Monthly Archives: November 2014

“Vote” for A Better Democracy – Join NCDD TODAY!

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XS Purple NCDD logoHappy Election Day, everyone!

As we come to the close of yet another contentious and at-times ugly election season, we are reminded again of the importance of the work that the NCDD community does. As reflected in our “Democracy for the Next Generation” theme for our recent national conference, we believe NCDD and the amazing innovators we represent are a part of the solution to the broken politics of our time. In helping people really communicate, bridging gaps and partisan differences, building better civic infrastructure, and engaging our communities, what we are all doing is working to build a better democracy.

SusanAndMartinSignsThat is why, as we recently announced, our NCDD annual membership rates are increasing tomorrow, Nov. 5th. We are committed to growing our work and its impact on the shape of our democracy’s future, and to support that growth, we will be relying on our amazing community for support.

So we are asking you on this Election Day to “vote” for NCDD and the better democracy we are building by joining or renewing as a member today. Your membership and continued support of NCDD is an investment in the growth of this work and of a new kind of politics, and we hope that you will decide to grow your investment today!

But if you act now and join or renew before midnight tonight, you can lock in the lower membership rates and access to all of our great NCDD benefits for two years instead of one! We want to let everyone take advantage of the old NCDD membership rates, but this is seriously your last chance, so you have to visit www.ncdd.org/join today.

We have not asked our members to pay higher membership rates since 2006, and we don’t take this change lightly. But we see this increase as our way of doubling down on building a more robust civic infrastructure and investing in the success of our wonderful D&D community.

Don’t put it off any longer! Join NCDD or renew/upgrade your membership today!

John Dewey’s Heritage

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I’ve argued in these blogs that the great majority of Americans who believe the nation is on the wrong track are, unfortunately, correct in their suspicions.

The most obvious signs of being on the wrong track are the countless instances of our institutions pursuing their own self-interest rather than the public good.


As to the major cause of the nation’s derailment, I’ve pinpointed an inadvertent consequence of the nation’s shift from the 1950s ethic of sacrificing one’s own self-fulfillment for others to an ethic of celebrating one’s own self-expressiveness. Self-expressiveness and other forms of individualism are fine in their place, but they must leave room for values that also advance the public good.

My most consequential proposal is that the American public needs to develop and nourish a countervailing ethic to the prevailing cult of the self. This would be an ethic that preserves individualism while also enhancing the integrity and official mission of our institutions.

Bringing about an ethical transformation in our society poses a monumental challenge. If we were obliged to create such a transformation from scratch it might be nearly impossible to achieve. The task becomes far more doable once we realize that we don’t have to invent the sort of ethic that is needed: it existed and thrived in the early and late decades of the last century in the doctrine of pragmatic philosophy.

Some parts of pragmatic philosophy are now obsolete, but others are powerfully germane to our current situation. The most compelling aspects of pragmatic philosophy for today’s America are those advanced by the philosopher John Dewey.

Five aspects of Dewey’s philosophy hold the potential to form building blocks for a new ethic of civic virtue. These are:

  1. Support for the Strong Versus Weak Form of Democracy
  2. Many Ways to Arrive at Truth
  3. A High Value Placed on Community
  4. Respect for “Intelligent Conduct”
  5. The Relevance of Philosophy to Everyday Life

Here is a brief elaboration of the first of these building blocks.

Support for the Strong Versus Weak Form of Democracy.

Many democratic theorists equate democracy mainly with voting. This reductionist view of democracy was particularly dominant in the years of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Our society is not nearly as conscious of the need to provide the public with the tools it requires for thoughtful democratic deliberation.

I think of the democracy-means-voting definition as the weak form of democracy. This is the kind of democracy that Bush was eager to develop in Iraq and other nations in the Middle East.

Inevitably, it failed to install the kinds of democracies Bush had in mind. Instead, it resulted in installing sectarian leaders like the Shi’ite leader Nouri el-Maliki in Iraq, electing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in Egypt and voting Hamas into power in the Gaza Strip. These elections advanced conflict more than democracy; they destabilized their nations because of their extreme partisanship.

John Dewey, on the other hand, was an advocate of the strong form of democracy. In addition to voting, the strong form of democracy requires the rule of law and democratic institutions. But even these are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient conditions for successful democracy. Essential to a thriving democracy, Dewey endlessly argued, is a high level of citizen engagement and participation.

Dewey recognized that our institutions are fully aware of the importance of voting and are prepared to take whatever action is needed to preserve its integrity. But he also recognized that our society is not nearly as conscious of the need to provide the public with the tools it requires for thoughtful democratic deliberation.

In the 1930s and 40s, Dewey engaged in a lively debate with the influential journalist, Walter Lippmann, about the public’s ability to contribute to shaping national policy. Lippmann, a thorough elitist, insisted on the public’s inability to understand the issues of the day, let alone contribute to resolving them. In response, Dewey championed active and constant public engagement as the heart and soul of successful democratic governance.

In my next blog I’ll identify the other four values and beliefs espoused by John Dewey that compositely constitute the kind of ethic the public needs to preserve but also that will help constrain the out-of-control aspects of our cult of the self.

Let’s Stop with the Screen-Shaming

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I read an article this morning about a photographer’s project capturing images of people who are together…but separated by their smart phones.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself in a conversation about how online engagement compares to “traditional” civic engagement. That is to say, is engagement online an acceptable replacement for face to face interaction?

This is a hot topic in many spheres – raising important questions about how we act and interact. Does digital technology open new horizons of global communication or ironically block us each off into our own self-imposed cell?

The answer is entirely unclear.

Probably its a little bit of both.

As framed, of course, the question is misleading. As if all in-person communication is some ideal and digital communication is audacious to think it could ever be equal.

This is a false dichotomy. Different forms of communication work well for different kinds of people and different kinds of communication work well for different kinds of topics.

Face to face interactions are high-context – that is, there are many contextual clues to draw from in interpreting your interaction. Language and words used are a piece of it, but tone, body language, and facial expressions mean everything.

Digital interactions started out exclusively low-context, but they don’t have to be.

But even if you assume low-context discussion spaces, that doesn’t intrinsically mean that deeper dialogue is not possible. It’s just different.

It may be better for some people, it may be worse for some people. It’ll just be different.

To be honest, I personally have a general bias in favor of the in-person experience. I don’t have a smart phone. When I was little, I stopped listen to my walkman on road trips because it distracted me from the experience.

I’m just kind of old fashioned like that.

But what’s best for me is not best for everyone. Just because I’m not big on communicating digitally doesn’t mean that my traditional modes are intrinsically preferable.

If you have a smart phone and you feel like it’s detracting from the life you want to live then by all means, take screen breaks or develop other tools to manage your connection. But your personal distaste for smart phone browsing doesn’t translate into a universal wrong.

So let’s stop screen-shaming. Let’s stop assuming that digital communication needs to meet some theoretic ideal measured against in-person interactions.

Let’s keep asking how to build spaces where people of all backgrounds and communication styles can interact genuinely and respectfully, where they discuss important issues and collectively work to address pressing problems.

We have many real and virtual tools to help build these spaces. And we should take advantage of all of them.

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postcolonial reaction

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Two recent articles by Pankaj Mishra put very different valences on the same fundamental story.

In “Modi’s Idea of India” (The New York Times, Oct 24), Mishra decries the “intellectual insecurity, confusion and aggressiveness” of Hindu nationalists and links it to the “grandiose intellectual conceits” of Russian nationalism (resurgent under Putin) and “Japan’s descent into unhinged anti-Western imperialism in the early 20th century.” All are reactions to the perceived humiliations of European and North American colonialism that spawn ressentiment and “fantasies of racial-religious revenge and redemption.”

In “The Western Model is Broken” (The Guardian, Oct 14), Mishra decries the “brutality” that underpinned European industrialization and nation-building in the 19th century, which “turned out, in the next century, to be a mere prelude to the biggest bloodbath in history: two world wars, and ferocious ethnic cleansing that claimed tens of millions of victims.” The West’s “liberal democracies,” he argues, have been “experienced as ruthlessly imperialist by their colonial subjects.” Efforts to turn formerly imperialized nations into copies of the West have been cruel, arrogant, and foolish and have bred inevitable resentment and reaction.

It is interesting that Mishra chooses to denounce Modi, Putin, et al. in the American establishment newspaper, while he attacks “Davos Man,” Francis Fukuyama, and The Economist in the more leftish Guardian. But the overall story is consistent. The main dynamic of our age is not a struggle “between liberal democracy and totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism.” That was “a largely intra-western dispute.” The “most significant event of the 20th century was decolonisation, and the emergence of new nation-states across Asia and Africa.” It is in that context that we must understand regimes as varied as Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey.

I would add that post-colonialism and anti-imperialism generally took the form of anti-capitalist, egalitarian, and statist movements from 1900-1980, but today’s critics of Western hegemony in countries like China, India, Russia, and Turkey are friendly to their own billionaires and business enterprises, tolerant of inequality, enthusiastic about consumer technology, and generally favorable to foreign direct investment. (See, e.g., “the Communist Party battles against equality“). They also defend traditional sexual mores against Western decadence. Perhaps, as Mishra says, the struggles between liberalism and authoritarianism were intramural Western affairs, yet it matters that the most powerful post-colonial societies now have conservative rather than socialist leaders–albeit with some variation.

One legacy of colonialism is that certain Good Ideas–e.g., accountability of governments to their people, individual rights, and cosmopolitanism–are now coded as “Western,” even though the main actual impact of the Western nations was depredation and humiliation. Under those circumstances, leaders who wish to ignore accountability, restrict personal rights, and close their countries to the world can present themselves as bulwarks against imperialism. But that is bad for their own people.

The Good Ideas always had precarious and limited followings in the countries that we call Western, which ought to be equally well known for trans-Atlantic slavery, fascism, and Stalinism. And the Good Ideas also have roots in other civilizations. It appears that modernity (marked by phenomena like individualism and deep social critique) was not invented for the first time in Europe ca. 1800 but has sprung up several times, e.g., in South India in the 15th century. That does not mean that every culture has been equally modernist at every point (far from it), but we should drop a simplistic equation of modernity with the West. This is hard to do, since modernity came with gunboats and Gatling guns to many parts of the world. Modernity is a mix of good and bad. Yet such institutional forms as competitive elections and freedom of speech are as much the birthright of Asians and Africans as of Europeans; and it would be the ultimate tragedy if they lost those rights in the name of anti-imperialism.

See also: “on modernity and the distinction between East and West“; “avoiding the labels of East and West” “on modernity and the distinction between East and West” and “the West and the rest.”

The post postcolonial reaction appeared first on Peter Levine.

National Harwood Public Innovators Lab, Dec. 16-18

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We highly encourage you to read the announcement below from our friends at The Harwood Institute, an NCDD organizational member. They are offering one of their great Public Innovators Lab trainings December 16th-18th, which NCDD members can get a 15% discount on. Be sure to check out the announcement below or learn more and register by clicking here.

HarwoodLogoNational Harwood Public Innovators Lab

December 16-18, 2014 in Alexandria, VA

Deepen Your Relationship with the Community

Communities across America are accelerating their change efforts with The Harwood Institute tools and methods shared in the Lab. It’s helping them engage people in new ways, generate new visibility and deepen their ability to lead change with community partners.

The Harwood Institute has a 25-year track record of success in helping individuals and communities accelerate their change efforts and achieve their strategic goals.

The Public Innovators Lab is open to all community leaders engaged in building a community’s capacity for change. It provides both the foundation of the Harwood approach coupled with a strong focus on concrete application. After the three-day training you will be able to:

  • Engage your community beyond the usual suspects to understand people’s shared aspirations.
  • Shift your relationship with the community through engagement – so that you aren’t simply seen as a customer service provider but are building will for people and groups to act together as partners.
  • Create or modify your strategies so they are aligned with your community’s capacity for change efforts – what we call a community’s “rhythms” or Stage of Community Life.
  • Assess the conditions that enable change in communities – what we call public capital – and learn how to build strategies to achieve your mission and create these conditions at the same time.

Cost: This 3-day course is $1,095.

Participants learn how they can use The Harwood Institute’s frameworks to start changing the way they and their organizations or community teams are doing their work, so that their efforts become more effectively rooted in the context of their communities. Having an orientation such that you use the community, not the conference room, as your reference point for the day-to-day and strategic decisions you make- we call this turning outward.

Learn more about the Public Innovators Lab and view the agenda at www.theharwoodinstitute.org/lab.

You can always learn more about the other great discounts available to NCDD members by visiting www.ncdd.org/discounts.

The NCDD 2014 Conference has been storified!

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Check out our awesome Storify page on the 2014 NCDD conference. Lots of great photos, quotes from evaluations, links and other gems in there that will give you a sense of the event, even if you weren’t able to make it.

Not only is this a great glance at the conference, this is a useful demonstration of how to bring content from a variety of different social media (and other) sources into one place to “tell the story” of an engaging event!