The Ecology of Democracy

                In the 70’s when environmental issues were starting to take hold, one of the regulations that was passed was that wetlands had to be preserved.  When the federal government planned to run a highway through a wetland in Nebraska, they offered to create a new wetland to replace the one that would be filled in during construction.  Everyone thought that was cool, and the project commenced.  The highway was built, and the new wetland was created.  To everyone’s surprise, the wetland failed.  It didn’t sustain a bird population or keep the food chain intact.  After several attempts, they finally figured out that a small and seemingly unimportant microbe was missing.  Without it, everything else collapsed.  The lesson was that an ecology is a fragile and complex system that needs all its parts to function.  The same is true for a democracy.

                Trump has decided that the way forward in his reelection campaign is to destroy the ecology of American democracy.  Having no accomplishments or policies to run on, he has turned to the old puritan ideals of exclusion.  A democracy is an inherently impure and dynamic creation.  Like a wetland, its structure is complex and multiple.  All of us are worse off when any part of that complex system is removed or compromised.  If we thought of diversity that way instead of as a conflict of interests, maybe we could begin to understand what a radical democracy is all about.  For too long, we have ignored the value of alternative perspectives.  The Republican party of the 21^st century has given up on the idea that this should be an inclusive society or even a democratic one.  The remedy for that is an ecological inspiration.

                Formal democracy seems static.  The buildings look like Greek and Roman artifacts, and the institutions that run a formal democracy are built on laws and regulations that have to be followed.  One of the shocking insights from Trump’s presidency is how vulnerable that kind of democracy is to shameless lawlessness and ineptitude.  When one side quits playing the game, there is nothing the other side can do to enforce the rules.  A radical democracy is based on something more resilient: the relationships of the people.  We are faced with a challenge of how much we value each other and how much we are willing to sacrifice for each other.  The answer to impending tyranny is not rebellion so much as it is love.  We have to care enough about each other to stand up even when we’re not in the direct line of fire, even when our personal interests aren’t involved.

                A public sphere may seem external, but the motivating energy has to be internal.  A radical democracy will not grow out the interactions of a cynical and fragmented people.  It cannot be sustained by a court or a legislature alone.  All of that depends on an internal ethos, a microbe if you will, that knits the communities of people together.  We do not have to be like each other to care about each other.  We need an ecology of democracy that recognizes the expanse and the limits of our connections.  The more diversity and innovation there is, the better off we all are.  Healthy children in other neighborhoods are good neighbors and maybe even potential partners.  An intellectual, cultural and genetic mix is stronger and healthier than any pure strain standing alone.

                We share this crumbling planet.  The children crying at the border are our children.  They are crying to call us to action.  We cannot fix this locked in our isolated communities.  If what Trump and the other autocrats around the world stand for is not defeated, we all die.  Thinking ecologically is thinking democratically.  We are going to have to think through what it means to have ‘wealth.’  The systems we’ve built are too big and powerful to allow them to reproduce unchecked.  The potential is great, but the risks are even greater.  We now have proof that not everyone wants this to work.  It’s time to stand up against those forces and join hands.  A war will only hasten the end.  It can’t be won.  We can rise together and try to create a richer and fairer world.  The only political ecology with any promise at all is a radical democracy.

Reading In A Democracy

                I can remember playing the game.  Very early in our education we learn how to respond to the reading assignments that are given us in school.  We learn to sacrifice our own insights and tastes to those of the class and the teacher.  I was pretty good at it.  I remember feeling like what we read in school was somehow better, more important, than the other stuff we read.  Having spent more than forty years on the other side of the desk, my view of those early days is a lot different now.  It always made me sad to see students unwilling to read on their own, to take a risk or just enjoy the ride.  The selection of texts and the enforcement of interpretation is still going on in school, but most of the ‘reading’ (it doesn’t have to be a text) in the culture has shifted to other venues.  I think reading in a democracy presents a different set of challenges to education.

                The late English cultural critic, Raymond Williams, often resisted the idea of the literary canon by remarking, “we have moved from pulpits to library carrels” as a means of enforcing culture.  He worked in Cambridge with F.R. Leavis who played a central role in creating the canon of English literature.  That canon amounted to what Harrari calls an ‘imagined order,’ the official story of who we are and how we got here.  Just as Defoe made it clear there was no ‘true born’ Englishman, literary canons and cultural narratives are all fabrications.  We teach them, sometimes following the same methods as biblical scholars (its own unique form of fabrication), as the truth.  So much of what Americans think of their own cultural heritage and the creation and practice of their democracy is part of an imagined order based on enforced reading in school.  Most of it is problematic or just flat out wrong. 

                On the North Side of Chicago, a high school is in the middle of a culture war over who’s story will and will not be part of the curriculum.  As a fairly affluent school with a lot of white students who intend to enter the race for Ivy League admissions, there is a strong push to teach the classics and prepare students for the cultural name dropping required and expected in that game.  As an integrated school with a large non-white and not so affluent group of students, there is a strong push for inclusion.  The ‘canon wars’ have been going on for awhile now, and this iteration is pretty similar to others, but it occurs at a more critical juncture in our cultural struggle with race.  There are other issues just as important in a democracy, such as the inclusion of LGBTQ students, but as the undemocratic white supremist we elected president lurches toward a re-election campaign, race is taking center stage.

                In the America I grew up in, we all had to settle for the same story.  We all read the same things and watched one of the three versions of the evening news.  We didn’t know and weren’t allowed to suggest that any of that was a lie.  It was served up like prison food, take it or leave it.  But the America I grew up in wasn’t really a democracy.  Everybody didn’t count, and not everybody was even allowed to vote.  The struggle in Chicago comes at a moment of reckoning about where we’ve been and where we’re going.  If this is going to be a democracy, the struggle over what gets read is critical.  A curriculum is a means of cultural dominance and exclusion. Just as people use the notion of ‘morality’ to restrict intergenerational change, a curriculum props up an imagined order.  That imagined order was invalidated by Trump’s election.

                Teaching the canon won’t get everybody, including a lot of privileged students who think they deserve it, admission to an Ivy League school.  It won’t even get every student into college.  It will guarantee that the narrative is limited, and that we continue to create a country where some stories aren’t told and don’t get reflected in our politics.  We perpetuate stories about ‘welfare queens’ that were never true and obscure the struggles and heroism of the working poor who struggle to feed their children.  We use narratives about gang violence to validate the mistreatment, incarceration, and murder of young men of color.  A democracy demands that they tell their own story and that that others see, hear and read that story.

                We find or lose each other in what we read and see.  A democratic education has to make the whole range of the people who make up this democracy visible.  Just as many of the well trained and well- intentioned teachers in that school in Chicago are finding out, we are not trained for this.  The curriculum has to be opened up to new story tellers and new presenters.  We will never be able to heal the rift in Chicago or anywhere else without listening.  Reading in a democracy means reading someone else’s story while they read yours, not because there’s a right answer, because there isn’t.  A democracy has to be humane.  Humanity is developed and protected by readers.

Democratic Thinking

                Being human is a paradox.  As Maturana says, we are simultaneously autonomous and connected.  Either condition by itself is not fully human.  We are caught in the play between these states that require us to shift focus or emphasis without abandoning or losing sight of the opposite state.  Democracy is a paradox on top of a paradox.  It demands we see the social through the perspective of the individual.  In some cultures, a civic view never materializes because the autonomous individual never emerges as a social actor.  In other cultures, the autonomous actor is too dominant, and the civic reality is stunted.  Currently, we are an example of the latter.  Learning to think democratically requires the conscious balancing of these dual but paradoxical arrangements.

                I think Dewey placed so much emphasis on education in democracy because he understood that learning how to think and act democratically is not natural.  We have to work at developing and perfecting our sense of balance and integration.  An education dedicated to that work would look radically different than the one we have constructed.  We have an educational system that values portable content mastery that can produce economic gain.  We do little to develop or encourage the emergence of a civic consciousness that extends beyond the individual. 

                One of the most essential abilities to radical democratic thought is being comfortable is unstructured scenarios.  Schools tend to rely on structured activities and memorization that actually reduces the development of unstructured thought.  Increasingly since the implementation of national testing programs aimed at assessing learning outcomes, students produce assignments that are limited to right and wrong answers.  Instead of experimentation, they jump to prearranged conclusions.  Democratic thinking requires working in conditions where there may be no ‘right’ answer and any answer at all may not help the process. 

                We have schools where classes have time limits, so for 40 minutes or so we’re going to produce answers to a limited number of questions in a specific subject and then move on to spend the next 40 minutes doing the same thing in a different subject.  Except for some general reading, communication and computation skills, the subjects have nothing to do with each other.  The students don’t pick the problems, and the teacher can’t really deviate from the assignment.  At the end of process, a few specifically talented students are harvested to promote a wildly unfair and unequal economic system.  It’s not surprising that we are struggling to create a political sphere that can sustain and expand a democracy.

                If schools helped us learn how to function in a radical democracy, they would promote learning that might last for days or weeks at a time as one integrated and ongoing inquiry.  Why do so many children in this school have asthma?  What do we need to know?  How many possible ways are there to approach or analyze the topic?  There won’t be one predetermined right answer.  There won’t be a test.  Every student can participate at their level of interest and mastery, learning not just from textbooks and teachers but from each other and community members.  If we valued democracy, we would start early to show students how to interact with and change their world.  We would build political agency and respect for difference and diversity as part of the inquiry.

                A democracy doesn’t need to sort its children; it needs to engage them.  By the time students leave our schools, they have become isolated and resentful instead of stimulated and connected.  Democracy is a radical and difficult thought experiment more than it is a system of government or a set of institutions.  So much of what is sick about our political culture is the direct result of an undemocratic and anti-intellectual approach to education.  A democracy requires inoculation from conspiracy theories and religious intolerance as much as children require inoculation from disease.  Unless we embrace the paradox of our being and reflect it through the paradox of democracy, we will never be strong enough to survive even the smallest infections of thought.

It Ain’t Easy

                If anyone thought that the transition to a more inclusive and radical form of democracy was going to be smooth and easy, the last week in Trump world should have ended that.  Once again, we were treated to the spectacle of racism and hate in American politics.  Once again, we heard small minded and xenophobic people act like a democracy was just for them and people who look, talk and believe like them.  We are a long way from anything resembling real democracy.  In fact, the most ‘democratic’ voices in the debate are the women being vilified by this poor excuse for a president.  His failures are too banal and numerous to comment on, but the consistent support of his followers is a sobering reminder that even the weak form of democracy we enjoy is in peril.

                Of course, none of this is new.  American democracy is built on a racist, misogynist and intolerant strain of thought that bubbles to the surface whenever things seem like they’re about to get more progressive and inclusive.  George Wallace ran a racist, populist campaign in the wake of MLK’s defining triumphs in civil rights.  It is no coincidence that Trump follows the inspirational presidency of Obama.  In both cases, people who claim to be “Christians” lend credibility and support to the worst forms of bigotry and hate.  What we have to do is figure out how to move beyond this chapter of this same old story to open a new horizon on what American democracy can become.

                Multicultural and multiracial democracies have never really succeeded.  If America is going to reinvent itself as a radical democracy, this battle has to be won and it has to be won decisively.  Tolerance is not virtue in the face of tyranny.  We have to be willing to fight the next election on every street corner, barbershop and coffee shop.  We have to confront and beat back ignorance and hate.  As I’ve written in earlier posts, violence will only feed the monster.  Our confrontations have to be peaceful and intelligent.  They have to patient and persistent, leaving no incident of prejudice and hatred unchallenged.  This is a time for vigilance.  It doesn’t matter if it’s your uncle or father-in-law at a family gathering or stranger berating someone in public.  It doesn’t matter if it makes you feel uncomfortable.

                I’m tired of hearing the false patriotism and hate of these same old rearguard assaults.  When I was a teenager, people who thought it was justifiable to tell people they had to ‘love it or leave it.’  They thought they could defend a war that looks worse and worse the more we know about it by shutting off decent.  They thought they could literally beat back protest and democracy the same way Bull Conner thought he could stop civil rights in Selma.  Maybe we thought those battles were over, but they’re not.  We fought a civil war, but we let the twisted legacy of a traitorous general remain.  We have avoided the bigots and Puritans thinking they had to come around sometime.  They won’t.

                This election is about whatever hope is left for American democracy.  The corporations don’t care.  The Evangelicals don’t care.  The cops don’t care.  The only real democratic vision of America is a multiracial and multicultural vision.  We have got to figure out what holds us together and what we can let go.  I can live next to you without agreeing with you or being like you.  We can live together without trying to be the same.  We are united by the faith we have in each other not our similarities to each other.  Democracies aren’t pure.  They don’t ground themselves in race or religion.  Democracies are dynamic and not stagnant. 

                This week, Trump decided the only way to stay in power is to play the dirtiest card from the bottom of the deck.  Even if this isn’t the fight you wanted, it’s the fight you are fated to wage.  In this historical context, with this Republican party and this president, it is a fight that we cannot ignore or afford to lose.  Every generation has to confront some enemy.  Every generation has an obligation to stand for what we think is the best vision of who we are and what we can be.  This time around, the enemy is among us.  It is an old and familiar foe, one of our blood relatives.  It’s high time we settled this.

               

Competition

                I like to compete.  I like playing games where you can test your luck and your skill in friendly competition with other people.  I like winning.  But when winning means breaking the rules, buying recruits with shoe contracts or prostitutes, changing the tax code to favor the rich or asking Russian oligarchs to interfere in an election, winning becomes something more than just a game.  It becomes a disease that weakens the social and cultural bonds we share, and it is incompatible with democracy.  Democracy cannot survive in a system that is so wrapped up in winners and losers.  It cannot survive in an economic system where such a small percentage of the people accrue all the wealth.  And no system of education that is designed to perpetuate democracy can make competition its primary motif. 

                Following the disastrous implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), competition has become the central structural foundation of American education.  We pit students against students and schools against schools in an insane and utterly undemocratic search for the ‘best.’  The most salient feature of the carnage that NCLB has visited upon public education is testing.  We have created a system that spends more time testing than it does teaching.  In spite of ample critical evidence that shows that the single point, high stakes testing schools engage in is flawed, inaccurate and counterproductive, we keep pouring more money and more instructional time into tests.  We have constructed a narrative that we are helping students by making sure that everyone can ‘perform’ to the same standards, but the tests we use reinforce biases grounded in class, race and gender so predictably that it’s hard to miss the point that the testing is done not improve but to sort.  The real cultural narrative of competition in education is a narrative about who belongs and who doesn’t.  It’s a narrative grounded in already existing privilege.

                We have naturalized the notion that school is about finding out who the ‘smart’ people are so that they can be rewarded with money and power, but the tests we use to determine who is smart and who isn’t are always already heavily slanted in the favor of the wealthy and powerful.  In other words, the wealthy and powerful are where they are because they are wealthy and powerful and not because of any inherent intellectual skill they possess.  In exactly the same era that we introduced more and more testing to help students ‘succeed,’ social and economic mobility in America ground to a halt.  More than ever before in our history, the family you’re born into determines the eventual social status you are likely to attain. 

                Even if they were fair and accurate, even if they ‘worked,’ the testing we use is inherently undemocratic.  We live in a world that is heavily invested in elite institutions that can’t convince people that evolution or climate science is real.  We have less cultural consensus about the what is real and what isn’t than ever in my lifetime.  We have more information and less understanding of what it means or how to use it.  Testing students relentlessly has not made us smarter or more unified in our attempts to deal with the problems we face.  There is more evidence of magical and conspiratorial thinking receiving more exposure.  If you doubt any of this, explain how Trump became president.  A democratic education isn’t about grades, it’s about creating a diverse political culture that values and creates active participation and engagement.  Our educational system restricts participation and devalues the experiences of most of its citizens. 

                Testing can help diagnose problems and measure growth, but it cannot stand as a measure of student’s intelligence or worth.  As we careen toward a future that will upend our assumptions about work and ecology, we have to restructure education to value experiences and input of every student and citizen.  Radical democracy cannot succeed with an educated elite leading the masses.  We tried that, and it’s failing miserably.  Instead of pitting the students against each other for praise and privilege, we have to connect them to each other to create a political will that will produce action.  That’s not just idealistic, it is realistic.  Their fates are already connected whether or not they want to see it that way.