Greg Watson’s Bold Campaign for a World Grid

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As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

A free flow of electricity across national boundaries would allow nations to acquire electricity at lower costs, most notably by moving from expensive, atmosphere-destroying carbon energy sources to renewables. The benefits from the vast savings on a global scale could be mutualized through a standard (lower) world price. The Grid would also greatly reduce the need for storage capacity and make the entire electricity-delivery system more flexible and resilient.

To explore the history of the World Grid idea and Buckminster Fuller's wide-ranging influence on systemic solutions, Greg Watson spoke with me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #31). 

Watson's push for a World Grid is a logical outgrowth of his long, pioneering work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and community development. He was formerly the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under three governors; the first Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which develops offshore wind energy; and the head of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots community land trust that converted 1,300 abandoned lots in Roxbury, Massachusetts, into a healthy, affordable neighborhood.

Watson often talks about the "Energy Trilemma" that we face – how to "simultaneously optimize sustainability, energy equity and energy security." He argues that a World Grid could address all three optimally: "It could tap the global solar, wind and water renewable energy resources and take full advantage of their geographic, seasonal, and night-day complementarity. In the process it could turn what has been considered a liability—i.e., the intermittency of renewable energy generation—into an asset, making the goal of a secure 100% renewable energy system accessible to all a realizable one."

Dymaxion projection map of the world

Watson's work as Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1980s was a springboard into his current line of advocacy.  For twenty years, until 1991, the Institute was a hotbed of bold eco-experimentation and systems thinking – a "new age mecca," as the New York Times Magazine called it. It was a testing ground for organic agriculture, sailwing windmills, solar algae ponds stocked with fish, and of course, geodesic domes.

It was at the Institute that Watson encountered a related project that Buckminster Fuller had proposed, the "World Game." This game-like workshop process is designed to help nations think more systematically and practically about global problems, and to develop cooperative solutions.

To help participants understand the inescapable global interdependencies facing humanity, Fuller developed what he called the "Dymaxion Project" – a map that visualizes the entire planet without the geographic distortions of conventional Mercator-projection maps. As Watson has said, "The one-island perspective is obscured by conventional map projections. The resource and energy flows that fuel the Earth’s resiliency are severely limited by the world’s 195 nation-state boundaries that Bucky likened to blood clots."

The Dymaxion map, by contrast, promotes an understanding of global cohesion: "It does not follow the North-up convention. Neither does it follow any South-up, East-up nor West-up—there is no right way up….Perhaps most important regarding the current climate crisis, is the Dymaxion revelation of a 'one island, one ocean planet.' The unfettered flows and recycling of resources make possible synergetic, emergent, regenerative energy interpatternings that are a primary source of Earth’s resilience.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Greg Watson here.

Greg Watson’s Bold Campaign for a World Grid

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As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

A free flow of electricity across national boundaries would allow nations to acquire electricity at lower costs, most notably by moving from expensive, atmosphere-destroying carbon energy sources to renewables. The benefits from the vast savings on a global scale could be mutualized through a standard (lower) world price. The Grid would also greatly reduce the need for storage capacity and make the entire electricity-delivery system more flexible and resilient.

To explore the history of the World Grid idea and Buckminster Fuller's wide-ranging influence on systemic solutions, Greg Watson spoke with me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #31). 

Watson's push for a World Grid is a logical outgrowth of his long, pioneering work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and community development. He was formerly the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under three governors; the first Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which develops offshore wind energy; and the head of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots community land trust that converted 1,300 abandoned lots in Roxbury, Massachusetts, into a healthy, affordable neighborhood.

Watson often talks about the "Energy Trilemma" that we face – how to "simultaneously optimize sustainability, energy equity and energy security." He argues that a World Grid could address all three optimally: "It could tap the global solar, wind and water renewable energy resources and take full advantage of their geographic, seasonal, and night-day complementarity. In the process it could turn what has been considered a liability—i.e., the intermittency of renewable energy generation—into an asset, making the goal of a secure 100% renewable energy system accessible to all a realizable one."

Dymaxion projection map of the world

Watson's work as Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1980s was a springboard into his current line of advocacy.  For twenty years, until 1991, the Institute was a hotbed of bold eco-experimentation and systems thinking – a "new age mecca," as the New York Times Magazine called it. It was a testing ground for organic agriculture, sailwing windmills, solar algae ponds stocked with fish, and of course, geodesic domes.

It was at the Institute that Watson encountered a related project that Buckminster Fuller had proposed, the "World Game." This game-like workshop process is designed to help nations think more systematically and practically about global problems, and to develop cooperative solutions.

To help participants understand the inescapable global interdependencies facing humanity, Fuller developed what he called the "Dymaxion Project" – a map that visualizes the entire planet without the geographic distortions of conventional Mercator-projection maps. As Watson has said, "The one-island perspective is obscured by conventional map projections. The resource and energy flows that fuel the Earth’s resiliency are severely limited by the world’s 195 nation-state boundaries that Bucky likened to blood clots."

The Dymaxion map, by contrast, promotes an understanding of global cohesion: "It does not follow the North-up convention. Neither does it follow any South-up, East-up nor West-up—there is no right way up….Perhaps most important regarding the current climate crisis, is the Dymaxion revelation of a 'one island, one ocean planet.' The unfettered flows and recycling of resources make possible synergetic, emergent, regenerative energy interpatternings that are a primary source of Earth’s resilience.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Greg Watson here.

the relevance of American civil religion to K-12 education

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Lately, debates about how to teach American government and history in K-12 schools have turned very hot.

These subjects have high stakes. A government can require children to study the government itself in ways that it chooses. Witness the appalling new curriculum required by the Russian government during the current war. Even when a government’s intentions are benign, education is still a means of shaping the society; therefore, we should expect citizens to advocate various goals and outcomes. Baron von Clausewitz famously called war “a mere continuation of politics by other means,” and one could say the same about civic education.

I believe that “American civil religion” generates additional energy that makes this issue particularly electric today. I take that phrase from Robert N. Bellah’s essay, “Civil Religion in America” (1967). Bellah writes: “What we have, then, from the earliest years of the republic is a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity.” He calls this collection a “religion,” for “there seems no other word for it.”

Much of American history and civics in K-12 schools has been defined by this civil religion, for better or worse. Efforts to change the curriculum look like efforts to change the civil religion, and maybe they are.

Although Bellah does not cite Durkheim, he evidently accepts Durkheim’s seminal 1915 definition of religion: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them” (Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 41; my thanks to Brian Hatcher for the reference).

As I observed a decade ago in Montpellier, VA, plexiglass now covers the “ink stain on the floor that may be some of the ink with which Mr. Madison took his notes on ancient constitutions, preparing for the Philadelphia convention.” That ink stain is something “set apart and forbidden” as sacred.

It is a good illustration of the original American Civil Religion, which, according to Bellah, “focused above all on the event of the Revolution, which was seen as the final act of the Exodus from the old lands across the waters. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were the sacred scriptures and Washington the divinely appointed Moses who led his people out of the hands of tyranny.” Bellah acknowledges a close analogy to Christianity but denies that the founders’ civil religion was meant to promote Christianity or to substitute for it. The founders applied a Christian model reflexively; it was all they knew.

Bellah locates a major change around 1860. “With the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth enters the new civil religion. It is symbolized in the life and death of Lincoln.” The sin of slavery and its overcoming become explicit and acknowledged elements of the American civil religion; Lincoln becomes a prophet. Like Christianity, the postbellum American civil religion includes evil, sacrifice, repentance, and salvation. I would add that when Reconstruction is betrayed, the national story gains another series of episodes and new prophets. Martin Luther King ultimately joins the annual cycle of collective remembrances, alongside Washington and Lincoln.

Writing in 1967, Bellah adds a new stage to the story:

We as Americans now face … what I call the third time of trial. The first time of trial had to do with the question of independence, whether we should or could run our own affairs in our own way. The second time of trial was over the issue of slavery, which in turn was only the most salient aspect of the more general problem of the full institutionalization of democracy within our country. This second problem we are still far from solving though we have some notable successes to our credit. But we have been overtaken by a third great problem that has led to a third great crisis, in the midst of which we stand.

The Vietnam War symbolizes this third crisis. Bellah argues that the American civil religion has always posed dangers, but its emancipatory and democratic elements have often been helpful at home. (Here I would note the central role of Black Americans in the liberation for which Lincoln was traditionally given credit.) However, Bellah argues, the American civil religion has often been harmful abroad. “With respect to America’s role in the world, the dangers of distortion are greater and the built-in safeguards of the tradition weaker.” Bellah acknowledges that “the theme of the American Israel was used, almost from the beginning, as a justification for the shameful treatment of the Indians so characteristic of our history [and] has been used to legitimate several adventures in imperialism.”

I think that right-wing Americans today see civil religion as under assault by what they label “Critical Race Theory”; their anger reflects a sense of blasphemy or profanation. They are especially anxious because they know that Christians are shrinking to a minority; thus the decline of the secular civil religion reflects a decline in the literal religion that has always mirrored it.

Ron DeSantis and his ilk miss the central meaning of the postbellum civil religion: Americans must struggle to defeat the evil of racism. This error has many precedents. Bellah wrote in 1967, “For all the overt religiosity of the radical right today, their relation to the civil religious consensus is tenuous, as when the John Birch Society attacks the central American symbol of Democracy itself.” On the other hand, I observe that real, principled conservatives know that the American story combines evil and redemption. They are much less fragile when people point out the evil roots of American history.

Bellah’s civil religion cannot suffice today. For one thing, it never seriously grappled with settler colonialism. Columbus stands alongside Lincoln on the annual civil/liturgical calendar, and that symbolism is no longer acceptable. The deep analogy to Christianity has also become increasingly problematic as the population has become more religiously pluralistic and secular. Because of the indelible contributions of Black Americans, I would not call the American civil religion simply ”white,” but it has never been inclusive enough.

Still, the postbellum civil religion was emancipatory and democratic. The American Civil Rights Movement then appropriated and strengthened the received story in powerful ways. Meanwhile the American national civil religion legitimized a federal role in social policy, which has served progressive ends.

Therefore, I wouldn’t give it up too quickly. I would be more interested in deepening and complicating the national myth than abandoning it. Taking a leaf from the major religious traditions, we should remember to include solidarity, celebration, contribution, salvation, and hope–as well as acknowledgement and repentance–in the recipe. (This is a gentle critique of certain forms of social movement activism that seem to favor repentance and blame over redemption, rather like politicized Calvinism.)

Political leaders and movements should tell and retell the national story in ways that broadly resemble religious narratives. In an educational setting, however, any single story poses a threat to free inquiry and debate. Inculcating a national civil religion, no matter how benign, is not the same as educating free citizens. For this reason, I would use questions to define the content of American history and civics, rather than promulgating any particular answers.

That distinction is a bit too simple, since the choice and framing of questions always reflects deeper commitments. Schools should be committed to such to core values as equity and liberty. It’s also unfair to describe a religion, as Durkheim does, as a “unified system of beliefs,” since religion always involves disagreements, questions, and critical debates. These can be elements of a civic religion as well. However, the more that a curriculum resembles Durkheim’s portrait of a religion as a unified belief-system, the less it involves free inquiry. And free inquiry is the core of liberal education.

See also: constitutional piety; when political movements resemble religions; is everyone religious?; the Democrats and religious Americans; what secular people can get out of theology; civic education in Russia;  the political advantages of organized religion; the I and the we: civic insights from Christian theology;

Voices in the Code: Citizen Participation for Better Algorithms

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Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Voices in the Code, by David G. Robinson, is finally out. I had the opportunity to read the book prior to its publication, and I could not recommend it enough. David shows how, between 2004 and 2014 in the US, experts and citizens came together to build a new kidney transplant matching algorithm. David’s work is a breath of fresh air for the debate surrounding the impact of algorithms on individuals and societies – a debate typically focused on the negative and sometimes disastrous effects of algorithms. While David conveys these risks at the outset of the book, focusing solely on these threats would add little to a public discourse already saturated with concerns. 

One of the major missing pieces in the “algorithmic literature” is precisely how citizens, experts and decision-makers can make their interactions more successful, working towards algorithmic solutions that better serve societal goals. The book offers a detailed and compelling case where a long and participatory process leads to the crafting of an algorithm that delivers a public good. This, despite the technical complexities, moral dilemmas, and difficult trade-offs involved in decisions related to the allocation of kidneys to transplant patients. Such a feat would not be achieved without another contribution of the book, which is to offer a didactical demystification of what algorithms are, normally treated as a reserved domain of few experts.

As David conducts his analysis, one also finds an interesting reversal of the assumed relationship between technology and participatory democracy. This relationship has mostly been examined from a civic tech angle, focusing on how technologies can support democratic participation through practices such as e-petitions, online citizens’ assemblies, and digital participatory budgeting. Thus, another original contribution of this book is to look at this relationship from the opposite angle: how can participatory processes better support technological deployments. While technology for participation (civic tech) remains an important topic, we should probably start paying more attention to how participation can support technological solutions (civic for tech).           

Continuing on through the book, other interesting insights emerge. For instance, technology and participatory democracy pundits normally subscribe to the virtues of decentralized systems, both from a technological and institutional perspective. Yet David depicts precisely the virtues of a decision-making system centralized at the national level. Should organ transplant issues be decided at the local level in the US, the results would probably not be as successful. Against intuition, David presents a clear case where centralized (although participatory) systems might offer better collective outcomes. Surfacing this counterintuitive finding is a welcome contribution to debates on the trade-offs between centralization and decentralization, both from a technological and institutional standpoint. 

But a few paragraphs here cannot do the book justice. Voices in the Code is certainly a must-read for anybody working on issues ranging from institutional design and participatory democracy, all the way to algorithmic accountability and decision support systems.

***

P.s. As an intro to the book, here’s a nice 10 min. conversation with David on the Marketplace podcast.

artificial intelligence and problems of collective action

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Although I have not studied the serious scholarship on AI, I often see grandiose claims made about its impact in the near future. Intelligent machines will solve our deepest problems, such as poverty and climate change, or they will put us all out of work and become our robot overlords. I wonder whether these predictions ignore the problems of collective action that already bedevil us as human beings.

After all, there are already about 7.5 billion human brains on earth, about 10 times more than there were in 1800. Arguably, we are better off than we were then–but not clearly and straightforwardly so. If we ask why a tenfold increase in the total cognitive capacity of the species has not improved our condition enormously, the explanations are pretty obvious.

Even when people agree on goals, it is challenging to coordinate their behavior so that they pursue those ends efficiently. And even when some people manage to work together toward a shared goal, they have physical needs and limitations. (Using brains requires food and water; implementing any brain’s ideas by taking physical action requires additional resources.) To make matters worse, human beings often have legitimate but conflicting interests, like the need to gain sustenance from the same land. And some human beings have downright harmful goals, like dominating or spiting others.

One can see how artificial intelligence might mitigate some of these drawbacks. Imagine a single computer with computational power equivalent to one million human beings. It will be much more coordinated than those people. It will be able to aggregate and apply information more efficiently. It can also be programmed to have consistent and, indeed, desirable goals–and it will plug away at its goals for as long as it receives the physical inputs it needs. For instance, it could clean up pollution 24/7 instead of stopping for self-interested purposes, like sleeping.

However, it still has physical needs and limitations. It might use fuel and other inputs more efficiently than a human being does, but that depends on how good the human’s tools are. A person with a bulldozer can move more garbage than a clever little robot that works 24/7–and both of them need a place to put the garbage. (Intelligence cannot negate physical limits.)

Besides, a computer is designed by people–and probably by individuals arrayed as corporations or states. As such, AI is likely to be designed for conflicting and sometimes discreditable goals, including killing other people. At best, it will be hard to coordinate the activities of many different artificially intelligent systems.

Meanwhile, people already coordinate their behavior in quite impressive ways. A city receives roughly the amount of bread it needs every day because thousands of producers and vendors coordinate their behavior through prices. An international scientific discipline makes cumulative progress because thousands of scientists coordinate their behavior through peer-review and citation networks. And the English language develops new vocabulary for describing new phenomena as millions of people communicate. Thus the coordination attained by a machine with a lot of computational power should be compared to the coordination accomplished by human beings in a market, a discipline, or a language–which is impressive.

One claim made about AI is that machines will start to refine and improve their own hardware and software, thus achieving geometric growth in computational power. But human beings already do this. Although we cannot substantially redesign our individual brains, we can individually learn. More than that, we can redesign our systems for coordinating cognition. Many people are busy making markets, disciplines, languages, and other emergent human systems work better. That is already the kind of continuous self-engineering that some people expect AI to accomplish for the first time.

It is of course possible to imagine that an incredibly intelligent machine will identify solutions that simply elude us as human beings. For instance, it will negate the physical limitations of the carbon cycle by discovering whole new processes. But that is an empty supposition, like imagining that regular old science will one day discover solutions that we cannot envision today. That is probably true–it has happened many times before–but it is unhelpful in the present. Besides, both people and AI may create more problems than they solve.

See also: the progress of science; John Searle explains why computers will not become our overlords;

a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups

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I few days ago, I proposed that Jane Mansbridge’s great book Beyond Adversary Democracy can suggest practical tools that would assist democratic groups as they make decisions. Such tools should be tested and revised, based on experience in the field.

As a first step, I provide this flowchart (above). The first step is to conduct a survey. The questionnaire would have to be carefully designed, but it could be customized easily for other organizations. Members of the group would be asked what they care about, their attitudes about process, and their social identities and roles within the organization. The survey would yield data that could then inform how the group makes decisions about each issue that the respondents mention.

introducing Habermas

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This is a 29-minute video lecture* in which I introduce the core ideas of the great German philosopher and sociologist Jurgen Habermas. I made it for our current Introduction to Civic Studies course, but it’s available for anyone to use. It also summarizes the beginning of chapter 4 of my recent book, What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life. In the book, I proceed to raise numerous critiques of Habermas, all of which have some validity, although I continue to find his framework useful.

*New version posted on 9/29, with better audio.

an existential threat?

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John Mearsheimer made the case against Ukraine on a well-attended panel discussion at the American Political Science Association. I don’t agree with those who disapprove of giving him a platform. If he’s wrong, his views should be aired so they can be rebutted, and I think that’s what happened when my Tufts colleague Oxana Shevel and other co-panelists debated him at APSA. If he has any actual insights, we should listen and use them.

I would emphasize a point that probably arose already in the panel discussion (some of which I had to miss). Mearsheimer said repeatedly that Russia faces an “existential threat” in Ukraine and is responding rationally and predictably. When he completed this phrase, it turned out not to mean a threat to Russia’s sovereignty, autonomy, or security within its borders. Mearsheimer meant a threat to Russia’s status as a great power.

I do not doubt that Putin and other Russian nationalists view a successful and European-oriented Ukraine as diminishing Russian global power. But this is the problem: Russia is not actually a great power.

In 2019, before the pandemic and the current full-scale war, Russia ranked right below Canada (population: 38 million) in GDP, and well below each of four European countries (Germany, the UK, France, and Italy). Its medium-term economic prospects were much worse than theirs because Russia is so dependent on fossil fuels. In population, Russia lies right between Bangladesh and Mexico (which has almost as big an economy), but its population has shrunk since 1992.

To be sure, Russia has a large military. In 2019, it ranked fourth in the world in military spending and sixth in the number of military personnel (at least on paper). But it arguably could not afford this expense. The Russian military cost 4.3% of its GDP, versus 3.7% in the USA, which nevertheless spent 11 times as much. That year, the proportion of the population that was enlisted in the military was four times as high in Russia as in the USA (an economic burden). And Russia was probably getting bad value for its military spending because of endemic corruption.

Russia has a vast supply of nuclear weapons, sufficient to end civilization. Nuclear weapons guarantee its security against a foreign invasion, and certainly pose a risk to other countries. Perhaps they are an asset in a conflict like the current one, because the US would be more likely to supply Ukraine with aircraft and long-distance guided missiles absent the nuclear threat. On the other hand, nuclear weapons are difficult to use to support conventional political aims.

It is a dilemma if Russia lacks the underlying basis for being a superpower yet views any events that diminish its great-power status as existential threats. However, the proposed solution of allowing Russia to act like a superpower is not only unjust; it is also unrealistic. Sooner or later, Russia must navigate the difficult road that Britain and France began to travel after 1945, reluctantly and incompletely acknowledging that they could no longer have empires. The USA should also make that transition, but in our case, the imperative is justice rather than necessity, since we actually retain the capacity to project global power.

See also: Russia in the larger history of decolonization; when states are blind

applying Beyond Adversary Democracy to solve problems

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Jane Mansbridge published Beyond Adversary Democracy in 1983. This book has been cited thousands of times and has deeply influenced political theory, certainly including my own work. At the recent annual meeting of the American Political Science association, Mansbridge won the Benjamin E. Lippincott Award for a “work of exceptional quality by a living political theorist that is still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years since the original date of publication.” Beyond Adversary Democracy was the book in question, although Mansbridge would also deserve the Lippincott for Why We Lost the ERA (1986). She gave a beautiful and interesting lecture on the future of political theory.

During her speech, Mansbridge recalled that she had been inspired to write Beyond Adversary Democracy to help the radically democratic organizations of the 1970s–the many co-ops and communes that sprang up in that era–to address the challenges of self-governance that seemed, sooner or later, to wreck most of them. Someone asked whether any group had ever used her book to solve such problems. She said: never!

Perhaps no one has developed, tested, improved, re-tested, refined, and disseminated a practical toolkit based on the theory of the book. Such a product would be useful not only for radically democratic organizations but for any group that employs democratic decision-making for some purposes and at some times. For instance: a department in a university.

The first draft of such a tool would be an experiment, requiring testing and improvement. The draft might start like this:

A friendly person who is independent of the organization should conduct an anonymous survey (derived from Jenny Mansbridge’s own instrument) to identify points of widespread agreement as well as conflicts of deeply felt interest within the group. “Interests” mean not only self-interested goals and needs (like raising one’s pay) but also ideals, such as committing the organization to a certain strategy.

The person who conducts the survey should then provide a public list of any issues that are not conflictual within the group. Members should not devote time to discussing these issues. Instead, they should delegate them to one person or a small team. The people who are put in charge of each non-conflictual issue should be required to report back periodically and to keep records, and they should be open to advice and complaints, but they should decide what to do without the whole group’s involvement. Rotating such responsibilities can be smart, but it can also be wise to give these tasks repeatedly to people who enjoy them and are good at them.

The survey should also generate a public list of issues that are contentious. The whole group should discuss these issues with a trusted moderator who can stay fairly neutral. An important purpose of such discussion is to help everyone better understand the contours of the disagreement by allowing individuals to voice their divergent values and needs. Some time should be spent looking for creative solutions that could satisfy most people. However, the group should be prepared to resolve such issues by voting anonymously after a finite amount of time spent on deliberation. Although majority rule cannot satisfy everyone, it is better than trying fruitlessly to reach consensus when interests actually diverge.

Once a vote is taken, the fact that a minority has lost should be explicitly acknowledged, and the group should formally thank them and resolve to try to make it up to them in some way later on. Then the group should shift to an issue that has been identified as non-controversial. They should explicitly mark this transition. “Well, that was a tough discussion, but now let’s talk about office furniture. Does everyone agree that Al can take care of that? Thanks so much, Al. Everyone, please contact Al if you have any special concerns.”

The survey should be designed to reveal whether differences of interest fall along identity lines. For example, women might be tend to differ from others on matters related to maternity. Or people of color might have specific concerns in a predominantly White organization. When that is the case, it is important for the people who hold leadership positions to represent both or all of the relevant identity groups. It may be both fair and necessary to reward them for serving on committees, since this burden can fall disproportionately on disadvantaged members of an organization.

On the other hand, when there are no differences of interest, or when differences do not fall along identity lines, then it is much less important for the decision-makers to be demographically representative. It becomes correspondingly more important to give tasks to willing volunteers, to individuals who have experience for the task at hand, or to people whose turn it is do more for the group.

These are principles or maxims, but they could be turned into flowcharts with diagnostic questions and suggestions. For instance: “Does this disagreement seem to divide your group by race, or gender, or job title, or some other identifiable characteristic? If so, what is the characteristic? Does the committee include people on both sides of that difference? How should we reward individuals who join the committee to make it more representative?” (etc.)

This kind of application by no means exhausts the value of Beyond Adversary Democracy, which is mainly a rich contribution to theory. For instance, the book can influence how we read Aristotle or Rousseau. However, applying insightful theories can improve the world; and the experience of applying them can further enrich theory.

Added later: a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups. See also: the New Social Movements of the seventies, eighties, and today; friendship and politics; needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments

cities in an era of migration

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(Montreal) I’ve had opportunities to visit several cities since July and have enjoyed watching migrants in those spaces.

In Cordoba, Spain, the cathedral was once one of the world’s great mosques. I watched many Muslim visitors, especially young Francophone Arabs. I wondered how they interpreted this space, with its Islamic heritage and its boldly Catholic symbolism. (In a terrible act of vandalism, Charles V dropped a cathedral right in the middle of its coolly harmonious aisles.) Meanwhile, Grenada now has a mosque for the first time since the renaissance, serving its substantial and growing Moroccan population.

Forty-five percent of Augsburg’s population consists of migrants. I heard second-hand about an African migrant’s strong critique of structural racism, which reinforces what I have learned on other recent visits to Germany. (I was in Weimar last November.) However, superficially, Augsburg appears to be a lively and diverse city in which people from many part of the world–including, now, thousands of displaced Ukrainians–interact quite productively. It’s also nice that Augsburg doesn’t seem to draw many tourists, despite being very attractive and interesting. That means that the diverse population seems committed to the place. For instance, they are rapidly learning German.

Iceland’s national citizen population is about 366,000, and each year before the pandemic it was receiving about 2.3 million visitors (counting the ones who stayed at least one night). Meanwhile, citizens of the Schengen zone can easily get Icelandic work permits. As a result, Reykjavik has turned into one of those global transit zones, where a sample of the world’s wealthier countries–plus a few refugees–parades through public spaces, being greeted and served by people who are almost as diverse as the visitors. Although Dubai is Iceland’s opposite in many other respects (from climate to politics), it is another example of this category.

Now I’m in Montreal, which I always enjoy as a bilingual city that is also a magnet for migrants from the whole world. I love the “bonjour hi” greeting, which invites one to respond in French or English. (As someone whose French is not bad, but is generally much worse than the locals’ , I’m not sure what is expected of me.) I also enjoy watching the trilingualism of many recent immigrants. The men who served me my “shawarma poutine magique mix” communicated amongst themselves in Arabic, and with their customers in rapid-fire English and French. The actual dish combined tater tots, shawarma meat, hot sauce, cheese, and fresh parsley in an apt melange.