The Zebra Storyteller

                Back in the day, when I taught literature classes using anthologies (I apologize), the Norton Anthology included a little story from Africa called the Zebra Storyteller.  In the story, a zebra storyteller was walking down the trail thinking about a recent spate of zebra killings by some unknown animal.  The storyteller imagined what it would be like if an ordinary cat had learned how to speak Zebra and used that skill to surprise its victims and kill them.  Just then, a house cat stepped out of the bushes and said hello in Zebra.  The storyteller, instead of being shocked and victimized, kicked the cat in the head and killed it.  The editors of the anthology said that the story was proof that literature and imagination were critical to living a good life.  I am writing this as your zebra storyteller.

                The news is full of more and more stories about the decline of Trump.  His behavior is more erratic (as if that’s even possible) and his poll numbers are sinking fast.  The pundit class is trying to figure out what possible strategy he can use to regain the presidency.  The narrow Electoral College victory he pulled off in 2016 (with the help of the Russians and voter suppression) looks less and less likely today.  Like the zebras killed by the house cat, they are making the mistake of thinking their adversary is going to use tactics they are already familiar with, like getting more votes in an election or at least more votes in the Electoral College.  But as I was walking down the trail the other day, it occurred to me that winning the election isn’t really what they are trying to do.

                I don’t think their goal is to win the election.  I think they already know they can’t (whether or not Trump knows it is debatable).  They will collect money, and spend it on themselves, and they will have campaign events and buy ads, but that is just for show.  They know they can’t win the election, but they have no intent of giving up their power.  They plan to either steal or invalidate the election.  Either is possible (note Moscow Mitch’s unwillingness to protect the election process), but the latter is easier.  It might be too much even for the most long gone Trumper to change votes or vote tallies.  It’s too bold and too easily detected.  All that has to happen is for enough doubt to be created so that his supporters  believe he was robbed.  Remember, these are people who already believe that millions of people were bussed into New Hampshire in the last election (where would they even stand?), and that cost Trump the popular vote.  In the midst of this confusion, Trump and Barr would suspend the constitution and claim power.

                If you think this is unlikely, ask yourself how many things you thought could never happened here have already happened.  We have a president who is owned and manipulated by Russian oligarchs that aided in his election.  We have a leader of the Senate who refused to fill an open seat on the Supreme Court or allow any legislation to protect our elections to come to the floor.  He has gutted the elections commission so it cannot intervene in next presidential election.  And our sister democracy in England is now run by its own Trumpian lout who is closing down Parliament to jam through an economically disastrous ‘hard Brexit.’  How much more has to happen before the cat that speaks Zebra starts its reign of terror?

                These are not normal times.  The mostly romanticized belief in American democracy we have been touting is in ruins.  Trump has already won that battle.  The alliances that protected us the last 70 years are now filled with nations that see us as an unstable partner.  The courts are packed with judges that are little more than political hacks intent on defending a partisan agenda.  The federal government is now in the hands of the most corrupt and inept (it’s hard to figure out which one of those should go first) group of appointees ever.  We are burning down the Amazon rainforest to sell soybeans to China.  Is invalidating an election really that much of a reach?

                Like all storytellers, I will leave you to your own thoughts, but don’t be surprised to run into a cat that speaks Zebra, and please don’t be afraid to kick it in the head and kill it.

               

A Democratic Ethics

                We have mostly thought about ethics as a rational enterprise.  Often ethics classes use scenarios or cases to deliberate and debate which action is more ethical.  Now those scenarios play out in automobile companies where programmers try to decide who dies in the crash, or they a resolved using algorithms to decide who gets medical treatment and who doesn’t.  But democracy isn’t a simulation, a game played in endless iterations seeking the best outcome.  Our interactions with people are often dominated by our feelings and senses more than they are by a rational calculation.  What modernity left out of democracy were the aesthetics of ethical choice.  A radical democracy is more about experience than objectification.

                When Dewey called art an experience, he was arguing for an aesthetic dimension to what he called “felt intelligence,” the mastery of feeling and technique developed over a lifetime of action and reflection.  That means we have to do more than rationalize our behavior, we have to experience the totality of its impact.  Dewey thought art was one way of developing the other experiential aspects of thought and action.  In that sense, perhaps it makes more sense to think of ethics as an art, developed over time, than it does to think of it as game playing in a poorly attended philosophy class.  I would argue that we know unethical behavior as much by how it feels as how rationally justifiable it might be.  In fact, we live in an administration that rationalizes the horrific and insane in the most mundane terms. Separating children from their parents is a matter of ‘immigration policy’ and degrading the environment is an ‘economic policy.’ 

                If we ground ethics in experience, we are grounding ethics in our bodies.  We are grounding our ethical choices not in abstractions but in the world.  Modernity has stripped the world of its cosmic significance, its connection to something we might consider sacred.  We’ve created a world full of things that are no more important or significant than any other random thing in the universe.  We don’t feel and do not act as if we were connected to the biosphere that sustains us or the social context that defines us.  We think of wealth as an arbitrary collection of abstract value that has nothing to do with the value of life.  In all these ways, we have constructed such a limited idea of ethics that it is hardly worth promoting it.  An ethics of experience resituates us in a world that is also alive.  It redefines us as part of a social nexus that values people and their existence.

                An ethical practice requires humility, the ability to see ourselves not as individual and independent actors but as interdependent beings who rely on other people and other living things for our being.  Diversity in modernity is mostly about advertising and marketing, about the desire and reproduction of difference.  Diversity in a radical democracy is a felt sense of entanglement grounded in the realization of our interdependence.  An ethical political and economic system wouldn’t burn the rain forests or lock children in cages.  The notion that a country or a religion can insulate us from the injustice supported by that country or religion is myopic.  Nothing that disconnects us from the larger context of life, some would call it a ‘deep ecology,’ can be considered ethical, no matter how many philosophers or corrupt Attorney Generals argue otherwise. 

                We will never value diversity among people if we cannot see the diversity in the biosphere.  We will never protect civil rights if we are not also protecting the environment.  Consciousness is not a distinctly human quality.  Our consciousness is shared by everything around us. The computerized out- sourcing of ethical decisions is a step away from a radical democracy and not an improvement.  The point of being ethical is not to be ‘right,’ the point of being ethical is to be in harmony with what sustains life.  Some of that life will confound and insult me, but it deserves its place as much as I deserve mine.  We cannot tolerate violence and greed.  If we want to live democratically, we have to accept the limitations of rational thought and embrace an ethics grounded in aesthetic experience.

The Road to the Right

                In the aftermath of WWII there was rift in American culture.  While the majority of Americans immersed themselves in the boom years following the war, a small cultural and literary movement mounted a protest to the suburbanized swirl of hula hoops, sit-coms, and mass marketing.  They eventually were called ‘The Beats,’ after author Jack Kerouac’s play on the word beat.  They became the cultural icons of the era, laying the groundwork for the iterations of the ‘counter-culture’ that followed.  They stood for a rebellious and idealized search for individual truth.  In On The Road, the main characters, Sal and Dean, go roaring across the country looking for “it.”   Rules were made to be broken, and the promise of a better world was only over the horizon.  Looking back on that period from the perspective of a President Trump and Proud Boys terrorizing Portland under police protection, the road looks a lot different than it did when Neal Cassady was driving a Cadillac a hundred miles an hour through the fields of Kansas.

                Road Lit was always a white male fantasy world.  There are so few examples written by women that each of them stands as the exception that proves the rule.  Only one road work, and it’s stretch to even call it a road work, was written by an African American.  It popularized the notion that it was the birth-right of every white male to take to the road, to somehow think of themselves as special.  The women, drugs and lack of responsibility were all part of the show.  Everything and everyone was fodder for the trip, but the trip never delivered the promised vision.  America never became the sacred land the Beats thought it could be.  Their original impulses to resist capitalism and crass culture of post-war America put their politics firmly on the left, but the privilege of their narratives drives us in a different direction today.

                Today, the ‘road’ is closed, but the internet is wide open.  America sustained a couple hundred years of narratives of limitless escape.  From the frontier to the wilderness, Americans, particularly white male Americans, could just leave.  There was always another adventure, another wife and job that would finally make everything okay and confirm just how individual and special the traveler was.  Sal ends up on a lonely pier in New Jersey romanticizing the America he failed to grasp but he felt was still out there to be found.  Today that trip takes place on the internet by people who never leave home.  Sal’s America was a fantasy, and their America is a digital fiction of air brushed porn and social media promising what no one can ever have.  Sal’s road led from the old culture of the East Coast to the opening of the West.  Today, geography doesn’t matter.  Those of us who followed in the footsteps of the Beats wanted to believe the gospel.  We wanted to believe we were resisting the establishment, even though the Beats sold their work and Kerouac ends up drunk on a bus to his mother’s house in Florida belittling the Beatniks, and presumably the Hippies, that followed.  In the end, it wasn’t the trip, it was the privilege that mattered.

                Today it is that privilege, the ingrained entitlement of white men to have a freedom and uniqueness just because they are white men, that is the political legacy of the road.  Escape is never an answer.  The rise of white supremacy in American culture and the grievance agenda of the Trump presidency is, I’m afraid, a logical extension of Sal and Dean.  The men driving and creating the hateful politics of the right believe they are entitled.  They should have the right to their own trip and their own vision, even if it’s nothing more than the pornographic fantasies of an Incel chat room.  They are no more willing than Kerouac’s characters to put in the work it takes to be real.  The fantasy that looks so appealing in On The Road, is pretty tawdry and worn in the age of internet.  White male privilege is a byproduct of the post WWII culture.  The Beats were never like the generation before them who never were allowed to think of themselves as all that special.  How dare women and people of color take that uniqueness away from them.  How dare anyone ask that they do what the Beats never did and take responsibility for what the do.  It’s no surprise then, that they follow the most relentlessly empty and vacuous politician in our history.  It’s no surprise that they see in him a model for political action.  Trump, who is nothing that he claims to be, is a perfect bookend to literary movement that never delivered what it promised.

Art, Education and Democracy

                John Dewey thought that the best way to think about art was to think of it as experience.  Like all experience, art creates knowledge and insight, so that the aesthetic was always already part of the cognitive and social dimensions of life.  If we think of art that way, it’s easy to make a case for the role it plays in educating people for participation in a radical democracy.  We encounter each other and learn to understand each other not through the contrived categories of social science data but through our direct experience.  Part of that encounter is aesthetic.  We react to the way people dress, what they listen to, how they talk and what they smell like before we even have a chance to think about the more abstract and intellectual markers we sometimes apply to others.  These senses are developed and fine tuned by the same experiential judgements we apply to art.

                I taught what was basically an ‘art history’ class for almost forty years.  I understand that the way we teach art now is exclusionary and colonizing.  The whole process of making canons of art and passing ‘universal’ judgements about high and low art is completely undemocratic.  Limiting art to the story and perspective of any one culture, religion, race, class or gender has less to do about art than it does an oppressive cultural narrative of dominance and exclusion.  But it doesn’t have to be taught that way.  It doesn’t have to be judged and ranked and limited so only a few tastes and perspectives, only a few experiences, are represented and explored.  Art in education is not meant, as Eliot’s reforms at Harvard in the 1870’s would have it, to train a few lower-class individuals to mingle with and work for the owner class.  We don’t need to study art to be ‘better’ or more sophisticated.  We need art to make us whole and to help us engage each other.

                Radical democracy is a contact sport.  It is more relational than it is rational.  We have tried building a democracy around rational and institutional practices.  It hasn’t really worked very well.  We are an extremely segregated society, in which we increasingly limit our contacts to people who are mostly like us.  The fear – and sometimes loathing – of ‘others’ makes it impossible to see a common good or a communal way forward.  Our democracy has become, primarily because of a broken economic system, a zero-sum game of groups waging political war over the few scraps left behind.  Education, particularly the vocationally oriented education we provide, merely reinforces the estrangement.  We still promote an ‘ideal’ culture, which means a white, patriarchal, protestant, heterosexual, European culture that excludes any other way of organizing the world.  We do not structure education as what Pratt calls a ‘contact zone.’  Mostly we teach folks that they don’t belong, unless they buy the right stuff, of course.

                None of us are the synthesized data-points we are thought to be.  The stuff that makes me interesting (Okay, cut me a little slack here) and human is not collected in an algorithm.  Our experience of the world and each other is primarily and initially an aesthetic one.  I’ve lost count of the number of times that music, dance, food, painting, tapestry or poetry helped me understand and value something that my abstract rational intellect just couldn’t comprehend.  The best things, the richest things, about a democracy are created in the intersections of our contacts with each other.  We create a world together and fill it with music and food and laughter and love.  We share pain and disappointment the same way.  Institutional democracy has lost the people that live in it.  We’ve stopped thinking about education as a fully human and life-long journey and settled for a hollowed-out and deracinated shell of ourselves.

                Dewey knew that art was an essential and irreplaceable part of an education.  He knew that if democracy was going to evolve beyond the crude forms it had started with and become an ethos and a way of life, then the aesthetic experience of our encounters and endeavors had to be part of it.  Art doesn’t make us ‘well-rounded.’  It doesn’t make us sophisticated, and it doesn’t make us cool.  It represents what every culture we have ever encountered already knew: art is how we understand life.  If that seems too obtuse or precious, ask the folks in El Paso or Dayton how the alternative works.

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.