Category Archives: Citizens & Civil Society

Creating Space for Dialogue

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A few different conversations over the last few weeks have made me more deeply appreciate just how difficult it is to have real dialogue.

It might be easy to brush this off as a problem of the Internet caused by a few particularly nasty trolls – and I have no doubt that is a problem – but I think the problem is broader than that.

Most of us don’t have opportunities to participate in productive dialogue in person, much less online. It’s generally considered polite to avoid contentious items, instead sticking to those topics where everyone can agree.

In Pygmalion, for example, Henry Higgins’ explains his plan to pass Eliza Doolittle off as upper class, saying, “I’ve taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health.”

Sticking to those topics may avoid conflict, but they in no way help people have real conversations across differences.

Having no experience with productive dialogue tends to lead to one of two responses when conflict does arise: either engaging in the conflict by arguing your point of view or shying away from the conflict by changing the topic.

But those aren’t the only options.

Those who have participated in productive dialogue know that conversation shouldn’t be about avoiding conflict or about having your way. It should be about learning.

I myself am still learning how to create safe spaces for real dialogue, but, I think, the most important thing I’ve learned is this:

Dialogue should be about trying to understand someone else’s point of view. It should about trying to see where someone else is coming from and appreciating the logic that leads them to their beliefs. It’s about respecting another person’s point of view and about expanding your own thinking by trying to see through someone else’s eyes.

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Power Creates Power

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I recently finished John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley.

The book is an in depth case study of one coal mining community. Gaventa documents how people had their land taken out from under them over 100 years ago by a huge, multinational company. He details the development of power structures separating the working poor, the local elite, and the absentee Company.

He illustrates how the very institutions intended to protect and support “the people” were turned against them: how Company power over workers’ jobs, home, and welfare led to power over their private ballots. How the union became so corrupted its leaders turned to murder rather than suffer a challenger who was slightly more populist. How those in power took both significant and subtle actions to maintain power, while those without power learned better than to even think of questioning authority.

Gaventa, who for years led the Highlander Center, sums up his study eloquently in his conclusion:

Continual defeat gives rise not only to the conscious deferral of action but also to a sense of defeat, or a sense of powerlessness, that may affect the consciousness of potential challengers about grievances, strategies or possibilities for change. Participation denied over time may lead to acceptance of the role of non-participation, as well as to a failure to develop the political resources – skills, organization, consciousness – of political action. Power relationships may develop routines of non-challenge which require no particular action on the part of powerholders to be maintained…

From this perspective, the total impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts. Power serves to create power. Powerlessness serves to re-enforce powerlessness. Power relationships, once established, are self-sustaining. Quiescence [inaction] in the face of inequalities may be understood only in terms of the inertia of the situation. For this reason, power in a given community can never be understood simply by observation at a given point in time. Historical investigation must occur to discover whether routines of non-conflict have been shaped, and, if so, how they are maintained.

This last point is particularly critical – too often we forget that the “impact of a power relationship is more than the sum of its parts.” We forget that these relationships are self-sustaining, with power creating power and powerlessness creating powerlessness.

The result is that we all find ourselves caught in a power structure not of our own making. We may consciously or unconsciously act in ways which reinforce or resist that structure. We may or may not even recognize a power structure is there.

Paulo Freire recognized this, too, arguing in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.

That is to say, we are all caught in this power structure, but it is only the oppressed who can save us.

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Agency

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Social psychologist Geert Hofstede is perhaps most well known for his construction of cultural dimensions. Hofstede considers culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others.”

Among his six dimensions of culture, Hofstede evaluates a society’s “Individualism versus Collectivism (IDV).” Hofstede explains:

The fundamental issue addressed by this dimension is the degree of interdependence a society maintains among its members. It has to do with whether people´s self-image is defined in terms of “I” or “We”. In Individualist societies people are only supposed to look after themselves and their direct family. In Collectivist societies people belong to “in groups” that take care of them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

The United States, as conventional wisdom would indicate, is more individualistic than collectivist.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, because in some ways that finding seems at odds with the lack of agency experienced by so many Americans – particularly people of color, those living in poverty, and others who are marginalized in our society.

As Kelly Oliver argues in The Colonization of Psychic Space: “One’s sense of oneself as a subject with agency is profoundly affected by one’s social position.”

Being an individualistic society, then, puts oppressed people in a double-bind. While Hofstede finds that American society expects “that people look after themselves and their immediate families only and should not rely (too much) on authorities for support,” the message to oppressed people consistently undermines their own sense of agency and self-efficacy.

Frankly, I was always somewhat skeptical of Hofstede’s anaylsis, and not only because he also has a masculinity/femininity scale defined as “wanting to be the best (Masculine) or liking what you do (Feminine).”

But the idea of America as an individualistic place, where everyone’s expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps…that just sounds like the line you’d get out of the ol’ boys network.

Surely, that has long been an element of our culture, and has often been a strongly expressed element of our culture, but it doesn’t speak for all of us and it doesn’t speak for me.

Oliver argues that “by resisting oppression, one regains a sense of oneself as an agent,” and that the process of resistance can be healing insofar as it can help build agency.

So let’s all, collectively, reject the narrative of an individualistic America. Let us collectively lift each other up and work together to change the dominant narrative. This is our country and we can shape it.

Happy Fourth of July.

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Mobilizing a Movement: A Pro-Life Case Study

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I heard a statistic last week which blew my mind: half of all pro-life advocates start as neutral or even pro-choice. Brought into the movement through social networks, these people eventually convert their view points and become pro-life activists.

In a classic case of the backfire effect, I simply refused to believe the speaker. Pro-choice supporters don’t become pro-life advocates to fit in with a different social group. That’s crazy talk.

So I looked into it a little more.

In The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works, Ziad W. Munson documents the mobilization efforts of pro-life activists around the country. His initial goal was to understand the difference between mobilized activists and unmobilized supporters. But as he studied mobilization he found this question didn’t make sense: activists were mobilized from a broader pool than simply unmobilized supporters. As Munson explains:

One of the central arguments of this book is that individuals get involved in pro-life activism before they develop solid beliefs or firm ideas about abortion. Individuals mobilized into the pro-life movement in fact begin the mobilization process with a surprisingly diverse range of ideas about the issue. A quarter of those who are now activists were more sympathetic to the movement’s opponents when they first became involved, expressing beliefs that abortion should be a woman’s right or that abortion is (at least sometimes) morally acceptable. Only after they participated in pro-life movement activities did their views begin to change. Another quarter of all activists first became mobilized with an ambivalent attitude towards the issue. They saw valid arguments on both sides of the controversy and admit that they could have been persuaded either way about abortion.

…This argument does not claim that individuals have no ideas about abortion before they get involved in the movement, nor that everyone is equally likely to become mobilized regardless of his or her preexisting beliefs. Some individuals, because of their person biographies and beliefs, are more likely to know others who are involved in the movement and thus are more likely to come into personal contact with the movement – a key condition in the mobilization process. And although fully a quarter of the activists once held pro-choice views, none of them were strongly invested in this position or were active on the other side of the debate. The point is not that people are completely empty vessels, waiting to be filled with ideas from social movements, but only that our view of social movement activity as expressive behavior that presupposes commitment misses the mark.

That made me feel much better about the initial statistic – which had sounded like liberal activists suddenly become conservative ones. The number started to make a lot more sense: when people with generally ambivalent views become engaged in the work, they develop stronger views.

Munson adds that the half of pro-life activists who started with pro-life beliefs held only “thin beliefs” on the topic: their views were “poorly thought out, often contradictory, and seldom related to a larger moral vision.”

This way of understanding social movement mobilization raises important questions about socialization and group interactions. It emphasizes the importance of social and collaborative relationships, of engaging together in working to make change. And it highlights the importance of dissension, of creating spaces where all ideas are robustly considered.

And perhaps most fundamentally, it demonstrates the critical role of civic education: people can form their views on issues later, but we need to educate them to think coherently and critically, to learn from others but to form their own opinions, to be skeptical of popular opinions. And we need to teach them to explore all sides of an issue as they begin to get involved, to seek out ideas and opinions which differ from the ones the are forming.

Otherwise…they may just find themselves as activists on the wrong side of an issue!

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Voting is Not Enough

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In the last presidential election, only 61.8 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. Unsurprisingly, the 2014 midterms were even worse, with just 36.4 percent of eligible citizens voting – the worst turnout in any election cycle since World War II.

Those are the kind of numbers which make civic advocates despair.

The Editorial Board of the New York Times reported that the low turnout “was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy.” The Times went on to bemoan the causes of the record-low turnout: “apathy, anger and frustration at the relentlessly negative tone of the campaigns.”

But we should be wary of correlating increased voter turnout with increased civic health – voting is an important act in a healthy democracy, but a turn out rate is not enough to diagnose a civic ailment.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa develops a power-powerlessness model of voting.

In a coal mining valley of Appalachia, Gaventa is struck by how local elections are always battles between elites which never address or engage the poor, working people of the community:

Though intensely fought, the conflict which emerges into the local political arena is rarely substantive compared with what could emerge. The candidates do not raise questions potentially challenging to either Company or courthouse – such as why the locally derived wealth is not redistributed through taxation.

Gaventa documents how both public and private (eg, voting) challenges to existing power structures are forcefully shut down by those in power. Over time, these power structures become stronger and the fear of reprisal becomes ingrained. Those without power exhibit repeated behavior which would be perplexing to an outsider.

In one Company town, turnout rates would get as high as 100%. Voting day was a special day, where folks would dress up to participate. Then they’d go to to the ballot box and vote unanimously for the company man – a man who was actively engaged in the oppression of the people voting for him.

While “a host of studies in political science argue that the poor may not participate or may not participate effectively, because of low income, poor education, lack of information, and other factors of a socio-economic state scale,” Gaventa draws a different conclusion:

Factors such as low income, low education and low status may, in fact, be reflections of a common index of ‘vulnerability’ or social and economic dependency of a non-elite upon an elite. Through processes of coercive power, those most likely to challenge inequalities may be prevented from challenge…Over time, there may develop a routine of non-conflict within and about local politics – a routine which may, to the observer, appear as a fatalism found in ‘backwardness.’ As regards to voting…the phenomenon would be better understood as a product of power relations, such that actions of challenge – and even, over time, conceptions of such actions – by the powerless against the powerful become organized out the political milieu.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t talk about voting, but voting is far from enough. When we talk about voting, we should talk about power – and not just the desperate claim that one person’s vote has the power to make a difference. We should talk about how structures of power shape our very approach to voting.

In one talk at Frontiers of Democracy last week, Denise Merrill, Connecticut’s Secretary of the State, said that the number one reason people give for not voting is that no one asked them.

While perhaps we shouldn’t feel the need to send an engraved invitation to every member of our democracy inviting them to participate in it, the reality is…we do.

When I see low voting rates, I don’t see a people who are too apathetic or too stupid to vote, I see a people who have been taught – explicitly and implicitly – that they have no agency in this world. That their voices and their thoughts have no value.

And when we talk about voting, too often we reinforce this sense – after all, if one vote out of 3 million is all the power you have…that’s just a reminder of just how powerless you are

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Fun and Civic Work

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Last week, I had the great pleasure of attending the 2015 Frontiers of Democracy conference. One theme that came up several times was fun.

In a session I facilitated, for example, I asked participants to share how they personally engage in civic work and then reflect on what they learned from each other’s approaches.

At the end of the session, one group reported that they’d had a quite engaging discussion about whether or not fun was required for sustainable civic impact.

Fun makes the work more enjoyable – making it easier to mobilize and engage others, and sustaining those who choose to take on the work. Fun brings people together, transforming a group of individual actors into a true community, capable of engaging in the work together.

But fun could also be superfluous, an add on that only works in some contexts, or even damaging – undermining the seriousness of an issue with frivolity.

We talked about gamification, using the tools of gaming to make civic experiences more fun.

We talked about the natural fun that comes about when people in a room simply like each other and enjoy each other’s company. One person described how much fun she has making signs or doing so-called boring work with a group she works with. The work may be dull, but being with the people is just fun.

There was also good discussion about whether fun was the right word – perhaps it was more of a public spiritedness we were looking for?

Later, in a conversation about engaging communities with city planning, someone else talked about the importance of engaging the arts – using music and dance to create a festive atmosphere. An event should be fun, so that community members would actually want to attend.

And finally, as the conference drew to a close, another person wondered if the concern about fun was actually a byproduct of the professionalization of civic work. If you feel like the host, you want to make sure your guests are having fun.

It strikes me – and perhaps I’ve been reading too much Wittgenstein – that we’re not talking about the same type of “fun” in all these scenarios.

There is certain type of forced fun, which does feel like a host trying to entertain guests. There can be a paternalistic danger in this approach, too – a tendency to say, “we’d better make civic work fun because that’s the only way we can get the people to do what is best for them.”

As if we aren’t people too. As if we do this work because we are somehow wiser or more self-aware.

The irony here, of course, is that at any good party the host is the only one worried about people having fun – everyone else is busy simply having it.

Perhaps that’s another type of fun – or a public spiritedness, if you will. When people come together, when people talk together and spend time together and simply get to know each other – that is fun. There’s no forced socializing or carefully constructed ice breakers, just people coming together.

And I think it’s only appropriate that I end with one of the panelists from my session. After this great discussion about different types of civic work, after this engaging debate about what is fun and whether or not it is required, he turned to me and smiled, saying simply:

That was fun.

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Internal vs External Infrastructure

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After my post from earlier this week, I got into a fascinating conversation about whether social justice work should focus more externally – on shared projects and improving institutions – or internally – on checking your own biases and privilege.

I may have just left it there, but yesterday someone else raised the same point in a conversation about building civic infrastructure to confront racial bias.

There’s nothing in the police manual that says officers need to treat people of color more aggressively than white people, one person argued, so the real need is for police officers to work on removing their own internal biases.

Someone else countered with excellent examples of how the external system really does increase and perpetuate racial bias among officers – they are trained as paramilitary, trained to expect the worse case scenario, and, yes, even trained to treat low-income neighborhoods as more dangerous.

Of course, the external v. internal debate is not really a zero-sum game, though there is an important question as to where we should collectively focus our resources and attention.

Focusing too much on either has its dangers: too internally focused becomes little more than navel-gazing without any real action or systemic change; too externally focused provides policy bandaids which do little to mitigate the day to day biases and microaggressions which people of color experience constantly.

But if the best path lies somewhere in between, it still raises an interesting challenge as to how to navigate that journey.

I imagine creating more spaces for shared work, with more spaces for self-reflection and improvement. I imagine creating structures and institutions which encourage us to improve ourselves by working together for the express purpose of working better together.

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Searching for Inspiration on Dark Days

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I’ve been thinking a lot about actionable steps, recently. Amid the murders in Charleston. Following the deaths of Walter Scott, Kalief Browder, Michael Brown, and far, far too many others.

I’ve read articles on how to be an ally, read commentary and analysis on the perpetual racism pervading our society. I’ve added my voice to those calling for change. I’ve joined mailing lists calling for action, attended protests and demonstrations. I’ve given financially where I can.

And none of it feels like enough. Nothing feels like it’s changing.

I woke this morning with the words of Oscar Wilde ringing in my head:

We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.

I rather wanted to spend the day hiding in my closet sobbing silently at all the ills in the world, but that didn’t seem like it would do anybody much of any good.

Besides, who am I to take the bench when people of color are dying? Not everyone has the privileged to just look away.

As I am wont to do at such times of despair, I re-read Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.

They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

I generally suspect that I’m the only one who finds the words of Camus a comfort. Who, after all, likes to imagine that “the workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd” than the fate of Sisyphus. The man who defied the gods and was pushed to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain.

Sisyphus, “powerless and rebellious.” (impuissant et révolté)

What an interesting juxtaposition of words!

Sisyphus knew he was powerless and yet he rebelled. The Gods couldn’t punish him, for still, he rebelled.

In Power and Powerlessness, John Gaventa examined the role of social power in maintaining the oppression of the poor in the Appalachian Valley.

Gaventa identified what he calls the three dimensions of power.

In the first dimension, A has power over B insofar as A is has more resources or can use more force to coerce B. The first dimension is a fair fight, where one side is stronger than the other.

In the second dimension, A constructs barriers to diminish B’s participation. Voter ID laws, monolingual meetings. In the second dimension, A rigs the game.

The third dimension is the most insidious. Not only does A control and shape the agenda, but A’s power is so absolute that A influences the way B sees the conflict. In the third dimension, B is not even sure she’s oppressed. It’s a woman who just naturally does all the house work.

I sometimes think that the pervasiveness of racism in America stems from Whites’ inability to reach this total level of dominance.

We brought people over as chattel and expected them to obey. We beat them and tortured them and did unspeakable things to break them, but they continued to resist.

We fancied ourselves as gods, and yet among those who were most powerless we found ourselves impotent. Unable to exert total power. Still they rebelled.

There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

Sisyphus is stronger than his rock.

But I imagine that it’s of little comfort to one who looks back on generations of oppression, who looks around to see their brothers and sisters dying. It’s of little comfort that some dead, French philosopher thinks you’ve won.

Yet there is something in this, I think –

For the battle goes on.

The battle goes on, and slowly bending the arc of the moral universe can feel very much like futile labor, it can feel like an effort in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.

But still the work goes on.

For we know that all is not, has not been, exhausted, and we know that fate is a human matter, which must be settled among men.

And there is so much work for us to do.

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Race, Gender, and Social Constructs

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This story about Rachel Dolezal – the NAACP leader who represented herself as black even though she is white – has been blowing my mind since I first heard about it.

Seriously, I have so many questions.

But with Dolezal announcing her resignation today, it seems unlikely that I’m going to get any of the answers I’m looking for.

But the whole affair has raised some interesting questions.

Isn’t race a social construct? How is being ‘transracial’ different from being transgender? Why should we celebrate Caitlyn Jenner but shun Rachel Dolezal?

Those are good questions, and they are important questions.

In my circles, these questions have mostly come from well-intentioned liberals – myself included – trying to articulate what our instinct tells us so plainly: ‘transracial’ – if that even is a thing – is not the same as transgender.

There may be some parallels, sure. For example, I can imagine Dolezal claiming that she is a “black woman on the inside,” or that she was born into the wrong body. I’ll never know Dolezal’s true motivations, but I have personally heard at least one white person make such a claim.

My instinct is to scoff and to find such a statement deeply offensive. I mean, what kind of white privilege do you need to feel comfortable declaring such a thing?

But perhaps that’s how transphobic people react to the struggle of the transgender. I couldn’t say, but it seems tenuous to simply trust my instinct with such a response.

There have been some great take downs of so-called “transracialness”: in pretending to be black, Dolezal indulged “in blackness as a commodity.”

Transgendered people face a real struggle – as Jenner told Vanity Fair, “I’m not doing this to be interesting. I’m doing this to live,” while “Dolezal is not trying to survive. She’s merely indulging in the fantasy of being ‘other.'”

Or as another article puts it: “Rachel didn’t want to be Black because she *felt* Black, because Black is not a feeling.  Black is an existence that was created for us by racists as a tool to justify ill-treatment and codify oppression into law.”

These are helpful arguments, but they still don’t quite satisfy me.

After all, it was just last week that I was hearing that long-time feminist leaders felt uncomfortable with Jenner’s decision to come out as femme. After all, what does it mean to “feel” like a woman? Certainly it is more than being a pin-up girl.

While it is easy to dismiss such concerns as transphobic, I think it’s more productive to engage assuming good intentions.

Elinor Burkett writes that “Women like me are not lost in false paradoxes; we were smashing binary views of male and female well before most Americans had ever heard the word ‘transgender’ or used the word ‘binary’ as an adjective.”

Whether appropriate or not, I can see why she might be disappointed to see a person who has benefited much of her life from male privilege choosing to showcase her womanhood in such a gender-stereotypical way.

So all of this has gotten us nowhere.

Power and privilege are make it more inappropriate for a white woman to claim blackness, but its not solely an issue of power and privilege.

After all, there is a power dynamic at play when it comes to trans women – but I believe it is our moral responsibility to welcome trans women as sisters and invite them to (re)define womanhood with us – whatever that means to them.

The situation with Dolezal is different. I wouldn’t presume to tell the black community what they should or should not do, but neither would I fault them for refusing to embrace Dolezal and for finding her blackface routine offensive. It is offensive.

The reality is that race is a social construct, and that gender is a social construct, but that does not mean that we should treat them the same.

That fact that this is all so confusing is good – it emphasizes the constructed nature of these institutions and forces us to re-evaluate what it means to have a gender or a race, and it makes us confront the important question of who has the right to define those terms.

As a white person, am I comfortable leaving it to the black community to define blackness, but as a woman I would be dissatisfied with any definition of “female” which excluded trans women – even if that’s what was wanted by the majority of people who were identified as women at birth.

So power is a critical piece of this, but there is some more.

Michel Foucault brilliantly documented how mental illness is a social construct. And how, like many other constructs, it can be dangerous – giving those in power permission to detain and torture those who are found to be outside the norm.

But just because it is a social construct, doesn’t imply that anyone can declare themselves mad.

In fact, mental health can be a positive social construct – allowing people who need help to get the help that they need. And hopefully, someday, removing the stigma around mental health.

All of that is to say that “social construct” is not one thing. They are not universally bad and we should not deconstruct them all to be universally permeable.

Social constructs are how we make sense of the world around us. They are how people in power maintain their power, but they are also how those who are oppressed reclaim their power.

It’s messy and it’s complicated and its complex – because by its very definition a social construct is “constructed” by society. It’s a thin facade that quickly looses coherence when questioned.

These are our rules, our collective rules, and we have the right to change them – or not – as we see fit.

The social construct of race has a very different history from the construct of gender for one simple reason – they are not the same and they shouldn’t be treated as such.

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The Revolution Comes in Pieces

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I’ve written before about my skepticism of “scaling up” as the solution to all our social challenges.

That’s not to say there aren’t some solutions which can provide more value by being brought “to scale,” but when it comes to issues of democracy and engagement, I prefer to think of “scaling sideways.” Lots of little, individual programs running parallel within parallel communities.

So I was quite taken with this little snipped from Joshua Miller and Daniel Levine’s recent paper on Reprobation as Shared Inquiry: Teaching the Liberal Arts in Prison:

“We do not know how to spark a revolution that will overthrow mass incarceration all at once and transfigure our society, but we believe that it can be made to fade away through a proliferation of non-carceral practices.”

The paper builds on Miller and Levine’s work with the Jessup Correctional Institution Prison Scholars Program – which you can support here.

Essentially, Miller and Levine argue that in order to build a truly just and effective prison system, we have to radically shift our society, doing away with our current systems of dominance and subordinance.

It’s not just a moral problem that “for the past 30 years, between 40 and 60 percent of prison inmates were below the federal poverty line,” or that “at midyear 1998, approximately 16 percent of inmates in US state prisons and 7 percent of inmates in federal prisons had a mental illness.” And it is not just a moral problem that the US “incarcerates Blacks and Latinos at disproportionate rates.”

Those are serious, moral problems within our society, but…those deep inequities also render our criminal justice system ineffective.

That is, “it is morally unreasonable to expect an offender to be moved by condemnations coming from agents of a system that routinely subjects him to injustice it is unwilling to recognize as such.”

Miller and Levine offer the Liberal Arts as a tool to break this dominant/subordinate cycle, a resource for engaging incarcerated people – not as subordinates in the ultimate system of domination – but as agents in reflecting on the “the nature of value, and the proper way to relate to other human beings in society.”

“Prison classrooms,” they write, “become political spaces at the heart of an institution where politics is disallowed.”

They acknowledge that their own work is small compared to the vastness of the challenge, but argue that “the utopian vision of a society in which the whole encounter between currently-dominant and currently-subordinated social groups is transformed is likely to be made up of a multitude of small, piecemeal encounters like this.”

Scaling sideways.

And that’s the thing: democracy requires individual engagement. It requires engagement from the individuals within a society, but more deeply, it requires that those individuals are engaged…individually. As autonomous beings, as agents of their own destiny and desires.

The challenges of democracy are challenges of collective action, to be sure – how to work together across differences and interests, how to divide and distribute limited resources.

But at its heart, democratic values are about the individual. The belief that every person’s voice has value, that all people are created equal and that all people demand your respect.

It’s not a simple case of rugged individualism, but rather a subtle interplay of individual and collectivist thought: all voices have value, and therefore we each have a responsibility to ensure that all voices are heard.

But a focus on individual agents requires programs that are small and flexible, developed for a local context and shaped by local knowledge.

You can’t scale up something like that without losing what gives it value.

But we can tackle the problem piece by piece, through networks of small efforts and regional connections.

We can scale these solutions sideways and little by little we can radically transform our society, making our deep inequities and injustices fade away through a proliferation of better practice.

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