I was thinking today about how many people across the political spectrum tell me in my sojourns that think our open society is closing up more and more, to the point that they not only consider it in deep decline, but only a matter of time before some sort of cataclysmic upheaval occurs. They point to one or the other of our two contenders for the presidency in our major parties as examples of how far we’ve sunk when it comes to no longer having leaders who reflect our highest hopes and aspirations They may be right. But I keep thinking what we really need to do is look at ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, each and every one of us, what we are doing, as individual citizens, to right the wrong that we see, and bring what we consider the promise of our nation and the world more into alignment with actual practice.
One thing I think we need to do though, is approach this not in a totally earnest way, but in a way that is tinged with a healthy dollop of playfulness — not of the leisure time mindless variety, but of the intensively creative kind, that transcended disciplines, like that practiced once upon a time in Florence, and of course in the Athenian polis.
What is so interesting to me about our first democracy in Athens is that it wasn’t born of revolution. Rather it just evolved, and for a while, a lamentably brief while, most of its citizenry was rather childlike — open, curious, inquisitive, pushing boundaries ever outward as they all the while forged ever more intimate connections with one another, advancing the virtuous quality of philia itself.
Most ever since, any democratic society has been the result of revolution, and hasn’t lasted that long in the grand scheme of things. Ours may well be no exception, try as many people of goodwill might to arrest any downward spirals. We’ll see.
Even Athens and Florence had brief shelf lives. The entwined individual and collective pursuit of arete — all around excellence in all dimension of life — floundered. People closed in on themselves, demagogues reigned, had their way, and individuals didn’t fight the good fight with enough will and determination to thwart this. The naked resources grab in the ill-conceived Second Peloponnesian War didn’t work out as planned; Athens lost, its military exhausted and depleted in a war it never should have been involved in, and soon democracy went by the wayside.
What I do see possibly happening now as then is a pull in dark and trying times towards irrationality, and this of course is when sophists, demagogues, tyrants can subvert democratic mechanisms for their own pernicious ends.
And so it goes, and so we must keep questioning, challenging, exploring, inquiring, with ever more open-mindedness, with ever more conviction that there are new and better possibilities for human being. We must not let the Socratic way of inquiry, and the ethos of empathic listening, and the gadfly tradition of challenging the common sense ‘wisdom’ of the day, go by the wayside, try as those would like to close open societies might try to intimidate us. Thankfully there are so many people determined to engaged in the public civic and to make sure that new ideas, bold approaches, greater inclusiveness (ideally including our children and youth) can inch their way forward.
I’m neither pessimistic nor optimistic, neither hopeful nor dejected, just determined to persevere and do what I can. I became a dad late in life, andI I am committed to doing whatever I can and must, and contribute my modest talents to the max to make sure there is a better day for one and all, Check out all the projects that I’ve begun with others, and more to come — all aimed at ‘childing’ us in ways that lead to ever evolving selves, both of the individual self variety, but with the childlike notion that the universe is also a kind of self in which we have a hand at being co-creators. Socratizing helps spur the transformative revolution that must take place on the inside if it is to occur on the outside. Inquiry, encounter, the methodical pursuit of timely and timeless questions in ways that can lead to new portals of discovery and new ways of connecting and communicating, are vital if we are to advance as a species. 