Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (5 page)

Bertha Gilkey’s liberating moment is occurring for more and more of us. With the S&L debacle costing taxpayers the equivalent in real dollars of the entire cost of World War II, with the toxic waste crisis causing vast and needless harm, and with “experts” producing radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millennia while they have no plan for safe storage—more and more citizens are shedding a sense of deference to the authorities “up there.”

Understanding citizen democracy as empowering individuals to shoulder responsibility involves us in a radical rethinking of power itself. In the dominant political tradition, power is a one-way force. The cue ball sinks the eight ball in the corner pocket—that’s power! As a one-way force, it is also a zero-sum notion: The more I have, the less for you. You must yield to my power, or I to yours. In striking contrast, empowerment as the core of public life returns us to the original meaning of power, from “poder”—to be able. Power is that which enables us to express our interests and values. It is no longer a one-way force, nor zero-sum. Indeed, we can acknowledge the oh-so-frequent instances where my willingness to shoulder responsibility—to assume more power—benefits you. Certainly Bertha Gilkey’s story is a case in point: her power catalyzed community power, benefitting the entire housing project and larger community as well.

Citizen politics is values based and values driven
. Most of us have also come to think of public life as a series of “issues” driven by narrow interests. But in the most successful citizen initiatives, issues “are dessert, not the main course,” as one effective organizer put it.

The main course is our values. What motivates people to act, to get involved? To stay involved? What we care about most—our children’s future, peace, security, protecting the integrity and beauty of the natural world, fairness for everybody. These are widely shared values. They manifest in issues. But power in public life derives from consciously naming the values that motivate action.

Such an understanding of motivation belies the dominant understanding of self-interest—simply a synonym for selfishness. Realizing the many dimensions of one’s own interests makes it possible to see that they cannot be furthered except in relationships—public and private. In fact, self-interest derives form the Latin
interesse
—“to be among.” As political philosopher Bernard Crick puts it:

 … the more realistically one construes self-interest, the more one is involved in relationships with others.
¹⁸

Thus, citizen democracy is not about learning to give up one’s interests for the sake of others. It is about learning to see one’s self-interests embedded in others’ interests. From concerns about environmental health and neighborhood safety to effective schools and job security—none can be achieved by oneself. Each depends upon the needs of others being met as well.

In this light, we see that selfishness—narrow preoccupation with self—can actually be an enemy of self-interest. In citizen democracy, self-interest is not to be squelched or simply indulged, but consciously developed in relationships with others. It is the basis of constructive political engagement.

Citizen politics is about solving problems
. In today’s political world, moral grandstanding and vicious mud-slinging are the order of the day. Poised against this dominant politics is the politics of protest—we’ve all learned how to decry what we
don’t
like.

Citizen politics takes the next step. It is task oriented. It is less concerned about proving our own righteousness or the others’ failings than about taking responsibility for solutions. Whether it is citizens developing land trusts to keep down the cost of housing or the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth moving from protest over toxic waste to joining a state taskforce to work out solutions.
¹⁹

But
where
do we learn to be problem solvers, rather than merely good complainers?

At home, at school, at work … just about anywhere people come together. Among the most effective classrooms in the country are those in which teachers are encouraging students to learn by tackling real problems in their communities. One of my favorite examples is in a grammar school in Amesville, Ohio, where Bill Elasky proves that his sixth graders can plan and carry out long-term problem-solving projects, given encouragement and back-up.

After a chemical spill in a nearby creek, Elasky’s students decided they “didn’t trust the EPA.” Constituting themselves as the Amesville Sixth Grade Water Chemists, they set out to test the water themselves—and succeeded. In the process they had to divide into teams, assign tasks, plan sampling and testing times, and so on. Soon the Sixth Grade Water Chemists became the town’s water quality experts, and their neighbors were buying their water testing services. These kids are learning democracy not by memorizing distant structures of government but by “doing democracy.”
²⁰

Citizen democracy assumes that citizen participation is just as necessary in governing economic life as it is in political life
. At the time of our nation’s founding, the primary unit of economic life was the family. We were family farmers, shopkeepers, and traders. It made a certain amount of sense to think of economic life as private, and therefore not governed by the same democratic principles that we deemed appropriate to political life.

But in the intervening years, what has happened? The determining unit of the economy is no longer the family. Dominating the economic landscape are giant bureaucracies—non-elected, but nevertheless with more power over the quality of our lives than most governments have. We call them corporations. They determine the location and the quality of many jobs, the health of the environment, and—through their political influence—even broader questions.

Today, the world’s four largest corporations enjoy a total revenue greater than the combined gross national products of 80 countries comprising half the world’s population. Yet we perceive them as
private
entities, beyond democratic accountability!

Citizen democracy—the concept of ordinary people assuming greater responsibility for public decision making—challenges us to ask whether such categories of public and private still make sense.

More and more citizens are taking responsibility for making democratically accountable such “private” economic structures. A consortium of citizen organizations developed the Valdez Principles, guidelines to ensure that oil companies take measures to avoid oil spills, the consequences of which are broadly public in every sense. The Financial Democracy Campaign is providing a vehicle for citizens to take part in devising a fairer burden-sharing of the federal Saving and Loan bailout.
²¹

Evidence of the last 20 years seems definitive on one point: Without democratizing
economic
decision making, reversing environmental decline seems beyond our reach. In his 1990
Making Peace with the Planet
, Barry Commoner updates his earlier classic,
The Closing Circle
. In the earlier work he predicted that only in the few cases where citizen movements were using government to require economic bureaucracies to change their technologies of production could environmental deterioration be substantially turned around. Commoner’s predictions proved correct: Real success in protecting the environment has been achieved in just a few instances: in taking lead out of gasoline, removing DDT from pesticides, and eliminating PCB from the electrical industry.

In other words, once U.S. corporations have been permitted—through citizen noninvolvement in the process—to emit into the environment each year what now amounts to almost four pounds of toxic substances for every person on earth,
it’s simply too late
. To dispose safely of this enormous quantity would require several times the profits of the chemical industry. Commoner argues that the record of the last two decades demonstrates that without citizens taking greater responsibility to ensure the halt of production of toxic substances in the first place, there is no solution.
²²

But, taking a position on
anything
, even speaking out in the classroom or workplace, is a scary proposition for most of us. How do we gain the confidence and the capacity to participate in earth-shaping decisions?

Citizen democracy is a learned art
. Earlier I noted that we’re not born citizens. True, anyone can respond to a few TV ads and pull a lever in a polling booth. But real citizenship is an art. Like the art of dance, music, or sport, we persevere only as we learn to do it well. If we feel awkward or foolish for too long, we’ll just stop! On the other hand, if we are learning the particular
challenges
and
rewards
of an art, we continue even if our “performance” is far from perfect. So, too, with active citizenship.

How do we as a society, and as individuals, come to take seriously building our capacities for expressing our values and interests in common problem solving?

The process can begin in family life. In 1985, my children—Anthony and Anna—and I wrote a book together. It’s called
What to Do After You Turn Off the TV
.
²³
Our idea was to entice families away from letting TV dominate home life, so they might discover the joys of each other’s company. We told of our own experience of eight years without TV and interviewed hundreds of other families to capture their experiences. We were struck by how many close families had developed some version of a “family meeting”—-a special time when everyone comes together to make plans and talk over problems that might have gone unresolved. Children in such families gain an early start in acquiring the capacities—for dialogue, compromise, mediation, and reflection—that can make them effective citizens.

Above I suggested a critical role for schools in learning the democratic arts. But equally important are the voluntary associations in which the majority of Americans are engaged—through religious affiliations, or in groups like the PTA, the League of Women Voters, Kiwanis, or Greenpeace. Can we come to see such involvements not just as means to solve a particular problem, or to address a given issue, but as occasions for learning the democratic arts, as opportunities for learning that can sustain our involvement throughout our lives?

So many people who become involved in addressing social problems experience early “burn out.” If we do not attend to the arts of reflection and evaluation of our progress, if we do not work to perceive how our particular effort is tied to long-term society-wide change, we soon feel like retreating into our private worlds. We deny our need to make a difference in the larger world. We deny ourselves.

As we begin to value the process of democratic renewal itself, seeing our efforts not as stop-gap measures but as engaging in long-term cultural change, we can attend to making that process
rewarding
—consciously measuring our success in incremental steps, deliberately creating celebration and cultural expressions to sustain our energies.

Growing up, most of us learn that “politics” is about staking out a position and defending it. The “art,” if there is any, is winning—not listening in order to understand the interests and values of others. If we are locked into pre-set positions, interaction at best hones our arguments but cannot awaken us to new possibilities. Creativity is lost. Thus, in the emerging citizen politics, listening may be the first art. Many are taking its cultivation seriously; one example is the Listening Project.

The Listening Project, a national program based in North Carolina, is a community organizing and outreach tool that uses in-depth, one-on-one interviews with people in their homes. Instead of the usual quick, check-off survey, organizers ask open-ended questions about people’s values and concerns. In one home, a middle-aged European-American man complained that the biggest problem he saw was the noisy black teenagers who hung out on the streets and caused trouble. On a simple survey, that one comment might have gotten him labeled as a racist. But the organizers listened. They didn’t argue. Their questions encouraged the man to look deeper. As he talked, he began to reflect as well. By the end of the interview, he himself had restated (and re-understood) the problem in his neighborhood as the lack of recreational facilities and opportunities for young people.
²⁴

These are some of the themes of citizen democracy. What they add up to is a profoundly different approach to social change than most of us are accustomed to. It means, for both Right and Left, breaking the habit of what I call the “manifesto approach” to social change: We decide on the program, and then “sell” it to others, or preferably, “convert” others to our truths. But, if in drawing up our alternative designs, we appear merely as more “experts” with our own brand of specialized knowledge, we do nothing to diminish the sense of powerlessness that people feel. If our process mimics the dominant instrumental view of politics—or of it fuels the polarized, highly moralized brand—we do nothing to encourage prople to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement. In so doing we fail to address the real crisis. For the real crisis is not that justice, freedom, and biological sustainability have not yet been achieved. It is that people feel increasingly disenfranchised from the public processes essential to their realization.

If this is true, then the real challenge is neither to proclaim beautiful values nor to design elegant answers ourselves; it is to create a politics of practical problem solving—one that is engaging and rewarding, that respects people and allows them to develop their own values in interaction with one another. This means learning, modeling, and mentoring the “democratic arts.”