By Isaiah Boronka
Published in June 2014
Our Local Democracy project, for me, has been a lens on understanding the relationship between political movements, democratic politics and what I call the living-right movement. It is well known that the early ‘democratic’ republics reserved political rights exclusively to white men with considerable property. During these early years slavery was entrenched, women were denied their rights and the poor were treated unfairly. Democracies talked about ‘equality’ while masking, what seems obvious now, undemocratic relationships.
Yet, as we know, this was only the beginning of the story. In less than two centuries Abolitionists challenged slavery, the Suffragettes fought for women’s right to vote, the Peace movement sought disarmament, Trade Unionism won the right to collectively bargain for fair treatment of Workers, the Civil Rights movement challenged racism and dismantled Jim Crow laws, feminism sought women’s equality and more broadly, the Gay Rights movement and the Environmental movement have all contributed to the gradual democratization of our societies and our politics.
It hasn’t stopped there, as efforts continue to dismantle the structures of inequality that exist in all societies. All of these movements were, to some degree, expressions of ordinary citizens taking responsibility for the world they lived in and mobilizing for real change. The question I ask myself is how can I receive well these traditions of justice and equality, these gifts, that my democratic ancestors have passed on and how can I let their light burn brightly still?
First, I would like to acknowledge a provocative essay, In Distrust of Movements that farmer and writer, Wendell Berry published in Citizenship Papers, outlining from his agrarian perspective, why he distrusts movements. The gist of his argument is that the massive environmental degradation that industrial civilization has unleashed requires a new response that cannot be solved by quick solutions or policy changes. Berry points directly at efforts each individual can undertake “to preserve local nature, or local health or to sell local products to local consumers.” The solution is beyond government policy, it is also about how we shape our own lives.
Berry understands that the issues we face are deeper than a political crisis, he names it as a cultural crisis. If humans are to recognize our dependency and responsibility for nature we need a culture that teaches and sustains this knowledge. The best culture that will teach us about our rootedness in nature is a culture rooted in local place, a local community.
Berry’s perspective is that movements by their nature are single focused, they simplify political issues so that they can be easily understood. However the passage of a bill rarely infuses the voter with the love of place, the love of neighbor, respect for the environment and the skills and virtues necessary to sustain community life. If humanity is to survive, we need cultural progress in all of these areas. This means a cultural shift, which movements have not been able to engender.
In the Local Democracy class we spend about two weeks of the course talking about the importance of the virtues. I like to think of them as ethical skills. Just as one might put time into learning how to play a piano, or build a table or ride a bike there are certain ethical practices that philosophers, from Aristotle to Aquinas to moral philosophers today, say we need to perfect if we are to live a good life. We need more opportunities to teach the virtues, especially given the environmental crisis, recognizing how ethical skills teach us to walk on the earth more gently.
When I think of the work necessary to build democracy, I come to commit myself to a new movement that seeks to change culture. I am thinking of a movement that honours advances in human rights by encouraging a living-right movement. A movement towards a flourishing of virtue where land stewardship, neighbourliness, inclusion and community are all sustained over the long haul.
A movement where the ethical skills of building community, offering our work as gift, serving others, living simply so others may have more and rejecting status so that all maybe equal are practiced, flourish and are celebrated. Without these ethical skills, these virtues, we can live neither with the land nor with each other.
For the last two hundred years, people have identified the evils of poverty and exploitation and longed to make a radical difference. Forty years ago, Dorothy Day asked these same questions and gave her own answer, “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”
