What We Did in Class after Election Day

I'm teaching two classes this semester, Environmental Literature and Rhetoric, and Writing Social Justice, a required course at Roosevelt U. In WSJ students had read two chapters from Amartya Sen's The Idea of Justice about "democracy as public reason." Here are our discussion questions, which took us most of the way through our 75 minute class meeting:

1. Amartya Sen says that democracies are more than just “elections and ballots.” To really work, democracies have to be “government by discussion.” He says there have to be ways for people to reason through problems together, and this has to be part of elections and governing. In our recently concluded Presidential election, do you think we achieved government or election “by discussion”? Explain why you do/don’t think so, providing some specific examples.

2. Sen argues that healthy media (newspapers, magazines, etc.) are crucial to functioning democracies because they do these important things: 1) They inform us by telling us what is happening, and where it is happening. 2) They protect citizens by “giving voice to the neglected and the disadvantaged.” 3) They give us a place to formulate our values, that is, to express what is most important to us as a society. Pick one of these three functions and answer this question: Did our media in this country succeed in performing it? Back up your answer with specific examples.

3. Sen talks a little bit about “sectarian demogogues,” by which he means people who advance their own interests primarily by appealing to prejudices rather than by advancing rational arguments. He says that in democracies, “the effect of sectarian demagoguery can be overcome only through the championing of broader values that go across divisive barriers.” Given that our new president-elect is the textbook definition of a “sectarian demagogue,” how/why did we fail to “champion broader values that go across divisive barriers”? What broke down? What can we do to fix it?

In Environmental Lit/Rhet, the reading due was from Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter. Before digging into those chapters we spent about 20 minutes talking about several principles that the ecologically-minded authors we've been reading all semester (including Bennett) seemed to value, and worried that the incoming administration will not share these values:

• Recognition of the limits of human control, of individual agency, even of collective human agency, that leads to deep humility
• Reverence in the face of mystery
• Appreciation of complexity
• Respect for the knowledge and methods of science coupled with a wariness towards its power
• Seeing beauty and strength in diversity of all kinds