Subject: Soft Transpartisanship, Hard Transpartisanship
Date: Sun, Apr 13, 2014
Msg: 100921
Hi Bentley -
Getting to the bottom of something isn't easy, especially if the usual suspects haven't done the analytic work that needs to be done - which is all too often the situation we find ourselves in.
Let me offer another way to come at this. I believe we need to make a distinction to be drawn between Soft Transpartisanship and Hard Transpartisanship.
Let me describe the reasoning that brings me to this conclusion. I am in the late stages of writing a book in which I seek to answer the "Competent America Question" - If America were a truly competent nation, what would be different about how we do business? It's a very thorny question.
In wrestling with it, though, I have evolved a high level model that makes sense to me - Narratives, Policies, Outcomes.
As citizens, we begin with narratives that arise from within the social groups and political groups that appeal to us. Along with our allies, we seek to turn our preferred narratives into policies, and once we have the policies we seek, we imagine that those policies will produce the outcomes we're hoping for.
But in between "policy" and "outcome" one must recognize the presence of cause-and-effect realities. Economic and commercial realities. Social realities. Environmental realities.
Suppose that you and I work from a narrative that badly misunderstands cause-and-effect realities. And suppose that we have enough political muscle to turn the policy we seek into law. What happens next? Our policy interacts with cause-and-effect realities that we didn't understand. Odds are it produced outcomes we didn't anticipate.
In this context, think about the central mission of Soft Transpartisan Dialogue. It draws us into conversations with one another, into relationships with one another, around our respective narratives. And, presumably, if we can achieve some common ground in our narratives, we will think we've made headway.
Hard Transpartisan Dialogue, by contrast, goes well beyond narrative. It also challenges us to examine the independent realities of a cause-and-effect world.
What do I mean by this? Let's take the retirement financing issue - I know it well, and it illuminates the shortcomings of soft transpartisan thinking.
If liberals misunderstand Social Security solvency, soft transpartisan dialogue will let them off the hook. Their misunderstanding might never see the light of day.
If conservatives misunderstand the limits of independent investment accounts as a core retirement strategy, soft transpartisan dialogue will also let them off the hook. Their misunderstandings will remain unexamined too.
Pew spent twelve million on public dialogue around Social Security in the late nineties. Those efforts demonstrated both the strengths and the limits of soft transpartisanship. In the public gatherings it sponsored, one saw a willingness to weigh different approaches, but one also saw a public that was constrained by the false certainties of the experts on both ends of the spectrum. When the experts can't illuminate an issue properly, it's almost impossible for the public to get past the limits of their false choices.
Liberal experts hadn't properly explained the challenge of Social Security solvency. They relied on a metric, Actuarial Balance, that taught people how to postpone insolvency, but didn't teach them how to achieve lasting solvency.
Conservative experts hadn't properly explained the limits of individual savings accounts. They imagined the presence of a cause and effect world in which GDP wealth grows at three percent while financial wealth grows perpetually at seven percent.
For the Pew Dialogues to have succeeded, they would have had to employ the tools of Hard Transpartisanship. The flaws of the liberal experts would have to have been identified and challenged; the flaws of the conservative experts would also have to have been brought into the open and discredited. That didn't happen, and - naturally - those Dialogues didn't have a meaningful impact on the issue.
I wish this were an isolated example, but it isn't. In our culture of impatient certainties, it happens again and again, on one major issue after another.
In my view, soft transpartisanship operates within those false certainties.
It takes a different kind a transpartisanship - what I call hard transpartisanship - to challenge false certainties and promote a culture of deep curiosity and deep thoughtfulness.
Accepting false certainties is so often the norm in America, not only within the right and within the left, but even in dialogues that bring both sides to the same table.
If we are to make real progress with this project, we shall have to adjust our scope. It won't be enough to wrestle with our differing narratives. We shall have to wrestle with our cultural preference for false certainties. We shall have to become wise enough to discover the underlying cause-and-effect realities that shape our situation.
If we are to make real progress in this project, I think Joan and Sandy and Mark will want to push the shovel a lot deeper.
Best,
Steve Johnson
On Apr 12, 2014, at 2:03 AM, Bentley Davis wrote:
> Steve, > > I also found the article extremely interesting. You bring up an important point that "we don't actually get to the bottom of things; we go just deeply enough to confirm our prejudices, then we stop." > > It's hard to go deeper unless you are discussing it with someone that has the opposite belief. I have been working on structure and tools to help get people to the bottom and my most recent one is http://SettleIt.org (not a great name but it was available). It encourages groups of people to keep going deeper and deeper into the conversation by constructing an argument tree to keep items in context. The person on the other side keeps us from stopping by inputting cons against our biased statements that we would prefer to ignore. > > This little experiment might give us some insights in how to practice group wisdom. Any feedback would be appreciated. > > Best regards, > Bentley Davis > 214-566-3522 > http://BentleyDavis.com > > > > On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 7:33 PM, Steven H Johnson wrote: >> Thanks, Michael, for the link to Ezra Klein's very intriguing article. >> >> Here's my take on the issue Ezra's raising. I don't think we have a culture of seeking wisdom; I think we have a culture of seeking certainty, and that folks of all political stripes participate in it. The result is that we don't actually get to the bottom of things; we go just deeply enough to confirm our prejudices, then we stop. >> >> Here's a few examples. Social Security solvency. Framing the global warming problem. Figuring out how to create better schools for poverty children. Clever certainties displace wise inquiry in each of these areas. >> >> >> Social Security. Liberals will tell us that Social Security is in good shape. Even Alan Greenspan brags in his book about how the reforms of 1983 put Social Security on the right track. But it isn't in good shape, and one of the many reasons for that is that the program's dominant metric, a tool called "actuarial balance," isn't really a solvency metric. It's an insolvency postponement metric. A reform that achieves actuarial balance is a program that postpones the program's insolvency crash until a few seconds after the end of the forecasting period. >> >> A wiser approach to Social Security would lead folks to set aside actuarial balance as their metric, and choose one that reflects genuine solvency. A steady Trust Fund ratio, perhaps. If the ratio of the Trust Fund to annual benefit payments were holding steady, over the years and decades to come, that'd be a trustworthy indication of lasting solvency. >> >> >> Global warming. Or what about the way in which the global warming issue has come to be framed as an "emissions reduction" issue, as though we were engaged in a rerun of the Clean Air Act? >> >> The logic of this situation tells us otherwise. The greater the total stock of CO2 in the atmosphere, the warmer the Earth becomes. The warmer the Earth becomes, the more climate change we get. Warming may be governed by rules of proportionality, but climate change is trickier than that. Climate change is also a matter of tipping points. Small adjustments in temperature can cause major changes in behavior. >> >> Work the logic backward and it leads to a hard conclusion: Climate change cannot end till global warming ends. Global warming cannot end till total CO2 has been capped. And total CO2 cannot be capped till the the consumption of fossil fuels has ceased. And the consumption of fossil fuels cannot cease till we've had a complete changeout of our energy technologies. >> >> It is a mistake - given this logic - to characterize our situation as an "emissions reduction" situation, as though we were engaged in a rerun of the Clean Air Act. That's a seriously inapt analogy. We're in a technology replacement situation. The Montreal Protocol is a better model. As old refrigerators wear out and need replacement, the new ones will use ozone-safe refrigerants. The heat pump we bought last summer is ozone-safe; the one it replaces was not. >> >> "Emission reduction" is a friendly term, but it badly understates our responsibilities. One wonders why our environmentalists are so weak in thinking this through. >> >> >> Schools. Or what about the way in which the challenge of educating low income children has been framed by policy partisans? Let's measure. Let's test. Let's grade teachers by the amount of progress children make. Let's shed teachers whose kids make no progress. In short, let's address this challenge by fiddling with the way we manage the adults. >> >> There is another, and wiser, way to explore this opportunity. It's to pay close attention to the principals who have done especially well, and dig deeply enough to figure out why. >> >> What one finds - in doing this - are principals obsessed by reaching every child, motivating every child, and making sure every child learns. One discovers a few implicit hypotheses: Children succeed when (a) they're highly motivated, (b) the lessons are learnable, (c) coaching from teachers is perceptive and on point, and (d) they invest enough time. Great principals find a hundred and one success factors that can help them motivate kids. They test kids to learn how far along they are, and then they pitch their instruction to kids at a level they're capable of understanding. They promote teacher observations and discussions, so that every teacher gets regular feedback on how well he/she responds to each child in the room. And they put in longer school days and bring kids to school on Saturdays. >> >> If we started by asking, "what's it take for every child to learn," instead of "what's it take to manage the grownups better" we'd make more progress. One gets fast certainties by asking how to manage grownups. One gets more wisdom by asking what it takes for every kid to engage, and learn. >> >> >> So I'd push back on the issue of information and certainty. I'd say that Klein's article confirms a larger theme - that our culture cultivates shallowness, not wisdom. We cannot be a mature public till we learn the difference between clever certainties and genuine wisdom, and our hearts begin to lead us toward wisdom. >> >> How do we become wise? I can spot symptoms of not being wise. I'm not sure I have the knack to practice wisdom. Or inspire wisdom. I do think it's a higher quality, one that we need a lot more of. >> >> Best to all, >> >> Steve Johnson >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Apr 8, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Michael Strong wrote: >> >>> Thanks, Michael, that was an excellent and highly relevant article. This statement by Kahan, >>> >>> " I asked Kahan how he tries to guard against identity protection in his everyday life. The answer, he said, is to try to find disagreement that doesn’t threaten you and your social group — and one way to do that is to consciously seek it out in your group. "I try to find people who I actually think are like me — people I’d like to hang out with — but they don’t believe the things that everyone else like me believes," he says. "If I find some people I identify with, I don’t find them as threatening when they disagree with me." It’s good advice, but it requires, as a prerequisite, a desire to expose yourself to uncomfortable evidence — and a confidence that the knowledge won’t hurt you." >>> >>> articulates an appropriate norm for a transpartisan group. >>> >>> Political scientists who study political ignorance are also acutely aware that more information usually leads to greater political polarization. I see this well-established empirical fact as devastating to those who would believe that "more information" or "better informed voters" would lead to any improvement in outcome. >>> >>> >>> >>> On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 6:49 PM, Michael Briand wrote: >>> Here's a link to a very good article (http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid) that’s directly relevant to the challenge of achieving transpartisanship. It explains why, if we want dialogue instead of “dueling monologues,” we need to deal with the human need for a robust personal identity. >>> >>> Michael Briand >>> >>> To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list, 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 >>> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> 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 > > > > To unsubscribe from the TRANSPARTISAN list, click the following link: > http://lists.thataway.org/scripts/wa-THATAWAY.exe?SUBED1=TRANSPARTISAN&A=1 >
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