The Workshops of Democracy

Daring Democracy, part 3

It's true that fixing the mechanics of elections would be helpful. It would help us feel more empowered, less fragmented, more hopeful, less isolated and indifferent. But democracy is more than elections. We also need to do the work of opening our hearts to democracy as a way of life. And when I say “we,” I need to acknowledge that y’all (that’s Southern for youse guys) are awesome. Just being here today, and Sunday after Sunday, and at other programs during the week is huge.

At congregations and other voluntary associations across the land, the work is done. Being here regularly helps grow an understanding that we are all in this together, dependent on, and accountable to, one another. It helps foster appreciation of the value of “otherness,” and hospitality to the stranger, those who seem different. It helps us engage creatively with the tensions: the internal tension when we find ourselves doing something not precisely in line with what we’ve said we value – and the external tensions with people whose opinions differ from ours. Engage those tensions, neither hiding them nor hiding from them, but using them to better understand ourselves and our neighbors.

Being here helps us find our voice, know the satisfaction of contributing to positive change, and resist narratives of our own powerlessness. It creates community, knowing that it takes a village to raise a Rosa Parks, and that steady companionship of kindred spirits nourishes the courage we need to speak and act as citizens.

Regular participation in congregational life is not the only way to do the work of opening our hearts to democracy as a way of life, but it is the best way I know.

So I really want to appreciate and invite us to appreciate together what an important thing – what an amazing thing -- it is to decide to be a congregation together, to keep this place going, to stay at the table to hash out differences, to resist the many temptations to take our ball and go home when things get a little hairy, to hang in and let the friction rub us smooth, to discern finally the lovely and delightful in one another and the light shining through our cracks. You’re here and you’re doing that, and that is such a great, hopeful thing – I just gotta say that.

But most Americans aren't here. During any given week, most Americans will not participate in any congregation where people practice and learn the gentle and the rough and tumble arts of being a people. More and more, Americans are either staying home, or they’re attending a mega-church, where they see a good show every week but participate in no decision-making, no dialog, no real encounter with one another. And our country suffers from the decline of heart-habits of democracy.

Fortunately, noncongregational forms of voluntary association may be gaining. Lappe and Eichen describe a growing network of organizations and concerns pushing back, reclaiming the vision that government of the people be for and by the people. Since most of the country isn’t here – that is, they’re not coming to us -- we can go to them. We can participate in and support noncongregational associations building democracy. What we learn here in our congregation about how to be together, how to be a people, are the attitudes and skills those other groups most need.

• Visit the website of the Democracy Initiative to identify national and local campaigns.
• The Move to Amend website connects a coalition of organizations and individuals quote “building a vibrant democracy that is genuinely accountable to the people, not corporate interests.”
• Reclaim Our Democracy is a group based at First Parish UU in Concord, Massachusetts working on the issues of escalating inequality and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Check out their website.
• Take a look also at Democracy Spring dot org, and
• Democracy Awakening dot org. More than 500 UUs participated in the launch of Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening in April 2016.
• The Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives started last November 2017 – they’re doing good building.
• The League of Women Voters has been toiling for democracy since 1920, and their ongoing work is more vital and important now than ever.

I’ll stop there. That should be enough to get you started.

Lappe and Eichen quote William Hastie, who, they note, was America’s first African American federal appellate judge:

“Democracy is becoming, rather than being. It can easily be lost, but never is fully won. Its essence is eternal struggle.” (Hastie)

It’s not consensus and parades. It’s not easy, quiet, orderly, and safe. It is struggle. It is the fullness of life: connection and meaning, purpose and agency. It is the life of wisdom and love that we can only find and make collectively with others. It is very exciting.

* * *
This is part 3 of 3 of "Daring Democracy"
See also
Part 1: Democracy: Not Quiet and Orderly, But Exciting
Part 2: Democracy: The Spiritual Need

Above text is excerpted and slightly revised from sermon delivered on 2018 Mar 25:

Democracy: The Spiritual Need

Daring Democracy, part 2

We need each other not merely because cooperating helps us get what we want. Oh, no. Our need is much deeper than that. We need each other in order to become individuals in the first place.

Individuals do not make society. The truth is, it’s the other way around. Societies make individuals. It is in and through our network of relationships that we are fashioned into the individuals we are.

Shared social life is not a compromise. Nor is it a tool for satisfaction of our a priori interests. Shared social life is our fulfillment.

Democracy, then, is not just the means of compromising and balancing out our various interests. It is the means through which we become who we are. It is the locus of our origin. It is the dialog that creates both us and our interests in the first place.

The problem, then, is not how to get people to set aside interests, but how to form meaningful interests; not how to leave people alone, but how to integrate them with others. Alone, isolated, we are alienated, powerless – in hell.

“A just society, is one in which human beings are ‘empowered,’ they are able to use and develop their essentially human capacities. It is a society organized to transcend alienation.” (C.B. MacPherson)

Joining together with others to fashion a community – finding therein our belongingness, is what makes us real.

And we will do it. One way or another, we will do it. If we don’t learn and maintain the democratic arts of hospitality to the stranger, of cherishing the voice that will tell us something we could not have imagined for ourselves, if we don’t have communities that feel safe and also encourage us to be bold enough to relish the challenging voice that stretches us, then we will instead build insular communities dedicated to protection, craving the safety we cannot quite achieve. One way or another we will join together with others to make our lives real. If we don’t do it in democratic community, we’ll do it in totalitarian community. It was Benjamin Barber who said:

“Our interdependence as members of the human species requires us to belong – if not to free associations, then to totalistic collectivities.” (Strong Democracy, 1984, p. 112)

And it was Robert Nisbet who had earlier said:

“The genius of totalitarian leadership lies in its profound awareness that human personality cannot tolerate moral isolation. It lies, further, in its knowledge that absolute and relentless power will be acceptable only when it comes to seem the only available form of community and membership.” (The Quest for Community, 1953, p. 202)

Yes, democracy is the most effective means of organizing consensus among diverse people. Yes, democracy preserves stability, and balances competing interests. But that is to see democracy just as a tool, an instrument. It misses the more fundamental significance of democracy as an end in itself, an ethical ideal. Democracy’s real significance is its larger ethical meaning as a way of life, “a form of moral and spiritual association,” with democratic government as but one of its manifestations.

What I’m saying is, Democracy goes deeper than its forms – the mechanics of voting and fair elections.

Certainly, there are things we could do to improve elections. Many of us can rattle off ideas.
Without even touching the issue of campaign finance and the corrupting influence of money in our elections, we could:

1. Replace the electoral college with direct popular vote
2. End the disenfranchisement of felons and ex-felons.
3. Allow on-site, day of voting registration.
4. Reform voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise the poor and minorities.
5. Have election MONTH instead of election DAY, with polls open 24-hours a day for 30 days.
6. Eliminate gerrymandering. Require that district maps be drawn so as to produce the lowest possible sum of all the district perimeters.
7. Require that each vote produces a hard-copy paper ballot.
8. Institute Instant Run-off Voting for every race with more than two candidates so that no one gets elected without a 50%+1 majority.

That’s just off the top of my head (well, pretty much). You might have a few more you could add.

Fixing the mechanics of elections, however, isn’t the same thing as democratic life: the larger ethical meaning of democracy as a way of life, “a form of moral and spiritual association.” Parker Palmer describes the deeper problem:

“We suffer from a fragmentation of community that leaves us isolated from one another. We suffer, ironically, from our indifference to those among us who suffer. And we suffer as well from a hopeless sense that our personal and collective destinies are no longer in our hands.” (Healing the Heart of Democracy, 2014. p. 19)

Lappe and Eichen argue that democracy is essential. Our human spiritual need is for connection, and for meaning. Meaning comes from a sense of purpose and of agency – that is, empowerment. Thus, democracy, they say, “as it enables us to meet these needs, is the realization of human dignity” They go on to say:

“Humans thrive best when the communities we create enable each of us, not just a privileged few, to experience a sense of power (that is, agency or simply knowing that our voices count), a sense that our lives have meaning beyond our own survival, and that we have satisfying connection with others. Add those together and what do you have? The essence of democracy. . . . Our deepest needs as human beings are met in the very journey for democracy itself.” (Daring Democracy, 2014, p. 162)

NEXT: The Workshops of Democracy

* * *
This is part 2 of 3 of "Daring Democracy"
See also
Part 1: Democracy: Not Quiet and Orderly, But Exciting
Part 3: The Workshops of Democracy

Above text is excerpted and slightly revised from sermon delivered on 2018 Mar 25:

Democracy: Not Quiet and Orderly, but Exciting

Daring Democracy, part 1

“A majority of Americans apparently have come to think of democracy as a matter of consensus and parades, as if it were somehow easy, quiet, orderly, and safe.” (Lewis Lapham, 2016)

Easy, quiet, orderly, and safe. Perhaps that sounds really good – right now. Perhaps after a stressful week, you crave the sanctuary of easy, quiet, orderly, and safe. Sometimes I crave that, too.

But I’m not going to offer easy, quiet, orderly, and safe today. Let me tell you why. You see: there’s another way to turn around anxiety stress. And that is to turn it into excitement.

Democracy isn’t easy, quiet, orderly, or even safe. What it is, is exciting.

Turning stressful anxiety into invigorating excitement is often as simple as just saying so. There’s a study about that; let me tell you about it. Professor Alison Brooks put volunteers into various nerve-racking situations including: singing karaoke in front of strangers; public speaking; doing ‘IQ-test’ arithmetic problems under time pressure. But before each activity, they spoke out loud a single sentence to themselves:
“I feel anxious,”
“I feel calm,” or
“I feel excited.”
Those who said “I feel calm,” got no effect at all, either on performance or self-confidence. Those who said, “I feel anxious” did worse. Both their self-confidence and their performance was lower. Those who said, “I feel excited,” “not only felt more self-confident but also performed better, objectively measured, at all the tasks — singing, public speaking, even arithmetic. Saying “I am excited” switches the mindset from threat to opportunity – which “increases dopamine activity, which focuses your attention and sharpens you mentally.” (Robertson 2017)

So let our sanctuary – a sanctuary which, per our vision statement, we hope to make a “sanctuary without walls” – be a place of excitement – a respite from stressful threat and a gathering ground for life and verve and challenge, not sleepy complacency. In that spirit, let us engage this exciting prospect: democracy.

In their book, Daring Democracy, which is one of two Unitarian Universalist Common Reads this year – a book for all UUs to read and talk about together -- Frances Moore Lappe and Adam Eichen, expose and document an “anti-democracy” movement, funded by big money, that co-opts democratic ideals and leaves so many in the US feeling lonely and powerless. The Anti-Democracy ideology narrows the freedoms of democracy to consumption – the freedom to shop.

As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Yet the current degraded state of democracy undermines worth and dignity.

As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm and promote the right of conscience and the use of democratic process. Yet we find our political institutions denying rights of conscience and limiting access to democratic process.

As Unitarian Universalists, we affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence. Yet the structures of government seem to mock our sacred interconnectedness.

"Democracy,” said John Dewey, “is the name of a way of life of free and enriching communion." The needs of democracy are the needs of life. As Terry Tempest Williams put it:

"Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up –ever – trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy.”

You may have noticed, we kinda need each other. We need each other to become and to be what we are. Recognizing this, a number of theologians now conceive of hell not as a place, not as an afterlife condition, but as alienation. Hell, they say, is disconnection from the social soil from which we draw essential nutrients.

Let’s look briefly at the historical development of our ideas of individual and society. The ways that past conceptions met some needs and neglected others will show us what all the needs are.

For the Medievals, nobility -- as in “exalted moral character, dignity, and admirable excellence” -- was the same thing as nobility -- as in “inherited wealth and power”. Thus feudalism was profoundly, fundamentally, and vastly unequal. It sustained itself as long as it did because it was clear about where everyone belonged, where everyone fit in. The miseries of serfdom were bearable – or, at any rate, were borne – because they were aspects of a clear and coherent moral order of things.

With the slow rise of the mercantile classes, Western political thought began moving toward a modern conception of individuals. By 1776, Thomas Jefferson, implementing the political theory John Locke’s Treatises of Government had expressed 100 years before, grounded the colonies’ claim to independence in an assertion that individuals were all created equal. They had inalienable rights. They had interests that counted.

On this new conception, you’ve got your interests, and I’ve got mine, and the political problem is that your pursuit of happiness is liable to interfere with mine. To solve that problem, governments, said Jefferson, “are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” for the purpose of balancing and co-ordinating individual interests. The government’s task was to get these atoms of individual interest to curb the urge to kill each other and set aside enough of their short-term interests to be able to cooperate for their own greater long-term interest.

This John Locke theory of the individual, and thus of the role of government, gave us equality, at least in principle, at least for white male property owners, but it left us without belongingness, ripe for alienation. It failed to see how deeply our need for each other goes.

NEXT: How deeply our need for each other goes.

* * *
This is part 1 of 3 of "Daring Democracy"
See also
Part 2: Democracy: The Spiritual Need
Part 3: The Workshops of Democracy

Above text is excerpted and slightly revised from sermon delivered on 2018 Mar 25: