In our exploration of our collective consciousness and our shared existence, much can be understood in terms of how far down into underlying ordering principles particular thoughts and actions reach. The vast majority of our academic and political debates occur between ideas residing at similar levels of subtlety, with decreasing participation as depth increases. These conflicting positions are generally more compatible in some essential ways than their various adherents realize, but also generally defective due to errors of oversimplification and “overreach” of application.
Examples in science include the 19th century debate between particle and wave theories of light, reconciled in the 20th century into a paradigm that transcended the distinction; and the apparent incompatibility of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, reconciled by String Theory, which provides a subtler mathematical penetration transcending that apparent incompatibility.
The principal modern example in geopolitics was the “debate,” culminating in a half-century long Cold War, between Totalitarian Command Economies and Democratic Capitalism, between political economic centralization and political economic decentralization. The lessons of history clearly point to some subtle blend of market dynamics and state regulation, of representative democracy rather than either plebiscite or dictatorship, as a form that transcends either of the previous political ideological poles. Even so, depending on the history of the particular country, extremists at one pole or the other (or both) are likely to continue to obstruct and disrupt the approach toward that transcendent blend, insisting that their pure ideology, existing on a more simplistic plane of conceptualization, is superior. In such instances the dialectic is across levels of subtlety, and the preference should be , in the light of the paradigm I am developing here, for the deeper level of subtlety.
(There are many today who are convinced that the fall of Communism conclusively vindicates its extreme opposite, though even if it had fallen to its extreme opposite, it would only have proven that it was the inferior, in terms of competitiveness, of two extreme views, not that there were no forms superior to both. In reality, Communism didn’t fall to its extreme opposite, but rather to the hybrid form that had developed from the Great Depression onward, that all societies that had participated in the post-WWII expansion of wealth had already implemented and continued to develop, by far the most successful modern form, which blind anti-government ideologues seek to undermine by insisting that their never-tested and fundamentally flawed ideal replace it.)
Another way to conceptualize this historical dynamic is in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, or the Taoist dance of opposites. In the Hegelian dialectic, a thesis is developed and argued, generating an antithesis and counterarguments, resulting eventually in a synthesis, which becomes a new thesis, generating a new antithesis…, and so on, constantly penetrating into deeper levels of subtlety by means of this dialectic. In Taoism, yin and yang are in a constant dynamic tension with one another, each always bearing the seed of its opposite (as in the image of the Taiji Tu, the Taoist symbol of yin and yang).
But it is not just the dance of opposites; it is also the resolution of puzzles. Hegel’s thesis and antithesis are both attempts to understand something, their interaction leading to a deeper understanding. But there is a perhaps even more robust “dialectic” involving Dominant Paradigm, Emerging Anomalies, and Subsequent Paradigm Shift. Frequently, the traditional dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis both precedes and occurs in the interstices of this paradigm-anomalies-paradigm shift dynamic, with competing pre-paradigmatic views vying for dominance, and then, within a given paradigm increasingly beset by anomalies, competing proposed resolutions vying for dominance.
There is even a dialectic that can be discerned in the competition of these two views, between those who understand human history primarily in terms of class conflict punctuated with occasional revolutions, and those who understand human history primarily in terms of dominant paradigms undergoing constant refinement through a process of trial-and-error and responses by centralized regimes to historical exigencies. An example of this can be seen in the competing views on the rise of modern democracy, between those who view it as the result of the less powerful confronting and challenging the more powerful and gradually advancing as a result (the Hegelian dialectic), and those who view it as the result of the English Crown’s need to empower broader and broader swathes of the population in order to finance internecine European wars (the dominant paradigm, anomalies or challenges, paradigm shift view).
In academe as in politics, people debate these competing views, these competing paradigms, these competing theses, as though they are mutually incompatible, only grudgingly and gradually arriving at some evenutal reconciliation which recognizes a subtler reality beneath them, subsuming them, transcending them.
Recently, I broadened and deepened the colorful thesis/paradigm described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change (and the related posts on “the evolutionary ecology of natural, human, and technological systems”) by adding in the concept of Emotional Contagion, and by doing so, continued to reconcile with new interweaving threads the social theoretical and social movement tapestries of thought being simultaneously developed on this blog. Another development of the thesis/paradigm might include recognition of the ways in which that pulsating, reverberating, expanding and contracting fractal flow of memes across our collective cognitive landscape involves a progression into ever-increasing subtlety and complexity, penetrating deeper into the ever-more fundamental algorithms generating ever-broader swathes of the complexity around and within us.
Just as the character Algono, in The Wizards’ Eye, was reaching ever-deeper into the potential of human consciousness, finding the algorithms by which change occurs, and then the algorithms by which those algorithms themselves change (as, for instance, scientific paradigms do, as we delve deeper into their implications, discover their anomalies, and transcend them), and so forth, into levels beneath levels, we are, or could be, forever reaching down into the deeper currents that subsume the shallower ones.
To put it another way, this act of reaching down into deeper currents is the act of finding the subtlest algorithms generating the greatest complexity, in much the way that a simple algorithm generates the Mandelbrot Set fractal. (Videos exploring the Mandelbrot Set: The Mandelbrot Set: Images of Complexity. See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foxD6ZQlnlU&NR=1, capturing the combination of self-similarity and complexity across scales; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEw8xpb1aRA, emphasizing self-similarity across scales, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eD9IRS9_tc&feature=BFa&list=SP6848FE2899BA0E73&index=10, emphasizing the complexity across scales. See YouTube “Mandelbrot Set Zooms” or “Fractal Zooms” for a wide variety of different projections, no two exactly the same. Also, see http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~wayne/mandel/gallery/, for a wide selection of different still images from the Mandelbrot Set.)
The implication is that, in both thought and action, our challenge in The Dance of Consciousness is to reach into ever deeper currents, finding ever-subtler algorithms of change that affect ever-broader swathes of the encompassing complexity of our existence. When we discuss the actual, practical problems that confront us as a people –problems such as unemployment, the collapse of the housing market, climate change, and illegal immigration– the most useful and effective policies for addressing them are invariably the policies based on more rather than less systemic understanding, reaching deeper down into the currents beneath the superficial phenomena under discussion. This effort, one aspect of which I have outlined in The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, is what I will call “Transcendental Politics.”
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As I play with my Colorado Confluence Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Colorado-Confluence/151536731532344), selecting interests and organizations and historical figures to “like” in an attempt to convey the universe of ideas and efforts that I believe we are called upon to try to weave together into coherent wholes; and as I survey my accumulating corpus of posts, wondering how to convey their underlying integrity; and as I struggle with the challenges of my personal life, of unemployment, of seeking a new career advancing this general cause of humanity, and of a wife and daughter who depend on me; I feel the full brunt of both the hope and despair that life serves up in such generous portions.
That is really what this blog, and my life, are all about. The many themes of the blog are all facets of a single orientation, an orientation that includes conceptual and practical dimensions, one that seeks understanding from a variety of angles, and a refinement of our collective ability to both accelerate the growth and deepening of our understanding and improve our ability to implement that understanding in ways which cultivate ever-increasing quality and humanity in our lives.
“Quality” is an interesting word, one explored in subtle ways in Robert Pirsig’s iconic novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The debate over what it means is, in many ways, at the heart of our political struggles. Does the quality of life require attention to social justice and material human welfare, or merely attention to individual liberty (narrowly defined as “freedom from state sponsored coercion”)? Does it require intergenerational justice, foresight and proactive attention to probable future problems, or merely short-sighted, individualistic service to immediate needs and wants? Does it have any collective and enduring attributes, or is it merely something in the moment, to be grasped now without regard for future consequences?
One of the difficulties of addressing these questions and their political off-shoots is the differing frames and narratives upon which people rely. But one of the most significant differences in frames and narratives is the one between those that would ever even identify frames and narratives as a salient consideration, and those that are trapped in narrower, shallower, and more rigid conceptualizations of reality. In other words, the most basic ideological divide isn’t between “right” and “left,” but between “aspiring to be more conscious” and “complacent with current consciousness.” To put it more simply, the divide is between those who recognize that they live in an almost infinitely complex and subtle world and those who think that it is all really quite simple and clear.
The social movement that we currently lack, and that we always most profoundly require, is the social movement in advocacy of the deepening of our consciousness, not just as an abstract or self-indulgent hobby, but as the essence of the human enterprise, and the most essential tool in service to our ability to forever increase our liberty and compassion and wisdom and joy, here and elsewhere, now and in the future.
This blog employs what I’ll coin “Coherent Eclecticism” in service to that aspiration. No branch or form of human thought is dismissed, no aspect of the effort denied, no wrinkle or subtlety ignored, to the fullest extent of our individual and collective ability. That does not mean that Coherent Eclecticism treats all ideas and opinions as equal, but rather as equally meriting the full consideration of our reason and imagination and compassion. We start with as few assumptions as possible, revisit conclusions not carefully enough examined, and dedicate ourselves to the refinement of those procedures and methodologies, individually and collectively, that best serve the goal of distilling all thought and action into the wisest, most liberating, most compassionate, and most useful concoction possible.
Coherent Eclecticism implies that apparent contradictions and incompatibilities may not be, that “realism” and “idealism” (the philosophy), “cynicism” and “idealism” (the attitude), aspects of conservatism and aspects of progressivism, religion and science, imagination and reason, aesthetics and practicality, may all be nodes in a coherent whole, may all serve a single vision and single aspiration. But it is not the arbitrary glomming together of disparate elements; rather, it is the careful articulation of subtly integral elements, the realization of coherence in complexity, of systems subtler and richer than our minds can ever quite fully grasp.
As I briefly describe at the beginning of The Politics of Consciousness, this is one aspect of Thomas Kuhn’s famous theory of “paradigm shifts,” the notion that accumulating anomalies within a coherent understanding lead to a focus on the resolution of those anomalies and a deepening of the understanding, often reconciling what had been apparently contradictory views. One excellent modern example involves The Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and String Theory in physics. Throughout the 20th century, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics had both proven themselves indispensable theoretical tools for understanding the subtleties and complexities of our physical universe, and yet they were apparently incompatible, addressing different kinds of phenomena, but essentially contradicting one another. String Theory has, to a large extent, reconciled that apparent incompatibility with a subtler mathematical model that transcends and encompasses both of its predecessors.
I describe this general phenomenon in fictional terms in The Wizards’ Eye, metaphorically synthesizing Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts with Eastern Philosophical notions of Enlightenment or Nirvana, describing a process which leads us into deeper and deeper understandings that are simultaneously rational and spiritual, reductionist and holistic, “noisy” and meditative. The narrative itself reconciles the forms of fiction and exposition, and the realms of Eastern Mysticism and Western Philosophy of Science.
Coherent Eclecticism is apparent, too, in the range of essays and narratives I’ve published on this blog, often seeming to inhabit completely separate realms, but always coalescing into a coherent vision when examined as a whole. The social theoretical essays in the first box at Catalogue of Selected Posts may seem at first glance to have little or no connection to the social movement essays in the second box, but, without trying, the threads that weave them together have gradually begun to appear. The most recent addition to the first box is Emotional Contagion, which identifies how the cognitive/social institutional dynamics described in posts such as The Fractal Geometry of Social Change have an emotional element to them. Among the earliest entries to what is now the second box, pulling together the essays that developed and now describe “the politics of reason and goodwill” (see The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified), are essays that explored that emotional contagion in current political activism, and the importance of being careful about what emotions we are spreading (see, e.g., The Politics of Anger and The Politics of Kindness).
These first two sets of essays, those in the box labelled “the evolutionary ecology of natural, human, and technological systems,” and those in the box labelled “the politics of reason and goodwill,” form together the overarching structure of the “coherently eclectic” paradigm developing on this blog. But the other boxes, with their various other focuses, fill in that framework, add other kinds of meat to those bones, get into the details of specific policy areas and specific ideological orientations and specific social and political phenomena, articulating those details with the overarching paradigm that organizes and channels them. And the fictional vignettes and poems celebrate the beauty and wonder of the entirety.
It’s quite a giddy thing to participate in, this dance of consciousness of ours. It is, when you get right down to it, both the means and the ends of all of our aspirations and efforts.
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The dynamics I described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change applies as much to emotions as to cognitions, as we all know: Kindness and unkindness, love and hate, generosity and selfishness, forgiveness and anger, are all highly contagious, spreading robustly in conflicting, resonating, self-amplifying currents of benevolence and belligerence. The world is full of flame wars and love fests, shouts of “get a room!” and “cage match!” On scales both large and small we cultivate either mutual goodwill or mutual antagonism with every word and gesture.
Indeed, the dynamical, ever-changing social institutional and technological landscape described in the essays in the first box at Catalogue of Selected Posts is as much a function of this emotional contagion as it is of the cognitive contagion on which I routinely focus. The two are intertwined, at times mutually reinforcing and at times mutually disrupting, bad attitudes undermining good ideas, and kind emotions concealing callous cognitions. I had discussed this several times, in a different context, in several of the essays in the second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts, such as The Foundational Progressive Agenda, The Politics of Anger, The Politics of Kindness, The Power of “Walking the Walk”, The Battle of Good v. Evil, Within & Without, and The Battle of Good v. Evil, Part 2.
In fact, I began to identify the interplay of the substance of our political positions and the form by which they are advocated, in The Basic Political Ideological Grid. But, as I began to indicate in that essay, their integration is more along the pattern described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, two reverberating currents intertwined in complex ways.
I have sometimes written (drawing on the work of economist Robert Frank, among others) that our emotions are our primordial social institutional material, the commitment mechanism that bound us together before we created governments and markets and enforceable contracts; the protoplasm of “norms” diffusely enforced through mutual social approval and disapproval. But even as we have rationalized our society through the ever-increasing domain of hierarchies, markets, (fully developed) norms, and ideologies, this emotional protoplasm is still flowing through that mass of latter developments, of cognitive social institutional material.
Political discourse is commonly more emotional than rational, and, as a consequence, more ideological than methodological (see Ideology v. Methodology). That’s because ideology is the handmaiden of emotion, while methodology is the handmaiden of reason. Since reason has always played, and continues to play, only a marginal instantaneous role in human cognitions and human history (though, somewhat paradoxically, a major long-term role), the dynamics described in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change are of a more emotional than rational nature, at least in real time.
And the emotional content counts, as much or more than the rational content. There are those on the left who argue that we need to be angrier, to be more like The Tea Party, which used anger so successfully. But I argue that that is a recipe for becoming The Tea Party, not for countering it, because it is the anger, more than anything else, that makes The Tea Party the scourge that it is. Of course, those who argue in favor of angrier politics are not opposed to the emotional content of The Tea Party, but only the substantive content. They are already adherents of The Politics of Anger, and are spreading the same emotional gospel with a set of alternative substantive hymns.
The robustness of The Tea Party, therefore, is not only to be measured by how many substantive adherents it has attracted, but also by how many people it has inspired to anchor their own politics in anger, because the virus of anger is as much a part of its message as the virus of extreme individualism, the latter carried by the former, or perhaps the former by the latter; it’s always hard to tell.
I could rewrite The Fractal Geometry of Social Change referring to emotional hues and shades rather than cognitive hues and shades, keeping all the rest intact, and it would serve the purpose well. But the final draft would have to combine the two, the emotional and the cognitive, for, to play on Richard Dawkins’ previous play on words, we are not just a story of genes and memes, but also of emes, all braided and blended in complex and mutually reverberating ways.
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The title quote, uttered by President Obama to describe the choice we had in the 2010 elections, captures the essence of the on-going struggle between humanity’s inner-angels and inner-demons, a struggle which produces the realization of both our dreams and our nightmares, depending on which prevails in any given moment of history.
The refrain “we want our country back” is the refrain of those who fear progress, who cling to a mythologically sanitized past rather than forge a path into the inevitable future. It attracts, along with those who are making some vaguer, narrower reference, those who want to take the country back from, among others, women, African Americans, Hispanics, non-Christians, and Gays, groups which have succeeded in diminishing the opportunity gap between themselves and the white, male, Christian minority that has historically maintained that gap to their own advantage and in accord with their own bigotries. And while we have progressed in diminishing the gap, the legacy of history remains with us today, and demands our forward-looking rather than backward-looking attention.
Those who have the courage to hope, to aspire to do better, don’t ever want their country “back.” We always want it “forward.” Our history has been the story of a people moving forward, conceived in a Declaration of Independence which continued and contributed to a transformation of the world already underway, accelerating our reach for future possibilities, and our removal of the shackles of past institutional deficiencies. It was a nation of Progressives, of people who knew that you don’t just accept the institutions handed down, but always seek to refine and improve them. It was a nation that drafted a document by which to govern itself, one which proved insufficient (The Articles of Confederation, drafted and adopted in 1777, though not actually ratified until 1781), and then got its representatives together to try again, ten years later, and get it right (producing the U.S. Constitution, which was a document drafted to strengthen, not weaken, the federal government).
The drafting and ratification of our brilliant Constitution marked a beginning, not an end, a point of departure through which to express and fully realize our collective genius, not an impediment to the use of our reason and will to address the challenges yet to come. It was drafted by people wise enough and humble enough not to imbue it with the quasi-religious hold it (or an insulting caricature of it) now has over some contracted imaginations. It was meant to be a source of guidance rather than a source of idolatry. It provided the nation with a robust legal framework through which to address future challenges, some of which were already visible at the time, and some of which were not, but which the framers knew would ceaselessly present themselves (and which many thought would promptly make the Constitution itself obsolete. The fact that that hasn’t come to pass is a tribute to our ability to make from the document they created in a given historical context one which adapts itself to changing historical circumstances).
Ahead of the country remained the abolition of slavery, the protection of individual civil rights from state as well as federal power, a far-too-late end to the slaughter and displacement of the indigenous population (too late because they had already been nearly exterminated, and removed to tiny, infertile plots of land), the institution of free universal public education, the extension of suffrage to unpropertied males and women, the passage of anti-trust laws to preserve a competitive market, the establishment and necessary growth of an administrative infrastructure which immediately preceded and facilitated the most robust acceleration of economic growth in the history of the world, the desegregation of our schools, the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the beginnings of absolutely crucial efforts to address the long-term detrimental health and economic consequences of environmental contamination.
There never was a moment in the course of this story when there weren’t challenges yet to be identified and addressed, many of which could only be successfully addressed by means of government, and, often, only by means of the federal government (e.g., the abolition of slavery, which ended up requiring the federal government to prosecute a civil war; the enforcement of Civil Rights protections; and environmental protections covering interstate pollutants). Our Founding Fathers understood that. Thomas Jefferson himself said that every generation needed to refine its institutions to adapt to changing circumstances and meet the challenges of their own day. Such people never wanted their country “back.” They always wanted it “forward.” And they dreamed of establishing a country that would renew rather than renounce that commitment with every new generation.
Though there are many today who don’t get this, most don’t get it by means of blurry vision and historical inconsistency, rather than a retroactive commitment to what they claim currently to be an immutable truth. It is a tiny minority today, utterly detached from reality, who want to completely abolish Social Security or Medicare, though there are many who vehemently opposed health care reform and improved financial sector regulation. The difference between those past acts of our federal government that we have come to take for granted and whose value we almost universally recognize, and those present acts of our federal government that so many (so absurdly) call a “socialist” threat to our “liberty,” isn’t in the nature of the policies themselves (they are actually very similar in nature), but rather in the difference of perspective granted by elapsed time and an improved quality of life.
The impassioned, angry, vehement opposition to today’s progressive reforms, almost down to the precise words and phrases (including cries of “socialism”), is virtually identical to that which confronted the passage of Social Security and Medicare in their day. It is the perennial resurgence of the same faction, the same force at work today as in those previous generations: The voice of fear, the clinging to past failures and deficiencies for lack of courage, the perception of progress as a threat rather than a promise, though those same cowering souls could hardly imagine living without the promises of progress fulfilled before their birth and in their youth. They take gladly from those progressives who came before and fought to establish the world they now take for granted, but fight passionately against those progressives of today striving to provide similar gifts of social improvement to future generations.
Economically, Hope counsels that we employ the best economic models to forge the best fiscal and economic policies possible to ensure the robustness, sustainability, and equity of our economic system, while Fear counsels that we base our economic policies on information-stripped platitudes, contracting rather than expanding, insulating rather than competing, cowering rather than aspiring. A hopeful people invests in its future; a fearful people stuffs its money in a mattress. A hopeful people works to create a higher quality of life, while a fearful people works toward enshrining past achievements and, by doing so, obstructing future ones. A hopeful people seeks to expand opportunity; a fearful people seeks to protect what’s theirs from incursions by others. A hopeful people reaches out, looks past the horizon, and works toward positive goals. A fearful people builds walls, huddles together, and obstructs the dreams and aspirations of others.
But in the past couple of years, it has not been just any other incarnation of the struggle between Hope and Fear. It is the most dangerous form of that struggle, the form it takes when we are on the brink of inflicting on ourselves enormous suffering. Because the struggle in recent years has been characterized by a terrifying discrepancy in passion: The angry, fearful mob is ascendant, while cooler heads are too cool, too uninspired, to face that mob down and disperse it.
It is under just such circumstances when, historically, Fear prevails over Hope. It is under these circumstances, circumstances that the hopeful among us are allowing to take hold, when countries get sucked into the nightmare that fear produces. This is what responsible, reasonable people of goodwill cannot, must not, allow to happen.
Be voices of reason and goodwill, voices that do not simply return anger with anger, nor return anger with despair, but rather return anger and irrationality with implacable reason and goodwill. Confront the angry, frightened and frightening mob and insist that we are better than that. Don’t let them put this state, this country, and this world back into Reverse again, as it was from 2001-2009, when America became a nation defined by fear, with a government defined by the belligerent ignorance which is Fear’s most loyal servant. Let’s keep this nation in Drive, and move hopefully into the future. In 2008, many of us were excited by that prospect, and in 2010, we should have remained warriors of reason and goodwill in the face of the Grendel of small-mindedness awoken by the small, fledgling steps forward we have taken as a people. We need to defend, preserve, and advance what we accomplished in 2008. We need to move forward, not backward.
There is a path forward, one that is not simply the continuing volleys of mutually belligerent blind ideology, nor one that is focused only on the upcoming election cycle: The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified. Join me in turning this simple, clear message into a reality. Let’s create the future we are wise enough to hope for, rather than the one we are foolish enough to forge in the pettiness of our fears.
Don’t sit this one out. Don’t let the brutal tyranny of Fear and Ignorance rule us.
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I happened upon a Facebook profile in which the individual wrote for political views: “Seeing clearly through the false right/left paradigm to the REAL issue: the State vs the individual” (she also put down for religion: “No religion…just Jesus,” which is another alternative reductionism). This is one of two prevalent ideological cornerstones that seem to be defining the new (or alternative) poles of the mainstream conservative-progressive spectrum (“false” or otherwise), the other being the identification of “corporations” as the boogeyman. These two poles are, in reality, almost identical in their underlying logic (or lack thereof), and thus almost identically defective.
It’s not that there are not problems and challenges posed by each respective boogeyman: The state, while saddled with accountability to the public, has a near-monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and is thus an inherently coercive social institution; while corporations, lacking access to coercive physical force, combine more subtle but comparably effective tools of manipulation, yet lacking any public accountability other than that imposed via the state. Rather, it’s that they are both indispensable aspects of our social institutional landscape (one being an essential component of a very robust political economy, and the other being a bulwark against mutual predation and instrument of mutual large-scale collective action), thus making mere vilification as meaningless as bemoaning the need to breathe.
The question is not whether they are problematic artifacts of our social institutional landscape (they are, as are all such artifacts in varying ways, including family, religion, mass media, etc., etc., etc.), but rather how best to manage them through our various vehicles of collective action (which include, but are not limited to, corporations and the state). This difference is critical, because while the reductionist approach sees them (the state or corporations, respectively) as beasts to be tamed, the social analytical approach sees them both as in some ways beneficial yet, as loci of power, always potential vehicles of social injustice. The basic ideological dispute over which is the problem and which is the remedy is erased in the awareness that they both are simultaneously neither and both.
The New Reductionism is evident in the many statements to be found currently scattered throughout the virtual landscape evincing a transcendence of The Old Reductionism, but simultaneously embracing its very similar replacement. The Old Reductionism is Left v. Right, Democrat v. Republican, an alliance of labor and the recently or currently ostracized (e.g., minorities, gays) v. (since the 1980s) an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and the traditional elites (i.e., white males) plus some portion of new entrants (i.e., the wealthy in general). The New Reductionism, which is a mere minor shift from this previous formulation, is New Left (rallying around a fanatical opposition to corporate power) v. New Right (rallying around a fanatical opposition to state power).
The Tea Party emerged announcing itself as an alternative to the failed left-right dichotomy, focusing instead on the pure and, to them, irrefutable rightness of opposing the state in service to a very narrow (and generally dysfunctional) definition of liberty. The Coffee Party emerged announcing itself as an alternative both to The Old Left and to The Tea Party, a more moderate and reasonable third way, but quickly became co-opted almost entirely by the same anti-corporate ideology prevalent in the mainstream progressive movement.
The problem with The New Reductionism is the same as the problem with The Old: It leaps to oversimplistic substantive certainties, not forged in any disciplined way, rather than investing in a focus on such disciplined procedures, the one and only remedy to reductionism in general. For instance, prior to the painstaking development of scientific methodology, our understanding of our natural surroundings was at best imaginatively rational but empirically unreliable and imprecise (such as in the case of the Greek Philosophers), and at worst a dogmatic literalization of ancient lore and mythology (such as in the case of religious dogmas of various kinds). It is only by subjecting ourselves to the discipline of well-formulated procedures and methodologies that we can increase The Signal-To-Noise Ratio.
I tried, for awhile, on a national Coffee Party internet site, to encourage that nascent political organization to embrace the real alternative to all reductionisms, a commitment to disciplined procedures for arriving at substantive conclusions, rather than a commitment to the already ideologically presumed correct substantive conclusions themselves. As more expressed an interest in this approach, the resistance to it grew correspondingly more intense, ideologues, as is generally the case in political discourse, drowning out any and all voices of subtler reason.
We need a movement that is committed not to our precipitous false certainties, but rather to our recognition that we can institute disciplines and processes which, to some extent, transcend our constantly aggregated individual folly, and give increased power to our never-sufficiently-tapped-and-realized collective genius. I’ve written repeatedly on one approach to doing so (see Catalogue of Selected Posts, particularly the essays in the second box, and most particularly The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified).
Whether reasonable people of universal goodwill rally around that particular framework, seeking to refine and build on it, or merely around the idea that we need to work together at constructing such a framework, it’s time for us to come together, and, rather than creating yet another New Reductionism, another commitment to precipitous, under-examined competing substantive certainties, create instead a New Holism, a new commitment to transcending our forever aggregating individual folly, and liberating our forever captive collective genius in service to our humanity.
The more profound conflict isn’t between those who reduce our political struggles to a tension between the individual and the state and those who reduce our political struggles to a tension between individuals and corporations, but rather between the commitment to liberating our consciousness in service to humanity, and the commitment to reducing our consciousness to a mere prisoner of its historical artifacts, in service to our bigotries. Unfortunately, the latter continues to dominate, by defining two versions of itself as the two poles of political ideological conflict. We need to define them together as a single pole, and confront them with their combined opposite: Reason in service to universal goodwill.
As Max Weber noted nearly a century ago, and as others have noted in various ways and various contexts, there is an inexorable logic to certain developmental paths that is not always in best service to our humanity, or to our ultimate goals. Weber called it the “rationalization” of society, an “iron cage” from which we can’t escape. We see it in evidence today in such things as economic globalization, over-reliance on fossil fuels (with all of the associated environmental and international consequences), and weakening of American communities in favor of both geographic mobility in service to careers and school choice in service to (or so the theory goes) increasing market forces disciplining public education. We also see it in politics, in the strategies used to win elections and campaigns, and the short-sighted, ritualistic attitudes fueling them.
I wrote about this once in reference to my own campaign in an overwhelmingly Republican district, in which I sought to maximize the value of my campaign win-or-lose rather than follow strategic prescriptions oblivious to any goal other than electoral victory, almost to the point of considering adherence to that goal a moral imperative even if more good can be done by looking beyond it (see Anatomy of a Candidacy: An Illustration of the Distinction Between Substantive and Functional Rationality). As the title of that essay illustrates, the salient distinction is between functional and substantive rationality, the former being the drive to make the processes by which goals are pursued ever more efficient and effective (which is what drives the inexorable “rationalization” of society discussed above), the latter being the relatively disregarded need to consider whether the goal being pursued is always and under all circumstances the most reasonable of all goals. Substantive rationality, to put it another way, refers to focusing more on what we are trying to accomplish than on how we are trying to accomplish it, and ensuring that we are not just constantly refining our techniques, but also constantly refining the goals that those techniques are mobilized in service to.
Politics is as caught up as any sphere of life in the goal-displacement of almost exclusive focus on improving the techniques by which the goal of winning elections and campaigns is pursued, and almost complete disregard for subjecting those intermediate goals to constant scrutiny in light of our long-term goals of putting this state, country, and world on an ever-accelerating path of ever-increasing reason and justice. True “progressives” need not only pursue progress on an issue-by-issue, candidate-by-candidate basis, always assuming that their own current understandings are perfectly accurate and incontrovertible, but also need to constantly reassess those current understandings, and seek to implement and advocate for improving the procedures by which we think and act in order to best serve our ultimate goal of improving the quality of life on Earth.
There is a related economic concept of “path dependence,” which is the tendency to stick with sub-optimal current ways of doing things due to the start-up costs of changing paradigms. A classic example is the “QWERTY” keyboard, which was designed to avoid the jamming of keys on the original mechanical typewriters. It is no other way the most effecient arrangement of keys on a keyboard. Yet the costs involved in everyone relearning how to type (or “keyboard,” as it is now called), along with other incidental costs of changing the keyboard arrangement, seem to outstrip any consideration of making a shift. We see this phenomenon throughout the social institutional landscape, in which existing social institutional procedures and structures have an inertia which outstrips their utility, all things considered. Path dependence has a psychological as well as economic dimension to it, with new ideas facing the habits of thought and belief into which potential adherents have invested themselves.
One of the necessary remedies to this imbalance is to constantly keep that ultimate goal in mind, and to not lose it to the short-term goals of winning elections and campaigns. That does not mean that the short-term goals are irrelevent, and the strategies in service to them can simply be disregarded. But it does mean that we keep in mind at all times that those strategies must always be mobilized only in service to our ultimate goal of improving the quality of life on Earth, and never allowed to blindly displace it.
This involves a bit of a cost-benefit analysis (always asking “does this strategy cost us more in terms of the ultimate goal than it benefits us in pursuit of it?”), and a recognition that the means have many incidental systemic consequences that may not adversely affect the intermediate goal of winning an election or campaign, but can adversely affect our social institutional landscape in ways which at times outweigh the marginal value of improved chances of winning that particular election or campaign. The cumulative effects of these incidental consequences of functionally rationally but substantively underscrutinized procedures and techniques are highly significant, and is one of the fundamental drags on robust long-term political progress.
I recently encountered an example of this on a left-leaning Facebook page, in which one participant posted a video of which she was very proud, that her organization had made, whose purpose was to stoke up popular rage against corporate power and influence. I found the video appalling, because it reinforced our irrationality rather than our rationality, reduced the issue to a two-dimensional caricature of the real issue, and was as likely to motivate a clammor for bad policies as for good ones (which is the cost of not only appealing to emotions in service to some rational end, which is generally necessary, but rather appealing to emotions in service to an emotionally defined end, which is frequently counterproductive).
This is what I call “the angry left,” a movement which superficially seeks progressive goals, but does so via methods which reproduce rather than moderate or transcend the underlying structural problems which favor irrationality over rationality in political decision-making, and which reinforces rather than counterbalances our tendencies toward mutual hostility rather than mutual cooperation. If the ultimate goal is best served by trying to increase the degree to which reason and universal goodwill guide us and inform our policies, then processes driven by irrationality and belligerence are unlikely to serve that ultimate goal very well in the long-run.
Ironically, “raging against the machine” in many ways reduces us to mere cogs within it. We have to aspire beyond the machine, to actualize and realize our humanity, to celebrate and believe in our potential to transcend our current state of being, as individuals and as a society. It is not that we can snap our fingers and create some lofty ideal, but rather that we are capable of doing better than we are doing, and we have to strive to do better than we are doing to realize that capacity.
This is not a call for political pacifism or non-confrontationalism. I confronted the woman who posted and extolled that video, just as I confront those on the right who argue belligerent and irrational ideological positions. But it is a call for keeping the ultimate ends in mind, and never forgetting that the means by which we pursue intermediate goals in service to those ultimate ends affect how well we actually move in their direction above and beyond their effects on our ability to achieve those intermediate goals.
The remedy to this perennial error of remaining locked inside the logic of political ritual and theater is to increase our attention to substantive rationality, even while maintaining our commitment to functional rationality in service to it. We do not want to let the latter displace the former, but cannot ignore the latter while pursuing the former.
This means moving toward grander visions, and more comprehensive strategies in service to them. Focusing exclusively on winning this election of this campaign locks us into the logic of short-term functional rationality and prevents us from being guided by long-term substantively wise goals. We need to be visionaries, and to promote visionaries, and to cultivate visionaries, rather than be political hacks, promote political hacks, and cultivate political hacks. We need to believe that we’re capable of doing substantially better than we are doing now, as a people, as humanity, and then figure out how to pursue the long-term goals which serve that far-sighted vision.
I am increasingly frustrated, because it is not that this is too complicated, or too difficult to do, but simply that we are too unaccustomed to consider the need for doing so. We have reduced politics and political activism to a set of technically refined rituals in service to short-term goals in struggles over immediate outcomes, and have almost completely lost sight of how our real political struggles cannot be measured in election cycles, nor are limited to what we commonly think of as the political sphere. Everything we do is political; every effort we make, individually and in various degrees of organizational collectivity, is political, and has political ramifications, because it all affects our social institutional landscape and coalesces into our ongoing evolution as a people.
We need to constantly remember that political efforts are not something separate from the entirety of our social institutional landscape, but rather something seeking to articulate with that entirety (see The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions) and the entirety of our processes of social change (see The Fractal Geometry of Social Change) in the most effective ways possible. This requires a part of our movement, a portion of our efforts, to be removed from our sophisticated, highlyt rationalized political rituals, to step back and remain critical of them, to attend to the larger picture and the longer term, and to discipline those technically sophisticated processes in service to our ultimate goals rather than forever co-opted by our immediate goals.
There is a way of doing this, if enough of us are willing enough to invest enough of our time, effort, and passion into it. There is a way of increasing the salience of reason and universal goodwill in our political efforts, to make them more attractive forces, to inspire people to move in their direction, not by ignoring the realities of our cognitive processes, but rather by addressing them in service to our ultimate goal of creating an ever kinder, gentler, more reasonable world. (See A Proposal, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, and How to make a kinder and more reasonable world, as well as the rest of the essays in the second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts, for an overview of my proposed methodology for pursuing this long-term vision).
Please join me in this effort. Help me to engage in the processes that serve our humanity, not just by fighting against our inhumanity on its terms and in its arena, but by trying constantly to refine the arena itself, improve our political substructure and popular processes, and make that social institutional framework one which is ever more defined by our humanity and our commitment to reason and universal goodwill.
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The following is a brief email exchange with a leader of a local Move On chapter to whom I offered to present PRG (“the politics of reason and goodwill”):
Q: since the GOP appears to be working on building the politics of RESENTMENT… that would be a good place to start. A think tank that would work on changing the discussion to politics of community goodwill. How would you go about doing that?
A: There are no panaceas. The Republican strategy of cultivating resentments and fears and hatreds -basically, of appealing to our basal ganglia (“the reptilian brain”)- is one that has a comparative advantage in the short run. When we invest our resources in confronting it (as we must), we have to recognize that we are fighting in their arena. But, as has been noted by John Maynard Keynes (“People will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”), respectively, Reason and Universal Goodwill (i.e., social justice) enjoy a comparative advantage in the long-run. One of the biggest mistakes that the Progressive Movement has made over the past few decades is to keep getting drawn into a brawl in a conservative arena, letting conservatives frame the narrative. We’ve done this because we, too, are more easily drawn to attending to the short-term urgencies than to the long-term struggle, and, as such, are constantly fighting to win “the reptilian brain” rather than to cultivate what human history has always struggled to cultivate: Human Consciousness. Traditional politics and political activism will continue much as they have, with the conservative ability to appeal to our baser natures always vexing us in the short run, and progressives trapped on a treadmill perpetually fighting against it, rather than engaged in the long-term effort to cultivate Reason and Goodwill. Other institutions, meanwhile, are more focused on those long-term evolutions: Academe, certain religious-philosophical orders and institutions (such as Esalon Institute in Big Sur, California), and so on. But the products of these other institutions are very esoteric, and do not diffuse into the population at large in any highly robust way. So the question is: How do we make a long-term investment in cultivating those human qualities in the population at large, that are not cultivated to any great extent by those esoteric institutions that are focused on them, and are mostly ignored by political activism? In one sense, it’s not a “political” question, because it isn’t at all about winning the immediate struggles over current policy issues and current electoral contests. In a deeper sense, of course, it is quintessentially “political,” since politics is really, at root, about the battle over what people believe (this is somewhat true even in brutal dictatorships, but more true the more democratic a society is). Even the much vaunted corporate power we talk about so much is the power to spend enormous amounts of money on media messages which affect what people believe. When we ask “how can we most effectively affect what people believe in the short run?” the answer, to too great an extent, is “appeal to their fears and hatreds and resentments.” When we ask “how can we most effectively affect what people believe in the long run?” the answer is increasingly “appeal to their dreams and aspirations and imaginations.” But how do you cultivate in people lost, to varying degrees, to their resentments and fears and hatreds, their forgotten or buried human consciousness, full of aspirations and yearning idealism? The answer is, basically, create viable channels of communication, effective messages, and reinforcing behaviors in which you can engage them. That’s what my proposal is designed to do.
The underlying idea is this: Most Americans presumably self-identify (accurately or inaccurately) as reasonable people of goodwill. Those who don’t are beyond reach, and can only be marginalized rather than “brought on board.” Many conservatives and moderates place a high value on “community” and “family,” and believe in social solidarity at that level, even if constrained within their own narrow definitions. Media Messages (both traditional and social) with markers that indicate that they are “progressive” or “liberal” or “Democratic” messages hit cognitive confirmation-bias filters and never reach the mind of any but those who are already on board. Reframing those messages, divorced from reference to particular policies or candidates, in non-partisan language, creates a pathway to reaching into at least some of the minds that would otherwise be inaccessible. There are three components to my idea for doing it: 1) a network of non-partisan community organizations committed to doing good works in the community, and creating a forum for civil discourse dedicated to examining issues from all points of view and with as much mutual respect as participants can muster (with guidelines agreed to up-front to reinforce this commitment); 2) something I call “meta-messaging,” which is a project to gather, design, publish, and disseminate narratives which reinforce people’s commitment to social responsibility and compassion (think of “A Christmas Carol,” which is both an example of, and a metaphor for, such “meta-messaging”); and 3) creating a user-friendly internet portal to all arguments, from across the ideological spectrum, that are actually arguments (even if bad ones), rather than just slogans and platitudes and emotional appeals. This third component lends legitimacy to the claim to be a movement committed to “reason” as well as to “goodwill,” and might, to some small degree, over time, increase the role of reasoned argumentation and analysis in the formation of popular political opinions. These three components are mutually reinforcing in a variety of ways. Doing good works in the community reinforces recognition of belonging to a society, of interdependence. The community forums to discuss political issues can encourage drawing on the information made available through the internet portal. The community organizations’ avowed purpose of strengthening our communities provides a conduit for the narratives (the “meta-messages”) reinforcing a sense of social responsibility. It is a movement designed to cultivate what is best in us, to improve how we arrive at our political positions both as individuals and as a society, and to produce a marginal, slight, constant impetus in favor of Reason and Goodwill. Since democratic politics, when all is said and done, is really a battle over what people believe, a long-term strategy which can exert a long-term pressure on what people believe, or the underlying attitude informing their beliefs, can have a bigger pay-off than all of the other more immediate types of political activism than we are typically engaged in. Since virtually all of our political organizational resources currently go toward the latter (the immediate political struggles), and virtually none to the former (the effort to affect underlying attitudes which inform policy positions), it seems to me to be obvious than we need to create a movement that redresses that by investing some small, perhaps even tiny, portion of our resources at affecting underlying attitudes. While it may seem naive to think that anything like this can work, I think it’s almost inconceivable that it wouldn’t, if any significant effort were made, though it wouldn’t yield any dramatic or easily measurable results in the short run (that’s not what it’s designed to do, or can do). The zeitgeist changes, and varies from society to society, mostly according to the cumulative winds of social change. Almost all efforts to affect those winds are focused on the short-term, and do so to the extent that those short-term efforts are successful. But we generally lack the farsightedness to invest in the long-term evolution itself, where we can have the most dramatic effects, and will encounter the least resistence (both from individual cognitive barriers, and organized political movements). When we figure this out, and begin to divert a very tiny stream of resources toward it, we will at last be working toward putting ourselves on a sustainable progressive path into the future.
Q: Specifically where would you start?
A: Do you mean, where would I start with the project I’ve laid out? With the first nodes in a network of non-partisan community organizations dedicated to this vision. That requires virtually no funding, just a sufficient degree of interest. As funding allows, the next step would probably involve developing the meta-messaging paradigm. I have a pretty straightforward human research experiment I’d like to operationalize for testing its efficacy, for those who prefer research-based practices rather than speculative ones. The most labor intensive component is probably the internet portal, which I envision as something similar to the human genome project: A huge cataloguing of information. I know that this is a different kind of idea. It’s not focused on a single issue (in fact, depends on not focusing on specific issues, or, in the context of organizing this movement, taking organizational stands on specific issues), will not yield returns within election cycles, is not inherently combative, does not identify the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” is committed to what I infer to be our underlying values as progressives (and what most certainly are my underlying values) rather than to the political ideology that has (imperfectly) grown out of those values, and aspires to initiate a gradual and sustained movement of the whole political tug-o-war in the direction of Reason and Goodwill rather than just to win a few rounds of that tug-o-war where it is currently located. There’s little doubt in my mind that we’re going to have to start to think more along these lines, and commit more resources to something similar to this, if we are serious in our commitment to get this country onto a better path. What we’re doing now plays right into the hands of those who want to define progressives as mere equal and opposite counterparts of conservatives, pick your flavor, it’s just a matter of taste. That’s because we treat our political struggles as a bunch of issues, on which their is an ideological difference of opinion, rather than as a tension between reason in service to humanity on the one hand, and irrational belligerence on the other, with progressives tending to be more aligned with the former and conservatives more aligned with the latter, but not always, and not in all ways. It is not only an idea about how to improve the efficacy of the progressive movement in the long run, but also about how to improve the quality of the progressive movement in the long run, by focusing more on advocacy of those procedures and methodologies which favor reason and goodwill, and less on the substantive positions that imperfectly track what conclusions those procedures would lead to. Right or wrong, agree or disagree, it’s a dialogue we desperately need to be having.
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Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
We tend to engage in politics treating the distribution of reason and goodwill in our society as a constant, and fighting over the variables of who is in office and what policies can be passed within the constraints of that constant. That’s necessary on a certain level (in the short-term), because the distribution of reason and goodwill does not tend to vary rapidly nor, thus far, to be highly amenable to intentional attempts to affect it. However, it’s clear that it does vary: It is quite different in Germany today than in Germany of the 1930s, and it is quite different in this country that fetishizes a notion of “liberty” that has come to mean “mutual indifference and social irresponsibility” than it is in most other developed countries, where the knowledge that “no man is an island entire of itself” has long been more fully embraced.
Throughout human history, we have developed techniques to affect parameters that had previously been intractable constants, such as how quickly we can move over the surface of the Earth, what environments we can exist in and for how long (e.g. extreme cold, submarine, outer space), how much energy from non-animal sources we can tap and utilize to perform “work” in our service, how fast we can perform calculations, how quickly we can communicate across large distances, and even how efficiently we can coordinate disparate efforts to mutual benefit (e.g., the evolution of monetary instruments, enforceable contracts, and improved organizational efficiency). I discussed this dimension of our on-going shared history in The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology.
Our entire social institutional landscape, in fact, is comprised of similar purposive efforts, pursued both as individuals and in groups or as societies. The era of brainy college kids starting Apple or Microsoft or Google or Facebook in their garage (or dorm room) followed the era of nations putting satellites into space and a man on the moon, and the era of uprisings utilizing their wares, organizing through social media, cascaded across the world, most recently in the Middle East (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain). Even The United States has seen its political effects, with Barack Obama’s election riding a netroots’ wave, and various other movements utilizing the new social media in various ways. These dynamics are discussed in The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change.
In this subtle, complex, dynamic social institutional and technological environment, it is more crucial than ever to correctly identify current political (and technological and social institutional) constants and current political (and technological and social institutional) variables, always recognizing that plying the variables deftly enough can convert, over time, constants into variables, bringing into range aspects of our shared existence that we did not previously imagine were within our power to affect.
The current trend is to take as a given the current distribution of cultural attitudes and political ideological convictions, considering the variables to be how social issues are interpreted through those lenses as they arise. The emphasis is therefore on “messaging,” on how well we design and launch pithy slogans and brief emotional appeals, something the left laments that the right has mastered, and that the left should emulate. On one level, this recognition of the importance of such messaging is perfectly legitimate; persuading people from within their current attitudes and ideologies to lean toward one policy or another is a tug-o-war utilizing the pulls of these kinds of messages.
But on another level, there is a deeper project which must not be abandoned, though it has hardly yet even been identified. One aspect of this project is what I call “meta-messaging,” targeting not the frames and narratives which determine particular positions on particular policies within the given of current attitudes and ideologies, but rather target the attitudes and ideologies themselves, plying cognitive dissonance in service to the underlying values that best serve humanity and that most people want to claim they adhere to and are motivated by. I discuss this in Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives.
In the end, there are really only two virtually absolute political constants: The underlying nature of the human mind, and the fundamental dynamics of physical reality. (Even these are not technically absoluteconstants, because biological evolution over milenia, or genetic engineering in a shorter time span, could conceivably alter the underlying nature of the human mind; and singularities involve breakdowns of what we think of as “the laws of physics” under certain extreme physical conditions, such as are found in a black hole or at the birth of the universe). Within the framework of these constants, we are faced with The Variable Malleability of Reality, a complex continuum of more and less malleable aspects of our environment and ourselves, which we are challenged to ply wisely in order to effect the most realizable and useful forms of contextual change.
One of the most salient and frustrating nodes on this continuum of malleability is human consciousness, not so much in the shallow and ideological sense of “getting others to recognize as a fundamental truth what I recognize as a fundamental truth” (so that libertarians long for the “enlightenment” of their fellow citizens in which the latter recognize the wisdom of libertarianism, while progressives long for the same in regard to progressivism, and so on), but rather on the more fundamental dimension of rigidity-to-flexibility.
On first encounter, so many assumptions, on so many levels, are so fixed and unassailable, from the false certainty that no political effort based on a complex and subtle message can ever be attempted (a certainty belied by our own national birth, and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, which was based on very subtle and complex arguments, sumarized by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay in The Federalist Papers), to the related false certainty that reason can not be made to play an increasingly substantial role in politics (a false certainty reinforced by a tandem misunderstanding of recent advances in cognitive science and of what it would functionally mean or require for reason to play a larger role in politics), to the false certainty that politics is only about who we get elected and what policies we get implemented today (involving the related false certainty that politics must always be focused on specific substantive issues to be meaningful and effective), to the false certainty that increasing goodwill in service to increasing compassion in our public policies can not be cultivated. All of these false certainties, which form an interrelated set, turn what could be a set of critically important political variables into a set of ossified political constants.
Many former constants become current and future variables as we liberate our own imaginations and collective genius in service to accomplishing that transformation. For milenia, the speed at which humans could travel was a constant, first determined by how fast we could walk, then by how fast a horse could run a vessel on water could be moved by muscle or wind or current, and increasingly by how fast our rapidly changing technologies can move us.
Today, the Dutch and Danish, for instance, are more committed to their collective welfare through the underlying values of reason and universal goodwill than we are to ours through our increasingly distorted and bastardized semantically drifting concept of “liberty” so dominant in some quarters (see, e.g., Liberty Idolatry, Liberty & Interdependence, and Liberty & Society). The difference in the distribution of attitudes among the populace may be very small, but the net effects are very large. It’s time for us to ask ourselves how to effect such a change, and then to set out to do it, whether it is a long project involving working our way up a hierarchy of malleability, tacking the most malleable preliminary aspects first, and thus paving the way to less malleable aspects later; or whether it is something that we can begin to tackle directly right away.
I believe it is a combination of the two. But, in either case, it is time to get off the treadmill of our self-limiting false certainties, not just those that obstruct progress as progressives currently define it in terms of substantive positions, but, more fundamentally, those that obstruct the progress that comes of believing in our potential on more fundamental and essential levels of our individual and collective being. It is time to think beyond what we assume to be current immutable realities, to work toward massaging them into greater malleability, both within our own individual consciousnesses, and within the collective consciousness that is human society.
This is a transformation we can accomplish one person at a time (starting with ourselves as individuals), and through a well-designed movement that increases both this cognitive agility and a commitment to recognizing our systemicness, our interdependence, and the challenges and opportunities that that poses to us as individuals and as a society. Doing so does not cure all ills or create some instantaneous dramatic change in our world, but rather establishes a continuous force in favor of that which best serves humanity, gradually, marginally, transforming humanity on a more fundamental level than we have yet managed, just as we have managed to move humanity gradually, marginally across similar thresholds in the past.
It is by means of committing to such procedures for change, such disciplines of mind and organization, that we transform humanity, that we cross those thresholds that move aspects of our reality from the constants column into the variables column. Our current efforts are more bogged down in self-limiting assumptions and rituals of thought and action than they need to be. Greater possibilities are available. All we need do is believe in those possibilities, and turn them into realities.
I’ve laid out one sketch of one plan for doing so, which would of course benefit from more minds and more participation. It can be found at A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill, and a series of related posts (including simplified and abbreviated versions of the proposal).
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We can do better. We, the people, can do better. One important step toward doing better is to ask ourselves “how,” and then commit ourselves to implementing it. There are several components to the answer to this question, but I would suggest that one crucial component is letting go of our false certainties, just as I once let go of a fallen tree I was clinging to in the rapids of The Current River in Missouri.
I was on a canoe trip with three college buddies, about 33 years ago. We were drifting down a lazy stretch of the river, holding our two canoes together, sharing a little something now used for medicinal purposes in Colorado. As we floated around a bend in the river, we hit the rapids and, at the same time, saw a tree fallen from the left bank, obstructing about two thirds of the width of the river. Jack and Andy, in the canoe on the right, were able to skirt the tree, but Ed and I, on the left, had to angle more sharply across the current, and were pushed sideways up against the fallen tree. We watched helplessly as our canoe filled with water and disappeared beneath us.
The next thing we knew, we were clinging to the tree on the other side, soaking wet, bumped and bruised by being sucked under the tree, desperately struggling against the torrential current trying to sweep us away. Neither of us could pull ourself up onto the tree trunk against that overwhelming force, and panic began to set in. Until Ed stood up. And the river was mid-thigh deep. So I stood up as well.
Mid-thigh deep rapids are not easy to stand in. The torrent still threatened to sweep us away. But we were able to stand our ground, to wade over to the small island downstream where Jack and Andy had recovered our canoe, to build a fire and warm up and dry off, and then to get back into our canoes and navigate our way downstream.
That tree trunk represents for me false certainty, the false certainty we were clinging to to avoid being swept away by a river we did not really understand. The river bed that we finally realized we can stand on, that is solid and unmoving, are the core values that never change, that are always there and on which you can always depend as the solid foundation on which to pause and reassess. People sometimes mistake the silt stirred up from those values, but carried by the current, for the river bed itself, and try to stand on it. But there is no footing on that silt. You have to plant your feet beneath it, on the core values themselves, the ones that lie even beneath the words we use to describe them, beneath ambiguity. I will refer to them as “reason” and “universal goodwill,” though these words, too, are mere approximations.
The river we are all on together is not The Current River of Missouri, but rather the forever forking river of human history. It does not flow to a single destination, but rather to an almost unlimited array of possible futures determined by the choices we make, the forks we take. Some forks rejoin others, and permit lost opportunities to be regained. Some foreclose certain other possibilities, perhaps forever. The river bed is not always comprised of reason and goodwill, but all too frequently of looser gravel, of less reliable values, sometimes even of muck so deep that there is nothing to stand on, only something to sink into. Our choices are consequential, sometimes momentous. We need to continue to improve our ability to make them wisely.
The river we are on is strewn with fallen trees, with obstacles that do not flow with the current but rather stand against it. These obstacles are our false certainties, our blind ideologies, fresh and alive until they fall across the stream and become something we crash against and cling to rather than admire and use for momentary guidance. Great ideas, like once noble trees lining the banks, becoming rotting trunks that we mistakenly believe mark a point that is as far as we need to go. But those who cling to them will only end up watching history pass them by, and will eventually rush to catch up or languish, because there is no life to be had clinging to a single spot, real or imagined, terrified of the river that we all must continue to navigate.
There is debris floating on the river, ideas we can hold onto and that still help us float downstream. But we must be careful to be ready to let them go when the time comes, to follow the branches of the river with the most solid of river beds, most strongly founded on reason and goodwill. Neither alone is quite enough: Goodwill without reason leads to good intentions poorly executed, which can be as harmful to humanity as malicious intentions rationally executed (i.e., “reason” without goodwill). The two must always be combined: We fare well neither atop the loose gravel of goodwill irrationally expressed, nor atop the thick muck of malice, regardless of how well or poorly executed it may be.
(This is a good place to pause, and make an important distinction between functional and substantive rationality. Functional rationality refers to pursuing a goal in a manner which most effectively achieves it, while substantive rationality refers to selecting goals which are most rational to achieve. There is a bit of a conceptual hierarchy to it, involving more proximate and more ultimate goals, and thus intermediate goals whose substantive rationality depends on how well they serve the ultimate goals beyond them. But it is important to understand that our knowledge of human irrationality, that humans do not make decisions and form opinions primarily through reason, and that recourse to rational arguments are not the best means of persuasion, refers only to functional rationality, to the fact that understanding and working with irrational congitive realities is necessary to functional rationality. It does not refer to substantive rationality, to the challenge facing each and every one of us to pursue those goals which best serve our collective welfare. We may have to appeal to cognitive frames and narratives to convince people to come on board, but we must exercise great discipline while doing so to ensure that we are inviting them aboard a sound vessel bound for a desirable destination.)
For some simple issues, goodwill is nearly enough on its own. Many civil rights issues fall into this category, such as legalizing civil unions and gay marriage. But many issues, particularly economic issues, involve complex dynamical systems, feedback loops, and numerous counterintuitive consequences to particular actions and policies. On such issues, it is critical that people let go of their ideological certainties, and agree instead to try to become part of a process which favors the best analyses, most in service to universal goodwill. There are real challenges to establishing such processes, but they are not insurmountable challenges. They are the kinds of challenges that we are most fundamentally called upon to confront affirmatively and effectively.
I have made some initial efforts in outlining how to pursue this vision, how to concretize a commitment to reason and goodwill, even in an irrational world laden with zealously defended competing interests (see, e.g., A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill, The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified, and How to make a kinder and more reasonable world). I have elaborated on several of the components (see, e.g., Meta-messaging with Frames and Narratives and Community Action Groups (CAGs) & Network (CAN)). I have identified and analyzed several of the challenges involved, several of the underlying concepts and dynamics, including The Signal-To-Noise Ratio, Ideology v. Methodology, Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems, The Variable Malleability of Reality, and a whole series of essays on “The evolutionary ecology of natural, human, and technological systems” (see second box at Catalogue of Selected Posts). I am also in the processes of having a page developed dedicated to this project at http://sharedpurpose.net/.
I’m asking people to join me in this effort to reach down to the most fundamental level of our shared existence, to base a movement not merely on the imperfect certainties floating on the surface of our historical stream, but on the rock-solid riverbed beneath. We can build a long-term and powerfully attractive movement based on Reason and Goodwill themselves, not expecting people to be anything other than what we are, but learning how to work with that in the ways which yield the most positive outcomes. It’s time to let our imaginations and our far-sightedness shape for us a methodology, a process, a movement whose purpose is not to triumph on this issue or that, or to win an electoral majority for this party or that, but rather to cultivate the minds and hearts and hands of all of us in ways which favor wiser and more compassionate thought and action, and wiser and more compassionate public policies. Until we consciously undertake that challenge, we have not even truly begun to realize our potential as a people.
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(originally written as a list of discussion points concerning why the national Coffee Party Movement should incorporate my model of “the politics of reason and goodwill” into their platform, on request after a long and robust dialogue on CPM’s “shared purpose website,” http://sharedpurpose.net/home/index.cfm?tq=579379&login=100803, mostly on the “plenary forum” page: http://sharedpurpose.net/groups/forum.cfm?tq=579379&login=100803, from March 16 to March 23, 2011)
1) The ultimate political battle field is the human mind. We are all, ultimately, fighting over what people believe and don’t believe. The salience of money in politics is due to its influence on what people believe (which is what the campaign contributions go toward influencing).
2) It makes sense for a political movement to zero in on that ultimate goal, rather than get lost in the various means of addressing it, or attempts to circumvent it. Attempts to circumvent it (e.g., pass legislation without popular support) only have lasting success to the extent that they ultimately affect what people believe. Awareness of the means of affecting popular opinion should not displace a focus on the ends those means serve.
3) Nothing is taken off the table by focusing on the struggle over what people believe. It merely is the ball we need to keep our eye on. All of the ways in which it can be affected are relevant and salient.
4) We can attempt to affect what people believe on an issue-by-issue basis, or we can attempt to affect what people believe by focusing on underlying values that underwrite support for all of the positions on issues we advocate for.
5) If we ask ourselves, “what qualities must a position have for it to be a position that I support?” hopefully, the answer we ultimately arrive at if we peel back the layers is “reason and goodwill.” We support policies that serve humanity rather than particular individuals at the expense of other individuals (“goodwill”). And we support them because they effectively serve humanity rather than ineffectively serve humanity (“reason”). We are really, when you get to the core of the matter, advocates for reason and goodwill. (Those of us who aren’t, or when we ourselves fail to live up to that ideal, are the ones in error. If and when our commitments are not defined by reason and goodwill, then it is our commitments that are in error.)
6) Since the postions on issues we hope to support are all defined by the degree to which the positions are recommended by reason and goodwill, then, to the extent that we can successfully advocate for reason and goodwill themselves, we have invested in the cultivation of popular support for the entire array of positions we advocate.
7) The political ideological landscape is dominated by competing substantive certainties, which, if charted on a graph defined by the axes “reason” and “goodwill,” would not lead us to conclude that we, as a people, are doing a particularly good job of aligning our certainties to those ideals.
8) Each adherent to each ideological certainty knows that his or her certainty is not to blame; it’s everyone else’s certainties that are not in accord with his or hers that are to blame. But reason itself informs us that this belief, held by virtually everyone of every ideological stripe, is the problem. If this chaos of conflicting substantive certainties is a major factor in reducing the salience of reason and goodwill in our political landscape, then we should work at diminishing the breadth and depth of our commitment to substantive certainties.
9) Reproducing this error by creating just another point source of such political ideological certainty does not contribute the kind of evolutionary/revolutionary change to the political ideological landscape that we, in the CPM, are aspiring to contribute.
10) To the extent that acting on conclusions about which policies are preferable is a necessary component of responsible citizenship, even when one is wise enough to recognize their conclusions as tentative and fallible, there are already plenty of vehicles for doing so. Adding another that repeats the work of larger and better funded movements advocating the same positions on the same issues is not a significant improvement on the current political ideological landscape.
11) Advocacy for focusing our efforts on something other than the substantive certainties subsets of us currently hold is not an argument to “do nothing,” but rather is an argument to “do something different.”
12) That “something different” includes establishing networks of community organizations whose purposes are to a) do good works in the community (e.g., tutor and mentor local kids, organize volunteer services and events that benefit the community in various ways, etc.), b) create a context for improved civil discourse among community members of all political ideological inclinations, and c) create bridges among these community organizations, to create a transpartisan political network steeped only in the commitment to reason and goodwill.
13) These community organizations and networks should not be political advocacy organizations, but rather simply organizations and networks committed to the principles of reason and goodwill. Again, to the extent that a commitment to these principles can be cultivated, popular support for the positions we favor can be marginally but significantly (perhaps, over time, dramatically) increased.
14) In conjunction with this network of community organizations, we should work at establishing a data base, or internet portal, which provides easy access to concise and accessible summaries of all policy arguments and counterarguments, including all arguments and counterarguments concerning what interests are being served or harmed by the proposed policy or position. This includes conservative arguments, “monetarist” economic arguments, and so on. It excludes “messaging,” all of the political noise produced by the marketing techniques that are designed to manipulate people and cultivate support for positions by circumventing reason and goodwill.
15) The community organizations can then sponsor community forums on issues of public concern, referring community members to the data base, or internet portal, through which they can access all arguments on the topic to be discussed.
16) The clearly expressed purpose of the community organizations would be that they are intended to be vehicles for civil discourse, for listening to one another, and for challenging our assumptions together to do a better job of governing ourselves wisely and compassionately. Those who do not agree with this purpose are free not to join or participate.
17) Despite the large number of people who reject this premise, in my experience, the vast majority of Americans consider themselves reasonable, and believe in the values of reason and goodwill. Those who explicitly reject these values will always exist, but we don’t have to continue to let them dominate a national discourse among a polity that overwhelmingly rejects the notion that it is better to strive to be irrational people of ill-will than reasonable people of goodwill.
18) In conjunction with this synthesis of community organizations and facilitation of rational and well-informed discourse on matters of public interest, we can also engage in meta-messaging in support of the values of reason and goodwll. An old and revered example of such meta-messaging is Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Few people watch “A Christmas Carol” believing that one is better off by being Scrooge before his transformation, and worse off for being Scrooge after his transformation. The transformation itself is effected by reaching into his own frames and narratives, and drawing on his formative past, incomplete present, and foreboding future to persuade him that he would be better served by acting with a greater commitment to universal goodwill.
19) The story itself is an example of meta-messaging, reinforcing the commitment to goodwill itself, rather than to any particular policy informed by goodwill. It is also a representation of meta-messaging, imagining spectral ministers who are able to reach into the minds of the most hardened among us and find the frames and narratives on which to work in order to effect such a transformation.
20) Modern cognitive science offers some insight into how to attempt to do the work of Marley’s Ghost and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future on a societal wide scale. Making it a part of a social-political movement to generate and broadly communicate, continuously, messages that have the effect of beloved Christmas stories on people’s feelings of goodwill, helps to build the bridge between organizing in mutual goodwill within our communities, and instituting public policies that are motivated by the same spirit on state and national levels.
21) As such, the three components of this proposal combine to comprise an integration of thought (the data base or portal), communication (the meta-messaging), and action (the community organizations), all mutually reinforcing various aspects of a commitment to reason and goodwill.
22) By creating a social-political movement committed specifically to this goal, to increasing the popular commitment to reason and goodwill as motivating values, we “soften the ground” for all of the other substantive political advocacy that we and others might engage in, promoting policies in service to reason and goodwill. It also focuses on the purpose of political advocacy, helping to keep the advocates themselves on track, and supporting substantive policies which actually are informed by reason and goodwill.
23) Such a movement does not have to catalyze dramatic changes in a large number of people to be dramatically successful. Very slight shifts in attitude among a very small minority of the population could have enormously significant effects on our political landscape.
24) Furthermore, the large, silent, moderate majority is looking for an attractive, sane, reasonable and goodwilled political alternative to which to flock. This proposal provides precisely that.
(please see The Politics of Reason & Goodwill, simplified and A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill for more on this topic)
