MUSICAL LEADERS

“When voting started, democracy ended.”

In the forward to his book titled Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, William Isaacs includes the quote above but does not indicate the precise source. He vaguely gives the credit to an “ancient Greek philosopher.” This may be intentional since his point is that the political process of democracy, whose roots are somewhere in the era of that anonymous ancient Greek philosopher, were more about the dialogic process of the polis than about electoral colleges, PACS, and opinion polls.

Soon we will be heading to the polls to vote, to choose our leaders. We believe to varying degrees that this is the solution to the maladies of our society. We want our new leaders to do a better job than our old leaders. Right now it is Republicans vs. Democrats. There are those who reason that many ills will be corrected if the House and Senate shift from the current majority to another majority. There are others who reason that things must stay as they are leadership-wise in order to finish what has already been started.

We differ on this; and because of those differences we tend to quietly shuffle off to the voting booths, go home, watch the election results, and pray that our candidates take on those new leadership positions. If they win, we reason that things will get better. But it is not the voting, and the winning that lie at the heart of democracy. Isaacs writes,

For the Greeks, dia – logos, flow of meaning, was seen as a cornerstone of civic practice, inseparable from self-governing. The polis or gathering place for governing, the root of our modern politics, was nothing but a physical space required for true self-governing. The capacity for talking together constituted the foundation for democracy, far more fundamental than voting. As one ancient Greek philosopher noted, “When voting started, democracy ended.”

We have been seduced, I believe, by messianic notions that a “savior” (or collection of “saviors”), can deliver us from our social woes. In an effort to hold to this notion, every few years we play musical leaders, upsetting the apple cart and hoping that the rotten apples will get lost in the process. The problem here is that the focus is on the leaders, instead of on us. It is the collective us that will ultimately determine the fate of our society, and of the world. Isn’t it ironic that we choose to quietly vote rather than engage in open discourse about so-called “political” issues? Isaacs continues,

In a sense we are running an historic social experiment today. We are experimenting with whether or not a society can hold itself together without the core process that has always bound societies, the process of conversation.

Before we study the candidates, perusing all of the planks in their platforms, perhaps it would be a good idea to examine ourselves, and reason together, discovering together how we need to change and adjust to reign in a better society for everyone.