By Ken Westhues
Published in December 2005
The biggest challenge for an educational program in local democracy is how to avoid contradicting the topic in how the program is organized. One cannot learn about small-scale democracy except by practicing it. An authoritarian structure for the program would subvert its purpose. We would not be smarter by the end, but stupider.
Fortunately, the twenty participants in this inaugural offering of the Working Centre’s Diploma Program in Local Democracy bring such rich and diverse backgrounds of democratic thought and action that they would not tolerate an
authoritarian program structure anyway.
Our course got off to the best possible start by participants’ exchange of the gifts of their own thoughts and experience, in a series of 20-minute introductory presentations.
It was amazing how well participants understood one another’s gifts and were able to take and build on them in discussion, despite the vastly different cultures, religions, classes, and occupations the presenters come from, and how varied are the authors and intellectual traditions they cite.
The participants’ common ground is the less than ideal situations in which we all find ourselves, day by day, throughout our lives. Some of these situations result from forces outside our control. Others we choose ourselves, but without fully realizing what we are getting into.
However such a situation comes to be, here it is, and the question is what to do. Local democracy means acting in the situation at hand in some creative way that promotes the equality, the common humanity, of ourselves and the other people involved. Anti-democracy means acting in a way that pulls people apart, distances them from one another, reinforces the hierarchies dividing them.
What made the presentations powerful was the stories told of specific little events, interactions, decisions that were turning points toward democracy, or toward its opposite.
One participant told of the day an official in a far-off land visited her father and proposed that he place his daughter in a well-paying job for the dictatorship. “We would sooner eat grass,” the father replied.
Another student told of helping her father with Christmas hampers. He was disabled from a chronic disease, but had insurance benefits enough to maintain a decent standard of living. They were taking the hampers to others with the same disability, but without the insurance.
On the other hand, a veteran of Canadian peace-keeping missions told of a commanding officer in his uniform
overseeing impoverished native laborers unloading a shipload of Christmas turkeys for the troops. Their work took several days. The question was what to pay them. “One turkey or two,” the officer pondered aloud, twirling his moustache and fearing to be too generous.
I told a story from my youth in rural Missouri, where segregation between blacks and whites was still the norm. It was far from an ideal world. A white farmer I knew hired several black day-laborers to work with him. He said lunch would be provided. Came time for lunch, he led them into his house and motioned them to the dining table, which his wife had set for all the men working that day. The black day-laborers hesitated. The local custom was that they would eat separately, typically at a table on the back porch. The farmer said to them quietly, “You work in our fields, you eat at our table.” I remember thinking even as a child that that farmer, in the real situation of his imperfect world, was serving a value on democracy. He reduced human apartness just a little, and word of his action travelled.
Exchanging honest stories is the heart of our program on local democracy, but there is more.
We have given ourselves assigned readings for the December/January break, some great ideas from activist thinkers like Christopher Lasch, Jane Addams, and Moses Coady.
We also took time this fall to listen to Geeta Vaidyanathan and Ramani Sakaranarayanan describe for us their biodiesel program for local economic democracy in some villages of eastern India. The World Bank funds their project. They were en route to California to pick up an international award
for it.
There is no telling what we might do in the second half of our course.
Yet the stories of democracy and anti-democracy from participants’ own first-hand experience have been front and centre in our course so far. No apologies for that. Abstract ideas are essential but dangerous. If local democracy means anything, it means taking turns listening and talking to the people around us, being alive to one another.
