By Wade Lee Hudson
As political violence permeated the United States and spread across the globe, in 1969 the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote On Violence. This small, passionate book analyzed the nature and sources of violence, offered some prophetic speculations, and challenged many widespread assumptions — including some that I had embraced but now reject. This re-evaluation will lead me to rewrite some of the content on this site.
Read MorePolitical organizations don’t encourage members to engage in self-reform to undo divisive social conditioning, including the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit. And personal- and spiritual-reform organizations don’t nurture political action to help change oppressive public policies. If these two communities made simple shifts in their approach, they could come together and build an independent social movement powerful enough to persuade Washington to respect the will of the people, transform social structures throughout society, and support compassionate personal growth.
The first step is to agree on a shared worldview rooted in compassion.
Read MoreBy Michael Johnson
The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country.
The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society.
The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means.
Read MoreSmall mutual support teams that embrace shared values and principles can nurture self-development. In Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, Tina Rosenberg reports that “from the affluent suburbs of Chicago to the impoverished shanties of rural India” mutual support teams have helped smokers stop smoking, teens fight AIDS, worshippers deepen their faith, activists overthrow dictators, addicts overcome addictions, and students learn calculus.[1]
Such teams could also help compassion-minded individuals set aside counter-productive tendencies and become more effective — and inspire politically inactive people to become more active. Those teams could serve as social greenhouses where we could develop our ability to relate as equals, create models, and strengthen our ability to help transform the world.
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Systmic/Essay
Reflections on Elizabeth Anderson
By Wade Lee Hudson
NOTE: Following is the text used in my January 12, 2020 “Democratic Equality and Democratic Dialog” PowerPoint presentation at the Humanists and Non-Theists committee of the San Francisco Unitarian church.
The article that had the biggest impact on me last year was “The Philosopher Redefining Equality” in The New Yorker. The subtitle reads: “Elizabeth Anderson thinks we’ve misunderstood the basis of a free and fair society.” That profile of Anderson begins: [play audio]
She ended up studying political and moral philosophy at Harvard under John Rawls and teaching at the University of Michigan, where she stayed, despite being heavily recruited by other universities.
In 1999 the esteemed journal Ethics published her path-breaking, widely reprinted article "What is the Point of Equality?" She’s also written three books, including Value in Ethics and Economics, which argues that some goods like love and respect should not be sold on the market or otherwise treated as commodities, and The Imperative of Integration, which examines how racial integration can lead to a more robust democracy. Her many podcast interviews include a great one with Vox.com founder Ezra Klein.
Last year Anderson received the no-strings-attached $625,000 MacArthur “Genius” award. Included in their announcement was this [play video].
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Racial Healing: Rhonda Magee
By Wade Lee Hudson
Racism continues to inflict enormous suffering. Rhonda V. Magee, an African-American law professor, reports, “I often notice a lingering feeling that I might be in danger—that I could, at any time, be discounted, rejected, disrespected, injured, or even killed for no reason other than my perceived ‘blackness.’” This reality provokes heated resistance from oppressed people, while relatively advantaged people experience guilt and denial (a majority of white people claim to be color-blind). Tensions are high. Discussing these issues is often difficult.
This dynamic applies to all people of color, but I focus on black-white relations, which are most problematic in the United States. When white people fail to fully understand black anger, they often respond with calm, paternalistic advice. When black people find this paternalism offensive, they sometimes end their relationship with the offender. When white people sense what’s happening, they often “shut up and listen” as a way to increase their understanding. Many white people feel they should censor themselves when they talk with black people about race-related issues. As a result of these and other factors, many white people end up unsure about whether, when, and how to speak about racism and race relations. Friendships fade. Unity dissolves. The potential for joint action is undermined.
Within this context, Magee’s work is helpful. Magee teaches meditation to her law students and conducts racial-healing workshops based on her ColorInsight methodology. Her wide-ranging, challenging, and insightful magnum opus, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, includes many compelling personal narratives and useful self-help exercises, such as “Mindful Speaking and Listening Practice.” She argues that mindfulness practice can help us acknowledge bias and choose how we respond to conflict and division.
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Face-to-face Democracy
By Wade Lee Hudson
A fully democratic society relies on empowerment — self-empowerment and collective empowerment — and respect — self-respect, respect for others, respect for everyone’s essential equal value, respect for individual rights and liberty, and respect for everyone’s right to make ends meet and fully participate in society without being subjected to discrimination or oppression based on race, class, gender, or some other arbitrary characteristic.
Practicing how to be democratic — how to relate to others as equals with compassion — nurtures a more democratic society — a society with self-confident, assertive, respectful, empowered members. A democratic society, in turn, nurtures grassroots movements that promote ever more respect and empowerment — an upward, virtuous circle.
At the same time, however, self-centeredness and hyper-competition promote a lack of self-confidence and passivity among the general population, and, among activists, fragmentation and asymmetrical polarization — a downward, vicious circle that sucks ever more people into its vortex and may eventually hit bottom, unless we, the people, mobilize massive, grassroots movements to transform our nation into a compassionate community.
Book clubs, church groups, and activist committees often cultivate democratic equality. These groups are democracy laboratories that cultivate respect and empowerment.
Face-to-face, horizontal, self-regulating, self-perpetuating, peer-to-peer open-ended “democracy circles” explicitly committed to advancing “face-to-face democracy” could build on these examples. Organizations could incorporate such circles into their current work. Existing groups could supplement their activities with such open-ended dialog. And new circles could emerge independently, perhaps with two individuals inviting one or two others to form a circle, which would increase its numbers organically.
Many methods could be used to structure this face-to-face democracy. Systemopedia associates are engaged in brainstorming and evaluating some such options. Following is one possibility.
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