Building a Living Democracy ... The Dialogue Continues

IN LIGHT OF THE EVENTS IN EASTERN EUROPE over the last year, Sojourners invited Gar Alperovitz to sketch a picture of an economics for the future. The result was his article "Building a Living Democracy" in our July 1990 issue. Taking into account the collapse of statism, or communism in the East as well as the declining moral capital of free-marketism in the West, Alperovitz opened a dialogue on the essentials for an alternative economics.

Sojourners has invited a handful of responses from others who interact with issues of economics, anticipating that each would bring a unique perspective to bear on Alperovitz's foundation. With these eight contributions, we hope to help the dialogue continue.

-- The Editors

The Renewal of Citizen Politics

I APPRECIATE GAR Alperovitz's attempt to relocate the progressive vision in participation for genuine self-government -- emphasizing that equality and liberty are prerequisites for meaningful participation. Unfortunately he did not make the break I was hoping for.

To some degree, Alperovitz's approach is still limited by what I call the "manifesto" approach to social change. We decide on the values, define the program, and then sell it to others, or, preferably, "convert" others to our truths.

If we progressives continue to focus on end-goal values such as equality, as does Alperovitz, we will continue to be seen as intent on foisting our ultimate plan on others, I fear. Most Americans think equality means a future state of forced leveling in which a lot of people get something for nothing.

I'm not quibbling over semantics. Our words have incredible power. Contrast "equality" with "fairness." Fairness suggests not an end point but an ongoing process -- everyone getting a chance, or even a second chance; and everyone carrying their share of the load. Responsibility, accountability, fairness, participation -- these are concepts that communicate a rewarding process, not an ultimate state (which someone else imposes).

But the problem of language reflects a deeper one -- that Alperovitz's call for "living democracy" is in the form of a prescription for alternative economic and political life. Yes, it goes beyond both "isms" (statism and capitalism) to envision more democratic decision making. But what we need may not be more bright ideas for alternative structures. Many localized (and some national) glimmerings exist. Rather, our energies and our creativity are needed to create consciously a democratic process, out of which will be forged concrete alternatives.

In other words, our biggest stumbling block is not the lack of a convincing program but the lack of an engaging process through which people can create that program.

If, in drawing up our alternative designs, we appear as just more "experts" with our own brand of specialized knowledge, we do nothing to diminish the sense of powerlessness that people feel. If our process mimics the dominant instrumental view of politics -- or if it fuels the polarized, highly moralized brand -- we do nothing to encourage people to take on the joys and frustrations of public engagement.

For the real crisis -- the world crisis -- in my view is not that "equality" and "liberty" (Alperovitz's key values) haven't been realized but that people feel increasingly disaffected from those public processes essential to their realization. Today's monomanical celebration of "the market" suggests to me a profound disillusionment with politics. As a result, people seek an organizing mechanism that is automatic (even, handily, "invisible"), allowing them to avoid public encounter altogether and trading citizenship in a polis for consumership in a market.

IF TRUE, THE REAL CHALLENGE to progressives is neither to proclaim beautiful values nor to design elegant answers; it is to create a politics of practical problem solving, one that is engaging and rewarding, and that both respects people and allows them to express and develop their own values in interaction with one another.

This means learning, modeling, and mentoring the "democratic arts" of active listening, dialogue, creative controversy, reflection/evaluation, negotiation, and compromise, among many others. All are arts needed to solve real problems, but perhaps were left undeveloped as long as we thought our job was only protesting and preaching.

To the degree that we dwell on our own ultimate vision, we blind ourselves to the here-and-now renewal of citizen politics. It's happening. Citizens are successfully challenging the power of the mining industry through Kentuckians For the Commonwealth. Community-based organizations affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation are taking responsibility for reforming schools from Maryland to Texas. Students in a grade school in southern Ohio are organizing themselves into teams to address community environmental problems (and not just to paint posters for Earth Day!). In "economic literacy" workshops in California and elsewhere, low-income workers are discovering their hunger and their capacity to de-mystify the jargon and engage in envisioning solutions themselves.

Progressives should be asking less whether these programs match our vision, and instead what we can learn about the concepts and arts of politics as community problem solving. What draws citizens into the public realm and sustains them over time? How can these concepts and arts be adapted to diverse settings and be actively taught, empowering more and more Americans to see public life as a vital human need, a rewarding arena just as essential as private life?

To be part of creating democratic public life means to preach less and listen more; to worry less about our vision of the future and more about building on an emergent politics of community problem solving in which people are developing capacities to shape that future themselves.

Frances Moore Lappe is the author of Rediscovering America's Values (Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1989) and cofounder of Food First, where she directed its Building Citizen Democracy program when this article appeared. In 1989, with Harry C. Boyte, Lappe cofounded Project Public Life, a national partnership for civic renewal.

'A Whole World of Heroes'

"THE DISEASE with which the human mind now labors," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, "is want of faith." These words appeared in his essay "New England Reformers," a sympathetic but critical discussion of the antebellum enthusiasm for sweeping institutional changes designed to promote equality, enlightenment, temperance, peace, and freedom. Emerson argued that society needed self-respecting men and women more than it needed a perfect set of institutions.

In their preoccupation with equality and social justice, he thought, reformers would level humankind to a common type and destroy respect for heroism and "genius," which inspired people by their example to live on a "higher plane." "We are weary of gliding ghostlike through the world," Emerson said. "... We desire ... to be touched by that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and make our existence a benefit."

These characteristically Emersonian sentiments exemplify one side in a long and continuing debate about whether democracy has to rest on virtuous citizens or whether it requires the right kind of institutions. The opposite side in this argument is best exemplified by the tough-minded Jeffersonian theorist John Taylor, who went to the heart of the issue when he claimed that self-interest was a "better and more permanent basis" of democratic government than virtue.

In his Inquiry Into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814), Taylor took the position that statecraft should seek to enlist "the interest of vice on the side of virtue." "An avaricious society," he insisted, "can form a government able to defend itself against the avarice of its members" -- a government of checks and balances, bills of rights, and so on. "It is in the governing principles, and not in the subject to be governed, that the virtue or vice resides, which causes ... freedom or oppression."

Alperovitz stands in the leading tradition of John Taylor. The institutional reforms he advocates amount to a far more energetic use of the state's powers than anything Taylor had in mind; but he too sees the issue, quite explicitly, as institutional. He recommends a whole series of structural changes in the hope of making people secure in their jobs, equalizing wealth, limiting corporate power, decentralizing political authority, and reviving democracy. It goes without saying that these are commendable goals.

Equally commendable is Alperovitz's willingness to break with the social democratic legacy, his openness to conservative thinkers, and his invitation to embark on a searching discussion unbounded by established political dogmas. He is right, I think, when he speculates that the current state of affairs, both in the United States and in the world as a whole, makes such a discussion more feasible than it has been for a long time.

SINCE I AGREE WITH ALMOST EVERYTHING Alperovitz says, why do I read his article with a certain sinking of the heart? It is because his institutional approach does not go to where the trouble really lies. He invokes Paul Goodman, but it is the Goodman of Growing Up Absurd, not Communitas, that we need to listen to.

"It is hard to grow up without Faith," Goodman wrote in the first of these books (the second in point of composition). Specifically, it is hard to grow up without work that demands enterprise, imagination, a willingness to take risks, and a desire to do something useful in the world.

Drawing without embarrassment on a theological tradition going back to the Reformation, Goodman reminded his readers that the only works worth getting excited about are the fruit of faith: "The 'Protestant ethic' is correct; and when our society now turns against it, it is admitting that it has lost a saving grace."

Alperovitz recalls that American society once rested on "millions and millions of individual entrepreneurs," who shared the "experience of individually risking capital and being directly responsible for their own economic enterprises." The theoretical rationale for this arrangement, as understood by people like Emerson and Goodman, was that proprietorship conferred a sense of vocation and elicited courage, resourcefulness, self-reliance, hope and good cheer, overflowing vitality -- "virtue," in a word.

But if that is the case, the answer to what ails us now does not lie in making people more secure in their jobs, much less in establishing a "legal right to a job." A job is no substitute for a calling. A democracy of job-holders is a contradiction in terms.

If the "entrepreneurial basis of liberty can never be retrieved," democrats are done for unless they can discover its moral equivalent in workers' ownership and other forms of cooperative enterprise. But first they need a spiritually compelling vision of life on a "higher plane." Without that, the public will take no interest in the search for an institutional equivalent of proprietorship (if that is in fact what Alperovitz has in mind). The public will not even recognize it as such. Unless the structural changes advocated by Alperovitz are informed by a new version of the Protestant ethic, people will dismiss them as another panacea handed down by experts.

If democracy has nothing better to offer than jobs and job security, why should anyone take it to heart? Aristocracies were cruel, exploitive, and often stupid as well; but at least they aimed high. They encouraged men and women -- those few who were in a position to aspire to more than subsistence -- to make the most of themselves. If democracy cannot generalize this kind of ambition (instead of doing its best to extinguish it), then democracy has no claim on our imagination.

The best definition of democracy was written, quite inadvertently, by that archenemy of democracy Thomas Carlyle: "a whole world of heroes." Where is the democratic prophet who will adopt that as a platform?

Christopher Lasch was Don Alonzo Watson professor of history at the University of Rochester in New York and the author of the forthcoming book The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (Norton, late 1990) when this article appeared.

When All the Rules Have Changed

I AM HAPPY TO SEE Gar Alperovitz raise all the right issues. His view that fundamental debate is now vital for America's future is much in accord with my own. Freedom, equality, and ownership, as well as how to constrain markets without the use of now-failed Stalinist central planning, are now debates in East and West, North and South.

However, shades of the Cold War remain inextricably coded within the discipline of economics -- which is why this narrowly focused, obsolete discipline can no longer monopolize the world's debates about these re-emerging fundamental concerns. Alperovitz still relies on this "economism" framework, whereas I now believe that this framework is widely dysfunctional.

Precipitating the exciting, open debates now occurring about the future of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China into economic slogans concerning the "triumph" of capitalism, the "magic of the marketplace," and the "failures" of communism and socialism only cuts off more fundamental rethinking and restructuring. It confuses officials in the South while infuriating those in formerly socialist countries.

Thus it becomes evident that the instincts of formerly socialist and communist officials to move toward markets and democracy are correct. They are searching for feedback, since complex, non-linear, dynamic systems cannot function without multiple feedback loops. A major error of neo-classical economics is its over-reliance on one form of feedback -- prices and markets -- which can only function well if all social and environmental costs are included. Since this can never be fully achieved, democracy provides an equally essential feedback loop -- votes.

However, prices and votes are only necessary, not sufficient. Additional vital feedbacks include: crusading, muckraking mass media; free associations of citizens, consumers, professionals, and workers; laws, rules, and regulations (constantly reviewed and amended); and all of nature's feedbacks of acid rain, rising levels of carbon dioxide, desertification, ozone depletion, as well as many humanly constructed "early-warning" mechanisms to supplement our senses and limited time horizons. A whole range of such additional indicators are now being introduced into many governments to correct their macroeconomic indicators and measures of "progress" such as the Gross National Product.

THESE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES ARE STILL being addressed in economic terminology as, for example: regulation versus deregulation, public versus private sectors, privatizing industry or nationalizing the means of production. All such debates boil down to a basic discussion of the rules of interaction.

In fact, what economists have taught us to reify as "the economy" is always a set of rules embedded in the various goals, priorities, and values of societies -- their "cultural DNA codes." No economic algorithm can be applied to any society across the board, which is one of the reasons why development economics has created so much hunger, debt, and ecological devastation in the world.

The London-based Economist magazine illustrated the schizophrenia of development economics in its "Survey: The Third World" of September 23, 1989. While editorially noting the tragic reverses in the South during the 1980s, it then continued with familiar urgings for more use of market forces, more social belt-tightening and "holding steady to the course," until the debt and other problems could be overcome and "normal" growth and progress could resume.

Yet in the same issue, actual reports from the scene belied this conventional wisdom. For example, the reporters admitted that the success of the "Four Little Tigers" of Asia (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea) had little to do with markets, since all four are heavily government-directed. The reporters' embarrassing conclusion was that the key variable in development was actually government regulation, and whether various governments had regulated "well" or "stupidly," or whether they had merely been "lucky."

Such a conclusion relegates 200 years of economic theorizing to a back-of-the-envelope triviality -- obvious to many of us in other disciplines, but still unacknowledged by economists anxious to protect their intellectual investments.

Hazel Henderson was an independent futurist, development consultant, and the author of Creating Alternative Futures (1978) and The Politics of the Solar Age (1981 and 1988) when this article appeared. An expanded version of this article, "From Economism to Systems Theory and New Indicators for Sustainable Development," appears in Technological Forecasting & Social Change (May 1990).

Third Party Time

"THERE ARE VERY DEEP LINKAGES between the structure of the economic system and the kind of politics it generates or permits. Little evidence exists to show that traditional political activity has had the capacity to move the American system toward greater economic equality in the 20th century."

At first glance, the above statement by Gar Alperovitz is one of the key assessments regarding our present-day American impasse in terms of the system's failure to reverse the process that generates greater and greater degrees of social and economic inequalities. As outlined in his article "Building a Living Democracy," a critical analysis of our American situation calls into question the 19th and 20th century role of the state itself, whether we are discussing the past performances of the Western-style, capitalist free-enterprise market state, or the socialist-style states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or the liberal welfare state.

Since both the capitalist and the socialist state apparatuses are inherently prone toward the ultimate fruition of anti-democratic processes, especially in the domain of economics, we would have to retrace social history all the way back to tribalism (primitive communism) to discover the designs of popular democracy (both social and economic) in the absence of some form of state political jurisdiction. Thus, we are stuck with the state, or some form of the state, from here on.

Even to conclude the obvious -- "Democracy in America is a slowly dying form: It has all the constitutional appearances of a vital practice, but its heart seems quietly to be weakening" -- is to suggest that it is not that the constitutional form is dying. It is the democratic content that is atrophying through a process of evolutionary social and economic disarray.

Come what may, the constitutional-state form will and must remain. The conservative versus liberal arguments over "too much" or "not enough" government intervention have to be argued out within the present state form, preserving the structural building blocks of the ballot, freedom of association, freedom of the press, and individual liberties.

It seems to me that the American constitutional-state form historically would allow more political styles of innovation than any other constitutional-state form (and this includes even the socialist-state forms of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe). Yet what is happening in those countries with a socialist-state form of government is that all of the anti-communist, one-party state protest movements have no other option but the organization of a number of different styles of second or third political party movements against the dominant Communist (one) Party state apparatuses.

If one reduces the political field of inquiry to a comparative investigation into the relationships among modern forms of nation-states (Western and non-Western), what would be the comparative significance of perestroika in the Soviet Union? An American form of perestroika means a fundamental restructuring of the dominant political party system with the constitutional-state form of government within the United States.

Glasnost only partially applies here because the American constitutional-state form of government has become the epitome of "openness" only so far as the "economic royalists" of Roosevelt's New Deal days have been permitted to subvert and strangle "social democracy" in pursuit of unlimited profits. Political glasnost is another problem.

ALPEROVITZ ENDS HIS ANALYSIS BY declaring, "For political activity to be powerful requires committed energy-ideals and values -- a clear sense of direction." It should be clear that the only organized vehicle possible for such energy, ideals, and values is a movement for a third political party. Such a new political party movement can be undertaken only by a coalition of the outcast minorities, led by committed segments of African Americans. It should be emphasized that there is little that is racially or ethnocentrically implied in these political assumptions, except to suggest that such racial or ethnic implications are the outgrowth of the peculiar American social evolution in terms of race and ethnicity as political variables. What is implied here are the latent ingredients of a new political theory of organization that only American society could have produced.

Harold W. Cruse was professor emeritus at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) and Plural But Equal (1987) when this article appeared.

The Vantage Points of the Disadvantaged

IN CONTRAST TO THE VAST AMOUNT OF work done on alternative security arrangements by analysts and practitioners who oppose nuclear and conventional militarism, systematic examinations of alternatives for political economy are scarce. As we now face the end of the Cold War, progressives across this country and others are prepared to offer viable, timely, and serious proposals for denuclearization and demilitarization. With considerably more creative and provocative offerings like that of Gar Alperovitz's, when the current system finally and irreversibly crumbles, we can also be ready with thoughtful, concrete, and carefully scrutinized proposals for new political and economic structures.

By tacking closely between perspectives and values held by conservatives, liberals, and progressives, Alperovitz breaks through the old categories in a wonderfully refreshing way. His concept of reconstruction could be exactly what we need to combine urgency with patience as we confront the now dominant political economy of destruction with a new political economy that embraces and upholds life in all its fullness.

The elements for a new vision suggested by the author all deserve considerably more attention and exploration. To extend the analysis here, I would pinpoint two issues: the unique perspectives of women and people of color as elements separate from the others; and implications of the entire analysis for international relations.

Although an emphasis on the category of equality is essential and well put by Alperovitz, discussing this element primarily in terms of income or job security will not necessarily tackle the inherent inequalities women find embedded in job segregation. Nor will it address the question of who performs the tasks of what Robert Cox calls "household re-production" -- child care, food preparation, laundry, cleaning. These and other issues are central to feminist critiques of economies across the globe, and any vision of the new must tackle them directly. To leave them out is to overlook divisions of labor that are fundamental to women's oppression. Many of the changes suggested by Alperovitz will enhance women's capabilities individually and collectively to gain more control over their own lives, but the particular problems facing women need specific and careful attention.

The same is true for issues related to racial oppression. I agree with Alperovitz's emphasis on smaller scale of political and economic organization as well as community control. The local can often be the parochial, however. Given the racist history of this country and the recent rise in overt expressions of racism, attention must be paid to providing mechanisms for rectifying any potential inequalities among communities (assuming that some could be predominately African American or Hispanic, for example) and for preventing discrimination based on race within communities.

Another question, that of U.S. foreign policy (economic, military, and political), is not mentioned by Alperovitz, but his framework has substantial and exciting potential for fundamentally altering the way this country relates to the rest of the world. A political economy organized around the elements he puts forth would not allow our nation to exploit many others as it does now.

Furthermore, his ideas are quite compatible with more democratically organized national security proposals that emphasize genuine defense rather than militaristic offense. (One of several such possibilities is civilian-based defense, as suggested by Gene Sharp.) Although I suspect that the Alperovitz alternative would not be a panacea for creating a global order founded on justice and peace, to remove some of the United States' exploitative capacity would be a great step in the right direction.

Jan Love was assistant professor of government and international relations at the University of South Carolina and served on the central and executive committees of the World Council of Churches when this article appeared.

Afflicted With Racism

GAR ALPEROVITZ'S novel understandings of equality, worker relations, community empowerment, liberty, economic arrangements, and political decentralization created an interesting vision of what it would take to correct what he sees as a serious problem in America today. The problem, as he states it, is that: "Democracy in America is a slowly dying form: It has all the constitutional appearances of a vital practice, but its heart seems quietly to be weakening."

However, as I reflected upon Alperovitz's article, I realized some of the assumptions scaffolding his ideas about democracy and about the central elements of a new vision of a restructured society are problematic for the African-American community. For instance, he apparently assumes that at some earlier time in American history the heart of capitalistic democracy was not weakening, that it was strong and was not a dying form, that it afforded greater political and economic liberty for Americans.

African Americans, on the other hand, assume that the heart of democracy has always been weak. It has always been impaired by the improper functioning of its social, political, and economic "arteries." While these arteries have allowed the free and steady flow of constitutional rights (and economic and political privilege) to middle-and upper-class white males, they clogged with waste (racism and genocide) when they reached black Americans and Native Americans. One only has to read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Gloria Jahoda's The Trail of Tears, Linda Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, or to review the history of the African-American civil rights movement to realize that for many people, the heart of American democracy has never functioned in more than a "half-dead" way.

The question for me, then, is whether this "living democracy" Alperovitz wishes to structure can ever be anything more than half-dead if the "central elements" of a new vision do not give attention to restructuring American consciousness with regard to racism. For African Americans, this would involve purging American consciousness of the anti-black sentiment that has been at the bottom of so much of the social, political, and economic thinking and acting in this country.

Economic and political restructuring alone cannot be the foundations for equality and liberty in America. If attention is not given to this affliction of anti-blackness in America's national consciousness, the small semiautonomous, empowered communities Alperovitz sees as vital for building a living democracy will be no better than the "states' rights" Southern racist communities black people fought against in the 1960s.

BY ASSESSING THE WAY THAT aesthetics, science, politics, and economics have historically worked together to condition American consciousness to be anti-black, one can begin to discover how the society must be restructured so that real and inclusive democracy can happen in America. For instance, we need to know where some of this national negative consciousness about blackness came from.

Winthrop D. Jordan (White Over Black) provides some clues. He cites the definition of the word "black" contained in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Deeply stained with dirt; soiled, dirty, foul ... Having dark or deadly purposes, malignant; pertaining to or involving death, deadly, baneful, disastrous, sinister." This suggests the kind of anti-black aesthetic values informing English consciousness (and rule) during the colonial period of America. Certainly this kind of aesthetic could allow the economic exploitation of black-skinned people through the institution of slavery.

Religion and the interpretation of biblical passages and stories (like the curse upon Ham) reinforced this anti-black aesthetic. And not only religion, but science and politics also worked together to condition American people to hold on to anti-black attitudes, to believe that black people were inferior. The American census report of 1840 willfully lied so that the economics of black oppression (slavery) could be seen as beneficial to blacks. According to the figures of this report, the American public was led to believe that freedom in the North created widespread insanity and idiocy among black people, while slavery in the South helped black people hold on to their sanity.

Secretary of State John Calhoun used this census report at the time, plus the new theories of physical anthropology (which claimed to prove scientifically -- on the basis of skull sizes -- that Negroes were morally and intellectually inferior to white people), to convince England and France that Negroes fared better under slavery.

The union of politics, science, religion, and economic practices for the sake of fostering and perpetuating a national anti-black consciousness is still intact in America. A "living democracy" cannot be built here as long as the national consciousness is infected with this cancerous "anti-blackism" that is the heart of white racism. (Perhaps one of the ways to begin purging the American consciousness of anti-blackism is to bring the 1840 census back upon the stage for analysis and apology.)

I have one final question to raise: If, as Alperovitz claims, revolution and reform are no longer viable routes to change, what historical evidence can he provide to show that political and economic evolution (which he seems to advocate) can eradicate the racial oppression black people experience in America?

Delores S. Williams was assistant professor of theology and culture at Drew University Divinity School in Madison, New Jersey when this article appeared.

Sustained by Prophetic Vision

AS AN AMERICAN OF AFRICAN descent rooted in the prophetic Christian tradition and democratic socialist heritage, I deeply resonate with Gar Alperovitz's egalitarian vision and progressive analysis. His insightful piece is the first treatment of the major challenges that confront the U.S. Left since the breathtaking events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. I believe he is very much on the right track.

Yet his seminal essay is predicated on a crucial unarticulated presupposition -- namely, that progressive political hope can be mustered and sustained by communities in our market-driven society. Alperovitz indeed is aware of this tacit assumption -- as seen in his brief mention of "committed energy."

But in stark contrast to his subtle structural analysis of contemporary economics and politics, his examination of the personal, existential, and cultural sources for generating progressive political hope in his project amounts to virtually moralistic gesture. He rightly highlights "a structural basis for an alternative, more egalitarian culture," yet he gives us no concrete sense of which particular traditions, moralities, or communities will or can preserve and promote the Utopian energy requisite for keeping his project alive.

Alperovitz invokes Martin Buber's fecund notion of reconstruction -- as an alternative to apocalyptic revolution and milquetoast reform. But he remains silent about what are the specific cultural groups readily available for such reconstruction. In short, Alperovitz fails to probe into the most profound level of the significance of the collapse of repressive communist regimes and the political lethargy of our consumer capitalist society -- namely, the relative eclipse of Utopian hopes for social betterment put forward in universalist and internationalist terms in the West.

Despite the salutary developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the political and economic spheres, the political hopes in the West are now channeled principally in national and usually chauvinistic and xenophobic forms. In this sense, Alperovitz's universalist and internationalist vision is morally compelling, yet it has little resonance or rootedness in our world of escalating nationalisms, tribalisms, and particularisms. To put it bluntly, the collapse of the ideal of communism is the collapse of the major secular source for Utopian hopes for social amelioration in the West.

Liberalism, social democracy, and feminism have all failed to generate the kind of widespread committed energy necessary to undergird meaning and value for struggle and sacrifice. Hence, the predominance of nationalism and its variants at the present moment.

Alperovitz rightly calls for a kind of progressive cultural renaissance, but it can never occur without a serious probing into the potent traditions and moralities that speak to and through the particularistic identities now afoot. The prophetic elements of religious traditions that sustain communities, preserve universal values, and project international visions may well constitute the most credible agents for progressive political hope in the new epoch. If so, this means that the grand enlightenment linkage of progressive politics to secular ideologies has been damaged, and maybe even severed.

This split does not bode well in an increasingly market-driven world in which the hunger for meaning and community tends to yield more authoritarian strategies to satisfy it. Radical democrats, including religious ones, have much to fear and lose in this situation -- such as the very credibility of the universal values and international visions that guide the few of us still audacious enough to act on them.

Cornel West was chair of the Afro-American Studies Program at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) when this article appeared.

A Task for Generations

JUST AS NATURE SEEMS TO abhor a vacuum, so history abhors a dead end. The Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the religious wars to the Enlightenment, the Cold War to the eruption of peace in the direction of democracy and market economies.

A- and H-bombs, ICBMs, and other weapons of apocalypse have suddenly become massively irrelevant just when we are too broke to address basic human needs in every locale, and just when, in Sen. Albert Gore's (D-Tenn.) sober analogy, an ecological "Kristalnacht" is happening around the globe. For better and for worse, we live on one of those hinge times in history.

Gar Alperovitz's "Building a Living Democracy: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism" has a finger on the pulse of this turning time. He recognizes that the rush to democracy and market economies is occurring in an era poised between unprecedented cooperation and widespread chaos, new unities and new divisions, transnational loyalties and severe local conflicts. And he is clear enough about what this means: The emerging shape of our era challenges the culture and forms of democracy itself, as we have known them, just as it challenges democracy's marriage to an impervious, even rapacious, capitalism.

Thus far, applause. Applause, too, for Alperovitz's recognition that this new culture of community, and community as the constitutive element of both a democratic polity and a humane economy, is a task for generations. It requires "revolutionary patience" (Dorothee Soelle). We would have to be slightly deranged, or possess an impressive sense of unwitting humor, not to see that what we begin here spans generations whose faces -- and sufferings and joys -- we will not behold.

But has Alperovitz, who is not deranged at all but is a bona fide seer, truly plumbed the depths of the challenge to democracy? Does he know what democracy, including his own proposed rendition, is up against? Has he taken account above all of the harsh message sent by a deteriorating planetary ecology in a world bursting with an exploding population in some quarters and an insane, institutionalized consumption level in others?

How does democracy work anyway? Through the registering of citizens' interests via their chosen representatives. Democracy's genius is to set the impressive power of individual and collective self-interest within a framework of accountability to a wider public good.

But what is the time span and the reach of people's interest, especially under the pressure of securing basic needs or when fearful of losing affluence as a way of life? Do present citizens vote the interests of future generations together with their own and on a par with their own? Who in a democracy represents future generations? Who takes account of their unspoken, unorganized claims to well-being?

The answer does not really matter if there is a natural harmony of present desires with the conditions for sustainable life some generations hence. The answer does not really matter, either, if there are unlimited resources for all for an indefinite future. But neither of these assumptions now holds.

The fact is that present choices mean forced future options, many of them cruel, and democracy, even community-focused democracy, has not yet found the way to deal with sustainability in the long run. It may shine in comparison with the present known alternatives, but that is pitiful little consolation if it, too, fails in due course.

NOR IS THE FOCUS ON THE FUTURE the only problematic one. Our earth is one, though our world is not. Can democracy match the needs of a world with only one ozone shield, one atmosphere, one enormously complicated hydrological system?

In short, how do we transform democracy to represent interests we do not experience as our own pre-eminent interests when democracy commands us to represent precisely those, even as enlightened community interests? How would democracy be extended to encompass unborn generations and current neighbors around the world if we never directly experience their interests yet increasingly intersect them with the consequences of ours?

How would democracy be extended to encompass the welfare of the flora, fauna, water, soil, and air upon which we are totally and utterly dependent? Is there such a thing as a "bio-community"? Does it require a "bio-democracy"? And what, pray tell, is that? Is there a democracy for the unborn? What is its form?

If these democracies do not exist, do we simply assume that acting in our own best interests, even as community interests, redounds in our kind of world to the welfare of future generations, human and non-human? If we do, we have a confidence that surpasses even God's own, since God seems intent upon weaning us from such a collectively egocentric view. Or do we finally join the burst of late 20th-century hedonism and say, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they die." Democracy has won the day, yes, and Alperovitz's proposed democracy is surely a marked improvement waiting to happen. But is even this democracy adequate to a world of vastly expanded human consequences in vastly contracted time and space, a world in which we are increasingly within striking distance of one another's lives?

Perhaps the question to Gar Alperovitz -- and all of us -- is, at base, not even this one. Perhaps it is not even whether democracy nurtured by a considerably different culture is up to the task. Perhaps the question is whether human nature is.

Larry Rasmussen was Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and president of the Society of Christian Ethics when this article appeared. Portions of his response are adapted from a longer piece, "The Planetary Environment: Challenge on Every Front," to be published in the journal of the Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy in Washington, DC.