Monthly Archives: June 2015

Ideas

On the Charleston shooting

The most important words said yet about what happened in Charleston are from the families themselves, who spoke to the shooter today:

“You hurt me. You hurt a lot of people. But God forgives. And I forgive you.”

“I forgive you. You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.”

“We are the family that Love built. We have no room for hate.”

These are the words of folks filled with Grace.

These are the words of folks who worked hard to be filled with Grace.

These are the words of folks whose family members were in church on Wednesday, because they knew being a Sunday Christian wasn’t sufficient to be the Grace dealers that God needed them to be.

What should we, their national neighbors — who don’t live in Charleston, who don’t live in South Carolina, who don’t live in the South, who don’t live in skin that puts us at risk of falling victim to this twisted form of hate — do in the wake of this burst of darkness?

I don’t know, but I think we should at the very least start by taking a page out of their Good Book and think about how we can be better vessels of Grace this year; better vessels for a country that needs Grace now more than ever.

The easy thing to do is to take this tragedy and use it to think complacently about how some folks we’ve never met in some community we’ve never lived in, way over there, in that far-off part of the country, are outside of the light.

The easy thing to do is to say racism or violence or darkness are apart from us, the disease of the other side.

The harder thing to do is to admit that we have the disease, too. Our own time and our own attention and our own tax dollars are complicit in the racism of our age. Our own souls are susceptible to the violence of thinking that some group is the cause of all of our problems. Our own moments of darkness are contributing to an environment where some child feels like he needs to shoot someone to feel a part of something.

The harder thing to do is to not just feel something, but to turn that feeling into doing something. No, not to tell someone far away to do something for you, but to do something ourselves: to go forth and listen to someone who is different than us; to go forth and amplify the voice of someone trying to say something; to go forth and help folks find a purpose beyond hate.

This isn’t an easy task, being vessels of Grace.

We might need to put in some extra effort. We might need to put in some extra time. We might need to be together more. We might even need to start going to church on Wednesday.

That’s what the family that Love built did to make sure they had no room for hate.

Ideas, Political Projects

The Democratic Promise, a Strong People, and an Open Nation: The Philosophy Behind the Progressive Alternative

I just posted my first major essay to ProgressiveAlternative.org, our new initiative to restore the integrity and broaden the vision of the Democratic Party.  It regards the philosophy behind the progressive alternative, examining the ideas of the democratic promise, strong people, and an open world. Here’s an excerpt:

That is what it means to have faith in the democratic promise, in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women. Unlike fundamentalists, we start from a place of political uncertainty. Unlike conservatives, we believe institutional evolution can lead us down bad paths and thus believe present ideas from living humans for institutional reform and replacement are worth considering. Unlike technocrats, we believe those ideas are not the providence of a small set of centralized experts, but rather should be harvested from every ordinary citizen.

This constructive genius has been called creative intelligence by secular thinkers like John Dewey. It has been called divine Grace that works through each of us by religious thinkers. InFalse Necessity, philosopher Roberto Unger describes it as follows:

The infinity of the mind is the model for our relation to all the social and cultural worlds we build and inhabit.  There is always more in us — more in each of us individually as well as more in all of us collectively — than there is in all of them put together, the past and present orders of society and culture.

This inexhaustibility is the most important fact about us.  It is inscribed in the plasticity that characterizes the human brain and makes us into language-speaking and culture-producing organisms.  Its deployment is the most important instrument of practical progress as well as of scientific discovery. (li-lii)

To the Progressive Alternative, our people’s living and constructive genius – our creative intelligence, our experience of divine Grace, the infinity of our mind, our inexhaustibility – is the great tool we have with which to face political uncertainty.

From this belief comes our political mission: to empower and equip this constructive genius of ordinary men and women, while restoring its political supremacy over non-living structures. Wise scripture, inherited institutions, and technical expertise should not be abolished, but they should be the servants, not the masters, of this constructive genius and its stewards, the living citizens and communities of today.

Read the full essay — “The Democratic Promise, a Strong People, and an Open Nation: The Philosophy Behind the Progressive Alternative” — here.

Read the original Progressive Alternative intervention, the founding document of the Progressive Alternative initiative, here.