The Spiritual Imperatives of Our Time - Reading

Opening Our Eyes to the Spiritual Imperatives of Our Time -- Reading

James Luther Adams

“The institutional ingredient [for true democracy] is the right of free association – the freedom to form or belong to voluntary associations that can bring about innovation or criticism in the society.  It is a fragile freedom, often under attack because it represents a dynamic force for change.  It brings about differentiation in the community, a separation of powers. “Voluntaryism . . . refers to a principal way in which the individual through association with others gets a piece of the action. It involves an exercise of power through organization.  It is the means by which the individual participates in the process of making social decisions.  This process, particularly when it affects public policy, requires struggle, for in some fashion it generally entails a reshaping and perhaps even a redistribution of power.”

He goes on to point out that voluntary organizations are a messy business.  Paying for a place to meet, developing leadership and being able to motivate your volunteers, and getting access to the media to get your message out are on-going challenges.  Thousands of different voluntary organizations are doing this, hoping to influence the direction of society.  We hope that the government is listening and will represent the public good and the public consensus, because the state possesses the ultimate authority and power to decide.  “In this congeries of associations we see the dispersion of power and group creativity characteristic in principle of a pluralistic democratic society.”p58  (Will someone tell Mr. Harper?)

Jane Mansbridge (president of the American Political Science Assoc. and Harvard Professor) writes: “People are most likely to come to understand their real interests in a small democracy, like a town or a workplace, where members make a conscious effort to choose democratic procedures appropriate to the various issues that arise.”

John Stuart Mill:  “We do not learn to read and write, to ride or swim, by being merely told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by practicing popular government on a limited scale, that the people will ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.”

In his book, What Then Must We Do?  Democratizing wealth and building a community sustaining economy from the ground up, Par Alperobitz proposes it is time for us to imagine the alternative to corporate capitalism as a way to organize the economic structure of society.  As the Occupy Movement clearly demonstrated, corporate capitalism is not working for the vast majority of people.  It has not demonstrated the capacity to address the imperatives of our time:  climate change; world poverty; the need for economic institutions that are not required to grow; democracy and peace; Justice and freedom.  But how do we initiate a true transformation of society, and how do we muster the political will to make this change?

P139 “The modern civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, [the fall of the Berlin wall, the Arab Spring,] even the modern conservative movement . . . all rose to major power without benefit of pundit prediction.  Indeed, the success of all these movements was quite contrary to the conventional wisdom at the time, which held that nothing serious could change.”  Many happened after years of hard struggle by people with vision who may not have seen the changes in their own lives.

Alperovitz’s  says we are in such a time of change now.  The changes are brewing, percolating, emerging.  His vision is for a democratization of wealth. 

He sees us “Slowly building an alternative basis of the economy in local communities and states through democratization strategies.” – Don’t wait.  Let the seeds of the future be sown in the ground of the present.

Across North America a checkerboard of municipal and state possibilities – are already emerging, demonstrating the potential democratization of wealth.  When the traditional strategies of job creation through tax incentives and infrastructure gifts didn’t work, city after city across the United States has begun to invent new strategies: public utilities, land trusts, private public joint ownership, community development corporations, and outright public ownership of retail and commercial enterprises—even public banks.  Meanwhile innovative workers are initiating worker ownership and control through pension plans, cooperatives, and other means, and farmers and consumers are building the local food movement.

This “possibility of a certain longer-term evolutionary institution-building and institution-shifting strategy—[is] not for the faint of heart or for the short-term, instant-gratification folks among us.”  He calls the process of “building institutions, workplaces and cultures concerned with democratizing wealth evolutionary reconstruction.”

Frances Deverell:  While it is too often necessary to stand up and be counted, whether it be against injustice in Palestine or with our own First Nations, or against building our future on an expansion of the tar sands, it is spiritually draining to be constantly on the defensive, standing up to stop what we don’t want.  It is far more empowering to outline the future you most want to see, and to start building it – step by step.