| advancing community |
good society |
| progressive leadership
gary e. davis |
October 11, 2020 |
Action-orienting policies can be usefully regarded as either inner-sourced (background-ing the actor) or outer-sourced (responding to public calling). Most of my discussion for an American politics of virtue pertains to inner-sourcing, backgrounding, which appro-priates an orientation relative to outer-sourced need or desire. Appropriative action is best when it’s pragmatic: balancing aspiration (thus “liberal” hope) with feasibility (thus “conservative” reconciliation). A keynote of reconciliation is recognizing need for greater public education in order to be deliberatively informed by public opinion. Political parentialism (not paternalism) may be unwittingly apt, enabling by example the educational leadership power of political life to concertedly cultivate—to my mind—communitarian locality and virtues of our humanity (such as astute reasoning in formation of opinion). In a sense, politics is best understood as founded in public health leadership (which, by the way, was the primary role of religious leadership in cultural evolution). Enabling healthy regions for lives where learning never ends (and for bonding organiza-tional activity to virtue-fostering values) has endless means of incentivization. No matter how plural and bricolagic an ecosphere is, common ground can be made through enabling persons to own better ways—ideally, through discourse and good justification). That way, too, politics can be a Janus-faced devotion to mediating support for collabor-ative global leadership against global warming, famine, poverty, extinction of beautiful species; and for thinking of the future of humanity democratically. |
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