Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Deep Democracy

Reverend Kurt Kuhwald
October 21, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

Democracy. O Democracy. How is it that when we say that word, when we raise those four syllables into the air, something happens? Something stirs … in the mind … in the heart … in the gut? We are stirred. Yet we’re also hard put to give a clear and final definition of what Democracy truly is. Not just because we all share the inner, disturbing sense that we don’t have it, but in fact, because we are not sure that we ever truly experienced it. Especially on a large scale. Especially on the scale of this country, the United States of America.

There are some words, powerful, that crack like lightening from the question of why we are stirred by the word “Democracy,” there are some words that arose back in 1999 in Seattle: “Another world is possible!” It feels like the people speaking! And indeed, it was.

“Another world IS possible!” At the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in June of this year, that I was fortunate to have attended, there were other critical words you may have heard about, words that took the vision of another possible world, that took that yearning, that deep, almost tragic, hope … took it further, brought it home, made it real for this place, this land, this country: To “Another world is possible!” that fiery band of activists added: “Another U.S. is Necessary.”

Let me be clear. This isn’t just some raucous, revolutionary raving; it’s not some irresponsible reactionary rant; it’s hard economic and social fact: The consequences of so many policies and programs of our current government are now building into a perfect economic, environmental and social storm of catastrophic proportions. A storm that is demanding the transformation of this country at its roots.

But let me first address that first statement, “Another World is Possible,” that wild, outrageous, almost unspeakable hope, fragile before cynical critique, that imagining that this world, with all its folly and violence, with all its inequity and suffering, this world can truly be transformed. But the fact is, it is a lie to maintain that another world ISN’T possible. It is a lie to declare history has ended with the supposed triumph of capitalism. It is a lie to believe that inequity is simply the way it has to be, and in fact should be — the use/exploitation of resources, the obscene gap that grows daily between the rich and the poor, the arrogance and myopia that puts profits over physical health and a clean earth — all show how damaging inequity truly is. It is a lie to believe that inequity MUST be the norm, and that the human quest for, need for, real freedom, real democracy, is merely a utopian dream. It is a lie to teach that democracy can be rendered into consumerist pabulum without grave consequences … one consequence of which is the breeding of resistance and opposition that, because it is robbed of hope, invariably seeks vindication through violence.

Of course another world is possible. That is not only a theological and a scientific possibility, it is an absolute necessity. Change is absolutely integral to the structure of reality, and recognizing possible futures is one way of recognizing change. Yet the chant “Another world is possible!” is more than a description of how the world operates, more even than a deep hope, it is a precise tool to dislodge a failing story: the story that history has ended; the story that democracy is best represented by an unrestrained, corporately dominated capitalism; the story that it is best for our country and the world if the people relinquish their primary freedoms for the sake of security, especially from terrorism; the story of an unending war on terrorism, which is actually the implementation of an elitist business plan; the story that so-called free enterprise must replace all social programs because they corrupt people’s initiative, and inherently lead to disorganization and sloth; the story that the people, fundamentally, can’t be trusted with governance because they are too impulsive, crass and limited in their understanding.

And … “Another world is possible!” leads directly, here at the ragged beginning of the 21^st century, to “Another U.S. is necessary.” Global possibility leads to national necessity because historically we have failed to bring to concrete reality the true vision of Democracy. While it is regrettable, deeply regrettable, it is also understandable, however, that this nation has been unable to fulfill the real hope of Democracy. The democratic dream originally arose here within the context, or in current terms, within the matrix, of Empire; within the cauldron of a long history of political and governance systems that were thoroughly embedded in a belief in and practice of violent domination, and domination not for the benefit of the many, of the people, but for the benefit of the few, the elite, the wealthy, the educated, the “deserving.” That dream arose, supposedly for the many, but was carried out in fact for only the few: In colonial America those who were able to participate in the new government consisted of only white, male, (presumably heterosexual) landowning, Christian adults; that is 10% of the total population. Democracy was overtly, categorically and violently denied to 90% of the rest of the population. This is a grave and critically important fact that must be understood as the groundwork for all the subsequent history of this country, and for all the decisions each Presidential Administration, Congress and Judiciary made, for every war we fought, for every social movement that arose along our national journey.

However, what the history of deep democracy in the U.S. became, and still is, is the struggle, a series of pitched battles, by groups of people to be able to claim sovereignty as persons and therefore to take their place in the democratic family of this country. That stream of creative struggle has been waged out of necessity primarily against three forces of coercion: (1) the creation of and support for racism used to seduce the rebellious white working class away from a class struggle with the wealthy; (2) the support for the emergence of a middle class that could be lulled into a complacent prosperity; and (3) the radically reactionary, and intentionally hidden power of the richest strata of persons bent on increasing their wealth and solidifying their power.

You know who many of those dissenting people were, you know what those rebellious movements were, or at least you found out after reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, or Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multi-Cultural America, for so many of those people and the movements they created were hidden away in a deafening obscurity. To list just a few: First there were the indigenous people of this land, one tribal group of which, the Iroquois, had a form of government that in fact became the framework for the Constitution that the colonists drafted and under which we live today. Another in the list of dissent, even before the revolution was Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia that was a complex reaction to equalize wealth among upper classes, indentured servants and frontier’s people and to eliminate the Indians thwarting frontier expansion. Of course, there were the hundreds upon hundreds of rebellions fomented by black slaves and abolistionists all over America and especially in the south all seeking freedom and dignity, fundamental elements of the democratic spirit---and all kept from our textbooks and classrooms in service to a Happying Up, false vision of a meritocrcy. And labor women and men have carried forward a continuous struggle for fair working conditions---a foundation for strengthening the basic human needs of people: from the Female Labor Reform Association in Lowell Massachusetts in the 1830’s and 40’s to the Wobblies at the beginning of the 20^th century and on to the Sutter Nurses who struck this month here in California. And of course, there were more, thousands, millions of people over time who struggled for a nation of true democracy, deep democracy against its absence, and against an oligarchy of power that was implanted from the beginning.

In September I spent a weekend in Humboldt County at a training led by an organization called “Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County.” DUHC has a model for social change that grew out of Joanna Macy’s description of the major dynamics of The Great Turning (the transformation from an Industrial-Growth Society, to a Life-Sustaining society). The fourth of the four actions DUHC believes is necessary to transform our world is called “Shifting Culture,” it states: “The most dangerous threat to democracy is the mistaken belief that the US is a democracy.” “The most dangerous threat to democracy is the mistaken belief that the US is a democracy.”

In other words, people suffer from a delusion ot tragic proportions in our country because they are led to believe that we have a democracy, or even more tragic, that we ARE a democracy.

Before I go any further, it seems appropriate to ask: “What is Democracy?” “The People Rule.” Plain and simple: The people rule. In a democracy the people rule because they have the power; the power resides in them. Power to decide, power to enact their decisions, power to educate themselves so that they can compassionately and equitably use their power, power to define what needs to be done on all levels.

One way we can approach determining the nature of democracy is by clarifying what it is NOT! It is not voting. It is not campaigning for office. Legislating laws and the institution of legislation, no matter how equitable its membership. It is not holding lawbreakers accountable and the institutions, the court system, that makes those judgments.

Forms, you see, cannot contain democracy. No institution can hold democracy, in fact institutions very often, some say most often, deny and suppress democracy. “It is an error,” writes C. Douglas Lummis, author of Radical Democracy, “It is an error to refer to institutions as if they were synonymous with the conditions they are intended to promote.” “We tend to think,” he goes on, “about institutions of learning or the Department of Justice or the religious establishment as the locuses of learning, justice and religion. We would be less likely to make the analogous mistake of thinking of institutions such as, say, beauty parlors, fitness centers, and penitentiaries as the locuses of beauty, fitness, and penitence.”

Then Loomis enters into an interpretation of a central argument of the great enlightenment philosopher, Montesquieu: “According to Montesquieu, democracy requires, in addition to law and the power to enforce it, ‘one spring more … namely virtue.’” Loomis adds, ldquo;That is, there can be democracy where there is political virtue, not otherwise … For Montesquieu, democracy is the name of a form of rule, not of a form of obedience. It is the name of a situation in which the people are in the sovereign seat of power, which means that they have power over the law. In this situation, nothing but political virtue can lead them to use that power in an orderly and restrained way.” And, he adds, “If Montesquieu is right the ‘state’ of democracy is preinstitutional.”

So here, in my understanding, is the critical central point: the preinstitutional “state” of democracy can reside nowhere than in the human heart/mind. And of course this makes eminent sense, for democracy is, after all, an invention of the human heart/mind. It does not exist as some preordained political form just waiting to be discovered by humans. Democracy is a response to social interaction where the power is, and has to be, invested in the people themselves, the same people who constitute the social group that is to be governed.

People do not need to be controlled. They need, rather, to develop means for guiding and monitoring and developing their interactions based on the ministrations of their own hearts. And because democracy is founded in the human heart/mind, it is inexhaustible in its capacity to create workable forms, as inexhaustible as the vast diversity of personalities that are born into life in human form — where we recognize, miraculously, no two are fully identical — No Two Are Fully Identical. And this is of course why the Neocon/fundamentalist argument that there is only One theology, one form of government, one form of economics that can work for human beings is a pernicious, restrictive, shrunken ideology that suppresses the human spirit, rather than supporting it. It is, in fact an ideology based on greed and the lust for power, not for freedom, the expansion of the human spirit, nor for the full and glad celebration of the Sacred Earth.

What the human heart/mind does out of its vital creativity is wonderfully recounted by Loomis quoting the great German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt: “In On Revolution Hannah Arendt notes that since the rise of the modern nation-state, revolution after revolution has produced, at least in the first stages, a peculiar political form she calls the council system. Again and again in the phase when the revolution was still revolutionary the polity has broken down naturally into units small enough that the people can confront one another in genuine communities, talk to one another, and choose and act collectively.”

Loomis then recounts his experience at Cal during the Free Speech Movement of 1964. He says, “I remember thinking that one would be able to tell by looking down from an airplane that the university was in an extraordinary state. Instead of streams of mutually alienated students marching dutifully to and from class, everywhere there were little knots of from five to twenty people, talking, exchanging information, arguing furiously.” “… it was an open secret in the movement that for many activists the method had become a big part of the motivation for participation. The sense of hope, trust, community, and joy of action which people experienced … brought with them a feeling of happiness totally different from the simple means-end satisfactions offered by competitive liberal society.”

So here it is. Here is the foundation of democracy, and what I believe we have to return to in order to reclaim this country for “we the people.”

• We need to regain trust in one another.
• We need to deepen trust first here, in this community, and then we need to carry that trustworthiness, trust-intelligence, out into the larger world.
• We need to stoke our hope, affirm our hope in the trust and affirmation we exercise for our own individual integrity, our own precious individual selves.
• We need to invest in community, in the sacred Sangha that is the fertile ground for our social survival and sustenance.
• We need to engage in those actions that give us joy, engage in those actions that allow the joy of our natural, deeply good, selves to flourish.
• And, lastly, And right here, in this good community, this justice-loving community, we need to unapologetically, and vigorously practice the fifth principle of the UUA: “The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large“ … from out of our deep self-cherishing.

Let me end this dharma talk with two quotes. The first from Thich Nhat Hahn, courageous monk whose compatriots have engaged Empire with their very lives in the deepest spirit of the democratic Earth-Mind. He says: “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves — slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”

The second, from Howard Zinn: “To be hopeful in bad times is not…foolishly romantic; it is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty [greed and violence], but of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future — the future is an infinite succession of ‘presents,’ and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

May our acts of trust, hope, and relationship be so centered. May the true spirit of Democracy fully and generously inhabit our heart/minds in open and welcome consciousness as we celebrate the victory of our on-going struggle in the paradise that is this world.

All My Relations.
Ashé. Amen. Ameen. Shalom & Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

 

Worship Associate Reflection