Democracy's "Lost" Inheritance - Quareness Series (24th "Lecture").
Looking "dispassionately" at our western socio/political environment today, there seems to be a growing need for us to recapture the spirit of a social covenant and to embed this spirit in our revitalised institutions. Such might help us to get beyond many of the problems posed by a loss of meaning in our limited contract societies, including our institutions' loss of public credibility. We might rediscover some common, even some sacred, ground for getting beyond the conflict and confrontation that now seems to have made our political life both sterile and dangerous.
Post modern reality is eclectic. It is plural. There are many truths, many values, many lifestyles, and many meanings that all vie for our attention and possibly for our loyalty. And this obvious eclecticism may well be the inevitable result of the privatisation of meaning, the fragmentation of shared public meaning into what the sociologists call separate "life-worlds". Among the pot-pourri of religions now available, to which any one of us might give our (limited) adherence, there is none that all of us can share as the underlying basis for our common social reality. This inevitably changes radically our attitude towards religion itself, but it also affects any possible relation between religion and politics. Realistically no organised religion as presently constituted can be the basis for a new social covenant.
In the neutralised public sphere of liberal contract societies, there has been an assumption that the state bureaucracy could step in to fill the vacuum left by the absence of shared meaning. The bureaucracy could arbitrate, like a neutral and impartial judge, between the conflicting rights and demands of the many private and sectional interests. One limited set of value neutral rules would be enough to organise the separate life-worlds into a working whole. But alas bureaucracy is not enough. It is certainly no replacement for a covenant relationship between the parties whose interests it arbitrates. Bureaucracy, or instrumental reason, may be necessary to some extent in our large and complex society, but the bureaucracy itself must presuppose that there are underlying principles regarding what or why things are being organised as they are. And these underlying principles are just what we appear to lack. This "superego" dimension of society (our shared values, assumptions, practices, common purposes) are precisely what seems to get left out of individualist or contract accounts of society. Our rights are protected, we are free (autonomous), but we don't know what we are free for or how to relate to the freedom of others.
It's a further problem that bureaucracy's rules are imposed, issuing from a neutral rationality rather than from the local meanings and traditions of individual small groups. These rules don't touch people where they're "at". When the bureaucracy arbitrates on disageements between individuals or interests, the arbitration tends to be accepted only grudgingly. It may be deemed "fair", but the conflicting parties rarely feel genuinely reconciled. All arbitrated settlements, compromises and votes are perhaps only second best solutions. They are "top down" solutions to differences that could be resolved genuinely only from the "bottom up" i.e. from within (emergent from) the nexus of meaning around which people's lives are focussed. In actual relationships, the spirit in which people do things is no less important than what they do.
Paradoxically whilst our need to accommodate pluralism has strengthened the privatisation (and
relativisation) of meaning, yet it is only through discovering some collective public meaning that we can learn to accommodate our pluralism. This paradox exposes both the inadequacy and the sterility of modernity's brand of liberal individualism as well as the futility of all attempts to recover shared meaning through the denial of difference. The first can only lead to increased conflict and confrontation, the second to the repression of conflict through an imposed and false homogeneity (and in time an inevitable turning back to the first - an endlessly stuck state of affairs "going around in circles").
I believe the full expression of difference to be a very important part of the raison d'etre of society itself. And commitment to the outright celebration of pluralism needs to be the basis of any new social covenant that we seek. We will never again find the common sacred dimension to today's complex society within the structure of any one of our existing organised religions when each is committed to its own singular and private meaning. We can now live in a sacred society only if we can find our common roots in some meaningful dimension of reality that undercuts and at the same time gives meaning to our differences.
Because it contains all potentialities, the "vacuum" (grounding/origin of all) is in its very essence plural. And it evolves through the expression and the meaning of those possibilities, through the creative dialogue between them. The dialogue between our various meanings, cultures, social groupings, etc. are the concrete steps in the unfolding process of the vacuum's evolution from potentiality to actuality. Thus there is a natural covenant between the vacuum and ourselves, between the source of all being and ourselves. This is a covenant between the vacuum and our social and political reality. The nature of this covenant grounds all our meanings in a wider sea of shared potential meaning. It lays on us the responsibility to express as much of this potential - develop as much of its pluralism - as possible.
The vacuum is our common reality. It is the source of our being and of our being together. It is because the vacuum contains all potentiality and because the vacuum is within us that we carry the potentiality of the other within us. It is because of our inner dialogue with these potentialities that a dialogue between us as persons is then possible. Our covenant with the vacuum is also political precisely because it has pluralism at its heart, because it calls upon us to conciliate between the different interests (different possibilities) in society and makes us aware that these all derive from a common and ultimate source. Through this new "quantum" covenant all our private meanings acquire a new shared public meaning. Each becomes a creative partner in the shared public enterprise of evolution. We all become partners in this enterprise, not despite our differences, but because of our differences. We need each other fully to become ourselves, to evolve that "dance" which is our common reality. Evolution needs us to be different to fully realise itself.
The dialogue process of deconstruction and resynthesis is similar to that described by some creative artists, who say that they have to "rid" themselves of old, habitual ways of seeing and learn to view the world in a new way - "everything we see in ordinary life undergoes, more or less, the deformation brought about by acquired habits....the effort necessary to get out of this rut requires a sort of courage and that courage is indispensable to the artist who must see things as though he saw them for the first time, you have to see the whole of life as you did when a child..." (Henri Matisse). In going through the deconstruction and resynthesis stages, the brain finds the appropriate unifying concept (and accompanying plan of action) in a moment of "insight".
In a quantum model of consciousness, the formation of new concepts is the expected outcome of diverse quantum superpositions (diverse possible interpretations) "collapsing" towards a coherent theme in keeping with the process of evolution. The two stages by which the brain reflects on and digests heterogeneous data to arrive at a coherent picture have both a horizontal and a vertical dimension. The horizontal dimension is the associations made between diverse pieces of the data as different neural modules oscillate in unison i.e. the various pieces of data relate to each other. The vertical dimension is the relation of the data across time. Our "one off" memory system allows the data to be compared to and integrated with past experience, while the process of collapse towards coherence (in the quantum model) links the data to the future through evolution.
The American quantum physicist David Bohm's dialogue process calls upon its participants to go through the same two stages that the limbic system in the brain uses to integrate its heterogeneous perceptual data. In dialogue the deconstructive stage is described as a "letting go" or "suspension" of one's own point of view as the only point of view. There must be a willingness to put one's own alongside others' points of view as one of many to be compared, contrasted, considered. The meanings and underlying assumptions of all the points of view can then be analysed, their cultural presuppositions and assumptions thus exposed, and their grip on consciousness loosened. Bohm (who incidently was driven out of the US by McCarthyism) believed that as people go through this process much of the emotional charge surrounding a rigidly held point of view is diffused, making it easier for participants genuinely to listen to one another. In the brain, it is a sense of frustration that is released.
When the rigid, tacit infrastructure is loosened, the mind begins to move in a new order. This new order is a whole new emergent level of consciousness in which the participants get beyond the fragmented state of individual consciousness to a shared pool of meaning and value, to a common purpose or understanding. They see that their original points of view in their original form clash, but if looked at in a new way give rise to a unity in plurality.
In adversarial debate, I do not let go of or suspend my own point of view. On the contrary, I sharpen it. I try to imagine the other person's point of view or set of arguments for the sole purpose of being better able to refute them. I do not place my point of view alongside the other's and regard them jointly as of equal weight. Rather I try to persuade the other, to win him over or convert him to my point of view. In adversarial democracy, I judge my freedom and my efficacy by the degree of opportunity I am given to promote or defend my point of view. A good free-for-all of give-and-take debate is taken as a sign of a healthy democracy. This is a view that argues "justice is strife" (per the words of the English liberal philosopher Stuart Hampshire).
The liberal individualist sees politics as necessarily ridden with conflict, and thus as necessarily
adversarial, because he has taken his model from the clashing billiard balls of mechanistic physics. The mechanistic organisation theorist sees conflict as best resolved through the use of power. However, just as in Newtonian physics where the billiard balls (atoms) never change internally when they meet, so in such an adversarial political model neither people nor their positions change very much through debate. People become entrenched rather than evolving.
By contrast, in the quantum model, two quantum systems merge when they meet. They get inside each other's boundaries and each acquires a new, a further level of identity. In the brain whole new neural pathways are laid down in response to experience. The brain is constantly changing internally, constantly evolving, as it responds to its environment and to its own responses to that environment. The matter of the mind interacts with itself at all times. In dialogue the participants' points of view evolve.
In adversarial debate I do not invent new concepts and new categories jointly arrived at with the other and through which we find some common ground. Rather I cling desperately to my own concepts and hope that the other will come to think in my way. With this, compromise is always the best outcome that can be hoped for. Compromise, rather than consensus, is the adversarial democratic ideal. But in compromise, rather than new ideas emerging and getting articulated, old ideas are slightly fudged to soften or disguise the points of conflict. In dialogue the other is my partner or fellow explorer in a mutually creative enterprise of discovery. As Daniel Bohm put it - "In dialogue everybody wins".
Real dialogue entails an emergent reality drawing our differences into a meaningful whole. It's a Socratic dialogue that gives voice to all the points of view - a "unity in plurality". The end result of such dialogue in the brain is the unity of a perceptual field that contains many diverse elements, not the suppression or manipulation of some data in favour of others, as in the adversarial arena. Socrates used the dialogue process to get young Athenians to break down their private assumptions and individual perspectives and to get them beyond disagreement to a common perception of truth. According to the contemporary Greek philospher Emilios Bouratinos, the whole of ancient Greek democracy up to about 550 BC rested on a similar dialogue process. The citizens of Athens would gather in the agora (marketplace) and discuss
whatever concerned them. They discussed problems with an open mind and their conversation continued until some resolution could be found. No votes were taken because the whole spirit of the meeting was to reach common agreement. According to Bouratinos, "the practice of taking votes actually spelt the end of true democracy". Therefore, he would advocate cultivation of a "quantum attitude" to recapture "democracy's lost inheritance".
The uncanny resemblance between the dialogue process and the brain's own processes for integrating heterogeneous perceptual data can be another example of nature providing us with a model and a basis for our own social behaviour. The brain's higher processes of reflective consciousness gives us something like a "dialogue archetype" or "complex group archetype" on which we can draw when trying to resolve our own differences and to make use of our own diversities in a creative way. In the brain, all the many pieces of disparate perceptual data are held together in the limbic system, the seat of reflective consciousness. If the brain has a quantum dimension, all these data take the form of excitations (patterns) on the limbic system's coherent quantum field (on its Bose-Einstein condensate). Each piece of data excites an oscillation of the underlying Bose-Einstein substrate. It is this feature, where all the data are excitations or expressions of a common substrate, that allows heterogeneous data to be held in superposition, or to be scanned holistically. The data are all entangled in the way that quantum excitations are. Boundaries are overlapped and they share an identity. They are stuff of each other's substance.
Similarly in society each of us, as existing things, is an excitation of the quantum vacuum (the ultimate Bose-Einstein condensate). Each of our coherent conscious patterns, our conceptual schema, our systems of value, our aspirations and fears and our cultural attributes are excitations of the quantum vacuum. As such we too are all entangled, stuff of each other's substance. This is the horizontal dimension to our covenant with the vacuum - our relationship to each other. We are all aspects of the same larger whole, "faces" of the underlying "God" or as Euripides expresses it at the end of the Bacchae where "many are the shapes of things divine". This relationship to each other gives us one primary motivation, as well as our basic capacity, to engage in dialogue. It imbues our dialogue with a mutual respect and mutual cooperation,
a philosophy of mutual belonging that is not possible in adversarial politics.
Evolution cannot take place without variation, without plurality, nor does evolution proceed without that plurality constantly combining to give new emergent forms. Perceptual evolution requires that the various bits of heterogeneous data recombine (resynthesize) into new holistic patterns. Social evolution requires that different points of view, different ideas, different ways of life and different traditions recombine into larger, more complex emergent wholes. Evolution imbues dialogue with a philosophy of mutual need and a commitment to the other's way or to the other's point of view as a necessary part of my own further way. This takes us beyond both adversarial politics and beyond a politics of mere tolerance to a politics of partnership.
Our old political priorities and existing social and political institutions appear at present to be undergoing a process of deconstruction. And this deconstructive process will likely expose the fact that the forces of post-modernity are such that we can no longer meet social and political necessity with the old categories, the old language, the old institutions. It also will probably show us that new categories, a new language and transformed institutions cannot be found through the agency of our old political philosophy or our existing political process.
Individualism, with its private spheres of meaning, its adversarial politics of conflict and confrontation and its neutralisation (and despiritualisation) of the public sphere, can never give us the basis for real dialogue. It can never give us the relation to each other or the sense of shared meaning necessary to conduct a dialogue in the right spirit. Still less can fragmentation of the public sphere into conflicting factions give us this shared meaning of a sense of common being. Beyond that, the bureaucracy which necessarily accompanies atomistic individualism as the sole binding force in society, is too rigid to allow new forms, new categories or new "languages" to emerge. Our existing political structures embody the adversarial mechanistic ideal.
Another factor seemingly making our existing political process mechanistic and unresponsive is the concentration of most power and decision-making at the centre, vested in increasingly few institutions and/or professional politicians who are distant from the daily lives of the people or small groups over whom they wield power and whom they are, comically, supposed to represent.
If we were to adopt dialogue as the central focus of our political process, the structures that embody it would have to be radically different, less centralised, less "professional" i.e. not entirely peopled by career politicians.
If we take the brain, especially the quantum brain, as our model for how to realise our fullest social potential, a politics of dialogue would stress the importance of many levels and many centres of creative conversation. The people who meet in these forums would have to do so as "independents" i.e. with an open mind, as ready participants in a creative dialogue rather than as advocates of some adversarial stance. This is not wholly incompatible with party politics but it would require a different attitude towards the primacy of "party loyalty". One's deepest political loyalty would be to open dialogue and to emergent, shared meaning, and to the underlying covenant of which that dialogue and meaning are expressions.
Parliament itself would have to reflect, indeed to amplify, not just the plurality of concern and opinion abroad in the land, but also the emergent meaning resulting from the many-levelled and ongoing conversation. Parliament would have to become a forum like the limbic system, where old categories (old habits and conditioned ways of thinking) are deconstructed and new ones resynthesized. It seems this could never happen within the present system of adversarial politics.
Historically, the first stages of many cultural creations - the early Greeks, the early Christian Church, the rise of modern science, the founding of the USA - were associated with many such open dialogues, before ossification set in. This "bottom up" approach has created new cultural, political and spiritual realities. The true allegiance of the "citizen pilgrim" is to his/her own mission of creative discovery.
Political priorities, like the brain's plans of action, should also be emergent rather than imposed - emergent, flexible and open to change in response to circumstances. It is far more powerful and far more representative of both our meanings and our potential that priorities emerge fresh from our ongoing conversation, and from the shared concerns and shared values that it represents. Keeping that conversation going, creating the multi-layered and multi-centred structures that make it possible, should perhaps be our highest political priority.
Unless I transform my personal attitudes, unless I attach my loyalty to the spirit of dialogue and to the "unity within plurality" that it embodies, nothing of significance will change. As Jung said each of us "are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its makers ....we make our own epoch". Each of us, as he realised, and as a quantum view of consciousness would explain, may find in his or her own depths the collective yearnings, the collective fantasies and the collective potential of the whole human race. I must realise that my own upsets and conflicts are the psychological equivalent of an "infection" that I can pass on to those around me (dem negative vibes arís). Others do the same to me, but it seems to evade my responsibility merely to ask that others change for my sake. I can/must do my best to deal with my own upsets, whatever their source. "The buck stops here".
To realise all this is the basis for a renewed religious attitude. Every time that I try to understand another person's point of view it is a small religious act. It is also a small political act and an antidote for "that great unspoken crime, a failure of the imagination".
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
November, 2012.