A few weeks ago, Kade Gianinetti, a student from my 2006 Tomorrow’s Voices class, came to our current class. Later, he wrote to me:
I’m still thinking about your class last night. The conversation about activism, privilege, and community connection stuck with me. The discussion around how socioeconomic circumstances affect our capacity to engage with larger issues like climate change was particularly thought-provoking. This paradox we’re living in resonated: while education and wealth might create awareness of bigger societal challenges, they can also erect barriers to actual connection. The data showing that people with higher education and income spend less time with their neighbors highlights something essential about community. I was struck by the sentiment that humans are inherently selfish. In our global, independent world, that can certainly feel true. But I believe in small communities that physically interact, there’s still an “evolutionary” tendency to share and protect the group. Capitalism—and our culture in general—emphasizes separation, but systemic indifference can’t survive if you’ve intact relationships.
His last sentence has stayed with me and feels particularly pertinent and politically useful now, in light of our current leadership’s callous and dangerous disregard for the well-being of others. Wise and revered thinkers have spoken about this for centuries, but it has never seemed to me so integral to the stability, and even the possibility, of democracy.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Justice is love in action.” Love compels us to offer our best for a person or group of people, while justice guides our relationships. Justice seeks to eliminate those things that harm the person and fairly award those that are due to the person. The power of love (agape) is the foundation for relationships that forge a just and decent democracy. Love and justice become two sides of the same coin, and as Father Thomas Keating from the Snowmass Monastery would say, the path of love requires courage and fortitude, highlighting the importance of expressing agape through acts of service, compassion and forgiveness; demonstrating that love is not just a feeling but also a way of being.
From this perspective, democracy isn’t a static noun, it’s active. Democracy’s task is to create relationships that connect us. It is a clarion call for a generosity of spirit that brings honor and decency to a social contract, following Aristotle’s notion that a constitutional government is a form of government in which citizens are free people and equals, ruling and being ruled in turn. In his essay, “Only Connect,” the environmental historian William Cronon says our actual survival depends upon connecting with others and forming meaningful relationships — truly engaging with the world around us.
In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place; it makes us responsible to those communities in ways that limit our freedom. In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves. Only connect.
We as human beings draw our power from our ability to connect, to work together, for good or evil. Justice — not equality — is the soul of our constitution, the bedrock of our democracy and the ultimate arbiter. Working together toward justice — a justice fueled by love — motivates people to speak out against wrongdoings, advocate for the marginalized and work toward a fair and equitable world.
All political parties, regardless of strategies, have — or should have — a fire to create a just society. When our leaders abandon that fire, it is bewildering. Author and columnist David Brooks recently wrote, “There’s something profoundly evil about the richest man in the world cutting food aid to the poorest people in the world.” It is important to name that evil, so we know where we stand. Student Vince Kunowicz recently said, “We have to be vigilant with ourselves so that we do not see ourselves led by greed.” A lack of empathy and sympathy (in short, extreme selfishness) leads to a disregard for other people.
Another student, Adenn Berry wrote:
The search to establish moral and sustainable societies seems to be never-ending. The original democracy of Greece established many of the noble founding principles of the United States and many other nations that proclaimed morality. However, they frequently failed to deliver on their founding promises or collapsed after short periods. Nevertheless, the principles still ring true today. The fundamentals to a principled and sustainable society are justice, public participation, and an unrelenting struggle towards realizing those goals for all members of society.
The history of the United States has been a never-ending battle to establish true public participation: The abolitionist movement, the women’s suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement fought to grant all citizens the right to vote. Truly great nations are those that allow “power [to] spring up whenever people get together and act in concert.”
What an honor to live in a democracy, to be given the tools to realize principles worthy of our time, our work, our lives. Watching Kade — now a father — come back after 18 years to discuss democratic ideals with my current students was such a tender exchange; everyone was inspired by the possibility infused in these beautiful ideas, even if always just beyond our collective reach. This is a time to truly appreciate MLK’s quote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” so that despair doesn’t blind us to the magnitude of the journey and the courageous company we keep.