Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Over the past few days I’ve had acute experiences of community—both positive and negative.  To me community starts with individual relationships.  Community is when love flows, and we are able to share our differences with humor and acceptance.  We see—no, we feel, the essential goodness and lovableness of the other person.  There is a virtuous cycle in this sort of community.  Acceptance and humor allows each of us to manifest our inner artist, our creative, humorous, high selves.  This in turn feeds the sense of play and adventure and satisfaction in community—in being together.  And unleashes even more love and acceptance and delight.  My dad and my boys and I got to this place the past few days in Iowa—and probably spared ourselves years of therapy!  The turn to this kind of community—the inner turn that starts this virtuous cycle, is, in my experience, often based on a conscious choice to love, and not to act from fear.  That is, not to fear my dad, not to fear his criticisms, and not to fear that I’m becoming like aspects of him I don’t like. All these are valid fears, but living in fear, and acting on the basis of these fears, just generates more of the same.  But recognizing the choice, I can move on.  I can decide to be the person I am, the artist I am, the individual creator I am, perhaps the rebel or badass I am—and also choose to love and embrace my dad.  To be honest about who I am, and to have the courage to live that with him, and the faith that by doing this I will—paradoxically—allow him to let go of his judgments and embrace me.  See why I said this will save years of therapy..

My faith is that if I have the courage to act this way—to embrace my own happiness and gifts, my actions help establish a community based on love and acceptance, and supportive of individual gifts and needs.  Rather than a (false) community based on cliques and conformity, the love-centered community celebrates individual creativity and even—or especially—the individual transgressions necessary for the artist to manifest and challenge our complacency.   E.L. Doctorow speaking of writing, “The writer must have a sense of transgression as he or she works, of writing what is not quite ok to say.”

Just as the virtuous cycle of love may be entered in a moment, so the vicious cycle of fear can also be entered in a moment.  Something triggers my fears and I react to defend myself—saying something perfectly justifiable when seen from my “worldview of fears”—that is, an understanding of the world based on worst-case assumptions about myself and the other.  Unfortunately, these (to me) perfectly justifiable statements are also unkind and devaluing when experienced by the other person, and tend to drive this person—a person that I love—into her or his own fears and defenses.  I often don’t realizing until later how devaluing my comments were, because I think my comments are based on a plausible view of reality. What is hurtful to the other is that my “plausible view” assumes the worst of the other’s and my motives and actions.  Thus it negates the other’s goodwill, negates my own good will, and negates our shared experiences of positive community and communion—experiences that we sometimes enjoyed only moments prior to the eruption of fears.  The experience of fear-in-relationship is the anomie that is the opposite of communion.

So community is something that exists in moments. Community can be born in a moment of loving choice, and collapsed in a few moments of fear and defense.  Community is subtle, delicate, and wondrous.  Community supports creativity and individualism, celebrating the expressions of each member’s gifts and arts.  This sort of creative community identifies and provides the conditions each person requires in order to realize her or his gifts and live as an artist.  The most creative community manages to do this even if these conditions seem somewhat idiosyncratic, or challenge certain assumptions of the community itself.  This is the hallmark, for example, of the truly bohemian artists’ community.

So what does this have to do with politics and the sorts of things I’ve been writing about on this blog?  Much.  And here is where my own sense of writer’s transgression is evoked, just a bit.  We can’t really change politics without speaking about and practicing the development of communion and community in this sense.  And this is “soft stuff” for politicos.  But here is my reasoning.  In our society worldwide many people are seeking exactly this sort of creative community—in their love lives, in their families, in their villages and towns and city neighborhoods, and in their business lives and jobs.  This desire is expressed in books, magazine articles, therapy and spiritual groups, and so on. 

Yet this sort of life—call it the creative life—is not consistent with the metaphors that underlie either Republican or Democratic party politics.  I think that Lakoff is correct—as I discussed at length in an earlier post—about the metaphors of family life being fundamental to political organizations. And I think that Lakoff is broadly right in his characterization of the metaphors underlying each party.  Republicans have government as the “strict father” who needs to be obeyed (and can discpline you up to and including capital punishment) but who also needs to be limited and kept from meddling.  The ideal Republican individual is the “upstanding citizen” who is “strong in the face of evil.”  Democrats have government as the  “nurturing mother” who is attentive to injustice and social needs, and who reaches out to provide aid and comfort.  The ideal Democratic individual is a “well-nurtured, happy person” who is “happy enough to be nurturing to others.”

Neither of these images quite fits the rock-out, individualistic, creative and free, post-conventional knowledge society that is at the vanguard in the world today, and that is most attractive to young people who are in position to choose.   The creative life is what people want.  Thus government—and an effective political party—would establish a community ethos that encouraged people to develop and use their gifts, to enjoy their individuality while sharing in love and communion with others, and to make diverse and unusual contributions to society.

In fact, I’m not sure that people want the government to be a parent, at all.  I think perhaps the right metaphor is more ecological—people want a context, an environment, and ecosystem that allows their creativity to thrive.  The proper role of the government may be as groundskeeper, or forester, or gardener.  Working unobtrusively in the background to help ensure the diversity and richness of the ecosystem—but respecting that the essential creativity in the system comes from new species and ecologies—and that generally these require neither strict fathering nor gentle mothering.