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.
In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know.
On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers contained in writing what scares you pale compared to the greater one of doing anything else. For any of us to turn our gaze away, to waste our time on work that isn’t wrestling with what’s most urgent for us, to diminish the import our stories should hold, deny our characters the impact they deserve, to do anything other than put our most vulnerable selves out there as openly as we can: for an artist there’s nothing more terrifying than that. Sometimes my long-ago mentor would say it another way: if what you’re writing doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth writing.” That’s not always about fiction. Sometimes that is also about working through the little existential crises that a growing and learning human experiences as one changes through time.
I spent yesterday afternoon on a phone call with my friends and colleagues Jenn Williams, Cedric Jamet and Troy Maracle talking about our next offering of Reimagining Education, to be held in Peterborough Ontario, near Toronto, October 16-18.
Our conversation was very much about the role of the practitioner in fields and contexts of uncertainty and complexity and how our work aims to support the capacity of practitioners who shape those systems.
This is an Art of Hosting, and its focus is one asking how to to bring more hosting and participatory learning work to education. In the past we have had folks from schools systems and post secondary institutions attend who come with a deep inquiry about how to improve the systems they are working in. We’ve had government folks, people who work in community services and folks who work as consultants with larger systemic issues as well. These gatherings have become an important place for people in education to encounter folks from outside their usual orbit, and for people who work with groups and systems to meet educators who are trying to deliver learning within systems that often conspire against them.
To me this focus, and the diversity of encounter, makes this a rich Art of Hosting workshop.
This is the place of no easy answers, fraught choices and no obvious way to effect the changes that are needed. In that sense, the conversations and the projects that we work with in this Art of Hosting are representative of the very biggest social challenges we face: cracking open places of genuine learning and co-creation in a context that seeks control and certainty.
Our team is well suited for this work. Jenn has been carrying this calling for her whole career as an experiential educator and consultant. She has worked on tall ships, in wilderness settings, in classrooms and in conference halls crafting spaces of encounter and genuine learning. Troy has spent his career in Indigenous education as a teacher, and leader, mustering resources to support Indigenous students and communities, and tending to a network of Indigenous educations leads in Ontario. Cédric teaches at Concordia University in the Human Systems Intervention program, working to prepare change makers in human systems.
Because of this team;s work and the people who come to this gathering, the particular Art of Hosting goes into a deep examination of what it means to lead, catalyse, and design interventions within powerful and seemingly unchangeable systems The focus is on education, but the applicability is broad. That focus though brings a grounded imperative to the work. We teach methods, tools, and perspectives that are going to be used right away to support change work. And we host in a way that the brilliance of the group, and the experiences each person is able to offer becomes a key resources for the learning.
We’d love to have you join us. Working in a forest for three days in a southern Ontario autumn with 30 other people who will get you and challenge you and support you is a gift. Registration is now open.
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.
Instead of addressing the economic crisis of the pandemic, monetary stimulus made it worse. It has contributed to a global affordability crisis in housing, a private insolvency crisis for tens of millions of people, provided the weathiest people in society with amounts ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions to buy more property and companies, all while increasing worker layoffs.
It created the economic distortions and crisis that our countries are all living through, pouring trillions of money into driving up the price of existing assets while nothing is going into productive activities. Trillions of dollars that could have gone to modern infrastructure, new power plants, housing, research and development or building everything from chip factories to battery plants to electric vehicle factores was squandered.
What is just as frustrating is that while central bankers seem oblivious, elected governments keep getting the blame for economic disruptions caused entirely by bad monetary policy and tsunami of debt it has unleashed. This is equally true across the political spectrum: debates centre entirely on government taxing, government spending, but not on reforming the policies of central banks who, in addition to the trillions of dollars they created for quantitative easing, also helped create over USD $25-trillion in credit with nothing to show for it.
Instead of recognizing that the housing affordability crisis, our productivity crises, and our personal debt crises were caused by this mind-boggling misallocation of investment, the blame has fallen on people, especially immigrants and refugees, for the fact that people in developed countries cannot get jobs that pay enough to afford a roof over their heads. It’s blamed on immigration, or Indigenous people, or whichever usual suspect is on the list, including by respected economists, who fail to recognize that we have a money problem that needs to be solved with money.
Wealth inequality, long identified as the biggest threat to the stability of democracies, has increased since the pandemic in entirely predictable ways.
The people I work with are now mostly facing years of austerity and at least a decade or more of catching up to underfunded services, infrastructure, and social needs, stagnant pay, and over inflated prices for essentials. Young people are having their future earnings extorted for an underfunded and over-valued post-secondary education and housing prices that are kept high to insure that middle class retirements don’t need to be funded by the state.
When governments praise economic growth as the way out of this mess, it’s important to remember that the gains of that growth largely go to the same people who benefit from low interest rates, which means that the people in the higher tranches of Lamott’s tables will continue to reap the benefits. Money that can be borrowed at 3% to make a 10% profit is a tasty proposition if you can afford it. Borrow cheap money, but “growth” equities and return the money. Awesome. If you have the capital to do it. And to get a few more percentage points of profit out of your equities, lower the operational costs of the company by replacing salaries with automation, or making the whole thing “efficient.” Which means throwing thousands of people out of work. All the while you aren’t taxed in that wealth because it isn’t year realized capital gains. In fact you can now borrow even more cheap money using your equities as collateral.
When governments start making noise about taxing that wealth, you can raise a stink about how inefficient and expensive public services are and how that puts a drag on investment, even though “investment” isn’t producing tangible and material development, just more vaporous equity.
And anyway, Lamont says that’s not even the right conversation to have. Wealth inequality is enabled by darker constraints and I appreciate that he brings a bit of light to what these are. We have no governments that are willing to address this situation meaningfully. Collapse is likely the only way out.
We live in an era of austerity during which there is more “money” in the world than there has ever been.