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The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks.
Michael Viard/Getty Images
Can the mighty rhizome teach us how to find a new social paradigm?
Dec 10, 2024
America is grappling with the implications of the election, and many are perplexed, even shocked about just how fast our society seems to be changing. Most people believe that our two-party system of democracy is stable and the uprising of authoritarianism and divisive red-versus-blue tribalism is an abrupt and anomalous change.
If you imagine our civil society as an organism, one would think its reaction would be to try to reclaim its previously perceived stable state. However, in nature, many organisms are well-equipped to embrace new realities and adapt in order to persist. For our society, we need to support and guide social change that can progress our democracy into a new paradigm. We can do this by stepping back and building new relationships for the purpose of understanding across our differences and creating change together.
I study change processes as they occur through transformative learning networks. These loose- knit social networks prioritize learning from others. To move through complex crises and spawn new realities, the people who gravitate to these networks take risks by disrupting their usual social patterns to build new relationships and understanding across ideological, institutional and geographic boundaries. These networks can give way to new professional fields, new schools of thought and even new organizations. For example, the Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network started as a group of individuals from different walks of life who all wanted to build community resilience in the face of wildfires; they just had different ideas about how to do it. Acknowledging that wildfire management is too complex for a single approach, they pooled their diversity of experiences and connections to innovate new solutions.
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We have all heard the phrase “the only constant in life is change,”attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Martin Luther King Jr. is credited with proclaiming, “change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”Human communities have evolved with a set of evolutionary biases that enable us to ignore and resist change. A prime example is our collective ability to discount the very real evidence for and effects of climate change. We fail to notice all the pieces of change as they assemble themselves until we are surprised by the qualitatively different state in which we find ourselves.So here we are, stunned and unsure how to make the next move.
In the mighty rhizome, nature demonstrates for us why change may surprise us and how, while we cannot stop change, we may be able to guide the change we want to see in the future. If you have ever weeded a garden you know about rhizomes. Invasive weeds (like Japanese knotweed and giant horsetails) and pretty ones (like wild iris) are all subterranean organizers. Rhizomes have no beginning and no end, they are decentralized, they struggle and spread underground hidden from our view and occasionally surface into the sunlight in bombastic manifestations showing us an organism we forgot existed has only gained vigor while we were not paying attention.
Even though we cannot see most of the rhizome's biomass and activities, underground it gathers energy, branches, twists and turns, breaks through barriers, and expands its network until it is ready to show itself again. The rhizome is a prolific botanical metaphor used by French philosopher Deleuze and his social activist collaborator Guattari along with contemporary organizational philosophers and change scholars to understand the complexities of social change as non-linear, heterogenous, non-hierarchical and subterranean.
The rhizome metaphor reminds us that we cannot simply rebuild hierarchical structures to generate change. Instead we must go subterranean to build our own learning networks, create new bonds, branch out and break through the barriers that constrain us. Engaging in civic society, participating in new relationships and learning from those who are engaged across social and political spectrum can help us reconfigure our understanding of our possible futures and gather our collective strength until we are ready to emerge as something new.
Connecting across our differences is scary. Thanksgiving tables across the country last month were full of anxieties associated with communicating in spite of our differences. We may prefer our instinctual draw to familiar homogeneous social gatherings that reinforce our biases and to fall in line under hierarchical organizational structures that provide clear rules on how we must behave. But, if we take on the rhizomatic view, we can instead be comforted by the knowledge that change happens through subterranean activity and if we want to be part of that change we need to build uncomfortable connections so we can learn together and imagine a new future.
So take a risk, be disruptive and find new people who challenge your assumptions and build friendships that create conditions for you to learn new things. You never know — you may be starting a new social movement.
Risien is the director of transdisciplinary research at Oregon State University and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.
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New York's daily newspapers had very different headlines the morning after Donald Trump was convicted in s hush money trial.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Why the American media and their critics won’t stop telling the same lie
Dec 09, 2024
The American media has a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.
“Bootleggers and Baptists” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.
There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite right, partisans, politicians and journalists themselves inflate the power, influence and importance of “the media.”
Let’s stay with the journalists for a moment. Members of all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. Nearly everyone, from politicians to plumbers, wants to believe that what they do matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors, journalists probably have the highest estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong — heck, I like to believe what I do matters. It’s that they exaggerate not just their power and influence but also their celebrity and personal authority. Heart surgeons are famously arrogant, but there is not an endless stream of conferences, books, editorials, essays and academic courses dedicated to the indispensable role of cardiothoracic medicine. I doubt there is any sanitation or plumbing trade journal that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on its front page.
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In psychological terms alone, it’s in the interests of journalists to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But the media are a mess in part because they believed their own hype.
I should be clear: I’ve had my own obsessions over the years, working as a conservative media critic and writing scores of columns about liberal media bias — which is real.
But I’ve grown weary with media criticism, again not because the criticisms are necessarily wrong but because they overestimate the power of the institutions they question. That’s the Baptist and Bootlegger problem: The outsize power and influence of the media is a lie that all sides have agreed on.
It’s like American journalism is an exhausted prizefighter on the brink of collapse, held up by his opponent to give the crowd a good show.
According to many on the right — who often unwittingly repurpose old left-wing formulations first introduced by progressives, “cultural Marxists” and other lefty bogeymen — “the media” create narratives and manufacture consent (a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky) that the rest of us are powerless to overcome.
Consider climate change. The press has invested vast resources to climate coverage and has been hectoring and catastrophizing about it for 20 years. And yet, climate change remains at or near the bottom of every public opinion survey about the “most important issue.” If the media can manufacture consensus, why is there so little consensus about climate change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just that it should — but can— define the interests of the public. The amount of energy and handwringing that has been put into, say, AP Stylebook revisions over terms like “illegal immigrant” or whether to capitalize “Black” or “white” when discussing race is premised on a grandiose theory of the role of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The whole “defund the police” conversation in the press transpired amid near-zero support for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a MAGA rally front-seater compared to many in the media (and not just among opinion columnists), and yet Trump not only won but improved his standing with nearly every demographic group.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the old “but real socialism has never been tried!” trope. If only the media had really held him accountable — or took climate change, race, etc., more seriously — things would be different.
The response from many in the media is to wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, the ineffectiveness of the media to control the narrative is occasionally celebrated but it never diminishes the hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, Michael Shellenberger insisted last summer, “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it. The industry has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline, 77 percent. Trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth as best you can and stop worrying about narratives. The American people will write their own.
Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Reading, Pennsylvania, can be a model for a path forward.
arlutz73/Getty Images
The election couldn’t solve our crisis of belief. Here’s what can.
Dec 09, 2024
The stark divisions surrounding the recent presidential election are still with us, and will be for some time. The reason is clear: We have a crisis of belief in this country that goes much deeper than any single election.
So many people, especially young people, have lost faith in America. We have lost belief in our leaders, institutions and systems. Even in one another. Recent years have seen us roiled by debates over racial injustice, fatigued by wars, troubled by growing inequities and disparities, and worried about the very health of our democracy. We are awash in manufactured polarization, hatred and bigotry, mistrust, and a lack of hope.
I believe the recent election was yet another proof point of these prevailing conditions in society that have been deepening for the past few decades.
Where does this leave us? If we as a country, as communities and as individuals aim to meet this moment, I believe we must focus on what it actually will take to address this crisis of belief.
Reading, Pennsylvania, a community I’ve been working with for over three years, provides a window into this challenge.
Some 10 years ago, a New York Times cover story declared Reading the poorest community in the United States. Once a predominantly white town, today it is nearly 70 percent Latino. For both the Trump and Harris campaigns, the community held deep significance as a Latino stronghold in a key battleground state.
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Each campaign held rallies there to activate potential voters. Both made promises as to how they’d serve the community if they were elected. Both, in my estimation, failed to see Reading for what it really is.
Where they saw people as voters, I see people as community members. Where they saw possible campaign donors, I see people's everyday contributions to the life of their community. Where they saw divisions to exploit, I see people coming together amid their real differences. Where they saw the opportunity to use poverty and working class struggle as a political football, I see people trying to support one another to improve their individual and shared lives. Where they saw a broken educational system, I see the community coming together to make education the entire community’s business.
After the election, I naturally thought of Reading. In fact, I visited the community just days later to release what The Harwood Institute calls a “ripple effect report.” This report documents the systemic change the people of Reading have created in just a few short years through our work together.
Reading is on the move at a time when so many communities feel stuck. Consider the following:
- Where people once saw seemingly intractable challenges — including a youth violence crisis, widespread mental health challenges, language barriers and a lack of access to early childhood education — today action is being taken on all of these fronts and others, producing real, tangible gains.
- Where people once described fragmented organizations marked by competition and operating in silos, today there is a growing network of leaders and groups who have shifted from just getting together to working together with a new shared purpose.
- Where people once felt neither seen or heard — or even included in community life to begin with — today people from various backgrounds and who speak different languages and dialects say they feel a new sense of belonging and possibility.
- Where people once saw deep divides across neighborhoods, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and language, and between and among institutions and organizations, today people are increasingly crossing these dividing lines and building a community grounded in shared responsibility.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, change in Reading started small and grew over time. It was led by everyday folks who care deeply about the place they call home. Ultimately, Reading is proving that we can create a more promising future and restore our belief in one another by forging a new civic path.
So yes, we have a crisis of belief on our hands. But we also have communities like Reading that are demonstrating that there is a better way forward. That there is a real alternative to our current divisive politics. That we can believe in something again. And that we can spread this belief from the local up to the national level.
More empty promises from politicians is not the answer to what ails us today. The answer will come from our local communities.
Harwood is president and founder of The Harwood Institute. This is the latest entry in his series based on the "Enough. Time to Build.” campaign, which calls on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build together.
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"Show the Way" by folk singer David Wilcox is a gift to this moment.
Love will show the way
Dec 09, 2024
I’ve spent nearly five decades encouraging citizens to move from debilitating despair to engaged activism. During all of this time, whenever I needed a break or a little inspiration, I turned to music, something I think more and more of us need these days. So it was a special treat to rediscover “Show the Way,” a song by folk singer David Wilcox and a particular gift to this moment. It begins:
“You say you see no hope.
You say you see no reason we should dream
that the world would ever change.
You say that love is foolish to believe
‘cause there'll always be some crazy
with an army or a knife
to wake you from your daydream,
put the fear back in your life”
Too many of us see no hope and feel the fear creeping back into our lives.
I heard warnings of that fear and hopelessness at the 2024 Miami Book Fair. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni spoke about his book “The Age of Grievance” and his concern about “our nation’s change from a fundamental optimism to a fundamental pessimism” and bemoaned “our love of simple answers that absolve us of any responsibility.”
Eddie Glaude Jr. — Princeton professor, MSNBC panelist and author of “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For” — warned that President-election Donald Trump “gives a permission structure for folks to hate and blame others for their condition.” Journalist and author of “We Are Home” Ray Suarez cautioned that “President-elect Trump is offering recycled hatred from the earliest time in our country” and worried that “threats are so huge that we’ll make room for cruelty.”
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But along with the authors’ deep concern were their calls to forge a better way. Bruni encouraged “civil discussion” and cited “the need to find common ground and seek compromise.” Glaude said that “for democracy to work we must become better people.” And Suarez’s own podcast, “On Shifting Ground,” aims to “give us hope for human resilience.”
In “Show the Way,” the songwriter’s relief from the bleakness comes in the chorus and points to the grounding that all great spiritual and political leaders offer:
“Look, if someone wrote a play
just to glorify what's stronger than hate
would they not arrange the stage
to look as if the hero came too late?
He's almost in defeat,
it's looking like the evil side will win
so on the edge of every seat
from the moment that the whole thing begins.
It is love who mixed the mortar
and it's love who stacked these stones
and it's love who made the stage here
although it looks like we're alone
in this scene, set in shadows,
like the night is here to stay
there is evil cast around us
but it's love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way”
Wasn’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. saying, “It’s love that wrote the play” when, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality”?
And didn’t King offer further clarity on what each of us can do to contribute to this ultimate reality when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that”?
But this leaves us with the question, “How?”
Organizations that work to deliver transformational advocacy lead with love and train us to reach across the aisle. They 1) start with bringing people together and forming them into local chapters so we’re not working alone, 2) train us to become effective activists and 3) encourage us to have breakthroughs, to do things as activists we never thought we could do. They treat us as the powerful people that we are.
But most nonprofits don’t even take the first step. They fail at starting new chapters, or they avoid the challenge altogether, because they see their members as incapable and not really committed.
I find former Citizens’ Climate Lobby Executive Director Mark Reynolds’ approach to starting a chapter to be particularly inspiring:
“Before I go to a city to start a CCL Chapter, I decide that I am going to fall in love with them before I get there. So, when I arrive, I try to find evidence in them and in the environment about why I will never be the same from having spent time with them.”
There will be a lot of challenging and exciting work in the next few years. That makes it all the more important to find an organization that understands and operates from the realization that “In this darkness love will show the way.”
Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
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