Tag: Democracy

WorldBlu Live – What Would You Do If You Were Not Afraid?

Posted on | by Sam

In the early afternoon of the first day of WorldBlu live — a remarkable global gathering of people who share a commitment to organizational democracy — Menlo Innovations CEO Rich Sheridan shared the moment when he knew he was in trouble. “It was Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” he began, “and over dinner, I asked my daughter Sarah what she thought of the experience.

“You must be really important, Dad.”

“Why do you say that, Sarah?”

“Because no one can make a decision without you first giving the OK.”

For Sheridan, his daughter’s candor helped him realize two essential, uncomfortable truths: First, he had created a team that could only move as fast as he could. And second, although he was doing important work, he was also robbing his colleagues of something essential.

Sheridan’s (and Menlo’s) story since then is characteristic of the people and companies that make the annual trek to participate in WorldBlu Live. And at this year’s conference, which is being held at the posh St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, a sold-out crowd of the most eclectic community you could imagine — from cable company executives to college administrators to online retailers to students and software developers — is actively plotting the biggest and most audacious of goals: seeding a global movement that results in one billion people working in freedom.

WorldBlu founder and CEO Traci Fenton explains: “The shift we are witnessing worldwide is a shift from the Industrial and Information Ages to the Democratic Age. To get there, we must put into practice a fundamental assumption of democracy — that each person has inherent worth and dignity. Currently, most people live and work in environments that are still bound to the command-and-control model, that still govern by fear, and that still deny us the space to be our most creative and fulfilled selves. But we who are here know something powerful: that when we, consciously and deliberately, choose to design our workplaces based on the design principles of freedom — and not fear — we help people and organizations develop the collective capacity to change the world.”

Imagine, then, a two-day program designed to equip people with the skills they need to bring about such shifts in their own communities and organizations. Imagine a mixture of storytelling, breakout sessions, and unstructured time for conversations. And imagine a ballroom filled with people who don’t just believe a vision like Traci’s is possible — but that it’s already underway.

There are many inspiring and illustrative examples worth sharing (and a number of others can be found via the conference Twitter feed — check the #worldblu hashtag). I want to share one with you here: the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, an internationally-renowned group of musicians that has been, for more than 40 years, making beautiful music — and doing it all without a conductor.

“Traditionally,” explains Executive Director Ayden Adler, “classical music has maintained a near militaristic attention to order and hierarchy. Back in 1972 Orpheus decided to accept the challenge of creating its order and beauty out of the multiplicity of voices and ideas that make up the group. We believe that process is directly responsible for the richness and the passion of our performances.”

See below to see for yourself. Stay tuned for further updates, Tweets, and blog posts about this remarkable group of people. And ask yourself, when thinking about your own profession or workspace, what would YOU do tomorrow if you were not afraid?

Democracy’s New Gatekeepers?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Democracy’s New Gatekeepers?

For many of us, the Internet still holds the promise of becoming the Great Equalizer, the Great Connector, and the Great Amplifier for the modern era. From its utility as a resource for citizens protesting a corrupt governmental regime, to its capacity to connect people who would otherwise never have an opportunity to meet, the web is, we hope, our best chance at establishing a new form of public square, and a new medium for a fuller incarnation of the marketplace of ideas.

There are, however, increasing warning signs that this may not in fact be the case. And aside from the writings of Lawrence Lessig, I’ve yet to come across a better, more succinct summary of the problem than the recent TED talk from Moveon.org founder Eli Pariser.

See for yourself — and let me know what you think.

NYC Innovation Tour

Posted on | by Sam

Those of you living in the NYC area have a cool opportunity worth taking advantage of this coming April.

IDEA, aka the Institute for Democratic Education in America, is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to ensure that all young people can engaged meaningfully with their education and gain the tools to build a just, democratic, and sustainable world.

IDEA helps transform education by showcasing what works in education and equipping others to learn from it. And this April 3rd-5th, IDEA will shepherd a group of people through an “innovation tour,” during which participants will explore four exemplary NYC schools, with opportunities to see and experience classroom and school culture, discuss instruction, and meet with school leaders.

IDEA’s Innovation Tours offer an in-depth opportunity to really see and engage with the most innovative schools in the U.S.  The NYC tour will take participants through the NYC iSchool, Urban Academy, Calhoun School, and The Green School.

Tours are designed to offer participants a chance to see dynamic schools in action, to learn from school leaders about the challenges and evolution of their culture and instructional program, and finally, to discuss ideas and applications with other teachers, students, parents, school board members, business leaders, and policy-makers involved in the tour.

Tour participants will also attend Columbia University’s Seminar on Innovation featuring IDEA leaders Kirsten Olson, Scott Nine, and Dana Bennis on Monday evening, April 4th. Tour costs average $300 per person or $150 without housing. Registration details, itinerary and further information can be found at www.democraticeducation.org/tours/newyork.

Check it out. And if you do, report back on what you discover!

In the Middle East & America, Nothing Left to Fear But . . . Freedom Itself

Posted on | by Sam

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

As waves of Arab protesters keep taking to the streets in countries across the Middle East, and as panels of Egyptian experts begin revisiting their country’s constitution in the wake of their country’s 18-day revolution, I want to take the infamous FDR line and give it a new ring: “The only thing we have to fear is . . . freedom itself.”

At first blush, this may seem foolish. After all, what aspect of the human condition could be more universal than the need to be free, and the desire to have the space to shape one’s own life and determine one’s own path in the world? And yet, while it’s unquestionable that freedom is the fundamental condition for any real growth, freedom from oppression means little if it is not accompanied by the freedom to fully be ourselves – and not just the freedom to select what type of jeans to wear, or even which politician to vote for. It’s a deeper level of self-actualization that we all seek in that word – and it’s something we in America, two centuries into our own experiment in liberty, are still learning about and struggling to support.

To see this tension played out in the life of a single individual, look no further than the legendary U.S. Supreme Court justice – and FDR appointee – Hugo Lafayette Black. It was Black who became known as the Court’s most absolutist defender of individual freedoms. And it was Black who warned us, back in 1961, that “too many men are being driven to become government fearing and time-serving because the Government is being permitted to strike out at those who are fearless enough to think as they please and say what they think. The choice is clear to me,” Black wrote. “If we are to pass on that great heritage of freedom, we must return to the original language of the Bill of Rights. We must not be afraid to be free.”

Reading these words, it seems incongruous that the Black of 1961 could, in 1969, also write these lines: “Change has been said to be truly the law of life, but sometimes the old and tried and true are worth holding. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable liberty,” he asserted, “is an enemy to domestic peace.”

What had happened in the span of those eight tumultuous years? Had the social unrest of the 1960s caused Black to lose his abiding faith in the constitutional principles of freedom and democracy?  Not exactly.  But he had certainly lost faith in the ability of the nation’s citizens – and particularly its young people – to exercise that freedom productively. In short, the octogenarian Justice whose career had been in the service of expanding freedom, and who had been watching the ways that freedom was being applied in the streets outside his office window – angrily, messily, passionately, violently – had started to doubt whether a truly robust application of free-speech rights was in the best interests of safety, order, and the future of the republic.  “Anything can happen here,” he told a friend, just weeks before his death – on Constitution Day, September 17, 1971.

History has of course shown us that, despite Black’s fears, the republic still stands. And yet Black’s inability to fully maintain his own commitment to freedom in the face of his own personal fears is instructive to all of us – particularly our world’s newest fellow experimenters in democracy. As with all things worthwhile, rough days lie ahead.

For better or worse, America has committed itself to an unprecedented experiment in freedom, an experiment premised on the principle that more speech is better, that more information will produce better judgments, that more knowledge will make more self-realized persons, that more associations and beliefs will make us more open-minded, that more press freedom will benefit society, that more robust expression of all sorts will make us a freer people, and that the more we allow for all of this the better our chances are to discover truth, beauty, freedom, and something about ourselves as well.  That, at any rate, is the operative principle; call it a collective hunch?  On that principle – a core First Amendment principle – we have banked everything.

Freedom also has its costs.  That is precisely why we fear it.  And the freedoms we have long honored – and that Egypt, Tunisia and other countries are now themselves seeking to embrace – is no different.  When liberals or libertarians applaud it, they can all too easily ignore the risks – indeed, the dangers – posed by unchecked expression.  By the same token, when conservatives or conformists rally against it, they can ignore the fact that unchecked demands for security lead all too often to tyranny.

This is not an argument for a “happy medium.” Rather, it is to say that those who love freedom or value security must be mindful of what they wish for. As the great educator John Dewey once warned, “The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states . . . The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions.”

Power to the People’s History

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Power to the People’s History

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

My wife likes to tell this one story from when she was in high school, and she asked her U.S. History teacher why the class wasn’t learning more about the Indians. “We don’t have time for the Indians,” he responded. “We have an AP curriculum to get through.”

Had I been as inquisitive as my wife when I was a teenager, I would have received the same answer. So, I suspect, would most of you; indeed, for too many of us, the study of American history ended up being little more than a linear, logical march through the years – filled with neat plot lines of cause and effect, victors and enemies, and a whole lot of triumphant white men.

Like so many others, I didn’t realize there was another way to imagine the chronicling of the American narrative, or the construction of history itself, until I first read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Once I did, my understanding of the world was forever changed.

It was one year ago today – January 27, 2010 – that Zinn died at the age of 87. And it was nearly twenty years ago that I, as a twenty-something American History teacher in Brooklyn, first assigned excerpts of A People’s History to an unsuspecting class of 16- and 17-year-olds.

I can still recall the combination of pleasure and puzzlement when we dedicated precious class time to an extended conversation of the ways industrialization had impacted the lives of women, who, Zinn wrote, “were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time [feeling] pressured to stay home where they were more easily controlled.” There was the unit when we learned that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – originally passed to ensure that former slaves were forthwith defined as full “persons” under the law – had instead been overwhelmingly co-opted by clever lawyers intent on protecting the personal rights of corporations. And there was the time of the year when, echoing my wife’s long-ago request, we read the 1838 words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, urging then-president Martin Van Buren to abandon the efforts underway to forcibly remove all Cherokees to make way for American expansion:

The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?

How indeed? And yet, here we were, being asked a different set of questions, and being forced to make sense for the first time of the many glories and hypocrisies of our national history. A People’s History was, in short, a radical, exasperating, inspiring, motivating vision of America, and of American history. And my students loved it. As one of them told me, years later, “Until I read Zinn, I viewed the world uncritically. But he taught me to mistrust the single viewpoint, to doubt, to verify, to ask more questions, and to always, always look for where the bones are buried.”

As in all things, of course, Zinn is best consumed in moderation; it is as foolish to exclusively teach his writings on American history as it is to solely teach the more sanitized stuff of textbooks. And yet all of us should be grateful for what Zinn helped bring about – a widening of the American narrative, a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be free, and an awakening in our cultural consciousness to forever remind us that, as with so much of life, all is not as it seems.

So on this anniversary of Howard Zinn’s death, I hope you’ll join me in honoring his memory. Visit the Zinn Education Project (http://zinnedproject.org/). Take a more open and honest look at the past. And help ensure that our schools equip students with the analytical tools they need to make sense of — and improve — the world today.

Rest in peace.

America’s Political (Dis)Harmony

Posted on | by Sam

I know it’s still January, but I’m already looking forward to March 26, when I’ll visit the National Constitution Center and participate in a program on Civility & Democracy. During that event, which will culminate in a public Town Hall discussion, we’ll have the chance to consider some essential questions of American identity and organization — questions that have been made even more timely in the wake of the public debate following the shootings in Tucson:

  • Is partisan rancor the exception or the rule in American politics?
  • What would the Founding Fathers think of today’s political climate?
  • What factors contribute to eras of extreme partisanship?
  • Is partisanship “bad,” or simply the way democracies work?

I had been reflecting on those questions all weekend — and then in yesterday’s Washington Post I read a new piece by George Will, who was himself reflecting on the history of America’s political disharmony. “What made the American Revolution a novel event,” Will writes, “was that Americans did not declare independence because their religion, ethnicity, language or culture made them incompatible with the British. Rather, it was a political act based on explicit principles. So in America more than in Europe, nationalism is . . .’intellectualized’: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ Who holds them? Americans. Who are Americans? Those who hold those truths to be self-evident.”

Will suggests we are, at our core, a “disharmonic society” because the ideals of [our] creed are always imperfectly realized and always endangered. For Americans, government is necessary, but “the distinctive aspect of the American Creed is its anti-government character. Opposition to power and suspicion of government as the most dangerous embodiment of power are the central themes of American political thought.”

Agree or disagree?

P.S. Next month, a new book of mine (a narrative history of free speech in America) is coming out. The title, We Must Not Be Afraid to be Free, is a line from a Hugo Black opinion, and the book is largely a trip through his career, and his own evolving understanding of how to strike the right balance, both individually and as an open society, between honoring our freedoms and controlling our fears.

Justice Black — a FDR appointee and, as a younger man in his home state of Alabama, a former Klansman — is remembered as one of the Court’s most vigorous defenders of free-speech rights. And yet at the end of his long career, as he watched the social fabric of the country unravel during the 1960s, Black did an about-face — and began ruling against free-speech claims. His own journey therefore provides a useful window into the personal challenges associated with tolerating the exercise of freedoms when the very act of voicing those ideas runs the risk of tearing us asunder.

To Honor King, Embody Our Ideals

Posted on | by Sam

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

Today, Americans will pay tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. with school assemblies, community programs and — to the delight of students and adults alike — a national holiday. Yet few if any Americans, at this crucial time in our nation’s history, will directly connect King’s heroism and accomplishments to his faith in — and use of — our primary tools of democracy, the five freedoms of the First Amendment.

This is a missed opportunity. More so than any other part of our Constitution, our laws or our civic principles as a nation, the freedoms of the First Amendment — religion, speech, press, assembly and petition — embody what it means to be an American. Properly understood and applied, they allow us to expand the promise of freedom more fairly and fully to succeeding generations of Americans, and forge unity in the interest of our diversity, instead of at the expense of it.

Every January, the holiday honoring King provides an opportunity to remember both what the First Amendment demands of us as citizens, and also what is possible when we exercise those rights responsibly in the cause of justice and freedom for all.

Consider, for example, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the iconic 1963 rally that introduced King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to white America — he had delivered those lines in front of black audiences many times before — and produced the most poignant petition for redress of grievances in our nation’s history. Nearly every American is familiar with King’s speech that day. Many of us were asked to memorize it as students. But how many of us were also taught about that day — and the movement — in the specific context of our democratic principles as a nation?

Recall that the march occurred as Congress was wrestling with whether or not to pass President Kennedy’s civil rights program. Recall that young people across the country were being jailed for peacefully assembling to protest the South’s policies of institutional racism. And recall that the quality of our national conversation was still so rudimentary that in the days and weeks before the march, white journalists peppered black commentators with what today seems like a shockingly naïve question — “What is it that Negroes really want?”

King and the other leaders of the movement understood that the best way to counter such naïveté and willful ignorance was by utilizing each of the First Amendment’s five freedoms to appeal to the nation’s conscience. So on that historic day, Aug. 28, they presented a program that celebrated the American belief in religious liberty, beginning with an invocation from the Archbishop of Washington and featuring remarks from the president of the American Jewish Congress; they relied on the press to broadcast images of the massive assembly — ABC and NBC even broke away from their regularly scheduled afternoon soap operas to join CBS and broadcast King’s speech in its entirety; and they petitioned for change with emotional appeals to, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature.”

Nearly a decade of protest and activism reached its symbolic pinnacle when hundreds of thousands of Americans of all colors gathered in the shadow of Lincoln, in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, to petition the Congress to establish 1963, in the words of organizer Roy Wilkins, “as the year racial discrimination was ended.”

The rest is history, yet both the glory of that day and its unfulfilled promise provide powerful mandates for parents and teachers. As King said later, the night before he was struck down at the age of 39, the future of democracy is always only as secure as the commitment of its youngest citizens. “In 1960,” he preached, “when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters … I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”

As much or more than anyone in recent American history, King had a profound understanding of the principles found in this nation’s “great wells of democracy.” And at the heart of his work was an appeal to all Americans to live up to our nation’s guiding principles and ideals.

Let’s remember that this holiday.

What George Washington Would Think of the 2010 Midterm Elections

Posted on | by Sam

Before I went to sleep last night — a night that, among other things, resulted in the loss of my wife’s job (she is/was Senator Feingold’s foreign policy adviser) — I happened to read Jill Lepore’s review of yet another new biography of America’s first president, George Washington. In it, she cites briefly from Washington’s renowned Farewell Address from 1796. Given that last night’s election results now mark the third election in a row that Americans have kicked a political party out of power (and we only have two, so . . .), I thought Washington’s two-century-old warnings to us seemed particularly prescient.

A central part of Washington’s legacy to us was his willingness to step away from power precisely at the point when he was most poised to consolidate it. Yet he also made sure in his farewell address to sound a few alarm bells, and urge us into “solemn contemplation, and to recommend to (our) frequent review, some sentiments which are the result of much reflection, of no inconsiderable observation, and which appear to me all-important to the permanency of (our) felicity as a people.”

In particular, Washington cautioned us to be aware of the growing trend in which “one of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws,” Washington continued, “all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.”

It is remarkable to think that when Washington was delivering these warnings, our country was just five years removed from the ratification of the Constitution. Yet it would make sense that his core caution then would have grown to become exponentially more relevant, and destructive, now: “However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

America, where to from here?

The Rally to Restore Sanity . . . Or Anoint a Magic Helper?

Posted on | by Sam | 5 Comments on The Rally to Restore Sanity . . . Or Anoint a Magic Helper?

With Jon Stewart’s satirical/heretical/fantastical rally now in the books – and with memories of Glenn Beck’s own DC fiesta still a recent memory – I’ve been wondering what, if anything, these two cultural events have in common. As I do, I keep thinking about Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic Escape from Freedom, and how both men seem to be wrestling with the same tension Fromm explored in his psychological exploration of modern man – namely, our dialectical relationship with freedom itself, and what that relationship tells us about ourselves and the societies in which we live.

Fromm’s book appeared just as the Second World War was intensifying (and years before the full weight of human depravity would become universally known). His thesis was that before we can understand the dynamics of any society’s social processes, we must first explore the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual.

Central to all modern societies and individuals, Fromm wrote, was man’s relationship with freedom itself, which he defined as “the fundamental condition for any growth.” Since the structure of modern society and the personality of modern man first began taking shape – beginning with the end of the rigid social structures and limitations found in the Middle Ages, and accelerating after World War One – we have become freer to develop and express our own individual selves and ideas. At the same time, however, we have become freer from a world that gave us, precisely because it was proscribed, more security and reassurance. “The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of the individual personality,” Fromm wrote. “But it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which modern man becomes more separate from them.”

So what does any of this have to do with the Stewart and Beck rallies? I think both events were either intentionally or unintentionally appealing to us based on which modern need we are likely to seek more acutely – “freedom from” or “freedom to.”

In either case, the dilemma of modern society and how it impacts us is the same: it has given us more space to develop as individuals – and it has made us more helpless. “It increased freedom,” says Fromm, “and it created dependencies of a new kind. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other.”

The danger, Fromm cautioned, is if we forget that “aloneness, fear and bewilderment remain; people cannot stand it forever. They cannot go on bearing the burden of ‘freedom from’; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom. The principal social avenues of escape in our time are submission to a leader, as has happened in fascist countries, and the compulsive conforming as is prevalent in our own society.”

Because of this anxiety – and this willingness to submit to someone who will do the thinking for us – our capacity to think critically has dulled over time. Ironically, however, this gradual numbing of our critical capacities doesn’t mean we feel more uninformed. On the contrary, the constant barrage of messaging so indicative of modern society tends to be designed in such a way as to “flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination. But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision.”

This tendency to submit has been widely written about – accurately, I believe – with regard to Glenn Beck.  The same could be said for the followers of other right-leaning hucksters, like Rush Limbaugh, whose followers proudly and tellingly refer to themselves as “Dittoheads.” In what ways is the situation most markedly different with Stewart? What distinguishes his power and the mindsets of his followers, who descended on the same stretch of land where Beck’s minions gathered just two months prior?

Here’s one area where I think Beck and Stewart clearly diverge: whereas Beck seems to use parts of Fromm’s thesis as his own playbook for exploitation, Stewart seems equally intent on waking us up from our stupor, and realizing that democracy “will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith that is the strongest the human mind is capable of, the faith in life and in truth, and in freedom as the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self.”

Understood in this light, it makes sense that Comedy Central and Fox News, as opposed to, say, Bravo or CNN, are the TV stations with personalities possessed of the power to organize massive rallies on the mall. Fox, after all, is the standard-bearer in a line of programming that exploits modern man’s dialectical relationship with freedom to the fullest. From Bill O’Reilly to Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck, Fox’s leading voices fit the description of what Fromm calls the “magic helper.” The reason we follow them is the same reason we seek freedom from our own ideas – “an inability to stand alone and to fully express our own individual potentialities.”  By contrast, Comedy Central is the station where the most powerful tool of all – satire – is employed daily to lay bare the “play within the play” that is modern democracy, and shame us into both individual and societal improvement. In a world where all is not as it seems, wit is our most powerful weapon.

The thing is, if we’re not careful, we Daily Show-watching, NPR-listening, organic grocery-shopping denizens can make Jon Stewart a “magic helper” as well. This is partially why I think so many feared the ramifications of a rally that would, at some point, need to become more serious than sardonic.

In 1941, Fromm was writing about a world where freedom had reached a critical point. “Driven by the logic of its own dynamism, it threatens to change us into its opposite.”

The same danger exists today. And the future of democracy depends on our developing the capacity to empower people to make meaningful and responsible choices with their freedom, and to help support the fuller creation of a society in which the growth and happiness of each person is our primary aim – and not to acquire fame and fortune, but to discover meaning and purpose.

So here’s to the spirit of today’s rally, alongside a healthy dose of skepticism, humor, and hope.

The Art of Choosing (or, Mad Men redux)

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on The Art of Choosing (or, Mad Men redux)

As some of you know, I’m in a bit of an ongoing conversation/debate about the uneasy marriage of democracy and capitalism (while still trying to clarify my own position on the issue). It began during a live audio interview with the Future of Education’s Steve Hargadon, and continued in the comments section of an Op-Ed I wrote about the popular AMC show Mad Men, which I describe as “a quintessentially American show about disembodied desire and emotion,” featuring a set of characters who “desire only the freedom to pursue whatever it is they cannot have.”

Today, as if on cue, my friend Steve Moore sent me a link to a recent TED talk by Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar, who was discussing the core ideas in her new book, The Art of Choosing.

I’ve provided a link to the video below, because Dr. Iyengar’s research relates directly to the issues affecting the behavior of the characters in Mad Men — namely, the increasing meaningless of choice (the central right in a democracy) when it becomes primarily defined by the products we can purchase, not the ideas we can articulate (or the range of emotions we can feel).

The value of choice, Iyengar insists, depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. Yet what has happened in the U.S. (the origins of which, to some degree, we see depicted in the early 1960s ad agency culture in Mad Men) is that instead of making better decisions as the number of choices available to us has grown, we have become overwhelmed by the volume, and the emptiness, of such individualized decisions. In this state, choice “no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints. It is not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae.”

This is the discomfort I was trying to articulate when I described the disembodied desire of the characters in Mad Men. Iyengar puts it this way: “The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American Dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much — freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says you can have anything, everything. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways.