Open Left - narrative

Cults And Culture

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:51:08 GMT

In my earlier diary, "Tales of the City Is Fiction--And Mythos", I responded to a post by Emptywheel, "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction" primarily by shifting focus from the fiction/fact distinction, which I agree is culturally conditioned, to the mythos/logos distinction as laid out by Karen Armstrong in her book, The Battle For God. In this diary, I want to advance another distinction, that between cults, which are deeply associated with mythos and culture, which properly functions to integrate mythos and logos.

My argument is that culture is necessary to prevent cults from becoming dangerous, and that the current failure of the Democratic-controlled Congress to hold the Bush Administration responsible can be seen as part of a broader failure of culture to prevent such danger.

My specific focus involves three aspects of culture: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate. By "consciousness," I mean an awareness of what narratives are doing, both as logos and mythos. This requires cognitive functioning at least at Kegan's Level 4, which takes the construction of social roles and relationships as object, on which it can reflect and act. (See "The Political Duality Of Rep and Dem", section "Cognitive Complexity II: Kegan's Subject/Object Model.") "Critical engagement" means that one not only has this capacity to reflect and act, but that one actually does so. And the capacity to mediate means that the culture itself provides tools, up to the level of institutions, such as courts, schools, legislatures, research institutes, etc. which can be used individually and collectively to ensure, among other things that mythos does not swallow up everything else, and that logos does not crush the life out of mythos.
Recap

My previous diary ended with the following two paragraphs, which help establish the relationship between cults and culture I will elaborate on below:

For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.
Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world.

Cults

In my previous diary, I quoted a passage where Emptywheel talked about The Count of Monte Cristo in the context of multiple different types of narratives about Napoleon that were circulating in Paris at the time. I quote now from the end of that passage, and continue to the next paragraph:

All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.
In a world in which Jack Bauer has greater influence over our detainee policies than all the FBI's best experts on interrogation methods, we would do well to avoid the trap of "fiction" and "non-fiction."

I want to focus here on the word "cult". In the introduction to The Battle For God, Armstrong writes:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.

This is, of course, presicely what conservatives feared about Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, as described in my previous diary. There is no doubt that Maupin developed a cult following, and even though the same word might not mean exactly the same thing, or function in exactly the same way, one can also say that sharing the experience of reading his work most certainly did work aesthetically upon his readers, "evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence."

Indeed, this can be said about gay and lesbian literature generally. The rapidity with which the gay and lesbian communities have formed has made the role of storytelling disproportionately more important than for other communities, but similar functions can clearly be seen in feminist, Black, Latino and other cultures. Meaning-making through narratives is an integral part of collective and individual identity-formation and reformation in opposition to identities imposed from without.

Cultic Knowledge--"24" And More

Now, about Jack Bauer. Can there be any other word for how his influence has spread than to refer to it in terms of a cult? And is there anything wrong with "24" that couldn't be handled with what I called for above--consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate? That couldn't, in short, be handled by a truly healthy culture? It is clearly not a matter of logos driving Jack Bauer's influence on American interrogators. It most clearly is an unmediated mythic process quite in line with Armstrong's description:

Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

It is precisely this sense of "sacred significance" and "apprehend[ing] the deeper currents of existence" that explains, at least in part, the utter contempt for democratic accountability--including consciousness, critical engagement, and capacity to mediate--that has run rampant throughout the Bush Administration. This describes a wide range of different sorts of actors. It is broadly applicable to the cultic mindset of neo-cons descended from Leo Strauss, for example, but it also describes the relatively simple-minded zealotry of a Monica Goodling, and the crabbed legal reasoning of a John Yoo, as well as the mindset of the actual hands-on interrogation/torture teams.

The challenge here is simple: we have an administration that functions based on cultic "knowledge." As just indicated, the use of torture based on the model of "24" is but one example of this. And the administration itself is but a culmination of decades of movement conservatism, working through numerous different organizational and institutional forms, passing on various different forms of cultic "knowledge," and rationalizing the "protection" of such knowledge from any form of public scrutiny or accountability.

This is the big picture behind the Bush Administration's absolute refusal of any accountability to courts or Congress--the cult will not yield an inch to the critical and mediating demands of culture, which are absolutely necessary to safeguard the culture against takeover by cultic forces. And this is the big picture behind the Democrats repeated failure--or more accurately, refusal--to act according to their constritutional duty: it is an abandonment of the responsibilities of culture.

I want to be quite clear, I do not believe that cults are necessarily evil. They are not. In fact, they can be tremendously life-affirming, sources of profound meaning and connectedness. It is the failure to mediate their influence in various ways that facilitates the development of some cults into destructive channels. It is the responsibility of culture to ensure that cults may flourish without destructive influence, either on individuals, groups, or society as a whole.

Today, our culture is so diseased, so overwhelmed with the pernicious influence of movement conservatism and its myriad cults, that it readily attacks as cults those who are least cult-like and most logos-oriented, while defending true cults from even most cursory form of scrutiny. More generally, rational behavior is attacked as cultic, while cultic behavior is defended as beyond question.

Backstory

This is the great irony behind the rightwing obsession with the 1960s. While the right entirely ignores the major social accomplishments of the 1960s--the end of legal segregation, the promotion of equal rights for women, the rebirth of the modern environmental and consumer protection movements, etc.--it obsesses endlessly over generally cultural, non-political behavior. that often had a more or less cultic flavor to it, broadly identified as the "counter-culture." The right obsesses over the notion that the "counter-culture" has fundamentally corrupted the basically sound American culture--despite the fact that prior to the 1960s, white and male supremacy were endemic and rarely questioned.

Yet, for all its seemingly cultic character, the "counter-culture" produced very little in the way of enduring cults. It disseminated its influence on the wider culture, to be sure, but this occurred primarily through processes of cultural diffusion, in which practices spread because they are fundamentally compatible with the broader culture into which they spread.

This was not immediately apparent, of course There were intense narratives of otherness deployed against the youth "counter-culture." But these narratives were almost entirely bogus. Both the virtues and the flaws of the "counter-culture" had many more historical antecedents than the demonizing narratives of the time would admit, while what was new about it reflected a world-wide shift in values that would not become apparent until decades later with the advent of the World Values Survey. But even that shift in values had been anticipated by a long line of prominent American thinkers, from Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to the Transcendentalists, Abolitionists, and anti-imperialists of the 19th Century, and so on.

In contrast to all this, however, it was the right that proceeded to organize itself along cultic lines, in ways that grew increasingly elaborate and well-funded over time. By the 1990s, this culminated in a widespread militia movement, an insular talk-radio empire, and a multi-faceted cultic attack on the President of the United States that nearly drove him from office. Over and over again, plain facts were dismissed in favor of wild speculations, as documented by Gene Lyons in his book, Fools For Scandal and in the book he co-authored with Joe Conasan, The Hunting of the President. At the same time, the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming posed a real and growing threat to human civilization was dismissed as some sort of wild-eyed theory--as if the worlds climate scientists were all part of one big cult.

This was the background against which the Republicans stole the 2000 election, capped by a Supreme Court decision so lawless that it even declared itself not to be a precedent for any future decision.

But, of course when your worldview is entirely swallowed up in a cultic black hole, it is simply impossible to conceive of anything else. The only alternative to Bush stealing the election is Gore stealing the election-not a fair election, determined according to existing laws and legal precedents. And by the same cultic logic, since the Clinton impeachment was a baseless witch-hunt (whether admitted or not), any talk of impeaching Bush must also be a baseless witch-hunt. For the cultic mindset, there simply is no possibility of any alternative. Mediating the excesses of cultic activity-by the constitutional system of checks and balances, or the scientific system of peer review-is simply inconceivable. It must, instead, be a form of persecution from followers of another cult.

Thus, a crucial aspect of what we are fighting for today is the recreation of culture and its mediating functions, not to crush cultic practices, but merely to limit their destructive tendencies, which currently threaten to destroy the very Western Civilization they pretend to so vigorously defend.

Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos

Paul Rosenberg — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 14:33:30 GMT

Emptywheel's response to Chris's diary,"The Rise of the Non-Fictional Aesthetic." was a fascinating read. I agreed with amost everything in "The Count of Monte Cristo Was Not Fiction", except for the title. In it, among many other things, she wrote:

And I mean it when I say, "the Count of Monte Cristo was not fiction"--even though it's one of the most compelling stories of all time and even though it gets stored in the juvenile fiction shelf of most libraries. "It's a book you read when you're fourteen," Slavoj Zizek scoffed to me once.
But the narrative was published in a newspaper. Not the kind of literary journal you think of when you thin of Dickens' serialized novels, but an honest to god daily newspaper, with each installment beginning on the bottom of the front page, just under the reports from Parliament.

Similarly, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City --a Balzac-styledz portrait of intersecting gay and straight characters and cultures in 1970s San Francisco--was published in the San Francisco Chronicle, and while not a direct parallel to The Count of Monte Cristo, there are enough similarities that it immediately sprung to mind when I read this passage. Those similarities are perhaps best summarized by saying that both books, published in a newspaper, evoked and provoked a broadly-shared public mythos, a term explained below.

Emptywheel argues that the fact/fiction divide is culturally contingent, but I do not believe in so lightly dismissing the distinction simply because it is culturally contingent. More importantly, however, I believe that the distinction taps into--though it is not identical with--a much more fundamental distinction that I think can be very clarifying for us: the distinction between mythos and logos, which plays a crucial role in Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, an invaluable book on the rise of fundamentalism since 1492 in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Down For the Count

Regarding The Count of Monte Cristo, Emptywheel goes on to show that its publication had profound implications:

This story, about a guy imprisoned at least partly because he once met with Napoleon, who then goes on to become a Napoleonic figure plunked down in "modern" Paris, appeared at a time when censorship laws dictated that you couldn't use the words "Bourbon" or "Republique" if you were writing things critical of the government. Dumas wrote the story after having met Louis-Napoleon, who was sitting in prison for one of his early unsuccessful coup attempts. But he wasn't the only one writing these Napoleonic narratives. Every single major daily in Paris--every one--was printing some kind of narrative about Napoleon in this period, whether they were "fictions," memoirs from Napoleon's brothers, race track reports using a horse named "Napoleon" as an allegory for speed and skill. These stories were all different conceptualizations of a certain kind of power that exerted tremendous influence in Paris at the time. All these narratives about Napoleon usually get described as the cultural phenomenon that was the "cult of Napoleon" but, as events would later prove, that cultural phenomenon was in no way fictional.

The same could be said of Maupin's work. It was, in fact, a mirror in which the city saw itself, a genuine sensation that captivated the city's attention. And when PBS broadcast it as a miniseries years later, it blew the lid off their usual ratings, while drawing a savage conservative counter-attack that derailed plans for PBS to air further sequels. (This was 1994, years before Ellen came out, or Will And Grace came on.) In fact, it seems quite commonplace for fact and fiction to interact like that, though rarely with such intensity that it becomes so obvious, even striking.

Rather than argue over the fact/fiction distinction, however, I want to shift focus to what seems a more fruitful and profound dichotomy, the aforementioned mythos and logos. For what I think is most essential that Emptywheel is pointing to is the power of mythos, and there is no denying its power to make history. The trick is making good history.

Mythos And Logos

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong discusses two distinct modes of understanding that have become confused in modern times--particularly (but by no means exclusively) by fundamentalists. (The introduction to her book is available online here, and presents the basic framework for understanding her argument, from which I'm going to quote.)

Armstrong writes:

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence.

Regarding mythos, she explains:

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

And regarding logos:

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.

And regarding their interaction:

In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world.

While they didn't always manage to keep the realms separate, they didn't suffer from systematic and persistent confusion. That came about with the remarkable burst of progress made in Europe from the time of the Renaissance onward. The more it seemed that logos could do, the more mythos was diminished, and the more people tried to replace mythos with logos--or, to reinterpret mythos as logos, which is what fundamentalists do with "creation science", for example. Far from being traditionalists, Armstrong argues, fundamentalists are distinctively modern--they have utterly lost the pre-modern understanding of the two realms, as well as the taken-for-granted attitude that mythos is by far the more important of the two. Instead--although quite unconsciously--they believe implicitly in the absolute superiority of logos, and therefore feel driven to prove that their mythos is logos, because if it is not, then it is nothing.

For a pre-modern person of faith, it is hard to imagine a more blasphemous attitude. But you need an historical (logos-based) consciousness to even realize this.

The mythos/logos divide is not the same as the fiction/non-fiction divide. Fiction can be soaked in logos. Not just detective fiction, hard science fiction or social realism, but virtually any sort of fiction can be quite concerned with the logic of how things happen, or the specificity of physical detail. Our fictions as much as anything else have been impacted by the rise of logos, and the shrinking of mythos. And yet, there is a connection, still, that goes to the issue of purpose. Generally speaking, the purpose of fiction is to explore, create, define or lament the lack of meaning. In contrast, the purpose of non-fiction is to further the understanding of how things work--although, as a working 19th-Century style journalist, my own reporting is clearly intended to engage in meaning-making. I wouldn't have it any other way.

For me, the issue is consciousness. At this point in history it's simply impossible to keep mythos and logos in separate containers. Oh, you can do it sometimes quite well, there's no denying that. And you should. But there are simply far too many ways in which the two realms interpenetrate one another to ever put a stop to it, which is what Emptywheel's example of The Count of Monte Cristo says to me.

Fundamentalists are systematically dangerous precisely because they they're unconscious about how they have jumbled the two modes together. It's not the jumbling per se that's dangerous--although it can be. But if one is conscious, if one can critically engage, then one can confront and deal with the danger. These are key: consciousness, critical engagement, and the capacity to mediate, which implies an ability to hold others, and oneself accountable. These are the essential elements of culture that allow us to collectively and collegially and socially sort out the various narratives by which we make and remake our world.

We Have Failed

worldtrippers — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:36:49 GMT

I always thought that the goal of the blogosphere was to raise the political dialog in our nation. To fill in the gaps where the mainstream media has failed. And, in general, we've done a pretty good job. We helped lead the charge and made the War the issue in 2006. We stood behind Chris Dodd and his fight against retroactive immunity.

But on one level, we have failed. When checking the blogs versus the mainstream media coverage of the Democratic Primaries, I honestly can't tell the difference.
Case in point. The recent blowup about race.

As the media overblow and overcovered some rather innoccous comments about Race, we here at the blogosphere stood by and did the exact same thing.

From the blogosphere...

Have the Clintons Surrogates Reduced Themselves to "Race Baiting"?
The dark heart of the Clinton campaign: a strategy designed to make race THE issue
Obama's Playing the Race Card Will Destroy his own "Hopes"

Versus the MSM's great reporting in articles likes...

Obama, Race and the Presidency
Why the Clintons Play the Race Card
Hillary Pulls Race Card and Obama May Fold: Margaret Carlson

Can you tell the difference?

I can. We are less reliant on facts, more inflamatory, and far more biased than the MSM.

But that's not the point of this article. No offense to any of the bloggers I linked to up there, and there have been plenty of great bloggers writing about how we have overblown this conflict, and others focusing on the real issues of race and gender.

But we have failed in a different way, we have failed to raise the dialog, failed to move beyond horserace coverage, and failed to throughly vet each of the candidates and his or her stances on the issues.

For example, the economy is on the doldrums, and numerous candidates have released economic stimulus packages. The mainstream media has ignored these packages, and the blogosphere, well, I've yet to see a detailed analysis of each candidates economic plan. Where do I turn? I would write one myself, but I'm certainly no economist.

We need to stop worrying about the horserace, stop recommending diaries that are nothing more than wire stories, and once again cover what the MSM won't, what really matters to America. We need to set the dialog for the fall, where I hope the main issues on everyone's mind will be the economy, the war in Iraq, and the looming Climate Change crisis. I will be blogging on the latter, making sure people realize what a threat climate change is. What about you?

Will we fulfill our role, or will we continue to let Chris Matthews, Wolf Blizter, and Lou Dobbs set the narratives? Good god I hope so.

Another New Vision

Dan Ancona — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:31:45 GMT

[Posted this morning at The Drum Major Institute]
A few months ago, Washington Monthly published The New Vision, by venerable JFK speechwriter Ted Sorenson. While certainly a powerful message, I believe Mr. Sorenson's speech failed to directly address three pressing tactical issues facing the country at this point: our lack of a clear, distinct and progressive economic program, the need for a broader and more participatory politics, and how we might begin to rebuild our shattered faith in government. These issues were also addressed to varying degrees in Matt Bai's The Argument.

In the discussion following these two works, it seemed clear that the left certainly does have an Argument, but that argument just isn't sharply focused enough to work as a political force. The following post (and this accompanying slide presentation) is the speech I'd like to hear, and an explicit attempt to refine that focus.

The High Road: Principles for a 21st Century Economy
Dan Ancona
October 1st 2007

We stand here together today near a turning point in the American and global economy. Globalization, the information economy and planetary environmental degradation are forcing us to confront new and difficult challenges; planetary scale challenges unlike any that human society has faced. Like all difficulties, these new difficulties contain opportunities, and the opportunities before us are planetary-scale as well. Technology is unlocking new forms of cooperation and expanding the limits of human potential, but our democracy has not adapted to these profound changes.
The conservative argument has been that the way to compete in the global economy is by taking the low road: we should cut taxes, drive down wages and try to compete directly with the developing world for jobs. But their tax cuts have not been met with a significant decline in spending, and have led only to deeper and deeper deficits. The American middle class is already facing declining benefits, flat wages, and more expensive housing, education and health care: no wonder two thirds of us feel like the economy isn't working for us at all.

The conservative argument for growth is based on a deeply and fundamentally flawed diagnosis of the critical factors underlying growth as the information economy continues to diversify and expand. Any venture capitalist in this country will tell you that financial capital is not the limiting factor in starting a technology business, and it's true for other sectors as well.

What is in short supply are good ideas. In even shorter supply are people who can execute on those good ideas, work hard and turn them into successful, sustainable businesses.

The fundamental question for growth today is this: how can our society best support people to develop themselves, to become the kinds of people who can come up with innovations and make them happen? The answer to this lies in expanding our understanding of human rights. The 21st century growth agenda has nothing less than one of the oldest economic ideas in existence - that of social justice, the foundation of human rights - at its core. In an ideas-based economy, we have the opportunity to rewrite the social contract and align our civilization and economy around both justice and growth. They're certainly far from incompatible. In fact, they are synergistic.

Take a company like Google as an example. Google's profits are, in part, a function of how many diverse, curious people there are in the world. The more diverse and the more curious people are, the more money Google makes.

And Google is hardly alone: thousands of new economy companies are linked to this same, basic wealth-of-networks dynamic. There is a bottom line rationale for a progressive economic alternative to the system we have now. While it is certainly true that many big corporations benefit greatly from the hard and soft corruption of the current system, a growing number are realizing that it is unquestionably in their best interest to have a government that can think long-term and make wise investments. And if we can't have that (yet), at the very least we can have a government that is run by people whose priorities go beyond short-sighted pandering with tax cuts and sketchy, lobbyist-driven earmark deals.

Some of this need for long term investment can be met by private capital, and still other parts can be met by philanthropy. But only a functioning democracy can provide the safeguards for the longest-term investments in infrastructure, education, research and defense at the scale these things need to happen at in a complex world. In 2003, total philanthropic giving in the United States - including corporate, individual, foundations and bequest - came to $241 billion. But the total US education budget alone for 2004-2005 school year was almost twice that, around $536 B. So the leverage opportunities that arise from having a functional, efficient and effective government that works for everyone and considers the long view are just enormous.

Personal responsibility and self reliance will continue to play roles in how both individuals and companies like Google succeed, as they always have. But just as the really big and planetary-scale problems require cooperation, so does the cause of personal freedom. True freedom is hugely complex and it is always created in a social context. Reagan was quite simply wrong in saying government is the problem: the path towards this greater substantial freedom points towards democracy, not away from it.

Democracy gives us the tools to meet these challenges. This is what democracy has always been about at its core: the art of the possible, the promise of expanding freedom for everyone through massive-scale cooperation. Tossing people out into the go-it-alone, sink-or-swim free market - let alone a deeply unfree market, where the deck is stacked against them by big corporations and a government captured by special interests - will not bend the arc of history towards justice.

Many, many books have been written lately about the need for liberal ideas. In fact we've had something of a tidal wave of ideas over the past few years - of course on countless weblogs, but also in magazines like Washington Monthly, The Nation and the American Prospect, as well as in new publications like Democracy, a Journal of Ideas. We've had deep studies like Larry Lessig's work on participatory culture and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that are helping to define the contours of potential in the new economic landscape. We've had great popular studies on our economy from folks like Barbara Ehrenreich, Tamara Draut, John Schwartz, David Cay Johnston, Norton Garfinkle, Richard Florida and Jared Bernstein, just to name a very few. And there are organizations like the Center for American Progress, Citizens for Tax Justice, Demos and the Drum Major Institute - again, just to pick a very few. These groups support deep and long-term work on fundamentals and policy design, as well as making these ideas understandable and connecting them to the political process.

These are great, but it's a vast amount of work to keep up with. Since most of us don't have the time or inclination to get into the deep end on all this, we need some basic principles. What do the ideas these authors present have in common? What are a few principles that we can pull from them?

And, what of the change from a thing-oriented economy to a person-oriented economy that Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of now forty years ago? That change may be happening below the surface: according to a recent poll, 93% of Americans think we are too concerned with work and money. The revolution in values has not yet happened, but we can design policies that will facilitate people who are hungry for this change to finally begin.

The conservative approach to growing our economy by keeping wages low and piling on debt is the low road. The progressive approach is to take the high road instead. Here are the six principles that define it.

Secure basic freedoms.
Invest in people and the future.
Democratize economic power.
Housebreak big corporations.
Build the green economy.

and last,

Globalize this approach.

At the core of these principles is securing basic freedoms. FDR's Economic Bill of Rights is a good template for this: housing, health care, useful work, education, and basic economic security are all basic rights that the federal government can and absolutely should play a role in securing. Without a basic level of security, people can't even get to the kind of freedom and opportunity that is so central to progressivism: the freedom that is the fruit of cognitive liberty, the potential to develop one's self as fully as possible. Securing these basic freedoms is the aim of social justice and it is the heart of the high road.

We need to invest in people. Investing in people is investing directly in the future of our country. To compete in the 21st century, we need to take our education and research system to the next level. Financial resources aren't the only thing the system needs, but they are certainly part of it. There is a bottom-line rational for beating structural racism and fairly distributing educational resources and opportunity; tax cuts don't create jobs, people do. The job creating leaders of tomorrow will be new immigrants and inner-city kids, if we give them a chance. Giving them access to the tools they need to become part of the participatory culture will pay us incalculable dividends.

We need to democratize economic power. The hypercapitalist system we have today unmistakably concentrates wealth. Since 1980, with government's help, this tendency has gotten completely out of hand. Unions, progressive taxation, minimum and living wage laws, and employee ownership all have one thing in common: they counteract this concentration by democratizing economic power. The American people are good and tired of being trickled down on! Our nation's economic policy has been hijacked by a small group of cranks and whiners - who, despite crumbling bridges and disasters like Katrina - are still pushing tax cuts alone as a solution to everything. This approach could not be less suited to the challenges we face today.

The response to this that you'll often hear is that this amounts to "redistributing wealth." But this response is based on a faulty understanding of how wealth is created. Wealth is not created by individuals acting alone, much as our popular culture likes to imagine it is. Individual effort plays a role, of course, but it's always in the context of investments that have come before and the society we are building together. Labor rights in particular are a big part of this. It is impossible to keep workers from organizing without cutting deep into basic 1st amendment rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, but we've seen that big companies have no problem doing exactly that. That has nothing to do with "redistribution," and it has to stop. Now.

It is long past time for government to lead on building the green economy. The long-time argument against building the green economy - that it would cost too much - is nonsense. Just a few years ago, oil was $50 a barrel, but today's headline is "Four in a row for oil price records: Crude tops $83 as dollar weakens, storm fears grow." There is indeed a storm coming. The dangers and costs of not doing anything are far, far greater. As Paul Hawken puts it, "markets make good servants, but bad masters and worse religions." They are tools for solving problems, not ends unto themselves. It is time for government to press markets into service and help us solve environmental problems.

And we need to housebreak capitalism. Capitalism is just like a puppy: it's great (at least until we come up with something better), but it definitely has a tendency to make messes. It's time to stop having to clean capitalism's messes off the rug. To do this, we have to change how Washington works. We have to bring the era of "money equals speech" to a close and publicly finance campaigns. Special interests should be at the table; but they can't buy every seat.

Last, we need to globalize this approach, and not the destructive, race-to-the-bottom low road that we've been taking so far. NAFTA is a perfect example of this, and it's been detrimental to both the US and the Mexican economies. The purpose of our trade policies, other than opening up international markets to our products, should be to encourage other countries to do the right thing. We can avoid races to the bottom, but only if we deliberately use our market power to compel our trading partners to avoid them.

In six words? Secure, Invest, Democratize, Housebreak, Green and Globalize. That's the high road.

One of the hallmarks of a successful governing philosophy is flexibility. I want to bring people together in discussion around this. These principles are just that - they're guidelines, not barriers. They are most certainly not a rigid ideology of some kind. I will always listen to you and the people I work with every day to do what is right for this country. There are people of great faith in both parties and I will work with them. The past few years have shown us all too clearly what one-party rule looks like when that party refuses to even listen to the other side.

To do this, I need your help. We're going to post longer explanations of all of these principles and how specific policies fit into them on our website over the next few weeks. You'll be able to discuss these ideas there, and if you have a story that illustrates on one of these principles, there will be a way for you to submit it.

I and my campaign staff believe the internet is an incredible tool for democracy. We've already made a number of tools available through our website to help you connect with each other. We want our campaign to be a fulcrum in building a participatory and agile democracy.

But we know technology can be very intimidating and difficult. So in every office that we're able to, we'll have a computer or two set up so that members of the public can come in and log in. We're going to designate one person to be a tech support contact. So if you have a problem with any of the tools on our website or can't figure something out and there's a local office near you, get in touch with them. We might not be able to solve your problem but we'll try our best to connect you with someone who can.

Every candidate running is saying this now, but it's important: this campaign is about you. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, we need a renewed and more participatory democracy. We're running a new kind of campaign that will help us all rise to this new challenge. Your small donations have already freed me to spend more time talking to ordinary folks and less time on the phone with high dollar donors, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate that.

Please, get involved during this campaign season. Talk with your neighbors. I know you are busy: we as a country work longer hours and more jobs than we ever have. But we need to get the word out about our campaign to millions more people, we need your help to spread this message of hope. One of your duties as a citizen of this country is to not be a spectator - and as it turns out, you're going to find it's incredibly rewarding too. You'll sleep better at night. And find out what's going on with your local government and political parties, too. Your involvement locally will make a huge difference.

In closing, this is very important. Our trust in government has been severely damaged over the past few decades, but over the past few years in particular. Government is an expression of our democracy. It is our democracy. People who say government can't work, that government can't solve problems but that it is the problem, are effectively saying that democracy can't work. It's one thing to say that you want an efficient government that uses tax dollars wisely, but it is entirely another to say that government is the problem itself. The American people working together is America's greatest source of strength, and the structure by which we do that is democracy, is our government. You and I here together, we are standing athwart history and saying yes, it is time to get moving again.

We can have a democracy and an economic system that works for everyone - but none of us can do it on our own. Abraham Lincoln - echoed four years ago by another great leader - said that a Government of, by and for the people shall not perish from this earth. Our democracy has brought us thus far on the path to freedom. The next evolution of it we're building here is the high road, the path to a secure and prosperous future.