Fuzzy Signals

The Power of Investing in Intellectual Infrastructure

NOTE: See the WorldChanging version of this essay to view the lively reader feedback.

In discussing the present state of the US Democratic party, former Senator Bill Bradley wrote an insightful editorial in the New York Times (which I read in the IHT). Bradley reminds us of how in 1971, Lewis Powell, who later became a US Supreme Court judge, "wrote a landmark memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses." He wrote it in reaction to his disgust of the "1960s revolution" and activism against Vietnam. The conservatives were loosing the battle over ideas, Powell surmised, and he wanted to change that. Following that memo, the Republican party built up a comprehensive pyramid structure that would fund, develop, and renew the intellectual foundations of the right wing. It works like this:

Big individual donors and large foundations form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate.

It's a very smart and proven model. By contrast, the Democrats have an inverted pyramid structure, one that relies unduly on its' leader to marshall support and ideas. Whereas in the Republican system the leader matters less because the base is stable (which is paradoxical because Bush is seen to be a "strong" leader), the Democrat's model is vulnerable to collapsing once the pivotal leader changes. Moreover, "In such a system [democrat party] candidates don't risk talking about big ideas because the ideas have never been sufficiently tested. Instead they usually wind up arguing about minor issues and express few deep convictions. A party based on charisma has no long-term impact." Recent studies in business and organizational literature also confirm this insight. Sustainable and stable companies avoid the "cult of leadership" and are built more like the Republican pyramid model; since this is the party most closely tied to business, perhaps this isn't surprising. Cross fertilization across sectors and social networks has always been a source of innovation.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have been reaping increasing returns from this 35 year investment in ideas and the institutions that incubate them. It's taken money, vision, and discipline, but arguably the conservatives are in power now because of this. By controlling the discourse through framing the debate, they now control the US government. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has become a thought leader in recent years by making this point and process more transparent to us. His solution is a systematic (re)investment in new framing ideas for the progressive movement, a strategy that Worldchanging fully supports, as Alex Steffen has written in Reframing the Planet and I've done in New Frames.

The imprint of Lakoff's agenda is plainly written all over Bradley's editorial, which is good news. We need more people to take this strategy seriously, because selling longer term investments in anything -- let alone something as abstract and intangible as "ideas" -- is hard these days, a myopic time where our social metrics only seem to recognize short term pay back and gratification.

Part of the problem is that the various actors involved -- leaders, advisors, activists, and investors like foundations in the political sphere -- don't have a good model or big picture for how worldchanging happens across times scales, something that I've argued is important. To simplify, worldchanging happens at many levels at once, and through the interaction between fast and slower moving drivers. The faster moving developments are easily perceived because we see them on the surface (e.g. events, experiments, new technologies, leaders); they are measured in time by the day, week, quarterly, yearly, or electoral cycles. The slower moving drivers (paradigm shifting ideas, values, culture, governance and infrastructure) work over decades and centuries and are thus harder to see and understand. Stewart Brand explains the neat division of labour between the fast and slow layers in The Clock of the Long Now:

Fast leans, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all of the attention, slow has all of the power. All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.

Successful civilizations, organizations, political parties, or individuals throughout history have figured out how to balance short term and long term investments. Without this balance, without both, these systems become brittle and maladaptive, which is where the Democrats are today. And they are not alone: much of the globe today is living with this imbalance, driven by a high discount rate for the future which has created years of underinvestment in our infrastructure -- whether it be transportation, education, health or our ecology.

The question is: can the progressives renew themselves by mustering the vision and discipline to fund such long term projects? This will require a long view. A long view is important because it enables people to see why and how long term investments make sense; a longer view makes these more visible in the present and thus more of a priority amongst the many competing short term imperatives. But the Catch 22 is that a long view is a kind of meta-meme that frames all the other ideas, and thus requires investment and time as well.

At Worldchanging we support all kinds of worldchanging -- both fast and slow. But we're also clear that it's these slower moving ideas that make the biggest difference in the long run. We are concerned, of course, like Bradley because right now it looks as if we're being whopped by better organized and better funded doomsdayers with a savvy sense of how to use both soft and hard power strategies. Even in the pop culture domain it looks as if we are being outmaneuvered, if the Left Behind apocalyptic novel series, which have been disturbingly successful, is any indicator. Not by accident, the authors are right wing evangelical politicos.

At the end of the day, we're hopeful, because we believe that grounded hope is the best strategy moving forward. We also take comfort in the fact that we are part of the culture creative class. This makes us a powerful and emerging contingent, as likely to surprise the mainstream by our collective clout in the near future just as the conservative religious right have done so today. So here is a fun challenge: let's create some pulp eco-fiction, stories that convincingly promulgate benestrophes instead of catastrophes, which is admittedly a much harder creative task than trading on negativity and biblical templates. But it's possible and needed. Besides, most people crave a happy ending more than anything else, so don't tell me there isn't a market for this.

And we're here for the long haul -- online and offline, and we're part of much larger global movement that transcends the American party system. (Case in point: I'm a Canadian based in France writing about American politics.) At Worldchanging, we're indicative of a long view group of committed folks co-creating a coherent set of ideas and practices that will, we hope, evolve into a better theory for how we want to live, work and play on this planet. As one wise person said, "stories are tools for knowing and judging. Change the stories and you change how people live." We believe that parts of this new story are already here, and while fragments of the narrative are still emerging, the bottom-up forces we are fortunate enough to float in give us a sense that they are within our grasp. The hard part will be focus, discipline, and of course, funding. But we'll get there.

Posted by nicole at April 1, 2005 07:59 PM