David Brooks hit at least one nail on the head in a recent New York Times column discussing (what he perceives to be) Obama’s success this past week, by returning to the network-liberal mode on which he ran in 2008, and retreating from the cluster-liberal mode into which he had recently fallen (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/10/opinion/10brooks.html). While I tend to agree with Brooks’ specific conclusions, it’s the distinction between these two modalities, and their significance, that I find particularly interesting and useful.
Just to summarize: “Cluster liberals” are those who entrench around an inflexible commitment to what they perceive to be “the right policy,” and consider compromises to be an act of selling out to an evil enemy. “Network liberals” essentially agree on the substance, but generally disagree on the utility of that attitude, recognizing instead the reality of conflicting views and interests, and the functional necessity of negotiating with those opposing positions in pursuit of the best achievable outcome. I am a very strong advocate of “network liberalism,” not because my commitment to the ideals of creating a kinder, gentler, and wiser nation and world is any less than that of those who adhere to “cluster liberalism,” but rather because I want actually to get there, rather than to dissipate my energy (and see others’ dissipated) in self-gratifying ways that serve only to prevent us from getting there.
In fact, I believe that “cluster liberals” are more similar to “cluster conservatives” than they are to “network liberals” (who in turn are more similar to “network conservatives”), because, as I’ve said before, the more salient dichotomy is an attitudinal and procedural one, rather than a substantive one. The closest analogy is the remarkable similarity between Fundamentalist Christians and their substantive enemies, Fundamentalist Muslims, who together form that to which Rational People are opposed to.
Many of my recent posts have spiralled around a similar distinction, voicing my frustration at the emotionally gratifying but generally non-to-counter-productive ideological entrenchment, accompanied by a chorus of righteous indignation, that diverts so much of the energy of those who would otherwise be contributing to the political goals that more level-headed and pragmatic progressives are seeking to advance (see, e.g., “The Fault, Dear Brutus….”, The Politics of Anger, The Foundational Progressive Agenda, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2).
As the posts I’ve linked to above indicate, I don’t think that striving to be “network liberals” rather than “cluster liberals” is just good politics (though I do believe it is that as well); it is also good policy. It is not just good form, but also good substance, because it better mobilizes the genius of the many, better recognizes our own individual limitations and failings, better acknowledges the subtlety and complexity of the world we are trying to affect, and better addresses the reality of what it takes to affect it effectively.
The Czech author Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, asked through his protagonist, who was witnessing an angry demonstration in France, “don’t they realize that the raised fists arethe problem?” It’s not always obvious, but the extent to which our quickness to absolute and generally oversimplistic certainties fuels an intransigent militancy in advocacy of those certainties is one of the biggest obstacles to human progress we face, bar none. Being wise and effective progressives requires being more humble, more strategically sophisticated, and more committed to outcomes than to outrage. I’m personally convinced that if everyone who shared my dream of a wiser and more compassionate social institutional context shared also this sense of what it takes to accomplish it, we would get there far sooner, and far more completely, than we will in our current state of angry intransigence.
Progressives, you face a choice: Gratify yourselves with outrage, or work effectively for a wiser and more compassionate world by being wiser and more effective warriors in service to the values that motivate you. Please stop undermining our efforts to do what can be done by insisting that anything less than righteous inflexibility is unacceptable. The world already has more than enough righteous inflexibility; what it needs instead is more wisdom.
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As part of A Proposal: The Politics of Kindness, I discussed the importance of organizing and acting in our communities, in non-partisan ways for non-political immediate purposes, in service to the ultimate social and political goal of deepening and broadening the shared commitment to reason and goodwill, in our private lives, in our communities, and in our public policies. I believe that doing so should become a social movement, akin to the Civil Rights Movement, but rather than dedicated to a single issue or set of issues, dedicated instead to a comprehensive attitude that implicates all social issues.
Clearly, the time is ripe for such a movement. Just as the Civil Rights Movement was blessed with a ready-made organizational infrastructure (the southern black church network), so too are all reasonable people of goodwill today blessed with an even more powerful and extensive organizational infrastructure: The Internet and Social Media. I’ve already written about the implications of this technological and social paradigm shift, the possibilities and potentials of which we have just barely begun to explore (se, e.g., A Major Historical Threshold or A Tragically Missed Opportunity?, Wikinomics: The Genius of the Many Unleashed, Tuesday Briefs: The Anti-Empathy Movement & “Crowdfunding”, Counterterrorism: A Model of Centralized Decentralization).
A Tea Partier told me on a Facebook thread recently, “just remember who’s better armed.” When it comes to the more powerful weapons of Social Media, it may be the progressives who are better armed. In any case, the implication of these particular arms is that they accelerate the sifting out of rational from irrational arguments, the lathe of public discourse and debate, which favors reason and goodwill in the long run. Certainly, when it comes to Reason and Goodwill, progressives are better armed, and will inevitably prevail. It is our job to expedite that eventuality, reducing the short-term detours into irrationality and belligerence constantly elongating that path.
The best way to do so is to change the game, the frame and the narrative. Right now, America is stuck in a tug-o-war between progressives and conservatives, both broadly perceived by the vast silent middle to be two opposing extreme camps (with perhaps slightly greater affinity for the conservative than progressive pole). But those same occupants of the vast silent majority would not perceive a movement of community volunteerism and community solidarity building to be either extreme or unattractive. And they would not find it offensive if such a movement included in its “mission” improving the civility and reasonableness of public discourse. But what is the progressive movement if not the commitment to mobilize reason and goodwill, and apply them to our public policies?
The most effective thing progressives could now do is to mobilize a network of Community Action Groups (CAGs) into a nationwide Community Action Network (CAN), dedicated to this component of the proposal linked to above. The only challenge is to create an emerging awareness of the power of such an effort, of the degree to which it can become a game changer if enough progressives were to commit themselves to it. Every local progressive group now in existence, every state house and senate district democratic party organization, every OFA chapter, every MoveOn chapter, every other local group with even moderately liberal leanings, can and should organize into a Community Action Group that seeks to do good works in their own communities, and to foster civil discourse based on no ideology other than a commitment to reason and mutual goodwill.
I ask everyone who reads this to please help me to promote this idea, because the way to become a nation of reasonable people of goodwill is for all who are committed to that end to strive to be reasonable people of goodwill in their own lives, and in their own communities, and to allow that to be a model to others, and to coalesce into a national level commitment. The reason why progressive advocacy is so much less effective than one might think it would be is because progressive advocates are so much less effective, permitting the frames and narratives of the far-right to take root and define the debate. Removing that power from them, and owning it ourselves, is not a function of better sloganeering, but rather of more compelling demonstration; we can and should, we must, demonstrate what it is we are advocating for, if we want our advocacy to become a truly powerful and transformative force in our national history.
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Given Douglas County’s move toward school vouchers (http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16803779), now is a good time to cut through the rhetoric, the ideology, and the assumptions, and examine the idea thoroughly and fairly.
The logic behind school vouchers is that by providing parents with the ability to take the tax revenue allotted to their child(ren) to whatever public or private school they choose, competition for students will ensue, and the quality of education in all schools will improve (or some will simply “go out of business,” to be replaced by those that have a more successful business model, better competing for the revenue that follows students to the schools of their choice). The argument against school vouchers revolves around the notion that they undermine our commitment to public education.
On the plus side, school vouchers empower parents and students to make their own choices regarding what school they feel best serves their educational needs. They incorporate market forces and competitive pressures into our national struggle to improve our abysmally poorly performing public education system. They do not, inherently, reduce the public investment in education, but rather merely contract out for educational services to the private sector.
On the negative side, school voucher programs are likely to create a permanent underclass of the poorest performing students left isolated in the most underfunded schools. They undermine communities most in need of the benefits of strong community solidarity, by creating a vehicle for abandoning what is often the central cohesive force in our modern communities: The local school. They undermine our commitment to education as “the great equalizer” by, ironically, assigning to each student an equal share of the tax revenue dedicated to public education, thus disenabling increased spending on those with greater needs. And they do absolutely nothing to address the problems of education where they reside, in our homes and communities, in our norms and ideologies, in our cultural anti-intellectualism and preference for mindless distractions over disciplined engagement with the world.
Since private schools are able to accept or reject applicants at will, and acceptance of vouchers will be made on the basis of their school mission and their profit-motive, the students most in need of the most attention will tend to be declined, while the students who are easiest to teach and need the least investment of resources will be preferred. This means that those children most in need of improved educational services will be least able to get them, and, in fact, will see resources that have been dedicated to them siphoned off by the flight of the higher-performing students from their local schools. This is a recipe for abandoning and defunding those children most in need of our attention and resources. It is a retreat from a commitment to equality of opportunity, and toward the reincarnated “social Darwinist” tendencies of the modern far right in America.
Student success is predicated most on their family and community environments; those children who have parents or community members who frequently engage them in intellectually stimulating conversations and model for them the disciplines and attitudes most conducive to success of all kinds will almost inevitably achieve academic success. Our primary focus on educational reform should be on cultivating more of that social support infrastructure outside the schools and school hours, not on dismantling that social support infrastructure even more. Academic failure in America has more to do with the advance of extreme individualism, and the decline of communities, than it does with any defects in the schools themselves. Giving those students already rich in the ingredients for the success increased opportunities at the expense of those poorest in those ingredients will certainly benefit some people, but it will hurt those who are most vulnerable, and will hurt us collectively as a society (by breeding a more entrenched substratum of despair, and all of the social ills that ensue from it).
The projected market-disciplining benefits of vouchers are at best dubious. “Market success” does not, in fact, automatically mean “higher quality”. All it means is that people tended to choose that particular good or service over its competitors. The higher the information costs (i.e., difficulties and obstacles to consumer-assessment of quality), the lesser the degree to which competition improves quality. Parents and students can indeed look at how past graduates of a school have fared, and make assessments on that basis, but those outcomes are based as much or more on the quality of the students that were admitted to the school as on the quality of education they received at the school.
Higher quality students moving from poor performing schools to these more selective schools may indeed on average experience improved individual performance, but not because of any improvement in the quality of educational services delivered; rather, as a result of isolating and removing low performing students from the equation. We have to ask ourselves who and what we are as a people: Are we committed to the continuing march of extreme individualism, the resurrection of “social Darwinism,” or are we committed to being a people who works together to increase opportunities for all? If the former, vouchers are the way to go. If the latter, we need to go in the exact opposite direction: A greater commitment to improving the services offered to families to assist them in better supporting their children’s education, and to communities to help move them in the direction of better facilitators of better educational performance and better citizenship in general.
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Out of many, one. The phrase on the Great Seal of the United States is an explicit reference to the realization of those who are idolized by today’s extreme individualists that we are not ultimately a mere collection of individuals or states, but rather each a part of a greater unity.
Those today who claim to be the standard bearers of the Constitution and of our original national ideology implicitly chant, instead, “E Unus Pluribum” (Out of the one, many). They constantly denounce recognition of human interdependence, and the responsibilities that come of membership in a society. They claim the Constitution which was drafted to unite us is the authority of division, that all sense of mutual obligation implemented through political agency is a travesty against the anarchy that they imagine is our highest ideal. They return us to the days of Social Darwinists rationalizing indifference to human suffering, and reverence for gross inequalities and injustices. They not only are the preachers of ignorance, but of centuries old ignorance.
But there are wisdoms more ancient than their ignorance. “E Pluribus Unum” is not just a political motto, but also a spiritual one. Hinduism codified the wisdom that individualism is an illusion, that we are each god pretending “he” is the Many, while in fact we all are merely faces of the One. It doesn’t require a deep spiritual revelation, or even enormous reflection, to realize the essential truth of this: We each think in languages, concepts, and forms that are not ours alone, that were produced by the many over time, and that merely combine in marginally unique ways with marginally unique balances to create our individuality very much on the margins of reality, with our commonality being by far the more basic fact of our existence.
The same that is true of us cognitively and culturally is true of us biologically: We are comprised of almost entirely shared genetic material, with only some marginal variation of how that material is combined creating some very marginal biological individuation. We are, biologically as well mentally, far, far, far more similar than we are different.
Our essential, pre-political unity is not just a function of similarity, but also of interdependence. Nature, sometimes misconceptualized as fundamentally an arena of competition, is at least as fundamentally an arena of cooperation, of interdependence, of an ecological unity (even, according to James Lovelock in his book Gaia, a geological/atmospheric/ecological unity).
Nature in general, and humanity in particular, consists of fields of coherence and variance, or individuation, within that coherence. The coherence is both temporal and spatial; there is a continuity of natural history, of human history, of the two in combination; there is a continuity among people in their families and communities, of families and communities in their states and nations; of states and nations in global humanity; and of all of this in the natural contexts (geological, ecological, and physical) in which we are embedded. The One is comprised of many, many elements, but they are all ultimately woven into a single dynamical tapestry in almost unlimited ways, on almost unlimited levels.
Individuation is neither the ultimate goal, nor a mere means to another goal, nor a useless illusion (despite the wisdom of Hindu thought); it is, rather, one small, beautiful, and powerful aspect of a vast coherent reality. We can celebrate it, admire it, enjoy it, utilize it, and analyze it, but we should not reify it, we should not turn it into an ultimate and immutable reality defining the limits of what we are and what we are capable of being.
Like many things in life, the relationship between the One and the Many, between the individual and the society, is a dialectic, with each serving the other, in order that the other may be of better service in return. The individualism of markets is a robust generator of wealth, while the social contract required to frame and regulate markets so that they continue to function both ever-more efficiently and ever-more fairly is our collective commitment both to that robust social institution, and to the individuals that it serves.
When minds gravitate to one extreme or the other, they diminish both their collective wisdom and their collective utility, and both individuals and the collectivity to which they belong suffer. We should neither subordinate individuals to some collective, nor collectives to some unbalanced ideal of individualism: We should instead explore our shared existence, complete with the vibrancy of individual liberty, both as a people and as individuals, working together to enrich all of our lives.
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I’ve been developing A Proposal: The Politics of Kindness in recent weeks, as well as communicating with others from across the political spectrum on matters of policy, ideology, and personal style, and the sheer lunacy and pettiness of popular discourse raises the question of whether reason and goodwill are powerful enough forces to cut through it, or whether those who are advocates for reason and goodwill have simply failed to present it in a transparent and compelling enough manner.
Here’s what should be completely non-controversial: We should govern ourselves by using sound reason applied to reliable information in service to all legitimate values and goals, including the protection and augmentation of individual liberty, the recognition of mutual interdependence, and a commitment to kindness and compassion. And yet, it is controversial, the simplicity of it buried beneath various idolatries and ideological rationalizations.
One former supporter wrote me and said that my use of jargon turns him off, and that I would attract more people to my ideas by avoiding it. I wrote back thanking him, telling him that I thought that he was absolutely right, that I would work on it, but that my writing style is really just my writing style, and it probably wasn’t going to change dramatically, in part due to my own lack of skill and my own unwillingness to invest the amount of time and energy necessary. I asked him to “bear with me.” He replied that I had chosen not to take his suggestion, but rather to rationalize continuing to do what he suggested I stop doing, so he wasn’t going to bear with me. I responded: “Fair enough. Different people have different ways of thinking, speaking, writing, and behaving. Some of those differences shouldn’t be tolerated, and some should. It’s up to each of us to decide for ourselves where we draw that line. No hard feelings.”
How much should it matter to any of us if another person’s writing style is annoying? Should it matter any more than if another has a tic, or a stutter, or a physical defect? How much does it matter whether the offending trait is seen as more or less an artifact of volition, or amenable to voluntary modification? Should gay rights really hinge on the argument over whether it is a life-style choice, or an inherent characteristic?
The defects of some ideologies (not just some conservative ones) have more to do with attitude than with substance. They are characterized by intolerance, absolutism, and other attributes that are inherently centrifugal in nature, tearing people apart rather than binding us together. Progressives should not see themselves as being in a battle against external foes called “conservatives,” but rather against both internal and external foes called “intolerance, irrationality, ignorance, anger, hostility, cruelty” and so on.
It’s time for all reasonable people of goodwill to dedicate ourselves to The Politics of Kindness. Yes, well-reasoned and well-informed kindness; well-communicated kindness; kindness that seeks the kindest outcomes and not just the kindest intentions; kindness that is disciplined and channeled and cautious in its certainties; kindness that is courageous and assertive and even at times combative in its advocacy; but, ultimately, kindness.
We exhaust ourselves in futile opposition to irrelevancies, and fortify ourselves within shallow but passionately held dogmas. What if we simply all tried to do better? Or, more realistically, what if those of us who read this message, or receive it from some other source, or independently think of it, consider the possibility of doing better? What if all those who care about participating productively in the creation of our future dedicate themselves to doing better? And what if all those so inclined began to more consistently and frequently encourage others to do better as well, in the kindest and most endearing of ways?
I’ve learned a lot from my seven-year-old daughter. One of the things I’ve learned is that love is far more powerful than anger. And, in the same vein, tolerance is far more powerful than intolerance. Kindness is far more powerful than hatred or indifference. Reason is far more powerful than irrationality, and knowledge is far more powerful than ignorance. And yet, these more powerful forces seem forever on the defensive. Anger, intolerance, hatred, mutual indifference, irrationality, and ignorance are forever on the march, while love, tolerance, kindness, reason, and knowledge seem forever (or at least too frequently) in retreat. It’s not because the latter set is weaker, but rather because those of us who would be its advocates are weaker in our commitment to it, which demands more of its adherents than do hatred, intolerance, anger, indifference, irrationality, and ignorance.
Those who want reason and kindness to prevail in the political sphere have to work harder in promoting it within ourselves, within our families and communities, within our thoughts and our actions. We will continue to lose to weaker forces more easily served unless and until we do.
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Denver’s Sun Valley Neighborhood is Poor in Income and Rich in Character. The Denver Post reported today on Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood, occupying a stretch just east of Federal Blvd., between 6th Ave. and Invesco Field, which will have a FasTracks Light Rail stop on the line from Union Station to the Golden County Government Building (http://www.denverpost.com/sun_valley/ci_16780609). The description of a mostly forgotten and isolated neighborhood characterized by deep poverty, widespread housing assistance, and tremendous ethnic diversity, in which the relatively small population sports some locally famous characters and exists with a high degree of intimacy, isn’t what most people think of as “idyllic,” but it has some qualities that many of our more affluent communities, especially in the impersonal suburbs, would do well to emulate.
When a Social Institution Unleashes Violence, It is Responsible for the Violence It Has Unleashed. The Denver Post reported on the soldier facing a hearing in Military Court to determine if a Court Marshall proceeding is appropriate for his murder of a shackled Taliban commander (http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16782041). The ideology of extreme individualism (i.e., the “Tea Party”) would generally say that only the individual, not the institution, bears any blame for the individual’s actions, but when we throw people into the midst of violence, under-attend to both their psychological propensities and to the stresses their psyches are subjected to, stoking the fires of violence within and without, we as a society bear responsibility for all of the violence we’ve unleashed, not just for those threads of it which were explicitly “ordered.” And we are responsible not only to the victims of the violence, but to the perpetrators of it as well, for we are the ones who have committed the act of violence against them. It may be the case that national militaries are indispensable, and that even some uses that result in innocent deaths are something that can’t be avoided, but that does not absolve us of any of the responsibility of the consequences of such uses, for all involved.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush Opposes Arizona-Style Racially Discriminatory Anti-Immigrant Laws. At a convention of city officials from across the county held at the Denver Convention Center, Jeb Bush and Harvard professor Robert Putnam, the former married to a woman of Mexican heritage, and the latter the father-in-law of a Hispanic son-in-law (and grandfather of half-hispanic grandchildren) both voiced their concerns about state anti-immigration laws which invite racial profiling, and turn our own Hispanic citizens into a suspect class. If the ugliness of such laws, which many of the angry voices on the belligerent right so strongly defend, is clear to anyone with Hispanics in their family, then it should also be clear to anyone capable of empathy or blessed withenough imagination to recognize the injustice of being suspected of a crime simply for being Hispanic. In my own on-going debates with members of this horrifying social movement one thing continues to amaze me: How resilient and well-fortified the ideology of hatred and ignorance is, that, despite the repeated lessons of the past and from around the world, we still have millions living in relative comfort eager to embrace it and defend it yet again, adamant that their own reincarnation of such bigotries is the only noble position, and that those who oppose it are despicable for doing so.
Which party is really committed to fiscal responsibility?The debate over the proposal by President Obama’s blue-ribbon commission on how to cut the deficit is revealing of something most rational people of goodwill already knew: Reason has fled the Republican Party completely, and a combination of fanatical ideology and rampant hypocrisy is all that now defines it. Though Republicans made their recent electoral gains by pretending to be responsible fiscal conservatives, the Republican rank-and-file is, ironically, less willing than Democrats to support the commission’s proposals, which rely mostly on spending cuts and secondarily on tax hikes, due to their ideological refusal to acknowledge that fiscal responsibility includes any responsibility to actually pay for a functioning government (I’ve been unable to find the poll; I believe I saw it on The Chris Mathews Show today, 12/4/10).
Secrecy in International Diplmacy is a Vital Ingredient.There are many situations in which shedding some sunshine on political maneuvers that have been hidden from public view serves the public interest, but, as is so often the case, revealing all secrets is not a universal and absolute good. JFK negotiated a peaceful end to The Cuban Missile Crisis in part by making a secret promise to remove American missiles (equally threatening to Russia as Cuban missiles were to America) from Turkish soil. The nuances, subtleties, and practicalities of international negotiations sometimes require a level of candor among our agents than complete and universal transparency allows. The traditional press, though always (for the last half-century or so, at least) far more inclined toward public disclosure than toward helping government keep secrets, has exercised a bit of self-restraint when a good case could be made for the maintenance of some secrets in service to the public interest. Some are offended by such a notion, but I argue that such a reduction of all things to plebiscite would be crippling to international relations. We formed a representative democracy for a reason; their are functions that require agents to be able to act with some latitude on behalf of their principal, and if we strip all of our agents of all such latitude, we will collectively suffer for it. The difficult challenge of holding our agents accountable to our interests, while empowering them to act with some independent (and even occasionally secretive) latitude, is not a trivial one, and errors will be made of both too much and too little public vigilance, too much and too little government empowerment and authorization. But the worst error almost always is the embrace of an extreme and inflexible absolute rather than some acknowledgement of the demands of nuance and subtlety to strike a well-reasoned balance.
While the decentralization of information production and access is, overall, a very powerful tool for human progress, it also poses some serious challenges to our collective welfare on a variety of fronts. One such front is reliability; a great deal of very unreliable information flows very rapidly along virtual networks. Another front involves striking the balance between complete public transparency and some enclaves of confidentiality, a challenge which involves dimensions other than international diplomacy (e.g., decreased confidentiality of personal information of various kinds is another, very different, dimension of this same problem). While some might make a bright line distinction between “public” and “private” information, the more useful distinction is between productive and counterproductive secrecy.
(See A Proposal for a slightly revised version of this post, followed by an extensive elaboration of its various components)
To advance the cause of Reason and Goodwill, I propose a project, or movement, that is comprised of three parts: 1) a policy analysis component; 2) an information dissemination component; and 3) a community organizational network component. While I conceptualize each of these in somewhat novel ways, in the context of grass roots political activism, it is the third which is perhaps the most innovative and crucial component, and so it is with the third that I will begin.
Currently, grass roots activism by those who claim the mantel of advocacy of Reason and Goodwill is almost entirely focused on electoral politics and public policy as generated through governmental mechanisms. As such, it is very easy for the opponents of this movement to dismiss these activists as people who want to take the opponents’ money and give it to others. One aspect of this conceptualization is that government is not considered an agent of the people, but rather an external entity which imposes itself on people and deprives them of their liberty. The arguments for and against this conceptualization are irrelevant for my present purposes. There are clearly many people who do indeed adhere to this conceptualization, and that fact is what’s relevant.
George Lakoff in The Political Mind talked about the need to activate the frames and narratives in all of us that are empathy-based, if we want to be successful in implementing empathy-based public policies. There are few people of any ideological stripe who oppose community involvement, and most actively support it. Many conservatives are involved in their communities through churches, civic groups, and PTAs, for instance. Such involvement is where their empathy-based frames and narratives reside, along with, in many cases, a notion of “family values,” some aspects of which are also empathy based. By increasing the association of these activities with what is currently referred to as “the progressive agenda” (though avoidance of the word “progressive” might be crucial to the success of this project), we can increase the value of the (possibly renamed) brand, attracting more people to it, including some who never imagined that they might be attracted to it.
History is replete with examples of the persuasive power of those who “walk the walk.” Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are two examples of “progressives” in their day, fighting to advance particular causes (Indian Independence and African American Civil Rights, respectively), whose examples were so compelling that few today would denounce what either of them stood for. They were “political entrepreneurs,” mobilizing “charismatic authority” in service to humanity. We can’t all be such giants, and we aren’t all willing to make the sacrifices it requires, but we can all make more modest sacrifices and rise to more modest heights, demonstrating the sincerity of our convictions and, by doing so, making the power of our message that much more irresistible.
There are already many who invest a great deal of time, energy, money, and personal commitment into advancing the progressive agenda. If some significant fraction can be persuaded to invest some increased portion of that time, energy, money, and personal commitment into increased, non-partisan community involvement, they will contribute greatly to increasing the association of the policies they advocate with the spirit of goodwill in service to mutual benefit. And by being direct agents of reason and goodwill in their communities, the public policies such activists favor are given a human face; rather than being easily conceptualized as the impositions of a remote overlord, such policies can be plainly seen to be the sincere preference of some good neighbors and community members who believe that the spirit of community can be expressed not just directly, but also through our government acting as an agent of our collective will.
I describe this component at greater length in several posts on my blog, Colorado Confluence. The post with the most concise and focused treatment is “The Power of ‘Walking the Walk'”: http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=1540.
This community-strengthening component isn’t only a laudable end in itself, but it also serves the second component I mentioned: Messaging. The cause of Reason and Goodwill is a powerful one, one which few would explicitly claim opposition to. The most pronounced failure of those who are its political advocates is the failure to connect the political expression of Reason and Goodwill to the widespread individual aspirations to be reasonable people of goodwill. One aspect of addressing that failure involves modeling what it means to be reasonable people of goodwill, and cultivating the commitment to it that might eventually translate into increased popular support for public policies that are expressions of reason and goodwill.
More generally, the messaging has to rely less on academic or legalistic argumentation, and more on resonating with the frames and narratives that form people’s minds. We need to reach people where they live, finding their own empathetic frames and narratives, and connecting the set of well-reasoned public policies which are empathy-based to those frames and narratives. Therefore, the second component of the project I am proposing is the continuing and focused development of a cognitively sophisticated system of disseminating not just “progressive” ideas, but doing so in ways which resonate with non-progressive mindsets.
This project, therefore, involves not only increasing popular positive associations with progressive policies by modeling a progressive spirit of mutual goodwill, and forming increased positive social connections with people who do not self-identify as “progressives,” but also involves communicating that same message in ways that are precisely tailored to most effectively resonate with those who are currently perhaps only marginally inclined to be attracted by it. The community involvement becomes the most important conduit for the message, communicated with increased credibility, and couched in increasingly effective ways.
Finally, the first component of this project involves reducing the arbitrariness and exclusiveness of what is assumed to be those policies which advance the cause of Reason and Goodwill. Rather than a traditional policy think tank with an ideological bias, this component of the project would have to strive to map out the entire range of public policy ideas and options, guided only by a commitment to reason in service to the public interest, acknowledging legitimate debates and ranges of uncertainty (such as, for example, between Keynesian and Chicago School Economics, and the associated policies of economic stimulus through public spending v. “fiscal conservativism”).
I envision this component as a very ambitious social institutional analogue to “the human genome project,” in which the social institutional landscape is mapped out using available analytical tools (e.g., microeconomic analysis, network analysis, legal analysis, meme theory, etc.), comprising a coherent complex dynamical systems paradigm, and then, within this context, all competing ideologies, policy ideas, proposals, and analyses are cataloged and evaluated, controlling as much as possible for ideological bias, simply subjecting the universe of human social and political thought to the crucible of methodologically rigorous reason.
Two important dimensions of this project need to be highlighted: 1) These three components are not mutually segregated, but are rather integral aspects of a single coherent effort, reinforcing one another, and creating a powerful synergy of progressive thought, communication, and action; and 2) An enormous amount of work has been done in all three areas, under a variety of organizational umbrellas; utilization and integration of the product of those efforts, and of the existing social institutional material that has been generated from all quarters, is a large part of what this project would be about. The community involvement component would actively seek out partnerships with churches and other religious organizations, civic organizations, PTAs, park districts, non-profits, local businesses, and all others who have already developed a community infrastructure to work with and through.
We would, through this synthesis of focused analysis, focused communication, and focused action, weave the spirit of reason and goodwill into the social fabric as it currently exists, and contribute to the ongoing evolution of that social fabric in ways more conducive to the cause of Reason and Goodwill.
I believe that this project would have to avoid direct political advocacy of any kind (a function already addressed by other organizations) in order to preserve its legitimacy, and to reduce the obstacles that explicit partisanship creates. Its purpose would be to explore the social institutional landscape with as little bias as possible (but with an explicit commitment to advancing the public interest through the advocacy of reason in service to mutual goodwill), and through a combination of direct involvement in our communities and well-designed (cognitively targeted) messaging, disseminating that understanding as widely and deeply as possible. This would “soften the ground” for traditional political advocacy, and would also increase the quality of what we are advocating for (by decreasing ideological presumption and increasing openness to all ideas).
I am currently looking for any and all feedback, assistance, direction, and referrals to others who might offer the same. I can envision this as either being a directly funded project that I oversee (or merely participate in), or as a project that finds a home in an existing organizational context. I am completely amenable to these, and any other, possible paths of implementation. Please email me at steve.harvey.hd28@gmail.com
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The bulk of my posts aggregate to inform A Proposal for a social movement, one which combines devising the best policy analyses in service to humanity with the best and most innovative and cognitively sophisticated messaging in order to attract an ever-widening range of the public to the agenda of Reason and Goodwill. The element that may be most novel and most powerful, however, is not this combination of the essentially familiar ingredients of policy analysis and messaging, but rather the one that can be a game changer, the one that may prove to be an irresistible force: Organizing not to change government or implement particular public policies so much as to create a simultaneously personal and social commitment to one another, by actually “walking the walk” of goodwill, of mutual interdependence and support, associating with “the progressive agenda” the attraction of a lived commitment to other people’s welfare.
As I wrote in The Ultimate Political Challenge, a single Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. captures the imagination and, in time, wins over the hardened hearts of much of the opposition. They both knew the power of their goodwill, of their personal commitment to it, and acted with the discipline to turn that goodwill into a social force. These two “political entrepreneurs” mobilized their “charismatic authority” in service to specific issues within a Progressive world view (Indian Independence and African American Civil Rights, respectively). What we lack today are similarly compelling political entrepreneurs, mobilizing similarly dedicated charismatic authority. And the step that hasn’t yet been taken is to mobilize those forces not to address a single issue, but to address the underlying issue of being a people dedicated to reason and empathy.
Today, there are many progressives angrily striving to implement progressive policies, but too often doing so with little or no internalized, personalized, and dedicated goodwill toward fellow human beings. It is just another blind ideology in their hands, not a commitment, not something they’re willing to sacrifice for. I challenge each and every one of them –AND MYSELF– not just to talk the talk, but also to walk the walk, to be, to some small degree, a tribute to those who were willing to give their lives to humanity, by giving some portion of our own. I challenge us all to strive to be “political entrepreneurs,” to strive to invoke our own “charismatic authority,” to demonstrate that individual initiative does not have to be mobilized only in service to the accumulation of individual wealth. I challenge us all to do good by being good, and by being good, vastly increasing our credibility as advocates for public policies aligned with that spirit.
The Tea Partiers, and other extreme individualists, who have managed to rationalize an indifference to the suffering of others and a denial of the responsibilities to others that come with the blessings of good fortune, are able to dismiss Progressives as people who want to spend other people’s money against their will, because, in fact, that’s all they see. But what if they saw instead the people who organize to mentor neighborhood kids, to help out those who are facing a crisis, to counsel and assist people in need, to be what they preach we as a society should be, and only in conjunction with that lived commitment, only as an auxiliary to it, are struggling to create a government that facilitates what they are already doing every day, in every way, as a natural part of our shared existence? Can you imagine the force of such a social movement?
All reasonable people of goodwill, who want to promote reason and goodwill, need to do so on the ground, in daily life, independently of government, if they want the advance of reason and goodwill to prevail. Those who can’t summon enough commitment to model for others what reason and goodwill look and feel like need to recognize that they are no better than those they oppose, no more than a bunch of people trying to impose their will on others without being willing to live up to the demands they themselves have made. No wonder the Progressive Movement is making so little headway! Who can trust armchair altruists, who talk a good game but live lives no more noble or generous than those they condemn?
I passionately want for us to become a kinder and gentler nation, a nation of people lifting one another up, a nation aspiring to realize the potential of the human spirit. There is one clear path to that end: For all of those who want the same to commit themselves to its realization, by becoming the kinds of irresistible beacons to reason and goodwill that Gandhi and King were, that each of us can be, even if to some smaller extent. By as many of us as possible striving to do so, we will give the Progressive brand a reputation for sincere goodwill that ever fewer will be able to deny. And the future will increasingly belong to what is best and most admirable in human beings.
This is what a commitment to Progressive policies demands of us: A commitment to personal progress in service to social progress, to being as individuals what we are advocating that we become as a society. Striving to rise to that challenge is the greatest gift we could give to our children, to their children, and to ourselves.
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Coloradans, mistaking our state’s insane and ignorant Republican caucus for a rational partner to off-set what they perceived as Democratic excesses, got what they asked for: A push for insane and ignorant policy (http://www.denverpost.com/legislature/ci_16736807). Buying into (if not authoring) the xenophobic hysteria around the immigration issue, the Colorado Republican House Majority is now using an essentially falsified estimate of the costs of illegal immigration to the state of Colorado to push for an Arizona style draconian law, neglecting the fact that Arizona’s law has hurt, not helped, Arizona’s economy (http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2010/12/01/immigration-law-would-hurt-colorado-says-gazette/19099/).
In A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue, I laid out a framework to inform public policy that takes into account the facts of how immigration (legal and otherwise) affects our economy, as well as other considerations. We don’t need blind ideologues in office, hurting the state economy in order to impose as public policy a lose-lose act of xenophobic belligerence. We need informed and thinking human beings, mobilizing reason and goodwill in service both to ourselves and to humanity.
In The Dream Act & The Battle Between Humane Reason & Belligerent Irrationality, I reiterated the nature of this struggle over our state and national identity, a struggle I discussed at more length in“A Choice Between Our Hopes and Our Fears”. The immigration issue is one of the most focused tests of our humanity, a test which we as a people are woefully failing. We serve neither ourselves, nor our ideals, when we treat an issue so much at the heart of what it means to be a humane people with such callous disregard for humanity. And, ironically, it is not only an act of generosity to pursue a more enlightened path, but also an act of enlightened self-interest, for we benefit more than we lose from the contribution made by these people coming here to improve their own lives.
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