The New Enlightenment?

(Photo: Stephen Melkisethian/flickr/cc)

by Robert C. Koehler, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/04/21/new-enlightenment

 

What remains endlessly hinted at about the 2016 presidential race, but not fully articulated, is that something enormous - bigger than politics, bigger than America itself, perhaps - is trembling and kicking just below the surface, struggling to emerge.

 

I have a name to suggest for this hypothetical phenomenon: the New Enlightenment. Nothing less than that seems adequate. There are millions of midwives at the ready - angry, despairing citizens - desperately hoping to assist in the birthing process . . . by being part of the Bernie Sanders campaign. 

 

I say this with full cognizance of the flawed, compromised nature of politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. The political process is a stew of money and competing interests, power, compromise, cynicism and secret deals. But that’s not all it is.

 

It’s also the opening to our collective future. A failure to acknowledge this leaves the process in the hands of those who think they own it.

 

The New Enlightenment?

 

The old Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which began sweeping across the consciousness of Western Civilization in the 17th and 18th centuries, implanted science, democracy and capitalism at our social foundations and fomented the industrial revolution. But the shortcomings of this enlightenment are many.

 

Slavery, for instance, flourished through much of the Age of Reason. So did war. So did genocide. The worst of who we are maintained its grip on power. We have yet to begin implementing our deepest values in the social and political realm.

 

The political mindset that sees Hillary Clinton as the pragmatic candidate in the Democratic race is unable to see beyond the parameters of a stunted political system. What she has accomplished in her political career is essentially defined by that stunted system, which not only serves (often in secrecy) the interests of those already in power, but fails to envision the implementation of power except in domination over some enemy or other.

 

This is illustrated with agonizing clarity by the recent controversy over the tough-on-crime and “welfare reform” policies of the Bill Clinton presidency in the 1990s, which, of course, Hillary supported and promoted, and which have begun coming back to haunt her. 

 

While the “war on crime,” the backlash against social spending and the implementation - via imprisonment - of what Michelle Alexander has labeled the new Jim Crow, got seriously underway in the Reagan era, Clinton continued and promoted rather than tried to undo these policies.

 

"The political mindset that sees Hillary Clinton as the pragmatic candidate in the Democratic race is unable to see beyond the parameters of a stunted political system."

 

As Alexander wrote recently in The Nation: “Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn’t reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine” (emphasis added).

 

She added that: “By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps” and “funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion . . . while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion.”

 

The result of all this, as Alexander and others have noted - and that Black Lives Matter activists recently brought to the forefront of the 2016 presidential campaign, confronting Bill Clinton as he campaigned for his wife - is that African-American incarceration rates went through the roof and families and communities were shattered. This phenomenon has resulted in recent, stunning apologies from former supporters of Clinton-era tough-on-crime policies.

 

For instance, U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush of Chicago, a one-time Black Panther, tore his heart out in an MSNBC interview this month over his support of that bill. “I am ashamed of my role. I sincerely apologize to my God, I apologize to my community, to my family,” he said, lamenting that, in his urgent desire to deal with the devastating impact of crime and crack in the black community, he became ensnared in single-focus thinking: “locking them up, keeping them in jail.”

 

Despite the anguished sincerity of Rush’s apology, I remain pierced by the question: Why? Why did sheer, vindictive punishment loom in that moment as the solution to crime? Why was Reagan, still the de-facto president, with the head of his chosen scapegoat still on the altar of American politics? 

 

Bill Clinton’s Democrats surrendered to Reaganism: to the pursuit of black “super-predators” and the defunding of “welfare queens.” They surrendered to racism, as American as apple pie. The New Deal was dead and the Old Deal had reclaimed control over American politics and American thought. And it’s still in control today, settled and unquestioned at the level of the political status quo.

 

"Of course ‘sorry’ isn’t enough, given the magnitude of the harm that has been done,” Alexander wrote, referring to Rush’s apology. “A brand new system of racial and social control has been born again in the United States, one that has functioned as a literal war on poor communities of color.”

 

The focus, she says, must be on rebuilding these communities that have been so devastated over recent decades. Yes, yes . . . but I would push it further. Social spending must be utterly redirected away from prisons and punishment, away from militarism and war, and toward the construction of real peace. The original New Deal was conceived in coexistence with war, but war eventually consumed it.

 

The cry of the New Enlightenment must be heard: Do not dehumanize! The only true enemy is the darkness we all share, lodged deeply in the collective human heart. When we try to kill it in “the enemy,” we kill ourselves.

 

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

Everyone Talks About Community Resilience, But What Do They Mean?

Mixed group repairing a road, South Kivu (Wikipedia)

by Hartmut Fünfgeld, Martin Mulligan, Wendy Steele, and Lauren Rickards, Transre: http://transre.org/en/blog/everyone-talks-about-community-resilience-what-do-they-mean/

Across policy domains, calls are echoing for ‘building community resilience’ or ‘making communities more resilient’ in the face of climate change and global environmental and economic crises.

Communities need to ‘get up’ to become stronger and more able to withstand external shocks - or at least that seems to be the tenor underpinning much of the political spin around community resilience.

Across the world, people working in government agencies and community-based organizations are being asked to ensure that local communities become more resilient to shocks and stresses, ranging from natural disasters and violent extremism to loss of employment, mounting debts, and largely hidden forms of social isolation.

However, this is more than just reassuring policy rhetoric. When you combine two ambiguous concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘resilience’, you get a linguistic construct that can mean almost anything to anyone. And that malleability is problematic when considering that community resilience really is the word of the day for many governments around the world, including the Australian Government, who are currently investing in developing community resilience as part of various strategies and programs, including the National Disaster Resilience Grant Scheme.

In a recently published paper, we highlight the complexities of both ‘community’ and ‘resilience’ and ponder what happens when both terms are combined in unreflected ways that have the ability to hide and, at the same time, blur political agendas. The term community conjures up connotations of social harmony, where people interact in a given place, join forces towards a public good, and are generally supportive of each other.

This interpretation is, of course, hopelessly exaggerated but still resonates strongly with many of us when we do things like organize ‘community festivals’; when we read about ‘strong community spirit’ in the aftermath of natural disasters; or when we move to a new suburb because we believe there is a good sense of community there.

As a key word in the English language, community is a term that ‘never seems to be used unfavorably’. Sociologists, however, have agonized over the multiple and often conflicting meanings of ‘community’ for decades, pointing out that communities are always made up of a diversity of people, with much more diverging interests than the ideal suggests.

Moreover, these days, the meaning of community has been extended and stretched by the major processes of social transformation - industrialisation, globalisation, and the global knowledge economy. Communities used to be largely local in nature. In the 21st century, communities exist as virtually connected networks of people, such as professional networks linked by professional standards, conferences and e-mail exchanges, or ‘linked-in’ virtual social communities where members are purely engaging with each other via their smart phone or laptop hooked up to the internet. Communities are no longer identifiable with our eyes; they are increasingly ‘imagined’ - and people are members of multiple communities at the same time.

Most commonly it is still used to signify communities recovering quickly (‘bouncing back’) in the aftermath of an external disturbance, such as a natural disaster or economic shock. The widespread rhetoric here is that, first of all, it is good if communities can recover quickly, and secondly, it is even better if they can recover back to their previously held status and functions.

Both of these goals of resilience are commonly found in resilience policy documents, yet they are, of course, hotly contested. They, along with other assumptions such as communities needing to ‘take their future into their own hands’, can be challenged as value-based goals that may well be in the interest of some community members but not of others, and most certainly not in the interest of all stakeholders (as often suggested) involved in such community resilience efforts.

In recent years, there has been a lot of critique of the resilience concept, mainly originating from academics, while resilience continues to rise in popularity among policymakers. Community resilience seems to ride right at the top of that popularity wave, and that is no surprise. Community resilience conveys a positive message that resonates strongly and directly with a ‘Yes, we can’ attitude.

Among many other messages, community resilience says that people can and should take their future into their own hands, that they can and should be responsible citizens, and that we all need to do our bit to make our city, region or nation stronger, more able to compete within a global market, and ready to deal with ever more environmental disasters triggered by climate change and other forms of global environmental change.

While such a call to arms may indeed be required to tackle global crises, it begs the question who should in fact shoulder the majority of such strengthening work. A community resilience framing suggests that it is groups of people, organized in communities. Yet embracing that view also means being aware of the many different views, values, and voices that exist in any community, which need to be articulated, discussed, and negotiated to find some common ground for building resilience. Not an easy feat at all, but one that all resilience practitioners know is critical if the goal is to make communities stronger and more rather than less equitable. 

This blog post was based on the article Keywords in planning: what do we mean by “community resilience”?, which was co-authored by Hartmut Fünfgeld, Martin Mulligan, Wendy Steele, and Lauren Rickards at the Centre for Urban Research, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University.