Painting - The Death of Socrates - public domain
This is a continuation of an ongoing exploration — or inquiry — I began with Borderlands: Aformal Generative Dialogue - an Introduction, so it’s best to have read that article ahead of this one. There will be other articles ahead in this series. And some will be more like carefully crafted essays than this one will be, I hope. But for today I just want to informally share some thoughts and ideas I have on the topic of dialogue. I’m developing my ideas on dialogue in research and inquiry, and that takes a lot of time and effort. It’s slow work. Today I just want to let it all hang loose and share some thoughts which are already largely developed (while also evolving and, I hope, maturing).
In my concluding paragraph in the first entry to this series I said, “This is all about politics. I want to write about dialogue as politics and politics as dialogue.” This may well have caused many of my readers to lose interest in this series of articles and essays. Quite understandably, the very word “politics” evokes boredom and disgust in a great many people. Countless people want nothing to do with “politics”, but this is partly because most of us understand politics as it is presented to us in popular media, in which it is conceived narrowly as a highly “domesticated”1 , formalized set of processes and procedures and institutions which exists exclusively within and for government/s. And it also happens that politics so defined just doesn’t work very well — if working well means creating conditions favorable to people, ecosystems, the biosphere—, or responding appropriately to the polycrisis.2
The fellow3 who maintains the What is Politics? YouTube channel was instrumental in my process of discovery about what politics actually is — and isn’t. One of his videos is titled, What is Politics, and Why Should Anyone Give a $#&%? In this video he explains that politics doesn’t just occur in the “public” realm, but also in the “private realm,” and divides politics into these realms. And he defines politics as, basically, “everything to do with decision-making in groups”. Now, of course, I was familiar with this concept prior to watching and listening to this video, but I was ripe for an aha! moment when I watched the video. My aha! amounted to realizing that if politics can occur both within government and outside of government, involving any sort of group at all, then we have a kind of freedom to imagine and invent entirely new ways of conceiving of and practicing politics — including ways which are not constrained by the dominant social imaginary,4 which divides “politics” into either public or private domains, per se.
It’s true — and commonly understood — that there is politics in private domains and in public domains, but I think the What is Politics? guy is wrong to assume that these two domains comprise a comprehensive list of the domains in which politics occurs. I wrote about the limitations of this conceptual schema in my essay, On Commoning, where I argued that there is in actuality a third sphere (or domain), distinct from the public and private domains. I call this “third sphere” the communal sphere (or domain).5
In On Commoning, I argued that the conceptual schema (which is part of a social imaginary) which acknowledges the public and private domains of politics, but which fails to acknowledge a communal sphere, works to obscure and conceal the existence of, and need for, a form of politics which cannot be reduced to the domains of public or private, per se.
Maybe I only alluded to, or hinted at, and didn’t adequately explain why a communal domain of politics is so very necessary in our contemporary world? I’m not sure. But I’ll try to be very clear on that topic here today.
I did say this:
All politics is the politics of an ethos. Ethos is at the heart and core of any politics. And the ethos of genuine egalitarian democracy never has ripened into a democratic, egalitarian society in the modern world.
(Maybe I slightly exaggerated. I’m not sure. There may be one or two exceptions, somewhere. But, for the most part, contemporary nations which self-identify as democracies actually fall far short of living up to this story about themselves.)
I further proposed — or maybe I only suggested or alluded — that the politics (and ethos) of the communal sphere (let’s call it domain today) was entirely incompatible with what has become of the public domain of politics, at least in many nations (e.g., the USA).
I’m basically arguing here and now that it simply isn’t possible, under current political conditions, to politically embody the ethos of communal, egalitarian politics in many or most countries, e.g., the UK, the USA, Canada, Brazil, China, India, Australia … pick a nation — unless one embodies that politics and ethos OUTSIDE of “public” politics, per se. I’ll explain why this is so shortly.
So what is “communal politics”?
Communal is a term which emerges not within property relations, but within relational being. The premise of egalitarian communalists is that our relations with one another are vastly more important than property relations, and that property relations constrain our being in ways which do our psyche and our bodies harm.
The communal sphere is a social space in which giving, caring, nurturing, supporting, collaborating… on egalitarian terms is the core ethos, that which informs and inspires our aliveness, our ethos, our politics. — from On Commoning
So, why can’t we enact communal politics within the “public” domain of politics?
I’m going to use the United States (USA) as an example of a general dynamic present in most nations, if not all nations (states), of the world today — which is also embedded in the relations between nations (states) geopolitically, etc..
America isn’t a democracy; it never was.
I don’t agree with everything which the philosopher Gabriel Rockhill has to say about politics and history, but I agree with much of it. It’s difficult to argue against the key points he makes in The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was. The USA was never intended by its founders to be a democracy. The founders feared and loathed democracy, per se, because they understood that were “America” to become a democracy it would result in a loss of status and wealth for them — them being the white male property owning members of the economic elite of their time and place, with each being (1) male, (2) white and (3) property owning elites. In other words, in short, the USA was deliberately founded as an oligarchy by oligarchs who feared and loathed democracy. This is simply a fact of history, like it or not. Simply note that the only people invited or allowed at the Constitutional Convention were (1) white (2) male (3) property owning elites. I would not have been invited, and odds are neither would you. So it was not “the people” who formed this new government. It was an oligarchy who formed an oligarchical government.
Sheldon S. Wolin Was Probably Right
Inverted totalitarianism is a system where economic powers like corporations exert subtle but substantial power over a system that superficially seems democratic. Over time, this theory predicts a sense of powerlessness and political apathy, continuing a slide away from political egalitarianism.
Sheldon Wolin coined the term in 2003 to describe what he saw as the emerging form of government of the United States. He said that the United States was turning into a managed democracy (similar to an illiberal democracy). He uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to draw attention to the totalitarian aspects of such a system, while the term inverted helps to portray the many differences with classical totalitarianism. — Wikipedia, Inverted Totalitarianism
… and I can add endlessly to the theories, evidence and bits of history, etc., which reveals a disturbing story in which the world’s governments tend to be dominated by essentially oligarchical structures, patterns, systems and institutions. But it’s now time for us to return the topic of dialogue, before that topic gets buried under the weight of an argument which most of my readers probably already understand as true, accurate and disturbing.
Why Dialogue Can Be a Healing Balm for Democracy
It isn’t at all clear that democracy has ever really existed in a full and complete way. Nor is it entirely clear what a full and complete form of democracy would be… what it would “look like in practice”. Human history is mainly a history of dominion, domination, oppression, violence, control … top down systems of rendering people powerless over their own lives.
I’ve always defined “democracy” as a mode of governance (which may differ from government in the state sense of the term) which is of, by and for the people — which the ancient Greeks called the polis — which was the name given to ancient Greek city states. But it is clear that modern nation states, for the most part, are not governed of, by and for their people. They are governed of, by and for an oligarchy.
So how does the oligarchy maintain its power over the majority?
They do so by one principal means. They seek to — and tend to succeed at — owning and controlling the means of … cultural reproduction. French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term “cultural reproduction” to mean something a little different than what I mean by the term. I’ve slightly modified Bourdieu’s sense of cultural reproduction in order to expand the concept so that it is a little more comprehensive in elucidating the scope of how culture is actually “reproduced”.
The opening sentence of Wikipedia’s page on “cultural reproduction” says,
Cultural reproduction, a concept first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings (i.e., norms) are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time.
Notice how similar (not identical, but similar) “existing cultural forms, values, practices” are to the terms ethos, social imaginary ideology, and conceptual schemas, etc.
Oh…, and my slight revision of the concept of cultural reproduction simply sets cultural reproduction down within time, just as Bourdeieu did. But I would have us think of cultural reproduction in an Einsteinian concept of time, which conceives of time and space as two aspects of one whole. (I’m a holist, after all!) And I would say that what happens from minute to minute, rather than merely generation to generation, as revealing a great deal more which is useful about cultural reproduction than Bourdeiu’s emphasis on generations ever could have. After all, if you take a little time to familiarize yourself with “animal culture” studies (which I strongly recommend), you’ll understand that culture comes down mostly to learning — and that learning comes down — to a huge extent, for humans especially — to what is called “framing” — which is what cultural reproduction ultimately does: It frames. It provides a social imaginary, an ideology, a story, a map, a model, a picture, an interpretive matrix… it provides… A culture. An ethos. A story, a … frame. It provides “meaning”. It provides the core ingredients of any politics.
The oligarchs own most of our media systems, institutions. (These are readily and easily demonstrable facts.) They use their extraordinary economic power to influence our university’s, our colleges, our schools, our political parties, our political processes…. Their intent is to keep us trapped in the mindscapes, the ideologies, the “thinking” and framings (or what passes for thinking) which enables them to keep the wool covering our eyes. But they cannot keep us from reading books published by independent publishers. (Not yet, but expect them to try.) They haven’t completely controlled the internet, but they’re working on it. Do you think they can control the local pub rather easily, the city parks, the coffee shops?
Where do we come together in dialogue? Can they control what we say to one another in our front or back yards, in our gardens, on the tails in the wild country?
I suspect not.
But that’s perhaps a slightly distracting question. Dialogue isn’t about control. It’s about a freedom which is always present where there are human beings. Nothing, apart from killing us all off, can control our freedom to dialogue.
And so I’ll have to take this up again, since this is already growing long and unwieldy in its risk of damned foolishness. I have so much more to say, but the key here is that I’d rather by far dialogue with you about it all than unfold a foolish monologue.
We’re leaving the age of monologues and essays and entering the age of dialogue again, long, long after Socrates and Plato’s dialogues.
Welcome to the journey, and thanks for walking with me.
In the spirit of dialogue, you’re invited to respond with a question, a comment, a poem, an essay or a rant. But remember, to be generative, a dialogue must reach into a well of both inquiry and sincerity, or it is at risk for falling into propaganda instead.
in the sense I provided in part one of this series
The term polycrisis denotes a situation characterized by the simultaneous occurrence or rapid succession of multiple interconnected crises within a society or system, impacting various facets such as politics, economics, health, and “the environment” (ecosystems, the biosphere).
Last time I checked, he doesn’t mention his own name on the channel, but I think I remember learning that his first name is Daniel. Why he prefers to have a face but no name is a bit of a mystery to me.
Wikipedia defines it this way.:
“The imaginary (or social imaginary) is the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols through which people imagine their social whole. It is common to the members of a particular social group and the corresponding society. The concept of the imaginary has attracted attention in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and media studies.”
— Imaginary (sociology), Wikipedia
I want to add “conceptual schemas” to the list provided in the opening sentence here. Obviously these are of crucial importance to the notion of the social imaginary.
In philosophy and cognitive science, a conceptual schema refers to a mental framework or structure that helps [or impairs!] individuals organize, understand, and interpret information or ideas. It's a cognitive framework that shapes how we perceive, categorize, and make sense of the world around us.
“Domain” may be the better word choice, for reasons explored in my later article, More on “public” and “private”.