Victoria’s Citizens’ Jury on Obesity

Author: 
Between July and October 2015, 78 Australians from the state of Victoria deliberated online and face-to-face in an experimental Citizens' Jury on obesity policy. Citizens participated in facilitated online deliberations over six weeks before meeting in person for two days to finalise their recommendations. The initiative was instigated by VicHealth,...

Democracy in Schools — The Need for a Larger Strategy

In my weekly conversation with Deborah Meier on Education Week, Meier asked last time, "At what point does one go from flawed democracy to one not at all?"

Meier is raising questions of larger strategy. If we understand democracy to include not only governance structures but also empowering cultures, the question is, How does such culture develop?

As I learned in the freedom movement as a young man (the "civil rights" movement) it's a mistake to make overly sharp contrasts between "democratic" and "undemocratic" communities, just as it's mistaken to contrast "good" and "bad" people. It's more or less, not either-or.

All communities have elements that "make for democratic action" and elements that "oppose democratic action," as the community organizer Saul Alinsky put it. In community organizing, the first job of an organizer when entering a community is not to identify what she or he thinks is wrong with it, but rather to get to know that community and its values, histories, power dynamics, conflicts, and leaders. Democratic capacities are developed from the inside out.

Beginning where a community is, not where one would like it to be, and developing democratic capacities, civic agency, is the strategy of "organizing." It contrasts with both mobilizing and also a human rights stance. Mobilizing, rallying people against injustices, often overlooks developing democratic capacities. Human rights, articulating ideals of equality and dignity and seeking protection usually through the courts, often is advanced as an alternative to popular agency. Both mobilizing and human rights play important roles in democracy. But the question needs insistently to be asked: How do they build civic agency?

In this vein, Martin Luther King assigned me to organize in poor white communities, though he knew full well that they included KKK members, a story told on the Civil Rights Movement Veterans website. We had some success, beginning in a white mill village in East Durham, N.C., as I've mentioned. I don't want to exaggerate. We also had many challenges and made mistakes, but we also saw changes and new interracial relationships.

My other point: it's important to think about building democracy schools in historical context.

I didn't know this at the time of King's assignment but later discovered that he and others were thinking about the movement's "next stage," which they believed needed to involve alliances between blacks and white working people.

Bayard Rustin, a political mentor of Dr. King, had argued for such alliance-building since the 1940s. By the mid-1960s he was making this argument with urgency. The battle against legal segregation was largely won. He saw the movement's next stage as much more difficult, tackling many-sided, complex problems, "wicked problems," such as chronic unemployment, failing schools, lousy housing, drugs, and antagonistic relations with police. All are still with us. The strategy Rustin proposed is still relevant.

In his 1965 essay "From Protest to Politics" Bayard Rustin proposed three elements. The first was electoral coalitions to win over middle America. Robert Kennedy's presidential bid in 1968 was in this vein, successfully appealing to white blue collar voters who had earlier backed the segregationist George Wallace. Cross-racial community organizing of the kind I was doing was the second. Here and there across the country, it was proving highly successful, but it never went to full scale. Institutional transformation, including transformation of schools, was the third. Deborah Meier helped show the way in this through the schools she founded in New York and Boston, which is why I see her work as so exemplary, but most neglected this approach entirely.

Rustin contrasted this, what could be called a sober democratization strategy, with the purist tone he saw among many young activists and white professionals, whom he called "moralists." Moralists looked at white working people with condescension and prejudice, seeing them as the enemy. This continues to be a problem. Today in education, a focus on consciousness-raising about injustices continues to substitute for the citizen politics which Rustin advanced.

Rustin, King, and others anticipated what would occur if alliance-building did not happen on a large scale: elites would drive a wedge between blacks and white working people. Divide-and-conquer was central to Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in 1968 and 1972. It reached new levels with Donald Trump. This is our context and our challenge.

"Trumpism" is much bigger than Donald Trump. Bill Doherty, a family therapist and pioneer in the movement called citizen professionalism, observes that Trumpism includes scapegoating groups; degrading rivals; and promoting the cult of the strong man. The cult of the strong man appeals to resentments, scorns reasoned discussion, champions narrow nationalism over respect for other societies, incites violence, and calls for people to trust in the great leader. Whether it is resurgent fascism or something new is beside the point. Trumpism is profoundly dangerous. It threatens existing elements of democracy, like protection of human rights. It threatens future democratic possibilities. It is emerging not only in the US but also around the world.

Bayard Rustin, like many around Martin Luther King, was shaped by the 1930s, in a time with parallels to our time, when the world faced rising dangers of totalitarianism. In response people created an international movement against fascism which not only defended democracy but also deepened democracy, showing connections between many issues. Rustin brought this perspective to the sixties.

The international movement was a seedbed for unions, cooperatives, culture change, anti-racist struggles, and organizing in and around education. It birthed successful anti-colonial movements. Overall it built civic agency on an immense scale, even with all its contradictions (like the manipulations of the self-proclaimed communist "vanguard").

Today, again, we need to develop something parallel.

Building democracy in schools is inextricably connected to building democracy everywhere.

Equilibrium, Madness, and Utopia

Is it possible to have the good without the bad? Does beauty create ugliness and does love beget hate?

These questions are often explored in dystopian fiction, but Szathmári Sándor’s Voyage to Kazohinia is notable in its resounding answer. Yes, these opposites endlessly create each other, Szathmári argues, and thus is it better to have neither.

It is better to leave passion and madness behind in favor of the calm stability of reason.

Perhaps this seems like not such a bold claim. Reason is certainly favorable, and ugliness and hate should be gladly left behind.

Yet, it is not quite as simple as that. The premise of the question finds that to abandon hate is to give up love, that defeating all the ills of society can only be accomplished by relinquishing the passion and spirit we hold most dear.

The perfect society is the monotonous society. Ideal and unchanging.

In making this point, Szathmári introduces us to the Hins. Technologically advanced, the Hins suffer no hunger or conflict. They live in equilibrium and harmony, through the mathematical clarity of kazo. They have no need for police or money; no need for government institutions regulating behavior. They each behave perfectly and have, quite sincerely, a perfect society.

But there is, perhaps, something unsatisfying in their existence.

We meet the Hins through Gulliver, our proud English protagonist. And while we might join the author in snickering at his cultural absurdities, there is one element of Gulliver’s impression of the Hins which resonates.

It starts with small observations. The Hins, we learn, “have no expression for taking delight in something.” A crowded beach is bathed in silence; among the Hins, “everybody was a stranger; not a single greeting was to be heard. Each simply did not exist for the other.”

Our hero begins struggling against this dispassionate view. He is impressed by the technological advancement of the Hins, but distraught by their seeming lack of feeling and soul. He desperately seeks to explain his culture to his Hin acquaintance, Zatamon, who interprets his words through the core Hin concepts of kazo, mathematical perfection, and its opposite, kazi.

After Gulliver carefully explains a number of concepts – friend, hatred, wife, happiness, theater, art, and political parties – Zatamon expresses his disappointment:

In your country the kazo is considered to apply to certain groups only, which, however, already means that it is not kazo as you do not observe it where others are concerned. Because you imagine some persons closer to yourselves and favor them, this can only be done at the same time you offer less or nothing to others. That is, both the things you give your friends and those you do not give others bear all the marks of the kazi concept. These friends do not receive out of need, or on the basis of a general state of equilibrium – at least this is what I gather from your words – but purely because you have invented the kazi idea of ‘friendship.’

…And as for the word ‘love,’ it seems to me you wish to indicate with this that people outside an exclusive circle are to be treated beneath the merit of their existence. But why do you call the same thing hatred on other occasions?

The Hins have no love or beauty or friendship because the mere conceptualization of such things existing indicates the existence of their opposites. They throw society out of balance, bring disharmony where harmony would exist otherwise. This might seem a tragic loss to our own kazi sensibilities, but giving up the extremes in favor of equilibrium is clearly the logical thing to do.

It should be noted, of course, that the philosophy which Szathmári advances here is by no means unique to the fictional Hins. Consider this eloquent passage from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

“Practice not-doing,” Lao Tzu advises, “and everything will fall into place.”

That is kazo.

This way of thinking is in bold contrast to the conclusions of others who have pondered this challenge of duality.

In 1959 – eighteen years after Kazohinia, but before it was translated to English – American author Robert Heinlein comes to a different conclusion in his novel Starship Troopers.

Heinlein similarly sees a tension between an idyllic but mundane society and a passionate society of hardship and growth.

Writing in the early years of the Vietnam War, Heinlein imagines a paradise planet called Sanctuary. Life is easy on Sanctuary, a tempting home for weary soldiers. But, while Szathmári genuinely advocates for the lifestyle of the Hins, Heinlein is clear that he sees such an appealing ideal as a trap.

The descendants of Sanctuary colonists will not evolve. “So what happens?” Heinlein asks. “Do they stay frozen at their present level while the rest of the human race moves on past them, until they are living fossils, as out of place as a pithecanthropus in a space ship?”

For Heinlein, it is not problematic that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are inextricably intertwined – both are a necessary part of human existence. Indeed, it is the challenge of living which truly makes us alive. Life on Sanctuary is no life at all.

This is the view of our Gulliver among the Hins. While Szathmári seems to advocate for the ideal society of the Hins, he knows such a view is unlikely to be adopted easily. Becoming fully acquainted with the dull, effortless, efficiency of Hin life, our hero finds himself filled with despair.

A feeling of terrible powerlessness came over me. I was buried alive among the dead in this island in the suffocating atmosphere of which the life-thirsty lung panted in vain. And there was no escape. I was to wither away here, without air and life…

Thus finding the Hins to be efficient but lifeless automatons, and painfully deprived of the passions he deems living, our hero makes his escape. He goes to live amongst the Behins, those  beings which the Hins find to be incurably kazi. 

Life amongst the Behins is so mad as to be hardly worth relaying. Gulliver is relieved to leave the colorless world of the Hins, only to find his new home “the most terrible bedlam in the world.”

Of course, the Behins are hardly more mad than we are. They greet each other with meaningless phrases and useless physical contact. They follow a convoluted set of social norms which are constantly changing and entirely unpredictable. They divide themselves into constantly warring factions that fight over nothing more than whether the circle or square is a more perfect geometric shape. They create work that doesn’t need to be done in order to enforce an arbitrary system in which the rich earn more than the poor. They are embarrassed to speak of basic physical processes (such as eating). They use metaphors which don’t in any way relate to the actual objects they are discussing. Women pay to have their faces mutilated in the name of beauty.

Yes, the Behins are quite mad.

This then, is the price of accepting the extremes. Of taking in love, hate, joy, and despair. It does, indeed, disrupt the unchanging world of the Hins, but while Heinlein sees these extremes as the essence of life, Szathmári argues the opposite – such madness is not life at all.

And while you are pondering which type of life makes you more alive, there is one more element of Szathmári’s deeply amusing satire worth mentioning.

In Behinistic society, people who speak the truth, who exercise reason, are frequently burned at the stake. Therefore, as Gulliver explains:

If one wanted to say something particularly sensible and dangerous he put a cap and bells on his head and put his fingers into his mouth. And the Behins listened to him with great amusement…

These makrus, as they were known, are the only ones who are free to speak the truth; at the cost that they are laughed at and never understood.

While “some openly described how stupid and wretched the Behin life was,” listeners always believed the words of a makru to apply only to their enemies. “…It never occurred to them that all the vile words the makrus wrote also applied to their own lives.”

In fact, while living amongst the Behins Gulliver begins writing the travel diary which we are ostensibly reading. His friend discovers the text and, finding his own name frequently amid the list of mad occurrences, asks out loud who that name is supposed to represent.

Yet this same friend guffaws moments later finding distasteful but accurate descriptions of a local dignitary. The friend encourages Gulliver to publish his comical work, assuring him that he need not fear the dignitary’s wrath: “How do you imagine that he would recognize himself?”

Considering the opportunity to publish his work among the Behins, our Gulliver reflects:

The proposal was enticing but after some thinking I realized that for the very same reason there was no point in publishing it. How could it be imagined that reading it would make them even one iota cleverer or would render their lives one jot more endurable with such a lack of comprehension? Should I publish the account of my travels? It deserved a lot better than to be object of idiots’ imbecilic guffaws.

facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditlinkedintumblrmail