https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xOvm5ZdIT5c
So welcome, everyone, to another Voices with Raveke. This is the second episode in my series with Greg Thomas. And it’s so wonderful to have you back. The first one was very exciting. And we were off camera and I was telling to Greg that in preparation for today, I read a couple of articles. And then I bought for each article the central book that was referenced. And this has been just it’s been very exciting. So Greg, I’m just going to turn things over to you. I know you’ve got sort of what you want to talk about. And then we’ll do what we did before. I’ll just ask questions and we’ll get into a dialogue, hopefully. And so please take it away. All right. I’ll be glad to thank you once again, John, for having me as a guest on Voices with Raveke. So our theme for today is democracy as antagonistic cooperation for e pluribus unum. So to ensure that this actually is more of a conversation and dialogue as opposed to a monologue, I want to ask you to talk about the concepts, not your concept, but you talk about the concept of I’m trying to think oppositional, opposing. Opponent processing? Thank you. Opponent processing. Why don’t we use that as a jumping off point? Because I see and feel that antagonistic cooperation and opponent processing resonate. I suspect that they’re identical. I think that they are different names from different fields for the same thing. And just to add into that, I’ve also recently, I guess when I was in Prague late last year, I made an argument about democracy should be reconceived as opponent processing at the level of collective intelligence and distributed cognition. So there’s an extended thesis there. But the core idea, which is also at the center of my theory of relevance realization, is that you can see all throughout nature and at many levels of scale a convergent solution to problems of adaptation, of adaptive fit. How that works is you get two systems that are biased, and they’re biased in opposing directions, but then you get them linking so that they’re actually, that opposition is actually cooperating to create an ongoing evolution of something. So one easy example is your autonomic nervous system. It’s trying to continually calibrate the level of arousal you should have for a situation. And what it does is it has the sympathetic system, which is biased, and that’s the right word, to interpreting as much as it can as an urgent threat or urgent opportunity. And the parasympathetic system, which is biased to interpreting as much as it can as a clear opportunity for rest, relaxation. And they’re constantly pushing and pulling on each other. And so your level of arousal is constantly evolving. And you see the same thing in your vision. You’ve got opponent processing between your focal and background. It’s not as clear, but probably something like opponent processing going on between the left and the right hemispheres. And then I basically argued it’s at the core of relevance realization, where you have all of these opponent processes that are trying doing opponent processing between over-fitting and under-fitting, and you’re doing that in order to bring about an optimal grip on the world. So how did that work, Greg, as a good introduction? Absolutely. Those are the examples that I recall. And I did see and re-see your lecture in Prague. So if you could, and of course, you won’t be able to give the entire lecture. Maybe. But if you could, in a nutshell, explain the connection you see between opponent processing and what I’m calling antagonist cooperation and democracy. I totally agree. That’s why, frankly, that’s why I titled this session Democracy as Antagonistic Cooperation for E Pluribus Unum. But I want to be able to riff on your thesis, and then we just dive in. Sure. Sure, sure. So the argument has a bunch of premises. And for each premise, there is also an argument and evidence. But I won’t. People can go and watch the talk if they want the more in-depth argument. And we’ll put notes to a link to that in the notes. So the idea is there is such a thing, which I think is now becoming non-controversial. There is such a thing as the collective intelligence of distributed cognition, which is more than just the sum of the individual cognitions. There’s a synergistic effect. There’s an emerging capacity for problem solving. That distributed cognition comes with distributed labor. So its ability to get an optimal grip on the world is larger, more expansive. It can deal with hyper-objects that individual cognition can’t deal with. So science as distributed cognition can track global warming, even though no one person could, as an example. And then the idea is democracy is such a system of collective intelligence working on large distributed cognition in order to solve very large, complex, and complicated problems, some of them verging on hyper-object kind of entities. And that democracy can be understood as an attempt to bring something into that collective intelligence that we see at work in individual intelligence, evolving anticipatory adaptivity. And you bring that about by opponent processing. And the idea about democracy is that what it’s supposed to do is have opponent processing where people, there are sides that represent different biases. My quick take on this, and we can expand on this, when the right is at the best, the right is recognizing that we’re not just animals, and we are called to virtue. We are called to responsibility. The left, at its best, reminds us, nevertheless, we are finite animals subject to fate. And we therefore need compassion and support. And they’re biased. And it’s good to be biased because these are values. But they, of course, are in opponent processing with each other because one is about our transcendence and the other is about our finitude. And what democracy can do is have them do opponent processing so that the collective intelligence is much more capable of evolving an optimal grip on the problems that that state or nation is facing. And then the critique is that we have lost that because democracy has degenerated into polarized adversarial processing where you don’t recognize, in opponent processing, you realize that the other person’s bias is the best field of correction for your bias, right? And vice versa. And so both parties, polls, are committed to the polarity. The polarity is more important than the polls. But what we now have is an adversarial processing. The other side is each side demonizes the other. And the other side is trying to destroy the other. The opponent processing is lost. The collective intelligence basically fragments and degenerates and loses its capacity, as we’re seeing, to do any significant problem solving. And then what happens, of course, in that situation is the people that make up and are supposed to be served by the machinery of that collective intelligence get more and more frustrated, which then tends to put people into a kind of scarcity mentality where there’s a narrative bias. And then they enhance the polarization. And the whole thing feeds on itself in a negative way. So that’s sort of as simple as I can make the argument. But I hope that wasn’t too messy. Not at all. Not messy at all. Very clear. And for me, it reminds me very much of one of the key points of the thesis that Steve McIntosh presents in his book, Developmental Politics, is that certain forces in American life and American politics in particular are interdependent polarities. Yes. One is necessary for the other. And as you say, as far as opponent processing, the biases of one and the gaps and what’s missing in one is filled by the other. So I mean, just that realization. And I think this is probably more the province of political philosophers, like Steve McIntosh, like a Danielle Allen, who I think we’ll be discussing also, at least I intend to, is that they can step back and look at the situation and say, OK, we can see how they relate to each other. But when we’re talking about political actors, particularly politicians, whose job it is to get elected again and ostensibly represent their side, the admission that the other side is a necessary complement is not necessarily something that their side wants to hear. So I guess one of the questions that we have to contend with is, how can we gawk about getting, not just politicians, but people who find themselves in one tribe or another, on one side of the spectrum or another, and really strongly there, to start to see a larger picture where the other side is seen as very important, not an enemy. As an opponent, there’s a difference between an enemy and an opponent. Yeah, do martial arts. Their opponent. But they’re not enemies, or they shouldn’t be conceived of as enemies. So what are some of the steps? And of course, I frankly think this leads to a discussion of wisdom. Yeah, yeah. But I think that’s a great. No, go ahead. Sorry. So I mean, I’m going to say something, and then we’ll, of course, dovetail with both of the articles you had me read. So what are the things that used to do this for America? I’ll qualify in a sec. But there was an overarching shared Christianity in a Christian framework that prioritized something above, namely God or the sacred, that both parties had. They were supposed to have a stronger allegiance or commitment under God and all that. I’m not advocating for this. I’m just doing a historical explanation. And then the idea was one way of interpreting that is that helped to function as a sacred thing that gave value to the process over the opponents and therefore prevented them from. So no matter how bad they were, they’re still Christians. And we all have to honor God, and we all have to. And then that merged and was also being gradually replaced with a man of God. Also being gradually replaced with American civic religion, which is in which America was rendered sacred in a lot of ways. And Americanism was a thing. Chris, Master Pietro, and Philip Misickvick and I talk about this in the zombie book on the meeting crisis. And then when the Americans won the Cold War, that sort of lost its grip. There was also problems in both of those formulations because, of course, there’s the formal separation of church and state in America. And so the relationship to Christianity was always one that was going to be inevitably subject to deep question and criticism. And then the Americanism, that has the opposite problem that all civic religions do, which is, and this is a Tillich criticism. Tillich is very fresh on my mind because I’m teaching the course on Beyond Nihilism. And I’ve just gone through Tillich’s courage to be with my students. But the problem with it is it can become a kind of idolatry in which you have something that’s finite. It might be large and powerful like the United States, but it’s still finite. And it’s standing in for ultimate reality and in that sense is subject to idolatry. And of course, that idolatry did come home to roost in certain ways for America. And so I think the two things that acted as glue have largely dissipated in a very significant way. The first one had an advantage over the second one in that at least in some ways, in some contexts, although it was also in serious decline, Christianity provided a place for the cultivation of wisdom and virtue as something distinct. And not just, of course, Christianity, but some of the other places, homes of worship and religion. So that’s my take on what used to do it. And then, of course, one more thing, which as your articles point to, interacted with both of those, was a shared popular culture. And that can’t do it anymore since the advent of cable TV. So cable TV and then more social media has fragmented. So for example, we could never have a phenomena, although they were British, but we could never have a phenomena like the Beatles again because we just do not have the consensus audience that we used to have. And so popular culture is also deeply fragmented. So the three things, and like I said, I’m presenting them analytically, but they all interpenetrated and talked to each other in interesting and sometimes deleterious ways. But all of those are in remission, significantly so. And then there’s nothing. And as Yeats would say, the center cannot hold. Right. Definitely. Thank you. Good analysis. I think for the sake of your view is we need to give them at least the titles of the articles that we’ve been referencing. Oh, please. Yes, I’m sorry. Yes. Yeah, great. Can you do that, please? I can gladly do that. One is entitled Can Civic Jazz Resolve the American Dilemma? And it’s found at a journal online called the Journal of Free Black Thought. And it’s also found on my own blog, tuneintoleadership.com. Excellent article, by the way. Very well written. Thank you. I appreciate it. It took a lot for me to write that. Let me just say this before I say the second article. That book, Civic Jazz, which integrates the work of Kenneth Burke, who is known primarily in studies of rhetoric and communications, but who was a true polymath, who was very influential on the work and thought of Ralph Ellison, who we’ll refer to as Albert Murray, how his thought on rhetoric as a distinction from the persuasive capacity of rhetoric, but more rhetoric as it relates to how art is a communication vehicle that integrates not only the artist, but the artist and the audience. The artist and the audience together have a communication, a rhetorical relationship, and that the art form, in this case jazz, and what it represents and what it signifies, and the feelings it evokes can actually have you move towards more of a realization of American civic and democratic ideals. So this book, and so I’ve read this book. It came out like seven, eight years ago, maybe 10. But I hadn’t reviewed it or written on it, and I felt compelled to do so. And I’m glad I did because it allowed me to put a lot of different ideas together. So I recommend that to folks to check out. And then the second was one that featured someone who we didn’t mention. I don’t think the first conversation, but I definitely had every intention of mentioning in this one, Zach Stein. Yeah, Zach’s amazing. Yes, he really is. So Democracy, the title of that article, found at tuneintoleadership.com, is democracy and a post-tragic blues sensibility. OK? Yeah. So that ties into our first conversation because there’s a strong connection and relationship between the arts, culture, civic life, philosophy, that I’m going to use a story, an anecdote, what Kenneth Burke called a representative anecdote, that I think will tie into one of your explanations and maybe tie together the sacred and the secular that we talked about in the first one and that virtue of you mentioning Christianity and then a civic religion, which is more secular, that bring those two together musically. So the great mid-century alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker, who if there were a Mount Rushmore of the greatest jazz improvisers, you would see Charlie Parker right up there with Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. But Miles Davis was a young student at Juilliard who played with Charlie Parker. So Charlie Parker really is like one of the founding fathers, in a sense, of the style called bebop. So anyway, there’s a song in jazz called that was written, I think, by Ray Noble in the 30s. And it was a part of the swing era. Da da da da da da da da da da da da. So big bands played this song, right? Well, Charlie Parker, as he was developing his abilities on the saxophone and playing in different groups, Cherokee was one of the songs that he worked on. And he found one night that if he played the chord changes to Cherokee but played in the higher partials of the harmonies that he could actually play a sound that he was hearing and feeling but couldn’t yet play. OK? Oh, wow. Yeah. So he found that. And without going that deep into music theory, let’s just say that if you’ve got one to eight, one being one note, the eight being the octave higher, that if you keep going, the ninth note will be the same as the second note. The 10th note will be the same as the third note, right? Like that. So if he played from nine and 11 and 13, if he played in that realm, he could play what he was hearing. And this was like the start of the birth of the style called bebop. He said it liberated him. It freed him. And what I take from that is the necessity I’ve written on this, that sometimes in order for us to get beyond the boundaries of the status quo and the norms, what Charlie Parker called it was stereotyped chord changes. That they were playing. Right, right. He had to tap into higher octaves. So I used the higher octave metaphor as a way of pointing to both a sacred higher octave, but also a secular higher octave. We need ways of realizing and tapping into wider, deeper, broader ways of conceiving things beyond the norm status quos of what keeps us caught in adversarial processing in order to get to the opponent processing or the higher dimensions of what’s already there. Now when I say that, I’m going to take something. Let’s talk about an individual note, musical note. So you have A, B, C. So you play that note, right? But if you analyze that one note, there will be other notes that are partial that make up those notes. Do you understand? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I do. That’s music theory. And that’s also dealing with sound, just vibrations. So even within one note, you have other partials that are a part of it. So a lot of times if you hear a vibraphone, they play one note, but it’ll vibrate other notes that are part of that. The point being that even when you have a oneness, one entity, there are other parts that are part of it. That ties to me and to E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, out of many notes, out of many peoples, a oneness, a unity, a diversity in unity. So of course, we’re talking metaphorically, talking musically, but these are the things that cause us to conceive of ourselves as democratic citizens that can hopefully allow us to see the bigger picture of what was intended with democracy 2.0. If democracy 1.0 was direct democracy in Greece that you talked about, an awakening from the meaning crisis, democracy 2.0 being the American form of democracy, then these are some of the things that we need to start to, I think, assimilate into our language as we speak about this to get beyond some of these just, it’s like dead ends and roadblocks that we get into. We kind of step away from it and we’re tapping into what? We’re tapping into cultural forms, cultural dynamics. Music is cultural. Language is cultural. So how we even describe ourselves is really crucial, I have to tell you that, as someone who, and again, it’s not just the propositional, but the propositional has its place. Of course. Yeah. Well, I wanted to, so when I was reading the article, and as you say that, a couple of things came up that I wanted to broach with you. One was, like, yeah, after I went through the sort of three things that held the center that are gone, and I made a specific proposal in Prague. I said, and right now I’ll talk about the bottom up proposal. There was a top down proposal. Maybe we’ll come back to that. But the bottom up proposal was, yeah, you have to change the culture. And the idea was we have to inseminate the culture. And I like the term you just used. It’s Langer, but it also comes from Casir, right? Cultural forms. We have to put in more cultural forms. And the way jazz and blues, and Plato talks about the way music trains cognition. So totally that. And that lines up with, I think it’s convergent. I was making the proposal of dialectic into dialogos to give people also that enculturation of cultural forms of discourse that would give them alternatives to the, like as I say, alternatives to the courtroom of debate and give them access to the courtyard of the logos. But I think, and you know I’m almost always, always using jazz metaphors and music metaphors for that. And it seems to me like having an ecology of practices. And when people were doing both, I think would be really, like I think that’s part of it. There has to be, we have to get this, we have to have a broadly shared cultural repertoire of cultural forms that afford, right? The cultural cognitive grammar of appropriating and appreciating democracy as opponent process. Absolutely. We also need an abductive capacity. Abduction. Yes, yes. Yes. You’re using it in the Peircean sense. As different from induction and deduction. It’s the ability to generate an appropriate hypothesis, often overlapping with inference to the best explanation. That’s what you mean by abduction. That’s what I mean. And I also mean what Paul Bohannon in a book called How Culture Works, which I first read in the late 90s when I was in grad school at NYU doing a doctoral. It’s such a pleasure talking to you. You are so well read. Your mind is so delicious. Thank you. And chef, oh my God. Well, thank you. Sorry for interrupting. Why do you think I love your series? You know, all these books that you’re mentioning. I mean, you know, and I’m writing them down, I’m ordering them. I mean, with your After Socrates series, I started rereading Plato. I got the one, I have it in the other room, where it’s like every day there’s a quote from Plato. I’m actually going through that now. And I date them. I date them a week ahead. So I just, so thank you. This is one of the things we said off camera in terms of intellectuals and thinkers that one of the things, the best things that they can do for one another is just refer each other to books, you know, things that have influenced them. So I’m trying to think, oh, Paul Bohannon, how culture works. For me, that book was almost like a Bible. I don’t mean to be sacrilegious. I’m gonna be like you, John, you know, don’t get me wrong. But what he talks about there is what he calls, and this is related to abduction. He says, one of the ways that culture progresses and culture moves forward and evolves is through what he calls recontexting. So taking things from one context and putting it into another. Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is how like innovation happens. Yeah, yeah. So my way of taking those four principles and six practices that I talked about in our first discussion that are derived from jazz and presented in the Jazz Leadership Project is taking a cultural praxis, theory into practice and applying it to working with leaders and organizations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we’re doing now, and what I’m attempting to do, is to take some of those same ideas but apply it on a larger sociocultural scale and level. Applying these same, because the thing about jazz that’s so prototypically, as many things, that’s prototypically American about it, it was founded and innovated by black Americans. And there’s an argument to be made that black Americans, by being on the underside and the shadow side of democracy, have a view of both what’s good and bad about democracy, or at least the shadows of democracy and the potential of democracy. So jazz was created by black Americans. And- Oh, this is a version of the adjacent innovation thesis, that innovation comes from things that are adjacent, not central to some. Yeah, great, that’s a very good point. Absolutely. I thought about that. So even though politically, socially, and economically, black Americans were not able to participate in the society with freedom, actually, I mean, literal freedom, obviously, and this is true during the period of enslavement and even through Jim Crow. However, where was there some wiggle room? Culture was where there was wiggle room. To the ability to define yourself, what’s important to you, your values, your meanings, and through the forms that you create to embody those values and meanings, of course, they were adjacent to conversations about freedom, liberty, a free enterprise system, all of these things there around. So you find those elements in the music, and you find the ability to do certain things that couldn’t be done in society. So I’ll give you an example from jazz. So if you say that the general society went on a, say, a march beat, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, jazz through nonverbal means said, you know something, baby? We’re gonna emphasize the two and the four. We’re gonna go one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. You see the subtle cultural response? You see, so it wasn’t something that they could do and proclaim, you know, even though you have people like Frederick Douglass, one of the greatest Americans, some say the greatest American of the 19th century. I would say he and Lincoln are probably pretty close. But most black folks couldn’t. Most black Americans couldn’t. Most Negro Americans could not do that. So you put it into your art form. And as I alluded to, I think in the first episode, you put things that you aspire to in it also. So you have that freedom within form in the play. In the improvising, in the experimenting. A lot of this is very akin also to American pragmatism. Yes, that’s great. That was exactly the, so yeah, I was gonna say, and you mentioned this in the article on the play, on Jazz, that there’s this, another prototypical, the philosophy generated in America is pragmatism. And then again, so it’s also interacting with that in a really, like again, it’s, but it, I mean, yes, I agree. I mean, it’s a form of resistance in the good sense of the word. Because like you said, outright statements or actions are dangerous. And of course, I’m not saying, when I said adjacent, I didn’t mean to in any way diminish the suffering. I was just using the name of a thesis. I don’t think, I can’t speak for anybody else, but I didn’t take it that way. And you were talking about the very process, how innovation occurred. Yeah, yeah. But the idea also of pragmatism, right? And that the idea is making it work and innovating and creating. But what, although it’s sort of propositionally indirect, and this is, you picked up on Langer a bit, right? It’s very direct at the level of the non-propositional. So in some ways it catches and can influence, like, I mean, I’m not trying to be utopic or whitewash anything, but jazz and blues and then later rock helped give a common language between blacks and whites in America. And this is some of the first places where you see integration, or I don’t know what word to call, happening, right? Because when you give people shared cultural forms, they stop being other to each other so much. They start to get that lingua franca that they can relate to each other. And I would put to you, it’s more persuasive, this is the other side of rhetoric, in one sense when it’s initially non-propositional because it engenders trust rather than trying to convince somebody of a particular idea. And that’s a different thing altogether. That is so keen, but I’m not surprised, John. This is one of the reasons why when we do our Jazz Leadership Project workshops, we use a live band. Just a few weeks ago from the taping, this taping, we were in Colorado in Denver, and we had a live jazz rhythm section. Oh, right. Acoustic bass, drums, drum kit, and the music itself, it goes right to you. It goes past some of the barriers. So we have them start off with, do gallantons take the A train? Why? Because we’re getting ready to go on a journey. You know? Go ahead. Have you ever heard of Michael Winkleman? He influenced me a lot. I got to meet him in person about shamanism. And he talks about how the shamanic trance, and there’s a mixture of music and narrative and a lot of dramatic and musical innovations going on. And so there’s, I talk about the Fallot state, but he talks about not only interhemispheric integration, but what he calls neural axial. So from like sort of the higher more, and it’s also front back, but what he means is, you know, it’s the vertical stack. And you invoke the vertical earlier on, right? And so, and his point is as you move down, as you go down, like you said, right? You get to stuff that’s evolutionarily more older, and therefore more and more broadly shared. And it’s also plugs into behavioral responses that are very adaptive and come with a high degree of sort of instinctive confidence. And so again, that gives you a vehicle by which you can come to trust somebody. Right, so, you know, we lay out, you know, our principles, our practices, you know, the band demonstrates, but I’m gonna give you another anecdote from what actually happened. Please, please. And it was so powerful. So we gave the mic over to the band members because they don’t just play well, they also can articulate what they’re doing and why, and it’s moving, all of that. Right, right. Like, you know, like two of the members, they’ve got master degrees. One of the members, the drummer, you know, he’s a dean at a charter school in the Bronx, you know? I mean, so very well-educated, very learned, as well as being great practitioners of the art and craft of music. So someone got up and said, well, all of that sounds good, but, you know, can you demonstrate? Now, they had played, but they were talking about, if I remember correctly, they were talking about, like, what do you do to integrate someone new into the band? What happens when there’s conflict? He was talking about all these different things. So someone basically channels them. That was a moment of antagonistic cooperation. So they challenged them to demonstrate. So what they decided to do, and the drummer, who I mentioned before, he says, yes, we’ll do that. He said, I’ll tell you what, he spoke to his other band members. He says, let’s not even count it off. Let’s not even determine whether it’s three, four, four, four, whatever the time, let’s just start playing. So it started off in a very free form where the bass was playing some notes, piano, the keyboard was playing certain things, the drummer, till after a while, there was nonverbal communication going on so that there was a response from the drummer to what the bassist did, and then a response from the keyboard player to what they both did. And before you know it, they were playing a song by McCoy Tyner called Passion Dance. And so they went into the song, and by the time they got to the swing period, the 20 senior leaders from this organization got up and erupted in applause because they didn’t have to explain it. They did it, they demonstrated it. And people were able to participate in it, in the moment. It was so powerful. So I didn’t have to, we didn’t have to, my wife and I didn’t have to convince people as to the bridge or the correlation between leadership and teamwork and what they do in the workplace. They saw it, they felt it at a deeper, you know, a somatic and aesthetic level, you know? And emotional level. That’s fantastic. That’s a great anecdote. Thank you, thank you. I wanted to ask you about the specific theses of each, the article you wrote, and then the conversation with Zach, and then ask you a question in addition. Okay. So, I mean, the first thesis picks up on what you just said, the capacity for jazz to teach us at this deeper, more centered level of how you can get opponent processing between individual improvisation and interdependence of playing together. And that that is a powerful lesson, right? And, you know, Jennings and his work, and it’s been picked up on, you know, ritual knowing. A ritual is powerful if it transfers broadly and deeply beyond where you practice the ritual, right? And so I see that with jazz, and then I get it. Maybe you can riff on this a bit, because we haven’t discussed this as much, but you know, the proposal that blues allows us to deal with the sort of tragic comedies, and then, but more importantly, get into the post-tragic frame. And why, so I can see why the blues does that, because what we talked about last time, I wasn’t clear quite so much on how that ramified back to tutoring people in democracy. Maybe a little bit more on that one. The first one, really clear, you know, improvisation, interdependent with working in literally in concert together, right? And I get that. So that’s really clear. I get how the blues makes us post-traumatic and post-traumatic is like what John Roussin says. It’s the hallmark of maturity is facing reality, and to face reality, you have to be in a post-tragic. I think I said post-traumatic, I meant post-tragic frame. But what I’m not clear on is the connection between the post-tragic and democracy. I got a bit of the argument there about that democracy is about getting us to sort of accept loss, but I wanna tease that out a little bit more, because it’s, I mean, for me, it’s like, I think democracy is about solving problems. So that’s how I pitched it, right? So you see the tension. I’m not saying there’s a contradiction, but there’s a question that needs to be asked, and that’s the question. Okay, very good. I’m glad you asked it. That’s great. So I mentioned Danielle Allen earlier. Her latest book is Justice by Means of Democracy, okay? Right. But she has an earlier work, which I was looking for, that Zach mentions. First of all, the book that I asked Zach to read for a presentation, a short presentation, it was only six minutes. I’m the co-director of the Omni American Future Project. The Omni Americans is the title of Albert Murray’s first book. We had a virtual event during the pandemic, and Zach was one of the presenters. So this is what you, the article you’re talking about was actually a transcript of Zach’s short presentation. The book that he read was called The Hero in the Blues by Albert Murray, okay? Yeah, I ordered it. Oh, thank you, dog. I can’t wait to hear what you think of it. So there’s a book that he mentioned by Danielle Allen that she wrote about 15 years ago or so called Talking to Strangers, okay? So let me try to lay this out in a way, often as you do, you have to kind of give context in order to answer the question. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that Danielle Allen argues in her work is that Ralph Ellison, who we mentioned and quoted in our last conversation, is one of the most important democratic theorists of the 20th century. And she comes to that perspective through his classic novel from 1952, Invisible Man, and from his nonfiction work found in the collected essays of Ralph Ellison’s Modern Library. But the two works individually that she was basing it on was one is Shadow and Act, which came out in the mid-60s, and then Going to the Territory, which came out, I think, in 1987. She points to Ralph Ellison, you mentioned ritual, Ralph Ellison talks about how any society, social rituals that are derived from the practices of the people and also the institutions of the society, they point to certain dynamics. One of the dynamics he talks about is how you have scapegoat dynamics happening in society. You have the development of guilt, you have something or some peoples who become the basis for social cohesion by virtue of them being a scapegoat. Yeah, Gerard does a lot of good work. Very, very, very similar. And I’m familiar with Gerard, but I get this directly from Ellison’s own work. Right, right, right. What he was saying is that, you know, in a democracy, any society, democratic or not, is going to have scapegoats. That seems to be, that comes with societies, it seems to be. Yeah, yeah. But what we need in a democratic society is a recognition of the sacrifices that others have made in order to have social cohesion. So let’s take elections. Whenever you have an election, you have someone who won and you have someone who lost. The fact that those who lost don’t commit violence in response to that. Well, until recently, until recently. Until recently, yes. Yes. Yes. It’s part of what keeps social cohesion in a democracy because you can live to fight another day, to vote another day. Right. So what happened in American society from the time that the concept of race came into being and you codified in law, and we’re gonna talk about this more in our third session, from the time that you codified race and you start to have a hierarchical grouping of people based on so-called racial identity until, of course, enslavement. My ancestors, my idiomatic kinfolk were the scapegoats. Right. We sacrificed. And the irony, this is why history is ironic. Ironically, that sacrifice allowed for, not for us, social cohesion. I said the last time, we got very familiar with absurdity and oppression and domination, but it actually allowed for a certain social cohesion among those folks who were racialized and identified as white. So again, we’re taking a look at it like this without, you know, we’re trying to analyze what actually happened in terms of the dynamics of it. I get it. I know you get it. You’re analyzing, you’re not justifying anything. Yeah, no, no. The reason I say that is because a lot of times when people talk about these things, it’s hard to talk about because of the pain and suffering that people have gone through. And you have to always acknowledge that. But now we’re talking about- There’s definitely that. What’s that? Well, I was gonna say there’s that, and I think that’s paramount, but I think it’s also buttressed by, we can’t, we’ve lost the ability to distinguish a discourse of analysis from a discourse of justification, which makes it, everything leaps into the courtroom of debate. And we think whatever we’re doing is we’re justifying something or other. And so, I mean, again, I think, I wanna be very clear. I think the emotional suffering is the paramount, but I think it’s exacerbated by, we have built up this conflation and confusion. We can’t adequately distinguish anymore in concept and in practice between a discourse of analysis like you just did. You are obviously not advocating for any of this or trying to justify it, but nevertheless, you’re trying to understand it, which is a different thing than trying to justify it in immoral terms. And so I just wanted to throw that in as something also that I think really muddies the waters when we try and do this. So I just wanted to reinforce that you’re very clearly trying to give an analysis here to afford to understand it. Exactly. So if we look at that, that dynamic, that social dynamic, and this is probably the toughest one to analyze, to analyze dispassionately or disinterestedly, but lynchings, that was a social ritual. It is a ritual. Yes, I get it. It’s a horrific one, but that was a social ritual. So to- Oh, no, no, it has all the earmarks of a ritual. And there’s purity code stuff flying around. There’s symbolic violence. There’s an attempt to eradicate some sort of perceived evil. Exactly. And there’s magic in there somehow. And of course, it’s an act of terror, like the Romans use of crucifixion, very, very similar, right? Very, very similar political ends. Yeah, totally, totally. I think, I mean, I made this argument about Nazism and communism, how we fail to see that there is a religious dimension to them. If we understand them only as political or economic behaviors, we’re missing something. And I’m not denying that there is obviously political and economic aspects to lynching, but there’s this religious context to it. Because religion can go bad, just like anything else, right? And yeah, and to me, and of course, I’m speaking from the outside, and so please take that into consideration. But for me, that’s what makes, that’s what takes it into the domain of horror, as opposed to something just, opposed to something just extremely terrifying, right? Or there’s an element of horror in there. I’m sort of at a loss of words, other than to say that. Well, no, okay, now, but let’s pursue this. I’m gonna get back to the function that served and how it relates to Danielle Allen and talking to strangers as it relates to Ellison. But let’s pursue this for a second. Because you’re right, and I know you make that, you make a clear distinction of horror. So talk about that for a second. Explore what you mean by horror. And some of the nuanced distinctions you make. So there’s, so horror is when, there’s your sense of your grip on reality is slipping because some of the fundamental structures are being undermined. And one way you can do this is you can, you can invoke the, like the supernatural. And I was talking here analytically, I don’t actually metaphysically believe in the supernatural, but you can invoke something that’s outside, right? That’s profoundly outside. And when you’re invoking like these notions of in-cohate impurity and in-cohate threat, there isn’t like, it’s, I’ll use Tillich. Here’s the distinction. Fear, you have a specific object in a well-defined problem and you know what you’re supposed to do, right? In anxiety, you don’t, it’s an ill-defined problem, you don’t have a specific target. And what you try to do magically is you try to translate that into a fear and an object that you can then deal with. But what’s underneath is a pervasive anxiety that’s being displaced. And so there’s this underlying sense that if we don’t, and forgive me, I’m just, I’m speaking, I’m trying to speak from that framework. I’m not speaking as I would wish to speak, right? But if we don’t kill this person in this, like in this really degrading, you know, visceral manner, somehow everything’s gonna fall apart. And there’s this horrific, like a sacrifice at a horror movie, a good horror movie, like one well done. That’s what I’m trying to convey. Did that land for you? Did that make sense? Oh, good time. I mean, there’s a movie, let’s go to pop culture for a second. There’s a movie called Get Out that came out, I don’t know, five, six years ago. And it’s suspenseful and it has elements of psychological horror, not so much, you know, the physical horror, you know, with, you know, the chains or, you know, massacre, more psychological. So you have a black American young man going out with someone who is a white identified young lady and she introduces him to her family. And they are on the surface, you know, they’re good white liberals. And they’ve got a picture of Obama on the wall and they’re like, you know, yay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is, but this gets into some of the psychology. But what these people were doing is actually they were, they were stealing and appropriating the humanity of black Americans who they, yes, I mean, I mean, so that you had people who were there, who were outer surface, they were, you know, they were colored, you know, like I am, but their sense of humanity were gone. They were more like actual zombies to go to your book. And so how did they do this? Well, the wife was a psychologist and she knew how to use certain techniques. I would say techniques of hypnosis. And so she is sitting there with this young man and she’s able to get him to concentrate on something. I forget what the object was, but she ended up taking him into himself where he could see and feel himself falling deeper within himself until like, you know, I don’t know what they call it, the dark place or, and he couldn’t get out. That was horror. That was horror. Okay, can I give you one back? Yes. Can I give you one back that was in my mind? That’s amazing. I haven’t seen that, but I’m gonna see it. So I wanna talk about the older version, and spoiler alert, spoiler alert. So first of all, I’m not talking about the new version, which was horrible. The old version of the Wicker Man. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. What happened? Oh, so this movie, there’s this police detective. He goes to investigate a disappearance and he starts to sense that this girl, that he finds out that Christianity has been displaced and they’ve returned to paganism on this island. And then he starts to suspect that maybe the girl was sacrificed because the crops are failing. And he gets lured into this thing where he thinks he’s gonna find, he thinks that maybe she’s still alive and he’s gonna find her. And it’s so archetypal. He’s in this parade and he’s disguised. He thinks he’s disguised as the fool and he’s in the parade. And then they suddenly grab him and they put him in the Wicker Man, which is this huge wooden, and he’s the sacrifice. And what’s particularly powerful is he’s the devout Christian. And so he is, right? His Christianity is at war with the pagan. And it’s, like you said, there’s no big monster, but it’s absolute horror because exactly that, this is what we’re talking about. That element of this goes beyond emotional resentment or hatred. There’s a deeper cracking on the ligaments of reality. And something is seeping through and people are trying to staunch that in this really symbolic and almost unconscious manner. But see it if you get a chance. Because for me, it’s an excellent example of example, something very analogous to what we’re talking about with the lynching, very analogous. Absolutely. I think it was called the sunken place. It came to me, the sunken place. And what would happen is these, once they were in the sunken place and couldn’t get out and could barely speak and emote, they had modern day auctions of people being sold to different people who were able to afford them and they would give a squirt of that. I mean, it’s like, it was, but now the- That’s brilliant symbolism though. It’s brilliant, you render people zombies and then they’re just open to manipulation and enslavement. Right, right. So back to the book that Zach Stein was talking about by Danielle Allen, Talking to Stranger. The basic idea is that how can we as democratic citizens deal with one another like we’re closer to being friends? Even though we’re not, we don’t know each other in a familial way or maybe we’re not neighbors, but can we as American citizens, one, respect and honor those who sacrifice, those who actually lose and we honor them, okay? And we thank them for having the grace to keep moving even though they lost. And it ties into ideas of sportsmanship, but at a higher octave, I think. And Ellison in his work, Fiction and Nonfiction, talked about these dynamics of a democracy. So the blues is both a tragicomic dynamic and a post tragic dynamic. It’s a tragicomic dynamic in that tragedy, loss, death is real and those who created the blues were very familiar with that. They were familiar with what Orlando Patterson calls social death. Where they couldn’t, you couldn’t even rest assured that your family would be kept together. You might have people sold to another plantation or something and your family is broken apart, let alone being whipped and all of that kind of stuff. So that’s the tragic part. What’s the comic part? One of the things that Danielle Allen talks about in talking about Ellison is, and I find this in Ellison’s work too. If what do we do if we’re in a situation of, and this is very interesting, I’ve never talked about this, but how do I respond when I’m seeing a horror movie? How do I deal with it? Like my wife, Jewel, she can’t watch them because she has nightmares at night. What do I do on the front? I laugh. I laugh at the horror, particularly when it’s like blood and glory. Yeah, I don’t find those movies scary at all. Yeah, but the real ones that are scary, where you feel when something happens, I guess my way of reacting and responding is to laugh. Laughter, comedy, humor, being something that we turn to as a way to cope with life and to, so it’s a tragic comic. Now. Can I speak briefly to that point of humor? Just briefly? Please do, but I do wanna make one more point about the comic dimension. Oh, finish then, finish. No, look, to connect Kenneth Burke. One of the things that Kenneth Burke in his work, he talks about tragedy, he talks about comedy, but he says that as members of a democratic society, from a pragmatic, from a perspective of pragmatism, where you have experimentation, you have a meal-er-ism where things can get better. You know, there’s a bias towards. Boots dropping. Right, a bias towards action. And then based on that action, we can assess, be empirical and assess what are the results? What do we need to adjust and change? Oh Lord, don’t lose your train. So you went to Burke. Right, thank you. And the comic, one of the things he says that as we engage in our experimentation, in our improvisations, in our trying to make things better, is that we’re gonna find ourselves in the midst of making mistakes. We’re gonna find ourselves, maybe as we fight against a system, being implicated in the perpetuation of that same system. Of course. And that’s the comic dimension. It’s like, you know. Yeah, it’s, yes, yes, yes. So that dynamic is there, that tragic comic. But the post-tragic, the blues idiom sensibility that we talked about in the first session, is post-tragic because it acknowledges and admits and owns up to the tragic. But it says, I woke up this morning, the sun is shining. I’m breathing. If I’m fortunate to have a loved one, I can have an attitude of gratitude. I can count my blessings. Now these are Christian rifts, because I grew up a Christian. So these are Christian rifts, counting your blessings. But you can still appreciate what you do have. And you can appreciate the possibility of another day and doing better tomorrow. So that’s a more of a post-tragic perspective. Okay, so I’m seeing that. Let me see if this is landing. If it’s landing with you. I’m getting it right. So the idea is this, you know, training this kind of comportment helps democracy because we’re gonna make mistakes and we’re going to lose. But if we can see through them rather than being blinded by them, we won’t degenerate into adversarial processing. We’ll still keep our commitment and our comportment to the process as a whole. Did I get the argument? Is that the argument? That’s a very key part of the argument, yes. Okay, so I get that really well. That makes sense to me. The thing I wanted to say about humor was absurdity is when there’s a perspectival clash when the clash and you experience it negatively. But humor is when you take the perspectival clash and you play with it and it allows for kind of an insight. Monty Python is a famous example of playing. Yeah, yeah, right. And so yeah, that move, I can see why that could be very important too because in democracy, there’s inevitably going to be perspectival clash and you could degenerate into that’s absurdity and then have like a purity response. That’s bad. Or you can, oh no, make me joke about it. There’s humor in it. People used to be able to tell jokes across the Republican democratic divide. Even Ronald Reagan was capable of doing that. Even Ronald Reagan, like that seems to just have disappeared. But I have one question that still is looming from the arguments, which is I found, so you gave me feedback. I got the core argument. It’s a good argument. What I didn’t hear is what happens to the displaced scapegoat function. I mean, according to Gerard and others, that doesn’t go away. So he proposes Christianity because Christianity takes the scapegoat and then inverts it and makes it the most sacred and blows the scapegoat mentality apart from the inside. And so there’s a particular thing you have to do. So what in your analysis? So thank God we’ve largely eradicated lynching and other scapegoating, right? But it seems to me that that function will just, it’s like a hydra. You cut off one head or two and it’ll just grow somewhere else. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? Totally what you mean. Like after 9-11, when for many people who practice Islam, Muslims, became the enemy. The scapegoat, yeah, yeah, yeah. One response, and I’m going intra-group here, one response amongst black folks was like, and it’s really not a charitable response, but it’s like, phew, maybe some of this pressure would be off us now. I’m serious, you know what I mean? It’s not that we, look, there are black Christians, black Muslims, black Buddhists, but it was like a relief because somebody else could take that load. Now, if the, so this is, I guess this is a really deep question. And I guess I’m gonna go to more of a concept if we could have more of a egalitarian distribution of losses, where it’s not just the same winners over and over again, if we could have more of a shared sensibility of winning and losing and fighting to another day, that can do it. I mean, but I also think that as we, and this is more of a getting to the aspect of pragmatism dealing with that everything is changing and open and contingent, evolving, even though scapegoating is probably a key part of all human societies, individually, and perhaps collectively, I wonder if we can transcend that impulse. That impulse becomes from, I would say, the ethnocentric stage of human development, more of a tribal orientation, where you’ve got one tribe over there and they’re the enemy. They’re not human. I think we can, I think we can, we can transcend it to a certain extent. I mean, I don’t have to demonize people who are identified as white. I don’t have to make white people the scapegoat in order for me to feel coherent in my life. In fact, I decried the very concept of race itself, which we’ll talk about the next time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, next time. So it’s, but this, because we’re getting to the part of our conversation we’re gonna have to come to a close soon. I do wanna say some things more about Ellison in relation to democracy. Why would Danielle Allen say that he may be one of the greatest democratic theorists of the 20th century? Couple of reasons. One, one of the things that Ellison says that as a writer, as American writers, and I could say, you could say writers in the English language, you have a responsibility to the furtherance of the language. You’re using the language. You have a responsibility to continue. I feel that too. Furthermore, as a citizen in a democracy, you have a personal responsibility for the continuation of democracy. It’s not just about what party you’re in, the political dimension, it’s personal responsibility. So if I, and this gets into the Omni-American ideal, if I will take personal responsibility for being an American and for living and exemplifying democratic principles of equality, of liberty, of freedom, of certain values, some which are interdependent polarities, if I say I’m gonna embody that and live that, then that’s something you strive to do. However, this gets into the more the ironic part. One of the things in a great essay of Ellison’s, which I’ll send to you called Little Man at Chihar Station, he talks about how Burke, Kenneth Burke, called the term like democracy a god term. A term. It is. Yeah, a term, a small G god. Because it represents the height of our very principles and values as Western people in terms of democracy. It also represents the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And so it’s also not just an ideal, it’s an agent in some fashion too. So that’s a very good candidate for a little G god. And we’re gonna talk more about your agent arena related to our next, because I actually use your definition, I don’t even know if you know this or not, I use your definition of worldview to contrast a racial worldview and a cultural worldview. I’ve done that in workshop. And that deals with the participatory agent arena relationship. So we’ll talk about that more. But what Ellison talked about in Little Man from Chihar Station is how there’s an anxiety and an unease that comes from being in an American where you have such a diversity. We strive for unity amidst diversity. We strive for out of many one. But the thing is, it makes us uncomfortable because we’re around all of this difference. We’re around all of this diversity. And what he says is most people find it easier to fall back on the things that make them comfortable. Their father’s beard, their mother’s milk, their religion, the racial identification, the ethnicity that they grew up in, and that’s where they feel at home. And the struggle, the agon is to, I think to become more rooted cosmopolitans to say, yes, I have my particularity of my experience, whether you put that in religious, ethnic, cultural, whatever terms, but that doesn’t stop me from identifying with the whole. Yes. It doesn’t stop that and it shouldn’t stop that. And he talks about that tension. And in his work, he’s like, take personal responsibility for democracy and then let’s exercise what we call and in certain corner of the integral theory, cultural intelligence, which is what you’re talking about as far as distributed cognition and collective intelligence. Very much, yeah, that’s very powerful. So it’s not easy, there’s nothing to do about this, obviously. No, no, that’s what he’s gonna say. It’s a stoic idea, like Cosmos, that my portless is the Cosmos. And I was gonna ask, does Ellison talk about, like what the stoics talk about, the deep need, like you can’t just sort of, I’m a citizen of the Cosmos, right? You can’t just self-identify. It requires a profound transformation of character and the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, Sophia, right? A capacity to see the Cosmos in the right way so that you attune to it. Does Ellison talk about anything like that, about how that’s sort of, because for me, again, right, part of what’s been missing a lot in the discourse about democracy is that democracy depends on, right, people cultivating the virtues so that they can commit themselves wisely to democracy. Sorry, I interrupted for too long. I was trying to get a point. I wanted to ask that question. Does he talk about that deep interconnection? In so many words? I mean, rumor has it that Ellison was one of the best read novelists of the 20th century. So he incorporates across time and space from Greek and Roman and Albert Murray also. So that’s a part of his perspective, I can say in so many words, maybe not specifically referring to the Stoics per se. Right, he doesn’t have to. I’m not worried about that. But yeah, you get that, okay. You definitely get that. But I do want to end with democracy 3.0. We mentioned 1.0 being like Athenian democracy, direct democracy, 2.0 being American. 3.0, and this comes from an effort by a gentleman named Tom Atlee and a gentleman’s name, Tom Atlee and Martin Rausch, where they’ve created a wise democracy pattern length. And they actually have a series of about a hundred cards. You can barely see it. But they have a pattern language for what they’re calling a wise democracy, where you have three dimensions. You have power, participation and wisdom as intersecting circles, okay. This was one of the articles that you were supposed to be given to read, but I’ll just explain it and I’ll send it to you. So if you see these three intersecting circles right now, they touch barely. The goal is to get them to touch more so that the power and decision-making is more participatory for more people. That’s something that Danielle Allen in Justice by Means of Democracy talks about. She calls it power-sharing liberalism. She basically called it principle, like non-domination as a fundamental tenet that we are gonna stop this empire age domination stuff, okay. Yeah, yeah. So we wanna get to a place where the wisdom, which they define in my own words, acting and being for the whole, for the sake of the whole. That’s one of their ways of talking about the real. That’s very platonic, by the way. Okay, I’m not surprised. So do we wanna, so they become more intersected so that power becomes more participatory and the participation becomes more wise. And that wisdom informs the power and the participatory and it becomes a- Well, that answers my question. That answers my question, the question I asked. But I’m just curious, what do you do with the cards? Like, what’s the- What you do is, you know, I’m gonna pick one. Pick a card, any card. Okay, so I’ll pick one. The third one down or something. Okay, okay. So you have deliberation. They have different principles, right? And they show you the connection to other principles. So this one is deliberation. Wisdom explores, discerns, ways, creates and envisions. It avoids jumping to conclusions and getting trapped by assumptions. Anything which helps us raise and carefully consider a healthy range of factors, perspectives and options before and as we act qualifies as deliberation. So utilize- That’s very good. And institutionalize diverse forms of such potent consideration. That’s one out of 95 cards with that type of potent wisdom. I mean, and so you can use it as for yourself to really get an idea of this democracy 3.0, what I’m calling that, to when you have an organization, making sure that your organization actually lives by these principles. You can build organizations based on this. And I heard about this. I heard about this first when I was listening to philosopher who had a conversation with Forest Landry. Yes, Forest Landry. And I learned about this, why is democracy project and pattern language from Forest Landry? Cause he was talking about democracy and some of the dynamics. And he- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And someone said, any group that you know of that really, and he mentioned them. So I checked them out and I’ve written about them on my blog. In fact, the essay that I’m gonna send you is called Democracy 3.0, Chaos Before Order. Please send me that. And can you send me a link or something about that deck? I’d like to get those cards. That’d be really cool. I definitely will. Okay. We should be bringing, I think that’s a great place to end. You answered my question about the stoics beautifully. That was, wow. You knocked that one out of the ballpark. That was just fantastic. Any final summative words? No, I just, you know, again, I have an attitude of gratitude and a feeling of deep appreciation for this opportunity. Oh, me too, me too. I’m loving this series. Like I’m just, like I said, I’m getting the books. Like you’re just having a profound influence on me. Oh, thank you. I just, really, really. Well, that’s where we’re gonna end. In talking with strangers, the key principle, democratic principle that Danielle Allen talks about is reciprocity. Reciprocity. Yes, this is a Hegelian idea. Okay, so I mean, you have so deeply influenced my own thought so that the opportunity for me to do that in kind is just wonderful. And I’m so looking forward to our next conversation because we’re gonna be able to parse, you know, now we’re gonna be talking about, you know, cultural intelligence versus race. There’s a big distinction. And that’s really key to my work. And so I’m really looking forward to our next conversation, John. Me too. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Greg. It was amazing.