On March 29, 2007 - 4:03pm Marshall Ganz said:Perhaps it's because I'm a child of the Sixties (well, more or less), but I can tell a distinctive difference between generations here. Ganz and Booth know organizing from experience. My educated guess is that kosmik and destor23 (and not just because they use nyms, not names) are children of the Internet, and know organizing from...well, from what they think it should be.
I agree that we don't will movements into existence, but I do think that the choices we make have something to do with it. I've been teaching the Montgomery Bus Boycott in a variety of different settings and one of the most interesting features is the way in which the choices the people made - E.D. Nixon, Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, Jo Ann Robinson, Martin Luther King, and others - interacted to launch this key chapter in the initiation of the civil rights movement. Dr. King's talk on the night of the first day of the boycott - which had been intended to be only a one day boycott -- put it so well in the way he combined his story of the transcendent pursuit of divine, civic, and racial justice with the strategic outcome of desegregating Montgomery's busses through collective action. I think we'd agree that "winning" takes this combination of moral energy, strategic focus, and organization building.
On March 29, 2007 - 4:17pm destor23 said:
Sure, the values/practicality combo is great when it results in the desegregation of a busline.
But look how it's implemented today. You wind up with Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman fretting about violent video games and threatening free speech in the process. With Chuck Schumer advocating an internet porn tax.
Issues matter. Especially often derided social issues. All too often, in a quest to combine values with a winning strategy, Democrats have advocated a rather conservative, or at least common stance on issues involving freedom of expression. I never see a move towards a more radical culture and a fairer economy combined.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
On March 29, 2007 - 4:41pm Heather Booth said:
You are so right that the choices we make, the leadership that is prepared, the willingness to jump in (even when--maybe especially when) we are not sure of the outcome, being ready to take risks and knowing that we need to move and organize with the people who are affected--all this determines if we can seize the moment. The moral energy, strategic focus and organization matters enormously.
And it is also true that even the same actions taken at another time, may not yield those results. And when there is not movement, we can be especially appreciative of organization.
Montgomery exploded because of the enormous pent up frustration, the rise of an African American population with some resources (to ride the buses and some with cars as an alternative), with a taste of rights (from the army and the network of civil rights groups and churches to provide organization).
Movement and organization, undergirded by courage and action and organizing is a center piece for the change we want to see. And how we build in the periods when there is not movement is also a test (and testimony) to the strategy and skills we have learned that help us endure and win.
--Heather
On March 29, 2007 - 7:09pm kozmik said:
The solution isn't in helping leaders pick the right rhetoric.
The solution is for voters to pick the right leaders who are sincerely committed to actions which happen to be right for the times. That's the real problem, most voters aren't very united or willing to put common goals before personal goals.
Montgomery exploded because of the enormous pent up frustration, the rise of an African American population with some resources ...
I don't mean to diminish the hardship and achievement of blacks and the civil rights movement, but without factoring in the larger environment of white America, it's like discounting the weather and kindling, wet or dry, when trying to build a campfire.
It seems this abstract debate tends to polarize between charismatic leaders with great rhetorical skills "willing into existence" movements on one hand, and oafish triangulation wonks incapable of providing a compelling narrative, on the other. We'd all like to have a charismatic leader to will out own personal issues into a movement, a personal god to pray to.
In reality, charismatic leaders tend to culminate movements which have already achieved a critical mass of like-minded voters, at least in spirit, if not yet in the details. Such powerful movements emerge in a million little mysterious ways in the culture.
The right leader at the right moment is critical, to iron out the wrinkles and focus people into action. The benefit of such unity is a powerful movement, shared purpose, and charismatic leaders who embody that purpose. The downside is that issues outside that focus must wait till they can achieve such consensus.
Until we on the left acknowledge this reality, of strength in unity of numbers, and the subsequent inherent need for compromise, we'll not see great leaders or hear great rhetoric on a national scale. It would simply be impossible for any leader to attempt to straddle the issues which divide us presently.
On March 29, 2007 - 9:04pm Marshall Ganz said:
Leaders and their constituencies interact. One of the challenges of leadership is to interpret, articulate, and celebrate those values that can inspire not only action, but compassion, perhaps, and courage. This isn't about charisma, but the work of everyday leadership that people do in their homes, work places, places of worship, schools, athlectic events, and so forth. For a variety of reasons, progessives have had a hard time bringing this values work into the public domain. Focusing on a particular issue, like buses, is a strategic choice. The energy to pursue it, however, and turn it into a success, is rooted in those values that inspire persistence, creativity, courage and action. And very often sharing values enable people to act with unity and solidarity far more easily that agreement on this issue or that, except, of course, where the issue has become a "stand-in" for values.
On March 30, 2007 - 8:05am kozmik said:
Certainly movements form organically, which was my original point. Campaign issues should be framed in moral terms. For example, health care and the environment are certainly mainstream moral issues.
The point I'm trying make is that we've bought into the "great revolutionary leader" myth, the notion such people had the power to will movements into being.
We expect leaders to address our personal issues and make them real by their "leader" power. So your issue only has 10% popularity nationwide? A good leader can fix that with a great speech, right? If only they'd have the "balls" right?
So, politics becomes infantile. My issues. My agenda. No compromise. No pragmatism. No responsibility for the movement's lack of success.
That forces politicians to triangulate between special interests, juggling many balls, instead of what they should be doing: focusing on core issues with broad popular support and framing them in a moral/pragmatic/inspiring language. It's all backwards.
A president and other high offices should be the embodiment of mainstream values, for better or worse. If people don't like the mainstream values, change them.
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On March 29, 2007 - 7:10pm destor23 said:
A bit of a harrumph here and I know I'm "concern trolling" a bit by saying this, but...
The two great organizers had an exchange, where they rapidly responded to each other, and when I joined it... nothing.
And... this is kind of a problem here at TPM, where the featured commentators don't engage with the people they're writing for...
...it's also of particular importance here where two people who organize folks for a living don't acknowledge a comment from somebody who they, I dunno, might want to organize.
I'm glad I got to read their exchange but, for their own purposes, they might as well have been emailing each other.
I should give some benefit of the doubt, of course. They're busy and can't answer every post. But, seeing this exchange highlighted on TPM Main kind of set me off.
Just kind of looks like these two were having a private conversation for public consumption?
Maybe I'm just being a jerk about it, but... I don't think so.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
Notice the language of destor and kosmik is all abstraction and theory. They sound almost like college freshman arguing "the big issues" of life in a dorm room at 2 a.m. And when destor23 can't get a word in edgewise because, quite honestly, he/she is not even in the same conversation with Booth and Ganz (rather, again, like an impertinent freshman who won't listen to two professors engage a subject, but insists on being a peer in their education conversation), it's their fault. I'm being harsh, I know, but sometimes a little harshness is called for. "Those who have ears had better listen!"
It is one thing to talk about how people ought to behave, another to organize them to put their bodies where their principles are. Booth and Ganz are discussing the latter, destor23 and kosmik the former. One is theory, the other: reality. And the reality is, and remains, that blogging does not equal organizing. Commenting on a blog, or writing your own, does not equal the civil rights movement, or the anti-war movement, of the '60's. Drawing people to your blog, or engaging a lot of like-minded people in the comments section of a blog, is not even on the same playing field, as putting your body on the line for what you believe, and convincing other people the time has come to put their bodies on the line with you.
Well, that's one note, but not the one I came here for. I picked up as much of that conversation as I thought would fit, and read the last comment after I'd pasted it here. What actually piqued my interest, though, was the discussion of values as a motivator, as a purpose for action. And what I notice in the contrast of generations (a presumptive one, I know, but a fair presumption, I think) is the assumption by the "older" generation that values matter to people, and the presumption by the "younger" generation that it really is, contrary to the complaint raised by Ganz and Booth, all about marketing:
I don't mean to diminish the hardship and achievement of blacks and the civil rights movement, but without factoring in the larger environment of white America, it's like discounting the weather and kindling, wet or dry, when trying to build a campfire.There is, in that observation, a curious admixture of Hegel and Kierkegaard that I've noticed more than once on the web, in blogs and blog comments. The Kierkegaardian side is that we are all individuals and we all make up our own minds about things, that we stand alone and responsible for what we think and do (push that far enough you end up with Sartre's individual trembling before the encounter with nothingness. But notice the conversation never approaches going that far.). The Hegelian side is that we are all still creatures of a a mysterious zeitgeist which "emerge[s] in a million little mysterious ways in the culture." So "movements" are something that just happen, which "charismatic leaders" just happen to latch on to. The parade was already there, in other words, and Martin Luther King, Jr. just happened to race out in front of it first.
It seems this abstract debate tends to polarize between charismatic leaders with great rhetorical skills "willing into existence" movements on one hand, and oafish triangulation wonks incapable of providing a compelling narrative, on the other. We'd all like to have a charismatic leader to will out own personal issues into a movement, a personal god to pray to.
In reality, charismatic leaders tend to culminate movements which have already achieved a critical mass of like-minded voters, at least in spirit, if not yet in the details. Such powerful movements emerge in a million little mysterious ways in the culture.
For starters, I'm guessing this is a person who has never even heard of, much less read, Taylor Branch's three volume work on "America during the King Years" (that's the subtitle to all three volumes). But the reason I am aure this person is part of the "Internet" generation, is the sheer ignorance of this statement (small wonder Ganz and Booth politely ignored these comments). Doing the smallest amount of reading into the Civil Rights Movement (read only King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail") and only the most obtuse reader would miss the fact that King was not a single charismatic leader of a vast movement, but one of many. In fact, he was the person chosen by the leadership to represent them, but to imply in any way that he was merely a figurehead or a self-aggrandizer (of which, sadly, we have had far too many on far too many social issues since Dr. King's death. John Lewis is one of the few truly admirable public figures left from those days, and Jimmy Carter is the lone example of truly selfless devotion to the public good, the international public good at that, whom I can think of just now, at least among Americans.), is well, it's embarassingly ignorant.
But that's the kind of "analysis" I come across on the web more and more (admittedly, my journeying is not broad; perhaps I'm hanging out in the wrong virtual neighborhoods). "Values", in this weltanschaaung, are merely those things that serve the goal of obtaining power. And that's the gap which divides Boothe and Ganz from destor23 and kosmik: not that the former are moral paragons and the latter benighted heathens, but that the "older" generation understands the value of good for the sake of good, and the "younger" generation understands values only insofar as they achieve political goals, which means: acquiring power.
Karl Rove would be so proud.
But it isn't all because of Karl Rove. Rove isn't that powerful, isn't that influential, isn't that important. In the end, his influence on world affairs will be less signficant than that of George W. Bush (who is a more venial and small-minded person than he's usually given credit for; Iago was considered a genial and trustworthy fellow by every character in "Othello," too) and Dick Cheney. Rove is just a symbol, here, but he is as perfectly an example of valuelessness as the comments of kosmik here. No, the fault is in the assumptions, assumptions fueled in part by the technology that makes it possible for me to say this, and you to read it. Technology, of course, is morally neutral. It has no moral agency, no responsibility, no will, no ability to act. It is a tool only. It responds to our decisions about how to use it. That is what it is for. But the Greeks who gave us the word techne understood it was merely the work of hands. We are the ones who have tried to make it the work of our hearts. "O machine! O machine!" If there is a whirlwind to be reaped, it is not solely because of George W. Bush or Karl Rove or the corrupt GOP. We have to look in the mirror to see who is responsible for that. It isn't the zeitgeist which did this: it's us.
Take this statement, for instance, by Ganz: "Leaders and their constituencies interact." No one who has not had a leadership role can possibly understand how true this is. Those who are not leaders look at the leaders and imagine, project, presume, all manner of power and authority flows from that position. Looking to it, we either ignore it, envy it, or seek to gain some benefit from it. But we usually imagine it exists apart from us, and often (when we don't get what we want from the leader) in spite of us. That's the attitude displayed here by kosmik and destor23: they don't have a clue what "leadership" involves.
When Jesus said: "The greatest of all shall be least and servant of all," it could be (and I'm sure has been) taken as "management advice"(in America today we tend to equate leadership with management. It's a false and debilitating understanding of the concept, but that's yet another topic.) It's not at all what he meant when applied to Ganz' comment, but it's a useful entry point to the issue. Leadership is a reciprocal relationship. Even the fiercest tyrant only rules because the people, at some level, permit him to, whether the people are a mass of disinterested "proles" (1984) or a military force willing to engage in criminal acts in order to secure their comfort and position. No leader rules alone, and it isn't a mysterious zeitgeist that puts him in power of keeps him there. No leader who doesn't understand he is also a servant, at least to some group, lasts long in the position of leader. Contrast the idea that leaders somehow find movements which they can lead, with what Heather Booth says (which neither kosmik nor destor23 seem capable of comprehending, because they never address it):
Montgomery exploded because of the enormous pent up frustration, the rise of an African American population with some resources (to ride the buses and some with cars as an alternative), with a taste of rights (from the army and the network of civil rights groups and churches to provide organization).But is blogging about enduring and winning? Or is it about the next news story, the next outrage, the next topic we can all gum to death in the comfort and self-assurance of being surrounded by people of like mind in the comment posts, while we all gang up in righteous wrath against the "trolls" who either want to argue with us, or who just don't quite hold to the opinion du jour on that blog? And notice how Ganz deftly draws other resources into the discussion, resources no one else mentions again:
Movement and organization, undergirded by courage and action and organizing is a center piece for the change we want to see. And how we build in the periods when there is not movement is also a test (and testimony) to the strategy and skills we have learned that help us endure and win.
Dear "thosethingswesay",I happen to agree with that, of course. It's the line Pastor Dan would pursue as well. But I still find that conclusion a bit vague, and a bit limiting. Walter Brueggemann would not be satisfied with shifting the conversation from "how" to "why." The prophets Brueggemann studies and learns from demanded justice, not a better way of talking about the problems that led to the Exile. They denounced social structures, suffered themselves for what happened, suffered for what they had to say, defied power and lived their lives as examples of what God and God's justice (which, they said, both came from God, and was God's order for the world, an order broken by human selfishness). Not to jump all over Ganz, either, but I feel, again and again, that these issues are so much larger than a blog post can contain. And that, ultimately, is the problem. Words trapped on paper have great power, great value: how else would I know about Archbishop Romero, or the courage of Dorothy Day, the sayings of the Desert Fathers, the wisdom of Thomas Merton? How else would I learn about liberation theology or the Rule of St. Benedict?
The motivation to change the world - what Walter Bruggemann calls the prophetic imagination - emerge from two sources: the experience of injustice and the experience of hope. We experience information about injustice and hope emotionally because that is how we percieve value -- not as a concept, but as a feeling.
And it is values that moves us to act, that answer the question of "why" it matters, why its worth it, why we must. We share values information most often through stories. On the other hand, we process information about " how" we can act to achieve outcomes, our strategy, conceptually, analytically, and creatively.
Getting somewhere takes both the heart, which moves us to want what we want, and the head, which tells us how we can get what we want - whether desegregating buses, putting a man on the moon, electing a president or making war or peace. We also need the hands, the practical skills.
But values differ. I hear you referring to a set of values which are not your own. But other values matter too -- like equality, dignity, compassion, tolerance, generosity and so forth.
The problem has been that one side knows how to speak in terms of values (why) while the other side seems to know only how to speak in terms of concepts (how) (think in terms of the presidential debates). And the side that knows how to build on its its values has been winning.
But words are lifeless things, too. And the words an essay can contain, a gospel, a book....these words are too large, and too long, for a blog post. Who would read Dr. King's famous letter if he had posted it on a website, rather than smuggling it out of jail on scraps of paper to be published? I'm not sure I would, and I write blog posts that surely set some record for blogging verbosity. I suppose there is some value in that, but not, I think, very much. We speak a lot in blogs of "why", and we speak a lot to "how." But in this destor23 was right, and no one picked up on it, either:
You wind up with Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman fretting about violent video games and threatening free speech in the process. With Chuck Schumer advocating an internet porn tax.That is how politicians discuss values; and it was as true during the Civil Rights movement as it is today. It isn't that we need our politicans discussing values (pace Ganz), it is that we ourselves need to reconsider our values. There is still been no nationwide outrage over the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, or the allegations and evidence of torture, or "extraordinary rendition" and other police-state tactics, even of the revelations of illegal wiretapping and FBI investigations. Perhaps the media is right, an the elections in November were merely a referendum on the war, and everyone has forgotten the debacle of the Gulf Coast after Katrina. Perhaps. We cannot look to the politicans to know what we think.
And I'm not sure we can look to the blogs, either. We need a more personal form of contact, and one that is more persistently personal than comments, or blog posts, or even "blog cons." Some of that is getting done, of course. But is there more we can do to move beyond the machine, and toward our common humanity?
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