une/July 2008
My Mother’s Garden
Muktha Jost
Getting A Grip
Frances Moore Lappé
The Documented Health Risk of
Genetically Engineered Foods
Dr. Jeffrey Bland Interviews Jeffrey Smith
The Emerging Significance of Urban Agriculture
Jody Woodruff
Our Food Future
Scott McGuire
We Need A New Generation of Farmers
Zoë Bradbury
Soft Intentions, Hard Results
Peter Moore
Fitness Training For The Brain
Jim Brown and Molly Brown
Improved Health Through Detoxification
Daniel Smith, ND
Awakening and Embodiment
An Interview with Judith Blackstone
Randall Keller
Reclaiming Our Attention
Guy Finley
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
Getting A Grip
By Frances Moore Lappé
What if together with our friends, family, and acquaintances, we could probe the root causes of the biggest threats to our planet? What if we were able to grasp something of the common origins of these threats and then identify powerful entry points to interrupt them? And more than that, what if we could then feel we are shifting the destructive underlying patterns toward health? Now, that’s power. Our power.
Bestselling author Frances Moore Lappé teaches that democracy is an art form that can enhance every aspect of our lives, and in her latest book, Getting a Grip, you’ll that find people just like you are living that truth—all over the world. Once we’ve reclaimed our power, Lappé explains, we’re able to make things better not just in local politics and the marketplace, but in our families and relationships as well. In the book you’ll learn how to practice democracy through active listening and mediation, how language can trap us or set us free, and how to transform fear itself into something that says Go instead of Stop. With so much at stake in a world gone mad, now is the time for Living Democracy. As Lappé asks in the Opening Note: “Why not go for it?”
We’re pleased to be able to offer our readers the following excerpt from Getting a Grip.
•• •• ••
I’ve finally figured it out. I am not overwhelmed, de-pressed, confused, or bewildered by our world gone mad. I’m ready. I’m past ready.
I just want to go for it.
Why can’t we have a nation—why can’t we have a world we’re proud of? Why can’t we stop wringing our hands over poverty, hunger, species decimation, genocide, and death from curable disease that we know is all needless? The truth is there is no reason we can’t.
They say—whoever the “they” are—that as we age, we mellow.
I don’t think so. I’m getting less and less patient.
Why? Because I realize that humanity has no excuses anymore. In the span of my own lifetime, both historical evidence and breakthroughs in knowledge have wiped out all our excuses. We know that we know how to end this needless suffering, and we have all the resources to do it. From sociology and anthropology to economics, from education and ecology to systems analysis … the evidence is in. We know what works.
“Soft” psychology as well as “hard” neuroscience also confirm that we humans come equipped with a moral compass—with deep needs and sensibilities that make us yearn to end the suffering. Yet we deny these feelings every single day at huge cost to our society and to our world.
No physical obstacle is stopping us. Nothing. The barrier is in our heads. We are creating this world gone mad, not because we’re compelled to by some deep flaws in our nature and not because Nature itself is stingy and unforgiving, but because of ideas we hold. Ideas?
Yes. This is one of the most startling discoveries—awakenings—of the last century: Human beings are in fact creatures of the mind. Our ideas about reality determine what we see, what we believe is possible, and therefore what we become. And we also now know that human beings can change our core, lifeshaping ideas, even our ideas of democracy, of power, of fear, and—yes—of evil itself.
As we do, we no longer have to settle for grasping at straws—wild acts of protest, or tearful acts of charity, or any other short-term, feel-less-bad steps. We become open to the possibility of real change, and, when you think about it, how could we ever believe “the world” can change unless we experience ourselves changing?
So Getting A Grip is about learning to see the killer ideas that trap us and letting them go. It’s about people in all walks of life interrupting the spiral of despair and reversing it with new ideas, ingenious innovation—and courage. It’s about finding that mixture of anger and hope to energize us for this do-or-die effort. Why not go for it?
Why are we as societies creating a
world that we as individuals abhor?
This is the question that’s propelled my life for decades now.
It is really bewildering. We know that no human being actually gets up in the morning vowing, “Yeah, today I’m going to make sure another child dies needlessly of hunger,” or muttering, “Sure, I’ll do my part to heat the planet and obliterate entire species.” Yet each day over twenty-five thousand young children die of hunger and poverty, and roughly one hundred more species are forever gone. And the crises are not abating, they just keep whacking us: global climate chaos, terrorism, racial and religious divides, life-stunting poverty, pandemic disease … and now our own government’s betrayal of constitutional principle.
Again … why?
I think for a lot of us, there is no real answer. Things just keep happening.
We know we’re not in control, and it seems like nobody is.
Sure, some people believe the problem is just us—human beings are just screwed up. Whether you call it original sin or simple selfishness, it’s just who we are. Others are more targeted in assigning blame. For them, the root cause of our planet’s crises is those particular people … the evil ones. Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, Dick Cheney. Still others believe we have no choice. We must conform to the now-proven economic laws of the global marketplace or suffer an even worse fate. For all their many differences, the consequences of these views are similar. They leave us powerless. With no grip on how things got so bad, we have no clue as to where to start to correct them. So we’re tempted to seize on any gesture of charity or any burst of protest—any random act of sanity. For a moment, at least, we can feel less useless in the face of the magnitude of the crises. Ultimately, though, acts of desperation contribute to our despair if we’re unable to link our specific acts to real solutions.
Feeling powerless, we’re robbed of energy and creativity, with hearts left open to fear and depression. No wonder the World Health Organization tells us depression is now the fourth leading cause of lost productive life worldwide—expected to jump to second place in fifteen years. Or that suicides worldwide now exceed homicides by 50 percent.
But what if … what if … together with our friends, family, and acquaintances, we could probe the root causes of the biggest threats to our planet? What if we were able to grasp something of the common origins of these threats and then identify powerful entry points to interrupt them? And more than that, what if we could then feel we are shifting the destructive underlying patterns toward health?
Now, that’s power. Our power.
Peeling Away the Layers
Over the years, I’ve come to sense that blaming the evil other stumbles on what logicians call an attribution error, the misplaced identification of cause. And it’s a pretty serious error, for it releases us from asking really helpful questions: What is it about the current order we ourselves are creating that elicits so much pain and destruction? And peeling to the next layer: What are our own unexamined assumptions and beliefs that leave us feeling so powerless?
In the late nineteenth century, for example, Indians outnumbered the British civil servants ruling them by three hundred thousand to one. Yet Indians’ widespread belief in their powerlessness continued until Gandhi and others re-framed reality, revealing the power that was theirs all along. In 1930, Indians declared independence and, sparked by Gandhi’s example, thousands walked over two hundred miles to the sea to protest the British salt tax. Within seventeen years, the Indian people had ousted their colonial rulers.
It’s pretty easy to see how mental concepts—ideas about reality—disempower others, whether it’s a belief in a ruler’s “divine right” or a conviction about the inferiority of a lower caste. It’s much harder to perceive the mental straightjackets we ourselves don every day.
Our future, though, may well depend on giving it a try.
In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, social philosopher Eric Fromm observes that all human beings carry within us “frames of orientation” through which we make sense of the world. They determine—often literally—what we can see, what we believe humans are made of, and therefore what we believe is possible. In other words, just about everything.
Now this trait might be just fine … if our frames are life-serving, but, Fromm warns, they aren’t always. To stir us to realize the danger within this unique aspect of our humanness—our filtering through socially determined frames—Fromm came up with this mind-bending declaration: “It is man’s humanity that makes him so inhuman.”
Cultures live or die, Fromm is telling us, not by violence, or by chance, but ultimately by ideas. And unfortunately for our precious planet, much of the world appears locked within sets of ideas, including our ideas about democracy, that actually contribute to our “inhumanity”—whether that means inflicting or ignoring the suffering and loss mounting worldwide.
What I call a Spiral of Powerlessness, the scary current of limiting beliefs and consequences in which I sense we’re trapped, has as its premise “lack.”
There isn’t enough of anything, neither enough “goods”—whether jobs or jungles—nor enough “goodness” because human beings are, well, pretty bad. These ideas have been drilled into us for centuries, as world religions have dwelt on human frailty, and Western political ideologies have picked up similar themes.
“Homo homini lupus [we are to one other as wolves],” wrote the influential seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Repeating a Roman aphorism—long before we’d learned how social wolves really are—Hobbes reduced us to cutthroat animals.
“Private interest … is the only immutable
point in the human heart.”
- Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America (1835)
From that narrow premise, it follows that it’s best to mistrust deliberative problem-solving, distrust even democratic government, and grasp for an infallible law—The Market!—driven by the only thing we can really count on, human selfishness. From there, wealth concentrates and suffering increases, confirming the dreary premises that set the spiral in motion in the first place. What this downward spiral tells me is that we humans now suffer from what linguists call “hypocognition,” the lack of a critical concept we need to thrive. And it’s no trivial gap! Swept into the vortex of this destructive spiral, we’re missing an understanding of democracy vital and compelling enough to create the world we want.
Democracy? Why start there?
Democracy is the problem-solving device much of the world now embraces as the way to meet common needs and solve common problems. So if our definition of democracy is flawed, we are in big trouble.
Elections Plus A Market …
That’s Democracy?
To see what’s missing, let’s explore a bit more the dominant conception of reality in which our nation’s culture, especially our view of democracy, is grounded. As just noted, its foundational premise is scarcity—there just isn’t enough of anything—from love to jobs to parking spots. In such a world, only one type of person thrives. So if you peel away all the fluff, humans must have evolved as competitive materialists, elbowing one another out in a giant scramble over scarce stuff.
Absorbing this shabby caricature of humanity, we understandably see ourselves as incapable of making a success of democratic deliberation—assuming a selfish nature, we’re sure somebody will always muck it up. Not to fret, though. We’ve been assured with ever-greater intensity since the 1980s that if real democracy—deliberating together to shape a common purpose and strategies—is suspect, there’s a perfect solution: Just turn over our fate to an impersonal law that will settle things for us. Privatize and commoditize all that we can—from health care to prison management to schools—in order to take full advantage of what Ronald Reagan called “the magic of the market.”
And government? It’s something done to us or for us by taking “our money,” so the less of it the better
From these assumptions, it is easy to see why most Americans grow up absorbing the notion that democracy boils down to just two things—elected government and a market economy. Since in the United States we have both, there isn’t much for us to do except show up at the polls and shop.
I like to call this stripped down duo Thin Democracy because it is feeble.
We breathe in this definition like invisible ether, so it’s easy to jump over an unpleasant fact: Real democracy and our peculiar variant of a market economy are based on opposing principles. Democracy derives from the Greek: demos (people) plus kratos (rule). Thus democracy depends on the wide dispersion of power so that each citizen has both a vote and a voice. But our particular market economy, driven by one rule—that is, highest return to shareholder and corporate chiefs—moves inexorably in the opposite direction. By continually returning wealth to wealth, a one-rule economy leads to an ever-increasing concentration of power.
In “getting a grip” myself, I’ve tried to shape a way of seeing the world that has explanatory power for me: Our primary obstacle, I lay out here, is that we’re stuck in an unworkable mental map that cannot come to grips with local-to-global crises—Thin Democracy. My diagnosis is hard-nosed about human frailty without writing off our species as incorrigible, for I am reminded almost daily that, as creatures of the mind, we have the unique power to bring to consciousness a failing mental frame—those core assumptions shaping our view of reality—and to remake it with new information and experience.
“[E]ach person has the biological
power to interrupt detrimental,
derogatory beliefs and generate
new ideas. These new ideas, in turn,
can alter the neural circuitry that
governs how we behave and what
we believe.”
- Andrew Newberg, M.D.
Why We Believe What We Believe
We can intentionally evolve more life-serving mental maps. Imagine that!
But to walk this journey presumes a certain kind of humility. With all our fancy forecasting—from ten-day weather reports to the “Fed’s” inflation predictions—we can be lulled into believing we can see into the future pretty well. But actually, we can’t. History doesn’t unfold in neat, even increments. It moves in messy, surprising jolts, and in this unprecedented era, the surprises could even intensify.
And here’s the big upside: Recognizing that in this unique moment it is not possible to know what’s possible … we discover we are free. We’re free to throw ourselves into the most thrilling, planetary struggle our species has every known. We can probe deeply, asking together, What might be a richer understanding of democracy—one strong and vital enough to meet today’s challenges, and compelling enough to stand up to extremists’ claims?
Thin Democracy vs. Living Democracy
Human beings don’t walk into a meaning void. That’s not who we are. So if we are to let go of the mental map that is generating Thin Democracy, more is needed than simply acknowledging its frightening pitfalls. We must have at least a glimmer of what can replace it. And that’s not easy, for some of the West’s most influential opinion shapers carry the presumption of scarcity right down to ideology itself. Referring to corporate capitalism, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared, “I don’t think there will be an alternative ideology this time around. There are none.”
Neither can one suddenly invent out of whole cloth something as profound as a new way of seeing the world. So the great news is that, as democracy reduced to elections plus a one-rule economy is failing, a richer form is taking shape. By its nature, though, it’s not as easy to describe as Thin Democracy.
It is, nonetheless, real. Yet because of the way human brains work, we probably won’t be able to recognize it unless we believe it’s possible. So as much as anything, my goal is to enable us to see possibility: what is happening all around us but still invisible to most of us.
I know the challenge because I was one of the blind ones only a few decades ago as I began asking, what might a workable democracy look like? I figured I’d follow up a few leads on engaged, more participatory forms of problem solving and write a book about what I learned. I expected to turn up a dozen or so examples. In the end, my headache was having to choose among hundreds to write The Quickening of America. I still laugh when I recall, on my author’s tour, a U.S. News & World Report interviewer confessing, “I went to Harvard, and I had never heard about any of what’s in your book!”
That book led to several more that have changed my life forever. They’ve given me a new lens through which I can now see what I like to call Living Democracy—democracy as a way of life, no longer something done to us or for us but what we ourselves create.
It’s new, and it’s really old.
Living Democracy furthers a long historical strain expressed throughout our history and in many indigenous practices the world over. Benjamin Franklin, for example, drew on the Iroquois Confederacy’s philosophy that, for hundreds of years before one Pilgrim set foot here, had succeeded by practicing inclusive decision making and by valuing diversity. For his part, Thomas Jefferson understood democracy as citizens’ everyday participation in public power.
The Living Democracy I see emerging is not merely a formal government set up but is embedded in a wide range of human relationships, so—and here’s the vital part—its values apply just as much in economic life or in cultural life as in political life. We don’t have to leave our humanity behind when, for instance, we enter the workplace. Put very practically, Living Democracy means infusing the power of citizens’ voices and values throughout our public lives and removing the power of money from governance. Rest assured, Living Democracy
isn’t a new fixed “ism,” blueprint, or utopian end-state. It continually evolves, incorporating new experience as more and more people reject the view that democracy is a set system and begin to work with the idea that democracy is a set of system qualities, driven by core human values.
Here is a contrast of assumptions between the dominant and failing Thin Democracy with those motivating a richer practice of democracy, one that may become democracy’s next historical stage:
Thin Democracy
• Democracy is a set system: elected government plus a market economy. We may have to keep cleaning it up around the edges, but our democracy is basically complete—it’s the culmination of human history.
• The free market, along with government and corporate executives and experts, determines what happens. Citi-zens vote, work, and shop. A single rule—highest return to shareholders—drives the market, which does tend to concentrate wealth and power … and then influence the political process. But there’s no other way; tampering with the market would kill its efficiencies and our way of life.
• Only officials and celebrities have public lives. Citizens choose them to carry the responsibility.
• Public life is ugly and alienating. No special learning is needed, just thick skins and big egos! (And access to big bucks.)
• Getting involved in public affairs is a necessary hassle to defend our private lives and interests. It is the burden a free people must bear to “earn” our liberties.
Living Democracy
• Living Democracy is a set of system qualities that shape daily life. Its values of inclusion, fairness, and mutual accountability infuse not only political life but economic and cultural life as well. Living Democracy is always evolving; it’s never finished.
• Citizens use their voices and values to shape public choices. They set rules to keep wealth continually circulating and to keep its influence out of politics. They decide what is a market commodity and what is a right of citizenship because it is essential to life. Moving beyond a one-rule economy (highest return to existing wealth), “values boundaries” guide the market, from environmental protections to anti-trust laws; and citizens’ conscious shopping choices foster healthy communities.
• All citizens have public lives. As buyers, savers, investors, voters, advocates, students, employers, wor-kers, and members of social benefit organizations, our actions create the quality of our communities and the wider world.
• Democracy is a learned art. As we practice its arts—active listening, creative conflict, negotiation, mediation, mentoring and other relational skills—we reap the joy of effectiveness.
• We humans know our own well-being depends on healthy communities and that only in public engagement can we fulfill our need to connect with others in common purpose, to make a difference, to express our values and to fully respect ourselves. Engagement is part of the good life.
Okay. As you’ve glanced at the contrasts above, did Living Democracy strike you as naïve or utopian, even if you didn’t want it to? Before exploring more deeply the qualities I see shaping Living Democracy, let me address a core reservation I sense in so many people.
Goodness of or in Human Nature?
Despite growing evidence to the contrary, a lot of us assume human beings aren’t up to the task Living Democracy implies. Most people just want to be left alone, we’re told. In fact, the right-wing leader Grover Norquist names his anti-tax movement the Leave Us Alone Coalition. By this logic, Living Democracy is naïve, even dangerous, because its emergence would require changing our very nature—at best, a hopeless proposition; at worst, a coercive nightmare.
Behavior proving the skeptics right is, of course, what we see every day in the media. But human beings are a lot more complex than this reductive frame would make us, and, this richness, too, is what we see everyday … if we open our eyes to it.
So the way forward seems clear: We can drop the dis
racting debate about the goodness of human nature and look for the goodness in human nature. With this frame, we can get rid of triggers proven to bring out the worst in us, and we can deliberately build on those that bring out the best, our clearly life-affirming needs and capacities: to be cooperative, to be fair, to be effective, and to search for meaning.
First, we’re cooperators. Darwin’s misconstrued notions about survival competition not withstanding, it turns out that cooperation explains our evolutionary success just as much. Human beings learned in our early tribal experience that our best chance to thrive is within communities that work for everybody.
Humans are unique among animals in our “pervasive sharing” of food, “especially among unrelated indi-viduals,” writes Michael Gurven, a leading authority on transfers among hunter-gatherers living as our early forebears did. Except in times of extreme privation, when some eat, all eat. And the most productive hunters share the most.
Cooperation, which energizes the practices I’m call-ing Living Democracy, flows in part from hard-wired empathy—increasingly well documented: “Brain imaging studies reveal,” writes psychologist Daniel Goleman, “that when we answer the question, ‘How are you feeling?’ we activate much of the same neural circuitry that lights up when we ask, ‘How is she feeling?’ The brain acts almost identically when we sense our own feelings and those of another.”
Babies cry at the sound of other babies crying, Goleman also notes, but not at a recording of their own cries. And there’s certainly no reason to think we humans might be less empathetic than Rhesus monkeys, who’ve been shown in an experiment to forego food (in some cases to starve themselves for up to twelve days) to protect another monkey from electric shock.
Neuroscientists using MRI scans discovered that when human beings cooperate, the same parts of our brains light up that are aroused when we eat chocolate! They note what, of course, even a moment’s reflection tells us: We’re hardwired to enjoy cooperation.
Second, a sense of fairness lives within most of us, for we have learned that injustice destroys the community on which we’re so dependent. Even the supposed godfather of greed, Adam Smith, grasped this truth. Of all the social virtues, Smith wrote more than two centuries ago, we are “in some peculiar manner tied, bound and obliged to the observation of justice.” Today researchers are finding even Capuchin monkeys demonstrate a measurable sense of fairness.
Third, we’re problem solvers. Thin Democracy’s assumptions shrink humans to spectators, shoppers, and whiners. But Living Democracies assume we are also doers. How could we possibly have become the dominant species unless we are problem solvers who enjoy seeing the impact of our work?
Our need to “make a dent” in the wider world, as Erich Fromm expressed it, is so great that he revised seventeenth-century René Descartes’ thought-focused notion of self. Fromm sums us up this way: “I am, because I effect.”
Finally, we’re creatures of meaning. Living Democracy replaces the simple materialism of Thin Democracy with the assumption that we human beings want our days to have value beyond ensuring our own survival; and one way we’ve long met that need is by striving to be good ancestors, enhancing our children’s and their children’s futures. As we “live democracy,” we quench part of our thirst for meaning by contributing to the rescue of our threatened planet and, on the way, enhance qualities deep inside us—empathy, leadership, and courage—this journey brings forth.
This yearning for transcendent meaning runs as deep as any biological urge, certainly. Might it surprise you to learn that roughly the same number, four hundred million, of Google sites turn up whether you search for “sex” or search for “God”?
An Ecology of Democracy
Five Qualities
Living Democracy, possible because of this richly com-plex nature of ours, isn’t a set system. Above I described it instead as a set of system qualities. And it’s important that we begin to name these qualities, for human beings have a hard time creating what we have no words to describe. Here, then, is my stab at five qualities I see transforming democracy into a lived practice able to solve problems that have seemed insurmountable.
1) Dynamic, never finished. Living Democracy is a work in progress to which each new generation applies the lessons of its experience. Between our nation’s founding and 2006, our fifty states have ratified over six thousand state constitutional amendments. Its dynamism means Living Democracy isn’t limited to redressing singular injustices; it’s able to create ever-more inclusive, fairer ways of making decisions. A “learning democracy” might be another apt moniker to describe what is emerging.
One recent “sighting” of this dynamism is “partici-patory budgeting,” a newly emerging form of citizen deliberation over key public choices. It began in Brazil where the wealthy have long held a tight grip on how city funds are allotted. To break the grip, in 1990 members of Brazil’s Workers’ Party—now one of the country’s largest—came up with participatory budgeting, a process in which as much as a fifth of a city’s budget gets allocated through multi-step, face-to-face neighborhood deliberations.
In the birthplace of citizen budgeting, the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, some one hundred thousand citizens have so far taken part. As a result, the share of resources going to poorer parts of the city and to programs benefiting the poor has grown.
Another dividend? The noticeable decline in corruption under the watchful eyes of so many citizens. Visiting a neighborhood near Porto Alegre in 2003, I admired the big, new community center and heard about a new school and clinic. Asking, “But, how can you afford all this?” I was told by smiling locals that less corruption meant more funds for the community. Plus, the new participatory system means greater government efficiency: In 1988, an administrative dollar in Porto Alegre brought three dollars in services; ten years later it brought seven dollars’ worth.
Participatory budgeting has spread to more than three hundred Brazilian cities, and their experience has inspired scores of others around the world to try it, from Durban, South Africa, to Saint-Denis, France. And here at home, in a handful of cities—Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Birmingham, Alabama; Dayton, Ohio; and Saint Paul, Minnesota, for example, citizens engage through a range of official channels to guide public spending and initiate community improvements.
2) Values guided, not dogma driven. Just mentioning the word “values” unnerves many Americans; they believe we’re hopelessly divided, so best not to go there. In truth, we’re hopefully united on some essential policies reflecting deeply shared values. Almost nine in ten of us favor raising the federal minimum wage. Almost eight in ten say we should do whatever it takes to protect the environment. And roughly two in three agree our government should guarantee health care for all, even if it means higher taxes.
These specifics reflect more general values infusing the dynamism of effective democracy: fairness, inclusion, and mutual accountability. By “mutual accountability,” I mean simply all sides shouldering responsibility. Pointing fingers at those up there—the president, the CEO—isn’t enough. Bemoaning our victimhood isn’t enough.
Jack Shipley, a sixty-six-year-old, part-time rancher near Grants Pass, Oregon, helped teach me this lesson. Jack is a leader in the Applegate Partnership, entrusted by the state with watershed protection planning for an eight-hundred-square-mile chunk of southern Oregon.
“The environmentalists criticize us for talking to loggers,” Jack told me a few years ago. “But how can we find solutions if we don’t include all people who are part of the problem?” he asks. So members of Jack’s group, the Applegate Partnership, began wearing a signature button around town: one word with the familiar “no” slash through it. The word is “They.”
If there is no “they” to blame, we realize all sides need to act. And did, arriving at a plan all could accept.
Another example of “mutual accountability” in action that brings to life the values of fairness and inclusion began in south Texas in 1990. Jolted by the closing of a Levi Strauss plant that left one thousand people jobless, two San Antonio church-based groups began searching for ways to ease the plight of the unemployed and of poor workers.
Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS)—which reaches fifty thousand families through twenty-seven parishes—and its sister organization, Metro Alliance, were upset. They saw new, well-paying jobs were being created, but San Antonio’s many low-skill job seekers, many of them Hispanic, weren’t filling them. Yes, the citizen groups could easily have jumped on the big companies, calling them racist for not hiring locals. Instead, they decided to be problem solvers: They identified the real stumbling block as the lack of effective job training.
Then the two organizations’ members—homemakers, bus drivers, ministers—formed a committee to come up with a solution themselves. The fruit of their labor is QUEST—Quality Employment Through Skills Training—now boasting almost two thousand graduates who are prepared not just for any job but for skilled, well-paying ones. Eighteen months after graduating, almost 80 percent of QUEST participants have jobs with an average hourly wage several times higher than in the minimum wage jobs many had held. Four other cities have replicated QUEST’s model and together have trained fifty-five hundred people.
Driven by widely shared values not fixed dogma, Living Democracy evolves as citizens bring those values to public engagement.
3) Learned, not automatic. Humans are innately social beings, it’s true, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily born knowing how to “do democracy” effectively. So more and more people worldwide are coming to understand democracy not as something we simply inherit and defend but as a learned art. Democratic skills, they are saying, can and must be deliberately taught—and practiced—just as are reading or cooking or dribbling a basketball.
Of course, if we’re not good at any these things, they’re not much fun. Running after tennis balls for hours, I’ve learned, gets pretty tedious. But as we gain skills, including those of “doing democracy,” our lives become ever more rewarding.
Young people are among those catching on and leading the way.
In the spring of 2007 at the University of California Santa Cruz, I met with students who had created their own strikingly successful course, the Education for Sustainable Living Program. Now in its fourth year, the course has spread to six California campuses. Three hundred eager students are enrolled in Santa Cruz. “We could never have gotten this course off the ground,” initiator Aurora Winslade, told me, “if the eight students who started it hadn’t studied communication skills together and committed ourselves to use them with each other.”
Schools, businesses, community institutions, and elected bodies are effectively learning democratic arts such as active listening, addressing conflict through negotiation and mediation, as well as mentoring and reflecting on experience.
4) Power-creating, not controlling. So much political talk obsesses over who’s got power and who’s losing it—as if there were only so much to go around. (One more instance of the scarcity presumption?) Yet, taken to its Latin root, posse, power means “to be able,” simply our capacity to act. So maybe we should be talking less about power’s division and more about its creation—what’s really needed to solve our problems.
Living Democracy practices create more power by enabling more people to act on their values and interests. In other words, Living Democracy widens the circle of problem solvers. It expands problem-solving power because it taps into the experience and insight of people closest to the problem. It thrives on the creativity engendered when diverse perspectives meet and the commitment to action that people willingly make when they “own” and are a valued part of the plan.
In a successful struggle to decentralize school deci-sion making in Hammond, Indiana, participant Patrick O’Rourke captured this notion of expanding power, noting that the new set up “broadens the base of decision making in a way that empowers everyone … [B]uilding administrators don’t lose out if teachers are more creative … they win. Everyone wins.”
5) Everywhere, not isolated. Finally, and perhaps best of all, Living Democracy’s values “work” throughout the many dimensions of our lives, not just the political. So it’s possible to align our inner selves. Citizens don’t have to chop ourselves in pieces and leave some of the best of us at home as we venture into our public lives.
What a boon to sanity.
Notice that I’m using public life to refer not just to what officials have but to all the roles we play—including voter, buyer, employer, investor, saver, worker, and volunteer. Living Democracy’s values apply from politics and economics to education, policing, the media, and more. This is what I mean by “everywhere.” But trickiest to grasp is democracy emerging in economic life, so I’ll dwell here a moment.
The ecological worldview in which Living Democracy is emerging enables us to see ourselves not as isolated atoms but as nodes in networks of relationships. Corporations then become just one channel we create to organize relationship networks. This means that corporations are not independent of us or unchangeable monoliths. A lot changes: We wake up to our own power, the multitude of ways in which we already do shape corporations and can redirect them to life-serving ends.
With this view of economic life, businesses respond to market cues, yes, but with accountability-boundaries that citizens set, from tax and trade rules to environmental and buyer-safety protections. We recognize both the formal channels—through governments—and informal influences—including our own daily choices and organized advocacy—we can use to keep the market fair and life-promoting. We citizens have to take the rule-setting function of economic life seriously, or our society ends up like a Monopoly game at the end of the evening … the fun’s over for everybody because one player gets all the property.
Once seeing the economy embedded in a culture of democracy, buyers also use the power of marketplace choices to send ripples demanding healthy and fair practices to producers, as in the growing Fair Trade movement.
A Premise of Plenty, A Spiral of Hope
In contrast to the premise of lack in the Spiral of Powerlessness, these five qualities generate a spiral of human growth and satisfaction I’ve striven to capture in what I call the Spiral of Empowerment.
Its premise is plenty—that as we come to appreciate and enjoy nature’s laws, learning to live within a self-renewing ecological home, we discover there’s more than enough for all to live well.
This realization I first experienced as a lightning bolt, when in my twenties I learned that there was more than enough food in the world to make us all chubby … and there still is, even considering staggering built-in waste.
I learned that we create the scarcity we fear.
Worldwide, for example, more than a third of all grain and 90 percent of soy gets fed to livestock. Future generations may well scratch their heads: You mean, in the early twenty-first century their feedlot system put 16 pounds of grain and soy into cattle to produce only one pound of beef on their plates? You mean that with the amount of water they used for that one pound of beef they could bathe for a year?
I learned that this irrationality took off, even though inefficient and harmful to health, because one-rule economics leaves millions of people too poor to buy food and keeps grain so cheap that it’s profitable to feed vast amounts to animals.
Beyond food, the US economy remains “astoundingly” wasteful, conclude the authors of Natural Capitalism, as “only 6 percent of its vast flows of materials actually end up in products.”
Imagine, then, the potential plenty, not to mention health benefits, as we shift toward equity and efficiency.
Similar plenty appears once we drop the scarcity lens surrounding energy. Our sun, wind, waves, water, and biomass offer us a “daily dose of energy” 15,000 times greater than in all the planet-harming fossil and nuclear power we now use, says German energy expert Hermann Scheer. Just one-fifth of the energy in wind alone would, if converted to electricity, meet the whole world’s energy demands, reports a Stanford-NASA study.
An awareness of plenty itself undermines a focus on raw, self-centered competition, leaving us able to refocus not on the goodness of human nature, which seems to deny human complexity, but on the undeniable goodness in human nature, including the deep positive needs and capacities just mentioned.
From there, the Spiral of Empowerment quickens. We gain confidence that we can learn to make sound decisions together about the rules that further healthy communities. Then, as we begin to succeed and ease the horrific oppression and conflict that now rob us of life, we reinforce positive expectations about our species. The destructive mental map loosens its hold. And as these capacities and needs—for fairness, connection, efficacy, and meaning—find avenues for expression, they redound, generating even more creative decision making and outcomes.
So “getting a grip” doesn’t have to mean a sober struggle. From this more complete view of our own nature and of what nature offers, could it instead become an exhilarating adventure?
Frances Moore Lappé has authored or co-authored 165 books, including the three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet which has awakened countless readers to the needlessness of hunger in a world of plenty. Lappé is co-founder of two organizations, Food First: The Institute for Food and Development Policy and Small Planet Institute (www.smallplanetinstitute.org.). Her most recent books include Hope’s Edge, written with her daughter Anna Lappé, about democratic social movements worldwide and Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity, and Courage in a World Gone Mad, from which this article has been adapted. In 2008, Ms. Lappé was selected as the 2008 James Beard Foundation Humanitarian Award honoree for her lifelong impact on the way people all over the world think about food, nutrition, and agriculture. Her writing has most recently been featured in The Nation and on The Huffington Post.
