RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

The Hard Part Is the Easy Part Is the Hard Part

I've been working for several weeks on the next installment of my emergent polities essay and, well, it's hard to get out. The reason it is hard is the answer is so simple: the world isn't black/white, right/wrong. There is a vast middle way but, for some reason, people insist we drive off the shoulders of the road, take an extreme unreflective position about issues, about things and, if you choose wrong, you are on the outs. You'd better watch it. This makes it hard to discuss things that have a place in our world, which are self-evident, like the value of government or the value of a free market, without running into the blank wall of absolutism. If you are for government, the free-marketers say, you are against the free market, and vice versa, as many people think that when one says there is a role for government it is an expression of consent to totalitarianism. But the world is greatly larger than those extremes.

Part of the problem, too, is the fact that much of the discussion of ideas has been reduced to slogans. This is the problem with the notion of emergence as the sum of unconscious decisions rather than conscious decisions that add up to a social system -- the society as anthill metaphor reduces the person to "profane trivialization of his or her humanity, and to utilitarianism," as Våclav Havel put it in his The Power of the Powerless.

Yet, slogans sell. To my mind, the more I wrap my mind around the question of how to transform even small corners of the market or society (and they are different, yet related things) to begin something new, the sloganeering of management theorists, while rousing, is just a distraction from the real issues. As the United States begins a dramatic transformation to a knowledge-dependent (as compared to knowledge-based) society, we are educating fewer and fewer people to think creatively, making more tradesmen who can do simple math; and in that context, the slogans of a Tom Peters, who I've always enjoyed reading and whose ideas I have used to manage and motivate people successfully, are revealed as a mere distraction. We need to change the notion of ownership and partnership which invests us all in society, not simply the way we manage people. This is the idea we hear fleetingly in slogans, but seldom in fully fleshed out ideas that deal with many perspectives and dimensions of our social reality.

And I cannot drive on the shoulder, ploughing over false opponents, people whom I have nothing against and every reason to want to draw into constructive discussion, yet who insist on seeing everything from the edge of reality, where all the accidents happen. Right or left, free or enslaved, disaster lurks at the extremes of human history. This is the hard part of writing about change, everyone is against it to one degree or another.

I was talking today with Tom Munnecke, of GivingSpace and who launched the September 12 Project and has thought extensively about how to explore positive alternatives. He sent a great essay along, Nothing Is Missing, that raises this issue of extremes and degrees of separation that are largely mythic and, yet, seem very real on the ground of experience. It's a great read, because it slowly strips away the cognitive dissonance that Tom experienced as his linguistic and cultural boundaries expanded to conclude that there is, in fact, nothing missing that prevents us from seeing beyond the mythic and cultural limits, but there is nothing, an absence of commonality in perspective that prevents us from seeing everything as a whole together at the same time, in other words, no central decision can produce results that apply everywhere at all times. We have to hold that paradox in our minds to recognize the hard part of any discussion with other peoples about how to move into the future, and then it is easy, because we have to come to accept a plurality of experience and opinions is necessary in a just society.

I sent Tom the first couple pages of the essay I am writing. Here is the text, with the changes he suggested in bold italics to make it a more positive discourse:

How can society institutionalize change? Assuming that a system which has become static is no longer alive, this is the demand of the rebel seeking to remediate injustice—they want a change—and the curse of the revolutionary, who moves from making a change in government to instituting a new order. The order becomes rigid almost from the moment it is suggested as political forces struggle to obtain and retain power. What about the U.S. Constitution? [My answer is that the Constitution is the greatest document on which government has been founded, but that it is under attack from people who fear the change represented by the flexibility of that document.] The French Revolution’s Terror and Russian Revolution’s purges are just two examples of how “every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.” The question, then, is how can contemporary man transcend the historical pattern of rebellion that is extinguished in failure or that consumes itself in the flames of revolutionary absolutism? What can we do to answer these questions in a way that all can comprehend and participate in the resulting social organizations?

The answer is quite simple: Start amplifying those aspects of civilization which are positive, adaptive, and help make the world a better place. [Yes! This needed a positive start, rather than the negative statement that follows.] Stop killing and punishing dissent while embracing differences in a marketplace of ideas that leads people to a self-organizing regime of narrowly and, consequently, low-social-power polities that implement social policy in local and transnational systems that can adjust peacefully through democratic debate. Simple to say, but, so far, it has been very difficult to put into practice in the world. Even Gandhi’s India, which overthrew the British Empire through non-violence descended into domestic genocide; the “Velvet Revolution” in Eastern Europe and the South African liberation from apartheid led by Nelson Mandela have come the closest to change without post-revolutionary slaughter.

In the case of the United States, the Bush II Administration notwithstanding, the system is generally affirming of the values of democracy. Yet, any system of governance that will transcend the us/them politics of the 20th century, in which nations and minorities have struggled with one another for supremacy, will have to succeed in bringing change in spite of presence of borders. Moreover, the success of new democratic institutions demands they be successful in a variety of social and religious contexts—in other words, is there a system or practice that can work in conjunction with social and religious institutions that are relatively inflexible. If we can conceive a system in which groups of people with common interest or cause can organize to address their needs while co-existing with Islamic law or Chinese communist economics, then there is, at least, an opportunity for incremental improvements in local and transnational coordination of social efforts without having to spill a lot of blood. [END]

The problem is that whenever someone decides to rebel against a situation they find intolerable or unjust, they set up an enemy, even if the enemy is simply someone who doesn't agree with their definition of justice or tolerance. Yet, we need rebellion to pursue change. As Albert Camus wrote: "Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended." When you institutionalize change, that is, when you turn from rebellion to revolution that gives form and permanence to the change, even the rebels turn on one another. We barely skirted self-immolation during the post-Revolutionary years in the United States, especially in the last years of John Adams' presidency and again during the 1840s to 1860s, the period leading up to, including and following the Civil War. Justice is such a fleeting thing, because we tend to drive on the shoulder of the road, shaking our fists at everyone who won't take and defend our position.

Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 22, 2003 11:01 PM | TrackBack