One More on Fixing Democracy, Part 1

This is the next to the last in a series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an article, The Wisdom of Crowds, How to involve ordinary citizens in complex political decisions,  in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode).

 

“The Teknologiradet, a Danish advisory council that informs the public and politicians about technological issues, had always relied on experts and opinion formers. It met in panels and committees to report to the government on its findings.  All that changed over a few beers one Friday afternoon about 25 years ago when the council came up with the idea to bring together complete novices instead. ‘After the weekend, everyone still agreed it was a good idea,’ Lars Kluver recalls.

 

“Kluver was named project manager for the first Consensus Conference. The topic was a tough one: biotechnology in agriculture. ‘Although the technology may be complicated, lay people don’t really have a problem understanding what’s going on,’ [after all, you can drive a car without understanding the finer points of the internal combustion engine] Kluver says. Ordinary citizens were perfectly able to discuss the opportunities and risks and to reach useful conclusions. Many more such meetings have taken place since then on topics like mobility, air pollution and electronic surveillance, in which average citizens have spoken out after extensive research, debate and interviews with experts.”

 

Still More Fixing Democracy, Part 2

This is the last in a series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an interview article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) with Tom Atlee, co-director of the Co-Intelligence Institute in Eugene, Oregon.

 

Q—So citizen councils should not replace parliaments but supplement them?

A—“Indeed. There’s no way to say this would be a better system for sure, because it’s tried only rarely.  We need to test this idea, over and over.”

 

Q—How do you get citizens who haven’t been part of the council to unify behind a decision?

A—“I believe the media have a gigantic role to play.  Journalists can write about who each participant is and report on the process. Then the public watches these diverse people expressing their diverse views, coming to respect each other, and shifting their thinking to recommend solutions together.”

 

Q—That’s not exactly the kind of journalism we see lots of….

A—“Yet this is exactly what Maclean’s, Canada’s weekly newsmagazine, has done at one of the most divisive times in Canada, with the Quebec independence debate being most vivid.  On a Friday, they brought together a dozen people who collectively represented the diversity of the country for a shared vision for Canada.  By Saturday night, it was a complete mess. Then, over dinner, one of the participants started to really listen to an indigenous woman and concluded the natives were feeling unheard—and the most important factor to get some kind of understanding is people feeling heard. So the next morning, this woman asked the indigenous woman to tell her story. That changed everything. In the end, everyone was hugging each other.”

 

Q—Sounds like a reality show!

A—“In fact, some have suggested a reality show like that. A reality show could feature dramatic conflicts among diverse citizens, their increasing understanding, and then a breakthrough that ends of being cathartic and enlightening for a whole nation. Bringing people together in a council will generate collective wisdom for and by the people, coming together around something. These things aren’t exactly characteristics of our current political life.”

Still More Fixing Democracy, Part 1

This is the first in a new series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an interview article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) with Tom Atlee, co-director of the Co-Intelligence Institute in Eugene, Oregon.

 

Q—“Your books explain how citizens can be involved in formulating policy on complex issues. Does this work for diverse issues as well?”

A—“Lifestyle issues, such as abortion and gay rights, tend to be harder to get people to agree on.  Yet in the last 20 years we’ve been developing both an increasing capacity to generate consensus and understanding on a wider range of issues and an ability to generate more civil forms of conflict on the difficult divisive issues.”

 

Q—“Can you give an example?

A—“After watching abortion activists screaming at each other on television, family system therapists at the Public Conversations Project in Cambridge, MA, got together a half-dozen of [them]. After first chatting over coffee and doughnuts—not knowing who each other were—they gathered in a circle to share what happened in each of their lives to make them so passionate about the issue. That’s when they discovered who was pro-life and who was pro-choice, in the context of their personal stories. So even if you disagree, you can come to understand why others think the way they do.”

More Fixing Democracy, Part 4

This is the last in a new series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) by Mary Parker Follett, a management consultant and author, taken from her book, The New State, originally published in 1918 and still very relevant today.

 

“Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, I repeat, makes unity.  Indeed as we go from groups of the lower types to groups of the higher types, we go from those with many resemblances to those with more and more striking differences.

 

“Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole—such is the law of growth.  The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life—the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation. The implications of this conception when we come to define democracy are profound.

 

“I may seem to overemphasize difference as difference. Difference as difference is non existent.  There is only difference which carries within itself the power of unifying. It is this latent power which we must forever and ever call forth. Difference in itself is not a vital force, but what accompanies it is – the unifying spirit.

 

“Really the object of every associating with others, of every conversation with friends, in fact, should be to try to bring out a bigger thought than any one alone could contribute.”

More Fixing Democracy, Part 3

This is the next in a new series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) by Mary Parker Follett, a management consultant and author, taken from her book, The New State, originally published in 1918 and still very relevant today.

 

“Democracy is not worked out at the polling booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of their complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. Many people despise politics because they see that politics manipulate, but make nothing. If politics are to be the highest activity of human beings, as they should be, they must be clearly understood as creative.

 

“Unity not uniformity, must be our aim.  Differences must integrated, not annihilated, nor absorbed. Anarchy means unorganized, unrelated difference; coordinated, unified difference belongs to our ideal of a perfect social order.  We don’t want to avoid our adversary but to “agree with him quickly”; we must however, learn the technique of agreeing.

 

“As long as we think of difference as that which divides us, we shall dislike it; when we think of it as that which unites us, we shall cherish  it.

 

“Instead of shutting out what is different, we should welcome it because it is different and through its difference will make a richer content of life. The ignoring of differences is the most fatal mistake in politics or industry or international life; every difference that is swept up into a bigger conception feeds and enriches society; every difference which is ignored feeds on society and eventually corrupts it.”

More Fixing Democracy, Part 2

This is the next in a new series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) by Mary Parker Follett, a management consultant and author, taken from her book, The New State, originally published in 1918 and still very relevant today.

 

“How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted voters, not individuals. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the good government associations, this is the herd life—‘following the lead’—democracy means a wholly different kind of existence.  To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy depends upon the creative power of every man.

 

“We find the true man only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life.  Man discovers his true nature, gains his true freedom only through the group. Group organization must be the new method of politics because the modes by which the individual can be brought forth and made effective are the modes of practical politics.

 

“Group organization releases us from the domination of mere numbers. Thus democracy transcends time and space; it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests in numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.”

More Fixing Democracy, Part 1

This is the first in a new series of posts on how to make our democracy work better based on an article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly Ode) by Mary Parker Follett, a management consultant and author, taken from her book, The New State, originally published in 1918 and still very relevant today.

 

“No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual.  Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual. Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our history.  We sought him through the method of representation and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every woman [and every race] and yet he eludes us.  Direct government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by sending more people to the ballot box, so we shall not find him by sending people more often to the ballot box.

 

“Are our constitutional conventions to sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism--the ballot box?  How completely that has failed us! Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals.”