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A Review of Healing the Heart of Democracy:
The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
Bruce L. Mallory
Over the past 30 years, Parker J. Palmer’s writings and teachings have been fundamental to our evolving understanding of the relationships between teaching and learning, heart and mind, courage and action, and personal and professional. His willingness to ask profound, even troubling, questions that get at the core of who we are as humans has informed and inspired countless classroom teachers, university professors, counselors, spiritual leaders, and professionals from all walks of life. As one who has read much of that literature and been gently prodded to search my own soul in one of Palmer’s intensive retreats, I cannot offer an objective, dispassionate review of his latest contribution, Healing the Heart of Democracy (2011, JosseyBass).
With that caveat, I assert that this is one of the most important books of the early 21st century for those who think and worry about the state of American democracy and the place of educational institutions in renewing our political and public lives. Those of us who see ourselves as part of the deliberative democracy movement, who work with young people who aspire to be effective and active citizens, and who sometimes feel the darkest despair at the tenor of contemporary politics will find Palmer’s book to be a clear, honest framework for looking toward the light.
The conception of this particular book has its origins in 9/11.
Palmer has always acknowledged his infrequent but deep depressions
and their effect on his worldview. The events of 9/11 happened
during one of those dark cycles. His sensitivities, as a Quaker and a
believer in what Abraham Lincoln called in his first inaugural address the “better angels” of the human spirit, were shaken to the cor, in the true Latin sense. Palmer often invokes the spirit, words, and challenges of Lincoln, whom he seems to revere both because Lincoln faced the most grievous challenge of our democracy and because Lincoln, too, suffered and learned from lifelong severe depression. Palmer’s 2005 essay on “The Politics of the Brokenhearted,” published by the Fetzer Institute, was an explicit effort to reconcile the events of 9/11 with their ftermath, when a national moment of grief focused on consolation and reflection morphed into years of ill-considered wars, Islamophobia, and a general circling of the wagons in American political culture. In this essay he offered the metaphor of the broken apart (shattered and angry) and the broken open (loving and redemptive) hearts that may follow such national and personal tragedies. In his current book, Palmer elaborates on that metaphor in depth.
Drawing on the writings of Terry Tempest Williams, Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Ellis and, most especially Alexis de Toqueville, Palmer asks us to start first with an examination of the capacities of the human heart. Following Williams, he sees the heart as the “first home of democracy” (p. TK), and he uses Toqueville’s observations of early American culture and its “habits of the heart” to create a framework for a psychological, moral, and political analysis of American democracy now. For Palmer, “the heart is as responsible for fascism and genocide as it is for generosity and justice” (p. 50). That is, the heart is where Lincoln’s better angels dwell and where the seeds of fascism and genocide can germinate. In the kind of democratic society that Palmer envisions, the conditions of public and political life create the conditions in which only the former is expressed, where our hearts are broken open to a collective compassion rather than broken apart into splintered shards of xenophobia and revenge.
Throughout his analysis, Palmer’s early Protestant and later Quaker convictions inform his understanding of human error and redemption. Concepts of sacrifice (see his retelling of the John Woolman story), suffering, compassion, and communalism are touchstones for creating a pluralistic democracy in which ideological differences become the starting point for problem solving rather than the seeds of wedge politics that dominate national discourse today. Thus, he writes, “No matter how jaw-dropping or morally offensive I find some people’s convictions, I must learn how to speak up in the civic community without denying my opponents their humanity and further poisoning the political ecosystem on which democracy depends” (pp. 31–32). Further, he claims:
Despite our sharp disagreements on the nature of the American dream, many of us on the left, on the right, and in the center have at Bruce L. Mallory is a professor of education and the director of the Carsey Institute, as well as former provost and graduate dean at the University of New Hampshire. He is founding director of New Hampshire Listens, which builds local and statewide capacity for civic engagement and public dialogue.
A Review of Healing the Heart of Democracy:
The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
Bruce L. Mallory
Over the past 30 years, Parker J. Palmer’s writings and teachings have been fundamental to our evolving understanding of the relationships between teaching and learning, heart and mind, courage and action, and personal and professional. His willingness to ask profound, even troubling, questions that get at the core of who we are as humans has informed and inspired countless classroom teachers, university professors, counselors, spiritual leaders, and professionals from all walks of life. As one who has read much of that literature and been gently prodded to search my own soul in one of Palmer’s intensive retreats, I cannot offer an objective, dispassionate review of his latest contribution, Healing the Heart of Democracy (2011, JosseyBass).
With that caveat, I assert that this is one of the most important books of the early 21st century for those who think and worry about the state of American democracy and the place of educational institutions in renewing our political and public lives. Those of us who see ourselves as part of the deliberative democracy movement, who work with young people who aspire to be effective and active citizens, and who sometimes feel the darkest despair at the tenor of contemporary politics will find Palmer’s book to be a clear, honest framework for looking toward the light.
The conception of this particular book has its origins in 9/11.
Palmer has always acknowledged his infrequent but deep depressions
and their effect on his worldview. The events of 9/11 happened
during one of those dark cycles. His sensitivities, as a Quaker and a
believer in what Abraham Lincoln called in his first inaugural address the “better angels” of the human spirit, were shaken to the cor, in the true Latin sense. Palmer often invokes the spirit, words, and challenges of Lincoln, whom he seems to revere both because Lincoln faced the most grievous challenge of our democracy and because Lincoln, too, suffered and learned from lifelong severe depression. Palmer’s 2005 essay on “The Politics of the Brokenhearted,” published by the Fetzer Institute, was an explicit effort to reconcile the events of 9/11 with their ftermath, when a national moment of grief focused on consolation and reflection morphed into years of ill-considered wars, Islamophobia, and a general circling of the wagons in American political culture. In this essay he offered the metaphor of the broken apart (shattered and angry) and the broken open (loving and redemptive) hearts that may follow such national and personal tragedies. In his current book, Palmer elaborates on that metaphor in depth.
Drawing on the writings of Terry Tempest Williams, Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Ellis and, most especially Alexis de Toqueville, Palmer asks us to start first with an examination of the capacities of the human heart. Following Williams, he sees the heart as the “first home of democracy” (p. TK), and he uses Toqueville’s observations of early American culture and its “habits of the heart” to create a framework for a psychological, moral, and political analysis of American democracy now. For Palmer, “the heart is as responsible for fascism and genocide as it is for generosity and justice” (p. 50). That is, the heart is where Lincoln’s better angels dwell and where the seeds of fascism and genocide can germinate. In the kind of democratic society that Palmer envisions, the conditions of public and political life create the conditions in which only the former is expressed, where our hearts are broken open to a collective compassion rather than broken apart into splintered shards of xenophobia and revenge.
Throughout his analysis, Palmer’s early Protestant and later Quaker convictions inform his understanding of human error and redemption. Concepts of sacrifice (see his retelling of the John Woolman story), suffering, compassion, and communalism are touchstones for creating a pluralistic democracy in which ideological differences become the starting point for problem solving rather than the seeds of wedge politics that dominate national discourse today. Thus, he writes, “No matter how jaw-dropping or morally offensive I find some people’s convictions, I must learn how to speak up in the civic community without denying my opponents their humanity and further poisoning the political ecosystem on which democracy depends” (pp. 31–32). Further, he claims:
Despite our sharp disagreements on the nature of the American dream, many of us on the left, on the right, and in the center have at Bruce L. Mallory is a professor of education and the director of the Carsey Institute, as well as former provost and graduate dean at the University of New Hampshire. He is founding director of New Hampshire Listens, which builds local and statewide capacity for civic engagement and public dialogue.
