Sender: "Bruce Schuman"
Subject: The Uninvolved Citizen and Transpartisanship
Date: Mon, Mar 24, 2014
Msg: 100830

From: List for transpartisan leaders and innovators [mailto:TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG] On Behalf Of millershed@EARTHLINK.NET Sent: Friday, March 14, 2014 12:07 PM To: TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG Subject: Re: [TRANSPARTISAN] The Uninvolved Citizen and Transpartisanship

Hi all,

I am John Miller. I have not done anything significant in the transpartisan field, so I'm not sure why I was accepted on this list!

I just want to voice some discomfort with "evolution of consciousness" models, based on considerable knowledge of Steiner's, some knowledge of Teilhard's, cursory knowledge of Hegel's, and admittedly scanty knowledge of Spiral Dynamics. It seems to me that all are teleological--that is, they assume a certain arc of development, from less to more perfect attainment of a goal (as, in Aristotle's analogy, an acorn gradually becomes a more and more perfect oak tree). This makes me a bit uncomfortable, especially since there's a certain history with these things of putting Germanic, European, or western societies on the advancing cusp of development.

At the same time, I try to be a bit of a historian and to utilize complexity theory, and I recognize (in agreement with Hegel) that complex systems are historical. And it's a historical fact, for example, that European culture gave rise to the modern scientific culture that has come to dominate today's global culture, and it's hard not to talk about scientific and technological progress in a non-teleological way. I also think it makes sense to say that cultures arise out of shared ideas, values, and worldviews and that, as these vary, various types of cultures emerge.

On the other hand, one can say that cultures (like species) evolve in ways that make them most suited to particular environmental conditions, and what might seem more perfect in one context is ill adapted in another. On the other other hand, I do believe that there is some being or essence to such things--that is, that the individual or species or culture interacts with its environment out of its own identity, rather than being formed by environment alone.

All that said (!), I get queasy with these models, as they place different cultures on points along a continuum from more or less advanced or evolved (or so it seems to me), and I can't help but wonder if there isn't a different and better way to frame the insights they arrive at. In particular, I would question whether (as is undeniably the case with a child, for example) every society must go through the same stages of development, in the same order. This assumes that there is some ideal societal form towards which all cultures are advancing, as there unquestionably is an ideal human form (in all its variety) towards which human beings advance. It's a fine analogy, and certainly interesting, but I'm not sure it's true. Nor am I sure why it should be true.

Most respectfully, and very willing to be further informed!

John

-----Original Message----- >From: Lawrence Chickering >Sent: Mar 14, 2014 10:51 AM >To: TRANSPARTISAN@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG >Subject: Re: [TRANSPARTISAN] The Uninvolved Citizen and Transpartisanship > >Dear Don, > >Thank you for this powerful statement. Your vision of Spiral Dynamics aligns >completely with my own view of advancing consciousness of the self, which I >adapted from Rudolf Steiner's teachings and is also aligned with Hegel's writings >on consciousness of freedom. I am attaching two papers I have written on >related subjects: first a background paper I wrote in 1997 for an Asia >Foundation U.S.-Asia Dialogue on Community and Citizenship; and second, >published in Policy Review in 2012, a paper on Educate Girls Globally and its work in >the most traditional and tribal communities in India. (I dislike the title; our title >was 'Empowering the Poor: The Role of Civil Society Organizations'.) > >EGG's experience shows it is possible to promote changes in the concept of self >fairly quickly in a way that supports movement toward modern democratic >and economic institutions and values. Since the process is entirely organic, >it is also politically stable: we have not encountered any significant opposition >or conflict in 7,000 schools serving about 800,000 children; and governments >in India are now pushing us to accelerate expansion of the program, while >funding significant parts of it. > >I would of course welcome any thoughts or comments you may have in >response to these. > >Best, >Lawry > >A. Lawrence Chickering >Founder and President, Educate Girls Globally (EGG) >1485 Main St., Ste 103c >St. Helena, CA 94574 >415.235.6628 >email: lchick0203@gmail.com >www.educategirls.org > > > >On Mar 13, 2014, at 02:15, Dr. Don Beck wrote: > >> >> It's not about ignorance -- there are what we call "Stratified Democracy" variations based on the Professor Clare W. Graves concept defined as "emergence, cyclical, double-helix model of bio-psycho-social development." >> The popular name is Spiral Dynamics-Integral in that we describe the processes by and the essential capacities that are necessary at different layers of evolutionary emergence, from pre-modern, to modern, then to post-modern. The new form is called "Integral Democracy."which, like the Russian doll metaphor, might contain all of the previous forms in its social-political-economic-religious/spirituality architectures. This is based on decades of serious scientific research including fMRI profiles. We also see it as Humanity's Master Code, one that generates the versions appropriate to assemblies of people within various groupings, historical contexts, and even geographical settings. The HMC is simply describes the way things (and various worlds) actually operate on the planet earth. >> >> These includes the collective biological DNA codes and the new emetics profiles (value systems) co-emerge over time. In short, there are different people at different levels of human existence with differentiated levels of complexity and capacities to change from one system to another. People can't be until they are. Strictly egalitarian models deny these realities.. We are creating Vital Signs Monitors to map out these deep level mimetic codes and their readiness to shift, change, or transform. >> >> There is considerable stress and strain both within societies as well as between and among their core belief systems, especially in times of turbulence and transformation, like now This documents the critical need for understanding the transpartisan perspective.. We introduced that concept and language back in l998. Tried to help a president-to-be when he first moved into the White House. Then came9-ll. We failed. It is like somebody disturbed a nest of hornets and they are spreading grief planet-wide. (But, they are also preparing us for the systems just now emerging -- don't kill them off, at least not yet.). What if the entire medical system had used transparison models in designing such a system. Traditional and Progressive views MUST be integrated and not isolated. We now have the models for doing just that. >> >> We developed this powerful ecological perspective during my 64 trips to South Africa which is a microcosm of the planet. Virtually everything that is happening South of the Limp River, is also happening to the North I will write more about it tomorrow. See the application in Israel-Palestine with Elza Maalouf -- www.buildpalestine.org. My colleague Said E. Dawlabani has just released a description of multiple economic models that go with the translpartisan political structures. These are NOT about race or ethnicity. See the movie INVICTUS that focused on nation building for Nelson Mandela and South Africa as an example. I was a special advisor to coach Kitch Christie. Good friend Michael Strong will know about the approach since I shared it with John Mackey at Whole Foods Market several years ago and contributed to the Conscious Business and Functional Capitalism movements. I have cited these practical applications of the thought processes so you would know this is not just a sterile theory used to contemplate the number of angels sitting on needles. >> >> Two other developments. First, Professor Ichak Adizes, author of Corporate Lifecycles, describes what he calls CAPI, ways to coalescence Authority, Power, and Influence around the same table at the same time. To be transparent, I have taught a graduate course at the Adizes Graduate School for 15 years. He knows what he is doing and has done so around the world. This is a very practical methodology designed to renew companies, discover synergy in problem solving and, to be frank, decide what to do in this Age of Collaboration. >> >> Check, also the innovative work of the Memnosyne Institute and Foundation, located in Dallas. Mary Ann ThompsonFrenk is the founder. She is the grand daughter of the founder of 7 Eleven Convenience stores and has been especially interested in the use of transpartisn thinking in Native American, Canadian, Mexican and other indigenous communities. She and husband Joshua are also working with the 18-40 age groups in various countries who have both financial and intellectual resources, and want to "change the world." >> . >> This whole framework is a grounded, well-established decision-making paradigm that has the power to reduce polarity, Us vs Them, and discover the creative energy to address our ever growing problems and threats. No doubt others are seeing major break outs in their worlds, and we need to thank John Steiner and Sally Heidrbacher for starting this process. They are planning a major full day event in Washington DC in October so we could interact face-to-face. A team from the Netherlands expanded this knowledge in a Millennial Grant 5, mother care, with remarkable results. Transperson is break out all over the country. It is time for us to stop complaining about the excessive behaviors within our political systems. >> >> See Said E. Dawlabani, MemeEnomics: The Next-generation Economic system. >> >> Finally, what we describe within political environments thus "TransPartisan" we translate into MeshWork Solutions within other domains. The very first Meshworks was used with Dr. Ken Salyer, of the World Craniofacial Foundation and Medical City in Dallas. You recall he was the lead surgeon who separated the conjoined at the head Egyptian Twins, an amazing and highly complex and difficult undertaking. He had to "mesh" Arab-Egyptian and American-Texas cultures, and bring together surgeons and other medical personnel from both Medical City and Dallas Children's Medical from across town. As you everything in Dallas in the JR Ewing World is competitive. >> >> I was with the team when Southwest Airlines flew us free of charge -- the boys, their parents, and Salyer 's group-- tao Houston to meet the then president of Egypt. The Middle Eastern media was fascinated with the story. Everybody was working pro bono. Here were Christian, Jewish, probably Atheist Texans providing this life-given therapy to two little poor Muslim boys living miles from Cairo.. I will let his new book A Life that Matters share with you the dramatic story. I tried to get the White House to give him a Medal of Freedom because of the thousands of kids, especially, >> those with serious craniofacial problems. >> >> The Salyer team, including his wife Luci who prepared the boys using advanced massage therapy, have made possible a normal life for so many. Maybe President Obama will respond. Dr. Salyer has played a major role in the development of the entire body of knowledge around this discipline. He deserves major credit since his team works in behalf of humanity itself. While many of us talk about human transformations, he creates them. >> At 03:51 PM 3/12/2014, Will Friedman wrote: >>> Interesting post, Michael. I'm going to quibble with it a bit--see what you think. >>> >>> I can understand why one would surmise that the sort of "political ignorance" that has been documented in various studies (and they're such easy surveys to design and such fun to analyze) means that deliberative democracy is impractical and impossible. I happen to think it's wrong-headed, but there's certainly a logic to the conclusion. >>> >>> I don't deny the results of those studies. Rather, I suggest that a more participatory and deliberative democracy does not require citizens to become experts on a wide variety of issues. Rather, it requires a productive integration of the kind of deliberating that experts can do and are good at (highly informed and deeply analytic with respect to the technical dimensions of problems) and the kind of deliberating that citizens are quite capable of, especially if provided some minimally supportive conditions (wrestling with values questions, deciding upon the desirability and acceptability of the practical consequences of different policies, providing the kind of non-expert knowledge that people close to a problem often possess...). Moreover, it is probably also useful to recognize that many citizens can develop significant expertise in one or two public issues (as in the notion of issue publics) and somewhat straddle these two worlds, creating some connective tissue. >>> >>> Admittedly, these observations, even if they hold up to scrutiny, are far from a neat answer as to how to promote deliberative democracy, but they do suggest that political ignorance is not necessarily the show-stopper that it is sometimes thought to be. On this score, let me add that it's one thing to ask whether or not citizen capacity can support a full and formal "deliberative democracy;" and another to ask whether or not we can make our democracy significantly more deliberative than it currently is, and if so, if that will have desirable consequences. I submit that the latter is the better formulation in that it sets one up for potentially ameliorative action with respect to the purpose of this gathering: The possibility of escaping mindless polarization and partisan excess so that real problems can be better solved. >>> >>> Will Friedman >>> Public Agenda >>> >>> >>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 8:41 PM, Michael Strong wrote: >>> Evelyn, >>> There is a substantial academic literature on the phenomenon of political ignorance, going back many decades with results from many nations. One of the findings is that most citizens in most nations are largely ignorant most of the time. Here is a Salon article summarizing, >>> >>> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/22/voter/ >>> Critical Review, the journal mentioned in the article, has been one of the leading venues for the publication of research on political ignorance. They have published dozens of articles on various dimensions of this issue in the past two decades. Because the phenomenon has been remained steady despite immense increases in the education levels of the citizenry in the U.S. and elsewhere, and is common around the world, most scholars are skeptical that anything can be done to change the fact that most people, most of the time, don't care enough about politics to be well informed. >>> I'm convinced by this literature, summarized here by Ilya Somin, that the entire idea of "deliberative democracy" is a fantasy in large communities, >>> >>> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1694650 >>> regardless of what we were taught in civics class. >>> How large is "large"? The "Dunbar number," the groups in which we evolved, were around 150 people. Somin seems to think that a jurisdiction of 10,000 might function, which is about the size of Athenian democracy or the Vermont town meetings romanticized by many of the civically-minded. >>> Whatever it is, we are vastly beyond the scale at which "deliberative democracy" might plausibly have functioned well. The largest states at the time of the American founding were several hundred thousand people, of whom only a tiny fraction were actually allowed to vote. Remarkably today many smaller jurisdictions seem to function reasonably well - Norway, Finland and Denmark are about 5 million, as is Singapore. Switzerland, which is highly decentralized, has about 8 million, with most cantons in the range of a few hundred thousand. >>> But we have more than ten states with a population larger than Switzerland, and twenty or more states with a population larger than Singapore, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Sweden, at 9.5 million would come in at about 10th place among U.S. states. While Singapore is ethnically diverse, the Scandinavian nations are far more ethnically and culturally homogenous than is the U.S. >>> Somin, above, concludes that because of political ignorance, we should keep the federal government (and the larger state governments) down to a minimal set of functions: Better to do a few things well than many things poorly. >>> With respect to your question, "Does it matter?" >>> I would say, "Yes." I personally believe that Big Finance, for example, is screwing us over regardless as to whether the Ds or the Rs win (they are major donors to both parties). Big Ag is also screwing us over (with big donations to both parties ensures that corn continues to receive huge subsidies), as are Big Construction, Big Real Estate, Big Health Care, etc. >>> >>> I see the greatest potential of the transpartisan movement to be to create a space in which transpartisan dialogue can find ways to create transpartisan wins against the special interests. Routine, highly polarized political dialogue redirects electoral debates into highly emotional symbolic issues (e.g. gay marriage, abortion) which allow special interests to quietly continue to extract economic rents from the rest of us. >>> Mutual demonization by the Ds and the Rs suits Goldman Sachs or General Electric or ADM just fine - they keep getting their subsidies while the political squabbles go and on and on. >>> >>> >>> >>> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 6:43 PM, Evelyn Messinger wrote: >>> Engaging citizens is at the root of the Transpartisan mission, and >>> some recent posts on this list provide an opportunity to confront the >>> question of citizen engagement head-on. >>> Rick Raddatz wrote, "60% of adults can't name their senators, and this >>> had remained steady across time and across all large democracies -- >>> it's not just an American thing..." Michael Strong added that "the >>> vast majority of citizens are stunningly ignorant regarding the most >>> basic facts of political debate." And we all know how dismal voter >>> turnout is in the US and Europe. >>> There is some disagreement about the make-up of the great disengaged, >>> and resolving this would be helpful. Do they occupy the "center," >>> essentially agreeing on a great majority of issues, ending up >>> disengaged because partisan ideologies have become too extreme? Are >>> they generally "sigle-issue" types, with strong feelings on the right >>> to life or climate change, but otherwise alienated from the parties >>> that champion these positions? Or are they too busy, uneducated, >>> frivolous and/or cynical to engage in the political process as it is >>> now configured? >>> Two additional questions can be framed by applying Tom Atlee's >>> excellent dissection of the "Trans" in Transpartisanship to the issue >>> of engaging the uninvolved masses: >>> - Can more people be engaged by reaching across the divide, and >>> therefore giving them what they long for, political bodies willing to >>> compromise in order to achieve results? >>> - Would people be energized by going "beyond parties and ideologies >>> altogether," focusing on issues where nascent agreement already >>> exists? >>> Finally, does it even matter if most people remain disengaged? Is >>> there a magic number of supporters - I've heard 20% of a given >>> population - at which an issue or political platform or candidate >>> becomes viable? >>> Your thoughts most welcome! Thanks and regards, >>> Evelyn >>> -- >>> Evelyn Messinger >>> http://citizenschannel.org >>> +1.415.377.6278 >>> ############################ >>> To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list: >>> write to: mailto:TRANSPARTISAN-SIGNOFF-REQUEST@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG >>> or click the following link: >>> http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN &A=1 >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Michael Strong >>> CEO and Chief Visionary Officer >>> FLOW, Inc. >>> www.flowidealism.org >>> For the definitive Conscious Capitalism book, see Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems, by Michael Strong with John Mackey, CEO Whole Foods Market, Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Hernando de Soto, Co-Chair of the U.N. Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and others, and listen to John Mackey's audio CD Passion and Purpose: The Power of Conscious Capitalism, both available at amazon.com or www.flowidealism.org. >>> Liberating the Entrepreneurial Spirit for Good >>> When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. >>> Leonardo Da Vinci >>> >>> To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list, click the following link: >>> http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN &A=1 >> >> >> >> -- >> Will Friedman, Ph.D. >> President >> >> Public Agenda >> 6 East 39th Street >> New York, NY 10016 >> 212-686-6610 ext. 121 >> >> www.publicagenda.org >> facebook.com/PublicAgenda < http://facebook.com/PublicAgenda> >> twitter.com/publicagenda < http://twitter.com/publicagenda> >> >> To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list, click the following link: >> http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN &A=1 >> >> To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list, click the following link: >> http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN &A=1 >> > > > > > > > >############################ > >To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list: >write to: mailto:TRANSPARTISAN-SIGNOFF-REQUEST@LISTS.THATAWAY.ORG >or click the following link: >http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN &A=1

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