The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
Are there other options?
I'm doing a cultural studies non-credit course at UBC called HUM.
https://www.humthemakingofus.com/home/hum-101201
https://humanities101.arts.ubc.ca/courses/
One of the readings for this week involved a project in New York run by Eve Tuck that studied why the high school graduation rate was so low.
The method used was called Participatory Action Research. The idea here was for the researchers to meet personally with the students and get their ideas about what the barriers to high school graduation were.
Strange to say, this seems to be a radical approach . ;-)
One of the issues that came to the fore for the students was whether to push for a reform of the system or whether to push for a revolutionary change of the system.
Reform offers change with a minimum of disruption and seems to be doable.
Revolution involves a lot of disruption as the old system is chucked and a new system made and seems almost impossible.
What is to be done? This presents a paradox. It's a damned if you do and damned if you don't, sort of situation.
Tuck, the author of the paper, said, when faced with a paradox, we need to look for a new way of looking at the problem. She shows a different perspective that comes from indigenous cultures that considers the linked concepts of sovereignty/contention/balance/relationship as a way of avoiding the paradox.
I wonder if our culture would be as polarized as it is if people had kept those concepts in the forefront of thinking as we dealt with problems like abortion and marriage or even drug addiction.
I think the "sovereignty/contention/balance/relationship" concept is beneficial because it causes those pushing for change to sympathetically consider those who are harmed by the change. It would also cause those who resist change to consider the harm caused by the status quo. It's a concept that fit's well with Karl Popper's idea of an open society.
Popper wrote critically of various thinkers (ranging from Plato to Marx) who claimed to know how society SHOULD be structured. One of the implications of knowing how things SHOULD be is that it's easy for people to fall into the fallacy of "the ends justify the means. As we know, at the level of society, that way of thinking rarely ends well.
Popper's idea was that we should solve the problems we see without trying to create a perfect system.
Do something.
Check what happens.
Solve any new problems that emerge.
Repeat.
I'm in a reading group that is studying capitalism with a critical eye. There's me, 2 Marxist scholars, and a successful entrepreneur.
We've kind of encountered the reform vs revolution paradox. For years now I've been writing about the Universal Basic Income as a solution to a number of social problems.
None of the others likes the idea much. The marxists don't like the idea because it's a reform that would prop up capitalism and capitalism must go for many many reasons.
I'm a bit like - do you really know the future? Personally I think a Universal Basic Income would be very corrosive to capitalism and it would also solve some proximate problems. It's perhaps a perspective that keeps us from being locked up in a paradox.
What do you think? I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.