Contents
Dan Wang
2
Dan Born
10
Matt Girson
22
Michael Culliton
27
Juanita Brown
35
Jeff Weissglass
48
Taylor Willingham
55
Sarah Hirschman
63
Adam Davis
70
Bart Scultz
77
Deva Woodly
81
New Art and Reflective Discourse: Two Examples from Current
Practice
Dan S. Wang
The world of contemporary art operates today under the auspices of a prevailing
pluralism. This is not to say that different styles, conceptual frameworks, and values
systems coexist comfortably, though it is true that evidence of pluralism is everywhere
apparent. This is a pluralism of stalemate as much as it is one of mutual acceptance. It is
as if the history of art, being the social mirror that it is, has irreversibly shattered and
landed in a pile of shards. The reflective pieces mix and touch each other, and sometimes
break each other, but each shard holds an image from its—and its viewer’s—perspective.
In simple terms, almost anything is allowed, to the degree that almost any approach to
making new art, provided it is pursued with commitment and skill, can somewhere find
or produce support in today’s world of contemporary art. Today I wish to give a report
on what some people who populate one particular part of the art world are doing. These
people are art workers who are active in and help to create that part of the art world
which prioritizes elements of what, here, today, we would call ‘civic reflection.’ I am
speaking about myself, my own practice, and those of my peers. I will describe two
projects as examples, both recently initiated and currently ongoing, both of which I had a
hand in producing.
Before I get to the examples, I need to say something about form. Freedom of and
attention to form—meaning the construction of a project, its architecture, materials,
scope, scale, and method—is what art treatments offer those of us who are interested in
advancing reflective discourse. As with the knowledge production generated by
experimental sectors in other fields, the potential for formal innovation and creativity is
what makes an art treatment valuable. Artists, even those who have few other areas of
knowledge in which they are expert, are particularly well-practiced in techniques of
design (improvised and intentional), documentation, dissemination, and audience
location, which together serve well the circulation of new forms. I say all this to simply
make this point: the contribution of artists should be judged on the level of form and
creativity of form—in this case, with the result of that creativity being new spaces,
vehicles, and moments for civic reflection. Any specific thematic content highlighted in
the following review for the purposes of this conference should be considered of
secondary importance. While contents are of course significant, and function to help
define audiences and discursive location, when we are aiming to consequentially impact
the workings of an existing political culture which systematically discourages reflection I
warn against understanding the role of artists exclusively or primarily as suppliers of new
thematic contents for prevailing cultural forms. Critical voices have called attention to
the political pitfalls associated with such an understanding from at least since Benjamin
delivered his essay ‘The Author as Producer’ before the Institute for the Study of Fascism
in Paris in 1934. As I proceed, you will find that many of today’s socially-engaged
cultural workers have taken the point to heart.
My first example falls under the dual title Midwest Radical Culture Corridor/Continental
Drift, or MRCC/Drift for short. There is no single term that encapsulates what the
MRCC/Drift is, but for ten days in early June of this year it was a combination research
tour, series of exhibitions, lectures, screenings, meals, and unstructured time for
exchange, peer education, and mind wanderings. A shifting group of persons numbering
between eight and eleven, who were mostly artists but not all, who mostly knew or had
worked with one another but not all, together traveled a route through Illinois and
Wisconsin, beginning in Urbana, continuing north through Chicago and Milwaukee, then
northwest to rural Elk Mound, south to the hamlet of West Lima, and then turning back
east to Madison. From there the travelers dispersed. Along the way, presentations were
given, physical labor performed, roads driven, screenings viewed, meals shared. Another
score of persons, at least, participated as hosts, guides, and presenters. Dozens of others
attended one or more of the public or invited events. The whole effort was made possible
through personal relationships, free labor, self-funded travel, and the generosity of hosts
who asked for little in return.
The itinerary below represents the announced events.
CHAMPAIGN - URBANA
DAY 1: Wednesday, June 4
* The Audacity of Desperation–making compromises in an inadequate political system.
* Kevin Hamiliton: the artist speaks about the university, technology, markets, and the biocomputing lab).
* Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes: Artist and activist-researcher provide an introduction to Drift.
DAY 2: Thursday, June 5
* 10:30-12:00 PM – Talk with Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Urbana. Bralts-Kelly, director of Urbana’s farmers market and
veteran food activist, will share her knowledge on regional food sustainability and challenges for local
populations.
* 12:30 PM – Visit Tomahnous Farms, Mahomet. Carpool from Urbana at 12:00 PM. The farm grows organic
fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and honey. Haynes, farmer and land use activist, will give a tour and discuss
issues with losing farm land in this ‘suburb’ of Champaign.
* 7 PM – Exhibition and potluck, Garage & Garden, Urbana (a Let’s Re-Make Space). There will be projects
about the re-use of locally produced waste, imagined neighborhoods, and things to take with you.
DAY 3: Friday, June 6
* 10 AM–Fighting Toxicity, Douglass Branch Library, Champaign. Ryan Griffis with members of ChampaignUrbana Citizens for Peace and Justice: Racialized geography, toxic tour.
CHICAGO
* Drift to Chicago/next stop with intermission at an Illinois State rest stop.
* 6:00 PM – Movies & discussion: Who controls our food? Our Daily Bread (1934) & The World According to
Monsanto (2008) @ Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood, Chicago. Bring homemade bread to share.
DAY 4: Saturday, June 7
* 2-4 PM–Release Party for AREA Chicago #6: City As Lab Saturday @ Paseo Prairie Garden, Logan Square.
This issue of AREA Chicago looks at Chicago as a policy laboratory in which experimental public policy in the
areas of housing, labor and education are tested on the residents of Chicago.
* 7 PM–Gerald Raunig @ InCUBATE
Vienna-based philosopher visits Chicago for the first time, breaks down the latest in art/social action theory, in
conversation with Dan S. Wang.
DAY 5: Sunday, June 8
* 1-5 PM–Tour the Chicago/Calumet Underground Railroad Effort (C/CURE)-Raising Spirits! initiative with
Martha Boyd in the Riverdale neighborhood. Meet @ Resource Center, 135th Place. Martha Boyd is Program
Director of Angelic Organics Learning Center¹s Urban Initiative in Chicago.
* 7 PM–Screening of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). Filmmaker and
author Sam Greenlee in attendance! Potluck dinner @ Backstory Café,
Experimental Station.
MILWAUKEE
DAY 6: Monday June 9
* Visit to Growing Power, a model for urban food production and worm love.
* Visit the Brady Street Pharmacy. Nicolas Lampert leads the way around Milwaukee.
DAY 7: Tuesday, June 10
* Visit the Black Holocaust Museum.
WESTWARD
* Travel to Elk Mound the long way, arrive in the late afternoon.
* Evening meal and hang out with the Langbys and some friends/collaborators of theirs from progressive
home schooling and local food networks, and the area Friends Meeting.
DAY 8: Wed, June 11
* Walk a mile to the Langby's neighbors for a tour of their organic dairy farm (they are farmer members of
CROPP).
* Help out in the garden.
* Evening explorations + slide show.
DAY 9: Thurs, June 12
* Travel to Viroqua/LaFarge/West Lima.
* 3:30 PM–Tour the HQ of CROPP/Organic Valley-Organic Prairie
* Evening picnic and walk-through of Heavy Duty Acres, with designer, bookmaker, printer Mike Koppa.
* Lodge/camp at Dreamtime Village.
DAY 10: Friday, June 13
* Chores at Dreamtime, help clean up after the floods in Viola.
* Big group dinner at Dreamtime.
MADISON
DAY 11: Sat, June 14
* Travel to Madison, planned strawberry picking is rained out.
* Last meal for the travelers, late night record-playing + ‘where are we at’ discussions.
These ten days of activity and togetherness came out of conversations beginning in the
second half of 2007 among and between a number of socially-engaged art workers who
questioned their practices in relation to place in an expanded, regional sense. Eventually
a decentralized process emerged out of those exchanges, resulting in the planning for
June. All the organizing took place without a single itinerary author, committee
oversight, or bureaucratic structure of any kind. The planning process itself was
saturated with deliberative discourse, but the kind that moved comfortably back and forth
between abstractions (‘how does this proposed plan address global capital’), application
(‘what’s the best way to structure the discussion following the dvd screening, so as to
maximize the quality of the exchange and encourage participation?’), and logistics (‘is it
okay if we camp on the Langbys’ lawn? How early may we conveniently arrive?’) In
other words, in the MRCC/Drift even the most deliberative of group processes included
some element of reflection, moments when organizers needed to revisit basic questions of
who and why.
You could say discussion and thought, much of it qualifying as reflective thought, were
the main product of the MRCC/Drift. In the announced programming above, there were
numerous occasions built-in to accommodate, instigate, and facilitate discussion on
various topics of social concern. Reflection was brought to bear on specific topics in
concentrated form, but also emerged in threads which ran over multiple days and linked
different planned events. The discussion formats took and continue to take different
shape, with no single form prevailing. At least three times while traveling the core
participant-organizers met for impromptu but intense group discussions. In addition to
the event formats that took place on the ten-day Drift, and the already-described
discourse of planning, the post-Drift reflections continue in the form of an exhibition
display, lectures such as this one, texts produced for print publication, blog entries,
photostreams, and one collectively-produced book. Further events are in the works. The
book project is notable for the way it took the Drift participants back to the pre-planning
mode, in which organizers stayed in contact for deliberative purposes, but the very nature
of the deliberation also produced occasions for reflection.
For all of the forms utilized by the Drift, in hindsight I must say one of its weaknesses
was the relative lack of direct engagement with a public, or, I should say, in public. Most
of the reflective discourse was produced through structured situations or in semi-private
social arrangements. As public action, the kind you might encounter without having been
specificially invited to participate in, witness, or attend, the Drift did leave something to
be desired. And yet, the Drift does offer this positive conclusion: as engaged
participants dedicated to civic reflection, we can and should embed our reflection in acts
that involve and/or combine travel, conviviality, research, physical labor, the creation and
dissemination of symbols.
The second example provides a different model, one which addresses the issue of direct
engagement, and, furthermore, has as its basic purpose the broadening of reflective
discourse in our democracy. Known as the Asking Questions, Generating Answers
Postcard Project, this initiative was conceived in a partnership between myself, the Hyde
Park Art Center, the Journal of Ordinary Thought, the Public Square at the Illinois
Humanities Council, and Dropping Knowledge.
Based on a project concept initiated by the social art activist group Anti Gravity Surprise,
the basic form of this project—the substance, if you will—is the standard 4x6 postcard,
designed as a fill-in-the-blank, freely distributed ‘talk-back’ vehicle. The postcards use a
design that can be displayed in a tiled arrangement, forming a patterned field on a wall
when displayed in numbers, and so far have been printed in three editions of 1000 each.
The 4833 rph section of the Hyde Park Art Center lent this project a large wall space, on
which for the past two months the steadily accumulating postcards have been pinned.
The cards invite participation with this text: ‘what question do you think should be on
america’s agenda’ and ‘please write it down here’
All partners bring to the project their own networks of dissemination, web of
collaborators, and engaged parties, all of which multiply the participatory audience and
reach into fields not normally accessible to all of us. The postcards have been distributed
in school classrooms, community writing workshops, contemporary art events, and
activist environments. They have been mailed to artists, educators, and activists around
the country, and returned from far away. They have been filled out in group situations, as
structured exercises, and in the insulated space of an individual’s private time. They are
on exhibit now at the Hyde Park Art Center, being compiled on-line, and form the visual
display around which a panel discussion is set for October 14th, at the Art Center. Timing
the project so that it would reach maximum visibility through the general election season
was a way to strengthen the association between reflective discourse and national
political processes.
Given the many arms of what begins simply with the humble postcard, we can see that as
a particular contribution from the field of contemporary art, this project emphasizes the
transversal, that is to say, the zones in which customary distinctions between modes
overlap and blur. In other words, the Asking Questions, Generating Answers Postcard
Project offers a model in which reflective discourse not only crosses the lines which
separate public and private, social and individual, art and activism, popular and academic,
but rather widen those zones of overlap, such that an entire constellation of labors and
production, as represented by the postcard project and its offshoot exhibits and events,
exists in that zone, making such distinctions impossible.
As with the MRCC/Drift, the Asking Questions project presents the question of limits.
The Hyde Park Art Center, while a terrific example of a combination neighborhood and
international art venue, is not the same as a shopping center or a retirement community or
a church. The good news is that the project aesthetics are not specific to an art context,
do not bear the baggage of preciousness, irrelevant academicism, or high-cultural
pretension, and it remains to be seen where these postcards might yet someday be
displayed.
To summarize, in a simple sense reflection begins with seeing ourselves. But because the
picture is social in nature, reflection necessarily becomes a complex act that must move
beyond the passivity associated with the notion of simple contemplation. The spatial and
temporal clearances required for reflective discourse are not abstractions. They really do
exist in time and space, which means they have place names, calendar dates, and street
addresses. These clearances require planning and organizational effort. The
organizational efforts themselves, when organically structured to minimize hierarchical
processes and maximize the leadership responsibilities of all who are doing the work,
become yet another medium for reflective discourse. Art, due to the freedoms afforded
by today’s prevailing pluralism, which itself is the end result of a century of all-but
exhausted transgressive frameworks which were meant to enable reflection, ultimately
and beyond all reactionary response, offers an especially fertile set of strategies from
which to grow reflective discourse. Socially-engaged art practice, in particular—
collaborative, participatory, and interactive—offers many models for doing just that.
What Do We Reflect When We’re Reflecting?
Daniel Born
1.
Can we talk about reflection without alluding to mirrors? I speak of reflection
here as both process and product, in the sense of
(1) the verb, reflection as a cognitive model for what we do individually or
in groups: “Come, let us reflect together on this problem before the
testosterone gets us into big trouble.”
(2) the noun, the outcome of such cognition, as in, “Our many reflections
were assembled in a handy, compact volume with some scratch and sniff
features for the visually impaired.”
So the quick answer to my opening question is “Yes, of course.” And though my
purpose in this paper is to think rather more literally about what it is that we reflect when
we’re in the business of reflecting, I have to grant the word’s generally weak and generic
usage. In common parlance, we use the word “reflection” as an analogue for thinking, or
pondering or deliberating. We don’t give much thought to its denotative meaning of light
or objects bouncing off a surface with a certain amount of speed. The word “reflection”
in this context seldom pertains to mirrors.
Yet the term evokes strong images—among them a pond’s placid surface. For me,
the word is usually associated with members of the leisure or academic class, those not
afflicted by a grinding day job. The appropriate attire is L. L. Bean, sturdy but attractive
gear. Reflection requires a well-appointed study, in which the furnishings are Mission
Craftsman or older. Better yet, it involves the right kind of landscape: either the English
Lake District, the Berkshires, or certain spectacular vistas near Kalispell. Reflection
without a journal is unfinished. Thinking becomes thought, becomes reflection, only once
it is cast in sentences. To be properly reflective one uses a Moleskin and a quality writing
instrument. Please note: the Blackberry and the Palm Pilot will not do. And the activity
involves not simply recording thoughts alongside natural backdrops—much as I admire
William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau—but also reading continually and
eclectically to afford a steady stream of new ideas and observations.
I would contend that reflection without reading results in vast pools of ignorance.
My commitment to text-based discussion is based on my training as a professor of
English that predates my work at the Great Books Foundation. Experience with seminar
discussions—and more recently, book clubs—tells me that the best dialogue is generated
by texts. Without texts, discussions too frequently mutate into one of two undesirable
scenarios: either the professor’s soporific monologue inflicted on the group, or the other
extreme, something akin to a kumbayah campfire meeting.
At the same time, I recognize that narrow kinds of reading are sometimes worse
than no reading at all. Narrow reading, rather than raise the level of reflection, may in
fact reinforce the reigning bias or ideology that holds sway with the group. In this
instance, following some of Cass R. Sunstein’s comments in Infotopia about the
“common knowledge problem” and “informational cascades” (81, 88), I would agree
with his stunning suggestion that “group members can be led to err not despite
deliberation but because of it” (102). This is particularly in force with self-satisfied
deliberative bodies that share a core of common knowledge and subtly discourage or
silence alternative points of view. So although I would like to say that more reading is the
answer to the world’s problems, I cannot say it. A certain kind of reading practice is, and
there’s the rub. Again, all one can say is that reflective communities will reflect what
they have or have not been reading. The actual contents of our reflection, the “goods,” if
you will, are the key to determining the quality of our reflective activity.
2.
Part of the problem with contemporary ideas about reflection is that they have
been hijacked by the revolution in thought described by M. H. Abrams in his monumental
study The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953).
There Abrams argued that the neoclassical poets saw their vocation as holding up a
mirror to reflect the glory of God’s creation. Then along came the Romantics, Blake,
Wordsworth, and their cohort, who conceived the poet not as reflector of the light but as
its source. Most radically, as Blake put it, the divine is the Poetic Imagination itself.
Whether the late Richard Rorty had read Abrams when he wrote his most
influential book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is not altogether clear, and I
am certainly not the first to notice the strong parallels between the works. (In Rorty’s
masterpiece, one finds in the index no reference to Abrams or to Romanticism, for that
matter.) Certainly by the early 1980s he had run across Abrams; in his article
“Deconstruction and Circumvention,” first given as a lecture at Northwestern during the
Summer School of Criticism and Theory in 1983, and then published in the University of
Chicago’s Critical Inquiry in September 1984, he gives Abrams a modest footnote.1 In
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty swept away whatever mirror fragments
Abrams had left behind:
The notion that our chief task is to mirror accurately, in our own Glassy
Essence, the universe around us is the complement of the notion, common to
Democritus and Descartes, that the universe is made up of very simple, clearly
and distinctly knowable things, knowledge of whose essences provides the
master-vocabulary which permits commensuration of all discourses. (357)
Even more emphatically, Rorty insists that “We must get the visual, and in particular the
mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether” (371). He desires not merely to shatter
the mirror, but to purge it entirely from use since, for him, it represents—to use another
metaphor—the wrong road taken by Western philosophy.
My purpose today is not to determine whether Rorty was right. I am not a
philosopher. Among other things, I teach writers of the Romantic movement, and my
own idea of the canon is that Rorty fulfills a useful cheerleading function for Blake. But
trying to purge the visual images from our understanding of reflection strikes me as rather
intemperate. I think it would strike Blake as silly, himself a visual artist down to the very
1
Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1991. Rorty writes, smiling, I think, “Before the appearance of books like M. H. Abrams’
The Mirror and the Lamp, it often did not occur to students of English literature to read Hegel” (87).
last word. Here I follow Blake and refute Rorty. And what I want to do in the remainder
of this paper is salvage that very visual metaphor of reflection, one I think is not totally
vacuous.
We need to ponder the metaphor of reflection and find a useful purpose for it.
Specifically, we might ask: What do we reflect when we are reflecting? I will admit this
is driven by my particular training as a professor of English. Putting it another way, what
kind of content do we find in communities of reflection, and how do we evaluate that
content? I believe that reflective discussion is enriched when participants have roughly
the same access to an eclectic range of written texts. Moreover, I think participants do
well to bring their familiarity with these texts into the course of discussion. Finally, I
believe that the best kinds of reflection manage to mediate textual evidence with the kind
of interpretive creativity necessary to stave off arid and mechanical recitations of “facts.”
(Thanks here to both Blake and Rorty.) If these commitments of mine seem obvious, I
can only protest that a preponderance of the learning going on in our reflective
communities understood most broadly, both inside and outside our universities, is still
based on an oral transmission model of authority. The guru or celebrity speaks with
charismatic force; the masses listen and watch intently, and perhaps a few hours later,
some of them blog testimonially about it.) In this scenario, cognition gets trumped by
spectacle.
3.
In making the case for reflective communities that read together, I think it’s
instructive to look at reflective communities that don’t. This is either because of relative
lack of access to books and magazines, or because the participants in these communities
no longer believe that print sources necessarily illuminate the truth of things.
As a way to illustrate this, let us consider Patricia A. Turner’s vivid account, I
Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (1993). Turner’s
study examines particular and fairly paranoid urban legends that have shown staying
power in African-American communities functioning primarily on the basis of oral
tradition. The rumors reflect the powerful force of that transmission. Turner also explores
some of the reasons why these stories persist, taking the reader through actual,
documented accounts of Klan behavior, or, as in the case of the AIDS story, considering
as a precursor the Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted by medical authorities over
four decades and ceasing only in 1972. Here’s a sample of the urban legends covered by
Turner:
1. The Ku Klux Klan owns Church’s Fried Chicken (which later merges with
Popeyes) and injects the chicken with an agent that sterilizes male eaters. (8492) The Klan does the same thing with Tropical Fantasy soft drinks. (103107)
2. During the late 1980s, the Ku Klux Klan gains ownership of the Troop Sport
clothing company. In at least four cities, rumor circulates that the word
“Troop” is an acronym for the words, “To Rule Over Oppressed People,” and
racial slurs are reported to be found printed inside the lining of the Troop
jackets. (92-98)
3. Kool menthol cigarettes, a favorite among African-Americans smokers, is a
brand owned by the Klan. The spelling of Kool with the letter “K” is part of
the tip-off. (98-103)
4. The AIDS virus was purposely spread by the U.S. government (or the CIA, or
the FBI) to help destroy people of color. (108-112; 137-139; 151-164)
5. The FBI or the CIA, or both, were behind the assassinations of Malcolm X,
JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (114-122)
Turner’s book shows how a reliance on oral tradition (and historical memory
based largely in oral tradition) can leave a community vulnerable to its worst fears. And it
should be clarified that she does not only treat rumors that have infected black
communities; her book begins with the nearly universal and erroneous claim about
ubiquitous cannibalism among Africans—a story that white explorers consistently
repeated over decades of colonial conquest. What is also interesting, in considering the
list above, is how some of these stories are sheer nonsense, and how others shade closer
to conspiracies that have actual basis in fact. For instance, regarding the Kool-KKK
cigarette rumor, Turner observes:
While I was working with African-American informants on this rumor in
late 1989 and early 1990, the marketing plans of R. J. Reynolds, a Philip Morris
competitor, for a new brand of cigarettes called “Uptown” began to appear in the
media. These menthol cigarettes, it was reported, would be heavily advertised on
billboards in black neighborhoods, in African-American newspapers, and in the
major African-American magazines such as Ebony, Jet, and Essence. This agenda
met with swift opposition from groups such as the American Cancer Society and
the NAACP, who voiced outrage at a marketing strategy that targeted toxic
substances at black Americans; in fairly short order, R. J. Reynolds abandoned its
plans for the product. Before long, however, informants began to name R. J.
Reynolds as the company with ties to the KKK. (101)
With or without the KKK, a large tobacco company was planning to target AfricanAmericans for a new menthol brand. Just business, not personal, one might say, but as a
careful scholar documenting actual business practices, Turner makes it abundantly clear
why conspiracy theories based on the passing of rumors often show such staying power.
Teasing the genuine conspiracies apart from the false rumors takes a certain kind of
practice that necessarily involves the apprehension of written texts to corroborate oral
storytelling. Turner’s scholarly practice sets the example for guiding a reflective
community through the steps of identifying the sources for their information. Those
marketing plans from R. J. Reynolds were not simply grapevine material, but could be
documented from print sources—and not simply any written sources.2 Part of the task of
truly reflective communities is the ability to make reasoned judgments about the
reliability of the texts they are reading. (This is why responsible professors tell their
The menthol cigarette story continues to be a live one. See Stephanie Saul, “Opposition to Menthol
Cigarettes Grows,” in the New York Times, 5 June 2008.
2
students that it’s not evil to read Wikipedia—we’re all reading it—but it is unwise to use
a Wikipedia article as substantive, reliable evidence.)
Needless to say, Turner’s book considered at the moment also reminds us of how
different reflective communities are perceived in the larger public arena, for instance, in
the electoral landscape. Barack Obama’s recent estrangement from his pastor at the
Trinity United Church of Christ is a case in point. Arguably, it was not the Reverend
Wright’s infamous “God damn America” phrase that finally forced Obama’s hand,3 but
the pastor’s repetition of the AIDS conspiracy theory as a government-sponsored
campaign to destroy people of color. (Indeed, in his press conference on Apr. 29, 2008,
Obama’s first specific complaint about Reverend Wright identified the minister’s words
on AIDS as a U.S. government conspiracy as one of several “ridiculous propositions.”4 It
makes altogether clear Obama’s decision to sunder ties with the Trinity United Church of
Christ as an act of political self-preservation.) One might say Obama had to sacrifice his
connections to a local, religious community whose pastor’s reflective standards didn’t
measure up.
Surely the problem with Reverend Wright’s repeating of this infamous rumor
cannot be traced to his lack of access to written texts; the minister, after all, has published
several books, and has a seminary education. A cynical reading of the incident would
suggest that repeating paranoid rumors such as these is useful to building community
3 Those who have read the text of Wright’s sermon (see Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive, “The Full
story behind Wright’s ‘God Damn America’ Sermon”), and who possess some biblical literacy, understand
that the Hebrew prophetic tradition called for damnation of the home country with some regularity.
The full text of Obama’s press conference is available at
www.salon.com/news/primary_sources/2008/04/29/obama_remarks/
4
identity. Such rumors gain special force in the context of religious gatherings where
belief rather than reflection, or careful fact-checking of written sources, is the order of the
day. The rumors gain credibility when they come in the context of much that can be
construed as wisdom. For instance, Wright’s famous line about “chickens coming home
to roost” as a metaphor for failed U.S. foreign policy has many adherents, some in the
Pentagon. Such rumors also have staying power given the history of a government that
has repeatedly, as Wright correctly points out, lied to its people. The tenacity of urban
legends is fed by this sense of betrayal. Turner describes the mindset well in this
anecdote: “When confronted with evidence that Church’s Fried Chicken was not owned
by the Ku Klux Klan and was not contaminating the chicken so that male eaters would be
sterilized, a bright young African-American female college junior responded, ‘Well, it’s
the kind of thing they would do if they could.’” (57)
This points up the difficulty of claiming that enough reading, enough booklearning, enough reflection fueled by properly chosen texts will make our democracy
better and stronger. Underlying convictions frequently trump rational evidence, or, more
insidiously, predetermine what one decides to read. How is a functioning reflective
community to know when it has succumbed to what Sunstein calls the “common
knowledge problem” (81)? Reflective groups, after all, judge their own success in part by
their ability to get along. But as Sunstein notes, a chronic occurrence in deliberative
bodies is that their sharing of a common accepted core of knowledge—the stuff that helps
forge unifying bonds—can actually lead to errors of perception and judgment. Some of
these reflective communities are deeply familiar with the world of the text; one might
point to the highly-educated policy wonks in Washington, who came to be known as the
Vulcans, who gave us the war in Iraq. I agree with Sunstein that real reflection occurs
when a community is willing to entertain points of view, and texts, that are perhaps
repellent or offensive to most of their members. And I believe that education in the
humanities provides the best context for developing such alternative ways of thinking and
perception.
With a little more time, I would say more about how reading habits shaped by the internet
have perhaps undermined the consideration of fully-developed arguments and longer
texts in favor of more effortlessly-gathered factoids. These information bytes too often
reinforce pre-existing bias rather than foster self-criticism and reflection. Web browsing
does not a reader make. But that’s another paper, for another day. What I would hope our
communities of reflection begin to do more consistently is foreground what they’ve been
reading, identify what it is that they reflect when they’re reflecting.
Owning up to our sources of reflection is one way of revealing how fair, rational, and
wise we truly are. It's also a way of letting the larger community of citizens know
whether they should take us seriously or not.
Sources
Rorty, Richard. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
-----. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979.
Sunstein, Cass R. Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008.
Turner, Patricia A. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American
Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Emailed Note: Hello Deva,
My essay is attached.
The workshop I intend to lead will ask participants to make works of
art in advance of a discussion of those artworks. The process will
illuminate opportunities to reflect on reflection and democracy.
One important caveat is that if participants know in advance that they
will be asked to make art they could feel inhibited and that would be
bad. The processes and techniques are all safe and straight forward.
The materials are all common and user-friendly. No previous art making
experience is necessary.
It is better to go into this process with a little vagueness and
uncertainty in order to maximize the processes and their affects.
Thank you.
Reflecting on Art and Its Place in Democracy
by Matthew Girson
…only truthful hands write true poems. I can see no basic difference
between a handshake and a poem.
A poem, . . . may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to sea with the surely
not always strong hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps
on a shoreline of the heart.5
The two epigraphs are from the poet Paul Celan who was born to Jewish parents
in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now Romania) in 1920. As a boy his mother instilled in him a
love of German poetry without knowing that by the time her son would be twenty years
old the family would be torn apart and thrust into Nazi labor camps. By this juncture
5
Waldrop, Rosemarie, trans. Paul Celan: Selected Prose, Sheep Meadow Press, NY, 1986. Most of
Celan’s poetry has been translated into English over the past few years. I can highly recommend three
books translations by Pierre Joris (Breathturn, Threadsuns, and Lightduress) published by Sheep Meadow
Press.
Paul Celan could speak seven languages and was writing poetry in at least three of them.
The poet’s mother would not live to see her son’s twenty-fifth birthday. After World
War Two, the young poet moved around Europe for a few years until settling in Paris the
1950s. He spent the rest of his life there, writing poetry almost exclusively in German,
which he referred to as “the mother tongue”: the life-giving language of his mother and
the life-taking language of the Nazis.
As the quotes illustrate, Celan was sensitive to how poetry could be read and
received. His poetry is marked by longings that are simultaneously bold and tentative
and his individual poems are built on the human, ethical terms of dignity and respect.
Any potential imbalance of power was avoided and the exchange between poet and
reader was built around trust, thoughtfulness, and honesty. As a visual artist, I embrace
Celan’s ideas and themes and hope that my art operates in ways similar to those that
Celan advocated for poetry. By extension, I can say that all art that is made with
thoughtful and heartfelt human instincts and intuitions can be understood as either a
handshake, or a message in a bottle, or both.
I start here because the ethical dimensions alluded to in Celan have great
resonance, especially when we consider the relationship between ethics and aesthetics,
and how these fields of study apply to reflection and reflective practice in a democracy.
As fields of study ethics and aesthetics rely on similar terms. Both involve assessing and
negotiating what’s “good” in our values, behaviors, and actions. Aesthetics focuses itself
on discussions involving the arts, and ethics is relevant to other aspects of our social
experience. These distinctions are centuries old and carry with them great legacies that
have helped us define our shared, democratic values and institutions.
A close study of contemporary ethics and aesthetics will reveal that their
relationship hinges on conditional verbs. Ethics helps us articulate what should be or
what ought to be, while the field of aesthetics has no such conditions. As art and the
contemporary art world has exploded (exploited) every potential boundary between art
and non-art, the world of art over the past century has given us anything and everything
in the name of art. Art can be anything, therefore the ethical laws and codes of conduct
that govern society do not limit it. If art can be anything, then, by extension, it can mean
anything, too.
Understood in these terms, art is a challenge, a burden, and a gift.
When confronted with new art or new art forms audiences are challenged to
figure out how to integrate the new work into existing structures and codes of
understanding. Like all systems of meaning, these structures and codes are social
constructions that reflect beliefs and values. These beliefs and values, in turn, are
informed by many factors including respect for and adherence to democratic notions of
inclusion, access, and participation. Whether new works of art are embraced because they
reflect accepted values, or repelled because they blatantly snub standards, it is always
worth questioning why and how they do so. Reflecting on these questions can guide
discussions toward the generation of new meaning. Reflection here is understood as the
first component in a long iterative process that leads through argument, debate, and
deliberation toward meaning.
The challenge presented by new art is born out of the need to make sense of the
world and the people and things within it. If new challenges are dismissed outright then
opportunities to grow and learn are missed. If challenges are not accepted then they can
become a burden, especially if others have embraced the new work and accepted the
potential of its challenge.
The gift is the opportunity to construct anew how we want to live, individually,
collectively, and democratically, with every new challenge. This gift does not open itself
for us. It demands effort from its audience, but, like many challenges, the rewards far
outweigh the limitations. Participating in the creation of new meaning and understanding
can be thrilling and empowering.
Building arguments about possible meanings in art can therefore serve as a model
for debate and deliberation in other fields. (Deliberation, to me, is thoughtful, reflective
debate in which the processes include the time to reflect on complexity and consider
multiple perspectives thus allowing for more thoughtful argumentation.) Because
meaning in art is contingent, the debates and arguments that are used to construe it are
constantly open to reconsideration, and thus open for reflection. Art is always
challenging its audiences to see and understand the world anew; this is consistent with a
political model built upon an open exchange of ideas and deliberative processes.
Reflection and reflective discourse necessitate thoughtful consideration of our
personal beliefs and values (internally), as well as our shared values and beliefs
(externally). This then becomes the backbone of debate and action. In a democracy built
on freedom of expression interpreting challenging new works of art enacts the potential
of democratic deliberation and political action. By reflecting on the challenges of new art
-- and there are always new challenges in new art -- we have an opportunity to participate
in the social construction of meaning that reflects shared democratic values. (The
alternative tends toward censure.)
The Naming the Goods Symposium of the Project on Civic Reflection provides an
opportunity to reflect on art and the role it can play in a democracy today, especially with
regard to how new art forces us to think, re-think, and reflect on our values and ourselves.
Whether it starts as a handshake or a message in a bottle, the exchange is a human one,
worth every effort, and the potential of the gift far outweighs the legacy of the burden.
Civic Reflection and the Transformation of U.S. Health Care:
A Practitioner Perspective
by
Michael Culliton
Director
Center for Healthcare Reform
St. Joseph Health System
August 25, 2008
Prepared for Naming the Goods: The Case for Reflective Discourse in a Democracy
A symposium by the Project on Civic Reflection
Setting a Context
For the past 15 years, I have worked with organizations interested in helping shape public
policy: some at the local level on issues such as creating a continuum of
shelters/affordable housing, others at the federal level on issues like welfare reform and
health care.
I backed into such work. As a public-school teacher, I was trained in and drawn to
participative education. As I began to work with adults and outside of formal education
settings, I transferred what I could of participative education approaches and looked for
guidance from more experienced sources. This led to study and application of Jane
Vella’s work on dialogue education, exploration of dialogue as described by William
Isaacs and others, and an investigation into Daniel Yankelovich’s work on public
judgment.
This work and accompanying interest in applied theory have led to a continuing praxis:
applying the theory to engage groups of citizens in conversations about social issues and
then stepping back to reflect: inviting and wrestling with the experience and feedback of
participants—including me—and the meaning of the gatherings.
Current Practice
In our designs for public engagement—gatherings ranging from an hour to a full day in
length—we use a common pattern: a thought-provoking question followed by time for
silent, individual consideration which is then brought to conversation with one other
person, a small group, or plenary. At times, the question invites people to draw from their
personal experience. Other times, the question is preceded by a succinct presentation or
the gathering of data generated by the group. A good portion of the questions fall within a
constellation designed to help people consider what they value and to articulate the
vision, purpose and priorities that might flow from this.
This line of inquiry is based upon observations by Daniel Yankelovich and a model for
public conscience work presented by Jack Glaser. In describing public judgment,
Yankelovich notes that, unlike expert opinion which draws upon an empirical proposition
that can be validated in principle, public sentiment tends to be grounded in value
judgments that cannot be validated.6 Ethicist and moral theologian Jack Glaser offers a
three-tiered pyramid as a map for helping the public struggle with contentious social
issues. The foundation of the pyramid is a consensual vision of a social reality with an
6
Daniel Yankelovich, Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World,
(Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 53-55.
29
accompanying articulation of its purpose and an explicit set of priorities. Glaser considers
these necessary before moving up to the second tier of the pyramid where a society
wrestles with creating the infrastructure and systems necessary to realize the vision with
its purpose and priorities. The design of specific programs, the third and top tier of the
model, and what Glaser would suggest as a later step in the process, is the place where
many conversations about social issues typically begin.7
Here is what this looks like in practice. During day-long dialogues on the future of health
care8 designed to bring together a broad cross-section of the public, participants are asked
to hold the usual introductory information—where they work, the nature of their
profession, where they live—and to instead take several minutes of quiet time to consider
this question: “Imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning with all you need to
redesign the U.S. healthcare system? What would this new system look like?” People
then introduce themselves, first to one other person—an opportunity to practice sharing
their vision and make refinements—and then to all at their table group, offering their
name and their vision of U.S. health care.
This is followed by a presentation of three “laws of life,” dynamics that impact a large
system like health care:
 You want it all. You can’t have it all.
 Effective plans begin with a clear purpose and priorities.
 Systems matter more as size and complexity grow.
The presentation is followed by time for participants to reflect on these individually and
then engage in conversation about what they might mean to health care.
With a vision and these dynamics in mind, participants then complete a priorities
exercise, a survey with 15 priorities for the future of U.S. health care. People are asked to
select five and to rank them in order of importance. Each item includes a stem, such as
“Advances in Medicine,” followed by a brief descriptor, “The U.S. healthcare system
should place a very high priority on researching and developing innovative treatments
and cures for medical conditions.” People fill out two copies of the response form,
keeping one for themselves for their record, and turning one into the facilitators who then
use a simple computer program to compile the group results. Responses are weighted:
first priorities at five points, second priorities at four points, and so forth down to fifth
priority with one point. The results are fed back to the group in the form of a bar chart.
People are then asked to spend quiet time considering how the group priorities compare
John (Jack) W. Glaser, “Tools for Ethical Discernment,” Health Progress (Catholic Health Association,
USA, January/February 2008), p. 51.
8
www.OurHealthcareFuture.org
7
30
with their individual priorities and their general reactions to the group profile. This is
followed by dialogue about the results in table groups and then the plenary.
As the day continues, participants use the top five priorities as a scorecard for rating the
current U.S. healthcare system and then two possible futures. Again, this exercise is first
done individually—taking time to read a written description of the current system, adding
in their own experience—and then in small groups, with the results shared in plenary.
The day closes with people re-visiting the vision they shared in their introductions and
considering what the work of the day means to this vision: what has been affirmed,
challenged, refined? What new questions do they have?
The design attempts to put aspects of the Yankelovich and Glaser theories into practice.
Drawing upon Yankelovich’s observation that the public operates from value judgments,
the design attempts to leverage this by focusing the conversations on what is important to
people. It also attempts to provide an opportunity for people to engage in some of the
“working through” stage—facing the hard choices and trade-offs inherent in an issue like
health care. Drawing from Glaser, the intent of the dialogues is not to help participants
decide on a solution (tier three of the pyramid model) but to be able to name, explicitly,
their vision and priorities for the future of health care and to use these as a lens through
which to assess both the current system and any proposed changes. And it draws upon an
assumption shared by Yankelovich, Glaser and others: unresolved social issues like
health care will not see significant change until the larger public comes to some shared
clarity about priorities and a direction. The design described above—and a variety of
shorter iterations with different content—are attempts to contribute to such movement.
Stepping Back
Because of the intent and nature of the work described above, my colleagues and I have
encountered civic reflection and reflective discourse and grown curious about shared
intersections and, even more important, the potential this has for enhancing and
improving practice. Of particular interest is the question: What is the role of reflection in
a democracy?
For me, the question creates immediate dissonance: when I think of reflection, I think of
the act of an individual stopping to think quietly about something. This to me seems in
disharmony with many of the common experiences of democracy: 30- to 60-second
television ads, slick flyers, public forums in which experts and elected officials have the
floor and citizens have two minutes to comment at a microphone, sound bites on the
31
news, cryptic phrases running along the bottom of the television screen or packed into the
cell of a busy web page, the opportunity to cast an occasional vote. While each of these
may provide an impetus for reflection, it seems unlikely that most of these actually ignite
such thoughtfulness.
If these observations are accurate, then how do we create opportunities to invite
reflection? Further, during such reflection, what do we in a democracy need to elicit?
In Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, William Isaacs notes that physicist David
Bohm drew a distinction between “thinking,” which Bohm saw as a “fresh response” to a
situation and “thoughts,” which he understood as “habitual reactions of memory.” 9This
insight may provide some direction in considering the quality of response that fulsome
reflection invites, especially in considering social issues that appear unresolved or
seemingly frozen in ideological topographies.
With this as a guide, one role of civic reflection and discourse will be to assist people in
knowing what their “thoughts” are and then providing opportunities and tools of
conversation that can help to move them into the realm of “thinking”—both as
individuals and as communities. This is not to oversimplify what it takes to create a shift
in personal or societal thinking. Our history is populated by changes in thinking that took
decades: the abolition of slavery and the abolition of child labor as two examples.
So how do we create opportunities to invite such reflection? Early efforts to convene
diverse, community-based dialogues on the future of health care have met with limited
success: the forty-some over the past three years are not likely to help generate the kind
of movement we hope to see. At the same time, feedback from hosts and participants
suggests something valuable generally happens for individuals and the portion of the
community gathered. People express appreciation for having the luxury of time to
consider an issue like health care more fully and the benefit of a structure that helps them
approach the issue from what they and others in their community value. What seems to
frustrate people most often is that the event does not conclude with a “solution” or clear
direction on the exact steps they can take to resolve the issue.
At this writing, we are compiling the feedback of more than 30 hosts, trying to learn of
ways we might alter and strengthen the design to make it one that is useful to a larger
number of people and communities. As we look at this and similar designs, what might
the idea of civic reflection and discourse bring to these future iterations?
9
William Isaacs, Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, (Currency, 1999) p. 60.
32
Possible Implications
Civic reflection and discourse invite people to reflect on “meaning” and the role of their
endeavors in the community and society. This differs somewhat from the usual
understanding of dialogue and deliberation as processes that help a community find a
solution to a social problem or answer a pressing policy question. Given this, is there a
way to offer exercises, such as the day-long dialogue described earlier, which would
somehow introduce the idea of “civic reflection” and more explicitly orient participants
to the possible role of such reflection in a democracy? Further, within the reflective
exercises that people engage in during a gathering, is there some way to introduce—in a
manner that is not purely conceptual and abstract—Bohm’s distinction between thought
and thinking and to make this operational within the discourse?
Similarly intriguing is the question of how material from the arts or humanities might be
woven into a reflective conversation designed to help people look at a social issue like
health care. Are there selections and accompanying questions that would engage people
around their values, vision, and priorities for health and health care? What possibility
might such a text hold for generating “fresh responses” that characterize thinking?
Further, in what ways could a more explicit introduction and use of the notions of
reflection in a democracy, of thought/thinking, and of alternate texts mitigate some of the
frustrations participants have expressed with past events? How might we begin to
understand reflection and thinking as complements—perhaps prerequisites—to dialogue
and deliberation around important social issues that we as a nation have yet to “work
through”? Similarly, in a culture that values immediate results, how do we help one
another to appreciate the contribution these can make to longer-term changes, to issues
that cannot and will not be resolved clearly in one, or even a series of meetings, over a
shorter period of time?
Going Forward
As I collaborate with colleagues to redesign the day-long dialogue on the future of U.S.
health care and on the design of similar, conversation-based gatherings, these are some of
the questions that will more explicitly begin to shape both our work and our informal
research on its effectiveness. In designing, we currently check meeting designs to ensure
that these invite people to consider and articulate their vision, values and priorities; and
that exercises encourage people to engage in dialogue. The notion of civic reflection can
serve as a springboard to experimentation with ways to more fully assess a design for its
reflective capacity, for its power to make such civic exercises not only an opportunity to
33
mirror our current values and understanding of who we are as individuals and a nation,
but to imagine, with a courage and integrity similar to that of abolitionists and suffragists
of the past, more robust expressions of our democratic ideals.
34
Emailed Note: Hi Deva, Jeff and Elizabeth,
Attached, as promised, is my contribution to the upcoming symposium. As we discussed,
this is a personal reflection
paper, rather than a more traditional academic offering. My dad's condition remains
stable at the moment so I'm hopeful of being able to join you.
In addition to my paper, please find below some questions that I'm hoping we might find
the opportunity to explore together.
I know you have a lot planned, so I won't be sad if we don't get to them, but I offer them
to stimulate your own thinking
about additional questions you as hosts think are important to our gathering, or as an
encouragement to discover the questions others
are bringing to the inquiry.

Some of the questions we might consider reflecting on together include:
What stories in our own lives draw us into this area of inquiry and practice, and why do
we care?

What is/are the deeper purpose(s) or aspiration(s) that our collective inquiry serves?

What core questions does each of us bring to this exploration, which, if we could shed
light on them, might help fulfill our deeper purpose(s) or aspirations?

Some of my own questions include:
If “democracy begins in human conversation”, as William Greider suggests in Who Will
Tell the People, what are the enabling conditions, principles, and practices that foster the
type of reflective conversation most conducive to strengthening democratic voice and
practice at every level of system.

What innovative architectures of engagement can embody these enabling conditions,
principles, and practices, and what role might the arts and humanities play as part of these
architectures of engagement?

What “doorways to democratic dialogue” hold the greatest potential to engage multiple
stakeholders in powerful ways across gender, culture, generations, race and class in order
to be enriched by diverse perspectives across traditional boundaries.

What are the multiple domains of interdisciplinary expertise and practice that need to be
brought to bear on this inquiry?

How can we foster collaborative dialogue and avoid trapping ourselves in definitional
debates as we explore these and other relevant questions across disciplinary streams?
35
I'm very excited about our upcoming time together and look forwar to whatever may emerge!
And, of course, I'd welcome any thoughts or
reflections that my own contribution evokes for you.
With my warm regards and best wishes,
Juanita
Conversation, Community, and Committed Action:
Shaping Democratic Futures, Together
By
Juanita Brown
Democracy begins in human conversation. The simplest, least threatening
investment any citizen can make in democratic renewal is to
begin talking with other people, asking the questions,
and knowing that their answers matter.
-William Greider
Who Will Tell the People10
Three Short Stories
The Jefferson Club
I remember as a child in Miami, Florida our home was always alive with
conversations. They weren’t just any kind of conversations. They were
conversations about the “big questions”—questions of justice, democracy, and
civil rights. They were conversations about philosophical issues, social action,
and campaigns to elect public officials who had integrity and guts. From those
early conversations the civil liberties movement in Florida was born, nurtured,
10
Greider, William, Who Will Tell The People? (1992) New York: Simon & Schuster.
36
and grew into a potent force for decency and fairness at a time of great turmoil in
the South.
How did that happen? How did my parents and a small group of kindred
spirits find each other, begin to reflect on their democratic ideals, find the
courage to survive cross-burnings, ostracism, and opposition, while nourishing
friendships imbued with a spirit of community and commitment that have lasted
a lifetime.
My dad, Harold Cowan, is 90 years old. My mom, Millie, is 87. They came
to Miami in the 1940’s from an immigrant ghetto in South Philadelphia. Recently
we filmed them talking about those days and the seminal role in their lives of the
“Jefferson Club,” named for the Jeffersonian ideal of participatory democracy.
My mom, Millie Cowan, spoke of the impetus for the Jefferson Club with the
same passion she’s demonstrated for more than half a century:
Right on the street in Miami where my sister lived they had signs that said No
Negroes, Jews, or Dogs Allowed. And at the beaches there were signs that said all
blacks had to get off the beach before dark or they would be subject to arrest. Can
you imagine? We were very, very shocked and very incensed. It was also the
McCarthy period and they were going after known liberals. We found out that
the Unitarian Church had a social action committee, and we began to meet others
who were also concerned about what was going on.
That’s when the Jefferson Club started. It was primarily a discussion group that
met every other week in various people’s homes. We would assign a question or
issue and people would bring in readings they thought illuminated the subject. It
wasn’t always political. Sometimes it was philosophical. We had questions like
“What is happiness? But more often than not, it turned to the political things that
were happening in Miami.
37
My dad continued:
Those conversations were very inspiring. They raised me to a different level of
thinking. The Jefferson Club made me start thinking about things outside of my
own survival. And, being very pragmatic I said, hell, let’s start doing something
about it! The Jefferson Club became a nucleus for social action in the community,
so when an issue came up, you didn’t have to form an organization. The people
and the friendships were already there. All you had to do was make a few phone
calls and you had a ready made organizing committee. We each supported the
others’ efforts. It was really a miraculous thing.
My mother added:
And it was during that period in the 1950’s that we founded the first local chapter
of the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida. Today, fifty years later it’s still
going strong with a lot of brilliant and wonderful young people–– young leaders
who are working so hard to keep our democracy alive. We’ve seen tremendous
social change take place over the years. All I can say is that we’ve had a lot of fun
being involved with all these community betterment activities. We’ve enjoyed the
most wonderful and meaningful relationships as a result of the Jefferson Club
days with people who really had a lot of heart and cared about everyone having a
voice.
That was a key theme of my youth…. the people’s democratic voice and
our responsibility as citizens to keep our democracy alive. From leafleting in
political campaigns, to creating social and legal services for poor people, to
enduring cross burnings on our lawn because my parents invited AfricanAmericans to our home––I knew that the Jefferson Club readings and
conversations I overheard in my parents living room, the thoughtful reflection
that was integral to their discussions, and the committed actions my family and
their friends took were because democracy was not a distant ideal. Rather
democracy was a tender, vulnerable, living “being” that needed nurturing and
protection by those who loved her.
38
The Farm Workers Movement
During the 1960’s I became a community organizer with Cesar Chavez
and the farm workers movement. It was in the thousands of house meetings—in
conversations among those seated on tattered couches in ramshackle homes and
labor camps that small miracles occurred. Though collective dialogue and quiet
reflection, the underlying assumptions that had kept farm workers stuck for
generations began to shift, slowly at first, tentatively. As workers shared tortillas
and bean suppers, they shared the “if onlys” about their lives and imagined the
impossible. With practice and encouragement, they began, through dialogue, to
ask the “what if” questions. And from the “what if’s” came the “why nots!”
Though many farm workers were illiterate and did not have access to the
kinds of readings that stimulated my parents and their friends in the Jefferson
Club, they had something just as powerful….the Friday Night Meetings and El
Teatro Campesino—the Farmworkers’ Theater.
The Friday night meetings were long but they were fun! Workers and
volunteers from key locations throughout the U.S. called in each Friday morning
to share grape boycott results, along with their latest learnings and current
dilemmas, all of which provided rich sources of collective knowledge to draw on.
This information, along with local farm worker reports and presentations were
punctuated with music, jokes, and storytelling. Cesar Chavez, the leader of the
39
farm workers’ movement acknowledged set backs, and there were many, but the
primary energy went toward the future. Its pull was alive! As the evening wore
on people began to call out “Teatro, Teatro!” because they knew that the time was
coming for El Teatro Campesino––the Farm Workers Theater–– to perform.
El Teatro Campesino stimulated whole-hearted engagement and
collaborative learning at its best. El Teatro had been birthed by the farm workers
themselves, led by Luis Valdez, who had a special talent for vivid images and
symbolic communication. Their only tools were themselves, their home made
masks, small placards, a pair of sunglasses, a red bandanna and a great deal of
imagination. El Teatro expressed with improvisation, humor and play the very
essence of the farm workers efforts as they learned together to create a
democratic future that was worthy of their best efforts. The people actively
participated, adding their own lively improvisational voices to the scenes from
“real life” that the actors created. In addition, the Teatro’s traveling Puppet
Theater, taken to dusty agricultural towns across the state of California and
performed in local parks and on street corners enthralled and educated farm
worker children and their parents alike.
El Teatro helped people see humor in even the most difficult times. El
Teatro affirmed hope, and honored defeat as a learning experience. El Teatro
demonstrated the power of story and song, of drama and symbol, of poetry and
40
art to mobilize the human mind, heart, and spirit across traditional cultural
boundaries and to transform vision into action.
Without being theorists in democratic process, El Teatro intuitively
understood and brilliantly engaged the arts to stimulate thoughtful reflection,
powerful conversations and innovative learning about farm workers’ rights and
responsibilities in a democratic society. On the evening that the United Farm
Workers won the very first election in the history of agriculture in our nation, it
was El Teatro Campesino—serving as a powerful mirror with microphones––
that helped the workers and their children see and reflect on their historic
success.
The World Café
Thirty years passed since my days with Cesar Chavez and the grape
workers in the mid-1960s. It’s January 1995. I’m now part of the core research
team of The Dialogue Project at the MIT Sloan School’s Organizational Learning
Center. I awake to a rainy dawn at our home in Mill Valley, California. We have
24 people from seven different countries arriving in half an hour to continue the
second in a series of strategic dialogues among “Intellectual Capital Pioneers”—
corporate executives, researchers, and consultants at the leading edge of this
emerging field.
41
Last evening we were in the midst of exploring the question “What is the role
of leadership in maximizing the value of intellectual capital?”
As I set out the breakfast and prepare the coffee, I’m concerned about how we
can create the right setting for the day’s agenda if the pouring rain continues and
no one can go outside on our patio to visit when they arrive. Then David, my
partner, has an idea. “Why don’t we put up our TV tables in the living room and
just have people get their coffee and visit around the tables while we’re waiting
for everyone to arrive? We’ll then put away the tables and begin with our normal
dialogue circle.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. As we put out the small tables and white vinyl
chairs, our interactive graphics recorder, Tomi Nagai-Rothe, arrives and says,
“Gee, those look like café tables. I think they need some tablecloths!” She
improvises, draping white easel sheets over each of the paired TV tables. Now
it’s getting kind of playful. I decide we need flowers on the café tables, and go for
small vases downstairs. In the meantime, Tomi adds markers on each of the
tables, just like those in many neighborhood cafés. She makes a sign for our front
door—Welcome to the Homestead Café—playing off of our address, Homestead
Boulevard, which is actually a narrow road up the side of a mountain.
Just as I place the flowers on the tables, folks begin to arrive. They are
delighted and amused. As people get their coffee and croissants, they gather in
informal groups around the café tables and begin to talk, continuing to reflect on
last night’s question. People are really engaged. They begin to scribble and draw
42
pictures on the tablecloths. David and I have a quick huddle and decide that,
rather than having a formal dialogue circle to open the gathering, we will simply
encourage people to continue to share and reflect on what’s bubbling up from
their conversations that could shed light on the core question we’d been
exploring regarding the relationship between leadership and intellectual capital.
Forty-five minutes pass and the conversation is still going strong. Charles
Savage, one of our members, calls out, “I’d love to have a feel for what’s
happening in the other conversations throughout the room. Why don’t we leave
one host at each table and have our other members travel to different tables,
carrying the key ideas from the first conversation–– linking and connecting with
the threads that are being woven at other tables?” There’s consensus that
Charles’ suggestion seems like fun. After a few minutes of wrap-up, folks begin
to move around the room.
The second round lasts another hour. Now the room is really alive! People are
excited and engaged, almost breathless. Another person speaks up. “Why don’t
we experiment by leaving a new host at the table, with the others traveling,
continuing to share and link what we’re discovering?”
And so it continues. The rain falling, hard. People huddling around the TV
tables, exploring together, testing ideas and assumptions together, building new
knowledge together, adding to each others’ colorful diagrams and pictures and
noting key words and ideas on the tablecloths. David and I look up and realize
43
that it is almost lunchtime. We have been participating in the Café conversations
ourselves and the hours have passed as if they were only a moment.
The energy in the room is palpable. I ask the group to wrap up their
conversations and gather around a large rolled-out piece of mural paper that
Tomi has placed on the rug in the middle of the living room floor. It looks, in
fact, like a large café tablecloth. We ask each table group to put their individual
tablecloths around the edges of the larger cloth and take a “reflection tour,”
noticing in silence the patterns, themes and insights that are emerging in our
midst.
As we gather around and Tomi begins to draw our collective reflections and
insights visually on the large mural paper in the center of the group, we know
something quite unusual has happened. We are bearing witness to something for
which we as yet have no language. It is as if a larger collective intelligence,
beyond the individual selves in the room, has become visible to us. The
improvised Café process has somehow enabled the group to access a form of
collaborative intelligence that grew more potent as both ideas and people
traveled from table to table, continuing their collective reflections, drawing their
ideas on the tablecloths, making new connections, and cross-pollinating their
diverse insights––focused around the core question that had drawn them
together.
Perspectives and Reflections
44
The experiences I’ve shared in these three vignettes span more than 50
years and have taken place in very different settings with different populations.
Yet, each of these stories continues to this day. The early efforts of my parents
and their friends helped to nurture a progressive movement for democratic
participation and social change that is still alive and well in South Florida. The
United Farm Workers continues its efforts to bring justice to the fields and is now
active in the immigration debate. The World Café process which we discovered
“by accident,” now often enriched by theater, readings, music, and the
meditative arts, is becoming a global phenomenon that amazes and humbles us.
From nurturing the democracy movement in Thailand, to fostering indigenous
rights in North America and New Zealand, to promoting civic engagement in
cities in both the US and Europe, the World Café process is serving to stimulate
authentic conversation, thoughtful reflection and committed action on behalf of
life affirming futures across sectors on six continents.
What can we learn from these seemingly disparate stories? What wisdom
might they hold for us as we consider ways to strengthen democracy? In each of
these cases the humanities and/or the arts, as well as a focus on powerful
questions have played key roles. In the Jefferson Club, core questions, coupled
with relevant readings brought by participants themselves served as key
catalysts for both reflection and collective engagement. In the farm workers’
movement, El Teatro Campesino played a pivotal role in helping workers
respond to the core question––How can life be better for our us and our families? In
45
the case of the World Café, not only the focus on core questions, and crosspollinating ideas but also on visual language through tablecloth drawings and
large-scale graphic murals accelerates the capacity for collective reflection and
meaning making.
We could say that in each of these cases, the arts and/or the humanities
played the pivotal role. However, I’d like to offer a complimentary perspective
as I reflect on these stories. They raise for me the question, “Is it the arts or
humanities alone that we should be focusing on? Or, might it also be important
to situate these powerful modalities as doorways to understanding an even
deeper core process that enables a democracy (or any other collective endeavor)
to flourish––the core process of making meaning and coordinating action in
human conversation that lies at the heart of our co-creative capacities as a
species?11
One image I hold of this rich territory comes from my experience as a
teenager living with my adopted grandmother in a colonial town in Chiapas,
Mexico. When you entered her home through the large carved wooden doorway,
the first thing you saw was a large central courtyard with vivid bougainvillea,
lush flowers and verdant trees in big clay pots with a large fountain in the center.
You could enter the central courtyard by going through any of the multiple
Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco, (1987), The Tree of Knowledge, Boston: MA.,
Shambhala Publications; Brown, Juanita with Isaacs, David and the World Café
Community (2005) The World Café: Shaping our Futures Through Conversations that Matter;
San Francisco: CA., Berrett Koehler.
11
46
arched entryways that surrounded this open, flower-filled space in the middle of
the house.
For me entering the space of collaborative reflection and democratic
dialogue is like entering this central courtyard in the spacious home of our
common humanity. Art, music, song, poetry, theatre, literature, visual language––
each of these are doorways that enable us to enter the central courtyard of human
conversation as a core process and to discover a fountain of collective wisdom
that can nourish our lives and the democratic futures we cherish.
It’s for this reason that I hope we will focus not only on the role of
reflection along with the arts and the humanities as doorways to democratic
discourse, but also on the discovery of a broader and/or deeper set of core
design principles that can create the conditions for powerful conversations and
committed action across traditional boundaries around questions that matter to
our common future on this fragile planet.
47
Reflection and Transpartisan Dialogue
by Jeff Weissglass
As advisory board chair of the Project on Civic Reflection, and previously as board chair
of the More Than Money Institute, I have spent several years supporting reflection, often
in a group context, with the hope of enhancing participants’ commitment to working for
the common good. In addition, as a core team member of the Transpartisan Center, I
help create dialogue among leaders from across the political spectrum with the goal of
easing political polarization and finding new solutions to public challenges. The question
for this symposium of whether we can “usefully talk about reflective discourse as distinct
from dialogue or deliberation” provides a good lens to look at how these two distinct
activities, reflection and transpartisan dialogue, relate to one another.
Based on my experience at the organizational level and attending transpartisan gatherings
as a participant, together with a brief review of literature on reflection and on dialogue, I
suggest that reflection is an inherent part of transpartisan dialogue work, but that it
operates mostly below the surface and focuses on public and inter-personal matters rather
than on personal values and beliefs. In discussing these thoughts, I also touch on two of
the other symposium questions: “What is reflection?” and “What is the role of reflection
in a democracy?” and offer my hope for a more clear and extensive role for reflection in
public dialogue.
What is Reflection?
Reflection for me has always had a “you know it when you see it” (or do it) quality. I
think of reflection as stepping back to consider what I’m feeling or what I’ve learned. It
is about thoughtfulness, considering all sides, and coming to new conclusions. It is an
activity that happens on long walks, writing in journals, or in conversations that are
consciously exploring difficult questions of personal motivation or values.
When I began this paper, I was happy to come across more scholarly approaches to
reflection. The most useful for this exploration was a 2001 article, Reflection in Higher
48
Education: A Concept Analysis, in which Russell R. Rogers reviewed and synthesized the
literature on reflection in the field of higher education over the prior 70 years.
Rogers summarizes the literature to say that reflection is a process of thoughtful
consideration that:
1. Requires active engagement on the part of the individual;
2. Is triggered by an unusual or perplexing situation or experience;
3. Involves examining one’s responses, beliefs, and premises in light of the situation
at hand; and
4. Results in integration of the new understanding of the situation into one’s
experience. 12
This articulation provides a good complement to my gut feel about reflection. After a
brief explanation of transpartisanship, I will use it to evaluate the role of reflection in
transpartisan dialogues.
Transpartisan Leadership Dialogues
Transpartisanship seeks to develop pragmatic solutions to the serious challenges
confronting society by reinvigorating the market place of ideas and reducing the negative
effects of political polarization. The main strategies of transpartisanship are to (1) view
the political map as complex rather than a stark choice between two sets of ideas; (2)
promote respect for principled positions; (3) seek to build trust; and (4) encourage a
highly engaged citizenry.
Over the last four years, the Transpartisan Center and its partners have pursued leadership
dialogues as a key strategy in promoting transpartisanship. They have convened
dialogues among activists, policy experts, authors, philanthropists, academics, and former
12
Russell R. Rogers, Reflection in Higher Education: A Concept Analysis, Innovative Higher Education,
Vol. 26, No. 1, Fall 2001, p 41.
49
elected officials with a wide range of political affiliations and views in private, invitation
only retreats.
The primary goal of these gatherings has been to build trust among participants and to
catalyze new collaborations among leaders with diverse views on issues of common
interest. Gatherings have occurred around the broad issue of democracy in America,
around policy issues (e.g., climate change and energy security; relations among the
United States, Israel and Iran), and around interests of specific groups (e.g., women;
youth). These gatherings have been well received by participants and have resulted in a
variety of promising projects.
Reflection in Transpartisan Dialogues
The following is an effort to understand the nature and degree of the reflection that
occurs in these transpartisan dialogues by applying Russell’s definition of reflection as
(1) engagement, (2) an unusual experience, (3) self-examination, and (4) integration of a
new understanding.
Active Engagement on the Part of the Individual
Participation in these dialogues has been entirely voluntary and invitees have been
identified and recruited by trusted colleagues. Therefore, most people who attend have
been very willing to engage in the dialogues. The invitation process, however, is focused
on attracting people with a wide range of views and ensuring that they will feel safe in
the conversation. From what I have observed, doing so leads conveners to downplay the
reflective aspect of the gatherings for a few reasons. First, many political actors are very
outcome oriented and are skeptical of dialogue as “all talk and no action.” Second, style
differences tend to make it harder to recruit right leaning individuals to dialogues, and
conveners have found that an emphasis on reflection or introspection can increase that
difficulty. Third, the polarized political environment itself causes people to see
themselves in a constant state of competition with those “on the other side.” To feel safe
in the dialogue, it is important that participants not feel compelled to make themselves
too vulnerable or to reveal doubts that their adversaries may be able to use against them.
Therefore, while participants are cautiously open to engaging in dialogue, I believe that at
the beginning most are somewhat resistant, or at least are not affirmatively committed, to
engaging in the reflective process.
50
Over the course of the gatherings, however, people do seem to become more open and
engaged. Two critical factors are (1) professional facilitation that incorporates
substantive issues, personal stories, and discussion of democratic principles, and (2)
creating a retreat type environment, away from day to day demands, that includes quiet
reflection time as well as free time for walks and other physical activity during which
participants might process what they’ve been learning.
Unusual or Perplexing Situation
The very nature of these gatherings is to put people into a situation that is unfamiliar.
First, dialogue itself is still somewhat unusual in our culture, particularly our political
culture. Mark Gerzon, one of the leading facilitators of transpartisan dialogue, describes
dialogue as having the following characteristics:





Inquiry, not advocacy, leading to new options
Involves suspending judgment
Acknowledges value of others’ positions
Develops a wider, shared knowledge base
Identifies deeper issues requiring resolution 13
Not only is the experience of intentionally listening carefully and being listened to by
others somewhat unusual, but doing so with those whom one generally identifies as an
adversary seems to provide the type of discordant situation that Russell has identified as
central to the reflective process.
Examining One’s Responses, Beliefs, and Premises
Examining one’s responses, beliefs, and premises involves the active introspection that I
believe is at the heart of the reflective process. The structure of transpartisan dialogues
13
Mark Gerzon, Leading Through Conflict, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.
51
provides the stimulus for this examination to occur with respect to personal relationships
and policy and political strategy.
A primary strategy of transpartisan dialogues is building trust by helping people get to
know one another. Dialogue sessions where participants talk about leaders they admire,
their own stories of becoming engaged in political work, and their own values and how
those values are faring in the world, provide a grounding that often causes a reevaluation
of assumptions about one another.14 In this process, participants are clearly examining
their responses, beliefs and premises, at least with respect to values, motivation, and
personal character of political adversaries.
Transpartisan dialogue also promotes reflection on basic assumptions about policy and on
the need and wisdom of pursuing partisan victory through divisive tactics. Much of the
discussion at the more general gatherings, for instance, is geared to identifying issues
where shared concerns exist. And the overall tenor of the gatherings is to get participants
thinking about the possibility of a more civil and collaborative approach to campaigning
and governing.
Integrating a New Understanding
It is hard to say whether participants are developing a new understanding, but evaluation
results, their willingness to attend further retreats, and the few cross party initiatives that
have emerged from the dialogues suggest that something important is shifting.
Implications and Opportunities
All of this implies that the dialogue process in a retreat setting has most of the
characteristics of reflection under the Russell definition. The reflection is embedded in
the dialogue process, making it difficult to see it as distinct from dialogue. The challenge
14
Participants in these dialogues have been carefully chosen and we are not dealing with
arch- enemies where violence and other difficult to forgive histories might create major
barriers to fostering a sense of one another’s humanity.
52
for the field of reflection is, I think, to develop practices and make the case that reflection
has a legitimate and important role to play.
From my experience in the transpartisan field, I see at least two areas in which further
development of the role of reflection could be extremely beneficial. The first is a unique
role that reflection can play in helping build political bridges and the second is a call to
view the challenge of our disagreements as a tremendous opportunity for personal and
national growth. I present these as a conclusion to this piece with the hope of beginning a
conversation about them.
Addressing the Right’s Reluctance
The core element of reflection – examination by participants of their own responses,
beliefs, and premises (or assumptions) – is also critical to the success of transpartisan
dialogue. At the same time, treading lightly around the idea of reflection appears
necessary to get people to attend the dialogues, especially leaders with right leaning
political views.
A key factor in the right’s reluctance is that many in this group place a high value on
tradition, duty, responsibility, and order and that the examination of beliefs that is
inherent in reflection may seem contradictory or threatening to these values. Many on
the right also feel that those on the left do not respect these core values and that the
dialogue process is little more than an effort by the left to get them to change their minds.
A fundamental concern about political and economic power does put the left somewhat at
odds with the values of tradition, duty, and order, so the feeling on the right that these
values are not respected does seem to have some validity. As a result, I believe that both
left and right have, for different reasons, been reluctant to examine these “right leaning”
values and beliefs and that reflective practices that delve into this arena could be
extremely valuable in the effort to bridge the political divide.
Personal Reflection
The reflection that occurs in transpartisan dialogues is focused mostly on relationships,
policy, and political strategy. In my experience, however, reflection has raised deep
personal questions, especially when I’ve been confronted with stark differences with
53
people I respect. That leaves me hoping for a much larger and more profound role for
reflection in the public sphere.
I believe that from a personal growth, and perhaps personal integrity standpoint, an
interaction with others who hold heartfelt positions that conflict with ours provides a
great opportunity. And from a political viewpoint, seemingly fixed positions might shift
if we explored often-unexamined values and beliefs.
Reflection can take us deeper into learning about ourselves. For example, we often
behave in the political realm as if we have a firm understanding of our own core values
and what we believe about how the world works. I believe we are not always so clear
about our own values and that it is particularly important for those of us acting in the
political arena to articulate – and question – the worldview that underlies our actions.
In the process we might discover that the values and beliefs we are working from have
been heavily influenced by our parents, teachers, coaches, community, faith traditions,
and political parties, among others. For many, honoring these teachers and communities
is itself a core value, and for others developing independent views is crucial. However,
we may in fact be acting from a set of beliefs that we don’t fully understand, and may
find more room for shifting our policy views simply by clarifying these beliefs.
In addition to clarifying what we do and don’t know about our beliefs, the question
emerges as to how settled and conflict free those beliefs are – whether we still agree with
them and want to live in accordance with them or whether we feel a need to amend or
replace them. And in particular, if there are competing values and beliefs, we need to
articulate and reconcile them.
One of my greatest hopes for the transpartisan field is that working with others who
challenge our views would spur this type of personal reflection, that collaborators from
around the political landscape would be mutually supportive in this exploration, and that
many personal and political shifts would occur along the way.
Reflection in this vision would still be integrated with dialogue, but rather than the quiet,
almost subversive role it currently plays, it would be clearly identified and we would
continue to develop practices to make it ever more appealing and useful.
54
A Moderator Reflects on Life in the Deliberation Trenches
Part 1
I did not set out to “do” deliberative democracy – whatever that means. How could I
choose work that I can barely describe to others? This work chose me, and the
opportunity to reflect on my experiences is a welcome diversion.
In 1990, I attended a three-day Public Policy Institute. I was uncertain about the content
and intimidated by the title. All I knew was that I would learn how to lead some kind of
discussion group called National Issues Forums that I could use in the local library
literacy program where I volunteered. A recent MBA graduate, I was wanted to add to
my skills kit. But what happened during those three days was a personal transformation
that I could not have predicted. I redefined what being a citizen meant to me and I joined
a community of practitioners and scholars tackling difficult public problems.
In this reflective journal, I will draw on my experience with deliberative democratic
models, such as National Issues Forums (NIF). I will share anecdotes and the lessons they
held for me from my past work with NIF in communities across the country. Hopefully,
putting you, the reader “in the moment” will give you a sense of the impact these stories
have had on me, and my reflection will be a pleasurable learning experience.
Which Way Out of the Storm?
Twenty people are seated in a circle, a discussion guide open on their laps. The
participants have been randomly selected from across the country to participate in a grand
experiment in deliberation. They vary demographically roughly mirroring the
demographic makeup of the United States.i A young woman introduces herself as the
moderator and describes what they will do for the next two days. They will deliberate
three issues using the National Issues Forums discussion guides and led by NIF-trained
moderators. For each issue, there are 3-4 approaches that the participants will deliberate,
weighing the potential benefits, and costs and consequences. They will then present
questions based on their deliberation to the 1996 presidential candidates. The question
and answer session with the candidates will be hosted by Jim Lehrer and broadcast on
public television stations across the country.
The topic at hand is, The Troubled American Family: Which Way Out of the Storm?
55
The moderator has barely set the stage for the first approach, “Revive Traditional Values”
when an elderly, white man declares adamantly, that a “family” is mother and a father.
His definition rankles a middle-aged, African-American, single mother who pushes back
indignantly. Does he mean that she and her children are not a family? The tension is thick
and the conversation proceeds on eggshells.
They move to the second approach, “Promote Responsibility for Children” and the single
mother describes how she worked multiple jobs to support her family, held her children
to high standards, and sent them all to college.
Halfway through the third approach, “Expand Societal Responsibility” the elderly
gentleman gruffly interrupts the conversation. Everyone is on edge and the moderator’s
mind races through all of her training on managing conflict.
“What,” he asks, “is the single most important word in the English language?” Perplexed,
no one answers.
“Love.” He continues, “What are the two most important words?” One young woman
timidly responds, “Thank you?”
“And what,” he asks, “are the three most important words?” Relaxing somewhat, several
people venture, “I love you?”
Turning to the African-American woman he’d disagreed with in the beginning of the
forum, misty-eyed, he said those three words…“I was wrong.”
Stories and Transformation in Deliberation
The word “transform” is over-used and often improperly. But it is appropriate in this
context because sometimes individuals in forums do “change in nature, or character” and
even, “convert” their way of thinking, as in the case described above. People’s
understanding of an issue and the “other” is transformed by engaging “eyeball to eyeball”
with people they might not otherwise encounter.
56
In the NIF model, the forum begins with a personal stake prior to opening the
deliberation. The moderator asks people to share a personal story about why the topic is
important to them before they deliberate the approaches. One-by-one participants tell
their story. In doing so, they claim the problem, confirm that it as an urgent issue, and
begin to learn how the issue has impacted others in the room. This portion of the forum,
often referred to as the “personal stake” serves to connect individuals to the issue. But it
accomplishes much more. It puts a face on a story.
After moderating hundreds of forums, I know that one outcome we can almost always
guarantee is that people in the forums will experience some kind of a shift in their
thinking. Even when participants at the end of the forum state that they haven’t changed
their opinion, they are changed in some way. We – I too am changed – cannot walk away
from each other’s stories unaffected. We may not change the way we vote or our political
leaning, but we will take the voices of those who think differently into the voting booth.
We may hold fast to our ideas about what should be done about health care or education
or immigration, but we will be more flexible and receptive to ideas that will
accommodate others. We may be willing to accept that the world is not black and white.
And sometimes, just sometimes, we may find ourselves pushing back when a dogmatic
colleague expresses an opinion just a little too strongly even though we share their
position. ii
Issues are complex and people are affected in different ways. They bring different, but
valid perspectives to the table. They have a story that explains their perspective and gives
it life. When we honor their story and are willing, we can be transformed. The elderly
gentleman in the story changed his definition of “family” because he heard a story that
was different from his own, yet surprisingly familiar. His thinking was transformed.
Discovering Common Ground
In the NIF model, issues are framed around 3-4 approaches. The moderator explains that
participants will talk through three broad approaches teasing out the benefits, and costs
and consequences of each. The approaches are not mutually exclusive and the goal is not
to vote, but to understand what the forum participants are willing to support, and why. In
the best framing, the approaches come from the way people on the street are talking about
the issues, which may be very different from the way the issue is presented in the media
and by public officials. It is important for the forum participants to see themselves and
their own concerns reflected in the approaches. Initially, an approach may look very
appealing, but through deliberation, some of the drawbacks may come to light. In a
forum, participants may choose elements of each approach that speak to their interests
57
and values, and reject aspects of an approach that violate what they hold dear. Statements
like, “I support X, but not to the point that it results in Y” are the beginning of a
framework for moving to action. Statements like, “I was wrong” are the foundation for a
relationship for working together.
We cannot know what led the gentleman in the story to expand his definition of what
constitutes a family. But deconstructing the story, even though we have to speculate what
factors contributed to this shift in thinking is a useful exercise to prepare to moderate
future forums. As I reflect on how the framework for the deliberative forum on The
Troubled American Family, I can envision how the first two approaches might have
played out in the minds of our characters.
The first approach, “Revive Traditional Values” calls for a return to traditional values,
particularly two-parent families. This approach describes the important contribution that
each parent brings to the family. Fathers are indispensable and are important role models
for sons. But, so this first approach says, their contribution is trivialized when they are
portrayed as bumbling fathers like Homer Simpson. Mothers provide loving attention and
devotion that no day care center can provide. A closer read of the first approach reveals
that the two-parent family is seen as means to an end. Supporters of this approach are
concerned for the welfare of children. They assert that traditional two-parent families are
stronger economically and cite the high rate of poverty among single parent families
compared to two-parent families as evidence. In other words, this approach views twoparent families as the best option for “instilling values that help children and strengthen
society”, and as an “antipoverty program”.
The single mother in our story struggled financially. She wore her hard work and success
as a mother like the badge of honor that it certainly was. But surely she would have
preferred greater financial stability for her family and more time with her children? For
whatever reason, she was not living the story described by this first approach. We don’t
know the story of how she came to be a single mother, but we can imagine valid reasons.
The second approach, “Promote Responsibility for Children” calls for parents to be more
responsible. This approach opens with the story of a real-life couple who left their two
young daughters – ages 9 and 4 – at home over the Christmas holidays while they took a
nine-day vacation to Acapulco. While this family fits the definition held by the elderly
gentleman in our story of a “traditional” family, they were clearly unsuited to raise
children – quite a contrast to the story of our single mother and her family. She achieved
the outcomes desired by supporters of the first approach in ways they had not envisioned.
Our elderly gentleman may still hold to his opinion that a two-parent family is an ideal
situation. But he cannot claim that a two-parent family is a guarantee or even the only
58
way to achieve the ultimate goals of a happy, stable, responsible family when he is sitting
across from someone who has proven otherwise.
The potential common ground between the two people in our story is that they care about
family no matter the definition and they care about the welfare of children. It is a small
leap to speculate that they share also values, such as responsibility, hard work and
education. This area of common ground is large territory to build upon.
Lessons for Moderators of Deliberative Forums: Drawing Light from Heat
I do not want this story to leave the reader with the idea that the intent of deliberative
forums is to cause one side in a disagreement to “see the error of their ways” and plead
forgiveness. And honestly, forums do not typically evoke scenes from a Hallmark
commercial. But magic moments are possible in every forum. In a videotaped interview,
an experienced NIF colleague describes how, in spite of the “gazillion things going on in
a forum” she never wants to miss the magic moment or “the spark” when the
conversation shifts. The shift may be as subtle as when the person who advocates for a
position acknowledges, “but I also worry about” and then cites a caveat or downside to
his or her own opinion. Perhaps a forum participant stops mid-sentence and reverses their
position. Sometimes the biggest break-through comes after a contentious or tense
exchange. The question is, “How can we turn a flash point in an explosive town hall
meeting into a moment of illumination and insight?” One of my earliest experiences may
shed light on how light comes from heated moments.
Following my experience at the Public Policy Institute – or should I say, my
transformation or my conversion – I immediately set out to hold forums in my
community. I convinced a company to give me a grant, bought issue books and videos,
booked a room, made posters, wrote press releases and held my first forum in a packed
community center. I learned that, “yes, you can try this at home” but “no, don’t try this
alone.” When the media showed up and I found myself on the evening news, I also
realized that I should probably seek opportunities to practice my moderating skills before
going “prime time.” I needed a venue where I could moderate a forum with a handful of
people, but wouldn’t have to do the hard work to get people to attend.
I went to jail.
I learned many interesting lessons moderating forums with inmates, but one example is
particularly relevant here.
59
The topic on the table was, Illegal Drugs: What Should We Do Now? I, and ten inmates
(experts of a sort on the issue) were seated in plastic chairs around a metal table in a
small room with a glass wall. On the wall, I had posted the guidelines for the forum to
which they all agreed.





The moderator will guide the deliberation, yet remain neutral.
Everyone is encouraged to participate.
The deliberation will focus on the approaches.
An atmosphere is maintained for deliberation.
All of the participants will listen to each other.
We didn’t have access to a video that is often used in NIF to introduce the issue, but I
was well prepared and provided them with an overview. I don’t remember exactly where
we were or what led to the point of contention, but two of the participants became rather
animated in their disagreement. A thousand things flashed through my mind as the
conversation escalated. “Why am I sitting across the room from the red panic button?”
“What made me think this was a good way to practice my skills?” “This never happened
in the mock forums at my training!”
Although I wish I could take credit for some brilliant moderator strategy that turned the
conversation around, I sat mute. Without any intervention from me, however, the
conversation did reach a major turning point when one of the debaters suddenly stopped
and said, “What a minute. I just heard what you are saying in a different way. We both
want the same thing; we’re just arguing about how to get there!”
That was a break-through moment. The conversation shifted away from the actions
proposed in the issue book. They began talking about what they wanted for their families,
their kids and their communities. They began sharing personal stories and how one
approach or another might have made a difference in their lives. My role as the moderator
was simply to make sure the space remained open and safe for them to continue sharing,
and to occasionally push them to reflect deeper, to imagine the positions of others who
were not in the room, and to consider the potential impacts of their ideas.
Like the characters in our first story, these inmates transformed their thinking when they
focused less on their opinions about what should be done and more on what they really
wanted. They also recognized that opinions about what should be done might be based on
very different understandings of what the problem really is.
60
That experience taught me to listen differently. It is not enough to listen to what people
say. As a moderator, I have to simultaneously listen to what is behind what people are
saying (their story, the basis for their thinking, the values that drive their opinion) and the
outcomes they believe their preferred approach will have (their aspirations, their desired
state). They are speaking in the present, but their opinions are formed out of their past
experiences and their hopes for the future. Often it is in these two realms that we find
connective tissue in the forums.
Personal reflection
Earlier I noted that my first experience with deliberation led me to a new sense of what it
means to be a citizen, not in the card-carrying sense, but as someone who is interconnected with others in complex ways that are not immediately evident. My early
experience was not unlike the story of an adult literacy student who participated in a
series of three forums. At the first forum, she sat quietly through the entire forum with
her coat on and her purse perched on her lap. At the second forum, she removed her coat,
set her purse on the floor and listened attentively. At the third forum, she removed her
coat, sat her purse on the floor and spoke. She declined the opportunity to attend the
moderator training because moderators don’t express their opinion, they guide the
conversation and she had, in her own words, “Found her voice.”
Eighteen years ago, I was one of those participants for whom “deliberation was so
rewarding that they felt the impulse to join the nascent deliberation movement and bring
that same experience to others.” Eight years ago, I left a demanding, but rewarding job
directing the literacy program where I was volunteering when I was first exposed to
deliberation and National Issues Forums to pursue work with communities struggling to
talk about divisive issues. I leapt and the net appeared!
My passion is not nurtured just by the individual transformations I have described here,
although I delight in the examples of individuals who have “found their voice.” Instead, it
is the potential for collective individual transformations to translate into real community
change that gets me out of bed every morning. I believe that a group of individuals can
begin see themselves as a collective force able to act together on issues of common
interest despite differences of opinion. You may cast me as a Pollyanna and I would take
that as a compliment. I can think of worse characterizations than a young girl with
infectious optimism. Adopting her “generous attitude toward the motives of other people”
has served me well as a moderator trying to remain neutral in the face of statements I
abhor. But that is a “lesson learned” I’ll save for Part 2!
61
i
This story is from the 1996 National Issues Convention (NIC) in Austin, TX. I was one
of the moderators for the NIC and was friends with the moderator of the forum described
here. This incident was reported in the press and I can probably find an official citation, if
necessary. NIC was an experiment in Deliberative Polling, a registered trademark of
James S. Fishkin. Any fees from the trademark are used to support research at the Center
for Deliberative Polling.
ii
I often joke that my years of moderating hundreds of forums has made it impossible for
me to hold adamant positions about what should be done. I can no longer state a strong
opinion without also acknowledging other perspectives. I believe X, but I also understand
that Y. Ask for my opinion and you’ll be treated to a one-woman deliberative forum!
62
People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos
Grassroots voices participate in the power and pleasure of literature
Can a conversation about a literary short story lead to a democratic reflective
exchange? Can an intimate contact with a poetic text give rise to a new
curiosity, to a desire to share one’s own reactions with those of others? Can
it encourage imagination to fly, to explore new areas? Can we say that a
reflective discussion develops as thoughts, feelings, fantasies are bounced
off the members of a group experiencing the same story? That this
conversation eventually becomes more critical as well as more assertive?
People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos is a program that organizes readings and
discussions of short stories in English and in Spanish in prisons, public
libraries, learning centers, rehabilitation organizations, and for women
groups, single mothers, senior centers. Today, the program is expanding in
the United States and is also developing abroad in France and in Colombia.
It all started a long time ago, with a first experimental group in Spanish
which I organized in 1972 after coming back from a 5-year stay in
Colombia. I approached a group of Puerto Rican women living in a public
housing project in Cambridge, MA. It was a nice sunny day and they were
sitting on their stoop watching over their children who were playing in the
patio; I asked them whether they would be interested in reading together a
story by Gabriel García Márquez – a most successful new author of their
own “cultura” that they may never have heard of. The word “cultura”
resonated with these women – it meant something good, something one gets
in school if one can get there, yet something not quite like school, something
closer perhaps to wisdom, to a secret knowledge that should be available to
all yet reserved to a few. About 10 women readily agreed to participate in a
session, the manager of the housing unit offered the use of a room, some
students from Harvard’s School of Education helped with the children – and
we were launched.
63
My goal was modest and close to my own interests: I was anxious to impart
my love of reading and my admiration for the new writers of Latin America
to different, less educated readers. I wanted to share my own pleasure with
people who were not used to books. I also thought that it would be
interesting to have a real contact with people with whom I had rarely a
chance to talk in a meaningful way. Little did I know then that a series of
unintended consequences would expand those goals, and that these
discussions of short stories would result in much more than a pastime that
brought such pleasure to both me and the participants.
Indeed that first encounter in Cambridge astonished me – how did it happen
that these women who had not been able for one reason or another to finish
school, who had never heard of García Márquez, and certainly never
engaged in any discussion of a literary story, find themselves so soon locked
in a passionate conversation about it?
I will try to give a flavor of the sessions by showing how three different
stories ignited conversations; how their words, counterpoints, images,
shadows produced jolts on the imagination; how the participants became
involved and emboldened to engage in lively exchanges which can perhaps
be called democratic reflections.
“La siesta del martes” (Tuesday Siesta) by Gabriel García Márquez, which I
read aloud on that first day in Cambridge, is a powerful and marvelously
told tale. A mother, accompanied by her daughter, takes a train trip to a
village where her son has been killed; she wants to accomplish a last rite by
depositing a bunch of flowers on his tomb. But the death has occurred in
murky circumstances and the priest, the power in the village, is not anxious
to let the mother know too much; he tries to prevent her from entering the
cemetery. However, through a series of deft, courageous moves the mother
achieves what she wants.
64
After finishing the reading aloud, rather than ask people to give their opinion
on the story as a whole, I decided to engage the women more intimately in
the texture of the tale and started by calling their attention to a particularly
striking passage where the mother says “Every mouthful I ate those days
tasted of beatings my son got on Saturday nights.” How can ordinary food
taste of blood? Some of the women had been close to violence and
immediately reacted to this metaphor, to this taste of blood that can
insidiously insert itself into daily experiences. But should the mother be so
upset about the blows that her son got in a boxing match? Some said after all
boxing is a sport, which can earn you good money. Others took the position
that one should not have to endure that violence to earn a living - and what
about all the people enjoying spectacles of this sort! More was said about
different types of violence, about who is allowed to exercise violence and
who is submitted to it.
I reread the lines which oppose the mother and the priest – her Spartan
refusal to accept the offer to sit down in front of the powerful priest, his
mellifluous empty clichés of consolation. The words resonated, with turns of
phrases the women knew well, and provoked a brisk exchange - has one the
right to oppose, fight a priest? What are the weapons that a poor woman can
muster to defend her rights? Has a mother the right to stand up for her son
even if he is, perhaps, a thief?
“La siesta del martes” is a rich story and its ambiguities, its shadows, its
contrasts, lead us to speculate. Why does the mother have no name? Was the
son really going to rob the widow? What happens at the end – will the folks
of the village let the mother and her daughter enter the cemetery? Or will
they attack her? Opinions flew back and forth.
I was careful to insert questions that encouraged the flow but never
demanded a consensus. I reread certain pregnant lines to make participants
notice their language, highlighted words that could activate memories
particularly apt at bringing forth a reaction. New voices pitched in, people
heard each other out, reacted often with passion. Yet it soon became obvious
that the story did not demand, in fact could not yield, right or wrong
65
answers. What it called forth was an elaboration, a contribution from its
readers who each perceived it through the lens of their own life experience.
This invitation to the participants, this encouragement to collaborate created
an atmosphere where people felt free to experiment, to use their voice
without fear. Almost inadvertently, through its own dynamic, the
interchange led to an increasingly critical discussion with multiple reactions.
The session ended noisily: the women left talking and pleased at having
heard a good story, pleased at having heard themselves express opinions on
important subjects, pleased at discovering what others thought.
Stories do not only put in motion discussions by proposing exciting topics
that resonate with one’s own life experience. Certain unexpected twists of
the poetic text, certain unusual expressions, have ways of igniting
conversations. A wonderful example happened in Trenton, NJ where I had
organized an intergenerational Gente y Cuentos group with Hispanic seniors
and Spanish speaking High School students. The first two sessions were not
a success and I was discouraged and about ready to give up. The older adults
thought that here was a good opportunity to harangue the young – “you
should not look at TV that much,” “you should go to Church on Sundays,”
“you should not carry on so freely with boys.” The young people sat with
eyes lowered, not daring to respond, obeying the Latino “respeto” (respect
due to older people). The mood was all wrong.
Then, in that third session, we read “Es que somos muy pobres” (But we are
very poor) a short story by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. The narrator, a
young boy, recounts how a catastrophic flood carried away all that the
village possessed – dismantled houses, cows, chickens, tools. After the
disaster his sisters left, says the boy, and became “pirujas” (prostitutes). As I
was reading, I heard a general snickering and as I finished there was a rush
from both young and old to mouth that word “pirujas” – why? Was it that
the sound is brilliant, fun? Perhaps it was exciting to find that slightly
unusual, risqué word for prostitute in a classical story; moreover they were
astonished at being able to play around with that “bad” word in a formal
discussion group, and now all together, old and young alike, enjoyed
66
bouncing that word around. At one point, a kind of release occurred: the
young began to talk in earnest to the older participants: “you don’t know
what it’s like to come from a Latino family into a Trenton high school!”,
“We are not what you imagine”… A conversation started about why the
sisters had gone off, left the village. I of course assumed that extreme
poverty had driven them to prostitution. But some of the older people put my
reasoning to shame by saying “But Sarah, we too are very poor and yet have
never been prostitutes!” The younger ones proposed a completely different
hypothesis: they felt that the father had treated his daughters very badly and
that they were really fleeing from him. Indeed the story alludes to these
difficulties but the more obvious, economic explanation jumped to my mind
first. It was remarkable that some of the students were able to entertain those
more sophisticated, psychological explanations. We, older people, were
quite surprised. This started a conversation on relations between generations,
between fathers and daughters. Almost miraculously that word “pirujas”
broke down barriers that just moments before seemed quite impossible to
dismantle. As a kind of “confianza” spread in the group, both generations
began to discuss common concerns: what was women’s place in society,
what were their available options? They ended the session talking to each
other, exchanging preoccupations. Later, it was quite heartwarming to see
the young people helping some of the older women to fill the evaluation
forms which had been distributed that day.
On another occasion, “Verano” (Summer) by the Argentinean writer Julio
Cortázar provoked quite a different conversation. The tale weaves two
strands: the somewhat boring, predictable life of a middle-class couple in
their vacation house with strange, perhaps imagined events, which erupt on
that placid scene. A neighbor unexpectedly drops off his little girl – could
they keep her until he returns from an errand in town? Then, later, odd,
ominous noises frighten the couple; incredibly, what seems to be a white
horse appears in the window, scrapes his hoofs at the door. Both Mariano,
the husband, and Zulma his wife are terrified. Mariano goes out to
investigate while Zulma becomes hysterical and, naked, stands in the
window to observe the scene. As Mariano comes back, having found traces
of hoofs, a wild access of anger, fear, and passion drives him to force
himself on his wife. Meanwhile the little girl is back asleep after having
67
gone to relieve herself in the garden – forgetting to shut the door. Did she
have anything to do with the horse?
Fear permeates the story; it irrupts into the lives of the characters driving
them to irresponsible, almost insane behavior. Increasingly threatening
words in the text create a menacing atmosphere of growing violence: after
much simple, almost mechanical talk about what to serve for dinner, what
music to listen to, what drink to pour, Mariano’s mild ways change as fear
grips him - now he swears, wishes he had a gun, gulps down drinks to give
himself courage.
The power of this invading fear brought out all kinds of personal stories –
participants remembered being afraid of teachers, they remembered the
sweat of fear during job interviews; some talked about street violence – fear
on the street. In the story, fear distorts people’s perceptions and corrupts
their morals: Mariano becomes so violent that he is ready to rape his wife.
Zulma accuses the little girl of letting the horse into the house. There was
much discussion about ways to rein in fear, about imaginary fears and real
dangers.
The conversation veered to the relation between men and women. What
were the rights of Zulma – could she refuse Mariano? There was much talk
about what makes a happy marriage. Having a drink at night, listening to
music together, going about one’s own business – is this enough? Did the
monotony of their jobs in town turn them into robots? Others thought they
were pretty lucky to have secure jobs – they were just spoiled middle class
folks.
These lively People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos encounters demand lots of
preparation. The temptation is to choose stories that focus on issues
important to the specific group we plan to meet. But can we be sure about
what concerns are crucial to others? Perhaps it is best to trust the power of
68
the poetic narrative. As she prepares a session, the coordinator must study
the story. Striking expressions, images, shadows, clichés should be carefully
noted. The best, most provocative questions are later built on these precious
poetic nuggets noted during a close and loving private reading. During the
session, after reading the story aloud, the coordinator intersperses questions.
Often, questions based on particularly knotty points of the story are the most
successful at firing the imagination and at uncorking personal recollections.
In the friendly atmosphere, devoid of fear of our encounters, intimate
recollections of life events are shared. Daily life becomes important,
valuable, as it becomes connected with a story written by a famous author
and shared with a group of companions. Even though I have not gone to
school, even though I have not read many books, the many things that I have
encountered along my life help me now to appreciate a “high culture”
complex story. The new reader feels creative as she helps bring the story
alive. The sharing of these personal reactions with others widens an
exchange which becomes ever more critical. Voices become more assertive,
yet the interest and curiosity to hear out the others help in the acceptance of
complexity.
Poetic texts make us wonder, spark our imagination, bring up memories,
reveal repressed feelings, force questions upon us. Curiosity and desire to
share reactions with others who experience the same story help structure the
first, vague resonances. Intricacies of the narrative are discussed, points of
view defended, rejected, accepted. Literary stories do not demand
conclusions; in fact their complexity encourages elaboration where new
voices not only share in the pleasure of the story and its poetics but also take
part in an increasingly critical democratic discussion where personal
concerns become intertwined with social and moral issues.
Sarah Hirschman
69
Adam Davis, September 2008
Work and Talk
I want to start with an unreflective invocation of some ancient wisdom and some
conventional wisdom: Thought alone moves nothing, and talk is cheap. Yet here we are,
participating in a symposium (which sounds ancient) on democracy (which sounds
modern to some), to think and talk about the value of thoughtful talk.
We are talking about the value of thoughtful talk because its value is questionable and
often questioned—its goods either unnamed or unrecognized as real goods. Its
questionable value derives from its apparent non-productivity and its apparent antiproductivity—thoughtful talk gets nothing done and often even gets in the way of getting
things done. If we’re thinking and talking, this caricature says, we’re not doing anything,
not working, not being productive.
I want in this paper to make a case for the value of thoughtful talk—or reflective
discourse—in the generally indifferent or hostile world of working and doing, but before
I start making the case, I want to say a bit more about the world of work and then a word,
too, about our largely separate world of thought and talk.
Work, as most people seem to assume most of the time, is not play; it's work. This means
many things, most of them unhappy, but chief among them is this: work is in some way
de-humanizing. Work, to continue the caricature, treats us as means and encourages us to
treat others as means as well. What matters is not so much who is doing the work as that
the work gets done. (If you, Ricky, don’t get it done, someone else will.) Here, then, are
two noticeable features of the world of work: 1) we are likely (and often encouraged) to
be treated as means and to treat others as means, and 2) we are likely (and often
encouraged) to ask only questions of how, of means—How can we make this more
quickly? How can we sell more of these? How can we get more done?
It is fairly easy to see that the how question’s reign might be threatened by other
questions—questions of why and what is. If we ask ‘why make this more quickly?’ or
‘what exactly is this more that we want to get done?’ we are potentially throwing a
wrench in the works, whatever the works may be.
70
What to do, then, with questions of why and what is—questions that, taken seriously,
might get in the way of work, but questions that, on the other hand, can’t be entirely
extinguished?
One solution is to establish a confined space for these questions, to let those folks who
want to think and talk do so somewhere else: let them go back to school, or let them
spend their free time on activities that resemble school—book groups, continuing
education classes, symposia. If there is a world of thought and talk, or thoughtful talk, it
is the world associated most strongly with the liberal arts. This world is concerned chiefly
with ideas rather than things, conversation rather than actions, the mind rather than
bodies. This world can seem insignificant or merely frothy in large part because it exists
outside the economic pressures that drive most of our existence. In fact it is precisely
because of their freedom from these kinds of pressures that we call these the liberal arts.
But what, then, is the relation between the world of doing or of work and the world of
reflecting or the liberal arts—or between questions of how, on one hand, and why and
what is, on the other? What is the relation between production and reflection?
In taking on this question, we have to acknowledge that much depends on what is being
produced, what is getting done. And if, as I suggested a moment ago, some kinds of work
require or depend on treating others as means and thinking only about our means rather
than our ends, I also have to acknowledge that there is a species of work, happily, that
aims at what we mean when we talk of ‘good works.’ The adjective here—the good in
good works—seems to show up when we are doing work that at the very least intends not
to treat others as means and in most cases to do much more than that. When our work is
in some sense an expression of care for (rather than use of) others, we are engaged in a
particular species of work—value-laden, or mission-driven, or other-regarding work.
We do this kind of work not principally for the external goods we accrue (money or
status or power) or for the desirable conditions (health insurance, a bowl of jolly
ranchers, flex time) but because we believe the work, in itself, has some element of
goodness in it—it is morally good work. We do this kind of work because we believe it is
good in some direct way for a cause, for others, for those who could use help, and
therefore that it is also good for us, even if the pay sucks. The most obvious examples of
this kind of work are the jobs that appear to require sacrifice—peace corps and
americorps, public defenders, perhaps also the military and missionaries. Then, next in
line, we would probably put teachers, nurses, people in the social services. Other value71
laden work would have to include doctors, engineers, office-holders, and police, but the
more obvious the rewards the individual workers receive for their work, the less likely it
is that we’ll call this work ‘mission-driven.’ Doctors Without Borders: good works.
Doctors in Westchester: shrewd career choice.
I want to stay with this distinction between work on the whole and good works for
another moment, because it seems to offer the beginning of a bridge between how
questions and why questions, between production and reflection. We can see a slightly
more specific version of this same distinction in the relation between entrepreneurship
and social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is, right now, very popular, as a term
if not as a phenomenon, and it happens that the term itself is unusually revealing. It is
revealing because the adjective does so much work: in the phrase ‘social justice,’ the
adjective is redundant (what other kind of justice is there?), but this is emphatically not
the case with social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship seems to be opposed to
typical entrepreneurship, that is, selfish or a-social or even anti-social entrepreneurship.
This one kind of entrepreneurship, which warrants the adjective social, seems to be
concerned with getting things done for others, with improving the world in some direct
way. Social entrepreneurship seems to stand toward entrepreneurship the way Aristotle's
healthy regimes stand toward their perverted reflections—and here, too, the distinction
rests on whose interest is being served, whose good. I doubt any defender of social
entrepreneurship would do away with the claim that SE is also good for the entrepreneur
herself, but again, the adjective drives us to think about the other, or the others' goods
being served.
Back, then, to the bridge—the adjective social in social entrepreneurship, like the
adjective good in good works, seems to move us toward the liberal arts in the following
way: social entrepreneurship, or any kind of good work, has what might be called
humanitarian concerns; the world of the liberal arts has humanistic concerns.
These words—humanitarian and humanistic—are obviously related, but there is still
some significant difference between them: the humanitarian is most concerned with our
basic and common needs—food, water, freedom from violence, and so on. The humanist,
on the other hand, is concerned with what is unique about us, what is highest or rarest in
us. The humanitarian sees a person in poverty and wants to deliver a bag of rice and a
vaccine. The humanist sees a painting in a museum and wants to deliver a lecture on the
nobility of the human spirit and to take a sip of wine.
Now, I said that I was hoping to build a bridge, but here I’ve arrived at another divide.
Again, then, to the bridge: I want to assert, as I move toward the end of this paper, that
72
the humanities, or a particular kind of humanistic activity, can help us become more
humanitarian, or more capable of living with—rather than among—others. This assertion
will extend beyond obviously humanitarian work in a few moments, but first I want
briefly to sketch the particular humanistic activity I have in mind and the impact I think it
can have.
The argument is pretty straightforward: the more vividly we see other people as other
people, the more likely it is that we will be concerned with their well-being, that we will
not be able to ignore those things that detract from their well-being. But seeing others as
others means seeing them as more than just bundles of needs. The more we see other
human beings as being like us—not so much in their bodies as in their minds and their
hearts—the more likely we are to want them to be treated with respect. The more
complex and deep their inner lives appear to us to be, the more likely it is that we will
take steps to improve the basic conditions of their physical lives. That, in any case, is the
core of the assertion, to be shot down later, no doubt.
For now, before it has been shot down, I want to talk a little bit about how we can come
to see others as others in some full sense—and this is where humanitarian concerns and
humanistic concerns really come together. I don't believe that all kinds of activities
generally understood to be humanistic conduce to our becoming more humanitarian,
more concerned with the well-being or the flourishing of others. Art appreciation
traditionally understood, for example, may not do the trick. But some kinds of humanistic
activities do. Talking with other people through texts, and especially through the artful
representation of characters and narratives, can, I believe, cultivate empathy.
When we read good texts well—and especially when we talk well with each other about
our differing readings of these texts (if these texts are good, there are bound to be
differing readings)—then at least three kinds of empathy (or identification) develop:
1) we empathize with, or put ourselves in the place of, the characters in the texts (we
may also put ourselves in the place of the author, though this is significantly
different, and probably less important)
2) we empathize with those we're talking to about the characters—the other people
in the room
3) we empathize with those outside the room who are in one respect or another like
the characters we've talked about or the people we’re talking with
The third of these is obviously the kicker, so here’s an example. In Chapter 11 of II
73
Samuel, from the Hebrew Scriptures, King David does some bad things—he doesn't go
out to make war when he should, and while he's home, he takes a soldier's wife,
impregnates her, tries unsuccessfully to cover it up, and then sends her loyal soldier of a
husband off with a message that will get him killed. David does all this, including the bid
at the cover-up, yet he doesn't seem to lose a moment of sleep until, in the succeeding
chapter, the prophet Nathan tells him a story. The story is short and powerful:
There were two men in one city: the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man
had exceeding many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing save one
little ewe lamb, which he had bought and reared; and it grew up together with
him, and with his children; it did eat of his own morsel, and drank of his own cup,
and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveler
unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to
dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him, but took the poor man's
lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him.
David hears this story and gets angry, as I suspect most of us do. The rich man, David
says, deserves to die, and to restore the lamb fourfold to the poor man. After David says
this, Nathan responds, “Thou art the man.” David hears Nathan say this, and he knows it
to be true: he is that man. Nathan’s story about the rich man’s treatment of the poor man
compels David to step away from himself and recognize what seem to be his inviolable
ethical principles. He thus comes to see Uriah and Bathsheba and himself through a story
and then a short but direct conversation about the story.
The important question, for the purposes of this paper, is not so much what David comes
to see but what a group of VISTA or AmeriCorps members, or non-profit board
members, or policemen come to see. What would they think and say in reading and
discussing this short excerpt from a big book? How would their notions of justice be
affected, and their sense of their colleagues, and their thoughts about their work?
For a moment, now, I want to try to imagine how I would respond if I were hearing what
I’ve been saying. I think, hearing this, I'd say: that all sounds nice, but where would
people actually talk about stories at work? And even if there were places where this
happened, would it actually issue in the thoughtful talk and the kinds of empathy
mentioned above? How would stories and talk about stories actually work to deepen
concern for others in the world of work?
74
I want to answer that very quickly by talking about some of the work I've been doing
over the past few years. Through programs run by the Illinois Humanities Council and
the Project on Civic Reflection, I have been going into the good-works workplace, the
underfunded workplace, but the workplace nonetheless—the world of getting things
done, the how-world—to help people talk with each other, through short but complex
pieces of literature, about the why of their work. I have been doing this with service
organizations, educators, non-profits, social service organizations, charitable foundations,
and volunteers. I and my colleagues in this work will go into an organization every few
weeks, arrange chairs in something resembling a circle, and help participants talk with
each other not about what they have to do at 3:30 or by the end of the week, but about
Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem ‘Lovers of the Poor’, or about Toni Cade Bambara’s short
story ‘The Lesson’, or about an excerpt from Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’—and,
most importantly, we will talk about how their understanding of these pieces of literature
impacts their understanding of the work that they share. What often seems to happen—
and what participants themselves say—is that they come to feel more connected with
each other, more connected to those they are serving, less likely to get burnt out, more
likely to consider things from other perspectives, and more likely to continue doing good
works.
When I began doing this work, at the suggestion of someone from the Illinois Humanities
Council, my great fear was that I would get people doing good work to think in more
complex ways about their work—and thereby to turn away from it. What I have seen
happen, though, is precisely the opposite—the more these folks have been able to think
and talk with each other about the weight and complexity of their value-laden work, the
more committed and energetic they have become.
Now I want to tie back in to where this started—with work on one side and thoughtful
talk on the other. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his First Discourse, concludes his defense of
the useful arts as against the fine arts by invoking a classic distinction between Sparta,
which knows how to act well, and Athens, which knows how to speak well. It's fairly
clear that Rousseau comes down on the side of the useful rather than the fine arts there, at
the end of the First Discourse. But here I want to suggest that the distinction between
acting well, on one hand, and thinking and talking well, on the other, isn't so clear. I want
to suggest more strongly that the fine or liberal arts, used in a certain way—even a
peculiarly democratic way—are likely to make the useful arts much more useful, and
more generally useful.
In beginning to make the case that reflection is good for production, that thoughtful talk
is good for our work, or at least for our good works, I have not done two important
things. First, I have not said much about the particular model of workplace text-based
75
discussion that I trust most. I’m counting on talking more about the model during the
symposium itself. Second, I have not taken on the most challenging part of an argument
for reflection in the workplace. That is, I have limited my argument for the value of
reflection in the workplace to the good-works workplace. But as I conclude, I want to say
two things about the limits of this argument.
First, the good-works workplace is much larger than we sometimes think; it could include
the fields of education, health care, national service, social service, and political and
military service, among others. So an argument that confines itself to the good-works
workplace may not be as limited as it first seems.
Second, I want to suggest that there is a stronger relation between the good-works
workplace and the workplace in general than we might often want to concede. I believe
that a friend of mine in New York who describes himself and his work as ‘part of the
problem’ is in the minority. Even in a roomful of Philip Morris executives, I imagine,
most of the folks around the table think of themselves as doing good work—work that
benefits others as well as themselves. And if most of us are likely to think that our work
does some good for others, then we and our work would be well-served by thinking and
talking with each other more about what this good consists in and who these others are.
The argument, then, is to use the humanities to re-humanize the workplace—and to
recognize that in the workplace, there exists what might be called a market for reflection.
In order to tap this market, though, we would first of all have to have confidence about
the value of this kind of thoughtful conversation, on its own and for its effects.
Thoughtful conversation is, for obvious reasons, cheap, but it can also be productive. For
it be productive, however, we might need to think again about what we're doing it for and
especially how we're doing it—and this last piece may require re-thinking our relation to
the books and arts we study.
76
SACRIFICING DEMOCRACY
Bart Schultz, Director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago
Abstract:
Can we usefully talk about reflective discourse as something distinct from dialogue or deliberation? What
are the differences?
My contribution to this conference will strike a highly skeptical note. I do not believe that democracy is in
a healthy state of realization in the U.S. or anywhere else, and I worry that calls for more reflective
discourse and/or dialogue and/or deliberation and/or civic friendship too often mask the political realities
and power dynamics that they ought to be countering. The challenge, especially in the U.S., is to achieve a
sufficient degree of pluralism and social intelligence to effectively stimulate reflective discourse, dialogue
etc. But without a much richer and more radical array of global social experiments, the evidential basis for
theorizing about such things is simply far too thin.
"What-what is that American promise? It's a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our
own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It's a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that
businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, to look out for American
Workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours--ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what is should do is that
which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep
our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure
opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who's willing to
work.
That's the promise of America, the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as
one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.
That's the promise we need to keep. That's the change we need right now"
Barack Obama, Acceptance Speeach at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, August 28, 2008
77
Barack Obama had trouble saying it. His acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention moved
artfully between the sense of "promise" as a ground for expectation and "promise" as a specific pledge, as a
saying that is a doing. One and the same "American promise" is something that apparently "makes us fix
our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend" and something that gets
made "to my daughters when I tuck them in at night and ... that you make to yours." The candidate in fact
made sparing reference to "democracy" in any serious political philosophical sense, opting instead to
inspire with talk of an "American promise" redolent of the aspirational, imaginative element uniting
everything from the March on Washington to the bedtime stories told to Malia and Sasha. Dreams that you
can believe in, not dreams to be deferred. A promise that can still be kept.
This is a special form of promise, a promise that bends without ever being finally broken, a promise that
can be both made to and kept by the people, a promise that in some magical way is almost its own
fulfillment, keeping hope alive. After all, the time horizon on this promise appears to be that long arc of
the universe tending towards justice. The allusion to the harsher perspective of a Langston Hughes was
fleeting and in faintly invidious contrast to the words of King's "I Have a Dream" speech: "The men and
women who gathered there could've heard many things. They could've heard words of anger and discord.
They could've been told to succumb to the fear and frustrations of so many dreams deferred." Instead, they
heard King's Ellisonian message that "in American, our destiny is inextricably linked, that together our
dreams can be one." And “'We cannot walk alone,' the preacher cried. 'And as we walk, we must make the
pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.'” The quotation marks fall as the
candidate makes the preacher's words his own. “America, we cannot turn back.” We cannot walk alone,
turn back, continue the politics of the past (eight years), etc.
Are we sleeping together, walking together, or waking together? All across American, "something is
stirring," and it's us, the American dreamers dreaming of "individual responsibility and mutual
responsibility." We need to march, not to Washington, but to the future. Washington will follow. True,
Obama knows “the cynicism we all have about government.” But he also knows that “Change happens—
change happens because the American people demand it, because they rise up and insist on new ideas and
new leadership, a new politics for a new time.” It is up to up to keep our brothers, our sisters, and the
promise of America.
If only the revisionist pragmatist public intellectual Richard Rorty had lived to see this version of
Achieving Our Country. In his book of that title, Rorty had taken his point of departure from James
Baldwin's line: "If we--and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks,
who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others--do not falter in our duty now, we
may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the
history the world." (Rorty, Achieving Our Country [Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1998] pp.
12-13). Here is the defining moment, and the handful has become a seeming multitude. Rorty's Baldwin
was not the angry Baldwin who, like Richard Wright, moved to France to escape American racism. For
Rorty, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for selfimprovement.... just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so
insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional
involvement with one's country—feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of
its history, and by various present-day national policies—is necessary if political deliberation is to be
imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.” (p.
3),
78
Rorty would have loved the deep historical irony of having the most truly cosmopolitan presidential
candidate the U.S. has ever seen opening up the very University of Chicago liberal/pragmatist Way he had
searched for—reweaving our solidarity and/or National pride to help us achieve our country, just when it so
desperately needs achieving. Forget the carping and whining of the literary Academic Left and get with the
real people, including those in Law School and Econ. Depts. Basketball is a perfectly legitimate substitute
for bowling; in fact, it is harder to people to do it alone.
It may turn out, some will argue, that Obama will confirm Rorty's diagnosis and prognosis: “Emphasizing
the continuity between Herbert Croly and Lyndon Johnson, between John Dewey and Martin Luther King,
between Eugene Debs and Walker Reuther, would help us to recall a reformist Left which deserves not
only respect but imitation—the best model available for the American Left in the coming century. If the
intellectuals and the unions could ever get back together again, and could reconstitute the kind of Left
which existed in the Forties and Fifties, the first decade of the twenty-first century might conceivably be a
Second Progressive Era.” (p. 56). Obama is trying—he loves the word “Progressive” and FDR, Kennedy,
King all loom large—though he will have to make that the second decade of the twenty-first century. One
only hopes that he will turn out to be even more progressive than he is on the matter of income inequality.
He needs to undo much more than the damage of the last eight years.
Addressing wealth inequality in a more serious way would surely be a big step. And it can be done. As
Larry Bartels argues, in Unequal Democracy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008) : “The fact that
most other rich democracies are considerably less unequal than the United States provides some reason to
think that political arrangements short of Stalinism might not be entirely futile in mitigating economic
inequality. For that matter, even the limited range of policies implemented in the United States over the
past half-century has had substantial effects on prevailing levels of economic inequality. In short, politics
matters.” (p. 19).
However, as Bartels also demonstrates: “although Americans have strongly and consistently favored raising
the federal minimum wage, their elected representatives have allowed the real value of the minimum wage
to decline by more than 40% since the late 1960s. Moreover, my analysis . . . shows that elected officials
voting on a minimum wage increase paid no attention at all to the views of people poor enough to be
directly affected by that policy change. My broader analysis indicates that this sort of unresponsiveness is
no anomoly, but a very common pattern in American policy making.” (p. 27). Indeed, like so many others,
Bartels cogently shows how in case after case, “Economic inequality clearly has pervasive, corrosive
effects on political representation and policy making in contemporary America.” (284). The force of the
point needs spelling out, however: “Observers of contemporary American politics may be unsurprised to
hear that elected officials attached more weight to the preferences of affluent and middle-class constituents
than of low-income constituents. However, only the most cynical critic of American democracy could be
unsurprised to learn that low-income constituents seem to have been entirely ignored in the policy-making
process.” (p. 286). Ignored, that is, when they have not been exploited, experimented upon, locked up,
terrorized, and/or used to fight unjust wars.
And this, of course, is not even to mention the global poor, the billion plus constituency that suffers from
U.S. policy but scarcely manages to secure so much as a passing reference in the Democratic candidate's
acceptance speech. The biggest problems of justice confronting the world today do not make appropriate
campaign material for the major parties.
79
So, apparently the cynic can find some comfort in the Truth about just how effective poor people have
actually been, when rising up. Like the American promise, hope's green valley is no doubt eternal, though,
and it is always possible that Obama will be as generous in extending the lower range of the middle class as
his rival was in extending the upper range, though dropping national boundaries is no doubt beyond all
hope. Many reflective liberals are quite certain that deep down Obama is better than his speeches. He will
have to be. Reality will demand it. The bridge at the end of the world, this world, has yet to be built.
It is difficult to reflect on U.S. politics at this time without reflecting on Obama, who surely does represent
a world historical moment. And I hope more people will read and reflect on his writings and speeches and
still manage to vote for him anyway. But under the circumstances, would it be good for each of us to step
“back from the pressures of daily life” and “think about not how but why you do what you do”? What will
come from “getting together with other civically engaged people and talking about your values and the
choices you make in serving your community,” and doing this by “discussing short readings that help you
gather and articulate your thoughts.” Is that what will help us learn to work together effectively for the
fabled “common good”?
Who knows? Why think there is any one result, even at any given time? At any rate, surely we will have a
better sense of what democracy really needs when we have had more experience with it as an actual social
experiment. And taking the beam out of our own eye before trying to spread what we know not would be
a reflective way to go. As it stands, the U.S. Is doing more to disenfranchise people than to bring them into
full participation. Witness the racial exclusions involved in the Supreme Court's new doctrine regarding
picture identification documents as a requirement for voting, a policy that has an environmentally perverse
incentive and harks back to racist literacy tests. This is very much in the mainstream of the U.S. political
tradition, alas (see Alexander Keyssar's sobering work, The Right to Vote [ New York: Basic Books,
2000]).
Moreover, the question “Who Reflects?” seems just as appropriate as that mainstay of democratic theory,
“Who Deliberates?” What is clear enough is that most of the major U.S. leaders, particularly in Republican
administrations, are not given to reading and reflection. It was a major news item when George W. Bush
claimed to be taking an interest in some serious literary works other than the Christian Bible—which one
can only take seriously as a literary work--even though no one really believed him anyway. If Bush spent
more time reading and reflecting and less time promoting the class interests that are destroying the world,
that would surely be a beneficial result.
Indeed, one could go further, and warmly recommend serious reading of and reflection on Darwin for the
majority of the U.S. voting public. And of/on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Bertrand
Russell, E.O. Wilson, Peter Singer (especially The President of Good and Evil [New York: Plume, 2004])
and many other compelling writers who challenge religious thought and help people think hard about their
values. Less time with the Bible, especially for Bush, and more with evolution and ecology would be a
great thing.
But my suspicion is that the Project on Civic Reflection will fail just as badly as the major U.S. political
parties when it comes to getting the relevant people to read things that will seriously challenge them. I
80
could support it as is, with all the jolly old Aristotle and Co. (though I would urge that the readings from
Twain include “Letters from the Earth”) if it held out the promise of getting lots of potential Republican
voters so lost in “deep” conversation that they forgot to go vote, come November. But should it be taken
up by the Obama campaign, it would simply be twisted by the opposition to bolster the charge of
intellectual elitism that they are trying to make stick. So, in the interests of party loyalty and National
Pride, I must, on reflection, privatize my reading. Civic Knowledge is a serious thing, demanding sacrifice.
81
What is the role of reflection in a democracy?
Democracy is a word with many valences. It brings to mind an ideal, a set of legal
procedures, as well as a structure of governance. I argue that reflection has a role in all
these aspects of democracy and that civically minded individuals have a role to play in
identifying the ways that democratic practice can be sustained and enriched by the selfconscious inclusion of reflection as a democratic practice.
I.
What kind of reflection has a democratic character?
Most of the time we think of reflection as intensely personal and it take on either a
philosophical or religious, rather than a political cast. However, there are certain
reflective process that take place within and among groups. Public reflection is not when
people come together to reflect individually, that might be called a Quaker meeting, or
meditative gathering, but instead it is when people come together in the same space to
reflect together on a theme or set of issues. This public reflection is made possible by
reflective discourse. While individual reflection might or might not have an aspect that
can be articulated, public reflection is a process that takes place through articulation –
from working out what we think and how we feel in and through the conversation that
takes place within the group.
While there is quite a bit of interest in and scholarship about both the benefits and
drawbacks of public deliberation as well as a vast and extensive library of scholarship on
reflection as a personal and singular phenomenological enterprise (especially as
82
articulated by Emmanuel Kant and G.F. Hegel), there is very little scholarship which
focuses on the nature and uses of reflection as an essential public exercise that may
provide essential goods for the development of the self as well as the creation and
maintenance of flourishing and effective communities of action. It is in an effort to
explore the intellectual history and content of the idea of public reflection as well as to
articulate it’s distinction from other forms of civic engagement and interpersonal
communication that we seek to hold a symposium exploring the issue in depth. The
format of the proposed symposium is simple. We will bring together leading thinkers on
public reflection and reflective practice as it is articulated by John Dewey. In, How We
Think, Dewey defines reflective thought as that mode of thinking in which the grounding
of some belief is deliberately sought and the adequacy of that grounding purposely
examined. He goes on to say that reflective thought has its greatest potential for insight
when it deals with ideas, issues and problems beyond the capabilities of direct perception.
For Dewey, though the public (especially democratic publics) benefit from reflective
thought, it is not necessarily an activity that is best undertaken in a collectivity. For
Dewey reflective thought is close kin to scientific inquiry and as such its purpose is
discovery of the true basis of belief for the purpose of judgment. While the model of
discourse that we call civic reflection is based on serious inquiry into the basis of belief,
both those we hold personally as well as those that motivate, trouble, and complicate the
work of civic life, it is not a format that aims toward judgment. It is a valid question (one
that we have been asked many times) to ask whether and how the process of reflection
benefits from the presence of a group involved in common work. Also, is there particular
83
efficacy in having group conversations in which judgment, that is, the acceptance or
rejection of an idea’s probable correctness, is not the goal?
Donald Schon, a theorist of reflective professional learning who draws heavily on
Dewey’s work, emphasizes the notion that reflection is the basis of all learning and
asserts that even more than the ability to judge what ought to count as truth, those
engaged in active reflection are better equipped to evaluate the meaning and effectiveness
of their own actions in the world. In this way, reflection is less like scientific inquiry than
an act of self-witnessing, in which the subject directs their attention to some aspect of
their own experience and attempts to evaluate it in a new way. In this conception
reflective thinking is the mechanism that makes it possible for people to learn from their
own experience and as such provides a unique source of knowledge that may aid in
determining best practices. Schon’s observations about mindful practice help to point to
the ways in which reflection not primarily focused on judgment, but instead premised on
a continuous process of paired inquiry and evaluation, can be useful to those involved in
practical activities, but his theory does not provide insight into whether reflection might
have special efficacy when it is undertaken in concert with others.
For purchase on this question we will mine the wisdom of scholarship on related
concepts like Aristotle’s notion of political friendship, especially as updated and
elaborated by Danielle Allen in her short yet profound work, Talking to Strangers. In it
she examines the idea that relations among citizens ought to be characterized by a kind of
respect which is based not primarily on the witnessing of demonstrated virtues or
valorized acts, but is instead “characterized by a kind of mutuality that conveys a
84
commitment to equality and shared decision making.”ii This mutuality is not based on
altruism or subscription to a fount of universal affection, instead it is the recognition of
the fact that people engaged in a common project, even when they are strangers and lack
the emotional intimacy of friends can benefit from implementing the core practices of
friendship during the course of their joint enterprise. This area of scholarly inquiry
considers the ways in which strangers can learn to relate to one another and cultivate
habits of expression, interaction and communication that make democratic community
more sustainable, effective and just.
In addition, the theoretical literature on inquiry’s relationship to self care as
elaborated by Plato and his readers including Michel Foucault can help us deepen our
inquiry from one that provides a useful instrumental explanation into one that also
examines the fundamental relationship between self care and care of the community.
Informed by the insights engendered by Plato, especially in his early dialogues
Charmides and Meno, this tradition of thought emphasizes the importance of inquiry as
the most effective tool for learning. In Meno, using the example of a school-aged boy,
Socrates asks: “Is he not better off knowing his own ignorance?” He makes a persuasive
case that not only is the boy better off, but so to are we all. This is because in Socrates
estimation, it is not lecture or explanation that is the best teacher, but the introduction of
doubt about unexamined things combined with the inspiration of the individual to
discover. Through the mouth that Plato provides, Socrates argues that doubt is not the
enemy of knowledge, but its essential aid, especially on matters that people are so
familiar with that the need for explanations or justifications is rarely perceived.
85
In addition, there is the related question of whether and how the act of reflection,
though it is profoundly personal, may always already take place in relation to a world
filled with other knowing subjects. Given our experience facilitating civic reflection
discussions, we have reason to suspect that refection as an interactive process among
people whose experiences and perspectives are diverse can provide access to ways of
understanding and knowing that would otherwise be impossible to tap into. Mikhail
Bakhtin’s work on polyphony and the unfinalizability of the self and others in the fullness
of human relation, which he describes as “carnival” is informative on this point. In his
work, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, he argues that in isolation, a single individual
can never get a clear picture of herself because her location in her own skin
simultaneously deepens and limits what she can know about her affect and behavior. That
means, in order to know the truth of ourselves, we require others who’s perspectives we
are able to understand and, in some basic sense, trust.
II.
How can reflection be a democratic practice?
Reflective discourse creates a habit of thoughtfulness and conversation that
cultivates desirable faculties in citizens: the ability to listen, the ability to consider
alternative ways of seeing and understanding issues, the ability to talk across
difference without ignoring or negating that difference, the ability to attend to
disagreement with civility, the ability to evaluate complex issues in a complex way.
These are all democratic behaviors that are not well-fostered in our contemporary
lives. We live in a culture where even the arts are asked to produce statistical
86
measures of the effectiveness of their programming. We are oriented toward
production and decision making, but do very little to prepare ourselves for these
processes. How can we produce without considering the purpose of what we are
putting into the world? How can we make decisions if we have few or incomplete
methods of identifying and evaluating the grounds upon which a decision should be
made?
III.
The Do-nothing fallacy.
So often we are asked: What does civic reflection do? This is a question that we
have often avoided or sometimes answered with the vague notion that it is the
experience of the conversation and not any outcomes that matter most. I think we fall
into a trap here. Civic reflection and all reflective discourse does something
extremely important, it cultivates a habit of mind and communication that increases
the capacity of regular participants to be able to identify, articulate, and address the
complex problems that are so common in our life and work. It helps people think
outside the box, it pushes people from their ruts, it reminds people that their point of
view is not the only legitimate point of view; it encourages people to examine their
own perspectives and value the perspectives of others. In short, cultivating a habit of
reflective discourse makes the difference between creating a democracy that thrives
and one that merely exists by virtue of legal structure. Public reflection prepares
people for both civic and political engagement, by giving them the tools to listen,
evaluate from many perspectives, and both examine and represent their own unique
viewpoint.
87
88
89