This is the final diary in a series devoted to probing some of the deeper dynamics and lessons to be learned from the recent controversies over the election irregularities in Ohio. In it, I focus primarily on the implications of issue entrepreneurship and levels of cognitive development. But I touch on other matters as well, and welcome a discussion that brings up any of the issues addressed earlier in the series.
If you haven't seen the previous diaries, a list of them, with links and brief descriptions is just below the fold, followed by the diary proper.
The Series So Far:
Dairy 1: Overview.
Diary 2: What unites us--"A Fighting Faith In The Spirit of Martin Luther King."
Diary 3: Chris Bowers' analysis re the importance of growing liberalism and attacking conservatism, with a focus on "liberalizing / progressivizing the 10-15% of the population that is currently primarily reform minded and non-ideological."
Diary 4: Lakoff's analysis of the Right Wing Power Grab and the Battle For American Democracy. This should have been the unifying frame for all of us in dealing with Ohio. But we are not yet sufficiently grounded in a number of important fundamentals to pull that off.
Diary 5: Issue Entrepreneurship/The Social Skills of Democracy, explored one of those fundamentals.
Diary 6: Cognitive Development, presented three constructs that help elucidate how thought processes differ at different levels of cognitive development, and what that means for politics.
Categories And Conclusion
In my last diary, I replaced a discussion of non-Aristotelian categories with a discussion of cognitive development. I now offer a brief summary of the points about non-Aristotelian categories as a lead in to my conclusion. (A fuller discussion can be found in my first attempt to deal with this issue in a single diary, "A Fighting Faith: OH, Democracy, Lakoff & Chris Bowers".)
I can sum up what's important for our purposes in Lakoff's treatment of categories fairly simply:
- The way we categorize the world is profoundly important, since categories organize how we see the world.
- Contrary to age-old notions, categories are not simply containers, with all member equally representative. They are highly structured entities, with structures that follow certain rules, but are specifically determined by circumstance-rather the way that a tree grows. There are ideal representatives, typical representatives, social stereotypes, negative stereotypes, etc.
- Because of this, particularly when dealing with abstract and/or disputed realms, people may seem to be talking about the same things, but have very different things in mind, different things which their categorization scheme picks out for them.
- This background interacts with the way that people consciously go about organizing as issue entrepreneurs, so that more is involved than simply the consciously articulated issues and their relationships.
- The higher your level of cognitive development, the easier it is to see the consequences of your own categorization processess, as well as that of others.
Ohio, Finally
What has all this got to do with Ohio? Plenty! Markos looks at the Ohio fraud diaries and he sees them in terms of his categories-just as we all see everything. What stands out for him is not just a product of what's in front of him, it's seen through oodles of past experience and categorization. Fraud does not stand our for him. Was there fraud? Sure there was fraud. There's always fraud. This is how he describes his outlook.
Now, this doesn't sound like a reformer talking, does it? Not if electoral fraud is an essential prototype for you, it doesn't. But what if something else is an essential prototype? You may be quite concerned about electoral fraud, but if you think something else is an essential prototype for the "political reformer" category, and you are very concerned with actually producing political change that improves people's lives, then electoral fraud is a double loser-it takes the wrong essential prototype of what needs to be reformed, and does so in a way that weakens long-term prospects for effective political action. Markos, like all of us, is an issue entrepreneur, and from the way he has organized his understanding of issues so far, what he sees going on in the fraud diaries is primarily a double loser.
The question here is not whether Markos is right or not. And it's not even if this is how Markos actually thought about it. (It's probably not, though it may be close in some sense.) It's really about having a plausible model for a defensible, even honorable political position. Because this is what successful progressive politics demands-that we find ways of treating everyone possible as if they are taking defensible, even honorable positions. Treating people this way is the basis for building bridges, alliances, and eventual unity-starting with creating the space that they can explain their reasoning, we can explain ours, and all of us can explore this reasoning together.
The same thing goes for those who piss Markos off the most. I'm not talking Georgia10 here. Georgia10 is clearly not the essential prototype Markos has in mind-although she is for the vast majority of people concerned about Ohio, if the comments and ratings are truly reflective of how people feel. There really are some nutcase conspiracy theorists out there, and we have to deal with them, because they're our nutcase conspiracy theorists.
Cognitive Development
Now let's add another factor. Let's bring in levels of cognitive development.
Now I have a confession to make. I haven't scrutinized Markos' writings well enough to have any clue what level he's coming from. What's more, the level you are at doesn't necessarily determine how you write. You write for an audience. A level four adult trying to teach 7-year olds had better not write or talk at level four. That way lies big trouble. While I try to pride myself on cultivating level 5 thinking (pride is so level 2!), I know that I often write things at a much simpler level. And this isn't a bad thing. Except when it is.
No, the real question is what level Markos chose to address this issue from, and that is intimately bound up in the question of what level this site generally functions at. Now, cognitive levels have rarely been systematically studied in a social (rather than individual) framework. But I think we can get away with this here, by reformulating it like this: what levels of thinking work at this site?
Answer: levels 3, 4 and 5. Dichotomous thinking in terms of durable categories doesn't fly here. See, for example, the widespread rejection of Peter Beinart's "A Fighting Faith." This is a place for people who can walk and chew gum at the same time. The minimal level of thinking that flies here is level 3, which has to do with finding community. Those who find a home here may well be functioning at level 3. OTOH, those who make a home here, who actively engage in shaping the site-either in large ways or small-may well be functioning at level 4. And those engaged in remaking themselves here-working through their internal contradictions, drawing insight from the paradoxes in their positions, etc.-they may well be functioning at level 5.
It seems clear to me that Markos saw this issue as something that concerned the site's identity as a community. He was therefore focused on level 3 concerns. What is the nature of this community, and how do we relate to one another? At a bare minimum, it means-as it always has-that some people are excluded. And that's why God invented troll ratings. It's a good bet that troll ratings correlate somewhat well with people operating at level 2 or below. People who have trouble taking into account the perspective of others, people who have trouble construing a relationship as the ground of being for their actions. (Level 4 constructs relationships, level 3 construes them.)
This seems like a fairly plausible prototype for how Markos saw the problems at the site. A mass outbreak of people acting in level 2 manner. This can be seen both in the breakdown of relationships, and in the tendency to accuse one another of being some sort of durable category. ("Elitist," "careerist," etc. on the Ohio skeptic side, "conspiricist" on the Ohio fraud side.) Now, clearly level 2 thinking can kill the site. Getting rid of it is a matter of survival. Thus, the only outstanding question I have about how Markos handled this is whether he carefully examined the level 2 thinking on the side of those who derided the interest in Ohio. I'm in no position to answer this myself. But I think it's something that Markos himself might want to think about.
What Is To Be Done?
What's more important, though, is not what happens on the low level of insuring site survival. It's what happens on the high end of inspiring site development, growth, change and evolution.
This involves questions about how to nurture and create synergy between those who already grant some respect to one another-Markos and Georgia10, for example. That seems to be a moot question at this point. But there's a meta-question that's still open: how do we get really good at collective issue entrepreneurship, so that conflicts like this one lead to breakthroughs, rather than breakdowns?
One strategy is to do what I have done-in Diary 4 (about Lakoff's analysis of the Right Wing Power Grab and the Battle For American Democracy) and elsewhere--to keep digging into what it means to be liberal, conservative or radical, and to seek out fundamental connections that can bring us together, and accurately define what it is we struggle against. But abstract models alone won't cut it. We need more, much more.
Part of what we need is infrastructure. We all know this by now. And my sense is that one reason Markos has ignored Ohio as much as possible is that he sees it as a distraction from building infrastructure, which he rightly sees as absolutely crucial to our long-term success. Dkos itself is a brilliant example of his concern for building infrastructure, and every one of us here can attest to the value of his dedication with every keystroke we type here. And, as noted above, the infrastructure here is not just technology-it's community.
Yet, the Ohio eruption has revealed a problem with Dkos that is, in some respects, a problem of design-a question of how to further enrich the community. This is not a bad thing. Invention is repeatedly involved with confronting problems, seeking them out, even, turning problems into lessons, challenges, and inspirations.
Dkos is now a community with so many different conversations intertwined that it needs more capacity for differentiation as well as connection, for fostering different kinds of conversations, so that, for example, disagreements at one level can be argued out, while at another level people can reflect together on the process they are engaged in, to see if some larger issues, insights, problems or opportunities can be discerned in the shapes of arguments that take whole threads of comments or even diaries to unfold.
I believe we face a fundamental challenge, which defines the very essence of what it means to be left, rather then right: we face the challenge of building bottom-up consensus, which does not build by restricting choice, action and the forms that solidarity may take, but rather builds through synergy by enhancing choice, diversifying action and forms and building strength by doing so, rather than diluting it.
This is, from one perspective, the problem of how to institutionalize level 5.
This is a tall order indeed. It is a job for grownups of all ages. Childish dependency will not get it done. But we have great models to inspire us. We have the conceptual models I discussed in my last diary, of course. But equally important, we have flesh and blood models to educate and inspire us. Models like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandella. And models who walk among us today, and post to this website every hour of the day.