Updating a picture

In the interest of truth in advertising, it's time for a new author pic. I remember my first author photograph, taken in 1987 by a man named Ernesto Monteavaro. To be photographed by Monteavaro was a great honour, since he'd been the official photographer of the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Monteavaro had taken a portrait of Borges' hands resting on a cane. Borges, who was blind, said "according to what they tell me, Monteavaro is the photographer who best captures my shadows."

My shadows have lengthened since the day, about three years ago when my current author picture was taken. My ideas have gotten older as well. My opinions grow in spurts, fed by changes in the environment that disprove my old theories about how the world works.

I recently discovered the ideas of Paulo Friere, a pedagogical philosopher. As far as I understood Frieire's core idea, students are viewed, in the conventional practice of education, as an empty vessel or "bank" into which learners passively receive the thoughts, influence and knowledge of the teacher. Students depend upon their teachers for solutions and in the process are robbed of their power, their equality, and their very humanity.

What struck me about Friere's idea was that this basic concept could easily be applied to the relationship between people, even in so-called "democratic" societies and the government which is supposed to represent them. In many countries, and I think this applies to both the US and Bangladesh, the process of voting for an elected official has become the equivalent of enrolling in a conventional school class. We surrender our authority, empty our vessels, and hope that a party or politician will fill those vessels for us. We are attracted to politicians who promise to solve our problems, rather than those who would help promote the kind of government that would allow us the maximum freedom to identify and solve our own problems.

Friere speaks of how education has detached from a student's own experience of reality. A teacher presents a fact, for instance she tells her American class that Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh (Before you get too excited about American education please be aware that such lessons never actually happen. Few Americans can even name the capital of Canada (Ottowa), and most think that Toronto is a city in Italy.) Friere says that this disconnect happens because geographical facts are irrelevant to the experience of most Americans. If education does not take into account its relevance to students, it ultimately teaches students that they are, themselves, irrelevant.

This idea is also true of government. A government which merely attempts to solve problems for the people denies the importance of individual responsibility in the process of self-government. Politicians come with their programs, their sound-byte solutions. They spend billions delivering the message to the electorate, but ultimately, they are positioning themselves to become temporary dictators. Once elected, they no longer seek the input of the common person, in fact, such input is seen as a distraction. The people are the recipients of a government's solutions, not the creators of those solutions. If I replace Friere's word, "Knowledge" with "Democracy", I could conclude that Democracy "emerges only through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other."

As I listened to a lecture about Friere's ideas, I kept thinking how it could re-define the way we think about politics. He spoke of a Teacher-Student contradiction, that reconciliation must take place in learning so the teacher becomes a student, and the student becomes a teacher. I felt that the disconnect in politics could, likewise, be solved by a reconciliation of the politician and the governed. The government must continually allow itself to be governed by the people, not just at election time, but always.

Our current governmental system denies the creative power of the average person, the taxi-driver and the herdsman, the businessman and the artisan. The government sees itself as the only innovator with the "grasp on reality" to develop solutions to problems that the government itself defines. Friere, if he were speaking of politicians instead of teachers, would say that a politician's efforts "Must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power." Today, on both our shores, this doesn't seem to be the case.

The higher up the ivory tower the politician lives, the more difficult this sort of partnership becomes. A politician who does not buy his own groceries, cleans her own home, travel our roads, cannot possibly understand what makes the rest of us tick. Sure, our leaders may have once moved in the common realm with the rest of us, but that experience, like my old author's photo, is simply a frozen moment in time and no longer reflects the daily reality you and I face.

Here in America, a disconnect has occurred between President Obama and the American people. Obama's election was orchestrated by a groundswell of grassroots support. Once in power, however, although Obama fulfilled many of his campaign promises, his focus was on overcoming political opposition, rather than creating a dialogue between the people and their leader. As a result, government, under Obama, became a battle of two political parties, both of whom saw the American electorate as a source of votes, not a source of solutions.

I wonder if the same sort of disconnect is at work in the battles of the BNP and the AL. Eventually, the only people who become "real" to the entrenched parties are the members of the opposition, so whatever party is not in power reacts only to moves made by their opponents. In such an atmosphere, no compromise is ever possible, and the problems and solutions offered by the average person can never come to fruition.

In America, in the Middle East, and throughout the world, people have never had more resources to allow ideas to bubble up from the base and shape the history of nations as they do today. Our "Occupy Wall Street" and "Tea Party" movements are the epicentres of current creative political action as the Internet begins to fill in gaps that an inattentive government is leaving behind. The watchword has become "peer-to-peer". New monetary and lending systems are emerging, new Internet-based forms of currency have come into existence, and perhaps the day is not far from arriving where issues like public safety and business regulation may find peer-to-peer solutions. Our governments would do well to stay out of the way and let these things happen, or better yet, encourage their growth. If they don't, politicians may find they are obsolete.

The face of the world is constantly changing. The government that serves the people must be a reflection, not just of the current geopolitical reality, but a family snapshot of the nation as a whole. Our governments may paint a pretty picture about the way things are, but unless they are connected with the creativity of the people themselves and capture the current popular consensus, that government will eventually become as dated and useless as…

…Well, as the youthful photograph of an aging writer.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", teaches the native art of oral tradition storytelling.