Reform and Revolution: Radical Democracy and the Red Meme

                It becomes clearer every day that our formal democracy cannot reform itself fast enough to cope with the political, economic or environmental challenges we face.  The slow pace of change that formal democracy produces is too easily side-tracked by special interests and institutional protocols.  We can see the same problem with education, where it seems increasingly difficult not just to change but to even ask the right questions.  The institutions of modernity were designed to resist sudden shifts in popular thought and action.  The oligarchy that runs those institutions has perfected the ability to stall, delay and, in the end, defer action as it works to protect its own status and interests.  It’s hard to see how reform in any of the major institutions of our society is going to be enough, not just to appease the growing sense of anger and despair but to remedy or confront the existential threats we face.  While reform may not satisfy the moment, revolution is a tricky proposition in the quest for a radical democracy.

                Our typical view of revolution centers around a violent conflict.  I admit that there are days I think a thousand guillotines in Battery Park at the foot of Wall Street wouldn’t be a bad start, but would another revolution lead to a radical democracy?  When the revolution is over, it’s the people who lead the revolution that end up in power.  That can be pretty cool if the name of the leader is Washington, but not so much if they’re named Robespierre or Stalin.  The Russian anarchist, Bakunin, warned that the people who lead the fight shouldn’t lead the society the revolution created, but that never happens.  Revolutions may be necessary, and violence may be justified, but that kind of revolution has a limited horizon when it comes to what happens next.  American school kids learn about the glory of the American Revolution but very little about the purging of loyalists or the attempts of the American Aristocracy to suppress real democracy.  Radical democracy didn’t emerge from the French, American or Russian revolutions.

                The philosopher, Ken Wilber, once proposed a scheme of memes or states of consciousness that determined how advanced a social order could be.  In his scheme, the problematic meme was the red meme, the meme of anger and fear.  If a society couldn‘t find a way to move beyond the red meme, the politics and actions of the culture were doomed to an endless cycle of fear and retribution instead of sustainable collaboration.  If we desire a radical democracy, we have to find a way to work beyond the red meme, that is, we have to have a revolution that doesn’t succeed because of violence.  Radical democracy demands a level of consciousness that resists the urge to turn everything into an us vs. them, right or wrong struggle for dominance.  It demands an ecology of thought that recognizes the interconnected fate of our existence. 

                Beyond the red meme means beyond an economic system that produces obscene differences between winners and losers, or an economic system that reduces everything in the world to its material worth.  Beyond the red meme means a sense of diversity and inclusion grounded in the common need to express ourselves as we are.  Beyond the red meme means totally revising our ideas of leadership and participation.  Beyond the red meme means creating an educational system that connects people to their communities instead of sorting them for exploitation by the rich.  Beyond the red meme isn’t an option or a utopian fantasy; it’s our only chance at survival. 

                These kinds of revolutions have happened before.  The introduction of Aristotle and the ideas from the North Sea revitalized a Europe devastated by plague and feudalism.  The New Science sparked a change in thought that ended religious conflict in Europe and brought on the Enlightenment.  Our revolution, like those that proceeded it, will have its flaws and limitations, but it will provide a way to move beyond the stalemate we are now facing.  We don’t need a general or a political leader; we need a billion souls committed to a new vision.       

The Libertarian Fallacy

                One of the consequences of a formal democracy based on individual rights derived from a social contract is the rise of libertarian philosophy.  Libertarianism is based on the assumption that individual rights are more fundamental and privileged than the democratic formation they are part of.  All of us can cite Jefferson’s “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” line in the Declaration of Independence.  Most Americans, I think it is fair to say, have a much stronger sense of their individual rights than they do of their democratic obligations.  The philosophical arguments that ensue are centered around the danger of the state dominating people’s lives, and that is a valid concern.  What I want to argue is that the problem with libertarian thought is not political or philosophical but biological.

                Libertarianism recognizes one of the biological realities of being human, namely that we are autonomous beings.  We aren’t identical to one another and we have different, sometimes radically different, ways of seeing, expressing and understanding the world we inhabit.  To someone in our culture that is more than obvious.  As a product of this culture, I value the autonomy we call individuality.  But autonomy is only half of the biological reality of being human: we are also connected.  Aristotle said we were political beings, which is another way of saying we are social beings.  We live in groups, and even when we’re alone, we envision others as the background of our actions and thoughts.  Libertarianism either ignores or devalues this connection in order to make individual choice the dominant characteristic of political action.

                Radical democracy cannot be libertarian.  Radical democracy has to balance the autonomous and the connected aspects of the human condition without making one the pretext to the other.  We are always already both.  Autonomy is always contextualized and conscribed by connection, and our connectivity is energized and manifested in our autonomy.  Human groups, of any size, that have energy and vitality also contain conflict and disagreement.  Those groups can only survive, however, if the conflict and disagreement are productive.  Productive groups both change and conserve.  They change by using language, and other tools, to create connections that are richer and more satisfactory, and they conserve by making sure that those changes enhance rather than weaken or even threaten the connection between the group and the biosphere.   Individuals that are part of a dying group can’t escape on their own.  Radical democracy is based on this tension or autopoiesis.

                Formal democracy is too rigid.  It is often based on purity, as was true in Athens.  Early American democracy had all kinds of restrictions about who was included and who wasn’t.  To its credit, it kept expanding the franchise and including more, but not all, of the people.  Even now, we argue about what ideas are truly “American,” which is a form ideological purity.  As formal democracy granted more and more groups of people ‘rights’ in the libertarian sense, it overloaded one half of the biological equation.  A democracy cannot simply expand rights without simultaneously rewriting and strengthening the connections that frame them.  A radical democracy does not promise and individual identity outside of or free from the social connection that gives it existence and connects it to the life world that sustains it.

                This is necessarily a dynamic and messy proposition, one in which our autonomy and our connection are continually in flux.  We have tried to keep it rational and clean.  We have tried to be democratic by having uniform institutions and white marble buildings (the Greeks painted theirs, you know).  The results were to create a sterile democracy that works if a benign and well-intentioned elite plays along with the democratic script.  Watch the news tonight and see if you still think that’s working.  A radical democracy is a face to face, hand to hand, idea to idea proposition that starts with primacy of our connection but recognizes the value of our autonomy.  We are smarter, safer and a lot more fun when our differences inform our solidarity. 

Democracy and Diversity

                One of the most difficult problems facing an attempt to reboot democracy is how to think about and act on the issue of diversity.  Even though we are a country who prides itself in being diverse, it is hard to point to any evidence that we have made diversity a productive part of politics and education.  For the most part, we have tended to work toward consensus and conformity as the expression of the majority without engaging the issues surrounding those who don’t get easily homogenized into the ‘melting pot’ of American culture.  In education, we have tried to squeeze diversity out of the curriculum by promoting a false narrative of standardization.  We have become stuck in some bad habits that prevent us from moving forward.

                I don’t think a radical democracy has the same need for consensus and standardization that a formal democracy based on an oligarchy has emphasized.  An oligarchy can only be so diverse, there isn’t a lot of room for divergence.  We have used the idea of experts, good schools and testing to entrench a limited range of voices and standpoints into the public discussion.  At the same time, the rapid advancement of information technology has made it easier and easier for people to express their views.  The debate over what to do about the resultant conflict has tied us in knots.  Figuring out a way to reconcile these forces is a major challenge to rethinking our politics and our education.

                The idea that we used to be unified and now we’re not is false.  We appeared united because only a very small slice of the people got to speak at all.  Gradually and thankfully that has changed some, but what happens when the legitimate demands from the new participants are at odds.  Both Feminist and Queer studies programs have opened up valuable new ways of thinking about art, society and politics, for example.  At the same time, a resurgence of white supremist and other hate speech has flourished.  In the academy the reaction has been to promote one and silence the other, but that isn’t an answer that seems to satisfy anybody.  Formal democracy has typically used institutions to censor and regulate public speech.  Libraries used to sort and code information, and schools used to enforce codes of speech and action.  There were some things about that scenario that were comforting.  There was an attempt to filter out bogus information and create some form of civility to public and political communication.  The price was that we only heard from a limited spectrum of people and views.

                Censorship is not the answer.  A radically democratic society wouldn’t recognize the authority to censor.  We cannot ‘protect’ people from the speech of others or act like that issues within censored speech are resolved just because they are limited or removed from sight.  A radical democracy has to openly engage all points of view without necessarily trying to resolve them.  My intent is not to privilege or valorize any particular type of speech.  I think there are things that a radical democracy has to challenge and contain, but it can’t use the tools of formal democracy to do it.  A radical democracy is a messy, loud and conflicted space.  There are limits.  Speech is democratic, but violence isn’t. 

                Dewey thought that inquiry would lead to consensus.  He put too much emphasis on the way that science and rationality would produce that consensus.  Schools have put a lot of emphasis on assimilation, of making sure that we all blend to whatever their view of cultural dominance happens to be.  I think a radical democracy has to drop the pretense that our differences can be smoothed over by letting some form of authority play judge.  Communities based on radical democratic principles need not resolve the differences within them.   In fact, the differences should be the dynamic energy that motivates the community to realize and sustain its principles.  The enemy of democracy is not difference, it’s purity. 

                One of the major structural and historical weaknesses of the American system of democracy has been the residual influence of the Puritans and a Christianity driven to expel all non-believers.  Radical democracy is not pure or even trying to be pure, but it is inclusive.  It is not inclusive because it doesn’t matter what people say or think, it is inclusive because it has a higher aspirational horizon: survival.  Only a political and educational system that forces hostile views into the public conversation about how we save the planet and each other, even if we hate each other, is capable of breaking down the emotionally entrenched believes that threaten our survival.  It will not happen because of reason.  Everybody thinks they are being reasonable.  We don’t have to agree to get along.  We don’t need consensus.  We need a truce held in place by the common threats to our existence.  This might not sound as lofty as Jefferson made it out to be, but it might be the only shot we’ve got.

Radical Democracy

                We have been living in and practicing a formal democracy.  We have laws and institutions that stabilize and regulate our formal democracy.  From the beginning, our democracy has been driven by an oligarchy, a class of elites that more or less run everything.  We put a lot of emphasis on leadership instead of participation, and we have a news media that presents the news at about a fifth- grade level to a general populace that they pretty much despise.  Public opinion doesn’t really matter much in a formal democracy.  The current president got almost three million fewer votes than his opponent, but he sits in the White House anyway.  The current leader of the US Senate decides to kill bills that a majority of the people support, and the Republican Party keeps trying to get rid of health care coverage and abortion rights even though a strong majority of people support it.  The senate is ramming through unqualified judges to turn the last branch of government into a rubber stamp for their abuses.

                Obviously, something is broken.  If the fundamental idea of a democracy is that the majority rules, with some restrictions, then is it fair to call what we have a democracy?  On a structural level, the protocols and procedures of government have allowed a well- organized, not to mentioned well- funded, minority seize control.  Millions of Americans are celebrating a musical about a ‘founding father’ of ill repute who was against the rabble voting for senators, let alone the president.  We are a democracy that values territory, and land ownership, more than people.  We have begrudgingly expanded the franchise far beyond the intention of the man who wrote some of the most stirring phrases of our founding.  This is not to say that it didn’t work, for a while.  But it isn’t working anymore.

                There are a lot of people who think that if we can get beyond our current political woes, the glory and stability of American democracy will be restored.  I’m not one of them.  It is true that what we face now is worse, but we have been heading this way for a while. We can elect new people, and we should, but the only way not to keep slipping back into the state we’re currently in is to fundamentally change our idea of democracy.  It is time to dig back into the foundation and root out the rot at the core. Democracies cannot be run by an oligarchy.  Eventually, power concentrated in the hands of the few will become power of the few over the many.  There is nothing that says we have to continue on as a democracy, but if being a democracy is important, then we have to exchange formal democracy for radical democracy. 

                Our democracy is grounded in the idea of individual rights, and it those rights that Jefferson so eloquently gave voice to, even if he never thought they should apply to everyone.  Rights are a product of thinking about individuals as part of a social contract, where we agree in some magical process to exchange our individual rights for a social arrangement that protects and unifies our interests.  Locke thought we could do this rationally, as individuals, while Hobbes was pretty sure we needed a strong leader to keep us from tearing each other apart.  We chose Locke.  In either version, rights are central.  To be fair, the emergence of rights after centuries of kings and popes was no mean accomplishment.  Even if we feel the restraint of depending on an oligarchy now, the founding oligarchy was a huge improvement over the despotic arrangements that preceded them. 

                I think there are two problems with the democratic origins grounded in the Enlightenment thinking about the social contract.  The first is the eventual problem of the oligarchy – the notion of elite rule – that I have already mentioned and which I will develop more later, and the second is the idea of individual rights.  There probably isn’t an American today who hasn’t used the phrase “it’s my right” or “I have my rights.”  Rights are the bedrock of our democratic beliefs, but that foundation is cracking.  A radical democracy has to be about more than rights.  It’s not enough to have your rights, to be free, if that freedom leads to the destruction of the planet.  A democracy is never just about you or me; a democracy is always about us.

                The social contract imagines us as unique and alone.  The fact is that none of us are either of those things.  The human condition is not isolation, it’s collaboration and interaction.  Humberto Maturana says we are a paradox of being autonomous and connected.  We are born into a world of other people and we are born into that world as a separate entity.  Being just one or the other fails to adequately represent our existence.  We need rights, but we also need community.  Radical democracy is a way of organizing that community so that both our individual rights and our collective responsibilities are realized.  No one has the right to harm the collective for their own advantage.  The collective shouldn’t have the power to stifle self-realization and expression. 

                Radical democracy is hard.  It is impossible if value rights above everything else.  One of the strongest signs of crisis in our democracy is the disappearance of the ‘we.’  There is a lot of talk about ‘tribalism’ today, of groups putting their interests above the whole.  I think in democracies and communities the idea of consensus is always problematic, always at risk or silencing or even erasing people on the margins, but a democracy has to find some way to embrace difference as necessary, as a way of expanding consciousness and perspective.  At its core this is less about law and policy than it is about values and perceptions.  If we want to be democratic, we have to figure this out.  The first iteration of American democracy has crashed and burned.  If we value democracy as much as we say we do, we have to the most democratic thing imaginable, we have to change.

Democratic Intelligence

               

                In an educational and social system dominated by an economic and political oligarchy, intelligence an individual quality.  We celebrate ‘smart’ people and reward them materially and monetarily for their knowledge and ability.  We identify ‘good’ schools where all the smart people go and give tests and rankings to be sure only the ‘best and brightest’ make it in (with all the legacy students who just bought their way in).  We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of intelligence this way that it seems almost heretical to suggest that intelligence is not an individual quality.  There are people who have higher aptitude for some kinds of intellectual work, but intelligence is a social and cultural phenomenon, not an abstract ability or quality.

                Intelligence is culturally bound in several ways.  Not all cultures or sub-cultures cultivate or value the same traits and knowledge.  Cultures often restrict intelligence to certain classes or institutions, and cultures have different ways of identifying and rewarding intelligence.  Finally, every culture has an idea of what they expect intelligence to produce.  In our culture we are obsessed with ranking intelligence, of limiting the voices and perspectives that can participate in decision making and dialog.  We identify valedictorians, as if the grades people receive somehow entitle them to greater status and credibility, even though valedictorians are often not the ‘smartest’ people in the class.  These rankings, of both individuals and schools, are there to protect the privileges of the elite.  Sure, every now and then some savant makes it through the maze and gets anointed as elite, but by and large where you start out is where you finish.  As Evan Watkins once said, “school is pretty much a place where you go to learn your place.”

                In a limited and oligarchic democracy such as ours, treating intelligence this way maintains the stability of the oligarchy and the institutions that sustain them.  If it works, everyone else follows their lead and we all feel better.  But when that ‘lead’ is into a war in Southeast Asia or a catastrophic banking collapse, cracks start to emerge.  When information technology makes information ubiquitous, even if a lot of it is bad information, elites have a much harder time controlling the narrative.  And when the groups outside of the elite, driven by cultural, economic, religious or ethnic issues start ignoring the message, trouble is on the way.  In a radical democracy intelligence has to have a wider and more varied bandwidth than we are used to producing or validating.

                It doesn’t matter who is ‘right’ if there is no cultural protocol for agreeing who gets to say what is right.  Science on climate change will not change the minds of religious dissenters, and Trump breaking another law will not convince his supporters to impeach him.  The problem with isolating intelligence by individual, institution or class is that those who are not allowed in will never accept the results.  Radical democracy is a relational ecology.  As such, it demands that the relational elements of producing knowledge and intelligence be part of the process.  There are always relational elements to the production of knowledge, but in a democracy run by elites those relationships are discounted and hidden.  In a radical democracy they have to be put on the table.

                Democratic intelligence is something we create together, and because we create it together it has credence across the divides that disrupt elite knowledge.  It doesn’t matter if you know the right answer if there is no one who listens to you or believes you.  Dewey’s idea of inquiry is grounded in the practice of deciding together what we need to know and how we’re going to know it.  It means overcoming the barriers of confidence and credibility that separate us in our current system.  It requires all the ways of knowing we currently practice, but it also requires relational aptitude that we don’t pay much attention to. 

                It requires generosity.  We have to listen to people we might not want to listen to, who might not initially have much to offer, but unless they are validated they remain outside the inquiry.  Generosity is a means of inclusion.  It also means we have to take others’ objections and perceptions seriously.  The point is not whether they are right or wrong; the point is that they are real barriers to communication.  We often read and listen as a sorting mechanism, to decide who gets included and who doesn’t.  Generosity demands we listen to understand not just what is being said but why.

                Radical democracy requires creativity and pattern recognition, the ability to recast and rearrange what people say so that we can all see the relationships.  Most people have trouble seeing the limits and implications of what they believe.  All of us have this problem occasionally.  Creativity lets us all get out of the limitations we bring to our perspectives or standpoints and see something from a new vantage point.  It helps us figure out what the larger consequences and possibilities of the situation might be.  When we create together we own it together and we defend it together.

                Democratic intelligence is pragmatic philosophy in action.  It is the rewriting of the horizons of our possibilities and beliefs as a shared experience.  We all know something valuable.  We all have blind spots and holes in what we know.  A radical democracy recognizes that our value is not determined by consensus but by contribution, conflict and resolution.  Intelligence only matters if it produces intelligent action.  Intelligent is only possible if the people are invested in the process.  We grew up with a story about who we are and what we can do.  That story has been in tatters for awhile now.  It’s time to tell a new story.  A story with multiple layers and levels of meaning.  A story of wider participation, and one that values a variety of roles.  It is a story of a democratic intelligence.

               

Democracy as Inquiry

                When thinking about how to reimagine democracy after the failure of our constitutional system in the age of Trump, I think the temptation is to assume we were more democratic than we ever really were.  It is hard to confront the limitations of formal democracy and its institutions as more than a temporary lapse of decorum and judgement.  If this was only a momentary gaffe, then the institutional foundations of formal democracy would be enough to build on.  This is not a momentary gaffe.  This is the moment of realizing that if we are going to be a democracy at all we have to be a more radical and less formal democracy. 

                Dewey said basically the same thing a hundred years ago when formal democracy looked a lot better than it does now and when the hope of science, including social science, made it seem that a bright future was just over the horizon.  Public education was a big part of that horizon.  While most others took a practical and economic approach to public education, Dewey warned that unless education made the values of democratic life and community its central focus we would never realize a democratic future.  For him, the driving force behind this version of education was the idea of inquiry.

                Of course, we use inquiry in education, but not in the holistic and systematic way Dewey intended and not to the ends he suggested.   We think of inquiry with an automatic qualifier, such as scientific or criminal, in front of it.  In those cases, there is a well- defined set of protocols and processes that shape the inquiry and its outcome.  When teachers use inquiry in a classroom it is usually limited to an inventive and interactive way of covering a fixed curriculum.  In short, where inquiry exists at all in schools, and those instances are becoming more and more rare, it exists inside a defined curriculum where the protocols and content are predetermined.  A radical democracy requires an entirely different version of inquiry.

                Dewey saw inquiry as a social, intellectual, aesthetic and political undertaking.  The point of inquiry for him was not just to answer questions but to pose them, and the questions he had in mind were big questions.  Who are we? How do we form communities?  What do we need to know to realize to be a more democratic society?   Essentially, he is arguing that inquiry is philosophy, although not the kind taught in school.  He rejected the notion that philosophy was about the mere memorization and recitation of previous thinkers from the past.  Philosophy had to be reinvented in every age and in every society to meet the conditions, including linguistic conditions, of the moment.  Inquiry was his suggested means of doing that.

                His time is not our time, however, and there are things about Dewey’s notion of inquiry that we have to change.  He had more faith in science and reason than seems justified today.  He was too quick to promote consensus and uniformity instead of working constructively with diversity.  He was a product of his era, just as we are products of ours.  Going back to Dewey for inspiration doesn’t mean that we can just pull his ideas off the shelf and apply them now.  Even those close to his ideas got entangled in arguments of progressive versus traditional education to the point of losing his larger democratic emphasis.  Our job is to apply the principles of inquiry and radical democracy to our own circumstances.

                In the last century, American democracy was aspirational in a way that it no longer seems to be.  A lot of his work on democracy took place between the wars when America was just finding its footing as an international power.  We thought we represented something new and bright in the world, a country finally aware of and capable of fulfilling its destiny.  We were wrong about a lot of that.  Just as Jefferson’s high- minded rhetoric was contradicted by his stance on slavery, the rhetoric of American transcendence in the last century was to be contradicted by economic inequality, racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  The metaphor of the ‘melting pot’ still left out a lot of folks.  The political divides in our country are obvious, but we are also more segregated by race and economics than we have ever been.  Social mobility is more stagnant (the least mobility in the industrialized world), and we struggle to find ways to even to talk to the people on the other side of those divides.

                If radical democracy is possible in America, it needs to be incubated in emergent institutions that bring people back together over an aspirational vision.  As corny and hypocritical as it was, Trump’s MAGA slogan represented that to some people.  Unfortunately, it represented a way back to white, male privilege and not a democratic future.  Radical democracy is not an ad campaign.  The work of creating an aspirational motivation for our moment has to include and not exclude the diverse segments of our society.  A healthy democracy knows what its people want to become, and what we don’t.  Inquiry is a means to discover a direction and a purpose for our community and our community of communities.  Inquiry is the posing of questions that unite us without Dewey’s rush to a manufactured consensus.

                Our age demands that we leave open the questions of what counts and who counts.  We face a long process of engagement over what our lives and our country should be.  We need a place to teach us how, from early childhood to old age, to engage these questions which have been ignored in the rush to build a technological façade of meaning.  Can we forge a democracy that both honors our differences and unites us in a common aspiration that is both decent and just?  The jury is still out on that, but the alternative is clear.  We either forge this radical democracy or we choose off and fight.