Foundations
Embarking on Absurd Adventures
I felt like I’d come to a turning point in my last post. Within a couple weeks, though, it began to feel more like a dead end. I thought I’d seen a path forward, but instead found myself facing a wall.
It wasn’t for lack of topics. There are plenty of topics and I have plenty to say about them. But it was not, apparently, their time. Non-writers may find this odd, but the reality is that I’m not in charge of what gets written in this newsletter. Every time I begin to think otherwise, a wall appears to remind me.
But, after more than three months, several books, many conversations, and a rediscovered 12-year-old blog post about journalism, I seem to have found another way forward ... largely by finding my way back to my original purpose.
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When I began this journey in 2014, I could see that the U.S. would soon face rough times, that our democracy was under threat. I had no idea how things would play out and didn’t expect the crisis to come so quickly but, however distressing, there’s been little surprising in the events of the last ten years. We’ve been laying a foundation for them for a very long time.
Two things were clear to me then.
The first was that the flawed foundation wasn’t just the result of a few years’ or even a few decades’ work by saboteurs. There have certainly been people working to sabotage any progress we’ve made, but the foundation was flawed from the start. That’s not a hypothesis; it’s just history. If we want something better, we’ll have to build on a new foundation.
The second was that we needed to start from the local and the particular, not from some grand national reform. That is a hypothesis. My views on this have evolved a bit, but I still believe the focus of our work has to be on our own communities, that otherwise any national effort is doomed. Indeed, much of what I’ve learned about resilience makes that clear.
But if those efforts, from local to national, are to result in a society where everyone can flourish, they have to be grounded in a common framework and set of principles designed to lead there.
Exploring resilience and the relational principles of ecosystems has been exciting in part because they seemed like they answered that need. When I finished my last post, I felt like what remained was to work out the practical applications.
Then I hit the wall.
Sometimes when I get stuck, it’s because I haven’t found the right way to look at things. Everything I need is there; I just need to find a different perspective or framing or a better place to start from.
But sometimes it’s because something is missing.
That happened last year with the idea of intentionality — until I stumbled on David Woods’ work on resilience engineering, I lacked a way to talk about how the human ability to plan and coordinate plays into resilience. Once I had that piece, the rest fell easily into place.
This time is similar. But rather than missing a piece of an otherwise coherent structure, it turns out that it’s the coherent structure itself that’s missing. I’ve been working on an important element, but it’s just one component of something much bigger. Resilience science offers tremendous insight into the world around us and our relationship to it. But it has less to tell us about two other critical arenas.
Stumbling on my old journalism blog post led me toward the first one. How we operate within our larger community is grounded in how we see and treat each other, both as individuals and through our institutions. That deeply affects what’s possible within our communities.
The other came clear to me as I read Danielle Allen’s 2023 book, Justice by Means of Democracy. Allen addresses flaws in the dominant political economic paradigm by rethinking what’s needed for justice from the ground up. The result is not just a theory of justice, but a set of design principles for the third critical arena: the political, social, and economic institutions we build to coordinate our efforts to live together. I’ll dig into her work later; for now what’s important is to recognize the need for such design principles.
Those three arenas together form the larger structure I was missing. If we want to rebuild our democracy on a better foundation, we need a framework that encompasses all three:
People: our and our institutions’ relationship to other people,
The world: our and our institutions’ relationship to the world,
Institutions: the design of the political, cultural, and economic institutions themselves.
I’ve largely focused on that second arena since late 2024. There’s obviously more to investigate there, but for now I want to shift focus and spend some time on people and institutions, as well as on ways the three intertwine.
One final comment.
When I look at that little list, I have to laugh. The scope there isn’t just audacious, it’s absurd.
And yet it is the scope of the systems in which every one of us operates every day, the systems that enable and constrain our choices and that our choices in turn will either foster or disrupt. For most of us most of the time, those systems are invisible.
And when systems are invisible, our options become invisible as well.
If we’re to rebuild our democracy, we have no choice but to embrace the absurdity of the task. Fortunately, no one of us is doing it alone and, as I’ll continue to share, we can build on the amazing work of a vast network of scholars and activists and caring members of our communities.
Until next time.
Afterthoughts
The Past is Not Behind Us. As we seek to build on new foundations, it’s important to remember that that’s not the same as denying our past, which doesn’t work. This beautiful essay by Jason Ferenczi explores the ways that past is present in any work toward a future and offers some questions that acknowledge the ways we are “not people standing outside history, looking backward at it. We are historical beings, gathering in historical communities, attempting to create futures from within stories that are still unfolding. We enter a history already underway.”
Voices from the Christian Left. As we rethink foundations, we need all voices, including religious ones. For many the voice of Christianity seems synonymous with the poison rhetoric of the extremist Christian Right, but there have always been powerful Christian thinkers, speakers, activists, and organizers who question current systems of power and advance a progressive vision. My friend David Rayburn hosts a podcast devoted to such voices and he’s had a couple interesting guests recently that I want to share.
Joerg Rieger is a professor of theology and the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University. David has two interviews with Rieger. The first is on his book, Theology in the Capitalocene, which explores capitalism’s negative impacts on social justice and the ways that theology and religion have contributed. The second is on the Wendland-Cook Program, which explores the relationship between religion and economic and ecological justice and works to equip communities in working toward justice.
Greg Jarrell is a cultural organizer with QC Family Tree in the Enderly Park neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina. He works with words and music to impact housing and neighborhood justice issues and is the author of Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods and A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging, that explore the intersections of white supremacy and racism, theology and music, and the strength, resilience, and beauty of community.
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