Portraits of Racial Politics
“It is the custom of scholars when addressing behavior and culture to speak variously of anthropological explanations, psychological explanations, biological explanations, and other explanations appropriate to the perspectives of individual disciplines. I have argued that there is intrinsically only one class of explanation. It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.” Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The unity of knowledge
How could interdependent politics,
studying effective/ineffective power in relationships and transactions,
in communication’s productive/unproductive exchanges,
in communion’s transubstantiations,
be an intelligently humane science
without also growing art-forms of imaginative expression?
evolving culture’s powerful articulations,
how best to constitute, contract, and behave together
toward daily through global social economic justice.
Political effectiveness is about control,
resources and rhythms of normative creation
favoring multicultural inclusiveness,
democracy of conjoining powers
to enrich future generations of Earth’s healthy prosperity.
Political relationships,
economic transactions,
ultimately support radically regenerate health trends.
The political evolutions of well-formed and reliably executed democracy
have become Favorite Sons of political scientists,
just as totalitarian monopolies of invested power
have become the scientist’s Straw Man for sociopathology
opposing mature polypathic political-economic powers
to effectively advocate socially therapeutic outcomes.
With this same normative assumption of political health science,
we evolve toward ever more inclusive
and therefore hopeful and healthy emergence
of cooperatively organized empathic trust
between political-economic cultural behaviorists.
The politics of healthy regenerative behaviors
unveil the arts and sciences of empathic trust
as dipolar contrasted to distrustful mutual immunity,
antipathy between individuals,
families,
subcultures,
tribes,
competing histories.
We emerge with a positively deviant cooperative political/economic culture
struggling against older pre-millennial WinLose Gaming assumptions
about this business of not only self-governing
but also WeThePeople governing
throughout an overpopulating Earth,
currently drawing too much energy to sustain a healthy home
for grandkids
and their extended genetic families
in the animal and plant ribonucleic kingdoms.
In Empathy and Democracy Michael E. Morrell critiques
“Agonistic theories…
because they tend to reify conflict to the detriment of possible cooperation and do not adequately theorize why we should expect people to remain [loyal] adversaries rather than become enemies.” (pp. 194-5)
What is this difference between a political adversary and an enemy
if not continued respect for co-empathic possibilities for mutual trust
in more cooperative political outcomes
through a “consilience” of mutual subsidiarity.
We can learn to become grateful for adversaries
to produce a more optimally discerned outcome.
On the other hand,
if we succumb to monocultural supremacist political thinking
as always and everywhere competitive WinLose strategics,
then our political choice of enemies for all “loser” roles and rules
precludes full maturation of a healthy cooperative democracy
for every economic body,
every political mind.
Shayla C. Nunnally
uses the language of trust and mistrust and distrust
to mine U.S. racial politics
(Trust in Black America: Race, discrimination, and politics).
Perhaps trust refers to the cognitive syllogism side of empathic feelings,
whether positive or negative,
as absence of trust appears
if and only if absence of empathy.
They co-arise nondually, to borrow from Buddhist Philosophy,
as thoughts have feelings attached,
and feelings manifest in thoughts, language of consciousness.
How might we pursue the art and science of politically empathic trust
given the historical predator v prey brand of slavery,
the hunting and gathering of dark-skinned people
supported by a Winners v Losers evolutionary enculturation history?
Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh
(Social Movements in Politics: A comparative study, expanded edition)
rests political Identity-Formation Theory
“on a simple assumption:
people’s actions are structured by deeply held beliefs.” (p. 240)
Perhaps nondual trust/beliefs with empathic/mutual feelings.
A relatively autonomous “non-elite” popular culture
drives political-economic participants
who become immersed in a movement culture.
A non-elite political-economic subculture
might be expected to also aspire to fulfill itself
as a movement culture,
from non-elite to co-elite,
or,
more radically,
a cooperative co-arising aspiration that thrills
and virally spreads
by co-opting elitist dissenters into active empathic-trust.
The cooperative optimization of future generations’ health and safety
is an ancient political-economic externally dialectical agenda,
apparently supported by regenerative ecosystemic evolving processes
across most, if not all,
living poli-economic systems.
In both Eastern and Western wisdom traditions
we find the feeling/belief,
that the political and economic systems of a society
are best judged by how well they govern themselves for those most vulnerable,
including the “non-elites” of this generation
but also children,
our future as global residents of Earth.
A cooperative turn to a level of multicultural and polypathic empathy-trust
seems to inevitably expand our Golden Rule
to explicitly include all life forms living,
not yet living,
and no longer living.
Here lies our cooperative political-economic dual destiny of discernment,
as “elites” actively listen to those speaking of non-elite empathic trust
that we are each predator/prey hybrids of mutual subsidiarity
evolving movements toward consilience of love
emerging Earth’s health-optimizing future.
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