Imagining Democracy, Michele M. Moody-Adams

In this London Lecture, Professor Michele M. Moody-Adams will explore the role of imagination in political communities as democracies.

Part of TRIP's Centenary Lectures 2025-6: Philosophy in Retrospect and Prospect.

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:07

Good evening, everybody, and a warm welcome to another London lecture in this centenary series of lectures brought to you by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. As I announced in the blurb at the beginning of this series, our centenary celebration was an occasion to invite some of the world's most distinguished philosophers to address you, and this evening's speaker is no exception. Michelle Moody Adams is the Joseph Strauss Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University in New York. She has also held academic posts at Wellesley, the University of Rochester, and Cornell, where she was the director of the program on Ethics and Public Life. Among her many academic distinctions, she's a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. Unsurprisingly, perhaps for somebody who's not only a distinguished scholar but also an institutional leader, she has a very broad range of interests in moral and political philosophy, from meta-ethics to moral psychology to more engaged topics such as academic freedom, equal opportunities in education, the ethics of historiography, and the future of democracy. Her books include Making Space for Justice, Field Work in Familiar Places, and as a co-author, Against Happiness. And her talk tonight is entitled Imagining Democracy. Michelle, it's a great pleasure to have you with us. Over to you.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Good evening, everyone. Delighted to be here and delighted to see all of you here. So while seeking lessons from the last time Democracy Almost Died, I just get my information here, the American historian Jill Lapore observed that nothing so sharpens one's appreciation for democracy as being witness to its demolition. And you can see there the title of the article was The Last Time Democracy Almost Died. And I have to say that I second this observation as I reflect on threats to democracy in my home country. And for those who value democracy, fears of its demise can seem overwhelming. But I will argue this evening that we can constructively move past these fears once we grasp the implications of an often overlooked feature of human psychology. And that feature is the fundamental intertwining of hope and fear. And it has profound importance for political thought and action. Now, thinkers as varied as the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 19th-century poet Christina Rossetti have taken note of what's called the dyadic relationship. They're a pairing relationship between hope and fear. And as Rossetti very pithily expressed it in a poem entitled Yet a Little While, hope itself is fear viewed on the sunny side. Now Spinoza's analysis is predictably more fine-grained. Spinoza argues, in this case it's in the ethics, that hope is an inconstant joy arising from the image of something in the future or in the past about whose outcome we're in doubt. And then he says conversely, fear is an inconstant sadness, which also arises from an image of something that's in doubt. Now, Spinoza goes on to observe further, and here's another quote, this time from the only work actually published in his lifetime. We can fluctuate wretchedly, says Spinoza, between hope and fear, but he goes on in this treatise to argue that laws can be designed so that people are restrained less by fear than by hope of something good, which they very much desire. And in this way, he says, everybody will do their duty willingly. Now, we may want to resist some of Spinoza's claims about the nature of hope and fear, but I think we should be heartened by the prospect that understanding their complex relationship may allow us to improve political institutions and practices. Now, Spinoza's appeal on the other slide to an image of something as the source of hope and fear underscores the importance of imagination to political thought and action. Indeed, the main goal of my remarks today is to establish that if we want to save democracy, we must begin by drawing on powers of imagination to help us approach political life with constructive hope rather than politically destructive fear. Now, what this requires first, as I argue in the early in an earlier work, in fact, The Making Space for Justice that was mentioned in the introduction, we have to reject the idea that the imagination is a single mental faculty. In fact, a more plausible view is that the word imagination is actually shorthand for an essentially heterogeneous, very complex set of processes and activities that allow us to generate ideas, images, stories, and experience through which we can both consider the unfamiliar and reflect on the familiar in novel ways. And I've argued that there are four types of imagination that are most relevant to political life. So epistemic imagination, this one extends knowledge, sympathetic imagination, which encourages us to be sympathetic and empathetic with others. Artistic products can be the outcome of obviously aesthetic imagination. And here, I think it's not just novels and poems and plays and films, it's painting, sculpture, photographs, and even music can allow us to understand ourselves and our relationships to others in new ways. Finally, there's narrative imagination, which is the kind of meaning-giving activity that actually is fundamentally human activity that allows us to generate new ways of understanding the past and new ways of pondering futures that we might bring about through new forms of collective imagination. So I've talked about the importance of drawing on imagination, but the second component of any serious effort to save democracy is doing what we can to inspire hope. And two kinds, I'll talk a lot about hope, in fact, today. Two kinds of hope are jointly necessary. First, we must be able to hope that democracy can actually provide a way of life worth saving, but we must also be able to hope that ordinary people, including ourselves, can actually be convinced to work to save any democracy that is, in fact, worth saving. And in these remarks today, I'm going to discuss several projects for imagining and sometimes re-imagining democracy as well as for generating appropriate hope. Some of the projects I'll discuss are primarily philosophical, which for me just means that they depend mainly on conceptual analyses and arguments for conceptual innovation. But I think we also need hybrid projects that combine philosophical reflection with insights from the social sciences and the arts. And I say this because I was trained by the John Rawls, who was perhaps, sometimes I would say actually was, but he was perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century. And he believed that political philosophy should primarily generate rational consensus on principles to govern institutions. And I don't think that's unimportant, but I don't think it's the only important task, in accordance with two philosophers, and there are actually others in this category as well, but these are just two, I think, are critical. Mark Johnson and Richard Rorty are two philosophers who've argued that two of philosophy's most important tasks are actually stimulating imagination and by presenting new ways of embodying democratic values, but also inspiring hope that we can produce and preserve ways of life which actually embody those values. But you may say, why are you confident that democracy is worth saving? And my answer is that I presume with political scientist Robert Dahl, so this is the book I'm thinking of. It's actually been published, I think, in an even later edition since this cover, but he's one of the, I think, really very extremely thoughtful commentators on the nature of democracy. And he actually says that it can provide a way of life, sorry, I'm gonna wait there, it can provide a way of life that is more desirable than any feasible alternative in three crucial regards. So, first, it can protect citizens from cruel and vicious autocrats. Second, it can secure rights and liberties that allow citizens to promote their fundamental interests, and he thinks this also tends to promote human flourishing as a consequence. And thirdly, it can safeguard forms of equality, especially political equality, that allow citizens to live according to laws of their own collective choosing. He doesn't actually, he actually sort of says these three things in a rather more convoluted way, but this is what his sense of what makes democracy value actually reduces to. But there's even a more concise expression of what's, I think, valuable about democracy that I find in the work of the American philosopher, the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who argued at the end of a wonderful essay, the title here, Creative Democracy, The Task Before Us, the task of democracy, this is the very final line of the essay, is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute. And I've come to think more than ever that this formulation has special resonance since it was written in 1939 directly in response to 20th century fascism and authoritarianism. Now, of course, throughout history, influential critics have vigorously rejected this ideal. And I will talk about three different ways of rejecting it in service of an anti-democratic project. Indeed, political philosophy began with the work of Plato in his defense in the Republic of the anti-democratic project that we now call epistocracy. You may not see this word used as often as, in fact, it's it probably will be in the future, but it's the rule of the wise, the rule of the knowers. And on this view, which still generates actually lots of vigorous debate, most people are dangerously ignorant and irrational and should thus be governed by their epistemic superiors. Now, there, as I said, is a vigorous and ongoing debate, but even the most detailed defenses of epistocracy turns out offer no reliable method for determining who counts as epistemically superior in all the relevant ways. Who are the wise in all the ways that matter? And in my view, in the absence of such a method, epistocracy often comes off as little more than elitist disdain for ordinary human beings. But there's a second anti-democratic project very much in debate and discussion in the current moment, and that's the anti-democratic project of theocracy, which is much more straightforward than epistocracy about whose judgments matter, insisting that political life ought to be shaped by divine guidance. My concern is that theocrats presume that the politically relevant content of their religious beliefs is somehow self-verifying. So if you ask them how do you know, they say it's just self-verifying. The politically relevant content. And that their license, they are licensed rather, to declare what arrangements are required by their beliefs. Lest you think such projects are a thing of the past or that they're confined to any one religious tradition, consider what's called Project 2025, sometimes described in here I quote, as a blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change, close quote. This program is still playing an outsized role in American politics. Some of you might actually know this. A current preoccupation of the project's authors is a plan to dramatically reshape American family life, for instance, to eliminate online dating, to require engaged couples to attend marriage boot camp, and to enact social policy, strongly encouraging, that's the word the phrase they actually use, strongly encouraging those couples to have at least two children in order to reverse population decline caused by all the dangerous liberal elites. But history shows that when such efforts succeed, those who dissent can be subject to an extraordinarily and unwarranted coercion and even sometimes outright cruelty and violence. History also confirms that the best protection from religious oppression is a network of political institutions that protect liberty of conscience and expression. Now there is a third movement away from democracy. And people who probably start with a theocratic stance, at least many of them, who recognize that people who draw the inference, I've just drawn about the lessons of history, that they'll tend to resist the theocratic project. And theocrats then often align themselves with a third anti-democratic project, this time of autocracy, ruled by an absolute power. And I say here shored up by oligarchs and fascists, there could be others involved in the shoring up. This is a claim that might make for political right, whether that might come from political oppression, economic dominance, or some perilous combination of the two. Some citizens of once vibrant democracies have been convinced by this dystopian understanding of political legitimacy, and this has made them unexpectedly sympathetic to the oligarchs and the fascists and the autocrats who promote it who promote it. And their dystopian turn confirms the reality of a process described by two political scientists, Robert Foa and Yasha Munk, as the deconsolidation of democracy. It's a famous article. And note that it's published July 2016. This is before Brexit, it's before the American presidential election in November. They were seeing these trends for at least eight to ten years before all these other things unfolded. And this process has involved a steep decline in citizen trust of democratic institutions and practices, decline in citizen commitment to democratic norms and values, and dystopian political forces have exacerbated these developments. They've exploited partisan disagreement and economic stagnation for anti-democratic aims. And the result, which I think has a global consequence, has been a decline globally in conventional interest-based politics and a consequent interest increase, sorry, in the politics of grievance, resentment, and sometimes unvarnished cruelty. Certainly that's what's happening in my home country. But this dystopian turn against democracy is not the only, and certainly not the best, response to the obvious failures of existing liberal democracies. Drawing on our powers of imagination, we have the capacity to revise, repair, and even reconstitute democratic institutions and practices to pursue that Deweyan ideal of the freer and more humane experience in which I'll share and to which contribute. And I just briefly to give you a sense of what's coming. The next few sections, this is the longest section of the paper, but even it is not very long. I'm going to take the first part of Dewey's quote and show what it means to create a freer and more humane experience. Part two, much shorter, will show what the imagination can help us do by way of shaping a way of life in which we all share. Part three, we'll talk about designing institutions to which all contribute. And then I will come back around to good old Christina Rossetti and her wonderful pithy quotation. What do we do to safeguard life that's on the sunny side, so to speak, of fear? So let's turn now to section one, the creating a freer and more humane experience. So to understand what this involves, this freer and more humane experience, I'm going to start in an unexpected place perhaps, we can reflect on the broader project of imagining political blueprints that shape Plato's political thought. Indeed, several of Plato's best-known dialogues, but especially these three, the statesman, the republic, and the laws, are, in my view, more or less detailed attempts to imagine a blueprint for political institutions. Now, if you're an historian of philosophy or have an interest in it, you may wonder about the wisdom of my description, since the republic notoriously includes a plan to exclude dramatic poets from the ideal polis. Plato's interest in what's been called by Arthur Danto the philosophical disenfranchisement of art might suggest to you that Plato has a deep and essential mistrust of imagination. But Plato never calls for the philosophical disenfranchisement of imagination in general. And indeed, his own political thought would be greatly impoverished by such a call, since his own philosophy consistently relies on epistemic, sympathetic, and narrative imagination to make some of the most important claims. And as one Plato scholar has recently argued, Plato's image making is actually far more important to his central philosophical arguments, not just in the Republic, but generally than most interpreters have so far acknowledged. Now, in a well-known example from Book Three of the Republic, Plato constructs the what's called the myth. Many of you will know this, the myth of the metals in the earthborne. It's a way of dividing up the social classes by telling people that some have gold mixed in with their souls, some have silver, some have bronze, etc., and the people with the gold are at the top. It's a way of nondiscursively showing, not through argument, but showing what it would mean to constitute a polis on what he considers defensible principles. So he draws on narrative imagination to do this. But his myth is also a way of generating insight into what would be required to secure the consent of anyone governed by those principles. Now, of course, it is Plato's way of ensuring that a decidedly undemocratic, humanly engineered division of social classes would be accepted as a natural order. So this isn't going to tell us how to imagine or reimagine democracy. In fact, we cannot look to Plato to help us understand what a blueprint for democracy should contain. But Plato's general approach confirms that imagination helps to constitute political communities, sometimes primarily through the narratives we tell, not only, and often to secure consent to their basic institutions and practices. So we already have at least a model for the idea of rather for the project of using imagination to shape a political life. Now, by the middle of the 20th century, social theorists began to argue that imagination is not just for a small Greek city-state working to constitute the community, that in fact it was also critical to the constitution of modern nations. Some of you might know the work of the, I think, great anthropologist Benedict Anderson book called Imagined Communities. It's been remarkably, this is one of the later editions, but it's been remarkably influential out even outside of his own discipline. And he argues here that national identities are grounded in a deep horizontal sense of comradeship, a sense of national security that actually requires imagination to develop. Why is this so important? In the large geographically expansive societies that we now call nations, people may never have an opportunity to meet very many of their fellow citizens. And yet, they're capable of having, says Anderson, a sense of solidarity that makes them willing to make profound. Sacrifices for the nation, including putting their lives on the line in its defense. He's not celebrating it or criticizing it, he's just saying here is a fact. And one of the interesting things I like about this work is that he reminds us that support for national solidarity often comes through the use of the imagination to symbolically commemorate the sacrifices of the unknown soldier. And to my knowledge, almost every major society, even those that are not democracies, do have such commemorative projects at the center of their sort of national lives. And this is a way I think of telling us how philosophy might find a path to the re-enfranchisement of art more generally. In fact, a lot of my own work has been about symbolic commemoration in public projects. Now, some recent political philosophy explores the role of imagination in securing specifically democratic stability. And this is the philosopher Charles Taylor Canadian, another extraordinary presence. Some people would say there's a competition between Taylor and Habermas and Rawls for best, you know, most important political philosopher. It doesn't matter, he's great either way. And he makes, I think, a notable contribution to this whole project of talking about the imagination in political society with his book, Modern Social Imaginaries. And as he understands the central concept of a social imaginary, so I'll just remind us that he's exploring the role in democratic stability. This concept of a social imaginary for Taylor refers to something that he calls the common understanding that makes possible a society's common practices and that grounds a widely shared sense of legitimacy. This is when people are told they've got to obey the law, they've got to do this and that, they've got to pay their taxes, etc. They will sort of reach back into the memory of what this imaginary contains. And he calls it an imaginary, he says, because it's mainly, and here's, I'm quoting here, mainly because it's carried in images, stories, and legends. He says it's that collection of images, stories, and legends through which the members of a given society actually make sense of their collective practices that make up and that they will then think ought to make up the social world. Now he's had some recent refinements of the view in ways that I think are important. He talks a great deal about the special challenges of culturally complex modern liberal democracies. In doing this, and I'm glad I mentioned Rawls actually earlier, he actually explicitly rejects the writing, the argument rather, put forward by John Rawls that liberal democracies, modern ones, are stable for the right reasons, that's Rawls's phrase, only when they're grounded on those rationally defensible principles I mentioned. Taylor argues instead that democratic stability always depends on having a vibrant social imaginary, even in a very culturally complex democracy. And such an imaginary, as he discusses it, this is my way of framing it. He doesn't use this image, but it's my way. He says what it requires is that students, citizens rather, must learn how to steer a middle path or a middle course between, I'll say, the stilla of unlimited inclusion and the Charybdis of unyielding exclusion. Finding this middle path is a challenge. Now, why does this challenge arise? He says there are two competing tendencies shaping the evolution of modern democracies. On the one hand, Taylor says, in the second half of the 20th century, most liberal democracies moved towards what he calls a philosophy of inclusion. This was a way of encouraging greater toleration of internal diversity as well as greater toleration in some sense of external diversity in the form of unfamiliar ways of life that might be valued by increasingly varied immigrant populations. So there's this tendency toward including more and more and valuing it. But Taylor understands that, on the other hand, a democratic way of life always contains a countervailing tendency to exclusion. Not only because it sometimes demands significant sacrifices. Anderson says sacrifice is in fact the basis of national solidarity, right? But also because democratic life consistently confronts us with what actually here Rawls has a wonderful phrase, strains of commitment. So if you've got to respect the free speech of people who are saying things you don't want to hear, that can be quite a challenge. You have to either avoid them or you have to listen and risk being offended. Here's another example. A democracy cannot persist, as is Taylor's example, unless its members learn to forego resentment of their political opponents, even when their side, so to speak, loses an election. This restraint will sometimes be experienced as a sacrifice, for some people a great sacrifice, apparently, or at the very least as a serious strain. This means that a democratic social imaginary will tend to foreground images, stories, and legends which encourage a deep sympathy with fellow citizens, often by appealing to that history of shared sacrifice. You're asking me to sacrifice by not being upset when I lose an election? I do it because I know as a group we're willing to engage in shared sacrifice. The problem, of course, is if that's how the imaginary works, it will tend to limit any readiness to sympathize with non-citizens. Now, Taylor nonetheless argues, and I actually think correctly, that whatever the sacrifices and strains of life in a modern liberal democracy, we are not relieved of the duty to find that middle path. What this requires, he adds, is that democratic majorities must learn to share something he calls identity space with at least some non-majority social groups, and that in a stable democracy, a national identity will always be a negotiated identity. You have to renegotiate it as new groups come in with new cultural assumptions, etc. He stressed, again, I think correctly, that this negotiated identity must include a fundamental openness to immigration. This is controversial. Taylor never offers convincing reasons for this conviction. I actually am going to argue that he's right, but I'd try to construct the argument. He's urged that being fundamentally anti-immigration is, quote, at odds with the claims of a democratic society, close quote, but to my knowledge, he's never tried to explain how. Now, one challenge for any such explanation, as we all know, there can be different projects of exclusion that underwrite this broad resistance to immigration. Some opponents will say, well, political solidarity demands ethnic or racial sameness. And some of that same group may even propose to exclude groups of people they think are at least allegedly inclined to criminality or terrorism. A second source of opposition to immigration may cite a presumed need for cultural and linguistic solidarity. And this would often come along with a special resistance to groups who resist conventional cultural assimilation. A preference for exclusion may emanate, thirdly, from fears of domestic economic scarcity. And finally, in recent decades, one or more of the kind of standard sources of opposition may become entangled with the politics of grievance and resentment. And of course, as we all know, this tends to generate inflammatory and dangerously unsupportable accusations that immigrants might be getting access to benefits of social cooperation that allegedly, anyway, belong only to Native citizens. Yet I'm going to argue that none of this can override the conclusion of an argument that properly clarifies the claims of democracy. And I'll just go through it this way. So the argument I think goes this way. Anyone could become a stranger in an unfamiliar society. Being a stranger does not deprive one of membership in the human community. That status, membership in the human community, generates both a civic and a broader moral duty of something I call humane regard, by which I just mean respect for human agency, for kind of her rationality, combined with compassion for the human capacity to suffer. Democracies must protect, this is Kantian language and from Immanuel Kant, a robust right of hospitality in order to properly acknowledge the duty of humane regard. But they must also remain fundamentally open to welcoming at least some strangers as members. Now, I know this argument rests on a conviction that cannot be directly established by means of discursive argument. What's that conviction that human beings are member of an expansive, geographically unbounded community of reciprocal moral obligation? But I have long argued, actually with Plato, that some of the insights that matter most in life will not be accessible to us until we learn to see ourselves and the world we inhabit in new and newly defensible ways. Equally important, as the contemporary philosopher Cora Diamond has observed, novelists and other writers, so here's that use the imagination again, in this case aesthetic, often play a critical role in deepening our grasp of the concept human being by showing what it means to recognize another as human and what happens when we fail to accord recognition or refuse to extend it. So I'm going to tell you that to understand and be convinced by an assent to the argument I've just offered, this is the caveat, the warning, we may need to see ourselves and the world in a new way. And I'm going to give you one source of that insight that maybe some of you know, but some may not. This is why it matters that two centuries before Immanuel Kant published his famous Perpetual Peace, in which he talks about a right of hospitality, Shakespeare actually anticipated some of Kant's claims through his collaboration with a group of playwrights on a for a long time little known historical play about Sir Thomas More. One scene of the play, which dates to about 1590, the play does, refers to anti-immigrant riots that occurred in London in 1517. I think they're sometimes called the May Riots, but my memory might be misleading me here. London in 1517, and it focuses on Thomas More's attempt to quell the riots. It's believed that Shakespeare composed Moore's soliloquy. It's actually apparently the only thing that remains of his handwriting, now known as the Stranger's Case Speech, and it appeals to the rioters' humanity. It encourages them to put themselves in the place of a stranger, facing an angry mob, challenges the notion that fear and resentment of the stranger can mightfully override the duty of humane regard. And I submit that any democracy worth having should be shaped not only by Shakespeare's insight that the rioters were dangerously wrong, but also by his recognition that they won't understand their error unless they can be brought to sympathize with a stranger who confronts angry cruelty. Indeed, and here is the further conclusion, if we grasp the argument's implications, so maybe we needed Shakespeare to help us or Kant or both, we'll put the prohibition of cruelty first. This is an argument that's made by Judas Clark. Let me motivate this argument for you. It turns out that if it's the angry cruelty that Shakespeare, for instance, wants the rioters to see the moral wrong of, what is one of the most important things we can do in a democracy is protect legal structures that embody a prohibition against cruelty. Supported, of course, by a political culture that values the liberty they protect. It's a vital argument to any democracy worth having. Or perhaps, like a lot of contemporary thinkers, you might say, no, it's to express an openness to moral pluralism. But in an extremely powerful discussion of something she calls the liberalism of fear, the political scientist Jude Schlaar invites us to imagine a different starting point. She says the deepest grounding for political liberty is the fact that everyone, again echoing Shakespeare here, everyone is vulnerable to the harm that can be done by cruelty, and thus that all of us have reason to try to prevent the oppression that produces it. In fact, she reminds us that those the kind of oppression that Mill worries about in on liberty is best addressed through this project. And the cruelty that's sometimes carried out, this is her phrase, by agents of the modern state using extraordinary resources of physical might and persuasion, also can be prevented best by the protection of liberty and the prohibition of liberal of various kinds of oppression. So this means that the institutions and practices of any democracy worth having must acknowledge that everyone is entitled to humane regard. So now we move to the, as I said, somewhat much shorter in some ways discussion. It's just that prohibiting the cruelty was so important. Shaping a way of life in which we share. Actually, let's go back to that. I like that image. If Dewey is right, the democratic ideal is not just having a freer and more humane experience, but being part of a life in which we all share. And if you were Robert Dahl, you might add, this is the only way we can hope to be governed by laws of our own collective choosing. The challenge is that a blueprint for democracy underwrites collective choosing, only if it both displays and encourages something that Dewey called the habit of amicable cooperation. He meant by this the habit of having faith that it's possible to conduct even our most intense disputes, controversies, and conflicts as actually cooperative undertakings, in which we give the other chance to express themselves instead of trying to have forceful suppression of one party by the other. And skeptics, of course, may say in most modern liberal democracies, maybe political conflict has already moved too far into the medium of force and violence for this kind of Dewey and project of promoting amicable cooperation to succeed. In my view, one task of contemporary political philosophy is actually to help us understand how serious the fracturing of political communities really is. I've written on this, in fact, myself. But in my view, we have the capacity to develop the habit of amicable cooperation, and to do so in a way that reverses the fracturing of community. One of the things I've argued is that we can learn from the theory of organizational behavior, and I really mean management studies in the corporate world, but especially from the practice of people who negotiate international conflicts, people who work in peace studies. They tell us that there are ways to settle conflicts, serious conflicts, that don't require dissent into violence. So we can adapt their methods, we can learn to engage in amicable cooperation. But we can also learn to listen to the better angels of our nature. This is a quotation from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address in 1861. Why is this so important? One of the things a good leader does is discourage, through their words and their actions, the debasement of public discourse. And they encourage a political culture that condemns violent conflict, especially in times of national crisis and division. And I think one of the most extraordinary things about Lincoln, again and again, he was very skilled at reminding us what our better nature, what our better angels might say, and also at encouraging us to, for all of his other flaws, encouraging us to listen to them. Now, even if ordinary citizens can be convinced by these claims, and I'm hoping that it's not entirely unconvincing, they might still feel stymied by several undesirable characteristics of contemporary liberal democracies. And here I will address only two, and far too briefly, of the most egregious problems. The first is the fact that many contemporary democracies seem designed to produce a sense of political disempowerment. They seem designed to concentrate political power in the hands of elites who have little interest in serving the public good and who even consider public service to be essentially a path to self-enrichment. This has led a number of contemporary thinkers to urge that if we're going to have democracy worth saving, we need to reimagine how our leaders are chosen and reshape the context in which decisions are made. One of the most promising projects, is one I actually really recommend, is by political scientists, I think she's Princeton now, Helene Landemore, 2020, where she says we can address the current sense of political disempowerment by redesigning political institutions. She's engaged in a profoundly, I think imaginative, I'll give you a few examples in a moment, a profoundly imaginative effort to show how we can sort of enable the flow of power. This is a very wonderful visual image through the body politic rather than allowing it to stagnate in the hands of an elite few. And she says what you need to do to achieve genuine openness may involve several experiments with new institutions and processes. So she describes things like open mini-publics, lotocratic representation, choosing people by lottery instead of by standard number counting of votes. Even something she calls crowdsourced policy processes. And she does wonderful things. She looks at examples in Iceland, in France, all over the globe, really, democratic experiments that she thinks will help stimulate the imagination in constructive ways. You can't just borrow someone else's experiment necessarily, but you can learn from what's from what they do. You can learn about what's politically possible. A second problem is that in most liberal democracies, the widespread sense of political disempowerment is conjoined with an equally widespread sense of economic disempowerment. Disempowerment, sorry. This is why it matters greatly that in a recent meeting, I believe it was May or June of 2024, I just happened on this one day when I was about to give a talk for another context, this wonderful group of economic leaders from around the globe who acknowledged that, here I'm quoting for them, three decades of poorly managed globalization and exaggerated faith in the efficiency of markets have contributed to declining trust in democracy. And they issued this wonderful summary joint statement: if we're to restore the credibility of our democracies, and that's my emphasis there under a new narrative and policy framework is required that recognizes the limitations of markets, lays out a more innovative role for the state, and broadens, sorry, broadens our view of what comprises economic success. So I was very, I was really taken by the thought that they were actually telling us that we needed to imagine new kinds of economic arrangements. The challenge, of course, is that some aspects of the narrative people already broadly accept poses obstacles in at least two ways. First of all, the best solutions will have to resist the claim from the fascinating work by Bernard Mandeville from the 18th century that unrestrained greed is a public benefit despite being a private vice. Seems clear, I think, that in a democracy worth having, this cannot be true, and we'll have to challenge it and think about what arrangements would constitute protecting. Ways of life that challenge it. It doesn't mean greed is bad in the private sense, but it can it be a public virtue. It's not so clear. But second, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in a book called The Tyranny of Merit, maybe we need to reject what he calls the tyranny of merit and the so-called myth of meritocracy that he thinks is often claimed to justify persistent inequality in many liberal democracies. It's a myth, I'm sure we all know it, that divides the social world into winners and losers, encouraging those who win to believe that they've earned their success through nothing but talent and hard work. I'm not against talent and hard work, but the idea that the people who are doing better are only there because of that ignores the role of luck and the fact that many prizes of socioeconomic competition are distributed by broadly nepotistic institutions and practices. And it's important that as it tells the winners how wonderful they are, it produces a sense of humiliation in those who lose out. And eventually, Richard Rorty, a philosopher, actually described this process. It gives way to a political backlash against elites whom they think look down on them. And I think this is why Michael Sandel is right to say that we need a new economic narrative that sees the myth of meritocracy as morally flawed and deeply corrosive of democratic cooperation. Indeed, in my view, this myth is done more than any other to undermine the very reasonable notion that some things actually count as genuinely public goods. My list would include access to decent health care, to a high-quality education, and a standard of living that allows pursuit of a flourishing life. And I think any democracy worth having should affirm that you can promote at least some public goods, even as you protect many of our important private interests. Continuing resistance to this idea is rooted in what I think of as a Hobbesian picture of the world. Again, all these sort of sense of the visual imagery that we're relying on. So Hobbes in the Leviathan 1651 presumed that the only thing standing between us and a war of all against all is his language. It's beautiful, wonderfully written. Fear of death, desire of such things that are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by our industry to obtain them. The problem with Hobbes' view is that he presumed an impoverished account of hope. He thinks the hopes that count politically are all individualistic, atomistic hopes, and that they can support a stable political life only if they allow us to suppress, I mean, just for a moment so you don't get misled by that, to suppress our elemental fears of violence, conflict, and death. So I want to say, sorry, I want to say that we can actually constructively transcend our elemental fears. And in fact, there are many political theorists, visionary leaders, ordinary political actors who've shown us how to generate collective hope that promotes stability, not by suppressing our fears, but encouraging and allowing us to transcend them in socially constructive ways. And I actually think they end up producing something you can call a collective reimagination of political life. One of the most important examples of that reimagination, some of you may know that Roosevelt was actually seen as a traitor to his class for the way he reimagined the world. But in his first inaugural, at the height of the depression in 1933, famous line, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. And he goes on to argue that one way that Americans, in this case, could transcend their fears of political disintegration was to address the condition of what he called that one-third of the nation that were ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. And he insisted on certain government-supported projects, including the New Deal Photography Project, some of the best photography from the 1930s actually came out of this project as a way of generating empathy for those who suffer. And I'll add that he encouraged programs to promote the flourishing of the arts more generally as a way of reinvigorating democracy by enriching, in a broader sense, collective imagination. So I think we can have a lot to learn from Franklin Roosevelt. So here, I'm sorry, designing institutions to which we all contribute. So at this point, some of you who are skeptical, you heard me use the phrase collective imagination. You may say that's just a façon de parler, just a manner of speaking to which nothing in reality answers. You may even say imagination is fundamentally an individual phenomenon, even when, as in some cases of epistemic imagination or narrative imagination, maybe it never even involves any kind of inner mental imagery. But as the epistemologist and philosopher of mind Timothy Wilson has recently argued, I was stunned. I taught a course on imagination and politics, and he had just published this article recently, and I had my students read it. Just as ascriptions of knowledge to a collective subject cannot be reduced to ascriptions of knowledge to its individual members, and I'll give you an example in a moment, some products of collective imagination cannot be understood as the result of processes carried out by a single individual. And Williamson goes on to add I'm sorry, I meant to have this for you. Oh, here we are, at the right place. It refers actually a collective imagination, not to some discrete events of imagining that might take place in an individual mind, but to complex and social and historical processes that may be extended in time, even across many generations, and that may be distributed across the efforts of groups of people, even entire cultures. Now you see this and you say, what could he possibly be talking about? One of his favorite examples is fairy tales. And you know, you think of the story of Cinderella, how in many different cultures it even has sort of different emphases and it gets refined and retold, and then somebody officially writes it down, but it's a product of collective imagination. He suggests that they're bodies of scientific knowledge. Now, he doesn't actually say modern physics is his example. I'm kind of extrapolating beyond the text, but not everybody who's a physicist knows everything about the history of ideas that led up to the contemporary way we talk about physics now. There will be some people who are brilliant physicists who don't know some things that others know. So you could think of it as a product, in this case, collective epistemic imagination. I want to argue, and this is important, that democratic constitutions are also products of collective imagination. There's a mythology in the US surrounding the idea that founding fathers created the Constitution, but in fact, democratic constitutions are never written all at once. They're never written by a single person or even a single group. They're products of historically ongoing processes of interpretation, amendment, and political experimentation through which I think the collective imagination of a nation unfolds. And of course, within which their collective wisdom about the content of democratic values evolves. And I think it turns out that when a collective when a product of collective imagination, say, produces a blueprint for a flourishing democratic way of life, it confirms Williams's contention that collective imagination turns out often, not always, but often, to be more cognitively effective than individual imagination. Now, given the time that this argument is meant to take, I can't attempt a systematic rebuttal of all the arguments for epistocracy that might be made. But I will say that given the complexity of the problems that confront contemporary liberal democracies, we need to encourage cognitive diversity. And I think this makes the way a democracy works with extremely complex problems that have many distinct parts that need addressing. It makes Williamson's point about cognitive diversity, I think, more important than other. In fact, in a famous passage from his book, The Public and Its Problems, it sounds remarkably modern. If you were to read this, you would say, could this really have been written almost a hundred years ago? He says, the man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied. So the experts shouldn't assume they can just discount the values, the knowledge rather that comes from the common man. And in fact, the global health expert Paul Farmer, in a book called To Repair the World, he's no longer with us, Farmer isn't, but it's a beautiful book, actually argues that the experts won't be very good at what they do. They won't judge properly about the appropriate remedies until they learn to respect local knowledge of which solutions to a complex problem are most likely to work and most likely to be sustainable in a given economic, social, or political context. So I am thus urging that we think of democratic decision making as requiring several sources of input. I'll call them realms of political deliberation, whose judgments have to then be funneled into collective decisions and recommendations. Now, this is not an entirely new idea. Two philosophers, political thinkers, Amy Gutman and Demis Thompson, have argued that there are at least two realms. I put them up here so then you would see how they kind of link together. One is the realm of official democracy that's composed of elected officials, political appointees, and high-level civil servants, but they introduce this notion of middle democracy, which includes forums of deliberation in which citizens come together to reach collective decisions about public issues. I'm not sure that all their examples of this meet my meet with my agreement, but they say things like court proceedings, administrative hearings, meetings of grassroots organizations, professional associations, shareholder meetings, etc. But I have argued, and I argued this a while back, 2018, that we actually need another realm. We need to talk about another realm, and I call it quotidian democracy because I think there is a realm of decision, choice, judgment, choice, and action that is politically weighty in its outcome, even when we think we're just engaged in our ordinary routines as private citizens, hence the word quotidian. I'll give you just a few of the main sites. Making and justifying actions as taxpayers, voters, and jurors, offering your judgments in an opinion poll or on a petition, participating in town halls or in political protests. Thirdly, now this is a very distinctive group, not everyone will ever have the opportunity to make this kind of contribution to democratic deliberation. But if you're a policeman or a social worker or a teacher in the US, we'd say public school teachers, sort of kindergarten up through the end of high school, you represent a public service, you provide it, in effect, you kind of represent the government in a way through what's called a street-level bureaucracy. A sociologist named Michael Lipsky invented that word. But this one everybody's involved in. We're often required to decide how to promote a seemingly private interest in a context where our decision has public implications because it affects other people's access to rights and privileges of citizenship. So if you're a business owner, you own a bakery, this is a real case in the US, and you're deciding whether to serve a potential customer whose moral values you reject, you make your decision and you have profound impact on someone's access to a right of access that is a publicly guaranteed right. Or your pharmacist deciding whether to fill a prescription, even though you have moral objections to the known effects of the medication. Again, another very common example in the U.S. All four of these contexts of judgment and action are implicitly forms of quotidian democratic deliberation. I won't try to give you any detail about how they all fit together. I have my theories. But what this means is that ideally a blueprint for democratic decision making should acknowledge the importance of all three sites, of all three realms, I'm sorry, in shaping decisions worth having. So there's your official democracy. This is fun for me to do with these images here, middle democracy and quotidian democracy. And you funnel them all together, if it's done properly, into decisions. This is Dewey's phrase, to which all contribute. Now, such efforts, I think, would address the concerns of some of the epistocrats about limitations on democratic citizen competence. We would need ways to encourage people to do this well, to make their contribution a valuable one. I think some of the contributions have to be encouraged through something called deliberative citizen assemblies, but I think there are other kinds of forums for discussion and debate where people don't have to make the choice, but just to figure out how a good choice in a democratic, culturally complex democracy would be made. I think these efforts could also remind us, if you help people learn how to contribute properly, that political competence is something that you learn only by doing. You're not just born into a democracy and you're going to be a great citizen. Thomas Jefferson, I think in the U.S. context was somebody who reminded people need to have practice doing this. And it's not unlike riding a bike or playing a musical instrument. But I'll also add that one thing Dewey was very good about was reminding us that if we think of democracy as just an external mechanism for the aggregation of preferences and interests, in effect that it's really only about the official level of democratic decision making, we are not going to be able to create and preserve democracies worth having. He says you need to think of it as an individual way of life. And it's often said, well, ordinary people are either too busy or not knowledgeable enough yet, but they're they're already making important decisions. Make them more intentional about it, help them become more intentional, and help them learn by virtue of participation to do it better. And I'll even say that rejecting that picture that Dewey described, the external mechanism picture, is more urgent than ever. I think as the dystopian turn I talked about early on is leading many people to care more about prosecuting grievances than promoting interests. And one of the brilliant things about that book, Achieving Our Country, from Richard Rorty, people famously cited it in the 2016 election in the U.S., he predicted that when people care more about grievances than interests, they're willing to vote for a morally unrestrained strongman who will do their political dirty work for them. So now we turn to our final section, again, a somewhat shorter section than the others, safeguarding life on the sunny side of fear. So I acknowledge that imagining and reimagining democracy in the ways I've suggested is not necessarily easy. It will require robust interest and commitment at every level of democratic deliberation and decision. But I think it's important if we want democracy worth saving. And I think also it will turn out that this is not a single discrete achievement, having a democracy worth saving, that it's an ongoing project of shaping, refining, and preserving. And so there are four things in conclusion that I think are necessary if we're going to safeguard this kind of life. First of all, whatever Plato said about political life, if we want a thoughtful political blueprint, we have to accept that political societies evolve. In the Republic, he's trying to describe an ideal society that would be static, that would never change, but real societies evolve and change over time. And we can't foresee all the challenges that may test the strength of our institutions or the competencies of our leaders and citizens. And this is why, so that quotation I gave you from Dewey's creative democracy essay talked about forever creation of a way of life, you know, in which all contribute, et cetera. It's an ongoing task. But I do think that we can learn to carry it out properly. We can be taught how to refine and enhance familiar efforts to respond to democratic change, the things we're already doing, but we can learn to do them better. I will add that the political blueprint will also need to acknowledge the importance of affect and design institutions that encourage hope rather than fear. I actually think there are two other emotions that matter: awe and wonder, but I could say more about that in the question if that comes up. So I think it importantly, once we acknowledge the complexity of emotions and the role they play will, I think, be more likely to produce a thoughtful political blueprint. The second of the four things we need to do is actually seek a richer picture of the kinds of hope that mattered. So I talked earlier about a kind of political hope that through amicable cooperation we can constructively transcend our most elemental fears. I've never denied, and I don't, this paper does not talk as much about it as I might, but I did want to say a little bit about it before I ended. In times of great crisis and great challenge, political hope has to be bolstered by a second kind of hope. It's a stance that the former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, the leader of the Velvet Revolution, actually called deep hope an orientation towards the world that allows us to work for something because it's good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. And I've spent a lot of my writing life thinking about what this deep hope consists in and how it can be created and sustained. Havel thought, here he followed Martin Luther King, he thought that deep hope is something that has to be understood to originate beyond the horizons of experience. That's actually a quote from the book Disturbing the Peace, which is an interview that Havel gave with an English-speaking commentator. I confess that I remain agnostic about the proper explanation because I think even if it might originate beyond the horizons of experience, whatever that means, you can't sustain it unless you can reasonably believe that working for what's good has sometimes succeeded, and that there are political exemplars whose efforts are critical elements of that success. So this leads to my third of the four recommendations for sustaining the life on the sunny side. We've got to identify exemplars. I think philosophers, historians, you know, literary theorists, ordinary people, sociologists who can inspire and sustain deep hope. My list includes Martin Luther King, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and someone not everyone will know, but some may, an international jurist named Raphael Limkin, who actually helped to create post World War II the global culture of human rights. He's an extraordinary figure of extraordinary courage. And my list of cultures, I'll call them, or episodes, I like that better, exemplary episodes would include. The global culture of human rights and its emergence, but also the end of South African apartheid and Mandela's election as president, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovak, the former Czechoslovakia, and the civil rights movement in America. None of these examples provide proof that democracy worth having is always within reach. I have not claimed to be able to show that, but their stories can stimulate democratic imagination, and I think inspire political hope that what imagination presents could come to fruition. Your list may not look just like mine, but everyone needs such a list. So we have to identify political exemplars who can inspire deep hope and trust that their efforts are sufficient to sustain it. But finally, I think we have to believe with a great American essayist, the man who wrote Charlotte's Webb, if people know that story, amongst other things, we believe with a great essayist A. B. White, that it's true that inventiveness and ingenuity have often led us, this is a White's phrase, into deep trouble. We can plausibly hope for those same traits, our inventiveness and our ingenuity, to help us find our way out. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:32

Great. Well, I I promised to ask you only three questions. I'm sorry I limited myself to three because there's so much I could ask you about that, but just as well we've got an audience here to do some of the work for me. Democracy. You started the talk by saying what was good about democracy, and I agree with you, but just wondered what you thought about this um idea that some people say democracies have a sort of presentist bias built into them because today's electorates make decisions that affect people for many future generations. Tyrannies you don't have to worry about getting elected to power much better at planning ahead, or at least they could be. And I'm thinking here particularly of uh issues about managing climate change. What do you say to that? How does democracy deal with that?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:22

Wow. Well, I don't think that well-designed and well-run democracies are any less respectful of the past or of history. In fact, I think they might in some instances be more respectful because, as I said, those the things we call blueprints for democratic life constitutions, they are historical products. Um and the the philosopher of law Ronald Dworkin argued that you kind of had to interpret them properly. You have to know the history, not just of interpretation, but the context in which the different um document parts of the document emerge. Um, but on climate change, you know, I'm not sure. There actually, James Lovelace, is that his name, who wrote the Gaia hypothesis? He became very anti-democratic in his life. I've been somebody who's kind of for a while reading this because I was very interested in the idea of kind of, you know, the world as a system that needs to be taken care of so all the entities that comprise it, including human beings but not only, can survive. He became very um autocratic in his later writings, thinking that somehow tyrannies were better at um, you know, getting people to care about climate change. But it turns out there's actually studies done, so I pursue this in my own interest, that show that democracies have actually been better at holding their leaders to account. They just have to be, much like my worry about making people more competent as citizens, they have to be made better aware of what the dangers are and more willing to interact with people who have some ideas of what the best remedies for the dangers we're facing with climate change are. But there actually are studies that suggest that the sort of tyrannical approach actually is it's narrow. It in fact it suffers from lack of cognitive diversity that collective imagination can give you.

SPEAKER_06 1:10:22

Thank you. Um I take it that imagination can work in favor of a number of different political systems, so it's not just democracy that mobilizes the imagination. Um I wonder whether, as it were, so a degree of polity building, a degree of persuasion is necessary to push citizens in the direction of a pro-democratic imagination rather than a pro-tyranical one. Can democracy justify its reliance on a non-rational poly-building process like that?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:08

I push back against the idea that imagination is non-rational. Okay. There are, so I'm there are people I'm just reading right now, um, it's Antonio D'Amasio's book called Strange, Stranger Things or The Order of Strange Things, who's arguing that virtually everything about what it is to be human, including imagination, including our capacity for feeling, is deeply embedded into all the things we most value, like rationality and reason. Even Plato, I think, who might have said there are some uses of imagination, as with the dramatic, it was with the tragic poets, and I should say with Homer. He might say there are uses of imagination that are intrinsically antithetical to reason. But his uses of imagination were not. That's why we talk about epistemic reason. I mean, there are people who talk about scientific creativity and advances in scientific knowledge depending fundamentally on what imagination can do to extend our knowledge, rational knowledge. Now it's true that sometimes it works by insight that is initially nondiscursive, but I don't even think it always works that way. But I think sometimes it, I even think Plato thought that. But if it's extending knowledge, the insight should be something that can be reformulated. I don't want to say translated, reformulated into a communicable truth. So I push back against the idea that imagination is fundamentally non-rational. Sometimes it is, not in service of unreason, but often modern physics, for instance, I think, wouldn't be what it is without collective epistemic imagination at the root of it. And there are people, um, I won't remember their names, um, Sloman and Fernbach. They have a book actually called maybe it's collective knowledge or something. They argued that the best things we've done as a species have actually come from our collective, not but also our collective imagination, in um, you know, that kind of diversity cognitively of insight into something new and the possible that we haven't thought about.

SPEAKER_06 1:13:21

Okay, thank you. Last question. This is about what you called quotidian democracy, towards the end of the talk. So decisions that have public implications, they can be a pain, they can be difficult, you know. Might be that some people love loud music and staying up late, other people like being really quiet and going to bed early. Isn't the fact that decisions have public implications a pressure towards social fragmentation? So you end up choosing just to live among people who like doing things the way you do, so you don't have to do the complicated political negotiation that you described as foundational for democracy.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:00

Right. Well, I'll say a couple of things. I won't deny that certain kinds of conflicts, even the ones that are ineliminable in human life, do often make us want to separate ourselves from others and they and to separate ourselves in ways that lead us to join up in xenophobic forms of association where we, you don't, I don't like that music, I don't like that culture. On the other hand, one of the great things about Dewey, and I'll add, there is a wonderful um thinker who started out as a pragmatist philosopher, but then moved actually into labor movement work and into corporate management. Um her name, Mary Parker Follett. As you get older, sometimes you recall of names. She has a wonderful essay called Constructive Conflict, in which she says, We're so prone to think that conflict always has to have a negative outcome. But you know, a violinist takes their bow and they rub, you know, they move it across the strings, and out of that kind of you know, tension, something beautiful can come. If you're an engineer and you have to learn how to harness the energy that comes from the friction of certain kinds of um, you know, flywheels or whatever, you're learning how to get something good out of conflict. And Vollett, and I I don't I think she studied with Josiah Royce, so I don't think she had a direct contact as a philosopher with Dewey, but they work together on social projects. Volett says, look, what we need to do is learn how to make conflict work for us, to do something for us. Don't try to eliminate it and acknowledge there will be some forms of conflict that we can't turn into a socially constructive project, but far more that we can than we've acknowledged. And the book, as I said, it's the I'm sorry, it's an article, famous article from like 1916, Constructive Conflict. I love I I actually recommend that now. Again, one of these things that sounds like it would be very ancient, and you would say, oh, it's you know early 20th century, what used to us. It's a wonderful, she kind of delineates the different ways in which we can learn to resolve our conflicts. Some kinds of resolutions actually she calls integrative consensus, where we just learn to see the things we value differently. So we might care less about being listening only to our own music if we hear the music of the other culture and we learn why they love it. And maybe we might even come to love it ourselves.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:28

Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:29

You can tell I'm just such an optic. Well, I'm not optist, I'm hopeful. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:34

Over to you.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:35

Uh yes, in the corner there by the wall.

SPEAKER_09 1:16:43

Thanks for such an informative and uh hopeful uh talk. Um I wanted to ask you whether you think that religion can have a positive role to play in the political imagination. Like throughout your talk, I felt that the idea of religion was relevant to a lot of the things you mentioned, you know, collective imagination, obviously, hope and fear, and um idea of deep hope as well, as well as to a lot of the thinkers you mentioned, you know, Charles Taylor is probably most famous for, you know, the secular age and you know that theme and where you know Martin Luther King drew you know hope from as well, is also relevant to that. Um you obviously mentioned the sort of negative side of like the Project 2025, the Christian nationalism and all of that. But um, you know, there is a there's a lot of work on Christian morality as the foundation of the Western Liberal Society. So I wonder whether you think that's possible and might be present in in politics over the next decade or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:41

That is such an important question, and it's one that I struggle with a lot because I do understand why some people want to say, you know, religion is sometimes maybe like the musical taste, but obviously with much greater weight in our to giving meaning to our lives, religion can be the source of great conflict. There's a book by Karen Armstrong. I only know this because I taught recently taught a course on the ethics of nonviolence where I was helping students understand how much some of the things we value most about the kind of philosophy of ethics of nonviolence does come to us from religious traditions of various sorts, from East, from South Asia, from Christianity. And of course, Martin Luther King thought that the Christian concept of agape was one that was accessible to everybody, even people who were purely secular in their beliefs. He thought Gandhi was basically Mahatma Gandhi was basically living out the kind of essence of Christian agape, love for other people, you know, brotherly love, and he didn't necessarily use that language. So I do think, I mean, I'm a lot of my language, not in this talk necessarily, does um focus on the need for a kind of sense of something that transcends ourselves if we're going to be sociable. That's why I mentioned, I mean, I'm actually finishing a pair of lectures now for a different context, in which I talk about awe and wonder, and awe having sometimes a deeply religious origin, not always, but awe and wonder as I call them two pillars of political life. Awe makes us, I think, more likely to imagine to value the things that human beings do when they're deeply virtuous in situations we don't expect them to be. And wonder, I think, makes us value human particularity. And of course, there are religious sources for both of those emotions, I'll call I call them or affective responses to the world. So yeah, I do think, but again, I know, you know, I guess I said Karen Armstrong wrote a whole book about why you shouldn't blame religion for all the things that it gets blamed for. Like any human product, any cultural product, any anything that comes to us maybe from another source, we can misuse it. We can turn it into something that is destructive and violent. Everything that we do that's beautiful can be used to, I think, defend unacceptable modes of living. But I think religion actually maybe has greater potential for good than we've acknowledged. And it's obviously I wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for Martin Luther King's transcendent faith in something other than what we see. And I will I'm not myself deeply religious, at least anymore, but I'm glad he had that faith, or I like that's why I'm here.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:38

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:48

Hello, thank you so much for an amazing talk. Um you you mentioned the sort of experiments in democracy, uh including was it a lotocracy? So I'm just curious, are there any of those that you feel would be um that that you'd like to see kind of carried out, perhaps like in America? Like what what kind of imaginative uh changes or innovations to the way democracies uh uh run would would would you like to see?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:20

Yeah, litocracies, one I'm not completely there on. There are people. Um Alex Guerrero and has a new book out from Oxford Press about how litocratic selection should be the only way you go. You'll cut down on uh the need for certain kinds of campaign funding. I mean, there are all these um deeply disturbing aspects of any kind of even a six-week campaign as you have here, there's still features of an electoral process that can be problematic. I'm not all the way there with the laudocratic thing. I still think there's something valuable about people having to tell you why they deserve to be in a leadership role, even if you're gonna cut it short. You know, in ancient Athens, I guess every citizen had to serve. Um, but I just I think there's something about you don't get a Lincoln or a Roosevelt in a situation where you're just choosing people by lottery, or at least it's much less likely, although then you get the other people you wish you didn't have whose names shall go unmentioned today. Um citizen assemblies, deliberative citizen assemblies, but not just on the model where you give them a problem to solve and you bring in experts and you have them debate. I actually think there should be a kind of analogous forum for just teaching people how actually to take the conflicts, even cultural conflicts that divide them, and helping them learn how they can produce democratically shared commitments, convictions, policies, despite their deeply divisive convictions. So for me, something like the citizen assembly model, and a lot of people are a lot of countries rather, I think are developing new ways of doing that. But I think it can't just be let's decide whether or not we'll have a new water system in our city, but why does the water matter to us? Or why do these things we know we need to produce, why do they matter? What values that we could find shared do they represent? Is that helpful at all? She talks about things like open many publics. So the example she gives at length is the um constitutional process in Iceland. I think it's like 2010, 2011, that was supposed to help them choose a new constitution. In the end, it did not end up producing a new constitution after all. And people sometimes write it off because of that. But she says, look at all the skills and competencies that people developed. Um and I think they drew on a range of these. She calls them open many publics. I think they're just a version of citizen assemblies.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:10

Okay, so right to your right first, yes. And then I saw you too.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:15

Um thank you for a really nice topic tonight. Um I actually uh when you were talking about persistent liberal democracies, I immediately thought of X, uh, especially after uh Elon Musk took over Twitter, uh, because that was seemingly an unlimited uh inclusion. I say seemingly because there's such a thing called the algorithm. Um and as you mentioned, for the persistence of liberal democracies, we need a middle path. Um and my concern is that this unlimited uh inclusion is is what's giving way to disinformation and the impact of disinformation. And my question is actually um about how you think uh the issue of disinformation is hurting collective imagination and how that in turn is hurting the persistence of democracies and even the birth of democracies.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:08

Wow. This is one that I knew it would be asked about. It's one that I've kind of very um cautiously skirted around, and in other papers I've talked more about it. I think the problem, and and I I want to avoid the notion that we live in a post-truth world. I think truth still matters. It's just harder to figure out where it lies now. I completely agree with you about the dangers of certain kinds of technology that and social media being a use of the technology that's deeply problematic. They've created um sometimes it's too much stuff out there floating in the world, and you called it information, not knowledge, good for you. Um and sometimes it in for some contexts it filters some of the things we need to know out of our realm of reflection. And figuring out how to address these two um sort of different tendencies that have come to shape our public discourse. I'm not sure I have the complete answer. I do know that when we demand actually more face-to-face interaction as part of our political lives, so the assemblies, and it even turns out, I mean, I well I'll finish the thought first and then give the qualification. Um, demanding more in-person interaction, people do not in in-person exchanges feel as empowered to be rude and cruel and hate-filled, even when they feel it, they always feel the need to filter. And I think that filtering actually ends up being for the person educative, because then they learn, you know, I can talk to somebody who doesn't look like me, despite the fact that normally I wouldn't. But you'd never have the opportunity to do that. I think the solution is going to be finding more and more ways for people to interact personally. And one of the saddest things, there was actually something called, it wasn't called the American Room. I won't be able to remember the name of the project, but in 2019, into early 2020, there was a very broad experiment, a little bit of America of Democratic Assemblies, plus the kind of more inchoate with conversations. I talked about just sharing the thing, cultural attitudes. Um and the the um occurrence of COVID-19 intervened in such a way that a lot of the benefits that were starting to emerge and people willing to engage in more and more of these things across the country, their willingness, of course, couldn't be acted upon. It turns out that, so I mentioned that paper, um, the article rather by Jill Lapore, the very very first slide from The New Yorker 2020, she points out that in the 19th century. 1930s, one of the things, an oddly, kind of uniquely, a little bit of a you know, cheesy kind of American notion that you just have a big town hall. But in fact, there were radio-based versions of people having these kinds of deep debates on town hall, talking about the future of democracy. Um, sometimes in a more direct, face-to-face personal way, not over the radio. Around the country, people organized groups to talk. They were sort of town meetings building on the kind of New England style idea, face-to-face. And it was only in that face-to-face exchange that a lot of the values that make democratic cooperation possible emerge. I worry, I think it's wonderful. I mean, you can do all kinds of things remotely with, you know, the um technologies that we've invented. But I think they've also endangered our understanding of just how deeply as human beings we need face-to-face personal interaction, um, at least where it's possible, in order to flourish fully as a species. And that's that's what those the things that too much on you know on hateful information or too little, where you're excluding the things that would counter the hate. That's why I worry a lot about the effects of um the internet. So I agree with you completely. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:31

There was a question a couple of rows forward. Yeah, keep your hand up so Julia can see you. Yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:38

Yeah, um, thank you very much. Um, so my question is about um economic theory. Um not an economist, I'll just reference.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:50

No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:50

But just I mean it's it's also it's also a topic that's very popular in political science. But um, so how would you say that this vision of collective imagination, which indeed implies a kind of a collective agency as well? So, like democracy is a process which is kind of an exchange between free and equal agents. Um how would you relate this? And how would you say that policy-wise, we can solve the collective action problem and the free rider problem with uh by you know imposing the no by I mean by trying to uh sustain this view, and how can we make uh disagreement, well, the big disagreement that is also implied in you know Arrow's impossibility theorem and all of that, how can we make that reasonable and actually um uh actually um uh conducive to a kind of a uh uh deliberative model of democracy, an imaginative model of democracy?

SPEAKER_01 1:30:44

So thank you for your for your question. The sections of the paper where I was gesturing towards an answer are the sections in which, in particular, I challenged the Hobbesian model of atomistic individualistic desires and hopes as the grounding for a genuinely democratic way of life. And in which I challenged that that's the reason I cited the Michael Sandel book. He's not the only contemporary theorist worrying about that mythology of the meritocracy, but I think he's on to something that what we what we need are culturally influential voices of in a variety of disciplines. And it's not just gonna be in economics. People will dismiss it if it's only coming from, particularly academics who are economic, economists, or even a Thomas Piketty trying to challenge. It's got to be coming more broadly, um, who point out that the mythology, the picture, the narrative that underwrites the way we live now, is not a narrative that we a need to accept, or a picture of what it is to be human that we need to accept. And it's not one that we're gonna want to accept if we really start thinking about how human beings flourish, the circumstances and conditions under which they flourish. So I it was with reason, it was like a last-minute thing that I added the Mandeville thing in there because I realized that that notion that unrestrained greed is good, it is deeply embedded. It's not just in the US culture or English culture. Um, the other thing I would add is that in the modern world, the economic engine that is unrestrained greed is now bolstered up by unrestrained cruelty. So there probably somebody should be writing a modern version of the fable of the bees where now there's a lot of people, and there are unfortunately some deeply religious people who say this is my religion allows me to do this, unrestrained cruelty now becomes a virtue if it's going to defend your way of life and not require you to change anything about the way you see the world. What's required is not just new theories, but new pictures that can shape new self-understandings. And if Thomas Piketty can give me one, I mean, I'm I'm not a Piketty expert, but I'm trying to think. Give me a new narrative, give me a new image of what it is to be human. That's what that group, the new economic forum, was saying. And you can go there, I mean, they're still writing, it they just formed in 2024. You might want to go look at them. Um the document they published was called, I think this is unfortunate because there's another document with this name. It's called the Berlin Summit document, but it's from May of 2024, and they're on their website. They're still, I think, unfolding, actually a pretty interesting idea. Um, but it's a new way of thinking about what success is, about how you share the benefits of social um production. Not talking communism, socialism, I'm talking about a new vision that no one has yet fully articulated or named.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:20

Yes, just just to your to your left.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:26

Hi, um, thank you very much for the talk. It was incredibly interesting. Um so I really just have one question which was left a little bit unclear in my own mind. Um I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the distinction or the way that you use, I suppose, um, or distinguish between the concepts of liberalism and democracy. Because it seems to me that um the vast majority of problems that we have in Western democracies is that um most of the post-liberal illiberal forces within them, say for example, like you know, um What was the name? Post-liberal or illiberal forces within uh Western democracies. They tend to think they tend to think that the problem is more um a suffocation of democracy by liberalism. So the concepts come apart, but I suppose on your account, it seemed to me that you were giving a very thick account of democracy, where democracy is more or less totally entwined with liberal norms.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:19

That's a fascinating question. I actually was going to talk about this. Judith Glar is somebody actually in the essay that I quoted, Liberalism of Fear, actually acknowledges that they are two different strands of the political traditions many of us value. And she actually says that liberalism and democracy have a marriage of convenience, but she says she doesn't see how, if you're going to have a robust version of each of the ways of thinking in realization in the world, she doesn't see how they can separate or divorce comfortably. It's a brilliant essay, I really recommend it. And yes, I suppose I have come to think that the best of democracy demands a robust liberalism, not neoliberalism, but real liberalism. And the best of liberalism comes out when you take equality and equal voice, political equality in particular, seriously. So for me, it's the two values together, liberty and equality. Um, you know, if you had a Lockean view, it would be all about liberty. Um, and if you had a Rousseau's view, it might all be, or mostly about equality. I think Schlar is right that it's a marriage of convenience that's unlikely to be properly uh broken up, that the best of each depends upon the connection. Am I making sense? I really recommend that essay. She I think of her, I mean, she's no longer with us, much underrated thinker because she never did anything really systematic. She mean she had this kind of fear and cruelty and all that, but she never gave you a systematic view. But that that essay is just so powerful. It will it will shock you out of every bit of complacency around liberalism.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:05

Um yeah, I was I was hoping to just follow up just very quickly. Um, so I'm familiar with Schlau. Um I suppose the the thing for me is that it seems still the case that democracy can be viewed in a in a in a slightly more thin conception um as a technology or a device, like for example, in in systems theoretical tradition in say like German sociology, um, there's the conception of democracy as a purely something, a techno, a technique or a device that generates a purely numerical code. Um that's at the totally other end of the spectrum from something thick and expressive and deliberative and representative. Um just some thoughts.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:41

I agree with you, and you're right. So I think I'm I don't know what so Joseph Schumpeter, who was one of the kind of it's all external, is a thing, you shouldn't care that much about democracy as a way of. I don't know if he had any connection to this tradition. He was Austrian, so I don't know. But one of the things I do know is that it seems to me Dewey is onto something in insisting that if you don't think of democracy as something that's not a purely external decision aggregating preferences mechanism, it's not something that's going to survive. You cannot get the best out of a democratic way of life unless you think of it as a way of life, but also an individual way of life, where you're willing. It's not just to sacrifice or or you know engage or accept the strains of commitment, but to actually do something on your own part in that quotidian realm. That's not his language, mine. Um But I of course there is a thin notion, but I don't think it's a notion that actually leads to human flourishing in the way the Deweyan model does. The thicker one. But you're you're I think you're absolutely right. Of course there are. And as I said, there is, there is a whole group of theorists now. You don't have to go to that tradition who are insisting that the external mechanism model is the only thing. They tend to be episocratic. They think most citizens are too stupid to put their two cents in. But in fact, they forget you learn to be politically competent by actually a lot like riding a bike. You don't learn to ride a bike by staring at it. You have to get on and you have to fall. Um, and you have to, you know, look like you don't properly balance, and then you get it. And you can't always describe to somebody else they have to learn to.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:24

Okay, there was one on the other side of the aisle. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 1:39:30

Yeah, thank you. And uh thank you for the talk as well. Um I've gone over in my head how many ways to phrase this question, but I suppose a couple of times we uh you were speaking about the idea of democracy, well there being this It's a persecution uh not persecution, it's a prosecution of grievances when it's going wrong. And one of the ways that that becomes particularly ugly is when it turns into violence or when people want to use the state to prosecute those grievances in a violent way. And it seems to me sometimes you have the state responding to that breaking down by using violence or using the fret of violence in itself. So my question is how does a good democracy that's doing well deal with violence within itself? How much does it tolerate it? What does it do with it?

SPEAKER_01 1:40:23

I couldn't give you an algorithm for that. I could tell you that, so I here it's this is actually kind of the influence of Rawls here. There is a limit to what we have to tolerate, even in a tolerant society. When order that makes ordinary life possible is under threat, the state may have to respond regrettably with some kind of coercive force. I think it should always be the last resort, but sometimes it is a necessary resort. Do you want, I can't give you an algorithm for that. It you know depends on the context, on the sort of violence in question. But you're absolutely right. It's been a deep worry of mine. I spent a lot of, so I have a paper that just came out in the um American, when I was president of the APA, it was my presidential address about the fracturing of community that's or that has emerged out of this politics of grievance. We don't have to live that way. And Dewey has, I think, and again, I mentioned Mary Parker followed as a sort of companion to the Dewey and ideal. We can learn to resolve conflicts, even serious. You can't eliminate conflict, it's part of life. You know, a married couple, I've been married 41 years, my husband and I argue once a week at least, right? You can't eliminate it, but you can learn how to resolve conflicts. How first of all to have the conflict in a way that doesn't have to devolve into something that's physically destructive, and then you can learn how to resolve it in a way that um can, in principle, produce something constructive. It doesn't always. But I don't have an algorithm. Um, in in a theory of justice, Rawls talks about the limits of toleration and says you can't say in advance what they are, but you've got to say if there are modes of violent action, dissent, and so forth, that threaten an order that makes human flourishing possible, that even makes democratic life possible, you've got to respond. Um, to me, it's always the last resort. I'm not talking about teaching a course on the ethics of nonviolence. I'm not sure I'm all the way there. Um, I don't, I, you know, sometimes I believe there's a place for self-defense. Um, and it the idea of defending the nation against serious threats, I think is not, it's an analogy to self-defense. So yeah, I but I think you can teach people how to resolve, how to have the conflict differently and how to resolve it differently so that it doesn't devolve. You know, while I was giving my presidential address the week before writing it, the fellow who shot the CEO of the healthcare company outside the Hilton, you know, I hate the big healthcare firms. That's not how you resolve your conflict with a healthcare company that denied your relative a claim or whatever it might be. There are other ways. And we need as a democratic society to remind people. Um, for me, the the part of it is leadership. Um, it's not without reason that I mentioned Lincoln and Roosevelt. These are people who avoid the debasement of public discourse. Um the uh we've the refusal to celebrate the cruelty. Um as I said, in my home country now, there are people who say cruelty is a virtue if it's in service of what we believe. So it's it's not just ordinary people, it's not just agents of the state in the sense of police or whatever, it's the leadership that sets out a standard to appeal to what I've Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.

SPEAKER_06 1:44:07

I think we had better leave it there. Um the discussion was so interesting that I've allowed us to go 15 minutes over time. Which I completely forgot. Um so uh you've got a 15-minute bonus QA. Uh thank you very much for your contributions, and Michelle, thank you so much for.