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.