A New Monthly Column: THE GOOD SOCIETY – RESOURCES FOR IMAGINING A BETTER WORLD (#1)

Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?  Robert F. Kennedy

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.    Justice Louis Brandeis

This is a column about the role of imagination and curiosity in building a better government and a better society.

I retired from teaching at UMass Amherst in 2014.  For the twenty years prior to that I directed a civic leadership program called the UMass Citizen Scholars Program ( CSP, now the Community Scholars Program) (see also here for the other UMass civic leadership program that I directed).

One aim of the CSP was to give our students the knowledge, skills, and motivation to be agents for progressive change.  To that end, our students took four courses in sequence. I taught the first of those courses – The Good Society. The primary aim of that course was to help students to believe that a better world is possible and to help them liberate their imagination so they could envision the world the way it could be or ought to be.  And then, the next three courses in the program explored how to enact that vision. And while actually building a better world poses prodigious challenges, imagining that better world also proved to be a substantial obstacle for my students as they struggled to imagine a world substantially different from the one that they inhabited.

Our very first assignment asked students to write a statement about the kind of world that they would like to live in.  And they would routinely push back against this seemingly innocuous challenge. Most of my students would rather have written about why a better world is not possible . And the visions that many students did come up with were incredibly modest.  So one element of our pedagogy was to expose our students to a variety of alternatives that challenged their sense of the way the world had to be. 

Each term we would explore five comprehensive case studies that examined ways of being in the world that stand in contrast to the world that our students inhabit and indeed to the dominant economic form – neoliberal capitalism.  The last time I taught the course we explored Cuba’s adjustment to austerity in the post-Soviet period of the 1990’s, the Highlander Center for Education and Research (where Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King trained),  a Columbian ecovillage that produced engineering wonders that enabled its residents to thrive in the midst of the inhospitable Columbian wilderness, the Kibbutzim (collective farms) of Israel in the late 1980’s, which guaranteed their residents the essentials of life (e.g. food, shelter, education and health care) unconditionally, from cradle to grave, and Ursula K. Leguin’s utopian novel The Dispossessed which imagines anarcho-syndicalism on a planetary scale.  In previous years our case studies included Zapatismo, The Mondragon Collectives of Spain, tribal societies, the New Deal, co-housing, community supported agriculture, community land trusts, Occupy Wall Street, local and regional alternative currencies, open source ,childcare in Sweden, health care in France, and Gross Domestic Happiness in Bhutan. One year, in order to drive the point home that people are creating political and economic alternatives all around us, we read the book Take Back the Economy,  by J.K. Gibson-Graham, Julie Cameron and Stephen Healy, which offered 85 unique, creative alternatives to a neoliberal capitalist economy. 

Of course, it is not sufficient to simply expose students to  these alternatives. Our students were inclined to expend great energy trying to dismiss each case, forcing it to conform to their own common sense which was very much framed by their lived experience within a neoliberal society. They would say – it may be true that Sweden provides universal childcare and parental leave or that an Israeli Kibbutz guarantees its members the necessities of life from cradle to grave, or that most of Europe provides universal health care,  but we could never do that here. And so the challenge for me was to help get them to embrace the idea that another world IS possible and help them envision that world – to help them overcome their skepticism and the myopia produced by their limited experience in the world, There is of course a complicated pedagogy behind this and perhaps in a future column, we’ll return to consider that pedagogy and how and why it works. But our first step, was simply to get people to pause and consider that different ways of being in the world exist.

What Does This Have To Do With Amherst?
Over the last year we have seen our elected representatives invest impressive amounts of time and energy in creating a new form of government for Amherst. The demands of working out the mechanics of how to govern has, to an extent, curbed, rather than expanded our civic imagination. We could benefit considerably from an expansion of our imagination and an exploration of possibilities that we have not previously considered or imagined.  Other communities have encountered some of the same challenges that we have and it is useful to consider how they have approached them. What decisions have they made, what policies have they undertaken, what projects have they embraced? And what reasoning did they bring to all of this and what outcomes did they realize? But there has been a reluctance to do this – to explicitly explore what folks are doing elsewhere and at least one Amherst Town Councilor has shown overt hostility any time one of their colleagues mentions what the City of Northampton is up to. Whether this reluctance is a product of a lack of curiosity, or hubris,  or failure of the imagination (e.g. other communities are too different from Amherst for us to extract useful lessons from their experiences) or simply from being too overburdened with a formidable workload to consider something new, it is something that ought to be overcome.  

I argue that there is great benefit to be had in liberating our municipal or civic imagination and to that end, each month,  I intend to present a creative idea or policy or project that has been undertaken elsewhere in the world as a provocation to our curiosity and our creativity.  The aim is not necessarily to say, that we ought to adopt the policies that we see being implemented in Northampton, or Concord, or Madison, Wisconsin or Helsinki Finland, but rather that we should consider what can we learn from the experiences of these communities?.  The aim is to put the brakes on our tendencies (if we share the disposition of my former students) to initially react with – that could never work here or that’s a strange idea, or that’s just not practical – and ask, what lessons are to be taken away from that particular example and where could we go if we think big?

When I was teaching,  I encouraged my students to think big.  I understood that my course required students to work with and indeed embrace concepts that they believed to be fiscally and politically unfeasible and that produced a degree of discomfort for them.  So I asked them to remember that feasibility is a malleable concept and I challenged them to rethink the boundaries of feasibility.  I reminded them that there were few people who thought that marriage equality was a politically feasible policy before it was enacted here in Massachusetts.  Indeed, most of the policy changes that we consider worthwhile in US history (to paraphrase Justice Brandeis) were deemed unfeasible and perhaps unreasonable before they were enacted. I’m thinking of things like the New Deal,  or the Civil Rights Act,  or The Voting Rights Act or the ADA or the  Bottle Bill (for which I worked in both Michigan, the first state to enact it, and later in Massachusetts).  Few thought it was politically feasible to elect a black man to the Presidency of the USA until the Obama campaign was concluded.  And when Dr. King was sitting in that Birmingham jail back in 1963,  his colleagues chastised him for being unrealistic and unreasonable and implored him to slow down and to back off because what he sought was politically unfeasible.  

We can also look at the flip side of this. President Obama took single payer off the table early in his discussions about health care reform because he deemed it to be politically unfeasible in this country at that time.  And as a result, that possibility was not discussed, debated, or considered and we remain the only country in the developed world that lacks universal health care.  Politics is not a passive activity.  Things become feasible because people organize to make them so. Marriage equality did not become law because folks waited for it to happen.  People went out and engaged in the political work that made it politically feasible. But first they had to imagine a world where such equality existed.

There will always be people who will tell us that the world we seek is unrealistic or unreasonable or unready for our ideas  and that what we seek is not politically of fiscally pragmatic.  But all of the good things that we enjoy are the result of people who were unwilling to be limited by such messages. There are plenty of good reasons for free higher education, or emptying the prisons or creating free universal pre-school or universal health care, or for creating net-zero communities,  or for meeting the needs of all of our fellow residents, or for not funding public schools with property taxes but with level state appropriations across school districts. Those in the past who brought bold new policies forward also engaged in stretching the boundaries of the public’s imagination about what was politically feasible at the time. 

And this applies here at home when we try to imagine, without constraint, the way our community could be and ought to be.  And we can help stimulate our imagination by looking at creative work that is being done elsewhere. So in the weeks to come, I will share examples of that creative work. Next month I’ll explore municipal composting and the ways that some communities around the world have created curbside composting programs, not only to reduce or eliminate the flow of organics into the waste stream and consequently reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to help stressed municipal budgets by producing compost and mulch for municipal properties and community gardens.