Healing the Heart of Democracy Part 2: Democracy's Ecosystem

Happy Tuesday friends!

Let’s jump back into Healing the Heart of Democracy, eh?

A quick recap of what Palmer has laid out so far (if you haven’t, it might be good to go back and read the FIRST POST):

• The human heart is the first home of democracy

• There are five “democratic habits of the heart” critical to our social health

  • An understanding that we are all in this together.

  • An appreciation of the value of “otherness.”

  • The ability to hold tension in life-giving ways.

  • A sense of personal voice and agency.

  • An ability to create community.

• Any serious attempt to live these habits out will challenge us at the deepest possible levels, and probably break our our hearts in the process

For Palmer, that heartbreak is good. If metabolized properly, it will lead us to all the right kinds of engagement with each other. He calls this “the politics of the brokenhearted.”

Much of the book is going to be spent teasing out each of the five habits—and that’s where we’ll spend the majority of our time—but before he gets into them, Palmer wants to make sure we’re clear on at least one thing: the ecosystem of democracy—what that means, why it’s good, and what it requires.

To call democracy an “ecosystem” is to point up the diversity that lies at the heart of our common life. We are not a cultural or ideological monolith and were never designed to be. Our social contract sets us up to be a society that values, promotes, and celebrates difference. Palmer remarks:

…the diversity that grows in a democracy delights the heart as well as the eye. Our diversity consists only in part of demographic differences such as race, ethnicity, and social class. Equally important are the wildly different lenses through which we see, think, and believe. At the center of America’s public life is a marketplace of ideas that only a free people could create, a vital, colorful bazaar of religious, philosophical, political, and intellectual convictions. When a democracy is working as it should, it is a complex and confusing mess where we can think and act as we choose, within the rule of law; can generate social and technological advances via the creative conflict of ideas; and can still manage to come together for the sake of the common good. (p. 12)

Sounds beautiful, right? It is. Beautiful, but also demanding. Our differences pressurize the system. They put tension and stress into it. If we handle the tension and stress rightly, it will make us better, stronger. (You might think about physical exercise here; it’s all about the management of right tension and stress). If we handle the tension wrongly, we’ll hurt ourselves or others or—worse—break (the exercise analogy holds true here, too). It’s all about how we approach it, what we do with it. 

In the last post we talked about two factors that will certainly undermine the effort Palmer is calling us into in this book: despair that there aren’t enough of us to get started and a false sense of urgency. Here now we meet a third, more insidious than the first two:

Fear of the “other.”

There are few things in life more challenging than pressing into relationship with folks whose ideas and convictions are different from one’s own. “Fight or flight” is how we usually respond—either succumbing to the temptation to annihilate the differences through some form of violence, or simply running away, retreating further and further into our safe little enclaves of sameness. 

Neither of those options makes us better; neither gets us where we need to go; neither promotes social flourishing, for if the democratic experiment is a celebration of difference that is meant to “generate, not suppress, the energy created by conflict, converting it into social progress as a hydroelectric plant converts the energy of dammed-up water into usable power” then we’re going to have to learn “how to hold conflict inwardly in a manner that converts it into creativity, allowing it to pull us open to new ideas, new courses of action, and each other” (p. 15).

This is hard. Very hard. As anyone who has ever successfully negotiated interpersonal conflict knows, it requires much of us—not least that we hold spaces of contradiction non-reactively and with the integrity born of patient love.  

Palmer offers the marvelous example of the 18th century Quaker John Woolman. Woolman, distressed by the contradiction between the Quakers’ professed belief in human dignity and the fact that many of them owned slaves, worked tirelessly to persuade his Quaker brethren and sistren to overturn the practice.

Quakers make decisions by consensus, which means that nothing is done quickly, and so even though many leaders were sympathetic to Woolman’s cause, there was simply no way to hand down a unilateral decision. Change would have to come slowly, from the ground up. And so for decades Woolman went up and down the east coast, sharing his convictions in homes and at farms and community gatherings, making his case for the freeing of slaves. 

One of the things that’s great about John Woolman is how thoroughgoing his commitment to his convictions was. Woolman, who never owned slaves, also “wore undyed white clothing because the dye was a product of slave labor”; he fasted at meals if he knew they were prepared by slaves; and “if he learned that he had inadvertently benefited from a slave’s work,” he would “pay that person his or her due without calling attention to the exchange” (p. 21). 

Woolman lived what he advocated for, and his willingness to hold the spaces of contradiction non-reactively over the long haul eventually won out as the Quakers were the first religious body in the U.S. to outlaw the practice of slaveholding within their communion—eighty years before the Civil War.

Now that strikes me as prophetic, on at least two fronts. 

Quite obviously the decision itself, late in coming though it had been, beat the rest of the nation to the punch. Woolman and the Quakers set a prophetic example in what they decided to do.

But it’s not just what they did; it’s how they did it. The Quakers held “their internal contradictions consciously and constantly” until they got where they needed to go. Palmer remarks that they “refused to resolve the matter falsely or prematurely” and instead “tested their convictions in dialogue and labored to achieve unity, trusting tension to do its work, until they finally arrived at a decision of historic proportions” (p. 21). 

That also seems to me prophetic—their willingness to hold contradiction and tension preserved their integrity as a body. Their patient love won the day. In this, too, they set an example: it’s not just what we’re advocating for or what we believe; the how is just as important to our health, to our future.

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Is it a stretch to say that things are not much in fashion anymore? I get the impression from the increasingly strident voices on the right and the left that we think we would be better off without each other (Cain and Abel, anyone?). That difference—of whatever kind—is not actually good. That the tension and conflict born of difference are bad and must be assiduously avoided or quickly resolved.

But that is to act like children and not like mature adults. It is also why we are finding it increasingly difficult to live with each other. We are silo-ing, and quickly. The fabric of our society is getting dangerously thin.

What I want to say is that churches should be places where that process is at least not finding footing, and at most being reversed. After all, we’re a people who tell a story of how God is the creator of a diverse and multifarious cosmos, who has reconciled a disparate and often warring humanity to himself and one another through the cross, and has done so without annihilating their differences. That unity-in-diversity is the goal, the place we’re headed.

Further, we believe that our God is the one who has given us the fruits of the Spirit so that both those God-given differences and also the fractures that fall between us because of sin might not overcome us, but rather that peace would prevail even in the conflict born of difference. 

I want to say those things. But unfortunately, they so often are not the case. Too often the church is complicit in the fracturing and fragmentation of our society.

And this is a sign to me that we have not taken our own message seriously enough, that the powers that be on the left and the right have captured us with their own agendas and ideological urgencies. 

It need not be that way, of course. We could choose otherwise. And if what Palmer is saying about the ecosystem of democracy is true, then perhaps one of the ways we might be benefit our society most is simply by first believing our own message, being what in fact we are, and working hard to practice it.