Spirit in Action
Healing The Heart of Democracy - Parker Palmer, Part 1
Parker J. Palmer is author of 9 books including his latest Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. In his writing and in his work with the Center for Courage & Renewal, he transforms minds & lives.
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Apr 2012
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ I count myself and my listeners fortunate today to have as our spirit and action guest, Parker Palmer. I'll tell you up front that he's got so much of value to share that we'll delve into it both this week and next. He's author of a number of life changing and deepening books, the latest being healing the heart of democracy, the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit. With his work with educators, with circles of trust, and with the center for courage and renewal, Parker Palmer changes lives by joining deep thought with transformative action. You can catch Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer in Madison, Wisconsin on April 27th, an evening of song and spoken word called "A Gathering of Spirits for the Common Good." And it's a fundraiser for Dane County Courage to Teach, to really talented, awesome hearts and voices. You can find the link on northernspiritradio.org, and right now, Parker Palmer, author of Healing the Heart of Democracy, joins us from Madison, Wisconsin. Parker, I am absolutely delighted you could join me today for spirit and action. Thank you, Mark. I'm delighted to be with you. I think there's a piece of this that I'll have to confess upfront. The fact that I am doing this radio program for the last six and a half plus years is in part due to you back in 2005 when I was floundering around for what I wanted to be as a grown-up. I read your book. I read a couple of your books. I read "Let Your Life Speak, Listening for the Voice of Location." And that led me to having a clearness committee of the Quaker meeting I'm part of and led to the decision to start Northern Spirit Radio. So, here's one very big thank you for that. Well, thank you. Those are lovely words to hear. I'm very glad for the outcome. You've been part of so many people opening their eyes to the vocation, to the work they're doing, to their fulfillment with life. When did you start to get wise? Well, I'm 73, and I don't think I'm there yet. As you say, what do we want to do when we grow up? We're growing up all the time, I think. But I think that the work I've done around questions of vocation, of meaning, and purpose in life has come much more out of my own struggles around those same questions than out of any particular wisdom. And those struggles for me began very early on when I went through college and then graduate school thinking I was preparing myself for one thing and then turning out to go in quite different directions. I thought I was going to become a college professor, and instead the first thing I did after getting my PhD was to become a community organizer in Washington, D.C. And it's been a zigzag path from then until now. So that's over the past 45 or 50 years, but a very fulfilling and satisfying path in which I've worked independently as a writer and traveling teacher for about the last 25 years. So I think in answer to your question, the writing and the retreating and speaking that I do on questions of vocation and on all of the other topics I've written about now in nine books, all of them have come out of my personal struggle with issues that were important to me, trying to tell my own story, shedding as much light as possible as I did so, and inviting my readers or the folks in my retreat to discover their own story in that context. Part of your genius, however, and it's not genius that you personally own but that you partake of, has to do with sharing in process. And that's a big part of what I got from healing the heart of democracy, is that the process is so essential. And there's things that kick us into process. I understand that for this book, your personal experience of depression was part of what moved you to address the bigger depression I guess you were seeing in the world. Yes, that's right, Mark, as I write in the prelude to this new book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. Somewhere around 2004, 2005, I fell into depression. It was actually for the third time in my adult life, and this one was complicated. It was not only depression that had personal, close-at-hand causes, as depressions often do. It also picked up, I think, a kind of despair that I was feeling and that many people were feeling about the world around me, around us, and in this case, especially the world called American Democracy. As I write in that prelude to the new book, I think the human heart is like proverbial canary in the coal mine that sniffs the toxic gases before human beings are aware that they're present and starts to die, functions as a distant early warning system. And so writing this book was, for me, one of the things that I did to try to journey through that darkness back toward the light. I have learned, as I've wrestled with depression, that as you have energy to do so, it was not only an important inner journey to be taken, but there's an important outer journey to be taken as well, reaching out as best one is able towards the external concerns that you care about or you might have a gift to offer. And so writing this book was part of that process for me. And I must say that in writing the book, I feel that I learned a great deal about being a better citizen of American democracy. I think that I hold the complexities, the conflicts, the tensions, the challenges that come with life in a democracy in a much healthier way than I was doing 678 years ago where I had allowed anger to kind of deteriorate and to despair and had really dug myself into a pretty deep hole that in a way was personal. But when you multiply my story by a very large number, which I think you can, what you get is a lot of citizens in despair who have abandoned the public realm, the civic arena, and have left a vacuum into which other powers, non-democratic powers, undemocratic powers are very happy to move. So I think part of the message of the book is that I needed to find a way to re-engage the civic life of our society on the other side of my despair. And it's my sense that there are a lot of other people who need to take that same journey in order to reclaim we the people. One of the key words, though, that I think we better talk about before we get going is what you mean by heart because a lot of people use that word very differently than you do. In our time, the word "heart" has a diminished meaning. It's often associated simply with emotions or feeling. It's often used in a sentimental or romantic way. The way I use the word "heart" in the book and the way the people I quote in the book use the word "heart" takes us back to the ancient roots of the word itself. It comes from the Latin core, C-O-R, and it points to the core, C-O-R-E of the human self, where all of our ways of knowing and being and doing converge. So in addition to feelings, what you find in the heart, classically understood, is cognition, intuition, willpower, problem-solving knowledge, relational knowledge, bodily knowledge, the multiple faculties for knowing and doing and being that human beings possess. And the heart classically understood is that integrative center of ourselves from which a fuller life can be lived and a fuller engagement in the world around us can be had. Core, C-O-R, the root of the word "heart" is also the root of our word "currage." "Heart and courage" are not far apart when you look at them in terms of their etymologies. And so the word includes not only a rich, complex kind of knowing, but also the courage to act on what we know. So in the book, that's what I'm appealing to, is that center place in ourselves. And of course in my work on education, especially on higher education, I've written fairly extensively about educating the whole person, not just the cognitive part of the human self, but the entirety of the human self. As Wendell Berry, one of my heroes says, you know, the outcome of higher education should be a whole person. And I think that it's very important to pursue this question on the educational front as well as on the front we're discussing today, which is American democracy. One of the areas where I think you've also written, spoken, drawn, inspiration from is on the spiritual front. As a matter of fact, in looking through your list of books, one that I haven't read, but I assume had some of the seminal truths that you bring out in healing the harder democracy, is from back in 1983, the company of strangers, Christians and the renewal of Americans' public life. And it seems to me that some of the themes that you're touching on here had their nations back in there. You're absolutely right. The company of strangers, which was my first, I think, probably major piece of writing around these issues of public life and politics, really came out of my experience as a community organizer that I mentioned earlier. The subtitle "Christians and the Renewal of America's Public Life" suggests a concern that I had then and I still have related to what are our religious communities, not only Christian, but Jewish, and Muslim, and Buddhist, and every other kind you can imagine. What are our religious communities' congregations doing in support of American democracy? We have a very rightful separation of church and state in this country, and I'm sure that you are with me as a Quaker in having no romance about the "good old days" when church and state were conflated because some of our spiritual ancestors, as Quakers, got hanged on Boston Common by political power holders who didn't think much of their beliefs. So we have no romance about the so-called "good old days." But at the same time, life is full of questions of meaning and purpose so that while we maintain this rightful wall of separation between church and state, we also want multiple institutions at work helping people deal with these questions of meaning and purpose, which, when they go unanswered, I think, create great spiritual vacuum or psychological vacuum in our lives that tends to get filled by not-so-healthy stuff. For me, spirituality is however you answer the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than your own ego. It's part of the eternal human condition that a life lived only in connection with one's ego is a lonely, isolated life. And so there's this yearning to be connected with something much larger than that. And I like the definition because it's neutral, it's value neutral. It doesn't say that what people get connected with is always a good thing. And historically, it isn't. The Third Reich can be seen as a dark and evil effort on the part of people to get connected with something larger than their own ego's and their own empty sense of self. And Hitler was very skillful at manipulating that yearning in people in a nation that felt it had lost its great tradition, that it had been abused and humiliated on the world stage at the end of World War I. Then their economy was in the dumpster, the culture seemed to have collapsed, and Hitler was a genius, an evil genius, rallying people around this myth of Aryan supremacy and, as we all know, manipulating that to extraordinarily cruel and evil ends. So it's important, I think, to study these things and to help young people study this spiritual dimension of life because there's so many important discernments to be made about what one gets connected with that's larger than one's own ego. You know, there's a form of American patriotism or nationalism or exceptionalism really is quite dangerous, as William Sloan Coffin once said. A patriot is someone who loves his or her country enough to have a lover's quarrel with it. And people who get uncritically connected with the myth of American greatness to the point where they can't have a lover's quarrel, certainly not the kind of patriots that William Sloan Coffin was talking about, the kind I think we need who love their country too much to let it sink to its lowest life form. These are all spiritual questions as well as political questions, and I think one of the things that I try to do in this new book is to make some of the connections between our inner lives of spiritual seeking and meaning making and our external lives of political engagement or disengagement. I was taken by the way that you defined spirituality there because in the book, the word citizen, you define, you say citizenship is a way of being in the world rooted in the knowledge that I am a member of a vast community of human and non-human beings that I depend on for essentials I could never provide for myself. And that seems very akin to your definition of spirituality. Absolutely. I think that one of the places where the book really helped me grow is the realization that citizenship is in fact our membership in this vast web of being, as some folks have called it, and that we live in a world that's so profoundly interconnected on every level, biologically, economically, politically, spiritually, whatever level you want to name, we are profoundly interconnected with people and forces that we will never personally meet but still have an interactive life with, that to be a citizen in the narrow sense confined to the kind of territorial boundaries of the United States simply isn't enough. And I think that anybody who's paid serious attention to the recent global economic collapse or the ongoing global degradation of our ecosystem, of our environment, understands the way we are embedded in a system that transcends national boundaries. I'm intrigued by another thing that you brought up in the book. Actually, I'm vastly intrigued by the whole book. Again, healing the heart of democracy is really a wonderful collection of deep reflections. One of them that you point out, and this is particularly relevant to me because back 30 years ago, I was in the Peace Corps, I lived in Togo in West Africa, so I lived in a dictatorship for two years. I'm wondering about the formative experiences of how you see our government. You quote later in the book, a survey or poll that says that 80% of people in 2010 in the U.S. said that the U.S. was the greatest country in the world. Of course, most people in their country have high esteem for their country. I mean, it's part of this patriotic love, right? It's the people we know that are close to us, that we value. Have you had a chance to live outside the U.S. for an extended time that ended up being part of the material for this book? My international experience is fairly limited, and it's been primarily in places like England and Finland, where I have taught at various sorts of educational institutions, never for more than a summer session of three months, for example. So, I can't say that I have a personal global perspective that has a strong experiential base. But in my work, I have been very blessed for a long time. I mean, even before there was email in the internet to have readers and correspondence and visitors from many places around the world who've read my books and who've wanted to engage the issues and/or me in relation to those books. I think the nine books are now available in about 25 or 30 translations. But my sense of our interconnectedness runs very deep, and I'm sure in a different way, Mark, than yours does, since you have spent time immersed in a dictatorship. I have not, but I do have this deep sense of interconnectedness that has come as one of the blessings of the work I've done, and my writing has crossed lines that I never imagined it would reach across. That's just been a great gift to my life, and I think every book I've folded more and more of that larger knowing in thanks to my readers and my friends. Well, one of the ideas that you bring up in healing the heart of Democracy Parker is the idea that there's these spaces, one which you call private space and one which is kind of the government space, and that in between them there is either a larger or smaller public space. It's that public space that makes possible democracy and particularly strong democracy. Can you comment about that idea and how you see it playing out in the U.S. right now? Right, so in the book, in one of those chapters, I offer this kind of three-layer model, as you say, which we're up top, we have these big boxes of political power. Down at the bottom of this three-layer model, we have our private lives. And then in the middle, depending on what society we're talking about, we either do or don't have a strong public life, so you've got political, public, and private. What's striking to me is that so many Americans think that the main purpose, the trajectory of American democracy from the very beginning has been to secure a livable private life for all American citizens. We invest heavily in our private lives and we tend to measure everything by how well our private lives are going. That's very understandable. I don't have an argument with that in and of itself, but what I think a lot of us as Americans miss is that without a rich public life, the private life doesn't really exist as we understand it in a democracy. The sure and certain proof of that is to look at any totalitarian society. A totalitarian society, by definition, is one where there is a very strong central power that has absolutely free and untrammeled access to the private life. So if you have a son or daughter who is getting crosswise with the central government by protesting or by thinking and expressing thoughts that are contrary to the regime, that son or daughter may very well, as they say in Latin America, be disappeared in the middle of the night. And we know that in places like Chile and Argentina and others, tens of thousands of people have been disappeared because the central government at certain points in the history of those countries had absolutely unfettered access into the private life. What every totalitarian dictator tries to do is to wipe out any vestige of that intermediary public life. And what do I mean by public life? Will I mean all of those places, occasions, events, structures, spaces, as you said, within which the company of strangers has a chance to gather and come together as a self-aware community of citizens of a democracy or stakeholders in the life of a society. So the public life in America is all around us every day. It's the life we live as we walk down a crowded city street. It's the life we live as we join a voluntary association. It's the life we live as we have free conversations in forums and hearings and debates about the common good. It's the life we live as we sit at sidewalk cafes or in coffee shops or in city parks mingling with strangers with whom we have to achieve a certain level of comfort or shared understanding because we're all in this together. In a totalitarian society, all of those opportunities for the free interaction of the company of strangers are wiped out. You cannot gather as three or four or five or ten people on a street corner and hold a rally. The police are going to come around and take you to jail or God knows where. There are no public events of the sort that the government doesn't control. Because there's this realization by people who hold power that a rich public life does two things that help democracy happen. One is it amplifies the rather small voice of the private citizen. When ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand of us get together and say the same thing, the people in political power are more likely to hear what we're saying. And the public life is also that buffer zone that keeps central power from reaching directly into private life and manipulating and controlling individuals in a way that maintains "social order." So what I worry about in our society is that our opportunities for public life and public interaction have been threatened increasingly, I think, for the last 50, 60, 70 years. That may be changing somewhat now with the impact of digital technology, the impact of cyberspace, the world wide web. And so we can talk now about the Arab Spring or we can talk about the Occupy movement in our own country and how a lot of that was fomented by the use of digital technology. I don't think we fully understand yet what the outcome of that is going to be and whether it can replace our dwindling opportunities to be face to face as the company of strangers. But let me give one example of those dwindling opportunities. Time was, and all we have to do, people of your age and mine can think back to the '60s and the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. When all of the action that brought America to confront, once again, its underlying racism and to try to do something about it, all of the action that triggered the civil rights bill of 1964 or the voting rights bill of 1965, that was action that was conducted on the public streets and the thoroughfares in public spaces where people would march in cities or march along highways going from city to city as they marched from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama to capture the attention of the American public. Today, a lot of those city spaces were once people gathered to pursue commercial interests, shopping, business, and so forth. A lot of those public spaces have been replaced, especially on the shopping side of things, by shopping malls. And the shopping malls are something very different from the city streets because they are private and not public spaces. That means that you can't demonstrate in a shopping mall. You can't pick it. You can't hand out leaflets. You can't recruit people for political purposes of various sorts. The private ownership of malls simply says, we won't allow those things here because they're not consistent with our agenda, which is to create an environment that keeps people in the consumer role that enhances the shopping experience. We're not interested in citizenship. We're interested in consumerism. And so as the whole consumer business in our society has shifted from the streets to the shopping mall, that's an example, it seems to me, of our endangered public life, which is, in my mind, frighteningly reminiscent of what happens in a totalitarian society when the government says, you can't do politics in the city streets. We're just not going to allow it. These are things I think we have to think deeply about. And in the case of shopping malls, there have been some court decisions which have recognized the truth of what I've just been saying and have said because these malls have replaced the city streets, citizens do have a right to conduct certain kinds of political activities within these private precincts, or at least immediately adjacent to them. But there haven't been many decisions of that sort and their impact has not been very far reaching. We're speaking today about healing the heart of democracy. The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit by Parker J. Palmer. He joins us today, his website, if you want to go directly to follow up on more of his books and his work, is couragerenewal.org. You can find that link also from northernspiritradio.org, which is my website. This is Spirit in Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio Production. We have out on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Almost seven years of programming interviews with people making major changes to make our world a better place, as well as our song of the soul program. So go to northernspiritradio.org to find that, find links to our guests, and to leave comments and to contribute all those kind of good things. As I said, we're here with Parker Palmer today, healing the heart of democracy is his latest book and it gives really valuable insights into what we need to have a strong democracy. As you said earlier, Parker, part of the genesis of this book was your own personal grappling with depression, with fighting your inner demons and seeing the outer demons going on in our world, and they were related, of course. One of the things that's true for both of us is that we live in Wisconsin. Of course, you're down near our liberal Mecca, the city of Madison, whereas I'm up here further north, a moderately liberal enclave in the state of Wisconsin. How does this process, this democratic process, look to you in Wisconsin, particularly in light of what happened a year ago, the major upheaval and response to it that happened? Well, I am fundamentally proud of Wisconsinites for a couple of things. One is the fact that they organized and came out in numbers in a classic public space, which was, of course, the square surrounding the state capital to make their voices heard, to make their desires known. That's exactly the kind of thing that would not have been allowed in the totalitarian societies we were talking about earlier. I'm also proud, and I was at several of the demonstrations, so I can say this from experience, of the fact that those demonstrations were 99.99% peaceful and nonviolent and good-humored. The crowd was not wielding flaming torches and throwing bricks. Individuals in the crowd were expressing their opinions and their viewpoints, and doing so in a strong and sometimes vivid, but I think, you know, always straightforward, nonviolent manner. And then there's one more thing that I'm proud of. It's absolutely true that the people at those rallies were more or less of one mind. And as you know, in the book Healing the Heart of Democracy, I make the strongest case I can for the importance of talking across our lines of division, for the importance of coming together as Republicans and Democrats and independents, as liberals and conservatives and those who are somewhere in the middle of that continuum, coming together as people of many different viewpoints and understandings, to have a life-giving conversation in which we hold the tension of our differences creatively, looking for something that might transcend our differences, something that might unite us, something that our differences would in fact open us to that is better than anything that any of us have thought up to date. I make a pretty strong case, I think, in the book for the fact that, and it's strong in the sense that it's one that I think historians and analysts of American democracy who know more about the subject than I do would agree with, the genius of the founders of this country was that they created a system of government, really for the first time in human history, in which conflict and tension became an engine of social order, of an improved social order rather than an enemy of social order. Most forms of government up until the institutions of American democracy were established, dealt with conflict and tension by trying to suppress it in order to maintain social order, but here's a new thing on the face of the earth. For example, a government in which there is a separation of powers between the executive branch, the judicial branch and the legislative branch, which, as I say in the book, function like a loom to hold the tension of the threads of this democracy so that we can keep weaving and reweaving the fabric of a good society, and we're able to come back to that reweaving task again and again and again to try to get it right, try one more time to get it right. The reason the founders did this was partly their own genius, but it was genius born of necessity. One of the things I think we don't often recognize about the history of this country is that conflict of the sort we're having today is really nothing new. At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, 30%, nearly a third of the delegates walked out on that convention refusing to sign the document and basically saying "apox" on all your houses, and even those who remained had such deep differences among themselves were still in such a state of profound argumentation that the only way to complete their task was to create a system of government that kept that argumentation going in perpetuity. I found a wonderful quote from George Washington who represented one side in these debates that didn't get everything it wanted, just as was true of every side. George Washington said, "Even though I'm disappointed that I didn't get some of what I wanted, it's very clear to me that the tensions between us caused us to exert ourselves intellectually toward a degree of inventiveness and political creativity that we would otherwise have not achieved. And they created a system of government that was intended to keep those conflicts alive, to keep those questions alive and to give us chance after chance to return to them. The racial issue in our society is probably the best example of that, where we're still working hard as we should be, to overcome the horrific legacy of slavery and racism that is in the aquifer that feeds the American consciousness. And we still have a long way to go. As Michelle Alexander points out in an important book called The New Jim Crow, yes, we have a black president, but we have more African Americans somewhere in our judicial or penal system today than we had in slavery ten years before the Civil War was fought. And that's not because of objective facts about crime, that's because of ill-considered laws that harshly penalize nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, and it's because of the unequal enforcement of those laws against people of color, when all the studies show that people who look like me, white people in this society, are more likely to use those illegal substances than our people of color percentage-wise. So we have a lot of work to do, but we have a system of government that allows us to keep doing that work, as I say, to keep weaving and reweaving the fabric. Well, back to Wisconsin. The other thing I'm proud of about Wisconsin is that I have experienced and been part of efforts created by other people to reach across lines of division, for example, to bring Democrats and Republicans together around the issues that triggered those massive demonstrations at the Capitol, and that eventually resulted in a recall election whose process were now in. And these are efforts to host creative conversations between people who fundamentally disagree, to get us out of the demonstration mode and into a conversation mode where we can start learning from each other and help create that more perfect union that the founders talked about. They were under no illusions that they were creating some sort of utopia. They knew they weren't, and they created a structure for government that is premised exactly on the notion that we need to keep reaching for a more perfect union. One of the chance that we shared, I'm sure that you shared as well as I had my experience of it, down in Madison, was this is what democracy looks like. And I think that's a statement you agree with. It's the coming together in a peaceful respect. I'm kind of glad that the demonstrations broke out here in Wisconsin. I think we're known for, how should we say, mutual respect, hospitality, friendliness. At the same time, that doesn't mean that we're not a very passionate people, but it's tempering the one with the other. You talked about the way that the whole constitutional Congress put it together, and somehow they went forward with the project in spite of the fact that they disagreed. The tensions were high, but somehow you stick together. One of the tensions that you talk about that is built into our system is this tension between, I think you refer to liberty and maybe democracy, or I don't know if those are the two polls that you talk about, that one always is moving forward and backward. They're vacillating back and forth because the more we put things in the public sphere, the less individual liberty we have, and we have to balance those two things. Where do you see that balance being in our society at present? Well, you know, I think that the founders, the intention of the founders, was to create a democracy within the context of a republic. So we have a mixed system. I am most interested in the democratic dimension of that mixed system, but when people talk about America as a republic, what they're referring to legally is the fact that a democracy, by popular vote, may decide to do something that suppresses in undemocratic ways a minority. On the republic side of things, the structural legal side of things, we can then correct that by protecting the rights of the minority, despite the popular vote that they failed to win. There are a number of items in our bill of rights that are expressly designed to do that, so that not everything is in the hands of the popular vote. And we can all be grateful for that. You know, I think that today, one of the biggest dangers that we face is the way in which terrorism in our post-9/11 world has been used, and I think often manipulated to suspend constitutional rights in this country in a way that I think any true patriot should find abhorrent. When you have what would once have been defined as illegal wiretapping or a vast government apparatus that is looking in on the lives of private citizens in ways for which are invisible and unaccountable, where a lot of that work is being farmed out to private industry rather than being held in public institutions established by public trust, you have a very dangerous situation, and I think we've been drifting in that direction. I think one of the things that saddens me about the last decade, and that certainly had me depressed around 2004-2005, was the fact that a fair number of Americans were saying, in public opinion polls, they were saying, sure, go ahead, take my civil liberties away. I'm more worried about terrorism than I am about these traditional American values. And that, of course, included people saying, sure, go ahead and torture terrorist suspects to get information out of them. Yeah, we've had a ban against that in international law, and yeah, that's never been the American way, but this is a new age and some of our core values have to go out the window. I profoundly disagree with that. I think that many Americans do, but I think that that's one of the ways in which we need to have a much more probing and fact-based public conversation about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The other area where these issues come up, these conflicts between democracy and fill in the blank, is the conflict between democracy and unfettered capitalism. It's a complicated subject, and economics is not my forte, but I think there are a couple of things that we now know. One is that the economic collapse that so many people are suffering from these days with jobs and homes lost and the rapid decline of the middle class and the fact that America is no longer anywhere near number one in the world when it comes to chances for upward mobility. The fact that this generation of young people are not going to be better off than their parents in the long run. A lot of that comes from unregulated and unfettered capitalism that was not subjected even to the rules that existed at the time, and many of those rules were stripped away so that financial institutions were not under scrutiny for their practices, and they got away with murder and are still doing that. And then, of course, we have the famous recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United, that gives corporate money the standing of individual money in our political system so that corporations can make massive, unanimous, invisible, unaccountable contributions to political campaigns, and so thoroughly outspend individual donors that the will of the people may not have a chance to be known since a few "people" in the form of corporations carry such a big financial stick. So these are the ongoing issues in our democracy that require us to go back to the loom, and I can use that image again, time and time again, as citizens, as we the people. Bill Moyer, I regard as a very wise man on these subjects. I'm deeply grateful for the kind of investigative journalism that he does into these topics. And he has said a simple but wise thing. He has said the only answer to the power of organized money in our society right now is the power of organized people. And so I come back again to we the people and the question of how we overcome these divisions between us in a way that allows us to reclaim this fundamental American insight that tension and conflict are not the enemy of a social order, a better social order. They are the engine of a better social order. And we need to stay true to that piece of our democratic heritage, a piece that the founders were very clear about, and a piece that they institutionalized at the very heart of our government, lest we lose the democracy that we claim to love. You know, I had a guest on not too long ago, another person who originated from Wisconsin, in this case, I think he's from Racine. I don't know if you know of the work of Gar Alpervitz. You said you were not an economist, so that maybe you weren't best fitted to comment on these things. It's written extensively in a number of areas, including economic democracy, and what can help balance this unseemly and undemocratic, I think, weight that corporations, unfettered corporate power, as you refer to it. Have you been exposed to Gar Alpervitz? And if not, I suggest that you listen to Nordenspiritradio.org, the interview with Gar. You'll find some things that are signs of hope coming out of different fields and that have broad partisan support, quite interestingly. I will listen to that interview because I like the work that you do on this show. I know just a little bit about his stuff, but I'm sure I have a lot to learn. You mentioned about Citizens United decision. I'm equally chilled in a different way by the recent Supreme Court decision about strip searches. You know, that you can strip search anybody who's stopped on any kind of suspicion. One of the things that I'm just constantly amazed about is people who, I think they describe themselves as conservative and that they're, you know, for individual liberties, how they somehow make the leap to give up those individual liberties in pursuit of, I'm not quite sure what, but in the case of the strip search decision, the Supreme Court said basically that jails in order to have good order within, they have to be able to strip search anybody that they want to. And when the jails become private corporations themselves, what power this has given over away from public life, away from any place where we have, as a people, dominion, it's truly frightening. And you'd think that you'd be able to bring together people from liberal and conservative circles together because, you know, it is our country and our lives. We should be able to work together on this. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, I have two responses, Mark, to that important question. On the one hand, I have my own opinions about that issue, which are very much along the lines of your own. And on the other hand, the question I'm wanting to keep holding for myself and others is, how do we sit down and have a conversation with people whose viewpoints we don't understand and make that a conversation that has a potential of going somewhere rather than starting out on the premise that what you believe or what I believe is inconceivable and therefore we have nothing much to talk, we have nothing to talk about, which is where I think a lot of us are at this point and is one of the reasons that we, the people, the we and we, the people keep shrinking in its meaning. When we and we, the people, get smaller and smaller, then we're losing our capacity to hold central government accountable, and we're handing it over to the play of other kinds of power. So let me just give you an example of one that I use in the book, as I'm sure you know, the kind of conversation, creative conversation I have in mind. The number of efforts have been made around hard or difficult conversations, the exploration of contentious topics among people who disagree about those topics. One example that I really like to talk about because I think it's very powerful has to do with day-long workshops or sometimes weekend workshops that are held around the topic of abortion, which as we know is a really challenging hot-button topic in our society, and in these workshops and these retreats, when people gather, let's say, for the day-long version of this, there is a basic ground rule enforced by the facilitators of this event that not until the very last hour of the retreat, will participants be allowed to tell anyone what their position on the issue is, what their opinion or stand may be. Instead, for most of that day together, they are coached in how to tell the story of the life experience that led them to that conviction, to that position. And then in safe spaces made safe by certain kinds of ground rules that, again, the facilitators enforced, they are given opportunities to tell those stories to each other. And then when at the end of the day, people start learning what opinions are present in the group or what positions people have taken. A remarkable but very human thing happens, which is that those stories have sort of opened the door into another person's life and have given people a sense of bondedness that we never get when we restrict ourselves to simply espousing our ideological beliefs. You know, it's been said that the more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to dislike or distrust them. In my experience, that's absolutely true. So by the end of the day in this workshop or this retreat around, let's say, the issue of abortion, by following this storytelling methodology and then letting people speak about their beliefs in the context of the story, people have bonded with each other at a deeper level, probably not changing their minds about the issue, but better able to understand why the person they're talking to holds the belief that they do. And when we can keep up building or reweaving the civic community that way, it seems to me that we strengthen our hand as we the people to start moving toward a little more consensus and a little more consensus on the common good, which we can never do when we're simply at war with each other at this level of ideological belief. And I've had a number of recent experiences right here in Wisconsin in a group called Reach Out Wisconsin, which is trying to bring Democrats and Republicans together around the issues that are tearing away at the fabric of our state. I've had recent experiences of storytelling, where this has proved to be a very powerful method of creating a new kind of conversation. So I think what I'd like to do with the person who holds a very different belief from mine, let's say on Citizens United or on the recent Supreme Court decision about strip searching, where I don't understand how that person can hold that conviction in light of other beliefs that they have espoused, I'd really like to be able to ask in one way or another, "What's your story? Tell me your story. Tell me what it is in your experience that leads you to think that this is not a contradiction for you, but somehow a coherent way of thinking about things." I think if we can get into the inquiry mode more than the argumentation mode, then when we get to the argument, the argument can be more creative. And we'll be much further along in terms of healing the harder democracy, which is the title of Parker Palmer's book that just come out recently, the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit. We'll continue our conversation with Parker Palmer next week on Spirit in Action. Don't forget his song and spoken word concert with awesome singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer on April 27 in Madison, followed the link on northernspiritradio.org, and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing.