Eroding democracy happens with a slow and persistent trickle of cynicism and mistrust of citizens by their governments. In this review of Democracy’s Second Act: Why Politics Needs the Public by Peter MacLeod and Richard Johnson, Kyle Wyatt reflects:
Democracy is not an idea, not a value, not a right; it’s a practice.” For far too long, citizens have been discouraged from that practice by duly elected governments on the left and the right?—?and by the civil servants and professional consultants in their employ. “Say as little as possible, as late as possible, in the most positive way possible,” they write of a general modus operandi that shapes Queen’s Park as much as it does Ottawa, Washington, London, and most other Western capitals. “It’s a defensive posture?—?useful for political survival, but corrosive to democratic understanding.”
Inevitably, MacLeod and Johnson argue, such corrosion will “slowly poison the democratic well,” leading to widespread cynicism, strongmen, and extremists?—?and to events like the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. “Populism, resentment, authoritarian nostalgia: These are not fringe forces. They flourish wherever people feel ignored, humiliated, or locked out.”
Every year I teach a course at SFU in Vancouver in the certificate program in Dialogue and Civic Engagement. Amongst the most assertive points I make is that inauthentic consultation and engagement is a betray of the promise of democracy, especially if you are working for government but also if you work in the corporate sector.
We are reaching the point where there is very little imagination in this field. The cult of efficiency and the brute impatience of powerful interests has deprived a generation of public engagement specialists from the knowledge and experience required to do this work right. What happens in its stead is performative consultation – engagement washing, I sometimes call it – and in my course I am certainly not afraid of pointing the fingers squarely at those that work at the frontlines of consultation. If you are actively engaged in this form of performative consultation you bear some personal and collective blame for why citizens are feeling disengaged and unrepresented at every level in Canadian governance.
The solutions are beyond us at the moment because the power that dictates what happens and what standards are applied to it are now writing legislation that essentially eliminates the requirements to meaningfully work with communities or interested groups in the pursuit of public policy initiatives. We are at a final chapter for this practice as neo-liberalism has pushed such engagement to the market. Unless you own a tangible interest in a project you really aren’t a stakeholder.
Perhaps what we need now are community investment coops that buy shares of major projects in order to influence them. Many First Nations are already doing this. It’s a cynical response to the problem but at this point it’s the most influential vector for engagement.
I’ll still teach the ideal because I hope people can find avenues of practice to develop these skills during this era while the public square is being auctioned off. But, inspiring examples aside, I’m not hopeful that the kind of meaningful engagement we built in the 1980s and 1990s will be sustained for much longer.
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I’m still delightfully jet lagged from the France trip meaning, early nights and early mornings, which suits me fine. It gives me time to read and reflect and to walk, this morning taking time to make a detailed eBird list of the species around me (about 25 this morning, many new flycatchers on the scene), and sit by the sea and catch up with neighbours and their dogs.
I was walking a bit this morning with Augusto Cugnotti’s post in my mind, “The Container is Borrowed” in which he reflects on a mammoth essay by Mark Downham called “The Geometry of the Vanishing Container.”
Downham’s essay imagines a kind of conservation between Harrison Owen and Patricia Shaw, who is a much more interesting person to read. I have not read much of Shaw’s work, to my shame. She was a collaborator with Ralph Stacy and her book on Changing Conversations in Organizations is an important work, and I’ve made a note to take Augusto’s advice and read it.
At any rate, the Coles Notes version here is that I’m looking at this through my own interest in what a “container” is. Increasingly I think that the way I think about dialogic containers are not really captured in the way folks talk use the word. Harrison’s work, captured in Downham’s essay is that the container (especially the physical container) is prepared as a way to trying to create the conditions for emergence. That was his abiding interest and I think Downham names the liturgical and spiritual elements of that in a way I haven’t really seen others capture. When I’m setting up a room, I sometimes feel like a bower bird, and I won’t pretend that liturgy and ceremony is far from my mind. I get it.
It seems that Shaw’s work is primarily concerned with the idea that a consultant or a host or a facilitator can never really be outside of the field in which they are intervening. This seems elemental to me and I’ve made a point of saying that the Participation aspect of the Four Fold Practice of the Art of Hosting is very much about this. You are a part of the field, as is the container and everything else.
Augusto is naming some of these ideas here and it makes me think about why both actual appeal to me.
I see containers as constraint regimes. They are structures that are catalyzed and emerge from constraints that create boundaries and affordances for meaning and action. They are emergent. They are a part of the field, and when we step into a field (a la Shaw) we create a constraint regime just through our presence. Harrison’s approach is that we create physical space and get out of the way of what happens next. But it seems obvious to me that what happens next is not devoid of power, conflict or all the avoidances and limitations that are rooted in the field as well. It is naive to use Open Space (our any other methods) and believe that somehow everyone has left history and identity at the door, including the host. They have not.
Somehow I might define my work as catalyzing action that moves in a “more like this, less like that” direction by working with constraints to change interactions. All change work is about changing constraints, and finding the ones that are most influential in a given context is what complexity work is about. It is not the work of the facilitator to do that. Complex facilitation is about changing interactions not about changing people. A facilitator is not neutral in this context but is in fact a deeply influential participant.
I’m not defending Harrison’s work per se, but learning Open Space taught me about the essential work of managing process and not getting involved in content. It was the first big move for me away from traditional “get involved in the content” facilitation. Shaw’s work – as I understand it from the papers I’ve read – is about acknowledging that there is no “outside.” This was clear to me as a person who had spent my whole career working in communities and organizations. These ideas flow from a number of streams. Lewin helpfully names fields. Snowden and Juarrero name constraints. Pualani Kanakaole names the importance of the deep layers of context that do the real work of hosting. Snowden and Kurtz name the importance of narrative. Isaacs names the container. All of it conspires and moves together to put a question to the practitioner:
“What are you doing?”
When I enter a field to make change now it is not without attention to the landscape of meaning and affordances that exist. I use narrative capture to do that so that the field itself can talk about its experiences, make sense of them, decide what to do. There is a container for this work, and it is lifted intentionally and deliberately and gently from the field, like pinching a bit of cloth on a table to form a little wrinkle. It is not the One Meeting That Rules Them All. Change work requires staying in intimate contact with the field, the larger context. When the dialogic container loses contact with the field, whatever happens there will fail to make the change. It becomes its own thing. Fun maybe, or frustrating, or a kind of utopia. But you will quickly hear people talk about returning to “the real world.” Understanding the current topography of change and resistance and make that visible with minimal intervention is critical. Keeping the work in contact with the field but intervening in smaller ways more often gives a better chance that affordances will be found for promising action. If you aren’t making change in the “real world,” change isn’t being made.
Containers exist because constraints exist. There is a connection. There is a flow. There is an inside and outside, there is an attractor. Even in the most subtle forms, these precipitate differences that become meaningful. What is happening inside this coffee shop is defined by who is on what side of the counter, which languages are being spoken, what the layout of tables and benches do. Who knows whom. The woman who made my espresso was once a kid on a team I coached. When she appears at her job at the community centre, I don’t order coffee from her. We both own shares in the same soccer team, one for which she also once played. The container emerges, is “borrowed” as Augusto says, from the field.
We cannot pretend otherwise. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t intervene to make change. It means we should be aware of our intervention and the role we play especially if we show up to the field with power and influence. And if we are making change, that work needs to be as deeply embedded in the field itself and not in the briefcases of consultants or the magic spells of method user guides. It’s about practice. I’m a practitioner.
Harrison’s most influential teaching on my life was not Open Space, actually. It was his slogan “Don’t trust the process, trust the people.” Follow that to its deepest implications and one might arrive at the kinds of questions about epistemic justice, colonization, domination, change-making, and democracy that matter. Those implications are ever-present in my work. I have no answers, but the question “What am I doing?” is a dear companion on the journey.
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The leadership candidates for the Conservative Party of BC vow to roll back indigenous rights and stop returning land to First Nations. and also object to being called colonizers, which begs the question about what they think colonization is.
Billionaires are colonizing our skies. If you think this is bad, the night skies will soon be populated with a million Starlink satellites and thousands more from other companies and nations. And it gets worse as there are companies like Reflect Orbital prepared to launch satellite grids that will reflect sunlight to the night side of Earth to power solar arrays 24/7. Follow Sam Lawler for more.
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The end of Viktor Orban’s reign had all the hallmarks of similar transitions from the authoritarian governments of Eastern Europe thirty years ago: a largely peaceful transition of power because the people finally decided that they would be ungovernable by this particular tyrant.
Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individual decisions to the contrary.
Orban is still in parliament as opposition leader and his state apparatus still exists. But his election loss, although not the same as the fall of the former Eastern European Communist governments in the 1990s, put me in mind of the thesis championed by Havel, of living in truth. It seems that the Hungarian people, despite election rigging and gerrymandering, just got sick of being ruled by an illiberal autocrat with deep ties to the insane administrations of both Russia and the United States. My hope is that the people of Hungary have demonstrated the way, even through rigged electoral politics, to depose of a “democratic dictator.” Others may follow.
Another article about what it’s like to teach in the era of LLMs. I’m interested to read these and see how they change over time as the LLMs change, school policies and pedagogy changes and students change. The part that resonates for me about this one is “friction.”
Helen Palmer has collected a number of different voices describing the Cynefin framework and some if it’s underlying theory and practice. It’s a useful primer to where the thinking is on this particular framework
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Ann Linnea goes for a walk in the woods on her island home in the Salish Sea, 160km to the south of me. She loves spring, as do I. The sea lions have started to leave here and there are only a few left meaning that, for the first time since November, there is actually silence at night. And like Ann also observes, our two most common early warblers are back, the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned. On top of that the dominant sparrow call is now the white crowned. Over the past week they have been appearing and singing more and more.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of their breakfast table, Ann’s beloved partner and one of my mentors Christina Baldwin turns 80. Happy birthday dear one!
“Thunderous and well rehearsed improvisations,” relates Edward R. Murrow when telling an anecdote about how an acquaintance described a lunch meeting with Churchill. But watch until the end, when Murrow shares his opinion on human rights and the obligations of the powers that command world-ending violence.
On a related note, Peter Levine makes the case that not only has a war crime been committed with the President’s foul utterances on Monday, but there is a collective and moral guilt that flows from that. This guilt dogs generations, and extends beyond borders. His reflections on Jaspers’ types of collective and personal guilt are a good roadmap for reconciliation and repair.