What are the Initial Assumptions Behind Our Thinking and Actions?
I'm assuming that citizenship is rooted in people and place.
Citizenship is a sense of blood and belonging, an attachment to people and to place. It is geography, history and demography, too. It begins with a reverence for the land. This may be steppes in Russia, jungles in Brazil, deserts in China, marshes in Iraq. In This Land is Your Land, an ode to America written in 1940, folk singer Woody Guthrie rhapsodizes over a continental country stretching from "California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forests to the Gulf Stream Waters." Guthrie sings: "This land was made for you and me." Yet as much as citizenship is about the land, it is also a respect for its people - their traditions, customs and institutions. These make them a nation. They are proud to belong. In any country, people and place remain the pillars of citizenship.
I'm assuming that the task isn't to erase difference; it is, rather, to find the dignity in our differences.
We are social beings. We are meaning-seekers. Group association is an important part of how we become ourselves-and become good citizens. ("The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular." - Jonathan Sacks)
I'm assuming that a key part of the "answer" is to somehow figure out how to do a better job of keeping politics and identity separate.
Precisely because so much of our meaning and identity arises from experiences within our particular group, our own meanings and identities will never be universally shared.
So: living together requires a layer of cooperation that straddles these differences. That layer is "politics." Society starts to get ugly whenever these two spheres of social life (the space where we belong, and the space where we cooperate) collapse into one.
When religion is politicized, God takes over the system. When politics turns into a religion, the system turns into a God.
Either way, respect for difference collapses. When religion is politicized, outsiders (non-believers) are denied rights. The chosen people become the master-race. When politics turns into a religion, outsiders (non-comformers) are granted rights if and only if they conform (and thus cease to be an outsider). The truth of a single culture becomes the measure of humanity.
In terms of how we will work together at this Table, I'm assuming that:
I'm assuming that, if you are joining me on the day on November 14, that you will have read this paper and, if you have any reactions, you will have shared them with the Group.
I'm assuming that any of these assumptions that go uncontested, we can confidently adopt as "operating principles" for our conversation together.
I'm assuming that this is a dialogue in three parts:
(a) Starting now, and which
(b) Receives a powerful stimulus at an in-person meeting on November 14, and (c) Continues until mid-December to shape some concrete, "Everest-worthy" opportunities for action.
I'm assuming that we will disagree, perhaps forcefully, on some things. And I am assuming that part of what will make us an unusually efficient and effective group is that we are going to be good at explicitly stating our assumptions, our expectations, our background understanding to one another.
And I am assuming that we are all great people and that we will enter this dialogue with a spirit of generosity and play. For myself, I certainly look forward to November 14 as being enormously impactful, yes-but also enormous fun.