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| The Corinthian agora |
This Fourth of July weekend I've been considering, with
gratitude, the freedoms I too often take for granted, and wondering how much
longer this experiment in democracy will continue.
During our March trip to Greece
I was reminded that while the first democratic governments began in the Greek city-states , for
most of the last two thousand years, “demokratia,”
literally “people power,” was banished from Greek and its beautiful islands, as various empires, invaders, and monarchies held sway.
In Corinth , our Biblical Tours guide, Costos Tsevas, made very clear that the “agora,” often
translated “marketplace” in English-language Bibles, originally had nothing to
do with buying and selling. The agora was the center of political discourse –
the place where citizens came to share their views, to make their case, settle
disputes, determine policy.
For four hundred years, roughly 800 to 400 BC, over a
thousand city-states rimmed the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black Sea shores,
“like frogs around a pond,” according to Plato. Some of these were monarchies,
some oligarchies where power was held in the hands of the powerful few, but many were governed by versions of direct democracy.
By the time of Paul, Greek democracy was just a memory,
swept away by King Philip 2 of Macedonia and his son, Alexander the Great, then
by the Roman empire . Yet even in Paul’s day,
the agora was a place for sharing ideas, celebrating victories, and condemning
traitors. Paul was accused, beaten, then released in the agora in Corinth , accused, beaten, and sent to prison from the
agora in Philippi .
In Athens ,
I spent a morning wandering by myself through the ancient agora, far larger
than the Roman agora that later took its place, far grander than the
marketplaces that sprang up around it.
Where is our modern agora?
At first, I found Costos’ insistent distinction between
agora and marketplace perplexing: so what?
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| Stoa of Atalos in the ancient agora, Athens |
But the more time I spent in the agoras of Corinth ,
Philippi, Thessaloniki , and Athens , the more I began to wonder: which is
more important, separation of church and state, or separation of commerce and
state?
In a way, neither is fully possible. As humans, our beliefs,
economics, political views are interwoven so tightly we can never separate
them.
But what happens when the marketplace drives our common life
and shoves aside all discourse about the common good?
And what happens when there’s no gathering place for
dialogue, for sharing vision, for confronting challenges as fellow citizens?
In early June I attended the national convention of the
League of Women Voters. The League is a non-partisan organization formed on the
eve of women’s suffrage in 1920 to study issues, educate voters, and create
space for dialogue outside of party lines.
For almost a century now, the League has been hosting
debates, providing voter’s guides, and looking for ways to understand issues on
a deeper level.
A repeated concern expressed at the convention was the
influence of money in every stage of the political process. Corporate lobbying
shapes regulation; deep pockets sway local elections; global industries place
invisible pressure on trade agreements and foreign policy decisions.
Many observers suggest American democracy is already dead,
supplanted by a transnational plutarchy (power in the hands of a wealthy few)
cut free of national allegiance. Author Chrystia Freeland analyzed this increasingly dislocated
group in Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, (summarized in a similarly titled TED talk). The inordinate power held by this small group has helped fuel protest movements from Occupy
Wall Street to a recent March for Democracy in California , which proclaimed:
The history of this country is marked by the tragic contradiction between its rightly esteemed principles—of fairness, freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness—and the destitute behavior of its government, ever willing to exploit, oppress, and make war on behalf of a tiny economic elite. Simply stated: We do not live in a democracy. This is a plutocracy, government for and by the wealthy.
Other observers
argue we need a new term to describe the current political situation:
corporatocracy. As defined by The Oxford Dictionary:NOUN (plural corporatocracies)
A society or system that is governed or controlled by corporations: in this age of corporatocracies, the money goes not to the inventor, but to the company.
For the League of Women Voters, the issue is important
enough to warrant a major two-year study on the constitutional amendment process
(are amendments needed to block corporate influence in elections or to clarify
the difference between the rights of people and corporations?),
the use and abuse of money in politics, and the role of redistricting.
One of our convention
speakers was Peter Levine, professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts
University, author of several books on the future of democracy, most recently
“We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.” In his convention remarks, and his
book, he describes the troubling failure of key American institutions:
We have put 2.2 million of our own people in prison, far more than any other nation in the history of the world. . . Yet imprisoning millions of Americans does not make us safe. Our homicide rate remains at least three times as high as the rate in any other wealthy nation in the world.
We spend more per child on K-12 education than almost any other country in the developed world, yet one-third of our young people drop out before they compete high school.
We spend far more on health care per citizen than any other country in the world . . . Even if the Affordable Care Act of 2010 meets expectations, we will still have the most expensive system in the world, with some of the worst health outcomes for poorer people.
Plainly, our institutions do not work. Their failure is not just wasteful: it is deadly. They are not just broken: they are corrupt – making some people rich and comfortable while failing the rest of us.
The solution Levine offers is not that we need better
government, but that we need better citizens: the kind of engaged, informed, actively
involved citizens that gathered in the ancient agora to share concerns, debate
solutions, then go build walls or gather boats to carry out the shared
conclusions.
It’s easy to sit at home and denounce the evil dunces whose
policies we’ve heard caricatured on the evening broadcasts that share our
political leanings.
It’s harder to understand the complexities of the problems
around us.
Even harder to find ways to engage in practical solutions.
We’re busy.
We’re distracted.
We’re deeply divided.
And we are less and less willing to listen carefully to
other points of view, less willing to participate in any kind of group that
doesn’t share and endorse our own perspectives, less willing to engage
constructively in civic organizations.
I go back to the Apostle Paul’s encounter with the Athenians
in their place of assembly.
He took time to listen and observe.
He saw the obvious: temples to a wide array of gods.
But he also observed the less obvious: an altar to an
unknown god.
He listened carefully, and gave credit where he could: “I
see that in every way you are very religious.”
He stated his own point of view without personal
attack, while making clear that he had
heard and considered other voices, quoting and validating what he could: ‘For
in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets
have said, ‘We are his offspring.
He introduced points of difference, but saw no need to have the
final word, and stopped speaking while at least some listeners wanted to hear
more: “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some
of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”
As we head into a new election season, I’m planning to blog
again on issues that confront and divide us. But as I do, I want to hear from
people whose views are shaped not by party politics, Fox News or CNN, but by
their own experience in the complexities of daily life.
I want to dig more deeply into the possibility of being
salt, light, or a voice of hope or wisdom in places mired in anger or
confusion.
I want to suggest ways to engage, not just by signing a
survey, or making a phone call, but by serving our communities in love while helping
to renew a web of compassionate engagement.
This is the last in a series of reflections, Texts in Context, revisting two formative
weeks spent in Greece in
March 2014. Earlier posts:
And it’s the first in a new series - yet to be named - exploring issues that confront and divide us.
