This Is Not News

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. When people realize that they’re being affected by these indirect consequences, they try to find some way to manage them, and that’s how governments form. (I’m shorthanding this a bit. Dewey takes a couple of chapters to set up this point, and that’s not entirely because of his occasional difficulties in making his point clear.)

I decided that a good way to illustrate this distinction was to, well, illustrate it. I asked my students to imagine that I was going to order a new PC from Dell (not likely any time soon), and to describe whose lives would be affected by this decision. The obvious starting place was that Dell and I would be affected, so I put marks on the board to indicate those two parties. Then we started digging. How is the computer going to get to me? Well, someone has to ship it, they said. So I drew a road connecting Dell and me, and a crude UPS truck. Who’s going to get affected by that truck? Neighbors who will be affected by smog and noise pollution, perhaps. So little exhaust clouds and houses got added near the truck. Where are the parts of the computer coming from? Well, they’re being manufactured in Asia, so I drew factories on the far side of the board, and then a boat taking the components to Dell in Texas. And so on and so on.

Now, despite the fact that my drawing was, quite frankly, terrible, I think this exercise was worthwhile. The students seemed to have fun thinking up all sorts of connections, and when we were done we had a framework to talk about how all of these ripple effects are shaped and regulated in our society. I may need to hit my sister up for some art lessons, but there’s definitely something for me to take away here in terms of how to get a point across.

When I was in high school DC Comics published a title called The Ray, about a teenaged hero who lived in Philadelphia. I bought a few issues but quickly lost interest. If I remember correctly, one of my major disappointments was that the colorist was making what should have been a bright, dazzling book too muted. But I also wasn’t crazy about the writing. The writer, some of whose books I had enjoyed in the past, was using a lot of slang and jargon in the dialogue, and my reaction as a Philadelphia teenager was that “people don’t talk like that – the guy’s trying too hard.� Well, a few years later I wound up in a Usenet conversation with the writer, who mentioned that he had lived in Philadelphia around the time he wrote the book and based the dialogue patterns on things he had heard around him.

That conversation has been rattling around for the last few days, as current media events and my own democracy research have converged on the idea of pluralism, the notion that rather than looking to form one single society that assimilates everyone who comes into it, a democracy should strive to promote and support the different small groups that have their own culture, thought processes, and ways of communicating and interacting with the world. Part of the aim is to get away from the notion that everyone needs to conform to a single dominant culture. Of course, all these pluralist groups are supposed to be able to relate to one another in a respectful fashion in order to keep the larger society flourishing. And my reaction to The Ray highlights the problem here, I think.

When you have groups that look at the world in different ways, and then express that worldview in different ways, there are going to be problems of interpretation. Those problems of interpretation can cause well-meaning groups to talk past one another, or interpret a differing viewpoint as a lack of respect. If communication and dialogue are going to be key to a democratic theory, there needs to be some kind of common framework that pluralist groups can work from, and I do not think that this can be merely a procedural consensus. There has to be a shared understanding of dialogue, democracy, respect, understanding, deliberation, and many other concepts. Not only are these required for communication attempts to be successful, they are required for communication attempts to begin. There are points of view that argue that deliberation is an elitist structure, one that puts a premium on rules of reasoning and conventions of dialogue that certain historically-advantaged groups are comfortable with and one that favors a slower approach to social change. These points of view argue that excluded groups shouldn’t be concerned about respect and deliberation – they should take action to make other people uncomfortable, to confront them with the problems and force immediate action. For a deliberative, democratic pluralism to work, a society needs to create a culture of deliberation, one that unifies the smaller cultural groups.

Now the $64,000 is how to make that happen.