democratic mindfulness • gary e. davis • berkeley


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	democratic mindfulness: concept, policy, and practice gary e. davis	September 6, 2024

Days back, I wondered how—or whether—the 2024 Democratic Party Platform related to what was said by leading voices at the 2024 Convention (Harris, Walz, Buttigieg, the Obamas, and Winfrey). Can it matter?

A nicely abstract aspect of that question is the derivative questions: When do words matter, and what’s the matter with political mattering?

Ha!: Usually, asking “What’s the matter?” results from a perception of distress.
But what “matters” is basically about what’s important.

Yet, importances may not be primarily obstensible: “matters.” Historically, our evolutionary legacy of survivalist priorities (baseline sustainability) made value (importances) prevalently materialist. However, modernity opened up a richer appreciation of value as such (rather than being supernaturalized).

The entire realm of material value can be understood relative to conceptions of sociality (socio-economics), but non-material value can’t be fairly understood socially (or sociocentrically):

What’s important implies that whole range of “matter”ing: psychal, personal, cultural, conceptual, social, and democratic.

Democratic value isn’t central to ordinary lives. Democratic value serves living value. It’s instrumental for everyone becoming a good_ life in a goodG society, which is culturally evolving (goodH).

For convenience, I’ll call that set the continuum of person-al being (of being a person) in one’s lifecycle among persons (from near-and-dear to civil strangers)
in our lifecycles, i.e., a living manifold of modes of being which is somewhat like the interpersonal continuum from intimate life to civil presence.

That’s a heuristic, pragmatic parsing of being. Any actual part of one’s life (or extended activity) is relevant (appeals) to multiple modes of person-al being;
or involves (engages) multiple modal implicities.

For example, being interpersonal likely implies the interests of one’s selfidentity (psychal); being cultural likely has social (group person-al) entailments; all modes likely have holistic (cohering, conceptual) implicatures (and conceptual interests implicitly imply an effective meta-sense of one’s conceptuality). I’ll be analytically more specific later.

So, overtly democratic life is easily regarded as marginal to being well because more-lifeworldly modes of the coninuum (psychal to social) mix with each other commonly and richly in private life, while public life (from cultural to democratic) is valuationally derivative (outside of public professions); i.e., a well-directed life understands public domains relative to private preferences. A public norm works because persons keep fidelity to recognition of a regulative’s value (thus granting its normativity) for one’s life.

But in a political season, a party platform can be very important—though journal-
ists and pundits commonly regard a platform as a throwaway (rhetorical market-
ing: ideology), because what “really” matters will show as policies of the actual administration or engagements of actual legislatures.

If one takes seriously a party platform or the content of carefully sculpted speeches, is that foolish? Imagining that someone downloads the party platform and decides to vote in light of reading it carefully might seem comical. We may have heard/read that the platform writers put lots of work into the platform, and leading voices at the convention put lots of work into ephemeral speeches. But who really takes that to heart? Not journalists in the 24/7 world of next!: “Here is the new news.”

The “Preamble” of the Democratic Platform asks, in effect, “What do you want?” It states, in effect: “Here’s what we’ve done for you recently. Now look at what we value”: the platform itself.

The speeches express “Here’s where we are.” Now, where are you?

Who are you: to yourself, to those you care about and for, in your culture, as hol-
istic life, in society, and wanting more from democratic life?

That obvious kind of appeal may seem trivial, but it’s a useful entrance into theorizing (modeling—idealizing?) the real Democratic mind[set].

The Democratic Party’s Platform is divided into 9 “chapters” (value spheres) with lots of sections (kinds of focus). I’ve divided the 9 spheres into four modes (regions) of political value. But my sequencing of the spheres has no resemblance to the actual chapter listing in the platform:

An important distinction in articulative action comes to mind: [a] articulation for the sake of appealing to an audience; and [b] articulation for orienting one’s understanding—here: [a] motivating voter support and [b] constellating public policy. My interest is [b].

But interest in [a] could be better sequenced. This matters inasmuch as the campaign is interesteded in motivating voters:

“Growing Our Economy…” (1) is abstract; it shouldn’t have been listed first. “Lowering costs” (3) has more near-term relevance than “Rewarding work…” (2). Though border security (7) is top interest for some voters, that would be a minority of voters who are worried about “alien” presence more than local community development (8), I surmise.

But what my sequence implicitly shows is that there’s a clear difference between near-to-lifeworld values and general political values. The hesitant voter wants near-to-lifeworld appeal.

Anyway, concern about prioritzation in appellant sequencing is useful for consid-
ering value conceptuality (a major interest of mine, for later) in relation to (irt) actual political life.

More abstractly, my [a]/[b] distinction above is between [a] appellant (motivating) intent of articulation irt [b] programmatic (orienting) intent of articulation (goal formation).

The National Convention’s appeals (by “my” leading voices) gravitated toward six kinds of focus: family/neighborhood, character, lifeworld values, freedom, political calling, and general global engagement.

The value spheres of the platform (grouped earlier) pertain to four of the six convention foci above; but character and lifeworld values foci of the convention don’t have easily correlated parts in the platform, though character and lifeworld values are vital for bonding voters to engagement with democratic life (as citizens, beyond the electoral season), in terms of advancing Democratic priorities through our seasonal lives.

The 57 platform policy foci, divided into 9 value spheres (earlier above), can be divided into six policy spheres (modes of programmatic implementation) associ-
able with the four convention foci. Though there’s no immediate practicality in doing that, it’s interesting to prospect relations of textual policy and expressed appeals.

I’ll spare you my six-modal parsing of the 57 policy foci relative to the four con-
vention foci. But the fourfold parsing above melds platform and convention in a way which is more relevant to thinking about programmatic policy (and demo-
cratic value) than does the 9-part value spheres oriented to voters as citizens with personal lives.

This difference between policy formation and political speech is integral for a good understanding of progressive political pragmatics (and gels coincidently with the difference which journalist Dionne highlighted briefly).

next—> supplementary discussion: progressive pragmatics 2024