t.  An entrenched and militant minority of corrupt politicians and billionaires with corrupt intent have weakened it to the point of collapse.  This is no time to wax sentimental over what was; this is time to prepare for battle.

                The Republicans have feigned outrage over almost everything.  It’s time to answer with a righteous outrage of our own.  The only real advantage we have is that they are a minority, and while that doesn’t guarantee their defeat, it gives us a chance.  Along with a demographic majority, we also represent most of the wealth and economic creativity in the country.  Those bright blue dots in the sea of red America are where the cities, businesses and universities are.  We need to organize that power and those institutions for the cultural conflict ahead.  The 2020 election isn’t about candidates or parties, it’s about building a new democracy to replace the old one we let be destroyed by greed and hatred.  The only way to be a patriot in this struggle is to be an organizer, by getting people to vote and getting them to the polls to overwhelm the corrupt plans to suppress and rig the vote.  Trump and the GOP has basically invited the Russians to do just that.

                Our goal has to be to take over as many of the institutions as we can.  Certainly, the presidency and both houses of congress.  But we can’t stop there.  Just as the Republicans have used their gerrymandered power in the legislature to revamp our institutions, we have to be prepared to do the same.  We need to legislate to the wave of new voters we bring into the process and destroy the remnants of the American Right.  That includes purging the judges that Trump and McConnell have installed to validate their corrupt view of the constitution.  It means multiple ethics charges leveled at Republicans who have violated their oath of office.  It means suing Fox News and Brietbart for false and malicious content on their news shows.  It means breaking the back of the control the petrochemical industries have exercised over our politics. 

                It also means new leadership.  The next election isn’t about the old coalitions of government, it’s about a new coalition that will map out the next 75 years the way FDR mapped out the last 75.  This is no country for old men (or women).  This is a time to run head long into this disaster and turn it into a new opportunity to reimagine who we are.  Watch, if you must, the House make the case for impeaching Trump.  Watch the Senate fold and the courts protect the president.  When that’s over and you’re finished mourning our democracy, let’s get ready for tomorrow.

Energy and Information

                As we watch the House Republicans systematically dismantle what we used to call our democratic institutions, I think it’s time to start thinking about the deep structural changes that have to occur before we can rebuild a more robust and radical democracy.  There are lots of things that will have to change and be rearranged, but the two I think are most basic to building a new society are energy and information.  As building blocks of our daily lives, these two systems not only control the way our lives play out, they control the way we think about the options that are available to us.  Changes in these two systems will change almost everything else we do.

                The change in energy has been coming for a while now.  Climate change and greenhouse gasses are part of our daily lexicon.  I don’t think, however, that we’ve been as radical as we need to be about this shift in energy or what that shift will mean to other aspects of our lives.  When people talk about a proposal such as the Green New Deal, the tendency is to say it’s too extreme or too radical.  That might have been true twenty years ago, but it’s not true today.  We had a chance to be moderate and gradual, but we passed it up for a chance to build a few more coal powered power plants and a few thousand more gas guzzling SUVs.  The environmental part of the equation is widely debated, but it’s the structural changes that come with a shift to renewable energy that might have the most profound impact on how we structure our lives.

                Our energy is centralized and monetarized, meaning that the power of energy is controlled by a few companies and those companies are more interested in profit than the environment or flexibility.  When renewables make up a majority of our energy (and there’s a transition phase where they won’t and will need to supplemented by things like nuclear energy) the way we think about energy will change.  Instead of large conglomerates controlling supply and running pipelines and wires everywhere, a new energy system can spawn a whole new independence.  There are already people who ‘live off the grid,’ but in this system there would be no ‘grid’ to be part of.  The dominate and coercive effect on our economy that energy companies have will be eliminated.  We can share energy and be more responsible for the choices we make about it.  If we produce our own energy, I think we will become more of how it impacts our lives, and maybe we can stop burning California to the ground.  Being self-dependent will also give communities more control over development and land use.

                I think most people would be confused by the idea of an information infrastructure, but we have one.  There is a monopoly of a few gargantuan companies, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), Apple and Microsoft, that control the information industry.  The proof that they’re monopolies is in the way they buy up every promising new alternative to their dominance.  We are at their mercy as much as the people in California are at the mercy of rolling blackouts.  Just as our experience with energy has conditioned us to act in certain ways, so, too, has the information business.  The control that they exert over what we know and how we know it is a direct threat to democracy, which depends on good information and a highly manipulated algorithm of ‘likes,’ to function.  We’ve been running a 25 year experiment about unfettered information in a capitalistic system, and the results are pretty clear.  Either we change the information infrastructure or we lose our grip on sanity and reality.

                Both energy and information challenge us to behave differently.  How much energy should we use?  Are all the things we use energy to do and make really worth it?  Are we really better off with no regulation of information?  Are we really smarter and more well informed because of it?  There aren’t any easy answers to any of this, but it’s time to start the conversation.  Among the reasons our democracy failed was the corruption of the economy and politics by petrodollars and the contamination of the ‘public sphere’ by information companies.  It’s too late to stop what they have done, but if we want a different future we have to change the way they impact our world.

Whatta Ya Know ?

                As we stumble on through the public impeachment hearings, a central problem in our democracy becomes more and more evident: there is no way to create a consensus around what is and is not true.  I’m not talking about the kind of Truth that comes with flaming bushes and stone tablets, just the ordinary grounds for agreeing how we sort out what we think is important.  A democracy cannot function without some mechanism for defining political reality.  I am also not proposing that we return to any of the male dominated truth machines of the church and state that propped up political reality since the Enlightenment.  But we have to find some way that we can talk to each other without retreating to separate universes and lobbing bricks at the other side.  How did this get to be so hard?

                Science was supposed to solve this problem.  Rational and scientific thought was supposed to be free of the ideological contamination that infected the religious definitions of reality it replaced.  It should be pretty simple.  We have visual evidence from space that the earth is round (ok, elliptical if you must), but more people than ever believe the earth is flat.  Exhaustive studies on the effects of vaccines have concluded that they do not produce autism, but the anti-vaxer movement still grows.  Over 99% of climate scientists believe that climate change is real, but people still deny it exists.  How could there be such a disconnect between science and popular belief?  Democracy is impossible if people just deny what they don’t want to believe.  It depends on a robust conflict of ideas that can be worked out through dialog and compromise to create a political truth.  That truth may, and probably will, be found to be wrong or insufficient down the road, but that’s part of the plan.  When Dewey tried to define democracy as inquiry, that constant interrogation of truth is exactly what he had in mind.  We can’t engage in inquiry because we can’t agree how to agree on what is real.

                The expectation, ever since Bacon, was that science wouldn’t fall into the same sectarian disagreements that sent Christians out to kill other Christians over petty doctrinal issues.  To be fair, the chemists and physicists aren’t cutting each other’s throats, but a large part of the population has simply tuned out.  As science advanced, it became more specialized and credentialed.  Early proponents of the ‘New Science’ didn’t have to go through peer review to get tenure or research positions.  That specialization helped the sciences, making their work more focused and more productive.  Unfortunately, it also cut out most of the people.  The way we teach science doesn’t really help the problem, concentrating on rote memorization instead of experimentation and direct experience.  But the bigger problem is that for a lot of people who don’t really understand what science is or how it works it isn’t any more valid than Uncle Ted’s version of how the world works.  Scientists don’t think they should have to have a narrative interface, but without one their work is just being ignored by people who don’t get it.

                The temptation is just to say that those people are dumb, and they might be, but they vote.  They elected a president who tweets out half-baked conspiracy theories daily.  Science will not survive as a stand-alone enterprise if the political will to fund it and follow it isn’t there.  People want to believe they understand the world; that it makes sense.  If they can’t make sense of science, they’ll find another story to tell about how the world works.  I think that’s the easiest way to understand why our political system is in trouble.  Elites thought they could control the narrative by talking only to other elites.  In a democracy, that’s not enough.  The point is that in a democracy science needs more than labs and equipment; it needs a story, one that is both inclusive and captivating.  I think that story exists, but scientists don’t seem to want to tell it.  We have to change the way we educate people about how we make knowledge.  We have to stop acting like a random selection of facts or information means anything at all.  We also have to stop assuming that we only need to speak to the people who are as refined and educated as we are.  Democracy as inquiry needs more than a plan for STEM programs; it needs a narrative about those programs that makes them accessible and understandable to all of us.

               

               

               

Good Faith

                When most people think about being able to read, they think about the mechanical aspects of identifying words, sounds and letters.  It is true that readers have to learn to master semiotic systems that underly the written language, but reading is far from a mechanical exercise.  At its core, reading is a social activity that involves the reader in an ongoing and preestablished conversation, one that always takes the reader outside of herself even if her original encounter is personal.  One way of looking at a text is to see it as a complete and non-negotiable artifact.  In this view, the text has a meaning and it is the job of the reader to faithfully find that meaning.  The problem is that even the simplest texts have multiple possible meanings, and the reader finds the meaning they are most willing to find.  This is the basic insight of Reader Response Criticism.  Some versions give more power to the text, and some give more power to the reader, but they all see reading as an interaction or negotiation between the text and the reader.

                There are two more things that have to happen for a reading to take place.  First the reader has to make a commitment to the text (text here can be almost anything).  In order to read, the reader has to want to read.  If they don’t, no amount of mechanical proficiency will produce a valid reading.  One of the reasons that reading test scores are always dubious is because the students taking the test don’t want to read the test.  They are smart enough to know the test means more to the adults than it does to them, so they mail it in.  The second thing that has to happen is that the reader, even when deciding to engage, has to make a good faith effort.  That is, they have to be willing to try to play within the framework of the text and be willing to engage other readings from other readers.  When other teachers used to say, “yeah, but what if they say Hamlet is about dogs from Venus,” my response was they weren’t making a real effort.  The teacherly impulse is to tell them what it means, but telling them what it means is not a reading, it’s a command.

                Committing to a reading is demanding.  A reader has to set aside whatever they’re doing to enter another realm of languaging.  If the person has learned that they are going to be pressured for a ‘right’ answer, the commitment is even less likely.  Language regimes can be brutal things.  You can be corrected, ridiculed or even punished for not getting it right.  A real commitment begins by surrendering your time and focus to a social encounter.  It means you are going to try and read something that is not of your creation and might put you at odds with other people.  Just like listening to a friend is more than just hearing the words, a commitment to reading involves more than just decoding a text.  In fact, sometimes we retract our commitment after getting into the text and finding out we’re just not interested in continuing.

                The issue of making a good faith effort is even more important.  We’ve all had to read things we didn’t want to read.  We committed to finishing but not really trying to make our own meanings and compare it to the meanings others made.  Good faith means we are going to take this seriously and try to work through what troubles us or what we disagree about.  It means you care and will show some respect for the people and the process.  Without good faith, reading is reduced to a game that allows anyone to say anything.  

                I think what applies to reading applies to living in a democracy.  We have to make a choice to make a commitment to dialog of our culture.  That commitment means we are going to try and stick it out and give it our best shot.  It means we have to sometimes suspend our judgement and give the process a chance to work itself out.  It means we have to stay engaged.  When we don’t the democracy weakens and becomes stagnant. Making a good faith effort means that we will not just participate in the dialog but respect the people and processes that are part of it.  That means not reducing everything to personal attacks or throwing out the most outrageous and factually untrue things we can to gum up the works.  Right now, we have on political party who is no longer reading in good faith.  They don’t value the rules, and they don’t care if they ruin or destroy the game.  They think Hamlet is about dogs from Venus.

Narratives of Possibility

                There was a time when we shared a cultural narrative of possibility about what we could become, individually and collectively.  Those narratives promised opportunity and equality to anyone who was willing to buy in and roll up their sleeves.  They were always a big part fairy tale, because both opportunity and equality have never been available to everyone.  But now even the thought of opportunity and equality gets lost in the dystopian narratives of our future.  Go to a ‘sci-fi’ movie and watch the trailers that precede it.  You will be treated to endless iterations of the same scenario – the good days are gone, technology is evil and the planet is dying.  Even though most of these movies have a hero that fights for the good, any hope of revival is a long way on the other side of some bad stuff.  We have to find a way to tell or retell our story in a way that makes the future possible.

                One of the worst things about the Trump presidency is that it sucks all of the oxygen out of the culture.  When you have a poorly behaved toddler in charge of the political machine, all it creates is an endless cycle of crisis.  Even if we fix the immediate political problems, we are dead in the water without a meaningful sense of where we go next.  We should be thinking about how things are about to change.  They are going to change whether we like it or not.  The crisis with the climate, the coming change in energy production, the economic changes that will come from those changes should all be at the front of our cultural play list.  Instead, we’re caught in a 24 hour news cycle of Trump’s new tirade.  We have the power to change the way we live if we can focus on those issues instead of spending way too much time with trump.  Are we going to use AI to finally free us from menial labor, or are we going to create a new class of killer robots who hunt us down if we ever stop working?

                Our cultural narrative is being held hostage by the shift in demographics that threatens to take power away from those who have, almost exclusively, held it.  Part of this generational, with Boomers holding on to their jobs and their money because they see no place for themselves in the future.  Part of it is racial, as the demographics of country inevitably create a country without a majority of any one race.  White folks can see they are losing their privilege, even those rural whites who support Trump and had little of it to begin with, and can’t deal with that future.  Part of it is gender based, as women ever so slowly move into positions of power, and men are left to figure out how all the things they have heard about being a ‘man’ are supposed to align with that.  All of it is economic, as an incredibly small number of people control the wealth the culture generates. Where do go to tell a new story?  What soapbox, what street corner, what reading group or media platform will host this event?

                There are narratives being told.  Facebook, and every other large platform, tells one every day.  They make it feel like our story, but it’s really their version of what they want us to ‘like.’  There are narratives of loss and fear that are driving us closer to violence and decline being pushed by Russian, Chinese and North Korean bots.  There are still narratives for elites that promote the idea that if your tastes are erudite sophisticated enough you can avoid the scrum.  Cultural narratives that are robust enough to create a new imagined order aren’t going to be that precious.  There are mass media versions of the story in the Marvel Universe and beyond that are long on action and special effects but are tired stories about individual heroes saving the world at their core.  I don’t think any of these are going to take us to a new narrative.

                The bad news is that things are falling apart.  The good news is that things are falling apart.  This is the moment where we can imagine what was unimaginable before.  Before, there was too much of the past in the way, but now a lot of that has been reduced to rubble.  What we were telling ourselves will not help us move to a new world.  Turn off the news.  Concentrate on where we are and what you can contribute to it.  It may be that the odds are long, but that is no reason not to imagine.  The critique of the failures of Modernity and the Enlightenment are complete.  Their failures cannot point the way to a new era. 

The Transgenerational Problem

                I was part of the first ‘generation gap’ back in the 60’s.  We were a generation that was sure it was destined to save the world and overturn the stodgy cultural values and practices that were still entrenched after the war.  We fought for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and against the war, at least some of us did.  The generation that ushered in the Free Speech Movement and the antiwar movement was always just a fraction of that generation.  “Boomers” were never demographically what they were made out to be in the media.  The majority of us didn’t go to college, didn’t protest the war, believe in sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll and weren’t particularly liberal.  But those of us who were got all the attention and all the credit for the change that was created.  We’ve apparently morphed from a generation who didn’t “trust anyone over 30,” to one that doesn’t think anyone under 70 should be president.

                We’ve gone from filial piety and elder respect to “Ok Boomer.”  As a society, we’ve balkanized the age differences between us and retreated into the comfortable stereotypes of Boomers, Slackers, Xers and Millennials.  Each generation has faced an accelerated and unique rate of change.  There is little that translates from generation to generation as a positive and enduring cultural anchor.  When the rate of cultural and technological change accelerates, the social connections between generations becomes weaker.  There is less and less that the new generation can relate to or depend on in forming their own necessary adaptations to the environment around them.  When the corrosive effect of market capitalism intent on branding and exploiting every possible difference is added to the mix, it is little wonder that we have the cultural and political rifts we see between generations.  Any healthy democracy has to find a way to facilitate a transgenerational exchange based on goals and values that may manifest themselves differently to each generation but are still recognizable to all generations.

                That problem used to be solved by social institutions that promoted political and educational programs that were designed to increase prosperity and inclusion.  That isn’t happening anymore.  Economic and social mobility is almost at a standstill in this country.  Education has been under a 40 year assault from conservative and right-wing political movements that has hollowed out and degraded what was once a source of pride and equality.  Political institutions have crumbled under the constant debasement of basic democratic principles resulting in the highest level of partisan division and outright cynicism in our history.  In short, we’ve lost the narrative that used to unite us.  To be fair that narrative was often a fiction, they almost always are, that needed to be exposed and debunked.  The problem is not the old narrative of white male privilege and its antipathy to women, people of color, LGBTQ people or immigrants has unraveled, the problem is that we haven’t found a way to replace it.

                The short-term outlook isn’t that rosy.  Trump is going to be impeached and the Republicans are going to respond with an all-out assault of lies and distractions, further weakening our political institutions. The 2020 election will be infested with an unprecedented number of foreign and domestic bots spreading conspiracies and misinformation, and the environment will continue to edge toward the cliff.  There will not be a kumbaya moment any time soon.  One thing that is possible is for Boomers to wake up and read the date on their drivers licenses.  Even with the unparalleled breakthroughs in medical science, no one over 70 should run for president.  The issue is not their health, the issue is the relevance of their frame of reference.  As Boomers, we have had our run, and the results aren’t pretty.  Some of us thought there was a path forward to a better and more equal society that was grounded in respect for each other and the environment, but we were wrong.  It is time to let our children drive.  If we don’t respect what they know and what they can do, we have no one but ourselves to blame.  On the other hand, it is time for the generations that follow us to learn from our example.  Good intentions and hubris are a recipe for tragedy and little else.  Democracies evolve.  They are nurtured and handed across generations.  We fumbled the hand off.    

It’s Not About You

                This is the point in the school year that the first round of parent/teacher conferences are just about wrapping up.  Parents all over the country are trudging into classrooms to hear how their child is progressing.  Most of the conversation will center around test scores and other evaluations that tell whether or not the student is on the right ‘level,’  A lot of nervous smiles and tense exchanges over those numbers will leave both the parents and teachers wondering what it’s all for.  The individual focus in education is a misguided activity.  It promotes a faulty idea of what intelligence is, and it normalizes a forced hierarchy of achievement.  The ‘data’ passed back and forth in the conferences says nothing about how intelligent or creative a child is, all it does is promote an undemocratic and inaccurate picture of what learning is and why we do it.

                Intelligence is not an individual property.  A person can only be considered ‘intelligent’ within a specific cultural context.  Being good in one context is no guarantee that you will be good in another.  Besides, the issue is not how a random individual is doing, but how the group or society is doing.  There are lots of really ‘smart’ people in America, but we still elected Donald Trump.  Over 98% of climate scientists agree that global warming is man-made, but we still live in an economy driven by petro-dollars.  A democratic society is not the invention of a few elite intellects.  It is the relationships and values of a collective.  Nothing in our current educational system promotes collective intelligence.  Instead, we pit students against each other in rankings, which are often based on statistically insignificant differences created while performing unrealistic and unimportant activities.  Life is not a test, and doing well on a test does not prepare you for life. 

                We are fixated on individual genius, but it is collective intelligence that creates and sustains the world.  There is nothing that one smart person can do about creating a just social order or an ecologically sustainable future.  It’s not that smart people aren’t valuable; they are, but only if the cultural context supports and responds to them.  Humans are diverse because their diversity adds to the possible solutions and adaptations available.  Whenever only one idea or one type of thought is allowed, the adaptability and sustainability of the group declines.  It’s good to have tall people for some things, but squeezing into small places requires a different physique.  We have chased the folly of individual greatness or brilliance to the point of diminishing returns.  We need an educational project that turns toward a collective sense of responsibility and participation.

                The politics of the moment couldn’t make this any clearer.  When almost half of the country is willing to support a narcissistic liar, it doesn’t matter what the rest of us think.  We have no common standpoint to work from.  There is nothing that we can point to even start building a shared vision or description of events.  Some of these people probably had high test scores and good grades.  What good did it do them, or us?  An educational system that fails to create a common basis for engagement is a failure, no matter what the ‘data’ say.  As long as we perpetuate the myth that only the elite from the elite institutions need a good education, we will fail as a democracy.  Setting aside the ridiculous notion that only really smart people get into ‘good’ schools, there is no elite institution capable of producing a democratic and civil intelligence.  In fact, they are almost guaranteed to produce the opposite.

                It’s too bad that all those parent/teacher conferences aren’t community events.  It’s too bad that parents go in alone to hear about just their child instead of seeing them in a collaborative setting.  Instead of some reified test scores, maybe the teacher should show off something they all did together.  Sure, some kids will have done more than others, but that doesn’t matter as long as they all contributed what they could.  If we can’t do it together, we can’t do it at all.  It’s not about you.   

Contracts

                Since the Enlightenment, at least, we have looked at societies as being based on a social contract.  The idea is that the sovereign rights of the individual are voluntarily limited by the social agreements, such as laws and institutions, and that those limitations are based on an enlightened self-interest.  The soaring rhetoric of the opening of the Declaration of Independence is probably the most well known and repeated expression of that idea.  Given that grounding, it is completely understandable that we have a democracy based on the adjudication of individual rights.  Scratch the surface of any American’s understanding of democracy, and they are bound to start talking about their rights.  In English law, rights are mostly related to money and property, so our democracy has also created an unequal and unsustainable economy of individuals making money at the expense of the political franchise.

                Now that the presidency of Trump has made the limitations of that approach obvious, it might be time to go back and rethink our obsession with a social contract.  On the one hand, the contract is supposed to protect us from tyranny, but what is the crushing poverty caused by individuals bending the rules to create obscene wealth at the expense of others if it’s not tyranny.  Of course, we don’t want a King, but a capitalist feudalism doesn’t really seem like such a cheery alternative.  Contracts for the oligarchy that founded our nation were only ever meant to apply to a limited class of individuals.  That is still true.  The market produces wealth, but only for those who can afford to play in and manipulate the system.  Most of us are just spectators.  The legal system protects our rights, but only if you can afford representation that is better than the other side.  The worst part of contracts can be seen in Trump.  He never signed one he intended to honor, and his oath of office was just another convenient lie.

                Social contracts cannot create nor protect a democracy.  A democracy has to have at its core a commitment to something greater than individual sovereignty.  Maturana says that we ‘bring forth’ a world, and democracy is a specific example of that.  Creating a democracy is a move to realize that it is what we are collectively and not individually that defines our existence.  We have been sold the story that it is strong individuals that make a society great.  That’s a lie.  What makes a democracy great is collective achievements of its people.  That means that democracy is the environment and relationships of its people, not in the archives in Washington D.C.  The constitution is still there, but the commitment to a social destiny is not.  We were never meant to be a diverse nation.  The compact of the founders only covered a small group of people.  Once their shared hatred of King George delivered a surprise victory, even that initial solidarity started to unravel.  They found out their interests were not so mutual and that their willingness to sign on to a new nation was compromised.  The narrative we spin out in public school American history is edited to leave out the conflicts and the exclusions, so now that we are faced with the end of that compact, we have no living example of how to proceed.

                If there is to be a next act in the American democracy, it won’t be created around contracts and individual rights.  If there is to be a next act, it will be based on a narrative grand enough to unite us and loose enough to let us be the diverse and complex society we’ve become.  Instead of the institutions of democracy, we should concentrate on the environment of democracy, the felt experience of seeing something beyond ourselves and our immediate interests.  As far as I can tell, there is a whole political party in America that thinks democracy is the right to make money, regardless of what or who is hurt in the process.  Their model of the contract is the same as Trump’s.  They cannot see and do not help create a living and relational environment of democratic value.  To them, their success is all that matters.  That approach has hit the wall.  The life world is in peril.  We are setting our children up to fight over the last scraps of food in an environmental diaspora.  We are wasting the time we have producing garbage instead of building a future.  The limited vision of the Enlightenment created such a strong sense of self that we are now incapable of understanding how illusory the self is.  Nothing we have thought or told ourselves about how we got here will help us get to a real democracy.

What Now?

                Last week the House of Representatives voted along party lines to formalize the next phase of the impeachment proceedings against Trump.  The number that should concern all of us is that there were no Republicans that voted for the inquiry.  That means that not a single member of the Republican Party thought bribery and extortion of a foreign government was even worth investigating.  When they had control of the House, they initiated 13 different proceeding on Benghazi, which was an unfortunate but not an unconstitutional event.  Now they seem to buy the line from the White House that Trump is not only immune to prosecution but to even being investigated.  It isn’t really surprising that the vote turned out the way it did, but that doesn’t make it any less concerning.  What it means is that the system of government that we were all taught to revere is dead.

                We have now reached the point where one of the two major parties in our country is willing to abdicate their responsibility for constitutional oversight to a craven liar.  They no longer make any pretense of believing in the most rudimentary functions of a democracy.  They were already a minority party ruling as the majority, but now it’s obvious that they intend to tear down whatever barriers were left to their rule.  They have corrupted the Justice Department, stacked the courts with the most egregiously unqualified slate of judges ever, and filled key government offices with incompetent sycophants at every turn.  They have breached our alliances around the world and undone decades of minimal improvement in the environment.  They separated and locked up over 5,500 children at the border in a move that had to make sadistic xenophobes around the globe envious.  The damage to our government and our image is only getting worse.

                The other major party is acting as if an election can stop or reverse this damage.  I don’t see how.  The next election will be marked by cyberattacks that will make the Russian interference in 2016 look like an outdated game of pong.  Voter systems will be hacked, and mistrust for the results will rampant on both sides.  The Democratic candidate, whoever it is, will win the popular vote, probably by more than the three million votes Hillary won by.  It won’t matter.  Trump and the Republicans will claim the results are invalid, and he will refuse to leave office.  The Supreme Court will support that, unless Roberts has a crisis of conscience at the last minute.  Democracy in America is no longer an electoral matter.  In fact, America is no longer a democracy.

                If Republicans play by the ‘rules,’ they lose.  They have no intention of losing.  This result was inevitable.  The protocols of our democracy were always papered over a litany of divisions that go all the way back to the earliest colonists.  For almost 250 years we perpetuated the narrative that we would rise above those divisions, but in the end we never really could.  We have spun a story about inclusion and expansion of the franchise, but in reality our story has always been about exclusion.  We were never able to confront and fix our problems because we could never really face them.  We put more faith in an unequal and unfair economic system than we did in political honesty.  This has been brewing for a long time, but the vote on the House floor makes it clearer than ever than American democracy is close to the end.

                I think it’s time to pick through the wreckage for whatever can be salvaged and move on.  The right-wing supporters of Trump like to talk about a civil war if he is removed.  They should be more worried about one if he’s not.  Democracy isn’t based on institutions; it’s based on the relationships and shared narratives of the people.  We will not move forward on policy alone.  The only way forward is a new story about who we are and how we’re connected.  Fixing the government doesn’t start in Washington; it starts in the neighborhood.  A diverse democracy demands a level on involvement and ethical behavior Americans have been unwilling and unable to give.  If we want to continue as a democracy, we’re going to have to face that responsibility.

Coleman Young

                My parents moved from central Wisconsin to Flint, Michigan in 1953.  They moved to be part of the economic boom that was going on all over what they now call Automation Alley.  The city at the heart of all this was, of course, Detroit.  In the 50’s it was one of the richest and fastest growing cities in the country.  The political and economic power of the region was wielded by auto executives and the millionaires that the Big Three and the supporting industries created.  They were mostly white guys in suits that invested in the civic development of the region.  In Flint, the Mott Foundation funded educational and cultural programs that made the city important.  The factories were booming, the unions were expanding, and future was so bright you had to wear shades.

                Underneath this prosperity, were the fault lines that would turn this region into the dystopia that it is today.  When I was in school, Flint had four Class A high schools and a network of parochial schools.  Today, there isn’t a single class A school in the city.  The landmark buildings of the Detroit architect, Albert Kahn, that symbolized the wealth and power of Detroit are often in ruins today.  There are books of photographs of decaying buildings that make the city look like a ghost town, like it was the site of some horrible war.  All these cities saw folks, mostly, but not entirely, white folks move to the suburbs and the surrounding small towns that stretch from the Tri-Cities to the downriver communities in Detroit. 

                What happened in Michigan is complicated.  It always is.  There is enough blame to go around about how something that looked so prosperous and solid could fall apart so fast.  The usual suspects have all been rounded up and interrogated, globalization, the unions, the lack of innovation have all been cited as being part of the demise.  But as I sit here watching what is left of American democracy being cynically destroyed by Republican sycophants defending an indefensible president, the element that I think played the biggest role is race.  It might have been difficult for Detroit to survive and flourish with all the economic and cultural upheaval of the 50’s and 70’s, but even that slim chance left town when the racial turmoil of the period caused the compact that connected the city to the surrounding area broke down in the 1970’s.  I don’t mean to imply that race wasn’t an issue before then or that everything was fine until the civil rights movement came along.  Far from it.  Race always divided the city and the shop, even in the best of days.  What I want to suggest, however, is that a fundamental change in the way people thought of Detroit happened when Coleman Young became mayor in 1974.

                When he became the first African American mayor of what was still a major American city, something changed.  The white people who had been leaving Detroit anyway, now left completely.  It was as if having a Black mayor meant they could abandon the city emotionally and culturally.  If Coleman was the mayor, then they were going to take their ball and go home.  Instead of trying to find a new coalition to share the city, they left it to die on its own.  Young wasn’t without some blame.  In the twenty years of his stewardship there was enough corruption and bombast to make what was an already difficult proposition impossible.  But every large city has corruption, and every large city has problems.  When they survive, it’s because all the people in the city want to make it work.  That didn’t happen in Detroit, or Flint, or Pontiac, or Saginaw. 

                I say this because this is the impulse I see today in Republicans.  The mere existence of an African American president was enough for them to abandon the country.  They no longer want any part of America.  They want their own, unsullied version of America that they don’t have to share with “them.”  There have always been racists that are load and vulgar about it, but in both of these instances the racism is deeper.  If white people can’t have control, then they don’t want anything to do with it.  It’s the only way that I can make sense of people supporting the most incompetent, corrupt and stupid president in our history.  I think most of the people who left the city would deny this, but what other reason is there?  So when I watch the news and see how bad things have gotten, I think of Coleman and the city they let die.

God and the Compact

                If the social compact is defined as those values and ethical connections that bind us together as a society, apart from any legal or formalistic ties, then I think the majority of people might assume that religion would be the default starting point for those values.  I think there is good reason to resist that impulse.  I think that religion, and Christianity in particular, has made our democracy less inclusive and less tolerant.  There are those who would argue that those using religion to divide us aren’t true Christians, but try telling them that.  There are things in the basic structure of monotheism that are antithetical to a social compact that will sustain a democracy.

                I think that people should believe and worship whatever and wherever they choose, but the idea that it is our ‘Christian’ values that sustain us is more problematic.  In the first place, Christianity in America is a shrinking part of the demographic.  There have been fairly sharp shifts in the number of people who identify as Christian as compared to those who identify as ‘non.’  That shift is even more pronounced among millennials.  Even of the shrinking number of older, white folk who identify as Christian, only a fraction of those actively practice.  Throw in the 9-10 percent of people who identify with a religion other than Christianity, and we are almost at a plurality of people who are not Christian,  That plurality is only going to grow as older generations die off.  It would indeed be odd if not tyrannical to base the ethical and moral foundation of a democracy on something that a minority believe.

                An even more compelling reason to leave religion out of this is that monotheism in it’s Abrahamatic forms is inherently exclusive and not inclusive.  The values are supposed to be ‘universal,’ but access requires conversion and orthodoxy.  Every sect of every religion based on the covenant with Abraham believes that they are the chosen ones.  They believe their interpretation of the word is the correct interpretation, and they have spent large parts of the last two millenniums killing each other over the right to say that.  This ethical flaw is not an aberration of a few practitioners, it is the foundation of monotheistic values.  The “Christian” values that we lean on are already given as a reason to exclude other religions or discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual identity.  They won’t even sell the people they think are ‘sinners’ a damn wedding cake.

                This is no way to sustain a democracy.  We’ve added “under God” to the pledge and printed “in God we Trust” on every piece of currency we make, but that hasn’t made us a more democratic or more inclusive country.  In fact, things are trending in the opposite direction, as they often will in times of social change and upheaval.  If you put a monotheistic religion under pressure, it resorts to trying to ‘purify’ the culture.  The mayhem and bloodshed are never far behind.  A democratic compact has to have a foundation that cannot be reduced to sectarian claims.  We have to be more cosmopolitan than Christian.

                We find ourselves faced with certain collapse and extinction if we don’t find a way to rebuild a social compact that protects not just the diversity of our culture but the diversity of natural world.  The ethical foundation for a revived social compact is under our feet.  We live in it.  We have to learn to share and preserve it together.  Christians have been conquerors and marauders.  They thought they were ordained by providence to rule the land and all that it gave.  They all think, in one way or another, that they are chosen.  They are not the examples we should use to build a democratic future. 

Citizenship

                In one of the most controversial and antidemocratic Supreme Court decisions influenced by Scalia’s hypocritical notion of ‘constructivism,’ the court ruled in Citizens United that corporations had the same first amendment rights as individuals.  The decision opened the flood gates of ‘dark money’ that has crippled the democratic process, skewing elections toward a hand full of very rich donors, think the Koch brothers, who are able to hide their influence and meddling behind shell entities.  What our democracy faces now is predicated on the notion that rights do not necessarily imply citizenship That is, that corporations have the ‘rights’ of individuals without the responsibility of citizenship.

                Naomi Zack frames the issue by distinguishing between the social contract and the social compact.  The contract contains all the legal and constitutional elements of the democracy, while the compact is the ethical and moral commitment that citizens in the society have to each other.  Without the compact, the contract quickly erodes into clever lawyering and constitutional chicanery.  It is the commitment to the compact, the values and ethics that ground the relational foundation of a democracy that keep that democracy alive and vital.  The court failed to see that extending the rights of the contract to entities with no commitment to the compact was a recipe for undermining and unraveling the foundations of the democracy.

                Corporations shouldn’t have the rights of citizens if they are unwilling to also assume the responsibility of the compact, of acting in accordance the values of fairness and humane treatment we depend on in a democracy.  This rupture between the contract and the compact is the main reason that capitalism is destructive to democracy.  We expect corporations to be driven by the bottom line.  Trump has even bragged that paying little or no taxes is a sign of a smart businessman.  It may be, but it is not a quality of good citizenship.  Making money is fine if it can be done within the framework of the compact.  We tend to only hold corporations accountable to the law, but their larger civic responsibility is to the values that sustain the democracy.  Obviously, that isn’t happening.

                Every day we are confronted with another regulation being rolled back or another tax break targeted to the already obscenely rich, as if the only thing that makes us a democracy are the rights that individuals and corporations (even political parties) have is to (barely) follow the law.  That may be a legalistic and formal minimum for a democracy, but it will never produce a sustainable society.  No one, individual or corporate, should enjoy the rights of the contract without living within the commitments of the compact.  We have reified the idea of the law, thereby separating it from the social and relational contexts that create it.  Any society that conflates being legal with being moral is doomed.

                We need to stop apologizing for demanding that there be an ethical component to democratic citizenship.  Anyone who isn’t willing to uphold the compact is not a citizen, and certainly not a patriot.  You may have rights, but they are only legitimate in the context of the values and ethical standards that create and support them.  It doesn’t help that we have a president and majority leader who have contempt for both the contract and the compact.  To them, this is just a game they play to enrich themselves and those around them.  In that kind of culture, babies are torn out of their mother’s arms at the border, the ocean is filled with plastic and more and more life forms are fading into extinction.  This cannot last.

                It’s fine to be absorbed in policy and spend your time combing over the details of each candidate’s health care plan.  But the more important question is what values does that plan promote?  If we’re going to put profit above all else, then we will never have an equitable program.  The most salient part of those values we need reflects most directly on the environment.  Wealth that is driven by destruction really isn’t wealth at all.  Burning oil to make money isn’t any better than selling meth to school children.  It is our values and relationships that sustain our democracy, not the rights of corporations.